The Third Person

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.

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.