IIf you are reading this, your world is in grave danger. Don't touch anything. Don't take samples. Leave this area immediately. Destroy everything you brought here and never return. We have left this message in stone in every language we have ever known to stop this terrible threat. Listen to these words, even if you don't feel like it.
“What does it say there?”
“He hits me.”
“Shouldn’t language be a big subject for a linguist?”
“This stranger tongues, stupid. It will take them years to understand this.”
“Plural languages?”
“Judging by the glyph patterns, it appears to be the same message repeated several times in different forms. It looks like some kind of Rosetta Stone, only much larger.”
“Yes, these monuments are huge. They must have made many copies.”
– At least dozens.
If you're reading this, it's because you missed, ignored, or misunderstood the messages we sent out on probes across the galaxy, as well as the one we relayed from the beacon here while the equipment was operating. You are careless in your rush to explore, just like us. This is your last warning. Heed these words, otherwise you will suffer our fate.
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“Could this be a religious text?”
“Perhaps. Building that structure and carving those signs certainly took a lot of effort. They also placed it in the center of all those road structures we saw from orbit. Whatever that says, I think it was very important to them.”
If you're reading this, you're wondering how these ruins came to be in a place of such abundance. You want to know why. Read our story and then come back. Listen to these words, otherwise your curiosity will destroy you.
“Well, upload your scans to the ship and we can send them home to see if anyone else can decipher them. Then head outside, we found something amazing.”
“What?”
“Just go outside, you should see it.”
We were like you. Our explorers once stood on another world, among the long-abandoned ruins of an alien civilization. They saw the message but didn't pause long enough to understand it. They were distracted by something more interesting. Listen to these words and don't make the same mistake.
“You took me away from the first alien languages ever discovered to show me…a mushroom?”
“The closest analogue might be a lichen or maybe a moss, but its genome is unlike anything we know.”
“Okay, so it's a lichen. What's the big deal?”
“Look at this metabolic profile.”
“Mmm hmm. What exactly am I looking at?”
“It's photosynthetic, so it pumps out a lot of oxygen, but it also does the Sabatier reaction at ambient temperatures, fixes its own nitrogen, accumulates elemental sulfur and phosphorus from rocks, and grows everywhere like a weed. Oh, and it seems to have its own radiation shield.”
“It's a tough lichen.”
“It's one kind of terraforming machine. Throw a little of it on an uninhabited space rock, and in a few decades it will become a paradise.”
In that distant world we found a form of life. It gave us the strength we needed. We brought it from another world, and it flourished here, just like those who found it before us. Now it is growing outside this building. We don't know how many other worlds he reached. Listen to these words and don't let them reach you.
