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

“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.”

“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.”

“Not just any investment bankers!” cried out Rip in his defence. “The most diabolically inter-spliced species of investment bankers ever devised! I isolated strains from the genome of Torniolic Speculation Gnomes, sprinkled in the potent and unrivalled Remorselessness and Lack of Care for Consequences DNA from the Ruthless Ruddigerian Financing Board, and countless other infinitely impressive bits of investment banking biology. Then I found a simple little hairy beast and injected it with the formula.”

“What possible bet could involve such diabolical and pointless activities?”

“Well that much even we don’t quite know,” said Wilx, punching information into his gigantic and confusing looking computing machine, which did all sorts of things other than computing, like spitting out dissolvable mind history tablets… which it did as Wilx stroked a large red button emphatically. “Here, eat this.”

“What are they?” asked Krimshaw and Rip.

“Dissolvable mind history tablets.”

“What do they do?” asked Rip and Krimshaw.

“Instantly bring us all up to speed on the information I just procured regarding the details of Rip’s bet. Rather than research extensively and explain my findings to all of you, I simply encrypted the necessary information from The Complete and Unabridged Historical Records of All Things, into this tiny tablet which, once dissolved in our mouths, will send the information to our respective brains without all your annoying questions making it take forever for you to understand.

“That sounds like a splendid way to avoid endless and painfully detailed explanations and move on with things.”

“It sure is.”

The trio swallowed the pills. Krimshaw saw and processed a full BBC Documentary series worth of information instantly and was shocked and awed… awed, and then shocked. A quick look around at the other two showed they were fairly shocked as well, but not nearly as awed as Krimshaw. They were more amused by the details of events they had buried under a pile of other equally insane events in their memory banks.

“Let’s compare our unique takes on the information received to make sure we’re all on the same page,” suggested Wilx. “It appears to me that Rip bet… er, someone, that he could hop into a wormhole, pop out in a random solar system, refrain from betting on the furthest planet from the sun, then cultivate a species of investment bankers on the one planet capable of sustaining life. He insisted that investment bankers were not only a great source of fuel, but that if unchecked by another more intelligent species, they would take over and dominate every square inch of the surface of the planet, destroying and polluting everything in sight, but leaving a fair amount of tasty fish buried deep in the ocean, untainted by the savage recklessness of the Investment Bankers. Then he would return from his time travels to reunite with… er, someone, and one day him and… er, someone, would randomly stumble out of a sideways time travelling worm hole in desperate need of both investment bankers and fish with a fully reformed Greeg named Krimshaw.”

“So just to recap,” said Krimshaw, “Basically Rip destroyed the potential of a decent planet and all of its decent life forms to evolve naturally by introducing this savagely over aggressive population of Investment Bankers… and he won this horrific bet and that’s why there’s a perfect gas station waiting for us in this solar system as we emerge from a time travelling worm hole?” asked Krimshaw, for the first time seeing Rip for what he was; a reckless, pathological maniac.

“More or less,” said Wilx.

“That’s pretty much what I got,” said Rip. “Except that the anonymous person I made this preposterous bet with was you Wilx.”

“Dammit, you blew my cover!”

“How could you possibly not remember all of this?” said Krimshaw, in a way that implied not remembering this would indicate insanity like this happens all the time. “Does insanity like this happen all the time to you two or what?”

“Well we didn’t actually know it had happened until just now, why else would we bet on it?” Wilx said calmly. “At the time, I was likely certain we would never see the planet again, and besides, there's a very good chance the incident and the bet hadn’t actually happened until we came out of the wormhole. It just means we've travelled sideways in time.”

“What?”

“Very common phenomenon. Happens all the time. Look, we flew into a time travelling worm hole, and when we emerged a series of completely incomprehensible coincidences occurred. That’s what tipped me off that it was time for some mind history tablets. It’s very simple, with well seasoned time travellers like me and Rip always recklessly jumping through hyperspace, the Universe couldn’t possibly make sense of all the reckless and potentially catastrophic things that well seasoned time travellers like us do, namely setting off destructive and nonsensical chains of events rippling throughout space and time… generally screwing things up for everything and everybody. So Universes, being clever and rather flexible things, will simply alter events in the past and present, re-aligning themselves so they can make sense of things.”

“Completely lost.”

“When we first met you and picked you up in the Greeg cage, oh by the way you were a Greeg before, an especially dumb and savage one too…”

“I was a what?!”

“Please, let me finish. So when Rip made his bet about turning you into a normal, intelligent being and all that other jazz that led us up to this point, he and I had never even remotely made a bet involving genetic splicing and investment bankers and fish. However, when we shot through the time travelling worm hole, the only possible way for the Universe to make any sense of us arriving here was if we had made such a bet, and were approaching such a planetary gas station. Without such constant re-alignments of reality, things would never make any sense in any of the Universes. It’s just the way things are.”

“I see,” said Krimshaw, only barely comprehending the significance of all of these nuggets of information. “So I was a Greeg at some time is what you’re saying? That’s what those officials were after before we hyper-jumped into the maze? That’s what those spidery creatures were really angry about? I’m nothing but a good for nothing Greeg that you taught how to read and behave somewhat normally just so this jackass could win a bet, which it turns out was just a minor piece of a much larger and more confusing bet, that never actually happened until we just recently shot out of a worm hole, because the Universe doesn’t like to be confused?”

“Close enough,” said Wilx.

“Oh look we’re here!” said Rip, failing to change the subject since they were quite clearly just floating past Neptune. Realizing it didn’t remotely work, he tried a different tactic. “Well, hey, look pal we still like you just the same… friend.”

“You don’t like me all, I’m not your friend, you just used me in a bet.”

“I use everyone in a bet, it’s kind of what I do.”

“That doesn’t make it okay!”

“Sure it does!”

“Alright you two, that’s enough, cut it out, etc.” interceded Wilx. “The important thing here is that the bet now exists, and Rip has won it, which changes things around here quite a bit.”

“Damn straight it does,” exclaimed Rip. “This is my fleet again, and I’ve got all sorts of other belongings and possessions back in my gambling arsenal. I’m back baby!”

As the information overloaded Krimshaw’s brain, he reeled and collapsed into a heap, slipping into unconsciousness. The telescreen flickered.

“Congrats on regaining control of the fleet Doc. We’ve always liked you more than that Astro-whatever-the-who-cares-ologist sidekick… you usually send us on much wilder and unpredictable adventures.”

“I bet you every one of my superfluous internal organs you can’t fly into the giant rings of that planet and survive,” said Rip, unable to contain the ability to make bets again.

“You’re on boss,” happily replied the soon-to-be-dead, self-appointed leader of Obotron 4, Krimshaw’s last memory was the cheer erupting from Rip as the ship exploded immediately upon coming in contact with the rings of Saturn. Krimshaw passed out.

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