A strange tale of a man named Robert

The following is a story completely constructed in 1997 by the mind of an undergraduate chemist. It should not be taken in any sense to be true. I personally hope that it will be at the very least vaguely amusing, but then I can offer no guarantees.

The story will unfold as time goes on. But for now, we have:

Chapter One - a general introduction to Bob’s world

It had been a long time since Robert Brule had been to Brighton. He must have been only eleven years old when his grandmother had taken him last. She was now dead. He wondered if this could be the reason for the delay in his return to the town he had enjoyed so much that year. He was now twenty-nine and working for a small internet service provider in East Anglia. He wasn’t really sure whether he enjoyed his job, but he did get to continuously test their equipment such that he could pick up the most irrelevant facts from the vast resource that is the Internet.

He planned for two months for his trip to Brighton. He didn’t want anything to go wrong. He was that sort of person. Unfortunately he was also the kind of person who is more likely to forget something vital, or forget to book a hotel room, the longer in advance he planned. As the time for his trip steadily came closer, he became more and more worried. "What if it isn’t as I remembered it?" he asked himself, and various members of a mid-morning bus queue. He was ignored by all but a small old man, who gave this advice "Should you find yourself in a circle of yellow pebbles, sing the chorus from Wannabe and the world will again be right." Bob noted this sage advice, and cycled off.

He would frequently frequent a bus queue only to ride off on his bicycle, purely because he liked the company, and also because there was much less chance of being recognised by someone who had previously become acquainted with him. Had someone already met him, it is likely that Bob would have met with a rather less than pleasant insult - he just seemed to have that effect on people. The more he talked to people and the more interesting things he talked about, the more they seemed to lose concentration and become agitated. Nobody however had the discourtesy to blank him when he entered into such conversations with ordinary folk on the street, but it took enormous self-control not to just walk away ignoring him. Had they done so, he could have made less enemies in the world, but society seemed to be showing itself to be a distinctly masochistic animal.

Chapter Two - Does life get more complicated with age or do we just get more simple?

Just one week before his planned trip, he had amassed a huge pile of leaflets by writing to the tourist information centre in Brighton. He had bought lots of maps of the area so that he wouldn’t get lost and ensured that he was going to catch the correct train by ’phoning National Rail Enquiries. He was certain of his train times because he had ’phoned up twice a day every day for the last seven days. He was going to have to change trains twice but had all the alternative trains possible written down so that he could even get there is London declared itself a separate country and refused to allow any non-Londoners to travel through it. He was beginning to feel excited. So what if he was only going to spend a weekend there - what a weekend he was going to have!

After work, in the evenings - for he worked during the day, Bob would often play Worms on his PC. He liked to try to kill the worms in different ways than the traditional ones. He would favour a blowtorch rather than a bazooka to take out the enemies and the pneumatic drill was perhaps his favourite method of despatching of them. He didn’t really care if he won in the end because it was the variety in kills that he appreciated rather than the number of them. In this way he considered himself much superior to the computer teams. He only ever appreciated it when the computer teams threw grenades high up onto themselves or died whilst firing a bazooka into the oncoming wind.

Lemmings was a game he had played in a similar fashion - particularly Lemmings 2 with all its different types of Lemming available to play with. He would then concentrated on wiping out all his Lemmings in the most aesthetically pleasing way within the surrounding landscape as possible. Of course, he had to save all the Lemmings every so often so that he had another landscape to try his explosive artistic skills on. That was a drawback, but it was still fun overall.

If he played Quake or Doom or a similar type of game, he would give himself as much health as possible and then see how far he could get by using only the least effective weapon available. He would think nothing of slowly axing someone to death whilst his victim used a chainsaw and threw grenades at him. That was fun to him. Using a gun type of weapon would have made the game too ordinary - Bob needed things to be different in his world.

That was probably why he wanted to work in the Internet supplier business - you could deal with customers who you might never see or even rarely hear their voices giving you free rein to imagine what you liked about them. You could look at your records and see all the various WWW pages that they had looked at, all the e-mail addresses they had sent mail to - although he would of course never read the mail, all the ftp sites they had linked to - any IRC channels they seemed to spend their time on. He would wonder what these people would be like in real life and if they would outwardly reflect any of the interests that Bob could divine from their use of the resources of the Internet. He would never have liked to work in an ordinary job where you saw all the people you dealt with or heard them on the telephone, or if he had just worked in a factory he would have been at the oppostie side of things and possibly known absolutely nothing about the customers who bought the products that he helped manufacture. If he had been really unlucky he might not even have really known what it was he was making, but then he could have imagined but once he had thought of one possible use then all the interest would have been lost. He would have become bored and that wasn’t really the kind of thing that Bob would be happy about being.

The week before he left for his weekend, he continued to invent lives for the people he dealt with and he was kept busy. He was also involved with keeping his company’s WWW site up to date and interesting for people who visited it. He was now spending less time in the evenings on his computer playing games and spending more time reading through all the tourist information that he had been sent. He felt ready to have his little break from the sleepy town in which he was living. He had packed all his things that he wanted to take with him and the weather forecast for the weekend was warm and sunny.

...to be continued? Somehow, I doubt it.

Any similarity to persons, places or events, whether real, imaginary, living or dead is purely accidental, except when intended. Please do not sue (or any other lowercase feminine forename). PBAB. RSVP.

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