Greegs & Ladders - By Zack Mitchell and Danny Mendlow
Page 28
***
There’s not much point in keeping up the illusion that I am not Krimshaw, so let’s just get on with it and have the big reveal.
I am Krimshaw.
There, now it’s official. Of course, I am not really Krimshaw, as that is just a name made up by a madman in order to win one of a series of ludicrous bets. I have no real name. At this point in the story, I just know that I was once a Greeg who had travelled sideways in time and that Universes were capable of shifting around like a Rubik’s cube, changing the way things had occurred so it could make sense of them. Fresh with this knowledge having knocked me unconscious, I awoke on a park bench and devoured an investment banker. Then I was thrown in prison. I did not realize at the time that the people of Earth treated their investment bankers with such reverence. In the rest of the Universe, it is common knowledge that investment bankers are the most worthless organisms ever to exist, so I saw no reason for me to refrain from snacking on one. In fact, I distinctly remembered reading in Gary Oldenhammers' Scrounging for Grub in 11 Trillion Solar Systems: “Important! If the vast amount of pointless energy stored in even a single investment banker can fuel your spaceship, it can surely provide you with necessary sustenance in a pinch.” This would be the first of many times my knowledge, research and understanding would get me in trouble on Earth. It would be the first of many times I would be incarcerated, put on trial, questioned, injured. My initial time on Earth could very well be described as:
The People of Earth VS. The Former Greeg Formerly Known as Krimshaw, (Formerly Known as Zook.)
But no one would ever bother describing such things.
I was asked a lot of questions by people who were not prepared to accept the very honest answers I had for them. First by the police officers who arrested me, then by the judge who prosecuted me; then the senate, the President, and finally various talk show hosts and tabloid magazines. In that order. That is, apparently, the hierarchy of human importance. You know you’ve really got something interesting if the talk shows and tabloid magazines are interested. These various questioning sessions often ended up with me turning the tables on my various interrogators, and them not having good answers for me.
One particular Q&A in the courtroom went like this:
JUDGE: You cannot simply go about eating people.
ME: It was just an investment banker.
JUDGE: His occupation does not matter, in the United States eating people is strictly forbidden.
ME: What is the United States?
JUDGE: A country.
ME: What’s that?
JUDGE: A sovereign union of states, what are you an alien?
ME: What’s an alien?
JUDGE: Someone not from Earth.
ME: Oh yes, that’s me. I’m not from here.
JUDGE: Yes you are! There is no such thing as aliens!
ME: Then why did you bring them up?
JUDGE: Silence!
ME: So what were those countries you spoke of?
JUDGE: Countries are… countries you idiot! Sections of land that our forefathers fought and died for so that we could have them.
ME: They sound stupid.
JUDGE: Countries are not on trial here mister, your cannibalism is!
I soon realized it was simply not possible for you human beings to accept that I was not a person or that all of the silly things you believe are in fact quite stupid. When faced with a barrage of overwhelming proof and logic, the automatic response of any human is to become violently angry. They will conjure up all sorts of indignant, ridiculous arguments to justify and defend their outdated beliefs. It is much easier for humans to defend what they know, then entertain for a minute what they do not. Luckily for me, I didn’t have to endure much of this. Because I was born and raised on a planet with such a massive orbit, I live quite a bit longer than the average human. Okay, a lot longer. So while the judge thought he had really stuck it to me with his sentence of ‘life in prison’ – the reality was that I quite enjoyed being able to kick back for the length of a human lifetime, get interviewed a lot, tell people how stupid they were, write some bestselling books, and become a sort of cult figure. In the first human lifetime, or HL (a unit of time I invented, measuring approximately 80 years) that I was on Earth, I was able to read every book ever written by a human, and graced the cover of every magazine there was. Not a lot of good books written by people, and the only decent ones were dismissed as fantasy, science fiction, comedy or satire. The best ones contained elements of all of these. The most ridiculous ones were by far the most popular and most revered. These tended to be ones that unequivocally reinforced stupid human beliefs. They were the literary equivalent of patting themselves on the back and saying “See, I told you we were right.” They were never right.
One thing I found quite amusing was a pattern of behaviour I like to call 'the circle of idiocy.' Despite the fact that every generation loves to laugh at how primitive their ancestors are with one hand, at the same time, they continue to behave exactly the same way and never learned any lessons from the past. To me, it was kind of like watching someone point and laugh at another for walking into a tar pit and drowning; then proceeding to walk right after them into the same tar pit as yet another pointed and laughed at the two of them, and so on, and so on. The circle of idiocy continues.
No matter, not my species. When it became obvious that I wasn’t ageing, and they couldn’t kill me, there was a lot of discussion as to what should be done. They tried to kill me many times rather unsuccessfully, thanks to the evasive survival techniques I had learned from numerous readings of Cannibalizing Your Crew After Emerging From a Time Portal: How to End Up Eating Dinner Rather than Becoming It.
Evidently, no conclusion could be reached, so they decided to release me. Turns out, their fears were unfounded, as nobody really cared. By the time another half HL had passed I might as well have never come to Earth. Anyone who talked of me like I actually existed was thoroughly mocked. The story about the cannibal Alien was a stupid myth, and only nutty fringe drug addicts believed a word of it. Many movies were made, and I entered into folklore along with Vampires, Dragons, Werewolves and Zombies... all of which I now can only assume must have been alien visitors themselves. Masks were circulated with my face, and were a pretty popular little Halloween seller for a few seasons, but then were quickly relegated to thrift stores. If you tried to tell people 150 years after I came to Earth about the massive unexplained disappearance of investment bankers and fish that occurred, they would most likely tell you it never happened. Some of the homeless folks would give you an accurate description of what transpired, but they were ignored completely and treated with the utmost disdain. I never could understand the way humans treated the homeless. The very fact that there was homeless people is baffling, when you consider the vast amount of unused hotel rooms, and rich people owning multiple properties, cottages, etc. The homeless were also some of the only people able to fully understand and listen to the facts I presented to them about the universe and humankind. A lot of them had even figured out much of the truth on their own! Truly remarkable creatures, completely misunderstood and unnecessarily cast aside by much more ignorant, less decent individuals. So quick was the rest of mankind eager to forget and suppress the ramifications of my arrival, that if you asked people 15 years after Rip and Wilx liquefied over three million investment bankers and nearly obliterated the supply of ocean dwelling fish, the humans had mostly invented various “Scientific Explanations.”
“Scientific Explanations” are things that humans like to use when something doesn’t make sense to them. What it translates roughly as is “We don’t like that thing that just happened, so this is what happened instead.” It is much easier for them to accept this new, completely made up explanation, rather than try to wrap their heads around something new. They put their unwrapped heads down and kept making their investment bankers money. Investment B
ankers were no longer merely the covert rulers of mankind. They were now the blatant and unquestioned dictators of the species. In a staggering series of events, their callous actions had bankrupted every country and government on the planet, and yet through their control of information and news, they were easily able to convince everyone that they were the only ones who could lead people out of the mess they had created. Pretty much everyone knew there was something decidedly evil and wrong with this concept, but they couldn't quite articulate it. For fear of becoming homeless, they kept their criticisms to themselves and did what the Investment Bankers told 'em to.
At first I was frustrated, and delusional. I thought I could actually get people to see the errors in their ways. It was an impossible task. Eventually, I just started telling people the truth and yelling at them. This was how I became a very successful stand-up comedian... and homeless. The audience thought I was playing a character of an alien who had been trapped on Earth for a long time and was fed up with things. Of course, I was really just an alien trapped on Earth for a long time who was fed up with things. They laughed and laughed as I shouted and yelled at them. I invented a whole new genre of comedy. It was dubbed Alien Impersonations, and sometimes Human Critics. Lots of college kids who had eaten magic mushrooms and had long hair got into it, but it was wholly dismissed as pointless and counterproductive by anyone who made lots of money. I would find out the longer I stayed on Earth that Vampires, Werewolves and Zombies were all in fact permanent residents of the orb. They would pop up and slink away as they saw fit, depending on world events and how well they figured they could blend into the background. Dragons, on the other hand, said 'fuck this' and flapped off to other solar systems. This world was beneath them.