Vaporware (2 page)

“Hold
on, Ryan.” Eric Jonas was long and angular, solidly constructed where Leon
looked like he’d been made from scraps. He was the one sitting in the daddy
seat; he was also the producer on the project, the head of the studio, and the
ultimate in-house arbitrator of its progress and success.

Out
of house, on the other hand, was an entirely different story.

In
front of him on the table was a tablet, its screen already covered with a
series of scribbles. Next to it was a tall aluminum coffee cup stamped with the
company’s logo: A single horseshoe, or perhaps an inverted omega, with the
legend “Horseshoe Games” underneath in simple block letters. The rest of the
table was covered similarly, divided between identical cups and cans of
beverages from the extended caffeinated family.

“What’s
the problem, Eric?” I asked, already cringing. I always hated looking down the
table while the projector was going. It gave everyone on that end of the room
the appearance of being ghostly shadow-figures, and it made their faces
impossible to read. The fact that Eric was leaning over the table like a
vulture in anticipation of its lunch wasn’t helping. “Did we scale back the MP
numbers? I thought we were good with promising 32, and then maybe delivering 64
if we could work out the latency issues.”

“Sure,
that was the plan, and according to Tryone—” Leon started in abruptly, then
ended just as abruptly as Eric raised his hand for quiet.

“That’s…not
the point. Lights?” Aaron Shepherd, the QA lead who’d been sitting in his usual
spot on Eric’s right, scurried up to turn on the main overhead fluorescents. As
they flickered into life, there was a groan from around the table, and the
image of Blue Lightning onscreen faded into a dim outline. A faint, throbbing
headache announced itself just behind my left eye; that meant that the
full-fledged skull pounder was on its way as soon as Eric finished ripping me a
new one.

Eric
unfolded himself from his chair, leaning forward and resting his forearms on
the table. “The problem we’ve got so far is that you haven’t said anything.”

“It’s
the first slide, Eric. I’m just defining the game.” I snapped back, more
defensively than I wanted. This wasn’t a fight I could win, particularly not in
front of witnesses. Yelling was just going to help me lose it that much sooner.

“You
haven’t defined the game. You’ve rattled off the same old back-of-box bullshit
bullet points that we get on every project, that’s all.” He levered himself off
the table and started walking around it, clockwise. “Come on. Immersive story?
There are solitaire games that claim that. FPS? There’s a million FPS games out
there. 32 player multiplayer? Nice, but not unique. What we’re missing,” and by
this time, he was within a couple of feet from where I stood, with only the
still-visible projector beam between us, “is something that blows the doors off
from minute one. Something that makes them know how amazing this game is, and
why they have to publish. Something that says Blue Lightning, and not ‘FPS with
interesting feature set.’”

I
tried not to glare at him. “Eric, you know these guys. If we don’t come out and
say it, they may miss the fact that it’s an FPS entirely. Remember what
happened when Virtual Vineyard tried to pitch that robot janitor game?”

Eric
rolled his eyes. It was urban legend in the game industry, the story of a small
dev team having basically shot its wad to present a pitch for a comedy
platformer starring a wacky robot janitor to one of the major French
publishers. Virtual Vineyard had pulled out all the stops, flown half their
staff to the meeting in Marseilles, had put on a four-hour-long sell session
that by all accounts had been legendary, and had been politely told thank you,
but we’re not interested.

Later,
through back channels, the head of the studio learned that the word “janitor”
didn’t translate into French, and so none of the suits he’d been pitching to
had the faintest idea of what he’d been talking about. And of course, none of
them had, at any point during the process, bothered to mention this.

That
was the scenario that every small development house lived in fear of, the thing
they all took wild steps to avoid, and everyone in the room knew it.

“It
doesn’t matter,” Eric said softly. “They know it’s an FPS. They’ve been funding
it for a year now. What we need to show them is why they’ve been funding it.”
He grabbed the mouse and started clicking through slides. “Here. What’s this?”

I
looked back. It was a screenshot, a moment captured from gameplay, showing the
lead character essentially pouring herself out of a light socket in order to
materialize inside a locked room. “It’s wrapping up the circuit movement
system. The player is jumping from inside the circuitry to the outside world
and—”

“Exactly.”
Eric was nodding, the first hints of enthusiasm visible on his face. “Something
cool that no one else has. Now, do we have a slide in here of the circuit
movement?”

I
nodded, my face hot and flushed with embarrassment. “We’ve got a capture of
some of the gameplay, too.”

“So
you’re saying we move that up front in hopes of giving the suits a stiffie?”
The voice that came from the side of the room was the last one I wanted to hear
chiming in.

“Jesus,
Michelle, we're trying to save the presentation here.” Inwardly, I
groaned.  There were very few women at the company, especially on the
production side of things, which meant that even if Michelle Steiner had been
the shy, retiring type, she would have stood out.

“Shy
and retiring” was not how anyone had described Michelle, not now and not ever.

Eric
looked over at me, his face an eloquent mask of “You deal with it.” I shot him
back a look that promised bloody vengeance, and then put on a grin as I turned
to face Michelle.

She
wasn't facing me, though. Instead, she was busy sketching something on a
notepad, not looking at anyone. “What you want,” she said, “is simple. We need
to stop thinking of this as a project review and instead start thinking about
it like it’s a commercial. We need to use this to really get BlackStone fired
up about the game, and that means showing them all the sexy stuff first to get
them hooked.”

She
turned her notepad around, and on it was a rough storyboard for a new
presentation, starting inside the machine and then exploding into the rough
combat sequence that Leon had demoed to me the day before. “Something like
this?”

Eric
leaned down and grabbed the notepad. “Something, yeah.” He looked over at me,
then around the room. “Ryan, Michelle, why don’t you sit down with this and try
to rejigger what we’ve got. All the Powerpoint stuff is good, but if we can
move this up front…will end of day tomorrow be all right?”

“Fine,”
I said, a little bitterly, and shut the projector down. The whirr of the fan
filled the room, along with the scent of scorched dust. “When are we presenting
this to the suits?”

“We’re
not,” Eric said softly, accenting the first word just enough to let me know
that all was not well. “We’re just sending them the presentation, and their
third-party group will be looking it over by themselves.” There was a moment of
quiet while that sunk in and he scanned Michelle’s sketches. “That’s why this
thing needs to be kick ass all by its lonesome.”

I
could feel my eyes getting really big and my guts trying to drop into my shoes.
If they didn't want to spring for plane tickets for us to present, that
meant—No. I caught the thought, cut it off, and stuffed it away. No sense
panicking the rest of the room, no sense freaking myself out, either. The game
rocked. It was going to be fine.

So
I just nodded and hoped like hell that I was keeping the panic out of my face.
“I see. Michelle?”

She
looked up at me, an unspoken question in her eyes. It translated roughly as
“How screwed are we?” and I wasn’t in a position to answer it here.

“My
office, fifteen minutes?”

“Sure,
if I can get my notepad back.” Embarrassed, Eric handed it to her. “I’ll see
you then.” She stood and, without looking at anyone else, left the room. The
rest of the attendees followed, chattering amongst themselves, their low voices
suggesting varying degrees of worry.

And
then there were two of us, me shutting things down and detaching my laptop from
the projector, and Eric standing there watching me. He waited until everyone
else was out of the room, then crossed to the open door and shut it.

“You
could have warned me,” I said as I unscrewed the video cable from the port on
the back of the projector. “Instead of hanging me out to dry like that.”

“I
didn’t know what you had planned,” Eric said, no apology in his voice. “If
you'd nailed it like you usually do, I wouldn't have said anything.”

“You
could have asked for a preview.” The cool-down light on the projector flashed
green, and I shut it down. The fan whimpered into silence, leaving only the
occasional thunks and groans of the building’s HVAC system to fill the void.
“If I’d known that wasn’t what you wanted, I wouldn’t have been here until
midnight every night last week trying to finish the presentation.”

Eric
frowned. “It doesn’t matter. Just work with Michelle and put the chrome up
front, OK?”

I
turned, and this time I didn't try to hide the fact that I was pissed off.
“It’s not chrome. It’s the core gameplay loop, and it’s what makes this game
different. You know that.” I'd said it, let him deny it if he had the balls to
do so. He didn't, though. He knew it was good, too, that we had a chance for a
real winner here.

“I
know, I know. And I know how proud you are of it, and how hard you’ve worked on
it. I know this is your baby, Ryan. But it’s everyone in the building’s baby,
and I need to make sure that it’s positioned best for the company.” I looked up
from wrapping the video cable into something vaguely knot-like and saw that
he’d positioned himself in front of the door. That tore it. I wasn't going to
be getting out of the room until we reached some kind of accommodation on
whatever Eric had in mind, and God help me if I tried.

 
I picked up the laptop and tucked it under my arm. “What’s the real issue,
Eric? How bad is it?”

Eric
looked away and flushed slightly. The admission that something was seriously
wrong shocked me; I’d thrown the question out there primarily to elicit a
denial, a confirmation that everything was in great shape. The fact that Eric
wasn’t denying anything was scary, a piss-your-pants bad warning sign that the
storm was coming.

He
finally looked at me but paused a long moment before saying anything. “I don’t
know. Maybe it’s not anything. I’ve just been getting a weird vibe from
BlackStone lately. They tell me everything’s great, but when I ask about
whether we’re going to be showing at any of the trade shows they keep putting
me off. And with the milestone eight payment coming up—the big one—it’s just
got a weird feel to it.”

I
stepped closer and shifted the laptop's weight. I'd dropped one once and still
hadn't heard the end of it from IT. “Why would they want to kill it? It’s
great, it’s as close to ahead of schedule as you can get, and it’s going to be
a hit. It wouldn’t make any sense to kill it.”

“Their
decisions don’t have to make sense to us, just to their bottom line. If they’ve
got another shooter that’s being done by one of their in-house studios, and
they want to protect it, then maybe it makes sense to them to kill ours. Not
that it’s the case, mind you—I have no idea what they might be thinking, if
anything. Like I said, I don’t know. It could be nothing.” Suddenly, Eric
snapped back to himself. “All of this is between you and me, understood?”

I
nodded, once. “Understood. Completely.” We looked at each other for a moment
longer, then Eric opened the door.

“Good
luck with Michelle. Try not to kill each other.”

I
stepped past him, a tight grin on my face. “No worries. We got that out of our
systems a while ago.”

“Uh-huh.”
Eric sounded unconvinced. “That’s not what half the office thinks. Or Sarah.”

“Sarah
knows better,” I said, my words clipped. “And that’s what matters.”

“Whatever
you say, Ryan,” Eric said, and shut the door. From behind them, I heard a crash
that sounded a lot like someone kicking a chair into a wall. I didn't go in to
see if Eric was all right. After all, they were his chairs.

Besides,
he'd told me to act like everything was fine.

Chapter 2

Michelle
was in my office when I opened the door. More specifically, she was in my
chair, with her feet up on my desk a series of rough storyboard sketches on the
whiteboard. The air was thick with the scent of overworked dry-erase marker,
and she was grinning.

I
dropped the laptop onto what passed for a flat surface, then stopped. I looked
at her, then at the board, then back at her. “Am I really necessary to this
process?” I asked, “Or have you and Eric gotten it all doped out, and you just
want me to do the typing?”

“Oh,
relax.” Michelle pulled her feet off the desk and scooted herself upright in
the chair. “Most of what you’ve got is fine, I think. He just wants to start
the presentation off with a bang, and I do bang better than you do.”

“I
think it’s best if I don’t respond to that,” I said and sat myself down in the
visitors’ chair against the wall. It was a small office, cluttered with papers
and empty game boxes, and nearly every square inch of wall was covered in
pinned-up maps, charts, or other documents related to the game. On the door was
the only personal touch I'd allowed myself, a poster of Charlie Chaplin as the
Little Tramp. Someone—not me—had added a thought balloon over Chaplin’s head
that read “At least I’m not making video games.” Everything else—desk,
bookshelves, cabinets—was strictly functional and at least partially
overwhelmed by the tide of clutter that the project had generated.

“I
still don’t get why you get an office,” she asked lazily. “Is that my fault?”

“I
don’t know,” I replied, flicking the door open a little wider so anyone passing
could estimate at a glance how much physical distance there was between the two
of us. “If you really want to know the truth, Eric insisted. He said he was
tired of me not getting anything done before midnight because I was answering
questions all day, so he wanted to put me someplace where I could shut the door
and work uninterrupted once in a while.”

“Which
was conveniently located down the hall from his office,” she said sweetly,
without smiling. “And the fact that it happened right after we, you know—”

“Blew
up all over the lunchroom?” I said it without rancor. “Don’t ask me. I just
work here. Besides, that was a long time ago, and we’ve got a presentation to
fix.” I looked across the desk at Michelle, the unspoken mantra of “eye
contact, eye contact, eye contact” looping in the back of my head. She was
short, and the way she sat, her feet dangled a couple of inches off the floor.
Like everyone else in the office, she wore jeans, which she’d paired with a
bright yellow t-shirt from a project we’d wrapped up three years ago. She
cocked her head, and her hair, reddish brown and longer than she’d worn it when
we’d dated, slipped down over one eye. Irritated, she brushed it away. No nail
polish, I noted automatically. It went with the no makeup and the no jewelry.
That was Michelle; there was never anything but Michelle, and if you couldn’t
handle that then God help you.

Back
in the day, I hadn’t been able to. But, I reminded myself, I was with Sarah now,
and there was work to do.

“So
how do you want to arrange this,” I asked. I scraped my chair across the carpet
to the whiteboard. “Are we going to start with a pure gameplay capture
sequence, or do you want to see if we have time to do something pre-rendered?”

Michelle
shook her head. “We don’t have time for pre-rendered. The best thing we can do
is a capture of you playing through the core sequence, then seeing if the sound
guys can put some music behind it and maybe a little voiceover.”

I
nodded. “Embed it in the presentation, or run it separately?”

She
rubbed her chin, then stood and walked to the board. “If we embed it, there’s
less of a chance of them forgetting to play it. Also, there’s no time lost with
a switchover. So that makes sense. What I was thinking,” and she took a marker
from the shelf at the bottom of the board, “would be that we’d start with the
logo, then dissolve to the gameplay. Is there anything you think we need to
show off besides the circuit runs and the combat?”

I
grimaced. “Everything else is just FPS, remember.” Michelle started to say
something, but I interrupted her. “Seriously, that’s our killer feature, and
nothing else is going to look as cool next to it. If we want to have a wow
moment at the beginning, that’s it. Maybe pull in some multiplayer for later,
but, no, at the start, we show that off.”

“Show
her off,” Michelle disagreed, and sketched a rough female figure more clearly
into the frames she’d made while waiting. “She’s got to be a big part of this.
She’s important. Hell, she’s the game.”

“No,
we’re the game. Everything we’ve put into it. But you’re right, she’s a big
part of it. Maybe if we—”

My
office phone rang.

Instinctively,
both of us looked toward the telephone. It was a sleek, black thing, covered
with buttons and, occasionally, blinking red lights, and at the top of the
keypad was a small LCD screen that conveniently showed the number of whoever or
whatever extension was calling at the time. I twisted in my seat and leaned
forward to get a better look at it, then realized that I knew whose the number
was.

“Do
you want me to get it? I’m closer.” Michelle turned and took a step toward the
desk. The phone jangled again.

“No!”
I coughed. “I mean, no.” Michelle shot me a quizzical look, and I wilted under
it. “It’s Sarah, and if you answer the phone, then I get to explain at great
length what you’re doing in my office, playing secretary.”

“Jesus,
Ryan, I wasn’t offering to get you coffee.”

“No,
no, I know that, and she probably knows that, too, but, oh the hell with it.
She just wants to know when I’m coming home, and the more time I spend talking
on the phone, the longer it’s going to take me to get home. If we just finish
this, I can get home sooner and tell her that I missed her call. OK? Let’s just
get back to it.”

The
phone rang a third time, angrier and more insistent. Michelle gave a
half-smile. “Lying? There’s a great way to build a strong relationship, Ryan.
I’m glad to see you haven’t changed too much.”

“Shared
house payments are a great way to build a strong relationship. Everything else
is secondary,” I retorted. But I kept my eyes on the phone and my butt in my
chair near the whiteboard and Michelle.

For
a fourth time, the phone rang, then a fifth. Midway through the sixth ring, it
cut off. I exhaled, only half-aware I'd been holding my breath. “It’s kicked
over to voicemail. We can get back to work.”

I
turned back to the board, pushing myself out of my seat, and a shuddering groan
echoed through the building. The lights, both the dim wall-mounted fixture on
the near wall and the harsh halogen floor lamp in the corner, flickered and
dimmed. A quick look into the hall told me that the same thing was happening in
the entire office. All the lights on the phone flashed red once and went dead,
and my monitor and desktop system abruptly shut down with a groan.

“Brownout,”
Michelle said, looking under the desk.

“Hey!”
I pushed my chair back and stood up. “What are you doing?”

“Checking
to see if your UPS sucks or you just forgot to plug it in.” She pulled her head
back up. “Don’t worry, that’s all I’m looking at.”

“Shelly—”
I started, but broke off as the lights came back up. The computer rebooted with
a ping, accompanied by the whine of an overstressed motherboard-mounted fan
trying its best to catch up. The phone lights gave one final, desperate blink
and then went out in unison.

“Huh.
The brownout must have eaten her message. Oh well, I’ll call her when we’re
done.”

Michelle
nodded distractedly, then glanced back at my monitor. “Hey, that’s weird.”

“What
is?” I moved around to see, careful to maintain distance between myself and
Michelle, who was still crouched half under the desk. After a moment, she
uncoiled herself and stood up, about six inches too close for my comfort. I
shuffled back, hoping she wouldn't notice.

She
pointed at the screen. There was the first screen of the presentation I'd
started giving in the meeting room. “I guess it didn’t shut down completely.
It’s open to slide number one.”

“Impossible.”
I leaned in for a closer look. “For one thing, I had the presentation open on
the laptop,”—I paused to tap it, closed and hibernating on the opposite side of
the desk—“not the desktop. For another, it did shut down all the way. We heard
it stop and we heard it reboot. It should have gone to the login screen, not to
Powerpoint.”

Michelle
looked at the monitor, a 36” flatscreen, then over at me, and then finally back
again. “Huh,” she said. “Why do you even have two systems?”

“Legacy.
Eric likes keeping things old school. Doesn’t matter,” I said, a bit brusquely.
“Now let’s finish this, so for once I can get out of here on time.”

“Optimist,”
she said and turned her attention back to the board. “So if we can keep this
sequence to fifteen seconds, will that be enough time to show off the gameplay
you want?”

“Twenty-five
seconds, minimum. And that’s if you want to do bare-bones, without any of the
really cool route-mapping stuff that we’ve got in the UI.”

“If
it’s really cool, we want to show it. Twenty-five seconds then, and then
another thirty-five for the combat.”

A
line was clearly being drawn in the sands of time there, and I was almost
sensible enough not to cross it. “Thirty and forty-five,” I said, and then
turned in surprise as the door to the office clicked shut.

“There
are other people trying to work,” said a muffled voice that was probably Eric’s
and most definitely on the other side of the door. “Unless you two are
finished?”

“Just
getting started,” Michelle yelled, loudly enough that I winced. “If you’re OK
with that.”

“Be
my guest,” maybe-Eric said.

Michelle
turned to me and placed the dry-erase marker in my hand. “Shall we?” she asked.

I
nodded and moved over to the board. “We shall.”

*  
*   *

Sarah’s
car wasn’t in the driveway when I got home. In and of itself, this was not
unusual. Sarah insisted on parking in the garage whenever possible, which was
to say when the clutter from my side of the two-car space didn’t spill over
into hers. So when I pulled in at six thirty, there was no real proof that I
was the first one home. There was no light coming from inside the garage, but
that didn’t tell me much. The internal lights only stayed on for two minutes
after the garage door opened or closed, which meant that if Sarah had gotten
home already, she’d gotten home a lot earlier than 6:28.

I
pulled into the driveway, a concrete slope that angled uphill at just enough of
an angle to scrape the undercarriage of my Mazda if I pulled in or out too
fast. Killing the engine, I sat there, waiting for the last notes of the Who’s
“Eminence Front” to fade out before unplugging my iPhone and tucking it in my
pocket. I always hated turning the thing on and getting the last few notes of a
song. It did strange things to my momentum, or maybe I was just superstitious.
Either way, now I made a point of letting the song run out before getting out.
No musical leftovers—that was the rule—which meant that I’d sit there and just
watch the house as long as necessary, in order to make sure I got to the end.

The
house was nice. It was a nice house, in a nice neighborhood, with nice
furnishings and neighbors, and if I had my way we'd live there maybe five years
at most before moving to someplace with a little more character. It had a brick
facing, or at least most of one, a rarity that was becoming increasingly commonplace
in the Raleigh area as more and more carpetbagger types moved down. The sides
and back were masonite, painted a soothing shade of grayish-blue that made the
house look older than it was. There was a full-height window facing the walk,
courtesy of the landing at the top of the stairs; Sarah had hung up a foot-wide
stained-glass piece in the shape of an Amish hex sign there the day we'd moved
in. “For good luck,” she’d said.

“I
thought they were supposed to keep bad luck away,” I'd replied.

“Same
thing,” she’d told me, and then bounced off into the bedroom to make sure all
the furniture there was situated appropriately. Not the same thing, I'd thought
at the time, but I let it pass, and never mentioned it again.

That
exchange had been a little over a year ago. The hex sign still hung there, the
bedroom furniture had been placed in accordance with both feng shui and Sarah’s
steel-edged whims, and it was in all ways a most admirable and pleasant home to
return to at the end of each day. This was true whether I was coming home at
6:00 (which never happened), 7:30 (more likely) or midnight, which happened
more frequently than either of us liked to think about.

The
walk from the driveway to the door was short, angular, and lined with shrubs
that required a great deal more pruning than they were worth. The actual lot
the house was on wasn’t that much larger than the building itself, but it came
pre-planted with a mix of highly aggressive bushes and Bradford pears to give
the development an air of permanence. The dead-fish odor of the pear trees'
many flowers still lingered in the air, with the last couple of blossoms hiding
out in the thick leaves. Thin green shoots from the trees had started to poke
up through the grass, I'd noticed, and for the umpteenth time I reminded myself
to mow the lawn and do something about them. Saturday, I decided. If I’m not in
the office, I'll do it Saturday.