This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/horrorfan_9 on 2024-11-20 07:58:23+00:00.

I’ve kept this to myself for far too long, and I don’t think I can carry the weight anymore. Maybe writing it down will help. Maybe not. Either way, someone should know the truth before it’s too late. If anyone reads this, don’t dismiss it as the ramblings of a lunatic. I’m not crazy. I wish I were.

I used to work at NASA. Officially, I was part of the public-facing missions—rovers, orbital studies, things they let the world see. Unofficially, I was involved in something else. Something hidden. Something that makes me wish I’d never joined in the first place.

It started in 2016 when the first classified images came back from Project Hermes. That’s what we called it internally—a black-budget mission that had been ongoing for decades, quietly probing Mars in ways the public could never know. We weren’t just looking for signs of microbial life. We were looking for something bigger, something… familiar.

And we found it.

The first anomalies were dismissed as natural formations—weathered rock, wind patterns, volcanic activity. But the more data we gathered, the harder it became to deny what we were seeing. Beneath the dust storms and red desolation, we found structures. Not just rocks shaped by chance but deliberate architecture. Crumbled towers, shattered domes, and sprawling grids buried beneath the Martian surface. It was ancient. Older than anything we’d ever imagined.

They brought me into the project when it was clear we weren’t dealing with random geology. My expertise in planetary systems made me an asset—or so they told me. In truth, I think they brought me in because I was naïve enough to still be excited about the discoveries. I didn’t understand the implications. Not then.

It wasn’t until we recovered the artifact that everything changed. They never let me see it in person; few of us did. It was an obelisk, black as void and covered in intricate carvings. Patterns that didn’t match anything in Earth’s archaeological record—or so we thought at first. The linguists worked on it for years before they made the breakthrough. The carvings weren’t alien. They were human.

That was the day we realized Mars wasn’t a dead planet we’d stumbled upon in the vastness of space. It was home.

Mars was our home.

The artifact told a story, though it wasn’t complete. The pieces we deciphered painted a grim picture. Mars had once been vibrant—oceans, forests, teeming with life. And then, humanity happened. The wars. The greed. The arrogance. It started small—territorial disputes, resources, borders. But the conflicts escalated until the entire planet was engulfed in fire. Nuclear war, ecological collapse… no one could say for sure how it ended. All we knew was that Mars had become uninhabitable. And yet, against impossible odds, some of them escaped. They found a way off the dying world and journeyed across the void to Earth.

We are the descendants of those survivors. Refugees from a ruined world.

I remember sitting in the lab when I first read the translated text. My chest felt tight, my breath shallow. I kept telling myself it couldn’t be true. It had to be some cosmic coincidence, a shared evolutionary path, something—anything—but the truth was inescapable. The genetic markers, the shared cultural motifs, the timeline. It all aligned.

We destroyed one planet already. And now we’re doing it again.

The higher-ups at NASA decided the public couldn’t know. “It would destabilize everything,” they said. They weren’t wrong. Religion, history, politics—it would all collapse under the weight of this revelation. But I can’t help thinking that’s what we need. A collapse. A reset. Because if we don’t change course, if we don’t stop the wars and the greed and the mindless consumption, Earth will follow Mars into oblivion. And this time, there won’t be another planet to flee to.

Do you understand what I’m saying? There’s nowhere else to go. The nearest habitable worlds are light-years away, and we don’t have the technology to get there. Earth is all we have. But we’re blind to the precipice we’re teetering on, just as we were before.

And sometimes, late at night, I wonder if it’s already too late. The signs are there—melting ice caps, mass extinctions, choking skies. It’s starting again. The same cycle. The same death march. And I don’t know how to stop it.

What terrifies me most isn’t that we’re repeating history. It’s the idea that we might not even be capable of change. Maybe this is who we are—creatures of destruction, destined to burn through one world after another until there’s nothing left.

I wish I could say I have hope, but I don’t. Not anymore. All I have is this overwhelming sense of dread, this crushing certainty that we’re hurtling toward our doom and no one cares enough to stop it.

Mars isn’t what we thought it was. And Earth won’t be, either, when we’re done with it.