Bright Young Things by Scarlett Thomas Read Free Book Online Page B

was little-girl-on-speed.
    ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘What’s wrong with it?’
    ‘None of my messages are coming through. Well, I mean, I’ve had no messages for about three days now but that’s just not right. My, uh, friend Dan always e-mails me like twenty times a day, so I thought there must be something wrong at your end.’
    ‘Did you?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Hello? Techno boy? I haven’t got any e-mails. I was expecting e-mails. Something’s fucked.’
    ‘Good logic,’ says Paul.
    ‘And you are technical support, right?’
    ‘I am.’
    ‘Are you trying to stall me?’
    Paul laughed then. ‘Yeah. Probably. What’s your login name?’
    He wasn’t trying to chat her up; his motives were higher than sex. He was just trying to keep her on the line for as long as possible, because that cost the company money.
    She paused. ‘Um . . .’
    ‘Take your time.’
    ‘It’s, um . . . this is really embarrassing.’
    ‘We have all the time in the—’
    ‘
Wetpussy
.’
    ‘Sorry?’
    ‘You heard.’
    ‘Wetpussy?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘Can you spell that?’
    ‘Of course I can spell it.’
    ‘No, I mean can you spell it out?’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘
Why
?’
    After half an hour or so, Paul had solved Rebecca’s problem. Stuck in the company’s cache were the missing e-mails, about twenty-three of them, all from this guy Daniel.
What are you wearing right now?
the first one said. Then:
Where are you?
Then:
Maybe you’re out. I’m just going to keep sending these. Hope you’re not ignoring me. I’d really like to see you naked right now.
    These were interesting enough for Paul to want to look at Rebecca’s entire e-mail history, which he did, forwarding all those to or from Daniel to his home e-mail address. And from then on, he decided to become their God. His target list (other people had ‘to do’ lists) had a new objective. Before, it had said:
Waste time. Cost the company money. Give free stuff to customers.
Now there was a new item on the list:
Make Rebecca fall in love with Daniel
. It was like a random act of kindness. And random acts were dada. This was definitely dada. And that was cool.
    For the first few weeks Paul just observed. He set up his work system to forward all Rebecca’s e-mails to his home, so he could study her in comfort. She and Daniel were both actors. She had just graduated from Dartington, and Daniel was in the middle of his training at RADA. They had met at a mutual friend’s party and swapped e-mail addresses, but hadn’t met since. It was obvious to Paul that they were in love, but with Dan’s playful sexual aggression, and Rebecca’s playful teasing/frigidity, they were getting nowhere. Paul’s input was clearly going to be needed here.
    Inspired by kiddie divorce films (the ones where the parents get back together after the cute kid and the blossoming next door neighbour trick them into it), Paul started adding and subtracting from the e-mails. At first he just added the odd word here and there. But before too long, he was composing whole messages all by himself.
    So one night, Rebecca never got the e-mail that asked what she was wearing; instead she got a message of love. And Daniel finally got what he wanted: an incredibly pornographic description of what Rebecca was wearing – or rather, what Paul imagined she was wearing. His instinct had been right. In response to Rebecca’s titillating honesty, Dan sent her a genuine message of love; and in response to his message of love, Rebecca really did send him something dirty – a detailed description of when and how she would give him a blow job. They arranged to meet the following week.
    Daniel eventually proposed to Rebecca in an e-mail. She said yes. Paul had stopped tampering by this point, but he was still observing, of course. Unfortunately, they’d worked out that someone had been tampering (which made them kind of grateful, but also pissed off about their lack of privacy), and had contacted the ISP. After