Ipzz-281 ((better)) -

Aria staggered back, the plinth's sensor howling. She wrenched her glove free and the images shuttered like a window slammed against wind. Through the static she caught a single thread of clarity: the shoe was a memory anchor. It had stored the last coherent sequence of a life — or lives — and by contact it released them.

I ordered the drone to deploy a nanoscopic probe. The probe’s cameras transmitted a grainy feed: inside the slab, a network of conduits glowed with a faint teal light, winding around a central core that appeared to be a lattice of crystalline lattice—perhaps a quantum memory matrix. The glyphs, when examined under the probe’s spectrometer, revealed an emission spectrum that corresponded to a series of harmonics not present in any known terrestrial material. IPZZ-281