You'd think I was dead. But when a ray of sweet sunlight pierced through the tinted window of the pod, the tint disappeared like shutters and let the sun bleed unto me with a vicious smile. Wake up sleepy head. Do you feel that? Is tastes like blood.

I opened my eyes before I saw the crusted red stream leap off my eyelashes. I felt dizzy when I found myself upside down, hanging loosely from my seatbelt, my head pressed up against the chilly window, my limbs either floating in midair or pressed with searing pain against the wall of the pod. I moaned, and closed my eyes again. I tried to feel for my belt buckle. I tried to let loose from its 'safe' embrace. But once I found the button to unlace the safety straps, my body cannon bombed on top my head and I felt a nick in my neck as I landed. I groaned in pain. I tried to curse, but my head hurt too much to make out anything determinable.

When I opened my eyes again, I realized a crack in my helmet. The transparent shield was broken like a glass fishbowl smashed to the ground. When I saw this, I began to notice the small shards sprinkled on my cheeks, forehead and hair like ice crystals. I was dead. I had to be. I was only a ghost breathing this vacuum. This pod's oxygen filter was in the red on the wall.

Then the most beautiful sound came, touched my ears like a lullaby before bed. I looked to the window, and when my eyes adjusted to the bright rays of the sunshine, the strangest color came true: Green.

Green. Was I in Eden? Heaven? There was nothing green on Mars, nothing besides the farm in my hut. But that hut was drowned, by the strange water that'd come from the mountain. What was this?

When came the thought that maybe, just maybe, the past years had all been only a terrible dream, that I may just quite possibly, be on Earth, my eyes started to swim above the rolling carpet of a dazzling smile. My face expanded as the oxygen flushed in through my pores. The green around me, all around me across the entire ring of windows, swayed in a slight breeze. My head rolled as my blinking lashes faced up to what I thought had killed me: High above me the window was cracked. The little oxygen left in the pod's supply must have spilled out of that crack. But in exchange, if indeed I was alive, a flood of oxygen from the atmosphere must have drained back in.

An exhale. My mouth opened in my smile. I laughed. Sweet relief. I'm home. I'm home! I laughed louder in what could have been a quiet rage of honeyed insanity. My journey through isolation has ended. I was back on the mother land!

But enough. That was fictitious. All of it. My smile almost disappeared, that is, before it rebuilt itself, when I heard a tap on the window beside me, and felt myself, for the first time in forever, feel utterly, truly loved...

I turned my head, and smiled. Five little fingers were wrapping on that dusty window. Those fingers followed up a little child's arm, and followed to the white dress of a little girl, her hair flowing long in curls while the sunlight shined through them. Her bangs rose above raised eyebrows and bright eyes that blinked atop a laughing smile. She was laughing at me. Infectious was that smile, and mine nearly cracked open my dimples to spill my blood. I laughed as she did. And tears burst sideways down my fallen face. What is more, the sound of laughter expanded, more children taller and shorter, older and younger arrived beside her and circled me in the pod all around. They were carrying sticks and flowers. I was in heaven. This was Earth. I looked over their heads, and found milky white clouds passing overhead in that clear blue sky. And the yellow sun was smiling, too...

But I was in for a rude awakening.

Over the girl's shoulders, a shifting shine of something silver swept across the trees beyond. I lifted my broken fingers. Ever so slightly. My mumbles were futile between my tired lips. What's that? I pointed straighter. What is that silver object as tall as the trees? Something inhuman was walking across the forest. What was it? Gaining some self-control, I managed to clear my throat. "Wha--" (What is that?)

The kids merely giggled to each other. That is, until an older boy came running. And then behind him, came a woman, hair swimming in the air.

Help! What is that? I pointed and my hand and finger convulsed. Exhausted, I said, "Wh-what is that!"

Everyone turned around, eyes following my finger: I gasped:

The sea of kids broke to reveal in the background a row of titanic robotic limbs, drifting and stamping like rolling spiders across fields of farm that could be seen between the breaks in the fields and forest. They were carrying trees, digging soil and spilling seeds. Draining irrigation systems through rolling fields of fresh new plants. Much like Israel learned to plant all new trees and master the art of water desalination, this looked like a taming of the Earth's desert.

But a bead of sweat ran down my hairline. I caught the faded red mountains far along the horizon. Those red mountains were all too familiar. My gut wrenched—this wasn't Earth. Those were Martian mountains. I was still here. I never left. The nightmare wasn't over! What was this but a sick dream! There was no escape for me!

"NO!"

The crowd of children started laughing. But the caretaker ran to the window and tried to open it with her palm. No use. She then used her nails to pry it and slide it open to help me out. Yet, to no avail. She yelled to one of the older kids to run off and get help.

I wondered why her alarm seemed to dwarf my own fears of being stuck on this hellish planet, so I shifted my head to see just what my body looked like. And then I understood. Chin on my chest, I strained and found the entire abdomen of my suit looked like it had been dipped in cranberry juice and wrung as dry as a twisted towel.

And there was my leg-- but where was the other one? Suddenly I saw, as I struggled to roll the slightest inch, that my foot was bent crooked underneath my back, and my heel had escaped through the bottom of my shoe, showing an open, fleshy scar.

When the Earth began to shake, the pod began to rumble. The children started screaming, and my head twisted to find them running, some of them waving their arms in adventurous cheer, because the boy the teacher had sent for help was running back to her. And behind him, came quickly the colossal robot spider, metallic and wired, running at a dangerous pace like a hungry dinosaur. Straight for me.

The teacher grabbed the boy's hand and wisped him out of the commercial robot's path, when I braced myself—for impact. I don't know why, but before the robot reached the pod, and swung its arm crashing through the windows of the pod to raise the roof away... my life flashed before my eyes, or at least, I saw that one family picture perturbed my vision:

Three smiling faces: The younger me, clean cut, no facial hair; my wife, eyes bright, those genuine crevices tracing her sincerest smile; and our baby, asleep and in my arms. That picture faded now--

CRASH!

The children's screams drowned under the bombastic plow the sweeping spider's arm orchestrated when it cut the glass and aluminum and metal and wires of the pod in half. The entire top of the egg cracked off and flew off to the other side of the tree farm.

Bits of glass rained down. I meant to scurry out of the pod's remaining base—but the smallest stretch burned my nerves like a white-hot cattle branding that melted my skin deep down to the bone. I shrieked and fell on my back. I looked up and the sunlight blared down on me. I heard a blare of dramatic violins shake me in an invisible symphony. Avante Garde. I lifted to block the sun and see my attacker. The spider crawled with its head stories above me. It completely blocked out the sun. The trees lurched all around and the ground hopped eight times when the robot staked the Earth to surround the pod with its glistening metal pillars. Its legs formed a circular fortress all around me. I felt my belt for a gun. Just to check. But when of course there was nothing, and no way to defend myself even if I did have one, the titanic insect blared an alarm, much like when a truck moves in reverse. The head of the spider began to lower like an elevator. As it fell upon me the world grew darker. The blue sky disappeared. The green canopies erased. The tall brown tree trunks vanished. My good luck was blown. In a sudden fast drop, the loud spider rang out like a jackhammer, and every sense outside my body went black, silent. Nothing.

Time passed before all gravity let loose. I exhaled for once and the strangest sensation cooled my skin and pulled me up. I levitated through the dark abyss. No up, no down, I drifted through space and nearly forgot my pain, that is, until a blinding white light appeared from some angelic circle overhead. The upward force pushed me high, and I accelerated like a sudden bullet and launched up before finding a ceiling with a stream of lights. I gasped—the upward pull ceased—gravity returned—and I fell back as a baby bird pushed from its nest.

I thought I'd fall a hundred stories back to Mars—when my head and spine landed smack on a concrete floor.

Naturally, I groaned some more. And when I opened my eyes, I felt two pairs of arms rip me by the shoulders off the cold floor and slap a pair of handcuffs around my wrists. I was under fucking arrest.

I turned and saw an array of monitors circling the walls; I tried hard to move my feet forward so they wouldn't drag as the two figures behind me forced me down a busy aisle. Where was I?

While they lurched me to the right and the right man's foot kicked a door open, I was thrown into a room where an enormous floor-to-ceiling window covered the two corner walls. The windows appeared like a flying simulator because the Martian landmass stood low beneath the round horizon. It was a beautiful day and the clouds seemed closer now. The figures pulled me across the empty room with zero furniture. We went closer and closer to the windows and as my eyes overlooked the wide expanse there were the spider legs racing through farmland beneath us, the feet of which tactfully dodged any form of planted life so as to avoid crushing them. The farmland went for miles and miles it seemed before tapering off to where a dwarflike brown wall, which could have been merely wooden stakes in the ground, split the boundary between rich green farmland and barren red desert. Mars extended its brick-colored soil to the mountains that lifted up to that purplish-blue morning sky. I was taken aback. Why did the Martian sky look so blue all of a sudden? Then I remembered that my helmet had been cracked like a fishbowl. I twisted my head as we moved forward to look at an angle through what was left of my broken helmet out the window. There it was, as I expected, a reddish-orange tint that filtered the bluish-purple sky to make the sky appear as a dreary golden-reddish hue. To me this was nothing but a miraculous change. Like the breaking dawn of the internet, I felt a renaissance flood in and open up my eyes. Something big has changed here. Mars was transforming into Terra Firma!

The spider made a swift bend around the forest and ran straight through a field where a giant corporate igloo appeared in the corner of my sight. The whole rounded out skyscraper imploded as we drew nearer. Endless mirrors reflected the surrounding Martian landscape and the cloudy, sunny sky. We reached a gate and it opened for us. The spider quickly swept to the edge of the entrance wall before a bridge opened like an extending limb. The spider finally came to a screeching halt, and the two men were the only forces keeping me from flying out the window. When the bridge connected, the windows opened completely, and we waited before a crew of militarized men in uniforms ran out to grab me. They opened up a stretcher and threw me onto it. An oxygen filter appeared and pressed over my face. I breathed in the freshest air I'd ever breathed in my life, and it reminded me of home on Earth. I heard a doctor put her hand on my face, she felt my neck. All of a sudden, a new wave of tears streamed down my cheek. I suddenly remembered my ex-wife, and the ocean breeze that smelled as fresh as this oxygenated air. There was some hint of salt in there wasn't there? This had the smell of the ocean. And as I was rushed through hallways around corners and bumped against moving crates like I was being rushed to a hospital surgical room, I closed my eyes because the lights were bright overhead. My eyes closed, I could hear the seagulls. The taste of fresh strawberries as I fed my baby daughter her first one. Her wiggling toes met the sand for the first time. And my wife took her in her arms and pulled my hand to the ocean. We ran to meet the waves. And the ocean splashed us as my daughter cried out in excited glee. I kissed my daughter. I kissed my wife. There was nothing like the ocean air.

When I felt the gurney stop, I had no time to open my eyes before they blindfolded me.

I felt the doctors fingers stay touching my neck. "Relax, handsome man," she said. "This will only hurt a little."

My hand broke into a fist. My bicep bulged. My arm convulsed when a needle spit through the naked crook of my arm. My vein engorged against the soft tissue. I cringed and immediately felt four pairs of hands hold me down as I moaned in pain through my oxygen tank. A blood pulse and temperature monitor were hooked to my finger. A blood pressure monitor wrapped around my arm. They slipped off my smelly shoes and yanked off my dirty socks. Someone held me easily by the chain of my cuffs as they unzipped my pants and stole them out from under me. A cold pair of scissors cut open the shirt of my suit. I felt the open air attack my gaping wounds across my abdomen. Immediately something that wreaked of alcohol slabbed over my body like an oily paintbrush that was dipped in vodka and lit on fire. Then a gel-like substance I guessed was antibiotic spread over me like a warm coat. I sighed and pouted out of reflex. Then someone grabbed my head and painted the vein on my neck with what felt like a paintbrush dipped in sterile alcohol.

"Brace yourself," the doctor said. I heard a squish like the squirting of a syringe. "Some anesthesia. This is going to hurt."

Before I could grit my teeth and scream, someone tore the oxygen mask from my face and choked me with a rubber mouth guard. I bit down hard. A thick sharp pole lodged deep into my vein. And that's the last thing I remembered before I woke up. My body brand spanking new. Just a scar from navel to chest. Staples, too.

They gave me a night in the hospital bed apparently. But I'd been asleep the whole time recovering. The moment I woke up, I was dragged out of the hospital level completely. And taken into questioning.

Which is unfortunate because I never got to see the doctor with my eyes. She had had a nice voice. Sexy, really.