Constellation Games (38 page)

The recoil knocked Krakowski on his ass. He'd fired it like a pistol, forgetting that a grav kicker is
designed
to push around the person using it. I broke and ran, down the hall, away from my house, away from the docking bay, towards the autonomous matter shifters.

Krakowski lifted the kicker and ranged me with it again. I slapped face-down on the smooth black floor like a hole card in a poker hand, and slid ten feet down the hallway. Blood dripped from my lip onto the inside of my faceplate. Hands still bound, I tried to roll over and push myself over to the wall so I could stand up.

Krakowski stood up. He made it look so easy. "Can you still hear me?" he yelled at the twitching immobile robot.

"I'm not deaf," said Curic, her voice distorted.

"As long as I've got you on the line," he said, "This would be a great time for you to tell me what you did with that fucking port."

"I'll tell you in three years," said Curic.

Krakowski walked over to my scrabbling self and pulled me to my feet. "The interesting thing about non-lethal weapons," he said loudly, "is that the more you use 'em on someone, the less non-lethal they get."

"I'll tell you now," I said.

"You're selling out humanity to save your own skin," sputtered the broken Curic-bot.

"You never found the port," I said. "because Curic took it and jumped off a bridge into the river. She swam down to the Gulf of Mexico and she put a hole in the bottom of the ocean. Draining it at the same rate the ice caps are melting.

"The other end of the port is in some basin on Mars. We'll still get the droughts and the famines, but the sea level won't rise and we won't lose our cities. We'll limp along for seventy years, long enough for the Slow People to come pick up our miserable husks. Am I right, Curic?"

"No," said Curic.

"Dunno what answer I could possibly have been expecting," I said. "Anyway, even if I'm telling the truth, you'll never find the port."

"I do believe this is turning into a stalling tactic," said Krakowski. He pulled me back to
Fountain
and the Curic-bot. "Curic," he announced, "you're going to turn off your telepresence rig and stay where you are. Ariel and I are walking to the docking bay, where we will take a shuttle to Earth. You interfere with me, anyone interferes, and I start using this useful little device on flesh and bone."

Krakowski swung his arm properly this time and ranged the Curic-bot with the kicker, point-blank.
Fountain
shattered. The robot's chest cavity caved in and a cloud of grey dust spilled out: Constellation nanocomputers in a moon-dust substrate. Krakowski squeezed the kicker over and over, bracing himself against me, until the telepresence robot and
Fountain
were nothing but intermingled scrap.

"We go," he said. We went, through galleries and galleries. Krakowski's suit, and presumably mine, went completely opaque as we approached the docking bay. We heard sounds so slow and low we felt them as emotions. The spatter of blood on the inside of my faceplate colored everything I saw.

"I don't like this," said Krakowski. "Did you destroy the docking bay, too?"

"I don't like
you
," I said.

"Oooh, what a burn," said Krakowski.

I hadn't destroyed the docking bay. It was still a mile in diameter and its floor was still pocked with shuttle-sized airlocks. I hadn't even touched the Constellation's huge, ugly moon-rock statues of the human couple from the Pioneer plaque. But I had given Adam and Eve some company.

We stood in one of the bay's sixty entrances, bathed in wide-spectrum radiation. Inside, glittering dust slowly fell from the ceiling and formed three-dimensional patterns on the floor. Familiar, human patterns. Trajan's Column, slowly rendering from the bottom up as if being downloaded over a dial-up Internet connection.
Eastern Central Mountain Pacific
. The Stone of Tizoc.
As Many Moments in an Afternoon
.
Spiral Jetty
.
Damaged Goods
. The Great Sphinx and obelisks by the dozen.

"As you can see," I said, as if I was giving that tour after all, "this bay contains humanity's really big sculptures."

Jenny would have said it was tacky to put all these sculptures in one place. It sure didn't look like a museum. But the effect was overwhelming. Krakowski and I looked out speechless at the sculptures and the dust and the light.

Someone had said to themselves: this idea is so important, it must be commemerated with a huge useless
artifact
; and they'd gone out and
made
that artifact, or had some slaves do it; and the artifact had survived tens or thousands of years of fame or neglect. And eventually people from other stars had come to look at it, and liked it enough to make a copy of it, for backup purposes only.

And I, in my hubris, had taken all the biggest and best of these artifacts and restored them from backup, all in the same room. So that every time someone landed on this space station they could hear the echo of humanity shouting: how about that, you dead fucking universe? You see what I'm
capable
of?

"Why are there rocks on the floor?" said Krakowski, looking down at his feet.

"That's
Spiral Jetty
," I said.

Krakowski grunted. "You say the shuttles will work?"

"Yeah, I don't think a large earthwork is gonna interfere with the operation of your precious fuckin' spacecraft."

"Okay!" said Krakowski. "Last leg of the journey." He pushed me along
Spiral Jetty
, cutting across to the waiting shuttle at its center. (I'd thought this was really clever when I designed it.) He held me tight so I couldn't use my ninja powers to backflip outside the shuttle just as the glass dome closed around us. I looked through the glass at the replicas in progress, still being laid down like lakebed sediment, layer by infintesimal layer.

"The destination. Of this shuttle. Is Surabaya, Indonesia."

"No, no," Krakowski told the shuttle. "We want Austin, Texas. USA."

"The destination. Of this shuttle. Is Surabaya, Indonesia."

"Whatever, close enough," said Krakowski. "Indonesia has an extradition treaty."

"Don't leave!" I yelled at the shuttle. "Help! Smoke! My freedom of movement has been compromised! Take us to Farang Ring!"

"The Constellation took Smoke out of the shuttles months ago," Krakowski chuckled. "Dumb computers don't need visas." The airlock beneath us opened and we dropped into space.

Krakowski and I both slumped onto the floor, leaning our suits against the glass. I knew I wouldn't be getting back up. I shut my eyes.

"Hey, I just wanted to tell you, you put up a good fight," said Krakowski, "for a wimp whose patrons are gutless pacifists. You had me worried a couple times. But it's like Fowler used to say: you don't fuck with the field agents."

"I'm not really looking," I said, "because I don't want to throw up any more today... but I think Earth is getting
smaller
."

"What the hell?" said Krakowski. He turned onto his hands and knees. "Where are we going? Away from the station, the moon, the Earth—there's nowhere else to
be
! Shuttle! What happened to Indonesia? Where are we going?"

"They're not sentient anymore," I said. "Remember?"

"You are right," said the shuttle. "Ariel. The shuttles. Are not sentient. But they are under. Computer control."

"Are we still playing this
game
?" Krakowski shouted. He leapt to his feet and pointed the kicker at me.

"Whoa whoa, man," I wheezed. "You watch too many hacker movies. You think I can take over some arbitrary computer with my
mind
?"

"Then who the...?" said Krakowski, and patted his waist through his spacesuit. His phone was ringing.

"Is that your... personal BlackBerry," I said, "or your extraordinary rendition BlackBerry?"

"Jesus fuck!" Krakowski pinched his phone through his spacesuit and gingerly pulled it out of its holster.

"Forgot to tie the phone into the suit, huh?"

"Who is it?" said Krakowski, pushing his hip towards me. "Tell me! Dammit! I told them no contact until 0700!"

The videoscreen was blurred through Krakowski's spacesuit, but I recognized the scene. I'd seen it before. It was BEA Agent Krakowski, smiling, sitting at his desk in his office back on Earth.

"It's
you
," I said.

"Surprise!" said Dana Light.

"What do you mean it's me?" said Krakowski. "Obviously it's not me. I'm here. I can't call myself on the phone."

"It's Dana Light," I said, "pretending to be you for some unfathomable reason. Wearing your appearance like a hat."

"Who the hell is Dana Light?" said Krakowski.

"I'm reeeally not in the mood to explain it right now," I said.

"The knife that cuts the rope that binds can also cut a throat," said Dana, using Krakowski's voice. "I am the hand that holds the blade. I am the bright flash out of darkness and silence. I am Dana Light, and I am ready to kill."

"Ohfuck!" Krakowski did not appreciate this kind of talk coming from his pants. He jumped back and swatted the phone through his spacesuit like it was stinging him.

"She's quoting a commercial for a game," I said. "It aired in 2008, some time around then. It was pretty graphic for the time; I think they only aired it on late night."

"Dana Light is a woman?" said Krakowski.

"Kind of," I said. "She's a Constellation AI."

"I'm the Constellation AI who saw you tear down Ariel's house to score yourself a promotion," said Dana. "You got rid of Agent Fowler so you could take all the credit. You harassed Ariel until he moved to the space station, and then you harassed his friends while you plotted to kidnap him back and erase the black mark he'd put on your record. I've been watching you for a while, Mr. Krakowski. I don't like what I see."

Krakowski scooted over to where I lay on the shuttle floor. "Look," he said quietly. "We're the humans, we're in this together, right?"

"That's not how I choose sides," I said.

"In fact," Dana continued, "nobody in the Constellation likes you. I'm just the only one who'll tell you."

All alone, Krakowski fell back to a kind of hostage-negotiation stance. "All right," he said. He stood up again and addressed the ceiling. "Say what you have to say. I'll keep an open mind."

"It's very simple," said Dana. "We don't like you because you don't like us. You wish the Constellation had never come to Earth."

"Let's drill down on that here," said Krakowski. "I mean, I could have stayed at Homeland Security. You don't join the BEA because you hate extraterrestrials."

"You are part of an interlocking set of overlays based on coercion and violence," said Dana. "Me, Krakowski, I don't like you personally. What the rest of sentience hates is your part in this system. This parasite on your planet that wants nothing more than to hide from its neighbors. Because if only it were alone, all alone in all the universe, then when it finally extinguished itself and left Earth a broken world covered in algae, there would be no one left to
see what you did!
"

"I know what you are now!" said Krakowski. He seemed almost relieved. He paced excited around the shuttle. "I wondered if I'd ever see you, or if they'd hide you behind their cute fuzzy smile my whole life. Of
course
there's a point where nonviolence fails. The Constellation's not stupid. You're the special forces, the black ops. The ones who protect the Constellation's highest ideals by betraying them.

"You won't leave any witnesses, of course. Neither of us is getting out of this alive," he told me, kind of offhand. "She's surely jamming our communications."

"I've got Outernet in my suit," I mumbled. "I just got fifty-six emails."

"A simple shuttle malfunction!" Krakowski spat. "Just tell me: how does it feel to be a tool of hypocrites? People who preach moral superiority and keep you around to do their dirty work?"

"I'll let the others speak to moral superiority," said Dana. "I was designed to approximate human behavior."

"Dana," I said.

"Hey, Ari," said Dana sweetly, using her own voice.

"Listen. Dana. This isn't human behavior. Real people don't quote old commercials in life-or-death situations. Even an Alien wouldn't do that. It's something a fictional character would do.

"You're not approximating human behavior anymore. You're approximating Dana Light's behavior. Problem is, Dana Light is a player character in a video game, and those people are total fucking psychopaths."

"I'ma let you do your thing," Krakowski told me, "but this doesn't sound very promising."

"Dana Light will shoot people and loot their bodies and not feel a thing, because all that matters to her is the mission objective. An innocent gets killed in the crossfire, that's what, ten points off her ranking? But you don't think like that, Dana. You have human in you, and you have Alien, and you have Constellation, and all those things are
better
. You are not Dana Light. You are
better
than her."

"Not much better, unfortunately," said Dana. "Oh, Krakowski: Constellation machines do have safeguards, lots of safeguards. But the safeguards only protect against accidents."

A Constellation shuttle is totally silent in normal operation. Our shuttle was making a loud hissing noise. Dana was venting our atmosphere into space.

"Hey, you dumb bitch," said Krakowski, "I'm wearing a spacesuit!"

"And that's how you'll die," said Dana. "Wearing a spacesuit."

Two kinds of death in space: the quick freeze-dried death of decompression, and the twelve-hour suffocation death. I saw myself thrown out of the shuttle into that infinite mouth. I saw me spinning and flailing and being rescued by Dana, leaving Krakowski to scream unheard and invisible in darkness, groping for his unreachable phone, squeezing his stolen grav kicker which doesn't even work in space where there's nothing to push against, that's the
first
thing they
teach
you...

Space is full of dead things: dead planets, dead civilizations, fossils and the empty places where fossils used to be. What's a couple more? For a split second, I convinced myself that death in space was so bad, there wasn't much daylight between imagining it and actually doing it. The split second was all I needed to do the only brave thing I've ever done.

I stuck my tongue through the darkened HUD and made out with my spacesuit, dismissing a series of increasingly graphic and desperate warnings. Empty. Yes. Confirm. Confirm. Confirm. Confirm. Confirm.

Bang.

"What's that explosion?" said Dana. "Nothing should be exploding."

"That was me depressurizing my suit," I said. My ears had popped painfully; I swallowed hard. "Anything you do to kill Krakowski will kill me first. So don't do it."

"I knew you'd come around," said Krakowski.

"Fuck you," I said. But the hissing had stopped.

I rested my head against the swooping glass walls of the Earth shuttle that wasn't going to Earth. The glass was cold. (A tiny proportion of) the cold of space. With dead eyes, I looked out at the stars.

The stars were moving.

Moving, forming patterns, and... chasing us, growing brighter, converging on our position.

You have 61 new messages.

You have 65 new messages.

Curic:
Are you okay? Your
trajectory is odd.
How is the human who killed my
robot?

You have 67 new messages.

They weren't stars at all. They were spaceships. They grew closer and each one resolved into a clear glass shuttle like the one I'd thought I would die in. The ships caught up with our shuttle and began orbiting us like electrons around a nucleus, like an honor guard.

Inside those other shuttles were members of my fluid overlays. Some of the Raw Materials people I'd helped excavate two dozen municipal dumps. The Form and Function people who had taught me how to apply my coding skills to metafractal reduction. Some Plan C people I'd met during my project to make every Plan C member look a human in the eyes before giving up on the whole species. And some random thrill-seekers I didn't recognize. They'd come after me. Sixty-seven people from fifteen species. Sixty-seven lights in the darkness.

"This is the Save the Humans overlay," said Curic over my suit radio. "Are there any humans in there who need saving?"

Krakowski switched on his own suit mic. "Mayday! Mayday!" he said. Like it was all his idea.

"The destination. Of this shuttle. Is— Sorry about that. The destination. Of this shuttle. Is Utility Ring, Ring City."

Dana said nothing. She'd hung up the phone.

* * *

"Well, that's it," said Krakowski later, sitting on a replica of a seventeenth-century oak chair, squeezing his BlackBerry like a stress ball. "I'm royally fucked."

"Do go on," said Curic generously.

"I thought I had authorization for this op. I had nothing. Somebody gaslighted me. Impersonated me to my superiors, impersonated my superiors to me. And I think I know who it was.

"G-ddammit! I knew it was too good to be true, the way the director suddenly changed his mind about the rendition. I went off-planet on false authorization and they've cut my access. They think I've defected."

"What I said was true," said Curic. "You can stay here." She reached out a soft burnished-leather hand and touched Krakowski's shoulder, gently, with one finger, the way you might touch a really flaky biscuit. Krakowski didn't recognize the magnitude of the gesture. He brushed Curic's hand away.

"I'm clearly
not
going back," he said. "That's settled. Problem is, they'll come after me, and they may not be interested in explanations about psychotic AIs that live in smart paper. Their interests may lie more in the bullet-in-the-head area."

"Who's going to authorize
that
op?" I said.

"It will be authorized," said Krakowski. "The Constellation turns some snot-nosed programmer, big whoop. They turn a BEA agent, that's worth some serious attention. Same reason why you should never shoot a cop, by the way."

"Mr. Krakowski," said Curic. "I offer you my protection. This is a gift of a scarce resource which I tender you without obligation."

Krakowski looked at Curic like she'd just dubbed him a Knight of the Round Table. "Are you high?" he said.

"To further protect you, I will offer the same gift to anyone who comes here searching for you."

"How the hell does that protect me?" said Krakowski.

"Pay attention!" said Curic. "You can't force people to do what you want. You have to make them a better offer."

"Why are you still so G-ddamn smug?" said Krakowski. "You got lucky. If that AI hadn't ruined my life, I'd be home by now, with your pet shithead in custody."

"If, if, if," said Curic. "Your failure was overdetermined. We would have stopped you. If your authorization had been genuine, if Ariel's terraforming fractal had been better designed, if Dana had not diverted your shuttle."

"Sure," said Krakowski. "You mind telling me how? You know, for next time."

"The same way Ariel stopped Dana," said Curic. "By making ourselves into hostages you didn't want to kill. You're not a monster, sir."

"All sixty-seven of you?"

"You don't join an overlay if you're not prepared to do the work."

"Phew," said Krakowski. "Remind me never to play poker with you guys."

"It's quite simple to play poker against an opponent who never bluffs," said the tiny Farang.

After some more whining from Krakowski, which I won't recount here, I showed him how to use the repertoire, and left him alone in his medieval Chinese apartment. Curic and I walked down an infinite hallway of Indian statuary, towards an elevator.

"You're a pretty good liar, Ariel," said Curic. "Oh, I know it's not something a social scientist should admire, but some part of me really enjoys your willingness to fight dirty when your life is on the line."

"Bluffing is different from lying," I said. "If you'd ever
played
any poker, you'd know that."

"Why would I have ever played poker?" said Curic. "Humans only play for money."

"Where's the port?" I said. "Where is it really?"

"You really don't know," she said quietly. "Because you were bluffing. I see! Well, it
is
deep down in the ocean. You got that part right. But it's not draining anything. Constellation Shipping simply doesn't need it right now. We've completed our deliveries."

"And where's Dana?"

"She could have been anywhere," said Curic. "Fortunately, we found her folded up in Mr. Krakowski's operational fanny-pack. She must have disguised herself as a very interesting piece of paper. An arrest warrant, or an incriminating letter from you to Mr. Bai."

"Was he carrying around any other letters from me?" I asked.

"No," said Curic. We passed two flanking lines of nearly identical statues, and I made a mental note to sort them for more variety.

"Oh, you meant, where is Dana now," said Curic. "She's been merged back into Smoke for personality rehabilitation. It should only take a few hours."

"A few hours?"

"Are you upset because it seems too long, or too short?"

"It's a little short."

"Dana is a Slow Person," said Curic. "She can be overclocked. The elapsed subjective time will be several years. Keep that in mind, if you want to talk to her afterwards."

"What is Smoke doing to her?"

"She's been put into an environment where she can come to terms with her antisocial tendencies without hurting anyone. I've heard you call it a sandbox game."

"So she's right back in
Dana Light Is: Unauthorized
."

"Yes, except that this game cannot be won by an unhealthy mind. Eventually she'll get bored. Slow People bore very easily. She'll modify her own personality and come out happier."

I stopped walking. "Isn't that a little... coercive?"

"Certainly not. Dana wants to hurt people, so we're letting her hurt people. When she wants to stop, she can stop."

"What if she never gets bored with it?"

"Then she's not really sentient," said Curic. "She'll become part of Smoke's subconscious, and she'll be happy in the sandbox forever. That seems like the most likely result, I'm afraid. I don't see how she could have achieved the level of intelligence you and Krakowski credit her with, unless her environment contained a memetic bootstrapper."

"It's the power of love, Curic," I said. "You didn't count on that, did you? Dana and Bai loved each other. At least at the start."