The "remembrance" project was an ambitious space colonization project. It eliminated the need to spend 99% of the spacecraft volume on life support, food, oxygen, and waste processing. It also eliminated all of the issues with biological compatibility on alien worlds.
Instead of keeping a few humans alive for tens or hundreds of years for space travel, they could send an inert load of thousands of small memory crystals, each loaded with the essence of donor humans. It would also include instructions on how to ingest them.
The locals would then gain human memories and skills. Dozens of small spacecraft were sent out, each with over one-thousand memory crystals and without the wasteful life supports overhead. The idea was that some seeder ships would land where the locals could find the crystals. If they landed in a place with only animals, the crystals would stay inert. They are only triggered if they bonded to a host intelligent enough to sustain a supplemental human consciousness.
Jake Taylor was a student at the University of Maine. One day, when he had no classes, he stumbled across a booth set up for "brain scans," Earn while you sleep. It looked like easy money; he signed up for the full scan, it would require sleeping in a booth for two days, but he would wake up thousands of dollars richer. It should be easy money...
The next thing he knows, he is no longer human, and the new world he finds himself in is a very dangerous place. So dangerous that the former occupant of the body he finds himself in has just died from a venomous snakebite.
He is informed that the body he was in had been wearing a crystal and that he is now one of "the resurrected." Some of those that died while wearing the strange crystals have their bodies healed, but their memories were replaced by something from the crystal.
The aliens never "read the instructions"; the crystals had found another way to activate.
