If there’s one thing I hate, its morning meetings. I love my job and was very lucky to get it, but my boss, a very smart fellow, has no oratory skills. Picard put it perfectly, talking and talking in one unending run on sentence. At least I get to use the Hubble today. We have whittled down possible human mars landing sights. NASA or Spacex, I don’t mind as long as we get there. 2026, fingers crossed.

Morning meeting canceled! Seems there’s a meteor that is going to hit mars later today and they want us setting Hubble wide view lens to capture it! Today just turned awesome!

Looks like the impact will be on the far side of mars so we won’t be catching the hit it self, but we will probably get some good shots of the post hit dust up. The object seems to be rather large. The trajectory guys are saying it came from outside the system, I say its
probably full of giant bugs like starship troopers.

Green mars! Pics we are getting back are showing a huge green cloud where the object hit! Its almost definitely going to be phosphorus so calm down all you reptoid fans. Spectrometer readings from our mars sats should be coming in soon so we can find out exactly what the cloud is made of.

Fucking false alarms! spectro coming back said that the green cloud that has almost totally engulfed mars, contained not only methane but possibly amino acids! everyone here at Goddard pretty much had a heart attack! sadly we are being told now that the object that struck mars was large enough to possibly send out an emp that would have thrown off all our readings. so as i said before probably phosphorus, but just for that split second, every scientist here had their childhood dream realized. the discovery of life.

Ladies and gentlemen! Its official! There is organic material on mars! The blanket of green dust has coalesced into thick cumulus clouds literally raining life down onto mars! Spectrometer readings have been triple checked and there is no question, the meteor that hit our sister planet earlier today seeded it with complex amino acids! This is truly extraordinary. Some of my colleagues are in actual tears. This maybe the most important day in scientific history.

Well now this is interesting... puzzling but very interesting. Methane levels are increasing steadily on mars as is, somehow, the temperature. some of us are saying its due to the new "atmosphere" keeping in light and heat that is normally lost due to a usual lack there of. we are waiting on close up sat images to maybe shed some light. today just keeps getting better.

Images are back from the mars sats.. Somehow there are animals on the surface. Not small ones either but large complex animals! Our best photo seems to show a herd of what look like bison! Everyone here is freaking out! there is ZERO explanation for any of this except possible satellite malfunction, but all systems seem to be in the green. We will have to wait a little while as the sats are passing to the dark side of mars before we can take anymore shots to confirm, but seriously! What the hell is going on!?

OK then, all sanity and reality has gone out the window. While waiting for the satellites to pass to the day side of mars, we took some calibration shots to make sure everything was ready when we passed to the day side so we could double check the "herd" of possible animals on the surface of mars. Well those night pictures came back dotted with thousands of pinpricks of light. Upon closer examination, we can confirm they are fires. Orderly groups of fires. Not blazing forest fires but possible, camp fires. This makes no sense whatsoever. One theory is that the meteor not only carried basic crude life, but was actually a kind of ark containing various species of life from another world. That sounds far more plausible than the hyper evolution theory on some of the NASA boards. That idea would involve almost a billion years of evolution in the course of a day, which is impossible! Day is coming soon on mars, we shall see if we can make heads or tails of this in the light of morning.

Alright, the general consensus is that we are not going to bother with theories anymore. Nothing in human history can explain what we are seeing on mars, but that’s probably due to what’s happening there is not involved with human history. As dawn broke over mars, we zeroed in on the area we had previously seen a herd of Martian bison. They weren’t there, the whole area was now an orderly pasture. Farm lands! Roads! We are seeing the signs of not just life, but of civilization, and as we panned our cameras along the road, we saw crude buildings! A town square! Culture! These beings are intelligent, and shockingly similar to ourselves. We are now taking photos constantly due to the fact that this strange form of accelerated evolution may cause us to miss something if we even blink! Questions can be answered later. For now we are all stuck in a state of wonder.

In the bible, god says the next time he returns it will be in fire, and just as with the flood before, most people will die. Glued to our screens here, we are watching as a fear none of us ever imagined is slowly being realized. Over the last 10 or 15 mins we have watched the new Martians turn their young minds to destroying each other. War has broken out on our sister world, and there is nothing we can do to stop it. The horror of seeing another race come to an intelligent level and destroy itself before we even had a chance to say hello is a torture us scientists had never thought of. Martian cities of red stone are ablaze, the peculiarly intricate design of their town squares smashed to rubble. Will our brothers and sisters of the same star die before we learned their names?

It would appear we are not alone... By the time the smoke had cleared from the first Martian war, we were sure we would only find destruction. Instead we found eyes looking across the gulf of space directly into our own. Telescopes! Grand modern telescopes had been erected! By the time we had figured out what we were looking at one of our sat men was running screaming into the room! They had come! They were here! A faint blip slightly outside of our usual transmission frequency was beaming a tether of information to mars. They had sent their own satellite here! It was in a comfortable high orbit, sending who knows what information back to its masters whom, only moments ago we presumed were all dead. Calls were made immediately to see if we could some how decipher the information, perhaps divine a language!

Silly silly scientists! Our hope of unraveling the secret of Martian language was not only misguided but beyond the level of impossible. This was not an ancient long dead race which had left sealed tombs full of script on papyrus for us to pour over. This was a race 18 and a half hours old. 18 and a half hours in which their culture, society and language had changed! This was like saying to a room full of linguists,"here is all the millions of years of written word from earth. Tell us what it says" we had no idea where one era of speech started and the next stopped. There might have been 40 different tongues spoken in 12 seconds. they were beaming us audio messages in tight 23 second increments but to us, even when slowed down to a crawl, it just sounded like chirps. A strange sing song tone of varying frequency when played at normal speed. Like someone pressing multiple buttons on a touch tone phone. The silliness of our bravado thinking we could so quickly translate an alien language made some of laugh when the facts were laid out. We laughed until we saw the flash from the surface of mars located in a city of pink and gold skyscrapers. It was a ship... They were coming here. right now.

Six minutes! Our best guess with the current course and speed, was that their ship would make earth orbit in 6 mins! What fantastic technology had our siblings found in so brief a time that our best men had spent their lives trying to find!? To say that the feeling in the air was tense was similar to saying the sun is large. There was not even time to get a group of dignitaries together to meet them with a band and fanfare! That’s assuming their motives were pure! What if they were on their way to destroy or enslave our race!? Calculators were destroyed in the act of trying to correctly find a fire solution to shoot blow them out of the sky before they got here. All in vain. First contact was coming straight at us at such speed, our out dated weaponry couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

The ship looked like a flying saucer straight off an old scifi book cover. Gold and sharp. It landed here at Goddard with a whisper. A group of us slightly more brave scientists were standing outside waiting for it, and to be perfectly honest, who else should have been there to greet our new guests. "No sudden movements, no loud speech. Just stay calm and act as welcoming as possible." That’s what we were all told, I don’t think I could have spoken above a squeak personally. I was trembling with a mix of every emotion possible. A hatch hissed open to reveal a pitch black interior. we waited what felt like an eternity before one of us gently said,"hello?"

"Who’s going in?" I raised my hand shakily. I may have been utterly terrified, but my curiosity was infinitely stronger. As I walked toward the ships yawning black entry way everything that had happened today flashed through my head. It had been roughly 21 hours since the impact on mars and here I was walking into a fully working interplanetary spaceship. Would this herald a new era of peace for man kind? Would it plunge us into catastrophic wars? No one could say. The time for asking open questions was over. Our brothers and sisters had come to us and now it was our turn to be a part of not just earths history, but the solar systems.
The smell of the ocean wafted out of the ship as I stepped over the threshold. Salt water and what seemed like lime. The air was very palatable and welcoming. recessed blue light winked on as I took another step. I was in a hallway that ended with a door roughly 5 feet tall. As I walked forward the door slid open to a larger room bathed in red light. The smell now was much different. A musty and thick, it made my eyes water a bit. This was a control room and sitting in each seat was a Martian... A red dusty Martian corpse. They were all dead, very dead. It looked as though they had died centuries before. Mummified bodies lay against strange control panels. A layer of red dust cover the floor beneath each one as before my eyes they disintegrated.

Back inside our survey room we watched in sadness as death moved as quickly across the face of mars as life had done earlier that day. It was later hypothesized that it wasn’t just evolution but time that had been accelerated on mars. The Martian civilization had been many millions of years old by the time they came here. Now the last of the green was swallowed by the familiar red of mars. The planet just as our young siblings, had gone back to the dust.