A lesser-known character featuring in the book Life, The Universe and Everything, the third of five books in the Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy "trilogy". Zipo Bibrok 5 x 108 is the inexplicable private name of His High Judgemental Supremacy, Judiciary Pag, LIVR (the Learned, Impartial, and Very Relaxed), the Chairman of the Board of Judges at the Krikkit War Crimes Trial. He was possessed of the finest legal mind ever discovered at the time (which was ten billion years before the main course of events in the H2G2 series) and took advantage of this to wear Ceremonial Beach Loafers in court.
His most famous (and indeed, only recorded) judgement was passed on the people of the planet Krikkit after they were finally subdued following a two-thousand-year period of war between Krikkit and the rest of the Galaxy, which the latter only narrowly won. His judgement was instrumental to the book's plot, and involved sealing the planet Krikkit in an envelope of Slo-Time until the end of the universe.
According a theory of mine which I haven't found elsewhere, Zipo Bibrok 5 x 108 is also a distant ancestor of Zaphod Beeblebrox, one of the major characters in the Hitch-Hiker books. I'm dead serious, too. Check the facts:
- Allowing for variations in language over the course of many millions of millenia, Zipo Bibrok's name is very similar to Zaphod Beeblebrox's.
- As is well known, an accident with a contraceptive and a time machine means that Zaphod's lineage is rather eccentrically numbered. Zaphod is Zaphod Beeblebrox the first. His father was Zaphod Beeblebrox the second. His grandfather was Zaphod Beeblebrox the third, and so on.
- Zipo Bibrok lived 10,000,000,000 years before Zaphod.
- The number after Zipo's name could be taken to mean that he is "Zipo Bibrok the 500,000,000th".
- On average, this would mean roughly 20 years between generations of the Bibrok/Beeblebrox lineage.
- Beeblebrox hails from the planet Betelgeuse Seven, while Bibrok's race is unspecified. If they're anything like humans, 20 years is reasonable.
It could be true. You never know, folks. Improbability fields are crazy things. (We also note with interest that the first time we meet Zaphod at the start of the first book in the Hitch-Hiker Trilogy, by a totally meaningless coincidence, it happens to be his two hundredth birthday. This is a shame. If Zipo's number had been 5 x 107, then there would've been exactly 5 x 107 generations, each of 200 years between the two.)