The Third Person

by Steve Mosby

  ‘That’s great,’ I said.

  ‘The server information. The user ID. Some background. I couldn’t get as much as I wanted, because my computer’s fucking up.’

  ‘I appreciate you looking for me. I really do.’

  I was trying to sound friendly, but his tone didn’t alter.

  ‘Jay, you remember what I told you yesterday afternoon?’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘About me backing out if this got dodgy?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I remember.’

  I wished he’d just say whatever was on his mind. But it probably wasn’t that easy for him. We had history, after all, and when you’re throwing out memorabilia you take a last look, don’t you? It’s not like throwing away a milk carton.

  ‘What are you saying, Gray?’ I prompted him. ‘You want out on me?’

  Without any hesitation, ‘I want out on you.’

  ‘It got dodgy?’

  ‘Not exactly. It didn’t need to get any more dodgy than it already was. I just can’t do this anymore. I don’t really want to explain it, but that doesn’t bother me too much.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Well, for what it’s worth, I understand.’

  It wasn’t worth anything and we both knew it.

  ‘I’ve set up a Yahoo account for you,’ he said, and then gave me the address. ‘Find yourself an internet café and check the inbox. Everything you need to know is there. I’ve sent the text, the user details, some background. As much as I could find.’

  ‘Thanks. I mean it.’

  ‘And that’s the end, okay?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That’s the end.’

  ‘You don’t ring here anymore.’

  I could imagine Helen leaning in the doorway, watching her boyfriend make this oh-so-difficult, oh-so-necessary phone call to his old friend. Secretly so pleased. She’d make him a nice coffee afterwards, and say some comforting shit about how he’d done the right thing. Which, of course, he probably had.

  I closed my eyes.

  He said, ‘You don’t call round.’

  Maybe they could even stop buying sugar now. One less thing to worry about.

  ‘It’s just… that’s it, Jay. That really has to be it.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be sorry. Just don’t call or phone or come round. Maybe you should even let go of all this.’

  ‘All this.’

  ‘Amy. Maybe you should let go of her and move on.’

  ‘Maybe I should move on.’

  ‘You there?’

  I blinked, realising that I hadn’t been speaking these last few things, just thinking them.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you in the next life, Gray.’

  And the receiver was down before I even knew that I’d done it. The traffic was still making its way past. Moving on and up as I stood there by the side of the road. None of the drivers were watching me: they were all watching the cars directly in front and behind, and that was all. In the cold morning sunshine there was something about that that struck me as being almost profound. But then it went.

  ‘Maybe I should move on,’ I said out loud.

  As though it was actually still possible.

  But I wasn’t going to get out of anything as easily as that.

  There was an internet café a block and a half away from the coach station: one of those wonderful all night places where you can surf and drink cheap coffee for about a pound an hour while the world outside gets dark and light and then dark again. Throw in the sizzle and smell of bacon, frying behind a counter at the far end, and you had a done deal as far as I was concerned. The dregs of last night’s clubbing circuit were slipping out even as I arrived. I got myself a coffee, a bacon sandwich and an hour’s screen time, and then logged into the account that Graham had set up for me.

  There were six new messages waiting in the inbox, five of them forwarded on from Gray’s own personal account and bristling with multi-coloured attachments. The sixth was a circular from i-Mart. It contained details of a few of their latest products and thanked me for subscribing to what it said was the most popular e-list in the western world. I cursed Gray quietly – but with a smile – and dumped the circular into a greedy trash can. A thousand shreds of digital shit disappeared into the electrical ether.

  The first thing I looked for was the text. It wasn’t there.

  The message was there, and it claimed that the text was attached, but it was clearly lying. I could only imagine it had got lost somewhere in the transfer: dropped off its perch at the base of the e-mail and fallen down onto the internet’s cutting room floor. Which was shit: it meant I’d have to talk to Graham and ask him to re-send it. Since that was going to be a difficult conversation, I decided to leave it for now. It was always possible that I’d be able to pick up the text myself later on. I knew the title, after all.

  The coffee was hot and weak, and the chief ingredient of my bacon sandwich appeared to be grease. Nevertheless, I worked my way through them as I read each of Graham’s messages in turn.

  It seemed that a man named John James Dennison had been responsible for posting the text on the server in the first place – or at least, it had come from his computer. Gray had forwarded some background information on him, along with a few photographs. The server itself was based in Asiago, as was Dennison himself. Claire had lived there, too.

  The waitress had helpfully provided me with a napkin the size of a postage stamp, and by the time I was using it to dab fat from the ends of my fingers I’d requested a hundred credits and set the main documents printing. An ancient bubble-jet over by the tray-stack was stuttering back and forth over sheet after sheet of information.

  I logged out, returned my plate to the counter and waited by the printer, collecting the paper as it came through.

  The way I was seeing things now, I had three leads to work on. I had this guy Marley, somewhere in Thiene, who was obviously a priority. But Gray had turned up nothing on that name – or rather, he’d turned up so much that there was no way of knowing if anything was actually relevant. There were thirty Marleys in Thiene alone. He’d given me the contact details for all of them, but I figured that was a long shot. It might not be his real name, for one thing. Even if it was I’d have no way of knowing which one of the thirty to go for. With time running out, I needed something better than that.

  The second lead was the writer. But if Marley was out of my reach for now then this guy was a million miles away. Without Graham to help me, I was going to have trouble locating him, and it was likely that his address wouldn’t be listed under his real name. And that was assuming he wasn’t living rough or squatting somewhere. That was if he was even still in the country. He could even be dead.

  I figured that if I did find the writer it would be by finding Marley. So first things first.

  Those two leads were big, fat, bloated ones, but they weren’t going anywhere.

  The third lead was John James Dennison.

  The guy who had – apparently – kept the murder text on his computer. Somehow, it had got from Claire to Dennison, and then to Liberty where she knew I’d be able to find it.

  This was the slimmest lead of all. It was also the only one I could really move on right now.

  The paper kept coming.

  Twenty minutes later, I was safely back in the bus station – still officially police-free – with a ticket for the ten-past-ten bus in my hand. I’d bought it with cash, and so there was no legal way that they could trace where I’d gone. Except for the coding which is in the metal strips of the banknotes, of course, but I think they deny that exists. Fuck it, though. I’d ridden my luck this far, hadn’t I, and so I figured maybe I’d ride it to Asiago as well.

  Let’s talk science.

  The human genome consists of twenty-three pairs of chromosomes. Each of these pairs contains several thousand genes, themselves made up of exons and introns. The introns can be disregarded for now: See them as br
eaks, like the stars dividing sections in a book. The exons are made up of a long series of three-letter words known as codons, and the letters in these codons are called bases. There are four chemical bases: guanine, adenine, thymine and cytosine. Or G, A, T and C.

  Consequently, there’s a very real sense in which the human genome is a book. It doesn’t go directly from side to side in its normal form, and it’s not written down on pieces of paper (in reality, it’s written on long DNA molecules: miniscule strands of phosphate and sugar). Nevertheless: in theory you could lay it all out and read it. One letter at a time; one letter after the next. Just like a book.

  Picture the whole genome as a shelf containing twenty-three volumes.

  Pluck out a volume at random and flick through its pages. You will find that there are several thousand chapters in this volume, and each chapter is divided up further into sections and section breaks. The sections of text are built up by a series of words, and these words are three-letter combinations from a total of four different letters.

  Now, replace the volume and look at the shelf.

  That shelf is all that a human being – or any living creature – actually is: nearly eighty thousand chapters formed from three-letter words, sectioned at certain points and distributed throughout twenty-three hardback volumes. That shelf exists twice inside the nucleus of every one of the hundred trillion cells which make up a human body.

  Religion aside: what you are, at your most basic, is information about how to build a body.

  The body is constructed as follows.

  The DNA of a particular gene is copied. Each of the four bases naturally pairs with another, creating a four-letter ‘negative’ of the original information. When this negative makes a copy of itself – in the same way – the original print is revealed: black reverses to white reverses to black. An exact copy has been produced.

  When a gene is translated, the copy is made from a different substance: RNA. The introns are removed and the resulting breakless text is then translated by a ribosome, which moves along the RNA, reading each three-base codon in turn. Mathematics dictates that there are sixty-four possible codons. Three of these tell the ribosome to stop; the other sixty-one are translated by the ribosome into one of twenty different amino acids, which build up into a chain that corresponds directly to the chain of codons. One for one. When the chain of amino acids is complete, it folds itself into a protein. Almost everything in an animal’s body is made either by proteins or of them.

  This is not how Life had to be. It is just how Life happens to be.

  We are information that is capable of reproducing itself. Information that forms a recipe of instructions for how to build an organism.

  Every creature on the face of the planet that walks, crawls, flies or swims is simply a word that has found a way to make the world around scream it, again and again and again.

  I made my way through the printed information as the coach wound its unsteady way out of the city centre, and then west to Asiago. I’d managed to secure a free pair of seats close to the emergency exit at the back. Leopard-skin covers? Slightly too narrow for anyone over six foot? A vaguely unpleasant smell of warm plastic? All present and correct. And it was three hours to Asiago, if the traffic was good. I put my feet up and set about wheedling my way into the world of John James Dennison.

  Gray had done me proud, and I took a moment to feel sad about our phone conversation. It was more content for that box inside my head. I imagined myself swinging open the hatch, pressing down hard on three murders, a ten-ton of grief and a good ten gigabytes of rape, perversion and snuff, and then throwing in the loss of my friend on top, giving him a last smile before closing the lid.

  That box must have been getting too full by now, but I didn’t really want to think about that.

  Instead: Dennison.

  I’d got pdfs of his passport, birth certificate and driver’s licence, and pages more information besides, including his national insurance information, bank details, home and work addresses and marital status. He was single.

  I flicked back a page, took in the photo and wasn’t surprised.

  Dennison looked like a dictionary definition of white trash: long blond hair, centre parted and hanging in greasy strings down onto his thin, bony shoulders; bug eyes you could play pool with; not quite enough skin to comfortably cover his face. And an Adam’s apple like he’d swallowed a severed snake’s head. The guy finished off this wholly horrific ensemble with the kind of moustache and thin beard that you’d generally only grow if you had scars to cover. This was a passport photo, of course, and had been taken when he was twenty-one, but you could only give someone so much benefit of the doubt. Dennison looked like some kind of hitch-hiking, heavy metal necrophile.

  I took one last look, and then continued.

  Actually, it got better for him. According to the information, he was twenty-seven now, living and working in Asiago, but he’d been born in Thiene and had attended school at one of i-Mart’s more prestigious academies, graduating with honours at the age of twenty-one. He’d then disappeared for a year. His degree was joint computer science and linguistics, which should have seen him set for life, and there were hints in his profile that the sideways step away from everyday existence had come as a shock to many. He was arrested eleven months later for defacing a Nestlé billboard. That one got him a suspended sentence, but he did genuine jail time a year later for another campaign. The judge – banging a Nike gavel and sporting a Gap wig – was having none of it, and sentenced Dennison to three months inside. After that, his record appeared to be clean. Another vaguely wayward sheep returned to the fold.

  The coach was lurching a bit. A waitress was rolling a juddering, clattering Coca-Cola coloured trolley up the aisle past me, so I stopped her and ordered a coffee. This was no doubt a disheartening sale of unlicensed caffeine, but – professional that she was – the smile only faltered for a nanosecond.

  ‘Two-fifty please, sir.’

  I paid her and then, starting to slurp up all that goodness, proceeded to flick through another few sheets. The coach hit the motorway, and we really started to travel. The ride smoothed out a little.

  These days, Dennison worked in a computer store, pulling in minus-three on the national average and keeping himself to himself. His bank details were in order – they seemed genuine – and the rest of his stuff seemed legit. The only indication that anything more interesting might be happening here was a couple of fluorescent marks that Gray had painted onto the pdfs of two bank statements. Both were beside payments for two hundred pounds, and both were transfers between Dennison’s account and another at the same bank. I turned to the next page, which didn’t seem to be about Dennison at all. It was a summary of some kind of pamphlet, or marketing material.

  The heading said: ‘The Society for the Protection of Unwanted Words’.

  There is nothing inherently special about the way the genome is constructed and read, and yet it does have a very special property. The genome contains the information within it to create something from materials in the world around it. And what it creates is a machine that is capable of carrying the genome around and producing more copies of it.

  A machine which spreads the word, which produces more machines, which all spread the word. And so on.

  There is nothing special about our bodies, however. Different animal genomes create different bodies, just as different people choose differently patterned suitcases. The suitcase that a particular genome creates will be one that is well-suited to surviving in the landscape – at least long enough to produce copies of that genome. In the case of human beings, this means bodies that will survive long enough to successfully mate and produce children.

  And so it goes.

  It is clear that – written in books and stacked along our shelf – the human genome is useless. The information is there, but it is in the wrong format. Written down on paper, it lacks the ability to translate itself and build a body. It needs to be wri
tten in chemicals and stored on chains of DNA. But this is only because that is the way the information is translated. The genome is software which builds its own hardware from the scrap flesh around it.

  What we have in the case of language – both spoken and written – is software that uploads itself into already existing hardware, and then uses that hardware to create copies of itself. It does this, as we shall see, on exactly the same basis as the human genome. All books are realistically and actually alive.

  They are alive in exactly the same sense that we are.

  Now, in an existing pool of animals some will be better adapted to surviving in their environment than others. The genes that produce better equipped animals will find themselves, on average, translated and reproduced more successfully than their equivalents. To put it crudely, genes for sharper teeth enable a tiger to kill more successfully and survive longer: the chances of reproduction are better. The genes are therefore more likely to be passed on. Future generations will contain more sharper-toothed tigers, and then more still.

  Advantages, by their definition, will become more common.

  A work of fiction may be made up of various ‘gene concepts’. These represent the theme of the work. The character-types. The basic plots available to the writer. These genes are contained within the body of the whole, and if they give the book ‘sharp enough teeth’ then it will ‘survive long enough to reproduce’. It will succeed in propagating itself more numerously.

  Let us now compare the translation of a human gene with the translation of the genome of a book.

  The codons in a gene are copied into a strand of RNA. The words on the page are translated into electrical impulses in the brain representing visual pictures.

  The strand of RNA is then translated into an alphabet of amino acids, which fold into a protein and begin to build an animal. The electrical impulses in the head cause further impulses, and the person experiences emotions and feelings based upon what he is reading.

  The body built by the genes will either be good or bad at surviving in its environment. If it is good, the genes will be reproduced in further bodies. The appeal of the qualities that a particular book has will likewise determine how many copies continue to be printed, and how many more heads the gene-concepts will find themselves in.