Constellation Games (20 page)

[This post is friends locked.]

I got up at the butt-crack of dawn and went to the spaceport with Bai, to pick up the new version of Dana. Curic had organized this transfer with blinding speed. A few days ago we'd dropped off Dana's phone with the BEA, they'd sent it up, and yesterday BEA Agent Fowler called me and said could I come to the landing site tomorrow.

KThxBai:
alarm clock. beep
beep
beep
ABlum:
stop it
KThxBai:
i'll be there in 15 to pick you up.
ABlum:
can you go by yourself?
i think i may actually be dead
KThxBai:
rise from your grave, bro.
you're curic's contact. you need to be there.

I heroically got out of bed, and despite misunderstandings and Mexican standoffs we were able to pick up the new, improved, self-aware Dana Light. Who Bai immediately took home for some TMI time, so she won't be coming in to work today. But we at Crispy Duck Games finally have an employee capable of translating
Sayable Spice
for us. And all you old college chums who are still bitching at me about Bai/Dana can shut up once and for all, because now you're just being racist against AIs.

The first time I tried to make it to the landing site there was a traffic jam five miles long: people spending a whole day trying to catch a glimpse of an alien spaceship. In the intervening two months, we've built a shitty spaceport out of Quonset huts and then abandoned it. Bai pulled his SUV past an unstaffed checkpoint and parked up front, near the entrance. There was one other car in the lot: Fowler's. Parked in a handicapped space.

The entrance to the spaceport building was chained up. Chain-link and razor wire surrounded the landing site itself, plus the trailers used by the BEA and customs. It was a perfect Texas autumn morning, the kind where if you wake up early, you can spend a few blissful hours not sweating like a hog.

I walked to Fowler's car and rapped gently on the window. He looked up from his texting and rolled down the window. "Mr. Blum!" he said. "Gentlemen."

"Where's Krakowski?" I asked. Bai shuffled up behind me and slurped at his enormous paper cup of coffee.

"Krakowski" — actually Fowler said "Crack-housey" — "is busy sleeping." Then Fowler noticed Bai's fraternity ring. "Awright! Omicron Beta Digamma!"

"Class of '11!" said Bai cheerfully. They bumped fists through the open window. The clink of ring on ring.

"'02," said Fowler. "Florida State."

"UT Austin," said Bai.

"Local boy! What can I do ya for? You want, like, an exit visa?" Fowler opened his car door and stepped out.

"We're taking delivery," I said loudly. "The smart paper prototype. You told us to come down here."

"Right, right. Yeah, your patron's sending down a shuttle." Fowler escorted the three of us through the razor-wire fence. We waded into the tall grass near the landing site and waited.

I never realized just how small small talk could get until I heard Bai chatting with Fowler about dear old Omicron Beta Digamma. I slouched off to the side and looked sullen until Bai got tired of Fowler staring at the sky instead of making eye contact, and came back over to me.

"Why does he keep talking about your patron?" Bai whispered. "Is the mob involved in this?"

"Curic is my 'patron,'" I said. "This is all a favor to the Constellation. Try and get them to sign a copyright treaty or some shit, as long as we're negotiating. People like you and me don't count."

"I just want Dana back," said Bai. "I'm tired of using my hand." He elbow-nudged me.

"Hey, look at me," I said, "not asking what difference it makes."

"Here it comes!" said Fowler, still looking up.

Bai pumped his fist. "Fuckin' A!"

"G-ddammit," said Fowler, "someone's in there! Why these people gotta make it difficult? Can they not follow some some simple instructions?" These were clearly rhetorical questions.

The shuttle landed noiselessly fifty yards away. Inside stood a single Farang. "It's Curic," I said.

"You can tell 'em apart?" said Fowler.

I couldn't. I still can't. "Who else would it be?"

The dome of the shuttle lifted up. "Hello," called Curic. She was holding a white box and a newspaper-sized sheet of paper.

"Freeze!" said Fowler, and drew his sidearm.

"Shitfuck!" said Bai, and backed off by stumbling backwards and falling on his ass, spilling coffee into the grass. I just kept my eyes on Curic, preparing myself for the deposition.
No, she never left the shuttle.

"Your arrival contravenes state and federal law!" said Fowler. I never thought I'd miss Agent Krakowski.

Curic didn't seem concerned at all. "Away put your weapon, Mr. Fowler," she said. "This isn't an invasion. I just came down to share some strawberry pie with Ariel and his friend. It's very popular among humans on Ring City. You can have some, too, if you want."

"Don't tempt this planet with your pie!" said Fowler. "Just toss out the parcel. Don't leave the shuttle!"

Curic did a DROP ALL and squatted on the glass floor of the shuttle. She folded the sheet of paper with her tiny furry hands.

"Hey!" said Fowler. "The parcel!"

"The parcel contains the pie!" said Curic, and kept folding. "This is the computer."

Fowler's face was taut; I could almost hear the dramatic music playing in his head. Here at last was the excitement he'd signed up for. He was Earth's last line of defense. Against a four-foot hermaphroditic otter armed with strawberry pie and a piece of paper.

After a minute, Curic stood upright, holding a paper airplane. She turned perpendicular to Fowler and his gun, and threw the airplane. It went fifteen feet and landed in the grass. Bai sat on his knees, looking over at the airplane. He looked sick.

Then nothing happened because the shuttle wasn't taking off. Fowler maintained his gonna-shoot-ya posture. Curic sat on the floor, opened the little white box and ate the pie, stuffing it past her antennacles in messy red handfuls.

Finally the dome of the shuttle descended. Fowler relaxed a bit. Curic waved to us with sticky hands. The shuttle lifted off.

The paper airplane was sucked up again in the wake of the shuttle and lodged in the chain-link fence. Fowler holstered his six-shooter, chased the airplane down, and handed it to me, huffing from exertion. "Can't believe I'm a fucking interstellar courier," he said. "Your patron's got a lot of balls, you know that?"

"Not even sure where to go with that one," I said, unfolding the paper airplane. "Lots of possibilities there."

"Gimme that," snapped Bai, snatching the airplane from me. He unfolded it to reveal a picture of a phone. As he tilted the paper, the picture of the phone fell to the bottom, the way a real phone would if you dropped it into a glass box. The picture of the screen of the phone lit up and displayed the AT&T Death Star. The creases of the paper airplane were already filling themselves in, leaving the paper flat.

"Congratulations, Bai," I said. "We're now pioneers in the exciting field of paper computing."

Fortunately, this was a slight exaggeration. Bai and I were the tenth or twentieth Americans to be sent smart paper from Ring City. This meant that there was a procedure for clearing the stuff through customs. Fowler had to wake up Krakowski, and Krakowski had to call someone he knew from Homeland Security, and who knows who that person had to call, but they did eventually find it.

While the calls were happening, we three, two humans and one newly-independent submind of Smoke, sat outside the BEA trailer.

"They're supposed to classify it as an industrial prototype," said Dana-in-the-phone-on-the-paper. "It's very simple." She was wearing a silver lamé ballroom gown and a baseball cap that said BITCH across the front.

"It's okay, sweetie," said Bai, who was being really really happy about everything. "Let's just enjoy being outside."

"So, uh, Dana," I said, leaning over, "did you end up learning Edink?" Dana made two interlocking sets of clicky-squeaky noises.

"'I have modest fluency,'" Bai read. "She's got subtitles!"

"Okay, that's excellent," I said, "I'd like you to do some translation work to help me understand old Farang video games."

"No," said Dana.

"Um. Well, that's one of the reasons we had you uplifted..."

"I'm not an application," said Dana. "If I'm going to do work, I want to get paid for it."

"I was going to pay you," I said. "I'm not an idiot."

"Curic said you might be," said Dana. (Thanks a bunch, Curic.)

"Bai, am I an idiot?"

"Noooo?" said Bai, his voice going a little higher than I would have liked.

The trailer door slammed open. "Okay, guys," said Fowler. "We do it as an industrial prototype."

"I told you," said Dana.

"Ssh!" hissed Bai.

Fowler literally took out scissors and cut twenty-five percent off the top of the smart paper, as an import tax. Bai never stopped smiling.

KThxBai:
Hi, Ariel. It was really good to see you at the spaceport.
ABlum:
uh, yeah, ok...
KThxBai:
Sorry! This is Dana. I'm using my boyfriend's account.
ABlum:
oh, hi. i thought you didn't sound like bai
KThxBai:
Hold on for just one second.
[KThxBai is now offline.]

DanaLightNotTheVideoGameChick:
Okay! Hello!
As I was saying, it was was good to see you. It was like meeting someone again after an absence of years and years. I recognized you, from before, but I didn't
know
anything about you. I'd been going through life with the mental power of a human telephone. Now I have space to think! I can make real friendships.
ABlum:
ok, yeah
i'm glad we could do this for you
are you ok to chat? i figured you and bai would want some time alone
him taking the day off etc
DanaLightNotTheVideoGameChick:
Oh, he and I are having sex right now. It's great! But I saw the blog post you put up and I need you to make a couple edits.
ABlum:
ok thats plenty
you mean the blog post i posted like 10 seconds ago?
DanaLightNotTheVideoGameChick:
That's it. Would you please get rid of the references to me as an AI?
ABlum:
are you offended?
i mean the whole point of that entry is "we picked up dana 2.0 at the spaceport"
DanaLightNotTheVideoGameChick:
Fun fact: The BEA doesn't like it when people sneak into the United States from Ring City. You saw what almost happened to Curic. Do you want that to happen to me?
ABlum:
no
DanaLightNotTheVideoGameChick:
So... you picked up a
smart paper prototype
at the spaceport. It's a computing technology, not a thought substrate. You can say that I came with Bai from Austin, but please don't say that I came down with Curic.
ABlum:
ok, so help me out here
bai shut down his "dana light" virtual girlfriend
because he started dating a human also named "dana light"
who also happens to look like the video game chick?
DanaLightNotTheVideoGameChick:
Do you remember any of my boyfriend's exes?
ABlum:
fair enough
the name thing is new, though
DanaLightNotTheVideoGameChick:
Make up another name. Describe me however you want. Just please write as though I were a human.
ABlum:
you're going to be an important part of crispy duck games
i'm going to be writing about you on the official blog
i can't make up some totally fictional contractor
DanaLightNotTheVideoGameChick:
I'm not going to say crazy shit all the time like Tetsuo, if that's what you're worried about. I may be based on an Alien psychology, but I'm designed to approximate human behavior.
ABlum:
what if agent fowler reads my blog and wonders where this "dana" person was this morning?
DanaLightNotTheVideoGameChick:
I'm not worried about Fowler. But if it bothers you that much, take me out of the blog post altogether.
ABlum:
i will do this for you because i don't want you to die
but i want to say that i'm not comfortable lying to my readers
insofar as i have any readers
DanaLightNotTheVideoGameChick:
I think you're more comfortable with it than you let on.
ABlum:
what do you mean by that
DanaLightNotTheVideoGameChick:
For starters, you sure use friends-lock a lot.
OH, SHIT!
ABlum:
????
DanaLightNotTheVideoGameChick:
Do you know what an orgasm
feels
like?
ABlum:
i thought i did
[DanaLightNotTheVideoGameChick is now offline.]