Matt Haig - The Humans

‘You got through it last time and you’ll get through it this time.’

‘No,’ I whispered, unheard. ‘No, no, no.’

‘ Mnnn ,’ he said, gripping his shoulder in infinite pain.

‘I love you, Daniel.’

His eyes clenched shut now, the pain too much.

‘Stay with me, stay with me, I can’t live all alone…’

His head was on her knee. She kept caressing his face. So this was love. Two life forms in mutual reliance. I was meant to be thinking I was watching weakness, something to scorn, but I wasn’t thinking that at all.

He stopped making noise, he seemed instantly heavier for her, and the deep clenched creases around his eyes softened and relaxed. It was done.

Tabitha howled, as if something had been physically wrenched out of her. I have never heard anything like that sound. It troubled me greatly, I have to say.

A cat emerged from the doorway, startled by the noise maybe, but indifferent to the scene in general. It returned back from where it came.

‘No,’ said Tabitha, over and over, ‘no, no, no!’

Outside, the ambulance skidded to a halt on the gravel. Blue flashing lights appeared through the window.

‘They’re here,’ I told Tabitha and went downstairs. It was a strange and overwhelming relief to tread my way down those soft, carpeted stairs, and for those desperate sobs and futile commands to fade away into nothing.

I thought about where we – you and I – are from.

Where we are from there are no comforting delusions, no religions, no impossible fiction.

Where we are from there is no love and no hate. There is the purity of reason.

Where we are from there are no crimes of passion because there is no passion.

Where we are from there is no remorse because action has a logical motive and always results in the best outcome for the given situation.

Where we are from there are no names, no families living together, no husbands and wives, no sulky teenagers, no madness.

Where we are from we have solved the problem of fear because we have solved the problem of death. We will not die. Which means we can’t just let the universe do what it wants to do, because we will be inside it for eternity.

Where we are from we will never be lying on a luxurious carpet, clutching our chest as our faces turn purple and our eyes seek desperately to view our surroundings for one last time.

Where we are from our technology, created on the back of our supreme and comprehensive knowledge of mathematics, has meant not only that we can travel great distances, but also that we can rearrange our own biological ingredients, renew and replenish them. We are psychologically equipped for such advances. We have never been at war with ourselves. We never place the desires of the individual over the requirements of the collective.

Where we are from we understand that if the humans’ rate of mathematical advancement exceeds their psychological maturity, then action needs to be taken. For instance, the death of Daniel Russell, and the knowledge he held, could end up saving many more lives. And so: he is a logical and justifiable sacrifice.

Where we are from there are no nightmares.

And yet, that night, for the very first time in my life I had a nightmare.

A world of dead humans with me and that indifferent cat walking through a giant carpeted street full of bodies. I was trying to get home. But I couldn’t. I was stuck here. I had become one of them. Stuck in human form, unable to escape the inevitable fate awaiting all of them. And I was getting hungry and I needed to eat but I couldn’t eat, because my mouth was clamped shut. The hunger became extreme. I was starving, wasting away at rapid speed. I went to the garage I had been in that first night and tried to shove food in my mouth, but it was no good. It was still locked from this inexplicable paralysis. I knew I was going to die.

Die.

How did humans ever stomach the idea?

I woke.

I was sweating and out of breath. Isobel touched my back. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, as Tabitha had said. ‘It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right.’

The next day I was alone.

Well no, actually, that’s not quite true.

I wasn’t alone. There was the dog. Newton. The dog named after a human who had come up with the ideas of gravity and inertia. Given the slow speed with which the dog left its basket, I realised the name was a fitting tribute to these discoveries. He was awake now. He was old and he hobbled, and he was half-blind.

He knew who I was. Or who I wasn’t. And he growled whenever he was near me. I didn’t quite understand his language just yet but I sensed he was displeased. He showed his teeth but I could tell years of subservience to his bipedal owners meant the very fact that I was standing up was enough for me to command a certain degree of respect.

I felt sick. I put this down to the new air I was breathing. But each time I closed my eyes I saw Daniel Russell’s anguished face as he lay on the carpet. I also had a headache, but that was the lingering after-effect of the energy I had exerted yesterday.

I knew life was going to be easier during my short stay here if Newton was on my side. He might have information, have picked up on signals, heard things. And I knew there was one rule that held fast across the universe: if you wanted to get someone on your side what you really had to do was relieve their pain . It seems ridiculous now, such logic. But the truth was even more ridiculous, and too dangerous to acknowledge to myself, that after the need to hurt I felt an urge to heal.

So I went over and gave him a biscuit. And then, after giving him the biscuit, I gave him sight. And then, as I stroked his hind leg, he whimpered words into my ear I couldn’t quite translate. I healed him, giving myself not only an even more intense headache but also wave upon wave of fatigue in the process. Indeed, so exhausted was I that I fell asleep on the kitchen floor. When I woke up, I was coated in dog saliva. Newton’s tongue was still at it, licking me with considerable enthusiasm. Licking, licking, licking, as though the meaning of canine existence was something just beneath my skin.

‘Could you please stop that?’ I said. But he couldn’t. Not until I stood up. He was physically incapable of stopping.

And even once I had stood up he tried to stand up with me, and on me, as if he wanted to be upright, too. It was then I realised the one thing worse than having a dog hate you is having a dog love you. Seriously, if there was a needier species in the universe I had yet to meet it.

‘Get away,’ I told him. ‘I don’t want your love.’

I went to the living room and sat down on the sofa. I needed to think. Would Daniel Russell’s death be viewed by the humans as suspicious? A man on heart medication succumbing to a second and this time fatal heart attack? I had no poison, and no weapon they would ever be able to identify.

The dog sat down next to me, placed his head on my lap, then lifted his head off my lap, and then on again, as if deciding whether or not to put his head on my lap was the biggest decision he had ever faced.

We spent hours together that day. Me and the dog. At first I was annoyed that he wouldn’t leave me alone, as what I needed to do was to focus and work out when I was going to act next. To work out how much more information I needed to acquire before doing what would have to be my final acts here, eliminating Andrew Martin’s wife and child. I shouted at the dog again to leave me alone, and he did so, but when I stood in the living room with nothing but my thoughts and plans I realised I felt a terrible loneliness and so called him back. And he came, and seemed happy to be wanted again.