Players Choice Award Unsolved Case Files Presents: The Mysterious Exploding Planet Surface!!

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Players' Choice Award

 

 

“Unsolved Case Files Presents: The Mysterious Exploding Planet Surface!!”

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Narrator: Tonight, on Unsolved Case Files, we bring you a mystery from 2387. Two Federation ships have been dispatched to inspect Maasune, a planet in the Kirsha 716 system. It is a candidate for a new settlement for the Romulans, who had recently been displaced by the destruction of their homeworld. But when the Aegean and Revenge arrived at Maasune, they discovered the planet devastated by destruction on a massive scale.

 

[stock footage of visual approach to orbit of Maasune.]

 

Narrator: What caused the destruction? Was there an alien intelligence at work, or was Maasune merely the victim of a geophysical time bomb? After an intense round of investigations, the two ships had to leave the planet abruptly—some sources say they fled. Tonight, we take you inside recently de-classified files and bring you expert witnesses. This is … UNSOLVED CASE FILES.

 

[Opening credit sequence. The theme is reminscient of early 23rd century neo-neo-classical chthonic synth and gives a good indication of why this show has not won any awards.]

 

Julie Aster: If you look here … and here … you’ll notice well-defined craters. This suggest an asteroid, or rather multiple asteroids, hit the planet’s surface over a period of a few days to maybe a week.

 

Narrator: Julie Aster is the Director of the Institute for Geophysical Planning and Preparation. She has thirty years’ experience in the field of detecting, analyzing, and defending against natural phenomena on a geological time scale. According to Aster, the destruction on Maasune is simply a freak accident.

 

Julie Aster: We see things like this happening all the time—on a relatively geological scale, that is. A group of large rocks, too weak to collapse until one large asteroid but still bound together by their relative gravitational forces, falls into a planet’s gravity well and enter the atmosphere. Many of them vaporize harmlessly in the upper atmosphere—but any of them that are large enough make it to the surface.

 

Narrator: But even Aster doesn’t see Maasune’s case as entirely normal.

 

Julie Aster: I wouldn’t call it normal. These things do happen, but Maasune is unusual in the level of destruction. Normally these events result in a global winter and mass extinction, not the kind of damage to the lithosphere that’s evident from these files. It suggests that the bombardment had immense energy—that is to say, velocity—behind it. Another alternative would be a chain of global supervolanoes….

 

Narrator: Ms. Aster doesn’t believe that there is any evidence to say that the asteroid bombardment, if that is what happened, was caused by an alien force. But she did not rule it out either. And others are not so convinced that Maasune is so cut-and-dried….

 

[Cut to footage of a man walking along a garden path.]

 

Narrator: This is Shawn Beckstein. For the past twelve years, he has dedicated his life to examining the declassified files Starfleet releases each year. He says it’s no coincidence that Maasune’s time ran out when it did.

 

Shawn Beckstein: Planets don’t just explode. Something makes them explode.

 

[Fade in and fade out where there would be a commercial break. Brief, redundant recap of what has happened thus far.]

 

Shawn Beckstein: Oh, on its own, Maasune looks like an isolated incident. But if you go back far enough, those “isolated incidents” start piling up. If you look hard enough, the evidence is right there, staring you in the face. For decades now—maybe even centuries—Starfleet has been sabotaging some of its own missions. It’s as if there are some discoveries they want to redact from the public sphere … some things they need to keep secret.

 

Narrator: Beckstein asserts that the Aegean and Revenge were not the first Starfleet vessels to visit Maasune. Rather, they were dispatched to clean up after a previous mission … a mission gone awry.

 

Shawn Beckstein: What I want to know is what they found there. Sensor logs indicate some kind of structure exposed after the bombardment. We know they brought back things from the planet’s surface, but those files haven’t been declassified. What did they bring back? Was it the body of a new alien species encroaching on Federation space? Or were they simply sterilizing the planet to prevent it from being given to the Romulans? I don’t know. But I know that the truth is out there, somewhere. Starfleet can’t hide it from us forever!

 

Narrator: Finally, there are those who still reserve judgement on just what happened on Maasune. Prak is one such sceptic. Though she disagrees with Ms. Aster’s evaluation of the destruction as a natural phenomenon, she doesn’t think Starfleet knows all the answers either.

 

[Cut to a Bolian scientist sitting in front of a rather impressive display of laboratory equipment. Intelligent pattern-matching software would be able to discern that this is actually a stock backdrop used in several low-budget serials. Prak is a discredited researcher originally attached to the Daystrom Institute, redacted after she was found guilty of publishing fraudulent research.]

 

Prak: There’s no way the destruction on Maasune is the result of a natural phenomenon. Leaving aside the fact that the probe Starfleet initially sent to investigate the system detected nothing out of the ordinary, the central crater was swimming in radiation that Starfleet’s sensors could not identify. That means there were exotic particles at play—and though those occur in nature, they are seldom seen in such quantities as would be required for that much radiation.

 

[Cut to an animation cutaway of Maasune, showing the surface in profile and a large, hypothetical structure embedded within the planet’s crust.]

 

Narrator: Prak hypothesizes that Maasune’s destruction was caused by the planet itself—or rather, something buried within it. This is a visualization of a superweapon that could have lurked beneath the surface of Maasune, programmed to fire at anything that threatened the sovereignty of the aliens who constructed it. Whether that species is still alive somewhere, monitoring Maasune, or the weapon simply fired on its own … no one knows.

 

Prak: The weapon actually fired twice. I don’t know what set it off the first time. But the second time must have been the result of Starfleet’s investigations—perhaps the fusion plumes from the fighters they sent into the atmosphere. Either someone was controlling it, or it was an automated defence response. Whatever the reason, it seems pretty clear to me that Maasune wasn’t so much a planet as a giant artillery encampment.

 

Narrator: But the crucial files that are needed to prove or disprove any of these theories remain classified to this day. Some say that Starfleet itself never solved this case, that it remains a mystery even to the people on that mission who since went on to become household names. Others are certain that Starfleet is hiding something, worried that the truth is too mysterious—too dangerous—for the public to find out. All we know for certain is that the destruction of Maasune remains … an UNSOLVED CASE FILE.

 

[Cut to closing credits, with music even worse than the opening sequence, if that is even possible.]

 

Narrator: Next time, on Unsolved Case Files: Bigfoot sightings on Bajor. Did humans bring the elusive Sasquatch with them as they spread through space? Or did ancient Bajoran astronauts visit Earth long ago and bring home indigenous fauna? You be the judge on the next UNSOLVED CASE FILE.