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"I think," Herb's voice was slow on the other end of the phone. "That I just summoned a demon over the internet." Will sighed, rubbed his nose where his glasses rested and asked his friend to repeat what he had just said. Herb told him again. Someone yelled something in the background. "Why didn't you message me about this?" Will clicked ICQ a couple of times, as if expecting to have missed a message. Of course not. "Um. Because there's a demon in my computer, Will. That made me a bit nervous about using it. I certainly disconnected from the net." Herb added. He did indeed sound very nervous. Again, someone was yelling, but quietly, as if they were some distance away, or perhaps it was the TV in the background. "Okay, before I go any further, I just want to point out the continued non-existence of demons to you." A message popped up on ICQ at that point, but it was merely porn Spam. Will killed it with irritation. "I may also have to mention that this is the twenty-first century and we haven't even believed in demons for..." "Yes, yes, yes, I know, but the fact remains that I have a demon in my computer," Herb cut in. "Can you come over?" Will thought about it for a second, took a swig of Dr Pepper. Flat. "Yes, sure. I'll be with you in.. uh.. quarter of an hour? I dunno, whenever the bus gets to me." And he hung up.
Minutes later, Will was on the bus, wondering why he agreed so readily to Herb's request to go visiting. Perhaps, he realised, he just desperately needed real live company, not just text. He knew there were real people writing that text, but, even so, it wasn't like they were in the room. Every so often, a person needs company. He shifted in his seat as a group of teenagers boarded and monkeyed their way down the length of the bus, swinging lazily from pole to pole. He self-consciously turned up his walkman, realising he half wanted the teenagers to hear the tracks he was listening to, for them to realise that he liked the same music as them, that he was cool. He suddenly felt the need for affirmation from a bunch of 15-year-olds who thought that not tidying their black-painted bedrooms was the highest form of political dissent. Of course, it wouldn't work like that. He was twenty five now. If he liked their music, it wouldn't mean he was cool. No, no, no. It would mean the music had suddenly ceased to be cool. He turned the mp3 player back down and sank into his seat. It was about three months ago he'd had a similar musical revelation. He'd realised that, any year now, people would be considering the music that he thought was cool, back when he thought stuff was cool, retro. That terrified him. His youth was slipping away, about to be drenched in irony and desperate, clingy hipness. It was too soon. The hyper-accelerated pace of progress made him uneasy in this sort of area. Generation gaps were appearing overnight, people unable to relate to their monozygotic twin because they were born minutes apart. Irony had become the cultural Esperanto, the one thing everybody seemed to misunderstand. This insight depressed him so much at the time that he slipped into one of his regular insular torpors, locking himself each night into his room with only a glowing computer screen for company, the words of a hundred far-flung strangers scrawled in sticky-pad windows. This became interaction, his trawl through other people's record collections his way of reassuring himself that, yes, he wasn't alone. Things weren't exactly dull, they just weren't interesting. They weren't anything at all, just life going on one second after another, dragging him further from the point in history that he felt he belonged. He had to face some uncomfortable facts. His time in the sun was gone already, he was nothing but a middle-aged man in waiting. It was infuriating. It must have been like this being a teenager in the time before the fifties, before they invented the concept of being a teenager. Someone needed to invent the concept of a twentysomething, because everyone he knew between twenty and twenty nine lived this kind of life - not a bad life, by any means, just a bland one, one without any kind of definition. He stared out of the bus window, into the rainy night. Demons. Why had he left his warm little house? Stupid.
Herb was pacing up and down when Will, using his old key, walked in, ruffling his hair to dislodge the few drops of rain which had settled in the short distance between the bus stop and the door. The younger man looked up as he heard the door slam. "Will. Cool. Come see." Uncharacteristically brief, Herb beckoned Will to the computer. Will, frowning, took a look at the monitor. There was a demon on Herb's desktop. It was sitting rather clumsily on top of the trash bin, which was shaped like a toilet due to Herb's penchant for lavatory-based desktop themes. It was about four inches tall, its skin the unsavoury green colour Will had last seen in patches on an old loaf. It appeared to be naked, but it was hard to tell at that resolution. It stared back at Will, then screwed up its face. There was the unmistakable sound of.. "Did it just take a shit?" Will asked. "Hey, I'm sitting on a toilet here, fuckwit," the demon snapped. "What do you think?" "It's been there for about two hours," Herb said, from a few feet away. "It seems to like the loo." "The loo," the demon mimicked, sarcastically. "Well, hark at Hyacinth. It's a shitter, numbnuts" "It's certainly a foul-mouthed desktop pet you've got there, Herb," Will announced, standing up straight. "But was it worth me coming over.." "Desktop pet?" The demon screeched, jumping down from the recycle toilet. "What the fuck do you think I am, limp-dick? You think this tosspot has access to this kind of voice-recognition software? Or this kind of AI? I'm a demon!" It paused, looked down at itself. "A temporarily quite small demon, but a demon nonetheless." |
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