The Humans (12 page)

‘Come on,’ I said, realising I should probably have acted already. ‘We have to go.’

We arrived on the road just as Gulliver was turning off it, and so I decided to follow him and see where he was going. At one point he stopped and took something from his pocket. A box. He took
out a cylindrical object and put it in his mouth and lit it. He turned around, but I had sensed he would and was already hiding behind a tree.

He began walking again. Soon he reached a larger road. Coleridge Road, this one was called. He didn’t want to be on this road for long. Too many cars. Too many opportunities to be seen. He
kept on walking, and after a while the buildings stopped and there were no cars or people any more.

I was worried he was going to turn around, because there were no nearby trees – or anything else – to hide behind. Also, although I was physically near enough to be easily seen if he
did turn to look, I was too far for any mind manipulation to work. Remarkably though, he didn’t turn around again. Not once.

We passed a building with lots of empty cars outside, shining in the sun. The building had the word ‘Honda’ on it. There was a man inside the glass in a shirt and tie, watching us.
Gulliver then cut across a grass field.

Eventually, he reached four metal tracks in the ground: parallel lines, close together but stretching as far as the eye could see. He just stood there, absolutely still, waiting for
something.

Newton looked at Gulliver and then up at me, with concern. He let out a deliberately loud whine. ‘Sssh!’ I said. ‘Keep quiet.’

After a while, a train appeared in the distance, getting closer as it was carried along the tracks. I noticed Gulliver’s fists clench and his whole body stiffen as he stood only a metre or
so away from the train’s path. As the train was about to pass where he was standing Newton barked, but the train was too loud and too close to Gulliver for him to hear.

This was interesting. Maybe I wouldn’t have to do anything. Maybe Gulliver was going to do it himself.

The train passed. Gulliver’s hands stopped being fists and he seemed to relax again. Or maybe it was disappointment. But before he turned around and started walking away, I had dragged
Newton back, and we were out of sight.

So, I had left Gulliver.

Untouched, unharmed.

I had returned home with Newton while Gulliver had carried on walking. I had no idea where he was going, but it was pretty clear to me, from his lack of direction, that he hadn’t been
heading anywhere specific. I concluded, therefore, that he wasn’t going to meet someone. Indeed, he had seemed to want to avoid people.

Still, I knew it was dangerous.

I knew that it wasn’t just proof of the Riemann hypothesis which was the problem. It was knowledge that it could be proved, and Gulliver had that knowledge, inside his skull, as he walked
around the streets.

Yet I justified my delay because I had been told to be patient. I had been told to find out exactly who knew. If human progress was to be thwarted, then I needed to be thorough. To kill Gulliver
now would have been premature, because his death and that of his mother would be the last acts I could commit before suspicions were aroused.

Yes, this is what I told myself, as I unclipped Newton’s lead and re-entered the house, and then accessed that sitting-room computer, typing in the words ‘Poincaré
Conjecture’ into the search box.

Soon, I found Isobel had been right. This conjecture – concerning a number of very basic topological laws about spheres and four-dimensional space – had been solved by a Russian
mathematician called Grigori Perelman. On 18 March 2010 – just over three years ago – it was announced that he had won a Clay Millennium Prize. But he had turned it down, and the
million dollars that had gone with it.

‘I’m not interested in money or fame,’ he had said. ‘I don’t want to be on display like an animal in a zoo. I’m not a hero of mathematics.’

This was not the only prize he had been offered. There had been others. A prestigious prize from the European Mathematical Society, one from the International Congress of Mathematicians in
Madrid, and the Fields Medal, the highest award in mathematics. All of them he had turned down, choosing instead to live a life of poverty and unemployment, caring for his elderly mother.

Humans are arrogant. Humans are greedy. They care about nothing but money and fame. They do not appreciate mathematics for its own sake, but for what it can get them.

I logged out. Suddenly, I felt weak. I was hungry. That must have been it. So I went to the kitchen and looked for food.

I ate some capers, and then a stock cube, and chewed on a stick-like vegetable called celery. Eventually, I got out some bread, a staple of human cuisine, and I looked in the
cupboard for something to put on it. Caster sugar was my first option. And then I tried some mixed herbs. Neither was very satisfying. After much anxious trepidation and analysis of the nutritional
information I decided to try something called crunchy wholenut peanut butter. I placed it on the bread and gave some to the dog. He liked it.

‘Should I try it?’ I asked him.

Yes, you definitely should
, appeared to be the response. (Dog words weren’t really words. They were more like melodies. Silent melodies sometimes, but melodies all the same.)
It
is very tasty indeed
.

He wasn’t wrong.

As I placed it in my mouth and began to chew I realised that human food could actually be quite good. I had never enjoyed food before. Now I came to think of it, I had never enjoyed anything
before. And yet today, even amid my strange feelings of weakness and doubt, I had experienced the pleasures of music and of food. And maybe even the simple enjoyment of canine company.

After I had eaten one piece of bread and peanut butter I made another one for us both, and then another, Newton’s appetite proving to be at least a match for mine.

‘I am not what I am,’ I told him at one stage. ‘You know that, don’t you? I mean, that is why you were so hostile at first. Why you growled whenever I was near you. You
sensed it, didn’t you? More than a human could. You knew there was a difference.’

His silence spoke volumes. And as I stared into his glassy, honest eyes I felt the urge to tell him more.

‘I have killed someone,’ I told him, feeling a sense of relief. ‘I am what a human would categorise as a murderer, a judgemental term, and based in this case on the wrong
judgements. You see, sometimes to save something you have to kill a little piece of it. But still, a murderer – that is what they would call me, if they knew. Not that they would ever really
be able to know how I had done it.

‘You see, as you no doubt know, humans are still at the point in their development where they see a strong difference between the mental and the physical
within the same body
. They
have mental hospitals and body hospitals, as if one doesn’t directly affect the other. And so, if they can’t accept that a mind is directly responsible for the body of the same person,
they are hardly likely to understand how a mind – albeit not a human one – can affect the body of someone else. Of course, my skills are not just the product of biology. I have
technology, but it is unseen. It is inside me. And now resides in my left hand. It allowed me to take this shape, it enables me to contact my home, and it strengthens my mind. It makes me able to
manipulate mental and physical processes. I can perform telekinesis – look, look right now, look what I am doing with the lid of the peanut butter jar – and also something very close to
hypnosis. You see, where I am from everything is seamless. Minds, bodies, technologies all come together in a quite beautiful convergence.’

The phone rang at that point. It had rung earlier too. I didn’t answer it though. There were some tastes, just as there were some songs by the Beach Boys (‘In My Room’,
‘God Only Knows’, ‘Sloop John B’) that were just too good to disturb.

But then the peanut butter ran out, and Newton and I stared at each other in mutual mourning. ‘I am sorry, Newton. But it appears we have run out of peanut butter.’

This cannot be true. You must be mistaken. Check again
.

I checked again. ‘No, I am not mistaken.’

Properly. Check properly. That was just a glance.

I checked properly. I even showed him the inside of the jar. He was still disbelieving, so I placed the jar right up next to his nose, which was clearly where he wanted it.
Ah, you see, there
is still some. Look. Look
. And he licked the contents of the jar until he too had to eventually agree we were out of the stuff. I laughed out loud. I had never laughed. It was a very odd
feeling, but not unpleasant. And then we went and sat on the sofa in the living room.

Why are you here?

I don’t know if the dog’s eyes were asking me this, but I gave him an answer anyway. ‘I am here to destroy information. Information that exists in the bodies of certain
machines and the minds of certain humans. That is my purpose. Although, obviously, while I am here I am also collecting information. Just how volatile are they? How violent? How dangerous to
themselves and others? Are their flaws – and there do seem to be quite a few – insurmountable? Or is there hope? These questions are the sort I have in mind, even if I am not supposed
to. First and foremost though, what I am doing involves elimination.’

Newton looked at me bleakly, but he didn’t judge. And we stayed there, on that purple sofa, for quite a while. Something was happening to me, I realised, and it had been happening ever
since Debussy and the Beach Boys. I wished I’d never played them. For ten minutes we sat in silence. This mournful mood only altered with the distraction of the front door opening and
closing.

It was Gulliver. He waited silently in the hallway for a moment or two, and then hung up his coat and dropped his schoolbag. He came into the living room, walking slowly. He didn’t make
eye contact.

‘Don’t tell Mum, okay?’

‘What?’ I said. ‘Don’t tell her what?’

He was awkward. ‘That I wasn’t at school.’

‘Okay. I won’t.’

He looked at Newton, whose head was back on my lap. He seemed confused but didn’t comment. He turned to go upstairs.

‘What were you doing by the train track?’ I asked him.

I saw his hands tense up. ‘What?’

‘You were just standing there, as the train passed.’

‘You
followed
me?’

‘Yes. Yes, I did. I followed you. I wasn’t going to tell you. In fact, I am surprising myself by telling you now. But my innate curiosity won out.’

He answered with a kind of muted groan, and headed upstairs.

After a while, with a dog on your lap, you realise there is a necessity to stroke it. Don’t ask me how this necessarily comes about. It clearly has something to do with the dimensions of
the human upper body. Anyway, I stroked the dog and as I did so I realised it was actually a pleasant feeling, the warmth and the rhythm of it.

Eventually, Isobel came back. I shifted along the sofa to reach such a position that I could witness her walking in through the front door. Just to see the simple effort of it
– the physical pushing of the door, the extraction of the key, the closing of the door and the placing of that key (and the others it was attached to) in a small oval basket on a static piece
of wooden furniture – all of that was quite mesmerising to me. The way she did such things in single gliding movements, almost dancelike, without thinking about them. I should have been
looking down on such things. But I wasn’t. She seemed to be continually operating above the task she was doing. A melody, rising above rhythm. Yet she was still what she was, a human.

She walked down the hallway, exhaling the whole way, her face containing both a smile and a frown at once. Like her son, she was confused to see the dog lying on my lap. And equally confused
when she saw the dog jump off my lap and run over to her.

‘What’s with Newton?’ she asked.

‘
With
him?’

‘He seems lively.’

‘Does he?’

‘Yes. And, I don’t know, his eyes seem brighter.’

‘Oh. It might have been the peanut butter. And the music.’

‘Peanut butter? Music? You never listen to music. Have you been listening to music?’

‘Yes. We have.’

She looked at me with suspicion. ‘Right. I see.’

‘We’ve been listening to music all day long.’

‘How are you feeling? I mean, you know, about Daniel.’

‘Oh, it is very sad,’ I said. ‘How was your day?’

She sighed. ‘It was okay.’ This was a lie, I could tell that.

I looked at her. My eyes could stay on her with ease, I noticed. What had happened? Was this another side-effect of the music?

I suppose I was getting acclimatised to her, and to humans in general. Physically, at least from the outside, I was one too. It was becoming a new normality, in a sense. Yet even so, my stomach
churned far less with her than with the sight of the others I saw walking past the window, peering in at me. In fact, that day, or at that point in that day, it didn’t churn at all.

‘I feel like I should phone Tabitha,’ she said. ‘It’s difficult though, isn’t it? She’ll be inundated. I might just send her an email and let her know, you
know, if there’s anything we can do.’

I nodded. ‘That’s a good idea.’

She studied me for a while.

‘Yes,’ she said, at a lower frequency. ‘I think so.’ She looked at the phone. ‘Has anyone called?’

‘I think so. The phone rang a few times.’

‘But you didn’t pick it up?’

‘No. No, I didn’t. I don’t really feel up to lengthy conversations. And I feel cursed at the moment. The last time I had a lengthy conversation with anyone who wasn’t you
or Gulliver they ended up dying in front of me.’

‘Don’t say it like that.’

‘Like what?’

‘Flippantly. It’s a sad day.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I just . . . it hasn’t sunk in yet, really.’