I suppose the best place to start is when Gordon got stuck in the storage room on the pier. If you ain’t read his diary entry, I would. But the long and short of it is the bloke went missing after we had the storm come through that night. It tore the bloody roof off one of the buildings at the end of the pier. And him along with it. The only reason we know he was there was because his diary suddenly popped up as a book on Amazon not long after, when most of us gave up on the idea of ever finding him alive.

I don’t know who put Gordon’s diary out there for the world to read. Honest. Yeah, everyone’s looking at me: Alex the bad guy in the story. The villain. So this is my way of clearing my name. Why would I want to publish the words of a dead man? Do I look like I need the money? For those of you who don’t know who I am, I’m Alex Cook, CEO of Alexandria, an entertainment company based in Brighton.

We specialise in slot machine design and have clients all over the world from Vegas to Macau. I started the company after cutting short my degree in psychology, realising I could make more of a difference coming back to my old man’s company, which at the time was just a bunch of old fruities along West Street.

The first great revolution in gambling was automation, when Charles Fey came up with the Liberty Bell in the 1890s. I actually have one of those in my office. It’s a beauty. That you could take a punter’s dosh and entertain them without any human intervention was a stroke of genius. Actually, strictly speaking, automated vending itself came about way before then. A couple of thousand years before. A Greek engineer called Hero Alexandria devised a system where you could slot a coin then out flowed a set amount of water. And yeah, this is who the company is named after. Contrary to what a lot of people think.

The second great revolution in gambling is what Alexandria is built on: the understanding of the human psyche. My old man used to take calls with all these fruit machine bosses. They were more obsessed with odds and payout ratios than they were about how the brain works. Surely, I thought, if you could understand why the punter felt the need to drop a few more quid into the machine, then you would know exactly how to calibrate those payout ratios. For example, instead of just paying out once every twenty times, you could feed the poor bugger a few near-wins and have him play more than twenty times without actually paying out. A near-win triggers the same parts of the brains as a lot of dopamine-response based behaviour. Porn, for example. Both gambling and porn have that “just one more try” thing about them that compels the user to dig for gold over and over again. There’s a joke in there somewhere about finding the right set of bells, but I digress.

I love the fact that some of the biggest gambling companies from all over the world do business with a little company in Brighton, East Sussex. I remind them that  a great gambling city - say Vegas or Macau - has the quintessential aspect of being somewhere to visit for the day. Brighton has been the day-tripping destination of choice for Londoners for more than two centuries. People come to experience a bit of a thrill. They come for a bit of an escape before they go back to their jobs, their families, their responsibilities.

Gordon has been part of the Alexandria team for almost fifteen years. He’s our lead designer. Does a great job.  He’s a bit intense but that’s what makes him so good. I ain’t seen no one spend the whole night just making the movement of something like a flying carpet, or a dancing goblin, just right. The man’s got an eye for detail.

But if you ask me, the bloke’s a bit… how shall we say… a bit on the spectrum, know what I mean? He never looks you in the eye when you’re speaking to him. And mumbles everything when he’s speaking to you. Maybe it’s because he’s part Asian. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. I’m a racist. But if I was I wouldn’t hire him would I? You have to admit though, most of them might be a bit socially awkward, especially the males of the species, but they’re all bloody hard workers.

I think the only person who really gets on with him is Ollie, my wife. But everyone gets on with Ollie. In fact, it was pretty obvious from the get-go that Gordon’s been into my wife from the moment he met her. But fine, I’m a man who’s secure in my marriage. Or was, as you will soon find out.

So anyway, soon after Gordon’s diary gets published, he gets found. Guess where? In a bloody wind farm off the coast! He wasn’t in great nick. But he survived. No idea how the bugger floated all the way out there. But there he was, hanging on the side of one of those maintenance vessels. Some engineer found him and thought Gordon was a dead body until a seagull hopped onto his head and he started moving. The engineer said Gordon kept trying to grab at a seagull. Probably wanted to eat it. Poor bastard.

They put him in hospital. They said it would take a few days before he could speak again. So about a week after, me and Ollie went in with some grapes and flowers and that. He was looking thin as a rail. I told him he wasn’t fired and that I was just angry at him for what he said to the client. He said the last thing he remembered was seeing the roof come off the pier building and next thing he knew he was being shat on by a seagull!

I don’t know about you but I bloody hate the things. Flying rats they are. Ollie says we should respect them in this town because they were here first. But have you seen them swoop in and snatch a donut clean from the hands of a child walking along the promenade? Have you seen the mess they make after pecking at a rubbish bag and spilling crap all over the pavement? Have you tried to go back to sleep at five in the morning after they’ve built a nest in your roof? You can’t kill them because they’re a protected species. And you can’t eat them cos they’re too sinewy and probably by now have rubbish in their guts and plastic shite coursing through their stinking veins.

So here’s the thing. The Gordon feedback thing I was telling you about earlier. Apparently, someone wrote a review of Gordon’s diary on Amazon, saying that it would be interesting if he ended up being found alive on a wind farm. And this was written two weeks before he was actually found on a wind farm.

Okay, so maybe it was written by someone who saw him there before they wrote it, or it was just a coincidence. Fine. But then a few days later, someone else wrote another review and mentioned how it would be fitting if the pier awarded Gordon compensation. And then, lo and behold, a day later, that actually happened.

So for a joke, I decided to write a review of my own and suggest something totally against the odds of happening. I wrote that Gordon’s bad luck should be balanced up and he should win a half a million quid on the lottery. And, yep, you guessed it, the following weekend he got won a clean half-mill! I did think of writing him winning the full jackpot but then who would do my animations, right? He even claims he didn’t realise he ever played the damn thing until he found a ticket in his pocket the day the lottery numbers were announced.

I told Ollie what was happening, and she wrote a review to test my theory. I said to her it had to be truly improbable to rule out coincidence. So she wrote that after Gordon was found alive and recovering in hospital, the nurse would find a black seagull under his bed (yeah, thanks Ollie). And no joke, the next morning, a nurse was giving Gordon his daily bed bath, and found a black seagull under the mattress. It even got into the papers, with it apparently being rare. 

Ollie decided to test this bizarre phenomenon further, and got a friend to write how me and her should win a holiday to the Maldives. But nothing happened. In fact, nothing else happened whenever we got people to write more bullshit. So I got the company secretary to write something about us but nothing happened again. After a few more tries, we realised that there seem to be two rules to this Gordon feedback thing. One: only one review per person. Two: it only happens if it’s to do with Gordon, and no one else.

So I was on my way to tell Gordon all of this, before we told the world. Ollie though, had reservations about telling Gordon. She said that he was already unsettled, having just won a bunch of cash and also being haunted by black seagulls. Just think of all the good in the world that could be done with this power, she said. But with Gordon the way he was, this power could be very destructive. Deadly, even. The way she said that and the way she was looking at me did, I have to admit, make me think about it a bit more. I mean, what if Gordon just gets someone to write in that his angry boss should just disappear or found on a bloody wind farm being shat on by a seagull?

Me and Ollie eventually agreed that we should contain this feedback thing as much as possible. At least until we figured out what to do with it. We went to check on Gordon at the hospital and see how he planned to spend his riches, but more to see how unhinged he still was. But by the time we got there, he sat there in his bed, with the wildest look in his eye.

“Have you seen what’s going on in the reviews of my book?” he said.

We pretended to not know what he was going on about.

And so he took us through exactly what I’ve been describing to you, from the wind farm, to the lottery win, to the black seagull. We tried to remain as though we were  freshly piecing it all together. But I could see those little cogs in Gordon’s brain spinning. I wasn’t sure whether he’d go bonkers on the spot, or realise the true potential of what was happening. Maybe it was a bit of both. The nurse had to come in a sedate him because Gordon’s heart rate and blood pressure were going off the charts.

This morning, I woke up in an empty bed with a letter addressed to me from Ollie. She was leaving me for Gordon.

So the bastard must have gotten someone to write how Ollie should fall in love with him. And I’m writing this to persuade you to help write something in there for her to come back to me. Please. You have to help me. I reckon by now you can see where I’m coming from. All I want is my wife back. Remember, what you write must always have something to do with Gordon’s life. You can’t write how you’re going to become a Hollywood film star, or how your worst enemy falls off Beachy Head. And you only have one chance at it. Don’t ask me why. I ain’t no scientist. And don’t blame me if nothing happens. Sometimes what you write happens. Sometimes it comes to nothing. But maybe if there are enough of you who can suggest that Ollie will come back to me, she will. Or she’ll at least see that she’s being brainwashed by this weird Gordon feedback thing.