Mike Lancaster - 0.4

Then he turned and left.

Didn’t look back.

A taste of things to come.

‘What did he mean?’ Kate O’Donnell demanded. ‘About the silos, and Annette and trying to save her?’

We were sitting on bales of straw, and it was pretty much pitch black outside.

I felt the words knot up on the tip of my tongue.

‘WELL?’ she prompted. ‘Do you have something to tell us?’

Lilly’s hand sought mine and I held on to it tightly as I told Kate and Rodney Peterson about what had really happened when we separated on the Crowley Road.

Kate was furious.

‘And you didn’t think that this might be a piece of information that we would want to know?’ she said incredulously. ‘You selfish, stupid-’

‘Steady on, Kate,’ Mr Peterson said calmly. ‘They were only-’

‘ONLY WHAT?’ she demanded. ‘Only keeping things from us? Only telling us lies? Only preventing us from making the most important decision of our life?’

‘There’s no decision to make,’ Mr Peterson said. ‘I’m not going to volunteer to become one of those… things .’

There was another silence. A big empty space where nothing was said, but so much was revealed.

It was Mr Peterson that broke it.

‘Surely you’re not actually considering it?’ he asked, his voice shocked.

‘I don’t know,’ Kate said at last. ‘It might not be so bad.’

‘I saw them,’ Mr Peterson said firmly. ‘I saw them for what they really are. I can tell you this with absolute certainty: they are not the same as us . Not even close. I saw them and I do not want to be one of them. I’m happy being who I am.’

Kate let out a cruel bark of laughter.

‘A postman and part-time ventriloquist?’ she said derisively. ‘A bad ventriloquist, at that.’

Mr Peterson looked at her, not with anger, but with humour.

‘I guess that is who and what I appear to be,’ he said. ‘But that doesn’t mean it’s all I am, or the way it has always been. For now, being a postman is good, honest work. And it makes me happy. Not everyone has to fly high to prove they exist; some of us are perfectly happy flying low and enjoying the view.

‘I’ll never be rich, but that doesn’t matter to me. Before I came to Millgrove I had a good job, a devoted wife and a beautiful little boy. But leukaemia stole my son from me, and everything else just crumbled away. Iain was four when he became ill, and Mr Peebles was just something silly I made to put a smile on his face. Most of the joke was how bad I was. But when he was laughing he forgot the pain, and that was better than doing nothing and watching him slip away.

‘So, yes, I’m a terrible ventriloquist, but it used to make Iain laugh. And so once a year I get Mr Peebles out of the cupboard and I stand in front of the village and I invite everyone to laugh. Not with me: but at me. Hearing other kids laughing makes me think, just for a second, that he’s still here. Here in the world. Not a cold, dead thing in the ground.

‘I don’t want to be upgraded. I don’t want to become one of those things. I want to remember my son. If you want to give up, become one of them because it’s easier, then go ahead. But difficult is good. It’s what makes us human.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Kate said quietly. ‘I’m just scared. More scared than I have ever been.’

‘Scared is something,’ Mr Peterson said.

We sat there in silence, letting it all sink in.

We were all scared, but who wouldn’t be?

If what Danny said was true – and I for one no longer had any doubts – then we no longer existed.

We were 0.4.

Irrelevant.

NOTE

There is a long pause here, followed by an odd acoustic glitch, which Lucas Pauley identifies as the tape being manually stopped. Then there is an odd snatch of music in which the words ‘sirens are howling’ can be (just about) discerned.

Ella Benison notes a dramatic change between the tape stopping and being restarted: ‘The tone of Kyle Straker’s voice has changed, and is more like the struggling narrative voice we saw during the first passage of the first tape. To me it seems obvious that Kyle needs time to settle back into his narrative flow because the time that has passed from switching off the tape to switching it back on is considerable.’

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 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.