Faster Than Light
A short story from HOLOGRAM KEBAB
Before we begin, I wanted to let you know I’ve just joined a poetry sharing group, so I can bring you some cheap and free poetry. A lot of it is quite unlike what I write, so if you want some variation, check it out!
Anyway, on with the story.
[EDIT: As of late December 2022, Hologram Kebab is neither here nor there. You’ll find out on the 24th specifically what I mean by this, but it’s good news]
Fair warning. This one gets spicy, and is a first draft.
HOLOGRAM KEBAB is a comedy book I told you all about last year, then shelved, and have now returned to. It’ll be a short book. I don’t want to overdo the funny.
It’s the weird sibling of WHO BUILT THE HUMANS?
I’m talking ‘selective inbreeding’, magic horses that can knit messages into scarves as they pass through their bowels, aliens that have God tied to a spit so he can do magic as a party trick, humans who deliberately ask for aliens to probe them, and the return of Crystal Susan and Tin foil Tim from WBTH, that book that spawned a multiverse.
FASTER THAN LIGHT
First contact goes about as well as you can imagine it would
What Captain Garth did to the spaceship could only sarcastically be described as a ‘textbook landing’. Sure, the ship had made physical contact with the planet, but there were usually other factors to think about when describing something as a ‘textbook landing’.
Firstly, the ship should arrive safely.
Secondly, the ship should land so that the passengers could stand on its floors, not the walls.
Thirdly, the ship should be on the right planet.
Captain Garth had not reached any of these goals. The outer hull of the ship had somehow managed to burst into flame in airless, fuel-devoid interstellar space. Then, through sheer ineptitude, it had remained aflame until arrival. And when it had finally arrived, it had arrived vertically, driven into the muddy bottom of a lake like a tent peg or that body my agent made me promise I wouldn’t mention ever again.
Garth’s quick decision to drive the burning ship noseward into an alien lake might have seemed smart at first, but the ship was already working hard at automatically extinguishing itself when he took control. This fact did not matter. Garth fancied himself as a hero.
And after that, Lesedi, Garth’s perpetually displeased second-in-command, pointed out that there was no lake at this coordinate, at which point Garth realised he had landed on the wrong planet.
“It’s not uncharted,” Lesedi said. “Scouts found a fledgling civilisation here though; we shouldn’t bother them.”
By the time she finished her sentence, Garth was already abseiling down to the planet’s surface. The first thing human boots touched on this uncontacted world was a very precious and very fragile vase. The second thing they touched was an endangered alien crab, which, at the time of writing this sentence, is now extinct.
“We did it!” Garth said. “After all those years of exploring, we’ve finally found a world in which life was not just once possible, but where life thrived and, against the odds, became technologically advanced.”
“Yes captain, we know, we were there,” said Lesedi.
“Well anyway,” the captain said boldly. “We got here and we can finally speak to what remains of the natives, look ahead! There is one of their temples!”
The rest of the astronaut-scientists looked admiringly at the huge stone structure ahead. They had already noticed it of course, but many had become preoccupied with the grass of this planet, which was psychic and telling them horrible things about their future. The captain was too brilliant to be bothered by this however and had in a stroke of genius crashed the ship so that its nose pointed directly at the temple doors. He pressed a button on his spacesuit and watched as a white robotic probe leapt out of the ship’s nose, hurtling and clanking and clattering against the temple doors.
Ding dong.
Nothing.
The astronaut-scientists marched up to the door, each eager to encounter humanity’s brothers and sisters in the cosmos, and also to remove all of their protective gear and insert alien parasites up each other for some reason.
Knock-knock.
Nothing.
Then a strange clunking of old locks and keys. The doors swung open, killing two of the astronaut-scientists in the process. A short green creature ambled up toward captain Garth, bowing its ridiculous head.
“What want?” it asked.
“Hello. We’re humans, from Earth.”
“What selling?” the creature replied.
“No, no, we aren’t selling anything.”
“Mmm. Heard you radio. Seen you television. What selling?”
“We aren’t selling anything,” Lesedi said, reassuring the alien.
“Well,” the captain said, having another of his genius ideas because he was so smart and handsome.
“If you’re interested I’m an investor in asteroid mining. What we do is we get people like yourself who are dynamic and team-oriented, and we place them in an isolating and soul-crushing environment where they have to wrestle with the data worms living inside the asteroids. If the worms tell you the names of enough numbers, you can enter those names onto a spreadsheet and I will let you smell my sandwich at dinner break, which lasts thirty-five seconds, just like sex. I’ll also pay you for your time, based on how many numbers you can find. It’s basically free money for you.”
“Hmmm,” the alien said, “Why not do yourself?”
The captain had no reply. He stepped back. Lesedi was about to say something, but then another crewmember stepped up to talk to the little fat alien (I am allowed to point out that it is fat, for in their culture it is a very honourable thing to be, as most of them have tape worms, which are also psychic like the grass I mentioned).
“Hello, I’m Baldrik,” he said. “Have you heard about all the numerous, very friendly religions on Earth?”
The alien laughed.
“What is he laughing at?” Baldrik said sadly. “I come from one of the friendliest religions ever. We only ever kill people if they tell us that our religion is wrong or if they don’t wear the right clothes or if they are gay or if they have opinions or if they like science or if they don’t eat the right types of beans or if they irritate us or if they-”
He was interrupted by the rising volume of the alien’s laughter, which is good as the author had really milked that last point about religion dry.
“Selling God!” the alien said. The alien’s family came to the temple doors now, laughing along with their huge froglike mouths, mocking the humans. One of them was rubbing its nipples as it was laughing, and lasers were coming out. The aliens’ yellow and purple and blue eyes rattled about in their skulls as they laughed, their diaphragms making ridiculous springing noises like the bedroom next to yours at university. One of the nipple lasers killed another astronaut scientist.
“No, no. It’s important. Because this is the future and all the religions have gotten along,” Baldrik explained. “We travelled here faster-than-light, we are more advanced than the humans you’ve seen and listened to on our broadcasts.”
“We already have God!” the alien’s wife laughed. She waved to someone deep inside the temple, and out came two smaller aliens carrying a wooden frame, upon which was a spit, and tied to that spit was a naked human.
“Impossible,” captain Garth said, who had just got finished talking to the psychic grass that told him his wife thought about drowning him every time he farted in his sleep.
“No. Possible!” the first alien proclaimed.
“That’s a human.”
“This God. God come here get away from chaos he create and we capture. Use God make party trick for birthday party. Can hide entire house up God,” the alien said.
“It’s not the truth,” God said. “I woke up here one day and couldn’t find my way back down.” He turned to the alien. “And I’ve changed my name to Gord again, so I’d appreciate it if you used it properly.”
The alien tutted and waved the suggestion away with a webbed hand, laughing again.
“God come here say human make sad. We keep God and make say your prayers out loud. Hilarious. Child ask to get less sick yesterday, God gave idiot good exam result instead!”
“No,” Garth said. “It can’t be!”
The alien laughed again, looking back at the naked God tied to a spit.
“Last night man pray to God say ‘please help me I am bleeding to death. Oh God there is so much blood argh’ and we make God tell us this prayer and we laugh and laugh and wife laugh so hard she lays egg!” the fat little alien boasted.
“Is that true?” Baldrik asked, looking hopelessly at God. Briefly he saw one of the little aliens poke Gord in the ribs with something.
“I have no idea. I don’t even know if this is canon,” Gord said. The alien indicated for the little ones to take Gord away from the door, and then began speaking to the humans again.
“We could put in cannon. Good idea,” the alien’s wife said.
“So no need God. No need TV or Radio or sell me this sell me that sell me sell me. No special coin or phone that tell me when wife have affair. Do not want. You go now. No need human.”
“You need proper sentence structure,” Captain Garth said, quite racistly. Lesedi shook her head. She was the only other surviving scientist now, as Baldrik had just been eaten by the psychic grass. The alien at the door stretched its arms and legs now, changing colour and inflaming its body to appear more threatening. Somehow it was over four times its original height, and had produced a gun from somewhere.
“Your smug dismissal of my people’s speech patterns is indicative not of their backwardness, but of yours,” the alien said. It was also smoking a pipe.
“Oh,” Garth said. The alien reached to both doors and began to pull them shut, moving his family gently out of the way.
“Now piss off,” the alien said. As the doors closed Lesedi caught a glimpse of Gord getting down from the spit and standing up, patting one of the smaller aliens on the head as he walked away into the depths of the temple.
“Do you think he likes it here?” Lesedi asked.
“Make magic again!” an alien said, jabbing Gord with a little spear. Gord sighed and walked over to a fire with a white sheet dangling nearby. He began to move unnamed parts of his body in front of the fire, casting a shadow that looked exactly like that equation physicists are desperately looking for. The aliens found this hilarious, but the humans couldn’t see it because they had been locked out at this point. I can’t write what the equation is because then I’d have to write a serious book to explain it, and I’m not in the mood. But I can tell you that it involves the radius and volume of a sphere and the approximate length of a medium-sized cat as they uncurl in a sunbeam divided by the amount of times I had to edit this line to make it funny. Time is a sphere, not a circle or a straight line.
And by the way, this was your God. The one you love and cherish. It wasn’t a fictional God. It was your God. He visited me and told me all these things after I ate some loft insulation, so I know it was true. You might want to rewrite that holy book to accommodate this new information. He told me all the other religions are wrong. This is the truth. This is the only truth. If you want to learn more you should join my seminar, it costs just a little bit less than paying someone to shower you with Aztec gold every hour of every day.