The waiting room smelled of ozone and old velvet. Elias sat on a threadbare chaise longue, his gaze fixed on the salt-rime creeping up the crimson wallpaper. He was a Donor, one of a handful of souls waiting to be partitioned. Beside him, a young woman in a patched-up dress hummed a tuneless, frantic melody, her fingers tracing a hole in the knee of her jeans. She was probably selling a first kiss, or the terror of a near-miss accident. Those were the common wares, the penny-stock emotions.
Elias was here to sell something finer. He was offering a moment of perfect, untainted authenticity—a feeling so rare in the gray fug of the broadcast griefs and manufactured joys that it was considered a masterwork.
A silver bell chimed, soft as a sigh. A door of polished obsidian slid open. “Donor 7,” a voice purred, devoid of inflection.
That was him. Elias stood, his joints cracking. He didn’t look at the humming girl as he passed into the corridor. The air grew colder, heavy with the scent of brine and anticipation. He walked towards a cavernous chamber, a great geode of a room that was once a subterranean salt cathedral. Crystalline pillars soared into the darkness, and the floor was a mirror of black, polished salt.
In the center sat the Bidders, arranged in a semicircle. They were wraiths of wealth, faces half-hidden by shadow and an air of profound boredom. He saw the Baron of Nostalgia, who bought only childhood summers; the Diva of Firsts, who craved the jolt of novelty; and, in the very front, the Woman Who Forgot How to Weep. Her face was a mask of placid beauty, but her eyes were deserts.
Before them stood the Auctioneer, Madame V. She was ageless, dressed in stark white, her presence as sharp and sterile as a scalpel. She smiled at Elias, a gesture that did not touch her eyes.
“Donor 7,” she announced to the assembly. “Offering a single, uncut synapse. A moment of pure, sovereign solitude.”
Elias was guided to a chair of cold, carved crystal. A technician, silent as a ghost, approached with a silver diadem humming with unseen energy. As they placed it on his head, Elias closed his eyes and summoned the memory. It was not a memory of action, but of absolute stillness.
He was standing on a black shingle beach in the heart of winter. The wind was a blade, the sea a churn of liquid iron. There were no boats, no birds, no other footprints. His life had just been hollowed out—a quiet quitting not from a job, but from a future he had meticulously planned. He had lost everything, and in that precise moment, standing on the edge of the world, he felt the immense, terrifying, and utterly liberating peace of being nothing to anyone. It was a core feeling, sharp and clear as ice. A perfect, private despair that had blossomed into a kind of strength.
“We have a bead,” the technician whispered.
On a small velvet cushion beside Madame V, a single, trembling droplet of quicksilver manifested. It pulsed with a faint, internal light, the color of a winter sky.
“The lot is presented,” Madame V said, her voice echoing in the salt-pricked silence. “A validated moment of authentic desolation, culminating in self-possession. A rare vintage. Who will open the bidding for this beautiful pain?”
The Baron of Nostalgia raised a manicured finger. “One year of my vineyard’s yield.”
“A paltry sum for such clarity,” Madame V chided gently. “This is not the cheap sugar of a playground memory, Baron.”
The Diva of Firsts, her voice a bored drawl, offered, “The copyright to my platinum-selling ballad of heartbreak. A fiction, of course. I’ll trade it for the real thing.”
A murmur went through the Bidders. It was a strong offer. Elias felt a phantom of the memory stir, the wind on the black beach. He was being bartered away.
Then, the Woman Who Forgot How to Weep spoke. Her voice was like dust. “My island.”
The chamber fell silent. Even Madame V seemed momentarily surprised. The woman’s private island was a legend—a self-sustaining paradise, a sanctuary from the acid rains and the blighted continents. It was the ultimate retreat.
“An entire ecosystem for a single feeling?” the Baron scoffed.
“I have forgotten the feeling of rain on my own skin,” the woman said, her gaze fixed on the trembling droplet. “I will trade a world I cannot feel for a moment I can. I wish to remember what it is to be alone and not be empty.”
Madame V smiled, a true and terrible smile this time. “Going once. Going twice. Sold… to the lady in want of a storm.”
The technician approached Elias. A fine, needle-like probe descended from the diadem and touched his temple. It was not painful. It was just… cold. He felt a sudden, clean emptiness, a surgical void where the black beach used to be. It was like a room in his mind had been scrubbed, bleached, and its single piece of furniture removed.
He was paid in a silent transfer, enough to live a dozen lifetimes without care. As he was escorted out, he saw the technician present the quicksilver droplet to the Woman Who Forgot How to Weep. She inhaled it from the velvet cushion like a grain of pollen.
For a heartbeat, her perfect face contorted. A single, perfect tear, crystalline as the salt on the walls, traced a path down her cheek. Then her expression settled back into its placid stillness, but her eyes were no longer deserts. Now, they were the sea in winter.
Elias walked out of the salt cathedral and into the rust-colored twilight of the city. He put his hand in his pocket, feeling the cold, hard chip that represented his new fortune. He tried to summon the memory, the source of his wealth. He searched for the feeling of the wind, the sound of the iron waves, the profound peace of his solitude.
But there was nothing. Only a smooth, featureless wall where a piece of his soul had been. The emptiness he was left with was a thousand times colder than the memory ever was.
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