A yellow jacket, a sweat bee and a fly are chasing each other in the slit of sunlight that passes over the rubbish bin this late Friday morning.

Getting permission to import them to Mars was no easy task.

I could not import dragonflies.

Vibratoids, the equivalent of speakers or earphones embedded in my body, give me the sensation that I’m in a deciduous forest as I walk through the greenhouse that serves as our meeting room, food growth chamber and place for general meditation.

The vibratoids make me think that insects are buzzing in treetops and birds are chirping as they fly from limb to limb looking for food.  The sound of wind through tree limbs and the small blasts of air on my arms, neck and face add to the immersion algorithm’s programmed goal of acclimating me to Mars with occasional reminders of what Earth must feel like, what we jokingly call the decompression chamber effect.

But I have work to do.  I cannot dwell too long on the memories of a planet I get to visit less and less often as the Martian colonies mature, requiring my attention, not to mention my declining health — I don’t know if I can endure many more trips.

I remember my last night on Earth.

But before I do, I’ll tell you a joke repeated to me by a fellow traveler to Mars, a tourist named Adyer Xedif.  A juvenile joke but one I’ve heard more than once from first-time visitors —  Q: If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, where are politicians from? A: Uranus.

I hear the rapid flutter of the wings of a hummingbird pass before my eyes but I see only the bird’s green body and white-tipped tail in my imagination.  Oh, how the immersion algorithm can be so cruel without knowing it!

We are a small set of colonies here, able to manage ourselves without the need for the professional political class of workers so, needless to say, we get a lot of jokes about politicians when tourists and new settlers begin to realise they won’t have politicos to blame for inefficiencies and errors that occur because, as we know, we want a perfect world and we train for a perfect world but we don’t live on a perfect world.

Our customer complaint system is a throwback to the time when “free market capitalism” was the rule of the day, including some societies on Earth.

We call it the customer complaint system for tourists and visitors although we know it locally as the PS or ProbSolv department.

Solving problems.  Rewriting algorithms, correcting databases and reconfiguring hardware.

As quantum computing devices that closely resemble the humans we used to be, we are able to adapt and adjust to changes on a colonywide scale much more rapidly than the old mass media socioeconomic shifts that often took generations, or Earth-based decades, to accomplish — within milliseconds, software updates will rewire our central nervous networks to accept the change from decentralised ant colony system to an interconnected but independent system of birds flocking during migration as programmers test the currently-accepted best practices method for colony survival.

But I digress.

The last night on Earth…sigh…

The cheerful look on Guin’s face after her trumpet performance with the Comet Plasma band playing big band tunes of the 1940s, her purple-and-black eye shadow, her…eyeglasses?

Why, in this day and age of implanted autocorrecting lenses did Guin wear eyeglasses?

Hmm…good question.

Anyway, Guin reminded me again she needs a new dance partner.

While watching the couples competing on the dance floor, I thought about what Guin and I have been through, our first trip to Mars, her decision to stay when I left, her decision to return to Earth for one more grand tour, talked into playing her trumpet again, with me now back on Mars and her still on Earth.

Why do I sense a vulture flying overhead?  How can a bird at an altitude hundreds of feet above me affect the vibratoids and air blowers such that I feel rather than see such a creature?  Is it because I know a vulture rides thermals and the wind effect around me is that of a thermal rising above and passing through the imaginary forest?

My, my, my imagination is overactive today.  Next thing I know I’ll hear an aeroplane fly by.  Ah, there it is.

Good for the immersion algorithm to know what my life was once like, in my previous body, back home.

I don’t miss mowing lawns or the smell of cut grass but I do miss the old solid-metal and solid-rubber tyred hand-pushed mower that sat in my garage.

There was a time, in a previous life, in my previous body, when I had a wife I wanted to learn to dance in order to improve her health.  I also wanted her to become proficient at dancing so that she and I were comfortable switching dance partners at big social dance events, because I wanted to overcome the habit of walking off to dance with other partners, leaving my wife alone at parties without dance partners to share momentary joy with.  That’s who I was — a seeker of increasing levels of joy when the occasion presented itself.

You know, one thing this immersion algorithm can’t simulate is the appearance of a column of gnats rising and falling in a dance all their own.

I smell rather than see a citronella candle burning nearby, simulating the feel-good effort to keep mosquitoes away from humans.

I barely recall the sound of slamming car doors and squealing brakes when my neighbours on Earth would return to their domiciles.  I know there was a time when the smell of burning cow and pig flesh was an indication that my neighbours were enjoying themselves in their backyards.

Now, I’m just as happy with the smell of recharging batteries or Martian “snake oil” treatments.

That last night on Earth, I stood next to one of the winners of the dance contest.  She wore the traditional outfit we still call “Rosie the Riveter.”  On her face she wore light peach coloured makeup that we of Mars no longer see as fashionable, able to change our face colour through skin tone circuitry like chameleons blending in or clashing with our environments as we see fit.

Will Guin return to Mars?  Will I dance with her again?  Will she and I ever be dance partners?

Although I have been outfitted with the latest in future forecasting capabilities, some futures I can only calculate, not predict with accuracy due to the influence of emotion-based algorithms I insist on keeping intact.

Do I miss Guin?  Sure I do, even if my work here at the colonies “needs” me and would miss me more if I left Mars for Earth.

Well, the chirps of cardinals and the warning hisses of a squirrel are like an alarm clock, telling me it’s time to leave the greenhouse and go back to the lab where I hope our latest in the new line of beings created from our imaginations will come to life, making our colonies more productive, more happy and prosperous in the longterm.

Talk to you kids of the past and the future again soon!