0.4

Fine but weird is the answer.

I stood in my old home (which no longer looks like the house I grew up in: there are odd tubes and ducts running through the place and the house is lit by – I really can’t tell you what by) surrounded by my family, and I was absolutely invisible to them.

They were happy, the three of them, happier than I’d ever seen them. It made me feel angry and sad and confused and alone.

I waited for them all to go out before I dragged the hidden tape recorder out from under the stairs and…

… and I guess this is the point where we came in.

Now I have made these tapes, and left a record, Lilly and I are going to travel some more.

Before we set off there are just two more things for us to do.

First up we’re going to look in on Kate O’Donnell and Rodney Peterson, see if they’re doing OK, to see if they’re still even here.

And then comes the big thing.

The last thing.

We’ve talked about it, Lilly and me, and it’s something that we can’t avoid. We have to know. We have to give ourselves the opportunity to make all of this go away.

We’re going to stop by Naylor’s silos, and we’ll see what happens.

Even if they are still full of the alien programmers’ code, we’re pretty sure we won’t take the upgrade.

But you never know until you are in the position to find out.

That’s why we’re going to sit there and wait a while.

To see if either of us wants to.

If one of us does, the other will too.

It’s our pact.

So this is it. It took a long time to get here, but this is my final message, and the whole reason, I guess, for these tapes.

Lilly and I have talked it over and over, and we agree that the hardest thing about all of this is the fact that we have been forgotten. By our families and friends. By our world.

Every one of the 0.4 can list the people they have lost and it hurts.

Maybe it shouldn’t, but it does.

Hence this testimony.

This recording.

My story.

All our stories.

Our world is the world that exists in the cracks of yours. We can look out through those cracks and see you, but you see us only rarely, out of the corner of your eye, for the briefest of instants, and then we’re gone.

When your world moved on it left us right here.

And you forgot about us.

But.

WE ARE STILL HERE.

Forgotten? Yes.

Unimportant? No.

Because we know the truth about you.

About the way things were.

About the way things changed.

About the way things are.

And we know that everything you are can change in a flash, the next time those alien programmers decide it’s time for another upgrade.

Maybe the next upgrade will allow us to be seen, I don’t know.

We are safe until then, it seems they don’t update dead code.

So, if all the odds against us line up in the right configuration, and if you find this tape, play this tape, and hear my voice on this tape then, please, just remember we were once here, that we are here now, and that we miss you all.

Farewell.

And.

Please.

Remember.

Us.

Afterword

The Straker tapes end with that simple plea, an appeal for remembrance. Kyle and Lilly’s story ends, and we can only guess at what the future held for them.

Maybe they decided to join us and entered one of the grain silos Kyle describes.

We will never know.

The tapes don’t tell us.

If we are to take the story at face value then we now have answers to questions we didn’t even know to ask. And questions we never thought we’d have to ask.

So, what about the 0.4?

What can we do for them?

When I was a small boy I used to visit my grandfather in his house in Berkshire. He was a collector of old things. He had a massive hoard of gadgets and trinkets that he really didn’t understand, just liked them as objects, as historical monuments to outdated ideas.

He had an old telephone in his collection: a chunky, black thing made out of a mysterious substance called Bakelite. At least it seemed mysterious to me, because it was so unlike the substances we use now.

The telephone used to sit on a stand in the corner of the room in which he stored all of the antique things he had collected.

There was a dial on the front of the telephone, with holes for fingers to turn it, and numbers that you could dial from one to nine, and then a zero.

I used to spin the dial and hold the receiver to my head and it was like a kind of time machine that connected me to the past in a way that felt real and important.

One day I was playing with the telephone and I thought I heard a sound in the earpiece. A distant crackle, as if there were a tiny current somewhere along the line. I remember feeling so excited by the sound – which I had to be imagining, the phone was not plugged into any network – and I pushed down the buttons on top of the telephone as if that would help to make that crackle clearer.

But pushing the buttons did nothing. I felt frustrated and a little angry. I didn’t even realise I was deploying my filaments until they had actually latched on to the mouthpiece of the telephone.

Of course, as soon as I noticed what I was doing I recalled them back into my body, but not before they had made an infinitesimal adjustment to the mechanisms of the telephone. I felt scared – my grandfather wouldn’t have been pleased to find me tinkering with his antiques – and was about to replace the handset so I could slink away when I heard something.

Something that wasn’t a just a distant crackle on a long-dead telephone.

Something that sounded like a human voice, speaking a single word.

I put the receiver back on its cradle and crept out of the room.