Greegs & Ladders Read online

  “We’re busy,” said Wilx.

  Ralph felt the pressure to skip to the point. “We just wanted to express our sincere and heartfelt thanks for the recent rescue of our two vessels, as well to send our regretful apologies that we were ever lost in the first place. We dread to think what would happen to us without the guidance system of Obotron 1. We look forward to sustaining a lifelong career out of following you around on your adventures. We would also like to say---“

  Wilx cut off the broadcast. “That’s enough.”

  “About the wormholes in the Maze,” said Krimshaw, “aren’t they time-travelling wormholes?”

  “Of course they are,” replied Wilx. “Have you ever known a wormhole not to be a time-traveller? Fly into one of those and you’ll be transported to any random time in the past or the future.”

  “So isn’t that our way out?”

  “What?”

  “This maze tours around the galaxy. It’s constantly moving. So if we fly into one of those wormholes we’ll reappear outside the maze no matter what, because during any other time it won’t be here.”

  Wilx thought this over for a minute. It seemed like a foolish plan, but they had nothing else.

  “It’s a brilliant plan!” he said.

  It actually was a brilliant plan. Flying into a time-travelling wormhole is the only way to escape the Maze. Even the official outer exit is not at all a means of escape. As mentioned before, the official exit is also the sitting perch for the Council of Eleven and a Half Thousand Different Coloured Robes. Anyone who finds the exit is put under trial by the Robes to decide if they are truly worthy of leaving the Maze. No one is ever deemed worthy. The ships are placed back at the starting point instead of being set free like the usual logical rules of finding the exit of a Maze.

  “Time-travel is frightening. Everyone prepare yourself,” said Wilx as he set the guidance system for the nearest wormhole. He then roped himself down with unbreakable Tjurdian Rope.

  “Hey, where’s our magically unbreakable rope?” asked Krimshaw.

  “There isn’t any more. You’ll have to prepare yourself for the horrid act of time-travel in some other less logical way.”

  Krimshaw prepared himself by gnashing his teeth, even breaking some of them. Rip didn’t move at all. The fleet of Obotrons flew directly into the center of a time-travelling wormhole. When they re-emerged on the other side of the obligatory mind-bending psychedelic light-show, the Maze and all of its war-faring spectators were nowhere to be seen.

  “It worked! We’re free!”

  “But where did we travel to?” asked Krimshaw. “Or when?”

  “I don’t know yet,” said Wilx. “So far all I know is that two of the Obotron ships are no longer with us. They’re either still inside the maze or they’re forever trapped in the purgatory of the wormhole. One thing is certain, we’ll probably never mention or think of them again.”

  TIME WARP

  of Things that are neither the Beginning

  nor the Middle, nor the End… Sort of

  CHAPTER 23

  Emerging from a Wormhole with an Empty Stomach

  The thing about hurtling through time is that there are far too many things about hurtling through time to even begin attempting to convey to you in a manner that won’t take up several human lifetimes. So I’m just going to try and keep you up to speed on the more important things pertinent to our journey and hope you don’t get too lost. You will almost certainly get too lost. Don’t worry, this is your fault, not mine nor the fabric of space and time’s. But try your best to keep up will you?

  The first thing that happens when you emerge from a time travelling wormhole, no matter who or what you are, is that you start evacuating whatever body you happen to have in a rather disgusting manner. It is inevitable that after you have done so, for a ridiculous amount of time, you will pretend as if you have not done so, and go about some sort of mediocre task avoiding eye contact with your fellow time travellers. This is not difficult, as thanks to the obligatory mind-bending psychedelic light-show you’ve all just experienced, your eyeballs will be twirling about like a pinwheel or one of those lollypops you get at Disneyland. Then (always at the exact same time as your fellow travellers) the guilt, shame and sloppiness is finally outweighed by the tremendous need to eat. When you have no food, the need to eat is a dangerous need indeed. This is discussed in detail in Horaticus Neil Travensenzels classic Cannibalizing Your Crew After Emerging From a Time Portal: How to End Up Eating Dinner Rather than Becoming It. Unfortunately all of the members of Obotron 1 had indeed read this book several times by now, and had stealthily thwarted the other two’s relentless attempts to eat them. When alas it was realized the stalemate would not be broken, and treaties began to be drawn up rationing out each others smaller limbs and not so vital organs in a timely manner, a simpler solution presented itself.

  The telescreen flickered and the crew members from a trailing Obotron stared desperately and hungrily into the screen. They were in fact trying to very rationally explain the situation they were in and help solve the problem of feeding everyone and cleaning up all the evacuated fluids and such; but good luck trying to get Wilx, Rip and Krimshaw to listen to a word of it. All they heard was “Hey, look at us, a whole expendable and not terribly important to anything or anyone ship chock full of tasty morsels that’ll stop you from having to ration out each others limbs and not so vital organs in a timely manner.”

  “Splendid good point,” praised Wilx. The crew members beamed with pride.

  “Stellar work team,” exclaimed Rip. The crew members patted each other on the backs and smiled and laughed, ecstatic to have contributed something to anything for the first time in their existence.

  “I’ll have the one on the left with all the fat hanging down,” salivated Krimshaw. The crew members dismissed this is as nonsense. What did he know, he was just a silly Greeg all dressed up, not a respectable leader of a fleet of Obotrons like Wilx and Rip.

  They would have re-examined that last line of thinking if they had any frame of reference to do so. They would have had a frame of reference to do so if they hadn’t been savagely devoured in a chaotic and wholly shameful display of spit roasts and improvised marinades made from the evacuated ickiness of other crew members. But sadly, they had. None of them had the good fortune to have brought a copy of Cannibalizing Your Crew After Emerging From a Time Portal: How to End Up Eating Dinner Rather than Becoming It on board with them. This was a rather silly move, considering the amount of time they’d spent doing nothing at all after realizing there were no towels to fold. But the kind of folks that are crew members in luxury fleets are not great independent thinkers. They tend to just follow the orders of whatever seemingly intelligent being is at the helm of the main ship and not ask too many questions, no matter how ridiculous or perilous they may be, or how clearly they are being influenced by his gambling drunkard of a co-pilot. After all, if he can afford to fly around a priceless fleet of Obotron 7 space ships and idly fill them up with crew members, clearly he must know a great deal more than the crew members about all sorts of important things. The crew members could never dream of owning even one ship, let alone the whole fleet. Even if they pooled all their salaries together, they could still only fill up a half a tank of investment bankers at best. The way they looked at it, they should feel lucky to be involved in anything as expensive and theoretically important as whatever it was that Rip and Wilx were up to. This knowledge of their own lack of importance and self worth kept most of them going, not just in this job, but in their lives as well. Blissfully thinking they’d scored a sweet gig and not wishing to rock the boat, they’d remain dedicated and content right up until the moment things got a bit dicey for the fleet. When things got a bit dicey for the fleet they were the first expendable pieces of cargo that the trio in charge had no issues with throwing overboard or, in extreme circumstances, eating.

  12 fully crewed ships and a very heartily overstuffed crew of three i
n a shiny Obotron 1 drifted on into the nearest galaxy searching for a place to fuel up on investment bankers and restock their food supply, completely unaware when they were. One ship, devoid of crew, and thus useless, was set on fire and lost forever. Not by the crew of the Obotron 1, but by angry protestors of the recently formed Obotronian Crew Members Who Demand The Right to Not Get Eaten By The Three Nitwits Running This Fleet If There’s No Food About and We’ve Just Emerged From a Time Travelling Worm Hole. They organized their movement from within the ranks of all the Obotron ships and brought their coalition to the scene of the heinous massacre. They decided the most poignant statement they could make was to set the ship on fire in protest and martyrdom, quickly ending the newly formed movement and annihilating any of the small amounts of crew members in all the remaining ships who could be stirred to fight for themselves and their fellow crew.

  Incidentally, this series of events would be the opening chapter of the upcoming Revised, Rapple Skin Bound, Flexy Covered, Extra Limited Edition of Hypocrisy Inaction: The Plight of the Pointless Protester.

  CHAPTER 24

  All About Time-Travel

  It is one of an astoundingly large and plentiful number of human misconceptions that time is linear. That is to say, that there was a beginning, then there is a middle, then there is an end. This stems from the human desire to make everything about them, and the ridiculous human trait of being completely unable to see things from a perspective outside their own. Time is so much more infinitely complex than this that it is an insult to time to even suggest it is only capable of going in one direction. Even the idea of time going in one direction at all is disgustingly simplistic. To suggest that you can only go forwards and/or backwards in time may be one of the most ridiculous assertions of all time. Literally. But even getting your average human to accept you can move throughout time at all, is dismissed as science fiction nonsense... much like everything that is true and universally accepted as fact. As such, when a human being on Earth writes up a novel about time travel, they tend to go backwards in time or forwards in time. Never, in the history of Earth stories, has anyone ever truly gone sideways in time. Shocking really, since time-travelling wormholes are the number one source of time travel, and sideways travelling accounts for over 79.43% of all wormhole related travels through time. There is absolutely no point in trying to explain sideways time-travel to you, because your brain simply will not allow you to understand it. Just let it be known that our trio has travelled sideways through time; not backwards, and not forwards. Thanks to blatant propaganda perpetrated by Michael J. Fox, this may lead you to think of parallel universes. There is no such thing as parallel universes. There are lots of universes, none of them are parallel. They are Universes, vast conglomerations of swirling galaxies, not gymnastics bars.

  Another human misconception about time travel is that when someone travels through time they do not at all physically move in distance. That is to say, if you plant yourself on a green bridge on fifth street and set your time travel machine (another falsity we will arrive at shortly) for 100 years later, you will appear on the exact same green bridge 100 years later, fully undisturbed from a century's worth of passersby who never wondered about the strangely dressed person frozen in the middle of the bridge. This could not be more false. Real time-travel is not so whimsically perfect. A time-traveller instead appears in an unplanned and random location that will likely turn out to be a dangerous place completely unfit to inhabit. Time-travelling while on the surface of a planet is not so worrisome, as you are limited to reappearing somewhere on the surface of that planet (like if you time-travelled out of Hawaii and ended up bobbing around in the South Atlantic), but if you time-travel while floating around in space then you suddenly have no limitations on where you might reappear. It could be anywhere else in space.

  'Machine’ is a word that has not much business being applied to the art of time-travel, unless one is a death-craving daredevil. As noted, time-travel is predominantly a naturally occurring event, whether one is simply passing through a wormhole, or leaping through a tear in reality caused by the sharp claws of Eagle Gods, or even looking at the sacred waters of the Seladorian Pools, said to be an act so incredible that it sends one spinning diagonally through time. These are the types of things that cause time-travel. Only about .004% of time-travel is achieved with the invention of a technological device or machine, and it usually turns out badly. Death-craving daredevils who invent faulty time-travel machines usually wind up the victim of a nuclear explosion. Time-travel is simply not meant to be invented. Let it happen in nature to the unfortunately dumb people who can’t avoid stumbling through tears in reality, but never try to control its spontaneous power.

  CHAPTER 25

  In which much is Explained, and much is made more Confusing

  “Buuuuuuuuuuuurrrrrrppppppp! So where are we?” belched Krimshaw casually.

  “You mean when are we?” snooted Rip condescendingly.

  “You’re both not going to like either of the answers,” said Wilx ominously.

  “Oh no, why’s that?” Krimshaw and Rip exclaimed, lurching forward.

  “Nothing.”

  “What do you mean nothing,” yelped Rip, gripping Wilx by his shoulder like things and shaking him violently. “Don’t you go about making ominous and cryptic statements and then withholding information from me you bastard!”

  “I was joking, I was only kidding, I just don’t know where we are, thought I’d lighten the mood after all that cannibalism,” lied Wilx through his teeth like things.

  “Shall we go for an unrelated stroll into the adjacent and sound proof corridor?” suggested Rip, sensing Wilx was hiding something, which he clearly was.

  “Fine.”

  Oblivious to the deceptive transaction taking place, Krimshaw delved into Very Rare Planets, scouring for hidden clues about the Greegs. For some reason he was compelled to flip back to the entry about Pluto and Rip. He looked out the window. Then he looked back at the book.

  “Hmm,” he thought, but didn’t know why.

  He peered back out of the window again for three point seven times longer than the first glance. He then studied the entry about Pluto for nine and eleven thirteenths as long as the previous stint.

  “Interesting,” he mused, sure that he was on to something, but still not aware of what it was.

  He picked up the half eaten leg of an Obotron crew member and chewed it thoughtfully, gazing out of the window for enough time that Rip and Wilx finished their top secret conversation and re-entered the room.

  “Ahem,” coughed Wilx.

  “Oh my tit faced cunt muffin sandwich on rhye to the power of six!” blurted out Krimshaw. “That’s Pluto! Outside! We’re at Pluto guys! It’s right there! Same as book. Me read!”

  “I bet you it isn’t,” quipped Rip, since there was no point in restraining from betting on Pluto any more.

  “We’re not technically on Pluto, so it wouldn’t count against you Rip… plus you have nothing to bet,” said Wilx, casually firing up a holographic digital star map. “Unless one of your long shot wagers comes true and you suddenly re-acquire vast amounts of bettables.”

  “One of them is bound to come through sooner or later with all this time travelling and visiting of solar systems in which I’ve been to in the past going on.”

  “Yeah, we’ll see about that,” prodded Wilx. “For now, we may just be the luckiest folk to ever emerge from a time travelling wormhole looking to fuel up and get some food.”

  “Why’s that?” asked Rip and Krimshaw, who were getting quite good at synchronizing their questions.

  “If my star maps and research are correct, the alignment of these planets and this solar system indicates we are merely a few billion kilometres from what is essentially the greatest gas station ever to exist. More or less untapped at this point, the life forms on the planet consist almost entirely of investment bankers and tasty fish. That’s pretty much all there is on the planet.”
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  “You couldn’t ask for a better place to pop by and fuel up your space ship!” Exclaimed Krimshaw.

  “Uh… yeah. What luck! Let’s go there quickly.” re-affirmed Rip, failing miserably to conceal his and Wilx’s sinister and as of yet un-revealed motives.

  “So how did such a planet come to be?” queried Krimshaw genuinely.

  “If theories had been circulated about such things, which they never have been, they definitely would never have even suggested that the whole evolution of the dominant life form on the planet was just the result of a drunken bet placed by Dr. Rip T. Brash The Third, suffering from PNBOAPFTFTIHS,” assured Rip, in his usual non-assuring manner.

  “That’s Post Not Betting On A Planet For The First Time In History Syndrome,” clarified Wilx.

  “I don’t follow you,” said Krimshaw.

  “It’s really quite simple,” said Wilx. “The need and desire to place a wager was so deeply engrained in Rip after such an insane streak of betting, that the act of not placing a bet while on the planet Pluto drove him to concoct the most absurd and ludicrous bet ever made up until that time.”

  “Wow, how long could this streak possibly have been going on?”

  “You don’t want to know,” said Rip in a shameful manner implying the topic of how long he had been placing absurd wagers for was not a topic to be discussed.

  “So what was the bet?”

  “He bet, er, someone, that he could completely annihilate the surface environment of a biologically utopian planet he’d stumbled upon simply by introducing a savagely over-aggressive population of Investment Bankers into the ecosystem.”