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  “Leon’s a good guy,” Sarah agreed, walking past Michelle to where I was taking cautious steps house-wards. “Honey, let’s get you inside. You’ve had a rough day.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said to her. “Was just going to go for a little while and—”

  “Shhh,” she said, even as we walked past where Michelle stood. “I understand.” Small steps, all uphill, carried us toward the door.

  “Let’s get you some water and some aspirin, and when you feel like it, we can talk about what happened and what happens next.”

  “Thank you, honey,” I said, and felt myself close to tears for some inexplicable reason. “You’re good to me.”

  “Most of the time, you’re worth it,” she said, but she was smiling. Then we were on the porch and she was opening the door. When I craned my neck back down the hill to thank Michelle, she was gone.

  Chapter 7

  Much later, we lay in bed, neither of us speaking. I’d been dosed with multiple applications of hot water, cold water, coffee, and stern glances until I’d reached a reasonable approximation of sober, and then poured in between the covers with stern admonitions not to do anything except sleep.

  Sleep, of course, proved impossible.

  The venetian blinds sliced the streetlight outside into thin, neat strips that ran across the ceiling. Occasionally, a car would go by, its stereo almost loud enough to be heard. After a while, Sarah came to bed, undressing without a word and climbing between the sheets. I’d set Linus, her favorite teddy bear, on her pillow before my last attempt to shut my eyes and force myself to sleep. She held him up for a moment, then gently set him on the floor and lay back, inches from me.

  Outside, a neighbor’s cat got into it briefly with something or another, One yowl, then another, then that was all she wrote. I found myself hoping the cat was all right, then wondering where the animal’s owner was before finally giving up and not caring. Next to me, Sarah’s breathing was deep, slow and measured, the sound of someone trying to go to sleep.

  Trying. Not succeeding.

  “It would have been a good game.” I said finally, into the stillness. “It really would have.”

  “I know, honey.” She didn’t move. “I know that one meant a lot to you.”

  I let out a long breath. “You don’t understand. It really was going to be good. We had something different. Something really cool.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I really am, Ryan.” Then she rolled over, propped herself on one elbow and looked at me. Her hand reached out to take mine and hold it, tight. “I wish it hadn’t happened, and I’m sorry if it didn’t seem that way.”

  “No, no. It’s not that at all.” I raised her hand to my lips and kissed it. “It’s just…hell, I wanted to see it. I wanted to play it. All those games I’ve worked on and there weren’t a whole lot I just really wanted to play, you know? They were work, and they were kind of interesting to do, but this was the first time I really felt like we were doing something special. Like I’d finally done something worthy with a design, something memorable and new. And now it’s gone.”

  She didn’t say anything for a moment. “Is there any chance….” The words just trailed off, and I let them.

  “In theory? Maybe. In reality? No.” I laughed, surprised by how bitter it sounded. “By the time Horseshoe’s next project wraps up, the tech will be outmoded, or someone else would have thought of it. It’s just not going to happen.”

  “Horseshoe’s next project….” she said. “Does that mean it’s not going to be your next project?”

  “I don’t know. I need more time to think.”

  “How much time?”

  “I don’t know,” I repeated, a little more forcefully. “Jesus, Sarah, it’s so tempting to just walk away. Eric laid this guilt trip on me this morning, about how everyone’s going to follow my lead, so if I go it’s all going to fall down. Like I’d be screwing Leon and the team if I left”

  “That’s not true, and you know it,” Her voice was right by my ear, her body pressed up against mine. “And that’s not fair of him. It’s not your fault the game got cancelled.”

  “No. It’s those bastards from BlackStone.” Pulling my pillow out from behind my head, I gave it a couple of punches. The gesture felt weak and empty, and after a moment, I let the pillow drop. “And now the next project will be with them, so every day the knife gets another little twist.”

  “So leave. Walk out. You don’t have to find another job. You could stay home and write—you could stay home and not write if you wanted to. But I don’t want you beating yourself up every day.”

  I swallowed, surprised at the sudden presence of what felt like a dagger in my throat. “It’s not even that,” I croaked.

  Sarah’s hand clenched for a second, then relaxed. “Honey? What is it? Don’t tell me you’re still thinking about going back.” She said it without hope, without judgment, without anything at all.

  I nodded, afraid to speak. “Thinking about it,”

  “Why?”

  Something grabbed my guts and twisted them, even as I tried to answer. It was obvious, it was simple, it was impossible to put into words. I opened my mouth and nothing came out.

  “Honey?”

  I swallowed, closed my eyes, and tried again. “It’s hard to explain.” A deep breath later, I gave it another shot. “There are people counting on me. If I quit over this, it’s going to look bad. It’ll look bad to whoever I interview with next, because I cut and ran.”

  She took her hand from mine and patted my cheek. “Funny, I thought the time in between projects was the best time to switch jobs. And if you’re staying home, it won’t matter, anyway.”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know. That’s not it, okay?” I rubbed my eyes, covering them with my hands. “It would be like I’m being driven off, like I’m taking my toys and going home.”

  “Maybe you’re too big for toys.”.

  I kissed her gently. “Are you saying it’s time to be a grown-up?” I asked when we broke apart.

  “I could be. Being a grown-up has its benefits.” She draped one leg over me. “Just thought I’d mention it.” My face rose up to meet hers and we kissed again. My hands found her back and roamed over it, pulling her to me.

  And when we broke the kiss, she looked into my eyes, and said, “You’re still going back in tomorrow, aren’t you?”

  I looked away. “Tomorrow? Yes. Beyond that, I don’t know. It’s what I do, honey. I make games. Without that….”

  She sighed and dropped her head to my chest. “I know you love your work, Ryan. I just hate how you have to do it.”

  “This one’s a port. They’ve already done most of the heavy lifting on the design end so it should be a pretty easy development cycle for me.”

  Her chuckle was a felt thing, not a heard one. “Oh, come on, love. We go through this on every game. There’s always a reason this one’s going to be easier, and there’s always a crisis and a deadline and a milestone and you’re there until two in the morning every night for a month.”

  “It’s not—”

  She put a finger to my lips. “It is. Every time. And if this is what you still love and still want to do, I understand, and I won’t make you choose between it and me, because I lose that one no matter what. But it’s not what I want for the rest of our life together, Ryan, and I keep hoping that you’re going to get as tired of it as I am.”

  It took me a moment to realize that the strange warmth I was feeling were tears, her tears, and that she was shaking. “I’m sorry, Sarah,” I said, knowing it was inadequate, knowing I hadn’t explained anything at all. “I just can’t. Not now. Not yet.” I wrapped my arms around her, and buried my face in her shoulder, even as she buried hers in mine.

  “I know,” she said, and we stayed like that all night, not speaking another word, until morning.

  * * *

  Breakfast was mostly silent. Sarah offered to drop me off at my car. I thanked her, and then we both concent
rated on eating. Last night's words hung heavy in the air between us. At one point, she asked me to pass the orange juice. I did so without comment.

  The drive to my car was nearly as quiet. It wasn't until Montague's was visible ahead of us that she turned to me. “Are you going to be home at a reasonable hour tonight?”

  I shrugged. “Most likely. If I’m going to be late….”

  “…you’ll call,” she finished. “I hope you won’t be,” she said a moment later. “It would be nice to have an evening together.

  I nodded. “I’d like that.” We pulled up at the curb by Montague’s. “I’ll get out here. No sense making you pull into the lot. It's a minefield.”

  “OK.” She leaned over and gave me a peck on the cheek. “Have a good day, Ryan. And I really am sorry about your game.”

  I got out. “I know. Love you too.” I shut the door and she peeled away, trying to catch the light at the end of the block while I walked across the lot, dodging potholes and puddles. The car was right where I’d left it, which I appreciated. A few bars I’d known would tow vehicles left there overnight, but Montague’s would give you until five PM the next day to come get your car. The sole exception was if you just went back into Montague’s and started drinking all over again. Then you got an indefinite stay of execution.

  Looking in the window, I could see that my laptop bag was still safe and sound on the passenger seat. That was a relief. I'd half-expected it to be gone, courtesy of a broken window. Muttering silent thanks to whoever watches over drunks and their stuff, I climbed in. Plugging my phone into the aux cable took a second—old school hardware, I know, but some habits die hard—and punched up a driving mix. God knew something had to psych me up for going in to the office, and caffeine wasn’t going to be able to handle the job on its own.

  The first track that came up was some AC/DC, a version of “Thunderstruck” off a live album. Good stuff to start a day with, I decided, enough to get the blood pumping. Slamming my hands on the wheel in time with the beat, I rolled down my window and started howling along with Brian Johnson. Other drivers shot me Significant Looks, which I mostly ignored. Let them get their own AC/DC, I thought.

  Three choruses in, the song started skipping. A steady pulse of “THUNDATHUNDATHUNDATHUNDA” hammered at my ears until I hit a red light and was able to pause the damn thing. A skip was bad news—it meant either the file was corrupted or the hardware was, and as “Thunderstruck” had played just fine earlier in the week, the odds were I was looking at a trip to the Apple store.

  I clicked through to the next track. Maybe it was just the one song that was corrupted, or the thing was still warming up. The dulcet tones of Mama Young’s best boys cut off abruptly, replaced by a random Yes album track. It lasted maybe thirty seconds before it started sputtering, and I took the opportunity of another red light to stare at the thing in disbelief.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” I told it and clicked through again. It got halfway through the intro before REM’s “Driver 8” was choking on itself. “Crap, crap, crap,” I said to no one in particular and tried again.

  It was an instrumental this time, heavy synth lines with a weird contrapuntal thing going on in the guitar part. It took me a minute to recognize it as one of the sound files we’d commissioned for Blue Lightning. The track was rough—the percussion line was way too over the top, and the main riff wasn’t quite there yet—but we’d been talking about this one as the main “alert state” loop, the one that would play every time things started to go to hell for the player. I’d dumped all of the rough music cuts to my iTunes so I could give them a few good listens before sending notes back to the sound studio in New York. I hadn’t had the chance to do it more than once, though, and now it didn’t seem like there was any point.

  Still, the song was catchy, and it wasn’t skipping, two points in its favor. I let it go and got into it a little bit as I drove. It was too short to be good driving music—loops like that rarely get over two minutes long, or they don’t work for in-game—but it was fun while it lasted. Finally, it faded out in a crash of major-chord synths, and the too-familiar intro to “Baba O’Riley” started in. “Come on,” I encouraged it. “Get to the vocals. Just make it to the vocals. You can do it.”

  Instead, it tripped over the first guitar riff and kept stumbling through it, replaying a half-second of Pete Townshend windmill for as long as I could stand it.

  I did a quick location check. Five more minutes to the office. All I needed was one more song to get me back into a good mood, and I’d be able to tackle the day.

  I clicked forward on the playlist.

  Garbled sounds that could have been something off the new Dave Gahan album.

  Click.

  A few bars of an acoustic Richard Thompson performance from Newport, jangled up with one another into an impenetrable mess.

  Click.

  Some Elvis I’d thrown on there as a joke, “Love Me Tender”. Only this time, it jumped straight into the middle of the song, letting the King beg “Love me/Love me/Love me/Love me-”

  “Sorry, Elvis, you’re not my type.” Click.

  Roxy Music, telling me what lived in every dream home, or at least trying to before their own noise overwhelmed them.

  One more, I told myself. One more, and then I’d shut it off. After all, I didn’t need music, I just wanted it.

  Click.

  There was nothing for a moment, then up came a swell of strings with that voice-of-God, O Fortuna chorus chanting over them. I felt a chill run down my spine as the brass came in, jagging along in an unresolved chord while the vocals thundered over it. It felt majestic, like the soundtrack to the end of the world.

  Which it had been meant to be. Even as the first chords came up, I realized that what I was listening to was supposed to be the music for the intro cut scene of the game, the quick cinematic sequence that laid out how the world had fallen apart and what you, the player, were expected to do about it. In other words, more Blue Lighting. That made two tracks out of the first ten that the randomizer spat out, an impressive feat considering I had over six thousand songs on there.

  Then again, they were both playing when nothing else was, so I didn't feel like complaining too much. Odds were that they were on an uncorrupted segment of the hard drive, and that’s why they were fine when other stuff wouldn’t do more than burp. That might have explained the frequent plays, too—other sectors just weren’t reading as there anymore. It sucked, but it made enough sense to calm whatever paranoia I had, and let me enjoy what music I heard.

  Two minutes out, and the song ended. No doubt I was now due for more mangled songlets, if I bothered to listen. Two minutes. I didn’t have to listen to anything else for two minutes. For crying out loud, I told myself, I could turn on the radio for two minutes.

  Instead, I let it play. No music came out, just some clicking noises, and then those same familiar strings, this time matched to a thudding bass line. This time, I recognized it instantly as the music for the shell user interface, the stuff you’d hear when making your way through the menus.

  It was still playing when I drove up to the office. It had ended and started itself again, and I just didn’t have the heart to cut it off. Instead, I parked and sat there, listening, until the last notes faded away.

  I hit Stop, pulled the cable out of the phone, and stuck it in my pocket. “Well,” I announced to myself, “that’s two things that are really messed up already today,” and headed toward the front door.

  Chapter 8

  The game company offices you see in movies look like dot-com heaven. Chrome, glass, light, air - they’re where the cool kids work, laughing all the way.

  Our offices were not like that. They were set in an office park, one floor of fire hazard-filled office space behind a glass door with our logo.

  Inside was dim and vaguely warm and not-entirely-good-smelling, the scent you get from too many people sweating too many deadlines in too tight a space. The funk had settled in
to the building a couple of projects back, gotten itself into the mud-colored carpet and the slightly paler mud-colored walls, and had lurked in there ever since. My office was better, but not much, and not always.

  There was a pile of documents on my desk when I got in that morning, which I completely ignored until I’d inhaled a cup of coffee and chowed down a strawberry frosted Pop-tart.

  Only after my blood chemistry had the right mixture of agitated and frosted did I pick up the top page and start reading. It was the vision statement for Salvador, the overview of the game’s core boiled down into a bite-sized nugget that could be communicated equally well to the team, to marketing, and to the public. Here, then, was the essence of Salvador, the foundation that everything else would be built upon. This what I was supposed to take, to breathe life into and use to inspire the rest of the team to chain themselves to their desks in order to meet the euphemistically phrased “aggressive schedule” that we’d be getting from BlackStone.

  I read it and blinked. The game, which preliminary hype had suggested was going to “reinvent the first-person shooter,” had been summed up by its creators as essentially “You shoot people, and they blow up real good.”

  I closed my eyes, clenched them shut for a minute, then opened them again. No good. The words on the page hadn’t changed. Oh, sure, there was some stuff in there about setting (“gritty and urban”) and tone (“futuristic”), but mostly it was buzzword central. First-person shooter, strong multiplayer component, microtransaction content, destructible terrain—all the usual suspects lurking in the woodpile for a game that would be technically polished but utterly generic. Run around, shoot aliens, get a bigger gun as a result—it was nothing the average gamer hadn’t seen a thousand times before. Oh, sure, it would be pretty. Gorgeous, if the guys in the art department had anything to say about it. But the gameplay would be the same old same old. There was nothing new here, nothing to grab a hold of and say “this is what’s going to make this game cool.” For all that the pitch hit all the right notes for the suits, it didn’t have anything in it for the devs, the guys who’d actually be making it. It was empty. Soulless, even.