Vaporware Read Online Free

cabinets—was strictly functional and at least partially
overwhelmed by the tide of clutter that the project had generated.
    “I
still don’t get why you get an office,” she asked lazily. “Is that my fault?”
    “I
don’t know,” I replied, flicking the door open a little wider so anyone passing
could estimate at a glance how much physical distance there was between the two
of us. “If you really want to know the truth, Eric insisted. He said he was
tired of me not getting anything done before midnight because I was answering
questions all day, so he wanted to put me someplace where I could shut the door
and work uninterrupted once in a while.”
    “Which
was conveniently located down the hall from his office,” she said sweetly,
without smiling. “And the fact that it happened right after we, you know—”
    “Blew
up all over the lunchroom?” I said it without rancor. “Don’t ask me. I just
work here. Besides, that was a long time ago, and we’ve got a presentation to
fix.” I looked across the desk at Michelle, the unspoken mantra of “eye
contact, eye contact, eye contact” looping in the back of my head. She was
short, and the way she sat, her feet dangled a couple of inches off the floor.
Like everyone else in the office, she wore jeans, which she’d paired with a
bright yellow t-shirt from a project we’d wrapped up three years ago. She
cocked her head, and her hair, reddish brown and longer than she’d worn it when
we’d dated, slipped down over one eye. Irritated, she brushed it away. No nail
polish, I noted automatically. It went with the no makeup and the no jewelry.
That was Michelle; there was never anything but Michelle, and if you couldn’t
handle that then God help you.
    Back
in the day, I hadn’t been able to. But, I reminded myself, I was with Sarah now,
and there was work to do.
    “So
how do you want to arrange this,” I asked. I scraped my chair across the carpet
to the whiteboard. “Are we going to start with a pure gameplay capture
sequence, or do you want to see if we have time to do something pre-rendered?”
    Michelle
shook her head. “We don’t have time for pre-rendered. The best thing we can do
is a capture of you playing through the core sequence, then seeing if the sound
guys can put some music behind it and maybe a little voiceover.”
    I
nodded. “Embed it in the presentation, or run it separately?”
    She
rubbed her chin, then stood and walked to the board. “If we embed it, there’s
less of a chance of them forgetting to play it. Also, there’s no time lost with
a switchover. So that makes sense. What I was thinking,” and she took a marker
from the shelf at the bottom of the board, “would be that we’d start with the
logo, then dissolve to the gameplay. Is there anything you think we need to
show off besides the circuit runs and the combat?”
    I
grimaced. “Everything else is just FPS, remember.” Michelle started to say
something, but I interrupted her. “Seriously, that’s our killer feature, and
nothing else is going to look as cool next to it. If we want to have a wow
moment at the beginning, that’s it. Maybe pull in some multiplayer for later,
but, no, at the start, we show that off.”
    “Show
her off,” Michelle disagreed, and sketched a rough female figure more clearly
into the frames she’d made while waiting. “She’s got to be a big part of this.
She’s important. Hell, she’s the game.”
    “No,
we’re the game. Everything we’ve put into it. But you’re right, she’s a big
part of it. Maybe if we—”
    My
office phone rang.
    Instinctively,
both of us looked toward the telephone. It was a sleek, black thing, covered
with buttons and, occasionally, blinking red lights, and at the top of the
keypad was a small LCD screen that conveniently showed the number of whoever or
whatever extension was calling at the time. I twisted in my seat and leaned
forward to get a better look at it, then realized that I knew whose the