Uses specific examples and at least two quotations from the novel to support the ideas.
Demonstrates insight through critical and/or creative thinking.
Structures the paragraphs correctly (topic sentences, body sentences with literary and other examples, connecting words, concluding sentences)
Expresses ideas clearly and correctly.
Talk about background on aliens did not like humans
-how his feelings began to change to where he wanted to be human and give up powers
Using the following, "I know that some of you reading this are convinced humans are a myth, but I am here to state that they do actually exist. For those that don’t know, a human is a real bipedal lifeform of mid-range intelligence, living a largely deluded existence on a small water-logged planet in a very lonely corner of the universe. For the rest of you, and those who sent me, humans are in many respects exactly as strange as you would expect them to be. Certainly it is true that on a first sighting you would be appalled by their physical appearance. Their faces alone contain all manner of hideous curiosities. A protuberant central nose, thin-skinned lips, primitive external auditory organs known as ‘ears’, tiny eyes and unfathomably pointless eyebrows. All of which take a long time to mentally absorb and accept. The manners and social customs too are a baffling enigma at first. Their conversation topics are very rarely the things they want to be talking about, and I could write ninety-seven books on body shame and clothing etiquette before you would get even close to understanding them. Oh, and let’s not forget The Things They Do To Make Themselves Happy That Actually Make Them Miserable. This is an infinite list. It includes – shopping, watching TV, taking the better job, getting the bigger house, writing a semi-autobiographical novel, educating their young, making their skin look mildly less old, and harbouring a vague desire to believe there might be a meaning to it all. Yes, it is all very amusing, in a painful kind of way. But I have discovered human poetry while on Earth. One of these poets, the very best one (her name was Emily Dickinson), said this: ‘I dwell in possibility.’ So let us humour ourselves and do the same. Let us open our minds entirely, for what you are about to read will need every prejudice you may have to stand aside in the name of understanding. of understanding. And let us consider this: what if there actually is a meaning to human life? And what if – humour me – life on Earth is something not just to fear and ridicule but also cherish? What then? Some of you may know what I have done by now, but none of you know the reason. This document, this guide, this account – call it what you will – will make everything clear. I plead with you to read this book with an open mind, and to work out for yourself the true value of human life. Let there be peace. PART I I took my power in my hand The man I was not So, what is this? You ready? Okay. Inhale. I will tell you. This book, this actual book, is set right here, on Earth. It is about the meaning of life and nothing at all. It is about what it takes to kill somebody, and save them. It is about love and dead poets and wholenut peanut butter. It’s about matter and antimatter, everything and nothing, hope and hate. It’s about a forty- one-year-old female historian called Isobel and her fifteen-year-old son called Gulliver and the cleverest mathematician in the world. It is, in short, about how to become a human. But let me state the obvious. I was not one. That first night, in the cold and the dark and the wind, I was nowhere near. Before I read Cosmopolitan, in the garage, I had never even seen this written language. I realise that this could be your first time too. To give you an idea of the way people here consume stories, I have put this book together as a human would. The words I use are human words, typed in a human font, laid out consecutively in the human style. With your almost instantaneous ability to translate even the most exotic and primitive linguistic forms, I trust comprehension should not be a problem. Now, to reiterate, I was not Professor Andrew Martin. I was like you. Professor Andrew Martin was merely a role. A disguise. Someone I needed to be in order to complete a task. A task that had begun with his abduction, and death. (I am conscious this is setting a grim tone, so I will resolve not to mention death again for at least the rest of this page.) The point is that I was not a forty-three-year-old mathematician – husband, father – who taught at Cambridge University and who had devoted the last eight years of his life to solving a mathematical problem that had so far proved unsolvable. Prior to arriving on Earth I did not have mid-brown hair that fell in a natural side-parting. Equally, I did not have an opinion on The Planets by Holtz or Talking Heads’ second album, as I did not agree with the concept of music. Or I shouldn’t have, anyway. And how could I believe that Australian wine was automatically inferior to wine sourced from other regions on the planet when I had never drunk anything but liquid nitrogen? Belonging as I did to a post-marital species, it goes without saying that I hadn’t been a neglectful husband with an eye for one of my students any more than I had been a man who walked his English Springer Spaniel – a category of hairy domestic deity otherwise known as a ‘dog’ – as an excuse to leave the house. Nor had I written books on mathematics, or insisted that my publishers use an author photograph that was now nearing its fifteenth anniversary. No, I wasn’t that man. I had no feeling for that man whatsoever. And yet he had been real, as real as you and I, a real mammalian life form, a diploid, eukaryotic primate who, five minutes before midnight, had been sitting at his desk, staring at his computer screen and drinking black coffee (don’t worry, I shall explain coffee and my misadventures with it a little later). A life form who may or may not have jumped out of his chair as the breakthrough came, as his mind arrived at a place no human mind had ever reached before, the very edge of knowledge. And at some point shortly after his breakthrough he had been taken by the hosts. My employers. I had even met him, for the very briefest of moments. Enough for the – wholly incomplete – reading to be made. It was complete physically, just not mentally. You see, you can clone human brains but not what is stored inside them, not much of it anyway, so I had to learn a lot of things for myself. I was a forty-three-year-old newborn on planet Earth. It would become annoying to me, later on, that I had never met him properly, as meeting him properly would have been extremely useful. He could have told me about Maggie, for one thing. (Oh, how I wish he had told me about Maggie!) However, any knowledge I gained was not going to alter the simple fact that I had to halt progress. That is what I was there for. To destroy evidence of the breakthrough Professor Andrew Martin had made. Evidence that lived not only in computers but in living human beings. Now, where should we start? I suppose there is only one place. We should start with when I was hit by the car. Detached nouns and other early trials for the language- learner Yes, like I said, we should start with when I was hit by the car. We have to, really. Because for quite a while before that there was nothing. There was nothing and nothing and nothing and— Something. Me, standing there, on the ‘road’. Once there, I had several immediate reactions. First, what was with the weather? I was not really used to weather you had to think about. But this was England, a part of Earth where thinking about the weather was the chief human activity. And for good reason. Second, where was the computer? There was meant to be a computer. Not that I actually knew what Professor Martin’s computer would look like. Maybe it looked like a road. Third, what was that noise? A kind of muted roaring. And fourth: it was night. Being something of a homebird, I was not really accustomed to night. And even if I had been, this wasn’t just any night. It was the kind of night I had never known. This was night to the power of night to the power of night. This was night cubed. A sky full of uncompromising darkness, with no stars and no moon. Where were the suns? Were there even suns? The cold suggested there might not have been. The cold was a shock. The cold hurt my lungs, and the harsh wind beating against my skin caused me to shake. I wondered if humans ever went outside. They must have been insane if they did. Inhaling was difficult, at first. And this was a concern. After all, inhaling really was one of the most important requirements of being a human. But I eventually got the knack. And then another worry. I was not where I was meant to be, that was increasingly clear. I was meant to be where he had been. I was meant to be in an office, but this wasn’t an office. I knew that, even then. Not unless it was an office that contained an entire sky, complete with those dark, congregating clouds and that unseen moon. clouds and that unseen moon. It took a while – too long – to understand the situation. I did not know at that time what a road was, but I can now tell you that a road is something that connects points of departure with points of arrival. This is important. On Earth, you see, you can’t just move from one place to another place instantaneously. The technology isn’t there yet. It is nowhere near there yet. No. On Earth you have to spend a lot of time travelling in between places, be it on roads or on rail- tracks or in careers or relationships. This particular type of road was a motorway. A motorway is the most advanced type of road there is, which as with most forms of human advancement essentially meant accidental death was considerably more probable. My naked feet were standing on something called tarmac, feeling its strange and brutal texture. I looked at my left hand. It seemed so crude and unfamiliar, and yet my laughter halted when I realised this fingered freakish thing was a part of me. I was a stranger to myself. Oh, and by the way, the muted roaring was still there, minus the muted part. It was then I noticed what was approaching me at considerable speed. The lights. White, wide and low, they may as well have been the bright eyes of a fast- moving plain-sweeper, silver-backed, and now screaming. It was trying to slow, and swerve. There was no time for me to move out of the way. There had been, but not now. I had waited too long. And so it hit me with great, uncompromising force. A force which hurled me off the ground and sent me flying. Only not real flying, because humans can’t fly, no matter how much they flap their limbs. The only real option was pain, which I felt right until I landed, after which I returned to nothing again. Nothing and nothing and – Something. A man wearing clothes stood over me. The proximity of his face troubled me. No. A few degrees more than troubled. I was repulsed, terrified. I had never seen anything like this man. The face seemed so alien, full of unfathomable openings and protrusions. The nose, in particular, bothered me. It seemed to my innocent eyes like there was something else inside him, pushing through. I looked lower. Noticed his clothes. He was wearing what I would later realise were a shirt and a tie, trousers and shoes. The exact clothes he should have been wearing and yet they seemed so exotic I didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. He was looking at my injuries. Or rather: for them. I checked my left hand. It hadn’t been touched. The car had collided with my I checked my left hand. It hadn’t been touched. The car had collided with my legs, then my torso, but my hand was fine. ‘It’s a miracle,’ he said quietly, as though it was a secret. But the words were meaningless. He stared into my face and raised his voice, to compete with the sound of cars. ‘What are you doing out here?’ Again, nothing. It was just a mouth moving, making noise. I could tell it was a simple language, but I needed to hear at least a hundred words of a new language before I could piece the whole grammatical jigsaw together. Don’t judge me on this. I know some of you need only ten or so, or just a single adjectival clause somewhere. But languages were never my thing. Part of my aversion to travel, I suppose. I must reiterate this. I did not want to be sent here. It was a job that someone had to do and – following my blasphemous talk at the Museum of Quadratic Equations, my so-called crime against mathematical purity – the hosts believed it to be a suitable punishment. They knew it was a job no one in their right mind would choose to do and, though my task was important, they knew I (like you) belonged to the most advanced race in the known universe and so would be up to the job. ‘I know you from somewhere. I recognise your face. Who are you?’ I felt tired. That was the trouble with teleportation and matter shifting and bio- setting. It really took it out of you. And even though it put it back in to you, energy was always the price. I slipped into darkness and enjoyed dreams tinged with violet and indigo and home. I dreamed of cracked eggs and prime numbers and ever-shifting skylines. And then I awoke. I was inside a strange vehicle, strapped to primitive heart-reading equipment. Two humans, male and female (the female’s appearance confirmed my worst fears. Within this species, ugliness does not discriminate between genders), dressed in green. They seemed to be asking me something in quite an agitated fashion. Maybe it was because I was using my new upper limbs to rip off the crudely designed electrocardiographic equipment. They tried to restrain me, but they apparently had very little understanding of the mathematics involved, and so with relative ease I managed to leave the two green-clothed humans on the floor, writhing around in pain. I rose to my feet, noticing just how much gravity there was on this planet as the driver turned to ask me an even more urgent question. The vehicle was moving fast, and the undulating sound waves of the siren were an undeniable distraction, but I opened the door and leapt towards the soft vegetation at the side of the road. My body rolled. I hid. And then, once it was safe to appear, I got to my feet. Compared to a human hand, a foot is relatively untroubling, toes aside. aside. I stood there for a while, just staring at all those odd cars, confined to the ground, evidently reliant on fossil fuel and each making more noise than it took to power a polygon generator. And the even odder sight of the humans – all clothed inside, holding on to circular steer-control equipment and, sometimes, extra-biological telecommunications devices. I have come to a planet where the most intelligent life form still has to drive its own cars . . . Never before had I so appreciated the simple splendours you and I have grown up with. The eternal light. The smooth, floating traffic. The advanced plant life. The sweetened air. The non-weather. Oh, gentle readers, you really have no idea. Cars blared high-frequency horns as they passed me. Wide-eyed, gape- mouthed faces stared out of windows. I didn’t understand it, I looked as ugly as any of them. Why wasn’t I blending in? What was I doing wrong? Maybe it was because I wasn’t in a car. Maybe that’s how humans lived, permanently contained in cars. Or maybe it was because I wasn’t wearing any clothes. It was a cold night, but could it really have been something so trivial as a lack of artificial body-covering? No, it couldn’t be as simple as that. I looked up at the sky. There was evidence of the moon now, veiled by thin cloud. It too seemed to be gawping down at me with the same sense of shock. But the stars were still blanketed, out of sight. I wanted to see them. I wanted to feel their comfort. On top of all this, rain was a distinct possibility. I hated rain. To me, as to most of you dome-dwellers, rain was a terror of almost mythological proportions. I needed to find what I was looking for before the clouds opened. There was a rectangular aluminium sign ahead of me. Nouns minus context are always tricky for the language learner, but the arrow was pointing only one way so I followed it. Humans kept on lowering their windows and shouting things at me, above the sound of their engines. Sometimes this seemed good-humoured, as they were spitting oral fluid, in my direction, orminurk-style. So I spat back in a friendly fashion, trying to hit their fast-moving faces. This seemed to encourage more shouting, but I tried not to mind. Soon, I told myself, I would understand what the heavily articulated greeting ‘get off the fucking road you fucking wanker’ actually meant. In the meantime I kept walking, got past the sign, and saw an illuminated but disconcertingly unmoving building by the side of the road. I will go to it, I told myself. I will go to it and find some answers. Texaco The building was called ‘Texaco’. It stood there shining in the night with a terrible stillness, like it was waiting to come alive. As I walked towards it, I noticed it was some kind of refill station. Cars were parked there, under a horizontal canopy and stationed next to simple-looking fuel-delivery systems. It was confirmed: the cars did absolutely nothing for themselves. They were practically brain dead, if they even had brains. The humans who were refuelling their vehicles stared at me as they went inside. Trying to be as polite as possible, given my verbal limitations, I spat an ample amount of saliva towards them. I entered the building. There was a clothed human behind the counter. Instead of his hair being on the top of his head it covered the bottom half of his face. His body was more spherical than other humans’ so he was marginally better looking. From the scent of hexanoic acid and androsterone I could tell personal hygiene wasn’t one of his top priorities. He stared at my (admittedly distressing) genitalia and then pressed something behind the counter. I spat, but the greeting was unreciprocated. Maybe I had got it wrong about the spitting. All this salivatory offloading was making me thirsty, so I went over to a humming refrigerated unit full of brightly coloured cylindrical objects. I picked one of them up, and opened it. A can of liquid called ‘Diet Coke’. It tasted extremely sweet, with a trace of phosphoric acid. It was disgusting. It burst out of my mouth almost the moment it entered. Then I consumed something else. A foodstuff wrapped in synthetic packaging. This was, I would later realise, a planet of things wrapped inside things. Food inside wrappers. Bodies inside clothes. Contempt inside smiles. Everything was hidden away. The foodstuff was called Mars. That got a little bit further down my throat, but only far enough to discover I had a gag reflex. I closed the door and saw a container with the words ‘Pringles’ and ‘Barbecue’ on it. I opened it up and started to eat. They tasted okay – a bit like sorp-cake – and I crammed as many as I could into my mouth. I wondered when I had last actually fed myself, with no assistance. I seriously couldn’t remember. Not since infancy, that was for sure. seriously couldn’t remember. Not since infancy, that was for sure. ‘You can’t do that. You can’t just eat stuff. You’ve got to pay for it.’ The man behind the counter was talking to me. I still had little idea of what he was saying, but from the volume and frequency I sensed it wasn’t good. Also, I observed that his skin – in the places on his face where it was visible – was changing colour. I noticed the lighting above my head, and I blinked. I placed my hand over my mouth and made a noise. Then I held it at arm’s length and made the same noise, noting the difference. It was comforting to know that even in the most remote corner of the universe the laws of sound and light obeyed themselves, although it has to be said they seemed a little more lacklustre here. There were shelves full of what I would shortly know as ‘magazines’, nearly all of which had faces with near-identical smiles on the front of them. Twenty- six noses. Fifty-two eyes. It was an intimidating sight. I picked up one of these magazines as the man picked up the phone. On Earth, the media is still locked in a pre-capsule age and most of it has to be read via an electronic device or via a printed medium made of a thin, chemically pulped tree-derivative known as paper. Magazines are very popular, despite no human ever feeling better for having read them. Indeed, their chief purpose is to generate a sense of inferiority in the reader that consequently leads to them needing to buy something, which they do, and then feel even worse, and so need to buy another magazine to see what they can buy next. It is an eternal and unhappy spiral that goes by the name of capitalism and it is really quite popular. The particular publication I was holding was called Cosmopolitan, and I realised that if nothing else it would help me grasp the language. It didn’t take long. Written human languages are preposterously simple, as they are made up almost entirely of words. I had interpolated the entire written language by the end of the first article, in addition to the touch that can boost your mood – as well as your relationship. Also: orgasms, I realised, were an incredibly big deal. It seemed orgasms were the central tenet of life here. Maybe this was the only meaning they had on this planet. Their purpose was simply to pursue the enlightenment of orgasm. A few seconds of relief from the surrounding dark. But reading wasn’t speaking and my new vocal equipment was still sitting there, in my mouth and throat, like yet more food I didn’t know how to swallow. I placed the magazine back on the shelf. There was a thin vertical piece of reflective metal beside the stand, allowing me a partial glimpse of myself. I too had a protruding nose. And lips. Hair. Ears. So much externality. It was a very inside-out kind of look. Plus a large lump in the centre of my neck. Very thick eyebrows. A piece of information came to me, something I remembered from what the hosts had told me. Professor Andrew Martin. My heart raced. A surge of panic. This was what I was now. This was who I had become. I tried to comfort myself by remembering it was just temporary. At the bottom of the magazine stand were some newspapers. There were photographs of more smiling faces, and some of dead bodies too, lying beside demolished buildings. Next to the newspapers was a small collection of maps. A Road Map of the British Isles was among them. Perhaps I was on the British Isles. I picked up the map and tried to leave the building. The man hung up the phone. The door was locked. Information arrived, unprompted: Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge University. ‘You’re not bloody leaving,’ said the man, in words I was beginning to comprehend. ‘The police are on their way. I’ve locked the door.’ To his bafflement, I then proceeded to open the door. I stepped out and heard a distant siren. I listened, and realised the noise was only three hundred metres away and getting rapidly closer. I began to move, running as fast as I could away from the road and up a grass embankment towards another flat area. There were lots of stationary haulage vehicles, parked in an ordered geometric fashion. This was such a strange world. Of course, when viewed afresh there were only strange worlds but this one must have been strangest of all. I tried to see the similarity. I told myself that here all things were still made of atoms, and that those atoms would work precisely as atoms always do. They would move towards each other if there was distance between them. If there was no distance between them, they would repel each other. That was the most basic law of the universe, and it applied to all things, even here. There was comfort in that. The knowledge that wherever you were in the universe, the small things were always exactly the same. Attracting and repelling. It was only by not looking closely enough that you saw difference. But still, right then, difference was all I saw. The car with the siren was now pulling into the fuelling station, flashing blue light, so I hid among the parked lorries for a few minutes. I was freezing, and crouched into myself, my whole body shaking and my testicles shrinking. (A male human’s testicles were the most attractive thing about him, I realised, and vastly unappreciated by humans themselves, who would very often rather look at anything else, including smiling faces.) Before the police car left I heard a voice behind me. Not a police officer but the driver of the vehicle I was crouched behind me. Not a police officer but the driver of the vehicle I was crouched behind. ‘Hey, what are you doing? Fuck off away from my lorry.’ I ran away, my bare feet hitting hard ground scattered with random pieces of grit. And then I was on grass, running across a field, and I kept on in the same direction until I reached another road. This one was much narrower and had no traffic at all. I opened the map, found the line which matched the curve of this other road and saw that word: ‘Cambridge’. I headed there. As I walked and breathed in that nitrogen-rich air the idea of myself was forming. Professor Andrew Martin. With the name, came facts sent across space by those who had sent me. I was to be a married man. I was forty-three years old, the exact mid-point in a human life. I had a son. I was the professor who had just solved the most significant mathematic puzzle the humans had ever faced. I had, only three short hours ago, advanced the human race beyond anyone’s imagining. The facts made me queasy but I kept on heading in the direction of Cambridge, to see what else these humans had in store for me. Corpus Christi I was not told to provide this document of human life. That was not in my brief. Yet I feel obliged to do so to explain some remarkable features of human existence. I hope you will thereby understand why I chose to do what, by now, some of you must know I did. Anyhow, I had always known Earth was a real place. I knew that, of course I did. I had consumed, in capsule form, the famous travelogue The Fighting Idiots: My Time with the Humans of Water Planet 7,081. I knew Earth was a real event in a dull and distant solar system, where not a great deal happened and where travel options for the locals were severely limited. I’d also heard that humans were a life form of, at best, middling intelligence and one prone to violence, deep sexual embarrassment, bad poetry and walking around in circles. But I was starting to realise no preparation could have been enough. By morning I was in this Cambridge place. It was horrendously fascinating. The buildings were what I noticed first, and it was quite startling to realise that the garage hadn’t been a one-off. All such structures – whether built for consumerist, habitative or other purposes – were static and stuck to the ground. Of course, this was meant to be my town. This was where ‘I’ had lived, on and off, for over twenty years. And I would have to act like that was true, even though it was the most alien place I had ever seen in my life. The lack of geometric imagination was startling. There was not so much as a decagon in sight. Though I did notice that some of the buildings were larger and – relatively speaking – more ornately designed than others. Temples to the orgasm, I imagined. Shops were beginning to open. In human towns, I would soon learn, everywhere is a shop. Shops are to Earth-dwellers what equation booths are to Vonnadorians. In one such shop I saw lots of books in the window. I was reminded that humans have to read books. They actually need to sit down and look at each word consecutively. And that takes time. Lots of time. A human can’t just swallow every book going, can’t chew different tomes simultaneously, or gulp down near-infinite knowledge in a matter of seconds. They can’t just pop a word-capsule in their mouth like we can. Imagine! Being not only mortal but also forced to take some of that precious and limited time and read. No wonder they were a species of primitives. By the time they had read enough books to actually reach a state of knowledge where they can do anything with it they are dead. Understandably, a human needs to know what kind of book they are about to read. They need to know if it is a love story. Or a murder story. Or a story about aliens. There are other questions, too, that humans have in bookstores. Such as, is it one of those books they read to feel clever, or one of those they will pretend never to have read in order to stay looking clever? Will it make them laugh, or cry? Or will it simply force them to stare out of the window watching the tracks of raindrops? Is it a true story? Or is it a false one? Is it the kind of story that will work on their brain or one which aims for lower organs? Is it one of those books that ends up acquiring religious followers or getting burned by them? Is it a book about mathematics or – like everything else in the universe – simply because of it? Yes, there are lots of questions. And even more books. So, so many. Humans in their typical human way have written far too many to get through. Reading is added to that great pile of things – work, love, sexual prowess, the words they didn’t say when they really needed to say them – that they are bound to feel a bit dissatisfied about. So, humans need to know about a book. Just as they need to know, when they apply for a job, if it will cause them to lose their mind at the age of fifty-nine and lead them to jump out of the office window. Or if, when they go on a first date, the person who is now making witticisms about his year in Cambodia will one day leave her for a younger woman called Francesca who runs her own public relations firm and says Kafkaesque without having ever read Kafka. Anyway, there I was walking into this bookshop and having a look at some of the books out on the tables. I noticed two of the females who worked there were laughing and pointing towards my mid-section. Again, I was confused. Weren’t men meant to go in bookshops? Was there some kind of war of ridicule going on between the genders? Did booksellers spend all their time mocking their customers? Or was it that I wasn’t wearing any clothes? Who knew? Anyway, it was a little distracting, especially as the only laughter I had ever heard had been the fur-muffled chuckle of an Ipsoid. I tried to focus on the books themselves, and decided to look at those stacked on the shelves. and decided to look at those stacked on the shelves. I soon noticed that the system they were using was alphabetical and related to the initial letter in the last name of each author. As the human alphabet only has 26 letters it was an incredibly simple system, and I soon found the Ms. One of these M books was called The Dark Ages and it was by Isobel Martin. I pulled it off the shelf. It had a little sign on it saying ‘Local Author’. There was only one of them in stock, which was considerably fewer than the number of books by Andrew Martin. For example, there were thirteen copies of an Andrew Martin book called The Square Circle and eleven of another one called American Pi. They were both about mathematics. I picked up these books and realised they both said ‘£8.99’ on the back. The interpolation of the entire language I had done with the aid of Cosmopolitan meant I knew this was the price of the books, but I did not have any money. So I waited until no one was looking (a long time) and then I ran very fast out of the shop. I eventually settled into a walk, as running without clothes is not entirely compatible with external testicles, and then I started to read. I searched both books for the Riemann hypothesis, but I couldn’t find anything except unrelated references to the long-dead German mathematician Bernhard Riemann himself. I let the books drop to the ground. People were really beginning to stop and stare. All around me were things I didn’t quite yet comprehend: litter, advertisements, bicycles. Uniquely human things. I passed a large man with a long coat and a hairy face who, judging from his asymmetrical gait, seemed to be injured. Of course, we may know brief pain, but this did not seem of that type. It reminded me that this was a place of death. Things deteriorated, degenerated, and died here. The life of a human was surrounded on all sides by darkness. How on Earth did they cope? Idiocy, from slow reading. It could only be idiocy. This man, though, didn’t seem to be coping. His eyes were full of sorrow and suffering. ‘Jesus,’ the man mumbled. I think he was mistaking me for someone. ‘I’ve seen it all now.’ He smelt of bacterial infection and several other repugnant things I couldn’t identify. I thought about asking him for directions, as the map was rendered in only two dimensions and a little vague, but I wasn’t up to it yet. I might have been able to say the words but I didn’t have the confidence to direct them towards such a close face, with its bulbous nose and sad pink eyes. (How did I know his such a close face, with its bulbous nose and sad pink eyes. (How did I know his eyes were sad? That is an interesting question, especially as we Vonnadorians never really feel sadness. The answer is I don’t know. It was a feeling I had. A ghost inside me, maybe the ghost of the human I had become. I didn’t have all his memories, but did I have other things. Was empathy part-biological? All I know is it unsettled me, more than the sight of pain. Sadness seemed to me like a disease, and I worried it was contagious.) So I walked past him and, for the first time in as long as I could remember, I tried to find my own way to somewhere. Now, I knew Professor Martin worked at the university but I had no idea what a university looked like. I guessed they wouldn’t be zirconium-clad space stations hovering just beyond the atmosphere, but other than that I didn’t really know. The ability to view two different buildings and say, oh this was that type of building, and that was this, well, that was simply lost on me. So I kept walking, ignoring the gasps and the laughter, and feeling whichever brick or glass façade I was passing by, as though touch held more answers than sight. And then the very worst possible thing happened. (Brace yourselves, Vonnadorians.) It began to rain. The sensation of it on my skin and my hair was horrific, and I needed it to end. I felt so exposed. I began to jog, looking for an entry into somewhere. Anywhere. I passed a vast building with a large gate and sign outside. The sign said ‘The College of Corpus Christi and the Blessed Virgin Mary’. Having read Cosmopolitan I knew what ‘virgin’ meant in full detail but I had a problem with some of the other words. Corpus and Christi seemed to inhabit a space just beyond the language. Corpus was something to do with body, so maybe Corpus Christi was a tantric full body orgasm. In truth, I didn’t know. There were smaller words too, and a different sign. These words said ‘Cambridge University’. I used my left hand to open the gate and walked through, on to grass, heading towards the building that still had lights on. Signs of life and warmth. The grass was wet. The soft dampness of it repulsed me and I seriously considered screaming. It was very neatly trimmed, this grass. I was later to realise that a neatly trimmed lawn was a powerful signifier, and should have commanded in me a slight sense of fear and respect, especially in conjunction (as this was) with ‘grand’ architecture. But right then, I was oblivious to both the significance of tidy grass and architectural grandeur and so I kept walking, towards the main building. A car stopped somewhere behind me. Again, there were blue lights flashing, sliding across the stone façade of Corpus Christi. sliding across the stone façade of Corpus Christi. (Flashing blue lights on Earth = trouble.) A man ran towards me. There was a whole crowd of other humans behind him. Where had they come from? They all seemed so sinister, in a pack, with their odd-looking clothed forms. 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 ostracise their own kind. If that was the case, it added weight to my mission. It made me understand it better. Anyway, there I was, on the wet grass, with the man running towards me and the crowd further away. I could have run, or fought, but there were too many of them – some with archaic-looking recording equipment. The man grabbed me. ‘Come with me, sir.’ I thought of my purpose. But right then I had to comply. Indeed, I just wanted to get out of the rain. ‘I am Professor Andrew Martin,’ I said, having complete confidence that I knew how to say this phrase. And that is when I discovered the truly terrifying power of other people’s laughter. ‘I have a wife and a son,’ I said, and I gave their names. ‘I need to see them. Can you take me to see them?’ ‘No. Not right now. No, we can’t.’ He held my arm tightly. I wanted, more than anything, for his hideous hand to let go. To be touched by one of them, let alone gripped, was too much. And yet I did not attempt to resist as he led me towards a vehicle. I was supposed to draw as little attention to myself as possible while doing my task. In that, I was failing already. 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. Human clothes They made me put on clothes. What humans didn’t know about architecture or non-radioactive isotopic helium-based fuels, they more than made up for with their knowledge of clothes. They were geniuses in the area, and knew all the subtleties. And there were, I promise you, thousands of them. The way clothes worked was this: there was an under layer and an outer layer. The under layer consisted of ‘pants’ and ‘socks’ which covered the heavily scented regions of the genitals, bottom and feet. 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. The outer layer of clothing seemed even more important than the under layer. This layer covered ninety-five per cent of the body, leaving only the face, head- hair and hands on show. This outer layer of clothing seemed to be the key to the power structures on this planet. For instance, the two men who took me away in the car with the blue flashing lights were both wearing identical outer layers, consisting of black shoes over their socks, black trousers over their pants, and then, over their upper bodies, there was a white ‘shirt’ and a dark, deep-space blue ‘jumper’. On this jumper, directly over the region of their left nipple, was a rectangular badge made of a slightly finer fabric which had the words ‘Cambridgeshire POLICE’ written on it. Their jackets were the same colour and had the same badge. These were clearly the clothes to wear. However, I soon realised what the word ‘police’ meant. It meant police. I couldn’t believe it. I had broken the law simply by not wearing clothes. I was pretty sure that most humans must have known what a naked human looked like. It wasn’t as though I had done something wrong while not wearing clothes. At least, not yet. They placed me inside a small room that was, in perfect accord with all human rooms, a shrine to the rectangle. The funny thing was that although this room looked precisely no better or worse than anything else in that police station, or indeed that planet, the officers seemed to think it was a particular punishment to be placed in this place – a ‘cell’ – more than any other room. They are in a body that dies, I chuckled to myself, and they worry more about being locked in a room! This was where they told me to get dressed. To ‘cover myself up’. So I picked up those clothes and did my best and then, once I had worked out which limb went through which opening, they said I had to wait for an hour. Which I did. Of course, I could have escaped. But I realised it was more likely that I would find what I needed by staying there, with the police and their computers. Plus, I remembered what I had been told. Use your gifts wisely. You must try and be like them. You must strive to be normal. Then the door opened. Questions There were two men. These were different men. These men weren’t wearing the same clothes, but they did have pretty much the same face. Not just the eyes, protruding nose and mouth but also a shared look of complacent misery. In the stark light I felt not a little afraid. They took me to another room for questioning. This was interesting knowledge: you could only ask questions in certain rooms. There were rooms for sitting and thinking, and rooms for inquisition. They sat down. Anxiety prickled my skin. The kind of anxiety you could only feel on this planet. The anxiety that came from the fact that the only beings who knew who I was were a long way away. They were as far away as it was possible to be. ‘Professor Andrew Martin,’ said one of the men, leaning back in his chair. ‘We’ve done a bit of research. We googled you. You’re quite a big fish in academic circles.’ The man stuck out his bottom lip, and displayed the palms of his hands. He wanted me to say something. What would they plan on doing to me if I didn’t? What could they have done? I had little idea what ‘googling’ me meant, but whatever it was I couldn’t say I had felt it. I didn’t really understand what being a ‘big fish in academic circles’ meant either though I must say it was a kind of relief – given the dimensions of the room – to realise they knew what a circle was. I nodded my head, still a little uneasy about speaking. It involved too much concentration and co-ordination. Then the other one spoke. I switched my gaze to his face. The key difference between them, I suppose, was in the lines of hair above their eyes. This one kept his eyebrows permanently raised, causing the skin of his forehead to wrinkle. ‘What have you got to tell us?’ I thought long and hard. It was time to speak. ‘I am the most intelligent human on the planet. I am a mathematical genius. I have made important contributions to many branches of mathematics, such as group theory, number theory and to many branches of mathematics, such as group theory, number theory and geometry. My name is Professor Andrew Martin.’ They gave each other a look, and released a brief air chuckle out of their noses. ‘Are you thinking this is funny?’ the first one said, aggressively. ‘Committing a public order offence? Does that amuse you? Yeah?’ ‘No. I was just telling you who I am.’ ‘We’ve established that,’ the officer said, who kept his eyebrows low and close, like doona-birds in mating season. ‘The last bit anyway. What we haven’t established is: what were you doing walking around without your clothes on at half past eight in the morning?’ ‘I am a professor at Cambridge University. I am married to Isobel Martin. I have a son, Gulliver. I would very much like to see them, please. Just let me see them.’ They looked at their papers. ‘Yes,’ the first one said. ‘We see you are a teaching fellow at Fitzwilliam College. But that doesn’t explain why you were walking naked around the grounds of Corpus Christi College. You are either off your head or a danger to society, or both.’ ‘I do not like wearing clothes,’ I said, with quite delicate precision. ‘They chafe. They are uncomfortable around my genitals.’ And then, remembering all I had learnt from Cosmopolitan magazine I leant in towards them and added what I thought would be the clincher. ‘They may seriously hinder my chances of achieving tantric full-body orgasm.’ It was then they made a decision, and the decision was to submit me to a psychiatric test. This essentially meant going to another rectilinear room to have to face looking at another human with another protruding nose. This human was female. She was called Priti, which was pronounced ‘pretty’ and means pretty. Unfortunate, given that she was human and, by her very nature, vomit- provoking. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘I would like to start by asking you something very simple. I’m wondering if you’ve been under any pressure recently?’ I was confused. What kind of pressure was she talking about? Atmospheric? Gravitational? ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A lot. Everywhere, there is some kind of pressure.’ It seemed like the right answer. Coffee She told me she had been talking to the university. This, alone, made little sense. How, for instance, was that done? But then she told me this: ‘They tell me you’ve been working long hours, even by the standards of your peers. They seem very upset about the whole thing. But they are worried about you. As is your wife.’ ‘My wife?’ I knew I had one, and I knew her name, but I didn’t really understand what it actually meant to have a wife. Marriage was a truly alien concept. There probably weren’t enough magazines on the planet for me to ever understand it. She explained. I was even more confused. Marriage was a ‘loving union’ which meant two people who loved each other stayed together for ever. But that seemed to suggest that love was quite a weak force and needed marriage to bolster it. Also, the union could be broken with something called ‘divorce’, which meant there was – as far as I could see – very little point to it, in logical terms. But then, I had no real idea what ‘love’ was, even though it had been one of the most frequently used words in the magazine I’d read. It remained a mystery. And so I asked her to explain that too, and by this point I was bewildered, overdosing on all this bad logic. It sounded like delusion. ‘Do you want a coffee?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. So the coffee came and I tasted it – a hot, foul, acidic, dual-carbon compound liquid – and I spat it out all over her. A major breach of human etiquette – apparently, I was meant to swallow it. ‘What the—’ She stood up and patted herself dry, showing intense concern for her shirt. After that there were more questions. Impossible stuff like, what was my address? What did I do in my spare time, to relax? Of course, I could have fooled her. Her mind was so soft and malleable and its neutral oscillations were so obviously weak that even with my as then still limited command of the language I could have told her I was perfectly fine, and that it was none of her business, and could she please leave me alone. I had that it was none of her business, and could she please leave me alone. I had already worked out the rhythm and the optimal frequency I would have needed. But I didn’t. Do not escape prematurely. Do not panic. There will be time. The truth is, I was quite terrified. My heart had begun racing for no obvious reason. My palms were sweating. Something about the room, and its proportions, coupled with so much contact with this irrational species, was setting me off. Everything here was a test. If you failed one test, there was a test to see why. I suppose they loved tests so much because they believed in free will. Ha! Humans, I was discovering, believed they were in control of their own lives, and so they were in awe of questions and tests, as these made them feel like they had a certain mastery over other people, who had failed in their choices, and who had not worked hard enough on the right answers. And by the end of the last failed test many were sat, as I was soon sat, in a mental hospital, swallowing a mind-blanking pill called diazepam, and placed in another empty room full of right angles. Only this time, I was also inhaling the distressing scent of the hydrogen chloride they used to annihilate bacteria. My task was going to be easy, I decided, in that room. The meat of it, I mean. And the reason it was going to be easy was that I had the same sense of indifference towards them as they had towards single-celled organisms. I could wipe a few of them out, no problem, and for a greater cause than hygiene. But what I didn’t realise was that when it came to that sneaking, camouflaged, untouchable giant known as the Future, I was as vulnerable as anyone. Mad people Humans, as a rule, don’t like mad people unless they are good at painting, and only then once they are dead. But the definition of mad, on Earth, seems to be very unclear and inconsistent. What is perfectly sane in one era turns out to be insane in another. The earliest humans walked around naked with no problem. Certain humans, in humid rainforests mainly, still do so. So, we must conclude that madness is sometimes a question of time, and sometimes of postcode. Basically, the key rule is, if you want to appear sane on Earth you have to be in the right place, wearing the right clothes, saying the right things, and only stepping on the right kind of grass. The cubic root of 912,673 After a while, my wife came to visit. Isobel Martin, in person. Author of The Dark Ages. I wanted to be repulsed by her, as that would make everything easier. I wanted to be horrified and, of course, I was, because the whole species was horrific to me. On that first encounter I thought she was hideous. I was frightened of her. I was frightened of everything here, now. It was an undeniable truth. To be on Earth was to be frightened. I was even frightened by the sight of my own hands. But anyway, Isobel. When I first saw her I saw nothing but a few trillion poorly arranged, mediocre cells. She had a pale face and tired eyes and a narrow, but still protruding nose. There was something very poised and upright about her, something very contained. She seemed, even more than most, to be holding something back. My mouth dried just looking at her. I suppose if there was a challenge with this particular human it was that I was meant to know her very well, and also that I was going to be spending more time with her, to glean the information I needed, before doing what I had to do. She came to see me in my room, while a nurse watched. It was, of course, another test. Everything in human life was a test. That was why they all looked so stressed out. I was dreading her hugging me, or kissing me, or blowing air into my ear or any of those other human things the magazine had told me about, but she didn’t. She didn’t even seem to want to do that. What she wanted to do was sit there and stare at me, as if I were the cubic root of 912,673 and she was trying to work me out. And indeed, I tried very hard to act as harmoniously as that. The indestructible ninety-seven. My favourite prime. Isobel smiled and nodded at the nurse, but when she sat down and faced me I realised she was exhibiting a few universal signs of fear – tight facial muscles, dilated pupils, fast breathing. I paid special attention to her hair now. She had dark hair growing out of the top and rear of her head which extended to just above her shoulders where it halted abruptly to form a straight horizontal line. This was known as a ‘bob’. She sat tall in her chair with a straight back, and her neck was long, as if her head had fallen out with her body and wanted nothing more to do with it. I would later discover that she was forty-one and had an appearance which passed for beautiful, or at least plainly beautiful, on this planet. But right then she had just another human face. And human faces were the last of the human codes that I would learn. She inhaled. ‘How are you feeling?’ ‘I don’t know. I don’t remember a lot of things. My mind is a little bit scrambled, especially about this morning. Listen, has anyone been to my office? Since yesterday?’ This confused her. ‘I don’t know. How would I know that? I doubt very much they’ll be in at the weekend. And anyway you’re the only one who has the keys. Please, Andrew, what happened? Have you suffered an accident? Have they tested you for amnesia? Why were you out of the house at that time? Tell me what you were doing. I woke up and you weren’t there.’ ‘I just needed to get out. That is all. I needed to be outside.’ She was agitated now. ‘I was thinking all sorts of things. I checked the whole house, but there was no sign of you. And the car was still there, and your bike, and you weren’t picking up your phone, and it was three in the morning, Andrew. Three in the morning.’ I nodded. She wanted answers, but I only had questions, ‘Where is our son? Gulliver? Why is he not with you?’ This answer confused her even more. ‘He’s at my mother’s,’ she said. ‘I could hardly bring him here. He’s very upset. After everything else this is, you know, hard for him.’ Nothing she was telling me was information I needed. So I decided to be more direct. ‘Do you know what I did yesterday? Do you know what I achieved while I was at work?’ I knew that however she answered this, the truth remained the same. I would have to kill her. Not then. Not there. But somewhere, and soon. Still I had to know what she knew. Or what she might have said to others. The nurse wrote something down at this point. Isobel ignored my question and leant in closer towards me, lowering her voice. ‘They think you have suffered a mental breakdown. They don’t call it that, of course. But that is what they think. I’ve been asked lots of questions. It was like facing the Grand Inquisitor.’ ‘That’s all there is around here, isn’t it? Questions.’ I braved another glance at her face and gave her more questions. ‘Why did we get married? What is the point of it? What are the rules involved?’ Certain enquiries, even on a planet designed for questions, go unheard. ‘Andrew, I’ve been telling you for weeks – months – that you need to slow down. You’ve been overdoing it. Your hours have been ridiculous. You’ve been truly burning the candle. Something had to give. But even so, this was so sudden. There were no warning signs. I just want to know what triggered it all. Was it me? What was it? I’m worried about you.’ I tried to come up with a valid explanation. ‘I suppose I just must have forgotten the importance of wearing clothes. That is, the importance of acting the way I was supposed to act. I don’t know. I must have just forgotten how to be a human. It can happen, can’t it? Things can be forgotten sometimes?’ Isobel held my hand. The glabrous under-portion of her thumb stroked my skin. This unnerved me even more. I wondered why she was touching me. A policeman grips an arm to take you somewhere, but why does a wife stroke your hand? What was the purpose? Did it have something to do with love? I stared at the small glistening diamond on her ring. ‘It’s going to be all right, Andrew. This is just a blip. I promise you. You’ll be right as rain soon.’ ‘As rain?’ I asked, the worry adding a quiver to my voice. I tried to read her facial expressions, but it was difficult. She wasn’t terrified any more, but what was she? Was she sad? Confused? Angry? Disappointed? I wanted to understand, but I couldn’t. She left me, after a hundred more words of the conversation. Words, words, words. There was a brief kiss on my cheek, and a hug, and I tried not to flinch or tighten up, hard as that was for me. And then she turned away and wiped something from her eye, which had leaked. I felt like I was expected to do something, say something, feel something, but I didn’t know what. ‘I saw your book,’ I said. ‘In the shop. Next to mine.’ ‘Some of you still remains then,’ she said. The tone was soft, but slightly scornful, or I think it was. ‘Andrew, just be careful. Do everything they say and it will be all right. Everything will be all right.’ And then she was gone. Dead cows I was told to go to the dining hall to eat. This was a terrible experience. For one thing, it was the first time I had been confronted with so many of their species in an enclosed area. Second, the smell. Of boiled carrot. Of pea. Of dead cow. A cow is an Earth-dwelling animal, a domesticated and multipurpose ungulate, which humans treat as a one-stop shop for food, liquid refreshment, fertiliser and designer footwear. The humans farm it and cut its throat and then cut it up and package it and refrigerate it and sell it and cook it. By doing this, apparently they have earned the right to change its name to beef, which is the monosyllable furthest away from cow, because the last thing a human wants to think about when eating cow is an actual cow. I didn’t care about cows. If it had been my assignment to kill a cow then I would have happily done so. But there was a leap to be made from not caring about someone to wanting to eat them. So I ate the vegetables. Or rather, I ate a single slice of boiled carrot. Nothing, I realised, could make you feel quite so homesick as eating disgusting, unfamiliar food. One slice was enough. More than enough. It was, in fact, far too much and it took me all my strength and concentration to battle that gag reflex and not throw up. I sat on my own, at a table in the corner, beside a tall pot plant. The plant had broad, shining, rich green flat vascular organs known as leaves which evidently served a photosynthetic function. It looked exotic to me, but not appallingly so. Indeed, the plant looked rather pretty. For the first time I was looking at something here and not being troubled. But then I looked away from the plant, towards the noise, and all the humans classified as crazy. The ones for whom the ways of this world were beyond them. If I was ever going to relate to anyone on this planet, they were surely going to be in this room. And just as I was thinking this one of them came up to me. A girl with short pink hair, and a circular piece of silver through her nose (as if that region of the face needed more attention given to it), thin orange-pink scars on her arms, and a quiet, low voice that seemed to imply that every thought in her brain was a deadly secret. She was wearing a T-shirt. On the T-shirt were the words ‘Everything was beautiful (and wearing a T-shirt. On the T-shirt were the words ‘Everything was beautiful (and nothing hurt)’. Her name was Zoë. She told me that straight away. The world as will and representation And then she said, ‘New?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Day?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It is. We do appear to be angled towards the sun.’ 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. Once she had calmed down she explained herself. ‘No, I mean, are you here permanently or do you just come in for the day? Like me? A “voluntary commitment” job.’ ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I think I will be leaving soon. I am not mad, you see. I have just been a little confused about things. I have a lot to get on with. Things to do. Things to finish off.’ ‘I recognise you from somewhere,’ said Zoë. ‘Do you? From where?’ I scanned the room. I was starting to feel uncomfortable. There were seventy- six patients and eighteen members of staff. I needed privacy. I needed, really, to get out of there. ‘Have you been on the telly?’ ‘I don’t know.’ She laughed. ‘We might be Facebook friends.’ ‘Yeah.’ She scratched her horrible face. I wondered what was underneath. It couldn’t have been any worse. And then her eyes widened with a realisation. ‘No. I know. I’ve seen you at uni. You’re Professor Martin, aren’t you? You’re something of a legend. I’m at Fitzwilliam. I’ve seen you around the place. Better food in Hall than here, isn’t it?’ ‘Are you one of my students?’ She laughed again. ‘No. No. GCSE maths was enough for me. I hated it.’ This angered me. ‘Hated it? How can you hate mathematics? Mathematics is This angered me. ‘Hated it? How can you hate mathematics? Mathematics is everything.’ ‘Well, I didn’t see it like that. I mean, Pythagoras sounded like a bit of a dude, but, no, I’m not really über-big on numbers. I’m philosophy. That’s probably why I’m in here. OD’d on Schopenhauer.’ ‘Schopenhauer?’ ‘He wrote a book called The World as Will and Representation. I’m meant to be doing an essay on it. Basically it says that the world is what we recognise in our own will. Humans are ruled by their basic desires and this leads to suffering and pain, because our desires make us crave things from the world but the world is nothing but representation. Because those same cravings shape what we see we end up feeding from ourselves, until we go mad. And end up in here.’ ‘Do you like it in here?’ She laughed again, but I noticed her kind of laughing somehow made her look sadder. ‘No. This place is a whirlpool. It sucks you deeper. You want out of this place, man. Everyone in here is off the charts, I tell you.’ She pointed at various people in the room, and told me what was wrong with them. She started with an over-sized, red-faced female at the nearest table to us. ‘That’s Fat Anna. She steals everything. Look at her with the fork. Straight up her sleeve . . . Oh, and that’s Scott. He thinks he’s the third in line to the throne . . . And Sarah, who is totally normal for most of the day and then at a quarter past four starts screaming for no reason. Got to have a screamer . . . and that’s Crying Chris . . . and there’s Bridget the Fidget who’s always moving around at the speed of thought . . .’ ‘The speed of thought,’ I said. ‘That slow?’ ‘. . . and . . . Lying Lisa . . . and Rocking Rajesh. Oh, oh yeah, and you see that guy over there, with the sideburns? The tall one, mumbling to his tray?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, he’s gone the full K-Pax.’ ‘What?’ ‘He’s so cracked he thinks he’s from another planet.’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Really?’ ‘Yeah. Trust me. In this canteen we’re just one mute Native American away from a full cuckoo’s nest.’ I had no idea what she was talking about. She looked at my plate. ‘Are you not eating that?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I could.’ And then, thinking I might get some information out of her, I asked, ‘If I had done something, achieved something remarkable, do you think I would have told a lot of people? I mean, we humans are proud aren’t we? We like to show off about things.’ ‘Yes, I suppose.’ ‘Yes, I suppose.’ I nodded. Felt panic rising as I wondered how many people knew about Professor Andrew Martin’s discovery. Then I decided to broaden my enquiry. To act like a human I would after all need to understand them, so I asked her the biggest question I could think of. ‘What do you think the meaning of life is, then? Did you discover it?’ ‘Ha! The meaning of life. The meaning of life. There is none. People search for external values and meaning in a world which not only can’t provide it but is also indifferent to their quest. That’s not really Schopenhauer. That’s more Kierkegaard via Camus. I’m with them. Trouble is, if you study philosophy and stop believing in a meaning you start to need medical help.’ ‘What about love? What is love all about? I read about it. In Cosmopolitan.’ Another laugh. ‘Cosmopolitan? Are you joking?’ ‘No. Not at all. I want to understand these things.’ ‘You’re definitely asking the wrong person here. See, that’s one of my problems.’ She lowered her voice by at least two octaves, stared darkly. ‘I like violent men. I don’t know why. It’s a kind of self-harm thing. I go to Peterborough a lot. Rich pickings.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, realising it was right I had been sent here. The humans were as weird as I had been told, and as in love with violence. ‘So love is about finding the right person to hurt you?’ ‘Pretty much.’ ‘That doesn’t make sense.’ ‘“There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.” That was . . . someone.’ There was a silence. I wanted to leave. Not knowing the etiquette, I just stood up and left. She released a little whine. And then laughed again. Laughter, like madness, seemed to be the only way out, the emergency exit for humans. I went over optimistically to the man mumbling to his tray. The apparent extraterrestrial. I spoke to him for a while. I asked him, with considerable hope, where he was from. He said Tatooine. A place I had never heard of. He said he lived near the Great Pit of Carkoon, a short drive from Jabba’s Palace. He used to live with the Skywalkers, on their farm, but it burned down. ‘How far away is your planet? From Earth, I mean.’ ‘Very far.’ ‘How far?’ ‘Fifty thousand miles,’ he said, crushing my hope, and making me wish I’d never diverted my attention away from the plant with the lush green leaves. I looked at him. For a moment, I had thought I wasn’t alone among them but I looked at him. For a moment, I had thought I wasn’t alone among them but now I knew I was. So, I thought to myself as I walked away, this is what happens when you live on Earth. You crack. You hold reality in your hands until it burns and then you have to drop the plate. (Someone somewhere else in the room, just as I was thinking this, actually did drop a plate.) Yes, I could see it now – being a human sent you insane. I looked out of a large glass rectangular window and saw trees and buildings, cars and people. Clearly, this was a species not capable of handling the new plate Andrew Martin had just handed them. I really needed to get out of there and do my duty. I thought of Isobel, my wife. She had knowledge, the kind of knowledge I needed. I should have left with her. ‘What am I doing?’ I walked towards the window, expecting it to be like windows on my planet, Vonnadoria, but it wasn’t. It was made of glass. Which was made of rock. And instead of walking through it I banged my nose into it, prompting a few yelps of laughter from other patients. I left the room, quite desperate to escape all the people, and the smell of cow and carrots. Amnesia Acting human was one thing, but if Andrew Martin had told people then I really could not afford to waste any more time in this place. Looking at my left hand and the gifts it contained, I knew what I had to do. After lunch, I visited the nurse who had sat watching me talk to Isobel. I lowered my voice to just the right frequency. I slowed the words to just the right speed. To hypnotise a human was easy because, out of any species in the universe, they seemed the one most desperate to believe. ‘I am perfectly sane. I would like to see the doctor who can discharge me. I really need to get back home, to see my wife and child, and to continue my work at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge University. Plus, I really don’t like the food here. I don’t know what happened this morning, I really don’t. It was an embarrassing public display, but I wholeheartedly assure you that whatever it was I suffered, it was temporary. I am sane, now, and I am happy. I feel very well indeed.’ He nodded. ‘Follow me,’ he said. The doctor wanted me to have some medical tests. A brain scan. They were worried about possible damage to my cerebral cortex which could have prompted amnesia. I realised whatever else was to occur the one thing that couldn’t possibly happen to me was to have my brain looked at, not while the gifts were active. So, I convinced him I was not suffering from amnesia. I made up a lot of memories. I made up a whole life. I told him that I had been under a lot of pressure at work and he understood. He then asked me some more questions. But as with all human questions the answers were always there, inside them like protons inside an atom, for me to locate and give as my own independent thoughts. After half an hour the diagnosis was clear. I hadn’t lost my memory. I had simply suffered a period of temporary insanity. Although he disapproved of the term ‘breakdown’ he said I had suffered a ‘mental collapse’ due to sleep- deprivation and work pressures and a diet which, as Isobel had already informed the doctor, consisted largely of strong black coffee – a drink, of course, I already knew I hated. knew I hated. The doctor then gave me some prompts, wondering if I’d suffered from panic attacks, low moods, nervous jolts, sudden behavioural swings or feelings of unreality. ‘Unreality?’ I could ponder with conviction. ‘Oh yes, I have definitely been feeling that one. But not any more. I feel fine. I feel very real. I feel as real as the sun.’ 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 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 it)] The distribution of prime numbers I looked at Andrew Martin’s emails, specifically the very last one in his sent folder. It had the subject heading, ‘153 years later . . .’, and it had a little red exclamation mark beside it. The message itself was a simple one: ‘I have proved the Riemann hypothesis, haven’t I? Need to tell you first. Please, Daniel, cast your eyes over this. Oh, and needless to say, this is for those eyes only at the moment. Until it goes public. What do you reckon? Humans will never be the same again? Biggest news anywhere since 1905? See attachment.’ The attachment was the document I had deleted elsewhere, and had just been reading, so I didn’t waste much time on that. Instead, I looked at the recipient: daniel.russell@cambridge.ac.uk. Daniel Russell, I swiftly discovered, was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University. He was sixty-three years old. He had written fourteen books, most of which had been international bestsellers. The Internet told me he had taught at every English-language university with an intimidating enough reputation – Cambridge (where he was now), Oxford, Harvard, Princeton and Yale among others – and had received numerous awards and titles. He had worked on quite a few academic papers with Andrew Martin, but as far as I could tell from my brief research they were colleagues more than friends. I looked at the time. In about twenty minutes my ‘wife’ would be coming home and wondering where I was. The less suspicion there was at this stage the better. There was a sequence of doing things, after all. I had to follow the sequence. And the first part of the sequence needed to be done right now, so I trashed the email and the attachment. Then, to be on the safe side, I quickly designed a virus – yes, with the help of primes – which would ensure that nothing could be accessed intact from this computer again. Before I left, I checked the papers on the desk. There was nothing there to be worried about. Insignificant letters, timetables, blank pages, but then, on one of them, a telephone number 07865542187. I put it in my pocket and noticed, as I them, a telephone number 07865542187. I put it in my pocket and noticed, as I did so, one of the photographs on the desk. Isobel, Andrew and the boy I assumed to be Gulliver. He had dark hair, and was the only one of the three who wasn’t smiling. He had wide eyes, peeping out from below a dark fringe of hair. He carried the ugliness of his species better than most. At least he wasn’t looking happy about what he was, and that was something. Another minute had gone by. It was time to go. We are pleased with your progress. But now the real work must begin. Yes. Deleting documents from computers is not the same as deleting lives. Even human lives. I understand that. A prime number is strong. It does not depend on others. It is pure and complete and never weakens. You must be like a prime. You must not weaken, you must distance yourself, and you must not change after interaction. You must be indivisible. Yes. I will be. Good. Now, continue. Glory Isobel was still not back, on my return to the house, so I did a little more research. She was not a mathematician. She was a historian. On Earth, this was an important distinction as here history was not yet viewed as a sub-division of mathematics, which of course it was. I also discovered that Isobel, like her husband, was considered to be very clever by the standards of her species. I knew this because one of the books on the shelf in the bedroom was The Dark Ages, the one I had seen in the bookshop window. And now I could see it had a quote from a publication called the New York Times which read ‘very clever’. The book was 1,253 pages long. A door opened downstairs. I heard the soft sound of metal keys being rested on a wooden chest. She came up to see me. That was the first thing she did. ‘How are you?’ she asked. ‘I’ve been looking at your book. About the Dark Ages.’ She laughed. ‘What are you laughing at?’ ‘Oh, it’s that or cry.’ ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘do you know where Daniel Russell lives?’ ‘Of course I do. We’ve been to his house for dinner.’ ‘Where does he live?’ ‘In Babraham. He’s got a whopping place. Can you seriously not remember? It’s like not remembering a visit to Nero’s palace.’ ‘Yes. I can, I can. It’s just that there are things which are still a bit hazy. I think it’s the pills. That was a blank, so that’s why I asked. That’s all. So, I’m good friends with him?’ ‘No. You hate him. You can’t stand him. Though deep hostility is your default setting with other academics these days, Ari excepted.’ ‘Ari?’ She sighed. ‘Your best friend.’ ‘Oh, Ari. Yes. Of course. Ari. My ears are a bit blocked. I didn’t hear you properly.’ properly.’ ‘But with Daniel,’ she said, speaking a little louder, ‘if I dare say it, the hatred is just the manifestation of an inferiority complex on your part. But superficially, you get on with him. You’ve even sought his guidance a few times, with your prime number stuff.’ ‘Right. Okay. My prime number stuff. Yes. And where am I with that? Where was I? When I last spoke to you, before?’ I felt the urge to ask it outright. ‘Had I proved the Riemann hypothesis?’ ‘No. You hadn’t. At least, not that I knew. But you should probably check that out, because if you have we’ll be a million pounds richer.’ ‘What?’ ‘Dollars, actually, isn’t it?’ ‘I—’ ‘The Millennium Prize, or whatever it is. Proof of the Riemann hypothesis is the largest remaining puzzle that hasn’t been solved. There is an institute in Massachusetts, the other Cambridge, the Clay Institute . . . You know this stuff backwards, Andrew. You mumble this stuff in your sleep.’ ‘Absolutely. Backwards and forwards. All the ways. I just need a little reminding that is all.’ ‘Well, it’s a very wealthy institute. They obviously have a lot of money because they’ve already given about ten million dollars away to other mathematicians. Apart from that last guy.’ ‘Last guy?’ ‘The Russian. Grigori something. The one who turned it down for solving the Whatever-it-was Conjecture.’ ‘But a million dollars is a lot of money, isn’t it?’ ‘It is. It’s a nice amount.’ ‘So why did he turn it down?’ ‘How do I know? I don’t know. You told me he was a recluse who lives with his mother. There are people in this world who have motives that extend beyond the financial, Andrew.’ This was genuinely news to me. ‘Are there?’ ‘Yes. There are. Because, you know, there’s this new groundbreaking and controversial theory that money can’t buy you happiness.’ ‘Oh,’ I said. She laughed again. She was trying to be funny, I think, so I laughed, too. ‘So, no one has solved the Riemann hypothesis?’ ‘What? Since yesterday?’ ‘Since, well, ever?’ ‘No. No one has solved it. There was a false alarm, a few years back. ‘No. No one has solved it. There was a false alarm, a few years back. Someone from France. But no. The money is still there.’ ‘So, that is why he . . . why I . . . this is what motivates me, money?’ She was now arranging socks on the bed, in pairs. It was a terrible system she had developed. ‘Not just that,’ she went on. ‘Glory is what motivates you. Ego. You want your name everywhere. Andrew Martin. Andrew Martin. Andrew Martin. You want to be on every Wikipedia page going. You want to be an Einstein. The trouble is, Andrew, you’re still two years old.’ This confused me. ‘I am? How is that possible?’ ‘Your mother never gave you the love you needed. You will for ever be sucking at a nipple that offers no milk. You want the world to know you. You want to be a great man.’ She said this in quite a cool tone. I wondered if this was how people always talked to each other, or if it was just unique to spouses. I heard a key enter a lock. Isobel looked at me with wide, astonished eyes. ‘Gulliver.’ Dark matter Gulliver’s room was at the top of the house. The ‘attic’. The last stop before the thermosphere. He went straight there, his feet passing the bedroom I was in, with only the slightest pause before climbing the final set of stairs. While Isobel went out to walk the dog I decided to phone the number on the piece of paper in my pocket. Maybe it was Daniel Russell’s number. ‘Hello,’ came a voice. Female. ‘Who’s this?’ ‘This is Professor Andrew Martin,’ I said. The female laughed. ‘Well hello, Professor Andrew Martin.’ ‘Who are you? Do you know me?’ ‘You’re on YouTube. Everyone knows you now. You’ve gone viral. The Naked Professor.’ ‘Oh.’ ‘Hey, don’t worry about it. Everyone loves an exhibitionist.’ She spoke slowly, lingering on words as if each one had a taste she didn’t want to lose. ‘Please, how do I know you?’ The question was never answered, because at that precise moment Gulliver walked into the room and I switched off the phone. Gulliver. My ‘son’. The dark-haired boy I had seen in the photographs. He looked as I had expected, but maybe taller. He was nearly as tall as me. His eyes were shaded by his hair. (Hair, by the way, is very important here. Not as important as clothes obviously, but getting there. To humans, hair is more than just a filamentous biomaterial that happens to grow out of their heads. It carries all kinds of social signifiers, most of which I couldn’t translate.) His clothes were as black as space and his T-shirt had the words ‘Dark Matter’ on them. Maybe this was how certain people communicated, via the slogans on their T- shirts. He wore ‘wristbands’. His hands were in his pockets and he seemed uncomfortable looking at my face. (The feeling, then, was mutual.) His voice was low. Or at least low by human standards. About the same depth as a Vonnadorian humming plant. He came and sat on the bed and tried to be nice, at the start, but then at one point he switched to a higher frequency. the start, but then at one point he switched to a higher frequency. ‘Dad, why did you do it?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘School is going to be hell now.’ ‘Oh.’ ‘Is that all you can say? “Oh?” Are you serious? Is that fucking it?’ ‘No. Yes. I, I fucking don’t fucking know, Gulliver.’ ‘Well, you’ve destroyed my life. I’m a joke. It was bad before. Ever since I started there. But now—’ I wasn’t listening. I was thinking about Daniel Russell, and how I desperately needed to phone him. Gulliver noticed I wasn’t paying attention. ‘It doesn’t even matter. You never want to talk to me, apart from last night.’ Gulliver left the room. He slammed the door, and let out a kind of growl. He was fifteen years old. This meant he belonged to a special sub-category of human called a ‘teenager’, the chief characteristics of which were a weakened resistance to gravity, a vocabulary of grunts, a lack of spatial awareness, copious amounts of masturbation, and an unending appetite for cereal. Last night. I got out of bed and headed upstairs to the attic. I knocked on his door. There was no reply but I opened it anyway. Inside, the environment was one of prevailing dark. There were posters for musicians. Thermostat, Skrillex, The Fetid, Mother Night, and the Dark Matter his T-shirt referenced. There was a window sloped in line with the ceiling, but the blind was drawn. There was a book on the bed. It was called Ham on Rye, by Charles Bukowski. There were clothes on the floor. Together, the room was a data cloud of despair. I sensed he wanted to be put out of his misery, one way or another. That would come, of course, but first there would be a few more questions. He didn’t hear me enter owing to the audio transmitter he had plugged into his ears. Nor did he see me, as he was too busy staring at his computer. On the screen, there was a still-motion image of myself naked, walking past one of the university buildings. There was also some writing on the screen. At the top were the words ‘Gulliver Martin, You Must Be So Proud’. Underneath, there were lots of comments. A typical example read, ‘HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! Oh almost forgot – HA!’ I read the name next to that particular post. ‘Who is Theo “The Fucking Business” Clarke?’ Gulliver jumped at my voice and turned around. I asked my question again but didn’t receive an answer. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked, purely for research purposes. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked, purely for research purposes. ‘Just go away.’ ‘I want to talk to you. I want to talk about last night.’ He turned his back to me. His torso stiffened. ‘Go away, Dad.’ ‘No. I want to know what I said to you.’ He sprang out of his chair and, as the humans say, stormed over to me. ‘Just leave me alone, okay? You’ve never been interested in a single thing about my life so don’t start now. Why fucking start now?’ I watched the back of him in the small, circular mirror staring out from the wall like a dull and unblinking eye. After some aggressive pacing he sat back in his chair, turned to his computer again, and pressed his finger on an odd-looking command device. ‘I need to know something,’ I said. ‘I need to know if you know what I was doing. Last week at work?’ ‘Dad, just—’ ‘Listen, this is important. Were you still up when I came home? You know, last night? Were you in the house? Were you awake?’ He mumbled something. I didn’t hear what. Only an ipsoid would have heard it. ‘Gulliver, how are you at mathematics?’ ‘You know how I fucking am at maths.’ ‘Fucking no, I don’t. Not now. That is why I am fucking asking. Tell me what you fucking know.’ Nothing. I thought I was using his language, but Gulliver just sat there, staring away from me, with his right leg jerking up and down in slight but rapid movements. My words were having no effect. I thought of the audio transmitter he still had in one ear. Maybe it was sending radio signals. I waited a little while longer and sensed it was time to leave. But as I headed for the door he said, ‘Yeah. I was up. You told me.’ My heart raced. ‘What? What did I tell you?’ ‘About you being the saviour of the human race or something.’ ‘Anything more specific? Did I go into detail?’ ‘You proved your precious Rainman hypothesis.’ ‘Riemann. Riemann. The Riemann hypothesis. I told you that, fucking did I?’ ‘Yeah,’ he said, in the same glum tone. ‘First time you’d spoken to me in a week.’ ‘Who have you told?’ ‘What? Dad, I think people are more interested in the fact that you walked around the town centre naked, to be honest. No one’s going to care about some equation.’ equation.’ ‘But your mother? Have you told her? She must have asked you if I’d spoken to you, after I’d gone missing. Surely she asked you that?’ He shrugged. (A shrug, I realised, was one of the main modes of communication for teenagers.) ‘Yeah.’ ‘And? What did you say? Come on, speak to me, Gulliver. What does she know about it?’ He turned and looked me straight in the eye. He was frowning. Angry. Confused. ‘I don’t fucking believe you, Dad.’ ‘Fucking believe?’ ‘You’re the parent, I’m the kid. I’m the one who should be wrapped up in myself, not you. I’m fifteen and you’re forty-three. If you are genuinely ill, Dad, then I want to be there for you, but aside from your new-found love of streaking and your weird fucking swearing you are acting very, very, very much like yourself. But here’s a newsflash. You ready? We don’t actually care about your prime numbers. We don’t care about your precious fucking work or your stupid fucking books or your genius-like brain or your ability to solve the world’s greatest outstanding mathematical whatever because, because, because all these things hurt us.’ ‘Hurt you?’ Maybe the boy was wiser than he looked. ‘What do you mean by that?’ His eyes stayed on me. His chest rose and fell with visible intensity. ‘Nothing,’ he said at last. ‘But, the answer is no, I didn’t tell Mum. I said you said something about work. That’s all. I didn’t think it was relevant information right then to tell her about your fucking hypothesis.’ ‘But the money. You know about that?’ ‘Yeah, course I do.’ ‘And you still didn’t think it was a big deal?’ ‘Dad, we have quite a lot of money in the bank. We have one of the biggest houses in Cambridge. I’m probably the richest kid in my school now. But it doesn’t amount to shit. It isn’t the Perse, remember?’ ‘The Perse?’ ‘That school you spent twenty grand a year on. You’ve forgotten that? Who the hell are you? Jason Bourne?’ ‘No. I am not.’ ‘You probably forgot I was expelled, too.’ ‘No,’ I lied. ‘Course I haven’t.’ ‘I don’t think more money’s going to save us.’ I was genuinely confused. This went against everything we were meant to know about the humans. know about the humans. ‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re right. It won’t. And besides, it was a mistake. I haven’t proved the Riemann hypothesis. I think in fact it is unprovable. I thought I had, but I haven’t. So there is nothing to tell anyone.’ At which Gulliver pushed the audio-transmission device into his other ear and closed his eyes. He wanted no more of me. ‘Fucking okay,’ I whispered and left the room. Emily Dickinson I went downstairs and found an ‘address book’. Inside were addresses and telephone numbers for people, listed alphabetically. I found the telephone number I was looking for. A woman told me Daniel Russell was out but would be back in around an hour. He would phone me back. Meanwhile, I perused some more history books and learnt things as I read between the lines. As well as religion, human history is full of depressing things like colonisation, disease, racism, sexism, homophobia, class snobbery, environmental destruction, slavery, totalitarianism, military dictatorships, inventions of things which they have no idea how to handle (the atomic bomb, the Internet, the semi-colon), the victimisation 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. I found a book called The Great American Poets. ‘I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,’ wrote someone called Walt Whitman. It was an obvious point, but something about it was quite beautiful. In the same book, there were words written by another poet. The poet was Emily Dickinson. The words were these: How happy is the little stone That rambles in the road alone, And doesn’t care about careers, And exigencies never fears; Whose coat of elemental brown A passing universe put on; And independent as the sun, Associates or glows alone, Fulfilling absolute decree In casual simplicity. Fulfilling absolute decree, I thought. Why do these words trouble me? The dog growled at me. I turned the page and found more unlikely wisdom. I read the words aloud to myself: ‘The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.’ ‘You’re out of bed,’ said Isobel. ‘Yes,’ I said. To be a human is to state the obvious. Repeatedly, over and over, until the end of time. ‘You need to eat,’ she added, after studying my face. ‘Yes,’ I said. She got out some ingredients. Gulliver walked past the doorway. ‘Gull, where are you going? I’m making dinner.’ The boy said nothing as he left. The slam of the door almost shook the house. ‘I’m worried about him,’ said Isobel. As she worried, I studied the ingredients on the worktop. Mainly green vegetation. But then something else. Chicken breast. I thought about this. And I kept thinking. The breast of a chicken. The breast of a chicken. The breast of a chicken. ‘That looks like meat,’ I said. ‘I’m going to make a stir-fry.’ ‘With that?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘The breast of a chicken?’ ‘Yes, Andrew. Or are you vegetarian now?’ The dog was in his basket. It went by the name of Newton. It was still growling at me. ‘What about the dog’s breasts? Are we going to eat those, too?’ ‘No,’ she said, with resignation. I was testing her. ‘Is a dog more intelligent than a chicken?’ ‘Yes,’ she said. She closed her eyes. ‘I don’t know. No. I haven’t got time for this. Anyway, you’re the big meat eater.’ I was uncomfortable. ‘I would rather not eat the chicken’s breasts.’ Isobel now clenched her eyes closed. She inhaled deeply. ‘Give me strength,’ she whispered. I could have done so, of course. But I needed what strength I had right now. Isobel handed me my diazepam. ‘Have you taken one lately?’ ‘No.’ ‘You probably should.’ So I humoured her. I unscrewed the cap and placed a pill on my palm. These ones looked like word-capsules. As green as knowledge. I popped a tablet in my mouth. Be careful. Dishwasher I ate the vegetable stir-fry. It smelt like Bazadean body waste. I tried not to look at it, so I looked at Isobel instead. It was the first time that looking at a human face was the easiest option. But I did need to eat. So I ate. ‘When you spoke to Gulliver about me going missing did he say anything to you?’ ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘What was it that he said?’ ‘That you came in about eleven, and that you’d gone into the living room where he was watching TV and that you’d told him that you were sorry you were late, but you’d been finishing something off at work.’ ‘Was that it? There was nothing more specific?’ ‘No.’ ‘What do you think he meant by that? I mean: what I meant by that?’ ‘I don’t know. But I have to say, you coming home and being friendly to Gulliver. That’s already out of character.’ ‘Why? Don’t I like him?’ ‘Not since two years ago. No. Pains me to say it, but you don’t act very much like you do.’ ‘Two years ago?’ ‘Since he got expelled from Perse. For starting a fire.’ ‘Oh yes. The fire incident.’ ‘I want you to start making an effort with him.’ Afterwards, I followed Isobel into the kitchen putting my plate and cutlery in the dishwasher. I was noticing more things about her. At first, I had just seen her as generically human but now I was appreciating the details. Picking up things I hadn’t noticed – differences between her and the others. She was wearing a cardigan and blue trousers known as jeans. Her long neck was decorated with a thin necklace made out of silver. Her eyes stared deep into things, as though she was continually searching for something that wasn’t there. Or as if it was there, but just out of sight. It was as though everything had a depth, an internal distance but just out of sight. It was as though everything had a depth, an internal distance to it. ‘How are you feeling?’ she asked. She seemed worried about something. ‘I feel fine.’ ‘I only ask because you’re loading the dishwasher.’ ‘Because that’s what you are doing.’ ‘Andrew, you never load the dishwasher. You are, and I mean this in the least offensive way possible, something of a domestic primitive.’ ‘Why? Don’t mathematicians load dishwashers?’ ‘In this house,’ she said sadly, ‘no, actually. No, they don’t.’ ‘Oh yes. I know. Obviously. I just fancied helping today. I help sometimes.’ ‘Now we’re on to fractions.’ She looked at my jumper. There was a bit of noodle resting on the blue wool. She picked it off, and stroked the fabric where it had been. She smiled, quickly. She cared about me. She had her reservations, but she cared. I didn’t want her to care about me. It wouldn’t help things. She placed her hand through my hair, to tidy it a bit. To my surprise, I wasn’t flinching. ‘Einstein chic is one thing but this is ridiculous,’ she said, softly. I smiled like I understood. She smiled too, but it was a smile on top of something else. As if she was wearing a mask, and there was a near-identical but less smiling face underneath. ‘It’s almost like an alien clone is in my kitchen.’ ‘Almost,’ I said. ‘Yes.’ It was then that the telephone rang. Isobel went to answer it and a moment later came back into the kitchen, holding out the receiver. ‘It’s for you,’ she said, in a suddenly serious voice. Her eyes were wide, trying to convey a silent message I didn’t quite understand. ‘Hello?’ I said. There was a long pause. The sound of breath, and then a voice on the next exhalation. A man, talking slowly and carefully. ‘Andrew? Is that you?’ ‘Yes. Who’s this?’ ‘It’s Daniel. Daniel Russell.’ My heart tripped. I realised this was it, the moment things had to change. ‘Oh hello, Daniel.’ ‘How are you? I hear you might be unwell.’ ‘Oh, I am fine, really. It was just a little bit of mental exhaustion. My mind had run its own marathon and it struggled. My brain is made for sprints. It doesn’t have the stamina for long-distance running. But don’t worry, honestly, I am back where I was. It wasn’t anything too serious. Nothing that the right medication couldn’t suppress, anyway.’ medication couldn’t suppress, anyway.’ ‘Well, that is good to hear. I was worried about you. Anyway, I was hoping to talk to you about that remarkable email you sent me.’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But let’s not do this over the phone. Let’s chat face-to-face. It would be good to see you.’ Isobel frowned. ‘What a good idea. Should I come to you?’ ‘No,’ I said, with a degree of firmness. ‘No. I’ll come to you.’ We are waiting. A large house Isobel had offered to drive me, and had tried to insist on it, saying I wasn’t ready to leave the house. Of course, I had already left the house, to go to Fitzwilliam College, but she hadn’t known about that. I said I felt like some exercise and Daniel needed to speak to me quite urgently about something, possibly some kind of job offer. I told her I’d have my phone on me and that she knew where I was. And so eventually I was able to take the address from Isobel’s notebook, leave the house and head to Babraham. To a large house, the largest I’d seen. Daniel Russell’s wife answered the door. She was a very tall, broad- shouldered woman, with quite long grey hair and aged skin. ‘Oh, Andrew.’ She held out her arms wide. I replicated the gesture. And she kissed me on the cheek. She smelt of soap and spices. It was clear she knew me. She couldn’t stop saying my name. ‘Andrew, Andrew, how are you?’ she asked me. ‘I heard about your little misadventure.’ ‘Well, I am all right. It was a, well, an episode. But I’m over it. The story continues.’ She studied me a little more and then opened the door wide. She beckoned me inside, smiling broadly. I stepped into the hallway. ‘Do you know why I am here?’ ‘To see Him Upstairs,’ she said, pointing to the ceiling. ‘Yes, but do you know why I am here to see him?’ She was puzzled by my manner but she tried her best to hide it beneath a kind of energetic and chaotic politeness. ‘No, Andrew,’ she said, quickly. ‘As a matter of fact, he didn’t say.’ I nodded. I noticed a large ceramic vase on the floor. It had a yellow pattern of flowers on it, and I wondered why people bothered with such empty vessels. What was their significance? Maybe I would never know. We passed a room, with a sofa and a television and bookcases and dark red walls. Blood-coloured. with a sofa and a television and bookcases and dark red walls. Blood-coloured. ‘Do you want a coffee? Fruit juice? We’ve acquired a taste for pomegranate juice. Though Daniel believes antioxidants are a marketing ploy.’ ‘I would like a water if that’s okay.’ We were in the kitchen now. It was about twice the size of Andrew Martin’s kitchen, but it was so cluttered it felt no bigger. There were saucepans hanging above my head. There was an envelope on the unit addressed to ‘Daniel and Tabitha Russell’. Tabitha poured me water from a jug. ‘I’d offer you a slice of lemon but I think we’re out. There’s one in the bowl but it must be blue by now. The cleaners never sort the fruit out. They won’t touch it. ‘And Daniel won’t eat fruit. Even though the doctor has told him he’s got to. But then the doctor has told him to relax and slow down, too, and he doesn’t do that either.’ ‘Oh. Why?’ She looked baffled. ‘His heart attack. You remember that? You aren’t the only frazzled mathematician in the world.’ ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘How is he?’ ‘Well, he’s on beta-blockers. I’m trying to get him on muesli and skimmed milk and to take it easier.’ ‘His heart,’ I said, thinking aloud. ‘Yes. His heart.’ ‘That is one of the reasons I came, in fact.’ She handed me a glass and I took a sip. 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, organised religion and probiotic yoghurts 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. ‘Where is he?’ ‘In his study. Upstairs.’ ‘His study?’ ‘You know where that is, don’t you?’ ‘Of course. Of course. I know where that is.’ Daniel Russell Of course, I had been lying. I had no idea where Daniel Russell’s study was, and this was a very big house, but as I was walking along the first-floor landing I heard a voice. The same dry voice I had heard on the phone. ‘Is that the saviour of mankind?’ I followed the voice all the way to the third doorway on the left, which was half-open. I could see framed pieces of paper lining a wall. I pushed open the door and saw a bald man with a sharp angular face and a small – in human terms – mouth. He was smartly dressed. He was wearing a red bow tie and a checked shirt. ‘Pleased to see you’re wearing clothes,’ he said, suppressing a sly smile. ‘Our neighbours are people of delicate sensibilities.’ ‘Yes. I am wearing the right amount of clothes. Don’t worry about that.’ He nodded, and kept nodding, as he leant back in his chair and scratched his chin. A computer screen glowed behind him, full of Andrew Martin’s curves and formulas. I could smell coffee. I noticed an empty cup. Two of them, in fact. ‘I have looked at it. And I have looked at it again. This must have taken you to the edge, I can see that. This is something. You must have been burning yourself with this, Andrew. I’ve been burning just reading through it.’ ‘I worked very hard,’ I said. ‘I was lost in it. But that happens, doesn’t it, with numbers?’ He listened with concern. ‘Did they prescribe anything?’ he asked. ‘Diazepam.’ ‘Do you feel it’s working?’ ‘I do. I do. I feel it is working. Everything feels a little bit alien I would say, a tad other-worldly, as if the atmosphere is slightly different, and the gravity has slightly less pull, and even something as familiar as an empty coffee cup has a terrible difference to it. You know, from my perspective. Even you. You seem quite hideous to me. Almost terrifying.’ Daniel Russell laughed. It wasn’t a happy laugh. Daniel Russell laughed. It wasn’t a happy laugh. ‘Well, there’s always been a frisson between us, but I always put that down to academic rivalry. Par for the course. We’re not geographers or biologists. We’re numbers men. We mathematicians have always been like that. Look at that miserable bastard Isaac Newton.’ ‘I named my dog after him.’ ‘So you did. But listen, Andrew, this isn’t a moment to nudge you to the kerb. This is a moment to slap you on the back.’ We were wasting time. ‘Have you told anyone about this?’ He shook his head. ‘No. Of course not. Andrew, this is yours. You can publicise this how you want. Though I would probably advise you, as a friend, to wait a little while. At least a week or so, until all this unwelcome stuff about your little Corpus incident has died down.’ ‘Is mathematics less interesting for humans than nudity?’ ‘It tends to be, Andrew. Yes. Listen. Go home, take it easy this week. I’ll put a word in with Diane at Fitz and explain that you’ll be fine but you may need some time off. I’m sure she’ll be pretty flexible. The students are going to be tricky on your first day back. You need to build your strength up. Rest a while. Come on Andrew, go home.’ I could smell the foul scent of coffee getting stronger. I looked around at all the certificates on the wall and felt thankful to come from a place where personal success was meaningless. ‘Home?’ I said. ‘Do you know where that is?’ ‘Course I do. Andrew, what are you talking about?’ ‘Actually, I am not called Andrew.’ Another nervous chuckle. ‘Is Andrew Martin your stage name? If it is, I could have thought of better.’ ‘I don’t have a name. Names are a symptom of a species which values the individual self above the collective good.’ This was the first time he stood up out of his chair. He was a tall man, taller than me. ‘This would be amusing, Andrew, if you weren’t a friend. I really think you might need to get proper medical help for this. Listen, I know a very good psychiatrist who you—’ ‘Andrew Martin is someone else. He was taken.’ ‘Taken?’ ‘After he proved what he proved, we were left with no choice.’ ‘We? What are you talking about? Just have an objective ear, Andrew. You are sounding out of your mind. I think you ought to go home. I’ll drive you back. I think it would be safer. Come on, let’s go. I’ll take you home. Back to your family.’ He held out his right arm, gesturing towards the door. But I wasn’t going anywhere. The pain ‘You said you wanted to slap my back.’ He frowned. Above the frown, the skin covering the top of his skull shone. I stared at it. At the shine. ‘What?’ ‘You wanted to slap my back. That is what you said. So, why not?’ ‘What?’ ‘Slap my back. Then I will go.’ ‘Andrew—’ ‘Slap my back.’ He exhaled slowly. His eyes were the mid-point between concern and fear. I turned, gave him my back. Waited for the hand, then waited some more. Then it came. He slapped my back. On that first contact, even with clothes between us, I made the reading. Then when I turned, for less than a second, my face wasn’t Andrew Martin’s. It was mine. ‘What the—’ He lurched backwards, bumping into his desk. I was, to his eyes, Andrew Martin again. But he had seen what he had seen. I only had a second, before he would begin screaming, so I paralysed his jaw. Somewhere way below the panic of his bulging eyes, there was a question: how did he do that? To finish the job properly I would need another contact: my left hand on his shoulder was sufficient. Then the pain began. The pain I had summoned. He held his arm. His face became violet. The colour of home. I had pain too. Head pain. And fatigue. But I walked past him, as he dropped to his knees, and deleted the email and the attachment. I checked his sent folder but there was nothing suspicious. I stepped out on to the landing. ‘Tabitha! Tabitha, call an ambulance! Quick! I think, I think Daniel is having a heart attack!’ Egypt Less than a minute later she was upstairs, on the phone, her face full of panic as she knelt down, trying to push a pill – an aspirin – into her husband’s mouth. ‘His mouth won’t open! His mouth won’t open! Daniel, open your mouth! Darling, oh my God darling, open your mouth!’ And then to the phone. ‘Yes! I told you! I told you! The Hollies! Yes! Chaucer Road! He’s dying! He’s dying!’ She managed to cram inside her husband’s mouth a piece of the pill, which bubbled into foam and dribbled onto the carpet. ‘Mnnnnnn,’ her husband was saying desperately. ‘Mnnnnnn.’ I stood there watching him. His eyes stayed wide, wide open, ipsoid-wide, as if staying in the world was a simple matter of forcing yourself to see. ‘Daniel, it’s all right,’ Tabitha was saying, right into his face. ‘An ambulance is on its way. You’ll be okay, darling.’ His eyes were now on me. He jerked in my direction. ‘Mnnnnnn!’ He was trying to warn his wife. ‘Mnnnnnn.’ She didn’t understand. Tabitha was stroking her husband’s hair with a manic tenderness. ‘Daniel, we’re going to Egypt. Come on, think of Egypt. We’re going to see the Pyramids. It’s only two weeks till we go. Come on, it’s going to be beautiful. You’ve always wanted to go . . .’ As I watched her I felt a strange sensation. A kind of longing for something, a craving, but for what I had no idea. I was mesmerised by the sight of this human female crouched over the man whose blood I had prevented from reaching his heart. ‘You got through it last time and you’ll get through it this time.’ ‘No,’ I whispered, unheard. ‘No, no, no.’ ‘Mnnn,’ he said, gripping his shoulder in infinite pain. ‘I love you, Daniel.’ His eyes clenched shut now, the pain too much. ‘Stay with me, stay with me, I can’t live all alone . . .’ His head was on her knee. She kept caressing his face. So this was love. Two His head was on her knee. She kept caressing his face. So this was love. Two life forms in mutual reliance. I was meant to be thinking I was watching weakness, something to scorn, but I wasn’t thinking that at all. He stopped making noise, he seemed instantly heavier for her, and the deep clenched creases around his eyes softened and relaxed. It was done. Tabitha howled, as if something had been physically wrenched out of her. I have never heard anything like that sound. It troubled me greatly, I have to say. A cat emerged from the doorway, startled by the noise maybe, but indifferent to the scene in general. It returned back from where it came. ‘No,’ said Tabitha, over and over, ‘no, no, no!’ Outside, the ambulance skidded to a halt on the gravel. Blue flashing lights appeared through the window. ‘They’re here,’ I told Tabitha and went downstairs. It was a strange and overwhelming relief to tread my way down those soft, carpeted stairs, and for those desperate sobs and futile commands to fade away into nothing. Where we are from I thought about where we – you and I – are from. Where we are from there are no comforting delusions, no religions, no impossible fiction. Where we are from there is no love and no hate. There is the purity of reason. Where we are from there are no crimes of passion because there is no passion. Where we are from there is no remorse because action has a logical motive and always results in the best outcome for the given situation. Where we are from there are no names, no families living together, no husbands and wives, no sulky teenagers, no madness. Where we are from we have solved the problem of fear because we have solved the problem of death. We will not die. Which means we can’t just let the universe do what it wants to do, because we will be inside it for eternity. Where we are from we will never be lying on a luxurious carpet, clutching our chest as our faces turn purple and our eyes seek desperately to view our surroundings for one last time. Where we are from our technology, created on the back of our supreme and comprehensive knowledge of mathematics, has meant not only that we can travel great distances, but also that we can rearrange our own biological ingredients, renew and replenish them. We are psychologically equipped for such advances. We have never been at war with ourselves. We never place the desires of the individual over the requirements of the collective. Where we are from we understand that if the humans’ rate of mathematical advancement exceeds their psychological maturity, then action needs to be taken. For instance, the death of Daniel Russell, and the knowledge he held, could end up saving many more lives. And so: he is a logical and justifiable sacrifice. Where we are from there are no nightmares. And yet, that night, for the very first time in my life I had a nightmare. A world of dead humans with me and that indifferent cat walking through a A world of dead humans with me and that indifferent cat walking through a giant carpeted street full of bodies. I was trying to get home. But I couldn’t. I was stuck here. I had become one of them. Stuck in human form, unable to escape the inevitable fate awaiting all of them. And I was getting hungry and I needed to eat but I couldn’t eat, because my mouth was clamped shut. The hunger became extreme. I was starving, wasting away at rapid speed. I went to the garage I had been in that first night and tried to shove food in my mouth, but it was no good. It was still locked from this inexplicable paralysis. I knew I was going to die. Die. How did humans ever stomach the idea? I woke. I was sweating and out of breath. Isobel touched my back. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, as Tabitha had said. ‘It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right.’ The dog and the music The next day I was alone. Well no, actually, that’s not quite true. I wasn’t alone. There was the dog. Newton. The dog named after a human who had come up with the ideas of gravity and inertia. Given the slow speed with which the dog left its basket, I realised the name was a fitting tribute to these discoveries. He was awake now. He was old and he hobbled, and he was half-blind. He knew who I was. Or who I wasn’t. And he growled whenever he was near me. I didn’t quite understand his language just yet but I sensed he was displeased. He showed his teeth but I could tell years of subservience to his bipedal owners meant the very fact that I was standing up was enough for me to command a certain degree of respect. I felt sick. I put this down to the new air I was breathing. But each time I closed my eyes I saw Daniel Russell’s anguished face as he lay on the carpet. I also had a headache, but that was the lingering after-effect of the energy I had exerted yesterday. I knew life was going to be easier during my short stay here if Newton was on my side. He might have information, have picked up on signals, heard things. And I knew there was one rule that held fast across the universe: if you wanted to get someone on your side what you really had to do was relieve their pain. It seems ridiculous now, such logic. But the truth was even more ridiculous, and too dangerous to acknowledge to myself, that after the need to hurt I felt an urge to heal. So I went over and gave him a biscuit. And then, after giving him the biscuit, I gave him sight. And then, as I stroked his hind leg, he whimpered words into my ear I couldn’t quite translate. I healed him, giving myself not only an even more intense headache but also wave upon wave of fatigue in the process. Indeed, so exhausted was I that I fell asleep on the kitchen floor. When I woke up, I was coated in dog saliva. Newton’s tongue was still at it, licking me with considerable enthusiasm. Licking, licking, licking, as though the meaning of considerable enthusiasm. Licking, licking, licking, as though the meaning of canine existence was something just beneath my skin. ‘Could you please stop that?’ I said. But he couldn’t. Not until I stood up. He was physically incapable of stopping. And even once I had stood up he tried to stand up with me, and on me, as if he wanted to be upright, too. It was then I realised the one thing worse than having a dog hate you is having a dog love you. Seriously, if there was a needier species in the universe I had yet to meet it. ‘Get away,’ I told him. ‘I don’t want your love.’ I went to the living room and sat down on the sofa. I needed to think. Would Daniel Russell’s death be viewed by the humans as suspicious? A man on heart medication succumbing to a second and this time fatal heart attack? I had no poison, and no weapon they would ever be able to identify. The dog sat down next to me, placed his head on my lap, then lifted his head off my lap, and then on again, as if deciding whether or not to put his head on my lap was the biggest decision he had ever faced. We spent hours together that day. Me and the dog. At first I was annoyed that he wouldn’t leave me alone, as what I needed to do was to focus and work out when I was going to act next. To work out how much more information I needed to acquire before doing what would have to be my final acts here, eliminating Andrew Martin’s wife and child. I shouted at the dog again to leave me alone, and he did so, but when I stood in the living room with nothing but my thoughts and plans I realised I felt a terrible loneliness and so called him back. And he came, and seemed happy to be wanted again. I put something on that interested me. It was called The Planets by Gustav Holst. It was a piece of music all about the humans’ puny solar system, so it was surprising to hear it had quite an epic feel. Another confusing thing was that it was divided into seven ‘movements’ each named after ‘astrological characters’. For instance, Mars was ‘the Bringer of War’, Jupiter was ‘the Bringer of Jollity’, and Saturn was ‘the Bringer of Old Age’. This primitivism struck me as funny. And so was the idea that the music had anything whatsoever to do with those dead planets. But it seemed to soothe Newton a little bit, and I must admit one or two parts of it had some kind of effect on me, a kind of electrochemical effect. Listening to music, I realised, was simply the pleasure of counting without realising you were counting. As the electrical impulses were transported from the neurons in my ear through my body, I felt – I don’t know – calm. It made that strange unease that had been with me since I had watched Daniel Russell die on his carpet settle a little. As we listened I tried to work out why Newton and his species were so enamoured of humans. enamoured of humans. ‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘What is it about the humans?’ Newton laughed. Or as close as a dog can get to laughing, which is pretty close. I persisted with my line of enquiry. ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Spill the beans.’ He seemed a bit coy. I don’t think he really had an answer. Maybe he hadn’t reached his verdict, or he was too loyal to be truthful. I put on some different music. I played the music of someone called Ennio Morricone. I played an album called Space Oddity by David Bowie, which, in its simple patterned measure of time, was actually quite enjoyable. As was Moon Safari by Air, though that shed little light on the moon itself. I played A Love Supreme by John Coltrane and Blue Monk by Thelonious Monk. This was jazz music. It was full of the complexity and contradictions that I would soon learn made humans human. I listened to ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ by Leonard Bernstein and ‘Moonlight Sonata’ by Ludwig van Beethoven and Brahms’ ‘Intermezzo op. 17’. I listened to the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, Daft Punk, Prince, Talking Heads, Al Greene, Tom Waits, Mozart. I was intrigued to discover the sounds that could make it on to music – the strange talking radio voice on ‘I Am the Walrus’ by the Beatles, the cough at the beginning of Prince’s ‘Raspberry Beret’ and at the end of Tom Waits songs. Maybe that is what beauty was, for humans. Accidents, imperfections, placed inside a pretty pattern. Asymmetry. The defiance of mathematics. I thought about my speech at the Museum of Quadratic Equations. With the Beach Boys I got a strange feeling, behind my eyes and in my stomach. I had no idea what that feeling was, but it made me think of Isobel, and the way she had hugged me last night, after I had come home and told her Daniel Russell had suffered a fatal heart attack in front of me. There’d been a slight moment of suspicion, a brief hardening of her stare, but it had softened into compassion. Whatever else she might have thought about her husband he wasn’t a killer. The last thing I listened to was a tune called ‘Clair de Lune’ by Debussy. That was the closest representation of space I had ever heard, and I stood there, in the middle of the room, frozen with shock that a human could have made such a beautiful noise. This beauty terrified me, like an alien creature appearing out of nowhere. An ipsoid, bursting out of the desert. I had to stay focused. I had to keep believing everything I had been told. That this was a species of ugliness and violence, beyond redemption. Newton was scratching at the front door. The scratching was putting me off the music so I went over and tried to decipher what he wanted. It turned out that what he wanted was to go outside. There was a ‘lead’ I had seen Isobel use, and so I attached it to the collar. so I attached it to the collar. As I walked the dog I tried to think more negatively towards the humans. And it certainly seemed ethically questionable, the relationship between humans and dogs, both of whom – on the scale of intelligence that covered every species in the universe – would have been somewhere in the middle, not too far apart. But I have to say that dogs didn’t seem to mind it. In fact, they went along quite happily with the set-up most of the time. I let Newton lead the way. We passed a man on the other side of the road. The man just stopped and stared at me and smiled to himself. I smiled and waved my hand, understanding this was an appropriate human greeting. He didn’t wave back. Yes, humans are a troubling species. We carried on walking, and we passed another man. A man in a wheelchair. He seemed to know me. ‘Andrew,’ he said, ‘isn’t it terrible – the news about Daniel Russell?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was there. I saw it happen. It was horrible, just horrible.’ ‘Oh my God, I had no idea.’ ‘Mortality is a very tragic thing.’ ‘Indeed, indeed it is.’ ‘Anyway, I had better be going. The dog is in quite a hurry. I will see you.’ ‘Yes, yes, absolutely. But may I ask: how are you? I heard you’d been a bit unwell yourself?’ ‘Oh, fine. I am over that. It was just a bit of a misunderstanding, really.’ ‘Oh, I see.’ The conversation dwindled further, and I made my excuses, Newton dragging me forward until we reached a large stretch of grass. This is what dogs liked to do, I discovered. They liked to run around on grass, pretending they were free, shouting, ‘We’re free, we’re free, look, look, look how free we are!’ at each other. It really was a sorry sight. But it worked for them, and for Newton in particular. It was a collective illusion they had chosen to swallow and they were submitting to it wholeheartedly, without any nostalgia for their former wolf selves. That was the remarkable thing about humans – their ability to shape the path of other species, to change their fundamental nature. Maybe it could happen to me, maybe I could be changed, maybe I already was being changed? Who knew? I hoped not. I hoped I was staying as pure as I had been told, as strong and isolated as a prime, as a ninety-seven. I sat on a bench and watched the traffic. No matter how long I stayed on this planet I doubted I would ever get used to the sight of cars, bound by gravity and poor technology to the road, hardly moving on the roads because there were so many of them. many of them. Was it wrong to thwart a species’ technological advancement? That was a new question in my mind. I didn’t want it there, so I was quite relieved when Newton started barking. I turned to look at him. He was standing still, his head steady in one direction, as he carried on making as loud a noise as he possibly could. ‘Look!’ he seemed to bark. ‘Look! Look! Look!’ I was picking up his language. There was another road, a different one to the one with all the traffic. A line of terraced houses facing the park. I turned towards it, as Newton clearly wanted me to do. I saw Gulliver, on his own, walking along the pavement, trying his best to hide behind his hair. He was meant to be at school. And he wasn’t, unless human school was walking along the street and thinking, which it really should have been. He saw me. He froze. And then he turned around and started walking in the other direction. ‘Gulliver!’ I called. ‘Gulliver!’ He ignored me. If anything, he started walking away faster than he had done before. His behaviour concerned me. After all, inside his head was the knowledge that the world’s biggest mathematical puzzle had been solved, and by his own father. I hadn’t acted last night. I had told myself that I needed to find more information, check there was no one else Andrew Martin could have told. Also, I was probably too exhausted after my encounter with Daniel. I would wait another day, maybe even two. That had been the plan. Gulliver had told me he hadn’t said anything, and that he wasn’t going to, but how could he be totally trusted? His mother was convinced, right now, that he was at school. And yet he evidently wasn’t. I got up from the bench and walked over the litter-strewn grass to where Newton was still barking. ‘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 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. Grigori Perelman 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 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. Crunchy wholenut peanut butter 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, 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. 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. Isobel’s dance 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.’ She went away to listen to the messages. She came back. ‘Lots of people have been calling you.’ ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Who?’ ‘Your mother. But be warned, she might be doing her trademark oppressive- worry thing. She’s heard about your little event at Corpus. I don’t know how. The college called, too, wanting to speak, doing a good job of sounding concerned. A journalist from the Cambridge Evening News. And Ari. Being sweet. He wonders if you’d be up to going to a football match on Saturday. Someone else, too.’ She paused for a moment. ‘She said her name was Maggie.’ ‘Oh yes,’ I said, faking it. ‘Of course. Maggie.’ 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. Then she did the opposite, her eyebrows going as low as they could. She sighed and went into the kitchen. ‘What have you been doing with the caster sugar?’ ‘What have you been doing with the caster sugar?’ ‘Eating it,’ I said. ‘It was a mistake. Sorry.’ ‘Well, you know, feel free to put things back.’ ‘I forgot. Sorry.’ ‘It’s okay. It’s just been a day and a half, that’s all.’ I nodded and tried to act human. ‘What do you want me to do? I mean, what should I do?’ ‘Well, you could start by calling your mother. But don’t tell her about the hospital. I know what you’re like.’ ‘What? What am I like?’ ‘You tell her more than you tell me.’ Now that was worrying. That was very worrying indeed. I decided to phone her right away. The mother Remarkable as it may sound, the mother was an important concept for humans. Not only were they truly aware who their mother was, but in many cases they also kept in contact with them throughout their lives. Of course, for someone like me, whose mother was never there to be known this was a very exotic idea. So exotic, I was scared to pursue it. But I did, because if her son had told her too much information, I obviously needed to know. ‘Andrew?’ ‘Yes, Mother. It is me.’ ‘Oh Andrew.’ She spoke at a high frequency. The highest I had ever heard. ‘Hello, Mother.’ ‘Andrew, me and your father have been worried sick about you.’ ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I had a little episode. I temporarily lost my mind. I forgot to put on my clothes. That’s all.’ ‘Is that all you have to say?’ ‘No. No, it isn’t. I have to ask you a question, Mother. It is an important question.’ ‘Oh, Andrew. What is the matter?’ ‘The matter? Which matter?’ ‘Is it Isobel? Has she been nagging you again? Is that what this is about?’ ‘Again?’ The static crackle of a sigh. ‘Yes. You’ve told us for over a year now that you and Isobel have been having difficulties. That she’s not been as understanding as she could have been about your workload. That she’s not been there for you.’ I thought of Isobel, lying about her day to stop me worrying, making me food, stroking my skin. ‘No,’ I said. ‘She is there for him. Me.’ ‘And Gulliver? What about him? I thought she’d turned him against you. Because of that band he wanted to be in. But you were right, darling. He shouldn’t be messing around in bands. Not after all that he’s done.’ ‘Band? I don’t know, Mother. I don’t think it is that.’ ‘Band? I don’t know, Mother. I don’t think it is that.’ ‘Why are you calling me Mother? You never call me Mother.’ ‘But you are my mother. What do I call you?’ ‘Mum. You call me Mum.’ ‘Mum,’ I said. It sounded the most strange of all the strange words. ‘Mum. Mum. Mum. Mum. Mum, listen, I want to know if I spoke to you recently.’ She wasn’t listening. ‘We wish we were there.’ ‘Come over,’ I said. I was interested to see what she looked like. ‘Come over right now.’ ‘Well, if we didn’t live twelve thousand miles away.’ ‘Oh,’ I said. Twelve thousand miles didn’t sound like much. ‘Come over this afternoon then.’ The mother laughed. ‘Still got your sense of humour.’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am still very funny. Listen, did I speak to you last Saturday?’ ‘No. Andrew, have you lost your memory? Is this amnesia? You’re acting like you have amnesia.’ ‘I’m a bit confused. That’s all. It’s not amnesia. The doctors told me that. It’s just . . . I have been working hard.’ ‘Yes, yes, I know. You told us.’ ‘So, what did I tell you?’ ‘That you’ve hardly been sleeping. That you’ve been working harder than you ever have, at least since your PhD.’ And then she started giving me information I hadn’t asked for. She started talking about her hipbone. It was causing her a lot of pain. She was on pain relief medication but it wasn’t working. I found the conversation disconcerting and even nauseating. The idea of prolonged pain was quite alien to me. Humans considered themselves to be quite medically advanced but they had yet to solve this problem in any meaningful way. Just as they had yet to solve the problem of death. ‘Mother. Mum, listen, what do you know about the Riemann hypothesis?’ ‘That’s the thing you’re working on, isn’t it?’ ‘Working on? Working on. Yes. I am still working on it. And I will never prove it. I realise that now.’ ‘Oh, all right, darling. Well, don’t beat yourself up about it. Now, listen . . .’ Pretty soon she was back to talking about the pain again. She said the doctor had told her she should get a hip replacement. It would be made of titanium. I almost gasped when she said that but I didn’t want to tell her about titanium, as the humans obviously didn’t know about that yet. They would find out in their own time. Then she started talking about my ‘father’ and how his memory was getting Then she started talking about my ‘father’ and how his memory was getting worse. The doctor had told him not to drive any more and that it looked increasingly unlikely that he would be able to finish the book on macroeconomic theory he had been hoping to get published. ‘It makes me worry about you, Andrew. You know, only last week I told you what the doctor had said, about how I should advise you to get a brain scan. It can run in families.’ ‘Oh,’ I said. I really didn’t know what else was required of me. The truth was that I wanted the conversation to end. I had obviously not told my parents. Or I hadn’t told my mother, at any rate, and from the sound of things my father’s brain was such that it would probably lose any information I had given him. Also, and it was a big also, the conversation was depressing me. It was making me think about human life in a way I didn’t want to think about it. Human life, I realised, got progressively worse as you got older, by the sound of things. You arrived, with baby feet and hands and infinite happiness, and then the happiness slowly evaporated as your feet and hands grew bigger. And then, from the teenage years onwards, happiness was something you could lose your grip of, and once it started to slip it gained mass. It was as if the knowledge that it could slip was the thing that made it more difficult to hold, no matter how big your feet and hands were. Why was this depressing? Why did I care, when it was not my job to do so? Again I felt immense gratitude that I only looked like a human being and would never actually be one. She carried on talking. And as she did so I realised there could be no cosmic consequence at all if I stopped listening, and with that realisation I switched off the phone. I closed my eyes, wanting to see nothing but I did see something. I saw Tabitha, leaning over her husband as aspirin froth slid out of his mouth. I wondered if my mother was the same age as Tabitha, or older. When I opened my eyes again I realised Newton was standing there, looking up at me. His eyes told me he was confused. Why did you not say goodbye? You usually say goodbye. And then, bizarrely, I did something I didn’t understand. Something which had absolutely no logic to it at all. I picked up the phone and dialled the same number. After three rings she answered, and then I spoke. ‘Sorry, Mum. I meant to say goodbye.’ Hello. Hello. Can you hear me? Are you there? We can hear you. We are here. Listen, it’s safe. The information is destroyed. For now, the humans will remain at level three. There is no worry. You have destroyed all the evidence, and all possible sources? I have destroyed the information on Andrew Martin’s computer, and on Daniel Russell’s computer. Daniel Russell is destroyed, also. Heart attack. He was a heart-risk, so that was the most logical cause of death in the circumstances. Have you destroyed Isobel Martin and Gulliver Martin? No. No, I haven’t. There is no need to destroy them. They do not know? Gulliver Martin knows. Isobel Martin doesn’t. But Gulliver has no motivation to say anything. You must destroy him. You must destroy both of them. No. There is no need. If you want me to, if you really think it is required, then I can manipulate his neurological processes. I can make him forget what his father told him. Not that he really knows anyway. He has no real understanding of mathematics. The effects of any mind manipulation you carry out disappear the moment you return home. You know that. He won’t say anything. He might have said something already. Humans aren’t to be trusted. They don’t even trust themselves. Gulliver hasn’t said anything. And Isobel knows nothing. You must complete your task. If you do not complete your task, someone else will be sent to complete it for you. No. No. I will complete it. Don’t worry. I will complete my task. PART II I held a jewel in my fingers – Richard Feynman – David Foster Wallace – Carl Sagan You can’t say A is made of B or vice versa. All mass is interaction. We’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for. For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love. Sleepwalking I stood next to his bed while he slept. I don’t know how long I just stood there, in the dark, listening to his deep breathing as he slipped deeper and deeper below dreams. Half an hour, maybe. He hadn’t pulled the window blind down, so I looked out at the night. There was no moon from this angle, but I could see a few stars. Suns lighting dead solar systems elsewhere in the galaxy. Everywhere you can see in their sky, or almost everywhere, is lifeless. That must affect them. That must give them ideas above their station. That must send them insane. Gulliver rolled over, and I decided to wait no longer. It was now or it was never. You will pull back your duvet, I told him, in a voice he wouldn’t have heard if he had been awake but which reached right in, riding theta-waves, to become a command from his own brain. And slowly you will sit up in your bed, your feet will be on the rug and you will breathe and you will compose yourself and then you will stand up. And he did, indeed, stand up. He stayed there, breathing deeply and slowly, waiting for the next command. You will walk to the door. Do not worry about opening the door, because it is already open. There. Just walk, just walk, just walk to your door. He did exactly as I said. And he was there in the doorway, oblivious to everything except my voice. A voice which only had two words that needed to be said. Fall forward. I moved closer to him. Somehow those words were slow to arrive. I needed time. Another minute, at least. I was there, closer, able to smell the scent of sleep on him. Of humanity. And I remembered: You must complete your task. If you do not complete your task, someone else will be sent to complete it for you. I swallowed. My mouth was so dry it hurt. I felt the infinite expanse of the universe behind me, a vast if neutral force. The neutrality of time, of space, of mathematics, of logic, of survival. I closed my eyes. Waited. Waited. Before I opened them, I was being gripped by the throat. I could barely breathe. He had turned 180 degrees, and his left hand had me by the neck. I pulled it away, and now both his hands were fists swinging at me, wild, angry, hitting me almost as much as he missed. He got the side of my head. I walked backwards away from him, but he was moving forwards at just the same speed. His eyes were open. He was seeing me now. Seeing me and not seeing me all at the same time. I could have said stop of course, but I didn’t. Maybe I wanted to witness some human violence first-hand, even unconscious violence, to understand the importance of my task. By understanding it I would be able to fulfil it. Yes, that might have been it. That may also have explained why I let myself bleed when he punched me on the nose. I had reached his desk now and could retreat no further, so I just stood there as he kept hitting my head, my neck, my chest, my arms. He roared now, his mouth as wide as it could go, baring teeth. ‘Raaaah!’ This roar woke him up. His legs went weak and he nearly fell to the floor but he recovered in time. ‘I,’ he said. He didn’t know where he was for a moment. He saw me, in the dark, and this time it was conscious sight. ‘Dad?’ I nodded as a slow thin stream of blood reached my mouth. Isobel was running up the stairs to the attic. ‘What’s going on?’ ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I heard a noise so I came upstairs. Gulliver was sleepwalking, that’s all.’ Isobel switched the light on, gasped as she saw my face. ‘You’re bleeding.’ ‘It’s nothing. He didn’t know what he was doing.’ ‘Gulliver?’ Gulliver was sitting on the edge of his bed now, flinching from the light. He too looked at my face but he didn’t say anything at all. I was a wasn’t Gulliver wanted to go back to bed. To sleep. So, ten minutes later, Isobel and I were alone, and I was sitting on the side of the bath as she placed an antiseptic solution called TCP on a circle of cotton wool and dabbed it gently on a cut on my forehead, and then on my lip. Now, these were wounds I could have healed with a single thought. Just to feel pain, sometimes, was enough to cancel it. And yet, even as the antiseptic stung on contact with each cut, the injuries stayed. I forced them to. I couldn’t allow her to get suspicious. But was it just that? ‘How’s your nose?’ she asked. I caught sight of it in the mirror. A smear of blood around one nostril. ‘It’s okay,’ I said, feeling it. ‘It isn’t broken.’ Her eyes squinted in pure concentration. ‘This one on your forehead is really bad. And there’s going to be one giant bruise there. He must have really hit you hard. Did you try and restrain him?’ ‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘I did. But he kept on.’ I could smell her. Clean, human smells. The smells of the creams she used to wash and moisturise her face. The smell of her shampoo. A delicate trace of ammonia barely competing with the heavy scent of antiseptic. She was physically closer to me than she had ever been. I looked at her neck. She had two little dark moles on it, close together, charting unknown binary stars. I thought of Andrew Martin kissing her. This was what humans did. They kissed. Like so many human things, it made no sense. Or maybe, if you tried it, the logic would unfold. ‘Did he say anything?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘No. He just yelled. It was very primal.’ ‘I don’t know, between you and him, it never ends.’ ‘What never ends?’ ‘The worry.’ She placed the blood-stained cotton wool in the small bin beside the sink. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry for everything. For the past and the future.’ An ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry for everything. For the past and the future.’ An apology, said while in dull pain, made me feel as close to human as it was possible to feel. I could almost have written a poem. We went back to bed. She held my hand in the dark. I gently pulled it away. ‘We’ve lost him,’ she said. It took me a moment to realise she was talking about Gulliver. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘maybe we just have to accept him as he is, even if he’s different to what we’ve known.’ ‘I just don’t understand him. You know, he’s our son. And we’ve known him for sixteen years. And yet, I feel like I don’t know him at all.’ ‘Well, maybe we should try not to understand so much, and accept some more.’ ‘That’s a very difficult thing. And a very strange thing to come from your mouth, Andrew.’ ‘So, I suppose the next question is: what about me? Do you understand me?’ ‘I don’t think you understand yourself, Andrew.’ I wasn’t Andrew. I knew I wasn’t Andrew. But equally, I was losing myself. I was a wasn’t, that was the problem. I was lying in bed with a human woman I could now almost appreciate as beautiful, wilfully still feeling the sting of antiseptic in my wounds, and thinking of her strange but fascinating skin, and the way she had cared for me. No one in the universe cared for me. (You didn’t did you?) We had technology to care for us now, and we didn’t need emotions. We were alone. We worked together for our preservation but emotionally we needed no one. We just needed the purity of mathematical truth. And yet, I was scared of falling asleep, because the moment I fell asleep my wounds would heal and right then I didn’t want that to happen. Right then, I found a strange but real comfort in the pain. I had so many worries now. So many questions. ‘Do you believe humans are ever knowable?’ I asked. ‘I wrote a book on Charlemagne. I hope so.’ ‘But humans, in their natural state, are they good or are they bad, would you say? Can they be trusted? Or is their own real state just violence and greed and cruelty?’ ‘Well, that’s the oldest question there is.’ ‘What do you think?’ ‘I’m tired, Andrew. I’m sorry.’ ‘Yes, me too. I’ll see you in the morning.’ ‘Night.’ ‘Night.’ I stayed awake for a while as Isobel slipped towards sleep. The trouble was, I I stayed awake for a while as Isobel slipped towards sleep. The trouble was, I still wasn’t used to the night. It may not have been as dark as I first thought it to be. There was moonlight, starlight, airglow, streetlamps, and sunlight backscattered by interplanetary dust, but the humans still spent half their time in deep shadow. This, I was sure, was one of the chief reasons for personal and sexual relationships here. The need to find comfort in the dark. And it was a comfort, being next to her. So I just stayed there, hearing her breath move in and out, sounding like the tide of some exotic sea. At some point my little finger touched hers, in the double-night beneath the duvet, and this time I kept it there and imagined I was really what she thought I was. And that we were connected. Two humans, primitive enough to truly care about each other. It was a comforting thought, and the one which led me down those ever-darkening stairs of the mind towards sleep. I may need more time. You do not need time. I am going to kill who I need to kill, don’t worry about that. We are not worried. But I am not just here to destroy information. I am here to gather it. That is what you said, wasn’t it? Stuff on mathematical understanding can be read across the universe, I know that. I’m not talking about neuro-flashes. I’m talking about stuff that can only be picked up on from here, on Earth itself. To give us more insight into how the humans live. It has been a long time since anyone was here, at least in human terms. Explain why you need more time for this. Complexity demands time, but humans are primitives. They are the most shallow of mysteries. No. You are wrong. They exist simultaneously in two worlds – the world of appearances and the world of truth. The connecting strands between these worlds take many forms. When I first arrived here I did not understand certain things. For instance, I did not understand why clothes were so important. Or why a dead cow became beef, or why grass cut a certain way demanded not to be walked upon, or why household pets were so important to them. The humans are scared of nature, and are greatly reassured when they can prove to themselves they have mastery over it. This is why lawns exist, and why wolves evolved into dogs, and why their architecture is based on unnatural shapes. But, really, nature, pure nature is just a symbol to them. A symbol of human nature. They are interchangeable. So what I am saying— What are you saying? What I am saying is that it takes time to understand humans because they don’t understand themselves. They have been wearing clothes for so long. Metaphorical clothes. That is what I am talking about. That was the price of human civilisation – to create it they had to close the door on their true selves. human civilisation – to create it they had to close the door on their true selves. And so they are lost, that is how I understand it. And that is why they invented art: books, music, films, plays, painting, sculpture. They invented them as bridges back to themselves, back to who they are. But however close they get they are for ever removed. What I am saying, I suppose, is that last night I was about to kill the boy. Gulliver. He was about to fall down the stairs in his sleep but then his true nature came out and he attacked me. Attacked you with what? With himself. With his arms. His hands. He was still asleep but his eyes were open. He attacked me, or the me he thinks I am. His father. And it was pure rage. The humans are violent. That is not news. No, I know. I know. But he woke, and he wasn’t violent. That is the battle they have. And I believe if we understand human nature a little more, then we will know better what action to take in the future, when other advances are made. In the future, when another over-population crisis arises there may come a time when Earth becomes a valid option for our species. So, surely as much knowledge as possible on human psychology and society and behaviour is going to help? They are defined by greed. Not all of them. For instance, there is a mathematician called Grigori Perelman. He turned down money and prizes. He looks after his mother. We have a distorted view. I think it would be useful for all of us if I researched further. But you don’t need the two humans for that. Oh, I do. Why? Because they think they know who I am. And I have a true chance of seeing them. The real them. Behind the walls they have built for themselves. And speaking of walls, Gulliver knows nothing now. I cancelled his knowledge of what his father told him on his last night. While I am here, there is no danger. You must act soon. You don’t have for ever. I know. Don’t worry. I won’t need for ever. They must die. Yes. Wider than the sky ‘It was sleep psychosis,’ Isobel told Gulliver at breakfast the next day. ‘It’s very common. Lots of people have had it. Lots of perfectly normal and sane people. Like that man from R.E.M. He had it, and he was meant to be as nice as rock stars come.’ She hadn’t seen me. I had just entered the kitchen. But now she noticed my presence and was puzzled by the sight of me. ‘Your face,’ she said. ‘Last night there were cuts and bruises. It’s totally healed.’ ‘Must have been better than it looked. The night might exaggerate things.’ ‘Yes, but even so—’ She glanced at her son, struggling uneasily with his cereal, and decided not to go on. ‘You might need the day off school, Gulliver,’ said Isobel. I expected him to agree to this, seeing that he preferred an education that involved staring at rail-tracks. But he looked at me, considered for a moment, and concluded, ‘No. No. It’s okay. I feel fine.’ Later, it was just me and Newton in the house. I was still ‘recovering’, you see. Recover. The most human of words, the implication being that healthy normal life is covering something – the violence that is there underneath, the violence I had seen in Gulliver the night before. To be healthy meant to be covered. Clothed. Literally and metaphorically. Yet I needed to find what lay beneath, something that would satisfy the hosts and justify the delay I was taking in my task. I discovered a pile of paper, tied with an elastic band. It was in Isobel’s wardrobe, hidden among all those essential clothes, yellowing with age. I sniffed the page and guessed at least a decade. The top sheet had the words ‘Wider than the Sky’ on them, along with these ones: ‘A novel by Isobel Martin’. A novel? I read a little bit of it and realised that although the central character’s name was Charlotte, she could just as easily have been called Isobel. Charlotte heard herself sigh: a tired old machine, releasing pressure. Charlotte heard herself sigh: a tired old machine, releasing pressure. Everything weighed down on her. The small rituals of her daily existence – filling the dishwasher, picking up from school, cooking – had all been performed as if underwater. The mutual energy reserves shared by a mother and her child had now, she conceded, been monopolised by Oliver. He had been running wild since she had picked him up from school, firing that blue alien blaster or whatever it was. She didn’t know why her mother had bought it. Actually, she did know. To prove a point. ‘Five-year-old boys want to play with guns, Charlotte. It’s only natural. You can’t deprive them of their nature.’ ‘Die! Die! Die!’ Charlotte closed the oven door and set the timer. She turned around to see Oliver pointing the massive blue gun up at her face. ‘No, Oliver,’ she said, too tired to battle the abstract anger clouding his features. ‘Don’t shoot Mummy.’ He maintained his pose, fired cheap electric fairground sounds a few more times, then ran out of the kitchen, through the hallway, and noisily exterminated invisible aliens as he charged up the stairs. She remembered the quiet echoing babble of university corridors and realised that missing it was a kind of pain. She wanted to return, to teach again, but she worried she may have left it too late. Maternity leave had stretched into permanent leave, and the belief had grown that she could be fulfilled as a wife and mother, a historical archetype, ‘keeping her feet on the ground’, as her mother always advised, while her high-flying husband made sure he didn’t dip beneath the clouds. Charlotte shook her head in theatrical exasperation, as if she were being observed by an audience of stern-faced mother-watchers examining her progress and making notes on clipboards. She was often aware of the self-conscious nature of her parenting, the way she had to create a role outside of herself, a part already plotted out for her. Don’t shoot Mummy. She squatted down and looked through the oven door. The lasagne would be another forty-five minutes and Jonathan still wasn’t back from his conference. She raised herself back up and went into the living room. The wobbly glass of the drinks cabinet glinted, shining like a false promise. She turned the old key and opened the door. A mini metropolis of spirit bottles bathed in dark shadow. She reached for the Empire State, the Bombay Sapphire, and poured out her evening allowance. Jonathan. Late last Thursday. Late this Thursday. She acknowledged this fact as she slumped down on the settee, but did not get too close to it. Her husband was a mystery she no longer had the energy to unravel. Anyway, it was known to be the first rule of marriage: solve the mystery, end the love. So, families often stayed together. Wives sometimes managed to stay with husbands and put up with whichever misery they felt by writing novels and hiding them at the bottom of their wardrobes. Mothers put up with their children, no matter how difficult those children were, no matter how close to insanity they pushed their parents. Anyway, I stopped reading there. I felt it was an intrusion. A bit rich, I know, from someone who was living inside her husband’s identity. I put it back in its place in the wardrobe underneath the clothes. Later on, I told her what I had found. She gave me an unreadable look, and her cheeks went red. I didn’t know if it She gave me an unreadable look, and her cheeks went red. I didn’t know if it was a blush or anger. Maybe it was a little of both. ‘That was private. You weren’t ever supposed to see that.’ ‘I know. That is why I wanted to see it. I want to understand you.’ ‘Why? There’s no academic glory or million-dollar prize if you solve me, Andrew. You shouldn’t go snooping around.’ ‘Shouldn’t a husband know a wife?’ ‘That really is quite rich coming from you.’ ‘What does that mean?’ She sighed. ‘Nothing. Nothing. Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.’ ‘You should say whatever you feel you should say.’ ‘Good policy. But I think that would mean we’d have divorced around 2002, at a conservative estimate.’ ‘Well? Maybe you would have been happier if you had divorced him, I mean me, in 2002.’ ‘Well, we’ll never know.’ ‘No.’ And the phone rang. It was someone for me. ‘Hello?’ A man spoke. His voice was casual, familiar, but there was a curiosity there, too. ‘Hey, it’s me. Ari.’ ‘Oh, hello Ari.’ I knew Ari was supposed to be my closest friend, so I tried to sound friend-like. ‘How are you? How’s your marriage?’ Isobel looked at me with an emphatic frown, but I don’t think he’d heard properly. ‘Well, just got back from that thing in Edinburgh.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, trying to pretend I knew what ‘that thing in Edinburgh’ was. ‘Right. Yes. That thing in Edinburgh. Of course. How was that?’ ‘It was good. Yeah, it was good. Caught up with the St Andrews lot. Listen, mate, I hear it’s been a bit of a week for you.’ ‘Yes. It has. It has been a lot of a week for me.’ ‘So I wasn’t sure if you’d still be up for the football?’ ‘The football?’ ‘Cambridge–Kettering. We could have a pint of mild and a bit of a chat, about that top secret thing you told me the last time we spoke.’ ‘Secret?’ Every molecule of me was now alert. ‘What secret?’ ‘Don’t think I should broadcast it.’ ‘No. No. You’re right. Don’t say it out loud. In fact, don’t tell anyone.’ Isobel was now in the hallway, looking at me with suspicion. ‘But to answer you, yes, I will go to the football.’ And I pressed the red button on the phone, weary at the probability that I would have to switch another human life into non-existence. A few seconds of silence over breakfast You become something else. A different species. That is the easy bit. That is simple molecular rearrangement. Our inner technology can do that, without a problem, with the correct commands and model to work from. There are no new ingredients in the universe, and humans – however they may look – are made of roughly the same things we are. The difficulty, though, is the other stuff. The stuff that happens when you look in the bathroom mirror and see this new you and don’t want to throw up into the sink at the sight of yourself like you have wanted to every other morning. And when you wear clothes, and you realise it is starting to feel like quite a normal thing to do. And when you walk downstairs and see the life form that is meant to be your son eating toast, listening to music only he can hear, it takes you a second – or two, three, four seconds – to realise that, actually, this is not your son. He means nothing to you. Not only that: he has to mean nothing to you. Also, your wife. Your wife is not your wife. Your wife who loves you but doesn’t really like you, because of something you never did, but which couldn’t be any worse, from her perspective, than the something you’re going to do. She is an alien. She is as alien as they come. A primate whose nearest evolutionary cousins are hairy tree-dwelling knuckle draggers known as chimpanzees. And yet, when everything is alien the alien becomes familiar, and you can judge her as humans judge her. You can watch her when she drinks her pink grapefruit juice, and stares at her son with worried, helpless eyes. You can see that for her being a parent is standing on a shore and watching her child in a vulnerable craft, heading out over deeper and deeper water, hoping but not knowing there will be land somewhere ahead. And you can see her beauty. If beauty on Earth is the same as elsewhere: ideal in that it is tantalising and unsolvable, creating a delicious kind of confusion. I was confused. I was lost. I wished I had a new wound, just so she could attend to me. ‘What are you looking at?’ she asked me. ‘What are you looking at?’ she asked me. ‘You,’ I said. She looked at Gulliver. He couldn’t hear us. Then she looked back at me, as confused as myself. We are worried. What are you doing? I told you. Well? I am accumulating information. You are wasting time. I’m not. I know what I am doing. It was never meant to take this long. I know. But I am learning more about the humans. They are more complicated than we first thought. They are sometimes violent, but more often care about each other. There is more goodness in them than anything else, I am convinced of it. What are you saying? I don’t know what I am saying. I am confused. Some things have stopped making sense. This happens, occasionally, on a new planet. The perspective changes to that of its inhabitants. But our perspective has not changed. Do you understand that? Yes. I do understand. Stay pure. I will. Life/death/football Humans are one of the few intelligent beings in the galaxy who haven’t quite solved the problem of death. And yet they don’t spend their whole lives screeching and howling in terror, clawing at their own bodies, or rolling around on the floor. Some humans do that – I saw them in the hospital – but those humans are considered the mad ones. Now, consider this. A human life is on average 80 Earth years or around 30,000 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, realise 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. But at ground level the humans don’t appear to spend their entire lives in a catatonic state. No. They do other things. Things like: – washing – listening – gardening – eating – driving – working – yearning – earning – staring – drinking – sighing – sighing – reading – gaming – sunbathing – complaining – jogging – quibbling – caring – mingling – fantasising – googling – parenting – renovating – loving – dancing – fucking – regretting – failing – striving – hoping – sleeping Oh, and sport. Apparently I, or rather Andrew, liked sport. And the sport he liked was football. Luckily for Professor Andrew Martin, the football team he supported was Cambridge United, one of those which successfully avoided the perils and existential trauma of victory. To support Cambridge United, I discovered, was to support the idea of failure. To watch a team’s feet consistently avoid the spherical Earth-symbol seemed to frustrate their supporters greatly, but they obviously wouldn’t have it any other way. The truth is, you see, however much they would beg to disagree, humans don’t actually like to win. Or rather, they like winning for ten seconds but if they keep on winning they end up actually having to think about other things, like life and death. The only thing humans like less than winning is losing, but at least something can be done about that. With absolute winning, there is nothing to be done. They just have to deal with it. Now, I was there at the game to see Cambridge United play against a team called Kettering. I had asked Gulliver if he wanted to come with me – so I could keep Kettering. I had asked Gulliver if he wanted to come with me – so I could keep an eye on him – and he had said, with sarcasm, ‘Yeah, Dad, you know me so well.’ So, it was just me and Ari, or to give him his full title Professor Arirumadhi Arasaratham. As I have said, this was Andrew’s closest friend, although I had learnt from Isobel that I didn’t really have friends as such. More acquaintances. Anyway, Ari was an ‘expert’ (human definition) on theoretical physics. He was also quite rotund, as if he didn’t just want to watch football but become one. ‘So,’ he said, during a period when Cambridge United didn’t have the ball (that is to say, any time during the match), ‘how are things?’ ‘Things?’ He stuffed some crisps into his mouth and made no attempt to conceal their fate. ‘You know, I was a bit worried about you.’ He laughed. It was the laugh human males do, to hide emotion. ‘Well, I say worry, it was more mild concern. I say mild concern but it was more ‘wonder if he’s done a Nash?’’ ‘What do you mean?’ He told me what he meant. Apparently human mathematicians have a habit of going mad. He gave me a list of names – Nash, Cantor, Gödel, Turing – and I nodded along as if they meant something. And then he said ‘Riemann.’ ‘Riemann?’ ‘I heard you weren’t eating much so I was thinking more Gödel than Riemann, actually,’ he said. By Gödel, I later learnt, he meant Kurt Gödel, another German mathematician. However, this one’s particular psychological quirk was that he had believed everyone was trying to poison his food. So he had stopped eating altogether. By that definition of madness, Ari appeared very sane indeed. ‘No. I haven’t done one of those. I am eating now. Peanut butter sandwiches mainly.’ ‘Sounds like more of a Presley,’ he said, laughing. And then he gave me a serious look. I could tell it was serious because he had swallowed and wasn’t putting any more food in his mouth. ‘Because, you know, prime numbers are fucking serious, man. Some serious shit. They can make you lose it. They’re like sirens. They call you in with their isolated beauty and before you know it you are in some major mind-shit. And when I heard about your naked corpus at Corpus I thought you were cracking up a bit.’ ‘No. I am on the rails,’ I said. ‘Like a train. Or a clothes-hanger.’ ‘And Isobel? Everything fine with you and Isobel?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She is my wife. And I love her. Everything is fine. Fine.’ He frowned at me. Then he took a moment’s glance to see if Cambridge United were anywhere near the ball. He seemed relieved to see they weren’t. United were anywhere near the ball. He seemed relieved to see they weren’t. ‘Really? Everything’s fine?’ I could see he needed more confirmation. ‘Till I loved I never lived.’ He shook his head and gave a facial expression I can now safely classify as bewilderment. ‘What’s that? Shakespeare? Tennyson? Marvell?’ I shook my head. ‘No. It was Emily Dickinson. I have been reading a lot of her poetry. And also Anne Sexton’s. And Walt Whitman too. Poetry seems to say a lot about us. You know, us humans.’ ‘Emily Dickinson? You’re quoting Emily Dickinson at a match?’ ‘Yes.’ I sensed, again, I was getting the context wrong. Everything here was about context. There was nothing that was right for every occasion. I didn’t get it. The air always had hydrogen in it wherever you were. But that was pretty much the only consistent thing. What was the big difference that made quoting love poetry inappropriate in this context? I had no idea. ‘Right,’ he said, and paused for the large, communal groan as Kettering scored a goal. I groaned too. Groaning was actually quite diverting, and certainly the most enjoyable aspect of sport spectating. I might have overdone it a little bit though, judging from the looks I was getting. Or maybe they had seen me on the Internet. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘And what does Isobel feel about everything?’ ‘Everything?’ ‘You, Andrew. What does she think? Does she know about . . . you know? Is that what triggered it?’ This was my moment. I inhaled. ‘The secret I told you?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘About the Riemann hypothesis?’ He scrunched his face in confusion. ‘What? No, man. Unless you’ve been sleeping with a hypothesis on the side?’ ‘So what was the secret?’ ‘That you’re having it away with a student.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, feeling relief. ‘So I definitely didn’t say anything about work the last time I saw you.’ ‘No. For once, you didn’t.’ He turned back to the football. ‘So, are you going to spill the beans about this student?’ ‘My memory is a bit hazy, to be honest with you.’ ‘That’s convenient. Perfect alibi. If Isobel finds out. Not that you’re exactly man of the match in her eyes.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘No offence, mate, but you’ve told me what her opinion is.’ ‘No offence, mate, but you’ve told me what her opinion is.’ ‘What is her opinion of’ – I hesitated – ‘of me?’ He pressed one final handful of crisps in his mouth and washed it down with that disgusting phosphoric acid-flavoured drink called Coca-Cola. ‘Her opinion is that you are a selfish bastard.’ ‘Why does she think that?’ ‘Maybe because you are a selfish bastard. But then, we’re all selfish bastards.’ ‘Are we?’ ‘Oh yeah. It’s our DNA. Dawkins pointed that out to us, way back. But you, man, your selfish gene is on a different level. With you, I should imagine, your selfish gene is similar to the one that smashed a rock over the head of that penultimate Neanderthal, before turning round and screwing his wife.’ He smiled and carried on watching the match. It was a long match. Elsewhere in the universe, stars formed and others ceased to be. Was this the purpose of human existence? Was the purpose somewhere inside the pleasure, or at least the casual simplicity of a football match? Eventually, the game ended. ‘That was great,’ I lied, as we walked out of the grounds. ‘Was it? We lost four nil.’ ‘Yes, but while I watched it I didn’t think once about my mortality, or the various other difficulties our mortal form will bring in later life.’ He looked bewildered again. He was going to say something but he was beaten to it by someone throwing an empty can at my head. Even though it was thrown from behind I had sensed it coming, and ducked quickly out of the way. Ari was stunned by my reflexes. As, I think, was the can-thrower. ‘Oi, wanker,’ the can-thrower said, ‘you’re that freak on the web. The naked one. Bit warm, ain’t you? With all those clothes on.’ ‘Piss off, mate,’ Ari said nervously. The man did the opposite. The can-thrower was walking over. He had red cheeks and very small eyes and greasy black hair. He was flanked by two friends. All three of them had faces ready for violence. Red Cheeks leaned in close to Ari. ‘What did you say, big man?’ ‘There might have been a “piss” in there,’ said Ari, ‘and there was definitely an “off”.’ The man grabbed Ari’s coat. ‘Think you’re smart?’ ‘Moderately.’ I held the man’s arm. ‘Get off me, you fucking perv,’ he responded. ‘I was speaking to fat bastard.’ I wanted to hurt him. I had never wanted to hurt anyone – only needed to, and there was a difference. With this person, there was a definite desire to hurt him. I heard the rasp of his breath, and tightened his lungs. Within seconds he was heard the rasp of his breath, and tightened his lungs. Within seconds he was reaching for his inhaler. ‘We’ll be on our way,’ I said, releasing the pressure in his chest. ‘And you three won’t bother us again.’ Ari and I walked home, unfollowed. ‘Bloody hell,’ said Ari. ‘What was that?’ I didn’t answer. How could I? What that had been was something Ari could never understand. Clouds gathered together quickly. The sky darkened. It looked like rain. I hated rain, as I have told you. I knew Earth rain wasn’t sulphuric acid, but rain, all rain, was something I could not abide. I panicked. I started running. ‘Wait!’ said Ari, who was running behind me. ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Rain!’ I said, wishing for a dome around the whole of Cambridge. ‘I can’t stand rain.’ Light-bulb ‘Have a nice time?’ Isobel asked on my return. She was standing on top of one form of primitive technology (step-ladder) changing another one (incandescent light-bulb). ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I did some good groaning. But to be honest with you, I don’t think I’ll go again.’ She dropped the new bulb. It smashed. ‘Damn. We don’t have another one.’ She looked, almost, like she might cry about this fact. She stepped down from the ladder, and I stared up at the dead light-bulb still hanging there. I concentrated hard. A moment later it was working again. ‘That was lucky. It didn’t need changing after all.’ Isobel stared at the light. The golden illumination on her skin was quite mesmerising, for some reason. The way it shifted shadow. Made her more distinctly herself. ‘How weird,’ she said. Then she looked down at the broken glass. ‘I’ll see to that,’ I said. And she smiled at me and her hand touched mine and gave it a quick pulse of gratitude. And then she did something I wasn’t expecting at all. She embraced me, gently, with broken glass still at our feet. I breathed her in. I liked the warmth of her body against mine and realised the pathos of being a human. Of being a mortal creature who was essentially alone but needed the myth of togetherness with others. Friends, children, lovers. It was an attractive myth. It was a myth you could easily inhabit. ‘Oh Andrew,’ she said. I didn’t know what she meant by this simple declaration of my name, but when she stroked my back I found myself stroking hers, and saying the words that seemed somehow the most appropriate. ‘It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay . . .’ Shopping I went to the funeral of Daniel Russell. I watched the coffin being lowered into the ground, and earth being sprinkled over the top of the wood casket. There were lots of people there, most of them wearing black. A few were crying. Afterwards, Isobel wanted to go over and talk to Tabitha. Tabitha looked different to when I had last seen her. She looked older, even though it had only been a week. She wasn’t crying, but it seemed like an effort not to. Isobel stroked her arm. ‘Listen, Tabitha, I just want you to know, we’re here. Whatever you need, we’re here.’ ‘Thank you, Isobel. That really does mean a lot. It really does.’ ‘Just basic stuff. If you don’t feel up to the supermarket. I mean, supermarkets are not the most sympathetic of places.’ ‘That’s very kind. I know you can do it online, but I’ve never got the hang of it.’ ‘Well, don’t worry. We’ll sort it out.’ And this actually happened. Isobel went to get another human’s shopping, and paid for it, and came home and told me I was looking better. ‘Am I?’ ‘Yes. You’re looking yourself again.’ The Zeta Function ‘Are you sure you’re ready?’ Isobel asked me, the next Monday morning, as I ate my first peanut butter sandwich of the day. Newton was asking it, too. Either that, or he was asking about the sandwich. I tore him off a piece. ‘Yes. It will be fine. What could go wrong?’ This was when Gulliver let out a mocking groan sound. The only sound he’d made all morning. ‘What’s up, Gulliver?’ I asked. ‘Everything,’ he said. He didn’t expand. Instead, he left his uneaten cereal and stormed upstairs. ‘Should I follow him?’ ‘No,’ Isobel said. ‘Give him time.’ I nodded. I trusted her. Time was her subject, after all. An hour later I was in Andrew’s office. It was the first time I had been there since I had deleted the email to Daniel Russell. This time, I wasn’t in a rush and could absorb a few more details. As he was a professor, there were books lining every wall, designed so that from whichever angle you looked at him you would see a book. I looked at some of the titles. Very primitive-looking in the main. A History of Binary and Other Non-decimal Numeration. Hyperbolic Geometry. The Book of Hexagonal Tessellation. Logarithmic Spirals and the Golden Mean. There was a book written by Andrew himself. One I hadn’t noticed the last time I had been here. It was a thin book called The Zeta Function. It had the words ‘Uncorrected Proof Copy’ on the cover. I made sure the door was locked and then sat down in his chair and read every word. And what a depressing read it was, I have to say. It was about the Riemann hypothesis, and what seemed like his futile quest to prove it and explain why the spaces between prime numbers increased the way they did. The tragedy was in realising how desperately he had wanted to solve it – and, of course, after he’d written the book he had solved it, though the benefits he’d imagined would never happen, because I had destroyed the proof. And I began to think of how fundamentally our equivalent mathematical breakthrough – the one which we came to know as the Second Basic Theory of Prime Numbers – had on us. How it enabled us to do all that we can do. Travel the universe. Inhabit other worlds, transform into other bodies. Live as long as we want to live. Search each other’s minds, each other’s dreams. All that. The Zeta Function did, however, list all the things humans had achieved. The main steps on the road. The developments that had advanced them towards civilisation. Fire, that was a biggie. The plough. The printing press. The steam engine. The microchip. The discovery of DNA. And humans would be the first to congratulate themselves on all this. But the trouble was, for them, they had never made the leap most other intelligent life forms in the universe had made. Oh, they had built rockets and probes and satellites. A few of them even worked. Yet, really, their mathematics had thus far let them down. They had yet to do the big stuff. The synchronisation of brains. The creation of free-thinking computers. Automation technology. Inter-galactic travel. And as I read, I realised I was stopping all these opportunities. I had killed their future. The phone rang. It was Isobel. ‘Andrew, what are you doing? Your lecture started ten minutes ago.’ She was cross, but in a concerned way. It still felt strange, and new, having someone be worried about me. I didn’t fully understand this concern, or what she gained by having it, but I must confess I quite liked being the subject of it. ‘Oh yes. Thank you for reminding me. I will go. Bye, erm, darling.’ Be careful. We are listening. The problem with equations I walked into the lecture hall. It was a large room made predominantly of dead trees. There were a lot of people staring at me. These were students. Some had pens and paper. Others had computers. All were waiting for knowledge. I scanned the room. There were 102 of them, in total. Always an unsettling number, stuck as it is between two primes. I tried to work out the students’ knowledge level. You see, I didn’t want to overshoot. I looked behind me. There was a whiteboard where words and equations were meant to be written but there was nothing on it. I hesitated. And during that hesitation someone sensed my weakness. Someone on the back row. A male of about twenty, with bushy blond hair and a T-shirt which said ‘What part of N = R x fs x fp x ne x f l x fi x fc x L don’t you understand?’ He giggled at the wit he was about to display and shouted out, ‘You look a bit overdressed today, Professor!’ He giggled some more, and it was contagious; the howling laughter spreading like fire across the whole hall. Within moments, everyone in the hall was laughing. Well, everyone except one person, a female. The non-laughing female was looking at me intently. She had red curly hair, full lips and wide eyes. She had a startling frankness about her appearance. An openness that reminded me of a death flower. She was wearing a cardigan and coiling strands of her hair around her finger. ‘Calm down,’ I said, to the rest of them. ‘That is very funny. I get it. I am wearing clothes and you are referring to an occasion in which I was not wearing clothes. Very funny. You think it is a joke, like when Georg Cantor said the scientist Francis Bacon wrote the plays of William Shakespeare, or when John Nash started seeing men in hats who weren’t really there. That was funny. The human mind is a limited, but high plateau. Spend your life at its outer limits and, oops, you might fall off. That is funny. Yes. But don’t worry, you won’t fall off. Young man, you are right there in the middle of your plateau. Though I appreciate your concern, I have to say I am feeling much better now. I am wearing underpants and socks and trousers and even a shirt.’ wearing underpants and socks and trousers and even a shirt.’ People were laughing again, but this time the laughter felt warmer. And it did something to me, inside, this warmth. So then I started laughing, too. Not at what I had just said, because I didn’t see how that was funny. No. I was laughing at myself. The impossible fact that I was there, on that most absurd planet and yet actually liking being there. And I felt an urge to tell someone how good it felt, in human form, to laugh. The release of it. And I wanted to tell someone about it and I realised that I didn’t want to tell the hosts. I wanted to tell Isobel. Anyway, I did the lecture. Apparently I had been meant to be talking about something called ‘post-Euclidean geometry’. But I didn’t want to talk about that, so I talked about the boy’s T-shirt. The formula written on it was something called Drake’s equation. It was an equation devised to calculate the likelihood of advanced civilisations in Earth’s galaxy, or what the humans called the Milky Way galaxy. (That is how humans came to terms with the vast expanse of space. By saying it looks like a splatter of spilt milk. Something dropped out of the fridge that could be wiped away in a second.) So, the equation: N = R x fp x ne x f l x f i x fc x L N was the number of advanced civilisations in the galaxy with whom communication might be possible. R was the average annual rate at which stars were formed. The f p was the fraction of those stars with planets. The ne was the average number of those planets that have the right eco-systems for life. The f 1 was the fraction of those planets where life would actually develop. The f i was the fraction of the above planets that could develop intelligence. The f c was the fraction of those where a communicative technologically advanced civilisation could develop. And L was the lifetime of the communicative phase. Various astrophysicists had looked at all the data and decided that there must, in fact, be millions of planets in the galaxy containing life, and even more in the universe at large. And some of these were bound to have advanced life with very good technology. This of course was true. But the humans didn’t just stop there. They came up with a paradox. They said, ‘Hold on, this can’t be right. If there are this many extraterrestrial civilisations with the ability to contact us then we would know about it because they would have contacted us.’ ‘Well, that’s true, isn’t it?’ said the male whose T-shirt started this detour. ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, it’s not. Because the equation should have some other fractions in there. For instance, it should have—’ I turned and wrote on the board behind me: fcgas ‘Fraction who could give a shit about visiting or communicating with Earth.’ And then: fdsbthdr ‘Fraction who did so but the humans didn’t realise.’ It was not exactly difficult to make human students of mathematics laugh. Indeed, I had never met a sub-category of life form so desperate to laugh – but still, it felt good. For a few brief moments, it even felt slightly more than good. I felt warmth and, I don’t know, a kind of forgiveness or acceptance from these students. ‘But listen,’ I said, ‘don’t worry. Those aliens up there – they don’t know what they are missing.’ Applause. (When humans really like something they clap their hands together. It makes no sense. But when they do it on behalf of you, it warms your brain.) And then, at the end of the lecture, the staring woman came up to me. The open flower. She stood close to me. Normally, when humans stand and talk to each other they try and leave some air between them, for purposes of breathing and etiquette and claustrophobia limitation. With this one, there was very little air. ‘I phoned,’ she said, with her full mouth, in a voice I had heard before, ‘to ask about you. But you weren’t there. Did you get my message?’ ‘Oh. Oh yes. Maggie. I got the message.’ ‘You seemed on top form today.’ ‘Thank you. I thought I would do something a bit different.’ She laughed. The laughter was fake, but something about its fakeness made me excited for some unfathomable reason. ‘Are we still having our first Tuesdays of the month?’ she asked me. ‘Oh yes,’ I said, utterly confused. ‘First Tuesdays of the month will be left intact.’ ‘That’s good.’ Her voice sounded warm and menacing, like the wind that speeds across the southern waste lands of home. ‘And listen, you know that heavy conversation we had, the night before you went la-la?’ ‘La-la?’ ‘You know. Before your routine at Corpus Christi.’ ‘What did I tell you? My mind’s a little hazy about that night, that’s all.’ ‘Oh, the kind of things you can’t say in lecture halls.’ ‘Mathematical things?’ ‘Actually, correct me if I’m wrong, but mathematical things are the kind of things you can say in lecture halls.’ I wondered about this woman, this girl, and more specifically I wondered what kind of relationship she’d had with Andrew Martin. ‘Yes. Oh yes. Of course.’ This Maggie knew nothing, I told myself. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I’ll see you.’ ‘Yes. Yes. See you.’ She walked away, and I watched her walk away. For a moment there was no fact in the universe except the one that related to a female human called Maggie walking away from me. I didn’t like her, but I had no idea why. The violet A little while later I was in the college café, with Ari, having a grapefruit juice while he had a sugar-laden coffee and a packet of beef-flavoured crisps. ‘How’d it go, mate?’ I tried not to catch his cow-scented breath. ‘Good. Good. I educated them about alien life. Drake’s Equation.’ ‘Bit out of your territory?’ ‘Out of my territory? What do you mean?’ ‘Subject-wise.’ ‘Mathematics is every subject.’ He screwed up his face. ‘Tell ’em about Fermi’s Paradox?’ ‘They told me, actually.’ ‘All bollocks.’ ‘You think?’ ‘Well, what the fuck would an extraterrestrial life form want to come here for?’ ‘That is pretty much what I said.’ ‘I mean, personally, I think physics tells us there is an exo-planet out there with life on it. But I don’t think we understand what we’re looking for or what form it will take. Though I think this will be the century we find it. Course, most people don’t want to find it. Even the ones who pretend they do. They don’t want to really.’ ‘Don’t they? Why not?’ He held up his hand. A signal for me to have patience while he completed the important task of chewing and then swallowing the crisps that were in his mouth. ‘’Cause it troubles people. They turn it into a joke. You’ve got the brightest physicists in the world these days, saying over and over and over, as plainly as physicists can manage, that there has to be other life out there. And other people too – and I mean thick people, mainly – you know, star sign people, the kind of people whose ancestors used to find omens in ox shit. But not just them, other people too, people who should know a lot better – you’ve got those people saying aliens are obviously made up because War of the Worlds was made up and Close Encounters of The Third Kind was made up and though they liked those things they kind of formed a prejudice in their head that aliens can only be enjoyed as fiction. Because if you believe in them as fact you are saying the thing that every unpopular scientific breakthrough in history has said.’ ‘Which is what? ‘That humans are not at the centre of things. You know, the planet is in orbit around the sun. That was a fucking hilarious joke in the 1500s, but Copernicus wasn’t a comedian. He was, apparently, the least funny man of the whole Renaissance. He made Raphael look like Richard Pryor. But he was telling the fucking truth. The planet is in orbit around the sun. But that was out there, I’m telling you. Course, he made sure he was dead by the time it was published. Let Galileo take the heat.’ ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Yes.’ As I listened, I noticed a pain begin behind my eyes, getting sharper. On the fringes of my vision there was a blur of violet. ‘Oh, and animals have nervous systems,’ Ari went on, between swigs of coffee. ‘And could feel pain. That annoyed a few people at the time, too. And some people still don’t want to believe the world is as old as it is because that would mean having to accept the truth that humans, in the day that has been the Earth, have been here for less than a minute. We’re a late-night piss in the toilet, that’s all we are.’ ‘Right,’ I said, massaging my eyelids. ‘Recorded history is just the length it takes to the flush. And now we know we don’t have free will, people are getting pissed off about that, too. So, if and when they discover aliens they’d be really pretty unsettled because then we’d have to know, once and for all, that there is nothing really unique or special about us at all.’ He sighed, and gazed intently at the interior of his empty packet of crisps. ‘So I can see why it’s easy to dismiss alien life as a joke, one for teenage boys with overactive wrists and imaginations.’ ‘What would happen,’ I asked him, ‘if an actual alien were found on Earth?’ ‘What do you think would happen?’ ‘I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you.’ ‘Well, I think if they had the brains to get here they’d have the brains to not reveal they were alien. They could have been here. They could have arrived in things that weren’t anything like sci-fi ‘ships’. They might not have UFOs. There might be no flying involved, and no object to fail to identify. Who the fuck knows? Maybe they were just you.’ I sat upright in my chair. Alert. ‘What?’ I sat upright in my chair. Alert. ‘What?’ ‘U. As in: no FO. Unidentified. Unidentified.’ ‘Okay. But what if, somehow, they were identified. They were “I”. What if humans knew an alien was living among them?’ After asking this, all around the café appeared little wisps of violet in the air, which no one seemed to notice. Ari downed the last of his coffee, and then considered for a moment. Scratched his face with his meaty fingers. ‘Well, put it this way, I wouldn’t want to be that poor bastard.’ ‘Ari,’ I said. ‘Ari, I am that—’ Poor bastard, was what I was going to say. But I didn’t because right then, at that precise moment, there was a noise inside my head. It was a sound of the highest possible frequency and it was extremely loud. Accompanying it, and matching it for intensity, was the pain behind my eyes, which became infinitely worse. It was the most excruciating pain I’d ever experienced, and it was a pain I had no control over. Wishing it not to be there wasn’t the same thing as it not being there, and that confused me. Or it would have done, if I’d had the capacity to think beyond the pain. And I kept thinking about the pain, and the sound, and the violet. But this sharp, throbbing heat pressing behind my eyes was too much. ‘Mate, what’s up?’ I was holding my head by this point, trying to close my eyes, but they wouldn’t close. I looked at Ari’s unshaven face, then at the few other people in the café, and the girl with glasses who was standing behind the counter. Something was happening to them, and to the whole place. Everything was dissolving into a rich, varied violet, a colour more familiar to me than any other. ‘The hosts,’ I said, aloud and almost simultaneously the pain increased further. ‘Stop, oh stop, oh stop.’ ‘Man, I’m calling an ambulance,’ he said, because I was on the floor now. A swirling violet sea. ‘No.’ I fought against it. I got to my feet. The pain lessened. The ringing became a low hum. The violet faded. ‘It was nothing,’ I said. Ari laughed, nervous. ‘I’m no expert but that honestly looked like something.’ ‘It was just a headache. A flash of pain. I’ll go to the doctor and check it out.’ ‘You should. You really should.’ ‘Yes. I will.’ ‘Yes. I will.’ I sat down. An ache remained, as a reminder, for a while, along with a few ethereal wisps in the air only I could see. ‘You were going to say something. About other life.’ ‘No,’ I said quietly. ‘Pretty sure you were, man.’ ‘Yeah, well. I think I’ve forgotten.’ And after that the pain disappeared altogether, and the air lost its final trace of violet. The possibility of pain I didn’t mention anything to Isobel or Gulliver. I knew it was unwise, because I knew the pain had been a warning. And besides, even if I wanted to tell her I wouldn’t have, because Gulliver had arrived home with a bruised eye. When human skin bruises, the skin takes various shades. Greys, browns, blues, greens. Among them, a dull violet. Beautiful, petrifying violet. ‘Gulliver, what happened?’ His mother asked the question quite a few times that evening but never got a satisfactory reply. He went into the small utility room behind the kitchen and closed the door. ‘Please, Gull, come out of there,’ said his mother. ‘We need to talk about this.’ ‘Gulliver, come out of there,’ I added. Eventually he opened the door. ‘Just leave me alone.’ That ‘alone’ was said with such a hard, cold force Isobel decided it was best to grant him that wish so we stayed downstairs while he trudged up to his room. ‘I’m going to have to phone the school about this tomorrow.’ I said nothing. Of course, I would later realise this was a mistake. I should have broken my promise to Gulliver and told her that he hadn’t been going to school. But I didn’t, because it wasn’t my duty. I did have a duty, but it wasn’t to humans. Even these ones. Especially these ones. And it was a duty I was already failing to follow, as that afternoon’s warning in the café had told me. Newton, though, had a different sense of duty and he headed up three flights of stairs to be with Gulliver. Isobel didn’t know what to do, so she opened a few cupboard doors, stared into the cupboards, sighed, then closed them again. ‘Listen,’ I found myself saying, ‘he is going to have to find his own way, and make his own mistakes.’ ‘We need to find out who did that to him, Andrew. That’s what we need to do. People can’t just go around inflicting violence on human beings like that. They just can’t do that. What ethical code do you live by where you can sound so indifferent about it?’ What could I say? ‘I’m sorry. I’m not indifferent. I care for him, of course I What could I say? ‘I’m sorry. I’m not indifferent. I care for him, of course I do.’ And the terrifying thing, the absolutely awful fact I had to face, was that I was right. I did care. The warning had failed, you see. Indeed, it had had the opposite effect. That’s what starts to happen, when you know it is possible for you to feel pain you have no control over. You become vulnerable. Because the possibility of pain is where love stems from. And that, for me, was very bad news indeed. Sloping roofs (and other ways to deal with the rain) and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, – William Shakespeare, Hamlet I couldn’t sleep. Of course I couldn’t. I had a whole universe to worry about. And I kept thinking about the pain, and the sound, and the violet. On top of that, it was raining. I decided to leave Isobel in bed and go and talk with Newton. I headed slowly downstairs, with my hands over my ears, trying to cancel out the sound of falling cloud water drumming against the windows. To my disappointment Newton was sleeping soundly in his basket. On my return upstairs I noticed something else. The air was cooler than it should have been, and the coolness was coming from above rather than below. This went against the order of things. I thought of his bruised eye, and I thought further back. I headed up towards the attic and noticed that everything there was exactly as it should be. The computer, the Dark Matter posters, the random array of socks – everything, that was, except Gulliver himself. A piece of paper floated towards me, carried on the breeze from the open window. On it were two words. I’m sorry. I looked at the window. Outside was the night and the shivering stars of this most alien, yet most familiar galaxy. Somewhere beyond this sky was home. I realised I could now get back there if I wanted. I could just finish my task and be back in my painless world. The window sloped in line with the roof, which like so many roofs here was designed to usher away the rain. It was easy enough for me to climb out of but for to usher away the rain. It was easy enough for me to climb out of but for Gulliver it must have been quite an exertion. The difficult thing for me was the rain itself. It was relentless. Skin-soaking. I saw him sitting on the edge, next to the gutter rail, with his knees pulled into his chest. He looked cold and bedraggled. And seeing him there I saw him not as a special entity, an exotic collection of protons, electrons and neutrons, but as a – using the human term – as a person. And I felt, I don’t know, connected with him. Not in the quantum sense in which everything was connected to everything else, and in which every atom spoke to and negotiated with every other atom. No. This was on another level. A level far, far harder to understand. Can I end his life? I started walking towards him. Not easy, given the human feet and 45-degree angle and the wet slate – sleek quartz and muscovite – on which I was relying. When I was getting close he turned around and saw me. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked. He was frightened. That was the main thing I noticed. ‘I was about to ask you the same thing.’ ‘Dad, just go away.’ What he was saying made sense. I mean, I could have just left him there. I could have escaped the rain, the terrible sensation of that falling water on my thin non-vascular skin, and gone inside. It was then I had to face why I was really out there. ‘No,’ I said, to my own confusion. ‘I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to go away.’ I slipped a little. A tile came unstuck, slid, fell and smashed to the ground. The smash woke Newton, who started barking. Gulliver’s eyes widened, then his head jerked away. His whole body seemed full of nervous intention. ‘Don’t do it,’ I said. He let go of something. It landed in the gutter. The small plastic cylinder that had contained the twenty-eight diazepam tablets. Now empty. I stepped closer. I had read enough human literature to realise that suicide was a real option, here, on Earth. Yet again I wondered why this should have bothered me. I was becoming mad. Losing my rationality. If Gulliver wanted to kill himself then, logically, that solved a major problem. And I should just stand back and let it happen. And I should just stand back and let it happen. ‘Gulliver, listen to me. Don’t jump. Trust me, you’re nowhere near high enough to guarantee that you’ll kill yourself.’ This was true, but as far as I could calculate there was still a very good chance of him falling and dying on impact. In which instance, there would be nothing I could do to help him. Injuries could always be healed. Death meant death. A zero squared was still a zero. ‘I remember swimming with you,’ he said, ‘when I was eight. When we were in France. Can you remember, that night you taught me how to play dominoes?’ He looked back at me, wanting to see a recognition I couldn’t give him. It was hard to see his bruised eye in this light; there was so much darkness across his face he might as well have been all bruise. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Of course I remember that.’ ‘Liar! You don’t remember.’ ‘Listen, Gulliver, let’s go inside. Let’s talk about this indoors. If you still want to kill yourself I’ll take you to a higher building.’ Gulliver didn’t seem to be listening, as I kept stepping on the slippery slate towards him. ‘That’s the last good memory I have,’ he said. It sounded sincere. ‘Come on, that can’t be true.’ ‘Do you have any idea what it’s like? To be your son?’ ‘No. I don’t.’ He pointed to his eye. ‘This. This is what it’s like.’ ‘Gulliver, I’m sorry.’ ‘Do you know what it’s like to feel stupid all the time?’ ‘You’re not stupid.’ I was still standing. The human way would have been to shuffle down on my backside, but that would have taken too much time. So I kept taking tentative steps on the slate, leaning back just enough, in continuous negotiation with gravity. ‘I’m stupid. I’m nothing.’ ‘No, Gulliver, you’re not. You’re something. You’re—’ He wasn’t listening. The diazepam was taking hold of him. ‘How many tablets did you take?’ I asked. ‘All of them?’ I was nearly at him, my hand was almost within grasping distance of his shoulder as his eyes closed and he disappeared into sleep, or prayer. Another tile came loose. I slipped on to my side, losing my footing on the rain-greased tiles until I was left hanging on to the gutter rail. I could have easily climbed back up. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that Gulliver was now tilting forward. ‘Gulliver, wait! Wake up! Wake up, Gulliver!’ ‘Gulliver, wait! Wake up! Wake up, Gulliver!’ The tilt gained momentum. ‘No!’ He fell, and I fell with him. First internally, a kind of emotional falling, a silent howl into an abyss, and then physically. I sped through the air with a dreadful velocity. I broke my legs. So that was my intention. Let the legs take the pain, and not the head, because I would need my head. But the pain was immense. For a moment I worried they wouldn’t reheal. It was only the sight of Gulliver lying totally unconscious on the ground a few metres away that gave me focus. Blood leaked from his ear. To heal him I knew I would first of all need to heal myself. And it happened. Simply wishing was enough, if you wished hard enough, with the right kind of intelligence. That said, cell regeneration and bone reconstruction still took a lot of energy, especially as I was losing a lot of blood and had multiple fractures. But the pain diminished as a strange, intense fatigue took over me and gravity tried to grip me to the ground. My head hurt, but not as a result of the fall; from the exertion involved in my physical restoration. I stood up dizzily. I managed to move towards where Gulliver lay, the horizontal ground now sloping more than the roof. ‘Gulliver. Come on. Can you hear me? Gulliver?’ I could have called for help, I knew that. But help meant an ambulance and a hospital. Help meant humans grasping around in the dark of their own medical ignorance. Help meant delay and a death I was meant to approve of, but couldn’t. ‘Gulliver?’ There was no pulse. He was dead. I must have been seconds too late. I could already detect the first tiny descent in his body temperature. Rationally, I should have resigned myself to this fact. And yet. I had read a lot of Isobel’s work and so I knew that the whole of human history was full of people who tried against the odds. Some succeeded, most failed, but that hadn’t stopped them. Whatever else you could say about these particular primates, they could be determined. And they could hope. Oh yes, they could hope. And hope was often irrational. It made no sense. If it had made sense it would have been called, well, sense. The other thing about hope was that it took effort, and I had never been used to effort. At home, nothing had been an effort. That was the whole point of home, the comfort of a perfectly effortless existence. Yet there I was. Hoping. Not that I was standing there, passively, just wishing him better from a distance. Of course not. I placed my left hand – my gift hand – to his heart, and I began to work. The thing with feathers It was exhausting. I thought of binary stars. A red giant and a white dwarf, side by side, the life force of one being sucked into that of the other. His death was a fact I was convinced I could disprove, or dissuade. But death wasn’t a white dwarf. It was a good bit beyond that. It was a black hole. And once you stepped past that event horizon, you were in very difficult territory. You are not dead. Gulliver, you are not dead. I kept at it, because I knew what life was, I understood its nature, its character, its stubborn insistence. Life, especially human life, was an act of defiance. It was never meant to be, and yet it existed in an incredible number of places across a near-infinite amount of solar systems. There was no such thing as impossible. I knew that, because I also knew that everything was impossible, and so the only possibilities in life were impossibilities. A chair could stop being a chair at any moment. That was quantum physics. And you could manipulate atoms if you knew how to talk to them. You are not dead, you are not dead. I felt terrible. Waves of deep-level pained, bone-scorching effort tore through me like solar flares. And yet he still lay there. His face, I noticed for the first time, looking like his mother. Serene, egg-fragile, precious. A light came on inside the house. Isobel must have woken, from the sound of Newton’s barking if nothing else, but I wasn’t conscious of that. I was just aware that Gulliver was suddenly illuminated and, shortly after, there was the faintest flicker of a pulse beneath my hand. Hope. ‘Gulliver, Gulliver, Gulliver—’ Another pulse. Stronger. A defiant drumbeat of life. A back-beat, waiting for melody. Duh-dum. And again, and again, and again. He was alive. His lips twitched, his bruised eyes moved like an egg about to hatch. One opened. So did the other. It was the eyes, on Earth, that mattered. You saw the person, and the life inside them, if you saw the eyes. And I saw him, this messed-up, sensitive boy and felt, for a moment, the exhausted wonder of a father. It should have been a moment to savour, but it wasn’t. I was being flooded with pain, and violet. I could feel myself about to collapse on to the glossy wet ground. Footsteps behind me. And that was the last thing I heard before the darkness arrived to make its claim, along with remembered poetry, as Emily Dickinson shyly came towards me through the violet and whispered in my ear. Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops at all. Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens I was back at home, on Vonnadoria, and it was exactly how it had always been. And I was exactly how I had always been, among them, the hosts, feeling no pain and no fear. Our beautiful, warless world, where I could be entranced by the purest mathematics for all eternity. .Any human who arrived here, gazing at our violet landscapes, might well have believed they had entered Heaven But what happened in Heaven? What did you do there? After a while, didn’t you crave flaws? Love and lust and misunderstandings, and maybe even a little violence to liven things up? Didn’t light need shade? Didn’t it? Maybe it didn’t. Maybe I was missing the point. Maybe the point was to exist with an absence of pain. Yes, to exist with an absence of pain. Yes, maybe that was the only aim you needed in life. It certainly had been, but what happened if you’d never required that aim because you were born after that goal had been met? I was younger than the hosts. I did not share their appreciation of just how lucky I was. Not any more. Not even in a dream. In-between I woke up. On Earth. But I was so weak I was returning to my original state. I had heard about this. Indeed, I had swallowed a word capsule about it. Rather than allow you to die your body would return to its original state, because the amount of extra energy deployed to be someone else would more usefully serve to preserve your life. And that was all the gifts were there for, really. Self-preservation. The protection of eternity. Which was fine, in theory. In theory, it was a great idea. But the only problem was that this was Earth. And my original state wasn’t equipped for the air here, or the gravity, or the face-to-face contact. I didn’t want Isobel to see me. It just could not happen. And so, as soon as I felt my atoms itch and tingle, warm and shift, I told Isobel to do what she was already doing: looking after Gulliver. And as she crouched down, with her back to me, I got to my feet, which at this point were recognisably human-shaped. Then I shifted myself – midway between two contrasting forms – across the back garden. Luckily the garden was large and dark, with lots of flowers and shrubs and trees to hide behind. So I did. I hid among the beautiful flowers. And I saw Isobel looking around, even as she was calling for an ambulance for Gulliver. ‘Andrew!’ she said at one point, as Gulliver got to his feet. She even ran into the garden to have a look. But I stayed still. ‘Where have you disappeared to?’ My lungs began to burn. I needed more nitrogen. It would have taken only one word in my native tongue. Home. The one the hosts were primed to hear, and I would be back there. So why didn’t I say it? Because I hadn’t finished my task? No. It wasn’t that. I was never going to finish my task. That was the education this night had brought me. So why? Why was I choosing risk and pain over their opposites? What had happened to me? What was wrong? Newton, now, came out into the garden. He trotted along, sniffing the plants and flowers until he sensed me standing there. I expected him to bark and draw attention, but he didn’t. He just stared at me, his eyes shining blank circles, and seemed to know exactly who it was, standing behind the juniper bushes. But he stayed quiet. He was a good dog. And I loved him. I can’t do it. We know. There is no point in doing it anyway. There is every point. I don’t believe Isobel and Gulliver should be harmed. We believe you have been corrupted. I haven’t. I have gained more knowledge. That is all that has happened. No. You have been infected by them. Infected? Infected? With what? With emotion. No. I haven’t. That is not true. It is true. Listen, emotions have a logic. Without emotions humans wouldn’t care for each other, and if they didn’t care for each other the species would have died out. To care for others is self-preservation. You care for someone and they care for you. You are speaking like one of them. You are not a human. You are one of us. We are one. I know I am not a human. We think you need to come home. No. You must come home. I never had a family. We are your family. No. It isn’t the same. We want you home. I have to ask to come home and I am not going to. You can interfere with my mind but you can’t control it. We will see. Two weeks in the Dordogne and a box of dominoes The next day we were in the living room. Me and Isobel. Newton was upstairs with Gulliver, who was now asleep. We had checked on him but Newton was staying there, on guard. ‘How are you?’ asked Isobel. ‘It was not death,’ I said. ‘For I stood up.’ ‘You saved his life,’ said Isobel. ‘I don’t think so. I didn’t even have to do CPR. The doctor said he had very minor injuries.’ ‘I don’t care what the doctor says. He jumped from the roof. That could have killed him. Why didn’t you shout for me?’ ‘I did.’ It was a lie, obviously, but the whole framework was a lie. The belief that I was her husband. It was all fiction. ‘I did shout for you.’ ‘You could have killed yourself.’ (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.’ ‘What happened to your tablets? They were in the cupboard.’ ‘I threw them away.’ This was a lie, obviously. The unclear thing was who I was protecting? Isobel? Gulliver? Myself? ‘Why? Why would you throw them away?’ ‘I didn’t think it was a good idea, to have them lying around. You know, given his condition.’ ‘But they’re diazepam. That’s valium. You can’t overdose on valium, you’d need a thousand.’ ‘No. I know that.’ I was drinking a cup of tea. I actually enjoyed tea. It was so much better than coffee. It tasted like comfort. Isobel nodded. She too was drinking tea. The tea seemed to be making things Isobel nodded. She too was drinking tea. The tea seemed to be making things better. It was a hot drink made of leaves, used in times of crisis as a means of restoring normality. ‘Do you know what they told me?’ she said. ‘No. What? What did they tell you?’ ‘They told me he could stay in.’ ‘Right.’ ‘It was up to me. I had to say if I thought he was a suicide risk or not. And I said I thought he would be more of a risk in there than out here. They said if he tried anything like this again then there’d be no choice about it. He’d be admitted, and they’d watch him.’ ‘Oh. Well, we’ll watch him. That’s what I say. That hospital is full of mad people. People who think they’re from other planets. Stuff like that.’ She smiled a sad smile, and blew a brown tide of ripples across the surface of her drink. ‘Yes. Yes. We’ll have to.’ I tried to understand something. ‘It’s me, isn’t it? It was my fault, for that day I didn’t wear clothes.’ Something about this question switched the mood. Isobel’s face hardened. ‘Andrew, do you really think this was about one day? About your breakdown?’ ‘Oh,’ I said, which I knew wasn’t in context. But I had nothing else to say. ‘Oh’ was always the word I resorted to, the one that filled empty spaces. It was verbal tea. The ‘oh’ should have really been a ‘no’, because I didn’t think this was about one day. I thought it was about thousands of days, most of which I hadn’t been there to observe. And so an ‘oh’ was more appropriate. ‘This wasn’t about one event. This was about everything. It’s not obviously solely your fault but you haven’t really been there, have you, Andrew? For all his life, or at least since we moved back to Cambridge, you’ve just not been there.’ I remembered something he’d told me on the roof. ‘What about France?’ ‘What?’ ‘I taught him dominoes. I swam with him in a swimming pool. In France. The country. France.’ She frowned, confused. ‘France? What? The Dordogne? Two weeks in the Dordogne and a box of bloody dominoes. Is that your “Get Out of Jail Free” card? Is that fatherhood?’ ‘No. I don’t know. I was just giving a . . . a solid example of what he was like.’ ‘He?’ ‘I mean I. What I was like.’ ‘You’ve been there on holiday. Yes. Yes you have. Unless they were working holidays. Come on, you remember Sydney! And Boston! And Seoul! And Turin! And, and, Düsseldorf!’ ‘Oh yes,’ I said, staring at the unread books on the shelves like unlived memories. ‘I remember them vividly. Of course.’ ‘We hardly saw you. And when we did see you, you were always so stressed about the lecture you were going to give or the people you were going to meet. And all those rows we had. We have. Until, you know, you got ill. And got better. Come on, Andrew, you know what I’m saying. This isn’t breaking news, is it?’ ‘No. Not at all. So, where else have I failed?’ ‘You haven’t failed. It’s not an academic paper to be assessed by your peers. It’s not success or failure. It’s our life. I’m not wrapping it in judgemental language. I’m just trying to tell you the objective truth.’ ‘I just want to know. Tell me. Tell me things I’ve done. Or haven’t done.’ She toyed with her silver necklace. ‘Well, come on. It’s always been the same. Between the ages of two and four you weren’t back home in time for a single bath or bedtime story. You’d fly off the handle about anything that got in the way of you and your work. Or if I ever came close to mentioning that I had sacrificed my career for this family – at that time when I had been making real sacrifices – you wouldn’t even so much as postpone a book deadline. I’d be shot down in flames.’ ‘I know. I’m sorry,’ I said, thinking of her novel, Wider Than the Sky. ‘I’ve been terrible. I have. I think you would be better off without me. I think, sometimes, that I should leave and never come back.’ ‘Don’t be childish. You sound younger than Gulliver.’ ‘I’m being serious. I have behaved badly. I sometimes think it would be better if I went and never returned. Ever.’ This threw her. She had her hands on her hips but her glare softened. She took a big breath. ‘I need you here. You know I need you.’ ‘Why? What do I give to this relationship? I don’t understand.’ She clenched her eyes shut. Whispered, ‘That was amazing.’ ‘What?’ ‘What you did there. Out on the roof. It was amazing.’ She then made the most complex facial expression I have ever seen on a human. A kind of frustrated scorn, tinged with sympathy, which slowly softened into a deep, wide humour, culminating in forgiveness and something I couldn’t quite recognise, but which I thought might have been love. ‘What’s happened to you?’ She said it as a whisper, nothing more than a ‘What’s happened to you?’ She said it as a whisper, nothing more than a structured piece of breath. ‘What? Nothing. Nothing has happened to me. Well, a mental breakdown. But I’m over that. Other than that – nothing.’ I said this flippantly, trying to make her smile. She smiled, but sadness quickly claimed her. She looked up to the ceiling. I was beginning to understand these wordless forms of communication. ‘I’ll talk to him,’ I said, feeling kind of solid and authoritative. Kind of real. Kind of human. ‘I’ll talk to him.’ ‘You don’t have to.’ ‘I know,’ I said. And I stood up, again to help when I was supposed to hurt. Social networking Essentially, social networking on Earth was quite limited. Unlike on Vonnadoria, the brain synchronisation technology wasn’t there, so subscribers couldn’t communicate telepathically with each other as part of a true hive mind. Nor could they step into each other’s dreams and have a walk around, tasting imagined delicacies in exotic moonscapes. On Earth, social networking generally involved sitting down at a non-sentient computer and typing words about needing a coffee and reading about other people needing a coffee, while forgetting to actually make a coffee. It was the news show they had been waiting for. It was the show where the news could be all about them. But on the plus side, human computer networks, I discovered, were preposterously easy to hack into as all their security systems were based on prime numbers. And so I hacked into Gulliver’s computer and changed the name of every single person on Facebook who had bullied Gulliver to ‘I Am the Cause of Shame’, and blocked them from posting anything with the word ‘Gulliver’ in it, and gave each of them a computer virus which I dubbed ‘The Flea’ after a lovely poem. This virus ensured the only messages they would ever be able to send were ones that contained the words ‘I am hurt and so I hurt’. On Vonnadoria I had never done anything so vindictive. Nor had I ever felt quite so satisfied. Forever is composed of nows We went to the park to walk Newton. Parks were the most common destination on dog walks. A piece of nature – grass, flowers, trees – that was not quite allowed to be truly natural. Just as dogs were thwarted wolves, parks were thwarted forests. Humans loved both, possibly because humans were, well, thwarted. The flowers were beautiful. Flowers, after love, must have been the best advert planet Earth had going for it. ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ said Gulliver, as we sat down on the bench. ‘What doesn’t?’ We watched Newton sniffing the flowers, livelier than ever. ‘I was fine. No damage. Even my eye’s better.’ ‘You were lucky.’ ‘Dad, before I went out on the roof, I’d had twenty-eight diazepam.’ ‘You’d need more.’ He looked at me, angry for saying this, as if I was humiliating him. Using knowledge against him. ‘Your mum told me that,’ I added. ‘I didn’t know that.’ ‘I didn’t want you to save me.’ ‘I didn’t save you. You were just lucky. But I really think you should ignore feelings like that. That was a moment in your life. You have a lot more days to live. About twenty-four thousand more days to live, probably. That’s a lot of moments. You could do many great things in that time. You could read a lot of poetry.’ ‘You don’t like poetry. That’s one of the few facts I know about you.’ ‘It’s growing on me . . . Listen,’ I said, ‘don’t kill yourself. Don’t ever kill yourself. Just, that’s my advice, don’t kill yourself.’ Gulliver took something out of his pocket and put it in his mouth. It was a cigarette. He lit it. I asked if I could try it. Gulliver seemed troubled by this but handed it over. I sucked on the filter and brought the smoke into my lungs. And then I coughed. ‘What’s the point of this?’ I asked Gulliver. ‘What’s the point of this?’ I asked Gulliver. He shrugged. ‘It’s an addictive substance with a high fatality rate. I thought there would be a point.’ I handed the cigarette back to Gulliver. ‘Thanks,’ he mumbled, still confused. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. ‘It’s fine.’ He took another drag, and suddenly realised it wasn’t doing anything for him either. He flicked the cigarette in a steep arc towards the grass. ‘If you want,’ I said, ‘we could play dominoes when we get home. I bought a box this morning.’ ‘No thanks.’ ‘Or we could go to the Dordogne.’ ‘What?’ ‘Go swimming.’ He shook his head. ‘You need some more tablets.’ ‘Yes. Maybe. You ate all mine.’ I tried to smile, playfully, and try some more Earth humour. ‘You fucker!’ There was a long silence. We watched Newton sniffing around the circumference of a tree. Twice. A million suns imploded. And then Gulliver came out with it. ‘You don’t know what it’s been like,’ he said. ‘I’ve got all this expectation on me because I’m your son. My teachers read your books. And they look at me like some bruised apple that’s fallen off the great Andrew Martin tree. You know, the posh boy who got expelled from his boarding school. The one who set stuff on fire. Whose parents gave up on him. Not that I’m bothered about that now. But even in the holidays you were never around. You were always somewhere else. Or just making everything tense and horrible with Mum. It’s just shit. You should have just done the right thing and got divorced years ago. You’ve not got anything in common.’ I thought about all this. And didn’t know what to say. Cars passed by on the road behind us. The sound was very melancholy somehow, like the bass rumble of a sleeping Bazadean. ‘What was your band called?’ ‘The Lost,’ he said. A leaf fell and landed on my lap. It was dead and brown. I held it and, quite out of character, felt a strange empathy. Maybe it was because now I was empathising with humans I could empathise with pretty much anything. Too much Emily Dickinson, that was the problem. Emily Dickinson was making me human. But not that human. There was a dull ache in my head and a small weight of tiredness in my eyes as the leaf became green. I brushed it away quickly, but it was too late. ‘What just happened?’ Gulliver asked, staring at the leaf as it floated away on the breeze. I tried to ignore him. He asked again. ‘Nothing happened to the leaf,’ I said. He forgot about the leaf he might have seen the moment he saw two teenage girls and a boy his own age walking on the road that ran behind the park. The girls were laughing into their hands at the sight of us. I have realised that, essentially, there are two broad categories of human laughter, and this was not the good kind. The boy was the boy I had seen on Gulliver’s Facebook page. Theo “The Fucking Business” Clarke. Gulliver shrank. ‘It’s the Martin Martians! Freaks!’ Gulliver cowered lower on the bench, crippled with shame. 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.’ Violence ‘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 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. 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. The taste of her skin 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 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. I am staying here. 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? "