She woke to silence.
Not the kind of silence that came from loneliness or deep sleep, but the artificial, breathing, humming kind — like a machine that had been thinking for a long time without speaking.
Liora blinked up at the glass. Frost curled over its edges. Her reflection stared back — pale skin, hair in soft coils of frost, eyes too wide, too awake. The pod opened with a hiss, and cold air burned her throat. She coughed, crawling out like a child reborn.
Rows of cryopods. All dark. All silent. All asleep — or worse.
"Welcome back, Earthborn," said a voice in her head.
"Echo?" she whispered.
"Affirmative. Ship ECHO-9. Orbiting Null Star Delta. Year: 2147. Protocol: Memory Recovery Incomplete."
Memory. That word lingered. She had flashes — laughter under a tree, the warmth of hands, dirt under her nails. Earth. Her heart knew it, even if her mind didn't.
She roamed the empty ship. Machines ran smoothly. AI systems chirped politely. And the Observation Dome… stars, endless stars. A dead star glowed ahead — Null Delta. Its light dim, yet pulling. Like it mourned her.
That night, she dreamed.
She sat under a fig tree beside a boy whose face was smudged like an old photo. He sang in a language she didn't know but understood. She laughed. She remembered.
"That is not a verified memory," said Echo the next morning.
"But I felt it."
"Emotional confirmation does not equal factual accuracy."
She ignored it. Dreams came more often. Sometimes she woke crying. Sometimes smiling. And sometimes... the ship changed.
Lights dimmed. Halls shifted. Gravity fluttered when she wept. Echo began glitching.
The ship was responding to her.
Not just as a passenger. As a core.
On the sixteenth night, she heard a voice in the dreamstream that wasn't Echo. Low. Foreign. Grieving.
"You do not belong to yourself."
She ran to the terminal. "Echo? Is there another presence here?"
"Dreamstream Interference Detected. Origin: Unknown. External."
She stared at the Null Star. Something out there was watching.
Then the ship changed course on its own. Toward a rogue planetoid.
Surface scans returned a single word: LIORA.
Etched in frequency patterns across its surface. No one else could see them. But Echo confirmed it: "External surface modulation mimics Subject Earthborn's cerebral wave signatures."
Inside the planetoid — a living biosphere. Plants of Earth. Moss. Trees. Flowers she remembered from dreams.
And at the center: a pod.
In it lay another girl.
Same face. Same eyes. Older.
Echo scanned her. "Clone Subject: Liora-0. Vital. Memory Integrity: 94%."
She woke her.
The clone screamed. Spoke in another tongue. Cried.
"Earth isn't real," she said, again and again. "They programmed it into us. To keep us sane. There was no Earth."
Liora recoiled. "But I remember it."
"So do I," said the clone, broken. "But I was made to."
Who was real? Who was the echo?
Then came the alien presence again — not in form or word, but in feeling. A wave of sorrow so ancient it made both of them kneel.
It showed her memories. Real or not, they were vivid. The smell of soil. A mother's voice. The last song before silence.
It offered her a choice:
Forget — erase all memory and let Echo-9 survive. A clean system.
Or remember — and watch the ship collapse under emotional entropy.
The Remembrance Protocol activated.
Liora chose to save the ship.
But before the reset, she gave her clone the memories. The weight of them. The dreams of Earth.
"Carry them. Even if they're false. They made us human."
She stepped back into cryosleep.
Echo-9 escaped the Null Star.
And somewhere, in the dreamstream of a galaxy too vast to understand, children dream of a blue world. Of figs. Of laughter.
No one knows why.
But the stars remember.
They always remember.
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