(///squashes.unattached.sake – Socks Island, Maine)

Darren hated it when people mocked him for being a stereotype. But he couldn’t say it wasn’t true.

After all, he worked as a software developer. He spent his spare time playing computer games, writing more software, and living on Wotsits. He had a series of faded black T-shirts adorned with references to cult sci-fi shows or weak jokes like ‘For Fox Sake’, with appropriate images. He didn’t have a social life worth talking about.

But you know? He didn’t care. He liked his life just the way it was.

Except for one thing. He lived by himself. He did his own laundry. And yet he still kept finding odd socks at the bottom of the drawer.

How? How was this possible? It had been the bane of growing up in a big family, there always seemed to be a pile of socks without a friend, and you could tidy the whole house and never find the other one. It was as if there was an alternate reality inside his house in which all the unattached socks lived in peace. And now it was happening to him in his solitary life.

So he did what he always did. He wrote some software. He created a game where he had 10 pairs of socks jumbled together, and he had to sort them as quickly as possible. He upped the number, became more creative with the designs, colour nuances with different hex values, rabbits with slightly varied ear lengths. He added a washing machine to spin them in before the sorting began, he created wash loads where the colours ran to add complexity. His sock nightmare became a source of endless inspiration.

He would have shared it with his friends, if he had friends, so instead he created a website to see whether people would discover and enjoy ultimatesockmatch.com. It turned out they did. The traffic threatened to break the server at times. He ensured there was sufficient capacity, and then added some advertising banners.

He wrote an app and released it onto phones. It hit the top of the charts almost immediately. He quit his day job and produced updates day and night: more intricate socks, different washing machines. He introduced Socko, described as ‘A Monster Who Squashes and Eats Socks’, so people had to finish their matching before he finished his meal. He offered in-app purchases to fight Socko, created sock match leaderboards for people to compete, and offered a subscription so people didn’t have to sit through adverts. The money flooded in. Ultimate Sock Match was an international sensation.

Darren sat in his mansion, while the gardener cut his lawn and his chef asked him whether he wanted hand-cut chips with his Wotsits pie. Life was perfect.

The maid came in. “Everything is done, Mr Darren,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“But there is one thing,” she added. “I have these three gloves without a match. What would you like me to do with them?”

_____

Why this location?