The Glass Planet
I have always wanted to write short stories. Nothing too serious, just an attempt at structuring all the random ideas that pop into my head and creating something that sort of reads like a short story. I am going to publish ideas as they come, mostly unpolished, and expand some of them into proper stories later. Possibly. This is the first one.
It is the year 2350. Humans have been travelling the Milky Way for a while now, far enough that the edges of the map are mostly survey work.
A small research vessel working one of those edges picks up something odd. A large concentration of glass, bright enough to stand out in the readings from a long way off. They follow it to a planet orbiting unusually close to its sun. Closer every year, as it turns out. The planet is falling in, slowly.
They send a probe. The data says almost the entire surface is glass. In places it is kilometres thick.
The probe makes a low pass and sends back pictures. There are shapes in the glass. Hollow ones, scattered across the surface and stacked in the layers beneath it. They look like beings. Almost humanoid, with four limbs of some kind. Further in, the glass holds the outlines of larger structures. Cities, probably.
Humanity has found another civilisation. Just a little late.
Years of observation follow. The working theory goes like this.
The planet was once covered in sand. A large impact knocked it out of its orbit and into a long, stretched loop that brought it close to its sun once every cycle. On each close pass the surface melted. On each far swing it cooled into glass. Thousands of orbits later, the glass was kilometres thick.
The beings were not preserved in it so much as remembered by it. Most died early, buried under ash and sand before the worst of the heat arrived. Their bodies burned away long ago and left hollow shapes in the glass, the way Pompeii did.
Judging by what the glass kept, they were advanced. Possibly more advanced than we are.
Tidal forces are still dragging the planet inward. Some researchers think part of the civilisation went underground, where a few kilometres of rock and glass would keep things cool. Nobody has found them yet. The work is ongoing, and the clock is running.
So this is how humans finally confirmed they are not alone in the universe. With a graveyard, slowly falling into a star.