Chapter 6
Chapter 6: What She Built
Watershed shipped in June, fourteen months after that Thursday.
Nisha uploaded the build at two in the morning in the specific way of someone completing a thing they had been inside for so long that its ending felt like a loss — the quiet studio apartment, the dark outside the window, her mother's watch on her right wrist showing 2:07. She submitted it to the storefront. She closed her laptop. She went to bed and lay there for a long time thinking about nothing in particular and feeling, underneath that, an enormous complicated thing she did not examine.
She texted Priya: It's done.
Priya replied four minutes later, which meant she was awake, which meant she had been waiting: I'm coming over with champagne in the morning. Don't argue.
Nisha did not argue.
The first three months, Watershed sold modestly. The kind of sales that were good for an indie title from a one-person studio with no marketing budget and a name nobody knew yet — not enough to matter to the industry, enough to matter to the person reading the numbers at eleven at night and quietly doing the math on how long she could keep the lights on.
She was fine. She told Priya she was fine. She told herself she was fine in a way that wasn't exactly lying but wasn't the whole truth either.
The whole truth was: she had spent two and a half years building a game about her mother, about memory, about the way you kept going back to a place looking for someone who wasn't there, and now it was in the world and out of her hands, and the apartment felt very empty, and she didn't know what came next, and she was more tired than she had let herself be in years.
She started Chapter 1 of a new project. She deleted it. She started again.
In September, a critic at a small games publication called Watershed "the most emotionally precise game released this year." The piece went briefly viral in the games community — indie developers sharing it, a few larger publications picking it up. The week the piece ran, Watershed's sales numbers did something that Nisha watched on her laptop with a feeling she couldn't name, which was: it found its people.
The people found it, and it found them back, and for three weeks her inbox was full of messages from strangers saying things like I lost my mother when I was fourteen and I didn't cry in a game until now and I had to put the controller down — which was a phrase she noted, filed away, did not examine too carefully.
She did not cry while reading them. She was fine.
She cried once, alone in the studio, at two on a Wednesday, rereading the letter from a woman in Winnipeg whose mother had died of cancer the previous winter and who had played Watershed three times. After that she was fine again.
Still Water Games moved from her apartment to a small shared studio space near Kensington Market in the second year, which was an act of faith that Priya called overdue and the accountant called reasonable. It was a room with one desk and one window and a secondhand couch that had been left behind by the previous occupant, and Nisha put her monitors on the desk and her notebooks on the shelf and worked twelve hours a day on the new project, which was about a city planner who kept finding cities she had already planned in other lives.
She abandoned the new project in March.
She started a different one in April.
In the third year, she was nominated for the Toronto Indie Games Festival's Best Indie Game award for Watershed, which had by then sold well enough that the number meant something real. She did not win. She went to the ceremony and sat in the third row and watched a game about memory and urban decay take the award, and she thought the game deserved it, and she thought: next time.
She told Priya this on the way home and Priya said, "Next time absolutely, and also — are you happy?" and Nisha thought about it properly.
"Working on it," she said.
"Nisha."
"I'm fine."
"I know you're fine. I asked if you were happy. Those are different questions."
They were. Nisha looked out the taxi window at the city going past — the October streets, the streetcar tracks, the specific quality of Toronto at night in the third year of a life she had built carefully and alone. She thought about the word happy and what she would put in it if she was being honest.
The studio. The games. Priya. The apartment that was hers. The fact that she was doing the thing she had decided to do at twenty-two with a credit card and no one's permission.
And the other things. The things she'd decided not to put anywhere.
"Working on it," she said again.
In the fourth year she made a game called Signal, about a woman who received messages from a version of herself in a parallel timeline. She built it in nine months — the fastest she'd ever worked — with the specific efficient momentum of someone who had found the thing she was making and was moving toward it.
Signal was strange and precise and harder to categorise than Watershed. It sold more slowly and developed a smaller, fiercer audience. The reviews used words like architectural and quietly devastating and, once, in a piece she read three times, a game built by someone who knows exactly what it costs to keep trying to reach something.
She had not written it about the night at the Broadview.
She had not.
She had written it about exactly what she said she'd written it about, which was: parallel selves, and the messages that crossed between them, and whether the version of you that took the other road was better or worse off, and whether it was useful to know.
She had also, somewhere in the second act, written a scene in which the protagonist received a message that had the wrong number of digits — one too few, the sequence that got you nowhere — and she did not cut it from the final build, and she did not think about why, and she moved on.
The convention announcement came in March of the fifth year.
Toronto Indie Games Festival, August. Two finalists for Best Indie Game. Still Water Games — Signal — and Bright Fault Games — Undertow.
She read the email twice. Then a third time, slower.
Bright Fault Games.
She put her phone down. She looked at the window. She picked her phone back up and looked at the email again, as if the name might have changed. It had not changed.
Undertow. She had not played the full release. She'd been going to, and then she hadn't, for reasons she had not examined, and now here was the name on a shortlist beside her own.
She thought about the bar. She thought about I'll finish it when I get back. She thought about the cortado ring on the window table and twenty minutes and the number that went to Brenda in Scarborough.
She set the phone face down on her desk.
Then she opened her laptop and pulled up the Still Water Games project file for the TIGF submission, and she worked for three hours, and she did not think about it.
She called Priya at six.
"I saw," Priya said, before she could start.
"It's fine," Nisha said.
"Nisha."
"Priya."
"It's been five years. You don't even know for sure it's the same—"
"Bright Fault Games," Nisha said. "Creative director. Jamie Calloway. Game about a man looking for his missing brother through a coastal town with shifting tides." She paused. "It's him."
Priya was quiet for a moment. "Have you looked him up?"
"I know everything I need to know."
"That's a no."
"That's an I'm not doing that."
"Nisha. You've been angry at him for five years for something that might—"
"He left without a word," Nisha said. "Priya. He left without a word."
"Or he left a note and something happened to it, and—"
"I don't need a story where it wasn't what it was." She paused. Her voice was level. She was a practical person. "It was a one-night thing that I let myself feel too much, and the appropriate response to that is to go to the convention, be professional, win the award, and get on with my life."
"The award. Which you and he are both finalists for."
"Yes."
"So you're going to see him."
"Apparently."
"And you're going to be fine."
"I'm always fine," Nisha said.
Priya made a sound that conveyed, without any words, that she had been listening to this for five years and had an extremely developed opinion about it that she was, for now, keeping to herself.
"I'll come to the convention," she said. "For moral support."
"I don't need moral support."
"I know you don't. I'll come anyway." A pause. "The man left a note, Nisha. People who ghost don't leave notes."
"Priya."
"I'm just saying. The story doesn't add up."
"The story adds up fine."
"Call it a glitch," Priya said. "And fix it."
Nisha looked at her apartment. She looked at the screen, the project file, the name of the game she had spent nine months building. She thought about parallel selves and wrong numbers and the version of the story you told yourself until it became the only one.
"I'll see you at the convention," she said.