Vaporware (34 page)

“I
could quit,” he sputtered. “After all, you got the only people I actually liked
here blown out the door.”

“As
long as she’s here, you’re not going anywhere,” I said. “So let’s call off the
pissing contest, all right? Yeah, I did a crappy thing, and I did it to save my
ass, but they’re better off out of here anyway. I don’t know what she wants,
but I don’t think it’s going to be about any of us in the end.”

“She
said she wanted to be with me.”

“She
told me that, too.” I could feel the pressure building behind my eyes, the
headache coming on full throttle. “Look, Terry, there’s only one way to put
this: she’s a project. And what do we know about projects?”

He
thought about that for a minute, then answered warily. “That they feel good
when they’re done?”

“Jesus,
man, what happened to you? You’ve been in this business nine years. You’ve
shipped four games. You should know this by now. The project always takes, man.
It takes your evenings, and it takes your weekends, and it takes your energy,
and it’s all in the name of pushing to the end for the good of the project and
the good of the company and if you’re lucky, the good of the guy in the cube
next to you. It’s about the project, but we all think it’s going to be magic at
the end, and that’s why we keep on signing up to have the shit kicked out of
us. Every. Single. Time!” I was shouting, and I realized it, and I didn’t care.
“She’s a project, Terry. She’s going to take everything she needs from us, and
a little more, and we’re going to be grateful for the chance to work ourselves
to the bone for her. She’s going to flash her tits at us and tell us she loves
us until we believe her, and when it’s done, she’ll move on and what happened
to us to get her there won’t matter. Do you understand?”

He
looked at me with heavy, sad eyes, and shook his head slowly. “I think you
don’t want her to leave you,” he said, drawing each word out like he was
tasting as he said it. “And I think you’re worried you’re not that good at your
job, and that she’s not going to be as cool as you thought she was, and that
someone else might actually contribute something worthwhile to her.” He paused,
and thought for a second. “Here’s the deal, Ryan. I’ll keep my mouth shut about
all of your bullshit, because she needs you. But when this is over, and she
makes her call, then all bets are off. You understand me.”

“No,”
I said truthfully. “But it doesn’t matter. I’ll see you at the meeting at
three, right.”

“Yeah.”
He spat on the asphalt, then rubbed the wet spot with his sneaker. “I have to
ask you one question, though.”

“Why
am I fighting her?”

He
shook his head. “No. If she’s really as dangerous as you think she is, why are
you still here? After all, if it’s safer for Lucas and those guys to be gone,
it’s gotta be that much safer for you, right?”

“I
don’t think there’s anywhere I could go,” I said. “I’ll see you inside.”

“Maybe,”
he said, and loped off.

I
sat down on the curb and watched him go. Time passed. Maybe it was five
minutes, maybe it was half an hour. People drove by, pulled up, went in. A
couple pulled out, never to return.

And
eventually, a shadow fell across me. I looked up. “Hi, Michelle.”

“You
need to stop shouting crap like that in the parking lot on a day when people
have windows open,” she said. “They talk.”

“What
are they saying? That I’m crazy, or that I’m an asshole?”

“Both.”
She sat down next to me. “Me, I’d like to call you crazy, but I know better.”

“You
know that I’m an asshole?”

She
nodded. “Yes. You are. And I wish to God I could just hate you, like you seem
to want me to.”

I
picked up a pebble from the parking lot and flicked it away. “You don’t?”

“Not
entirely. But yesterday I got real close. Now, Leon, on the other hand….”

“Yeah.
Leon.” We sat there in silence for a few more minutes. I tossed more pebbles
into the lot. Michelle picked a blade of grass from a crack in the asphalt and
started knotting it.

“Are
you going to do it?” She asked the question looking straight ahead, not at me.
I shook my head.

“I
don’t think so. It’s getting scary, Michelle.”

“Scary?
How?”

“She
wants things,” I said. “She wants them, and she’s not going to stop until she
gets them. And she’s starting to figure out that there are things in the way of
what she wants, and I’m thinking she might want to get those things out of the
way.”

“Those
things?” She turned to face me. “You mean Sarah.”

“And
maybe you, too.” I dropped the pebbles and then dropped my face into my hands.
“So I’m going to stop it. I’ve gotten most of the guys on the black project
fired, which isn’t even the first shitty thing I did this week, but it’s going
to take away from her getting stronger. At least, I think it is. I’m trying to
make Terry jealous enough to quit. And then I’ll take a few more steps.”

“Idiot.”
An elbow caught me in the ribs. “Why aren’t you asking for help with this?”

I
spread my fingers enough that I could see her and she could see my eyes. “Who’s
going to help, Shelly? The friend I screwed around with, or the friend I
screwed around on? Or maybe my girlfriend, whom I cheated on? I screwed up, and
that means I need to do this and take whatever hit I have to in order to make
things right. Maybe Sarah never learns that I had to do some horrible stuff to
protect her from Blue Lightning. That’s fine, if she never learns that I did
something horrible to whatever we have together. And I’ll carry that as long as
I have to, because she hasn’t done anything wrong.”

“And
you have.” Michelle stood, shaking her head. “You ever think that you wouldn’t
have fallen back into bed with me if there hadn’t been something there you
weren’t getting at home? It’s not all you, Ryan. It never has been, and it
shouldn’t be now. Most good leads learn that pretty early.”

She
reached down, hand extended in my direction. After a second, I took it, and she
helped pull me up.

“I’ll
finish Salvador,” she said. “But no long nights, at least not working with you.
And after this, I think maybe one or both of us should think about working
somewhere else, Ryan.”

I
took a good look at her shoes. They were black Converse hi-tops with electric
pink trim, long laces triple knotted and still trailing floppy on the ground
behind her. They were perfect; they were Michelle. “I think you’re probably
right,” I said, still keeping my eyes low. “Maybe I should have left after the
cancellation.”

“Yeah,
well, we’ll cover that in the post-mortem. I’ll see you inside.”

“See
you,” I mumbled after her. After a while, I followed.

*   *   *

I ran into Dennis on the way
back to my office. He was toting a couple of external drives by their cables,
looking like a deep-sea fisherman taking his wares to market. “Hey, man. How’s
the head?”

“Attached,”
I said. “How’s by you?”

“Weird.”
He shook his head. “You know all those backup tapes Eric had me order?” I
nodded. “Well, now he wants me to send ‘em back. Only it’s too late for pickup
today, so they’ve got to sit in the lockbox on the floor in front of reception
all weekend, where some jackass can use ‘em for a stepladder.”

“Isn’t
the lockbox supposed to be proof against that sort of thing?”

“Yeah,
but you never know. There’s always gonna be some numbnuts who accidentally uses
a blowtorch to get the candy jar open, and the next thing you know all the
backups are crispy fritters.”

“Well,
good luck,” I told him. “I promise—no blowtorches out of me.”

He
gave me the sort of look he usually reserved for the newbs who didn’t realize
that you actually had to plug in a network cable on both ends. “No, you’d come
up with something interesting.”

“Heh.
Take care of yourself, Dennis.” I waved and headed back toward my office.

“Have
a good weekend, man.”

I
stuck up my hand to do a sort of backwards wave and vanished into my office.

Four
guys had gotten fired that morning. Four guys had gotten fired because of me.
They were gone now, out of the building, with most traces they’d worked there
already gone. I looked around at my office walls and wondered how long it would
take me to be gone, to be scrubbed out of this place. A couple of posters, a
couple of papers…I decided it wouldn’t take very long at all. I could be ready
to quit in an hour, if I wanted to leave an orderly legacy for whoever came
after me. If I wanted to be a dick about it, half that.

And
if I got myself fired, it wouldn’t take more than a couple of boxes under
Marie’s watchful eye, or maybe Eric’s, to crate up my time here and haul it
away. Everything that had been mine would be gone.

How
long could it take, then, to get a project’s DNA out of this place? Would it be
enough to scrub some of it? Would any trace linger? There were still guys in
the back talking about games they worked on ten years prior. “You weren’t here
for Liberation: First Defiance,” they’d say. “Now that was a death march.” Ten
years gone, and they were still bitching about it. It was as if as much of the
game had gone into them as they’d put into the game, the project having seeped
into the soul of the place. Maybe wiping out some files wouldn’t be enough to
wipe out Blue Lightning, if it came to that. Maybe she’d be here as long as
anyone who’d worked on her was, a ghost lingering in the memories of those who
put something of themselves into her. And even then, we’d probably carry her
with us.

If
that was the case, I decided, then I was already screwed and might as well get
some work in on Salvador while I waited for the axe to fall. The meeting
schedule was full right up until five—nobody was looking to get out early, not
today. Whatever Blue Lightning was up to, in the light of day it was poor,
unloved Salvador that needed my attention.

*  
*   *

There
was still plenty of daylight at six, when the last of the meetings wrapped up.
It was another level meeting, one that Shelly had decided to attend, and it had
gone well enough that we’d just kept rolling after the putative back end had
been reached.

She’d
caught my arm as the meeting was wrapping up and the rest of the folks were
filing out of the room. “You need to talk to Sarah.”

I
pulled my arm away, but not violently. “One disaster at a time, OK?”

“It’s
all the same one, Ryan,” she said, and walked away.

I
was still thinking about that when I got back to my desk. Eric was on his way
out, and he gave me a curt little nod as he headed for the door. Dennis was
long gone, the lockbox of backups parked prominently in front of reception with
a Post-it note warning everyone from staff to the cleaning crew not to touch it
on pain of cannibalism. There was laughter from the back of the building, no
doubt some serious multiplayer action or other, but otherwise people were
drifting out the doors in ones and twos, ready to start the weekend.

A
chat window popped up onscreen.

“Are
you coming home?” It was Sarah, flinging smileys with abandon. “I thought we
had a date, mister.”

“Coming
home soon i swear i just got out of a meeting” I did a frantic email scan. “Got
to answer a couple of emails, wrap a couple of things up, and then i’ll head
home “

“What
are we seeing?”

“Dunno.
that’s about half of what’s keeping me here.”

More
smileys. “Well, don’t let it keep you too long, or I may have to start without
you.”

“Reaaaallly,”
I responded, doing my best to type lasciviously, but by then she’d already
logged off. I stared at the screen for a minute, then bent to the keyboard.
“Damn.”

Email
was taken care of quickly enough, and I started thumbing through Netflix’s
streaming catalog to come up with something suitable for the evening’s
entertainment. It needed to be something that Sarah wouldn’t mind missing, but
wouldn’t object to initially, something that wouldn’t gross her out or grab her
attention too much. Mama was right out—too gross and too nerdy, even with
arthouse director cred. The latest Batman flick? No, Christian Bale was a
little too good-looking. Maybe a giant monster movie….

There
was a knock on the door. I looked up, surprised to see Terry there.

“Ryan?
Can I talk to you for a minute?”

“Sure.”

“Thanks.”
He slipped inside and shut the door. In his hand was a piece of paper with some
tiny writing on it. It looked hand-scribbled, too small for me to read. “Don’t
want to be overheard,” he offered by way of explanation, “especially
considering what we talked about this morning.”

“Ah
yes, that. Been thinking about it.”

He
nodded. “I have. And I wrote down what I was thinking. I’d, uh, like it if
you’d take a look at it. Maybe it would help both of us get a better
understanding of what’s going on here.” He clutched the paper tighter. Wrinkles
appeared around his fingers.