We all have memories we would like to forget. But we can't let go of the past because without the past, we are nothing. — Professor Milos Terzim, Past Lives, CY 10889
Day 27.
Elena’s fingers trembled as she flipped through the decrypted Chinese logs. The deeper she read, the colder she felt—despite the stale warmth of the habitat module.
Project Zhuque hadn’t been an exploratory mission.
It was a containment effort.
The logs were fractured, corrupted by radiation and irregular time stamps, but one line repeated like a fevered whisper echoing across dimensions:
“Time fractured — Zhuque compromised.”
Zhuque had targeted Jezero Crater—far to the north. Once hailed as the best chance for discovering signs of microbial life, it had become something else entirely.
A wound.
The Chinese team had found cracks in chronology—not metaphorical. Literal ruptures in causality.
Dust storms that hit before the sensors registered wind.
Drones that flew perfect survey loops, only to return with footage dated days in the future.
Astronauts who recorded video logs they later had no memory of making.
One entry chilled her:
“Liu recorded her own death three days before it happened.
Same crater. Same suit. Same position.”
Tariq, now back from the cave and visibly shaken, leaned over her shoulder as she read.
“You think they got stuck in a time loop?”
Elena shook her head. “No… worse. I think they escaped it—and brought pieces of it with them.”
Day 29.
They ventured into an unmapped sector near their landing site. The surface appeared unremarkable.
Until the scans came in.
Beneath the dust: heat fluctuations, anomalous gravity readings, and trace isotopes of decay older than human presence on Mars.
Jin-Soo called it a temporal scar—a fracture in spacetime stitched back together… badly.
The surface showed faint circular burn marks and footprints—dozens.
Some too deep.
Others vanished overnight.
Day 30.
Routine cam logs revealed a shadow at the edge of the habitat.
Elena.
Same suit. Same visor. But she hadn’t left the module that day.
Later, a log appeared on her terminal:
“We shouldn’t have come.”
Her voice.
She hadn’t recorded it.
That night, Tariq stared at her across the darkened comms bay.
“You said something to me on Day 35,” he murmured.
“It’s Day 30,” she replied.
“I know,” he whispered. “But I still remember it.”
Day 31.
At the center of the scar, they found a stone shaft—like a collapsed well. It spiraled downward into darkness, far deeper than it should go.
Scanners couldn’t map it.
Around the rim: warped metal fragments. Not theirs. Not Chinese. The alloy was… unknown.
They lowered a probe.
It didn’t return.
But the footage did.
It showed itself descending—then ascending.
Then nothing.
Day 33.
Anomalies escalated.
Jin-Soo collapsed in the medical bay, babbling: “I saw myself. I was sleeping.”
Footage confirmed it. Two Jin-Soos, overlapping by three seconds. Then one disappeared.
Later, they found a scratch etched into the cave wall:
“Day 40. Ravi dies.”
It was Day 33.
Day 34.
Jin-Soo began dreaming of Earth.
But not their Earth.
“The continents were… wrong. Like they’d folded in. The oceans were gone. The cities looked like coral, not steel. The sky was violet.”
Tariq had dreams too—of Earth swallowed in sand. He stood in New York, but it was under a dome. And the moon above was shattered, glowing with veins of fire.
Ravi said nothing, but started sleeping in his suit.
Day 35.
The comms crackled to life—on their own.
A voice broke through the static:
“Odyssey One, this is Earth Command. Repeat, Earth Command. Do not engage the site. You were never meant to—”
Cut.
The timestamp was five days in the future.
No satellite logs. No radio source. The transmission shouldn’t exist.
But it did.
Ravi whispered, “Then who sent it?”
Day 36.
The Martian sky shimmered with green and violet auroras.
Mars has no magnetic field strong enough to produce auroras.
Then radar pinged something in orbit.
A ship.
Identical to Odyssey One.
No signal. No transponder. No motion.
Just… floating.
Ravi paled. “It’s us. From another thread.”
Elena’s voice was steady. “No. It’s what’s left of us.”
Day 37.
They returned to the cave.
The wall had changed.
Not in length—in depth.
The letters sank farther into the stone, as if the rock itself had softened to let them in.
Around them, the stone had warped—like heat waves on glass.
New carvings had emerged.
Symbols. Coordinates. Equations.
And names.
Elena. Tariq. Jin-Soo. Ravi.
Dates followed each one.
Some already passed.
Some yet to come.
Ravi found his—next to Day 40.
He said nothing.
But Elena saw him slip a scalpel into his suit pocket later that night.
Final Log Entry (Encrypted)
Commander Elena Ruiz
“We are not alone.
Not in space.
Not even in time.We stepped onto a dead planet and woke it.
Not because it sleeps.
But because it waits.”
NEXT – Are you ready for Part V – The Awakening—where the trap isn’t just time… it’s memory. And Mars remembers everything.
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