The Corruption

(I still need to come up with a name for this story, so if anyone wants to recommend one, I'll be happy to consider any recommendations.)

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Big business, corporations, the stock market, and space exploration and colonization. They all play a huge role in the lives of mankind today. Every once in a while, some company with a huge budget takes a huge gamble in developing some new technology to aid in the colonization effort on Mars. Many projects are failures, some are successes. Mars still remains an inhospitable place, but there have been six colonies established on strategic points all over the Red Planet. These outposts were established under the UN, because it was ruled that all men go forward into space as equals.

'That makes it sound more simple than it really is. This is a very complex system and it all has to work perfectly or people die. That's just how it works.' Servius thought bitterly. 'If it dosen't work right, people die, either on launch, landing, or during life on Mars.'

Servius stood up and took the memo he had been reading and crumpled it up. He knew all this, there must be a new employee in another department, or in this one, he had no clue. His desk was littered with papers detailing the success rates of missions sent to Mars versus the profitability of them.

Servius hated his job, because he knew that those missions that were unsuccessful, many of those missions, men and women had died. He knew that, but there was no way that concept could be covered on a graph. He was an analyst, and he made sure that the missions to Mars were still worth it.