“I’m not quitting,” I said wearily. The waitress swooped by and grabbed the check and my card, warbling “I’ll be back with this in a minute!” I revised my estimate of her age upwards to maybe seventeen and precocious and watched her fade off into the crowd. “It’s just…there’s something about Shelly you should know, OK?”
I was surprised to hear the words coming out of my mouth. I had no intention of confession, of messing up my friendship and working relationship in one blow. Nor was the guilt I felt over the whole thing an unbearable, obsessive thing. Instead, it scuttled around the edges of my thoughts, there when I talked to Sarah or tried to talk to Shelly, but mostly shoved into the dark corners of my mind with the excuse that there was nothing I could do about it.
“Shelly?” Leon’s eyes narrowed. “I thought we were cool with all that. We are cool, right? Right?”
I opened my mouth to tell him that no, things were profoundly uncool, and no words came out.
“You okay, man? You look like you’re choking or something.”
I realized I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go forward and confess, couldn’t go back and pretend I hadn’t started this conversation. I was stuck, balanced in the middle before taking the plunge into an even deeper professional and personal nightmare than the one I was already in.
“Come on, Ryan, what’s the deal?” Leon was half out of his seat now, busily trying to determine whether he needed to beat the crap out of me or save my life. I waved him back down, even as my throat squeezed any words I might have said into voiceless rubble.
“Here’s your check, gentlemen. Have a terrific day!” Salvation came in the form of the waitress. She put the credit card slip and my card down on the table and slid both across to me. “Come back and see us again!”
“We will,” I finally croaked, and took the check. Leaving her a large tip, I signed, flipped it over, and tucked my card back into my wallet. Experimentally, I swallowed a couple of times to see if my throat was letting air through for a change. It was, or at least swallowing only felt like I’d sucked down a pocketknife instead of a Bowie.
Leon was still looking at me, eyes narrowed. “You were saying, man?”
I stood. “Look,” I said, and it came out a dry rasp, “I just wanted to…I don’t know how to say it. Just be careful with Shelly, OK? She gets really passionate about stuff, and sometimes you get caught up in it, and the next thing you know you’re hurting, bad. OK?”
“Oh-kay.” He looked puzzled. “You don’t need to warn me, bro. I can take care of myself. And passionate”—he licked his lips in cartoon lasciviousness—“is just fine by me.”
With a sinking feeling, I nodded. I’d tried to tell him, I told myself. If he’d been thinking about what I said, he’d have known.
Whatever.
And as I stood there with a sick smile on my face, Leon pointed to the neon-faced clock on the wall. “Let’s get going, man. Like you said, gotta get the notes in order.”
“Yeah,” I followed him out. “Got to get everything in order.”
Terry and his crew were already in the parking lot when Leon and I left. They watched us pull out without making a move toward Terry’s car, and they were still watching us when we went around the corner and away.
Chapter 24
At five of one, I made my way to the conference room. A few of the level artists and designers were already in there, setting up to show off their sketches and rough map proposals for how they were going to translate Salvador over. I nodded, said a few hellos which might or might not have been answered, and then took the seat to the left of the head of the table. This was Shelly’s meeting, I reasoned. Might as well let her have the big chair.
More artists filed in. The clock hit one, then five after, then ten after. I looked around. No Shelly. Her absence didn’t seem to be slowing down the other artists, who were engaged in an animated conversation about some Eastern European tactical shooter they’d picked up pirated copies of. It hadn’t been released in the States yet and was, from what I could gather, “the shit.”
Experimentally, I cleared my throat. A couple of heads swiveled in my direction. “Uh, guys, isn’t Michelle supposed to be in on this meeting?”
One of the indistinct figures around the table—I recognized him by voice as Sean, the lead level designer—shook his head. He was seated at the end of the table, “driving” the presentation material, and his dreads caught the edge of the projector beam. “She said she wasn’t coming.”
“Wasn’t coming? She’s got to be here,” I said. “This is her meeting.”
Sean shook his head again, more slowly. “She said that she didn’t think she needed to be here because, and I quote, that prick Ryan is just going to pick whatever maps get him hard, anyway.” He paused for a minute. “Sorry, man. Should have told you sooner.”
Competing thoughts tied my tongue in knots as laughter raced around the table. She couldn’t just walk out on the meeting—she had a responsibility to the project, and to the team. If she had personal problems with me, it wasn’t right for her to drag the team into it. And the line about getting me hard was dangerously close to pulling Blue Lightning out into the open, which I didn’t think any of us wanted to do.
And, to my surprise, I wanted her there.
In the end, I waited for the laughter to stop and pulled out my phone. “Whatcha doing?” asked the guy sitting a few seats down. It was, I realized, one of the guys Terry had been talking with out in the smokers’ lounge the time we’d had that odd conversation. His name, I remembered now, was Lucas; he was beefy, heavyset, and unshaven. He wore an old Blue Lightning team t-shirt, and his unbrushed hair stood out like the silhouette of a palisade against the projector’s light.
“My job,” I said, and called Michelle. Without a word, I put the phone on speaker and slapped it down on the table. It rang seven or eight times without her picking up. Around the room, I could see the artists’ eyes, Michelle’s people’s eyes, watching me. The whites reflected the glow from the projected screen at the front of the room, the lurid colors of the Salvador project logo. It made them look oddly demonic, gave them the impression of being inhuman creatures waiting for some unspoken signal to pounce on the poor unsuspecting fool who’d walked into their lair.
Michelle didn’t answer. I tapped the phone to disconnect, then redialed It rang twice, loud and tinny, and someone picked up.
“Michelle?”
No one answered.
“Come on, Michelle. We need you down here for the multiplayer level concept review. We can’t wait for you forever.”
There was another pause, then Michelle answered. “You’re not really good with that word ‘need,’ Ryan. Go have your little meeting. Let me know how it comes out.”
Someone whistled. Sean muttered a single, drawled, “Daaaamn.” I felt my face flushing and fought the urge to hang up there and then.
“Come on, Michelle. This is an art meeting. Whatever we come up with here needs your signoff.”
“I’m sure whatever you come up with will be fine, Ryan dear.” Her tone was all sugary poison. “After all, you always make the best decisions.”
“This is not the time or the place –” I began, but didn’t get any further. Michelle’s voice, cutting, cut me off.
“You do whatever you want, Ryan. I’ll sit back here and make sure we make it,” and there was a pause then, a cold one, “pretty.”
Then she hung up.
I was left in the light from the screen, the phone dangling limply from my hand, the cord coiling back and forth while the rest of the room watched and giggled and said nothing. There was nothing they needed to say.
Shutting my eyes, I took one deep breath, then set the phone down carefully. Sean coughed, once, and said, “You think maybe we should reschedule?”
I shook my head. “No. You heard her. Sean, if you could leave the presentation with the top downs open, I’d appreciate it. I’ll send notes back after I’ve had a chance to look at
everything.”
He wrapped his arms around the computer possessively. “But we really should—”
“You heard her,” I said. We locked eyes for a moment, and then he looked away.
“Yeah, OK.” The other artists were already shuffling out of the room, golden rectangles of light spilling in to the darkness where the boardroom doors had been opened.
Lucas was the last one out. He stopped in the doorway, just a blocky silhouette, and turned to look at me.
“She isn’t going to like this,” he said.
“At this point, I don’t care what she likes,” I said, colder and meaner than I needed to. He shook his head and walked off, shutting the door behind him.
I waited a minute to make sure that the last of them were gone, then moved down to Sean’s chair and started skimming through the proposed level concepts. Most were excellent—a processing plant of some sort, an underground defense bunker, a desert missile base—and I resolutely gave them my full attention.
I did this even when the light in the room changed to include a harsh, blue glow. I ignored it for a while, until the light was bright enough to interfere with the images on the screen, and the sense of eyes burning into the back of my neck was too much to ignore. Then and only then did I turn around.
When I did, the light was gone, and I was alone.
* * *
The first timid knock on the door came an hour later, well after the next meeting the room was booked for was supposed to have started. I didn’t say anything, and after a moment, someone cracked the door and stuck their head in. It was Dennis, with a sheepish expression on his face. “Look, man, I don’t mean to rush you,” he said, “but we sorta got to get the room now, if that’s OK.”
“It’s fine,” I said, cutting him off. I disconnected Sean’s laptop from the projector and set it into its cool-down cycle before standing up. “Sorry I took so long.”
“It’s cool, man,” he said, still hanging on the door and layering each word with a heavy slather of calculated inoffensiveness. “If you need anything else—”
“I take it the whole building knows about my little chat with Michelle?”
He paused for a minute, mouth agape, and scratched his head. “I don’t think the QA guys have heard yet. At least, not most of them. Everyone else?” He shrugged as eloquently as he could with only one shoulder visible.
“Yeah.” I headed for the other door. “Could you make sure Sean knows I shut everything down? I know he’s got some tight deadlines, and I don’t want to disturb him.”
“Whatever, man,” Dennis said, and then I was out of the board room and into the light. Head down, I bulled my way back into my office. First things first: write up the notes and send them to the art team and around to the leads. Second things second: check the calendar to see if there were any more meetings with Michelle scheduled for the day and, if so, cancel them with prejudice. Third—
“Ryan. My office. Now.”
I didn’t need to look up to know who was speaking; I barely needed to check to see if my door was open. It was Eric’s voice, Eric’s commanding tone, Eric’s caustic disappointment I was hearing.
“Can it wait until I get these notes done?”
“I don’t know. Can it?”
I sighed. “Probably not.”
“Good call.” He came into my office and shut the door behind him. “Want to explain to me what the hell happened to turn a simple level concept review into a soap opera today?”
I didn’t stand up. He paced back and forth, turning his face to me every third or fourth word to see what effect they were having.
Keeping my tone even, I said, “I think Michelle is mad at me.”
Eric sputtered. “In other news, water remains wet. What the hell did you do to get her pissed off enough to pull that stunt?”
I coughed gently into my hand. “With all due respect, she’s the one responsible for the stunt-pulling. Shouldn’t you be calling her on the carpet instead of me?”
He stopped and stared at me. “Do you really want me asking her the hard questions?” he asked. “Do you think you’re going to like the answers I’m going to get out of her? That’s why you’ve got this chance to give me a plausible excuse so I can pretend we’re having business as usual and not a full lead-level implosion that could take the project down with it.”
With difficulty, I swallowed. “Got it. What do you want to hear?”
He looked at me like I was an idiot child playing with power tools. “Whatever the hell I can take back there and get Michelle willing to be in a room with you so the business of this company can go on, and so that my CD isn’t laughed at for being a thumb-dick every time he walks into a team room.”
“Right.” I thought about it for a minute. “Tell her I said she’s right,” I finally said. “And that the issue in question won’t be a bother anymore.”
Eric shook his head. “I thought you knew better than to stick it in the crazy.”
“I didn’t. Maybe she did.”
“Ah.” He stood there for a moment, hands clasped behind his back. “I’ll start this ball rolling, but it’s up to you to get it where it needs to go. Or something like that.”
I looked up at him. “I will eat crow, dirt, shit, or whatever, Eric, to get this project done. Whatever happened, whatever you think happened, I am not going to let it endanger either my work here or my relationship with Sarah. You can take that to the bank, and beyond that, I really don’t care.” I pulled up the pad I’d taken my notes on and started transcribing them.
“I see,” he said, and then he was gone. He shut the door behind him.
I concentrated on the notes, managing to extract some sort of coherent feedback from them over the space of the next hour. Pouring over the various map concepts I’d seen, I ranked them in order, made suggestions about changes to geometry that might jibe a little better with Salvador’s idiosyncratic AI and combat model, and otherwise made it clear that I’d looked at each one very carefully and professionally.
“You shouldn’t be the one who has to apologize,” a voice in my office said. I hadn’t heard the door open, but then again I hadn’t expected to.
“He’s right,” I said without turning around. Reflexively, I reformatted the notes to fit our standard format, an automatic process that somehow lent comfort and continuity. “I should apologize.”
“But why?” The room’s illumination grew brighter, acquiring tinges of bluish-white. “Not that I mind anything that slows down your other project.”
I attached the file to an email and addressed it to Sean, to Michelle, to Leon and Eric and a couple of other folks I thought would appreciate the contents. “It’s the company’s project,” I said tonelessly. “The sooner it gets done, the sooner the company gets paid, and the sooner we can move on to something else.”
“Something old?” There was a dreadful eagerness in her voice, and desperate longing, too. “You could go back to something you’d been working on, couldn’t you?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think BlackStone will let us.” A brief message went with the document, an explanation of what I was sending along amidst a raft of compliments for the level team on their work and ideas. “They want us working on their stuff, and I’m not sure when we’ll ever be able to break away.”
“Oh.” There was silence, crinkled at the edges by faint sounds of static and popping electricity. The hair on my arms stood up. “Ryan? Why won’t you look at me?”
I hit SEND. The email leaped away, into the system. A soft ping told me it was safely gone. “Because I don’t want to see you”
She laughed. “Don’t be silly. Of course you want to see me. You want to see all of me.”
“No, no I don’t.” I locked my eyes on the monitor, on the long list of emails demanding immediate answers. “If I see you now, I have to believe in you. If I see you in broad daylight, during working hours, then I have to admit you’re real.” A thought came to me. “You can’t walk in
to dreams, can you? Sarah—my girlfriend—said she dreamed about you.”
“You can tell the bitch she’s just dreaming.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
With a kick, she spun my chair around so that I was looking up at her. She stood, far too close, lithe and graceful, balanced on the balls of her feet as if she were about to turn my office into her own personal parkour workout. “It’s not supposed to,” she said. “Besides, don’t you know that women hate to share?”
“This isn’t happening.” I screwed my eyes shut. “This isn’t happening, this isn’t happening, this isn’t happening!”
“Tsk tsk tsk.” Her fingers traced a cold line down my cheek, one that somehow let warmth linger behind her fingers. “It is happening,” she said, her lips very close to my ear. “It’s just happening a bit slower than it might happen otherwise, because you’re not very good at admitting to yourself what you really want. Soon enough, everything will be where it needs to be.” The word “needs” was drawn out, a painful parody of Michelle’s scorn in the board room.
Someone knocked on the door. “Come in,” Blue Lightning said, even as I was shouting “Don’t!”
The door swung open. Shelly stood there, face grim, a sheaf of printouts in her hand. In an instant, her eyes took it all in: Blue Lightning leaning into me, my hands clutching the armrests of my chair, the twin charges oozing through the air of my office.
The printouts fell to the floor. “Ryan…,” Michelle said, even as my visitor turned and smiled and blew her a kiss. Then, without another word, she vanished.
“Shelly,” I said faintly, and then: “Help.”
She left the papers where they’d fallen, and ran.
* * *
Shelly’s response to the notes I’d sent was polite, precise, professional, and brief. She suggested one change in the prioritized map list I’d sent around, and then Okayed it.
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