The First Mann on Mars: Chapter One: Derek and Barry

The First Mann on Mars

©Copyright 2024 by Mark Watson

Chapter One: Derek and Barry

It is a truth universally acknowledged, at least by those in the exclusive club of people with a spare continent or two in their back pockets, that if your best friend happens to own all the spaceships, you are likely to end up in space yourself, whether you want to or not. Such was the case with Derek Mann, Earth’s second richest human, whose singular achievement on the path to becoming the first Mann on Mars was, as with many things in his life, entirely accidental.

Derek, you see, was a man of substantial size, which is to say that his gravitational pull was noticeable. He had inherited his fortune from his father, who had inherited it from his father, and so on, in a chain of progressively less competent individuals stretching all the way back to a Mann who, quite by mishap, found himself the sole owner of a considerable chunk of America. This was shortly after everyone around him had inconveniently expired via a series of regrettable scalping incidents. This ancient patriarch, with the cunning and wit now synonymous with the Mann family name, would often chuckle and claim to have “put the Mann in Manhattan,” a joke so profoundly crap that it has persisted…