Mike Lancaster - 0.4

‘Nought-point-four,’ Danny said, rolling the phrase around his mouth, still obviously amused. ‘Oh yes, you are nought-point-four. You must know, or at least sense, that you are no longer… relevant .’

‘We feel pretty relevant,’ Mr Peterson said.

‘Of course you do,’ Danny said solemnly. ‘But you’re not.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Mr Peterson demanded.

‘The problem, as I see it, is that you completely misunderstand the nature of the thing that has happened to you,’ Danny said. ‘That has happened to us . But how to explain?’

He pretended to be puzzled, then grinned as he pulled Mrs Birnie’s video camera from his pocket.

‘Aha,’ he said. ‘Exhibit A. The invasion captured on amateur video. Have you watched it yet? Oh, silly me, of course you haven’t.’

He handed the camera to Lilly.

‘Just press play,’ he told her.

Lilly fumbled with the device, pushing buttons again and again, and getting frustrated at her lack of success.

‘Hurry. Hurry,’ Danny said. ‘Unless you want the vestigivore catching up with you again.’

He saw our blank looks.

‘Vest-igi-vore.’ He said. ‘ Vestige – a sign, mark, indication or relic. Vore – suffix, meaning eater. Vestigivore – eater of relics, of things no longer needed. How about you think of it as… well, a kind of anti-virus software . As in: it touches you and you die, almost as if you never existed. Delete. No restore from recycle bin.’

He cocked his head.

‘Listen,’ he said.

The roaring, chattering, hissing sound from earlier suddenly seemed very close.

Just outside the barn, in fact.

‘Give me the camera,’ Danny demanded, urgently. ‘Quickly now.’

Lilly threw it back at him as if the object had suddenly grown hot in her hands.

The sound ceased, almost instantaneously, like a switch had been thrown.

Just like the sound had stopped outside Kate O’Donnell’s house the moment she turned her computer off. And like it had stopped when I threw the camera to Danny.

‘For simplicity’s sake, think of it like this,’ Danny said. ‘You are… have become… incompatible with this camera. You four are analogue. The camera is digital.’ He turned to Lilly. ‘The reason you couldn’t get it to play is because you can’t. It, like me, has been upgraded . You might set it off by accident, and incur the wrath of a vestigivore, but our technology is pretty much dead to you now.’

He pocketed the camera.

‘I’ll put this somewhere safe,’ he said.

‘What are you talking about?’ Kate said. ‘None of what you are saying makes any sense.’

‘Well, let me make things clearer,’ Danny said. ‘You four just happened to be in a hypnotic trance when the most significant event in history occurred. An upgrade to the human operating system was transmitted, and you missed it.’ He smiled. ‘Oops.’

I felt my temper rising.

‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘An upgrade? You’re saying all of this is happening because of an upgrade? ’

‘Correct,’ Danny said. ‘A necessary software update with a raft of improvements, bug fixes and a whole load of new and interesting features.’

The look on our faces made him chuckle. I saw Lilly’s jaw was clenched, and her hands were tight fists at her sides. I guess she wanted to punch him too.

‘You only have to take a look at the world around you to see the old operating system was hopelessly out of date,’ Danny said in a mocking voice. ‘Now we have an alternative. From this day everything changes. There will be an end to crime, war, poverty, fear, starvation, disease, greed and envy; a straight path, fast track, express route into a golden future of unlimited possibilities.’

He looked at me with a hint of what I thought might be sadness.

‘Unfortunately you won’t be coming on that journey with us,’ he said. ‘Oh, there are many more like you; people who just happened to be in the wrong phase of sleep; people driving who got mildly hypnotised by the white lines on the road; people under the influence of certain drugs; people in the grip of near-death experiences; people engaged in certain types of daydream. Blah blah blah. There’s a subsidiary file that lists all this stuff, a sort of ReadMe, I guess you’d call it, but the upshot of it is that you won’t be completely alone.’

‘Alone?’ Lilly said. ‘What do you mean?’

A cloud seemed to pass across Danny’s face. Again, I thought it might be sadness, a trace of regret.

‘I guess I really haven’t been explaining myself all that well,’ he said. ‘We… and by that I mean anyone who isn’t nought-point-four… have, er, been changed. Changed into creatures capable of putting the world to rights. A software upgrade was transmitted and, even though we’re still in the early phases of the upgrade, now that we have learned filament networking it should be over in-’ he looked at his wrist even though he wasn’t wearing a watch – ‘a few hours.

‘Then no one will even know you are here. You will be filtered out. You will be pieces of old code floating around in a system that no longer recognises you. You should be OK, as long as you stay away from any digital technology. If you don’t, then… well, you’ve seen a vestigivore – they are programmed to delete harmful code.’

‘This is madness,’ I said.

‘This is the end of madness , my friend,’ Danny said. ‘A new world is being born. Everything is going to be OK.’

‘But not for us,’ Lilly said.

Danny shrugged.

‘How can we just be filtered out?’ I asked, my mouth suddenly dry.

‘The human mind filters out all sorts of useless detail,’ Danny said. ‘It’s how you get through the day without being driven mad. You don’t register the things that aren’t, for whatever reason, important to you. I don’t mean to sound harsh, but that’s what you have become to us: Useless. Relics. Dinosaurs.’

He broke off for a short while, and then he said, ‘Have you ever seen something out of the corner of your eye, but when you looked there was nothing there? Or felt like you’re being watched, when there’s no one around? Dead code. Old systems. Things you have been programmed not to see. Occasionally we catch a glimpse. And tell stories of ghosts and monsters. They’re what make dogs bark at night, or a cat’s hackles rise. They’re there, you’ve just been programmed not to see them.’

‘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.’