The first pill went down easy, small and white like a grain of rice, which Duc thought was either deeply ironic or God's idea of a sick joke. At sixty-eight, everything hurt—his knees when he stocked the low shelves, his back when he reached for the cigarettes behind the counter, his heart when he looked at the dwindling customer traffic through the bulletproof glass he'd installed after the third robbery.
"Memorex," Dr. Patel had said, sliding the sample pack across her desk two weeks ago. "New drug. Very promising for early-stage memory issues. Your insurance covers it, Mr. Nguyen."
That alone should have been a warning. His insurance never covered anything worth a damn.
Now, standing in the dim fluorescent flicker of Duc's Quick Stop at 6 AM, waiting for the morning rush that barely existed anymore, he dry-swallowed the pill and went back to inventorying the energy drinks. The kids loved their Monster and Red Bull, chemicals he couldn't pronounce flooding their systems before their first period bell. At least they still came in, unlike the old-timers who'd moved away or died, taking their lottery ticket habits and newspaper purchases with them.
The bell above the door chimed, but when Duc looked up from his clipboard, nobody was there. Detroit wind, probably. The door needed adjusting—another thing on his endless list of repairs he couldn't afford.
"You got any of those bánh mì left?"
Duc's hand froze over the inventory sheet. That voice—Jesus Christ, that voice hadn't asked him for anything in forty-nine years. He looked up slowly, his chest tight, and there was Minh standing by the sandwich cooler, twenty-five years old and wearing his ARVN uniform like it was 1975 and the North Vietnamese Army wasn't breathing down Saigon's neck.
"No," Duc whispered. Then louder, angry: "No, you're not here."
Minh smiled, that crooked smile that had charmed girls from the Mekong Delta to the embassy district. "I'm as here as you are, anh hai. More, maybe. You've been running from me longer than you've been standing still."
Duc gripped the counter until his knuckles went white. Hallucination. Had to be. Stress, maybe, or the blood pressure medication mixing badly with the new pills. He closed his eyes, counted to ten in Vietnamese, then English, then opened them again.
Minh was examining a bag of shrimp chips, holding it up to the light like he was checking for communist propaganda hidden in the ingredients list.
"Get out," Duc said.
"Can't. You brought me here." Minh set the chips down, walked—no, glided, there was something wrong with how he moved—toward the counter. "Forty-nine years, and you finally decided to face me. Though I don't think this is what you had in mind."
The bell chimed again, and this time it was real: Lakisha Washington, still in her scrubs from the night shift at Detroit Medical Center. She stopped short when she saw Duc's face.
"Mr. Nguyen? You okay? You look like you've seen a ghost."
Duc almost laughed. Almost told her. But Minh was already fading, becoming translucent like cigarette smoke, and then he was gone. Just Lakisha and him in the store, the morning light starting to creep through the barred windows.
"I'm fine," he lied, his hands shaking as he rang up her usual—coffee, black, and a protein bar. "Long night."
She studied him with those sharp nurse's eyes that missed nothing. "You taking your medications? All of them?"
"Yes, mother," he said, attempting a smile.
She didn't smile back. "I'm serious. I've been seeing some weird reactions to some of the new drugs. Anything unusual, you call me, okay?"
After she left, Duc stood alone in his store, waiting. But Minh didn't come back. Not that morning, anyway.
---
The second time Duc saw his brother, Mrs. Chen was there, arguing about expired milk. She was eighty-three, older than Duc, and had been shopping at his store since he'd opened it in '92 with his wife's life insurance money. Cancer had taken Mai in eighteen months, American dream to American nightmare just like that.
"This milk is bad," Mrs. Chen insisted in Mandarin-accented English, waving the carton. "Look at date!"
"It's good for three more days," Duc said, but his attention was on Minh, who stood behind Mrs. Chen, making faces. Same uniform, same age, same crooked smile. This time, though, there was something wrong with his neck, a dark line across it that Duc didn't want to examine too closely.
"Three days is not fresh!" Mrs. Chen slammed the carton on the counter.
"Then don't buy it," Duc snapped, his eyes never leaving Minh.
Mrs. Chen followed his gaze, turned around, saw nothing. When she turned back, her expression had changed. "You okay, Mr. Duc? You look... somewhere else."
Minh walked through her—through her—and Duc bit his tongue hard enough to taste blood.
"I'm fine. Take the milk. Free. Just... please go."
She left, muttering in Mandarin about crazy Vietnamese, but at the door, she paused. "My husband came to me last night," she said quietly. "In my kitchen. Twenty years dead, but there he was, young like when we married in Guangzhou." She looked back at Duc. "You taking new medicine? Small white pills?"
After she left, Duc locked the door, flipped the sign to CLOSED, and sat down hard on the stool behind the counter. Minh perched on the counter itself, legs swinging like a child's.
"She sees her dead too," Minh said conversationally. "Interesting drug you're taking, brother. What else does it do?"
"You're not real."
"Real is relative. I'm real to you. That's what matters."
"What do you want?"
Minh's face went serious, the playful ghost act dropping. "What I've always wanted. For you to remember. Really remember. Not the sanitized version you tell yourself, but the truth. The heat. The smell of diesel and fear. The sound the embassy gates made when they closed."
Duc's hands shook. "I tried to get you out. The papers weren't ready. There wasn't time—"
"Liar." The word came out soft, almost gentle. "You had two sets of papers. One for you and Mai. One for me. You chose her."
"She was my wife!"
"I was your brother."
The store's fluorescent lights flickered, and for a moment, Duc could smell it—Saigon in April, the city rotting in the heat, helicopter blades chopping the air like butcher's knives. Then it was gone, and he was just an old man in a dying store in a dying city, arguing with a ghost that shouldn't exist.
His phone rang. Lakisha.
"Mr. Nguyen? Mrs. Chen just came into the clinic, saying you're acting strange. She also mentioned something about seeing her dead husband. She's taking Memorex too. How many pills have you taken?"
"Two," Duc admitted.
"Stop. Right now. Don't take anymore. I'm coming over."
But after she hung up, Duc looked at the pill bottle. Looked at Minh, who was examining the bullet hole in the window from the 2018 robbery, tracing it with one finger.
"Take another," Minh suggested. "Let's see how deep this rabbit hole goes."
Against every instinct, Duc did.
---
By the time Lakisha arrived, the store was full of ghosts.
Not just Minh anymore, but others—a young Black man in a Pistons jersey with three bullet wounds in his chest browsing the candy aisle, an elderly Polish woman in a babushka examining the pierogis Duc had started stocking for the gentrifiers, a little Mexican girl who couldn't have been more than six, standing on tiptoes to see the toys Duc kept behind the counter to prevent shoplifting.
"Jesus Christ," Lakisha breathed when she walked in. She couldn't see them, Duc realized, but she could feel them. The temperature had dropped ten degrees, and their breath came out in small puffs.
"How many did you take?" she demanded.
"Three total." Duc's voice sounded far away to his own ears. "They're all here. All the dead. But they're not... they're not from here."
"What do you mean?"
The man in the Pistons jersey turned, and Duc could see through him to the energy drinks behind. "That's DeShawn Morris. He was seventeen when he died, but that was in 1967. He's wearing a jersey from 2004."
Lakisha pulled out her phone, typing rapidly. "DeShawn Morris, Detroit, 1967..." Her face went pale. "Shot by police during the riots. Mr. Nguyen, he died before you even came to America."
"The little girl," Duc continued, pointing to where she stood, now holding a stuffed elephant from the toy shelf. "She's speaking Spanish, but with an accent I don't recognize. Not Mexican. Maybe Guatemalan?"
"Describe her."
Duc did, in detail—the Mary Janes, the blue dress with white flowers, the butterfly clips in her hair. Lakisha's typing grew more frantic.
"Lucia Fernandez. Died in ICE custody, 2019. But Mr. Nguyen, she died in Texas. Why would you be seeing her here?"
The Polish woman had moved closer, and Duc could smell pierogis cooking, though his store had no kitchen. She was speaking, but not to him—to someone else, someone invisible even to Duc's drug-enhanced perception.
"It's not just my dead," Duc said slowly. "It's... it's everyone's. Everyone who takes the pills."
Lakisha grabbed his shoulders. "We need to get you to a hospital. Now."
"No." Duc pulled away. "Not yet. I need to understand." He looked at Minh, who had been watching silently. "You know what this is, don't you?"
Minh nodded. "We're commodities now, brother. Packaged, processed, ready for consumption. Someone figured out how to bottle grief, to sell trauma like it's a designer drug. And we—the dead—we're the product."
"That's insane," Lakisha said, though she was responding to Duc's half of the conversation.
"Is it?" Duc walked to his ancient computer, started typing. "Memorex. Who makes it?"
"Pharmatech Industries," Lakisha answered. "They're huge. Based in Chicago, but they've got facilities everywhere."
"And what do they make besides drugs?"
Lakisha frowned. "Medical devices. Some tech stuff. They bought a VR company last year..." Her face changed. "Oh my God."
Duc found what he was looking for—a press release from six months ago. "Pharmatech Industries announces revolutionary new virtual reality experience: 'Echoes of the Past.' Live the memories of others. Feel their joy, their pain, their final moments. Coming soon to select VR arcades."
"They're harvesting memories," Lakisha whispered. "From immigrants, refugees, poor people. People whose insurance covers Memorex but nothing else. People nobody would believe if they complained."
The ghosts in the store had multiplied. They filled every aisle, pressed against the windows, stood three deep at the counter. All of them were looking at Duc now, waiting.
"What do you want?" he asked them.
They spoke in unison, a chorus of the dead in a dozen languages, but the message was clear: justice.
---
Dr. Marcus Brennan lived in Grosse Pointe, because of course he did. The executive in charge of Pharmatech's "Experimental Therapeutic Division" had a house that could have fit Duc's entire store in the garage. Duc and Lakisha sat in her beat-up Honda Civic at 2 AM, watching the lights in Brennan's home office.
"This is insane," Lakisha said for the tenth time. "We should go to the police."
"With what? A story about ghosts and stolen memories? They'd put us in psychiatric hold."
"We could talk to the media—"
"Owned by the same people who own Pharmatech's parent company." Duc had done his research in the past week, as the ghosts grew stronger and more demanding. "We need proof. Real proof."
They'd tried the legitimate channels first. Lakisha had filed reports with the FDA, the medical board, even her hospital's ethics committee. Each time, the reports disappeared. One administrator had taken her aside and suggested she might be "stressed" and should consider a leave of absence.
Meanwhile, more people were taking Memorex. Duc had started a list—Mrs. Chen, Roberto from the bodega two blocks over, three of Lakisha's patients, an entire assisted living facility in Dearborn. All of them seeing the dead. All of them scared to talk about it.
"He's moving," Lakisha said.
Brennan's office light went out. A minute later, the garage door opened, and his Tesla pulled out silently, heading toward the freeway.
They followed at a distance, Lakisha's Honda struggling to keep up with the Tesla's smooth acceleration. Brennan drove north, then west, into an industrial area Duc recognized—the old Packard plant district, miles of abandoned factories and broken dreams.
"Why here?" Lakisha wondered.
They found out soon enough. Brennan's Tesla disappeared into a warehouse that looked abandoned from the outside but had very new security cameras and a card-reader at the entrance. They parked a block away and approached on foot.
"There," Duc pointed to a loading dock with a broken lock. They'd almost made it when a hand fell on Duc's shoulder.
He spun, expecting security, but found Minh instead. His brother looked different—more solid, more real. The wound on his neck had opened into a smile of red.
"Not that way," Minh said, and for the first time, Lakisha gasped.
"I can see him," she breathed.
Minh nodded. "The closer you get to the source, the thinner the veil becomes. Follow me."
He led them through a hole in the fence Duc hadn't noticed, through a door that should have been locked but wasn't, down corridors that smelled of industrial cleaner and something else, something organic and wrong. The ghosts were here too, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, pressing against the walls like smoke against glass.
They heard it before they saw it—hundreds of voices speaking at once, telling their stories. Duc recognized Mrs. Chen's husband describing the Cultural Revolution, Roberto's mother recounting her border crossing, a child speaking Vietnamese about the boat, the pirates, the camps.
The main floor of the warehouse had been converted into something from a nightmare. Hundreds of hospital beds in neat rows, each occupied by someone connected to IVs and wearing VR headsets. Technicians in white coats moved between them, adjusting equipment, taking notes. At the center, a massive server farm hummed, processing and storing the extracted memories.
"My God," Lakisha whispered.
Brennan stood at a control station, arguing with someone on his phone. "I don't care about the projections. We're already seeing degradation in the subjects. The extraction rate is too high... No, I understand the launch date, but if we burn through all the subjects, we'll have nothing left to harvest."
Duc felt rage rise in his throat like bile. These were his people, Detroit's forgotten, plugged into machines like batteries, their trauma being siphoned off for some rich kid's VR experience.
"We need to document this," Lakisha said, pulling out her phone.
But the moment she started recording, alarms began to wail. Security guards appeared from everywhere, moving with military precision. Brennan's head snapped up, his eyes finding them across the warehouse floor.
"Run," Minh said, but Duc was already moving.
They didn't make it far. The guards were younger, faster, and they knew the building. Within minutes, Duc and Lakisha were zip-tied and kneeling on the cold concrete while Brennan paced in front of them.
"You have no idea what you're interfering with," he said. He looked exhausted, dark circles under his eyes like bruises. "This isn't some evil conspiracy. We're providing a service. These people's memories, their experiences—they're invaluable. Through VR, others can understand what it truly means to be a refugee, an immigrant, a survivor. It's empathy, commodified."
"It's theft," Duc spat. "You're stealing their souls."
"Souls?" Brennan laughed bitterly. "There are no souls. Just electrical patterns in the brain. We're copying them, that's all. No one gets hurt."
"No one gets hurt?" Lakisha struggled against her restraints. "My patients are seeing their dead relatives! Mrs. Chen hasn't slept in a week!"
"Side effects," Brennan admitted. "We're working on it. Version 2.0 will be cleaner."
"There won't be a version 2.0," Duc said quietly.
Brennan smiled. "An old man and a nurse? You think you can stop this? Pharmatech has contracts with the Department of Defense, ICE, Homeland Security. This goes all the way up. The memories we're extracting aren't just for entertainment—they're intelligence. Every refugee's journey mapped, every immigrant's network exposed. It's the ultimate surveillance, willing participants who don't even know they're participating."
Behind Brennan, the ghosts were gathering. Not just Minh now, but all of them, every soul that had been touched by Memorex, every memory that had been stolen. The temperature in the warehouse plummeted.
"You're wrong about one thing," Duc said. "There are souls. And they're angry."
Brennan frowned, started to respond, then stopped. His breath came out in a cloud. Ice was forming on the windows, spreading in fractal patterns like frozen screams.
The ghosts became visible all at once, flooding the warehouse like a tide of memory and pain. The technicians screamed, backing away from their stations. The patients in the beds began to convulse, their stolen memories returning in a rush that overloaded the machines.
Servers sparked and caught fire. The VR headsets cracked, releasing sounds that might have been voices or might have been static. The guards dropped their weapons, some running, others falling to their knees as dead relatives appeared before them, accusing, forgiving, demanding justice.
Brennan stood frozen as a young girl approached him—not a ghost, but a memory. His daughter, Duc realized, seeing the resemblance. But younger than she should be, maybe seven or eight, wearing a hospital gown.
"Daddy," she said, "why didn't you save me?"
"Sophie?" Brennan's voice broke. "But you're alive. You're at Brown. You're studying pre-med."
"I was sick first," the girl said. "The treatments didn't work. You promised you'd find a cure. You promised you'd never let anyone suffer like I did."
"I did find a cure! The research from this project, the neural mapping—it could help millions!"
"By hurting others?" The girl—ghost, memory, or manifestation of guilt—reached out to touch his face. "This isn't what I would have wanted."
Brennan collapsed, sobbing. Around them, the warehouse was falling apart. Pipes burst, spraying water that instantly froze. Electrical fires spread despite the ice. The patients were waking up, pulling off their headsets, screaming or crying or sitting in stunned silence.
Minh appeared beside Duc, using a ghost's knife to cut the zip-ties—and somehow, impossibly, it worked.
"Time to go, brother."
"The patients—"
"Will be fine. The living have a way of surviving. It's what they do." Minh helped Duc to his feet. "But this place won't stand much longer."
Lakisha was already free, helping patients out of their beds. "We need to evacuate everyone!"
The next twenty minutes were chaos. Duc, Lakisha, and even some of the guards worked together to get everyone out as the warehouse collapsed in on itself, consumed by otherworldly cold and very real flames. The ghosts guided them, showing safe passages, holding doors that should have been buckled by heat.
They made it out just as the first fire trucks arrived. The warehouse was fully engulfed now, forty years of abandoned Detroit finally claiming another victim. But everyone was alive—confused, traumatized, but alive.
Brennan sat on the curb, still crying, being comforted by a technician. The guards had disappeared into the night. The patients huddled in groups, sharing impossible stories about what they'd seen while under.
"The evidence," Lakisha said. "It's all gone."
"No," Duc said, watching the smoke rise into the dawn sky. "We have witnesses now. Hundreds of them. And they'll talk. The dead made sure of that."
As if in response, his phone buzzed. Then Lakisha's. Then every phone around them. Videos were uploading to social media, documents appearing on WikiLeaks, emails flooding news outlets. Somehow, in those final moments, the ghosts—or the system itself in its death throes—had transmitted everything.
By noon, #Memorex was trending globally. By evening, the FBI had raided Pharmatech's headquarters. Within a week, the company's stock had crashed, its executives were under indictment, and the Memorex recall was international news.
---
A month later, Duc stood in his store, restocking the shelves. Business had improved—funny how being at the center of an international conspiracy made you a local celebrity. Reporters still came by sometimes, wanting to hear about the night the dead rose up against corporate America.
He didn't take Memorex anymore, obviously. No one did. But sometimes, in the early morning when the light slanted just right through the bulletproof glass, he could still see Minh. Fainter now, like a photograph left in the sun, but there.
"You saved me," Minh said one morning, as Duc counted the register.
"You were already dead."
"No. You saved me from being forgotten. From being just another ghost in someone else's machine. That's all I wanted, brother. To be remembered as I was, not as someone else's commodity."
Mrs. Chen came in, looking healthier than she had in years. The other Memorex patients had formed a support group, meeting weekly in the basement of St. Augustine's. They called themselves the Awakened, which Duc thought was a bit dramatic, but trauma needed its rituals.
"Morning, Mr. Duc," she said, picking up her usual milk and bread. "You see any ghosts today?"
It was their running joke now, except it wasn't really a joke.
"Just the usual," he said, nodding to where Minh stood.
She couldn't see him anymore, but she nodded anyway, understanding. They'd all lost the ability to see the dead once Memorex left their systems, but the memory of seeing remained. That was the real gift, Duc had come to understand—not the drug-induced visions, but the reminder that the dead were always with them, waiting just beyond the veil, wanting nothing more than to be remembered truly.
"Your brother?" she asked.
"Always."
She paid for her groceries, paused at the door. "My husband came to me in a dream last night. A real dream, not the drug kind. He was young, like when I first met him. He said to tell you thank you."
After she left, Duc stood in his store, surrounded by the ordinary miracles of contemporary life—energy drinks and lottery tickets, cigarettes and hope packaged in plastic and aluminum. Minh was fading now, becoming translucent in the morning light.
"Will you come back?" Duc asked.
"When you really need me," Minh said. "Or when you're ready to join me. Whichever comes first."
"I'm sorry," Duc said. "About Saigon. About the papers. About everything."
"I know," Minh said, and then he was gone, leaving only the smell of bánh mì and the distant sound of helicopters that might have been from 1975 or might have been Detroit Medical Center's fleet, carrying the living to safety, one flight at a time.
Duc went back to his inventory, counting what remained, making note of what was needed. Outside, Detroit continued its slow transformation, neither dying nor thriving but persisting, like the memories of the dead, like the stories we tell ourselves to survive.
The new shipment would arrive soon. He needed to make room on the shelves.
Life, after all, went on.
Even when the dead were watching.
Even when they were not.