Greegs & Ladders (7 page)

Aimlessly
Bumbling Through Space and Time

with an
Irreparably Damaged Guidance System

Wilx and Dr.
Rip T. Brash The Third, being a pair of well-seasoned space and
time travellers, were quite used to unforeseeable numbers of
ill-fated shortcuts. In fact, if one were to describe their lives,
if they had tombstones or obituaries like you after they died, they
would almost certainly read:

“Here
lies/R.I.P. Wilx/Dr. Rip T. Brash The Third… his/her/its life was
an unforeseeable number of ill-fated shortcuts.”

‘Shortcuts’ is
a very misleading term though. Long periods of painfully boring
floating would be much more accurate. When aimlessly bumbling
through space and time with a guidance system that’s been
irreparably damaged by a reformed Greeg with violent Greeg
tendencies bubbling just below the surface, one will spend the
majority of the time doing nothing. Seeing nothing. Feeling
nothing. Anticipating nothing. Nothing, after all, is what most of
this Universe is. It is what most of everything is. Nothing.

Seasoned space
and time travellers have developed multiple ways to cope with this.
Dr. Rip T. Brash The Third continued building up his tolerance for
exotic intoxicants and losing tremendous bets to Wilx, who passed
his time writing and reading about every species that has ever
existed in the cosmos.

Krimshaw had
no such pastimes to pass the time… or the space. He chose a
different method. He went completely insane. He snapped. He
flipped. He destroyed a lot of things. He was detained and locked
in a Greeg Cage that Rip used for exotic dancers and space whores
he wished to especially degrade. Krimshaw felt comfortable here and
smashed his face against the bars.

“Better make
sure that Jebidiah fellow never sees this relapse,” said Rip.

“
Died
yesterday,” said Wilx, not bothering to look up from the latest
issue of
Creepy Crawly Telepathic Worm-like Flying Fish That Start
Off Rather Small but Grow to be Over 600 Meters Tall and Several
Thousand Kilometers Long, Grow Feathers and Scales in Weird Patchy
Clumps all Over Their Body, Sprout Extra Limbs Which Serve No
Purpose and then Try to Colonize Nearby Solar Systems With
Astoundingly Innovative Technology and Weaponry That’s Never Been
Seen Anywhere Else and Never Will be Seen Again, Only to Have a
Sudden Shift In Consciousness and Nostalgia Late in Life, Leave the
Battle Grounds and Return to Mate and Raise Young Then Sit Around
Talking About How Easily They Could Have Smashed Whatever Hapless
and Peaceful Civilization They Happened to Wage War on This
Particular Generation.

This was a
fairly average sized title for an Astrospeciology publication. With
infinite physical Universes expanding exponentially larger and
smaller in a perpetual never-ending sea of possibilities, one had
to be pretty specific when classifying all of the species out
there. One could never classify something so impossibly infinite to
comprehend of course, but one could try. And several did.

Wilx was
reading an interesting story about how all of the surrounding, and
once peaceful civilizations now had a massive amount of
mind-blowing combat technology that was continuously being
abandoned by the Creepy Crawly Telepathic Worm-like Flying Fish in
their old age. These once peaceful and simple civilizations had
been so savagely and nonsensically brought to the brink of
extinction that they now harboured quite a bit of anger and
vengeance they otherwise never would have. They also never would
have had the ability to communicate with their neighbouring
victims, except that all of them now had Telepathic Worm-like
Flying Fish Technology, and it was only a matter of time before
they all had a chat and realized this wasn’t an isolated incident,
united in coalition and waged savage retaliatory hostilities
against the Flying Fish’s home planet. The writer was of the
opinion that this was just the natural course of events with these
creatures and this would somehow eventually lead to the outlying
civilizations becoming peaceful again, all of the weapons being
destroyed, the Flying Fish being brought nearly to extinction, the
outlying civilizations returning to their respective home planets
and things starting all over again in a cyclical fashion. This
tended to be the way things played out in most universes; they
escalated to fevered and catastrophic levels, and then started all
over again with a clean slate.

Wilx
somewhat agreed, although he was fairly certain that it was only a
matter of time and space before the nearby Solar System Swallowing
Swatch he’d read about in the latest issue of
Planet Eaters, Solar System
Swallowers and Galactic Gobblers
would simply inhale the whole lot of
them.

“Good
Riddance,” said Wilx aloud, entirely unimpressed with the whole
ordeal. He put down his magazine and turned to Rip. “Now, let’s
talk about this Greeg.”

“Former
Greeg,” corrected Rip.

“Well, we’ve
obviously still got a lot of work to do before we can call him
that. But maybe this isn’t such a bad thing.”

“How so?”

“Well, if he’s
still prone to Greegian outbursts maybe that could come in handy
when we do reach the Greeg planet.”

“So you really
do think it exists?”

“It couldn’t
be any more clear to me that not only does it exist, but that once
our little friend sees it and understands who he is and what we’ve
done to him, we could very well learn more than anyone has ever
learned about Greegs, ever.”

“A bold
statement.”

“Care to
wager?”

Dr. Rip T.
Brash was faced with a predicament he’d never encountered. He had
nothing left to wager. Wilx now owned everything he had, ever did
have in the past and ever would have in the future. Confused and
shaken, Rip looked desperately for a drink. Not a drop to be found.
Rip went to his back-up plan. He fumbled with the remote control to
bring up the crate-filled liquor ship and sent it flying towards
the Obotron 1. Salivating and panting like a dog, pressed up
against the glass and staring out at the ship, Rip saw the most
horrifying thing he’d seen in his entire life. IBP radicals somehow
had located the fleet and set up one of their signature space
blockades. In typical radical fashion, an IBP signature space
blockade wasn’t a very well thought out endeavour. When you
consider these were creatures that have devoted their life to
preserving the most useless organism ever to exist, you can’t
expect top quality results. This IBP space blockade consisted of
locating the Obotron liquor supply ship, well known as the
lifeblood of Dr. Rip T. Brash The Third, and when it was called up
to the Obotron 1, materializing several thousand ships in front of
it full of IBP protesters holding up hand drawn signs to the glass
windows and spelling a message with the ships.

The message
was this:

The
liquor supply ship being full of nothing other than liquor, the IBP
radical’s various futile messages reached precisely no one. Then,
and here’s the crazy part, then they lit all their ships on fire.
The logic being that liquor was flammable and would be destroyed.
This is true, and it was destroyed. Mission Accomplished. What else
is true is that every single IBP protester was also quite flammable
and they too were destroyed. Hundreds of Millions of dead
protesters… just to piss off an eccentric alcoholic doofus. What is
also true is that the sheer amount of investment bankers required
to fuel on stand-by and then materialize the IBP blockade into the
‘No’ formation at precisely that time, was staggeringly more than
the entire Obotron 7 fleet could ever consume… ever. It was a
curious universal fact that every protestor was inevitably just as,
if not more, guilty than what or whoever it was that they were
protesting. This is discussed in detail in Karl Von
Marxschenhowzer’s infamous
“Hypocrisy Inaction: The Plight of the Pointless
Protester.”

Wilx
happened to be reading
Hypocrisy Inaction: The Plight of the Pointless
Protester,
as Dr. Rip T.
Brash the Third saw his precious liquor supply explode and then
evaporate. Rip then did something he hadn’t done for awhile. He
went completely insane.

the Cycle of
Insanity Finally Gives Way to a Bustling Solar System

Dr. Rip T.
Brash The Third awoke in a Greeg cage. He assumed this meant he’d
had a damned fine night of drunken sex with a space whore and
treated her miserably. He looked out and saw Krimshaw and Wilx
staring at him and chatting and remembered this was not the case.
He was painfully sober and not remotely hungover. None of his
genitals stung like anything. He shook the bars of the cage in
futility and screamed.

“What is the
meaning of this? What have I done to deserve this?!”

“Aside from
acting like a common Greeg and causing irreparable damage to the
ship's already irreparably damaged guidance system and urinating
all over the miniscule remaining food supply… nothing,” retorted
Wilx.

Krimshaw
laughed hysterically, thoroughly enjoying mocking Rip and being out
of the cage. Seeing how pleasant it was to mock the one in the
Greeg cage, and not be the one being mocked in the Greeg cage.

This
pattern would continue for a long time, as the trio floated
aimlessly through space. Wilx was next in the Greeg cage after he
flipped out on Krimshaw for using his latest issue of
Flappy and Droopy
Skinned Blob-like Floating Jelly Monsters
as toilet paper. Krimshaw thought this was a huge
step in his development, which it most certainly was, considering
his history of feces related slip-ups. They each took turns being
confined to the Greeg cage, and causing irreparable damage to the
ship and each other. This was fairly standard for any beings
confined to a ship for this length of time. Most luxury fleets had
a Greeg cage in them, which the owners claimed to be put there for
devious sexual encounters. It was much more often used for this
sort of rotating, musical chairs-esque confinement of rogue fellow
travellers gone wild.

Finally, the
pattern was broken. An unexpected, unwarranted and un-requested
hyperspacial jump landed the fleet smack dab in the middle of the
most bustling solar system within five trillion Universes. The New
York City of Solar Systems. The China of Solar Systems.

The Kroonum
System.

Kroonum

Kroonum is a
blue-spotted Zeta Sun that provides warmth and life for 27 planets.
Not one of these planets is mellow or uninhabited. They all suffer
major problems of overpopulation and a lack of sleep.

If New
York is the city that never sleeps, then Kroonum is the Solar
System that has never even
heard
of sleep. There are simply too many exciting things to do
to even consider the notion of falling asleep. To sleep for even
the shortest amount of time while in Kroonum is to miss at least
several unprecedented and historically life-changing events in
galactic history. The last time someone stepped out for a nap they
ended up missing the resurrection of The Beatles, as well as the
12-hour reunion concert that followed shortly thereafter. The
seemingly endless show ended with a complete front-to-back
rendition of
Abbey Road
,
played against the stirring backdrop of Kroonum’s famous
Whizzling-Firebeam asteroid shower (an event that is believed will
only happen four times, ever). This was the third time it had
happened. The person who’d stepped out for a nap was later informed
of the excellence of The Beatles, and was also told he would do
best not to miss the next Whizzling-Firebeam asteroid shower. He
ended up missing it on account of being dead, as the fourth and
final asteroid shower did not occur for hundreds of years (or
89,126.3 zillion Schmickian years, if you want to get precise in
the matter).

“Where are
we?” asked Rip.

Wilx looked
around confusedly. “We’ve just undergone an unrequested
hyperspacial jump.”

“I know…but
where exactly did we jump to?”

“I’m trying to
figure that out,” said Wilx as he scrambled through the star
charts. “Look over there…I see a planet missing its top half. Could
that be the legendary Clug Raddo?”

“What's Clug
Raddo?” I asked.

“A planet that
lost its northern hemisphere due to the climactic event of the
Dishwashing Chronicles.”

“What happened
in the Dishwashing Chronicles?”

“Well tell you
about it later. For now I need to focus on the fact that we’ve
jumped many universes in the complete opposite direction from the
planet Hroon and the sunned district of Herb.”

“Do we have
any pomegranates?” asked Rip.

“Uh, what are
pomegranates?”

“Did the rest
of the fleet make the hyperspacial jump with us?” asked
Krimshaw.

“Good
question. At least someone is having relevant thoughts around
here.”

Wilx tracked
the fleet.

“Hmm…there are
only 16 Obotrons currently following us. It seems a couple of the
ships didn’t make the jump at all.”

“What does
that mean?” asked Krimshaw. “Two of the ships are still in another
universe? Their crew members are just floating around
aimlessly?”

“Oh, no.
Nothing like that. They’ve assuredly perished by now.”

“What?”

“Without the
guidance system of Obotron 1 they were probably sent crashing into
the surface of the nearest planet. Or, if you prefer, careening
into the vacuum of the nearest black hole. Or maybe they burned up
in the infernos of the nearest Red Giant. One thing is certain,
they were destroyed by the nearest object of dangerous
proportions.”