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  He shrugged. “I scheduled it. If you’d walked, it would have been to discuss finding a new CD. Instead, you get to tell everyone about Salvador, and what cool and exciting features we’re going to get to try to cram into a last-gen box.”

  More coffee. “Well, that starts with you and the financials. But I can walk them through the design, maybe point out where the trouble spots are.”

  Eric nodded and stood. “Good. I’ll let you handle that, then. I’m going to go start shaking trees to see if I can line us up something for when this particular sleigh ride comes to an end.”

  I looked at him and shook my head. “That whole tree-sleigh ride thing is way too Ethan Frome for me.”

  “Ethan Frome?”

  “Jesus, Eric, didn’t they make you read that in high school? One of the great American classics, by virtue of the fact that it’s depressing and it’s short.”

  He pursed his lips. “Sounds like my kind of book. Now what does it have to do with our project? Or is that a crack on the length of the dev cycle we’ve got to work with.”

  “Nope. Just that there’s a sleigh ride in that one, too.”

  “What happens?”

  “They wrap themselves around a tree, and everyone’s crippled for life.”

  “Heh. Sounds perfect.” He grinned, a little bit, and started toward the door. “Just one question,” I added. He turned to me.

  “Yes?”

  “Who are the leads on this one?”

  He smiled, or at least the lower half of his face did. “We’re rotating. The art and engineering leads on BL were both in my office this morning, telling me they’d rather eat their own testicles than be leads on this one.”

  “Charming,” I grimaced. “Distaste for the project?”

  “Burnout. They pretty much said the same thing, which was they’d rather be doing work than schedules and meetings.”

  “Lucky them.” I shrugged. “So you’re dropping a couple of new suckers into the barrel. Who are they, and do they know they have to deal with the deadly combination of you as producer and me as lead designer?”

  “Leon and Shelly are probably aware of that, yes.”

  I stared at Eric, my mouth hanging open. “Leon and Shelly?”

  “What? You don’t think they’re qualified?” The bastard was actually smirking at me now, just waiting to see how I could dig myself in deeper.

  “No! I mean, of course they’re qualified, but the three of us? Me and Michelle? Do you really think that’s a good idea?”

  “Actually, I kind of do.” Eric said. He sagged forward over a chair, elbows and forearms flat on the table. “I figure you need as much of a comfort zone on this one as any of us, maybe more. And since the heavy lifting on this one’s been done, I can give it to you. It’s not like they’re not qualified.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s not that. And I’d better not get too much of a comfort zone with Shelly or Sarah’s going to kill me.”

  “No fishing off the company pier, especially with ones you already threw back.” He said it with grim humor. “So it’s settled, and you can give me a debrief after you talk with your leads. Anything else, or can I go chase the almighty dollar?”

  “Chase Euros instead,” I told him. “And could you please give me a little more warning about stuff like that next time? Pretty please?”

  “Since you asked so nicely, I’ll think about it.” He moved to the door. “And go sit at the head of the table. You’re leading the meeting.” A moment later, he was gone.

  I purposefully did not watch him go, choosing instead to riffle through the papers for the overview doc I’d written up. I’d intended it for Eric’s eyes as a basic assessment as to the geography of the world of hurt we were in for, but it could serve as crib notes for a briefing as well. Where to start? Well, with an overview, I thought, and then a rundown of the features that we were going to have to either cut, gut, or redo in order to cram a next-gen title onto an old-gen box. That’s where the real fun was going to come in, a roll call of doomed features that we’d have to ruthlessly execute in order to get the game out on time and on spec. Then there was the stuff the hardware just wouldn’t support, stuff we were going to have to rip out and rebuild from scratch—the entire multiplayer interface, for one. Even better, buried deep within the docs had been the hint of some additional feature requests that BlackStone clearly planned to hit us with at the least convenient time possible. Put them all together, line them up and call them out, and I might have a halfway-decent look at what we were looking at going forward on Salvador.

  All of which kept me nicely preoccupied from thinking about how I felt over what Sarah had done.

  A hard thump on the back of my chair jerked me back into the real world, or at least the board room. I looked up to see that it was Michelle. She’d elbowed my seat on the way toward taking the chair at the head of the table.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “I’m supposed to be over there.”

  “Were,” she said sweetly. “You were supposed to be over here. But you aren’t. And I am.” And with that, she dropped neatly into the seat and put her feet up on the table. I stared at her, and she stared back. “What, is this a penis-only chair?”

  I cringed. “Look, Shelly, I know it’s a fairly casual work environment and all, but all things considered, I’m not sure it’s a great idea for the word ‘penis’ to come up in any conversation we have.”

  “Because she’s seen yours?” Leon ambled in and took the chair opposite me. “I mean, I knew this was a small project, but—”

  I made rimshot noises while miming a cymbal crash. “Can we get started, or is there anything else you want to share with the class?”

  “I got nothing,” he replied and took a pen out from behind his ear.

  “Him too.” Shelly slid a notepad across the table to him, saving one for herself and none for me. “Is Eric going to be joining us?”

  “Not unless you start throwing things,” I told her. “Something about running the studio in the meantime. Don’t worry, though. I’ll give him the full debrief. That is, if we can actually get this thing off the ground.”

  Leon started to say something half-witty about my briefs, but Michelle shushed him. “Okay, point made. What do we have?”

  And I told them, in agonizing detail. Without a build, it was impossible to be sure, but most likely we were in for a tough, tight development cycle. The entire multiplayer system would have to be redone, including most likely the networking code and the UI. Textures would have to be downsampled. Objects would need their polygon counts slashed, and not in a way that could be done programmatically. The number of enemies onscreen would have to be drastically reduced or else the game would slow to a zoetrope-level frame-rate flicker. And on and on and on it went, with Leon and Shelly asking questions every so often. Most of them I could only answer with “I don’t know” or “We’ll have to wait for the build.” The ones where I had more concrete information didn’t make them much happier.

  Eventually, I wound down. Leon looked at Michelle, eyebrows raised with an unspoken question. She spoke it. “Is that it?”

  I nodded. “Yup. Doable, but a bastard, I think. There’s going to have to be some crunch.”

  She nodded distractedly. “It would be a lot easier if we didn’t have to touch every single object.”

  “But you do. And the schmucks at BlackStone’s main studio never document their code, so my guys are going to be flying blind once they get in there.” Leon sounded like he was in the process of crapping out a sea urchin, one of the really big ones. He looked up at me. “Any chance of getting a couple of their engineers out here to help us?”

  “You’ll have to ask Eric.” I shrugged. “I’d hope so, but you never know. Don’t count on it so you can be pleasantly surprised?”

  “Heh.” He scooped up his notepad and riffed through it, then stood up. “If that’s all, I’m gonna go break the bad news to the engineering team. You kids play ni
ce, you hear me?”

  Michelle grabbed a dry-erase marker from the board behind her and whipped it at his head. He ducked, and the marker hit the wall cap-first, sending shards of splintered plastic everywhere. “We lose more markers that way,” Leon said in a mock-mournful voice, then ducked out.

  Michelle stood as the door swung closed behind Leon. It hit the frame with a solid thump, followed by the click of the latch dropping into place.

  Michelle frowned. “That was weird.”

  “What was?” I found myself looking back and forth between her and the door, and mostly seeing a lot of the space in between. “Leon making a joke? I mean, OK, it was kind of funny, which is unusual for him, but—”

  She threw another marker, but more softly. It hit my arm and cartwheeled off to the floor. “Ow,” I said. “What was that for?”

  “To shut you up,” she said. “Not that it’s doing any good.” She walked around to stand by the doorway, thankfully out of reach of any more felt-tipped ammunition. “Leon didn’t close the door.”

  I rubbed my arm and rolled my eyes, more or less simultaneously. “Is that it? Come on, it was air pressure or something. Someone opens the front door and half the doors in this place slam, the ones that aren’t blocked by someone’s action-figure collection.”

  Michelle gave me a long, slow look of the sort that used to mean that I’d forgotten a dinner date and which now meant that she was glad I was someone else’s problem. “That’s something you’re going to have to work on if we’re going to make it through this project in one piece.”

  “What, my understanding of the laws of physics?” I gave her my best smile.

  She wasn’t impressed. “No. Your having an answer for everything. If we’re going to make this work, Ryan, then you’re going to have to get better at listening.

  I bent down to pick up the fallen marker, as much to hide my annoyance as to buy time to think of a response. It had rolled away, and only the sight of the blue cap sticking out from under my chair gave the slightest hint as to where it was. “It’ll be fine, Michelle,” I said, in between grunts as I fumbled for it. “Most of the hard decisions will be made for us by the hardware or BS. The real thing I’m worried about is the time this is going to take.”

  “Idiot,” she said, with only a vague hint of affection, and walked around my chair. She knelt down in front of me, grabbed the marker, and placed it in my hand. “You’re really worried about all those long nights we’re going to be spending in the office and how Sarah’s going to take it.”

  I shook my head, even as my fingers closed around what she’d given me. “Sarah and I have other things to talk about right now.”

  “Arguing over rings?” she asked, then saw my face. “Oh. Oh, I’m sorry, Ryan. What’s wrong.”

  “Nothing,” I muttered. “She’s not real thrilled with my decision to stay on.”

  “Ah.” There was a pause, and then, “Is that it?”

  “She offered to support me if I wanted to just stay home and write, or carve duck decoys, or whatever.” The words came out unaccountably bitter.

  “And you said no.” Shelly’s voice sounded odd now, slightly fuzzy, as if she were congested or sniffling.

  I nodded. “Because I wanted to feel like I was pulling my weight. Because I didn’t want to let everyone down by quitting. Because….”

  “Because you love what you do.” There was a ring of finality there, and a ring of truth. “And because you believe in what you did.”

  “Yeah,” I said, and stood. “I guess I do. Or did. Blue Lightning really felt special, like something had reached down and given me just that little bit of inspiration that makes a game magic. Like I’d finally done what I was meant to be doing, what all those years and other projects had led up to. That I’d, I dunno, I’d found my calling.”

  Abruptly, the ridiculousness of what I’d said hit me, and the air went out of me all at once. “Or whatever. Thanks for listening, Shelly. Though honestly, I have no idea why I’m talking to you, of all people about this. Still, I appreciate it.”

  I turned my chair around to face her, and to finish thanking her.

  She smiled, put her finger to her lips, and walked out the door.

  Chapter 10

  My first reaction was to call Sarah and ask her what the hell she thought she was doing, trying to leverage Eric like that. The decision, when I made it, was mine, and I had no idea what she thought she’d accomplish by trying to apply pressure. It wasn’t going to provoke Eric to fire me, though it might nudge him toward treating me a little “better” and thus make it even less likely that I would walk. None of it made any sense, and Sarah not making sense didn’t make any sense.

  It added up to “don’t call”. Instead, I decided to take a walk outside to see if I could work off some steam before I blew up at someone who didn’t deserve it.

  Slipping out the back door, I stepped into what was jokingly called “the smokers’ lounge.” Smoking was prohibited inside the building, of course, and Eric strongly discouraged it out front where guests, visitors, prospective hires or anyone else might see it. That left the area outside the back door from the lunchroom, which opened up onto a tiny, vaguely paved chunk of parking lot that only got used for desperation overflow. Small cells of smokers were scattered here and there, some on the sidewalk under the vague overhang that provided a little protection from the elements, some scattered more widely on the asphalt itself.

  Everyone looked up when the door opened, sized up who was coming out, and then went back to their conversations. A small knot in one of the parking spaces edged a few steps further back, as if to keep themselves from being overheard. I recognized Terry as one of them.

  “Hey, Terry.” I wandered over in his direction. He didn’t look thrilled to see me, but he didn’t turn his back on me entirely, either.

  “Hey,” he said. The others with him—a couple of artists whose names I couldn’t remember, a networking engineer named Larry, and one of the QA temps—kept their heads down or nodded. None of them looked at me or said anything.

  There was a moment of awkward silence, and then another one, and a third before Terry shuffled his feet and reached into his pocket for a pack of American Spirits. “You smoking now, Ryan?”

  “Naah,” I replied. “But the air out here is cleaner than it is in there, if you know what I mean.”

  That got a chuckle from a couple of them, and Larry started grinning. “Bullshit’s too thick for you, man?”

  I nodded. “Something like that, yeah. Thick enough to spread like peanut butter.” That got another laugh, and a half-smile from Terry. “So what are you guys doing out here?”

  Terry waved a half-smoked cigarette. “Smoking. And talking. And waiting.”

  “For something to compile?”

  He shook his head no. “Waiting for a few things and a few people to come around, if you know what I mean.”

  “I’m not sure I do.”

  The group started to break up then, people looking at each other and then at me and muttering darkly the whole time. “I told you this was bullshit,” Larry said, and one of the artists agreed with him, and then it was just me and Terry. He looked at me, took a drag on his cigarette, and then deliberately spat right between my feet. “She said you’d come around, sooner or later,” he said. “Looks like it’s later.”

  “She said? Who said? Sarah? Shelly? Come on, Terry. Work with me for a minute, OK?” But he just looked at me and shook his head, then shuffled off like the smoke had knotted his lips to silence.

  I thought about going after him, but by this point half the smokers out there were watching our little tableau, and I didn’t want to run the risk of having things escalate in front of a couple of dozen of witnesses, any number of whom were no doubt holding phones with 4+ Megapixel camera capability.

  Instead, I squared my shoulders and stomped off around the building widdershins, hoping that anyone I ran into would at least make a little goddamned sense.
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br />   Walking was supposed to work off some of my burn, so of course I got the exact opposite effect instead. As I trudged past the just-planted holly bushes and artistically spread mulch that lined the parking lot, I could feel myself getting steadily more steamed. What the hell had Sarah been thinking? What was Michelle pulling with her disappearing act? Why was Terry going all spooky, and why wouldn’t any of these people leave me the hell alone to do my job? Speaking of which, why hadn’t Eric—

  “Hey.”

  I stopped and looked up. Leon stood there, a little winded, small half-moons of sweat under his pits. He’d had to run to catch up with me, or so it seemed. He was breathing hard, and his hair was a mess.

  “Hey Leon,” I said, and started walking again. He stood still for a moment, startled, and then scurried to catch up.

  “I’m glad I caught you, man. Shelly says she heard you’re quitting. WTF?” A car with a handful of junior designers in it zipped past on its way out to something lunch-like, the occupants waving. I waved back.

  “Not true,” I said and sped up a little. Leon rolled his eyes, and panted a little harder catching up. “Let me guess—Shelly heard it from Sarah?”

  He blinked, or maybe that was just a way of getting sweat out of his eyes. “How’d you know?”

  “Because Sarah has apparently been telling everyone that I’m quitting, God knows why, and the fact that she’s now calling my ex-girlfriends to tell them is really chapping my ass.”

  “So you’re not quitting?” Leon’s voice was suddenly hopeful. I stopped, turned, and stared at him.

  “I don’t know, OK? Maybe I am and maybe I’m not, but right now, all I do know is that my girlfriend informing everyone that I am quitting is making me want to stay more than ever, because I’ll be damned if I let her paint me into a corner by telling everyone in the world what I’m supposed to be doing. All right? You happy? You got your answer? I don’t goddamned know!”

  He took a couple of steps back, and put up his hands like he was trying to talk down a jumper from a high window. “Easy there, Captain Caveman. Just chill out, OK? And maybe once you stop shooting blood out your eyeballs, you can call Sarah and, I dunno, maybe ask her to cut it out? Instead of going apeshit all over me, you know? Geez.”