25 Feb The Winds of Mars are Howling

Approximately 334 days ago according to the Martian Calendar, NASA began to use the *Perseverance* Rover for research of the Red Planet. Thanks to the Rover, we have learned more about our distant neighbor this year than ever before. 

But not all of it is for the betterment of mankind. 

Two microphones aboard the Rover have been recording the winds of the red planet for quite some time, trying to determine the acoustic differences between our world and Mars. 

Mars has an unusual atmosphere compared to this planet, with very different temperature, density, and chemistry. These differences have three main effects on the sound you’d hear:

**The Speed of Sound**

Sounds emitted in the cold Martian atmosphere take slightly longer to get to your ear. With an average surface temperature around -81 F ( or -63 C), Mars has a lower speed of sound, around 540 mph (~240 meters per second), compared to about 760 mph (~340 meters per second) on Earth. 

You probably wouldn’t notice up close, but over longer distances you definitely would. Imagine trying to hear the roar of a fire, only to realize that the house you were getting to had already burned down. 

**The Volume of the Sound**

The level you hear will also be automatically lower on Mars. The Martian atmosphere is about 100 times less dense than on Earth — that is, there’s just a lot less of it. That affects how sound waves travel from the source to the detector, resulting in a softer signal. On Mars you’d have to be much closer to the source of a sound to hear it at the same volume as you would on Earth. 

**The Quality of the Sound**

The atmosphere of Mars, which is made up of 96 percent carbon dioxide, absorbs a lot of higher-pitched sounds, so only lower-pitched sounds travel long distances. This effect is known as attenuation — a weakening of the signal at certain frequencies — and it would be more noticeable the farther you were from the source.

Put together, these three impacts change how you or anything would sound in the atmosphere of Mars. 

Imagine then, the surprise felt when it was recorded only a week ago; what sounded like screaming. 

I was at my station, reviewing the audio and barely drifting off to the ambience that was carrying through the microphones when this extremely high pitched shriek pierced the airwaves. 

Immediately I fumbled with my gear, snatching the headphones off as I felt my heart beat faster than it ever had before. 

I took a moment to recompose, and then placed the headphones back on to listen. The noise was gone, but it did feel like there were reverberations from it everywhere in the audio. There was this low thrill that filled the void from the shriek. 

Hesitantly I rewound the audio, turning the volume to a lower frequency so it wouldn’t hurt my ears. Ordinarily to get proper analysis we are told to not do this, but the situation was unique and I figured that it would be easier to handle the screams if they didn’t terrify me. 

What I heard disturbed me beyond what mere words can describe. 

The best way to offer an explanation would be to provide you with an anecdote from my childhood. 

I had a dog named Brutus when I was little, a large Labrador retriever that could hold his ground against the toughest predators out there. One time I swear I saw him run off a bear. This dog was loyal, he would always go with us hunting and making sure that we were protected. It was like he had eyes in the back of his head. 

One particular hunt, my brother and I decided to go out when it was storming and try to find a few deer that enjoyed grazing after a soft rain. Yet the storm hadn’t quite passed us yet and I fell into this muddy ditch. Brutus came slipping and sliding right behind me. 

His leg got caught by this gnarly thorny branch and he let out this yelp that pierced the rain. I got up and tried to help him but it was like attempting to wrangle a fish as it flopped from the water. 

Brutus was confused, terrified and struggling so much that it was only making his pain worse with each passing moment. We couldn’t seem to pull him free. 

I told my brother to go get our dad, try to find a rope and we could perhaps snag the branch up and free Brutus. Meanwhile he continued to whine and yelp, the thorns digging into his leg muscles the more he fought against the snare. 

“Ain’t no way to move that branch. It’s too muddy. I don’t have any good equipment,” dad told us when he assessed the situation. He told us to leave Brutus there and he would figure it out. 

But he didn’t. Instead as my brother and I went home I could hear my dog’s shrieks echo across the night air. The sound of suffering. Endless pain. And with each new yelp it became worse. 

The sounds across the airwaves of Mars reminded me of my dog and how he died that night caught in the mud. I was helpless to save him, as helpless as I was to find out the truth about these recordings. 

I pulled up the location data from the rover to give me an idea of where the shriek had come from. 

Near to one of the many wide craters that we have been studying to search for Martian water, I realized. 

The data was still being transmitted and it told me that the final compiling would come in the morning. It was difficult to wait, but I knew that there wouldn’t be many more answers coming that night. 

Still intrigued by the noises I heard, I decided to pull audio files from the surrounding area for the past week and see if I could determine any clues. 

It resulted in a lack of sleep, and even less answers. 

As I pieced together the audio on my home desktop I noticed that a pattern emerged. The screams were there, every so often, amid the data. 

But they were moving. I pulled out a map of the Martian landscape and began to chart a course where I heard them. As the rover moved and surveyed the area, the noise would sound as though it was following the river. 

Was there a possibility something was alive on the Martian world and watching our rover? 

The painful and anguished screams haunted my dreams. It sounded worse and worse with each new recording I found. Hearing the silence and the low thrumming soil of Mars in between the unexpected shrieks was a blessing. 

My tired brain told me there was more to it, but I had to sleep. And of course nightmares came when I did. I saw cities that didn’t have shape. Metropolitan areas on mars from ancient times. It reminded me of the old science fiction stories from the 20s, an entire civilization living under the ice. 

In the dream something crashed on the surface of the planet. Something from a world unlike any we had ever encountered. 

The dream didn’t offer it any shape or form. It was just this abomination of noise that was surrounding the entire landscape. The martians ran and shrieked, the formless creature mimicking their suffering and spreading its awful noise everywhere. The ground shook and swallowed them all up. Leaving behind only vibrations. 

I woke the next day in a cold sweat. It felt like that same noise had permeated my skin. I wanted so desperately to find out what was happening on the Red Planet so I got to work and immediately checked the other rovers to see if they picked up mysterious signals. I wanted my dream to be nothing more than my fragile imagination. 

But as I reviewed the traces of data we had collected I saw disturbing evidence of something within the soil where the rover had surveyed. 

Microorganisms, bacterial life that can exist anywhere in the universe. It was migrating through the ground and following the rover. 

I began to check other data, photographs and videos from the area that had been downloaded and properly cleaned. 

Yet I found nothing. No evidence of a life form near to the area. Or at least… not one visible. 

As much as I hated to do it, I decided to present the data to my manager. I figured they could keep things under control and perhaps alleviate some of the worry I had. These screams were troubling me, making me lose sleep and I wanted to find a scientific solution that wouldn’t terrify me. 

She promised to review the data but the next day when I asked about it, she acted like I had made the whole thing up. 

“That has already been processed and cataloged. I want you to focus on the other findings from the crater,” she insisted. 

When I returned to my research though, I found copies of the audio files on my computer which confirmed that I had truly heard these noises. So why was she denying their existence? 

I tried to move them offline again to have someone outside of our facility review the data, but soon found that the information was now heavily secured. 

“Someone didn’t want this to get out,” my close friend Stephen told me. I showed him the chart of the Martian landscape that I’ve been reviewing and he began to trace a pattern from where the different noises had come from. 

“And each time you said that it’s a high pitched noise?” he asked. I nodded and he told me something that should have been plainly obvious: “This thing is getting closer and closer. Each time you record it, the pitch is decreasing. The wavelengths are traveling to you slower and slower as well. In other words, Something may have gone terribly wrong on the surface of Mars and we don’t even know about it yet.” 

 

“Do you believe it could be something dangerous?” I asked. 

 

“What have the samples shown?” 

 

I reviewed them again. The sudden findings of life that I had recorded were now gone, erased completely. Rewinding that trace data showed a shocking result. When the noise came, the bacterial life forms would shrivel as a result. 

 

These screams were acting as a pestilence on the Martian world. 

 

The next nightmare I had was more vivid, the extraterrestrial parasite which had crashed on the planet was now infecting the ground. I saw a lush and vibrant Mars transform into the wasteland we knew so well. 

 

The civilization that named the planet home was killed in only a matter of weeks. And then the virus ate them alive. Devouring every part of their body and possibly even their soul. 

I saw the invisible effects of the screams on the planet everywhere I looked in my dream. Scars that ran deep into the red core revealed wounds of dead soil, dangerous invisible parasites that eagerly cling to any life that passes by. 

Suddenly, I felt my leg slipping into the crimson soil, being pulled under. Dragged down to this Martian hell. I found myself scraping and gasping for breath as dirt and soil was spilling into my throat and I was drowning on this alien world. 

I woke up gasping and unable to breathe, and I ran to the bathroom and began to vomit. 

What came out of my lungs were particles of sand and red soil. I looked down at my body, astonished to find that I was covered in the color of Mars from head to toe. 

Swiftly I bathed and shook away the nightmare, disturbed by this sudden telepathic connection I had with the planet. Was it because of the infectious noise that I had heard? Was it trying to eat me alive the same way it had the old Martians? 

I tried again to tell my supervisors of the potential threat, but instead of listening she informed me that I was going to be relocated to a different department. 

“There was evidence that you attempted to retrieve secured audio files recently and share them which goes against our policy. You’re lucky you have a job at all,” she told me. 

I was astounded at the sudden change in attitude, her behavior seemingly hostile when I brought up the recordings. 

“I’ll have the rest of the team review them. But I’m afraid I will have to ask you to clear out your desk and leave by the end of the day.” 

I did as I was told, but not before I created a small back door program to get into their network. It didn’t take long and I was certain that monitoring the noises would be smart for the future. 

Once finished, I left for lunch and started to download the files to my own laptop, Stephen assisted me with it but told me that most of the files now seemed corrupted. 

“I think your bosses are doing this on purpose,” he said. 

“I think it might be that this noise is affecting them subconsciously,” I admitted as I fidgeted nervously with my fork. 

“Have you tried to play the audio backwards?” he asked casually. The thought hadn’t even occurred to me. 

“Are you saying it’ll be like a secret code or something?” I joked. 

‘“No, but it could reveal something about the samples we are missing,” he told me. 

As we experimented with the corrupted audio again, I heard distortions and shrieks again and he immediately became tense. 

“Jesus that’s a nightmare,” he whispered nervously. His hair was standing up on his arm as we kept listening and I commented, “It gets louder every time the rover is obtaining samples.”

“The samples that are transmitting data here… transferring whatever this is… to earth?” He asked. 

Neither of us knew what to make of that implication but he requested to review the data and try to hack it that evening so I let him. 

I called my boss that evening, begging her to listen to reason. Something about all of this was very wrong. 

“You need to step out of the way of progress. These samples will show us how the entire planet of Mars has evolved into the Eden it is today.”

“An Eden? Are we talking about the same planet?” I asked with a soft laugh but she didn’t appreciate the joke. Her tone was serious. 

“What the planet is offering to our world is greater than anything you can imagine. Terraforming an entire world into a perfect environment, it would be a miracle for Earth,” she whispered. 

I found myself suddenly uneasy talking to her. 

“But… the planet of Mars is dead. We’ve seen that it’s deteriorating, perhaps even dying. How is that a blessing for us?” I asked. 

The silence in the next moments were ominous. 

 

“Death is the only consistency in the universe. Life sprung from nothing eons ago.  It’s inevitable that one day it will all be snuffed out. Our time here is for one purpose alone. To serve as fuel for the next cycle.” 

 

“What:.. um what are you talking about?” 

 

Then I heard this low thrill behind her as she kept speaking. “It’s our every existence that is the problem. Life is meant only to feed death. And death, that’s eternal. Perfect. Beautiful.” 

 

“Michele… Do you hear that?” I whispered, becoming terrified by the conversation. She sounded possessed. It sounded like the winds of Mars were bristling through her lungs.

 

“It is the warning of the future we must prepare for. The inevitable transformation of our own world.” 

 

My mouth felt dry. 

 

“These samples that have been taken from the craters… what exactly happens to them?” I asked. 

 

“I think you know the answer to that. They come here. They will find their way to our world, one way or another,” she whispered. The noise in the background was making my ears feel like they were bleeding. 

 

“Surrender to evolution. Death is the ultimate phase of all life.” 

 

I hung up the phone and frantically called Stephen, hoping that he was available. 

 

Yet I got no answer. I grabbed my keys and decided to race to his house. These recordings were more than just a peculiarity. They were a threat to our world. 

 

I tried to knock on his door but there was no response. I shouted for his attention yet instead I heard that same shrill noise. It made me want to cover my ears and get into a fetal position. 

 

I pulled myself up and found a window I could crawl into. Inside his small one bedroom house, the noise was deafening. My eardrums felt like they could burst as I stuffed wads of paper to soften the intense screams. 

 

Then I found Stephen, mutilated in his living room. It was clear the injuries were self inflicted. He had taken one of his kitchen knives and sliced off his ears first, stuffing them into his mouth. Then he had sliced his wrists and let the blood drain out on his couch. Finally even as his life ebbed away, it appeared that he had carved open his stomach, letting his guts hang out and dangle on the carpet. 

 

Somehow despite all of this madness, I saw that my friend had typed a message on his laptop. 

 

A warning. 

 

THEY ARE LISTENING. 

 

I found myself wanting to pick up that same blade and harming myself. This invisible voice was urging me to kill. To let death take over my useless body. 

 

The blade touched my own neck, cutting into my flesh as I struggled to escape the screams. I managed to get out before I was overwhelmed by that desire. 

 

As I drove home, my boss called me again. I panicked and sent it to voicemail. When I later checked the recording all I heard was more of the same howling. 

 

Slow methodical shrill noises that told me the strange invisible threat I had heard was now here. 

 

I made it home, hardly able to think straight or even focus, then I managed to compose this wanting for others. 

I have realized that the concerns Stephen had were even more serious than we first understood. The dangerous invisible evil is already on its way here. 

And worst of all, we may already be too late to stop it.