A house fly, seeking the open world of a fly’s life, buzzed against the window.

Lee looked at his chewed-down fingernails.

He relished the victory of getting politicians to perform their patriotic duties to save the republic from economic doom by refusing salaries, perks or graft from government jobs.

Lee lit a candle, meditated for a few minutes and watched spider webs in the woods send silent reflective codes across the crowded airwaves to his eyes.

Only so much time left to live.

He knew that modern technology decreased the time until boredom set in.

Readers wanted an entertaining storyline that attracted their sympathies toward and/or away plots, themes and characters.

Lee wondered how much doubt and paranoia was good for competition.

He had one goal, a lifelong goal, to establish Earth-based lifeforms off this planet.

A second fly joined the first at the lip of a skylight.

Twenty minutes had passed since the candle was lit.

Lee snuffed the wick.

A thin trail of smoke, a million wisps of translucent spider threads, rose to the ceiling, chasing the flies.

He could open the airlocks to let the flies out of the room.

After all, flies didn’t understand ambient temperature, oxygen content or 3D projections that simulated a wooded backyard.

Lee had grown up in this Martian laboratory, watching the 3D imagery become more realistic – trees changing and growing through the seasons, birds and insects flying past, rain and snow falling while making the appropriate sounds/temperatures changes to the windows and skylights.

When he reached maturity, his bionic caregiver taught him about the harshness of Martian atmospheric conditions, spending weeks training Lee on the use of a full-body covering that protected him when he was ready to step into the airlocks and wander the Martian landscape.

Lee sent a house fly into the airlock.

The fly did not appear in the window view outside the airlock.

Lee opened the airlock and the fly was gone.

A hint something was amiss.

Lee decided then and there to create or find an environment on another world where he and house flies could roam freely.

His great-great grandparents had come from Earth and left him instructions not to return.

He mentally connected to the laboratory computer network to check his simulation results.

Were enough supplies available to build a gravity-defying vehicle to get him away from Mars and on to a place where his Earth-based plants and animals could thrive outside?

Another twenty minutes had passed but time had no meaning to Lee.

His virtual friends came and went without a connection to time or reason.

He logged the moment and sent it out to his impatient fans on Earth who wanted every detail of his normal celebrity life as the only living, laboratory-created person on Mars.

Or so they told him.

He didn’t know or care.

He had an outer space ship to design and build.

Or so he led himself to believe, he and his fans unaware he was a computer simulation himself.