Day 1,107

By the time we discovered life on another planet, it was too late... for them. The disaster we'd barely scraped through - a space-born virus that nearly turned all our oceans to a pus-like primordial ooze, the first world with intelligent life hadn't survived.

All we found were rotting buildings, rotting bodies and countless videos of their final moments. With enough time we'll be able to translate what they're saying, though the look of desperation and agony on their faces as they die on screen gives us a pretty good idea of what they're saying.

The video that stood out the most earned the nickname of Bone Man, for the way the rot had eaten away at their face and upper torso to the point where we could see their internal organs pulsing frantically as they spoke with an absolute lack of emotion.

In the background three aliens collapse and you don't see them get back up again, all the while the Bone Man continues to talk. Maybe they're describing the how the virus devastated their world as it nearly did ours, perhaps they know its origins, perhaps their people are its creators.

Until we can decipher their language, we know as much as we did before we found them.

The second world we found held no records, it had long since been overrun by the virus to the point that all our scans showed was the primordial ooze with a few metal skeletons of presumed buildings poking out. Each one of these fragile spires held dozens of rotting bodies, most of the remaining flesh was covered in bite marks.

When the footage went public people swore continually that the bodies were still moving, all reaching up towards the probes and they were right. They had been asking for help without words but with the virus so far-gone in their systems and their bodies so utterly foreign to our medical knowledge there was nothing we could do.

At least, we all tell ourselves that in the hope that we will sleep easier tonight and not dream of their warped, rotting bodies with jaws dangling by a pus-drenched thread of muscle as their sightless eyes stare into ours, begging for help they know they won't receive.