Davey Tabor, next to Lu Ping, was on vacation, supposedly trekking Nepal. Davey called in every few days from what he said was a satellite phone, telling glowing anecdotes about monks and Sherpas and the thousand-year enlightenment, but he seemed vague on the specifics, which led some Podders to suspect that the trek was a cover story and that Davey was actually doing a round of job interviews in California.
Beltran, next to Davey, was signed out to a mental health day — the company allowed them five per annum. Bjorn Bjornsson, next to Beltran, was busy grooming his screen pets, a litter of furry whatzits, and Vaughn Naubek at the next desk was making fun of him.
Bjorn said, “At least I don’t carry pictures of Phoebe in my wallet.”
Naubek had changed out of street clothes into his working costume, a letter carrier’s summer knits, white knee socks, gray-blue shorts, a sky-blue shirt, and a U.S. Postal Service pith helmet. Naubek had taken to dressing “in character” to get himself psyched up for working on a new-series monster known as the Postal Worker. He winced at Bjorn’s comment, glanced at the couch where Phoebe slept, uttered something vile in UNIX, and went back to work.
Jens hung his coat on the rack, signed himself in on the in/out whiteboard, and sat at his terminal between Prem and Naubek. He debugged SmoShadow for the next few minutes, clearing error flags, until he got it to compile. He grabbed his mug and went up to the second floor for the weekly meeting of the Spec Committee.
10
Meredith Shattuck, sexless, cool, and twenty-two, was boss of everybody in the conference room, Digby from the server ring, the twins from marketing, Jaffe the attorney, the head creative, and Jens, who came in late. This was the Spec Committee, BigIf’s politburo of design, where system problems were hashed out, new product lines discussed, asses kissed and paddled, egos fluffed and crushed. Meredith presided in her heavy horn-rims and her pearl-gray Nehru suit, buttoned to her tiny, pointed chin. The suit made her look less Indian than Maoist, a Maoist from Connecticut, Miss Porter’s School, and Harvard, where she had spent, she always said, the best semester of her life, leaving at eighteen to join and finally run the largest war game on the Web. Her hair was short and glossy brown, barbered carefully, hair by hair it seemed, and she listened to everything — the head creative ranting, mad schemes from the twins, Jaffe’s dense and verbless legalese — with the same expression of polite engagement, one hand on the blondwood conference table, one hand in her tailored lap, a Connecticut Confucian, a Communist entrepreneur, a woman trapped inside the body of a woman.
“Smoke?” she said to Jens. “Are we actually talking about smoke?”
“No,” said Jens, “smoke shadows.”
The topic wasn’t actually smoke or shadows, but rather Jens’ modest (so he thought) proposal to upgrade the blackened crater, the game’s Cartesian 0, 0, 0 and universal starting point. Jens, knowing that he would be on the crush-and-paddle list for not completing Monster Todd, had planned to unveil SmoShadow as cover and excuse for his delays on the new monster bot. Jens made his pitch. The smoke pouring from the crater, as presently configured, didn’t cast a shadow — a nit, perhaps, Jens said, but why not do it right?
Digby leapt in before Jens could finish. Digby pointed out that they already had shadows in the crater, moving with the sun, a phasing crater lip of gloom, adjusted for the weather, the goddamn fucking weather, Digby said, clouds and partial clouds and toxic clouds, plus other local-object shadows, helper bots and human, holybots and monsters, and all of these had to be splined and tessellated by the angle engines, giant loads of memory and throughput, batching plots to render engines, which colored plots and shaded them, laying texture maps (sand, shale, stucco wall), and turned the colors down to create a hazy fading in the distance, rounding objects in the foreground by wrapping darkness around “curves,” eight or nine subrenderings, Digby pointed out, Z-sorting and MIP mapping, alpha-blending, P-correction — all of this to produce a weak 3-D illusion, forget about the loads of movement, aping movement, saving movement, everybody’s moving and the game is about movement, we’re heading west to destiny, and then you’ve got preloaded sprite routines, the mo-capture files, and the new full-polygon monsters, and all of this remembering and math-on-the-fly was carefully divided between the servers and the user’s at-home RAM and vid cards, dual-ported, double-buffered, co-co-co-co-processed, and even so, Digby said, they were barely hitting three frames a second in the lulls, and now you want to enhance the smoke?
“No,” Jens said, “the shadows. The smoke is fine, it’s wonderful. I’m talking about shadows.”
The crater was every player’s first impression of the game and, if studies were correct, the place they saw on average 6.2 times a month (the average player died that often and was reborn from the hole — this was a post — Plague War number and a happy one; in the worst weeks of the war, players died a dozen times a day and desubscribed at the rate of ten a minute). The crater was important, Jens contended, a signature tableau, the realistic scree, the ocher tones and dusty wash, a symbol of a land returned to Bible times by Revelation 21. The crater code was very nearly perfect, Jens believed, except for this: the smoky pillar, paletted in gorgeous twenty-four-bit gray, should cast a shadow in its thickest part, and yet it didn’t. Jens had written SmoShadow to track the billow’s dancing shape and local densities, a function of prevailing winds. SmoShadow would upload the sun’s position and throw a moving shadow on the crater wall, making allowances for rocks and rough terrain and the lip-horizon (because smoke in shadow, out of sun, would not cast a shadow of its own) — a complicated hack, and yet Jens had made it happen in a kilobyte, compiled.
“I have the mod right here,” said Jens, brandishing SmoShadow on the disk. “Just give me a second and I’ll get it loaded. You’ll see how beautiful it is.”
Jens had expected support from the head creative or at least the twins — they were always hot for new immersive graphics — but the twins were silent and the head creative said, “I think we need more dread.”
Reed and Reese were nodding. They claimed to be nonidentical twins. Jens, who couldn’t see a difference, suspected that the twins’ parents, fearing merged identities and unhealthy personality dependence, had told their sons, falsely, that they weren’t identical and the twins grew up believing in their difference, so they were relaxed and non-hung-up about dressing alike (baggy chinos, polo shirts) and driving the same car — vintage MG Spiders, a color called Champagne — and thinking the same way about how to sell the game and whip the competition, because they weren’t identical, they were just agreeing, like any two smart and market-savvy people.
“I’m not sure I follow, Head,” said Meredith.
Head was shaggy, fifty, ponytailed, a lamp-tanned movie refugee who kept himself by force of will on California time. Head said that Hollywood was dead, that the Web was the future of all entertainment narratives. Deep immersive gaming — this was the new movies and they should all be damn glad to be among the founding fathers, the Chaplins and the Griffiths and the Lumières, but everybody knew that Head was still in love with the big screen, still mourning the loss of the Ohm’s Law franchise, a series of high-grossing summer action pictures, Ohm’s Law, Ohm’s Law II, OL III: The Reckoning, up to OL VII due out in July. Head had co-executive-produced the first Ohm’s Law, which told the story of Joey Ohm, a tough but flawed detective, battling an asteroid. Sequels pitted Joey against other planetary threats, global warming, mass extinction, a wandering black hole, but Head was gone by then, disenfranchised of his franchise, squeezed out by his former so-called friends’ attorneys.