Vaporware

by Richard Dansky

  “You think there’s a company out there that sells this crap?” Shelly asked as the waitress set down glasses of water on coasters stamped with the Guinness logo. I looked up at her. “Two Harps?”

  The waitress, a woman with a brunette pageboy cut and a figure like the Venus of Willendorf, nodded. “Sure thing, hon. Anything else?”

  “Bushmill’s,” Shelly interjected. “Two. For starters.”

  The waitress looked back and forth between us for a second. “Those for you, honey, or one for each?”

  “One for each, thanks.” She dipped her fingers in her water glass and started sketching on the tabletop, even as the server turned her back on us and ambled off.

  “Bushmill’s?” I asked.

  Shelly didn’t look up from the table, where the lines she was sketching joined the dents and dings and cuts the tabletop had suffered. Something was taking shape there as she raced to build it, even as the water beaded up and flowed away where she drew. “You look like you need it. I figured I’d be sociable and join you.”

  I chuckled, but my heart wasn’t in it. “Can’t argue with that logic.”

  “You never could,” she answered, and kept sketching. The level in her water glass had already dropped a good inch and a half. I pushed my water glass over toward her, careful not to disrupt any of what she’d already done. “Here. Take mine.”

  “You want my fingers in your glass?” she snorted, but the next time she needed to reload, she dipped into my glass. Then she flicked the cold water at me, and I ducked reflexively. “Pointillism,” she said, and laughed, and pointed at the flecks of water on the table.

  That time, my grin was real.

  The waitress chose that moment to return with the tray of drinks, setting the whisky down first and then the beer. Both came down at the end of the table, far from the water sketch. She served Shelly first. “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “It’ll be finished by the next round. I’ll show you then. Deal?”

  “Deal,” said the waitress, and then “Is there anything else you need? Food? A menu?”

  I wrapped my fingers around the glass of whiskey. “We’re fine for now, thanks.”

  I got an “Okay ” in a voice like she didn’t believe me, and she melted back into the bar. The rugby fans were yelling about something. I caught hints of a call that had gone the wrong way, or maybe a misinterpretation of a rule. It made no sense to me, so I did my best to ignore it.

  Shelly picked up her whiskey and held it there, looking at me through the amber light of the glass. “Do we need a toast?” she asked. “Or do you just need a shot?”

  “Yes,” I said, and clinked my glass against hers. “To getting the hell out of there tonight before something serious happened.” I threw it back, and slammed the glass down on the table. Shelly’s eyes widened, but she did the same, and then reached for the beer.

  “Now that you’ve got a drink in you, can you tell me what happened?” She took a sip. A pencil-thin foam mustache formed on her lip, sitting there until she wiped it away with the back of her hand. “Or were you and Terry and the thing having a threesome?”

  I shuddered. “Don’t joke about that.” To cover up the shakes, I took a swig of beer, which turned into draining half a pint glass before I knew it. “Jesus,” I said. “The way I’m going, you’d better finish that sketch in a hurry.”

  “Uh-huh.” She tapped a finger on the table impatiently. “So. Story.”

  “Story.” I took another drink, and got halfway through what was left. “The short version? I was at my desk, the lights went out, and she showed up.”

  “What were you working on?”

  Rather than meeting her eyes, I looked past her. One of the rugby fans stumbled into the bathroom, missing the door twice before finally finding the handle. “I was looking at some of the old Blue Lightning docs.”

  Shelly said, “Interesting,” in a voice that indicated it was anything but. “Did she materialize, or beam in like Star Trek, or what?”

  “You called her ‘she’ just now, you know?” I finished my beer. “Are you going to finish yours?”

  “Order another,” she shot back, and took a healthy swig. “And call the waitress over. Someone needs a refill.”

  “Someone needs to get laid,” I shot back, then turned to scan the room for the waitress. I caught her eye as she was offloading a tray of empties at the bar, and she nodded. “She just showed up in the monitor.”

  “Your monitor’s not that big,” Shelly said. “There’s no room for her in there.”

  “That’s what you’re worried about in all this?” I shook my head in disbelief. “Look, she talked to me, OK? She told me that I needed to help her. She told me….” I couldn’t repeat the rest of it. “She told me a lot of things,” I added lamely. “And she talked about Terry.”

  “That must have been skeevy as all hell.” Shelly looked like she was about to say something more, but the waitress chose that moment to appear. “What else can I get you?”

  “Two more of the same,” Shelly announced. “And we’ll start a tab. Ryan, give the nice woman your credit card.”

  I dug out my wallet and tossed the MasterCard to the server. “What’s your name,” I asked.

  “Leah,” she answered, checking the back of the card for a signature. “You got a picture ID to go with this?”

  I flashed my driver’s license at her. She looked at it, nodded. “Good enough. Two more Harps and two more Bushmills?”

  “Just the Harps, I think,” I said, as Shelly looked daggers at me. “For now,” I amended.

  “Got it.” Leah leaned over the table. “Is it done?”

  “It’s done,” Shelly answered, and leaned back. “What do you think?”

  Leah looked at the table, then looked at me, and then flicked her glance back and forth a few more times before saying anything. “It’s good. It’s really good. I don’t know how you did it, but….” She looked at me again. “Yeah.”

  “Thanks,” Shelly said. I looked from her to the waitress and back again, and then down to the table. By then, though, Shelly had already run her arm across the tabletop and wiped the sketch away.

  “What was it?” I asked. Shelly and Leah looked at each other, sharing a wordless moment of disgust at the male of the species, and then one went off to fetch our drinks while the other stayed to keep badgering me.

  “Now, what did she say to you?” The emphasis Shelly put on the word made it clear she wasn’t comfortable with it, didn’t actually believe it, or at least didn’t want to.

  “Personal stuff,” I answered, shifting uncomfortably. “Look, is this really necessary?”

  She looked me in the eye, and gradually I stopped fidgeting. “I’d say so,” she finally said. “Come on, Ryan, talk it out. I can see you’re still shaken up. Just tell me and maybe we can figure out what to do next. After all, I’ve seen that…thing, too.”

  I shook my head. “She’s not a thing. She’s Blue Lightning.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  I started ticking off the evidence I’d come up with on my fingers. “One, she looks like the main character.”

  “The main character has no face,” Sarah interrupted. “This chick’s clearly got one, at least if you believe that video feed we got off Terry.”

  “Her face changes depending on the person she’s talking to.” I thought for a minute, struggling to find the best way to explain it. “It’s their idea of what she should look like.”

  Shelly looked unconvinced, so I plowed on. “She only started showing up after the project got cancelled. All the weird stuff that’s happening, like my phone freaking out, it’s Blue Lightning-related. She got into a log file as I was looking at it. She’s the only explanation for the screenshots and the leaks. And most importantly,” I’d saved the best for last, “she told me. Not in so many words, but…she told me.”

  There was silence, then. Shelly stared at me. I stared down at the table and wondered wha
t she’d drawn. “That’s not possible, you know,” she finally said.

  “I know.”

  “It’s just a video game. It’s not a person. It’s not alive. It doesn’t have…superpowers, or whatever this thing can do.”

  “I know.”

  “It shouldn’t be real. It can’t be real!”

  “I know. But it is.”

  As Leah dropped off the new round of beers, Michelle settled into a sulky silence. “I don’t understand,” was all she said, and then attacked the beer fiercely.

  I took it a little more slowly. “I agree it should be impossible. But it is. I know it. You know it. Terry sure as hell knows it.”

  “Screw Terry,” she said, and drank more beer. “Screw all of this. I should quit.”

  “Don’t run out on me, Shelly,” I said. I was surprised to find that I meant it. “There’s got to be some logic to this thing.”

  “Logic? You want logic? How’s this, then? The game gets cancelled, but because everyone’s put so much into it, it gets a little boost of love or belief or whatever, and that’s enough to bring it to life. And now it wants to say thank you by giving everyone a big, sloppy kiss? Sorry, I don’t swing that way.” She spat the words out like they tasted bad and washed her mouth clean with beer after each sentence.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll play along. So everyone sweated so much and loved the game so much that it woke up. And then, what, the guys on the black project kept it alive?”

  “It did show up to Terry first, right?” She finished her beer and signaled to Leah for another one.

  “That we know of, yeah.” I thought about it. “Though maybe not. You remember the Powerpoint?”

  She nodded. “The one where neither of us made the changes, and - oh God, I’d almost forgotten about that. You think it was-”

  “Yeah. I think it was. And—bear with me here, because this is going to sound shitty— maybe she’s more solid to me because, I don’t know, there’s more of me in her?”

  “That’s gross, Ryan.” Michelle frowned.

  “For God’s sake, Michelle.” She had the good grace to look slightly embarrassed, and I went on. “Seriously, my job is to hold the vision of the game, right? The dream of it. Everyone else kicks in, but everyone else has, I dunno, a specific part of it that’s theirs. Levels and features and objects. But the way they all come together? Eric keeps telling me, that’s mine.”

  Shelly pursed her lips to one side. “Jesus, you’re an egotistical bastard. But you might be right. Ah, hell. Where’s the next beer?”

  “Coming,” I said, as I saw Leah cresting through the sea of rugby fans, now mostly wobbly in their chairs or standing under the television.

  “Good.” She grabbed my pint glass and took a drink. “You should finish yours.”

  “I’m driving,” I reminded her. “Besides, it’s got your germs on it now.”

  She missed the joke, or maybe she dodged it. “Never bothered you before.”

  I said nothing, just looked away, embarrassed.

  “Oh, come on, Ryan. I’m just messing with you.”

  “Yeah.” I grabbed one of the menus and changed the subject. “Do you want anything to eat? I hate drinking on an empty stomach.”

  “God, yes.” Leah arrived at our table with more beer. “Water for my next round,” I told her, and she made a note of it. “And an order of the potato skins to split, and I’ll have the chicken sandwich, and my friend usually gets the shepherd’s pie.”

  “Coming up.” She turned on her heel, vanishing into the crowd, half of which was now doing an unintelligible chant for one team or another.

  “They’re having fun,” Shelly said softly. She put the menu down. I nodded. “Are you still having fun? With what we do, I mean. Is it fun for you?”

  “The stuff with the weird blue glowing woman or the bit where we make games?”

  “Either. Both. Is one enough to put up with the other. If it is, what the hell is wrong with us? This isn’t funny, Ryan. ”

  I thought about it for a second. “What brought that on?” I finally found myself asking,. “I mean, we’re in the fun business. We make games.”

  Shelly finished my beer, maybe a little faster than I would have expected. “That’s not the same thing. We make things for other people to have fun with, sure. But do you actually have fun doing this?” The empty glass hit the table with a clank, turned upside down for emphasis.

  I looked at her, at the open question on her face, then looked down at my drink. There was still some head on the beer, so I poked at it with my index finger and drew a little smiley face in the foam. “See?” I said. “You’re not the only artist here.”

  Shelly snorted but didn’t back down. “You’re not answering the question.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “It’s not an easy question to answer.”

  “Best shot?”

  I nodded. “Best shot. No, it’s not fun.” I saw Shelly lean forward, but I held up a hand to stop her. “It’s not fun, and it was never about fun for me. I mean, there are bits of it that are a lot of fun, that I really enjoy, but those are chrome. They’re not the heart of it for me.”

  “Then what is?” She cocked her head sideways and rested it on her palm.

  “Creating something,” I said, after a long minute of looking for the right words. “Dreaming something up, and getting everyone else to buy into that dream and share it and make it better, and then making it happen. And there’s more, there’s always more. Maybe what we do is going to be something no one has ever seen before. Maybe some kid sitting in his living room is going to see what we made and go “Whoah!” and tell his friends “You gotta see this!” and have that little bit of magic happen to him from what I—what we—dreamed up and worked so damn hard on.”

  I was half up out of my seat now, pointing and waving my arms and thumping my hand on the table for emphasis, before I noticed her looking at me. There was a question in her eyes, but a different one than she’d been about to ask a minute ago. “Shelly?” I said.

  “Thank you, Ryan.” She took a long, deep, shuddering breath and turned her face to the wall. “Thank you for telling me that.”

  “It’s just the truth,” I told her, and dropped back into my seat. “That’s really all I’ve got to keep me going in this.”

  “It’s all you’ve got,” she answered. She waited a long time before continuing. “Not everyone has that. There are people in there who really do think this is fun, and God bless them for it. And there are people in there who are convinced that they could never, ever do anything else in a million years. So they’re stuck doing this if they don’t want to be working the deep fryer at a McDonalds, and they’ll never get out until they’re pushed, and they hate every minute of it because they’re supposed to be having fun, cause it’s games, right? And there are people who got in and got settled and then figured out that it’s not what they want, but they’re caught, because the money’s just good enough that they can’t walk away and start over.”

  “And what about you,” I asked her, leaning across the table to put my hand on her arm for comfort. “None of those sound like you.”

  Michelle turned to me, her eyes wide open and serious. “I’m one of the ones who doesn’t know what else to do, Ryan,” she said quietly. “I’m one of the ones who knows I’m really good at this but doesn’t know why. And then every so often, someone like you comes along, someone who really believes in this stuff and who makes it sing, and that’s enough to pick me up and carry me along for a year or two. That’s enough to give me a reason to keep coming back for more. And when that dream isn’t there, then….” She shrugged, and to cover her embarrassment she noisily tossed down the rest of her beer.

  I pulled my hand away. For a moment, I thought she was going to grab it and hold it in place, but her fingers only twitched and didn’t move, didn’t reach for mine.

  “It’s okay,” I said, not knowing what else there was to say.

  “It’s
not okay.” She shook her head. “I hate it. I hate not being able to find whatever it is that I need to drive me on my own. I hate having to latch on to something else. It’s why I hate you. Because you don’t have to.”

  “You hate me?” I sat back, and pulled my hands off the table entirely. “I thought we were, well, friends, or something.”

  I got a wan smile in return. “Just a little bit,” she said. “God, watching you get hyped up about Blue Lightning, about all the cool stuff that was going in there…you really picked up the room and carried it, you know? It was like falling in love. You loved it, so we loved it. We all believed in that game, Ryan. I believed in it.”

  “Terry still believes in it,” I said softly. “And I’m starting to.”

  “Well, I don’t,” Shelly leaned forward across the table. “I believe in you. Even when I hated you, you made me fall in love with an idea. No wonder it’s sticking around. If I were a ghost of something you’d dreamed up, I’d stick around, too.”

  “Shelly, I….” I sat for a moment, with her almost looking up at me in the way she used to, once upon a time, when I loved her. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Don’t say anything.” She smiled. “Just do me a favor. If you can find a way to believe, just a little bit, in this new crap thing we’re working on, I’d like that. I’d really like that a lot.”

  “I’ll try,” I heard myself say. “No promises.”

  Her words came out almost a choke, almost as a sob. “Your promises were never worth much anyway.” She slid out of the booth. “I’ll be back in a minute. Don’t eat all the skins when they show up, all right?” Without another word, she headed for the rest rooms.

  I watched her go, at least as far as dignity would allow, then just stared at the wall thinking about what she’d said.

  The clank of a plate landing on table yanked me back to reality. Leah set down silverware and a giant offering of what I presumed were potato skins, a bubbling volcanic mass of day-glow cheese product and bacon and chives with a thundercloud of sour cream in the center. “Your meals will be out in a couple of minutes,” she said. “Eat fast.”