had. The little army surplus shovel was still standing up in the ground right where I had left it. I fell to my knees beside the grave site and began to weep.
'Laz, ol' buddy. If only I could fix you now.'
Steven, I am sorry. There would be nothing left of the neural pathways that made him who he was. We could rebuild the dog's body but it would be mindless or blank and would not be the dog that was your friend. I thought I could actually detect the sorrow in Mike's mind voice. He was becoming more and more alive every day.
Honey, let's do what we came to do, she said.
We used the nanomachines to remove the dirt and exhume his remains. After only a few months his body was still in pretty good shape and there was plenty of live genetic material left. When I saw the poor little guy's body I lost it. I started bawling and couldn't stop. I fell to my knees crying.
'I don't know that I can stand this,' I muttered. 'I am so sorry, buddy. If only I had known then what I know now, I could have saved you. I'm sorry . . .'
'I have enough genetic material, Steven. We should bury him now.' Tatiana had a strong stomach—or at least had Mikhail turn off her typical reflexes; Lazarus smelled bad and there were bugs and things crawling on his corpse. She shifted the sands and formed a silicon-and-carbon box around Lazarus's body. There was a crystalline form of silicon dioxide engraving on the dark gray box. It simply read,
I used the nanomachines and erected a huge and fitting memorial to my buddy. The memorial was a three- meter-tall obelisk made of carbon placed in an extremely tight matrix. It was damned near unbreakable. Engraved in the obelisk was the following: '
'There is just one thing missing.' I reached into the sand and built a squeaky toy that was reminiscent of his favorite one. I set it on top of the glass surface of the grave and had it sink down inside the glass a few inches. 'Now, you'll always have that squeaky toy, buddy.' I cried some more and sat there Indian style for about a half hour. Tatiana stood there behind me with her hands on my shoulders and never flinched or moved until I was ready to go.
'Thanks for doing this with me, Tatiana.' I wiped the tears from my face.
'You are welcome, Stevie. He must have been a really great friend.' She held my hand and we walked back to the cloaked alien spaceship.
Before we left Earth again I made a handful of diamonds and a suitcase full of foreign currency out of carbon from some of the debris alongside the road in Bakersfield. Tatiana and I cashed in the diamonds and cash through the CIA's 'diamond factory' and we bought up all of the new beachfront property in Bakersfield and all of the property within a ten kilometer distance from Lazarus's burial site. It cost about a hundred million dollars—it was cheap since the reclamation after The Rain was far from completed. We set up a pet cemetery around the memorial and kept a large budget in place to have it maintained. The town around the cemetery remained as Bakersfield, California, and it became
* * *
We set up a state-of-the-art cloning lab on the Moon and hired some of the best scientists in the field. We got them cleared and moved them up to the Moon with us.
We took fertilized zygotes from several different breeds of female dogs and replaced the DNA in them with Lazarus's. We mixed the X and Y chromosomes in a few of them so we would have some boy dogs and some girl dogs. We then froze a few hundred of the Lazarus clone zygotes in case we needed them in the future. But most importantly, we had a litter of pups of Lazarus clones—some were girls and some were boys and some had a few physical traits and colors mixed in that we threw in on purpose so that they all wouldn't look the same but would have Laz's genetic traits. One of the pups was a spitting image of my old buddy and he is the one that we took. We gave the rest of the pups to the kids on the Moon. We let Mindy, Michael, Ariel, and Hunter have the first pick and then we gave the remaining three to other kids. It was my plan to make sure that Lazarus's genes lived forever.
The clones thrived and we used the nanomachines to remove any genetic anomalies that might have caused them problems in the future. There were early cloning experiments years ago where the scientists cloned a four- year-old sheep. The clone came out four years old. We didn't want that with Lazarus's clones; we wanted puppies that were honest to goodness puppies and not four-year-old puppies. The alien nanomachines and Mike and Mikhail helped us figure out how to make proper clones and all of the Lazarus IIs turned out perfect.
Although we had built my late friend one great memorial down on Earth, I felt that the best memorial was the clone puppy. Scientifically, he was known as Lazarus II but I felt that he needed to be his own puppy and so I named him Woodrow the Dog instead. Tatiana and I call him Woody. At first we didn't get any of the pups fixed and it wasn't long before there was a puppy surplus on the Moon. We also made sure that some other breeds were brought up so as not to stagnate the gene pool.
We encouraged folks traveling to the new outpost worlds throughout the quarantine zone to take a few puppies with them as well. Lazarus's DNA was spreading across the galaxy along with humanity. I liked this very much. It might have been the damned Grays that were inadvertently responsible for his demise, but it was also their fault
