The Third Person

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 Nestle 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 written 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.

A book is identical to the body of an animal. The more successful that body is, the more copies it will succeed in creating of itself.

There are more copies of An Elegant Ending by Jim Thornton in existence right now than there are tigers. There are more copies of the Bible than there are turtles. The genomes of these books are better at reproducing themselves than the genomes of turtles and tigers. As creatures, they are more successful. The environment that these books have to survive in is our culture, and they have to be good enough survivors to influence us to build more copies of them. If not, their competitors will succeed.

After all, we only have so much space on our shelves.

By the time the coach rolled into Asiago – a quarter of an hour ahead of schedule – I was most of the way through the bundle of society propaganda that Gray had pulled off the net for me, and my brain felt addled. As we eased slowly past the mirrored glass side of the terminal, it occurred to me that I ought to be nervous, but I couldn’t be bothered. All in all, I’d been through a full thirty-five page pamphlet purporting to prove that literature was alive, studied nine pdfs of various leaflets and flyers and read two newspaper articles. One was a two column report on a linguistics convention that Dennison had given a parallel session paper at, and the other was a half- page ‘look at the loonies’ piece in the local press.

In addition to giving papers in support of the cause, it seemed that Dennison had been donating two hundred pounds to them every other month. The articles I’d read made the society seem very active, with outings and demonstrations that bordered on the criminal. An accompanying photograph to the local paper’s piece showed a young woman with a nose stud holding a placard. She had written ‘Censorship Kills’ on it, and the caption beneath read: ‘War of Words: a society supporter stirs up dissent’.

Well, she did look pretty pissed.

I put the papers down and, instead, imagined Amy sitting beside me, like we were on a regular trip to the seaside. On coach journeys, Amy always sat next to me, and she’d usually get tired real quick. So she’d go to sleep leaning on me. Her head would collapse slowly: from my shoulder to my chest, and then to a jerk awake. I’d brush an avalanche of hair from her face, hooking it behind her ears, and she’d snuggle back in, looking all crumpled and