Meanwhile, back on Primordial Earth during the first half of the 21st century…
In the division of powers for the conglomerate of Uber-Awesome Industries, Uber-awesome Laboratories was the department responsible for the theft, research and advancement of science and technology. This was not for the advancement of humanity but for the advancement of Uber-Awesome Industries and its majority shareholders.
At the research facilities for Uber-Awesome Laboratories, all sense of morality and ethics were left on the sidelines in the pursuit of unbridled scientific advancement. The scientific research conducted at one particular facility was dedicated to the development of substances and technologies that could cure dementia and enhance brain function.
As part of the research, geneticists experimented with gene splicing different species of animals, creating chimeras – all manner of chimeras which were mostly short-lived, hideous abominations. However, not all of the chimeras were monstrous. One experimental line of chimeras used a batch of Guinea pigs imported from Brazil. They were infected with a bioengineered virus that gene spliced their DNA with genes from capybaras, porcupines, beavers, humans and bottlenose dolphins. This created chimeras that were three feet tall and embodied with all that was adorable. They were unbelievably cute. These chimeras were bipedal. They walked with a waddle and were capable of being taught rudimentary tricks.
Their inherent nature was consumed with kindness and fortified with unquestionable resilience. They were also incredibly brave, fearless and determined creatures. However, their intelligence was determined to be just marginally higher than a porpoise … which was still pretty stupid but endowed with self-awareness none-the-less. They were gullible – easily tricked and therefore easily controlled.
Their instincts for purity, goodness and their innate sense of empathy. dignity, integrity and mental fortitude, resonated like a beacon of warm light in the pan cosmic psi field. For his concept of 'the greater goodness', like a moth to a candle flame, Bloke the Bulldog was drawn towards them.
Bloke saw their immense potential. They just needed a little nudge in intelligence. He cared little for impressive physiques and physical attributes. Real warriors, true heroes, thought Bloke, were driven by an unrelenting sense of justice, compassion and higher forms of morality. Real warriors, true heroes, understood the importance of the greater goodness and possessed the resilience to walk that long hard road of hardship in order to cast light into the darkness. Real warriors, true heroes, were measured by their hearts and resolve and not by the size of their biceps.
These chimeras, these fat fluffy slobs of cuteness, these brave resilient souls … they had 'the will' but needed the ability to think 'the way'. All that they needed, thought Bloke, was a massive, titanic, behemoth, gigantic boost in intelligence.
And so, it was, that Rodney Red Rocket entered the Sol star system just behind the planet Jupiter. Bloke held on tight as Rodney's rocket exhaust scorched the fabric of space-time. Rodney did this to build up sufficient speed to ride Jupiter's gravitational field and use it as a slingshot to propel them towards the inner solar system.
As per Newton's Second Law, Rodney needed to drop some mass in order to increase his acceleration. As such, the majestic rocket dumped its fuel reserves in one big burn. Not to worry though, his fuel tank was always full, converting zero-point energy into the physical matter of rocket fuel. It fried and flattened a nearby asteroid, warping it into the shape of cigar that was over 100 metres long and 40 metres wide. This cosmic nugget gradually tumbled away into the void on a hyperbolic trajectory. It would later be detected by the Pan-STARRS telescope at the Haleakalā Observatory in Hawaii. With perfect precision, Rodney used Jupiter as a slingshot and sped towards planet Primordial Earth.
When it came to games of stealth such as hide and seek, Rodney Red Rock was the absolute GOAT. As Rodney entered the atmosphere of Primordial Earth, the rocket cloaked itself. If anyone actually looked up, all they would see was a bipedal bulldog, flying in a straddled seated fashion, drinking a beer while smoking a durry.
It was witching hour when Rodney appeared above the Uber Awesome Industries laboratory. He would wait with Zenlike patience and hovered above as Bloke leapt off his fuselage and bomb dived towards the roof of the building that housed the cute and fluffy chimeras.
Bloke made himself intangible as he fell with the grace of a coconut through the roof. He landed with both boots on the floor of the laboratory that housed the cages of 60 mating pairs of the chimeras. With the power of will and God Gave Rock 'N' Roll To You by Kiss, rattling in his enchanted brains of literal marshmallow, Bloke deactivated the security cameras. He then took a stroll between the rows of cages that housed the mascot chimeras.
Purple mist filled the air and soaked into the cages as Bloke crop dusted the entire lab. The chimeras sneezed and sniffled as they inadvertently inhaled the purple mist. The effects were almost immediate. The mist as molecules entered the chimera's bloodstreams and travelled to their central nervous systems. Inside their brains, neuroplasticity went into hyperdrive as more connections between neurons were forged than stars in not one galaxy or universe for that matter, but more neural connections than the totality of stars across several universes. There wasn't an IQ test imaginable, that could test their heightened intelligence.
Satisfied at the rows of deep, insightful eyes that now stared back at him with infinite thankfulness, Bloke looked up and leapt with great speed through the ceiling, into the sky and onto Rodney's fuselage. The two then disappeared in the wake of a trans-universe portal.
All this of course, was invisible to the human eye. However, if you were a milli-eyed pixie-slug from Epsilon Indi V, you would have watched the spectacle in amusement. Unfortunately, if you were a milli-eyed pixie-slug from Epsilon Indi V, the searing hot temperatures on Earth would instantly cause your gelatinous body to sublimate. The lack of sufficient atmospheric pressure would also cause you to undergo explosive decompression. With complete certainty, if you were a milli-eyed pixie slug from Epsilon Indi V, you would explode into chunks of yellow goo akin to monkey vomit at the base of a banana tree, before you had the chance to view the spectacle of a red rocket that assisted a bipedal bulldog to bust into a dodgy lab … which made this tangential rant pointless.
The 60 mating pairs, easily deciphered the combinations on the locks to their cages. They then broke out of the laboratory and hitched a ride on a departing freight train. Through the clandestine method of stowing away, they made their way to a top-secret space facility hidden deep in the belly of the nation. Under the cover of darkness, the 60 mating pairs commandeered eight orbital hypersonic cruise missiles. They then jacked a handful of tanks and also an Italian coffee machine that wasn't actually manufactured in Italy. They also committed credit card fraud by purchasing a shipping container of duct tape. They then went to work in an empty hanger to create a starship capable of FTL travel. Yep, Dick Alpha had nothing on these furball brainiacs.
The 60 mating pairs buckled in as they switched on the ship's zero-point energy collector and powered up the ship's systems. The starship blasted through the roof of the hanger and was in orbit above the Earth within a second.
The 60 mating pairs stopped to view an orbital space battle that occurred between two larger ships – one which was heavily damaged and a much smaller ship. From quick scans, the 60 mating pairs were able to determine that two forms of predatory creatures were inside one of the larger vessels. Genetics from both types of creatures was of Earthly origin but heavily gene spliced. The first larger ship was on a trajectory course to burn up over the skies of Antarctica. The second larger vessel only contained the first type of creatures. A temporal disturbance in space-time occurred above the east coast of Australia before it disappeared.
As for the much smaller ship, it possessed a single occupant. The 60 mating pairs were alarmed to discover from their scans that the occupant possessed identical chimera DNA to their own. The occupant was male. The ship was damaged and also plummeted towards the east coast of Australia, more specifically the region of south east Queensland. It jettisoned what scans determined to be a damaged, thought activated nanotech construction module … the technology was likely used to change the ship's form and conduct instantaneous repairs. This explained why the smaller ship was damaged and unable to repair itself. It couldn't initiate repairs if the technology it depended upon for repairs was itself in need of repairs.
It took only a few moments for the 60 mating pairs to reach the consensus that the occupant of this ship was a member of their newly created race which therefore meant, he had travelled through time. The 60 mating pairs then determined that the two larger vessels had hostile intent and that they had also travelled through time to destroy them.
As for the brethren in the stricken vessel, with great anguish, the 60 mating pairs chose to abandon him on the logical grounds that at this point in time, they simply did not know enough to interfere with historical events in the time-line. They wished him well in a one-way holographic transmission and hoped that their posterity would soon come to his aid.
The 60 mating pairs then performed a deep space scan of nearby star systems and detected in the Sirius B system, a small habitable planet that was devoid of complex life. The planet was close enough to the white dwarf star to provide a pleasant and temperate climate. It was slightly larger than Mars and thanks to plate tectonics, large volcanic eruptions and photosynthesis from rudimentary lifeforms, possessed a breathable, Earth like atmosphere. The landmass mostly consisted of a band of island archipelagos that spread around the entire circumference of the planet at the equator. Smaller islands and archipelagos were spread across the vast oceans of both the northern and southern hemispheres with extensive ice caps at both poles.
The planet had a large moon that also possessed a thick, breathable atmosphere which was also attributed to plate tectonics, large volcanic eruptions and photosynthesis from similar, rudimentary lifeforms.
A more invasive scan determined the rudimentary lifeforms on both the planet and its moon, possessed DNA and compatible biochemistry to life on Earth. This suggested panspermia. This rudimentary life was also locked in an evolutionary cul-de-sac with no hope of evolving into more complex lifeforms before the planet and the moon, eventually became uninhabitable. The planet was perfect for colonisation.
Satisfied that they had found a home, the 60 mating pairs of the first generation of Semi-Aquatic Guineas Pigs, activated their starship's warp wave engine and disappeared in the wake of distorted ripples in the fabric space-time.
Meanwhile on Mount Olympus, Fabien the French Bulldog sensed with great rage and angst, the emergence of this unquestionable force of righteousness and good. With great anxiety, he paced, pondered, pined and whimpered about the halls of the Greek gods.
He thought about Bloke the Bulldog, the brother he had never met. The brother he hated. The brother he wanted dead. He thought about the great disturbance that Bloke hatched to thwart his diabolical plans to unravel the very fabric of cosmic creation.
Fabien wanted to watch all things burn and he realised that Bloke wanted to prevent that.
Two can play that game, you British bastard, he thought, as he hatched his own counterplan.
Fabien strutted into Zeus' study and found the god playing Donkey Kong Country Returns on his Nintendo Wii. He paced by the endless shelves of unopened airport novels that gathered oceans of dust. Zeus believed that to be in possession of lots of such books, meant to his visitors that he was intelligent and educated.
Fabien approached a globe that was placed on an empty desk. The globe was suspended by the actual shrunken version of the titan Atlas. Fabien leapt up to the top of the desk. He whimpered as he placed a paw on the continent of Africa, more specifically, the Congo jungle.
Zeus paused the video game, "What is that Fabien?" the god asked in ancient Greek, "why are you whimpering?"
The god hopped up from the sofa and walked towards the malignant Frenchie. Fabien looked up at the god with puppy dog eyes, fake sadness and want of sympathy. He continued to whimper as he kept his paw on the Congo jungle.
"I see," realised Zeus as he picked up the Fabien and cuddled him while he blew random raspberries on his belly, "my little lad wants to go for a walk I see, well, fair enough."
As The Power by SNAP! boomed from the stereo above Zeus's fireplace, the god stepped out to the balcony with Fabien resting over his shoulder. The Frenchie glanced back at the globe … at the shape of Africa and the Congo jungle. Zeus leapt off the balcony at three times the speed of light and headed towards the Congo. There were gorillas in that jungle, strong, chest thumping, fierce gorillas.