Books, Beverages, The Moon

It had always been my dream to create a hit beverage. I wanted children in Sudan drinking my cans and doctors in Toronto sipping my bottles. I wanted Coca-Cola to be the new Pepsi, and Pepsi to be the new something less than whatever Pepsi is.

There was only one way to establish my brand: the Guinness route. Everyone knows that before Guinness even dared to unleash their drink they invented the Guinness Book of World Records. Every home in the world has one. It was the ultimate strategy: Instant brand recognition. As soon as Guinness hit the pubs, people were seeing a new drink with a familiar and tasty name.

All I needed was a book. Harry Potter had already been done, and so I had to come up with a completely new idea. Within six years I had it: The Moon. People are genuinely crazy for the moon. That’s why they call them “Lunatics”. If you hide a drawing of the moon inside someone’s pillow they’ll have nightmares. That is the power of Earth’s pearly white satellite.

It was pretty clear to me what people wanted to know about the moon. Everyone knows who the first man on the moon was, but no-one, not even NASA, has any record of who the second man was. Even the second man himself wouldn’t be entirely sure. Being first is the only thing people care about in the late 21st century.

I designed a book to record the first of every event in the moon’s history. Who was the first man to dance on the moon? Who was the first person to cry on the moon? Just as I expected, people went crazy for the book.

As with the Guinness Book of World Records, everyone wanted to be in it, which meant millions of silly topics. People would do whatever it took to get in. They’d spend hundreds of pounds on a flight to the moon just to be the first person to hold their left hand in the air whilst rubbing a kettle with their right foot on the moon.

By the third annual, there were over 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 entries. I was rich beyond my wildest dreams. What reason did I have for launching a hit beverage now? The dream was over. I used my trillions of space dollars to send a bomb into the moon’s core. I was the first and last man to ever destroy the moon.