Mike Lancaster - 0.4

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 revolutionised 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Having families and carrying on their outdated lives.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.

We are their tools.

The human brain has something like 100 billion neurons. It’s the most sophisticated computer on the planet. Multiply it by the six billion people on Earth and you have a lot of computing power.

Tie those minds together and you have one hell of a network.

We don’t use all of our brains, all of the time.

We use the small bits that we need and the rest just sits there.

Imagining. Daydreaming. Inventing.

Maybe someone is renting out all that extra processing power.

Or all that extra memory space.

Renting it out from our programmers.

Maybe this is what most things on our planet are about: commerce.

Maybe we consumers are, ultimately, nothing more than consumables .

Some of the 0.4 think I’m crazy when I start talking like this, and perhaps I am.

But perhaps I’m not.

Because since the rest of the world was upgraded, all of the 0.4 agree on one odd, beneficial side effect for us, the ones who missed out.

It’s a small comfort, but it’s how I have been able to remember so many details when relating these events into a tape recorder.

You see, our memories have become much more effective; the clarity of recollection seems much stronger than before. I remember entire conversations, verbatim passages from books, thoughts I have had and things I have seen, all with such clarity that it’s as if, for the first time, we are allowed to use our whole brains.

Rather than the parts rationed out to us by a memory-intensive operating system.

I guess no one wants to store their data the old way.

Lilly and I eventually came back to Millgrove, to see how our families were doing without us.

Fine but weird is the answer.

I stood in my old home (which no longer looks like the house I grew up in: there are odd tubes and ducts running through the place and the house is lit by – I really can’t tell you what by) surrounded by my family, and I was absolutely invisible to them.

They were happy, the three of them, happier than I’d ever seen them. It made me feel angry and sad and confused and alone.

I waited for them all to go out before I dragged the hidden tape recorder out from under the stairs and…

… and I guess this is the point where we came in.

Now I have made these tapes, and left a record, Lilly and I are going to travel some more.

Before we set off there are just two more things for us to do.

First up we’re going to look in on Kate O’Donnell and Rodney Peterson, see if they’re doing OK, to see if they’re still even here.

And then comes the big thing.

The last thing.

We’ve talked about it, Lilly and me, and it’s something that we can’t avoid. We have to know. We have to give ourselves the opportunity to make all of this go away.

We’re going to stop by Naylor’s silos, and we’ll see what happens.

Even if they are still full of the alien programmers’ code, we’re pretty sure we won’t take the upgrade.

But you never know until you are in the position to find out.

That’s why we’re going to sit there and wait a while.

To see if either of us wants to.

If one of us does, the other will too.

It’s our pact.

So this is it. It took a long time to get here, but this is my final message, and the whole reason, I guess, for these tapes.

Lilly and I have talked it over and over, and we agree that the hardest thing about all of this is the fact that we have been forgotten. By our families and friends. By our world.