Vaporware (8 page)

He
nodded. “Yeah. A couple of times. You said you liked the detection algorithm
that would chain the state changes through the guards.” He looked pleased at
the memory. “And I really hate to throw away that work.”

“It’s
not getting thrown away,” I told him as I stood up. Ideally, Terry would get
the hint. “We’re keeping all the Blue Lightning assets.”

“We
are?” Terry’s face lit up with hope. “Are they staying on the network?”

I
thought about it for a minute and took a couple of steps toward the door.
Coincidentally, this took me a couple of steps closer to the still-seated
Terry. “I don’t know. Eric didn’t tell me how we’re going to handle things,
though I think we might just back up the database and pull it off Perforce. But
BlackStone isn’t taking the assets. So who knows? Maybe someday we’ll be able
to resurrect the game and do it properly.”

He
nodded, a little too eagerly, and uncoiled from the chair in a cloud of knees
and elbows. “That would be great,” he said. “If we could work on it again some
day. Thanks for your time, Ryan. I really appreciate it.” He grabbed my hand,
shook it, stood, then shook my hand again and walked off with a particularly
energetic, stiff-legged gait. Just watching him go made me nervous. It reminded
me of water striders and Daddy Longlegs and things that live under the bed when
you’re six years old.

A
ping from my system told me that it had finally finished shutting down. There
was no reason to stay in the building, not any longer. I might have given Terry
the party line, or at least some of it, but there was still a lot of thinking I
had to do for myself.

The
lights in my office suddenly seemed much too bright. I turned them off and
left.

Chapter 6

I'd
made it almost halfway to my car when my iPhone started blowing up with text
messages. A quick look told me they were all from Leon, and all variations on
the theme of MAN WHERE R U?

GOING
HOME, I texted back, and made it maybe ten feet further toward my car before
the response hit. “WRONG ANSWER. EVERYONE @ MONTAGUES. WAITING ON YOU.” Then, a
second later, “RUNNING OUT THAT FRUITY BELGIAN CRAP YOU LIKE. HURRY.”

In
spite of myself, I laughed, then sent back a response. “NO THX—MICHELLE.” It
zipped into the ether with a ping, and I crossed the rest of the distance to my
car.

It
was silver (mostly) and looked new (mostly), at least until you peeked inside
and saw the impressive amount of crap strewn around the back seat. Fast food
wrappers, abandoned electronics packaging, unopened mail, dog-eared books, and
more rattled around back there, accurately reflecting my state of mind most
days.

The
phone rang as I was swinging myself inside. “You’re kidding, right? Nobody uses
phones to actually talk anymore, Leon.”

He
snorted. In the background, I could hear yelling and the clatter of glasses,
overlaid with a thin coat of jukebox George Thorogood. “You text too slow.
Shelly said just call you and end the drama.”

I
shut the door and pulled my seat belt on. “You seriously think I’m going to
swing by so Shelly can take another swing at me?”

He
laughed. “You asked for that one, Ryan. But if you apologize real nice, I think
she might let you buy her a beer and tell her you’re sorry.”

“I’m
not supposed to be buying my ex-girlfriend beers, Leon,” I said, hitting the
ignition button. “Or had you forgotten that?”

I
could almost hear him shrug. “Details. Just get over here, all right? I’ll see
you when you get arrive.”

“Sarah—”
I started, but he cut me off.

 “She
knows. I called her and told her you needed to get pissed, and she gave her
blessing after I promised I’d get you a ride home.” He paused. “You got a smart
woman, bro. Now come on over to the ‘gue, get stupid, and get it all out of
your system before you go do anything stupid. No argument.”

He
cut the connection before I could protest, and I flipped the phone onto the
passenger seat. I thought about it and decided that if Sarah was good with it,
I’d better be good with it, too. Besides, Leon was right—better to talk things
through with people and maybe come to an informed, reasonable decision before
talking to Sarah about the future.

None
of the other folks walking across the parking lot waved as I pulled out, but
that was all right. I didn’t wave to any of them, either.

 *  
*   *

Montague’s
was not technically what one would call an Irish pub, not in this day and age.
For one thing, it was most emphatically not decorated in chintzy pseudo-Celtic
knickknacks, black and white pictures of James Joyce, or huge reproductions of
classic Guinness posters. The old-school jukebox—which meant that it wasn’t
digital— featured precisely one Chieftains CD, and every time someone tried to
play a track off it, the bartender cut the feed to the speakers in under thirty
seconds. They did in fact serve Guinness, as well as Harp and Magners and a
number of more obscure brews that originated in Ireland, but this was a matter
of customer preference and not part of any horseshit prefabricated theme.

By
the time I got there, the drunk was already well underway. Shelly and Leon may
have led the charge, but several other folks had gotten the same idea, and the
center of the bar was a knot of grumbling game devs pondering their next move.
There were already enough in place for the central table amoeba to have formed,
with numerous smaller ones pushed together to make one contiguous, oddly-shaped
seating arrangement.

I
stood there, framed in the doorway for a moment while my eyes adjusted to the
light, or lack thereof. The board at the end of the bar announced the day’s
specials. There were $2.50 drafts for beers I’d never heard of, a burger with
stuff on it I’d never eat, and a mixed drink called a “staggering squirrel”
that sounded like a third-string Batman villain. The televisions over the bar
were on but muted, two showing soccer games and one showing a combination of
stock tickers and talking heads.

When
my vision cleared, I could see Leon at the far end of the mass of tables, an
empty chair next to him. A purse hung over the back, and a half-empty beer sat
on the table. For a moment, I thought it must be Michelle’s, only to my
knowledge she’d never left a beer half-finished in her life.

“Dude!”
Leon had spotted me, half-rising out of his seat and waving me over. “I didn’t
think you’d make it.”

Heads
swiveled and a couple of beers were raised in my direction as I made my way
over to the table. “Hey, folks,” I said, and pulled up a chair on the other
side of him from where Michelle’s stuff lurked. “What we have here is a failure
to lubricate.”

“That
should be taken care of immediately,” he said and raised an arm for a waitress.
“This man needs a beer, bad.” I cringed, but the server, perhaps recognizing
that this had been One Of Those Days, just nodded and vanished into the
darkness behind the bar.

“So,
man, like what the hell?” Across the table was one of the character artists, a
skinny little guy named Gordon who’d just started six weeks earlier. He’d been
with EA and a couple of the other big companies, and everyone on the team had
been blown away by his portfolio. We all thought we were lucky to get him. “I
mean, I came out here to get away from all that political bullshit killing
projects, and here it is all over again.”

He
took a swallow of beer for emphasis, then looked at me like I might have an
answer. I didn’t have one, so I grabbed a couple of peanuts out of the bowl in
the middle of the table and popped them in my mouth.

“You
work for BlackStone, you ain’t getting away from the BS,” Leon chimed in, to a
general round of bitter laughter. “Man, I am so pissed.”

I
put my hands on the table. “It could be a lot worse,” I said. “Nobody’s getting
laid off, we’ve got work on a title that’s going to make some money, and….” My
voice trailed off as I tried to think of a third good thing.

Gordon
didn’t let me twist in the wind for more than half a minute, which I thought
was kind of him. “We’re working on a port,” he exploded. “Ports suck.”

“Ports
are easy,” I argued back.

“That’s
because they’re shit work,” he replied. “We’re going to be scaling down
next-gen stuff for old-gen consoles, which means it’s going to look like crap.
Plus, we won’t get enough time to do it right because hey, it’s just a port.”

“They’re
going for simultaneous release—” I started, but he waved me off.

“Whichever
team is doing the lead SKU is going to have bigger problems than getting us
assets on time.” He sat back in his chair and drank angrily. “And the worst
part is, once you get a reputation as a port house, nobody ever looks at you as
anything else, ever again. We’re screwed.”

And
here it was, the very thing Eric had mentioned. Gordon was going to jump ship.
Whether or not he already had lines in the water was immaterial. It was clear
that he’d made up his mind, and was trying to make up everyone else’s for them.
If his arguments got a foothold, there’d be a stampede out the door. That would
leave the folks who stayed short-handed and force us to hire any warm bodies we
could find, and that meant the chances of the game being crap would go from 98%
to a cool one hundred.

Michelle
picked that moment to return, sliding bonelessly into the chair. She shot me a
quick look, then planted her elbows on the table and leaned forward. “Come on,
Gordon,” she said, not taking her eyes off him. “It’s not going to be that bad.
Right, Ryan?”

The
look she gave me this time was fraught with significance. It said, Here is your
moment, which I am giving to you. Do with it what you will, but you owe me.

The
beer finally arrived—Guinness, of course. I took a sip. “Shelly’s right,” I
said. Gordon snorted in disbelief, but I didn’t let him start up again. “Look,
losing Blue Lightning sucks. Trust me, it sucks worse for me because I knew
about this before you guys did and had to sit there and take it while Eric said
he was going to kill my baby.” I took another drink, and corrected myself. “Our
baby.”

 There
were murmurs of agreement around the table, and I pressed on. “I don’t
necessarily like the idea of working on a port, either. But if it’s going to be
a port, at least it’s a port of something cool, and something that’s going to
sell. And when we come through, we’re going to be fucking ninjas and we’ll
write our own ticket. .”

The
words were coming fast and easy now, and they were having an effect. I could
see a few heads nodding in agreement, the guys who were looking for a reason to
stay. Next to me, Leon was a statue, staring into his beer. Michelle kept her
head on her hands, looking everywhere but at me with a tiny half-smile on her
lips.

“We’re
keeping the code base. We’re keeping the assets. Blue Lightning is still ours,
not theirs. So we do this, we make our cash, and then we flip BS the bird as we
sign on with a new publisher and make something that will ensure they piss
themselves with envy.” I didn’t know where the patter was coming from, but it
fell into that old rhythm that I knew from a thousand feature meetings, the one
that let me take everything everyone had said and weave it into a simple,
single vision that everyone recognized as something they’d helped make.

Something
they could believe in. Something they could make real

“Besides,
it’s going to embarrass the hell out of their internal teams when we do an
old-gen version that plays better than their next-gen ones. You know we’re
better than they are. Give them a head start, give them twice the team, I don’t
care. We’re going to play tighter and better on old-gen because we know our
shit, and there’s still a lot more people with those consoles than with the next-gen
ones. We’ll get better scores, we’ll sell more, and at the end of the project,
we cash the check and give BlackStone a big, fat fuck you.”

I
took a long drink of Guinness, which under normal circumstances would have been
a mistake. Screw it; these circumstances weren’t normal. If Eric knew what I
was saying, he’d probably have a heart attack—the bill on all this anti-BStone
sentiment was going to come due sooner or later—but he’d asked me to get people
to rally ‘round, and that was exactly what I was doing.

Slowly,
across from me, Gordon shook his head. “Believe that if you want,” he muttered,
but that was all. It was over. The table broke into a dozen small
conversations, or at least the people sitting at it did, and I felt the tension
leak out of me. Michelle was still sitting there, smiling, which I wasn’t sure
I liked, but Leon was thumping me on the back like I’d just taken down Apollo
Creed without crapping thunder in my shorts.

Since
Leon’s built like a telephone pole and I’m built like a fire hydrant, this
didn’t quite result in my spraying Guinness all over the table, but it came
close. “Easy, Spartacus,” I told him and got a laugh in response.

“Good
stuff, man. You know, I was real worried about you at that meeting, but it
looks like you’re OK. I’m glad you’re cool with it.”

I
took another sip of dark foamy goodness and found to my surprise that I’d
nearly emptied the pint glass. “It is what it is. You make the best of what
you’ve got and try not to screw anyone else in the process.” I killed the beer
and started looking around impatiently for the next one. Someone else patted me
on the shoulder and pressed a full glass into my hand. I took a sip, looked
around to thank whoever had given it to me, and found they were gone. What the
hell, I told myself, and raised it high.

“To
Blue Lightning!” I said. “Blue Lightning!” the rest of the room echoed. “She
was gonna be beautiful,” I said. “And we’re gonna miss her.”

I
called Sarah as another beer arrived and told her that I was still at the bar.
She told me to take my time, and then asked me to hand the phone to Leon. I
did, and after that, things got a little blurry. Loud, too, but they’d been
loud before that. Lots of people being loud, either talking about what had just
happened or aggressively not talking about it in a way that said they were
still stewing over what had happened. For my part, I just tried to keep
everyone laughing. In the end, the noise and the light and the laughter all
blurred into one, the wake for the game we’d all slaved on and loved and would
never see again.

*  
*   *

I’m
reasonably certain I didn’t go face-first into a beer. That’s because when I
woke up, I had marinara sauce on my nose, and that told me I’d gone down into
one of the plates of fried cheese sticks instead. Slowly, I wiped it off, and
tried to synthesize the sounds I was hearing into something that might or might
not be words.

“I’ll
take him home.” Michelle’s voice came from someplace far away and to the left,
and I tried to turn my head to get a better idea of where it was coming from.
After a moment of this, I realized that opening my eyes might help, though the
significant effort required might be beyond me at the moment.