The Endless Expanse

The archaeological team has laid bare the remains of a modest temple. Delicately carved from an organic alien material the exterior was once brightly colored but has faded to a dull gray. A fully operational holographic priest still presides over the church. While the temple was in use she took confessions from wayfaring penitents offering healing, reconciliation and sanctuary to this otherwise inhospitable nook of the universe.

Unusual mechanical confessional chairs akin to torture devices have led the archaeologists to believe there may be more to the temple than meets the eye.

Hidden under the floor tiles in the sacristy, the archaeologists have discovered a secret crypt where the walls are lined with rows upon rows of tiny blue digital orbs, their circuitry glittering in the dark. Each orb contains the memory of a single confession and can be plugged into a cryptic looking machine at the center of the room to reveal its contents.

Those who confessed their sins were blessed with oblivion, the memories of their deeds extracted by the confessional chairs and stored within the digital orbs.

Sin is unoriginal. The memory orbs contain countless accounts of tedious little transgressions; infidelity, bearing sacrilegious garb, exposing your flappers, adorning your feelers, ingesting your neighbor's pet, child or spouse... The deeds of one penitent alone stand out - those of the priest herself...

The holo-priest, as it turns out, is a virtual representation of the church's founder, Illuminate Saariah. She appears to have suffered from severe memory loss and was haunted by the conviction that she had committed a heinous act in the past. The tiny molluscoid priest extracted and stored over a hundred of her own confessions in an attempt to figure out what she had done.

Illuminate Saariah's work station is littered with obsessive scribbles about a place called Ix Belèn and the horrors she fears transpired there. Judging from her journal she had intermittent moments of clarity followed by complete memory loss. She writes that if she did not recognize her own handwriting she would have thought they were the ramblings of a madwoman. It seems likely that her deteriorating mental health was a side-effect of repeated memory extraction but without a body it is impossible to say.

Piecing together a coherent course of events from her many fragmented confessions has proven as hopeless for the archaeologists as it was for her, but they have uncovered what could be the coordinates to Ix Belèn from one of her many memory orbs.