We were all honored to be the first terranauts in over five hundred years. But nobody was more excited than Jarek. You could hear his booming voice all through the corridors, singing, shouting, laughing; being chosen as an Explorer was his life's dream come true. And he was the craziest of all of us.

Our ship, the Mayfly, took six years at top speed toward earth, and the entire journey, Jarek was making his plans.

"I'm going to swim. Swim!" He told us, over and over again. "Water! On earth there's water everywhere. They used to call it the 'Blue Planet', before, well. Before. Swim. The thing I want to do most is swim." He even started looking up traditional Earth play, things our ancestors used to do for fun. But always focusing on what could be done on the water.

It was a long journey, but I suppose you know that. We had all been trained, but we couldn't help but be nervous. Our ancestors left the polluted Earth, so polluted that no human could possibly survive on it, in the hands of specially programmed nanobots. We had left them there, we had no way of knowing if they didn't just... run out. What if there was a glitch? What if the Earth we returned to was just as deadly and as dead as the Earth we left so long ago?

Jarek knew that it would be okay, and he was the first one in the pod, followed by me, then Dee, then Tadrian, and our aiming couldn't have been more perfect.

We landed on the beach. You've seen pictures. We've all seen pictures, but it was more beautiful than you could possibly know. The breeze was a cool welcome home, and it was softer, and more sweet-smelling than anything on our ships, the air in a steel space flyer is dead and stale and barely breathable. The air on Earth is alive.

"The nanobots did it! They did it! We can return home!" We were ecstatic. Jarek had jumped on Dee's back and was screaming toward the skies, those skies... they were the clearest blue, and the clouds where whiter than white. There is no beautiful thing I can compare the Earth to, because nothing compares to it except Earth itself.

"Now, let's get busy." Those were Jarek's words as he pulled off his helmet and stripped out of his protective suit, revealing shorts, the most old-fashioned, laughable things any of us had ever seen. "Busy," in Jarek's vocabulary never meant work. It always meant play... and play he did.

He'd studied up on something called "kiteboarding", and before I had even time to understand what he was doing, he was harnessing the wind, like our ancestors had done once. He took something like a brightly colored sheet and harnessed it with lines to his torso, took out a board, attached it to his feet, just like he must have studied in pictures for those six long years.

And out into the ocean he went. The ocean is bigger than the pictures, louder than our recorders tell us, and more wild and savage than your imaginations could possibly know. We somehow knew to fear it, maybe instinct, but Jarek dived out into it, and the wind carried him, and it... was magnificent.

And then there was blood. Everywhere. It went after his fingers and toes first, then up his legs, and arms, to his torso, until nothing was left. We saw him disitigrate into red nothing out into the water, and then he was gone.

We knew what we were seeing.

But we could not believe it.

Would not, until now.

We told you he died because of an accident, but it was no accident.

The nanobots our ancestors left on Earth to eat up the pollution were programmed to learn, not to just eat up pollution, but to take care of anything and everything that created that pollution. When we returned, their programming had continued to advance, and without any of the human creations, factories, machines, left to take care of, the nanobots had taken the next logical step.

The nanobots know that we are the creators of pollution. Council of the Republic, I beg you. Never send out more terranauts. We can never return.