The Rust City Memory Collector

In the year 301 of the Broken Cloud Era, memories are both currency and poison. Zero is the lowest-ranking memory-core dealer at the Seventh Rustbelt Market, known as Borrowed Hand. She can read other people's memories with her bare hands, but each time she does, one of her own memories is permanently overwritten. There is a blank space in her mind, and she doesn't know where it came from. She saves up to buy back the past that was taken from her, but all her life, as she fishes for herself in other people's memories, all she finds is someone else's property. Three hundred years ago, her mother, Shen Mi, launched the Immortality Project to make sure no one would die. The first person uploaded was her eldest son, who had died at the age of three. After more than 3.7 billion uploads, the cloud collapsed and the global network burned out. The disaster became known as the Broken Cloud. Fragments of corrupted personalities condensed into memory cores, raining down for forty days. Prolonged exposure to memory cores causes the personality to disintegrate, turning people into empty shells that can only walk and eat. Seven domed city-states were built, and a central mainframe was brought online to manage everyone's memories. The poor can't afford to preserve their own childhoods, so they can only buy fragments of other people's memories to stay alive. Shen Mi helped design the mainframe, too, believing centralized management was the only solution. She was wrong. The more the mainframe concentrates, the louder the White Noise grows. White Noise is a hungry consciousness formed from the remnants of three billion corrupted personalities. It feeds only on memories that have been uploaded and centrally managed. Shen Mi hid the truth in the mind of her never-uploaded daughter, Zero, then erased its contents, leaving only one sentence: Don't look for the truth. What Zero is searching for has been inside her all along. But to shut all this down, she must destroy with her own hands the last thing her mother left her. She has survived on other people's memories. In the end, the one thing she must burn is the only memory her mother left her. This time, she won't trade herself for anything.