an inch and a half below average, but for some reason everyone seemed to be over six feet tall. I got to where the bar was, more or less by mashing my face into the back of three different navy blazers. The bar was unmanned. I stepped behind it, kicking aside empty cans of Red Bull as though they were dry leaves, and rummaged through bottles until I’d united gin, tonic, and a plastic cup.
I turned around and, surprisingly, Lisa was there. I handed her an airplane-size bottle of Jameson that she tapped against my glass.
“Nice demo.”
“Thanks.”
“Seriously,” she said. “You coped.”
“How’s the party?” I asked.
“Peter Molyneux’s fly is open. So there’s that.”
“So let’s get to a corner. I need to ask you something,” I said.
“Okay.” Her lips compressed slightly and she took her distance, bracing for whatever was to come. It occurred to me that women in tech probably got propositioned a lot.
“So look. We’re here at E3, right? You showed up for this,” I said.
“There’s a lot of tech stuff you don’t have to go to, but I do.”
“That’s exactly it.” Another blazered giant elbowed between us, giving me another face full of high thread count. “And I came to run the demo. I slept, like, three hours last night, and I was humiliated in front of hundreds, if not thousands, of my peers. And I would still have killed to come here. Killed. I’m not like you. I’m in a suite party at E3 and that is the center of my universe, and you’re totally unaware that this…”
I paused, and noticed again there must have been a hundred people here in a hotel room that legally allowed sixty-three, and apart from Lisa every single one of them seemed to be laughing, or shouting to make a point about video games.
“… this… rules. It actually rules. But you act like it’s a complete chore. Like you’d rather be anyplace else in the world. It makes me feel like a loser. Why do you even come here if you hate it?”
“Because,” she said carefully, “I like solving problems. And I got into this because the technology is going to be more important than the games. And for a reason I don’t want to tell you. You’ll laugh.”
“Today isn’t my day to laugh at people.”
“I wanted to make cyberspace.”
“Like VRML? That 3-D Web thing?”
“Games. Games were going to be everything. Why doesn’t anybody remember what it was like in 1984? We had TRON. We had Neuromancer. It was logical.”
“Wait. Wait. Are you saying you’re in games because you think we’re building cyberspace? Like in Neuromancer? Like Snow Crash? For real?”
“It was logical. Everything you do in games are things you want to do in a computer anyway. Manipulate data, change it, look at it. Early text adventures were almost the same thing as command-line interfaces with directory structures. I think real-time 3-D environments are going to be how we do a lot of things with computers.
“We all thought WAFFLE was going to be… the backbone of things. The information infrastructure. It was going to be the Internet, because the Internet was going to work like a game. It made so much sense. Who wouldn’t want cyberspace to happen?”
“But… no one wanted—”
“I know no one wanted it. I know 2-D was more ergonomic. I know no one wants to spend the cycles. Thank you. I know. Nobody wants cyberspace. It sounded great when Neuromancer came out, but… nobody wants the Internet to fly around and visit giant spheres and stuff. Heads floating in space. Turns out, if you can just click on bits of text that’s all you need.”
“So that was how you were going to be rich?”
“That was how I was going to matter.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The Monday morning leads meeting was unusually solemn.
“I have some unfortunate news,” Don said. “It seems there is a major bug in our software.”
“You know, we could always spin this as a feature,” Matt said. “Darren would put it on the box in big letters: ‘Now with Enhanced Mayhem Generation.’”
“I thought of that,” Don said. “But that’s not even the thing that worries me. Even if it’s a feature in a game, it’s not a feature in AstroTrade.”
“Why do we care about that?” I asked. “I thought AstroTrade went out of business.”
“It did. But the way it went out of business was by selling its assets to a company called Enhanced Heuristics, which existed for about ten minutes then sold out to a thing called Paranomics. Which