The closer you get to the light, the greater your shadow becomes. — Wayist aphorism, Book of Enlightenment
Day 38.
The cave wall no longer changed in ink, or even depth.
It breathed.
The coordinates carved into it pulsed faintly in thermal scans. No heat source. No activity. Just warping stone—as if time was folding around it.
Jin-Soo stared at the patterns and began to laugh quietly.
Elena leaned closer. Her jaw tightened.
“They’re not coordinates anymore.”
Tariq frowned. “Then what are they?”
She traced the arcs on her tablet, connecting the sequence of glyphs.
The screen rendered the final shape.
Not a map.
Not a spiral.
A brain.
“It’s not a place we found,” she whispered.
“It’s a place that found us.”
Day 39.
The drive to Jezero took 11 hours.
Or maybe 9.
The timestamps didn’t agree.
The terrain grew stranger as they neared the crater—smooth plains interrupted by unnatural ridges, like something underneath had tried to breach the surface.
A stone arch marked their entry into the crater’s basin.
When they turned back five minutes later—it was gone.
Ravi asked, “Did we take the wrong path?”
Jin-Soo shook his head, staring back at where it should’ve been.
“No… the path took us.”
Day 39, Evening.
They set up camp near the rim of a collapsed ridge.
Scans of the old “well” structure at the center of the basin now returned inconsistent depths—32 meters, 89 meters, infinity.
When they scanned it again an hour later, it was deeper.
Ravi dropped a data marker and marked a flag at the rim.
The next morning, it was gone.
But the rover logs showed no one had moved.
Day 40.
Ravi disappeared.
His suit was missing.
No breach. No airlock activation. Just his shadow burned into the sand like an afterimage caught mid-step.
Etched into the rover’s windshield: “Day 40 – Ravi dies.”
Below that, a second line had appeared.
“Stop digging.”
No one had written it.
But Jin-Soo whispered, “I heard that last night.”
“You heard it?” Elena asked.
He nodded, terrified. “A voice. In my head. It said… ‘You are still falling.’”
Later, Tariq heard it too.
“One of you has been here before.”
Day 41.
The rock formations around Jezero were no longer geologic.
Some were too perfect—symmetrical in ways erosion couldn’t replicate.
Other areas had grown unstable: a cave whose entrance measured 8 meters, but whose internal path now ran 43.
Ravi’s footprints, tracked by drone, began looping back toward the cave—despite him being gone.
Worse, some footprints led to the top of a nearby ridge.
The team had never gone there.
And by morning, the ridge was gone.
Day 42.
The habitat walls shimmered for a moment just after solar sync.
The interior lights pulsed. Cameras reset.
When they checked logs, the night footage showed a seventh crew member sleeping on the floor.
The figure wore a standard Odyssey suit.
No one could identify who.
Tariq erased the file. But Elena had already backed it up.
Day 43.
They reached the basin’s heart.
There, the tower emerged from red stone—half-buried, half-grown.
It spiraled upward like coral.
Organic. Cold. Humbling.
Jin-Soo fell to his knees. “It’s not a building. It’s a recording.”
The whispers returned.
Clearer now.
“We remember you.”
“The others never made it this far.”
“But you will.”
Elena touched the base.
It responded.
Heat surged through her chest—not warmth, but recognition.
Her heart raced.
And in the hum of the tower, she heard her own voice.
“I’m already here.”
Day 44.
Tariq didn’t wake.
His suit was untouched. No trace of movement.
Just a handprint burned into the habitat window. Facing out. Larger than his own.
Jin-Soo simply said, “He’s part of it now.”
Day 45.
Only Elena and Jin-Soo remained.
They mapped every coordinate from the original cave wall into the rover’s system.
The result wasn’t a path.
It was a pattern.
Circular.
Fractal.
Growing.
When zoomed out, the pattern resembled a human brain, wrapped in orbit lines like a solar system.
“It’s not a planet,” Jin-Soo said.
“It’s a machine that thinks. And we’re inside it.”
Elena didn’t reply.
Instead, she stepped into the spiral chamber at the tower’s base.
The walls shimmered.
And the voice spoke again.
“Loop complete. Initiating memory echo.”
Unnumbered Log – Redacted
Commander Elena Ruiz
“This is not exploration.
It’s recursion.We aren’t discovering Mars.
Mars is remembering us.And when memory repeats enough…
it becomes real.”
NEXT WEEK: Part VI – Echo Memory
© 2025 insearchofyourpassions.com - Some Rights Reserve - This website and its content are the property of YNOT. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to share and adapt the material for any purpose, even commercially, as long as you give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.
