Vaporware (32 page)

“And?”

I
took a deep breath before continuing. “And I’ve been trying to figure out what
to do about it for weeks now, because I didn’t want to rat them out, but at the
same time—”

“At
the same time you didn’t want to screw the project or the company.” He turned
around and shot me a look fraught with meaning. “And that’s what’s been bugging
you?” There was a hint of emphasis on the word “that,” a suggestion that he
knew a little more than I’d told him and he wanted to see if I’d come clean.

Screw
it. What was he going to do, I asked myself. Ask Michelle and Leon? They
wouldn’t give him the straight dope either, not if they wanted to avoid a
little psychiatric leave of their own.

“That’s
it,” I said, and then forced myself into a coughing fit so I wouldn’t have to
say anything else.

“Ah,”
Eric said. “I see.” He walked over to his desk and punched up an extension on
his phone. “Marie?” he asked into the speaker.

There
was a pause, then the voice of our HR maven came back, crackling over the line.
“Yes? Hello?”

“I’m
going to need your help. We’ve got,” and he looked up at me, “four termination
notices I need you to prepare, and one letter of discipline to go into a file.
Ryan will be down shortly to give you the names.”

“Four?”
she asked, clearly surprised. “Do we have cause?”

“I
think so,” he said calmly. “Ryan will explain when he gets there.” He cut the
connection and looked down at me. “That is, if you’re sticking by your story.”

“It’s
the truth,” I said, and shivered. “But I don’t think you need to—”

“Your
thinking hasn’t been working so well lately, Ryan,” Eric said, his voice deceptively
mild. “Now go down and talk to the nice lady in HR about how these people have
been working on a project they weren’t supposed to on company time.”

“It’s
going to be a huge morale hit,” I warned him.

“I’ll
take that chance. It’s better than missing a milestone because people are too
busy working on side projects to get their shit done.”

“But
you don’t have to fire them,” I pleaded. “Yell at them, suspend them, embarrass
them, whatever, but all they’re doing is caring a little too much about what we
worked on.”

“The
only thing getting them fired right now”—and he pointed a long finger straight
down at me—“is your word. So if you really don’t want this to happen, just tell
me you’re concussed or something similar, and I’ll call Sarah and she’ll come
in and take you to the hospital. On the other hand, you might want to think
about whether it’s best for all concerned if they go. Really, this one’s all on
you.”

I
sat there for a moment, staring at my shoes. My head throbbed, the pulsing of
the blood in my temples nearly deafening.

“Four?”
I finally croaked. “Why just four?”

“We
need Terry,” Eric said, his voice eminently reasonable. “Now, do you need help,
or can you make it to HR on your own?”

*   *   *

The building
was mostly empty by the time I left Marie’s office. She’d been very calm and
professional about the whole thing, taking my statement and making me verify
each element before attaching them to the appropriate termination notices.

It
felt a lot like I was being given another chance to back down, to back off and
take my chances. Though every word I gave Marie was true, it felt worse than
the lying I’d done, and while none of it was lies, it wasn’t all of the truth,
not by a long shot.

Then
again, I was painfully aware that telling the whole truth wasn’t going to help
my campaign to avoid having Sarah step into the building and risk an encounter
with Leon or Shelly. Or, for that matter, with someone who’d talked to them, or
who’d heard about what had happened, or who’d talked to someone who’d heard,
or…the list went on, and the risk went up, and by the time I was done running
it down I’d convinced myself that it was for the best that those four guys
would be getting out of the studio and away from Blue Lightning. It would be
safer for them, certainly.

The
thought that it would be less competition for me, I mostly stopped before it
started. Mostly.

Nobody
said anything as I made my way back to my office, nobody stopped me or waved or
asked me any questions. Folks going out the door kept on going, occasionally
looking in my direction but not saying anything. It confirmed my suspicions
that the story of my little tete-a-tete with Michelle had already gone viral,
and I wouldn’t be surprised if some version of it didn’t pop up on gamer gossip
blogs before suppertime.

Wearily,
I sat down behind my desk and tried to catch up. Thankfully, most of the email
that had come in required no response. The vast majority were “new in build”
announcements, communiqués sent to let everyone know that Something Had Changed.
A few were forwarded humor posts. One was an internet meme image, a Sarcastic
Wonka with the caption, TELL ME AGAIN HOW YOU DRINK YOUR COFFEE WITH OUR ASS.
Not a one was a question about the game.

The
only email directed my way exclusively was from Dennis, who wanted to know how
the new monitor was working out for me and to assure me that the new one was
coming within a couple of days. Possibly. If everything went right with the
requisitions.

I
started to answer him, then thought better of it. Instead, I picked myself up
and headed over to his warren.

He
was neck-deep in a system when I got there. The box was on his desk and open,
with various bits of its electronic guts sprawled out around it. I recognized a
couple of hard drives, a high-end video card, and something that could have
been a heat sink, but the sheer volume of components was overwhelming. There
was no way any sane man could cram that much hardware into one case. For
Dennis, it would be tough.

“Just
a minute.” His voice echoed from the vents at the back of the case. “Gotta do a
little soldering here, and I’ll be right with you.” The smell of hot lead
drifted then past me as I waited. There was nowhere to sit; every flat surface
was covered in bits of hardware awaiting either reconnection or recycling.

Finally,
the sounds of banging inside faded, and Dennis stuck his head out. “Hey, Ryan!
What’s up? I hear you were playing skull hockey in the break room, man.”

“More
like a gravity check,” I told him, and tried to smile. “Nothing too serious, except
for some scrambled brains.”

“Ahh,
you can’t scramble what you ain’t got,” he said, grinning to take the sting out
of it. “Now, what can I do for you?”

Gingerly,
I stepped to his desk. Nothing crunched underfoot as I did so. “It’s about the
monitor….”

“Oh,
geez. Don’t tell me that one crapped the bed, too.”

“No,
I—”

“Cause
if it did, we can maybe use one of the seventeen-inchers until your new one
comes in.”

“Really,
it—”

“And
I guess I’ll just have to put a rush on the new one I ordered for you, though
Eric’s not gonna like what that costs.”

“Seriously,
Dennis, I—”

He
scratched his chin. “Maybe we could just go down to Best Buy and get one, and
cancel the order. Or I could repurpose that one, and—”

“Dennis!”

He
looked up, shocked, and blinked at me twice. “What, man? I’m thinking here.”

“You
don’t need to worry.” Almost without realizing it, I placed my hands on the
desk and let them take my weary weight. “The monitor you got me is fine. It’s
just fine, and right now I don’t think it would be good for morale if I got a
shiny new expensive toy.”

That
got me another blink. “You’re saying you don’t want the new monitor?”

“That’s
exactly what I’m saying.”

“Huh.”
Dennis cocked his head and squinted at me. “You sure? I think maybe you hit
your head harder than you thought.”

“I’m
sure,” I said. “If it’s too late to cancel it, give it to someone else. One of
the artists will appreciate it, maybe. But I’ve got all I need.”

He
threw up his hands. “If you say so, man. But that’s gotta be the first time
anyone’s ever turned down an equipment upgrade that I can remember.”

“Brett
Lewis turned down a widescreen monitor about a year back,” I reminded him.

“Yeah,
but that dude was looking at porn all the time and calling it ‘visual
reference,’ and he didn’t want no one to see that freaky shit he was into.”

“Look,
when a man and a camel really love each other, it’s a beautiful thing. It’s not
Brett’s fault the rest of us couldn’t understand that.”

Dennis
stared at me for a moment, then collapsed into laughter. “Damn, man. I thought
I was the only one who remembered that stuff. Okay, you win. I’ll find
someplace else for the monitor, but I won’t tell anyone. You’ve got until it
arrives to change your mind, you hear?”

I
gave him a wry smile, the best I could manage. “And the sad thing was, we never
even put the camel in the game.”

“Stop
it, man, just stop it.” Still laughing, he waved me out. I turned to go and
nearly broke my toe as I did so, kicking a long metal lockbox. Instantly,
Dennis stopped his giggles.

“Dude!
Watch it!”

I
stepped carefully over the box, which, on first examination, seemed to be in
perfect repair. It was gunmetal gray and maybe two feet long, with a fold-off
top held in place with a tiny Yale lock. Below that was a label with the
Horseshoe logo on it and a series of dates. “Offsite backups?” I asked.

He
nodded. “About four months’ worth. Enough to basically bork the whole thing, if
we lost ‘em. Eric asked to see ‘em. He wanted to check some usage patterns or
something over the last couple of months on the Blue Lightning project. I told
him he coulda got those from the network log files, but no.” Dennis’ hands went
up in a grand Goth gesture of being put upon. “So I had to call up our offsite
provider and jump through nine kinds of hoops just to get the shit back in the
building.”

I
looked down at the box, then at Dennis. “Wait a minute. Those are our offsite
backups? Did they make backups of the backups or something before sending them
here?”

“That,
my friend, would cost extra. And don’t even get me started on putting this shit
in the cloud.” Dennis gave a wicked little chuckle, then extended his hand.
“Gimme the box, would you?”

I
bent down to pick it up. The metal felt unaccountably warm in my hands. “So if
there was a fire or something, we’d be totally screwed for backups? It would
all go poof?”

Dennis
reached out to take the lockbox. I handed it to him. “Mostly,” he said. “After
the other ones he made me order get here, then we’ll really be up shit’s creek
if something goes wrong. But,” and he placed the container on a sliver of clear
space on his desktop, “the odds of that are a couple of zillion to one. What’s
going to burn in this place? We even got fireproof carpets.” He dug a toe into
the dried puke-brown stuff at his feet for emphasis.

“People?”
I asked.

“No,”
he corrected me. “People burn out. They don’t burn up.”

“Maybe
someone will get creative,” I told him, and then headed for the door. “Thanks
again on the monitor thing, Dennis.”

“Don’t
mention it,” he said. By the time I was back in the hall, he was back inside
the guts of the machine he’d been working on when I came in, crooning sweet
nothings to its electronic innards.

“At
least it isn’t camels,” I said to myself, and walked away.

*  
*   *

The
trick, I decided as I walked from Dennis’ cave to my own, was to get out of the
building before Blue Lightning showed up and told me what she thought about
getting her other minions canned. Marie wasn’t going to call them in until the
morning, but if Blue Lightning could get into our email system, she could get
anywhere on the internal network, and that included human resources.

I
discounted the possibility of Terry and company waiting for me in the parking
lot with a tire iron as tomorrow’s disaster.

Eric,
I saw as I headed down the hall, had already taken off. Indeed, that entire end
of the building had already emptied, unusual for a Thursday afternoon. Normally
that was the work-late night, the desperate push to get everything done so
everyone could feel justified in getting out at a decent hour on Friday.

Today,
however, it was just me, and I intended to rectify that as quickly as I could.
A quick email check showed nothing new worth mentioning. Saving the documents I
had open and checking them back in to the database took another minute;
shutting down the other apps not much time beyond that. I put the desktop into
standby mode, packed up the laptop, and shoved it into its bag, then looked
around. There was no sign of anything untoward, no sign of life other than my
own movements. All there was to do was let Sarah know I was coming home, kill
the lights, and get out.

I
pulled out my cell phone and thumbed in the quick-dial for home. It rang twice,
then Sarah picked up. “Hello?”