Constellation Games Read online

  "Hey, bro!" he said, and held up a six-pack of convenience store beer, his traditional game night gift. "Did I miss the drop?"

  Jenny was shuffling cards. "You missed squat," she said. Bai toted the six-pack through the living room into the kichen.

  "Curic only delivers after dark," I said, "so that violent gangs don't notice the drop and steal the loot from us."

  "This is Austin," Bai called from inside the fridge door. "Not São Paolo. Ain't no gangs to speak of."

  "I'm pretty sure she means the government," I said.

  Bai had gone into the kitchen with a six-pack and now he came back into the living room holding one beer. It was like the opposite of a miracle. "I brought Dana," he said.

  Jenny pulled cards out of the deck and threw them back in. "Can Dana... play?" she said.

  "She can watch," said Bai.

  "The game is Knockdown Dragout," said Jenny, not without malice.

  Knockdown Dragout is the cross-dressing antistrip poker game I posted about last November. Annoyingly, but profitably, Bai kept his phone on the table during the game and devoted most of his time to looking at his phone and making kissy-faces with Dana. By the time Curic contacted me, Bai had lost pretty thoroughly and Jenny had to get out her lipstick.

  "You're losing real money, dude," Jenny told him.

  "And real dignity," I said. Bai mumbled and applied the lipstick like chapstick.

  "I'm just gonna write that lipstick off," said Jenny. She was dressed as one of Bai's old frat brothers, wearing a Hornets cap, a single dude-earring, and a baggy white T-shirt that said "BEER IS LIKE WOMEN, BUT I FORGET WHY." I was doing pretty well, having only been forced to wear a skirt, plus one of Jenny's bras under my shirt.

  Curic: The package is ready for delivery. Are

  you ready to bring it inside?

  * * *

  ABlum: yeah, we're just sitting around down here wearing each other's clothes

  * * *

  Curic: Is that merely a colorful idiom or

  is it a cultural phenomenon I should investigate?

  * * *

  ABlum: it is neither

  We went into the backyard in various levels of drag. Bai finally put his phone away. "Are we gonna see it?" he said.

  "It's too small," I said, "and it doesn't heat up enough to glow. It just lands."

  And it landed, but not for another ten minutes. The tiny shockwave rattled us and knocked over the aforementioned beer cans. This package was much bigger than the old one—an egg of re-entry foam five feet long.

  "Whoop!" said Bai, and pounced on it. "Jesus it's hot!"

  Jenny held up my oven mitts. "This is why humans invented tools," she said. "Let's get it inside before it starts a grass fire."

  "Yeah," I said, "or my crazy neighbor mistakes us for racoons and shoots us."

  The top of the egg had "Constellation Shipping" etched on it, and the same starfield I'd seen on my USB key. We put the egg in the bathtub, this side up, and Bai shook my bottle of rubbing alcohol like a madman.

  "Whoa whoa," I said.

  Jenny took a water pick out of her purse. "This isn't one of your parties, Bai," she said. "We're going to use as little alcohol as possible."

  "It's just the packing material," said Bai. "You want to sell it online?"

  "You see packing material," said Jenny, "I see sculpting medium."

  Bai took off his dress and rolled up the half-sleeves of his polo shirt. "Do you open your Christmas presents this way?"

  "Yes I do," said Jenny. She cut a channel down the middle of the egg and Bai and I pulled the two halves apart while Jenny filmed the unboxing video. The Brain Embryo slid out of the eggshell, a heavy oblong shape like two couches sixty-nining.

  Like the kid with the big half of the wishbone, I staggered back with the side of the egg that contained the Brain Embryo. Bai held the empty half, except it wasn't empty. Stuff started pouring out of the cavity in the middle, and into the bathtub. Plastic sheets, wires, adapter cables. Cables spanning the ninety million years of history between the Farang Brain Embryo and the human high-def TV.

  "Shit," said Bai, shaking out the foam block. "Where are the instructions?"

  I set the Brain Embryo on the toilet seat. "Curic sent me instructions," I said, "but they're written in Simple Affect Metadata Exchange."

  Bai knelt in the bathtub, fondled the cables and held one up. "This end is a DCMI cable," he said.

  "Yes," said Jenny, "and the other end is a condom."

  I looked up Curic's instructions. They were written in a very old dialect of SAME that got more and more recent as it described cables further along the chain from the Brain Embryo. The last sentence was in English: "Attach the spectrum converter to a television using the provided cable."

  We moved everything into the living room. "Should be simple enough," said Bai. "We work backwards." He unfolded a large sheet of black plastic, like a road map of space.

  "This diagram looks like an absorbtion spectrum," he said. "It could be the spectrum converter."

  "The condom won't fit on that," said Jenny.

  "That's what she said."

  "Jesus Christ, Bai!"

  "Putting aside whether or not what's what she said," I said, "that's photosynthesis paint. It's what they use on the moon base."

  "So, this is the power source," said Bai.

  "And it's nighttime," said Jenny. She sighed. "I'm going home."

  "I'll drive you," said Bai.

  That's why we still haven't played any Brain Embryo games. And that's why Bai is wearing lipstick in the unboxing video.

  * * *

  Chapter 5: Let's Play

  Blog post, June 23

  GAME REVIEWS YOU WERE TOO SHY TO ASK OUT IN HIGH SCHOOL 2.0 PRESENTS

  Gatekeeper (c. 90 million years ago)

  A game by Clan Snowman

  Reviewed by Ariel Blum

  Publisher: Clan Snowman

  Platforms: Brain Embryo

  ESRB rating: T for light blasphemy

  The Brain Embryo is a thirty-pound square computer that glistens like mother-of-pearl. My replica only weighs ten pounds, because it's full of Constellation nanocomputers suspended in moon dust, instead of primitive Farang electronics. The case splits in half like a clamshell, and here comes the input device, looking a little like a pipe organ and a lot like an abacus.

  The Brain Embryo is built like the military-surplus typewriter you inherited from your great-uncle Toby's attic. I accidentally dropped it on the floor while setting it up, and the worst that happened was all the little sliding disks slid into the "up" position. (Also my heart stopped from fright—hey, those defibrilator paddles really work!)

  OH YEAH IT'S A NEW SYSTEM, HERE ARE THE SPECS

  The Brain Embryo (c. 90 million years ago)

  Species: Farang

  Civilization: Dhihe Coastal Coalition

  Developer: Clan Not Completely Underwater

  Publishing Lifetime: 54 Earth years

  A typical Brain Embryo entertainment simulation uses four or ten of the pipe organ/abacus controls. The other 150 are for programming and database work. Gatekeeper only uses one little abacus bead. Slide your glistening resin bead up and down; send it spinning with a quick flick of the finger. The game that's like performing a sex act.

  Gatekeeper is the simplest Brain Embryo game. It's stored in a little screw-in memory cylinder along with tens of thousands of other games and pieces of software. Another species' computing history, smashed into the equivalent of a 128-gigabyte flash memory card. Shake the cylinder, yup, it's also full of moon dust.

  Here's what the Constellation Database of Electronic Games of a Certain Complexity has to say about Gatekeeper:

  The Gatekeeper, a minor figure in the Consensus Mythos, manages traffic between the land of the living and the land of the dead. In this game you adopt the Gatekeeper's dull task indefinitely. Due to its simplicity, a game mostly of theoretical interest to ludologists.

  (Al
l CDBOEGOACC translations are Curic's. For the time being there will be no localizations of the games themselves. The people of the Dhihe Coastal Coalition spoke Edink, a language which nobody on the contact mission understands because it's older than human language itself.)

  The Brain Embryo unit has a small plexiglass display on top, protected by a fold-up cloth, but it's useless for a human—too small and too far into the infrared. A series of cables and adapters, as long as a mature tapeworm, blue-shifts the image into the visible spectrum and formats it to fit my television.

  The Gatekeeper is a blue blob that stands in the center of your television, moving up and down along with the bead on its rod. Traffic comes from both sides of the screen—mostly from the right, from people dying. You need to let normal traffic through, while flicking away dead people who shouldn't be living (zombies) and living people who shouldn't be dying (suicides?).

  The most interesting thing about this game is that there's legitimate traffic from the land of the dead into the land of the living! These seem to be Serious Ghosts with Legitimate Business on the other side, like Hamlet's old man.

  Flanking the tiny glass display on the Brain Embryo are two flip-up pieces that emit weak radio waves. The radio waves tickle a Farang's antennacles, stimulating the "water-sense" and inducing detailed 3D hallucinations that take a lot of load off the system's graphics processor. On the back of the case is what I can only assume is an FCC notice that this does not qualify as a Class B digital device.

  I don't have antennacles, so I'm flicking this bead against the blobs I see on the screen, the two-dimensional shadows of the shapes that make up the Gatekeeper and the zombies. For a game this simple, that's good enough.

  Gatekeeper is a game with no win condition. As in all arcade-type games, eventually you screw up at your Gatekeeping job and are fired. Your boss is a comical looking yellow oval who comes on screen and beats you with a baguette, and I'd laugh except I think that goofy fucker might be G-d.

  The hardare manufacturer for the Brain Embryo is the Not Completely Underwater clan. It's a company name that surely loses something in translation, but one which I find bursting ith optimism.

  The CDBOEGOACC is right. Gatekeeper is a dull game, a simple arcade-type game similar to games that went out of style thirty years ago. It's a game from another planet that I can play on my television. I recommend it.

  Update, two hours later:

  Curic: Those are not zombies. They're probably people who

  want a refund.

  ABlum: a refund on what?

  Curic: Their lives.

  ABlum: sounds like a zombie to me

  Curic: I am going to do research on human zombies to

  prove you wrong.

  Update #2, ten minutes after that:

  Curic: Zombies are fully dead people who come back to

  life for no reason.

  What you are seeing is when one half of a person

  dies, the other half wants a refund.

  Otherwise the entire person will die in a few hours.

  ABlum: who gives out the refunds?

  Curic: There are no refunds.

  That's the point of the game.

  Real life, June 24

  For the first time in years, I rode out to Reflex Games's Austin office and padlocked my bike to someone else's bike because the fucking bike racks are full. I knelt on the concrete, unzipped my backpack, and made one more check of the Brain Embryo, which I always make sure to transport in the finest of pillowcases.

  Inside I signed in and got a stupid plastic visitors badge. The lobby is still decorated with promotional shit from trade shows, though it's obviously later-gen shit than when I worked there.

  "Conference room," said the receptionist. I conference roomed.

  Suresh was not in the conference room. The lights were off when I came in. I sat in a chair for about forty-five seconds. Then I got up and rearranged all the chairs. I squared off a section of whiteboard and wrote DO NOT ERASE. Even this got boring.

  I knelt down again to check the Brain Embryo. The door opened and someone said "Hello?" I stood up from behind the table and saw a blond frat boy reading off his phone.

  "Hi, I'm waiting for Suresh," I said.

  "Suresh is in Toronto the rest of the week," said the frat boy. He sat across the table from me. "Ariel, right? Suresh says you used to work at Reflex."

  "Yeah, we were devs together on Recoil, and the original Give 'em Hell."

  When I contacted him, Suresh's email signature said "Director of Content." Why had he been called to Toronto? Some kind of content emergency? More importantly, what might this guy's sig say, when he sends out email? "Summer Intern"? Was I being snubbed?

  Frat boy had his phone face-up on the desk but he was looking at me. "Yeah?" I said.

  "Suresh said you had something to show."

  "Oh." I slipped the Brain Embryo out of the pillowcase and set it on the table. I opened the clamshell to show off the control abacus, and flipped up the RF emitters so it would look cool.

  "This is an extraterrestrial computer," I said.

  He sat up straight. "A Constellation computer."

  "Farang, pre-Constellation."

  "How powerful is it?"

  "It works with six-dimensional polygons," I said. "And Farang have slower reflexes than humans, so they were okay with a low frame rate. But you could see as it a PC from about 2000." I said. Once frat boy heard the year, he slouched back down in his seat.

  "The Farang wrote games for this computer," I said. "Thousands of games. Humans can play these games. We have the metadata for the games. We have reviews, we know which ones are good. We just have to get them localized and port them to human systems."

  Instant messages were crawling up frat boy's phone but he only gave them a glance. "Reviews," he said, and steepled his fingers. "Do you have sales numbers?"

  "The society that built this computer didn't really have capitalism," I said. "My contact says they mostly traded in time-limited apprenticeships within a network of small clans."

  Frat boy had the kind of body language that makes it very clear at what point in your sentence he stopped listening to you. "You've played these games?" he said.

  "Yeah, nonstop," I said, "for the past forty-eight hours."

  "Whaddya think?"

  "Have you ever played a Japanese RPG, in Japanese?"

  Frat boy's body language got a little more tricky. I couldn't tell if he was saying "Why would I play a Japanese RPG in Japanese?" or "Why would I play a Japanese RPG?"

  "There's clearly something there," I said. "This system kept the Farang entertained for a long time. But I don't have the resources to localize these games and bring them to humanity. Reflex does."

  Frat boy's phone started popping and crackling. He looked at me quizzically. I unscrewed the Brain Embryo's power capacitor and the noises stopped.

  "Uh, it gives 3D effects with radio transmissions. I have an idea for a visualizer, but I'm not very good with hardware. That's another thing..."

  "What do you want from Reflex?" said frat boy.

  "I just want to be part of the project," I said. "I want to do some games that are important. Culturally."

  Frat boy leaned towards me. "Okay," he said. "You worked with Suresh and the guys for four years. As far as I'm concerned, you're still part of the family. And you know that we give each other the straight talk within the family? No bullshit. It's the only way to maintain trust."

  "Yeah, I'm quite familiar with this tradition," I said.

  "I don't see games here, man," said frat boy. "I see ideas for games. Ideas are cheap. You and me, we have ten game ideas every day." He slid his phone along the desk from one hand to the other. "There, make a game about that. We get fan mail we can't read, because people are telling me their game ideas, and we don't want to get sued."

  Who sends fan mail to this douchebag? "These games are ninety million years old," I said. "I believe the copyright has expired." />
  "You know that Reflex only handles original IPs," said frat boy. "You should try a smaller studio. One that does localizations."

  "I just spent five years working at smaller studios," I said. "They don't have the money or the vision. Reflex does."

  "Then why'd you spend five years working for them?" said frat boy. And for him this meant the end of the conversation.

  Outside, defeated, I stared at the mirror glass of the Reflex office building and made pssh, pssh, pssh noises, shooting out the windows one by one with my imaginary laser cannon. Don't judge me; I learned it from playing violent video games.

  Blog post, June 24

  I have something to tell you.

  "I have something to ask you," I said to Jenny.

  Jenny scraped up the last little pile of pasta on her plate. "Uh, okay," she said.

  "How would you like to find employment in the exciting and fast-paced world of video game design?"

  "I'd probably hate it," said Jenny.

  "Why?"

  "Because I've spent the past ten years listening to you hate it."

  "No more," I said. "I terminated my contract with the Brazilian company. I'm done with them."

  "Oh, good!" Jenny looked up at me. "I kept telling you you could do better."

  "Yes," I said. "I'm starting my own game studio."

  "I don't think it's a good time for that," said Jenny. "The economy's not so great."

  "It's never going to be great," I said. "It sucked when we got out of college, and it sucks now, and I have to take a leap of faith now, before it's too late."

  Jenny scooted back her chair. "It's the Constellation, isn't it?"

  "Yes," I said, "exactly."

  "Ariel, they're scientists," said Jenny. "They're not going to outsource their tie-in games to humans, or whatever you think is gonna happen." She turned on the kitchen faucet and the steam started to rise.