After I watched the fire burn the city down, the engineers nudged me to the car. But I refused. I ran to the nurse and doctor. Snatched the baby into my arms and got onto my knees beside its mother. Valencia raised her hand to me and muttered, "John..."

The cold gave me goosebumps. I shivered beside her while the doctor put his hand on my shoulder to signal me to stand to my feet. But the baby cried in my arms. And its hands pulled around toward its mother like a compass pointed to her from within its heart.

I looked to Valencia whose ailment afforded her a pale complexion. Her lips disappeared while they turned white to match her skin. She turned her eyes. She knew I was afraid. Because I would die.

Her composure noted she feared nothing, for she already lost it all. The company exiled her from Earth. So she tried marry me on Mars. To start a life. To start a family. But no cigar. The hut kaboom. The city kiboshed. The end presented itself. This song ends and there is no coda. No return to harmony.

Valencia said my name. So I knelt, let her touch my foot when her fingers quaked, and bent the baby to her face to kiss. Valencia laid her cheek to the baby's and I felt an electric shock pulse through my arms.

"John," she said, "you married a human."

I nodded to her. "Yes. I did."

My words choked Valencia when she squirmed. Her eyes pressed. Tears spilled. She felt pain like I had poured poison into her ears. But she composed herself. And opened her eyes to me. "I know her."

My eyes widened. I tasted the smoke which carved its way up the mountains. It pushed its way through me like a herd of furry mammals whose smoky hair shed over my whole body and penetrated my mouth, catching onto my tongue, yanking coughs from my lungs. I tried to cover the baby's face in my shirt but my shirt was thin as thread. Her mama wore a blanket which the doctor wrapped around her like the corn tortilla around a burrito. Valencia lifted her hands to her baby, and I obeyed. The baby left my grasp and fell into her trembling fingers and it stopped crying the second it fell into Valencia's chest. The smoke departed. Silence bathed the mountain.

I uttered, "My ex-wife left my life long ago. I forgot her."

But Valencia shot me a sad smile. She never looked at me. She only kissed the head of the shivering infant whose belly pressed atop Valencia's chest. "The past never forgot you."

I shook my head and I drew my eyes to the stars. "She forgot I existed long before I left Earth. Space is a mere buffer in the distance between our hearts."

But Valencia shook her head. "She knows your father."

Those words stung me like fangs biting my chest. Valencia knew nothing about my father.

She shook her head like she could telepathize to hear my protests. "Your father, the cyborg. The company's king. The CEO of the whole thing. Al Zander..." She let the words bake in an oven of heated pause. Turning her eyes to watch me burn, she said, "He's with her. Your father and your wife. They're together now. And he fucked a kid out of her." Her face turned a decrepit blue and I thought Valencia had passed beyond the point of death.

The baby's eyes shut and appeared to sleep on Valencia's chest that turned bluer by the second. Her eyes darting at me, Valencia froze into an ice sculpture and so did the child. The two of them meshed into a below zero Celsius and the doctor yanked me to my feet before I could pull the baby off her mother's dying chest.

The doctor scorned me when he faced his shadowy stare in my face. "She's a humanoid."

Stunned, I said nothing. I could hardly pull my eyes of the woman who'd just professed that my father put my wife to bed. The fury in my chest could have been enough to rethaw her and the child to reanimation.

But the doctor snapped me out of it with the slap of the face that only the nurse spotted before she gasped and clasped a hand over her mouth which gaped like a ghoul's.

"How could you consummate with the enemy? Who raised you? The luddites would have exiled you!"

"But I am no Luddite," I said, realizing the city's people called themselves Luddites for abstaining from bodily adoption of biotechnology. "I've been trapped on Mars in a crater fifty miles from your burning city. I've been stranded for years because the company where I worked had sent me to dig graves for millionaires but the crew died in a shuttle crash and I was the only one to abort through a pod. The golden age of biotechnology passed over me like pop magazine news passes over the Amish."

This cracked a giggle out his lips which pursed under the weight which he bore from conservative disgust. "Still, your copulation parallels the horrors of bestiality and pedophilia. How could you soil your morality with a robot?"

"A humanoid, you mean," I corrected. "A human made by one-hundred-percent intention."

But the doctor shook his head. "Do you know the traits of your daughter?' He pointed to the baby who lay still as a lily pad on a snowy lake. Her mother's eyes finally closed.

But the doctor swallowed his disgust before he said, "I hope you loved your family with all you had." He turned his eyes to the ice. "They will be gone soon. We won't survive much longer either. Mars is no place for man."

I looked to Valencia and the baby. I realized my only motivation until the past few hours were to get my ass back to Earth. To await a shuttle. To board a shuttle. To return home. See the beautiful blue marble of the Milky Way Galaxy and spend the rest of my days soaking in the sun, on a beach, on an island. I was just a man whose only relationship was with himself. The universe was my only mistress. Sometimes I would escape my own head and escape for an evening with the stars. Look up at all their nakedness. Those flashing lights. I could walk for miles around the hut. Make a few trails under the weight of my own feet. Being alone was forced solitude but it was also forced reflection. I knew my place in the universe because I was the only moving person of whom to take notice. But now, as I look around me at the engineers, at the nurse, at the doctor, at Valencia, at my baby, at the city of burning human corpses and creation, I know I am less than infinite. I make up only a fraction of the infinite. And I know I am not infinite because my sense of self has been extended while infinite by definition can never be extended because it is already infinitely extending. I am not infinite because the moment my child was born by a humanoid mother my soul extended onto another. And that is love: love is the self-extended onto another. That is love in marriage. That is love in parenthood. That is love in true friendship. That is love in tight community.

I am three people now. Rather than one, I am the number of my body.

Leaving the doctor, I returned to my motionless humanoid "wife" and daughter, and laid my hand on both their foreheads. Fevers heated both. "Valencia," I said.

My wife flinched her lips to signal her fading consciousness.

"I left you," I admitted.

She breathed a gust of dry air to nod.

"And I'm sorry," I apologized.

She refrained. Her silence accepted my apology. She soaked in my acknowledgement. She loved I cared.

"I wish I could take you home," I said. Defeated, I squatted into a sit. The Martian mountain crust shivered me timbers. I sat on my ass. And listened to the fire crackle. All was dead in that town. But that was all over now. Now was time to be. I meditated. Felt the smoke pass over us. Felt it pass away. I breathed in deep fresh terra-formed-Mars air. The oxygen filled my lungs. Mars lived because man lived. As much as man gains blame for destruction, man sure knows how to create.

I bent over, and kissed the forehead of my daughter. Kissed that cold-warm swirling mix of fever and sucked the sickness right out of her frontal lobe. Her tiny ball of fingers wiggled and a silent yet ferocious yawn escaped the sleepy baby. Something warm lit my heart. I wanted to save my child. But no food, no water meant no life. I wanted to raise my child. My child who sprouted like that tree from the soil in theh blink of an eye. I lost her as quickly as I gained her.

I watched her yawn and then turn her head to away. To face the sky-high fire city down the mountain. The back of her head was hardly a whirlpool of peach fuzz. I bent to kiss her soft head. She was the most spectacular specimen I'd ever seen. A hybrid of man and man's own creation. Either a genetic marvel bred through natural/artificial diversity, or an incestuous catastrophe the archaic gods never planned.

I turned to the mother. I bent to kiss her snow-white lips. She muttered something or other.

I said, "A star will fall on us before I let you go."

I barely knew the fleeting words I sang before they escaped me. Unrehearsed, they produced themselves. Potentially I had to say something. Anything to show her I was still there beside her. But whatever I said, whatever I meant, delivered a silvery smile across her cold lips. Her eyelids tented over her but I could see her eyes light.

Off in the distance, one engineer shouted to us. The doctor, nurse and I turned to find both engineers pointing to the ceiling of stars. My hand touched Valencia's hand when I lifted my face.

The universe was a marvel. A shooting star crossed the atmosphere. It was fiery blue. It broke the air but sped slower than a plane. Realizing the shooting star was a falling object, I heard all four heartbeats of the doctor, nurse, and two engineers accelerate. Then I touched my chest. My heartrate jumped.

The incoming missile, asteroid, superman, whatever you want to call it, entered and I stood to my feet.

"What is it?" The nurse asked the doctor.

The doctor shrugged and said, "Not my specialty."

The engineers shrugged to us like we had sent them a question via telepathy.

That was when the missile swam bright into clearer view and an electric white flash exposed it for what I recognized it to be. A missile from the company.

Feeling a sweep of relief all of a sudden, my heart melted and the vision of a family man's life faded from memory again. That missile was my ticket home. Whoever/whatever was in it, would either take me to Earth, come with me to Earth, or stay behind so I could get to Earth without compromise. I forgot all about my extended self, and felt my soul recoil like a roll of measuring tape back into my solitary chest.

The missile passed over us and we spun our heads to watch it land somewhere at midpoint between the mountain and the hut. WE would go toward that shuttle and leave the nurse with the mother and child. The men would go on their macho way.

And find the shuttle. Fuel inside. Food inside. And feminine replica inside, too.

When the shuttle struck the Martian crust, the concussion created a beautiful sound.