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Title: The Memory Orchard  Author: Naim Uddin   Word Count: 1,050   [Start of Story]    The first time I saw the orchard, it was winter on Mars. Not the kind of winter you’d imagine—no snow, no frost, just a dull red silence stretching across the horizon. The orchard stood out like a wound in the landscape: rows of silver-leaved trees, each one humming faintly, like they were alive. I was told they were. Dr. Eliza Monroe, the lead neurobotanist, met me at the edge of the grove. She was short, sharp-eyed, and wore a scarf that fluttered in the thin Martian wind. “You’re late,” she said, without looking at me. “I got lost,” I replied. “Maps don’t work well out here.” She snorted. “Maps don’t work because this place doesn’t want to be found.” The Memory Orchard was a classified project under the Martian Terraforming Initiative. Officially, it was a neural archive—trees genetically engineered to store human memories. Un...