Human.4

blown past, I don’t think they would have looked out of place.

No life.

Stillness.

It was as if the buildings were brooding, the village was dreaming, and we were just a solitary thought passing through its mind.

The village green was set up for the talent show, but it was deserted too. It looked strange and unsettling.

The stage was empty, and in front of it was chaos. Things that people had brought along with them—picnic food, blankets to sit on, handbags—had been left behind and lay on the grass.

People don’t leave their personal effects lying around like that. They take them with them when they leave. They cling to their possessions almost like a reflex.

Nor do they leave people lying on the stage after they have had some kind of mental breakdown.

But they had left Mr Peterson.

He was still in the same spot we had last seen him.

He was all alone, curled up in a tight ball of his own fear. I suddenly felt terrible that we hadn’t thought to go back for him sooner. But we’d had our reasons for forgetting him, I guess. Like the world suddenly turning strange and terrifying.

What was everybody else’s excuse?

We approached Mr Peterson and I could see his body trembling like a leaf. His lips moved as he formed soundless words. His eyes were squeezed shut.

'Mr Peterson?' I called.

If he heard me there was no visible sign.

'He’s in shock,' Kate O’Donnell said.

'Why is he still like this?' Lilly asked.

'I think he saw something,' I said. 'I think he saw what happened.'

'But he was hypnotized too.'

'Everyone’s different. Maybe his trance was just a bit shallower than ours.'

Lilly shrugged.

'How do we get him to tell us what he saw?' she said.

'Ask nicely?' I suggested.

'You are such a loser,' she said, but with a smile.

'I know.' I smiled back.

Kate knelt over Mr Peterson and put her hand gently on his shoulder. Initially he recoiled from her touch, but then his eyes opened and he looked at her face.

'It’s you,' he said. 'You came back.'

'Of course I did, Rodney.'

She reached down and found his hand, wrapped it in hers, holding it tight.

'And you’re still you,' he said.

'Yep,' she said. 'At least I was last time I looked.'

'They . . . they didn’t . . . get you.'

'Who?' Kate asked him. 'Who didn’t get me?'

'All of them,' Mr Peterson said, suddenly seeming to come back to reality from the dark place he had been hiding in inside his own mind.

'You saw something,' Kate said. 'I… we . . . need to know what it was.'

Mr Peterson looked up at her and there was warmth and compassion in his eyes, but there was also fear.

'Something happened to me,' Mr Peterson was saying. 'It was like they say in the Bible, where the scales fall from someone’s eyes, where they suddenly see the truth behind the visible. I saw the people in the crowd, all of them, and they had become . . . were becoming… something else. Something . . . impossible.'

'What did you see?' That was from Lilly, and there was an urgency that made Mr Peterson turn to see us standing there for the first time.

'What did I see?' he said. 'I don’t know how to describe it. I’m used to the way things look… here . . . in this world, you know? Everything here follows . . . I don’t know… visual rules, about form, perspective, and color. The things we see in this world . . . well, 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 recognize. 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.