He says something Eliza doesn’t catch in her distraction, then winks again. A few people chuckle. “Ladies and gentlemen,” that’s the cue. Eliza, Devonte, Lewis and Jean-Pascale plunge their hands into their bags and strap the gear to their faces, keeping their heads bowed as if everyone hasn’t already guessed. Preston keeps going: “I give you.” He pauses to let the front row turn around.
“Guilds of the Protectorate. On. Vive.”
The crowd goes full Bacchanalia; it should be exhilarating to face everyone going bananas like that, even if she can’t see them through the eye-gear. Eliza can hear someone shouting, “I knew it! I knew it!”
From the back, she hears Suzanne crow, “We beat EverQuest! We’re doing it first! First VR MMO!”
Someone else: “Is it gonna work with other shit? Is it gonna work with Oculus?”
“Settle down, settle down,” Preston says into his microphone. We can hear the smile in his voice; he doesn’t want anyone to settle down. He is loving every second of the rave and revelry. “We have to go over what the next couple of weeks are going to look like. We’re all going to have to hit the ground running!”
Devonte throws one of his hands in the air and starts jumping around. He tips into Eliza once, then pops his headset up onto his forehead for better balance. Lewis jumps up and down too, and keeps bashing into her; she is sure she’ll have bruises up her right arm. When she turns to look at him, his Vive is already up on his forehead. Some of us think he steals sidelong glances every few jumps; he knows he is hurting her and doesn’t care. But most of us think it’s just the excitement; he has no idea. Eliza stands there, her thin smile evaporating. She feels like a wet spaghetti noodle among the party streamers.
Chapter Twenty-Four
It is already dark by the time they file out of the movie theater. It is shocking how small Fancy Dog actually is, given what they produce, given how many of us there are. Only filled one theater. Eliza is wondering what to do, how to proceed. Does this thing with Lewis and JP still fall into the realm of not so big a deal? Had they crossed some sort of imaginary boundary? Could she make it something she could ignore? We think she both should and could. This is the way the world works. This is how jobs are. Not only gaming jobs. All jobs. She has to learn to handle the real world. Move the fuck on. Keep making the game, that’s what we pay them to do. We pay for play. Make play for us.
She is contemplating her failures as a programmer and a woman when she sees Preston leaning against the movie theater wall. He isn’t with the rest of the company, not even with Brandon. He isn’t wearing a coat, even though it’s cold. His face is upturned, smiling, in the never-dark of Manhattan. Caressed by a streetlight. He isn’t smoking, but we wish he were. It would be the perfect, classic image. The James Dean of nerds.
She walks up to him and ruins it. “Preston?”
“Eliza, hi.”
She hesitates here, afraid to spoil his reverie, his celebration. It was a very successful internal announcement. He knows it will be leaked. He plans for it now. He’s never had a colander for a company before, but he’s getting used to it. Using it to his advantage. They only ever leak stuff like this; nothing that would truly hurt him or Fancy Dog.
Or she continues boldly without any hesitation at all, gleeful at wrecking serenity. We’re all for disruption but for fuck’s sake, think about what you’re disrupting! “Sorry, I actually don’t know how to say this.”
Preston thinks she is about to confess her attraction to him, tries to find a way to prevent this from happening. His face goes on a journey. “Eliza, if this is a Conversation, I think it should wait unti—”
“Even if I wanted to have a Conversation with you right now, we sure don’t want to have it in the office in front of Lewis and JP.”
“What’s goi—”
“Lewis just called me a feminazi whore during our meeting. And he accused us of. Well.” She reddens a little and is grateful for the dim light. Perhaps her embarrassment is hidden in it. “Accused us of being together? Like, together together.”
Preston’s eyebrows nearly touch in the middle. It isn’t exactly what he was expecting, but it’s just as bad. If not worse. “Like, boyfriend girlfriend together?”
“I think the insinuation was a little more vulgar than that.”
Preston looks around. The company is almost entirely out the doors now, and most of them haven’t noticed his hiding place on the side of the building. It is safer to go from here, he thinks. She’s right. It’s better to do it outside the office.
Or perhaps it continues to be her idea. “Why don’t you take me to dinner?” she says. “It’s been kind of a rough day.” She stands coyly, her shoulders collapsing toward her chest, one of her feet popped up on one single toe, knee turned in. Her eyes are big with seduction, with ambition, with entitled greed.
Chapter Twenty-Five
LFleis: i told you
JPDes: it is wierd.
LFleis: i told you
JPDes: but not conclusive
LFleis: told you told you told you told you told you told you told you
JPDes: she’s probably telling on you.
LFleis: nope
JPDes: what do you mean nope? it was a lot.
LFleis: well maybe also that
LFleis: but you saw them leave together FROM THE BACK OF A MOVIE THEATRE
LFleis: i mean come the fuck on
LFleis: not even subtle
LFleis: if i get fired for this i swear
JPDes: no one said anything about getting fired
LFleis: if i get fired for this, you have to promise to stick up for me, okay?
LFleis: like, do something
JPDes: and what would that be?
LFleis: i dunno
JPDes: dude no one is getting fired
JPDes: just stop being a dick
Chapter Twenty-Six
The Inspectre follows one set of IP addresses in particular. He keeps an encrypted document full of all the numbers currently and previously associated with this 4chan ID, those couple of Reddit usernames. He attributes all these numerals, names and posts to one man. One employee at Fancy Dog, the one we all call Leaky Joe. Some of us think the Leaky Joe among us is a myth. Some think he is multiple employees, because how could one person spill everything he does and not get fired? In this way, Leaky Joe is our Shakespeare. But The Inspectre has his finger on the IP pulse, nonetheless, and whether or not it comes from one guy or many, he deems these communiqués genuine.
So when Leaky Joe complains on KotakuInAction, that most illustrious subreddit, that this bitch of a co-worker just threatened sexual harassment allegations against two gameplay-feel programmers to try to get a promotion and lol, it failed, looks like the world isn’t as fucked as we thought—well. With the help of The Inspectre, we know to which company Leaky Joe is referring. A company with a few small development teams. One of which is made up of two fine gentlemen and one conniving cunt. How dare she. A modern witch. A blemish on the face of the world.
Click save. Add bookmark. Remember this post, for it is one more of the shattered puzzle pieces we assemble and reassemble. We love The Inspectre. We love how he caresses each piece of information, how he gleefully hands it to us bit by bit. We love his rage, especially. The towering inferno of it, barely masked; it matches the heat under our own skin. We love to see it burst through to the surface.
The Inspectre is intrigued as he sits in his lair. It is a large square room at the bottom of a hole deep enough to kill those who don’t know the precise jumping pattern from ledge to ledge on the way down. There is no door to this windowless basement cell he calls home; one must be able to walk through walls to enter. He looks at his latest screenshots, hung aesthetically and appropriately by a length of clothesline—photos of Black Hole, of Doctor Moriarty. But Circuit Breaker is missing from most of his shots. He does have a few of the squabble, when the Diversity Squad was (abnormally) thrown into the public eye. Invisible to all but
friends, those three. The room is baked in the red glow of developing film, and he feels his face flush with that same sort of heat. How dare she be so inaccessible to him. He has access to everything. Everyone. Invisible, involuntary. She is infuriating.
He wants to watch them closely. Closer, even, than he is already. He has managed to add a few Fancy Dog employees to his friends list, so it isn’t that much of a stretch, he thinks. There will be friends in common. It would not be out of the realm of possibility for them to click accept.
He requests to add Circuit Breaker first. Then Doctor Moriarty and Black Hole. He waits for a couple days, but doesn’t hear from any of them. He understands entirely why Lewis and JP don’t respond to his friend request. They’re busy. And they’re a guild of two, exclusive, and everyone knows it. His best bet is to gain their goodwill by doing work for them—he’ll have to figure out how to approach the duo. But Eliza? Her bias is showing. Her bias against the Inspectres of the world, the straight men, the white men. His rage begins to simmer under his tongue; yes, yes, we love when the anger bubbles up, floods the landscape like lava. Explosive at times, slow and crawling at others. But as transformative. As destructive. He plots. He is about to get his big breakthrough and he doesn’t know it yet, but we do.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
They duck into the first place that looks private: Castle and Cognac. The walls are cream and the light is dim. A cocktail menu lazes on the table, and both parties ignore it. Some of us can see them; some of us are close enough, in meatspace, to actually touch them. It is unusual, to run into them anywhere that isn’t digital.
Preston looks bewildered, eyes wide and metaphorical feathers ruffled from stuffing himself in his coat too quickly. “So what happened?” he asks, a little less professionally than he likes. “What did he say? Tell me everything.”
Eliza recounts the conversation in the collaboration room. She sounds meaner than we expected. Strident. Like she’s licking her lips with a predatory relish. Or maybe recounting the incident actually hurts. But there is a calmness to her. That, at least, we all agree on. A confidence we don’t usually imagine into her mouth. Not the person we imagined coquettishly standing with her foot popped onto her toe and her knee turned in. How does she pull off all of it, this version and that one? How does she manipulate him into liking her when she’s not only a six on her best day, but a six with a shrill voice like a goddamn fire alarm?
“Fuck,” Preston says when she finishes her story. He covers his mouth. “Sorry. Pardon me. I didn’t mean to—” He interrupts himself because he’s thought of something. Something that will surely take her down. We lick our lips. “Am I to understand you didn’t have a Conversation with Lewis before coming to me outside the theater?”
Eliza blinks. “What?”
“Did you have a Conversation? With Lewis?” Preston repeats.
“Uh. No.”
“So what I’m hearing is that you came right to me without having a Conversation with them, rather than modifying your behavior based on our last Conversation and talking to them first?”
“Welcome to Castle and Cognac!” A waiter materializes next to their table, as if out of the miasma of sheer enthusiasm. “Something to drink for you both?”
“We need a few minutes, thank you.” Preston has not forgotten his manners; he’s handling himself perfectly. The waiter dematerializes.
“I came right to you,” Eliza continues. “I had no idea what to say to him. It was blatant sexism. And he thinks you and I—” She pauses, her body not letting her talk and turn red at the same time.
“Yes, that—that is a little embarrassing.” Preston looks down at the tablecloth. “But once you’ve cooled off a bit, you have to start first by telling him about his specific, observable actions and how they made you feel.”
“Excuse me?”
“And give him a chance to rectify his behavior.” Preston takes a breath and his face becomes the man we see in photos. It’s debonair, but—safe somehow. We feel safe when we see him like this, in control of everything around him. Eliza recognizes his company-meeting expression. “Policy is in place for a reason,” he begins. “The Conversation policy is there to create a corporate culture of openness and mutual respect. It allows us all to correct each other’s behavior without putting any emphasis whatsoever on management—your Conversations aren’t less important than mine, for example.” Except they are. Eliza knows her Conversations are inherently less valuable than those of the co-founder, original game designer and CEO. We know it too. She is nobody and yet here she is, somehow. “I see you jumping straight to me to have a Conversation about someone else’s behavior and asking me to deal with it. That undermines the culture we work so hard to create in a number of ways.” Preston holds up his hand and ticks his fingers with his thumb. “First, it teaches everyone to respect my Conversations more. We should be respecting everyone’s Conversations. Second, it makes me the referee for all sorts of—”
“Can I get you guys anything?” the waiter asks, pen touching paper in anticipation.
“No, no, we haven’t looked at the menus yet,” Preston says, smooth, as if that’s what he intended the rest of his sentence to be.
“No problem!”
“Anyway.” Preston keeps his eye on the waiter to make sure he is out of earshot before continuing. “It makes me a referee for all sorts of interpersonal disputes when I should be running a company. And thirdly, skipping Conversations and going right for me takes the opportunity away from Lewis to correct his behavior. Lewis is a good guy. I’m sure he would have corrected his behavior if you had given him the chance to.”
“How can he correct something that’s already happened?” Eliza asks. Christ, what a fucking idiot.
“Well he could have apologized to you. Taken it back. Promised to do better in the future. And—” Then Preston smiles. His face softens into something different, but just as safe. Just as welcoming, understanding. What a stand-up guy. We take notes. His posture seems to say, I’m here for your existence, here for your feelings. What a fucking good play. “You might have told him that we weren’t seeing each other. In any capacity.” He blushes and it looks like he’s been dipped in a bucket of bright red bicycle paint. “He could have retracted that statement. Said he believed that we weren’t together.”
“That’s what you’re concerned about?” Eliza asks, incredulous.
“Well, that and other things,” Preston says quickly. “Of course, other things as well.”
“Like the fact that all those statements he made, those things he said, point to a dislike of women that will interfere with any woman he works with and impact Fancy Dog culture and maybe, if he ever gets to design games, affect the kinds of games he produces?” We’re surprised; given how flustered we have imagined her up to this point, she is pretty eloquent. We feel ourselves start to nod our heads. Then, wait—we don’t believe in this kind of bullshit. It’s just games. Games don’t affect how you are in the real world at all. Hysteria.
“See, I don’t think his little outburst points to that. I think it points to—I dunno—insecurity, stupidity, a lack of social skills.” Preston pauses and mutters, “or a lack of a hold on reality.” It doesn’t occur to him that he might offend Eliza, that he is hitting the we-are-definitely-not-fucking note a little too hard. It does occur to Eliza, we can see it on her face (inside, we scream with laughter), and Preston attributes her horrified look to recent events. “But they don’t point to a hatred of women, I don’t think.”
“And if I disagree?”
“Then you should tell him that his observable actions,” Preston stresses that last part, “make you feel disliked as a woman. Because you’re a woman. And you should assume his positive intent, so you’ll probably want to add something like, ‘and I don’t think that’s what you intended for me to feel.’ Or maybe something like, ‘and I recognize you were just trying to make sure that all was right with the world.’ See, there’s a million ways to talk to
him about this without accusing him of something that’s going to wreck his life. We don’t want to wreck anyone’s life here.”
“What about mine? My life?”
Preston squeezes his lips together and furrows his eyebrows until they join at the center and make him look like a Muppet. “I’d hardly call your life wrecked. You’re on a well-paid team that’s launching a premium product this week.”
They sit in silence for a second. Until: “Hello again, guys! Have you had a chance to look at—”
“NO!” Eliza and Preston both yell in unison. The waiter scampers backward.
“Look, we have to order something soon or leave,” Preston says. He squeezes his temples with his palms, eyes closed, tense. “Eliza, why couldn’t you have just had a Conversation with him. You’re good at Conversations. I’ve seen you do it—you keep having Conversations with me, for Christ’s sake; that’s not an easy thing to do. You can’t say you were scared of him. Frankly, he’s a lot less scary than I am and you seem to have absolutely no issue speaking your mind to me.”
Eliza chooses her words very carefully, afraid, we think, that they don’t feel like they are in the right order or the right words. “I just felt like this was too big for a Conversation.”
“Well it’s not. Eliza. You seem to have the idea that this is a bigger deal than it is. If everyone came to me every time they were personally offended by one of my employees, I’d never get anything done.”
We Are Watching Eliza Bright Page 8