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  “So, man, like what the hell?” Across the table was one of the character artists, a skinny little guy named Gordon who’d just started six weeks earlier. He’d been with EA and a couple of the other big companies, and everyone on the team had been blown away by his portfolio. We all thought we were lucky to get him. “I mean, I came out here to get away from all that political bullshit killing projects, and here it is all over again.”

  He took a swallow of beer for emphasis, then looked at me like I might have an answer. I didn’t have one, so I grabbed a couple of peanuts out of the bowl in the middle of the table and popped them in my mouth.

  “You work for BlackStone, you ain’t getting away from the BS,” Leon chimed in, to a general round of bitter laughter. “Man, I am so pissed.”

  I put my hands on the table. “It could be a lot worse,” I said. “Nobody’s getting laid off, we’ve got work on a title that’s going to make some money, and….” My voice trailed off as I tried to think of a third good thing.

  Gordon didn’t let me twist in the wind for more than half a minute, which I thought was kind of him. “We’re working on a port,” he exploded. “Ports suck.”

  “Ports are easy,” I argued back.

  “That’s because they’re shit work,” he replied. “We’re going to be scaling down next-gen stuff for old-gen consoles, which means it’s going to look like crap. Plus, we won’t get enough time to do it right because hey, it’s just a port.”

  “They’re going for simultaneous release—” I started, but he waved me off.

  “Whichever team is doing the lead SKU is going to have bigger problems than getting us assets on time.” He sat back in his chair and drank angrily. “And the worst part is, once you get a reputation as a port house, nobody ever looks at you as anything else, ever again. We’re screwed.”

  And here it was, the very thing Eric had mentioned. Gordon was going to jump ship. Whether or not he already had lines in the water was immaterial. It was clear that he’d made up his mind, and was trying to make up everyone else’s for them. If his arguments got a foothold, there’d be a stampede out the door. That would leave the folks who stayed short-handed and force us to hire any warm bodies we could find, and that meant the chances of the game being crap would go from 98% to a cool one hundred.

  Michelle picked that moment to return, sliding bonelessly into the chair. She shot me a quick look, then planted her elbows on the table and leaned forward. “Come on, Gordon,” she said, not taking her eyes off him. “It’s not going to be that bad. Right, Ryan?”

  The look she gave me this time was fraught with significance. It said, Here is your moment, which I am giving to you. Do with it what you will, but you owe me.

  The beer finally arrived—Guinness, of course. I took a sip. “Shelly’s right,” I said. Gordon snorted in disbelief, but I didn’t let him start up again. “Look, losing Blue Lightning sucks. Trust me, it sucks worse for me because I knew about this before you guys did and had to sit there and take it while Eric said he was going to kill my baby.” I took another drink, and corrected myself. “Our baby.”

  There were murmurs of agreement around the table, and I pressed on. “I don’t necessarily like the idea of working on a port, either. But if it’s going to be a port, at least it’s a port of something cool, and something that’s going to sell. And when we come through, we’re going to be fucking ninjas and we’ll write our own ticket. .”

  The words were coming fast and easy now, and they were having an effect. I could see a few heads nodding in agreement, the guys who were looking for a reason to stay. Next to me, Leon was a statue, staring into his beer. Michelle kept her head on her hands, looking everywhere but at me with a tiny half-smile on her lips.

  “We’re keeping the code base. We’re keeping the assets. Blue Lightning is still ours, not theirs. So we do this, we make our cash, and then we flip BS the bird as we sign on with a new publisher and make something that will ensure they piss themselves with envy.” I didn’t know where the patter was coming from, but it fell into that old rhythm that I knew from a thousand feature meetings, the one that let me take everything everyone had said and weave it into a simple, single vision that everyone recognized as something they’d helped make.

  Something they could believe in. Something they could make real

  “Besides, it’s going to embarrass the hell out of their internal teams when we do an old-gen version that plays better than their next-gen ones. You know we’re better than they are. Give them a head start, give them twice the team, I don’t care. We’re going to play tighter and better on old-gen because we know our shit, and there’s still a lot more people with those consoles than with the next-gen ones. We’ll get better scores, we’ll sell more, and at the end of the project, we cash the check and give BlackStone a big, fat fuck you.”

  I took a long drink of Guinness, which under normal circumstances would have been a mistake. Screw it; these circumstances weren’t normal. If Eric knew what I was saying, he’d probably have a heart attack—the bill on all this anti-BStone sentiment was going to come due sooner or later—but he’d asked me to get people to rally ‘round, and that was exactly what I was doing.

  Slowly, across from me, Gordon shook his head. “Believe that if you want,” he muttered, but that was all. It was over. The table broke into a dozen small conversations, or at least the people sitting at it did, and I felt the tension leak out of me. Michelle was still sitting there, smiling, which I wasn’t sure I liked, but Leon was thumping me on the back like I’d just taken down Apollo Creed without crapping thunder in my shorts.

  Since Leon’s built like a telephone pole and I’m built like a fire hydrant, this didn’t quite result in my spraying Guinness all over the table, but it came close. “Easy, Spartacus,” I told him and got a laugh in response.

  “Good stuff, man. You know, I was real worried about you at that meeting, but it looks like you’re OK. I’m glad you’re cool with it.”

  I took another sip of dark foamy goodness and found to my surprise that I’d nearly emptied the pint glass. “It is what it is. You make the best of what you’ve got and try not to screw anyone else in the process.” I killed the beer and started looking around impatiently for the next one. Someone else patted me on the shoulder and pressed a full glass into my hand. I took a sip, looked around to thank whoever had given it to me, and found they were gone. What the hell, I told myself, and raised it high.

  “To Blue Lightning!” I said. “Blue Lightning!” the rest of the room echoed. “She was gonna be beautiful,” I said. “And we’re gonna miss her.”

  I called Sarah as another beer arrived and told her that I was still at the bar. She told me to take my time, and then asked me to hand the phone to Leon. I did, and after that, things got a little blurry. Loud, too, but they’d been loud before that. Lots of people being loud, either talking about what had just happened or aggressively not talking about it in a way that said they were still stewing over what had happened. For my part, I just tried to keep everyone laughing. In the end, the noise and the light and the laughter all blurred into one, the wake for the game we’d all slaved on and loved and would never see again.

  * * *

  I’m reasonably certain I didn’t go face-first into a beer. That’s because when I woke up, I had marinara sauce on my nose, and that told me I’d gone down into one of the plates of fried cheese sticks instead. Slowly, I wiped it off, and tried to synthesize the sounds I was hearing into something that might or might not be words.

  “I’ll take him home.” Michelle’s voice came from someplace far away and to the left, and I tried to turn my head to get a better idea of where it was coming from. After a moment of this, I realized that opening my eyes might help, though the significant effort required might be beyond me at the moment.

  Leon, or someone who sounded a lot like him, answered. “You sure? I can take care of it. It might be easier, ‘cause I can carry him better.”

  “�
��M OK,” I heard myself announce. “Just gimme coffee. Gonna be fine.”

  “Oh, no, you’re not.” I knew that tone of voice. “Leon, get his keychain before he tries to do something stupid.” I felt fumbling hands go at my jeans pockets and tried to slap them away. “Come on, man. I don’ like you like that.” Sensibly, Leon ignored me and fished out my keys.

  “You’re positive,” he asked, before dropping them with a jingle into Michelle’s outstretched hand.

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s the opposite direction for you, not for me. Just help me get him out to my car and I can take it from there.”

  “Gotta pay my tab,” I protested. “Can’ go home ‘til I do that,”

  “We covered you, Ryan,” Michelle said without breaking stride. “And since you can’t drink anything else without dying of alcohol poisoning, it’s time we cleared out and let the nice people at the bar have some new paying customers.”

  “I’ll pay you back,” I promised, my head flopping down and my chin hitting my chest as Leon hoisted me out of my chair. “Hey!”

  “Easy, man. Just helping you get out to the car.” He slid one arm under my shoulder and wrapped it around me, yanking me up and toward him so that my constant collapse could be translated into forward motion by his direction. We played table slalom as we lurched toward the door, Michelle presumably following, as I didn’t see her in my admittedly narrow field of vision. Behind us, I heard the waitress who’d served our end of the table call, “Have a nice evening!” over the clank of glasses.

  Evening? Jesus. How long had I been there?

  Outside, the sky was dark, or nearly so. As I gaped at the few visible stars, Michelle came around and got her weight under me. “My car’s just over there,” she said. “Help me dump him in the passenger seat and I’ll take care of the rest.”

  “My car’s right there,” Leon answered. “Last chance—”

  Michelle tensed. “Look, Leon, if you want to say ‘Sarah’s going to be there,’ go ahead and do it, and I’ll still say the same thing. I’ve got no problem with Ryan, or with Sarah. If she’s got a problem with me, that’s her issue, and if she’d rather Ryan wrapped himself around a tree instead of having me drive him home, then to hell with her.” As if to emphasize her point, she dropped her half of the dead weight that was yours truly and headed for where she was parked.

  “Michelle, wait. Oh, man, I didn’t mean—” Leon’s excuses trailed off into muttered under-the-breath frustration, and he followed after her as fast as my limp presence would allow.

  She was already in the car, windows down and engine running. “Door’s open,” she said, not moving to help. “Just open it up and dump him in.”

  “I didn’t mean that, Shelly,” he said, propping me against the side of her car as he yanked the passenger side door open. I slid a few inches but stayed mostly vertical. Don’t drool on the window, I told myself. Surely you can handle that much. Then Leon was grabbing me again and shoving me inside. A dangling arm was pulled out of the way and thrown into my lap, and then the door slammed shut. “I just don’t want you doing a nice thing to become a problem, you know?”

  She shot a withering glare past me, one that gentled a bit after a moment. “Silly man. Nice things always become problems. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “See you, Shelly,” he answered, and then turned and trudged off. We sat for a second. Michelle put it into gear and the crunch of gravel announced that we were leaving. Cool air slapped me in the face as we picked up speed, and I could see my car, tucked into the corner of the lot, as we turned out into traffic.

  “The windows are down so you can puke if you want,” Michelle said conversationally. “I’m not going to slow down, though, so be careful where you aim.”

  “Don’t need to puke,” I answered, and then pressed my gut experimentally with my fingers to test the hypothesis. “Just sleepy.”

  “Uh-huh.” She spared me a glance with all the leftover scorn she’d pulled from Leon. “You need coffee, and a hot shower, and a lot of water, and maybe a B complex vitamin, and then you need to sleep.”

  “Sorry,” I said, and turned my face to the cool plastic of the seat. “Didn’ wanna be a bother today.”

  “Today you’re entitled,” she said, a little more gently, as she made a left and went around a minivan doing a leisurely cruise in the passing lane. “Tomorrow, God help you, but today, you get a freebie. What Eric pulled on you was a dirty trick.”

  I shook my head, or tried to. “He’s right. Gotta take care of everyone.”

  “Including Eric,” she said. “He just killed your baby. You should have had some time to deal with that before he asked you to play rodeo clown.” I got another look, longer and more searching. “You did a great job back there, but I could tell your heart wasn’t in it. Blue Lightning was going to be a great game. If you’d called bullshit, a lot of people would have followed you right out the door, you know.”

  Including you, I thought, but didn’t say. We went past trees, past new housing developments with names like “Kirkwood Highlands.” past strip malls at a steady rate of one supermarket per. Somewhere in my cerebellum, drunk was fighting a holding action against coherence and losing. “I was being selfish, Michelle. I love Blue Lighting. I love having a job better. And if I walked, Sarah wasn’t going to let me get another job in games. She hates me doing it, you know. And I didn’t wanna go out the door ‘cause I was being an artiste.” I tried to bring my hand to my forehead in the time honored “sensitive artist” pose, but just succeeded in slapping myself instead. “Ow,” I said, and stared at my traitorous hand.

  There was silence for a couple of blocks before she answered me. “You might want to think about who’s being selfish there.” And then, “Give me your cell phone.”

  I reached into my pockets to haul it out. “Why?” I asked stupidly.

  “To call your girlfriend to let her know you’re safe and on your way home. That’s why.”

  “Oh,” I said, handing it over. She fumbled with the autodial for a second, then put it to her ear.

  “Hello? Sarah? It’s Michelle. Yes, I’m on Ryan’s phone. He’s fine. Just had too much to drink. I’m bringing him home. Leon was headed the other direction, so…no, no, it’s no bother. Yeah, there were lots of people there. He just drowned a couple of people’s sorrows with one too many. Yeah, I will. Don’t worry. I’ll give you his keys. Bye now.”

  She flipped the phone closed and tossed it into my lap. “At least she had the good grace not to ask if you’d gotten wasted over at my place.”

  I protested. “She’s not like that.” A pause. “She likes you. She told me.”

  Michelle laughed, short and sharp and bitter. “Oh, God, Ryan. She may say that. She may even want to think that. But she doesn’t and she never will. It doesn’t matter that we’re ancient history. She’ll always worry.”

  We coasted to a stop at a red light. I recognized the intersection. We were maybe six blocks from home. “Why?”

  “You’ll figure it out one of these days. And in the meantime, if I do enough stupid things like this, maybe she’ll finally unclench her hair.” Grinning, she looked over at me. “God, can you imagine if I did take advantage of poor little drunk you? She’d have a heart attack.”

  My expression must have said volumes, because Shelly just laughed. “Easy there, tiger. I’m not interested.”

  I slouched back in my seat, a half-dozen responses coming to mind. She doesn’t like you because I was a wreck after we broke up, she does like you but thinks you’re keeping me in video games when I should be moving on to something else, she wants me to get a better-paying job that doesn’t work me so hard—all of these came and went. Instead, I just said, “So are you going?”

  Michelle shrugged, then took the last right before the turn onto my street. Min-McMansions rolled past, anonymous and identical. “I don’t know. My headhunter texted me a couple of times today with some stuff. Word’s already out somehow.”


  “Gordon?” It didn’t really matter. All it took was one guy barfing something onto Twitter and word would spread, and then the vultures would start gauging their chances.

  “Maybe. Don’t know, don’t care. We’ll see if any of the offers look interesting.” She turned left without signaling, onto Cordero, my street. The house was three blocks down.

  “I’d like it if you stayed,” I mumbled, then leaned my face out the window. Maybe I’d been too hasty with my assessment of my gastro-intestinal state.

  “That’s sweet, Ryan,” she said in a low voice. “Thank you.”

  “Welcome,” I muttered thickly. “I’m still pissed off about this whole thing, you know.”

  I felt, rather than saw, her nod. “I know. That’s why I wanted to make sure you came out there today. I figured you could get some of it out of your system. I didn’t know then that you’d been co-opted.”

  “Leon tell you?”

  “Leon has a hard time keeping his mouth shut,” she agreed. “And he likes you. So if you want to do right by him, figure out how you really feel about this and deal with it. Even if it does mean moving on. Because otherwise, you’re just going to drive yourself nuts, and I won’t always be there to take you home.”

  “We’ll see,” I said, as the car glided up to the curb. The front door was open, and, at the sound of the engine, Sarah came outside to the curb.

  Michelle cut the engine. “This is your stop, sailor,” she said, and unbuckled my seat belt before getting out of the car. “Sarah? He’s fine. His car’s at Montague’s.” My keys dangled from her hand.

  Sarah was smiling, mostly. “Thanks for taking care of him, Michelle. I owe you one.” She took the keys, even as I fumbled with the door handle and let myself out.

  “Sounds good,” she said, instead looking back at me as I wobbled to my feet. “Really, though, it’s no big deal. Leon would have done it, but like I said, he was headed the other way.”