Constellation Games Read online

"That's the exact opposite of my idea," I said. "All these games on the Brain Embryo all-in-one pirate cart. We'll port them to human systems. We already know which games were the hits. We just need to localize them. It's like finding money lying on the ground."

  "Yeah, alien money," said Jenny. "How do you know the bank will take it?"

  "I'm taking a risk and putting up the capital," I said. "That's why they call it capitalism. Okay? To make a game you need one dev and one artist. I want you to be the artist."

  "I'm a fine artist," said Jenny. "I do mixed-media sculpture."

  "You do graphic design for websites," I said. "You can do pixel art."

  "Are you trying to piss me off?"

  "I made pony games!" I said. "But I quit! You can always quit! It's the secret of adulthood. Let's quit being hacks, and do something cool."

  "Okay," said Jenny. "I admit this is the first time you have combined a silly game idea with a harebrained money-making scheme."

  "Why is it a scheme?" I said. "We make a product and sell it. How hard can it be? Every douchebag either one of us has ever worked for has managed to do this!"

  "So it's just... pixel art?" said Jenny, "Like on your T-shirts?"

  "Yeah, of course," I said.

  "Cause I do 3D modeling," said Jenny.

  "That skill won't transfer," I said. "Your sculptures don't move. They don't even have to look like specific things. 3D models are why Pôneis Brilhantes looks like shit. You get stuck in the uncanny valley and have to spend a million bucks to climb out."

  "Speaking of which," said Jenny, "what kind of budget are we looking at?"

  "I'll pay you a salary," I said. "That's right, an actual fucking salary. You come to work every day and you get money. We're goin' old school here."

  Jenny turned with a soapy cup in her hands. "Health insurance?" she said.

  "Let's not go crazy."

  This is what I wanted to tell you. My consulting S-corp is now a game studio. Say hello to Crispy Duck Games!

  "When do we start?" said Jenny.

  "When I find a Brain Embryo game worth porting," I said.

  "Well, don't take your time finding one," said Jenny. "I'm tired of watering down the pasta sauce."

  Crispy Duck Games: WE'RE NOT HACKS ANYMORE!

  * * *

  Chapter 6: The Stars My Screensaver

  Real life, June 26

  Some men in black done knocked on my door, and I don't mean Johnny Cash impersonators. There were two heavies standing on the stoop and if they weren't wearing sunglasses they sure wanted to. They were in their thirties. One was tall and looked like he'd rather be anywhere else; the other was short and buff and wore a dangerously loosened tie.

  "Ariel Blum," said the tall one, sizing me up through the door chain. I briefly catalogued my crimes. Nothing unusual for my age/ethnicity/location, nothing that justified dudes in suits.

  "Do you have a warrant?" I said. "Because I'm pretty sure you still need one."

  "We just want to talk to Ariel," said the short buff one.

  "I'm Ariel," I said.

  The agents confered between themselves. "Isn't... Ariel a woman's name?" said the tall one. Like I'm hiding the Little Fucking Mermaid in my bathtub.

  "It was a man's name until nineteen eighty-nine," I said. "I squeaked in under the wire."

  "Mr. Blum," said the short one. "We just need to talk. Really quick. There's no trouble."

  "Give me an acronym," I said.

  "B.E.A."

  "Oh, the—"

  "Bureau of Extraterrestrial Affairs. State Department."

  "I'll come out." I undid the chain and slid out onto the porch. Two agents at the door and a black car at the curb. An old natural-gas government sedan. Probably borrowed from the local Homeland Security office, and the agents with it.

  "I'm agent Krakowski," said the tall one. "My junior is Fowler."

  "Agent Fowler," said the short one.

  Krakowski ignored this. "You've had contact with an extraterrestrial," he said/asked.

  "Yeah, text chat." No point in denying stuff I've posted to my blog. "You want to talk to her?"

  "Species?"

  "Farang."

  "Oh-kay." Krakowski made a gesture to Fowler, who handed me a form out of a manila folder. "We need to register you as a contactee. Once you do, you'll be eligible to sponsor a visa so your contact can visit the United States. "

  "Hold it," I said, looking up. "This form is a fake. There's no Paperwork Reduction Act notice."

  "G-ddammit," said Fowler. He eyed the dead pot plant on my porch like he wished he could still bust me for it.

  "Blum, cut us a break," said Krakowski. "The BEA is ten days old. We're scrambling here. If we had to run timing studies on all our paperwork, Brazil and China would be building theme parks for ETs before we hosted our first state dinner."

  "We're talking about competiveness," said Fowler. "Extraterrestrial technology driving American firms out of business. Commie lasers on the moon. You want to see that happen?"

  "Not particularly." I haven't gotten any work from an American company in three years, you pompous fucks.

  "So." Fowler pointed at the form in my hand.

  "Okay," I said, "but I want to see some badges."

  The badges came out. Leftovers. Homeland Security, as I suspected.

  "Has your contact delivered to you any piece of technology or other item or value through direct atmospheric insertion?" said Fowler.

  "I was hoping I could visit Ring City."

  "One thing at a time," said Krakowski. "Have you gotten anything? Any gifts? They may not have called them 'gifts'."

  "I got a game system," I said.

  "A game system?"

  "Yeah, an old Farang—look, we're basically the same age. You never played Nintendo? One of those."

  "Why a game system?"

  "I asked for one."

  "We'd like to see it," said Krakowski.

  "You'll also need to fill out a customs form," said Fowler.

  "Are you sure? It literally fell out of the sky."

  "It's an illegal import."

  "Technically it's an illegal import," said Krakowski. "It's fine. Nobody's going to jail. We just need to get organized about these things. It's one of those situations where the situation changes faster than the law."

  Fowler gave me a stack of forms. The real thing this time, government-issue.

  When my brother Raph got his Playstation, all the neighborhood kids came to look at it, even the ones who were about to get one for Christmas, because Christmas hadn't come yet. Showing the Brain Embryo to the BEA agents reminded me of that feeding frenzy, except the neighborhood kids didn't want to disassemble the Playstation and use the parts to build public-private partnerships.

  "This looks like a weapon," said Fowler, waving around a cable like it was Dogood Browne's demon-killing whip.

  "That's the video splitter," I said. It does not look like a weapon at all.

  The examination took a few minutes, and Krakowski shifted the Brain Embryo back and forth for the shaky-shaky sound of the moon dust inside.

  "This stuff," he said. "All the Constellation tech. Full of moon dust."

  "Yeah," I said.

  "Some people are selling the dust online. 'Souvenir of the moon' kind of bullshit. That's a bad idea."

  "Why?"

  "Health hazard. The dust contains smart matter that we have no idea how it works. We also have obligations under UN treaties not to commercialize the moon."

  "Seems like that treaty went down the crapper when the Constellation started digging big chunks out of the thing."

  The look on Krakowski's face gave me the party line on UN treaties and their location vis-a-vis the crapper.

  "The treaties are all we have," he said. "If we don't stick together, the Constellation will start playing one country against the other."

  "We play this right," said Fowler, "there'll be plenty of moon dust for everybody."

  "We
'll send you an informational packet," said Krakowski as he left, "once we get a discretionary budget for the design of informational packets. If your contact says or does anything to alarm you, or you notice anything suspicious, notify us immediately."

  "Like what?" I said. "What are you afraid of?"

  "It's precautionary only," said Fowler. "There's been no determination of fear."

  After they left I pressed my ear to the door. "Okay, never contradict me in front of a civilian," I head Krakowski say. "Just don't fucking..."

  (N.B. the form takes 24 minutes to fill out.)

  Blog post, June 27

  GAME REVIEWS OF IRREVOCABLE DECISIONS 2.0 PRESENTS

  Handle the Real Style (c. 90 million years ago)

  A game by Clan Extra Echo and Clan Let It Sink

  Reviewed by Ariel Blum

  Publisher: Clan Extra Echo (?)

  Platforms: Brain Embryo

  ESRB rating: M for grand larceny and occasional vengeance

  Looking through fifteen thousand extraterrestrial games used to be kind of a fun activity, good way to spend a weekend, but now my livelihood depends on finding the SINGLE MOST AWESOME GAME ever made for the Brain Embryo so I can port that game to human computers, and it's becoming a bit of a chore. Which makes me more and more worried about my backup plan of becoming a gigolo.

  Handle the Real Style is not the game I've been looking for. I'm writing about it because it's the game that taught me how to look at Farang games.

  You may recall my Gatekeeper review, where I used the word "blob" a lot. This was an accurate depiction and I stand by it. These games are full of multicolored roundish blobs. I figured there was some complicated 3D shape overlaid on the blob in the RF band which I didn't see because I don't have antennacles.

  But Handle the Real Style starts off with something I recognize: a starfield. Stars give off all kind of light, and they're pretty quiet in the RF, so they look about the same to Farang as to humans. Pretty nice graphics, too—there's a kind of nebula thing in one corner of the sky, and you can even see the Milky Way.

  And there's this strange two-tone blob in the middle of the screen, just like in Gatekeeper. I found the controls and moved the blob around, assuming it was a space shooter with a starfield background. But as I moved around, other shapes occluded the stars and I realized that I was looking up at the sky.

  That's the secret. Humans make games with top-down views, and Farang make games with bottom-up views. I was looking at these little brown blobs like they were the top view of something, or maybe the side view of something, but actually they're upskirt shots of Farang: little circular forms with leathery feet at the bottom and the wiggly antennacles sticking out.

  Now these games make a lot more sense. You start Handle the Real Style on the beach. Eventually the sun comes up and the stars go away. You can go into the ocean, dive as deep as you want, and the camera will stay right beneath the player character the whole time, as the sky and the water's surface fade away past the draw distance.

  The CDBOEGOACC describes Handle the Real Style as "a vengeance game typical of the period", and doesn't say much else. I admit I find this game a little light on the vengeance. You can go into other peoples' caves and steal their stuff (lots of Farang games are based around theft, the way human games are based around homicide), but you never see the other people. The world is detailed, well-realized, and completely empty. If you revenge yourself on someone, and they never find out, is it really vengeance?

  There's a lot of text in Handle the Real Style, but no way to translate it, so I just made up my own story. In this game you play the last Farang on Earth (well, whatever they call it), taking a post-apocalyptic opportunity to steal back all the power tools lent to his/her neighbors over the years and never returned. I'm through with this game, but I may drop back in a couple years from now to see how (in)accurate that story is.

  Update: Here's the now-obligatory rebuttal from Curic.

  Curic: The "nebula thing" is a nebula.

  Please add this to your review. That nebula was very

  prominent in the night sky back then and very

  important to a lot of Farang.

  * * *

  ABlum: ok

  why was it important?

  * * *

  Curic: I don't know. People were very

  superstitious back then.

  They probably thought they could get

  there if they built a big

  enough tower or a fast

  enough spaceship or

  something.

  Real life, June 27

  Beep beep. "Pick up," I said. My hands were covered with free-range chicken juice. "Hey, Jenny."

  "Do I have a job yet?" said Jenny from the phone on the counter. "I'm gonna call every day, like a plucky newspaper dude."

  "I've been planning the cookout," I said. I held up my drippy hands to the phone. "Things are marinating."

  "What are you looking for? Like what's the criteria? 'Cause I can scout the database myself, while you marinate."

  "Uh, when the Constellation made the database they assembled a histogram of reactions to each game, kind of like they use on Groupinion. I'm trying out the games that everyone likes."

  "That won't work," said Jenny. "Everybody 'likes' Trent Fellersen, but I wouldn't show his art to aliens."

  I washed my hands and put a lid on the chicken. "He's the one with the airbrushed... What's wrong with his stuff?"

  "Okay, you remember the cartoon I drew way back when, where Picasso's painting a still life and Bugs Bunny keeps stealing the fruit?"

  I remembered. "Yeah."

  "When Bugs Bunny steals the fruit from Trent Fellersen, Fellersen doesn't even go after him. He just gives up, and sells the painting as is. Like, 'yes, it's a primer coat and the outline of an apple, I'm a genius.'"

  "Sounds like you don't like him," I said. I dropped potatoes into a pot of water.

  "Oh, I 'like' him," said Jenny. "'Like' is the placeholder emotion. Don't give the world more shit people 'like'. I want to do a game that that some people loved and some people hated."

  "That's a good idea. Skewed histogram. We'll look at the rating and the standard deviation."

  "Can I do that part?" said Jenny. "And get paid for doing it?"

  "Maybe we can split it up," I said. "Let's talk about it after the cookout."

  "Oh, oh!" said Jenny. "Did you hear about Papua New Guinea?"

  "I heard that it exists," I said.

  "The Constellation just landed shuttles all over Papua New Guinea. Like eight hundred people. Except about three hundred were Them; maybe that only counts as one person."

  "What are they doing there?" I said. "That's the middle of nowhere."

  "I don't know, handing out old computers, or whatever the Constellation normally does. I thought you'd know about this already."

  "They're probably linguists," I said. "People speak a lot of different languages there."

  "Well how come they get all the space aliens? When do we get some?"

  "Jenny. Geez. The aliens are not a dessert."

  "You know what I mean," said Jenny. "You said the BEA assholes were going to let Curic come down to Austin. She's already missing the cookout."

  "I don't know," I said. "There's foreign policy shit." I picked up the phone and looked up a map. "Clearly New Guinea needs the tourism more than we do. Plus, if they do take over the island like people are afraid of, everyone will secretly think 'well, at least they only got Papua New Guinea.'"

  "And they'll stop with one island? They've got portable wormholes. You can't quarantine that shit."

  I looked at the map. "Oh, wow," I said. "New Guinea shares an island with Indonesia. If the Constellation takes over Indonesia, then China gets involved, and then we're all fucked."

  "Where are you getting this? Why does China care?"

  "They have defense pacts with all those south Asian countries."

  "That's in Limited Nuclear Exchang
e," said Jenny. "Not real life."

  "Oh."

  "Doofus."

  * * *

  Chapter 7: Party Creation

  Blog post, June 28, morning

  If you have a big cookout on the actual Fourth of July, everyone is going to some other cookout, so you're left alone with more food than you can eat. Have a cookout the weekend before, and not only will you have a good time, you'll probably ruin some other fucker's cookout the next week, because lots of people can't take a cookout two weeks in a row. This is my theory, anyway.

  Today the Brain Embryo makes its public debut at my annual Pre-Fourth-Of-July Sexy Cookout. (Everything sounds better when you call it "sexy".) The "public" here is Jenny's friends, and my friends, such as they are. Putting the two sets together usually causes some kind of fun explosion, if only because my friends are always astounded to discover that their pickup lines don't work on Jenny's friends.

  The Sexy Cookout is my yearly attempt to build the most stereotypical image of summer imaginable, so everyone can have a "fun summer" memory to look back on when it starts to rain. My friends in their work polo shirts and Jenny's in whatever they wear; beers in hand, dropping by the grill to share inanities. The sweating, the sprinkler, the heat of the grill and all the other things about an Austin cookout that are fun in retrospect.

  I want to do it right this year, because this might be the last cookout. Nobody knows what human civilization will be like in a year. Next year there will be a new holiday on the calendar—the anniversary of first contact—and we may all be living on different planets. The memory of this summer, when we were all together in Austin; I want it to last as long as it needs to.

  Real life, June 28

  Jenny doesn't cause trouble but she's suspiciously good at pointing it out. The first sign that my cookout was in trouble came from her. I was turning the traif in the backyard when Jenny came out with a beer bottle in each hand.

  "Not being judgmental," I said, "but it's a little early to be double-chugging it."