Vaporware (22 page)

“I’ve
got a challenge for you,” I said. “Eric asked me to track down a leak, and I
figure you’re the man to talk to.”

He
stretched his arms out and cracked his knuckles melodramatically. “No sweat.
What am I looking for?”

I
thought for a minute. “Mail logs, to start. Did someone send anything with
attachments to Yar’s Vengeance?”

Nodding,
he minimized the game window and pulled up a connection to the mail server.
“Dunno, but I can check. Anything else you can tell me about it?”

“Start
looking after Blue Lightning got cancelled. No one would have had reason to
leak anything until then, right?” He nodded. “And you can probably rule out any
of the artists. The screenshots aren’t good enough. They would have done
touchup before they let them out of the building.”

“What
a sad state the world is in when people can’t let the games speak for
themselves.” Dennis shook his head, even as his fingers were flying. “What
happened to honesty in marketing, man?”

“Didn’t
know there ever was any,” I said, and we both laughed. “Anyway, if you come up
with anything, let me know.”

“You
know it’s a longshot, right? They could have just dropped the images onto a USB
drive and mailed them from home, or posted them somewhere the Yar’s guy grabbed
them, or, well, there’s a lot of ways they could have gotten out there.”

I
grimaced. “I know. But it’s worth checking, at least.”

He
swung his feet down onto the floor and leaned forward. “It is. I’ll let you
know if I get anything. You’ll be at your desk?”

“Unless
Michelle kills me in the meantime, yeah.”

Dennis
gave a short bark of laughter. “She ain’t going to kill you. She still likes
you a leeetle too much, bro.”

I
shook my head. “She and Leon hooked up. I’m just hoping they let the kids call
me Unca Ryan.”

He
blinked. “Leon and Michelle? No way!”

“Yup.”
I looked back out into the hallway for a second. No one was there. “Keep it
under your hat, OK? Eric’s not real fond of people fishing off the company
pier.”

“That’s
‘cause Eric don’t get laid.” He gave another bellow of laughter. “Well,
goddamn. Tell you what—let me get on this for you, and I’ll have something by
the end of the day. You think of anything else, let me know, all right?”

“All
right.” I pulled myself back out into the hall. Behind me, I could hear him
still chortling to himself. “Shelly and Leon? And fucking Leon?”

I
shook my head and kept going.

*  
*   *

Talking
with Dennis had given me an idea. If it was going to be tough to track down how
the images got out, I could at least start by figuring out how they might have
been made. Screenshots were, after all, just that—a snapshot someone took with
a screen capture utility while playing or pulled from recorded footage of
gameplay. And the stuff on Yar’s Vengeance had looked genuine, like it had been
pulled from someone’s personal play log and not a carefully choreographed play
session designed to show off the game’s best assets.

Back
at my desk, I pulled down the last build of Blue Lightning off the network and
installed it on my debug kit. I’d had one on there, but like a good soldier I’d
wiped it when we switched to Salvador. Now I needed it again.

While
it was downloading, I sent a quick email to Sarah asking if she wanted to go
out for dinner, then dealt with a few other issues that all seemed terribly
important to somebody.

At
last, a ping let me know the build was installed. I picked up the controller
and fired the game up.

The
screen flickered for a moment, and then the familiar shell appeared. I felt
myself grinning at the sight of it and at the memory of what the game was going
to be. That faded quickly as I thumbsticked my way through the menus to the
Quick Play option, then started scrolling through the maps looking for the one
that had so prominently featured my electronic demise.

There
were twelve maps in the list, plus a test space that we’d used for testing out
features. I scrolled down quickly, past a post-industrial wasteland and a
battle-ravaged space station, past a mile-high tower and a burning oil refinery
and a nuclear power plant perpetually about to go critical.

And
then, there it was—Urbanscape. It was one of my favorite maps, one we’d done
strictly for multiplayer. It didn’t quite fit the game’s story, but we didn’t
care because it was so much damn fun, a war-ravaged downtown with hunks of
architecture liberally appropriated from New York, Chicago, Paris, London, and
Poughkeepsie. The central premise, as Michelle had described it, was “blow the
crap out of your favorite buildings,” and really, it had been all about the
collateral damage.

I
selected it, and the game began cycling through load screens. On my laptop, I
pulled up the most egregiously offending screenshot and zoomed in for
comparison. Finding where the screen capture had been taken might give me a
clue to who had taken it.

The
loading screen vanished, and in its place was the imaginary cityscape I
remembered. I put the game on PAUSE, then inputted a series of cheat codes. One
would render me invulnerable to enemy fire, another would let my character run
at ten times normal speed, and a third would allow me to fly as needed. All of
these had been immensely useful in building and testing the space, letting us
get to particular spots on the map to examine them without having to play
through again and again. Now, though, they were just helping me get to where I
needed to be.

There
were enough landmarks in the screenshot to allow me to find the general
location easily. I could see a chunk of modified-just-enough-to-not-get-us-sued
Sears Tower, which immediately placed the site in the southwest corner of the
map. Also visible was a row of brick-fronted shops I’d insisted on, relics of
the six years I’d spent growing up in Connecticut. From the relative angle, the
shooter on the image had been almost due south of the spot and elevated about
thirty meters.

I
went hunting. My avatar—faceless as a default, as I hadn’t bothered to go
through the customization screens—sprinted through the streets. Generic enemies
spawned in and took potshots at her, but they mostly missed, rockets and
blasters taking chunks out of the level geometry as I sped past. The few rounds
that hit bounced off, leaving explosions hanging in mid-air as my Blue
Lightning maneuvered past them, ignoring them.

Within
seconds, I’d reached the spot where my avatar had died so spectacularly. I
checked the screenshot to double-check, and there it was. Same sidewalk, same
steaming manhole in the middle of the street, same storefront with glass as yet
unbroken by hostile fire, and same dirty snow-grey sky overhead. All that was
missing was my virtual corpse.

With
the spot established, I turned to the source of the screenshot. I oriented
myself south, guesstimated the angle, and flew along the best-guess vector.
After a second, I turned myself around so I could try to match the onscreen
image with the screenshot for distance.

And
I promptly flew out of the world. One second I was staring at the streetcorner
in question, the next I was looking at the untextured back side of one of the
buildings that marked the map boundary. The map, in its entirety, sat there
floating in space, a titanic playset cast adrift from any context. This was
perfectly normal, the standard effect of moving outside of the playable space
on a map. After all, the levels really had more in common with Hollywood sets
than anything else. They were elaborate fronts and showpieces, but there was no
context to them. They just floated in virtual space, until someone found a bad
bit of level geometry and fell out of the world.

Like
I said, it was normal, except for one thing. The shot on Yar’s Vengeance looked
like it had been taken from roughly this distance, far outside the level’s
playable boundaries.

“What
the hell?” I stopped, then zoomed forward until I was back in playable space.
The second I was back in, I checked the image for reference. It was no good; it
was too close. A thumbnail guess on the image gave it a range of fifty meters
scoped; I was maybe thirty and running up against the map boundary. Maybe
unscoped would work, but the image had shown the tell-tale signs of the sniper
scope user interface effects around the edges. That meant, in simplest terms,
that the screen capture had been taken from outside the map and through a
building. It could have been taken from an earlier version of the space, when
that building hadn’t been there, except that I knew for a fact that the outside
boundary had been one of the first things the level artist had built.

So
that, then, was impossible.

Another
possibility was that the internal landscape had been re-arranged and that the
corner in question had been moved closer to the edge. I shot off an IM to the
artist in question, and ten seconds later I got my response. NO CHANGES TO SW
CORNER OF THAT MAP—IT PLAYED GR8. Y U ASK?

Just
curious, I wrote back, and OKTHX. If the distance didn’t work, maybe I had the
angle wrong. If I went up, maybe I’d get the distance I needed to make and take
the shot.

I
guided my avatar straight up, looking for a spot where the shot might have been
taken. There had to be a ledge, a fire escape, something that the shooter could
have stood on.

There
was nothing. I stopped and thought about it for a minute. If there was nowhere
to stand, then they had to be using a cheat code, except that by the time the
distance was right, the angle was way off.

In
other words, the screen shot was impossible. It couldn’t have been taken, not
without a massive rework of the level that had never happened.

Below
me, on the street, enemies were gathering, taking potshots into the air where
my avatar hovered. As more and more showed up, the game’s frame rate slowed.
Missiles crept through the air, their smoke trails burgeoning behind them.
Individual bullets whined and nicked off the architecture while more and more
AI took up firing positions on the street below.

Impossible.
I sat there and thought about it. The explosions and bullet ricochets got more
and more infrequent until finally the game locked up, a full sixty or so
hostiles frozen in the act of firing. I let it sit there, then turned and
tapped out a message to Dennis. Got anything???

There
was a long wait, then his response popped up. YEAH U WONT BLEIVE THIS 1.

I
sent him back a quick, ??? When that didn’t get a response, I added, won’t
believe what?

SOMEONE
HACKED THE MAIL SERVER CREATED AN ACCOUNT SENT PIX DELETED IT.

Can
you do that? I asked.

U
CANT, came back, followed by, DON’T KNOW WHO COULD NO LOGIN ATTACHD 2 HAX

I
hesitated for a minute, and then typed leon? terry?

Another
window popped open. It was Eric, and he wanted to know how things were going
with the hunt for the leak. Just fine, I typed in. Onto something, give me a
minute.

His
message flashed back an OK, just as a third window, this one from Sarah, winked
into existence. I’d rather stay in tonight, if that’s OK with you. Maybe we can
order something.

Sure
that’s great, I typed back, then bounced over to Dennis’ window, which was now
blinking for attention. PARANOID MUCH?

It’s
because of who I work with, I dashed off, and went back to Sarah’s window,
which was now blinking again.

What
do you want? Chinese? Pizza? I could go for Thai. She added a smiley-face
emoticon at the end, which told me that she really wanted Thai and she really
wanted to talk about it to make sure I did, too, which was exactly what I
didn’t have time for with chat windows blowing up all over my screen.

I
answered her with, I’m good with whatever you decide, then went back to Dennis
just as Eric’s window flared open with a request for details and a new one from
Leon took up a chunk of increasingly crowded screen real estate. D00d. Got a
minute?

Not
right now, I typed back at him, then went back to Dennis, who’d announced,
DON’T THINK THEY COULD BUT I COULD BE WRONG.

No,
no, I wrote back to him. That’s good to know. Then it was I’m working on it to
Eric, a quick look at Sarah’s Is everything OK that required either a thousand
word answer or no answer at all, and then can you give me five minutes to Leon.

It’s
just a quick thing, he wrote back. OMW.

“No!”
I found myself shouting, as the message tag attached to Leon’s window went into
AFK mode.

With
only a moment’s hesitation, I jumped back to Sarah’s window. Everythings fine,
I wrote. Just a little busy.

If
you don’t want Thai we don’t have to have it, she wrote back instantly, leading
me to believe she’d already typed it in and had just been waiting for a sign of
life from me before sending it. In the meantime I’d hopped to Dennis’ window
and thanked him, then over to Eric’s to respond to his query about all the
busted equipment that had been found on various engineers’ desks. Personal
equipment, I wrote back. Leon’s. Trying an experiment with realtime
picture-in-picture that we didn’t want to present before we had an idea if it
was worth trying. It was a lie, but as the entire point of the exercise had
been to shield Terry from Eric, I didn’t want to rat him out at this juncture.