My free story from THE COSMIC COMEDY COLLECTION (NSFW)

Containing aliens who communicate using memes.

The Cosmic Comedy collection is exactly what it sounds like, a collection of Sci-Fi comedy stories by all the people I have met who manage to do Sci-Fi and comedy at the same time.

The comedy ranges from my stuff (zany, dark, and a little edgy) to more wacky, irreverent, and then right back to dark again. It’s a good mix of stories, arranged in such a way so as to have each story complement the previous.

Every single story in the book is brand new and exclusive to the book. You won’t be able to read them anywhere else.

We elected to use mine as the free sample, because I invented the book and because I didn’t want the other authors to have to make theirs free. So here it is.

At the end of this post, there’s also a livestream I recorded with John Coon and Devilishbookworms, all about the direction sci-fi seems to be going, and how we might make it a little more fun.

Since I’m also a comedian, my short story is a love letter to 2010s meme culture, but you don’t need to know anything about that to understand it. It’s silly and twisted on purpose, with lots of nods to pop culture.

It’s also on the COMEDY subletter, and you can manage which subletters you’re subbed to in your Substack settings.

(This story is absolutely not safe for work)

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RAWR OF THE WURLDS XD

Chapter 0

Obligatory worldbuilding disguised as prologue

The alien ship lumbered at the edge of the solar system like a student lumbering in the porch of his girlfriend’s house, trying to convince her he isn’t drunk. The alien ship also pissed itself and was eating a kebab. It was more of a giant robot than a ship, and more of an abstract, fractal shape than a robot. It was a forever-shifting thing which defied visual description, not just because it was convenient for your narrator, but because it was a shapeshifting thing that survived by adapting to the civilisations it bothered, like a door-to-door salesman pretending to care about your divorce so he can sell you a television. It lolloped and lumbered and stumbled and shimmied about in space, because to fly in a straight line would be more fuel efficient, and would remove the need for this vast hideous thing to hop from planet to planet pinching other people’s wesources. Sorry, resources.

Inside the alien ship were some aliens, already perusing the initially commercially unsuccessful films and literature of the little planet they were headed toward. These green-skinned beasties were hungry followers of nostalgic trends and fads, culture vultures hell bent on consuming as much quirky galactic media as possible. Some called them the pop cultists, others called them intellectually dishonest, many of them called them greasy-headed posers. Some called them hipster twats. But always, above and beyond all these nicknames remained their true title.

Invadliens^tm (patent pending).

It should be known to the reader that the Invadliens were very evil. Owing to the concept of nominative determinism, they had a cultural and almost biological imperative to invade things. It could not be beaten out of them. Not even with a big stick. It was in their nature. Every aspect of Invadlien life, from religion to restaurants, reproduction and science, was based upon the central tenets of Invasionism (not to be confused with Virtualism), their core belief system. When Invadliens were not out invading other planets, they were breaking into their own houses, hacking their own bank accounts, and stealing their own resources. For this reason, their planet looked very much like it had recently been vomited out of both ends of something, for it was in a constant state of theft-recycling.

Having long ago mastered interstellar travel (because they stole it), the Invadliens now sought higher achievements in the cosmos, mainly the theft of brains so that they might vicariously experience the highs and lows of low-tech alien life without the unsanitary risks of sexually transmitted diseases, sexually transmitted religions, or sexually transmitted pre-programmed plot-device nanobots which hide in your sex organs and listen to your thoughts. They’re in there. They’re in there right now. Get them out get them out get them out get them out get them out get them out get them out get them out get them out get them out.

Anyway, their ship crawled, danced, lurched toward its next target, forever shifting its form to assimilate the rapid-fired memes emanating from the target planet’s rich and irony-filled biosphere. The atmosphere was scanned, and presumed to be danker than any dankness ever danked before.

The Invadliens, believing themselves to be gods, wanted only to seek out and experience a life that for them was in the distant past. Their species’ history stretched so far back in time that to remember it would be to overload the hard drive of the cosmos, also, someone stole all the records. Sure, you can’t destroy information, but you probably shouldn’t drag it all out of the zip folder at the same time. It's like therapy. We deal with this universe one memory at a time, and the Invadliens deal with their own lost prehistory by sampling ours. It’s a form of self-imposed therapeutic gaslighting, or something.

It is important at this point not to start the story, but to list off some random details of the Invadlien species, without which the following tale of their invasion of the monkey planet would have about as much context as that article you just read on the news. Also, I came up with all of this, and it would be a shame to edit it out.

1.          The Invadliens are a type 47 civilisation, and are so far advanced that they see the other 46 types as idiots. Humans are type 2.

2.          The Invadliens, being shapeshifters, have adopted human form for this story. This not only helps navigate the inevitable budget cuts for the sex scenes in the upcoming television series, it also speaks to a deep existential question about the nature of human existence, probably.

3.          Some Invadliens are born with the power of precognition. These ones are often promoted to royalty. You would think that this prescience might permit them some respite from natural chance and predation, but the recent Invadlien king-psychic had no idea I would edit him out of this story, thus rendering this part not canon.

4.          The Invadliens are running out of fuel, which for various evil reasons they derive from the molten cores of other people’s planets. They also sometimes harvest brains, but this is more out of habit than out of necessity. It’s just something to do on the weekend.

In case it wasn’t abundantly clear, the monkey planet is Earth.

They are coming here.

In fact, I think they just landed.

Chapter 1

Unconstitutionally loving the alien

Crawling slowly toward Earth, so as to give us enough time to panic about it and take stylish establishing shots, the hideous, forever mutating starship showed the world its impressive weaponry, most of which was stolen. They had Andromedan claptrap slappers, Extradimensional cabinets (useful as prisons, and for imprisoning Doctor Who fans), Graxxan war dolphins, Mycelial frond cannons, and some other cool-sounding sci-fi stuff.

They also had a plank of wood with a nail through it.

All of which was now pointed directly - or lopsidedly - at Earth.

The first word spoken by the fiends was rough, hardly translatable.

“UwU,” said the alien ship.

Followed by a dangerous, foreboding warning.

“XD *nuzzles ur pwecious wesources* XD!”

Then, a single beam of light erupted from the underside of the mothership as it split into countless smaller vessels. The ambassador for the Invadliens had arrived, somewhere in a field in America. One of the fields. It had a tree in it. Probably a rusty truck. You know the one.

This ambassador made his way into the loving arms of the military, who fed him with only their most incompetent staff until a translator arrived. It took several days for the military to find someone able to translate the Invadlien language, primarily because they don’t associate with big nerds. The translator, in her mid-30s, wore a Doctor Who scarf and Star Wars shirt. Fearing she might be an actual time traveller due to her aging jeans and glasses, the military put her in her own sealed unit beside the alien ambassador. There was a door between the two, for the Invadlien’s convenience, should he get hungry again.

“My name is Remedy Sparks,” the translator said.

“Can haz molten coreburger?” the alien asked. He looked Remedy up and down, noting the various pop culture references on her old tweed jacket, and morphed himself to incorporate them in his look. His face became that of Spock from Star Trek, his eyes the roving red beam of the Cylons, and his ears became wide and pointed. Finally, his hair turned blonde and plaited itself like millipedes writhing over each other, weaving itself into Princess Zelda’s hair from The Legend Of Zelda.

Remedy Sparks turned to the window of the secure unit and looked into the darkness where she knew the base captain, Jenny, would be watching.

“He seems to be appropriating early 2000s meme culture. Sources indicate that the Invadliens first learned about Earth through Tumblr and Myspace,” Remedy explained.

“I’m just glad they didn’t catch our first major broadcast,” Jenny said.

“Yeah, me too.”

“This morning they positioned ships above all our active volcanoes,” Jenny mused. “Tell them to back off. We fear they might set off global eruptions.”

“Big badaboom,” the alien said. Its face shifted briefly to a caricature of Leeloo, from The Fifth Element. Leeloo looked weird with Princess Zelda’s hair.

“Nice,” Remedy said. She lifted her keys out of her pocket to show the alien a keyring of the water element.

“Wait,” a security guard said. He was stood beneath an overhead lamp, his face gaunt and serious. “Tumblr?”

“Yes,” Remedy confirmed.

“Could we not… you know.”

“Not what?” Jenny asked.

“Convince them they’re ugly, make them run away.”

“That’s disgusting,” Remedy snapped.

“Could work,” Jenny said.

“It could, but it would ruin our planet’s reputation. What if these beings are the first of many? Do we want them to know we are a hateful, spiteful species?”

“They’ve already been through all of Myspace and Tumblr, it wasn’t all group hugging sessions,” the soldier said.

“Melody, what does he mean?” Jenny asked. She got closer to the glass, her military uniform taking the interest of the Invadlien, who appropriated a few badges and smiled at the officer.

“Remedy,” Remedy said.

“Remedy. Hey! You can’t do that,” Jenny said, pointing at the alien.

“I can haz war?” the alien asked playfully. It rubbed its fake badges and smiled.

“The soldier has a point,” Remedy began. “We’re lucky they have latched onto meme culture and not something more harmful like children’s television.” She turned to the Invadlien. “No ambassador, you can no haz war.”

She shook her head and pushed a printed meme across the table to the alien. It depicted an elongated white cat appearing out of the eye of a typhoon, watching over the whole Earth.

“We have a defender, a guardian.”

“Longcat…” the alien said.

“The longest and most powerful of cats.”

“Can haz how many cheeseburger?”

“All the cheeseburger.”

“Cringe.”

The alien pushed himself back in his chair. He briefly became Insanity Prawn Boy, from the popular Youtube series On The Moon. After several seconds of him screaming and laughing out the word ‘anus’, the alien finally calmed down. Now he shifted to a gross hybrid of several characters from BBC’s Sherlock Holmes and Supernatural. He snapped one of his fingers off, formed it into a cigarette, and smoked it. The smoke was a darkish green colour, and seemed to move about the chamber with its own intelligence, its own ambition.

“We need to get you out of there,” Jenny said.

“Lock me in.” Remedy said darkly.

“Why?” Jenny said, even as she gestured for the soldier to follow this order. The young man scurried to the second airlock and sealed it. Remedy Sparks looked out at the observation room with a grim expression.

“I never thought I’d have to relive this,” she said.

“Relive what? Tell us what’s happening in there or you’re getting dragged out of there by hazmats in fifteen seconds.”

The Invadlien cracked his neck, twisted his free hand, and opened his palm.

“Would you like a Jelly Baby, Watson?”

Only Remedy knew what this meant.

“We’ve been SuperWhoLocked.”

“What the hell do you mean?” Jenny made sure the airlock was tight, and returned to her position looking into the secure unit. Rather than permit Remedy to answer, the Invadlien took it upon himself.

“Well, it seems there’s a preestablished chain of events you want me to see here, some references to 1960’s Science Fiction, no doubt. Unfortunately I shan’t be able to permit you this delusion as I am presently encumbered by a greater mystery. How does my hair stay so fluffy? And what’s more, how does it manage to both woo chronically online females and irk chronically online males? Why does it effect these two groups so differently? And why are the DVDs so expensive even all these years later? That’s what I don’t understand, but I do understand it, because I understand everything. I am very clever. Also I am very handsome if you’re into elves. Which reminds me. Did I ever tell you about the time elves that lived under Gallifrey? I saw one in Dean’s hair once. It was totes amazeballs.”

“He can’t handle three fandoms at a time. He’s going to break down,” Remedy said.

“And what would a breakdown do?” Jenny asked.

“Well he’s copying classic Sci-Fi; any logical contradictions will likely result in an explosion.”

“We need to evacuate.”

“No, I’ve got this.”

Remedy pointed again at Longcat, the defender of reality, destroyer of TacGnol, the ancient shadow god. The alien did not care for this foreboding symbol anymore. He was chattering madly about mysteries that needed solving.

“That’s it,” Remedy rooted through her meme folder and pulled out an X-Files meme.

“Lolz. I’m not saying it wuz aliens, but it wuz aliens!” the alien read aloud. His face now shifted to agent Fox Mulder, a much easier character to handle.

Jenny tapped on the glass and spoke into the intercom again.

“Wait. Can we… Can we keep him like that a while?”

This goes to the same bookshelf as TCCC, so really there was no point putting this banner here. It looks nice though, doesn’t it?

Chapter 3

Are there memes on Mars?

After violating several treaties on human-alien contact in the omitted Chapter 2, officer Jenny let Remedy resume her work with the impressionable shapeshifter who, despite being able to sustain a sexual encounter with another species for well over eight hours, just like your favourite Wattpad billionaire werewolf space pirate sex dragon, was not at all tired, and was presently hopping up and down on the table ranting about the old god ChinChin.

“Gib me the core-sy boss,” the alien chanted. He was now playing the flute with his nose, and had dressed in a pink morph suit.

“Great, now he’s a sex-crazed caricature.”

“Not my fault,” Jenny said.

“You slept with it.”

“Not relevant. Filthy Frank and Pink Guy showed up after the main hype of SuperWhoLock. The alien is learning.”

“Oh my god, you’re right. He’s catching up to the modern day. But how?”

“We gave him the Wi-Fi password,” a nameless soldier said.

“Why would you do that?”

The soldier did not reply. Rather, his head opened up and shifted into a foghorn which blasted its horrid sound across the room. His eyebrows knitted themselves into hideous neon green pixel glasses.

“Like a boss,” the soldier said.

Jenny made light work of incapacitating him, elbowing the Invadlien in the foghorn face and calling for backup. The room was soon filled with more soldiers and officers, all of whom were quizzed on meme culture, all of whom passed the shapeshifting test when Jenny tried to kick them into increasingly smaller suitcases. It was a basic, rudimentary test, but it worked.

Apart from that one contortionist she wrongly imprisoned.

“We need to get through to the Invadliens, and fast,” Jenny said.

“You wasted precious hours on your X-Files fan-fiction lovefest,” Remedy reminded her boss, lifting a dishevelled ginger wig up to the window.

“I was trying to teach it how to love.”

“And how did that go?”

“It was a bit bitey.”

“Right.”

“But outside that,” Jenny said, “A solid seven out of ten. Anyway, it wasn’t all smut. I managed to distract the alien and grab this,” Jenny gestured to the large metal doors at the end of the dimly lit room, through which walked two scientists. One of them was holding a glass vial.

“You grabbed some scientists?”

“No, the vial. It’s got a microchip in it.”

“And where was that on the alien?” Remedy Sparks asked. At this point the alien turned to face Jenny, turning his face away from the pile of printed memes on the table.

“You don’t want to know,” Jenny said.

“NYYYYEEESSSSSSS,” the alien Pink Guy said. His face shifted through various characters finally settling on Pepe the frog. Finally, the alien sat perfectly still, cross-legged on the table. It began muttering something too quiet for Remedy to hear, and she wasn’t about to get up close to it. She had seen enough Sci-Fi horror to know how that ends.

“Ask it what it’s doing,” Jenny instructed. She handed the vial back to the scientists.

“But who was phone?” Remedy queried the alien. The strange being flickered and mutated, shuffling through various hideous caricatures of old memes. Finally, it vaguely resembled Cell, from Dragon Ball Z.

“Oh no,” Remedy said, getting down beneath the table.

“I’m a firin mah lazer! Blaaaarrrgggh!” the Invadlien shouted. But no laser erupted forth from its contorted face. Instead, an eerie silence fell upon the room. Everyone knew something was wrong, but it wasn’t clear what.

“UwU, notices ur Invadlien ships. Why u land on planet?” Remedy asked.

“We iz here to glomp ur pwecious wesources! XD” the alien said.

“But which ones?”

“LAVA. HOT HOT LAVA!”

“Got him. I’m calling the Pres, now. We’ve got all we need,” Jenny walked out of the room. Remedy and the alien sat uncomfortably in the isolation chamber, which had yet to be hosed down from last night, and looked out at the soldiers, officers and scientists observing them.

“You’re here to take the molten core of the Earth,” Remedy murmured. She thought of how to rephrase this in a way the alien would understand.

“We iz Longcat. U iz TacGnol.”

“Affirmative Master,” the Invadlien said, its head now that of K-9 from Doctor Who.

“How u haz core?”

“Sucky sucky!” the Insanity Prawn Invadlien explained.

A soldier walked through the metal doors to the dimly lit room, putting himself between the others and the isolation pods.

“Miss Sparks. Officer Jenny wishes to inform you that the Invadliens have fired upon two volcanoes in the last three minutes. Our military powers are no match for them. It’s up to you now. We need a distraction to get through their shields.”

“LAVA. HOT HOT LAVA!!!” the Invadlien said, again as Insanity Prawn Boy.

Remedy racked her brain for something she could use to keep the aliens occupied. She tried one final appeal to Earth’s authority over its resources.

“All our base are belong to us.”

“No u,” the alien said.

“That doesn’t even make sense. Wait. Can haz access to ur battle ships?”

“Negative master.”

Remedy grunted in frustration. In her peripheral vision she could see the soldiers and officers chatting amongst themselves. Outside this sealed room, outside this military base, outside this desert, the world was ending, volcano by volcano. Invadliens had infiltrated almost every single military installation on the planet, suffocating them under waves of memes and irony. The shitposting and viral cryptocurrency memes had already wrecked the economy, and now the lava pouring down those volcano slopes would wreck the planet, plunging it into a near-permanent winter, choked under ash and the shadows of Invadlien motherships. The lava flowed like a shapeshifter, pouring into towns and cities, melting and burning anything in its path, changing to the shape of the landscapes it obliterated.

That was it. The solution.

“Get me more memes.”

One by one, under Remedy’s careful instructions, all the world’s broadcasting channels stopped talking about the apocalypse and started doing something about it for once. Every transmitter was pointed toward the alien ships, every channel tuned to re-runs of old Youtube Poops and meme compilations. The Invadliens, with no personality of their own, soon became overwhelmed with choice.

Remedy looked at the Invadlien pioneer across from her. He began to shift again, this time into a form she did not recognise from any meme or popular show. This time he was truly alien, becoming his real self. He was a mass of violent barbed tentacles and teeth.

“Shit, they’re already shedding it. “Deploy leekspin, eight-hour loop, square aspect ratio, blurry.”

“The techno version?” a soldier asked.

“No, classic.”

The soldiers turned on monitors in the room, faced them to the isolation pod, and blasted the once-viral video. The Invadlien turned, but didn’t seem too interested.

“Reverse enhance,” Remedy instructed.

“What?”

“Just smear grease on the screen or something. It’s too high definition. It’s funnier if it’s blurry.”

“OMG u filmed this on an iPotato, megalulz,” the Invadlien said as the grease was applied to the screen. He was fixated now, utterly fascinated by the low-quality meme.

“Just as I thought,” Remedy said, “The Invadliens are not just absorbing meme culture to communicate their intentions with us, they are embodying it. Their predictable invasion of America before the rest of the world, their cartoonish attacks on volcanos. All of this is based on pop culture. They aren’t truly sentient, which means…”

“They can be defeated by love and friendship?” Jenny asked, barging through the door.

“Evidently not. No, we can reprogram them.”

“My god. They have no culture of their own.”

“Precisely. They’re grey goo,” Remedy picked up a printed meme and wrote on the back of it. “They appropriate anything we give them.” She pressed the paper to the glass of the isolation booth.

They’ll catch up to current memes soon. And then that’s it for us. Make new memes about their own destruction.

Jenny nodded. The military now turned its attention to generating viral content about the Invadliens, resurrecting the ancient memes that had brought them slithering to Earth in the first place. The first meme was tested on the Invadlien ambassador, who was reduced to a bubbling mass of recycled content after being shown a ten-hour Invadlien cringe compilation, replete with completely unnecessary links to a shirt store thrown in every three minutes. After watching his own species relentlessly parodied under layers of dubstep, foghorns, and slow-motion effects, his body simply turned into soup.

This too was added to the ever-increasing playlist of Invadlien cringe moments.

The rest of the Invadlien invaders were defeated through similar means. In fact, they were so busy being defeated they almost entirely forgot to harvest any brains before they imploded. The memes were numerous and delirious, an arsenal that spanned over ten years of pop culture.

Firstly, Earth’s Longcat triumphed over the TacGnol of the Invadlien starships. Then Invadliens disguised as Nyancat blasted through their own invisible force fields. After this, the hobbits (Invadlien scout ships) were taken to Isengard (The centre of the sun). To add insult to injury, the survivors were encouraged to shapeshift into the flying spaghetti monster and to entangle each other in a death-knot with their noodles. Back on Earth Invadlien soldiers were isolated and thrust into doomer memes, before being splattered with a very loud metal pipe that fell from nowhere in particular. Liveleak logos were helicoptered in above surviving Invadliens, foreshadowing their hideous deaths.

When only the robotic henchmen and robot butlers and robot sex butlers of the Invadlien species were left behind (action figures coming soon), tactics needed to be changed.

“Deploy philosoraptor!” Remedy demanded.

Finally, the robotic remnants of the Invadlien forces were destroyed by the very same thing which destroys that one annoying family member at every reunion you’re forced to go to: difficult questions, and also undercooked turkey.

But it was not yet done. The Invadliens had yet more ships on the way to Earth, all of whom had no doubt learned from what they saw unfold there. So, there was one final punch to be delivered.

The world beamed out one final message to the invaders.

“Have u seen Deez?”

To which the oncoming Invadlien ships replied.

“Deez wut?”

Revealing a critical flaw in their armour. It was Remedy’s honour to deliver the last line herself. She took to the microphone, leaning close.

“Deez Nutz.”

And with that the final mothership exploded.

“Hah! Godeeeeem!”

It was over.

Until the inevitable cash-grab sequel.

END

So that was my story from THE COSMIC COMEDY COLLECTION, which is available in eBook form in more places than I can count.

I can’t count very far.

Here’s the button to get your own copy of THE COSMIC COMEDY COLLECTION. Or don’t. You can just read the free story above and get a cake instead. I’m not here to judge. I’m only judgemental when I’m on stage.

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Livestream?

As I mentioned above, I also had a three-hour livestream chat with Devilishbookworms and fellow TCCC author John Coon, which was supposed to just be half an hour, but we had a lot to talk about.

Mainly, about where sci-fi seems to be going according to the big publishers, where we think it should be going instead, and how we can get there.

It was weird, funny, and quite insightful. If you’ve got the time, give it a listen, and subscribe to my youtube, where I post an interdisciplinary mix of Minecraft letsplays, standup comedy sets, and writing posts.

(please forgive the clickbait title, youtube does bad things to people who don’t have clickbait titles. I do plan on changing it soon).

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And there’s a behind-the-scenes below this paywall. A select few of you are currently on a free trial, and if you want one but weren’t included, just ask. You can email me at Halfplanetpress@gmail.com to get one.

All my posts are human-written.