[ WP ] We finally get men on Mars and they discover an old Soviet flag placed down decades ago . The Soviets won the space race but for whatever horrifying reason did n't say anything .

When she was only fourteen, Anastacia found an old computer, with a physical screen that you had to touch and an actual plastic power button, at a garage sale. Her aide had immediately dismissed it as outdated rubbish, and besides, what did she need it for when she had an AI Assistant right there in her prefrontal cortex? She bought it anyway, and spent endless hours fiddling with the thing. The network it ran on was no longer around, or it could n't find a connection to it through the over-populated concrete tunnels above her head. Either way, there was n't much it could do. What it did do, however, was spark a lifelong interest in out-of-date technology. 
 
 That interest had lead her, twelve years later, to a cold dank sub-basement of the Kremlin. Patriarchs ran the city only a few floors above her head, nearer to the surface, but for now, she was alone in one of the oldest archives. It had been built during a transitional era, when paper was still the primary method of record-keeping, but digital media was beginning to come into its own. The place was a mess, owing to multiple attempts by a person or persons unknown ( but probably affiliated with the mafia ) to reconcile the two storage formats. It had n't worked. 
 
 Anastacia wormed her way through reams of half-rotted papers, to her goal. She ’ d found an old machine down here. It was too big to carry home, so she ’ d spent her weekend evenings over the last few months sneaking into the Kremlin, just to poke around with an old radio-printer-calculator thing covered in vacuum tubes and see what it would do. Last week she ’ d gotten it working. Mostly. It clacked away industriously, outputting the same message over and over again. 
 
 Tonight, she had the final ingredient: A roll of printer paper. It had taken three days of food tickets to afford, but she was used to hunger. She sat down cross legged in front of the beast, and threaded the paper ( somewhat squashed from time in her satchel ) onto the machine ’ s spindle. 
 
 For a moment, everything was silent, as if the room was holding its breath along with her. Then, from deep within the machine, a little clapper played a noise. She could see in her mind's eye exactly which clapper. It had been a pain in the ass to replace. Luckily she had small hands. 
 
 The timbre of the mechanical sounds changed when the paper hit the actual printing mechanism. From clack-clack-clickity, to vrmp-vrmp-vrmple. Slowly, centimeter-by-centimeter, the message formed: 
 
 
 The experiment has failed. Yeltsin is gone. He just walked out of the airlock without a suit. None of the others know why, and he was the only one who understood the project. I fear what may follow if our attempts to repair the Psoglav fail. I am setting this message to loop indefinitely. If it is still going one month from now, on the date of the fourteenth of august nineteen-eighty-eight, assume all is lost and go to a quarantine footing for the indefinite future. Broadcast will repeat in thirty seconds. 

