If you can't find the truth where you are, where do you expect to find it? — Pilgrim’s Canticle, Book of the Way, 452 AFC
Part I – The Message
The year was 2035. After decades of delays, disasters, and debate, humanity finally set foot on Mars. The world watched as Odyssey One, the first manned mission, landed in the Aonia Terra region. Captain Elena Ruiz and Commander Tariq Singh made history with every step they took.
Their mission was simple: explore, collect samples, and establish a permanent habitat.
But on Day 3, the scanners picked up something strange.
A heat signature—faint, pulsing—deep underground, far from any known volcanic activity.
They followed it to a cave.
Inside, the air was unnaturally still. Dust hung motionless in the beam of their lights.
Deeper in, their flashlights caught something half-buried in red soil: a human skeleton, slumped against the stone. The suit it wore was unfamiliar. The fabric, brittle with age. The helmet, cracked and clouded.
Not NASA. Not ESA. Not any known program.
Above the body, crudely carved into the rock:
“They were already here.”
The cave grew colder.
Outside, something stirred in the dust.
Part II – The Forgotten Mission
Elena crouched beside the corpse. The suit was bronze-colored, the fabric worn and sun-baked. A red patch on the arm had faded almost to nothing—but she recognized it.
“中国国家航天局.”
China’s space agency.
Tariq stepped back, stunned. “That’s not possible. China never landed on Mars.”
Not officially, anyway.
Back at base, Elena bypassed mission control’s firewalled archives. She found it—a buried file:
“Project Red Ghost – Classified. China, 2029.
Mission Outcome: Lost. No survivors. Public Cover: Failed Orbital Probe.”
“They were here,” she whispered. “And no one ever told the world.”
“But someone knew,” Tariq said. “We landed less than six kilometers from this cave.”
“This wasn’t exploration,” Elena replied. “It was confirmation.”
That night, Tariq couldn’t sleep. He returned alone to the cave, drawn to the message like a moth to a dying light.
He crouched beside the wall. His flashlight swept across the carvings—and stopped.
There was something new beneath the first message.
Fresh. Jagged. Uneven.
“Don’t trust the silence.”
That hadn’t been there before.
Behind him, something moved in the shadows.
Part III – The Silence
Day 12.
Elena sat frozen at the comm panel. The last transmission from Earth repeated in her headset:
“Copy that, Odyssey. Confirm site coordinates… standby…”
Then—nothing.
A burst of static.
And silence.
No response. No signal. No ping from satellites. All frequencies: dead.
She rebooted. Switched to backup. Changed bands. Nothing.
Later, she activated the long-range telescope. Earth came into view—distant and radiant.
But something was wrong.
Too dark. No city lights. No satellites blinking in orbit. Cloud cover moved as always… but there was no glow beneath the night side.
Jin-Soo ran the numbers.
“We have food and water for 297 days. If we ration.”
They were six people now.
Six humans.
Alone.
On a dead planet.
Staring up at what used to be home.
Day 16.
Ravi, the engineer, broke the silence.
“What if we were meant to be the ones left?”
No one answered.
The thought lingered, heavy and unspoken.
Were they the survivors?
Or the experiment?
Elena couldn’t stop replaying that single line:
“They were already here.”
Was it a warning about Mars?
Or about Earth?
Day 19.
They expanded the ground scan near the cave and discovered something deeper—beneath the bedrock, a shaft-like void. Not a natural cavern, but a vertical wound in the surface.
It was lined with what looked like fragmented metal. Sharp edges. Melted steel.
Ravi’s voice was low. “That’s wreckage. Not from a rover. Something bigger.”
They excavated a single twisted panel. It bore no insignia—just a number. The font was Earth-standard. But no one recognized it.
The crater was deeper than it should have been. And older.
“This… wasn’t just a cave,” Elena whispered. “It was a crash site. Or a dig site. Or… both.”
Day 20.
Jin-Soo started dreaming of Earth.
But not the Earth they knew.
“The continents were… distorted. There were no oceans. The sky was pale gray.”
In one dream, he stood at the edge of a massive dry trench, where the Atlantic should’ve been. Towering vines wrapped abandoned skyscrapers in silence. The moon looked shattered.
“I think it’s the future,” he said. “Or… maybe a version of the past that almost was.”
The others started having visions too.
Ravi described a city submerged in red light, beneath a glass dome.
Tariq saw himself stepping onto the Martian surface—but his body was already there, decayed and unmoving.
Day 22.
They returned to the cave.
The message had changed.
Not erased—added to.
Same wall. New words. Deeper. Sharper.
Not the same hand.
Not human.
“Humanity failed.
Mars is reset.”
To be continued… PART IV – The TIME SCAR
First in a series on colonizing Mars… More to come. Expect changes along the way.
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