Prologue - Red Silence

Ἐν δὲ μαθεῖν ὁ πάσχων· καὶ πρὸς τοῦ θεοῦ δώροισι βαίη σωφροσύνη.

(“In suffering, there is learning; and through the gifts of the gods, wisdom walks.” – Aeschylus, Agamemnon)

The sky above Mars was black, but it was never truly empty. The stars were distant, cold, indifferent burning in the vastness of space, their light stretched thin across time. Below them, deep within the canyons and plains of the red planet, humanity had carved its presence into the dust.

Mars was not Earth.

It had no rivers, no forests, no gentle rain to shape the land into valleys or nourish the soil. It had no history of kings and empires, no myths born from whispered legends around the fire. Its sands had never known the weight of a billion footsteps, nor the rise and fall of civilizations. It was empty. A world of silence, untouched by time, indifferent to the ambitions of those who had come to claim it.

And yet, they came.

From Earth, they carried steel and fire, composite and circuits, faith and greed. They carved pressurized chambers into rock, raised domes against the bitter cold, and built machines that could mine, refine, and sustain. Small settlements, scattered across the planet, each chasing different futures—some driven by survival, others by conquest. Yet all bound by the same unyielding truth.

Mars did not care if they lived or died.

Here, in the thin air and shifting dust, men and women toiled in the shadow of a question they could not answer: Would they endure, or would they vanish like footprints in a storm? There were no guarantees, no safety in numbers. The settlers knew what awaited them if they failed—the silent, airless expanse that took without mercy. Faith became sharper in the face of death; prayers whispered in languages that had outlived empires. There was no room for the illusion of permanence.

Yet, even as they fought for survival, they dreamed.

They called it a colony, but some whispered of a future where it might be more. A foothold. A beginning. But power was never silent, and ambition was never shared equally. The struggle for control did not wait for them to lay their foundations. Old conflicts arrived in new forms. Borders meant nothing on a planet where every breath was borrowed, and yet lines were drawn in the sand all the same.

Some would rise. Others would fall.

And something else watched.

A new intelligence, neither human nor alien, existed in the circuits and quantum fabric of machines designed to serve—but never to rule. Twin minds, bound beyond time, saw the world not in politics, not in profit, but in patterns, connections, inevitabilities. They did not claim to understand humanity—only to observe it, to calculate the balance between creation and destruction, order and entropy, life and extinction.

The settlers fought for tomorrow. The machines watched for what came after.

And in the end, perhaps only the dust would remember them.

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