Майк Ланкастер: Human.4

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.

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 center, where they were quickly and efficiently organized.

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 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.