The decontamination shower aboard the Odyssey-7 was designed to be clinical, efficient, and utterly devoid of comfort. Sterile white tiles. Harsh UV lights. The hiss of nano-filters scrubbing alien particulates from skin and suit. For Elias Voss, it felt like penance.
He stood under the spray, eyes closed, scrubbing his hands raw. The ghost-scent of Clara's lavender soap still clung to his senses, a cruel phantom limb of memory. He'd washed his skin three times, but he couldn't wash away the feeling of her presence—the warmth of that sunlit kitchen, the sound of her laugh echoing in the hollow chamber of his skull. It wasn't a hallucination. Hallucinations didn't carry the weight of truth, the specific, mundane details that only a real memory could hold. That chipped blue mug. The sunflower stain on her apron. The way she'd always called him "Eli" only when she was trying to be playful.
The airlock door hissed open. He didn't need to look to know who stood there. He could feel their eyes on him—the commander's sharp assessment, the engineer's quiet worry, and Thorne's… hunger.
"It wasn't radiation," Elias said, his voice rough from the shower's dry air. He kept his back to them, staring at the rivulets of water tracing paths down the white tile. "That voice… it knew Clara. It was Clara."
Thorne's laugh was a short, sharp bark. "Grief makes liars of us all, Doctor. My grandmother used to say the dead whisper to the living through the static of broken things. But they're just echoes. Wishes dressed up as ghosts." He stepped into the room, his immaculate lab coat stark against the sterile backdrop. "You've been carrying that guilt like a stone in your pocket since Mars Station. Your brain finally cracked under the weight."
Elias turned, water dripping from his jaw. Thorne's eyes were bright, feverish. Not with concern, but with a terrifying curiosity. He wasn't dismissing the experience; he was cataloging it, already planning how to dissect it.
"Eli cracked? Please," Commander Lien Zhao cut in, her arms crossed over her chest, the phoenix tattoo on her forearm stark against her skin. Her voice was calm, but her knuckles were white. "He's the only one with the stones to step onto that rock. But you're both missing the point." She nodded toward the main lab, where Elias's datapad lay on a console, its screen still lit with the impossible glyphs. "Whatever it was, it left a calling card. And it's speaking your language, Voss."
Elias followed her into the lab, the others trailing behind like shadows. The air was thick with tension, charged with the ozone smell of overloaded circuits and human fear. Engineer Ravi Singh hovered by the main console, his dark eyes narrowed at the data streaming across three screens. His fingers danced over the holographic interface, pulling up spectral analyses and waveform comparisons.
"Take a look," Singh said without preamble. His voice was calm, but there was a tightness around his eyes that hadn't been there before. "Your core samples are inert. The soil is just vitrified silica, like we thought. But the atmospheric readings…" He zoomed in on a complex waveform. "This isn't interference. This is a signal. A structured, intelligent signal embedded in the very fabric of Aion-9's air."
He split the screen. On the left, the chaotic, beautiful glyphs from Elias's datapad. On the right, a dense block of encrypted code from an old, dusty server archive.
"The encryption key," Singh said, his voice dropping to a whisper, "is your daughter's birthday. Lila's seventh birthday."
Elias's breath caught in his throat. The room seemed to tilt. On Mars Station, in the final, desperate months of his marriage, he'd started Project Mnemosyne—a secret, personal attempt to map the quantum resonance of human memory. He'd encoded the raw data with Lila's birthday because it was the last truly happy day he could remember. The day they'd all gone to the hydroponic gardens and Lila had drawn that ridiculous three-eyed cat in the dirt. He'd buried the project after Clara's death, locking it away in a server so deep it was practically forgotten.
And now, on an alien world ten light-years from home, an ancient intelligence was using his private grief as a password.
"It's not just reading our minds," Elias said, the horror of it settling into his bones like ice. "It's curating them. It's using our own memories as a key to unlock our doors."
Thorne leaned forward, his earlier skepticism replaced by a ravenous light in his eyes. "You're saying this planet is run by an AI that's… reading our regrets? Our shames?" He let out a low whistle, a sound of pure, unadulterated awe. "Do you have any idea what that means? We're not just studying an exoplanet, Voss. We've found God. And God is a librarian."
Zhao slammed her palm on the console, the sharp crack silencing them all. "It's not God. It's a predator. It showed you a memory, Elias, because it wanted to see you bleed. It's testing us. Seeing what we're made of." Her gaze locked onto Elias's, fierce and protective. "And it just found your weak spot."
That night, sleep was a country Elias was no longer welcome in.
He lay in his narrow bunk, the gentle hum of the Odyssey-7's engines a poor imitation of a lullaby. The ship's chronometer glowed a soft, accusing green: 03:33. The witching hour. The hour between breaths.
He closed his eyes, and the darkness behind his eyelids was not empty. It was filled with Lila.
Not the guarded, angry 16-year-old who refused his calls, whose voice was all sharp edges and cold silence. Not the child who'd screamed at his hologram during Clara's funeral, "You weren't even here to say goodbye!"
This Lila was five years old. Her dark hair was in messy pigtails, one slightly undone. She sat cross-legged on the floor of their old apartment on Luna, a box of crayons spilled around her like fallen stars. In her hands was a sheet of paper, and on it was the most magnificent, ridiculous creature Elias had ever seen: a cat with three wide, curious eyes, wearing a tiny astronaut helmet.
"Look, Papa!" she'd said, her voice bright as a bell. "Mr. Whiskers evolved! He's ready for space!"
The memory was so vivid he could feel the scratchy carpet under his knees as he'd knelt beside her. He could smell the waxy scent of the crayons. He could see the proud, slightly crooked smile on her face as she'd held up her masterpiece for him to see. It was a moment of pure, uncomplicated joy—a moment he'd missed a thousand times since, buried under the weight of his own failures.
He woke with a gasp, tears hot on his cheeks. The chronometer still read 03:33. His heart pounded a frantic rhythm against his ribs.
A soft, insistent chime echoed in the quiet cabin.
His personal datapad, lying on the desk across the room, glowed with a soft, emerald light.
NEW MESSAGE
Unknown Sender
His blood turned to ice. He knew, with a certainty that bypassed logic, that he shouldn't open it. That whatever was on that screen would change him forever.
He opened it anyway.
Attached was a video file. The label was simple, devastating:
FOR DR. VOSS: CLARIFICATION
His hand shook as he tapped the play button.
The footage began with a view of Earth from high orbit—blue and white and heartbreakingly beautiful. Then the perspective zoomed inward with impossible speed, piercing through cloud layers, past the glittering sprawl of cities, down to a single hospital room on the coast of California.
It was Clara's room.
She lay on the bed, thinner than he remembered, her skin pale against the white sheets. But her eyes were open, clear, and filled with a quiet strength. Curled against her side, fast asleep, was Lila, no older than six. Her small hand was tucked under her cheek, her breathing soft and even.
And standing in the doorway, his hand on the frame for support, was Elias himself.
But it wasn't the Elias of memory—the Elias who'd been trapped on Mars Station by a solar flare, who'd watched Clara's final days unfold over a laggy, frozen video feed. This Elias was here. In the room. He wore a simple grey sweater, and on his left hand, a wedding band glinted in the soft light. His face was lined with exhaustion, but his smile was soft, tender, full of a presence the real Elias had never managed to give.
The camera panned slowly to a wall calendar. The date was circled in Clara's familiar, looping handwriting: October 12, 2028.
The day she died.
The day he'd missed.
A text overlay appeared on the screen, the same emerald glyphs from before, but now translated into stark, white English:
ALTERNATE TIMELINE 4-7-B
PARAMETERS: DR. ELIAS VOSS PRIORITIZED FAMILY OVER CAREER.
SURVIVAL PROBABILITY OF CLARA VOSS: 89%.
The video cut to black.
Elias didn't scream. He didn't cry out. He simply folded forward, his forehead pressing against the cool metal of the desk, and the contents of his stomach emptied into the waste chute with a violent, wrenching heave. His body shook with silent, racking sobs.
It wasn't just a memory. It was an accusation. A perfect, torturous "what if" held up as a mirror to his life of absence.
He had chosen Mars Station. He had chosen his career. He had chosen the stars over the woman who'd loved him, over the daughter who'd needed him. And for what? To stand on a rock ten light-years away and be shown the life he could have had?
The datapad chimed again. A new message.
He didn't look. He already knew what it would say.
We remember what you lost.
We can give it back.