Authors: Matt Haig
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
‘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.