Cixin Liu: The Weight of Memories

© 2016

Translated by Ken Liu

First published in Chinese in Sea of Dreams , 2015, a collection of Liu Cixin’s short fiction.

Mother: Baby, can you hear me?

Fetus: Where am I?

Mother: Oh, good! You can hear me. I’m your mother.

Fetus: Mama! Am I really in your belly? I’m floating in water…

Mother: That’s called the ami-ani-amniotic fluid. Hard word, I know. I just learned it today, too.

Fetus: What is this sound? It’s like thunder far away.

Mother: That’s my heartbeat. You’re inside me, remember?

Fetus: I like this place; I want to stay here forever.

Mother: Ha, you can’t do that! You’ve got to be born.

Fetus: No! It’s scary out there.

Mother: Oh… we’ll talk more about that later.

Fetus: What’s this line connected to my tummy, Mama?

Mother: That’s your umbilical cord. When you’re inside mommy, you need it to stay alive.

Fetus: Hmmm. Mama, you’ve never been where I am, have you?

Mother: I have! Before I was born, I was inside my mother, too. Except I don’t remember what it was like there, and that’s why you can’t remember, either. Baby, is it dark inside mommy? Can you see anything?

Fetus: There’s a faint light coming from outside. It’s a reddish-orange glow, like the color of the sky when the sun is just setting behind the mountain at Xitao Village.

Mother: You remember Xitao? That’s where I was born! Then you must remember what mommy looks like?

Fetus: I do know what you look like. I even know what you looked like when you were a child. Mama, do you remember the first time you saw yourself?

Mother: Oh, I don’t remember that. I guess it must have been in a mirror? Your grandfather had an old mirror broken into three pieces that he patched back together-

Fetus: No, not that, Mama. You saw yourself for the first time reflected in water.

Mother: Ha-ha… I don’t think so. Xitao is in Gansu, land of the Gobi Desert. We were always short of water, and the air was full of dust whipped up by the wind.

Fetus: That’s right. Grandma and Grandpa had to walk kilometers every day to fetch water. One day, just after you turned five, you went with Grandma to the well. On the way back, the sun was high in the sky, and the heat was almost unbearable. You were so thirsty, but you didn’t dare ask for a drink from Grandma’s bucket because you were afraid that she was going to yell at you for not getting enough to drink at the well. But so many villagers had been lined up at the well that a little kid like you couldn’t get past them. It was a drought year, and most of the wells had gone dry. People from all three nearby villages came to that one deep well for their water… Anyway, when Grandma took a break on the way home, you leaned over the side of the bucket to smell the cool water, to feel the moisture against your dry face…

Mother: Yes, baby, now I remember!

Fetus:… and you saw your reflection in the bucket: your face under a coat of dust, full of sweat streaks like the gullies worn into the loess by rain… That was your first memory of seeing yourself.

Mother: But how can you remember that better than I do?

Fetus: You do remember, Mama; you just can’t call up the memory anymore. But in my mind, all your memories are clear, as clear as though they happened yesterday.

Mother: I don’t know what to say…

Fetus: Mama, I sense someone else out there with you.

Mother: Oh, yes, that’s Dr. Ying. She designed this machine that allows us to talk to each other, even though you can’t really speak while floating in amniotic fluid.

Fetus: I know her! She’s a little bit older than you. She wears glasses and a long white coat.

Mother: Dr. Ying is an amazing person and full of wisdom. She’s a scientist .

Dr. Ying: Hello there!

Fetus: Hello? Um… I think you study brains?

Dr. Ying: That’s right. I’m a neuroscientist-that’s someone who studies how brains create thoughts and construct memories. A human brain possesses enormous information storage capacity, with more neurons than there are stars in the Milky Way. But most of the brain’s capacity seems unused. My specialty is studying the parts that lay fallow. We found that the parts of the brain we thought were blank actually hold a huge amount of information. Only recently did we discover that it is memories from our ancestors. Do you understand what I just said, child?

Fetus: I understand some of it. I know you’ve explained this to Mama many times. The parts she understands, I do, too.

Dr. Ying: In fact, memory inheritance is very common across different species. For example, many cognitive patterns we call “instincts”-such as a spider’s knowledge of how to weave a web or a bee’s understanding of how to construct a hive-are really just inherited memories. The newly discovered inheritance of memory in humans is even more complete than in other species. The amount of information involved is too high to be passed down through the genetic code; instead, the memories are coded at the atomic level in the DNA, through quantum states in the atoms. This involves the study of quantum biology-

Mother: Dr. Ying, that’s too complicated for my baby.

Dr. Ying: I’m sorry. I just wanted to let your baby know how lucky he is compared to other children! Although humans possess inherited memories, they usually lie dormant and hidden in the brain. No one has even detected their presence until now.

Mother: Doctor, remember I only went to elementary school. You have to speak simpler.

Fetus: After elementary school, you worked in the fields for a few years, and then you left home to find work.

Mother: Yes, baby, you’re right. I couldn’t stay in Xitao anymore; even the water there tasted bitter. I wanted a different life.

Fetus: You went to several different cities and worked all the jobs migrant laborers did: washing dishes in restaurants; taking care of other people’s babies; making paper boxes in a factory; cooking at a construction site. For a while, when things got really tough, you had to pick through trash for recyclables that you could sell…

Mother: Good boy. Keep going. Then what happened?

Fetus: You already know everything I’m telling you!

Mother: Tell the story anyway. Mama likes hearing you talk.

Fetus: You struggled until last year, when you came to Dr. Ying’s lab as a custodian.

Mother: From the start, Dr. Ying liked me. Sometimes, when she came to work early and found me sweeping the halls, she’d stop and chat, asking about my life story. One morning she called me into her office.

Fetus: She asked you, “If you could be born again, where would you rather be born?”

Mother: I answered, “Here, of course! I want to be born in a big city and live a city dweller’s life.”

Fetus: Dr. Ying stared at you for some time and smiled. It was a smile that you didn’t fully understand. Then she said, “If you’re brave, I can make your dream come true.”

Mother: I thought she was joking, but then she explained memory inheritance to me.

Dr. Ying: I told your mother that we had developed a technique to modify the genes in a fertilized egg and activate the dormant inherited memories. If it worked, the next generation would be able to achieve more by building on their inheritance.

Mother: I was stunned, and I asked Dr. Ying, “Do you want me to give birth to a child like that?”

Dr. Ying: I shook my head and told your mother, “You won’t be giving birth to a child; instead, you’ll be giving birth to”-