The Archivist's Lantern

"A woman named Lira works as an Archivist—a government official trained to extract, analyze, and preserve people's memories—in a city where forgetting is a crime and memories are currency." The wealthiest people keep theirs in vaults made of crystal. For food, the impoverished must sell theirs, forgetting their names, loved ones, or even their birthdays.

Stoic and exact, Lira has always done things the right way. But on the day she finds a forgotten item—a lantern that has no registered owner and was discovered flickering among the ruins of Sector 9, a section of the city that was closed off decades ago due to a mass memory collapse—everything changes.

A child's laughing, a beach at sunset, and the name "Kael" murmured again are among the shards of a life other than Lira's that fill her mind as she lights the lantern. However, Kael is not listed in the registration. No documentation. Not a thing.

Lira defies convention and goes back to Sector 9 because she is motivated by a memory that is not hers. She finds a secret community there where people share stories verbally rather than digitally and are not subject to the memory tax. Among them is Kael, an elderly man who remembers her right away, and they refer to themselves as the "Remnants."

He claims that before they stole your memories and claimed you as their own, "you were one of us once."

Lira's world falls apart. The Archivist is not who she believed herself to be. Her background, her training—it was all made up. Before giving herself over to the system, she had created the lantern herself, leaving it as a failsafe memory trigger.

She now has to decide whether to battle to reclaim what was taken—from her and innumerable others—or go back to her secure, manufactured identity.

She decides to keep in mind.

And in a city that attempted to eradicate them, the lantern turns becomes a beacon of defiance, pointing people back to who they really are.