The Humans

by Matt Haig

  As we listened I tried to work out why Newton and his species were so enamoured of humans.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘What is it about the humans?’

  Newton laughed. Or as close as a dog can get to laughing, which is pretty close.

  I persisted with my line of enquiry. ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Spill the beans.’ He seemed a bit coy. I don’t think he really had an answer. Maybe he hadn’t reached his verdict, or he was too loyal to be truthful.

  I put on some different music. I played the music of someone called Ennio Morricone. I played an album called Space Oddity by David Bowie, which, in its simple patterned measure of time, was actually quite enjoyable. As was Moon Safari by Air, though that shed little light on the moon itself. I played A Love Supreme by John Coltrane and Blue Monk by Thelonious Monk. This was jazz music. It was full of the complexity and contradictions that I would soon learn made humans human. I listened to ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ by Leonard Bernstein and ‘Moonlight Sonata’ by Ludwig van Beethoven and Brahms’ ‘Intermezzo op. 17’. I listened to the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, Daft Punk, Prince, Talking Heads, Al Greene, Tom Waits, Mozart. I was intrigued to discover the sounds that could make it on to music – the strange talking radio voice on ‘I Am the Walrus’ by the Beatles, the cough at the beginning of Prince’s ‘Raspberry Beret’ and at the end of Tom Waits songs. Maybe that is what beauty was, for humans. Accidents, imperfections, placed inside a pretty pattern. Asymmetry. The defiance of mathematics. I thought about my speech at the Museum of Quadratic Equations. With the Beach Boys I got a strange feeling, behind my eyes and in my stomach. I had no idea what that feeling was, but it made me think of Isobel, and the way she had hugged me last night, after I had come home and told her Daniel Russell had suffered a fatal heart attack in front of me.

  There’d been a slight moment of suspicion, a brief hardening of her stare, but it had softened into compassion. Whatever else she might have thought about her husband he wasn’t a killer. The last thing I listened to was a tune called ‘Clair de Lune’ by Debussy. That was the closest representation of space I had ever heard, and I stood there, in the middle of the room, frozen with shock that a human could have made such a beautiful noise.

  This beauty terrified me, like an alien creature appearing out of nowhere. An ipsoid, bursting out of the desert. I had to stay focused. I had to keep believing everything I had been told. That this was a species of ugliness and violence, beyond redemption.

  Newton was scratching at the front door. The scratching was putting me off the music so I went over and tried to decipher what he wanted. It turned out that what he wanted was to go outside. There was a ‘lead’ I had seen Isobel use, and so I attached it to the collar.

  As I walked the dog I tried to think more negatively towards the humans.

  And it certainly seemed ethically questionable, the relationship between humans and dogs, both of whom – on the scale of intelligence that covered every species in the universe – would have been somewhere in the middle, not too far apart. But I have to say that dogs didn’t seem to mind it. In fact, they went along quite happily with the set-up most of the time.

  I let Newton lead the way.

  We passed a man on the other side of the road. The man just stopped and stared at me and smiled to himself. I smiled and waved my hand, understanding this was an appropriate human greeting. He didn’t wave back. Yes, humans are a troubling species. We carried on walking, and we passed another man. A man in a wheelchair. He seemed to know me.

  ‘Andrew,’ he said, ‘isn’t it terrible – the news about Daniel Russell?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was there. I saw it happen. It was horrible, just horrible.’

  ‘Oh my God, I had no idea.’

  ‘Mortality is a very tragic thing.’

  ‘Indeed, indeed it is.’

  ‘Anyway, I had better be going. The dog is in quite a hurry. I will see you.’

  ‘Yes, yes, absolutely. But may I ask: how are you? I heard you’d been a bit unwell yourself?’

  ‘Oh, fine. I am over that. It was just a bit of a misunderstanding, really.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  The conversation dwindled further, and I made my excuses, Newton dragging me forward until we reached a large stretch of grass. This is what dogs liked to do, I discovered. They liked to run around on grass, pretending they were free, shouting, ‘We’re free, we’re free, look, look, look how free we are!’ at each other. It really was a sorry sight. But it worked for them, and for Newton in particular. It was a collective illusion they had chosen to swallow and they were submitting to it wholeheartedly, without any nostalgia for their former wolf selves.

  That was the remarkable thing about humans – their ability to shape the path of other species, to change their fundamental nature. Maybe it could happen to me, maybe I could be changed, maybe I already was being changed? Who knew? I hoped not. I hoped I was staying as pure as I had been told, as strong and isolated as a prime, as a ninety-seven.

  I sat on a bench and watched the traffic. No matter how long I stayed on this planet I doubted I would ever get used to the sight of cars, bound by gravity and poor technology to the road, hardly moving on the roads because there were so many of them.

  Was it wrong to thwart a species’ technological advancement? That was a new question in my mind. I didn’t want it there, so I was quite relieved when Newton started barking. I turned to look at him. He was standing still, his head steady in one direction, as he carried on making as loud a noise as he possibly could.

  ‘Look!’ he seemed to bark. ‘Look! Look! Look!’ I was picking up his language.

  There was another road, a different one to the one with all the traffic. A line of terraced houses facing the park.

  I turned towards it, as Newton clearly wanted me to do. I saw Gulliver, on his own, walking along the pavement, trying his best to hide behind his hair. He was meant to be at school. And he wasn’t, unless human school was walking along the street and thinking, which it really should have been. He saw me. He froze. And then he turned around and started walking in the other direction.

  ‘Gulliver!’ I called. ‘Gulliver!’

  He ignored me. If anything, he started walking away faster than he had done before. His behaviour concerned me. After all, inside his head was the knowledge that the world’s biggest mathematical puzzle had been solved, and by his own father. I hadn’t acted last night. I had told myself that I needed to find more information, check there was no one else Andrew Martin could have told. Also, I was probably too exhausted after my encounter with Daniel. I would wait another day, maybe even two. That had been the plan. Gulliver had told me he hadn’t said anything, and that he wasn’t going to, but how could he be totally trusted? His mother was convinced, right now, that he was at school. And yet he evidently wasn’t. I got up from the bench and walked over the litter-strewn grass to where Newton was still barking.

  ‘Come on,’ I said, realising I should probably have acted already. ‘We have to go.’

  We arrived on the road just as Gulliver was turning off it, and so I decided to follow him and see where he was going. At one point he stopped and took something from his pocket. A box. He took out a cylindrical object and put it in his mouth and lit it. He turned around, but I had sensed he would and was already hiding behind a tree.

  He began walking again. Soon he reached a larger road. Coleridge Road, this one was called. He didn’t want to be on this road for long. Too many cars. Too many opportunities to be seen. He kept on walking, and after a while the buildings stopped and there were no cars or people any more.

  I was worried he was going to turn around, because there were no nearby trees – or anything else – to hide behind. Also, although I was physically near enough to be easily seen if he did turn to look, I was too far for any mind manipulation to work. Remarkably though, he didn’t turn around again. Not once.

  We passed a building with lots of empty cars outside, shi
ning in the sun. The building had the word ‘Honda’ on it. There was a man inside the glass in a shirt and tie, watching us. Gulliver then cut across a grass field.

  Eventually, he reached four metal tracks in the ground: parallel lines, close together but stretching as far as the eye could see. He just stood there, absolutely still, waiting for something.

  Newton looked at Gulliver and then up at me, with concern. He let out a deliberately loud whine. ‘Sssh!’ I said. ‘Keep quiet.’

  After a while, a train appeared in the distance, getting closer as it was carried along the tracks. I noticed Gulliver’s fists clench and his whole body stiffen as he stood only a metre or so away from the train’s path. As the train was about to pass where he was standing Newton barked, but the train was too loud and too close to Gulliver for him to hear.

  This was interesting. Maybe I wouldn’t have to do anything. Maybe Gulliver was going to do it himself.

  The train passed. Gulliver’s hands stopped being fists and he seemed to relax again. Or maybe it was disappointment. But before he turned around and started walking away, I had dragged Newton back, and we were out of sight.

  Grigori Perelman

  So, I had left Gulliver.

  Untouched, unharmed.

  I had returned home with Newton while Gulliver had carried on walking. I had no idea where he was going, but it was pretty clear to me, from his lack of direction, that he hadn’t been heading anywhere specific. I concluded, therefore, that he wasn’t going to meet someone. Indeed, he had seemed to want to avoid people.

  Still, I knew it was dangerous.

  I knew that it wasn’t just proof of the Riemann hypothesis which was the problem. It was knowledge that it could be proved, and Gulliver had that knowledge, inside his skull, as he walked around the streets.

  Yet I justified my delay because I had been told to be patient. I had been told to find out exactly who knew. If human progress was to be thwarted, then I needed to be thorough. To kill Gulliver now would have been premature, because his death and that of his mother would be the last acts I could commit before suspicions were aroused.

  Yes, this is what I told myself, as I unclipped Newton’s lead and re-entered the house, and then accessed that sitting-room computer, typing in the words ‘Poincaré Conjecture’ into the search box.

  Soon, I found Isobel had been right. This conjecture – concerning a number of very basic topological laws about spheres and four-dimensional space – had been solved by a Russian mathematician called Grigori Perelman. On 18 March 2010 – just over three years ago – it was announced that he had won a Clay Millennium Prize. But he had turned it down, and the million dollars that had gone with it.

  ‘I’m not interested in money or fame,’ he had said. ‘I don’t want to be on display like an animal in a zoo. I’m not a hero of mathematics.’

  This was not the only prize he had been offered. There had been others. A prestigious prize from the European Mathematical Society, one from the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid, and the Fields Medal, the highest award in mathematics. All of them he had turned down, choosing instead to live a life of poverty and unemployment, caring for his elderly mother.

  Humans are arrogant. Humans are greedy. They care about nothing but money and fame. They do not appreciate mathematics for its own sake, but for what it can get them.

  I logged out. Suddenly, I felt weak. I was hungry. That must have been it. So I went to the kitchen and looked for food.

  Crunchy wholenut peanut butter

  I ate some capers, and then a stock cube, and chewed on a stick-like vegetable called celery. Eventually, I got out some bread, a staple of human cuisine, and I looked in the cupboard for something to put on it. Caster sugar was my first option. And then I tried some mixed herbs. Neither was very satisfying. After much anxious trepidation and analysis of the nutritional information I decided to try something called crunchy wholenut peanut butter. I placed it on the bread and gave some to the dog. He liked it.

  ‘Should I try it?’ I asked him.

  Yes, you definitely should, appeared to be the response. (Dog words weren’t really words. They were more like melodies. Silent melodies sometimes, but melodies all the same.) It is very tasty indeed.

  He wasn’t wrong.

  As I placed it in my mouth and began to chew I realised that human food could actually be quite good. I had never enjoyed food before. Now I came to think of it, I had never enjoyed anything before. And yet today, even amid my strange feelings of weakness and doubt, I had experienced the pleasures of music and of food. And maybe even the simple enjoyment of canine company.

  After I had eaten one piece of bread and peanut butter I made another one for us both, and then another, Newton’s appetite proving to be at least a match for mine.

  ‘I am not what I am,’ I told him at one stage. ‘You know that, don’t you? I mean, that is why you were so hostile at first. Why you growled whenever I was near you. You sensed it, didn’t you? More than a human could. You knew there was a difference.’

  His silence spoke volumes. And as I stared into his glassy, honest eyes I felt the urge to tell him more.

  ‘I have killed someone,’ I told him, feeling a sense of relief. ‘I am what a human would categorise as a murderer, a judgemental term, and based in this case on the wrong judgements. You see, sometimes to save something you have to kill a little piece of it. But still, a murderer – that is what they would call me, if they knew. Not that they would ever really be able to know how I had done it.

  ‘You see, as you no doubt know, humans are still at the point in their development where they see a strong difference between the mental and the physical within the same body. They have mental hospitals and body hospitals, as if one doesn’t directly affect the other. And so, if they can’t accept that a mind is directly responsible for the body of the same person, they are hardly likely to understand how a mind – albeit not a human one – can affect the body of someone else. Of course, my skills are not just the product of biology. I have technology, but it is unseen. It is inside me. And now resides in my left hand. It allowed me to take this shape, it enables me to contact my home, and it strengthens my mind. It makes me able to manipulate mental and physical processes. I can perform telekinesis – look, look right now, look what I am doing with the lid of the peanut butter jar – and also something very close to hypnosis. You see, where I am from everything is seamless. Minds, bodies, technologies all come together in a quite beautiful convergence.’

  The phone rang at that point. It had rung earlier too. I didn’t answer it though. There were some tastes, just as there were some songs by the Beach Boys (‘In My Room’, ‘God Only Knows’, ‘Sloop John B’) that were just too good to disturb.

  But then the peanut butter ran out, and Newton and I stared at each other in mutual mourning. ‘I am sorry, Newton. But it appears we have run out of peanut butter.’

  This cannot be true. You must be mistaken. Check again.

  I checked again. ‘No, I am not mistaken.’

  Properly. Check properly. That was just a glance.

  I checked properly. I even showed him the inside of the jar. He was still disbelieving, so I placed the jar right up next to his nose, which was clearly where he wanted it. Ah, you see, there is still some. Look. Look. And he licked the contents of the jar until he too had to eventually agree we were out of the stuff. I laughed out loud. I had never laughed. It was a very odd feeling, but not unpleasant. And then we went and sat on the sofa in the living room.

  Why are you here?

  I don’t know if the dog’s eyes were asking me this, but I gave him an answer anyway. ‘I am here to destroy information. Information that exists in the bodies of certain machines and the minds of certain humans. That is my purpose. Although, obviously, while I am here I am also collecting information. Just how volatile are they? How violent? How dangerous to themselves and others? Are their flaws – and there do seem to be quite a few – insurmoun
table? Or is there hope? These questions are the sort I have in mind, even if I am not supposed to. First and foremost though, what I am doing involves elimination.’

  Newton looked at me bleakly, but he didn’t judge. And we stayed there, on that purple sofa, for quite a while. Something was happening to me, I realised, and it had been happening ever since Debussy and the Beach Boys. I wished I’d never played them. For ten minutes we sat in silence. This mournful mood only altered with the distraction of the front door opening and closing.

  It was Gulliver. He waited silently in the hallway for a moment or two, and then hung up his coat and dropped his schoolbag. He came into the living room, walking slowly. He didn’t make eye contact.

  ‘Don’t tell Mum, okay?’

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘Don’t tell her what?’

  He was awkward. ‘That I wasn’t at school.’

  ‘Okay. I won’t.’

  He looked at Newton, whose head was back on my lap. He seemed confused but didn’t comment. He turned to go upstairs.

  ‘What were you doing by the train track?’ I asked him.

  I saw his hands tense up. ‘What?’

  ‘You were just standing there, as the train passed.’

  ‘You followed me?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I did. I followed you. I wasn’t going to tell you. In fact, I am surprising myself by telling you now. But my innate curiosity won out.’

  He answered with a kind of muted groan, and headed upstairs.