Augmented Reality: The Atlantic Salmon GT
Stephen W. Cote
Copyright Stephen W. Cote 2012
Published at Smashwords
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Augmented Reality: The Atlantic Salmon GT
Life presents opportunities to make mistakes but rarely accommodates a galactic fuck-up. While squinting at slide fourteen, projected growth rate deltas per post acquisition merger, as if the act made tolerable such monotony, the future scrolled across the back of Derry Brown’s eyelids. Similar to a residual image from a marathon gaming session, a possible future unfolded to disaster.
Beneath twisted aluminum and shattered carbon, desert sunlight blazing through toxic top fuel smoke, the digital tachometer ticked zero. The capacitors drained and laser-scribed numbers faded along with the heartbeat of the wrecked driver. A moment prior and beyond twelve hundred kilometers per hour, the nose caressed a conical vapor halo and the driver realized the forward winglets wouldn’t hold. Their strut mounts cracked and the distressed inclination routed airflow to lift the back end and drive the nose into the ground.
The problem was not the driver, dereliction in the pit, or the ridiculous attempt to weld steel to carbon fiber. Its origin stretched hundreds of years into the past to a large consumer manufacturing company meeting wherein twenty employees basked in the OLED glow of a projector painting the wall with a slide presentation.
Derry held the nouveau GT's steering wheel, his body careening through space and time. In HDR resolution the vehicle unraveled itself out from his under his feet. In the pit prior to the race, his non-corporeal self followed the shoddy workmanship to the factory floor, then to a series of instructions based on a thesis that cited a researcher’s formula. The formula had been copied-and-pasted from an application that misinterpreted font color when transcoding from ASCII to math-markup. Most amazing to Derry, no one caught the error in all those years. And, the application that erroneously injected the wrong character used a shared code library that indexed color codes with friendly names. Someone had thought to be politically correct and change Indian Red to Atlantic Salmon.
Slide fourteen: A growth rate delta against cost benefit of incorporating some intern’s undergraduate open source project instead of using a proprietary but standards-compliant library. Total cost would be twelve more cents. Not per unit. Total. Twelve cents.
“This is really fucking stupid.”
The recently hired blonde gaped. She mouthed something, which Derry supposed was “Mind your language.” But her words meandered across the table as little smoking carbon fiber swirls, spelling out a possible definition of her gentrified euphemism: Jesus Christ, why the fuck are you fucking swearing you goddamn balding pot-bellied asshole?
Derry shrugged and blinked away the smoldering debris gushing from the woman’s mouth. Laser lettering infused a brushed aluminum plate suspended over her head with a job title that wrapped four lines and protruded past the beveled margin into the air. Above the mish-mash title her name, some hyphenated abortion of a fifth grader’s state capital spelling test, stirred into a melting pot of indeterminate nationalities and glimmered in serif and rainbow hues.
Averting his eyes, he told the CTO, “Twelve cents? This is the fourth time we’ve talked about this. I don’t understand what real value we’re gaining with this change.”
“Derry, you know this is an important foundation project for Acheron Software. We’ve hired and committed multiple teams.” Jeff Markenson adjusted his gray ponytail from his left shoulder to his right.
Derry gritted his teeth and faced the project technical lead. “And you’re okay with taking on an unnecessary amount of work to save twelve cents?”
Dervish Whirlgi bobbled his head and raised his hand. “I have something to add.”
The laser-inscribed aluminum placard bounced over Dervish’s head. An ominous cloud formed. “Yes?” Derry asked.
“Well …” Thunder rolled from the cloud, a bolt of lightning struck the tabletop. Chunks of burnt aluminum skittered across the laminated wood surface. Greasy streaks of top fuel oozed from beneath the metal. Every tenth word Dervish spoke, lightning struck a bit of metal, melting it and igniting the fuel, leaving a buzzword glowing in the molten reflection. “And,” Dervish went on. Buzzwords and the bleeding-edge technical jargon du-jour sprouted across the table until by the time Dervish stopped talking Derry could barely see him through a maze of smoke and flame and molten metallic crap piles of buzz speak.
“We’ll wind up paying millions to save twelve cents,” Derry told Dervish, and with the color name change on the tip of his tongue, Indian Red to Atlantic Salmon, an oval badge punched its way atop the aluminum nameplate and pulsed crimson. Must be his hot button. Dare I push it? Better not.
Dervish gave another head bobble. “It’s our last chance to add the color support for the new version. And it’s much more complex than …” The clouds regrouped and lightning rained down with another torrent of double-tech-talk until Derry listened to the post-conclusion silence while he surveyed the crashed GT jutting through the tabletop.
“So, we’re all good,” Jeff told the audience.
The lights came on and the projected presentation faded into sterile white paint, and the smoke cleared from the haggard audience. Dervish stood, consulted a smartphone, and as he left the room a faux carbon fiber racing patch warned observers, whom Derry knew to be him alone, that Bobbling while Texting is Illegal.
The blonde new hire touched her head as if to shoo away the messy job title, and scowled at Derry as she walked past. He couldn’t help but stare at the dashboard emblazoning her sweatered cleavage: RPMs high, Fuel low, Speed zero, and a shift warning flared yellow. Naturally he looked to see if she rode the clutch, and then clenched his eyes shut when she sneered something about not appreciating uninviting stares. Even with his eyes closed, entombed in a dimly lit gray sphere of visual solitude, an interpretation of her words graffitied his private wall in laser lettering with: Fuck you, you old lecherous boob- and crotch-gazing bastard piece of shit.
Pham Z waited beside Derry until the room cleared, the last wafts of smoke dissipating into the hallway. "I think Jeff is too invested in the design change to back down. He has budget approval, and backing out now wouldn't look good – for him."
Derry jostled his potbelly against his beltline. His eyes drifted from meeting Pham's dark brown irises to a patch of empty air over his spiked black hair.
Pham glanced up. "You still seeing things?"
He nodded and an exclamation point, plasma-singed metal, sprung from Pham's gelled mini-frock. "All tests negative."
Question mark. "Fantasy multi-player role playing game?"
"No, something new. High-tech futurist racing with visceral graphics. Star Trek saved Mad Max from a dystopian future sort of feel to it."
"One word," Pham said. "Acupuncture."
A bevy of sprites crowded Pham's face and Derry turned away from an Asian teen's wet dream of a motorcycle growing out of his head. "I'll assume that sounds more interesting."
"Hell yeah." His engine revved and the high-pitched whine reverberated off the corridor walls. "It can't be any more insulting than you telling me I look like a snaggle-toothed dwarf priest with cheap armor, low hit points, and a raging hard-on for older half-elf peasants."
Derry considered the comparison: Viagrified dwarf priest or an underpowered motorcycle on the streets of futuristic racecars. "Anyway.” He beckoned Pham to follow him and walked towards his office. "We have to figure out how to keep the current color map library. If it goes out -"
"Bad things," Pham said. "I know."
Safe from interruption in the womb of his office, cubicle walls with a door and beside a thick girder a narrow pane of glass overlooking an adjacent rooftop, Derry relaxed into his uncomfortably worn office chair. Pham wheeled a caustically cheap plastic guest chair from the miniature meeting table to Derry’s desk and sat. Derry opened the desk drawer, removed a bottle of pills, and popped one in his mouth.
Holding the caplet between his canines, he said, “Glycine transporter. For schizophrenia.”
“I thought you tested negative?”
Derry crunched the caplet, swished bitter fragments with saliva, and swallowed. “There is no absolute test, but every psychiatrist I’ve seen said it’s negative.” He counted on his fingers, “My thoughts aren’t disorganized, I’m not being controlled by anyone, and I’m not hearing voices commanding me to pee in the water cooler.”
Mueslick Blanceccek knocked on the hollow-core office door. “Derry …” Above the doorframe a scoreboard etched the wall, and beside Mueslick in slot four a ticker tape scrolled a translation of his trans-negative Slavic pidgin. “I have a very important matter to discuss. I should come back later?” He entered the office and stood behind Pham. Translation: Get out.
Derry nodded Pham towards the door, and when he didn't take the hint asked, “Pham, give us a moment?”
Pham cocked his eyebrow and yielded the chair to Mueslick. He left the office and closed the door.
Mueslick picked up a marker and drew several rectangles on the dry-erase board. “This is Acheron system. This is acquisition. This is new TBD system.” He added a few arrows, some words and squiggles. “We connect them like this, and then we are integrated, yes?” Waving the marker tip at Derry, he added, “Now you and Dervish are good, yes?”
“That’s a permanent marker.”
He looked at the black tip of the marker and then at the board. “It’s good because this is the right design.”
Derry stood, picked up a dry-erase marker, and tapped the acquisition box. “If we have to use something for the sake of integration, can we use another part of their codebase?” Exhaust smoke plumed from the marker cap snapped atop the end. “Like the icons? They have very nice icons. And we wouldn’t have to change our tests.”
“Ah,” Mueslick said. “They do.” Translation: Not enough. “I think Jeff needs the software working together.”
A small rectangle took the semblance of a checkered flag and the hand-scrawled boxes smoothed their outer corners until the permanent marker traced a futuristic racecourse. Last week’s post-it sprung a press box, grandstands unfolded from the marker tray, and the racecar Derry had driven roared to life from the confines of an ineffective eraser. But the course was incomplete. Halfway from an unscrubbable blotch, between a squiggle of embankment and an S-curve, empty space beckoned for attention. Derry swiped the smearable marker between two permanent black lines and stepped back. Instead of migrating the color library code into Acheron, they could reuse Acheron’s licensed version. Albeit the cocksure undergrad’s dream of open-source success, and his smug grin, would die in the flames of back-office political minutia, as so many projects were doomed to repeat.
And Mueslick said, “It’s safe.”
“It’s safe,” Derry said. Let the acquisition codebase shoulder the burden of integrating Acheron’s code into theirs, and the racecar destined to crash, at least in his mind, would be saved.
“Ah, so you will suggest our idea to Jeff? Good.” He parked the pen in the grandstands. Somewhere in the distance, hundreds of spectators cried out in horror.
Our idea. Derry nodded. “Thank you for discussing this with me. If Pham is still outside, send him in?”
After Pham and Mueslick exchanged places and thin layers of particleboard and wood laminate once more secured the room, Pham inquired if they had made progress.
Ambulance sirens blared, their tires screeched along the bottom of the whiteboard. Mueslick’s permanent marker had taken out the VIP booth. “That’s not going to work,” Derry said, and picked up the marker smudger and smeared his dry erase line over the permanent scrawls.
“I told –“
“Fair warning,” Derry said as a pair of Japanese anime creatures frolicked on Pham’s shoulders with cans of synthetic oil vapor clearly labeled as homeopathic and environment friendly. “If you finish that sentence I’m pretty sure the little octopus on your left shoulder will use his tentacles in a crime against nature on the panda squatting on your right shoulder.”
“You have ten minutes before part two.”
“More meetings?” Derry threw himself at his chair and reviewed his daily agenda. As usual, a solid wall of meetings stretched from eight in the morning through six in the evening, many hours double or triple booked. Although having exercised his right not to accept the meetings, the meeting organizers somehow managed to find and drag him kicking and screaming into another round of hell.
“Mister Markenson.” Pham greeted the CTO whose lanky body stretched the length of the doorframe. When Jeff entered, Pham exited and closed the door.
Acheron Software’s Chief Technical Officer was prototypical: Every quirk of a software geek and inexperienced manager, over-indulged and over-paid and over-worshipped, rolled into the personified spliff of an aging hipster. The previous Halloween Jeff wore a bed sheet and claimed he was a ghost. What kind of ghost costume involves twisting the sheet at the both ends, gluing a red light within a burnt nib on the head, and sporting a five-pointed green patch of fabric stitched to the chest? He would have been less subtle dressed as a bong.
In the context of the present conversation – what had Jeff been saying, anyway? – He stepped out of his shoes as CTO and into the spotlight of a mid-race advertisement. The lights dimmed, and he enjoined the audience via a crappy stereoscopic 3-D effect to race only with Permafrost Deodorant. Because when you absolutely must stop funky odors from polluting the air, take a page from nature and freeze your stinking biomass. Derry had to admit the jingle was catchy.
“Are you humming?”
Derry sucked his lips into his mouth. “Listening. I was listening.”
“Dervish has spent a lot of time architecting this solution. It would be a good idea if you collaborated with him.”
Derry pointed to the blue-gray blotch on the whiteboard. “If we reverse the integration of the color library –“
“We’re past the question-and-answer phase of the architecture.”
“I wasn’t involved in those discussions,” Derry said.
Jeff leveled a deadpan gaze, and for a moment the hallucinations gave way to a sublime emptiness of expression. “I didn’t know you wanted to be included. I’ll remember to invite you next time.” Then, he swished his ponytail. “You should apologize to Yndiahna for your language.”
His ears hurt hearing her name almost as much, but not quite, as visualizing how she spelled it. Yndiahna’s name echoed into Ithaca, infusing Jeff’s future role with a touch of Greek history. Black leather wrapped his shoulders and thighs, and his ponytail curled upwards to top his racing helmet with a Corinthian crest.
If the vision suggested symbolism, it may well have been: Racers, to your vehicles. Soon it would be too late. Sponsored by: Parents Against Culturally Demeaning Names. Yndiahna would be protesting in the hallway.
Derry stood and tapped the keyboard to lock his account. A horn blared: Pham pointed at his bare wrist. The next round of merger meetings and power points awaited. Nausea swelled in his chest. And what is the dystopian future’s fascination with tight leather? He walked slowly to limit chaffing. The bonus swatch of leather stitching his racing jacket around his potbelly rubbed his tummy raw.
He followed Pham down the hall to the meeting room. Yndiahna, as expected, protested the sponsors disrespecting her name. Derry stopped a few steps past her and said, “I apologize if my word choice was disrespectful.”
Yndiahna beamed. A firecracker popped electric confetti from her head. Paparazzi crowded her, LED flashes tracing shadows between her pale complexion and white backdrop. Pham coaxed Derry into the conference room, and Yndiahna smirked and said, “Please mind your language in the future.”
Dervish sat beside Jeff, his carbon fiber racing helmet adorned with a smirking Buddha silhouette. He looked down. A metallic balloon bounced on Dervish’s shoulder, letters glowing within: I smirk at you.
Derry sat at the far end. Halfway up the table, Mueslick winked before lowering his visor and angling his Siberian Motors GT alongside Jeff's and Dervish's in a uniform motor pool. With the racecars crowding the table, Pham had to park his motorcycle by the whiteboard, after which he took the chair adjacent to Derry. Derry looked from the floor to the edge of the table where the tapered nose of his vehicle reared its scientifically problematic winglets. He glanced up at the two individuals responsible for imprisoning him in a deathtrap of poor design. Mueslick didn't have another choice, Derry thought, although the permanent marker on his smudgeboard defied coincidence.
"Yndiahna," Jeff said, "The lights."
She stood and flipped the dimmer switch from glaring fluorescent to the low-voltage hum of sub-daylight.
Gleefully, Derry thought, she carried a solid green flag back to the conference table, swinging her hips, and, Oh, good lord, our future hell invented a carbon-fiber thong.
Dervish took command of the presentation. "I will now present my design for integration. My team –" His words faded into the monotonous jingoism of proud sponsors, never letting the viewer forget why they are present. He stepped on the accelerator, revved his engine, and Yndiahna waved the green flag.
The race was on. Fireworks crackled overhead, lasers inscribed smoke rolling up the drywall, and Dervish led the procession of racers around the track. Soon they would accelerate and the future would end with an explosive crash taking out the VIP booth.
As Derry became sucked into the procession, the current slide glowed neon with lines similar to those Mueslick had drawn. The autopilot flared: Turn Left, Re-routing for obstruction. The glowing path led the soon-to-be-flaming wreckage of integration right into Jeff's lap.
He jerked the wheel left and careened into Dervish. "Stop."
Jeff glared. "Derry, let's keep all questions until the end."
Derry stood and began to walk to the front of the room. As he did so, Dervish's and Jeff's cars crowded him into the rail. Momentarily he scuffed his passenger door before lurching through the bottleneck. He pointed at the neon line superimposed atop Dervish's drawing by neurons backfiring in his head.
"Right there."
"What am I looking at?" Dervish asked. "That's the new service model. The interface for …"
He tapped a blurry rasterized box in the middle of a convoluted drawing. "You changed a common system interface to use the integrated library."
"Yes," Dervish said, "This is the right design."
"But the library uses non-standard names." Then Derry said to Jeff, "Everything in the existing Acheron system must be updated and retested."
Dervish bobbled, his car swerved. He clicked through the slide deck. "Testing is …"
"Hold on," Jeff told Dervish. "We have a lot of systems that depend on these services. Will they have to be patched?"
Dervish mumbled and clicked through more slides. "That is here." Seconds later, he clicked to another slide.
Jeff said, "Your architecture takes advantage of the new functionality, but, yes, Derry, I now understand your concern…"
Thunderclouds formed, rain pelted the conference table. An announcer blared: Race postponed due to inclement weather.
Derry walked to his seat, and when he passed Mueslick he patted his shoulder. "Thanks for your help."
Once in his seat, the possible race-centric future receded into the doldrums of reality. Pham pantomimed revving his motorcycle engine and Derry told him, "You can stop doing that now." As Pham's high-pitched engine-whine ceased, Derry held his palms to his face and relished the reprieve from hallucination.
"I was starting to like that one," Pham said. "What do you think the next one will be? Side-scroller? Steampunk role-playing?"
Derry shrugged. Then, the sound of metal slides recoiling into receivers echoed through the room. He looked up and saw Dervish aimed a high-powered sniper rifle at his forehead.
"Shit. It's a first person shooter."