New Rule Number Three: We can’t touch the 1.0.
We can’t get closer than an inch or so away from them without our hand/body/whatever getting stopped by some force or charge that prevents us making physical contact. It’s like some kind of dampening field, a protective layer that means that the 0.4 and the 1.0 are no longer capable of interacting.
Over the course of the day we watched as the people we once knew used the machines of the village to construct strange new technologies, recycling their possessions to create new machines. Often we would see people interface with a machine, a component, a circuit board, by connecting to it with those fleshy filaments.
New Rule Number Four: You never get used to the sight of those filaments.
You really, really don’t.
Of all the things they do that seem alien to us, this one is still the worst. It affects you at a base level, both horrifying and captivating at the same time. You know it’s something you shouldn’t see; something that goes against all the laws of nature and order.
But you still find yourself staring.
We sat there on the edge of the green and watched as people suddenly started fusing themselves to circuit boards, changing the chips and connections by what seemed like thought alone.
Even Chris—my baboon boy, idiot, football-obsessed brother—was performing delicate adjustments to the circuitry. It was such an unlikely sight that I watched him for a long time. And as I sat there, I began to realize that Chris was gone now, gone forever, and that we would never argue or fight again. I felt a cold stab of regret, of loss, and I had to turn away from him.
I was surprised to find that I had tears in my eyes.
Lilly, it seemed, was taking it all rather badly too.
She had been growing more and more gloomy, watching as people acted in ways that were strange and disturbing. I kept trying to reassure her but it didn’t work.
Eventually she stood up, made an exasperated noise and stormed off across the green without another sound. I wondered if I should follow her, but she hadn’t invited me and she probably needed some time to think about things by herself.
Kate took off a few minutes later, and Mr Peterson went with her to make sure she was OK.
I sat there in the sun and watched the people of Millgrove doing their stuff.
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.
Chapter 45
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.