Someone to believe in me - Chapter 1 - Draft

They had proper Gods in the old days, thought Bob. Not that Bob was a proper God but he was determined to get there. If you want to be precise, Bob was a spirit although he preferred the name Godling even if it did sound a little pretentious. He was a young Godling if the term can be applied to anything eternal. Perhaps it would be fairer to say that Bob had only become Bob fairly recently. Until then, he had just been a spirit, a spark in the ether that was almost wholly unnoticed, even by Bob. Awareness and his name had both come very much later

Gods such a Zeus and Odin had lorded it over vast temples and what God didn’t want that? However, these are perks that only Gods at the top of the popularity stakes ever get; they all started small. The same was true of Bob who started out by a roadside just north of Newbury, fairly close to a lay-by. Gods have some things in common with mortals though they are very different in form. The spark of godhood is without form and without voice and… well, without anything very much. The spirits just floated around without knowing that they were spirits and with no thought other than “I am”. They also have hunger, just as mortals do. Mortals crave food and love and really sophisticated mobile phones. Gods are simpler. They crave belief. They can never have enough belief and without it, they are mere specks on an invisible wind.

Bob found some belief by the roadside. It was only a very tiny pool but it was enough to sustain him and wake him from a stupor that had lasted since the beginning of time. Bob became aware of the world and of his own nature. The place of belief was not very impressive compared to marble temples. This was just a few bunches of rather wilted flowers but someone had stood here and wanted to believe in something very much. Bob stayed (although he had no name yet) and absorbed a little of the belief, sipping away at it until he grew strong by the standards of the spirits, which is to say that he had rather less life than a mouse. He waited for a time and he didn’t know how long the wait was because he had no idea of time as humans would measure it. The belief would fade away and then a human would come and lay some more, together with a fresh supply of wanting to believe. It was a small existence but it was a start.

Bob’s first worshipper (and here we have to be generous with our definition) was a Mr Ray Charles. Not Ray Charles, the blind Piano player but Ray Charles, the vending machine repair man. The event was a piece of luck, good luck for Bob even if it was bad luck for Mr Charles. A nail punctured the tire of the rather batter Silver Vauxhall Cavalier that Smedley and Sons (ltd) had supplied so that he could get to their clients and ensure that the supply of chocolate bars, crisps and slightly tired sandwiches could continue to be vended at ludicrous prices to people with no time to get better food. Mr Charles sighed and pulled over on the grass verge, his tire bumping and flapping as he did so. This was about 300 yards from the token roadside shrine.

            Mr Charles did what any practical man did. He swore and got out of the car to look at the tires. The front nearside would never be the same again. Being a prudent pipe-smoking kind of fellow, he carried a spare tire, a jack, one of those odd spanners and a warning triangle in the boot of the car. He also carried tools and spare parts for vending machines but that need not concern us here. The triangle was set up and the tools and spare tire brought to the appropriate place on the car.

            It was the curse that brought Bob to the scene. These things have power in the world of spirits. Hatred of a god is as much belief as a prayer and while Mr Charles’ curse was a very minor one, it was better than nothing when you were a spirit on the make. Bob came running, or at least, he would have done so if he had legs. He watched as Mr Charles pulled off the hubcap and loosened the bolts that held on the wheel. He watched again as the car was lifted on the jack and the wheel removed. Now, Mr Charles was a sensible fellow so he put the 4 bolts from the wheel on the hubcap so that they wouldn’t get lost. He was also rather a clumsy one and he stepped on the cover, catapulting the bolts in to the long grass by the side of the road. Bob watched all this with interest if not understanding. Mr Charles scrabbled in the grass and managed to find 3 of the bolts fairly quickly but the 4^th was more elusive. Time was ticking on and Mr Charles had a schedule to keep. Finally, he spoke. “Oh God, where is the damned thing?”. Bob had his first prayer!

            Bob thought for a moment because he had never had a prayer before. Burning bushes were not an option as they would have taken far more power than he had. The same was true of bolts of lightning and creating a new bolt out of raw firmament. Damning the bolt was relatively easy but he wasn’t going to get any belief out of that. The best that he could do was to reveal the hidden bolt. Marshalling all of his power, Bob cast his first miracle. He managed to bend two blades of grass a tiny distance. It wasn’t much but it let the sun through to glint on the oily metal. Once, twice and then Mr Charles saw the little flicker of light. He scooped up the bolt with a triumphant cry of “Bob’s your uncle!” and so the nameless spirit became known as Bob even if it was only to himself.

            Fresh, directed belief is very different to belief that is left hanging around to be claimed. It was intoxicating and powerful. At once, Bob decided that he would go with his worshipper and hope that he would get some more belief as he went alone. The visits to the roadside shrine had been less frequent in the last few weeks. Bob was gaining in intelligence as he gained power and he thought that there would be more belief where there were more people. He was also grateful in his way to Mr Charles. It isn’t every day that you get a first believer.

Bob had experienced a lot of the world but he couldn’t be said to remember it because memory implies understanding and though. Until he happened upon the roadside shrine, Bob had been nameless and thoughtless. If he recalled sensations then he could now make some sense out of them but the world seemed a new and strange place. He followed his believer in to workplaces and campuses and saw many people. Of course, the people ignored Bob because they couldn’t see him but they also pretty much ignored Mr Charles. Bob wondered if people needed to be believed in as well. If so, his believer was out of luck. The only people who ever paid much attention to Mr Charles were a voice on the phone called Tracy and Mr Charles’ wife, Ann. Neither of those could really be said to believe in him even if they talked to him. Ann believed a great deal but she believed in another god with an intensity that made Bob quite jealous. She was forever reading a book about her god and telling Mr Charles that he should believe in her god. Mr Charles would just smile and change the subject but this worried Bob. Why should some other god have his believer? That said, except for that first time, Mr Charles hadn’t done any believing in him.

Bob was pretty hungry when he found his second believer. He had followed Mr Charles to an office that was very much like a dozen other offices that they had been to in the week before. People worked in little cubicles with low walls and most of them looked much the same – both the people and the desks. There was one that stood out because of the amount of clutter. There were Shamrocks and tiny plastic trolls with vivid hair and even a rabbit’s foot. There was a computer buried in there as well. Because Bob was curious, he had followed a lot of what Mr Charles did and tried to help him with a few more small miracles. These didn’t seem to work as well as the first one that he had tried. He knew that Mr Charles was supposed to fix the machines and it was a simple enough thing to separate two bits of a stuck relay but rather than making Mr Charles happier, it seemed to cause problems and frustration. It was quite a while before Bob understood that the machines were not supposed to work before Mr Charles had a chance to fix them. Bob now knew more about vending machines than pretty much any god. Ann had said that her god was all knowing and all seeing but that seemed like advertising to Bob. Bob had become, in a very small way, the god of vending machine repair. It didn’t look as if there was much future for a god in a field which no-one was much interested in and with only one believer who wasn’t all that pious.

            Bob was mulling this over when Mary came back to her desk. She was a little plump and her skirt and blouse rather struggled to contain her generous curves. She also looked worried and that was of interest to Bob. He knew in a general kind of way that worried people prayed more. Thinking about it some more, Bob realised that all the offices had a lot of computers and not many vending machines. It could be a step in the right direction to become the god of computers. They were mechanisms and Bob understood the vending machines pretty well now. He reasoned that it couldn’t be that hard. He would still visit his first believer of course but it was only natural for a god to have many worshipers. Distance didn’t mean anything to Bob so he could go back any time that he wanted but he decided that he would spend some time with Mary as well.

At first, Bob just watched. Everything that the people here did seemed to revolve around the computers or the phones. It took a little while to work out what was going on but it clearly had something to do with people being paid for having had an accident. Bob decided to look in to the computer a little more deeply. At first, he was completely lost but there were clues here and there. Electricity was very different to the sort of power that he had but he could sense it all the same. It was flying around at tremendous speed in all directions inside the computer. Some of it was a regular pattern and other signals flashed by in different patterns all the time. If he concentrated, he could make out numbers on the wires but they didn’t seem to mean anything. Bob didn’t speak English of course. He didn’t even know what language was until he had been awakened. What he could do was understand the thoughts of worshippers (or more often, potential worshippers) and that gave meaning to the sounds. The computers didn’t seem to have any thoughts at all but they seemed important so he wanted to understand. He tried looking in to Mary’s mind but a person’s mind is a rather hazy thing unless they are deliberately thinking about the thing that you want to know.

            Bob decided to go with personal experience. He had learned about vending machine from a vending machine repairman. Perhaps he could learn about computers from a computer repairman. Unless computers were a lot more reliable than vending machines, there had to be one somewhere in the building. He left Mary for a while and went looking around the building. It was interesting in a way and he managed to snack on some really heartfelt cursing coming from a younger man some distance down the hall. As Bob listened, he realised that the man was angry because his computer wasn’t working. That was perfect as he would be bound to call a repairman. Bob would have thanked his lucky stars except that, as a Godling, he didn’t believe in anything like that. Bob was a little disappointed that the repairman wouldn’t be there until the next day but at least he got a little more cursing to keep him going.

            Since there was nothing to do but wait, Bob went back to watching Mary. She filled in forms and answered short letters that he had heard the others call Email. Most of them seemed to be about very unimportant things but at least he could understand them. After a while, people started to leave the office and Bob followed Mary when she left. Her car was a lot like the place where she worked in that there was clutter everywhere. There was a cross and a star and a little gold medallion hanging from the mirror and Bob became even more sure that Mary wanted to believe in something. Godlings can recognise religious symbols even if they don’t recognise the god that they belong to.

When Mary got home, she fed her cat. Bob didn’t much care about animals as they didn’t believe except in the vaguest possible way. The way that the cat behaved made him think that it believed that it was a god. Mary called the car Bas and that was a word that jogged a memory in Bob. It had been a hot, sandy place and there had been many gods and many worshippers. None of them had worshipped Bob, of course. After she fed the cat, she turned on the television and watched a program called Eastenders. Bob had never seen a mind so focussed on a television programme before. If only he could get Mary to believe in him with the same intensity, he would much less hungry.

            When the program finished, Mary suddenly started rushing around the house, trying to do two or three things at once. She was making a meal and straightening cushions as if her very life depended on it. Her thoughts were hard to make out because she didn’t think about one thing for more than a moment before rushing on to something else. When the meal was in the oven, she rushed to the bathroom and had quite a leisurely bath. As soon as she was out of the bath, she started rushing around again. This time, her thoughts were easier to read, not least because Bob was learning how her mind worked. She was expecting a visit from her boyfriend, Max.

            When Max arrived, Bob got a bad feeling about him. It wasn’t jealousy because Bob had no interest in the physical aspects of Mary but what Max thought and what Max said were very different. All the while that he was talking to Mary, his mind kept darting back to an image of another girl. Max knew that it was the duty of a god to protect his worshippers; that was part of the deal. He just didn’t have any clear idea of how to protect Mary against something like this. He didn’t know for sure but he didn’t think that Mary wanted to share Max in the way that she was. Bob watched them eat and talk as he thought about his responsibilities and whether there was any way that he could carry them out. He couldn’t make the rains fall or at least, not more than a handful of drops and he certainly couldn’t stop an earthquake. He was, after all, just a minor spirit with a hunger to be more. He watched them as they went in to the bedroom and undressed. They mated and that all seemed quite normal to Bob. He had seen very much the same in his billions of years of existence. It was only then that it occurred to him that Mr Charles and Anne had never mated while he had been there. He was still wondering about that when Mary started calling “Oh God!” over and over. It would have been a shame to let the belief go to waste.

            After Max and Mary fell asleep, Bob watched them for a little while. Snoring wasn’t very interesting and they hadn’t started to dream yet. He decided to check on Mr Charles and do his duty. It wasn’t as if there was much that he could do but he had to try. He was a little stronger from Mary’s heartfelt cries. Travelling from Reading to Newbury took less than a heartbeat. Gods couldn’t be everywhere at once but they could move around so quickly that it was hard to tell the difference. Mr Charles’ house was on a quite street well away from the city centre but that didn’t matter to Bob who could just appear anywhere that there was a worshipper. All seemed very well there. The couple were also in bed but Anne was reading her book and Mr Charles was working on some kind of puzzle in the newspaper. There didn’t seem to be much for Bob to do until Mr Charles dropped his pen which promptly rolled under the bed. Mr Charles tutted (Anne had some very strong views on swearing so that was strictly limited to the car) and got out of bed to fish for the pen. Bob seized his chance! He could help his worshipper and maybe he would have more faith. Bob passed another miracle and tapped the pen so that it rolled out, stopping against a pyjama clad knee. Mr Charles’ expression was quizzical (much as it had been when he was working on the puzzle) and he softly said “Thank you”. Anne looked over and asked him what he was thanking her for. Mr Charles smiled in a pleasantly empty way and replied “Nothing, dear. Just talking to myself”. Bob felt a small but precious jolt of belief.

In the morning, Mary went back to work and Bob rode with her. Max had left early to get back to his flat to change for work but his thoughts had been on meeting someone called Sharon as she parked her car in the same place as he did. Bob went with Mary as she carried out the rituals of the morning, the first coffee, the changing of the voice mail message and the routine greetings to her co-workers. He had noticed that Mary was much given to small rituals and he found that encouraging. That morning, she had weighed herself before and after her shower. He knew that she had been disappointed by the result and knew from her mind that she expected to get the same result after her shower but she weighed herself twice just the same.

            Throughout the day, Bob kept visiting the young man with computer trouble. He seemed to be spending the morning alternatively gossiping with colleagues about football and calling up something that he called the “No help at all line” to complain that the engineer hadn’t arrived yet. Bob was there when the engineer finally arrived. He had expected an older man rather like Mr Charles but this was a gawky youngster barely out of his teens and still graced with a face full of acne. Bob concentrated very hard on what the newcomer said. Most of it would have been quite incomprehensible to someone without the ability to read minds as it contained strings of letter that meant something to the engineer but nothing at all to the people that he was talking to. Whatever the problem with the computer was, the repairman fixed it with a few clicks of the mouse. The lecture on the importance of using the online help took considerably longer. Bob found this difficult to follow because the repairman was not really listening to what he was saying. Half formed thoughts of Trolls and Orcs were behind the recitation but Bob managed to understand enough to be useful. That was apparently more than the insurance claims officer (he had learned the title from Mary) had been able to do. “So, my local settings affect the translation from Askey to Ebby Dick?”, he asked. The words were blurred for Bob by the fog in the speaker’s mind. The repairman sighed and explained again “No, your locale settings affect the translation of ASCII to EDBDIC. It is really very simple. Let me explain…” Bob didn’t stay to listen to the rest but he had formed a plan to learn more.

            When Mary went to lunch, Bob stayed at her workstation. While much of the computer repairman’s speech had been nonsense, Bob had understood the part about the online help. A small series of miracles brought up the online help and the definition of ASCII:

A standard single-byte character encoding scheme used for text-based data. ASCII uses designated 7-bit or 8-bit number combinations to represent either 128 or 256 possible characters. Standard ASCII uses 7 bits to represent all uppercase and lowercase letters, the numbers 0 through 9, punctuation marks, and special control characters used in U.S. English. Most current x86-based systems support the use of extended (or "high") ASCII. Extended ASCII allows the eighth bit of each character to identify an additional 128 special symbol characters, foreign-language letters, and graphic symbols.

This was good as far as it went but what did each number represent? Mary had used a search engine when she was looking for information and so Bob did the same. He quickly found a table that linked the numbers and letters. Bob popped inside the computer to have a look and see if he could make any sense of the patterns on the wires. Most of the numbers were gibberish but a few did seem to form words. Pressing the keys was a great deal of effort (for a very small godling) and Bob wondered if it would be possible to just move the energy around. He had learned to do this with the vending machines. He tried and found that it was simple enough to stop the energy or to let it flow. The only difficulty was that he had to concentrate on what he was doing because everything happened so fast. After that, he tried to make sense of things but they were all very confused. Bob was still trying to make some sense of what the computer was doing when Mary returned. Bob popped out and was saw that the screen had changed to blue with white writing. Mary seemed annoyed by this and turned the computer off and then on again. Bob decided to experiment on someone else’s computer next time to avoid upsetting his believer. He recognised that Mary wasn’t strictly speaking a believer but she very much wanted to believe in something and Bob was determined to be that something.

            Bob stayed in the office when Mary left. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t be back with her in an instant if he needed to be. After all the human left. Bob went to the computer that he had seen the repairman fixing. It didn’t seem likely that Mary could be blamed for anything that went wrong here. If the man who used it needed to turn it off and on again, that didn’t really matter as he wasn’t a worshipper. Gods and godlings don’t feel much responsibility for those who don’t believe in them. Bob was more careful this time and studied the computer. The keyboard seemed pretty simple. When they key was pressed, it connected two little bits of copper and energy flowed between them. The vending machines had buttons that worked the same way. Bob didn’t need to press the key to make that happen so that would be easy enough. There were lots of wires coming in to the computer at the back but only a couple of them seemed to matter. There was a big fat one where energy came in to the  computer and there was a little one which plugged in and made little green and yellow lights flash. All the other wires led to things that were on the desk and which he had seen Mary use. This was all going quite well, he thought. He jumped back to Mary’s house to check that she was OK but she was watching the television again and didn’t need her godling just then. Bob went back to the office and started working the computer. It was tricky at first but it became easier and faster with practice. Bob was able to read the emails of Jonathon Brown (Manpower) (Bob had got the name from the emails) and none of them seemed to be about belief. A lot of them seemed to be about women and football although there was also a lot of mail about accidents. There were also letters stored in the computer and almost all of those were to people who wanted money for something that had happened. Bob thought that this was interesting because people who want something badly probably would believe in things. It would be good to know these things when it was time to expand. Bob knew that he needed a lot more belief than he was getting and that would mean more worshippers. Even some worshipers would have been an advantage at that point.

            Even working as fast as he could, it took several hours for Bob to read everything that made sense on the computer. There were a great many files that just seemed to be random strings of numbers. He needed to understand people if he was to get them to believe in him and those wouldn’t help him. Bob decided to do some research on gods. If he wanted to be a popular god then he had best know what people wanted from their gods. He started a search. “Results 1 - 10 of about 31,400,000 for gods” – It certainly seemed that people were interested in gods! Bob was sure that had to be a good thing. Most of the information seemed to be about gods who had been popular for a while such as Jupiter and Minerva or Othin allfather and Thor. Bob didn’t feel ready to compete with the big boys so he had best avoid their temples. He searched for temples of the main gods. There were 1,900000 references to temples to Thor. Could he really have that many temples, wondered Bob? He looked a bit more closely and then realised that all the references were to temples long gone. He checked for temples of Zeus and Minerva and Othin but it was the same for all of them. Everything was ruined and half forgotten. If those gods were still around at all then they were hanging on by their spiritual fingertips. Bob wondered if these people believed in anything at all so he searched for “belief”. There were a great many references to belief but they mostly seemed to be about “God” – not “a God” or “The God named such-and-such”. Could there be one god that had pushed all the others out of the way? Bob knew that he had to learn more about that god. He started to read but most of it didn’t make any sense to him. People talked about their god as if there was only one and yet they were talking about very different gods. This made no sense at all. Bob knew the way that belief had to work even though he had only been aware for a few weeks. People believed in gods. The gods did things for the people in return. This god would have to be doing some impressive miracles to be able to get that many believers.

Bob decided to check on Mary. He didn’t know what he would do when he had many believers but he would be certain to look after the two that he had. It only took a moment to find Mary in her living room. She was sitting at the table in a dining chair and trying to write a letter. The page was blank and Bob could see that she was crying. Religion was supposed to make people happy, thought Bob. He tried to see in to her mind but it was too jumbled to understand. He caught a glimpse of Max and a great feeling of loneliness but nothing that made much sense. As he watched, a teardrop rolled down Mary’s face and splashed on to the paper. She wiped it away with a sob, leaving a damp trail. Bob didn’t know how to cheer up a human but he could do something about the tears. He caught the next teardrop and held it in the air. A second followed and a third and soon Bob was struggling to hold them all at once. There was nothing he could do but put them together in to a big drop until he could get rid of them. Soon, there was a single fat drop that wobbled and caught the light. The reflection caught Mary’s attention and she tried to focus with red rimmed eyes on the little ball of tears.

            Bob suddenly felt very self conscious but he didn’t know what to do other than hold the tears. Mary watched the light reflected through the ball with a strange mixture of expressions. She was no longer crying but she still looked sad and now puzzled. She reached out a hand to catch the tears but Bob moved the ball back. Mary rubbed her eyes and slowly shook her head.

            “I can see it but I don’t believe it. Oh god, what is happening?”. That was a prayer but how could Bob reply? He could hear her thoughts but he had no idea how to make her hear him. Maybe he could give her a sign. Slowly and a little clumsily, Bob shaped the tears in to a small smile.

            Mary watched and her position was tense, her expression intent. “Is there someone there?”. Bob made the ball bounce up and down like a nodding head.

            “Where are you?”. Bob had no idea how to answer that one with a few tears. He was still thinking when the next question came. “Who is it?”. At least this was a question that he could answer. Slowly he formed three watery letters: “BOB”

            Mary looked, her eyes still wet with tears. “I am going mad. Sweet mother of God, I am crazy.” Bob didn’t have a mother; he had always just been so he didn’t know what he could say to that. “Are you real?”

            Bob formed the word “YES”. He hoped that she didn’t ask anything that needed a long answer.

            “Are you a ghost?”

            “NO”

            “Then what are you?”

            Bob formed more words in the air. The tears were evaporating fast. “I”, “AM”, “YOUR”… Could Bob claim to be her god? She would certainly expect more in the way of miracles than Bon could provide. Was lying to his believer acceptable? Bob thought that it was better not to take the chance and finished with the word  “FRIEND”

            “But why are you here?

            There was very little of the tears left. Bob spelled out “I NEED YOU TO BELIEVE IN ME”

            “Believe in you?”

            The word “YES” formed and faded in front of Mary.

Mary went to bed without any more tears. She kept looking around the room as if she expected to see something there but Bob was no more visible than he usually was. Just before she closed her eyes, she whispered “Goodnight, Bob”. Bob would have smiled if he had anything that could smile. He popped over to see Mr and Mrs Charles but they were sound asleep. Mr Charles was dreaming about vending machines but he had no idea what Ann was dreaming. She wasn’t a believer, after all. Since Bob’s little flock seemed quite safe, he returned to the office to do a bit more research. He needed to know how gods could have mothers. He wondered if he should consider himself an orphan

It was broad morning before Bob finished his research. He had learned a great many things about what humans believed but a lot of it seemed to make very little sense. It didn’t seem to make much more sense to a lot of humans but some of them were very emphatic that they and they alone had the truth about religion. The Christians and the Jews and the Muslims all seemed to believe in more or less the same god but none of them could agree (even among themselves) who the god was or what he wanted. Some of the pictures had been interesting though. The ones he could find were of an old human in white robes with a full beard. Bob wondered if Zeus was still in business after all. Anyway, he would have to find out more about that later since people were coming in to the office and they would notice him using the computer.

            Bob moved over to Mary’s desk and waited. He could have gone straight to Mary, of course, but he wanted to think things over. It was a while before Mary turned up but Bob found the time useful. She seemed in an awful hurry to reach her desk and her supervisor looked at her angrily and then down at his watch. Bob quickly passed a miracle and the minute hand jumped back. The supervisor looked surprised but just shook his head before walking off in the direction of the coffee vending machine. Mary quickly unlocked her PC and put on her phone headset. Since Mary was busy catching up all morning, Bob shifted between her and Mr Charles just to make sure that they were both alright. Mr Charles was in a classroom listening to someone explaining in very, very simple terms what customer service was. Bob managed to catch quite a lot of what was on the course since the instructor seemed to assume that his audience were somehow mentally defective.

            Mary got a quick lunch from the vending machine that Mr Charles had repaired. She sat down at her desk and opened up notepad on her PC. She looked at the blank page for a few moments and started typing:

“Last night, I met Bob. Well, I thought that I did. I don’t know what Bob is or who he is or…” She hit backspace over and over to delete the text. “Damn it, Bob, who are you?”

            Bob wondered what to say. He let himself flow in to the keyboard until he was just under her fingers. Carefully, he let his essence control the circuits. “i am bob”

            Mary looked confused and just stared at the screen for a moment. She typed “Are you a hacker? Is this some kind of joke?”

            “maybe i am a hacker. this isn’t a joke. serious”

“Is that you, Max? You could get in to all kinds of trouble hacking in to the office. I didn’t even know that you could use a computer”

            Bob typed back, “not max. i am bob. i want to help you. i need you”

            “Is that someone from the IT department? You know this is harassment, you creep?”

            “sorry sorry not from it. we spoke yesterday, words in tears. please help me”

            Mary’s expression softened, becoming thoughtful. “How did you do that?”

            Bob had no idea how he had done that. Miracles happened when he wanted them although he had to admit that they were very tiny miracles. “you wanted to believe. need you to believe”

            “Believe in what? Believe in you?”

            Bob was pleased that she was getting the idea. “yes, believe in me”

            Mary typed back. “Why should I believe in you? I don’t even know who you are?”

            “but i believe in you”

            “Am I going mad?”, typed Mary

            “no. please help”

            “How can I help you? I don’t even know where you are.”

            “i need you to believe in me. can you show me that you do?”

            “How?”, typed Mary

            “could i have a sacrifice please?”

            Mary typed quickly now. “If you are thinking goats and pentagrams then you can stop that right now, Buster”

            “no goats. please, can you sacrifice your e9 to me?”

            Mary frowned. “My e9?”

            “your e9 from the vendamatic”

            She looked down at her desk. “The chocolate bar?”

            “yes”

            “How do you sacrifice milk chocolate?”

            “break it and think of me”

            “Can I still eat it afterwards?”, she asked

            “yes”

            Feeling very foolish, Mary reached down and snapped the chocolate in two. Bob had his first sacrifice.

That night, all the traffic lights were green on Mary’s trip home.