The Memory Broker

The Memory Broker

The sign above her door flickered, as always. “MEMORIES BOUGHT. MEMORIES SOLD.” Neon pink. Cheap and desperate. It matched the clientele.

Marin Vale, once the face of investigative journalism on every major network, now worked in the shadows—alone, forgotten, and forgotten on purpose.

She wasn’t just a memory broker. She was the memory broker. People came to her for stolen moments, for erasing guilt, for reliving what they’d lost or selling what they couldn’t bear to carry anymore. Love, grief, even trauma—it all had a price. And Marin had stopped asking why years ago.

That night, a new client walked in. Mid-thirties. Nervous eyes. A twitch beneath his left temple—probably a cheap neurojack. “I found something,” he whispered, sliding a data chip across the desk. “It’s… not mine. I think it was taken from someone else. I didn’t buy it. I swear.”

Marin leaned forward. “Illegal memory acquisition is a federal—”

“Just watch it.”

She plugged it in. The memory projection blurred, then stabilized. It was from a child’s perspective. Rain. Running footsteps. A scream. Then—a woman, bleeding, reaching toward the lens. She mouthed a word before everything went black.

“Marin.”

The air in her office went still.

She ejected the chip with shaking fingers. “Where did you get this?”

“I told you. It was uploaded into my feed cache by mistake. I swear on my life.”

She let him go. Maybe she shouldn’t have.

Over the next few days, Marin dove into her own stored memories—locked, categorized, boxed neatly in her offline vaults. There was no record of that night. No record of that woman. No child, no scream, no trauma. But she knew that name. She knew that voice.

So she did what she hadn’t done in years: hacked into the Federal Memory Archives.

Most people only saw their surface memories, the things they recalled consciously. But deeper memories—suppressed, erased, rewritten—those still lived beneath the cortex, even if buried.

She found a ghost file tied to her neural ID. Locked. Government encrypted.

And she found a match: the woman from the memory. Listed as deceased. No official cause. No autopsy. No record of ever having existed publicly.

Her name was Lina Vale. Her sister.

Marin didn't remember Lina.

She had been erased.

Worse—her own memories had been edited to insert a fake narrative. A childhood without siblings. Parents who died in an accident. A career path shaped by tragedy, not curiosity. A void disguised as motivation.

She stared at herself in the mirror, trying to see the woman who would have known Lina.

When she went back to her office, the client was dead. Shot in the spine. Clean. Professional. No records. No witnesses. The chip was gone.

But Marin had already copied it.

The final memory on the chip—the part Marin hadn’t watched—was from her own point of view. Years ago. Holding Lina’s hand. Begging her not to testify against a biotech giant developing illegal memory-wiping technology. Marin had convinced her to stay silent. Said she’d take the evidence and run it herself.

She hadn’t.

She had sold the story—and the truth—to the very company Lina was trying to expose.

And they had paid her in amnesia.

Now Marin knew everything. She knew who she had been. Who she had betrayed. And why she could never forget again.

She uploaded the full memory archive to the Net under her real name.

And as she waited for the consequences—legal, mortal, or otherwise—she sat back in her chair, lit a cigarette, and whispered, “Lina, I remember you now.”