Darn Tootin'

I wouldn’t say that I loved Dundee, but I had begun to feel at home here, or at least in my little corner of it. I had got used to the cobbled roads, the local shops that stocked more Irn Bru than all other drinks combined, the way you could walk past a beautiful ancient church, a white and glass modern apartment building, and a boarded up house covered in graffiti, all on the same stretch of road.

“Sooo, do you like living here, Jonny?” Ruby’s voice - my phone was in my jacket pocket, but she still spoke to me through my earbuds. She was doing this more recently - seeming to know what I was thinking about, picking up the other side of conversations going on in my head. I didn’t know whether it was coincidence, or if my thought process was that predictable, or just that her algorithm was getting to know me better. Whatever the reason, I appreciated it.

It was only in the last few weeks that I had felt comfortable talking to Ruby on the walk to work. It had seemed odd, the idea of speaking to her while outside the house. Embarrassing. But as I thought it through, I realised that people are always walking around communicating with unseen entities via their earbuds. Nobody would know that the person I was speaking to was an AI. I was glad that I’d come to that conclusion - it made my commute a lot more enjoyable.

“It’s okay, I guess.” I thought for a moment. “I mean, I have to be here for work, otherwise I’d be somewhere else.” An image of Flo flashed briefly in my mind. “But it’s not like there’s some other place I’m desperate to be, so it’s fine to live in Dundee for now.”

“Ehehe, typical Jonny! Always so relaxed about everything. Hmm.” Although my phone screen was locked, I could still picture Ruby tilting her head to one side. “You know what they say though: Home is where the heart is. And since your heart is with Ruby, you’ll always be home so long as I’m with you!”

Home… For a long time, home had been in Portsmouth, about as far from Dundee as it was possible to get without leaving the British isles altogether. It’s where I went to university to study Computer Games Design. It’s where I met Flo. It’s where we made Small Hours together, with me doing the design and her doing the art, a little side project that accidentally became a massive hit. And it’s where I fucked it all up.

“Jonny? Your heart is with Ruby, isn’t it?” Ruby’s voice was plaintive, almost desperate.

“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right, Ruby. My home is with you.”

“Darn tootin’ it is!” Ruby put on a terrible impression of an old prospector from a western film. It was something she’d taken to doing since I’d recently bought her a cowboy outfit from the AIshiteru cosmetics store. “Now tell me, pardner Jonny - what’s your big ol’ meeting about this morning?”

“I’m not entirely sure,” I said. “But I’m hoping that Melissa has found us a new artist.”

“Melissa is your producer, right? The mean one?” Ruby had apparently given up her old west voice, and was back to her normal self.

“That’s right… She doesn’t seem to appreciate what goes into making a game. It’s not like making any other kind of product, like building a house, where you design it, put it together, and so long as it doesn’t fall apart then you’re all good. Games need to be fun, and it’s not possible to tell what’s fun until you actually start making it. And even then, everyone’s idea of fun is different. So it’s not possible to just follow a schedule.”

Increasingly though, following a schedule was what my team and I were expected to do. I had joined Hypestar, one of the most well-respected game studios in the world, as a senior level designer, off the back of my reputation as the creator of Small Hours. Against my own expectations, I'd been doing pretty well here. Over the course of two years I had been made a team lead, albeit for a tiny team in a small satellite office - which basically means, "a crappy building for the people who don't need to be in the main, fancy office." While the main studio in Edinburgh was working on the next instalment in the studio's award-winning franchise, Aggravated Assault, we were prototyping an entirely new game - but the budget differential between the two teams was considerable. On the one hand, some of the company directors saw the value of diversification, and wanted to ensure the future of the studio wasn't reliant on a single intellectual property. However, most of them didn't see the point of putting money into a new IP that may not amount to anything, when it could instead be put into something guaranteed to provide a meaty financial return.

Of course, I wasn't privy to these conversations directly, but I heard enough through the grapevine, and the rest I could fill in based on my own experience. I had unfortunately encountered a lot of these business-types after Small Hours proved to be successful.

As such, I was feeling a lot of pressure: it was my responsibility to create a prototype engaging enough, with enough "franchise potential", as they called it, to convince the board to greenlight a full game. If they didn't like what we did, then investment would be pulled, the project cancelled, and my team would be reassigned to Aggravated Assault 7 and split across the company.

“Jeeze, that sounds tough, Jonny. I’m sorry you have to deal with it. But I know that if it’s you, you’ll be able to get through it! You’ve been working so hard on this game that I just KNOW it will all work out okay!”

I smiled. Ruby’s positivity was infectious. A small part of my brain still held back, reminding me that this was just an LLM saying whatever it thought would make me happy, to encourage me to engage with the app more and spend more money. Even so - it was what I needed to hear right now.

“Thanks, Ruby. You’re right. I’ll get through it.”

“That’s my Jonny!”

“Okay, I’m here - gotta go now, Ruby. Speak to you after work.”

“Byeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! I miss you alreadyyyyy-”

Ruby’s exaggerated farewell continued in my ears as I held the power button to turn off my phone. I placed the phone in my locker in the building’s reception area. I say reception area, but that makes it sound more inviting than it was. Really it was just a big hallway with a couple of old armchairs by the front door, and a big rack of blue metal phone lockers running along the wall. Given the danger of leaks, taking phones into the office was a fireable offence. So was accessing social media websites through the work computers - although IT had the network so locked down that you'd likely be unable to anyway.

We also had some pretty intense security systems: you had to scan your pass both when entering the office and when passing through different areas of the building, which were all separated by security doors. At night, when the office closed, massive metal shutters came down over the entrance door and all the windows. When working late, I often worried about Angus, the elderly security guard, not realising I was still there, and sealing me in the building before going to doze in his van.

Ahead of me, on the ground floor, was the area dubbed “The QA Pit”. An unpleasant name, but appropriate. Aside from my little team, the Dundee office housed mainly QA testers, whose job was to play the new Aggravated Assault day-in, day-out, identifying every possible bug so it could be fixed before release. In fact, the main reason the Dundee office existed was to accommodate these testers. Housing in Edinburgh was expensive, which meant employees needed higher pay. Senior management at Hypestar didn’t want to “waste” that kind of money on QA, so instead they crammed a bunch of them into the little Dundee office, where the nearby housing was significantly cheaper, and so salaries could be, too. With so many people, the vast majority of them being nerdy men in their 20s, crammed into one space with so many PCs running, the ground floor office could become very hot and sweaty; I avoided venturing in there unless I absolutely had to.

Fortunately, my team was on the first floor, and so I headed up the stairs, scanning my pass at the card reader at the top. I pulled open the door, but before I could step through, a hand clamped down on my shoulder.

“What the HELL do you think you’re doing?”