The Humans by Matt Haig Page B

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.
    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.
    Was it wrong to thwart a species’ technological advancement? That was a new question in my mind. I