Bronze Soldier, I hope this message finds you well.

You have been selected for an experimental military training on Mars in the year 3033. You will be here for a long time and go through many challenges that your civilian earth counterparts have not been chosen for, but you must remain certain in your capabilities. Here is where you will be training as part of our Active Space Force 1st Generation Soldier; Mission Mars. (ASF 1GS) Your job will be a Botanical Supply Specialist.

You will undergo ASF G1S MARS TRAINING for 6 Earth Months. 1st month will be acclimating to your new environment without genetic enhancements.

Your next 2 months will be acclemation with genetic enhancements.

Your last 3 months will consist of battle drills and MARS TERRAIN TRAINING.

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There will be rules to your living areas and schedules for your enlistment. The things we have found here were found through trial and error and are determined to either help or harm earth itself. Do not make your fallen soldiers sacrifices be in vain by disobeying direct orders. This list is your only saving grace for the things that lie here have proven to be unforgiving.

1ST MONTH:

BASIC RULES

- Do NOT stare into the Mars darkness for too long. It calls for the naive and vulnerable, of which you happen to be for now.

- Stay inside any method of transport unless escorted elsewhere by G1 personnel.

- Make no loud sounds. Everyone here will communicate through sign language or writing.

(Before when we first landed, we communicated through speech and we learned that what lies in the dark listens, learns and lures. We've lost 6 G1 Soldiers due to voice replications and unknown calls in different directions. Do not make the same mistake.)

0000: Bedchecks and Sleep will be had within the Landing Zones and underneath Mars Rock in soundproof bunkers. Here is the only place where speech is unrecognizable from outside. You will be silent elsewhere.

0200: Accountibility.

0600: Survalence checks will be conducted every 4-6 hours for safety. You will do this once you reach your last 3 months. For now, remain sleep.

0900: Hygiene will be conducted until Breakfast in the above land zones. The showers lie below the barracks and the water will cut off after 15 Minutes. This will happen 3 times and there are 10 showers.

1000: Breakfast will be in the Command Hall at the center of the overall base. Low whispers are safe enough but talking is still not recommended.

1200: Survalence Checks and PT will be conducted in the gym below the command hall in shifts and rotations in intervals of 15 minutes for 1 hour. Afterwards is Hygiene again until 1300.

1300: Mars Acclemation and Planetary Adjustment. The data we collect from this will be put in your bio-packet and sent back to earth.

1600: Sterilization and Lunch back in the command hall.

1800: Survalence Checks, Classes and Mission Planning until 2200.

2200: Hygiene and freetime.

You will receive more guidance 1 week before your next 2 months. Follow these rules and stay out of trouble.

Goodluck,

CPT Mars.

Mission briefing for the Oceanic Wastes:

Pillars Erected: 125/100

Covers everything from the center to the beyond, farthest around 400,000km into the beyond

Max Range: The Local Group, only covers oceanic planets

Portfolio:

- Frozen Wastes (see for rundown on the wastes)

- Volcanic Wastes

- Oceanic Wastes

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Well done. Now, you'll be exploring the sunken wastes. They're like swamps on earth. This will be a little more dangerous from the get-go. Ask Angstrom to teleport you back if you must. We need a minimum of 50 flagged spots.

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Rules for the inner circle:

1. Enter through the Everglades. Any other swamp will leave you disappointed.

2. There will always be a bit more land than water.

3. There will be giant (around skyscraper-level) bugs crawling around this moist, smelly hellscape. Just take a shower before you come here, stay far, and that fly won't get revenge on you for its swatted brother. These bugs rely off pheromones and their compound eye can't see you.

4. Stay away from the water. While it doesn't have some terrifying creature with a million glutes or something, it's filled with the waste of this land. You'll get a terrible sickness if you do.

5. Don't eat anything in these wastes. They're not poisonous but they do rely on the water in these wastes.

6. Rip out a bug's compound eye and put it over your head like a hat. You'll need it for the next ring.

Overall, this area is dangerous unlike other inner circles and you will have to restrict yourself a bit to survive.

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Rules for the middle ring:

1. The vegetation will be so dense that it creates a shroud of pitch darkness. We also believe some supernatural force might be at play here. Anything's possible in these wastes. The bug's eye will help you see.

2. You will see artifacts. I'm gonna tell you this in advance -- these are from the Waste Empire. They're a 4D travelling race stuck in the wastes who want to purify the wastes. Noble, right? Except they'll subjugate any sapient being and implant technology into them to turn them into eternally tortured robots filing out their mission. They'll outright KILL the non-sapient beings. They're not an issue here.

3. You will see mud. Water will be replaced with just mud. There is an infinite ocean from now on below this swamp. Avoid the mud, as it seems to suck anything into it.

4. You'll see the Empire's corpse cyborgs killing things here. If you see one, put them out of their misery. They'll try to subjugate you and take you to their emperor if they sense you.

5. Avoid the animals. Along with bugs, there are even bigger (about mountain-level) frogs who will not hesitate to eat bugs. Don't get caught in the crossfire of corpse cyborgs, giant bugs, and even bigger frogs.

Overall, this area is extremely dangerous. Don't try anything fancy, you are bacteria here along with the corpse cyborgs.

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Rules for the outer ring:

1. Take off your bug eye hat, most vegetation has died due to the mass of mildly acidic mud here. It smells terrible here, so we have given you a drink that disables your olfactory sense.

2. If you see the ground warping, look out for a turtle. It's twice the size of a frog. It moves very slowly due to its slow speed and size, so it's best to move out of its way.

3. If you see someone with a mustache, stop moving. People with mustaches belong to the Waste Empire. They also can't see nonmoving things.

4. Your next bet is to keep your eyes off them if you have to move. If you get far enough, you're safe.

Overall, this area is very very dangerous and is your first encounter with the crazed empire of these wastes.

---

Rules for the beyond:

1. The beyond is marked with a wall. Even the Waste Empire doesn't want to touch it. Don't go into it. It has bubbles if you go far enough that can rupture eardrums and destroy cities. The mud is ever-churning and the mud looks like it sinks into itself. Go there if you have a deathwish.

This area is extremely dangerous, and if the Waste Empire doesn't wanna subjugate it, you shouldn't either.

---

It's okay if you get around 30/50 of the buoys placed, but it has to be above half.

The City of Damokles

I am going out for a walk with my dog, for a quick cigarette, trying not to look up. 

"The City of Damokles", as people know it, lives in constant dread. Those literal Swords hanging above us, visible on the cloudy sky. Like fangs from god.

There are three unwritten rules: don't look up, don't go under one, and don’t talk about them.

They are fixed to the sky as if nailed there, yet sometimes they seem to glide, moving silently. You would expect them to make some grand, heavy noise... but no. Although it is hard to be sure, nobody is stupid enough to stare for long.

The worst part? Most people act as if they are not there. Nobody talks about it. As the act of acknowledging them would bring Doom to you. Impending “Doom” and “Judgement” are how most people think of it.

I would like to believe this city is news worldwide, but I am quite sure nobody cares… maybe they did initially, but people get bored fast. And, let’s be honest: it is almost impossible to get people to talk out-loud about those things, or even consider taking a picture. 
How would anybody from outside Damokles know?

Everybody is terrified, but what can you do about it? Life goes on while we wait for our Judgment.

Dog Walk

The thing is: I have to walk my dog, Figa, because otherwise she will shit on the carpet again. Not her fault. I need a cigarette anyway. 

It is winter outside, maybe it always is. It is getting dark already, and the unease rises. The clouds block the night sky, so those Swords become invisible, on top of silent. I don’t know if the silhouette of the sky monoliths covering the stars would be better…

In the almost total silence of dusk, snow crunches loudly under our feet.
A car radiator clicks as it cools down.
The smoke of the cigarette mixes with the steam of my breath. A pleasant mix of hot and cold.

Everybody has a safe path, where they haven't seen a looming shadow from above. Figa has hers… a zig-zag towards her favorite tree, behind our building lot, through a rusty chain-fence. She seems happier than most, not worried about her impending Judgment. Maybe dogs don’t get judged.

As a teen, it felt exhilarating to go out after midnight, deep in winter, challenging my friends to look up, defying… but we never actually did look up. Then it turned into constant dread, and now I am just tired of it.
Sometimes I felt that it would be better if those things finally fell.
I was wrong.

The First Event

The deafening siren woke me up at the crack of dawn. 
Figa was barking like crazy, terrified.
As the adrenaline of the interrupted sleep faded a little, I remembered feeling like a bomb and earthquake had simultaneously happened during my sleep. 
I don’t dream at night, but I remember the feel of it.

On the other side of the city, the Block 17 of the Sunshine Estate was no more. The building has been flattened, with a big –huge– Sword standing in its place. It looked like a cross, a 30-metre-high tombstone, its blade buried perhaps seventy meters underground.

There were attempts at rescue, but nobody would get near the object. 
No survivors were found.

What came right after that were the justifications. Mostly from old folks, the ones raised in zealot fear. The people living there had deserved it, apparently. 
Somebody was cooking meth, somebody else was cheating their wife, there was a family of illegal refugees squatting an abandoned apartment.
Nevermind that a total of 230 people lived there. 80 of those were kids. It was somehow justified. 
Nobody acknowledged the Sword itself, only the Judgement.

Eventually, the families and friends of the dead started to get pressured. Some pushed back, but most tried to move out of the city.
That’s when we learned that we have been quarantined.

Trapped

Apparently, the world knew about us, they just didn't want anything to do with it. 

Somebody told me that the international consensus was that “we were being judged, us alone, and that letting us escape the Judgement would propagate it to the world”. So, a blockade was placed at 20 kilometers from the city border. Being captured before the blockade meant jail, crossing it meant a summary execution. Probably an exaggeration.

For people like me, not much changed. My job at the warehouse stayed the same. We were still getting supplies from outside the city. The supplies themselves were only delivered mid-way up to the blockade. A second truck system needed to ship them from the blockade into the city. Pipelines and electric lines were still connected. Things were more expensive than before, but they are always getting more expensive, that’s a constant in life.

I read somewhere that there were discussions to cut us completely out. The experts discussed back-and-forth if assisting us was intervening with the Judgement. 
The verdict is still out.

Time I

It is remarkable how easy it is to fall back into routine, how a new level of dread can become just another part of your day. It only took me a few days after the first Event to walk my dog, and after a Month, life was mostly the same as before.

But also, it is so easy to blackout parts of your world. It took me 8 months to see the Sword for the first time. Even when my window looked directly at it, I didn’t remember seeing it before. Ever. Funny how the brain works.

From afar, the Sword was unremarkable, it could have been made of the same concrete as the building itself. A brutalist sculpture, massive and unrefined.
It was very calm around it. No movement, no birds. Just a giant letter T, surrounded by buildings.
I didn’t look at it for long.

The Anniversary

As we got close to the 1-year anniversary of the first Event – the euphemism used to talk of Block 17 being flattened by a giant Sword that fell from the sky – people were getting ready for it to happen again. 

Nobody discussed it out loud of course, but you could feel the tension, people trying their best to uphold an obscure righteousness that would save them from Judgement. The churches were brim-full, people were aggressively kind to each other, but also on the edge of snapping. 

That last week before the Anniversary, the streets were filled with strained smiles. It was scary for me, but even more for Figa. I could not go out anymore. I called sick to work, they accepted it without discussion.

But when the Anniversary date came, nothing happened. 
Then nothing happened again, and again. For 7 years.

Time II

As years passed by, the prelude to the Anniversaries got heavy with anticipation, and then followed by a week of silence. People were particularly quiet after. It was not relief, but uncertainty. 

But also, each new Anniversary was less intense than the one before. With the absurd hope that maybe it would never happen again, that at some point we would forget.

Up Close

One fall evening, our walk took longer. Figa was getting old by then, but she was still happy for any extra time out of the apartment. 

I don’t know why, but we ended up at Block 17. 
I guess I finally needed to see it from up close.

It wasn’t late, but the surroundings were deserted.
The place was more or less how it had been the day after the Event. A flattened building with a Giant Sword through it. I had expected the impact to cave down the surroundings, but it was as if the Sword had pierced the ground without friction. 
No crater, no shattered pavement, but lots of debris everywhere.

It was not easy to look at the Sword itself, even if it was right in front of me.

On a corner, there were the remains of a memorial: an uniform mass of rotten flowers, wet handwritten notes and old photographs.

The place was starting to get fresh layers of graffiti, and there were some empty bottles and cigarette packets littered around. 
Nature was healing. 

The Judgement

It was not an Anniversary when the second Sword fell, just a random day (I think it was Wednesday), the one after fell 2 days later.

And, once they started falling, they never stopped. Every few days, a new “Event”. 
Flattening a complex building, a hospital, a random empty parking lot. 
From afar, now the city looked like a brutalist graveyard, huge blocks of cement, with monumental crosses sprinkled around.

As it got harder to justify why certain buildings had been judged, fanaticism increased. People started looking at older, more obscure religions, better suited for ineffable gods. Then started fighting about which was the right one. 
I am starting to think that the Swords don't care.

I heard there are some ONG trying to help us. They send supplies, and are pushing for the government to evacuate us. Others have tried to organize and cross the blockade illegally, multiple times.
Neither is gonna work. 
After the second Sword fell, the government got under a lot of international pressure to not let anybody out. Breaching containment might cause the whole country to get nuked.

Personally, more than the dread, I hate those sirens. That rising whaling once a Sword falls, the same used before air strikes. They usually sound at sunrise, and I haven’t gotten a proper night of rest for who knows how long. 
Now you go to bed not knowing if you will wake up. 
And if you wake up, it will be by that damn siren.

I think tonight I will go for a walk with my dog, and enjoy the night sky.
I haven’t looked up in a while. Figa does not mind.

 I got all the cartons and packages up to my floor after an hour. I was very tired after climbing up to the seventh floor back and forth carrying my stuff. The elevator in the building I had just shifted to was not working, some technical error said the security guard. 

I recently shifted to this new apartment for a new job I had found in the city. I was looking forward to this day for a long time but this broken lift ruined it all for me on the first day itself. 

Today was my night shift at the hospital so around 8 pm I got ready, locked my apartment and set out for work. Out of habit I pressed the elevator button , to my surprise it was working. As I entered the elevator there was a sudden drop in temperature in there, maybe due to the big fan inside it making so much noise. Inside the elevator a poster caught my glance. It was white paper with 3 rules written on it 

1. Do not look for the lion 

2. Help no one but yourself 

3. Always press button for your own floor

I was running late so I didn't think much of it, probably some kids put it there. The Elevator stopped at ground floor , I got out and headed to work. 

Next morning I returned from work all tired and slept the whole day, it was my weekly day off. I didn't cook dinner that day and decided to eat outside. It was 11:30 at night , maybe something was still open I thought. I went to the elevator and pressed the button. After a couple of minutes the door opened and I entered the elevator. Quite some time had passed and still I hadn't reached the ground floor. Then I could hear a man's scream , it felt like a distant scream coming from somewhere below me. The voice said "Hey.....is anyone in the elevator? Please help me I'm stuck in the basement !! Anyone there ?"

"Basement?" I thought. I hadn't seen any staircase or anything on the ground floor leading to the basement but when I looked at the elevator buttons there was a button for basement. I had never seen it before but there it was. I pressed that button. The elevator doors opened. 

It was completely dark in there , I couldn't see a thing clearly. I could see walls covered in mud , rusted metal sheets and rods there.  I walked a little and saw an opening in the ground , there was light coming from it. I stood over it and glanced down , there were metal bars along the wall that I climbed down. I tried calling for that man but there was no answer. 

As I got down I saw leaking pipes , rusted metal rods and pipes on the floor. Across this I could see a large metal cage like structure with a big door. I went towards it to inspect it, it was open. I stood in front of the gate. On it was another sign with text "Lion's Den : Authorised personnel entry only". I tried to peek inside it , I couldn't see anything. I heard the scream again from beyond the cage. "Please help me!". I hesitated at first but the thought of someone trapped inside compelled me to enter. As I entered it felt like I was inside a real cave. I stepped on something and heard a cracking sound and I froze. Slowly, I looked down. It was a bone. I looked around and

saw a human skull lying a few feet away. My heart skipped a beat, I couldn't feel my legs for a moment.

 Something moved in the darkness. I stopped breathing and listened. Then came a deep, low growl coming from the darkness. My heart was pounding in my chest. I was drenched in sweat, my hands were trembling, and I could barely catch my breath. Panic took over as I realized I had to get out of there. I turned around and ran back as fast as I could, barely looking behind me. When I reached the gate I locked it from the outside and ran towards that vertical passage with metal bars.

As I was climbing I heard that man's scream again from behind me. He was screaming for help "Hey don't leave me here alone !! Come back and open the door!! A lion dwells around here ! Save me please!". At that moment I just wanted to reach the elevator. I climbed as fast as I could and finally reached the elevator door. I pressed the button as hard as I could. 

The doors opened , I entered inside and pressed the button for my floor, the seventh floor. I glanced at the paper with rules for a second. I was still breathing heavily. The doors opened and it was not my floor it was the basement. I pressed the button again for seventh floor. After a few seconds , doors opened again and it was the basement again. I was in disbelief, I couldn't believe my eyes. My vision was getting blurry. This time I pressed all the buttons of the elevator and sat down on the floor. I was feeling weak and couldn't stand. It started to get dark in front of my eyes as the elevator climbed up. I could barely see or hear. I heard the chime of the elevator but it sounded different this time. It was like the sound of the heart monitor. "Beep" "Beep".

The darkness closed in.

Next thing I knew, I was lying on a hospital bed. Apparently I was found passed out in the elevator by one of the residents of that building. He called the ambulance and got me admitted in the hospital. It was nothing serious, I was discharged after a few hours in the evening. I thanked the neighbor who found me. Next day I called the movers and moved to a new apartment. I told the neighbours I got a better paying job on the opposite end of the town. I never inquired about the elevator, the lion or the man stuck in the basement. I can't even tell if it was actually a man.

Good job, Terra! You're a master on riding a bike with training wheels! Now let's see if you can ride a bike WITHOUT training wheels! Now, Daddy and Mommy found a very hot but very big spot that's nice and flat! You can ride your bike there!

1. Always wear a helmet. Keep it tight and make it form a 'V' shape around your ears!

2. Always hold your handlebars. You're gonna fall if you don't hold them!

3. Don't touch my special documents. They're for grown-ups only! Daddy needs them for his explorer job.

4. If you see grandpa, run to me and I'll take you home. He's a very very scary man! He'll do very bad stuff to you if you talk to or touch him.

5. Don't take off your shoes. The ground is really really hot!

6. Don't go too far from Mommy and Daddy. Bad things like to eat kids like you in the distances.

And that's all! Have fun with your new bike!