Excerpt: Ty the Knot

Over on my Patreon, I’m writing a heist story called “Squeak Thief” for $5 and up subscribers, but if you’re at the $20/month tier, you get monthly updates on the ongoing sequel to Ty Game, tentatively (but who are we kidding) called Ty the Knot. Usually I’ll keep the Patreon content exclusive there, buuuuut I haven’t been writing anything else this month and I don’t think the subscribers there will mind if I give you a sneak peek at the latest chapter…

The setup here is that Tami, now working at her own game studio, is doing a deal with MeerkoSoft, a meerkat-founded software company and game console maker/game publisher that is definitely not based on any real-world company. Chet, the mule deer who’s going to be the liaison, has taken over one of the conference rooms in Tami’s office and this is their first official day together (though they’ve met before).

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A thick body spray scent surrounded the deer, but Tami managed not to wrinkle her nose. He stuck out a hand and she shook, careful to keep her paw’s grip strong but not too strong. “First day of working together!” he said. “You guys have good coffee here. Good. That’ll save me a few bucks at Starbucks every morning.”

“Axel insisted on that,” Tami said. “I can’t tell the difference between good and bad coffee, really. Drives him crazy, though.”

“You can’t tell, really?” Chet reached the door of the conference room and Tami saw that he’d already taped a piece of paper over the nameplate that said “Sonic.” It read, “Chet Wilkerson,” and underneath, “Project Manager, MeerkoSoft.” She kept her eye-rolling internal, and walked in.

They’d only found one chair, which was behind the table. The box of Chet’s stuff sat on the table, but he’d taken out a signed baseball and a picture of his family and put them out along with a wood-and-brass nameplate with his name engraved on it. 

Chet plopped himself down in the chair. “I don’t know where to get another chair,” he said. “Sorry about that.”

Here in the office, the body spray scent was even stronger. Did MeerkoSoft allow scents this strong? “I don’t mind standing. This shouldn’t take long. So you wanted to set up a schedule for our check-ins?”

He laced his fingers together and smiled. “I think we’d settled on Monday, Wednesday, Friday? Does nine o’clock work okay or would you rather give yourself a bit of buffer and go for nine-thirty?”

“Nine is fine,” Tami said, “but let’s start with just Monday and Friday and then, as production ramps up, if we need to add Wednesday, we can.” When he didn’t say anything, she went on. “It’s just that one of our core cultural components here is minimizing meetings, and if you’re going to be part of our team, I feel like we should all embrace the culture here. Maybe,” she tried to be jokey, “there’ll be something you can take back to MeerkoSoft.”

“That’s a great idea,” Chet said, and she knew right away he wasn’t going to go for it. “Tell you what, though, I’ve got daily catch-ups with my boss at MeerkoSoft, and he wants me to keep my finger on the pulse here, so even going to just three days a week is stretching it a little.”

“Can’t you keep your finger on the pulse without meetings?” Tami asked, a rather inane question to hide her distraction at wondering how a daily catch-up meeting could possibly be useful. Maybe Chet was so unreliable that his manager wanted to keep close tabs on him. Or maybe his manager was so insecure that he couldn’t let Chet go one day without talking.

“Sure, sure.” Chet smiled amiably. “And if we get to the point where we don’t need the Wednesday meetings, I’ll ditch them. Heck, I’ll ditch all of them. Maybe not all. I mean, I should be telling you what the situation at MeerkoSoft is too, right? These meetings go both ways.” He waved his hand between himself and her. 

“Okay. Fine.” It was only an extra half hour once a week. She could manage that. At least she didn’t have to report every day. “So what did you and Axel talk about?”

“Oh,” Chet waved a hand. “Just getting to know the e-staff. He was here early so we did the meeting.”

Axel had said, though, that Chet specifically told him to come in early. Tami bit her lip. “Great. So what do you need today?”

He gestured to the whiteboard on the wall to her right, which had been wiped clean. “Just a rundown of the various resources and a real high-level timeline for the project. Today and tomorrow I’d like to meet the team leads. I’ll be working most closely with the project managers in each group, I think.”

“Yeah, so.” Tami leaned back against the wall. “Why don’t you fill me in on exactly what you view your interaction with the team here looking like? That’ll help me out a lot.”

“Oh, sure thing.” He scratched at his antler spots and then laced his fingers behind his head. “From a purely engineering standpoint, I’m the point of contact for your dev team to get whatever specs and info they need. I transmit requests and return answers. Easy peasy one-two-three.”

“Great.” Why did he have to be so annoying? “Can you start by sending them an overview of the new architecture in the MBox?”

“Sure thing.” He pulled out his phone. “Remind me to get MBox specs for engineering.”

“Reminder set for one hour,” the phone replied.

He pointed at the phone. “See? Our new phone assistant lets you automatically assign reminders to a time if you don’t specify one. I tell you, we’re gonna eat that iPhone one for lunch.”

The people Tami knew who had a phone running MeerkoSoft’s OS were all inside this room right now. “Fantastic,” she said. “What about with the gameplay and story teams?”

“That’s where I’m not as directly involved,” he said. “With the engineering guys, I send them stuff—I got a biz dev guy on our engineering side, he’ll keep me posted as things change. With the story and gameplay, that’s a little trickier. I just want general updates and if there are things I need to run past our S&P group, I will. That’s Standards and Practices.”

“I know what S&P is,” Tami said. “And not everyone on our engineering staff is a ‘guy.’ I just wouldn’t want you to get off on the wrong foot with them.”

“What?” This was the first time Chet looked surprised by something Tami had said, but he recovered quickly. “Oh, guys and dolls. Fantastic. Love that.”

“Actually.” Tami didn’t really like how much she was enjoying this. “Vi identifies as female, yes, but Finny is non-binary and prefers ‘they/them’ pronouns, and even though Mike identifies as male, they prefer ‘they/them’ as well. Just so you know.”

“Fantastic,” Chet repeated, but his eyes shifted as he said it and he brought his hands back down to the desk. “I’ll make a note to ask everyone’s pronouns.”

“Maybe your phone can remind you.”

“Nah.” He looked at it, apparently oblivious to Tami’s sarcasm. “But that’d be cool, wouldn’t it? If it could detect that you were meeting someone for the first time and remind you of things you need to know to be respectful? Oh! Maybe phones could just have that information—opt-in, of course—and then it comes up on your screen when you’re near someone else’s phone for the first time.” He picked up his phone. “Remind me to call Carl about new contact phone idea.”