The Third Person

CHAPTER TWELVE

A surreal truth: as my consciousness was gradually solidifying, the fractured image inside – hanging in my head like a blurred poster – was the passport photograph of John James Dennison.

He just didn’t look like that anymore.

His hair had been cut – short and neat – and he looked tanned and fit. Maybe seaside living had worked a wonder on him. I recognised him from the eyes, which still seemed to protrude a little, but they were about all that remained of the sallow, ugly, long-haired individual that had posed for that passport photo. He also looked considerably older, and slightly more calm.

I blinked, and it hurt.

‘It’s relatively easy to set up a simple circuit through a metal door knocker,’ he told me, nodding to himself as he crunched into the final third of the apple he was holding. The rest of the words were obscured by his wet chewing, but I could just about make them out.

‘Rapping the knocker completes the circuit. You see? You just wait for the person to lift the knocker away from the metal plate on the door and then switch on the juice.’ He swallowed. ‘Bang.’

I just stared at him.

‘Little switch on the back of the door, see?’

Well, I couldn’t see, because we were in the living room and the front door was at the end of the hallway outside. Obviously stronger than he looked, Dennison had man-handled me through from where I’d fallen down in the street outside. The back of my head seemed to have taken a fair whack on the ground: it was still pounding, and I felt sick. My right arm was half-numb, too, resting limply over my thigh. It didn’t even feel like an arm at the moment – more like somebody had stitched a sock full of rocks onto my shoulder.

The room we were in contained a table and chair, two settees, the pair of us (one of us on each settee, facing each other), and a whole lot of paper. Most of the paper was tethered in bundles against the base of the walls, but in places he’d piled it up to waist height. There was more on and under the table, which was in a curtained bay window at the far end of the room. The sheets on the table seemed more spread out, as though that was where he read things before cataloguing and binding them. And there was a ball of twine on the floor by the chair, so that made sense.

I looked around. More paper.

Paper as far as the eye could see.

When I was growing up, there was an old lady living in the same street. Her house was owned by the council. She was kind of mad – in that harmless, slightly smelly way that some old people manage – but I always got on with her okay, and my mother went round there quite a bit, dragging me along to see if there was anything I could do: shopping, maybe, or odd jobs. What I remember about that old lady, whose name was Bunty, is that she had cats: cats by the armful. Probably twenty or so regulars – all strays – and she knew each of them by name. There were too many for her, of course, and that was why the council came and took them away; she couldn’t clean up after them or feed them properly, and I only had so much spare time for my mother to give away. It used to half kill Bunty every time the men came, and my mother would say that, although they had to, it was a shame – for the cats and for Bunty. I think that was one of my first encounters with the idea that there isn’t always something that’s entirely for the best. There’s only ever a compromise between a bunch of different interests.

Regardless, what I remember is the cats. Cats in the living room; cats in the hallways; cats crawling all over the fucking furniture. And that was what Dennison’s front room reminded me of, except that he had paper instead of cats. They were resting the same, dotted around the same – they even smelled the same: pungent; slightly dirty. The place was like nothing so much as a rescue shelter. Which, I suppose, is what it was.

Dennison was sitting across from me, wearing pale blue jeans and a beige shirt. My gun was hanging loosely from his left hand. In the other, the apple.

He took a last bite, just as I wondered whether he knew how to work the gun, or not. Although that obviously hadn’t stopped me.

‘So you want to tell me who you are?’ he said. ‘Scratch that, because you probably don’t. So instead – just tell me who you are.’

A complicated question for my bruised head.

‘Jason Klein.’

‘Okay.’ He nodded. ‘That’s good. And who the fuck might you be, Jason Klein?’

I started to shrug, but my numb arm would have made it lop-sided. Instead, I attempted a rather intricate question of my own in reply.

‘Do you electrocute everyone who knocks on your door?’

It must have come out okay, because it got an answer.

‘If I don’t know them,’ he nodded, ‘these days, yeah. It’s a good job, too, when they turn out to have a fucking gun in their pocket, isn’t it?’

He tossed the apple core into the far corner of the room and then pointed that gun at me, suddenly more serious.

‘What do you know about my girlfriend, Jason Klein? Is that why you’re here?’

I looked away.

What I was dealing with was a mirror image of me: an ordinary guy, dealing with other ordinary guys doing very fucked up things. Except that he seemed to be more in control of the situation than I was – nodding aside – and he was dealing with those guys much better. I would probably have shot me and run away by now. I’d be well into the existential crisis part.

I said, ‘I don’t even know who your girlfriend is.’

Although I did, of course.

‘She was called Claire Warner.’

‘Fuck.’

It was obvious: Claire gets the file; Claire stores it on her boyfriend’s computer system. They were together, or had been. Could I see her with Dennison? I think I probably could, although perhaps not as seriously as I imagined he’d done.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Fuck. Absolutely. Are you here to kill me, too?’

‘I didn’t kill Claire.’

‘You didn’t?’

‘No.’

So, I figured, what happens is this. Claire rings me up and tells me the filename just in case something happens to her. That meant that her boyfriend probably didn’t know about it. Because if he did, why would she bother telling me at all? He’d be the back up for if anything went wrong.

‘How did you know her?’ he said.

‘We met in a Chat room. Ages ago.’

‘On the computer?’

The idea pissed him off a little.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘We met on Liberty. She was a friend of mine.’

‘A friend?’

A friend, he was asking, with a silent just.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A friend.’

‘Well, she never mentioned you to me.’

‘She never mentioned you to me, either. How about that?’

Although he looked doubtful now, my attitude wasn’t making Dennison point the gun at me any less.

‘Look – I haven’t seen her in a while,’ I said. I sounded as tired of this as I felt. ‘We met for a drink once – six months or so back – but I haven’t heard from her since then. Not properly, anyway. So I can’t think of any reason why she would have mentioned me, or even thought about me.’

‘How did you find me?’

I tried a weary look.

‘Oh, it was incredibly fucking difficult.’

‘Very not funny.’

‘I found you through Liberty.’ I said. ‘A while back, Claire told me the name of a file she’d stored on your system. She obviously used your log in, because there it was – sitting right beside it. It’s not difficult to trace a person from server details.’

If I was feeling tetchy, I think I had good reason. The one lead I could realistically follow up was very clearly a dead end: Dennison didn’t know anything. Claire had just used him as a means to store the file so that it couldn’t be found on or traced back to her own computer. The guy wasn’t going to be able to tell me anything about where it had come from or what it was really about; he didn’t have the first clue. He wasn’t anything to do with this at all.

And on top of all that, the fucker had electrocuted me.

He was still pointing the gun at me – but of course he was.

His girlfriend had been found murdered, and he was affiliated to a vaguely militant underground organisation. The man was probably scared shitless. In fact, the more I looked at him the more obvious it was. He was completely fucking lost.

I sighed.

‘I know what happened to Claire,’ I said. ‘If you want to know, then I can tell you.’

From the way his gun hand faltered slightly, I figured that he did.

‘And if it makes it any easier, I can also tell you that the men responsible for it are dead. Because I killed them last night.’

Dennison looked as though he was almost going to cry. Instead, he just shook his head and lowered the gun. It rested on his thigh, and he looked so weary that I felt more of a connection with him than ever.

‘Tell me what’s going on?’

So I did.

Dennison made me go over the facts a couple of times, but by then he’d put the gun down on the settee beside him and I didn’t mind so much. I was thirsty, though.

‘Look, can you get me a drink?’

‘Yeah, sure.’

He started to get up, and then glanced at the gun.

‘I’m not going to shoot you,’ I said. I probably couldn’t even stand up. ‘For God’s sake.’

‘Okay. I hate the thing anyway.’

He was away for a couple of minutes, and I took the time to recover myself, but didn’t make a move for the weapon. Dennison wasn’t about to shoot me anymore and the people he was nervous about – the men who had killed his girlfriend – were currently smelling up a mansion a few hundred miles west of here. I was after a man named Marley and the gang he worked with, and I was probably being pursued by the police. But neither of those parties seemed likely to be turning up at Dennison’s house in the near future. I almost wished they would.

‘Here.’

‘Thanks.’

I took the water and gulped it down, pleased to see that my right arm was working a little better.

‘I’m glad you killed those men.’

He sat down.

‘I mean, I never thought I’d fucking say that about anybody. About anything. I used to think it was horrible when something died.’

‘It was horrible,’ I said.

‘They deserved it, though. I’m glad you did it. Jesus, listen to me.’

The idea made me feel uncomfortable, so I said, ‘How long had you known Claire?’

‘On and off, for years. We were friends some of the time, more than that at other times. We were always breaking up and getting back together, you know? She was too wild for anything else. It had been about a year, and then she came to see me a month or so back. She didn’t look well, and I wanted her to stay. She seemed so lost. She stayed for a bit, but then she was gone again. Claire never wanted to settle down.’

‘No.’

‘She wasn’t the type. I’m glad you killed those men.’

He might have been glad, but I still felt uncomfortable. Last night, I’d felt pretty guilty about the two murders, but I’d put them away with everything else and wasn’t about to start analysing them now. Fortunately, he changed the subject.

‘They killed her because of something she stole?’

I nodded.

‘Yeah. They were after a piece of art made out of text. She stole it from them, and stored it on your server for safe keeping.’

I didn’t want to tell him that she’d worked as a prostitute, but we were circling it. I needn’t have worried though: the words seemed to go through him – he was miles away. It seemed like he was running something over in his head. Something that was suddenly making sense of a shitload of chaos.

He said, ‘She stored it on the Society’s database.’

‘Right.’

‘And it was this… murder text.’

‘Well, it was a story,’ I said. ‘A description of a murder. And I think that one of the people in the story is my girlfriend.’

‘But there’s something different about it?’

‘It’s real.’

‘I don’t get it.’

‘So well-written that it’s as good as real. Here.’

I reached into my pocket and produced the ticker-tape description of the Saudi distillery. There was no point fucking around: you needed to see this to believe it.

Dennison picked it carefully from my fingers and then read it.

‘Jesus.’

I finished off the water. ‘Jesus, indeed.’

‘Let me read this again. This is incredible.’

‘That’s only a short one,’ I said. ‘This guy writes books and books filled with that kind of shit. I read some of his other stuff.’

‘I don’t understand… this is just-’

‘Incredible. Yeah. I know.’

I’d had the same reaction, just less time to be verbal about it.

‘How does it work?’ ‘

I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘I’ve thought about it, and I just don’t know.’

Actually, it seemed like an impossible problem. If you tried hard enough, you could look at the words and take them in one by one, but it just wasn’t the same. When you took it apart, it just stopped working: it stopped laying its golden eggs. To get the full effect, you had to just sweep through it without pausing for thought – which was what your mind wanted to do anyway. It was only then that the vistas and imagery within it came alive around you.

Dennison read it again, shaking his head.

‘So who is this guy?’

‘The killer question. More importantly, I want to know who he works for. I find them, and I find Amy.’

‘Do you have a copy of the text that Claire stored on our database?’

I shook my head.

‘No. It’s corrupted anyway. You can only make out a few words.’

‘That’s the point. Everything’s corrupted.’

‘Profound.’

‘Can you walk?’

I almost laughed. It seemed a ridiculous question, not least because what I most felt like doing was dying in the dark somewhere.

‘Well, let’s see.’

I eased myself to my feet, expecting my legs to feel a little shaky. In fact, they seemed fine. I rolled my shoulders. That worked, too.

‘Seems like it.’

‘Come on, then,’ he said. ‘You can see for yourself.’

The rest of Dennison’s house was decorated and furnished in the same minimalist, paper-motif manner as his living room. More tethered bundles of paper lined the walls of the hallway, and seemingly random scraps and sheets had been tacked to the wall on the stairs, like butterflies. It was covered with torn out pages from notepads, shopping receipts and carefully flattened, multi-coloured sheets. There was writing on all of them. In fact, Dennison had even scribbled here and there himself, looping practically unreadable sentences like ribbons around the bannister. He’d reduced the first floor landing to a metre-wide strip of tattered tortoise-shell carpet, with occasional breaks in between the stacks to allow for doorways into similarly loaded rooms. The place smelled musty – like a poorly attended aisle in an underfunded library.

‘I like what you’ve done with the place,’ I said.

He stopped beneath a dangling mobile made from discarded bus tickets.

‘In here.’

The room turned out to be both a study and a storeroom. On the wall opposite the door there was a computer, sitting humming on a desk strewn with paper. A plastic dictation arm stuck out from the right-hand side of the monitor, and a sheet of a4 was hanging down from the clipper. Dennison was halfway through a Word document, no doubt transcribing what he saw as life from the paper to the hard drive.

All of that took up only one corner. The rest of the room, to the left, was piled high with paper – or rather, hung high. He’d suspended a number of vertical storers from the ceiling – the kind normal people use for T-shirts and trousers – and filled each box with documents of all shapes and sizes. At least ten of them were hanging down from the ceiling like paper punchbags, almost touching the floor, with just enough room to move between them, and sticking out from the base of each section was a coloured tag, presumably to label the contents. Beyond these strange pillars, there was a window. Its dark blue curtains were drawn, and the sun was trying to fight its way through. It was failing. The only light in the room was coming from the monitor, and it was making the various label tags glow fluorescent, like nesting fireflies.

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.

That’s how it begins.

‘It won’t open.’

Dennison sighed and shook his head.

‘Fuck.’

I said, ‘My friend opened it yesterday. It was okay then.’

He just kept shaking his head.

‘Well, it’s become too corrupted since then. It’s probably irretrievable.’ He narrowed his eyes as though he was trying to see through the screen. ‘Fuck.’

‘There’s no way of opening it?’

‘There’s no way of opening it.’ He leaned back in the chair and linked his fingers behind his head. ‘We’ve tried to get into corrupted files with every program we’ve got, and they just won’t load. Won’t open on anything.’

‘Check the hard drive,’ I suggested. ‘See if she saved a copy.’

‘It won’t be there.’

‘Check it anyway.’

He sighed, but started a search.

‘It won’t be there. If it was, my whole hard drive would have been corrupted by now.’

I stopped biting my nail.

Something inside me thought oh fucking shit.

‘What do you mean?’

He tapped the screen.

‘Well, my guess is that it’s this file that started all the trouble.’ He stared at me, as though this should be obvious. ‘If it was on my hard drive, there’s no reason to think it wouldn’t have had exactly the same effect. All my files would be corrupted. I wouldn’t be able to run anything.’

His face fell.

‘Oh shit.’

‘Graham got the file off Liberty,’ Isaid. ‘Every computer he linked through will have a copy of that file on it.’

Dennison nodded. ‘How many?’

‘The search took a while. I don’t know. A lot.’

I remembered what Graham had said to me on the phone that morning:

my computer’s fucking up.

‘Shit.’

‘Well, unless they deleted the file pretty quickly, chances are it’s started corrupting their hard drives.’ Dennison settled back. ‘And that’s it, then: no way back from that. I reckon that most Liberty users set the deletion rate at about once a day.’

I said, ‘But some don’t even set it at all. They just do it manually, after a while.’

He looked at me for a second, and then the computer beeped.

[File not found]

He tapped a key and closed the search window. ‘It’s not on the hard drive.’

I thought back to the internet café.

‘I think it’s worse,’ I said. ‘Graham e-mailed me the file as an attachment, earlier on today, but it never arrived. It got lost somewhere on route.’

‘Well it’s out there, then. For better or worse, it’s out there.’

‘For worse.’

I was figuring that millions of pounds’ worth of file damage, coupled with the possible crash of the entire internet was at least as damning, legally speaking, as murdering three criminals. Profit margins have rights, too. I wasn’t sure who exactly they’d charge, but I figured they’d start by arresting everyone they could find on Liberty and then whittling it down. And it seemed pretty likely that me, Graham and Dennison were still going to be there if it got down to three.

Dennison didn’t seem bothered.

‘Maybe. Worse for us. But not from the file’s point of view.’

‘It doesn’t have a fucking point of view.’

‘Maybe not.’

‘It’s a fucking text document. Jesus.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But there’s an implict only there when you say “it’s a fucking text document”, isn’t there? And it’s clearly not only a text document. Look at what it’s done.’

‘This is absolutely insane.’

I felt like a man floating in space who needs to punch something or else he’ll explode.

All I want is to find Amy.

‘Fuck. Wait here.’

Dennison was gone. A creak of the floorboards, and then I felt the vibration of his feet on the stairs.

I sat down in the chair and looked at the screen – bathed myself in its light. I felt empty inside, and it was a weird feeling because actually the whole room seemed just as empty. The dark turned the pillars of paper into weathered, shadowy things that a strong breeze might knock into a flurry of grey, fluttering dust, but there was no breeze in here at all, and so they simply hung there, gathering more. It felt like this room had been bricked up for centuries and only just uncovered – or it would have done without the computer, anyway, which was as incongruous as a laptop in a tomb. The only living thing here, myself included. The screen was giving out an angle of hard light, and I figured that the nicest thing in the world right then would be to fall into it, get pixelated by some sharp, blinding process, and then lie down in the harsh brightness of it all. Spreadeagled and warm beneath a radioactive processor sun.

You’re losing it, I thought, and leant my head back so I could stare at the ceiling instead. It was always possible that I might lose it completely and put my head through the monitor, and at least the ceiling was out of reach.

I heard the creak in the doorway and looked back down.

Two things. There was a message on the screen that said:

[You have received 1 new message]

And Dennison said, ‘You need to see this.’

He kept a small black and white television on the side in the kitchen, and the screen was busy with movement as I followed him into the room and took a seat at a small wooden table in the centre. It took about half a second to realise that we were watching a newsflash of some kind, and then about another five seconds for my jaw to hit the table.

‘Fuck,’ I said. ‘This is really, really bad.’

On-screen, a small bland man was reporting exciting news in a voice that was attempting to be calm, failing only slightly. He was telling us – repeating, most likely – that half of the computers in America were off-line. Servers were just collapsing. There were literally hundreds failing every minute.

‘Yes,’ Dennison said, nodding. But his tone of voice was very close to that of the newsreader, and I got the impression that he didn’t entirely agree.

‘You realise,’ I told him, ‘that we’re going to burn for this? They’re going to fucking arrest us. And probably shoot us.’

Nobody knew what was happening, the newsreader told us. Experts were being consulted from all over the world, and there were already reports of servers crashing in several different countries. This was going to be – as I mentioned – really, really bad.

‘Shit,’ I said.

‘We’ll see.’

I shook my head. Dennison was clearly a man who needed his priorities whacking with a hammer, but I didn’t have the energy to argue with him. Graham had sent me the text, and off it had gone, destroying everything in its path. I could only hope that the entire net was brought down by it, because that was probably the only way that – when the dust had settled – we might escape from this anonymously. But that just seemed inherently undesirable. I liked the internet; I wanted it to stay where it was.

On the screen, the newsreader was explaining that a growing number of internet mail accounts and websites were inaccessible. Government sources suspected a hacker of instigating the attack. If so, it was suggested, it would be the worst instance of computer crime in the history of the world. The perpetrators would be fucking arrested, and probably shot.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘At least your e-mail is working.’

Dennison looked at me.

‘What?’

‘You got mail,’ I said. ‘Just as you called me. So your account is still working.’

I trailed off and stared back at him. And then, after a second or two more of this, we got up without a word and went back upstairs to read the e-mail.