Field note. The colony preserves the voices of the dead.
Specimen presented: a rectangular device, warmed by a lithium reaction, capable of storing acoustic vibrations indefinitely. The human has retained one such recording for two thousand one hundred rotations of this planet. I confirmed the count from the display. The voice belongs to an organism whose respiration ceased long ago. This is verifiable: the human refers to it in the past tense, and does not expect a reply.
Procedure observed. The human presses the surface. The stored voice emits from the speaker, distorted, low fidelity, approximately fourteen seconds in duration. The content is trivial. A request to acquire a food item on the return journey. A question about scheduling. A trailing sound at the end, unstructured, possibly laughter, possibly a swallow. Nothing of survival value is transmitted.
The human does not move during playback. Respiration slows. Lacrimal glands activate, secreting saline. I have logged this response elsewhere and classified it as a drainage malfunction, but the correlation with the recording is now too consistent to ignore. The fluid appears deliberate. The organism seems to be leaking on purpose.
I attempted to isolate the trigger. It is not the words; the words are logistics about food. It is the specific frequency signature of that one deceased organism, which the device reproduces and no future organism ever will again. The human has fourteen seconds of a sound that has left the universe permanently, and rations them.
Correction to earlier hypothesis. I recorded that humans engineer their bodies into decoration and their motion into ceremony. I now revise this. They have also built a machine whose sole function is to let them stand very still and be spoken to by someone who cannot speak. They call it, from context, "keeping." I cannot classify the leaking.
I have stopped trying to.