Big If by Mark Costello

Author:Mark Costello [Costello, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 978-0-393-05116-2
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2002-06-16T16:00:00+00:00

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

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