The days leading up to bucket list item #2 consist of me perusing forums about psychedelic experiences and entity contact. I even post a question in one of these forums, against my better judgment (a consequence of wine-fueled impulsivity): "Worried I'm going crazy. I know I shouldn't believe in the crocodile-ish/lizard-ish people I encountered, but I do. Will this ever end?" Many of the responses I receive are aimed at convincing me that these experiences are real, that there exist worlds outside of our own—not helpful. But some of the responses say something in the vein of this: "The same thing happened to me. It was only temporary. A year down the road, I was able to see the experience for what it was: a product of my imagination."

Now, I feel much more calm. Okay. It's a temporary belief brought on by a temporary—(I refuse to call it "psychosis" anymore)—confusion. Or obsession. Or desire to explain something in a more creative way than science can: brain waves < another world. One day soon, I will stop believing. Brain waves > another world.

But part of me doesn't want to stop believing. I think it's that emotional part of me—that part that feels like Lizard Man and I had more to say to one another, more to give one another.

As I get ready to go clubbing with Nakomi, my pocket computer starts to ring. Gordon Goby's name appears on the plastic screen. Why is he calling me?

Although I plan to leave my life behind for this man, I hardly know him, and his notoriety does cause me to feel starstruck at times.

"Hello?" I hold the computer's camera close to my face so he can't see my ridiculous outfit.

"Izzy. I saw your TEDTalk. Wanted to congratulate you."

"Thank you, Mr. Goby."

"Thanks for championing the cause, too. You wouldn't believe how many news articles keep coming out about the 'futility' of our colony, our 'selfishness,' our wealth and intellectual-property 'hoarding'...don't these people realize we're aimed at preserving humanity?"

"Yep. Yep. I totally agree." He probably expects me to say more, but I find myself at a loss for words.

"Are you getting excited?" he asks after a moment of awkward silence.

I realize, right then, that I've hardly been thinking about Mars. Crocodile/Lizard Man has overtaken my stream of consciousness—he's all I think about. "I can't wait. I'm just trying to make the most of the time we have left."

"Well, be careful. We wouldn't want to lose you before the launch." Gordon laughs like this is funny, but I suddenly remember that feeling I had under the influence of Vivectica ™—that feeling of being lost forever. That feeling that I might not come back.

Maybe I haven't come back.

"I'll be careful," I say.

We hang up, and I call a self-driving car on my Voom! app to take me to the club.

Club Galaxzee is a club in Portland where patrons dress like aliens and dance their legs, or other appendages, off. Tails, antenna, and claws (especially lobster-esque claws) aren't an uncommon sight.

That's why I have dressed in alien attire, the "ridiculous outfit" I didn't want Gordon Goby to see me in. I wear a cute orange dress and matching antenna. Orange shimmer covers the exposed parts of my body. I feel immensely grateful for the self-driving car; a driver would surely inquire about my outfit.

After the drive, I arrive at the club to find Nakomi near the front of the line, who has purchased the black contact lenses that each cover the entire eye, iris and white included. They make her look pretty freaky, and her scaly green dress, complete with a tail, makes her look freakier. When she opens her mouth, I see she's wearing teeth.

"I'm a humanoid lizard," she tells me. "In honor of your Vivecta journey."

"I'll be surprised if you find any dance partners looking like that," I lie, because even though she looks freaky, she also looks freaky gorgeous.

"Look around you. Everyone is dressed like this."

She's right. The line of patrons snaking out the door looks absolutely alien, every single one of them.

The two of us enter the club, where humid, body-heated air greets us. The air smells like a mixture of hard alcohol, sweat, and rose petals (the floral scent probably comes from some ambient-scenting machine hidden somewhere). The music's volume makes hearing each other's voices difficult.

I wonder how I used to enjoy this scene so much. So many people fill the club that I wonder if they'll have to start turning patrons away per fire-hazard-prevention regulations.

We head straight to the bar, where Nakomi orders us two cocktails: "Two Uranus Martinis, please."

As the bartender begins to concoct whatever kind of martini a "Uranus Martini" might be, Nakomi whispers, "Look! They have Phobos mules. We'll definitely have to try those. You'll have to tell me all about what it's like to have two moons once you get to Mars."

Ah, yes. In a few months' time, I will lose Luna and acquire Phobos and Deimos, both much smaller and irregularly shaped in comparison to our spherical beauty. My imagination looks up into Mars's sky at the strange-shaped and illuminated rocks. Will the sight be magical, or will I miss the luminescent orb I've come to love?

As the bartender presents us with our drinks, which are very pretty—the blue-green color of Uranus—Nakomi starts a tab, and I start to chug mine. Once I'm in the mood, the sounds and smells and sights of this club stop assaulting me the way they are; drinking will help with that. The drink goes down easily; it tastes like a combination of lab-cultured blue lichen and green apple—not great, but not bad if you've acquired a taste for blue lichen. Nakomi narrows her eyes at my half-chugged drink before taking her own sip, and she wrinkles her nose. "Don't like lichen?" I ask.

"This tastes like sour sea water."

I shrug and drink some more. Nakomi plugs her nose and chugs her own drink, before turning back to the bartender and ordering two Phobos mules.

The bar is beginning to get crowded, and Nakomi and I both receive some dagger eyes for taking up space, so the two of us move to stand next to a pillar.

I'm finally beginning to feel the music; my body moves ever so slightly to the beat. "Should we dance soon?" I ask.

"After this drink."

I drink my Phobos mule, which tastes like ginger ale and cherry, far less quickly than I drank my Uranus cocktail, savoring the much-better flavor. "So," I say to Nakomi. "What are the end goals for the night? Get gross and sweaty?"

"I think you should plan to get gross and sweaty underneath someone else, preferably in my apartment so we can watch their walk of shame in the morning and dish on the details over cappuccinos."

A scoff escapes my throat, then I laugh at her ridiculous plan. "I'm not going home with anyone tonight."

"Why not? How long has it been?"

My dry spell has lasted well over a year, but Nakomi probably already knows that. Careers like ours don't leave much room for flings, and something happens to your sex drive when all of your gratification is stimulated from success. At least, something has happened to my sex drive.

"I'm not doing it," I repeat.

"How many people will be living in the second colony once you arrive?"

"Like, two hundred, maybe?" That's an exaggeration.

"That's not a very wide selection, and you'll have to be careful who you sleep with, since you'll be in such close quarters with all of them. Wouldn't want to spoil any relationships. If I were you, I'd take full advantage of the wide selection of humans here before leaving."

"You take full advantage of that, anyway!" I tell her, which is true: Nakomi's sex drive is something to be rivaled, and her beauty combined with her success makes her a desirable package for many potential lovers.

She smirks and waggles her eyebrows, drawing more attention to her liquid-black alien eyes.

Right on cue, a man approaches us; he's dressed in a form-fitting silver jumpsuit complete with silver antennae, a convincingly three-dimensional third eye painted onto the middle of his forehead. I can tell he's checking out Nakomi, but suddenly, he looks straight at me. "Would you mind telling me your friend's name?"

Nakomi scoffs here. "You could just ask me yourself. She's not my keeper."

"Her name," I say, conveying a sense of royalty, divinity, and mystique with my tone, "is Goddess."

Nakomi throws me a glowering look, and I smile back naughtily. That name is an inside joke between the two of us. She and I have both been placed on a list created by PAHPG—People Against Humans Playing God (couldn't they have come up with a title that would beget a better acronym?). Our mutual crime, to state the obvious: playing God—she with molecules, I with insect genes. Millions of people exist in the world who qualify for placement on that list, but the group only lists people with notoriety, which the two of us have. Great accomplishments and pretty faces: a potent combination in the notoriety game. We laugh at PAHPG's list and frequently call each other "Goddess" just to spite them, but it's usually something we do in private, hence her glower.

"Goddess, huh?" he says. "Well, Goddess, I'm ... Zeus." He smiles like he thinks he's just the cleverest person ever. "Wanna dance?"

Nakomi takes a deep breath as though she's preparing to reject him, but then she sighs. "You know? Why not. Dancing; it's what we came here for, right?" She smirks at me.

My eyes roll at her, because we came here to spend time together. But she doesn't care.

As I watch her and whatshisname disappear into the crowd of bodies seething on the dance floor, I think about the sin of "playing God." "Defying the natural order." The rhetoric surrounding the debate has always amused me. As if humans exist outside of the natural order, I think, and then I think more about Nakomi, catching a glimpse of her gyrating against Zeus like an animal. That's all humans are. Animals. Not separate from nature. Not pseudo-Gods. People driven by base needs, like Nakomi over there, driven by her need for validation, for touching bodies, for the mating dance that tends to bring people together again, despite the fact that most people won't use that term. This is all evidence of our lizard brains. One of the four Fs is fucking.

Resigned to my newfound loneliness, I notice a guy standing nearby who isn't wearing a costume. Drapes of curly, medium-length black hair frame his face, and his eyes are the kind of green I suspect is real, but who knows these days with the hyper-realistic looks that contact lenses can achieve. I look away when he catches my gaze, and when my eyes flit back to where he stands, I catch him staring.

He walks up. I notice he's not wearing any alien attire, which makes him a deviant in this place. I like that.

"Let me guess," he says as he approaches, and his voice is deep and baritone, his teeth straight and white. "You must be a Martian." Now that he's closer where I can see his androgynous features, including his proportions, as well as hear his voice, I wonder if he's trans, but that's not a game-changer for me: I play all fields, if and when I play the field. Will I play the field tonight?

"Not Martian yet," I answer. "But I will be soon."

He laughs; he probably thinks I'm joking.

"You look like a regular human," I tell him.

"I'm a musician," he tells me, and now I laugh, because he seems a bit overeager to share details he thinks I'll find impressive with me. He must realize he's overeager, because he says, "Sorry, I know you didn't ask."

"What kind of a musician?" I ask, daintily sipping my Phobos mule through the too-thin cocktail straw.

"Lucid dream trance. Reality-shifting pop. Micro-math-metal EDM. Stuff like that."

I nod like I know what he's talking about. Music genres have just gotten so ridiculously specific that I no longer pay attention; I think musicians themselves are the only ones who understand them. What I hear: he makes electronic dance music. "Do you like to dance, or just to make dance music?" I ask him.

"I love dancing. Are you asking me to dance with you?"

"Why not?" I ask, and he offers his hand. Apparently, the lure of mating dances is too much for my lizard brain to resist, too.

I abandon my unfinished drink on the counter. With my hand in his, we make our way to the dance floor and begin to dance. Do I want to be doing this? It feels strange to be acting like such a young adult when I've just recently given a TEDTalk on my very-adult accomplishments, but maybe Nakomi is right: maybe I should seize each and every one of my remaining Earth days before I can only peer at Earth from millions of miles away, before each scenario like this one becomes a distant dream in my mind.

The dance music certainly sets the mood. In fact, whatever is playing is downright perplexing. The lyrics are simple: "Surrender to the flow, flow, flow, flow..." The song is doing that weird thing where it sounds like the notes are going up, up, up, up, and then they go slightly down, but then they go up, up, up, up again. The sequence repeats again and again, making you wonder if it's possible for notes keep rising forever...surely not.

"How do musicians do that?" I ask him, since he's apparently an expert.

He gestures to his ear like he can't hear me, so I scream the question in his ear once more.

Bringing his own lips to my ear, he says, "It's called a Shepard Scale. It's an illusion. It seems like the pitch is increasing forever, but it's not. The song consists of overlapping notes, one octave apart, being played at different volumes. The overlapping notes and volumes cause each scale to fade in and out so that the beginning and end of each scale is indistinguishable from the preceding or following scales. This fools listeners into thinking the rising or falling notes are never ending."

A well-spoken musician. "Great explanation. It's really cool," I tell his ear.

"It reminds me of DMT," he says, smiling, and suddenly I like him more. "Going up and up forever."

Grabbing his hand, I drag him from the dance floor, away from the blaring speakers.

"You like DMT?" I ask where he can hear me.

His eyes light up. "I love it."

"I just tried it for the first time. My friend invented Vivectica ™."

"No shit!"

"I want to do it again, but she's convinced we have to take time to recover or something." I roll my eyes.

"You know..." he starts. Then, after a pause, he finishes: "I have some at my apartment."

I study him, trying to maintain a neutral expression. Possession of psychedelic drugs is not legal, but it's not criminalized. Regardless, the illegality of his possession doesn't deter me. His defiance of the law, much like his defiance of the club's dress code, allures me. "Want to go back to your place? Take a trip out of this world?"

His green eyes light up. "That does sound much more thrilling than staying here."

I'm not sure what's gotten into me tonight. It feels like something is pulling me to this man's apartment, where he keeps his illegal drugs. This is so not me.

But I'm surrendering. Surrendering to life's flow.

Maybe the flow will take me back to Lizard Man.

subchapter | free will

There are three prevailing theories of free will, with varying theories in between. 1) The theory that free will exists. Humans are free agents capable of choice. Humans must contend with all external forces and make choices, sometimes despite those forces. 2) Fatalism—free will is an illusion; certain specific events are fated to happen, no matter what happens in between these events. Many believe such events are fated to happen due to external forces (e.g., Gods). 3) The theory of determinism: free will is an illusion; life is a series of cause/effect events, with each effect simultaneously being the cause of something else. No external forces exist in this view, because the cause/effect chain of events involves all factors, and therefore all factors are considered internal to the chain of events.

Many scientists believe in some variation of theory number 3, as there is mounting evidence that human actions result from various causes with choice playing no role. Big Data collection and analysis has proven just how predictable human behavior really is: if human agency existed, would a Big Data analytics firm be able to use your social media posts and credit card spendings to accurately predict your seemingly out-of-the-blue divorce? Human behavior will never be totally predictable, because there is too much chaos—too many factors to consider, even for Big Data analytics firms.

Still, many of these same scientists privately entertain the notion that their free will still exists, for without free will, what are we? Are we nothing more than domino pieces within a chain of dominoes, waiting for our next push, our next fall?

Is agency—the ability to make choices—one of the grand illusions fooling humanity?

If it is, is it better to think it's not?