Майк Ланкастер: Human.4

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 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.

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.