Human.4

by Mike A. Lancaster

  “What are you talking about?” Mr. Peterson demanded.

  “The problem, as I see it, is that you completely misunderstand the nature of the thing that has happened to you,” Danny said. “That has happened to us. But how to explain?”

  He pretended to be puzzled, then grinned as he pulled Mrs. Birnie’s video camera from his pocket.

  “Aha,” he said. “Exhibit A. The invasion captured on amateur video. Have you watched it yet? Oh, silly me, of course you haven’t.”

  He handed the camera to Lilly.

  “Just press PLAY,” he told her.

  Lilly fumbled with the device, pushing buttons again and again, and getting frustrated at her lack of success.

  “Hurry. Hurry,” Danny said. “Unless you want the vestigivore catching up with you again.”

  He saw our blank looks.

  “Ves-ti-gi-vore,” he said. “Vestige—a sign, mark, indication, or relic. Vore—suffix, meaning eater. Vestigivore—eater of relics, of things no longer needed. How about you think of it as … well, as a kind of antivirus software. As in: it touches you and you die, almost as if you never existed. Delete. No restore from recycle bin.”

  He cocked his head.

  “Listen,” he said.

  The roaring, chattering, hissing sound from earlier suddenly seemed very close.

  Just outside the barn, in fact.

  “Give me the camera,” Danny demanded urgently. “Quickly now.”

  Lilly threw it back at him as if the object had suddenly grown hot in her hands.

  The sound ceased, almost instantaneously, like a switch had been thrown.

  Just like the sound had stopped outside Kate O’Donnell’s house the moment she turned her computer off. And like it had stopped when I threw the camera to Danny.

  “For simplicity’s sake, think of it like this,” Danny said. “You are … have become … incompatible with this camera. You four are analog. The camera is digital.” He turned to Lilly. “The reason you couldn’t get it to play is because you can’t. It, like me, has been upgraded. You might set it off by accident, and incur the wrath of a vestigivore, but our technology is pretty much dead to you now.”

  He pocketed the camera.

  “I’ll put this somewhere safe,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?” Kate said. “None of what you are saying makes any sense.”

  “Well, let me make things clearer,” Danny said. “You four just happened to be in a hypnotic trance when the most significant event in history occurred. An upgrade to the human operating system was transmitted, and you missed it.” He smiled. “Oops.”

  I felt my temper rising.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “An upgrade? You’re saying all of this is happening because of an upgrade?”

  “Correct,” Danny said. “A necessary software update with a raft of improvements, bug fixes, and a whole load of new and interesting features.”

  The look on our faces made him chuckle. I saw Lilly’s jaw was clenched, and her hands were tight fists at her sides. I guess she wanted to punch him too.

  “You only have to take a look at the world around you to see the old operating system was hopelessly out-of-date,” Danny said in a mocking voice. “Now we have an alternative. From this day everything changes. There will be an end to crime, war, poverty, fear, starvation, disease, greed, and envy; a straight path, fast track, express route into a golden future of unlimited possibilities.”

  He looked at me with a hint of what I thought might be sadness.

  “Unfortunately, you won’t be coming on that journey with us,” he said. “Oh, there are many more like you; people who just happened to be in the wrong phase of sleep; people driving who got mildly hypnotized by the white lines on the road; people under the influence of certain drugs; people in the grip of near-death experiences; people engaged in certain types of daydreams. Blah blah blah. There’s a subsidiary file that lists all this stuff, a sort of ReadMe I guess you’d call it, but the upshot of it is that you won’t be completely alone.”

  “Alone?” Lilly said. “What do you mean?”

  A cloud seemed to pass across Danny’s face. Again, I thought it might be sadness, a trace of regret.

  “I guess I really haven’t been explaining myself all that well,” he said. “We … and by that I mean anyone who isn’t zero-point-four … have, er, been changed. Changed into creatures capable of putting the world to rights. A software upgrade was transmitted and, even though we’re still in the early phases of the upgrade, now that we have learned filament networking it should be over in”—he looked at his wrist, even though he wasn’t wearing a watch—“a few hours.

  “Then no one will even know you are here. You will be filtered out. You will be pieces of old code floating around in a system that no longer recognizes you. You should be okay, as long as you stay away from any digital technology. If you don’t, then … well, you’ve seen a vestigivore—they are programmed to delete harmful code.”

  “This is madness,” I said.

  “This is the end of madness, my friend,” Danny said. “A new world is being born. Everything is going to be okay.”

  “But not for us,” Lilly said.

  Danny shrugged.

  “How can we just be filtered out?” I asked, my mouth suddenly dry.

  “The human mind filters out all sorts of useless detail,” Danny said. “It’s how you get through the day without being driven mad. You don’t register the things that aren’t, for whatever reason, important to you. I don’t mean to sound harsh, but that’s what you have become to us: useless. Relics. Dinosaurs.”

  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 zero-point-four, the rest of us just jumped to one-point-zero.”

  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 … irrelevant. 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 newfound 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 0.4 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 0.4.

  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 find a way through this.

  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 watched 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, and started 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 leaving out, what he wasn’t telling us.

  He looked a little baffled.

  Maybe a little hurt, although maybe that’s just me, trying to see him as my friend, rather than the alien thing he had become.

  “That list of people who’d 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.

  “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?” 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 full dark.

  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 out 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 —”

  “Stea
dy 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.