Vaporware (7 page)

He
looked around the room, letting those words hang there in the air while he
crossed his arms over his chest.

“What
the hell?” Leon whispered, and dug an elbow into my ribs. “What’s he talking
about, man?”

“Wait
for it,” I told him sotto voce. “You’re going to love this one.”

Leon
turned and looked at me quizzically. “He told you? Why’d he tell you?”

“I
wouldn’t dream of spoiling the surprise,” I said, not without bitterness, and
turned back to the front of the room. “Come on, man,” Leon muttered, but after
a moment he did the same.

“As
you know, we’ve been working with BlackStone for the last year to publish Blue
Lightning. Everyone here has put a lot of time and energy into that game, and I
want to thank you for everything you’ve done, but unfortunately, BlackStone
does not want to continue funding development for Blue Lightning at this time.”

“BS!”
someone shouted, an old joke from the team rooms that suddenly wasn’t funny.
“So we’re going with another publisher, right?” someone else called out, a
female this time.

“They
can’t do that!”

“Why
do they want to kill it?”

“Are
they crazy?”

And
finally, the question Eric had been waiting for, “What’s going to happen to
us?” It came from up front, from an engineer named Terry Lee who put the “er”
in “nerd,” a quiet guy passionately devoted to his work and his gadgets and,
near as anyone else could tell, not a hell of a lot else. “What’s going to
happen to us?”

Eric
smiled, an “everything is going to be all right” grin that didn’t quite make it
to his eyes. I could feel my hands curling into fists as I saw him do it,
knowing that the whole thing had been choreographed so neatly that Terry didn’t
even know he was part of it. In a couple of seconds, Eric would look sad and
tell everyone that Daddy had a new girlfriend now and that we should be happy
to meet her. And the whole thing was so smooth that they’d all go along with
it, be on their best behavior and spit-shine their virtual shoes in order to
make a good first impression when the new project came down the pike.

The
fact that he was right to do it didn't help me feel better, not one little bit.

“We,”
he said, and I winced in anticipation, “are going to be doing the current gen
console and PC ports of the project they call Salvador. That means that we’re
going to be on a tight schedule. It means we’re going to be busy. It may even
mean that we need to do a little staffing up, but,” and he paused for effect,
“if we do a good job on this, there could be more work coming down the pike. A
lot more.”

Pandemonium
resolutely failed to erupt, just a low rumble that was half grumble, half
excited whisper. Leon made a noise like steam escaping from a busted pipe.
“Man, that sucks. Blue Lightning would have kicked ass.”

“I
know.” Something in my tone made him look at me speculatively. Up front, Eric
was answering questions, each one no doubt of vital importance to the future of
the studio, but I wasn’t listening.

“Shit.
This has got to blow big time for you. I’m sorry.”

I
hitched my shoulders. It might have been a shrug. “At least he let me know
first.”

Leon
shook his head. “Yeah, like giving you the blindfold and cigarette after he
shows you the bullet with your name on it. That’s cold, man. That ain’t right.”

“It’s
the publisher, not Eric. He’s just doing his job,” I said, but it sounded
hollow, even to me. Leon said something that might have been “Wait here. I’ll
be right back,” and slid off into the crowd. I watched him go for a moment,
then turned my eyes back to the front of the room.

As
I did, the lights flickered briefly, never quite going out, but dropping to a
definite dim for a good half-second or so. People looked at  the fixtures,
worried for that split second until the roar of the air conditioning unit
reawakening confirmed that we did in fact have power.

“No
big deal, just another brownout,” someone ahead of me explained, and woman
standing next to him—a new hire, I thought, a younger woman who’d just
graduated from one of the video game degree programs popping up like mold in a
bachelor’s fridge—nodded, relieved to know that we weren’t getting a flyover
from a UFO and instead were just teetering on the edge of a blackout because
too many people in the local grid had cranked their HVACs too high. Behind her,
I could just make out Leon talking excitedly to someone, but from where I
stood, it was impossible to see who.

Eric
took that opportunity to wrap things up. “That’s all I’ve got,” he said. “I
know it’s a lot to digest, so I’m going to unofficially shut down production
for the day. If you want to stick around, play games, talk—whatever—I’ll be
here in my office until six. Otherwise, if you want to get out of here, go
ahead. We’ll get a fresh start on Salvador tomorrow.”

He
turned and walked slowly toward his office, trailing would-be questioners like
a celebrity trolling a string of reporters. By the time I looked away, the rest
of the group had already started to break up, drifting into clumps mostly
broken down by department. In ones and twos, people were straying back to their
desks, far more than were headed for the door. I stood and watched, shaking my
head.

“Pathetic,
huh?” said a familiar voice at my elbow. “Give them the day off and they still
head right back to their desks.”

“Maybe
they’re just packing up, Michelle,” I said stonily. “Or they have other things
to do.”

“Uh-huh.”
She sounded unconvinced. A hand, which I was reasonably sure was hers, latched
onto my elbow. “Leon and I are going out to Montague’s so we can get properly
drunk and pissed off about this whole thing. Are you coming?”

I
turned to face her, brushing her hand off my arm in the process. She stood
there, her arm half-poised in midair to try to tug at me again, face caught in
an expression that I’d long since grown familiar with, then gotten weary of. It
was the look of “What am I going to do to Ryan for his own good,” as portrayed
by widened eyes, a mouth turned down into a concerned frown, and an
ever-so-slight head tilt to the right.

“You
go,” I said, feeling myself falling into the steps of a familiar dance. “I want
to see if Eric's got any docs on the new project I can look at. You know, get a
head start on tomorrow.”

“God,
you're bad at this corporate rah-rah shit,” she said, gently re-attaching her
hand to my arm and then closing it in a grip that told me she’d been studying
with fiddler crabs. Not-so-gentle pressure drew me down the hall and toward the
door. Leon was already there, holding it open and blessedly doing so without
comment. “We can do this one of two ways. Either you can say something stupidly
noble, which will piss me off enough to argue with you in the middle of what is
really looking like a shitty day for everyone, or you can just let me drag you
off peacefully.”

“Those
are my only choices?” I asked, barely bothering to try to slow the pace.
Honestly, there wasn’t much point to it.

Michelle
shook her head, hair going everywhere. “Not much of a choice, to be honest.
Either way, you end up at Montague’s, completely shitfaced, before lunch. The
only question is how long is it going to take to get you out the door.”

I
looked at her, bemused. “Yeah, whatever. I’ll be fine.”

In
response, she spun me, shoving far harder than someone her size should have
been able to and slamming me up against the wall. My head hit maybe an inch
from a framed poster celebrating one of our early games, a misbegotten
platformer starring an anthropomorphized vulture named Varney. It had tanked.I
had about six-tenths of a second to consider that before Michelle was up in my
face, furious with me. “You listen to me, Ryan Colter. You will not be fine. You
are not fine right now. You are having a really crappy day, and the best thing
I can do for you, as a friend, is take you someplace where you can shut your
brain off for a couple of hours and tell everyone how you really feel about
what just happened, because today you get a mulligan. Today, you can be a dick
and no one will call you on it. So even though you’d rather pretend to be noble
where everyone can see you, you might as well take advantage of this one time
offer and the fact that you actually have people in this office who care about
you.” Her volume had been rising as she went along, until by the end it was a
full-fledged shout. She stood there, red-faced, and glared at me. Somehow
during this exchange, her hand had moved from my arm to the front of my shirt.
It looked for all the world as if I were being mugged.

“You’re
not supposed to care about me anymore, Shelly,” I said. “It’s very sweet, but—”

She
slapped me. The crack of skin on skin echoed like a pistol shot, deafening in
the enclosed hallway. “You stupid son of a bitch,” she said, and took a step
back. “I don’t. Leon does.”

And
she turned and walked away, out the open door, while I stood there and felt all
the eyes on me. Leon shot me a glance that said everything that needed to be
said, then let the door swing shut and walked down to the parking lot, a few
steps behind Michelle.

“Ow,”
I said to nobody in particular and rubbed my cheek. It stung where she’d popped
me, and I was quite certain that the left side of my face was now fire-engine
red. “Brilliant,” I muttered and headed for my office. There was no sense in
heading home, not until my face got its usual pasty sheen back. With my luck,
Sarah would decide to come home for lunch, and explaining to her that I’d been
slapped at the office by an ex-girlfriend was simply not something I really
felt up to doing.

Instead,
I figured, I’d get a head start on tomorrow’s work. I’d archive all of the Blue
Lightning documents and prepare the closing kit, the virtual steamer trunk full
of everything related to the project that would get tucked away into a virtual
attic in case anyone ever wanted to see it again. The decks would be cleared
for Salvador, assuming I stuck around long enough to work on it.

I’d
been at it for all of ten minutes when there was a knock on the door. I looked
up to see who it was and spotted Terry, half-leaning around the corner. “Can I
come in?” 

I
nodded. “Sure. Have a seat. I wasn’t doing anything important, just cleaning up
some old files.”

He
blinked, then ambled in. Terry fit the first half of the old saying about game
developers, “rail or whale,” and he looked like turning up the HVAC would blow
him clear out of the building. He was tall and skinny, with a shockingly round
face and black hair that was maybe ten bucks’ worth of trimming away from being
done with a Flobee. As he folded himself into the spare chair, I finished
packing files into the archive I was building and waited for him to speak.

“So,
uh, what do you think?” Terry’s eyes were focused somewhere about a foot above
my head and to the right, which was as close as he was likely to get to looking
me in the eye.

“About
this?” I shrugged. “It’s business, Terry. Eric did a great job taking care of
everyone.”

He
leaned forward, his arms resting on the edge of my desk. “But he didn’t take
care of everyone.”

“Hmm?”
I shut down my web browser and chat programs and glanced in Terry’s general
direction. “We’ve all got jobs, don’t we? That’s what’s important.”

“You
don’t sound like you believe that.”

I
shook my head. “What’s not to believe? Who didn’t get taken care of?”

He
blinked, then said solemnly “Blue Lightning.”

“Blue
Lightning?” I laughed. “I’d say Blue Lightning got taken care of once and for
all.”

He
snorted, his face turning red. “Blue Lightning’s a great project. They should
have let us finish it.”

I
nodded. “Thanks, Terry,” I said softly, then got a hold of myself. “I think so,
too. But it’s out of our hands. If we want to have jobs tomorrow,” —And do
you?, my subconscious kept asking—“then we have to wave goodbye. I don’t like
the decision, but I can’t argue with the logic. Besides,” and the words tasted
like the inside of an ashtray as I said them, “I hear some cool things about
Salvador.”

Terry
looked crestfallen, and his face went from red to white. “I thought you’d be
the one person to really stand behind the project, Ryan. It was your vision.
You’ve been on it longer than anyone else. Why aren’t you trying to save it?”

The
shutdown sequence on my system started, I spun in my chair. “Because there’s no
way to save it. I can’t fly to BSoft headquarters and convince them to fund the
game when they’ve made up their mind already. I’m not going to drag my heels
and screw up the next project, and get people fired. What exactly do you want
me to do, Terry, because I don’t know what it is that I can do? Hell, I don’t
even know what I want to do, not that it actually matters worth a damn.”

Terry’s
eyes opened wider, and he rocked back into his chair. “Jeez, man, I’m sorry. I
know you’re upset about this—”

“I’m
not upset!” He stared at me. I coughed into my hand. “OK, maybe I’m a little
pissed off. Not at you, Terry. But Blue Lightning is going away whether we want
it to or not, so I can’t—we can’t let ourselves go crazy over it.” I tried to
smile. “You did some really great work with the AI. Did I ever tell you that?”