Read Constellation Games Online
Authors: Leonard Richardson
Tags: #science fiction, aliens, fiction, near future, video games, alien, first contact
Sunday morning at my parents' house means cereal and video games with the volume turned down. I don't see any reason to stop this tradition just because I moved out ten years ago and the cereal I used to eat has been recalled for being carcinogenic.
Every time I come over, I put in a little time on my parents' old Wii maintaining my
City, In Darkness
city. Most visits, I don't even have to change the disc; it's still in there from last time.
While I worked on civic improvements, Tetsuo lay like a dog in front of the couch, ate dry cereal out of the box, and browsed his strategy guide for
Recoil
.
"I've made decisions to use the English translator when I talk to students," he said, apropos of nothing. "I don't want to misplace communications."
"You hate the English translator."
"I ought to burn my dislike," said Tetsuo. "If people would admire me as a teacher, I should speak like your parents."
Leave a
CiD
game alone for six months and the Adversary takes over the city, tearing down my urban wind farms and replacing them with seedy brothels, or in my case, Stinky Soda Factories (gotta keep the Wii release rated T for Teen). The citizens stop attending city council meetings.
Then one holiday or another comes along, I go up to my parents' house, and Hizonner returns in glory, walking the streets like a beat cop, fixing potholes by clicking on them and laying down the wrath of zoning ordinances. Afterwards I take the train back to Austin and my city goes to shit again. It's good for me to have a routine at my parents'.
"My folks
teach
English," I told Tetsuo. "They're expected to have a certain fluency. Half my CS professors had worse English than you."
"I have seen the hateful blogs," said Tetsuo. "They mock the way Purchtrin speakers speak English."
"You're getting better," I said. "But you start using the translator, and no one will be able to tell you from Ashley."
"What have you wronged Ashley?" barked Tetsuo.
"No! What? Her
translator
sounds a little bland. Like daytime talk shows. Doesn't make me feel like there's going to be a test."
"I must say important things and have understanding. To say them in a bland sound may even be better. Hierarchy Interface does that."
A
City, In Darkness
city doesn't really deteriorate gradually when you stop playing. Nothing can happen when the Wii is off. When you start the game, the software checks a timestamp in your savefile to see when you last played. The Adversary's damage is prorated based on how long you've been away.
So, what if I were to just walk away from the game and never come back? My city would stay clean and productive forever. That sure sounds like a win condition. What does it say about my goals that I keep coming back to the game, deliberately fucking everything up so I can have some mindless fun refilling the potholes?
"Ma, I'm—I'm kinda lying a lot, and I don't know how to stop."
Yes, Ariel, wait 'til the last minute to have your emotional breakdown. Wait through the meals and the after-meal conversations, through sorting your high-school stuff into boxes for attic/Tetsuo/yard sale. Wait until all the stuff has been loaded, and your dad and the space alien are actually waiting for you in the car, and then go to your mom and start your sniffling, because this is your absolute last fucking chance.
Mom was a champ: she set down her pen and turned and held her arms open. "C'mere. C'mere, honey. How did it start?"
"On my blog," I said. "Pretending that Bai's girlfriend is a human being."
"That's a new one on me," said my mother. She tried to determine from first principles how a liberal should handle this situation. "What is she really, an ET? If it's okay to tell me."
"She's a submind of Smoke," I said. "She's been given an Alien psychology, like, Tetsuo's psychology. And that's causing its own set of problems, and I'm having to lie to Bai about the problems. And now there's this thing about my house burning down. Ma, it didn't really burn down. But I can't tell anyone what really happened, even you. I just can't. So I have to lie some more."
Linda Blum's mother-fu was being tested as never before. "Okay," she just said. "It's okay."
"Jenny doesn't respect me anymore, ma. She thinks I'm an idiot who burned his house down. And now I'm lying to everyone about Curic, too."
Mom thought about this. "Are you in trouble?" she asked.
"A little? Maybe? I didn't do anything wrong! I don't think. I just feel real bad."
"You don't like lying. That's a very honorable trait. Ariel, you don't
have
to talk about everything."
"I'm still lying. Lies of omission."
"Are you still writing things down? You know you can write the truth in private, and eventually..."
"All the stuff I wrote in private, Ma, in college. Curic scanned it and now it's in the Constellation repertoire 'til the end of time. I don't want it there. I can't even trust what I write down in private."
"What do you want me to say, honey?" said my mother. "I'm not gonna tell you not to lie. Sometimes people have to lie." Mom's grandmother only made it through the War because a bunch of people lied their asses off.
"How do you know?" I said. "How do you know if you really have to lie, or if you're just making excuses for yourself?"
"Are you willing to do the work," said my mother, "to make the kind of world where you can tell the truth?"
"I think so," I said. "I'm trying."
"That's my boy."
Man, fuck this whole thing. I spent hours getting Agent Krakowski on the phone and he knocked me down in five minutes. Just because he has a desk, he thinks he's a big shot.
"What's with the desk?" was the first thing I said.
"What do you mean what's with the desk?"
"You've clearly set your BlackBerry on a desk," I said. "I can barely see you in the middle distance, it's just the desk stretching out to infinity like the fucking amber waves of grain. You're in one of those fancy government offices with a picture of the President on the wall."
"The desk is a desk," said Krakowski. "Good work gets noticed in the BEA. It's a brand-new organization: the bureaucratic rot hasn't had time to set in."
"Where's Fowler?" I asked. "Is he your desk buddy?"
"Fowler is back at Homeland Security. He had a distressing habit of making insulting remarks about our Constellation allies. It got so bad, I felt I had to notify our superiors." Krakowski smiled in a way I didn't like. "Didn't I tell you I'd have that punk inspecting shipping containers in Anchorage?"
"No," I said, "you never said that."
"Riight," said Krakowski thoughtfully, like
why would I tell YOU?
"Are you on a secure line?"
"This is an off-the-shelf phone," I said. "It's full of NSA backdoors, just like your BlackBerry."
"Smartass," said Krakowski. "I'm talking about the Outernet backchannel. I don't want you calling me if you've got smart paper in the
room
."
"Well, there's none in the
room
," I said. "So. I know you didn't want to hear anything more from Tetsuo Milk."
"Yeah, I don't. Did he say something about Earth, or politics, or anything?"
"No, it was about the Slow People."
"If I wanted to hear Professor Milk make shit up, I'd attend his lectures. I don't need you telling me the same stuff he says in public. The point of intelligence gathering is to discover secrets."
"Tetsuo is my friend," I said. "I'm not gathering intelligence from my friends. That's why they call it friendship."
"And that's why we have the twice-yearly contact audits," said Krakowski. "So you don't need to call me every time you have a friendly conversation with a friend."
"Yeah, so you can ruin my Fourth of July every year for the rest of my life," I said. "Should I just hang up, or do you want to hear about Curic?"
"Ah, well, we love Curic," said Krakowski. "He knows how to keep secrets."
"Based on your strong implicit suggestion," I said, "I asked her about Ragtime. Everything she said is consistent with what Tetsuo told me."
"I'll be the judge of that," said Krakowski. "Don't go freelance. Just tell me what he said."
"Uh," I said, "I have notes somewhere."
"Okay," said Krakowski. I wondered why we had to be away from any Outernet backchannel just to discuss what Curic had told me over the Outernet in the first place.
I called up my notes from a file called "Ragtime Notes." "So imagine there's this planet," I said, "where the people died out fifty million years ago. The mastodons have come back or whatever. You wouldn't know it was ever inhabited, except for the thorium in the atmosphere. So, they're all dead and that's sad and everything, but at least we can be paleontologists, right? See what they were like. Except, Ragtime got there twenty million years ago and dug everything up."
"Dug it up."
"Ragtime takes the fossils, the arrowheads, the coins, the nuclear reactors. Everything within certain negentropy boundaries. Now there's no history left. You're stuck in this planetary system studying another damn species of mastodon that doesn't even have a fossil record. And that's why nobody wants to come on the contact missions.
"Curic said the Constellation can kind of communicate with Ragtime. But they can't stop it, and it moves faster than they do, because it doesn't get bored or demoralized finding planet after planet where everyone's dead."
"All right," said Krakowski, who'd clearly heard all this from someone else. "This is good stuff, really good stuff, but let me bring up a kind of different direction for you. You're a computer geek, yeah?"
Not for you,
I thought. "Yeah."
"We are scrambling to find out how the Outernet works. There's a shitload of technical documentation and nobody who understands it. We are looking at mass adoption of a communications device that hasn't undergone FCC testing and probably contains bugs."
I write video games. Why are you asking me?
"All software has bugs," I said. "You just update the firmware."
"
Bugs,
" said Krakowski. "In-tell-i-gence gathering devices. The Constellation loves recording things. Now they're going to record every conversation anyone ever has."
"I think you might be projecting a little."
"Not even counting what happens when perverts start hiding smart paper in the girls' locker room. We have to head this off at the pass."
"Why don't you just ban smart paper? That seems like the kind of thing you'd do."
"Who's this 'you?'" demanded Krakowski. "I can't ban a damn thing. You want to tell the chairman of the Committee on Science and Technology he has to give up his new phone?"
"Yeah, I guess you're in a real tight spot," I said, "what with all the free computers and Outernet making all those Americans happy."
"You can't just introduce advanced technology into a society that's not ready for it," said Krakowski. "This is a clusterfuck and we need help."
"I'll think about it," I said. (Meaning no.) "Can I get my exit visa back?"
"We'll see," said Krakowski. (Meaning no.)
"Will you give me a desk?"
"No," said Krakowski. (Also no.)
Fucking Krakowski with his fucking desk. I had a desk, too, and then
you took it
.
To:
Jun-Feng Bai, Ariel Blum, Jenny Gallegos
Subject:
Tetsuo Milk Presents: An Email MessageI'm unfortunate not to have seen you. I didn't forsee the crowd in the lecture hall or I would have smuggled you 3 and etc. through the speaker's entrance. I was misled by a sign saying 541 maximum occupancy, which I now believe refers to the maximum number of
permanent
residents.This transcript of yesterday comes from the Purchtrin-English translator. I expected it to give me precise words but instead it gave me short words. Oh well!
---
Tetsuo Milk, Ph.D.
“While there is a lower class, I am in it.” — Eugene DebsHi, students. My name is Tetsuo.
You've spent your entire lives sitting in chairs like these while adults like me stand in front of you and tell you about history. You thought you were almost done! You thought you could graduate, get dog-walking jobs, and forget about history. Then we arrive from nowhere and tell you that history is eight hundred million years longer than you thought. Bad luck!
Where I used to live, we use devices called intuition pumps. You spend a day with the intuition pump and the history of eight hundred million years goes through your brain. At the end of the day you forget everything. No one can remember all that stuff. But it's easier to learn the second time.
There are no intuition pumps for humans, so what shall we do? The summary of this class promises I will tell you eight hundred million years of stuff in twenty hours, and also have twenty hours for questions-and-answers. That's impossible. I'm already starting three weeks late. I didn't write this summary, by the way, although I like the questions-and-answers idea.
So let's throw history away.
Here's some history, so we can see what we're throwing away. [I DISPLAYED ON THE COMPUTER SCREEN A CUSTOM-MADE SLIDE SUMMARIZING THE ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF THE IP SHKOY. -T.M.] My ancestors maintained dozens of cruel and beautiful civilizations: the Ip Shkoy, the Nanawan, the Gle. I could talk for four hundred hours about the Ip Shkoy alone. We could re-create their society on a small scale in the McKinney Falls State Park. It would change your life. We do not have time.
I will tell you about the Ip Shkoy for two hours, and I will only mention them at all because they happened to be around when the Constellation visited their world. Instead of eight hundred million years across hundreds of planets, I'm going to tell you about fifteen contact missions.
I'll tell you about ten successful missions, because humans like the number ten. I'll tell you about the four catastrophic failures, and then there's one that a lot of people think was a failure, but they're wrong. We can handle fifteen things in twenty hours, yes? Yes, you're writing this down, this is good. [WHENEVER I MENTIONED A NUMBER, PEOPLE WOULD WRITE THE NUMBER DOWN. -T.M.]
Okay, now bear with me on a slight digression. I want you to think about a period of time: seventy Earth years. We're all young people in this room, except the folks with the cameras, but we can all imagine seventy years. Just think of Earth seventy years in the past.
This is the time of your grandparents. There's no Internet and no Abstract Expressionism, but there's capitalism, radio, and primitive space travel. What is it? [AT THIS POINT THERE WAS CLARIFICATION FROM THE AUDIENCE. -T.M.] I'm sorry, I just assumed there was space travel.
Most contact missions last thousands of years before they rejoin Constellation space. This contact mission, the one you and I are working on right now, will only last seventy years. As I speak, a spaceship is heading back to reopen a port to Constellation space. It will arrive in about seventy years. I think this is a very bad idea, but I was on the losing side of the argument.
This is why I'm telling you about all the catastrophic failures, even though there were only four. We're in danger of creating the fifth catastrophic failure. When the port reaches Constellation space, your culture must be strong and self-confident enough to join that eight hundred million years of history. If we fail, your civilization will blow apart like {{{foreign metaphor not translated}}}. Well, it will not be a picnic for you and me. [AT THIS POINT I MADE A MEANINGFUL GESTURE. - T.M.] If you— Actually— Please be— Okay, I think this time we will spend the entire two hours in questions-and-answers.