The Memory Thief

The first memory I ever stole was not mine to take.

It belonged to an old man on the seventh floor, a trader who had climbed the Tower decades ago and never left. He had traded away his first love, his childhood home, his mothers face—keeping only the memories that served his work.

But he had one memory he refused to sell: the moment he decided to enter the Tower.

I took it anyway.

The World Above and Below

Let me explain how things work here.

The Tower rises from the center of Meridian City, a structure that should not exist by any physics the lower world understands. It has been here longer than recorded history, longer than the city that grew around it, longer than the languages we use to describe it.

Floors stretch upward without apparent end. Some say there are thousands. Others claim the number changes. The only certainty: higher floors hold rarer, more valuable memories.

Below the Tower, the city sprawls in concentric circles:

• The Outer Ring: Where those who cannot afford to trade live ordinary lives with ordinary memories
• The Middle Ring: Where traders operate, where memories flow like currency, where fortunes rise and fall
• The Inner Ring: Where the Tower's shadow falls, where the most powerful memory merchants maintain their vaults

And then there is the Tower itself. A world unto itself.

What Memory Is Here

In Meridian, memories are tangible.

Not metaphorically. Literally.

A skilled extractor can pull a memory from a willing mind, crystallize it into a form that can be held, viewed, traded, implanted. The memory becomes an object—iridescent, about the size of a marble, humming with the emotional weight of what it contains.

A memory of joy glows warm amber. A memory of grief pulses deep blue. A memory of first love shimmers with colors that have no name in the lower world.

These objects have value. Enormous value.

Because memories are not just the past. They are capability, emotion, knowledge, identity.

A master calligraphers memory of the brush contains ten thousand hours of practice. A generals memory of a decisive battle contains strategic genius. A mothers memory of her childs birth contains love potent enough to change behavior.

Buy the right memory, and you gain what others spent lifetimes acquiring.

The Thief's Trade

I am what they call a Memory Thief.

Not the polite title used in official circles—Memory Retrieval Specialist—but the honest one. I take memories from those who do not wish to sell them.

Sometimes I am hired. A merchant wants a competitors secrets. A lover wants proof of betrayal. A government wants information that cannot be obtained otherwise.

Sometimes I take for myself. A memory that catches my attention. A story I want to know. A capability I need.

The old mans memory—his decision to enter the Tower—I took because I needed to understand.

Why does anyone choose to climb? What drives someone to trade pieces of themselves for the higher floors? What is worth losing your mothers face?

His memory would tell me.

The Extraction

The process is not gentle.

Willing extraction is surgical, careful, almost painless. The subject relaxes, the extractor finds the thread, pulls gently, and the memory separates cleanly.

Unwilling extraction is different.

I waited until he slept. The seventh floor has a rhythm, and I had learned it over weeks of observation. When his breathing deepened, I approached.

The device I use looks like a needle made of light. It finds the memory you want—if you know exactly what you are looking for—and pulls.

He did not wake. They rarely do. But they know, somehow. When they next try to recall what you took, they find only absence. A gap where something used to be.

Some recover. Some descend into confusion, the missing piece destabilizing adjacent memories like a removed keystone. Some die, if the memory was load-bearing.

The old man would survive. The memory I took was not essential to his identity. Just to mine.

What I Found

His memory played as I held it in my hand, walking the cold corridors of the seventh floor.

He was young in the memory. Younger than I am now. Standing at the Towers base, looking up at the impossibility of it.

And he was afraid.

That surprised me. I expected conviction. I expected ambition. I expected the certainty that drives people to trade their humanity for power.

Instead, I felt his fear. His doubt. His desperate wish that someone would stop him, tell him there was another way, give him permission to stay below.

But no one did. So he entered.

And spent forty years climbing, trading, becoming the hollow thing I had just stolen from.

The Question

Sitting in the darkness of the seventh floor, holding a stolen memory, I wondered:

Would I become the same?

I had entered the Tower three years ago, a thief from the Outer Ring with nothing to trade but skills. I had climbed seven floors by taking what I could not buy.

But what was I losing in the process?

The memory pulsed in my hand, someone elses fear mixing with my own.

The Tower takes from everyone who enters. The only choice is what you offer—and what is taken without consent.

Next: Entering the Tower—what the first floor teaches those who survive it.