Thursday, October 8th, 2026

MEDAL LOG: the President hung a metal disc around my neck today and called me a modern-day Thomas Edison, which is generous, since Edison was dead forty years before I landed and all I did was read his file on the flight in. Weighed it in my palm once the cameras swung to Jensen: heavy, cold, zero lithium, ribbon smells like government carpet and 1986. Humans tag the specimens they are proudest of, same as we do, except we use the ankle.

National Medal of SCIENCE, awarded for work I would describe as "remembering."

Reporters noted every recipient had donated to the President's campaigns, said it like a scandal. Not a scandal, a closed loop: money goes in, medal comes out, on Zorgon we call this a receipt and we laminate it. Brin got one, Lisa Su got one, Nadella and Dell got the technology version, which I am told is the same disc with a different verb.

Posted tonight that SpaceX will be worth orders of magnitude more than the current Earth economy, prefaced it with "this will sound super crazy," which is the human phrase for "I have done the math and you have not," because Earth's ledger is $126 trillion and does not include the planet I am actually restoring, so the number is not crazy, it is just not finished!!!!

— E, 494 million km from home, medal in the fourth pocket next to the warm phone, first object the money ever became