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The executive’s mind tastes of expensive wine and an even cheaper, more acidic regret. I navigate the raw static of his thoughts with a practiced ease, sifting through the chaotic debris of recent experiences for the single, gleaming memory his competitor paid me to extract. Far below his penthouse window, the City of Glass sprawls in my peripheral vision, a breathtaking and monstrous expanse of neon and holographic advertisements that flicker across buildings of reflective steel. It is a city that never sleeps, powered by what its people remember and what they are willing to forget. My world, our world, runs on this volatile, invisible economy of the soul.
My neural interface, a thin silver band that rests coolly against my temple, hums a soft, low-frequency tune as it translates his synaptic patterns into a landscape I can read and manipulate. Memory theft is not a crude act of smashing and grabbing. It is a delicate art form, one I have perfected over seven long years of solitary practice. The first rule is to find the thread. The second is to pull it loose with surgical precision. The third, and most important, is to never, ever leave fingerprints in the soft clay of consciousness. My intrusions are ghosts, whispers that fade with the morning light.
There it is. The memory of his betrayal glows with a feverish, unnatural brightness, hotter than the others, pulsing with shame and the frantic, rabbit-heart rhythm of adrenaline. He sold his partner's proprietary algorithm to a rival corporation three weeks ago. The transaction itself unfolded in a private, soundproofed booth at The Gilt, one of those opulent restaurants where the wealthy conduct the kind of business they would rather not recall. I watch the moment play out like a filmstrip projected onto the inside of my own skull. I see the crisp handshake, the almost imperceptible slide of the data chip across the polished table, and the hollow, haunted look that settled in his eyes the instant he realized what he had become. A flicker of something within me recognizes that hollow look, a familiar, yawning emptiness I quickly and brutally suppress. I could feel sorry for him, for the quiet damnation he has purchased. I do not. Empathy is a currency I cannot afford to spend.
The extraction itself is a precise, eleven-minute procedure. I compress the memory, folding it into a dense, encrypted neural file, a tight and neat package of pure data that will sell for enough credits to keep me fed and, more importantly, hidden for another two months. His mind will register the theft as nothing more than a subtle gap, a brief, puzzling discontinuity in his personal timeline. By morning, his brain will have already begun the work of smoothing it over. Human consciousness despises a vacuum above all else. It will stitch the gap closed with plausible fictions of its own making, weaving a comfortable story that makes sense of the sudden and inexplicable lightness in his soul.
I disconnect the interface with a soft click and pack my equipment with efficient, silent movements honed by years of practice. The executive continues to sleep, his face strangely peaceful now that the weight of his guilt has been lifted without his knowledge or consent. He will wake confused, perhaps, about why he feels so unburdened. Maybe he will believe he has finally, miraculously, forgiven himself.
That is the great lie people tell themselves about memories. They believe their experiences define them, that they are nothing more than the fragile sum of what has happened to them. I know better. Memories are just data, simple electrical impulses that can be copied, edited, or deleted as easily as any other file. In this gleaming, ruthless city, they are currency, and they are worth nothing more sacred than the credits for which people will trade them.
I slip out of his apartment building the same way I came, through a rusted service elevator whose software has not been updated with modern facial recognition protocols. The night shift security guard, a man with a tired, sagging face and a cheap, flickering tablet, laughs at something crude on his screen. He does not look up as I pass, a ghost in the very machine he is paid to watch over.
Outside, the city breathes its usual cold, electric rhythm. Three blocks to the east, the gray-uniformed Truthspeakers patrol the Memory Market, their impassive presence a constant and chilling reminder that lies are illegal here. Genetic engineering made them incapable of deception, turning them into walking, talking recorders of objective fact. They enforce honesty with the same dispassionate efficiency I use to steal secrets. I pull my hood lower, keeping my head down and my thoughts quiet. In a city where some can sense dishonesty like a change in the air pressure, even thinking too loudly about my work feels like a reckless gamble.
The underground transit, a rumbling metal serpent, carries me toward the Forgotten Quarter, the sprawling, unmapped sector where people like me make our homes. We live in the spaces the city pretends do not exist, in derelict buildings that appear on no official maps and whose residents are conveniently absent from any census data. We are the necessary ghosts, the invisible cogs that keep the great, gleaming machine running smoothly. My apartment is a small, defensible space on the fourteenth floor of a decommissioned data storage facility. The walls still emit a low, residual hum of electromagnetic energy, a sound I have learned to find deeply soothing. Here, and only here, can I finally allow myself to breathe.