Steve Mosby - The Third Person

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.