I pulled out my phone; I had ten unanswered messages. "There's no such thing as undersleep," I said. "And you don't need to bring in peer pressure. Sleep isn't smoking. You could have just said 'Hey, it's two-thirty, time to pack it in.' And I'd go."
"That's not what your friends told me," said Curic.
"My friends are just jealous." I stood up. "At least, that's what my mother used to tell me."
"I have your duffel bag," said Curic. "I'll take you back to Human Ring."
The duffel bag was as big as Curic herself. I took it off her hands and we left Tetsuo's replica apartment. As soon as I was not playing video games anymore, the distance from Austin and the time since I'd slept started creeping up on me, making me yawn in a way that terrified small tree-dwelling Alien Ring animals.
"Tetsuo made a store," I said, laughing. "An Ip Shkoy store. If we want to play a new game, we have to go to the store and buy it. It's so ridiculous."
"If you're going to live here—"
"I'm here for a week," I said. "Let me have fun."
"—you should affiliate yourself with one of the existing human communities. I don't want something bad to happen to you."
"Like, who, the Eritreans? Haven't they been through enough? The last thing they need is an American sticking his nose into their business."
Curic and I walked into the pitch-black cma forest and climbed into an Alien-sized Ewok bucket on a rope. Curic stood on the tippy-top of the bucket and started shifting rope like it weren't no thang, pulling us up through the forest.
"What about the humans inhabiting the microgravity environments?" she asked, without stopping for breath.
"Who?"
"You know," said Curic. "The government employees. Not the spies, the insular group. The ones with the patches on their clothes."
"The whole reason I'm here is to learn about the Constellation. I'm not going to waste time hanging out with humans, even if they are cool astronauts."
"You need to maintain a human connection," said Curic, "or you'll forget human body language. And I don't think you want to hang out with the spies."
"Oh, shit!" I said. "I forgot. I'm a spy."
"Then perhaps you would—"
"No, you don't understand. I told the BEA I'd report on the Constellation. It was the only way they'd let me come up here. And I spent the whole day playing video games with Tetsuo. I've got nothing to report."
"Do you have any experience in spycraft?" asked Curic. "Infiltration? Cold reading? Propaganda? Torture? Extracting false confessions?"
"No!" I said. "How could you think that?"
"They can't expect very much from you," said Curic. "The other spies I've met are professionals. Just write about the games."
Our bucket breached the cma plant and showed us the sky. It was nighttime here, just like it was in Austin, but there were no stars in the sky. The "sky" here was just the day side of Alien Ring. The home of another four million Aliens, who, if the night side was anything to go on, were right now swinging through the cma on rope ladders, building replicas of historical environments, chatting with humans over the Internet, and having sex with each other every half hour.
Curic and I walked from the bucket to a big jumble of bubble airlocks, just like the ones on the moon. Another group of ports connecting Alien Ring to every other Ring. Tiny flying night creatures swarmed around the airlocks, certain that the daylight from other worlds was somehow important, not at all certain whether to approach the light or flee it.
"We're almost there," said Curic. We pushed and tugged ourselves through the thickened-jelly airlock, through a wormhole, into a hotel hallway.
Okay, hotel hallways are a little narrower, and carpeted, and they end eventually, but that's what we're dealing with here. A shiny hall made of moon-dust ceramic, with big round doors on either side and inoffensive diffuse light coming from nowhere in particular. I expected to see signs for the ice machine.
I sagged in the Earth-normal gravity. I took off my breathing mask. "What is this?" I said.
"The human environment," said Curic.
"Where's the techno-primitive aesthetic? Where's the trees?"
"We don't have any Earth trees," said Curic. "We built the kind of environment humans enjoy."
"This is a fucking hospital," I said. There were no smudges on the walls, no dust on the floor. "It's a cubicle farm. We don't enjoy this environment. People make us stay here."
"It looks like a space station," said Curic. I think I'd hurt her feelings.
I walked toward one of the doors and it irised open, just like a door on a space station. The temperature of Human Ring is seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit. Through the door was a room the size of the Ip Shkoy apartment I'd just left. It contained a bunkbed, a combination sink+shower, and a squat toilet. The walls and the fixtures were the same ceramic as the hallway, lit by the same nondirectional light.
I looked back, out at the endless rows of doors. "How long is this hallway? It looks like it goes on forever."
"It does," said Curic. "It's a loop around the Ring."
"No one's going to come here," I said. "What the fuck. No one will go through what I had to go through, for this."
"This is a temporary structure," said Curic, almost pleading. "We know we're not humans. This was our best guess. It won't stay this way. Your greatest artists and architects will come here to redesign Human Ring. The challenge will be irresistable. We'll train them in metafractal reduction, and in five years, this habitat will look completely different."
"What government's going to send an artist up here for five years? I'm a spy, and I have to go home in six days!"
"Then the refugees or the astronauts will do it," said Curic. "It will happen eventually."
"I won't sleep in a twin-size bunkbed," I said. "This isn't computer camp."
"Sleep in the hallway," said Curic. "Or go to the central cylinder and sleep in microgravity, like the astronauts. Or make your own bedding from the Repertoire. But know that your friends on Earth want you to sleep, and they want you to breathe a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere while you do it."
I gave up. I left Curic outside and let the door close like a techno-anus behind me. There were no sheets and no pillows on the bed; just a soft fabriclike skin over the matress. I put my head on my duffel bag and instead of going to sleep, I wrote an email to Krakowski and Fowler.
Subject: The thrilling adventures of ARIEL THE SPY
Yesterday (July 18) I played video games. All games mentioned are from the Aliens' Ip Shkoy civilization of 17 million years ago, created ~50 Earth years after their contact with the Constellation. Played on a replica system in a historically accurate setting in conjunction with a hard-core professional historian.
Ev luie Aka's Ultimate DIY Lift-Off: Anti-Constellation propaganda. An astronaut comes back from the dead to stop the Constellation from strip-mining the Alien homeworld. A technically interesting rails shooter where the 'rail' is the orbit of your Vostok-style spacecraft, said spacecraft having been anachronistically equipped with guided missiles and aerial mines.
Gourmand's Delight: Action game. Throw food into the other guy's mouth until he pukes. Social commentary? Historian sez: "No, puking is funny."
Recapture That Remarkable Taste: Inferior remake of Farang Sayable Spice (see my blog passim, or don't). Thanks to knowledge of period food, historian was able to unlock rather explicit cutscenes, playable through dialogue trees.
Gewnoy Multislam: Allegedly a game pitting different styles of martial art against each other. Game refused to start because it believed it was a pirated copy. Most likely culprit is defective temperature sensor in replica False Daylight system. Will play in historian-approved emulator later.
Rolling Weight: Failure To Protect The Innocent: Police procedural set in impoverished cities outside Alien homeworld's equatorial forests. Hard-boiled mood somewhat upset by player character's ridiculously high jump. Optional second and third players control all NPCs. Engrossing; native
-language strategy guide has been employed. Have in possession a saved game at ~25% completion.
Today: more games, probably.
Love and kisses,
Ariel
Blog post, July 19
Woke up in Human Ring, did a little exploring and saw this handbill stuck to the wall near the bubble airlock back to Alien Ring. I'd missed it last night.
HUMANS! HUMANS! HUMANS!
BOTHERED BY UNSIGHTLY
HEAVY METALS * RADIOACTIVES * MEDICAL WASTE
? ? ? THE RAW MATERIALS OVERLAY WILL DISPOSE OF YOUR TRASH
SAFELY AND FREE OF CHARGE
www.materials.rc.luna/disposal
TOXIC LAND REMOVED
INDUSTRIAL PROCESSES STREAMLINED
LOW MINIMUM ORDER
! ! !
I took five or six copies in different languages and stuck them to the wall of my room using NASA tomato paste from the Repertoire. Now my room is slightly different from the eight million other Human Ring rooms.
Blog post, July 19, evening
[This post is friends locked.]
Howdy, bro, you know how you'll score a sweet new licensed football game, with totally marginal improvements over last year's entry in the same franchise, spend hours breaking it in, and the next day end up all sore from all those motion-control passes and hikes? Or, I suppose that might also happen with actual sports.
Well, a similar thing happened to me. I stayed up all night with Aliens reenacting an ancient Alien culture and when I woke up today, I'd kind of forgotten what humans look like. Curic was right.
It didn't help that I woke up in a local-TV commercial for heaven (Private Rooms! Free Cable!). Breakfast from the Repertoire was an international variety of pastes from ten different space programs. So after breakfast I decided to go meet the brave men and women who eat this paste every day. I went to the central cylinder.
I probably should have gone before breakfast, but it's cool. Thanks to years of dealing with buggy 3D game engines, I can handle weightlessness pretty well. I just have to couple it with not being trapped in an infinite void and lacking any point of reference. As long as I don't look down the entire eighty-mile length of the central cylinder, I'm fine. Twenty miles down the zipline, after spotting Cryptids, Goyim, and three enormous Auslanders glowing like suns, I saw a tiny human figure in NASA blue.
I pulled up close to her with alternating back-and-forth pulses from my gravity kicker. She wasn't actually a tiny figure, that was just perspective, and she wasn't gigantic like an Auslander. She was the correct size for a human woman. She had two normal-sized eyes and no eyespots I could see. She held a clipboard in one forehand hand and a Space Pen (Made in the USA) in the other. Her mouth was a mouth, not a parrot beak swarming with antennacles. Her short blonde hair free-fell in a halo around her head, matted with dried sweat to an extent previously seen only on young punk girls panhandling in downtown Austin.
Either the astronaut or I was upside down. She'd rolled up the legs of her flight suit, as though she'd been walking through puddles. Her legs were hairy and her toes decorated with badly-chipped pink nail polish. Time to break out the ol' human small talk.
"Hi," I said.
"Mmm." The astronaut ticked a checkbox on her clipboard with her Space Pen.
"I'm Ariel Blum."
That got her to look up, and then down. "Oh, hi," she said. "Mission Specialist—", and then she said her name. But this is not the kind of blog that throws around women's names, even when they wear those names on patches on their chests. So I'm going to call her Miss Ion Specialist.
I couldn't figure out how to rotate myself, and Ion Specialist was perfectly comfortable interacting with someone who was upside-down relative to her, or at least didn't seem to expect anything better from the likes of me. So I just kept talking to her nail polish.
"I haven't seen another human for a while," I said. "You're with NASA?"
"And you, a civilian."
"Is it that obvious?"
"I don't already know you," said Ion. "Also, you're—" she tapped her neck with her pen "—green. 'Never rode the Vomit Comet' kind of green."
"Oh," I said. "Yeah, first time in zero gravity. It's a little strange."
"There's no such thing as zero gravity." Ion was clearly not the kind of astronaut they send to schools to explain things to kids. "We're in free-fall around Luna."
"Have you been there?" I said. "To the moon? I went yesterday."
Ion ticked another box on her checklist, possibly a checklist called "Stupid Questions From Civilians."
"I was the eighth woman on the moon," she said. "I could have been the fourth, but who needs the publicity, right?" Eyes back on the clipboard. "Love to shoot the shit, dude, but these experiments won't monitor themselves."
"What experiments?"
Ion glanced around. "The apparatus is in Utility Ring. I'm just here to get away from Certain People for a few hours."
"I mean, what experiments are you doing?"
"ISS backlog," said Ion Specialist. "Uh, how do foams behave in free-fall? How do nematodes reproduce? Plasmas, smoke points, physiological tests, miscellaneous."
That didn't sound too difficult. "Can I help?"
"Do you have any astronaut training?"
"I can wash your glassware," I said. "Or! I can give you the news from Earth." (Brilliant, Ariel, like astronauts don't have the Internet.)
"Earth." Ion Specialist drew the word out real long, as though Earth was a TV show she'd enjoyed watching but forgotten about between seasons.
"I can get you a drink," I said, "and you can enjoy your vacation from Certain People."
"You can try," said Ion, "but the only alcohol in the Repertoire is blood packs for Inostrantsi. I'm not that desperate."
"I know there's caipirinha."
"What's that, some kind of industrial solvent?"
"It's like a Brazilian mojito."
Ion looked at me with a kind of respect. She glanced at her clipboard and blew her breath out through her lips. "Aright," she said.
Floating here and there in the central cylinder are ceramic... asteroids, basically, objects big enough to absorb your momentum and small enough for a few people to cling to and talk. They cluster around Repertoire stations, so I kicked off towards the nearest cluster. And then past it, then away at an angle, and finally bam into a plus-sign-shaped asteroid.
Ion was waiting for me there. She'd seen where I was going and pushed herself over with a single swipe of the gravity kicker she wore like a ring on one hand.
"Hey, civilian," she said.
The caipirinha comes out the Repertoire as a thin sticky sheet. I tore it in half, rolled it up, and put each half into a plastic bulb of water. A little shaky-shaky and the drinks were ready.
"Ariel, how did you get up here?" asked Ion, like this had been really bothering her. "You're the first 'civilian' I've seen who wasn't secretly working for the feds." She took a capipirinha bulb and sucked on it steadily, like an IV drip.
"How do you know I'm not secretly working for the feds?" I said, kind of insulted.
"You're not," said Ion. "Aw, hey there, liquor, I missed you, too! So what are you doing here?"
"Playing video games," I said. No, I didn't say that! I said: "I'm studying the earlier contact missions. Did you know that the Aliens had an early industrial civilization when the Constellation contacted them? Like World War II, except with public sex and space travel. Isn't that amazing?"
"Which ones are the Aliens?" said Ion Specialist.
"The eight-foot monkey lizards! How long have you been up here?"
"Contact event plus nine hours," said Ion. "Oh, I should have gotten someone to take my houseplants. They're probably dead by now."
"You've been lighting foam on fire for six weeks?" I said. "I enjoy weightlessness experiments as much as the next taxpayer, but is the ISS backlog really a good use of your time? Like, what about all the extraterrestrials?"
"I'm an astronaut,"
said Ion, "which means I run the experiments I'm ordered to run, like a good little lab assistant, or I go back home. I'm also a physicist, which means I don't know which end of a Gweilo to shake hands with and which to gossip about afterwards. You want xenobiology, you should talk to Dr. Wicklund."
"Cody Wicklund? He's the—"
"Yeah, a real expert at shaking hands. There's a civilian for ya. Head asshole of the NASA Asshole Corps."
My phone rang. It was 9:04 in Austin. "Shit," I said, looking at the screen, "Sorry, I have to take this. It's the BEA."
"Is that supposed to impress me?" said Ion Specialist. "Is the BEA some big space monster, like Her? The Bug-Eyed Alien?"
"Sssh!"
Agent Fowler was on the other end of the phone, and I don't want to give him any time in this blog post, so suffice to say that he was really happy about Ev liue Aka's Ultimate DIY Lift-Off, and this was really bad news for me and the rest of the human race.
"The Bureau of Extraterrestrial Affairs is a government agency," I said. "AKA the feds. And I've been here for one day and they're already misrepresenting my work." Ion Specialist whistled innocently.
"The Ip Shkoy," I said, "one of the early industrial Alien civilizations. They made this... well, it was a... kind of video game."
"Oh, you're into video games?!" said Ion. Hundred thousand miles from home and I'm still falling into this conversational trap. "There was this game I played when I was a kid, and I could never remember the name."
"Did it involve Blizzard Lizard?" I said. "Because that would be Blizzard Lizard."
"No, it was all text, it was on the computer. You were on this big spaceship, but it was breaking down, and you had to build replacement parts out of your cargo of tacky tourist souvenirs."
"That sounds like Starfarer." Nineteen eighty...seven? When that game came out, I was nothing but my grandparents pressuring my parents to give Raph a little brother.
"Yes! That was it! Awesome! Anyway, go on with your story."
"Well, the Ip Shkoy made this game where you basically blow up the entire Constellation contact mission. BEA thinks that game was on to something. Now they want me to see what the Constellation did to make the Aliens so mad."
Constellation Games Page 12
