Vaporware (31 page)

It
wasn’t until nearly one that Terry appeared outside my door. “Are you ready?”
he rasped as I looked up from the meeting notes I’d been trying to compile for
nearly an hour.

“Yeah,”
I told him, and then noticed the shadows behind him. “What are they doing
here?”

He
turned and looked. I could see faces now, Lucas and the others he’d been
hanging with in their little cloud of suspicious smoke. “They’re all in this.
They’re all part of this. They should be there.”

I
caught myself frowning. “I wanted to talk to you, not the entire Cub Scout
troop.”

Terry
just stared at me for a minute. “Maybe they have something to say. Or maybe
they deserve to hear what you’ll say. It’s not all about you, Ryan.”

“No,
it’s about her,” I answered, and got nods and murmurs in return. “Tell you what,
then. Let’s go grab a conference room or something and do this.”

“I
don’t want to meet here,” Terry said, the lines on his face pulled down in a
clown-painting frown. “It’s not the sort of thing Eric should be walking in
on.”

“Then
you probably shouldn’t have everyone hanging out in the hall in front of his
office,” I pointed out. Terry turned around in a panic, and I hauled myself up
out of my chair. “Fine. Have it your way. Let’s go grab McDonalds or something.
I’ll even buy everyone a Happy Meal.” I marched out past him, and, as if by
reflex, Lucas and a couple of the others followed.

Terry
didn’t. He just said, “You don’t have to be a dick about it,” and then stalked
along, careful to keep his distance.

*  
*   *

In
the end there were six of us. Terry, another engineer, Lucas, two other
artists, and me. There was no one from QA, no level design or project
management. It was just a bunch of guys who, for all intents and purposes,
could be hanging out for any reason at all.

“Is
this the whole black project?” I asked. They flicked looks back and forth while
silently deciding how to answer that one.

“Yeah,”
Terry said finally, which earned him a disgusted look from Lucas’ wingman. “So
far, anyway.”

I
waved a french fry around like a pointer. “How long have you been working on
it?”

“Pretty
much right from when she got cancelled,” he admitted.

Lucas
jumped in to clarify things. “It was just Terry at first. The rest of us were
looking to, I don’t know, keep her alive, I guess. Not lose what we’d done.”

“So
you started working black. And when did she start talking to you?”

Terry’s
food sat in front of him, untouched. I could see it slouching visibly toward
room temperature. He ignored it and practically snarled at me. “Hasn’t she been
talking to you all along? Didn’t you see her in your head from the beginning?
Didn’t you hear her?”

“Not
like that,” I said softly. “And I never touched her.”

“You
will,” he said bitterly. “Oh, you will.”

“Dammit,
I don’t want to! I just want to know if it’s worth my time and my sanity to
work with you guys on this, because honestly right now I’m not sure if I’m
going nuts or not.”

“You’re
not,” Lucas reassured me. “We’ve all seen her. We’ve all talked to her.” He
paused. “She talks to Terry more. But she talks about you.”

“Great.”
I wiped my forehead with a napkin. “I think I’m flattered. But you’re really
not helping the whole ‘not nuts’ thing right now.”

Terry
stared down at the table, not meeting my eyes. “It all seems crazy. I know. I
remember the first time I saw her. I was working late trying something with her
code, and she…reached out. Reached right out of the monitor. Offered me her
hand. And I took it, and I was hers. I understood.”

“Understood
what?”

It
was Lucas who answered. “What she was. What she needed. Why we needed to be the
ones to finish her, and what that would mean.”

“Would
it mean that I’d stop having a freaky naked blue chick appear in my—” I nearly
said “girlfriend’s dreams” or “document files” or a dozen other things.
Instead, I ended lamely on “work,” and dared anyone to tell me I’d thought of
saying anything different.

Terry
sighed. “Why does it always have to be a joke? You’re smarter than that. We all
know it, and we all know you believed in her, back when she was our project.
Why don’t you admit it—you want to finish her as much as we do.”

“Maybe,”
I said hesitantly. “So, if I were hypothetically to help you out, what would
you want from me?”  

He
looked at the others before answering. “It’s not what I want. It’s what she
wants. And she wants you.” Each word was ground out bitterly, the verbal
equivalent of someone turning big rocks into small ones with a tiny, tiny
hammer.

“Because?”
I let the word hang there. Terry’s face got red; Lucas rushed in to fill the
gap.

“Because
she wants you to finish her. There are parts of her that are missing, and she
needs to know what they are.”

I
shook my head. “Why don’t you guys just fill it in, then? Ignore the
documentation like you always do, and there you go. There she goes.”

“It
doesn’t work like that,” Terry said, after swallowing a few times to get
himself able to speak. “We could make stuff up, yeah, but that wouldn’t be the
original vision. That wouldn’t be the missing parts of her. It just wouldn’t
fit, and she’d be hurt because of it. In pain. Crippled.”

Lucas
nodded. “She needs the stuff you never wrote down that belongs to her. Until
she gets it, she’s incomplete.”

I
thought about that for a moment. “And then what?”

Terry
blinked. “Then what what?”

“Then
what happens? I finish the design, and you guys,” I waved in their rough
direction, “implement it, and then what happens? Does she go away? Transmit
herself to the Sony plant and get discs pressed of herself? What does she do?”

“It
doesn’t matter. She’ll be free.” Terry’s voice was dreamy. “After that, it’s
all details.”

“Free.”
I stood up. “Free,” I repeated, walking to the door. “Will that be a good
thing?” 

“It’s
better than being broken. Or forgotten,” Terry said, softly. “Our dreams
shouldn’t be forgotten.”

“Not
unless they’re nightmares,” I said, and walked out.

When
I got back to the office, I sent Terry an email. It read, I’ll think about it.
I didn’t sign it, but I did bcc it to my home account, and then I started
prepping for another meeting.

*  
*   *

It
ran for nearly two hours, which was about an hour longer than I thought it
needed to. What was clear from the beginning was what we had time to do; what
took forever was figuring out what we had to leave on the chopping block in
order to get there. In the end, nobody was exactly happy with the decisions
we’d made, which meant that everyone’s ox got gored a little bit and that we’d
probably made a mistake somewhere. In my experience, it was usually safer to
hack out one system rather than snip out bits and pieces of a lot of them—the
game tended to end up with a lot of not-quite-satisfying elements that way—but
no one was willing to either throw their favorite on the pile or mandate that
someone else’s go, so we ended up with lots of little trims everywhere.

Afterwards,
I retreated to my office. The message light on my phone was blinking when I got
there, an insistent little red eye winking at me way too fast. I thought about
ignoring it, or, better yet, deleting whatever message was on there, but duty
won out.

A
closer check indicated that there were six messages waiting, which was odd.
Normally I didn’t get six messages in a month, let alone in the course of a
long lunch and a single meeting. Thinking it might have been an emergency, I
checked my cell phone to see if someone—Sarah, I confessed to myself—had been
trying to reach me that way, but there were no new messages, no missed calls,
and no evidence I’d even needed to bring the phone along with me.

Curious
now, I punched in my code and let the voicemail playback begin. The first one
was blank, probably a wrong number, and there was the tell-tale click of the
fumbling hang-up five or six seconds in. I deleted it and kept going. The
second one was an automated voice mail message informing me that certain
messages I’d stored in the system for ninety days were about to be deleted, and
that I should do something about it if I wanted to keep them. I ignored that
one, too, and skipped to the third.

Breathing.

That’s
all it was, the sound of somebody breathing. Not heavy, not obscene, just the
faint whisper of breath in and out on the other end of the line. No voices, no
words, just slow, steady breathing. I caught myself on the verge of saying
“Hello?” into the receiver, then let it play out to the end.

That
one, I saved.

The
fourth message was like the third, but longer. The fifth one, though, had
words.

At
first, it sounded like the others—wordless, voiceless, just the in-and-out of
air on the other end. I almost punched in the code to save it and moved on to
number six. But then the voice started, so soft at first I wasn’t sure I heard
it, but rising in volume with every syllable.

“Ryan?”
it said. “Ryan? You should pick up. You should talk to me. We have so much to
talk about.” A pause. “I miss you. Do you miss me? I think you do.”

I
knew the voice. After all, I’d written the notes for it, heard it in my
imagination, gotten as close to it as we could have in the voice casting and
placeholder dialogue recording sessions.

And
of course, I’d heard it in my office, the night the last bits of my life had
started to go to hell.

I
let the message play out. There was more space after the last words, more
sounds of sibilant breathing left so I’d know whom the other calls were from.

I
thought about it, then deleted the message. She’d made her point. When I was
done listening to the sixth voicemail, I’d go back and wipe out the other ones,
too.

The
sixth one was from Sarah. It said that she figured it was easier to reach me on
my work number than on my cell phone, and that she was going to make lasagna
for dinner. She hoped that was all right.

I
thought I was going to cry.

Chapter 25

Quarter
of six, and I headed back to the break room to get what I hoped would be my
last cup of coffee of the day. For some reason the coffee service we used always
resupplied fresh coffee on Friday, which meant that by Wednesday afternoon
everything that wasn’t decaf was gone. I picked the best of a bad lot, shoved
it in the machine, and waited.

There
was a click and a thunk beside me, the sound of one of the cabinets opening and
then closing. I looked over and there was Michelle, a styrofoam coffee cup in
her hand, eyes resolutely straight ahead. If she noticed me watching her, she
didn’t give any sign. She didn’t move any closer, nor did she step further
away.

Two
can play at that game, I thought, turning back to the coffee maker. It gurgled
and hissed, pissing brown bean juice into my mug. Steam leaked out the side,
evidence of a broken seal somewhere. One of the QA wonks wandered in, saw the
two of us standing there, and backpedaled right out.

The
machine finished. I looked at Michelle, who was still resolutely not looking at
me, and fought the urge to just walk out and leave her the coffee. Sooner or
later we were going to have to talk to each other, after all.

For
a moment, neither of us moved. Then I grabbed my cup as she reached for a
coffee packet, and our hands nearly touched.

“Ryan…,”
she said, and stepped back.

“Michelle.”
I grabbed my mug and pulled it away. “I think there’s still some of the
imitation Blue Mountain in the back. I, uh, kind of hid a couple of the packets
back there.”

“Yeah.
Thanks.” She rummaged a bit, then pulled out one of the stashed packages. I
stepped back and let her brew her cup, then handed her the creamer that I knew
she’d drown the coffee in once it finished brewing.

“What’s
with the styrofoam cup?” I asked as she poured. “I thought you wanted us to get
rid of them because they’re mean to the planet.”

“Do
you always have to be such a dick about everything,” she asked. Her voice was
weary. “I mean, come on. Can’t you even make a simple cup of coffee without
turning this into some kind of mind game? Besides, I gave you mine, and you
never gave it back.”

“I
was just trying to make conversation,” I said, surprised at her tone.

Michelle
shook her head as she reached for the box of sugar packets on the counter. “No,
you weren’t. I didn’t jump down your throat, so you had to push to see how far
I’d let you go. You can go wherever you want, Ryan. I’m just not going there
with you any more, okay.”

I
took a swig of coffee. It was scalding hot and burned going down. “Oww. Jesus.
What the hell?” I made a face and tested the inside of my mouth experimentally
with my tongue. Michelle stirred in her sugar, unimpressed, and dumped in a
second batch of creamer on top of the first. “Look, Michelle. I’m sorry. I’m
not really myself these days.”

“Oh
really? I’d say you’re being yourself more than ever.”

Another
swig of coffee, another burn going down. “No, look, it’s her, OK? I don’t know
what she’s doing or how she’s doing it, but everything in my life is going
insane right now, and I’m just sort of flailing around because of it.”

“But
that’s just it,” she said. “It’s not just your life. It’s my life. It’s Sarah’s
life. It’s the lives of everyone you’re working with.”

“And
it’s her life,” I added. “I don’t know what I should do.”

“What
do you want me to tell you, Ryan?” She picked the cup up, the coffee inside the
color of melted chocolate, and held it in front of her like a ward against
evil. “That I forgive you because you’re in kind of a weird place? Well, I
don’t. That you should do something about…her? I don’t know if or what you
should do. I’m just here to make a stupid port of a stupid game and collect my
paycheck, not make you feel better because you’ve got your sensitive artist
panties in a wad.”

“Michelle,”
I said, hating myself for saying it, “I don’t know what to do.”

“Good,”
she replied, turning away. “Maybe that’ll encourage you to think things
through. You know, take some responsibility for what you’re doing instead of
just blundering from crisis to crisis.”

“Terry
wants me to help him,” I said as she started walking away. She stopped.

“Are
you going to?” she asked in a small, scared voice.

 “Do
you think I should?”

“No!”
The word tore out of her like a shriek as she whipped around to stare at me.
“Jesus, Ryan, that thing they’re working on isn’t human!”

“Does
that make her evil?”

“It
tried to kill you!” Her eyes were wide, her face flushed, her mouth open in
disbelief that I’d even entertain the idea. “And now, because it let you see
its tits, you’re going to be its best friend forever? Whatever it is. Whatever
made it, it’s not normal. It’s not right. And nothing good’s going to come of
it being here.”

I
took a step forward, hands held out wide in a gesture of surrender, the pose of
an unarmed cop approaching a hostage-taker. “I don’t know what brought her
here, either, but she’s here now. She’s alive now. And I don’t know if letting
her go on like this is the kindest or the cruelest thing to do.”

“Deleting
her would be the right thing to do!” Michelle’s voice rose as she stalked
toward me, her anger rising. “Don’t you get it, Ryan? Whatever’s going on now
is just the beginning. You’re on the edges, but you’re going to get sucked in.
Whatever she needs now, she’ll need more, and more, until she’s taking
everything.” Suddenly, she threw back her head and laughed, a scary, unhinged
sound. “You know what? I just got it. Just now, I finally got it.”

“Got
what?”

“Her.”
Michelle’s head snapped back down and she fixed me with a bemused predator’s
stare. “She’s the job, Ryan. She’s the goddamned job, and she’s the other
woman, and she always has been.”

“She’s
just a game,” I sputtered, barely believing the words as I said them.

“I
know exactly what she is and what she means, even if you don’t.”

The
words escaped before I could stop them, before I could think about them, before
I’d even realized I’d formed them. “You’re just jealous, you know that? You’re
jealous that she wants me!”

Silence.
Michelle staring at me, eyes impossibly round, face impossibly pale. Her cup
fell to the floor, the coffee spilling out like the blood of a murder victim in
a wide, savage arc.

“Oh,
God. Oh, Shelly. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I didn’t mean that.”

“I
only got to be the other woman once,” she said, quietly, then turned and walked
away.

“Michelle!”

She
didn’t turn, didn’t even slow down. I said something under my breath that would
have gotten me fired if HR had heard it and started after her.

My
foot hit coffee instead and skidded from under me. I felt myself going over,
felt the mug of scalding hot coffee slipping out of my hand. It arced up and
over even as I slipped backwards, glistening past as I went down. Somehow it
spattered on the tile before I hit, the hot spray splashing across the back of
my head as if in anticipation. Scalp wounds are supposed to be bloody, I
thought, and then my head hit the floor with a rifle shot crack and everything
went white. I felt the impact of the mug on the ground, felt the air whoosh out
of me as my back hit, felt something sharp tear into my hand and realized it
was part of the now-broken mug spinning off from its demolition.

Then
there was silence, except for the ringing white noise in my ears, and the
pounding of my heart, and the wheezing of my breath as I tried to figure out
how my lungs worked again.

That,
and the sound of clapping, slow and steady, low and sarcastic. Someone had
seen. Someone had heard. Someone was there.

“Who,”
I croaked, and then “help me up.”

“You’re
pathetic,” replied Leon.

And
then, as an afterthought, “Cocksucker,” as he turned and walked away.

*  
*   *

For
the longest time, Eric just sat in his chair, looking at me, not saying
anything. I sat in the chair opposite, an icepack on the back of my head, and
looked at the floor. Coffee had soaked the back of my shirt and pants, leaving
a ferocious itch as it dried off my skin. In the far distance we could hear
explosions; tests of sound files and triggers that rattled the walls at
irregular intervals.

Finally,
he spoke. “What am I going to do with you, Ryan?” he asked. “You were one of
the few people in this building I thought I could trust absolutely. I thought
you could be professional. I thought you could do your job without letting any
personal issues get in the way. Instead, you wind up flat on your ass in a
puddle of coffee. How’s the hand, by the way?”

I
looked at it. The bleeding had stopped, but I had a fancy new two-inch cut just
below the wrist. “It’s fine. Flesh wound and all that.”

“Good.”
He coughed into his fist, then picked up where he’d left off. “Right. Flat on
your ass in the break room. I ask you to lead the team, and now neither the
Engineering nor the Art lead want to be in the same room with you. I ask you to
work on a simple port, and instead we end up behind pretty much as soon as we
start. Do you have any kind of explanation for this, or should I just advise
you to go take a few weeks’ vacation?”

“Vacation?”
I croaked. “Why vacation?”

“So
you don’t do anything else stupid that would force me to fire you.” He looked
at me again, and the anger swapped itself out for pity. “Come on, Ryan, what is
it? You’re not a screw up, not like this. Is there something else that’s going
on? This isn’t like you.”

I
opened my mouth to say something inoffensive, like a promise to straighten up,
and instead, I started laughing. My head throbbed with each cackle, but I just
couldn’t stop myself. Bent over, howling, I just shook my head and laughed.
“Oh, Jesus, Eric. If you knew. If you only knew.”

“Easy
there.” He was out from around the desk, my head in his hands and cradling me
to look up into the ceiling light. “You sound like you might be concussed. Let
me get a look at your eyes to see if you’re dilated.”

“I’m
not dilated, I’m screwed,” I protested, and suddenly that was even funnier, and
I laughed until I couldn’t breathe.

“Drink
this,” Eric said about a lifetime later, forcing a cup of water between my
hands. I took a gulp, chortled, and coughed as half of it came out my nose.
“Oh, man, man, what did you have to do that for?”

Eric
held the cup in my hands until he was sure I wasn’t going to drop it, then
leaned back, squatting on his haunches. “To keep you from passing out, mostly.”
He stared at me intently. “Do I need to take you to the urgent care? Do I need
to call Sarah and let her do it for me?”

I
blinked twice, and suddenly nothing was funny anymore. “God, no. I’m all right,
Eric. I just tried to apologize to Shelly and it didn’t work and she spilled
her coffee, and then I slipped and….” My head was throbbing now, and my hand
throbbing with it, and then I thought about Leon. “Oh, God. What a mess.”

“You
are,” he said matter-of-factly. “And I still think I should take you to the
emergency room.”

“It’s
just a bump,” I protested. “And to answer your question, yeah, there’s
something going on. I guess I should have told you about it a while ago.”

He
stood, then turned to face the window. “If it’s about canceling Blue
Lightning….” 

“It
is. Sort of.”  I gathered myself to tell him everything, then stopped. What
could I tell him? That our cancelled project was walking around the building,
naked, demanding overtime and a hell of a lot more? That would get me sent to a
whole different kind of hospital and get Sarah brought in, and sooner or later
she’d talk to Leon and Shelly, and….

No.
Wasn’t going to happen, couldn’t happen, couldn’t be allowed to happen. In an
instant the alternative made itself crystal clear. There was a way out of this,
a way to move forward and buy enough time to make penance for my sins later.
There was a way to save the project and, if I was lucky, at least put Blue
Lightning on hold for long enough for me to figure out what to do about her.

“Yes?”
Eric was waiting, and not patiently. He was angry and just wanted me to give
him an appropriate target. And if I didn’t, I was quite certain, then it would
be me.

“There’s
a black project running for Blue Lightning,” I said. Eric nodded but didn’t say
anything, and after a minute, I continued. “Terry’s leading it. There are at
least four other people involved. They’ve been working on it instead of
Salvador, and they asked me to get involved.”

“Instead
of Salvador?” he finally asked. “Not on top of it?”

“It’s
gotten kind of intense,” I said, and hoped that my voice didn’t give away
anything more than it ought. “At least, that’s what they told me.”