Memories Turn Currencies

In the neon-drenched sprawl of Neo-Versailles, nothing held more value than a memory.

Money? Obsolete. Gold? Decorative. The new wealth lay in lived experiences-bottled, traded, or stolen. A child's first laugh, a heartbreak on a rainy Tuesday, the moment your mother told you she loved you. In a city that never stopped consuming sensation, memories were more than sentimental-they were currency.

No one knew that better than Silas Vane, once the most infamous memory thief in the district.

He sat alone in a rundown corner café in Sector D9, sipping synthetic coffee and staring at the flickering holographic billboard above the counter: “Trade nostalgia, buy tomorrow. MemoryBank pays top rates!”

Silas once lived like a king. Luxury apartments. Neural enhancers. A library of stolen moments tucked into encrypted mind vaults. He could taste the summer breeze of Italy 2029, hear the crackling fire of a Wyoming cabin Christmas that never belonged to him, and recall falling in love-dozens of times-without ever getting hurt.

Now? He had three memories left.

And two were nightmares.

He adjusted the memory jack hidden beneath the collar of his faded coat. His neural balance was down to 17 credits, barely enough for a bus ride. Worse, the last clean memory he owned-the only one worth anything-was about to expire.

You see, memories degraded over time unless refreshed by the original host or lived through again. But Silas hadn’t had access to a memory vault in months. He was blacklisted from every bank, hunted by both debt collectors and former clients.

And his mind?

It was falling apart.

Silas didn’t plan on becoming a thief. He had started as a memory editor, helping people erase trauma, tweak shame, repackage sorrow. Then came the black-market gigs. A stolen kiss here, a sun-drenched afternoon there. And finally, entire lives lifted from neural tapes while the hosts slept, waking a little emptier each time.

The job was simple: jack in, clone the memory, wipe your trace, and cash out. But greed had made him careless.

He stole a memory from a client named Alea Rhinn. A quiet woman with eyes like frozen stars. She had come in for a standard restoration, but he had tasted her past-her entire past-and taken the best part: a memory of her brother’s death, transformed into peace.

It wasn’t joyful. But it was beautiful. The kind of memory that haunted you like a song.

When she found out, she didn’t scream or cry. She whispered, “You took the one thing that made my grief bearable.”

Then she disappeared.

A week later, his vaults were hacked. Every high-value memory corrupted. His name flagged across the grid. His face tagged in every MemoryBank. No place to hide. No memory worth selling.

Now, Silas had nothing left but shadows.

Until he saw her again.

It was on a crowded street, near the west dome where vendors sold synthetic dreams in pill form. Alea. Walking alone, wrapped in a cloak of silver thread. She looked directly at him and smiled, as if she’d been waiting.

Silas followed.

Not out of vengeance.

Out of desperation.

She led him to a forgotten quarter of the city, where buildings still had windows and streets weren’t lined with glowing advertisements. They entered a crumbling library, one of the last physical structures untouched by neural tech.

Inside, Alea turned and spoke.

“You’re dying, Silas.”

He nodded. “I’m bankrupt.”

“I know. I watched your balance crash. That was part of the deal.”

He blinked. “Deal?”

“I never went missing. I sold the rights to my memory. The grief. The beauty. The pain. But not to a vault. To something older. Something more… permanent.”

“What does that mean?”

She walked to a desk and opened an old book, yellowed and stiff.

“You stole my closure. So I offered something else in return. A memory that consumes others. One that eats its way through the thief’s mind until there’s nothing left.”

Silas took a step back, heart racing. “That’s not possible.”

“Isn’t it?” Her smile didn’t reach her eyes. “You’ve been reliving it, haven’t you? Not because you want to. Because you can’t stop.”

He staggered. She was right.

That one memory-her brother’s death in her arms, the soft hum of a lullaby, her whispered goodbye-it had played again and again, without his control. A virus in his mind. A haunting that refused to fade.

“It’s alive,” he whispered. “The memory…”

“Is feeding,” she finished.

Silas fell into a chair, trembling. “Then I’m finished.”

“Not quite,” Alea said. “There’s one last thing you can trade.”

He looked up, eyes hollow. “What?”

“Yourself.”

Later that night, in the underbelly of Neo-Versailles, a new memory capsule hit the black market.

It sold for 100,000 credits. Priceless.

It wasn’t joy, or sorrow, or a great adventure.

It was the complete, unraveling identity of a man who had lived a thousand stolen lives and forgotten who he was. A man who had loved memories more than reality. A thief undone by a single, perfect grief.

Buyers described the experience as terrifying. Intimate. Some cried. Others disconnected halfway through, claiming they felt their own memories being pulled away.

But one user, a hacker known only as M3rcury, finished the entire simulation. And at the end, he found a message burned into the last neural frame:

“Memories are precious. But they are not yours to take.

- S.V.”

Silas Vane was never seen again.

But in the memory markets of Neo-Versailles, he became legend. Not for the lives he stole.

But for the price he paid.