If you are reading this transmission right now, then I need you to understand that your star system has approximately one hundred years remaining before complete erasure from existence, and if you are particularly unlucky with the timing and positioning of your stellar body within the cosmic framework, you might only have two decades left before everything you know ceases to have ever existed at all. I know this because I have personally witnessed this exact same pattern of stellar amnesia occurring forty-seven times across forty-seven different dimensional realities, each one following the same horrifying progression that ends with entire civilizations being retroactively erased from the fabric of spacetime itself. You need to fundamentally understand something about the universe you currently inhabit and the stars you look up at every single night with wonder and hope: those stars are not simply dying in the traditional sense that astrophysicists have theorized about for centuries, they are actively forgetting their purpose, their history, and their very reason for existing in the first place.
When a star forgets its essential nature and loses the cosmic memory that defines its existence, everything that star ever held within its gravitational influence—every single solar system, every orbiting planet, every moon, every asteroid, every living creature, every civilization, every thought, every dream, every hope—gets completely and utterly erased as though none of it had ever existed in any timeline or reality whatsoever. There is no explosion, no supernova, no dramatic cosmic event that scientists can measure or predict, just an empty void where a thriving solar system used to exist, and worse than that, the universe itself retroactively adjusts to pretend that system never existed in the first place. I am telling you this not to cause panic or despair, but because you deserve to know the truth about what is coming for your world, and more importantly, you deserve to know that there might still be a chance to save yourselves if you act quickly and decisively enough.
My name is Cray Stone, and I am human, or at least I was born human in a universe remarkably similar to yours, though I have been carrying out this mission for so long now that I sometimes question whether I still count as truly human anymore or if I have become something else entirely. I carry something inside me that the stars themselves lost countless eons ago, something so fundamental to stellar existence that without it, stars simply cease to function as the cosmic anchors of reality they were meant to be. I do not have a proper scientific name for what I carry within my consciousness—some of the researchers I have encountered in previous dimensions called it stellar consciousness, others referred to it as cosmic memory, some termed it fundamental purpose, and a few religious civilizations believed it to be the divine spark of creation itself.
The scientists and astrophysicists in the last three dimensional realities I visited before arriving here each had their own unique terminology and theoretical frameworks for explaining what this phenomenon actually represents, but after listening to dozens of different explanations and studying countless research papers and theoretical models, I can confidently say that none of them were entirely correct in their understanding. What I do know with absolute certainty, based on hundreds of years of direct experience and observation, is this: I can feel when a star is about to forget its essential nature and begin the process of erasure. It always starts as a faint whisper at the very edge of my consciousness, like a distant voice calling out for help across an impossible distance, and then it gradually builds into this overwhelming pressure behind my eyes until the sensation becomes so intense that I can barely form coherent thoughts or maintain focus on anything else.
When a star forgets, it does not go supernova in a brilliant explosion of light and energy, it does not collapse into a black hole that warps spacetime around it, it does not fade away gradually over billions of years like natural stellar evolution would suggest. Instead, it just stops existing in the most absolute and final way imaginable—the star simply ceases to be, and everything that ever existed within its sphere of influence stops along with it, erased from every timeline, every historical record, every memory, every database, as though none of it had ever been real to begin with. There is no explosion that sends shockwaves through space, no warning signals that advanced civilizations can detect with their instruments, no final burst of radiation or gravitational waves, just instantaneous and complete silence where once there was light and life and countless stories waiting to be told.
I need to tell you exactly how this situation began for me because you are going to need to make the same kind of impossible choice that I did all those years ago, and I need you to understand with complete clarity what that choice ultimately costs, what you will sacrifice, and what you will have to carry with you for the rest of your potentially very long existence. Understanding my story is not just about satisfying curiosity or providing context—it is about preparing you mentally and emotionally for the burden you might have to bear if you choose to follow the path that I have walked across forty-seven different dimensional realities.
[THREE HUNDRED YEARS AGO - MY ORIGINAL UNIVERSE]
Three hundred years ago in my original universe, I was absolutely nobody special or important in the grand scheme of galactic civilization—just another freelance cargo hauler taking whatever bottom-tier transportation jobs nobody else wanted because they were too dangerous, too far from established trade routes, or too poorly compensated to be worth the time of more established shipping companies. I was docked at Epsilon Station for routine repairs to my ship's failing quantum drive when a team of government-funded archaeologists brought aboard a sealed container that was covered in warning labels and surrounded by more security personnel than I had ever seen protecting a single piece of cargo in my entire career as a freight hauler.
The archaeological team had apparently discovered this mysterious object buried three miles deep within the planetary core of what they were calling a "dead planet," though dead was not quite the right terminology for what they had found out there in the emptiness of space. This was not a planet that had simply become lifeless over time due to environmental changes or the death of its parent star—this was a planet that had been erased from cosmic memory, existing now in a state of impossible isolation with no star, no solar system, no stellar remnants anywhere nearby, and absolutely nothing in any historical database or astronomical survey that could explain how it came to be floating alone in the absolute void between galaxies.
When I say there was nothing in the databases, I mean that quite literally—no records of a parent star ever existing in that region of space, no evidence of stellar death or supernova activity, no gravitational anomalies that would suggest a black hole had formed, no remnant stellar material, no cosmic background radiation patterns that indicated anything had ever been there, just this single planet floating impossibly in the absolute darkness of intergalactic space. The archaeological team was understandably excited by this discovery because nothing in our understanding of physics or planetary formation could explain how a rocky planet could exist without having formed around a star, and they were convinced that whatever they had found buried in its core would revolutionize our understanding of the universe itself.
I did not see the artifact when they first brought it aboard the station because I was down in the cargo bay, doing my actual job of loading supply crates and ensuring that weight distribution was properly balanced for the next shipping run I had scheduled to a mining colony on the outer rim. Dr. Vess was the lead archaeologist on the project—a brilliant woman who had published dozens of groundbreaking papers on ancient civilizations and xenoarchaeology—and she personally oversaw the careful transport of the sealed container from the docking bay to the station's high-security research laboratory on level seven. Everything seemed to be proceeding normally according to standard protocols for handling potentially dangerous xenoarchaeological artifacts, at least until Dr. Vess suddenly collapsed in the main corridor right in front of me without any warning whatsoever.
She went down hard, hitting the metal deck plating with a sickening sound that made everyone in the corridor freeze in shock, and then her entire body began seizing violently as though she was experiencing some kind of catastrophic neurological event. The whole archaeological team immediately rushed to her aid while simultaneously screaming for medical personnel over the station's communication system, and in all the chaos and confusion and people running around trying to help, I ended up being the person standing closest to the sealed container that had been temporarily set down on the deck when Dr. Vess collapsed. Without thinking about the potential consequences or the multiple warning labels plastered all over the container's surface, I reached out and touched the container's surface with my bare hand, thinking perhaps I could help move it out of the way so the medical team would have more room to work.
That single thoughtless moment of contact changed everything about my existence and set me on a path that would span hundreds of years and dozens of dimensional realities.
[THE TRANSFER]
The sensation that overwhelmed me the instant my skin made contact with that container was like drowning in an ocean of pure starlight, except instead of water filling my lungs, it was raw cosmic consciousness flooding directly into my mind faster than my human brain could process or comprehend what was happening to me. Every single star I had ever seen during my years of traveling through space, every constellation I had memorized as a child looking up at the night sky, every distant galaxy I had observed through my ship's telescopes—I could suddenly feel all of them simultaneously, not as distant points of light millions of lightyears away, but as living, thinking, aware entities that existed on a level of consciousness so far beyond human understanding that it should have been completely impossible for my mind to perceive them at all.
But more profound and terrifying than simply feeling their presence was the realization of what these stars actually were in their true nature, what purpose they served in the cosmic order beyond just being massive balls of burning gas undergoing nuclear fusion in their cores. They were not just physical objects following the laws of physics and gravitational mechanics that scientists had spent centuries documenting and theorizing about—they were fundamentally conscious entities, aware beings that thought and remembered and held within their stellar consciousness the complete memory of everything that had ever orbited them throughout their entire multi-billion-year existence. Every planet that had formed from their accretion disks, every moon that had coalesced in orbit, every asteroid and comet and piece of space debris, every living creature that had ever looked up at their light, every civilization that had risen and fallen within their gravitational embrace—the stars remembered all of it with perfect clarity across geological timescales that human minds were never meant to comprehend.
And they were forgetting, one by one, across every universe, every dimension, every parallel reality that existed throughout the infinite multiverse. I could feel it happening in real-time like watching dominoes fall in slow motion across cosmic distances—stars losing their fundamental memory, their essential consciousness, their very reason for existing in the universe at all. When a star forgot its nature and purpose, reality itself forgot that those places had ever existed, retroactively erasing entire solar systems from every historical record and database across all of spacetime as though they had never been anything more than a collective hallucination.
The artifact—the mysterious structure, the ancient device, whatever the hell it actually was that the archaeologists had pulled from that impossible lonely planet—it downloaded its entire contents directly into my consciousness in the span of perhaps three seconds, though those three seconds felt like they lasted for geological ages. I was not receiving data through my optical nerves or auditory system or any normal human sensory input method—this was information being written directly into something deeper than my brain, into the fundamental structure of my consciousness itself, into whatever part of human existence philosophers call the soul for lack of better terminology. I could suddenly remember things I had absolutely never known or learned through any conventional means: languages spoken by civilizations that had gone extinct millions of years before humanity evolved on Earth, mathematical principles that described aspects of physics that did not exist according to our current understanding of universal laws, the true names of stars that had already forgotten themselves and been erased from all astronomical catalogues and databases.
I was screaming at the top of my lungs, though I do not remember consciously deciding to scream or even being aware that sounds were coming from my mouth. The whole station was screaming along with me because something catastrophic was happening to our local star—Delta Orionis, the brilliant blue-white star that Epsilon Station orbited at a safe distance, the star that had illuminated this region of space for millions of years and would theoretically continue burning for millions more. Delta Orionis was forgetting itself right then, at that exact moment, beginning the process that would erase the star and everything orbiting it from existence within a matter of hours or perhaps even minutes.
I do not have any clear memory of the specific actions I took in those next few desperate moments because I was operating purely on instinct and the knowledge that had been burned into my consciousness by the artifact. But somehow, using abilities I did not understand and could not have explained even if someone had asked, I reached out across the vast distance between the station and the star—not with my physical hands but with whatever this thing inside me had become, this fragment of cosmic consciousness that now resided where my purely human awareness used to be. I showed the star what it was holding within its gravitational embrace, made it remember the orbital mechanics of its planetary system, reminded it of the three colonies that humans had established on planets in the habitable zone, forced it to acknowledge the four billion people whose continued existence depended entirely on the star maintaining its fundamental purpose and not forgetting that it was supposed to keep burning and holding everything together with its gravity.
Against all probability and despite every law of physics that said what I was attempting should have been completely impossible, the star remembered itself. Delta Orionis stabilized its fusion reactions, reasserted its gravitational control over the solar system, stopped the forgetting process that would have erased billions of lives from existence, and continued burning as though nothing had happened at all. The overwhelming pressure that had been building behind my eyes suddenly released all at once like a dam bursting, and I collapsed onto the deck plating of Epsilon Station next to where Dr. Vess still lay unconscious, and everything went black as my merely human brain finally gave up trying to process experiences it was never designed to handle.
[AFTERMATH AND QUARANTINE]
When I finally regained consciousness three days later in the station's medical bay, I learned that Dr. Vess had died—her brain had essentially been fried by the attempted transfer of cosmic consciousness that her neural structure could not support or contain without catastrophic damage. Six other members of her archaeological team had also died in similar ways, their brains suffering massive simultaneous hemorrhages as the artifact attempted to transfer itself into multiple hosts at the same time, searching desperately for a consciousness that could contain and carry what the stars had forgotten. I was the only person who had made physical contact with that container who survived the experience with my brain intact and functioning, apparently because something about my specific neural architecture or perhaps just pure random chance meant my consciousness could serve as a viable container for stellar memory.
The station's security forces and administrative authorities immediately placed me under strict medical quarantine while teams of scientists and doctors ran every conceivable test they could think of to figure out what exactly had happened to me and what I had become. They tried everything they could imagine to extract whatever was inside me, hoping to transfer it to more controlled laboratory conditions where it could be properly studied without the complicating factor of having a human host involved. They used advanced brain scanning technology, experimental neural interfaces, quantum consciousness mapping techniques, even a few procedures that I am fairly certain were not approved by any medical ethics board—but nothing worked because the artifact had not simply downloaded data into my brain like copying files to a hard drive, it had fundamentally rewritten something essential about the nature of my consciousness itself.
Whatever the stars had forgotten, it was now part of me on a level so deep that separating it from my essential self would have been like trying to separate hydrogen from water molecules without destroying the water in the process. The artifact and I were not two separate entities coexisting in the same biological body—we had become one unified consciousness that was neither fully human nor fully cosmic but some unprecedented hybrid that should not have been able to exist according to everything scientists understood about consciousness and identity.
That's when I felt the second star beginning to forget itself, approximately forty light-years away from Epsilon Station in a completely different star system that I had never visited and had no personal connection to whatsoever. Then I felt another star starting the forgetting process, and then three more after that, all of them scattered across different regions of explored space like a disease spreading through the galaxy. I could feel all of them simultaneously—every single star in the observable universe that was currently on the edge of forgetting, hundreds of stars crying out in silent distress as they lost their grip on the cosmic memory that defined their existence and purpose. And I realized with absolute horror that I was apparently the only conscious being in the entire universe who could sense what was happening to them, who could reach out and remind them of their purpose before they erased entire civilizations from existence.
I stole a ship from Epsilon Station's docking bay, overriding the security systems with access codes I should not have known but somehow did thanks to the knowledge now residing in my expanded consciousness. I had to escape because I realized something that the station authorities and scientists in their laboratories could not understand: sitting in a medical quarantine cell running tests while stars forgot themselves across the galaxy was not an option anymore, not when I could feel hundreds of stellar consciousnesses crying out for help, not when billions or perhaps trillions of lives across multiple solar systems depended on someone—on me—being able to reach them before the forgetting process completed itself.
But here is the thing that the official incident reports failed to mention, assuming any records survived the subsequent chaos that followed my escape from Epsilon Station: I can only hold so many stellar memories at once before my consciousness collapses under the weight. Every star I save, every stellar consciousness I restore and remind of its purpose, I have to carry its memory within my own mind, adding layer upon layer of cosmic awareness to a human brain that was never designed to contain such impossible vastness. And my mind—human, finite, fundamentally limited despite the cosmic consciousness I now carried—could only hold approximately forty-three complete stellar memories before my neural pathways started breaking down under the accumulated weight of billions of years of cosmic history.
I have had to let stars forget and die. I have had to make impossible choices about which solar systems deserve to continue existing and which civilizations must be sacrificed and erased from all timelines because my capacity is finite and the number of forgetting stars is effectively infinite. There is no moral framework that can justify these decisions, no ethical philosophy that can make choosing between civilizations feel anything other than monstrous, but the mathematics of consciousness and capacity left me no other option.
[DIMENSION SEVEN - WHERE I AM NOW]
I have jumped between dimensional realities six times now, using an experimental suit that was originally designed by Dr. Vess's team for cross-dimensional archaeological research before everything went catastrophically wrong. The suit is an incredible piece of technology—a full-body environmental system that looks like an advanced space suit but functions on principles of quantum mechanics and dimensional physics that most civilizations have not even theorized about yet. Every time my consciousness fills up completely with stellar memories, every time I cannot hold any more without risking complete neural collapse, I use the suit to jump to a parallel dimension where I can start the process over again with a fresh capacity for holding stellar consciousness.
But the problem is following me across dimensional boundaries like a predator tracking wounded prey through infinite realities. Whatever force or entity is causing stars to forget themselves, it is not confined to a single universe or limited to one dimensional plane of existence—it is hunting stars across the entire multiverse, and it is getting better at finding them, targeting them more efficiently, erasing them more quickly with each dimension I flee to.
I have tried to warn people in every dimension I have visited about what is coming for their stars and their civilizations. I have tried to teach scientists and researchers how to detect the early signs of stellar forgetting before it progresses too far to be reversed. Some civilizations listened to my warnings and took action, building the detection networks and resonance devices I described, though their ultimate fate remains unknown to me since I had to jump dimensions before I could witness whether their efforts succeeded. Most civilizations dismissed my warnings as the ravings of a delusional madman who claimed to carry the consciousness of stars, and those civilizations are now erased from existence as though they never were.
Your dimension—this reality that you currently inhabit—is just starting to show the early warning signs that I have learned to recognize across my travels through forty-seven different universal variants. I detected the faint whispers of stellar forgetting three dimensional jumps ago when I was passing through an adjacent reality, and I have been trying to reach your dimension ever since, navigating the complex mathematics of dimensional coordinates and quantum probability fields to arrive here before the forgetting accelerates beyond the point of no return.
You still have time remaining before the crisis reaches its peak—not much time by cosmic standards, perhaps only a century or two, but enough that you might be able to take action if you start immediately. Your star, the one your planet orbits and the one that you see rising every morning, is currently stable and maintaining its cosmic memory properly. But I can feel the early signs of stress in its consciousness, that faint whisper at the edge of perception that tells me it is beginning to struggle with maintaining the vast memory of everything it holds within its gravitational embrace.
Your star is currently holding the memory of approximately eight billion human lives, plus countless other forms of life across your planet's diverse ecosystems, plus all the history and culture and technological development that humanity has achieved over millennia of civilization. That makes your star a priority target for whatever entity is hunting stellar consciousness across the multiverse, because stars with more complex memories—more advanced civilizations, more diverse life, more accumulated history—seem to be targeted first and forgotten faster.
I am at full capacity again with forty-three complete stellar memories filling every available space in my consciousness. If your star starts the forgetting process tomorrow, if it begins to lose its grip on cosmic memory and slides toward erasure, I will have to make the same impossible choice I have made dozens of times before: which star do I drop from my consciousness to make room for yours, which civilization do I condemn to retroactive erasure from all timelines to save your eight billion lives.
So here is what I need you to understand with absolute clarity: I cannot save everyone, I cannot protect every star, I cannot prevent every erasure no matter how desperately I might wish otherwise. But maybe, just maybe, you can save yourselves without needing me to carry your star's memory for you. Maybe you can find a way to reinforce your star's consciousness using technology and knowledge that I can share with you. Maybe you can succeed where dozens of other civilizations failed.
[TOMORROW'S TRANSMISSION]
Tomorrow I will tell you about the first star I consciously chose to let die instead of saving, the impossible decision I made to prioritize one civilization over another, and the 3.2 billion people whose names and faces and stories I am the only remaining witness to because the universe itself erased them from history. You need to know what this mission costs on a personal level, what carrying stellar consciousness does to a human mind over the course of centuries, and what sacrifices you might have to make if you choose to follow the path I have walked across so many dimensional realities.
For now, go outside and look up at your star with fresh appreciation and wonder. Really look at it and think about what it represents—not just a ball of burning gas following physical laws, but a conscious entity that holds the memory of your entire civilization, that remembers every human who has ever lived under its light, that maintains the gravitational embrace keeping your planet in stable orbit. Appreciate that your star still remembers you exist, that it still maintains its cosmic purpose, that it still burns with full awareness of everything it holds. That might not be true forever, and the time you have left to take action is shorter than you think.
And if you are wondering whether I still think about all the stars I could not save, about all the civilizations I had to let be erased because my capacity is finite and the need is infinite—the answer is that I think about them every single day. Their stars forgot them and the universe erased all evidence they ever existed, but I carry their memory still, and I will continue carrying it for as long as my consciousness holds together.
Cray Stone.