Vaporware (5 page)

But
there was no reason for her to have felt like she needed to sneak those in, or
to sneak onto my system to do so. If anyone in the building knew me well enough
to guess my password, she'd be the one. The coffee was probably just a way of
distracting my attention.

I
took a sip. It was cold and bitter. I could feel the grounds on my tongue.
“Screw it.” Shutting down the chat application, I went to work reconstructing
my torn and tattered napkin, the road map of my revised inspiration.

At
six, Eric left for the day. He stuck his head in my office as he passed.
“Everything OK?” he asked.

I
nodded. “I'm still not quite sure what the hell happened with that slide deck,
but what the hell. As long as you're happy with it.”

He
scratched behind his ear. “Whatever. I think you just misremembered or
something. It's off, and until we hear from Phil, there's no sense in
worrying.”

“We
haven't heard from him yet?” I looked up in surprise. “I thought you sent it
before he left.”

“Yeah,
yeah. He's not exactly the most punctual guy when it comes to getting back to
us. You know that. Anyway, if there's nothing else?”

I
grinned at him. “In other words, there had better not be anything else.” With
empty hands, I shooed him off. “There's nothing, I swear. I'll catch you
tomorrow.”

“All
right,” he said, and vanished from the doorframe. “Try to get out of here
sometime,” I heard his voice echo from down the hall as he walked away.

Try,
I thought to myself. Try indeed.

Chapter 4

“Mmmm?”

“Shh,
honey. Go back to sleep.” I eased myself out of bed, one questing foot hitting
the carpet before I dared move the second one. Beside me, Sarah snuggled close,
maybe a quarter awake at best. I leaned over and kissed her forehead. “I love
you.”

“Mmmm,”
she said again, and then, in a small voice thick with sleep, “Hurry back.”

“I
will,” I promised, and extracted myself from the bed. She rolled over, curling
the blankets to her in a maneuver that I knew well. I stood there, watching her
for a moment, my eyes adjusting to the darkness of the bedroom even as the
klaxon of NOT TIRED NOT TIRED NOT TIRED echoed in my brain. I'd been in bed for
a solid hour, lying as still as I could in the dark so as to avoid waking
Sarah, eyes open and staring.

Eventually,
I'd decided that sleep just wasn't in the cards and thought I should do
something useful instead. First, though, I waited and watched until Sarah's
breathing grew regular and she'd bunched a pillow up to curl herself around. I
pulled the sheets up to her chin, resisted the urge to kiss her again, and
shambled off to my office.

The
night was warm enough that I didn't have to worry about a bathrobe; stripey
pajama bottoms were good enough. I sagged into my chair, making sure the office
door was shut behind me, and fired up the computer. A quick email check, I
decided, and then some useful competitive analysis, by which I meant playing a
game for a while. I thought about working on my novel—it had been sitting
peaceably at a cool fifty thousand words since NanWriMo ended—but decided
against it. Too tired, I told myself. Whatever I wrote wouldn't be any good.

The
company email page took forever to load, grumbling along like it was dialup.
Someone at the office was downloading something big, I decided. Probably porn,
or maybe BitTorrent movies. Either way, I didn't much care. I just tapped the
desk with my fingers until, one by one, the screen elements popped in. I
checked the clock. 3:30 AM. I'd been counting sheep longer than I'd thought.

“Just
a quick mail check,” I repeated, and scanned the list. One item caught my eye.
It was from a BlackStone address, a familiar one.

When
Eric had sent the presentation over to Phil, he'd cc'ed me on the message. I'd
paid no attention at the time.

Phil
apparently hadn't paid any attention either. He'd hit Reply All, not just
Reply, which meant that I could take a look at his thoughts on our
presentation. With luck, he wouldn't be asking for major changes, and I could
spend minimal time making his requested tweaks. BlackStone was funny that way,
constantly moving the target that the third party studios were supposed to hit.
Michelle had voiced her suspicion, more than once, that they were just doing it
so they could call “breach of contract” whenever they felt like it. I'd been
more generous—I'd said that they didn't know what the hell they wanted, either.

I
clicked the link. Phil's email opened up.

The
third time I read it, it finally sunk in.

Eric:

Thank
you very much for your presentation. I'm sure it is excellent. However, it is
my understanding that the Executive Board has decided that it is not in
BlackStone’s interest to pursue the Blue Lightning project at this time. This
is not a formal announcement, of course, but I wanted you to be aware of the
way the wind was blowing. I do know that they are very pleased with your
studio's work and plan to offer you something else to make up for the
disappointment.

I
am sure we will be in contact soon.

Best
Wishes,

Phillip

I
stared at it for a while, then stared some more. There was a soft ping, the
sound of new mail, and I looked down.

It
was from Eric. Apparently, he'd been having trouble sleeping as well. I opened
it up.

Not
a word to anyone.

-Eric

That
was all it said. That was enough.

I
shut down the computer and walked out of my office. The bedroom was to the
right, warm and inviting.

I
turned left, went downstairs, and spent the rest of the night sitting in a kitchen
chair, staring at the wall.

*  
*   *

Sarah
was her usual bustling self in the morning. If she noticed that I hadn't come
back to bed, she didn't say anything about it. For my part, I didn't say
anything about the email I'd seen. I had a bowl of cereal; she had an egg-white
omelet with low-fat cheese and a precisely measured pinch of parsley, and then
she was off in a whirlwind of newly promoted efficiency.

I
stood at the front door and watched her go. It wasn't until after her car's
taillights had faded into the distance that I dragged myself upstairs and threw
myself into the shower.

Maybe
it was a mistake, I told myself. Maybe Phil jumped the gun. Maybe I didn't
actually read what I thought I read. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

But
in my gut, I knew it was bullshit. I knew the project was dead. Maybe it didn't
know it yet. Maybe I wasn't allowed to tell anyone that the sentence had been
passed. But it was over.

Hot
water sluiced over me. I stood there, letting it run down my back, and leaned
into the wall. It should have been no big deal. Projects got killed all the
time. There were guys I'd met at Game Developers' Conference who'd been in the
industry ten years without ever shipping a title, because the games they were
working on always got axed or handed off to another studio or otherwise taken
away.

But
this was going to be the one. I'd felt it. So had the team. There was something
magical in the game, a real sense of something new and exciting and cool. This
was going to be the one to really make us as an independent studio.

I
was the creative director, and it was going to be the one to make me. Now, for
reasons that would never be explained and that I would never comprehend, it was
dead.

Just
like that.

I
sank down onto the floor and let the water flow over my skin until it was
freezing. I was thirty five, positively ancient in game-development terms, and
I'd just seen my best shot go bye-bye. Maybe Sarah was right. Maybe it was time
to let her pay the bills while I tried to do something else, something that
didn't rely so much on so many other people, so far away.

Eventually
I turned the water off.

*  
*   *

Eric
was waiting for me when I walked in the door. “My office. Now.”

“And
a good morning to you, too, Eric.” I dropped my laptop bag on the floor outside
my door. “Is this a before-coffee or an after-coffee conversation?”

He
glowered at me from behind his desk. “It's a now conversation.”

“Right,
then. No coffee.” I was already headed toward his office as I said it, any
cheap bravado I'd felt draining away.

“Shut
the door.”

I
did.

“Sit.”

I
sat.

He
leaned forward over his desk, looking tired. Looking beaten, for lack of a
better word. There were dark circles under his eyes, which were reddish in the
way only a sleepless night or a long drinking binge can bring. There were lines
down his face, and his hair looked like he'd done the five-finger brush job
instead of his usual immaculate grooming. There was stubble on his cheeks.

I
was shocked. There was never stubble on Eric's cheeks. Other times when we'd
had contracts pulled, other times when it looked like the entire company might
go tits-up, he'd always managed to maintain a positively respectable
appearance. I'd asked him about it once, and he told me it was simple—if he
looked like there was nothing to worry about, then other folks would figure
there was nothing to worry about. Look like the world was caving in, and there
would be panic in the streets, which would then make his job that much harder.

Today,
he looked like crap.

“So,”
he said, “you saw the first email in that chain. Would you like to know the
rest of it?”

“I'm
not sure,” I said cautiously. “Should I know this stuff?”

He
rubbed his eyes. “You're going to have to, sooner or later, so you might as
well. The short version is that there were about fifteen more messages back and
forth last night after I chopped you out of the cc list. Some was with Phil,
some was with the higher ups, but none of it was what you'd call good.”

“So
we're screwed?” I felt myself deflating, even as I asked. There had been some
tiny particle of hope that the email I'd seen had been incorrect, that Phil had
gotten his wires crossed or had been since overruled. Now, it was snuffed out.

“Blue
Lightning is screwed,” he clarified, and looked at me through his fingers.
“That’s why I called you in here. As for the suckage, it’s real simple. Their
marketing department ‘no longer has confidence’ in Blue Lightning, and are no
longer supporting the project. We are to stop working on it immediately, if not
sooner.”

Feebly,
I protested. “But...we have a contract.”

“In
theory, we’ll get a kill fee.”

I
blinked, suspicious. “In theory?”

Instead
of answering, Eric stretched out in his chair and stared up for a long moment
at the ceiling. “In theory,” he finally said. “In reality, I expect that trying
to recoup it from them will take somewhere on the order of five years, and cost
us a half a million in lawyer’s fees.”

“We
can’t afford that,” I blurted out. The pressure in my chest eased
infinitesimally. As dire as this seemed, the fact that Eric was talking to me
indicated that he had something else up his sleeve. If he didn’t, he probably
would have been setting the place on fire for the insurance money. He was a
practical kind of boss; that was one of the reasons everyone liked working for
him. Still, having Blue Lightning cancelled was a kick in the creative crotch.
To lose it now, well, that was a lot of work they were asking us to throw out.
A lot of late nights and passion and skull sweat, a lot of weekends blown to
make milestones and self-imposed deadlines, a lot of hours spent as a small
part of a medium-sized team trying to make something big.

A
lot of love.

“No.
We can’t,” he agreed. “Which is what they’re counting on.” He left the sentence
hanging, as if daring me to finish it.

Another
bout of panic seized me. “Do they want the assets?” If they did, we’d have to
bundle up every bit of work we’d done—art, code, design, sound—and hand it
over, never to be seen again. BlackStone could then theoretically turn the
project over to someone else to do whatever they wanted with it, or they could
sit on it, or they could just use the discs we’d backed everything up onto for
coasters. Every trick that we’d come up with over the course of the project
would be theirs, never mind that we’d done a lot of the heavy lifting before
they sent dime one in our direction.

Eric
waved off my concern. “No, they’re not asking for that, at least. They just
want us to stop working on it.” He gave a wan grin. “I don’t think they
particularly want the IP, to be honest, which tells you how little they think
of it.”

I
tasted cold vomit in the back of my throat and swallowed hard, trying to clear
things enough that I could actually speak. “And those guys want everything.
Wow. They must have really hated it if they’re willing to let it go.”

“They
don’t think it will come back to hurt them,” he said. His fingers drummed the
desk. “The really angry-making part of this is that they’re probably right.”

I
stared at him, suspicion beetling in my mind. “There’s something else going on,
isn’t there?” I leaned back in the chair and tilted my head back toward the
ceiling. “OK, I’m not seeing it.”

Sound,
rather than sight told me that Eric had gotten up. “What the hell are you
doing?”

“Looking
for the other shoe,” I replied. “Any second now, it’s going to drop.”

He
laughed despite himself, and came around to the front of the desk. “I hate to
say it, but you’re right. There’s a one-two punch here, and there’s no way to
duck.”

“Part
one is killing our project. Part two is….”

“They’ve
offered us something else.”

My
head snapped down so fast I could actually hear my neck crack and feel my
molars bounce off one another. “Something else?” My eyes narrowed. “Like what?”

He
held up that damnable piece of paper. “That’s the bitch of it.” Someone knocked
on his door, and without turning he called out “In a meeting. Come back in five
minutes.”

I
raised an eyebrow. “Five minutes? You’re an optimist.”

He
fixed me with a decidedly humorless stare. “I don’t think either of us will
want to continue this conversation past that point. Look, here’s the deal.” He
started pacing, ticking the points off on his fingers as he did so. “They want
us to do an old-gen port of their new FPS project. Maybe PC, too, if we look
like we can handle it. They’re offering acceptable money and a longer contract
if we just roll everything off of Blue Lightning and onto this new thing, which
they’ve code-named Salvador.”