The President, happily playing Electoral from Earth had done everything he could to steer clear of the vortex of alien activity unfolding on Mars. Earth felt rationale when compared with its cold red neighbor orbiting millions of miles away.

But things down here had also taken a twist for the stranger in many important ways. First, as if pushed by an irrational force, multiple groups and corporations had independently plotted for the end of the world - all planned for November 21. To the right, a religious cult built an Ark under the polar ice hoping to avoid their own nuclear winter a. Emilio quickly caught and jailed these morons. Also, a dangerous group of rich evil European racists commissioned Takeda, an expert to kill everyone with a plague. These monsters, with a single exception rotted in dirty jails.

But Marilyn and Liam were right, Earth’s current suicidal impulses were designed to confuse and obfuscate the real task above - he knew that in his heart. The list of plots seemed endless and even included some fueled by stupidity and recklessness. An oil rig in the gulf was set to hit a pocket of underground gas on Sophie’s birthday. Now that he knew the common factor to each debacle, the events were easier to discover and stop. Helped by Marilyn’s doomsday predictions, Emilio ordered a moratorium on anything of relevance. But if he understood any of the dynamics in play, his own actions would likely backfire.

But if this wasn’t enough, Liam entered the game and at the direction of Sophie pushed him ‘opening his horizons.’ He gladly would have hidden from this latest weirdness out of fantasy books — a seer, really? He knew he had a role to play, a strange one at that. A man hunted some visions, a deranged man locked in a cell. He saw his madness, coupled with more depravity result in a rescue. It remained jumbled.

Hours ago, talking to his advisor in a chamber below, the word ‘Mercury’ had been pronounced. Rudely, like a child deciding his parent’s intercontinental flight would be ruined, Emilio’s mind took him down a path to the unknown. The human shapes in the room disappeared one by one as he had an out-of-body experience.

The experts in the room watched, powerless as Emilio’s role in the Attraction was formalized. There was darkness and void soon filled by a star-filled sky. Above, he could see the Milky Way - he floated. This was a vision from within the solar system, yet he was far away, watching a different planet. Dreams rarely made complete sense and obviously visions were closer to them than Virtual Reality. Ahead, a giant white ball of gas burned the size of a city. The Sun was warming him and sending life-sustaining rays. In a vision, everything had meaning, even this irradiation. Floating alone, he could feel the irradiant heat, as if he was there, watching on a cold night.

Others watched, he felt, others.

This ‘vision’ as a seer was different. The images were not only peaceful, he felt them like a play director only could. Damn this to hell. He was here to learn, not to guess potential outcomes. His mind peeked in folds of time or space. Visions were a bit like a deja vu, a fleeting mental kick that lasted for minutes. In the vision, he began to float in space attracted by a white star. He was falling slowly and as he did, the heat increased. He knew he was drawn to a destination. Ahead, the surface explosions of the sun pushed large streaks of magma up into the sky. He felt like he needed to escape the attraction of the flames, yet he was moving closer and closer. Then his eyes adapted to the light and a small black rock less than a light second from the ball of magma, on it was pain.

This was Mercury.

It stood alone, isolated in the most inhospitable place of the solar system. The emotions deep within him and the planet grew. The feeling was different, a command, strong. Then on the surface, at an angle near the top, he felt loneliness and fear. Something or someone was calling him. He saw himself fall closer to the grey rock. It had surface wrinkles, a map, and a very unique crater was shining. On an edge, sparkled ice. Mercury was the size of Mars and Earth's moon.

As part of the ridges and craters, there were veins where the sun never shone. In these lines of darkness, sand moved like blood in the veins of the human body. This was where Marilyn had begun her Cosmos 1999 story weeks before the launch of the contestants. She knew there was something here, life.

The President descended, like a ghost into these dark veins. He soon stood on Mercury’s ground, in sandals, and around was a vortex or a tornado of energy that lifted from the edges of this crater. He felt creatures, he/them needed to escape the Sun, constantly looking for cold rest. On the back side of Mercury, just beneath a crater's edge was a small colder area in the permanent shade. He floated closer to the crater. In the shade, around that one crater, he could see black ash dance, it had traces of gold. The ash was bombarded by the hot plasma and storms burning past the Sun. Then he saw it. Below the rim, under the black dust.

In the darkness danced gold color sand. It was alive and reminded him of the sand flowing in the figurines Marilyn sent to Earth from Mars. They were in his vaults. There was life here, and it needed rescue. The globes back in the laboratory were a key part of this plan. The sand danced in small puffs like cigarette smoke in a warm breeze. Below, his sneakers walked in ankle-deep ash.

Under the ash were eggs, balls. He bent down and moving his hand waved the light ask away revealing the globes. They all were identical except one. He reached for it. He had seen it before. This was a ball found in San Francisco, but it had black dust in it. As he looked at it, the face of Ronaldo, the explorer on Mars, the mission leader flashed. Then, as every vision, it took a turn for the worse. Looking up, he saw a ball of magma, the Heliocorium ordered from the Metil in the Purple surface. The liquid solar lava slowly poured out and the burning rock fell on Mercury as each of the stranded creature in this glacier died.

His mind snapped back to reality.