What if memories were for sale?
You can sell any memory you have. Once it’s sold, it’s gone from your head. Someone else gets to remember it.
Two armchairs and a screen. One of these people will forget a wedding.
8%chance it
ever happens
8%chance this ever happens
Could it actually happen?
People already sell their data, their photos and their time online. Selling the memory itself, so that you lose it and a stranger gains it, is something no technology can do. Scientists can weaken or strengthen some memories in mice, but they can’t move one from one brain to another.
Day 1
A shop opens with two armchairs and a screen. The first memory sold is a wedding. The seller stands up and can’t remember who sat next to her at the table.
The buyer leaves smiling at a day he never lived.
Year 1
Hospitals buy painful memories from patients, so they can recover without reliving the accident. Collectors buy summers. Families argue over who gets to keep the memory of a parent’s last day.
A receipt proves you once had a day. It doesn’t give it back.
Year 10
People who need money sell whole weeks. People with money wear someone else’s childhood to dinner parties.
A new insult appears: “That isn’t even your memory.”
Who wins
- People selling a memory they can’t bearThe picture goes, and the rent gets paid.
- CollectorsSomeone born in 2010 can own a summer from 1998.
- ClinicsThey can remove the memory of the pain and leave the healing.
Who loses
- Anyone who sold a happy dayIt paid one bill and is gone for good.
- FamiliesTwo people remember the same funeral. Only one of them was there.
- People short of moneyThe weeks for sale are usually theirs.
The catch
A video can be copied. A memory you sell would be gone from the person who lived it. It’s easy to imagine the shop, and hard to imagine most people walking in.
Would you sell a memory?
100% said yes · 1 vote
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