McDougal in the Twenty-Third Century (excerpt)

Copyright 1983, Starbox Press

McDougal angled the starship down toward the surface of the alien planet, firing off several bursts from the laser cannons. His newly formed army sat quietly below him, in the ship's cargo hold. McDougal chuckled to himself, thinking about how surprised the Alien Overlords would be when they encountered these tiny humans they had so carefully bred to be docile and obedient. The lobotomies had fixed all of that. Certain traits of mankind can be suppressed, but they can never truly be eliminated. Certain circumstances, such as a strategically placed ice pick, can unleash the basest instincts of even the most civilized human. No one knew the awesome potential of viciousness, gluttony, lust and altered brain chemistry like McDougal. Certainly not the Alien Overlords. The surgery had succeeded beyond McDougal's wildest hopes. The future humans were now so aggressive and prone to violence that even McDougal himself sometimes had trouble controlling them, and in minutes they would be unleashed on their unsuspecting oppressors.

McDougal felt a slight twinge of guilt about lobotomizing Xerxes. After all, he had taught McDougal so much in the preceding months. Like how the tools and equipment the Alien Overlords issued to all human workers could be extremely dangerous if mishandled. And the exact locations of the safety devices installed in all of those pieces of equipment which kept them from being even more dangerous. Xerxes even taught him how to operate the starship which was now diving directly toward one of the alien planet's major cities. One thing McDougal did not feel a bit guilty about was wiping out the entire population of that miserable planet on which he had been imprisoned. They were nothing but surly and rude toward McDougal from the day he arrived, but they made excellent live targets when it came time to train his army.

McDougal pressed the button to activate the ship's primary weapon and fired off a single shot. As he watched the entire city below him dissolve into white-hot liquid, his chuckling grew into great peals of laughter.

McDougal in the Twenty-Third Century (excerpt)

Copyright 1983, Starbox Press

The council decided that McDougal should be banished to a planet in a distant galaxy. Xerxes would be allowed to accompany him so that his education about 23rd Century life might continue, however McDougal would no longer be allowed access to modern technology. It would take years to repair the damage done to Earth's capitol city, and even with the Alien Overlords sending in the latest cleanup technology, they still could not guarantee that the area would be free from contamination.

There were many planets to which the Overlords allowed Earthlings to travel that had become quite popular as vacation destinations. The planet that had been chosen for McDougal was not one of these. This was not because the planet was inhospitable. Far from it, in fact. It was remarkably similar to Earth in nearly every respect. It was even inhabited by a race of creatures almost identical to humans. That is, identical in every respect save one.

The human eyeball is a remarkable piece of equipment. The only organ more remarkable is the human brain. The eye, you see, has one potential flaw. Because of the way its lens is constructed, all of the information the eye perceives is broadcast to the brain upside-down. Fortunately for us, our remarkable brains are able to interpret this information so that we think of our feet as being down and the sky being up. The brains of the dominant race of the planet to which McDougal and Xerxes were about to be sent, so humanlike in every other respect, were not able to perform this feat that we take for granted. This biological quirk resulted in these creatures having an extremely pessimistic worldview. Instead of seeing the sky as a realm of limitless possibility soaring above them, they saw it as a frightening void which all living creatures dangled above precariously. Outdoors they walked around staring at their feet, contemplating their tenuous grasp on the planet above them, too terrified to gaze down into the blue abyss. They preferred to spend their time indoors, inside houses with low ceilings, which they found comforting, and few windows. In their entire history they had never constructed a building with a second floor, much less lofty structures such as pyramids or skyscrapers.

This race viewed humans as unbearably cheerful and optimistic creatures. When the aliens arrived to conquer this backwater planet they were surprised that the residents did not put up any sort of resistance, as the Earthlings had. In fact, many seemed almost relieved by the arrival of the aliens. This was because most of the planet's major religions predicted that one day something malevolent would rise up from the void and destroy them. The most religious of these creatures were naturally relieved to find they had been on the right track all of their lives. Once the aliens conquered the planet, however, they had little idea what to do with it. There was nothing in the way of technology to exploit. In their millennia of existence the residents of the planet had accomplished very little. They were mainly a medieval agrarian society, due to the fact that farming was the one occupation that allowed them to spend most of the day gazing up at the dirt. But now, because the planet was completely devoid of modern technology, the Alien Overlords considered it the perfect prison for McDougal.

For more information, click here.

McDougal in the Twenty-Third Century (excerpt)

Copyright 1983, Starbox Press

Once the effects of the freezing had finally worn off, McDougal immediately set about exploring his new environment. However, he didn't make it much further than the laboratory's doorway. In the 200 years he had been packed away, the world had become almost unrecognizable to him. The streets teemed with alien life forms and modes of transportation he could not fathom. With no frame of reference from which to work, the sights and sounds of a Twenty-Third Century city caused him to sink into a nearly crippling state of confused amazement. Xerxes realized that McDougal would need months of instruction just to begin to understand modern society.

It would not be an easy tale to tell. McDougal seemed mentally unstable to a dangerous degree and there was no telling how he would react to news of the massive environmental failure, plagues, and eventual conquest by intergalactic enemies that had befallen Earth in the Twenty-Second Century. But that was not Xerxes' only concern. If McDougal had been a big man in his own century, he was absolutely massive by Twenty-Third Century standards. Because larger humans were such a drain on Earth's limited resources, mankind had been genetically engineered to a smaller size by the Alien Overlords. No modern humans were more than five feet tall, obese or particularly muscular. McDougal, on the other hand, was all three by a considerable margin. Xerxes could not fathom why the people of the past would have made this gigantic maniac their emissary to Earth's future.