400 Boys and 50 More (74 page)

Oh well. Maybe they’d come around. He’d never seen a game yet that couldn’t stand to be improved—unless it was one of his own.

Barton saw no reason not to use the same procedures he’d used when converting
Gorefest
into
Skullpulper
. You built a world up from the basics. Code was more basic than textures, but he didn’t have access to that. So he’d start with textures, then do models (and the sounds that went with them), and finally (best for last) invent a new armament.

“The number of textures in the game is immense,” a message from n01 had informed him. “However, if you will kindly assemble the elements of a new visual language, we have utilities to employ your textures as the basis for an almost infinite variation of new patterns.”

So they took shortcuts, but that was kewl. So did he. Even his rush-jobs still had the definitive Needles look. With the money he was making, he could have afforded to hire a few artists, but he prided himself on being a renaissance kid. This was to be his vision, start to finish.

He began with a tile, 64 by 64 pixels square, blown up to fill his screen. One pixel at a time, he began to shade and sketch and manipulate until he had an interesting texture. He used his much-hacked version of
Mickey’s MasterPainter
, a Disney painting program he’d been using for all his art projects since he was six years old. Sometimes he started with a blank tile; more often he worked from an existing image—such as a photograph or a modified tile from
Skullpulper
. He designed brown panels striated with darker lines, punctuated with knotholes like long, torn, gaping faces. He made tiles of grainy gray and speckled brown, poking up from matted green, to serve as rocky ground and sparse vegetation. He created panels set with gruesome demonic faces, leering fanged gargoyles. Mushroom-hued alien textures. Metal meshwork smeared with what looked like old, rotten blood. Tessellated grids clotted with hair and tissue. He made everything a designer would want in a world.

After days of unbroken work, Barton began to see his custom textures everywhere. This always happened in the middle of a project. When he lay down to snatch a few hours of sleep, colored tiles replicated themselves on the undersides of his eyelids, wallpapering the interior of his brain with riveted blue panels, ocher brickwork, coppery asphalt. When he woke and wandered upstairs for more of the sugary espresso fuel he craved, the walls seemed to crawl with patterns he had designed. The biggest difference between the visual content of his dreams and his waking hours was the lack of a monitor framing his dreams. And sometimes he dreamed the monitor as well.

It was more than a week before he had a complete set of textures he was happy with—the makings of a new world. He gathered the files into a single pack, zipped it up, and e-mailed it to Noware. That was at 3:14 a.m. on a Saturday.

Just before noon of the same day, when he finally rolled out of bed, there was a message from n01 waiting in his mailbox. He expected, at worst, a mere confirmation: Textures received. At best, the usual raves. What greeted him was both unexpected and unwelcome.

Excellent work, Mr. Needles (may we call you Lord?)! Many of these are everything we had hoped for, and should serve to fill in every aspect of our game. However, we note that overall there is a certain grim, even cruel, quality to the work. We discern little of lightness here, little of humor or human kindness—

“Human kindness?” he said with a sleepy snarl. “What is this shit?”

We are therefore returning certain textures which we consider inappropriate for this conversion, and request that you kindly recast them with a somewhat more benign demeanor. It is our intention that this game be significantly less grueling and gruesome than the usual fare. We believe our conversion will find a ready niche in a world already saturated with bloodlust and senseless violence.

Attached to this message was a file comprised of every tile that was even slightly macabre or sinister: the demon faces, the gory floors, the gears clogged with flesh.

In Barton’s first flush of disgust and indignation, he started a letter like those he had fired at GoreX toward the end of the
Skullpulper
conversion, letting his venom shape and seethe through every bitter sentence. But gradually he found himself reconsidering such a rash response. If Noware had stated their intentions at the outset, he could have told them to flick off before agreeing to their terms. But now…the money. Yes, the money, already beginning to bubble yeastily and rise like wonderful dough, inflating….

In the end, he deleted the letter.

Why had they picked
him
for the TC? They knew his work—they’d praised it. Had they sought him out with the ulterior intention of subverting his natural style? He still suspected they were some sort of quasi-religious outfit. Maybe it was Barton himself they wished to convert.

Well, they couldn’t touch him. He would do what they asked, but in the end he would have his way. In the end it would be Lord Needles’s world.

He treated the revision work with economical disdain, devising a program to switch the goriest tones of clotted blood with soothing pinks, soft blues, subdued nursery-room yellows. The multitude of fierce icons were more difficult to alter, but he devised a fractal filter that softened and blurred the masks of evil, then re-sharpened them into whimsical forms. Wicked spikes and jagged fangs softened into curls and spirals like multicolored rotelle pasta. The grimly leering slits of demon-serpent eyes became cheerful crescent moons mounted on the fuzzy cheeks of smiling-snouted orange teddy bears.

Barton reserved the serpent smirks for himself. And carefully laid the groundwork for his subversive masterpiece.

The batch of revised textures, fired back at Noware approximately 12 hours after their rejection, met with no further objection: “Textures received. More than acceptable. Please commence entity conversion based on the attached model files.”

This terse message was accompanied by an immense collection of .mdl files. Once he began to examine the files, he was disappointed to find how utterly unimaginative they were.

No monsters. No aliens. No marine sergeants frothing bloody foam.

Instead, he found people, all sizes and shapes and colors, all ages, but all utterly ordinary. The fact that they were naked was the strangest thing about them. Game models were usually decked in flamboyant colors, military garb, savage armor. So the nakedness of these was odd…but ultimately boring.

His first task, therefore, was to make the models interesting again. That should be no problem. There were enough similarities in the basic human forms that one good all-purpose program would be able to remake the entire tedious population on a global basis.

On a whim, and for consistency’s sake, he went back to the image of the stupid cuddly teddy bear he had concocted for his tiles. Having settled on a basic teddy bear model, he went through the human model files, altering all of them in one sweep, creating a motley army of awkward, patchy teddy bears. He spent the next day tweaking them individually, keeping limbs aligned and furry snouts smiling.

The next group of models was harder to comprehend: batches of limbs, unattached to any creature; horns and fur and scales. There were machine parts, things that looked like the hoods of generic midsized cars, lampstand bases, twigs and fronds. He no longer had any idea what he was altering. He followed his own sense of style, hoping to make all these oddments look as if they shared some common source; he teased the limbs into long strings and let them snap back into floppy curls. He turned gentle arcs into spadelike parabolas. He had never worked in the dark like this before, guided only by a sense of rightness; but after a time he found it addictive. He enjoyed the alterations for their own sake, without a thought to their purpose or ultimate use, or to what sort of game this all added up to. Days passed; and, more importantly, nights, when he hardly stirred from his seat. But while he reveled in the work, his plans for revenge were far from forgotten.

All the grimness, all the cruelty, that was such an essential element of everything he’d done before the Noware TC, he carefully set aside for a private project. It was to be a secret entity, something made all the more hideous by contrast to the warm and whimsical creatures which surrounded it.

Barton distilled his conception of evil into a hybrid bearing the worst features of every monster he had ever wrought or dreamed of. A Demon Lord. In scale, it was several hundred times the size of the human figures; it was gray and black and dripping with blood; its maw a festering pocket of abscessed fangs and sucking lamprey tongues. Its body was a slimy mass of chancres from which razor-hooked tendrils uncurled, and it moved on a carpet of insect legs that could adhere to any surface. It was covered with eyes and armor, and was all but unstoppable. He decided to include one—and only one—weapon in the artillery pack which, if cleverly used, might kill it.

The hardest thing was finding the right sound for the beast. He experimented for days until hitting upon a satisfactory noise, achieved by feeding glass and bone and masses of sinewy fat into the kitchen sink garbage disposal and recording the gurgling, grinding sound with a microphone taped to the plumbing down where the razors whirled. By raising this to an almost intolerably high pitch, he captured what sounded like a scream of demonic triumph.

The Demon Lord would be Barton Needles’s signature. Anyone who played the game would recognize his handiwork as soon as the monster devoured them.

But naturally he could not simply e-mail the Demon Lord to [email protected] and expect accolades. He could imagine their shock and horror, and then their polite rejection. Well, he would not give them a chance to reject it before letting them know what he thought of their namby-pamby vision of a peaceful world. First, there would be a good long reign of carnage.

Noware had unknowingly delivered the means of its undoing into his hands. The original collection of models had been accompanied by a large DLL file—a dynamic link library containing a number of animation and other routines shared by many of the models. Changes to the models necessitated changes to the animation functions; and Noware had entrusted him with this rudimentary programming task.

He compressed his Demon Lord data and hid the unlabeled array among others in the DLL. He then found an ordinary animation function, one that would be called fairly frequently during runtime, and made one minor alteration: at random intervals the normally useful function would return a pointer not to an ordinary animation function, but to the Demon Lord array. The game would then decompress, load, and let loose the monster.

If Noware eventually did locate the monster array and tried to remove it, all model animations would fail. Meanwhile, it was self-triggering, and would spawn at random but frequent intervals. Over time, if the creatures were not killed, there would be hordes of them all through the game. By then, of course, the hard-core gamers would have risen to the challenge and mastered the tricks of the arsenal.

On the other hand, no hard-core gamer of Barton’s experience would spend more than two minutes in this particular world anyway. With all its soft edges and pastel colors, it would repel them instantly. It was just as well he was working anonymously. A world like this would be death to his reputation…except for the Demon Lord aspect.

He would do things differently next time. Not that there need be a next time. Once he’d been paid in full for the Noware TC, he would have the capital he needed to start his own company, with a few hand-picked employees. He’d rent an office on the cheap end of Water Street, and a renaissance of coolness would surely crystallize around his arrival. He’d buy a new car…something fast and flashy and astronomically expensive. Yes, it was time to think along those lines.

He packed up the model files and shipped them off to Noware. The money was almost his. Nothing remained now but to create or convert an arsenal of weapons, an immensely enjoyable task after so much tiptoeing around. It was hard to imagine how even the grubs at Noware could expect him to make chainguns and rocket launchers seem sweet and innocent. Ultimately, a weapon was a weapon, even if it shot marshmallows and had a fuzzy pink handgrip.

Acknowledgment arrived no more than forty-five minutes after he’d sent off the models.

Dear Lord Needles:

Thank you for delivery of your model pack. The models appear more than satisfactory—certainly there is nothing in the least offensive or inappropriate here; further minor modifications can be attended to by our staff if necessary. We have deposited the balance of your payment in the account you previously specified. We thank you for your participation in our TC, and look forward to working with you in the future should any similar project ever again arise.

Barton’s surprise was enormous. He typed a hasty response: “I don’t understand. I’m still waiting to convert the weapons pack. If you gave that work to someone else I’ll be really p.o.’d—and you don’t want to p. me o.!”

His fingers slammed and skittered on the keyboard. He smashed the Send button and waited in a fury for n01’s reply.

It came almost instantly:

All weapons code has been expunged from source. No weapons in our TC. This is to be a peaceful game as we have previously stated. Thank you again for your participation. All elements are in place, and we have received final approval to embark on Total Conversion immediately. We trust you will be pleased with results.

Barton couldn’t force himself to stay at the screen another moment. He got up snarling and stormed out of his room.

It seemed to be morning—what hour exactly, or what day, he felt unsure. His mother wavered in the kitchen doorway until she saw his face; then she retreated to the safety of her pots and pans. He rushed out of the house, past his neglected Alfa Romeo. He didn’t trust himself to drive right now; he would kill someone—maybe even himself. Well, he wasn’t stupid or rash, and he wasn’t about to take chances like that. He felt as if he hadn’t been out of the house, or used his legs, or felt the sunlight in weeks. He was not far wrong.