Mrs. Rodriguez clutched her purse like it contained her last hope, which in a way, it did. She sat in my waiting area, a converted alcove behind the main extraction room, where red velvet curtains blocked the view of the copper chair. Her eyes were puffy from crying, but her jaw was set with the kind of determination that came from having no other choice.
"Tell me about the memory," I said, settling into the chair across from her. It was 3 PM, prime business hours in my underground clinic. Above us, Chinatown buzzed with afternoon traffic, but down here, the soundproofing kept us isolated in our own little world of secrets and desperation.
"It's... it's the last Christmas morning with my son." Her voice cracked on the word 'son.' "Diego was eight. He woke me up at five AM, so excited about his presents. We didn't have much money, but I'd saved for months to get him that bicycle he wanted."
I pulled out my standard contract, the paper crisp and legal despite the illegal nature of our business. "Christmas morning with a child, high emotional content, approximately two hours of memory. Market value is sixty thousand."
Her hands shook as she reached for the contract. "I need sixty-five. The rent is past due, and they're evicting us tomorrow."
"Sixty-two. That's my final offer." I kept my voice level, professional. In this business, showing emotion was showing weakness. "The memory is beautiful, but child death trauma reduces the resale value. Most buyers want pure joy, not the shadow of loss."
The words hit her like a slap, but she signed anyway. They always did.
Mrs. Rodriguez had lost Diego three years ago to leukemia. She'd been selling her memories of him one by one to pay for medical bills, then funeral costs, then basic survival. I'd bought her first memories of his birth, his first steps, his kindergarten graduation. This Christmas morning was probably the last valuable memory she had left.
"The extraction will take twenty minutes," I told her, leading her to the copper chair. "You'll feel some disorientation afterward, but no permanent damage. You'll remember that Christmas happened, but you won't be able to recall the specific emotions or details."
She nodded, settling into the chair with the resignation of someone who'd been here before. "Will you... will you take good care of it? The memory?"
I paused in adjusting the neural crown. It was against my policy to make promises about memory storage, but something in her voice reminded me of Elena. The way my sister used to worry about stray cats and injured birds, always trying to save things that couldn't be saved.
"I'll make sure it goes to someone who understands its value," I said instead.
The extraction went smoothly. Mrs. Rodriguez's Christmas morning flowed through the neural interface in vivid detail—Diego's squeals of delight, the smell of coffee and cinnamon rolls, the way the morning light caught the red ribbon on his bicycle. It was a beautiful memory, worth every penny I was paying for it.
When it was over, Mrs. Rodriguez sat up slowly, blinking in confusion. "I... something about Christmas? With Diego?"
"You spent Christmas morning with your son three years ago," I said gently. "It was a happy day."
She smiled, but it was empty now, lacking the warmth that had filled her face when she'd described the memory. "Yes. It was happy." She took the cash I handed her—sixty-two thousand in untraceable bills—and left without another word.
I was cataloging the memory chip when Maya burst through the back entrance, her black hair even more disheveled than usual. She clutched her laptop bag to her chest like a shield, and her thick glasses were slightly fogged from rushing.
"We need to talk." She glanced around my clinic, checking the corners where she'd installed motion sensors. "Not here. Upstairs."
Maya Chen was the only person in Neo Francisco I trusted completely, which wasn't saying much since I barely trusted myself. She'd been my tech support and security expert for five years, ever since she'd dropped out of MIT's neuroscience program and landed in the underground memory scene. Most people saw a nervous, socially awkward hacker. I saw someone whose paranoia matched my own.
We climbed the narrow stairs to my apartment above the clinic. Maya immediately pulled out three different devices—a signal detector, a white noise generator, and something that looked like a metallic spider.
"Sweep the room first," she muttered, deploying her electronic countermeasures. "You've got bigger problems than usual."
"Define 'bigger.'" I poured myself whiskey while Maya worked. It was becoming a habit, day drinking, but these weren't normal days.
"Someone's been asking questions about you. Professional questions. The kind that come with badges and budgets." Maya's fingers flew over her laptop keyboard, pulling up encrypted files. "Government contractors, specifically. Memory regulation division."
My whiskey glass froze halfway to my lips. "How professional?"
"They know about your real extraction capacity. They know you can do things with memories that shouldn't be possible." Maya's voice dropped to barely above a whisper. "And they know Elena was your sister."
The whiskey burned going down, but it helped steady my nerves. Government attention was the last thing I needed, especially now. The Memory Regulation Division was supposed to monitor legal trading, but everyone knew they had black ops teams for handling underground dealers who got too powerful.
"There's more." Maya pulled up another file, this one filled with newspaper headlines and police reports. "Elena isn't the first investigator to die mysteriously in the past six months. Three others, all working different cases, all ruled accidental deaths."
She showed me the faces—two women and a man, all in their twenties or thirties, all with the sharp eyes and determined expressions of people who asked too many questions. Like Elena.
"Maria Santos, fell down subway stairs while investigating missing persons cases. James Park, car accident during a corporate fraud investigation. Linda Crawford, drowning while looking into illegal adoption rings." Maya's fingers tapped nervously on her laptop. "All different cases, all different methods, but same result. Dead investigators, closed cases."
I studied the faces, memorizing every detail. "What did they have in common besides being dead?"
"That's the scary part. Nothing obvious. Different cities, different types of investigations, different police departments handling the cases." Maya pulled up a map with red dots marking each death. "But look at this."
The red dots formed a rough circle around Neo Francisco, like a noose tightening around the city. "Someone's cleaning house," I realized. "Eliminating threats."
"Gets worse. I traced the government inquiries about you. They're not coming from local offices." Maya's voice was barely audible now. "Federal level. Someone with serious resources wants to know about Luna Hayes."
I walked to my window and looked down at the street. Everything appeared normal—tourists buying knockoff electronics, locals hurrying to work, the usual urban chaos. But now I wondered how many of those faces belonged to people watching me.
"How much time do we have?" I asked.
"Maybe a week before they move from surveillance to action. Maybe less if you keep doing illegal extractions." Maya closed her laptop. "Luna, you need to disappear. New identity, new city, new life. I can have papers ready by tomorrow."
"No." The word came out harder than I'd intended. "I'm not running."
"Then you're going to die. Just like Elena, just like the others." Maya stood up, clutching her laptop bag. "Whatever she was investigating, it's bigger than one person. It's bigger than revenge."
"Maybe. But Elena died because she got too close to something important. Running away won't honor her memory." I finished my whiskey and set the glass down with deliberate care. "Besides, I have an advantage the other investigators didn't have."
"What's that?"
"I can make people forget they ever met me."
Maya stared at me for a long moment, her expression cycling through fear, admiration, and resignation. "You're planning something incredibly stupid, aren't you?"
"I'm planning something incredibly dangerous. There's a difference." I walked to my safe and pulled out Elena's necklace, the one containing her death memory. "Elena found something worth killing for. I'm going to find out what it was, and I'm going to use it to destroy whoever took her from me."
"And if this federal investigation gets you first?"
I thought about Mrs. Rodriguez, selling her last precious memory of her dead son just to keep a roof over her head. I thought about the copper chair humming at sixty hertz, processing human experiences like commodities. I thought about Elena's final thirty seconds, full of terror and determination.
"Then at least I'll die trying to finish what my sister started."
Maya shook her head but didn't argue. She knew me well enough to recognize when my mind was made up. "What's the plan?"
"I'm going to do what I do best. I'm going to get inside someone's head and steal their secrets." I opened the window, letting in the sounds of the city—car horns, voices, the distant hum of the Memory Exchange processing legal trades. "But first, I need to find out who's been asking questions about me."
"That's suicide."
"Maybe. Or maybe it's justice." I turned back to Maya, seeing my own determination reflected in her nervous eyes. "Elena died investigating something. These other people died investigating different things. But what if they're all connected? What if there's one person, one organization, behind all of it?"
Maya was quiet for a long moment, processing the implications. "You think Elena stumbled onto something much bigger than she realized."
"I think Elena stumbled onto something so big that killing investigators has become routine." I picked up Mrs. Rodriguez's memory chip, watching it catch the afternoon light. "Someone's been very busy covering their tracks. Time to find out who."
"Where do we start?"
"With the one person who might have answers." I slipped Elena's necklace over my head, feeling the weight of her final memory against my chest. "Adrian Blackstone was on that balcony when Elena died. Whether he pushed her or witnessed her murder, he knows more than anyone else."
"How do you plan to get close to a billionaire?"
I smiled, feeling the familiar cold satisfaction that came with planning a complex con. "I'm going to give him exactly what he wants. Access to Elena's memories. But he won't know he's getting them from the source."
Maya's eyes widened behind her glasses. "You're going to pose as a memory merchant with Elena's extracted experiences."
"Better than that. I'm going to let him think I'm just another dealer who happened to acquire some black market Elena memories. He'll pay whatever I ask, and while he's lost in nostalgia, I'll be mining his mind for information."
"That's..." Maya paused, calculating risks. "Actually brilliant. And completely insane."
"The best plans usually are." I walked to my closet and pulled out the business cards I used for high-end clients—expensive cardstock, subtle gold lettering. "Time to introduce Mr. Blackstone to Luna Hayes, memory merchant extraordinaire."
Maya gathered her equipment, still shaking her head. "For the record, I think this is going to get us both killed."
"Probably." I looked out at Neo Francisco's skyline, where the Blackstone Tower rose like a silver needle piercing the sky. "But Elena's already dead, and these government investigators won't stop with just me. If we don't act now, we'll all be running forever."
"Or until they catch us."
"Then we better make sure they don't."
As Maya headed for the door, she paused. "Luna? Be careful with Blackstone. Men with that much power don't like being manipulated."
"Good thing I'm better at manipulation than they are at spotting it."
After she left, I sat alone in my apartment, holding Mrs. Rodriguez's memory of her son's last Christmas. The chip was warm from my palm, containing joy and love that she'd never feel again. In a few hours, some wealthy collector would pay triple what I'd given her to experience that Christmas morning as if it were their own child, their own happiness.
The memory trade was built on desperation and inequality. People like Mrs. Rodriguez sold their most precious experiences to survive, while people like my usual clients bought artificial happiness to feel human again. I'd been part of that system for eight years, telling myself I was just providing a service.
But Elena's death had changed something in me. For the first time, I was going to use my skills for something other than profit.
Tomorrow, Adrian Blackstone would receive an anonymous offer to purchase genuine Elena memories. He'd think he was buying from just another black market dealer looking to make easy money.
He'd be wrong about almost everything.