When neural technology allowed memories to be extracted, copied, and implanted, a new economy emerged: the memory market. Buy the experience of climbing Everest without the training. Purchase the memory of a first kiss that was better than your own. Sell your childhood memories of a world before the Cascade — pre-Cascade memories command premium prices, because they're the only evidence that things were ever different.
Memory farmers — people who deliberately seek intense experiences specifically to harvest and sell the memories — are a recognized profession. Extreme sports, romantic encounters, moments of genuine danger: all performed not for the experience itself but for its resale value. A trauma black market thrives in the Dregs, where combat memories, near-death experiences, and moments of acute suffering are traded among thrill-seekers and fetishists. Fabricated memories — synthetic experiences indistinguishable from organic ones — flood the market and are sold as authentic. The provenance problem from art has migrated to consciousness itself.
The identity crisis is existential: a wealthy Sprawl resident might carry 10,000 purchased memories and 50 organic ones. Whose life are they living? The memories feel real — they shaped personality, informed decisions, built the person they believe themselves to be. But the experiences belong to strangers, harvested from lives they never lived. "The Borrowed Life" is what Memory Therapists call the condition, and they have no cure — because curing it would mean erasing the person the patient has become.