The Humans

by Matt Haig

  Oh, they had built rockets and probes and satellites. A few of them even worked. Yet, really, their mathematics had thus far let them down. They had yet to do the big stuff. The synchronisation of brains. The creation of free-thinking computers. Automation technology. Inter-galactic travel. And as I read, I realised I was stopping all these opportunities. I had killed their future.

  The phone rang. It was Isobel.

  ‘Andrew, what are you doing? Your lecture started ten minutes ago.’

  She was cross, but in a concerned way. It still felt strange, and new, having someone be worried about me. I didn’t fully understand this concern, or what she gained by having it, but I must confess I quite liked being the subject of it. ‘Oh yes. Thank you for reminding me. I will go. Bye, erm, darling.’

  Be careful. We are listening.

  The problem with equations

  I walked into the lecture hall. It was a large room made predominantly of dead trees.

  There were a lot of people staring at me. These were students. Some had pens and paper. Others had computers. All were waiting for knowledge. I scanned the room. There were 102 of them, in total. Always an unsettling number, stuck as it is between two primes. I tried to work out the students’ knowledge level. You see, I didn’t want to overshoot. I looked behind me. There was a whiteboard where words and equations were meant to be written but there was nothing on it.

  I hesitated. And during that hesitation someone sensed my weakness. Someone on the back row. A male of about twenty, with bushy blond hair and a T-shirt which said ‘What part of N = R x fs x fp x ne x f l x fi x fc x L don’t you understand?’

  He giggled at the wit he was about to display and shouted out, ‘You look a bit overdressed today, Professor!’ He giggled some more, and it was contagious; the howling laughter spreading like fire across the whole hall. Within moments, everyone in the hall was laughing. Well, everyone except one person, a female.

  The non-laughing female was looking at me intently. She had red curly hair, full lips and wide eyes. She had a startling frankness about her appearance. An openness that reminded me of a death flower. She was wearing a cardigan and coiling strands of her hair around her finger.

  ‘Calm down,’ I said, to the rest of them. ‘That is very funny. I get it. I am wearing clothes and you are referring to an occasion in which I was not wearing clothes. Very funny. You think it is a joke, like when Georg Cantor said the scientist Francis Bacon wrote the plays of William Shakespeare, or when John Nash started seeing men in hats who weren’t really there. That was funny. The human mind is a limited, but high plateau. Spend your life at its outer limits and, oops, you might fall off. That is funny. Yes. But don’t worry, you won’t fall off. Young man, you are right there in the middle of your plateau. Though I appreciate your concern, I have to say I am feeling much better now. I am wearing underpants and socks and trousers and even a shirt.’

  People were laughing again, but this time the laughter felt warmer. And it did something to me, inside, this warmth. So then I started laughing, too. Not at what I had just said, because I didn’t see how that was funny. No. I was laughing at myself. The impossible fact that I was there, on that most absurd planet and yet actually liking being there. And I felt an urge to tell someone how good it felt, in human form, to laugh. The release of it. And I wanted to tell someone about it and I realised that I didn’t want to tell the hosts. I wanted to tell Isobel.

  Anyway, I did the lecture. Apparently I had been meant to be talking about something called ‘post-Euclidean geometry’. But I didn’t want to talk about that, so I talked about the boy’s T-shirt.

  The formula written on it was something called Drake’s equation. It was an equation devised to calculate the likelihood of advanced civilisations in Earth’s galaxy, or what the humans called the Milky Way galaxy. (That is how humans came to terms with the vast expanse of space. By saying it looks like a splatter of spilt milk. Something dropped out of the fridge that could be wiped away in a second.)

  So, the equation:

  N = R x fp x ne x f l x f i x fc x L

  N was the number of advanced civilisations in the galaxy with whom communication might be possible. R was the average annual rate at which stars were formed. The f p was the fraction of those stars with planets. The ne was the average number of those planets that have the right eco-systems for life. The f 1 was the fraction of those planets where life would actually develop. The f i was the fraction of the above planets that could develop intelligence. The f c was the fraction of those where a communicative technologically advanced civilisation could develop. And L was the lifetime of the communicative phase.

  Various astrophysicists had looked at all the data and decided that there must, in fact, be millions of planets in the galaxy containing life, and even more in the universe at large. And some of these were bound to have advanced life with very good technology. This of course was true. But the humans didn’t just stop there. They came up with a paradox. They said, ‘Hold on, this can’t be right. If there are this many extraterrestrial civilisations with the ability to contact us then we would know about it because they would have contacted us.’

  ‘Well, that’s true, isn’t it?’ said the male whose T-shirt started this detour.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, it’s not. Because the equation should have some other fractions in there. For instance, it should have—’

  I turned and wrote on the board behind me:

  fcgas

  ‘Fraction who could give a shit about visiting or communicating with Earth.’

  And then:

  fdsbthdr

  ‘Fraction who did so but the humans didn’t realise.’

  It was not exactly difficult to make human students of mathematics laugh. Indeed, I had never met a sub-category of life form so desperate to laugh – but still, it felt good. For a few brief moments, it even felt slightly more than good.

  I felt warmth and, I don’t know, a kind of forgiveness or acceptance from these students.

  ‘But listen,’ I said, ‘don’t worry. Those aliens up there – they don’t know what they are missing.’

  Applause. (When humans really like something they clap their hands together. It makes no sense. But when they do it on behalf of you, it warms your brain.)

  And then, at the end of the lecture, the staring woman came up to me.

  The open flower.

  She stood close to me. Normally, when humans stand and talk to each other they try and leave some air between them, for purposes of breathing and etiquette and claustrophobia limitation. With this one, there was very little air.

  ‘I phoned,’ she said, with her full mouth, in a voice I had heard before, ‘to ask about you. But you weren’t there. Did you get my message?’

  ‘Oh. Oh yes. Maggie. I got the message.’

  ‘You seemed on top form today.’

  ‘Thank you. I thought I would do something a bit different.’

  She laughed. The laughter was fake, but something about its fakeness made me excited for some unfathomable reason. ‘Are we still having our first Tuesdays of the month?’ she asked me.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said, utterly confused. ‘First Tuesdays of the month will be left intact.’

  ‘That’s good.’ Her voice sounded warm and menacing, like the wind that speeds across the southern waste lands of home. ‘And listen, you know that heavy conversation we had, the night before you went la-la?’

  ‘La-la?’

  ‘You know. Before your routine at Corpus Christi.’

  ‘What did I tell you? My mind’s a little hazy about that night, that’s all.’

  ‘Oh, the kind of things you can’t say in lecture halls.’

  ‘Mathematical things?’

  ‘Actually, correct me if I’m wrong, but mathematical things are the kind of things you can say in lecture halls.’

  I wondered about this woman, this girl, and more specifically I wondered what kind of relationship she’d had with Andrew Martin.


  ‘Yes. Oh yes. Of course.’

  This Maggie knew nothing, I told myself.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I’ll see you.’

  ‘Yes. Yes. See you.’

  She walked away, and I watched her walk away. For a moment there was no fact in the universe except the one that related to a female human called Maggie walking away from me. I didn’t like her, but I had no idea why.

  The violet

  A little while later I was in the college café, with Ari, having a grapefruit juice while he had a sugar-laden coffee and a packet of beef-flavoured crisps.

  ‘How’d it go, mate?’

  I tried not to catch his cow-scented breath. ‘Good. Good. I educated them about alien life. Drake’s Equation.’

  ‘Bit out of your territory?’

  ‘Out of my territory? What do you mean?’

  ‘Subject-wise.’

  ‘Mathematics is every subject.’

  He screwed up his face. ‘Tell ’em about Fermi’s Paradox?’

  ‘They told me, actually.’

  ‘All bollocks.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘Well, what the fuck would an extraterrestrial life form want to come here for?’

  ‘That is pretty much what I said.’

  ‘I mean, personally, I think physics tells us there is an exo-planet out there with life on it. But I don’t think we understand what we’re looking for or what form it will take. Though I think this will be the century we find it. Course, most people don’t want to find it. Even the ones who pretend they do. They don’t want to really.’

  ‘Don’t they? Why not?’

  He held up his hand. A signal for me to have patience while he completed the important task of chewing and then swallowing the crisps that were in his mouth. ‘’Cause it troubles people. They turn it into a joke. You’ve got the brightest physicists in the world these days, saying over and over and over, as plainly as physicists can manage, that there has to be other life out there. And other people too – and I mean thick people, mainly – you know, star sign people, the kind of people whose ancestors used to find omens in ox shit. But not just them, other people too, people who should know a lot better – you’ve got those people saying aliens are obviously made up because War of the Worlds was made up and Close Encounters of The Third Kind was made up and though they liked those things they kind of formed a prejudice in their head that aliens can only be enjoyed as fiction. Because if you believe in them as fact you are saying the thing that every unpopular scientific breakthrough in history has said.’

  ‘Which is what?

  ‘That humans are not at the centre of things. You know, the planet is in orbit around the sun. That was a fucking hilarious joke in the 1500s, but Copernicus wasn’t a comedian. He was, apparently, the least funny man of the whole Renaissance. He made Raphael look like Richard Pryor. But he was telling the fucking truth. The planet is in orbit around the sun. But that was out there, I’m telling you. Course, he made sure he was dead by the time it was published. Let Galileo take the heat.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Yes.’

  As I listened, I noticed a pain begin behind my eyes, getting sharper. On the fringes of my vision there was a blur of violet.

  ‘Oh, and animals have nervous systems,’ Ari went on, between swigs of coffee. ‘And could feel pain. That annoyed a few people at the time, too. And some people still don’t want to believe the world is as old as it is because that would mean having to accept the truth that humans, in the day that has been the Earth, have been here for less than a minute. We’re a late-night piss in the toilet, that’s all we are.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, massaging my eyelids.

  ‘Recorded history is just the length it takes to the flush. And now we know we don’t have free will, people are getting pissed off about that, too. So, if and when they discover aliens they’d be really pretty unsettled because then we’d have to know, once and for all, that there is nothing really unique or special about us at all.’ He sighed, and gazed intently at the interior of his empty packet of crisps. ‘So I can see why it’s easy to dismiss alien life as a joke, one for teenage boys with overactive wrists and imaginations.’

  ‘What would happen,’ I asked him, ‘if an actual alien were found on Earth?’

  ‘What do you think would happen?’

  ‘I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you.’

  ‘Well, I think if they had the brains to get here they’d have the brains to not reveal they were alien. They could have been here. They could have arrived in things that weren’t anything like sci-fi ‘ships’. They might not have UFOs. There might be no flying involved, and no object to fail to identify. Who the fuck knows? Maybe they were just you.’

  I sat upright in my chair. Alert. ‘What?’

  ‘U. As in: no FO. Unidentified. Unidentified.’

  ‘Okay. But what if, somehow, they were identified. They were “I”. What if humans knew an alien was living among them?’

  After asking this, all around the café appeared little wisps of violet in the air, which no one seemed to notice.

  Ari downed the last of his coffee, and then considered for a moment. Scratched his face with his meaty fingers. ‘Well, put it this way, I wouldn’t want to be that poor bastard.’

  ‘Ari,’ I said. ‘Ari, I am that—’

  Poor bastard, was what I was going to say. But I didn’t because right then, at that precise moment, there was a noise inside my head. It was a sound of the highest possible frequency and it was extremely loud. Accompanying it, and matching it for intensity, was the pain behind my eyes, which became infinitely worse. It was the most excruciating pain I’d ever experienced, and it was a pain I had no control over.

  Wishing it not to be there wasn’t the same thing as it not being there, and that confused me. Or it would have done, if I’d had the capacity to think beyond the pain. And I kept thinking about the pain, and the sound, and the violet. But this sharp, throbbing heat pressing behind my eyes was too much.

  ‘Mate, what’s up?’

  I was holding my head by this point, trying to close my eyes, but they wouldn’t close.

  I looked at Ari’s unshaven face, then at the few other people in the café, and the girl with glasses who was standing behind the counter. Something was happening to them, and to the whole place. Everything was dissolving into a rich, varied violet, a colour more familiar to me than any other. ‘The hosts,’ I said, aloud and almost simultaneously the pain increased further. ‘Stop, oh stop, oh stop.’

  ‘Man, I’m calling an ambulance,’ he said, because I was on the floor now. A swirling violet sea.

  ‘No.’

  I fought against it. I got to my feet.

  The pain lessened.

  The ringing became a low hum.

  The violet faded. ‘It was nothing,’ I said.

  Ari laughed, nervous. ‘I’m no expert but that honestly looked like something.’

  ‘It was just a headache. A flash of pain. I’ll go to the doctor and check it out.’

  ‘You should. You really should.’

  ‘Yes. I will.’

  I sat down. An ache remained, as a reminder, for a while, along with a few ethereal wisps in the air only I could see.

  ‘You were going to say something. About other life.’

  ‘No,’ I said quietly.

  ‘Pretty sure you were, man.’

  ‘Yeah, well. I think I’ve forgotten.’

  And after that the pain disappeared altogether, and the air lost its final trace of violet.

  The possibility of pain

  I didn’t mention anything to Isobel or Gulliver. I knew it was unwise, because I knew the pain had been a warning. And besides, even if I wanted to tell her I wouldn’t have, because Gulliver had arrived home with a bruised eye. When human skin bruises, the skin takes various shades. Greys, browns, blues, greens. Among them, a dull violet. Beautiful, petrifying violet.

  ‘Gulliver, what happe
ned?’ His mother asked the question quite a few times that evening but never got a satisfactory reply. He went into the small utility room behind the kitchen and closed the door.

  ‘Please, Gull, come out of there,’ said his mother. ‘We need to talk about this.’

  ‘Gulliver, come out of there,’ I added.

  Eventually he opened the door. ‘Just leave me alone.’ That ‘alone’ was said with such a hard, cold force Isobel decided it was best to grant him that wish so we stayed downstairs while he trudged up to his room.

  ‘I’m going to have to phone the school about this tomorrow.’

  I said nothing. Of course, I would later realise this was a mistake. I should have broken my promise to Gulliver and told her that he hadn’t been going to school. But I didn’t, because it wasn’t my duty. I did have a duty, but it wasn’t to humans. Even these ones. Especially these ones. And it was a duty I was already failing to follow, as that afternoon’s warning in the café had told me.

  Newton, though, had a different sense of duty and he headed up three flights of stairs to be with Gulliver. Isobel didn’t know what to do, so she opened a few cupboard doors, stared into the cupboards, sighed, then closed them again.

  ‘Listen,’ I found myself saying, ‘he is going to have to find his own way, and make his own mistakes.’

  ‘We need to find out who did that to him, Andrew. That’s what we need to do. People can’t just go around inflicting violence on human beings like that. They just can’t do that. What ethical code do you live by where you can sound so indifferent about it?’

  What could I say? ‘I’m sorry. I’m not indifferent. I care for him, of course I do.’ And the terrifying thing, the absolutely awful fact I had to face, was that I was right. I did care. The warning had failed, you see. Indeed, it had had the opposite effect.

  That’s what starts to happen, when you know it is possible for you to feel pain you have no control over. You become vulnerable. Because the possibility of pain is where love stems from. And that, for me, was very bad news indeed.