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Two days after the executive’s painted confession in burgundy and silver has dried, I descend into the Memory Market. I make my move at dawn, when the crowds are thinnest and the shadows are longest. My face is completely obscured by the deep hood of my jacket, a necessary precaution against the ever-present surveillance drones that patrol the district with their cold, unblinking lenses. The market itself sprawls across six blocks of the Industrial Quarter, a chaotic, labyrinthine maze of makeshift stalls and heavily encrypted terminals where memories are bought, sold, and traded with the feverish, desperate intensity of a stock exchange.
The executive’s memory, now stripped of all its emotional resonance and reduced to a cold, hard stream of pure data, sits on a chip no larger than my thumbnail in the zippered pocket of my jacket. It contains everything his competitor paid me to steal: the algorithmic secrets, the names of those involved, and the precise timeline of the betrayal.
I navigate the labyrinthine alleys with a familiar swiftness, a predator’s economy of motion, avoiding the main thoroughfares where the gray-uniformed Truthspeakers maintain their unnerving, silent presence. They do not typically make arrests here. The market exists in a carefully maintained gray zone of legality, a necessary evil for the city’s information-based economy that is officially unacknowledged by the state. Still, attracting their focused attention is a foolish and often fatal risk.
My broker, Chen, operates from a cramped, poorly lit stall in the market’s deepest and most dangerous sector, where the air is thick with the metallic smell of ozone and damp, decaying concrete. He is a small, wiry man with nervous, fluttering hands and eyes that never stop moving, constantly scanning every shadow for potential threats. He has managed to survive in the brutal information trade for thirty years, a near eternity in this business. Such longevity requires either exceptional luck or an even more exceptional sense of caution. Chen possesses both in abundance. As I approach, he is methodically polishing a small, smooth, black river stone with his thumb, a nervous tic that only serves to sharpen his predatory focus.
“You are early, Arielle,” he says, his voice a low, gravelly rasp. His stall is deceptively modest, containing little more than a desk and a few rickety chairs, but the custom-built, quantum-encrypted terminal beneath his desk is worth more than most people in this city earn in a decade.
“I have something time-sensitive.” I place the chip on his desk without a word.
Chen picks it up with delicate, almost reverent fingers, slots it into his reader, and scans the contents. His expression remains a carefully constructed mask of professional indifference, but I do not miss the slight, almost imperceptible widening of his eyes. Good data always gets a reaction, no matter how disciplined the broker.
“Corporate espionage,” he murmurs, his eyes flicking up to meet mine. “High-level algorithm theft. The source is clean?”
“Always.”
He considers this for a moment, running the file through his extensive verification software. The process takes three long minutes, during which the only sound is the low hum of his machine. When it finishes, he quotes me a price that is exactly what I expected. Chen is fair, in his own way. He is never generous, but he never cheats his best suppliers. I negotiate out of pure habit, pushing for an additional ten percent. He counters with eight. We settle on nine. He initiates the credit transfer to my secure account while I wait, the silence between us heavy with unspoken questions.
“You are taking bigger risks lately,” Chen says as the transaction completes. “The Bureau has been running more and more internal audits, looking for leaks in their classified systems.”
“I am careful.”
“Careful people do not last forever in this business.” He ejects the chip and hands it to a waiting, shadowy assistant for resale. “This is just advice from someone who has seen a great many careful people disappear.” He pauses, his sharp eyes flicking to mine again with a new intensity. “Speaking of risks and rumors, there are whispers. About old Sarah Winters. The Deputy Director who went dark a few years back. Word on the deepest channels is that she is not as gone as the Bureau wants everyone to think. Building some kind of ghost network, they say, a quiet opposition to the current regime.”
“Rumors are cheap, Chen,” I say, my voice deliberately flat.
“Perhaps.” Chen shrugs, his attention already returning to his screen as he moves on to his next transaction. “But even rumors can be valuable data if you know how to interpret them. Good luck with whatever you are planning, Arielle.”
I do not ask how he knows I am planning something. Chen reads people the way I read memories, finding the undeniable truth in what is deliberately left unspoken. I pocket my payment, feeling the digital weight of it not as a victory, but as the price of my solitude. It is the currency that keeps me safe, and it builds the walls that keep me alone.