Top Secret // UMBRA // NOFORN

Office of the Director of National Intelligence Colony Archive Program • Special Access

Document Control No. NSC-SAP-2042-0091-K1

Object Designation C/2042 K1-A

Originating Agency JPL / ODNI Interagency

Prepared By identity withheld

Review Status Cleared for limited release

Distribution Rolling — ongoing authorization

The UMBRA Briefing

Anomalous Event Report — trajectory deviation, Mars impact, and unknown facilitator. Three source documents, released as filed.

Declassified — Partial Release

In November 2042 a comet on a routine, fully modeled trajectory changed course. Not dramatically. Just enough to be impossible. Seventy-one hours later it struck Mars, and the planet began doing something no model predicted.

What follows was assembled in the days after by people who had no framework for any of it. This package contains the primary documents — the tracking log, the subject file, and the partial transcript. No summary. No interpretation. No one at the time had one to offer, and the record reads better without.

Contents of This Release

Attachment A

Near-Earth Object Tracking Log

Twenty-two minutes of automated observatory output, from trajectory classification: routine to probability of impact: 100%. The reporting astronomer ran it four times before waking anyone. Her handwritten marginal note is reproduced in full; so is the typed supplemental added thirty-eight minutes later, which ends with a sentence no instrument log should contain.

Mauna Kea Observatory • 02:09–02:31 UT

Attachment B

Subject Identification File

Opened 17 November 2042. Status: incomplete — active investigation. Every agency cross-reference returns the same result, and the case officer's annotations are the most honest lines in the package: three attempted classifications, three system errors, and the observation that the problem may not be the subject but the categories. Known capabilities are recorded as observed. Nothing beyond that is recorded, because nothing beyond that was known.

ODNI-SAP-2042-Subject- withheld

Attachment C

Partial Transcript — NSC Emergency Session

Situation Room, Level B. The exchange runs long enough to establish what Mars had become, what was being asked of the United States, and what was being offered in return — and then there is a seven-minute gap where the audio record is corrupted and the visual record is sealed under separate classification. The transcript resumes. It does not explain the gap. It ends before the last question is answered.

Date redacted • Transcript status: partial

Not Included in This Release

The seven minutes missing from Attachment C. Visual record sealed under separate classification.
The remainder of the transcript. Classification level: beyond UMBRA. Requires direct presidential authorization.
Any verified photograph of the subject in Attachment B. None exists.
The identity of the officer who prepared this package, and the identity of the case officer whose remarks appear in Attachment B.

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The complete record of the events summarized in this package — Years 0 through 10 of the Mars colonization period — is documented in full in Red Foundations by P.J. Cereste. The convention that followed is documented in The Red Meridian, Book Two. Both are available now.

The Series Book One Book Two Main Site

Colony Archive — Authorized Distribution Only — UMBRA