Vaporware

by Richard Dansky

  “I know, I know. But hear me out. So Leon rigged some cameras at his desk so we could see if he was staying up all night at the office working on Blue Lightning on his own and if anyone was working with him. And before you say anything, he’s behind and he’s screwing up badly at work, and I was honestly thinking that if we had proof he was doing the black project thing, we could use it to convince him to cut it out before he got his stupid ass fired. Which he still might.” Sarah looked unimpressed, so I continued. “It was supposed to be just me and Leon, but Michelle was there when I got there, and she’d apparently been there for a while, and then we watched.”

  “Watched what?”

  “Watched Terry get it on with a ghost.”

  To her credit, Sarah did not scream. Nor did she immediately stomp out of the room calling me a liar, nor did she throw anything heavy or sharp-edged in my general direction. Instead, she just looked at me. “You did what?”

  “I think,” I said, pronouncing every word slowly and carefully, “that we saw Terry getting it on with a ghost. Or at least most of one. I couldn’t really see below the waist, as Terry had his—”

  “I don’t think I want to hear any more.” She stood, not looking at me. “I’m not going to say I don’t believe you, but what you’re saying, well, it’s kind of hard to believe.” I scooted halfway down the bed toward her. She didn’t back away, but she looked like she was thinking about it. “I’m not even sure whether I want to believe you or not,” she added.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know if I want you to believe me. Maybe it would be better for both of us if you told me I was out of my mind, and then I could start trying to forget what I saw last night. Tell me often enough and I just might be able to do it.”

  Sarah shook her head. “Now I definitely don’t believe you. You want me to believe you, or you wouldn’t have told me at all. If you really didn’t want me to know what happened, you would have come up with some sort of idiot lie, and I would have called you on it….”

  “…Because I can’t lie to you for shit,” I interrupted, “and then we would have had a huge fight and then really awesome makeup sex. So, honestly, considering how amazing the makeup sex usually is, I would have been much better off doing a crappy job of lying to you in hopes of getting laid. Am I right?”

  I thought I had her with me then. I really did. And then, the alarm went off, bleeping like someone was backing up a dump truck under the bed.

  “I’ve got it,” we both said simultaneously, but she just stood there as I dove across the bed, reaching down to hit the snooze button on the clock we always kept within arm’s reach on the floor. The first tap didn’t do anything, as was often the case, and neither did the second. The third worked, but by then Sarah had her game face on, and when I looked back up at her, there wasn’t any laughter there.

  “Hi,” I said, acutely aware of the fact that I was hanging half over the edge of the bed and looking up at her sideways.

  “Hi, yourself,” she said back, but with her mind somewhere else. “Pull yourself back up before you fall onto the alarm clock. I don’t think I can lift you if you get yourself knocked out.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of asking,” I said as I hauled myself back into the bed. “Look, Sarah, about last night—”

  “Here’s what we’re going to do,” she said briskly, stepping toward the door. She stopped and looked at me over her shoulder. “You’re going to pretend that you didn’t tell me what you told me. I’m going to pretend that you were just working late, like you always do. We both can pretend that I’ve already nagged you about spending too much time at the office, and that will be the end of it. Because, honestly, a little more suspicion and resentment is going to do this relationship a lot less harm than you asking me to believe you saw one of your friends screwing a ghost.” She blew me a kiss. “Don’t forget to pay the Time Warner bill, OK?”

  And then she was gone.

  “He’s not a friend,” I said and collapsed back into bed. From downstairs I heard the sound of the front door opening and then closing, then the more distant sound of a car engine rumbling to life. For my part, I lay there for a few minutes until the magical effects of the snooze button wore off, and then I kept laying there some more as the alarm beeped its most frantic beeps in my direction.

  Eventually I got tired of the noise and killed the alarm. The clock read 8:15. It meant that Sarah had left for work at least half an hour earlier than usual, for which I couldn’t blame her. There was no sense staying for breakfast when her boyfriend was toting a full load of crazy.

  I shoved myself into my slippers and out of bed. The morning rituals—shower, cup of crappy coffee as I logged in and scanned my Twitter feed—seemed to take longer than usual, or maybe I just wanted them to. Every time I thought about going into the office for the morning, my mind just slid off the idea. Seeing Michelle and Leon would mean talking about what we’d seen. It wasn’t a conversation I was looking forward to.

  There was also the little matter of talking to Terry.

  I had no idea what to say after seeing something like that. “So, Terry, what exactly were you getting it on with last night? The camera images were a little fuzzy toward the end there.” I mean, I couldn’t even express concern for the guy without admitting we’d been spying on him, and as for the other stuff we’d seen, well, that was way out of bounds. Even starting that conversation would be impossible. So would facing him.

  At the same time, he was part of the team, and he was clearly in what Leon would call “some serious shit.” Walking away from that didn’t seem like such a hot idea, either.

  I took another sip of coffee and read down the feed. Most were the usual—my life sucks, here’s the stupid thing politicians did yesterday, here’s another pointless meme—but one Tweet caught my eye.

  It was a link to an article titled “Great Games We’ll Never See” from a gaming blog called Yar’s Vengeance that I visited only when there was work I really, really didn’t want to do. There wasn’t anything wrong with it—for one thing, it was generally written in complete sentences, which I regarded as a plus—but there wasn’t anything that particularly compelling about the content, either.

  Today, though, there was, because the hashtags for the link included #BlueLightning.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.” I clicked over and skimmed the intro. It was the standard bullcrap about how great games are always getting cancelled despite the fact that they were going to be really, really awesome, and how it sucked for everyone involved.

  Which it generally did, but not for the reasons they imagined. Of the games that usually ended up in articles like this, half were never anything more than marketing vaporware, and another two thirds had all the fun quotient of sticking your hand in a blender.

  On the other hand, Blue Lightning had never made it to the lists before. They were always full of big-name titles, or experimental projects from big-name developers, and I’d always assumed that we were too far under the radar for BL to grab any mindshare for something like this.

  But there she was, sitting at number seven. I blinked a couple of times and read what they said about my dead project.

  “A hot-looking shooter from well-regarded indie studio Horseshoe Games, Blue Lightning promised a combination of heady gunplay with an innovative movement system that was, literally, fast as lightning. While the shooter action would have been enough to hold our interest, particularly considering Horseshoe’s solid track record, the mechanisms of the teleportation system—players could lay down cable that they could zap themselves into, only to re-emerge somewhere else on the map’s “grid”—would have made for a real break from the traditional rail shooter we’ve all gotten way too used to. Don’t even get us started on what multiplayer would have been like. From the footage we’ve seen, it would have shaped up as serious challenger in the shooter arena. And keep those cards and letters coming, kids—rumor has it that the project may be resurrected.”

  “Bullshit,
” I told the computer, and then, since I didn’t sound angry enough for my own taste, I shouted it. “Bullshit!”

  To add insult to injury, there, next to the paragraph, was an image, clearly a screenshot from one of our test multiplayer sessions. The graphics were nothing better than OK, the placeholder textures were clearly visible, and the gamertags could just about be read. It was all very real, in the sense that it was 100 percent, no bullshit, absolutely authentic. That was a screen capture from Blue Lightning.

  And this, too, was a problem, because we’d never released anything like that, officially or unofficially. Which meant that somehow, someone had leaked it, probably as part of a half-assed effort to get the fan community to try to pressure us to start the project back up again. That wasn’t going to happen, not in a million years, but in the meantime we’d have one more hassle to deal with, and after last night, I was all full up.

  “You,” I said to the author of the piece, an anonymous type whose byline read EvilJohn, “are a pain in my ass. Thank you so much for adding to all the crap I was dealing with.” Then, feeling somewhat better for having flung virtual poo in the man’s direction, I composed a “Hey, you’d better look at this” email to Eric, complete with link to the article. “Your problem now,” I told the computer as I hit Send, then headed back to the bedroom to put on some pants.

  Pants were a necessary part of going in to work, after all, and as much as I might have wanted to dodge any and all of the unpleasant scenarios I’d come up with, there was really no way of getting around it.

  And if I was going to do it, I might as well get it over with.

  Chapter 18

  Michelle texted me on the way in with, “R U GOING N?” I checked the light I was sitting at—still red—and texted, “DUH. WORK 2 DO.” The light changed, I sent the message and hit the gas. She didn’t text back.

  The parking lot was mostly empty as I pulled in, which didn’t surprise me. It was still early. Eric’s car was there, though, parked in its usual spot a couple of spaces down from the door. He got in earlier than anyone most days but refrained from taking the closest spot as a matter of principle. I’d asked him about it once, and he said that it felt like a reproach to everyone else when he parked there, like he was showing off how he’d gotten in earlier than they had and was therefore working harder than they were.

  This one of the reasons most people at Horseshoe liked working for Eric. The ones who didn’t tended not to stick around too long.

  There was no sign of Michelle’s car, which didn’t surprise me, nor did I see Leon’s. As for Terry, he usually parked around back, and I wasn’t about to drive past his usual parking spot in the quest for mine.

  I parked a couple of spaces past where Eric had and headed inside with a mix of dread and adrenaline riffing through my veins. Email from Eric was waiting for me when I got there, a response to the one I’d sent him earlier. “See me,” it said, with a couple of exclamation points for emphasis. I figured that trumped more coffee, so I went down the hall into the lion’s den.

  “Ryan,” he said as I walked in, but didn’t look up. His attention was focused on his laptop screen. From where I stood I couldn’t see what he was looking at. Even the reflection in his glasses didn’t provide much of a clue. “How’d you find this little bombshell?”

  “Twitter feed. It found me,” I said truthfully. I dropped into a chair. “We didn’t release that screenshot, did we?”

  “No,” he said, and gave himself up to a minute of furious typing. “We didn’t release any screenshots because BlackStone marketing was in charge of all that, and near as I can tell, they never did much more than tell people it was coming at some point. Third party doesn’t get the marketing love.” He looked up at me, his expression pained. “Damn. I thought I’d let this go.”

  “Nobody has,” I said, shrugging. Choosing my words carefully, I added, “I wouldn’t be surprised if some people were running a black project to finish it after hours, to be honest. Even if they’d been warned against it.” I thought about saying more but something stopped me. I’d already convinced my girlfriend I was crazy; I didn’t want to add my boss to the list. Instead, I finished with a lame “That’s just speculation, of course.”

  Eric looked down his glasses at me for a long minute. “Uh-huh. Look, if anyone does have any half-assed ideas about resurrecting the project before we can find someone to pay for it, I know that there’s no hope in hell you’ll sign on with them, because Sarah will skin you alive if you do.” I started to say something, but he held up his hand. “Don’t. If there were a black project, and I’m not saying there is, and I didn’t know about it, which we both know would be damn near impossible, and if you were approached to help out, which I’m not saying you were, I know you’d have a hard time saying no. But because Sarah is a lot smarter than you are and likes to see you occasionally, and because you don’t want to lose your girlfriend and your house by staying at work even more than you do, you wouldn’t do anything that stupid. Which means this entire discussion is moot, except for one thing.”

  “What’s that?” My voice was suspicious and low. “You don’t think I leaked this stuff?”

  He shook his head. “You’re smarter than that. Besides, I blew up the screenshot.” He spun the laptop around so I could see the screen. There, in the upper right hand corner of the image was a clear shot of me—or at least my avatar—eating a grenade to the face.

  “Nice ragdoll,” I said. “This one shows off the physics engine really well.”

  “Don’t change the subject. What it also shows is you demonstrating your usual skill level, which is to say that you couldn’t have taken it because you were too busy getting fragged.”

  “Yeah, all of mine looked like an incoming RPG.” I turned the machine around. “So you’ve cleared me of the leak. What next?”

  He smiled, but it wasn’t a happy smile. “What’s next is that you get to find out where this came from.”

  “Whoah, whoah, whoah,” I said. “I’ve got deliverables. Somebody, I’m not saying who but I think his name is Eric, tasked me with trying to figure out a leaderboard system that a nine-year old can’t cheese.”

  “You’ve got another deliverable now,” he said. “Come on, you want to know as badly as I do.”

  I thought about some of the weird stuff that had been happening and paused a moment before answering. “I’m not sure about that,” I said. The flatness of my tone gave Eric pause. “But if you really want me to, I’ll give it a shot.”

  “I do,” he said. “Now go get some coffee. You look like you got ridden hard and put away wet last night.” He turned his face to the laptop. “I hope it was a good time, at least,” he added noncommittally, by way of a dismissal.

  “For somebody,” I answered, and walked out.

  One part of the conversation with Eric seemed like a good idea, and that was coffee. If I was going to get through the day, I would need bean juice.

  The break room was quiet when I got there, the usual morning buzz of conversation subdued. There were only a couple of guys, clustered in the middle of the room and shooting occasional, expectant glances at the microwave and coffee machine. The smell of warm oatmeal had overpowered the usual stink of overstuffed trashcans and leftovers, mainly because the packets of oatmeal that the vending machine in the corner spat out were so over-seasoned with cinnamon that they’d make a Keebler elf cry.

  “Hey, Ryan.” One of the guys staring vulture-like at the coffee maker gave me a nod. Thomas was one of the engineers who worked on the physics engine; he often joked that his job description was “things fall down go boom.” What he was technically responsible for was making sure that bodies acted like bodies and objects acted like objects, which was a lot harder than it looked. He was one of the smartest guys in the company and usually one of the quietest. Most of my conversations with him consisted of curt nods. But today, he felt like talking, even when nobody else did.

  I nodded back and went over to th
e dish rack to see if my mug was still sitting there after yesterday’s half-hearted attempt at a wash. “Hey, Thomas. How’s it going?“

  “Doing all right. Did you see the piece on Yar’s this morning? Pretty cool, huh?”

  “Yeah.” The mug was there, much to my surprise, so I grabbed it and joined the orbiting cloud of coffee-seekers. “I was kind of surprised to see BL show up.”

  He grinned. “I don’t care how it got there. It’s nice to see some love. Maybe it’ll help us get the project back someday.”

  “Yeah,” I said, hoping to avoid getting too deep into this particular conversation. “Nice to see someone saying nice things about the studio.” I edged into line a bit behind Thomas and the others. They’d been there before me, after all; they had dibs on the machine.

  The guy at the front of the line pulled a packet of coffee concentrate, then put it back, then pulled another one. “Anyone know which is better?” he asked, starting a debate among a couple of the other folks up close. “So do you know who took the screenshot that ran with it? It looked pretty decent.”

  Thomas stirred off-white powder into his coffee until it turned the color of melted milk chocolate. “I dunno. I just figured it was some marketing goober playing with the build. Why do you care?”

  I tried to grin. “Honestly? Because it’s a great shot of me getting fragged, and I wanted to give whoever took it some shit for making me look bad.”

  He looked at me and shook his head. “Ryan, if your years in the industry should have taught you one thing, it’s that you don’t need any help with that.” He took a look at the still-lengthy line for the fountain of life, did some complicated calculations, and decided that it was clearly too long a wait. “Screw it, I’ve got some Monsters in the minifridge. Catch you later.”