Vaporware (15 page)

“So
I’m the asshole,” I heard Dennis say. “Serves me right.” He stood, a fine coat
of white dust on his hands and in his hair. “You’re good to go. Just don’t blow
this one out, too, all right? At least not until I can get your replacement
in.”

“No
worries and no resolution shifts,” I told him. “I’m going to live in
low-resolution land until you get me my new 36 incher.”

He
gave a short bark of laughter. “You don’t have to go that far, but don’t go too
crazy. I don’t have any more monitors back there except some dinky-ass
seventeen inchers than run on coal.”

“I’ll
be good to her,” I promised. “Catch you later, man?”

“Sure
thing.”

I
turned on the monitor. Apart from the slightest of greenish tinges to the image
onscreen, it looked fine.

“Good
enough,” I said, and shut everything down. I could see in the hallway that the
sunlight spilling through the windows had just started to acquire that syrupy,
late-afternoon glow. A look at my watch, it told me it was a little after six,
plenty early by my standards. In the distance, the hubbub of the back room was
still going strong.

And
Michelle was waiting in the hallway, with just a few things she wanted to talk
about before I took off.

*  
*   *

Sarah
was curled up on the couch when I got home, eating a salad while a Colin
Farrell movie played on the television.

“Hi,”
I said, dropping my bag on the floor and leaning over the back of the couch to
kiss her forehead.

“Hi,”
she said distractedly. “There's more salad in the fridge, if you want it.
Otherwise it's leftovers.”

“Huh.”
A quick check of the fridge provided incontrovertible proof that she was lying;
there were no leftovers to be had. I cracked open a leaf-filled vat of
tupperware and spooned it out into a bowl. It hit the sides with a faint
slapping sound, which the addition of croutons didn't do much to dispel.

“I
thought you were going to wait for me.” I settled on the couch next to Sarah.
She tucked her legs up further underneath her and poked at a particularly
recalcitrant bit of baby spinach with her fork.

“For
the movie? I was. I did.” Her fork finally speared the evasive green, and she
popped it in her mouth, chewing thoughtfully. “For about an hour. Then I waited
a little while longer, and then I decided that if I couldn't get you home on
time, I could at least tell Alexander the Great when to start and stop. It felt
like a good tradeoff.”

I
shoved a forkful of salad into my mouth, as much to avoid having to respond for
a few seconds as anything else. “I got grabbed on the way out the door,” was
what I finally offered. “I was headed for the door, and Michelle grabbed me.”
Too late, I realized how that sounded. “I mean—”

Sarah
cut me off. “I know what you mean. There was just one more thing. I know how
this goes, Ryan.” She jabbed viciously at a cherry tomato, which fairly
exploded under the impact of the tines. Tiny jets of tomato guts spattered the
inside of her salad bowl. “So I decided to start the movie, because if I'd
waited, it would have been too late to see the whole thing by the time you got
home.”

She
looked up at me, and after a second I found myself staring into my leafy
greens. “It was work, you know. It's not like I was messing around.”

“I
know.” She put down her fork and grabbed the remote. The volume on Alexander
telling someone off went up, abruptly.

“You've
been staying late for work, too, lately….” 

“Because
there's no reason to come home early, now, is there?”

When
I looked up, she was aggressively staring at the television, the set of her jaw
telling me how deliberately she wasn't looking my way.

“I
guess not,” I mumbled, and ate my salad.

Chapter 12

After
work meant Montague's, and Montague's meant beer. I'd spent the day in
meetings, going over the results of the various playtest sessions from the past
week and what they meant for our production schedule. By the end of the day, my
back felt like a mattress spring, and Leon had suggested going out to unwind a
little bit.

“Sarah
going to be OK with this?” Leon asked, leaning over the foosball table like the
unlamented Varney. He held the ball in his left hand; his right deathgripped
the rod attached to his goalie.

“She
called to tell me she was working late.” I put my hands on the striker and
midfielder bars. All of Leon's men had been painstakingly painted in the colors
of the Irish national team. All of mine were in the colors of the English team,
and most of them had been deprived of their snap-off heads at some point in the
two weeks since the table had been installed.

“Fair
enough, then. Loser buys?” He dropped the ball.

“Loser
buys.” I lined up a midfielder and twisted, rifling the ball at his goal. He
slid a fullback in the way and easily deflected my shot, sending the ball
spinning around to where another one of his men could pick it up. His hands
flew from rod to rod as I struggled to keep up. I'd just gotten my fingers
around the grip on the goalie bar when he flicked his wrist and rocketed the
ball into the corner of my goal with a solid thunk. My goalie slid into
position too late.

He
grinned. “I'm ordering something expensive.” I ignored him, fishing the ball
out of my goal and adjusting the score to reflect the fact that I was already
behind. Two taps on the side of the table, as per custom, and then it was in
play again.

It
was four to nothing before either of us spoke. I dropped the ball onto the
table and watched it carom away from my line of strikers. Leon caught it with
his, then spun it back a line and pinned it in position under one of his
midfielders, lining up a shot. “I did some checking on that box for you,” he
said conversationally, and then flicked the ball at my goal.

I
shunted it aside, barely, and spun a couple of fullbacks in vain as the ball
rolled by, just out of reach. “What did you find?”

He
brought up the ball and passed it to the center of his line, slamming a hard
sideways shot that evaded my defenses and cracked against the back wall of the
table. “The thing we saw?”

“Yeah?”
My goalie brushed against the ball, enough to send it on a slow roll toward
midfield.

“Yeah.”
He skated the ball from man to man, line to line. “I checked the build. It
wasn't in there.”

“What?”

He
took advantage of my surprise to slam another shot home. The ball hit the back
of the goal so hard it popped right back out. I gave it a whack with my goalie
and somehow sent it skittering down the length of the table, avoiding both my
desperate swipes and Leon's more reasonable ones. “If it doesn't stay in, no
goal.”

“No
goal.” He turned his attention to corralling the escaped ball. “It wasn't in
there. I checked everything. No bad calls, no misnamed objects, no nothing.
It's just not in the build.” A quick swipe, and the ball was careening toward
my goal again. I nearly fell forward trying to get my defenses in place, and
managed to deflect it just enough to have it bang off the back wall and spin
away.

“Then
how did it get in there?” I cranked the spin on one of my defenders, which
merely resulted in the ball going backwards into my own goal. This time it
stayed there.

Leon
shrugged. “I don't know. I don't know a lot of things about this project. For a
simple port, it's got more than its share of weird-ass shit going on.”

I
nodded. “It does seem that way. Did you purge all the Blue Lightning stuff out
of the database?”

He
stared at the ball pointedly until I picked it up and put it in play again.
Seconds later, it was back in my goal. “Blue Lightning was never in there, you
know that. All that's over in its own database. I could scrub that easy, but
there's no point—it's all self-contained. No crossover possible. Mind you,
wiping it would just get it off the network, maybe. It's all backed up offsite,
plus whatever crap guys have sitting on their hard drives. But even someone who
had the whole project database on their system couldn't have inserted something
into the build. It's just not possible.”

“We
saw it,” I reminded him. I rolled the ball onto the table again.

“Once,
and then your system shit the bed.” He spun his forwards as the ball meandered
down the center line. “And something ate the dump off my machine, too.”

The
ball hit the far side of the table with a gentle click, then bounced off and
started rolling back the way it at came. Experimentally, I spun a line of
kickers. They whipped up a tiny breeze that didn't affect the ball's trajectory
in the slightest. Leon just stood there and watched it, fingers tensing on the
grips of his rods.

“You're
kidding me, right?”

Leon
shook his head. “Nope. No proof. But with all the weird shit going on, you
almost kind of expect that. Of course there's not going to be any evidence left
for anyone else to see. That would be too easy.”

“Weird
shit?” I asked, trying to keep my voice level. I knew which weird shit, so to
speak, I'd seen.

He
ticked them off matter-of-factly, his hands never leaving the foosball rods.
“The object in the game, and what came after. Brownouts even when nobody's
running their AC. Weird equipment failures all over the back of the building.
And that.”

He
nodded down at the table. I looked.

The
ball had stopped, dead center on the green-painted field of play. One of Leon's
guys twitched, but didn't come close to batting the ball. I didn't bother.

“Pick
it up and do over?” I asked. He shook his head.

“No
way, man. You don't stick it in the crazy, and you don't mess with the weird.”
He relaxed his death grip on the handles and backed away from the table.
“Besides, my beer's getting warm.”

I
followed him back to the booth and slid in on my side. Leon's beer, mostly
full, was still there. Mine was gone, the mere couple of inches left in the
pint glass having proved irresistible to the waitstaff..

I
tried to ignore Leon's beer. “Got anything else on the weird list? Or is that
it?”

He
looked at me for a long moment before taking a swig of beer. “There's other
stuff. And I know you've seen a couple of things, too, not that you ever talk
about it. But every so often you do that clench thing with your face that means
you don't want to say something.”

“Heh.
You're not doing a lot to convince me here, Leon.”

Another
sip of beer, and he shrugged. “I don't have to convince you. But if I tell you
nobody saw shit like this before we started working on Salvador, would you
believe me?”

I
thought about it for a minute. “I don't know. And I don't know if there is
anything to see. God knows we're all stressed out enough on this one.”

“No,”
he corrected me. “You're stressed out. The rest of us just see weird little
things once in a while. No big deal, really.”

“If
you say so.” I slapped a twenty down on the table. “This ought to cover me,
man. I'll catch you later.”

Leon's
eyebrows went up. “You're not pissed, are you?”

I
shook my head. “Nope. Just want to check something else at the office and then
go home. Another beer and I won't be able to drive.” I stood up, and as I did
Shelly walked through the door, shaking an umbrella dry. “Besides,” I added,
“she's better company than I am.”

“She's
got a better rack than you do.”

I
grinned at him. “I won't tell her you said that.”

“She's
the one who told me.”

With
a flourish, I turned to go. “If you need her to tell you that, you're in worse
shape than I thought. Catch you tomorrow, man.”

“Tomorrow.”
He didn't sound entirely enthusiastic. I nodded to Michelle as I passed her,
and she put a hand out to stop me.

“Hey.”

“Hey
yourself.” Gently, I removed her hand from the center of my chest. “I was just
taking off.”

“I
can see that.” She cocked her head sideways and grinned. “Sure you won't stay a
little while longer? We can pretend it's a leads meeting and charge Horseshoe
for it.”

Over
her shoulder, I could see Leon. He caught me looking and raised his glass in a
mock toast. I grinned, then turned back to Shelly. “Would love to, but I
can't.” Her face fell a little. “It's not you, it's Leon. He stomped me so
badly at foosball that if I don't get out of here now, I'll never hear the end
of it.”

“You're
full of shit,” she said sweetly, and patted my cheek. “If I call the office in
fifteen minutes, are you going to pick up?”

“No,”
I said. “I'll let it ring and bitch about how it's distracting me from my
work.”

She
laughed at that. “Same old Ryan,” she said, shaking her head. “All right, you
win. I'll see you in the morning.”

“See
you then.” I walked away. The closer I got to the door, the more I could hear
the rain hammering down. It was a real summer cloudburst, each fat drop visible
as it pounded the asphalt of the parking lot and exploded into watery shrapnel.
Little rivers were already rushing toward the drains, carrying hapless trash
along with them.

The
bartender caught my eye as I stepped up to the door. “You might want to wait,”
she said, shaking her head back and forth. “It should be done in a few
minutes.”

I
nodded, then turned to look at Leon. He and Michelle were already deep in
conversation. Over in the corner, I could hear the clack of a spinner on
foosball, or foosball on wooden tabletop.

“Naah.
I won't melt,” I said, and ran out into the rain.

*  
*   *

The
rain was still coming down four hours later, not that I paid much attention to
it. I was sitting in a dark room with only screenglow to keep me company.

There
was no one else in the building, of that I was sure. If there had been, they
undoubtedly would have come to complain when I settled in with the latest build
at the station in the center of the main team room and cranked the volume.
There was motion on the screen, but none else anywhere in the building, except
perhaps the steady growth of the forest of empty Coke Zero cans next to my
chair. The last evidence I'd heard of anyone else had been an hour ago, a door
slamming shut.

In
front of me was a scene of post-apocalyptic devastation, decorated in
late-period dead mutant. The main character, whom marketing had imaginatively
code-named “Sal,” was in the middle of the frame, doing a short, jerky idle
animation loop that was supposed to make him look natural and at ease while he
waited for the action to begin. Unfortunately, the loop wasn't long enough to
really sell the illusion, instead giving the image of a guy who really needed
to get out of his gleaming battle armor fast and find the nearest rest room.
Off in the background, individual pixels slowly coalesced into advancing
enemies, and the controller buzzed in my hands to simulate the earth's quaking
under their warlike tread. Bits of special effects razzmatazz onscreen
indicated that sufficient “hyperbattle charge” had built up, enabling me to use
powers that would lay waste to both my enemies and the scenery around them.

What
really mattered, though, was the small box in the upper left corner that showed
a steady series of numbers fluctuating between six and forty-six, the frame
rate indicator. Our goal was sixty, but we'd settle for thirty, the refresh
rate of the human eye, if we could get it. In a game where one of the sell
points was going to be the sheer number of things we'd have to get onscreen at
once, keeping the frame rate up was going to be vital, and I'd spent the last
four hours since getting back from Montague's watching the numbers creep up and
down. 

I
settled in for what would hopefully be one of the last runs. Next to me was a
notepad where I'd been marking highs and lows and other things like how many
enemies were on screen, how many special effects were going off, and how many
buildings and other bits of interesting terrain were in the vicinity. All of it
was important data and all of it was being tracked automatically by tools built
into the game, but the numbers had been coming up wonky recently and I wanted
to double-check with my own eyes. The trick had been pausing the game in time
to write it all down before getting killed.

The
controller buzzed again, stronger this time. The rumble of approaching enemies
shook the chair I was sitting in and set up a sympathetic buzz in my sternum. I
could hear alien battle cries, or at least the placeholder versions we’d
stubbed in to see if the sound system worked.

And
somewhere in the room, a phone started ringing. I ignored it and gripped the
controller, leaning forward in my chair a little bit in anticipation. So far
the play had been…decent, even if the frame rate had slowed to a stuttering
crawl every time things got interesting.