Discovering New Mars

After hundreds of years of space exploration, we finally located signs of civilization out there. Mankind had had about 8 generations of space telescopes of increasing power, culminating with placing stations all over the far side of the moon to act as a virtual telescope almost as large as the moon itself. This scope swept across the plane of the Moon’s orbit for two weeks each lunar month and then shut off to recharge when the Sun’s light blinded it the other two weeks.

It was this scope that found it, an Earth-sized planet 135 light-years from Earth that bore unmistakable signs of not just life but significant industry. Because of its reddish color, people had taken to calling it New Mars. Early analysis showed it had an atmosphere similar to Earth’s, and lots of liquid water. Once a month the moon-scope faced New Mars and we collected one type of data after another. Trips to the moon to augment the scopes allowed it to gather types of data it had not originally been equipped for, back when its goal was only to locate the planet. Spectroscopic analysis made clear it had an atmosphere with the familiar gases: oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water, with no obvious poisons.

Because mankind had longed for centuries to travel to another planet where we could live (the moon and our neighbor Mars not qualifying on that last condition), we planned an expedition. It was far from practical; the idea was just to send some people there on a one-way trip. They could report back, and nearly three centuries from now we’d hear what it was like. Maybe by then we’d have come up with some more practical means of traveling there. There were many risks, such as collisions with objects in space we couldn’t see, but there were plenty of volunteers and the global space travel organization chose candidates.

There were limitations on our ability to build near-light-speed ships; they could only be so big. Partly for this reason and partly for greater chance of survival, we were sending six ships, each holding ten astronauts selected for both a variety of skills for the mission and varied genetics, with four men and six women on each ship. If the mission was successful, and both conditions on the planet and the residents permitted it, they’d be expected to breed and populate the planet.

We built other support ships as well which would precede the people. The first probes were going to explore the planet, learn about the geography, climate, the distribution and density of people, the language, plant and animal life, and whatever else they could pack AI into the probes to do. Another set of ships which followed were garden stations. These would go into orbit around the planet, send drones into the atmosphere to retrieve water, and grow a variety of food plants that generations of space missions had shown were easy to grow in space.

Four years after we discovered New Mars, the manned ships were launched, one a week for six weeks, for their 150-year flight. For those on board, because they traveled close to the speed of light, the time would be much shorter, but it would still be many years. Because it was impractical to load the ships with enough food for the travelers to live normally during all that time, the travelers were going to be in suspended animation the whole way. We wanted them to still be able to have children after they arrived.

Arrival

I was on the third ship to leave Earth, and the first to arrive out of our six crewed ships. As I came out of stasis, I found my uniform, which was stored in a chamber designed to preserve it during the flight, and put it on.

I was on the end of a row of stasis chambers. Across from me, Melissa Canelli came out of her chamber at about the same time I did. The other two chambers I could see both had the red lights on indicating their occupants had not survived the journey, which worried me, but when I went down the rest of the row there was only one other dead.

The ships were far apart, but close enough to maintain fairly slow communication, which the ships did automatically for most of the trip while we were suspended. Upon our arrival, we read the logs. We lost communication with the first ship early on in the journey, and the second ten years ago. One of the following ships was still functional, but two others had also dropped off the radar in the middle of the trip. This was why we sent six separate ships, after all. I counted myself lucky for being on one of the two ships that made it, and one of the seven people who survived the stasis. The other ship reported their commanding officer did not survive, so I was, as ranking officer, in charge of the entire mission.

As we approached the planet, we got transmissions from the advance craft already there, enough of which had made it to do their job. It was a beautiful, largely water-covered planet very similar to Earth, if you ignored the red color of the water. It had 0.98 standard gravity, a day 23.5 hours long, and a 382-day year (about 374 Earth days). It had 22% land area, 90% of it at reasonably habitable temperatures, and all of that heavily developed. It had two moons, one large one, smaller than Earth’s moon and a little closer, orbiting in 27 days, and a pretty small one 4 times as far out.

And while we’d detected many signs of a civilization at least equal to 21st century Earth’s when we first detected New Mars and in the years we spent preparing, and plenty of signs of civilization when we got here, there was one thing missing: The people who built it. The reddish color of the water was some form of marine plant life which was abundant near the surface over both shallow and deep water. Except in the coldest parts, and small areas perhaps set aside as parks, the land was covered with buildings ranging from small houses to shopping malls. There were lots of solar cells including part of just about every roof, and wind turbines and other renewable energy resources. The worldwide density of the construction indicated they had more of common metals like iron and aluminum than Earth did, or they’d already done some serious asteroid or moon mining to find them. There were, however, no obvious signs of major space exploration around the planet.

It was just the people who were missing. There were a large number of what appeared to be maintenance robots, keeping the power generation systems running, but there were no life signs coming from them. There were plenty of wild animals, mostly small ones, but they didn’t show signs of intelligence we’d expect for building something like this. There were fleeting signals of something else, what appeared to be beings of a suitable size to be the people who built this, but we hadn’t spotted them yet. We had plenty of videos of the landing modules from our probes flying through their cities, but none showed any of the people who built all this.

There were statues and murals that showed some fairly humanoid looking bipedal beings. They were a bit stouter than humans, with prehensile tails which reached to the ground when they let them hang down. Judging by the typical sizes of these statues, they were about human-sized. We had records of written and spoken language, on signs and murals, and in audio broadcasts our satellites had recorded years before arrival, though all the broadcasts repeated on some schedule and we had already collected clear copies of all of them. The automated linguistics satellites had deciphered three separate major languages and prepared automatic translation systems for us to use, should we encounter any of the people, as well as what we believed to be five minor languages we did not have enough samples of to fully translate.

There were houses, lots and lots of houses. Readings suggested that there had been housing for approximately 12 billion human-sized beings. “Had been” because, unlike the power generation facilities, many of the houses were in various states of decay. Some whole neighborhoods had collapsed. Most of them seemed still fully functional, though empty. Those houses usually had half their roofs devoted to solar cells, the other half to rooftop gardens, probably meant for growing food, though they were untended and growing wild. It appeared the maintenance robots were keeping them from covering the solar cells, but otherwise not tending to them.

The Hunt for People

Some catastrophe had befallen the people here, and as our ship completed the last leg of its journey toward the planet, we set about discovering what it was. Atmospheric scans showed no elements there which would be toxic to us. It had a bit more oxygen and carbon dioxide and a bit less nitrogen than Earth did, and twice the argon. There was very little atmospheric sulfur, which agreed with the post-fossil-fuel power generation systems we found.

There was a healthy biosphere of microorganisms. There were none we thought would be harmful to us. And there were small animals which had not been harmed by what was there. They freely rummaged through the remains of the rooftop gardens on the houses that had collapsed, and less often on the standing houses.

There were no signs of unusual radioactivity as might be associated with nuclear warfare or a nuclear energy disaster. The destroyed houses didn’t appear to have suffered damage from conventional warfare, either. It was more like neglect and lack of maintenance. And there were no obvious signs of large-scale death. We saw occasional skeletons which could have been people’s bodies that the small animals had already picked clean for food. But there were far too few of these for them to have all died suddenly.

And there were those fleeting life signs that could have corresponded to the missing residents, but they never seemed to last for more than a minute. Were they living deep underground, coming up briefly to retrieve food? The scans run so far were strong enough to penetrate the buildings we saw here and one or two levels of basements (though few buildings had more than one basement level) and we simply weren’t seeing them, but if they were deeper we would have missed them.

After my ship docked with one of the functioning garden satellites and we got our first meal of real food after arriving, we made that our base of operations and sent its location to the other surviving ship as a rendezvous point. That ship was two weeks behind us. Eight of their people had survived the suspended animation, as had seven of ours, and we agreed to wait for them while continuing to observe. We sent our first report back to Earth, just giving the status of the ships and bringing them on alert to watch for our subsequent reports.

From this space-dock, we analyzed the data on the fleeting life signs and saw that they were concentrated in certain areas. Specific buildings, one or two per square kilometer, were generating these signs periodically, some more than others.

In response to the early data showing no people, one of the other ship’s crew suggested that the people could be in a kind of suspended animation. We scanned for fainter life signs that might have corresponded with that, and found none. Cryogenic freezing would have given a strong temperature signal which was also absent. And the signals we got didn’t seem weak, just transient.

The next bright idea came from the only other man besides me to survive from our ship, Anton Fredericks. He noted that there was a large power generation infrastructure that seemed to be functioning, and wondered where the power was going. The sensors on the drones the probes sent out weren’t equipped to check for power movements. We commanded one of the probes to collect several of its drones and bring them to us, and we were able to modify them to scan for significant power movements and sent them back down into a particular city we’d chosen for no reason other than that we had the most data on it.

This took some time, and it took more time to collect data on the power movements. First off, the power was indeed going underground. Their entire power grid was underground, with individual buildings connected at basement level and deeper trunk lines. But in addition to this we found sharp power drains occurring occasionally in the buildings with the fleeting life signs.

By this point, the other ship was arriving, and we stopped to welcome them aboard, and feed them. After their first meal, we summarized our findings, and together we agreed we needed to watch these buildings. The power drains gave us more specific points to watch than simply the entire building, so we picked the building in this city which had seen the power drains and fleeting life signs most often, and sent a couple video drones to try to get as close to where the drains were happening as they could get.

It was then sleeping shift for half of us, but the rest, four of our crew including myself and four of theirs, gathered in a room where we could watch the live video feeds from our drones. One drone entered a large gallery with a sign written in two of the three major languages. Our translation system displayed that it meant MAKE A WISH in both languages. The room contained about thirty statues loosely matching statues we had seen of the people elsewhere. But while most of the statues elsewhere were clothed, these were all totally naked. It showed the people were even more humanoid than we had thought, down to the sexual organs, though some of the statues appeared to possess both male and female organs. The sexual organs were prominent, with the males sporting erections and the females posed so as to make the sexual organs prominent. This made us wonder if we’d found an alien brothel.

And then it happened. A live person, green-skinned and matching the general appearance of the statues, appeared in a flash of light on one of the statues. It was a female, and she appeared to be in a sexual encounter with the male organ of that statue. She stepped off, went over to a different statue, engaged in sex with that one, and vanished in another flash.

Two of the women gasped out together, “What the fuck?!”

“That does appear to be the relevant question,” I responded, drawing laughs from some of the others. “I believe I saw a woman materialize in a sexual position with one of the statues, switch over to another statue, and vanish as quickly as she appeared.”

There was a chorus of agreement in the room.

Deanna Dixon, a woman from the other ship who was managing our connection to the drones, said, “I’ve saved the relevant bit of video permanently, and I am going to instruct the computer to watch for any similar events, save them as well, and alert us.”

“For that matter, have it save anything that looks significantly different from the empty room we have been watching the rest of the time,” another suggested.

Immediately after Dixon called out “Done” the alert went off, and we saw a male of the species similarly switch from one female statue to another. It was about fifteen minutes later when we saw a second man appear, and a few minutes after that a woman.

Fredericks asked, “So what do we have here, some kind of sex parlor? Are these people getting transported somewhere where they are having sex in the positions they put themselves into?”

“Matter transportation would account for the high energy drains,” a woman from the other ship responded.

“Maybe it’s virtual sex,” another woman suggested. “Rather than an immediate transport, they are stored in a computer where they have virtual sex for a time. When the session is up, they come back, and start another session. That would account for us not being able to detect the life signs except during these moments.”

I responded, “Oh, God! An entire civilization that has gotten themselves so addicted to virtual sex that it’s all they do. They built robots to do all their maintenance, so they didn’t have any actual work they had to do on their own.”

The others nodded and said various words of agreement.

Fredericks said, “At least, the robots do all the maintenance needed to keep the system going. They don’t seem to be keeping the people’s houses from falling apart, but I guess they are no longer using them, anyway.”

“So what do we do?” I continued. I wanted to survey ideas from my crewmates before jumping into a course of action.

Fredericks replied, “I think it’s imperative that we try to make contact. It’s possible they are so sex-addicted that they will ignore us and continue what they are doing, but I do think there’s a chance if we make contact that we can get someone to explain to us how they got into this state. It’s unlikely they will attack us, given that they come out of these encounters naked and carrying nothing, though it is possible we may encounter automated security systems.”

“I agree with that assessment. We either try to get their story or make a good effort to do so, and send a report back to Earth. Then, since there are plenty of good living quarters available, we take up residence.”

The others agreed as well, and a woman from my ship, Clara Callahan, added, “And we absolutely do not participate in anything these sex parlors offer, since they are obviously too addictive.”

Not everybody expressed their agreement, but there were no denials of the statement. There were two Ayes (one of them mine) and an Amen.

One of the previously silent ones from the other ship, Ping Guo, added, “If we can’t get anything from them, maybe we can find something in the homes they are no longer using.”

“That’s a good idea,” Nelson Jenry, a man from the other ship, commented.

Deanna Dixon said, “It looks like they have extensive computer systems. They might have history recorded in them.”

“Fine, we have some alternatives if we can’t get it from the horse’s mouth,” I acknowledged.

We agreed to wait until the end of the current sleep cycle, give the sleepers a chance to make other suggestions, and send a mixed team down. But they had no other ideas and agreed with what we had come up with.

The landing team would consist of 2 pilots and 4 explorers, split from our two sleeping shifts, so we didn’t have to withdraw if it took too long. Ultimately, if nothing went wrong, our entire team would go down and settle on the planet, but we needed to investigate before we fully committed. By the time they reached the surface, the people from my shift would be sleeping. We drew lots for slots. First we picked one pilot from each shift to be part of the landing party, and the other three pilots would remain in space. Then two explorers from among the rest of each sleeping shift. I ended up selected as an explorer.