Chapter 6: The Memory Tax
The silence in Silas's apartment had a new quality. It wasn't the void-like detachment he was used to. It was an active silence, a silence that had been earned, purchased with a piece of his mind. The pulsating right angle across the street still throbbed, but erratically now, like a wounded heart. A flaw in the light.
He made coffee. The ritual was automatic: grind, pour, boil. As he waited, he stared at the small, framed photo on his kitchen counter. It was a generic landscape, something bought to fill space. But beside it, a rectangle of dust-free wood stood out, slightly lighter than the rest. Something had been there. A second frame. He knew this with a certainty that had no details. A memory of absence.
He tried to recall what was in the missing frame. A face? A place? A concept bloomed in his mind: "loyal companion." It carried a warmth, a feeling of dry fur and quiet panting on a summer porch. But there was no image, no name, no breed. No chronological marker. Just the ghost of a feeling, amputated from its context.
The coffee maker hissed. The sound was too sharp, a scalpel in the quiet. He poured a cup, his hand steady. The analytical part of his mind—the cold, cunning architect—was already dissecting the phenomenon.
Hypothesis: The stabilization of the flawed Node required energy. A sacrifice. The system, in its relentless drive for balance, had repossessed collateral. Not from the dream, but from the source of the chaos: him. It had taken a memory. Not a random one. A foundational one. A memory tied to innocence, to a simple, unconditional bond. A memory that, in its own way, was an anchor to a simpler humanity.
It wasn't an attack. It was a tax.
A slow, thin smile spread on his face. It wasn't a happy smile. It was the smile of a mathematician who has just discovered a beautiful, terrifying new variable. They're not trying to destroy me. They're trying to balance the ledger. And they're using my own life as currency.
The manipulator in him awoke, sharp and hungry. If memories were currency in this silent war, then they were also a battlefield. And a battlefield was a place of trade, leverage, and spectacular, calculated risk.
He went to work. The office was a cathedral of eerie calm. The gridlines on the floor seemed fainter, the pulsating light from across the street casting long, trembling shadows that broke the perfect geometry. The system was wounded, and it was conserving energy.
Dan didn't click his pen. He sat at his desk, motionless, staring at a spreadsheet that showed nothing but zeros. "The numbers," Dan muttered, not to Silas, to the air. "They won't… resolve. There's a remainder. An infinite remainder."
Silas passed him by. The intern, Leo, was gone. His desk was empty, not just of person, but of history. No pencil marks, no dust, no impression in the chair. As if the equation of his existence had been simplified right out of reality.
The message was clear: the Memory Tax could escalate. It could repossess more than childhood pets. It could repossess people, reducing them to conceptual remainders.
He needed a bank. A place to store his memories where the tax collectors couldn't reach. Or better, a place to invest them for a higher return.
---
Translation was a calculated gamble. He focused on the feeling of the lost dog—the warmth, the loyalty—and used it as a key. He didn't try to resist the dream; he tried to bribe it with the ghost of what was taken.
The dreamworld accepted his collateral.
He didn't arrive in a city or a plaza. He arrived in a field of too-perfect grass, under a sky the color of faded parchment. The grass was uniformly green, each blade the same height, and it didn't bend under his feet—it parted with a soft, rustling sigh, creating a perfect path. At the end of the path stood a building.
It was the Archive of Lost Causes.
It was a paradox in stone. From one angle, it was a vast, classical library, with endless rows of windows and soaring Corinthian columns. From another, it was a brutalist slab of grey concrete, windowless and severe. From a third, it resembled a colossal beehive, humming with low, organic vibration. Its form depended not on where you stood, but on what you were trying to remember.
The air smelled of dust, ozone, and the faint, sweet-decay of old paper and dying neurons.
He walked the path. The grass closed behind him, leaving no trace. There were no Whisperlings here. The silence was profound, but it was a full silence, packed with the weight of forgotten things.
The great doors—wood, then steel, then waxy honeycomb as he approached—swung open soundlessly.
Inside was infinity, curated.
The space stretched in non-Euclidean directions. Shelves made of bone, polished wood, and crystallized honey reached into a gloom pierced by floating, jellyfish-like globes of soft light. The shelves were not labeled with letters or numbers, but with emotions, senses, and logical fallacies.
Section: Unjustified Joy. Subsection: Smells That Evoke Lost Summers.
Aisle: Premature Regrets. Volume: Words Unsaid, Sorted by Phonetic Weight.
Wing: Circular Arguments, With Annotations on Their Inevitable Conclusions.
And there were the librarians.
They were the Mnemonovores. They stood tall and slender, their bodies composed of layered, translucent parchment that rustled with every movement. Where faces should be, they had shifting, kaleidoscopic patterns of text—fragments of forgotten poems, obsolete equations, dead languages. They had too many long, delicate fingers, each ending in a different tool: a quill, a stamp, a scalpel, a blotter.
One detached itself from the shadow of a shelf labeled "Abandoned Convictions." Its parchment body whispered like a turning page.
"A visitor. A claimant. A debtor." Its voice was the composite murmur of a hundred closed books. "You have incurred a deficit. The Balance seeks equilibrium. Your assets are being liquidated."
"I'm here to negotiate my debt," Silas said, his voice cool. He was not pleading. He was opening negotiations.
The Mnemonovore's face-patterns swirled into something resembling a smile made of parenthesis and ellipses. "Negotiation implies a transfer of value. What value do you possess that The Balance does not already own?"
"Future value," Silas replied, the manipulator's gears turning smoothly. "You're repossessing past memories. Static assets. I offer you something more valuable: the memory of a future choice."
The library around them seemed to hold its breath. The floating lights dimmed.
"A… future memory?" The rustling held a note of intrigue. "A contradiction. An impossibility. A delicious paradox."
"Not impossible," Silas countered. He took a step closer, his eyes fixed on the shifting text. "I will live a choice. I will act. The experience will be real. But the memory of the decision-making process—the calculus, the risk-assessment, the 'why'—that, I will give to you, in advance. You will own the origin of the action before it even occurs."
It was an insane gamble. To sell the memory of a decision was to become a puppet of his own pre-committed fate. It was to act without knowing why. But the manipulative-like part of his mind saw the brutal logic: it was the only asset the system couldn't tax, because it didn't exist yet. He was trading existential uncertainty for present security.
The Mnemonovores gathered, a whispering circle of parchment and ink. Their conference was a sound of rustling, snapping, and soft, clicking stamps.
"We accept," the lead one finally pronounced. "A novel currency. We will shield one past memory of your designation from The Balance. In exchange, you will surrender the memory-of-decision for a future action, to be determined by us at the moment of transaction. The action will be non-fatal, but otherwise unbounded."
"Non-fatal," Silas repeated. "Define 'fatal.'"
"It will not directly cause the cessation of your biological or oneric functions."
A loophole wide enough to drive a nightmare through.It could maim, corrupt, or damn him. Perfect.
"Agreed."
The Mnemonovore extended a scalpel-fingered hand. "Designate the memory to be protected."
Silas didn't hesitate. "The memory of my own name. Its origin. What it means." Not the word 'Silas,' but the concept of self tied to it. The core identity.
A soft, approving rustle. "A prudent investment. The anchor of 'I.' Very well."
The scalpel-finger touched Silas's forehead. It was cold, dry, and painless. He felt a gentle pull in his mind, like a single thread being drawn out. There was no flash, no loss. Instead, a strange certitude settled over the memory of his name. It felt… fortified. Weatherproofed.
"Now," the Mnemonovore whispered, its face-patterns swirling into a complex, binding contract. "Our price. The future memory."
The other Mnemonovores raised their blotter-fingers. From the shelves, tendrils of shadow and whispers of lost causes flowed, weaving into a single, dark, seed-like object. It was a Memory of Choice, unborn.
"You will, upon waking, go to your kitchen. You will take the sharpest knife. You will press its point against the center of your reflection's eye in the window. You will press until the glass groans, and you will wonder, with a curiosity you will not remember, if the flaw in the glass and the flaw in the light are connected by a pressure you can apply. The memory of why you choose to do this—the curiosity, the strategic calculation, the risk-assessment—is ours."
The seed was placed against his temple. It sank in, cold and final. A future amnesia, pre-installed.
"The transaction is complete. The memory of 'why' is now our property. You will live only the 'what.'"
---
He awoke standing in his kitchen.
The transition was seamless. One moment, the rustling of the Archive. The next, the hum of the fridge.
His body was already in motion. He walked to the knife block. His hand, steady and sure, selected the eight-inch chef's knife. He felt the weight of the handle, the coolness of the steel. He turned and faced the dark window over the sink.
His reflection was pale, eyes dark hollows. He raised the knife.
There was no why. No fear, no hesitation, no manic impulse. There was only the action. The logic of it was a ghost in his mind—he knew there had been a reason, a brilliant, insane, calculated reason, but it was gone, leaving only a smooth, empty pathway to the act.
He pressed the needle-point tip against the glass, directly over his reflection's left pupil.
He pushed.
The glass emitted a low, strained groan. A delicate spider-web of cracks blossomed around the point, fracturing his reflection into a dozen fragmented Silases. He increased the pressure. The groan intensified. The cracks spread, intersecting the faint reflection of the pulsating right angle from the building across the street.
In that moment, he saw. Not with memory, but with perception.
The cracks in the glass and the flawed, dark pixel in the right-angle pattern of lights… they resonated. They were part of the same stressed system. The pressure he applied here was transmitted, not physically, but metaphysically, through the sympathetic bond between his action and the wound he'd inflicted on the logical world.
He was not testing the glass. He was probing the flaw.
With a final, sustained push, a single, clear snap echoed in the silent kitchen. A tiny, conical piece of glass popped from the window, leaving a perfect, piercing hole directly over his reflection's eye.
Across the street, the pulsating right angle of lights flickered and died entirely for three full seconds. When it returned, two more windows had gone dark. The flaw was spreading.
He lowered the knife. He placed it carefully in the sink.
He felt nothing. No triumph, no fear. Only a profound, analytical void where the reason for his action should have been. He had traded the memory of a choice for the security of his name. He had acted as a perfect, reason-less agent, and it had worked.
He looked at his fractured reflection in the broken window. The manipulator in him, operating on instinct without the memory of its own planning, assessed the result.
Risk: Extreme. Outcome: Systemic damage confirmed. Leverage achieved. The pathway of action without memory-of-decision is… efficient.
He was becoming something new. Not just a man slipping between worlds. A void with a will. A strategic black hole, swallowing the light of reason and memory, warping the battlefield to his advantage.
The Memory Tax would continue. The Balance would seek new payments. But he had found a bank, and a terrible, brilliant currency.
He smiled at his shattered reflection. The smile held no joy, no madness.
It was the smile of a man who has just discovered he can auction off pieces of his soul, and that the highest bidders are often the most afraid of the dark.