The Memory Auction

The memory broker's office occupied the forty-third floor of a building that no longer had a name, only a frequency, and Aurelio Vance arrived there on the last morning he would ever own his own past, though of course he did not know that yet. No one ever did. That was the cruelty the trade depended upon: a man could not feel the weight of a memory until the moment he was asked to set it down, and by then he had already signed.

He sat in a chair grown from pale living wood, in a room that smelled faintly of ozone and lilies, and across the desk a woman called Sain studied him with the patient, appraising warmth of someone who had spent twenty years learning to look like a friend. She wore the silver caduceus of the Mnemosyne Exchange at her collar, and her eyes, when they met his, held the particular softness of a professional who has watched a great many people sell the only things they could not replace.

"You understand the mechanism," she said. It was not quite a question. "We do not copy the memory, Mr. Vance. We extract it. What we take, you will no longer have. The buyer experiences it as their own — the colors, the warmth, the smell of it — and you experience its absence. A clean hole. People imagine a scar, but it is gentler than that. It is more like a room you walk past and cannot remember why the door is locked."