The Hipster From Outer Space (The Hipster Trilogy Book 1) (19 page)

Moomamu The Thinker

“So we’re not going to meet a king?” Moomamu said as he rode the mechanical stairs back towards the surface. He closed his eyes, enjoying every gust of wind that passed over him.
 

“Why would you think that?” Gary said, his front paws on Moomamu’s shoulder, his mouth next to his ear, his tail pointing upwards.

“Why wouldn’t I? It’s called King’s Cross.”

As he said this a long-haired male with makeup turned around and looked at Moomamu. His facial configuration was full of questions. His makeup was full of black and sadness. His t-shirt was full of death.

“No, my cat doesn’t talk,” Moomamu said. At this the male with dark eye makeup nodded and turned back.

“It’s just the way humans do things. They like to name things after other things," Gary whispered.

Moomamu nodded and closed his eyes for an upcoming zephyr.
 

“So are we now in the midlands at least?”

“Not in the slightest. First Thinker needs to get cleaned up. Then grab a ticket for the overground. And finally get some food because Gary is hungry for food.”

Moomamu had only recently spent an hour locked in a cage with a madman and was then trapped with that madman on a planet full of sex pests. He’d only been back for twenty minutes and he already couldn’t wait to leave it. “Gary would also like to know why Thinker is so wet.”

“It wasn’t me. It was the Babosi and their games.”

As they made their way to the top of the motorised stairway they found themselves at another set of gates which Moomamu masterfully outsmarted: feed the machine and it lets you through. Easy. He saw another human feed her ticket into it, only for it be spat back out. It growled at her and she slapped it and said “Oh come on you stupid thing.”
 

“Here,” Gary said, pointing his tail towards another metal gate. “Thinker must go and clean himself. Gary will wait here.”
 

The cat jumped out of his hands. His back claws scratched Moomamu’s arms as he leapt to the ground. Moomamu shook his head at the rudeness and then walked to the gate. This one wasn’t as busy as the others. It was a small doorway protected by a rotating circular trio of arms. The machine didn’t have a mouth the right shape for his paper, but instead it ate his metal sterling currency directly. With that, the arms rotated to let him into the water rooms.

Since Moomamu had awoken as a human with a new sense of smell, he'd not prepared himself for what was coming from those excretion chairs. The smell was so bad he believed it could be weaponised for military purposes.

He copied the humans around him and cupped his hands beneath the running water point. It was similar to the one in the flat, but instead of a small circular button this one operated through empathy. All Moomamu had to do was show the water point his dirty hands, and it would spit the water out into them.

The Obondan goo had dried mostly leaving crusty white patches in his hair and his ears and beard. After a few minutes of rinsing his beard and his hair under the warm empathic water points, and after several odd looks from humans, he walked over to a wall-mounted wind machine. They were little boxes with metal spouts, similar to the empathy water points in some ways. You placed your wet parts beneath them and they blew out hot air. Moomamu didn’t see any other humans washing and drying their heads. Mostly they were doing their hands. But nobody else had travelled several light years that day to a sex planet and back. He thought they would understand if they asked. But nobody did. They looked at him like he was the cause of the excretion smell heavy in the air.

When Moomamu exited the gate he couldn’t see the cat. His tongue dried and his skin prickled for a second before taking another step and seeing the ginger fluff of his tail. Another step and he saw the whole of him, sitting on the floor next to a human shrouded in a cloak made from old weathered animal skin — the face hidden in the shadow of the hood. Moomamu saw the cat looking up at the shrouded human, into the hood, talking to him. At first he felt like he’d been lied to. The cat said he didn’t talk to humans, but here he was, chatting away like an old-lady human. But then he caught a glimpse of the face within the hood and he realised it wasn’t a human at all. Its skin was crumbling, paper-thin and layered with crust and its eyes were so bloodshot the whites had all but vanished in the red. He took another step forward and the figure disappeared completely, as if it was never standing there.

“Who was that?” Moomamu asked as he picked the cat back up.

“It is no concern of the Thinker. Maybe one day Thinker will find out, maybe not. Doesn’t matter.”
 

Of all the things Moomamu didn’t care about this was one of them. His thoughts were simply of getting home. The rest was nonsense. It was binary to him: 1s and 0s. Would this advance him getting home or would it not? He was only interested in 1s.

The King’s Cross was a big cluster of humans all going places. All on their way to their different places of work, to their families, homes, affairs, whatever. Giant metal snake-things were there too, but no longer hidden underground and instead crawling across the surface of the planet.
 

He walked back through the rotating metal arms and Gary led him to another gatekeeper to get a new piece of paper. This one was a ticket to get him to a place called Nottingham.
 

“We have to wait now for a while,” Gary said. “How much money does Thinker have?”

“A few more coins.”

“Are you hungry?” Gary said.

Moomamu followed his nose to the nearest eating place. He smelled the milk and the cooked animal flesh emanating outwards.
 

They sat at one of the tables: Moomamu on one seat, and Gary opposite him.
 

The place was full of lowlife humans, some full of fat, all scoffing and all fully disgusting. Still, Moomamu was hungry. A female with coppery dark hair walked over to them. She had the lines around her eyes of a human who’d given up. Might just go ahead and die tomorrow.
 

Carol Francis

Her lungs were empty. Her blood felt cold. She was weightless, like her body was nothing more than a warm breeze, floating upwards, far from the clouds and the atmosphere, to the point where upwards lost context, to the point where even the word lost context. The only communication out there was a psychic connection between the beast and its host.

Carol had long since left her body, but she still felt the morning water crawling into the fabric of her dressing gown, pulling itself towards her skin. She felt the presence to her left. She felt her body shivering in the cold.
 

From its outline all she saw was the fur, pitch black in places, and a refraction of the cosmos surrounding it in others — all the colours of the neighbouring galaxies splashing it with rainbow coloured nebulae. Its concentration was completely on the hole in front of it. Its chubby, fleshy hands grabbing onto the red mush spilling out and filling its mouth. It was growing with each bite, not enough for human eyes to see, but at a pace noticeable to Carol’s insight.
 

In the Outer Reaches of space, it made no noise, but from watching it, Carol almost heard the grinding of its teeth against the tougher part of the food — the gristle and the bone.
 

Carol willed her body to move closer to the beast. But with that single thought the beast turned to her. It was impossible. It was as though the beast heard her thoughts. Its ears pricked upwards and it looked at Carol. And then its voice. A whisper so sharp it cut its way into Carol’s thoughts, hacking at her mind, her consciousness.

A Thinker.
 

It’s voice was made of words and images and whatever sensory devices it could utilise to make itself clear.
 

I’ll come for your flesh,
the beast said as it scooped a handful of the stuff into its mouth.
I’ll peel your skin and eat your tongue.

With the images came the pain they suggested. Its fingers grabbed handfuls of skin from her arms, pressing so tightly its fingers went into the skin and meat beneath. She screamed as the beast yanked so hard the skin split beneath her shoulder blades.
 

Somewhere a dog barked.
 

Carol woke. Her skin cold. Her back wet. A pressure on her stomach. It was still dark, but it felt like the sun might peek its head up at any moment. She lifted her head and looked at her stomach. Indie was lying on her — her paws stretched outwards and over her. She was looking at her, tongue bouncing out of her mouth. She barked again and Carol jumped.
 

“Indie!” she shouted. The dog’s ears lowered and she dropped her nose to Carol’s side. “Sorry Indie,” she said. “It’s okay.” She reached down and patted her head before sitting up and tried to make sense of what she’d seen.
 

It wasn’t the first vision she’d had since being on Earth. She’d had a few in her time, and she’d have many more. Recently, though, there’d been more than ever — an influx of them. This was the first vision of the beast, but she’d seen similar horrors over the last few months: horrors that convinced her that the world was coming to an end. Now, though, it had a face.
 

She climbed to her feet and swore under her breath. Her back was soaked with morning dew. She whistled and clicked her fingers and Indie followed her back into the kitchen where she closed the door. She filled the kettle and set it to boil.
 

As she placed the tea-bag in an empty mug she had another vision. This time it was short and calm and flashed before her like someone flicking a light switch off and then back on in quick succession. A single image of a man. A Thinker, like herself. But a Thinker built on inconsistencies. The DNA which he’d laced his consciousness with was wrong. It didn’t line up on any measure of time or space and existed on a fabric of its own.

Carol poured the tea, added sugar and milk and sipped from it.
 

“Maybe,” she said quietly. “Maybe…”

Aidan Black

What a day. A mixture of disappointment and success. A true lesson in what the start-up entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley would call “pivoting”. Occasionally you come to a roadblock — lack of funding, no audience, no interest, maybe some programming is broken, your employees aren’t getting along, and you have to change course. Make the best of what’s given to you. You pivot. If life gives you lemons, you pull their fucking teeth out, bag ‘em up, and feed them to your pigs.
 

Aidan sipped from the tea. It was bearable. He didn’t like bearable. But it was the only thing keeping his mind from exploding. He’d already complained about the first cup. He knew that if he complained about the second cup he was going to have to get physical and he already had a full van and a sore head.

The restaurant was sub-par. If he were the manager he’d have the place running like a well-oiled machine. He’d have the place packed with customers. He scoffed as he looked around. There were four customers, and one of those customers was a cat. A fucking cat! They didn’t eat baked goods and they certainly didn’t pay for anything. Maybe it was the cat that was putting people off.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out his comb when the tinnitus-like whine, the whitest noise, ramped up like some fucker was riding the volume knob — all the way to eleven. His head felt like it might explode. He smelled copper. He saw fire. He saw an ape, screaming, teeth biting down.

Moomamu’s here.

“Okay,” he said, pressing his head onto the cool surface of the table. “Where? Fucking where?”

Kill him. Rip his tongue out. Tear his skin off. Kill him. Feed me. You miss one hundred percent of the chances you don’t take. Kill him.

“Okay,” he screamed. He didn’t care if people were looking now. “Just tell me where!”

 
Across the table. With the cat.
 

The whispering voice was angry. The noise subsided just enough for him to run the brush through his hair and to look over to the bearded man with the cat. He would normally follow him to a quiet area, avoid unwanted attention, but the pain … the fucking pain. He had to finish it now. It wasn’t the original plan, but he had to deal with the cards he’d been dealt. He had to pivot.

Sammy Black

Her hairy pink belly was rising and falling. Slowly. Each breath weaker than the last. Her eyes had been closed most of the time. Occasionally opening them to look out at the other pigs or at Sammy as he cleaned around her. A dull whimper escaping her every now and again. The smell of death and dying sticking to her.
 

Elsa was eight years old. It was natural for a pig like her to pass away. Too many piglets had left too many scars. Mother pigs like Elsa aren’t supposed to last much longer than that. But only a few weeks before she was bouncing around the pen like a pig in … well. The point was, she’d been a lively little chunk of fat, oily eyes of vivid black, hardly settling, until recently.

Vets were out of the question. There was no way they could have people snooping around the Pig-House. Unless that person never left. And a local person going missing would be too much. The whole town would come together. A village search. Pitchforks. Wicker Man. Bees.

Sammy continued on with his work, cleaning up after the others, feeding the goats, gathering up eggs to sell. The daily routine. The ritual.
 

He was scraping up goat shit from a pathway when he heard the scream. A haunting whine that carried through the farm stopping every animal in its tracks. It was coming from the Pig-House. It was coming from Elsa.
 

When Sammy ran back to look he fell to his knees and screamed. It wasn’t the dead pig that scared him — he’d seen his fair share of dead animals, and then some. It wasn’t the pooling of inky black liquid seeping out of her eyes, her ears and mouth that had chills running down his spine. And it wasn’t the sudden sinking in of her skin, like the bone had partially crumbled inside her. No, none of that made him want to run away as fast as he could and not stop running until he fell to the floor with exhaustion. It wasn’t any of those things. It was the hand pressing outwards against her stomach. A human hand, as if it was trying to break its way out of Elsa’a dead body.