What If Your Memories Were Sold to the Highest Bidder?

The bidding began at midnight.

In a sleek, chrome-paneled room somewhere deep beneath the ruins of what used to be Chicago, men and women in expensive suits clicked their virtual paddles as images flickered across a wall-sized screen. The auctioneer’s voice echoed through the air like a machine-generated chant: “Lot 244. Childhood. Age range: 6 to 10. Vivid. Intact. Unfiltered. Starting bid: 250,000 credits.”

On the screen, a girl ran barefoot through a meadow. Her laughter filled the silent room, an echo from another time. No one saw her face. That was part of the draw. The anonymity added intrigue. What mattered wasn’t whose memories they were—it was how real they felt.

Behind a dark glass partition, Ava watched as the final bid was placed. 1.4 million credits. Someone would now own her memory of her mother brushing her hair and humming “Moon River.” The rhythm of that tune had soothed her for years, even after her mother disappeared. Now it was gone.

And Ava couldn’t remember the melody anymore.

In the world of 2149, memory was currency. The Memory Exchange Commission regulated its trade—or so they said. In truth, memories were stolen more often than sold, hacked by black market brokers or siphoned during hospital scans. For the wealthy, owning someone else’s life had become a pastime. They didn’t just crave art or yachts anymore—they craved experience. They wanted to feel heartbreak. Or joy. Or terror. Especially if it wasn’t their own.

Ava used to work for the Commission. She’d been a Scanner—a person with the unique neural flexibility to extract memories from hosts and store them intact. It paid well, but she’d left after the “Accidental Harvest” case. A boy’s entire identity had been erased when the scanner pulled too hard. The boy had no name, no history. He was still in a facility, singing lullabies to strangers.

Ava had sworn she’d never scan again. But after her debts mounted—medical, rent, blackout fees—she made a choice. She started selling off her own memories.

The first was small. A math competition win at age 11. Then her high school graduation. Then the day her father died, and she realized grief had a sound—like rain on plastic. After each upload, the emptiness inside her grew. But the credits flowed, and she told herself it was temporary. Just enough to get back on her feet.

Then she sold her first kiss.

That’s when the dreams began.

She saw a city with no name, where buildings pulsed with light and everyone wore masks. In the dream, someone whispered to her: “You were never meant to forget.”

It was during her third memory transfer that Ava met Julian. He was a collector—young, magnetic, and disturbingly calm. Most clients kept their distance. Julian watched her, studied her like a scientist does a rare insect.

“I don’t want your memory,” he said after the scan. “I want to help you remember.”

Ava didn’t trust him.

“Why?”

“Because I know what they took from me. And I think they took it from you too.”

Julian claimed he was once a Memory Broker, but someone had wiped his core identity. He no longer remembered where he was born or what he used to care about. He only knew it felt wrong. In a secure archive, he found fragments of his own memories auctioned under random lot numbers—his laughter in a snowball fight, a woman crying his name, a dog with one ear.

He showed Ava the listings. One of them was hers.

“Lot 217,” he said. “A song. A woman’s voice. Moon River.”

Ava’s hands trembled. The song.

She agreed to help him. Not to reclaim her memories—they were gone, maybe forever—but to shut down the black market servers storing thousands of lives.

They broke into a storage facility on the outskirts of the city—an underground vault called EchoCore. It wasn’t just a place where memories were held. It was a weapon.

Within minutes, Ava and Julian were surrounded. Security drones swarmed. But instead of running, Ava stood in the center of the server room and activated the Emergency Memory Cascade—a scanner function that would flood the system with uncontrolled data, corrupting any stolen memory beyond recovery.

It would cost her everything she still remembered.

Julian shouted, “No! You’ll lose who you are.”

She looked at him, tears in her eyes. “I already have.”

Then she pulled the trigger.

Ava woke up in a rehabilitation center two weeks later. Her memory was blank. The doctors called her a “hero of neural liberation,” but the words meant nothing to her. Strangers visited and thanked her for “freeing their childhoods.” Some cried. One gave her a bracelet and whispered, “You saved my daughter’s first smile.”

She didn’t recognize any of them.

Months passed.

Ava started over. She read books. She watched the rain. She learned to hum again. One day, sitting on a park bench, a man walked up. He looked familiar, though she couldn’t say why.

Julian.

He sat beside her, quietly, respectfully.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She tilted her head. “For what?”

“For letting you do it alone.”

They didn’t talk much after that. But each week, he visited her in the park. They played chess. Drank terrible coffee. And once, Ava laughed at something he said—and for a split second, a melody stirred in her chest.

“Moon River,” she said softly.

Julian froze. “What did you say?”

“I don’t know.” She blinked. “It just felt…right.”