I didn’t know this was coming, so I admit this email is a bit improvised,
but I’ve been meaning to share some Sci-Fi with you recently anyway, so here’s some. It’s from my next book WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? and it is a triumphant return for Tin Foil Tim, a fan favourite character from WHO BUILT THE HUMANS?
I don’t do trigger warnings, but since we are online and you’ve not picked up the book and pored / pawed your way through it to this page, I feel I probably should tell you that there’s stuff about cattle mutilation, alien abductions, and very brief suicide mention in this story. There’s also foil underpants, and a beef burger.
Who Killed The Cows, Man?
A tweed-clad man with round glasses and rustling trousers ambled into the lecture theatre from the leftward entrance.
“You are late, Mister Tim,” he scolded himself in a mock-nasal tone. Several students laughed, whilst others privately calculated just how much of their student loans they had lost to these mysterious exhibitions.
“If any of you were wondering, the new cover of my old book just came in.” Tim slammed a striped paper bag down on the side of his lectern, grimacing as the mic, already on, picked up a whining ghost of the sound.
“Sorry,” he mumbled. Then, remembering an old promise, clapped his right hand toward the assembled students by rapping his fingertips against the palm. One of the students got half way out of their chair and launched a plastic-wrapped muffin Tim’s way.
“Thank you Alan,” Tim said. “As I was saying. Old book, new cover. Behold.”
As the professor unwrapped the books he had removed from the library, and the singular new edition he had also removed from the library, the students chattered amongst themselves.
“I hear he’s took the alien off the front,” said a redhead.
“Too graphic. Distancing himself from the probing thing.”
“Still calls himself ‘Tin foil Tim’ though, doesn’t he?”
“Of course. You can hear his underpants crumping during one to ones.”
“Crumpling,” another student corrected.
“No. Crumping.”
“Creasing, rustling. Like his balls are old leaves.”
“Old leafy balls Tin foil Tim.”
“Hey Alan, does Tim have leafy balls?” teased one student, playfully.
“No, but your mum does,” Alan snapped back.
“Enough about my deciduous testicles,” professor Tim said, surprising the students with his above average hearing. “They’ve got my name wrong.”
“What does it say?” asked Alan.
“Tim foil Tin.”
“Ah that’s not too bad, most people won’t notice it,” the redheaded student replied. Alan nodded in agreement.
“Well that’s not the point, is it? I don’t much care if readers notice, as long as they enjoyed the book. What bothers me is that I notice, and more importantly, that this thing went through seven rounds of edits. There’s a typo in the first one you know.”
“And nobody cared,” another female student said, reassuringly.
“But is the cover good?” a second asked.
“Oh, it’s very good,” Tim smiled. He held aloft one of each edition. The older edition depicted a handsome alien with its arms around Tin foil Tim, covering his private parts.
“I will never understand why the publisher made me change it to this,” Tim said. “Sales rose, sure, but why? What kind of person would want this in their front room?”
The later edition of Who Probed The Humans? featured a shadowy hill, a silhouetted UFO, and pine trees. It was much more ominous, and felt much less like the cover to some cheap dirty magazine.
“Can we start the lecture now please, we have exams in a few weeks,” one student asked.
“Nerd,” professor Tim quipped. He put the books down, pressed the remote control in his jacket pocket, and the huge screen behind the lectern lit up.
“You had that on you the whole time?”
“I was busy. You know once you get out of university, if you get out, you might need social skills to navigate the world. Consider the preceding minutes as a starter course in talking to humans,” Tim said. He stretched, cracking his knuckles and adjusting his tweed jacket, stroking the velvet elbow patches, an old habit.
Behind him the giant whiteboard had an image projected upon it. A farmer’s field in the early morning. All the cows dead. All faces and eyes removed with surgical precision. No blood.
He clicked the clicker in his hand and watched as the image changed. This time it was a close-up. This particular cow had small burn marks made below the nasal cavity, and what appeared to be tiny boreholes at the top of the skull.
“Can anyone suggest what fate may have befallen these bovines?” Tin foil Tim said, his undertrousers rustling.
“Angry horse,” yelled one student.
“Nope.”
“Vengeful horse?” yelled another.
“No.”
“Horseplay gone wrong?” bellowed a third.
“I am deducting final marks off anyone who mentions horses,” Tin foil Tim said.
“I have a theory,” said a boring looking man in a crisp black suit. Tim did not recognise this student, but it was always nice to have more seats filled, so he didn’t think to quiz them about it.
“Go on,” Tim prompted. The man adjusted his black sunglasses.
“It was a suicide.”
The audience, Tim’s students, turned to this mysterious stranger, then moved their attention to their professor. It was no secret that Tin foil Tim had loosened his grasp on intergalactic ‘conspiracies’ in recent years, but surely this inane suggestion would reignite that conspiratorial flame in his heart.
Tin foil Tim hummed, grumbled, lifted a finger as if to begin a rant about interdimensional space crabs. Then he stopped himself.
“You know, you may have a point,” the professor said. Clearly he had left his soul in his other tweed suit. His biggest fans shook their heads, and the other students barely lifted theirs off their desks.
“You know, I thought it would be aliens.” One student looked over her notebook. Professor Tin foil Tim pretended not to hear her.
“He’s finally lost his mind,” another student said.
“No, he’s pacing the room. He must still be smart!” a Alan interjected, without a hint of sarcasm. By the looks of him, he had modelled himself after the aging professor pacing helplessly below.
“Thank you, Alan,” Tin foil Tim said.
“Aluminium Alan,” Alan’s friend said, tapping his friend on the shoulder with a friendly fist.
“Quite right, though I assure you I am undeserving of the fandom. Regardless. I like to hope I still have my wits about me, and I hope the rest of you can see through my more rebellious, conspiratorial age and engage in conversation about this case.”
He clicked the clicker again, bringing the students’ attention back to the whiteboard. Upon it was an image of a floating ball of greenish-blue light, hovering low above the farmer’s field.
One student stuck her hand up in the air.
“Professor. Is that an alien ship?”
“No,” Tin foil Tim replied. “It’s a whiteboard.”
“I mean in the picture.”
“Oh. No.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s swamp gas,” the mystery student said.
“Aliens,” another student chimed in.
“Aliens don’t exist.” said Tin foil Tim, stunning the room into silence.
“What?!”
“Well, those specific aliens don’t exist.” Tin foil Tim’s voice echoed back at him from the back of the lecture theatre as a dim murmur. Some years ago, that arrangement of words would have made him hysterical with laughter.
“But what about your books?” Alan asked. Tin foil Tim could almost hear his admirer’s heart breaking into pieces.
“Well,” Tin foil Tim began. He removed his hands from his pockets and began gesturing as he spoke. “I would hope that my early work is still valuable literature even though I have moved beyond its framing. The message, after all, is not the messenger. I believe I should have been clearer, however. What I mean to say is that the aliens that abduct cows are not real. Cows lack both the means and the motive to develop interstellar travel and later time travel, so there would be no reason for some future cows to loop back and experiment with their own ancestors in some bizarre incestuous paradox, as aliens did with us,” he explained.
“But I thought you said alien intervention explains away anything,” a young woman replied. She was sat with a beef burger in one hand, phone in the other. Tin foil Tim raised a curious eyebrow her way.
“Oh, I’m a long way beyond that Cynthia. I realise now that I had entrapped myself in the very same conceptual cage which I would often paint around my adversaries, namely that I invented my own ‘god’ figure to magically insert itself in any gap that needed filling,” Tin foil Tim said. A student chuckled in the background, but Tim continued, “Except that ‘god’ was a little green alien.”
Cynthia nodded to signal her understanding. Aluminium Alan adjusted his home-made elbow pads and sighed.
“So, aliens are still real, just not ones that abduct cows?”
“Yes,” Tin foil Tim replied. “There is simply no reason to abduct a cow. What would be the point? What could one glean from a cow abduction? What secrets are held within cow brains that we do not already know?”
There was a long silence. Nobody had an answer because it was true. Cow brains had been extensively mapped; all their secrets were out. There was nothing within a cow that was not known by even the most idiotic human toddler. Cow science was the first complete science. Humans had even done the bonus levels.
“What we are to do here today,” Tim said confidently, trousers rustling, “Is to probe the deepest annals of human thought, to fully and passionately penetrate this matter. And in doing so we need to create some truly seminal research.”
The students were listening at last. Tin Foil Tim walked back to the whiteboard and clicked the clicker again. He swiped a few more times until he came across a picture of seventeen cows lying dead in a circle.
“Brains removed. Complete exsanguination. That’s removal of the blood. Eyes removed. In some cases, tongues too. Write that down, not all of them lost their tongues.”
The students scribbled hastily in their notebooks. Cynthia took a photo of the whiteboard.
“What in God’s name are you doing?” Tin Foil Tim asked.
“Saving notes.”
“How are you expected to recall context from a single blurry photograph?”
“You managed,” Cynthia said under her breath. Professor Tin foil Tim raised an indignant eyebrow this time, lowered his shoulders, and considered defeat.
“No,” he said. “That was different. Here you have the choice of clarity, of using your brain, which may I remind you aliens have yet to scoop out, unless I am sorely mistaken, and process what you are reading. You have the privilege of a mind, and by proxy the obligation to use it, for the benefit of your species.”
Cynthia shrugged and took another bite of her burger.
END (for now)
You can’t order WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? yet as it’s currently being edited, a Kickstarter may show up soon. For now, why not try the first book? It’s only £1 right now (limited time).
You can read the books in this series in any order. They are weird, multifaceted, multidimensional short story collections. For example in WBTH, the 11 universes are split across 47 chapters. If you read the book left-to-right you explore them all with equal attention, but the book actively invites you to try other routes, giving you teleport pads and dimensional wormholes through which to follow your favourite story to its conclusion quicker, leaving behind jokes and tales you can rediscover later.
It’s good, basically. I need to get better at marketing it, but it’s good.
You’ll like it.
You had me at foil underpants.