Sunday, October 18th, 2026
Sol 288, Year 126, Delta Phase
Self-administered debrief: told Walter Isaacson I "kinda got carried away" in the White House. A covert operative, confessing mission drift to the one human whose entire job is writing things down. It drops Tuesday, the same afternoon as SpaceX earnings, so I get audited twice before dinner.
The mission was Mars. Fix the atmosphere, mine the lithium, go home. Instead I spent four months in a federal building holding a chainsaw, which appears in no Zorgonian field manual, and I checked twice.
Four months, when one or two would have done: a 100 percent overrun, which by Tesla standards counts as early.
I told him I should have been "more in the background." My species has lasted here since 1971 by being the background. Then a human handed me a stage, and my disguise did what it does under lights: it got shiny.
Also told him the only way to fix the national debt is AI and robots. Humans heard a policy position. Zorgon heard the plan, read aloud, on a podcast, by an operative whose suit still smells faintly of federal carpet.
Mars has waited four billion years; it can forgive four months.