I’m not gonna ask jenna to help me write this, not when she’s dealing with losing emily, but carrie insists I should write something about what happened to the martians in case anyone is still reading this. so I’m going to.
everyone is saying that bacteria killed them, that they didn’t come here prepared for illness. that’s not entirely true. we found traces of an artificial antibacterial compound in many of the martian remains which suggests they did have some level of disease prevention in mind when they came. the more compelling theory, which fits with our preliminary dna analysis of the remains, is that they suffered something like total immune collapse due to accelerated aging. and I mean accelerated aging.
the dna we’ve found in the martian remains looks universally like shit. not to get too scientific but it looks like someone took a fucking hacksaw and just threw a bunch of shit together and called it an organism. the martians were less than a year old, but their nucleotides were not only put together like a child’s attempt at a complex model kit, they looked like they’d been forced to age. basically no telomeres, which are the caps that protect the ends of dna when cells split. all of their cells exhausted themselves to death.
our best working theory so far is that the martians didn’t put themselves together very well. these individuals seem to have been engineered specifically for this invasion, a little more than a year ago, with the express purpose of getting them here and carrying out some kind of agenda. the martians didn’t seem to think beyond that.
so while they weren’t so stupid as to send invading forces with zero protection from illness, they were dumb enough to make soldiers with ugly patchwork dna who, on exposure to our world, aged like overripe tomatoes and left themselves vulnerable to some of the nastiest pathogens we’ve built up resistance to. in fact one of the biggest issues we’ve come across in analyzing martian remains is the fact that they’re really fuckin disgusting. loaded with pus and cancerous growths and every disease under the sun. it makes getting a proper picture of what happened kind of difficult.
something similar, but way less dramatic, happened with the red weed. it started to die before they did, as far as we can tell. we’re lucky that it did tbh because the red weed emissions have fucked up our climate enough. if it’d continued to spew gases and heat up the atmosphere for even one more day the planet might be uninhabitable. who knows.
that’s enough science shit for now. time to go hug my wife. it’s been a few hours, don’t want to delay any more