What would you do if you woke up tomorrow to find the last five years of your life forcibly wiped... all because you couldn't keep up with the monthly subscription? On Praxis Station, this isn’t a nightmare. It’s the law.
Memory isn't a biological record. It's a financial asset.
Elias worked in the Cognitive Collections division of the Praxis Orbital Station. His job was simple: when the citizens of the lower rings defaulted on their Neural Retention subscriptions, Elias hacked into their cortical ports and executed the Cull Protocol.
Exactly sixty months.
Five years of grief, love, failures, and lessons, evaporated in a microsecond.
The debtors would wake up disoriented, reduced to obsolete versions of themselves from half a decade ago, doomed to repeat the same blue-collar mistakes just to keep feeding the corporation.
Elias felt no guilt.
To him, identity was a luxury for those who could afford it; the rest were just renting hardware.
At the end of his shift, Elias logged into his private terminal.
As a Class-A Extractor, his own memory was shielded by a lifetime contract.
He would never forget.
He would never lose the thread of his own existence.
Or so he thought.
Running a routine diagnostic scan, the system spit out an anomalous flare.
GHOST_PARTITION_DETECTED.
SECTOR: DEEP CORTEX.
It wasn’t residual data from the clients he’d just wiped. The file architecture was embedded in his own optic nerve, encrypted under a military-grade lock that only a Supreme Executive should possess.
Driven by an impulse that logic couldn’t suppress, Elias used his extractor credentials to crack the vault.
The file shattered.
And the avalanche crushed him.
It wasn’t text data.
It was a direct injection of neurochemistry and first-person experiences.
The smell of ozone and damp earth from an agricultural colony.
The grip of a tiny hand clutching his index finger.
A woman with asymmetrical eyes and a scar on her chin, looking at him under the amber light of a dwarf star.
“Promise me we’ll pay it, Elias. Promise me we won’t let them take it,” she pleaded, her voice breaking with raw terror.
Elias’s amygdala exploded.
His body reacted with such a violent surge of cortisol and adrenaline that he dropped to his knees on the cold metal floor of his cubicle, hyperventilating.
He loved that woman.
He would die for that child.
The biological and emotional bond was absolute, tearing at his chest, undeniable.
But his conscious mind was blank.
He didn’t know their names.
He didn’t know where they were.
Hands trembling, he extracted the file’s metadata.
He traced the source of the recording.
His breath hitched as he read the source code.
It wasn't a grafted memory.
It was a native backup.
Creation date: Seven years ago.
Cull date: Five years and one month ago.
Elias wasn’t an elite corporate Extractor.
He had been a colonist, a lower-class citizen who defaulted on his own family’s subscription.
The corporation hadn’t just wiped the five years covering his marriage and the birth of his son; analyzing his coldness and psychological profile, they had offered him a prefabricated identity.
They gave him the suit, the paycheck, and the illusion of power, turning him into the executioner of his own class.
His terminal panel suddenly flashed, bathing the room in harsh red light.
UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS TO CULLED ARCHIVES.
CULL PROTOCOL ENGAGED.
INITIATING 60-MONTH WIPE IN: 30 SECONDS.
Elias stared at the countdown.
He had half a minute before he forgot again.
Half a minute before he stopped loving the woman with the scar.
Half a minute to revert to the perfect corporate drone, stripped of a past and ghosts.
He didn’t try to stop the wipe; he knew it was impossible from his clearance level.
Instead, he ripped the uplink cable from his port, slammed it into the station’s mainframe terminal, and began compiling the memories of the woman and the boy into a mass-transmission virus.
If they were going to steal his mind, he would make all fifty thousand inhabitants of the Orbital Station remember and love his family right alongside him.
INITIATING GLOBAL BROADCAST.
TIME TO NEURAL CULL: 5 SECONDS.
Elias smiled, closed his eyes, and waited for the dark.