0.4

One small shake of the head and that’s what Danny could do now: stop rage and turn it into fear.

What have you done to my friend? I thought, because this wasn’t him.

‘Please,’ Lilly said. ‘Please, Danny. Stop playing around with us. I’ve had enough. I’m tired and cold and scared and I want to go home. What happened today? Why has everyone… changed? What are you?’

Danny looked on the verge of saying something. He had a dreadfully serious expression on his face and seemed to be having trouble finding the right words. Instead he looked around the barn and gestured towards a row of straw bales at the back of the barn.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Sit down.’

‘We don’t want to sit down,’ Mr Peterson said crossly. ‘We want to know what the hell is going on.’

‘THEN SIT!’ Danny said, his face suddenly looking cruel in the red light.

We sat.

‘I only have a few hours,’ Danny said. ‘This is a… caretaking routine for the master program that will end as soon as the installer quits.’ He paused and reflected on his words. ‘Actually, and more accurately, it’s a sub-routine, but that’s just splitting hairs.’

‘The master program,’ Lilly said. She turned to me. ‘That’s what you were talking about. A computer program that was the spaceships and ray guns all rolled into one. You were right.’

Danny laughed.

‘Was he?’ he said, amused by the idea. ‘Why, Kyle? What did you say?’

His gaze made me feel nervous.

‘I said that our planet was being invaded,’ I said. ‘That we were experiencing an alien invasion that doesn’t waste ships or troops, and doesn’t give us a chance to fight back.’

Danny raised an eyebrow.

‘Sounds fascinating,’ he said, his voice dripping with condescension. ‘Tell me more.’

I felt a sudden, red urge to punch him in the face.

Instead I carried on.

‘Whenever I try to get my head around all of this, I keep coming back to computers,’ I said. ‘I don’t know if it’s because we first saw the weird language on Kate’s Mac, but it made me realise that an invasion doesn’t have to be violent. Because an alien race could send a signal across space, a signal that contained a computer program designed to overwrite humanity and all the things that make us human. With one clever piece of software they could change us all, at once, into the image of themselves.

‘Maybe human DNA has been altered by this signal. And human brains are being reprogrammed to mimic the invaders’ brains.’

Danny grinned as if he were delighted by my words. He clapped his hands together and then rubbed them against each other.

‘Oh, how wonderful,’ he said, again with the patronising tone, the superior air. He was almost daring me to continue.

‘We just happened to be in your trance when the signal was transmitted,’ I said. ‘A one-in-a-million chance. It meant our brains were in a different state, and the signal passed us over. Maybe our invaders had considered every possible human state – from awake to asleep and everything in between – but hadn’t considered hypnotised. Maybe there’s a tiny percentage of humanity that – for a variety of reasons – will be immune to this invasion by computer program. Us. The nought-point-four.’

‘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.