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  Out of house, on the other hand, was an entirely different story.

  In front of him on the table was a tablet, its screen already covered with a series of scribbles. Next to it was a tall aluminum coffee cup stamped with the company’s logo: A single horseshoe, or perhaps an inverted omega, with the legend “Horseshoe Games” underneath in simple block letters. The rest of the table was covered similarly, divided between identical cups and cans of beverages from the extended caffeinated family.

  “What’s the problem, Eric?” I asked, already cringing. I always hated looking down the table while the projector was going. It gave everyone on that end of the room the appearance of being ghostly shadow-figures, and it made their faces impossible to read. The fact that Eric was leaning over the table like a vulture in anticipation of its lunch wasn’t helping. “Did we scale back the MP numbers? I thought we were good with promising 32, and then maybe delivering 64 if we could work out the latency issues.”

  “Sure, that was the plan, and according to Tryone—” Leon started in abruptly, then ended just as abruptly as Eric raised his hand for quiet.

  “That’s…not the point. Lights?” Aaron Shepherd, the QA lead who’d been sitting in his usual spot on Eric’s right, scurried up to turn on the main overhead fluorescents. As they flickered into life, there was a groan from around the table, and the image of Blue Lightning onscreen faded into a dim outline. A faint, throbbing headache announced itself just behind my left eye; that meant that the full-fledged skull pounder was on its way as soon as Eric finished ripping me a new one.

  Eric unfolded himself from his chair, leaning forward and resting his forearms on the table. “The problem we’ve got so far is that you haven’t said anything.”

  “It’s the first slide, Eric. I’m just defining the game.” I snapped back, more defensively than I wanted. This wasn’t a fight I could win, particularly not in front of witnesses. Yelling was just going to help me lose it that much sooner.

  “You haven’t defined the game. You’ve rattled off the same old back-of-box bullshit bullet points that we get on every project, that’s all.” He levered himself off the table and started walking around it, clockwise. “Come on. Immersive story? There are solitaire games that claim that. FPS? There’s a million FPS games out there. 32 player multiplayer? Nice, but not unique. What we’re missing,” and by this time, he was within a couple of feet from where I stood, with only the still-visible projector beam between us, “is something that blows the doors off from minute one. Something that makes them know how amazing this game is, and why they have to publish. Something that says Blue Lightning, and not ‘FPS with interesting feature set.’”

  I tried not to glare at him. “Eric, you know these guys. If we don’t come out and say it, they may miss the fact that it’s an FPS entirely. Remember what happened when Virtual Vineyard tried to pitch that robot janitor game?”

  Eric rolled his eyes. It was urban legend in the game industry, the story of a small dev team having basically shot its wad to present a pitch for a comedy platformer starring a wacky robot janitor to one of the major French publishers. Virtual Vineyard had pulled out all the stops, flown half their staff to the meeting in Marseilles, had put on a four-hour-long sell session that by all accounts had been legendary, and had been politely told thank you, but we’re not interested.

  Later, through back channels, the head of the studio learned that the word “janitor” didn’t translate into French, and so none of the suits he’d been pitching to had the faintest idea of what he’d been talking about. And of course, none of them had, at any point during the process, bothered to mention this.

  That was the scenario that every small development house lived in fear of, the thing they all took wild steps to avoid, and everyone in the room knew it.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Eric said softly. “They know it’s an FPS. They’ve been funding it for a year now. What we need to show them is why they’ve been funding it.” He grabbed the mouse and started clicking through slides. “Here. What’s this?”

  I looked back. It was a screenshot, a moment captured from gameplay, showing the lead character essentially pouring herself out of a light socket in order to materialize inside a locked room. “It’s wrapping up the circuit movement system. The player is jumping from inside the circuitry to the outside world and—”

  “Exactly.” Eric was nodding, the first hints of enthusiasm visible on his face. “Something cool that no one else has. Now, do we have a slide in here of the circuit movement?”

  I nodded, my face hot and flushed with embarrassment. “We’ve got a capture of some of the gameplay, too.”

  “So you’re saying we move that up front in hopes of giving the suits a stiffie?” The voice that came from the side of the room was the last one I wanted to hear chiming in.

  “Jesus, Michelle, we're trying to save the presentation here.” Inwardly, I groaned. There were very few women at the company, especially on the production side of things, which meant that even if Michelle Steiner had been the shy, retiring type, she would have stood out.

  “Shy and retiring” was not how anyone had described Michelle, not now and not ever.

  Eric looked over at me, his face an eloquent mask of “You deal with it.” I shot him back a look that promised bloody vengeance, and then put on a grin as I turned to face Michelle.

  She wasn't facing me, though. Instead, she was busy sketching something on a notepad, not looking at anyone. “What you want,” she said, “is simple. We need to stop thinking of this as a project review and instead start thinking about it like it’s a commercial. We need to use this to really get BlackStone fired up about the game, and that means showing them all the sexy stuff first to get them hooked.”

  She turned her notepad around, and on it was a rough storyboard for a new presentation, starting inside the machine and then exploding into the rough combat sequence that Leon had demoed to me the day before. “Something like this?”

  Eric leaned down and grabbed the notepad. “Something, yeah.” He looked over at me, then around the room. “Ryan, Michelle, why don’t you sit down with this and try to rejigger what we’ve got. All the Powerpoint stuff is good, but if we can move this up front…will end of day tomorrow be all right?”

  “Fine,” I said, a little bitterly, and shut the projector down. The whirr of the fan filled the room, along with the scent of scorched dust. “When are we presenting this to the suits?”

  “We’re not,” Eric said softly, accenting the first word just enough to let me know that all was not well. “We’re just sending them the presentation, and their third-party group will be looking it over by themselves.” There was a moment of quiet while that sunk in and he scanned Michelle’s sketches. “That’s why this thing needs to be kick ass all by its lonesome.”

  I could feel my eyes getting really big and my guts trying to drop into my shoes. If they didn't want to spring for plane tickets for us to present, that meant—No. I caught the thought, cut it off, and stuffed it away. No sense panicking the rest of the room, no sense freaking myself out, either. The game rocked. It was going to be fine.

  So I just nodded and hoped like hell that I was keeping the panic out of my face. “I see. Michelle?”

  She looked up at me, an unspoken question in her eyes. It translated roughly as “How screwed are we?” and I wasn’t in a position to answer it here.

  “My office, fifteen minutes?”

  “Sure, if I can get my notepad back.” Embarrassed, Eric handed it to her. “I’ll see you then.” She stood and, without looking at anyone else, left the room. The rest of the attendees followed, chattering amongst themselves, their low voices suggesting varying degrees of worry.

  And then there were two of us, me shutting things down and detaching my laptop from the projector, and Eric standing there watching me. He waited until everyone else was out of the room, then crossed to the open door and shut it.

  “You could have warned me,” I said as
I unscrewed the video cable from the port on the back of the projector. “Instead of hanging me out to dry like that.”

  “I didn’t know what you had planned,” Eric said, no apology in his voice. “If you'd nailed it like you usually do, I wouldn't have said anything.”

  “You could have asked for a preview.” The cool-down light on the projector flashed green, and I shut it down. The fan whimpered into silence, leaving only the occasional thunks and groans of the building’s HVAC system to fill the void. “If I’d known that wasn’t what you wanted, I wouldn’t have been here until midnight every night last week trying to finish the presentation.”

  Eric frowned. “It doesn’t matter. Just work with Michelle and put the chrome up front, OK?”

  I turned, and this time I didn't try to hide the fact that I was pissed off. “It’s not chrome. It’s the core gameplay loop, and it’s what makes this game different. You know that.” I'd said it, let him deny it if he had the balls to do so. He didn't, though. He knew it was good, too, that we had a chance for a real winner here.

  “I know, I know. And I know how proud you are of it, and how hard you’ve worked on it. I know this is your baby, Ryan. But it’s everyone in the building’s baby, and I need to make sure that it’s positioned best for the company.” I looked up from wrapping the video cable into something vaguely knot-like and saw that he’d positioned himself in front of the door. That tore it. I wasn't going to be getting out of the room until we reached some kind of accommodation on whatever Eric had in mind, and God help me if I tried.

  I picked up the laptop and tucked it under my arm. “What’s the real issue, Eric? How bad is it?”

  Eric looked away and flushed slightly. The admission that something was seriously wrong shocked me; I’d thrown the question out there primarily to elicit a denial, a confirmation that everything was in great shape. The fact that Eric wasn’t denying anything was scary, a piss-your-pants bad warning sign that the storm was coming.

  He finally looked at me but paused a long moment before saying anything. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s not anything. I’ve just been getting a weird vibe from BlackStone lately. They tell me everything’s great, but when I ask about whether we’re going to be showing at any of the trade shows they keep putting me off. And with the milestone eight payment coming up—the big one—it’s just got a weird feel to it.”

  I stepped closer and shifted the laptop's weight. I'd dropped one once and still hadn't heard the end of it from IT. “Why would they want to kill it? It’s great, it’s as close to ahead of schedule as you can get, and it’s going to be a hit. It wouldn’t make any sense to kill it.”

  “Their decisions don’t have to make sense to us, just to their bottom line. If they’ve got another shooter that’s being done by one of their in-house studios, and they want to protect it, then maybe it makes sense to them to kill ours. Not that it’s the case, mind you—I have no idea what they might be thinking, if anything. Like I said, I don’t know. It could be nothing.” Suddenly, Eric snapped back to himself. “All of this is between you and me, understood?”

  I nodded, once. “Understood. Completely.” We looked at each other for a moment longer, then Eric opened the door.

  “Good luck with Michelle. Try not to kill each other.”

  I stepped past him, a tight grin on my face. “No worries. We got that out of our systems a while ago.”

  “Uh-huh.” Eric sounded unconvinced. “That’s not what half the office thinks. Or Sarah.”

  “Sarah knows better,” I said, my words clipped. “And that’s what matters.”

  “Whatever you say, Ryan,” Eric said, and shut the door. From behind them, I heard a crash that sounded a lot like someone kicking a chair into a wall. I didn't go in to see if Eric was all right. After all, they were his chairs.

  Besides, he'd told me to act like everything was fine.

  Chapter 2

  Michelle was in my office when I opened the door. More specifically, she was in my chair, with her feet up on my desk a series of rough storyboard sketches on the whiteboard. The air was thick with the scent of overworked dry-erase marker, and she was grinning.

  I dropped the laptop onto what passed for a flat surface, then stopped. I looked at her, then at the board, then back at her. “Am I really necessary to this process?” I asked, “Or have you and Eric gotten it all doped out, and you just want me to do the typing?”

  “Oh, relax.” Michelle pulled her feet off the desk and scooted herself upright in the chair. “Most of what you’ve got is fine, I think. He just wants to start the presentation off with a bang, and I do bang better than you do.”

  “I think it’s best if I don’t respond to that,” I said and sat myself down in the visitors’ chair against the wall. It was a small office, cluttered with papers and empty game boxes, and nearly every square inch of wall was covered in pinned-up maps, charts, or other documents related to the game. On the door was the only personal touch I'd allowed myself, a poster of Charlie Chaplin as the Little Tramp. Someone—not me—had added a thought balloon over Chaplin’s head that read “At least I’m not making video games.” Everything else—desk, bookshelves, cabinets—was strictly functional and at least partially overwhelmed by the tide of clutter that the project had generated.

  “I still don’t get why you get an office,” she asked lazily. “Is that my fault?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied, flicking the door open a little wider so anyone passing could estimate at a glance how much physical distance there was between the two of us. “If you really want to know the truth, Eric insisted. He said he was tired of me not getting anything done before midnight because I was answering questions all day, so he wanted to put me someplace where I could shut the door and work uninterrupted once in a while.”

  “Which was conveniently located down the hall from his office,” she said sweetly, without smiling. “And the fact that it happened right after we, you know—”

  “Blew up all over the lunchroom?” I said it without rancor. “Don’t ask me. I just work here. Besides, that was a long time ago, and we’ve got a presentation to fix.” I looked across the desk at Michelle, the unspoken mantra of “eye contact, eye contact, eye contact” looping in the back of my head. She was short, and the way she sat, her feet dangled a couple of inches off the floor. Like everyone else in the office, she wore jeans, which she’d paired with a bright yellow t-shirt from a project we’d wrapped up three years ago. She cocked her head, and her hair, reddish brown and longer than she’d worn it when we’d dated, slipped down over one eye. Irritated, she brushed it away. No nail polish, I noted automatically. It went with the no makeup and the no jewelry. That was Michelle; there was never anything but Michelle, and if you couldn’t handle that then God help you.

  Back in the day, I hadn’t been able to. But, I reminded myself, I was with Sarah now, and there was work to do.

  “So how do you want to arrange this,” I asked. I scraped my chair across the carpet to the whiteboard. “Are we going to start with a pure gameplay capture sequence, or do you want to see if we have time to do something pre-rendered?”

  Michelle shook her head. “We don’t have time for pre-rendered. The best thing we can do is a capture of you playing through the core sequence, then seeing if the sound guys can put some music behind it and maybe a little voiceover.”

  I nodded. “Embed it in the presentation, or run it separately?”

  She rubbed her chin, then stood and walked to the board. “If we embed it, there’s less of a chance of them forgetting to play it. Also, there’s no time lost with a switchover. So that makes sense. What I was thinking,” and she took a marker from the shelf at the bottom of the board, “would be that we’d start with the logo, then dissolve to the gameplay. Is there anything you think we need to show off besides the circuit runs and the combat?”

  I grimaced. “Everything else is just FPS, remember.” Michelle started to say something, but I interrupted her. “Serio
usly, that’s our killer feature, and nothing else is going to look as cool next to it. If we want to have a wow moment at the beginning, that’s it. Maybe pull in some multiplayer for later, but, no, at the start, we show that off.”

  “Show her off,” Michelle disagreed, and sketched a rough female figure more clearly into the frames she’d made while waiting. “She’s got to be a big part of this. She’s important. Hell, she’s the game.”

  “No, we’re the game. Everything we’ve put into it. But you’re right, she’s a big part of it. Maybe if we—”

  My office phone rang.

  Instinctively, both of us looked toward the telephone. It was a sleek, black thing, covered with buttons and, occasionally, blinking red lights, and at the top of the keypad was a small LCD screen that conveniently showed the number of whoever or whatever extension was calling at the time. I twisted in my seat and leaned forward to get a better look at it, then realized that I knew whose the number was.

  “Do you want me to get it? I’m closer.” Michelle turned and took a step toward the desk. The phone jangled again.

  “No!” I coughed. “I mean, no.” Michelle shot me a quizzical look, and I wilted under it. “It’s Sarah, and if you answer the phone, then I get to explain at great length what you’re doing in my office, playing secretary.”

  “Jesus, Ryan, I wasn’t offering to get you coffee.”

  “No, no, I know that, and she probably knows that, too, but, oh the hell with it. She just wants to know when I’m coming home, and the more time I spend talking on the phone, the longer it’s going to take me to get home. If we just finish this, I can get home sooner and tell her that I missed her call. OK? Let’s just get back to it.”

  The phone rang a third time, angrier and more insistent. Michelle gave a half-smile. “Lying? There’s a great way to build a strong relationship, Ryan. I’m glad to see you haven’t changed too much.”