Vaporware (10 page)

Which
it had been meant to be. Even as the first chords came up, I realized that what
I was listening to was supposed to be the music for the intro cut scene of the
game, the quick cinematic sequence that laid out how the world had fallen apart
and what you, the player, were expected to do about it. In other words, more
Blue Lighting. That made two tracks out of the first ten that the randomizer
spat out, an impressive feat considering I had over six thousand songs on
there.

Then
again, they were both playing when nothing else was, so I didn't feel like
complaining too much. Odds were that they were on an uncorrupted segment of the
hard drive, and that’s why they were fine when other stuff wouldn’t do more
than burp. That might have explained the frequent plays, too—other sectors just
weren’t reading as there anymore. It sucked, but it made enough sense to calm
whatever paranoia I had, and let me enjoy what music I heard.

Two
minutes out, and the song ended. No doubt I was now due for more mangled
songlets, if I bothered to listen. Two minutes. I didn’t have to listen to
anything else for two minutes. For crying out loud, I told myself, I could turn
on the radio for two minutes.

Instead,
I let it play. No music came out, just some clicking noises, and then those
same familiar strings, this time matched to a thudding bass line. This time, I
recognized it instantly as the music for the shell user interface, the stuff
you’d hear when making your way through the menus.

It
was still playing when I drove up to the office. It had ended and started
itself again, and I just didn’t have the heart to cut it off. Instead, I parked
and sat there, listening, until the last notes faded away.

I
hit Stop, pulled the cable out of the phone, and stuck it in my pocket. “Well,”
I announced to myself, “that’s two things that are really messed up already
today,” and headed toward the front door.

Chapter 8

The
game company offices you see in movies look like dot-com heaven. Chrome, glass,
light, air - they’re where the cool kids work, laughing all the way.

Our
offices were not like that. They were set in an office park, one floor of fire
hazard-filled office space behind a glass door with our logo.

Inside
was dim and vaguely warm and not-entirely-good-smelling, the scent you get from
too many people sweating too many deadlines in too tight a space. The funk had
settled into the building a couple of projects back, gotten itself into the
mud-colored carpet and the slightly paler mud-colored walls, and had lurked in
there ever since. My office was better, but not much, and not always.

There
was a pile of documents on my desk when I got in that morning, which I completely
ignored until I’d inhaled a cup of coffee and chowed down a strawberry frosted
Pop-tart.

Only
after my blood chemistry had the right mixture of agitated and frosted did I
pick up the top page and start reading. It was the vision statement for Salvador,
the overview of the game’s core boiled down into a bite-sized nugget that could
be communicated equally well to the team, to marketing, and to the public.
Here, then, was the essence of Salvador, the foundation that everything else
would be built upon. This what I was supposed to take, to breathe life into and
use to inspire the rest of the team to chain themselves to their desks in order
to meet the euphemistically phrased “aggressive schedule” that we’d be getting
from BlackStone.

I
read it and blinked. The game, which preliminary hype had suggested was going
to “reinvent the first-person shooter,” had been summed up by its creators as
essentially “You shoot people, and they blow up real good.”

I
closed my eyes, clenched them shut for a minute, then opened them again. No
good. The words on the page hadn’t changed. Oh, sure, there was some stuff in
there about setting (“gritty and urban”) and tone (“futuristic”), but mostly it
was buzzword central. First-person shooter, strong multiplayer component,
microtransaction content, destructible terrain—all the usual suspects lurking
in the woodpile for a game that would be technically polished but utterly
generic. Run around, shoot aliens, get a bigger gun as a result—it was nothing
the average gamer hadn’t seen a thousand times before. Oh, sure, it would be
pretty. Gorgeous, if the guys in the art department had anything to say about
it. But the gameplay would be the same old same old. There was nothing new
here, nothing to grab a hold of and say “this is what’s going to make this game
cool.” For all that the pitch hit all the right notes for the suits, it didn’t
have anything in it for the devs, the guys who’d actually be making it. It was
empty. Soulless, even.

I
thought about that for a second, then said it out loud. “This game has no
soul.” The words felt right. Look closely at Salvador, and it was a
Frankenstein monster of a design, features ripped out of a dozen other games
because they’d sold well, not because they belonged together or said anything new.
The vision was a masterpiece of cynicism.

Not
like Blue Lightning.

Abruptly,
the air conditioner cut out, and the lights fluttered then faded for a moment.
I could hear a loud popping sound coming from under my desk as the surge
protector failed to do its duty, and then the light on the monitor screen
flared white and died. Out in the hallway voices called back and forth, each
confirming to the other that it wasn’t just them and that we were in fact
getting hit with yet another in our regular series of brownouts. Most were just
long enough to chow down on unsaved data; a few turned into genuine blackouts.
Each time one hit, it was the signal for people to start counting down until
the power outage was long enough to justify everyone going home for the day. In
the meantime, people went outside, people pulled out their tablets or Magic
cards or smartphones, or people stood around and bitched.

For
my part, I kept on reading, mainly because there was enough light for me to do
so, and waited for the power to come back up.

Five
minutes on, the brownout had officially faded to black and people were
streaming outside as the heat built up inside. As I swapped the core vision for
the feature list, I saw Michelle headed through the door at a fast trot, across
the parking lot, and out of view. I could hear laughter drifting faintly back.
There were worse things than sitting outside in the sun while on the clock, or
at least that’s what it sounded like.

With
that cheerful thought, I went back to reading. I’d made it six whole bullet
points in before someone knocked on the door.

“Hey,
Leon,” I said without looking up.

He
stepped into the office, blinking. “How’d you know it was me?”

I
shrugged and kept trolling through the proposed game features. They were really
big on wide-scale destructible terrain, the ability of the player to basically
cause property damage inside the game world. This was tricky for a whole host
of reasons, not the least of which being that characters controlled by the
game’s artificial intelligence generally weren’t very good at dealing with
changes to their world. When the world changed, your average AI would make
characters walk into large pieces of rubble in best wind-up toy fashion, which
rarely made for challenging gameplay. Throw in the ability to clamber over
obstacles, which was tucked in a couple of bullet points down, and the game had
the potential to be a physics-AI steel-cage-match nightmare. “Michelle’s the
only other person who’d actually come looking for me right now, and she’s
already outside. So it was either going to be you or the ghost of Duke Nukem.”

“The
new Duke Nukem came out last year,” he corrected me. “So what are you reading?”

I
tried to read another line, then gave it up as a bad job and put the paper
down. “Design docs on Salvador. This one’s going to be a bear.”

Without
asking, Leon crossed to my desk and grabbed a sheet of paper at random. “Let me
guess—too many features, not enough time, too many external dependencies, and
the assets we’re getting are crap?” He settled into the much-abused visitors’
chair and put his feet up on my desk. “Did I miss anything?”

“I
can’t vouch for anything except the feature list, which reads like a fanboi’s
three-legged wet dream.”

“Tentacles?”
he asked. I threw a wadded up ball of paper at him, which bounced off his
shoulder and into the trash can. Stoic to the last, he ignored it, and grabbed
another paper from the stack. “Man, you’re right. This is a recipe for crunch
time goodness, starting tomorrow. Still, if we can pull it off….”  

The
heat in the room was suddenly oppressive. I was acutely aware of the silence
where the clunking sound of the HVAC normally was, the higher-pitched whine of
my machine’s CPU fan on top of it. The voices of our coworkers were a muted
buzz at best. Leon looked at me. “Dude, are you all right? You look kind of
pale.”

Not
trusting my voice to say more than “I’m fine,” I nodded. The sweat rolling down
my face was oddly warm, and I could feel more of it trickling out of my armpits
and down my sides. “Just got hot all of a sudden,” I gasped.

“Maybe
we ought to go outside.” He offered me a hand.

I
waved him away. “No, no, I’ll be fine. Really. Just need the AC to come back
on. And as for the game, I don’t know.”

Leon
blinked. “Don’t know what?”

My
fingers drummed the stack of documents. “I don’t know about it. If we pull it
off, it’s going to sell, no doubt about that. It’s going to have chrome out the
yin-yang, assuming we don’t start cutting too many features to fit it on an
old-gen box or killing ourselves to meet milestones and implementing stuff
half-assed.”

“But?”  

“But
there’s nothing at the heart of it. It’s like someone saw all the cool stuff
that other games are doing and said ‘We want that and that and some of that,’
and never mind actually coming up with a game concept to hang all this crap on.
There’s a hole in the middle of,” and I tapped the doc pile, “this.” The words were
forcing themselves out, like I had to say them while I still felt brave enough
to do so. My head was throbbing, and I found myself wishing for a glass of
water.

Leon
sat back down heavily. “So you’re saying we’re screwed.”

I
shook my head. “No. That’s not it at all. Like I said, it’s going to sell. It’s
going to be shiny and pretty and cool, and if we get it out the door it’ll sell
like crazy for about three, four weeks. But it’s missing something. It’s
missing that thing Blue Lightning had, where all the pieces fit seamlessly
because there was a game there, and the features were just aspects of it. This
is just…features riding the bus together.” I wiped my brow with my forearm. It
came away wet, and an instant later I could feel the slow, fat drops of sweat
rolling down again. “Blue Lightning might not have sold as well, but it would
have been a better game.”

The
words came out slowly, as if each one had an unseen weight to it. Leon looked
disappointed, but even as he opened his mouth to say something, the lights came
up and the HVAC thunked into sudden life. From outside, I could hear Eric
shouting “Come on, people, back inside!” and the doors opening as people
trudged back to their desks.

“You
really think that?” Leon asked. I nodded. “I don’t know if I’m glad to hear it
or not.”

“Why
would you be?” I reached under my desk and rebooted my system. “I mean, I just
told you I don’t actually like the project we’re going to be killing ourselves
over for the next year or so.”

He
scrunched up his face for a minute before answering. “I guess. But it’s nice to
know you think we had something good going. Even if it was theoretically your
idea.”

I
grinned at him. “Yeah, well, I can’t help it if I’m brilliant.” The cold—well,
cool—air pouring down from the ceiling vent had me feeling much better in
record time. “Now get out of here so I can read these things and you can go do
whatever the hell it is you do when you’re not ignoring the documentation.”

“We’re
going raiding while we wait for some stuff for the closing kit to compile,” he
answered, already halfway out the door. “Level 40 on the Argentblade server, if
you want to come along.”

I
waved papers at him. “Some of us have work to do, Leon. Have fun storming the castle.
I’ll catch you later.”

He
grunted something at me and was halfway out the door before I realized there
was one other thing I wanted to talk to him about. “Hey, Leon!”

He
stopped and half-twisted back so that his head was in the doorframe. “What?”

I
shoved the dysfunctional iPhone across the desk. It slid past the edge,
teetered for a moment, and fell. Halfway to the floor, it landed in Leon’s
hand. He’d reached back to snag it, which was pretty much what I’d expected
he’d do. His long fingers wrapped around it, cradling it for a moment before
pulling it in and staring at it. A look of confusion crossed his face. “Dude.
It’s your phone. What’s the deal?”

“It
shit the bed when I was coming in this morning. You like messing with that
stuff, so I figured you might want to take a look at it. If you can get it
running, that would be cool. If not, feel free to salvage it for parts.”

Leon’s
face screwed itself into a frown. “You sure about this? I thought Sarah gave
you this one.”

I
shrugged. “I’ll by a new one, same model, if it’s fried. No need for her to
know.”

He
shot me a look that suggested that I had just placed myself on the endangered
species list. “Whatever, man. I’ll see what I can do with it.”

“Cool,
thanks,” I said to his retreating back, and settled in to mount another attempt
on the ramparts of documentation in front of me. “Eenie, meenie, miny, ah, the
hell with it,” I muttered and pulled what looked like a preliminary mission
design from the middle of the stack. “Here goes nothing.”

I
read. I drank coffee. I read some more. I took a few notes, took a leak in
order to deal with the coffee, and read a few more docs. The shape of the game
became clear to me, the features arranging themselves in neat cascades while
the storyline and mission progression hung from them like low-hanging fruit.

A
loud banging startled me into dropping a dozen sheets of paper. They fanned
out, snowing themselves onto the floor.

I
looked up to see Shelly standing there, my phone dangling by an earbud cord off
the tip of one of her fingers. Behind her, the sunlight creeping down the
hallway was shockingly red. I’d apparently been reading the docs for hours.
“This is yours, right?” she asked. “I mean, nobody else in the building has
quite the same taste in dinosaur rock that you do.”

“Looks
like it,” I said. “I take it you’ve been listening to it?”

“Just
checked the active playlist,” she said, stepping far enough into the office to
slap it down on my desk. “Leon said it was yours, but I wanted to make sure. I
don’t think there’s anyone else on the planet, Pete Townshend included, who
needs that many versions of ‘Eminence Front’ in one place.”