Майк Ланкастер: Human.4

To the girl in Cromwell that I fell in love with and whom I am proud to call my wife

THIS DATA STORAGE UNIT, OR "BOOK", HAS BEEN DESIGNED TO REPROGRAM THE HUMAN BRAIN, ALLOWING IT TO REPLICATE THE LOST ART THAT WAS ONCE CALLED "READING". IT IS A SIMPLE ADJUSTMENT AND THERE WILL BE NO NEGATIVE OR HARMFUL EFFECTS FROM THIS PROCESS.

WHAT YOU ARE DOING: "READING"EXPLAINED

EACH SHEET IS INDELIBLY PRINTED WITH INFORMATION AND THE SHEETS ARE VISUALLY SCANNED FROM LEFT TO RIGHT, AND FROM TOP TO BOTTOM.

THIS SCANNED INFORMATION IS PASSED THROUGH THE VISUAL CORTEX DIRECTLY INTO THE BRAIN WHERE IT CAN THEN BE ACCESSED, JUST LIKE ANY OTHER DATA.

When Danny Birnie told us that he had hypnotized his sister we all thought he was mad.

Or lying.

Or both.

These are the words that begin the spoken narrative of Kyle Straker. It’s a story that many have heard about , but few have had the opportunity to hear for themselves. It is both a piece of oral history from a time we are largely unfamiliar with—the early twenty-first century—and a tale with dark depths, which, if true, has important lessons for us all to take away from it.

For those unfamiliar with the history of the Kyle Straker tapes, a brief recap might be helpful. The tapes were discovered two years ago, in the understair cupboard of a house in the small Cambridgeshire village of Millgrove. The first tape was labeled "Dire Straits". Luckily the finder was an antique music enthusiast, who had the necessary analogue equipment to play back the tapes, otherwise the story of Kyle Straker would have been condemned to the dustbin of lost history.

After discovering their true contents, the tapes were passed on to the authorities. They have been the subject of much controversy and debate ever since.

The peculiar format that you are holding—a book—was still the dominant form of information storage at the time the tapes were made. There is a reason why I insisted on this archaic format which will, I hope, become apparent as the narrative progresses.

If the story you are about to read is true, then this work is respectfully dedicated to the 0.4.

Mike A. Lancaster,

Editor

… is this thing on?

Testing, testing.

One two. One two. Two.

Ha. You know those roadies who get up on stage and test all the band’s gear before a gig? And they do all that "testing testing one two one two" stuff into the microphones, to make sure they’ll work when the singer finally takes the stage. Well, Simon once said that the reason they said "one two one two" was because roadies couldn’t count to three.

Made me laugh, but I guess you had to be there.

Anyway—how can you tell if these things are even working?

I mean, low-tech or what?

Still, of course it’s low tech, it’s a tape recorder. An old and battered relic of a time before digital storage and CDs; iPods and MP3s; memory sticks and SD cards.

At least it works. I wasn’t sure it would, it had been abandoned and left to rot in the cupboard under the stairs.

I kinda know how it feels.

Anyway, the tape player is old—it was made by Amstrad, the company started by that rude bloke off The Apprentice. Mum used to love that show. Even went through a phase of saying "You’re fired" for a while when we did something stupid or naughty.

Funny the things you miss.

NOTE— The Apprentice

What was known—ironically—as "reality TV". Entwistle in his paper "Manufacturing Nothing: Light Entertainment" writes: "Afraid to see the world around them as a larger picture, people instead reduced their views of the world to the tiny, artificial windows they called “reality TV”. What is certain, however, is that reality played little or no part in such programmes."

Oh well. I’d better get on with putting this on to tape; the story I have come back home to record. I’ve been making notes for weeks, jotting down the things I remember, the conversations, the impressions I had at the time, just so I could do this. Make this tape. Tell you these things in my own voice.

I’m doing it in the hope that someone will listen and realize that everything has changed.

Changed forever.

That the world they are living in is not the one it has always been. That there are a few of us left who can remember the way things were—the way they were meant to be.

Looking back is easy, but there’s a temptation to fill in blanks. I’m going to try to tell it as it happened to me, all in the right order and everything, without filling in any of the stuff I learned later. That’s why my notes are going to be important.

I’ve worked it through in my head and reckon that tenses are going to be a problem; you know, whether "has" and "is" should be "had" and "was", but the first set sounds better in my head because it’s how things were at the time, and not how they are now.

If that makes sense.

My English teacher would probably throw a fit, but then he’s probably changed too, and it’s my story anyway, so I’ll tell it the way that feels natural, the way that feels right.

I even know the way the story starts, the very moment it all started to change. The crazy thing that Danny said, that summer afternoon. And, yes, Dad, I’m taping over one of your Dire Straits albums. Something you should have done a long time ago.

When Danny Birnie told us that he had hypnotized his sister we all thought he was mad.

Or lying.

Or both.

The sister in question is a couple of years older than him and never struck me as the kind of girl who’d fall for any of Danny’s nonsense.

She had to be used to it.

She lived with him.

So she had seen his short-lived preoccupations with stamp collecting, and the difficult withdrawal from his Pokémon addiction. She was even used to his new obsession with becoming the next David Blaine, and the hours he spent practicing with packs of cards.

She always struck me as the kind of girl who’s going to be a star. Some people are just like that. You know that they will, as my grandad used to say, land butter-side-up.

There was no way that Danny—who, no matter how hard he tried, would always end up butter-side-down —could have done what he had told us he had.

Danny’s face was pale and thin, with dark semicircles under each eye, and his hair was a dirty brown color, tousled on top. He was small for his age. Heck, it was my age too—and that’s fifteen and a half, thanks for asking—and I was almost a full head taller than him. And he seemed to exaggerate that smallness by hunching his shoulders and bending his back.

"You should have seen it," he said, his eyes sparkling with excitement. "It actually worked. I mean, I knew it could work, but still, I didn’t really think it would. "