text: &#x200B; Kyle Douglas is dying faster than most people. His genes are shot and he’s got more cancer in his chest than he’s got lung. Such a shame. When I told him the news he laughed so hard he coughed up blood. Good for him. Whatever he’s got there’s probably no treatment for. I say probably because we have no idea what he’s got. Whatever it is he got from breathing in that corpse dust on Mars. Whenever I go in to up Kyle’s morphine dosage (that’s what we do when there’s nothing left to do), I find myself talking to him about what it was like to be the first man to walk on Mars. He tells me that on Mars the gravity is weaker so it’s less tiring to walk around. The day Kyle fell from the sky was the day the media decided it was going to talk until we evolved to not have vocal cords. What he found on Mars was too good not to milk. The rover images that were transmitted to earth in the days after his return were stunning. Columns of red marble and crumbled statues of alabaster. The statue was of Atlas, or his martian equivalent, holding up the sky. Kyle got invited to speak on just about every single late night talk show in America. The invitations stopped when he started to cough up his lungs. I guess journalists must’ve collectively decided they wanted selective electro shock therapy because, while their coverage of the discoveries from the martian mission has remained consistent, they seem to have forgotten about the man who is dying from some illness we have no recorded cases of. Tourism companies have already started shipping off billionaires to get the privilege of breathing the same dust of the man who is dying from space cancer. The world will remember his discovery but not him for he will be forcefully forgotten because his fate does not align with the interests of those who control information. When Kyle opened the sarcophagus in the Martian Temple he saw himself staring back at him. I guess it makes sense that we would choose Mars. It is man’s nature to return home. A great man told me we were food for worms. A great martian told me we would be food for *Creatis Incelopathys*. That’s what we named the airborne disease Kyle contracted when he breathed the same air as that martian corpse. Don’t bother trying to make sense of the name, we gave something that we have no knowledge of an utterly nonsensical name in the hopes that its nature may reveal itself to us. We still have no clue why the cancer is spreading so quickly. I must remember to short the stocks of the businesses owned by the billionaires traveling to Mars to smoke the ground up bone marrow of their ancestors. Kyle tells me that he thinks he’s seen what happens next. That is to say, next after dying. He tells me he’s going to a world without pain or lies. I tell him that the morphine is causing him to hallucinate. I’ve already been forced to sign a non disclosure agreement by about twenty different corporations who funded the mission. “His body is ours and so is his fate.” they tell me. I suppose that’s appropriate, most of his cells are now infected by some disease they inadvertently caused him to get. When he’s lucid, I ask him who he sees when he sees what’s next. He tells me he sees his long dead love. I tell him she’s food for *Creatis Incelopathys.* He laughs.