by Kondor, Luke
The longer he was in the human body, the more he picked up from his human brain. The human names of the clothing were always on the tip of his tongue.
The length of fabric tied around his neck had become frayed where one of the cats had slashed at him, and the bottoms of his leg cover-uppers, no wait, the trousers, were sodden with dirt and wet.
He never thought he’d say it but he missed the excretion machines of Earth. He didn’t like the idea of excreting at all, but if he was going to do it, he’d prefer the feel of the cold porcelain throne against his buttocks. In this cell he’d been left with a tray full of pebbles, similar to the one Gary had used in his old room.
At least they changed the pebbles on a daily basis when they brought him the food — cooked animal flesh of a sort skewered on wooden sticks. He had no way to tell what animal gave its flesh, but he was sure a bit of Mexican/Indian spice mix wouldn’t go amiss. He tried to suggest such a thing to one of the guards but was met with a bashing of the end of the guard’s wooden thump-stick to his stomach.
As he lay on the damp rags, trying to find a dry patch, he looked to the ceiling — so dark he may as well have had his eyes closed. Outside the cats loitered. Muggy, thuggish guards. The ones that Moomamu had seen came in several flavours. One missing a tail, the other a leg, and another, bigger one with its missing eye. That one was the alpha for sure.
He didn’t speak to the guards. Not anymore. Not after the first few times he’d tried. Each word was met with a swift thump-stick to the body.
You see, there was a stick, a wooden pole, made just the right size to fit through various holes in the walls and the door. Thump-sticks, or thumpers as the cats called them. The holes hidden behind metal doors were on all sides of the prison cell.
A word, cooking suggestion, plea, or even hygiene advice from Moomamu was quickly followed by that quiet scratching of a metal hatch opening somewhere in the dark cell, soon to be followed by a thump-stick. The jabbing was usually followed by the laughter and the meows of the guards.
“Each word spoken by human is punishable by thumper,” they said, over and over.
Moomamu had pains in his legs, arms, and mostly, his stomach and lower back — a favourite place for the cats to jab.
No more talking for Moomamu.
He coughed as quietly as he could, covering his mouth to muffle the sound. In the dark he had time to think. It reminded him of his time in the stars, the eternity before he’d woken as a human.
Up there, he had stimulus. He could experience an empire falling, or a new species mutating, or a colliding of stars, all within the space of a millennia. There seemed to always be something happening in his Thinking Point, but in here, in the cell, there was nothing but him and his memories.
He pushed himself upwards and leaned his back against the corner of the cell and cried like a human spawn, tasting the salt from his tears as they travelled down his face and into his mouth. The tears didn’t quench his thirst.
“Teleport” was the word that came to his mind more than any other. “Teleport, teleport, teleport.”
He said the word so many times it made little sense to him anymore. He began to think that his ability to move his matter from one part of the universe to another wasn’t of his choosing. Perhaps it had been some external force all along. A force that had finished with him since he’d saved the humans, and was satisfied to see him rot in this cell.
“Please,” he said between sobs. “Please take me home.”
“Home?” a voice said in the dark. Not his own. The voice of a crumpled old man. A smoked timbre to his voice.
Moomamu hesitated to say anything for fear of the reply being a thump-stick in the dark.
He peered around, trying to determine where the voice came from. Maybe it was his own mind? Maybe he’d become broken?
“Why would you want to go home?” the voice said.
Moomamu looked around the cell, squinting, focusing, but he couldn’t work it out. The voice seeped through the gaps in the walls, worked through them like water.
“Are you still there, boy?” it said.
But Moomamu didn’t reply. He remained quiet. He laid down in the darkness.
“Hellooo?” the voice whispered, almost tunefully. “Are you theeerreee?”
Moomamu buried his face into his hands as more warm tears fell from his face. He tried to control his breathing, but couldn’t stop his heart from racing or his lungs from sputtering.
“Why won’t you talk to me?” the voice asked again as Moomamu cried in the dark. “Why won’t you talk to me?”
JoEl The Engineer
Marvellous. It was all so marvellous.
A four-wheeled machine powered by what smelled like gasoline. The wheel in his hands to control the direction. The pedals to pump the fuel into the system. The stick and clutch for shifting between engine patterns. And another pedal to slow the thrusters, or so he assumed. Simple stuff really.
He had a little more difficulty navigating the human road systems. It was all backwards to him. Why were there so many different vehicles in the first place? On Gamma Nebulous it was one hundred percent public transport. Apart from warp, of course, but only certain breeds were allowed licenses for warp travel. And only certain people of certain bloodlines were even given an opportunity to apply for such a license. None of which he was party to, but he hadn’t been sent to Earth in any of the normal processes. Somebody high up in the chain pulled some special strings to get him there.
An elderly human male in a red car next to him screamed something at JoEl. He read his moving lips to be saying something about “lanes” and “wrong way”. The human’s wrinkly bald face reddened and hissed from behind his protective glass window.
JoEl had no idea what he meant by lanes, so he pushed the acceleration pedal down and drove onwards, shifting the vehicle to the other side of the road, leaving the old man in the distance behind him.
JoEl shrugged.
Normally, if JoEl wasn’t sure about something, he’d contact Tech Admin — a travel guidance system for Freelancers. Pricey, but worth it. They helped with transport methods. Places of interest. Local laws. That kind of thing.
No need though. He was handling fine on his own—
Honk!
Oh very well, he thought as he moved back to the lane going with the traffic.
He still couldn’t believe how much the Earth had changed in such a short space of time. He saw the youths of the humans using mobile communication technologies in the form of black handsets. Touchscreen. Technology that was similar to his own tablet device — a device that allowed him access to the Freelance Network. From there he could see his schedule, job list, invoices, billings, and, most importantly, the Freelance Network Boards. In his line of work, access to the Boards was a priority. Heck, without it, JoEl would he homeless. His wife Nahl and their child TeAl would have no food to eat, no water to wash in. They’d be destitute. JoEl didn’t take this lightly. the Freelance Network brought him opportunities that other Nebulans could only dream about.
The Board also had tutorials on how to do pretty much anything. If you needed to know how to unpick a Zungian lock, how to impersonate a Royal Tau Guard, or hotwire a human car. It was all there for the Freelancers to take. Knowledge shared for free amongst colleagues trying to make their way in the universe.
As the dial on the car’s dashboard shot upwards and to the right, a camera flashed him.
Curious, he thought. Very curious.
He continued to push the pedal down. Any harder and it might’ve gone through the floor. He overtook vehicles of varying shapes and sizes. There was even a much larger vehicle, long, carrying several of the smaller vehicles on its back.
Another of the human vehicles screamed at him as it turned off to the lane to the right hand side.
“Sorry,” JoEl said, chuckling away like a kid in a hoversack. He thought of his son, TeAl. He would’ve loved to ride in a human vehicle like this. “Maybe one day
TeAl will make his way to Earth,” he said to himself as his chuckling died away.
If it’s still there, that is.
The sun started to drop from the sky and the poles lining the streets lit up, illuminating the road ahead of him.
JoEl whispered the words “Tech 1.2.0” to his jacket. A module beneath his overcoat vibrated and beeped with life.
“You’re through to Tech Admin, Mooan-oo speaking, how can I be of service today?” The voice vibrated through the module on JoEl’s overalls and spoke directly into his hearing aid, a mechanical piece of wetware wiring his audio equipment directly to his overalls. Each word tickled the tiny bones in his ear drums.
“Well, my dear, this is Freelance Engineer 12a speaking. I’m currently on Earth performing job number 8c.12 and I need some help with directions.”
A few seconds passed as the Tech Admin brought up his details.
“Okay JoEl, please bear with me whilst I pull up the relevant information.”
The inside of JoEl’s red-tinted lenses beeped and a small display appeared in the corner. A map. His location marked with a small zero and the target point an x.
“JoEl, I have to inform you that you’re currently violating Earth speed laws relevant to the country of England and should slow your speed down to at least sixty on the dial.” Moano-oo’s voice was filled with faux-concern. JoEl wondered how many other Freelancers she’d spoken to that day.
“I’ll be fine,” he said.
“Okay. JoEl, I can see that in a short while you will need to turn left.”
JoEl was on his way to Arron Turner. He was a young one. Not of working age. Probably still studying, dreaming about the possibilities of his future — which was a shame really. JoEl wondered if Arron had been activated yet. Would he know JoEl was on his way?
As the clouds parted and the starlight appeared above the car, JoEl looked up. He wondered where he would be sent to next after this job was complete. How long would it be before he got to go back home again?
An hour of Earth time passed quickly as JoEl drove through the busy streets and roads of the country. With Tech Admin’s directions he found himself in a quieter, suburban area. Houses packed with humans on every side of him. Perfect gardens with beautifully-arranged oxygen farms. Homes ideal for families. In a lot of ways it reminded him of Gamma Nebulous. The vast gardens and seas of housing estates that lined the planet’s equator.
JoEl remembered the summers of Gamma Nebulous — the smell of the animal slaughters. A matured carven for each family. A tradition. Smiles and bloody mist filling everyone’s nostrils. It was the adult’s job to close the carven and the closing would mark a special day for a Nebulan like JoEl. A rite of passage. The first days of adulthood began on those warmer days where the carven would suffocate in the summer air, buried in its own flesh.
“And the target is just up the road here,” Tech Admin said.
“Brilliant,” JoEl said. “I’ll be fine from here. Thanks again.”
The module died and JoEl shook the memories of Nebulous from his mind. The car slowed, dropping to a lower gear. He gently nudged it forward. The houses were quiet. It would be sleeping hours for the majority of the humans. Some of the windows in the houses still had their lights on, but most were out. Many of the humans were turning themselves off, resting until it was time for their routines to begin again the next morning.
He read the numbers on the front of each house door: 21, 23, 25. He arrived at the one he recognised. The house that belonged to the family Turner. He pulled the car up on the side of the road and waited. The lights were still on in the house, and so were the neighbours’. It was still too active. He would have to wait a little while before making his way in to finish the assignment.
Nisha Bhatia
“You fucked that up a bit, didn’t you,” the man said down the phone. It was her producer: Tom.
Producers were always called Tom, and they always had a beard that spanned the spectrum of hair — brown and blond and grey with a peppering of ginger.
“Tom, I’m so sorry,” Nisha said. “But I can’t really take responsibility for having a mind spasm, can I?”
She’d known Tom for more than fifteen years. They’d gone to university in Manchester together to study Broadcast Media. He went down the production route and she went on to become a presenter. He went for the behind-the-scenes glory of spreadsheets and equipment and budgets and she went with makeup and the always-smiles.
“Look, I’ll be honest, it isn’t going to kill you or anything. You’ve built up such a solid relationship with the audience over the last five years of this show I think you’re allowed to have a brain fart or whatever that was every now and again,” Tom said.
Nisha had escaped the studio in good shape. As soon as the cameras went dead she had burst out of there, made an excuse about picking up her non-existent nephew from a made-up school, and avoided all eye contact as she made her getaway. The only casualty was the receptionist, Joan. Or was it Joanne? Or Jan?
“There’s always tomorrow,” June said.
The receptionist had meant to say it as a way of caring. She’d meant it to be a gentle caressing of the face, but it felt more like a backhand slap. The kind that left her sore and red and embarrassed.
She switched her phone to her other hand and rubbed her sore cheek and jumped over a puddle. She walked the long stretch of road leading to her apartment building: the twenty-two-storey monstrosity reaching for the stars in Canary Wharf.
It was already getting cold and dark. The summer months had passed by and she hadn’t even noticed.
The warm damp smell of suds and conditioner tickled her nose. A laundrette across the road. Inside the dryers tumbled freshly-cleaned clothes. It looked cozy. It looked warm. A mother was inside, emptying a tumble dryer as her child played with a yoyo.
“Nisha?” Tom said from the phone. “You still there?”
As he spoke, Nisha stepped in a puddle. The muddy water seeped into her black shoe and up into her tights. An “eurgh” escaped her mouth and she shivered.
Five years. The show had been running for five years now. In the beginning, they were challenged every which way for having a show that clashed with the greats — The Morning Show and Jezza’s Breakfast Hour. White, English, proud. The old-fashioned hosts of yesteryear. The staples of British television. But Tom and Nisha had stuck with it. They pushed through and now look at them. They had their loyal viewers who loved what they did and kept coming back every single morning. Even with the colour of her skin she’d been taken in as a British household name.
They came back every morning to listen to Nisha talk about light-hearted news like fairs and fad diets and charity events. The important stuff.
“Is anybody talking about it? Any chatter at all?” she asked Tom.
“Not really,” he replied. She could hear the salt in his voice. “Maybe some people somewhere online are talking about how you had a stroke or something.”
“A stroke? I’m twenty-seven, for fuck’s sake.”
“I know, I know, but, there’s not much you can do with the weirdoes who hang around on the internet. Some of them are even claiming you had a vision.”
“What?” she said, trying to chuckle at the idea. “A vision?”
She noticed a group of teens up ahead, hooded smokers, looking over at her from the other side of the road. A small one on a bicycle with a lit cigarette poking out of his mouth. She picked up her pace.
“Yeah I know, right?” he said.
An awkward moment passed between the two of them.
“I had an idea for a guest,” she said, finally.
“Go on.”
“Dr Warwick Dalton.”
“The space guy?” he said.
“Yeah, he’s just started a new podcast. I figured it would be fun to get him on to talk about the future of the planet and all that.”
“The future of the planet and all that?” he repeated her words slowly, as if spitting th
em through custard.
As Nisha passed the tribe of youths in hoods, she heard one of them say “Go back to your own fucking country you fucking Muslim.”
She walked on, ignoring it. For one, she wasn’t a Muslim; she was born English to Indian immigrants. And secondly, why would that matter? Still, she picked up the pace.
“Well?” she said.
“Yeah, we’ll look into it,” Tom said before putting the phone down.
As she neared her building she came to a crossroads. The road ahead — the straight road — led to home, to warm food, a bath, bed, fresh for tomorrow’s morning show. But to turn left … well, it could go a few ways.
She took a step forward, towards home, but then instantly pulled it back and whispered “one last time” to herself.
The road going left took to her towards a different sort of familiarity. It took her towards a place she once called home, back when the apartment buildings didn’t reach so high. It took her to her husband’s flat.
On the way, she stopped at an off-licence to buy a bottle of whatever rosé was on offer at the time. She’d normally buy something smaller, a beer or whatever, but she needed a large bottle today. She’d had a stroke, goddammit! She always had the small bottle of vodka hidden in her inside jacket pocket. It was a gift. Something she was supposed to drink after giving birth. A welcoming cheers. Nine months sober.
She pushed the thoughts of the bottle to the back of her mind and wiped her eyes as she rounded the corner towards the cinder-block of an apartment building. London life, tired, looking for some sort of reprieve from the hustle of the city, was all around her. Homeless people hiding from the rain and making huts out of cardboard boxes. People on phones with briefcases. More youths. All she was doing, she told herself, was offering some help in finding reprieve, solace, fun.