The Clamour of Silence

You should have heard it: the sounds the world made when those images came through. Not the initial grainy pictures that loaded in at first. They were always grainy at first. You could count the pixels on those ones easily enough. No, only the usual nutters whirled up a stir when those ones popped up on the ultra-niche threads online. Those that slept in tinfoil and rubbed mercury across their temples. No one really paid attention to those murmurings until the next set landed in our laps, more defined and sleeker. That made people pause for real. You could see the clear, manufactured edges. And despite the erosion of time having played a heavy part in covering them up, as the rovers dug deeper, and carefully brushed away the debris, the reality was clear as day.

Ruins on Mars.

Like I said, you should have heard it. Conspiracy theorists pounded their chests, scientists rummaged through decades of data thought pure speculation up until that moment, descendants of famous science-fiction authors long dead took to the news and radio shows to claim their family had always known. Everyone, all at once, had something important to say, so nothing important was heard. It all got lost in the maelstrom of excitable chattering as theory upon theory upon theory was thrown against the wall. The rovers moved all too slow for us, methodically moving small pieces of rocks, one at a time. Despite having finally designed a machine that could dig and comb through the red Martian soil remotely, the bots were clumsy, awkward things. You had to be careful with how you operated them. One wrong move, and the machines got stuck or broke and were worthless. Not so much different as they are today, unfortunately.

Nevertheless, every time a pebble was moved, or the dust was sifted, the picture got clearer, and the excitement got louder. In a time where news came and went so quickly, it was nice to have something that stuck around. An unusual constant, weathering the insufferable storm of unending media frenzy. And even though we bickered amongst ourselves and across borders so much so that it slowed down the progress even further, one thing was finally agreed upon by all.

We were not alone. Not anymore. Proof that life existed outside of our little bubble, and right in our back garden was nothing short of a miracle, one that the scientists reminded us of on a daily basis. A fraction of a fraction of a fraction inside of a microbe. An answer to a question we had forgotten we had been asking for the majority of our species’ existence. And with that answer came only more questions. Were they native to the planet? Real-life Martians that rose and fell, trapped on their little red rock? The notion made everyone on our little blue rock stir uncomfortably. Or were they travellers? Jumping from system to system to find a suitable place to lay their hat for a few millennia before moving on? If so, was it a place to live? A place of commerce? A glorified pitstop on the way to intergalactic highways with far more interesting scenery and company? Regardless, one more question was answered not too soon after they had started piling up. They were intelligent. At least by our standards.

The rovers had widened the hole that they had been digging to get a better sense of the ruins they had uncovered. It was clear from the get-go that it was some type of wall. We weren’t sure what it was made of. We didn’t have the technology to identify it through photo recognition, and the nine-month journey from here to Mars meant that the ever-growing list of volunteers to go inspect it had to wait quite a while before they got a shot at examining it with human eyes and proper equipment. And as we waited, the rovers kept digging and kept widening. And eventually, they found a door. I’m not talking about some empty opening where a door used to be. I mean an actual door, with hinges and handles and everything. The whole nine yards. That baby even had a port hole on it. Thankfully, despite the rover’s clunky nature, they were equipped well to break through most surfaces. Not with brute strength, but slow clinical precision. And these robotic surgeons would slice away carefully, day in and day out. On top of this, the elements of Mars had taken their toll on the ruins as well, long before they buried them. And so, they went to work on the door, slowly but surely. And as they peeled back the dirt and soot, something else became very apparent. These walls and door and all the elements that held them together were unnervingly similar to our own technology. Granted, the construction and design were far superior to our own, but the similarities were obvious. This led to further speculation. Were we descendants of these beings? Had they finally made it to Earth, and somewhere along the way lost who they were before giving rise to our new imagined histories? The question was an uncomfortable one, a single brick in the fabric of our lineage removed that caused everything else we knew about ourselves to shake with uncertainty. A once-popular term raised its head again often during these discussions: “The Goldilocks Zone.” Apparently, this referred to when a planet was the right distance from the Sun so that it could sustain life. For Mars, that was around 4 billion years ago, during a period of Earth’s history I still can’t pronounce. For us, well, we’re still working our way through it. But this didn’t stop the other theories from twisting and turning as well. Some claimed we weren’t descendants of these unknown masters, but were indeed created by them: a breed of hyper-intelligent interlopers that zipped around the vastness of space, infecting planets with life, just for the sake of creation itself. Others said that we were a glorified zoo, and that Mars was an observatory for them to watch us from afar as they experimented with our primitive lives. These theories were all half-baked. They circled and clashed with each other and were just a way to fill the time as the door was meticulously removed, piece by piece. Each nut, bolt, and screw overanalysed with the little we had on the red planet as we did so. And when the rovers finally removed the last of the door and slowly rumbled on through into the structure, we all collectively held our breath.

The initial reveal was a bit disappointing. A lot of us hoped, in vain, that the secrets to creation would be laid out on the other side of the door, with careful instructions on how to properly navigate the cosmos in, preferably, an easy-to-follow manner. But all that was found was empty rooms. Not the kind of empty that came from centuries of decay, though the ruins seemed to be excellently preserved in some sort of vacuum. No, it was like a warehouse that had been stripped of everything it previously held. There were no aliens, or instruments of science fiction, or even basic furniture. It was just empty room after empty room. Even the walls had been laid bare. The only part of it that seemed impressive was the sheer size of the space. The corridors seemed endless. A cold, dead, infinite maze of nothing. We all wondered aloud to each other: why it was empty? And the prevailing answer left an uncomfortable feeling at the pit of my stomach. The emptiness of the ruins seemed calculated. This wasn’t the sign of a civilization that went out with a bang or crumbled in on itself. They knew exactly when they were “leaving” and made all too sure that we wouldn’t be able to follow them or even learn anything about them.

It’s safe to say that our relationship with this mysterious species we were never to meet soured somewhat after this revelation. But that didn’t stop us all from digging further. Even as the interest began to wane and pessimism began to set in, our little rovers diligently carried on, moving from room to room in search of anything. And even though every single room was as identical as the last, they never wavered in their quest for discovery. Months went by and life moved on for most people. When the astronauts were four months away from making it to Mars, and people were beginning to question whether we should bring them home before wasting their time, a rover operator noticed something amiss in the latest of empty rooms they were searching through. It was the floor. Every room had panelling across the floor, and in the past, removing them had revealed nothing. But this operator was excited that one of the panels was slightly warped compared to the others, sunken deeper into the ground. It was almost unnoticeable. Almost. But this operator had been looking at the same room over and over again for months, so much so that any slight defect or change was almost painfully obvious to them. At this point, people didn’t really care if a little extra time was wasted to check underneath it, so he was granted his request to remove the panel. And lo and behold, the first and only artifact of this civilization was found.

A large portion of the space beneath the panel had been carved out to make way for what seemed to be a hidden compartment: a hidey-hole crudely cut away unevenly, as indicated from its creation aeons ago. One of these aliens had made a secret space, just for themselves, one they had clearly forgotten about or never told their comrades when cleaning house. Maybe it slipped their mind. Maybe they were long dead by the time their buddies left. Either way, it was filled with cylindrical containers. Five of them, all identical in shape and size. But as the rover pried open the first container and its cold white light filled the hole greedily in search of treasure, it was revealed that this alien wasn’t interested in hiding away priceless artifacts, tomes of knowledge, or even secret mementos only for them.

It was for their favourite condiment.

Salt. That’s all it was. Just salt. Any potential argument that could have been made that the salt was being mined, or transported, or kept for scientific purposes was also immediately snuffed out by the fact that there were markings on the inside of the can that gave a very clear warning.

Two sentences. Both saying the same thing. The first in English, the second in Mandarin:

“I’ll say it twice just to make sure you listen, Tao: Get. Your. Own.”

Not just one of our languages, but two. Perfectly understandable and eerily modern, not some bastardization of either, etched clearly into the lid of the container. The whole opening was livestreamed, so the reveal was instant and seen everywhere. People lost their damn minds. They screamed accusations of the whole endeavour being some elaborate ruse to keep us all “civil” and “under control.” Others raged on about secret government projects that had long been shelved and hidden away from the rest of us peons. The arguments and the panels and the endless babbling were all reignited, along with the mass confusion that came with it. None of the theories felt right or solid enough. Holes were poked into all attempts at reasoning. But then one theory began to take hold. Not officially held by any particular government or organization, but it permeated so heavily online that it was obvious to see that not only were people beginning to believe it to be true, but they also wanted to be true. A phrase that at first made the world collectively groan in cliché slowly became more and more accepted, as all other explanations proved unsatisfactory: time travel.

I mean, we had already found sophisticated ruins on Mars; jumping to time travel didn’t feel as big of a stretch, as a result. And it was one that a handful of physicists had been prattling on about since those first images appeared. You see, every niche corner of the scientific community had tried their best to make the situation related to their work from the get-go. It was a little exhausting sure, but also nice to see. Talented minds pooling together for the pure sake of discovery, rather than for the usual stench of profit, was a welcome change. AI specialists and roboticists had flocked together to work on improving the rover’s software and hardware. Mechanical engineers tinkered away tirelessly on advanced camera systems, archaeologists bickered about the proper ways to traverse the dig site, and historians frenzied over the newly found artifacts, trying to ascertain their potential origins. All the while, a group of physicists claimed that these ruins weren’t left by aliens, or even humanity in the past, but us in the future, having travelled back before we even existed.

The idea was that humanity, however far off in the future, had failed to develop a satisfactory answer to long-distance space travel, but had somehow managed to achieve the arguably more difficult task of not only travelling through time, but back in time. As a result, an unorthodox answer to the question of colonizing different planets rose its head. This is where the “Goldilocks Zone” came back into play. What if we went back in time to when Mars was still habitable? It would give humanity the opportunity to escape our own planet by disappearing into the past without the worry of all the grandfather paradoxes and butterfly effects that came with it. How could we possibly effect the future of humanity so far away? People didn’t buy this theory at first. But then it expanded as we began to ponder it further. It was no secret that without proper terraforming technology, our time on Earth was limited. Maybe this was less of an experiment of time travel and colonization. Maybe this was humanity’s only way to survive the eventual bubbling of the oceans and blackening of the sky. It made sense as to why the ruins seemed to be so meticulously abandoned as well: our descendants covering their own tracks as diligently as they could, out of fear that their ancestors would discover them. Which we did, unfortunately, thanks to one idiot’s inability to share. Even then, it was still just a theory, no matter how popular it became, one that required too many ifs, ands, or buts. It would have fallen into obscurity, eventually, along with the rest of them as louder opinions took hold over time. If we had let it. But we didn’t. Because no matter how far-fetched it seemed, it had changed something in us as a civilization. No longer was time travel an unobtainable instrument of science fiction. It felt predetermined. And with that, countries and companies called back their scientists and engineers en masse with record levels of funding. Because you know what’s better than discovering time travel is possible? Being the first ones to commodify it. And that all too familiar stench of profit returned to the proceedings, which made the whole thing feel too normal. Too boring. Too predictable.

And then, sure enough, the ruins disappeared. Instantly. Over night.

The rovers that were inside the ruins when it happened all of sudden were buried under mountains of dirt. The ones still on the surface travelled back to the entrance and were left with a shallow hole to nowhere. All traces of the ruins, every last scrap of them: gone. There was less confusion this time when it happened. Some had already predicted this would occur, and the rest of us caught on pretty quickly. We had been right. We had discovered a piece of our future. And as a result, that changed us. Changed our directory. Our intended path was now forever altered. Some argued that we would still discover time travel and venture elsewhere other than Mars. Others said we just got better at covering our tracks. But most of the world felt differently. It felt like we had strayed from the necessary path of discovery to save ourselves and were doomed to never figure out time travel. And now, with the ruins disappeared, it left a bad taste in our mouths and a feeling that we were going to be forever trapped to die on this planet. When that feeling set in and spread through us all like a disease, that realisation stuck deep within us, and we knew for sure it was true.

Man, the silence when we all realized what we had done. Well. Like I said, you should have heard it.