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
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.
