In a quaint village nestled between rolling hills and winding rivers, there lived a man who spent his days perched upon a weathered wooden chair on the front porch of his modest cottage. His eyes, a mirror to the vast expanse of his thoughts, gazed blankly into the distance as if searching for something just beyond the edge of his consciousness.

The man's mind was a void, a vast emptiness that seemed to swallow up any stray thought or fleeting emotion that dared to cross its threshold. He sat there, unmoving, a solitary figure against the backdrop of the bustling village around him.

Neighbors passing by would stop and exchange fleeting greetings with the man, but he hardly registered their presence. His mind was elsewhere, lost in the labyrinth of his own thoughts and memories.

Some said he was a dreamer, a man who had wandered too far into the recesses of his own mind and had lost his way back to reality. Others whispered that he was haunted by ghosts from his past, memories that clung to him like shadows in the fading light of day.

But the man paid them no mind. He remained on his chair, a silent sentinel guarding the threshold between the known and the unknown, his gaze fixed on a horizon only he could see. And there he sat, lost in the vast emptiness of his mind, a solitary figure in a world that seemed to have forgotten him.

The man stared blankly into the distance, his eyes unfocused and glazed with a lonely frost. Yet he wasn’t lost, and his mind was as focused as a laser beam. What he was seeing was a desolate world 140 million miles from the blue marble we know as Earth. What he was seeing was a blighted wasteland riddled with asteroid craters, ragged mountain peaks formed of cosmic iron and dust, and ravines so deep they swallowed up all light like a black hole. There was life here once, but not for over a million years. They are all gone now, and the remnants of their decomposing civilization lie hidden far beneath the surface.

He hears a voice in his head, “Don’t think, only see.” It was a voice from the past, a facilitator within the US Army’s highly classified Project Stargate, where highly trained and vetted clandestine operators used remote viewing for psychic espionage and target acquisitions. The days of covert government surveillance using only the consciousness were no longer sanctioned by the government, at least that was the US Army and the CIA’s declassified position. Yet today, the man who sat alone in his weathered chair wasn’t really there; he was viewing the surface of Mars by hovering above it in his ethereal body, and it was as real as the peeling paint on his rickety front porch.

A flash in his mind jerked him from Mars’s surface and to an intersection the man recognized as being only a few miles from his home. A black van with black tented windows stopped at the streetlight. The wooden armchair creaked as his body tensed. In his mind, he could see who they were, and he knew what they were up to--government spooks heading to his location. He had to leave, and he had to go right now!