“Knock it off, Ryan,” he said, sounding tired. “I’m not making any offers, and I’m not making any threats. You can do whatever the hell you like. I’m just telling you what I see and where I think you fit into this, because I need your help to ride this one out without someone getting damaged. Like you said, my job is to make sure everyone else has a job, and taking the deal seems like the best way to ensure that. If I try to fight this, God knows when we’ll see the money from the kill fee and we’ve got no line on the next gig. If we try to do Blue Lightning in the meantime, we’ll run out of cash in under three months. Any other publisher we talk to will know we’re over a barrel and will screw us that much harder.”
I wanted to get angry, to get indignant on behalf of our work and our integrity, but all I got was a hollow feeling. “I know,” I said, and it came out like I’d been gut-punched. “It’s just….”
“It sucks.” He took a few steps closer and put a hand tentatively on my shoulder. “It sucks a lot, and I know this is a lot to ask. But, if you understand why I have to make this decision, you can help make it easier for everyone. I don’t want people hurting themselves, Ryan. I don’t want anyone cutting their own throats because at the end of the day, this is a job. It’s a job we all love, but it’s still a job, and the paycheck is what covers the rent, not artistic integrity or anything else. If you want, I can see if I can find something to tuck into your envelope to make the medicine go down a little easier, but I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Cheap bastard,” I said weakly.
He shook his head. “No. I just think that if I do that, in about two months you’ll decide that you were bought off and will work yourself up to doing something really stupid, like quitting, in order to make your conscience feel better. I’d rather have you here, without any more self-inflicted holes in your stomach lining, and feeling all right about what you’re doing. If this works out the way I hope it will, there’s going to be plenty on the back end for everyone, anyway.” Abruptly the pressure of his hand left my shoulder, and Eric turned to look away, a tired scarecrow who knew the big black birds were coming. “So make up your mind,” he said. “I’d appreciate your help with this, if you want to give it. If not, I understand. You’ve put in a lot of time on that project, and put a lot of yourself into it.”
I put my hand on the doorknob. “I’ll think about it,” I said thickly. “That’s all I can promise.”
“I know,” he said. “That’s all I can ask for. Now get out of here, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t talk to anyone else about this. I'll be making the announcement today, but I have a few other folks I need to sit down with before the shit officially hits the fan.”
Pithy comebacks came to mind, “It already has,” maybe, or “I’ll go get an umbrella.” None seemed worthy, and instead I just let myself the hell out, I left the door slightly ajar. I had a feeling that I wasn’t going to be the last one in that office this morning, not by a long shot.
Chapter 5
My email app pinged. Eric’s note announcing the unscheduled company meeting had just come in, setting a time down to the minute when he’d be forced to lower the boom.
It was a nice piece of business writing, clearly designed to foster the impression of honesty and open communication while mitigating the knee-jerk panic that always accompanied something like this. I wasn’t sure how much good it was going to do, but the attempt, at least, was praiseworthy.
I remembered the first time I’d been laid off. The company president had sent an email calling a company meeting in the parking lot outside the office. The last time he’d done that, there had been an ice cream truck waiting as a reward for our hitting a milestone. This time, he told us that we were all fired, and the VP of marketing locked the doors while he was making his speech. It was two weeks before we were allowed back inside to get our stuff.
Out in the hallway, I could hear the rising buzz as people reacted. At some companies, I knew, they’d preface something like this by cutting net access or taking down the mail server, pulling the plug on the phone system, and maybe locking the doors, never mind that it was a fire hazard, all to keep word from getting out a half-second faster than it might otherwise. Eric didn’t bother. Enough people had net access through their phones that trying to shut down the lines of communication was just going to look stupid and out of control.
So I applauded Eric for playing it straight, even as I checked the clock. The meeting was scheduled for eleven; it was a few minutes after ten now. There was plenty of time to prep for whatever I intended to do, as soon as I figured out whatever the hell that was.
The cell phone fell into my hand as if by reflex. Yeah, I thought. Calling Sarah would be a good start.
She was at her desk when I called her, the phone ringing precisely twice before she picked it up. “Sarah Bogdan.” It was an announcement. By calling her, I'd come into her place of authority, seeking an audience. Or at the very least, that's what it felt like.
“Hi,” I said. “Do you have a minute to talk?”
“Ryan,” She sounded exasperated. “I thought if you were going to call me during the day, you'd use the landline so we didn't use up minutes.”
“Sorry. I just hit the first number I had for you.”
She paused for a second. “Are you all right? You sound funny.”
I pulled the phone away from my face for a moment, so the explosive sigh I'd been holding in didn't deafen her. “No, I'm not all right,” I said. “Remember that offer you made last night?”
“Yes?” She drew the word out until it was begging for a few more syllables. “Why?”
I pressed on. “Remember how we said there was going to be plenty of time before I needed to make a decision?”
“What are you getting at, Ryan? I'm kind of busy, and I’m sorry, honey, but I don’t have time for guessing games.”
The urge to hang up came and went, just like that. Calm, I told myself. Be calm. She doesn't know. “You said when my project's done, right? Well, that's going to be in about an hour.”
There was a pause which I put down to either confusion or elation. “I don't understand. I thought you weren't at alpha yet. How can you be done...oh. Oh, I'm sorry, honey. That’s terrible news.”
“Yeah.” I kicked the floor experimentally, sending my chair spinning slowly counterclockwise. “So, anyway, I, um, I just wanted to let you know. That maybe, there'd be a change coming sooner instead of later. Or maybe not. I don't know. It all depends. I just wanted to let you know, if that makes any sense.”
“Of course it does.” Her voice was calm now, soothing. “Look, sweetheart, I really have to go. First day in the new position, and they're watching me like a hawk. But we can talk about it tonight, OK? Just don't worry and know that whatever happens, I love you.”
“Love you too,” I said and broke the connection. My office felt stifling and dim, the tasteful light from the wall sconce barely enough to illuminate the papers on my desk. I looked at them. Design specs for Blue Lightning, sample promotional material, a list of basic interview questions from BlackStone PR that they'd been planning on feeding to magazines and websites once the game got a little more play—all of it worthless. I stacked them next to my monitor and headed to the conference room. As far as I knew, there was still a version of Blue Lightning set up in there, minding its own business. In under an hour, it would get shut down. The debug kit, a sample version of the finished console hardware, would get its hard drive wiped, and the equipment would get assigned to another project. The television would get something else jacked into it, the controllers would go back in a box somewhere, and the code that made up Blue Lightning would get backed up and hidden away.
If I was going to play, this was going to be my last chance.
I stalked down the hallway, nodding and smiling and minimally waving to the folks who said hello as I passed. A couple shouted out questions—had I seen Eric's email, did I know what was going on, did I have time to talk?
I gave a shrug for an answer, or a “Dunno” or “I'll catch you after the meeting, OK?” Stopping seemed like a bad idea; I'd get swamped and never get started again. No one was working. Everyone was talking, huddled into clumps or jabbering excitedly into smartphones. A couple of the younger kids just sat there, staring at their monitors with looks of dread on their faces. They hadn't been through it before and probably thought that they might never get another job in gamedev. Someone else would set them straight, I was sure. Someone always did.
The clock on the wall of the conference room read 10:30 by the time I made it there. Half an hour, then, to get in my last licks. I shut the door, debated going back out for coffee, and decided against it. Instead, I booted up the debug kit and killed the lights. The room went dark for a minute, then went electric blue as the game's load screen flared out from the television. The placeholder logo was there, bright and jagged, and next to it…her.
She was crouched, predatory, one hand cradling a smooth, streamlined pistol, the other held up so that electricity could drip off her fingers like water. Sparks flowed down and puddled at her feet, while the blankness where her face ought to be was turned to the camera, its challenge implicit. She was almost too bright to look at, the sheer intensity of her coloration illuminating the room even as it faded everything else onscreen to insignificance. Below her, the words “PRESS START TO PLAY” throbbed slowly, fading in and out in time with what might have been her imaginary heartbeat.
I picked up the controller. It was warm, as if someone had just been playing it. Thumbing it on, I walked over in front of the television and braced myself. There was a chair behind me, but I gave it a little kick and it skidded off. Standing would show respect for the game, and I was too wired to sit in any case. As an afterthought, I found the remote for the TV and thumbed up the volume. Let her go out with a bang, I thought. A bang, and a crash, and a couple of big-ass explosions.
A couple more button presses and the action screen faded in. I recognized the space, a futuristic library. Multi-leveled and chopped into innumerable small rooms, it was a claustrophobic nightmare generously stocked with hunter-killer robots, alien nasties, and human commandos intent on wiping the player avatar out. There were no bookshelves here, just gleaming rows of data banks and helmets that users could jack into. These were conduits the player avatar could disappear into or pop out of, giving the player one advantage over the insane numbers being brought to bear against him. Her. Us.
I considered it an almost fair fight. In the single-player game, the plan was for this to be the penultimate level, where the player would face off against an evil version of their character. The evil twin could also go circuit-riding, negating that player advantage, but we hadn't even gotten to the point of designing the AI necessary for that. It was, and would remain, a dream.
This, on the other hand, was just pure hunter-killer mode. There were lots of bad guys, one me, and a time limit, nothing more.
I checked my weapon. It was the basic blaster pistol, blessed with unlimited ammunition but not much else. That was fine. Other weapons would be coming available shortly.
Sighting down the barrel of the pistol, I put one round into the floor to blaze my trail. In front of me was a closed door. I opened it and started running.
* * *
It wasn't the shouting that got me out of the game, it was the heavy pounding on the door, which only slowly distinguished itself from the sounds of onscreen carnage and destruction. Then and only then did the words become clear.
“Come on, Ryan. Open up. The meeting's starting. Get out here, man.” The voice was Leon's. I checked the clock, which read 11:04. For gamer time, that was pretty punctual.
“Coming!” I shouted, then turned down the volume and repeated myself. Onscreen, Blue Lightning stood frozen, paused mid-kill with an explosion blossoming behind her. Dead bodies, broken robots, and shattered crates were everywhere, a more spectacular method of marking progress through the level than shooting the floor. A blaster bolt hung, suspended in midair. It would never reach its target.
I tossed the controller onto the table but didn't shut off the console. Let someone else do that. I wasn't going to be the one to pull the plug on my baby.
The common area was full when I stepped out of the conference room. People stood or sat, clustered by department or temperament. Leon stood by the door, fist raised to knock again, but most of the rest of the engineers were huddled at the back, arms folded across their chests and looks of disbelief on their faces. Alex, the guy I'd beaten for the last coffee cup the day before, was pontificating about something; three or four other engineers stood in a circle around him and nodded enthusiastically.
“Hey, Leon,” I said. “Thanks for getting me out of there. I just got sucked into the game.”
He nodded. “I know how it is, man. Even without the real polish, she's a beauty, huh? Just wait until we get a chance to really make her sing.”
I bit the inside of my cheek, hard, to avoid saying something, and instead found a spot strategically located near the rear. It was close enough to the engineers that I wasn't isolated, far enough away that I didn't actually have to listen to them. Leon looked around for a minute, then decided to stick with me.
“So what's this about? You know?”
I shook my head. “It's Eric's show. Let him tell you.”
“OK.” He sounded dubious. “I just thought since you were in there this morning….”
“It’s Eric’s show,” I said firmly. “Let him tell you.”
A quick look around the room told me whom Eric had already spoken to. Those were the guilty faces, the ones with eyes pointed at the floor and mouths kept resolutely shut. I counted four in the room. Eric had been keeping this one close to the vest all right, not that it would matter now.
And he had in fact been waiting for me, because as soon as he saw Leon and me at the back of the crowd, he started waving his hands and shouting for quiet. “People, people,” he said, and the hubbub cut off like it had been sliced. Faces turned to the front of the room. Silence fell. Someone coughed expectantly. Somewhere up in the rafters, the HVAC thrummed to life, then thought better of it and shuddered to stillness.
Eric scanned the space, hands held out like an orchestra conductor trying to put down a mutiny from a well-armed brass section. For a long moment, he said nothing, and as he didn’t, neither did we. Here and there, you could see heads turning, people looking away as if doing so would somehow prevent Eric from saying something bad.
I just stared at him.
“I want to thank everyone for coming,” he said, then coughed into his hand. “No. That’s not right. I want to thank everyone for listening, and for not jumping to any conclusions before I had a chance to talk to you.” He scanned the room, locking eyes for a moment or two with those who’d look at him, passing over those who wouldn’t. “And before this goes any further, let me state one thing right off the bat: Everyone’s still got a job. We are not closing, we are not laying anyone off, and we are not going out of business.”
Eric paused to see if what he’d said had produced the desired effect, but there was no need to. There was a rush of air as half the company let out the breath it didn’t know it was holding, conversational flotsam like “I told you so” and “Thank God” bobbing to the surface of a sudden buzz of discussion.
Again, Eric held up his hands for quiet. This time, it took him a few seconds to get it. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to keep what we discuss next in-house until everything is said and done. I’ve always tried to be open with you about the business side of things, and that means trusting you to keep information inside the building. Again, I’m sorry if it seems like there’s a lack of trust on this one, but I just learned most of this myself this morning, and what we’re talking about is so big that I couldn’t take any chances.”
He looked around the room, letting those words hang there in the air while he crossed his arms over his chest.
“What the h
ell?” Leon whispered, and dug an elbow into my ribs. “What’s he talking about, man?”
“Wait for it,” I told him sotto voce. “You’re going to love this one.”
Leon turned and looked at me quizzically. “He told you? Why’d he tell you?”
“I wouldn’t dream of spoiling the surprise,” I said, not without bitterness, and turned back to the front of the room. “Come on, man,” Leon muttered, but after a moment he did the same.
“As you know, we’ve been working with BlackStone for the last year to publish Blue Lightning. Everyone here has put a lot of time and energy into that game, and I want to thank you for everything you’ve done, but unfortunately, BlackStone does not want to continue funding development for Blue Lightning at this time.”
“BS!” someone shouted, an old joke from the team rooms that suddenly wasn’t funny. “So we’re going with another publisher, right?” someone else called out, a female this time.
“They can’t do that!”
“Why do they want to kill it?”
“Are they crazy?”
And finally, the question Eric had been waiting for, “What’s going to happen to us?” It came from up front, from an engineer named Terry Lee who put the “er” in “nerd,” a quiet guy passionately devoted to his work and his gadgets and, near as anyone else could tell, not a hell of a lot else. “What’s going to happen to us?”
Eric smiled, an “everything is going to be all right” grin that didn’t quite make it to his eyes. I could feel my hands curling into fists as I saw him do it, knowing that the whole thing had been choreographed so neatly that Terry didn’t even know he was part of it. In a couple of seconds, Eric would look sad and tell everyone that Daddy had a new girlfriend now and that we should be happy to meet her. And the whole thing was so smooth that they’d all go along with it, be on their best behavior and spit-shine their virtual shoes in order to make a good first impression when the new project came down the pike.
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