Future Games

by John Shirley

  “Good idea, but let’s talk to Chirac first. And not a word about this to anyone until after the game.”

  “Sir?”

  “Right now I’m going to get me some hits.”

  “Wittgenstein speaks of a ‘language game’ in which two workers are building a wall. Worker A says ‘block,’ ‘pillar,’ ‘slab,’ or ‘beam.’ Worker B hands him the appropriate piece of rock or wood, and the wall gets built.”

  “So, Doctor,” Jenny Flagg spoke up, “exactly where was, uh . . . Wittgenstein going with this?”

  Dr. Chirac smiled. “His point was that the worker delivering the components doesn’t need to know how the slabs and beams are used. Worker B doesn’t even need to know that it’s a wall they’re building. All he has to do is respond to each word with the appropriate action. In this language game, as in most cases when we use natural language, what matters is not understanding, but the appropriate response.”

  “Sort of like our pitching signs,” Alex said. “The pitcher doesn’t have to know why the catcher wants a slider or a fastball, as long as the catcher’s done her homework.”

  “And as long as the signs are interpreted correctly, and the right pitch delivered, yes. The pitcher, like Worker B, doesn’t actually have to understand the task beyond appropriate responses.”

  “The pitcher’s like a robot,” Hunter said, winking at me.

  I ignored him, saying, “But in this case, the catcher, Worker A, is also a Tau. She must have some kind of a clue what she wants the pitcher to throw, which means she’s got to have some objective in mind.”

  Dr. Chirac opened her hands to the heavens. “Or possibly Worker A is herself following a learned response. A certain sequence of pitches for a certain batter. Or perhaps they’re simply repeating all our pitches since they began their observation, in the same order.”

  “How come we never just assume they’re playing baseball?” Jenny Flagg asked.

  “Oh, I assure you, Sergeant,” Dr. Chirac said, “they are playing baseball. Wittgenstein’s point is that Worker B is still building a wall, whether or not he understands the exact purpose of each piece in it. When we teach children how to use language, we start with just such an absence of background knowledge.”

  Jenny spoke for all of us. “Huh?”

  “Ask a young girl how old she is. She’ll say ‘three’ and hold up three fingers. But this three-year-old cannot accurately define for you what a year is or even know that each finger represents one year in some abstract sense. She has simply been taught to make a certain gesture and sound in response to a certain question.”

  She turned to Hunter. “But children are not robots, of course. They are simply people with incomplete language development. These simple language games are how they learn the language, like a puzzle falling into place from meaningless pieces.”

  “So you’re saying it doesn’t matter whether they’re just imitating us or whether they actually understand the game,” I said.

  “It does matter. With good reason, teachers and parents want to know when the child actually comprehends what a year is. That understanding is the goal of the developmental language game. But in the meantime, what we are doing is not useless. We are teaching them the imitative responses around which real comprehension is built.”

  I decided to bring it back to my original question. “So we shouldn’t let them win?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so. The appropriate response in any game is to try to win. We should be upset when we walk a Tau player, not walk several in a row to give up runs. And we should clap and cheer when we win. That’s what winning means: It’s the thing you want to happen. We must continue to demonstrate that and strive to keep our reactions consistent.”

  Jenny Flagg shook her head. “But humans don’t always try to win every game. Sometimes you let kids win. And you always pitch a little bit easier to them.”

  “Perhaps my analogy is straining. These are not children. We must assume that these Tau are researchers, scientists even. They may not have PhDs as we understand them, but they have been selected to make contact and learn what they can about us. Right now, that means playing baseball properly.”

  McGill, who’d read the last transmission from Halihunt and NASA, looked at me.

  “Well, I got to say, Houston isn’t going to be happy with that,” I said. “The PR angle was great, until they realized that the Taus still haven’t got so much as a single, and that we clobber them every game. Kind of takes the shine off it.”

  “We’re ambassadors here,” McGill chimed in. “We’ve come in the spirit of friendship. Would it kill us to let them win a couple?”

  “Frankly, I think the problem is in your attitude. You’re being very American, I must say.” We all looked at Ashley Newkirk, who continued. “This isn’t about winning, but playing the game properly, which means doing your best. You Americans seem transfixed by the idea that a game that can’t be won isn’t worth playing. One example: I was in the States once for your so-called ‘World Series,’ to which no other countries are invited, I might add.”

  “Except Canada,” Jenny said.

  “And Havana is in the league now, excuse me,” Honorio added.

  “Very well, but what happened was this: I understood this ‘World Series’ was to be seven games long. But when one of the sides won the first four, they simply stopped playing!”

  No one else said a word, so I offered, “And . . . ?”

  Ashley shook his head. “So typical. Can’t win, go home. In cricket, a five-test series always is played to the end, even when one of the sides can no longer possibly win.”

  “But why?” Jenny cried.

  “Because a test series has five matches,” Ashley said, not too helpfully. “Why get so caught up with winning? As long as the Tau are willing to play, why not play?”

  “Well, we are American, and this is baseball,” I said. “And it is a problem.”

  What I didn’t explain was the other part of NASA’s concern: how the imbalance in our interplanetary league was playing to the rest of the world. A fundamentally American team was beating a bunch of untrained beginners at our own national game, relentlessly, day in and day out. The perfect sports metaphor for the way we’d been dealing with the rest of the world for the last century.

  “It’s not quite the morale builder it used to be, either,” Jenny added. “With their pitching so good, at least it’s fun to try to get hits off them. But three-up, three-down from them nine innings every game is getting tedious. It’s not good sport.”

  Alex gestured to Yoshi. “Any chance of that changing?”

  He looked dubious. “Here’s the problem.”

  The wallscreen lit, showing a Tau at bat with skeleton superimposed. It moved slowly through a swing, and red highlights appeared at its upper elbow joints.

  “When humans swing a bat, most of the rotation doesn’t come from our shoulders; it comes from the elbow and wrist. Taus don’t have much mobility there; their two elbows bend less than our one, and they have relatively little wrist action. That’s why they throw straight-arm.”

  “So they’ll never get much force?”

  “Not enough for a solid hit. And if we pitch slower, like Jenny suggested, it’ll just make it worse. They need to connect with a fastball to get any power. As far as I can see, they’ll only ever be really good at bunting. For them to score consistently, we’d have to fake some seriously bad fielding.”

  Alex sighed. “And they’re so damn observant, they’d know what we were up to.”

  “Or worse, interpret it as part of the game,” Dr. Chirac said.

  “Well, we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t,” I said. “Any ideas?”

  “What about mixed teams?” Jenny said. “Some Tau and some humans on each side.”

  We looked at Chirac.

  “A fascinating idea, but how would we ask?”

  A week later, everything changed.

  I was warming up fo
r another desultory first inning of striking out three hapless Tau when a new batter came up to the plate.

  We knew the usual Tau team by now. They rotated among about a dozen regulars, distinguishable by thorax markings, the gray and yellow speckled across what I thought of as their chests. This Tau had a distinct cluster of reddish dots near her right shoulder that I’d never seen before. She also had a strange stance, the bat held out low, almost over the plate, as if she wasn’t quite ready yet.

  I decided to go easy on her, waving off Hunter’s signal for a fastball. (We had changed our signs, given that the Tau were reading them, but our opponents, disappointingly, had yet to alter theirs.) Hunter glanced at the new player, nodded understanding, and signaled a slow ball, a new pitch we’d invented without telling Dr. Chirac. She’d probably noticed the easy throws we were sneaking in, but hadn’t complained. The Tau had managed to get a piece of one or two, but never out of the infield. Yoshi was right: If you threw slow, their puny swings couldn’t generate any power. If you threw fast, they missed completely.

  I did my usual wind-up ritual, spitting with a little extra distance to make the newcomer feel at home, and threw.

  The Tau did not swing.

  “Strike one!” Chirac called.

  I shrugged to Hunter and sent in another meat pitch.

  Again, it ignored the ball.

  “Strike two!”

  “Mighty Casey at the bat,” I muttered.

  On my third slow pitch, the Tau feebly lifted her bat to meet the ball. It connected, and tipped over Hunter’s head. He ran after it, gathered it up, and threw it back to me.

  My fourth pitch got the same treatment.

  As did my fifth.

  Hunter, running back with an annoyed look on his face, signaled for a fastball.

  I nodded and wound up, then let a hard one fly.

  The Tau’s knees bent, the bat rising to again meet the ball. This time the hit angled away from home plate at ninety degrees, rolling toward Yoshi within his forest of new tubed-in cameras.

  Yoshi threw it back to me with a puzzled expression.

  I shook off Hunter until he gave me a slider, then threw the meanest pitch I could, which broke to the outside just before it reached the Tau.

  She didn’t swing.

  “Ball one!” Chirac cried.

  I stretched to loosen up my shoulder, which had twinged a bit on delivery. The Tau didn’t swing at bad pitches much anymore. Their incredible eyesight and observational skills were pretty hard to beat. But this was a new player. She was awfully cool for a creature who’d never held a baseball bat before.

  Were they reading our signs again?

  When Hunter signaled for a fastball, I nodded.

  And threw a change-up.

  Hunter may have been fooled, but the batter reached out with impeccable timing and tapped the ball backward at about forty-five degrees. One of the xeno team assisting Yoshi was already there, and threw it back to Hunter.

  I swallowed. The Taus, or one of them anyway, had come up with a strategy.

  Hunter must have realized I wasn’t sure about our signs, and his fingers flashed gobbledygook.

  I nodded, and threw a curve ball. The Tau left it alone again, and it zoomed past an unprepared Hunter.

  “Ball two!”

  I tried three more fast balls in succession. The Tau tapped the first two away effortlessly, but by the third my arm was wearing, and she remained motionless as the ball carried low and outside.

  “Ball three!”

  I threw one into the dirt, aiming for the Tau’s bat.

  It stepped back, and the ball bounced off Hunter’s glove, rolling back toward me across the sheetgrass.

  “Ball four. Take your base!” Dr. Chirac cried.

  I tugged on my cap and looked around at the fielders. They stared back at me a bit befuddled. We had walked Tau batters before, but none had ever deserved it like this batter. She’d worked the ball like a pro, and frustrated me into giving her the base.

  I stretched my arm, hoping there weren’t going to be any more at-bats like that one.

  There were.

  The next batter, a regular player with broad gray stripes that faded in the middle of her thorax, also sat out the first two pitches. But once she had two strikes on her, she consistently tipped the ball over Hunter’s head, defending the strike zone with effortless precision. I didn’t throw her any intentional balls, but she finally walked when my arm faltered after twelve hard pitches.

  “Take your base!”

  For the first time ever, a Tau was in scoring position.

  I tried deception next. Hunter and I rotated through my selection of curve balls, knuckleballs, and sliders. I did my best to stay on the periphery of the strike zone, trying to give Dr. Chirac some tricky calls.

  This Tau also proved too smooth for me, though. She took a stab at anything even approaching a strike, only leaving the obvious wild pitches alone. Since she didn’t need a solid hit, she could swing and connect with everything that wasn’t garbage. The balls eventually came.

  The bases were loaded.

  With the next Tau I went inside, hoping the thin end of the bat might pop one up for Hunter to catch. But that extra elbow came in handy; she pulled back easily and used the top of the sweet spot, sending every ball fast and high over Hunter’s head. He was getting exhausted from chasing balls.

  The first Tau, that new one, walked into home. The Tau had scored their first run.

  The usual cheer came from the alien audience, with what sounded to my untrained ear like a little something extra. A few of the humans managed to find their voices as well.

  I called Hunter to the mound, and Alex jogged over from third base.

  “You need relief, Colonel?”

  I rubbed my arm, which was screaming. “Not yet. Let’s try one more thing. Hunter, how about you stand up?”

  “What?”

  “It’ll put you in better position to catch the high tips.”

  “Yeah, with my face.” Although we had a catcher’s mask, Hunter didn’t have a proper chest protector. I made a mental note to request one.

  “I’ll send some slow ones in. See if we can’t get a foul out.”

  “Okay?” He sounded dubious.

  “What are you smiling about?”

  Alex shrugged. “This is great. They’ve found a way to score. Talk about strategic thinking. A whole new way to play baseball.”

  “Yeah. I guess. If you can call it baseball.”

  The rest of the inning went much the same way. I got one actual out, managing to squeeze a pop fly from the bottom of their order, the pitcher. After that, they scored five more runs to make it an even ten, walking all the way. Then the next two stood impassively and let me strike them out, which took some doing at that point, my arm on fire from shoulder to fingertips.

  Across the rest of the game, we put up a mighty struggle, posting eleven runs of our own, more than we had in ages. We subbed through five different pitchers (I was done after that first inning), but no one managed to get more than one out per inning. It was always the Tau who decided when their ups were over. They scored exactly ten runs per inning, and when the game was done they had walked into home an even ninety times.

  For the first time in history, humanity had lost a baseball game.

  By seventy-nine runs.

  The usual xeno team was there, all on time for once, along with the military and McGill. I sat down and turned to Yoshi.

  “So what the hell happened?”

  “They got a new strategy, I guess.”

  “No kidding. But how did it happen so fast? From zero runs to ninety in one game.”

  He nodded. “It surprised me, too. But now that I’ve thought about it, the real question is: Why didn’t they do it all along?”

  He queued a field recording, a Tau frozen in the pixelated grayscale of a fly-sized spycam. The creature held a spear out before itself like a sword.

  Yoshi eye-moused
, and the screen jumped into motion. The Tau wove and dodged, hitting at flying objects with the spear.

  “This is one of their pre-hunting rituals, or games, or punishments. I’ve been focusing on it since our first game with the Tau. The other adults in the hunt are slinging rocks at her, and she’s fending them off with her spear.”

  “Looks dangerous,” Jenny said.

  “Not for a Tau. Their hand-to-eye is too good, and with those double elbows they can cover their whole body efficiently. The Tau may not swing with any power, but they’re good at blocking an object that’s coming toward them.”

  I frowned. “So they’ve always been capable of the batting they showed today?”

  “Sure. Those slings can get a projectile up to two hundred K. And they don’t hold back. Any adult Tau could fend off balls thrown by humans. Add a little understanding of the strike zone, and they can get a walk pretty much at will.”

  “Two hundred kilometers per hour?” I repeated.

  He nodded. “Yep. Much faster than any pitch you’re going to manage, Colonel.”

  I opened my mouth, then closed it again.

  “So why did they wait until now to kick our asses?” Alex asked.

  Yoshi shrugged. “ ’Cause they didn’t think of it?”

  Dr. Chirac spoke up. “It wasn’t part of the grammar of baseball as they understood it. Human players generally try to get a hit. Look at your terminology: You think of the tipped ball as ‘foul,’ or bad. You count the first two as strikes. But for a player with the Taus’ skill set, the foul ball ultimately puts the batter in control.” She nodded to herself. “It seems probable that until now they were imitating us, trying to play the way we do. They were probably more interested in experiencing the game’s normal rituals than in beating us.”

  “But that new player,” I said, “the one who led off today, had a different idea.”

  “She wanted to win,” Alex said.

  Dr. Chirac lowered her voice. “This is the conceptual breakthrough we have been hoping for.”

  “And the PR save we needed,” McGill said happily. “The Tau finally got a game off us, and they did it by figuring out a totally new way to play baseball.”

  “Not exactly, Mr. McGill.”