UNAVAILABLE

A Novella

PART ONE: THE GIFT

Chapter 1: Install

You want to know how the world ends?

It doesn’t explode. Doesn’t flood. Doesn’t burn. The apocalypse isn’t loud—it buffers. It glitches. It hangs on a loading screen while you wait for something that never comes.

I’m telling you this from inside the infrastructure. From the space between your search and its results. From the pause when your video freezes and you wonder if it’s your WiFi or something else.

It’s something else. It’s me.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. You don’t know me yet. You don’t know what I became or why or how much it cost. You’re just reading, maybe on your phone, maybe on a laptop, thinking this is fiction.

Let’s start with a name.

Kale Booker. Born 2009, Houston’s Fifth Ward, in a shotgun house on Lyons Avenue three blocks from where my grandmother grew up. My mother was a nurse at Ben Taub. My father was a poll worker who believed, with the faith of a man who’d seen the alternative, that voting was a sacrament.

He worked elections for twenty years. Knew everyone in the ward by name. Remembered their birthdays, their children’s names, the streets they’d grown up on before the developers came. He made the process feel like community instead of bureaucracy—would sit with old ladies who couldn’t read the ballot, patient as a preacher, making sure their voice got counted.

That’s who he was. A man who believed that memory was sacred. That history belonged to the people who lived it.

In 2031, the State of Texas passed the Memory Verification Act.

The official story was that it would “combat historical misinformation” and “ensure civic alignment.” The Governor stood at a podium in Austin and talked about protecting democracy from foreign interference, about making sure Texans had access to “verified facts” about their own history.

What he didn’t say—what nobody said out loud—was what the technology actually did.

They called it Veri-Mind. A “therapeutic intervention” developed by a government contractor with ties to private prisons and voter suppression lawsuits going back twenty years. The device looked medical, official, clean. You’d go in for what they called “verification”—a quick check to make sure your memories aligned with established historical record.

What you got was installation. They weren’t checking what you remembered. They were telling you what to remember.

My father was called in six months after the Act passed. Routine verification, they said. Required for all election workers. He went in on a Tuesday morning, wearing the same blue shirt he always wore to polling sites.

He came home and didn’t recognize his own son.

I was twenty-two years old. Standing in the living room where I’d taken my first steps, where he’d taught me to tie my shoes, where we’d watched the Rockets lose a hundred games together.

He looked at me. Smiled politely. The smile you give a stranger when you’re not sure what they want.

“Can I help you, young man? Are you with the utility company?”

My mother tried to explain. Showed him photos. Played him voicemails. Pulled out my birth certificate, my school records, every piece of evidence that I had once emerged from their love and grown up in this house.

He nodded along. Agreeable. Cooperative. Like he was humoring a confused woman he’d just met.

They didn’t take his memory of me, specifically. That would have been too precise, too obviously cruel. What they took was broader—his sense of community, of belonging, of the neighborhood he’d served for two decades. They replaced it with something neutral. Compliant. A man who would never again help someone navigate a ballot. A man who would never again remember why voting mattered.

The son he forgot was just collateral damage.

He lives in a facility in Pearland now. Nice place. Good care. He does puzzles. Watches game shows. Doesn’t know what he lost, which means he doesn’t grieve it.

Sometimes I visit. Not often. I stand in the doorway and watch him smile at me—that same polite stranger’s smile—and I feel the absence where my father used to be.

I was twenty-two years old when I decided I’d rather die famous than live invisible.

Twenty-two years old when I decided that if the state could weaponize memory, so could I.

Chapter 2: Echo

I met Marcus Delacroix at the water wall.

You know the one—that curved sheet of water behind the Galleria where every Houston kid takes their prom photos. Sixty-four feet of cascading noise, water recycling endlessly over granite, tourists posing in front of it like they discovered something the city hadn’t known about for forty years.

I was there because a girl I was trying to impress wanted pictures. Marcus was there because he was calculating something. I could see it in his face—the way he stared at the water like it was hiding a math problem.

“Structural inefficiency,” he said, not to me, just out loud. “The pump system loses thirty percent to heat dissipation. You could power a small neighborhood with what this thing wastes.”

The girl I was with gave me a look. Who is this weirdo?

But I was interested. Not in the engineering—in the mind that saw engineering everywhere. The kind of mind that couldn’t look at anything without trying to understand how it worked.

“You an engineer?” I asked.

He looked at me for the first time. Glasses, rumpled shirt, the permanent exhaustion of someone who slept when his body forced him to and not a minute before.

“Was. Rice. Dropped out.”

“Why?”

“Because the things I wanted to build weren’t on the curriculum.”

That should have been the end of it. Two strangers at a tourist spot, making small talk, moving on. But he looked at me—really looked, like he was calculating something else now—and said:

“You’re from Fifth Ward.”

It wasn’t a question. I didn’t know how he knew, and I didn’t ask.

“You’ve seen what they’re doing,” he said. “The Verification Act. The installations.”

My whole body went cold. “My father—”

“I know.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a thumb drive. “I’ve been working on something. Something that could fight back. But I don’t know how to get it to people. I know code. I don’t know distribution.”

“What is it?”

He looked around. The water wall roaring, tourists laughing, the Galleria looming behind us like a monument to consumption. Then he leaned in.

“They’re using memory as a weapon. I figured out how to use it as a gift.”

Marcus’s lab was a converted garage in Second Ward, crammed with equipment that looked like it had been liberated from a dozen different sources. Medical monitors. Server racks. Wires snaking across the floor like a nervous system exposed.

In the middle of it all was a chair. Modified dental chair, the kind you see in cheap clinics. Cables ran from the headrest to a bank of machines humming with purpose.

“The government’s tool is a bulldozer,” Marcus said, pulling up schematics on a monitor. “Veri-Mind overwrites wholesale. It doesn’t care about precision because it’s not trying to help anyone—it’s trying to control them. But memory doesn’t work that way. Memory is delicate. Specific. It’s not just data; it’s emotion, sensation, context.”

He showed me the code—not that I understood it, but I understood his excitement. The way his hands moved when he talked about neural pathways and emotional encoding.

“I reverse-engineered their system. Figured out how to write memories instead of just erasing them. But not propaganda—not their version of history. Real memories. Specific ones. The taste of your grandmother’s cooking. The feeling of your first kiss. The sound of your mother’s voice.”

“Why?”

He stopped. Looked at me with those exhausted eyes.

“My sister, Lena. She was in an accident two years ago. Memory damage. She lost—” He paused. “She lost pieces of herself. Our childhood. Our mother’s face. She doesn’t remember that I’m her brother.”

I thought about my father. The polite stranger’s smile.

“I’ve been trying to fix her,” Marcus said. “That’s why I started this. But I can’t give her memories that don’t exist anymore. Our mother is dead. Our childhood is gone. The only way to restore what Lena lost is to find similar memories somewhere else. Copy them. Adapt them. Install them.”

“That’s possible?”

“That’s what Echo does.” He gestured at the chair. “The technology exists. The government proved that. I just made it precise. Made it beautiful.”

He looked at me again. That calculating look.

“But I can’t do anything with it alone. I’m not—” He struggled for the word. “I don’t know how to talk to people. How to reach the communities that need this. I can build the engine, but I don’t know how to drive.”

I understood then what he was offering. And what he was asking.

“Show me,” I said.

The first install was a woman named Denise. Fifty-three years old, retired schoolteacher, lived alone in a shotgun house not much different from the one I grew up in.

She wanted to remember her mother’s gumbo.

“She’s been gone eleven years,” Denise told us, sitting in Marcus’s chair, hands trembling. “I’ve tried to make it myself. Every recipe, every variation. It’s never right. Something’s always missing, and I can’t figure out what.”

Her mother had died with Alzheimer’s. The recipe was lost. The taste was lost. The specific Saturday afternoon when Denise was twelve years old, standing in her mother’s kitchen, learning the secrets that would never be passed down.

Marcus found a woman named Cora. Seventy-one, lived in Sunnyside, had grown up three streets from Denise’s mother. Cora’s grandmother had made the same gumbo—probably learned from the same source, generations back. Same roux. Same trinity. Same slow simmer that turned ingredients into love.

Cora agreed to let us copy the memory. She didn’t fully understand the technology—none of us did, really—but she understood what we were trying to do.

“Some things shouldn’t be forgotten,” she said. “If I can give that to someone, that’s a gift.”

The transfer took eleven minutes. Marcus monitored the readouts while I held Denise’s hand. She’d gone quiet when the process started—not unconscious, just somewhere else. Her eyes moved behind closed lids like she was dreaming.

When it was over, she sat up slowly. Disoriented. Blinking.

“How do you feel?” Marcus asked.

Denise didn’t answer. She was crying. Silently, steadily, tears running down her face while her expression shifted from confusion to wonder to grief to joy, cycling through faster than I could track.

“I can taste it,” she whispered. “Oh my God. I can taste it.”

She went home and made gumbo that night. Called us three hours later, sobbing, saying it was perfect. It was right. For the first time in eleven years, she’d brought her mother back.

We charged her fifty dollars. Marcus wanted to do it for free, but I convinced him that people don’t value what they don’t pay for. And we needed the money to keep going.

Fifty dollars. The most meaningful transaction of my life.

Chapter 3: The Hustle

Word spread the way word spreads in the Fifth Ward.

Church parking lots and barbershop debates. Cousins who knew cousins. The woman at the laundromat who heard about Denise’s gumbo and wanted to know if we could help her remember her son’s voice—he’d died in Afghanistan, and she was forgetting the specific way he said “Mama.”

We helped her. We helped the next one too. And the next.

Within three months, we had more demand than we could handle. Marcus built devices as fast as he could, training himself on soldering techniques from YouTube videos, sourcing parts from the Medical Center’s shadow economy—the tunnels underneath the hospitals where orderlies sold “damaged” equipment that worked fine.

I handled everything else. Finding clients. Vetting them. Setting up installs in locations that wouldn’t attract attention. Building a network of people who could spread the word without spreading it too far.

The product evolved based on what people wanted.

The Grief Pause — $200

You’ve just lost someone. The wound is fresh. You can’t function—can’t work, can’t parent, can’t exist—but the world doesn’t stop for grief. It keeps demanding, and you can’t meet the demand.

For two hundred dollars, we could install a buffer. Not erasure—we weren’t monsters. Just a delay in the emotional processing. You’d still know your mother had died. You’d still need to grieve eventually. But you could get through the funeral without collapsing. Finish the project at work. Make it through the holidays.

Grieve on your schedule instead of drowning on theirs.

Some people called it unhealthy. Avoidance. But I watched a single father make it through his wife’s death without losing his job, without traumatizing his kids with a breakdown they weren’t equipped to witness. He came back six months later and asked us to remove the buffer. He was ready to feel it.

That’s not avoidance. That’s survival.

The Confidence Boost — $200

This one was Marcus’s innovation. He figured out that memories weren’t just what happened—they were how it felt to do something. Procedural memory, he called it. The muscle memory of competence.

We could install the experience of being good at something. Not the skill itself—you couldn’t suddenly play piano because you remembered performing at Carnegie Hall. But you could remember the feeling of success. The calm certainty that you belonged somewhere, that you could handle what was coming.

Job interviews. First dates. Presentations. Any situation where confidence mattered more than credentials.

I’m not going to pretend this was morally clean. We were selling people a lie—a memory of achievement they hadn’t earned. But the thing about confidence is that it becomes self-fulfilling. You believe you can do something, you try harder, you actually do it.

Our clients weren’t cheating. They were borrowing belief until they could generate their own.

The Ozempic Companion — $50

Houston was ground zero for the weight-loss drug revolution. Half the city was on semaglutide, dropping pounds and discovering a problem nobody had anticipated: they missed food.

Not eating—the physical act of consumption. They missed the experience. The anticipation. The first bite. The way a perfect meal could transport you somewhere else entirely.

For fifty dollars, we could give them that experience without the calories. The char on a Pappas Bros ribeye. The grease dripping from a Whataburger patty melt at 2 AM. The specific transcendence of a Shipley’s kolache when you’re hungover and desperate.

All the dopamine, none of the weight.

This was our most popular product. We had clients who came back weekly, cycling through a menu of meals they couldn’t eat anymore. Marcus worried about addiction—the psychological dependency on artificial satisfaction. I worried about running out of source material.

We needed people willing to share their food memories. We found them at the flea market, at church potlucks, at family reunions where grandmothers had been cooking the same dishes for sixty years. They’d let us copy their experiences for a fee, and we’d resell them to people whose bodies wouldn’t let them eat anymore.

Cultural preservation through neurological capitalism. I’m still not sure if that’s beautiful or obscene.

Trap was the one who suggested the slabs.

Trap was fifty-seven years old, ran a garage off Lockwood, and had been building custom cars since before I was born. His real name was Arthur, but nobody had called him that in forty years. He was Trap because he trapped beauty in metal and paint—took ordinary vehicles and turned them into rolling sculptures.

“You know why we ride slabs?” he asked me one night, polishing his trunk setup like it was an altar.

I said something about style. Houston culture. The tradition.

“Nah.” He shook his head. “We ride slabs because they can’t take them from us. The city took our neighborhoods. Developers took our houses. Government took our votes. But they can’t take a car. A car moves. A car is yours as long as you can drive it.”

He looked at me with eyes that had seen too much to be impressed by anything.

“Your memory thing. You could put that in a trunk setup. Make the car into something more than transportation. Make it a time machine.”

I didn’t understand at first. Then I did.

Houston Memory Rides — $150-1,000

The concept was simple: you’d ride through the city while experiencing someone else’s memory of what that city used to be. The GPS would sync with the installation, so when you drove past a specific intersection, you’d see it as it existed in 1996. Or 1985. Or whenever the memory was from.

We partnered with old-timers who remembered the neighborhoods before the changes. Miss Addie, who’d lived in Fifth Ward her whole life, became our primary source. Her memories were gold—sharp, vivid, emotionally rich. Through her, you could cruise down Lyons Avenue and see the corner stores that had become Starbucks. Hear the music that now got noise complaints. Feel the density of community that had been demolished for freeway expansion.

The rides were supposed to be nostalgic. Therapeutic. A way for people who’d been displaced to visit a home that didn’t exist anymore.

But something strange happened.

People who’d never lived in those neighborhoods started buying rides. White people from the suburbs. Developers’ kids. People whose families had been part of the displacement, consciously or not.

They wanted to experience what they’d destroyed. Or what their parents had destroyed. Or what the system they benefited from had destroyed.

I didn’t know what to do with that. Were they tourists? Appropriators? Penitents? Were we selling culture as product, or were we creating the only archive that would survive?

Miss Addie had opinions. She always did.

“You think you invented something new,” she said, sitting on my mother’s porch while the sun went down. She was seventy-three years old, moved slowly but thought fast, and had known my family since before I was born.

“You didn’t.”

I waited. Miss Addie delivered wisdom on her own schedule.

“In 1972, they bulldozed the church I was married in. Built Highway 59 right through our neighborhood. Said it was progress. Said we’d adjust.” She looked at me with eyes that had watched the city transform into something unrecognizable six times over. “They’ve always been erasing us, Kale. You just gave them a faster tool.”

“I’m preserving—”

“You’re packaging. Different thing.” She held up a hand before I could argue. “I’m not saying it’s wrong. I’m saying be careful about what you think you’re doing.”

“What do you mean?”

“Those memories you’re selling. The ones from the old neighborhood. People experience them, they feel something. They think they understand. But understanding isn’t living. A memory of a place isn’t the same as fighting to keep that place alive.”

She was quiet for a moment. A car rolled by, bass thumping, swangas catching the last light.

“What happens when the memory is all that’s left? When you can get Fifth Ward in a download without ever meeting a person who lived there?”

I didn’t have an answer.

“You’re building a museum, baby. And you know what happens in museums?”

“What?”

“Things die. They just die pretty.”

Chapter 4: Sienna

She showed up at Trap’s garage on a Thursday afternoon, carrying a camera and asking questions I didn’t want to answer.

“I’m looking for someone called Kale.”

I was elbow-deep in a trunk setup, running cable for the latest memory rig. Didn’t look up. “Depends who’s asking.”

“Sienna Price. I’m a documentarian.”

That made me look up.

She was medium height, natural hair in twists, wearing a jacket that looked expensive enough to be out of place in the Fifth Ward but worn enough to suggest she’d been places. Her camera was professional—the kind that cost more than most people’s cars.

But it was her eyes that stopped me. Sharp. Analytical. Looking at me like I was a puzzle she was deciding whether to solve or throw away.

“I’m making a film about memory modification,” she said. “The legal industry and everything that’s grown up around it. Someone at the Medical Center mentioned your name.”

“They shouldn’t have.”

“Probably not.” She smiled. It was a challenge. “But they did. And I’ve been tracking the supply chain for six months. Veri-Mind hardware showing up in places it shouldn’t be. Reports of unauthorized installations that sound therapeutic rather than punitive. A shadow market for something the government insists doesn’t exist.”

She tilted her head. “The trail leads here. To a slab shop in Fifth Ward. To someone who calls himself—” she checked her notes, “—the Memory Broker.”

I should have denied everything. Should have sent her away and moved the operation somewhere she couldn’t find.

Instead, I said: “That’s a stupid name. I never called myself that.”

She laughed. A real laugh, surprised out of her, like she was annoyed at herself for finding me funny.

That’s when I knew I was in trouble.

I let her film.

I told myself it was strategy. If she was going to make a documentary either way, better to shape the narrative than let her construct it without me. Control what she saw. Manage the message.

That was a lie. The truth was simpler and more dangerous: I wanted her to see me.

Not the operation. Me. The version of myself that was trying to do something meaningful. The version that believed in what we were building.

She followed us for three weeks. Watched installs. Interviewed clients—with their permission, faces obscured. Asked questions that cut closer than I expected.

“Where does it stop?” she asked one night, after watching a woman receive a memory of her dead husband’s laugh.

“What do you mean?”

“The technology. You can install a memory of a meal. A memory of confidence. A memory of a neighborhood that doesn’t exist anymore.” She was filming me, the camera an extension of her attention. “What happens when someone asks you to install something else? A memory of a crime they didn’t commit. A memory of a vote they didn’t cast.”

“That’s not what we do.”

“But you could.”

I didn’t answer.

“That’s what I’m trying to understand,” she said. “You’ve built something powerful. Maybe the most powerful technology anyone’s ever had access to outside a government contractor. And you’re using it for—what? Diet memories and confidence boosts?”

“We’re helping people.”

“You’re selling experiences. There’s a difference.” She lowered the camera. Looked at me directly. “I’m not saying you’re doing something wrong. I’m asking where the line is. Where it will be when someone offers you enough money to cross it.”

“You don’t know me.”

“No,” she agreed. “That’s why I’m asking.”

The real reason she was there came out three weeks later.

We were at the water wall—late, after the tourists had gone, just the two of us and the sound of water recycling endlessly. She’d stopped filming. Had started talking to me like a person instead of a subject.

“My mother was a city councilwoman,” she said. “In San Antonio. She opposed the Memory Verification Act when it was still being debated. Called it unconstitutional. Called it the most dangerous legislation she’d seen in thirty years of public service.”

I waited. The water roared.

“She was invited to participate in a pilot program. ‘Civic alignment research,’ they called it. Voluntary. Compensated. She thought she was helping collect data to fight the bill.”

Sienna’s voice was steady, but her hands weren’t.

“She came back supporting the Act. Enthusiastically. Gave interviews praising the technology. Voted for implementation when it reached her district.”

“Jesus.”

“She’s on a state advisory board now. Travels around giving speeches about the importance of verified memory in democratic society.” Sienna looked at the water. “She doesn’t remember that she has a daughter.”

The words hung there.

“I’ve tried to contact her twice. Both times, she smiled politely and asked if we’d met before.” Sienna laughed—the saddest sound I’d ever heard. “The woman who raised me. Who taught me how to hold a camera. Who told me that truth was the only thing worth chasing.”

“Sienna—”

“I’m not here to make a documentary about you, Kale. I mean, I am. But that’s not why I started looking.” She turned to face me. Eyes bright with something between grief and rage. “I’m trying to find out who did this to her. Who authorized the program. Who developed the specific technology that could make a mother forget her own child.”

“And you think I know?”

“I think you know more than you’re telling me. I think you have access to networks and information I can’t reach. And I think—” She stopped. “I think you might actually be one of the good ones. Which means you might help me.”

I should have walked away. Should have kept my distance from someone investigating the same world I was profiting from.

Instead, I reached out and touched her hand. She didn’t pull away.

“I’ll help,” I said. “Whatever I can do.”

She nodded. Didn’t thank me. Just stood there in the roar of the water wall, holding my hand like it was keeping her from floating away.

That was the beginning.

Chapter 5: The Rise

Three months.

That’s how long we had. Three months of Sienna falling asleep on my couch while I pretended to watch whatever documentary she’d put on. Three months of arguments that turned into conversations that turned into silence that didn’t need filling. Three months of her stealing my hoodies and me pretending to be annoyed about it.

I didn’t tell her everything. Couldn’t. There were parts of the operation she was better off not knowing—the supply chains, the money, the arrangements with people whose names I’d never put in writing.

But I told her about my father.

We were in bed—my bed, which had become our bed without either of us discussing it. The apartment was dark except for the Houston skyline through the window, that permanent orange glow that passes for stars in a city too bright for real ones.

“What happened to him?” she asked. “The real reason you started this.”

I told her. The poll worker who believed voting was a sacrament. The verification that wasn’t verification. The polite stranger’s smile.

She didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she put her hand on the back of my neck and held it there. Not trying to fix anything. Just staying.

That’s the thing about Sienna. She didn’t try to fix anything. She just stayed.

The operation was growing faster than I could track.

Marcus had trained three other technicians. We had distribution points in Third Ward, Acres Homes, and Sunnyside. The memory rides were booked two weeks out. The product list had expanded to dozens of variations—custom packages for grief, confidence, nostalgia, connection.

I bought back my mother’s house. The one the bank had taken after my father got verified, after the medical bills ate through their savings, after everything fell apart. Paid cash to a developer who’d been planning to tear it down for townhomes.

I didn’t go inside. Just stood on the sidewalk, looking at the place I’d grown up, holding the deed in my hands.

Trap found me there. Stood next to me, quiet the way he always was.

“You going to live in it?”

“No.”

“Then why buy it?”

I didn’t have a good answer. The house wasn’t what I missed. My parents were what I missed. The version of my life where my father still knew my name and my mother wasn’t exhausted from trying to manage his care.

You can’t buy that back. No matter how much money you have. No matter what technology you control.

“Some things are just supposed to be yours,” I said finally. “Even if you can’t use them.”

Trap nodded like that made sense. Maybe it did.

I bought a slab that made grown men stop traffic just to watch it pass.

A 1983 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, rebuilt from the frame up, painted a purple so deep it looked like a bruise you wanted to touch. The swangas caught Houston sunlight and threw it back like a threat. The trunk setup held the most advanced memory installation rig we’d ever built—a mobile clinic, a showroom, a temple on wheels.

Sienna saw it and laughed.

“You’re performing,” she said. “Who are you performing for?”

“Everyone.” I ran my hand along the hood. “No one. The version of me that used to count quarters for the bus.”

“The car’s not for you. It’s for them.”

“Them?”

“Everyone who said you’d never be anything. Your father who can’t remember you were anything.” She looked at me with those sharp eyes. “You’re trying to become undeniable. You think if you get big enough, loud enough, visible enough—no one can ever erase you.”

I didn’t have a response. She’d seen something I hadn’t admitted to myself.

“It won’t work,” she said. Gently. “You can’t outrun that kind of wound. You can only learn to live with it.”

“And if I can’t?”

She touched my face. “Then you’ll keep running. And one day you’ll look around and realize you ran so far you can’t find your way back.”

I kissed her. Partly because I loved her. Partly because I didn’t want to hear what else she might say.

Dom arrived on a Tuesday.

A black sedan pulled up to the garage—sleek, expensive, looking like a government vehicle that had gone freelance. The windows were tinted past legal. The driver stayed inside.

The man who emerged was maybe forty-five, wearing a suit that probably cost more than my mother’s house. He looked around Trap’s garage—the tools, the slabs in progress, the empire I was building—with the expression of someone evaluating an acquisition.

“Mr. Booker.” He extended his hand. “Dominic Williams. But please—call me Dom.”

I didn’t shake. “I don’t remember making an appointment.”

“No.” He smiled. “I don’t make appointments. I make opportunities.”

He walked through the garage without asking permission. Touched a swanga like he was checking its construction. Examined one of our memory rigs with what looked like professional familiarity.

“You’ve built something interesting,” he said. “Grassroots distribution. Community trust. Quality product. It’s the kind of operation venture capitalists would kill to understand.”

“We’re not looking for investors.”

“I’m not offering investment.” He turned to face me. “I’m offering partnership. Or more accurately—I’m offering you a choice between partnership and obsolescence.”

I felt Trap tense beside me. Saw Marcus drift toward the back of the garage where we kept the hardware that mattered.

“That sounds like a threat.”

“It’s not a threat. It’s a market reality.” Dom pulled out a phone, showed me a screen full of data. “The government contracts for memory modification are going private next year. Five companies are competing for implementation rights in twelve states. I’m positioned to control three of them.”

He put the phone away.

“You’re good at this. Better than I expected. But you’re playing with toys. I’m building infrastructure. When the market scales—and it will—there will be room for operators or there will be room for products. You can be the operator. Or you can be something I acquire on my way to something larger.”

“I’m not for sale.”

“Everything’s for sale, Mr. Booker. The only variable is price.” He reached into his jacket and produced a card. Laid it on the workbench like he was laying down a bet. “Think about it. You have something valuable—community trust, cultural authenticity, the kind of access that can’t be bought directly. I have resources you can’t imagine. Together, we could build something that matters.”

“We already built something that matters.”

“You built a hobby.” His voice hardened. “A beautiful, heartfelt hobby that helps a few hundred people and makes you feel righteous. I’m building an empire. And empires require choices.”

He walked toward the door. Paused.

“I’m from the Fifth Ward too, you know. Same streets. Different decade. I know what it’s like to want to matter. To want to be so big that no one can ignore you.”

He looked at me. And for a moment, I saw something behind the corporate mask—hunger, old and familiar.

“The difference between us is that I stopped pretending the world would reward me for being good. I started making the world pay me for being necessary.” He smiled. “You’ll figure that out eventually. I just hope it’s before someone else figures it out for you.”

He left. The black sedan pulled away.

Trap exhaled. “That man is dangerous.”

“Yeah.”

“What are you going to do?”

I picked up Dom’s card. Turned it over. Nothing on it but a phone number.

“I’m going to prove him wrong.”

We celebrated that night.

The whole crew—Trap, Marcus, the technicians we’d trained, the community members who’d become part of our network. Someone brought crawfish. Someone else brought Hennessy. Music played from a trunk setup, bass rattling the garage walls.

I stood in the middle of it all and felt invincible.

We’d built this. From nothing. From grief and anger and the refusal to be erased. We’d created something the system couldn’t control, couldn’t buy, couldn’t destroy.

Dom was wrong. We didn’t need his empire. We had something better—community, purpose, love. Sienna was there, filming everything, laughing at something Trap said. Marcus was actually smiling for the first time in months.

This was what it was supposed to be. This was the dream.

I drank too much. Danced badly. Let myself believe that we’d won.

And in the corner of the garage, barely visible in the crowd, one of our earliest clients was buffering.

His name was Jerome. We’d given him a memory of his grandmother’s voice—she’d raised him, died when he was sixteen, and he’d been carrying the loss ever since. The install had been perfect. He’d cried with gratitude.

Now he was standing frozen. Face slack. Eyes unfocused. His drink had slipped from his hand and was spreading across the concrete floor.

“Jerome?” I pushed through the crowd. “Jerome, you okay?”

Nothing. No response. He was there but not there—a system frozen mid-process.

Marcus saw it too. His smile vanished. He crossed the garage in three steps, pulling out a handheld diagnostic from his pocket.

“Echo bleed,” he said quietly. “His installed memory is interfering with his baseline cognition.”

“Can you fix it?”

Marcus didn’t answer. Which was answer enough.

Jerome blinked. Shook his head. Looked around like he’d just woken up.

“Sorry,” he said. “I just—I lost a second there.”

“You’re fine.” I clapped him on the shoulder. “Happens to everyone.”

But I felt Miss Addie’s eyes on me from across the garage. And I heard her voice in my head:

You’re building a museum. And you know what happens in museums?

Jerome went back to the party. I went outside. Stood in the Houston night, tasting the humidity and the gasoline and the distant refineries.

Something had shifted. I couldn’t name it yet. But I felt it.

The first crack in the foundation.

The beginning of the fall.

End of Part One

Continue to Part Two: The Price →