Belnar Imperium
The Belnar Imperium were an alien race that established a colonial presence on Mars. Their current whereabouts are unknown.
Martian Ruins
Currently, all information about the Imperium has come from archeological evidence discovered at the Belnar Complex on Mars. Located 3700 km west-northwest of Olympus Mons, 900 km souteast of Elysium Mons, and 375 km north of the northernmost of the Cerberus Fossae, this sprawling ruin has provided humanity with a wealth of information regarding our vanished neighbors.
One unequivocal fact is that 36.4 ± 0.3 million years ago, a spacefaring race established an outpost on Mars. It is known that the race was not native to Mars, as there exist artifacts of extra-areological provenance, based on comparative isotope analysis. In fact, the isotope distribution does not match that of any known location in the solar system, strongly suggesting an extrasolar origin for the Belnar.
The precise origin of the Belnar is currently unknown, though records have been uncovered giving tantalizing hints of a relatively local origin. A tactile plaque (see below) placed on the outside of what is believed to the main Belnar administrative building in the northern ruins appears to be a star chart with a number of nearby stars highlighted. Whether any of these are the Belnar homeworld, or whether they are just other locations visited by the Belnar (or perhaps even the homeworlds of other starfaring species) is unknown.
No biological specimen (either Belnar of of any other organism) has survived the ages since the Belnar city was abandoned, so a precise biological analysis of the Belnar is impossible. Based on the facilities, artifacts, and other remnants, however, an incomplete picture can be assembled.
Several tactile plaques contain the gross body plan: three lower appendages arranged with radial symmetry, a stout, barrel-shaped midsection, three whip-like upper appendages, and a low, domed projection from the top of the midsection. From workstation ergonomic considerations, we can deduce that the average Belnar was approximately 120 cm tall. Belnar "chairs" are more akin to low stools which take most --but not all-- of the weight-bearing load off the legs.
Belnar workstations and tools are typically rod shaped, with control surfaces arranged in a spiral fashion all the way around. It is surmised that Belnar arms were long, tactile, super-prehensile appendages, tipped with a pair of opposing muscular "fingers," somewhat akin to the tip of an elephant's trunk, but more gracile. In order to operate the control rods, Belnar anatomists hypothesize that the entire surface of the arm had extremely dense innervation and musculature, allowing fine manipulation of surfaces all along its length, with gripping of objects handled by the arm-tips and by prehensile wrapping.
The primary sensory mode of the Belnar is unknown. The tactile plaques have no obvious features analogous to "eyes," though this doesn't rule out their existence. However, at the very least, the Belnar appear to be unaware of the perceptual concept of "color," as the interiors of all Belnar installations (as well as their fixtures and artifacts) have no artificial pigmentation or coloring. Every item is simply the color of its constituent materials.
The leading theory is that the Belnar perceived the world primarily through their tactile sense. The surfaces of most Belnar equipment (as well as floors, walls, and sometimes ceilings) are densely covered with intricate patterns of raised and recessed markings. These markings are believed to be either written language or some more fundamental communications / information presentation protocol. In the Belnar xenology community, the term "tactograms" was coined to describe the markings. Work on deciphering these tactograms has been slow-going, though a small subset is thought to have a reliable correspondence established. No other form of communication has been discovered.
Complicating the matter is that the static tactograms engraved into the majority of surfaces appears to be a limited subset of a more general class of tactograms. Nearly every human language is recorded using a static set of glyphs, without any extension in time. It would seem the vast majority of Belnar tactograms have a temporal component to them. The same static tactogram can apparently represent quite different notions depending on its time evolution. In this respect, the Belnar language is more akin to modern signing languages.
Predominant among the evidence lending credence to the "tactile language" theory are the enormous quantity of "tactile plaques" present in the ruins. Most are electromechanical devices capable of changing their surface geometry to display tactograms. In a few extraordinary examples, an entire tank filled with a ICEF-contained Trans-Newtonian fluid is capable of acting as a three-dimensional tactile plaque, but all have quite sophisticated surface manipulation capabilities.
In general, these devices are thought to be the equivalent of our raster- and vector-scanned two- and three-dimensional display screens. Some plaques are paired, with the assumption that one is for input and one is for display, but the majority seem to combine both functions into one device.
It is through these plaques that we get most of our information about the Belnar. While our grasp of the tactile language is still extremely tenuous, guided trial-and-error exploration with the devices has given us access, in a few cases, to Belnar data. In many cases the retrieved data is incomprehensible until we develop a further understanding of the tactile language, other data is at a coarser scale and represents the tactile equivalent of a photograph or video.
Using 3D laser scanning techniques, it is possible to adapt from a tactile plaque to a human-readable display. It is via this mechanism that we have been able to begin to interpret the vast quantities of Belnar data still existent in their electronic record systems. We have a long way to go in understanding this data, but some insights have been made into the Belnar way of life.
One particular building contains dozens of tactile plaques that depict various Belnar going about their lives. Some researchers speculate that this building and its contents were specifically created to inform future archaeologists about the Belnar, though there is nothing like a Rosetta stone to help with interpreting the imagery. For this latter reason, other xenologists suspect that the facility was a knowledge retention installation, meant to transfer useful knowledge of industrial processes to future generations. For this reason, the building has become known as the Academy.
What is is depicted in the Academy is what appears to be a very communal society. Belnar work exclusively in units that Belnar xenologists have come to call Trios, with two Belnar working while one appears to supervise. However, the supervisor role is rotated regularly between members of the Trio. In virtually all industrial applications viewed in the Time Capsule, there does not appear to be any higher tier in the hierarchy; there are no foremen, no managers, and no executives. The Trio is the fundamental and only functional worker unit.
Unfortunately, there are no tactile plaque depictions of leisure activities (indeed, no facilities dedicated to that purpose have yet been discovered) or Belnar home life. Whether any sexual dimorphism (or, indeed, any gender at all) exists is unknown. There are no depictions of Belnar reproduction or offspring.
A work-home split has been posited due to the fact that the majority of industrial concerns are concentrated in the northern ruins, while the southern ruins seem to be group dormitories and housing facilities. It is possible that less durable single-Belnar habitations existed and have been erased by time, but that not a single trace exists, while numerous dormitories are still extant would lend doubt to that supposition.
Physiology
Technology
UNRA xenologists believe that at the time of the Mars ruins' abandonment, Belnar technology was not much more advanced than humanity's[1]. The discovery of the 36x chemical rocket-propelled engines beneath the ruin's surface supports this hypothesis[2]. Analysis showed that the rockets were as close to the theoretical limit as appears possible for that technology, and used hydrogen and fluorine as reactants[3]. The use of chemical rocket propulsion posed a mystery, as such travel would still be incredibly slow and incapable of passing jump gates into the Sol System and subsequently reaching Mars.
