The woman sat down in the surprisingly uncomfortable chair with the bright light behind it that would shine over her shoulder and obscure her face from the camera.

“This chair is terribly uncomfortable,” she complained, scooting to the edge and finding a perfect dent for her rump and smoothing her skirt over her knees. She crossed her ankles, wishing she had worn hose.

“It’s a posture chair,” Liam replied, accentuating his natural Savannah drawl that made him so popular here in Chicago. “Ever wonder why everyone on my show looks so good?”

He flashed the smile he was known for. The one that made you trust him immediately. Even on the air this would instill a sense of calm in his loyal viewers, but from four feet away it was almost overwhelming. His tan suit barely wrinkled as he leaned back crossing one knee over the other. It must have been tailored to his frame. The woman relaxed a little.

“So, now that we’re here, I’m going to need your name.” He smiled again.

“Oh hell no!” she started to stand and Liam sat up, reaching toward her.

“Miss, please. You don’t have to do it on camera and we won’t use your name. But if I can’t verify your identity, I can’t cite you as a source, and the story will never see air, and then what’s the point of use even being here.” Another smile.

“Fine. After I’m done. And nowhere near any of these damned cameras or microphones.” 

She gestured towards the lapel mic on her navy blue suit jacket. Noticing a spot on the lapel, she licked her finger and rubbed at it furiously. Liam had heard a tiny tinge of a deep southern twang when she said “these damned microphones.” He scribbled “AL?” on the notepad in front of him and looked back at the woman in the suit.

“Fair enough,” a sterner smile, “But I have to have something to call you. She thought for a moment.

“Camellia.” A real Montgomery Camellia, alright, Liam thought, drawing a star next to the AL on his pad.

“Okay Miss Camellia. Look at the monitor to the left of the camera. We can’t see anything about you except that you’re a woman, do you see that?” She nodded. “Jerry, can we put a preview of what the audience will hear during air?” Liam’s producer was expecting this, and casually slapped a button.

“Go ahead, Camellia,” Jerry projected.

“Will you talk for me please?” another famous smile.

“What do you want me to- oh!” She laughed nervously. “I sound like a tuba!”

Her musical and vibrant laugh was full-force now, and she visibly relaxed a bit, trying and failing to compose herself. 

“I know you tested in preparation for today’s visit, and you know everyone on the crew tests every three days. Would you be comfortable taking off your mask so we can hear your voice a little better, and so our facial recognition camera can analyze your expressions more completely? I can also get you something to drink, the sweet tea in the break room is excellent.”

Liam saw Camellia visibly relax this time and he flashed a smile at his producer. Still giggling, she pulled a rhinestone-studded mask case from her purse, pulled the KN95 from behind her ears, folded it, and put it away in one practiced motion. Her lipstick underneath was a perfectly lined and wholly unsmudged carnation red. The sound trick always works  on the skittish ones, Liam thought, adding FASHIONISTA to his notes.

“Thank you, Camellia, we like to be able to tell our audience that every possible measure was taken to ensure we’re giving them the truth. Okay, Jerry, that’s enough.” The deep rumble of her titter stopped in the sound monitors and Camellia composed herself.

“Now, Camellia.” Liam didn’t smile this time. “Can you please look into the camera, tell us the date and why you’re here?”

Still smiling from her amusement, her face grew somber as she looked into the camera and took a steadying breath.

“It is Saturday, May 16^th, 2125, and I am here to expose corruption, collusion, and fraud on the part of my employer, Memcorps Bank, NA.”

“That’s a pretty big accusation.” Liam had heard Camellia’s claims before, it’s why they both were here. Never ask a question you don’t already know the answer to in a formal interview. That had been Professor Zahelu’s first rule of journalism, and with a piece this big, Liam was taking no chances.

“Yes it is,” Camellia pressed on, “and I have the evidence to back it up-“ she started to reach for her purse. 

“Well before we get into that, let’s establish some background. How long have you worked at the bank?”

“Almost two decades.” Camellia sat back and relaxed a little.

“And what do you do there?” 

“I manage the Commodities department.” 

“So you’re still working there even after everything you’ve discovered?”

“Yes.” Camellia eyes lost her smile.

“And why is that?”

“I wanted to collect enough evidence to make my case.” Her voice lowered half an octave.

“Why not go to the police?”

“I wasn’t sure it would help.” Lower still, and quieter now, her voice was barely audible.

“Why not?” Camellia bit her lip and looked down, blinking quickly. Liam was pretty sure her eyes were getting a little brighter, too. It was time to switch tactics.

“So you’re in commodities management.”

“Yes.” Camellia’s looked up and took a steadying breath.

“What does that entail?

“I help keep the memory data safe from being corrupted.” Her voice was becoming higher and louder again.

“How can it be corrupted?”

“Loss of power to the servers, cyber attacks, AI tampering, and plain old data corruption over time.” There she was. Still scared, but not shutting down anymore.

“Memories can lose fidelity eventually?”

“The older ones, from before Memcorps’s charter, yes.”

“So before the way that memories are collected and stored was refined and regulated?”

“Yes, that’s right.” Liam paused and waved to someone outside of the lit interview area, and young man in all black appeared, setting down a tray with two glasses and a glass serving pitcher of amber brown liquid. Liam leaned toward the table between the two chairs and filled a glass. 

“Tea?”

“Yes, please.” Camellia smiled as she gratefully reached for the glass Liam offered to her before pouring himself one and settling back into his seat. She looked to her right and noticed a small table, out of sight from the camera but easy to reach from where they sat. Liam didn’t like his guest to have to hold a glass the whole time. Seeing she had relaxed, he returned to the interview.

“So what do you supervise in the Commodities department?” Camellia shifted a bit into her chair, crossing one leg over the other with her hands on one knee. She could have been in any corporate meeting room in the world.

“In addition to conducting tours for shareholders and potential investors as the need arises,” that’s why she’s so poised, Liam thought, “I manage the department that reviews memories in the bank for anything that could indicate a particular bank of memories could be experiencing corruption.”

“So elongated limbs, extra fingers, orange skies?”

“And coffee that smells like the ocean, yes.” They both chuckled at that, and Liam steered the conversation back to the reason she was here.

“Interesting. How long did you say you’ve worked there?”

“It’ll be 19 years this August.”

“And have you ever played whistleblower before?”

“Once. I reported a coworker, Cathy, when I had reason to believe she was stealing.”

“Was she?”

“Yes.”

“And what happened?” Camellia looked down again and took a deep breath before answering. 

“The company reported her to the government. Once they had a warrant, FBMI agents came to her home office and arrested her. They seized all her assets, and she was ordered by the court to deposit all her memory packages containing banking protocol and finance law. She was also given a lifetime ban on all legal, financial, and politics packages, and with those bans she’s really only qualified for service, labor, and some clerical work. I heard from a coworker that she cleans houses now.”

“Those are some pretty heavy sanctions.”

“Embezzlement is something the government and Memcorps takes very seriously.”

Liam shifted in his seat.

“Now what about Memcorps, have you ever seen or found anything in their policies or practices to suggest they might be behaving in ways that were unethical, or even illegal?”

“Not until about three months ago.”

“What happened then?”

“I saw something…” She swallowed hard and looked at the floor. The camera wouldn’t see it, but Liam could tell she was fighting back tears.

“Let’s back up.” Liam didn’t want this getting out of hand. A little emotion was good, but too much too early and this story would die on the cutting room floor. 

“Let’s talk a little bit about how the bank works in general. Now, Memcorps is the oldest bank in the United States, correct?”

“Correct, we received our charter back in 2042. Before then, Memcorps was Meme-ory. It was simply a social way to share memories with your friends.”

“People used to just share memories?” Liam asked.

“Yes, before the dollar fell and the United States switched over to USMems, people used to share memories with everyone. Of course they weren’t the Mems we know now, where you can recall the actual experience, more like an impression. And people could keep their own versions of memories they wished had gone a little differently, just like the Wish Fulfillment packages you can download now.”

“Interesting, so you could deposit something you also held onto?”

“Not exactly, there were no deposits, because there was nothing to deposit into. It was more like reading, or watching a movie, where you saw and heard what happened first-person, but if you tried to access it later, you were just remembering your impressions of the memory rather than the experience of it. You could see the coffee and know you were drinking it, but you wouldn’t smell it or taste it.” Camellia was comfortable with this part, explaining the history of memory was part of her tours.

Liam paused and chuckled.

“That all sounds very complicated.” 

“Well, it’s almost 80 years of memory history in a nutshell.” Camellia laughed.

“I see, I see. Now how did Meme-ory become Memcorps?”

“When the treasury shifted to Mems instead of the dollar, Meme-ory was one of three companies that had the databases large enough and stable enough to store large amounts of Memories for long periods of time. Wells Fargo bought one, Bank of America bought the second, and our founder, Philip Alexander spent his Meme-ory fortune getting the authorization to switch over to Memcorps and become Bank of Mems.”

“Well he and his family certainly made that investment back, didn’t they?”

“Yes, they did. Memcorps is now the largest bank in the world.”

“What do you think contributed to their success?”

“Innovation. We were the first bank to safely transplant a set of memories into a donor body. We were also the first bank to use active scanners to determine how full the brain was so nobody’s brain gets overtaxed. We even developed our own scanners that can make deposits and withdrawals so the customer only has to visit one machine. And we were the first bank to be able to target a specific amount of time, and a specific set of memories related to one topic. That’s how we created packages for use as a training module for various careers.”

“Like when my parents purchased the journalism package for me.”

“Exactly. Now you can insert and remove packages as you want while still retaining your personal experiences. And we have the largest library of Public Domain Memories in the market.”

“The free memories.”

“Yes, the reproducible memories that can be obtained the hard way by anyone. Reading the Constitution. Visiting a generic park. Dollar-currency era memories that are lower-quality. All free to any Memcorps customer.”

Liam tugged at the cuffs of his shirt underneath his jacket.

“Sounds too good to be true.”

“It’s not, as long as everyone plays by the rules.” Camellia’s voice was quiet again.

“Which brings us to why you’re here. When did you first notice something was wrong?”

Camellia took a deep breath and shifted in her seat.

“I was reviewing the daily memories of one of our tellers.”

“Is it standard practice for tellers to deposit their memories?”

“It’s completely voluntary, but if they give up half their day’s work, they can withdraw half a day of a leisure activity. We get valuable information about the daily happenings within the bank and the concerns about our customers, and our employees get to leave the most stressful parts of the office behind them and remember fun instead of work.”

“How many employees participate in this program?”

“About half.”

“And why don’t the employees simply deposit their entire day in exchange for an entire day of leisure?”

Camellia laughed.

“They would be of no use to us then.”

“Why is that?”

“Would you want an employee that had effectively been on vacation for three years? The only way they learn on the job is by doing the job and remembering their mistakes.”

“Well then don’t they learn slower than they should?”

“Not significantly. Our studies show only a 10% slower learning rate than in employees who don’t deposit their time.”

“Well then why would Memcorps sponsor a program like that? Doesn’t that represent a net loss in terms of labor costs?”

“Not when you factor in the value for the training department, human resources, and even customer experience. Our customers know they could be being observed by anyone within Memcorps, so they tend to be more efficient and civil to our tellers. That leads to higher employee satisfaction, which creates better retention and of course, and even better customer experience.”

“So it’s win-win for everyone?”

“Pretty much.”

“Now why do you think it is that your employees only learn 10% slower, rather than 50%?”

“People aren’t as dumb as they look.” Liam chuckled at that.

“Can you elaborate, please Miss Camellia?” They were both chuckling now.

“Consistency is key to building any skill, but there isn’t a significant increase in learning from an 8 hour shift rather than a 4 hour shift. However, studies have shown there IS a larger increase in fatigue and a higher instance of burnout.”

“Boy, I sure wish I could forget half of my job sometimes.”

“Don’t we all?” they laughed, until Camellia sombered.

“This is usually when I would say you should come work with us, but I can’t in good conscience say that now.”

There was his in.

“So let’s get back to your work. Do I remember from our phone conversation that this investigation of yours started with a spot-check on one particular deposit for one of the employees who participates in this program?”

“Yes, I was reviewing a Tuesday afternoon from a Teller in one of our Dallas branches.”

“Now, why were you looking at this particular block of memories? Isn’t that typically something quality control or one of your teams would handle?”

“Certainly, but there had been a problem with the batch of memories from that branch, and I wanted to spot-check the memories individually to see if the problem was with the database or the scanners for that region.”

“I see, so tell me about this memory.”

“It was a teller at one of our flagship stores. These are the stores where we pioneer new programs. They have the best performance; the most traffic, the highest amount of deposits, the most high profile customers-.”

“-Your super-stores.” Liam interjected.

“Exactly,” Camellia preened. “Our super-stores. I was reviewing an altercation between the teller and a customer who was leaving soon for a trip to New York.”

“When you say you were reviewing, did you make a withdrawal?”

“No,” Camellia smiled. “No, that would be far too much for a person in my position to take in. Plus, the amount of time it would take to deposit and withdraw each memory would be cost-prohibitive in terms just on how much time our reviewers would be spending in scanners alone. So we have special memory review stations, where the agent can see and hear what was translated by the visual and auditory complex, like watching a video of the memory.”

“I see, so you were watching the memory, so to speak.”

“Yes. Anyway, a customer was arguing with a teller over a transit map of New York.”

“That’s in the public domain isn’t it?”

“It is, but it requires 0.12% capacity of your memory available. The woman was already at 80.00% capacity according to the scanner the teller was using.” Camellia was getting agitated.

“And Memcorps couldn’t install the memory?”

“Memcorps is very conservative with its lending policies. If someone is paying down a package like corporate leadership or law practice, as this customer was, we require they keep at least 20% of their capacity free, in case they forget to make a deposit and accumulate memories too quickly, and so we don’t risk them going over 90%.”

“What happens at 90%”

“Memories start to destabilize and they can be difficult to deposit or repossess.”

“What does that look like?”

“Say for example, your journalism package.”

“Yes”

“You remember going to class, studying, passing exams.”

“Of course.”

“Do you remember the first time you met your wife?”

“I better say yes!” Camellia smiled.

“Of course you do. But if your memories are destabilized, you may start to believe you met your wife in your journalism class. You were never IN a journalism class, but the two could blend together. Then if you ever decided to sell your package, you would either have to omit that class, or lose the memory of meeting your wife forever.”

“I see how this can be a big problem. So what happened with the customer.”

“She argued that she knew she was at 79.05% because she had a home scanner.”

“I’ve heard those can be unreliable.”

“Like with anything, you get what you pay for, and this woman paid for the best.”

“So what happened?” She fussed with her hair and re-crossed her legs, clearly uncomfortable.

“The teller refused to give her the memory so she stormed off in a huff. I documented that the teller had followed Memcorps policy. As is our policy with any customer altercation, I reviewed the next interaction the customer had with a teller. It happened to be 15 minutes later, at a different store. She had decided to deposit some early childhood memories into her personal account to make room for the Transit Map.”

“What happened.”

“The teller gave her the map.”

“Was the teller unaware of the policy?”

“No, her scanner said the woman was at 79.05%.”

Liam swallowed. Here we go.

“Is it possible she could have deposited those memories somewhere else?”

“Any deposit of more than half a percent has a federally mandated waiting period of three days.”

“And is it unusual for that kind of discrepancy between scanners to occur?”

“We have the most sophisticated scanners developed by man. They can detect your capacity to a millionth of a percent. They are calibrated twice a day by an armed guard.”

“Why so much caution?”

“The scanners not only read the balance in your head, they also make withdrawals and deposits. Without careful calibration they could make the minds of all of our customers unstable.”

“I see. So the discrepancy is unusual.”

“A discrepancy of more than two hundredths of a percent is enough for us to shut an entire branch down for an investigation. Anything over 5 tenths of a percent and the entire board of directors could go to jail. This was a discrepancy of 0.95%. This wasn’t unusual, this was unimaginable.”

“Why are the laws so strict regarding the scanners?”

“Because any restriction of the exchange of memory is considered an affront by the banks on the free market.”

“What did you do?”

“I started digging.”

“And what did you find?”

Camellia swallowed.

“Systematic manipulation of the scanners. It was only in flagship stores, and it was only during peak hours, but it was nationwide and it was terrifying.”

“So why come to me? Why not go to the police or the FBMI?”

“Because of something else I found.”

Camellia pulled out a rollout screen from her suit pocket and pressed play. On the screen was a bedraggled woman vacantly chewing on a piece of her hair. The shot was filled with her face, her eyes looking watery and slightly unfocused. Liam had just enough time to think to himself they would need to cut this bit when he heard a disembodied voice coming from the screen.

“Cathy,” the woman’s eyes focused slightly and shifted from side to side. “Cathy,” the voice called again. The angle of the camera widened to reveal the woman was wearing a hospital gown and staring out a large picture window half-obscured with horizontal blinds. Cathy turned toward the speaker.

“You have a visitor.” The shot widened again to reveal a tall orderly in dark blue scrubs standing next to-

“Is that you?” Liam asked Camellia, who nodded. Liam could see a name badge on the left side of her chest, but couldn’t quite make it out. He wondered if she would leave the footage with him.

Liam looked down at his notepad and hastily scribbled VISIT CATHY, when he heard a door slam behind him. 

Surprised, Liam looked up to find the studio empty. Liam stood up, confused. He tried to remember what had just happened. He had been conducting an interview with a skittish woman from Memcorps Bank about… it was fuzzy. Some kind of shady dealings, maybe with deposits? Liam looked back down at his pad and saw the notes he’d been taking: AL*, FASHIONISTA, VISIT CATHY. None of this was helpful.

Liam looked around the studio again. The place had been ransacked. The cameras were gone, his skeleton crew were gone, the booth was dark, even the sweet tea he’d been drinking was turned over. Walking over to the table behind the guest chair, Liam saw a broken glass on the ground, the clear imprint of red lipstick on what had once been one lip of the glass. He looked back to the booth.

“Jerry?” Liam called out, but heard nothing but the street below coming through the windows. He stood up, turning back to the posture chair. Where had the woman gone? Where had everyone gone? Where were the cameras? He looked back at the empty chair again. The almost-empty chair. There was something small and black sitting on the seat. Liam leaned over and recognized the mic, cord, and battery pack of a simple lapel mic. He picked up the mic and felt something on the bottom of the pack. He turned it over, a small sense of deja vu picking at the back of his brain, as though he knew what to expect. Taped to the back of the mic’s battery pack was a note:

LEAVE IT ALONE. 

Liam gulped and took the note off the pack, crumbling it and stuffing it into his pocket. He put the mic back down on the chair and looked at his battery-operated watch. It was a hokey affectation but Liam liked having some analog tools in this nearly entirely digital world. He even prided on how much care he took of this “pretentious antique,” as his wife called it. But something was wrong. Either it was an hour fast or he had just lost an hour. Liam pulled out his phone. The time on his watch was correct. He opened his phone and placed a call. 

“Liam? Whatcha got?”

It was Jerry’s standard greeting, and not at all what he would sound like if he had just woken up in a raided news studio.

“Jerry, man, where are you?”

“I’m on the boat, dude, have been all day.” Liam quickly checked the date on his phone. It was still the same day.

“You, uh… haven’t been by the studio at all today?” Liam swallowed hard.

“No, man, I figured you were calling me with some hot story.” Shit.

“Oh, sorry, no-” Liam thought quickly, “I just was wondering if you and Maria wanted to come by for dinner. Janet is making her gumbo and I found this microbrew you’ve gotta try.” This was true, and had already been part of the plan for the day anyway.

“Sounds great, let me just check with Maria and I’ll get back to you.” Crap. Would they get to Maria too?

“I think Janet already talked to her to plan their margaritas.” This was perfectly plausible. It was nice, your best friend being married to your wife’s best friend. 

“Well then if the women-folk have their mind set on it, we best just be good husbands and go along.”

“Alright, man,” Liam was trying not to let his building panic show in his voice. “See you later.”

“See ya’.”

Liam ended the call and looked around the studio. In an hour, they had removed all his equipment, put Jerry on his boat at least 30 minutes away, and wiped his memory to the exact place where he would know what had happened and why. One thing was clear. Someone didn’t want this story told…