Vaporware (4 page)

She
took up the butter and spread the faintest of schmears on the bread, then
nibbled on a corner. “You’re very sweet, you know that?”

I
grinned. “Thank you. For you, I try. Everyone else thinks I'm a right bastard.”
I tore off a hunk of bread , then looked back up at her. “Anyway, you were
saying?”

“I
was saying that this is just something to think about, OK? There’s no need for
an answer any time soon, and certainly not until the game you’re working on is
done.”

 I
felt myself stiffening in my seat, and in a decidedly non-erotic way. “Yes?”

She
looked away for a moment, and it struck me that she was unsure of what to say
next. That sent another jolt through me. Sarah was never unsure of herself,
never at a loss for words. It was one of the things I found attractive about
her, the ability to react to damn near anything and act as if she’d seen it
coming all along. And now she was stammering, or the nearest thing to it. It
scared the hell out of me.

The
words came out of her in a rush. “Look, I did the numbers. You know how you’re
always talking about how, if you had the chance, you’d stay home and write?
Work on your novel, really work on it?” She paused to gulp down a breath but
plunged on before I could interject or affirm or do much of anything. “With my
new salary, if you want to, you could do it. We could do it. We could afford
it. We’d have to eat out a little less, and maybe tighten our belts in a couple
of other places, but we could do it. If you want.”

I
opened my mouth to answer, but she shushed me. “You don’t have to say anything
now. You don’t have to decide now. I know there’s a long way to go on your
game. But I wanted you to know,” and she gave a little shudder, as if she, too,
were afraid, “that I can do this for you. If you want.”

“Honey,
I...” My voice trailed off as my throat tightened. Words tried to force their
way out but failed for lack of air behind them. “Are you sure?”

She
nodded, not trusting herself to say anything. I closed my eyes and thought about
what I was going to say next. This was serious. Anything flip or off-the-cuff
was going to echo for a long time, and not in a good way. Sarah knew how much
she was asking and how much she was offering. I wasn't—I couldn't—shove that
offer back in her face.

But
I wasn't sure I could take what she'd offered, either.

Deep
breath in, deep breath out.

“Thank
you,” I said, and said nothing else for a minute. “And thank you for believing
in me that much.”

“You're
welcome,” she said, the words shuddering out of her. She took a gulp of wine,
not a sip. “And again, you don't have to answer tonight, and if you say no it's
okay, and—”

I
reached across the table to take one of her hands in mine. “Sarah,” I said. “I
had no idea we could ever do something like this. I'll think about it, I
promise. We're almost at alpha, so there's plenty of time. And if you change
your mind, just say the word, and it will be like this conversation never
happened. No hard feelings, no worries.”

“I'm
not going to take it back,” she said, sticking her chin out for defiant
emphasis. “You said you always wanted to write. Now we can afford it, and,” she
looked away, eyes shy, “It will be nice coming home to you, instead of waiting
until the electronic gremlins let you go each night.”

“That
would be nice,” I said, and I meant it. No more late, late nights, no more
frantic rushes to publishers’ deadlines, no more takeout Chinese in the break
room because we weren't getting out of there until the deliverable was dead.

On
the other hand, no more leading the team. No more being able to play something
I'd dreamed up and see it live and on the screen, responding what I told it to
do. No more making a vision become real.

No
more making games.

It
was a lot to think about.

I
raised my glass. “To the decision, whatever it may be.”

Sarah
raised her glass to mine. “And to making it together.”

“Together,”
I echoed. The glasses touched. We drank. And not another word was said about it
that night.

Chapter 3

Not
that long ago, I thought to myself as I stood in Eric's office, sending a vital
message to Europe had been an occasion. It would have gone by clipper ship,
with all sorts of fanfare and farewells, muttered imprecations of the
importance of the missive and proud declarations that it would be delivered in
good time—no more than a couple of months. Sending a message of that sort had
carried weight. It had been an event, something of significance, something not
undertaken lightly.

I
thought about that as Eric hit a few keys on his Android and sent the
presentation winging overseas. Attached had been a small note—“Hey, Phil, take
a look at this and let me know what you think. We can do a polish pass before
it goes in front of the board in London.” I knew what it said; I'd helped draft
it. Now, all we could do was wait, unless they asked for changes, in which case
we'd make them and send them along, toot sweet. Privately, I expected we'd have
at least four more iterations to go before everything was nailed down to
everyone's satisfaction.

“That's
it?” I asked, not expecting much of an answer.

“That's
it,” Eric confirmed, not giving me much of one. “He should still be in the
office, so at least we'll get some kind of confirmation that he received it.
Otherwise,” he shrugged. “There's not a lot else we can do at this point.”

“Do
you want me to—”

“I
want you to get back to work on the shell UI, is what I want,” he said, almost
gently. “There's a lot riding on this presentation. We both know that. But if
you get wound up, then everyone you work with is going to pick up on that, and
this place is going to turn into a psych ward.” He coughed into his hand.
“Hopefully, for no reason whatsoever.”

“Gotcha.”
The word tasted unpleasant in my mouth. “So just go back to my desk and pretend
it's all fine?”

Eric
put the iPhone down on his desk and took a sip of coffee. “Go back to your
office and stop being such a goddamned drama queen, if you can handle that.
There's nothing we can do until BlackStone gets back to us, and for all we know
they're going to double the budget and give us six more months.”

“As
if.” I looked around, not wanting to meet his eyes. Eric's office was twice the
size of anyone else’s in the building, but somehow he'd made it look positively
cozy. There were game posters on the walls—ours as well as ones from games he
just liked—action figures on the bookcases, a lightsaber he'd gotten in trade
from one of the guys at LucasArts propped up in one corner, and a general air
of nerdly comfort. Not the desk, though. His desktop was orderly, neat, and
polished to a terrifyingly bright gleam.

Once,
back in the day, Shelly had half-joking suggested we break into Eric's office
and have sex on his furniture. I'd refused, primarily because I was convinced
he had motion sensors in there.

“Weirder
things have happened,” he said, breaking my train of thought. “If they like it,
and again, there's no reason they shouldn't, then we should be ready to take
advantage of it.”

“And
if they don't,” I filled in, “then it's not like there's anything else I could
be doing in the meantime.”

“Now
you're getting it.” Eric raised his coffee in a semi-toast in my direction. “So
get the hell out of here and get back to work.”

“Yessir,”
I said, and put down the Transformer I'd been fiddling with. “Let me know if you
hear anything?”

“Of
course.” His tone, if not his expression, was long-suffering. “You get to make
all the changes they'll be asking for, anyway.”

I
didn't quite slam his door shut behind me as I went out. After all, I
reflected, that's the sort of thing a drama queen would do.

Instead,
I headed for the coffee machine in the break room at the back of the building.
Watching Eric guzzle had reminded me of my own acute caffeine deficiency, which
I resolved to remedy as quickly as possible. Without bean-juice-flavored rocket
fuel, there was no way I was going to make a dent in the UI documentation that
I needed to get on.

The
break room was crowded, or at least the area around the coffee machine was. I
waited my turn while turning over the UI issue in my head. Every screen between
startup and gameplay was another chance for players to get lost and fail to
find a way to play. By the same token, every screen players had to click
through to quit was another exercise in frustration, one more likely to get the
average users to turn off the console rather than quit out properly. That, in
turn, could result in corrupted save data, which meant that the next time they
played, they’d lose some of their hard-earned progress and get too pissed off
to make up the ground. This was something preferably to be avoided. But at the
same time, there were too many choices that players potentially needed to make
before getting into gameplay that defined the experience, and all of them were
important.

But,
and this was the idea that was really starting to take shape, maybe we could
move some of those choices into the game itself, so that the selection was an
in-game process. In other words, the player character would make the choices in
game, instead of the player doing it outside of the game world. That would save
time and increase immersion, making the game flow better and more quickly. In
my mind’s eye, I could see the UI flow changing, screens dropping away and
consolidating. It was too much to keep in my head. I needed something to write
it down on before I forgot it all.

I
grabbed a chair and started sketching on a napkin. Weapons selection could be
integrated into the gamespace if you provided a suitable default. That chopped
one, maybe two screens out of the flow, though it was going to mean a whole new
ingame system, for which the engineering staff was not going to love me. But if
we just moved those UI screens over....

A
clank on the tabletop startled me, and the pen tore through the thin paper of
the napkin, half-shredding the sketch I'd been working on. “Dammit!”

“Sorry,
Ryan.” It was Michelle's voice. I looked up as she slid a full coffee mug
across the table at me. “Didn't mean to startle you.”

“It's
fine, it's fine,” I said, clearly not meaning a word of it. “The important
thing was that I got it down on paper, so I can reconstruct it when I get back
to my desk.”

“Be
nice, and I'll tell you where we keep the pads with actual paper on them so
next time you can use one of them.”

“Thanks,”
I said, and tried hard to be actually thankful. “You didn't have to...the
coffee, I mean.”

“I
know,” she said, and slouched over the table. “But I saw you hand Alex the cup
and figured you could use a refill. You're useless without your Jesus juice
anyway.”

“Just
seemed like the nice thing to do.” My efforts to reconstruct the napkin were
shredding it with unerring efficiency, so I stopped trying and grabbed the mug.
“You sure you don't want this instead?”

She
shook her head. “I'm drinking water at work these days. So, drink up.”

“Thank
you,” I said again, and meant it this time. 

“Don't
worry about it,” she told me and got up. “I know where to find you.”

“Everyone
does.” I stood as well, coffee in one hand, napkin in the other. “I'll catch
you later.”

 “Maybe.” 
And she turned, and was gone, and then someone was whooping over having found a
hidden stash of cups in the cabinet under the microwave and I got the hell out
of there before I forgot what I was working on completely.

Clearing
space on my desk for the coffee was easy; finding a place for the napkin was
harder. I ended up setting both down, one on top of the other, before kicking
my desktop system out of sleep mode and pulling up the appropriate
documentation for the stuff I was proposing to modify. The screen flickered and
cleared as it woke up, and I found myself cursing softly. The same Powerpoint
I'd been working on was up, despite the fact that I'd closed it before sending
the final, Michelle-approved version to Eric for transmission to our foreign
overlords. Changes had been made to it, too—I could see that much from the
first screen. Somehow, the main character's pose had been changed to be more
alluring. Her lean forward was deeper, the tilt of her head more, well,
coquettish.

It
was all very definitely come-hither, which I wasn't comfortable with. For one
thing, the point of the game wasn't to come hither. It was to go thither, and
then blow the living hell out of everyone you found there. For another, there
shouldn’t have been time for someone to change things up, not between when I'd
sent it to Eric and when I'd come back from coffee. Someone would have had to
sneak into my office, hack my password to unlock the system, load the
presentation, replace the image, and then sneak out with enough time to spare
for the thing to drop back into sleep mode, and I didn't think that was
possible.

I
stuck my head into the hallway and yelled. “Eric?”

“What?”

“Was
anyone in my office while I was getting coffee?”

“No.”
He didn't look up, and his tone indicated that I was going to be in a hell of a
lot of trouble if he did. “Why?”

“Someone
screwed around with the images in the presentation. You may want to check the
one we sent to make sure it's what we want them to see.”

“Oh,
for the love of—”

I
didn't hear any more, ducking back into my office to see how much damage had
actually been done. Flipping through the slides, I could see it—subtle changes
here and there. A screenshot tweaked, a phrasing adjusted, a bullet point
deleted. If you didn't know what had been there beforehand, you wouldn't know
anything was different. If you'd sweated blood over each slide before turning
it in, the alterations stood out like a full-grown tiger at a petting zoo.

 Something
blinked on the menu bar at the bottom of my screen. I glanced at it
automatically. It was an instant messenger programming, proudly informing that
someone wanted to talk to me. “Great. Just what I need,” I grumbled and clicked
on it.

A
window popped up, dead center, with Michelle's username on it. “DID ERIC GET IT
OFF?” 

I
typed “That's kind of a personal question,” and then erased it. “He did. Did u
make changes????” was what I finally went with.

NOT
AFTER I SENT IT 2U

A
pause.

Y???

“Something's
changed,” I typed in. “Lots of little edits from this morning, after we locked
everything down. Check UR file.”

OK.

There
was a pause of somewhere between thirty seconds and ten years, and then she
came back with HUH.

“Huh
what?”

CHANGES
YES I DIDN’T DO THEM BUT

“But
What?!?!?!?!”

I
considered marching down to her desk, considered picking up the phone,
considered yelling really loudly. Instead, I waited.

R
CHANGES I WANTED TO MAKE BUT HAD NO TIME 4

I
sat there and digested that for a minute, even as I heard Eric's voice out in
the hall. “Looks good from here, Ryan,” he said. “Don't give me a heart attack
next time.”

“Sorry,”
I mumbled, not loudly enough for him to hear, and thought about it for a
minute.

“If
not you,” my fingers tapped out, “then who?”

I
paused a minute before sending it, hoping that Shelly would punch through
something that would answer this, that would make sense. Maybe she'd made the
changes after all. Maybe someone had 'fessed up.

No
such luck.

I
waited another minute, then hit Send.

Her
answer came back almost immediately. DONT KNOW, she wrote, BUT WE SHOULD HIRE
THEM LOL

Laugh
out loud indeed, I thought. Very funny. I let myself cool down for a minute,
then typed “Next time we check it in to the versioning software database so we
can see who checked it out and made changes.”

Yeah.
There was a break, and then, But at least it looks good.

“Whatever”
I sent. “Whoever it was could have stuck anything in there—porn or Hitler or
whatever, and wouldn't that have been fun when Phil at HQ opened it up?
Besides, someone hacked into your system, and mine, and maybe Eric's, and that
bothers me. I really want to know who did this before they do something serious
and nasty, and it's not just a case of a couple of GIFs being swapped out. If
they start swapping out assets in the game, then we're really screwed.” I
slammed home the last period and hit Send.

The
window blinked and spat back a “Too many characters” error at me. I watched it
blink for a minute, then took a sip of coffee and closed the window. The hell
with it, I decided and started working on the revised UI flow instead.

Shelly
sent me a couple more messages, but I ignored them. The only logical solution
to this little conundrum was that she'd made the changes, and if that were the
case, I didn't much feel like talking to her. All she'd had to do was ask, and
I would have gone along with them. I had to admit it—on the whole, the tweaks
she'd made had improved the presentation. The points were clearer, the images
more striking, the message stronger.