Story
Taking place on June 17 of 2019, ten months after Vita 1's last contact to Earth with the message "stay alone, stay alive" on August 8 of 2018, the investigative team of Kenzo Uji, Martin Karne, and Diane Matlock approach Vita 1 on Mars in their spacecraft. Vita 1's main computer, MOOD, seems to sense their arrival. Whilst Kenzo, as pilot of the spacecraft, is forced to make a crash landing on the Martian surface and its crew depart into different airlocks of Vita 1 base, MOOD apathetically predicts that, although three have entered, only two will leave alive. Now separated into different airlocks, the three take radios from their spacesuits to stay in verbal contact with each other. All three go through decontamination, but each notes something is "wrong, something very wrong" concerning the decontamination gas they are exposed to. Initially, only Kenzo can enter the base, as Karne and Matlock's airlock doors have been locked. Kenzo stumbles upon various dead bodies in the silent hallways, including the corpse of the base's leader, Antonio Fellicci. By listening to his recorder, Kenzo discovers that the base's downfall came about when people started shooting at each other in the base hallways. Kenzo finds Fellicci's room, but finds a dead man supernaturally levitating in the hallway. Using Fellicci's computer, Kenzo manages to unlock the door to Karne's airlock. However, after using the door controls, the dead body of Fellicci's girlfriend suddenly comes back to life, and tries to attack Kenzo.
Karne exits his airlock and enters the base in a different area than the one Kenzo has explored. Not long after traversing the hallways, Karne notices that his watch now displays the impossible time of "48:62", a passcode to a nearby hatch - this, along with various other small details, are the work of MOOD trying to help the three survive. Using a passcode discovered by Kenzo, Karne enters the arboretum, obtains a gun form a corpse, and encounters a Trimorph; a mutated zombified mass of three people, which blocks the way to the recyc oxygen treatment room.
Read more about this topic: Martian Gothic: Unification
Famous quotes containing the word story:
“Personal beauty is then first charming and itself, when it dissatisfies us with any end; when it becomes a story without an end; when it suggests gleams and visions, and not earthly satisfactions; when it makes the beholder feel his unworthiness; when he cannot feel his right to it, though he were Caesar; he cannot feel more right to it than to the firmament and the splendors of a sunset.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Our ancestors were savages. The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every state which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source. It was because the children of the Empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the northern forests who were.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“For slowly even her sense of him
And love itself were growing dim.
He no more drew the smile he sought.
The story is she died of thought.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)