by Matt Haig
‘My replacement?’
‘That is what I said. I am here to do what you were unable to do.’
My heart was racing. ‘What do you mean?’
‘To destroy information.’
Fear and anger were sometimes the same thing. ‘You killed Ari?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why? He didn’t know the Riemann hypothesis had been proved.’
‘No. I know. I have been given broader instructions than you. I have been told to destroy anyone you have told about your’ – he considered the right word – ‘origins.’
‘So they’ve been listening to me? They said I was disconnected.’
He pointed at my left hand, where the technology still evidently lived. ‘They took your powers away, but they didn’t take theirs. They listen sometimes. They check.’
I stared at it. At my hand. It looked, suddenly, like an enemy.
‘How long have you been here? On Earth, I mean.’
‘Not long.’
‘Someone broke into this house a few nights ago. They accessed Isobel’s computer.’
‘That was me.’
‘So why the delay? Why didn’t you finish the job that night?’
‘You were here. I did not want to hurt you. No Vonnadorian has killed another Vonnadorian. Not directly.’
‘Well, I’m not really a Vonnadorian. I am a human. The paradox is that I’m light years from home, and yet this feels like my home. That is a strange thing to feel. So, what have you been doing? Where have you been living?’
He hesitated, swallowed hard. ‘I have been living with a female.’
‘A female human? A woman?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where?’
‘Outside Cambridge. A village. She doesn’t know my name. She thinks I am called Jonathan Roper. I convinced her we were married.’
I laughed. The laugh seemed to surprise him. ‘Why are you laughing?’
‘I don’t know. I have gained a sense of humour. That is one thing that happened when I lost the gifts.’
‘I am going to kill them, do you know that?’
‘No. Actually, I don’t. I told the hosts there is no point. That’s about the last thing I said to them. They seemed to understand me.’
‘I have been told to, and that is what I will do.’
‘But don’t you think it’s pointless, that there’s no real reason to do it?’
He sighed and shook his head. ‘No, I do not think that’, he said, in a voice which was mine but deeper, somehow, and flatter. ‘I do not see a separation. I have lived with a human for only a few days but I have seen the violence and hypocrisy that runs through this species.’
‘Yes, but there is good in them. A lot of good.’
‘No. I don’t see it. They can sit and watch dead human bodies on TV screens and feel nothing at all.’
‘That’s how I saw it at first, but—’
‘They can drive a car thirty miles every day and feel good about themselves for recycling a couple of empty jam jars. They can talk about peace being a good thing yet glorify war. They can despise the man who kills his wife in rage but worship the indifferent soldier who drops a bomb killing a hundred children.’
‘Yes, there is a bad logic here, I agree with you, yet I truly believe—’
He wasn’t listening. He stood up now, stared at me with determined eyes as he paced the room and delivered his speech. ‘They believe God is always on their side, even if their side is at odds with the rest of their species. They have no way of coming to terms with what are, biologically, the two most important events that happen to them – procreation and death. They pretend to know that money can’t buy them happiness, yet they would choose money every time. They celebrate mediocrity at every available opportunity and love to see others’ misfortune. They have lived on this planet for over a hundred thousand generations and yet they still have no idea about who they really are or how they should really live. In fact, they know less now than they once did.’
‘You’re right but don’t you think there is something beautiful in these contradictions, something mysterious?’
‘No. No, I do not. What I think is that their violent will has helped them dominate the world, and “civilise” it, but now there is nowhere left for them to go, and so the human world has turned in on itself. It is a monster that feasts on its own hands. And still they do not see the monster, or if they do they do not see that they are inside it, molecules within the beast.’
I looked at the bookshelves. ‘Have you read human poetry? Humans understand these failings.’
He still wasn’t listening.
‘They have lost themselves but not their ambitions. Do not think that they would not leave this place if they had the chance. They’re beginning to realise life is out there, that we or beings like us, are out there, and they won’t just stop at that. They will want to explore, and as their mathematical understanding expands, then they will eventually be able to do so. They will find us, eventually, and when they do, they will not want to be friends, even if they think – as they always do – that their own ends are perfectly benevolent. They will find a reason to destroy or subjugate other life forms.’
A girl in a school uniform walked past the house. Pretty soon, Gulliver would be coming home.
‘But there is no connection between killing these people and stopping progress, I promise you. No connection.’
He stopped pacing the room and came over to me, leant into my face. ‘Connections? I will tell you about connections . . . An amateur German physicist works in a patent office in Bern in Switzerland. He comes up with a theory that, half a century later, will lead to whole Japanese cities being destroyed, along with much of their population. Husbands, wives, sons, daughters. He does not want that connection to form, but that does not stop it forming.’
‘You’re talking about something very different.’
‘No. No, I am not. This is a planet where a daydream can end in death, and where mathematicians can cause an apocalypse. That is my view of the humans. Is it any different from yours?’
‘Humans learn the errors of their ways though,’ I said, ‘and they care more for each other than you think.’
‘No. I know they care for each other when the other in question is like them, or lives under their roof, but any difference is a step further away from their empathy. They find it preposterously easy to fall out among themselves. Imagine what they would do to us, if they could.’
Of course, I had already imagined this and was scared of the answer. I was weakening. I felt tired and confused.
‘But we were sent here to kill them. What makes us any better?’
‘We act as a result of logic, of rational thinking. We are here to preserve, even to preserve the humans. Think about it. Progress is a very dangerous thing for them. The boy must be killed, even if the woman can be saved. The boy knows. You told us yourself.’
‘You are making a little mistake.’
‘What is my mistake?’
‘You cannot kill a mother’s son without killing the mother.’
‘You are speaking in riddles. You have become like them.’
I looked at the clock. It was half-past four. Gulliver would return home at any moment. I tried to think what to do. Maybe this other me, this ‘Jonathan’ was right. Well, there wasn’t really a maybe. He was right: the humans could not handle progress very well and they were not good at understanding their place in the world. They were, ultimately, a great danger to themselves and others.
So I nodded, and I walked over and sat on that purple sofa. I felt sober now, and fully conscious of my pain.
‘You are right,’ I said. ‘You are right. And I want to help you.’
A game
‘I know you are right,’ I told him for the seventeenth time, looking straight into his eyes, ‘but I have been weak. I admit it to you now. I was and remain unable to harm any more humans, especially those ones I have lived with. But what
you have said to me has reminded me of my original purpose. I am not able to fulfil that purpose and no longer have the gifts to do so, but equally I realise it has to be fulfilled, and so in a way I’m thankful you are here. I’ve been stupid. I’ve tried and I have failed.’
Jonathan sat back on the sofa and studied me. He stared at my bruises and sniffed the air between us. ‘You have been drinking alcohol.’
‘Yes. I have been corrupted. It is very easy, I find, when you live like a human, to develop some of their bad habits. I have drunk alcohol. I have had sex. I have smoked cigarettes. I have eaten peanut butter sandwiches and listened to their simple music. I have felt many of the crude pleasures that they can feel, as well as physical and emotional pain. But still, despite my corruption, there remains enough of me left, enough of my clear rational self, to know what has to be done.’
He watched me. He believed me, because every word I was speaking was the truth. ‘I am comforted to hear this.’
I didn’t waste a moment. ‘Now listen to me. Gulliver will return home soon. He won’t be on a car or a bike. He’ll be walking. He likes to walk. We will hear his feet on the gravel, and then we will hear his key in the door. Normally, he heads straight into the kitchen to get himself a drink or a bowl of cereal. He eats around three bowls of cereal a day. Anyway, that is irrelevant. What is relevant is that he will most likely enter the kitchen first.’
Jonathan was paying close attention to everything I was telling him. It felt strange, terrible even, giving him this information, but I really couldn’t think of any other way.
‘You want to act fast,’ I said, ‘as his mother will be home soon. Also, there’s a chance he may be surprised to see you. You see, his mother has thrown me out of the house because I was unfaithful to her. Or rather the faith I had wasn’t the right kind. Given the absence of mind-reading technology, humans believe monogamy is possible. Another fact to consider is that Gulliver has, quite independently, attempted to take his own life before. So, I suggest that however you choose to kill him it would be a good idea to make it look like suicide. Maybe after his heart has stopped, you could slice one of his wrists, cutting through the veins. That way, less suspicion will be aroused.’
Jonathan nodded, then looked around the room. At the television, the history books, the armchair, the framed art prints on the wall, the telephone in its cradle.
‘It will be a good idea to have the television on,’ I told him, ‘even if you are not in this room. Because I always watch the news and leave it on.’
He switched on the television.
We sat and watched footage of war in the Middle East, without saying a word. But then he heard something that I couldn’t, his senses being so much sharper.
‘Footsteps,’ he said. ‘On the gravel.’
‘He’s here,’ I said. ‘Go to the kitchen. I’ll hide.’
90.2 MHz
I waited in the sitting room. The door was closed. There would be no reason for Gulliver to enter here. Unlike the living room he hardly ever came into this room. I don’t think I’d ever heard him do so.
So I stayed there, still and quiet, as the front door opened, then closed. He was unmoving, in the hallway. No footsteps.
‘Hello?’
Then a response. My voice but not my voice, coming from the kitchen. ‘Hello, Gulliver.’
‘What are you doing here? Mum said you’d gone. She phoned me, said you’d had an argument.’
I heard him – me, Andrew, Jonathan – respond in measured words. ‘That is right. We did. We had an argument. Don’t worry, it wasn’t too serious.’
‘Oh yeah? Sounded pretty serious from Mum’s side of things.’ Gulliver paused. ‘Whose are those clothes you’re wearing?’
‘Oh, these, they’re just old ones I didn’t know I had.’
‘I’ve never seen them before. And your face, it’s totally healed. You look completely better.’
‘Well, there you go.’
‘Right, anyway, I might go upstairs. I’ll get some food later.’
‘No. No. You will stay right here.’ The mind patterning was beginning. His words were shepherds ushering away conscious thought. ‘You will stay here and you will take a knife – a sharp knife, the sharpest there is in this room—’
It was about to happen. I could feel it, so I did what I had planned to do. I went over to the bookcase and picked up the clockwork radio, turned the power dial through a full 360-degree rotation and pressed the button with the little green circle.
On.
The small display became illuminated: 90.2 MHz.
Classical music blared out at almost full volume as I carried the radio back along the hallway. Unless I was very much mistaken it was Debussy.
‘You will now press that knife into your wrist and press it hard enough to cut through every vein.’
‘What’s that noise?’ Gulliver asked, his head clearing. I still couldn’t see him. I still wasn’t quite at the kitchen doorway.
‘Just do it. End your life, Gulliver.’
I entered the kitchen and saw my doppelgänger facing away from me as he pressed his hand on to Gulliver’s head. The knife fell to the floor. It was like looking at a strange kind of human baptism. I knew that what he was doing was right, and logical, from his perspective, but perspective was a funny thing.
Gulliver collapsed; his whole body was convulsing. I placed the radio down on the unit. The kitchen had its own radio. I switched that on, too. The TV was still on in the other room, as I had intended it to be. A cacophony of classical music and newsreaders and rock music filled the air as I reached Jonathan and pulled his arm so he now had no contact with Gulliver.
He turned, held me by the throat, pressing me back against the refrigerator.
‘You have made a mistake,’ he said.
Gulliver’s convulsions stopped and he looked around, confused. He saw two men, both identical, like his father, pressing into each other’s necks with equivalent force.
I knew that, whatever else happened, I had to keep Jonathan in the kitchen. If he stayed in the kitchen, with the radios on and the TV in the next room, we would be equally matched.
‘Gulliver,’ I said. ‘Gulliver, give me the knife. Any knife. That knife. Give me that knife.’
‘Dad? Are you my Dad?’
‘Yes, I am. Now give me the knife.’
‘Ignore him, Gulliver,’ Jonathan said. ‘He’s not your father. I am. He’s an imposter. He’s not what he looks like. He’s a monster. An alien. We have to destroy him.’
As we carried on, locked in our mutually futile combative pose, matching strength with strength, I saw Gulliver’s eyes fill with doubt.
He looked at me.
It was time for the truth.
‘I’m not your father. And neither is he. Your dad is dead, Gulliver. He died on Saturday, the seventeenth of April. He was taken by the . . .’ I thought of a way of putting it that he would understand. ‘. . . by the people we work for. They extracted information from him, and then they killed him. And they sent me here, as him, to kill you. And kill your mother. And anyone who knew about what he had achieved that day, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it because I started, I started to feel something that was meant to be impossible . . . I empathised with you. Grew to like you. Worry about you. Love you both. And I gave everything up . . . I have no power, no strength.’
‘Don’t listen to him, son,’ Jonathan said. And then he realised something. ‘Turn off the radios. Listen to me, turn off the radios now.’
I stared at Gulliver with pleading eyes. ‘Whatever you do, don’t turn them off. The signal interferes with the technology. It’s his left hand. His left hand. Everything is in his left hand . . .’
Gulliver was clambering upright. He looked numb. His face was unreadable.
I thought hard.
‘The leaf!’ I yelled. ‘Gulliver, you were right. The leaf, remember, the leaf! And think of—’
It was then that the other ver
sion of myself smashed his head into my nose, with swift and brutal force. My head rebounded against the fridge door and everything dissolved. Colours faded, and the noise of the radios and the faraway newsreader swam into each other. A swirling audio soup.
It was over.
‘Gulli—’
The other me switched one of the radios off. Debussy disappeared. But at the moment the music went away I heard a scream. It sounded like Gulliver. And it was, but it wasn’t a scream of pain. It was a scream of determination. A primal roar of rage, giving him the courage he needed to stab the knife that had been about to cut his own wrists into the back of a man who looked every inch his own father.
And the knife went deep.
With that roar, and that sight, the room sharpened into focus. I could get to my feet before Jonathan’s finger reached the second radio. I yanked him back by the hair. I saw his face. The pain clearly articulated in the way only human faces can manage. The eyes, shocked yet pleading. The mouth seeming to melt away.
Melt away. Melt away. Melt away.
The ultimate crime
I would not look at his face again. He could not die while that technology remained inside him. I dragged him over to the Aga.
‘Lift it up,’ I ordered Gulliver. ‘Lift up the cover.’
‘Cover?’
‘The hot plate.’
He did it. He lifted the circular steel ring up and let it fall back, and he did so without a single question in his eyes.
‘Help me,’ I said. ‘He’s fighting. Help me with his arm.’
Together we had enough force to press his palm down to the burning metal. The scream, as we kept him there, was horrendous. Knowing what it was I was doing, it truly sounded like the end of the universe.
I was committing the ultimate crime. I was destroying gifts, and killing one of my kind.
‘We’ve got to keep it there,’ I shouted to Gulliver. ‘We’ve got to keep it there! Hold! Hold! Hold!’
And then I switched my attention to Jonathan.
‘Tell them it is over,’ I whispered. ‘Tell them you have completed your mission. Tell them there has been a problem with the gifts and that you will not be able to return. Tell them, and I will stop the pain.’
