I too have a dream

10.12.2088
CONFIDENTIAL REPORT
We retrieved the following excerpt from the remains of the Armada 10, our first manned expedition to Mars, conducted by Dr. Fitzgerald Surdinni, Praetor of the Independent Astronauts of REDNASA, the objective of the expedition being the foundation of the first human colony on the planet.
The source of the information seems to be an intelligent life form residing on the red planet itself. The format of the retrieved excerpt can be interpreted in both audio and written variation, the written variation being the least lessened in quality by radiation. Here is the unrefined excerpt itself:
"And I decided to use the earthling tongue in order to put this down in my journal, for this tongue interests me. And I want to point out right away that the use of a tongue such as this one makes the thoughts come rolling out of the brain in an almost comically slow manner. And so I wonder at these earthlings. And I laugh at them, for as I use my body to produce these sounds and symbols, a tremendous amount of time and energy is being spent to waste.
And so it is the second year since the first earthlings came wobbling on our planet; and the second year of our hunting down every single one of them, and those that kept coming afterwards to seek their kin. And we cut off all signals they tried to send back to the blue planet, their Earth, so that the earthlings learn not of our being, so that no fright befalls them, so that they keep coming in search. And as they keep coming, so do we keep harvesting their protein tissues for consummation.
And they quite please us. And they quite help us. And naturally so, for it is pure meat that makes up their being. And who would even fathom to think up the possibility of such a valuable energy source blessedly coming to our very doorstep from a far-off neighbor-sphere?
And no longer shall we have stoop to preserving nutritive bacteria beneath the planetary polar caps, and to starvation, living off microscopic vermin all the while. And we shall eat meat. And we shall keep it in secret, not allowing the earthlings to gain contact with Earth, once they set foot here. And we shall play nonexistent. And let their machines take countless pictures of the red deserts above, and send them off to distant satellites. And let those foolish specimens be ignorant toward us, and send in more and more people. And more meat.
And this language is ridiculous. And see just how curious it is that I made one of the earthlings demonstrate their laughter to me, and all I received in response was a sound resembling "hahahahahahaha". And it was difficult making him comply, because, as he was aware of our intentions of consuming his flesh, he insistently resorted to screaming in a state of what seemed as fear-provoked over-excitement. And this state was accompanied by a peculiar salt-water secretion through a set of facial glands; and I should note that these specific glands tend to be quite nourishing and pleasing to the taste.
And he did not want to laugh, and he refused, and I barely succeeded in subduing him. And I had to remove limbs, one or two, to finally get him to demonstrate. And it is even more peculiar and amusing to sever their protein bodies and observe, because they do not possess regeneration abilities. And they merely shriek, and quiver, and spurt their inner liquids all over.
Hahahahahaha. And even I can now do this laughter. Hahahahahaha. And it is contagious.
Hahahahahahahaha.
And some of the earthlings required to converse with me, before we proceeded to disjoint them into protein portions; and that is how I came to decipher the formula of that absurd sound-mimic communication system, their tongue. And they asked me who I was, and what I was, and whether I was an "intelligent son of a Martian life-form bitch" or not, and "why on Earth" are we buried so deep down into the planet’s bowels.  
And in truth it made me eager to tell, to make contact with one of them. And to observe the response too. And I shall quote the particular earthling here directly with the sound record that I acquired, because this is their only manner of speaking, using streams of vibrations that are carried through a provided atmospheric environment. And I am engraving these vibrations into the physical page of this source. And here they are."
What follows is a sound recording in the alien intellect’s "diary", containing the voice of one of the victims of the Armada 11 rescue expedition, the crew we sent on a mission to search for survivors of the Armada 10, most importantly, our renowned "Prophet of the Void”, Dr. Surdinni. The victim’s voice has been identified as that of Dr. Surdinni’s chief assistant, Dr. Valentina Beroe.  
PLAY:
I...I...What’s that? Is it recording my voice? Should I talk? Sob. What am I supposed to say? I...I don’t know. I don’t understand, what are you trying to tell me? I can’t understand you, stop fucking snarling at me! What do you want?
FAST FORWARD
Alright, alright! I...alright. Sob.
We arrived...here on Mars...sixty hours ago. Landing was successful--precisely two hundred and three kilometers away from Cleopatra Crater, cough. We grounded the ships in deep, we got ready and started the search. To look for the missing explorers we were going to cover a five-hundred-kilometer radius from our landing position, sob.
Alright, alright, I’ll speak clearly, I won’t cry anymore! Alright, fine! NO! NO! Please don’t, not the eye, not the...
FAST FORWARD
Name’s Valentina Beroe, thirty-seven years old, Vacuum Valley and Absolute Black Hole specialist, missionary of REDNASA. Humans successfully made it to Mars two years ago. We’ve brought here two fleets since, the Armada 10 and the Armada 11, 10 carrying settlers over, and 11 looking for the settlers after they vanished. Each fleet got...mysteriously deserted, and almost immediately after deployment. All the people...they were just gone, as if the earth beneath split open and swallowed them. Or rather the Mars beneath, sob, cough.
We were supposed to find out where the people went. Because every ship and sonde kept sending information back as usual--reports, locations, video data, everything--but the people disappeared nonetheless, cough.
We found no people. Found something else though. We found... an inhabited planet.
We deployed successfully near Cleopatra...and we searched a radius of five-hundred kilometers around the known landing spot of the Armada 10...
That cursed planet. God help us.
Then we searched, and searched. To no avail. No survivors. Not from the first ones, not from the second ones. The shuttles were all there, the probes too, and all their personal belongings. Only thing missing was them. We wondered for a time, and then we knew. Because we got found.
You laugh. Is it funny? Do I amuse you? Do I amuse you very much, you shapeless worm? Eh? Abomination! Fucking Martian piece of sh...
FAST FORWARD
You gonna laugh, bastard? Hahahahaha! You gonna laugh it up? You don’t even come close to human laughter. Hear yourself cawing! You can’t spit out two regular sounds with that disgusting cloaca gaping on your fucking back! You can’t do real laughter, shithead! You can’t! Monster! Fuck y...
FAST FORWARD
I’m Valentina Beroe, thirty-seven, from REDNASA. They sent me and my colleagues to search for the missing settlers. We found Mars inhabited. They captured us. One of my hands is severed. One eye melted. They’re recording everything I say.
They want to communicate with me, tell me things. Fine, tell me then. There. The Martians are telling me.
They’ve been here for an indefinite period o’time. And there’s no such thing as "Mars" to them. They call it something like "phjertume". Can’t tell if that’s a proper noun or just their word for "planet". They live within its bowels, somewhere in the mantle. Population’s enormous, their caves endless. I can’t define their state of civilization or progress. "Technologically advanced" would be putting it way too inaccurately. Here, in their sorta world, the borderline between technology and evolution is somewhat blurred...distorted. You can’t be sure whether they’re...genius robots or a biological super-species. It’s as if their cells are made outta wire. Like veins...but wire.
They speak a rotten English, try like hell to squeal one sentence out properly, usin’ some gadgets, or organs, or something in-between. So they’re telling me. About their life.
Why are you telling me all this, you damned son of a whore? Why are you telling me, if you’re gonna fucking eat me? Tell my why, tell me! I’m gonna fu...  
FAST FORWARD
Jesus Christ, I’m watching them eat Ruben alive! Right in front of me. They’ve paralyzed him, so he wouldn’t try to fight back and disturb them. No move, no peep. But he’s watching. He’s just lying there on the ground, naked...helpless. And they’re slicing pieces off of him! He’s looking. At me.
And that alien monster still wants to tell me things. Go, monster, tell me, if it’s gonna please you. Play with your food before you eat it, filthy gob.
We humans have been wondering, the thing tells me, why Mars lost its waters. And where did the waters go. Here, then, it’s giving me the damn answer. They’ve sucked it all down below ground. All gathered into the underground colony so it can be used for consummation and hygiene. What good is it up there, it says, if the planet’s atmosphere’s not hospitable? Why would they keep water where they can’t thrive? That’s why they drained it all into the deep. The polar caps they let be. Couldn’t melt the ice. Besides, there’s edible organisms in that ice, it says. Though they have no more use for those. Cause the earthlings were here now, the bastard adds, to sate them.  
It’s asking me if I have any children. Cause if I do, they’d probably smell of the same juicy proteins I smell of.  
I AM GOING TO FIND YOUR MOTHER AND FU...
FAST FORWARD
Name Valentina. Got a husband and four kids back home. They’re asking ‘bout height, weight. A hundred ‘n’ seventy, sixty-nine kilos. But that was before...sob...Now I’m short a left hand and a right leg, so there’s gotta be difference. They melted my remaining eye, so I can’t see. Said the more I see, the more I get scared, tense. And that’s hormones spoiling my meet.  
So I can’t see them no more. Cough. But I remember them. The Martians. They’re not humanoids. They don’t look like anything on Earth, not even organic. They do have bodies and some sorta musculoskeletal system. They have orifices too, more than five or six, and they’re located without any symmetry whatsoever. I recall the color as something between beige, reddish or dark pink. It changed...sob. Changed according to the surroundings, lighting, surface, temperature. Even mood, I think. I couldn’t define whether they were sorta transparent or not. It’s as if their bodies took up no space, had no volume. More like this: where their bodies stood, space went sort of fluid, melted down into plasma. Space took them up, not the other way round.
None of the severed spots hurt. They’ve sedated me, like they did with Ruben. He’s dead now. Must be.
But...if their bodies aren’t "bodies", why do they need to feed?
We transform mass into "seisaim", they tell me. The scum can’t pronounce "space-time". They’re "eslaining ith in thse ost earsling way oossible," because otherwise we, the two-legged, wouldn’t be able to even begin to grasp their nature.
I’m not hurting...anywhere. My mind’s fading now, though. I’m about to die. Finally.  
They’re trying...to bring me back. Keep me alive for just a little...while longer. So I can answer where...where, precisely, my children reside on Earth. The meat with genes s...such as mine, they say...is extremely n...nutritious.
Fuck you.
STOP
No more data has been preserved. End of report.
#
05.08.2092
We dispatched all forces against Mars in one massive military expedition. The entire World Treasury and Recourse Base were exhausted in the undertaking. We examined the whole surface, pulverized 80% of the planetary crust.
No life forms were found. No underground colonies. We only managed to locate a capsule containing the remains of Dr. Fitzgerald Surdinni. He had committed suicide.
From the capsule we also retrieved an infra-archive of several diary entries. The text was hand-written. Explained in it were the motives for the doctor’s "fun little joke" that he played on his fellow humans back on the "tiny greenish planet," locking all his crewmen and colleagues in the provision stores on board the Armada 10, and leaving them there to be kept in "the darkest of dark", so that his trick would prove successful. When the rescuers of the Armada 11 arrived, he waited for the crew to head out in search of survivors and away from the Mother-ship Central. He then "snuck in" and locked them out. Inside, he devised a scenario, simulated the voices of several other crew members to create the "alien’s journal", fabricated all data fed to our satellites, then lastly, "I cooked up my own imaginary species of high intelligence, ridiculously amusing in its legitimacy", as he describes it; a species to supposedly inhabit Mars and behave predatorily towards the human race.
He transmitted the fiction to Earth.  
After three months of investigating Fitzgerald Surdinni, his residence, public and restricted record, Praetorian Vault account and resources, we discovered a hard copy of a medical diagnosis, made by Surdinni’s personal neurologist, days prior to the dispatching of the Armada 10. The diagnosis revealed middle-stage Alzheimer’s.
Despite the discovery of his condition, Fitzgerald Surdinni was put on posthumous trial and sentenced to public denunciation on charges of ruining the global economy, endangering the lives of four hundred scientists, and concealing disability.        
#
Inscription on the grave monument erected to mark the 300th anniversary of Fitzgerald Surdinni’s death:
Here lies Fitzgerald Surdinni, the man who gave us Space, the founder of the first permanent colony on alien soil, the discoverer and cultivator of the new New World. Into this stone we carve his very last written words to humanity, revealed many decades after his passing, now standing proud and high up for the Universe to hear:
"I too have a dream. A dream that humanity shall continue to go on even after all the ages of darkness and thunderous storms it has suffered. A dream that it will not stray from the grand path of the future, even if this path no longer rests on dear dirt and soft grass, the loving flesh of our Ancient Mother, even if the path climbs high up, and up, and into the eerie, mystical, yet disarmingly beauteous abyss of the stars.
I too had a dream, but far too many minds fought to strangle it. In order to build a massive colony on Mars, I was in need of massive finances, and just as massive a pillar of good willing souls, which, to my great regret, is of the rarest gifts a man can be bestowed. The mission neared failure. But I saw the answer. The only answer: my mission, my cost. If I was to succeed, I would have to pay for it by myself entirely. And the cost was neither that of money, nor of gold; it was me, my name, my soul, my place in the world.
I willingly and publicly disgraced my intellect, ensuring its future proclamation as corrupted by Alzheimer’s. Thus I gained the moral right to act with seeming relentlessness. I let myself become the mad scientist, who tossed a bunch of people onto a desert planet, like mice in a maze; and I led the mice to believe that the maze was actually infested with predators. The mice started squeaking in terror, and a ton of other mice came running to aid them; I threw them into the maze as well. Thus I gained the most vital element my dream required, despicable as my ways might have been: a large number of people on an empty planet. And, naturally, large numbers of people bring along large stacks of resources. There is the perfect formula for colonization.  
So my dream has come true. I have successfully given humanity the new New World, because, once people set foot on the red dirt and walked it, they came to realize it bit no more than the brown one. Very soon they will realize what I came to realize years ago: we now have in our hearts the bravery to stay.
It is time for me to pay the price, though. In truth, the mission is still far from accomplished before my eyes. But it is time, and I’ve secured the final stages of the deed as best I can.
The people I blessed with a new home will demand my life, claim it. Let them. I’m glad to give it. The Universe is based on an investment-and-return system, you see, you give away one thing, and gain another. In return for my death, people will give me immortality. May not happen in months, not in years. Perhaps not in centuries, for that matter. But it is of no concern; let the centuries roll for as long as they want. If there is one thing in our world that is truly overpriced, it is time."
Three centuries after his death, the remains of Fitzgerald Surdinni were exhumed from his unmarked grave on Earth and laid to rest in the honorary mausoleum at the very heart of Marsion Sardinniopolis, precisely two hundred and three kilometers away from Cleopatra Crater.