Greegs & Ladders by Zack Mitchell, Danny Mendlow (top 10 ebook reader txt) 📕

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 in 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.

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.

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