The Humans Read online

  The doctor smiled. He told me he had read one of my books on mathematics – an apparently ‘really funny’ memoir of Andrew Martin’s time teaching at Princeton University. The book I had seen already. The one called American Pi. He wrote me a prescription for more diazepam and advised I take things ‘one day at a time’, as if there were another way for days to be experienced. And then he picked up the most primitive piece of telecommunications technology I had ever seen and told Isobel to come and take me home.

  Remember, during your mission, never to become influenced or corrupted.

  The humans are an arrogant species, defined by violence and greed. They have taken their home planet, the only one they currently have access to, and placed it on the road to destruction. They have created a world of divisions and categories and have continually failed to see the similarities between themselves. They have developed technology at a rate too fast for human psychology to keep up with, and yet they still pursue advancement for advancement’s sake, and for the pursuit of the money and fame they all crave so much.

  You must never fall into the human’s trap. You must never look at an individual and fail to see their relation to the crimes of the whole. Every smiling human face hides the terrors they are all capable of, and are all responsible for, however indirectly.

  You must never soften, or shrink from your task.

  Stay pure.

  Retain your logic.

  Do not let anyone interfere with the mathematical certainty of what needs to be done.

  4 Campion Row

  It was a warm room.

  There was a window, but the curtains were drawn. They were thin enough for electromagnetic radiation from the only sun to filter through and I could see everything clear enough. The walls were painted sky-blue, and there was an incandescent ‘lightbulb’ hanging down from the ceiling with a cylindrical shade made of paper. I was lying in bed. It was a large, square bed, made for two people. I had been lying asleep in this same bed for over three hours, and now I was awake.

  It was Professor Andrew Martin’s bed, on the second floor of his house. His house was at 4 Campion Row. It was large, compared to the exteriors of other houses I had seen. Inside, all the walls were white. Downstairs, in the hallway and the kitchen, the floor was made of limestone, which was made of calcite, and so provided something familiar for me to look at. The kitchen, where I had gone to drink some water, was especially warm owing to the presence of something called an oven. This particular type of oven was made of iron and powered by gas, with two continually hot discs on its top surface. It was called an AGA. It was cream-coloured. There were lots of doors in the kitchen and also here in the bedroom. Oven doors and cupboard doors and wardrobe doors. Whole worlds shut away.

  The bedroom had a beige carpet, made of wool. Animal hair. There was a poster on the wall which had a picture of two human heads, one male and one female, very close together. It had the words Roman Holiday on it. Other words, too. Words like ‘Gregory Peck’ and ‘Audrey Hepburn’ and ‘Paramount Pictures’.

  There was a photograph on top of a wooden, cuboid piece of furniture. A photograph is basically a two-dimensional nonmoving holograph catering only to the sense of sight. This photograph was inside a rectangle of steel. A photograph of Andrew and Isobel. They were younger, their skins more radiant and unwithered. Isobel looked happy, because she was smiling and a smile is a signifier of human happiness. In the photograph Andrew and Isobel were standing on grass. She was wearing a white dress. It seemed to be the dress to wear if you wanted to be happy.

  There was another photo. They were standing somewhere hot. Neither of them had dresses on. They were among giant, crumbling stone columns under a perfectly blue sky. An important building from a former human civilisation. (On Earth, incidentally, civilisation is the result of a group of humans coming together and suppressing their instincts.) The civilisation, I guessed, was one that must have been neglected or destroyed. They were smiling, but this was a different kind of smile and one which was confined to their mouths and not their eyes. They looked uncomfortable, though I attributed this to the heat on their thin skin. Then there was a later photograph, taken indoors somewhere. They had a child with them. Young. Male. He had hair as dark as his mother, maybe darker, with paler skin. He was wearing an item of clothing which said ‘Cowboy’.

  Isobel was there in the room a lot of the time, either sleeping beside me or standing nearby, watching. Mostly, I tried not to look at her.

  I didn’t want to connect to her in any way. It would not serve my mission well if any kind of sympathy, or even empathy towards her were to form. Admittedly, this was unlikely. Her very otherness troubled me. She was so alien. But the universe was unlikely before it happened and it had almost indisputably happened.

  Though I did brave her eyes for one question.

  ‘When did you last see me? I mean, before. Yesterday?’

  ‘At breakfast. And then you were at work. You came home at eleven. In bed by half past.’

  ‘Did I say anything to you? Did I tell you anything?’

  ‘You said my name, but I pretended to be sleeping. And that was it. Until I woke up, and you were gone.’

  I smiled. Relieved, I suppose, but back then I didn’t quite understand why.

  The war and money show

  I watched the ‘television’ she had brought in for me. She had struggled with it. It was heavy for her. I think she expected me to help her. It seemed so wrong, watching a biological life form putting herself through such effort. I was confused and wondered why she would do it for me. I attempted, out of sheer telekinetic curiosity, to lighten it for her with my mind.

  ‘That was easier than I was expecting,’ she said.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, catching her gaze face-on. ‘Well, expectation is a funny thing.’

  ‘You still like to watch the news, don’t you?’

  Watch the news. That was a very good idea. The news might have something for me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I like to watch the news.’

  I watched it, and Isobel watched me, both equally troubled by what we saw. The news was full of human faces, but generally smaller ones, and often at a great distance away.

  Within my first hour of watching, I discovered three interesting details.

  1. The term ‘news’ on Earth generally meant ‘news that directly affects humans’. There was, quite literally, nothing about the antelope or the sea-horse or the red-eared slider turtle or the other nine million species on the planet.

  2. The news was prioritised in a way I could not understand. For instance, there was nothing on new mathematical observations or still undiscovered polygons, but quite a bit about politics, which on this planet was essentially all about war and money. Indeed, war and money seemed to be so popular on the news it should more accurately be described as The War and Money Show. I had been told right. This was a planet characterised by violence and greed. A bomb had exploded in a country called Afghanistan. Elsewhere, people were worrying about the nuclear capability of North Korea. So-called stock markets were falling. This worried a lot of humans, who gazed up at screens full of numbers, studying them as if they displayed the only mathematics that mattered. Oh, and I waited for the stuff on the Riemann hypothesis but nothing came. This was either because no one knew or no one cared. Both possibilities were, in theory, comforting and yet I did not feel comforted.

  3. Humans cared more about things if they were happening closer to them. South Korea worried about North Korea. People in London were worried chiefly about the cost of houses in London. It seemed people didn’t mind someone being naked in a rainforest so long as it was nowhere near their lawn. And they didn’t care at all about what was happening beyond their solar system, and very little about what was happening inside it, except with what was happening right here on Earth. (Admittedly, not a great deal was happening in their solar system, which might have gone some way to explain where human arrogance came from. A lack of competition.) Mostly
, humans just wanted to know about what was going on within their country, preferably within that bit of the country which was their bit, the more local the better. Given this view, the absolutely ideal human news programme would only concern what was going on inside the house where the human watching it actually lived. The coverage could then be divided up and prioritised on the basis of the specific rooms within that house, with the lead story always being about the room where the television was, and typically concerning the most important fact that it was being watched by a human. But until a human follows the logic of news to this inevitable conclusion, the best they had was local news. So, in Cambridge, the most important thing on the news was the story about the human called Professor Andrew Martin who was discovered walking unclothed around the grounds of the New Court at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University, during the early hours of that morning.

  The repeated coverage of this last detail also explained why the telephone had been ringing almost continuously since I had arrived, and why my wife had been talking about emails arriving into the computer all the time.

  ‘I’ve been fielding them,’ she told me. ‘I’ve told them you aren’t up to talking right now and that you are too ill.’

  ‘Oh.’

  She sat on the bed, stroked my hand some more. My skin crawled. A part of me wished I could just end her, right there. But there was a sequence, and it had to be followed.

  ‘Everyone is very worried about you.’

  ‘Who?’ I said.

  ‘Well, your son, for a start. Gulliver’s got even worse since this.’

  ‘We only have one child?’

  Her eyelids descended slowly, her face was a tableau of forced calm. ‘You know we do. And I really don’t understand how you left without a brain scan.’

  ‘They decided I didn’t need one. It was quite easy.’

  I tried to eat a bit of the food she had placed by the side of the bed. Something called a cheese sandwich. Another thing humans had to thank cows for. It was bad, but edible.

  ‘Why did you make me this?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m looking after you,’ she said.

  A moment’s confusion. It was slow to compute. But then I realised, where we were used to service technology humans had each other.

  ‘But what is in it for you?’

  She laughed. ‘That question’s been a constant our whole marriage.’

  ‘Why?’ I said. ‘Has our marriage been a bad one?’

  She took a deep breath, as if the question were something she had to swim under. ‘Just eat your sandwich, Andrew.’

  A stranger

  I ate my sandwich. Then I thought of something else.

  ‘Is that normal? To have just one. Child, I mean.’

  ‘It’s about the only thing that is, right now.’

  She scratched a little bit at her hand. Just a tiny bit, but it still made me think of that woman, Zoë, at the mental hospital, with the scars on her arms and the violent boyfriends and the head full of philosophy.

  There was a long silence. I was accustomed to silence, having lived alone most of my life, but somehow this silence was a different kind. It was the kind you needed to break.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘For the sandwich. I liked it. The bread, anyway.’

  I didn’t honestly know why I said this, as I hadn’t enjoyed the sandwich. And yet, it was the first time in my life I had thanked anyone for anything.

  She smiled. ‘Don’t get used to it, Emperor.’

  And then she patted her hand on my chest, and rested it there. I noticed a shift in her eyebrows, and an extra crease arrive in her forehead.

  ‘That’s odd,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your heart. It feels irregular. And like it’s hardly beating.’

  She took her hand away. Stared at her husband for a moment as if he were a stranger. Which of course he was. I was. Stranger, indeed, than she could ever know. She looked worried, too, and there was a part of me that resented it, even as I knew fear – of all the emotions – was precisely what she should have been feeling at that moment in time.

  ‘I have to go to the supermarket,’ she told me. ‘We’ve got nothing in. Everything has gone off.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, wondering if I should allow this to happen. I supposed I had to. There was a special sequence to follow and the start of that sequence was at Fitzwilliam College, in Professor Andrew Martin’s office. If Isobel left the house, then I could leave the house too, without prompting any suspicion.

  ‘All right,’ I said.

  ‘But remember, you’ve got to stay in bed. Okay? Just stay in bed and watch television.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That is what I will do. I will stay in bed and watch television.’

  She nodded, but her forehead remained creased. She left the room, and then she left the house. I got out of bed and stubbed my toe on the doorframe. It hurt. That wasn’t weird in itself, I suppose. The weird thing was, it stayed hurting. Not a severe pain. I had only stubbed my toe, after all – but it was a pain which wasn’t being fixed. Or not until I walked out of the room and on to the landing, then it faded and disappeared with suspicious speed. Puzzled I walked back into the bedroom. The pain increased the closer I got to the television, where a woman was talking about the weather, making predictions. I switched the television off and the ache in the toe immediately disappeared. Strange. The signals must have interfered with the gifts, the technology I had inside my left hand.

  I left the room, vowing in times of crisis never to be anywhere near a television.

  I went downstairs. There were lots of rooms here. In the kitchen, there was a creature sleeping in a basket. It had four legs and its body was entirely covered with brown-and-white hair. This was a dog. A male. He stayed lying there with his eyes closed but growled when I entered the room.

  I was looking for a computer but there was no computer in the kitchen. I went into another room, a square room at the back of the house which I would soon learn was the ‘sitting room’, though most human rooms were sitting rooms if the truth be told. There was a computer here, and a radio. I switched the radio on first. A man was talking about the films of another man called Werner Herzog. I punched the wall and my fist hurt, but when I switched off the radio it stopped hurting. Not just televisions, then.

  The computer was primitive. It had the words ‘MacBook Pro’ on it, and a keypad full of letters and numbers, and a lot of arrows pointing in every possible direction. It seemed like a metaphor for human existence.

  A minute or so later and I was accessing it, searching emails and documents, finding nothing on the Riemann hypothesis. I accessed the Internet – the prime source for information here. News of what Professor Andrew Martin had proved was nowhere to be found, though details of how to get to Fitzwilliam College were easy to access.

  Memorising them, I took the largest batch of keys on the chest in the hallway and then left the house.

  Starting the sequence

  Most mathematicians would trade their soul with Mephistopheles for a proof of the Riemann hypothesis.

  – Marcus du Sautoy

  The woman on the television had told me there would be no rain so I rode Professor Andrew Martin’s bicycle to Fitzwilliam College. It was evening now. Isobel would be at the supermarket already, so I knew I didn’t have long.

  It was a Sunday. Apparently this meant the college would be quiet, but I knew I had to be careful. I knew where to go, and although riding a bicycle was a relatively easy thing to do, I was still a bit confused by the laws of the roads and narrowly escaped accidents a couple of times.

  Eventually, I made it to a long, quiet tree-lined street called Storey’s Way, and the college itself. I leant my bike against a wall and walked towards the main entrance of this, the largest of the three buildings. This was a wide, relatively modern example of Earth’s architecture, three storeys high. As I was entering the building I passed a woman with a bucket and a mop, cleaning the w
ooden floor.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. She seemed to recognise me, though it wasn’t a recognition that made her happy.

  I smiled. (I had discovered, at the hospital, that smiling was the appropriate first response on greeting someone. Saliva had little to do with it.) ‘Hello. I’m a professor here. Professor Andrew Martin. I know this sounds terribly strange but I have suffered a little accident – nothing major, but enough to cause me some short-term memory loss. Anyway, the point is I am off work for a little while but I really need something in the office. My office. Something of purely personal value. Is there any chance you know where my office is?’

  She studied me for a couple of seconds. ‘I hope it wasn’t anything serious,’ she said, though it didn’t sound like the sincerest of hopes.

  ‘No. No, it wasn’t. I fell off my bike. Anyway, I’m sorry, but I am a little bit pressed for time.’

  ‘Upstairs, along the corridor. Second door on the left.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  I passed someone on the stairs. A grey-haired woman, astute-looking by human standards, with glasses hanging around her neck.

  ‘Andrew!’ she said. ‘My goodness. How are you? And what are you doing? I heard you were unwell.’

  I studied her closely. I wondered how much she knew.

  ‘Yes, I had a little bump on the head. But I am all right now. Honestly. Don’t worry. I’ve been checked out, and I should be fine. As right as the rain.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, unconvinced. ‘I see, I see, I see.’

  And then I asked, with a slight and inexplicable dread, an essential question: ‘When did you last see me?’

  ‘I haven’t seen you all week. Must have been a week ago Thursday.’

  ‘And we’ve had no other contact since then? Phone calls? Emails? Any other?’

  ‘No. No, why would there have been? You’ve got me intrigued.’