Pria Vasquez-Kwan
Memory Farmer · The Crop Grower · The Woman Who Sells Presence
Overview
Pria Vasquez-Kwan lives her life for other people to remember.
She is twenty-nine years old, a professional memory farmer — a person who deliberately seeks intense, novel, emotionally rich experiences specifically for extraction and resale. She has climbed the Orbital Elevator without a compartment, spent a week in the Wastes without augmentation, and fallen in love three times specifically because the memories of falling in love sell for 600–900 credits depending on depth.
Her relationship with her own experiences is complicated. She doesn't live her experiences the way most people understand living. She performs them — maintaining awareness during every intense moment that the moment will be extracted. This awareness changes the experience. The buyer gets the sunset without the knowledge of sale. Pria keeps the sale without the sunset.
Her most profitable extraction: a memory of holding a dying stranger's hand in the Cold Corridor during a compute drought. The stranger grabbed her hand and held it while her body temperature rose past recovery. Pria held the hand. The hand went slack. The memory sold for 4,700 credits because the emotional content was not grief but presence: being the only person who chose to stay when staying accomplished nothing.
Voice & Personality
Pria uses agricultural metaphors with no irony. She considers herself a farmer — growing something in the soil of her own nervous system, harvesting it, selling it at market. She calls experiences "crop," buyers "harvest," and her own consciousness "soil."
The Meta-Consciousness
Every experience carries the performance layer — awareness that the moment is being recorded for sale. The layer is invisible to buyers. Pria carries it everywhere.
Deliberate Abstention
Has never experienced a purchased memory. "If I start consuming, I lose the crop." The farmer who never eats from another's field.
The Loneliness Underneath
Being in a room full of genuine experiences while cataloging them for resale. The most honest thing about her is the thing she can never sell.
"My mother treats people who can't stop buying memories. My father treats people who can't stop selling them. I thought I'd combine both family traditions."
"The soup gets cold. I drink it anyway. The cold soup won't make the recording."
Connections
Fen Morrow
Both farm their own consciousness for sale — Fen harvests unconscious dreams, Pria harvests conscious memories. Both keep private notebooks of the things they refuse to sell. The parallel is structural: two people converting lived experience into commodity, paying with the distance between the moment and its documentation.
The Impression Market
Professional supplier. Pria sells organic experiences through the Street Market — memories grown in her own nervous system, extracted and packaged for buyers who want something that tastes real because it was.
The Cold Corridor
Site of her most profitable and most morally complex extraction. 8°C coolant air, warm soup in a ceramic cup, the sound of forty people breathing in a pipe-corridor, the feel of a stranger's hand growing slack. 4,700 credits for the emotional content of presence.
Dr. Aris Kwan
Distant family connection through the Kwan branch. She grew up surrounded by clinical vocabulary about memory and identity — the language of treatment became the language of trade.
The Residue Bar
Sells through the Street Market rather than the Pavilion. The distinction matters — the Street Market trades in raw, unfiltered memory. The Pavilion curates. Pria's crop doesn't survive curation.
Tensions
Experience as Commodity
A life optimized for resale value is a life never quite her own. Every sunset carries the invisible price tag. Every moment of genuine connection arrives pre-cataloged for commercial extraction. The farmer's paradox: the crop must be authentic, but the cultivation makes authenticity impossible.
The Performance Layer
The buyer gets the sunset without the knowledge of sale. Pria keeps the sale without the sunset. Between what the buyer receives and what the farmer experiences lies the invisible tax of documentation — the specific distance between living a moment and recording it.
Presence and Its Price
Her most valuable extraction was not grief but presence — the act of staying when staying accomplished nothing. The memory trade's cruelest irony: the most profitable thing Pria has ever recorded is the one thing she cannot replicate deliberately. Genuine presence resists performance.
Mysteries
What remains unresolved around the memory farmer of the Dregs:
- The Cold Corridor hand: 4,700 credits for holding a dying stranger's hand. The emotional content was presence, not grief. Pria has never attempted to replicate the conditions — some crops only grow once, in soil that cannot be re-seeded.
- The private notebook: Like Fen Morrow, Pria keeps a record of things she refuses to sell. The notebook's contents are unknown. The fact of its existence suggests that even a professional memory farmer draws a line between crop and self.
- The abstention: She has never experienced a purchased memory. Her parents — both Memory Therapists — treat the addicted and the exploited. Pria sits precisely between their two patient populations, belonging to neither, serving both.