0.4 (16 page)

‘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, dur, of course it has and of course we are,’ Danny said. ‘Humans are, after all, a work in progress.’

‘And it’s always nought-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 humour 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.

‘Nought-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.’

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 hypnotised,’ 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.

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 nought-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.

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 nought-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 realised 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-fuelled 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 realise 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.

‘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 humour.

‘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 leukaemia 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.

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.