The Third Person

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 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.