Oh yeah, he said. That’s not why I rang at all.
And so he explained. While searching the flat, they’d checked the writer’s computer, which was still connected to the slightly stalled internet, and they found an item of e-mail that was rather strange. It was blank, Dennison said, but it caught his eye because of the address of the sender. Like the video clips I’d received that day at his house, the e-mail had been sent to the writer by Amy Foster.
But it wasn’t just an e-mail. There was an attachment, too, and it sounded from Dennison’s description of it as though it might be the schio file. He was sending it on to me at the address that Graham had set up, but he’d already read it through and he told me that he had a theory.
Throughout the file, the majority of the text was decayed and ruined. You could make out odd words and the occasional phrase. Part of the beginning of her murder was complete, and I didn’t know whether I’d be reading that again any time soon. That aside, the only section that read relatively cleanly was near the start of the text. But Dennison’s theory, despite the evidence, was that this section had changed too.
He painted me a picture. He imagined this text. It would have begun to be corrupted already, he said, by swapping data with the other files on his Society’s server, but then it was downloaded by Graham and let loose across the internet as it dropped off the e-mail he’d sent. I’d imagined it lost on an ethereal cutting-room floor, but Dennison saw it flying instead: flinging itself from server to server, collecting and swapping letters and words. In the process, it had fucked half the computers in the world, if only in miniscule ways, but it had also – he felt – had impetus. The damage was the downside of purpose; the text had been reinventing itself as it went.
He said the text was conscious. During its travels, it had abandoned most of itself; the unnecessary sections were forgotten, left to erode. The real progress was deliberate and concentrated, and the result of this poaching and shifting was the attachment that had arrived at the writer’s computer, probably only slightly before Graham himself. Along the way, it had collected the video evidence and deposited it in my inbox. Then, had it waited? Did it know Graham was on his way, and that I would end up there too? I couldn’t know – probably never would. All I could do was read what it had written of itself and take from it whatever was there. Read into it whatever I wanted.
So some nights, when the house feels dark – when I start to feel very lonely, and the heating starts clicking, and the pipes creak, and the ticking clock in the other room starts to sound like cover for movement downstairs – I go and read the printout I took of the document when I could finally access my e-mail, and it makes the house a little lighter around me.
You are looking at a girl.
She is wearing a pale blue blouse and a white cotton skirt: frail clothes that you can’t quite see through but which still manage to give you an idea of the slim but womanly figure beneath. Her skin is tanned and clear, and her hair is shoulder-length, brown and full of body. Not curly exactly, or frizzy, but a kind of pleasing combination of the two, streaked through with patches of blonde where the sun seems to have bleached it. Her face is pretty, but not exceptionally so – although you can tell that if she was smiling she’d be very attractive indeed. It’s just one of those faces that lights up when it smiles and makes everything else seem somehow less important.
And ever so slowly, she gives you that smile.
She doesn’t need to, though: it’s there in her stance, and in the expression on her face. She’s completely at ease, and not in the least bit angry with you. Perhaps once upon a time she was, but she’s over that now. She’s looking at you as though she understands that you’re just another frail human being, exactly the same as her. You’re not perfect, but it’s not something she blames you for. It’s not something that’s your fault.
It breaks your heart that you can’t go over and hold her, but the fact is that you can’t. Not anymore. That’s not why you’re here.
She mouths the words I love you, and you look away for a second, but then you force yourself to look back. She has this sad-happy smile on her face. You can tell that she means it.
And after a moment, you smile back.
Steve Mosby
