Constellation Games (36 page)

Happy Thanksgiving! I'm eating strawberry pie. By myself. Sorry, Ma.

Hey, there's another American on Ring City who's not a spy, a diplomat, or that deadly combination, the spiplomat. His name is Adam and the poor bastard works for Reflex Games.

"Oh, yeah?" I said. "You know, I used to work in the Austin office."

"Head of development," said Adam, "Toronto." Okay, he's not actually American, so sue me. The border looks a little fuzzy from a hundred thousand miles away. (160,000 km)

Adam had met me as I picnicked in the hallway outside my house. I've created a back yard using synthetic dirt from the garbage project, and I'm growing a little patch of grass that I stole from an abandoned NASA weightlessness experiment. (Don't worry, I stole the control group.) But until the grass is able to hold itself up in normal gravity, let alone stand people walking on it, "outside" means out in the hall. I have a white-noise generator on my phone which I use to simulate a nearby brook, but I turned it off when Adam said hello.

Adam the Canadian squatted and picked a peak-of-the-season strawberry out of my bowl. "We're all big fans of your blog," he said.

"Even the part where I said Reflex was staffed by douchebags?" I said, because I gotta self-sabatoge.

"Of course we're staffed by douchebags," said Adam. "Have you
seen
this industry? But we've got the
talented
douchebags, and we all get along 'cause we're a
family
. A family that you're still part of. Reminds me, can I take some 3D scans of your house?"

"Am I a tourist attraction now?"

"You and the Eritreans," said Adam. "Nothing else in Human Ring really stands out, y'know? Doesn't seem that bad on TV, but then you get here, and..." He gestured down the corridor that ran for a hundred and fifty miles (240 km), encircling Human Ring and coming right back here.

"We can't put five million identical rooms in a game," he said. "That's 1980s stuff. So we're focusing on the other Rings, and on Mars."

"I see," I said. "You're here on business. You're gonna put my house in the
Temple Sphere
sequel."

"Not a sequel," said Adam, tut-tutting his finger at me. "It's a totally new IP.
Constellation: Disputed Space
will be the first triple-A title to use motion capture from real extraterrestrials."

"Why do they have the head of development, Toronto, up here doing motion capture?"

"You mean, why is the head of development
in space
, doing motion capture of
awesome space aliens
?"

"Point taken."

"
Entre nous
, it's a liiittle difficult to get some of this data. Like the Peregrini, I don't even know. I can't even take the cameras into Peregrini Ring or they'll melt."

"Ask the Peregrini to wear spacesuits," I said, "and stick those old-school ping-pong balls on the spacesuits, and do the motion capture here."

Adam nodded. "That's probably good enough," he said.

"You don't need to do this at all," I said. "If there's one thing the Constellation has, it's information about themselves. Just ask them for the 3D models they already have."

"We thought about that," said Adam, "but we'd need some kind of computer archaeologist to translate that data into a format we can use."

"Yeah, that's the Reflex way, all right," I said. "Do what we did last time, no matter what."

"Say," said Adam, as though he'd given this a lot of thought. "You're a kind of computer archaeologist. I saw what you did with the Brain Embryo, and the Jurassic smart paper OS. You could do this. Save us a lot of money. Get us maps, too; geographic data beyond our wildest dreams.

"I've talked to your old colleagues. A lot of the people you worked with on
Recoil
are now very high in the company. You're a great developer. We could use you back on the team."

I won't lie: my heart leapt. I could get back into the industry. I'd be educating people about the Constellation. Reflex isn't perfect, but it's less embarrassing than making pony games for tweens, or having every single employee of my indie studio quit, including myself.

Then I came off my high. "Uh, this is an interesting idea," I said, "but I'm a fugitive. Pretty much unhirable."

"To the United States, you're a fugitive," said Adam. "To Canada, you're a political refugee."

"Wow, it's like the same thing, but better."

"Yeah. If this is what you want, we can do it. We keep a little quiet, I doubt the FBI will risk pissing off both the Constellation
and
the Dominion."

"The Dominion?"

"Of Canada, dumbass."

"Oh. Well, I'm... thinking about it. What's the game like?"

"
Disputed Space
?" said Adam. "It's an awesome new experience. Tactical FPS but with RPG elements, branching storyline. You'll love it."

So, like every other Reflex game. "What's in the branching storyline?"

"It's strong, very strong. Basically, Ragtime attacks Earth, big disaster, and this multinational force trains with Constellation equipment to take them down. Obviously the Constellation can't do the job themselves because they're pacifists. But we plan to make a couple Constellation races playable in the sequel."

"Uh, so," I said, "Ragtime is a negentropictropic matter cloud. You can't have a space marine shoot it with a gun."

"Artistic license," said Adam. "Obviously the Constellation can't be the bad guy. That's disgusting. Nobody wants another
Ev luie Aka's Ultimate DIY Lift-Off
."

"I don't want to nitpick, it's cool that you read my blog and with the job offer and everything."

"No, it's good, what is it?"

"The Constellation aren't pacifists because they faint at the sight of blood. If someone attacked Earth, the Constellation would... I don't know, but they wouldn't say 'here's some weapons, go be our Shabbas goy'."

Adam folded his arms and stared at my house like he was trying to burn it down with his mind. "It's a
game
," he said. "It has to have the elements of a game. It can't just be happy fun time."

"Af be Hui made eight best-selling games," I said, "in a society more fucked up than ours, and only
The Long Way Around
had anything like space-marine-with-a-gun. People have been making games for a billion years, and yeah, a lot of them are bad or incomprehensible, but you don't have to use those. What's it gonna take, y'know? The most important event in human history happens, and you use it to tweak the game you were gonna make anyway."

"We weren't 'gonna make it', dude, it was three-quarters
done
. It cost us twenty million dollars."

"Oh!" I said. "Wow, I just realized—I don't have to do this!"

"Well, yeah. No one's making you—"

"No, sorry, it's not you. All this stuff was going through my head—can I take back a job I already quit? What's the least embarassing way to prostitute myself here? Will my opinion count for anything, or are you only interested in learning what color guts should fall out when a Farang gets shot? The same shit I've been arguing my whole life.

"But that's not a constant, it's how human society works. I sell my time and my pride for a chunk of that twenty million and the right to bitch about it ineffectually. That's what Curic meant when she asked if I'd been bargaining with myself. But I don't need money anymore. I'm infinitely wealthy."

"Well, good for fuckin' you," said Adam. "The rest of us still have to work for a living."

"You have a choice," I said. "You're already here. You don't have to go back."

Adam looked up the infinite hallway again, then back at me, like
are you kidding?
. "No thanks," he said. "I have a family, and I like living with humans, in a place where I can see the sky."

"Okay," I said. "I just wanted to point it out. Most people don't even get the choice."

"This was a waste of time," said Adam, "and now I'm lost in Human Ring. I can't believe Tetsuo thought you'd be interested."

"Tetsuo?" I said. "You talked to Tetsuo?"

"He didn't talk to you you?" said Adam. "He's our cultural consultant. The Ragtime thing was his idea. So was hiring you."

"No," I said. I started packing up my picnic. "He didn't talk to me. But he's gonna."

"I just learned something disturbing," I told Tetsuo Milk.

"I just learned that live animals are sometimes considered property!" said Tetsuo.

"I... I still think I can win this round," I said. "Because I learned that you're working with Reflex Games on that
Disputed Space
piece of shit."

Outernet video quality kept getting better as more people switched to smart paper. I was getting twenty frames a second of Tetsuo's office at UT Austin. I could see the posters behind him go through their animations: Tetsuo's home planet; Somn doing something, probably masturbating. One poster showed a stream of blocky blown-up animated GIFs from Constellechan.

In the foreground, twenty frames of Tetsuo a second. He knelt in front of a low desk, looking down at me, nursing a bottle of hot sauce. You'll Only See Kis Shadow! had gone home. It was early morning, Austin time.

"I work with them," said Tetsuo. "It's not secret. My name is on their website!" He said this with the tone of someone who's finally hit the big time.

"Sorry, I've been out of the loop," I said. "I've been reprogramming matter shifters. I don't have time to keep my friends out of trouble."

"Thanks for classifying all that garbage," said Tetsuo. "The data's very good."

"Well,
look
at the data for one second, Tets. The washing machine in the 1988 strata is the same as one in the 1984 strata. They change it just enough so you'll buy a new one. And now they make games that way, too. You can't get them to change anything except textures and maps and who the bad guy is. People will keep thinking Ragtime is some kind of malevolent entity instead of a fucking... nebula. And your name will be on
that
."

"Do you think I'm a dumb guy, Ariel?" asked Tetsuo. No sarcasm, no anger, just a regular question.

"I think you can be... kind of naive, sometimes?" I said.

"I sorted through garbage," said Tetsuo. "I sorted the garbage of the Ip Shkoy. It was replica garbage, with purpose of training historians. Other people on this mission have not gone through garbage. They're surprised by your garbage!

"Ha ha! I'm not surprised! I know about the washing machines! I saw how your labor was coordinated to produce
Pôneis Brilhantes
. I even know what your garbage will look like in the future."

"What will it look like?" My replica house was creaking, settling down for the night. Curic had even gotten the sounds right.

With one forehand Tetsuo picked up a stray scrap of smart paper and folded it into an origami cube. "It will still look like garbage," he said. "But it won't accumulate."

"Why are you making
more
garbage?" I said. "You told this guy Adam to come up and recruit me back to Reflex? Why the hell would I want that?" Except I kind of had wanted that.

"Do you remember
The Long Way Around
?" asked Tetsuo. He squished the cube between two fingers.

"Yeah," I said. "It was one of Af be Hui's games. You're trapped on a strange planet."

"You're trapped because an asteroid hit with the planet," said Tetsuo. "The hit collapsed the port you went through, and now you can't get back."

"You didn't mention that when we played it," I said. "Is that the backstory?"

"Search the game database about asteroids," said Tetsuo. "We made a lot of games about asteroids hitting with planets."

"'We' here is the Ip Shkoy?" I started typing a query against the CDBOEGOACC.

"Down was hit with asteroids often," said Tetsuo. "A few million years, another asteroid hits with us. The forests burn and the ocean life dies. We didn't know about it. We were the second form of intelligent life to come from our planet, and we didn't even know what killed the earlier guys."

"I'm... sorry?" I said. I wasn't sure what kind of greeting card you send for that situation.

"Then
they
came," said Tetsuo, his voice envious and afraid of
them
. "Came the monsters from space and they said: you have an asteroid problem, but we can help. What happened to the earlier guys ought not to happen to you.

"Well, everyone enjoyed a shitting the pants. Suddenly everything bad from ancient history was an asteroid's fault. We had to decide to fear the space monsters or the asteroids, and we mostly decided the asteroids."

The query ran. Tetsuo French-kissed the hot sauce bottle to get the last of it. There were over a hundred Ip Shkoy-era games about clobbering or getting clobbered with asteroids.

"You also have an asteroid problem, Ariel," said Tetsuo. His numb tongue made his accent worse. "You already know this problem. You could move the asteroids if you wanted, so you don't worry for the problem."

From his desk Tetsuo picked up an old
Star Trek
action figure I'd given him, and fiddled with the articulations. "Whenever we tell you of a problem, you know it already," he said. "So you don't worry for it. Instead you decide to fear us, the monsters from space, because we are new. But suppose..."

"But suppose Tetsuo Milk looks at us with his watery anime eyes," I said, "and says some really scary shit in his adorable Purchtrin accent. About something we didn't know about before, like Ragtime? He's kind of a dumb guy. Maybe he lets things slip sometimes. We should pay attention."

"The agent Krakowski keeps telling me to shut up," said Tetsuo. "But he never stops listening."

"Because telling you to shut up is the best way to keep you talking," I said. "Man, you are playing with fire."

"There is no other material to play with," said Tetsuo.

"Have you thought about what happens if this
works
? You'll get a generation of humans afraid to leave Earth because you trolled everyone with the terrible secret of space."

"I shouldn't say what I think will really happen," said Tetsuo.

"And now you're keeping secrets?" I said. "That's Curic's thing. You were always... don't be like this, Tets."

"I am declining to play my cards upfaced," said Tetsuo. "The BEA is recording what we say."

"You need to tell me this shit!" I said. "I'm an outlaw. I'm--wait, they bugged the Outernet?" I was a little disappointed. "That was fast."

"No, it just bugged my office," said Tetsuo. He held my old action figure in front of his smart paper. A tiny black dot was visible at the base of the neck: stolen Constellation technology. "It doesn't usually matter."

Curic had wanted information from me, and I'd gone along because she'd offered things in return. She'd asked for more, and she'd offered more, and I'd done more, and here I was. Tetsuo had only ever wanted to have fun playing video games with me.

But now Tetsuo was nearly a father, and I was... whatever I was about to become. We were adults, running through life without knowing the outcome, talking to each other across a chasm of schemes and politics, like my parents at faculty parties.

"I'm hanging up," I said. "Just tell me one thing, for the record. Does Ragtime even exist? Or did you guys make it up to scare people?"

"It exists," said Tetsuo. He spoke clearly into the action figure. "It has always existed. It's older than the universe."

ABlum:
you're an asshole
TetsuoMilkPhD:
hahahaha