Vaporware

by Richard Dansky

  I read it from home.

  For about ten minutes after Michelle had run from my office door, I’d just sat there, paralyzed. I was afraid she’d come back, afraid Blue Lightning would come back, afraid Eric would come back, afraid any move I made would result in disaster or chaos or another step into the abyss I could feel myself sliding into with each interaction.

  Eventually, gingerly, I found it in me to scoop up Shelly’s papers. They were a printout of my notes with her comments on them, I saw. Maybe she’d wanted to go over them, or perhaps just leave them there. A peace offering? I didn’t know. But I did know that I didn’t want to sit in that office any longer.

  I sent a “Not feeling well—going home” email around the company. Some of them would no doubt laugh, thinking Shelly had kicked my ass. Let them, I decided. I’d work on getting their respect back another day. Today, there were bigger things I needed distance from. I took another minute to put some key docs on my flash drive, then thought a minute and added what I had of the Blue Lightning files as well. There was enough room, although barely, with the hundreds of megs of sketches and screenshots that were included, and maybe by studying what there was of Blue Lightning I could figure out what she wanted, or how to stop her.

  A ping, a disconnect, and I was ready to go. Eric brushed by me in the hallway, opened his mouth as if to say something, and then just shook his head. “Feel better,” he finally called out as I headed for the door.

  But there were no further incidents as I went home. The iPod didn’t misbehave, no mysterious female figures appeared in my rearview, and the weirdest thing that happened was that I hit a run of four green lights in a row.

  It didn’t reassure me.

  I left Sarah a message on her voicemail, telling her I’d come home early and that I’d be making dinner. I didn’t tell her about the fight with Michelle, or about lunch with Leon, or about the visitations I’d had in my office, natural or otherwise. Then I pulled something roughly steak-shaped out of the freezer to defrost, threw it on the counter, and went upstairs to pretend to work.

  By the time I’d finished with emails, Michelle’s included, I was bored. All of the questions I had to deal with seemed to have obvious answers—yes, we wanted to keep the weapons selection scroll horizontal, the same as all the other menus in the game; no, we didn’t want to incorporate a matchmaking feature that bracketed potential players by age group. With each email I felt myself getting increasingly exasperated, with the senders and with myself for my impatience. After all, these were questions that needed to be asked, decisions to be confirmed, details that needed to be ironed out with all parties lest someone interpret a conversation the wrong way and end up pouring weeks of effort into work that would have to be thrown out. Answering those emails was part of the daily routine and far from the most onerous aspect of it. The problem, really, was me.

  “Bored now,” I told the computer as I hit Send on the last answer. In response, it gave me the ping of an incoming message.

  “Great. One more,” I muttered, and clicked it open. It was, I saw with some interest, from Terry. Reflexively, I looked for oddly-named attachments, knowing even as I did so that suspecting Terry of sending along viruses was just plain silly. Besides, if he did send one along, there would be no way I’d spot it.

  The email itself was brief and to the point. It read: ARE YOU IN? 4 HER, NOT ME.

  I stared at it for a while, then typed a response but didn’t send it. Instead, I popped my USB key into the computer and opened up the folder of Blue Lightning documents I’d taken home. For a moment, I hesitated. Technically, I was still working. It was not something I needed to be spending time on.

  More than that, though, opening them felt like opening a door. It was an acknowledgement, somehow, that I had been talking to Blue Lightning, and that I was responding to her presence.

  To her need.

  “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” I muttered, and scrolled down the list. They sat there, innocent and harmless like a line of rattlesnakes looking the other way. Weapons systems. Simulation. AI. Narrative. Everything that had gone into the concept of Blue Lightning. And in those files, I knew, were gaps, places that were marked “TBD” or “Finish later” or just left achingly, gapingly blank.

  She wanted me to fill those places in. She wanted Terry and whoever else he might be working with to realize them. She wanted to live.

  I checked the dates on the file. All were April or earlier, all predated the project’s cancellation, if only by a single day. They were fossils, insects stuck in amber, a look back at something that had died.

  I clicked the first one open. It was the narrative doc, a simple one to look at first. The story of the game was here, along with the character histories and motivations, what there was of the world bible, and so forth. It was as resolutely non-technical as anything in the bunch, and I’d selected it precisely for that reason. Looking at this was just getting reacquainted with the game, not making a promise. Besides, I knew everything in it already, knew it by heart and memory.

  Paragraphs skipped by. I read a few, cringed at clunky prose or stuff that should have been updated, and hit PageDn to keep rolling. But the spirit of the game was there, clean and strong and vibrant. I could feel where the good ideas connected, where they got together and sang, and where the stuff that didn’t quite ring true waited patiently to be replaced with words that were more inexpressibly Blue Lightning.

  Almost unconsciously, I found myself correcting mistakes, tightening grammar and fixing spelling errors, arranging the document in its funeral best. From there, it was a small step to adding phrases, filling in small gaps, making connections that were obvious upon a fresh read-through, deleting passages that had outstayed their welcome. It was a light edit, a toe dipped back in waters I’d abandoned.

  And at the very end of it were two words I hadn’t typed.

  THANK YOU.

  Shuddering, I closed the doc and re-opened my email to Terry. Other messages had come in, other questions needing to be answered, but I ignored them.

  We need to talk, I wrote back to Terry, and sent it. Then I shut the computer down, turned off the power strip, and pulled the plug out of the wall for good measure.

  * * *

  Sarah found me sitting on the couch when she got home, fast-forwarding through a month’s worth of DVRed episodes of MythBusters. “Hi.” She leaned over the back of the couch to kiss me.

  “Hi,” I said back. “I’ll make dinner if you want.”

  She didn’t move, resting on the couch back to keep her face near mine. “That’s it? I’ll make dinner? What about hello, what about how was your day, what about glad you’re home, now let’s have passionate sex on the coffee table, huh?” It was said with a smile I could hear, laced with pleasure at finding me home.

  I reached back to touch her face with my fingertips and turned away from the TV. “Sorry, honey. Just a weird day, that’s all.” I dug up a decent attempt at a smile and let it crawl onto my face. “I’m really glad you’re home.”

  “I can tell,” she said, tousling my hair. “What happened?”

  “More of the same,” I said, feeling oddly unwilling to share the details. “I’m probably taking it more seriously than I need to.”

  Her finger tickled my ear as her other hand slid across my chest. “You’re right. You need to stop worrying about that stuff, and about ghost women who don’t really exist, and instead you need to start worrying about the real live woman you’ve got right next to you.” Her breath was warm in my ear, promising a serious threat to the furniture’s structural integrity and more.

  “I love you,” I said. I covered her hand with my own. “And you’re right. I shouldn’t be thinking about this.”

  Sarah bounced back up like she was on springs. “But right now, you’re distracted. ‘sokay.” She leaned down to kiss the top of my head. “Make dinner. I’ll go upstairs and change out of my work clothes, and we can discuss this again,” she paused dramatically,
“later.”

  Without waiting for me to answer, she bounced off. There were footsteps on the stairs as she headed up, and that encouraged me to hoist myself off the couch and toward the kitchen.

  My head was still in the fridge when she came back down, anxiously scanning the crisper drawer for something that could conceivably be added to the steak to provide a vague nutritional benefit.

  “The hamper’s getting full,” she announced, and sneezed once. The sound startled me into an abrupt collision with one of the refrigerator shelves. Bottles clanked and teetered, and I reeled back rubbing the back of my head and mumbling “Ow.”

  “Oh, honey, I’m sorry.” Sarah stepped back out of my way, a look of concern on her face. I waved her off.

  “No big deal,” I said, and backhanded the refrigerator door shut. “The steak isn’t defrosting fast enough. How do you feel about pizza?”

  “Ethiopian?” she countered hopefully. I nodded as I stood up. “Good, then. And I’ll do laundry tomorrow, unless you’re out of socks or something.”

  “I just don’t want to lose any more fights with our appliances,” I told her, and kissed her forehead, and then led her out the door.

  * * *

  The last thing Sarah said to me before heading to work in the morning was that I was suddenly racking up serious boyfriend points.

  “Bachelor party coming up,” I told her. “We’re going to Diamond Girls, and I need to have enough boyfriend points that you’ll let me go.”

  She’d laughed at that, and then left. I watched her go and shivered. The air conditioning was turned up just a touch too much, enough to raise goosebumps on my arms, and I adjusted the thermostat down in preparation for leaving. The temperature seemed to change almost immediately, as if it were glad to adjust itself to what I wanted. I stared at the thermometer on the wall for a long moment to be sure that nothing actually had changed and got the mute evidence of numbers to tell me I was imagining things. Still, there was a sense of tension loosening, of something tight in the house easing away from snapping once I’d closed the door behind Sarah.

  Then again, the most likely suspect for that was me and my own guilty conscience. Best, then, to get to work, to a space I wasn’t tainting with lies, and to focus on something I actually could do.

  Like, for example, talk to Terry.

  He wasn’t in my office when I arrived, but it didn’t take him long to send me a chat message once I logged on to the network. It read, LUNCH.

  I answered in the affirmative, then settled in to try to work. The unanswered questions from yesterday were still there, with a plus-sized batch of fresh ones. There were three meetings on the schedule, two before lunch and one after, and a progress report for BlackStone that I needed to get moving on as well. All in all, it was a perfectly normal workload for a perfectly normal day, which didn’t keep the minutes from dragging past. A couple of times, emails came back requesting clarification on my clarifications, and then clarifications on those. Eventually, I stopped answering.

  It wasn’t until nearly one that Terry appeared outside my door. “Are you ready?” he rasped as I looked up from the meeting notes I’d been trying to compile for nearly an hour.

  “Yeah,” I told him, and then noticed the shadows behind him. “What are they doing here?”

  He turned and looked. I could see faces now, Lucas and the others he’d been hanging with in their little cloud of suspicious smoke. “They’re all in this. They’re all part of this. They should be there.”

  I caught myself frowning. “I wanted to talk to you, not the entire Cub Scout troop.”

  Terry just stared at me for a minute. “Maybe they have something to say. Or maybe they deserve to hear what you’ll say. It’s not all about you, Ryan.”

  “No, it’s about her,” I answered, and got nods and murmurs in return. “Tell you what, then. Let’s go grab a conference room or something and do this.”

  “I don’t want to meet here,” Terry said, the lines on his face pulled down in a clown-painting frown. “It’s not the sort of thing Eric should be walking in on.”

  “Then you probably shouldn’t have everyone hanging out in the hall in front of his office,” I pointed out. Terry turned around in a panic, and I hauled myself up out of my chair. “Fine. Have it your way. Let’s go grab McDonalds or something. I’ll even buy everyone a Happy Meal.” I marched out past him, and, as if by reflex, Lucas and a couple of the others followed.

  Terry didn’t. He just said, “You don’t have to be a dick about it,” and then stalked along, careful to keep his distance.

  * * *

  In the end there were six of us. Terry, another engineer, Lucas, two other artists, and me. There was no one from QA, no level design or project management. It was just a bunch of guys who, for all intents and purposes, could be hanging out for any reason at all.

  “Is this the whole black project?” I asked. They flicked looks back and forth while silently deciding how to answer that one.

  “Yeah,” Terry said finally, which earned him a disgusted look from Lucas’ wingman. “So far, anyway.”

  I waved a french fry around like a pointer. “How long have you been working on it?”

  “Pretty much right from when she got cancelled,” he admitted.

  Lucas jumped in to clarify things. “It was just Terry at first. The rest of us were looking to, I don’t know, keep her alive, I guess. Not lose what we’d done.”

  “So you started working black. And when did she start talking to you?”

  Terry’s food sat in front of him, untouched. I could see it slouching visibly toward room temperature. He ignored it and practically snarled at me. “Hasn’t she been talking to you all along? Didn’t you see her in your head from the beginning? Didn’t you hear her?”

  “Not like that,” I said softly. “And I never touched her.”

  “You will,” he said bitterly. “Oh, you will.”

  “Dammit, I don’t want to! I just want to know if it’s worth my time and my sanity to work with you guys on this, because honestly right now I’m not sure if I’m going nuts or not.”

  “You’re not,” Lucas reassured me. “We’ve all seen her. We’ve all talked to her.” He paused. “She talks to Terry more. But she talks about you.”

  “Great.” I wiped my forehead with a napkin. “I think I’m flattered. But you’re really not helping the whole ‘not nuts’ thing right now.”

  Terry stared down at the table, not meeting my eyes. “It all seems crazy. I know. I remember the first time I saw her. I was working late trying something with her code, and she…reached out. Reached right out of the monitor. Offered me her hand. And I took it, and I was hers. I understood.”

  “Understood what?”

  It was Lucas who answered. “What she was. What she needed. Why we needed to be the ones to finish her, and what that would mean.”

  “Would it mean that I’d stop having a freaky naked blue chick appear in my—” I nearly said “girlfriend’s dreams” or “document files” or a dozen other things. Instead, I ended lamely on “work,” and dared anyone to tell me I’d thought of saying anything different.

  Terry sighed. “Why does it always have to be a joke? You’re smarter than that. We all know it, and we all know you believed in her, back when she was our project. Why don’t you admit it—you want to finish her as much as we do.”

  “Maybe,” I said hesitantly. “So, if I were hypothetically to help you out, what would you want from me?”

  He looked at the others before answering. “It’s not what I want. It’s what she wants. And she wants you.” Each word was ground out bitterly, the verbal equivalent of someone turning big rocks into small ones with a tiny, tiny hammer.

  “Because?” I let the word hang there. Terry’s face got red; Lucas rushed in to fill the gap.

  “Because she wants you to finish her. There are parts of her that are missing, and she needs to know what they are.”

  I shook my head.
“Why don’t you guys just fill it in, then? Ignore the documentation like you always do, and there you go. There she goes.”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” Terry said, after swallowing a few times to get himself able to speak. “We could make stuff up, yeah, but that wouldn’t be the original vision. That wouldn’t be the missing parts of her. It just wouldn’t fit, and she’d be hurt because of it. In pain. Crippled.”

  Lucas nodded. “She needs the stuff you never wrote down that belongs to her. Until she gets it, she’s incomplete.”

  I thought about that for a moment. “And then what?”

  Terry blinked. “Then what what?”

  “Then what happens? I finish the design, and you guys,” I waved in their rough direction, “implement it, and then what happens? Does she go away? Transmit herself to the Sony plant and get discs pressed of herself? What does she do?”

  “It doesn’t matter. She’ll be free.” Terry’s voice was dreamy. “After that, it’s all details.”

  “Free.” I stood up. “Free,” I repeated, walking to the door. “Will that be a good thing?”

  “It’s better than being broken. Or forgotten,” Terry said, softly. “Our dreams shouldn’t be forgotten.”

  “Not unless they’re nightmares,” I said, and walked out.

  When I got back to the office, I sent Terry an email. It read, I’ll think about it. I didn’t sign it, but I did bcc it to my home account, and then I started prepping for another meeting.

  * * *

  It ran for nearly two hours, which was about an hour longer than I thought it needed to. What was clear from the beginning was what we had time to do; what took forever was figuring out what we had to leave on the chopping block in order to get there. In the end, nobody was exactly happy with the decisions we’d made, which meant that everyone’s ox got gored a little bit and that we’d probably made a mistake somewhere. In my experience, it was usually safer to hack out one system rather than snip out bits and pieces of a lot of them—the game tended to end up with a lot of not-quite-satisfying elements that way—but no one was willing to either throw their favorite on the pile or mandate that someone else’s go, so we ended up with lots of little trims everywhere.