Constellation Games (37 page)

GAME REVIEWS FROM SPACE 3.0 PRESENTS
A Few Ip Shkoy Games About Asteroids
A cautionary tale by Ariel Blum

Smelter Losers
(Kunu) Collect small asteroids in a matter shifter to build a bigger matter shifter to collect bigger asteroids. Repeat indefinitely.

The Long Way Around
(Perea): Survive on a hostile planet after the port you came through is collapsed by an asteroid impact. Indulge the PC's fantasies of crafting a spaceship and getting home "the long way around," even though the insane crafting system means this is almost certainly impossible.

To Cover The Forest Forever
(Perea): Ip Shkoy chick on a date can't get to first base because endless hail of asteroid impacts keeps burning down the venues. Zap the incoming asteroids a la
City Defense
and be rewarded with porn. Apparently first base is the only base.

Occluded Occlusion
(Ul Neie - Restored Leadership) Tile-sliding game with heavy math. Combine thrust vectors to knock asteroids into the sun. Second player has their own sun; don't touch it or they get the points.

Untitled
(The Great Hall of the People And Also Science) Quiz game installed in kiosks for a museum exhibit. Test your knowledge of Ip Shkoy knowledge of asteroids, from their importance in ancient mythology, to their seedy past causing mass extinctions, to the then-modern-day planetary defense project. Answer correctly and be rewarded with porn.

G'go Station: Beseiged in Space
(G'go) Someone is killing your colleagues at the Asteroid Damage Mitigation Overlay! Talk to NPCs, bust some skulls, and piece clues together to unravel the mystery. The mystery unravels in more ways than one when it's revealed that an asteroid has been going around stabbing people to sabotage the project. That's right, a sentient asteroid with a fucking knife. We're done here, people.

"Merry Christmas, shithead."

I woke up in a hammer lock, my face pressed against the headboard. I was at home, in my old house on Earth.

"I'm... Jewish..." I said. No, I wasn't on Earth—this was the replica of my old house. The voice was from Earth, though. It was the voice of BEA Agent Krakoswki.

"Happy holidays, shithead." Krakowski tilted my head and carefully knocked my forehead against the headboard, just hard enough to raise a lump. His hands were gloved, pebbled. He was wearing a spacesuit that had never seen vacuum.

"Get up," he said. I couldn't move with Krakowski pinning me down, so I just acquiesced as he pulled me up. He just wanted to give a command and have me obey it.

Krakowski held his left hand in front of my face. He had my grav kicker attached to his fingers like a clip-on set of brass knuckles. "This is a grav kicker," said Krakowski. "Constellation use it to set up standing gravity waves. Helps them maneuver in zero gravity."

"That's
my
grav kicker," I said. "I know what it is. I use it every day."

"Thing is," said Krakowski, "it also makes a great non-lethal weapon." He shoved me forward, swung his arm in an arc like he was playing slow-pitch, and squeezed the kicker. A standing gravity wave formed between us and slammed me into my nightstand. As I fell over, the gravity wave echoed off the wall and interfered destructively with itself inside my guts. I dropped to my knees and barfed up replica french fries and cranberry aioli.

"You got any more?" Krakowski crouched down next to me, wiped my mouth with one of my dirty T-shirts. "Get it all out. Nobody likes puke in a spacesuit."

"Spacesuit?" I asked.

"Get it on," said Krakowski. "We're going outside. I don't want any accidents."

I crawled over to my desk and pulled myself to my feet. On my desk was a paper computer showing my incomplete reduced-fractal redesign of Human Ring. I turned away from Krakowski, giving exaggerated pants, and brushed my thumb against the START control.

"Okay," I said, "Okay." The pain from the kicker faded quickly, but I moved deliberately into my suit, coughing and wiping my nose.
He thinks I'm a wimp,
I thought.
Let him think I'm a wimp.

"Hurry it up," said Krakowski. I glared at him. I got my suit on. "Pressurize it." I pressurized it. Discolored creases around the joints popped out as the suit inflated.

I saw a brief faint blue glow from outside—Cherenkov radiation. At least
some
part of my metafractal reduction was working. Krakowski wrenched both my hands behind my back and I heard a spraying sound. He let me go. My arms were fixed in place, bound in an obnoxious yoga pose.

"This is reentry foam," said Krakowski. "I know you're familiar with it. Now, we can do this the hard way or the easy way. You're going to walk with me to the reception chamber, we'll board a ship, and we'll take a nice twenty-minute trip back to Earth."

"Why did you put the hard way first?"

"We're doing it the hard way now," said Krakowski.

"What's the easy way?"

"I can cover the rest of your body with this foam and
drop
you to Earth like a packing crate," he said. "That would be very easy for me. So don't give me any trouble."

"Sure, Krakowski," I said, "no trouble."

"Suit mic off, shithead," said Krakowski, and slapped my helmet. "You broadcast anything, I'll hear it too." But he didn't cover me with reentry foam for my trouble. Instead, he muscled me stumbling downstairs to the living room.

"Nobody ever checks the reception chamber." I could almost see Krakowski's smirk behind me. "Barely been used since first contact. Perfect site for a little black op."

I took one last look around. It didn't feel like I'd see this house again, on any planet. Krakowski slipped ahead of me and opened my front door.

"What in mother of fuck!" he shouted.

Krakowski'd come into my house from a beige, well-lit Human Ring hallway identical to every other. He was walking out into the Surrealist wing of an art museum. The walls were dead voids, synthetic obsidian, like space without stars. Huge, lurid paintings leapt from the walls, set apart with frames of gleaming white metal ten microns thick. Dali's
Harpo Agonistes
. Tanguy's
During the Silence
. Magritte's
L'été de la raison
. Duchamp's enormous
Culmination
, up high where I could see it from my second-story window. All my favorites, all recreated in museum-quality fidelity.

"What did you
do
?" demanded Krakowski, instinctively knowing that I was to blame.

"Human Ring is being re-terraformed," I said. "We can't go out there. We need to sit tight for a few hours."

"
What
did you
do
?" he repeated.

"Human Ring has a half million miles of hallway," I said. "Every day, the Constellation scans tens of thousands of human artworks. I just put the two together."

"You're turning the largest space station in history into an
art museum
?" said Krakowski. "That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard."

"I'm making it a place human beings will want to live," I said. "There will be real furniture, and multiple layouts, and open spaces, parks, with plants. And if you hadn't interrupted me before I finished, there'd be windows into space, and fucking
pillows
on the beds."

"Well, I guess it's the thought that counts," said Krakowski. "Now let's get moving. You can give me a tour on the way to the reception chamber."

I looked down the hall at the apartment I was using for storage. I hadn't excluded it from the metafractal. The consoles and cartridges I'd worked so hard to recover from the world's garbage dumps were gone, turned into raw materials and then into artworks and furniture.

"I don't think you heard the part where we can't go out there," I said. "It's not a matter of convenience. There are autonomous matter shifters crawling the halls. They'll turn you into an installation piece. They don't conserve anything except mass and angular momentum."

"Bullshit," said Krakowski. "Constellation tech is full of failsafes. It won't do anything to hurt people."

"Oh," I said, "Constellation tech, like the kicker and the reentry foam?"

You don't see this look on authority figures anymore. Krakowski was trying to figure out if I was joking. Usually it doesn't matter: they're allowed to get pissed at you either way. But here there would be real-world consequences if I was serious.

"You wouldn't do anything to hurt the Eritreans," Krakowski said finally.

"The Eritreans rebuilt their neighborhood themselves," I said. "Re-terraforming is for the places where nobody lives. I'm talking altered-physics slow-light fusion, Krakowski. You get a dose of that Cherenkov radiation, your kids will come out pre-circumsized."

"Then it's a good thing we have these reliable spacesuits," said Krakowski. "You will go first." I left my house at kickerpoint.

"You're crazy," I told him. "The reception chamber is five miles—" I stepped off the last stair and started walking past the surrealist masters, eyes straight ahead, using awkward tongue gestures to send an instant message from inside my suit.

"What's the matter?" said Krakowski. "Afraid of a little radiation?" I kept quiet.

"You finally shut up, Blum. What's the secret?" I kept walking.

"Oh, I see," said Krakowski. "You think we're going to get into an elevator. And the elevator will be a submind of the station computer. It'll say 'Hey, you're restricting that shithead's freedom of movement!' and it'll call its supermind for help."

"Or," I said, "we're going to walk and climb and go through ports for
five miles
, and eventually people will start getting curious about what's going on in Human Ring."

"Funny you should mention ports," said Krakowski, catching up to me. "Because I just happen to have requisitioned one from BEA stocks. I set one end in the reception chamber. The other one's right here. So the reception chamber isn't five miles away, Blum. It's fifty
feet
away. We'll be out of here before they even know you're gone. Keep walking!"

With a hand-on-the-shoulder, Krakowski stopped me between two silver-gelatin Man Ray prints, at the door to an apartment. It was now an oak door festooned with Victorian carvings, instead of something you'd see on a submarine, but a door is a door.

"Twelve, thirteen, fourteen," said Krakowski. "This should be the one." He frowned. "Unless the matter shifters got the port, too. Open the door, Blum."

"Hands!" I said. "Foam!"

"Ah, right," said Krakowski. He opened the door and a tornado of smoke blew out. "Shit! Fire!"

The day before, this apartment had been identical to every other apartment in Human Ring. After I started my program, it had spent a few minutes as a fancy Weimar-era Bauhaus apartment, its contents and layout determined by algorithm.

Now it was ruined. The replica furniture was melted, scorched, and covered in fresh soil. The upholstery smouldered and bright flame slowly consumed the stark wallpaper.

"Is
this
part of your plan?" said Krakowski. He sprayed down the cushions and the wall with reentry foam from a little can. The smoke started to clear.

"No," I said. "I told you, I didn't finish everything. This looks like a bug."

A metal-and-leather chair was embedded in the floor of the room. It had fallen into Krakowski's port, partially blocking it. The chair shivered and jerked in the mouth of the wormhole, pushed and pulled by a continuously shifting gravity differential.

"At least that's still here," said Krakowski. "The way my day has been going..." He carefully crossed the room and pulled the chair out of the port. The leg that had been dangling over the other side had been cleanly sheared off.

"..." said Krakowski, looking through the port. He looked seasick. Tactically speaking, this would have been a good time to run for it, but of course I had to inch into the room and take a peek, 'cause I'm an idiot.

The other end of the port tumbled and rolled through an enormous volume of empty space, blown by strange winds, twisting and spinning, bouncing off matter precursors for which humans have no names. Flashes of fusion light through the port made the front of Krakowski's suit go opaque like a radiation badge. Gusts from that huge emptiness fanned the remaining wallpaper flames, making them dance like candles.

"What happened to the reception chamber?" said Krakowski. "What's that
hole
? Where's my
ship
?"

"I don't know!" I said. "I mean, the reception chamber's near the central cylinder, right? That whole area's being carved out for a big outdoor space, like the
cma
forest in Alien Ring. So there's no bug; you just fucked up space-time in a way I didn't plan for. You look through the port, you're looking at the big forest-park at the center of Human Ring. Thus the dirt."

"You
destroyed
the reception chamber?" Krakowski stomped back to the doorway and shook me by the shoulders. "That was a UNESCO World Heritage Site!"

"I would have preserved it!" I said. "Don't fuckin' kidnap me before I finish reducing a metafractal!"

A cloud of synthetic dirt sprayed through the port at high pressure, covering our suits. Krakowski brushed at his shoulders.

"Nice going," he said. "Quick thinking! We'll just go to the docking bay and take a shuttle from there! You've bought yourself fifteen minutes,
and
you've earned my everlasting enmity."

"Enmity? Who talks like that?"

"
You
talk like that, shithead! Move!" We left impressions in the dirt on our way out, dirty footprints in the hallway outside. Krakowski slammed the door.

"Please halt!" said a gaspy syrupy voice. Krakowski spun around. A small spindly robot barred our way.

"Who the hell are you?" said Krakowski.

"That's a telepresence robot," I said. "Not a person robot."

"I know that. Who's on the other end?"

"My name is Curic," said the robot. "You probably don't remember me."

"Don't flatter yourself," said Krakowski. "I know you. You're the bitch-bastard who caused this problem in the first place."

"Then you know that Ariel enjoys my protection," said Curic, "and that I won't allow you to compromise his freedom of movement. I am here to stop you from forcibly relocating him back to Earth."

"And how," sneered Krakowski, "will you stop me?"

"By making you a better offer," said Curic. "By inviting you to stay here."

Krakowski looked down at the robot like it was the plucky comic relief. "Stay
here
?" he said.

"In Human Ring, or on Mars," said Curic. "Stay with us and help your fellow humans build societies that can cope with post-scarcity. Stop clutching at the badges of hierarchical status and the failed systems of your species' past."

"That's not an offer," said Krakowski. "That's propaganda. An offer would be something I'd be at least slightly interested in."

"Yeah, I'm with Krakowski here," I said. "This is your brilliant plan? Convince a federal agent to defect?"

"What do you want me to do, Ariel? Coerce him? 'Beat him up?' That won't solve anything."

"No, it will!" I said. "It really will! I promise!"

"Face it, Curic," said Krakowski, "you have no way to handle this. Your superior system of social organization only works if everyone cooperates. You say 'coercion' like it's a dirty word, but coercion is just how the rules are enforced. You can't deal with someone like me. You've given up the tool because you don't like its name."

"Coercion is how
coercive
rules are enforced," said Curic. "Nobody enforces the rules of a game. Nobody makes photons carry the electromagnetic force. That's just how the world works."

Krakowski pointed my grav kicker at the telepresence robot and squeezed. Curic hit the hallway wall spread-eagle, twelve robotic arms splaying in an arc like a Da Vinci sketch, the body of the robot scratching the obsidian wall and cracking Duchamp's
Fountain
.

"Curic!" I exclaimed, even though it was just a robot.