Authors: Mike Lancaster
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.
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 centre, where they were quickly and efficiently organised.
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.
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 realise 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.
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 revolutionised 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.
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.’