Free The Humans by Matt Haig Page B

there would be a few more questions.
    He didn’t hear me enter owing to the audio transmitter he had plugged into his ears. Nor did he see me, as he was too busy staring at his computer. On the screen, there was a still-motion
image of myself naked, walking past one of the university buildings. There was also some writing on the screen. At the top were the words ‘Gulliver Martin, You Must Be So Proud’.
    Underneath, there were lots of comments. A typical example read, ‘HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! Oh almost forgot –
HA!’ I read the name next to that particular post.
    ‘Who is Theo “The Fucking Business” Clarke?’ Gulliver jumped at my voice and turned around. I asked my question again but didn’t receive an answer.
    ‘What are you doing?’ I asked, purely for research purposes.
    ‘Just go away.’
    ‘I want to talk to you. I want to talk about last night.’
    He turned his back to me. His torso stiffened. ‘Go away, Dad.’
    ‘No. I want to know what I said to you.’
    He sprang out of his chair and, as the humans say,
stormed
over to me. ‘Just leave me alone, okay? You’ve never been interested in a single thing about my life so don’t
start now. Why fucking start now?’
    I watched the back of him in the small, circular mirror staring out from the wall like a dull and unblinking eye.
    After some aggressive pacing he sat back in his chair, turned to his computer again, and pressed his finger on an odd-looking command device.
    ‘I need to know something,’ I said. ‘I need to know if you know what I was doing. Last week at work?’
    ‘Dad, just—’
    ‘Listen, this is important. Were you still up when I came home? You know, last night? Were you in the house? Were you awake?’
    He mumbled something. I didn’t hear what. Only an ipsoid would have heard it.
    ‘Gulliver, how are you at mathematics?’
    ‘You know how I fucking am at maths.’
    ‘Fucking no, I don’t. Not now. That is why I am fucking asking. Tell me what you fucking know.’
    Nothing. I thought I was using his language, but Gulliver just sat there, staring away from me, with his right leg jerking up and down in slight but rapid movements. My words were having no
effect. I thought of the audio transmitter he still had in one ear. Maybe it was sending radio signals. I waited a little while longer and sensed it was time to leave. But as I headed for the door
he said, ‘Yeah. I was up. You told me.’
    My heart raced. ‘What? What did I tell you?’
    ‘About you being the saviour of the human race or something.’
    ‘Anything more specific? Did I go into detail?’
    ‘You proved your precious Rainman hypothesis.’
    ‘Riemann. Riemann. The Riemann hypothesis. I told you that, fucking did I?’
    ‘Yeah,’ he said, in the same glum tone. ‘First time you’d spoken to me in a week.’
    ‘Who have you told?’
    ‘What? Dad, I think people are more interested in the fact that you walked around the town centre naked, to be honest. No one’s going to care about some equation.’
    ‘But your mother? Have you told her? She must have asked you if I’d spoken to you, after I’d gone missing. Surely she asked you that?’
    He shrugged. (A shrug, I realised, was one of the main modes of communication for teenagers.) ‘Yeah.’
    ‘
And?
What did you say? Come on, speak to me, Gulliver. What does she know about it?’
    He turned and looked me straight in the eye. He was frowning. Angry. Confused. ‘I don’t fucking believe you, Dad.’
    ‘Fucking believe?’
    ‘You’re the parent, I’m the kid. I’m the one who should be wrapped up in myself, not you. I’m fifteen and you’re forty-three. If you are genuinely ill, Dad,
then I want to be there for you, but aside from your new-found love of streaking and your weird fucking swearing you are acting very, very, very much like yourself. But here’s a newsflash.
You ready? We don’t actually care about your