The year is 2025, and I am obliged by the high council of authors (not to be confused with the council of high authors) that I must affix ‘trigger warnings’ to my stories in case anyone comes across them who, in the real world, has dealt with the subject matters the stories concern.
For this reason I must inform you that the following story contains:
Inbred fish
A bit more time travel
Cousin marriage jokes
Meta comedy about the last book
Time travel
Australian lizard people with erectile issues
A horse which contains the entire universe
A sentient missile that tries to kill itself using, you guessed it, time travel
One instance of someone reading a road sign
Plastic foliage
Cave people
Golden machines bashed into nothingness by aforementioned cave people
A medium sized bush
I think that’s everything. Let’s move onward and sideward.
Hello everyone.
Wait. I have an announcement.
Carmen has won a $20 book voucher (or equally valued thing I find in my cupboard) for bringing three of her friends to this publication! I ran this small promo last year using Substack’s in-built leaderboard.
And now Carmen has become the first person to bring three friends here, I must now come up with a new prize. Comments are open.
But first, the story.
This story was written very recently. Now that the pre-orders for WHO KILLED THE HUMANS got cancelled (unless you’ve got them on crowdfundr, in which case you can ask for a cancellation any time and I’ll accept it, but if you wait you’ll still get your stuff eventually) I had a bit more time to sit and think. Here are the things I thunk with my brain.
Having burnout is not fun or nice. I dislike it
Gordon and Arrogance should at some point befriend a fish
That fish should have a weird backstory
More time travel
If I am bringing these WHO BUILT THE HUMANS characters back for WHO KILLED THE HUMANS, I cannot do so with a careful quill. I must abandon any caution and reclaim the weirdness that make WBTH so great
What if reptilian shapeshifters had Australian accents and snorted human skull powder as an aphrodisiac?
What if posted the story free as thanks to my fans?
Here are your answers.
My brother the fish
Part 1
(Note, you will be reading part 2 shortly, it’s just that in the past, people have told me emails longer than 2000 words are a bit overwhelming. I’ve listened, and this story is now a two-parter).
Enjoy,
Gord stumbled his way through the thick bracken that separated the town of Syrupy Giblets from Finnicky Gimmick technology park. Arrogance Deluxe walked beside him, on the pavement, like a normal person.
“I told you, we need to use stealth,” Gord said, emerging from the bushes. He looked up at the beautiful monument to brutalism that was the Finnicky Gimmick offices and laboratories.
“This is where Missy the Missile was made, will be made, won’t be made,” Arrogance said in wonder. “It’s been here all this time, the end of all things.”
They stopped for a moment by a road sign which had been graffitied. The town just North of Syrupy Giblets had been named, on most street signs, as ‘Seedy Inbreedy’ when in fact it was called [insert name of reader’s hometown].
“Are the rumours about that place true?” Arrogance asked. It was now that Gord remembered she wasn’t a native, and wasn’t yet accustomed to the hideous rumours and legends that surrounded this possibly coastal town.
“My mate had a girlfriend from there once, she could breathe out of her bottom,” Gordon said.
“Remind me why we’re dating?” Arrogance said. She brushed the leaves off Gord’s messy old jacket. He was very pleased with the opportunity to tell a story.
“We’d always admired each other for bluntly being who we really were, with no pretence.”
“I do love your sudden bouts of seriousness,” Arrogance confirmed. Gordon nodded, continuing.
“We’d lost touch for a few years, but then a stroke of luck hit when a young boy called Tim put his football through my greenhouse, snuffing the society I had imagined lived within my strawberry patch.”
“Ah yes, the indecent exposure,” Arrogance said.
“It was a loose robe and a windy day. Anyway, my running from the investigators meant I needed somewhere to hide, and what better place than A Touch Of Genius, your former employer. Where you were disguised as Albert Einstein.”
The pair of them made their way onto the car park, noted the lack of security in the booths, the holes in the tarmac, the panicked quivering of security cameras, one of which had little robot arms that covered its ‘eye’.
“I still have that beard,” Arrogance said, winking.
“And you are still my ‘special relative’,” Gordon said.
Gordon tried to subdue his arousal and stepped closer to the building. They made their way inside place without incident. Gord took a leaf from the plastic plant in the big pot by reception. There was a lady behind the desk, polite and unperturbed by intruders. Behind her was an appropriately sized aquarium, within which could be seen a single goldfish working its way in and out of the eye sockets of a fake human skull.
“Hello, do you have an appointment?” the receptionist asked.
“We are time travellers, sent back to stop Missy the Missile from ever coming into existence,” Gordon said honestly.
“Who is Missy the Missile?” the receptionist asked.
“Perfect, we are right on time.”
Arrogance barely had time to shake her head before the receptionist pointed the pair to a corridor and a waiting room, within which was a smorgasbord of strangely dressed characters. A makeshift sign had been created from a propped-up whiteboard, which simply read ‘time travellers and the chronologically challenged. Wait time two hours give or take’.
“How can the wait time be two hours, we’ve time travelled?” Arrogance said. Her boyfriend was not too sure. “I’m not too sure,” he said, thus cementing the fact he was not too sure. Nonetheless the pair sat down on their seats, which has already been labelled for them, and waited. The room was a pale green, the colour of grasshopper puke. A darkened pine trim brought to mind the 1980s, but the clientele brought to mind every other era that had, or would soon, exist.
To the pair’s left was a trio of Victorian women chatting amongst themselves.
“What are you in for?” one of them asked.
“Trying to stop a missile from annihilating a horse that contains the universe,” Gordon explained. The Victorian lady nodded.
“We been picking the pockets of meandering chrononauts,” she happily proclaimed. She plucked a golden needle from a fashionable corset.
“This is the key to their machine,” she said.
“And where’s the machine?” Arrogance Deluxe asked. The Victorian ladies pointed across the waiting room, to a small tribe of cavepeople who had made a shining pancake out of the delicate gold machinery.
“We think they built them fragile for this reason specifically mister. That a wise chrononaut does not leave their vehicle unattended, and in the event of their death triggers a reaction in the metal that makes it both soft, and incredibly attractive to our primordial cousins,” one of the Victorian ladies said. She took the time machine key and tossed it to the cavepeople, who very quickly folded it into nothingness, but not before jabbing one of their number in the eye.
A large flatscreen TV set into one wall now displayed a message.
“Time travellers are encouraged not to share information that might lead to the fragmentation of the current timeline, or the creation of new timelines,” the receptionist’s tired voice came through the speakers. Gordon nodded a goodbye to the Victorians, but leaned in toward his girlfriend.
“And who do you think they are?” he asked, glancing diagonally across the room. Two time travellers, a man and a woman, their faces obscured by a localised spacetime well so as to hide their identities, were talking to each other about black hole cosmology in the corner of the room. The man wore a flowing brown and red scarf, and the woman wore a crucifix necklace and blue dress.
“Cosplayers, whatever those are,” a reptilian beside Arrogance whispered in a thick Australian accent, briefly lowering his sunglasses. “Dressing up as their favourite time travellers from fiction, fell into a time hole themselves because some temporal editors or something thought their costume was the real thing. And before you ask, had a few too many at my pal’s wedding, woke up on a parallel Earth.”
“It happens,” Gord said. He fist-bumped the green-skinned reptilian, who smiled broadly and put his sunglasses back on. The reptilian took a bag of white powder from a shoulder bag and prepared to sniff it, but he saw Gord looking.
“Do you… you don’t want some, do you?”
“After my adventure, might as well,” Gordon said.
“You don’t know what it is.”
“I think I do,” Gordon said. Arrogance moved subtly, making the space between Gordon and the reptilian wider.
“I thought we’d be saving the universe sober,” she said.
“Sorry honey,” Gordon said. “Old habits.”
“It’s for the best,” said the suave reptilian. “This ain’t coke.”
“What is it then?”
“You sure you want to know?”
“I want to know everything, it’s a psychological affliction.”
“Alright then mate. It’s human bone.”
“Human bone?”
“Powdered. It’s a potent aphrodisiac.”
“A bone for a bone,” Arrogance quipped.
“That’s good, can I use that?”
“No.”
END
See you next week for part 2.
Grateful!!!
No worries Phillip! I know how busy you are!