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Pill Box

2 min readMar 20, 2025

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The red planet

When I first noticed that pill boxes were usually less than a quarter full, little did I suspect that this would lead to … let’s just say much bigger things.

For years on opening my medicine packs from the chemist, and confirming that the boxes were almost always far too big for their contents, I just shrugged, thinking, What a waste of good air. There are probably logistic or commercial reasons, I conjectured and that was that. Then one day, on a whim, I pulled out the superfluous air over the pills and stored it in a biscuit tin. With my multitudinous ailments, the tin soon filled up, and I bought cheap plastic containers and began using them. When my flat was overflowing with my plastic boxes of collected air, I discovered that there was an ice-making factory in our town, and I went in one day and asked if they could freeze some air for me. We’ll even freeze your mother-in-law the man said, if you’re willing to pay. In a nutshell, that was how I started owning massive quantities of liquid air.

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I became notorious for this, and Channel 4 did a documentary about what the press called my fad. Inevitably very soon this practice spread throughout the country. And again it ended up becoming a world phenomenon. Why do you do this? People ask, and (remembering this man who climbed the Everest, who responded, Because it is there!) I said, Because it is air.

We developed our own website, and when the Indo-Sino-European Space Agency, the ISESA was planning their ambitious trip to Mars, and the papers wrote about the main problem facing them, viz the absence of an atmosphere, many suggested that our lot could come up trumps with the millions of gallons of liquid air we kept in our garages. One thing leading to another, as president of the Liquid Air Club, I was contacted by the ISESA, and I arranged to supply them with one million tons of pill box air, as the papers called it.

As the rockets were being assembled, tankers of pill box air were arriving daily at Bucharest Military airports, as the rockets were being launched at the Space Station of Muramaresulu.

The rest is history. Millions of litres of the pill box air were released in the atmosphere of the red planet. Obviously the air that we sent from Earth was going to act as a sort of seed, for within months, vegetation was nurtured and photosynthesis helping, in a matter of years the planet was generating its own oxygen and carbon dioxide.

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San Cassimally
San Cassimally

Written by San Cassimally

Prizewinning playwright. Mathematician. Teacher. Professional Siesta addict.