The red mist pulled back like a red velvet curtain being drawn back from the set of an elaborate play, but when it pulled back, there were no actors, no energy filled thespians prepared for a night of comedic revelry or tragic woe. All that remained was simply a set, set dressings abandoned by time and overcome by centuries of age.

The group of them stood in the center of a wide city street, under a cloudy red sky. All around them dark masses rose up into the darkness, jagged buildings hidden partially from view by the curtains of red mist that, though they had drawn away, still lurked in side alleys and down narrow streetways.

The world around them was absolutely silent but for the moan of wind through dried and decaying plant matter.

Around them, the city was trapped in a slow state of active decay.

The glow of Polarus As and its sister stars Ab and B glowed distantly through the cover of fog.

Adam Vir spun in a slow circle blinking once to switch on his mechanical eye, adjusting the settings without thought as his superior mechanical vision penetrated through the fog reconstructing the city around him. For it was a city after all, as they eye recreated a facsimile of what had been , he saw buildings and doorways, and windows, and metallic structures that might once have been billboards or signs, lumps of metal that may or may not have been vehicles.

His visual readouts scrolled across his right field of vision.

Dr. Wilson, their biology expert was kneeling on the ground running his hand over the cracks in the roadway.

Something seemed off.

Adam couldn't place it, but looking around the city left him with a sense of uneasiness that was a product of both familiarity and uncanniness. There was soemthing about this place that gave him the impression that he was looking into a memory, a scene that he had witnessed but couldn't bring to the forefront of his mind, like having a word stuck on the tip of the tongue but being unable to recall it.

Like walking through your childhood preschool classroom, unable to remember entirely, but sure that you have seen the objects before, the colorful chairs, the tiny round tables, and the colorful toys.

He shook his head once, clutching the small alien figure tighter to his chest as a bank of fog rolled up the street blocking their once unhindered view.

"So.... Strange."

Adam turned down to where Dr. Wilson was crouching against the ground, hand resting on the roadway.

"What is it?"

Adam didn't want to speak, somehow breaking the silence felt like.... Like a breach of some unwritten rule.

Like speaking during a prayer or a eulogy.

Wilson leaned back ,"There are no plants here."

Adam frowned, "I don't...."

The man cut him off with a wave of the hand, motioning to the ground before him, "There are no plants here." He ran his finger through the crack in the roadway and held it up rubbing his gloves together and letting a thin trickle of dirt pass between his fingers, "There's plenty of dirt, and if this city was abandoned it would make sense that nature would have taken over at some point, but..... there's nothing, not in the city anyway..... and now that I think of it, the plants that had taken over the roadway outside of the city didn't.... well there weren't enough of them to warrant the time it would have taken the buildings to decay as much as they did."

He stood eyes scanning the ground.

Adam frowned, "What is that supposed to mean.

"It means, that when this city..... died... the plants died with it. The further you go out the more the plants managed to proliferate, which means that this was likely the epicenter for something that started and then spread outwards."

Adam felt a chill roll down his spine.

"Do you mean.... You think it killed them, whatever this was?"

Wilson shook his head, 'No, no because as far as what I've seen there are no bodies."

Adam turned to look at the streets and found that, the doctor was right. No animals, no aliens, nothing that even remotely resembled a body. The city streets were vacant and abandoned. Images flashed through his mind, and now he understood why it all seemed familiar. This was imagery out of every apocalypse movie and zombie media he had ever seen, accept it wasn't.

There was no sign of a disaster.

There were no bodies.

No signs of explosions or violence.

The city was not a post-apocalyptic nightmare. It had simply been.... Abandoned.

Adam couldn't help comparing it to the scene in Serenity (the movie created from the Firefly series) where River, their resident ship psychic, brings the ship and it's crew to the planet Miranda, a border planet controlled by the central government at one point, where chemicals had been put into the terraforming atmosphere as an attempt to stamp out all aggression.

As it turns out the chemicals work to well, and the population simply laid down to die, starving where they lay unwilling or uncaring enough to get up. All accept for those of which the chemicals had the exact opposite affect on.

He shivered looking around again.

But of course he wasn't gong to find deranged madmen driven to insanity by governmental attempts at making humanity docile.

This wasn't science fiction after all.

No, this was reality , and the reality had no bodies to shed light on what exactly had happened here.

Adam motioned the group forward, down the main street passing by buildings on either side with their facades crumbling.

The street itself was relatively wide open, not blocked with decaying vehicles or debris.

Their progress was unhindered up the street as they walked.

On both sides the buildings began to grow larger and larger, more unstable as they made their way further into the city.

Stone gave way to metal and glass, and other materials that had been more well preserved by time to the point where it was almost as if they were simply walking through a sleeping city. Adam kept his eyes trained to the alleys on either side of them, expecting at an moment to see a sudden burst of movement or the twitch of a shadow.

But he saw nothing.

The road ended just ahead of them, and the group drew to a stop, craning their heads back to look up at the massive building towering many hundreds of feet into the air. The red fog was thick around the building, making it difficult to properly see. Through a sudden rift in the cloud, Adam thought he caught symbols above the massive front entryway, which, though crumbling and indistinguishable, still seemed familiar.

There wasn't any sort of verbal agreement to go along with their actions, but together they stepped forward, up the small set of steps and through one of the doors, into a wide vaulted atrium . Red light filtered in from the doorways, casting beams cutting through a thick layer of dust that rose up from the floor.

Their feet echoed with dull thudding noises over the smooth stone.

"Does it no seem odd."

The entire group turned to find maverick standing at the center of the room looking back the way they had come. Her face was hidden by her helmet but there was something of uneasiness written in her posture.

"Doesn't it seem odd, that everything here seems the perfect size for us?"

Adam felt his chest tingle lightly.

"What do you mean?"

Maverick waved a hand at the doors, "The steps, the doorways, the desk over there, which I am assuming is a reception desk." She paused, "But that's just it isn't it. That's why all of this seems so wrong, so familiar..... because it IS familiar."

The humans shifted nervously, glancing between themselves with looks of awe.

"The architecture, and the city layout and just the way things ARE..... just like."

"Just like a human would do it." Krill supplied

The group of them instinctively backed into each other raising their weapons as they created a large open circle, as if expecting the zombie hoard to finally break their silence and come rushing out of the darkened hallways, though of course they never did.

Eventually Adam gave his orders radioing back to the ship, and waiting for a response from the crew before requesting additional teams to come and back them up. He had learned a few lessons from his tendency to make stupid decisions, but this time would not be that time. The teams arrived within the next two hours and set up a base of operations in the front lobby of the abandoned building, complete with radio relays, backups, generators, food and rations, and more than five ship shuttles ready to take off if needed.

Even with that many people and that much activity, it was still eerily quiet.

Only two teams would be allowed to move at a time while the rest provided backup from the ground floor perimeter. In a building this large they would clear from top to bottom, assuming they could find their way to the top with Adam's team acting as the spearhead on exploration. It wasn't simply because Adam always insisted on going first in these situations, but he Ramirez and Sunny were arguably the best fighters on the ship. Him because he was trained by both the saint of Anin and the King of Sparta, and the other two because of one half of that. Not to mention Ramirez's team, who trained under him, which made them more then qualified.

Not to mention that Adam was also wearing the Iron eye exo suit with attached armor planting making him a human tank if worse were to come to worst.

And so he led his people into the largest and darkest hallway, eventually finding a stairwell leading them up.

The cool stone was miraculously preserved with time, and they made it to the top of the building passing through abandoned rooms that seemed to have been left suddenly and without warning, though as others had pointed out, there was no sign of violence. The top floor was a single room that gave them access to a 360 view of the city below, though most of that was obscured by the red mist. A red mist that seemed to permeate the building more heavily than they would have assumed, leaving the end of some hallways obscured completely.

The top room cleared, they made their way down the steps onto the second floor, and here they found..... they weren't exactly sure, but desk and cupboards containing strange instruments, glass containment units that could have held anything at one time or another.

There was no sign of anything organic.

Windows grew absent the closer they drew to the center of the building, and they were almost surprised when they came out on one of the upper floors onto a large balcony that looked down hundreds of stories. The opening and balconies were in an octagonal shape, and in the center of that ring hung a massive figure.

The group stepped back in awe, craning their necks upwards.

What hung before them, by way of massive dried out tubes and steel cables, was.... Well it was hard to tell what it was.

It looked like a robot, sort of, or a suit of armor, at least forty feet tall with a massive helmet, and huge shoulders.

It looked like it had been in the middle of construction when the occupants of this place vanished, leaving its torso unfinished, and wires and tubes hanging from its stomach cavity like guts spilling from an open wound.

It didn't pass anyone's notice, that the suit's proportions.... Were distinctly human or humanoid in shape.

Red mist rolled and pulsed around the figure as they tip toed quietly along the balcony and into the next hallway.

With each abandoned silent room they came to, there were more questions to be asked. Test tubes containing glowing blue liquid and nothing else, rooms full of buttons and elvers that they dared not touch, vats of dried out green sludge hardened into rock, massive factory floors that had been in the process of making.... Something.

Miles and miles of hallways that went without natural light, only to step into a corner room that was filled with windows, and open floors with nothing else.... Simply an open room.

They kept walking recording as they went, taking images and samples and evidence to bring back to the GA, who their comms specialists were in communications with downstairs. They kept going and the further they went down, the less.... Familiar the rooms became. Sharp corners and right angles slowly began to curve becoming organic. Hallways were now longer straight but wound in tight circles, their feet no longer echoed over stone.

At the very middle of the tower, just below the last floor to have a balcony. They found a set of dark rooms. Originally the doorways had been blocked by thick titanium blast doors, but they had been left open rather than closed.

Stepping inside the group of them found nothing unusual.

At least not at first.

It was simply row upon row of drawers.

They followed this hallway inward until it opened up into a large circular room.

At the center of this circular room there stood a pedestal , and branching off from this room was more hallways vanishing into darkness those of which were also filled with drawers.

Adam walked over to one of the sections, tugging open a drawer that seemed larger than the others. Inside he found a small white silver ball, that glittered a perfect polished shine despite it's likely age. He turned it over in his hands as the others fanned out through the different hallways.

He glanced down into the box and read.

"The Eden Project."

He paused stepped back and then looked into the drawer again blinking his eyes multiple times as he tried to determine if what he was seeing was real.

Shaking his head he called for the others, who ran from the darkness assuming that there was something wrong.

Red mist rolled around their ankles like a shallow pool.

Ramirez and Sunny looked into the drawer, "More of those weird Symbols?" Sunny asked.

Adam looked at Ramirez who seemed almost as confused.

Maverick shouldered her way in and froze.

"I...." She looked up at Adam, "Can you?"

He nodded.

"What is going on!" Sunny demanded

The others filtered over in curiosity.

Adam looked at the group of them motioning to the other humans to take a look. Some of them saw nothing more than symbols.

But Dr Wilson gasped in surprise and stepped back.

"What!"

Adam turned to look at the other baffled humans and aliens, "It says.... The Eden Project."

Sunny frowned, "how do you know what it says?"

He shrugged, "I don't know, it looks like English to me."

Still holding the white silver ball in his hand he turned to look at the pillar at the center of the room, noting that, its very top had a small round indent in the top.

The kind of thing that might hold a ball of this size.

"Whatever this is, I think we are about to find out."