[ WP ] Humans are colonizing Mars after discovering extinct life , despite not knowing how the life had died off . There is one man , though who thinks he knows what , or who , ended life on Mars the first time .

I still remember the day I landed on Mars, the sand was just as red, and the air was just as rustic as I could have ever imagined, and yet the planet still felt just as alien as any unknown ball of rock in the vast expanse of space. No rudimentary education could have prepared me or the others on board the research ship U.R.S Kaley when we saw the remnants of ancient life. Life that might as well have been intelligent, maybe even star faring. What we saw however was closer to the small dust particles left behind after a large space is vacated then say a shining martian utopia. The leader of the research team, a man by the name of Jonathan Becker sought to find the secret of this footnote of a civilization, knowing that such a secret would be quite valuable. The expedition as such hunkered down and began to set up all of the equipment needed for underground exploration, yet none of the equipment in the whole damn universe could save us from the horrors we saw in the deepest recesses of the Martian underground. What we, what I, saw was engravings all throughout the tunnels leading up to a colossal chamber filled with rotting corpses preserved by the humid conditions of the chamber they had expired within. At the center was a pedestal of sorts and inside it was a slithering mass, as Becker approched it, despite the crews urgent warnings, he began to seize up and collapsed and as soon as he had fallen our ears were assualted by a horrific noise. Had I not ran back to the surface along with two other crew members I surely would have died right then and there. 
 
 It was only when we returned to Earth that we realized what we had brought along from that dreaded chamber and how evasive it was to the microbial sensors designed to prevent such an infection. That thing that killed the martians, had the same adverse affect on us, human beings who by intuition happened to stumble upon it and for a lack of a better term feed it. That all brings us back to now, my colleagues are either all dead or have committed suicide, and very soon I may do the same but before I do I must let you know, that mass beneath mars that so easily overwhemled us and the martians before us will do the same with earth and if it may be lucky I will be it's herald. 
 
 As the man named Langston began to convulse the federal agent walked out of the sterile room and proceeded to label the man as nothing but a lunatic, broken down by mental illness and nothing more. The agent looking through the clear glass could see that the man on the other side was close to death and with that the agent dozed off seeing no reason to help such a sick and insane man. The agents last thoughts were of home and his wife's warm embrace, as the sounds described by Langston engulfed him and no sooner did a red mass erupt from the hollow body of a man once named Langston. 
 
 Around the world news broke out of an outbreak on Mars with a 100 % mortality rate, symptoms are almost nonexistant until the very end, when the infected would collapse and a mass would emerge from the husk of a body. Mass hysteria ensued and the Martian colonists were abandoned, and just like that all those thousands of years of progress up to the colonization of Mars vanished. Humanity's legacy snuffed out Iike a burned out candle.
