Closed Loop

They always came to me wrapped in plastic raincoats, their collars turned up against the stink, trying not to look desperate. They shuffled in from the puddled streets, blinking against the neon glare like rats scurrying out of a sewer. Men in rumpled suits, women in threadbare dresses that still carried a whiff of old perfume, ghosts of a better life none of us believed in anymore.

Business was steady tonight. Steadier than usual. Maybe the rain drove them in. Maybe the city had just broken a few more souls than it fixed this week.

I ran a clean shop. No black-market cortex jacks, no memory dumps ripped from dying minds. All my product was curated: licensed uploads, private captures, some stitched and smoothed at the edges to make the dreams run sweeter. Didn't matter. Nobody asked for credentials. They just wanted to forget.

A kid with scabbed hands paid half a week's wages for fifteen minutes at a dinner table with people who loved him. A factory woman with joints gone stiff from the line bought the memory of a hike through an evergreen forest, the kind that hadn't existed within a thousand klicks in decades.

And the rich? They came later. Drenched in silk and chrome, they wanted curated love affairs and impossible summers. They paid triple for something tender. Something rare.

I dealt to them all, took their credits, watched their eyes go glassy with longing. I told myself it was just a business.

And maybe it was. Until she showed up.