"It doesn't make sense," Fardo said. "These humans must have had access to kreblock records."

She laid out the replications of the documents found in a medical facility on the ruined planet. "By all accounts, the humans died off millennia before the kreblocks even evolved."

"So then how did they have what looks like exact anatomical scans of a kreblock?" Researcher Geswaq picked up one of the papers. "Even has some kind of decorative paint on its skin, look how white it is."

"Could it be convergent evolution?" one of the archaeological interns asked.

"No," Fardo said confidently. "Look closer at the records. It doesn't just look like a kreblock. The organs, the neurons, the blood chemistry, it's all exactly the same."

"Could have been some type of time machine?" Geswaq asked.

"No, the humans weren't even advanced enough to keep their own planets alive."

The door slammed open. The frizzy microphone cover like hair of the man brushing against the top of the door frame as he entered. "I have the answer."

"Oh God," Fardo groaned. "I thought they banned you from the intergalactic research division."

"I'm not here as a researcher," Wewill said, holding up his mop.

"Then why are you bothering us? Just clean up and leave."

"Panspermia!" He gave as an answer. "Ancient aliens!"

Fardo slammed the paper she was studying down in frustration. "If I let you say your crazy theory, will you leave?"

"I will," Wewill offered, smiling as wide as a school boy. "We are humans, or at least their descendants."

He whipped out a projector using the far wall to display a presentation he clearly put together himself. "It is well known fact that there are several missing links between kreblocks and their closest ancestors. It is also known that kreblocks can tolerate and even thrive on a diet including meat, yet every animal on our own planet is toxic to us."

Fardo sighed. "The leading theory on that is that we did tolerate the meat of some now extinct animal."

"Which we have no evidence of!" Wewill declared, waggling a finger at her. "But the biggest discovery that all but guarantees this is the case has been right in front of us for decades!"

The next slide of the presentation showed a dilapidated archaic spaceship. The dessicated pilot looked a bit like a hairy kreblock mummy, with a muzzle and bigger teeth. "This was discovered in interstellar space near this solar system, the vacuum has preserved it's DNA perfectly. This creature has almost 99% DNA similarity with kreblocks!"

"That's impossible!" Fardo said, looking at the creature.

"The data is all there, free to look at but obfuscated for those who don't want to see the truth. I believe that this was another species of hominid that lived among the humans, the chimpanzee, which records found by your very teams state shared almost 99% similarity with humans."

"Bring me that data," Fardo snapped to the intern she forgot the name of. They scurried off.

"The conspiracy is real. Human sent out colony ships from their failing planet, one of which must have landed on our homeland and mixed with our own ecology as all history of humanity was lost. But that's not the scary part."

"And what's that?"

"One need not go back but a few hundred years of kreblock history to see we were a violent warmongering species. If one colony ship survived, likely others did as well, possibly preserving their knowledge they are human. I fear that when we do find living aliens, they will look like us, act like us and likely had a hell of a head start."

/r/surinical

"This is wrong, very wrong," Shenji said. "Look here, an innervated electrical system spanning the appendages, converging into a tall column that travels to a central nexus. That would mean that these... creatures... maintained a singular consciousness within their anatomy. It might have even controlled all of the appendages..."

"Like us," Shenja asked?

"...Yes," Shenji said in quiet disbelief.

The decrepit building stretched high into the sky, budding from the crust of OEP-112 with such definitive purpose that it couldn't have been anything but consciously constructed. They would need to wait for the geoengineering team to arrive for confirmation, but the structure appeared to be made from many different types of material; mostly a "chewed and spit out" stone, refined and purified metals bent to shape, long tubular pathways containing fine wires, likely to grant passage to natural currents of power, like consciousness. Or electricity.

Besides the strange formation they stood in, the outside remnants of organic life crept into even the deepest hall of the building. Large, green leafed vines with sparse yellowed bulbs jutting from the stems grew wild in the foyer they used to enter. Red skinned tubules broke the tiled ground, revealing a textured and cracked material reminiscent of rock, but purposefully laid and cleaved to act as foundation above the crust of the planet.

"Is that right?" Shenja asked, annoyed this time.

"What? I'm sorry, there is just so much to take in, so much that doesn't make sense here," Shenji said. "What did you ask?"

Shenja stood up on both feet, leaving Shenji kneeling over the artifact anatomy chart.

"Am I right in assuming that that is a set of light refracting organs on the nexus compartment? Like ours?"

Shenji unfocused his left eye from the layer of the nexus system before him and refocused it on Shenja's artifact. Shenja had found a second poster underneath what appeared to be a workbench in another room. This one detailed how round, lensed balls in front of the nexus connected to it, giving these creatures the ability to decode light signals from their world. His right eye would continue to examine the nexus system before him. That way his recording lens would continue trying to decipher the nonsensical tabulations on the poster into readable text.

"This is troubling," Shenji said. "This looks so similar to us... Even their finely detailed systems mirror ours. But how..."

Shenja interrupted, "I'm signalling central command for our uptake. This is a ridiculous assignment."

"... could these organisms exist? No other record I'm aware of mentions an organism in the genealogy with a singular nexus system like ours. In fact, this shouldn't be possible because... because..."

"It's not a real assignment Shenji, these artifacts have been placed here by Ascension and their kind. To what end, I'm not sure, but what we are seeing isn't possible. Not with what we know of this galaxy." Shenja summoned a spectral screen before him marking down their location, and silently sent his thoughts to the bridge of the research ship in orbit.

"One minute before uptake. They are completing scans of the other exposed crust formations and will be here after," Shenja said. He walked away to the foyer, mumbling angrily under his breath.

At that moment, the recording lens beeped, pulling Shenji from his focus on the posters. In bright text before his eyes, he read:

>Known script detected

>Genealogical: Ancient honorific scripture, n=.79

>Typological: s. Lexical, n=0.41, unreliable

>Translate?

Shenji froze, paralyzed by what his lens was showing him. An ancient honorific scripture? What did that even mean? How would any lexicon have any knowledge of this language, let alone know how old it was? What did honorific even mean in this context?

Shenji felt his skin prickle, his eyes as wide as dinner plates as he thought "translate: yes".

Immediately Shenji's vision was filled with white bars scanning each symbol on the poster before him. The bars would scan, and imprint in his vision an overlay of readable text in his native dialect. It took almost ten seconds to fully render the entire poster readable, but all he needed to know, all he could possibly take in before he was transported from his position back to central command, was the heading of the poster; T-- human ph-siological systems.

Human.

Hu. man.

Shenji had found the cradle of life. He had made a terrible discovery.

Tomb worlds were never pleasant to visit. Some, like Agara VII were irradiated balls of wasteland, the only remnants of a long forgotten, world ending war. Others, like Michelo II, were nothing more than clumps of rock, their atmosphere destroyed by some quirk of solar physics, leaving nothing but fossilised remains and the odd structural remnants. A select few, though, like Regatus III, were very much alive.

What makes them tomb worlds then, you may wonder, and the answer is simple. ‘Living’ tomb worlds had an active biosphere, albeit one that was usually incredibly (or even fatally) damaged or was in the process of recovering from some catastrophe. Most of these worlds were in the latter category, having been bathed in the cleansing fire of nuclear war (or some other global crisis) which wiped out whatever sentient life was unfortunate enough to have inhabited the planet, leaving the few surviving fauna and flora to rebuild the planet and all evidence of the previous sentient inhabitants destroyed or buried.

Ragatus III, though, was unique even amongst this select group of ‘living’ tomb worlds in that the biosphere in this planet was very much alive and kicking. Biodiversity was through the roof for a normal planet, yet alone a supposed post-catastrophe one. Ragatus was, according to scans, a full-on garden world that seemed better suited for Hextic life than even their own home world of Alfa Kenturae.

None-the-less, Ragatus was most definitely a tomb world; the desolate and decaying cityscapes, traces of industrial and nuclear pollutants, and other signs of past civilisation made sure of that. The question on everyone’s mind, though, was what exactly killed the natives? Sure, there was evidence of recent rapid rise (and subsequent fall) in sea level, but that should be nowhere near enough to have wiped out a species. The Hextic had gone through a similar cycle on their own planet when their own industrialisation went overboard, and while to took some work they had adapted to the change and rebuilt their own world back to what it was once the temperature lowered and the poles re-froze.

In order to answer the all important question of ‘where are the natives’, the ship that had just discovered this planet, HSS Acantus, had sent landing parties to several points on interest that had been detected from orbit; several extremely well preserved buildings doted throughout what seemed to be major cities, a single radio single that was still pinging from somewhere high in the mountains of the largest continent on the planet, and three extremely primitive launchpads.

Arriving at one of those launchpads via shuttle, Hedonius Macdecan, a tall man of thirty years, and his team of twelve began to search the pad and the compound surrounding it.

“Surelia” Hedonius beaconed one of his engineers over, “what do you make of this?” He gestures to the launchpad, which was little more than a huge slab of concrete with snapped metal girders sticking out in odd places.

“If I had to make a guess, sir” Surelia scratched his neck as he gathered his thoughts. “I’d say that this be a launching platform for one of those old-timey spacecraft, the ones we used to build on the planet surface back on Alfa Kenturae-like, although it’s bigger than any I’ve ever laid eyes on, sir.”

“Peculiar, don’t you think?”

“Wha? Oh! Ay, sir, it is right peculiar like.”

“Do you think they managed to build whatever was meant to be launched here?”

“I don’t rightly know, sir, but I would wager that If they were gonna build it they woulda built it here. That’s the way we used to do it back home, see.”

“So they never got round to starting then?”

“I wouldn’t righty know, sir. They coulda built ‘er and launched ‘er sir, or they didn’t built ‘er at all. Those be the only options I be seeing.”

“Don’t you think we would’ve detected something that big in orbit?”

Surelia shrugged noncommittally. “It’s possible we misidentified ‘er as an asteroid, or maybe she crashed on one of the planets in this here system. Heck, she could be floating through the void even as we speak, sir. There’s a lot of space to hide In space. All I know for sure is that if she was built, they launched ‘er.”

“Thank you, Surelia.” Because of his thick Lodnor accent, most people assumed Surelia was quite simple-minded, when in reality he was one of the smartest people who served on HSS Acantus. “This is Officer Macdecan to Officer Luentia.”

“This is Luentia, what can I do for you, Officer?”

“We’ve got evidence that the natives may have launched rudimentary spacecraft before their extinction, Id like to request we release probes to do a complete survey of the system and the surrounding space for any signs of them.”

The communicator was silent for a couple moments. “The Megart has granted your request, probes are being deployed now. Good day, Officer.”

“Good day.” The communicator disconnected with a soft beep, before a ping signalled someone was trying to contact him; he pressed the button to accept the call. “Macdecan here.”

“Sir! We’re in the compound on the western edge of the site, we’ve got something we’d like you to see.”

“On my way, Macdecan out.”

(Continued in next comment)

"Captain!", the radio squawked in the voice of Science Officer Hithlomiel. "My field analysis of the remains and archeological findings here is complete. It's fascinating, you need to see this!"

"Can you upload it to the ship's server?", Captain Narion asked.

"Yes, I'm doing it right now! By the Exalted One, Captain, you MUST see this!", Hithlomiel's voice was bubbling with excitement.

"This is some kind of error", Captain Narion thought as he started to peruse Hithlomiel's findings. "It's just Elfoid remains, nothing more... Wait!", a thought flashed in his head as he examined a photo of some posters found on the ruins. The beings depicted were, indeed, very similar to Elfoids, but on close inspection, it became obvious that they were not. The most obvious distinction was round ears. Precise anatomical drawings hid more details the Elfoids lacked. These people had 32 teeth, while the Elfoids had 28. There was a strange, tiny, dead-end intestine these people had and the Elfoids didn't. The eyes' retinas were literally facing the wrong way. But there were much, much more similarities than distinctions. These people had a tetracameral heart, a pair of lungs, a network of blood vessels and a gastrointestinal tract. Their bodies were made of eukaryotic cells with DNA encoded proteins.

"Science Officer, these people..."

"They looked like us, yes. But with one small caveat. They looked like the naturally evolved version of us. Untouched by genetic enhancement."

"So... this... this dustball, forsaken by the Exalted One, is the actual birthplace of the Elfoid kind? Not Anor? Do you have any further data? What were they like?"

"Ample medical data, Captain. It appears these beings weren't biologically immortal and got sick pretty often, so their doctors were never out of work. Here, I have uploaded some scanned old photos".

One photo depicted a woman that was impossible to mistake for an Elfoid, so bloated and massive she was. It reminded Narion of old science fiction flicks, where the evil aliens always looked like uglier, monstruous version of Elfoids.

"What is THIS?"

"Body fat, captain. Apparently it's a medical condition these people sometimes had, which caused their body fat to become so massive".

"Another thing edited out of us? Like those extra teeth?"

"Yes, and now I see why the extra teeth didn't make the cut. Look at these X-Rays of them growing wrong way."

Narion was extremely confused by Hithlomiel's excited, chatty attitude. All these images looked horrible. The hypertrophied body fat, teeth growing wrong way... What's next, hairless scalps? Misshapen spines? Tumors growing on skin? "Don't tell me they sometimes had all that, too!", Narion shuddered. The Elfoids' imperfect ancestors looked like Elfoids at best... and like sick twisted monsters at worst.

"You say they weren't biologically immortal. Any success with deciphering their records? What was their average lifespan?"

"About 65 Anorian years, or 80 local ones".

"So they died as barely more than children", Narion whispered in horror.

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