Elara walked to the X-ray diffractometer, a machine that hummed with the quiet authority of a truth-teller. “You’ve run the pattern?” she asked.

She tapped her keyboard, pulling up the PDF-4+ database. “Now, you don’t flip cards. An algorithm does it in 0.2 seconds. But the soul is the same: a library of the universe’s crystal lattices, built by the JCPDS.”

The next morning, Leo found Dr. Vance holding a physical JCPDS card up to the light.

She placed the card back in the drawer.

“Let me tell you a story, Leo,” Elara said, pulling up a chair. “About how we learned to read the language of dust.”

Leo gasped. “That’s a Martian mineral! A sulfate hydrate formed in freezing brine.”

“That’s the real story of the JCPDS,” she said. “Not perfection. But a promise to keep correcting, keep measuring, keep adding. The universe writes its X-ray signature on everything. The JCPDS taught us how to read it.”