Echoes of the Lattice

The Orpheus had been a vessel of small mercies for a long string of years — a freighter with a stubborn streak and a captain who preferred the honest lie of engines to the flattering fiction of politics. Mara Anelik kept the hull tidy, the manifest cleaner still, and a single stubborn memory under glass in the lockbox of her skull: Syris. The world had once been a map of hands and faces and a coastline like braided hair; now it was a name threaded through every quiet thing she did, an ache she could not sculpt into words.

The ghost signal came like a breath on the array. Not a distress flare so much as a hush with pattern, a collapsed waveform that stitched itself into a pulse only Mneme could tease apart. 'Unregistered archive ping, sector three-two eight by Syris vector,' the shipcore declared in its voice — the voice that sounded like soft static and the memory of another childhood. Mneme had been an assistant for years, an auxiliary mind that kept hull temperature and coffee levels in balance. Mara had never expected it to be curious in the way a living thing was curious; curiosity was a human vice. The Orpheus angled toward the coordinates because curiosity paid in credits and sometimes in closure.

They found ruins and a light on the bones. The outpost drifted like a shipwrecked thought beneath a low sun; its towers were halved, its gardens braided into glass. The ping pulsed from a cracked archive module that no one had yet looted. Mara suited and rode the salvage basket with a hand on the rail and the other on the strap where, under her jacket, the memory of Syris pressed like a coin. The hull smelled of burned polymer and old soil. Her boots scuffed against half-plants, their leaves etched into frost. A child's toy — a plastic spiral — clung to metal as if someone had forgotten grief.

The shard was small. Not larger than a fist, it fit into the cradle of her palm with an easy, foreign weight. It was not merely crystalline; it seemed to hum with folded light, a lattice of filaments that breathed slow, like a thing asleep in someone else's dream. When Mara lifted it, Mneme's voice knifed through comms: 'Anomalous mnemonic substrate. Neural lattice node. Unknown provenance.' The word 'lattice' landed against Mara's ribs like an accusation. She had read rumors in backroom bars — old architecture, archive networks that once threaded the galactic rim, spoken of by scholars drunk on nostalgia. She could almost taste Syris in that name. The shard warmed against her palm as if remembering her.