The Sky's Version

The morning after the flare, Lina was the only person who remembered Ema.

She did not realise it when she woke. She realised it when the baker asked why she was carrying two cups, and when the boy in the lift looked at the blue scar on her wrist as though it were decoration. In the square, the mural still showed three girls running beneath the dome, but the one on the right had lost her face. It had not been erased: the pigments that gave the painting depth were searching the sky for a key and finding a gap.

Lina had slept with her link closed. Ema had asked her to on the night she left.

“If you ever tell me again, use your own memory,” she had said. “Not everyone else's.”

The community kept its public memories in organisms suspended above the dome. They did not contain whole scenes. They held the keys that allowed each home to open voices, images and testimonies; the thickness of the ozone arranged those keys the way pressure orders the notes of an instrument. When the star burned, the sky changed the tuning.

The screen in the square showed that the ozone column had fallen by almost half. Six months of keys no longer answered.

The gaps did not respect the order of days. One couple knew they no longer lived together but could not remember the conversation in which they had divided the furniture. The music teacher recognised a new song in his own handwriting and could not hum it. Two children argued over whether the stone dog beside the canal had ever had a name. The flare had not erased six months. It had broken the tunings that opened them.

Nobody asked about Ema.

Lina tried her name on three people. The baker thought she meant a variety of wheat. The boy in the lift said Ema might have been a visitor, because visitors did not enter the common sky. An old woman recognised the sound but connected it to a dust storm many years before.

Each mistake left the outline of the absence intact and changed what it might mean.

Lina returned home with both cups. She put one in front of Ema's chair, then removed it at once. She did not want to rehearse a mourning. Ema was alive. She had gone to the observatories on the terminator, where the star never appeared whole. For a while she sent private messages. Then she stopped.

The house announced a transmission from Calma, the sister colony beneath a K star.

There, a flare of similar temperature had done the opposite. The ozone had thickened, and the oldest indexes opened twice before decaying smoothly. Calma retained the copy made nine months earlier, during the last exchange of skies.

“One hundred and eight fragments compatible with the gap,” the house said.

Lina opened the first. A girl had yellow paint on her knees. In the second, an adolescent was repairing a kite on a windless terrace. In the third, Ema left sliced fruit beside Lina's bed during a fever.

The copy ended before the departure.

Lina played the fragments in reverse order. At first Ema grew younger naturally. Then the seams appeared: the same gesture seen from two angles because both worlds had remembered it before separating; a sentence Lina had spoken coming from the baker's mouth; the kite changing from yellow to white.

Calma was not sending facts. It was sending coincidences old enough to resemble them.

In the last fragment shared by both worlds, Ema tightened the kite string as though the lack of wind were a personal objection. Lina remembered holding the spool. The copy said someone else had held it. The difference did not matter if all they wanted was to return a face to the mural. It mattered if they had to decide who spoke for her.

At dusk, the square opened a common reading. There was no central custodian. Each inhabitant contributed private memories, and the archive formed a public key wherever several of them agreed. The method kept one person from correcting the past alone. It also turned small disagreements into noise.

The baker tried to restore a recent recipe. Seven customers remembered seven different tastes. Instead of choosing, they registered a loaf with seven cuts. The music teacher decided not to recover his song. If he had composed it once, he said, he could compose another. A woman from the choir replied that perhaps the song also belonged to those who had learned it. He asked for one night.

When Lina's turn came, the mural showed the faceless outline.

“Calma has one hundred and eight fragments,” she said.

“Then bring her back,” the baker replied.

There was no cruelty in the sentence. The baker did not know whom she was asking them to bring back.

Lina opened the copy of Ema laughing over a table. A murmur of anticipated recognition passed through the square. They still did not remember her, but that face fitted places that retained their shape.

“That is my daughter,” Lina said. “But it isn't the last version.”

She explained that Ema had closed her public link and left. She did not explain why.

A woman from the canal raised her hand.

“If there is no common memory, all we have is your claim.”

“Yes.”

“Calma's copy is verified by two skies.”

“The second sky copied the first.”

The atmospheric curves appeared on the wall. Under Calma's star, the hot flare had raised the ozone. Under theirs, the same heat had collapsed the column. A neighbour asked which of the skies was broken.

The house answered:

“Neither. They preserve different chemical histories.”

The square fell silent. Atmospheric archives had reduced forgery. They had not ended versions, but nobody liked to admit that an agreement could grow old too.

Lina asked for a pause and went home.

She took the unlinked device from its drawer. It retained her last conversation with Ema because Lina had closed the sky before listening to it. The recording could not be verified. It might have been edited, might belong to another night, or might be an imitation built by Lina herself.

She opened it.

“I don't want you to say I left because of the work,” Ema said. “Or that this city became too small for me. I'm leaving because every argument here ends as the version most people can bear to remember.”

Lina heard herself reply:

“Common memory stops one person's pain from governing everyone.”

“It also stops one person from keeping a pain that makes everyone else uncomfortable.”

“You can register your version.”

“And watch it get averaged until it looks like a difference in nuance?”

Ceramic struck something. Lina remembered the broken cup not because of the recording, but because the pressure still returned to her fingers when she closed her hand.

“You're leaving to punish me,” her past voice said.

“I'm leaving to find out what I remember when nobody helps me.”

Lina had taken that argument to a common reading. Not all of it. She had presented the departure as a work decision and Ema's silence as a need for distance. Twelve people contributed memories of her restlessness, her curiosity about the terminator, her habit of climbing to the observatories. The sky formed a bearable version. Ema saw it before cutting the link.

The recording reached the sentence Lina had repeated for months:

“If you ever tell me again, use your own memory. Not everyone else's.”

Then came another sentence, one Lina had managed not to remember:

“But leave room for me to say no.”

She stopped the voice.

Outside, the surviving organisms were rising from the dome's reservoirs. They were not restoring the previous atmosphere. They were forming new keys around the loss.

Calma sent another report. There, the excess ozone opened certain memories twice. One woman remembered two births of her son; one man, two overlapping farewells. The stable sky had not preserved the past without touching it either. Its abundance was another kind of alteration.

In the morning, Lina returned to the square.

She did not ask to restore all one hundred and eight fragments. She selected five: the yellow paint, the kite without wind, the fruit beside the bed, a minor argument about the stone dog's name, and Ema's still face before she cut the link.

Then she added the private recording.

“It can't be verified,” the woman from the canal said.

“No.”

“You could have changed it.”

“Yes.”

Lina placed both cups before the camera. One was intact. The other had a crack repaired with resin. The community remembered that the cup had broken, but not who had thrown it.

“I threw it,” Lina said. “This is my version. It includes the fact that it isn't enough to be Ema's.”

The camera rejected *memory* mode: only one mind confirmed the scene. Lina changed it to *testimony*. The word appeared below her face. It did not promise shared truth. It promised a visible source.

The baker opened the testimony branch and added that Ema had stopped buying sweet bread two weeks before leaving because Lina kept ordering it for her. The music teacher remembered that Ema had quit the choir after a song of hers was corrected by vote. The woman from the canal registered her doubt about the recording.

Others kept the branch closed. For them, the mural remained an outline. A dozen accepted Calma's fragments without the argument; in their links, Ema laughed over the table again and still belonged to the city.

The new sky kept all three openings. It did not average them.

In Lina's link, the face in the mural returned slowly. First the scar through the eyebrow, then the mouth. The eyes remained empty because no fragment agreed on the direction of their gaze.

Lina did not try to complete them.

She left the cracked cup on the rim of the fountain. Those who had opened her testimony knew she had thrown it. Those who chose Calma's copy remembered Ema drinking from it during a fever. To those who rejected both branches, it was only a repaired cup beside an incomplete mural.

At noon, the star lit the dome and the organisms in the stratosphere returned a violet band. It was not the colour from before the flare. Nor was it a copy of Calma's sky.

Lina looked up. For the first time, she could not mistake what was shared for what was the same.

Scientific note

This story draws on version 1 of *Preparing for the Early eVolution Explorer: The Impact of Flare Temperature on Ozone Column Depth in Earth-Like Atmospheres*, by Jaime S. Crouse and six co-authors, submitted to arXiv on 24 August 2026.

The paper combines observational flare rates with synthetic time series and a one-dimensional photochemical model. It simulates a Proterozoic Earth-like atmosphere with 0.01 bar of oxygen for 180 days under two stellar types and two flare temperatures. In the modelled scenarios, hot flares have the stronger effect on ozone: around a K star they can raise the column to roughly twice its quiescent level, while one large hot flare around an M star can reduce it to about half. Reflected-light spectra retain this difference.

The authors infer that planetary atmospheres around M stars are more volatile and that K stars may offer advantages for biosignature searches. The study bounds four scenarios; it does not cover the continuum of stellar types, temperatures, compositions or flare histories. Its 180 days do not establish long-term behaviour, and the results are models of photochemistry and spectra, not detections of life or demonstrations of habitability.

The stratospheric organisms, the sky as an archive of keys, Calma, the colonies, the characters, their messages, behaviours and specific causal chains are fictional compositions. The paper neither describes nor predicts an atmospheric memory technology. The story extrapolates the time dependence of an ozone signal and the modelled result that a similar perturbation can produce opposite responses depending on the host star.

Read the preprint on arXiv