by M. J. Scott
"All the more reason to relax now." Nat grinned at me as she coated her nails with iridescent polish.
"Forgive me if I don't find being held hostage on my couch relaxing," I grumbled.
"Be good, or no chocolate cake for dessert."
"You made cake?" The notion was cheering.
"I will. If you behave yourself."
"Blackmail."
"Absolutely. Now what do you want to watch next?"
She waved at the screen, but instead of neat squares of the program guide, the screen filled with a hissing fuzz of jumbled colors.
Nat swore. "What is up with everything?"
It had been one of those weekends. The lamp in my bedroom had blown not one but two bulbs in a row, our ancient syncaf machine had given up the ghost, and our net link had been temperamental all weekend. Now the screen.
Sara would've said the place needed cleansing. I figured it was just Murphy's law that everything would conspire against me when I was confined to quarters.
"Try rebooting," I suggested.
Nat nodded and picked up her datapad. Luckily, after an initial minute or so of irritated flickering, the screen came back to life. I settled back, hoping for something to distract me.
Monday morning, as advertised, there was a limo waiting out front to take me to my appointment. Less as advertised, Damon was inside.
"What are you doing here?" I asked. The car was already pulling away, so there was no chance to retreat to the safety of the sidewalk.
"Good morning." Damon held out an actual coffee mug. "Latte?"
I took the mug, unable to resist the rich smell wafting from it. Real coffee. "That didn't answer my question." I took another happy sniff, then sipped, trying not to moan as caffeine and sugar flowed over my tongue.
"I'm taking you to the clinic."
"Has anyone ever mentioned you're a control freak?" I muttered as I put the coffee down on the little tray table thingy in front of me and fastened my seat belt.
"I prefer to think of it as concerned for employee welfare."
I picked up the mug again and took another appreciative sip, trying to ignore how well he pulled off the suit jacket, T-shirt, and jeans look. "You escort all your employees to the doctor?"
"No. Just the annoying ones with pretty green eyes."
I choked on my coffee.
Pretty?
He thought my eyes were pretty?
What was I supposed to say to that? And how was I going to ignore him when he was complimenting me? I chose discretion as the better part of valor, pulling out my datapad and pretending to be absorbed by my newslink. The articles might as well have been written in Swahili; the only thing registering with my brain was the fact that this man, the one I was trying desperately not to let my hormones register as hot, thought I had pretty eyes.
It made me even more nervous than the imminent clinic visit.
Like I said, my mother liked her men tall and pretty. And in some ways, I was definitely my mother's daughter. Though I'd had years of carefully controlling that side of my nature, of only letting my libido loose on my terms. Damon Riley wasn't going to be the one to change that. Not if I had anything to say about it.
Dr. Barnard scanned my vitals and proceeded to gently prod my arm. "Any unusual pain?"
"No, I've been fine. My wrist has been sore but less each day."
He clucked his tongue. "Good. That sounds like everything is healing well. Let's test the chip, then."
I held out my arm and he sprayed the shield with something that made it peel away like shed skin. Thin, cool fingers closed around my forearm as he probed my wrist then scanned both the wrist and the chip with two separate scanners. He studied the read-outs in silence, then smiled at me. "That all looks good. You know how to engage it?" He gestured toward the armrest of the chair where the chip dock waited.
"I think so." I laid my arm gingerly against the dock. It connected with a soft click. I bit my lip.
"It'll be fine," Damon said calmly from the other side of the chair. For a moment I wished he'd hold my hand again. Instead, I curled the fingers of my free hand against my sweaty palm.
"Now," Dr. Barnard said, "when I start the simulation, you'll see a yellow door. I want you to think about walking to the door and opening it. Don't move at all. Just think. Your avatar should respond immediately."
I nodded, trying to breathe deeply as my pulse kicked up a notch or two. The hospital smells that immediately filled my nose didn't help.
I closed my eyes and leaned back. It's all going to be fine. It's all going to be fine. The voice in my head sounded convincing, but I couldn't stop the nervous hum in my stomach. What if I got the wobbles again? Would I lose the job? Would Damon think I was an idiot?
All you have to do is walk forward and open a damn door, I told myself firmly as the circling thoughts started to sound slightly hysterical.
"Ready?"
I focused on the colors playing inside my eyelids. "Yes." Between one heartbeat and the next, the colors blinked out.
:CONTACT:
A sensation like a cool breeze flowed over me, and then I stood in a small bare room with pale blue walls. The door, just as promised, glowed yellow about fifteen feet away from me. I hoped the color scheme didn't reflect a real room somewhere. The blue I could live with, but the yellow was more radioactive than soothing.
Sun-warmed air brushed my face, carrying the scents of spring and growing things rather than air-conditioning and antiseptic.
Smell. I was smelling something that wasn't real. Damon had said I was getting next-gen, and he'd apparently delivered. I sniffed deeply, but I couldn't smell anything like the hospital no matter how hard I tried.
Impressive.
But I didn't have time to think about how much code went into fooling your brain into smelling something that wasn't there. I had to complete the test.
The door. Radioactive yellow or not, I had to walk across to it.
Not sure exactly what to do other than what I'd usually do in a game, I imagined myself walking across the room. My avatar moved forward smoothly—or smoothly except for the small stumble when the hyper realistic sensation of walking registered. As far as my brain was concerned, I was walking across the room, carpet squishing gently under my feet.
Doubly impressive.
The quality of the illusion was even better than the game I'd tried. I reached the door and opened it. Just as I stepped through, I thought I heard someone call my name. Faintly, almost on the edge of hearing. But despite the softness, the tone sent a shiver down my back.
:OVERRIDE:
"Maggie."
This time the voice was completely normal, and with that one word, the room vanished and I was staring at the insides of my eyelids again.
"Everything okay?" Damon asked.
I opened my eyes and smiled through a lingering chill. "Yes. That was cool. Everything is so real."
"No wobbles? We called your name twice—"
Relief blew through me. It had been Damon talking to me. And probably just some weird transitional effect that made his voice sound strange. "I feel fine."
"Great." Damon nodded. "Do what you need to, Doc."
Dr. Barnard repeated his tests, told me I could stop taking the painkillers whenever I was ready, told me he’d send me more aftercare instructions, then pronounced me free to go. Damon whisked me back to Riley Arts, and before I had too much time to think, I was down in a cubicle with a couple of the Archangel programmers, getting set up to go code-trawling.
Things started well when I turned on the screen at my desk and it flickered and died.
"Fuck," I muttered under my breath. Jiggling the switch didn't restore the stupid thing to life. Way to make a first impression. Blowing up the equipment always went down well.
I stuck my head out of the cubicle. "My screen's dead," I said to Eli, the youngest of the programmers.
"That's weird. We got new gear a few weeks ago." He came around the low part
ition separating us and peered at the stubborn blackness of the glass, blond dreads falling across his face. "Let me try."
He did the same jiggle-and-flick routine I'd tried, then fiddled around with some of the buttons on the control panel. No response.
"Must be my magnetic personality," I joked.
Eli grinned, then pushed up the sleeve of his shirt to lay his wrist against the chip link on the desk. "Let me log a job. Then we'll move you to a new station." His face went curiously blank for a few seconds, but then he blinked and the personality was back behind his puppy brown eyes. "There, all done."
We gathered my things and I moved one desk down, holding my breath as I turned the system on. This time everything behaved itself.
Eli flipped open a panel in the cubicle wall and pulled out a lead that ended in a flexible cuff with the familiar chip dock. "You use the desk dock and I'll use this. Then I'll show you how to call up the code."
I nodded and laid my arm against the dock, nerves rising all over again.
"This is a clean copy of the code," Eli said, strapping the cuff around his wrist. "Dedicated server bank, isolated from the main systems. So we can't screw anything up."
I hadn't intended to screw anything up, but it was nice to know I couldn't. "You guys have been working on this for how long?"
"Couple of weeks. We haven't found anything though. Ready? I'll talk you through it. Close your eyes."
I did as instructed. "What happens if I keep them open?" I asked, suddenly curious.
"You'll see the data like an overlay of whatever you're looking at. It's kind of weird. And it gives most people a mother of a headache pretty fast. Plus it's almost guaranteed you'll fall over if you're standing."
"Eyes closed. Check."
"Okay, I'm starting the log-on sequence."
:CONTACT:
Multicolored flames danced across my vision, coalescing slowly into the Riley Arts logo floating above a keypad.
:GOOD MORNING, MAGGIE DIANA LACHLAN:
:CODE VERIFICATION REQUIRED:
"The system recognizes your chip, but we use our passwords as well. Punch it in."
Eli's real-life voice sounded too loud somehow. My hand flexed involuntarily, but I managed not to reach for the keypad physically. Instead I imagined typing in the sequence I'd been given. Evidently I got it right, because the Riley logo vanished, replaced by a clean white room with a giant screen covering the wall facing us. Neat rows of icons marched across the middle of the space.
Eli kept up a running commentary as he demonstrated each function and started explaining the various parts of the code. So much code. All the code. I'd never really appreciated just how much work went into these games. But the sheer volume was hard to ignore when you knew you were going to have to comb through it line by line.
"Any questions?" Eli shut down the last program and the screen cleared.
"Lots, but I think I've got the basics. Let me poke around a bit, and then I'll have more."
His avatar—pretty much him in real life, except his virtual hair was shorter and a more violent blonde that made me think he hadn't updated the skin for a while—cocked its head. "How does this work exactly? What you do?"
"I see if I can find a problem."
"One a team of us working for weeks hasn't been able to spot?"
Ah, I knew this conversation. Egos. They bruised easily. "Maybe not. But then we have a bigger problem."
"Such as?"
"If it's not the program, then the game can't be released until we figure out what exactly happened to the testers."
His expression changed as my words hit home. "Oh. I see. I'll leave you to it. Good hunting." He made a funny little bow with his hands pressed together, and then the avatar vanished, leaving me staring at the big screen.
Chapter Six
More hours than I liked later, I arrived home, showered, took something for the headache threatening to devour my brain, and curled up on the sofa in blissful silence. Apparently, all it took to drain my excess energy was a long day of trying to get my head around game code. I felt like I'd been stampeded, dusted off, and then run over by a steamroller. Sleep was irresistible.
I jolted awake about an hour later when Nat charged through the front door, calling my name.
"You're asleep?" she asked, bouncing into the room.
"I was." I pushed myself upright, telling my pounding heart to stand down. It ignored me, and the combination of adrenaline and nap brain was disorienting. I rubbed my forehead with the heel of my hand, trying to reconnect to reality, then regretted it. The headache was still prowling my synapses, though better than it had been. Maybe I needed food.
"What time is it?" My stomach rumbled as though answering the question.
"Nine-ish," Nat chirped, all bounce and enthusiasm as she circled the room, depositing her bag and checking the comp screen for messages.
Definitely past dinnertime. "You're home late." Late and dressed in what were, for Nat, very conservative clothes. Practically a suit. Where had she been?
"I had an interview. At Righteous."
That snapped me into focus. "For the tester position?" Dumb question. The smile on her face told me all I needed to know.
"Yes." She twirled into the middle of the room. "I find out in a couple of days, but I think it went really well."
My stomach sank. I’d been hoping it would take longer for her to go through the process. Nat working for Righteous could only complicate things. And, despite Damon’s reassurances, I wasn't happy about her taking a job as a tester for a company whose testers were currently having bad things happen to them. But it was also a big deal for her, so I just had to ignore complicated for now. "Congrats."
She wrinkled her nose. "You don't sound very happy for me. You haven't sounded very happy about this from the start. What's wrong? Afraid I'll muscle in on you and Damon Cutie-pie Riley?"
Cutie-pie wasn't the term that sprang to mind when I thought of Damon. He was beyond cute. Another realm beyond. I might not want to do anything with that fact, but I couldn't ignore it. "Hardly." Though the thought of Nat batting her eyelids at him did make my teeth grind a little.
"Then what's wrong?"
I tried to unclench my jaw. I couldn't tell her, couldn't warn her about the other testers. I’d signed that damned agreement, and I had to trust that Damon wouldn't let anything happen to her. In fact, I'd make sure he looked out for her. In the meantime, I had to do something to ease the hurt in Nat's eyes. "I'm sorry. I'm just tired. Long day."
Her eyes went to my arm. "Your chip? It's working? Chill."
"Very. But tiring. You wouldn't believe the amount of code I looked at today." Acres of code. Or miles. My head hurt too much to figure out the correct measure.
"Anything interesting?"
"Nothing I can tell you if you want any chance of landing this job."
She pulled a face. "No chill, Mags."
"Tough." I yawned. "What do you say to pizza for dinner? Or did you already eat?"
"I ate. But there's leftovers in the fridge. You shouldn't be eating crap. You just had surgery. You need good food."
"My wrist's all healed." I held it up so she could see. "The doctor said so. So pizza isn't going to hurt."
The expression on Nat's face told me she wasn't convinced by my argument. She headed into the kitchen. "How do you want your tofu?" she yelled back at me.
"Wrapped inside a pizza?"
"Fat chance."
The next morning, I descended to the depths of my cubicle at Righteous only to find a message alert floating on my screen. Damon, requesting my presence in his office.
"I've been summoned," I said to Eli. "Back soon."
I allowed myself a short detour to one of the cafeterias for a syncaf fix. Despite my exhaustion last night, I hadn't slept well. Which was my fault for napping. Napping never helped. My headache had taken another two doses of painkillers to vanquish, and, despite the drugs, it was hard to find a position that didn'
t make my wrist uncomfortable. Worst of all, every time I'd started to drift off, I'd thought I'd heard someone calling my name and jolted awake again.
"Here I am," I said when Cat ushered me into Damon's office. "What's up?" I tried not to feel happy to see him but couldn't stop the silly teenage glow that warmed my stomach.
He leaned back in his chair and stretched, like he'd already been working for hours already. Maybe he had. His greenish-blue shirt was wrinkled. The rumpled look suited him.
"I wanted a status report," he said.
Irritation zapped my glow as a familiar tension squeezed the muscles up my back. "I sent you one last night. If you want another one, then you have to give me time to do some more work first."
One side of his mouth curled. "Actually, I meant on you. How are you feeling?" He eyed the takeout cup in my hand.
Whoops. Maybe I should have asked for a triple shot. Then I might not have jumped to conclusions. Still, something like the glow returned at his concern, though it was immediately chased by confusion. He'd been there when the doctor had cleared me, so why was he asking how I was? Maybe he wasn't happy with the report I'd sent him.
"All chill," I lied, then drained the last of the syncaf. I needed my wits about me. "No problems."
"Nat told you about her interview?"
She’s Nat now? I nodded, pasting on a smile. "She's very excited."
"You're not? My HR manager says she's an excellent candidate."
I nailed him with a look. "That's not exactly what I meant. You have a game that's doing weird things. Why should I be happy that my best friend wants to volunteer to be potential cannon fodder?"
His shoulders squared and he gave me a look as annoyed as mine. "Nothing's going to happen to her. That's why I hired you."
If sheer force of will could guarantee her safety, then he'd be right. Unfortunately, I didn't believe the universe would organize everything so it turned out the way Damon Riley wanted.