Free Sparks by David Quantick Page B

hole.”
    Sparks was unnerved, partly because Gibbons looked angry now and partly because he had managed to make “arsehole” into two separate words. Nevertheless, he sensed that placating Gibbons, who it appeared no one sodded with, was a bad idea, so he decided to just tell him the truth.
    “My girlfriend left me,” Sparks told Gibbons. “She went off to Australia because I couldn’t commit, whatever that means, and I was crap, which is fair enough. But I love her and I want her back.”
    Gibbons was looking dangerous, like an ale shark, if they exist, which they don’t. Sparks forged on:
    “Anyway, I also discovered recently that there are alternate worlds. Like this one, only different in a lot of ways, and if you step on a butterfly it doesn’t matter. So I think that somewhere out there is a world where there’s another Alison like the one I love, only this time if I can be less crap, she’ll love me and not care about committing, whatever that means. So I’m going to look for that world.”
    “Fnutter,” Gibbons said under his powerful breath, and turned to look out of the window.
    Sparks took his iPod-like mp3 player out of his bag and listened to Radio 2 all the way back to London.
    Sparks arrived at Paddington Station shortly after midnight. The underground was closed and there were no taxis, so he made his way home on an array of buses. The last bus of the four that he took – which was also the grimmest – happened to take him past his office, and Sparks, noticing this, did something he had never done before. He got off the bus and went to his office when he didn’t have to.
    Unlocking the door and turning off the alarm system – the phrase “turning off” here identical in meaning to “hitting” – Sparks tried to walk across the room in the dark, barked a shin on the desk edge, and using swearing managed to turn his anglepoise lamp on. The room looked slightly better in the dark, as shadows in corners hid a lot of mangy anarchy. Removing some sort of apple core (he hoped) from his chair, Sparks sat down and turned his computer on. It farted electronically into life. Sparks muted the sound and clicked on his internet logo. After a while, the computer – belying slightly computers’ general image of being supersmart creatures that will one day enslave the human race and make them pull trucks full of coal around for some reason – noticed that Sparks was clicking on his internet logo, and reluctantly connected him to the internet, in the manner of somebody introducing two people to each other who he knows will get on really well and do interesting things and stuff as soon as he has buggered off and stopped annoying them.
    Sparks found a search engine, opened it, and wrote RANDOM LIFE GENERATOR in the little writing gap. As before, the computer started to have what scientists would call a crap attack, and flashed up skulls and daggers and various other pirate things. Just for the hell of it, Sparks turned off the computer’s mute button and let the poor sod shudder as its speakers were filled up with music and noises clearly designed to be played on a bigger system, such as one they might have installed at a stadium.
    Again, the screen filled and cleared and went mad and then became a field of names. Sparks waited for them to settle down so he could get to work, but the screen changed again. Sparks stared in disbelief and distress at the new details. In a large and unfashionable typeface, the screen requested him to type in a user name and a password. Clearly changes had been instituted.
    Bugger, thought Sparks, I’m buggered. He was tired from the journey and keen not to use up all the swearwords he knew, in case things got worse. Then he had an idea. Remembering the only other people he’d ever met who had heard of the Random Life Generator, Sparks typed in the word JEFF.
    Nothing happened; that was the easy bit. Even Sparks knew that user names were easy because they were just names,