They didn’t make the law because people were weak. They made it because people were drowning.

 

Wars no longer ended. Pandemics came in overlapping waves. Wildfires became seasons. Violence wasn’t exceptional; it was ambient. By the time the first neural purges were introduced, grief had become a permanent feature of consciousness. People didn’t laugh anymore. They didn’t cry either.

 

So forgetting was made legal. Then free. Then mandatory.

* * *

 

Mara Tey had trained for it. Being licensed as a Level 7 “Cleanser”, she took pride in her steadiness, in the delicate removal of harmful memories. Her station on the 45th floor overlooked a city that shimmered with order. Scheduled wipes happened every quarter. All deviations were logged. No return client had cried in her presence for many years.

 

Freeing people from their pain was the most satisfying thing she’d ever done. Less pain meant less grief. Less grief meant less anger. Less anger led to peace, contentment, and what everyone believed would be the beginnings of societal utopia.

 

But these days Mara dealt more with trivia than trauma — scraped knees instead of abuse, broken coffee machines instead of lost children. Her clients winced at the slightest inconvenience. The world felt irritatingly fragile.

 

Until Callen arrived.

 

He wore no anxiety patch. He didn’t blink in fast rhythms or fidget with the intake stylus. His stillness unsettled her more than distress ever had.

 

“What brings you in today?” she asked, smoothing the console display.

 

He paused. “I’ve had a persistent memory. I think it might be real.”

 

She looked up.

 

“It’s a rooftop. There’s smoke. Someone’s shouting. I hear myself call out, but I never see who I’m trying to save.”

 

Mara’s fingers paused over the neural reader.

 

“Do you want it removed?”

 

“I want to know if it belongs to me.”

 

She tapped the scanner. The room dimmed to a soft amber as the memory thread rendered the scene.

 

It was a rooftop. The light was severe, a hot noon sun slicing across metal. A woman stood near the ledge, trembling. Her mouth formed something — words or silence, it wasn’t clear. Then the scream. It arrived without warning, blooming like blood in water. She turned, then slipped… or leapt. The memory fractured.

 

Callen exhaled. His hands were still.

 

Mara stood very slowly.

 

She knew that scream. Knew how deep it came from. Knew, too, the way the woman had resisted treatment — how she had shouted until Mara had gone too deep, severing the emotional roots instead of trimming them.

 

The woman had died the next day. ArbiterNet had cleared her, and her client’s death had been recorded as “a collapse due to cognitive destabilization”, not suicide. And Mara had moved on. Until now.

 

“You were there,” she said quietly.

 

“How do you know?”

 

“You were a witness,” she said. “Sometimes trauma leaves fingerprints, even if it doesn’t belong to you.”

 

Callen didn’t react.

 

“You want the pain gone. But it’s not yours alone. That scream… it echoes because it’s carrying something real.”

 

His voice was low. “Then why does no one remember it?”

 

“Because I made sure they didn’t.”

 

He looked at her for the first time without expectation.

 

“You?”

 

She nodded. “She was flagged as ideologically unstable. I was supposed to dampen her aggression. Instead I cut deeper than I should have.”

 

Mara remembered those visits. Grief is the last proof that love was ever real, the woman would repeat. Mara cut until the woman couldn’t say it anymore.

 

Callen looked back at the scanner. The light from the ledge shimmered on the console like sunlight on water.

 

“I don’t want to forget her,” he said.

 

“You’ll hurt.”

 

“I already do.”

 

She walked to the shelf behind her desk and unlocked a drawer. Inside was a memory archive, manual and unindexed. She had kept it for mistakes for which the system didn’t have a category. She handed him the slim wafer.

 

“This is her file. Unedited. It was never entered into the civic ledger.”

 

He took it carefully.

 

“If you give it to anyone, it will vanish,” she said. “But if you carry it… if you just remember… then something of her will survive.”

 

He turned the wafer over in his hands. “What happens to you?”

 

“I’m not sure,” she said. “But I think it’s better that I remember this.”

 

Callen slipped the wafer into his coat.

 

Mara waited.

 

“I think she looked at me right before she fell,” he said. “Like I was supposed to do something.”

 

“You were,” Mara said. “You were supposed to remember.”

 

He nodded once, as if sealing something shut.

 

And then he left.

 

She did not log the appointment.

 

She did not mark his memory for removal.

 

She did not schedule another client that day.

 

Instead she turned off the scanner, stood by the window, and watched the orderly city far below where no one ever mourned, no one ever broke, no one ever remembered anything too sharp to carry.

 

The sun moved across the glass. A bird startled off a ledge. Somewhere out there, Callen walked beneath a sky that still held a ghost.

 

A ghost Mara chose to share. A ghost she chose to remember.

 

And that memory stayed, not as a burden, but as a weight her soul would learn to carry.