WBTH2 spoiler + Character profile: Slin-vek
Including a breakdown of what inspired the story
The WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? TWO pre-orders are not far away now
Here’s a spoiler before a spoiler, I’m partnering with Grumblebricks to create exclusive Lego chapter headings for the upcoming WBTH hardback.
Grumblebricks is a professional Lego Artist and one of few Lego comedy creators. He was on Channel 4’s Lego Masters in 2017. You might recognise him because we look suspiciously similar. That’s because I’m Grumblebricks.
I’m also a lot of other characters… but we’ll get to that another time.
Nice and easy. I don’t have to pay the guy for the (currently 12+) hours he’s put into these renders and character designs, and I don’t have to rely on some picture vomit machine to force out some simulacra of images it has stolen. Each and every one of these renders is hand-made and carefully positioned. It was made with intention, it has a purpose.
From the left we have Lax Morales in his native Atanattat form, a triangular timeship, professor Nori Furukawa, and behind him the Earth and Varda’s ship from Lucy’s universe. The purple creature on the right is Slin-vek.
WBTH2 spoiler
Slin-vek is not a new character. You met her before in the Architects universe of WBTH, where she was the nameless owner/antagonist of you, the human in the story. Slin-vek was in her late teens at the time, an alien squid accustomed to playing with humans like we play with toys. Her species is so far advanced compared to us that we didn’t even notice their invasion. To the more enlightened members of the human species, it felt like a gradual erosion of what made us human, a reduction of our agency and creativity, individual by individual, until only Player Characters remained.
It felt a lot like how I feel with social media. I would love to post my Grumblebricks stuff alongside my dark comedy, my poetry, my paintings of synaesthesia (because that’s a thing I do I have no outlet for yet), my children’s adventure books (yeah, I do that too), my comedy shirts, my creative writing help books, my bookmarks and posters, my writing coaching, and all the other stuff I make along the way. But the truth is, technology, mainly social media, punishes you for being interesting.
If you are multifacted, in any way, your content gets shown to less and less people, until like me you have an author account that gets 3 ‘likes’ on a carefully made post about a new book, and 12,000 ‘likes’ (yes, really) on a video of you talking about a chicken burger. It’s why I was concerned about making comedy content here. I forgot that other humans like varied things, and that algorithms are not the boss of me.
But, in the Architects universe, algorithms are all we know.
Back when I wrote the original Architects story, I was inspired by how social media was eroding our individuality. I knew of someone at the time who was too ill to work, but had his benefits removed from under him because he missed an appointment. I’ve since been in the same situation myself. What this other guy did was delete his social media, make a new tiktok account, and repost stolen Family Guy clips. He made £500 a month from people clicking ads in the middle of those clips, and he made all the videos from his bed. No more missed rent, no more arguments with the benefits office because he was too sick to get the bus into town to tell them he was too sick to get the bus into town.
When Slin-vek’s people take over Earth, they see how timid we are as a species - having long ago beaten our predators back into the shadows - and they find it incredibly easy to slip in and start replacing us.
One by one, people become less interesting.
They become less unpredictable.
They become less human.
As far as other fiction goes, I looked to THE X FILES and DARK CITY to see how writers in the recent past covered the whole ‘human replaced by alien’ trope. Because it is a trope, and I’m not afraid to use it. Provided I think I’ve made an original twist on the idea (the aliens seeing us not with malice, but like children playing with toys) I give myself permission to use tropes. Everything is a trope anyway. I can only imagine an emerald pyramid because I can imagine an emerald and I can imagine a pyramid.
So we humans are already sanding our edges down to play pretend with each other. We’ve not yet left our solar system, and many of us don’t see the point.
That is the point where our story in the Architect universe of WBTH2 begins. Slin-vek, given special access to the secrets of her advanced world through her actions in WBTH, is now tasked with finding out just what is eating the Earth from the inside. Because something is down there, something ancient and angry.
Both stories, in both books, are complete things which can be read on their own.
But if you happen to have both, there’s a deeper meaning to be unlocked.
Slin-vek loves her human like a pet. To her it is obvious that we are sentient, even if most of our functions have been replaced by the Architects. So when she’s told there’s something stirring in the unexplored depths of the planet Earth, she is excited to meet what she hopes will be a fully natural, unaltered, unchanged human.
Because according to her world’s historians, those died out before she was born.
So this is how I write. On the surface, I build nice Sci-Fi adventure stories for people who want a casual read. I hide the weirder stuff beneath that, making it so that it’s there if you want it, but it won’t get in the way if you don’t.
The depths are accessible to anyone who looks for them.
If you’ve got WBTH, try reading the Furukawa Universe’s chapters in reverse order, you’ll see what I mean.
There’s a spoiler for Earthloop hidden in there. It’s been there since 2020, and so far, only three people have found it.
Are you excited to see Slin-vek again?