Human.4

by Майк Ланкастер

  I opened my eyes and started scanning the hedges by the side of the road for a sign of the thing that was making such a terrible noise. I could see nothing there, and that made me even more terrified. I ran faster.

  I’ve never been particularly athletic, but I think I could have run for the county if I’d matched the speed I was making then, spurred on by that inhuman sound.

  I was even starting to feel that I might outrun it.

  Suddenly Lilly screamed my name.

  Chapter 37

  The scream pulled me back to the real world.

  I turned my head to face forwards.

  Just in time.

  I killed the speed. Ground to a halt and stood there, gasping for air.

  I realized that Lilly had just saved my life.

  The thing that had been following us, then moving alongside us, had now overtaken us.

  It was waiting there, directly in front of me.

  Blocking my way forwards.

  It’s not easy to describe it. In fact, the more I think about it, it’s probably easier to talk about what this thing wasn’t, than to struggle with what it was. I mean, I don’t think the thing was solid, and I’m reasonably sure that it didn’t have a form that the human eye could recognize. It didn’t look alive, but it didn’t look not-alive, either. It didn’t look natural, but it didn’t look entirely unnatural.

  Oh yeah, I’m making a good job of this.

  Let me try again.

  It seemed more like something missing from this world, than something added to it. It was as if there were a tear in the skin of our world, and it had revealed this terrible thing beneath it.

  At the time I remember thinking about those pictures you see in anatomy books, when they show a person, and then the bones and muscles inside them.

  You strip away the skin of this world, I thought, and this is what you find hiding underneath.

  "What in God’s name is it?" Kate O’Donnell asked, and I saw her cross herself.

  I shook my head.

  It was too much.

  This tear in the world had been following us, hunting us, and now it had us.

  And we were too tired and too scared to do anything about it.

  It moved closer, pushing against the surface of our world and making the air seem to bulge as it did so. I stood there wondering what stuff this… thing, this tear, was made of, and I wondered what it would do to us when it reached us: whether it would hurt; whether it would dissolve us, melt us, or suck us through into its cold blackness until we were nothing.

  There were tears streaming down my cheeks, and I could feel the cold breath of infinity roaring in my face.

  "Hey!" someone shouted from somewhere behind me. "Are you going to just stand there and let that thing wipe you off the face of the planet?"

  I turned around.

  Somehow I wasn’t surprised.

  By the side of the road, standing straight and tall, stood Danny. He nodded towards the tear in space and cocked his head to one side.

  "If you have any interest in surviving the next few seconds," he said, "then I suggest you toss over that video camera you picked up on the green."

  I thought, Video camera? What is he talking about?

  The air bulged again and the tear moved closer.

  I thought, How does he know I’m carrying his mum’s video camera?

  Danny said, "Quickly. Throw it here."

  I reached down and fumbled the camera out of my pocket. Lights were flashing on its tiny casing.

  It had switched itself on when the can of drink hit it.

  It had been filming the inside of my pocket all that time.

  "Do it now," Danny advised and I threw it over to him. He caught it in one hand and switched it off.

  Then he smiled and nodded towards the tear in space. It was already drawing back, moving away, as if its interest in us—the interest that had it screaming across the countryside—had suddenly ended.

  "Danny, what the -?" I started, but Danny shut me up with a dismissive wave of his hand.

  "I guess you all have some questions," Danny said, and his face suddenly looked sad. "Follow me and I’ll try to answer them for you."

  Then the sad look was gone.

  He turned and started walking into the field behind him, away from that terrible patch of moving darkness, away from the road, away from Millgrove, away from Crowley.

  After a few seconds, we followed.

  We trudged across a field sun-baked into clay, following Danny Birnie in pursuit of answers. Danny had been there at the start of all this, and there was something right about his being here now.

  I realized that I was afraid. Not of the terrible thing that had been seconds away from destroying us, but afraid of my friend.

  Of Danny.

  Of what he had become.

  He walked quickly, neither slowing down nor turning to check that we were keeping up with him. Or if we were even following him, for that matter.

  The sky was almost full dark now, with a summer-stuffed moon looming on the horizon, surrounded by wisps of cloud and tiny, icy chips of starlight.

  For centuries humankind had stared up into a sky like that and wondered whether they were alone in the universe.

  Now I thought we had our answer.

  A dark, tall shape loomed out of the darkness ahead and Danny led us towards it. Eventually the shape resolved itself out of the near dark, revealed itself to be an old, ramshackle barn on the edge of the field.

  "I guess here is as good as anywhere," Danny said.

  He walked into the barn.

  It was no longer Danny, I was certain of that. He was one of them. This could be a trap, an ambush, a massacre.

  But he might really have answers.

  Answers we needed.

  We followed him into the barn.

  Quietly.

  Like cattle.

  Or…

  NOTE

  The last break in the narrative as the end of the tape once more gets in the way. Howard Tillinghast sees this break as crucial. "This is the point at which innocence breathes its last gasp of oxygen, before revelation takes it away, forever."

  Tape Three Side Two

  … last side of the last tape I can find. It’s one of Dad’s mix tapes that he makes for the car so he can embarrass us with his bizarre musical taste on long journeys.

  Still, I guess we’re almost through now. There’s not a whole lot more to tell.

  Only the bad stuff.

  The stuff I don’t even want to think about.

  This might get a little mixed up, but bear with me, I need to work out the best way to tell you the things I have to tell you.

  I wonder if anyone’s listening.

  If you are then I need you to believe me.

  It’s the truth.

  Chapter 38

  Inside the barn it was dark, and there was a musty stench in the air that made me gag. My shin crashed into something hard.

  "Oh, I’m sorry," Danny said in the gloom. "How thoughtless of me."

  I heard him moving about and then…

  . . . then it wasn’t dark any longer.

  I heard Kate O’Donnell gasp.

  Oh, I know how crazy this sounds. Do you know how many times I have run it through in my head and still end up doubting the evidence of my own senses?

  An eerie halo of reddish light, bright enough to illuminate the barn around us, suddenly appeared, surrounding Danny.

  He smiled.

  "Bioluminescence," he said, as if it were another of his conjuring tricks he was performing and he was particularly proud of it. "I knew I could do it, but . . . well . . . WOW!"

  Danny looked at us and shrugged.

  "It’s a simple trick, really," he said. "Basically, I converted some skin cells to photoproteins." He spoke like that was not only normal, but something we should understand. "I’m fueling them with some excess calcium that I’m growing from my own skeleton."

  He laugh
ed. "It tickles, if anyone’s interested."

  NOTE—"Bioluminescence"

  Although dramatically simplified, this is indeed the way that we produce light. One of the strengths of the Straker Tapes is, I believe, that they do show us the things we do normally and naturally in a new and different way, as if Kyle is really experiencing these commonplace sights for the first time, in the position of an outsider.

  In Identity Crises: Bodies as Text, Steinmetz writes: "Things we take for granted are shown in a new light by Straker’s words. Filament networking and bioluminescence are so familiar to us that it takes a boy to remind us how precious these things are."

  We stood there open-mouthed, trying to work out if Danny was toying with us, or whether he’d really just used parts of his skeleton to light up the barn.

  There was a long silence and then Lilly stepped towards Danny with a ferocious look on her face that was altered into something satanic by that strange red glow. Danny shook his head, and there was something about the way that he did it that made Lilly stop in her tracks.

  Suddenly it wasn’t rage on her face.

  It was fear.

  One small shake of the head and that’s what Danny could do now: stop rage and turn it into fear.

  What have you done to my friend? I thought, because this wasn’t him.

  "Please," Lilly said. "Please, Danny. Stop playing around with us. I’ve had enough. I’m tired and cold and scared and I want to go home. What happened today? Why has everyone… changed? What are you?"

  Danny looked on the verge of saying something. He had a dreadfully serious expression on his face and seemed to be having trouble finding the right words. Instead he looked around the barn and gestured towards a row of straw bales at the back of the barn.

  "OK," he said. "Sit down."

  "We don’t want to sit down," Mr Peterson said crossly. "We want to know what the hell is going on."

  "THEN SIT!" Danny said, his face suddenly looking cruel in the red light.

  We sat.

  "I only have a few hours," Danny said. "This is a… caretaking routine for the master program that will end as soon as the installer quits." He paused and reflected on his words. "Actually, and more accurately, it’s a sub-routine, but that’s just splitting hairs."

  "The master program," Lilly said. She turned to me. "That’s what you were talking about. A computer program that was the spaceships and ray guns all rolled into one. You were right."

  Danny laughed.

  "Was he?" he said, amused by the idea. "Why, Kyle? What did you say?"

  His gaze made me feel nervous.

  "I said that our planet was being invaded," I said. "That we were experiencing an alien invasion that doesn’t waste ships or troops, and doesn’t give us a chance to fight back."

  Danny raised an eyebrow.

  "Sounds fascinating," he said, his voice dripping with condescension. "Tell me more."

  I felt a sudden, red urge to punch him in the face.

  Instead I carried on.

  "Whenever I try to get my head around all of this, I keep coming back to computers," I said. "I don’t know if it’s because we first saw the weird language on Kate’s Mac, but it made me realize that an invasion doesn’t have to be violent. Because an alien race could send a signal across space, a signal that contained a computer program designed to overwrite humanity and all the things that make us human. With one clever piece of software they could change us all, at once, into the image of themselves.

  "Maybe human DNA has been altered by this signal. And human brains are being reprogrammed to mimic the invaders" brains."

  Danny grinned as if he were delighted by my words. He clapped his hands together and then rubbed them against each other.

  "Oh, how wonderful," he said, again with the patronizing tone, the superior air. He was almost daring me to continue.

  "We just happened to be in your trance when the signal was transmitted," I said. "A one-in-a-million chance. It meant our brains were in a different state, and the signal passed us over. Maybe our invaders had considered every possible human state—from awake to asleep and everything in between—but hadn’t considered hypnotized . Maybe there’s a tiny percentage of humanity that—for a variety of reasons—will be immune to this invasion by computer program. Us. The zero-point-four."

  "Zero-point-four," Danny said, rolling the phrase around his mouth, still obviously amused. "Oh yes, you are zero-point-four. You must know, or at least sense, that you are no longer… relevant."

  "We feel pretty relevant," Mr Peterson said.

  "Of course you do," Danny said solemnly. "But you’re not."

  "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, a kind of anti-virus 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 analogue. 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 possibili
ties."

  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 daydream. 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 recognises you. You should be OK, 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 OK."

  "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."