The Hipster Who Leapt Through Time (The Hipster Trilogy Book 2) (30 page)

“It’s easy, stupid human with self-confidence issues,” Moomamu said as he carefully made his way down the steps, his aching leg muscles ready to give way at any moment. “All we need is a simple bit of time travel. The source of the alien invasion is a little monkey that flew into space and got lost. I have to now jump back and … stop the monkey from ever flying in the first place.”
 

Moomamu reached the bottom of the stairs and stepped onto the stage. The short man was half the size of Moomamu, even in the giant black shoes. He looked up to the people sat at the desks. They’d grown silent and the whispering had stopped. He saw the man with the blond curls and lip hair on the ground level to his right. The lump on his head ached. He looked back to the short man. His little pig face had his eyebrows sculpted to neat points. He was a vain man, for sure.

The man chuckled at Moomamu.

“And how do you suppose you simply jump back?”
 

As the man spoke Moomamu closed his eyes, opened them again and found himself standing behind the doctor. He turned to look at Moomamu. His eyes widened.

“Fucking magic man, over here!” shouted one of the armoured men from the desks as his friends joined in with cursing.
 

“What the flippin’ ‘eck?”

“Aw, I’m missing me oxygen already.”

“Shut it!” the doctor shouted.

“I can jump, believe me, I can jump. But to go back in time, I need to go to a soft spot,” Moomamu said.

“So, where can we find this soft spot?”
 

“Not too far away … a little up north.”

Mark Hertzenberg

The Last Status Update

Holy shit.

The world is ending.

Apparently.

If you don’t know who I am. You’re probably irrelevant. At least, I used to think so, but maybe not now.
 

My name is Mark. I made the social network that all of you spend hours and hours on. Your pour your lives into this software I built, and for a long time I thought it was a good thing. What do I care if you spend your life outside playing games with your kids in the park? I care more about you taking pictures or videos, creating rich media content and putting it on my social network to share to your friends and families.
 

Why do I care about it?

I’ve never explained to anyone before, but my big idea, my big dream, was for you to pour enough of yourselves on there that we finally reach that singularity we’ve heard so much about. The Transhuman Movement. I wanted to keep consciousness flowing, but I wanted to remove the physical part. I wanted you to be able to transfer your experience, decision making, habits, online. And I thought we could do this by uploading enough of our memories and personalities up through games, annoying quizzes, and status updates.

Why did I want to do this?

Because I wanted to do something significant.
 

Not an unusual goal. Pretty standard, to be fair. We all want to be noticed in some way. Some of you wear funny hats to stand out. Others amongst you write novels or films or paint pictures. I even once saw a person running naked through Manhattan. Why? Because he wanted to be noticed. It’s the core desire of the human experience. We want to be noticed. We want to be significant.
 

This afternoon a black cloud descended upon London, England, like a swarm of robotic locusts and ate all the organic life it could get to. The green grass of the parks. The birds, insects, squirrels, and yes, the humans. Race, gender, political preference, it really didn’t matter. It gobbled it up like it was nothing. And we saw it all because the non-organic technology—cameras, and the internet—allowed us, the rest of the world, to watch.
 

As the cloud makes its way across the globe, and the world is consumed, we’re being told to make our way deep underground. To hide in bunkers until The Signal (apparently that’s what it’s called) has finished with the organic matter it can reach and leaves the planet. I have my suspicions that this thing will find us anyway. Or, at the very least, won’t leave at all.

As the UK is consumed, and all of those physical bodies are eaten away, I have to think that I did something right because they’re still there, albeit online. Their likenesses, preferences, videos, pictures, their humanity, is stored. I created the empty container, and we all filled it with our humanity, and together we created the Time Capsule of our species. But that’s all it is. A Time Capsule.

Even as the cloud makes its way to the US where it will likely consume me too, and I, like the rest of the world, become little more than ones and zeros on the internet, I realise how wrong and silly I was. All those hours spent plugged into my laptop, coding away. All of the business meetings, the traveling from city to city to drum up money. Why? To be noticed? I’ve come to realise that I’m as insignificant as anyone else. We are insignificant as a species.

We’ll all be online for as long as our hard drives will last, but with nobody there to interact with, we’ll simply be the falling tree in the woods with nobody around to hear it.
 

So what have I really done?

Nothing.

I just wasted your time.

For that, I’m sorry.

For now, get to your bunkers, and let’s hope we survive this plague. If we get out, and there’s even a sliver of usable earth left, I know what I’m doing. I’m sure as shit not playing Farmville. Instead, I’ll be starting a real farm. I’ll be making real tangible things, like potatoes.

Yeah, I think potatoes are as significant a thing as I or humanity could ever hope to make.
 

So, hopefully see you on the other side,

Peace and love,

Mark

Luna Gajos

HOW DO YOU WIN AN argument? Teleportation. Easy. Why didn’t she think of it before? Luna looked out at the supposed countryside. Miles of rolling hills now patches of brown and dirt where the farmland once was. Dr Warwick spoke of the damaged soil. He talked about how difficult regrowing anything would be. The depletion of the oxygen levels was a genuine concern. The fundamental change out in the open could have caused an atmospheric shift. Something would happen. Something that Dr Warwick could only guess at.

The only thing Luna was any good at was cashing up a till whilst serving an irate customer, and monitoring the golden brownness of the pastries at the CrunchyBites restaurant. She was damn good at that. But this, whatever it was, was something else entirely.

She was also good at scrabble.
 

Polish scrabble, at least.

“Can you open a window?” she said to the rest of the car. It was full. A big four-wheeled jeep with black armoured plating. The IPC logo in bold white type on the bonnet.
 

A man with a shaved head called Daniel Wilson drove. His youthful soft skin reminded Luna of the employees at CrunchyBites. In the passenger seat was the pretty Indian TV host Nisha Bhatia, with the little brown boy on her lap, Darpal.
 

Luna was in the central back seat. Moomamu to her right, Gary to her left (adamant about having his own seat).

 
“But I’m cold,” Darpal said. “Can we keep it closed, please?”

The car was an IPC Security car. The IPC wasn't just a school, apparently. The IPC was also the premier non-lethal weapon developers of the twenty-first century.
 

“Sure, fine,” Luna replied. “Whatever you want.” She turned her head to look back at the trail of cars they’d passed. Hundreds, maybe thousands. All driverless. Probably stuck in traffic during their escape from the capital. Dying in a queue. Surely the worst way to go. The only movement on the road was their convoy. Three of the IPC Security cars. The doctor. The science teacher. A handful of IPC security. Forced to leave the HQ and make their way together.

“Does this remind you of anything?” Luna asked Moomamu. Just above the collar of the black t-shirt she could see a faint white line of scarring.
 

“Yes,” Moomamu said, without turning to look at her. “It reminds me of the last time we went to the soft spot. The time I gave my life to save the world. The time the cat led me to die.”
 

“Gary didn’t have a choice,” Gary said from her left side.

“Sure. And you didn’t give me a choice either. But I have one now. I’m going to leap back, do this job for that old lizard man, who’ll then take me back to my home and away from this nonsense.”

“Thinker has spoken to Light?”

“Yes … I forgot you were friends.”

“Light is no friend. Thinker should not trust Light.”
 

“At least he’s going to take me home,” Moomamu said.
 

“Guys,” Nisha said from the front of the car, “I know you’ve got stuff to work out but can we quiet the drama just a tad? Darpal and I have never met a talking cat before, never mind one with issues. I think it’s a little too much.”
 

“Yeah, it’s pretty fucked up,” Daniel said from the driver’s seat. “Also, if you guys get all bitchy and start yelling or whatever, you’ll probably lure a bubble or two down to us.”

“Yeah, that sounds reasonable,” Luna said, her voice down a couple of levels. “Plus I thought you two were friends.”
 

“We’re not friends. I don’t have friends. I’m a Thinker. I’m a god.”

“Thinker is not capable of friends,” Gary said.

They both turned away from each other, looking out their windows at the passing fields of dirt.

A moment of silence passed.

“I’m scared of the cloud,” Darpal said.
 

“Don’t be,” Nisha replied. “You see Mr .Wilson here?”

“That’s Sergeant Wilson, miss,” he said without looking away from the road.

“Well, Sergeant Wilson and the rest of his team are all with us. We’re all here to protect you. We’re not going to let anything hurt you. And if a bubble does even try its luck we’ve got EMPs to take it down.”
 

“Well, Miss Bhatia, technically we wouldn’t really be able to use the EMPs.”

“What do you mean?” Nisha said.

“Well, miss, most cars run on some sort of electronic system now. If we were to use an EMP it would take out the cars too. Probably for a few hours. By that time, more bubbles would show up to check on the missing bubble. Usually a twenty-minute process. That’s well before we could get back up and running and it wouldn’t give us enough time to hide either.” He spoke with all the calmness of someone who thought he was offering genuine insight.
 

“Have you got any other weapons?” Luna said.

“IPC made a big splash over the world with its use of non-lethal weapon technology and its private security department. A fantastic supplement for forces that require a delicate touch when dealing with peacekeeping, controlling movement of civilian populations, crowd control, refugee control, etc. It was the board’s and Dr Warwick’s belief that by creating effective non-lethal weapons we could save the world.” He smiled at Darpal and winked at him.

“Brilliant,” Luna said, as she looked out into the barren wastelands and seas of people reduced to dust in the cars around them. “Thanks for saving the world.”
 

“You’re welcome,” he said. “You’re very welcome.”

Dr Warwick

The indigo children. A miracle? That’s what they were supposed to be. Instead, they turned out to be psychic beacons for an alien invasion. What a fucking miracle. All that time he’d wasted in his life. The IPC was founded on the very idea of finding and nurturing the children. They built an empire around themselves with the idea of funding and hiding the IPC’s true intent. The academies around the world put together to filter the children, to find those with the indigo speck.
 

“Does anyone else feel like they’re in the unpopular car,” Mr Foster said as he leaned forward from the central back seat, poking his head in between himself and the IPC Security guy who was driving, Kevin Wilson. Mr Foster shoved his bald head into the front like an unwanted turkey egg.

“What do you mean?” Dr Warwick said.

“It’s just … this reminds me of the school trip I went on once to Wales in Year Five. All the cool kids got their own room but I was an extra so I had to stay with these two weird kids. One of them had night terrors. I hardly slept a wink that entire two-week trip.” Mr Foster sat back again. An egg being sucked back up the womb.

“And then the cool children decided to make fun of me when I fell off the zip wire.”
 

“Sounds horrible, sir,” Kevin said from the driver’s seat.
 

“It was, Kevin. It really was.”