Mind of McDavid

By Joshua Mancini

When McDavid gets left behind on Earth, he and a group of unlikely allies must work together to get back to their families, who are traveling to a new world, and to stop those who want to keep everyone on Earth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9798889606420

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Mind of McDavid

Joshua Mancini

Copyright © 2023 Joshua Mancini

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2023

ISBN 979-8-88960-614-7 (pbk)

ISBN 979-8-88960-642-0 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Prologue

What the Dorris Doing?

Gangster Zack Is Cool

The Scary Short Girls at the End of the Hallway

The Scary Strike

Road Warrior Reid

A Scary Valedictory

Crazy Cool Control Center

Dorris of Darkness

About the Author

Prologue

From a radio to a robot, the idea of the machine is a metacognition about escapism regarding existence. Comfort is the enemy of progress, and progress is the enemy of perfection. We, the people, blindly follow these rules and then impulsively design machines to do the same. History is filled with these repeating philosophies that we never utterly understand until it is too late. This is that story, for when it's too late.

By the year 2182, humanity had resolved the greatest threat to mankind, overpopulation. A global governing agency by the name of SSL had come up with a plan to transport everyone from Earth to another earthlike planet ten light-years away named Kepler.

Over the next thirty years, SSL forced public and private schools to focus students learning on engineering, mathematics, and physics so when the students graduated, they would easily be able to enter the only work there was—building spaceships to transport people to Kepler. SSL had to make hundreds of thousands of these spaceships, and the future generation was the perfect workforce.

Dave McDavid was one of these students, the top of his class. He left high school with a girlfriend named Karen and hundreds of notebooks from school literally filled to the brim with notes and sketches of certain parts of these spaceships. He left with a philosophy that would loop in his head for the rest of his life: Don't let people think you're stupid! and a fear of being put out of touch. When he graduated, he was placed in the manufacturing facilities, placing one metal tube into one place on ship after ship after ship. For most people, this was the only work there was.

Each ship could hold up to two million pounds or about ten thousand people. That means to get all eighteen billion people off world, they would need one million and eight hundred thousand ships. And McDavid sat in a factory, placing a metal tube in each one. After a couple of years of mind-numbing factory work, McDavid and Karen got married and had two kids, Zoe and Savannah.

At the time, McDavid was five feet eight inches, not tall but not short either. He had short brown hair and a black-and-white tattoo of a cross with a snake curling around it on his left arm that he got the day after he graduated high school.

With this type of factory work, it wasn't hard getting a promotion, yet McDavid jumped on any promotion he could get as if it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but the promotions had their cost. The higher you climb that corporate ladder, the more you get promoted, the more time you would have to spend on Earth—overpopulated, air-polluted, garbage-littered Earth. Before the promotions, McDavid probably had a year before he and his family could take one of the ships to leave Earth and travel to Kepler. Now? Over a decade before he and his family could leave. But McDavid didn't mind. At the end of the day, he was implementing his inner philosophy, not letting people think he was stupid. And at the end of the day, that was all that mattered.

*****

With the time of his departure off this Earth less than a day away, McDavid found himself waiting outside in a short line all by himself. He spent his last night on Earth all by himself in a short line. The line led to an ice cream truck. It was dark out, the only light illumination was from the ice cream truck's glowing sign and the few streetlights that hadn't already been broken. Trash littered the ground. There were cracks in the road, and the sidewalk and dead grass spread through the yard that surrounded the road.

There were people in front of McDavid and behind him but not his family. He moved up a spot. He looked over to his girls, his wife and two daughters, sitting in the car, talking, and laughing. McDavid was just staring at them. It was his idea to get ice cream. Their last night on Earth and all McDavid wanted to do was connect with his two girls. He always felt distant from them, especially in these last few years while they were in high school. His time and energy were split between his family and his work. At least, that's what he thought. However, they thought differently.

In the car, the dimly lit dome light on the ceiling of the car gave the girls enough light to see each other and chat about almost anything. They kept glancing at McDavid, then giggling.

So, Mom, are we actually going to do it? Zoe, one of the daughters, asked.

I think so! Karen, McDavid's wife, giggled. I got the letter ready, and because of all the missing people, the ship's insurance policy is offering one million dollars to any family with a missing person. That means when we get to Kepler, we're going to be rich! I'm just not sure if we will be able to pull it off.

This is going to be so nice! Savannah, McDavid's other daughter added. Finally, we will have some peace.

*****

McDavid finally made it to the front of the ice cream line. The ice cream parlor was pretty worn down, but that was what happened when it was one of the last in the world.

How much ice cream do you have left? McDavid asked in a hurry.

Just vanilla, she spoke in a rough, masculine-sounding voice. The ice cream lady had a tuft of white-and-gray pointed hair on the top of her head. She wore a maroon sweater and black horn-rimmed glasses with supporting chains.

I'll take four cones, McDavid said swiftly. He looked back at his car to see his