Authors: Matt Haig
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.
‘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.
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.
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 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.