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 cafe 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
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 breaks, 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.
