Vaporware (29 page)

Chapter 24

At
five of one, I made my way to the conference room. A few of the level artists
and designers were already in there, setting up to show off their sketches and
rough map proposals for how they were going to translate Salvador over. I
nodded, said a few hellos which might or might not have been answered, and then
took the seat to the left of the head of the table. This was Shelly’s meeting,
I reasoned. Might as well let her have the big chair.

More
artists filed in. The clock hit one, then five after, then ten after. I looked
around. No Shelly. Her absence didn’t seem to be slowing down the other
artists, who were engaged in an animated conversation about some Eastern
European tactical shooter they’d picked up pirated copies of. It hadn’t been
released in the States yet and was, from what I could gather, “the shit.”

Experimentally,
I cleared my throat. A couple of heads swiveled in my direction. “Uh, guys,
isn’t Michelle supposed to be in on this meeting?”

One
of the indistinct figures around the table—I recognized him by voice as Sean,
the lead level designer—shook his head. He was seated at the end of the table,
“driving” the presentation material, and his dreads caught the edge of the
projector beam. “She said she wasn’t coming.”

“Wasn’t
coming? She’s got to be here,” I said. “This is her meeting.”

Sean
shook his head again, more slowly. “She said that she didn’t think she needed
to be here because, and I quote, that prick Ryan is just going to pick whatever
maps get him hard, anyway.” He paused for a minute. “Sorry, man. Should have
told you sooner.”

Competing
thoughts tied my tongue in knots as laughter raced around the table. She
couldn’t just walk out on the meeting—she had a responsibility to the project,
and to the team. If she had personal problems with me, it wasn’t right for her
to drag the team into it. And the line about getting me hard was dangerously
close to pulling Blue Lightning out into the open, which I didn’t think any of
us wanted to do.

And,
to my surprise, I wanted her there.

In
the end, I waited for the laughter to stop and pulled out my phone. “Whatcha
doing?” asked the guy sitting a few seats down. It was, I realized, one of the
guys Terry had been talking with out in the smokers’ lounge the time we’d had
that odd conversation. His name, I remembered now, was Lucas; he was beefy,
heavyset, and unshaven. He wore an old Blue Lightning team t-shirt, and his
unbrushed hair stood out like the silhouette of a palisade against the
projector’s light.

“My
job,” I said, and called Michelle. Without a word, I put the phone on speaker
and slapped it down on the table. It rang seven or eight times without her
picking up. Around the room, I could see the artists’ eyes, Michelle’s people’s
eyes, watching me. The whites reflected the glow from the projected screen at
the front of the room, the lurid colors of the Salvador project logo. It made
them look oddly demonic, gave them the impression of being inhuman creatures
waiting for some unspoken signal to pounce on the poor unsuspecting fool who’d
walked into their lair.

Michelle
didn’t answer. I tapped the phone to disconnect, then redialed It rang twice,
loud and tinny, and someone picked up.

“Michelle?” 

No
one answered.

“Come
on, Michelle. We need you down here for the multiplayer level concept review.
We can’t wait for you forever.”

There
was another pause, then Michelle answered. “You’re not really good with that
word ‘need,’ Ryan. Go have your little meeting. Let me know how it comes out.”

Someone
whistled. Sean muttered a single, drawled, “Daaaamn.” I felt my face flushing
and fought the urge to hang up there and then.

“Come
on, Michelle. This is an art meeting. Whatever we come up with here needs your
signoff.”

“I’m
sure whatever you come up with will be fine, Ryan dear.” Her tone was all
sugary poison. “After all, you always make the best decisions.”

“This
is not the time or the place –” I began, but didn’t get any further. Michelle’s
voice, cutting, cut me off.

“You
do whatever you want, Ryan. I’ll sit back here and make sure we make it,” and
there was a pause then, a cold one, “pretty.”

Then
she hung up.

I
was left in the light from the screen, the phone dangling limply from my hand,
the cord coiling back and forth while the rest of the room watched and giggled
and said nothing. There was nothing they needed to say.

Shutting
my eyes, I took one deep breath, then set the phone down carefully. Sean
coughed, once, and said, “You think maybe we should reschedule?”

I
shook my head. “No. You heard her. Sean, if you could leave the presentation
with the top downs open, I’d appreciate it. I’ll send notes back after I’ve had
a chance to look at everything.”

He
wrapped his arms around the computer possessively. “But we really should—”

“You
heard her,” I said.  We locked eyes for a moment, and then he looked away.

“Yeah,
OK.” The other artists were already shuffling out of the room, golden
rectangles of light spilling in to the darkness where the boardroom doors had
been opened.

Lucas
was the last one out. He stopped in the doorway, just a blocky silhouette, and
turned to look at me.

“She
isn’t going to like this,” he said.

“At
this point, I don’t care what she likes,” I said, colder and meaner than I
needed to. He shook his head and walked off, shutting the door behind him.

I
waited a minute to make sure that the last of them were gone, then moved down
to Sean’s chair and started skimming through the proposed level concepts. Most
were excellent—a processing plant of some sort, an underground defense bunker,
a desert missile base—and I resolutely gave them my full attention.

I
did this even when the light in the room changed to include a harsh, blue glow.
I ignored it for a while, until the light was bright enough to interfere with
the images on the screen, and the sense of eyes burning into the back of my
neck was too much to ignore. Then and only then did I turn around.

When
I did, the light was gone, and I was alone.

*  
*   *

The
first timid knock on the door came an hour later, well after the next meeting
the room was booked for was supposed to have started. I didn’t say anything,
and after a moment, someone cracked the door and stuck their head in. It was
Dennis, with a sheepish expression on his face. “Look, man, I don’t mean to
rush you,” he said, “but we sorta got to get the room now, if that’s OK.”

“It’s
fine,” I said, cutting him off. I disconnected Sean’s laptop from the projector
and set it into its cool-down cycle before standing up. “Sorry I took so long.”

“It’s
cool, man,” he said, still hanging on the door and layering each word with a
heavy slather of calculated inoffensiveness. “If you need anything else—”

“I
take it the whole building knows about my little chat with Michelle?”

He
paused for a minute, mouth agape, and scratched his head. “I don’t think the QA
guys have heard yet. At least, not most of them. Everyone else?” He shrugged as
eloquently as he could with only one shoulder visible.

“Yeah.”
I headed for the other door. “Could you make sure Sean knows I shut everything
down? I know he’s got some tight deadlines, and I don’t want to disturb him.”

“Whatever,
man,” Dennis said, and then I was out of the board room and into the light.
Head down, I bulled my way back into my office. First things first: write up
the notes and send them to the art team and around to the leads. Second things
second: check the calendar to see if there were any more meetings with Michelle
scheduled for the day and, if so, cancel them with prejudice. Third—

“Ryan.
My office. Now.”

I
didn’t need to look up to know who was speaking; I barely needed to check to
see if my door was open. It was Eric’s voice, Eric’s commanding tone, Eric’s
caustic disappointment I was hearing.

“Can
it wait until I get these notes done?” 

“I
don’t know. Can it?”

I
sighed. “Probably not.”

“Good
call.” He came into my office and shut the door behind him. “Want to explain to
me what the hell happened to turn a simple level concept review into a soap
opera today?”

I
didn’t stand up. He paced back and forth, turning his face to me every third or
fourth word to see what effect they were having.

Keeping
my tone even, I said, “I think Michelle is mad at me.”

Eric
sputtered. “In other news, water remains wet. What the hell did you do to get
her pissed off enough to pull that stunt?”

I
coughed gently into my hand. “With all due respect, she’s the one responsible
for the stunt-pulling. Shouldn’t you be calling her on the carpet instead of
me?”

He
stopped  and stared at me. “Do you really want me asking her the hard
questions?” he asked. “Do you think you’re going to like the answers I’m going
to get out of her? That’s why you’ve got this chance to give me a plausible
excuse so I can pretend we’re having business as usual and not a full
lead-level implosion that could take the project down with it.”

With
difficulty, I swallowed. “Got it.  What do you want to hear?”

He
looked at me like I was an idiot child playing with power tools. “Whatever the
hell I can take back there and get Michelle willing to be in a room with you so
the business of this company can go on, and so that my CD isn’t laughed at for
being a thumb-dick every time he walks into a team room.”

“Right.”
I thought about it for a minute. “Tell her I said she’s right,” I finally said.
“And that the issue in question won’t be a bother anymore.”

Eric
shook his head. “I thought you knew better than to stick it in the crazy.” 

“I
didn’t. Maybe she did.”

“Ah.”
He stood there for a moment, hands clasped behind his back. “I’ll start this
ball rolling, but it’s up to you to get it where it needs to go. Or something
like that.”

I
looked up at him. “I will eat crow, dirt, shit, or whatever, Eric, to get this
project done. Whatever happened, whatever you think happened, I am not going to
let it endanger either my work here or my relationship with Sarah. You can take
that to the bank, and beyond that, I really don’t care.” I pulled up the pad
I’d taken my notes on and started transcribing them.

“I
see,” he said, and then he was gone. He shut the door behind him.

I
concentrated on the notes, managing to extract some sort of coherent feedback
from them over the space of the next hour. Pouring over the various map
concepts I’d seen, I ranked them in order, made suggestions about changes to
geometry that might jibe a little better with Salvador’s idiosyncratic AI and
combat model, and otherwise made it clear that I’d looked at each one very
carefully and professionally.

“You
shouldn’t be the one who has to apologize,” a voice in my office said. I hadn’t
heard the door open, but then again I hadn’t expected to.

“He’s
right,” I said without turning around. Reflexively, I reformatted the notes to
fit our standard format, an automatic process that somehow lent comfort and
continuity. “I should apologize.”

“But
why?” The room’s illumination grew brighter, acquiring tinges of bluish-white.
“Not that I mind anything that slows down your other project.”

I
attached the file to an email and addressed it to Sean, to Michelle, to Leon
and Eric and a couple of other folks I thought would appreciate the contents.
“It’s the company’s project,” I said tonelessly. “The sooner it gets done, the
sooner the company gets paid, and the sooner we can move on to something else.”

“Something
old?” There was a dreadful eagerness in her voice, and desperate longing, too.
“You could go back to something you’d been working on, couldn’t you?”

I
shook my head. “I don’t think BlackStone will let us.” A brief message went
with the document, an explanation of what I was sending along amidst a raft of
compliments for the level team on their work and ideas. “They want us working
on their stuff, and I’m not sure when we’ll ever be able to break away.”

“Oh.”
There was silence, crinkled at the edges by faint sounds of static and popping
electricity. The hair on my arms stood up. “Ryan? Why won’t you look at me?”

I
hit SEND. The email leaped away, into the system. A soft ping told me it was
safely gone. “Because I don’t want to see you” 

She
laughed. “Don’t be silly. Of course you want to see me. You want to see all of
me.”

“No,
no I don’t.” I locked my eyes on the monitor, on the long list of emails
demanding immediate answers. “If I see you now, I have to believe in you. If I
see you in broad daylight, during working hours, then I have to admit you’re
real.” A thought came to me. “You can’t walk into dreams, can you? Sarah—my
girlfriend—said she dreamed about you.”