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

“I’m good thank you, Nisha,” he said, a little too quiet, but it was okay. It would be one of the heartfelt interviews rather than the loud and bubbly ones. She lifted her knee and wrapped her hands around it, interlocking her fingers. A posture she’d found to make guests feel relaxed, at home, easy peasy.
 

The idea was to make the guest forget about the camera. To forget that the footage was being broadcast to millions of British people. Hell, there was even the internet now. They could say something stupid. End up remixed and auto-tuned. They could go viral.

He nervously coughed into his hand and his eyes darted from one side of the room to the other.

“All things considered,” he finally added.

“That’s right,” Nisha said, trying to match his sombre tone. “Because you’ve not had a good time of it recently, have you, Alan?”

“No, I haven’t, to be honest,” he said, shaking his head like a child who’d had a bad day at school.
 

There was
almost
an awkward silence before—

“Go on,” she said, willing him onwards.

“So, I’m a soldier — served in Iraq.”

She nodded, leaned in closer. She could smell the oily mist of sweat that surrounded him. A salty aura. She tried to hide her disgust. She had to show concern when it was due, happiness when it was due. She was a puppet. The producers of the show had their hands inside her. Her operators.

“And … I saw things, action, killing; horrible, dreadful things that no one should ever have to see in their lives.”

“Mmmmm,” she said, nodding harder. In the fake window behind her they had a backdrop of the River Thames. The big wheel — the London Eye — in plain sight. She wondered if she’d ever go on it. It was a still picture, but the wheel seemed to be spinning on its axis. Slowly, but moving for sure.

“Yes, well.” He wiped the sweat from his brow. “There are times now … when … I wake up from my nightmares and … these nightmares are so bad I often wake up and the bed is saturated.”

There was a moment of silence. Uncomfortably long until—

“Saturated?” she said, lost in the conversation. ”With sweat?”

Alan shook his head. He was confused. Reddening. Maybe even embarrassed.

“Go on,” she said, watching the wheel spin in her peripheral vision.

“So I, with the help of my family, wrote a book which documents my experiences … the horror of it all … the killing …” Alan’s voice trailed off.
 

In the distance, she heard a faint whine, quiet at first, but building. She felt off-kilter. More than the hangover. Her balance was off, like the world’s gravity was rotating around her head, pulling her downwards towards an ever-moving floor. She could see Alan — suit and sweat — and she could see the cameras, the crew, even the backdrop of London, but it was all too distant. The wheel shouldn’t be moving. It didn’t make sense to her. The planet spun with increasing intensity and she couldn’t make sense of it. She needed to lie down. If she could just lie down for a second.
 

Please …

If she could please just fucking lie down!

…

Somewhere someone asked if she was okay.
 

She couldn’t answer them. She was passed all that now. She needed to sleep it off — whatever
it
was.
 

The heat of the studio lights was now a physical force, pushing her to her side, forcing her over herself. The world spun, faster and faster. Her limbs loosened, detached even, and a spiral of black worked its way outwards from the centre of the chaos until it swallowed her up.

For a second she was weightless.

For a second she was at peace.

She wasn’t dead. Neither was she alive. She just
was
. Maybe it was heaven. Maybe this was the afterlife and she was about to spend eternity doing this. Floating and whatnot.

She was now well above planet Earth. Stars were all around her. Moons and suns too. Glorious nebulae oil paintings draped over her. She was in space. But it was all only on her left side. It was her other side, the right one, which was pitch black. Devoid of light or wonder. All of life on her one side and nothing but dark emptiness on the other.

Before getting a chance to wonder what had happened to the stars, something moved. Something in the void. She couldn’t see the figure itself, but could make out its movements in the thick black, like a watery creature swimming in the night sea, catching glimmers of the moonlight.
 

The movement was small and distant. Taking up nothing more than the palm of her hand, but then she realised she’d been focusing on a single part of the whole. Like she was looking at an ant on a patch of grass, and only after refocusing her eyes she saw that the ant was surrounded by an army of others. The floor crawling with life.

This was much the same. As her eyes refocused, shifted perspective, she realised that the black she saw before her wasn’t an absence of light and stars. It was a mass itself. It was so big, so enormous, that it blocked out the whole of space on her one side. And it was the mass that was moving towards her, creeping forward.

She heard its vibrations. The fractal grinding of magnets and metal colliding. It was a vessel of sorts — a spaceship. Not solid, but made of millions, maybe billions, of tiny moving blocks. Forever changing its shape, rearranging, screaming as it did so, like the ant army, migrating to a new nest.
 

She looked on in wonder and fear as it crawled towards her. The moving parts of the ship climbed over her, screaming, consuming her, pulling her inside, where each of the tiny black parts tore her body to pieces on a microscopic level, atom by atom. It didn’t need her flesh for food or sustenance, but it wanted her dead, and any other lifeforms it came across. It was rage, pure and simple, divided up into robotic nano-machinery. Chaos. A flood. A signal.

She shrieked as the last of her was consumed and the lights became clear again.

Movement.
 

People.

It was the camera crew. They were looking at her — the producer to her right, slack-jawed, the tight skin of his bald head reflecting the studio light.

She looked to her left to see the soldier, the author. His face was one of surprise. She followed his gaze to his wrinkly old hand resting on her shoulder. She saw the curls of hair on the backs of his fingers and the yellowing fingernails.
 

“Are you okay?” he said, more confident than ever.

The producer, peering over the autocue, had his hands pressed together, praying for a miracle. Not another headline.
 

“Yes,” Nisha said finally. “I’m fine.” She forced her lips to part, her bleached teeth to show. She shook her head and said, “I came over all funny for a second.” She brushed her head to emphasise the funny-ness of it all.

The soldier’s hand retreated and they turned back to the camera with the little red light on it.

“And speaking of funny, please join us after the break where we’ll be talking to professional funny man, comedian Roy Lacey.”

“And my book?” the soldier interjected.

“What?” Nisha said.

“Can I quickly plug my book?” His face showed genuine concern for the first time.

“Oh yes, yes, of course,” Nisha said. “Please remember to go and buy
The Man Who Went To War
by our friend Alan Whitman, available from all good bookstores. Thank you very much for coming on the show, Alan. I found your words inspirational and thought-provoking.”

With each word she spoke she could feel the rage prodding at her from behind the wall of cameras, waiting for the right moment to pounce — the commercial break. The producer in the shadows.

“Thank you,” Alan said, now smiling, all relaxed. Like he was settling into his favourite chair to read a good book. “Thank you.”

JoEl The Engineer

His name was JoEl The Engineer. Pronounced Joh-Ehl Duh Enj-Inn-Ear.

He pressed his fingers against his lenses, making sure they were secure against his skin. The lenses, with their brown-red tint, showed a different shade of Earth. Oh, how the world had changed. A smile crept up on him as he looked upon the humans.

No more horse-slaves carrying their masters in their little wooden carriages. No more dark streets filled with the dying and the plagued. Oh, humans, he thought to himself, you’ve outdone yourself.

“Marvellous,” he said.

He smelled the fine pollution lining the air and, to him, it smelled like progress. It wouldn’t be much longer, at this rate, before the humans took their seat in the Galactic Community. Maybe in the next century or so. JoEl looked forward to it. He enjoyed the ethnic diversity within the Community — a collection of planets, sharing in technology and resources, and governed by a hand-grown collective of great minds.
 

His fingers twitched as he ran them across the surface of his jacket — a long black coat made from the skin of a desert-turtle of Fradgor. It draped down to his exposed feet, hiding his overalls beneath.

JoEl wasn’t any old engineer. He was an onsite engineer. Which meant he travelled for his job. Depending on where his work sent him, he could find himself in one corner of the galaxy one decade, and in the opposite corner the next. He was a nomad in many ways, only seeing his family back on Gamma Nebulous every twenty-five years or so — on the Earth calendar, that was.
 

“Mornin’,” said an elderly woman with pale sagging skin and the grey hair of an almost-dead. She was supporting herself with a stand mechanism, using its four legs to supplement her own two. “The sun’s out.” She pointed to the star in the sky — Sol, the big flaming gaseous ball.
 

JoEl couldn’t imagine it
not
being out. If it wasn’t, they’d all be dead.

“Yes,” he said, looking up to it. “I’d say you’ve got about another five billion years or so.”

The woman squinted at him, unsure what he meant.
 

“Well,” he clarified, “once the sun burns all of its hydrogen, it will become a red giant. It will burn bright, becoming more luminous, hotter, and will expand all the way out to the inner circle of the solar system, destroying this planet in the process.”

Her saggy skin sagged a little more and the creases above her brow deepened.

“No need to worry,” the engineer said. “You’ll be long dead before then.”

She turned and made a clicking noise with her mouth before scuttling away with her walking device. He smiled as wide a smile as the tendons in his face would allow.
 

He crossed the road to the other side and found himself in front of a row of merchant shops — food, drinks, furniture, that sort of thing. The last time he was on this planet, he’d decided against eating any of the human food, on account of the plague that was rapidly killing humans, but he’d always regretted it. Eating ethnic food was part of the fun of working onsite. He’d read on the Freelance Network how good the meat and the alcohol was and he’d always felt a pang of regret that he never indulged.

A group of Earth children, all in the same uniform of grey bottoms and red tops with a little white insignia on the chest, passed by. A school of them, led by a single teacher, bald of the head, bearded of the face.
 

How fascinating, he thought, to see how small and hairless the humans began, and how hairy and saggy they became. Years were not kind to humans. One of the children in red bumped into JoEl’s side. His fingers twitched.

“Sorry sir,” the little blond-haired boy said. He looked up and JoEl caught his blue eyes.
 

“It’s okay, little one,” he said looking up to the teacher, who waved an apology to him.

JoEl continued. He passed some houses, small red-bricked boxes with little patches of oxygen farms — squares of grass, flowers, and trees.
 

He took a deep breath and pulled the Earth’s air inside. A rich mix of oxygen and smog that clung to the back of his two hundred teeth.
 

“Marvellous,” he said again.

He passed a shop window full of pictures of houses attached to monetary values. He caught his reflection in the glass. His skin was nice and tight around his face. He hoped it would stay that way for the duration of the job. A female inside waved at him and he waved back.

Next up, a window display full of animal carcasses strung up. Their innards removed and exposed for all to see. JoEl’s mouth salivated.

Tasty.
 

In handwritten gold paint, a sign above the door read ‘Jim’s Butcher’s’. The white splintered door was closed but the smell of flesh still found its way to JoEl’s nostrils. He pressed his hand against the cold wood and pushed it open. A bell rang above his head as the fresh wave of meat-stink hit him.
 

With all their progress, the humans still required analogue technologies such as doorbells. Disappointing, but still, the flesh appealed.

Inside a cool breeze from a mechanical fan washed over JoEl and his finger’s twitched again. The shadows of the carcasses in the windows covered him. The counter was a display of more flesh. Some ground up and wrapped in organic matter. Some flayed strips. Some larger chunks of meat shaped into balls. A tongue of some sort — beastly, and full of pockets and nodules.

“Oh yes,” he said aloud to nobody. “Lovely.”

“You’d like some beef tongue?” a man said from behind the counter. His patch of grey hair and the tops of his eyes peered over the counter — a little piglet human with a belly full of meat and fat and fluids. Oh dear. Not too healthy. Is this the sign to come for the humans? Old and frail or fat and short? His chubby chin barely reached above the counter.

“Yes,” JoEl said. “I’d like some tongue. And please give me some of those big pieces of … what are they called? “

“Steak?” the piglet said. “You’d like a couple of sirloins?”

“Yes,” JoEl said, showing him a good solid Earth grin. “I’d like to try a few of your delicacies.”
 

“Right, great, well then, well … let’s see … How many would you like?” The upper corner of the piglet’s lip lifted and his nose scrunched up. A horrible display.