The Memory Broker

The Memory Broker

By Hasnain Shah

The first thing I remember selling was my mother’s laugh.

It was soft, golden, like sunlight on rippling water. A collector offered me 800 credits for it — a fortune at the time. I told myself I didn’t need it anymore; I still had the memory of her hands, the way she stirred coffee, the way she hummed “Fly Me to the Moon.” I figured one memory wouldn’t hurt.

That was ten years ago, when memory trading was still a niche indulgence for the rich — something you bought to feel “authentic emotion.” Now, it’s an economy. Brokers like me deal in nostalgia, trauma, love, adventure. The past is a commodity, and the black market pays best for stolen ones.

I go by Eira Vale. At least, that’s the name I’ve kept since the real one blurred somewhere between transactions. My job is simple: authenticate, extract, and resell memories. The extraction device looks like a halo made of glass — once it sits on your temples, it dives into the folds of your hippocampus, catalogues experience like files, and copies them for export.

No pain. Just a gentle hum. Then a hole where something used to live.

I’ve seen people walk out of my office smiling, feeling lighter, freer — until they start noticing the gaps. Forgetting a child’s name. A favorite song. The way they used to dream.

Last Thursday, a new client came in. He was tall, nervous, the kind of man who looked like he’d already lost too much.

“I need to sell something… recent,” he said, voice tight. “You do discreet work, right?”

“Always,” I told him. I led him to the chair, fastened the halo, began the scan. The neural map glowed across my screen — fractal lights twisting like galaxies. I began sorting through his memory queue.

That’s when I saw it.

A memory tagged ‘Eira Vale – 2:17 A.M. – 22/04/2145.’

My heart stumbled. The date matched last week.

Curious, I opened it.

The image bloomed before me in immersive clarity: a small apartment. My apartment. The man in the memory stood by the window, holding a mug of coffee. I was there too — curled up on the couch, barefoot, humming softly as rain streaked the glass.

He reached out and tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear. I laughed.

My laugh. The same one I’d sold years ago.

The feed flickered, and the system confirmed: Memory source valid.

“Where did you get this?” I demanded.

The man blinked, startled. “What do you mean?”

“This memory— it’s not yours. It’s mine.”

He frowned. “No. I lived that. You’re the one who—” He hesitated. “You’re the one who moved in next door. We… we’ve been seeing each other for months.”

I stared at him. “That’s impossible.”

He looked utterly confused. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

After he left — frightened, mumbling apologies — I locked the office and reran the analysis. The metadata didn’t lie. The neural signature matched mine perfectly.

Someone was selling my life.

I tore through my digital archives. Sure enough, dozens of new listings had appeared under my identity: Eira Vale — First Kiss in Winter — 400 credits.

Eira Vale — The Day She Quit Her Job — 250 credits.

Eira Vale — The Memory Broker’s Regret — 900 credits.

Each memory perfectly rendered, available to anyone with the credits to buy.

I traced the listings back to their seller — an account called MNEMOSYNE. No physical address. No ID trail. Just a symbol: an eye surrounded by seven stars.

That night, I went home and checked my mirror. The woman who looked back felt… off. Her eyes softer, her hair slightly longer than I remembered cutting it. On the wall, my photographs — the ones from places I’d never been — now hung in neat frames. In one of them, I stood beside the man from earlier, smiling like I’d always known him.

I felt the edges of panic rise.

I grabbed the extraction halo and set it on my own temples. “Run self-scan,” I whispered.

The system whirred, analyzing synapses. Then the result flashed on the screen:

Warning: Duplicate consciousness detected.

Source identity: MNEMOSYNE Primary Host.

You are the derivative.

For a moment, I couldn’t breathe.

It meant that somewhere — in some lab, some server, some black-market warehouse — there was an original me. The first Eira Vale. I was the copy. A replica built from traded memories, sold and recombined into a life that never truly belonged to me.

All those missing moments, all those strange gaps in my mind — they weren’t lost by accident. They were never mine to begin with.

I shut down the scanner and stared out the window. Rain again. The world outside glowed neon and distant. Every drop felt unfamiliar on the glass.

If I’m just a collection of borrowed memories, then what makes me me?

Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe identity, like memory, is only worth what someone’s willing to pay for it.

Tomorrow, I’ll track down MNEMOSYNE. Or maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll sell what’s left — the fear, the confusion, the ache of realization — and start clean again.

The Memory Broker selling the memory of discovering she was never real.

Now that should fetch a good price.