Greegs & Ladders - By Zack Mitchell and Danny Mendlow
Page 18
CHAPTER 18
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:
NO