Elina Voss was born remembering.
Not in the philosophical or spiritual sense claimed by those who speak of reincarnation or prophetic dreams. Hers was biological—clinical. From the age of two, she could recall the exact arrangement of objects in a room, the precise words of a conversation, the number of cracks in a wall. By five, she could recite entire textbook pages she had glanced at only once. By nine, she corrected her teachers on formulas she had read in passing. Her mind didn't forget. It couldn't.
At first, it was a miracle. Then, an anomaly. Eventually, a resource.
At thirty-two, Dr. Elina Voss was an astrobiologist, computational linguist, and specialist in non-human communication patterns. She worked for the UEIC (United Extraterrestrial Intelligence Commission), an international entity operating outside traditional governments with a single mission: to discover life in the universe—and decipher it. Voss was their most prized asset, not only for her vast knowledge but because she remembered every transmission, every spectrum, every visual or mathematical anomaly that passed through the agency's monitors.
When the signal was detected, Elina was the first to receive it.
The message had no known planetary origin. Nor did it resemble any natural emission. It was a modulated, pulsing signal—extremely precise. It came from coordinates 41.290-AU, beyond the Kuiper Belt, in an uncharted region of deep space. They called it Void Node-9, a name that meant nothing except what they didn't know.
The signal wasn't audio, nor conventional radio. It was a series of optical sequences: compressed bursts of light that, when decompressed, revealed three-dimensional visual patterns—spinning, folding, intertwining like impossible architectural structures. Some called it fractal art. Others, geometric aberration. Only Voss memorized them completely, down to the last vertex. When she closed her eyes, she could rotate them in her mind as if viewing them from within.
A week later, a mission was authorized. The UEIC assembled a minimal crew: two engineers, a cryptographer, an AI pilot, an autonomous explorer robot… and Elina.
The spacecraft, called Seraphim-9, was small—almost claustrophobic. More lab than ship. During the journey, Elina spent hours replaying the visual patterns from the signal in her mind, searching for repetitions, symmetries, anything that could decode into language.
There were none.
They weren't symbols. They weren't words. They were structures—something perceived beyond the senses, something her mind captured with surgical precision… but could not understand. And yet, something in her recognized an echo. As if the pattern wasn't revealing itself, but awakening.
Forty-three days later, Seraphim-9 reached its destination: an icy moon orbiting a nameless gas giant—a planet so dark it seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. The moon had no breathable atmosphere, no tectonic activity. But something broke the terrain's symmetry: a black structure protruding partially from the ice, visible only from orbit due to the thermal anomaly it emitted. It had no right angles. It cast no shadow, though the light touched it.
When the crew descended, Voss was the first to approach.
—"It's artificial," she said flatly, as though she'd known all along.
Its shape shifted: from some angles, it looked like a fractured obelisk; from others, a ring, a spiral, an irregular prism. But never exactly the same. Cameras couldn't capture it properly—images came out distorted, doubled, blurred. Only Elina saw it clearly, and once she did, it was burned into her mind. Forever.
She stood motionless in front of the structure for nearly fifteen minutes, unblinking. The engineers called to her. The robot scanned. The signal intensified.
—"What we saw from Earth," Voss finally said, "wasn't a signal. This is the source."
Inside the structure, time seemed to slow. The walls weren't walls—they were projections. Surfaces that absorbed light and returned it in pulses of vision. The geometry was greater than the interior space. One could turn a corner and be somewhere entirely different. There was no echo, but vibrations remained. It felt like walking through a memory shared by an entity that didn't exist in our reality.
And then it happened.
A pattern. A flash.
An impossible image projected from the center of the main chamber. It resembled a city—no, a machine—no, an organism. Something that vibrated, contracted, expanded, lived and died in a single instant. Each crew member saw something different. One screamed. Another collapsed. The cryptographer tore off his headset and ran toward the decompression chamber. He froze to death before they could stop him.
Only Voss remained standing.
She didn't move. She didn't blink. Her pupils dilated until they swallowed the irises. Her breathing slowed. Deeply. The image, she knew, wasn't in front of her. It was inside her.
—"It's not a message," she whispered. "It's a memory."
The exploration robot began to emit static. Its optical system went white. Then nothing.
The ship's AI sent an automatic warning to the team: "EM anomaly detected. Navigation failing. Return recommended."
But Elina didn't respond.
Back aboard the ship, hours later, Voss was still replaying the image in her mind. She could see it with absolute clarity—each segment, each line, each impossible point of light. She knew she was looking at something no human had ever seen before. Something older than stars. Something that had been waiting. She couldn't explain how she knew—only that her mind recognized it.
She remembered. And that made it real.
She couldn't stop seeing it. Even with her eyes shut. Even with her face covered. The image was still there. And slowly, it began to change. To move. To form new patterns that hadn't been there before. As if the thing, once observed… was responding.
The lead engineer fell ill the next day. He said he heard voices. Saw figures in the walls of the ship. Another began writing symbols he didn't remember learning. Some matched the patterns Elina saw. But only she understood them—not because she comprehended them, but because she remembered them exactly as they were.
And now they were inside the others too.
Voss stopped speaking. She spent her days in the observation capsule, projecting the image in her mind. Taking notes. Tracing structures. Redrawing lines that replicated in fractal symmetries. Security footage showed that strange carvings had appeared in her quarters—circles, patterns, curved triangles, symbols of no known origin.
But when the ship's AI scanned them… it found nothing.
Just a clean wall.
Seraphim-9 lost contact with Earth three days later.
And the last recorded transmission before the silence was a line spoken by Elina Voss, staring directly into the lens:
—"If you remember it, it exists. If it exists, it is not dead."
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First chapter of the novel. I'd like to know your opinion. I'd also like to know if you consider the ability to forget nothing a blessing or a curse?