Upon retirement, Michael bought a ticket to Mars. He had made good money working all those years and plunked most of it down on a one-way passage to the red planet. Round trip would have been too expensive, and he figured he would probably die out there anyway.

            When Michael got to Mars, the weather wasn’t the best. He kinda knew that was coming, but it was really cold, like 200 degrees below zero at night. Nevertheless, he soon got used to the routine at the Mars Budget Inn where he spent most of his time.

            One day Michael decided that he was ready to die and hired a ride on a Muber, a Martian startup modeled after the Earth mega-corp Uber, and gave the driver coordinates that would pretty much exhaust all the money he’d put in his Muber account, which was all the money he had left in any account. It would have been enough to stay at the Mars Budget Inn for another eight years, but Michael wanted to die the same way he’d lived, in a hurry and with curiosity.

            It really was a bit surprising that a Muber accepted his ride request all the way out to 44 degrees East/49.5 degrees South. That was one long-way-to-go from the Mars Budget Inn, but it turned out that the driver, one Billy Casanova from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, a place on Earth almost under water, had just bought a brand new Mesla battery-operated planetcrawler. Mesla was another Martian startup, and Billy’s Mesla had a range of 2.5 long-way-to-goes, so that was enough to get Billy’s client all the way out to his destination, make it back safely to his home at the Mars 3-Star Thermodome, and still have ½ long-way-to-go in reserve.

            Neither Billy nor Michael knew how long it would take to get to the crossroads of 44 East and 49.5 South. There probably wasn’t a crossroads there anyway because there weren’t too many roads on Mars. Even on Earth, where they came from, longitudes and latitudes didn’t have crossroads where they crossed. So there you go, why would you expect there to be one on Mars? It was going to be sort of an adventure for both, a near death experience for Michael, until he died that is, and a bit worrisome for Billy who fortunately was adventuresome. And this trip alone would make almost half a year of payments on Billy’s Mesla, so he could take it easy at the Mars Three-Star Thermodome for quite a while after he got back. To pass the time, he liked playing old video games and masturbating ferociously with his curtains wide open. People at the Thermodome were very tolerant and sometimes he got quite a crowd at his window. Because people there were kind of bored and had a lot of time on their hands, to say nothing of the fact that they weren’t very busy.

            On Mars, you can see how far a place is on the map, but you never know if you’re going to run into some slimy slow sand which drops your velocity down to a fraction of the speed you can normally go over solid terrain. Which is why Billy and Michael weren’t sure how long it would take them to reach their destination. So they decided to leave at 4 p.a. and get a jump on the day. Michael was like that old Indian in the movie who said, “It’s a good day to die,” and Billy was really happy to be getting this mega-fare that would make his payments on the Mesla for six months. Billy told Michael he could stretch out in the back seat with a bottle of water or a shot of cocaine, but Michael was a sociable sort of guy so he told Billy he’d be fine riding up front and accepted the shot of cocaine.

            At first the cocaine made Michael really talkative and communicative, downright chatty you might say, so Billy couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Which was frustrating. Because besides being adventuresome, Billy was a guy who liked a good conversation as much as he did ferocious masturbation, and each time he’d try to respond to one of Michael’s insightful comments on any of the myriad of fascinating subjects that Michael was covering, it would be like, “Yes, that’s so…” and he was going to offer an apt affirmation and segue to a discerning observation about whatever random rumination happened to be bouncing around his brain at the moment. That’s the way it usually is with extroverts; I’m an extrovert so I know how that works. But Billy could never get a word in edgewise until Michael started coming down from the effects of the shot of cocaine and pretty much melted into the front seat, licking his lips and grinding his teeth while trying to avoid eye contact at all costs, finally passing out and leaving Billy talking to the Mesla’s non-conversant windshield, which would at least listen to him.

            By this time they were almost three tenths of a long-way-to-go out in the direction they were headed. And we’re about to get to the most interesting part of our story. I hope you like it and aren’t getting bored.

            After Michael had been slumped over snoring in the front seat for about an hour, he was awoken by Billy nudging him in the shoulder, just like he might have done in a similar situation on Earth. “Hey, Michael, l-, loo-, look,” Billy said in awe as he gazed at the sight before them that left even this extrovert nearly speechless. As Michael sat up in the seat, remembered where he was, and stared in wonder at the awesome awesomeness in front of them, he too was left nearly speechless, so the whole air-conditioned Mesla was left in an eerie, battery-powered reverie of silent wonderment. As their eyes stayed riveted on the sight before them, their feelings gradually morphed without their realizing it to ones of veneration and then nearly worship, as they somehow became aware that what they were beholding was a Temple, unlike any Earthly or Martian temple they had ever seen. Fortunately, Michael was from Missouri in the middle of the bible belt and had seen a lot of fake worship, so he wasn’t drawn into the worship phase as easily as he might have been. Billy on the other hand was almost praying to the darn thing and just about ran into it before Michael jerked up on the hand brake as the Mesla came screaming up to the outer perimeter of its amorphous exterior.

            It’s hard to believe what happened next, but I might as well tell you or else the story ends here. No, neither Billy nor Michael accepted Jesus as their personal savior, but Michael was ready for pretty much everything else and immediately jumped out of the Mesla. But then he jumped right back in because he’d forgotten in his excitement to put on his spacesuit. You can’t just go prancing around Mars without a spacesuit.

            OK, that’s not the exciting part, anybody who’s ever been to Mars knows you can’t prance on Mars spacesuitless, but what was incredible was what happened when Michael stepped into the Temple in his Malmart discount spacesuit. With one big WHOOOSH, it was sucked off his body and ripped to shreds and tattered and triturated until it was no more that tiny shreds of whatever it was made of, and he was left buck naked, every inch of his body exposed. Michael thought to himself, “So this is how I’m going to die, of Martian exposure. What a bummer, I won’t have a chance to say anything profound like the old Indian who said it’s a good day to die because I’ll be in extreme discomfort,” when all of a sudden he gradually felt himself becoming enveloped in a soft and malleable material that was really more like a cloud. That’s right, it happened gradually, all of a sudden. All at once, and little by little. Kind of like an immediate orgasm that threatened to climax any second but just kept him on the edge, with his body swaying slowly in ectoplasmic ecstasy.

             Sounds pretty nice, huh?

            What Michael didn’t know was that the temple was equipped with Sense&Synth technology which sensed all the gases and solid nutrients that a body requires and synthesizes them on demand. So the right mix of nitrogen, oxygen, and trace gases was provided to his nose and mouth area and he never got hungry or thirsty or had to eat or drink again. And the rest of his bodily necessities were taken care of as well. Imagine that if you can.

            Like I said, it’s hard to believe this is true. Michael was so excited he tried to exit the Temple to tell Billy. Thoughts of introducing this incredible Sense&Synth technology to friends with high level contacts in Silicon Valley were racing through his head (Michael had already come up with a catchy acronym: SAS!), but as soon as he stepped out of the Temple the protective cloud disappeared and he was exposed, buck naked, to the normal 50 degree below zero daytime temperature. So he had to jump back into the Temple, and he never did get to tell Billy or anybody who could make contact with entrepreneurs on Mars or Earth what he had discovered. S&S technology was just one of those things that can’t be exploited for personal gain, kind of like Edgar Cayce’s psychic powers if you know what I mean. If you don’t, forget it, it’s not worth explaining, and not as interesting as what happened next.

            Back in the Temple, Michael was once again enveloped in the extreme comfort of Sense&Synth technology. As he started taking in the Temple’s interior, he noticed a stark beauty that reminded him of the Calvinistic cathedrals at Geneva and Lausanne on Earth, except this time the state of ectoplasmic ecstasy he found himself in seemed to provide in and of itself all the beauty that was missing on those bare Calvinistic walls. Kind of like the VR technology introduced decades before on Earth that had been a brief hit before its adherents turned into murderous zombies responsible for the millennial genocide of the 2020s.

            It’s hard to explain why anything more has to happen in this story. Pre-orgasmic physical exhilaration surrounded by bountiful beauty should be good enough for anyone to stop searching, but Michael eventually decided to take a few steps and explore the interior of the temple. I mean why not just sway in ectoplasmic ecstasy forever? Isn’t that what most people would do? Or do some people feel a need to Do Something, no matter if things are going just fine for them, maybe because doing something will benefit somebody in their family, or their tribe, or even the rest of Humanity, or Martianity. Michael just happened to be in the group that wanted to Do Something. For some reason he didn’t fully understand, he wasn’t content to titillate forever on the edge of orgasmic climax in his cloud of ectoplasmic ecstasy. In retrospect, it may not have been a wise choice, but he started wandering around the Temple somewhat randomly, exploring its cavernous reaches until he ran into what he immediately recognized as an interplanetary vehicle, an alien spaceship on what appeared to be a fully-equipped launch pad.

            Now Michael was not an astronaut, but he’d been driving tractors on the family farm on Earth since he was six years old, cars and trucks for forty more years on the home planet, and then compact Marley-Davidson scooters on Mars ever since he’d been there. So what the heck? He climbed into the alien ship and took off. He decided to head to Earth and drop in at NASA to show them what he found, so he started entering “Go to Earth” at the terminal next to the only seat in the spaceship. Unfortunately, as soon as he entered the first “G” keystroke, the onboard computer mistakenly auto-completed his input to “Gamma3.” Darn thing! The computer had taken over and now he was headed to this planet called Gamma3. Concern crept into his brain and encroached rapidly on ecstasy as its dominant emotion.

            Would he make it to Gamma3? Did he have enough fuel? Would he still be in a state of ectoplasmic ecstasy if he made it there? What was on Gamma3?

            Then as if in answer to the questions forming in his mind, a 60-inch 8k display popped up in front of him with images of Gamma3, its beautiful topography, and its inhabitants. “Oh my God,” exclaimed Michael at the sight, “Gamma 3 is inhabited by dinosaurs! I’m going to a planet inhabited by dinosaurs.”

            And as if that weren’t troubling enough, a text ribbon at the bottom of the screen read, “please be informed that your present S&S system is not compatible with Gamma3’s atmosphere, TempleOS 8.6 required” and a square with just one button on it popped up on the screen in the middle of the frozen image of a brontosaurus in a beautiful Gamma3 rainforest . “OK” was the only option presented. Michael tried clicking outside of the square containing the OK button, and nothing happened. He searched around the edges of the display for something to click on, and nothing! Finally in desperation he started punching the ESC button repeatedly, and after about the fifth time he hit it, the screen went blank except for an image of two hands wrapped around the neck of a gasping visage and the words “native Gamma3 atmospheric anatomy required with TempleOS 8.3” in fine print at the bottom of the screen. Apparently the spaceship was from planet Gamma3 and assumed the astronaut onboard would be too, but Michael was originally from Earth and had neither Gamma3 anatomy nor his Malmart spacesuit.

            Michael felt a tightening of his throat and a burning of his skin as the ectoplasmic cloud gradually and suddenly, bit by bit and all of a sudden, vanished from around his body. Well that’s what you get for trying to Do Something, he thought, and stopped struggling to breathe. “Well it’s a good day to die, and this time I have enough time to say something profound,” he mused, as he resigned himself to ending a good life right there in the spaceship that had just left the ectoplasmic ecstasy of the temple on Mars.

            “You don’t always have to do something, my friends,” he preached to the non-existent multitude he imagined would love to hear his supremely simple message, “Ecstasy is enough.”

Finn Briscoe (aka Pinko Lomax): An engineer and tech entrepreneur with a passion for Latin American fiction, who didn't make it big but did make it bust, I write punk sci-fi in this incarnation. I read at open mic fiction and poetry readings in South Florida when they let me and sometimes tell stories at local storytelling events. I am also a volunteer at NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) Broward County. A version of this story appears in my upcoming novel, God Is a Mortician–A Brief History of Green Aliens with Fifteen Eyes, Mortician Deities on Earth, and Extraterrestrial Experimentation with Human Sexuality,