[ WP ] An alien race starts to colonize Mars . They completely ignore humanity on Earth and just go about their business .

Part 1 of? 
 
 The most concerning thing to the worldship Iki is that she didn ’ t recognise the civilisation currently growing on Mars. Or much about it, in fact; it was more alien than usual. As far as it could be said meaningfully on the topic, it was pre-metric, and didn ’ t have any Archons or Mechanotesseractoid brains. 
 
 She pulsed at them in light, then radio, then neutrinos, then with a voxel wave. None of the signals were noticed or responded to. She did so again, shouting at them with every broadcaster, and there still wasn ’ t any acknowledgement at all. 
 
 She briefly intercepted Earth ’ s outbound radio transmitters, as well as the Israeli prototype neutrino flinger that she was absolutely sure they shouldn ’ t have, and sent them some information from Earth ’ s direction. Still, absolutely nothing. 
 
 Not wanting to bring Neptune ’ s eye to bear, she decided to abandon any harsher remote contact and brought down a physical probe. Specifically, two-hundred and fifty starfish nets. 
 
 The first landed, and surveyed the landscape. It was, from the surface, the classic red Mars, with the exception of the grid of cubes in the distance. Some were still growing from the ground, bottom-down; others were fully grown, and glowed warmly, as one would expect from an area of habitation or power generation. 
 
 The starfish net fluttered closer to the cubes. Externally, they were mainly featureless, with a few bumps and air filters around the shiny outside. It wandered around, looking for an entrance or exit, but there were none. 
 
 A second net approached, and networked with the first, but their combined power still didn ’ t notice anything out of the ordinary about the cubes. They called up to Iki, who also failed to notice anything exceptional about them. 
 
 After a few days of exploring, floating around the cubes, watching new ones be contructed then spring to life in the infrared spectrum all at once, progress in exploration had failed to be made. They were built in such a way that made them consistently secure to casual entry through the entire process; no visible gaps, even to the sensors of several nets working in concert, formed. 
 
 The nets received a second command from Iki, permitting destructive exploration. 
 
 One net immediately flung itself at the cube, and, tightly coiled, started burrowing through. The resultant reaction from the cube was exceptionally sudden, and comprised a multi-pronged memetic attack ( of the standard, soft, and hard varieties, over multiple frequencies ), followed by a conventional detonation restrained by force fields, followed by the space surrounding the net being partitioned and then voxelated, followed by something that Iki didn ’ t even recognise that caused storm activity on Neptune to flare up massively. 
 
 Correction: the civilisation was most certainly post-metric, and destructive exploration was no longer taking place. Plenty of data was gathered there, though not all of it made a whole lot of sense. 

