Vaporware Read online

  I thought about that for a second, then said it out loud. “This game has no soul.” The words felt right. Look closely at Salvador, and it was a Frankenstein monster of a design, features ripped out of a dozen other games because they’d sold well, not because they belonged together or said anything new. The vision was a masterpiece of cynicism.

  Not like Blue Lightning.

  Abruptly, the air conditioner cut out, and the lights fluttered then faded for a moment. I could hear a loud popping sound coming from under my desk as the surge protector failed to do its duty, and then the light on the monitor screen flared white and died. Out in the hallway voices called back and forth, each confirming to the other that it wasn’t just them and that we were in fact getting hit with yet another in our regular series of brownouts. Most were just long enough to chow down on unsaved data; a few turned into genuine blackouts. Each time one hit, it was the signal for people to start counting down until the power outage was long enough to justify everyone going home for the day. In the meantime, people went outside, people pulled out their tablets or Magic cards or smartphones, or people stood around and bitched.

  For my part, I kept on reading, mainly because there was enough light for me to do so, and waited for the power to come back up.

  Five minutes on, the brownout had officially faded to black and people were streaming outside as the heat built up inside. As I swapped the core vision for the feature list, I saw Michelle headed through the door at a fast trot, across the parking lot, and out of view. I could hear laughter drifting faintly back. There were worse things than sitting outside in the sun while on the clock, or at least that’s what it sounded like.

  With that cheerful thought, I went back to reading. I’d made it six whole bullet points in before someone knocked on the door.

  “Hey, Leon,” I said without looking up.

  He stepped into the office, blinking. “How’d you know it was me?”

  I shrugged and kept trolling through the proposed game features. They were really big on wide-scale destructible terrain, the ability of the player to basically cause property damage inside the game world. This was tricky for a whole host of reasons, not the least of which being that characters controlled by the game’s artificial intelligence generally weren’t very good at dealing with changes to their world. When the world changed, your average AI would make characters walk into large pieces of rubble in best wind-up toy fashion, which rarely made for challenging gameplay. Throw in the ability to clamber over obstacles, which was tucked in a couple of bullet points down, and the game had the potential to be a physics-AI steel-cage-match nightmare. “Michelle’s the only other person who’d actually come looking for me right now, and she’s already outside. So it was either going to be you or the ghost of Duke Nukem.”

  “The new Duke Nukem came out last year,” he corrected me. “So what are you reading?”

  I tried to read another line, then gave it up as a bad job and put the paper down. “Design docs on Salvador. This one’s going to be a bear.”

  Without asking, Leon crossed to my desk and grabbed a sheet of paper at random. “Let me guess—too many features, not enough time, too many external dependencies, and the assets we’re getting are crap?” He settled into the much-abused visitors’ chair and put his feet up on my desk. “Did I miss anything?”

  “I can’t vouch for anything except the feature list, which reads like a fanboi’s three-legged wet dream.”

  “Tentacles?” he asked. I threw a wadded up ball of paper at him, which bounced off his shoulder and into the trash can. Stoic to the last, he ignored it, and grabbed another paper from the stack. “Man, you’re right. This is a recipe for crunch time goodness, starting tomorrow. Still, if we can pull it off….”

  The heat in the room was suddenly oppressive. I was acutely aware of the silence where the clunking sound of the HVAC normally was, the higher-pitched whine of my machine’s CPU fan on top of it. The voices of our coworkers were a muted buzz at best. Leon looked at me. “Dude, are you all right? You look kind of pale.”

  Not trusting my voice to say more than “I’m fine,” I nodded. The sweat rolling down my face was oddly warm, and I could feel more of it trickling out of my armpits and down my sides. “Just got hot all of a sudden,” I gasped.

  “Maybe we ought to go outside.” He offered me a hand.

  I waved him away. “No, no, I’ll be fine. Really. Just need the AC to come back on. And as for the game, I don’t know.”

  Leon blinked. “Don’t know what?”

  My fingers drummed the stack of documents. “I don’t know about it. If we pull it off, it’s going to sell, no doubt about that. It’s going to have chrome out the yin-yang, assuming we don’t start cutting too many features to fit it on an old-gen box or killing ourselves to meet milestones and implementing stuff half-assed.”

  “But?”

  “But there’s nothing at the heart of it. It’s like someone saw all the cool stuff that other games are doing and said ‘We want that and that and some of that,’ and never mind actually coming up with a game concept to hang all this crap on. There’s a hole in the middle of,” and I tapped the doc pile, “this.” The words were forcing themselves out, like I had to say them while I still felt brave enough to do so. My head was throbbing, and I found myself wishing for a glass of water.

  Leon sat back down heavily. “So you’re saying we’re screwed.”

  I shook my head. “No. That’s not it at all. Like I said, it’s going to sell. It’s going to be shiny and pretty and cool, and if we get it out the door it’ll sell like crazy for about three, four weeks. But it’s missing something. It’s missing that thing Blue Lightning had, where all the pieces fit seamlessly because there was a game there, and the features were just aspects of it. This is just…features riding the bus together.” I wiped my brow with my forearm. It came away wet, and an instant later I could feel the slow, fat drops of sweat rolling down again. “Blue Lightning might not have sold as well, but it would have been a better game.”

  The words came out slowly, as if each one had an unseen weight to it. Leon looked disappointed, but even as he opened his mouth to say something, the lights came up and the HVAC thunked into sudden life. From outside, I could hear Eric shouting “Come on, people, back inside!” and the doors opening as people trudged back to their desks.

  “You really think that?” Leon asked. I nodded. “I don’t know if I’m glad to hear it or not.”

  “Why would you be?” I reached under my desk and rebooted my system. “I mean, I just told you I don’t actually like the project we’re going to be killing ourselves over for the next year or so.”

  He scrunched up his face for a minute before answering. “I guess. But it’s nice to know you think we had something good going. Even if it was theoretically your idea.”

  I grinned at him. “Yeah, well, I can’t help it if I’m brilliant.” The cold—well, cool—air pouring down from the ceiling vent had me feeling much better in record time. “Now get out of here so I can read these things and you can go do whatever the hell it is you do when you’re not ignoring the documentation.”

  “We’re going raiding while we wait for some stuff for the closing kit to compile,” he answered, already halfway out the door. “Level 40 on the Argentblade server, if you want to come along.”

  I waved papers at him. “Some of us have work to do, Leon. Have fun storming the castle. I’ll catch you later.”

  He grunted something at me and was halfway out the door before I realized there was one other thing I wanted to talk to him about. “Hey, Leon!”

  He stopped and half-twisted back so that his head was in the doorframe. “What?”

  I shoved the dysfunctional iPhone across the desk. It slid past the edge, teetered for a moment, and fell. Halfway to the floor, it landed in Leon’s hand. He’d reached back to snag it, which was pretty much what I’d expected he’d do. His long fingers wrapped around it, cradling it for a moment before
pulling it in and staring at it. A look of confusion crossed his face. “Dude. It’s your phone. What’s the deal?”

  “It shit the bed when I was coming in this morning. You like messing with that stuff, so I figured you might want to take a look at it. If you can get it running, that would be cool. If not, feel free to salvage it for parts.”

  Leon’s face screwed itself into a frown. “You sure about this? I thought Sarah gave you this one.”

  I shrugged. “I’ll by a new one, same model, if it’s fried. No need for her to know.”

  He shot me a look that suggested that I had just placed myself on the endangered species list. “Whatever, man. I’ll see what I can do with it.”

  “Cool, thanks,” I said to his retreating back, and settled in to mount another attempt on the ramparts of documentation in front of me. “Eenie, meenie, miny, ah, the hell with it,” I muttered and pulled what looked like a preliminary mission design from the middle of the stack. “Here goes nothing.”

  I read. I drank coffee. I read some more. I took a few notes, took a leak in order to deal with the coffee, and read a few more docs. The shape of the game became clear to me, the features arranging themselves in neat cascades while the storyline and mission progression hung from them like low-hanging fruit.

  A loud banging startled me into dropping a dozen sheets of paper. They fanned out, snowing themselves onto the floor.

  I looked up to see Shelly standing there, my phone dangling by an earbud cord off the tip of one of her fingers. Behind her, the sunlight creeping down the hallway was shockingly red. I’d apparently been reading the docs for hours. “This is yours, right?” she asked. “I mean, nobody else in the building has quite the same taste in dinosaur rock that you do.”

  “Looks like it,” I said. “I take it you’ve been listening to it?”

  “Just checked the active playlist,” she said, stepping far enough into the office to slap it down on my desk. “Leon said it was yours, but I wanted to make sure. I don’t think there’s anyone else on the planet, Pete Townshend included, who needs that many versions of ‘Eminence Front’ in one place.”

  I started in with “Well, actually the alternate guitar line on the studio outtake version,” but the sight of her eyes glazing over brought me up short. “What were you doing with it, anyway?” I asked. “Leon was either going to fix it or cannibalize it for parts.”

  She fixed me with a disdainful glare. “Leon gave it back to me to give to you because he had to take off; and for the record, he said there was nothing wrong with it, other than a few unlabeled tracks that you’ll probably want to generate song data for. It’s fine, and you’re crazy. At least, that’s what he told me to tell you.” She gave me a tight little smile. “He said I could get creative telling you that, too.”

  I picked it up gingerly and looked at it. “It wasn’t fine in the car this morning.”

  “Then maybe your car sucks,” she said sweetly. “Not my problem anymore.”

  She cocked her head to one side. “And you should be going home. It’s getting on seven.”

  I blinked. “It is? How the hell did that happen? I was just sitting here reading docs—”

  “And you’ve read about two hundred pages’ worth. That’s a decent day’s work, Ryan. Go home.” Without waiting to see if I was going to follow her advice, she left.

  Leaving me still at my desk, behind a now-broken wall of papers and looking suspiciously down at piece of hardware that had decided to play it coy. “Let’s see what you’ve got,” I told it, and hit play.

  From the earbuds, I could hear a tinny, distant rendition of the last good song the Who ever wrote. It played clean, all the way through.

  “Huh,” I said, and stuck it in my pocket. It was still playing when I turned out the lights and shut the door, and for all I cared, it could play all night long.

  Chapter 9

  Naked and lovely, Sarah said to me, “I think dinner’s gotten cold.”

  “I am willing to accept those consequences,” I said contentedly, and snuggled her against my chest. We’d made only the barest of starts on supper before making our way upstairs, and had wreaked absolute havoc on our bed sheets and the neatly stacked laundry thereupon. Now the tasteful cream-colored carpet was covered in untastefully strewn colors and whites, and the sheets dangled off one corner of the bedframe.

  I stroked Sarah’s hair a couple of times and was rewarded with a contented purr. Linus sat on the corner of the bed, faced deliberately away from us; I snagged him and tucked him into Sarah’s arms. She purred again and snuggled into me. “That was nice,” she said. I nodded and kissed the top of her head.

  “We should do that more often.”

  “Start getting home earlier and we just might.”

  “I’m going to try,” I said, not trusting myself not to turn this into another debate. “But I’m here right now.”

  Sarah yawned. “I know. And it’s wonderful.” She yawned again, theatrically this time, with a sound like a lioness settling in to watch her cubs. “I hear you nearly threw away one of my presents today.”

  “I did?” I thought for a minute. “Oh, the phone? I wasn’t throwing it away, I was going to let Leon have it if it was broken.”

  “That’s generous of you,” She poked me in the ribs. “And when were you going to explain to me that you’d broken something I’d given to you?”

  I grinned. “I was going to buy another one just like it and never tell you, that’s how. I liked it a lot and didn’t want you thinking you’d gotten me something that wasn’t good.”

  “That’s sweet,” she said, sleep dulling the edge of her words. “I got an email from Leon about it, you know. He didn’t want to play with it without asking if I was OK with it. Are all your friends afraid of me?”

  “Only the smart ones,” I said, chuckling. “Leon, on the other hand....”

  “Mmm,” Sarah said, and then she was asleep, snoring softly against my chest. My left arm was pinned underneath her, no doubt priming itself for the moment when it would fall asleep, but I’d deal with that when it came. For the moment, I had her, and she had me, and work was far away.

  I decided that it, like the dishes, could keep until morning.

  * * *

  Six chairs around the table in the conference room, two people in them. Eric was at one end, hunched up in the “daddy” seat. His back was to the far wall, framing him against one of the whiteboards. They rarely ever got cleaned, so there was a faint halo of old dry-erase marker squiggles all around him.

  “You look like a Peanuts character.” I said, looking up from my laptop. I was on the near side of the table but not at the end. That would have put my back to the door. Sarah called that sort of thing bad feng shui, and so did I when she was around. The rest of the time, I just hated having my back to the door.

  “Pigpen,” he answered, filling in the missing name and leaning back. “So who does that make you? Sally? Charlie Brown?”

  “BlackStone already yanked the football out from under me,” I pointed out. “And I’d go for Snoopy, but Sarah would probably think that was weird.”

  “Heh.” He kicked the underside of the table once, twice, a third time, and rubbed his eyes. “So what’s the deal, Ryan? Are you in?”

  “In?”

  “In.” He cracked a couple of knuckles, not the complete set. “I got a call from Sarah this morning, you know.”

  “Oh did you,” I could feel my stomach sinking. “What did she want?”

  Eric gave me a weak grin. “She wanted to know if I was going to work you to death on this one, or if she had to go public like EASpouse did a couple of years ago.”

  I cracked a smile I didn’t feel. “She’s not shy, is she?”

  “No, and she’s not stupid, either. She also told me that you’re thinking about quitting. Something about writing full time, or at least until you get bored and get ready for a real job.”

  “That was supposed to stay between me and her,” I
said softly. “She shouldn’t have brought you into it.”

  “No, she shouldn’t have,” he agreed. “But now she has. And what are you going to do about it?”

  I looked at him, licking my suddenly dry lips. “I’ve given this a lot of thought,” I said. “A lot of thought. I thought about what you said, and about the company. I thought about what I actually want to do. And I decided, God help me, that I’m in.”

  “Thank you,” he said. His arms dropped off the sides of his chairs like all the bones in them had just gone on coffee break, and I suddenly realized how nervous he’d been about the whole thing. “We’re going to make this work,” he said, as much a prayer as a statement of purpose. “We’ll give everyone but the leads a couple more days to shake it out of their systems, but in the meantime, you and I lay the groundwork for hitting the ground running next week. Once people are working again instead of chasing their tails, we’ll be just fine.”

  I nodded. “I don’t see what choice we have,” I said, and I meant it. Either we moved on this, or we’d die, and I’d just bet…what? My job? My career in gaming? My relationship? I wasn’t sure, but I was reasonably certain I’d bet something on this project, and this company.

  There was a pile of docs in front of me, the edited highlights of the stuff I’d read yesterday. I tapped it with one finger. “I can give a debrief on what we’re dealing with here if you want to get the ball rolling.”

  He shrugged. “Save it for when we get the leads in here.”

  A sip of coffee went down with moderate success. “And when might that be?”

  Eric made a big show of looking at his watch. “About ten minutes. You might want to go pee or something before this one starts.”

  I blinked at him. “You scheduled that without knowing if I was walking?”