Day 11: The best-laid plans of men and spacemen

On a mysterious alien planet, marooned humans find that they must play along with ancient beings' games.

One of the weaknesses for creatures living in a world with limited diversity of intelligence is that a single point of view tends to eclipse others. For example -- humans. For millenia, they were alone in the universe. They understood the world within the context of minutes, hours and days; their lifespans -- of about 100 years by the time colonizing space travel became a reality -- meant that they rarely had to plan for more than a decade or so in advance. Even their most visionary members struggled to lay plans that would span centuries.

When a weak, but cleary artificial, signal was detected from a habitable planet, exploration teams were dispatched to examine it. What they found was a world that was extensively modified; ancient machinery, most of it with no immediately obvious purpose, lay in disrepair across the planet. The builders seemed to have perished -- in some places, where the conditions were right, their mummified bodies remaind; in others, their corpses had moldered away, leaving only scattered bone fragments. There was no sign that anything more complex than grass still lived.

That changed after several nations' teams had established base camps, however. The machines flared to life one evening, sending red lights arcing into the sky. Where these lights crossed orbiting ships, the craft cleanly separated. Within moments, the vessels were destroyed, their remains drifting into the atmosphere and spectacularly burning up as they streaking across the night sky.

Voices, heavy with self-importance, declared themselves to the camps -- the explorers had entered into a contest, and would work to advance their new patrons' interests. Teams that satisfied their patrons' goals would be granted passage off the planet. Most of the teams immediately sought the source of the voices; results were mixed. Some returned without finding any information. Some never returned at all.

Now, each of the teams works to fulfill daily instructions from their disembodied masters. Sometimes they're given innocuous tasks; other times they're asked to directly interfere with other teams. Some teams have been ordered to slay their opponents. Most teams also work as they can on uncovering the nature of their masters. It seems that the patrons have difficulty observing activities carried out at night; during the twilight hours, groups of archaeologists have taken to excavating in search of clues. Many teams have diplomatic and information-sharing units that contact each other and pool knowledge after hours.

What they've found so far is frightening -- it seems as though the process they're experiencing has happened before, perhaps dozens of times. It also seems that the voices, whoever -- or whatever -- they are, have been building toward some grand goal, and that the individual actions of each team have been helping cement the foundation for some mysterious event.