Vaporware (13 page)

Either way, I
wasn’t happy, and I didn’t want to deal with something like this again. Pulling
my phone from its protective case, I dropped it to the ground. It hit, bounced
once, and landed with a plasticky crack. Before I could think better of it, I
brought my foot down on it and ground it into the asphalt—left, right, left
again—until it was an unrecognizable smear of electronics and glass. It took me
a minute to pick the smartchip out of the mess, but I did and tucked it into my
pocket.

“Dude!”

I looked up.
Leon had come back out into the lot and was gaping at me like my head had
turned purple. “What?” I asked, in the most reasonable tone I could manage.

“Why…?” He
choked to a stop, waited a minute, and then tried again. “Why did you do that?”

I shrugged.
“Someone is playing games.”

“Well, duh,”
he said and fell into line next to me as I started walking again. “I mean,
that's what we do, right?”

I shook my
head. “Not like this,” I said. “Someone's playing games with me.”

*   *   *

It was July
before everything shook itself out, or at least felt like it had. The question
of whether I would be quitting Horseshoe died a lingering death from attrition,
as evidenced by the fact that I kept going to the office. Sarah's new job took
more and more of her time and attention, for which I was thankful—it kept the
pressure off the fact that I was once again falling into old habits of working
late. The game itself was progressing reasonably well, as we lifted assets
bodily out of one build and slammed them into another, making the necessary
changes, cuts, and adjustments along the way. By the middle of the month, the
build was working well enough to playtest, which the team did, dutifully if not
always enthusiastically. Michelle and Leon and I formed a solid, efficient
working triad, with Leon keeping a lot of the same hours I did.

I noticed
after a while that Michelle had started keeping those same hours, too.

The incidents
of high strangeness seemed to have faded. A new cell phone was put to work, and
it mostly behaved itself. No more spoofed phone calls, but I never was able to
figure out who’d made them in the first place, or why they’d stopped. And the
Blue Lightning soundtrack cuts stayed off the playlist from that point forward.

“Maybe it’s
God telling you something,” Leon said when I brought it up for the four
hundredth time. “You know, like, maybe it’s a sign you and Sarah need to work
on your communication issues.”

“Oh, shit,
that reminds me!” And I dug out my new phone and texted Sarah to tell her
that’d I’d probably be running late that night, though not with Michelle.

Mysterious
brownouts continued to plague the building, resulting in some truly classic
shouting matches between our IT maven Dennis and the head of our landlord's
maintenance crew over whose fault it was.

Life went on.
Work went on. Things continued in the directions they had already been
traveling in, and I never felt inclined to change course. There never seemed to
be a need.

*   *   *

There
had been almost seven minutes of silence before I realized that I’d had come to
the end of the queued-up playlist, and iTunes was patiently waiting for me to
select something else. Not wanting to get started on anything that would drag
me under for an hour—or to get another lecture from Dennis about sucking up
bandwidth by switching over to Spotify—I popped the buds out of my ears instead
and stood up. The usual popping noises ensued—knees, lower back, neck, in that
order. For the thousandth time, I reminded myself that sooner or later I'd have
to take advantage of our wonderful medical benefits to go see a chiropractor.
One of these days when I had a little time, I told myself, and then gave it up,
because that line of reasoning led nowhere. It had taken me six months to
replace my glasses after I lost a pair on a business trip, as Sarah never
failed to remind me, simply because I couldn’t find (or make) the time to
schedule the appointment.

The
speaker on my desktop phone buzzed, the red indicator light flashing, and I
nearly jumped out of my skin. “Jesus,” I said to myself. “Calm down, dumbass.”
My finger hovered over the phone for a moment as I tried to remember which
button turned on the speakerphone, then I pressed my best guess. To my right, I
could see my screensaver kick in, the monitor fading to black.

“Ryan
here,” I said. “What’s up?”

“Yo,
man,” a staticky voice called over the phone’s speaker. “We’re setting up a
server for Happy Fun Time. You in?”

Happy
Fun Time was in-office slang for multiplayer testing. Everyone who could spare
the time would log in to the latest build for some therapeutic annihilation of
their coworkers while simultaneously performing a gut check on the status of
the game. QA was all well and good for telling you if there was a hole in level
geometry, but Happy Fun Time was where you went when you were looking to see
how the game actually played.

“CTF
or Deathmatch, Leon,” I said to the air in the phone’s general vicinity. There
was a crackly moment of near silence while I waited for the answer. I could
hear Pink Floyd playing faintly in the background. Someone in the Engineering
room was always playing Pink Floyd.

“Deathmatch,”
he said finally. “We’ve got ten, no, twelve people already in. Some of them might
even suck worse than you do.” In the background, I could hear a general buzz of
laughter. “And we're using yesterday's build. You should have it already, if
you’re doing your job in that fancy office of yours.”

“Yesterday's?”

“Yeah.
Dennis said there was some kind of hiccup with the database and the build
wouldn't compile today, so we're using yesterday’s. Are you cool with that?”

“Cool,
but not in,” I said to the phone. “Maybe next time.”

“Aww,
come on. We need the numbers, man. Networking wants to beat on the join-on-the
fly stuff for a while, and we need bodies.”

“The
networking engineers want to see if they can rack up more kills than usual,” I
told him. “You’ve got plenty of pigeons without me.”

“Pussy,”
Leon said and broke the connection. The laughter and trash-talk had already
started at the back of the building, typical evidence of Happy Fun Time.

“What
the hell,” I mumbled  and headed back to the team room. If I wasn’t going to
play, I could at least watch. An observer mode that would allow you to watch
the action like it was a football game was planned, but not implemented yet, so
if I wanted to see any of the on-screen play I needed to do it the
old-fashioned way: go stand behind someone’s monitor and heckle.

The
room was in full swing when I got there, smack talk going back and forth
freely. A couple of the guys were using headsets, the rest just yelling a
mishmash of positions, expletives, and on-the-fly tactical decisions. Everyone
had debug kits on their desks, long controller cords snaking out of them. A
lucky few, Leon included, had wireless controllers and guarded them jealously
against theft and confiscation.

There
were nods as I went past various players, headed for Leon, but nothing
more—take your eyes off the screen and you were asking to be sniped. In the
complicated calculus of multiplayer bragging rights, a long-distance headshot
was worth more than just about anything other than an execution-style kill, and
with competent players those were rarer than rubies.

Leon
sat at the back, in the corner near a window. It was privilege, proof of
seniority and skill. The more time you put in, the more say you had in where
you sat, and Leon had put in a lot of time. His desk was angled so that his
monitors were arranged away from the rest of the room. You could only see what
was on them by standing directly behind him or by going outside and looking
through the window. What that said was that management trusted Leon not to
screw around and get his work done, a rare and rarified privilege in a team
room environment.

“Hey,
lamer,” he said as I sidled in behind him. “What brings you down here?”

“I
wanted to watch you get
 
pwned,” I
said. “How’s it looking?”

He
shrugged. “Second pass textures are in, but there’s something messed up with
the particle emitters. All the explosions are purple.”

“It’s
not a bug, it’s a feature,” I repeated automatically, and we both chuckled.
“Gameplay holding up?”

He
made a noise in the back of his throat, and not a happy one. “Enh. This map
needs some serious rework. You can camp three of the spawn points, and there
are a couple of bottlenecks where the whole thing just turns into a turkey
shoot. See?”

He
gestured toward the screen. I leaned in over his shoulder and looked.

The
space in question was a vaguely futuristic ruined city, appropriate for the
near-future sci-fi feel of the game we were putting together. Wrecked cars,
empty streets and damaged buildings made up most of the landscape, a scene
painted in grey and black and brown. The only flashes of color came from the
bursts of weapon fire, mostly green and blue, as players moved back and forth,
guns blazing. Here and there were pure white patches, indicators for missing
textures that peeled away the illusion of the world and showed the naked
geometry beneath.

“What
am I supposed to be looking at, Leon?” My glasses slipped a fraction of an inch
down my nose, and I shoved them back into place. “Is there a topdown view?”

“Hang
on one moment,” he twitched the left thumbstick on his controller. The onscreen
view spun left, the gun in the middle of the screen barked, and an armored and
armed figure about half a virtual block away fell, smoking, to the digital
street. At the top of the screen, the system spelled it out in system font:
D3XTER has killed muffyfluffy.

“Muffyfluffy?”
I asked, incredulous, even as the action continued and new lines of text were
drawn. Robz0r has killed Demonyght. Shadoo has blown himself up.

“Jay,
over in level design,” he replied. “And no capital letters. He insists you
pronounce it all lowercase.” A raised eyebrow indicated he thought this was as
goofy as I did. “Now, let me show you what I was talking about.”

He
turned his attention to the screen and zig-zagged his way down an alley and up
a low-hanging fire escape. In the virtual distance, explosions and the whine of
high-tech imaginary weaponry played soft and loud in turn, mixed in with clanks
and thuds and the omnipresent chatter.

Onscreen,
the fire escape gave way to rooftop and the sound of gravel crunching under
Leon’s avatar’s feet. The rooftop was rimmed by a low brick wall, surmounted
with the iron ladder we’d just climbed over. Vents and antennae dotted it
strategically, and I winced, thinking of the problems with collision detection
those were going to cause. In the center was a small shed with a single door
which led, presumably, to a stairwell and down into the building below. That
is, if the building actually had an interior, as opposed to merely a shell.
That was the trick to virtual construction that most people outside the
industry never got. The only things in the world were the ones that someone
deliberately made and put there. Don’t make a floor? It doesn’t exist. Don’t
make an interior? Then your building is a big empty box. Nothing happened by
implication or by extension. It all had to be created with intent and loving
labor, or else it never existed.

“Over
here,” Leon said and sprinted to the corner. A quick drop in vantage point
indicated that he’d gone into a crouched stance, the better to hide from
snipers on other rooftops, and then he peered out into the fictional night.

“Where’s
the spawn point,” I asked. “And is that the base for CTF?”

“Down
that street there.” He launched a glowing purple blob that I was fairly sure
was intended to be a plasma grenade. It arced out into the dark, then landed
with a boom to emphasize his point. “But you can see that while it looks like
there’s two ways out, there’s all sorts of problems with it.”

I
nodded. “You can drop grenades on it from here, for one thing. And I’m assuming
you can get up on those other buildings?”

“Some
of them. Plus, if you look down the secondary access route, you’ll see the next
problem.”

“Oh,
yeah.” I could see at once what he was talking about. The side alley that led
away from the spawn point did so in a long, straight line. At the far end,
overturned vehicles and a dumpster had been set up in such a way as to provide
superb cover. Anyone coming out of the base and down that alley was going to
get taken apart like funnel cake. And, depending on the game settings, they
might just spawn right back in there and have to do it again.

“Not
fun,” he agreed. “Got any suggestions?”

I
thought for a minute. “Move the spawn point to a rooftop, say, that one.” I
pointed at the tallest building on the screen. “Put two fire escapes on
it—we’ve got the objects, right—and maybe build the interior as well, so you
have multiple routes in and out.”

“Mmm.
Maybe not on the last. That building’s just a frame—we’re talking a lot of
polys to make the interior anything more than a staircase and a lot of locked
doors.”