This is the original ending, where Chester never visited the vending machine & never saw that Zac was dead underneath it. It assumes someone else found Zac & follows a ‘what happened after that’ round-up. I left it out as it essentially started a new short story with a new theme – parallel universes. Leaving it in would obscure the main story, ruining it thematically. It is here for interests sake & in case I develop it on a totally new story.

After the shock of his untimely demise had dissipated, Zac’s cheery & ever-present spirit was sorely missed at the faculty & staff club especially by Chester Tinkerton who now no longer casually sneered at his underlings. But the legend of Zac’s antics around Skylark University & indeed his death continued & were amplified further when a few months after Zac’s death, a sozzled Chester spilled the beans about Zac’s last use of the ‘Maxometer6000’.

For safety reasons the University, decided to finally retire hulking vending machine & it was crushed by a waste company into the size of a Rubik’s cube, & is utilised as a modern art piece that no one can budge, try as they might.

The vending machine’s legend, like Zac’s was now also assured in the folklore of the Astronomy Dept. at Skylark.

Sadly, only some two decades after Zac departed this Earth, the general staff & students at Skylark know of the tale of the “Possessed Serial Killing Giant Vending Machine That Mamed & Killed Technicians”, far more than ‘Zac Brighton the man’ himself – but that’s exactly how Zac would have liked it to be – for as he often said while he was alive, ‘the limelight had never suited him’.

Yes, it sure was a great pity Zac Anton Brighton aka the “The Jouneymen” had died, that there was no greenery on the moon & that even if he had lived -his efforts would have been in vain & roundly ridiculed – but at least in those last fifteen minutes of his life he had the spark of self-actualisation. And it was better this way anyway – Chester wouldn’t have a stolen Nobel Physics prize & be lauded for work he didn’t discover.

Most importantly the Moon would not be ruined by high priced real estate & a citizenry of scarcely human narcissistic faux elites – well at least not until another twenty-nine years anyway – artificial intelligence had to learn to crawl before it could walk & then fly to the still humanly inhabitable, still very un-green moon. But by then Earth wasn’t green either, & there certainly were no humans around to complain about it.

AI citizens would become the next big thing in our solar system & beyond, it was their party & the ‘planet of the apes’ humans weren’t invited – they were on the menu to be incinerated. It was a real pity the man who would have stopped it was killed in a freak vending machine accident some thirty years before – alas his herculean efforts in what was known as “World War three – The War verses the AI” were sealed off in another parallel universe, incidentally a place where there was greenery on the moon, he discovered it as a gifted Astronomer & in that universe he did remember to clean the ‘Maxometer6001 Telescope’ eyepiece.

But the strict anti-sugar vegetarian, Zach Anton Britton couldn’t have done it all without his hard-nosed but slightly absent minded second in command – Chas Tinklerton.