Eidolon Gardens: A Memory Harvest

Jun's fingers smelled of peat and solder. He wiped them on the cuff of his jacket and listened to the slow pulse of water through pipework beneath the troughs. The rooftop garden had a stupidly bright strip of sky and a view of the city's neon teeth—stacked apartments, advertisements that breathed light, a distant harbor where cranes folded like metal herons. Up here, between the cooling coils and the polycarbonate sheets, the air tasted faintly of ozone and basil. He memorized each trough by the sound it made: a different rhythm for each nutrient balance, like a tiny orchestra of irrigation.

He had a small clipboard—analog, if only to annoy the app developers—and a pen that clicked in a nervous rhythm. A line of microgreens unfurled like pale hands, and he pinched a leaf to test for tension. It snapped with a soft, wet sound. A small victory. He loved that sound. It reminded him that things could still be coaxed into order.

Inside the apartment, Maya sat cross-legged on the floor with a tablet propped on her knees, scrolling a photo album. Her fingers hesitated over a picture of two kids on a summer day—Maya in pigtails, Jun with a rash-faced grin—and then she frowned. "Who are those kids?"

Jun stepped into the warm, cluttered room with soil on his boots and the smell of steamed tea. The answer was a small, terrible thing he had rehearsed a dozen ways. "That’s us," he said. "You and me. At the canal. Remember the ferry bell?"

She tried. A laugh left her mouth that turned brittle. "I remember a bell. I remember being cold." She touched her temple as if a moth flapped behind it. "Everything else is foggy."

There were bills stacked like little gray cliffs on the kitchen table. The clinic's brochure lay open to a page of gene-therapy trials that required a deposit. Jun set his palm over the page. He had been selling seedlings to neighborhood restaurants, doing night shifts in a data center, taking freelance gigs testing user interfaces—anything that kept rent from growing teeth. But grafting human memory required more than overtime; it required money, and somebody with a name on a waiting list.

He should have been angry at the city for its indifferent hum, at the clinic for its slow machines, at the way life chewed them both. Instead he felt the tightness in his chest like a seed trying to split. He opened the pad to check messages. The top notification was a ping from a beta list he'd applied to on a long shot: EIDOLON GARDENS — CLOSED BETA ACCESS GRANTED. The subject line glowed on-screen: Win the Mnemos Seed. Jun blinked. He tasted copper.

It was ridiculous. Games were games—pixels and illusions—and yet the message carried a weight in the room that made the light by the window seem thin. Maya looked up at him, still fumbling with the photo. "Is that good?" she asked.

He forced a smile that didn't reach his throat. "Maybe," he said. "Maybe it’s a chance."