Vaporware (23 page)

How
did it fly? he wrote back, and I cringed. Rather than answer, I jumped back to
Sarah’s window, just as Leon walked into my office.

“Hey,
man,” he said, and shut the door.

I
looked at the chat windows, then at him, then at the windows, then at the door,
then back at him. “What’s up?”

Instead
of responding, he dropped into a chair. “You got five minutes?”

“If
I say no, you’re going to sit there and keep asking me until I do, right?” With
an unspoken groan, I pushed back from the desk and folded my hands in front of
me. “What’s up?”

“It,
uh, it’s about last night,” he said, looking around nervously.

“The
equipment? I’ll help you replace the cameras, if you want. Even if it was your
idea to put them in there.”

“No,
no.” He waved his hands like he was calling for an incomplete pass. “Though if
you want to chip in, that’s cool. It’s something else.”

“Leon,
I don’t have time for twenty questions. Does it have something to do with the
glowing female we saw last night? Just maybe?”

He
stood up and started pacing. “That’s a whole other discussion. But I wanted to
talk to you about Shelly.”

I
blinked. “Michelle? What about her?”

He
didn’t look at me, just kept pacing back and forth in the tight space between
my desk and the door. “I just wanted to make sure that we were still cool even
though Shelly and I have kinda hooked up, with us being buds and all.” The
words were a rushed mumble, barely distinguishable from one another as he
stumbled to get them out. Only when he was finished did he turn to look at me.

I
laughed. “Jesus, Leon, is that what you’re worried about? She’s my
ex-girlfriend. EX. Eee-eks. Whatever happens with you two is between you two,
OK? Me, I’m going to spend a little more time trying to figure out who’s taking
impossible screenshots to leak to a fan site and where the naked women crawling
out of the monitors are coming from, if that’s all right with you.”

Leon’s
face collapsed into an expression of hurt. “Are you sure, man. ’Cause I don’t
want there to be any problems if there’s anything, you know, lingering.”

My
eyes rolled. “There’s no lingering. Period. If you want me to get upset, I’ll
try, but I really don’t have time right now. Come back around four o’clock and
I’ll see what I can do then.”

“If
you’re not going to take it seriously,” he grumbled, and took a couple of
shuffling steps toward the door. “Wait a minute. What did you say about
impossible screen shots?”

I
turned the laptop around so he could see. “The only way to take this shot was
from outside the playable space and behind a piece of level geometry. Which
makes it impossible.”

Leon
thought about that for second and scratched his chin for emphasis. “If it’s
impossible, there’s only one person I can think of who could take it.”

I
leaned forward. “Yeah? Who? Terry?”

“You
gotta lay off this Terry thing. He’s good, but he’s not that good. No, I’m
thinking it was the blue lady.”

“Aw,
come on!” I threw myself back into my chair, which bounced itself and the back
of my head off the wall. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve heard in…OK, in
minutes.”

“Why
is it so stupid?” he asked. “If you ask me, she’s impossible. Besides, if she
lives inside the network, she can probably do things in there that we can’t.”

I
shook my head slowly. “But why would she be sending out screenshots?”

“Maybe
she liked the game?”

“Heh.”
I thought about it for a second. Inside the game, inside the network—the pieces
fit, if I was willing to believe the first one. “I have to admit, I’m still
having a hard time trying to believe that we actually saw her. And I’m having a
harder time thinking of how we could explain this to Eric if she is the one who
did it.”

“Yeah,
I can see that. It’s just a thought.” He put his hand on the doorknob and
half-turned it. “I’m not sure I believe it.”

“Me
neither. Which is how I’m getting through the day.”

He
stepped out into the hall, hand on the doorknob. “Good call, man. Open or
shut?”

“Better
leave it open,” I told him, but my eyes were already on the screen. Hastily, I
pulled up Sarah’s chat window.

If
you don’t want Thai, you just have to say so. Chinese is fine. I’ll see you
tonight. This was followed by a smaller, system message informing me that Sarah
had logged off of the chat. It was time-stamped five minutes ago, right after
Leon had first come into my office.

“No!
No no no no no no!” I frantically typed in a message to the now-grey messaging
window. Thai is fine! I love Thai! Leon came into the office and I couldn’t
shut him up! I sent it, on the off chance that she’d log back in later in the
day and see the message waiting for her. Then, when it didn’t immediately cause
her to log back in, I grabbed the phone and dialed her cell number. Two rings,
and her voice mail picked up. “Hi, you’ve reached Sarah Bogdan. Leave a message
at the tone and I’ll probably get back to you.”

My
throat was abruptly dry, my voice scratchy. “Hey, Sarah. It’s me. I’m sorry I
didn’t answer the IM, but Leon came into my office and wouldn’t shut up and I
couldn’t get him out of here, and look, Thai sounds great. Do you want to pick
it up, or do you want me to, or…just call me, okay? I love you, and I’ll see
you around six thirty at the latest. The absolute, utter latest. Bye.”

“Problems
at home?”

I
looked up to see Eric sticking his head through the gap in the doorway that
Leon had left. He looked faintly bemused, as if he’d had the same conversation
a few dozen times himself.

“Nothing
important,” I told him, devoutly hoping I was right on that one. “Just missed a
chat window while Leon was in here talking about—”

“I
know what Leon was talking about,” Eric interrupted. “Most of it, anyway. Is
there going to be a problem?”

“With
me and him over Shelly? No. With me and Shelly? Naah. With Leon and Shelly if
they break up? God only knows.” I ticked them off on my fingers, one by one.
“Worst comes to worst, I get Leon drunk and we can commiserate about what a
ballbreaker she is, then I apologize to her profusely and tell her that Leon’s
kind of a dickweed and she did the right thing.”

“And
when they get back together and compare notes, they’ll both hate you.”

I
nodded. “Which is the way it should be, really. Everybody hates the creative
director.”

He
gave a short bark of laughter. “I’m so glad you’ve got the proper perspective
on this. Now,” and he let himself the rest of the way into my office, “let’s
talk about this leaked screenshot.”

So
I told him what I felt comfortable telling him, about the deleted email address
and the fact that I was trying to track down how the shot had been taken by
going back into the build. I did not mention anything about anyone glowing
blue, climbing out of monitors, or interfacing with Terry, nor did I mention
anything else from the previous night’s misadventure. From there, we moved on
to following up on the screenshot, and a discussion of scheduling for the
documentation on the revamped multiplayer features.

It
was another hour before we were done, at which point I needed to go to a
meeting with the level designers to talk about some recurring sightline issues,
and then after that there was a sitdown with the AI engineers to discuss the
list of enemy behaviors I was asking for and how many of them they could deliver
in a reasonable timeframe. By that point, it was almost five, and I finally had
enough time to start on some of the work I’d set out for myself as the day’s
labors, some of which had to be done if I wasn’t going to bottleneck some of
the feature implementation that had to start tomorrow.

And
when I looked up, it was dark.

Chapter 19

Sarah was waiting for me under
the porch light when I got home, sitting there on the stoop with her hair tied
back and her eyes on the sidewalk. She was wearing her favorite red blouse,
that and jeans and a look of utter weariness. Her feet were bare, and I
wondered how long she’d been sitting there.

She didn’t
look up when I pulled in, nor when I cut the engine and got out in the
driveway. I walked around to the passenger side of the car and grabbed my
laptop from the shotgun seat and got nothing as a response. She just stared at
the sidewalk, stared at the ground, stared at anything but me.

“Hi,” I said
softly as I made my way up the walk to where she sat. The door was open behind
her, golden light spilling through it and around her, but I didn’t go past. I
didn’t dare.

“Hi back,” she
said, not looking up. “How was work?”

“Long,” I said
before I could think better of it. “Tiring,” I added after a minute. “How was
yours?”

She shrugged.
“The same. I got home around six. What time is it now?”

I fished out
my cell phone and looked at it. “Nine thirty,” I said, and knew that she
already knew the answer. “I’m sorry I wasn’t home sooner.”

“No you
aren’t,” she said, softly. “This is what you do.” I started to protest, but she
held up her hand to stop me. “No. Don’t. It’s very simple. If there is work,
you do work. When the work is done, you come home. If there is no work, half
the time you invent work. Tell me I’m wrong.”

I sat down,
heavily, on the cement in front of her. Her eyes flicked to my face for a moment,
and then back down to the ground. “I can’t,” I said after a long while. “I
don’t know why.”

“I do,” she
said, but without heat. “I know you. You let the job define you so you don’t
have to, and I’m just here to fill the space around the edges.”

“That’s stupid,”
I protested, and her head shot up, eyes staring.

“Is it now?”
she asked.  “I’m not the one doing it. Let me tell you something about
yourself, Ryan. There are certain people in this world who, no matter how
talented or clever or smart they are, inevitably end up getting shoved into the
gears of the machine for the sake of everyone else. Maybe they do it because
they’re afraid to stand up for themselves. Maybe they do it because they worry
too much about everything but themselves. And maybe they do it because they’re
selfish, and don’t think they deserve any better, no matter what anyone around
them thinks. You’re one of those people, Ryan Colter. You always have been and
you always will be.”

“Am I now?” I
whispered.

Her eyes were
bright, wet with tears she wasn’t going to let herself shed. “Yeah. You are.
There’s not a grenade out there you won’t throw yourself on just to be the one
who does it, and you know what? I’m stuck with you. I get to watch you blow
yourself to bits again and again and again, and there’s nothing I can do about
it because that’s just what you are.”

“Sarah….”

She shook her
head violently. “Don’t say anything, Ryan. Please, don’t say anything. If I
don’t get this out now, I never will, and if I don’t say this once it’s going
to kill me. There are two things that happen to people like you, the people who
like throwing themselves into the gears.”

My hand
reached out for hers. She brushed it away. “What two things,” I asked.

“Either you
get chewed up and disappear forever or you get used to it. Get to like
it—having yourself be chewed up, that is. You get addicted to the agony of the
fresh calamity every time you get tossed on the fire.”

I drew back,
felt my arms crossing themselves across my chest involuntarily. “Which am I?” I
finally asked after a moment of silence.

Sarah stared
at me. “It doesn’t matter. Either way, you end up in the same place—nothing
left, and the machine goes looking for a new victim. The only question is how
far I’ll let myself be dragged along with you.”

Abruptly, she
unwound herself and stood up. “I love you, Ryan. Your pad thai is in the
fridge. It got cold waiting for you. Oh, and the DVR is cued up for your usual.
I’ll be upstairs if you need me.”

“Sarah—”

But she had
already gone inside. After a moment, the porch light winked out and left me
sitting there in the faint, golden light from the lamp in the front hall. The
door was left open, an invitation or a challenge or a warning.

I sat there,
for how long I don’t know. There was some noise from upstairs at first, then
nothing but the comfortable quiet creaks of a well-worn house settling in on
itself for the night. And I sat there, watching gnats and moths swarm around the
top of the screen door and the azaleas move in what passed for a breeze, and
didn’t move. Couldn’t, really. Couldn’t force myself to get up, to go inside,
to take that cold dinner and that television routine and then inevitably flip
open the laptop and see if there were any late emails that needed attention.

Couldn’t. Not
tonight. Not with Sarah’s words hanging in the air, daring me.

Like an old,
old man, I got to my feet. One step, two steps, and then up onto the porch, and
I swung the screen door open. The wave of cool air inside hit me like a
physical blow, the differential between home and the world outside almost
enough to twist my gut through its last unknotted half-inch. Another step and
I’d be all the way inside, wrapped in the cold comfort. From there, it would be
easy to take another step into routine, and another, and another, all the while
pretending nothing had been said. Nothing was wrong, nothing had changed,
nothing mattered—that’s what I could pretend if I kept walking.

Instead, I
slipped the laptop bag off my arm and gently set it down  by the door. I was
supposed to have it with me everywhere I went but, well, the hell with it. Who
was going to report me? Myself? Screw that.

I shut the
door behind me as I went back out, shaking my head and rolling my shoulders in
hopes of unraveling the knot that had taken up residence between my shoulder
blades. A mouse knot, we usually called it at work, but this one was the size
of King Rat. For a moment I stood there and waited for a sound from inside the
house, feet coming down the stairs or a voice calling my name and asking where
I was going.

There was
nothing. She probably thought I was going back to work, I realized bitterly.
Why wouldn’t she?

I thought
about the laptop for a moment. It was fine right where it was, on the other
side of the door from me. That’s where it would be staying. My feet took me
back down the walk and to the car. Normally I locked it, but not this time. It
was an omen, perhaps, or just an indicator as to which way escape lay.

I got in and
slammed the door behind me, jammed the key into the ignition, and got the hell
out of there. A light might have gone on upstairs as I was leaving. Might have.
I don’t know. I didn’t look to see.

I’d left the
house determined just to go, to be alone with my thoughts without Sarah’s
presence as a reminder or the lure of the keyboard.

To just be,
whatever that meant. I threw the car into gear and headed away from home, away
from work, away from any place I might see anyone or anything I knew.

And ten
minutes later, I found myself turning into the office parking lot, not surprised
by it all.

*   *   *

There were
four cars in the lot when I pulled in. One was Terry’s. It was near the door,
the sure sign of a late-night dinner carpool. The other three were scattered
around the lot, unrecognizable and anonymous.

Pulling in
next to Terryis car, I killed the engine before killing the radio or the
lights. The beams illuminated the front of the office and a stretch down the
hall, brighter cutting through the glass than the interior lights were. I could
imagine blind salamanders and white-eyed cave fish scuttling for cover
somewhere in the vicinity of the supply closet, then shut everything down and
headed inside.

*   *   *

The building
was quiet. That was the first thing I noticed when I got inside. Normally when
folks were working late, it was an excuse to take off the headphones and crank
the volume, especially if there wasn’t anyone else around. Instead, what I
heard was funereal silence. Even the chunking, thunking noises of the HVAC were
oddly muted, hushed by the weight of the dim light.

I didn’t
bother turning on the overhead lighting on the hallway leading down to my
office. I didn’t bother turning on the lights in my office, either. Instead, I
just slung myself into my chair and fired up my computer. The bluish-white glow
from the screen filled the room, washing out all of the color that might have
been there at the same time. Even the faint green glow from the debug kit, the
tell-tale indicator that it was still running in spite of itself, looked
weakened.

Seeing it
reminded me that I’d left it on all afternoon, ever since the poking around I’d
done in the Urbanscape level. The screen itself had long since gone dark, a
power-saving measure built into the monitor to rescue it from people like me,
but the steady, low whirr coming from the debug kit told me that something was
still going on in there.

I grabbed the
controller from where it sat on my desk and pressed a few buttons to wake the
monitor up. It flashed white, then black, then white again before slowly
drawing in the familiar scene I’d been stymied by earlier.

Except that it
wasn’t the same. When I’d left it, the scene was frozen, the simulation
overwhelmed by the sheer number of entities onscreen. Now it showed a clean
street, my avatar hovering over it like an avenging angel inspecting her
handiwork. The dozens of enemies were gone. A quick check of the radar
subscreen showed me that they weren’t anywhere on the level, either. They were
gone. Wiped out. All of which was eminently possible if someone very good had
snuck into my office and played the game exceptionally well, but not so
possible if the game was frozen.

I shook my
head. Leon was right. The weird little things were adding up in conjunction
with the big ones, and they almost scared me more. I ended the mission, then
set the log to dump to my system. Looking at the record of all of the AI
decisions on the level would tell me who had done what to whom and when. While
that was going, I dove back into the level design documentation for Urbanscape.
Something about the freeze was nagging at me, and I wanted to double check what
I thought I remembered.

After a minute
of digging, I found the level design and opened it up. At the end of the doc
were notes from the QA lab, the testers whose job it was to push things to the
limit to see if, how, and when they’d break. Usually, they’d put something in
there about the maximum number of enemies a level could support while still
maintaining frame rate.

I scrolled
through the doc. The space had been designed for 60 enemies at a time in
hunter-killer game modes, with more respawning in to replace the ones the
players had killed until the timer ran out or the desired number of kills had
been reached. A decent frame rate was thirty frames per second, thirty redraws
of the onscreen image. Officially, we had been gunning for sixty, but as Leon
had said, he could give us sixty if the game involved sitting in a white room
with no furniture and fighting invisible rocks.

Toward the
back of the doc, I found what I was looking for. Written in the notes section
by one of the testers—all that was there were the initials C.M. —was a small
entry noting that frame rate dropped below acceptable levels with 74 enemies on
screen and 16 players. This was dated three days before the project was shut
down, and there was no note of any change to the geometry that would wreck the
frame rate in those three days. There was barely any record of it being touched
at all. And yet, somehow it had sprung a memory leak that choked it at
two-thirds of its expected performance.

Or, and I felt
a chill go down my spine, there was something else in there that was chewing up
processing power.

I was saved
from following that train of thought by a window popping up to inform me that
the game log was ready to be read. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was looking for
in there—notes on the kills, I guessed—but it was information, and it might
help me figure out what exactly had been happening.

In the
hallway, something moved. I heard the sound just as I clicked to open the log
file, the unmistakable shuffle of sneakered feet on office-park carpet.

“Hello?” I
called. “Anyone out there?”

There was no
response, just the sound of a couple more steps fading into the dark, and what
might have been some asthmatic breathing. “Hello?” I called again and moved
from behind my desk. “Look, if you want something, you just have to ask, okay?
Okay?” By the time I finished, I was halfway into the hall myself, staring down
the better-lit sections of the building and hearing the sound of someone
beating a hasty retreat.

Whatever, I
told myself. Probably someone who heard noise up at the front and wanted to see
what was going on. Either that, or someone who’d been downloading porn and
thought he might get caught in the act. Either way, I didn’t consider it my
problem and retreated to my desk.