The Dream Market Auction

The air in the underground vault was thick with expensive smoke and desperate desire. This was the Veiled Bazaar, where the hyper-rich of Neo-Sanctuary came to buy what they could no create themselves: real, unfiltered emotion. Lysander moved through the crowd, a ghost in a tailored suit. He was a Dream Trader. His product was humanity, bottled and sold by the milliliter.

“Next lot,” the auctioneer’s voice boomed, digitally enhanced to sound omniscient. A hush fell. A holotank glowed to life above the stage. “A classic. First Kiss. Nerves, exhilaration, the taste of strawberry lip-gloss. A pristine capture from a donor in the Mid-West Sector. Bidding starts at 50,000 creds.”

Lysander didn’t even glance up. He dealt in higher-end merchandise. His clients didn’t want cliché; they wanted raw, specific, and potent. He was here for one thing: Lot 47.

His source, a sweaty little man in the data-mines, had whispered about it. “It’s… different, Lysander. It’s not a dream. It’s a memory. Pure. Untouched by the cynicism of the age. It’s gonna break the market.”

Now, it was time. The auctioneer cleared his throat. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have a truly special item. Lot 47. We call it ‘Sunshine and Popsicles’.”

The holotank erupted with light. Not the lurid neon of the city, but the fierce, golden glow of a long-lost summer sun. The image solidified into the memory of a young girl, no more than seven, sitting on a wooden porch step. She was laughing, a sound so clear and joyous it cut through the cynical atmosphere of the room. She was clutching a melting lime-green popsicle, her hands sticky, her face lit with a perfect, unselfconscious bliss. The sensory data stream was overwhelming: the smell of cut grass, the warmth of the sun on skin, the sublime, sugary tang of the treat.

A collective gasp went through the crowd. For a moment, every jaded billionaire, every exhausted socialite, was transported. They were that child. They felt that simple, perfect joy.

Lysander’s professional detachment shattered. He wasn’t a trader anymore; he was a witness. He felt a pang in his chest, a forgotten ache for something he hadn’t known he’d lost.

“Bidding starts at 500,000 creds,” the auctioneer said, a greedy smile in his voice.

The numbers began to flash on the screen, rising at a dizzying pace. 750,000. 1.2 million. 2 million. Lysander’s own hand twitched. This was it. His retirement. His life of ease. All he had to do was participate in the theft.

His eyes stayed locked on the girl’s face. Her laughter echoed in his mind, and suddenly, it wasn’t just joy he felt in the memory. He felt the shadow of its loss. This wasn’t just a dream. It was a piece of someone’s soul. Someone out there had lost this. Maybe it was ripped from a neural archive in a data-heist. Maybe it was sold by someone starving and desperate. This memory was a ghost, and the person it belonged to was now haunted by its absence, forever feeling an inexplicable emptiness they could never name.

The bid hit 3.5 million. The crowd was electric.

Lysander thought of his empty apartment, his accounts waiting to be filled, the silence that awaited him. Then he looked back at the little girl on the porch, a moment of perfect, innocent happiness frozen in time, about to be consumed by the highest bidder and used as a temporary fix for their emotional decay.

He couldn’t do it.

His hand didn’t raise to bid. Instead, his fingers flew across the datapad on his wrist, accessing a back-channel program he’d built for emergencies. He couldn’t afford to buy the dream, but he could afford to sabotage the auction.

As the auctioneer raised his gavel, “Going once… Going twice…”, the brilliant hologram of the little girl flickered. It distorted, scrambled into a mess of static, and then vanished entirely. The auction house plunged into darkness and confused uproar.

In the chaos, Lysander slipped out. He stood in a damp alley, the neon signs of the city bleeding into the sky. He was broke. He was a pariah in his industry. He had thrown away the biggest score of his life.

A cold rain began to fall. But as he stood there, he replayed the memory in his own mind—the sun, the laughter, the popsicle. He hadn’t captured it in a vial. He couldn’t sell it. But for a moment, he had felt it. Truly felt it. And in a world that traded in echoes, he realized he was now one of the few people left who owned something real. He had given the ghost back its rest, and in return, it had given him a piece of his own humanity back. It was the one deal in his life that was actually worth making.