The planet’s surface was a sea of glassy basalt, broken only by the occasional spire of ancient stone that rose like the ribs of a dead leviathan. The Astraeus touched down in a shallow crater, kicking up a plume of fine, amber dust.
One fateful night, as Dr. Kim was reviewing the latest batch of test results, she stumbled upon an unusual pattern in the genetic code of one of the test subjects. The sequence, labeled "ADN-368-9", seemed to defy all known laws of genetics. It was as if the code had been written by an intelligent being, not a human. ADN-368