Constellation Games (32 page)

This is just to set the record straight. The three participants in this conversation all have recordings of the conversation, so I guess I'm just asserting that the stuff I said is the truth.

Bai called me and was angry. Bai doesn't do angry well. He called me some names and eventually got to the point: "Why aren't you paying Svetlana for the work she's doing?"

"Calm down," I said. This is a stupid thing to say to someone, but I never claimed to be smart. "Not only am I paying Svetlana, one of the things I'm paying her to do is manage the payroll. So if the money's not coming through, it's her own fault."

"I let this slide for two months already," said Bai. "It's not cool, bro!"

"I'm just gonna throw some ideas out here," I said. "Is it possible that
Svetlana
Dana [Fuck it! -A.B.] is spending her own money? Look in your purchase history."

"It's my account," said Bai. "Dana doesn't have direct access."

"She is your phone, Bai. She knows your passwords."

Bai put his smart paper down and my view of the video chat filled with his poking fingers as he logged on to check his cash flow. I pulled over my development paper and checked the corporate account.

"The money's going out," I said. "I dunno what to say."

"Shit!" said Bai. "Experience Holdings LLC! That's the store I useta buy her accessories from."

"Okay, problem solved," I said. "I'm paying her, she's spending her own money on 3D models of clothes. You got a problem with that, take it up with Dana. I'm not getting involved."

"You're already involved," said Bai. "You modded her so she wouldn't want more stuff all the time. Now she's broken, and she's squandering our nest egg."

"Do you really want to go there?" I said.

"I'm already here," Bai said.

"I didn't mod 'Dana'," I said. "I modded a simple pseudo-AI that your friends had agreed to treat as a real person, out of politeness. And then that program was
replaced
with a
real
AI that approximates how an Alien would act if the Alien were 'Dana.'

"I could make the pseudo-AI think her desires were easy to meet. A real Alien won't fall for that. She wants what she wants, and you have to have to deal with her like a real person, because that's what she is."

"Thank you, Ariel," said Dana's sultry voice.

"Bai," I said, "did you use the Dana-phone to call me
about Dana
?"

"It's my phone, bro!"

"You're a pretty understanding guy, Ariel," said Dana. "It's a bit surprising to me that you have to pretend to have a girlfriend."

"Ex-cuse me?"

"You know, your little blonde shiksa? Who no one but you has ever talked to? You expect your friends to believe you're fucking an
astronaut
? It's a little unrealistic, and believe me, I know from unrealistic fantasy girlfriends. Is she Canadian as well?"

"Tammy is from Ohio! She was the eighth woman on the moon! She has a Wikipedia page!"

"So does Dana Light," said Dana, "but she's not Bai's girlfriend."

"Because she's a
fictional character
."

"Bai, sweetheart," said Dana. "Let's not argue about money. Just, thanks for getting us all on the line together. Ariel is not being a team player. He's been using fealty to his fake astronaut girlfriend as an excuse to avoid a relationship with us. I want you to have a talk with him, man to man."

"What," said Bai, "the fuck."

"Well, sure, okay!" I said, "Let's get it all out here! Dana has an Alien psychology, which means that if it's consistent with human behavior, she'll act like an Alien. And part of being an Alien is having sex with the people you work with. They call it transitive pair bonding. That's how Tetsuo hooked up with his wife. Probably both his wives."

"You— the—" said Bai.

"She's been coming on to me for weeks, and I've been
tactfully
pushing her off because this is the exact conversation I didn't want to have. But now she's making fun of my totally real girlfriend, so fuck it. You deal with Dana, Bai. You start treating your Alien girlfriend as a person, and stop pretending she's the video game heroine you jerked off to when you were a teenager, and maybe she won't feel like she needs two boyfriends."

"You insensitive motherfucker," said Dana.

"Dana," said Bai. "I forbid you from having anything to do with Ariel. You are not to do any more work for Crispy Duck Games."

"I'm not a child," said Dana. "You can't forbid me shit. Anyway, the point is moot because I quit."

"You can't quit," I said. "You're fired."

"Very well," said Dana. "It seems all three of us want the same thing."

And that's it. I wash my hands of it.

Not posting this. Eyes on the prize, Ariel.

Hello, blog. I have moved! I know I just moved two weeks ago, but that was always supposed to be a temporary situation, and now I've got something much better.

See, funny story: I used to own a house. Mortgage interest deduction on my taxes and everything. Through the good graces of some friends I'd made, I was fortunate enough to be keeping some interesting extraterrestrial technology in my house. Old computers, game systems and stuff. Then, a month ago, some agents from the Bureau of Extraterrestrial Affairs came and took away my house, to get at the alien technology. Or maybe to get some other technology they
thought
I had. Or maybe just so one of the agents could score a promotion. Who knows?

I wrote about this at the time—I've posted that entry now, backdated and un-friends-locked. The BEA took everything I had and tore my damn house down. They threw me a National Security Letter that said I couldn't tell anyone what had happened. I had to lie to my friends, make myself look like a moron who'd started a wiring fire and burned down his house.

Well, hey, can't make an omelet, right? It's all in the name of national security. Except they didn't just take my house. They
kept hassling me
, after they didn't find what they were looking for, as though I'd hidden the stash in my summer home or my ski chalet. When they finally started reimbursing me for the loss of everything I owned, they let the money drip out, a little bit every two weeks, so it would feel like a salary. Like I was working for them.

And oh yeah, they tried to get me to work for them. They're running scared about what happens now that everyone on Earth has access to smart paper. Of all the things the BEA might worry about, they chose "computers are too fast and too cheap." They asked me to figure out how the Outernet works, so they can do to it what they already did to the Internet—stop us from using it to talk to the people who hold our lives in their hands (or equivalent appendages).

I mean, nobody expects the BEA, or anybody really, to deal with global warming, but how about applying those Homeland Security dirty tricks to problems that are a) problems and b) of extraterrestrial origin? Like, what happens in seventy years when, in addition to having really good computers, we're all offered the chance to play a very immersive video game?

The game is called
Slow People
. By all accounts, it is one fucking amazing game. It's a MMORPG with trillions of players, a MUD that lets you create whole worlds. The catch is the same as any game: to enter the magic circle, you have to give up some of your real life. And since
Slow People
is so very engrossing, playing it means giving up the outside world entirely, with its pains and troubles. Once you start playing, everything outside the game seems too slow and boring to bother with.

If history is any indication, ninety percent of us will choose to play that game.

Maybe this is fine. Most of the people on Ring City seem to think it's a great solution to the problem of more humans than Earth can support. But the people I trust, the people who've actually spent time with us, don't want to archive all of humanity's stuff and then archive humanity itself. Like my friend Tetsuo Milk, who's devoting his life to convincing people not to play
Slow People
, even though his own relatives will be playing it in a few years. He thinks he can get that market penetration number down to forty or fifty percent.

Props to Tetsuo, but that's not good enough. The Constellation contains two hundred billion flesh-and-blood people. That includes thirty billion Aliens like Tetsuo, scattered across seventeen custom-terraformed planets and uncountable space stations. The galaxy has space for ten, fifteen billion humans. We deserve to join the Constellation as equals and reach out to the stars, not to end up in some solipsistic gated community the size of a small asteroid.

Long story short, I've moved again. Specifically, I've moved to Ring City. I'm now living in lunar orbit, in Human Ring, along with miscellaneous spies, two hundred Eritreans, and the casts and crews of three reality TV shows. I'm going to convince the Constellation to turn the probe around, to keep this contact mission going, to do this properly rather than letting the Slow People through just because we're about to fossilize ourselves.

I'm sick of feeling helpless, and I'm sick of being separated from the woman I love. So over the past few weeks I took a look at the things keeping me from my goals. I made the things I didn't like go away, and I decided not to be bothered by the loss of everything else.

I'd like to visit Earth again in the future, but let's be realistic: this looks like a one-way trip.

PS to BEA Agent Krakowski: Needless to say, this was entirely my decision. (You can tell because it's so stupid.) No one on Earth knew about this plan or helped me carry it out. So... just don't. Okay?

Ring City is exactly the way I left it. The Human Ring docking bay is as vast and empty as space itself. (Well, not quite.) The big chintzy statues of Adam and Eve from the
Pioneer
plaque are still standing, naked, to greet a flow of humanity that never arrived. I drag my heavy bags through the docking bay and into a bland Human Ring hallway, looking for the nearest unoccupied apartment.

The first hallway is claimed by embassies and news organizations. I open a door experimentally. The apartment is unlocked and uninhabited. I could pull down a nameplate and move in; no one would notice.

Instead I schlep my bags around a corner, into another hallway identical to the first. I turn at every junction, alternating left-right-left to keep from getting lost. By this crude algorithm, I find an unclaimed room. It's got a bunkbed with no pillows, a shower/sink, and a squat toilet. What a surprise.

I set down my bags and put my own damn pillow on the bottom bunk. Then I go back to the docking bay for my cherry tree. Finally, I write on the door with a dry-erase marker:

A. Blum
(Temporary)

I can get caipirinha from the repertoire out in the hall, but this is a special occasion. From my bag I take a cut-glass decanter and pour some scotch into the cap of a shampoo bottle.

AND NOW
AN OPEN LETTER TO ALL AND SUNDRY

Hey, thanks for finally reading my blog, but I'm not at all interested in doing an interview/telling you how I got to Ring City/converting to your fake-ass religion/lab-teching your microgravity experiment. Bye!

Love and kisses,
Ariel

Jenny,

There's a lot of paper in this envelope. Please at least look at all of it, no matter how this makes you feel. The stuff in the back is contracts that transfer ownership of Crispy Duck Games to you. They need your countersignature, but you might want to wait a couple days. I don't want you to get screwed over if the BEA freezes my assets.

I've strung you along long enough, so I'll just say it now: I am moving to Ring City. I'm literally gonna shove this under your door (assuming it fits) and then leave. I probably won't be back for a few years. Technically, illegal exit is only a misdemeanor, but I'm sure if they wanted to, the BEA could prosecute a Greenland Treaty violation or something.

I'm leaving for two reasons. The first is the same reason Tetsuo came to Earth. If we don't make contact—real contact—with the Constellation, the Slow People will make contact with our grandchildren, and they won't have a clue how to handle it. There are a thousand conversations I wanted to have with you about this, but I didn't want you to become complicit. When Krakowski comes knocking, you can honestly say "that sumbitch left without telling me a damn thing."

When I went back to my folks' place in September, I stole my father's cut-glass scotch decanter. If he goes, and I'm not on Earth to inherit anything of his, that's the thing I'd miss the most, so I took it. I just wrote him a letter apologizing and telling him why the decanter is important to me, and I'm still in a storytelling mood, so I want to tell you a story, too. It's the story of us, the weird story, the story we agreed not to tell anyone else, and this may be my last chance to tell it. Plus, this way you'll know it's really me writing this letter, and not some BEA or Constellation trick.

It was the fall of 2005 and Bai convinced me me to hit UTAkuCon. I was a wallflower
at the nerd con
. Bai had to drag me through the dealer's room. I picked up a couple import games using money I couldn't afford to spend. In the big central hallway, Bai and I hid in anonymity beneath the din of conversation and planned our next move.

Across the hall I saw a cosplayer, a girl with a sharp black pageboy haircut wearing a white dress, her shoulder pads and sleeves decorated with deadly metal spikes and gothic-looking gears. She was chugging a bottle of water.

I nudged Bai. "Hey!" I said. "That girl is dressed like Taikan-Victory!" Bai just nodded.

"Stop acting like you know who Taikan-Victory is," I said.

"Who is Taikan-Victory?"

"The girl who turns into a spaceship from
Tangent Go Thru
. It's a super-obscure Japanese shooter. This is incredible!"

"Go talk to her," said Bai, like it was that simple.

"No! She'll think I'm one of those perverts who comes to leer at the cosplayers."

"She thinks that now," said Bai. "Talk to her and prove her wrong. Just tell her you get the reference. Girls like that."

Bai spoke with false authority on the topic of girls and what they like, but now he'd put my honor at stake. I walked across the broadest hallway at UTA. We're talking light-seconds wide.

"Hey, nice costume," I said.

You looked up from your con schedule. I remember looking down at the floor, the condensation on your water bottle. "Thanks."

"Are those blades real?"

"They're metal," you said. "They're not really sharp. I don't wanna cut someone's throat."

"Cool." I could have walked away and we never would have met. But then I said: "I didn't think anyone else even knew about
Tangent Go Thru
."

"Is that a drug?" you said. "Are you dealing?"

"It's a video game," I said. "For the Dreamcast." Like naming the platform would make it all clear. "You're dressed like the player character."

"No," you said, "I'm Skewer Sue."

I ran a little emergency flowchart in my head. "I've never heard of Skewer Sue. Who's she?"

"Only the greatest character to come out of the feminist comics revolution of the early Nineties," you said.

"I don't know much about comics," I said. "When I was a kid, my parents never let me have them."

"Are they super-religious or something?"

"No, they're just English professors."

I lost track of Bai around that time. I walked the dealer's room again, with you, and you told me the entire history of comics. We argued and haggled with dealers in graphic novels and manga. I told you about game design, how you can trigger the pleasure circuits in someone's brain just by setting up a little system of feedback loops, and how designing those feedback loops triggers an even bigger pleasure circuit in the
designer's
brain.

You mentioned the intrusion of comic-book imagery into pop art. By this time, you were running out of comics history, so we jumped into art. You moved forward from the 1950s; I tried to counter with what I knew of seventeenth-century English literature. Finally we went back to your dorm room so you could look up examples on the Internet, and I sat on your bunk and carefully paged through your collection of "Fair"-condition issues of
Skewer Sue
.

"My mind is blown," I said. "My obscure import shooter totally ripped off your comic book."

"This is so weird," you said. "Why would someone do that?"

"So many Japanese games have totally random references to American pop culture," I said. "That's why I love imports, so I can discover this stuff." (Yes, I was an insufferable snob back then.)

We ate awful turkey tetrazzini in the dining hall and ran back up to your room and the 'net. We pulled a six-pack of illicit beer from your mini-fridge and drank it. Somewhere around eleven, your roommate left with a backpack full of textbooks and didn't come back.

It was three in the morning. I'd installed emulators on your computer, and we'd traded the keyboard back and forth playing Cipher games. You'd drawn that comic where Picasso's trying to paint a still life but Bugs Bunny keeps running off with the fruit. You'd talked for fifteen minutes about Judy Chicago's
The Dinner Party
. Now you were lying on your bunk with your shoes off.

I rubbed my eyes. I was thinking about going back to my own dorm room for some sleep. Well, that's one of the possibilities I was thinking about.

Skewer Sue's weapons lay in a foot-stabbing pile on the floor; you were still wearing the white dress. "How long did it take you to make the costume?" I said.

"Like ten hours sewing, fifteen hours in the metal shop," you said. "I cheated on the bracelets to get it done in time."

"Could you make another copy?"

"I guess," you said. "Maybe twenty hours total. Why?"

"It's just a dumb idea," I said. "I was thinking if you showed me how to make a Taikan-Victory costume, we could go together to the con next year. We'd match."

You had a huge smile on your face. You interlaced your hands behind your head. "You want me to make you a dress?" you asked.

"It's a spaceship hull," I said.

"Yeah, but you're dressing up as a girl. Spaceship."

"Yeah, so what? We'll be obscure reference buddies."

"Ariel, sorry, I gotta ask, are you gay?" You pulled up your feet and I sat on the bed next to you.

"No," I said.

"Good," you said.

"I just think it'd be funny— what do you mean 'good'? You have something against gay people?"

"What do you think I mean?" you said.

It's a pretty lossy line but I receive signals eventually. I climbed up the bed and kissed you.

This was when you made the sound. I heard it as a kind of sputtering, I flinched away but I had already resigned myself and started penning my confessional letter:

Dear
Attitude
Magazine,

I met this great girl at a con and we got drunk and when I kissed her, she upchucked right in my face; how do ya like them apples?

I remain, as ever, your most obedient servant,
Ariel Blum (age 18)

And I got (I've never told you this before) halfway through the thought: "If I handle this well, she's more likely to sleep with me eventually, so it could be a net positive." But all this had happened in my mind and there was still no puke, and the sound you were actually making caught up with me. You were laughing.

I pushed myself up. "Is this a joke?" I said. "Get the nerd's hopes up and then laugh at him?"

"Wha?" you said, a little dazed. "You didn't—did you do that on purpose?"

"This isn't funny," I said.

"Kiss me again," you said, like an order.

I kissed you again and you laughed again, big broad Marx Brothers laughs, your lips writhing, impossible to catch. You pulled away. "Stop! I'll get hiccups!"

"Is this like a thing?" I said, as though that sentence meant something. Back then I was very sensitive about my kissing style. Actually I still am, my whole life.

"You don't feel that?" you said.

"I feel
something
," I said.

"Ariel, you have a superpower," said Jenny. "Did nobody tell you?"

"Is it the good kind of superpower?" I said.

You blew the bangs out of your eyes. "This morning," you said, "I put on my costume and I was Skewer Sue, for the con. And when we came back here, I took off the spikes and stuff, and I was Jenny again. And— and— then, you kissed me and I saw that Jenny is just another costume. We're all cosplaying, all the time, and when you kissed me, you took off the 'Jenny' costume and there was nothing underneath.

"I was just this bag of
meat
, this
animal
with arms and legs, with this
stuff
wrapped around me, laying on stuff, surrounded by stuff, fifty feet off the ground, held up by a huge complicated machine made of
stuff
. It was the funniest thing in the world to be this bag of meat surrounded by stuff and another one here watching me laugh."

"Is this your way of telling me you don't want to make out? Because—"
She
You pulled my head down and kissed me, with tongue. (I'm having real trouble keeping this in the second person.)

When I kissed you, I'd been too nervous for anything to really register. Now you kissed me and I finally felt your lips against mine. There was a split-second release of endorphins and then your tongue shorted some circuit inside my mouth and the universe went dead.

I let out a choked humming scream and rolled off the bed, inches from getting killed by Skewer Sue. "That's not supposed to happen," I said, my cheek pressed against the dorm room carpet. "I've never kissed a girl before, but I know what's supposed to happen."

"What? What is it?" you said. Trying to hold off laughing, waiting for the punchline.

I couldn't lift my head off the floor. "There's nothing there," I said. "The universe is just a bunch of atoms bumping into each other."

"Yeah!" you said, and started laughing again. "It is! It's just
stuff
!"

"It's not funny!"

"It's the
only
thing that's funny!"

"This is not supposed to happen," I said. Like I had some kind of Service Level Agreement.

"Let's skip the kissing," you said. Oh, beautiful practical Jenny. "Nobody says there has to be kissing." You started unbuttoning the sixty pearl buttons on the front of your Skewer Sue dress.

That got me off the floor. I knelt on the bed astride your legs. My briefs were strangling my cock. "Jenny," I said. "Jenny."

"There's no Jenny," you said. "She's not home." Your chest was heaving. It was the first time I ever decided not to look at breasts. You were still undoing the tiny buttons, one at a time. Oh, careful meticulous Jenny.

"I need Jenny," I said. "I don't want to do this with an animal or a bag of meat. I want Jenny who knows all about art and is so beautiful."

You smiled, biting your lip to hold back the laugh, the life rushing back into your eyes. You stopped undoing your buttons and pinned me with your gaze. You inhaled heavily and said: "Wastebasket."

"Wastebasket?" I said. And
that
was when you puked on me.

"Tell me, please," you said when I left for my own dorm an hour later, showered and with the ex-turkey scraped off my clothes. "Tell me if it happens with other girls. I want to know."

Well, Jenny, it doesn't. It's just us. I still can't explain it, but I've felt that feeling again. It's the feeling I get whenever I go into space. The Earth falls out from under me and I'm stranded in a universe of nothing, just like that night in your dorm room. Maybe this is just the feeling I have when I get something I've been wanting my whole life.

You asked me what I saw in Dr. Tammy Miram besides that she puts up with my immaturity and her boobs look nice in microgravity (they do look great, BTW). I couldn't formulate the truth because we'd agreed to settle for friendship and never to talk about this, about two bags of meat pressing against each other while 'Jenny' stands off to the side laughing and 'Ariel' whimpers abandoned in heat-death.

Here is the truth: Tammy is a cosplayer
who never takes the costume off
. Even when she un-Velcros her flight suit and stands before me naked, she's still the physicist, the Mission Specialist. She already knows that we're nothing but collections of atoms who momentarily got lucky. She doesn't find this funny or terrifying; it's just a fact she needs to do her job.

Tammy's been a romantic hard-luck case her whole life, just like me. She's got an emotional shell surrounding her like a clingy Constellation spacesuit. Most guys want a woman to be
naked
when she gets naked. But I need some assurance that I can kiss a woman without turning us both into bags of meat.

And that's the second reason I'm leaving Earth.

I'm going to put this letter under your door, I'll walk into a Constellation shuttle and I'll go up into space again. This time I'll keep my eyes open and pretend I'm kissing you.

I never believed that for any given person there was one other person who was "right" for them, love at first sight, and that happiness depended on finding your "other half." How would that even work? Especially now that we know there are trillions of people in our galaxy alone. How is it that the right person for you is always born on the same planet at around the same time? It's astronomical. You'd have to believe in G-d or something.