In The Night Factory

He stooped awkwardly to place his load upon the platform, opening the lid of the tin box and lifting with both hands what seemed like a large scroll, with lines of text written along it. He slowly unrolled it and lingered there for a short while in front of the now silent crowd, his face concentrating downwards, indulging in the script. Perhaps a last check for errors was also part of the procedure? The crowd waited patiently until the giant placed the finished scroll upon the slanted pulpit-like top of the plinth, manoeuvring the stone edifice to face the audience, this last gesture causing a thunderous roar from the crowd, the stone slabs of the square beginning to quake beneath hundreds of stamping feet.

Just beginning to be satisfied with work done, he unexpectedly slapped a hand to his forehead, signalling a false start to the crowd, rushing to the plinth, sliding a pen from behind his ear as he did so and began to hastily correct a section of the text. He eyed the script closely, head travelling from side to side. The giant worked furiously making final edits, aware of the impatient grumbles from the crowd at his rear. Finally he stepped back a few paces to kneel before his finished work, the crowd making fanatical clicking sounds that echoed throughout the square.
The giant then stooped his creaking frame, having to strain all his various joints in order to pick up his baggage and then moved stiffly towards the door, banging his fist upon it whilst clamping his load awkwardly between right hand and chin. A visible gap appeared and the grinding metal door, flashing sparks upon the cobbled stone, at last created enough space for the giant man to pass through.

The towering figure of the giant had disappeared inside, the doors having swung back together, banging closed with a dull thud. The stage was now bare except for the plinth with the scroll displayed there for all to see. The crowd appeared to be steadying their natural impulse to rush towards it, waiting for a sign, a signal or something to mark the next course of action.

The tension in the square mounted again when the church bells sounded the half hour mark, a signal for the first line of figures to take their places upon the steps.

Once inside the doors Darrus collapsed to the ground, his legs falling in a disjointed heap beside him, boots like boulders tumbling across the hallway.
“These bloody stilts are killing me. I’ll have to remind myself to make a new, more comfortable pair.”
After he pulled off the last buckle, he let out a deep sigh of relief and pushed the wooden contraption away, resting his aching back against the wall. “Never again, never again, this is the last time. I just hope that this one goes smoothly than before.”

Even though he was tired and really felt like collapsing upon in his bed up stairs, Darrus kept himself awake with the hope that some person in the crowd outside would at last begin to read his work, having spent so much of his time on it. He would, of course, inevitably fall prey to the temptation of visiting the control room yet again; he had converted it himself from the downstairs toilet, and it did the job well enough, receiving information from a customised treadmill placed just before of the plinth. Readers had to step onto it in order to read the material and then he would reel in information from the dials, watching the red pins nervously flick back and forth inside their dusty windows. He had improvised a wooden board was over the bath, on top of which was piled several graph machines of different sizes, recording the incoming data, their metal encasements rattling each time a new visitor stepped onto the treadmill. Darrus had removed these outdated machines in secret from the local hospital, his previous workplace, having broken in there in the middle of the night, using his spare keys to open the store room in the Electro Cardiac department where there was easy access to the heart monitoring machines and defibrillators. He had linked all the gadgets up with the use of the old wiring and broken fixtures he’d found lying around on the factory floor.

Sitting himself on the toilet seat he busied himself by flicking switches, eyes fixed into the home made periscope that slid down from the ceiling, where upon it tunnelled through the brickwork and emerged along the front side of the chimney, its swivelling lenses spying the visitors, scanning names of figures as they moved up and down the front steps.

Engrossed as he was in drawing up pen portraits of the most regular customers Darrus wouldn't have heard the handle of the door unfastening and the sharp heels of his mother stepping up behind him, only noticing when he felt a hand grabbing hold of his shoulder bone.

“Thought you’d be in here again” she said with her high pitched voice blaring into his ear, making his body jump up, eyes popping out of the service goggles, the periscope tentacle quickly zipping its segments back into the ceiling.

"Are you crazy woman, you can’t just drop in like that unannounced, in the middle of everything, can't you see I’m concentrating. I was just getting into it.”

"If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times, don’t bring strangers back to this house. If you don’t get them to go away I’m going to phone the police. The dogs gone missing as well, he hasn’t eaten any of his food”

“You know all about this though mother, as I’ve explained before, these are my friends and they read my writing and stuff, It’s OK.”

“What writing, I never see any writing, all I see is you lazing around, fiddling with these knobs. I’m waiting for you to get a proper job, then we can have a bit of space round here."

“Well, you said I could use the bathroom.”

“Only temporary, only temporarily I said. I thought it best to keep you occupied with something, but this is going to far.”

His mother stood there, hands on hips, all her weight leaning over and pecking her finger down at Darrus’s dwindling form, eyes frowning, her white lips pushed out to a point, scrunching her hook nose, staring at Darrus in the face ”Right, in two minutes and I want you washing those dishes in the kitchen, is that clear.”

“Oh, mum.”

“Don’t Oh Mum me; get into the back there before I skin you. Look at the state of you”

“I’ll just have to get some new legs, those old ones are killing me.”

“Don't think you can impress me with your costumes. Remember, I know you like the back of my hand Darrus Floyd Wheelan. You don’t fool me? You and your writing, you're going to start pulling your weight around here right now!”

“But mother, I need to check the plinth, to see if they’re reading it."

“Get in there and do those dishes and I hope your going to put those things back where you found them?"

"Well, they're er… very handy you see"

"Don’t blame me if you get caught, I know nothing.

Now come on…” She stood back pointing the way for him to the kitchen."

"Oh, can’t I do it later? You know, they’re all out there and I’m missing vital statistics, for god sakes!”

“Don’t swear at me.” She said pointing him in the chest area. “Look, you can play on it later for a bit, when you’ve done your dishes.”

”Oh, I wish you would take this thing a bit more seriously, do you know how rare it is to get this many visitors at once?”

”I’ve read your writing and and I don’t know why you bother.”

”Mother!”

”I’ve got a good mind to go and tell that crowd to go away. My roses are getting ruined with all their trampling feet”

“Don’t worry, I’ll clear it all up when they’ve gone.”

“What - you’re going to grow my prize specimens back are you Daz”

“Mum.”

"Right, come on, out!”

“Oh…if I …I suppose I have to.”

Darrus trundled his aching body reluctantly out from his monitoring studio, hobbling along the corridor and into the kitchen, grabbing a towel to start on the large pile of dirty dishes standing there.

“Here, put this on” She handed him an apron.

Putting the noose over his head, more submissive now that he was inside his mother’s arena, he picked up the first dish in the pile. He stopped suddenly, his ears pricking up and twitching at the sounds in the hallway. He thought he had heard the faint sound of heels tapping up the iron staircase, heading up to the first floor window.

“Mother… Mother, is that you?”

“Just doing what I should have done a long time ago Daz my boy.”

“What, what are you doing Mum?”

“Never you mind, this lot are going to have a piece of my mind”

Darrus 's dropped a dish to the floor, shattering fragments across the stone slabs. Ignoring the mess, he walked hurriedly to the staircase shouting up. “Mum this isn’t the right time, Mum, Mum!”

His mother had scaled the staircase and was inspecting the Square outside through the landing window, rubbing the dust off with her apron, peering out, face pressed against the glass, eyes squinting into the light. “They all look very suspicious to me, and what’s happened with all their faces?”

"They’re just people Mum, just people I’ve contacted through the network. I need an audience, you know, for my work. Mum, close the window; it’s got nothing to do with you."

"We’ll see about that, young man. I notice they’ve ruined my magnolias in the front patch! I’m going to go out there and tell that crowd off. So this is the company you keep.”

“They’re intelligent thoughtful individuals Mum. You can’t just go and barge in, it’s a sensitive situation, and anyway I’m not going to let you.”

”Thoughtful, thoughtful, since when are they thinking about me and my sinus problems, it’s giving me a headache all that humming and buzzing all over the place. Can’t they keep it down a bit?”

”There’s nothing I can do. Once you start these things you’ve got to go with the flow.”

“Well I’ve had enough. I don’t like this going with the flow business, you can’t trust anybody in this world.” She said pulling the window frames out."

“No. Mother no!”

“It's got to happen some time.”

Darrus grabbed hold of his mother and tried to drag her back, pulling at her arms, but she forced him back.

“Get away, get away, are you mad” She said, her sharp tone rising to a hoarse screech. “You’re using my connection and I want to use it too. Let’s have a look at your favourites then. Which one's Rubenavista?"

"No, there’s not one of them there, nothing there. Please mother, Come away from the window, come on, they’ll see you."

“Don’t you come way for the window me. Get down there, go on.” With that Darrus’s mother took a swing at him with her hand bag. Darrus, slow to duck, met with the full force of the fat and bloated bag, full of miscellaneous objects, his head hitting the wall with an audible thud, body stumbling along the corner panelling, holding his head in pain.

“There, that’ll teach you to talk to your mother like that, out of my way. I’m going to give this lot a piece of my mind.” His mother pulled the window further out until she made sure that she was in full view of the crowd, her bright yellow rubber gloves clasping the outside edges of the frame. Sections of the crowd were in the middle of formal proceedings; Rubenavista was just about to step onto the treadmill.

“Now listen you lot…”she shouted, her shrill voice echoing around the open space. Darrus managed to stop her momentarily by grabbing hold of one of her thick legs on the ground and pulling with all his strength, slowly heaving it backwards.

“Mum, you’re ruining everything! It’s taken me ages to get this far. Mum, Mum, come away”

He struggled to hold his her back, hands grabbing at the spotted red and yellow piny, but there was no stopping his mother in her present mood.

“Now listen…he hasn’t got time for all this writing business, he’s got lots of tidying up to do in his room, also there’s the dishes, which he’s just about to do, isn’t that right Darrus?”

“They don’t know my real name, say it’s not my real name!” said Darrus, crouching in the corner.

"Friends who don’t know your name, well I never…you down there, stop drawing graffiti on that wall, this is a protected building.”

"A comment? Hey Mum, out of the way."

“get off me Darrus…this is all for your own good.” She shouted back inside towards her legs where Darrus was pulling and scrabbling about on the floor in desperation. His mother had a tight grip on the window frame though and the more he struggled the more stubborn she was to hold on to the ledge, her squawking voice turning into a high pitched scream. Darrus’s resistance was weakening.

“Don’t you listen to him; he’s a phoney and a crook. You’re all wasting your time; go on be off with you. And mind those roses on your way out; you’ve already knocked over my magnolias. Go on beat it the lot of you!”

“Don’t listen, she doesn’t mean it!”

The commotion by the window was causing a stir in the crowd; Rubavinusta and Deadcat could be seen hesitating near the foot of the plinth.

“Mum!”

“Go to bed, your grounded now…the way you've treated your own mother, it’s so disrespectful”

“Please Mum, Get away from the window; they don’t know about, you know, family and everything.”

"What, are you ashamed of your own mother? After all those years slaving away for your education, how dare you! And look what you’ve got to show for it.”

She turned again towards the crowd; “you enter my font garden without asking with all your humming and clicking business, I’m telling you now go away or I’ll call the police…. Darrus… dishes. Now!.”

She swung her handbag around and landed it firmly on Darrus’s left cheek. “Get back and do some housework like I told you…get down stairs, go on."

“They think that this is my site.” he mumbled sheepishly.

"Well it’s not; it’s mine - and you young man, you need to learn some manners."

While Darrus was nursing his wounds his mother leaned out once more towards the crowd; ”See what you’ve done, it’s all your fault, he never used to be like this, he used to be a good boy!”

Darrus ducked from another swing of his Mother’s arm. She shouted down at him:
“This is my house, and I don’t want you taking it over with all this shenanigans, It was alright as a hobby but now it’s just gone too far. I want you to stop hanging round with those strange looking people. Get yourself some proper friends.”

The sound of the thick leather bag hitting Darrus on all parts of his body grew louder and more insistent and Darrus’s retorts could be heard travelling across the corridor and down the spiral staircase towards the kitchen.

Bash Bang…beep… Bash Bang-beep!… ….bang-beep!… ...bang-beep!... …bang-beep! ...ba-beep! Ba-eep!...Beeee…p!... The alarm system that Darrus had set up to alert him when somebody enters hammered away on his desktop. He slowly turned his heavy head over on the stylus pad, shielding his eyes from the red alert sign flashing up on the screen. He lifted one of his left digits and let it flop down over the return button on the keyboard. The customised handbag on the inside of the screen stopped it’s banging, the exaggerated fastening button giving the option of 'snooze' or 'get up'. It seemed funny when he had downloaded it. Darus was barely awake and hardly able to open his eyes to function properly. He half consciously clicked through the windows to the ‘recently visited’ section. He looked towards the pixelated square and at the latest addition at the top of the descending list of data. What he saw enabled his mind to tick off a box etched deep on the inside of his brain. “Right Deadcat, Deadcat, right that’s how many..mmmn?
His head slumped back again onto the computer tablet, hand raking over the keyboard to land on the arm of his chair. His subconscious eye surveyed the remaining boxes in his head, wondering what new data would flow next through the wires.

# posted by Neil @ 9:06 pm

- Have you been looking at my blog?

- What do you mean – I haven’t been there for ages.

- I ask you again - have you been looking at my blog?

- What’re you asking for?

- Just asking, that’s all.

- Er, no, I have not been looking at it. Why?

- Are you sure you haven’t?

- Hey, what’s going on with you? Why are you asking me this?

- I have certain information that tells me otherwise, that’s all. Let’s say I know a thing or two about your recent travels, past experiences, the paths you have trodden…

- Come on Darrus, what are you playing at? What’s going on?

- …Your foibles, your changes of mind, your secret decisions to take that route not this route, appearing to be happily searching and playing around with the World Wide Web, tapping through with ignorant pleasure, taking no heed of the spy software that could lurk dangerously in the shadows.

- Are you trying, in your customarily bizarre way, to tell me that you’ve found some software and have enlisted yourself as some sort of sinister spy on the web?

- Ur, I wouldn’t put it quite like that.

- Oh yes, what is it some sort of ripped off freeware rubbish?

- Oh I think you are underestimating the power of this new technology Owen, you would be quite impressed.

- Impressed by what? What has it found out then, eh?

- Oh, I don’t know. One or two little morsels of info, that’s all.

- What have you found out? What incriminating evidence has your beady little machine sought out? Come on!

- No need to seek it out Owen, no, it is all there. Anybody that goes through my site leaves their trail behind them, their country of origin, their route to the site, the address; I think I could make a pretty good picture of my inhabitants. Interesting cultural types you know, artistic, well read, that sort of person.

- From what little titbits of information did you get that idea? Are you sure you’re not exaggerating the importance of these statistics Darrus?

- Hey, it’s got graphs and everything, pie charts, plenty of comparative data. I’m not sure how it gathers all this info but it’s a real eye opener, I can tell you. People are coming in from all over the world.

- What do’ you mean eye opener? What can this information really tell you other than the fact that you are an obsessively analytical nut, fantasising about a bunch of abstract data floating about on the internet? I bet there’s nothing concrete?

- So you’re alternating between Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers now then?

- Hey, how did it get that?

- It’s got it here. You come in with the name Monkey, sometimes Iguana, and here I’ve got you as Golden Boy for some reason, I don’t know.

- What! What a stupid…what, are you sure? That’s weird; I really do need to sort out my browser.

- That’s just a small section of what I have here.

- So there’s more stuff about me then is there?

- Some.

- You’re having me on, I don’t believe it. Ur…Wh..What can that thing do, exactly? What information than can it really find out?

- I don’t know all about it yet. There’s all these buttons and I’m not sure what they do.

- So what does it say on top of them then?

- Ur…job history, financial situation, family tree, er…home statistics, stuff like that.

- Home statistics? You mean they can track you to your home, where you live!? I can’t believe that all this information is legit, it just can’t be. There are privacy laws, public rights, things like that. You can’t get away with it.

- I looked into one of them before but it all looked a bit complicated, I’ll leave that until later. I’m not really interested in your personal details anyway.

- Yes but this thing you’ve got is freeware, any bugger can get hold of it. They’ll be tracking me and my trail of information must have spread across continents, be lodged in search engines across the world. My logins and passwords will be used to open gateways and pass through firewalls everywhere. People in poor countries will be desperately trying to work out my online banking login codes. My computer and electrical equipment at home will be bugged by advertising companies, endless pop up windows and interference on my TV, break ins, murders, child abduction…

- Hey, look who’s exaggerating now...hang on a minute; did you enter my site for fifty one seconds just recently?

- Why?

- Yep, you’ve been looking in my comments, what could that be for? It all fits into place now? All marked on my graph on the wall - that’s about the average, fifteen minutes twenty three seconds.

- On the wall? Are you going nuts. You’re taking this stats business a touch towards the extreme aren’t you?

- It’s a serious activity. There are people there and they are contacting my site on a pretty regular basis. This is a cultural exchange going on here. Hang on, there’s another one, he or she has just entered my space for a total of 25 seconds! Where’s my pen? I can sense their ghostly presence floating about the computer. Somebody stayed from there yesterday for an hour, thirteen minutes and eighteen seconds at Five fifteen pm, on my blog? It’s funny you know when I’m looking at the stats I imagine the actual people moving their cursors around, gazing into the screen. It’s hard to say that they are looking at me but I can imagine them walking about and talking about my site, you know. He’s a bit shifty this guy.

- Who?

- Rubavenusta.

- Could be a nice girl or a single lady?

- No really - there is - there’s somebody. Hang on I’ll just…there they are again, the Risler Cooperative. There’s a ring of computers at that place I’m sure of it; Rubavenusta, Lutea, Kakome and Jawela. These people are talking and discussing my site, sitting next to each other, like in a row of computers I reckon? The thing is they never leave a comment and never travel away from the home page, it’s weird.

- I’d try and get some rest if I were you; it’s nearly two in the morning. When’s the last time you looked out of a window or stepped out of the front door?

- Oh, it’s OK. Anyway we’re in English time; Americans are five hours behind us. To them it’s nearly nine o’clock. Just in time to log on and search blogs. I gotta keep onto this thing; I need to follow the various patterns of behaviour. You should see this graph, everything’s happening so fast.

- You know you could be just tracking repetitive machines programmed to sift sites and throw them into directories. I’ve read about this sort of thing somewhere.

- No I think that these are genuine people I’m contacting out there. I just wish that I could find more information about them. Some further sign of their actual presence.

- There is a one in a million chance that a stray internet surfer will land in your area, you do realise that. I have this mental image of that Ruba bod. A kind of robotic number crunching machine digging trenches through the multi layers of internet resources, sucking the blogger sap that seeps from the fields of information. A kind of automated machine programmed to engage and replicate itself throughout the blogger systems.

- Hey you know, maybe it’s a person, with a name and everything.

- Called Rubavenusta?

- Well…er, maybe that’s just his password…or something.

- I doubt it.

- You’re so negative. I think that there’s a whole array of people out there, real people, with real bodies investigating and thinking about my work. The only thing is this software has trouble telling how long people stay in the site, reading stuff. Twenty seconds isn’t long enough. I got this Skype thing online that lets you actually talk to people free. I could speak to those people if I could find em.

- They might be trivialising it and calling it crap to their mates. They could be putting a block on your site coming into their browser. Hey, that’s an idea.

- They wouldn’t do that?

- Of course they wouldn’t, you know so much about them don’t you?

- Enough, you ought to have more belief in humankind you know Owen. There is such a thing as blogging etiquette you know.

-Who knows they could write one thing and say another, couldn’t they?


- There’s this person from Jackson City. At first I thought it was like a search engine or something y’know, automatically loading my page every week, but I am beginning to think that it’s actually a real person. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a regular reader?

- Probably programmed to have reader-like characteristics, it would make for a slightly more intelligent android for your collection.

- The ‘Deadcat’ person has popped his head up again. That’s three times this week. I’ve come to the conclusion that it really is a kind of search engine. I’ve Googled it and er, I’m pretty sure. Also he arrives at exactly 2.14.66 pm every day.

- Told you. Replicants the lot of them.

- Owen, you’ve been watching too many Sci-Fi movies.

- Ah, but they hold the real factual data Darrus.

- Wait, wait. Just a minute…no, it’s OK, it’s the same. God I thought I had another customer there for a second…

- …Darrus…Darrus, are you there!?

- Er…just been on a little exploration. Hang on a minute…Do you live in Cherry Blossom way, Athens, Georgia? I thought you lived in Chiddsworth, South Sussex?

- Well I find that it’s sometimes best to – what!?

- That explains it then. And you say you’re twenty five but you don’t sound twenty five on the phone. Owen, tell me now - are you really twenty five?

- I am fed up with this. Right, I can’t have conversations like this any more Darrus, this is crazy.

- What! Oh, no, this is interesting…

-What? What is? What are you doing? I don’t know why I’m even listening to this.
All I know is that little numbers continue clicking over in your head in direct unison with that stat counter that you play with, replicating spurious information like a virus, hovering over every conversation we have.
I really do think that you should give this thing a rest now; you’ve been on this thing for days now, non stop. Every conversation I have with you is now dominated with you rushing off to check your statistics; it’s like your life has been taken over by this thing. All your talk these days is related in some way to the figures that spurt from that bloody machine. You haven’t been out of the flat for weeks, you’re not eating properly and you’ve lost weight apparently! I’m scared that one day when I phone your voice will have dramatically changed pitch and your conversation will be limited to what Lutea is doing, whether ‘Deadcat’ has visited yet, how long did ‘Potbelliedpig’ spend on your site?

- Don’t be silly.

- Well, you know what I mean. I suppose you either become a hunter or one of the hunted.

- Or both.

- Yes, well, it seems like this is the world you step into when you go online.

- Yeah, I think I’m going to switch off now.

- What, go to bed?

- No, switch off the computer.

- Switch off?

- Yeah, I’ve had enough. I’m feeling a bit tired. I can feel a headache coming on. All my visitors have been in today anyway. I’ve marked them on the graph; from two thirty till five in the morning is the rush hour. Only ‘Noderick’ hasn’t come in today and I’ll find that out in the morning.

- Right, goodnight then. Remember my advice is to get off that thing; one day you’ll wake up and find yourself physically changed into a remote mechanical device, unable to un-flap your navigation tools and roll from the bed and down the landing platform towards your workstation. They’ll be tracking you from Mars.

- I can’t stop it now, I ‘m just getting into it. It’s kind of like fishing in the sea you know. You throw in your line and the bait floats out there on the surface bobbing over the waves that crash in towards the shore. All you can do is stand there imagining a million different varieties of life swimming about in the endless ocean depths. What chance is there that one will investigate the disguised morsel that you have dumped into their path? Will they or won’t they bite? What size and what kind of fish will they be? When will the orange float bob up on the surface as a Sea Bass clasps its jaws onto the dangling hook and how long will he stay for, before dangling and wriggling themselves free, disappearing back into the dense blue nothingness? That’s the attraction Owen, curiosity for the unknown. I just hope I get a better catch tomorrow.

- Er…Yeah, Um...see you then Darrus.

- See you, bye.

- Bye.



“Oh I’m going to shut down, I am going to shut down!”, Darrus said to himself as leant over th desk to search through the stat-counter windows. He was going to try and stop himself from repetitively clicking onto the stat software and put an end to his habit of endlessly staring at the graphs and pie charts, but kept putting it off as there was never a right moment. "Where have they all gone, oh, fifteen instead of fourteen? Right, projects, graph icon, Michigan, mmm…, a search engine! I really need something to do while I ‘m waiting for new stats to come in, lets have a look at the referring link, what, Brains, manure, goldfish? They typed that and my page popped up, fourth from top!? Oh god! Right that’s it, time for a break, have a cup of tea and put some toast in. Bye, bye, software, see you later."

Darrus reluctantly shifted from his swivel chair and crossed half of his body into the light of the hallway, stopping there and hesitating momentarily, turning to look back, leaning one arm against the door and directing his tired eyes at the deserted computer screen, its rays shaping the soft plastic folds of the keyboard and the smooth fractured shell of the mouse casing. A window with it’s own light source, not coming from the sun or reflecting from the buildings and clouds around the flat but from a different kind of world containing different forms of satellites, surveillance cameras and information systems. How would Rembrandt have painted this scene, thought Darrus, would the light emanating from a computer screen be the source which he would use to sculpt a self portrait, swirling his white paint around? The wires sidling down the wall behind him would be hinted at with a few quick brush strokes and then pushed back with dense layers of dark brown glaze. Rembrandt’s easel would partly mask the fur coat and the intricate folds of his clothes in the painting, the electric light from the screen casting down upon him, open windows exhibiting the data graphs and pie charts.

Darrus turned his blinking eyes towards the fluorescent glow of the kitchen, his fingers pressed a real button on the wall and clicked a real switch on the kettle, but it all seemed the same somehow. The same electricity flowed through every vain of the flat, and ran through each appliance arranged in the room.
In the study a collection of closely linked black casements contained the computer hardware, the disks purring and electricity humming underneath the Ikea desk, wired in together with everything else. The computer had gradually developed a presence in the flat beyond the sum of its parts; wires spreading out and traversing the corners of the room, their plugs like sucker pods bleeding into the architecture of the house. linking to unseen wires, like thick veins ran just below the surface of the walls from the main arteries, flowing into the street, streaming information out to form small trickles of data that in turn joined with the open sea of electrical information.
Part of the rear casing of the computer had been torn away revealing a mass of tightly nit wires tied like string into bundles, their ends flowing into small streams down towards the darkness where the motherboard lay quietly feeding, a foetus in it’s womb, linked to by a swirl of black cords feeding a grotesquely oversized, unblinking eye lying tilted up on the desk, beaming it’s incessant glow upon the surrounding forms, rays torching the dark sediment of hairs rising through the dense atmosphere.

“Right, Kettle on, toaster on to number five.” He stood around waiting for the appliances to heat up and for their self timing mechanisms to explode into action. It seemed a longer time than necessary to wait, usually taking about two minutes thirty seconds for the circuit switch to flick over, connecting the wires and making the button pop up. Darrus let out a deep sigh of impatience. "Well, I’ll have tea in a minute but first I’ll just check what’s going on while I’m waiting."

All of Darrus’ daily activity’s now were interspersed with trips to the stats site to ‘check’ on any visits. He was hanging on sluggishly to the familiar processes and habits, beating the same path to the stat-counter time after time. To take away the repetitive nature of it his statistical investigations developed further into more obscure territory.

The reality was that Darrus didn’t bother to turn up for work after the summer holidays, things had gone too far. He’d been going in late nearly everyday now anyway, and what with the threats from his line manager and not being able to concentrate he felt it was only a matter of time anyway. The college had sent an envelope to him but it stayed in the pile at the door. Darrus knew what was in it but didn’t want to face the facts. These weren’t the kind of facts he was interested in anymore.

"Mmm..check the stats, see what’s happened. I know it’s only five minutes, but what the hell. OK. Come on start up! This things bound to conk out soon, plastic nightmare."
Walking around and pacing up and down the hallway of the flat; "I’ve been to their sites, now what makes them pop in and say hello to mine? I suppose it’s nothing special. I’ll have to tidy it up, make it look a bit more presentable."

As less and less figures flashed up on the data window, Darrus’s graph changed gradually form a nice high mountain range to a single horizontal line crawling the bottom of the ocean. This lack of function within the process i.e; nobody visited the site, instead of dampening down Darrus’s enthusiasm only fuelled it towards new artificial heights. Darrus’s habits became more pronounced as a habit with no real meaning attached. Repetitively entering the site it seemed for no other reason but to satisfy his need for, at least the potential of, some traveller visiting his hidden space. What new methods to entice the hoards could he conjure up?

"Right ten minutes has gone now, must check the stats."
Darrus habitually now moved his curser towards that particular favourite stat counter button. Sometimes without even thinking he would find himself in the site, his browser having automatically entered his password and login. Deciding then to - what the hell, may as well, check the graphs and data lists, prowling down the lines of information.

Darrus was at the point where he was making up excuses in order to travel to visit his stat counter. Each time there was the insane thrill of not knowing whether a fragment from a star in the far off galaxy would fall and land in his ever widening catchment zone. More often though now it was just search engine fodder, the offshoots of searches for ‘moth repelling light bulbs’ or ‘British Albino Ladybirds’, and the search engines sending out bogus links to his site in order to bump up their customers statistics.

If there was no change in the hit counter then just as worthwhile would be the Country/state/town area where a pie chart dissected the percentage of Americans, Australians, Canadians, etc. that entered the site. The sense that there was a world of possibilities to be tapped into, to familiarise ones self with and believe that the work was for a reason, enabled him to search and communicate, even at this great distance, to the world, via these apparently logical abstractions. There were occasionally times when Darrus did began to realise the growing limitations of his software, how much he did and didn’t know about the visitors to his site, to a point where he realised that he knew nothing at all really. At these times his imagination normally went into auto pilot when it no longer mattered about the accuracy of the facts, all that mattered was their ability to justify his absence from a reality outside which was becoming increasingly more difficult to deal with. He thought up ever more extravagant excuses to wipe away the guilt he felt with spending so much time at the computer, neglecting himself to the point where he was no longer shaving or cleaning the flat. He had unhooked the phone and now connected with people only through a network wire via ‘Skype’ with headset and mike hovering by his mouth. He didn’t answer the door, the newspapers were piling up and he had not worked on his comic for months. The square flat computer screen began not just to take more importance in his life, but to completely dominate it. It was difficult to notice when the final switch happened from his previous life to one of subordination to the network administration tasks that now consumed his time. It had been a month since he had last phoned Owen, him having now become just another piece of data, in amongst the ever increasing list of statistics arriving onscreen inside his stat software window. All he knew was that Owen seemed to come in at exactly three fifty six, every two weeks, the software recording; ‘browser unknown’ and ‘no referring link’.

# posted by Neil @ 8:25 pm