Vaporware

by Richard Dansky

  I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, man. I’m just a little freaked out.”

  He looked at me for a moment, then shook his head. “It’s OK. Just think decaf thoughts for a while or something, you know? I don’t need you wigging out on me, and you don’t want to be freaking when you talk to Sarah.”

  Somehow, I found myself staring at my shoes. “You’re right. I should call her. She wouldn’t do something like this.”

  “Now you’re getting it.” He started to shuffle off. “I’ll be out front,” he said. “Lemme know if you need to talk after, OK?”

  “Will do. Thanks, Leon.”

  “No worries. I just don’t want to have to break in a new CD. Took three years just to get you housebroken.” We both laughed, then he headed off and I pulled my phone out of my pocket. There was a long moment of staring at the screen before I punched in Sarah’s number.

  It rang twice before Sarah picked it up. “Ryan?” she said. She didn’t sound happy.

  “Sarah? What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me? After all, you’re the one who just called to say you and Michelle would have to be working late tonight.”

  I caught myself gawping and yanked my jaw shut through sheer force of will. “What? That’s impossible. I didn’t call you. I’ve been in meetings all day!”

  “You called,” she insisted. “And if that’s what you’ve got to do, Ryan, fine, I understand, but that’s really kind of a crappy thing to pull on me today, and—”

  “I didn’t call!” It came out louder than I expected, and harsher. “I swear, honey, I didn’t. I was actually calling now because Eric said you called him—”

  “Eric? Why would I call Eric?” There was shock in her voice now, and suspicion.

  Deep breath in, deep breath out. “Eric said that you called him and that the two of you talked about your offer to me. Later on, Shelly told Leon that you’d called her….” I waited for the explosion, and when none came, I continued. “And that you’d told her I was quitting.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” Some more choice invective followed, and I had to pull the phone away from my ear until the volume finally tailed off.

  “Look, honey, I’m sorry. I have no idea what happened here. I just wanted to call you to make sure that it hadn’t been you. You know, just to be a hundred percent.”

  There was a sharp intake of breath. “So you’re not working late with Michelle?”

  “No, honey. We’re on the same project, but nobody’s working late tonight, I promise.”

  “Then who called?”

  “I don’t know. I was hoping you did.” I looked up, looked around. There was no one else on that side of the lot. Leon had already vanished back toward the building. It was just me and the phone out in the middle of the asphalt pancake, but even so, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this private conversation was somehow on display, that someone was listening in and judging what was said.

  But there was no one, and I put the phone back to my ear.

  “Maybe we should talk about this when we get home,” I offered.

  “No, Ryan. I want to know what’s going on here, and I want to figure it out before any other mysterious phone calls get made.” Sarah’s voice was resolute, her tone dropping rapidly from heated anger to frosty suspicion.

  I sighed. “I don’t know. Eric told me you called him. Leon said Shelly said you called her. Both of them told me you’d said things that, well, that I wasn’t too happy about. And—”

  “Why would I call either of those two?” There was a muffled thump, and then, more quietly “No, I’m fine. Just some personal stuff. I’ll be in the board room in a minute.” There was another second’s pause, and then she was back, swearing softly under her breath.

  “Sarah? Listen, if you’ve got to go….”

  “I’ve got a meeting in about two minutes, Ryan, but let me make this clear. I did not call Eric, and I most certainly did not call Shelly. He’s responsible for your insane work schedule, and she hurt the man I love. I’ve got no love and little respect for either of them, and I most definitely would not discuss our future with either of them. The fact that you even thought I might do something like that hurts me, Ryan. You know me better than that.”

  A jolt of pain startled me, along with an unpleasant taste in my mouth, and I realized I’d been biting my lip hard enough to draw blood. There were two things I could do here. I could apologize. Sarah was right; the woman I knew and loved was most certainly not the sort to pull that sort of junior high trick, and to have thought that she might was unworthy.

  The other was what I said next. “You’re right, honey. And by the same token, don’t you think I deserve a little benefit of the doubt here? Why would I call you to tell you I’d be working late tonight or working with Michelle? We’re just getting started. You know that. There’s no need to stay late.”

  There was wordless silence on the line, intercut with the sound of too-ragged breathing. “You deserve…some of the benefit of the doubt, Ryan. You’ve made calls like that too many times before.”

  “Not this time,” I said. “And I don’t want to keep making them.”

  “That’s good to hear.” She let out a long, shuddery breath. “I’m sorry too, Ryan. It’s like that’s what I was afraid I was going hear when I picked up the call, and it sounded like you….”

  “Maybe an old voicemail stuck in the system. I don’t know, honey. And I don’t know who could have called, pretending to be you. But I’ll find out.”

  “If you can. If not, well, just go set everyone straight, okay?” She was all the way back now, 100% in control. There was steel in her voice, and a little edge of anger on top of this. “If they’re trying to get rid of you, fine. But they don’t get to drag my name into this. Not for a second. And they don’t get to do this to us.”

  “I know,” I said. “I know.” And then, “I love you.”

  “I love you, too. Have a nice day not quitting.” Then she cut the call, and there was silence.

  I stared at the phone for a second, then flipped through my “Dialed Calls” menu. And there it was, the evidence in its LCD glory, a record of a five-minute phone call to Sarah’s work line. No doubt her phone would have displayed the incoming number; no doubt she would have taken it as evidence the call was genuine. And I had no doubt, now, that Shelly and Eric’s phones would show perfectly legit calls from a number that could be traced back to Sarah.

  All of which meant that someone had somehow cracked our phones and was spoofing from them, sending calls and attaching our numbers. They’d chosen those calls to make, and they’d known just what to say to set both of us off. I thought back to that sensation of being watched during the phone call and wondered if instead it had been a sense of being listened to.

  Either way, I wasn’t happy, and I didn’t want to deal with something like this again. Pulling my phone from its protective case, I dropped it to the ground. It hit, bounced once, and landed with a plasticky crack. Before I could think better of it, I brought my foot down on it and ground it into the asphalt—left, right, left again—until it was an unrecognizable smear of electronics and glass. It took me a minute to pick the smartchip out of the mess, but I did and tucked it into my pocket.

  “Dude!”

  I looked up. Leon had come back out into the lot and was gaping at me like my head had turned purple. “What?” I asked, in the most reasonable tone I could manage.

  “Why…?” He choked to a stop, waited a minute, and then tried again. “Why did you do that?”

  I shrugged. “Someone is playing games.”

  “Well, duh,” he said and fell into line next to me as I started walking again. “I mean, that's what we do, right?”

  I shook my head. “Not like this,” I said. “Someone's playing games with me.”

  * * *

  It was July before everything shook itself out, or at least felt like it had. The question of whether I would be quitting Horses
hoe died a lingering death from attrition, as evidenced by the fact that I kept going to the office. Sarah's new job took more and more of her time and attention, for which I was thankful—it kept the pressure off the fact that I was once again falling into old habits of working late. The game itself was progressing reasonably well, as we lifted assets bodily out of one build and slammed them into another, making the necessary changes, cuts, and adjustments along the way. By the middle of the month, the build was working well enough to playtest, which the team did, dutifully if not always enthusiastically. Michelle and Leon and I formed a solid, efficient working triad, with Leon keeping a lot of the same hours I did.

  I noticed after a while that Michelle had started keeping those same hours, too.

  The incidents of high strangeness seemed to have faded. A new cell phone was put to work, and it mostly behaved itself. No more spoofed phone calls, but I never was able to figure out who’d made them in the first place, or why they’d stopped. And the Blue Lightning soundtrack cuts stayed off the playlist from that point forward.

  “Maybe it’s God telling you something,” Leon said when I brought it up for the four hundredth time. “You know, like, maybe it’s a sign you and Sarah need to work on your communication issues.”

  “Oh, shit, that reminds me!” And I dug out my new phone and texted Sarah to tell her that’d I’d probably be running late that night, though not with Michelle.

  Mysterious brownouts continued to plague the building, resulting in some truly classic shouting matches between our IT maven Dennis and the head of our landlord's maintenance crew over whose fault it was.

  Life went on. Work went on. Things continued in the directions they had already been traveling in, and I never felt inclined to change course. There never seemed to be a need.

  * * *

  There had been almost seven minutes of silence before I realized that I’d had come to the end of the queued-up playlist, and iTunes was patiently waiting for me to select something else. Not wanting to get started on anything that would drag me under for an hour—or to get another lecture from Dennis about sucking up bandwidth by switching over to Spotify—I popped the buds out of my ears instead and stood up. The usual popping noises ensued—knees, lower back, neck, in that order. For the thousandth time, I reminded myself that sooner or later I'd have to take advantage of our wonderful medical benefits to go see a chiropractor. One of these days when I had a little time, I told myself, and then gave it up, because that line of reasoning led nowhere. It had taken me six months to replace my glasses after I lost a pair on a business trip, as Sarah never failed to remind me, simply because I couldn’t find (or make) the time to schedule the appointment.

  The speaker on my desktop phone buzzed, the red indicator light flashing, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. “Jesus,” I said to myself. “Calm down, dumbass.” My finger hovered over the phone for a moment as I tried to remember which button turned on the speakerphone, then I pressed my best guess. To my right, I could see my screensaver kick in, the monitor fading to black.

  “Ryan here,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “Yo, man,” a staticky voice called over the phone’s speaker. “We’re setting up a server for Happy Fun Time. You in?”

  Happy Fun Time was in-office slang for multiplayer testing. Everyone who could spare the time would log in to the latest build for some therapeutic annihilation of their coworkers while simultaneously performing a gut check on the status of the game. QA was all well and good for telling you if there was a hole in level geometry, but Happy Fun Time was where you went when you were looking to see how the game actually played.

  “CTF or Deathmatch, Leon,” I said to the air in the phone’s general vicinity. There was a crackly moment of near silence while I waited for the answer. I could hear Pink Floyd playing faintly in the background. Someone in the Engineering room was always playing Pink Floyd.

  “Deathmatch,” he said finally. “We’ve got ten, no, twelve people already in. Some of them might even suck worse than you do.” In the background, I could hear a general buzz of laughter. “And we're using yesterday's build. You should have it already, if you’re doing your job in that fancy office of yours.”

  “Yesterday's?”

  “Yeah. Dennis said there was some kind of hiccup with the database and the build wouldn't compile today, so we're using yesterday’s. Are you cool with that?”

  “Cool, but not in,” I said to the phone. “Maybe next time.”

  “Aww, come on. We need the numbers, man. Networking wants to beat on the join-on-the fly stuff for a while, and we need bodies.”

  “The networking engineers want to see if they can rack up more kills than usual,” I told him. “You’ve got plenty of pigeons without me.”

  “Pussy,” Leon said and broke the connection. The laughter and trash-talk had already started at the back of the building, typical evidence of Happy Fun Time.

  “What the hell,” I mumbled and headed back to the team room. If I wasn’t going to play, I could at least watch. An observer mode that would allow you to watch the action like it was a football game was planned, but not implemented yet, so if I wanted to see any of the on-screen play I needed to do it the old-fashioned way: go stand behind someone’s monitor and heckle.

  The room was in full swing when I got there, smack talk going back and forth freely. A couple of the guys were using headsets, the rest just yelling a mishmash of positions, expletives, and on-the-fly tactical decisions. Everyone had debug kits on their desks, long controller cords snaking out of them. A lucky few, Leon included, had wireless controllers and guarded them jealously against theft and confiscation.

  There were nods as I went past various players, headed for Leon, but nothing more—take your eyes off the screen and you were asking to be sniped. In the complicated calculus of multiplayer bragging rights, a long-distance headshot was worth more than just about anything other than an execution-style kill, and with competent players those were rarer than rubies.

  Leon sat at the back, in the corner near a window. It was privilege, proof of seniority and skill. The more time you put in, the more say you had in where you sat, and Leon had put in a lot of time. His desk was angled so that his monitors were arranged away from the rest of the room. You could only see what was on them by standing directly behind him or by going outside and looking through the window. What that said was that management trusted Leon not to screw around and get his work done, a rare and rarified privilege in a team room environment.

  “Hey, lamer,” he said as I sidled in behind him. “What brings you down here?”

  “I wanted to watch you get pwned,” I said. “How’s it looking?”

  He shrugged. “Second pass textures are in, but there’s something messed up with the particle emitters. All the explosions are purple.”

  “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature,” I repeated automatically, and we both chuckled. “Gameplay holding up?”

  He made a noise in the back of his throat, and not a happy one. “Enh. This map needs some serious rework. You can camp three of the spawn points, and there are a couple of bottlenecks where the whole thing just turns into a turkey shoot. See?”

  He gestured toward the screen. I leaned in over his shoulder and looked.

  The space in question was a vaguely futuristic ruined city, appropriate for the near-future sci-fi feel of the game we were putting together. Wrecked cars, empty streets and damaged buildings made up most of the landscape, a scene painted in grey and black and brown. The only flashes of color came from the bursts of weapon fire, mostly green and blue, as players moved back and forth, guns blazing. Here and there were pure white patches, indicators for missing textures that peeled away the illusion of the world and showed the naked geometry beneath.

  “What am I supposed to be looking at, Leon?” My glasses slipped a fraction of an inch down my nose, and I shoved them back into place. “Is there a topdown view?”

  “Hang on one moment,” he twitch
ed the left thumbstick on his controller. The onscreen view spun left, the gun in the middle of the screen barked, and an armored and armed figure about half a virtual block away fell, smoking, to the digital street. At the top of the screen, the system spelled it out in system font: D3XTER has killed muffyfluffy.

  “Muffyfluffy?” I asked, incredulous, even as the action continued and new lines of text were drawn. Robz0r has killed Demonyght. Shadoo has blown himself up.

  “Jay, over in level design,” he replied. “And no capital letters. He insists you pronounce it all lowercase.” A raised eyebrow indicated he thought this was as goofy as I did. “Now, let me show you what I was talking about.”

  He turned his attention to the screen and zig-zagged his way down an alley and up a low-hanging fire escape. In the virtual distance, explosions and the whine of high-tech imaginary weaponry played soft and loud in turn, mixed in with clanks and thuds and the omnipresent chatter.

  Onscreen, the fire escape gave way to rooftop and the sound of gravel crunching under Leon’s avatar’s feet. The rooftop was rimmed by a low brick wall, surmounted with the iron ladder we’d just climbed over. Vents and antennae dotted it strategically, and I winced, thinking of the problems with collision detection those were going to cause. In the center was a small shed with a single door which led, presumably, to a stairwell and down into the building below. That is, if the building actually had an interior, as opposed to merely a shell. That was the trick to virtual construction that most people outside the industry never got. The only things in the world were the ones that someone deliberately made and put there. Don’t make a floor? It doesn’t exist. Don’t make an interior? Then your building is a big empty box. Nothing happened by implication or by extension. It all had to be created with intent and loving labor, or else it never existed.