The Humans

by Matt Haig

They were aliens to me. That was the obvious part. What was less obvious was the way I seemed like an alien to them. After all, I looked like them. Maybe this was another human trait. Their ability to turn on themselves, to ostracize their own kind. If that was the case, it added weight to my mission. It made me understand it better.

You must strive to be normal. Yes. You must try to be like them. I know. Do not escape prematurely. I won’t. But I don’t want to be here. I want to go home. You know you can’t do that. Not yet. But I will run out of time. I must get to the professor’s office, and to his home. You are right. You must. But first you need to stay calm and do what they tell you. Go where they want you to go. Do what they want you to do. They must never know who sent you. Do not panic. Professor Andrew Martin is not among them now. You are. There will be time. They die, and so they have impatience. Their lives are short. Yours is not. Do not become like them. Use your gifts wisely. I will. But I am scared. You have every right to be. You are among the humans.

There was also the option of a “vest,” which covered the marginally less shameful chest area. This area included the sensitive skin protrusions known as “nipples.” I had no idea what purpose nipples served, though I did notice a pleasurable sensation when I tenderly stroked my fingers over them.

She laughed, and her laughter was the opposite of her voice. It was a kind of laugh that made me wish there was no air for those manic waves to travel on and reach my ears.

Primes, quite literally, drove people insane, particularly as so many puzzles remained. They knew a prime was a whole number that could only be divided by one or itself, but after that they hit all kinds of problems. For instance, they knew that the total of all primes was precisely the same as the total of all numbers, as both were infinite. This was, for a human, a very puzzling fact, as surely there must be more numbers than prime numbers.

As well as religion, human history is full of depressing things like colonization, disease, racism, sexism, homophobia, class snobbery, environmental destruction, slavery, totalitarianism, military dictatorships, inventions of things which they had no idea how to handle (the atomic bomb, the Internet, the semicolon), the victimization of clever people, the worshipping of idiotic people, boredom, despair, periodic collapses, and catastrophes within the psychic landscape. And through it all there has always been some truly awful food.

To be a human is to state the obvious. Repeatedly, over and over, until the end of time.

As I did so, I thought of the startling capacity for belief inherent in this species. Even before I had fully discovered the concepts of astrology, homeopathy, organized religion, and probiotic yogurts, I was able to work out that what humans may have lacked in physical attractiveness, they made up for in gullibility. You could tell them anything in a convincing-enough voice and they would believe it. Anything, of course, except the truth.

I looked around at all the certificates on the wall and felt thankful to come from a place where personal success was meaningless.

“I don’t have a name. Names are a symptom of a species that values the individual self above the collective good.”

“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.

Then she raised her eyebrows at me. It meant something, clearly, but I had no idea what. It was frustrating. You see, the language of words was only one of the human languages. There were many others, as I have pointed out. The language of sighs, the language of silent moments, and most significantly, the language of frowns.

Now, consider this. A human life is on average eighty Earth years or around thirty thousand Earth days. Which means they are born, they make some friends, eat a few meals, they get married or they don’t get married, have a child or two, or not, drink a few thousand glasses of wine, have sexual intercourse a few times, discover a lump somewhere, feel a bit of regret, wonder where all the time went, know they should have done it differently, realize they would have done it the same, and then they die. Into the great black nothing. Out of space. Out of time. The most trivial of trivial zeroes. And that’s it, the full caboodle. All confined to the same mediocre planet.

(I have to admit that humans waste a lot of their time—almost all of it—with hypothetical stuff. I could be rich. I could be famous. I could have been hit by that bus. I could have been born with fewer moles and bigger breasts. I could have spent more of my youth learning foreign languages. They must exercise the conditional tense more than any other known life-form.) “But I didn’t kill myself. I am alive. Let’s concentrate on that.”

Some humans not only liked violence but craved it, I realized. Not because they wanted pain, but because they already had pain and wanted to be distracted from that kind of pain with a lesser kind.

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.

The problem lying behind the lack of human fulfillment 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.

Then I considered the glass. The glass had been distilled from rock and so it knew things. It knew the age of the universe, because it was the universe.

Suddenly it made me realize why religion was such a big thing around here. Because, yes, sure, God could not exist. But then neither could humans. So, if they believed in themselves—the logic must go—why not believe in something that was only a fraction more unlikely?

And I felt an incredible excitement at being able to witness the love reemerge inside her, because it was a total, prime-of-life love. The kind that could only be possible in someone who was going to die at some point in the future, and also someone who had lived enough to know that loving and being loved back was a hard thing to get right, but when you managed it, you could see forever.

The point was also to forget meaning. To stop looking and start living. The meaning was to hold the hand of someone you cared about and to live inside the present. Past and future were myths. The past was just the present that had died and the future would never exist anyway, because by the time we got to it, the future would have turned into the present. The present was all there was. The ever-moving, ever-changing present. And the present was fickle. It could only be caught by letting go.

I was reluctant to speak. Speaking to a human you cared about, I realized, was so fraught with hidden danger that it was a wonder people bothered speaking at all.

“They believe God is always on their side, even if their side is at odds with the rest of their species. They have no way of coming to terms with what are, biologically, the two most important events that happen to them—procreation and death. They pretend to know that money can’t buy them happiness, yet they would choose money every time. They celebrate mediocrity at every available opportunity and love to see others’ misfortune. They have lived on this planet for over a hundred thousand generations and yet they still have no idea about who they really are or how they should really live. In fact, they know less now than they once did.”

People fall off roofs and survive. After all, humans—especially adult ones—want to believe the most mundane truths possible. They need to, in order to stop their worldviews, and their sanity, from capsizing and plunging them into the vast ocean of the incomprehensible.

You had to stay consistent to life’s delusions. All you had was your perspective, so objective truth was meaningless. You had to choose a dream and stick with it. Everything else was a con. And once you had tasted truth and love in the same potent cocktail, there had to be no more tricks.

Don’t think you know. Know you think.

Politeness is often fear. Kindness is always courage. But caring is what makes you human. Care more, become

To like something is to insult it. Love it or hate it. Be passionate. As civilization advances, so does indifference. It is a disease. Immunize yourself with art. And love.