Government governs at its own risk. Its own privacy is not as important as the privacy of its own citizens. Just like religion, a government is nothing without its citizens and God is nothing without the faithful. Pithy quote: People should not fear their government, their government should fear the people. Unfortunately there's too much apathy and people are kept sedate with new shiny gadgets. I understand the irony that I'm no better than the rest which completely undermines what I'm trying to say here. I'll paraphrase Daniel Carver, "Wake up American people!"
Now start thinking for yourselves.
Go do something, because I told you so.
Just regular people. No one I'd know from waking or dreaming life. They were in street clothes and felt at home in the alien climate. The obvious hit me, we didn't need our suits. Once the helmets were off, we could breathe and the adventure became even more exciting for me.
I made sure to turn off my oxygen just in case everything reversed itself to be spiteful.
After some more wandering, usually following the stowaways, I found a door in a steep cliff face. Some of the stowaways were climbing up there. Behind the door was a hippy Wiccan magick store run by two women. That's when I realized the other side of the door led to Utah and once I stepped through the door I was in Colorado.
One of the owners bent my ear, telling me about one of her dreads. At the end of the work day, the water level suddenly drops only to be followed by a surge of fresh water. The cause? All the toilets in Colorado flushing at once just like the apocryphal Superbowl halftime story. The store had been lucky so far but sooner or later the joint would be flooded out.
When I left the store on the Colorado side, I saw they weren't kidding. Suddenly all the creeks and ponds were drained dry. Minutes later there was a surge of muddy water that splashed up against the sandbags in front of the hippy Wiccan store's door.
I went back through the store and stepped out to Utah. It was still Mars in my heart and mind. One of the things I really wanted to see was a martial sunset. The rocks were a deep orange-red. Some of them suddenly became translucent due to the angle of the light, shafts of gold shone through their usually opaque bodies. Overhead the sky was becoming a deeper blue. Maybe it was a trick of the eye but the sun seemed to become much brighter the closer it came to the horizon.
Something distracted me over at the shop's door and I had to investigate. When I came back, the sun hadn't moved. In fact it was stuck on the horizon like a still frame of a nuclear explosion.
