What happens when your past becomes a currency?

The first memory Kael ever sold was his seventh birthday. The cake's vanilla scent, his father's laugh, the warm glow of candles—all extracted in a five-minute procedure at the Mnemotek Booth. He walked out with 500 credits and a strange hollow space where the memory used to be. The official report called it "harmless cognitive decluttering."

That was ten years ago. Now Kael worked as a Memory Hunter in the Gray Zone, finding desperate people willing to trade their past for present survival. Business was booming. The wealthy bought memories like vintage wine—a first kiss, a childhood adventure, a perfect sunset. They called it "experiential wealth." Kael called it survival.

His boss, Madame Evangeline, ran the most exclusive memory parlor in the Upper Sector. "The rich aren't buying memories," she often said, swirling a vial of someone's wedding day. "They're buying time. A chance to feel what they've forgotten how to feel."

Kael's latest assignment was different. Find "chronological orphans"—people with terminal illnesses willing to sell their entire memory catalog. The payout was life-changing, the cost unimaginable.

That's how he met Elara, a woman with six months to live and memories worth millions. Her mind was a treasure trove: studying sea turtles in Madagascar, conducting orchestras in Vienna, discovering archaeological sites in Peru. She'd lived a dozen lives in one.

"I'm not selling," she told him flatly when he made the offer. They sat in her modest apartment, surrounded by photographs of places she'd been, people she'd loved. "These memories are who I am."

"Who you were," Kael corrected gently. "The money could give you comfort in your final months. Experimental treatments. Luxury."

Elara smiled, a sad, knowing look. "You really believe that, don't you? That memories are just data that can be traded?"

He'd heard this before. The moral objections. The philosophical arguments. They always faded when bank accounts started growing.

But Elara was different. Instead of throwing him out, she made tea. She showed him photographs, telling stories behind each one. The time she got lost in Marrakech and found a hidden library. The student she'd mentored who became a renowned scientist. The husband she'd loved for forty years before he passed.

"Close your eyes," she said softly. "Describe your favorite childhood memory."

Kael tried. He reached for the birthday party, the laughter, the cake... but found only the clinical description he'd recited when selling it. The facts were there, but the feeling was gone. The warmth, the joy, the love—extracted, bottled, and sold to some stranger who now probably remembered it as their own.

A cold realization settled in his stomach. He'd been selling pieces of himself for years, and now he was just an empty house where other people's memories occasionally echoed.

"Why are you showing me this?" he asked, voice tight.

"Because you're more victim than villain," she said. "You've been convinced that memories are commodities when they're actually the foundation of our souls."

That night, Kael broke into Madame Evangeline's records. What he found made him sick. The "chronological orphan" program wasn't for the dying—it was a cover. They were targeting healthy people, erasing them completely, and selling their identities to the ultra-rich who wanted entirely new lives. The victims woke up as blank slates, shipped off to state facilities while others lived their lives.

The final record he opened was his own file. "Subject Kael: Optimal candidate for full extraction. Minimal identity anchors remaining."

He'd been harvesting himself for years, and now he was ripe for the final picking.

Kael returned to Elara's apartment as dawn broke. He brought with him every credit he'd saved, a data chip with evidence of the operation, and a plea.

"Help me remember how to be human," he said.

She took his hand. "We'll start with something simple. The smell of rain on dry earth. The weight of a book in your hands. The taste of fresh bread."

And as the city woke around them, Kael began the slow, painful process of collecting new memories not to sell, but to keep. To build a self that no one could buy or steal. A person made of moments, not transactions.

In a world trading its past for comfort, he was learning the most radical act was to remember and to feel.