Matt Haig - The Humans

‘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 version 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.

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.’

A lie. And a gamble that they were tuned to him and not to me. But a necessary one. He told them, yet his pain continued.

How long were we like this? Seconds? Minutes? It was like Einstein’s conundrum. The hot stove versus the pretty girl. Towards the end of it, Jonathan was on his knees, losing consciousness.

Tears streamed down my face as I finally pulled that sticky mess of a hand away. I checked his pulse. He was gone. The knife pierced through his chest as he fell back. I looked at the hand, and this face, and it was clear. He was disconnected, not just from the hosts, but from life.

The reason it was clear was that he was becoming himself – the cellular reconfiguration that automatically followed death. The whole shape of him was changing, curling in, his face flattening, his skull lengthening, his skin mottled shades of purple and violet. Only the knife in his back stayed. It was strange. Within the context of that Earth kitchen this creature, structured precisely as I had been, seemed entirely alien to me.

A monster. A beast. Something other.

Gulliver stared, but said nothing. The shock was so profound it was a challenge to breathe, let alone speak.