In a near future world, a social network by the name of MINDS gifts its users with the unique ability to communicate directly by thoughts and recreate reality by their deepest fantasies and desires.

In the MINDS network, desires are actualized in a spilt of a second and unwanted elements erased from reality. The advanced algorithms of MINDS enable the user to virtually visit any place in the world or in history within seconds, in an utterly realistic three-dimensional reality. Humans can use their mind to determine everything they please – from the weather to the way their friends look like and behave. But the ultimate comfort comes at a price, and the unexpected results reveal the grand plan behind MINDS.

From “Rocket Summer” to “The Million-Year Picnic,” Ray Bradbury’s stories of the colonization of Mars form an eerie mesh of past and future. Written in the 1940s, the chronicles drip with nostalgic atmosphere–shady porches with tinkling pitchers of lemonade, grandfather clocks, chintz-covered sofas. But longing for this comfortable past proves dangerous in every way to Bradbury’s characters–the golden-eyed Martians as well as the humans. Starting in the far-flung future of 1999, expedition after expedition leaves Earth to investigate Mars. The Martians guard their mysteries well, but they are decimated by the diseases that arrive with the rockets. Colonists appear, most with ideas no more lofty than starting a hot-dog stand, and with no respect for the culture they’ve displaced.Bradbury’s quiet exploration of a future that looks so much like the past is sprinkled with lighter material.  In “The Silent Towns,” the last man on Mars hears the phone ring and ends up on a comical blind date. But in most of these stories, Bradbury holds up a mirror to humanity that reflects a shameful treatment of “the other,” yielding, time after time, a harvest of loneliness and isolation.