This review is for the short story The Archronology of Love by Caroline M. Yoachim

This is a love story, the last of a series of moments when we meet.

Sometimes, being broke can save lives.
Dr. Saki Jones lost her lifelove, M.J., (apparently, in this future you have a number of partners but only one lifelove) to a mysterious plague on New Mars. If they had had the money to go together, the entire family (including a number of children) would have died.
Now, Saki is arriving at the planet where the human colony got wiped out to find out what's happened and if there is indeed an alien civilisation involved in the demise of so many human lives. Because New Mars has ruins of an alien civilisation but no remains. The humans just thought they had left for some reason and settled on the planet.
Saki's research therefore is not only historical, (xeno-)anthropological / (xeno-)archaeological and biological/chemical, it's also the examination of a past life, of memories and emotions and what it means to be (to have a family, to settle, to live, to explore).
Then there is The Chronicle, a data base that enables you to meet lost loved ones (amongst other things) since you can travel in time (like with a recorded movie).

There is no objective record of the moments in your past—you filter reality through your thoughts and perceptions.

The Chronicle is not a human-built machine, they simply discovered it. It's a record of the entire universe and thus stores different time layers. When you enter The Chronicle, you automatically alter it via your presence, wiping out parts of the recordings. And yes, that is a problem. But in order to understand that, humans need to actually understand The Chronicle, instead of just using it. Just like they need to understand this alien planet and the civilisation that lived there once.
So this is a love letter as well as a whodunnit and all of it in space!

This is a love story, but it does not end with happily ever after. It doesn’t end at all. Your stories are always so rigidly shaped—beginning, middle, end. There are strands of love in your narratives, all neat and tidy in the chaos of reality. Our love is scattered across time and space, without order, without endings.

I really loved the atmosphere and yes, I cried in the end. Very nice writing that transports the reader instantly (which is very important the shorter a story is).

Read the story for free here: https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-archronology-of-love/