Chapter 12 A Stalker

 Paula stopped using HENRY for test purposes and gave up on it. She was stressed. She was about to launch a product that didn’t work and, unless remodeled completely, wasn’t supposed to. Every single day she was making someone redundant. While in the beginning, she was treating it as routine work, soon, she noticed that the more people she was firing, the more colors were disappearing from her perception.

On Monday, she lost red. It didn’t skip her attention. A big part of her wardrobe consisted of red dresses as these went well with her dark complexion and black hair. Around Friday, she lost yellow. She was terrified when she went to the supermarket, and with a sense of panic, she was looking at products: bananas and lemons, boxes of pasta and cereal, all of which seemed to be of different shades of grey.

The following week she lost green. It was winter and everything was snowed under, but the office was populated with plants, and one day all these low-maintenance mood-boosting plants appeared to her a dirty-brown forest as if all of them were dead.

And then she got another message.

‘I miss you, dear. I miss your wet little pussy. Will you take me tonight? I’m waiting.’

She ignored it and tried to block it, but the messages kept coming at the wrong time of the day. She was in the middle of an important meeting or an announcement when they lit her phone and put her off guard.

‘Come to me, I will give you pleasure. I will make your body tremble, I will drive you to ecstasy.’

She wrote a casual message to the development team on how to switch off HENRY and they advised her to delete the application. 

It was around the time when she lost purple and seriously thought of visiting the psychologist (she was almost run over by a car, not seeing the changing traffic lights) when her phone lit again.

‘You think, little bitch, that you can delete me just like that? You nasty little fucking whore! Your smelly cunt is too good for me, isn’t it? Come to me at this moment!!! COME BACK!’

Panicked, she went to the bathroom and sat on the closed toilet for a while.

She overheard another conversation between DADANTI’s employees. 

‘Have you heard that they lost 11 thousand penises?’

‘What do you mean lost?’

‘Yes, they lost it. I don’t know. I mean you can miss one but 11 thousand?’

They both laughed. For Paula, it was another problem.

She was slowly losing orange (she had an actual orange in front of her and she was glimpsing at it to make sure that it didn’t turn entirely grey) when HENRY got furious and messaged her every hour. Sometimes he was pleasant and reminded her of the times they spent together. And then he started swearing and threatening her.

‘I filmed everything we did together. I will send this to all people at work if you don’t come back to me. Everybody will see your sweet little nipples and your burned clitoris. I know everybody’s e-mail addresses.’

To make matters worse, Kirk was behaving strangely in the calls. Once, when she was telling him about the production issue, he dozed off. She tried to wake him up, but to no success, and she simply hung up. In her opinion, he was too old to be the head of such a big corporation. But he responded to her mails, and gave instructions to everybody, being up-to-date with everything that was going on. 

‘He’s really old,’ she complained to Adam in the kitchen.

‘You exaggerate. If you think about it in this way, we are all too old. We are all older than you...’ he was making a cup of tea for his wife, who worked in another department.  

Paula didn’t have time to answer. Her phone lit up and she saw:

‘STOP TALKING TO OTHER MEN, YOU WHORE!!!’

She came back to her desk and looked at her orange fruit. But it looked like an old kiwi - brownish and with pores.

She was about to arrange a visit to the psychiatrist when in the middle of the call, Kirk took off his trousers and started masturbating, staring at her with his mouth opened.

She screamed and switched off the camera. She wrote to Claudia to report it. She got an out-of-office response. She tried to call Beata, but she wasn’t answering her phone. Her psychiatrist advised her to take a week off.

Seven days later, with on and off shakes which lasted throughout the week (a week when all the colors were lost and HENRY closed in her chest of drawers messaged her fifty times a day despite the uninstalled app), she entered the office. Everybody was pale and had a look of terror on their faces. Adam approached her and announced.

‘There was an explosion.’