Playing Tyler (3 page)

“Unit?” I shake my leg as I wait for the ding of the microwave and the next round of Pizza Pockets.

“Yes, unit. It's smaller and hopefully more user-friendly than the flight simulators we've used in the past. We're hoping that your feedback will help us figure out how to make the design better, find any kind of bugs, that sort of thing before we put the unit into production.”

“Hope it's more exciting than the PC game you gave me.”

“Maybe. The game that you've been playing is a flight-simulation game. We've integrated a gaming platform with a system known as the USC, the Universal Control System. Whereas before you were flying a computer-generated combat theater, the UCS uses satellite maps of approximately seventy-five thousand miles of South Asian airspace.”

“So you've written a game into Google Earth?”

“More like a 3D, Haranco version of Google Earth, but yes. Not to mention the hardware. Lots of screens and gadgets and things you'll love. You'll simulate the missions of multiple UAVs, Predators and the like, and we'll use your experiences to test comfort factors, enhance the usability for pilots, stuff like that. My department wanted to come up with a way for our boys to be more at home behind the controls of a drone. Make it a one-man operation based on the game and the equipment we're having you test.”

“Cool.”

He smiles. “It's a great game, Tyler, you'll love it. Just write down any problems you find with it.”

I grab the Pizza Pocket. Damn, it's hot. Now the whole kitchen smells like cardboard pizza.

“How high do I have to score on this sim to qualify for your flight school?” I don't want to be stuck. I want to go to that flight school. It's right down the road. I could stay close to Brandon.

He smiles, a good, open smile. “Just play it, Tyler.” He winks. “And who knows? The Air Force is like anything else.”

I raise my eyebrow.

“Sometimes you get to sneak in the back door.”

The doorbell rings. It's one of those modern bells in a long case next to the door, manufactured special so that it sounds old. Sounds like you're hearing an actual bell. I hacked its code so that it rang “Happy Birthday” on Mom's birthday once. She laughed. That was a long time ago. I don't think she'd laugh now.

I shuffle on the shag as I reach the paneled doors. I open the door.

Holy shit. The cold air slaps me in the face like a sock full of quarters and my mouth goes dry. It's her.

“Hi. I'm here to set up your system.”

My tongue goes numb. Freaking numb. Can't move it. Shit. It's SlayerGrrl! Designer of
World Of Fire
, three-time ILG champion. Until she stopped playing. Why did she stop playing? The International League Gaming championship is the biggest competition around. Her nose is smaller than it looks in the picture. Terrible picture. She's totally hot. Say something, Ty. Something witty. Something smart. She looks around the porch. I'm losing her, say something quick. Witty, clever… Now, Tyler, now. Speak.

“Hey,” I say.

She nods and twists her awesome lips into a tight smile…

Dammit! That was so not suave. Tell her you know who she is. That you've always wanted to meet her, a girl who games to game, not to impress a boyfriend or because it sounds like something fun to do when stoned. A girl who designed a game so badass that supposedly people have actually died while playing it because they didn't want to walk away from the console. Quick. Now, Ty, witty, clever. “Your nose doesn't look so big in real life.” Shit. Her eyes widen in surprise. Her cheeks turn bright red. Like neon red. Shit! “I mean, your profile picture is just awful.”

Her eyes narrow and her shoulders square.

I so suck at this.

Rick smiles slightly as he opens the door. “Miss Jones, please come in.”

“Hi, Mr Anderson, sorry if I'm a little late,” she says.

“Not at all.” He shoots me a sly look. “Miss Jones, this is Tyler, the young man you will be assisting with the simulator.”

She looks like she's not really happy to be here, and as she comes into the house she trips, stumbles.

“I know who she is.” Stop talking, Ty. Just stop. “She had the highest scores ever in a few combat games.” She looks up at me, like I might be saying something right. Wow. She is so pretty, face even looks like a heart. Lips that dark pink. “Till I beat them.”

Now her look is closed again. What? Girls make no sense sometimes.

“Miss Jones here is a student at Yale. She works in our UCS design department.”

Yale. No wonder she hasn't been online in a while. She's so cute. Standing in my house. Dressed nice. I mean, her jeans sorta hug her hips a little, and cling in all the right places, but she's wearing an old
Akira
T-shirt, like she knows she doesn't have to dress up to look good. She does look good, though. Real good.

“Now, Tyler.” Rick walks across the shag. I like her hair. Dark brown except for one streak near the front bleached blond. “Tyler!” Rick says. I jump. He laughs, leading SlayerGrrl past me and into the house. Just wait till I tell the clan. Peanut and Alpha will never believe that I met SlayerGrrl. Rick's phone buzzes and he reads a text. “Dammit. I have to run. Tyler, can you go with Miss Jones and let her give you the rundown on the unit? I'll call and check in with you later.”

Hell yeah, I'll go with SlayerGrrl. I'd follow her anywhere.

 

The upgrade is sweet. Not as sweet as SlayerGrrl, though. She sits in the console chair and looks like a goddess. The chair itself is pretty impressive. Like an office chair, only it's specially designed to mold to your ass or something.

The whole contraption's shaped like a big half-shell. You sit facing a high-def screen in five panels, stretching up and a little over where your head goes when you're sitting in the thing. She's in front of the central keyboard, and there are two controllers. One for the altitude and angle of the flight, and the other is this big ball that sits under your palm. It has little touch pads around it for finger commands.

The top part of the screen has a panoramic setting in crazy-high definition. You can pull any of the simulated drones' cameras up on any screen except for the one that sits just above the keyboard. The screen over the keyboard is like a standard gaming map-panel. Only here it's a GPS-specified map of your waypoints and target locations and some info on weather, wind speed and direction and other basic flight data.

The game looks about the same in its most basic components as the PC version, only where the original game had pixelated terrain, like an Xbox game or something, this one looks more like a movie. Graphics are epic.

“Tyler.” SlayerGrrl looks me in the eye. My heart jumps. “Are you listening?”

“No.” I look at the screens. “I just want to try it.”

“Yeah.” She purses her lips. Like she's not used to telling people what to do. Or telling people anything, for that matter. “Please listen to what I'm trying to tell you, OK?”

She doesn't look too happy with me. Her nose, which is sort of cute even though it might be considered a little big, is all wrinkled up like she's frustrated. It's really cute, actually. Except it means that she's pissed, probably. Focus. I look down at her shirt. “You know that they're playing
Akira
down at Criterion in a few weeks. Midnight movie. Wanna go?”

“Yes, no, I mean, yes, I know that it's playing and no, I'm not going with you. Can you just listen?”

“Sure.” That. Sucks. She doesn't move, though, doesn't get further away. Maybe I should start slow, like with her phone number.

“When you sit down, make sure to put on the cuff first.” She holds out a floppy circle of blue Velcro. “Just roll up your sleeve.”

She slides the cuff up my arm. Damn, her hands are soft. Like, I don't know, something nice. Something I want to feel more of. She hits a few keys and the cuff tightens. “It's measuring my blood pressure?”

“You have to be wearing the cuff to log on.” She looks at the screen on the bottom right that has all the flight stats, and a small icon for my blood pressure readout pops up onto the screen. “The joystick will also be measuring your pulse as you go.”

I frown. She stands and gets out of the chair. “Please sit,” she says.

I do. The chair is nice, big, like an armchair, except for the stupid cuff around my arm. “OK, well, what's the sign-in procedure? Do I get to enter a gamertag or something?”

She looks at me like I just shit myself. “This isn't
Call of Duty
.”

I look at the setup around me: multiple screens controlling multiple drones, fancy chair, me, Tyler MacCandless, beta testing equipment that's probably going to be sold to the Air Force. “Yeah, well, no, actually,” I look her in the eyes, “It kinda is.”

I move over in the seat. She should sit. Doesn't need a lot of room. She's tiny. And if she sits she'll be close. I tilt my head to point out the empty space next to me in the chair. “Wanna play?”

 

Ani

Did it have to be him? Tyler MacCandless, the boy who beat my record? It had to be him? It's not like we actually played against each other that year, so he didn't technically beat me, just my record, but still. Seeing him makes me miss gaming even more.

I just have to take a deep breath and plow through this demo. The way he looks at me makes my heart beat in a new, quick little rhythm. No boy has ever looked at me that way, like I'm just a girl, not some genetic aberration.

In fact, he's looking at me like I'm actually worth seeing and I'm not so certain that I like it. He is cute, though. Most gamer boys are either gangly or, well, large-ish. But Tyler's built, not too big, but he has great arms and has deer-like eyes that are focused entirely on me.

And he wants me to play?

Part of me still can't believe I stopped competing; that science fair project sort of eclipsed everything. But competing was all I used to live for, giving me a break from Mom, keeping my mind off of Dad back when he was deployed.

I look at the empty space. Should I do it? Is it like, unprofessional or something? I played the thing for hours and hours every day in between classes after meeting Mr Anderson in that restaurant last week. I wish Mr Anderson had let me make the game more exciting; I don't know if I really want Tyler to play. If he's expecting it to be as cool as
World of Fire
then he's going to be disappointed.

Tyler's eyes are dark and sweet and desperate and I sit, trying to rub away the warmth that's rushing to my cheeks before he notices.

 

Tyler

“I shouldn't. Check your login one more time, make sure that you hit the code in the right sequence so you can get onto the system after I leave.” SlayerGrrl points as she leans in over my shoulder. I like her here. Next to me. Her hair sorta skims over my shoulder. She smells like, I don't know, flowers and things. Good things. Girly things.

“Login's fine,” I say. “Wanna play
Haven
? I could hook it up to the UCS pretty easy.”

“No, I can't.” She stops, like she's holding another word in her mouth. “Sorry.”

I grab a bag of chips, hold some out to her. “Why don't they just ask you to beta test their system?” She stands up and arches her back. She looks good. Real good.

“I designed it.” She shrugs. “So I guess I'm biased.”

She's so pretty. And she's in my room. Shit. Should I have hid that magazine? Maybe take those posters off the wall? I don't know. Sort of messy, my room. I get up and kick some dirty clothes under the bed. She smiles. Pretends to look at the screen.

“You miss it?” I hold the bag as she takes a few chips. “Gaming?”

Her eyes cloud over a little, go all distant. “Sometimes.”

“Why'd you stop?” I ask.

“It's complicated.” Her cheeks are like this shade of pink, pink like cotton candy.

Damn, for the first time in my life I wish I went to Yale. Or maybe at least wasn't failing Math.

SlayerGrrl touches my shoulder. My heart leaps. Oh shit. She touched me, what does that mean? Dammit. I really should have cleaned my room. Bet those guys at Yale remember to clean up their rooms before a girl comes over. I dig under the piles of crap on the floor and grab a few games. She's gonna try and leave if I don't think of something.

“Do you have any more of these chips?” she asks, moving to sit on the corner of my bed. My heart flies. Like, well, maybe explodes, just… quietly.

I should say something cool. I mean, there's a girl. A hot girl. A smart, hot, gamer girl, sitting on my bed in tight jeans and a T-shirt.

Seeing her there, perched on a sea of mismatched sheets, face haloed by a wall full of band posters, makes me want to, well, redecorate, I guess. Not hole up in such a dump. Shit, wait, do I have more chips? I better. “I don't know.”

“Oh.” She looks at the empty bag. Do I ask her to come with me to the store? No. Can't do that, I don't have a car.

Be brave, Ty, bold. “Let's call for pizza.”

She puts down the bag. Her face is a mask. Shit. I can't read it. She says, “I should get back. There's a meal plan.”

“No!” I jump out of the seat. “We're just getting started and you're going to leave?”

She looks odd, tilting her head. Maybe that was the wrong thing to say. I probably sound like a cave man compared to the guys at Yale. I suck at this. But she has to stay. I look at my feet. Boyfriend. She's got a boyfriend. Too pretty not to. “Boyfriend waiting?”