He broke off for a short while, and then he said, "Have you ever seen something out of the corner of your eye, but when you looked there was nothing there? Or felt like you’re being watched, when there’s no one around? Dead code. Old systems. Things you have been programmed not to see. Occasionally we catch a glimpse. And tell stories of ghosts and monsters. They’re what make dogs bark at night, or a cat’s hackles rise. They’re there, you’ve just been programmed not to see them."
"That would mean that this has happened before," I said. "That we are already upgrades of earlier systems that we were programmed to screen out."
"Well, duh, of course it has and of course we are," Danny said. "Humans are, after all, a work in progress."
"And it’s always zero-point-four of the population who miss the upgrade?" Lilly asked him. "I mean that’s still a lot of people to ignore."
Danny laughed, loud and long, and I felt that I was missing out on the joke.
"Oh, now, that is utterly priceless," Danny said, still laughing. "I see how you made the mistake, but . . . oh, that is just too much."
And then he laughed some more.
"Care to explain the punch line to us?" Mr Peterson said.
"The humor lies in the fact that you extrapolated from the available data and reached an understandable, but utterly erroneous, conclusion. A village of close to a thousand people, there are four of you . . . oh, it’s just hilarious."
He rubbed his hands with glee.
"Zero-point-four isn’t a percentage," he said. "It’s the software version number. You’re software version 0.4. The rest of us just jumped to 1.0."
Chapter 39
There was silence while we tried to process all the things that Danny was saying.
It wasn’t easy.
No one should have to hear that life, as they know it, has ended.
No one should have to learn that they are, to all intents and purposes, irrelevant.
Yet, out of the madness one thought just kept nagging at me and I was the one who broke the silence.
"You say that this is the result of a computer program, transmitted with the sole intention of making this planet a better place?" I asked him.
Danny nodded. "Precisely."
"But a transmission requires a transmitter," I said. "So, transmitted by who?"
"Ah," said Danny. "That really is the crucial question, isn’t it? Well, I’m sorry. I haven’t got a clue. I’m afraid the programmers haven’t included themselves as data. That’s not really the job of software, is it? It’s a bunch of instructions, not a biographical sketch."
"So we’re to believe this . . . your version of events, without even knowing who did this to us?" Mr Peterson asked.
"It really doesn’t matter whether you believe it or not," Danny said coldly. "If a person refuses to believe in gravity, it doesn’t mean that they will float up into the sky. Science isn’t like that. It doesn’t care whether you believe it."
He studied his fingernails.
"Anyway, that’s not why I’m here," he continued. "I am telling you this so that you have a chance at survival. So you understand the nature of what has happened to you, and you understand why this is happening to you. I am telling you this so that when the people you know and love simply stop seeing you, when the majority of people on this planet become unaware of your existence, then maybe you won’t go totally and utterly out of your minds. You have simply become . . . redundant. You will become invisible to us. That’s going to be pretty hard for you to take."
Lilly made a frustrated sound.
"Excuse me?" Danny said. "Did you just interrupt me to snort?"
Lilly looked back at him with cold concentration, almost as if she was trying to outstare him.
"It’s not true," she said.
"O-kaaay," Danny said, as if talking to a small child. "What isn’t true now?"
"Any of this," she said. "It doesn’t even make any freaking sense! You can’t upgrade humanity and we’re not just hardware that you can rewrite. We’re the way we are because of millions of years of evolution."
She threw her arms in the air in frustration. "So I am going to explain everything that has happened today without bolting on aliens. Which, by the way, I hate."
"I’m all ears," Danny said.
The red glow seemed to deepen around him, throwing shadows across his face.
"We’re still hypnotized ," Lilly said. "We’re still in a trance. We’re standing on the stage on the green and everything else is just fantasy."
She glared at Danny.
"So bring us out of it," she demanded. "Now. Snap your fingers, or whatever it is that you do, and wake us up."
Danny smiled the strangest of smiles.
"I wonder…" he said. "Shall I snap my fingers? Shall I put this . . . hypothesis of yours to the test? Will you awake, back on the stage, with the roar of laughter from the audience ringing in your ears? What do you think?"
As he spoke he lifted his hand into the air, just above his head, his thumb and first two fingers resting together, ready to snap together.
"Here goes," he said.
He brought his hand down and snapped his fingers.
Chapter 40
We awoke on the stage, blinking in the bright light of a perfect summer afternoon and everyone was laughing and really amazed by Danny’s new-found gift and Danny won the talent show and when we all went home we said it was the best day ever and we laughed about zero-point-four and alien operating systems and were amazed by the detail of the fantasy that Danny had constructed for us and—to cut a long story short—we all lived happily ever after.
Chapter 41
Except that wasn’t what happened.
Of course it wasn’t.
That’s just silly storybook stuff.
When Danny clicked his fingers, nothing happened.
We were in the barn; Danny was still shining inside his bioluminescent aura; and Mr Peterson, Lilly, Kate and I were still very much zero-point-four.
It was in the silence following the click that things happened.
Small things.
Human things.
The only things we had left.
Lilly started to cry—huge, body-wracking sobs and fat tears—and Kate O’Donnell put a protective arm around her. I just stood, watching dust motes swirling in the air of the barn and tried to understand this new world.
Without falling apart.
Danny stood there, watching us.
Watching us all deal with it as best we could.
He took no pleasure from the sight, I’m pretty sure of that, but looked on with a cold, alien detachment that made me wonder if the 1.0 were going to be as perfect as Danny seemed to think.
Maybe he wasn’t even really listening. Perhaps the alien code was bedding down, performing last-minute tweaks.
I realized that he was losing interest in us—he was looking more and more like he needed to be somewhere else.
I had a few last questions for Danny.
Danny the boy magician, encased in his impossible halo of bone-fueled light.
I asked Danny what he was missing out, what he wasn’t telling us.
He looked a little baffled.
Maybe a little hurt, although perhaps that’s just me, trying to see him as my friend, rather than the alien thing he had become.
"That list of people who skipped the upgrade," I said. "You said it was contained in a ReadMe file. What is that?"
"It seems to be installation information," he said. "Although for whom, and why, I do not know. I’m sure it will auto-delete when the update is complete."
"What else does it say?" I asked him.
Danny looked surprised that it interested me, but then he shrugged and started reeling off a bunch of jargon and tech-stuff in a robotic voice before trailing off into silence.
Most of it I didn’t understand, so most of it I don’t remember.
But I do remember three things he said about halfway through his
recitation.
Danny said, "Fixed system slowdown when individual units are put to sleep, allowing greater access to unconscious processing activity."
And he said, "Tightened encrypted storage parameters to comply with new guidelines."
And then he said, "Completely reworked user interface makes access of data easier and faster."
"What does that mean?" I asked, when he was finished.
Danny shook his head.
"I’m sure you’ll figure it out," he said. "You do realize that this upgrade was necessary, don’t you, Kyle? The human race had become a danger to itself, to the planet."
"Well, why did they leave us here?" I asked. "Why didn’t they just get that vestigivore thing to wipe us all out?"
Danny smiled a cryptic smile.
"That wouldn’t be anywhere near so entertaining, would it now? Think of the future generations," he said.
I thought he was joking.
"I’d say, “I’ll be seeing you,”" Danny said. "Except I won’t, of course."
Just before he turned for the door, he looked at me and said, "Annette says “Hi”."
I stared back at him.
"She says it was really sweet of you," he said. "Trying to save her, and all."
I could sense Kate O’Donnell’s stony glare and felt my cheeks redden.
"Now she wants to try to do the same for you," Danny said, that red aura fading. "Meet her up at the Naylor silos and you can end all of this now."
Then he turned and left.
Didn’t look back.
A taste of things to come.
Chapter 42
"What did he mean?" Kate O’Donnell demanded. "About the silos, and Annette and trying to save her?"
We were sitting on bales of straw, and it was pretty much pitch black outside.
I felt the words knot up on the tip of my tongue.
"WELL?" she prompted. "Do you have something to tell us?"
Lilly’s hand sought mine and I held on to it tightly as I told Kate and Rodney Peterson about what had really happened when we separated on the Crowley Road.
Kate was furious.
"And you didn’t think that this might be a piece of information that we would want to know?" she said incredulously. "You selfish, stupid—"
"Steady on, Kate," Mr Peterson said calmly. "They were only—"
"ONLY WHAT?" she demanded. "Only keeping things from us? Only telling us lies? Only preventing us from making the most important decision of our life?"
"There’s no decision to make," Mr Peterson said. "I’m not going to volunteer to become one of those… things."
There was another silence. A big empty space where nothing was said, but so much was revealed.
It was Mr Peterson that broke it.
"Surely you’re not actually considering it?" he asked, his voice shocked.
"I don’t know," Kate said at last. "It might not be so bad."
"I saw them," Mr Peterson said firmly. "I saw them for what they really are. I can tell you this with absolute certainty: they are not the same as us. Not even close. I saw them and I do not want to be one of them. I’m happy being who I am."
Kate let out a cruel bark of laughter.
"A postman and part-time ventriloquist?" she said derisively. "A bad ventriloquist, at that."
Mr Peterson looked at her, not with anger, but with humor.
"I guess that is who and what I appear to be," he said. "But that doesn’t mean it’s all I am, or the way it has always been. For now, being a postman is good, honest work. And it makes me happy. Not everyone has to fly high to prove they exist; some of us are perfectly happy flying low and enjoying the view.
"I’ll never be rich, but that doesn’t matter to me. Before I came to Millgrove I had a good job, a devoted wife and a beautiful little boy. But leukemia stole my son from me, and everything else just crumbled away. Iain was four when he became ill, and Mr Peebles was just something silly I made to put a smile on his face. Most of the joke was how bad I was. But when he was laughing he forgot the pain, and that was better than doing nothing and watching him slip away.
"So, yes, I’m a terrible ventriloquist, but it used to make Iain laugh. And so once a year I get Mr Peebles out of the cupboard and I stand in front of the village and I invite everyone to laugh. Not with me: but at me. Hearing other kids laughing makes me think, just for a second, that he’s still here. Here in the world. Not a cold, dead thing in the ground.
"I don’t want to be upgraded. I don’t want to become one of those things. I want to remember my son. If you want to give up, become one of them because it’s easier, then go ahead. But difficult is good. It’s what makes us human."
"I’m sorry," Kate said quietly. "I’m just scared. More scared than I have ever been."
"Scared is something," Mr Peterson said.
We sat there in silence, letting it all sink in.
We were all scared, but who wouldn’t be?
If what Danny said was true—and I for one no longer had any doubts—then we no longer existed.
We were 0.4.
Irrelevant.
NOTE
There is a long pause here, followed by an odd acoustic glitch, which Lucas Pauley identifies as the tape being manually stopped. Then there is an odd snatch of music in which the words "sirens are howling" can be (just about) discerned.
Ella Benison notes a dramatic change between the tape stopping and being restarted: "The tone of Kyle Straker’s voice has changed, and is more like the struggling narrative voice we saw during the first passage of the first tape. To me it seems obvious that Kyle needs time to settle back into his narrative flow because the time that has passed from switching off the tape to switching it back on is considerable."
Chapter 43
That was all three months ago now.
Three long and very strange months.
I still remember every detail of that crazy day and crazier night.
Now I have committed them to tape I hope the nightmares that replay every night when I close my eyes may finally leave me in peace.
Or the thing we call peace these days.
Danny didn’t lie to us, you see.
If anything, he understated.
We stepped out of the barn when it was morning. It was just before 7 a.m. according Mr Peterson’s Mickey Mouse watch. The dawn had revealed a low bed of mist that clung to the field, making it seem ghostly.
Lilly and I had done a lot of talking well into the night. Then we’d lain there on lumpy, scratchy bales of straw and tried to sleep: the kind of fitful half-sleep that bends a person’s back in such a way that it hurts when you move and it hurts a different way when you don’t.
We had a fuzzyheaded vote on what we should do next, and the consensus was that we go back into Millgrove. If a fraction of what Danny said was true then we wanted to see evidence of it at home.
It seemed important, somehow.
A way to say goodbye to the things we had lost.
We hit the village outskirts and headed towards the green.
In my mind I had a single plan.
I was going to walk up to someone I knew and I was going to wish them a very good morning.
And as it was early on a Sunday morning, it was likely that the people of Millgrove would still be sleeping, so I reckoned I would have to walk up to a front door, ring a doorbell and see what happened from there.
As it turned out, things were nothing like we had expected.
Chapter 44
If the people of Millgrove had slept, there was certainly no sign of it. As we drew nearer to the green we could see that the place was a hive of activity. From a distance it looked like the people were pulling the village apart. Frantically. Cars, buildings, even lamp posts seemed to be in the process of being dismantled.
It looked like some people were digging up areas of the path and road as well.
They were systematically wrecking the village, with wires and cables being ripped from
the ground; cars with their bonnets open being stripped of engines and electrical systems; lamp posts were opened up and their wires bared; people were knocking holes in the roofs of their houses; teams of locals came out of houses with gadgets and appliances which were then piled up on the village green. Washing machines and fridges; television sets and home computers; lawn mowers and microwave ovens and leaf blowers and electric toasters.
We were starting our first day under The New Rules.
New Rule Number One: Don’t try to figure out what the 1.0 are doing; you’re simply not wired to understand them.
A group of people were working on dismantling the equipment, and putting the components of each item into carefully ordered piles.
The people working on the cars would occasionally walk over and drop components, light bulbs or car batteries, off at this strange recycling center, where they were quickly and efficiently organized.
There was no idle chatter; no one was messing about or goofing off.
We reached the green and no one even saw us arrive.
We stood there watching the crazy industry around us and, if we happened to be in the way, the person who needed to get past would suddenly change their path slightly to avoid us without even a passing glance.
We tried talking to them, pleading with them, screaming at them; but nothing could get them to notice us.
Just like Danny had said.
We were being filtered out.
We were irrelevant to them.
New Rule Number Two: The 1.0 can’t see or hear us.
They really can’t.
It’s not a trick—they’re not pretending not to see us—we no longer register to them, and all memory of us has been wiped from their minds.
So we watched for a while, stunned by the activity going on around us. If there was rhyme or reason to what they were doing then it wasn’t a rhyme or a reason we knew.
Human.4 Page 12