You ever have not merely a bad idea–but a terrible, no-good, utterly compelling idea? A hideous idea that won’t leave you alone until you act on it? An idea that makes folks say “You shouldn’t have! No, really, I’m not being polite. You shouldn’t have.”
No? Me neither.
This year’s April Fools’ book might be as close as I ever get.
This novel will go to Kickstarter backers and Patronizers first. I’ll have the print and ebook in my bookstore next, then it’ll be available on retailer sites. If you want to know more, you can read the uncopyedited first chapter below. If you want to know less, go elsewhere.
Here’s the first chapter.
Assimilate (R-23 Mix)
A sky flared silver-blue around a scrawny yellow sun. Scattered shrubs too stubborn to accept extinction cracked through dirt scorched to pavement and clawed towards the sky, dusty green leaves stretched to catch any hint of rain or falling sweat or spit. Heat-drenched stones had become open-air kilns hotter than the dirt. The only people who willingly stayed were rocks.
But if you stayed, if you watched, you’d see the innocent convict reassemble himself on this parched world. Upon discovering he had a mouth, he promptly screamed. A billion billion compatible life forms in the galaxy, and he’d escaped into a filthy meatsuit. A meatsuit on a world that was pure death to algae-based life.
But the GalactiCops would never look for him on this dead-end blue-green world.
The convict tried to cackle, but this body didn’t even have gills.
He wobbled on stolen feet. Only two legs? Clumsy. Unreliable. Plus, two-legged species were always the ones to invent police. Sociologists claimed it had something to do with a fondness for kicking each other in the fork. A handful of bipeds decided that they needed to impose their morality on others and in just a few million years they tromped all over the galaxy telling the aquatics to stop singing starhymns and the algae to stop churning.
There might be police here. But not GalactiCops.
The distant horizon wobbled. Balance! If he fell, the superheated dirt would harm the meatsuit. Fine, let the host handle that—what? Breathe? What was breathe?
Incendiary air wheezed in through the face-holes, inflating the torso.
His vision stabilized.
Oxygen exchange through a bellows? What prankster had designed this biome?
Worry about that later. Body first.
Two arms, two legs, attached to a central torso. Bilateral symmetry. A paltry five digits on each hand, but one of them was opposable. Convenient, that. A lump of hard bone atop the torso, half-covered in sensory organs. A food-hole with grinding bones top and bottom, two air-holes above it, two (ouch!) visual organs further up. Audio receptors on each side, nice for echolocation. Thin fur over the top. A flexible pinkish-brown membrane encased the meatsuit. The convict’s healthy spore-green was suffusing through the membrane, tightening his control.
A word drifted up from the host: man. He was a man. Male.
Not just meat, but sexed meat? Dis-gus-ting. No wonder they kicked each other in the fork.
#
This poor bastard won’t be on screen much but he’ll shadow the whole picture, so you need to know a couple things. The Prime Algae had felt the need for an innovative thinker unconstrained by society’s preconceptions so it had meticulously selected his sperm spores instilling intelligence, unconventionality, curiosity, and persistence. His native form was an endlessly flexible mass of algae the size and strength of a Chevette—yes, there’s newer cars that size, but we’re in 1989 so let’s keep the Mini Cooper reboots out of shot. He’d gone off and solved some of the Parent Algae’s more pressing problems, incidentally covering a few planets in a brand-new high-reason computational cyanobacteria of his own devising. A couple animal species made ridiculous claims to “own” those planets, when even meatsuits know that algae is welcome everywhere. The convict had gone so far as to make the results of his research freely available through the modulated digestive gas emissions all sensible species used for communication. Unlike light interception or vibration analysis, even the most primitive life forms could perform direct chemical analysis. How could he have been more generous, more transparent? The animals only had to take a good whiff to get ample warning of atmospheric changes, but no, they hadn’t bothered!
Enter the GalactiCops.
Exit to the prison planet Plutocrat’s Pleasure.
The convict had scavenged the parts to build a spatial inverter. Not much of one. Just enough to get a few million spores and a few gigasouls of his essence across space in a self-reassembling container. Patient hours probing the light years in search of not just a usable host body, but a host body near equipment that could be autoassembled into a useful multitool. It wouldn’t do any good to escape to a resource-stripped planet, but with a multitool he could build the tools to build the tools to return to the Parent Algae and heroically unleash a cyanobacterial Golden Age across the galaxy.
The first step, escape, had succeeded.
The host wore the chunky spore pod on a chain around his neck. The spatial inverter had reassembled the atoms of whatever devices the target had been using into a multitool, a little clunky but you couldn’t expect an algorithm sketched on blotting paper to understand style or grace. One end of the multitool’s shaft was hollow, designed to slide over one of the host’s upper limbs up to the middle joint so the meatsuit could seize the control bar. The other end was serviceable crystals and controls. With this he could slice mountains or smelt carbon dust into delicate starwarp lace.
The host’s brainstem surged in satisfaction. The multitool was very male? What? A repulsive image flashed from the host. Meatsuits were even worse than he’d imagined!
Appalling or not, he wore one now. He had to care for it, return it in better condition than he found it. The meatsuit wore protective cloths over most of its body, exposing only the head and hands. Everything felt overheated. Surely the meatsuit didn’t live in this barren oven! It had to have shelter, somewhere.
Dread rippled through him. Was this species at the dying end of a Great Filter? Had he escaped to a planet wheezing its last?
Mountains ringed the horizon. One looked closer than the others.
The host urged that way. It might not be in charge, but it didn’t want to dry out and flake away either. It urged the convict to bring along the round canteen, but the thought carried an obscene image of unscrewing the top and wrapping its food- sphincter around the opening. The convict wanted nothing to do with sphincters.
Now, a name. Algae recognized each others by their emissions. Meatsuits used stupid names and even more stupid titles, transmitted by vibrations in electromagnetics or water or stone. Start with the title, indicating rank. Doctor? No, the host was a Doctor, a doctor of rocks. The convict wasn’t anything like this creature. Not for long. He needed a title that meant knowledge-sharer, discoverer of new wisdom—
The host threw back Professor.
Yes. Professor. Professing the truth. That would work. Now the name. He gathered up his memory of his personal emissions aroma and told the host to translate it. A jumble of pointless implications and impressions came back, wrapped around a few clear words.
Good enough. He would fit in.
Until he didn’t need to.
Professor Raisin Bran Farts set out to show them. Show them all.
#
Speaking of names, we need an establishing shot of our approaching GalactiCops. There they are, approaching Earth. Saucer-shaped GalactiCop Cruiser 82 has all the sleek styling of a Cybertruck and the timeless grace of a moose on fentanyl, but the inertialess drive goes from zero to everything in nothing so who cares how stupid it looks?
The Greys invented police long before humans did. One of the things they police is access to humans. It’s not that they care about us. Humanity hasn’t evolved enough to join the galactic market and hasn’t invented antigrav so the Galactic Species Index classifies us as livestock. If someone figures out how to profitably strip-mine us before we get our act together, we’re done. While the Orion’s Sword civilizations consider human pineal glands a potent aphrodisiac, we’ve put so many toxic chemicals in our environment that the Swordian Morality League has taken to saying, “take gland for your last stand.” The Greys put humanity on the Protected Species list, which isn’t so much for our benefit as giving them another excuse to put the boot in. The Swordian Society for Responsible Human Ranching will get that law changed one day and swoop in to save us from ourselves, for them.
Greys have jointless limbs, almost like tentacles. Their three fingers bend wherever way. They’re kind of like turtles with extra forehead nostrils and extensible necks. Each giant eye has one lid. It blinks up. Sort of creepy, but not a bad creepy.
The more experienced GalactiCop was on his fifth life, old enough to actually be grey. His people came from the sunny side of a tidelocked inner planet like Mercury. Most bright siders never leave their tunnels, so when he departed his colleagues named him Bright Land. That happens to be the meaning of our name Lambert, so we’ll go with that.
The newer cop still had the bronze hide of his first life and the impish humor of the young, but he was serious about being the best police he can. He actually read Blackstar’s Simplified Law for The Fuzz and marked notes in the margins. They’re not even the kind of notes about how a GalactiCop could leverage the law and his position to get free probing from the Greys Of Negotiable Affection. His colleagues call him Serious but that’s not a name here so we’ll call him Earnest.
By the time the Professor learned the importance of carrying water when hiking through the inland California desert in high summer, Bert and Ernie were landing. Ernie hopped to the armory and drew a turboblaster, calling “Come on, partner!”
Bert didn’t even look up. He was eating a burrito.[1] Not just any burrito, but Galactic Cuisine’s brand new Deluxe Everything Jumbo. In his last life he’d had a side gig as a Burrito Influencer on NextGalaxy. While reincarnation had stolen his soothing high-pitched grinding voice, and with it his audience, he maintained his in-depth knowledge of the art form and Galactic Cuisine still had him on their reviewer list.
Be warned, Galactic Cuisine never removes anyone from their reviewer list. Tearing open the wrapper legally grants Galactic Cuisine a nonexclusive, irrevocable license to analyze, resell, or modify the consumer. Nobody reads license shrinkwrap, so it’s fine. Once Bert opened a burrito, his GC-updated enzymes wouldn’t let him stop eating until he devoured the whole thing. Bert believed it was because he was “savoring,” but the truth is all Galactic Cuisine food tastes like violently molested sea cucumber.
Ernie’s impatient ripples annoyed Bert. “Listen. Ernie.”
“He’ll get away!”
“Nah,” Bert grunted around a mouthful of Genuine Fast-Breeding-When-Fed-But-Adorably-Purry Fuzzballtm burrito filling. “Don’t take that little turboblaster. Get the big one.”
Ernie perked right up at that, but he’d spent too much time with Simplified Law for the Fuzz to just snatch it. “Is this perp that tough?”
“Who’s in charge here, kid?”
“You are.”
“That’s right.” Bert chomped. “This fungus busted out of a high-security prison fifty-nine parsecs away. It’s dangerous.” Still chewing, he hauled himself to the door and selected a pistol turboblaster. “Don’t take no chances. Weapons on fricassee. You see our escapee, you put him down.”
They emerged on the same baked desert the Professor loathed, but Galactic Cuisine has so heavily bioengineered the Greys over the last fifty millennia that they’re equally uncomfortable everywhere. Ernie waved his rifle about like the parboiled sky might hurtle hot hail, but Bert kept himself relaxed and sighted along his turboblaster’s barrel to scan among the scraggly shrubs and scattered boulders. It would be easier to see the escapee if he knew what type of body it had claimed.
Professor Raisin Bran Farts had figured out enough about knees to crouch behind one of those scraggly bushes. The multitool’s weight dragged at his arm. Algae doesn’t have a divinity to swear by, or at, so it had to soothe itself with action. Using a multitool to direct raw energy lacked style, precision, and cleverness, but it would make short work of the GalactiCops. Algae isn’t a natural user of ranged weapons, though. The Professor aimed at the GalactiCop with the bigger gun.
The multitool’s automatic targeting assessed the GalactiCops, identified Ernie’s turboblaster as the most serious threat, and blew it straight off his shoulder.
Ernie wailed at the impact, more surprised than hurt.
“Called it,” Bert muttered. Every GalactiCop’s first field lesson: perps shot the person carrying the biggest gun. Bert wasn’t about to take chances. His karma was so low, his next life he’d probably come back as an author.
Bert would enjoy telling everyone back at the station how Ernie sniveled, but took the chance to line up his shot and let the fungus have it. The turboblaster’s auto-targeting took over and knocked the multitool right off the fungus’ arm.
The Professor had believed he knew all the flavors of pain. He had a point. Prison isn’t kind to algae. But algaes don’t understand bones. They know the concepts, sure, but that’s like Mrs. Perfect Dentition earning her PhD in toothache theory. The multitool’s clear housing went all the way up to the meatsuit’s elbow. The impact broke the meatsuit’s radius in three places and the ulna in four. Bone pain was a whole new kind of agony, one wholly alien to everything the Professor had ever experienced. He fell back, not knowing how to override the meatsuit’s pain signals.
The last thing Professor Raisin Bran Farts saw was the grey GalactiCop raising a brutal turboblaster square at his meatsuit.
Bert blasted the meatsuit to a scorched black mark. The indestructible spore pod thudded to the ground. “Hey, kid! You’re fine. On your feet.”
Ernie didn’t feel fine. Humiliation made a Grey’s elbows hurt, and Ernie’s felt like they’d been dipped in boiling lead. He would need a few more encounters to internalize Bert’s first field lesson, as well as the second: your partner is a bastard.
Bert tossed the burrito stub in his maw, dropping the wrapper.
A buzzing rose from behind one of the rocky hills. Had the convict left a dangerous surprise? Ernie flowed to his feet. No, not a weapon.
A flying machine. A powered metal glider dragged by an airscrew. What sort of species would use that instead of simple antigrav?[2]
Bert shouted, “Kid! Grab your weapon and let’s go!”
“What about the convict’s weapon?” Ernie said.
“Did you see where it landed? Cause I didn’t. It’s not traceable to us, but your turboblaster is. The natives find that, the Contact Form’ll be nine times as bad!”
The tiny aluminum Cessna wobbled past, but by the time the pilot turned around and came back for a closer look Bert and Ernie had grabbed the turboblaster and flung GalactiCop Cruiser 82 into the sky, leaving only the distinctive triple divots from the thrusters.
An escaped convict fricasseed with little enough damage and a weak enough witness that they had to do only a few hours of paperwork. A job done, if not done well.
[1] Wrapping one food in another food is universal among intelligent species, the most spectacular example being the avisvores of Omicron Spaniel and their Living Turducken.
[2] Every sensible species invents antigrav right before figuring out nuclear power and right after discovering spalt.
