Читать книгу The Humans - Matt Haig - Страница 17

She told me she had been talking to the university. This, alone, made little sense. How, for instance, was that done? But then she told me this: ‘They tell me you’ve been working long hours, even by the standards of your peers. They seem very upset about the whole thing. But they are worried about you. As is your wife.’

‘My wife?’

I knew I had one, and I knew her name, but I didn’t really understand what it actually meant to have a wife. Marriage was a truly alien concept. There probably weren’t enough magazines on the planet for me to ever understand it. She explained. I was even more confused. Marriage was a ‘loving union’ which meant two people who loved each other stayed together for ever. But that seemed to suggest that love was quite a weak force and needed marriage to bolster it. Also, the union could be broken with something called ‘divorce’, which meant there was – as far as I could see – very little point to it, in logical terms. But then, I had no real idea what ‘love’ was, even though it had been one of the most frequently used words in the magazine I’d read. It remained a mystery. And so I asked her to explain that too, and by this point I was bewildered, overdosing on all this bad logic. It sounded like delusion.

‘Do you want a coffee?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

So the coffee came and I tasted it – a hot, foul, acidic, dual-carbon compound liquid – and I spat it out all over her. A major breach of human etiquette – apparently, I was meant to swallow it.

‘What the—’ She stood up and patted herself dry, showing intense concern for her shirt. After that there were more questions. Impossible stuff like, what was my address? What did I do in my spare time, to relax?

Of course, I could have fooled her. Her mind was so soft and malleable and its neutral oscillations were so obviously weak that even with my as then still limited command of the language I could have told her I was perfectly fine, and that it was none of her business, and could she please leave me alone. I had already worked out the rhythm and the optimal frequency I would have needed. But I didn’t.

Do not escape prematurely. Do not panic. There will be time.

The truth is, I was quite terrified. My heart had begun racing for no obvious reason. My palms were sweating. Something about the room, and its proportions, coupled with so much contact with this irrational species, was setting me off. Everything here was a test.

If you failed one test, there was a test to see why. I suppose they loved tests so much because they believed in free will.

Ha!

Humans, I was discovering, believed they were in control of their own lives, and so they were in awe of questions and tests, as these made them feel like they had a certain mastery over other people, who had failed in their choices, and who had not worked hard enough on the right answers. And by the end of the last failed test many were sat, as I was soon sat, in a mental hospital, swallowing a mind-blanking pill called diazepam, and placed in another empty room full of right angles. Only this time, I was also inhaling the distressing scent of the hydrogen chloride they used to annihilate bacteria.

My task was going to be easy, I decided, in that room. The meat of it, I mean. And the reason it was going to be easy was that I had the same sense of indifference towards them as they had towards single-celled organisms. I could wipe a few of them out, no problem, and for a greater cause than hygiene. But what I didn’t realise was that when it came to that sneaking, camouflaged, untouchable giant known as the Future, I was as vulnerable as anyone.