Once she said that I felt uncomfortable wearing a spacesuit in a forest. "There's no oxygen here?"
"There is oxygen," said Ashley, "but there's also nitrous oxide."
I chose the mask. We had it made at a repetroire station, and then I tagged along behind Tetsuo and Ashley as we went to ground transportation: skyway cars, ziplines, ports that jumped us from the day side to the night side and back again, and good old fashioned buckets with ropes and pulleys for descending into the forest.
"Curic said you know all about the Ip Shkoy Aliens?" I asked Tetsuo.
"Oh, I know a little," said Tetsuo modest-style.
"You know she gave me an Ip Shkoy computer? Simulates Hi-Def False Daylight? It's pretty cool."
"My expertise is in social relations," said Tetsuo, "but I've been crashing course on popular culture for your visit. Between you and I, we'll be able to do some truly hard-core research."
"Do you speak Pey Shkoy?"
"Well enough to seduce," said Tetsuo, and twisted some vowels into balloon animals. "That means 'you have beautiful hindarms.' Too bad the civilization is extinct, or I would be making some serious time with the ladies."
"Ladies other than me," said Ashley.
Whatever part of my mask kept the nitrous out, didn't keep out the smell. It was a smell like ozone and cloves, and as we went down into the darkness of the forest it picked up spices that don't have names, the leaves decaying on the ground and the living things underneath. I could tell it was a stronger version of the way Ashley and Tetsuo smelled.
Finally Tetsuo and Ashley stopped in front of a metal garage door, which Tetsuo lifted up to expose an honest-to-G-d hole carved in the side of the tree.
"Here we are," said Tetsuo.
"Oh, shit," I said. "I left my bag in Human Ring."
"That's a good place for it," said Ashley. "You won't want to stay here."
"Or maybe I left it on the moon."
"I've created a historical representation of an Ip Shkoy dwelling from the period under study," said Tetsuo. "It is perfect on average." He lifted himself up onto his hindarms, walked into the hole in the tree and I followed. Ashley crawled in behind us.
"Why are you going bipedal?" asked Ashley. "You look silly." Tetsuo's over seven feet tall and his head was bumping the ceiling.
"Domestic bipedalism was fairly common among the Ip Shkoy," said Tetsuo. "Anyway, the human goes bipedal."
"Ip Shkoy were shorter," said Ashley, and didn't stand up.
"This has everything necessary for research," said Tetsuo, as if he were trying to sell me the place. Dim reddish light sifted in through the door, the window, and a balcony that looked out into the tree's hollow interior. "You'll find the False Daylight computer, as well as a number of competitive hardware and media typical of the period."
"Do you live here?"
"This is Tetsuo's toy," sniffed Ashley in the actress' resampled voice. "I won't live in a historical replica."
"But you do!" said Tetsuo in English. "This Ring is a recreation of a techno-primitive past that did not exist! Just as with the human Disney and his eponymous Land!"
"Yes," said Ashley, "a fantasy of the past, with proper toilets and no horrible Ip Shkoy food. That's fine with me."
"You must cease enhating replicas!" said Tetsuo. "There are no un-replicas! Your precious fossils are replicas!"
"I'm not a replica," said Ashley.
"You're a replica of your parents."
"A synthesis, fucktainer!" [?? -AB]
Tetsuo snarled at Ashley and continued the argument in Purchtrin. The two growled at each other and then he nipped her with thick chewing ridges and Ashley pulled the smaller Tetsuo down on top of her with her powerful tail.
"Ariel, please excuse," said Tetsuo in English. He and Ashley leaped like displeased cats out the door and window respectively. I decided not to follow them, which turned out to be one of my genius ideas, because shortly thereafter distinctive sounds could be heard echoing through the local forest.
I was probably blushing or some shit, so I just poked around the historical recreation. It was so dark I had to use my phone as a flashlight. The building was one big room organized by activity, like a Japanese apartment. A humming tank of refrigerated water held lift-out racks of food packages. Near some long beanbag chairs I found a film projector that accepted tape canisters shaped like the infinity sign. Connected to the film projector was Tetsuo's Simulates Hi-Def False Daylight.
I twisted the capacitor to turn it on. It clicked but nothing happened. I fiddled with the film projector and it lit up one wall with a sickly pink light. Nothing appeared on the screen, but at least there was enough light in the room that I could look around.
The floor was covered with trapdoors concealing storage spaces. Inside one storage space, I found tape canisters for the projector and memory cylinders for the False Daylight. There were dozens of the buggers in little plastic cases. I dropped them in front of the projector beam, sprawled on one of the beanbag chairs, and sorted through the cases, trying to find a logo I recognized from my home experiments with my replica system.
The cases opened from the top and some of them had labels in lurid colors. Others had plain white stickers on them with Pey Shkoy glyphs handwritten in smudged marker. The tape canisters were movies. They had full-color and (possibly, depending on what exactly I was looking at) obscene labels, labels worn smooth in spots by the fiddling of small Alien fingers.
My replica False Daylight had arrived in pristine condition from a repetoire fabricator in Ring City's utility ring. This unit had surely come from the same fabricator at around the same time, but it was dirty, some of the abacus beads were missing, and the plastic on one corner was chipped.
I picked up the heavy projector and pointed it towards the kitchen. The refrigerator's water hookup looked old and rusty where it connected to the water main. There was dirt and... crumbs? in the corners.
This wasn't some Nixon-in-the-kitchen recreation. This used to be somebody's house. A month ago I'd invited Curic into my home and let her snoop around, looking in and under everything and asking questions. Two million years earlier an Alien had invited one of Curic's ancestors into his crappy dark inside-a-tree apartment. Curic's ancestor had scanned everything, just like Curic had for me, and the whole damn place had been stored in the Repertoire until Tetsuo Milk needed to bring the Ip Shkoy era to life.
I pictured a replica of my house made from Curic's notes and scans, in some future space station light-years away. Some poor confused fucker poking at my stack-o-Playstations.
"Hello, Ariel," said a scratchy oily voice from behind me.
"Aaah!" I hit my head on a dangling internal root and whirled to face Curic.
"Welcome to Ring City," said Curic. "You're very jumpy today."
"Curic!" I said. "Don't do that!"
"My name has changed," said Curic. "Please point the archaic multipurpose light emitter somewhere else; it's hurting my eyes."
I set the projector down. "Did you get married?" I said.
"Get your mind out of the gutter," said Curic. "An overlay that cares about such things has modified the romanization of Oyln. My name is now 'Huric'."
"Can I still call you Curic?" I said. "That's what I'm used to."
"You may," said Curic. "As far as I'm concerned, 'Curic' and 'Huric' are equally far away from [hoot, click]."
"Curic," I said, "I think Tetsuo and Ashley are having sex next door."
"If you say so," said Curic, and shuffled over to check out the refrigerated tank.
"They were having an argument and they left and now it's bonk bonk bonk. I know they're newlyweds, but is that normal?"
"Newly-weds?" said Curic. "I don't know what that word means, but Aliens use sex to maintain social cohesion, just as humans do."
"I do not use sex to maintain social cohesion."
"Then perhaps you are the abnormal one," said Curic. "How do you like his old-style dwelling? Very much a post-contac
t house. Many Farang influences here." Curic ran a hand over the projector I'd been holding.
"False daylight," she said, and shut it off.
"I need that to see."
"Sorry." She turned it back on.
Tetsuo and Ashley crawled back into the apartment. "Oh G-d!" said Tetsuo. "An anachronistic extraterrestrial in my painstakingly researched gaming-hovel!"
"He's talking about you," Curic told me. "I'm perfectly chronistic here."
"It's actually a joke," Tetsuo explained.
"Ariel," said Curic, "now that we are all here, I want to invite you to a party in Inostrantsi Ring. There are a lot of Inostrantsi who would like to meet a human."
"No," I said. "Give me a break. I just went to a space station and the moon and a huge forest. I walked through wormholes and I sat in a fucking Ewok bucket with a rope. I don't want to swim in liquid methane and get shown off to kelp plants right now. I'm exhausted. I want to sit down and play some Ip Shkoy games with someone who actually knows something about the Ip Shkoy."
"Yes!" said Tetsuo. "I win!"
Blog post, July 18
GAME REVIEWS FROM SPACE 2.0 PRESENTS
Ev luie Aka's Ultimate DIY Lift-Off
A game by The Ul Neie Corporation
Reviewed by Ariel Blum
Publisher: The Ul Neie Corporation
Platforms: Simulates Hi-Def False Daylight
ESRB rating: T for stylized violence and general bastardry
I lay prone on a cylindrical beanbag chair in the replica Ip Shkoy apartment. Tetsuo Milk, my guide to ancient Alien culture, assembled a False Daylight memory cylinder from modular parts, following a diagram on a paper insert.
"I little know this period of history," said Tetsuo Milk. "I've been focusing on the time three generations after contact. But this game was named after someone I recognized, and I was lucky enough to get a first edition."
"It's a replica," I said.
"Yes," said Tetsuo, "a replica of the first edition. Curic thinks you will be satisfied with soft-dolls, but I believe in the most accurate experience possible." He screwed the memory cylinder into the False Daylight unit.
"What's a soft-doll?"
"Curic gave you a looks like a False Daylight computer," said Tetsuo, "but it's not a real replica. It is nanologic in particulate suspension. It contains all the software everyone made for the system. You don't have to change memory devices at all times. It won't malfunction after a while so that you buy a newer computer. It's a soft-doll. This," he patted the battered False Daylight, "is a real replica."
"Okay, I get it," I said. "You're a retro snob. Why do you call it a soft-doll?"
"Oh, there's a Gaijin folktale," said Tetsuo. "A child's parents die, so ki makes replacement parents out of cloth and sand. But cloth and sand can't love you." He paused. "However, they can't die, either," he admitted.
"I ask because 'soft doll' is almost the name of a human piece of software: an AI program that lets you pretend to have a girlfriend."
"Well, there you are," said Tetsuo. He turned on the projector, which lit up the apartment wall with its washed-out pink light.
"First time perfect," said Tetsuo. "Ev luie Aka's Ultimate DIY Lift-Off."
"I don't see anything."
"Oh, the spectrum!" said Tetsuo. "I made an adapter for human eyes, but it's not historically accurate." He crawled across the apartment floor, looking in trapdoors, translating a little song into English as he searched:
Ev luie Aka, here she comes
Looking down through the cma at you
Ev luie Aka, there she goes
If you've been bad, she'll fuck you up
"Who's Ev luie Aka?" I said. "Some kind of sky deity?"
"She was my species' first astronaut," said Tetsuo. "One of the only ones, really, before-contact. She was Ip Shkoy, like this computer. She took a few orbits in the Standing Committee on Appropriations."
"The what now?"
"You pay for it, you get to name it."
Tetsuo slipped a dark cap over the projector's lens and its light shifted into the visible spectrum. A torpedo-shaped slug of purple metal wobbled back and forth among explosions and what looked like an attempt to do particle effects using two-dimensional polygons.
"You can see?" Tetsuo asked me.
"The colors are off, but I can see them. You see it okay?"
"I see most about everything." Tetsuo stretched his torso forward to the False Daylight abacus and started the game. Projected on the apartment wall was a patch of green sky instrumented with crosshairs and fringed by trees. Pey Shkoy characters scrolled in from the left.
"'We're preparing for lift-off,'" Tetsuo read. "'Holy shit, space monsters! We're under attack! Save us, Ev luie Aka!' Now we launch, I suppose."
The trees (cma, whatever) and the clouds peeled away, and Tetsuo was flying over a globe. Blobs swooped down from higher orbits and took up holding patterns. Big red symbols appeared on the screen.
"'Your time limit is one orbit,'" Tetsuo read. "'Kill everybody.' There is not much concern for historical accuracy here. How should I kill people from a primitive orbiter? Perhaps I drop empty fuel tanks on them?"
"In these games you always have missiles or something. Shift the beads at the edges."
Tetsuo mashed at the abacus and a black dot shot out at the vanishing point in the middle of his crosshairs. "This is ridiculous," said Tetsuo.
"What's that say?"
"It says, 'Orbit complete, touch down at landing site.'" Tetsuo's ship lost atitude and slammed into the ground.
"Hrm," he said. "'You could not land. You are dead. You left six enemies alive. Down' — that's just the Pey Shkoy name for the planet — 'Down is doomed! Set clips on positions blah-de-blah to reduce difficulty."
Tetsuo's review: "That was really terrible. The geography was accurate, though. Let's play something else."
"Hold on," I said, "let me try." I pulled the abacus towards me and started a new game.
"'Preparing for lift-off,'" said Tetsuo, "same shit as the other time."
I made an inventory of the abacus beads, projectile-vomiting polygons into the distance. "This is a little weird," I said. "I'm pretty sure the Mercury orbiters didn't have any weapons."
"It's all made up. Ev luie Aka orbited Down five times and landed in the ocean. There were no weapons and no space monsters."
"Whoa! What's that?"
"Aerial mine," said Tetsuo.
"Why am I dropping mines in front of my ship?"
"I cannot answer that question." My ship hit the mine I'd just dropped and belly-flopped into the cma, which started to burn.
"'You could not land, you are dead,'" read Tetsuo. "'You killed everybody, you shalt proceed to the next launch.'"
"'Shalt'?"
"It's an archaic usage. I just want to convey the vicinity. How do you know so much about old Ip Shkoy spacecraft?"
"It's not a real spacecraft. It's an idealized 3D environment with one degree of freedom. You've seen one, you've seen thirty to forty percent of them."
"You have some kind of preternatural pilot's ability?
"No," I said. "I just play a lot of games. This is only difficult because the controls are an abacus. Okay, what does this say? I need to know what I'm shooting at."
"You are shooting at Farang."
"What. The. Fuck." My hands dropped, the abacus beads clattered down to their rest positions and I stared at Tetsuo. "Curic? I'm trying to kill Curic here?"
"The evil Constellation are mining your home planet for materials to build a space station. You—"
"Did that actually happen?"
"It happened not! The Constellation used occlusions... in English... asteroids! The whole game is a bullshit, like with your people and the moon."
With no hand nudging the beads I spun out and crashed into an enemy ship—a Farang ship. The screen turned white. Well, pink.
"Why'd they put this in a game? The False Daylight system is Farang technolo
gy in the first place. It's insulting."
"I don't have specific knowledge of this game," said Tetsuo, "but cultures change very rapidly after contact. People were afraid."
"No, I see it," I said. "Ev luie Whoever went into space on her own, before the Constellation came. That made her a folk hero. The same thing is happening on Earth. Astronauts are being idolized. They're tough dudes who fly human spacecraft. Not slobs like me who were lucky enough to get an exit visa and almost threw up on a Constellation shuttle."
Tetsuo thumped the floor with his tail. "That is a model with explanatory power."
"This was like fifty years after the Constellation contacted the Aliens?"
"I don't know about years," said Tetsuo. "Almost two generations."
"Why would someone's grandchildren still be pissed at the Constellation? What did they do?"
"They wanted us to change," said Tetsuo. "They came to our planet and they wouldn't shut up about fluid overlays and unhierarchical forms of social organization. We felt like we had to listen to them, because they were so powerful. But secretly we thought of them as monsters from space. And now here we are at your planet, and we are the monsters from space."
"Why'd you come here? Why even bother?"
"Don't you want to be a monster from space, too?"
* * *
Chapter 13: Your Day Job
Real life, July 18-19
"Ha! Weak point!" I stabbed Tetsuo five times in the torso. "Eat an honor blade, motherfucker!"
"Hello again," said Curic, walking into the replica Ip Shkoy apartment.
"Uh, hi," I said, "the thing I just said to Tetsuo was in the context of this game we're playing, Rolling Weight. I don't actually want him to eat an honor blade."
"And I didn't actually hear what you said," said Curic. "I came to tell you that your friends would like you to stop playing games and go to sleep."
I rolled off the beanbag chair onto my back. "My friends? Why are my friends involved in this decision?"
"I've turned your social network into a fluid overlay for your off-world maintenance," said Curic. "Your friends have been very helpful. The idea is to keep you from dying of undersleep or radiation poisoning."
Constellation Games Page 11
