TOP10 | 2025 | Month 12

"Remise"
By Romain Brunas   

I qhare with my last personnal project for "Remise" contest... 
The Golden Pavilion
An old French proverb says that to have a good memory is to have the memory of an elephant.
That thought drifted through Patient 501’s mind as her vessel glided silently through the Tanzanian sky.
Below her stretched the vast elephant reserve — silent, golden, almost eternal.
And on the horizon, rising from the amber light of dusk, stood the gleaming silhouette of the Golden Pavilion.
The Tanzanians had given it that name because of its stainless-steel columns, gilded by the sun, built to withstand centuries of rain and burning savannah winds.
Isolated at the heart of the animal lands, the Pavilion seemed to breathe — as if it housed the memories of the souls it guarded.
No human lived there anymore; only the wind and time dared to touch it.
The Golden Pavilion was one of the five Memory Sanctuaries scattered across the Earth.
For more than a century, humankind had conquered death —
but never memory.
The first immortals, trapped in the overflow of their own consciousness, fell into madness.
Their memories decayed, collided, contradicted each other, until they became little more than fractured dreams.
Then, the scientist Graham Seldon found a solution: a mnestic storage system, directly linked to the human mind.
Each column within the Pavilion held the complete memory of one immortal — their life, emotions, loves, everything they had ever been.
To preserve mental stability, one had to reconnect regularly to the Matrix, accessible only within the Sanctuaries.
That is why Patient 501, now one hundred and seventy-one years old, was returning today — for only the second time — to the Golden Pavilion.
Her vessel descended gently into the central courtyard, a vast circle of metal and stone partly overgrown with tall grass.
The golden stalks swayed in the wind, brushing the polished sides of the columns as if nature sought to reclaim the monument into its eternal cycle.
The silence there held the weight of a tomb.
Then, a figure emerged from between the high grasses: the Archivist.
An android — bare, metallic, its body made of silver alloys and pulsing filaments of light.
Its surface caught the sunset in fractured gleams; its movements were precise, almost human, but devoid of warmth.
Its eyes, two translucent orbs, shone with a calm golden hue.