Who Baked The Shroomans?
Dude, this is like, totally weird.
What follows is an unreleased teaser for the short story Who Baked The Shroomans, which will be exclusive to the sci-fi comedy collection Who Killed The Humans?, which comes out in March 2025. It is a story about vast alien mushrooms who consume humans in order to experience our memories.
It’s a very fun story, and the tonal opposite to Mycelial, my very serious sci-fi horror about mushrooms. You see, in Who Killed The Humans? realities sometimes fracture, giving you the reader the choice of where to go.
My hope in sharing this excerpt here for free is that you might fall so madly in love with my poetic and comedic sci-fi storytelling that you rush to pre-order the book on Amazon.
If I have 100 pre-orders, the book will blow up in popularity.
And, if you pre-order now, you get it at a reduced price, because the price changes when the book comes out on March 5th 2025.
Anyway, let’s read the story.
Who Baked The Shroomans?
“No, you’re doing it wrong. I said in the gills!” she shook her bulbous head, slapping the pipe from under his. The two Shroomans laughed together in slow motion, toying with spores as they dangled soundlessly in damp air.
“I just, I’m nervous,” he admitted.
“It’s just Receptionist Blues. Nothing too strong.”
“I know but, what if she hated her job, what if it makes me angry?”
“I’m bigger than you,” she said reassuringly. “Just take it. It will be okay.”
The male Shrooman picked up the pipe again, gazed with green mutant eyes at the tiny biped trapped within. Spores had slowed the creature’s metabolism down so that it barely realised what was happening. The human could be smoked and toked and poked by a whole circle of stoner Shroomans, then put back into its own timeline without many side effects. Of course the best ways to access its complex neurology and hormones were often invasive, but most of them didn’t remember, and those that did quickly forgot.
To the receptionist, the giant circle in the sky came and went so fast she could pretend she never saw it. The worst that came of the encounter was a migraine, and a strange aversion to eating mushrooms that lasted several weeks.
“What’s her name?” the male Shrooman said.
“What?”
“Her name.”
“Do you name all your drugs?”
“I know they have names,” the male Shrooman said.
“We don’t have names.”
“We do, we just don’t say them.”
“We don’t.”
“We definitely do.”
“Go on then. What’s my name?” the female Shrooman asked. She took the pipe back, set the human down, and let it walk around a bit. She leaned a mycelial chin on vast tentacled hands as the biped sluggishly moved around.
“I like to call you Sequence.”
“Why?”
“You have that pattern up the side of your head, like a language.”
“And what shall I call you?” Sequence asked the male.
“Ooooouuull.”
“Is that a name or a neurological event?” Sequence asked. Her gills flared, ten-thousand open lungs, and secreted something like a cloud over the dollhouse world between them. This was mushroom laughter.
“Ooooouuull is a name and a title,” Ooooouuull explained.
“Right. And what does it mean?”
“It is the first sound I felt in this world, in my fibrous body. A sort of wave of thinking that made me alive.”
“Ooooouuull,” Sequence repeated.
“Ooooouuull.”
“So are you taking the human?” Sequence asked.
“I want her name first,” Ooooouuull said. Sequence lowered herself into the watery atmosphere of this planet, dropping down between the trees, her body pulsing and flickering with light, the fields beneath her mass twisting into geometric patterns that followed the complex energies emanating from her. The wheat buckled and crackled, projecting Sequence’s genetic code into a bowing and standing of plants, a painting put onto the planet in an instant, electromagnetically seared into the crops in concentric geometric patterns.
“Why?” she asked, even as she sucked the name from the world.
“I think it will help me get in the mood.”
“We’re smoking them, not fucking them,” Sequence twisted her bulbous cap in the air, aligning herself with the thoughtweb of the world.
“You’re talking like one, you’ll be gone soon.”
“And you’re not at risk of convergence yourself, knowing its name?”
“I want to know her name,” Ooooouuull asserted himself.
“Her name is Rhonda, Rhonda the receptionist.”
“Sounds familiar.”
“Don’t think too much about it. They all do after a while.”
From above the world, Ooooouuull could see the closed eighth eye atop Sequence’s head. It was a dark crystalline green, the pinnacle of mycelial symbiosis with living minerals. It was an evolved rite of passage, an eye that specifically opened only when a Shrooman was high enough to realise something totally mega, like if they could feel music resonating through their teeth, and were too high to remember they didn’t have teeth. Or if they realised that the true nature of time was a spiral, and that the spiral was not a tightly wound thing but a swirling trajectory like a strand of DNA, corkscrewing through reality, and that spiral staircases also looked like that, so fancy human structures were basically a metaphor for the universe and Shroomans were basically a metaphor for themselves, or something. And time is a flower unfurling, a night out dissolving into the memories of its participants, dude. Is there any good food in the fridge? My eyes feel furry. Books are basically astral projection made physical, a psychic object which reprograms the uppermost layers of your mind which you choose to open up when you open the book.
You open book.
Book opens you.
That sort of revelation.
Anyway, Sequence’s magic eighth eye had not opened yet because she saw herself as more of a guiding spirit for other aspiring skull-gobblers, a leader figure. She figured this one out on her gap year. That was her excuse anyway. She inhaled deeply now, taking the human up from its containment chamber and into her head. Deep inside her gills, Rhonda the receptionist swirled and floated soundlessly, itching in this strange void. If she was conscious and more receptive to psychic energy, she might have noticed someone had died here once, the results of a breath held too long for Sequence, which bereaved a young human family of its matriarch. It didn’t matter though, the psychocrop was strong and yielded good results. Sure, they weren’t breeding as much these days, and they’d likely go extinct by 2379, but they had some weird experiences that made even the dullest of humans worth consuming. There was always the backup farm on Mars, anyway, and Sequence’s older brother had that mini fridge in his apartment on Europa with some prime neanderthal dankness ready to go.
She exhaled. Rhonda the receptionist flitted back through the membrane inside the pipe, and her dozy body drifted in the dense atmosphere.
“Oh fuck, that was a dense one,” Rhonda coughed.
The report was due by Friday. Sci-Fi Stevie was freaking out by the water cooler, copycat Carl was making a fool of himself, and the clouds outside were perfect circles, hideous surreal things that reminded Rhonda of mushroom caps. The cover was a triangle, for a while. No idea what that means. Sequence was feeling around the room for meaning, for a title, a name, a purpose.
“I’m a regional stock management procurement go-between pre-meeting meeting facilitator,” she said.
“Fuck is that?” replied Ooooouuull. Sequence, eyes closed, shrugged in the peculiar way sentient mushrooms shrug, opening heavy flaps on her shoulders to expel spores. Her friend’s idle intrusion briefly bent the illusion, giving Sequence a way out, something real to hold onto. She closed her eyes tight and opened them, tightened and opened, tightened and opened, until flecks of kaleidoscopic colour took over.
“I’ve got a thing due by the time with the person,” she said. The high was already wearing off. Rhonda the receptionist wasn’t as strong as some others because she cared less about what she was doing. And now she was beginning to pick up on what was going down. The two Shroomans felt it in the air, that wave of mammalian realisation that meant it would soon be time to return the primate to its rightful place on the planet’s surface.
Ooooouuull took his friend by one of her many tentacles, and helped her eject the human from her sensory cavity.
“We need something stronger, someone weirder,” Sequence said.
Want to read more?
Price is discounted until release day.
Pre-ordering it could make 2025 the year I become a full-time writer.
Notes on the WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? series
Whilst WKTH is not a direct sequel to Who Built The Humans?, both books share some universes, so if you do have the first one you’ll find new layers of jokes and storytelling.
Some characters return for WKTH, but you don’t need to have read WBTH to understand it. Both books are written to be read individually.
As well as mushrooms, there is a magic horse, a talking fish, and a sentient missile determined to erase its own past.
The book will feature on BBC radio.