THE DISTINCTION
I don't steal memories. I just sell them.
The distinction matters—to me, anyway.
The Extractors do the dirty work. They lurk in alleyways with their syringe-guns and neural harvesters, draining tourists of their first kisses, their wedding days, their mother's laughter.
I just run the shop. Gray market. Top floor of a building that doesn't exist on city maps.
Customers come for the hits: a Nobel Prize winner's moment of discovery, a rock star's first stadium roar, a dying man's final peaceful thought. Experience someone else's peak life without the work. Without the consequences.
Or so they think.
I've been doing this eight years. Long enough to know the look people get when they buy their first memory—that slack-jawed wonder, the pupils dilating as the neural sync takes hold. Long enough to recognize the addicts by their trembling hands, the ones who've burned out their own capacity for joy and now live entirely through stolen moments.
I tell myself I'm providing a service. Harm reduction. If people are going to fry their synapses, better they do it with clean, certified merchandise than the street trash cut with synthetic trauma.
The distinction matters. It has to.
Tuesday started like any other. Rain against the windows, the kind that turns the city into a watercolor painting viewed through dirty glass. I was inventorying last week's acquisitions when the delivery came.
Standard courier drone, no signature required. Black foam container, no return address.
I get thirty packages a week. I don't ask questions.
But this one was different.
No label. No memory classification. Just a date stamped on the side in red ink: three days from now.
My first thought was forgery. Some Extractor's idea of a joke, or a competitor trying to spook me. I almost threw it in the incinerator chute.
Almost.
Inside: a single crystal storage chip. High grade. Military extraction tech. The kind that can capture not just sensory data but emotional context, proprioception, even the phantom taste of adrenaline in the back of the throat.
Worth more than my shop. Worth more than my life, probably, to the right buyer.
I shouldn't have played it. We never play the merchandise. Corrupts the data. Degrades the resale value. Violates the cardinal rule that keeps us all from becoming the junkies we serve.
I played it.
I told myself it was quality control. Authentication. I told myself a lot of things.
The headset settled over my temples like a familiar lover, and the world dissolved into someone else's rain.