Science-Fiction

The Lining

A corporate memory-courier who smuggles other people's stored years through customs in the lining of her own skull is hired to carry a dead engineer's last weekend to his daughter on a mining moon — and discovers the memory contains the access codes to vent the moon's air. She can deliver it intact and let the daughter decide whether twelve thousand lives live or die, or burn it before landing and lose the only recording of her own wedding, pawned into the same skull years ago to pay for the job.

Category

Fiction

Subcategory

Science fiction

GENBN filing

FIC/SCFI

Length

20,246 words

Mood

Tense, intimate, morally airless

Setting

Near-future solar system; the story moves from a corporate transit hub to Kesh's Reach, a domed mining moon with twelve thousand residents

Format

Browser reader & EPUB

Visibility

Public — anyone with the link can read it