Greegs & Ladders (14 page)

Recklessly
Abandoned

When he awoke,
Krimshaw was not on a space ship at all, he was on a park bench on
the planet Earth with a piece of paper stuck in his beard. He
didn’t have a beard, quickly remembered this and ripped off the
fake beard fastened to his face. He read the note:

We popped by to
fuel up the space ships.

Ate some tasty
fish. Left you behind.

Might be back
some time. Do not, under

any
circumstances, remove your beard.

“Hey there
stranger, have I got a great deal for you! Invest now and in five
years you’ll double, no, triple, no scratch that, triduple your
money! Is triduple a word? For you it is! Oh dear god, what
happened to your face?”

Somehow,
Krimshaw instinctively knew that this man was the most useless
organism that could ever exist. He promptly ate him. This didn’t go
over well with some folks in blue uniforms, who promptly threw our
friend Krimshaw in a jail cell.

***

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 court room 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 Bankers 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.

A Strange
Observation Regarding Human Sexuality

I observed
something unique happen over the course of the next 140 HL’s. The
human male became more and more effeminate. Their penises shrank
and they started staying home and taking care of the kids and
cleaning, while the women went out to work. While the men’s penises
shrank, the women’s clitorises began to grow and grow and grow. The
men waxed their legs and got makeovers to look hot and attract the
women with the highest paying jobs. The women, burdened with their
new work load, stopped caring about their appearance and they began
to grow hair all over and dress much more casually. Men began to
spend much more time sucking on the ever growing clitorises and
much less time sticking their penises inside women’s vaginas. The
women stopped delivering babies out of their vaginas and their
vaginas began to close up.

It wasn’t long
before the women’s clitorises had grown the size of men’s penises,
and their labia’s began morphing into testicles. Men, of course,
had the opposite occur, and the two sexes effectively switched
places completely. Physiologically. Mentally. Socially. Those who
were men, now looked like and behaved like those who were women.
Relations between the two didn’t change at all. They might as well
have not switched places. But they did, and I found it interesting.
This crossover of sexuality would occur on multiple occasions
during my time on Earth. Later research I conducted would reveal
this phenomenon happened several times throughout human history and
often explained the downfall of great civilizations. Those Roman
Bath Houses, Greek Philosophers, Victorian man blouses and San
Francisco began to make a lot more sense.

An Inconvenient
Planet Appears, and the GGFLTD Takes Over

One day a
planet appeared in the night sky. This planet was not one of the
planets that humans were used to seeing, but it was quite clearly
very close to them. Closer than 7 of the other planets in their
solar system. The reaction was typical. People either claimed it
had always been there and that anyone who didn’t know that was an
idiot, or that it wasn’t there at all, and anyone who claimed it
was there was seeing things… and an idiot. It should be noted that
around the same time this happened, I received an update from Dr.
Rip T. Brash The Third and Wilx. Not in person of course. When I
went outside to pick up the newspaper with the headline “New
Planet: Has it always been there or is it not there at all?” I
discovered another note accompanied by a needle and a vial of
glowing liquid. The note read: