The more time I spent there, the more I felt split.
Each moment rippled backward and forward. Decisions I hadn't made yet bled into the present. I saw myself with Keene's eyes. Lyra's hands. Nolan's voice. I heard songs in my sleep—songs my mother never sang, in a language I'd never known, but which made me weep.
Time stretched and folded. I no longer walked—I drifted through scenes of memory. A classroom from childhood. The smell of ocean air. A funeral I never attended. A city skyline from another life.
The town began changing shape. Streets reoriented. Buildings vanished or doubled. The version of me who welcomed me had changed too. He now spoke in multiple voices, echoes layered like feedback through a tunnel.
"The artifact doesn't simulate reality," he explained. "It doesn't need to. It remembers. Every crew. Every thought. Every emotion spilled inside it."
I realized then: it wasn't a place we had explored.
It was us. A mirror turned inside out. Humanity's collective unconscious, made manifest.
The artifact was a vessel, yes—but it wasn't alien.
It was human.
A backup copy of all we were. Created long ago. Maybe as a failsafe. Maybe as an act of desperation. To preserve not our bodies, but our being.
Earth had not vanished.
It had been uploaded.
The wars, the climate collapse, the extinction events—we hadn't survived them physically. But we had endured in remembrance.
Each ship sent to investigate the signal was not a rescue mission. It was a retrieval. Not of data. But of identity.
And I... I was the final piece.