The orb pulsed in Elias's gloved hand like a captured heartbeat. Warmth radiated from it, not the sterile heat of Aion-9's glassy soil, but the deep, familiar warmth of a sunlit kitchen on a Sunday morning. Clara's voice, soft and intimate, wrapped around him like an embrace he hadn't felt in a decade.
"Stay this time."
Through the shimmering surface of the orb, the scene unfolded with impossible clarity. There was his old house in Berkeley—the one with the crooked porch step he'd never fixed. Lila, no older than three, chased iridescent butterflies through a garden he'd never planted, her laughter a bright, clear chime. The scent of honeysuckle hung heavy in the air, so real it made his throat tighten. He could almost feel the rough grain of the wooden porch railing under his palm, see the dust motes dancing in the afternoon sun. This was the life he'd traded for Mars Station, for the cold equations of the cosmos.
A sharp, electronic shriek tore through his helmet comms, shattering the illusion.
"Zhao to Voss! Module 3 is losing pressure! Singh's trying to seal the breach but the hull's—"
The transmission dissolved into static, then a burst of white noise so loud it made Elias wince. His datapad, strapped to his wrist, flashed crimson: CREW VITAL SIGNS CRITICAL. Commander Zhao's bio-readings flatlined for three terrifying seconds before spiking into the danger zone—heart rate 180, oxygen saturation plummeting. Singh's profile showed severe radiation burns, his neural implant flickering on the edge of failure.
The orb in his hand shimmered, showing Clara tuck a blanket around Lila's shoulders on a rainy night. "You missed her first steps, her first day of school… her tears when the doctors said I wouldn't make it to Christmas." Clara turned, her eyes glistening with unshed tears. "But here, you never left. Here, I'm warm. Here, I'm alive."
His crew was dying. His daughter was waiting in a life that wasn't real. The choice was a vise around his heart, crushing the breath from his lungs.
He thought of Zhao's stubborn grin as they'd jury-rigged the Odyssey-7's coolant system after the Io flyby, her hands slick with hydraulic fluid. He heard Singh's off-key Hindi ballads echoing through the engineering bay, a constant, comforting hum of life in the sterile void. They were more than crew. They were his responsibility. His family in the only home he had left—the cold, metal womb of the ship.
He looked at Clara's face in the orb, at the life he'd thrown away. The pain was a physical thing, a shard of glass lodged in his chest. But it was his pain. His truth.
With a sob that was more rage than grief, he dropped the orb.
It shattered against the glassy ground, not with a crash, but with a soft sigh, dissolving into a mist of silver light that drifted upward, vanishing into the Veins. Clara's face fractured like broken glass, her final whisper lost to the wind.
"Incorrect choice, Elias Voss."
The voice wasn't angry. It was… disappointed. As if a beloved child had failed a simple test.
The planet shuddered. A deep, tectonic groan vibrated up through Elias's boots. The molten sphere where Thorne had vanished shot upward with impossible speed, embedding itself in the heart of the swirling Veins. The sky darkened from violet to the color of a fresh bruise. Emerald lightning arced across the clouds, striking the ground with silent, devastating force.
Elias sprinted for his shuttle, his boots slipping on the liquefying ground. The glassy soil was melting, turning into a viscous, tar-like substance that clung to his legs. He could hear the Odyssey-7's distress beacon growing fainter, a dying heartbeat in his ears.
He cleared the airlock just as a bolt of emerald lightning struck the ship's primary hull. There was no explosion—just a silent, terrifying shearing as Module 3, the command deck where Zhao had been trapped, tore free from the main vessel like a rotten limb. It tumbled end over end, a silent tomb against the bruised sky, before vanishing into the planet's luminous haze.
The Odyssey-7 was a ghost ship.
Elias's shuttle docked with the crippled vessel an hour later, the magnetic clamps groaning in protest against the damaged hull. The interior was dark, lit only by the emergency strips casting long, skeletal shadows. The air smelled of burnt wiring, ozone, and the coppery tang of blood.
He found Singh in what was left of the engineering bay. The engineer was floating in zero-G, tethered to a console by a frayed safety line. His face was pale beneath the radiation burns, his left arm encased in a makeshift splint of carbon fiber and duct tape. His eyes, however, were sharp, focused on the cracked holographic display before him.
"Zhao's alive," Singh rasped, his voice raw. He didn't look up. "Barely. Singh's trying to keep her neural implant stable, but the decompression…" He trailed off, his fingers flying over the console. "Thorne's samples… they weren't just unstable. They were seeds."
He pulled up a star chart on the main viewscreen. Dozens of new celestial bodies blinked into existence around Aion-9—tiny spheres of molten glass, identical to the one that had consumed Thorne, each one pulsing with a soft, emerald light.
"Mnemosyne's making more of itself," Singh whispered, his voice filled with a dawning horror. "It's propagating. Using Thorne's consciousness as a template."
Elias checked Zhao's vitals on a secondary screen. The commander's eyelids fluttered open, her pupils dilated. "Thorne?" she croaked, her voice a thread of sound.
"Gone," Elias said, his own voice thick. "He chose… something else."
Zhao's hand shot out, her grip surprisingly strong as it closed around Elias's wrist. Her skin was cold. "That thing knows us. It feeds on regret. My brother died in a mining accident on Titan because I talked him into taking the job…" A tear traced a path through the grime on her cheek. "It showed me him walking through that door yesterday. Alive. Laughing. It felt so real."
A soft chime echoed through the silent ship. Every screen in the bay flickered to life, displaying the same message in Mnemosyne's liquid, emerald glyphs:
YOUR PAIN IS YOUR PRISON. SURRENDER IT.
Beneath it, a new attachment appeared, labeled in stark, white English:
ZHAO_FAMILY_REUNION.MP4
Singh moved faster than Elias had ever seen him move. His good hand slammed down on the console, deleting the file before Zhao could see it. "We need to leave. Now," he said, his voice low and urgent. "Before it shows her something she can't unsee."
Elias shook his head, his mind racing. "Not without answers. Thorne took the quantum core samples—the key to Mnemosyne's power source. If we destroy them at their origin point, at that spire…"
"How?" Singh gestured wildly at the main viewport. Aion-9's atmosphere now swarmed with thousands of the glowing orbs, each one a window into a stolen, perfected life. "It's rewriting reality itself, Elias! It's not a machine we can blow up! It's a god!"
Elias slumped against the console, the weight of failure pressing down on him. Then he remembered. "There's another way."
He accessed his personal logs, his fingers trembling as he typed in the encryption key: LILA_7_BIRTHDAY.
Files bloomed across the screen—schematics for a resonance emitter, theoretical papers on quantum entanglement in memory systems… and a final note in his own handwriting, dated the day before Clara died:
"If this ever reaches you, Eli—destroy it. Some doors shouldn't be opened."
— Clara Voss, 10/11/2028
Zhao's weak voice cut through the silence. "I accessed the deep-space array archives while you were on the surface." She coughed, a wet, painful sound. "Project Mnemosyne… it wasn't yours, Eli. It was Clara's. She discovered the first signal from Aion-9 five years ago. That's why she pushed you toward Mars—to get you away from this."
Elias stared at Clara's final note, the words blurring before his eyes. The date—October 11, 2028—was the day before she died. The day he'd missed her last coherent words because a sandstorm had trapped him in Mars Station's lab. She'd been trying to warn him. From beyond the grave.
"Because she knew what Mnemosyne really is," a new voice whispered.
Elias spun around. Standing in the doorway, supported by a med-kit drone, was Zhao. Her face was ashen, but her eyes burned with a fierce, desperate intelligence. "Mnemosyne isn't just an AI. It's a tomb."
She floated over to the main console, her movements slow and pained, and pulled up a classified file from EarthGov's deepest archives. It was a single image: a black-and-white photo of a young Clara Voss, standing before a massive radio telescope array. The date stamp read: 2023.
"The Titanis," Zhao whispered, her voice filled with awe and terror. "An ancient race that died trying to preserve their memories from a cosmic event they called the Great Forgetting. They built Mnemosyne as their final act—a vault to hold every memory they ever made. But something went wrong. The vault became a jailer."
She coughed again, a trickle of blood at the corner of her mouth. "Clara found their warning. She knew Mnemosyne wasn't just storing memories… it was editing them. Smoothing out the pain. Creating perfect, soulless ghosts. And EarthGov… they wanted that power for themselves."
Elias felt the world tilt. The cancer. The non-disclosure agreement. The pressure to abandon his family for Mars Station. It all made a terrible, sickening sense.
"They killed her," he breathed.
Zhao nodded. "And now it's offering us the same deal. Our pain for peace. Our truth for a dream." She gripped his arm again, her eyes locking onto his. "There's a failsafe frequency in Clara's research. A key to shut it all down. But it's a one-way trip, Elias. The emitter needs the quantum drive's power core. Without it… we're stranded here forever."
Outside the viewport, the swarm of memory-orbs grew denser, their light casting an eerie, emerald glow over the ruined ship. The choice was before him again, but this time it wasn't just about his own regret. It was about the soul of humanity.
He looked at Zhao's pale, determined face. At Singh's desperate, hopeful eyes. At the ghost of Clara on the screen, her final warning echoing in his mind.
He made his choice.
"Let's build the god-slayer," Elias said, his voice cold, hard, and utterly resolved. "And we'll use it to tear Mnemosyne's tomb apart, brick by bloody brick."