The Humans (7 page)

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.’

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.

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

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.