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they look like they belong here.’

He fought to make it clearer.

‘I’ve never thought about it before: the way that everything that is from here looks like it belongs here. That even the most dissimilar things in our world – a puddle and an aircraft carrier; an apple and a wisp of smoke; a chicken and the London Gherkin; a road and a piece of sweetcorn – they all use these same visual rules.

‘I know that now, but only because they – the ones who have been changed – don’t. The people here… they look different now. As if they… they don’t obey the visual rules of Planet Earth. They have… other levels, layers, facets… I don’t know… description is hard when there’s nothing you have seen that looks anything like what you’re seeing.’

‘So, try.’

‘They still look like people. They are still people, I think. But, somehow, that’s a surface image, and what they are now extends way past the surface. Imagine you had a projector that could project a perfectly clear image on to water, but you could still see the water beneath. That’s kind of what I saw, I guess. A projection. A new image superimposed over each of the people of this village.

‘Most of it I can’t even begin to describe. Colours I don’t recognise. Textures that make no sense. Constantly in motion, ever-changing, like shadows playing across them… and then there are the symbols-’

‘Symbols?’ Kate interjected. ‘What do you mean, “symbols”?’

Mr Peterson shook his head.

‘A language, I guess,’ he said. ‘Moving across them, across their surfaces. Almost like hieroglyphics… with hooks and curls and spikes and eyes as letters. I… I think it is a language, but it doesn’t behave like our language. It’s not flat and on the page, instead it twists and spins, revealing new elements of each character… each word… every time it moves.’

NOTE – ‘hieroglyphics’

An extremely ancient form of writing which Rodderick identifies as originating in Egypt. ‘Hieroglyphics, although antiquated by Kyle Straker’s age, were a rebus-like pictorial language that is similar in structure to our own computer code.’ Benson notes: ‘Like a precursor to Zapf Dingbats, hieroglyphics made visual images into a language.’ He then notes: ‘… if you transpose the word “hieroglyphics” into Zapf you get: .’ Benson offers no explanation of just why we would want to do this, But then he is the man who translated the Bible into WingDings.

Kate looked aghast.

‘We’ve seen it,’ she said.

‘You’ve seen it? How? Where?’

‘On my computer screen. It’s all the stupid thing will do… display these weird characters.’

‘Your computer?’ Mr Peterson sat up straight. ‘But that means… it’s not just them… it’s… a program?’

‘A computer program?’ Kate said.

She turned to me.

‘You said it was some kind of language,’ she said.

I nodded.

‘But it didn’t look like any computer code I’ve ever seen…’ she said. ‘So what does it mean?’

I felt cold.

Pieces started fitting together.

‘What is it?’ Kate asked, noticing my look.

I fought to put my intuition into words.

‘I keep coming back to the idea of an alien invasion…’

Lilly made an exasperated sound that I tried to ignore.

Kate asked, ‘And exactly how would this be a sign of an invasion?’

‘It depends how you interpret the word “invasion”,’ I said. ‘Perhaps this is exactly the way you would invade another planet. I mean, would an alien race really come down in shiny metal ships and try to take over through military might, knowing that we will fight back?

‘Or, suppose the strategy was more subtle: infiltrating the planet with alien copies of humans, like the Body Snatchers. There’s a danger that the duplicates will be uncovered before there are enough of them to take over.

‘Maybe there is another way, and we’re seeing it now.’

‘But how?’ Lilly asked.

‘What if this computer program we’re seeing is the invasion?’ I said. ‘What if it’s their spaceships and their ray guns and their infiltration devices, all rolled into one?’

‘I’m not following you,’ Lilly said.

I wasn’t sure I was following it myself.

‘I’m just trying to put pieces together,’ I confessed. ‘It’s like I can almost see what’s happening here, but I can only catch glimpses of it out of the corner of my mind’s eye. There’s this vague idea that disappears every time I turn to look at it full on.’

Lilly nodded, and it seemed that she was urging me on to think about it more.

‘Try,’ she said.

So I did.

‘It was the alien language. Which we could see changing and shifting in front of us. How it was lined up on Kate’s computer screen. I said it was like sentences. But maybe because I was seeing them on a computer screen it’s got me thinking about computers, and about how computers work. Lines and lines of instructions, a particular form of sentence, computer code. What if we’re seeing a programming language?’

‘Programming what?’ Lilly asked.

‘That’s where I keep coming up blank,’ I said.

I realised that Mr Peterson was paying close attention to my words, and I saw him nodding.

‘You got something?’ I asked.

Mr Peterson shrugged.

‘I’m a postman,’ he said, and I thought he had just descended back into madness, but then he went on to explain: ‘And over the last few years there have been a lot of changes in the kind of things we deliver. There are the obvious changes – a lot more parcels from eBay and Amazon; a great deal less of those envelopes containing holiday snaps now that most photography has gone digital.

‘The one that seems sad, though, is that there are a lot fewer handwritten letters. People don’t send as many small, personal letters as they used to because they tend to stay in touch electronically. They have email, Facebook and Twitter. You don’t post a letter now, you click a mouse button and it’s delivered instantly.’

‘Is there a point to this story?’ Kate asked impatiently.

‘The point is that if you want to get in touch with a single person then you might send them a letter. An actual, physical, tangible piece of mail. But if you wanted to get in touch with everyone, instantly…’

‘You’d do it digitally,’ Lilly finished.

Mr Peterson nodded.

‘Electronically,’ he said. ‘With computers.’

‘A digital invasion?’ I mused. ‘What would that even be?’

Mr Peterson shrugged.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But mightn’t it look a little like today?’

‘Hang on a moment,’ Kate said with horror. ‘Are we seriously still talking aliens here? I mean, come on, there has to be another, rational explanation.’

‘I’d love to hear it,’ Mr Peterson said.

‘I just can’t believe that we’re suddenly in a world where “aliens” is the first place we’re looking for answers,’ she said incredulously. ‘Not “we’re still hypnotised and all of this is just imaginary”. Not “mass hysteria” or “sunspot activity”. Not “a virus” or “something in the water”. You know – the kind of answers