Time, gentlemen

Iain and Bear had bought the drinks in. This instantly brought a shower of praise from with Nigel and Jonathan (Jonathan at first resisting the call away from his laptop). Nigel promised it was his turn next, it was his turn next; Jonathan's gratitude dissolved into distraction and he turned back to the screen.

Bear shuffled off to the jukebox. He wasn't particularly ursine: in fact, he was thin and gangly, arching his way over to the console like a stop-motion figurine, the bastard brainchild of Harryhausen and Giacometti. His last name was Berry, and since primary school everyone had shortened it to Bear. For a while he had added a fey growl to his introductions, with accompanying hand gestures. He stopped after some doped-up seventeen-year-old girl with stupid eyes had laughed like a drain for a full half hour over whether Bear had had his injections or not.

Iain was talking shop with Nigel, again. A few minutes were remaining before nine o'clock, the time when the bar staff seemed to be contractually obliged to turn up the music. Conversation was soon to be squashed and pulped by the sham that The Weaver's Arms could be coated with decibels of trashy shellac, and its inhabitants thus swallow more easily the pretence that it was a club. So Iain was squeezing discussion into the remaining time. His body pumped out movements into its extremities, and he windmilled his hands if not his arms: not enough room.

"The thing is that the whole of the academic market, if not the public service market in general," he was spitting at Nigel, who was half a pint too drunk to really take it in, "is actually easy money. I mean, I know that a lot of the schools are completely slammed for cash flow. But they're just as completely petrified of litigation. And the ones that don't give a shit about all that, I mean the government departments, you know, Whitehall and all that, not that I've had specific dealings with them but Mark Coutts at Psyentia sells to them all the time... anyway, if you tried anything like that on with them they'd laugh in your face. But they do have the cash flow so they don't mind paying up. And though they grind exceeding small they don't half grind rich. Eh?"

He grinned, and Nigel just nodded. Nigel was new to the firm, and fresh out of university. It had taught him nothing at all about holding his liquor, as he had spent four of his first six terms with a committed Methodist, who seemed less committed about certain matters, the more Nigel expressed his temperance at the college bar. An encouragement if ever there was one, yet even after Yvonne had gone off with Martin---the starey-eyed, slack-jawed treasurer for the Christian Union, all predation and pizza evenings---Nigel never took to drink, harbouring instead the child's dislike of alcohol's bite. After three pints in the company of Iain (whose conversation (even when both parties were sober) was to be inhaled at one's peril, like pot fumes) Nigel felt stoned. Iain had legendary status in the company, however. Nigel hoped that someone, somewhere in the back of his head, was taking notes. But he would probably only remember it next time he was sat drunk and drooling in The Weaver's Arms. Contextual, he thought, although he had an inkling he couldn't currently spell it. If he could only take all the clients here, and revisit Iain's advice over two bottles of claret... but for business lunches it wasn't exactly Marco's, and didn't have the walk along the canal that Tasty Sam's the Chinese, or Newnham and Fleet's, had to offer.

Shaming them all, Jonathan tapped away on the laptop. Nigel couldn't take in such dedication: it seemed a little contrary in its rudeness. But then Jonathan was the departmental data monitor, their tame IT person. He wasn't built for conversation, but hid fish-eyed behind his glasses. When he spoke it was nervous and impeded.

The music got louder. Bear returned from the jukebox and angled himself into a seat. "Sons of bitches," he spat. "Sons of fucking bitches put bloody Bob Marley on for six or seven tracks. It showed me on the display as I was putting my ones on. No Woman No Fucking Cry is on twice. Jesus. Where's my drink? Jesus. And what are you doing, Jonathan? It's Friday night. You'd better not be working on the figures that came in from Zürich today, or I'll have to reach over there and kill you before you show us all up."

"Actually," he said after a few seconds, with an air of intellectualism, "I'm writing a sh-short story."

Everyone looked up from their drinks.

"It's ffffor a website a friend of mine in the States mmmaintains."

Iain's expression seemed to shift gear between different widths of grin. "A friend in the States, eh, Jonty boy? You ever met 'em?"

"Well, nnno," Jonathan admitted, unconcerned. "But I sp-speak to them on IRC and ytalk, and that em-em-MSN messenger that the l-l-lamers in IT are still letting us use."

Nigel turned a friendly, interested, and above all hammered expression towards Jonathan. "Wha ish itchour writinthen?"

"Fffanfic. You know, based on existing stories. I'm doing a c-cross-over b-between The Matrix and Blade Runner. There's a lot of stuff about The Matrix recently. They've extended the, um, the g-gist of it all into other, um, areas."

"Narrative," Bear corrected. "But I don't see why you can't inject something more interesting in there, like Jude The Obscure or the Mallory Towers novels, or Oklahoma.... Oh, never mind," he finished, seeing the query approaching from far behind Jonathan's goggles. There was a gap in the music, and then the syncopated sound of reggae. "Christ, here comes Bob Marley now," he added with a melodramatic wince of pain. "Anyone got a gun? I need to kill myself, after killing all of you and that twat with the hair over there in the corner that I swear put this track on."

"The screen looks funny," Iain said. "What's that you're writing it in? It's all black."

"DOS. I've got an old ed-editor. I used it o-on my first PC. It's j-j-just what you're used to. B-but it only works in a DOS window."

On cue the other three all took sips from their drinks, siphoning them through similarly bemused expressions. Jonathan wasn't the sort to be writing a story, although the subject matter he had chosen lended some credulity to the idea. It wasn't something any of them had predicted. Briefly they each thought with horror that Jonathan might want them to read it.

"Er... is it going well, then?"

Jonathan shook his head, and then pushed his glasses up

"Not-t-t-today. The thing has b-been playing up. It won't let me have the d-DOS window on the screen with Windows. I have t-to keep ssswitching. Alt-enter, you know? Alt-enter." He said it like it was obvious. "Alt-enter. Like this." He pressed a couple of keys.

A sudden power cut rendered the entire pub black. The wailing of the jukebox stopped, and nobody could have seen their hand in front of their face, if their hands had been there. Iain thought, typical of that idiot, no social whatsname, doesn't think twice of plugging his bloody laptop into the mains and blowing the fuses on the whole pub. But after a heartbeat the trip in the electricity supply flipped back; lights returned, and the music with it.

"Jesus, Mary and Gob-bloody-shite, Jonty," said Iain resignedly. "The least you could do with that fucken machine is make it steam-powered, so you wouldn't have to bring down the National bloody Grid with it."

Jonathan looked sheepish. "The b-b-b," he began to bleat, "b-battery only lasts twenty mmmminutes. I didn't think anyone would notice." Putting the laptop on the cushion beside him, he rummaged around on the shelf at the back of the sofa, where the paisley cover was stapled to a long, varnished plank. He reached behind a lamp---suspiciously switched off---and pulled on the power cable as if it were a string of novelty flags emerging from a magician's assistant. It spooled onto the seat until he found the plug, and unplugged it.

Immediately there was another blackout, as short as the first. Those who thought the first glitch had been a trick of their eyes---or their drinks---sat up in their seats, or stood up uselessly. Everyone had noticed that time, and it was only the crowds that prevented anyone from noticing Jonathan, leaning guiltily towards the power socket. With a clarity that comes rarely but vividly to the drunkard, Nigel was the first to lean over and yank Jonathan into his seat, almost bouncing him back out of it. "Shiddown, you idjot," he stage-whispered, and everyone nearby could hear. Jonathan was more embarrassed now than he had ever been before, and wanted to get as far from the pub as he could: would have done, had it not been so full of people. His clumsy hands contented themselves with pulling nervously at the corners of his computer, and he moved it from the cushion to the table, in the middle of them all.

"Oh, great," groaned Iain. "Where are we going to put our drinks now? Jonathan, shut that thing down and come and interact with some humans. Jonathan." He began to coax and wheedle. "Come on, Jonathan. Lips off that little cyber-nipple now. Switch it off and come and play-hey...!"

Jonathan began to close down his programs. "I'll j-j-just switch off the editor, then." He looked up, blinked at each of his companions in turn. "It might take a while. I'll just switch back to Windows-"

The instant stretched out, Jonathan with one hand on the keyboard, the click of it sounding like a purr underneath a laughter track of pub noise. Longer, purr, longer, and then snap: it broke off, leaving that same blank darkness. Not black; maybe grey. Washed out, thought Bear, like how a television screen is so much lighter than its darkest blacks when you switch it off. And then the lights were on again, but all conversation had ceased. Rooted to the spot, each of them slid their eyes between each other's, wondering if their own were as wide with fear as everyone else's. There was a moment, and Bear noticed briefly that else in the pub seemed to be sharing it with them.

"Hell's bells," he said quietly. "What happened then?"

Only Jonathan woke up at the sound of a question. The hesitancy was still there in his voice. "There was a delay." But no stutter. Just fear. Something terrible had just flashed behind those thick spectacles. "Of course. It's because it's so old. It... didn't want to switch back to Windows. So it took longer."

A pause, lights on this time. Then: "Are you serious?" cried Iain. "Are you bloody serious? Are you telling me that that bloody thing, that laptop of yours... Don't talk bollocks, Jonty. If you're trying to say that, that-"

"Jesus, Iain, shut up. Whatever he's saying," Bear ground out through his teeth, "I don't want to be the one to turn the damn thing off. And for Chrissake, Nigel: put your pint down somewhere else. What do we do now, then?"

They sat there, with twenty minutes of battery life, wondering.