Hypnotic Journeys to Mars

I woke up in a forest.

I thought I was dreaming, at first. That this was all part of some vivid nightmare, but I was really awake. This was real.

I looked down at my hands, and they were covered in blood. I felt woozy and disoriented, and it took me a moment to realize that the blood wasn't mine.

I slowly started to stand up, and realized there were bodies on the ground. I walked over to one and turned it over with my foot. It was an adult man, with gray hair and a gray beard, wearing a dark suit. The left side of his face was crushed inwards from a gunshot wound, which had also smashed his left eye into goo. There was no way he could be alive after that wound, no matter how hard he'd been trained as a soldier.

And yet there he lay. Not moving. Not breathing. Dead as dead could be.

I remembered the last thing that happened before I awoke here, in this eerie forest full of corpses. My sister Lucy and I had been travelling through space on a ship with our mother when we came under attack by a group of rogue soldiers who wanted to hijack our ship for themselves and travel back to Earth to launch attacks against the government that had exiled them four years ago when they tried to take control of the government without asking anyone else what they thought about it first. We managed to fight them off - barely - but in the process my sister got shot in the stomach by one of their snipers who took aim at my mother as she was fighting another of them hand-to-hand with her pistol drawn from her boot holster.

They were both dead now - my sister and my mother - and I couldn't help but feel like this whole ordeal was my fault somehow because I'd let myself get hypnotized by Lucy while we were traveling through space together and...

This thought hit me like a ton of bricks, causing me to stagger backwards until I fell over onto my butt on bloody dead leaves and pine needles that scratched at my bare legs as the realization sunk in even deeper than before:

I'd been hypnotized by my own sister! She'd said she didn't think she could do anything too bad if she put me under, but I'm pretty sure that murdering all these people would be considered "too bad" by most definitions of the word! What if - what if she thought she killed me as well? Would that make her mad? Would it make her want to kill herself? Or maybe try to kill herself by killing me again? How long did hypnosis last for someone who wasn't trained in it? How do you even find out something like that? And why hadn't I ever heard of hypnosis being used on people besides actors or criminals before? This wasn't fair! None of this was fair! Why did these people have to die?!

I stood back up again, ignoring the scratches on my legs and the stinging sensation they gave me as they began bleeding again where I stepped on them too hard while falling over earlier, and walked over to another body lying nearby. It was a woman who looked just as old as the first one I'd found nearby - more grey hair, more wrinkles around her eyes - except she wasn't wearing a dark suit like the other guy had been; instead she wore an odd white jumpsuit with an orange line going up each leg from her ankles to her waistline with red stripes going across those orange lines every few inches, separated into multiple smaller lines between each red stripe. They didn't look normal enough for me to recognize them for what they were right away though. They looked strange enough for me not to immediately think about spacesuits or uniforms worn by firefighters or police officers or something like that when I saw them; instead it took me several seconds to realize what they reminded me of at first: clown outfits! Clown costumes! The kind you'd see worn by circus performers! Only these weren't so much colorful costumes as they were boring white jumpsuits designed more for function than fashion... which made me wonder why anyone would wear something like that instead of brightly colored clothes like you see so often in comic books or movies whenever superheroes or villains are shown wearing spandex outfits or full body armor or something like that! What's wrong with color?! Why would someone wear white when you can wear any color you wanted nowadays?! This was stupid! All of this is stupid! Everything is stupid! Clothes are stupid! Color is stupid! Clowns are stupid! People are stupid!! Hypnosis is stupid!!! My sister is stupid!!! Me!!!! Everything!!! All this blood is stupid!!! It should never have happened!!! None of this!!! Noooooo!!!