“Meet Miss Cherry Divine.”
“She’s awesome.”
“Totally gorgeous. But can you kill her?”
“Of course,” Today Rhea responded without hesitation.
Wearing a red, low-cut evening gown, the woman was leaning seductively against a wall midway down the street, one high-heel-clad foot pressed against it. Her tousled blonde hair fell past her shoulders. A come-hither look heated her eyes. A double barreled shotgun was aimed at her torso.
“But do you want to?” Today asked.
“Do I?”
“Let’s find out.”
Cherry Divine turned and slowly started walking down the street, her hips rolling from side to side. She looked back over her shoulder and cooed, “What are you waiting for? You afraid or something?”
A multitude of oversized monitors scattered across a spacious conference table provided the only light in the computer lab. Images created by screen savers floated across the monitors: tropical fish, zoo animals, the Simpsons, space ships. Also on the table and around the perimeter of the lab were a maze of keyboards, mice, mouse pads, stereo speakers, joysticks, cables, electrical cords, power strips, CD-ROM writers, external hard drives, Jaz drives, cartridges, laptops, and CPUs—both whole and in pieces. Along one side of the room was a graveyard of computer components. Diskettes and CD-ROMs were scattered like cupcake sprinkles. In a chair sat Tickle Me Elmo with a cigar jammed in its mouth. Inside a CPU that had its cover removed was G.I. Joe in a compromising position with both Busy Gal Barbie and Christmas Barbie. A huge stuffed gorilla sat on the floor in a corner with a cardinal-and-gold USC Trojans cap jauntily perched on its fuzzy head. A sheet of paper scrawled with the message USC SUCKS was stuck to its chest with a steak knife.
It was called the War Room. In it, Pandora’s core team was reviewing the final touches on their latest game—Slade Slayer’s Suckers Finish Last—which was about to be released to the public.
Mick Ha stood to one side of Today. “Is that Bridget’s voice? It’s perfect!”
Kip Cross was seated to Today’s left, his chair pulled out a few feet so that he was with the group yet slightly apart from it. His arms were crossed over his broad chest, and his long legs were stretched in front of him and crossed at the ankles. He was shod in rubber, dime-store flip-flops, which were the only shoes he ever wore, rain or shine, other than running shoes when he jogged. He’d started wearing flip-flops when he was poor. They’d since become part of his image.
Kip had a strong nose and jaw and deep-set, dark eyes. He wore his prematurely gray hair in a short buzz cut. The style accentuated his prominent facial features and made him look erratic, even slightly mad.
Kip was Pandora’s system developer, the programming genius behind the graphics engines that made Pandora’s games unique. The engine creates the illusion that images on a two-dimensional computer monitor exist in three-dimensional space. Walls have density, tunnels look claustrophobic, creatures have substance. The players feel as if they’re speeding through virtual worlds.
Slade Slayer was Kip’s creation. Pandora’s team of artists and game designers put flesh on Slade and devised the shallow plots of his adventures—kill or be killed, using an arsenal of real and fantasy weapons in an ultraviolent world—but Slade was Kip’s baby. Everyone considered the unhesitating, direct, macho Slade Slayer to be Kip’s alter ego, a theory that he consistently rebuffed.
Kip smiled at Toni Burton. “Toni and I listened to all the actresses she tested and both of us thought Bridget’s voice had the right combination of sweetness and danger.” His own voice was deep but the volume soft.
Toni Burton widened her lively blue eyes and playfully wrinkled her pug nose at Kip. She was cute and willingly played the role. Twenty-six years old, she had worked at Pandora for five years, starting as Bridget’s secretary after dropping out of college. When she noticed Bridget observing the exchange between her and Kip, she hastily returned her gaze to the monitor.
“Why did we bother doing tests with all those actresses if you were going to use my voice all along?” Bridget asked her husband. “We wasted three weeks.”
The game’s heavy-metal sound track droned in the background along with reports from the weapons Today fired and the screams of the vanquished.
“I wasn’t sure I wanted your voice,” Kip replied. “Toni convinced me it was right.”
Toni smiled tentatively at Bridget. “I hope you’re not mad, B. Kip and I thought it would be a nice surprise for you to be sort of immortalized as the voice of Cherry Divine.”
Bridget set her lips in a line. “I’m mad about the time we lost. Every computer-game company in the world is trying to be the next Pandora. We command the market now, but if we lose market share, we’ll never get it back.”
“Just wait until they sample the shareware version of Suckers Finish Last,” Today said with confidence. He mashed a keyboard key, and the image on the screen, a 3-D representation of a darkened city street, quickly turned as if the player had spun to look behind. Today pressed the key again and the image swirled forward.
“Whoa! And we thought we had a lot of complaints about motion sickness before,” Mick Ha said, shifting his attention between the computer monitor and his tennis shoe, which he grasped in his hand. The top of his white Converse sneaker was almost covered with a black pen drawing of a snarling dog.
Mick was Pandora’s lead graphic artist, who drew and converted to computer images the Slade Slayer games’ sleek yet decayed postindustrial environment of streets, sewers, high- and low-tech structures, and their dizzying population of aliens, ghouls, zombies, rabid dogs, and deadly vixens. Mick’s black hair was shaved close around the sides and back and cut long on top. He wore thick, rimless glasses. He had an easy smile, was the most consistently amiable of the mercurial Pandora group, and had been with Kip and Bridget almost from the beginning.
Today, sitting ramrod straight in the chair, furiously tapped one foot as his fingers madly traveled the keyboard. He shook his head with awe. “This game sucks like a vacuum.” It was high praise.
“It’s totally immersive,” Toni enthused.
“It’s great,” Bridget said. “I was impressed by the bits and pieces I saw, but the finished product is beyond belief.”
“It’s your best work, Kip,” Toni said, smiling broadly at her boss and, until last week, her lover.
Kip smirked with self-satisfaction at the images on the monitor, then said, almost as an afterthought, “It was a team effort.”
“That’s right,” Today said as he worked the keyboard. “A freaking team effort.” He shot a glance at Kip. “That’s why Bridget is correct to take the firm public.”
Kip’s face darkened.
“Huh, buddy?” Today verbally prodded.
In response to Today’s keyboard commands, Cherry Divine sauntered down the street. She paused at a corner and then disappeared around it.
“Cherchez la femme,” Slade Slayer intoned in a deep, male voice through the speakers.
Mick looked up from drawing on his tennis shoe, his index finger covered with black ink. “I can’t wait to see how the final level looks.”
“You don’t know?” Toni asked.
“I did a bunch of work on it but Kip patched it together.”
“Really?” Bridget said.
“Same here,” Today added. “Our man Cross was intent on keeping the solution a secret.”
“So only Kip knows how to win?” Toni grinned at Kip. “That’s so cool!”
“Why, Kip?” Bridget asked.
Kip shrugged. “Someone’s always leaking the solution. And I wanted you guys to have fun figuring it out too.”
Bridget frowned. “That was a lot of extra work for you, Kip. You could have spent that time working on the engine for the next game.”
“Bridget,” Kip said in a clipped voice, “I did it for fun. If this ever stops being fun for me, I’m out. You can tell that to your investment bankers.”
The room grew quiet except for the game’s relentless music and the rat-a-tat, ka-pows, and death wails of the battlefield.
“What’s this?” Today rapidly clicked some keys. “It’s random. Totally random. Dammit, a bug. Arrgh! I’ll fix it later. It’s not material.”
Bridget put her hand on her hip and pointed at the screen. “I’m not wild about this cyber-bimbo. My idea was to give Slade a girlfriend, to build more of a plot into the game—”
“A girlfriend?” Today bellowed. “Slade Slayer doesn’t have a girlfriend.”
“Not a cyber-bimbo,” Kip said. “Not nearly.”
“Slade’s going to blow her away, isn’t he?” Bridget said.
“Not necessarily,” Kip said cryptically.
“She has my voice, I think she looks slightly like me, and Slade’s going to blow her away.”
“Not necessarily,” Kip insisted.
“You didn’t make her the boss monster?” Mick asked with disbelief.
Kip smiled broadly with his lips closed.
“Arrghh!” Today yelled. There was a barrage of gunfire as he spastically tapped a key with his thumb.
“I hate when that happens,” Slade Slayer’s voice said as the screen image shifted to look as if the player were lying on the street. Blood flowed across the asphalt.
“I’m dead,” Today announced, flinging his hands up. “A Morph Drone under the manhole cover.”
Today Rhea was Pandora’s lead designer, providing the loose plot of the games which was presented to the player in a series of levels, like chapters in a book. The games consisted of ten levels composed of discrete virtual locations, each with a distinctive physical style. The player had to accomplish specific tasks at each level before moving on. Adversaries became increasingly clever and harder to kill with each higher level. To win the game, the player had to prevail at the highest level and kill the game’s most formidable adversary, who only appeared at the very end—the boss monster.
Today restarted the game and typed commands to spin the screen image backward and down, revealing an armor-encased, reptile-like creature climbing from a manhole cover in the street. “Die!” With a flurry of keyboard commands, a Molotov cocktail appeared in Slade Slayer’s hand at the bottom of the screen. There was the scratch of a match being struck then the snap of fire as the fuse was lit. The hand heaved the cocktail into the manhole cover as the creature snarled and growled. There was an explosion. Bloody pieces of the Morph Drone flew from the manhole and were scattered across the street. Today’s knees bounced agitatedly as his fingers frenetically worked the keyboard.
“Awright! Turning out to be my kind of day,” Slade Slayer said.
“Drive on,” Today pronounced.
“You got him,” Toni said, laughing.
“I always get ‘em, one way or another.” A blue cotton kerchief was tied pirate-style around Today’s head over his brown hair, which fell in curls past his shoulders. He was all-American good-looking and was wearing Top-Siders without socks, black sweatpants cut off at the knees, and an oversized T-shirt printed with a picture of the grunge band Alice in Chains. He had two earrings in his left ear: a small gold ring and a peace symbol dangling from a chain. He was twenty-six.
“I think you’re ready for a deathmatch, buddy,” Mick Ha taunted.
“You think so, little man?” Today was a bundle of nervous energy in constant motion. “Are you ready for a man-beating?”
“Let’s do a three-way game,” Kip said.
“Oh-ho. Cross the boss picks up the gauntlet,” Today said.
“Remember the time.” Bridget looked at her watch. “It’s eleven-fifteen. At midnight we transfer the file.”
Today advanced the screen image around the corner where Cherry Divine could be seen sashaying up a long set of stone steps. A stone castle loomed at the top of the staircase.
“Wait a minute,” Bridget protested. “Those look like the steps next to our house, Kip.”
“Bridget, those steps are just way too creepy,” Mick explained. “I had to use them.”
“I’m not liking this,” she said.
At the top of the steps, Cherry went into the castle through a massive door that stood open. She poked her head back out and breathed, “What are you waiting for?”
“I don’t like this at all, Kip,” Bridget complained.
“What are you talking about?” Kip said.
“You know damn well what I’m talking about. Slade Slayer’s going to blow her away, isn’t he?”
“Chill out, Bridget,” Today said, scowling.
“What’s wrong, B?” Mick asked.
Bridget rubbed her forehead with her fingertips. “I’m not keen on seeing a woman murdered, even a digital woman, after I spent half the afternoon talking to the police about Alexa.”
The room again grew quiet except for the sound of the game’s kinetic music, special effects, and Today’s bursts of clicking on the keyboard.
“Do they have any idea what happened to her?” Toni asked.
Bridget shrugged sadly. “Someone bashed in the back of her head with a large rock and she tumbled into a ravine. She was found inside the park, a long way from where I left her. It had to have been someone she knew or wasn’t afraid of.”
“Maybe someone forced her,” Toni suggested.
Bridget shivered.
“Check out the castle!” Today exclaimed, oblivious to the tone of the conversation. “It’s gloomy, it’s damp. I love it.” The fingers on his right hand twitched against the keys as his left hand restlessly tapped the side of the keyboard, his thumb never far from the vital key that fired his weapons. “Where’d she go? There she is! Should I shoot?”
“Go for it!” Mick yelled.
“Hey! What’s goin’ on? She’s like sending rays or something from her eyes. Doesn’t look good. Baby’s going bye-bye.” Today mashed his weapon key. “What?”
“A slingshot!” Mick exclaimed. “Now I get it.” He beamed at Kip. “That’s why you wanted the slingshot.”
Today impatiently pounded his weapon key and moaned, “You turned my shotgun into a freakin’ slingshot.”
“She put a spell on you,” Kip explained, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, still looking at the monitor.
“Akkk. Look!” Mick cried.
“She’s the boss monster, isn’t she?” Today said. “Kip, you maniac!”
Cherry Divine’s beautiful face had turned into Slade Slayer’s, still topped by her perfect blonde coiffure. From the bodice of her low-cut evening gown, she pulled out a handgun and blew Slade Slayer away. “Sorry, sucker,” she hissed as his blood spread across the stone floor.
“I didn’t see that coming,” Bridget admitted.
Today slapped the keyboard. It slammed into the monitor with a brittle retort. “This is dark, Kip. This is way dark.”
“What’s it mean?” Toni asked. “The boss monster is Slade Slayer?”
“Slade’s worst enemy is himself?” Mick suggested. “It’s very mental, Kip.”
“I get it, I get it.” Today frenetically bounced his feet on his toes. “He has to kill himself to win. Or kill the dark side of himself.”
“And the dark side is a woman?” Toni tried.
Bridget listened to their discussion without comment.
Kip tried to suppress a smile. “You guys are reading too much into this. I just thought it was graphically interesting.”
Everyone looked at Kip as if they didn’t believe him.
“Really,” Kip insisted.
Toni crossed her legs, grasped her knee with one hand, and examined the pedicure on her sandal-clad foot. “What time is it?”
“Ten till,” Bridget said.
“Kip, give me the cheat codes,” Today demanded. “You changed them on the tenth level, didn’t you?” His fingers pounded the keyboard. “Prick!”
Kip laughed.
“Give ‘em up! I’ve tried everything. Cherry’s killed me every time. Wait…I know what you did.” Today’s fingers flew. Then he again shoved the keyboard against the monitor. “Kip, you bastard!”
Kip watched Today’s struggle with amusement. “Cherry Divine has a heart of pure malice. But you can beat her.”
“I give up.” Today flung himself back into his chair, picked up a ballpoint pen, and started rapidly clicking the top. “Tomorrow, I’ll figure it out in ten minutes.”
“Tough talk, cowboy,” Toni said.
“What time is it now?” Today asked.
“Six till,” Mick said.
Today nervously clicked the pen. “So when do we cash in on this deal?”
Bridget hoisted herself onto the table, first sliding a keyboard out of the way. “I’m taking steps to initiate a Pandora IPO right now. Kip and I are meeting with T. Duke Sawyer tomorrow.”
“We’re going to be rich!” Mick exclaimed.
“Nothing has been decided yet,” Kip said.
“Yes, it has,” Bridget responded.
Kip glared at his wife. She met his stare.
Today continued madly clicking the pen. “C’mon, Kip. I left bug-fix and ship-cycle hell at Microsoft to come here for less money and more stock options. That was the whole point. Go with a small start-up firm, build the company, go public, cash in. It’s high time. I’ve got a family now.”
“I’ve got stock options, too,” Toni said.
Mick looked at his watch. “Two minutes!”
Using a mouse, Today accessed the communications software, instructed the modem to dial, and logged onto the Internet. He dragged and dropped into place the .ZIP file that contained the programs.
Bridget started counting down. “Five, four, three, two, one.”
Today clicked on OK, uploading the shareware version of Suckers Finish Last—consisting of the first two levels of the game—onto Pandora’s FTP site on the Internet.
The group silently watched as the files copied.
“Done,” Kip solemnly pronounced when the upload was complete.
“Within minutes, Suckers will be mirrored to dozens of other sites and after that, users around the world will be downloading it and playing,” Toni said.
“Then they’ll get hooked and send us fifty bucks for the rest of the game.” Today rubbed his palms together.
“I’ll get the champagne.” Bridget hopped off the table and left the room. Outside, she walked on a catwalk past offices, reached a roughhewn staircase, and descended to the ground floor. She crossed the massive airplane hangar and walked to the large lunchroom that occupied one end of the structure. Inside, she opened the refrigerator and retrieved the bottle of French champagne she had put there earlier that day. From a cabinet, she gathered plastic flutes. She gasped when someone touched her shoulder.
“You scared me,” she said to her husband.
“Why are you doing this, Bridget? We’re going to get revenue from the release of the new game. We can pay T. Duke back. Pandora will be ours again. You promised you’d think about it.”
“I have.” Bridget looked at her husband with dismay. “Kip, things can’t stay the way they are. You heard them upstairs. We promised them this. We can’t stay a small computer-games company forever.”
“Why not?” Kip’s posture grew rigid and red blotches appeared on his cheeks.
Bridget had long grown accustomed to the way anger transformed her husband. She responded calmly. To do otherwise would only inflame him further. “I have to think about Brianna’s future.”
“Bull. You’re more concerned about your future. About building your empire, your name.” His face was now bright red. He menacingly leaned toward her, his fists tightly clasped by his sides. “All I ever wanted was to develop games with no one bothering me. Now I’m going to have to worry about someone’s grandma losing money because she bought Pandora stock. You’re going to change our whole way of life.”
She did not move away. She imagined she felt heat radiating from him. “Like you haven’t done anything to change our way of life? And you’re the last one to talk about keeping promises. I saw the way you and Toni looked at each other. You said you’d ended it with her.”
“I have.”
“To free up time to ball the nanny?”
Kip’s bluster left. He suddenly seemed to have run out of things to say.
She touched his chin and ran her thumb against the cleft there. Her eyes grew glassy. “Where did we go wrong?”
“I made mistakes, Bridget. I want to make it up to you.”
She smiled sadly. “Things can’t be the way they were. Not for us, not for Pandora.”
“Let’s try again, B.” He reached for her and she stepped back. He beseechingly held his hands toward her.
A tear rolled down her cheek but her voice was firm. “Tonight, I’m firing Summer. Tomorrow, I want you to fire Toni.”
“Sure. Anything you say.”
“And I want you to move out.”
“All right. Okay. We’ll separate for a while. Give ourselves some space. Then you’ll call off your investment bankers and we’ll pay T. Duke his money back.”
She moved her head almost imperceptibly, but the message was clear.
Kip stared at her the way he’d stare at code he’d written that wasn’t running right. But this problem couldn’t be fixed by analytically putting zeros and ones in the right order. He drew back his fist and slugged his wife in the face.
She let out a muffled cry and went down, banging against the counter before sliding to the floor. She looked at Kip with horror.
He loomed over her, appearing even taller than he was. His fists were balled by his sides, his face still scarlet. He made a shuffling movement toward her and she cowered against the cabinets.
“You’re not going to destroy my life.” Struggling to regain his composure, Kip ran his hands across his bristly hair and left the room without looking back.