The mission logs would call it Planet Kepler-89f, but among the crew, it simply became First Soil. The first place where gravity felt right. Where the air didn’t kill. Where sunsets looked like promises instead of warnings.
The landing was clean. The ocean was calm. They offloaded the first habitat unit by the water’s edge and claimed a ridge for solar. Others began surveying the inland valleys and jagged plateaus. One detail remained consistent for all explorers: no fauna, only flora. Wind, rock, ... and questions.
The ground took their weight as if it remembered others who had come first.
Weeks later, a reconnaissance shuttle returned with data from the highlands: a monolithic tower, rising out of the horizon like an exclamation left by a vanished intelligence. An anomaly, architecturally impossible by any known standards. Radiometric analysis placed the material at several hundred thousand millennia old. Composition: unknown. Energy signature: passive, but consistent.
They marked it on the survey. No one approached. Not out of caution, but something subtler. Not fear; instinct.
There were no ruins. No infrastructure. No signs of collapse.
And yet, the planet felt maintained. Like a museum where everything still worked, but no one had visited in a long, long time.
No signals, no transmissions. Yet systems kept logging impossible redundancies: data points looping, rewriting themselves. It wasn’t malfunction. It was mimicry. As if the planet, or something on it, was learning the way they live and thought.