MistNovel - Read Web Novel Stories & Fiction Online

My apartment is small, but it is unequivocally mine, a sanctuary and a workshop filled with salvaged, custom-modified equipment and the tools of my other, truer trade. The air itself is a unique cocktail of scents. It smells of ozone from perpetually overloaded circuits, the faint, chemical tang of stabilizing neural fluid, and the sharp, clean bite of turpentine. It is the complex and layered smell of my real life. A massive, professionally stretched canvas dominates one entire wall, its pristine white surface a silent, waiting invitation. On a set of reinforced shelves beside it, dozens of slender glass tubes filled with shimmering, multicolored neural fluid are lined up with the precision of an apothecary. Each one contains the raw, distilled emotional data I have carefully extracted from the memories I steal. This cramped, humming room is where I cease to be a thief. This is where I am allowed to be an artist.
The memory I took from the executive tonight contains far more than just the cold facts of his betrayal. It holds the dense, suffocating weight of his shame, the sharp, splintered, crystalline edges of his fear, and the desperate, pathetic litany of justifications he constructed to shield himself from his own actions. My personal equipment, a custom-built rig far more sensitive than the crude, portable tools I use for a simple extraction, allows me to separate these pure emotions from the narrative that created them. I can distill them into their essential forms, a process I think of as a kind of emotional alchemy, and then project them as focused beams of light and color onto the waiting canvas.
The city’s clandestine underground art scene pays a small fortune for these memory paintings, these haunting, vibrant displays of feeling completely divorced from their original context. In a world where genuine emotion is often suppressed, commodified, or sold off to the highest bidder, my clients crave the chance to feel something real, even if that feeling is borrowed from a stranger’s darkest moment. They are emotional vampires, and I am their most reliable dealer.
I meticulously set up my projection rig, the hum of its power core a familiar comfort. The process of painting is a delicate, meditative dance. The shame comes first, bleeding out from the projector as a deep, suffocating burgundy, so dark and rich it is almost black. It pools on the canvas like spilled wine. Next, I isolate the fear, which manifests as fractured, chaotic lines of brilliant, desperate silver, slashing across the dark background like lightning in a storm. I use my digital brushes, a series of complex holographic tools, to carefully layer them together. I build a composition that speaks not of a specific corporate crime, but of the universal, silent, and terrible price of ambition. The final painting will inevitably sell to some wealthy collector who wants to hang a piece of profound, raw emotion in their sterile, minimalist home. They will admire its terrible beauty, and they will never know it was constructed from a quiet moment of treason in a penthouse suite overlooking the city they believe they own.
By the time I finish my work, the first weak, gray hints of dawn are creeping through the narrow, grimy windows of my studio. The finished painting seems to pulse with a life of its own, a captured storm of stolen emotion that is both beautiful and monstrous. I carefully clean my brushes and store the residual neural fluid. My body aches with a deep, familiar exhaustion from the long night, but my mind is already moving ahead, calculating my next move. Somewhere else in this vast, glittering metropolis, another job is waiting. Another memory to steal. Another secret to sell. Another feeling to capture and put on display.
This is my life. It is the life I have meticulously chosen for myself, a careful, precarious balance of risk and reward, of profound cynicism and secret creation. And I have never, not for a single moment, allowed myself the weakness of questioning it.
But a change is coming. It is a subtle tremor in the very foundations of my world, a tectonic shift I cannot yet see but can feel in the deepest parts of my being, like the fall in air pressure before a storm. A new assignment is on its way, one that will force me to confront the true nature of the art I create and the life I lead. It will fundamentally challenge my core belief that memories are nothing more than disposable data. It will introduce me to a man whose mind is unlike any I have ever entered. And it will set me on a path from which there can be no return. Until this moment, I have only ever been a thief of memories. Soon, I will be asked to become a destroyer of them.