The First Mann on Mars - Chapter Two
Chapter Two of the hilarious new science fiction novel, The First Mann on Mars by best selling, multi-award-winning author Mark Watson...
The First Mann on Mars
©Copyright 2024 by Mark Watson
THE STORY SO FAR…
Moronic Billionaut Derek Mann, along with his snarky, silver AI sidekick Barry Wilkinson, are hurtling toward Mars in a somewhat questionable spaceship…
Chapter Two: Pudding
They were already more than halfway to Mars when an incident of some vague but troubling nature occurred, forcing Barry Wilkinson to undertake the highly unenviable task of waking Derek. Derek, who had once famously slept through an entire academic year, was currently ensconced behind a fortress of a sleep mask, earplugs, and what Barry could only describe as a near-magical level of obliviousness.
As per the official mission protocols—composed by a committee who evidently had never met Derek—Barry began with Protocol One: the gentle poking. Derek, as expected, did not so much as twitch. He remained a serene lump, floating through space with the detached grace of a man utterly unconcerned with emergencies, personal safety, or the potential implosion of the cosmos.
Barry sighed and escalated to Protocol Two: harder poking. This also proved futile, eliciting nothing but a dreamy mumble about pudding, which, while interesting, was not particularly helpful in resolving the current situation.
Protocol Three, or "The Nose Pinch," came next. This move was traditionally designed to induce panic in the sleeper, but in Derek's case, it merely resulted in a shift from pudding to a somewhat cryptic murmur about custard.
Finally, with an air of resignation, Barry activated the most drastic measure: Protocol Four, a maneuver that involved simultaneously pinching Derek’s nose while smothering his mouth—an action that was either guaranteed to wake him or, in some legal systems, be classified as attempted murder. Barry hoped it would be the former.
For a brief and terrifying moment, it seemed even this would fail. But then, as if surfacing from the depths of a dream about confectionery warfare, Derek’s arms flailed wildly. His earplugs shot out, ricocheting off the capsule walls in a rather dramatic fashion, and his eyes bulged open like a startled fish.
“Who? What? Where? Pudding?” Derek spluttered, gulping in a lungful of artificial air, his brain clearly still lagging several seconds behind.
“Oh, good, you’re awake,” Barry said with the innocent expression of someone who had absolutely not been trying to suffocate a colleague moments earlier. “I’ve got a bit of news from Earth.”
Derek blinked, his face a mosaic of confusion and residual dreams of desserts. “Ugh. What’s happened? Is it important?”
“Well,” Barry said, adjusting his tone as though he were discussing nothing more significant than a minor issue with the coffee machine, “Earth, sir... It’s been utterly destroyed.”
Derek paused, processing this in the slow, deliberate way one might consider the implications of a mild weather forecast. “Destroyed, you say?”
“Yes, sir. Utterly.”
“Gone?”
“Not gone, sir. Just... ruined. Quite, quite wasted.”
“Blown up? Vaporised? Bits floating around?”
“Not exactly, sir. More of a smouldering... lump,” Barry clarified as he flicked on the viewscreen, revealing what used to be Earth. Now, it more closely resembled a burnt potato, emitting a lazy wisp of smoke into the vast, indifferent void of space.
Derek stared at the blackened, charred sphere for a moment, then turned back to Barry, still half asleep, but now with a vague sense that this might be important.
“Well,” he said, scratching his head, “that’s... inconvenient.”
“Yes, sir,” Barry agreed. “Most inconvenient indeed.”
Derek stared at the viewscreen, his sleepy brain finally catching up with the gravity of the situation—or at least attempting to. “Right, okay… so… Earth’s now a burnt crisp floating in space,” he said, rubbing his temples as though this might somehow assist in the thinking process. “But, er… why? What caused it?”
Barry, ever the optimist, clasped his hands behind his back and adopted the tone of someone about to deliver bad news to someone else’s cat. “Ah, yes, well, that part is a little unclear. You see, there was an incident involving, er… let's call it an unfortunate chain of events.”
“Go on,” Derek said, not entirely sure he wanted to hear more but aware that, on some level, he was supposed to care.
“Well, it all started with the Large Hadron Collider.”
“Ah, of course,” Derek nodded sagely, as if this immediately explained everything. “The Collider… doing what?”
“Colliding, sir,” Barry said with a sigh. “Colliding rather more enthusiastically than it was supposed to.”
“You’re telling me they blew up Earth by colliding things?”
Barry shifted uncomfortably. “It’s a bit more complicated than that, sir. You see, some bright spark down there—probably bored, probably under-caffeinated—decided to see what would happen if they turned the Collider up to eleven.”
“Ah.” Derek rubbed his chin. “Eleven.”
“Yes, sir. Eleven.”
“And then?”
“And then… well, as it turns out, when you push enough particles together at a speed no one’s entirely comfortable with, the universe tends to have… opinions.”
“Opinions?” Derek repeated, incredulity creeping into his voice.
“Yes, sir. Violent, planet-wrecking opinions, if you will.”
Derek blinked slowly. “So Earth is a smoking ruin because someone at the Hadron Collider decided to crank it up to eleven and annoyed the universe?”
“In essence, sir, yes. Though the official report referred to it as a ‘quantum anomaly of previously unimaginable magnitude.’”
Derek nodded, looking a little more awake now. “Right. And this ‘quantum anomaly’ just… ruined Earth.”
“Well, it didn’t just stop there,” Barry said, glancing nervously at the console. “There’s also been some… aftereffects. Some kind of ripple, if you will. A cosmic tantrum.”
“A tantrum?” Derek frowned.
“Yes, sir. A very large, very unpredictable, and very, very tantrum-y one. Space-time’s been behaving rather like an unruly child ever since. Wormholes popping up where they really shouldn’t, random gravitational inversions, that sort of thing. And, of course, Earth… well…” He gestured helplessly at the smouldering marble on the screen.
Derek let out a long breath. “So Earth’s been maimed because some genius thought they’d outsmart the universe. And now space itself is throwing a fit.”
Barry shrugged. “Pretty much, yes.”
Derek stared blankly at the screen, then at Barry. “Pudding,” he muttered again, as though that singular thought still made more sense than anything else.
“Yes, sir,” Barry agreed. “I think we could both use some pudding right about now.”
Derek drifted languidly across the capsule, the sheer boredom of space travel nudging him toward the one thing that promised any sort of entertainment: the replicator. It was a newfangled gadget, looking suspiciously like a posh microwave that had been to finishing school. Derek stared at it with the curiosity of a man about to make a questionable life decision.
“Hi,” he said, as if chatting with a new acquaintance at a party. “Can you make anything at all?”
“Yep!” chirped the replicator, in a voice that was just a little too chipper for Derek’s liking. “Anything at all!”
Derek's eyes widened. “Wow. Even pudding?”
The replicator hesitated, as if it had just remembered it left the space oven on back home. “Anything,” it began again, a tad less enthusiastically, “except pudding.”
Derek blinked. “What?” he spluttered, flailing a bit in the zero gravity, his legs kicking the air like a man who's just found out his lottery ticket was one number off. “Why not?”
“Well,” the replicator said, sounding like it was about to deliver some bad news while still maintaining a bizarre level of cheerfulness, “we were in a bit of a rush to upload all the recipes, you know? Tight schedules, endless meetings, something about quantum algorithms—total nightmare. Anyway, we sort of… forgot puddings. I mean, I have all the names, but no actual recipes, so I’d have to guess the ingredients.”
Derek stroked his chin in what he assumed was a thoughtful manner, but in reality looked more like he was trying to remember if he’d left the iron on. “Hmmmm,” he mused aloud. “Shall we give it a shot?”
“Not a good idea,” Barry interjected from the other side of the capsule, not even looking up from his console. This was an android who had seen enough disasters today.
“I’m up for it!” the replicator chirped eagerly, clearly unbothered by the potential for catastrophic culinary failure.
Ten minutes later, Derek was floating mid-air, clutching his stomach, looking about as green as an intergalactic space frog. “I think I’m going to throw up,” he groaned, his face contorting into a look of profound regret.
“Do it in the airlock, please,” said Barry, in the manner of someone who had long accepted that their life was filled with absurd requests. “Otherwise, it’ll just float around in here in a big, blobby mess.”
Derek grimaced. “I didn’t think it could go that wrong,” he moaned. “Everybody knows Toad in the Hole doesn’t have actual toads in it.”
“To be fair,” Barry noted, still calmly tapping at his controls, “I’m not sure the replicator does know that.”
The replicator, sounding entirely too perky for a machine that had just tried to poison someone, piped up. “Shall we try something else? Buckle Cake, maybe? No? How about Brown Betty? Raspberry Fool? Summer Berry Grunt?”
“Best to leave it,” Barry remarked with the detached wisdom of someone who had, at some point, probably witnessed an explosion caused by an overambitious toastie machine.
“Open the airlock,” Derek groaned, flapping weakly toward it, knowing that in the infinite void of space, at least his stomach could find peace.
As the airlock slid open with a soft whoosh, Derek gave the replicator one final glare. “Next time,” he muttered, “just stick to sandwiches.”
“Got it!” chirped the replicator, utterly unfazed. “Shall I make one now? I’ve got this great idea involving—”
“No,” Derek and Barry said in unison, as the door to the airlock closed behind him. The microphone from inside the airlock transmitted the sound of Derek throwing up bits of semi-digested toad.
The replicator, whose voice was still far too cheerful for a machine that had just facilitated a culinary catastrophe, piped up. “He didn’t have to eat it, you know,” it said, addressing Barry with the air of someone gently suggesting they weren’t to blame for the inevitable disaster.
Barry, who had long since resigned himself to the absurdities of life with Derek, sighed as he rummaged around the console. “Well,” he muttered, fumbling for, finding, then activating the off switch for the airlock microphone, “he’s not exactly the sharpest tool in the box.”
The airlock door swooshed open and Derek groggily floated back in. Barry closed the airlock door and activated it, flushing out the regurgitated toad in the hole then went back to fiddling with the control console.
“Better?” enquired Barry.
“What a horrible trip this is turning out to be,” grumbled Derek. “First Earth gets wiped out and now we find out that the replicator that can make anything, can’t make pudding. What a disaster.”
“It could be worse,” the replicator announced. “At least you didn’t try the Knickerbocker Glory.”
Barry didn’t even glance up…
“Or Spotted Dick.”
END OF CHAPTER TWO
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