Chapter 116: Mom on the Destruction of Earth

Following the meeting, Jason found his mind clouded with even more questions.

Maybe our solar system is extraordinary. Perhaps in the ancient past, it had served as battlegrounds for interstellar civilizations, or maybe they were just a small corner of a much vaster cosmic war zone.

His unease didn’t stem solely from the committee’s debate about extraterrestrial threats, but also from a private conversation he had with Lily shortly afterward.

“Was there something you wanted to tell me?” Jason asked. He had just stepped out of the conference room and noticed Lily lingering by the door, looking unusually hesitant.

She was typically a quiet person who rarely spoke unless it was absolutely necessary. The fact that she had sought him out against her usual nature meant it was important.

Lily nodded with a blank expression, casting a cautious glance back at the empty conference room. Understanding her silent cue, Jason turned around and led her back inside, closing the door behind them.

“Alright, you can speak freely now,” Jason said, pulling up a chair for her.

“Well… as you know, I possess a latent telepathic ability,” Lily began, remaining silent for a long moment before finally articulating her thoughts. “When we were near the alien craft, I could sense a distinct aura of malice in the air.”

Jason was taken aback. “You could read the entity?” he asked in disbelief.

“Only barely,” she replied, frowning as she recalled the sensation. “We were too far away, and the malice was very faint. I could only grasp the general intent.”

“Tell me everything.”

“When you were running away, the emotional projection was frantic. It felt as if countless voices were whispering, ’Occupy, or control?’ I couldn’t entirely decipher the mechanism, but it felt like the entity had the power to hijack a person’s mind. And not just simple hypnosis, it felt like complete domination. Total control over a person’s consciousness!”

Jason went on high alert. “Total control?”

A chill ran down his spine as he remembered the overwhelming hypnotic pull he had experienced. Perhaps it really was possible.

What did it mean to completely control a person? It meant altering them from the inside out, rewriting their very identity! Whether it was achieved by deleting memories, implanting neural parasites, or using biological control chips… just because humanity lacked the technology didn’t mean an advanced alien race couldn’t do it.

If Lily’s telepathic reading was accurate, the implications were terrifying. If he hadn’t insisted on joining the expedition, the original scout team might have returned to the Noah just fine, but the people who came back would have been fundamentally different.

Their allegiances would have shifted; they would no longer be human. What would have happened then? The thought made his blood run cold.

After a long moment, Jason managed to steady his breathing. No wonder the flesh mass was so desperate to capture a living host. If Lily’s theory was right, it all made perfect sense. As long as the entity could control just one person, it could use them to lure in the rest of the crew!

Eventually, the entire human population aboard the Noah could have been subverted, reduced to an enslaved race serving an alien master.

The universe was incredibly dangerous, not just because of kinetic bombardments and laser fire, but because of insidious, unseen horrors like this. He shuddered. Fortunately, his stubborn decision to join the vanguard had averted a catastrophic crisis.

“Is Henry under its control?” Jason asked, his voice dropping to a serious whisper. “Or any of the others? I give you full clearance to use your telepathy on the crew to verify.”

Lily shook her head. “No… don’t worry. Their psychological profiles are completely normal.”

Jason breathed a heavy sigh of relief. Lily’s unique talents were proving to be an invaluable asset.

“Because I was stationed so far from the craft, I even stepped outside the Noah to get a better read,” Lily continued. “The entity’s consciousness was incredibly chaotic. It felt like a massive amalgamation of thoughts, as if hundreds or even thousands of minds were blended together into one.”

She paused, organizing her theory. “Because of that, I suspect the flesh mass is either a creature that consumed the original alien crew, or more likely, it is a biological hibernation chamber for the aliens themselves. I highly doubt an advanced race would be foolish enough to get eaten by their own creation, so the hibernation theory makes more sense.”

“You think the flesh mass is a stasis pod?”

Jason considered the idea. A massive, pulsating, biological hibernation chamber? It was a grotesque concept to a human, but if it was capable of sustaining life, it was theoretically possible.

You couldn’t judge an extraterrestrial civilization by human aesthetic standards. While a human would rather die than crawl into a giant slab of living meat, an alien species might view it as peak biotechnology.

“What’s your supporting evidence for this?” Jason asked.

“We haven’t found any alien remains outside the ship, and you explored the interior without finding any traditional mechanical stasis pods. We can hypothesize that this biological mass is the stasis pod. Its soft, fleshy structure might have been designed to absorb the massive kinetic impact of the crash, ensuring the survival of the crew inside.”

Jason nodded, gesturing for her to continue.

Lily maintained her calm, analytical tone. “After the vessel crashed, the surviving aliens retreated into the biological pod, barely clinging to life. As Austin suggested earlier, it’s highly probable that a massive interstellar war was raging across the system. Outmatched and stranded, the survivors didn’t dare reveal themselves and instead entered deep hibernation.”

“They were likely waiting for the war to end, hoping a rescue fleet would eventually find them and wake them up. Unfortunately for them, their entire civilization was likely defeated or wiped out. So, they remained dormant for millions of years… until our mining operations disturbed them.”

“With their ship’s life support broken and the Martian atmosphere toxic to them, they have no choice but to stay hidden inside the pod.”

Jason nodded thoughtfully. If Lily was right, there might only be a small handful of surviving aliens left inside. The crash had caused catastrophic damage, leaving them trapped. And the rescue fleet they were waiting for had been destroyed eons ago.

“The biological mass is massive, extending all the way through the floor of the vessel and deep into the bedrock. This means it has direct access to the raw uranium deposits beneath it,” Lily noted. “Look at this specific frame from the drone footage…”

Jason followed her pointed finger to a paused video on a datapad. Sure enough, through a deep fissure in the Martian rock, a faint, flesh-colored texture could be seen clinging to the subterranean walls. It was an incredibly subtle detail that flashed by in a fraction of a second. He was amazed Lily had spotted it.

“The Australian continent back on Earth…” Lily said quietly, her voice trailing off. “…was also exceptionally rich in uranium.”

Jason frowned, struggling to see the connection. “What are you getting at?”

“…This biological hibernation chamber seems capable of absorbing ambient nuclear radiation from the uranium ore to sustain itself. Because of this, even with the ship’s power grid completely destroyed, the pod can keep the crew alive indefinitely by feeding on the radiation. I suspect that when this vessel was going down, the pilot used the last of their thrusters to intentionally crash-land in a uranium-rich zone.”

“And Australia, back on Earth, was home to some of the largest uranium reserves on the planet…”

Jason’s eyes widened in sudden realization. “Are you saying… there was a crashed alien vessel buried under Australia?”

“It is a strong possibility,” Lily said, looking up at him.

Jason began pacing the length of the conference room, his mind racing. The exact cause of Earth’s sudden destruction had always been the greatest mystery haunting the survivors. Could an ancient, buried alien craft really have been the trigger?

Australia had been a vast, sparsely populated continent dominated by harsh deserts. An alien vessel buried hundreds of meters underground could easily remain undiscovered for human history.

Furthermore, no two crashes are identical. The vessel on Mars had lost its engines, leaving it completely without mechanical power. But what if the hypothetical vessel under Australia suffered different damage? What if the cockpit was destroyed, killing the crew, but the engineering bay and its antimatter containment systems remained fully intact?

Over millions of years, even the most advanced containment fields would eventually fail. If a massive reserve of antimatter leaked out and came into contact with regular matter, the resulting annihilation event would be apocalyptic.

It would be enough to shatter the Earth.

Antimatter undoubtedly possessed that kind of destructive yield.

According to old military theoretical texts, if just three antimatter bombs, each weighing 13.22 kg, were deployed into geosynchronous orbit at an altitude of 35,786 km, spaced exactly 120° apart and detonated simultaneously, the resulting thermal radiation would instantly sterilize most of the globe. Anyone exposed to the flash would be incinerated on the spot.

Each of those hypothetical doomsday weapons only required 6.61 kg of actual antimatter!

The energy conversion of antimatter is absolute. It is roughly 1064 times more powerful than an atomic bomb of the same mass, and 266 times more powerful than a standard fusion warhead. The annihilation of just 6.61 kg of antimatter with 6.61 kg of regular matter yields an explosion equivalent to a 50-megaton hydrogen bomb!

By that logic, if an alien engineering bay containing thousands of tons of antimatter fuel was buried underground and containment suddenly failed, the instantaneous detonation would easily possess enough force to blow the planet to pieces.

Jason grew increasingly convinced that this was the true cause of Earth’s demise.

While Professor Thomson firmly believed Earth was destroyed by a targeted kinetic kill vehicle, and other scientists held their own varying theories, the actual truth had always remained unconfirmed.

As Jason expanded on the theory, he realized how strange the Australian continent had always been. Its ecosystem was entirely isolated, home to bizarre species found nowhere else on the planet, kangaroos, platypuses, koalas. While human evolutionary biologists had long attributed this to continental drift and geographic isolation, Jason suddenly entertained a wilder hypothesis: extraterrestrial microbes.

An alien spacecraft would inevitably carry trace amounts of extraterrestrial microorganisms. Leaking into the isolated Australian biosphere over millions of years, these microbes could have interacted with Earth’s native fauna, assimilating, mutating, and altering the evolutionary tree.

Perhaps the sheer weirdness of Australian wildlife was a direct result of alien biological contamination.

It was a wild, unscientific leap of logic on Jason’s part, but if it were true, it meant humanity had suffered the ultimate collateral damage. Or perhaps, the ship that crashed on Earth hadn’t been a small scout like the one on Mars, but a massive capital ship.

Only a flagship would carry an antimatter reserve large enough to crack a planet.

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