Vaporware (30 page)

“You
can tell the bitch she’s just dreaming.”

“That
doesn’t answer my question.”

With
a kick, she spun my chair around so that I was looking up at her. She stood,
far too close, lithe and graceful, balanced on the balls of her feet as if she
were about to turn my office into her own personal parkour workout. “It’s not
supposed to,” she said. “Besides, don’t you know that women hate to share?”

“This
isn’t happening.” I screwed my eyes shut. “This isn’t happening, this isn’t
happening, this isn’t happening!”

“Tsk
tsk tsk.” Her fingers traced a cold line down my cheek, one that somehow let
warmth linger behind her fingers. “It is happening,” she said, her lips very
close to my ear. “It’s just happening a bit slower than it might happen
otherwise, because you’re not very good at admitting to yourself what you really
want. Soon enough, everything will be where it needs to be.” The word “needs”
was drawn out, a painful parody of Michelle’s scorn in the board room.

Someone
knocked on the door. “Come in,” Blue Lightning said, even as I was shouting
“Don’t!”

The
door swung open. Shelly stood there, face grim, a sheaf of printouts in her
hand. In an instant, her eyes took it all in: Blue Lightning leaning into me,
my hands clutching the armrests of my chair, the twin charges oozing through
the air of my office.

The
printouts fell to the floor. “Ryan…,” Michelle said, even as my visitor turned
and smiled and blew her a kiss. Then, without another word, she vanished.

“Shelly,”
I said faintly, and then: “Help.”

She
left the papers where they’d fallen, and ran.

*   *   *

Shelly’s
response to the notes I’d sent was polite, precise, professional, and brief.
She suggested one change in the prioritized map list I’d sent around, and then
Okayed it.

I
read it from home.

For
about ten minutes after Michelle had run from my office door, I’d just sat
there, paralyzed. I was afraid she’d come back, afraid Blue Lightning would
come back, afraid Eric would come back, afraid any move I made would result in
disaster or chaos or another step into the abyss I could feel myself sliding into
with each interaction.

Eventually,
gingerly, I found it in me to scoop up Shelly’s papers. They were a printout of
my notes with her comments on them, I saw. Maybe she’d wanted to go over them,
or perhaps just leave them there. A peace offering? I didn’t know. But I did
know that I didn’t want to sit in that office any longer.

I
sent a “Not feeling well—going home” email around the company. Some of them
would no doubt laugh, thinking Shelly had kicked my ass. Let them, I decided.
I’d work on getting their respect back another day. Today, there were bigger
things I needed distance from. I took another minute to put some key docs on my
flash drive, then thought a minute and added what I had of the Blue Lightning
files as well. There was enough room, although barely, with the hundreds of
megs of sketches and screenshots that were included, and maybe by studying what
there was of Blue Lightning I could figure out what she wanted, or how to stop
her.

A
ping, a disconnect, and I was ready to go. Eric brushed by me in the hallway,
opened his mouth as if to say something, and then just shook his head. “Feel
better,” he finally called out as I headed for the door.

But
there were no further incidents as I went home. The iPod didn’t misbehave, no
mysterious female figures appeared in my rearview, and the weirdest thing that
happened was that I hit a run of four green lights in a row.

It
didn’t reassure me.

I
left Sarah a message on her voicemail, telling her I’d come home early and that
I’d be making dinner. I didn’t tell her about the fight with Michelle, or about
lunch with Leon, or about the visitations I’d had in my office, natural or
otherwise. Then I pulled something roughly steak-shaped out of the freezer to
defrost, threw it on the counter, and went upstairs to pretend to work.

By
the time I’d finished with emails, Michelle’s included, I was bored. All of the
questions I had to deal with seemed to have obvious answers—yes, we wanted to
keep the weapons selection scroll horizontal, the same as all the other menus
in the game; no, we didn’t want to incorporate a matchmaking feature that
bracketed potential players by age group. With each email I felt myself getting
increasingly exasperated, with the senders and with myself for my impatience.
After all, these were questions that needed to be asked, decisions to be
confirmed, details that needed to be ironed out with all parties lest someone
interpret a conversation the wrong way and end up pouring weeks of effort into
work that would have to be thrown out. Answering those emails was part of the
daily routine and far from the most onerous aspect of it. The problem, really,
was me.

“Bored
now,” I told the computer as I hit Send on the last answer. In response, it
gave me the ping of an incoming message.

“Great.
One more,” I muttered, and clicked it open. It was, I saw with some interest,
from Terry. Reflexively, I looked for oddly-named attachments, knowing even as
I did so that suspecting Terry of sending along viruses was just plain silly.
Besides, if he did send one along, there would be no way I’d spot it.

The
email itself was brief and to the point. It read:  ARE YOU IN? 4 HER, NOT ME.

I
stared at it for a while, then typed a response but didn’t send it. Instead, I
popped my USB key into the computer and opened up the folder of Blue Lightning
documents I’d taken home. For a moment, I hesitated. Technically, I was still
working. It was not something I needed to be spending time on.

More
than that, though, opening them felt like opening a door. It was an
acknowledgement, somehow, that I had been talking to Blue Lightning, and that I
was responding to her presence.

To
her need.

“Stupid,
stupid, stupid,” I muttered, and scrolled down the list. They sat there,
innocent and harmless like a line of rattlesnakes looking the other way.
Weapons systems. Simulation. AI. Narrative. Everything that had gone into the
concept of Blue Lightning. And in those files, I knew, were gaps, places that
were marked “TBD” or “Finish later” or just left achingly, gapingly blank.

She
wanted me to fill those places in. She wanted Terry and whoever else he might
be working with to realize them. She wanted to live.

I
checked the dates on the file. All were April or earlier, all predated the
project’s cancellation, if only by a single day. They were fossils, insects
stuck in amber, a look back at something that had died.

I
clicked the first one open. It was the narrative doc, a simple one to look at
first. The story of the game was here, along with the character histories and
motivations, what there was of the world bible, and so forth. It was as
resolutely non-technical as anything in the bunch, and I’d selected it
precisely for that reason. Looking at this was just getting reacquainted with
the game, not making a promise. Besides, I knew everything in it already, knew
it by heart and memory.

Paragraphs
skipped by. I read a few, cringed at clunky prose or stuff that should have
been updated, and hit PageDn to keep rolling. But the spirit of the game was
there, clean and strong and vibrant. I could feel where the good ideas
connected, where they got together and sang, and where the stuff that didn’t
quite ring true waited patiently to be replaced with words that were more
inexpressibly Blue Lightning.

Almost
unconsciously, I found myself correcting mistakes, tightening grammar and
fixing spelling errors, arranging the document in its funeral best. From there,
it was a small step to adding phrases, filling in small gaps, making
connections that were obvious upon a fresh read-through, deleting passages that
had outstayed their welcome. It was a light edit, a toe dipped back in waters
I’d abandoned.

And
at the very end of it were two words I hadn’t typed.

THANK
YOU.

Shuddering,
I closed the doc and re-opened my email to Terry. Other messages had come in,
other questions needing to be answered, but I ignored them.

We
need to talk, I wrote back to Terry, and sent it. Then I shut the computer
down, turned off the power strip, and pulled the plug out of the wall for good
measure.

*  
*   *

Sarah
found me sitting on the couch when she got home, fast-forwarding through a
month’s worth of DVRed episodes of MythBusters. “Hi.” She leaned over the back
of the couch to kiss me.

“Hi,”
I said back. “I’ll make dinner if you want.”

She
didn’t move, resting on the couch back to keep her face near mine. “That’s it?
I’ll make dinner? What about hello, what about how was your day, what about
glad you’re home, now let’s have passionate sex on the coffee table, huh?” It
was said with a smile I could hear, laced with pleasure at finding me home.

I
reached back to touch her face with my fingertips and turned away from the TV.
“Sorry, honey. Just a weird day, that’s all.” I dug up a decent attempt at a
smile and let it crawl onto my face. “I’m really glad you’re home.”

“I
can tell,” she said, tousling my hair. “What happened?”

“More
of the same,” I said, feeling oddly unwilling to share the details. “I’m
probably taking it more seriously than I need to.”

Her
finger tickled my ear as her other hand slid across my chest. “You’re right.
You need to stop worrying about that stuff, and about ghost women who don’t
really exist, and instead you need to start worrying about the real live woman
you’ve got right next to you.” Her breath was warm in my ear, promising a
serious threat to the furniture’s structural integrity and more.

“I
love you,” I said. I covered her hand with my own. “And you’re right. I
shouldn’t be thinking about this.”

Sarah
bounced back up like she was on springs. “But right now, you’re distracted.
‘sokay.” She leaned down to kiss the top of my head. “Make dinner. I’ll go
upstairs and change out of my work clothes, and we can discuss this again,” she
paused dramatically, “later.”

Without
waiting for me to answer, she bounced off. There were footsteps on the stairs
as she headed up, and that encouraged me to hoist myself off the couch and
toward the kitchen.

My
head was still in the fridge when she came back down, anxiously scanning the
crisper drawer for something that could conceivably be added to the steak to
provide a vague nutritional benefit.

“The
hamper’s getting full,” she announced, and sneezed once. The sound startled me
into an abrupt collision with one of the refrigerator shelves. Bottles clanked
and teetered, and I reeled back rubbing the back of my head and mumbling “Ow.”

“Oh,
honey, I’m sorry.” Sarah stepped back out of my way, a look of concern on her
face. I waved her off.

“No
big deal,” I said, and backhanded the refrigerator door shut. “The steak isn’t
defrosting fast enough. How do you feel about pizza?”

“Ethiopian?”
she countered hopefully. I nodded as I stood up. “Good, then. And I’ll do
laundry tomorrow, unless you’re out of socks or something.”

“I
just don’t want to lose any more fights with our appliances,” I told her, and
kissed her forehead, and then led her out the door.

*  
*   *

The
last thing Sarah said to me before heading to work in the morning was that I
was suddenly racking up serious boyfriend points.

“Bachelor
party coming up,” I told her. “We’re going to Diamond Girls, and I need to have
enough boyfriend points that you’ll let me go.”

She’d
laughed at that, and then left. I watched her go and shivered. The air
conditioning was turned up just a touch too much, enough to raise goosebumps on
my arms, and I adjusted the thermostat down in preparation for leaving. The
temperature seemed to change almost immediately, as if it were glad to adjust
itself to what I wanted. I stared at the thermometer on the wall for a long
moment to be sure that nothing actually had changed and got the mute evidence
of numbers to tell me I was imagining things. Still, there was a sense of
tension loosening, of something tight in the house easing away from snapping
once I’d closed the door behind Sarah.

Then
again, the most likely suspect for that was me and my own guilty conscience.
Best, then, to get to work, to a space I wasn’t tainting with lies, and to
focus on something I actually could do.

Like,
for example, talk to Terry.

He
wasn’t in my office when I arrived, but it didn’t take him long to send me a
chat message once I logged on to the network. It read, LUNCH.

I
answered in the affirmative, then settled in to try to work. The unanswered
questions from yesterday were still there, with a plus-sized batch of fresh
ones. There were three meetings on the schedule, two before lunch and one
after, and a progress report for BlackStone that I needed to get moving on as
well. All in all, it was a perfectly normal workload for a perfectly normal
day, which didn’t keep the minutes from dragging past. A couple of times,
emails came back requesting clarification on my clarifications, and then
clarifications on those. Eventually, I stopped answering.