Vaporware by Richard Dansky Page A

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?”
    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