Vaporware (20 page)

My
eyes still smarting from the beating they’d taken, I stumbled over to one of
the nearby desks and picked up one of the room’s few desktop phones. I thought
about calling Michelle to tell her not to worry, but for one thing, I wasn’t
sure that she shouldn’t. For another, I could no longer remember her number without
the cell phone there to provide it for me.

Instead,
I called home. The phone rang six times before the answering machine picked up.
“Hi, this is Ryan and Sarah,” I heard my voice saying as the recording kicked
in. “We can’t come to the phone right now, but if you leave something pertinent
at the tone, we’ll try to get back to you as soon as we can.”

I
racked my brain for a moment to try to come up with something amusing to say,
or at least pertinent, but nothing came to mind besides the realization of how
painfully cheesy the greeting was. It would have to be changed, I decided, as
recognition came that the recording had beeped and was waiting for my message.”

“Hey
honey, I’m fine. I’m at the office. I’ll be home soon.” There was nothing else
to say, really, so I hung up. My cell phone was still dead, so I stuck it in my
pocket and made my way out of the building and onto the front steps. The
concrete was colder than I expected, but I sat and waited anyway. Sitting in
the car would have provided too much temptation to drive away and go home.

It
took fifteen minutes for the headlights of Michelle’s car to appear, followed
shortly by the rest of it. That was five more than I’d anticipated, five fewer
than driving anywhere near the legal speed limit would have allowed. She
parked, skewed across three spaces, and hopped out before the glare from the
headlights had died completely.

“What
the hell happened?” she demanded as she stomped over to where I sat. “One
minute we’re talking, and the next—”

“I
know,” I interrupted her. “I was there. Where’s Leon?”

“In
the car. You still haven’t answered my question.” And lo and behold, there was
Leon shifting himself out of the passenger door, moving a good deal slower than
Michelle had.

I
glanced over in his direction, and he threw me a gesture that could only be
interpreted as “What?” I threw him a wave, and then turned my attention back to
Shelly. “What happened? I don’t know. Hell, your guess is as good as mine.”

For
that, I got a grim little smile. “Funny, here I was thinking that the only way
my guess would be as good as yours would be if I had been there when everything
went nuts, which I wasn’t. You, however, were, which means that not only is
your guess better than mine, but you can probably actually tell me some of the
details, which I would dearly love to know. Now, are you going to tell me, or
should I just beat them out of you?”

“She’ll
do it, too, man,” Leon added, having ambled over close enough to catch the back
end of Michelle’s explosion. “Besides, I want to know what happened to my
cameras. Those things were not cheap.”

“Here,”
I said, and pulled the one I’d salvaged out of my pocket. I tossed it to him,
and he caught it reflexively.

“Oh,
man!” His face papered itself over with dismay. “No way I can salvage this.
There’s no way!”

 “Take
a look at the cord.” I could sense Michelle getting ready to erupt at being
ignored and briefly enjoyed the sensation before looking at her. “As for what
happened, you know most of it.”

Her
stance relaxed a bit but not the look on her face. “Try me.”

“I
turned Terry’s machine on. When it finally booted, it went nuts, and the
monitor shot out white light like a searchlight. Every other system in the room
went just as crazy until I pulled the plug on Terry’s.”

“And
then they all stopped?” Leon didn’t sound convinced. “There’s no way that
unplugging one should have affected the others.”

“That’s
your issue with this?” I asked, my voice on the ragged edge of incredulity.
“There’s no way any of this should have happened. Honest to God, I’m not sure
how much of it actually did happen, and how much was just me breathing in weird
plastic fumes. But you know what? Right now, I don’t care. I just want to go
home”—I looked at Michelle—“to Sarah and forget about this until morning. And
no, I’m not going to check email or do a damn other thing online until then.”

I
stood and took a step toward my car. Michelle moved to block me. “What about
Terry?” she asked. “Shouldn’t we make sure that he’s all right?”

“His
car’s not here, and neither is he,” I said irritably. “If you want to go by his
place to make sure he’s still alive, you can do it. But my money says he went
home. Which is what I’m going to do.”

“Are
you sure you’re OK to drive?” Michelle asked, a hint of concern getting lost
and accidentally wandering into her voice. “I mean, what you described sounds
pretty screwed up.”

“I’m
fine.” A pause. “Thank you.” She stepped aside.

“Come
on, man,” Leon said. “You can’t just leave it here.”

I
thought about what we’d seen over the webcam. About the melted cables and that
pure white light. I thought about what I’d seen, and what possible explanations
there could be for it, and what might happen if I kept poking. Then, I turned
to Leon. “Tonight,” I said, “I can,” and walked past him.

“You’re
chickening out,” he called after me. “This is too screwed up to let go.”

“Maybe
it’s too screwed up to keep poking at tonight,” I called back without turning
around. “Look, you guys do what you want. Me, I’ve seen enough for one night.
Whatever it is in there, I’m leaving it alone until morning because,” and I
stopped, and I turned back to face them. “Because I am afraid. Maybe I could
have died in there. Maybe I could have gone blind. Maybe whatever we think we
saw Terry getting close to could have popped out of his machine again and eaten
my brain. It doesn’t matter. I’m not going back in there, and I’m not going
anywhere near Terry or a computer until I’ve had a chance to think about this
crap logically and tamp down the heebie-jeebies to a dull roar. Do you
understand?”

“Yes,”
said Michelle. “Get some sleep. We’ll talk tomorrow.” Another pause. “Say hi to
Sarah for me.”

“Yeah,”
Leon added awkwardly. “Come see me when you get in, OK? We’ll figure something
out.”

“I’ll
try,” I said softly, and got into my car. The two of them watched me drive off.
Neither of them said anything else, and I was reasonably certain they weren’t
holding hands.

The
drive home took exactly as long as it should. I didn’t speed, nor did I drive
unnecessarily slowly to baby my still-recovering eyes. Sarah had left the
outside light on for me, but the interior was dark. I left it that way,
shrugging out of my clothes and into bed. Sarah was there, of course, already
asleep.

“Mmm?”
she asked as I curled up next to her.

“Shh,”
I said, and kissed the back of her neck. “Go back to sleep.”

She
yawned. “You’re shaking. Are you cold?”

I
put an arm around her. She pulled it close. “Parts of me are,” I told her.
“Parts of me. That’s all.”

Chapter 17

“Hey.”

I
was fairly sure that was Sarah’s voice, but until I was sure, I didn’t want to
commit to anything as permanent as opening my eyes. Instead, I made a noise
that probably came out as “manurmble”, turned over, and tried to bury my face
in my pillow.

“Ryan.
Hey there. Wake up.”

It
was definitely Sarah. It was also definitely too early in the morning for her
to be trying to wake me up, according to my never-yet-proven-wrong internal
clock. I simultaneously pulled the blanket up over the top of my head and tried
to stay as motionless as I imagined a sleeping body would, muttering “Lemme
‘lone” as I did so.

Sarah
seemed unimpressed and pinched my foot through the comforter as evidence. “Come
on, Ryan. It’s time to get up.” She sounded mildly irritated, which could go
one of two ways. Either she’d get more agitated the longer it took me to get
out of bed, in which case it behooved me to get up now and answer her, or she’d
get more agitated the longer it took me to get out of bed, in which case I
should just stay under the covers until her annoyance reached a sufficient
level for her to give up and wander off.

While
I thought of that, she pinched me again. Hard.

“Ow.”
Clearly, strategy number 2 had outlived its usefulness. I threw off the covers
and sat more or less up, tucking my feet up under me as I did so. “Good
morning. What was that for?”

“I
don’t know,” Sarah said. “Why don’t you tell me?” She was, I saw as I rubbed
the sleep out of my eyes, standing fully dressed at the foot of our bed. One
corner of her mouth was turned down in what could only be called a practice
frown.

A
yawn made a mad dash for freedom from my innards. I fought its escape for a
minute, then gave up, treating Sarah to what had to be an unpleasant view of my
unbrushed teeth and tonsils in all their glory. “You’re not going to believe
me, honey,” I said when I had control of my facial muscles back, “but I didn’t
do anything.” Last night’s memories came flooding back, and I shook my head to
clear it. “Nothing bad, anyway.”

Something
of the sheer strangeness of the evening’s encounters must have made its way
into my voice, because instead of debating with me, Sarah sat down on the bed.
“What happened? You didn’t come home until late.” A pause. “Really late.”
Another pause. “You were at the office, right? I mean, you never said, but I
assumed….”  

And
there it was, the real question. The problem was, I had no idea what I could
tell her without sounding like I was either lying or completely insane.

I
thought about it for a minute and picked insane.

“I
was at the office for a little while,” I said, doing my best to keep my voice
level. “Mostly, though, I was at Leon’s. We were, ah, hell, are you sure you
want to hear this?”

She
settled in, smoothing the comforter next to where she sat. “Yeah. I think I do,
because you sound a little freaked out right now. Let me hear it, and then I’ll
decide whether to be mad at you for staying so late or worried that you and
Leon did something stupid, all right?”

“I’m
more worried about you thinking I should be committed,” I told her quietly.
“Let me think of how to say this, because you’re not going to believe a word of
it.”

“Start
with ‘I was thinking of my beautiful girlfriend,’ and I’ll believe that much.”

I
chuckled. “Believe it or not, I was, and not just because Michelle looked like
she was snuggling up to Leon.”

Sarah
straightened up like she’d been shocked. “What? Those two? What the hell is he
thinking?”

“That
his wrist is hurting? I have no idea.” I shrugged, trying for casual. “As long
as she’s looking at someone else, I’m happy.”

That
brought Sarah back down in a hurry. “I guess. I’m still not crazy about you
spending all night with her over at Leon’s.”

“With
Leon,” I pointed out. “Trust me, honey. There’s nothing to worry about there.
And all this is beside the point. We were at Leon’s because of that thing I’d
mentioned the other day. He’d rigged up cameras at the office. We…I thought….”
I tried to figure out how to explain what came next without sounding like a
paranoid dickweed.

“You
thought what?” Sarah was no longer patting the bed next to her in invitation, I
noticed.

I
let it out all at once. “You remember Terry? Skinny guy, bad hair, no social
skills?” She nodded minimally. “Terry’s been acting weird, and we thought that
if we figured out why he was acting strange, we could help him out.” She
started to tell me this was a dumb idea, and I held up my hand to forestall it.

“I
know, I know. But hear me out.  So Leon rigged some cameras at his desk so we
could see if he was staying up all night at the office working on Blue
Lightning on his own and if anyone was working with him. And before you say
anything, he’s behind and he’s screwing up badly at work, and I was honestly
thinking that if we had proof he was doing the black project thing, we could
use it to convince him to cut it out before he got his stupid ass fired. Which
he still might.” Sarah looked unimpressed, so I continued. “It was supposed to
be just me and Leon, but Michelle was there when I got there, and she’d
apparently been there for a while, and then we watched.”

“Watched
what?”

“Watched
Terry get it on with a ghost.”

To
her credit, Sarah did not scream. Nor did she immediately stomp out of the room
calling me a liar, nor did she throw anything heavy or sharp-edged in my
general direction. Instead, she just looked at me. “You did what?”

“I
think,” I said, pronouncing every word slowly and carefully, “that we saw Terry
getting it on with a ghost. Or at least most of one. I couldn’t really see
below the waist, as Terry had his—”

“I
don’t think I want to hear any more.” She stood, not looking at me. “I’m not
going to say I don’t believe you, but what you’re saying, well, it’s kind of
hard to believe.” I scooted halfway down the bed toward her. She didn’t back
away, but she looked like she was thinking about it. “I’m not even sure whether
I want to believe you or not,” she added.

I
shrugged. “I don’t know if I want you to believe me. Maybe it would be better
for both of us if you told me I was out of my mind, and then I could start
trying to forget what I saw last night. Tell me often enough and I just might
be able to do it.”

Sarah
shook her head. “Now I definitely don’t believe you. You want me to believe
you, or you wouldn’t have told me at all. If you really didn’t want me to know
what happened, you would have come up with some sort of idiot lie, and I would
have called you on it….”

“…Because
I can’t lie to you for shit,” I interrupted, “and then we would have had a huge
fight and then really awesome makeup sex. So, honestly, considering how amazing
the makeup sex usually is, I would have been much better off doing a crappy job
of lying to you in hopes of getting laid. Am I right?”

I
thought I had her with me then. I really did. And then, the alarm went off,
bleeping like someone was backing up a dump truck under the bed.

“I’ve
got it,” we both said simultaneously, but she just stood there as I dove across
the bed, reaching down to hit the snooze button on the clock we always kept
within arm’s reach on the floor. The first tap didn’t do anything, as was often
the case, and neither did the second. The third worked, but by then Sarah had
her game face on, and when I looked back up at her, there wasn’t any laughter
there.

“Hi,”
I said, acutely aware of the fact that I was hanging half over the edge of the
bed and looking up at her sideways.

“Hi,
yourself,” she said back, but with her mind somewhere else. “Pull yourself back
up before you fall onto the alarm clock. I don’t think I can lift you if you
get yourself knocked out.”

“Wouldn’t
dream of asking,” I said as I hauled myself back into the bed. “Look, Sarah,
about last night—”

“Here’s
what we’re going to do,” she said briskly, stepping toward the door. She
stopped and looked at me over her shoulder. “You’re going to pretend that you
didn’t tell me what you told me. I’m going to pretend that you were just
working late, like you always do. We both can pretend that I’ve already nagged
you about spending too much time at the office, and that will be the end of it.
Because, honestly, a little more suspicion and resentment is going to do this
relationship a lot less harm than you asking me to believe you saw one of your
friends screwing a ghost.” She blew me a kiss. “Don’t forget to pay the Time
Warner bill, OK?”

And
then she was gone.

“He’s
not a friend,” I said and collapsed back into bed. From downstairs I heard the
sound of the front door opening and then closing, then the more distant sound
of a car engine rumbling to life. For my part, I lay there for a few minutes
until the magical effects of the snooze button wore off, and then I kept laying
there some more as the alarm beeped its most frantic beeps in my direction.

Eventually
I got tired of the noise and killed the alarm. The clock read 8:15. It meant
that Sarah had left for work at least half an hour earlier than usual, for
which I couldn’t blame her. There was no sense staying for breakfast when her
boyfriend was toting a full load of crazy.

I
shoved myself into my slippers and out of bed. The morning rituals—shower, cup
of crappy coffee as I logged in and scanned my Twitter feed—seemed to take
longer than usual, or maybe I just wanted them to. Every time I thought about
going into the office for the morning, my mind just slid off the idea. Seeing
Michelle and Leon would mean talking about what we’d seen. It wasn’t a
conversation I was looking forward to.

There
was also the little matter of talking to Terry.

I
had no idea what to say after seeing something like that. “So, Terry, what
exactly were you getting it on with last night? The camera images were a little
fuzzy toward the end there.” I mean, I couldn’t even express concern for the
guy without admitting we’d been spying on him, and as for the other stuff we’d
seen, well, that was way out of bounds. Even starting that conversation would
be impossible. So would facing him.

At
the same time, he was part of the team, and he was clearly in what Leon would
call “some serious shit.” Walking away from that didn’t seem like such a hot
idea, either.

I
took another sip of coffee and read down the feed. Most were the usual—my life
sucks, here’s the stupid thing politicians did yesterday, here’s another
pointless meme—but one Tweet caught my eye.

It
was a link to an article titled “Great Games We’ll Never See” from a gaming
blog called Yar’s Vengeance that I visited only when there was work I really,
really didn’t want to do.  There wasn’t anything wrong with it—for one thing,
it was generally written in complete sentences, which I regarded as a plus—but
there wasn’t anything that particularly compelling about the content, either.

Today,
though, there was, because the hashtags for the link included #BlueLightning.

“You’ve
got to be kidding me.” I clicked over and skimmed the intro. It was the
standard bullcrap about how great games are always getting cancelled despite
the fact that they were going to be really, really awesome, and how it sucked
for everyone involved.

Which
it generally did, but not for the reasons they imagined. Of the games that
usually ended up in articles like this, half were never anything more than
marketing vaporware, and another two thirds had all the fun quotient of
sticking your hand in a blender.

On
the other hand, Blue Lightning had never made it to the lists before. They were
always full of big-name titles, or experimental projects from big-name
developers, and I’d always assumed that we were too far under the radar for BL
to grab any mindshare for something like this.

But
there she was, sitting at number seven. I blinked a couple of times and read
what they said about my dead project.

“A
hot-looking shooter from well-regarded indie studio Horseshoe Games, Blue
Lightning promised a combination of heady gunplay with an innovative movement
system that was, literally, fast as lightning. While the shooter action would
have been enough to hold our interest, particularly considering Horseshoe’s
solid track record, the mechanisms of the teleportation system—players could
lay down cable that they could zap themselves into, only to re-emerge somewhere
else on the map’s “grid”—would have made for a real break from the traditional
rail shooter we’ve all gotten way too used to. Don’t even get us started on
what multiplayer would have been like. From the footage we’ve seen, it would
have shaped up as serious challenger in the shooter arena. And keep those cards
and letters coming, kids—rumor has it that the project may be resurrected.”

“Bullshit,”
I told the computer, and then, since I didn’t sound angry enough for my own
taste, I shouted it. “Bullshit!”

To
add insult to injury, there, next to the paragraph, was an image, clearly a
screenshot from one of our test multiplayer sessions. The graphics were nothing
better than OK, the placeholder textures were clearly visible, and the
gamertags could just about be read. It was all very real, in the sense that it
was 100 percent, no bullshit, absolutely authentic. That was a screen capture
from Blue Lightning.