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

by Luke Kondor

  Gary could remember the day he was born. Not many humans could do that, but Gary could. And he wasn’t even a human.

  He remembered coming out, tail first. He remembered his mother. He remembered his family. He missed them all.

  He walked over to the bedroom door and dug his claws into the carpet. As he did so, the cool material soothed his nerves. He pulled at it and the strings of fabric tore. His old companion would’ve been angry at him, but he would do it anyway whenever he wasn’t looking. It felt too good not to. You know how it is. Gary had seen more of life than most Tall Ones. For this reason he felt that if he wanted to scratch something, he should be allowed to scratch something. Gary remembered the first time he met a Tall One — a hairless, pink giant. He hadn’t been sure if Tall Ones were food or friend. He pulled his claws out of the carpet and jumped back onto the duvet with cartoon pictures of turtles. He sniffed it. The new Tall One had some strange smells. Like dirt.

  He wandered up the bed to where the Tall One rested his head. He pushed and pulled on the fabric. It felt right. He squatted down and peed. Once done, he pushed the fabric around to dry his paws and waited.

  Tonight, he thought, it will begin.

  Moomamu The Thinker

  As Moomamu fled the grassy banks with his hands full of Earth currency, his feet began to hurt. The paths were solid and flat and covered in tiny rocks. He kept standing on them, and whenever he ventured to the wrong part of the path the human-moving machines would scream at him.

  “Shut up,” he shouted back at them, remembering to point and flick his beard as he did. It was all about dominance, he remembered.

  Some of the vehicles were monstrous red blocks full of gatherings of humans from all different tribes. There were humans from a suited clan, always with little cow-skin cases by their sides. There were those from the tribe of black makeup, black hair, and sour facial expressions. The most interesting clan he saw was difficult to describe. Their facial hair came in all shapes and sizes, they were all in early adulthood, they wore ill-fitting clothing from a decade or two prior, and they all had a sense of superiority about them. An unusual tribe for sure.

  As he ran past the screaming vehicles, he came across a small round building full of the latter tribesmen. On the sign above it read ‘Shoreditch Grind’.

  He smelled the dark roasted caffeine seeds and the cow’s milk seeping out through the open door. The nonsense music followed the smell — banging drums and some shouting. Tribal stuff.

  The warmth of the place spilled out, calling to him inside. He’d felt his skin go bumpy and shaky and his nipples had become firm from the cold.

  Inside were more of the odd non-uniformed tribe, drinking from little cups of black liquid.

  He saw signs that read ‘coffee’, ‘beans’ and a lot of words ending in ‘o’. To his right, he noticed a man in leather shorts drinking from a tiny cup. To his left, a woman with her spawn on her knee drinking from a frothy white lactation thing. The mother, that is.

  Moomamu walked up to the man behind the counter. He had olive brown skin and a fine line of hair above his lip.

  “What can I get you?” he said. His accent was from a different part of Earth. Moomamu recognised it from his time as a Thinker. A plastic badge was pinned to the man’s chest. It read ‘Lucas’.

  Moomamu touched his nipples. Still firm from the cold.

  “Have you got anything hot?” he said and smiled at the man.

  “Erm … yes.” He looked up and down at Moomamu. “Interesting outfit by the way. Very brave.”

  “Okay, I will take one of your hot beverages.”

  Moomamu noticed Lucas looking at his shoulder, at the tattoo. He’d forgotten about it.

  “Okay, tea? Coffee? Macchiato? Cappuccino?” He pointed to the sign above his head.

  Moomamu didn’t want Lucas to think that he didn’t understand. He laughed like Lucas had told him a joke and said “I’ll take a cappuccino.”

  Lucas turned around and began working away on some metal machinery that screamed into the small metal bucket of cow’s milk and drooled deep dark caffeine into a cup.

  “Take a seat,” he said. “I’ll bring it over to you.”

  Moomamu tried to make sense of the music coming through the sound boxes in the corners of the room. It was a blend of tribal drumming and synthesised melodies, overlaid with vocal harmonies and a man shouting the words “Keep me coming back” over and over. Moomamu could tell by the man’s voice that he’d never procreated. He didn’t know why he knew. Maybe it was something in his voice. It had an air of unfulfillment in it.

  Moomamu sat down on a bench next to the woman with her spawn. He thought it was strange to see her drinking cow’s milk when she had two ripe bosoms of her own.

  “You know you could just …”

  The woman looked at Moomamu. He was about to go into the details of lactating mammary glands when Lucas arrived with his beverage.

  He placed it in front of him and waited expectantly.

  “What?” Moomamu said. “You want your currency now?”

  “No, no,” Lucas said, smiling.

  Moomamu sensed that Lucas was unhappy with him, but he wasn’t sure why. It was something to do with the facial movements. On the surface he was happy. His teeth were showing, his lips were curled at the edges, and his cheeks were flush. But in the micro-expressions — a slight dip in his brow — Moomamu could see his dissatisfaction.

  He did his best to mirror Lucas’s face before he turned to his cappuccino and Lucas walked back to the counter.

  “You should’ve said thanks,” the woman said. “It’s customary to say thanks in England.”

  Moomamu looked over to her and her little egg-headed larva.

  “Thanks,” he said, making his face do the smile configuration, but if she could read his micro-expressions she might see something a little different. She’d have seen that Moomamu didn’t like her. In fact he wanted her to leave. Then he could use her baby as currency for more food and beverages.

  “That’s okay, duck,” she said with a chuckle before going back to her drink.

  Moomamu smelled through the frothy bubbles and got a whiff of the caffeine. His nostrils flared and a shiver of warmth ran down his spine.

  “Oh,” he said. “This is good.”

  He sniffed some more and then licked the top of the froth. It was sweet and creamy and it made his taste buds dance. He giggled.

  The woman looked at him again.

  “Just leave me be, human woman, I’m enjoying my hot caffeine drink.”

  She tutted and said it was called a ‘cappuccino dear’ and turned back to her spawn.

  Moomamu dipped his face a little more into the drink and sighed. He noticed other people in the café looking at him and felt himself become embarrassed and hot.

  He picked the drink up and poured some of it into his mouth. The caffeine hit his tongue, and wow. It burned a little at first, which caught him off guard.

  He then pursed his lips and blew into it. The blowing motion came naturally to him, like he’d been doing it forever. In fact he’d done everything — walking, running, shouting, and now blowing, with ease, like he’d been doing it for years. How did he even know the language so well? Was it the body he was in? If it belonged to someone before him, it must have some residual thought patterns bouncing around in there.

  Or, perhaps being human was easy, or Moomamu was great. Difficult to tell for sure.

  But then he blew too hard into the cappuccino and the froth flew upwards and hit his face.

  He found himself laughing again, but then quietened when he saw the others looking at him.

  The flavour was so rich and deep and his body warmed throughout. He’d never experienced such a strange delight before. Various sensations playing on several of his new human senses.

  He tipped the receptacle upside down and shook whatever remained into his awaiting open mouth.

  “Another one,” he shouted to Lucas beh
ind the counter.

  He looked at Moomamu with his brow furrowed, but he nodded and said “Okay”.

  A few minutes later and Moomamu’s second cappuccino arrived and was better than the first. A perfect white foam top hiding the black within.

  “You know,” Lucas said, “I like your style.”

  Moomamu didn’t know what he was talking about, so he nodded.

  Lucas folded his arms and looked at Moomamu’s beard, his tattoo, his pants.

  “I can tell you don’t know anything about coffee, but here in Shoreditch it’s more about the attitude than the knowledge. We can teach you how to do the difficult stuff. How would you feel about working here? In the Grind?”

  “The Grind? I thought it was called the Shoreditch Grind?”

  “It is, but I shortened it.”

  “Okay, well, you better get a new sign then.”

  Moomamu held out his pile of currency from the park. He didn’t know how much any of it was.

  “How much currency will you trade me for my slavery?”

  Lucas looked at the metal circlets and single paper currency with his eyebrow raised.

  “I can pay you a little more than that,” he said.

  “Okay, human caffeine man. You should know that I don’t plan on being here for long. I will soon go back to my home with the stars. You see, I am meant for big things, much bigger than you could even imagine. I am somewhat of a god to you.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Lucas said. “Fine. Just like all my other employees.”

  Carol Francis

  “So it was only really in the last five minutes, in the last day of the year, that the predecessors of humans stretched their backs, and looked up a little more, and started calling themselves homo sapiens,” she said into the phone.

  Indie was lying on the tiled kitchen floor next to Carol. She was nibbling on her paw.

  On the other end of the phone she wasn’t even sure if June was still listening. She could hear her breathing, but she hadn’t said a word in over an hour. She could’ve been sleeping for all Carol knew.

  On the shelf above her there was a rosette that Indie had won earlier in the year. Fastest flyball run. It was next to a photo of herself, her husband Jim, and their two children. That was from a few years back.

  “And then, if you think about that, human life as we know it only really existed in the last five minutes of the year, so think about your own life, your own measly eighty years or so, and you realise you’re not even a minute of this planet’s time. You don’t even get that much, combined with the fact that there’re seven billion humans on the planet and you have to think that we don’t really matter at all, June.”

  June made a “mmmmn” sound. It wasn’t even a word, but it told Carol that she was boring.

  “I’m sorry June,” she said.

  “What? Why are you sorry?” June said.

  “I totally forgot what you were asking me to attend,” Carol admitted.

  “Training,” June said, seemingly waking herself back up. “I need you to come to agility training on Wednesday because we desperately need to get ready for competition. It’s a big one, super important, and we need all hands on deck to make it work.”

  Carol took a deep breath.

  Indie’s tail wagged with tired enthusiasm.

  “Have you not been listening to a word I’ve been saying?”

  “Sorry?” June said.

  “Have you not been listening to all my talk about the universe, the … the fucking shortness of life?”

  “What did you say?”

  June’s voice shifted. The swearword seemed to slap her out of her daze.

  “Sorry June, but maybe I’ve not been making myself clear. It’s my fault, not yours, it really is.”

  “So are you coming to the training? Are you going to help the team?”

  “June, I’ve been at every single training day, every event, every rally, everything for the last five, maybe six years …” She took a deep breath. “Of course I’m going to be there.”

  “Okay, brilliant news,” June said. “I’ll update the Facebook group and maybe even send a Tweet about it to our followers. Carol is on the team.”

  June hung up and Carol sighed.

  It didn’t matter, she thought. “We’ll all be dead soon anyway.”

  Indie’s ears perked and she sat up. A car was pulling up on the driveway.

  Aidan Black

  Aidan had been following the long-haired man from the café for twenty minutes, before he saw him turn into an empty cul-de-sac. He walked all the way up the street past several houses of nothing and entered the one on the end.

  It was semi-detached. The windows were boarded up with metal sheets and there was a brown Ford Fiesta parked outside the front. The front wheel and the rear bumper were missing. The windscreen was buried in a sea of parking tickets. And there were bin bags taped to where the rear passenger seat window should’ve been.

  Aidan waited and watched from the entrance to the cul-de-sac, hands in his pockets, chewing high-strength mint chewing gum. He waited twenty minutes before he decided that he could go and get the van.

  By the time he parked up, it was starting to rain. It was the fine rain that foreshadowed the coming storm.

  He got out, double checked that his tools were in the back, and locked it up.

  He stepped into the garden through the open gate — all rust and black paint. The grass was overgrown and there was a kid’s rusty bike with a bush growing through it.

  He did his best to step quietly. He looked at the small gaps in the boarded windows to see if he was being watched.

  It doesn’t matter.

  “It does if I get arrested,” he said.

  He walked up to the front door and looked into the house through the frosted glass but he couldn’t see anything. No movement. Nothing.

  He walked around the side of the house where he’d seen the long-haired man walk, treading as carefully as he could. He could see where a fence would have been, but it was now open to any and all squatters.

  Harsh breaths was laced with clean menthol. He took the gum from his mouth and pressed it into the brick wall of the house.

  He looked for a weapon but couldn’t see anything.

  You don’t need a weapon.

  Aidan peeked his head around the corner of the house and saw a back garden worse than the front — more grass, a children’s climbing frame in pieces, and a shed with broken windows. But no people.

  He held his breath to listen but still couldn’t hear anyone.

  He heard cars passing, trees swaying in the wind, and children playing somewhere in the distance, but he couldn’t hear … Wait …

  …

  Glass crushing underfoot somewhere in the house. Maybe upstairs? He couldn’t see anything in the window above his head. He took a step further into the garden. The back door to the kitchen was open. He took a step inside.

  It looked like the kitchen from his childhood. In fact, everything about this house reminded him of his childhood. The house he grew up in was different. As different as two houses could be, but there was something about the rusty faucets and the dirty floor. Those fucking rusty faucets. He could swear he’d used those faucets in his youth. It was like someone had moved the faucets of his parent’s home and slotted them here just to fuck with him.

  Aidan took another step forward and a rat jumped out and ran past his foot. Aidan shook his head in disgust.

  “Fucking rats,” he muttered under his breath.

  The floor was as dirty as they come but it had been swept. All the empty beer cans and food had been pushed to the sides. He was tempted to turn the faucet to see if the place had running water, but decided against it.

  He held his breath again and listened.

  Nothing.

  He carefully placed one foot in front of the other, again and again. The thought of taking his suit to the dry cleaners came to his mind. He did his best to forget, to focus.

>   Once through the kitchen, he was in the empty living room, and, just like the kitchen, it had been tidied. The crap and the rubbish had been pushed to the sides. Someone had been nesting.

  Still no weapons. He clenched his fist and stepped with more urgency, expecting to see the long-haired man at any time.

  Rip his tongue out.

  “I won’t do that,” he whispered. “I’m not going to rip a poor fucker’s tongue out.”

  He made his way to the exposed stairway and walked upwards. They creaked under his weight. He held his breath. He pushed on and picked up the pace. At the top of the stairs was the bathroom, which he looked in first.

  Broken mirror pieces on the floor. No sink. A toilet with no seat. Other than an empty pizza box and some old cans of Special Brew, the shower was empty.

  He turned back on himself walked into the adjacent bedroom, now making more and more noise.

  “Come on, I’m not here to hurt you,” he said aloud. He pushed open the other bedroom door. “I’m here to help you.”

  Kill him. Rip his tongue out. Burn his skin.

  “No!” he shouted as he walked into the master bedroom. “I’m not going to do that.” There was a soiled bed mattress on the floor and rubbish pushed to the edges of the room.

  Find him. Kill him. If you want to be successful you’ve got to …

  “Shut up,” he said. “For fuck’s sake.”

  He looked around, his fists ready. But he was alone. He breathed in through his nose three times, and then out through his mouth three times. It was a calming technique. It worked.

  “Sixty foot and made of diamond,” he whispered.

  He walked to the bedroom window to see if the man had escaped when he wasn’t looking.

  He’s here.

  Aidan heard the footsteps too late. He heard a thud, followed by an immense surge of pain running down the back of his neck.

  Carol Francis

  Jim groaned as he sat down on the reclining chair in the living room. He groaned more as he put the leg rest up. He pulled his baseball cap down so the peak covered his eyes and it wasn’t long afterwards that he drifted off to sleep.