Journal Entry 1: The Discovery
Year: 2546
Date: Nov 27, Sunday
Location: Orbital Facility 5
Two decades into the century, the United Solar System Coalition began research on wormhole technology, planning to use it to explore and colonize Proxima Centauri B. Developing something as ground-breaking as portals was bound to mess with the balance of power, so most of it happened in secret installations like the one I am in, with military contractors in charge of much of it during the war. They have been under civilian administration for a while now, but I am forbidden from revealing much about it beyond the name, unfortunately. They have not even officially acknowledged this facility’s existence, so I would not be surprised if I vanished both in the portal and the records. I have elected to put down my thoughts now while I still can.
Even after the war, the Centauri Project did not go as well as planned. Despite our expectations, Proxima B was dead. Fossils of coral-like organisms and tentative tracts appear about a hundred million years ago across the planet, then abruptly vanish. What happened was a mystery, but the remains of simple aliens were no more exciting than the jellies we had found on Enceladus a century prior. Terraforming carried on with mixed success.
Around three years ago, one of the orbital observatories discovered something far stranger, an unexpected gravitational signature closer to Proxima. The object was inconsistent with any asteroid or planet known, with subsequent imaging betraying its clear artificial origin. Evidence of alien civilizations was not new - Ceres deciphered the Klaas Signal in 2399 - but this one was literally in our galactic backyard. Fearing the worst, the Centauri Project was temporarily suspended while the USSC moved military vessels into the system under the guise of a training exercise. Months went by, but the worst never came. A rogue technician even sent a message to the station, but was met by the same radio silence. As fears abided, the USSC set up a mission to investigate. The first crews sent never returned, greeted by what appeared to be a self-defense system. It took two months until someone would set foot on the station.
As remote imaging would reveal, the station consisted of six massive domes surrounding a series of tubes and rings, which the surveyors would soon come to call the ‘decks’. At the very center of the station was a vaguely cylindrical structure, terminating at one side with a cap, shaped vaguely like a mushroom. The focus of the initial expeditions were to scour the lightless decks, and that they did. Most everywhere was completely dead. Some bleached, some scorched, some lacking air entirely. But as the explorers ascended the hatches and journeyed through vents, stony dots appeared on the walls, and for the first time in the expedition, the explorers realized the alien space station may have outlived its constructors. Dots gave way to patches, and patches gave way to growths. Shapes danced in the shadows, and clicks echoed through the dark.
Exploration of Dome 1 started in June 2543, and ended in immense disappointment. They probably expected to find a thriving, or at least, living, civilization, but the whole dome was vacant. The explorers who walked out the ‘ziggurat-like structure’ connecting the dome to the decks saw nothing but dunes of stone choked by sulfurous fumes. They even attempted to date the whole thing, and found the rock was around 380 million years old. To think we were still fish when whatever precursors built this construct!
The next dome was even stranger. Still no civilization, but a lot of alien fauna. Biotic cylinders rolled through endless mudflats, while gaseous floaters commanded sparks through their tendrils. The whole land was coated by an impenetrable mist and a grave storm wailed every day at the exact same time. Some explorers climbed the crags and mountains, and found screeching groves surrounded by gelatinous ‘trees’, hundreds of meters tall. An aerial drone allegedly encountered what seemed to be a zeppelin before it was lit on fire and crashed.
But that’s not the weird thing, the weird thing is that they may not be aliens at all. I have not been briefed on all the details yet, but apparently they ran some genetic tests on some of the fauna, and found our very own biochemistry. Indeed, these esoteric forms in Dome 2 seemed to have been an outlier. The next accessible dome, Dome 4 (Dome 3 was apparently ‘vacuum sealed’, whatever that means), had biota almost recognizable. The armored, neckless megafauna there bore a passing resemblance to placoderms, bony-skinned fish in Earth's deep past, while the little bugs that crawled among the undergrowth were unmistakably arthropods.
If this were all true, that would make them descendants of Devonian life. The chronology does line up; placoderms were completely extinct by the end of the Devonian, and 380 million years is a long time for animals to diversify past identification. There are not any Devonian fossils on Ceres or wherever the USSC is planning this whole thing from, so they had to call in experts from their allied states on Earth. Luckily, I have studied the Hunsrück Slate - one of the best-preserved Lagerstätte of this time period - quite extensively, so I was offered to join the programme. Needless to say, Hunsrück is Lower Devonian, while the station is apparently Upper Devonian, but people in charge of the program did not seem to care that much, or even to know the difference. Someone nicknamed the station ‘Rhynia’, after the Rhynie chert in the Lower Devonian, which unfortunately stuck.
I am leaving tomorrow for the Proxima Centauri system. I will probably spend a few days in our base camp with my future team before starting to explore the station. I do not have too much of an idea of what I will be doing up there yet, but it definitely will have something to do with studying the local wildlife. I heard rumors about leeches and stylophorans being among the aliens, although I doubt that the latter could have really done that well.
I will try to write again from the base camp, if everything goes as planned.
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