The Third Person (27 page)

‘Here.’

‘Thanks.’

I took the water and gulped it down, pleased to see that my right arm was working a little better.

‘I’m glad you killed those men.’

He sat down.

‘I mean, I never thought I’d fucking say that about anybody. About anything. I used to think it was horrible when something died.’

‘It was horrible,’ I said.

‘They deserved it, though. I’m glad you did it. Jesus, listen to me.’

The idea made me feel uncomfortable, so I said, ‘How long had you known Claire?’

‘On and off, for years. We were friends some of the time, more than that at other times. We were always breaking up and getting back together, you know? She was too wild for anything else. It had been about a year, and then she came to see me a month or so back. She didn’t look well, and I wanted her to stay. She seemed so lost. She stayed for a bit, but then she was gone again. Claire never wanted to settle down.’

‘No.’

‘She wasn’t the type. I’m glad you killed those men.’

He might have been glad, but I still felt uncomfortable. Last night, I’d felt pretty guilty about the two murders, but I’d put them away with everything else and wasn’t about to start analysing them now. Fortunately, he changed the subject.

‘They killed her because of something she stole?’

I nodded.

‘Yeah. They were after a piece of art made out of text. She stole it from them, and stored it on your server for safe keeping.’

I didn’t want to tell him that she’d worked as a prostitute, but we were circling it. I needn’t have worried though: the words seemed to go through him – he was miles away. It seemed like he was running something over in his head. Something that was suddenly making sense of a shitload of chaos.

He said, ‘She stored it on the
Society’s
database.’

‘Right.’

‘And it was this . . . murder text.’

‘Well, it was a story,’ I said. ‘A description of a murder. And I think that one of the people in the story is my girlfriend.’

‘But there’s something different about it?’

‘It’s real.’

‘I don’t get it.’

‘So well-written that it’s as good as real. Here.’

I reached into my pocket and produced the ticker-tape description of the Saudi distillery. There was no point fucking around: you needed to see this to believe it.

Dennison picked it carefully from my fingers and then read it.

‘Jesus.’

I finished off the water. ‘Jesus, indeed.’

‘Let me read this again. This is incredible.’

‘That’s only a short one,’ I said. ‘This guy writes books and books filled with that kind of shit. I read some of his other stuff.’

‘I don’t understand . . . this is just—’

‘Incredible. Yeah. I know.’

I’d had the same reaction, just less time to be verbal about it.

‘How does it work?’ ‘

I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘I’ve thought about it, and I just don’t know.’

Actually, it seemed like an impossible problem. If you tried hard enough, you could look at the words and take them in one by one, but it just wasn’t the same. When you took it apart, it just stopped working: it stopped laying its golden eggs. To get the full effect, you had to just sweep through it without pausing for thought – which was what your mind wanted to do anyway. It was only then that the vistas and imagery within it came alive around you.

Dennison read it again, shaking his head.

‘So who is this guy?’

‘The killer question. More importantly, I want to know who he works for. I find them, and I find Amy.’

‘Do you have a copy of the text that Claire stored on our database?’

I shook my head.

‘No. It’s corrupted anyway. You can only make out a few words.’

‘That’s the point. Everything’s corrupted.’

‘Profound.’

‘Can you walk?’

I almost laughed. It seemed a ridiculous question, not least because what I most felt like doing was dying in the dark somewhere.

‘Well, let’s see.’

I eased myself to my feet, expecting my legs to feel a little shaky. In fact, they seemed fine. I rolled my shoulders. That worked, too.

‘Seems like it.’

‘Come on, then,’ he said. ‘You can see for yourself.’

The rest of Dennison’s house was decorated and furnished in
the same minimalist, paper-motif manner as his living room. More tethered bundles of paper lined the walls of the hallway, and seemingly random scraps and sheets had been tacked to the wall on the stairs, like butterflies. It was covered with torn out pages from notepads, shopping receipts and carefully flattened, multi-coloured sheets. There was writing on all of them. In fact, Dennison had even scribbled here and there himself, looping practically unreadable sentences like ribbons around the bannister. He’d reduced the first floor landing to a metre-wide strip of tattered tortoise-shell carpet, with occasional breaks in between the stacks to allow for doorways into similarly loaded rooms. The place smelled musty – like a poorly attended aisle in an underfunded library.

‘I like what you’ve done with the place,’ I said.

He stopped beneath a dangling mobile made from discarded bus tickets.

‘In here.’

The room turned out to be both a study and a storeroom. On the wall opposite the door there was a computer, sitting humming on a desk strewn with paper. A plastic dictation arm stuck out from the right-hand side of the monitor, and a sheet of a4 was hanging down from the clipper. Dennison was halfway through a Word document, no doubt transcribing what he saw as life from the paper to the hard drive.

All of that took up only one corner. The rest of the room, to the left, was piled high with paper – or rather, hung high. He’d suspended a number of vertical storers from the ceiling – the kind normal people use for T-shirts and trousers – and filled each box with documents of all shapes and sizes. At least ten of them were hanging down from the ceiling like paper punchbags, almost touching the floor, with just enough room to move between them, and sticking out from the base of each section was a coloured tag, presumably to label the contents. Beyond these strange pillars, there was a window. Its dark
blue curtains were drawn, and the sun was trying to fight its way through. It was failing. The only light in the room was coming from the monitor, and it was making the various label tags glow fluorescent, like nesting fireflies.

Dennison slid onto the seat in front of the computer and rattled out a few shortcuts on the keyboard. ‘Sorry it’s so idark in here.’

The Word document saved and disappeared.

‘It’s a wonder you can see to type.’

‘Sunlight wears the ink away.’ He didn’t seem to be paying much attention to me. Instead, his gaze was darting over the screen. He tapped another couple of keys, not needing to use the mouse at all. His fingers flicked about like a martial artist throwing kicks. Windows flashed up and then vanished again.

I looked around, secretly wondering what drove a man to want to do this.

‘This is your museum, then?’

‘Part of it.’ He gave me a look of irritation. ‘But it’s more like a zoo. These texts are all still alive. It’s just that nobody wants them right now.’

‘Imagine that.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Imagine that.’

‘What are you doing now?’

He was going through screens at a hundred miles an hour; it was harder to keep track of Dennison in full flow that it was Graham, and that was saying something.

‘I’m logging into the main database. We have our own sections, but it’s not actually based here.’

I had a thought. ‘

Is it possible that Claire stored a copy of the file on your hard drive?’

‘Maybe. She probably just uploaded it straight from the disk, but I’ll check in a minute. Here we are.’

A new application window had opened, with buttons and
menus across the top; the centre-to-bottom of the screen was taken up by a white box, divided into three columns. The columns were filled with filenames, seemingly at random. Although the screen was only long enough to show about forty names in each column, there was a scrollbar on the right-hand side, and it looked like it scrolled one fuck of a long way.

‘They’re listed in the order they arrived at the moment,’ he said. ‘Or at least they should be. The buttons at the top allow you to introduce more, and to search for a particular animal by species or filename.’

As I watched the screen, two of the names changed.

Dennison pointed quickly.

‘See that?’

‘Yeah.’

‘They just switched places. That file just jumped up close to that one. It skipped disk sectors.’

‘Why did it do that?’

‘Well, that’s what we don’t understand,’ he said. ‘We don’t know how or why it’s happening. This is what I meant when I said everything’s corrupted; it’s just all fucking up. They’re going at a rate of around two every ten seconds. Look.’

Another filename changed. ‘

They move all over the database. It’s getting faster, too.’

‘Nobody’s programmed it to do that?’ I said. ‘You must have a virus.’

‘We don’t have a virus.’ Dennison looked as though his intelligence had never been so insulted. ‘You don’t think we thought of that? We’re on Liberty, for God’s sake. A computer virus has got more chance of getting into you than our database. Look. There it goes again.’

Another change.

‘And that’s corrupting the files?’

‘It seems to be. But we can’t even open some of them anymore to check. And there’s more.’

He pressed another couple of keys. The number 3480092 appeared in a box on the right-hand corner of the screen: white text on black. As I watched, it rolled on to 3480093, and then kept steadily ticking over.

‘That’s going up about one every second.’ Dennisons’s face was lit by the monitor’s glow. ‘We usually get about a quarter of that from Liberty anyway, what with files coming in, but the system flushes out replica data, and that accounts for a good section of it. This is just a genetic museum, after all: we only need one of everything. That number, though.’ He tapped the screen once. ‘We reckon that’s about six times what it should be.’

‘That’s the number of files in the database.’

He nodded.

‘Yeah. Only a sixth of the new files are coming from outside. The rest of them are being born inside the computer as we’re watching.’

‘Born?’

Up until he said that, I’d been with him.

‘Born. We’ve located and examined a few: they’re hybrids of adjacent texts. Just like human beings take chromosomes from both parents, the new texts are mixtures of the texts that contribute to them. Look.’

It happened so quickly that I almost missed it. A new text had appeared underneath one of the jumpers I’d just seen.

‘That’ll be a hybrid of that and that,’ Dennison told me. ‘It’ll stay there for a few days, and then it’ll be on its way. That’s how it usually happens.’

As he said it, another couple of files changed names.

‘We can cope with the Liberty situation, but not with this. At this rate, we think our server will crash within a fortnight.’

‘At this rate, I think you’re right.’ I leaned closer to the
screen. Watching little dots. ‘Jesus. And you don’t know why this is happening?’

He shook his head.

‘Not until now. But I’m willing to bet it’s got something to do with the file that Claire stored on here. I don’t know what, though. We’ll need to take a look at it. What was it called?’

‘“Schio”,’ I said. ‘As in the place.’

He tapped in the word and hit [RETURN]. After a few moments of seeming inactivity, the file listing cleared – reduced to one.

schio

‘There it is.’

Dennison hit a button and the name became highlighted

schio

and flashed.

His thumb back-kicked the [RETURN] key. The mouse pointer, unused until now beyond an occasional stutter as his hand knocked the cable, flicked over into an hourglass.

He said, ‘It’s loading.’

It begins with a punch.

Long Tall Jack’s a big man: a six foot five skeleton with a good sixteen stone of fat and muscle resting upon it. You don’t pick fights with Long Tall Jack if you’re a grown man, but this girl is half his size. His fist connects hard, and she goes down flat on the bed. The air coming out of the mattress and the air coming from her sound the same. Not loud. Not anything, really. Her hands go up to clutch at her broken nose, and she leaves them there, like she’s holding her face together. Blood slips out between her fingers.

Jack clambers onto the bed. First one knee. Then the other.

The girl is stunned, so he doesn’t need to be quick, or even
very careful. He just bats her legs to either side – once each with his knees – and then crouches between them. He reaches over her with his big hands, finds the neck of her pale blue blouse and rips it: pulls it apart the way a mortician opens the ribcage. For a second, her hands are knocked away from her face, but they return almost straight away. Jack doesn’t even bother to take the blouse off her: he just leaves it in tatters over her arms and turns his attention to her skirt.