Matt Haig - The Humans

‘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:

f cgas

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

And then:

f dsbthdr

‘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.

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.