Vaporware (21 page)

And
this, too, was a problem, because we’d never released anything like that,
officially or unofficially. Which meant that somehow, someone had leaked it,
probably as part of a half-assed effort to get the fan community to try to
pressure us to start the project back up again. That wasn’t going to happen,
not in a million years, but in the meantime we’d have one more hassle to deal
with, and after last night, I was all full up.

“You,”
I said to the author of the piece, an anonymous type whose byline read
EvilJohn, “are a pain in my ass. Thank you so much for adding to all the crap I
was dealing with.” Then, feeling somewhat better for having flung virtual poo
in the man’s direction, I composed a “Hey, you’d better look at this” email to
Eric, complete with link to the article. “Your problem now,” I told the
computer as I hit Send, then headed back to the bedroom to put on some pants.

Pants
were a necessary part of going in to work, after all, and as much as I might
have wanted to dodge any and all of the unpleasant scenarios I’d come up with,
there was really no way of getting around it.

And
if I was going to do it, I might as well get it over with.

Chapter 18

Michelle
texted me on the way in with, “R U GOING N?” I checked the light I was sitting
at—still red—and texted, “DUH. WORK 2 DO.” The light changed, I sent the
message and hit the gas. She didn’t text back.

The
parking lot was mostly empty as I pulled in, which didn’t surprise me. It was
still early. Eric’s car was there, though, parked in its usual spot a couple of
spaces down from the door. He got in earlier than anyone most days but
refrained from taking the closest spot as a matter of principle. I’d asked him
about it once, and he said that it felt like a reproach to everyone else when
he parked there, like he was showing off how he’d gotten in earlier than they
had and was therefore working harder than they were.

This
one of the reasons most people at Horseshoe liked working for Eric. The ones
who didn’t tended not to stick around too long.

There
was no sign of Michelle’s car, which didn’t surprise me, nor did I see Leon’s.
As for Terry, he usually parked around back, and I wasn’t about to drive past
his usual parking spot in the quest for mine.

I
parked a couple of spaces past where Eric had and headed inside with a mix of
dread and adrenaline riffing through my veins. Email from Eric was waiting for
me when I got there, a response to the one I’d sent him earlier. “See me,” it
said, with a couple of exclamation points for emphasis. I figured that trumped
more coffee, so I went down the hall into the lion’s den.

“Ryan,”
he said as I walked in, but didn’t look up. His attention was focused on his
laptop screen. From where I stood I couldn’t see what he was looking at. Even
the reflection in his glasses didn’t provide much of a clue. “How’d you find
this little bombshell?”

“Twitter
feed. It found me,” I said truthfully. I dropped into a chair. “We didn’t
release that screenshot, did we?”

“No,”
he said, and gave himself up to a minute of furious typing. “We didn’t release
any screenshots because BlackStone marketing was in charge of all that, and
near as I can tell, they never did much more than tell people it was coming at
some point. Third party doesn’t get the marketing love.” He looked up at me,
his expression pained. “Damn. I thought I’d let this go.”

“Nobody
has,” I said, shrugging. Choosing my words carefully, I added, “I wouldn’t be
surprised if some people were running a black project to finish it after hours,
to be honest. Even if they’d been warned against it.” I thought about saying
more but something stopped me. I’d already convinced my girlfriend I was crazy;
I didn’t want to add my boss to the list. Instead, I finished with a lame
“That’s just speculation, of course.”

Eric
looked down his glasses at me for a long minute. “Uh-huh. Look, if anyone does
have any half-assed ideas about resurrecting the project before we can find
someone to pay for it, I know that there’s no hope in hell you’ll sign on with
them, because Sarah will skin you alive if you do.” I started to say something,
but he held up his hand. “Don’t. If there were a black project, and I’m not
saying there is, and I didn’t know about it, which we both know would be damn
near impossible, and if you were approached to help out, which I’m not saying
you were, I know you’d have a hard time saying no. But because Sarah is a lot
smarter than you are and likes to see you occasionally, and because you don’t
want to lose your girlfriend and your house by staying at work even more than
you do, you wouldn’t do anything that stupid. Which means this entire
discussion is moot, except for one thing.”

“What’s
that?” My voice was suspicious and low. “You don’t think I leaked this stuff?”

He
shook his head. “You’re smarter than that. Besides, I blew up the screenshot.”
He spun the laptop around so I could see the screen. There, in the upper right
hand corner of the image was a clear shot of me—or at least my avatar—eating a
grenade to the face.

“Nice
ragdoll,” I said. “This one shows off the physics engine really well.”

“Don’t
change the subject. What it also shows is you demonstrating your usual skill
level, which is to say that you couldn’t have taken it because you were too
busy getting fragged.”

“Yeah,
all of mine looked like an incoming RPG.” I turned the machine around. “So
you’ve cleared me of the leak. What next?”

He
smiled, but it wasn’t a happy smile. “What’s next is that you get to find out
where this came from.”

“Whoah,
whoah, whoah,” I said. “I’ve got deliverables. Somebody, I’m not saying who but
I think his name is Eric, tasked me with trying to figure out a leaderboard
system that a nine-year old can’t cheese.”

“You’ve
got another deliverable now,” he said. “Come on, you want to know as badly as I
do.”

I
thought about some of the weird stuff that had been happening and paused a
moment before answering. “I’m not sure about that,” I said. The flatness of my
tone gave Eric pause. “But if you really want me to, I’ll give it a shot.”

“I
do,” he said. “Now go get some coffee. You look like you got ridden hard and
put away wet last night.” He turned his face to the laptop. “I hope it was a
good time, at least,” he added noncommittally, by way of a dismissal.

“For
somebody,” I answered, and walked out.

One
part of the conversation with Eric seemed like a good idea, and that was
coffee. If I was going to get through the day, I would need bean juice.

The
break room was quiet when I got there, the usual morning buzz of conversation
subdued. There were only a couple of guys, clustered in the middle of the room
and shooting occasional, expectant glances at the microwave and coffee machine.
The smell of warm oatmeal had overpowered the usual stink of overstuffed
trashcans and leftovers, mainly because the packets of oatmeal that the vending
machine in the corner spat out were so over-seasoned with cinnamon that they’d
make a Keebler elf cry.

“Hey,
Ryan.” One of the guys staring vulture-like at the coffee maker gave me a nod.
Thomas was one of the engineers who worked on the physics engine; he often
joked that his job description was “things fall down go boom.” What he was
technically responsible for was making sure that bodies acted like bodies and
objects acted like objects, which was a lot harder than it looked. He was one
of the smartest guys in the company and usually one of the quietest. Most of my
conversations with him consisted of curt nods. But today, he felt like talking,
even when nobody else did.

I
nodded back and went over to the dish rack to see if my mug was still sitting
there after yesterday’s half-hearted attempt at a wash. “Hey, Thomas. How’s it
going?“

 “Doing
all right. Did you see the piece on Yar’s this morning? Pretty cool, huh?”

“Yeah.”
The mug was there, much to my surprise, so I grabbed it and joined the orbiting
cloud of coffee-seekers. “I was kind of surprised to see BL show up.”

He
grinned. “I don’t care how it got there. It’s nice to see some love. Maybe
it’ll help us get the project back someday.”

“Yeah,”
I said, hoping to avoid getting too deep into this particular conversation.
“Nice to see someone saying nice things about the studio.” I edged into line a
bit behind Thomas and the others. They’d been there before me, after all; they
had dibs on the machine.

The
guy at the front of the line pulled a packet of coffee concentrate, then put it
back, then pulled another one. “Anyone know which is better?” he asked,
starting a debate among a couple of the other folks up close.  “So do you know
who took the screenshot that ran with it? It looked pretty decent.”

Thomas
stirred off-white powder into his coffee until it turned the color of melted
milk chocolate. “I dunno. I just figured it was some marketing goober playing
with the build. Why do you care?”

I
tried to grin. “Honestly? Because it’s a great shot of me getting fragged, and
I wanted to give whoever took it some shit for making me look bad.”

He
looked at me and shook his head. “Ryan, if your years in the industry should
have taught you one thing, it’s that you don’t need any help with that.” He
took a look at the still-lengthy line for the fountain of life, did some
complicated calculations, and decided that it was clearly too long a wait.
“Screw it, I’ve got some Monsters in the minifridge. Catch you later.”

One
by one the other pilgrims at the caffeine shrine either took their offerings or
wandered off as well, finally leaving me face to face with the key to my future
productivity. “Which one, which one,” I asked myself, digging into the drawers
of single-cup pods. They had different names—Jamaican Blue, Colombian Morning,
Kona Aroma—but near as any of us could tell, they all tasted exactly the same.
I grabbed one at random, dumped it into the machine, and waited.

“You’re
supposed to press the ‘brew’ button, genius,” I heard Michelle say from behind
me.

“Just
testing you.” I pressed the button, which I’d completely forgotten about.

“Uh
huh.” There was a pause. I waited for the inevitable, and counted to three in
my head before it arrived. “Ryan, we have to talk.”

I
turned to look at her. She looked, by any estimation, like hell. It was the
standard “sleepless night” package—bags under bloodshot eyes, messy hair,
sallow skin, and mismatched clothes. She stood there, shoulders slumped, eyes
on the floor, and waited for me to say something. She was wearing one earring,
I noticed. She never wore just one earring.

“About
last night?” I gave her a week grin. “Come on, if we phrase it like that,
people will think we’re sleeping together again.”

“Cut
it out!” Her head snapped up and she glared at me. “You joke, and you joke, and
you joke, and this isn’t funny. Last night? Not funny. The other thing you
mentioned? Not funny, either. So for the love of God, can you be serious, just
once?” Her hands were balled into fists at her side. White knuckles, too, the
sort you see on people who are about to go for an axe.

“I’m
sorry,” I said. “Look, Michelle, this is not a break room conversation, OK?
You’re right, I should be taking it more seriously. I just don’t want to get
too freaked out about it and screw up any chance we have of figuring this thing
out. And I’m sorry I made the joke. I shouldn’t have.”

“No,
you shouldn’t,” she said, but her hands unclenched and she took a long,
shuddering breath. “What do you want to do?”

“Right
now?” I pointed at the coffeemaker, which had started dribbling thin brown
fluid through its innards and out its nozzle. “I want to wait until the coffee
finishes brewing. Then I want to finish up the bullshit assignment that Eric
just gave me, and maybe by the time that’s done, I’ll have figured out what I
want to say about what happened. That’s all I’ve got.”

Michelle
stared at me. “You’re kidding me.”

“No.”
The coffee machine belched and burbled; we both ignored it. “The last thing I
want to do is charge into this half-assed. So let me get this other stuff done
and get my head right, and then we can tackle it with our full attention.”

“Fine.
Call me when you’re ready.” She stomped past me, out the door.

“OK,”
I told her retreating back, but softly. Too softly for her to hear, or at least
that was the intention. First things first, though, and that meant trying to
track down the source of the screenshot.

*  
*   *

Dennis
was mostly at his desk when I poked my head into his office; the rest of him
was on it. He was leaning back in his chair, feet up and planted next to his
titanic flatscreen monitor, his keyboard in his lap as his onscreen avatar
hacked and slashed his way through what looked like another fantasy MMO. I
didn’t go any further in; there wasn’t really room, not with the guts and cases
of a dozen machines spread out across the floor. Behind him, more equipment sat
jammed onto wire racks, boxes of cables and mice with their cords hanging down,
speakers in twos and fried motherboards stacked like kindling.

“Hey,
what’s up, man?” He flashed me a grin, then turned his attention back to the
screen. “Sorry, got some aggro to deal with. Gimme a sec.”

“No
worries.” Onscreen, bright green and purple carnage erupted as Dennis tapped
away at his keyboard. Strange, gargling howls emerged from the speakers, muted
out of courtesy to the rest of the building.

I
scanned the rest of the room, wondering how Dennis ever actually made it to his
desk in the morning. It looked like a jumping puzzle from an old-school
platformer—step here to avoid that empty tower case, then hop this way to avoid
the steel lockbox for the offsite backups, then dodge the stack of still-boxed
video cards to keep them from toppling over onto the invoices for Microsoft
Office upgrades, and….

“So
what can I do for you?”

Whatever
Dennis’ homicidal dwarf character had been doing, he’d finished doing it, since
he stood on top of the fading corpse of something half-dragon, half wild boar.
Bright lights chased one another off in the distance, other players doing
unspeakable things to each other’s characters or the local virtual ecology.