The Echo Bureau

The Echo Bureau

The office was located in a basement that smelled of ozone and damp paper. Elias Thorne sat behind a desk cluttered with "Memory Spheres"—small, glass orbs that pulsed with a faint, violet light. His job at the Bureau of Temporal Sanity was simple: he bought memories that people no longer wanted to carry.

"I want to sell the summer of '94," the woman across from him said. She looked exhausted, her coat frayed at the sleeves.

Elias adjusted his spectacles. "A whole summer is expensive, Mrs. Gable. It leaves a large hole. You’ll have the skills you learned, but the faces, the smells, the heartbreak... they'll be gone."

"That’s the point," she snapped.

Elias connected the silver filaments to her temples. As the machine hummed, the violet light in the sphere turned a vivid gold. He saw flashes of a beach, a blue car, and a man laughing. Then, the light settled. Mrs. Gable blinked, her eyes clearing like a fog lifting. She looked at the sphere with zero recognition.

"You just finished a routine filing," Elias lied gently, handing her the credits. After she left, Elias didn't put the sphere in the vault. Instead, he took it to the back room where his own collection sat.

He was a "Collector of the Lost." He wasn't supposed to, but he would occasionally "wear" the memories he bought. He plugged the gold sphere into his own headset. Suddenly, he was on a pier in 1994. He felt the salt spray and heard the man’s laugh. For a moment, Elias wasn't a lonely clerk in a basement; he was loved.

But the danger of the Echo Bureau was the "Shadow Effect." The more memories you took in that weren't yours, the more your own identity dissolved. Elias looked at his hands; they were becoming translucent. He realized with a jolt of terror that he couldn't remember his own mother’s name, but he could remember the name of Mrs. Gable’s first dog.

He reached for the "Erase" lever on the console. To save himself, he would have to wipe the vault—thousands of stories, thousands of lives. He looked at the glowing orbs, each one a universe of human experience. With a shaking hand, he pulled the lever.

The basement went dark. The hum stopped. Elias sat in the silence, a man with no past, waiting for a future he finally had the space to inhabit.