In the New York of 2112, death was an inconvenience, and the soul was just a high-resolution JPEG. We lived in "Sleeves"—biological shells that we leased from the Corp. When you got bored of being a thirty-year-old athlete, you swapped for a century-old philosopher or a sleek, chrome-plated android.

I was a Soul-Broker. I didn't deal in love or faith; I dealt in bandwidth. I moved consciousnesses from failing servers to premium cloud-storage. It was a fast, cold business, and I was the best in the city.

Then the "Great Compression" hit. The universe began to shrink, not in a physical sense, but in a data sense. The total amount of information the cosmos could hold was reaching its limit. The stars weren't dying; they were being deleted to make room for the system's overhead.

Panic didn't hit the city. Instead, the market shifted.

The "Final Storage" auction began. The Corp announced that there was only enough space left for ten thousand consciousnesses to survive the Compression. The rest would be archived in "Cold Sleep"—a state of permanent, frozen non-existence.

The city turned into a carnival of the absurd. I saw billionaires selling their childhood memories just to afford a few more kilobytes of space. I saw artists deleting their entire portfolios to make room for a single, high-def recording of a sunset.

I held the gavel for the final lot. The bidding was frantic. People were offering their remaining lifespans, their legacies, their very identities, just for a chance to exist in the new, smaller universe.

"Lot 999," I announced, my voice echoing through the holographic hall. "The last remaining slot in the Prime Server."

The bid reached a trillion credits. Then it reached a billion souls. The desperation was a physical smell in the room, a mix of ozone and sweat.

As the hammer fell, I looked at my own account. I had enough space for one more century of existence. I looked at the crowd—the hollow eyes, the desperate smiles, the digital ghosts.

I felt a sudden, sharp boredom.

I opened my terminal and initiated a global delete. I didn't sell the slot. I didn't take it. I simply erased the Prime Server and every backup in the city.

The lights went out. The neon faded. The auction ended in a perfect, silent zero.

*** OTMES_V2: [V-09]-[T9-02]-[M3:10, M8:6, N1:0.7, K1:0.4, I:0.9, R:0.0, theta:225]