Architects - A short story
Big post today, I realised I hadn’t sent you a story for a while. That’s because I tend to write in layers. Usually, one of two things happen first.
The main idea of a story arrives as a question, such as, ‘what if we could edit time like we edit film?’ (as seen in THE CERTAIN UNIVERSE)
The shape of a story arrives, with its world almost intact, its characters half-detailed, its dialogue fragmented.
After this point the untangling begins. I’ll fill in any gaps, work out the finer structure of things, and begin developing the world.
And since there are some subtle links between the Earthloop Trilogy, The Stephanie Glitch, and Who Killed The Humans?, it makes sense that I’m writing all of them simultaneously.
The same goes for the poetry collections.
And the standup.
So whilst I might average 750 words a day at the moment, a complete story doesn’t show up often. If I wanted instant gratification I’d probably just write poems about my feelings, but since I don’t have any, I’m quite comfortable writing about the end of reality at the hands (claws?) of the robot time crabs.
Anyway, here’s ARCHITECTS. It’s a self-contained part of a larger universe.
No robot time crabs in this one, but there are psychic squid who keep humans inside a video game. So the usual stuff you would expect from me.
Architects
You love swimming. You only have time for it on the weekend, and you never miss it. You go in the mornings, when it’s quiet, and at the start of every other day you work in the city. Your life is all suits and briefcases, spreadsheets and dinner breaks. You spend your weekdays rushing because that’s what you’re used to, because that’s what the city wants.
Before work you kiss your husband goodbye and drive away, listening to traffic announcements and playing guessing games with radio hosts. You never call in or text because you’re too busy, but you always imagine you might do one day. You wonder what you might say if you won a prize, if you’d be one of those embarrassingly overexcited people, and secretly you envy them.
You finish your breakfast bagel at the same time each day, roughly at the same point in the clogged road. Looking up, you remember that you once told a friend all the buildings looked the same. They don’t any more, you have attributed a personality to each of them. You go to meetings with some of the people that work in them, they are nothing like the zombies you once jokingly imagined.
You tap impatient fingers on the steering wheel, growl at traffic lights and shake your head, wondering if you’ve become a zombie too. You’ve started to recognise people in coffee shops, meaning you’re now part of the clockwork. For a while this was comforting, but now it just makes you feel more lonely. You yearn for unfamiliar faces.
Later you will arrive home after another uneventful day, still thinking about the terrible coffee the new guy made for you. You will wish you would have told him instead of being polite, because if he stays in the company you’re doomed to more days of pretending. Your husband orders a takeaway and you put a movie on, falling asleep together in the front room. Now the Architects come to you. They slide through the walls like slow ghosts, peeling themselves like snakeskin from the brick and plaster. One by one they slither and writhe their way into your reality, their tentacles exploring the fireplace and photo frames. One of them reaches a wet suction cup to your head and clasps it, pulling a flap of skin loose from your forehead. Less than half a second has passed in your world, with the Architect making their careful delicate movements as slowly as they can. Another of them watches as the first peels the skin away, revealing a shining black skull. They smile a lipless smile, tilting their beak from under their bulbous grey head. Another presses their tentacle into your husband’s spine, unsheathing a long barb. Your Architect winces as it watches the procedure, your husband becoming a transparent mass of data slumped against your shoulders. His is an archaic model, you are far more elegant, far more advanced.
Now your Architect extracts you, plucking a tiny metal coffin from a recess in your skull. Silently the other two Architects watch as yours shows off, coveting the slim machine between her suction cups. The third Architect inflates the air sacs and trumpets news to the other two. Time in this reality is catching up, bouncing back into place, they have to leave.
Lazily your Architect retreats to the wobbling patch of wallpaper atop your fireplace, leaving you dreamless and mindless as your husband twitches and begins to reconstitute. By the time you both wake up they will have come back and fixed this, as they always have.
Before your Architect leaves she passes your box to her companion, allowing him to taste your experiences with his evolved tentacles. She remarks in her own language that this is what clairvoyance is, a passing of one mind to the next across conductive medium in a higher reality. The second Architect nods and gestures towards your husband, still a twisting mess of calculations. They look at their barb and at your black box. Your Architect shakes her head. In your world you are perfect for each other. But somewhere higher up you are incompatible, born on different production lines, to gods with distinctly different philosophies. You will never truly understand one another, but you will never become intelligent enough to notice. The second Architect chuckles in their low rumbling growl, but yours seems displeased. Silently she sulks away into the wobbling wall, leaving your head open to the midnight air.
Back in their reality the Architects plug your mind into a dark wall. This is where the majority of the work is done now, changing destinies and minds until the perfect set of events is reached. This used to be a game for the Architects, but now it is more similar to having a pet or being a god.
In the early versions of Earth everyone dreamed in the same place, and some effects of that early design remain. Very occasionally people might visit someone else’s dreams, if enough details align, but it is rarely remembered in the morning. The people you call soulmates just share the same dreams with you, whether they remember or not. The ex-boyfriend who moved abroad still thinks about you when he is sleeping, but he never remembers.
The Architects sit in their pods and press rubbery suction cups to circular screens, sliding through ideas as they develop their plans for your life. They take someone here, add someone there. One of the Architects starts a war on the other side of the planet just to watch the conflict trickle down to a grieving family you pass on your way to work. They delight in connections such as this, their brains wired to derive pleasure from understanding.
In their old age the Architects have sought to create increasingly complex puzzles to solve. They began by altering our evolution, slowly replacing organic humans with their own versions, creating a new race that would be easier to edit and reprogram. Unlike most new models, you had an organic human somewhere in your genetic history, one of the last to die.
In the beginning, human foetuses were taken from the womb and replaced with new models. Sometimes new mothers would sense something was wrong after it happened, but the humans developed drugs to counteract this, believing the mother to be suffering from a mental illness. The Architects allowed this to happen, slowly shifting the balance between real and artificial people over the course of two centuries. On the day you were born there were no organic humans left.
The Architects are in charge of our destinies. What we know as fate is actually the arrangement of delicate events set before us, a game that some Architects believe is similar to chess. Sometimes the mind of a human plugged into the soul wall can detect these plans. This is called precognition, and rather than fix it, the Architect elders have decided that it is a natural part of our evolution.
You saw your own death when you were seven. It was a huge robot that killed you, something from a movie you weren’t supposed to be watching. You pressed your face between the bannisters and saw your parents huddled on the sofa, watching the robot kill person after person like it was nothing. You had nightmares about it for years, but when it killed you in your nightmares it didn’t shoot you or stab you like it did in the movie. It drowned you.
Soon your Architect returns. Tonight, for the first time in a decade, you have that nightmare again. Tomorrow you will wake up and it will be Saturday. You will be preparing to drive to the local swimming pool as you do every week, when you will get a sudden and overwhelming sense that you have experienced this exact moment before. Shrugging, you will dismiss it as nothing. You will never make it to the pool, but instead will lose control of your car, crashing through a barrier and down a hill. The car will flip seven times on the way down before landing upside down in a reservoir. You will briefly lose consciousness, only to regain it when the freezing water hits you. You will drown before you have a chance to escape, and your body will float out of the open door moments after your death. For you the world ends here.
Your Architect will slide out of a rock and swim lazily toward your rising body. She will peel back your forehead again and take your mind, carrying it carefully out of your reality and into her own. For a second she feels regret, wonders if it is too late for a miracle in the frozen water. She does nothing as your reanimation becomes more and more impossible, blinking as the hours pass.
One night your husband spends so long by your grave that he nearly freezes to death, but his Architect programs in a nightmare that scares him so much he wakes up and stumbles home. Tired of you and the monotony of your life, your Architect puts you away by their bedside, swims into their pod and sleeps.
This universe is continued in Instructions For Reanimating Your Human, a story in the Architects universe inside my debut book, WHO BUILT THE HUMANS?
WBTH contains 47 chapters of similar length and weirdness to Architects, all of which can be read in almost any order, leading a friend to call them,
“ADHD friendly Science Fiction”
Signed copies of WHO BUILT THE HUMANS are now 50% off on my eBay page (global shipping is enabled). You can get them by clicking on the banner below, or typing whobuiltthehumans.com into your search bar.
The listing has them priced at £10, so you can pay a little extra if you choose to, but I’ve set the listing to automatically accept offers of £8 and above. At that price, I hope I might break even. In 2022 they cost around £4.60 to print, £50 to ship the lot, and I’ve got to consider packaging materials alongside eBay’s hefty cut from sales.
Typically, I sign and draw something in them. So message me on eBay once you buy a copy and I’ll sign it to you and draw whatever strange alien being you can imagine. Daleks shouting profanities are a speciality of mine.
Despite their flaws, eBay are the most convenient way to insure your purchases against someone biting a hole in the book whilst it’s in transit, which has happened before: When I launched the book, a fan in Germany got a package decorated with what looked to be bite marks.
I guess my book is just more delicious than the books the Guardian keeps banging on about. It’s certainly funnier, and weirder.
These used to sell for £16 with no extras, or £20 at ComicCon with bookmarks and other bits included (to cover my table). I don’t know if I have bookmarks or stickers left, but if I do, I’ll include them as a surprise.
I’m making this heavy discount because, to be honest, I need them gone quickly. I have about 40 left over from August 2022’s ComicCon (I bought 110, so I did do well, especially as a first-time vendor) and I want them out of my house.
On the harder days they loom like a memory of a business error made by an over-enthusiastic author (though I would have sold more had I not been placed in a tucked-away corner of the convention under a giant television depicting dancing people all weekend, but I’m totally over it, honestly).
On the easier days they still loom dreamlike, but this time I am reminded of the amazing reviews the book has gotten, and how my only issue in life as an artist is that I am simply not that good at marketing. On those days it bothers me that there are people out there on the internet complaining that Sci-Fi is not weird enough any more, and they have no idea I exist, putting dark comedy and existential crises in the same head of the same character, then kicking that character diagonally through time into a universe where everything is inexplicably now a battle rap poem and crystals can talk and they hate humans.
It makes sense in the book, trust me.
If you’re still not sure, here’s my favourite review.
★★★★★ “An astonishing creation, filled with conjecture and supposition. I can honestly say that I have never read anything like this before. The scope is Universe wide and simultaneously microscopically small and incredibly intense.
Phillip Carter has taken the philosophical idea that all of reality is but the dream of some immense cosmic being and dragged it kicking and screaming into a new existence.
The language is poetic and the ideas challenging both in their execution and in the way consciousness is perceived.
Many strands are interwoven and ultimately connected into a whole much greater than the sum of its parts.
Phillip also infuses the book with an acerbic devastatingly acidic wit compounded with a bone dry sense of humour. The author’s obvious intelligence shines through in both the creative imagination and the beauty of the language, never pandering to any temptation to “dumb down” instead urging the reader to expand their own knowledge and awareness.
This is not a by-the-numbers or trope-driven book following some predetermined and predictable formula but rather an exercise in intellectual science-fiction. It is not the easiest of books to read and understand making all the more worthwhile for it but neither is it so convoluted as to be incomprehensible.
I definitely look forward to reading more by Phillip and highly recommend this to any reader wanting more than genre written pulp.”
That was written by Mark, who I didn’t know at the time but thanks to Substack, I do know now. Hi Mark!
Mark’s review actually arrived on my Amazon page right when I was considering packing it in and not launching my future books. So when people say reviews don’t matter, those people are lying. Reviews absolutely do matter. Mark saw right to the core of WBTH, and his review is a piercing and intelligent unpacking of the strange creature I have created.
All it takes is one reader.
Just one.
And you have an audience.
So as a present to you, and to my mum (hi mum) a signed WBTH is 50% off.
They’re taking up space in her house, after all.
I’ve not got my own place yet. I’m an author, you should have guessed that.
Mum actually took out a loan to help me pay for ComicCon, and whilst I did break even and make a lot of new fans (and almost got Earthloop funded before it died at 80% on Kickstarter… a story for another time when I reboot it), I still have a bit of that loan to pay off.
I also need to buy a new 10 pack of ISBNs for HalfplanetPress, as I have around 10 books due out in paperback next year. That whole iterative writing thing is paying off, because I just finished four poetry books, three of which are Sci-Fi poetry books. I finished them all within the same week.
The other one is a comedy poetry book. That’s another thing I do.
And I finished a new writing prompt book for Sci-Fi as well, but that’s for another post. Lots of stuff.
And then I’ve got that PR firm who are interested in Earthloop…
So, if I can sell these signed copies of WBTH at 50% off, I’ll hopefully break even on them and be able to pay off a little bit more of the loan. I’ll also have about a cubic metre more space in my house, so I’ll do a little tiktok or something where I stand menacingly in the space the books are currently taking up. People seem to enjoy me standing menacingly in places.
The books are in mint condition. I’ve not bitten them or anything.
If they’re not sold by January, I am going to sell them as hamster bedding.
See you next time.
Phillip.