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It's 2100 and as Elon Musk predicted, roughly one million people now live on Mars. After a rogue AI eradicated all human life on Earth in 2070, a message is finally sent to the colony inviting humanity to return to its home planet. Cautious but curious, you alone volunteer for the mission. by Fauxbrother

I pointed my smart stick down the unlit hallway, scanning for life. Another human being would be great at this point. I was alone willing to venture down the private corridors of an early space adopter, Elon Musk, in order to find the fuel source we needed to get off this useless rock. As I went deeper, the hipster designed drinking cups and overly futuristic hover units put me in a state of retro suicide. I want to die, but above all, I wanted it to all die with me.

In the desktop computer was a file containing the means of manufacturing propellant with the carbon dioxide and nitrogen in the Martian atmosphere. We hauled out the entire computer, and every file present that belonged to Elon. In his papers was a letter to Neil DeGrasse Tyson describing a course of action for dealing with rogue AI that could prove very useful on the journey back to AI-infested Earth.

Crawling on the technology spires of self healing plastic, you reach heights in low gravity impossible on your home planet Saturn. You skid and slide along the windows to martian shops, wavy in form, barely there in some places. It all merges in and out of reality, making use of other universes to hide societies inside coded cells in space and time. And it seemed to be ever-expanding, reaching far out to Phobos, Mars' moon.

At Phobos, the human base watches it all in fright. They've known about the Mars gluttony since the seventies. They're just hiding its spread in the solar system from the main public. And that would last for ever too, if it weren't for the ever-expanding size of all the solar cells at once.

It seemed there really was no reason to continue the mission without help.

Writing by jrdnjones