'I’ve just about had enough of this,' Mr Peterson said angrily. He rolled up his sleeves and walked up to Eddie Crichton, who was hauling a dishwasher out on to the green.
I saw what Mr Peterson planned to do, but I don’t think any amount of sensible argument could have stopped him.
He drew back his fist and punched Eddie in the face.
I closed my eyes for a second, not wanting to watch, and I waited for the sound of a fist connecting with a face and maybe a howl of pain.
I got neither.
I opened my eyes.
Mr Peterson was standing there, looking confused.
Eddie Crichton just carried on with what he was doing. It didn’t look like he had felt a thing. It didn’t look like he had noticed a thing. He dropped off the dishwasher and made his way down the road. Mr Peterson strode back to us.
'I couldn’t lay a glove on him,' he said. 'All the energy I put into the blow . . . it just . . . I don’t know…
Now, of course, three months down the road, we know exactly what Mr Peterson meant. We can’t entirely explain it, but we know it well.
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
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
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.
