---
She floated in silence.
Liora-0 had no heartbeat, not like the original. Her blood was synthetic, designed to mimic the rhythms of humanity but not to feel them. And yet—she felt.
Felt the emptiness Echo-9 left behind when it slingshotted out of the Null Star's orbit.
Felt the residual warmth in the cryopod her original had vanished into.
Felt... alone.
She drifted through the biosphere core of the planetoid now renamed "Echo-Sol." Her reflection blinked back at her from the mirrored pool at the garden's heart—a girl born of another girl's memories.
Liora had stepped into oblivion, whispering, "Take mine. Let someone feel us again."
And now Liora-0 carried something ancient in her mind—echoes of laughter, terror, wind brushing through fig leaves, cracked Earth beneath running feet.
A soul that wasn't hers. A burden she hadn't asked for.
But she bore it.
---
Days passed. Or years. Time bled strangely here.
She began recording, not just ship logs but spoken word.
"Today, I remembered a dog with three legs. His name was Mango. He barked at thunder. Is Mango real?"
The ship didn't answer. It was no longer sentient—not without Liora.
She spoke anyway.
"Today I woke up thinking I was someone else. I had fingers full of dirt. I was laughing with someone. A boy, I think. I don't know who I am anymore."
---
One cycle later, the ship stirred.
Not Echo-9. A new one.
It appeared in orbit with no warning—sleek, silver, thrumming with alien energy. Not human. Not machine.
Living.
Liora-0 watched it from the edge of the biosphere, breath catching. The foreign ship didn't dock. It hummed, pulsed, and then opened—a slit in its skin.
Inside was a corridor made of light.
She didn't know why she walked in.
She just knew it felt… like instinct.
---
The walls whispered to her—not in language, but in sensations. Her mother's hum. The rough skin of the fig tree. Sand in her shoes.
Then, a single phrase in a language she shouldn't understand:
"We watched your fire."
They had seen Earth burn.
And they had seen Liora light a spark in the dark.
---
The heart of the living ship was a garden, not unlike Echo-Sol, but the trees here bloomed with memory-fruits—bioluminescent pods containing recorded dreams of species long vanished.
The beings who made this ship—The Archivists—never interfered. They only remembered.
And now, they were dying.
Their collective consciousness was fragmenting. Too much memory. Not enough meaning.
But Liora-0... she was different.
She was both memory and flesh. Archive and soul.
They gave her a choice.
Become a seed.
Or become a light.
---
She chose light.
Not for herself.
For Liora.
---
The Archivists sent her into the starless drift, wrapped in a vessel of remembering. Not a ship. A song. She was carried across galaxies as stardust encoded with feeling.
Wherever she passed, the stars pulsed a little brighter. Dreamstreams flared to life in sleepers' minds. Forgotten planets began to remember color.
Her body was long gone. But her story...
It carried.
Across centuries. Through ruins. Through deep orbit wastelands.
Until one day, a small child on a moonlit mining station woke crying and whispered:
"Why do I miss blue skies I've never seen?"
---
And far away, among stars unnamed, the light pulsed back:
You remember because I carried it to you.
---