Confusion may arise, for causal systems, from mistaking "having negative signal values (amplitudes)" and "depending on negative time indices".
A strict memory-less system depends neither on past (for the causal case) nor on future values of the input but on current ones to determine the current value of the output. The output at $n$ only depends on inputs at $n$. For a strict memory-less and causal system, you could not depend on former (negative, in a way relative to the current index) time indices.
By extension, some allow memory-less systems to have a constant delay, i.e., to hold only one value at a given lag: the output at $n$ only depends on inputs at $n-k$ with a fixed integer $k$. So, in general, a memory-less system can have the following form, with $k$ any integer:
$$y[n] = f(x[n-k])\,.$$
For realizable causal systems that cannot look ahead in the future, only $k \ge 0$ are allowed.