Ambiguously Human / Literature

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Ambiguously Human in Literature.

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• A Conspiracy of Truths: Blackwitches are considered this by the people of Nuryevet. The blackwitch Chant encounters reinforces this, making horrible noises and radiating an aura of dread.
• The "human" Wonderland natives of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland never have their species referred to directly. And considering the nature of Wonderland itself, it's hard to say.
• Jane, the protagonist of —All You Zombies—, looks indistinguishable from a human, and believes that she is one herself, but, thanks to time travel and hermaphroditism, turns out to be both of her biological parents, thereby making her related to no human on Earth, or even to any other living thing, and is also every character in the story, without exception.
• Judge Holden, the Ax-Crazy, Wicked Cultured antagonist of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, is deliberately written so that the reader comes away from the story unsure of whether he's human or some kind of ethereal demon in human form. For the most part, the novel is a mundane, if extremely lurid and violent, depiction of life on the US Western frontier in the 1850s... until we're introduced to Holden, who's a completely hairless giant of a man with deathly pale skin (despite spending most of the novel in the deserts of Mexico), almost supernatural strength, an uncanny ability to master any trade effortlessly, and a tendency to randomly appear in people's lives without warning. The final chapter also reveals that Holden apparently does not age and claims to be immortal.
• Kazuki Akai of Cerberus High is regarded this way for possessing abilities unlike any human or canid breed until it is discovered that he is a homunculus created by Hades. This bothered him at first, being the I Just Want to Be Normal-type but over the course of the story which ended in him having a transformation which left him Not Quite Back to Normal, Kazuki finally accepts his status as being not-quite-human but not-quite-canid-breed either.
• Arunis Wytterscorm, most prominent Big Bad (of several) in The Chathrand Voyages, frequently makes disparaging remarks about humans and humanity in a context that makes it plain he doesn't consider himself one. The little that's revealed about his backstory leaves it unclear if he feels he's evolved beyond humanity, or if he was simply never human in the first place. Further complicating the issue is that while his body is human, he's a three-thousand-year-old body snatcher, so the form he takes during the books is not what he originally looked like. Later, one of his primary contestants for the Big Bad title is his equally horrible, equally ambiguous sister, Macadra.
• The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant:
  • The Haruchai are a warrior people who all share a telepathic link, possess absolutely inflexible morals and rarely show any emotion. They come across as so inhuman at times that it makes one wonder.
  • The Insequent: innately magical beings or just humans who have extensively studied magic? The world may never know.
• The Cosmere:
  • Hoid, essentially a walking talking Meaningful Background Event, appeared as a minor character in every Cosmere novel, despite being set on different worlds and centuries apart, but it isn't until The Stormlight Archive that we get an idea of how ambiguous he is. He's unfathomably ancient, once spent a year being digested by a giant monster to no apparent ill-effect, and willingly admits he doesn't know if a Shardblade, one of the deadliest weapons in the Cosmere, would have any effect on him whatsoever. We know he's definitely not a Shard Holder, but he is old enough to have known the original sixteen Shard Holders when they were still human. He possess a sixth sense that tells him "where he's needed" but not why he's needed there. Pattern, a Spren ^note  Spren are essentially human thoughts and ideas brought to life in the Cognitive Realm , says Hoid is "like us", but different, and can't really articulate it beyond that.
    Hoid: I began life as a thought, a concept, words on a page. That was another thing I stole. Myself.
  • Word of God is that Hoid was human originally a long time ago but now 'it's complicated' and 'he is not exactly that'.
  • In The Stormlight Archive the people of Roshar have some very strange genetics, with multi-colored hair and strange eye colours abounding, to say nothing of various odd features of various ethnic groups (foot long eyebrows, bluish skin, and a shadow that falls towards light rather then away from it). They're all treated as humans in-story (except maybe the ones with the backwards shadows who got mostly exterminated at some point). Word of God from Sanderson is that the Fantasy Pantheon of his cosmology came from a world with humans, and so when they created their own worlds they used them as a template, but put their own spin on it. Also the backwards shadow people (Siah Aimans) are confirmed to NOT be human by Word of God though they can interbreed with humans and several ethnic groups are part-Siah in origin. (The ones with blueish skin but normal shadows). Also the Herdazians (who have stoneline fingernails) and the Horneaters (who have abnormally tough dentation that can crush horns and shells are Uneven Hybrids with Parshendi/listeners/singers again according to Word of God (though there are some hints for the observant in the books).
  • Also notable are the humans from Mistborn: The Original Trilogy, who are capable of surviving in a post-apocalyptic ash-choked wasteland that would certainly kill earth humans, though they don't look any different. It's stated in the third book that the Lord Ruler screwed around with their genetics so they could survive.
• C. S. Lewis:
  • The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lady of the Green Kirtle from The Silver Chair looks human, but she has formidable powers (like mind control and turning into a snake) that other humans in the setting lack. She's also referred to as a "Northern Witch", and the other Northern Witch we meet (Jadis the White Witch) is the last surviving inhabitant of an alternate universe and is rumored to be half Jinn and half Giant. Combine this with the Lady's lack of any backstory whatsoever, and you get an enormous mystery as to her true nature.
  • The Space Trilogy: The Un-man in Perelandra may be an ancient creature from the depths of space, but when it crashes into Venus, it has the appearance of a human body. The problem is, its body is always a little un-lifelike, as if it's a corpse being operated by a puppeteer. Eventually it's revealed that the Un-man is the very human Weston possessed by a being of pure mind.
• The Diogenes Club series has its version of The Men in Black, who work for a covert organization called the Undertaking. The series is deliberately ambiguous about whether they're human; they're all dissonantly serene when they're on the job, but some have shown more human touches in private — and then there will be something else that makes you wonder again. Several of them have strange deformities, and all of them, it's hinted, are hiding something horrifying behind their Sinister Shades. Nobody knows exactly where the Undertaking gets new agents from, with rumors ranging from "they hire normal humans, then turn them into something else" to "they grow them in vats fertilized with the remains of their predecessors".
• Discworld:
  • The City Watch of Ankh-Morpork is sometimes described as being comprised of "humans, dwarves, trolls, goblins, gargoyles, a vampire, a werewolf and Nobby Nobbs." He carries a certificate identifying him as human (and that just says he's probably human), but that only makes some people more suspicious. There are some hints in later books that he might have some goblin blood in him, and despite being repulsive to human women he's quite attractive to the goblin ladies, but it's never confirmed either way.
  • The Patrician of Ankh-Morpork technically isn't anything other than human, so he's described as "human, but only by default". He's very thin and pale, is rumored to live on only bread and water (although he actually seems to eat normally, if sparingly), and hardly ever sleeps but never looks sleep-deprived. He's rumored to be a vampire, and then-Captain Vimes of the City Watch expresses surprise when it turns out he bleeds when injured like any other human. Plus, he Never Gets Drunk and it seems his overall aura is occasionally too spooky to be a human's. But, nonetheless, he's human.
• The woman on the beach in DO NOT TAKE THE SHELLS looks like a ragged, skinny human being, but speaks and behaves so off it suggests she might be anything but. Then there's her remarks about living "below the water".
• The Dresden Files:
  • White Court vampires' demons don't physically manifest, even though there are subtle physical changes when they draw on their demon.
  • Changelings, half-humans-half-Fae, are human unless they Choose to be Fae.
  • Mac the barkeep, who seemed to be a regular human in on the Masquerade until that time he got shot and healed within seconds. In the same book, an Outsider singles him out for particular contempt, calling him a “watcher” who has no business getting involved after some choice he made a long time ago.
  • Ms. Gard, whose species was not made clear for some time but was shown to be more physically capable than your average human. Turns out she's a Valkyrie.
  • Wizards like Harry are a bit more than human. Provided they decide to use their talents, they get a much longer lifespan and a minor Healing Factor.
  • Kincaid looks like and claims to be a "vanilla mortal", but Harry's skeptical. He's not. Really, really not.
• In The Edge Chronicles there are various fantastic races (there are no Earth animals or plants whatsoever) but all of the protagonists are human-ish (they have pointy ears) and aren't given a race name. In around the tenth book, one of them is named as a 'fourthling' and described as what you get if you add up all of the other races and take an average.
• Egil's Saga: There are many hints that Kveld-Ulf's family line is part giant. All of them are exceptionally big and strong, and Skallagrim and Egil are moreover monstrously ugly, having abnormally thick and bulging skulls. All of them show occasional berserking behavior — as is typical for trolls — and Kveld-Ulf is rumored to be a shapeshifter. When Skallagrim goes to King Harald, the doorguard who announces the arrivals is not sure "if they can be called men" because "they are more like giants in size and looks", and when Egil seeks out Arinbjorn at York, the messenger describes him to Arinbjorn as "big as a troll". Kveld-Ulf's genealogy also suggestively mentions that he had a maternal uncle called Hallbjorn Halftroll.
• Goblins in the Castle: Igor. He looks human, but claims to have just "happened" rather than being born, has lived over six hundred years, and says he's died before (but evidently got better). It's lampshaded in Goblins on the Prowl, where Fauna notes at one point that "I'm counting Igor as human, though no one is entirely sure about that."
• In Gulliver's Travels the Yahoos' origin implies that the whole species are the descendants of a European couple who shipwrecked on Houyhnhnm-Land decades before Gulliver showed up, and just kept breeding and breeding, with each of their children breeding with each other and each generation becoming increasingly feral until they were nothing but a whole race of inbred savages. Which just confirmed Gulliver's belief that Humans Are Bastards.
• Nagato, Ryoko and Kimidori from Haruhi Suzumiya look human, except for their strange hair colors. Yet they are interfaces created by an alien intelligence that exists as formless data and cannot interact directly with humanity. Meanwhile, there are also seemingly normal humans with odd hair colors in the series as well, so that's not a dead giveaway for identifying "interfaces" in disguise.
• In His Dark Materials, the witches look fully human and can breed with human men (in fact, this is the only way they can breed) to produce healthy and fertile children of both sexes — their female children are also witches, but their male children are human, suggesting some kind of Human Subspecies. Aside from that, though, they're a One-Gender Race with lifespans potentially in excess of a millennium, a lot of seemingly inherent supernatural abilities like flight, sort-of-invisibility and prophecy, immunity to cold, and the ability to perceive things that "ordinary" humans can't, like the feeling of starlight on their skin, and daemons who can travel far from their bodies although it's later revealed that they're not born with this ability and ordinary humans can acquire it too.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy uses this trope very frequently, albeit (maybe) not intentionally. The author, Douglas Adams, occasionally describes his alien creatures' appearance in detail, but most of the time he neglects to describe them altogether other than to say that they're not from Earth. In fact, only two species (the Bartledanians and Lamuellans in Mostly Harmless) were ever described as looking exactly like humans, but since no one ever said how the other aliens aren't like humans, most of them were portrayed by ordinary actors in the film adaptation. Ford and Zaphod do look human, though. Ford is able to pass for one for fifteen years without difficulty, and while Zaphod normally has two heads and three arms, when the extras are absent he can attend a human party with nobody raising an eyebrow. Amusingly enough, this apparently doesn't go both ways, since aliens sometimes remark on Ford and Zaphod having a pet monkey with them instead of assuming Arthur is a member of their race.
• "Imogen's Epic Day":
  • The delivery man who brings Imogen the MacGuffin that begins her quest is described as classically handsome in a lot of ways — flawlessly smooth skin, perfectly white teeth — but off in such a way that he looks more like rubberhose toon than an actual person.
  • Agent Campbell from the NQB somehow manages to vanish just as Safira the Ancient appears, only to reappear right after the threat has passed, as though she had magically worked her way in and out the narrative.
• Inheritance Cycle: Angela comes off as this. She seems like a young and very quirky human woman, but constantly claims that she's "older than she looks" and relates bits of back story implying a very complex and interesting life. She also seems to know certain spells that few or any other people can cast. Some fans have speculated that she is really an elf, though real-elf Oromis claims that she's human.
• Anthony Fremont from It's a Good Life. There are hints that he does not look human, though there are no details about what he does look like. He is described as having a "wet, purple gaze", that he has an "odd shadow", is referred to as a "goblin" at one point, and he was weird-looking enough that when he was born, the doctor screamed, dropped him and tried to kill him. And there's also the fact he can warp reality without limits.
• Jigoku no Gouka de Yakare Tsuzuketa Shounen: It's unclear how human Flare still is after his trip to Hell. His body is a transformed version of the fires of Hell, and he can emit fire and wrap himself in it without burning himself. His strength and speed are inhuman even when compared to his previous athletic prowess, to the point that he treats a harsh hike through the forest as a casual jog when a knight like Aishera is winded and sweating.
• Land of Oz:
  • It's unclear if Ozma is human, half human and half fairy, or a fairy. She was introduced as a human but later books give her an inconsistent amount of fae blood.
  • Furthermore, it isn't clarified whether the Munchkins are simply short humans, or some kind of Human Subspecies.
  • The Wicked Witch of the West is so old that the blood in her veins has evaporated. She also melts when water splashes on her.
• Little Sister and the Month Brothers (originally Marushka and the Month Brothers), a Slavic folk tale has the titular Month Brothers, who appear human, but have Elemental Powers reflecting their role as different months, and they are named directly for the month their role is, e.g. Brother January. The brothers appear to be Ambiguously Related and Vague Age, with some looking closer to Grandpa God. It's not made clear in the story itself that they're gods or whether they're humans with Differently Powered Individual powers, gods or spirits taking A Form You Are Comfortable With, and the text refers to them as "the men". At best, it's open to much speculation what their origins really are. The story is in the Public Domain and is known for its Squick ending of Old Man Marrying a Child.
• Moby-Dick: Fedallah is ostensibly human, but has apparent unexplained psychic powers. Stubb claims he's a Louis Cypher.
• The titular Harley Quin of The Mysterious Mr. Quin seems like a perfectly normal human, aside from his uncanny knack of being in exactly the right place at the right time to kick off whatever train of deduction is taking place. Mr. Satterthwaite never quite figures it out, but it's heavily implied that he's the incarnation of the theatrical Harlequin figure. Or possibly Death.
• Neverwhere:
  • Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar are confirmed as nonhuman by Door, but we never find out what they are.
  • This goes for essentially everyone in London Below: they mostly look like (extremely idiosyncratic) humans, but have a variety of never-explained super-powers, seem to have been down there for generations, and occasionally traffic with overtly non-human beings.
• The titular assholes from Night of the Assholes all look human, even if they all look and behave like every jerkass stereotype you could imagine, but they are virtually unkillable with the exception of their ass.
• Once: In the Bracken estate's woods, Thom Kindred happens upon what appears to be, reclining before an oak, a short young woman - unabashedly naked, and attended by tiny glowing winged figures.
• Peter Pan makes this trope Older Than Television. Peter doesn't age — but in Neverland nobody ages. He can fly — but, again, thanks to pixie dust anyone can fly. He has pointed ears — but was he born with them, or are they just a side-effect of living in Neverland? He certainly doesn't glow like Tinker Bell, and he is human-sized.
• In the original novel of The Phantom of the Opera the titular antagonist aka Erik has signs of this. Although the narrative does point to his status as The Grotesque as merely a deformity from birth that made him look like a corpse and almost every other seemly supernatural element in the book has a rational explanation behind it, there’s still multiple spooky traits about Erik that cast doubt on him being completely human. Firstly there’s the fact he has yellow eyes that can only be seen in the dark and burn like coals. Then there’s the fact he can go for weeks and months without sleeping or eating which should be impossible for a human man. Helping this ambiguity is the frequent exclamations from Christine and the Persian that Erik is a demon, claims that aren’t so easy to Hand Wave as just superstition given what we are presented with.
• The Phantom Tollbooth: Some of the characters appear human, are clearly not demons, yet have strange powers — for instance, the Bings family has sight-related superpowers, one boy is only 0.58 of a whole boy, and Rhyme and Reason possibly caused all manner of anomalies to happen after their banishment.
• Richard Upton Pickman in H. P. Lovecraft's Pickman's Model. His features seem to change in ways that aren't quite human, and he somehow managed to persuade ghouls to model for him without becoming their dinner. It is left ambiguous whether he is a changeling, a hybrid (via his witch ancestress being a changeling), or simply an eccentric with an interest in Things Man Was Not Meant to Know.
• The Whites in the Realm of the Elderlings series, and by extension the White Prophets, are rather ambiguously human. Easily mistaken for albinos when young, their skin, eyes and hair darken throughout the course of their lives to golden and eventually to chestnut brown whenever one of their prophecies has been fulfilled and the world nudged from its set course. Subtle hints like their longevity and something slightly off about the Fool's wrists clue Fitz in as well. The Fool then says that no, the Whites were not human, and neither is he.
• Redshirts gives us Q'eeng, whose appearance is never described and whose species never mentioned, but who is very obviously and implied to be In-Universe an Expy/Captain Ersatz/transparent rip-off of Spock.
• Scarlett Undercover: Mook claims to be Scarlett's guardian angel. Due to the book's Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane setting, it's not clear whether he is actually an angel or just a normal human. He often seems to know things without being told, but there's never any definite proof.
• In La Saga de los Confines, from Liliana Bodoc, Drimus El Doctrinador, a powerful wizard who is the main and most faithful servant of Misaianes, the son of death, and is also the most evil character in the entire saga. He is hunchbacked, which makes it difficult for him to walk normally and therefore he often prefers to walk on all fours accompanied by a pack of fighting dogs raised by him, he eats very little and according to him "is satiated by his own emotions", he is also immune to all kinds of poisons, the beauty of women does not seem to affect him and he does not feel any kind of sexual desire, among other human needs.
• In The Secret of Platform 13, many magical creatures look human enough that they can pass in society outside the Island (while the Island itself has some Muggles, including the royal family). The rescue team sent to find the lost prince — a wizard, a fey, a young hag and an invisible giant — were chosen not just for their skills but because they can move around London relatively unnoticed.
• James A. Moore, writer of The Blasted Lands Series, wrote the horror trilogy of Serenity Falls. The only thing that can save the accursed town is Jonathon Crowley. Known as the "Hunter", he's The Dreaded by the supernatural world. He's always got agelessness and a Healing Factor, but if he's facing the supernatural and he's invoked by someone for protection then he'll power up to Physical God levels and go slaughtering whatever unearthly thing he faces.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • House Targaryen (and possibly all other dragonlord Valyrian bloodlines). Targaryen women may be likely to give birth to half dragon looking babies with wings and scales and the same goes for women that have conceived with a Targaryen male. They claim to be the only people able to control dragons, and a few of their members posses precognitive powers.
  • The Red Priests, but particularly Melisandre, since she's described the most and has even become a POV character. She has scarlet hair and eyes of the same impossible shade, and she commands powers that most don't understand (but are clearly dangerous). She does not need food or drink, and hopes that she will no longer need sleep eventually. A potent poison that has been shown to kill two different people does nothing to her. Everyone note that there's something off about her, even as they cannot deny that she is very beautiful.
• Stephen King:
  • Randall Flagg, the antagonist of several seemingly unrelated stories. His backstory implies that he at least was human once, but his later incarnations are a bit less obvious about that fact.
  • Walter O'Dim aka Marten aka The Man In Black canonically Was Once a Man. Whether he's now a very powerful but still-human sorcerer or has been turned into some kind of demon after centuries (possibly millennia) of dabbling in evil magics, who can say. For that matter, the Crimson King: Evil God or man with an A God Am I complex?
• Stuart Little:
  • The titular character inexplicably resembles a Funny Animal rodent despite being born to humans. Whether he's a human who just looks like a rodent, a case of Random Species Offspring, or something else entirely is never made clear. Averted in the (very loose) film adaptation as Stuart is a mouse adopted by humans.
  • There's also Stuart's sort-of-girlfriend Harriet, who is the biological daughter of humans, and unlike Stuart she looks human, but she's doll-sized.
• In the Thursday Next series, fictional people and objects (from the Book World, where all literary characters live) are said to look different from "real" people and objects, but Thursday can't quite put her finger on the reason. When a villainous fictional character, Yorrick Kaine, escapes into reality, he's tricked into revealing his true nature because he can't discern who's talking without literature's "he said / she said" dialogue tags at the end of each spoken sentence.
• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • In The Hobbit, Beorn is one of the few characters to be identified as human but have undeniably supernatural powers, which are evidently heritable—namely, he can assume the form of a huge bear. He also appears to be abnormally large in both forms, as it's mentioned that in his man form, the three-foot-tall Bilbo doesn't even come up to his knees. That said, he is noted to have a somewhat human-ish lifespan, as he's dead of old age by the time of Lord of the Rings. Gandalf himself muses on the fact that though he knows Beorn has very old heritage going back to the first of his kind, he isn't sure if he's a descendent of the first men or the first bears; that is, whether Beorn is a man who can become a bear or a bear who can become a man (though he leans towards the former).
  • Tom Bombadil looks human but is too short for a man, too tall for a hobbit, and obviously neither. Even Tolkien doesn't know what he is. His wife Goldberry is even more ambiguous, since we get neither a clear description of her nor even a Shrug of God.
  • Orcs are artificially created, but not from nothing, since evil is incapable of Creating Life. This has led to some speculation on what they are, with guesses being corrupted elves (like in the movie), corrupted men, or a cross between a man and an elf. Even how much they look like humans is a matter of some debate. Worth noting there's some Flip-Flop of God here as The Silmarillion explicitly reveals orcs to be early elves tainted by Morgoth/turned savage in the wild, while later drafts by Tolkien keep their origins a mystery and unconnected to the elves.
  • The Uruk-Hai raise even more questions, as it's clear that Saruman himself was responsible for their creation, but even Treebeard spends some time musing on how he did so, wondering if they're orcs that have been enhanced, corrupted men, or some kind of crossbreed between man and orc. If they're the last one, that also raises the question of whether orcs can indeed breed — after all, we never see any female orcs, but the massive numbers of them out there mean that new ones have to come from somewhere. Tolkien himself didn't seem entirely sure. The films make this even worse, since Elrond claims they're a blend of standard orcs and "goblin-men" (which is ambiguous as to whether it's a hybrid or an unrelated creature), but the audience gets to see them apparently born from cocoons in the ground (a reference to an obscure one of Tolkien's guesses as to where orcs came from).
  • Though Gandalf in The Hobbit came across as a very old human with supernatural powers, Lord of the Rings began increasingly dropping hints that he, and the others of his order, were something else entirely: starting with the fact that he hasn't aged, and continuing on with many mentions of a greater mission and purpose, along with Saruman dying in a manner almost identical to Sauron. Though it did allude to other humans able to use magic, such as the Mouth of Sauron, none were given the same presentation as the wizards. The appendices claim the five wizards to have been messengers from across the sea, and later materials fully clarified that they were Maiar, a class of supernatural being that also includes Sauron and the balrogs.
  • Hobbits have their origins kept firmly Shrouded in Myth. Just about every source agrees that they are at least somewhat connected to humans, but whether they represent an unusual ethnicity like the Druedain or a different species entirely, and how and when they split off, is never fully elaborated upon.
• In Tuf Voyaging, Haviland Tuf is eight feet tall, heavily built even for his height, completely hairless and has snow white skin yet no one ever questions his humanity nor is any explanation ever given for why he looks this way. There do exist, however, genetically altered populations of humans in the setting, so maybe they assume he's one.
• The Witches: At one point, a boy sees a woman who he suspects to be a witch, because she wanted to show him her pet snake and was wearing gloves (which all witches wear). Then again, he never sees her again, not even during a meeting of all English witches, and it was winter at the time.
• Wonder Woman: Warbringer: Jason is stronger and faster than a normal human. It's hinted that this might be because of the family's legacy, but Jason has been dealing in biology and genetical manipulation, so it's not clear whether that's the reason for his strength.
• Worm: Capes were human, but accidentally entered into symbiotic relationships with alien "passengers" in a time of high stress, changing them each at a fundamental level. However, most (sane) capes still consider themselves to be human, albeit a parahuman subset.
  • Case 53's are an interesting example. They experienced extreme and permanent physical changes, such as becoming semi-organic metal, or their body being almost entirely composed of oily black tentacles. The majority of them also still see themselves as human, but the media and other capes are often less inclined to do so.
  • Discussed further in the sequel Ward where Victoria Dallon no longer views herself as fully human due to her extended time being a deformed garden of flesh, as well as having a lot of residual animal DNA left in her system due to the process of restoring her original body shape.
• Xanth gives us Humphrey, the magician of information. He is human, but centuries of dealing with high concentrations of magic seem to have given him a rather gnomelike appearance. Trent uses him as evidence as to why Xanth needs occasional fresh blood in the form of non-magical immigrants. Without periodic infusions of ordinary humans, the human race will either mutate into something else, or crossbreed itself out of existence.