The Humans (20 page)

I turned around, assessed Theo’s physical structure and dynamic potential. ‘My son could beat you into the ground,’ I shouted. ‘He could flatten your face into a more
attractive geometric form.’

‘
Fuck
,
Dad
,’ said Gulliver, ‘what are you doing? He’s the one who fucked up my face.’

I looked at him. He was a black hole. The violence was all inward. It was time for him to push some the other way.

‘Come on,’ I said, ‘you’re a human. It’s time to act like one.’

‘No,’ said Gulliver.

But it was too late. Theo was crossing the road. ‘Yeah, you’re a comedian now, are you?’ he said as he swaggered towards us.

‘It would be fucking amusing to see you lose to my fucking son, if that’s what you fucking mean,’ I said.

‘Yeah, well, my dad’s a Taekwondo teacher. He taught me how to fight.’

‘Well, Gulliver’s father is a mathematician. So he wins.’

‘Yeah right.’

‘You will lose,’ I told the boy, and I made sure the words went all the way down and stayed there, like rocks in a shallow pond.

Theo laughed, and jumped with troubling ease over the low stone wall that bordered the park, with the girls following. This boy, Theo, was not as tall as Gulliver but more strongly built. He was
almost devoid of neck and his eyes were so close together he was borderline cyclopic. He was walking backwards and forwards on the grass in front of us, warming up by punching and kicking the
air.

Gulliver was as pale as milk. ‘Gulliver,’ I told him, ‘you fell off a roof yesterday. That boy is not a forty-foot drop. There is nothing to him. No depth. You know how he is
going to fight.’

‘Yes,’ said Gulliver. ‘He’s going to fight well.’

‘But you, you’ve got surprise on your side. You aren’t scared of anything. All you’ve got to do is realise that this Theo symbolises everything you’ve ever hated.
He is me. He is bad weather. He is the primitive soul of the Internet. He is the injustice of fate. I am asking, in other words, for you to fight him like you fight in your sleep. Lose everything.
Lose all shame and consciousness and beat him. Because you can.’

‘No,’ said Gulliver, ‘I can’t.’

I lowered my voice, conjured the gifts. ‘You can. He has the same bio-chemical ingredients inside him as you do, but with less impressive neural activity.’ I saw that Gulliver looked
confused, so I tapped the side of my head and explained. ‘It’s all about the oscillations.’

Gulliver stood up. I clipped the lead to Newton’s collar. He whined, sensing the atmosphere.

I watched Gulliver walk over the grass. Nervous, tight-bodied, as if being dragged by an invisible chord.

The two girls were chewing something they didn’t plan to swallow, and were giggling excitedly. Theo too was looking thrilled. Some humans not only liked violence, but craved it, I
realised. Not because they wanted pain, but because they already had pain and wanted to be distracted away from that kind of pain with a lesser kind.

And then Theo hit Gulliver. And he hit him again. Both times in the face, sending Gulliver staggering backwards. Newton growled, seeking involvement, but I kept him where he was.

‘You are fucking nothing,’ said Theo, raising his foot fast through the air to Gulliver’s chest. Gulliver grabbed the leg, and Theo hopped for a while, or at least long enough
to look ridiculous.

Gulliver looked at me through the still air in silence.

Then Theo was on the ground and Gulliver let him stand up before the switch flicked and he went wild, punching away as if trying to rid himself of his own body, as if it were something that
could be shaken away. And pretty soon the other boy was bleeding and he fell back on the grass, his head momentarily tilting back and touching down on a rose bush. He sat up and dabbed his face
with his fingers and saw the blood and looked at it as if it were a message he’d never expected to receive.

‘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.

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.

Belonging as I did to a species which had only ever really known one day, there was initially something quite exciting about having any kind of rhythm at all. But now I was stuck here for good I
began to resent humans’ lack of imagination. I believed they should have tried to add a little more variety into proceedings. I mean, this was the species whose main excuse for not doing
something was ‘if only I had more time’. Perfectly valid until you realised they
did
have more time. Not eternity, granted, but they had tomorrow. And the day after tomorrow. And
the day after the day after tomorrow. In fact I would have had to write ‘the day after’ thirty thousand times before a final ‘tomorrow’ in order to illustrate the amount of
time on a human’s hands.

The problem lying behind the lack of human fulfilment was a shortage not just of time but of imagination. They found a day that worked for them and then stuck to it, and repeated it, at least
between Monday and Friday. Even if it didn’t work for them – as was usually the case – they stuck to it anyway. Then they’d alter things a bit and do something a little bit
more fun on Saturday and Sunday.

One initial proposal I wanted to put to them was to swap things over. For instance, have five fun days and two not-fun days. That way – call me a mathematical genius – they would
have more fun. But as things stood, there weren’t even two fun days. They only had Saturdays, because Mondays were a little bit too close to Sundays for Sunday’s liking, as if Monday
were a collapsed star in the week’s solar system, with an excessive gravitational pull. In other words one seventh of human days worked quite well. The other six weren’t very good, and
five of those were roughly the same day stuck on repeat.

The real difficulty, for me, was mornings.

Mornings were hard on Earth. You woke up tireder than when you went to sleep. Your back ached. Your neck ached. Your chest felt tight with anxiety that came from being mortal. And then, on top
of all that, you had to do so much before the day even started. The main problem was the stuff to do in order to be presentable.

A human, typically, has to do the following things. He or she will get out of bed, sigh, stretch, go to the toilet, shower, shampoo their hair, condition their hair, wash their face, shave,
deodorise, brush their teeth (
with fluoride!
), dry their hair, brush their hair, put on face cream, apply make-up, check everything in the mirror, choose clothes based on the weather and the
situation, put on those clothes, check everything again in the mirror – and that’s just what happens before breakfast. It’s a wonder they ever get out of bed at all. But they do,
repeatedly, thousands of times each. And not only that – they do it by themselves, with no technology to help them. Maybe a little electrical activity in their toothbrushes and hairdryers,
but nothing more than that. And all to reduce body odour, and hairs, and halitosis, and shame.