Vaporware

by Richard Dansky

  Toward the back of the doc, I found what I was looking for. Written in the notes section by one of the testers—all that was there were the initials C.M. —was a small entry noting that frame rate dropped below acceptable levels with 74 enemies on screen and 16 players. This was dated three days before the project was shut down, and there was no note of any change to the geometry that would wreck the frame rate in those three days. There was barely any record of it being touched at all. And yet, somehow it had sprung a memory leak that choked it at two-thirds of its expected performance.

  Or, and I felt a chill go down my spine, there was something else in there that was chewing up processing power.

  I was saved from following that train of thought by a window popping up to inform me that the game log was ready to be read. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was looking for in there—notes on the kills, I guessed—but it was information, and it might help me figure out what exactly had been happening.

  In the hallway, something moved. I heard the sound just as I clicked to open the log file, the unmistakable shuffle of sneakered feet on office-park carpet.

  “Hello?” I called. “Anyone out there?”

  There was no response, just the sound of a couple more steps fading into the dark, and what might have been some asthmatic breathing. “Hello?” I called again and moved from behind my desk. “Look, if you want something, you just have to ask, okay? Okay?” By the time I finished, I was halfway into the hall myself, staring down the better-lit sections of the building and hearing the sound of someone beating a hasty retreat.

  Whatever, I told myself. Probably someone who heard noise up at the front and wanted to see what was going on. Either that, or someone who’d been downloading porn and thought he might get caught in the act. Either way, I didn’t consider it my problem and retreated to my desk.

  The log file was open when I got back, a sprawling scroll of raw, steaming data. I could read it well enough to pick out the basics—where routines had been triggered, what loops had come into play when, where and when casualties had occurred, but it was dense stuff, and slow going. The fact that the mission had been running for something like ten hours, generating data the entire time, didn’t help to speed the process up much, either.

  Looking down at the bottom of the screen, I saw that the logfile ran to somewhere near two hundred pages. Line-by-lining it could take the rest of the night and then some. Doing a quick skim instead, and trying to pinpoint the exact moment when the stuck had become un-stuck and the live and hostile had become dead and nonexistent, seemed like the best way to tackle it with any reasonable hope of completion.

  Maybe a quarter of the way in, I stopped. Not because I’d found what I was looking for, but because I’d found something else. In the middle of the log, there were six empty lines, followed by two words, and then six more blanks.

  HELLO RYAN, the logfile said.

  I gawped. Sat there for a moment, trying to comprehend what it was I was looking at. And then, very slowly and very carefully, I started scrolling down again.

  Fifty lines further down was another message: I HOPE YOU DON’T MIND.

  There was another noise out in the hallway. Spooked, I looked up. This time, I caught a silhouette, a tall, skinny silhouette.

  “Damnit, Terry, have you been screwing around on my system?” I hurried into the hallway. Terry was mostly gone; I saw bits of him disappearing around the corner, flying feet and waving hands as he ran for it.

  “Stupid bastard!” I shouted after him. “You’ve got to come up with something better than commenting a log to screw my head!” I listened for an answer, but there wasn’t one.

  “Idiot.” I shook my head. “Tomorrow, I’m definitely talking to Leon.” Outside in the parking lot, a car door slammed. Someone taking off, most likely. Someone who didn’t want to play tag with Terry.

  When I got back to my desk, there was another comment in the log, a new one right under the last one I’d found. TERRY’S NOT DOING THIS, it read. I AM.

  And then, as I watched, the letters formed themselves on the screen, inserting themselves into the document one at a time with deliberate, careful slowness. I REALLY THINK WE SHOULD TALK.

  My first instinct was to run, to head for the door, drive home, and tell Sarah I was quitting effective immediately.

  PLEASE?

  Please. Whoever it was had said please. “Jesus.” My fingers found their way to the keyboard. I could see them shaking, each at its own frequency. I took a deep breath and tried to steady them, then typed, WHO ARE YOU?

  There was a pause, then the words, I’M YOURS, inched their way into being.

  SARAH? I typed back. WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE? HOW ARE YOU DOING THIS?

  The answer, when it came, was swift and furious. The lights went out, not dramatically and in sequence, but rather darkness came down, and came down hard. Every light in the building went, snuffed out in an instant. The emergency lights flared on for an instant, then they, too, faded away. The HVAC wheezed to a stop, and the air thickened as it ceased circulation.

  Somehow, my laptop stayed on. NOT THE BITCH, appeared almost instantly. NEVER CONFUSE ME WITH THE BITCH.

  I’M SORRY, I wrote, hurriedly and with enough typos to require retyping it and then retyping it again. WHO ARE YOU? SHELLY?

  CLOSER, came back, followed by, YOU KNOW ME. YOU JUST DON’T KNOW HOW WELL.

  My heart rabbited along in my chest, beating a little faster with each exchange. Crazy stalker? Crazy stalker with mad hacking skills? Crazy stalker with mad hacking skills who was in the building and had cut the power? In the hallway a couple of voices rose, people saying they were getting the hell out, then the front door closing and opening and closing again.

  Common sense told me to get out, too. No sense being trapped in the building with whoever was on the other end of the surreal conversation I was having.

  Common sense told me to get out. Curiosity told me to figure out who it was, which might make any possible defense—or restraining order—that much more effective.

  But there was no sense taking too many unnecessary chances. I got up to shut my door and lock it and shoved a chair in front of it, just in case.

  And when I had finished, I turned around to sit back down, and she was there.

  She was sitting in my chair, arms folded demurely over her breasts. She was naked, her legs crossed in front of her and the chair spun halfway around. She looked at me over her shoulder, and as she saw that I saw her, she smiled.

  It was her smile that scared me the most. Because the face that looked at me and smiled, a dazzling, seductive, beautiful smile, was not the same face that I’d seen on the webcam the night before. The figure was the same, but the face had changed, metamorphosed into something equally, heart-stoppingly attractive, but different.

  There was Shelly’s chin and cheekbones. There were Sarah’s eyes, the curl of the hair that fell down across her forehead. There was the small, sensual mouth of a woman I’d known and lusted after for four years of college but never spoken to. There were pencil-thin and razor-sharp movie star eyebrows, there was the button nose that my junior prom date had hated but that I’d found irresistible, all blended together to make one stunning whole.

  “Like I said,” she said, “I think it’s time we talked.”

  No intelligent sounds came out of my mouth. I sagged against the whiteboard instead, blinking furiously. For she was bright, and with every breath, getting brighter. The blue-white light from her swallowed the output from the laptop’s screen, ate up the monitor’s empty cityscape, washed away the indicator light on the debug kit.

  “Who are you?” I finally stammered. “Why are you here?”

  She laughed, the sort of laugh you only hear during lovemaking when you’ve done something spectacularly right. “Ryan, don’t be silly. I’m here because of you. By you. For you. With you. Isn’t that enough?”

  “It’s a little too much,” I said, and put my hand up to shield my eyes. “Could
you…put something on, at least? Something dimmer?”

  Again, the delighted laugh, and it suddenly got very hard to concentrate. She spun the chair back around, uncrossed her arms, spread her legs. As she did so, the light dimmed, and she sat there in what looked to be a high-necked unitard, a deeper shade of blue than her skin, form-fitting and marked here and there with patterns that looked like circuitry or language or both. “Is this better,” she asked. “I didn’t think you’d want the armor.”

  “The…armor?”

  “The combat armor, silly. It’s not very comfortable the way it was designed, and I don’t think it would have been very good for your chair.” She shook her head. “Anyway, I just wanted to say hello. We got off to such a bad start last night, and I’ve been trying so hard to talk to you.”

  I gulped. “Talk to…me?”

  She nodded. “Of course, you. We should thank Terry. He’s the one who figured it out, of course. He’s been working on it all along.” She looked up at me, pouting. “I had to thank him somehow, you know, and he loves me so much, but it doesn’t change the way I feel about you.”

  Slowly, I edged toward the door. “The only thing that Terry’s been working on has been....”

  She smiled. “Exactly.” Unwinding herself from the chair, she stood up. “Don’t worry. We’ll be seeing more of each other. There should be some…benefits for working so late, don’t you think?”

  And as I stood there, paralyzed by her words and their implications, she kissed me.

  Not on the lips, just a soft, gentle peck on the forehead. Where her lips touched me, I felt fire.

  My eyes closed. When I opened them again, she was gone.

  There was a sudden, sharp noise out in hall, the meaty thwack of a fist hitting drywall. Then, footsteps trailing off into the dark.

  Terry, I thought wearily. Good goddamn, and staggered back to my desk in the dark.

  Chapter 20

  For a long time I sat there, hands gripping the desk for the sheer, blessed solidity of it. Onscreen, the Windows logo bounced back and forth on a black background, utterly placid and utterly unaware of what it was replacing. My skin felt tight and hot, as if it had been sunburned, on my forehead where it—she—had kissed me. The lights had not come back on, nor had the ones in the hallway.

  Eventually the screen saver timed out, clicking over to sleep mode and fading to black. I let it, closing my eyes and leaning back and wondering what the hell had just happened. I’d seen…something.

  No. I’d seen the same thing that Terry had seen, that Terry had made some kind of contact with. I’d seen the thing that had tried to fry my eyeballs in the team room that night.

  I’d talked to it. Touched it. Listened to it. Learned what it was.

  The knowledge left me shaking. The thought that we—that I had created that, dropped the bottom out of my gut. It…she was Blue Lightning. Of that, there was no doubt. She’d as much as confessed to it, and the fact that she looked like the game’s main character, even wore the face I imagined on that character, told me all I needed to know.

  When she’d been doing improbable things with Terry, that had been bad enough. But I’d attracted her attention now, and she wanted mine.

  She wanted me. And that terrified me.

  “Hey. What did you do to the lights?”

  Michelle’s voice cut the darkness from the other side of the door. I opened my eyes and called out “Wait a minute,” clearing the chair away from the door and opening it for her.

  She didn’t step inside. Instead, she chose to hang on the doorframe, leaning with her head peeking into my office.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. “I thought everyone else had gone home.”

  “You didn’t answer my question. I don’t have to answer until you do.” She gave the ghost of a grin in the dim light.

  I walked back to my desk. “I didn’t do anything to the lights. They got shut down.”

  “Say what?” Shelly let herself off the doorframe and walked in. Experimentally, she waggled the light switch a few times, up and down. The light itself didn’t change, nor did we get the tell-tale hum of a fluorescent powering on. “Huh. Blown fuse?”

  I pointed to the computer. “That’s still running, and not off the UPS.”

  “Then how….” She stopped and thought for a second. “Oh. Oh, no.”

  “Yeah.” Suddenly, my neck hurt like hell. I reached back to massage it. “She was here. She wanted to talk to me.”

  “She?” Shelly stepped over to my desk. “Since when was it a she?”

  “Since the art department gave the model hi-poly count boobs?” I shook my head and grimaced. “I’m sorry, that was unfair. But it’s definitely a she. And I think I know what she is.”

  Michelle cocked her head to one side and looked at me. “You look like crap,” she said. “And I don’t like where you’re going with this, and right now the office is creeping me the hell out. Do you want to get out of here? Maybe go over to Montague’s and have a beer?”

  I rubbed my eyes. “Deal. I’ll drive.” A sudden thought struck me. “And I answered your question, now you answer mine. What are you doing here tonight?”

  Shelly made a face, the corners of her mouth turned down and her brow wrinkled up in disgust. “There was a huge mess with the check-in on about a thousand objects. I had to go back and correct it manually.”

  “Ow.” I caught myself wincing. “So who dies tomorrow?”

  “Nobody. Innocent mistake. It happens.” She stepped out of the office and into the hallway, where the lights were slowly coming back on. “So, shall we?”

  “We shall.” I followed her into the hall, and turned to shut the door behind me. “But you’ll have to tell me who you are and what you’ve done with Michelle.” Not quite arm in arm, not quite lockstep, we headed for the door.

  “This is really tired Michelle, Ryan. And are you sure you’re OK to drive? You look shaken up.”

  I got to the door a half-second before she did and buzzed us out. “I’m fine. I think. And yeah, I’d rather drive. It’ll take my mind off of things.”

  “Things.” Shelly followed me, making sure the door was shut behind us. More than once, it had failed to latch and the alarm had gone off at ungodly hours as a result. Eric was the only one who could shut it off at times like that, and he was never much fun the day after.

  “Things,” she repeated, as we headed for my car. I dug out my keys and opened the door on her side first. “It’s still naked, right?”

  Walking around to my side of the car saved me from having to answer. By the time I got there, Shelly had reached across the seat and unlocked my door. I swung it open and got in, reflexively plugging my phone into the aux cable as I did so.

  “Montague’s it is, unless you’ve got a better suggestion?” I threw the car into gear and peeled out.

  “Montague’s has beer,” Shelly answered, her hands fiddling with the phone. “Mind if we get some music.”

  “Go ahead,” I told her, “but I’m warning you, all it seems to want to play these days is the sample tracks from the Blue Lightning soundtrack.”

  She gave me a smile of such frightening plasticity that I nearly rear-ended the car in front of us. “Really. And why would that be, do you think?”

  I didn’t smile back at her. “I think I’m starting to get an idea.”

  Michelle hit play. Music flooded the interior of the car, cranked too loud and with the bass mixed way too high. “Jesus, Ryan, what the hell do you do in here?”

  “Sorry, sorry.” I adjusted the settings and turned the volume down. The thrumming caterwauls resolved themselves into something off an old Todd Rundgren album, and I rolled down the windows to keep the sound from bouncing around inside quite so much. “I hadn’t realized they were up so high.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” She leaned out the window and let the wind catch her hair. It had cooled off considerably. There was a fat, full moon in the sky, and enough stars to be n
oticeable. No clouds, and there was a faint cool snap in the air.

  We didn’t speak the rest of the way to the bar. I concentrated on the road, keeping to some of the less busy, less well-lit routes so we’d stay more in the moonlight. The music did all the talking necessary, which wasn’t much, track after track touching on angry or mad or sad or alone or some combination in between.

  Shelly skipped one song, once, that I’d put on a mix for her back in the day. I didn’t say anything, just let it go.

  The parking lot was just on the wrong side of half-empty when we got there. I picked a spot near the dumpster and pulled in. Shelly wrinkled her nose as she rolled up the window. “Jesus, Ryan. You always take me to the nicest places.”

  “It’s the last place anyone else parks,” I said as I got out. “Less likely to get my door dinged.”

  “If you say so.” She sounded unconvinced, and her expression didn’t help sell it, either. We headed inside.

  The bartender gave us a nod, then went back to racking glasses as they came out of the dishwasher. Only one of the televisions was on, a small cluster of middle-aged men sitting underneath it in silence as it showed a rebroadcast of a rugby match from halfway around the world.

  “Bar?” I asked. Shelly shook her head and headed for one of the back booths. After a second, I followed her, a glimpse of the game having proved insufficient distraction. Behind me, there was cursing and cheering in equal measures. Someone must have scored.

  Shelly was seated when I caught up to her. She’d taken the inside, her back resting against the high dark wood of the booth and her eyes looking out past me toward the door. I slid in opposite. Behind her, the tops of the bathroom doors were visible. I kept my eyes on Shelly instead.

  The table was made of the same dark wood as the benches, pitted and scratched and scarred from untold patrons who’d been unkind or ungraceful. Against the wall was a napkin holder flanked by an honor guard of condiments, a beer menu tucked in behind them. The wall held a framed reproduction copy of The Irish Times from 1924, next to a print of a black and white photo of the Dublin GPO. Neither of them looked particularly authentic, and the frames were mismatched.