In Mnemosyne, people traded in memories.
Not metaphorically. The city’s economy ran on lived experience—harvested, bottled, and exchanged like wine. A merchant might sell his first kiss for a week’s groceries. A beggar could auction her mother’s funeral to buy medicine. The richest citizens glowed with stolen nostalgia, while the poor grew hollow, their minds scraped clean of everything but the present moment.
And then there was Vesper, who couldn’t forget.
The Girl Who Remembered Too Much
Vesper’s memories stuck like burrs. Where others could pluck them out neatly (a summer afternoon here, a childhood fear there), hers resisted extraction. The Mnemosyne Memory Market had blacklisted her after three failed harvests left their silver extraction needles bent.
“Defective,” the traders whispered.
But the truth was worse.
Whenever someone tried to take a memory from Vesper, she saw theirs instead—flashes of secret griefs, shames, loves. And lately, she’d begun noticing something terrifying in those stolen glimpses:
The same face.
A woman with oil-black eyes, appearing in everyone’s memories. Always watching. Never remembered unless Vesper pointed her out.
The Memory Thief
The sightings led Vesper to The Recall, a speakeasy where memory addicts traded in unlicensed recollections. There, a washed-up historian named Silas recognized the woman instantly.
“The Custodian,” he breathed. “She’s not a person. She’s the city’s first memory.”
He explained:
- Mnemosyne was built atop a machine (some said a god) that had devoured its creator’s mind to birth the city.
- The Custodian was its hunger given form, siphoning memories to keep the machine fed.
- And the Market? Just a distraction. “She takes the ones we don’t notice missing.”
Vesper’s stomach dropped. “Why can I see her?”
Silas refilled his drink with someone else’s wedding day. “Because you’re not just resistant. You’re immune. And that makes you her next meal.”
The Remembering Disease
That night, Vesper’s dreams weren’t her own.
She was the Custodian, standing over a sleeping inventor, drinking his mind like broth.
She was the first Mnemosyne citizen, trading half his life for a copper coin.
She was herself, years from now—empty-eyed, strapped to the machine as it pulsed with stolen time.
She woke screaming.
And the Custodian was in her room, fingertips pressed to Vesper’s temples.
“You’ll make such a good archive,” she whispered.
The Recall Rebellion
Vesper escaped with a memory she shouldn’t have had: the machine’s location.
With Silas and a gang of memory-thieves (their minds Swiss cheese from reckless trading), she plotted:
- Sabotage the Market’s extraction pumps (using Vesper’s “defective” blood to corrode the machinery).
- Lure the Custodian into a trap—a labyrinth of mirrors where every reflection showed her true form.
- Destroy the machine by feeding it Vesper’s most dangerous memory: the moment she realized she was immune.
But the Custodian was waiting.
The Last Memory
The machine was a spider of glass and wire, its belly swollen with liquid time. The Custodian stood at its heart, smiling.
“You can’t kill me with what you are,” she said. “Only with what you were.”
Vesper understood.
She let the Custodian take her earliest memory—her mother singing.
But as it flowed into the machine, Vesper changed it. Not the lullaby, but the ending: her mother’s voice cracking, the song unraveling into a scream.
The machine shuddered.
It wasn’t built to hold pain.
Epilogue: A City That Dreams
After the explosion:
- Mnemosyne’s citizens wake with new memories—ones they shouldn’t have.
- Silas tends the ruins of the machine, now a garden where wild recollections bloom like mushrooms.
- And Vesper?
She walks the streets, collecting the memories people choose to give her.
Not for trade.
For safekeeping.