Matt Haig - The Humans

‘That’s a very difficult thing. And a very strange thing to come from your mouth, Andrew.’

‘So, I suppose the next question is: what about me? Do you understand me?’

‘I don’t think you understand yourself, Andrew.’

I wasn’t Andrew. I knew I wasn’t Andrew. But equally, I was losing myself. I was a wasn’t, that was the problem. I was lying in bed with a human woman I could now almost appreciate as beautiful, wilfully still feeling the sting of antiseptic in my wounds, and thinking of her strange but fascinating skin, and the way she had cared for me. No one in the universe cared for me. (You didn’t did you?) We had technology to care for us now, and we didn’t need emotions. We were alone. We worked together for our preservation but emotionally we needed no one. We just needed the purity of mathematical truth. And yet, I was scared of falling asleep, because the moment I fell asleep my wounds would heal and right then I didn’t want that to happen. Right then, I found a strange but real comfort in the pain.

I had so many worries now. So many questions.

‘Do you believe humans are ever knowable?’ I asked.

‘I wrote a book on Charlemagne. I hope so.’

‘But humans, in their natural state, are they good or are they bad, would you say? Can they be trusted? Or is their own real state just violence and greed and cruelty?’

‘Well, that’s the oldest question there is.’

‘What do you think?’

‘I’m tired, Andrew. I’m sorry.’

‘Yes, me too. I’ll see you in the morning.’

‘Night.’

‘Night.’

I stayed awake for a while as Isobel slipped towards sleep. The trouble was, I still wasn’t used to the night. It may not have been as dark as I first thought it to be. There was moonlight, starlight, airglow, streetlamps, and sunlight backscattered by interplanetary dust, but the humans still spent half their time in deep shadow. This, I was sure, was one of the chief reasons for personal and sexual relationships here. The need to find comfort in the dark. And it was a comfort, being next to her. So I just stayed there, hearing her breath move in and out, sounding like the tide of some exotic sea. At some point my little finger touched hers, in the double-night beneath the duvet, and this time I kept it there and imagined I was really what she thought I was. And that we were connected. Two humans, primitive enough to truly care about each other. It was a comforting thought, and the one which led me down those ever-darkening stairs of the mind towards sleep.

I may need more time.

You do not need time.

I am going to kill who I need to kill, don’t worry about that.

We are not worried.

But I am not just here to destroy information. I am here to gather it. That is what you said, wasn’t it? Stuff on mathematical understanding can be read across the universe, I know that. I’m not talking about neuro-flashes. I’m talking about stuff that can only be picked up on from here, on Earth itself. To give us more insight into how the humans live. It has been a long time since anyone was here, at least in human terms.

Explain why you need more time for this. Complexity demands time, but humans are primitives. They are the most shallow of mysteries.

No. You are wrong. They exist simultaneously in two worlds – the world of appearances and the world of truth. The connecting strands between these worlds take many forms. When I first arrived here I did not understand certain things. For instance, I did not understand why clothes were so important. Or why a dead cow became beef, or why grass cut a certain way demanded not to be walked upon, or why household pets were so important to them. The humans are scared of nature, and are greatly reassured when they can prove to themselves they have mastery over it. This is why lawns exist, and why wolves evolved into dogs, and why their architecture is based on unnatural shapes. But, really, nature, pure nature is just a symbol to them. A symbol of human nature. They are interchangeable. So what I am saying—

What are you saying?

What I am saying is that it takes time to understand humans because they don’t understand themselves. They have been wearing clothes for so long. Metaphorical clothes. That is what I am talking about. That was the price of human civilisation – to create it they had to close the door on their true selves. And so they are lost, that is how I understand it. And that is why they invented art: books, music, films, plays, painting, sculpture. They invented them as bridges back to themselves, back to who they are. But however close they get they are for ever removed. What I am saying, I suppose, is that last night I was about to kill the boy. Gulliver. He was about to fall down the stairs in his sleep but then his true nature came out and he attacked me.

Attacked you with what?

With himself. With his arms. His hands. He was still asleep but his eyes were open. He attacked me, or the me he thinks I am. His father. And it was pure rage.

The humans are violent. That is not news.

No, I know. I know . But he woke, and he wasn’t violent. That is the battle they have. And I believe if we understand human nature a little more, then we will know better what action to take in the future, when other advances are made. In the future, when another over-population crisis arises there may come a time when Earth becomes a valid option for our species. So, surely as much knowledge as possible on human psychology and society and behaviour is going to help?

They are defined by greed.

Not all of them. For instance, there is a mathematician called Grigori Perelman. He turned down money and prizes. He looks after his mother. We have a distorted view. I think it would be useful for all of us if I researched further.

But you don’t need the two humans for that.

Oh, I do.

Why?

Because they think they know who I am. And I have a true chance of seeing them. The real them. Behind the walls they have built for themselves. And speaking of walls, Gulliver knows nothing now. I cancelled his knowledge of what his father told him on his last night. While I am here, there is no danger.

You must act soon. You don’t have for ever.

I know. Don’t worry. I won’t need for ever.

They must die.

Yes.

‘It was sleep psychosis,’ Isobel told Gulliver at breakfast the next day. ‘It’s very common. Lots of people have had it. Lots of perfectly normal and sane people. Like that man from R.E.M. He had it, and he was meant to be as nice as rock stars come.’

She hadn’t seen me. I had just entered the kitchen. But now she noticed my presence and was puzzled by the sight of me. ‘Your face,’ she said. ‘Last night there were cuts and bruises. It’s totally healed.’

‘Must have been better than it looked. The night might exaggerate things.’

‘Yes, but even so—’

She glanced at her son, struggling uneasily with his cereal, and decided not to go on.

‘You might need the day off school, Gulliver,’ said Isobel.

I expected him to agree to this, seeing that he preferred an education that involved staring at rail-tracks. But he looked at me, considered for a moment, and concluded, ‘No. No. It’s okay. I feel fine.’

Later, it was just me and Newton in the house. I was still ‘recovering’, you see. Recover. The most human of words, the implication being that healthy normal life is covering something – the violence that is there underneath, the violence I had seen in Gulliver the night before. To be healthy meant to be covered. Clothed. Literally and metaphorically. Yet I needed to find what lay beneath, something that would satisfy the hosts and justify the delay I was taking in my task. I discovered a pile of paper, tied with an elastic band. It was in Isobel’s wardrobe, hidden among all those essential clothes, yellowing with age. I sniffed the page and guessed at least a decade. The top sheet had the words ‘Wider than the Sky’ on them, along with these ones: ‘A novel by Isobel Martin’. A novel? I read a little bit of it and realised that although the central character’s name was Charlotte, she could just as easily have been called Isobel.