It is at this point in the tapes that there is an interruption to the recording. A thud, some sounds of movement, and then an indistinguishable background voice.

Although much debate has raged about this section of the tapes, the consensus is that Kyle Straker has just been joined by another person. Later in the recordings it even becomes clear who this person is, but for now the voice is distant and muted and – even with sophisticated technological enhancement – impossible to decipher.

Perhaps we would have discovered more about the other person here, but the tape ends abruptly after Kyle addresses the newcomer.

… yeah , I know. I’m just in the middle of… I will… I just need to …

NOTE

Nathaniel Parker applies a version of Occam’s razor – that the correct answer is often the simplest – arguing that the tape only stopped before ‘… finish recording this.’

Tape Two Side Two

(Silence)

I felt like a criminal on the run, making my way through enemy territory. I was terrified of bumping into anyone, but there was no one around to bump into. The village, it seemed, was deserted. Like Mum and Dad, everyone had to be back at home.

Awaiting further instructions .

I couldn’t trust anyone.

Doctor Campbell had said that I was one of the nought -point-four , and that I would have to be dealt with . Did that make everyone else in the village, everyone I knew, part of the other group?

Nought-point-four – that was four-tenths. Four over ten. Two-fifths. Was that how few people like me still existed? Had the other nought-point-six been changed somehow?

0.6.

Six-tenths.

More than half.

Was I now in the minority?

And how mad did that sound?

I didn’t know, not for certain, that there was anything going on here at all.

I was running scared through the village because… because of what?

OK, something had happened in Millgrove; something that had affected everyone in the village, except for four people who were hypnotised at the time.

OK, there was no one on the streets of the village, even though it was a Saturday afternoon and there were always people on the streets.

OK, my parents were acting oddly.

And, OK, the doctor had said a few things that had sounded sinister to me.

But maybe Doctor Campbell was right. Maybe I was suffering from the after-affects of hypnosis, and had experienced an inverted version of reality that had meant I had seen everyone else standing still when it was really me who was paralysed.

Maybe the whole thing was just a fantasy.

Maybe none of it was real.

Maybe it was paranoia and nothing else.

Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe.

A nightmare , the doctor had called it: could it be nothing more than that? Could my mind be playing tricks upon me?

And that made me think of Jerry Possett. Local guy. Old – in his seventies, I guess. Probably harmless, but something has gone wrong with his brain. He holds conversations with people who aren’t really there; often arguing with these imaginary people in an angry voice.

To Jerry, those people are really there. He sees them, hears them. But they don’t exist. And Jerry doesn’t seem to know that they don’t exist.

The point I’m making here is that our brains play tricks. They can make us see patterns where there are no patterns; see faces in the grain of a wardrobe; castles in cloud formations; something psychologically revealing in an ink blot; can even make ordinarily sane people see UFOs over old man Naylor’s grain silos.

I don’t know enough about the way the brain works. In fact, I don’t have a clue how the brain works. Hundreds of thoughts flow through my brain from one hour to the next and not one of them is about how I’m thinking them.

So what if this was just my brain going off the rails?

Hallucinations.

Paranoia.

A mental breakdown caused by Danny’s act.

Meningitis.

Swine flu.

Marsh gas.

Maybe my brain just never wired up all that well to begin with and my whole life had been leading up to this moment, where the bad wiring sends sparks of insanity through my skull and makes me into a Jerry Possett, a nutcase to be avoided.

Maybe nought -point-four was simply doctors’ jargon for he’s blown a fuse in his brain and we need to get him somewhere secure before he harms himself or others.

How was it even possible to know if your brain was malfunctioning, because the very thing you need to think it all through is the very thing that might be playing up in the first place.

Was that some kind of paradox?

Was I mad?

I arrived at Lilly’s house and didn’t know what to do.

If her family were behaving anything like my family they wouldn’t let her out; they would be finding excuses to stand by the door and make sure she stayed where she was.

Should I throw stones at her window, to attract her attention?

That would be a whole lot easier if I knew which one was her room.

Did I really want to speak to her, anyway?

Did I want to discover that she had no memory of the things I remembered happening to us? Did I really want to find out that all this was happening because my mind was messed up?

I stood there, trying to find a path through it all.

And then the front door of Lilly’s house burst open and Lilly came hurtling towards me.

Lilly saw me standing there and her face registered both surprise and relief. She sprinted towards me and shouted, ‘RUN!’ with such urgency that I did just that.

Turned around and ran.

Gave into a stampede instinct inherited from an earlier model of humanity, where sabre-toothed tigers stalked the landscape.

I ran, hearing Lilly’s feet slapping the pavement just behind me, and it was as if all the tension of the day had suddenly been given an outlet in one mad burst of energy. I drove my legs as fast as they would carry me, away from Lilly’s house, without an idea in my head as to why we were running.

Nor where we were running to – it didn’t matter.

In those moments, with every thought, breath and muscle focused on the physical act of running, I felt… free .

Someone shouted Lilly’s name from behind us, and Lilly’s footsteps sped up as a result. She gained ground on me, and then she was running next to me.

‘Where are we going?’ I shouted, feeling the words ripped from my lungs.

‘I don’t know,’ she shouted back. ‘I’ve just got to get away from… from them .’

I should have been terrified by her words, but instead they actually made me smile. If Lilly was feeling the same way, and her parents had suddenly turned weird, then I wasn’t crazy.

My mind was not broken.

I could get through this.

We could get through this.

I think I only realised where we were heading when I started recognising details of the route from earlier. Some kind of impulse had nudged us towards a place we both thought could give us sanctuary from the madness that was hemming us in on all sides.

We stopped running as we passed the Cross house.

My lungs were burning and there was a fierce pain in my side. Bent over double, I gasped and wheezed and Lilly joined me, even placing a hand on my back.

‘Thank you for coming to get me,’ she said.

‘No problem,’ I said. ‘Thanks for the exercise.’

She half-smiled.

‘I’m sorry I got into that silly stuff earlier,’ she said quietly. ‘You know, the Simon stuff?’

‘It’s OK,’ I said, finally unbending myself and standing up straight. ‘How is Simon?’

Lilly shook her head. ‘He’s gone,’ she told me. ‘Just like all of them. I mean they’re there, and everything, but they’re not, not really.’

She stood up too.

‘I must sound crazy,’ she said.

‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘I know exactly what you mean. They have changed.’

We carried on towards Mrs O’Donnell’s house.

‘Has Doctor Campbell been round for a visit yet?’ I asked her.

She nodded. ‘You too, huh? He told me that I had experienced a powerful hallucination, that it was all a dream I was having, but, like, awake. You?’

‘Same story.’ We were at Mrs O’Donnell’s door now. ‘I overheard him telling my parents that I was one of the nought-point-four.’

Lilly looked at me oddly.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she asked.

I shrugged.

‘I haven’t got a clue,’ I said. ‘I was hoping you’d have an idea.’

I lifted my knuckles to the front door, was just about to knock, and turned to Lilly.

‘But I think you’re one of them too,’ I said.

I knocked.

There were noises from within and we stood and waited for them to get closer. Mrs O’Donnell, it appeared, was in no hurry to open her door. Lilly and I stood there, feeling horribly exposed, and I started thinking that any second two angry sets of parents were going to come around the corner.

Along with Doctor Campbell, no doubt.

Finally, Mrs O’Donnell opened the door. She raised an eyebrow when she saw us, but ushered us inside without a word. She looked around before closing the front door, as if checking no one was following us.

‘I wondered if you might come here,’ she said, showing us through into the living room.

She was watching us oddly. There was a kind of resigned look, but it was mixed with what might have been a little sternness at us invading her home again.

‘Sorry to disturb-’ I began, but the sudden seriousness on her face shut me up.

‘Can either of you tell me what the hell is going on?’ she demanded.

Lilly and I just shook our heads.

‘Nothing good,’ Lilly said. ‘My… my parents aren’t my parents any more.’

‘Mine neither,’ I said.

Mrs O’Donnell looked at us with a kind of weary acceptance.

‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘You’re both out of breath.’

‘We ran here,’Lilly explained.

We sat down on one of the two sofas. Mrs O’Donnell disappeared for a few moments and returned with a couple of glasses of orange squash. She handed them out and took a seat on the other sofa.

She asked me what had happened, so I sketched the events since we had parted on the high street. All of that seemed an awfully long time ago, even though Mrs O’Donnell’s clock told me it was just less than an hour. Again, my body and a clock disagreed. Time passed weirdly through the looking glass.

Mrs O’Donnell heard me out, then shook her head and gave an exasperated tut.

‘And this thing he called you… nought -point-four … you’re sure that’s what he said?’

I nodded.

‘Well, what do you think that’s supposed to mean?’ she asked.

I told her that I didn’t have a clue.

‘Nought-point-four,’ she mused. ‘Decimals. Pretty meaningless unless you know what they’re referring to.’

She turned to Lilly and her face softened a little.

‘And what’s been happening to you, my dear?’

Lilly sighed.

‘It hasn’t gone a lot different to Kyle’s afternoon,’ she said. ‘Simon was, like, totally weird. I met up with him when everyone got moving again, and I thought he might be a little… I don’t know… disorientated by the… well, you know, whatever it is we’re calling all of this.’

She waved a hand in the air as if showing how hard this whole thing was to describe.

‘Anyway, I started asking him about what had happened to him, you know, all the freezy stuff, and he looked at me like I was mad.’

She broke off and then she shook her head.

‘No,’ she said sadly. ‘Except he didn’t look at me like that. I think I could maybe have coped with that. This look was something else.’ She paused as she tried to pin down her thoughts. ‘He looked at me like I was… dirt. ’

I thought about how Doctor Campbell had looked at me.

‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘I got angry with him. At first I thought that he just didn’t believe me, or something. But it wasn’t that. It was like he was… looking down on me. As if he knew something that I didn’t. So I got cross with him, and he just walked away. Just turned his back on me and walked. He didn’t turn around.’

Her top lip was quivering and she had tears welling in her eyes.

I felt a sudden flare of anger at Simon for doing that to Lilly, and then a stabbing pang of guilt when I realised it actually wasn’t a whole lot different to what I had done to her after visiting her parents’ house.

‘So I think: Fine. Be like that ,’ she continued. ‘And I walk home – the whole thing rolling round and round inside my brain. And I’m scared and angry and confused and angry again. And my parents are like: What’s up with you? And I don’t even know where to start. And they look like my parents, they sound like my parents, but there’s something… off about them, so I tell them that we’ll talk later and I need to go to my room, and that’s when Doctor Campbell rings the doorbell.’

‘Your parents didn’t call Doctor Campbell either?’ I asked her.

‘No,’ she said, sounding a little baffled by the question. ‘They didn’t have time. I mean I hadn’t even gone upstairs when he turned up, so how could they have called him? And then there’s the whole telephones not working thing.’

Mrs O’Donnell leaned forwards in her seat.

‘Do you think Simon told him to come around and see you?’

Lilly looked genuinely shocked.

‘Why would he…?’ she started. ‘I mean… he wouldn’t… would he?’

Mrs O’Donnell shrugged.

‘I guess it all depends on what we’re saying happened to these people,’ she said. ‘If we’re saying they were merely disorientated by the effect of their… of the trance, then, no, I don’t think your boyfriend would have told Doctor Campbell to come around to see you.’

Mrs O’Donnell leaned back again.

‘But I suspect neither of you is altogether satisfied with that as an explanation for the changes in personality that you noticed.’

‘It wasn’t Simon,’ Lilly said, with such certainty that Mrs O’Donnell raised an eyebrow of surprise. ‘And they weren’t my parents.’

‘Well,’ Mrs O’Donnell said, ‘that’s certainly a big statement to be making, isn’t it?’

Lilly nodded. ‘It’s true,’ she said.

‘But it was us that were hypnotised,’ Mrs O’Donnell said. ‘It was us that were put into a trance. This could be just some weird altered version of reality caused by Danny’s act.’

That had been Doctor Campbell’s line, and it had a persuasive logic to it.

‘But-’ Lilly tried to interrupt but was silenced by a curt wave of Mrs O’Donnell’s hand.

‘All I’m saying is that we cannot discount the possibility that there are psychological reasons for all that is happening to us. There are only four of us who saw things one way, and everyone else saw things another. Four individuals out of… what?… a total of a thousand people saw something that the other nine-hundred-and-ninety-six did not; whose version of the events would you believe first? Honestly, it wouldn’t be ours.’

I had stopped listening.

My mind had just slotted some details together, and I felt a shiver travel the length of my spine.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Oh no.’

Mrs O’Donnell looked over at me.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

Her voice seemed to travel miles to reach me through the sudden rush of panic I felt.

‘Oh no. No no no no,’ I said. ‘How many people did you say live in Millgrove?’

‘It’s about a thousand,’ she said. ‘Just under, I think.’

‘And how many of us were hypnotised? Are seeing things differently to everyone else?’

‘Four,’ she said, as if explaining something to a very dull child.

I didn’t care.

The numbers were too terrifying.

‘So, what are we, you know, as a percentage of the village’s population?’ I asked, feeling sick, hoping my maths was wrong.

‘Well, we would be four out of a thousand… Which would make us… let me think…’ She stopped. ‘Oh,’ she said coldly. Her face had lost some of its colour. She looked at me. ‘That’s very good, Kyle,’ she said. ‘We are in trouble, aren’t we?’

‘Er, what are we talking about here?’ Lilly asked, bemused.

‘What percentage of the village population do we represent?’ I asked her.

She shook her head. She should have worked it out way sooner than me.

‘The answer is nought-point-four,’ I said. ‘We are nought-point-four of a per cent.’

‘We have to find Rodney,’ Mrs O’Donnell said and it took me a few seconds to work out who she was talking about. Even though we had been talking about the four of us , it seemed crazy that I could have forgotten about the fate of the fourth person.

Mr Peterson.

Last seen in a foetal ball on the stage at the talent show.

Where we had left him.

‘What happened to him?’ I asked. ‘I mean, after everyone started moving again?’

‘I don’t know,’ Mrs O’Donnell said. ‘I was so relieved, I… I kind of forgot about him. I wandered down the high street, sort of in a daze, but no one was talking. They were just filing past, completely silent. When I spoke to someone they responded, but it was like they would rather not be talking. As if there was something… new… going on in their heads. They no longer seemed to need to chatter away about nothing. It was eerie. Like… like a funeral , or something.’

I drained the orange squash and rolled the glass around on my trouser leg.

‘I… I need to ask something,’ I said. ‘And… well, there’s no sort of easy way to… Are we talking aliens here, do you think?’

Both Lilly and Mrs O’Donnell looked at me seriously.

It was Lilly who spoke first.

‘There’s no such thing as aliens,’ she said definitely.

‘Wow, I had no idea that scientists had actually figured that out,’ I said. ‘Last I heard they were still keeping an open mind.’

‘You know what I mean. No little green men and silver spaceships.’

‘That’s not the only kind of alien life possible,’ I said. ‘Has anyone seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers? ’

Mrs O’Donnell sighed.

‘You do realise that was a film ?’ she said caustically. ‘Not a documentary. And Invasion of the Body Snatchers wasn’t really about aliens. It was about Communism, and the remake was about the changing roles of men and women in modern society.’

‘I thought they were from outer space,’ I said grumpily. ‘In fact, I remember them saying that the pod things that took over people and changed them were aliens.’

Mrs O’Donnell’s face told me that she thought I had missed the point that she was making.

‘The differences in text and subtext aside,’ she said, ‘you’re thinking that alien pod creatures arrived in Millgrove during a village talent show, and took over everybody except the handful of people hypnotised by a boy magician?’

‘Yeah, well you put it that way and it sounds kinda stupid,’ I said. ‘But pod people was only meant as an example from a science fiction movie. We are agreed that something weird happened, aren’t we? I mean, this isn’t everyday Millgrove, is it? People that we know are acting strangely . We recognise their faces, but no longer recognise them .’

‘We have no way of knowing what happened when we were in trances on that stage,’ Mrs O’Donnell said, ‘but surely it’s more likely that it’s US who are at fault, that we’re seeing things differently-’

‘Have you managed to get any TV or radio signals?’ I interrupted. ‘Managed to reach anyone by phone? Are you getting anything on your computer except those symbols we were looking at earlier?’

The look on her face answered my questions for me.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘I’m a kid. I know that. But it doesn’t mean that I’m incapable of seeing what’s going on around me. We are in deep, deep trouble here, and if you want the absolute truth I really don’t know what to do about it. But I do know that hiding my head in the sand is the wrong thing to do.’

I was getting frustrated and flustered.

I was even waving my arms in the air.

‘I think that’s why Lilly and I ran here. To get an adult to help us work out a way to put all this right. To bring our parents back to us. To make things go back to the way they were. We need you, Kate.’

It was the first time I’d called her, or even thought of her, by her first name.

‘OK,’ she said, getting to her feet. ‘We’ll go and find Rodney Peterson and then we’ll head out of town. We’ll get help. We will find people who can figure this thing out.’

‘Thank you,’ I said.

She smiled.

‘It’s fine, Kyle. Now let’s get going.’

We got into Kate’s car and the plan was simple. Stop off and check on Mr Peterson, and then get the heck out of Millgrove.

None of us was really surprised when it refused to start. The car didn’t make a sound. There was no ignition straining against a flat battery sound. Not a spark of life in the engine at all.

So we walked down the deserted streets, aware of just how strange it was that they were deserted. We knew that there were people inside those houses, but there were no signs nor sounds of life. It made me think of those ghost towns in Westerns. If a couple of spiky tumbleweeds had 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 hypnotised 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 colour. 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 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 that sound like they didn’t originate on Fringe or Doctor Who .’

The only one of Kate O’Donnell’s explanations that held any water for me – that we were still in a trance and the whole thing was just a fantasy – was the very one that was impossible to prove or disprove. It was like the old question that the film The Matrix was based upon: how can you tell whether you’re just a brain in a jar, experiencing a sophisticated virtual-reality program that is flawless in its execution?

The answer is: you can’t. So it actually doesn’t make much sense entertaining it. If we woke up and found out the day had just been a weird dream, then that would be great, but we couldn’t bank on it.

And we certainly couldn’t close our minds to other answers in the hope that it was right, because we could…

NOTE

The thought here is never returned to. Kyle must have finished the thought on the blank part of tape. Ernest Merrivale sees the fact as proof that the tapes are all recorded one after the other, without breaks. He suggests that if there had been any break between each tape, Kyle would have rewound the tape to see what he had last said, and thus would have realised that the blank tape was cutting off his words. The error would never have been repeated.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 683