“Oh, the places you (won’t) go” by Arlen Markob. Photomontage made from magazine clippings.
Not a single soul could have anticipated the photograph returned to Earth by the Perseverance rover that day. It had touched down on Mars only a few sols before, and once its systems were found to be in good operating order, it set about its mission to search for signs of life on the red planet. The scientists at NASA’s Mars exploration team primarily hoped to find evidence of microbial organisms, the sort that might have existed in pools of water long since evaporated from the planet’s surface. What they absolutely were not expecting to find was what appeared in one of the first images returned by the rover. It was frankly not an unfamiliar sight, but its very familiarity made it equally unnerving and exciting. It bore implications the likes of which none present were prepared to handle, and it signified the start of a horrific episode previously unimaginable.
What Perseverance captured in photographic form, only a few meters away from its landing site, was what appeared to be a human skull. Half of the people who initially saw the image were certain it was a mere trick of light and shadow playing at a somewhat round rock, an example of pareidolia, the tendency of human beings to see faces in inanimate objects. This assumption was maintained even as the rover returned an image taken closer to the object, despite the fact that its details were sharper and more undeniable. Once the third picture came back to Earth, there was no denying it. The pearl-white surface, the two identical eye sockets, the pronounced zygomatic bones, the jagged line running between the frontal and parietal bones–it was precisely what one’s first impression suggested. What sat before the rover, partially buried in red dirt, was a perfectly preserved human—or at least humanoid—cranium.
The exploration team was galvanized by this discovery. Some were taken hold by a deep anxiety about the object’s implications, but most could not avoid indulging the curiosity that emerged naturally from a scientific mind. What did the presence of such an object entail, exactly? How did it get there? How long had it been there? Whose skull in particular was it? It had the potential to alter all preexisting knowledge of human history—and even the history of the entire solar system. Of course, it first had to be verified before any conclusions could be drawn. They needed pictures from different angles, and they needed to send the images to specialists in anthropology and archaeology to properly analyze the object and confirm that this fantastic discovery was not mere charlatanry.
Sure enough, the analyses came together to determine that the object was in fact genuine. Using four photographs—from the front, back, and both sides of the skull—it was assessed by its approximate measurements to belong to a modern human being, though only “modern” in the sense that it did not belong to one of our more distant evolutionary ancestors. Its exact date of origin could not be determined without laboratory tests, but from the images alone, it was found to be most similar to specimens found from the Mesolithic era, some eight to ten thousand years in the past. Further research would require the skull to be brought back to Earth, so the team at NASA began making plans to send a capture-and-return probe to the red planet.
The project was going to be an expensive one, so the team decided—despite the risks that came with doing so—to publish their discovery in order to raise funds. The news headlines that resulted from this caused the public to go mad with excitement. “SCIENTISTS REWRITE HISTORY WITH MARS DISCOVERY.” “SKULL ON MARS CHANGES EVERYTHING WE THINK WE KNOW.” “HAVE HUMANS BEEN MARTIANS ALL ALONG?” As people poured over the news and the photographs of the skull, all manner of theories sprung up. There were those who accused NASA of forgery, or of falling victim to some Russian or Chinese plot. There were also plenty of laymen who incorporated the discovery into half-baked theories about humanity’s extraterrestrial origins, or who used it to justify some doomsday prediction or other. Verses from the Book of Revelation along with some Nostradamus-esque prophecies circulated social media for a few months, but after some time had passed, the uproar mostly settled down.
Despite its short duration, the excitement over the discovery raised enough funds that the project was able to commence. Over the course of the next few years, the team designed and built the probe that would secure the skull and bring it back to Earth. Meanwhile the Perseverance rover was sent onward to search for similar signs. The scientists were quite disappointed—though not deterred—upon failing to find more human remains on the planet’s surface. Even the rover’s x-ray spectrometer could not detect anything below the surface. It was determined nonetheless that there had to be more bones somewhere. The range of the rover’s spectrometer was limited, after all. Perhaps most of the remains were buried much deeper below the surface, and the one skull had only emerged due to some unknown geologic activity. Whatever the cause might have been, the team continued the project and launched the retrieval probe, the Agrippa, on the eighth anniversary of the initial discovery.
Surprisingly, everything went according to plan. There were no setbacks during the mission except for one moment roughly halfway through the seven-month journey when what was assumed to be a chunk of asteroid collided with the probe as it traveled towards Mars. It struck a non-critical part of the probe and caused only minor damage. The Agrippa went on to land safely on the planet’s surface and followed the tracks left by its predecessor towards the skull. New images were fed back to the team on Earth in order to verify the object’s integrity for transportation. It appeared just as it had eight years prior; the only difference was that it was covered in significantly less dust, but this was likely due to a recent windstorm detected on the planet’s surface. With an appendage featuring rubber-tipped fingers, the probe lifted the skull from its position and gently fed it into a capsule specifically designed for the object.
The video camera attached to the probe captured the process. As it was raised from the ground, the reddish earth drained from the skull’s cavities and the bright sun-bleached bone gleamed in the midday light. Its teeth—which had previously been hidden in the dirt—were in excellent condition, aside from some visible wear, which was in keeping with the previous Mesolithic prediction about its origin. The skull was seated into the thickly padded chamber at the center of the rover, which then sealed itself tightly. This video of the steel door sliding shut as the hollow eye sockets stared blankly into the camera was the last that was seen of the pearly cranium.
The Agrippa returned to Earth safely after another seven-month journey. Reporters from every media outlet, both major and minor, flocked to the facility where the probe was brought to have its contents unsealed. The capsule had to be opened under very controlled conditions, so the press was not allowed in the room, but the process was recorded so that footage could be distributed to news agencies later. Clad in full-body suits to protect themselves against any potential microbes on the object–and to protect the object itself from deterioration–a team of four scientists extracted the steel container from the probe and unlocked it. The door slid open, but the skull was gone.
The interior of the padded capsule was coated with a yellowish powder which was initially assumed to be what was left of the skull. Some biochemical process must have reduced the solid bone to dust during its transportation to Earth, though this was a total surprise considering that it showed no signs of decay over the eight years between when it was photographed and seemed to sustain no damage when it was handled by the probe. Upon analysis, the dust proved to be mostly sulphuric and contained almost none of the other elements known to compose bone. Exactly what had occurred could not be determined, and while the scientists racked their brains over this conundrum, the media went wild.
“NASA SCIENTISTS CAUGHT WITH THEIR PANTS DOWN!” “RESEARCHERS CAUGHT IN PLOT TO DEFRAUD PUBLIC!” “MARS SKULL WAS HOAX ALL ALONG!” These and other headlines plastered newspapers and social media feeds for weeks on end. Those who had been skeptical of the discovery from the start got to relish in their declarations of “told-you-so.” The scientists’ futile attempts to explain what went wrong were ignored and they became the subject of great ridicule and controversy. After being dismissed from their positions, they only narrowly avoided being brought to court over their alleged multi-million-dollar fraud. Disgraced and lambasted, they vanished into obscurity, and the dive in public support for NASA’s Mars exploration projects led to huge cuts to the organization.
—
It is here that I must reveal myself as one of the scientists involved in the Perseverance and Agrippa projects. I am Dr. Avery Lambert, former NASA employee and specialist in physics and cosmology. To this point I have related the story as far as the public knows it, as a tale of an amazing discovery that turned out to be a hoax at worst and a great disappointment at best. The truth, of which even I have only recently become aware, is far more terrible.
When I speak of a greater truth to this story, I do not mean to say that the events as recounted so far are inaccurate. We did in fact discover what was thought to be a human skull on Mars, and we did in fact send a probe to retrieve it which returned empty aside from some anomalous dust. It is what has happened since then that has rendered these initial events even more consequential. That skull, or whatever it was that took the shape of a skull, brought to this planet something far more unpredictable than its own discovery. The other three have already fallen victim, and I can draw no conclusion except that I am the next in line.
When I speak of the “other three,” I refer to those with whom I opened the capsule that was supposed to contain our prize. I was one of the four scientists in that room. The others were Dr. Mercator and Dr. Goode–an astrobiologist and an aerospace engineer, respectively–and Dr. Eckert, a physicist like myself. The capsule itself was primarily Goode’s design, so she was the one responsible for opening it. Mercator, as one of our biology specialists, was going to conduct the first tests on the skull. Eckert and I were present to assist however might be needed to ensure the safe handling of the object. We were all taken aback when the cylinder showed itself to be empty and there was hardly a moment of silence before Goode muttered a confused “what the hell.” It was she who first reached into the chamber and swept up a bit of that yellowish dust on the gloved tip of her index finger, and it was she who first fell victim.
Goode made several appearances before the press in an effort to explain what had gone wrong with our mission. We were all very grateful for this, because her position in the public eye meant that the rest of us were spared much of the ridicule she endured. It was her name that was most often dragged in the media, and it was she who was first dismissed from her position. Her health had begun to decline before departing and I at first assumed this was the result of stress exacerbating some underlying ailment. There was one morning when I was making a cup of coffee in our break lounge and she entered the room, appearing slightly bloated, and coughed up a wad of dark substance into the sink. She insisted it was probably just a symptom of bronchiectasis–cystic fibrosis ran in her family, after all–so I too dismissed the issue as one of little concern, despite the fact that her coughing fits grew worse up until the day she left NASA.
None of us heard much from Goode afterwards. She took a job with a passenger jet manufacturer within a month following her dismissal, but from what I have been told, she was hospitalized soon after that. Her cause of death was never published, but I did manage to learn that she was on life support for nearly ninety days and was cremated once she had passed. Mercator fell ill around the time of Goode’s death, but neither myself or Eckert had contact with him. All we could determine was that he too was kept in the hospital for an extended period of time before succumbing to whatever illness he had contracted.
One might wonder here why there was not a thorough investigation regarding some Martian disease that may have been brought to Earth by our probe. After two of the four scientists present at the opening of the chamber died from some mysterious illness, why were they not properly autopsied and studied, and why were the other two not immediately quarantined? These are questions that deeply perturb me now, but even I did not bother to draw a connection between Goode and Mercator’s deaths at first. They were eerily coincidental, no doubt, but were just distant enough from one another in time that I did not see the need to regard them as having anything to do with each other. After all, Eckert and I were still healthy at that point. As long as things stayed that way, I felt no need to worry about my own fate.
It was nearly a year after our public humiliation when Eckert finally became ill. He and I were closer than the others, having studied together during our postgraduate years, and we had regular lunches with one another even after we had both been removed from our positions at NASA. We sat down together at a small bistro one midday in April. Eckert had previously complained about the onset of pain in his chest and stomach, but in my mind these could have been caused by almost anything–a spell of indigestion, perhaps. At least, this is what I thought until Eckert lifted a handkerchief to his mouth and coughed into it. I noticed just before he folded it over on itself that the napkin contained a glob of blackish mucus, and my heart skipped a beat. “Craig,” I said–that was his first name–“How long have you been coughing up blood?” He answered with a shrug. “Just a few days. Nothing to worry about though. I’ve seen my doctor already and he thinks it’s a fungal infection of some sort. Not a contagious one though.” When I mentioned that I had seen Goode spitting a dark substance into the sink before she was hospitalized, Eckert’s demeanor changed dramatically. Our conversation at that point fixated on the subject of this mysterious disease.
We determined that there must have been something in that capsule–in that sulphuric dust, specifically–that had infected the first two members of our group and now had latched onto the third. Neither of us had heard of any other members of our staff dying from an obscure illness in recent months, so it seemed safe to assume that the disease was not contagious. Only those who had been exposed to the powder in the capsule would fall ill, and apparently the protective suits we wore were not sufficient to guard us from this foreign affliction. Luckily we had cleaned out the capsule thoroughly before letting anyone else set their hands on it. The only samples of the powder we saved were safely contained for study, but in order to make sure another soul does not have to suffer our fate, I have written a letter to the laboratory to which we sent those samples insisting that they be destroyed immediately. I have yet to receive a reply.
I departed the bistro that day with a grave feeling in the pit of my stomach. I was one of the four who had been exposed, and three had already fallen ill. My fate was sealed, as far as I could tell. It did not help that this meeting was the last time I saw Eckert alive. We exchanged many phone calls in the following months so that I could be informed about the progress of his illness. The pains in his chest and stomach only increased as the weeks went on, and his coughing got worse as well. His speech, which was at first only occasionally interrupted by fits of hacking and wheezing, slowly became replaced by agonized moaning. I can only imagine how much worse he might have sounded if he had not been making an effort to suppress his pain in order to speak with me.
Eckert had grown increasingly paranoid since our last lunch together. He began visiting his doctor multiple times a week, demanding that more tests be done, more MRIs be taken, more treatments be tried. I have no doubt that his physician was equally baffled and annoyed. My telephone conversations with him were always about the disease, and his understandable dread took an eldritch turn when he began to humor delusions about what might be going on inside him. One day he suggested only half-jokingly that he might have accidentally inhaled some tiny alien larvae that were now growing and gnawing at his guts, like something out of a Ridley Scott flick. I of course assured him that such ideas were nonsense, that nothing living had ever been found on Mars, let alone was anything returned by our capsule. My efforts to quell his paranoid thoughts were unfortunately in vain, as he continued to indulge the wildest fantasies. His penchant for consuming science fiction films no doubt drove this arrant speculation.
Our last conversation was a brief one. It was a quiet afternoon in late July and my phone startled me when it rang. I picked it up to hear Eckert’s strained voice on the other end. “Avery,” he wheezed. “I put… your name… release form.” I gathered that he was trying to tell me he had submitted a form to allow me access to his medical records once he had passed. It was something he suggested doing when he was more lucid, so that I might have a better idea of my own prognosis. I thanked him and asked if there was anything I could do for his family after his death. He said no and explained–albeit with difficulty–that he had already made all the necessary arrangements, since he knew there was no escaping what had beset him. His final words turned my blood cold even with the bright summer sun casting rays through my office window. “My insides… they say it’s bad,” he groaned between every couple of words, and a faint gurgling sound could be heard in his voice. “Not like anything… anything they’ve seen. Doctor says… melting… everything… everything inside… melting.”
Eckert was comatose shortly afterwards and was pronounced dead hardly a week later. Since then, my nerves have been totally shot. Disbelieving his fantastical delusions has not saved me from mirroring his paranoia. The only way I have managed to steady myself enough to write is with a heavy draft of bourbon. I was not able to attend Eckert’s funeral and I had to quit my job the day after that last phone call. Focusing on work was impossible, and there was not much point in putting forth the effort when I knew what was awaiting me anyway. There was a clear pattern to the disease. One always fell ill shortly after the last had died, as if it was jumping from person to person. Goode, Mercator, and Eckert had been taken by it. I was next. And knowing what I know now, it twists my stomach to think that all three of my predecessors were kept alive in such a sickening state for so long. This disease, or whatever it is, is more inhuman than anything I have encountered in all my years of studying the cosmos. It defies the very nature of our being. No person should have to suffer it, nor should it have ever been brought to this planet. It would have remained isolated from humanity if it were not for our wanton curiosity, though I suppose curiosity itself was not the source of our demise. Curiosity coupled with an insatiable eagerness to claim what we found outside of our world as a part of it–that seems to have been our undoing.
It took some time but I managed to acquire the records from Eckert’s stay at the hospital as well as his autopsy report. The official cause of death was determined to be “a previously undocumented type of degenerative gastro-pneumopathy.” It appeared to be similar to the types of wasting disease found in deer and cattle, but instead of targeting the nervous system, it primarily affected the host’s respiratory and digestive systems, leaving the host lucid through most of the process. The tissues of the various organs swelled before slowly dying off, deteriorating gradually into an anomalous mass. I could sense the doctor’s trepidation in the way his notes were written. Even a man who had spent his life studying and treating grotesque diseases could hardly make sense of what was happening before him, and this only contributed to my own perturbation. Most distressing were the photographs included in the autopsy report. The first few, which depicted Eckert’s inanimate and emaciated form atop a cold mortuary table, were unsettling enough. What was found inside him nearly caused me to vomit.
There was little that could be distinguished among the liquescent morass that filled Eckert’s body. A central lump appeared to have been his stomach, and a pair of lumps above it were probably once his lungs. All had either turned to blackish sludge or was saturated by it beyond recognition. The longer I gazed at those pictures, the stronger I felt the urge to regurgitate my lunch. This was not helped by the fact that I was dizzily intoxicated, having drained a bottle of bourbon before sitting down to read through the reports. I was forced to set the photographs aside and fight off my queasiness, fearing what might come out of me. Once an hour had passed and my stomach had settled, I returned to the medical documents and picked up where I had stopped reading. There was little more I could endure, however, and once I finished going through the doctor’s final notes, I stumbled into the bathroom and heaved the contents of my stomach into the toilet.
After consuming those records, I can not bear the thought of what I am soon to endure. This disease–or whatever it is–has finally set itself upon me. Yesterday morning I felt a tickle at the back of my throat and coughed, leaving a small black splotch in the crook of my arm. I was expecting this to happen at any moment, but anticipation did not mitigate the onset of abhorrent fear as soon as the first symptom showed itself. I realized in that moment that what I witnessed Goode spitting into the sink and Eckert coughing into a handkerchief was not merely bloody mucus but a small portion of their decaying organs, bits of lung and stomach tissue coalesced into a horrible dark slime. I spent the rest of the day in a drunken stupor, as the surrender of my cognitive faculties was much preferable to the sober thoughts of my slow and painful demise–and of that final terror which Eckert suffered.
Today I have abstained from drinking in order to prepare for my departure from this world, though every waking moment is filled with torturous thoughts of what is going on inside me. Luckily I have no family that will mourn me, having never married nor fathered any children. My only remaining relatives are too distant to be very concerned with my affairs, and thus I plan to leave my estate to the benefit of the university from which I graduated. I have already written my will, and I now write this account which I hope will serve two ends. First, I wish to clear my name and the names of my fellow disgraced scientists by providing a more complete record of the tragic affair in which we were involved. Second, I wish to warn others of the danger to which we exposed ourselves and the abominable fate that has been its result.
That skull–that damnable skull–we thought would rewrite human history. We fancied it would immortalize us as the heralds of a new era of the sciences and humanities. It has only brought our demise, and I become increasingly aware of this fact as I feel the corruption it bore taking hold of my every organ. Pain has begun to set in throughout my core and my coughing has already grown worse. It is only a matter of time now until my insides have devolved into a tarry mass like those who have preceded me. It is only a matter of time now until I am consumed by my own futility.
I will not allow myself to be slowly overtaken by this otherworldly corruption. I can not sit idly as it renders me helpless and turns my insides to black sludge. As sickening as the whole ordeal has been, I thank Eckert for offering me the ability to know just what awaits me and to do something about it. I purchased a small pistol this afternoon. There was something ironic in the salesman’s insistence that I buy something more durable than the inexpensive piece I had picked out. I only need it to function once, after all, and I hope I did not leave the salesman with any suspicion about my intentions. Normally I would be a staunch advocate for keeping weapons out of the hands of those who are suicidal, but with a fate so horrifying as what I know I am to suffer, an early death will be a great mercy.
It was the last few lines of the doctor’s notes that convinced me to see to it that my life is ended sooner rather than later. The slow and painful degeneration caused by the sickness was terrible enough by itself, but the last few moments of Eckert’s life were nothing any person should be forced to endure. As brief as the episode was, relatively speaking, I can not imagine a less desirable end to a terminal illness. Here is what was written on the final day of my friend’s life:
Patient awakened from coma around 2:00 PM complaining of intense pain. Administered 5 CCs of morphine. Patient failed to respond to morphine and began screaming. Administered another 5 CCs of morphine. Morphine still ineffective. Patient began convulsing and struck nurse who attempted to stabilize him. Patient’s screaming grew louder and contained signs of acute psychosis (shouts of “it’s inside me” and “the skull, the skull.”) Administered 20 CCs of haloperidol. Patient was subdued but continued with delusional speech (“get it out,” “please help,” etc.) Speech eventually tapered off. Cardiac flatline detected. Attempts to resuscitate failed. Patient declared dead at 2:38 PM. Assumed cause: multiple-organ failure due to unknown degenerative disease. Notes to be updated following autopsy report.
The notes conclude with a suggestion that the case be referred to some task force on emerging diseases, but I doubt this would do much good. My plan, after all, is to dispose of the last victim of this corruption before the sun rises tomorrow morning.
The physical and mental agony my friend suffered in that final half-hour is far more than I have the will to endure. I have fought hard to avoid fixating on the things he must have seen and felt as his cognitive faculties failed, the alien presence that seemed to be eating away at his insides the way hydrochloric acid dissolves the zinc inside a penny, leaving nothing but a thin shell. I can sense that presence within me now. I will save myself from its horrible putrefaction and its grotesque illusions while I am still able.
I do not fear my own death now so much as I fear the persistence of this blight among those who continue to walk along Earth’s surface. As I reflect on my life before its early end, it appears that the disease which I have caught in a terminal form already existed among the human race, long before we ever sent a probe to Mars. It is spread freely from person to person, from one generation to the next, from priest to parishioner, and my fellow scientists and I were afflicted by it long before we were exposed to that yellowish dust. Our ailment, in all its bodily horror, is merely an exaggerated strain of this disease. Its most common form is not that of physical decay, but of arrant psychological speciousness.
What comes from space is not for us. We were not made for this universe, nor was it made on our behalf. Our relationship is one of coincidence, and it is folly to claim what is outside of our world for ourselves. Even those whose acumen precludes delusions as fantastical as Eckert’s are no less guilty of this infection. We sit on our little rock gazing at the stars and planets through telescopes, giving them names they will never hear spoken, imagining faces on the moon and creatures among the stars. All the while we are willfully oblivious to the desolate response that comes back to us from those untouched places. We persist in singing our little songs to drown out the deafening silence of all that encompasses us. There is no man on the moon, only craters. There is no Cassiopeia or Taurus, only giant balls of thermonuclear fusion as distant from one another as they are from us. And there were never any humans on Mars. Perhaps there might have been something that looked like a person from Earth, but it lived a life immeasurably separate from our own. Whatever humanoid being that cranium belonged to was hardly obligated to submit itself to our limited conception of the universe–and we were fools to have thought of it as our sibling.
—
“We understand the world in its becoming, not in its being.
‘Things’ in themselves are only events that for a while are monotonous.
But only before returning to dust.
Because sooner or later, obviously, everything returns to dust.”
–The Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli
Written October 23-30, 2020. Published October 30, 2020.
J.D. Smirl 