First time writing here, hope you like it.
When humanity built the first city on Mars, everyone expected the red planet to feel empty.
They were wrong.
At night, Mars was louder than Earth had ever been. The settlement hummed with generators, ventilation systems, mining machines, and the constant whisper of air moving through metal corridors. Beyond the glass, the desert stretched endlessly beneath a black sky filled with stars.
Marla loved those stars. Every night after her shift at the communications station, she climbed to the observation deck and watched them. One star was always brighter than the others. She called it Home.
She had been twelve when Earth disappeared from the sky—not physically, but from their lives. A communications accident had cut the colony off from every signal. Earth was still there, orbiting the distant Sun, but for seventeen years no message had arrived. No voices. No music. No news. Nothing.
Then, on an ordinary Tuesday, Marla's console began to blink.
INCOMING SIGNAL.
She froze.
The message contained only three words: WE SEE YOU.
Marla stared at the screen, hardly breathing.
A second message appeared almost immediately: DO NOT ANSWER.
Her heart began to race. She called the station commander, but before anyone arrived, the console displayed a final transmission—a photograph. It showed Mars from space, the colony visible as a tiny cluster of lights against the endless darkness. But above it was something enormous and impossibly close: a ship.
Mara stepped backward. They hadn't detected it because it wasn't approaching Mars. It was already there. Outside the observation window, one of the stars disappeared. Then another. The ship was blocking the sky. Across the colony, alarms began to scream as emergency lights flashed through the corridors.
Marla looked toward the place where she had always imagined Earth to be. For seventeen years, she had believed that humanity was alone. Now she understood the truth. They had never been alone. They had simply been unheard.
The colony lights went out one by one. Marla stood in the darkness, watching the enormous ship descend through the thin Martian atmosphere. Then her console came alive one last time.
This time, the message wasn't in English. It wasn't in any human language. Yet somehow, she understood it.
WE HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR YOU TO LOOK UP.
Marla smiled nervously and looked through the window at the stars. For the first time in her life, she wasn't looking for home. She was looking for what came next.