Vaporware

by Richard Dansky

  “What are we looking at?” Michelle asked.

  “Just a minute, just a minute.” Leon fiddled a bit more, and a series of windows popped up onscreen. On all of them was Terry, or some portion thereof. The picture quality was grainy as all hell, but it was unmistakably him. There was a small palisade of Monster energy drink cans next to his keyboard and a double monitor setup behind them. To his right was a dev kit, a circle of green light shining out from its power indicator and fuzzing up the picture.

  “Kill the ones from the left side,” I said. “The image is crappy, and the light’s messing up the picture. All we’re getting is the silhouette.” Leon nodded, and two of the windows went away. The refresh rate went up as he did so, treating us to a slightly more realistic vision of Terry typing, leaning forward, then typing some more.

  “Let me scan the room,” he said softly. “Make sure there’s no one else in there.”

  “Can you do that?” Michelle asked.

  He nodded. “Camera four is on a swivel. It’s got 270 degree coverage.” Slowly, the window at the top right treated us to a view of empty desks covered with equipment and empty soda cans, game cases and action figures, and the occasional candy jar. No people, though. No computers that showed anything onscreen, no other sign of life or work or light, only Terry and his machine.

  “We’re clear,” Leon announced with some relief. “Nobody but Terry in there. Which is good, because I’d hate to be doing this and catch someone watching porn or something and beating off at his desk.”

  I punched him lightly on the shoulder. “You’ve never done that.”

  He turned and looked at me, his face a mask of indignation. “The hell I haven’t. There was this one guy we called Dr. Spankenstein, back when I was working at—”

  “Guys, can we focus here?” Shamefaced, we turned back to the laptop. Michelle’s expression was half smirk, half disgust. “The important thing is that if he’s the only one there and nobody’s running any processes overnight, then we know that whatever we see is his.”

  “Exactly.” Leon gave her a grin. “But I still think it’s a good thing we don’t have sound. Just in case.”

  Michelle let that one go without comment. Instead, she tapped the screen with one finger, clicking her nail against it to avoid leaving a smudge. “That one,” she said. “It’s from directly behind him. All we’re getting is his back and his hair.”

  “And his back hair,” Leon quipped.

  Michelle ignored him. “Can we kill that one?”

  “Not yet,” I said, the beginnings of an idea coming to me. “Leon, can you zoom in enough to show us what’s on his screens?”

  “I can try,” he replied, and hit a few controls. The images in half the windows grew larger and blurrier in roughly equal proportions.

  “No good.” Michelle frowned. “The only angles you’ve got are side ones. It’s too distorted. Maybe we could get a better feed if you killed the back cam?”

  “No,” I said, “And here’s why. We want to see what he’s looking at, right?” They both nodded. “OK, put that one on max zoom and get ready to do some screen captures.”

  “What are you going to do?” Michelle asked, but I was already whipping out my cell phone.

  “He’s in the way? We’ll get him out of the way.” I dialed in the number for the work switchboard and hit an extension at more or less random, then let it ring. A second later, Terry’s head jerked up and to the left, presumably in the direction of the now-ringing phone.

  “What are you doing, Ryan?” Michelle turned, puzzled. I couldn’t help noticing that she was pressed up awfully close against Leon as she did so. “He’s not going to answer someone else’s phone.”

  “He will if it keeps ringing.” I hit redial. Onscreen, Terry put his head down in an obvious attempt to concentrate.

  I hit redial again. “And ringing.” Terry looked left, looked straight ahead, then looked left again, longer this time.

  “And ringing.” Another press of the button. A jerk of the head, definitely annoyed, and he leaned forward to crank the speakers on his system.

  “Now I’m really glad we don’t have sound,” Michelle said. “He’s probably cranking some old Floyd B-side they recorded in a cave while tripping on acid,”

  “And grooving with a Pict,” Leon finished. “But I still don’t get what you’re trying to do.”

  “I do,” Michelle said, and flipped open her phone. “Two phones are harder to drown out than one.” She dialed, hung up, redialed. I grinned and redialed.

  And just like that, he stood up, glanced left and right, and stomped off-camera. “Now, Leon!” I shouted as I killed the phone connection. I could see Michelle doing the same as we zoomed in on the center screen.

  “Maximize it, you idiot,” Michelle said. It jumped to fill the entire screen. “Are you getting screen caps?”

  “Screw that,” Leon replied, intent on the laptop. “I’m capturing the feed. We can look at this later to see what he’s working on. Though I can tell you right now, that looks an awful lot like the detection algorithm from Blue Lightning.”

  “The code’s got to be commented,” I said. “Can you read any of it?”

  He peered forward. “Yeah, good call. That’s what it is. He’s running with Shawn’s stuff and—oh, crap.”

  Terry’s shape filled the screen as he hastily adjusted the volume on his speakers. I looked over to see Michelle’s thumb poised over her phone. “Don’t,” I said. “We got what we need.”

  “Aww,” she said but put the phone away. “That was pretty sneaky of you.”

  I kept my poker face on. “I don’t like doing this any more than you do. I figured the faster we got it over with, the faster we could stop. The phone thing was just a way to speed things along.”

  Leon half-turned around. “But now that we have the evidence, what do we do? I mean, we could go over there right now and tell him to cut it out.”

  “How’s that going to help?” Michelle asked. “He’d be angry at us for spying, or he’d hear us coming and hide what he was doing. Short of scrubbing his machine while he sat there and then disconnecting it from the network, how exactly could we stop him from telling us to get screwed and getting right back to it?”

  I raised my hand. “We don’t need to do anything tonight. Tomorrow, I’ll talk to the appropriate folks and we’ll sit down and have another little chat with Terry. Nothing serious, nothing that’s going to make him think he’s about to get fired because he’s not, just a friendly request to ease up on the hours on the black project. Or else.”

  Leon snorted. “Horseshit. He’s hiding this for a reason. We say one word to him about it and he’s going to freak out. And when he freaks out, he’ll go back to doing exactly what he’s doing, just even more so, because he’ll think he’s running out of time.”

  I sighed. “Look, Leon—”

  Michelle interrupted me. “Guys.”

  Leon waved her off. “Don’t ‘Look Leon’ me. I know Terry, and—”

  “Guys.”

  “Michelle, we’re trying to have a discussion here, and—”

  “Guys!”

  We stopped, mouths opened, and turned to look at her. She was pointing at the screen. “I think this is important,” she said.

  I looked at the screen. The image of Terry’s back was still maximized, but now it was silhouetted, framed in a brilliant white glow. Streamers of light fanned out around him, like the sun’s corona during an eclipse.

  “You still have the side views open?” I asked softly. Leon nodded. “Good. Minimize this one.”

  He did so. And we stared.

  The angle that showed it best was the window in the lower right, and Leon quickly maximized it. On it, we could see Terry in profile. He sat there, hunched forward, hands still on the keyboard. In front of him was his work setup, speakers pushed well back, monitors positioned to ergonomic perfection.

  And leaning out of the monitor was the shape of a woman.


  Not all of her, at least, not all that we could see. What I could see was a face and perhaps as far down as halfway to her waist. Her features, what I could see of them, had a faintly Asian cast to them, while her figure was slender and her breasts small. She wore no clothes that I could see, and her hands gently stroked Terry’s hair and face.

  That’s what I think I saw, anyway, because she was made of fierce blue-white light. Shot through with static, flickering toward darkness for milliseconds before blazing more intensely than ever, she leaned forward. Her eyes, pure black and empty, closed as her mouth half-opened.

  Terry pulled his hands off the keyboard. One flew up to clasp hers as she stroked his cheek. The other drew her closer, pulling her into a kiss. Or perhaps she did the pulling, white fingers laced with sparks tangled in his hair.

  Their lips met, and for an instant, I could have sworn the light was in Terry, too.

  “Oh my God,” Michelle breathed. “This isn’t happening. We can’t be seeing this.”

  Onscreen, the woman had emerged further from the monitor. I could see the beginning of the curve of her hips, even as she drew Terry’s face down to bury it between her breasts. His hands moved over her back, tentative at first, then more and more confident. One slid around to her belly and down, reaching to the edge of the monitor where woman-shape met cold glass.

  “Turn it off.”

  I tore my eyes away and looked at Michelle. Her face was flushed, her eyes wide with horror.

  “I said turn it off,” she said. “I can’t watch this. I don’t want to watch this!”

  Leon shuddered and shoved the laptop away as I saw the tips of Terry’s fingers start to ripple into nothingness. A low moan, the tinny quality of the laptop’s speakers doing nothing to disguise the raw need in it, the sexual power, filled the room.

  “We don’t have sound,” I said. “Leon, you said we don’t have sound.”

  “We don’t!” He turned from me to Michelle to the screen. “I swear, I didn’t hook up any mikes!”

  Terry’s hand sank into the screen, fingers splayed as it trailed down into the imagined shape of womanhood. Her head was thrown back, eyes closed, mouth open, and the groans of desire we were hearing were coming from her lips.

  “I said stop it!” Michelle lunged for the laptop. Her fingers hit the keys, disabling the connection.

  And the woman onscreen opened her eyes.

  Turned.

  Stared straight into the camera.

  And smiled.

  “No!” Leon snatched the computer away. The image of the woman stared out at us, her moans still echoing in the corners of the room. For a long instant the picture hung there, and then suddenly, abruptly, the machine powered down.

  The screen went black, and I found I could breathe again.

  “We’ve gotta go,” Leon said. “I don’t know what the hell we just saw, but we have to stop it. Get your coat. I’ll drive.” He stood, visibly shaking, and the laptop fell out of his fingers to the table. There was a sharp crack, and he stared at it. “Goddamn,” he said reflectively, then more emphatically. “Jesus goddamn fucking hell shit!”

  I was already heading for the door. “No. I’ll go to the office and make sure nothing happened to Terry. You stay here and see if you got any video capture of that…thing. Michelle, stay with him and make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid.”

  She opened her mouth to argue, but saw the look on my face and nodded instead. “Call if you need help.”

  “I will,” I said, and went out into the night.

  Chapter 16

  The parking lot was empty when I got there. Terry’s car, a gunmetal-gray Chevy Impala with some rust along the sides, was gone. The only lights I saw were the red of emergency exit lights and the dim yellow of the hallway fixtures. There was no dancing light to give away the presence of someone playing a console game on a television, no monitor glow leaking out the windows. There was just silence, and darkness, and a feeling of desolation.

  I sat there in my car, a feeling of dread seeping into my bones. I knew I had to go inside to check on Terry. I knew I had to see, to make sure he was all right. But the thought of doing so, of walking in on more of what I’d seen, terrified me.

  My phone buzzed. I grabbed it, thankful for the interruption. “Yeah?”

  Michelle’s voice crackled over a bad connection. “Well?”

  “Well, what? I just got here. I can tell you that his car is gone, though.” I found myself snapping and not caring that I was doing it. “I’ll go inside as soon as I finish doing a circuit around the building.”

  “Uh-huh.” The doubt in her voice was plain. “In this of all things, Ryan, don’t be chickenshit.”

  “I’m going, I’m going,” I groused. I cut the connection before she could say anything else hurtful and true. Killing the engine, I stepped out into the night.

  “You did a shitty parking job,” I told myself as I marched to the front door. Somehow, I dug the keycard out of my wallet and waved it in front of the sensor. There was a moment’s hesitation, then the loud thunk of the lock disengaging. The door swung open a half an inch. I grabbed it before it could re-engage, or before I could change my mind, and went inside.

  * * *

  The building was empty.

  There’s a certain feeling an uninhabited office has, a sort of echoing purposelessness that bounces off the walls and can only be assuaged by the return of the workforce in the morning. Only then does the building acquire its proper hum and vibe, the right level of chatter and argument bouncing through the halls. Until then, the office sits and waits and feels sorry for itself.

  There was none of that when I went inside. Instead, there was a nervous energy that didn’t belong, a feeling of something that had been interrupted, unhappily.

  I had a feeling I knew what that was.

  The lights were dim, providing enough glow to see but not enough to do anything useful. It gave the hall a sinister air, yellow light on dead-orange carpet and taupe walls. Termites would feel right at home, I thought, and headed for Terry’s team room.

  It was dark, but it was always dark. The shades had been drawn to make sure no stray light—whether from street lamps, stars, or that old devil sun—ever made it inside. This room was made for huddling over your work and getting it done, plain and simple, and night did not improve its character or sociability one bit. Green and amber lights shone off monitors and dev kits, making scattered constellations here and there.

  “Terry?”

  I didn’t expect an answer. He was gone, and frankly I wasn’t exactly sure what I’d say to him in any case. “Getting any from your monitor lately?” didn’t seem like a good start to a potential conversation, and the other openers I had were worse.

  “Hello?”

  I stepped inside. The room smelled odd, with the sharp crackle of ozone layered over the usual aroma of stale bodies and snack food. I’d been half expecting the place to smell like sex, but there was no hint of that at all. There was just the sharp tang of electricity, as if there’d been a spring thunderstorm, one of fearful intensity but short duration.

  “Terry? If you’re here, pal, let me know.” His desk was halfway down the room and on the left-hand side. I passed other desks slowly, hesitantly. It may have been my duty to try to find Terry, after all, but that didn’t mean I wanted to run into whatever he’d been communing with.

  Another step forward, and something gave a hesitant crunch under my foot. Pulling out my phone for light, I eased back a step and took a look at what it might have been before I’d bigfooted it.

  That part was easy. It was a webcam, one of Leon’s. A length of wire jutted out of the back, maybe six inches’ worth, before it had been melted clean through. I held up the phone and looked around. Other black shapes lay on the floor, little tails of wire sticking out behind them.

  The phone buzzed, and I nearly dropped it. Another chirp, and I felt sufficiently recovered to answer. “What?”

&nbs
p; “What yourself?” It was Michelle. “Where are you now?”

  “The team room. He’s gone, all right.”

  She didn’t sound satisfied with that answer. “What about the other…thing? Is it there?”

  I glanced around the room. No electronic enchantresses met my gaze, and from where I stood, the monitors on Terry’s desk looked deeply unerotic. “Not that I’ve noticed. Though you may want to tell Leon he’s going to need some new webcams.”

  She chuckled nervously. “He’ll be thrilled to hear that.” In the background, I could hear Leon moaning, his anguished voice asking after the fate of his equipment. Michelle shushed him, then turned her attention back to the phone. “Have you checked his desk yet? There might be something there.”

  I opened my mouth and swallowed back a double shot of annoyance. “Gawrsh, I never thought of that, Michelle. I was on my way there when I had to stop and answer my phone. Maybe when I’m done talking, I’ll be able to get back to it.”

  “Uh-huh.” She sounded unconvinced. “It’s been twenty minutes since I called you in the parking lot, Ryan. How long does it take you to go down a hallway?”

  I blinked. “That long? No way. I just got in here.”

  “Whatever. Tell it to your girlfriend. She’s gotten used to your interesting time sense, I hear. In the meantime, how about you walk over to that desk and use your camera app to take some pictures and send them back here. I’d like to see what the hell happened.”

  “Then you should have come yourself, or were you too busy comforting Leon over his poor widdle webcams?” My bitterness surprised me. I hadn’t thought I’d cared what she did with herself these days, or who she did with herself, for that matter.

  It didn’t surprise Michelle, though. “We can argue about our personal lives later, thanks. Just see if there’s anything weird at Terry’s desk, then go home, all right? I’ll be happy to have a screaming fight at work tomorrow.”

  “Can’t. Too many meetings scheduled. Can we have the screaming fight on Thursday?” That was a joke, a weak peace offering. Silence told me she was considering it.