Greegs & Ladders - By Zack Mitchell and Danny Mendlow

by Zack Mitchell

CHAPTER 29

  Some Formerly Ambiguous Odds and Ends, of the Loose Variety, are Tied Up

  Many more HL’s passed by. More planets began to appear. Then entire suns. Then solar systems. They came from all over the place, seemingly surrounding the earth. Many of them were clearly inhabited. The people of Earth had two choices: to accept that they were wrong about nearly everything and acknowledge the ever changing realities surrounding them… or completely ignore the facts and further delude themselves about their own importance in the grand scheme of things by denouncing science, logic and observation in favour of even more self aggrandizing religion, ritual, silly clothing and wars over all of the above. Guess which one they chose?

  Herb and me saw it all happen, together. We had no idea why all of this was happening, but we at least acknowledged that it was. Two of the new stars appeared on opposite sides of what humans called their sun. The two stars violently smashed into the sun, forming a colossal new super star, five times the size of the Earth’s old sun. The shock-waves from this collision blasted Mercury, Venus and the Earth into Mars, forming a hideously unshapely conglomeration of a planet. A planetglomerate.

  Humans reacted as they always did in times of chaos and uncertainty, they engaged in massive amounts of carnage and violence and sexual misconduct. STD’s were spread and cultivated rampantly. “The Economy” began to ungrow. Panic struck the board members. At the behest of the GGFLTD's Growth Restoration Division, scientists worked tirelessly to keep up with all the diseases, developing new and better ways to make sex safer and more sterile. They eventually settled on an ornamental and intimate genital contraption for both the male and the female. The male device was a tube that sucked ejaculate out of his penis, funnelling it into a sealable and sterile tube, where it could be kept for over 2 hours. With a few more HL's of work, the ejaculate was able to be stored for over 40 hours. The sterile tube was then placed in a receptacle attached to the side of a suction cup that formed around the female genitals with a tube leading inside her, directly to the womb. Once sterilized and tested, the male ejaculate was pumped into the female and delivered right to her biological doorstep. Sex was forbidden by law, except for procreation, even the word sex was banned. It was only to be done in a strict, laboratory setting and was a completely joyless affair. Since the only purpose was to procreate, it was not called sex any more, it was called an “Attempt.”

  The shock-wave continued throughout the rest of the solar system as well. Jupiter was knocked off of its orbit, floating about various solar systems as it pleased. It had become a 'free planet.' The shock-wave sent Saturn smashing into Neptune, forming a mini star which pulled both of their various satellites, along with the asteroid field, into orbit. The many moons and asteroids were slung around the new mini-star in circles like a lasso, with each one eventually smashing into the planetglomerate (making what was already a hideously ugly thing into a true monstrosity.) During one of these collisions, Mars was actually dislodged from the planetglomerate, and began to slowly drift away. Seeing a chance for escape, my pal Herb rallied the approximately 1% of the population still capable of critical thinking and they hopped aboard the planet of Mars, thoroughly disgusted with the direction the rest of the species was taking. All of the smartest, most intelligent, freethinking human beings joined Herb's expedition with the intent of forming a veritable Utopia on Mars. Under Herb’s steady guidance, they would succeed in doing so. Herb cordially invited me to come along, but I refused, for what I was observing on the planetglomerate was something I felt somebody needed to see and record. I don’t believe in words like fate, purpose or higher power, but I began to see why those cruel, heartless bastards left me here all this time. I was to watch something spectacular unfold.

  Due to the sweltering heat from the newly formed stars surrounding them, the humans gradually shed their clothing, until they had no choice but to be naked. It simply wasn’t practical, or possible, to wear clothing. However, the humans couldn’t simply discard a way of thinking so engrained in their brains as shame of their naked bodies. So they simply shifted the same mentality they had once applied to clothing to nakedness. It became socially ridiculous to be seen wearing clothing of any kind. People were mocked and ridiculed for it, flocking out of the great mud camps into 'The Cleanliness.'

  Long ago, the actual human board members of the GGFLTD had ceased to exist. It is the natural progression of Investment Banking firms. They keep 'growing' to a point where no humans are required to keep “The Economy” running. At this point, all humans were desperate to get back to the good old days and make “The Economy” graphs and charts go up again. Feverishly, they put their heads down, built things, and kept them clean. Then they looked at them and said ‘hey, look at that, we built that, better keep it clean or else it will get dirty.’ Slowly but surely, “The Economy” started to spit out graphs that went up again. With all of the scientists and critical thinkers gone, the rest of the species quickly agreed everything was their fault... after all, now that they were gone, the graphs were going up again. Rejuvenated by this new found purpose, the creatures poured out over every inch of the surface of the planet building and cleaning spotless surfaces that looked like varnished marble, shiny glass windows and freshly bleached tile floors. They looked like this, because that’s precisely what they were. It all looked very impressive, and it gave everyone something to do and to look at. This process continued for many thousands of HL’s, until they had covered every square inch of the place with buildings and structures and surfaces… anything to keep their minds off of the insanity swirling around them in space. Anything to avoid facing the truth that they were not alone, and they were not important. Anything to keep “The Economy” from going down again. The task of building and expanding and keeping such a hideously large planetglomerate clean was enough to take anyone’s mind off of 59 suns swirling about you in a wonderful new star system. Nearly every species of plant and animal was obliterated. As was always the case, the only creatures that survived were ones able to adapt to their surroundings. Among the most impressive of these creatures was The Quigg, a perfectly, biologically-evolved cleaning specimen, who could shine and disinfect surfaces like nothing else. Soon enough, almost all the other life forms on the planet were simply bio-cleaning creatures. Since they had no need to do work any more, the dominant species on the planet got lazier and lazier with each passing HL. They also got sloppier and more brutish and less intelligent. They stopped learning about things, and passing on knowledge.

  With knowledge transference deteriorating, a curious thing happened to the belief systems and religions of humanity. As the ability to read and write lengthy texts faded away, all of the major religions became progressively more watered down and simplified, eventually culminating with one, simple, accepted religious philosophy to explain everything. The basic tenant of the new, global religion was this: “Whatever it is that made everything for us, thanks for that.”

  In their relentless construction and expansion efforts, the de-evolving humans found that there were all these silly trees and green things in the way, blocking perfectly good potential surfaces and/or structures. Naturally, they cleared all of the obnoxious greenery out of the way and dumped them into pits. They dumped their nuclear power plants, their nuclear waste, their gold and jewels in the pits too. Lastly they set up massive siphoning pipelines to drain the oily oceans and fill up the pits. They couldn’t remember the details, they just knew that these were all things of immense value and worth, and therefore good things would happen if they were all to be mixed up together. They spent a few human lifetimes doing just that, and thus, the great schmold pits were born. A few more HL’s after the creation of the great schmold pits and nobody on earth had the slightest idea that indeed they had created these pits. The sub-humans simply revered the supposed mystical powers of the glowing, greenish goop, and chocked up their origin to whoever it was that made every
thing for the human being. They didn’t know they had created schmold any more than they knew they’d created the clean planet full of meaningless surfaces and structures. Even though I witnessed it all, it is difficult to say when the exact transition was complete. But sometime around these last few events were surely the final days of human beings as you know them, and the beginning of The Greegs, as I know them. As a cherry on top of the evolutionary cake, human paparazzi grew one more set of pterodactyl wings, and the Flying Grimbat Messengers were born.

  One day, I took a small Greeg aside and told him some very simple facts. I figured if Rip had made me intelligent, maybe one by one I could make them intelligent too. The young boy’s name was Groolfh. We know what happened to him, and what became of Herb’s Utopian society on Mars. Thanks to his injection, Herb survived, and would go on to have the entire star district named after him. Not via any election, just because the space mapping space mappers found he was the only notable and worthy being in the whole place.

  After Groolfh was murdered and the only decent remnants of humanity destroyed, I mostly hid in the caves of the Klaxworms. It was clear that nothing in Greegland was going to change. Once a species has fully become Greegs, once they have hit rock bottom, they simply cannot go any lower. Even if a single Greeg like me can be civilized, the Greegs as a whole are hopeless. They are far dumber in groups. They feed off of each others ignorance and stupidity. This is why I can now understand why Carnivals keep them in small numbers only. Despite my best attempts to remain ignorant and sealed off from Greegs, I was kept abreast on things with nauseatingly frequent updates from Flying Grimbat Messengers.

  In about 15, 000 HL’s after they'd first left me on a park bench, Dr. Rip T. Brash The Third and Wilx appeared on the planetglomerate. Only 2 Obotron ships trailed them.

  “Hey old buddy, great news! After extensive research and adventures, we’ve figured out where all these planets and suns came from! Turns out this whole galaxy was swallowed by a Galactic Gobbling Groobin!” Unable to speak any of the many prepared speeches I had conjured up over the years for this precise moment, stunned by the audacity of Rip, my jaw merely hung open like a common Greeg. “Yeah, so, basically this thing's digestive system is just an intricate series of time travelling worm holes and the like that’ll send whole solar systems shootin’ diagonally, sideways, arching, skittering, riveting and spiraling through time and space. All these planets and stars came from all over the vast expanses of time and space to form this new star system in the equivalent of the Gobbling Groobin’s large intestine. His small intestine was the maze we escaped from by the way. Wilx says it happens all the time, neat hey?!” I sputtered and drooled and shook violently. “Come on aboard the ship, we still have some fish left, we’ll tell you all about where we’ve been and what we’ve been up to.“

  I boarded the ship, devoid of any explainable emotion. One thing was for certain, I definitely harboured a deep desire to murder both Rip and Wilx.