Part I – The Message
The year was 2035. After decades of delays, disasters, and debate, humanity had finally touched the red sands of 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, establish a permanent habitat.
But on Day 3, the scanner picked up something strange.
A heat signature, pulsing faintly underground, far from any volcanic activity.
They followed it to a cave.
Inside, the air was still—eerily so.
Deeper in, their lights flickered across the rocks and revealed something impossible: a human skeleton, slumped against the wall, partially buried in red dust. The suit it wore was old—too old. The fabric, brittle. The helmet, cracked.
Not NASA. Not ESA. Not any known program.
And then they saw the words, crudely carved into the stone above the body:
“They were already here.”
The cave grew colder.
Outside, something stirred in the dust.
Part II – The Forgotten Mission
Elena crouched by the corpse. The suit had once been a dull bronze, its logo barely visible, but unmistakable: a red patch with Chinese characters.
“中国国家航天局.”
China’s national space agency.
Tariq stepped back, stunned. “That’s not possible. China never made it to Mars.”
Not officially, anyway.
Back at base, Elena bypassed mission control’s firewalled database. She found a buried file:
“Project Red Ghost – Classified. China, 2029.
Mission Outcome: Lost. No survivors. Public Cover: Failed Orbital Probe.”
“They were here,” she whispered. “They made it. And no one ever told the world.”
“But someone knew,” Tariq said. “We landed only six kilometers from this cave.”
“This wasn’t exploration,” Elena replied. “It was confirmation.”
Later that night, Tariq couldn’t sleep. He returned to the cave, drawn back to the message. As he crouched beside the wall, his flashlight caught something new.
There was more writing now—beneath the original four words. Jagged. Fresh.
“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 message from Earth repeated in her headset: “Copy that, Odyssey. Confirm site coordinates… standby…”
Then… static.
The signal died. Communication with Earth went dark.
No signal. No ping. No satellite response. All frequencies: dead.
She rebooted the system. Tried backups. Changed frequencies. Nothing.
Later, she activated the long-range telescope. The blue planet came into view, distant and comforting—until it wasn’t.
Earth was… wrong.
Too dark. Cities no longer glowed. Clouds moved, but there were no signs of civilization.
Jin-Soo ran calculations. “We have food and water for 297 days if we ration.”
They were six people now.
Six humans.
On a dead planet.
Looking 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?”
They didn’t reply. No one wanted to say it, but they were all thinking the same thing.
Were they the survivors… or the experiment?
Elena couldn’t stop replaying that one line from the cave:
“They were already here.”
Was it a warning about Mars?
Or about Earth?
Day 22.
They returned to the cave to check the message again.
It had changed.
Not erased—added to.
Same wall. New words. Carved deeper. Not the same hand.
Not human.
“Humanity failed. Mars is reset.”
To be continued…
First in a series on colonizing Mars… More to come. Expect changes along the way.
