On Mars, night always came too quickly. The darkness frightened me. I tried to read. I tried to walk ten thousand steps a day. Sometimes I tried to scroll the online chat, but the internet was too slow, staggered by a wireless connection thousands of miles away. The live updates about my life among the Martians never felt like they were about me, anyway, just a reproduction of me for lonely, bored people on Earth to ambiently chatter, drawing each other closer through me. 

I wasn’t allowed to chat back to them, which would have made the month feel less like an eternity in solitary confinement. I watched as some commentators said that I was boring, threatening to stop watching, complaining that it was taking me too long to do the deed. Others discussed my body, even though the feeds were too fuzzy to see it clearly. I got sick of looking at the comments. Without my commentary there was no truth to be found there, only a one-sided conversation with people who only wanted to get a better look at me, if only to choose the right insults to hurl. 

The only lights on Mars were fixtures rigged to a webcam connected to a computer that monitored me in the room where I was, by mandate of Mr. Beast, to have “sex” with an alien. $1,000,000 to stay on Mars for a whole month. An additional $1,000,000 if I engaged in “intercourse” with a Martian. This was a point of contention in the chat for some commentators, while others worried about whether or not I was a biological woman. Their arousal, alien or not, woman or not, was a private matter. Still, they brought it to the chat. Chat, how should we feel?  

I wasn’t even sure if having sex with an alien would have even counted as sex. They didn’t have human faces or human genitals. This, too, was a problem in the chat: commentators speculated about the alien’s gender, accusing it of being trans, too. They were adamant, convinced of something impossible while expecting that I have sex in the raunchiest manner possible. Interpretative dance, improvisation, was not what the people on earth—the chat–wanted. They wanted to see a performance. Dry humping, heavy petting, licking, the works. 

Nothing had to (nor could) go in anywhere specifically. Because the connection was so bad, nobody would know the difference; it just had to look like 90’s scrambled porn on basic cable, titillating because of a vague feminine presence. The alien—the premise of the whole show—never mattered. For two million dollars, I could have fucked the wall. I could have fucked myself. 

It all looked the same, exactly what you’d expect fornication live from outer space to look like: pixelated. In the end, there was no God in the room with us. Only my two million dollars, the online spectators, and Mr. Beast, all of us estranged from the light.