The problem with stealing other people’s memories is that you start to lose the difference between what’s theirs and what’s yours. Luckily, I know how to exploit that—as long as the teachers don’t find out, anyway. Normal after-school jobs are overrated if you have a secret in-school business. When your last name is emblazoned on the school crest—and the school letterhead—the other students will let you get away with anything. Like stealing their memories.

On my laptop, I open up my memory-uploading app. A line of students snakes away from me, each one wanting to buy a different experience. And I have loads of experiences to choose from, indexed within the app. I bypass the cool graphic interface normal users of HiveMind see and run the hacking program I wrote back when my dad was first developing the software. It uses a variety of complex algorithms to gain backdoor access to all the files stored in the HiveMind cloud, not just my own.

Usually, my partner in crime, Zoey Flint, doles out numbers as though the students are waiting in line at the deli, except she texted me that she’s running late today, so I’m doing it myself. Once they receive a number, they disperse across the courtyard and mill about like strangers trying to act normal before they break out in a flash mob.