225th Entry

June 10^th, 2037

1400

Dear Earth Diary

“Money.”

…What?

“You asked why we did it.”

Money? You sent Mary and I into deep space, built an entire city, and hundreds of clones… for money?

“…Well yes. Why else would you do that?”

You’re not trying to secretly take over the world?

“Oh maybe. To be honest I haven’t really thought that far ahead. You’d probably need money to do that though, so hey, we’re in a good place for that.”

Oh.

“To be fair, deep space wasn’t exactly the original goal. It was simple enough. Send an unwitting test subject to Mars, the closest other planet we have, to do some cloning research that would never be legal on Earth, wait a while, go get them, bring them back, and sell them! Foolproof!”

So, what happened?

“We missed.”

By a lot.

“Well, technically speaking we also saved the earth from a fatal collision with an asteroid so you know, not all bad. Anyway, that was that, we thought it was all over when suddenly twenty years later, boom! Automated distress signal. It was too far away for us to properly see but best case, it landed safely, enough of the test subject –

“Hello.”

“Hi there! - Enough of her was left that some usable DNA could be sampled, and the, this is cute, “light dogs” you called them I think, I think I might steal that, the “light dogs” were hopefully in one piece, and we could get our clones after all!

I don’t know if I could be more disgusted right now.

“Worst case, we get the Zubrin back, wash the blood off it, and try again!”

Oh. There we go.

“Anyway, you know the rest. Because you were there. And here, sorry, here’s where I start to get a little angry. Because despite everything I just said, I don’t have my clones. Which means I can’t sell them to anybody.”

Who would want to buy a clone?

“Lots of people. I’ll confess I don’t have a comprehensive list in front of me, but marketing tell me they’re very optimistic. But turns out I’ve been paying them for nothing, thanks to you.”

So… we won?

“Haha. You’re funny. Which side of the bars are you on?”

The losing side?

“The losing side. Because despite the setback, I still have a very good spaceship. It’s even better than the ones I lost. And there’s a couple of hundred free range clones just waiting to be picked up as soon as we want.”

“You won’t find them. We made sure of that.”

“Oh you did a very good job and I’m so awfully proud of you. But if you haven’t noticed, I own a space agency, which is specifically designed to find very far away things and then put other things on them. Don’t you worry, we’ll find them again eventually.”

Why would you spend so much money buying NASA?

“To make more money.”

Why?

“…Sorry I don’t understand the question.”