Sparks (2 page)

Now Sparks had run out of reasons to be online. And, according to his computer, he had THINGS TO DO. But seeing Alison’s email address had made him think of Alison again. This was hardly surprising – seeing traffic wardens could make him think of Alison. Pictures of racing drivers could make him think of Alison. Once he had actually been at the pictures with Alison and, engrossed in the film, had forgotten she was there until a huge ant-faced robot had loomed into sight on the screen, and that had reminded him of Alison and he had suddenly started with the realisation that the proper Alison was sitting next to him. He tried to explain this to Alison in the pub later, but she just smiled, in a way that also reminded him of her, if you can be reminded of somebody by something that they are doing when you are actually looking at them.

So Sparks being reminded of Alison by her email address was not deeply unusual for him. Email had played a large part in the early stages of their relationship, when after a lot of sex and beer, they would have to part and go to their respective places of work. Sparks, feeling empty somehow without Alison, would email her little messages and graphics. He had read about emoticons, little faces made up of semi-colons and commas that apparently when you looked at them sideways made faces. To Sparks they always looked like someone had been shot dead and fallen face down onto the part of the keyboard where the semi-colons live, but he supposed other people liked them. Eventually, Alison sent him an email asking him to stop sending her bits of punctuation because she couldn’t understand them. Sparks, who had been trying to convey the emotions of regret and mild lust by drawing a little semi-colon face with some number for a hat, realised then and there that she was the woman for him.

I LOVE YOU, he wrote back.

SO DO I, Alison replied.

SO DO YOU WHAT? wrote Sparks. LOVE YOURSELF, OR ME?

I HAVE TO GO NOW, Alison replied.

Most of their correspondence was like this. It wasn’t the collected letters of George Bernard Shaw but it meant a lot to Sparks, and to Alison as well. Sparks found to his utter lack of surprise that he was feeling slightly aroused. The combination of beer, bad food and low-grade sleep had not dented the wreckage of Sparks’ libido in any way. The fact that his (fairly useless) instincts told him that dumping Alison – because Sparks was the dumper here – was the right thing to do was irrelevant, so far as his libido was concerned. Sparks’ libido was like a Japanese soldier in his trousers who thought the war was still on and occasionally would rush out and kill some socks, or something. Right now the soldier appeared to be fixing bayonets for a charge.

Now, Sparks was not the kind of person who used the internet in a dubious manner. He would never dream of giving his credit card number to some people in Idaho so he could watch tiny videos of oddly-endowed men and women at it like knives. He still vaguely believed that pornography involved the exploitation of women. He was generally embarrassed when someone sent him material of a suggestive nature on the net. But right now, that second, he found he wanted to see something rude.

Now what?
thought Sparks, who was no expert on the internet. He had no sites bookmarked, perhaps because he didn’t know what a bookmark was, unless it was leather and had A PRESENT FROM BEAUFORT CASTLE written on it. But he did vaguely remember a conversation he’d overheard in a pub a few weeks ago, when Alison had been at the bar buying them drinks and Sparks was whiling away a few minutes eavesdropping on a pair of spotty men at the next table.

“It’s amazing,” said the first spotty man. “You just go to the site, and it generates other sites, and it’s random.”

“What, like dirty sites?” said the other spotty man, who clearly was not ready to move on to the subject of randomness yet.

“Yes, dirty sites,” the first spotty man said. “It generates them. At random.”

“What do you mean, ‘random’?” said the other man.

“I mean random,” said the first man. “Random random. How else can I explain it? Random is random. That’s the word for it. Random is the definition of random. I don’t know! It’s random, it’s got randomness, it…”

“So what do you do?” asked the other man, who had a relentless quality to his enquiries.

“I work in a hobby shop,” said the first man, slightly embarrassed. “We sell plastic jets in kit form.”

“No,” said the second man, “to get the sites.”

“I told you,” the first man said, “You go to the site and it generates sites, and you click on them, and…”

“These are dirty sites?” the other said.

“Yes dirty sites!” said the first man, a bit loudly. “Random ones! That change all the time!”

“Oh,” said the other man. “Random. I see.”

He took a sip of his beer.

“So they’re definitely dirty then?”

Just then Alison reappeared with the drinks, and the conversation moved on to more salacious topics, like why Sparks didn’t like pasta, and why that man over there was trying to put the other one’s head into his pint glass.

Sparks, remembering the spotty men in the pub, and noting that he now had an ocean-going chub going on, made a decision. He tapped the words RANDOM DIRTY SITE GENERATOR into the computer. Then he looked at them and felt embarrassed. He wondered if other people could find out what sites he had been looking at. A vision of Alison finding out that Sparks looked up dubious sites came into his mind, followed by one of Sparks, unshaven and dark-lidded, being deported for unspecified sex crimes and made to live in a barrel far out in the Atlantic Ocean.

Sparks looked at the words RANDOM DIRTY SITE GENERATOR again. He erased the words DIRTY and SITE, so now he was looking at the phrase RANDOM GENERATOR. It looked too short.
Like life
, Sparks thought, except the way he was feeling right now, his life could have got shorter by about 50 years and he wouldn’t have been that bothered. As far as Sparks was concerned, Sparks and his life were heading for a divorce.
I’ve dumped my girlfriend
, Sparks thought,
and now I appear to be considering dumping my life
.

Life
, thought Sparks. The Japanese soldier in his trousers had retreated to the jungle of his subconscious.
Life
, thought Sparks again, trying to sound wry in his head. He looked at the computer again, and typed LIFE into the search engine. Then he clicked on GO. Too late, and frankly not caring that much, Sparks realised that when he had written LIFE on the search engine, the cursor had still been where he’d erased dirty site. The search engine was racing off to look for, not LIFE, but something else.

The something else came up. There was one result for it.
Result
, thought Sparks, this time trying to sound ironic in his head. The information on the result was scanty in the extreme. It consisted solely of the three words Sparks had typed in. On the screen in front of Sparks, underlined in a rather nice blue, were the words RANDOM LIFE GENERATOR. Sparks clicked on them.

Everything changed after that. Sort of.

But not quite yet.

Sparks was impressed; you didn’t get sites this slow nowadays. It was all highly retro. First the screen on Sparks’ computer filled up with red pixels, very slowly, like a large and cumbersome migraine. Then the three letters R, L and G appeared, flashing hesitantly. This went on for fully two minutes, after which the word LOADING appeared. This too flashed for a couple of minutes, until finally the R, the L and the G reappeared, spread out away from each other, and the spaces between filled up with letters to read, perhaps a little unsurprisingly, RANDOM LIFE GENERATOR.

All in all, six minutes had passed since Sparks had clicked onto the site. Yet he was totally engrossed in its unfolding; so much so that when the word ENTER appeared, in orange letters in a little yellow box that was so almost orangey-yellow as to make the word ENTER all but illegible, he stared at it for a long time, just oddly contented at coming across such an amateurish but somehow engaging site. It was, to use a word that Sparks had excised from his vocabulary and liked to wince at whenever others – such as, mainly Alison – used it, cute. Finally, when the word ENTER started flashing and some sort of rudimentary electronic keyboard began to play the scales in a dinky but sluggish way, Sparks woke from his reverie and clicked on ENTER.

All hell broke loose. The music stopped being dinky and started being jagged and jarring, like some modern classical music Alison had made Sparks listen to once, while the screen turned black, then red, then a garish yellow, then repeated the colours in a strobing fashion, and suddenly (and, from where Sparks was sitting, a bit too realistically) a tiny object rushed forward from the centre of the screen, getting larger and larger as it got nearer, until – just before it became so big it nearly filled the screen – it turned from small white blob to a huge bleached skull and crossbones.

The skull and crossbones looked unnaturally real to Sparks. Then its white jaws opened and a voice so loud that it made Sparks start (and also made him wonder how his crappy old speakers had got so powerful) shouted:

 “WARNING! DO NOT ENTER WITHOUT PERMISSION OR AUTHORISATION!”

Sparks sat back in shock, part of him wondering if anything else scary might happen, like the computer getting off the table and twatting him, or his ears suddenly catching fire. Nothing, fortunately, did, and the skull and crossbones just lurked on the screen, wobbling slightly and not looking all that frightening at all any more. Sparks moved the mouse tentatively across the screen. When the cursor passed over the formerly terrifying skull, a little hand appeared. Sparks clicked on the little hand.

Nothing happened. Then the screen filled with text. Hundreds of words rushed downwards like a dictionary with the trots. Sparks peered in, to see if any of the words were rude. None of them were, although some of them were pretty strange and one of them might have been FROTTAGE. Finally the words slowed down to autocue speed, then some more again, and then they stopped completely. Then most of the words vanished, including the one that might have been FROTTAGE. There were about 12 words left on the screen, and they stood there, blinking slightly like some words picked for a school football team. Sparks leaned over and examined the screen. The 12 or so words didn’t make much sense to him.

TODAY’S WORD REDOLENT OPERATING ENTRANCE LONDON 92 MARYLEBONE HS DUTY R PATTERSON

Then the screen cleared completely, and just as quickly refilled itself again. There were 12 or so new words, and this time they said:

TODAY’S WORD REDOLENT OPERATING ENTRANCE CAEN 45 RD CENTRALE DUTY JM LEVERT

The screen cleared again, and refilled itself. Now there were some new words and they read – but Sparks had lost interest. The whole thing, whatever it was, looked like it might go on like this, as far as Sparks could tell, forever. He frowned and moved the mouse across the screen, looking for the word EXIT. Sparks found it, in the top right corner and was about to click on it when a shrill noise jammed itself into his consciousness. After a couple of seconds, Sparks realised that it was not the sound of a thousand tiny virtual missiles launching themselves with a shriek from the computer into his eyes, but his mobile phone. (He was not a man who got a lot of phone calls, and as a consequence could never quite remember his ringing tone.)

He reached across the desk for his mobile. The display said TLA. It was the lovely Alison – calling, Sparks suddenly realised, for the first time since he had dumped her. Perhaps she wanted to get back with him! Perhaps – perhaps it was more complicated than that! In his mind’s slightly bloodshot eye, Sparks could suddenly see two Alisons next to each other in two split screen... screens, he supposed it would be.

One Alison was smiling as she pressed SPARKS in her mobile phone memory. She looked ready to forgive and to make a new start.

One Alison was crying as she pressed SPARKS in her mobile phone memory. She looked as unhappy as a person can be.

Sparks winced. The second image was the likeliest. He pressed ANSWER, and the phone went dead. Alison had rung off, presumably not while smiling. Sparks felt miserable. Suddenly the boring listy website looked interesting again. The words were still coming up on the screen and clearing again and vanishing and returning.
Even for a pretty bastard obscure message
, he thought,
this one looks completely unable to make up its mind
. He decided to see if there was a pattern, like those submarine code things there was a documentary about every week these days.

Probably,
Sparks thought with a numb excitement,
I have stumbled into some sort of government website and these are codes that could authorise a nuclear war or have the entire Shadow Cabinet rounded up to be eaten by dogs in a King’s Cross lock-up. Then again, probably not.

He read the latest words on the screen. TODAY’S WORD was still REDOLENT, whatever that signified, and there was still an OPERATING ENTRANCE, but this time it was BIRMINGHAM 32 OLIVER CROMWELL MANSIONS and the DUTY was LIN-YIU. Sparks’ head started to hurt in a new way. His hangover –
vanilla vodka and ginger ale vanilla
– started to hover like a nasty drunken fly on the edges of his perception. These messages were hard and possibly too stupid to be important secret service codes. Then again, Sparks believed the security services to be capable of doing anything at all, especially if it was completely idiotic and the sort of thing that would cause a slightly dim toddler to wave its arms in panic and shout, “No no no no NO!”. Sparks looked at the screen, checking for places to click that might accidentally plunge the world into horrific nuclear darkness. There weren’t any. He sat back in relief as the screen refreshed itself.

TODAY’S WORD REDOLENT it said, as ever, then OPERATING ENTRANCE LONDON 17 OSWALD ROAD DUTY T SINGH. Sparks blinked. His flat was about 200 yards from an Oswald Road. He groped for a pen on his pen-covered desk and wrote the address down. Then, after a moment’s thought, he wrote down REDOLENT and T SINGH. When he had done that, Sparks wondered why. Normally he was the kind of person who didn’t even reply to letters that promised him millions of pounds and all he had to do was send the letter on to some other gits, but now he was writing down an address from a site that he didn’t know anything about.