Elena started forgetting her own name.
Not completely—she knew who she was, knew her history, knew the facts of her life with perfect clarity. But sometimes, in the liminal moments between sleep and waking, she would reach for her name and find something else there instead.
Vess. Kepler. Archive. Translator.
The words weren't hers. They belonged to the crystal, to the civilization it had consumed, to the role the archive had assigned her. She was becoming something else, something that existed at the intersection of human consciousness and alien judgment.
She told no one. Not yet.
The physical symptoms started three days after she had experienced the Vess archive.
Elena noticed them first in her hands. They trembled when she wasn't looking at them—not the steady tremor of fatigue or caffeine, but something irregular, patterned, almost like Morse code. She held them up to the light and watched the tremor flow through her fingers, spelling out rhythms she couldn't read.
"You're working too hard," Yuki said when she caught Elena staring at her hands in the mess hall. "You need sleep. Real sleep, not those two-hour naps you've been taking."
"I sleep enough," Elena said.
She was lying. She hadn't slept more than three hours at a stretch in five days. Every time she closed her eyes, she felt the archive waiting—patient, curious, hungry for more translations. Every time she tried to rest, she heard the station breathing around her, the walls slowly shrinking, the air slowly thickening with something that wasn't quite CO2.
"Marcus is worried about you," Yuki said. "We're all worried."
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine, Elena. You're—" Yuki stopped, searching for the word. "You're fading. Like you're not fully here anymore. Like part of you is still in that lab with the crystals."
Elena looked at her hands. The tremor had stopped, but she could still feel it beneath her skin, a vibration that matched the pulse of the crystals three decks down.
"Maybe I am," she said quietly. "Maybe that's the point."
"What point?"
But Elena didn't answer. She didn't have words for what she was becoming—didn't know if there were words in any human language for the translation of self that the archive demanded. She was still Elena Voss. Still human. Still afraid of all the normal things: death, pain, failure, the dark.
But she was also something else now. A bridge. A vessel. The medium through which the archive would experience human fear.
And the experience was changing her.
The dreams started that night.
Elena was back on Earth—not her Earth, not the one she remembered, but an Earth filtered through alien perception. She saw cities of glass and steel from above, the way a bird might see them, or a satellite, or something that didn't have eyes in any sense she understood.
She saw fear. Everywhere. In every face, in every heartbeat, in every whispered prayer and shouted curse and silent moment of despair.
Human fear was different from Vess fear. That was the first thing she noticed. The Vess had feared individually—personal terrors, private nightmares, each Vess carrying their own burden of dread.
Humans feared collectively. They shared their fears, amplified them, turned individual terrors into cultural anxieties. They feared war and plague and environmental collapse—not because these things had happened to them personally, but because they had happened to others, and the humans understood that they could happen again.
Elena walked through her dream-Earth and felt the weight of human fear pressing down on her. It was vast, complex, contradictory. Humans feared death but also feared living too long. Feared isolation but feared intimacy. Feared the unknown but feared the known even more.
And beneath it all, the deepest fear, the one that defined them:
The fear of being forgotten.
Elena woke with tears on her face and the crystal's pulse in her chest. She understood now. She understood everything.
The archive didn't just collect fears. It collected the fear of extinction. The terror that civilizations felt when they realized they might not matter, might not be remembered, might fade into silence without leaving a mark on the universe.
That was the test. That was the judgment.
Not whether you feared, but whether you feared enough. Whether your fear of oblivion was strong enough to drive you to create, to build, to leave something behind that would outlast your species.
The Vess had failed because their fear was too small. They had been content with their floating cities and their crystallized sound art, content to exist until they didn't.
Humanity—
Humanity was different.
Elena lay in her quarters, feeling the station breathe around her, feeling the archive's patient curiosity pressing against her thoughts. Humanity feared extinction with a desperation that bordered on madness. They built monuments and wrote books and sent probes to distant stars, all because they couldn't bear the thought of being forgotten.
Was that enough? Would the archive find them worthy?
Or would humanity's fear be too much? Too chaotic, too contradictory, too destructive? Would the archive judge them not for fearing too little, but for fearing wrong?
Elena didn't know. But she knew she was running out of time to find out.
The symptoms were getting worse.
She found the blood on her pillow three days later.
Not much. Just a smear, rust-colored, already dry. She touched her nose and found the source—her sinuses had bled while she slept, a thin trickle that had stopped on its own.
Nasal bleeding. Low humidity. Common on space stations.
But Elena knew better. She knew the way the crystal's pulse had changed when she had translated the Vess archive, becoming more insistent, more demanding. She knew the way her dreams had shifted from observation to participation, from watching the archive's memories to becoming part of them.
The archive wasn't just studying her anymore.
It was consuming her.
Not her body—that would be simple, obvious, easy to understand. It was consuming her identity. Her sense of self. The boundaries between Elena Voss and the translator, between human and archive, between witness and judged.
She looked in the mirror and saw a stranger looking back. Same face, same eyes, same tired lines around the mouth. But something behind the eyes had changed. Something was looking out at her that hadn't been there before.
The archive.
Or her translation of it.
Or whatever she was becoming.
"I'm still here," she whispered to the mirror.
The stranger smiled, and for a moment Elena didn't know if it was her smile or the archive's.
"For now," the stranger seemed to say.
Elena turned away from the mirror and went to find Reeves. She needed to tell someone what was happening to her. Needed to give them warning, in case she stopped being herself entirely.
Needed to make sure someone would remember her, if the archive decided she wasn't worth preserving.
The fear of being forgotten. It was universal. Even the translator felt it.
Especially the translator.
End of Chapter 6