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  “Thank you,” she said, and she was smiling, her glass still held up. “But there’s more.”

  “More?” I paused with the wine hovering close to my lip. “What else could there be?”

  She nodded demurely, smiling. “How about an office instead of a cube, and a raise, and all sorts of other compensation-type goodies that we can talk about later?” She took another sip of her wine before setting the glass down on the table. “Wow, I haven’t seen you smile like that in ages. I’m really glad you got home on time tonight so we could share this.”

  “Me, too.” I felt a warm glow suffusing my face and spreading down through my belly. The wine, I thought, or maybe just Sarah. She could do that to me even on days without earth-shattering good news. And on a day like today….

  She took a sip of wine, then topped off her glass. “Which sort of brings me to the next topic, and it’s not something you have to answer right now. I just want you to think about it.”

  “Is that the marriage conversation?” I made a show of sliding my chair back and pretending to bolt. “Should I start running, or—”

  “You are impossible,” Sarah said, but without heat or anger. She mock-glared at me, but she was trying to hide a smile, which killed the effect. “And don’t you dare look relieved, mister.”

  I just pulled my chair back to the table, head down in contrition, as Andy set a basket of bread down on the table. “Anything I say now will just get me in trouble, so I’m just going to sit here quietly and gaze at you in adoration.” I took a sip of wine. “And drink. But mostly gaze.”

  “That’s a wise decision.” Sarah’s lips crinkled into a smile. “That makes two you’ve made tonight.”

  “Who’s counting?”

  She smiled for real now. “Me.”

  “Touché.”

  “Later,” and the smile became a promise. “But as I was saying before we were attacked by delicious carbs—do you want some bread, honey?”

  I unwrapped the napkin to reveal a steaming loaf of what looked to be unsliced semolina bread underneath. Braving the oven-born heat, I tore off a hunk and placed it on Sarah’s bread plate. “You first, my dear.”

  She took up the butter and spread the faintest of schmears on the bread, then nibbled on a corner. “You’re very sweet, you know that?”

  I grinned. “Thank you. For you, I try. Everyone else thinks I'm a right bastard.” I tore off a hunk of bread , then looked back up at her. “Anyway, you were saying?”

  “I was saying that this is just something to think about, OK? There’s no need for an answer any time soon, and certainly not until the game you’re working on is done.”

  I felt myself stiffening in my seat, and in a decidedly non-erotic way. “Yes?”

  She looked away for a moment, and it struck me that she was unsure of what to say next. That sent another jolt through me. Sarah was never unsure of herself, never at a loss for words. It was one of the things I found attractive about her, the ability to react to damn near anything and act as if she’d seen it coming all along. And now she was stammering, or the nearest thing to it. It scared the hell out of me.

  The words came out of her in a rush. “Look, I did the numbers. You know how you’re always talking about how, if you had the chance, you’d stay home and write? Work on your novel, really work on it?” She paused to gulp down a breath but plunged on before I could interject or affirm or do much of anything. “With my new salary, if you want to, you could do it. We could do it. We could afford it. We’d have to eat out a little less, and maybe tighten our belts in a couple of other places, but we could do it. If you want.”

  I opened my mouth to answer, but she shushed me. “You don’t have to say anything now. You don’t have to decide now. I know there’s a long way to go on your game. But I wanted you to know,” and she gave a little shudder, as if she, too, were afraid, “that I can do this for you. If you want.”

  “Honey, I...” My voice trailed off as my throat tightened. Words tried to force their way out but failed for lack of air behind them. “Are you sure?”

  She nodded, not trusting herself to say anything. I closed my eyes and thought about what I was going to say next. This was serious. Anything flip or off-the-cuff was going to echo for a long time, and not in a good way. Sarah knew how much she was asking and how much she was offering. I wasn't—I couldn't—shove that offer back in her face.

  But I wasn't sure I could take what she'd offered, either.

  Deep breath in, deep breath out.

  “Thank you,” I said, and said nothing else for a minute. “And thank you for believing in me that much.”

  “You're welcome,” she said, the words shuddering out of her. She took a gulp of wine, not a sip. “And again, you don't have to answer tonight, and if you say no it's okay, and—”

  I reached across the table to take one of her hands in mine. “Sarah,” I said. “I had no idea we could ever do something like this. I'll think about it, I promise. We're almost at alpha, so there's plenty of time. And if you change your mind, just say the word, and it will be like this conversation never happened. No hard feelings, no worries.”

  “I'm not going to take it back,” she said, sticking her chin out for defiant emphasis. “You said you always wanted to write. Now we can afford it, and,” she looked away, eyes shy, “It will be nice coming home to you, instead of waiting until the electronic gremlins let you go each night.”

  “That would be nice,” I said, and I meant it. No more late, late nights, no more frantic rushes to publishers’ deadlines, no more takeout Chinese in the break room because we weren't getting out of there until the deliverable was dead.

  On the other hand, no more leading the team. No more being able to play something I'd dreamed up and see it live and on the screen, responding what I told it to do. No more making a vision become real.

  No more making games.

  It was a lot to think about.

  I raised my glass. “To the decision, whatever it may be.”

  Sarah raised her glass to mine. “And to making it together.”

  “Together,” I echoed. The glasses touched. We drank. And not another word was said about it that night.

  Chapter 3

  Not that long ago, I thought to myself as I stood in Eric's office, sending a vital message to Europe had been an occasion. It would have gone by clipper ship, with all sorts of fanfare and farewells, muttered imprecations of the importance of the missive and proud declarations that it would be delivered in good time—no more than a couple of months. Sending a message of that sort had carried weight. It had been an event, something of significance, something not undertaken lightly.

  I thought about that as Eric hit a few keys on his Android and sent the presentation winging overseas. Attached had been a small note—“Hey, Phil, take a look at this and let me know what you think. We can do a polish pass before it goes in front of the board in London.” I knew what it said; I'd helped draft it. Now, all we could do was wait, unless they asked for changes, in which case we'd make them and send them along, toot sweet. Privately, I expected we'd have at least four more iterations to go before everything was nailed down to everyone's satisfaction.

  “That's it?” I asked, not expecting much of an answer.

  “That's it,” Eric confirmed, not giving me much of one. “He should still be in the office, so at least we'll get some kind of confirmation that he received it. Otherwise,” he shrugged. “There's not a lot else we can do at this point.”

  “Do you want me to—”

  “I want you to get back to work on the shell UI, is what I want,” he said, almost gently. “There's a lot riding on this presentation. We both know that. But if you get wound up, then everyone you work with is going to pick up on that, and this place is going to turn into a psych ward.” He coughed into his hand. “Hopefully, for no reason whatsoever.”

  “Gotcha.” The word tasted unpleasant in my mouth. “So just go back to my desk and pretend it's all
fine?”

  Eric put the iPhone down on his desk and took a sip of coffee. “Go back to your office and stop being such a goddamned drama queen, if you can handle that. There's nothing we can do until BlackStone gets back to us, and for all we know they're going to double the budget and give us six more months.”

  “As if.” I looked around, not wanting to meet his eyes. Eric's office was twice the size of anyone else’s in the building, but somehow he'd made it look positively cozy. There were game posters on the walls—ours as well as ones from games he just liked—action figures on the bookcases, a lightsaber he'd gotten in trade from one of the guys at LucasArts propped up in one corner, and a general air of nerdly comfort. Not the desk, though. His desktop was orderly, neat, and polished to a terrifyingly bright gleam.

  Once, back in the day, Shelly had half-joking suggested we break into Eric's office and have sex on his furniture. I'd refused, primarily because I was convinced he had motion sensors in there.

  “Weirder things have happened,” he said, breaking my train of thought. “If they like it, and again, there's no reason they shouldn't, then we should be ready to take advantage of it.”

  “And if they don't,” I filled in, “then it's not like there's anything else I could be doing in the meantime.”

  “Now you're getting it.” Eric raised his coffee in a semi-toast in my direction. “So get the hell out of here and get back to work.”

  “Yessir,” I said, and put down the Transformer I'd been fiddling with. “Let me know if you hear anything?”

  “Of course.” His tone, if not his expression, was long-suffering. “You get to make all the changes they'll be asking for, anyway.”

  I didn't quite slam his door shut behind me as I went out. After all, I reflected, that's the sort of thing a drama queen would do.

  Instead, I headed for the coffee machine in the break room at the back of the building. Watching Eric guzzle had reminded me of my own acute caffeine deficiency, which I resolved to remedy as quickly as possible. Without bean-juice-flavored rocket fuel, there was no way I was going to make a dent in the UI documentation that I needed to get on.

  The break room was crowded, or at least the area around the coffee machine was. I waited my turn while turning over the UI issue in my head. Every screen between startup and gameplay was another chance for players to get lost and fail to find a way to play. By the same token, every screen players had to click through to quit was another exercise in frustration, one more likely to get the average users to turn off the console rather than quit out properly. That, in turn, could result in corrupted save data, which meant that the next time they played, they’d lose some of their hard-earned progress and get too pissed off to make up the ground. This was something preferably to be avoided. But at the same time, there were too many choices that players potentially needed to make before getting into gameplay that defined the experience, and all of them were important.

  But, and this was the idea that was really starting to take shape, maybe we could move some of those choices into the game itself, so that the selection was an in-game process. In other words, the player character would make the choices in game, instead of the player doing it outside of the game world. That would save time and increase immersion, making the game flow better and more quickly. In my mind’s eye, I could see the UI flow changing, screens dropping away and consolidating. It was too much to keep in my head. I needed something to write it down on before I forgot it all.

  I grabbed a chair and started sketching on a napkin. Weapons selection could be integrated into the gamespace if you provided a suitable default. That chopped one, maybe two screens out of the flow, though it was going to mean a whole new ingame system, for which the engineering staff was not going to love me. But if we just moved those UI screens over....

  A clank on the tabletop startled me, and the pen tore through the thin paper of the napkin, half-shredding the sketch I'd been working on. “Dammit!”

  “Sorry, Ryan.” It was Michelle's voice. I looked up as she slid a full coffee mug across the table at me. “Didn't mean to startle you.”

  “It's fine, it's fine,” I said, clearly not meaning a word of it. “The important thing was that I got it down on paper, so I can reconstruct it when I get back to my desk.”

  “Be nice, and I'll tell you where we keep the pads with actual paper on them so next time you can use one of them.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and tried hard to be actually thankful. “You didn't have to...the coffee, I mean.”

  “I know,” she said, and slouched over the table. “But I saw you hand Alex the cup and figured you could use a refill. You're useless without your Jesus juice anyway.”

  “Just seemed like the nice thing to do.” My efforts to reconstruct the napkin were shredding it with unerring efficiency, so I stopped trying and grabbed the mug. “You sure you don't want this instead?”

  She shook her head. “I'm drinking water at work these days. So, drink up.”

  “Thank you,” I said again, and meant it this time.

  “Don't worry about it,” she told me and got up. “I know where to find you.”

  “Everyone does.” I stood as well, coffee in one hand, napkin in the other. “I'll catch you later.”

  “Maybe.” And she turned, and was gone, and then someone was whooping over having found a hidden stash of cups in the cabinet under the microwave and I got the hell out of there before I forgot what I was working on completely.

  Clearing space on my desk for the coffee was easy; finding a place for the napkin was harder. I ended up setting both down, one on top of the other, before kicking my desktop system out of sleep mode and pulling up the appropriate documentation for the stuff I was proposing to modify. The screen flickered and cleared as it woke up, and I found myself cursing softly. The same Powerpoint I'd been working on was up, despite the fact that I'd closed it before sending the final, Michelle-approved version to Eric for transmission to our foreign overlords. Changes had been made to it, too—I could see that much from the first screen. Somehow, the main character's pose had been changed to be more alluring. Her lean forward was deeper, the tilt of her head more, well, coquettish.

  It was all very definitely come-hither, which I wasn't comfortable with. For one thing, the point of the game wasn't to come hither. It was to go thither, and then blow the living hell out of everyone you found there. For another, there shouldn’t have been time for someone to change things up, not between when I'd sent it to Eric and when I'd come back from coffee. Someone would have had to sneak into my office, hack my password to unlock the system, load the presentation, replace the image, and then sneak out with enough time to spare for the thing to drop back into sleep mode, and I didn't think that was possible.

  I stuck my head into the hallway and yelled. “Eric?”

  “What?”

  “Was anyone in my office while I was getting coffee?”

  “No.” He didn't look up, and his tone indicated that I was going to be in a hell of a lot of trouble if he did. “Why?”

  “Someone screwed around with the images in the presentation. You may want to check the one we sent to make sure it's what we want them to see.”

  “Oh, for the love of—”

  I didn't hear any more, ducking back into my office to see how much damage had actually been done. Flipping through the slides, I could see it—subtle changes here and there. A screenshot tweaked, a phrasing adjusted, a bullet point deleted. If you didn't know what had been there beforehand, you wouldn't know anything was different. If you'd sweated blood over each slide before turning it in, the alterations stood out like a full-grown tiger at a petting zoo.

  Something blinked on the menu bar at the bottom of my screen. I glanced at it automatically. It was an instant messenger programming, proudly informing that someone wanted to talk to me. “Great. Just what I need,” I grumbled and clicked on it.

  A window popped up, dead center, with Michelle's username on it. “DID
ERIC GET IT OFF?”

  I typed “That's kind of a personal question,” and then erased it. “He did. Did u make changes????” was what I finally went with.

  NOT AFTER I SENT IT 2U

  A pause.

  Y???

  “Something's changed,” I typed in. “Lots of little edits from this morning, after we locked everything down. Check UR file.”

  OK.

  There was a pause of somewhere between thirty seconds and ten years, and then she came back with HUH.

  “Huh what?”

  CHANGES YES I DIDN’T DO THEM BUT

  “But What?!?!?!?!”

  I considered marching down to her desk, considered picking up the phone, considered yelling really loudly. Instead, I waited.

  R CHANGES I WANTED TO MAKE BUT HAD NO TIME 4

  I sat there and digested that for a minute, even as I heard Eric's voice out in the hall. “Looks good from here, Ryan,” he said. “Don't give me a heart attack next time.”

  “Sorry,” I mumbled, not loudly enough for him to hear, and thought about it for a minute.

  “If not you,” my fingers tapped out, “then who?”

  I paused a minute before sending it, hoping that Shelly would punch through something that would answer this, that would make sense. Maybe she'd made the changes after all. Maybe someone had 'fessed up.

  No such luck.

  I waited another minute, then hit Send.

  Her answer came back almost immediately. DONT KNOW, she wrote, BUT WE SHOULD HIRE THEM LOL

  Laugh out loud indeed, I thought. Very funny. I let myself cool down for a minute, then typed “Next time we check it in to the versioning software database so we can see who checked it out and made changes.”

  Yeah. There was a break, and then, But at least it looks good.

  “Whatever” I sent. “Whoever it was could have stuck anything in there—porn or Hitler or whatever, and wouldn't that have been fun when Phil at HQ opened it up? Besides, someone hacked into your system, and mine, and maybe Eric's, and that bothers me. I really want to know who did this before they do something serious and nasty, and it's not just a case of a couple of GIFs being swapped out. If they start swapping out assets in the game, then we're really screwed.” I slammed home the last period and hit Send.