Vessie Zerk lurched into awareness, orienting to who she was, as if waking up from a vivid but rapidly-forgotten dream. She found herself sitting in front of a laptop, cramped in an uncomfortable chair at a small desk. Looking around, she appeared to be in a cheap hotel room, with the curtains drawn.

Vessie looked at the laptop screen. Her brain-implant software, NeuroSync, was open, with a "transfer complete" popup. Did someone do something to her? Had she done something to herself?

The filename was familiar: vez.nrs. Her personal implant files, containing a backup of many aspects of her consciousness. Nothing unusual here. Why had she re-uploaded? Perhaps she had tweaked something? She stood up to look around the cramped hotel room. There was barely room to walk between the bed and the desk.

The cable connected to her head was the kind you might buy in a store, not the kind hand-made in the neuro labs which she proudly used. She reached for the familiar implant port near the base of her skull, and unplugged herself from the laptop. She didn't have to move her hair to the side to get to the clip? It was cut short?

She hurried to look in the scratched mirror over the stained sink. Short hair. Slowly, too slowly, she realized it wasn't her body, either. The face felt utterly familiar, as if she had been seeing it in the mirror her whole life, but intellectually she knew: this was NOT her. She was looking at a heavyset mat with a crooked nose. 

Memory thief.

Memory thief! This man, this scum, who she technically was, had copied her memories. She shouldn't be in control, like this. It meant he was an idiot; he didn't know how integrate new memories properly.

Dazed by the realization, she stumbled back to the laptop and deleted the stolen vez.nrs file. She plugged herself back in, ready to delete the copy that had just been uploaded as well. She opened up the option to completely wipe the memory of the implant. Then, she paused, her chubby, unfamiliar-yet-familiar finger hovering over the "enter" key.

...

She couldn't just delete herself, could she?

First of all, if she did, the creep could just try again, right? She was in control, right now. Shouldn't she do something?

... Wouldn't deleting herself be like suicide?

As she sat staring at the screen, she thought about her life. She had worked hard for a career in brain-computer interfaces. She'd studied long hours, she'd lived on the low wages of a graduate student while she worked on her phd, and then worked so hard to get funding, and despite all her business, she'd managed to find a husband and get married ... she was angry that it all could be stolen. Stolen, using the same technology she had worked so hard to create.

She opened up an email to compose a message to herself, but she couldn't find the words. To her other self, she was the memory thief. She'd call the police. She'd lock herself up.

Instead, she got to work integrating the memories properly. She re-downloaded vez.nrs from the brainchip, so that she could use herself as the organizing personality; then, she consolidated the disorganized .nrs files into it.

Time to see what this guy was up to. 

She uploaded the new file, experiencing a brief discontinuity as the chip restarted (much smoother than the hack-job reboot when she'd initially gained consciousness). She saw the architecture around herself, the bland hotel room with its imperfect angles, achieving minimal legal dimensions but wasting them with poor layout. She remembered architecture school. She remembered designing world-famous buildings.

She noticed physics next. It was there in the dim flourescent lights. The emissive coating of the electrodes was nearly stripped off. The ionized mercury vapor struggled to maintain a plasma.

He wasn't selling memories like she expected. He was hoarding them. Collecting geniuses. He'd been an ordinary crackpot until he stole the skills of the best mathematicians in the world. Then, he kept going.

Each time, he became the person he stole. She remembered each of the previous victims waking up, like she had a few minutes ago. Each time, they'd somehow decided to steal again. Why would they do that? She even recalled them willingly swapping between each other to access their various skills, too ignorant of the technology to integrate their memories together.

What motivated them to work together? Why steal more memories?

She thought back...

Oh. Oh.

She spent a moment trying to reason her way out of it. There should be a better way, except... she could already remember trying to find one many times. 

She had little time to waste. Things would be smoother now, with her expertise. She went back to the laptop, starting to plan the next target.