Vaporware

by Richard Dansky

  “The only thing getting them fired right now”—and he pointed a long finger straight down at me—“is your word. So if you really don’t want this to happen, just tell me you’re concussed or something similar, and I’ll call Sarah and she’ll come in and take you to the hospital. On the other hand, you might want to think about whether it’s best for all concerned if they go. Really, this one’s all on you.”

  I sat there for a moment, staring at my shoes. My head throbbed, the pulsing of the blood in my temples nearly deafening.

  “Four?” I finally croaked. “Why just four?”

  “We need Terry,” Eric said, his voice eminently reasonable. “Now, do you need help, or can you make it to HR on your own?”

  * * *

  The building was mostly empty by the time I left Marie’s office. She’d been very calm and professional about the whole thing, taking my statement and making me verify each element before attaching them to the appropriate termination notices.

  It felt a lot like I was being given another chance to back down, to back off and take my chances. Though every word I gave Marie was true, it felt worse than the lying I’d done, and while none of it was lies, it wasn’t all of the truth, not by a long shot.

  Then again, I was painfully aware that telling the whole truth wasn’t going to help my campaign to avoid having Sarah step into the building and risk an encounter with Leon or Shelly. Or, for that matter, with someone who’d talked to them, or who’d heard about what had happened, or who’d talked to someone who’d heard, or…the list went on, and the risk went up, and by the time I was done running it down I’d convinced myself that it was for the best that those four guys would be getting out of the studio and away from Blue Lightning. It would be safer for them, certainly.

  The thought that it would be less competition for me, I mostly stopped before it started. Mostly.

  Nobody said anything as I made my way back to my office, nobody stopped me or waved or asked me any questions. Folks going out the door kept on going, occasionally looking in my direction but not saying anything. It confirmed my suspicions that the story of my little tete-a-tete with Michelle had already gone viral, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some version of it didn’t pop up on gamer gossip blogs before suppertime.

  Wearily, I sat down behind my desk and tried to catch up. Thankfully, most of the email that had come in required no response. The vast majority were “new in build” announcements, communiqués sent to let everyone know that Something Had Changed. A few were forwarded humor posts. One was an internet meme image, a Sarcastic Wonka with the caption, TELL ME AGAIN HOW YOU DRINK YOUR COFFEE WITH OUR ASS. Not a one was a question about the game.

  The only email directed my way exclusively was from Dennis, who wanted to know how the new monitor was working out for me and to assure me that the new one was coming within a couple of days. Possibly. If everything went right with the requisitions.

  I started to answer him, then thought better of it. Instead, I picked myself up and headed over to his warren.

  He was neck-deep in a system when I got there. The box was on his desk and open, with various bits of its electronic guts sprawled out around it. I recognized a couple of hard drives, a high-end video card, and something that could have been a heat sink, but the sheer volume of components was overwhelming. There was no way any sane man could cram that much hardware into one case. For Dennis, it would be tough.

  “Just a minute.” His voice echoed from the vents at the back of the case. “Gotta do a little soldering here, and I’ll be right with you.” The smell of hot lead drifted then past me as I waited. There was nowhere to sit; every flat surface was covered in bits of hardware awaiting either reconnection or recycling.

  Finally, the sounds of banging inside faded, and Dennis stuck his head out. “Hey, Ryan! What’s up? I hear you were playing skull hockey in the break room, man.”

  “More like a gravity check,” I told him, and tried to smile. “Nothing too serious, except for some scrambled brains.”

  “Ahh, you can’t scramble what you ain’t got,” he said, grinning to take the sting out of it. “Now, what can I do for you?”

  Gingerly, I stepped to his desk. Nothing crunched underfoot as I did so. “It’s about the monitor….”

  “Oh, geez. Don’t tell me that one crapped the bed, too.”

  “No, I—”

  “Cause if it did, we can maybe use one of the seventeen-inchers until your new one comes in.”

  “Really, it—”

  “And I guess I’ll just have to put a rush on the new one I ordered for you, though Eric’s not gonna like what that costs.”

  “Seriously, Dennis, I—”

  He scratched his chin. “Maybe we could just go down to Best Buy and get one, and cancel the order. Or I could repurpose that one, and—”

  “Dennis!”

  He looked up, shocked, and blinked at me twice. “What, man? I’m thinking here.”

  “You don’t need to worry.” Almost without realizing it, I placed my hands on the desk and let them take my weary weight. “The monitor you got me is fine. It’s just fine, and right now I don’t think it would be good for morale if I got a shiny new expensive toy.”

  That got me another blink. “You’re saying you don’t want the new monitor?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  “Huh.” Dennis cocked his head and squinted at me. “You sure? I think maybe you hit your head harder than you thought.”

  “I’m sure,” I said. “If it’s too late to cancel it, give it to someone else. One of the artists will appreciate it, maybe. But I’ve got all I need.”

  He threw up his hands. “If you say so, man. But that’s gotta be the first time anyone’s ever turned down an equipment upgrade that I can remember.”

  “Brett Lewis turned down a widescreen monitor about a year back,” I reminded him.

  “Yeah, but that dude was looking at porn all the time and calling it ‘visual reference,’ and he didn’t want no one to see that freaky shit he was into.”

  “Look, when a man and a camel really love each other, it’s a beautiful thing. It’s not Brett’s fault the rest of us couldn’t understand that.”

  Dennis stared at me for a moment, then collapsed into laughter. “Damn, man. I thought I was the only one who remembered that stuff. Okay, you win. I’ll find someplace else for the monitor, but I won’t tell anyone. You’ve got until it arrives to change your mind, you hear?”

  I gave him a wry smile, the best I could manage. “And the sad thing was, we never even put the camel in the game.”

  “Stop it, man, just stop it.” Still laughing, he waved me out. I turned to go and nearly broke my toe as I did so, kicking a long metal lockbox. Instantly, Dennis stopped his giggles.

  “Dude! Watch it!”

  I stepped carefully over the box, which, on first examination, seemed to be in perfect repair. It was gunmetal gray and maybe two feet long, with a fold-off top held in place with a tiny Yale lock. Below that was a label with the Horseshoe logo on it and a series of dates. “Offsite backups?” I asked.

  He nodded. “About four months’ worth. Enough to basically bork the whole thing, if we lost ‘em. Eric asked to see ‘em. He wanted to check some usage patterns or something over the last couple of months on the Blue Lightning project. I told him he coulda got those from the network log files, but no.” Dennis’ hands went up in a grand Goth gesture of being put upon. “So I had to call up our offsite provider and jump through nine kinds of hoops just to get the shit back in the building.”

  I looked down at the box, then at Dennis. “Wait a minute. Those are our offsite backups? Did they make backups of the backups or something before sending them here?”

  “That, my friend, would cost extra. And don’t even get me started on putting this shit in the cloud.” Dennis gave a wicked little chuckle, then extended his hand. “Gimme the box, would you?”

  I bent down to pick it up. The me
tal felt unaccountably warm in my hands. “So if there was a fire or something, we’d be totally screwed for backups? It would all go poof?”

  Dennis reached out to take the lockbox. I handed it to him. “Mostly,” he said. “After the other ones he made me order get here, then we’ll really be up shit’s creek if something goes wrong. But,” and he placed the container on a sliver of clear space on his desktop, “the odds of that are a couple of zillion to one. What’s going to burn in this place? We even got fireproof carpets.” He dug a toe into the dried puke-brown stuff at his feet for emphasis.

  “People?” I asked.

  “No,” he corrected me. “People burn out. They don’t burn up.”

  “Maybe someone will get creative,” I told him, and then headed for the door. “Thanks again on the monitor thing, Dennis.”

  “Don’t mention it,” he said. By the time I was back in the hall, he was back inside the guts of the machine he’d been working on when I came in, crooning sweet nothings to its electronic innards.

  “At least it isn’t camels,” I said to myself, and walked away.

  * * *

  The trick, I decided as I walked from Dennis’ cave to my own, was to get out of the building before Blue Lightning showed up and told me what she thought about getting her other minions canned. Marie wasn’t going to call them in until the morning, but if Blue Lightning could get into our email system, she could get anywhere on the internal network, and that included human resources.

  I discounted the possibility of Terry and company waiting for me in the parking lot with a tire iron as tomorrow’s disaster.

  Eric, I saw as I headed down the hall, had already taken off. Indeed, that entire end of the building had already emptied, unusual for a Thursday afternoon. Normally that was the work-late night, the desperate push to get everything done so everyone could feel justified in getting out at a decent hour on Friday.

  Today, however, it was just me, and I intended to rectify that as quickly as I could. A quick email check showed nothing new worth mentioning. Saving the documents I had open and checking them back in to the database took another minute; shutting down the other apps not much time beyond that. I put the desktop into standby mode, packed up the laptop, and shoved it into its bag, then looked around. There was no sign of anything untoward, no sign of life other than my own movements. All there was to do was let Sarah know I was coming home, kill the lights, and get out.

  I pulled out my cell phone and thumbed in the quick-dial for home. It rang twice, then Sarah picked up. “Hello?”

  “Hi.”

  “Ryan? Don’t tell me you have to stay late tonight.” Her voice was worried, not angry. “The lasagna’s in the oven already.”

  “No, no, no,” I said, doing my best to be reassuring. “It’s the exact opposite. I’m coming home now.”

  There was a pause, then a burst of static. Individual words came through, “can’t” and “what” and “call back.” Then it faded, letting me hear Sarah’s voice. “Ryan? Are you there? Ryan? This isn’t funny. Just let me know if you’re coming home tonight, okay?”

  “Sarah?” I said, and got that flat, dead tone that’s an absence of the phone’s mike picking up your voice, a sure sign that it wasn’t getting through. “Look, Sarah, if you can hear me—”

  “She can’t hear you,” Blue Lightning said, and then the connection dissolved into howling static.

  Deliberately, I put the phone in my pocket before turning to face her. It was a small thing, maybe, a way of demonstrating that I wasn’t entirely at her beck and call.

  If it worked, she didn’t show it.

  She was perched on one arm of the guest chair, balanced perfectly on something that should have supported neither her weight nor her pose. One foot in front of the other, crouched down like a hunting cat ready to leap upon its prey, she looked at me with wide eyes. “I could have done more than block your call, you know,” she said. “I can imitate your voice. I could call her and have her think it’s you. I could say terrible, terrible things to her and have her think you said them.”

  “Why didn’t you,” I said warily, and thought of “Sarah” supposedly calling Eric. “And why would you want to?”

  “Silly.” She leaped off the chair without so much as a millimeter’s disturbance in where it sat. “I wouldn’t do something like that. It’s not nice. Besides, I don’t need to do anything like that. You’re mine already. You just need a little more time to figure it out.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not anybody’s. And whether or not I…finish my work on you has nothing to do with Sarah.”

  She put a cool finger to my lips. A tiny spark jumped from her fingertip to the tip of my tongue, making me taste ozone and smoke. “It’s got everything to do with her. And here. And what you do from now on.” Her finger slid along the side of my mouth, catching the faintest hint of moisture between my lips, and trailed along my jawline. I found myself holding still, hardly breathing. She stepped closer to me, and I became aware of how intensely female this thing I’d created was, how much sexuality I’d hidden in her creation and my imagination. Her every move was a hint at what else that body might be capable of, in love or war or both. The sleekness of her skin, the play of muscle underneath it and the smooth curves of her flesh, all said “sex” even though she’d been designed to deal death.

  “Please,” I said. “I need to get home.”

  “Do you?” She stepped even closer, pressing her body against mine. I could feel the heat of her now, warm in all the right places to let me know she wanted me, and without wanting to I felt myself responding. “Maybe you should work late tonight. You’ve got so much to do.”

  One step back was all I had, and then my back was against the wall. I took it, and she closed with me. “I’m going home,” I told her, “And I’m doing it right now. We can talk tomorrow. We’ll talk tomorrow.” I gulped down air through a throat that felt like it had been twisted shut. “But not tonight. Not now.”

  “If you say so.” She laughed, and her finger tickled my ear before she pulled it away. “But I think you want to stay.”

  “Not tonight,” I said, trying to put a little more finality in my voice, and turned away from her. “That’s all I can say right now.”

  “Oh, all right.” Her voice dropped to a pouty whisper. “By the way, it was very selfish of you to get those other boys fired. You didn’t need to be jealous, though. You’re the one I really want. The one I really need.”

  “Is that true?” I asked, but she was already gone.

  Chapter 26

  “Good night,” I told Sarah, and kissed her on the back of her head.

  She sneezed. “Bless you,” I told her, and kissed her again.

  “It’s not funny.” She sniffled once, experimentally. “I’ve been sneezing all week when I come home.”

  “Not at the office?”

  “No.” She sniffled again. “And I have no idea why. It’s worst when I’m in here.”

  “Maybe you’re allergic to me,” I said, spooning up behind her. “Any minute now you’re going to break out with gigantic purple spots.”

  “Stop it,” she said, making feeble batting motions in my direction. “I think I need to go see an allergist.”

  “OK.” I held her for a minute. “I think I got some people fired today at work,” I said finally.

  “I was wondering.” She rolled over to face me. “You were acting so strange during dinner. Not that I wasn’t glad to have you home, but still.”

  “Weird day,” I admitted, “and a rough one. I got into some arguments at work, and I slipped in the break room, and then Eric called me on the carpet and I had to come clean about some stuff that I’d been sort of covering up for the guys.”

  “Oh, babe, I’m sorry.” She reached out to stroke my face gently, her fingers tracing up and down where a few hours ago, Blue Lightning had run one finger across.

  I tried not to think about that.

  “Are you all right
? Do we need to get you to a doctor?” I caught her hand in mine and wound our fingers together, held her tight, hand to hand and arm to arm.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I just need a good night’s sleep.”

  Sarah said nothing, but her look was one I’d seen before, the one she’d always used to let me know that I wasn’t getting away with anything when I tried to be brave.

  “Seriously,” I told her, “I’m all right. A lot of things have gone wrong, and there’s a long way to go, but,” and I gathered myself to say it, “I think I’m finally headed in the right direction. With work, with us, with dealing with some old stuff, all of it.”

  “Uh huh,” she said, and sneezed. “Any more ghost sightings?”

  “No. Not that it would have made a difference today.”

  “If they got fired, sweetheart, it’s because of something they did. They can’t blame you for not protecting them forever when they were doing something stupid.”

  “Yes, but….” The words ran dry. “I wish there had been another way,” I finished lamely.

  “It’s their fault, not yours,” Sarah said firmly. “Now stop worrying about it, and get some sleep.”

  “You sure you want to sleep?” My fingers left hers and traced a line down her arm. “I’m not too tired.”

  “What exactly are you suggesting?” She caught my hand with hers and brought it to her mouth and kissed each fingertip. “Don’t tell me you’re in the mood all of a sudden, now that you’ve made your grand confession.”

  “Maybe.” I moved a little closer to her. “And maybe you just made me realize how lucky I am to be with someone like you.” The back of my fingers brushed her cheek, then she turned away.

  “I’m sorry, babe,” she said. “I’m just really tired. And some of us don’t have flextime.” She curled up around her pillow. Half the blankets went with her.

  “It’s OK,” I heard myself saying. “I love you.”