What if you could talk to the sun?

An excerpt from WKTH. Plus - You can name this story!

Feb 21, 2025

So my next collection of short sci-fi tales, WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? comes out on March 5th. By the time you read this, you’re almost too late to get it at the reduced pre-order price. Not too late, but almost too late.

There will be a button at the end of this email.

The book is ready to fire out across the internet into various devices, but I have left one story without a title.

Today, you can choose that title.

But first, if you want some new music.

I discovered this album yesterday, I love it.

Story time

The story you are about to read was originally called MIDNIGHT AT ZENITH. I wrote it for a short story collection in 2015, called PERIPHERIES. It was all my own writing. I put it together at university for an assignment.

Along with the delayed multi-author extravaganza PLANETARY OVERLAP (which might come out as a Lego Bionicle fan-fiction collection), PERIPHERIES and the stories it contained inspired what would, one day, become WHO BUILT THE HUMANS. That idea of a multidisciplinary, weird book that was both a comedy and a reflection on our place in the cosmos has been an idea in my head for a while.

WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? was my debut onto the literary scene, a collection larger than most novels, in which I added a novella about time travel at the last minute as an extra bit of thanks to the 26 people who pre-ordered it in 2020.

WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? is a touch shorter. It contains not only stories which got edited out of WBTH because they wouldn’t fit, but entirely new tales about touchy feely robots potentially gaining sentience, an alien with a throbbing headache who uses old ladies as navigation systems in the thrift store dimension, and a magic horse who ate a universe. This punchier collection of short stories is sure to be less intimidating to convention goers, who sometimes take one look at WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? and tell me they are worried it will be heavy going. It can be, but only if you pick that path.

MIDNIGHT AT ZENITH has been unpublished since I first wrote it in 2015, and last year I set about rewriting it, giving it some polish with my new writing skills I have developed in the decade hence. For example, I now know the word ‘hence’. Aren’t I clever?

At the end of this excerpt you will have the opportunity to choose the title for this story. Because I won’t be calling it MIDNIGHT AT ZENITH any more, I want to give it a new title.

Your choices are:

SUNDOWN

WHO GRILLED THE HUMANS?

And I know how amazing WGTH would be as a title (with the intent of making this story available on its own as part of the series, as it fits the series theme) but I am particularly a fan of Sundown, not least because I can then use WGTH somewhere else.

But, it might be up to you.

Anyway, shall we get to the story?

MIDNIGHT AT ZENITH

It was nearly midnight at Zenith, Last orders. I waved over the bar. A band of red light jumped into my palm. Gestures like this used to piss them off. Barman sensed I still had money in there and floated over. One more Aphrodisiac I said. The cocktail that is. I drank ‘em as quick as they made ‘em back then.

Mars wasn’t green yet, but it was early days. Looked to my glass and tasted the last of the cinnamon and butterscotch on my tongue. Couldn’t appreciate another. Was at the edge of the abyss. Ran the glass over the holoplate and the blue green light came through. Paid my tab and got up. Turned away from the TV screen and the mission reports. Twenty-five humans living on Mars now, and hardly anyone sat down to think about just how incredible that was. Too much going on down here on Earth to think about it.

Some kids were crowding this old guy in the corner, laughing. I had nothing better to do, so I joined them, to see what the fuss was about. He said something about small mindedness, the kids poked at him some more. Guy tweaked his lapels and broke free. Moved to the empty dance floor. I asked him why the kids were bothering him.

“No time for magic,” he said. I asked him what sort of magic. He told me it was too late in the day. Asked me to come back the next day, few hours before sundown, so I did. Looking back, I think he was testing my faith.

Sure, I’d already had a few before he showed the next night, but I know what I saw. He ordered my drink for me, a Godfather.

“Lasts longer,” he said. “Lots to talk about.”

He walked me to the beer garden, pointed at the sun. Held a cigar out in one hand. Asked me to give him eight minutes, I laughed at the specificity, sat down anyway. People were staring from inside, pointing, but they got bored soon enough. We became shadowy figures under the pink sky.

He asked if I needed a light too, waved the cigar in the air. I said no, asked what the magic was. He just smiled like an idiot, like he was in on a joke I hadn’t figured out yet. Asked me to wait. He closed his eyes and looked as if he was meditating. He scrunched up his face once, twice, and opened his eyes again. I asked him what we were doing out here.

“Waiting,” he said. “Most people turn away from the beautiful things because they won’t wait for them to reveal themselves.”

He invited me to look at the setting sun, I declined, and he laughed, as if he forgot it burns your eyes. He looked up intently, smiled to himself.

Said her name was Sol, the sun that is. Said he could speak to her. Had to be outside he said. Had to be a line of sight between em. He was building excuses case the trick failed. I’ve been scammed before. I checked my watch. It had been seven painful, drawn-out minutes. Nothing’s happened I said. He gave me that stupid smile again. Then a laser beam broke the air between the sun and the cigar. It was only for a second, like lightning, a line drawn between the sun and the cigar, then it was gone. I almost didn’t think it was real, but the tip of the cigar was red hot. He flicked it into his mouth and inhaled sharply.

He told me people said matches are better than lighters, but he thought sunlight was better than both. He laughed and his wrinkles deepened. He said he didn’t have to think about angles or that sort of thing, it just happens. Takes eight minutes to get here but it happens. Like walking, we never think about the angle of our feet. It’s just instinct. He had an instinct to burn.

I started thinking about the power. He could do anything. He could power cities, kill people. All that just to light a cheap cigar and show off to some drunk stranger. I asked him why he didn’t use this power for anything else, if it was real. He said he’d be shot. Easy answer. I asked him if it took eight minutes for light to get here why didn’t it take another eight for his thoughts to get there. He laughed. I thought it was a big question, but he just laughed. Blew smoke in my face. Said something about the speed of thought, their minds locked. Said the sun knew at the same time because there’s no time between them. They’re parts to the same organ. He rambled a lot.

Now I don’t know much about science, but it sounds like bullshit to me I said. Asked him if he had a flying machine or something with a laser rifle, positioned high up, in the sun’s sunset beams, so I couldn’t see it without eclipse glasses or something. He practically choked when he laughed at me, said that was too clever, too complicated. Wouldn’t work.

“The truth is always elegant,” he said. I stared at the sun, Sol, and wondered. He asked if I wanted a cigar now, if I’d changed my mind. I said yeah.

“Thought you’d change your mind,” he said. A flick of his finger produced another cigar from the packet, holding it aloft. Another sunbeam lasered its way through space, between satellites, through the atmosphere, between planes and birds and finally ended its cosmic journey at the tip of that cigar. There was no wait this time, it didn’t make sense.

“There’s not another window for a while. Sol knows where all things are, where they will be, where they should be,” he explained. “Ordered your light beam just after mine.” He passed me the cigar. “Sunlit tobacco,” he said. Told me he was a poet for a time, but he’d always struggled socially. Had some success then vanished, escaped the limelight.

Sunlit tobacco… He was right; it was better than all else. The cheapness of the brand was irrelevant, transcended by the ignition. The thing almost felt alive, as if mother nature herself had breathed pure white energy onto my tongue. As I sucked back the flavour of it I felt myself imagining another Earth, one covered in giant mushrooms, millipedes the size of small cars. I fell backwards, my spine rattling over the shell of an ammonite, my soul sliding into a volcanic vent. I saw life emerging from bubbles, DNA knitting itself together. I was a surfer on a solar flare returning to Sol. I looked back at the bar, at the paving slabs and neon signs, the people and their clothes and their culture, their language. I realised now it’s all software. It ain’t real, not one bit of it. Even this conversation we’re having right now, it ain’t real. It’s reality encoded into soundwaves or particles or electrons and translated back into a dream, and that dream contains the world.

I was a vampire on a vein of light. I thought that right then, wondered about saying it for a while, said it. He laughed. Said I was a poet too.

We sat in the garden for some time. He told me about when he first spoke to her. How she was his first love. How girlfriends came and went but never understood him. He said he’d been here before, on Earth, before this body. He was a fragment of the old sun’s mind that never died out. That great fireball up there wasn’t him, but she was at the same time. It was deeper than soulmates, more intimate than he could describe in human words. I found that interesting. Human words. Such an odd way to describe his own language.

He told me he had been all sorts of animals. That long ago he remembered being an ant that had immolated itself with this newfound power, cremating its own nest in a suicidal act of rebellion. He had been a bird that used a laser to vaporise the reptile that had eaten his eggs, and he had been an oviraptor stalking the highlands of some ancient landmass. Before then he had misty memories of life as a trilobite, and told me he still felt the ache of the sand collapsing down upon him, that he had a dim understanding that his old corpse was in a shop somewhere in Whitby, but that he didn’t want to find her. I took another sip of the Godfather cocktail and inhaled sharply, taking in the evening air.

In all his lives he had played the part of a small god or lunatic, an evolutionary force trapped inside an individual. He had boiled the surface of rivers to escape predators, he had burnt holes through larger males in battle. He told me he had steered evolution wherever he went, intentionally or not. He was pure chaos until this life, where humanity had given him other vices to enjoy. He had no natural enemies as a human, no predators beside unemployment, starvation, acts of violence, traffic. Compared to the wild world it wasn’t too bad, so he didn’t suicide his way up to another incarnation this time.

“It’s a spiral,” he said. “Like the chambers of that ammonite you saw.”

I asked him how he knew. Asked him what came next. He didn’t explain. Said he was most free as a human, most distracted from the violence of evolution. It was no longer kill or be killed, but a whole mess of systems within systems. Told me he’d gone to college, learned painting, literature, a bit of law, ethics. He’d studied to be an actor, and used that to pretend he was more normal. Never saw the point in mathematics, as he knew where most things were all the time anyway. It’s a philosophy of positions he said, something he didn’t need. Made no sense to me. He noticed his cigar was almost finished, and closed his eyes again. He scrunched up his face, thinking intensely about something. Opened his eyes, then repeated the ritual once.

He finished his cigar as we sat there, as the revellers in the bar lost interest in looking at the old man who told stories and his young new friend, ready to be scammed. I knew what I saw, and I didn’t care if people would grill me about this conversation as soon as I got back inside. Even if somehow it was all fake, it was still fun to listen to. Much better than chitchat about the Mars missions, talk of alien corpses up there, conspiracies explaining recent cuts in communication. None of this was as interesting as my new friend. I was sat across from a man who could speak with the sun, Sol. A man who had such strange insights into nature that he was almost preternatural himself. I felt an incandescent sadness wash over me as I sobered up, as I realised the fleetingness of this encounter. I could see it in his eyes. I was an alien. He wasn’t human, he just dressed like one. He was lonely.

I could smoke the cigars, I could have the conversation, but I would never know, not really, if any of it actually happened. I would always be distanced from him by that impatient scepticism that had everyone else leave before the eight minutes elapsed, or before he’d stopped talking. I’d had the flying machine laser gun theory, and he laughed at it, but I could tell then it had hurt him, and it still hurt him now. This isolated stranger wasn’t talking to me to show off, he was talking to me because he had nobody else.

This story is continued in WHO KILLED THE HUMANS?

But before the big shiny BUY IT NOW button, let’s decide what this story is called. It is just a small baby. A mere nine and a half years old.

What shall we call it?