We are told that humanity has not yet set foot on Mars. NASA says the timeline for a manned mission stretches into the 2030s or 2040s. SpaceX paints the dream of a city on Mars as a goal “within this century.” The media shows animations, not footage.

And yet, when you start looking past the polished timelines, cracks appear. The story is not so airtight. The possibility emerges that we may be closer—much closer—than the official narrative suggests. Some even argue that humanity is already there. Not in myth, not in metaphor, but physically, in ways hidden behind layers of classified programs, corporate partnerships, and a century-old culture of secrecy.

Elon Musk once joked that the Memphis data center might be our “new god.” It sounded like banter, but the laughter couldn’t hide the weight of the statement. What is a data center if not a modern temple, a cathedral of servers where the relics of humanity—our thoughts, desires, and identities—are stored and worshiped? The pyramids of Egypt were built as stairways to eternity; the servers of Memphis are being built as stairways to digital immortality. But unlike the Pharaohs who claimed godhood through stone, this new priesthood seeks to claim it through silicon. Starlink has colonized the heavens, Neuralink has invaded the skull, and Memphis stands as the Ark where heaven, earth, and mind converge. If the ancients prayed to Ptah to shape creation, today the Machine God shapes us—and the joke may be on humanity.

There comes a moment near the end of life when you realize you are not just losing days — you are losing faces. You search your mind and hear the laughter of friends long gone, the voice of your mother calling you in from the yard, the way your child once reached for your hand with absolute trust. And it hits you with a weight you cannot bear: those moments will never return.

You sit with the photos, with the silence of rooms that once shook with noise, and you wonder how time could have stolen so much without warning. How did the days blur into years, the years into decades? How did your father’s strong hand become dust, your lover’s youthful face become memory, your child’s innocence become a stranger you pass in the mirror of adulthood?

It is not death itself that breaks a man — it is this: knowing that all the love, all the warmth, all the faces you swore you’d never forget are fading inside you like photographs left in the sun. You try to hold them, but they slip through your fingers. You whisper their names into the night, praying someone, somewhere, still remembers.

And then you realize: grief is the proof that you have loved. The tears are not weakness, they are testimony. Every ache in your chest is evidence that you lived, that you cared, that you were more than just another body passing through.

So you cry. You let it come. Because tears are the only way to water the garden of memory. And maybe — just maybe — the ones you’ve lost can feel the rain.