The Humans - by Matt Haig

The war and money show

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

‘Oh.’

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

‘Everyone is very worried about you.’

‘Who?’ I said.

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

‘We only have one child?’

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

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

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

‘Why did you make me this?’ I asked.

‘I’m looking after you,’ she said.

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

‘But what is in it for you?’

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

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

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

 

 

A stranger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘That’s odd,’ she said.

‘What?’

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

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

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

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

‘All right,’ I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Starting the sequence

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

– Marcus du Sautoy

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Thank you.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Oh, it’s nothing. It’s just, this bump on my head. I am all over the place.’

‘Dear, that’s terrible. Are you sure you should be here? Shouldn’t you be at home in bed?’

‘Yes, probably I should. After this, I am going home.’

‘Good. Well, I hope you feel better soon.’

‘Oh. Thank you.’

‘Bye.’

She continued downstairs, not realising she had just saved her own life.

I had a key, so I used it. There was no point in doing anything overtly suspicious in case anyone else should have seen me.

And then I was inside his – my – office. I didn’t know what I had been expecting. That was a problem, now: expectation. There were no reference points; everything was new; the immediate archetype of how things were, at least here.

So: an office.

A static chair behind a static desk. A window with the blinds down. Books filling nearly three of the walls. There was a brown-leaved pot plant on the windowsill, smaller and thirstier than the one I had seen at the hospital. On the desk there were photos in frames amidst a chaos of papers and unfathomable stationery, and there in the centre of it all was the computer.

I didn’t have long, so I sat down and switched it on. This one seemed only fractionally more advanced than the one I had used back at the house. Earth computers were still very much at the pre-sentient phase of their evolution, just sitting there and letting you reach in and grab whatever you wanted without even the slightest complaint.

I quickly found what I was looking for. A document called ‘Zeta’.

I opened it up and saw it was twenty-six pages of mathematical symbols. Or most of it was. At the beginning there was a little introduction written in words, which said:

 

PROOF OF THE RIEMANN HYPOTHESIS

 

As you will know the proof of the Riemann hypothesis is the most important unsolved problem in mathematics. To solve it would revolutionise applications of mathematical analysis in a myriad of unknowable ways that would transform our lives and those of future generations. Indeed, it is mathematics itself which is the bedrock of civilisation, at first evidenced by architectural achievements such as the Egyptian pyramids, and by astronomical observations essential to architecture. Since then our mathematical understanding has advanced, but never at a constant rate.

Like evolution itself, there have been rapid advances and crippling setbacks along the way. If the Library of Alexandria had never been burned to the ground it is possible to imagine that we would have built upon the achievements of the ancient Greeks to greater and earlier effect, and therefore it could have been in the time of a Cardano or a Newton or a Pascal that we first put a man on the moon. And we can only wonder where we would be. And at the planets we would have terraformed and colonised by the twenty-first century. Which medical advances we would have made. Maybe if there had been no dark ages, no switching off of the light, we would have found a way never to grow old, to never die.

People joke, in our field, about Pythagoras and his religious cult based on perfect geometry and other abstract mathematical forms, but if we are going to have religion at all then a religion of mathematics seems ideal, because if God exists then what is He but a mathematician?

And so today we may be able to say, we have risen a little closer towards our deity. Indeed, potentially we have a chance to turn back the clock and rebuild that ancient library so we can stand on the shoulders of giants that never were.

 

 

Primes

The document carried on in this excited way for a bit longer. I learned a little bit more about Bernhard Riemann, a painfully shy, nineteenth-century German child prodigy who displayed exceptional skill with numbers from an early age, before succumbing to a mathematical career and a series of nervous breakdowns which plagued his adulthood. I would later discover this was one of the key problems humans had with numerical understanding – their nervous systems simply weren’t up to it.

Primes, quite literally, sent people insane, particularly as so many puzzles remained. They knew a prime was a whole number that could only be divided by one or itself, but after that they hit all kinds of problems.

For instance, they knew that the total of all primes was precisely the same as the total of all numbers, as both were infinite. This was, for a human, a very puzzling fact, as surely there must be more numbers than prime numbers. So impossible was this to come to terms with, some people, on contemplating it, placed a gun into their mouth, pulled the trigger, and blew their brains out.

Humans also understood that primes were very much like the Earth’s air. The higher you went, the fewer of them there were. For instance, there were 25 primes below 100, but only 21 between 100 and 200, and only 16 between 1000 and 1100. However, unlike with the Earth’s air it didn’t matter how high you went with prime numbers as there were always some around. For instance, 2097593 was a prime, and there were millions between it and, say, 4314398832739895727932419750374600193. So, the atmosphere of prime numbers covered the numerical universe.

However, people had struggled to explain the apparently random pattern of primes. They thinned out, but not in any way that humans could fathom. This frustrated the humans very much. They knew that if they could solve this they could advance in all kinds of ways, because prime numbers were the heart of mathematics and mathematics was the heart of knowledge.

Humans understood other things. Atoms, for instance. They had a machine called a spectrometer which allowed them to see the atoms a molecule was made from. But they didn’t understand primes the way they understood atoms, sensing that they would do so only if they could work out why prime numbers were spread out the way they were.

And then in 1859, at the Berlin Academy, the increasingly ill Bernhard Riemann announced what would become the most studied and celebrated hypothesis in all mathematics. It stated that there was a pattern, or at least there was one for the first hundred thousand or so primes. And it was beautiful, and clean, and it involved something called a ‘zeta function’ – a kind of mental machine in itself, a complex-looking curve that was useful for investigating properties of primes. You put numbers into it and they would form an order that no one had noticed before. A pattern. The distribution of prime numbers was not random.

There were gasps when Riemann – mid panic attack – announced this to his smartly dressed and bearded peers. They truly believed the end was in sight, and that in their lifetimes there would be a proof that worked for all prime numbers. But Riemann had only located the lock, he hadn’t actually found the key, and shortly afterwards he died of tuberculosis.

And as time went on, the quest became more desperate. Other mathematical riddles were solved in due course – things like Fermat’s Last Theorem and the Poincaré Conjecture – which left proof of the long-buried German’s hypothesis as the last and largest problem to solve. The one that would be the equivalent of seeing atoms in molecules, or identifying the chemical elements of the periodic table. The one that would ultimately give humans supercomputers, explanations of quantum physics and interstellar transportation.

After getting to grips with all this I then trawled through all the pages full of numbers, graphs and mathematical symbols. This was another language for me to learn, but it was an easier and more truthful one than the one I had learnt with the help of Cosmopolitan.

And by the end of it, after a few moments of sheer terror, I was in quite a state. After that very last and conclusive ∞, I was left in no doubt that the proof had been found, and the key had turned that all-important lock.

So, without so much as a second’s thought, I deleted the document, feeling a small rush of pride as I did so.

‘There,’ I told myself, ‘you may have just managed to save the universe.’ But of course, things are never that simple, not even on Earth.

 

 

A moment of sheer terror

ξ(1/2+it)=[eŖlog(r(s/2))π-1/4(–t2–1/4)/2]x[eiJlog(r(s/2))π-it/2ζ(1/2+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 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.