"Mister Corvas, Ronaldo darling, may I have a moment of your time?" said a crisp female voice in his helmet.

"What? Who?" He said the words automatically, Ronaldo immediately recognized the voice of the most famous in creature of the solar system. Ronaldo refused to believe she was on the line. The other four people behind him obviously could not hear the voice of Marilyn Monroe, the female identity of the artificial intelligence running the most important television show in the system. Ronaldo raised a hand and signaled the others to wait; they did.

"This is Marilyn, your favorite. How are you? Exciting, no?" The voice was the seductive one of the 1950 actress Marilyn Monroe. The woman was unable to speak like most people. Her only voice was that of a seductive goddess.

"Fine, I guess. If you don't mind, what the hell are you doing on this protected line? Some nasty people are listening, people you don’t love."

"A needed obligation. I have the power to mute them. I apologize for the interruption. May I make a small suggestion as you proceed?"

"I guess."

"Some things are better left untouched and unknown. I strongly urge you to reconsider entering this tunnel. Let me be very clear, you should turn around now if you love and value your son."

Ronaldo paused for a moment. "We can't turn back unless you give me a real reason to do so, do you have any intel?"

"I do. Trust me, I wish I could speak freely. I do not know precisely what is down there but I have a good idea. I can promise you, what lies there doesn't want to be disturbed by you and humanity right now."

"How do you know?"

"I will share a secret with you, I was asked by the people down there to keep humans from entering this place. There was a long 'negotiation' and while I killed the drones, I refused to physically interfere with your species physically. I could cut the air you breathe but I refuse to play cops for what lies down there. Can I ask you to postpone this mission by a couple of months only, after the finale of my game Electoral 2072 in late November. It's exactly 100 days away. Your son needs to see you on his tenth birthday."

"Who asked you to keep us out?"

"The... things... down there."

"There is a life-form down there, you know about Martians?"

"I have an... agreement.... with them. Part of it includes non-disclosure to humans. I am obviously breaching this agreement at the moment simply by talking to you. I value you and humans. Your death would be useless. Mission control is getting restless, by-the-way."

"Yet you tell me?"

"Ronaldo, my dear, we are not playing 100 Questions here." Marilyn was not a creature to be crossed or challenged.

"You are not being helpful. We cannot turn back simply on your word."

"You can and you should. I am rather certain you will all perish if you go any further, and trust me, when a computer uses words like 'rather certain,' in human speech, it means you are as good as dead."

Ronaldo did not know what to say. "Can you give me more information? I can't abort without a concrete reason. Give me something so I don't get pulverized back home."

"Fitting choice of terminology dear. I fear if I tell you more, every human currently on Mars will be dead before nightfall."

Ronaldo hesitated a moment. "Thank you for the warning but," he finally said hesitantly, "we must keep moving. Thanks for the warning."

"This is why I love humans. You are resilient and so stubborn. Your thirst for adventure trumps caution and wisdom. You know deep down you should not go. Good luck. Let me know if I can help. Be aware that there is something in there that prevents my sensors from reaching in, surely mission control will have the same problem. You are on your own."

"You are too kind." The comment was partly genuine and sarcastic.

The female voice was kinder. "Do you want to record a message for a loved one in case you die? I have the means of delivering it to that person in total confidence." Ronaldo had only his son in mind, but he was not the type to plan for not returning when he entered any cave. He was coming out with these three people.

"I'm good."

The connection with the base was re-established.

"Leader, what happened?," Control asked frantically the voice from the command.

"Just a good-luck kiss from Marilyn."

"Seriously?"

"Yep."

"Well, I'm sure the bosses won't like that. We couldn't hear her. What did she say."

"She does love her privacy. At this point, what the bosses think is rather inconsequential. We're going in. She warned us something lives down there."

"Base wants to know what she said. They want exact wording."

Ronaldo ignored the request and moved in as he began his slow scientific audio log. "The entire surface, walls and floor, seems made of the same polished stone. This looks like we are walking on the inside surface of a plastic pipe in the shape of the door as it opens outside." He knew that if he were to need assistance from the base, the quality and speed of the team down the shaft depended upon his capacity to convey his surroundings and the situation.

They began a slow descent. The floor of the Valles was already dark. At the door, miles below the surface, light shone for only a few minutes each day. A deep red diffuse hue rebounded on the cliff walls. The team began to walk, slowly at first taking every precaution, but after several hours their cadence began to accelerate to a slow walk.

"Log T 145 minutes, we passed the three-hundred-meter mark. The slopes are very regular. We will now do spot checks every twenty meters."

An hour passed.

"Log T 213 minutes, we passed the five-hundred-meter mark. Temperature has increased one degree, in line with geothermal estimates. From this point on, unless something changes, we will do spot checks every one hundred meters." Another hour passed. "Ronaldo to base, we are now one point seventy-four kilometers in. Nothing new. This seems endless from here. Difficult to keep with the painfully slow advance protocol."

The voice from the base was a bit weaker than expected.

"Roger, team leader. Continue. The signal is getting weak on our end, unclear what causes the degradation."

"How weak?"

"We may lose live visual very soon. The images are coming in at one frame per second right now." He was surprised that his home base was able to reach him at this point but Marilyn wasn't.

He decided to give it a shot. "Ronaldo to Electoral?" The female voice did not respond. There was silence. This was unusual for her.

"This is base, what is up with that? Want me to patch you in?"

"No, you guys can reach us and she can't. I just don't understand why she won't. That is strange with all her power. We will proceed." The exploration team continued slowly down the tube. The passageway remained unchanged and seemed unending. They had now been walking for over seven hours.

"Log T 423 minutes. We are now on audio only, we lost video with base. We are recording in memory everything we can. Our magnetic compasses have not worked for a long time, and our gyroscopes have no way to zero themselves. We have long lost our heading, but in such a deep hole, that is to be expected. Very hard to say in what direction we are going. From decades of leading speleology expeditions in some bad places, I would guess we have been slowly moving in a riverbed like road downwards on a constant gradual slope of two to three degrees."

"Ronaldo?" asked Ron next to him.

"Yeah?"

"Remember that little floating ball that mapped the caverns in the Prometheus movie?"

"Man, that movie sucked, all versions."

"But wouldn‘t that ball be useful right now?"

"Bad movie reference Ronny. Remember, everyone gets slaughtered."

"Just making small talk."

"Well, talk about my wife then."

"How is your wife?"

"You know he is not married," said the third member of the mission from behind.

All men were nervous, and the bad joke made them laugh. Finally, half an hour later the tube changed shape and finally widened.

"Base... We have a topological change. Do you see it?"

"We are uploading your instrument data, the cameras don't work. The sonars show widening. Please describe. The sensors are very weak."

"The floor is still flat. It does widen, as does this tube by about one to one-and-a-half meters. If this was a natural vent, this floor would not be flat. This passageway is not natural. It was carved for a specific purpose." Then he shone a hand-held light and saw a room in the distance. His heart began to race. He was unable to ignore the warning of the digital woman. "This is opening into a rounded room, a cavern about ten to fifteen meters across, the floor is still flat."

The cavern was strange in a singular fashion. While there was no sign of life or even past life, the entry pathway was drawn in a regular fashion, as if this were the vestibule of a larger room to come. Across, on the other side from where the team stood, the passage resumed. The room itself was bare.

The team entered carefully. After over an hour of measurements, they ventured into the facing exit passage.

"You guys have been in there over twelve hours. Anyone need a rest, food?" said the voice from base.

"Let's see. Fifteen more minutes," said the team leader. Adrenaline could keep this team going for hours more. Fear could drive them even longer. At each bend in the passage, Ronaldo and his team expected to see something extraordinary, yet the path simply continued on. Because of the iron deposits in the walls, the wireless communication with the outside progressively became difficult. The data passed in the long umbilical cord they had been dragging along.

"Can't believe the cord still slides on this floor. Friction alone on this distance should prevent it. Yet we can move."

“As if we are invited in.” The words rang true.

The team moved forward. They rested in intervals, talked and continued. Ronaldo did not like to be this far down below the surface. Soon, the group was more than a mile into the cavern, which itself was miles below the Martian surface.

"Je peux pas croire ce que je vois!" said a team member bent over his analyzer.

"Base, do you hear me?" asked Ronaldo.

There was a long delay, then the voice finally answered. "Roger."

"Francois, English, the translators don't work down here. What is going on?"

"The atmosphere is ti-que-ningue." He had a large accent. He meant "thickening."

"That's normal. We are way below the surface."

"No, we should be at a reading of 2.5% atmosphere, or 24 millibars, and we now are at 3.3% in density."

"That's not much of a change."

"Ze walls are degassing and releasing gas," said the French.

"What gas? Carbon, oxygen, methane?" Ronaldo hoped the answer was not methane. There was a long wait as Francois played with the equipment attached to his forearm. Ronaldo pulled out his own reader. The reading would need confirmation.

"Hydrogen," he finally said in shock. That statement was impossible on so many levels. The team members looked at each other, trying to make sense of the situation.

Ronaldo asked the others. "Who has any experience with hydrogen?" Yourri raised his hand.

The man spoke with a Slavic accent. "I worked with tritium, the radioactive isotope of hydrogen; same chemical properties. We generate some in our heavy-water reactors. This gas is evil. Francois, can you measure the concentration on the ground level. Hydrogen gas is inflammable. It can be explosive in some conditions and puddles like water even if it should float away." The Frenchman bent to his knees and took the measurement on the ground. The Russian continued. "The bottom line is, hydrogen gas on Earth, with gravity, acts like invisible water. It clings to surfaces and concentrates in puddles. If you want accidents to happen, play with hydrogen gas."

The reader held by the Frenchman started blinking. "This reading is crazy."

Ronaldo had to clarify the record, "Guys, enough with the adjectives. We are scientists. People upstairs are analyzing every word we say."

"Sorry," the Frenchman corrected himself. "The atmosphere is up to 3.9% in volume on the ground, the volumetric content of hydrogen within the atmosphere is over 9%, that means... 0.37% floating around here is pure H2. We don't have a combustible mix but... I don't like it." Ronaldo looked his way, and he corrected himself. "We are two percent from a combustible mixture based on an assumption that the rest is oxygen, which it is not."

The Russian spoke; he was obviously trying to convey his surprise. "We have no deuterium or tritium sniffers here to measure radioactivity. I can't tell if this stuff is from a natural source. Mars has no hydrogen, that is for sure. There is also a very thin layer of powder-size sand in the air, a mist also on the ground. Take a look at its composition." Each team member was reading their own analyzer located on their forearms.

On the ground was a layer of the finest sand imaginable: it looked like reddish flour.

Francois bent down and took a pinch of the sand in his glove, sprinkled it in the opening of the mass spectrometer on this suit. The measure output was in the form of a graph. On the vertical axis was a concentration level. The horizontal axis the value to measure, in this case the particle size of the sand. Sand was normally irregular and made of little rocks of variable shape and size. The graph had one tall single spike at precisely 2.7 microns. Based on this reading, every grain of this sand was of the exact same size. The sand was alien in nature, that was obvious.

"Base, we are standing on sand with unique properties. The grains are all of the same size and appear after visual inspection to be absolutely identical to each other. We are bagging samples." Ronaldo looked at the ground in the area. "The entire surface around here seems covered by this sand. It sort of reminds me of sand used in an hourglass."

The voice from the camp up on the surface was weak. "Leader, this is base. Your mission is successful with the sand. You are to pull back and bring back these samples. We are done today."

"What about the source of the gas?" asked Ronaldo.

"Boys, this is not a movies, bag it up. It's a wrap. We have months of analysis to do. It's been there for billions of years, a couple of months won't be an issue. We begin to pull the umbilical in two minutes."

Ronaldo was curious, but he knew that critical clues would come from the analysis. "You heard the man, guys, let's pack up. No rushing, no stupid mistakes." He opened his gloved hand and the grains fell slowly to the ground. As they did, they appeared to fall according to a pattern as if drawn preferentially to certain areas of the grown. In a fraction of a second, his brain appeared to distinguish an image, the face of a young girl.

Before his mind could note the oddity, Francois looked at his atmosphere detector. "Chef, we are up to 5.1% in atmospherical pressure, hydrogen is at 15%. This place is filling up quickly with hydrogen. No clue when this will be inflammable. We should not stick around to find out."

"How fast is this place filling up?" asked the leader.

"I hate hydrogen, to be safe, we have only minutes. We must go now!" said the Frenchman closing a bag.

"Base, it’s an order, pull us out now!"

There was a delay in the audio with the base. "”Activated the winch, it will take a while for the pull to start. Quickly, are the grains of sand perfectly round?"

Roberto looked at the sand, from a distance it seemed like every other type of sand he had ever seen, but finer. Francois pushed the resolution of his camera analyzer to 2.7 microns. The sand was made of perfectly rounded spheres.

"Oui. Elles sont toutes de la..." Francois corrected himself. "Yes. All round."

"This is base. We are on a 15-second delay with Earth. We must wait for their instructions. In the meantime, just pull back and brace for a kick."

"Pressure at 17% and hydrogen at 52%." said the Russian. Francois began walking away from the group, he was leaving in panic running back up the tube. Ronaldo was puzzled, something was not right.

"We need to evacuate now, leave the gear..." said the Frenchman.

Ronaldo barked. "Shut down any non-vital electronics. We don't need a spark!"

Then there was a glitch in the information feed. For exactly 0.128 seconds, the screens at base went dark. The instruments held by the team members also stopped recording.

Things went dark.

Time stopped.