Matt Haig - The Humans

‘All right, Gulliver,’ I said, ‘It’s time to go home.’ I went over to Theo. I crouched down.

‘You are done now, do you understand?’

Theo understood. The girls were silent but still chewed, if only at half-speed. Cow-speed. We walked out of the park. Gulliver hardly had a scratch.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘I hurt him.’

‘Yes. How does that make you feel? Was it cathartic?’

He shrugged. The trace of a smile hid somewhere inside his lips. It frightened me, how close violence is to the civilised surface of a human being. It wasn’t the violence itself that was the worry, it was the amount of effort they’d gone to to conceal it. A homo sapiens was a primitive hunter who had woken each day with the knowledge he could kill. And now, the equivalent knowledge was only that he would wake up each day and buy something. So it was important, for Gulliver, to release what he only released in sleep out into the waking world.

‘Dad, you’re not yourself, are you?’ he said, before we got back.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not really.’

I expected another question but none came.

I was not Andrew. I was them. And we woke, and the still light bedroom was clotted with violet, and though my head didn’t hurt exactly, it felt extremely tight, as though my skull was a fist and my brain was the bar of soap it contained.

I tried switching off the light, but the dark didn’t work. The violet stayed, expanding and leaking across reality like spilt ink.

‘Get away,’ I urged the hosts. ‘ Get away .’

But they had a hold on me. You . If you are reading this. You had a terrible hold. And I was losing myself, and I knew this because I turned over in bed and I could see Isobel in the dark, facing away from me. I could see the shape of her, half under the duvet. My hand touched the back of her neck. I felt nothing towards her. We felt nothing towards her. We didn’t even see her as Isobel. She was simply a human. The way, to a human, a cow or a chicken or a microbe is simply a cow or a chicken or a microbe.

As we touched her bare neck, we gained the reading. It was all we needed. She was asleep, and all we had to do was stop her heart from beating. It was really very easy. We moved our hand slightly lower, felt the heart beating through her ribs. The movement of our hand woke her slightly, and she turned, sleepily, and said with her eyes still closed, ‘I love you.’

The ‘you’ was a singular one, and it was a call to me or the me-Andrew she thought I was, and it was then that I managed to defeat them, become a me and not a we, and the thought that she had just escaped death by such a narrow margin made me realise the intensity of my feelings towards her.

‘What’s the matter?’

I couldn’t tell her, so I kissed her instead. Kissing is what humans do when words have reached a place they can’t escape from. It is a switch to another language. The kiss was an act of defiance, maybe of war. You can’t touch us , is what the kiss said.

‘I love you,’ I told her, and as I smelt her skin, I knew I had never wanted anyone or anything more than I wanted her, but the craving for her was a terrifying one now. And I needed to keep underlining my point.

‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’

And after that, after the awkward shuffling away of that last thin layer of clothes, words retreated to the sounds they once were. We had sex. A happy entanglement of warm limbs and warmer love. A physical and psychological merging that conjured a kind of inner light, a bio-emotional phosphorescence, that was overwhelming in its gorgeousness. I wondered why they weren’t prouder of it. Of this magic. I wondered why, if they had to have flags, why they didn’t just opt for one with a picture of sex.

Afterwards, I held her and she held me and I gently kissed her forehead as the wind beat against the window.

She fell asleep.

I watched her, in the dark. I wanted to protect her and keep her safe. Then I got out of bed.

I had something to do.

I am staying here.

You can’t. You have gifts not made for that planet. Humans will become suspicious.

Well then, I want to be disconnected.

We cannot allow that.

Yes, you can. You have to. The gifts are not compulsory. That is the point. I cannot allow my mind to be interfered with.

We were not the ones interfering with your mind. We were trying to restore it.

Isobel doesn’t know anything about the proof. She doesn’t know. Just leave her. Leave us. Leave us all. Please. Nothing will happen.

You do not want immortality? You do not want the chance to return home or to visit anywhere else in the universe other than the lonely planet on which you now reside?

That is right.

You do not want the chance to take other forms? To return to your own original nature?

No. I want to be a human. Or as close to being a human as it is possible for me to be.

No one in all our histories has ever asked to lose the gifts.

Well, it is a fact you must now update.

You do realise what this means?

Yes.

You will be trapped in a body that cannot regenerate itself. You will grow old. You will get diseases. You will feel pain, and for ever know – unlike the rest of the ignorant species you want to belong to – that you have chosen that suffering. You have brought it on yourself.

Yes. I know that.

Very well. You have been given the ultimate punishment. And it makes it no less a punishment for having been asked for. You have now been disconnected. The gifts are gone. You are now human. If you declare you are from another planet you will never have proof. They will believe you are insane. And it makes no difference to us. It is easy to fill your place.

You won’t fill my place. It is a waste of resources. There is no point to the mission. Hello? Are you listening? Can you hear me? Hello? Hello? Hello?

Love is what the humans are all about but they don’t understand it. If they understood it, then it would disappear.

All I know is that it’s a frightening thing. And humans are very frightened of it, which is why they have quiz shows. To take their mind off it and think of something else.

Love is scary because it pulls you in with an intense force, a supermassive black hole which looks like nothing from the outside but from the inside challenges every reasonable thing you know. You lose yourself, like I lost myself, in the warmest of annihilations.

It makes you do stupid things – things that defy all logic. The opting for anguish over calm, for mortality over eternity, and for Earth over home.

I awoke feeling terrible. My eyes itched with tiredness. My back was stiff. There was a pain in my knee, and I could hear a mild ringing. Noises that belonged below a planet’s surface were coming from my stomach. Overall, the sensation I was feeling was one of conscious decay.

In short, I felt human. I felt forty-three years old. And now I had made the decision to stay I was full of anxiety.

This anxiety was not just about my physical fate. It was the knowledge that at some point in the future the hosts were going to send someone else. And what would I be able to do, now that I had no more gifts than the average human?

It was a worry, at first. But that gradually faded as time went by and nothing happened. Lesser worries began to occupy my mind. For instance, would I be able to cope with this life? What had once seemed exotic began to feel rather monotonous as things settled into a rhythm. It was the archetypal human one which went: wash, breakfast, check the Internet, work, lunch, work, dinner, talk, watch television, read a book, go to bed, pretend to be asleep, then actually sleep.