Ark of the Damned

When he was thirty, and had built up quite a bit of money by playing the stock market, he began to construct a rocket ship. The sleek form of an interstellar craft rose from the farmland next to his rural house. When the news people came, he told them he was building it in order to win the X-prize. The X-prize was a contest that gave the winner ten million for building a craft that could go into space, orbit, return and repeat within two weeks.

A year and a half after he started, Noah blasted himself in space, becoming the first person to do so without government assistance. Everyone watched him closely, especially the governments. To everyone's surprise he parachuted down three miles from his house. Two weeks later he repeated the journey.

After he won, he refused to sell anyone the designs for his spacecraft. Instead he started up a company named Astronautic Design Solutions. The company consisted of only himself. It sold nothing, but bought all sorts of metals, tubing, and electronics. After another year had passed, Noah had built himself another rocket ship, which stood next to the first on his open farmland. If you wandered out there in the middle of the day, you could see cows grazing next to the thrust nozzels of the spacecraft.

After his second spacecraft was finished, the United States government sent a group of special ops out to steal his blueprints. A week later a package arrived at their door containing three sets of dog tags. No one bothered him for a long, long while. Six years and seven rockets later, Noah requested permisson launch all nine of his shuttles. It was reluctantly given to him.

Onboard these nine glistening metallic beasts were eighty designer clones of Noah. He had been creating them in his basement lab while working on the shuttles. They were intelligent and aged at an accelerated rate until twenty-five, at which point they stopped ageing entirely. The news crews filming from the road were bewildered as they witnessed a line of eighty-one identical people in blue jumpsuits board the craft.

The launch went off without a hitch. Noah and his crew of Noahs sailed gently to the planet Mars. There they constructed a environmentally stable dome which was used for housing, farming, and as laboratory space. A full scale cloning and mining operation was begun, and living space just barely outstriped the need. By this time, Noah had declared Mars his own personal planet. The U.N. decided to allow him this, as no one had any use for the practical use for planet, and he did not seem a threat. That turned out to be a mistake.

The Noahs melted the ice on Mars and spread a special blue-green algae throught the water. Twenty years later the air was breathable. By then the number of clones had reached three million. By then the Martian city was visible by telescope from Earth. By then the first Noah was dead. On his death bed he requested that his progeny destroy Earth. They launched a full scale nuclear attack against the dark side of the moon. This upset it's orbit just enough to send it colliding into the planet it used to orbit.

The moon came down slowly. It took a year before the impact came. It hit Asia. The impact killed everyone on that hemisphere and the dust cloud killed the rest. All that was left were Noahs. Some would say he was paranoid. Others would call him brilliant. I don't suppose it matters, as both those types of people are dead now.

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