Constellation Games (14 page)

Woke up in Human Ring, did a little exploring and saw this handbill stuck to the wall near the bubble airlock back to Alien Ring. I'd missed it last night.

I took five or six copies in different languages and stuck them to the wall of my room using NASA tomato paste from the Repertoire. Now my room is slightly different from the eight million other Human Ring rooms.

[This post is friends locked.]

Howdy, bro, you know how you'll score a sweet new licensed football game, with
totally marginal
improvements over last year's entry in the same franchise, spend hours breaking it in, and the next day end up all sore from all those motion-control passes and hikes? Or, I suppose that might also happen with actual sports.

Well, a similar thing happened to me. I stayed up all night with Aliens reenacting an ancient Alien culture and when I woke up today, I'd kind of forgotten what humans look like. Curic was right.

It didn't help that I woke up in a local-TV commercial for heaven (Private Rooms! Free Cable!). Breakfast from the Repertoire was an international variety of pastes from ten different space programs. So after breakfast I decided to go meet the brave men and women who eat this paste every day. I went to the central cylinder.

I probably should have gone
before
breakfast, but it's cool. Thanks to years of dealing with buggy 3D game engines, I can handle weightlessness pretty well. I just have to couple it with not being trapped in an infinite void and lacking any point of reference. As long as I don't look down the entire eighty-mile length of the central cylinder, I'm fine. Twenty miles down the zipline, after spotting Cryptids, Goyim, and three enormous Auslanders glowing like suns, I saw a tiny human figure in NASA blue.

I pulled up close to her with alternating back-and-forth pulses from my gravity kicker. She wasn't actually a tiny figure, that was just perspective, and she wasn't gigantic like an Auslander. She was the correct size for a human woman. She had two normal-sized eyes and no eyespots I could see. She held a clipboard in one
forehand
hand and a Space Pen (Made in the USA) in the other. Her mouth was a mouth, not a parrot beak swarming with antennacles. Her short blonde hair free-fell in a halo around her head, matted with dried sweat to an extent previously seen only on young punk girls panhandling in downtown Austin.

Either the astronaut or I was upside down. She'd rolled up the legs of her flight suit, as though she'd been walking through puddles. Her legs were hairy and her toes decorated with badly-chipped pink nail polish. Time to break out the ol' human small talk.

"Hi," I said.

"Mmm." The astronaut ticked a checkbox on her clipboard with her Space Pen.

"I'm Ariel Blum."

That got her to look up, and then down. "Oh, hi," she said. "Mission Specialist—", and then she said her name. But this is not the kind of blog that throws around women's names, even when they wear those names on patches on their chests. So I'm going to call her Miss Ion Specialist.

I couldn't figure out how to rotate myself, and Ion Specialist was perfectly comfortable interacting with someone who was upside-down relative to her, or at least didn't seem to expect anything better from the likes of me. So I just kept talking to her nail polish.

"I haven't seen another human for a while," I said. "You're with NASA?"

"And you, a civilian."

"Is it that obvious?"

"I don't already know you," said Ion. "Also, you're—" she tapped her neck with her pen "—green. 'Never rode the Vomit Comet' kind of green."

"Oh," I said. "Yeah, first time in zero gravity. It's a little strange."

"There's no such thing as zero gravity." Ion was clearly not the kind of astronaut they send to schools to explain things to kids. "We're in free-fall around Luna."

"Have you been there?" I said. "To the moon? I went yesterday."

Ion ticked another box on her checklist, possibly a checklist called "Stupid Questions From Civilians."

"I was the eighth woman on the moon," she said. "I could have been the fourth, but who needs the publicity, right?" Eyes back on the clipboard. "Love to shoot the shit, dude, but these experiments won't monitor themselves."

"What experiments?"

Ion glanced around. "The apparatus is in Utility Ring. I'm just here to get away from Certain People for a few hours."

"I mean, what experiments are you doing?"

"ISS backlog," said Ion Specialist. "Uh, how do foams behave in free-fall? How do nematodes reproduce? Plasmas, smoke points, physiological tests, miscellaneous."

That didn't sound too difficult. "Can I help?"

"Do you have
any
astronaut training?"

"I can wash your glassware," I said. "Or! I can give you the news from Earth." (Brilliant, Ariel, like astronauts don't have the Internet.)

"Earth." Ion Specialist drew the word out real long, as though
Earth
was a TV show she'd enjoyed watching but forgotten about between seasons.

"I can get you a drink," I said, "and you can enjoy your vacation from Certain People."

"You can try," said Ion, "but the only alcohol in the Repertoire is blood packs for Inostrantsi. I'm not that desperate."

"I know there's caipirinha."

"What's that, some kind of industrial solvent?"

"It's like a Brazilian mojito."

Ion looked at me with a kind of respect. She glanced at her clipboard and blew her breath out through her lips. "Aright," she said.

Floating here and there in the central cylinder are ceramic... asteroids, basically, objects big enough to absorb your momentum and small enough for a few people to cling to and talk. They cluster around Repertoire stations, so I kicked off towards the nearest cluster. And then past it, then away at an angle, and finally
bam
into a plus-sign-shaped asteroid.

Ion was waiting for me there. She'd seen where I was going and pushed herself over with a single swipe of the gravity kicker she wore like a ring on one hand.

"Hey, civilian," she said.

The caipirinha comes out the Repertoire as a thin sticky sheet. I tore it in half, rolled it up, and put each half into a plastic bulb of water. A little shaky-shaky and the drinks were ready.

"Ariel, how did you get
up
here?" asked Ion, like this had been really bothering her. "You're the first 'civilian' I've seen who wasn't secretly working for the feds." She took a capipirinha bulb and sucked on it steadily, like an IV drip.

"How do you know
I'm
not secretly working for the feds?" I said, kind of insulted.

"You're not," said Ion. "Aw, hey there, liquor, I missed you, too! So what are you doing here?"

"Playing video games," I said.
No, I didn't say that! I said: "I'm studying the earlier contact missions. Did you know that the Aliens had an early industrial civilization when the Constellation contacted them? Like World War II, except with public sex and space travel. Isn't that amazing?"

"Which ones are the Aliens?" said Ion Specialist.

"The eight-foot monkey lizards! How long have you been up here?"

"Contact event plus nine hours," said Ion. "Oh, I should have gotten someone to take my houseplants. They're probably dead by now."

"You've been lighting foam on fire for six weeks?" I said. "I enjoy weightlessness experiments as much as the next taxpayer, but is the ISS backlog really a good use of your time? Like, what about all the extraterrestrials?"

"I'm an astronaut," said Ion, "which means I run the experiments I'm ordered to run, like a good little lab assistant, or I go back home. I'm also a physicist, which means I don't know which end of a Gweilo to shake hands with and which to gossip about afterwards. You want xenobiology, you should talk to Dr. Wicklund."

"Cody Wicklund? He's the—"

"Yeah, a real expert at shaking hands. There's a civilian for ya. Head asshole of the NASA Asshole Corps."

My phone rang. It was 9:04 in Austin. "Shit," I said, looking at the screen, "Sorry, I have to take this. It's the BEA."

"Is that supposed to impress me?" said Ion Specialist. "Is the BEA some big space monster, like Her? The Bug-Eyed Alien?"

"Sssh!"

Agent Fowler was on the other end of the phone, and I don't want to give him any time in this blog post, so suffice to say that he was really happy about
Ev liue Aka's Ultimate DIY Lift-Off
, and this was really bad news for me and the rest of the human race.

"The Bureau of Extraterrestrial Affairs is a
government agency
," I said. "AKA the feds. And I've been here for one day and they're already misrepresenting my work." Ion Specialist whistled innocently.

"The Ip Shkoy," I said, "one of the early industrial Alien civilizations. They made this... well, it was a... kind of video game."

"Oh, you're into video games?!" said Ion. Hundred thousand miles from home and I'm still falling into this conversational trap. "There was this game I played when I was a kid, and I could never remember the name."

"Did it involve Blizzard Lizard?" I said. "Because that would be
Blizzard Lizard
."

"No, it was all text, it was on the computer. You were on this big spaceship, but it was breaking down, and you had to build replacement parts out of your cargo of tacky tourist souvenirs."

"That sounds like
Starfarer
." Nineteen eighty...seven? When that game came out, I was nothing but my grandparents pressuring my parents to give Raph a little brother.

"Yes! That was it! Awesome! Anyway, go on with your story."

"Well, the Ip Shkoy made this game where you basically blow up the entire Constellation contact mission. BEA thinks that game was on to something. Now they want me to see what the Constellation did to make the Aliens so mad."

"Sounds like something worth knowing."

"Yeah, except the Constellation didn't actually do anything. The game is bullshit."

"Says who? Someone from the Constellation?"

"Oh, well, yeah. But I wouldn't have heard of this game in the first place, if it wasn't for Tetsuo."

"So? Tetsuo slipped up."

I was clinging to the plus-sign-shaped asteroid for dear life, but Ion still had some angular momentum going, and by this point in the conversation I was once again looking at her toenail polish. I scrambled to the other side of the astroid so I could look her in the eye.

"That game was made fifty years into the contact mission," I said. "This one's been going six lousy weeks, and humans are already getting mad at the Constellation. 'What have they done for us?' Not a hell of a lot. Whose fault is that? I dunno. But people are pissed that the Constellation didn't come here with ready-made solutions to all our problems."

"Why would they have solutions to our problems?" said Ion. "They don't even observe proper experimental controls. You would not believe how they treat my apparatus."

"I'm saying you don't need a reason to be angry. You can just get angry and make a slanderous game. And then seventeen million years later, the BEA will use that game to feed the hysteria on Earth. Different planet, same problem."

"Mmm," said Ion, looking at her clipboard. "Would you like to hear my secret way for dealing with these things?"

"Yes," I said.

"Not thinking about it." She held out her empty, collapsed bulb. "Would you get me another industrial solvent?"

After she'd finished her checklist and her second caipirinha, Ion Specialist pulled herself to the plus-sign-shaped asteroid and looked me over one more time, as if deciding whether she could trust me. "I have a question for you," she whispered. "Have you ever heard of a company called Constellation Shipping?"

"It's not a company," I said. "It's just a logo they put on the boxes they send down to Earth. It's like a running joke."

"Ariel the civilian, I have decided to show you something weird. Something I found in Utility Ring."

"I'm from Austin," I said. "We'll look at anything weird."

"That's good," said Ion Specialist conspiratorially, "because I'm from Akron, Ohio, and if we see something weird, we don't have many options other than starting a rock band."

"I play drums a little."

"Why don't I just show you."

She showed me.

I had a bed set up with the two bunkbed mattresses, and a pillow made from twenty-five identical shirts from the Repertoire. It was a nice system, but there was no nightstand, so when Jenny called, I had to roll onto the floor and feel around for the phone.

"I am freaking unhappy!" said Jenny. "You haven't even looked at my concept art."

"I... was asleep," I said.

"It's nine-thirty," said Jenny.

"Yeah, nine-thirty in Austin," I said.

"Oh, did you tire yourself out floating around Ring City with your girlfriend?" snapped Jenny. "While I was busting my ass on
Sayable Spice: Earth Remix
."

"Dammit. Jenny. Curic's not my girlfriend."

"I'm not talking about Curic."

"Oh." I let that hang there for a second. One of Smoke's subminds decided I wasn't going back to sleep, and turned on the room light.

"I know your signals, Ariel," said Jenny, real proud of this, like I play 'em so close to the vest. "The cutesy pseudonym? Posting an innocuous conversation and friends-locking it? What did she 'show you' in Utility Ring?"

"It was a shipping container," I said. "She didn't know about Constellation Shipping, so she freaked out when she found a shipping container in a space station orbiting the moon. I'll write about it when I— great, now my mother is calling. There goes sleep."

"Oh, she calls
right
as I call?"

"Hold on." I switched to the incoming call. "Hi, Ma."

"Ariel, this is your mother."

"Yeah, Ma, hi, what's up?"

"I read your blog," said my mother. "Who is this Ion Specialist?"

"She's... a woman... I met... on the space... station," I said, picking every word from a menu of generic-sounding words.

"What's her real name? I want to look her up and make sure she's not one of the crazy astronauts."

"Her name is Tammy, Ma.
Doctor
Tammy Miram."

"Miram? Is there the tiniest possibility that that's a Jewish name?"

"I don't think so, Ma. She's some kind of lapsed-Catholic Unitarian Buddhist."

"Well, you know me, I don't care, as long as you're happy. Only, please tell me they sell rubbers in the bathrooms up there?"

"Ma, every single assumption you made in that sentence is wrong."

"Just tell your mother she doesn't have to worry."

"We did nothing, Ma." I got up and took the conversation outside, to the infinite hallway.

"Doesn't sound like a girl you want to do nothing with," said my mother.

"We made out a little, okay? We made out in zero gravity behind a shipping container!" I shouted it out to everyone in Human Ring, which was nobody. "Are you happy now?"

"That's a pretty cheap date, honey."

"All right, Ma," I said, "you have officially crossed the line. I've got Jenny on hold, and I'm going to have her humiliate me about this instead of you."

"Jenny, that poor girl."

"Bye, Ma. Take care. Buh-bye now. I'm back."

"Did you move?" said Jenny. "It looks different."

"Yeah, I'm in the hallway now," I said. I held the camera lens away from me and waved the phone around. "Drink it in. Fuckin'... Kansas in space."

"Well, after your nap, lover boy," said Jenny, "take a minute to look at the damn concept art. I like it and Bizarro Kate likes it, but maybe you think it's too anime-ey for a video game."

"Maybe it is," I said, "but I'm not the art dictator. I hired you so we could get a division of labor. You should go with the style you're comfortable with."

"That's sweet, except this game isn't about pachinko or time management, so our main audience is likely to be young men. Which means we might want more of a comic book look."

I paced the cold black floor in my bare feet. "Guys like anime, too," I said. "The anime club in college was full of guys."

"And at the time I calculated that that was about eighty percent wanting to look at tits."

"So is comic books."

"Nah," said Jenny. "Sixty percent, tops."

"I need a break from Tetsuo," I said. "I'll look at the art tomorrow morning."