Vaporware Read online

  “If you say so.” She sighed. “Look, I know I said I'd be late, but this is ridiculous. It's eleven thirty, Ryan. There can't be anything that important at the office right now, can there?”

  I rubbed my eyes, and was surprised to find that they stung like hell. “That late? Christ. I had no idea. I'm just going to wrap this last test up, and then I'm coming home.”

  “You promise?”

  “Promise.” A sudden noise distracted me. I turned to see that the game had reloaded and restarted, even though the controller was unplugged and by all rights it should have been frozen. Multiple explosions detonated onscreen, deafeningly loud and too virtually close for comfort. “Shit, shit, shit!” I dove for the controller to pause things, the phone tumbling out from under my ear to crack against the desktop. Grabbing the controller, I mashed the pause button, only to realize it was still unplugged and that pressing the buttons would have no effect. “Hang on!” I shouted over the onscreen din, reaching out to shut off the television before it blew out my eardrums.

  The power switch clicked. Abruptly, there was silence, except for the low grinding of the disk drive in the guts of the debug kit. I'd shut that off in a minute, I decided, and reached for the phone instead.

  It dangled off the edge of the desk, the cord sawing back and forth as it did. Gingerly, I picked it up, holding it between two fingers like it might jump out of my hand if I held it too tightly. “Hello? Are you still there?”

  “What the hell was that?” Sarah's voice had managed to shed any of the gentleness of a minute ago. “It sounded like a bomb going off in there.”

  “Technically, it was a series of cluster grenades—” I began, before realizing too late that the question had been, at best, rhetorical.

  “Whatever. Come home when you feel like it, once you've finished playing.”

  “Sarah, I—”

  There was a click. The line went dead.

  “Crap,” I said out loud, then hung up the phone. It didn't feel sufficiently dramatic, so I walked over to the television. “It's your goddamned fault, you know. If you'd just stayed paused, none of this would have happened.”

  The television didn't say anything, but the debug kit kept making chunking noises, the sign of a hard drive that was thinking hard about ending it all. I turned and glared at it instead. “And you were supposed to stay paused, jackass. What the hell happened?”

  Stooping down, I picked up the stray controller and pulled the cable in. Regardless of my personal feelings, it still needed to be connected, if for no other reason than to get it ready for the regular crew in the morning. Walking over to the debug kit, where it sat humming and sassy on the desktop, I reconnected the cable and set the controller next to it. My finger jabbed out at the power button....

  ...and then stopped. Maybe it would be best to give Sarah some time to cool down. There was no sense rushing home just to walk into a fight. I could wait until she was asleep and then come home. I could even do something nice for when she woke up in the morning.

  The more I thought about it, the more I liked that plan. There was a 24-hour Harris Teeter on the way home. I could stop in and get flowers and maybe something for breakfast. And, if I tiptoed in and didn’t make any noise, then maybe I could arrange the flowers in a way where she’d see them before she saw me in the morning, and….

  Without really thinking about it, I grabbed the controller, then turned the television back on. The game sprang back into life, even as I settled down into my chair. Just a little while longer, I told myself, and as long as I was here, I should at least get a little more done on the frame rate testing.

  In front of me, a brand new Salvador materialized onscreen, glistening and ready for battle. I gave him my full attention.

  Chapter 13

  It wasn’t the pounding on the door that woke me up the next morning. It was the pounding on the desk next to my head.

  “Whurr?” I said, or at least I think I said, as I began the laborious task of extricating my face from the slightly sticky puddle of drool in which it had become stuck. My eyes opened roughly at the same moment I realized that A)my head was on something much harder than my pillow and B)there was a really loud noise being generated somewhere very close to my poor, tender skull.

  Trying again, I came up with “Whaa?” at least until I got my head off the desk and myself sitting vaguely upright. In front of me, I could see Eric, or at least the section from waist to mid-torso. Any more would have meant opening my eyes wider and that wasn’t a challenge I was really up to at the moment. “Good morning?” I finally croaked, and rubbed my eyes. “It is morning, right?” I swear, crinkling up my forehead to think about that made an actual sound.

  Or maybe it was just my imagination, and anticipation of what I knew was coming.

  I managed to pry my eyes open a little wider. It wasn’t a win. Eric did not look happy, and since he was looking in my direction, he specifically did not look happy with me. “Yes, it is morning,” he said. “And by the…looks of you, you’ve been here all night. Is that the case?”

  Slowly, I nodded. “I think so, yeah. I was doing some frame rate testing, and I got caught up in it, and then before I knew it, it was late, and I was just going to write some emails, and...oh my God.”

  Eric sighed. “At least you didn’t fuck up the coffeemaker this time.”

  I thought about that for a second. “That’s because we switched to the single cup packets.”

  He snorted. “Yeah, well, that was because you kept on letting the pot boil dry and stinking up the whole building. So I have to ask, what the hell were you doing here?”

  “I told you,” I began, but got no further. Eric’s warning hand was up and that was the end of that.

  “No, you gave me an excuse. We’re still way early in the project, Ryan. What the hell are you doing pulling crunchtime hours?”

  “I just thought—” I tried to interrupt, but he barreled right over me.

  “No, you didn’t. If you’d thought, you’d have realized that if you’re pulling all-nighters, then you’re going to burn yourself out before there’s a need for you to be doing that. Even better, you’re going to get other people thinking that if you’re in, they have to be in, and they’ll burn out, too. Is that what you want?” He was practically shouting now, and if the veins in his forehead weren’t actually throbbing, they were at least stretching and warming up to do so.

  “Jesus, Eric. I was just trying to get a little ahead of the curve.” I was honestly at little shocked by the vehemence of his tone. Eric was one of the good guys, as far as employers in the industry went, but even he wasn’t exactly the sort to complain when guys wanted to put in a little extra work.

  “It’s still early days,” he said, exasperated. “There isn’t that much curve to get ahead of, especially with half the team still beat to shit after the hours we were running on Blue Lightning.” He grabbed the back of his neck and started rubbing it, eyes fixed and staring at the floor. “Was anyone else in that late?” he asked. “Just tell me. They’re not going to get in trouble. I just don’t want them doing it until it’s called for.”

  I racked my brain, trying to bludgeon it into looking at its tape backup of the evening before. “The last thing I remember,” I said carefully, “was someone leaving around nine thirty, maybe ten, and then the building going quiet.” I thought about it for a minute more. “Terry. Terry was the last one out. I remember him saying something about good luck with whatever I was doing, and then hearing the door slam. There wasn’t anyone after that, at least not that I heard.”

  Another noncommittal nod. “Do you know what he was here working on?”

  I gave my best “dunno” gesture, hands spread wide. “I couldn’t tell you. For all I know he was downloading buckets of hamster porn.”

  Slumping back in my chair, I started cataloguing my aches and pains. A throbbing between my shoulder blades reminded me that I’d slept awfully funny, and the pounding headache that had just manag
ed to manifest myself was chiming in with the fact that there hadn’t really been that much sleep involved. All of a sudden, I was out of one-liners. “If you’re that worried, why not ask him what he was doing? As far as I know, he’s getting his work done, right?”

  Eric coughed, gently, into one fist. “According to Leon, he’s not. He’s already a week behind.”

  “A week?” I sat up in a hurry. “We haven’t been at it enough weeks for him to be a whole one behind.”

  The smile Eric gave me was not a pretty thing. “Now you’re getting it. Plus, he’s been coming in late, calling in sick a lot, and generally acting like he’s exhausted. I was wondering if he was following you around, but from what you say, that’s not the case. But whatever he actually is working on, here or at home, needs to stop because he’s paying too much attention to it and it’s going to get him fired.”

  I rubbed my forehead wearily. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “So you don’t get any surprises,” he said, his voice a little softer. “Go home. Take a shower, take a nap. Come back in after lunch, assuming Sarah hasn’t changed the locks.”

  “Don’t joke about that,” I warned him, but he was already walking out the door and pretending he couldn’t hear. A minute later, he was gone, and I heaved myself out of the chair.

  Moving meant air moving around me, which meant getting a whiff of myself, which in turn was a seriously bad idea. Eric was right; home and a shower was definitely on the agenda. I sent a quick OOO email to the team list stating where I was going (home for unspecified reasons), when they could expect me back (after lunch) and how they could reach me in emergency (cell or text or email), then shut everything down and headed out the door. A quick check of the now plugged-in cell phone told me that it was 9:30. Core work hours didn’t start until 10, so the building was still mostly empty, with the occasional slam of car doors outside providing counterpoint to the ping of machines booting up.

  I didn’t see Terry out in the parking lot as I headed to my car, not that I was expecting to. From what Eric had said, he’d probably be pushing the 10 AM buzzer, if not going past it, and waiting around on the off chance I’d run into him before Leon or Eric did struck me as a lousy idea. In theory, we had a mandatory 8-hour work day with core hours between 10 and 4. Folks could come in when they wanted and leave when they wanted as long as they put in their time and were there during core so other people could find them or schedule meetings as necessary. In reality, it meant that the engineers started coming in around seven and the artists started coming in around nine-thirty, and while most people put in their hours, there were always a few who came in around ten, took an hour lunch, and left before five in hopes that no one else in the building could actually do the math.

  Folks like Terry, apparently. Odds were he was still taking the whole Blue Lightning cancellation pretty hard, but sooner or later you just had to snap out of it and move on.

  Unless, of course, he wasn’t moving on. The thought stuck with me as something to explore when I got back in.

  After a nap and a shower, though. Definitely after a nap and a shower. And with that thought, I got in my car and went home.

  * * *

  Sarah was not at the house, which did not surprise me. That indeed had been my hope and the reason I'd stopped off at a supermarket to pick out what looked to be a reasonably healthy bouquet of roses to set in a vase, half peace offering and half apology. What did surprise me was that there was a small vase on the table in the breakfast nook, which someone had filled with carnations. Next to it was a note from Sarah, faintly perfumed.

  Ryan, it read, Sorry I snapped last night. I should know better by now that sometimes, things just happen. Let's make it up tonight. Love you—Sarah.

  I screwed my eyes shut tight and held onto the note tight enough to feel it crumple under my fingers. She was apologizing to me? It made my head spin. If anyone should be apologizing, it should have been me, on bended knee and—

  A sharp pain in my hand told me that the note wasn't all I'd been squeezing. I'd apparently gotten a good grip on the roses as well, and the thorns had punctured my palm and fingers in a half-dozen places.

  “Heh. Stigmata,” I joked to myself, then put the note down gently on the table so that I might better ponder the problem of the roses. Taking the carnations out of the vase seemed like a poor idea, and putting another vase of flowers next to them seemed worse. Instead, I ended up taking a lemonade pitcher from the cabinet, then trimming the rose stems and setting them in there with a healthy dose of plant food and some Sweet'n'Low. Sarah had told me once that adding the stuff to cut flowers helped them last longer, so I added a packet's worth, and then put the empty paper next to the pitcher on the counter. Its mission was to serve as evidence that on occasion, I did indeed listen.

  A cup of coffee, a shower, another cup of coffee, and a quick bowl of cereal later, I felt somewhat closer to human. The clock over the kitchen sink told me it was still a quarter to eleven. The shower and associated ablutions had taken less time than I thought, and I could get back into the office without missing much of a beat.

  My feet took a couple of steps toward the door, and then stopped. I realized I didn't need to be back into the office until around one, possibly even later. I could go in, but I'd given them all night. They could spare me for another couple of hours, and the place probably wouldn't explode in the interim.

  My head felt oddly clear, as if it were suddenly unfogged with caffeine and sweat and stale air and all the other smells that intrinsically, subconsciously, told me that here was a place of work.

  “I could stay home for a little while.” Hearing the words aloud, surprised me, so I said them again. “I could stay home for a while.” I could smell the perfume from Sarah's note, drifting up from my fingers and across from the table. There were roses in the mix, too, and the faint leftover scent of last night's cooking, and meanwhile sunlight was making golden diamonds on the kitchen floor as it spilled in through the half-drawn blinds.

  My cell phone buzzed. I pulled it out and looked at it. One of the level designers was calling, no doubt with a question of supreme importance having to do with box placement or how many exploding barrels to put in. Holding the still-vibrating thing up, I told it, “Sorry, I'm in the shower,” and tossed it on the counter next to the roses. It shook once more, then was silent. After a minute, the message notification came up. I turned the phone over, so I wouldn't have to see it if I came back downstairs, then grabbed a can of Coke and headed for my office.

  The fact that the phone had been completely drained of juice twelve hours ago never crossed my mid.

  * * *

  I'd been telling people about the novel I was writing for about as long as I'd been in games. They'd been nodding and rolling their eyes for almost as long, once it became clear that the odds of my ever finishing anything were worm's-belly low. Still, it was a much-cherished dream, and one that I took out occasionally to see if I could breathe some life into it. There was a large crossover in ambition between writing and game design, or so I'd noticed at various conferences and conventions. Writers always wanted to get their books made into games, and game writers and designers always wanted to write novels. On the designer side, I'd chalked it up to auteur syndrome, the desire to do something creative that didn't require committee meetings and approval stagegates. For the writers, I mostly figured it was about money. Beyond that, I had never given it much thought, except to sit down occasionally and try to hammer out something of my own.

  The Novel Projects folder on my system looked like an untended graveyard when I booted the machine up. Folders marked the graves of a dozen or more projects, lined up neatly to show where they'd fallen. And at the bottom of the list, tagged Active with a splash of red, was the one marked CURRENT PROJEKT. Inside, was a single document file, named CHAPTER ONE.

  With a look at the clock—it was now almost eleven—I opened the file, and started writing.

  * * *

&
nbsp; The front door cracked open at twelve thirty, shocking me out of what had been a pleasant writerly fugue. “Hello?” I called downstairs, and did a hasty save, just in case. “Hello?”

  “Ryan?” Sarah's voice floated up the stairs. “Is that you?”

  “I hope so,” I said, and got up to meet her in the hallway. Her footsteps had already announced she was coming upstairs, the peculiar thump-tap of her footfalls instantly recognizable. “What brings you home for lunch?”

  I stepped into the hallway and she was there. Navy skirt, cream-colored blouse, gold necklace—she looked beautiful. I had to look close to see the dark circles under her eyes, and the places where the makeup just barely failed to hide them.

  The look on her face told me she didn't think I was looking so wonderful myself. Then her eyes softened, and we just fell into holding each other.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey, you.” She looked up to kiss me with dry lips. “I'm sorry I yelled last night. I was just getting worried.”

  I kissed her again, to stop her apologizing. “Shhh,” I said, when we broke the kiss. “You have nothing to apologize for. I should have come straight home from the bar, but I just wanted to check one thing and—”

  This time, she stopped me. We came up for air a minute later, both grinning like idiots. “How much time do you have?” I asked her.

  “Not enough,” she replied primly, “but I hope you have a good reason to come home on time tonight now.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said, and then there were a few more minutes without talking.

  “So why were you home?” she finally asked, when we reached a point where we had the choice of stopping or making ourselves very late.

  I adjusted my jeans to make them a little more comfortable, and tried hard to think about baseball. “Eric sent me home for a few hours after he found me asleep at my desk. I'm not supposed to come in until after lunch.”