Vaporware (14 page)

“It’s
occluded. It’ll be fine.”

He
grunted. “That’s what you creative types always say. Hmm. That building there
might work.”

I
shook my head. “Too short. You can rain down fire on the rooftop from there,
there, and there. So maybe no interior, but put a walkway across to another
roof or two and spread some occlusion around the base of the building so that
there aren’t a lot of direct lines on the fire escapes.”

Leon
nodded his approval. “Though we’ll need cover on those fire escapes—it’s a long
run down, and stairs are always a bitch.”

“Details,
details,” I said. “Shoot me the name of this map so I can write up the proposal
and…wait a minute, what’s that?”

“What’s
what?” With business concluded, Leon had gone into zoom mode, looking through a
scoped and magnified view for targets. One was in his crosshairs now, a
humanoid figure in gleaming armor with a massive helmet and an equally massive
gun. As I watched, it belched green fire at an unseen target, accompanied by a faint
sound of bacon frying.

“Not
the guy. Behind him.” I moved around Leon’s chair and leaned in close. “Do you
see it?”

The
figure sprinted off to the left. Where he’d stood, I could see a pulsating blue
box, resting on the sidewalk. Crackling fingers of electricity wrapped
themselves around it and played down into the gutter. Then there was a purple
flash and the sound of an explosion. The image of the box was replaced with a
wildly cartwheeling view of sky and building, mixed with a sickening sense of vertigo
as Leon’s avatar went spiraling toward the ground. It hit with a wet thud, and
the screen faded to black. Up top, the letters told us what we already knew:
Shadoo killed D3XTER. Across the room, a war-whoop rang out. Shadoo—one of the
new guys we’d hired on to make deadline—had finally killed someone besides
himself.

“Shit,”
Leon said, and leaned back in his chair. “And I’m out of respawns, so we can’t
go back and look at whatever you were trying to show me. At least, not until
the next round. What were you looking at, anyway?”

I
frowned. “I thought I saw something right past where that guy you were scoping
was standing. It was supposed to be an ammo box, I’m pretty sure, but the model
was wrong.”

Leon
grinned. “And that’s what you’re worked up about? The wrong model? Bug it in
the database and move on, my friend. We’ve got way bigger problems than that.”

“It’s
not the fact that it’s the wrong model…,” I started to say, then trailed off.
“Has the replay feature been implemented yet?” I asked instead.

Leon
pursed his lips. “I think so. You want me to pull this one to see if I can spot
your magic box?”

I
nodded. “Yeah. Pull it, save it, and dump it to my In/Out. I want to take a
closer look at this thing if I can.”

He
shrugged again. “You’re the boss, more or less. You should have it in twenty
minutes.”

“Beautiful,”
I said, and walked off. Behind me, the chaos of battle slowly receded.

Chapter 11

Half
an hour later, Leon knocked on my door.

“Come
in,” I told him. “It’s open.”

He
was already halfway through. “I figured, but I wanted to be polite. The video
capture of the replay is in your shared folder. Pull it up. I want to see what
you’re talking about.” He flung himself into the spare chair I kept in the
corner, then walked it over behind my desk with his feet.

I’d
already found the file by the time he stopped thumping the chair legs against
the floor, and clicked on it to open it. “Jesus, that’s big.”

“It
was a long match,” he said, unapologetic. “I tried to trim it down for you a
bit. That’s what took so long.”

“No
worries. Now let’s see what we’ve got.” We both sat there for a moment, waiting
for the playback to catch up to the frame I was looking for. Game footage
scrolled past, kills and near-misses and explosions galore.

“There.”
I clicked the pause button. “You see it?”

Leon
peered in. “Behind the character model?”

“Yeah.”
I tapped the screen with a pen. “You can see some of the particle effects over
the shoulder here, and there.”

He
frowned. “Could be. Advance it frame by frame?”

I
nodded and started the slow playback. With agonizing deliberateness, the figure
onscreen stopped, turned, and then strode away, leaving behind it….

“There!”
I shouted. “You see it? There!” I froze the image onscreen.

Leon
sat back in his chair. “Son of a bitch, you were right. That’s an ammo
re-supply box from Blue Lightning.”

Almost
unconsciously I wiped my forehead. “Shit. I was getting worried that I’d been
seeing things.”

“Nope,
that’s definitely an immigrant from the other asset list. Good eye, Cap’n.”

He
stood up, stretched, and stared suspiciously at the screen. “That’s going to
have to come out before the next build, I think.”

“The
real question is, how did it get in there.” I frowned, thinking about what I’d
seen and what it implied.

“Shit,
that’s easy.” His face showed relief. “Some smartass artist stuck it in as an
Easter egg thinking we wouldn’t notice. It shouldn’t be too hard to figure out
who did it, and it’ll get pulled out without any hassle.”

I
looked up at him, not smiling. “I’m not sure that’ll take care of things. I
don’t know if you saw it, but it looked like the object swapped in during the
play session.”

The
wave I got was dismissive. “That’s impossible. The engine doesn’t support
on-the-fly switching. You’re dreaming, man. Come on, there’s no need to go all
Scooby Doo on something like this.”

“Fine,”
I said and spread my hands. “Tell you what—re-run the sequence and tell me when
you start to see the SFX. Then tell me if the box was there all along or if it
just swapped in after we started looking at it.”

“I
will,” he said. He grabbed the mouse. “Let me just rewind…hey, hang on there….”

Onscreen,
the image had frozen. Despite Leon’s frantic zig-zagging of mouse against mouse
pad, nothing on the monitor was moving.

“Locked
up,” I said. “I’ll reboot.” I hit Control-Alt-Delete, waited a moment, and did
it again. Nothing happened.

“Need
to cold boot,” Leon offered, and reached under the desk to hit the power
button. There was a brief, spitting, sparking noise, and the screen went black.
A familiar whiff of burned peanut butter wafted up, and a thin stream of smoke
trickled out of the back of the monitor.

“Oh,
man,” he said, and stepped back, dismayed. “What the hell is going on here?”

“You
owe me a monitor,” I told him. “Screw it. I’m getting out of here for the
night.”

His
glance went from the screen to me and back again, his expression worried.
“Yeah. Just make sure the fire’s out before you go. And, uh, don’t let anyone
else see the monitor before you trash it.”

“Why
not?” I asked, but he was already headed for the door. I watched him go, then
looked back at the now-broken screen.

Etched
into the glass were a series of jagged lines, emanating from a central shape
that could have been a box of some sort. If you looked at them long and hard
enough, they sort of looked like lightning.

*  
*   *

 “You
need to stop downloading so much porn.” That was Dennis’s take on the broken
monitor when he ambled in to take a look at it. He spun the broken flat panel
around on my desk, cocked his head, looked at it for a moment, then whistled.
“Seriously, what did you do to this thing?”

“I
played the build,” I said. “No, scratch that—I played some captured video
footage from the build.”

“Huh.”
He scratched his head.  

“New
tat there?” I asked. He nodded and grinned like a madman, then shoved a meaty
forearm underneath my nose. A stylized whale in dark blue ink stared up at me
with a huge, empty eye. The tail curved around past Dennis’ elbow and vanished,
not that I was terribly eager to see where it went.

“Yeah.
Salish Indian design. I saw it online and it sort of spoke to me, you know?
Figured it was maybe my totem animal talking. But you don’t care about that,
you care about what happened to your monitor.”

I
did my best rueful grin. “Sorry, man. I’d love to talk about the ink, but duty
calls.”

“Yeah,
yeah, I know.” The arm, complete with whale, retracted, and he started
disconnecting cables from the back of the equipment. “No two ways about it,
this thing is totally fried. Good thing you were still under warranty.”

“Any
idea what happened to it?”

Instead
of answering, he ducked under my desk and continued disconnecting the dead
flatscreen from my tower system. “I think,” and there was a grunt and a pause,
“that you maybe got some kind of power surge,” another pause, another grunt,
“and the thing just ate itself.” His head popped up over the desktop. “Man,
you’d better hope nobody walks in right now.”

Despite
myself, I chuckled. “Everyone knows you’re irresistible, Dennis. They’d just be
surprised it wasn’t me under the desk, blowing you to get better gear.”

“Hah!
Good one!” He disappeared again, only to re-emerge with a clutch of cables in
his fist. “Old school CRT, generally you got something like this by switching
resolutions a lot. An old monitor just couldn’t take it, and you’d end up
blowing it out. A lotta games did that, actually—fixed screen resolution for
the shell UI, but once you went into gameplay, kablooey. I remember this one
game I bought….” His voice trailed off into indecipherable mumbles.

I
leaned down in hopes of hearing him better. Dennis was talking under his breath
now, fiddling with cables.

 
“But that was a CRT, right? Antique. And this one was new?”

He
cocked his head. “New-ish. Like I said, it’s still under warranty. But
honestly, this looks like it came from outside. We’d better get you a
replacement monitor fast so we can see if your system got fried, too.”

I
groaned. “Don’t even say that. Do you have anything I can use?”

Dennis
stuffed the cords into a pocket of his jeans and hefted the dead monitor. “I
think so. Just hang in and I’ll be back with something teevee-shaped.”

“Okay.”
He turned to go, and a sudden thought struck me. “Do you need to ship that back
as part of the warranty?”

He
paused. “Eventually, but they’re always slow with the shipping labels. Could be
a couple of weeks. Why?”

“No
reason,” I said. “But if you could hold onto it for a while, I’d appreciate
it.”

“Sure,
whatever,” he said and ambled into the hall. “Don’t go anywhere.”

“Not
going anywhere, my man,” I told him. “Just bring me back something nice.”

“Yeah,
good luck with that,” he called back. A couple of steps and he vanished around
a corner, though I could still hear his voice as he held court, explaining to
all and sundry that I’d managed to destroy another piece of equipment.

The
explanation he offered seemed sensible, and as such, was tempting. We got power
surges all the time, the result of operating in an area where thunderstorms and
massive construction combined to make brownouts and power surges near-daily
occurrences.

Sensible
also meant that I could stop poking at this, and get back to my job of delivering
a working, fun game to BlackStone instead of chasing phantoms. All in all, it
definitely seemed to have some benefits.

My
new phone buzzed. I swiveled in my chair to pick it up. “Yello.”

“Green,”
said Sarah, giggling. “Seriously, though, honey, do you really need to answer
the phone like that at the office? What if it’s someone expecting something a
little more…professional.”

I
closed my eyes and counted to three—slowly, and in Spanish—before answering.
“Honey, we have entire company meetings in fake pirate-speak. The guy who’s
fetching me a new monitor lets the spirits tell him what to draw on his arms,
and we had four guys come in last month dressed appropriately for Internet
No-Pants Day. I don’t think anyone’s going to mistake this place for a
button-down office any time soon.”

“Not
now,” she said primly, “but someday. Just wait. I’ll make a million dollars
here, then buy Eric out and fire you so you have to spend all your time at home
peeling grapes for me.” I opened my mouth to say something, but she’d already
moved on. “Are you coming home soon?”

I
gave a silent prayer of thanks for getting an easy question this time. “Yes. My
monitor just blew up, so we’re going to put a replacement on to see if anything
got lost. Then I’m coming home.”

There
was a pause on the other end of the line. I could imagine a different set of
mental gears clicking into place before she spoke next. “It’s not going to make
a difference whether you check now or in the morning, is it?”

“It
might,” I said gently. “If the system is fried, too, then Dennis can start
fixing it tonight.”

“Dennis
should go home once in a while.”

“Dennis
sleeps here half the time because he lives out in East Assburger and he gets
connectivity at the office for playing Guild Wars.” We’d had this conversation
at least a half-dozen times, mostly in private, usually ending with “Poor
Dennis. You should invite him over for dinner some time.” “Besides, with any
luck, everything will be fine, and both he and I can get out of here soon.”

I
paused and thought about going home on time. “I really want to get home and see
you,” I added, and meant it.

“Good.”
There was a wistful note of satisfaction in her voice. “If you get home early
enough, maybe we could watch a movie. There’s stuff here from NetFlix with dust
on it.”

“We
switched to NetFlix digital two years ago,” I said before I could stop myself,
then continued. “I’ll call you once I get on the road. It shouldn’t be long.”

“You’d
better,” she said, but there was no heat in it. “I love you.”

“I
love you, too,” I said, and cut the connection.

Dennis
peeked around the corner of my doorway. “Trouble?”

I
grinned, or at least made the attempt. “For a change? Naah. Come on in.”

“Today’s
your lucky day, man.” He leaned back, out of sight, then emerged, staggering
under the load of a massive black CRT monitor. “Twenty-three inches, and it’s
all yours—at least until I can replace the other one.” With a creak of
straining plastic, he set it down on the desktop.

I
peered at it. So help me, the blank, unpowered screen looked like it was
staring back at me. It was huge, deep enough to cover the entire desktop and
tall enough to hide behind. At the top of the frame, where the manufacturer’s
logo should have been, someone had planted a puffy sticker of one of the
Powerpuff Girls.

“Does
it work?” I asked dubiously. “What’s that thing made out of, dinosaur bones?”

He
shook his head and grinned expansively. “Naah. It’ll do you just fine until we
can order you a new one. In the meantime, try not to peel off Buttercup. I know
it’s tempting, but leave her be.”

“If
you say so.” I nabbed a tissue from the box on my desk and wiped the screen
down. Thick dust came away as I cleaned it, giving me vague hope for the
picture quality. Meanwhile, Dennis had crawled under the desk with power cord
and video cables in his hands. “Let me plug this into your system first. Then I
can handle the power cord and get a look at your UPS while I’m down here.” He
coughed. “Remind me again why you’ve got a laptop and a desktop?”

“Because
the laptop can’t play games for shit. At least, not according to you, the last
time I asked, and because I can’t take the tower on the road with me.”

There
were thumping sounds, and abruptly the indicator light on the side of the
titanic monitor flickered from dead to amber. Another minute, and it flashed
green.