by Steve Mosby
Regardless, what I remember is the cats. Cats in the living room; cats in the hallways; cats crawling all over the fucking furniture. And that was what Dennison’s front room reminded me of, except that he had paper instead of cats. They were resting the same, dotted around the same – they even smelled the same: pungent; slightly dirty. The place was like nothing so much as a rescue shelter. Which, I suppose, is what it was.
Dennison was sitting across from me, wearing pale blue jeans and a beige shirt. My gun was hanging loosely from his left hand. In the other, the apple.
He took a last bite, just as I wondered whether he knew how to work the gun, or not. Although that obviously hadn’t stopped me.
‘So you want to tell me who you are?’ he said. ‘Scratch that, because you probably don’t. So instead – just tell me who you are.’
A complicated question for my bruised head.
‘Jason Klein.’
‘Okay.’ He nodded. ‘That’s good. And who the fuck might you be, Jason Klein?’
I started to shrug, but my numb arm would have made it lop-sided. Instead, I attempted a rather intricate question of my own in reply.
‘Do you electrocute everyone who knocks on your door?’
It must have come out okay, because it got an answer.
‘If I don’t know them,’ he nodded, ‘these days, yeah. It’s a good job, too, when they turn out to have a fucking gun in their pocket, isn’t it?’
He tossed the apple core into the far corner of the room and then pointed that gun at me, suddenly more serious.
‘What do you know about my girlfriend, Jason Klein? Is that why you’re here?’
I looked away.
What I was dealing with was a mirror image of me: an ordinary guy, dealing with other ordinary guys doing very fucked up things. Except that he seemed to be more in control of the situation than I was – nodding aside – and he was dealing with those guys much better. I would probably have shot me and run away by now. I’d be well into the existential crisis part.
I said, ‘I don’t even know who your girlfriend is.’
Although I did, of course.
‘She was called Claire Warner.’
‘Fuck.’
It was obvious: Claire gets the file; Claire stores it on her boyfriend’s computer system. They were together, or had been. Could I see her with Dennison? I think I probably could, although perhaps not as seriously as I imagined he’d done.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Fuck. Absolutely. Are you here to kill me, too?’
‘I didn’t kill Claire.’
‘You didn’t?’
‘No.’
So, I figured, what happens is this. Claire rings me up and tells me the filename just in case something happens to her. That meant that her boyfriend probably didn’t know about it. Because if he did, why would she bother telling me at all? He’d be the back up for if anything went wrong.
‘How did you know her?’ he said.
‘We met in a Chat room. Ages ago.’
‘On the computer?’
The idea pissed him off a little.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘We met on Liberty. She was a friend of mine.’
‘A friend?’
A friend, he was asking, with a silent just.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A friend.’
‘Well, she never mentioned you to me.’
‘She never mentioned you to me, either. How about that?’
Although he looked doubtful now, my attitude wasn’t making Dennison point the gun at me any less.
‘Look – I haven’t seen her in a while,’ I said. I sounded as tired of this as I felt. ‘We met for a drink once – six months or so back – but I haven’t heard from her since then. Not properly, anyway. So I can’t think of any reason why she would have mentioned me, or even thought about me.’
‘How did you find me?’
I tried a weary look.
‘Oh, it was incredibly fucking difficult.’
‘Very not funny.’
‘I found you through Liberty.’ I said. ‘A while back, Claire told me the name of a file she’d stored on your system. She obviously used your log in, because there it was – sitting right beside it. It’s not difficult to trace a person from server details.’
If I was feeling tetchy, I think I had good reason. The one lead I could realistically follow up was very clearly a dead end: Dennison didn’t know anything. Claire had just used him as a means to store the file so that it couldn’t be found on or traced back to her own computer. The guy wasn’t going to be able to tell me anything about where it had come from or what it was really about; he didn’t have the first clue. He wasn’t anything to do with this at all.
And on top of all that, the fucker had electrocuted me.
He was still pointing the gun at me – but of course he was.
His girlfriend had been found murdered, and he was affiliated to a vaguely militant underground organisation. The man was probably scared shitless. In fact, the more I looked at him the more obvious it was. He was completely fucking lost.
I sighed.
‘I know what happened to Claire,’ I said. ‘If you want to know, then I can tell you.’
From the way his gun hand faltered slightly, I figured that he did.
‘And if it makes it any easier, I can also tell you that the men responsible for it are dead. Because I killed them last night.’
Dennison looked as though he was almost going to cry. Instead, he just shook his head and lowered the gun. It rested on his thigh, and he looked so weary that I felt more of a connection with him than ever.
‘Tell me what’s going on?’
So I did.
Dennison made me go over the facts a couple of times, but by then he’d put the gun down on the settee beside him and I didn’t mind so much. I was thirsty, though.
‘Look, can you get me a drink?’
‘Yeah, sure.’
He started to get up, and then glanced at the gun.
‘I’m not going to shoot you,’ I said. I probably couldn’t even stand up. ‘For God’s sake.’
‘Okay. I hate the thing anyway.’
He was away for a couple of minutes, and I took the time to recover myself, but didn’t make a move for the weapon. Dennison wasn’t about to shoot me anymore and the people he was nervous about – the men who had killed his girlfriend – were currently smelling up a mansion a few hundred miles west of here. I was after a man named Marley and the gang he worked with, and I was probably being pursued by the police. But neither of those parties seemed likely to be turning up at Dennison’s house in the near future. I almost wished they would.
‘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.
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.’