Vaporware (25 page)

“Your
monitor’s not that big,” Shelly said. “There’s no room for her in there.”

“That’s
what you’re worried about in all this?” I shook my head in disbelief. “Look,
she talked to me, OK? She told me that I needed to help her. She told me….” I
couldn’t repeat the rest of it. “She told me a lot of things,” I added lamely.
“And she talked about Terry.”

“That
must have been skeevy as all hell.” Shelly looked like she was about to say
something more, but the waitress chose that moment to appear. “What else can I
get you?”

“Two
more of the same,” Shelly announced. “And we’ll start a tab. Ryan, give the
nice woman your credit card.”

I
dug out my wallet and tossed the MasterCard to the server. “What’s your name,”
I asked.

“Leah,”
she answered, checking the back of the card for a signature. “You got a picture
ID to go with this?”

I
flashed my driver’s license at her. She looked at it, nodded. “Good enough. Two
more Harps and two more Bushmills?”

“Just
the Harps, I think,” I said, as Shelly looked daggers at me. “For now,” I
amended.

“Got
it.” Leah leaned over the table. “Is it done?”

“It’s
done,” Shelly answered, and leaned back. “What do you think?”

Leah
looked at the table, then looked at me, and then flicked her glance back and
forth a few more times before saying anything. “It’s good. It’s really good. I
don’t know how you did it, but….” She looked at me again. “Yeah.”

“Thanks,”
Shelly said. I looked from her to the waitress and back again, and then down to
the table. By then, though, Shelly had already run her arm across the tabletop
and wiped the sketch away.

“What
was it?” I asked. Shelly and Leah looked at each other, sharing a wordless
moment of disgust at the male of the species, and then one went off to fetch
our drinks while the other stayed to keep badgering me.

“Now,
what did she say to you?” The emphasis Shelly put on the word made it clear she
wasn’t comfortable with it, didn’t actually believe it, or at least didn’t want
to.

“Personal
stuff,” I answered, shifting uncomfortably. “Look, is this really necessary?”

She
looked me in the eye, and gradually I stopped fidgeting. “I’d say so,” she
finally said. “Come on, Ryan, talk it out. I can see you’re still shaken up.
Just tell me and maybe we can figure out what to do next. After all, I’ve seen
that…thing, too.”

I
shook my head. “She’s not a thing. She’s Blue Lightning.”

“How
can you be sure?”

I
started ticking off the evidence I’d come up with on my fingers. “One, she
looks like the main character.”

“The
main character has no face,” Sarah interrupted. “This chick’s clearly got one,
at least if you believe that video feed we got off Terry.”

“Her
face changes depending on the person she’s talking to.” I thought for a minute,
struggling to find the best way to explain it. “It’s their idea of what she
should look like.”

Shelly
looked unconvinced, so I plowed on. “She only started showing up after the
project got cancelled. All the weird stuff that’s happening, like my phone
freaking out, it’s Blue Lightning-related. She got into a log file as I was
looking at it. She’s the only explanation for the screenshots and the leaks.
And most importantly,” I’d saved the best for last, “she told me. Not in so
many words, but…she told me.”

There
was silence, then. Shelly stared at me. I stared down at the table and wondered
what she’d drawn. “That’s not possible, you know,” she finally said.

“I
know.”

“It’s
just a video game. It’s not a person. It’s not alive. It doesn’t
have…superpowers, or whatever this thing can do.”

“I
know.”

“It
shouldn’t be real. It can’t be real!”

“I
know. But it is.”

As
Leah dropped off the new round of beers, Michelle settled into a sulky silence.
“I don’t understand,” was all she said, and then attacked the beer fiercely.

I
took it a little more slowly. “I agree it should be impossible. But it is. I
know it. You know it. Terry sure as hell knows it.”

“Screw
Terry,” she said, and drank more beer. “Screw all of this. I should quit.”

“Don’t
run out on me, Shelly,” I said. I was surprised to find that I meant it.
“There’s got to be some logic to this thing.”

“Logic?
You want logic? How’s this, then? The game gets cancelled, but because
everyone’s put so much into it, it gets a little boost of love or belief or
whatever, and that’s enough to bring it to life. And now it wants to say thank
you by giving everyone a big, sloppy kiss? Sorry, I don’t swing that way.” She
spat the words out like they tasted bad and washed her mouth clean with beer
after each sentence.

“Fine,”
I said. “I’ll play along. So everyone sweated so much and loved the game so
much that it woke up. And then, what, the guys on the black project kept it
alive?”

“It
did show up to Terry first, right?” She finished her beer and signaled to Leah
for another one.

“That
we know of, yeah.” I thought about it. “Though maybe not. You remember the
Powerpoint?”

She
nodded. “The one where neither of us made the changes, and - oh God, I’d almost
forgotten about that. You think it was-”

“Yeah.
I think it was. And—bear with me here, because this is going to sound shitty—
maybe she’s more solid to me because, I don’t know, there’s more of me in her?”

“That’s
gross, Ryan.” Michelle frowned.

“For
God’s sake, Michelle.” She had the good grace to look slightly embarrassed, and
I went on. “Seriously, my job is to hold the vision of the game, right? The
dream of it. Everyone else kicks in, but everyone else has, I dunno, a specific
part of it that’s theirs. Levels and features and objects. But the way they all
come together? Eric keeps telling me, that’s mine.”

Shelly
pursed her lips to one side. “Jesus, you’re an egotistical bastard. But you
might be right. Ah, hell. Where’s the next beer?”

“Coming,”
I said, as I saw Leah cresting through the sea of rugby fans, now mostly wobbly
in their chairs or standing under the television.

“Good.”
She grabbed my pint glass and took a drink. “You should finish yours.”

“I’m
driving,” I reminded her. “Besides, it’s got your germs on it now.”

She
missed the joke, or maybe she dodged it. “Never bothered you before.”

I
said nothing, just looked away, embarrassed.

“Oh,
come on, Ryan. I’m just messing with you.”

 “Yeah.”
I grabbed one of the menus and changed the subject. “Do you want anything to
eat? I hate drinking on an empty stomach.”

“God,
yes.” Leah arrived at our table with more beer. “Water for my next round,” I
told her, and she made a note of it. “And an order of the potato skins to
split, and I’ll have the chicken sandwich, and my friend usually gets the
shepherd’s pie.”

“Coming
up.” She turned on her heel, vanishing into the crowd, half of which was now
doing an unintelligible chant for one team or another.

 “They’re
having fun,” Shelly said softly. She put the menu down. I nodded. “Are you
still having fun? With what we do, I mean. Is it fun for you?”

“The
stuff with the weird blue glowing woman or the bit where we make games?”

“Either.
Both. Is one enough to put up with the other. If it is, what the hell is wrong
with us? This isn’t funny, Ryan. ”

I
thought about it for a second. “What brought that on?” I finally found myself
asking,. “I mean, we’re in the fun business. We make games.”

Shelly
finished my beer, maybe a little faster than I would have expected. “That’s not
the same thing. We make things for other people to have fun with, sure. But do
you actually have fun doing this?” The empty glass hit the table with a clank,
turned upside down for emphasis.

I
looked at her, at the open question on her face, then looked down at my drink.
There was still some head on the beer, so I poked at it with my index finger
and drew a little smiley face in the foam. “See?” I said. “You’re not the only
artist here.”

Shelly
snorted but didn’t back down. “You’re not answering the question.”

“You’re
right,” I said. “It’s not an easy question to answer.”

“Best
shot?”

I
nodded. “Best shot. No, it’s not fun.” I saw Shelly lean forward, but I held up
a hand to stop her. “It’s not fun, and it was never about fun for me. I mean,
there are bits of it that are a lot of fun, that I really enjoy, but those are
chrome. They’re not the heart of it for me.”

“Then
what is?” She cocked her head sideways and rested it on her palm.

 “Creating
something,” I said, after a long minute of looking for the right words.
“Dreaming something up, and getting everyone else to buy into that dream and
share it and make it better, and then making it happen. And there’s more,
there’s always more. Maybe what we do is going to be something no one has ever
seen before. Maybe some kid sitting in his living room is going to see what we
made and go “Whoah!” and tell his friends “You gotta see this!” and have that
little bit of magic happen to him from what I—what we—dreamed up and worked so
damn hard on.”

I
was half up out of my seat now, pointing and waving my arms and thumping my
hand on the table for emphasis, before I noticed her looking at me. There was a
question in her eyes, but a different one than she’d been about to ask a minute
ago. “Shelly?” I said.

“Thank
you, Ryan.” She took a long, deep, shuddering breath and turned her face to the
wall. “Thank you for telling me that.”

“It’s
just the truth,” I told her, and dropped back into my seat. “That’s really all
I’ve got to keep me going in this.”

“It’s
all you’ve got,” she answered. She waited a long time before continuing. “Not
everyone has that. There are people in there who really do think this is fun,
and God bless them for it. And there are people in there who are convinced that
they could never, ever do anything else in a million years. So they’re stuck
doing this if they don’t want to be working the deep fryer at a McDonalds, and
they’ll never get out until they’re pushed, and they hate every minute of it
because they’re supposed to be having fun, cause it’s games, right? And there
are people who got in and got settled and then figured out that it’s not what
they want, but they’re caught, because the money’s just good enough that they
can’t walk away and start over.”

“And
what about you,” I asked her, leaning across the table to put my hand on her
arm for comfort. “None of those sound like you.”

 Michelle
turned to me, her eyes wide open and serious. “I’m one of the ones who doesn’t
know what else to do, Ryan,” she said quietly. “I’m one of the ones who knows
I’m really good at this but doesn’t know why. And then every so often, someone
like you comes along, someone who really believes in this stuff and who makes
it sing, and that’s enough to pick me up and carry me along for a year or two.
That’s enough to give me a reason to keep coming back for more. And when that
dream isn’t there, then….” She shrugged, and to cover her embarrassment she
noisily tossed down the rest of her beer.

I
pulled my hand away. For a moment, I thought she was going to grab it and hold
it in place, but her fingers only twitched and didn’t move, didn’t reach for
mine.

“It’s
okay,” I said, not knowing what else there was to say.

“It’s
not okay.” She shook her head. “I hate it. I hate not being able to find
whatever it is that I need to drive me on my own. I hate having to latch on to
something else. It’s why I hate you. Because you don’t have to.”

“You
hate me?” I sat back, and pulled my hands off the table entirely. “I thought we
were, well, friends, or something.”

I
got a wan smile in return. “Just a little bit,” she said. “God, watching you
get hyped up about Blue Lightning, about all the cool stuff that was going in
there…you really picked up the room and carried it, you know? It was like
falling in love. You loved it, so we loved it. We all believed in that game,
Ryan. I believed in it.”

“Terry
still believes in it,” I said softly. “And I’m starting to.”

“Well,
I don’t,” Shelly leaned forward across the table. “I believe in you. Even when
I hated you, you made me fall in love with an idea. No wonder it’s sticking
around. If I were a ghost of something you’d dreamed up, I’d stick around,
too.”

“Shelly,
I….” I sat for a moment, with her almost looking up at me in the way she used
to, once upon a time, when I loved her. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Don’t
say anything.” She smiled. “Just do me a favor. If you can find a way to
believe, just a little bit, in this new crap thing we’re working on, I’d like
that. I’d really like that a lot.”

“I’ll
try,” I heard myself say. “No promises.”

Her
words came out almost a choke, almost as a sob. “Your promises were never worth
much anyway.” She slid out of the booth. “I’ll be back in a minute. Don’t eat
all the skins when they show up, all right?” Without another word, she headed
for the rest rooms.