PLAY (7 page)

Chapter 9

I’ll take the beanbag chair

Max turned and I followed him into the non-living-room living room.

“Are you zoned for this?” I blurted, taking in the bodies in front of computers. Two men and a woman sat in the meeting room, huddled around giant sheets of paper.

“As of now, you’re on fundraising. You got legal issues, take it up with Riley McKay.”

One of the men sitting at the table had familiar red hair, and stood at the sound of his name. Riley looked the same as he had Friday, in a navy suit and purple tie that were a nod to good tailoring and personal flair at once. He would’ve rocked Alliance with his sheer togetherness.

But, as I remembered from the casual way he’d egged me on Friday and how laid back he’d been to find out Max fudged their forms…looks could be deceiving. I didn’t know any lawyers who would be willing to be left out of the loop. He was either careless, crazy, or supremely confident.

“Nice to see you again, Payton,” Riley offered, a grin stretching across his boyish face.

“Likewise. I think. Do you work here full time?” I asked.

“I take a few other clients but I own part of Titan.” He leaned in. “And we are, for the record, zoned for this.” Riley had the corners of my mouth twitching despite my discomfort with the whole situation. “So, do you want the grand tour? If you wait for that guy to give it to you, you’ll be waiting a long time.” He shot a look at Max, who’d already been called away by an older guy in front of a computer screen.

“Sure.”

I trailed Riley to the center of the room. “So this is the guts of Titan, aka the Pit. We have about twenty developers, plus or minus, working at once.”

My gaze scanned the room. “There aren’t that many here.”

“Oh, you are good at math,” he teased. I shot him a look. “We have a couple coders in Tokyo, one in Montana. A sound guy in Portland. And an artist with a farm outside Cape Town. Max doesn’t care as long as the work happens and everybody keeps a lid on what we’re really doing.”

“Manufacturing Ebola?”

He laughed. “No. We’re making the best games ever to grace the planet. But since Oasis came out and Titan went from nobody to legit in two weeks flat, the competition’s always looking for dirt. Max likes to keep a lid on things.”

“Right.”

“Hey everyone.” I jumped as Riley raised his voice. Heads turned toward us, including Max’s. He looked irritated to have had his conversation disturbed. “This is Payton. She’s helping us get the money to pay your salaries. So she wants anything, you give it to her.”

If they were surprised, they didn’t look it.

Riley introduced me around individually until my head was a whirlwind of names. Terry and Jenna were the lead developers and probably had ten years on me. Claire could’ve passed for a college co-ed. She, Tom, and Zane were working on Evolve. Jimmy, who looked like a biker, and Muppet, the kid who’d been playing pinball, were working on Phoenix.

By the time Riley finished giving me the tour it was after ten. I was startled to realize the Pit was still humming. Jenna, Terry and Tom were meeting about something. Muppet, the other girl and two guys whose names I’d already forgotten were still steadily typing away at their desks. With the exception of one guy, who appeared to be on email, the others were entering lines of white text into black voids.

“It’s Jimmy’s night to put the kids to bed,” Riley explained, as if I’d realized one of them was missing.

I followed him into the kitchen, where he grabbed a Red Bull out of the fridge. “You want one?” he offered.

I shook my head. “Thanks.”

“We got lots.” I leaned in to look at the contents of the fridge. Along with a few Rubbermaid containers were at least two dozen cans of energy drinks in three different varieties.

Jesus.

“So what, everyone works around the clock?”

Riley popped the tab and poured the dark contents into a glass, taking a long and grateful drink. “Pretty much. Most of the team’s working on the engine but some of it’s the game. We need to have it all done in six months if we’re going to meet projections. That’s what we were reviewing.”

“And who does that—Max?”

“Me and Max. I’m not a typical lawyer,” he explained, reading my mind, “and the two of us go back. Other questions?”

“Yeah. Why am I here?”

“We need money for the game. I signed off on the original ask—the twenty mil—but apparently Max forgot a few things in that estimate.” Riley rolled his eyes like his friend had forgotten to pick up the mail. “Max said he’d fix it himself, but he’s not the most diplomatic.”

“Really? I hadn’t noticed.”

Riley grinned. “I was shocked he got the Alliance funding, if I’m honest.”

“Tech’s our new priority. Management was drooling when they saw you on the prospect list.”

He lifted a shoulder. “That explains it. Max doesn’t know when to ask for help. But what genius does, right?”

Riley led me out of the kitchen and through the Pit to a room that was roughly underneath Max’s office. “This is me.”

I looked around. Instead of Riley’s desk being against the windows like Max’s, it was partway down the interior wall facing the door. The rest of the space had a beanbag chair of the same variety as the ones in the Pit, some well-used bookshelves, and a neglected-looking fern.

“I’ll rig up a desk for you,” Riley offered.

“I’ll take the beanbag chair,” I deadpanned, but he didn’t get the joke.

“Your call.”

Ten million dollar rounding errors. Guys named Muppet. Beanbag chairs and pinball.
This was worlds away from Alliance, from everything I knew.

How the fuck are you going to help these guys?

I swallowed, the enormity of my task washing over me. If this didn’t work, I—and they—would be totally screwed. “Um. Do we have any leads on funders?”

Riley handed me a thick file from his desk. “Don’t get too excited. A lot of these are cold calls. Most of Oasis was built and financed out of Max’s pocket. Probably why it took him four years and why doesn’t want to do it again.”

“Thanks. I’d better get reading. Can I borrow some of these?” I pointed to a jar of highlighters and a stack of Post-its on Riley’s desk.

“Knock yourself out.”

I found an extra desk in the Pit, next to the now-silent pinball machine, and settled myself there.

I wasn’t sure where to start. I’d never been dropped in the middle of a place without knowing my bearings. Without any kind of training or support, or without other colleagues who did what I did.

Still, I wasn’t ready to give in.

The files didn’t tell me much about Titan, but they told me lots about potential funders. When it was nearly midnight I stood and stretched. The papers in front of me were marked up with an assortment of highlighters and Post-its.

Prospects were an important piece of the puzzle. But trying to connect the dots to understand where to go next was impossible until I learned more about Titan and Phoenix. But, that wasn’t going to happen tonight.

By the time I poked my head back into Riley’s office, my brain had already ground to a near standstill. “I think I’m going to have to take this home and start fresh in the morning. Where’s Max?”

“Probably in his office upstairs. I’ll show you a shortcut.” He walked me to the door and pointed to the private stairwell.

The first thing I noticed when I got upstairs was the music. Low, folksy indie wafted through the apartment from some hidden speakers in the living room. The dull ambience of the tenth floor—computers, the occasional chatter—was gone. Along with the dim lighting, it was almost peaceful.

I crossed to the open door of Max’s office, feeling more like an intruder than I had the first day here.

Today his desk looked like it’d been raised up, and I realized it was one of those electric ones that could be adjusted so you could work in different positions. Max stood in front of it, facing the same black screen that seemed to monopolize the coders downstairs. Beyond him, the city beckoned, its lights glinting softly through the darkness outside the wall of windows.

In his t-shirt and jeans, he looked more like a comp sci student absorbed in a school assignment than the leader of a company.

“I can see your reflection in the window,” he murmured. “Are you coming in or just hovering?”

“Do you have a few minutes?”

I half expected Max to say no, but instead he said, “I have as long as you need.”

I crossed to him, setting my papers on the waist-high desk. “Here’s what I’m thinking based on the little I know so far. I’ll dig deeper on these three leads. Learn more about their past investments. How deep their pockets are.” I indicated the papers Riley had printed for me from his office. “The budget says you need an extra ten million, but that’s a lot to go straight debt. You should look at equity financing.”

Max had been listening quietly—right up until the last part. “No equity. I’m not giving up a dime of my company.”

I was used to knee-jerk reactions. They almost never meant “no,” but “not right now” or “not like that.” I switched to my most comforting voice. “We’ll look at options. Equity doesn’t have to mean giving up your right to make decisions. And, we don’t need to look at it right now.”

“Payton?” Max rubbed his lip, hauling my attention to the curve of his mouth.

Could you please stop doing that?

“Yeah?”

“No fucking equity.” The edge in his voice cut through the soft music just audible from the other room. “Anything else?”

I forced my attention back to the papers. “Yeah. I’ll have the leads back to you in a week.”

“How about tomorrow?”

My jaw dropped. “Seriously?” I thought of everything I had to do at Alliance tomorrow. “You know I don’t work for you, right?”

“Yeah. But what you will remember from the documents I sent Alliance is that we’re planning to launch in six months.” He waited, I nodded. “I want to do it in four.”

“What? Why?”

He flashed teeth. “Because the biggest studio in the world is launching their latest project in five. They’ve already announced it.”

“If you launch later…”

“The world is playing their game instead of mine.”

I resisted the urge to groan. “I’ll do what I can.”

It was two days, not one, before I had reviewed three prospects in detail and identified two new ones. Doing that meant staying up until four am only to get up for my day job at seven.

I’d naively expected a gaming company to be more…easygoing. Grown men and women working at things that were the rest of the world’s play. Still, it seemed like everyone in Titan put in more hours than I did at Titan and Alliance combined. I was learning they were every bit as talented as any other professionals, plus they threw everything they had, everything they
were
, into their work.

“Don’t chalk this up to laziness, but what do you do in your downtime?” I asked Riley one night. I sipped the last of the watermelon slushie I’d brought from Alliance while Riley got Red Bull number two—three?—from the fridge.

He grinned. “You’re funny, Payton. I like that. Seriously, though, the coders usually take a month or two off between games. Until then, they work in sprints, practically around the clock, until something’s ready for Max to review. Why, you starting to regret your offer to help?”

“I just don’t get why Max wanted my help. All he seems to do is shoot down my ideas,” I complained. So far, he wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t bend, wouldn’t even discuss any of the options I’d come up with. I was getting seriously frustrated.

We emerged from the kitchen, and the man in question was sitting across the Pit with a circle of developers. They occupied a melange of task chairs, beanbag chairs and the a chaise lounge. Max watched as one of them—Zane, I think—wrote something on the table in the middle. Max shook his head, took the pen from Zane, and scrawled out something else. Jimmy, who I remembered because he looked like a biker, erased what Max had written and wrote something new.