No matter what we did or said, we could not get them to notice us.
"I’ve just about had enough of this," Mr Peterson said angrily. He rolled up his sleeves and walked up to Eddie Crichton, who was hauling a dishwasher out on to the green.
I saw what Mr Peterson planned to do, but I don’t think any amount of sensible argument could have stopped him.
He drew back his fist and punched Eddie in the face.
I closed my eyes for a second, not wanting to watch, and I waited for the sound of a fist connecting with a face and maybe a howl of pain.
I got neither.
I opened my eyes.
Mr Peterson was standing there, looking confused.
Eddie Crichton just carried on with what he was doing. It didn’t look like he had felt a thing. It didn’t look like he had noticed a thing. He dropped off the dishwasher and made his way down the road. Mr Peterson strode back to us.
"I couldn’t lay a glove on him," he said. "All the energy I put into the blow . . . it just . . . I don’t know… it went somewhere else."
Now, of course, three months down the road, we know exactly what Mr Peterson meant. We can’t entirely explain it, but we know it well.
New Rule Number Three: We can’t touch the 1.0.
We can’t get closer than an inch or so away from them without our hand/body/whatever getting stopped by some force or charge that prevents us making physical contact. It’s like some kind of dampening field, a protective layer that means that the 0.4 and the 1.0 are no longer capable of interacting.
Over the course of the day we watched as the people we once knew used the machines of the village to construct strange new technologies, recycling their possessions to create new machines. Often we would see people interface with a machine, a component, a circuit board, by connecting to it with those fleshy filaments.
New Rule Number Four: You never get used to the sight of those filaments.
You really, really don’t.
Of all the things they do that seem alien to us, this one is still the worst. It affects you at a base level, both horrifying and captivating at the same time. You know it’s something you shouldn’t see; something that goes against all the laws of nature and order.
But you still find yourself staring.
We sat there on the edge of the green and watched as people suddenly started fusing themselves to circuit boards, changing the chips and connections by what seemed like thought alone.
Even Chris—my baboon boy, idiot, football-obsessed brother—was performing delicate adjustments to the circuitry. It was such an unlikely sight that I watched him for a long time. And as I sat there, I began to realize that Chris was gone now, gone forever, and that we would never argue or fight again. I felt a cold stab of regret, of loss, and I had to turn away from him.
I was surprised to find that I had tears in my eyes.
Lilly, it seemed, was taking it all rather badly too.
She had been growing more and more gloomy, watching as people acted in ways that were strange and disturbing. I kept trying to reassure her but it didn’t work.
Eventually she stood up, made an exasperated noise and stormed off across the green without another sound. I wondered if I should follow her, but she hadn’t invited me and she probably needed some time to think about things by herself.
Kate took off a few minutes later, and Mr Peterson went with her to make sure she was OK.
I sat there in the sun and watched the people of Millgrove doing their stuff.
Understanding none of it.
It got too much for me to bear alone and, after a while, I went home too.
New Rule Number Five: You can’t go back.
Well, of course you can physically go home, I just don’t recommend it. It’s not good for your sanity to see just how easily you can be painted out of a family picture.
The front door of my house was wide open and the place inside had been systematically trashed.
All the electrical gadgets had been taken out, stripped down, and were probably already being wrecked for parts on the green.
New Rule Number Six: Even to the people you knew and loved it is as if you never existed.
My room was stripped bare.
Stripped right back to the wallpaper.
Nothing of me remained there.
In just a few short hours I had been carefully Photoshopped out of my own family.
Out of my own life.
When I got back downstairs, and when the tears had cleared from my eyes, I found that all of my possessions had been taken down into the back garden and just dumped there.
I think that was the worst moment for me.
Standing there amid the discarded remnants of my life, thinking about the cold-hearted programmer who had written the sub-routine that got 1.0 parents to empty a forgotten 0.4 son’s room, and leave it piled in the garden like so much rubbish.
I dragged a rucksack out of the debris; filled it with some clothes, books and mementos from the pile, and then turned my back on the house.
Forever, I thought.
Only thing is: forever is a long, long time.
I went back to the green feeling sick, feeling betrayed, feeling utterly alone. I threaded my way through the crowd of people who no longer knew I had ever existed. They just moved around me without realising they were doing it. Piling up more gadgets on the green, ready for…
For what?
I didn’t know.
I was surprised to find Lilly there already. She was almost impossibly relieved to see me and ran over, throwing her arms around me, and crying into my neck.
The story she sobbed on to my shoulder was the same as my homecoming, with only minor differences.
She, too, had packed a bag.
"I can’t stay here," she said through her tears. "I just can’t."
"I know," I said. "I can’t, either."
We both felt it—the overwhelming need to get away from this place. If we were dead to the people of Millgrove, then they were dead to us. We would be like ghosts haunting our old lives, and if we were going to make it in this world that had forgotten us, we were going to have to do it somewhere other than here.
We stopped round at Kate’s house.
She and Mr Peterson had made their decision about how they were going to proceed.
They told us over a breakfast put together from the things in Kate’s cupboards. Some toast and cereal, orange juice and a hot cup of tea. I ate like I hadn’t eaten for a month.
Kate O’Donnell and Rodney Peterson were staying put.
"The truth is I’ve always been an outsider here," Kate told us. "I don’t think things will be that different, if I’m honest. I have Rodney now. We’ll be fine."
Mr Peterson looked over at her and smiled.
They made an OK couple, I thought.
We told them that we understood, said our goodbyes, and then Lilly and I set off for Cambridge. The nearest town, a place we both knew, but that wouldn’t carry the painful associations of a village that had simply forgotten we ever existed.
It would be a good starting point.
And then, we thought, we would go travelling further.
New Rule Number Seven: You live with this the best way you can.
Chapter 45
And now we’re done.
I have made a record of these events and maybe I will feel better for doing it. I feel like I have been carrying all of this around in my head, and it has been weighing me down.
Perhaps the burden will be lighter now.
There are only a few things left for me to say.
No neat, happy ending: but an ending all the same.
There are so many questions that we are unable to answer; but what I can tell you is how we are today.
The 0.4.
In a 1.0 world.
Lilly and I keep moving. It’s a choice we made. We thought that we would see a few places before we decide where we’re going to settle and what’s
going to become of us.
There are a fair few of us 0.4 around, and many of the others we have met are already working on living as closely as they can to how they once did—before this happened. They are busy forming communities, banding together and generally making the best of the hand that life has dealt us. There are places that the 1.0 don’t go—whole estates, whole villages—and the 0.4 move in.
It’s easy to find the 0.4 in whatever city or town we visit. Graffiti is our notice board, and we advertise ourselves to others like us; tell each other where we can meet, where we can find beds for the night among friends. We’re in this together and, although it is far from perfect, it’s far from terrible, too.
We stay away from the machines that the 1.0 build. They are forbidden and we know just how we will be rewarded if we dare to break that simple rule.
The 1.0 love their gadgets.
They have completely revolutionized the way they live, and have already developed a form of energy that travels through the air and seems to have no environmental impact whatsoever.
To be honest, we mostly stay away from the 1.0 altogether. They are the reminders of everything that we aren’t, and of everything we have lost.
In darker moments I wonder how many have gone before us, previous versions, skipping upgrades and being forgotten by everyone.
Living.
Surviving.
Having families and carrying on their outdated lives.
Generation after generation hanging on, still here, unseen by even the 0.4.
The 0.3.
The 0.2.
The 0.1.
I wonder if they are here too, forgotten as each new version overwrites the old. I wonder if we share this world with the direct descendants of Neanderthals, homo erectus, proto-humans. I wonder if they are still here, just hidden from view by the algorithms and code of our programmers.
I think it’s likely, but it brings little comfort to know that there are others like us.
If anything it makes it worse.
We’re not unique.
We’re just another layer of junk in the landfill of upgraded humanity.
Chapter 46
I keep thinking about the night in the barn.
It’s like a scab that I keep worrying at with a nail.
I keep thinking about Danny’s insistence that the upgrade from 0.4 to 1.0 had been necessary, to stop the human race from destroying itself and the planet it inhabited.
I contrast that with the three things I remember him telling me from the ReadMe file, and think that far from being society-improving, humanity-improving god-figures, the programmers responsible for the human upgrade had other things on their minds entirely.
"Fixed system slowdown when individual units are put to sleep, allowing greater access to unconscious processing activity."
"Tightened encrypted storage parameters to comply with new guidelines."
"Completely reworked user interface makes access of data easier and faster."
When the nights are dark and I can’t sleep—and those nights are frequent—I often find myself thinking about these improvements, and try to work out just what they say about our programmers, and the programs the 1.0 are running now.
It all comes down to the question of motive.
I think we are useful to the programmers.
We are to them as computers are to us.
We are their tools.
The human brain has something like 100 billion neurons. It’s the most sophisticated computer on the planet. Multiply it by the six billion people on Earth and you have a lot of computing power.
Tie those minds together and you have one hell of a network.
We don’t use all of our brains, all of the time.
We use the small bits that we need and the rest just sits there.
Imagining. Daydreaming. Inventing.
Maybe someone is renting out all that extra processing power.
Or all that extra memory space.
Renting it out from our programmers.
Maybe this is what most things on our planet are about: commerce.
Maybe we consumers are, ultimately, nothing more than consumables.
Some of the 0.4 think I’m crazy when I start talking like this, and perhaps I am.
But perhaps I’m not.
Because since the rest of the world was upgraded, all of the 0.4 agree on one odd, beneficial side effect for us, the ones who missed out.
It’s a small comfort, but it’s how I have been able to remember so many details when relating these events into a tape recorder.
You see, our memories have become much more effective; the clarity of recollection seems much stronger than before. I remember entire conversations, verbatim passages from books, thoughts I have had and things I have seen, all with such clarity that it’s as if, for the first time, we are allowed to use our whole brains.
Rather than the parts rationed out to us by a memory-intensive operating system.
I guess no one wants to store their data the old way.
Chapter 47
Lilly and I eventually came back to Millgrove, to see how our families were doing without us.
Fine but weird is the answer.
I stood in my old home (which no longer looks like the house I grew up in: there are odd tubes and ducts running through the place and the house is lit by—I really can’t tell you what by) surrounded by my family, and I was absolutely invisible to them.
They were happy, the three of them, happier than I’d ever seen them. It made me feel angry and sad and confused and alone.
I waited for them all to go out before I dragged the hidden tape recorder out from under the stairs and…
. . . and I guess this is the point where we came in.
Now I have made these tapes, and left a record, Lilly and I are going to travel some more.
Before we set off there are just two more things for us to do.
First up we’re going to look in on Kate O’Donnell and Rodney Peterson, see if they’re doing OK, to see if they’re still even here.
And then comes the big thing.
The last thing.
We’ve talked about it, Lilly and me, and it’s something that we can’t avoid. We have to know. We have to give ourselves the opportunity to make all of this go away.
We’re going to stop by Naylor’s silos, and we’ll see what happens.
Even if they are still full of the alien programmers" code, we’re pretty sure we won’t take the upgrade.
But you never know until you are in the position to find out.
That’s why we’re going to sit there and wait a while.
To see if either of us wants to.
If one of us does, the other will too.
It’s our pact.
So this is it. It took a long time to get here, but this is my final message, and the whole reason, I guess, for these tapes.
Lilly and I have talked it over and over, and we agree that the hardest thing about all of this is the fact that we have been forgotten. By our families and friends. By our world.
Every one of the 0.4 can list the people they have lost and it hurts.
Maybe it shouldn’t, but it does.
Hence this testimony.
This recording.
My story.
All our stories.
Our world is the world that exists in the cracks of yours. We can look out through those cracks and see you, but you see us only rarely, out of the corner of your eye, for the briefest of instants, and then we’re gone.
When your world moved on it left us right here.
And you forgot about us.
But.
WE ARE STILL HERE.
Forgotten? Yes.
Unimportant? No.
Because we know the truth about you.
About the way things were.
About the way things changed.
About the way things are.
And we know that everything you a
re can change in a flash, the next time those alien programmers decide it’s time for another upgrade.
Maybe the next upgrade will allow us to be seen, I don’t know.
We are safe until then, it seems they don’t update dead code.
So, if all the odds against us line up in the right configuration, and if you find this tape, play this tape, and hear my voice on this tape then, please, just remember we were once here, that we are here now, and that we miss you all.
Farewell.
And.
Please.
Remember.
Us.
Afterword
The Straker tapes end with that simple plea, an appeal for remembrance. Kyle and Lilly’s story ends, and we can only guess at what the future held for them.
Maybe they decided to join us and entered one of the grain silos Kyle describes.
We will never know.
The tapes don’t tell us.
If we are to take the story at face value then we now have answers to questions we didn’t even know to ask. And questions we never thought we’d have to ask.
So, what about the 0.4?
What can we do for them?
***
When I was a small boy I used to visit my grandfather in his house in Berkshire. He was a collector of old things. He had a massive hoard of gadgets and trinkets that he really didn’t understand, just liked them as objects, as historical monuments to outdated ideas.
He had an old telephone in his collection: a chunky, black thing made out of a mysterious substance called Bakelite. At least it seemed mysterious to me, because it was so unlike the substances we use now.
The telephone used to sit on a stand in the corner of the room in which he stored all of the antique things he had collected.
There was a dial on the front of the telephone, with holes for fingers to turn it, and numbers that you could dial from one to nine, and then a zero.
I used to spin the dial and hold the receiver to my head and it was like a kind of time machine that connected me to the past in a way that felt real and important.
One day I was playing with the telephone and I thought I heard a sound in the earpiece. A distant crackle, as if there were a tiny current somewhere along the line. I remember feeling so excited by the sound—which I had to be imagining, the phone was not plugged into any network—and I pushed down the buttons on top of the telephone as if that would help to make that crackle clearer.
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