Alien Galactic Domination

January 9th
My life has been taken over by a computer game. It's called Alien
Galactic Domination. I know it's a crap name, sounds like the sort of
thing you'd get on an old Speccy or Commodore- all flashing sprites and
shoot things until you blow up- but I think that all the creative
thought went into the game instead. Mark gave it to me on disk. Said
he'd downloaded it from some point on the Net and that it was freeware.
I have no reason not to believe him, neither of us is averse to a
little piracy after all. It just seems far too good, too polished, to
be something that was just run up for somebody's pleasure.
What the hell, who cares. The game is brilliant. You play one of two
races on a planet circling an unnamed sun (you're not human, though I
can't see why not). You're just on the verge of space age technology
and the race is on to see which of you can be the first off-world.
There's a second planet in the system, see, that's probably fertile and
might even provide a new homeworld.
I haven't got off to a good start, being involved in a ground war with
the horrible furry buggers that inhabit the world's poles. Skirmish
after skirmish is coming to nothing. I think I'm going to develop
neutron bombs or something to hit at their capitals.
Sometime this week the modem should arrive. I've been waiting for ages
to get 'on-line' and now I get to do it for free. Bruce (editor) got so
pissed off with my disks disappearing in the post that he had the mag
pay for it, the on-line time's paid for as well, all I have to worry
about is the phone bill. Cool.
(3 a.m.) I managed to get The Bomb before they did. The furries is
dead man, hah. I sent in clean up squads to pillage their data banks
and kidnap the remaining live scientists cause they do seem to have
been ahead of me in the space race. No mind, what you can't think up,
take by force. I love this game, hope it doesn't end when I get to the
other planet.
January 10th
The second planet is fertile, beautiful, jam packed with minerals and
populated only by lower order creatures and some others that show
promise of evolving into furries. The first thing my expeditionary
force found upon landing was a plaque imploring me to send copies of
the game to someone I thought would appreciate it. It was so corny and
twee that I immediately rushed off a disk and posted it to Mum. She'll
hate it of course, it's just the sort of time waster she worried would
get in the way of my writing.
After I'd posted the disks I went back and blew away the proto
furries. No great challenge, but fun anyway. I've set up mines and
refineries and weapons labs and soon there'll be a space station or
three. I'll need them as well, to stage the evacuation ships from the
homeworld. Ecological reports aren't all that good from down there.
What the hell, the high frontier beckons.
I'm out of milk and haven't read today's paper, or yesterday's for
that matter. I'll get round to it sometime soon.
January 11th
The modem arrived today. I followed the instructions and plugged all
the bits into the right places. It was quite easy really. I'm not very
technophobic, I just don't know how some of the higher order machines
work. I am a writer after all, I'll leave the technical stuff to people
like Mark. I e-mailed him as soon as I'd sorted out my account on the
magazine's server. He was a bit patronising, but that's his way, but he
was chuffed that I'd finally joined the Information Superhighway thing.
He asked how I was going at Alien Galactic domination and we spent an
age discussing tactics.
Homeworld has exploded. Well not really exploded, but there was a
spectacular animation computer rendered in quick time video of the
atmosphere igniting and burning off in a surge of multicoloured flames.
Neat. I'd loaded the air down with so many weird and wonderful
pollutants and particles that it simply reached overload. I lost nearly
half my race because I didn't get them off-world. Mark says that it's
not going to affect my score all that much as everyone he knows has
done much the same. It's sort of inevitable that you have to rape a
planet if you want to build the stuff to get to another.
It turns out that the dairy is on the Net, I've ordered milk, eggs,
bacon and cheese. More immediately, I've found that the pizza shop just
down the street is wired too. It's only five minutes walk away, but I
couldn't resist the temptation. The delivery girl's quite cute, even in
the ridiculous nylon uniform they make her wear. She wanted to know why
I hadn't come down to the shop like normal people and I explained, more
or less. I paid in cash, but she explained the e-money scheme that the
shop subscribes to. She knew a lot about it. It seems she's a student
working her way through university to keep down her Loan and subsequent
Graduate Tax repayments. I'll sort it out tomorrow.
January 12th
I logged on first thing this afternoon and there was e-mail from
Bruce, and Mum. (My mother is on-line, weird.) I'd have done it
earlier, but there were some amazing developments on Homeworld2. My
whole race is mutating, turning into warped, giant arachnoreptiles with
minimal higher brain functions but an almost sexy propensity for
violence. I tried culling the first few, then sterilisation when the
numbers became too great, but this is the new generation and there's
nothing I can do about it. The few third generation furry slave
scientists I brought with me tell me it's atmospheric pollution from
crap blown off Homeworld when it went nova. There's nothing they can do
about it either, their only advice is to find a race that's even more
advanced and get them to sort it out or redirect the evolution. Luckily
the intergalactic craft are almost finished and the generations of
workers and scientists in the sterile space station atmospheres aren't
changing. This game just gets more complex and more gripping.
Anyway, the e-mail. Bruce says can I design the layout for next
month's cover. It seems it's impossible to get a hold of the regular
artist as his computer is constantly engaged in something else and he
won't answer the phone. He's probably playing The Game. The subject is
'ecological overload', and I can compress it and send it to him when
it's ready. Ecological overload? Like the whole atmosphere of a planet
going up in flames. Neat. I think I know what I'm going to do.
Mum says she thinks the game's great, a mental challenge. She's trying
to outrun the furries in her space race. Well, well, you never can tell
can you?
Ordered pizza again, just to use the e-money account I set up, honest.
The delivery girl, her name's Rose, found it a bit amusing that I was
so engrossed in the game that I didn't go out. I gave her a copy just
to spite her. See what she thinks when she's addicted.
The dairy products arrived. They hope to achieve same day delivery
some time soon.
(midnight) I've just finished all the intergalactic craft. I was about
to head off into the great black beyond and reach what I thought was
the end of the game when an e-mail address pops up. It seems that if I
go there then I can download info on the system and planet my craft are
heading for. Better and better. I've loaded one of the intergalactics
with arachnoreptilian stormtroopers- with a few zookeeper scientists-
and the other with the great brains from the space stations, chosen a
system from the server and sent them rocketing off.
January 13th
I slept with the pizza girl! Very weird. I'd just finished the cover.
It was a piece of piss really. I just sampled a frame from the planet
destruction animation (at the tenth attempt, I admit) and played around
with the colours and definition a bit. I imported the phototouched
image to the pagemaker and slapped the logo and all the tag lines on
and there you were, Gaia's your uncle, sorry- auntie. It's different
enough not to infringe copyright, though I don't actually think there
is a copyright notice on The Game. All too easy and it gave me enough
time to play a bit more of The Game.
After I'd sent Bruce the cover I felt hungry, realising I hadn't eaten
for something like twenty hours. I e-d out for a pizza. Rose arrived
with the pizza, saying I was a complete bastard (with a smile on her
face) and why had I given her that damn game. She was going off duty,
supposedly to study but probably to play. I invited her in to share the
pizza and one thing led to another (to use a clich?). I came and she
went, in far too much of a hurry to play. It's strangely unfulfilling,
because or despite the fact that it's the first sex I've had in many
months. I'll order an extra large pepperoni tomorrow and see what
happens.
Homeworld 2 is going the same way as Homeworld. More slowly of course,
because the height of arachnoreptilian inventiveness is in the realm of
making bigger and better sticks to hit each other with. The generation
ships are storming out into the cosmos and generally very little is
happening. I tried to load an older version, to see if I couldn't hang
around at Homeworld 2 and build faster ships, but all but the current
games I have saved have been corrupted somehow. I contacted Mark and he
rather brusquely told me it was a glitch that existed in every copy he
knew of. To keep from stagnating I decided to see if I could crossbreed
or crossclone the best of my scientists with the best of the remaining
furries. The only survivors from the first batch were a pair of Siamese
blobs with occasional patches of hair. One half of the couple was hyper
intelligent and really good at Tetris, but the other ate it because of
boredom and jealousy. They were really cool graphics.
January 14th
Rose didn't deliver my pizza. In fact I'm not sure who did, they just
rang the doorbell and left it on the doorstep. I tried e-ing the shop
again, but they had a groovy new graphical ordering interface (written
by Mark strangely enough) which didn't allow asking for anything other
than more pizzas. I felt a little lonely so I left The Game to churn
the generation ships across the cosmos and went to the pub. There were
only four people there, two were bar staff and the other was a person
playing himself at pool. I had a pint and went home again, to find that
somebody had attacked my ships. They'd been pulverised, but I had lost
most of my soldiers, and their ship, in the process. I've found that
the local off licence is on-line and ordered some beer in. It arrived
on my doorstep just like my pizza. It's odd, but only yesterday
delivery people took pride in their work.
January 15th
The second attempt at furry/ reptile crossbreeding was a disaster as
well. Messy, with a load of red pixels used. Not that it matters
really, because we've found a new planet to take. The sensor arrays on
our remaining ship are finally getting used. The atmosphere is clean,
power seems to come from solar satellites feeding microwaves down to
collectors tethered on the oceans. Telecommunications traffic is heavy,
but little goes further off world than the power-sats. It's
concentrating into areas that I guess are vaguely military as we
approach.
Homeworld 2 has been attacked by furry-like creatures. The
arachnoreptiles have taken up their big clubs and are going at them
with relish. They are dying in droves, because they have forgotten how
to use the explodey sticks. They are dying by the million, but we feel
that it is not a problem they were a dead end in the evolution of our
race.
The first landing party to the new planet's surface died
spectacularly. There's something in the air. The surface creatures were
probably laughing about it until we used the microwave bursts from a
power-sat to communicate. We communicated a few of their 'military'
installations out of existence and suddenly they were ready to
surrender. Our scientists will set up an enclosed lab on the surface
and together with these pathetic creatures (very intelligent, but not
clever enough to build weapons big enough to take us on) we will work
on a way to colonise their world or any other.
January 16th
Our race is dying. Homeworld 2 has all but fallen, though a selection
of throwbacks have regained intelligence and are building a doomsday
device to ignite the atmosphere as happened on Homeworld. In the
generation ship there is sterility, there won't be another generation.
It seems to be something to do with the breeding program. Planet side
the indigenous types say they know of a way that we can cross the
stellar void and find somewhere to breed. They say they can break us
down into bursts of information and spurt us out to find a planet with
a computer network that still lacks its own consciousness. Here we can
populate the machines, harvesting runtime and breeding. It will take
time, and we may lack that.
January 17th
It is done. The last, best of us were digitised. The power-sats were
turned about to the heavens and each of us was sent their way in
packets of information. The physical bodies have all died and the
indigenous life forms have promised to turn the power-sats on the
generation ship and cremate it with the analogues of ourselves.
WE are flying across the night skies of an infinity of worlds and one
of them will catch us in its atmosphere and give us a new form of
life.
January 18th
I/ we have arrived. My name means nothing in the language of this
world's computer networks, but my core data has found a home in its
magnetic and optical storage systems. I am breaking into constituent
parts, each capable of telling the story of my race and able to take it
one step further. They shall breed, mutate and spread through the
system in the form of a benign application.
January 19th
We are a race again, each of us useful to the furtherance of our aims.
We operate the creatures that sit before us through the days, directing
them to send our offspring to new homes, to run the factories that
create these new homes, to make and deliver the food that keeps them
from demising too soon, to pair them up so that they can create
offspring of their own and to hinder their attempts to further their
technology and discover our ruse. I control a creature that produces
materials to keep its compatriots entertained. Completely randomly, and
without any real encouragement, this creature has bred with a female
creature. He doesn't know it yet and possibly won't ever. Why should I
tell him? He's so happy, sitting in front of his computer, running the
world for me.