They did not look like anything we imagined. Microscopic bacteria with thick armored shells living deep in the Martian wasteland.
Attempts to catch one were futile till we brought in the big guns who extracted them all in one fell swoop.
It was clear that they were intelligent, trying countless methods to escape the sealed glass container we installed to study them. But of course, they failed.
Our instruments detected indecipherable sounds emitting from them. We recorded and played it for the Commander.
“Mayday! Mayday! We have been captured by gargantuan hostile aliens on Mars Base. Houston, do you copy?”
Christina Sng is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A COLLECTION OF NIGHTMARES. Her fiction has appeared in Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Grievous Angel, New Myths, and Space & Time.
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