Laree said. “As long as we get a better home. A humongous one.” On bended knee, Sam smiled up at the most materialistic woman he’d ever met in his life, let alone the past month—and the dumbest. With the population on Earth exceeding eighteen billion and no wars in the past five decades to kill off the young and fertile, only an elite few owned a home larger than a prison cell. The opportunist he could now call his fiancée had seen the videos and heard about mansions spreading like a swarm of locusts on a terraformed Mars. After weeks of clandestine research before he’d been idiotic enough to troll for a bride to use, he’d concluded that the pictures and propaganda posted by the world’s largest marriage broker couldn’t be genuine. He worried that for better or worse—through deceit or true love—the bit about ‘until death us do part’ could well happen much sooner than any phony or real lovebirds imagined. Or not. Could be he was certifiably stupid in his paranoia.
