Looking into the glass eye that was his internet webcam, James drew a long drag on his cigarette and it threw shadows across his chiselled face as he said, “You want to know do you? You really want to know what happened?”

            There were several users in the chat room but as far as James was concerned there was only one. His username was Spartan300 but his real name was Barry. James can remember thinking that if he was called Barry then he too would have a username that bore no resemblance to the one he was christened with. Spartan300 and James1302 had talked online for coming up to two years now. Back then Spartan300 was called Tonym0ntana on account of Scarface being his favourite film, but 300 had knocked it from the top space on his mental list so his username had to go. At first James1302 had no idea who he was, but after Spartan300 joking around with him for several days he finally clicked.

            James and Barry had never met in the flesh but with the use of webcam’s they felt they didn’t need to. Although the image on James’ laptop was a blurry one, it was clear enough to see that Barry fitted the internet geek stereotype as comfortably as an Italian suit around a catwalk model. His thick black hair was always scraped back from his forehead with a mixture of gel and grease, his glasses had heavy black rims and although they didn’t look like NHS glasses from the nineteen fifties, they certainly weren’t at the cutting edge of fashion. The bags beneath Barry’s dark brown eyes were borderline smack head owing to his addiction to the online game World of Warcraft. In fact he was so addicted that he would only be online to chat before eight in the evening because he ran a guild that always needed his superior skills on their particular dungeon raid. In life Barry was always overlooked, but online he was a God and that was the thing that kept him paying his monthly subscription.

            Whilst using both hands to swipe his already pushed back hair Barry spoke with the impatience of a sleep deprived internet dork, “Of course I want to know what it was like.”