Free Constellation Games by Leonard Richardson

to say something. Then she did a double take and cooed to herself in Oyln. She held the quarter between two fingers in sick fascination, turning it over and over as though it were the still-wriggling corpse of a trilobite.
    "Oh, I see!" she finally said in English. "This is money !"
    "Is that okay?"
    "I thought it was all in software," said Curic.
    "We got bills, too," said Bai.
    "This is fine," said Curic. She flipped the quarter onto the driveway. It came to rest on a crack in the concrete, nestled in dead grass.
    "This is called the star-draw," said Curic. "It binds the five of us in common purpose. Everyone, take a piece of money and toss it down, just like I did."
    Jenny looked in her purse for a dime, took aim, and pegged Curic's quarter with a precision shot. "Don't try to hit my money," said Curic. "Just throw it in the same direction."
    Bai and I threw our coins. Eduardo's rolled into the front lawn, which I had landscaped in Southwestern style so I didn't have to water it. The coins on the ground looked like this:
o
     *

     O

     o

     O
    A little like the Constellation Shipping logo, except with a few coins instead of a lot of stars.
    "This is a constellation," said Curic. "There is no pattern. We just happened to draw the stars a certain way."
    "So why... did we... do it?" said Bai.
    "This one is ours ," said Curic. "A constellation is a pattern claimed from randomness. This shape identifies the five of us, right now, and the project we're about to carry out."
    "Uh," I said, "what is the project? I thought we were just going to spend Independence Day together."
    "I told you in email," said Curic. "We're going to scan your house."
    "I thought you meant, like, look at my house."
    No. She meant scan . This was how I was to pay for all the old computers packed in their FPS crates. Just like during the first Internet boom, the coin of the realm was sweet, juicy personal information. Curic had some super sensors in her hands and antennacles, and that day she touched and/or snuffled everything in my house .
    Curic systematically snooped through every room, and every box in every room, and every box inside another box. And if that box should contain a third box, she'd be interested in that box as well. She emptied out my change jar (money!). She rifled through my game cartridges and disks. She itemized my refrigerator magnets. She stuck an antennacle in my shampoo. She offered to image my hard drives and flash cards. (I said no, eventually gave her the drive with my ROMS and music.) I had to pick her up to put her on the kitchen counter or into the high closet space, which is how I know so much about what she smells like. She crawled under my bed, runnning her hands over my winter clothes, skimming my old notebooks from college.
    This took seven hours. I would have gone crazy except for the bizarre questions Curic constantly asked to to keep me on my toes. "What's your favorite book on this shelf?" "Why is this insulating foam blue instead of white?" "Did you get this yourself or did someone give it to you?" "Tell me why Sonic is important to you." "Why don't you have any musical instruments?" She asked me questions about stuff she'd given me . "What color do you see this as?", pointing to one of the cables that came with the Brain Embryo. Everything she touched, she put back within an inch of its original location.
    If that star-draw we did really had any connection to our house-scanning project, Curic and I were definitely the bright stars in the constellation. Jenny had a grand old time heckling me, telling Curic to look for porn (who keeps hard copies of porn?), and playing with Eduardo on my PS4. Bai's main contribution was to drive to the grocery store for a lot of little plastic bags to hold the food from all the cans Curic opened.
    Once it cooled down a little, Curic scanned the exterior. She climbed out my bedroom window and walked fearlessly up and down the roof, unafraid of falling—half gravity, right?
    Bai left