The Third Person (New Blood)

by Steve Mosby

  ‘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.

  That doesn’t tear so easily. He has to pull it off her, and it’s at this point that she realises what’s happening, and she says no. Her hands come down and flutter around his own like a couple of ineffectual birds.No! He ignores her, but then her legs kick a little, and they’re more of an irritation than her hands. He can’t work the skirt down over her kicking legs, and her voice is getting louder and more desperate –No-o-o! – and so he punches her so hard between her legs that the whole bed shakes.

  Jack watches her to see whether there’s going to be any more fighting. When it’s obvious that there’s not, he starts moving again. He finishes undressing her, throwing the skirt to one side, and then he climbs on top of her, his elbows pressing down hard on the inside of her upper arms, knocking her palms away from her red, tear-stained face. His hands pull her head right back by the hair. In this surrender position, with her pinned there and sobbing, he starts to rape her.

  That’s how it begins.

  ‘It won’t open.’

  Dennison sighed and shook his head.

  ‘Fuck.’

  I said, ‘My friend opened it yesterday. It was okay then.’

  He just kept shaking his head.

  ‘Well, it’s become too corrupted since then. It’s probably irretrievable.’ He narrowed his eyes as though he was trying to see through the screen. ‘Fuck.’

  ‘There’s no way of opening it?’

  ‘There’s no way of opening it.’ He leaned back in the chair and linked his fingers behind his head. ‘We’ve tried to get into corrupted files with every program we’ve got, and they just won’t load. Won’t open on anything.’

  ‘Check the hard drive,’ I suggested. ‘See if she saved a copy.’

  ‘It won’t be there.’

  ‘Check it anyway.’

  He sighed, but started a search.

  ‘It won’t be there. If it was, my whole hard drive would have been corrupted by now.’

  I stopped biting my nail.

  Something inside me thought oh fucking shit.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He tapped the screen.

  ‘Well, my guess is that it’s this file that started all the trouble.’ He stared at me, as though this should be obvious. ‘If it was on my hard drive, there’s no reason to think it wouldn’t have had exactly the same effect. All my files would be corrupted. I wouldn’t be able to run anything.’

  His face fell.

  ‘Oh shit.’

  ‘Graham got the file off Liberty,’ Isaid. ‘Every computer he linked through will have a copy of that file on it.’

  Dennison nodded. ‘How many?’

  ‘The search took a while. I don’t know. A lot.’

  I remembered what Graham had said to me on the phone that morning:

  my computer’s fucking up.

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Well, unless they deleted the file pretty quickly, chances are it’s started corrupting their hard drives.’ Dennison settled back. ‘And that’s it, then: no way back from that. I reckon that most Liberty users set the deletion rate at about once a day.’

  I said, ‘But some don’t even set it at all. They just do it manually, after a while.’

  He looked at me for a second, and then the computer beeped.

  [File not found]

  He tapped a key and closed the search window. ‘It’s not on the hard drive.’

  I thought back to the internet café.

  ‘I think it’s worse,’ I said. ‘Graham e-mailed me the file as an attachment, earlier on today, but it never arrived. It got lost somewhere on route.’

  ‘Well it’s out there, then. For better or worse, it’s out there.’

  ‘For worse.’

  I was figuring that millions of pounds’ worth of file damage, coupled with the possible crash of the entire internet was at least as damning, legally speaking, as murdering three criminals. Profit margins have rights, too. I wasn’t sure who exactly they’d charge, but I figured they’d start by arresting everyone they could find on Liberty and then whittling it down. And it seemed pretty likely that me, Graham and Dennison were still going to be there if it got down to three.

  Dennison didn’t seem bothered.

  ‘Maybe. Worse for us. But not from the file’s point of view.’

  ‘It doesn’t have a fucking point of view.’

  ‘Maybe not.’

  ‘It’s a fucking text document. Jesus.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But there’s an implict only there when you say “it’s a fucking text document”, isn’t there? And it’s clearly not only a text document. Look at what it’s done.’

  ‘This is absolutely insane.’

  I felt like a man floating in space who needs to punch something or else he’ll explode.

  All I want is to find Amy.

  ‘Fuck. Wait here.’

  Dennison was gone. A creak of the floorboards, and then I felt the vibration of his feet on the stairs.

  I sat down in the chair and looked at the screen – bathed myself in its light. I felt empty inside, and it was a weird feeling because actually the whole room seemed just as empty. The dark turned the pillars of paper into weathered, shadowy things that a strong breeze might knock into a flurry of grey, fluttering dust, but there was no breeze in here at all, and so they simply hung there, gathering more. It felt like this room had been bricked up for centuries and only just uncovered – or it would have done without the computer, anyway, which was as incongruous as a laptop in a tomb. The only living thing here, myself included. The screen was giving out an angle of hard light, and I figured that the nicest thing in the world right then would be to fall into it, get pixelated by some sharp, blinding process, and then lie down in the harsh brightness of it all. Spreadeagled and warm beneath a radioactive processor sun.

  You’re losing it, I thought, and leant my head back so I could stare at the ceiling instead. It was always possible that I might lose it completely and put my head through the monitor, and at least the ceiling was out of reach.

  I heard the creak in the doorway and looked back down.

  Two things. There was a message on the screen that said:

  [You have received 1 new message]

  And Dennison said, ‘You need to see this.’

  He kept a small black and white television on the side in the kitchen, and the screen was busy with movement as I followed him into the room and took a seat at a small wooden table in the centre. It took about half a second to realise that we were watching a newsflash of some kind, and then about another five seconds for my jaw to hit the table.

  ‘Fuck,’ I said. ‘This is really, really bad.’

  On-screen, a small bland man was reporting exciting news in a voice that was attempting to be calm, failing only slightly. He was telling us – repeating, most likely – that half of the computers in America were off-line. Servers were just collapsing. There were literally hundreds failing every minute.

  ‘Yes,’ Dennison said, nodding. But his tone of voice was very close to that of the newsreader, and I got the impression that he didn’t entirely agree.

  ‘You realise,’ I told him, ‘that we’re going to burn for this? They’re going to fucking arrest us. And probably shoot us.’

  Nobody knew what was happening, the newsreader told us. Experts were being consulted from all over the world, and there were already reports of servers crashing in several different countries. This was going to be – as I mentioned – really, really bad.

  ‘Shit,’ I said.

  ‘We’ll see.’

  I shook my head. Dennison was clearly a man who needed his priorities whacking with a hammer, but I didn’t ha
ve the energy to argue with him. Graham had sent me the text, and off it had gone, destroying everything in its path. I could only hope that the entire net was brought down by it, because that was probably the only way that – when the dust had settled – we might escape from this anonymously. But that just seemed inherently undesirable. I liked the internet; I wanted it to stay where it was.

  On the screen, the newsreader was explaining that a growing number of internet mail accounts and websites were inaccessible. Government sources suspected a hacker of instigating the attack. If so, it was suggested, it would be the worst instance of computer crime in the history of the world. The perpetrators would be fucking arrested, and probably shot.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘At least your e-mail is working.’

  Dennison looked at me.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You got mail,’ I said. ‘Just as you called me. So your account is still working.’

  I trailed off and stared back at him. And then, after a second or two more of this, we got up without a word and went back upstairs to read the e-mail.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The day was beginning to die. There were still a few hours of daylight left, but even so: the sun had broken the backbone of the sky, and now it was falling. The air was that little bit colder and you could tell that the clouds gathering at the base of the horizon were going to stick there and darken, swelling up until they filled the world with dusk and then finally solidified into a night sky. Dennison told me it was raining back in Bracken; he’d heard the forecast while I was in the bathroom being sick.

  ‘I’ll drive you,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t have to.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘At the moment, I’ve nothing to hang around for. And apart from anything else, I want to see the texts at that house.’

  I’d given him the address of Hughes’ mansion. He’d told me that the texts there represented a new form of life, and that there was no way he was risking them falling into someone else’s hands. And perhaps there was some clue in them as to what was happening.