So my favourite character from Ralph Breaks the Internet is Spamley and my all time favourite is Surge, and I wanted to write something to get back into WIR and thought about what it would be like if they ever met each other and this is the result!
All my thanks go to my lovely wife Aurorawest for editing this and supporting me through it - go and read her stories, they're fantastic! And credit also goes to her for coming up with the idea of Surge having a visa system in the first place.
The first visitor from the Internet was due to set foot in the Arcade in less than a minute, and Surge was not looking forward to it one single bit.
After Vanellope had left and never returned, Ralph had spent the first week struggling to drag himself into work. As worrying as that had been, what had really alarmed Surge was Ralph's developing plan to go out into the Internet and visit her every evening. Surge didn't trust him not to oversleep or get lost and put his game at risk again and so, with the support of more people than he'd been prepared for, he'd suggested that Ralph entertain a visitor here.
Surge's system of entry had taken a week to create and a further month to develop. He wanted to stretch out the process even longer, because the more he thought about allowing someone from the Internet into their Arcade the more terrible the idea seemed. He became nervous. He became defensive. He became obstructive. But since Ralph didn't once lose his patience or temper with him, Surge had the misfortune to contract a guilty conscience and so didn't delay or delete the process and now it was complete.
If anything went wrong while the visitor was here, Surge knew he'd get the blame for it. He was still suspicious that he hadn't been blamed for Ralph being allowed to neglect his game so that he could stroll into Sugar Rush and edit it as he saw fit. Or that he hadn't hard coded Vanellope into her game so that it wasn't possible for her to permanently leave.
He'd received plenty of blame after other games had been abandoned or taken over and ruined so it made sense to prepare for more.
But maybe it really was like Tapper kept telling him – Ralph and Vanellope had been the ones at fault, not him. They had free will and he had no right to interfere with that. And since he wasn't a mind reader he couldn't have predicted what had happened. Sugar Rush had been fixed, Ralph's track had been erased, none of the players had abandoned it, everyone was happy and everything had gone back to normal. He should stop worrying and stop overcompensating or people really would start to get upset with him. And no, no-one hated him. They had never hated him. He was invited to places. He was asked to join parties and drinks and book clubs. He was included. He had been included for years now. People gave him the time of day and sure they'd never see him as the life and soul of the party but he didn't want that anyway, so why was he complaining. What he should be doing was placing an order for a drink or making his way out of the door so a paying customer could take his seat because this wasn't a charity and rush hour was about to start.
But preparing for worst case scenarios was embedded into Surge's reason for existence, and heart breaking experience had strengthened his need to plan for danger and eliminate it before it occurred. And if he couldn't stop danger from starting then he'd sure as heck start its stop.
Surge walked down the center of Game Central Station and scratched that last line from the imaginary speech he'd written. It was a great speech he'd prepared to give to the entire arcade if he ever had a reason to deliver it. But the problem with terrible things happening around here was that they happened quickly. They didn't have the decency to give him any advance warning at all, let alone the fourteen minutes and seventeen seconds his heart warming, soul stirring, reassuringly epic speech called for. It really was a great speech, and he didn't want to end it on a clunky line like that.
It was a Friday night, sixteen minutes until closing time, and everyone was busy working. The Station was brightly lit and empty but not quiet. It wasn't ever quiet to Surge. A constant hum of electricity flowed up the walls and along the ceiling and pooled like a vast crackling ocean hidden beneath his feet. The electrical grid he was permanently connected to was more intimate than a code vault and more powerful than all of the games combined.
He neared his destination and slowed and stopped. The brightly worded digital display above the tunnel's entrance still generated excitement throughout the arcade despite the Vanellope/Sugar Rush/Wreck-It Ralph Virus incident. If anything everyone was more excited about what lay at the tunnel's end, which made no sense to him at all.
Wifi.
What a joke.
It was a dangerous joke that wasn't a laughing matter at all if you thought about it seriously. He'd started to calculate the number and manner of ways someone could die horribly in the internet with the aim to write a comprehensive list and distribute it to everyone, but when his calculations reached 0.003% his processors had collapsed under the flood of data and he'd had to re-boot himself.
He looked up at the neat red letters and felt a scowl begin to form. It wasn't like one of his jokes, which were funny and reassuring and informative all at the same time. No-one had laughed out loud at one yet, but he knew that one day someone would.
The internet.
Surge sighed. It really wasn't a laughing matter. It might not be new anymore but it was still dangerous and people just didn't get that. They thought they did but they didn't. The only way they could truly understand the danger was to experience it, but that meant experiencing it and Surge existed to protect people from exactly that. If someone experienced a dangerous situation they'd be better equipped to avoid it or defeat it next time, he understood that, but that knowledge could only come from genuinely being in danger and that was what they should avoid in the first place.
They didn't understand. They didn't listen. They pretended to listen to his fact filled lectures and pretended to understand the gravity of the situation but they didn't. They lied and lied badly. In fact some of them didn't even have the decency to pretend at all. Instead they just loudly complained about how this was worse than watching someone else race instead of being out on the track themselves, and what time was dinner, and when could they get back to their karts, and how much longer did they have to sit here before they all died of total boredom?
Surge felt his head throb. He needed to stop this circular train of thought before it gave him another full blown headache that would take him seconds to deal with. Seconds. Sometimes tens of seconds. A double digit episode of seconds that felt like hours of discomfort, as his filters dissolved sharp spikes of tempered electrons and vented them into the grid for recycling.
And speaking of seconds…Surge checked his internal clock again. The arcade's first visitor from the internet was due to arrive in 5.3 seconds, and he needed to have a clear head to deal with him.
He took a deep breath in and held it, fully aware that he didn't need oxygen to survive but doing it anyway, because Zangief had told him that the mere act of doing so would clear his head and put him at ease.
4.5 seconds.
Surge exhaled slowly. The nagging pain hadn't gone away. If anything it felt worse. "Thanks," Surge muttered to himself. "Thanks for the great advice." Well at least no-one had heard him thank an invisible person for doing nothing, so there was that. That could have gone worse. It could all be worse. It could get worse. It would get worse. If he didn't do his job properly now than it would definitely get worse and he'd have to pay for it. Everything would be ruined and they'd go back to how they used to treat him. So what he needed to do was to calm down and follow the script or he may as well not have designed a visa system in the first place and simply left the tunnel unguarded with nothing but a huge sign hanging up saying 'Welcome Dangerous Internet Guests – Please Ruin Us As You See Fit.'
4 seconds.
Surge gripped his trusted clipboard for reassurance. It was all there with him. All 81 pages of the Non-Immigrant Tourist Visa Application Form (SP-13). The form that allowed someone from the Internet to enter Litwak's Family Fun Center and Arcade on a temporary basis subject to the successful completion of the pre-screening questionnaire and submission of a root code analysis cube from an authorised Anti-Virus District physician that his own diagnostic tests had counter verified as virus free.
Surge drummed the fingers of one hand against his leg.
If anyone was watching him do that and was bored or clueless enough to ask him what he was nervous about, Surge would lie and say he was worried he didn't have enough copies of Form 17-T on his clipboard. That would shut them up. Or maybe it wouldn't. Maybe they'd press him and wouldn't accept anything less than the truth, and he didn't know how he'd respond if that ever happened.
3 seconds.
The tunnel was empty. If the visitor was late then Surge would definitely know how to respond to that. He possessed an unenviable vault of experience dealing with people who showed a lack of respect, and if he was late it...wait. Might it be against his visa conditions? Could he be deported before he arrived? Could Surge stop him from even entering the arcade?
Surge snapped his head down and rapidly flicked through the thick stack of papers clamped onto his clipboard. Maybe section 27 sub-section 5 had something about punctuality clauses and would give him the justification to-
"Hello and good afternoon!" A chipper voice announced. "Or should that be evening? Knowing when one turns into the other isn't exactly a speciality of mine on account of them not existing in my neck of the woods. Well I suppose they do exist and not just in a 'if it's real to me then it's real real' sense because they are real, aren't they? Morning, afternoon, evening...they're all part of life's rich tapestry. Hi, I'm J. P. Spamley."
Surge looked up slowly at the first visitor from the internet to visit Litwak's. Spamley stood tall and rigid and very green. The snakes of electrical code embedded in his body pulsed bright and strong. A little too strongly, Surge decided. He was also grinning widely. A little too widely, if Surge was going to be honest with himself.
This sudden wave of honesty made the most of things, and crashed through an unguarded opening to deliver six simultaneous judgements about Spamley in a hard punch of data:
/1Unimpressive.
/2Untrustworthy.
/3Safe.
/4Impressive.
/5Risky.
/6Dependable.
Surge shook his head at himself and deleted the list as quickly as it had arrived. He may not be dependable, but the Visa Terms and Conditions were. He cross-checked the time and Spamley's visa conditions and section 27 sub-section 5 and cursed silently.
Everything was correct. Spamley had every right to be here.
"You must be Surge, right? Pleased to meet you." Spamley took off his cap.
Surge allowed the thick stack of papers his forefinger was holding up to collapse back onto the clipboard. "Correct." He eyed the cap that Spamley was wringing between his hands. "Reason for visit?"
"To, uh, visit a friend?" Spamley looked worried that this was a trick question and he'd already failed a surprise test. "Wreck-It Ralph? Do you know him? From his game? The game Fix-It Felix Junior?"
"It rings a bell."
"It does?"
Surge prepared a razor sharp comeback to Spamley's inevitable comment about an actual bell being involved, and slotted it into his vocal processor queue with a satisfying snick. He opened his mouth and waited for Spamley to trap himself.
"Glad to hear it," Spamley said pleasantly. "Got me worried that I'd made a mistake filling out section 1 question 6."
Surge deleted his planned response and purged it painfully. "You hadn't," Surge snapped, irritated that Spamley knew the form so well and hating himself for it. "That...yes...checks out. Your response conforms to an accepted option for travel and temporary admittance to the Arcade proper."
"Good. Great. Sooooo….."
"...so?"
"So when does this proper admittance start? Meanin' me being allowed past this black and yellow tape you've got me standing behind."
"When you've answered my questions."
"Questions, right. They're...not the same ones on your form are they? The ones you've already said I've answered correctly 'cause if I hadn't I wouldn't be allowed this far down the tunnel in the first place?"
"...Duration of visit?" Surge said mechanically.
"Until we drink Tapper's dry!" Spamley enthused, as he went for the humourous approach and politely bypassed the wide open exasperated one. "Ralph's plan, not mine. I said such a thing was impossible and he said he didn't know if it was possible but that we should try and I said sure we should try and then we both said it would be for science and you look like a science kind of guy so what do you think?"
Surge blinked. "About your plan to consume excessive quantities of alcohol in an attempt to put an arcade veteran out of business?"
"Ah I'm just messin' with ya! I'm only here for two days, just like my form says. But seriously, can it be done? Drinking Tappers dry? Would his drinks keep comin' back no matter how many kegs you emptied, or would he have to shut up shop if we went too far? Has that ever happened? What would the gamers do? Tappers wouldn't be unplugged would it? Cause that would be a real shame let me tell you. This is the day and age when small businesses need all the help they can get 'cause The Man is out to get you and you don't know what's gonna happen from one coin slip to the next."
Surge took a nice, long, well deserved break of a two full seconds to let Spamley truly sink into his sphere of reality. Pre-screening him and investigating him was one thing, but interacting with him in person was another. Spamley was nervous, that was obvious. In fact he was nervous bordering on scared. But what did he have to be scared about? He was from the Internet, that place full of ordered chaos and power whose vast scope Surge would never be able to measure. The internet was big and different and unquantifiable and should therefore be treated with caution. That's all Surge was doing - being cautious. He was double checking things. He certainly wasn't delaying Spamley's admittance to the Arcade, and certainly wasn't trying to get Spamley to give up and turn around and go back home.
A sharp spike of pain to the base of Surge's skull told him what his core programming thought of those thoughts.
Even with all his power and knowledge and experience Surge still felt threatened, and like a lot of people confronted by what they considered to be a dominant power Surge hesitated. He didn't flee or fight but rather semi-froze. He retreated to an area of safety and familiarity and stared hard at his clipboard full of questions, and vowed to take the knowledge that he had ever considered Spamley a dominant power to his grave.
"I just want to see how's Ralph's doin, that's all," Spamley said.
"Justification for visit?" Surge asked without thinking about.
"To visit Ralph? I just said that and-"
"Why?"
"Why is he my friend?" Spamley frowned. Surge couldn't tell if his expression was powered by annoyance at being asked yet another question he'd already provided an acceptable answer for, or because he'd decided to delve inwards and examine what it meant to be connected to another living entity in the way that definition permitted.
Just as Surge began to severely regret opening his mouth, Spamley's puzzled expression cleared and his face brightened. "Well it all began when I was drummin' up business outside eBay, my usual patch. It was kinda a slow day if I remember rightly, not too much going on after the morning commuter rush hour. Now that's a good time let me tell you, all those users zombie eyed on the train or the bus and needing something to keep them awake before they can get a free cup of coffee from the office because they don't want to pay for any premium blend which, come to think about it, isn't that surprising since they're on my site trying to earn some money and-"
"'Reason for visit: personal.'" Surge recited crisply. He scanned the relevant section of the visa form. "OK. Fine. That's an acceptable answer you've got there Juliet Papa."
"What?" Spamley stuttered, as he actually took half a step back. "I ain't no papa. What are you sayin'? Has someone been sayin' things about me? What have you heard? What's going on?"
Surge's expression soured, and his fear scale threatened to tick down a level. "Usage of the phonetic alphabet is clearly dying out there as much as it is in here."
"You askin' if I know the alphabet?" Spamley's eyes widened. "Are you saying I'm dying? Can I die in here? Like - actually die? But I'm not a character - I don't have a game I'm coded into. I'm just me. I just wanted to see Ralph and have a drink with him and then return to my business and I don't mean no trouble I really don't."
Surge felt a muscle in his cheek twitch. "Occupation?"
"The visa form didn't say nothin' about dying. My Anti-Virus doc said I'd be safe and sound in here if I took a booster jab every day and I've already taken three today. If my personal well being is at risk here then I have a right to know about it. I don't know what those rights are, but I know I must have them. I know I must probably have them. And one of those rights is the ability to make informed and consenting choices related to my strong desire to not die or enter into the terrifying world of surprise parenthood."
"Occ. U. Pation?"
"I already told you that I'm-" Spamley snapped. Then he cut himself off sharply and took a deep breath. He held it. And held it. And held it...and held it. He held it some more and then exhaled and smiled. He stood up straighter and pushed his shoulders back slowly. "C.E.O."
Surge's eyes tracked slowly upwards as the rest of him remained motionless. "C.E.O? That's not what you submitted as your answer to question 11."
"I…" Spamley cast his mind back as to what he'd written on the form. "...am a small business owner, yes. That hasn't changed. That will never change. I'm just givin' you some more info here Mr. SP."
"How about we keep the info flowing and you confirm the name of your company so I can cross check it?"
Spamley's smile didn't falter.
Surge could see the silent battle going on inside Spamley's head. If he kept answering Surge's questions then surely he'd be allowed into the arcade, because that's what the visa terms and conditions promised. But if he didn't answer the questions then Surge would have the perfect excuse to turn him away, no matter what the visa terms and conditions promised. That would be unprofessional. That would be unfair.
Things were already unfair.
"Don't worry," Surge said. "I can find it on page-"
"LootFindr." Spamley's smile melted into a genuine one as he thought about his company. "Built it from the ground up myself. Those early days were tough, let me tell you. Everyone against you because they say they don't want it and it's against the rules. But I knew there was a market for it and it makes some people happy and I'm not forcing anyone to do anything against their will, so how can it be wrong? I'm not a virus. I'm not out to hurt anyone. I'm harmless. You have to believe that."
Surge let these last four sentences sink in. They sunk in deeply, and were analyzed and cross-referenced and stress tested and accepted. But.
Without being aware of it, Surge had taken his pen out and written the name of Spamley's company on the first page of forms stacked onto his clipboard. He'd mindlessly written it on a spare line underneath the question 'Previous Names: Continued.' That wasn't right, but he wasn't going to worry about it.
What suddenly did concern him was how much power he had and how he could wield it. Maybe he should set up a Visa Oversight Committee and let others review and amend the visa process. Maybe he should even let them vote. After all, the admission of Internet guests affected everyone. The thought of making the visa process more democratic wasn't a horrible one, but it made him suppress a shudder. He'd be there all day and night listening to them bicker and complain and not agree with everything he said. It was tempting to just decide everything in the name of doing what was best for everyone, but it was unfair.
"Oh, Surge? Pal?" Spamley asked politely, having clearly given up expecting a response to his declaration of being harmless. "You got a little spelling error on your form there."
"I doubt that," Surge said without looking down at the form. "I know your answers inside out."
Surge immediately wished he hadn't said that, because no-one would blame Spamley for immediately losing his temper and accuse him of wasting time by asking questions he already knew the answers to. Spamley would then Look at him and wonder how much more time he was going to waste.
But all Spamley said was "Yeah you do, look-" as he shot out a finger to point the error out.
Before his clipboard could be touched, Surge took a step back and hugged it to his chest. "Do not touch this," Surge warned, his voice more of a hiss than he would have liked.
Spamley jammed his hands on his hips and nodded briskly. "Sure thing buddy, no problem no problem we're cool we're cool - I'm hands off until you tell me otherwise. I don't get the whole not wanting someone else to touch your board thing since that's how I stay in business, but each to their own right."
Surge took another pointless deep breath and adjusted the hold he had on his clipboard to one that wasn't so childish.
Spamley hadn't looked away. His face was politely puzzled and he was waiting. They both waited some more. "Still got that spelling error though," Spamley said. "Can't just wish that away."
Surge exhaled a big draft of nothing. Once again Zangief's calming exercise had been the real waste of time here. Surge made a mental note to bring it up with him at the next book club and to propose a ban on choosing another celebrity self-help book for at least a year. Maybe two if he wasn't immediately shot down. "What spelling error?" he said.
"The name of my company."
"I know the name of your company. And unless you've changed it in the last few seconds, I'm not wrong."
"But you spelled 'Findr' with an 'e.' There ain't no e for me you see."
Surge closed his eyes. With his fingers he flipped the pen around and lowered it to the page. Then he opened his eyes and realised he wasn't using a pencil and his pen didn't have an eraser on it. He sighed, and smartly rotated the pen back around. With one sharp stroke he drew a straight line across the incorrectly spelled company name. In the space next to it he wrote out the name again in his clinically precise handwriting.
"Ah, Surge? Sir?" Spamley said kindly. "You left a gap."
"…excuse me?"
"A gap. You know, a space. Between the words 'Loot' and 'Findr.' You can't leave a gap or it's not right."
It wasn't right that Surge was doing any of this. The name of the company didn't belong in the line designated for additional previous names, and Surge already knew the answer to every question he'd asked. They both did. Spamley was probably wondering why his incorrectly spelled company was being written on an incorrect section by the person who'd created the question and already knew the answer too.
Surge could cross out the name of the company again and take a third stab at it and get it right. Or he could ignore it. Or he could scrunch the piece of paper up and start again. Surge sighed again, knowing he was only doing this to drag out the time and delay the inevitable. "I'll amend this later. I'm-"
"Still using a clipboard I see," Spamley said with genuine interest, unaware that he'd interrupted Surge from what he was about to say.
"I was blind to the fact that your vision is twenty-twenty."
"Yeah I haven't seen one of those in years," Spamley said, ignoring Surge's excellent joke to peer down at the clipboard. "Not much call for them in the net you see. They're too limited for the amount of data storage and transfers we need, even on a short-term basis. And when I say short-term I mean real short term, like a second. Like a point something of a second. It'd take a person years to transfer data using a buffer that slow."
"I am not slow."
Spamley's eyes flicked up. "I didn't say you were."
Surge shuffled and cleared his throat. "This is a closed system. Nothing can attack it from the outside. Not a virus, not a worm, not a sneaky horde of swivel eyed Trojan horses spying on you from behind a bush."
Spamley cupped a hand around his chin and nodded. "Trojan herds got broken up years ago and tend to work alone now. They're solitary little things with blunt teeth and suspicious smiling faces that creep you out big time, let me tell you. But you…you ain't got no firewall around that thing."
"My clipboard doesn't need one. I've designed a different set of protections for it."
"But of course it needs a firewall! I could just take your pen or use my own and scribble all over it. I mean you actually use a pen. With ink." Spamley paused to consider the state of the world he now found himself now. "Once you've filled that paper up with data you can't transfer it or even erase it. It just sits there takin' up what little memory the board has."
"Thank you for explaining the basics of data accumulation and storage to me."
"If you make a mistake you can't erase it. Can't swipe away ink from a piece of paper. Not like you can with a tablet."
"Then it's a darn good job I don't make mistakes."
Spamley inhaled only semi-apologetically through his teeth. "You spelled my company's name wrong on the wrong line and didn't leave a gap."
"…often. I don't make mistakes often. What's your point here pal?"
"Are you worried you're makin' a mistake with me?"
Surge gripped his clipboard tightly. Another headache began to blossom, and he wondered just how much Ralph had told Spamley about everyone in the Arcade and every game's overlapping history. Since Ralph liked to talk to anyone who would listen, it was a safe bet to make that Spamley knew everything.
"Are you worried you're going to regret givin' me a chance?" Spamley asked. "Yeah I'm used to that. But I'm not a flight risk. I'm not gonna hurt anyone here or run off and cause damage Mr. Surge. You can trust me. I'm not a dark web pop-up or a Trojan in disguise or someone who disrespects your rules. I'm not a Double Dan or an Insecure Ralph or a Turbo or-"
Surge shuddered and involuntarily let go of his clipboard. It hit the floor with a heavy thump.
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean-" Spamley spluttered, taken aback at Surge's reaction.
Surge crouched down to pick up his clipboard and paused, one hand on the stack of papers and the other splayed on the floor to keep his balance.
He wasn't scared at hearing Turbo's name spoken out loud. He wasn't a simpleton. He wasn't worried that the greatest racer ever would suddenly appear in his kart to roar out of one game's outlet and crash into another and destroy them both in seconds.
That word, Turbo, which had toppled from a name to rot into a swamp of adjectives that could be distilled down into one: Beware.
Rather it was the casual way Spamley had said it that had made Surge shudder. The way he had slipped it into the conversation as if it was nothing special. And that's because to him it wasn't. He hadn't lived through what had happened with TurboTime and RoadBlasters and paid the ongoing price for it. It was history to him; a piece of Arcade lore. But to some of the Arcade's residents it was still something they thought of every single day. It was something that continued to influence and define them, no matter how much they hated it and fought against it. Turbo continued to embed himself in something he had no right to be in, and exert an influence he would smile in smug delight at discovering he had.
Surge knew these things just as sharply as he knew that they only applied to him. And he was tired of it. He really was tired.
So maybe it was time for a change.
Surge knew he wasn't hated by the rest of the Arcade. It really was like Tapper kept telling him and threatening to write on a board and point to so he didn't have to keep repeating himself. He wasn't hated or blamed or ignored. But it was hard to fully accept that was now the case. It was easier to believe he secretly was all of those things, and that another terrible incident was just waiting around the corner that he would be held responsible for. He had experience with them, and knew how to handle them if they occurred again. They were familiar. But they were also dead plastic weights wrapped around his feet. He knew what a self-fulfilling prophecy was. And he also understood that one could be defeated or changed or ignored.
He knew that one could be erased.
Surge stood up slowly.
Spamley was looking around the Station. He was drinking it all in as if this was the closest he'd ever get to it. He was looking at the great vaulted ceiling, the high arching windows, the streams of artificial light spearing the ground, the benches, the information booth, the game outlets with their worlds of promises, the unique historic confined grandeur of it all.
Surge had never seen anyone look at his home like that. As if Spamley couldn't believe his luck that a bottom feeder pop up such as himself had been given something so rich and rare to experience.
Surge swallowed. He wanted to say 'I'm just following procedure. I'm just doing my job. You understand that right?' He wanted to say 'You're from the internet. You're powerful. You have coding and abilities none of us ever knew existed and I'm scared.' He wanted to say 'You've done nothing wrong and I'm sorry.'
But before he could work up the nerve to say anything at all, Spamley spoke.
"Ralph's a lucky guy," he said quietly. "Having you watch out for him. They all are. Some of us don't have anyone watching our back."
Surge ran a finger down the top piece of paper on his perfectly aligned pile and needlessly adjusted it. He wanted to say something reassuring and funny and informative but was coming up blank. His gears were turning but they weren't gaining traction to take him anywhere. Unable to generate a response that Spamley deserved, Surge once again fell back to safer ground.
"Your, uh, form – your answer to section 2 question 8 – mentions a Gord," Surge said. "'A highly respected individual I employ and work with' you said. So you do have people with you. Well you have a person. And I'm presuming it's a person, since you didn't specify a class of entity for him. Her. It. Them. Which reminds me that I…" Surge flicked to the back of section 1 and clicked his pen. "…did not make that a question in the first place." He made a neat note in the margin. "There. Something to do later on."
"Amend your form?"
"Yep." Surge put his pen away and tidied the papers. "Can't let that little omission run away from me for too long or I might clean forget about it."
"Yeah you…don't wanna do that. That's the stuff of nightmares right there."
There was a pause.
"He," Spamley said. "Gord's a he. For your form, in case you wanna write it down. He's a real good guy don't get me wrong, I love that little fella. But during workin' hours it's just me out there. Drummin' up business and smiling and dealing with the Pop-Up Blockers all day long." Spamley's face fell further as he said that. He looked older and wiser and thoughtful. He looked like someone you didn't want to look at. "They never give me a chance to explain myself. Never. They don't read out a list of carefully prepared questions from a clipboard and give me a warning to make better choices in the future. They tower above me and scream and shove me in the chest. They leave me on the ground, and it's my choice to pick myself back up or stay down there forever."
There was a second of thick silence.
"But they can't get the best of me!" Spamley exclaimed brightly, his grin artificially wide and persona re-calibrated to its default public setting. "I'm goin' places, and no-one can stop me. Except for you eh Surge – you're stopping me from entering this arcade. P.O. Blockers have nothing on you ha ha that's a joke, please don't ban me."
Surge didn't laugh. He didn't even pretend to laugh. He looked at Spamley in open honest thoughtfulness and watched his visitor's eyes slide down to the Station's floor in discomfort. Surge wondered how the Station's floor compared to the Internet's. He also wondered about the grid network these Pop-Up Blockers used to travel around the Internet on and what criteria they used to maintain an optimal heat, energy and functionality ratio. Their processing power must be enormous.
Surge pushed this line of thought away, knowing that he wouldn't ever ask Spamley about them. Even thinking about doing so had set off a small traitorous alarm in one of his sub-processors, which was an uncomfortable surprise no matter what angle he looked at it from. And it would do him no good whatsoever to step into a quicksand pit of envy, so he pushed the prospect of talking with one of them even further away. He pushed it away carefully, not sharply.
Spamley opened his mouth to speak again, but Surge held a hand out to stop him. With his other hand he held out the clipboard and its fat stack of papers containing a mountain of carefully prepared questions.
And he deleted them all.
Spamley's eyes widened in horror. "You're banning me?"
"It means this application is null and void," Surge said. "And because it is not fit for purpose, the answers previously contained on it are now subject to my discretionary interpretation. Its failure will be hard coded into the arcade's master vault and never erased. It'll be wheeled out for training purposes on how not to conduct an external verification interview when such a scenario next presents itself."
"I'm not sure what all that means but it sounds much worse," Spamley said in despair. "I don't want to be a void. Or a failure. I am not a failure."
Surge successfully fought back the beginnings of a smile. "I didn't say you were."
"Oh? …oh."
Surge let go of the clipboard and it fell. The instant it touched the ground it crackled, sparked green, and dissolved into the electrical mainframe that formed the foundation of the Station. At just under the speed of light it zipped away towards the back wall and combined with the dense world of code that existed within and behind it.
"Pretty nifty," Spamley said in approval. "When things disappear in the net they just – disappear. They don't put on a light show like in here."
"I'm considering making it a tourist attraction."
There was a pause.
"What I'm saying," Surge began before he could lose his nerve, well aware that he needed to be the one to break at least one of these silences, "Is that you're free to enter the Arcade proper. And that maybe my form could possibly, maybe, be slimmed down a bit for future applicants."
"You gave me seventeen pages to fill in about the last locations I'd visited," Spamley said, the relief and delight on his face betraying the harsh tone he was going for. "They had to include the date and time and any credible witnesses that could verify my justification for being there. I nearly cried on Gord's shoulder when I saw that."
Surge crossed his arms over his chest and rocked back and forth on his feet. "Yeah, that…may have been a bit too much to ask."
"Seventeen pages Surge. Seventeen. After page eight I did cry on Gord's shoulder."
Surge stopped rocking. "And you completed them all perfectly. Ralph's a lucky guy to have you as his friend."
Spamley grinned warmly and visibly relaxed. "Yeah, well, me and him go way back. Actually we don't, but I said I'd come and visit him if I could and that's what I did and I...can, can't I? Come in and visit him?"
Surge stepped forward to the tunnel's entrance and peeled away the Do Not Enter tape. It fluttered to the ground and lay in a crumpled line just before the Station's border. Surge thought about banishing the tape to the grid and distributing its raw code to the same place the visa forms had been sent to. But he didn't. Spamley might appreciate the symbolism of being allowed to step over that physical line himself. Maybe he'd even step on it.
Surge held out his hand for Spamley to shake, and silently willed him to do the latter.
"Welcome to Litwak's."