The Last Memory Dealer

Content Warning: This story contains themes of grief and existential choices.

The syringe cast a sickly green haze in the clinic’s gloom, its bio-lume fluid painting fractured shapes across water-stained walls. Lena tugged at her gloves; the latex clung to her skin, damp with nerves. Antiseptic and rot warred in the air, but neither could overpower the sour tang of fear seeping from the man strapped to the dental chair—a rusted thing salvaged from a foreclosure auction, its leather cracked like drought-parched earth. They always tremble, she reminded herself. Fear was part of the transaction.

Her client’s tailored suit shimmered like oil on pavement under the sputtering overhead light, its threads too fine for Sector 12. His knuckles whitened on the armrest, veins mapping his desperation. But his bloodshot eyes and the whiskey tang radiating from him told another story. A high roller drowning in regret, Lena thought. She’d seen his type before: executives, politicians, artists—people who’d traded their joy for power, only to realize too late what they’d lost.

“Remember,” she said, her voice flat from years of repetition, “I’m only extracting five minutes. The happiest five minutes of your life. Once I take them, you’ll forget them forever. That’s the trade.”

“Get on with it,” he rasped, the words unraveling like split yarn.

The needle kissed his temple. Lena’s hand didn’t shake—a skill honed through years of swallowing her own dread. The machine whirred awake, its monitor blinking erratically before sharpening into a fractured home video: confetti caught in a ceiling fan’s whirl, a woman’s laugh dissolving into thunder, a grubby fist thrusting candy toward the lens.

Typical, she thought. Sentimental fools.

But as the memory looped, something pricked at her chest. Cherry-red lollipop. Wrapper crackling. “Love you, Lina-bear. The memory’s echo hit her diaphragm like a sucker punch. She shook it off. Sentimentality was a luxury she’d buried years ago, right next to her father’s empty promises.

South Block Sector 12 held the clinic which situated itself between a closed laundromat store and a pawnshop with neon lights. Outside the rain produced a hissing noise on the pavement as hover-cars emitted a humming sound overhead. Lena left the clinic with her boots hitting the damaged tiles which made the deadbolt procedure sound like an injured creature.

The man in the chair shifted, his Rolex catching the light. A relic from his former life, Lena mused. She’d learned to read clients quickly: the way he gripped the armrests wasn’t just fear—it was grief. Men like him came here to erase the memories they couldn’t bear to keep, trading them for a numbness that let them sleep at night.

The machine, a hulking contraption of rusted metal and humming wires, was their livelihood. Lena’s father had built the prototype years ago, back when he’d promised her they’d “revolutionize the world.” Instead, he’d sold it to a syndicate for a bag of credits and a one-way ticket out of their lives.

As the needle pierced the man’s skin, Lena’s mind flickered to her first extraction. She’d been sixteen, trembling worse than the client now. Jax had stood behind her, his breath hot on her neck. “You want to survive?” he’d said. “Pretend it’s just data. Code. Forget the faces.”

But the faces always lingered.

Lena never watched the memories afterward. Her brother Jax, who handled the buyers in their illegal trade, said it was bad for business.

“Empathy’s a tax on survival,” he’d sneer, cataloguing the vials of stolen joy they sold to the highest bidder. The rich paid fortunes to inject someone else’s happiness, chasing a high their own lives couldn’t provide.

But that night, Lena hesitated. The client’s memory—that lollipop moment—had felt familiar. She slid the vial into her viewer, the machine whirring softly as the scene replayed.

The child’s giggles sharpened into focus. Cherry-red lollipop. Wrapper crackling. “Love you, Lina-bear.

Her breath caught. No.

The child wasn’t a stranger.

It was her.

The man was her father.

Jax’s office was a shrine to their trade: shelves lined with vials of stolen memories, their hues ranging from molten gold to deep violet. He’d categorized them by emotion—Joy, Love, Triumph, Nostalgia—each labeled in his jagged script. Lena had always avoided this room. The memories here weren’t just stolen; they were hollowed, stripped of context until they were little more than drugs.

But tonight, she stood in the doorway, the vial of her father’s memory clutched in her fist. Jax looked up from his ledger, his eyes narrowing. “You’re sloppy,” he said. “Sentimentality’s how we got caught last time.”

“Last time?” Lena snapped. “You mean when you sold a kid’s birthday memory to a Corp exec? The one that got him killed?”

Jax shrugged. “Collateral. You think the streets care about collateral?”

Lena’s jaw tightened. She’d been twelve when Jax first brought her into the business. Their mother had died in a med-center riot, and Jax had sworn they’d never starve. But survival had a cost.

Jax found her smashing the vial against the clinic’s concrete floor, golden liquid pooling like liquid sunlight. “You’re out of your damn mind,” Jax hissed later, cornering her by the clinic’s emergency exit. His charm had curdled into something feral. “That memory’s worth six figures!”

“It’s mine,” Lena hissed, her voice raw. “He sold me. His own daughter’s happiest moment!”

Jax froze. For once, his composure cracked. “So what? You knew the job. We all pay the price.”

She stared at the shards of glass. Her father hadn’t recognized her in the clinic—the memory of her was already gone. All that remained was the hollow man buying back a ghost.

Lena wrenched the power cord from the machine. “We’re done.”

“You’ll starve,” Jax warned, his voice low. “No one quits this trade.”

Lena pocketed the remaining vials, their warmth seeping through her coat. Let the buyers starve instead, she thought. Let them learn to make their own damn memories.

The vial shattered at her feet, releasing a shimmering mist. For a heartbeat, Lena was eight again, sitting on her father’s shoulders as he carried her through the market. She could smell the fried dough, feel his laugh rumble through her bones.

Jax grabbed her wrist. “You’re throwing away years of work. You think the syndicate won’t hunt you? They’ll gut you for this!”

“Let them try,” Lena spat. She pulled a knife from her belt—the one she’d taken from her father’s workshop—and slashed the remaining vials. Memories swirled in the air: a first kiss, a graduation, a sunset over the old city. They dissolved like smoke.

Jax backed toward the door, his face pale. “You’re dead, Lena. You know that?”

She smiled, bitter and bright. “Better dead than empty.”

The next client arrived at midnight, their silhouette blurred by the clinic’s frosted glass door. Lena injected her own memory into the machine—the feel of her father’s calloused hand holding hers, the sugar burning her tongue, the warmth she’d spent a lifetime resenting him for losing.

“Five minutes,” she told the client, her voice steady. “But this one’s free.”

The client was a woman this time, her face obscured by a hood. She laid a credit chip on the table. “I need to forget,” she whispered.

Lena pocketed the chip but loaded her own memory into the machine. The woman stiffened as the needle pierced her skin, but when the memory played, her shoulders relaxed. A tear slid down her cheek.

When it was over, the woman stared at Lena, uncomprehending. “Why?”

Lena traced the scar on her palm—the one from the night her father left. “Some memories are meant to be shared.”

Outside, the rain had stopped. Lena stepped into the alley, the weight of the vials gone. For the first time in years, she felt light.

Epilogue

Weeks later, rumors spread through the underground: a rogue extractor was giving memories away. The syndicate’s enforcers scoured the sectors, but Lena was already gone, her clinic abandoned.

In a cramped apartment downtown, a boy laughed as his father lifted him onto his shoulders. The man’s eyes, once hollow, gleamed with tears.

“Love you, Lina-bear,” he whispered.

And somewhere, Lena smiled.