Living Memory

It was forty-two years ago my beloved mother died and left me a bequest. And it was forty-two years ago my older brother Bryce tried to stop me claiming it.

I'll admit to having some genuine curiosity the morning we met at the office of our mother's attorney. Bryce and I always had a fractious relationship; he was twelve years older than me, and I always chalked up his indifference and even his flashes to hostility toward me to the gap in our ages, but the aggression with which Bryce prosecuted his case against me was startling. It was also hurtful. What on earth could his problem have been? I was perplexed, and I was angry. But I was also here to talk -- and I was genuinely willing to listen. I hoped for some clarity from him, some indication of why, exactly, he would try to prevent me taking possession of the inheritance our mother had willed to me.

The meeting didn't start on an auspicious note. Bryce was nearly half an hour late. Someone had left a screen running in a nearby office or common space; there was a newsfeed story about a women being murdered, the great-granddaughter of an energy company executive. Some man who had influenced government policy back in the days when we still burned fossil fuels. Like the Owners do now. Her death was one in a string of similar killings that authorities assumed to be the work of vigilantes angry at the way the world burning down around us, with summers so hot thousands died every year; drinkable water at a premium; arable land disappearing; crops failing season after season.

The interviewer was talking to a government official. "It's not like we saw the problems coming in advance." he was saying. "The environmental challenges we face are part of the Earth's natural cycles. They can't always be predicted."

"But the groups bringing lawsuits against the energy conglomerates insist that scientific data has shown for almost two centuries that the Earth's climate was being impacted by human activity, much of it to do with energy use and agriculture," the interviewer said.

"That's really just propaganda," the government official replied. "The science is far from settled - "

Bryce entered the small private office where I sat waiting for him. The office was down the hall from the agreed-upon meeting room.

"Sure you want to do this?" he asked.

"Sure you want to challenge my right to have what my mother intended for me to have?" I shot back.

"I don't want to drag our family business out to lawyers," he said, "but you're forcing me."

"I am forcing nothing," I said. "You've always tried to push me around. I usually let you have what you wanted because I didn't really care. You seem tot think that means I'm weak. The truth is, you and I have different values. You've finally come up square against my calves, and I won't back down."

"So be it," Bryce said. He turned this back and walked out of the office. I followed him up the hallway. It was a brief and silent walk to the sumptuous room where his lawyer and mine sat on opposite sides of a long, handsomely lacquered hardwood table.

That table, perfectly preserved as it was, had to be decades old. That was the thought in the back of my mind. It would have been illegal to produce in the year 2152 - that was the year of the meeting I'm telling you about. Harvesting trees was no longer allowed, except for those insiders who possessed the miniscule number of permits. By that time furniture -- and most everything else -- was manufactured using carbon composite, which, back then, was the principle material used in 3D printing. The use of plastics was as forbidden as the cutting of trees; we had a thin layer of plastic covering the Earth's entire surface, or so the scientists said, and that didn't even account for the vast mounds of plastic trash in the landfills and dump sites and the gigantic "trash islands" in the oceans. The track islands were not islands at all, you understand, but rather floating collections of rubbish as large, in some cases, as several states combined.

Of course, now we use different materials for our printers, and we struggle with the problem of a thin layer of early printer carbon having been distributed around the globe as goods created back then have broken down and dispersed. It was going to be a problem -- I saw it coming even then, when everyone was still talking about the plastic crisis our parents and grandparents had inflicted on us. While everyone was discussing the plastic crisis, the biocollapse crisis, the health crisis, and every other risks, and the way our elders had blindly led us over the cliff, so to speak, I had the sinking feeling that our own offspring would hold to account for even worse things.

Well, here we are, drawing close to the dawn of the 22nd century, and the problems we should have seen coming are upon us. They are worse than we could have imagined they would be. Forty years ago, when I was young and hopeful and determined, environmental issues were always on my mind. I was a lawyer myself, back then, a legal activist of sorts for environmental causes. Now, of course, there is no such thing as environmental law -- nor labor law, nor family law, nor civil rights law. Now, of course, the law is simple enough to sum up in a few words: The Owners can do what they want, and property... that is to say, 98% of humanity... has no right to object.

But aside from matters of law, the simple fact of our time is there is nothing green left to preserve. The forests are gone, the crops are gone, and all we have are algae floating atop the dead oceans and toxic weeds growing in the cracks of tumbled-over walls in the crumbled cities.

Ah, never mind. I'm only saying what anyone today can see for himself. All this bitter regret over things lost is old, now, older than even I am, and when laments for the vanished garden our planet used to be fall on the ears of the young, they're automatically disregarded. Why wouldn't they be? Such complaints make no sense to a generation that has never seen a living tree or glimpsed the stars, never swum in a lake or in the ocean, never stood on a mountaintop and looked across miles of landscape through transparent air. To the young people, all the grousing about what we've lost, all the fears about what's to come -- all of that has a creaking and brittle sound about it. Wrapped up in their cerebrexes and virtual warfare games, young people today have no interest in the regrets and complaints of their elders.

It's just that back then, you see, we were still trying to preserve something -- anything -- any scrap of nature, any scrap of human dignity. We were losing the battle, but at least we were still fighting. Society still had debates, because dissent had not yet been outlawed. Wealthy corporations defended to idea that money was speech -- but speech was more than money then, and you could express an opinion even if you didn't have a single guilder to back up your right to have an opinion. People still grew angry, or strove to remain hopeful, or felt they had something worth defending and protecting -- something to offer to the future. That is to say, the future still existed.

And the future seemed, for a time, to hold the promise of racial memory. Imagine it! Something that went beyond books or films or digital archives. Real memories, shared and handed down, a way to preserve a true and fundamental grasp of the past. Cerebrex technology was creating a revolution in how we communicated, in how we explained ourselves to each other, and how we preserved history. Human experience -- the memory of the senses, the memory of an individual's actions in the world -- could be recorded artificially and then replayed. But there were those who fought against the very concept of memory shares, and Bryce -- Congressman Bryce MacKenzie, my brother -- was one of the most dedicated foes of the new technology's applications in this regard.

Bryce was like all the others who wanted to control memory sharing. He applauded the commercial and military applications -- after all, with the memory sharing we could now quickly train whole armies in complex tasks, tactical theory, and the use of offensive and defensive technologies. We could educate vast numbers for the work force in a matter of weeks, instead of having to train them up slowly. And if the right values and the right lessons could be imparted from an older generation, well then, there was nothing to fear.

But Bryce and his fellow lawmakers - not to mention influential pastors and business leaders other ideologues - were frankly terrified of the wrong sorts of memories being circulated. Anyone with a centiliter of skepticism or a bent for critical thinking could think of a million sinister reasons for such reluctance. What if a peaceful protester experienced a brutal beating at the hands of a domestic soldier - or a whole squadron of them - while running a memory recorder? What if her terror and pain and genuine wish to be heard (and her rage at being needlessly, viciously pummeled) were to be circulated?

But Bryce and his fellow Theopublicans didn't address such concerns. Instead, they dredged up all the most vile and poisonous precedents to which human technology had been put to use. They cited child pornography, practically hyperventilating as they did so. They pointed to the best-seller status of memory clips created by serial killers, rapists, and arsonists. Snuff clips, they called the marketed memories of thrill-killers, even as they convened behind closed doors to find ways to justify refusals to release any memory clips created by cerebrex-wearing domestic soldiers who opened fire on innocent people for trivial reason, or for no reason at all. Mayhem memories, black market merchants called such clips. The public must be protected from such things at all costs.

The progressive among us - academics, scientists, philosophers, and storytellers - pushed back with a rare degree of passion and forcefulness. I was one of that class, and I pushed back right along with the rest of them. We did so knowing that we were making targets of ourselves. But the freedom to experience, to communicate, to transmit knowledge, to remember... it was too important. We might be framed or murdered; we might be disappeared or discredited. But we spoke up all the same, because memory share offered us the potential for true racial and institutional memory.

You do understand what I mean, I hope. For the first time in human history we had an infallible means of knowing the past, at least from an objective perspective; we could record and replay a true, raw, personal record of the world as it was... or, from today's standpoint, as it used to be. Memory share technology offered researchers, artists, and ordinary people the chance to know history first hand, without regard to anyone else's filters, censorship, or spin. To be freed from historical manipulation was to escape the careful and continual sculpting of a predetermined and utilitarian history - a history labeled as truthful by those with a vested interest in having the world's population believe in it, no matter how glaring or obvious its discrepancies or how calculated and overt its lies.

There was also a healthy dose of old-fashioned reactionary angst in the way memory share technology was rejected by the powerful, and in the way their rationales were adopted by the masses. The concept of the old was changing. Memory share technology was new. And so were Bryce's arguments against it - both in the public sphere, as when he stood before the cameras or the House of Representatives, and in private, as during our meeting that September day.

"You shouldn't do this, Donald," he told me as soon as we were through the door and in the meeting room. He hadn't even sat down yet.

"Cut the theatrics. We've been through this," I said. "And what do you mean, wrong?"

Bryce took a seat at the head of the table. I thought this an obvious ploy by him and his lawyer to establish his unofficial status as the head of our extended family... not to mention the alpha male in the room.

"Can't you see if for yourself?" Bryce asked me, his voice low and intense. "Don't you read the newsfeeds? You know about Abel Cabrera, right?"

Abel Cabrera, the boogeyman of the anti-memory share mob. Cabrera was a notorious thrill-killer who'd also been an early adapter of memory share technology. He'd recorded thirteen murder sessions -- that's what the media called them, and the dark market picked up on the term. Murder sessions. The term carried hints and insinuations: Stifled cries of excitement, bootlegged experience. My grandfather would have called them snuff films, except Cabrera's crimes, and his methods of documenting them, were so much more elaborate and so much more immediate than anything ever committed to mere video.

Back then, the first of the Ownership Laws were still being formulated. Some were the result of new legislation that was being challenged in the courts; other laws arose from the way the courts were striking down old statutes and regulations. Once citizenship by birth was rescinded (along with minimum wage laws and the right to collective bargaining) it was like a huge and interconnected series of dominoes falling down, driving collapse in every direction. Churches could suddenly "draft" people into their faiths, and individual members of those churches could assault or even kill people who did not belong to their faith tradition. All they needed to do was find a line or two in the Holy Book of their choice that exhorted believers to slay the unbelievers. The so-called "Their Blood Be Upon Them" laws nearly dragged the nation down into insane, civilization-ending chaos until unexpected backlash resulted, temporarily, in a suddenly-muscular federal government cracking down on unrest.

Among the ruins of civil protections and other legal niceties that had been scrapped was a statute that prevented convicted criminals from profiting directly from their misdeeds. That law had been targeted by corporations angry about the previous decade's rash of corporate prosecutions. "If corporations are people," the courts had reasoned during that rare moment when one did not dictate law, "then they should be charged and punished like people when they break the law." That provision in the civil code had been enacted to stop kidnappers, arsonists, and killers from selling their stories to film studios and publishing firms; now it was being used as the go-to, catch-all statute in cases that sought to bankrupt companies that made their living by polluting rivers and lakes, or destroying wetlands, or tricking people into signing away their organs even before they died.

Naturally, since it was a law that protected human lives and put restraints on profits, the major companies hated it and worked relentlessly to abolish it. They eventually succeeded. Once the hated law was gone, killers and rapists and child-slavers made common cause with virthouses and publishers in all media. The killers and other criminals became celebrities, their crimes touted as compelling stories and hard-hitting morality fables. But the spiritual health of society was never what the big companies had in mind, of course. They were happy to sell a Bible story or a snuff virt or anything else that would move downloads and boost ratings.

News tabloids started to pay exorbitant fees for full confessions and gory details provided by hackers, stranglers, and - one of the best selling of the new true-crime genres - cash slashers, a class of criminal who made his mark by stealing small sums from enormous numbers of victims, usually through some sort of banking scam or cyber-theft.

Able Cabrera was the most successful of the new breed of pathological miscreants who enchanted consumers of mass media and raked in bitlucs by the truck full. A few days before Bryce and I met in that small office, Cabrera had given his voice seal to a contract that paid his estate a handsome lump sum for the rights to memory shares of his four remaining murder sessions, plus royalties. The amounts were astronomical, but the tabloids were going to earn it all back and then some. Cabrera was a real showman: Each of his murder sessions was more diabolical and gruesome than the last, and the prospect of seeing what fresh horrors his demented imagination had dreamed up whipped his fan base into an insatiable frenzy as each new release date approached.

Cabrera had been on death row for several years, so the last of his crimes had long been completed. But the hiding places for his memory share gel-drives were just as clever as the crimes themselves, and the authorities had no luck tracking them down and preventing their release. If anything, the efforts of law enforcement to puzzle out the hiding places where Cabrera stashed his gel drives only fed the fire of the killer's infamy: In one instance a high-profile raid on a Swiss bank, with a special ops team defending on a safe deposit box with torches and assault weapons, yielded not a gel drive, but the missing hand of one of the killer's victims. The tabloids had a field day; the ratings and feed shares went through the roof. Cabrera single-handedly made murdertainment the most profitable sector in the business world.

Cabrera gave out the locations of his hidden gel drives one by one to his publishers, and his publishers did the rest. As demand grew, so did Cabrera's prices. Outrage and indignity skyrocketed with each new publication, but so did sales figures and profits. The final deal was completed even as Cabrera was being marched to the plasma chamber. The moment Cabrera gave his voice seal to the contract, several things happened in quick succession: His lawyer downloaded the locations of the final four memory shares; the publishers activated the bitluc transfers to the accounts of Cabrera's production company; and three burly prison workers shoved Cabrera into the execution chamber, where a combination of microwaves and superheated gases evaporated his body within seconds.

What Cabrera didn't know was that his publishers had cut a separate deal with the prison's CEO and board of directors. Witness-eye views of his execution were cerebra-cut, packaged together, and offered as a special collector's memory share (at a special collector's price). Even the members of the Church of Purification - relentless prudes whose code of conduct was far more rigid than others of their creed, and whose punishments for sin almost equal to Cabrera's own symphonies of torture, rape, and slow expiration - bought the special edition.

"What's going on with Cabrera's memory shares is inexcusable," I told my brother. "But telling me that all memory shares should be illegal is like arguing that all books should be illegal because some fraction of books are pornographic."

Bryce chuckled at my words. "But that's exactly why books have been outlawed," he said.

"It's still a bad argument," I snapped.

"In other words, you expect me to win," Bryce said. "So why not just agree? I know there's sentimental value to the memory share our mother left you, and I'll even pay you something to make up for you not getting it."

"That's not the issue," I told him. "Money is not the issue; sentiment is not the issue. The point is that these are memories she wanted me to have. Me; not you."

"You shouldn't have them," Bryce flared.

"Why the fuck not?" I flared back. "Those memories are part of her life, part of who she was. She collated that memory share for me, Bryce - for me! These are the memories she wanted me to have, and not you, and no one else."

"You still shouldn't have them," he said. "It's dangerous. It's unnatural."

"Talk like that gives you away," I said. "Don't think I don't know you're running your re-election campaign on a platform that includes the banning of memory shares."

"It's a principle worth defending," Bryce said. "We don't allow cloning, which really is just a matter of copying bodies or parts of bodies. Why would we allow memory sharing, when that's a matter of copying personal experience?"

"Why not just outlaw art?" I asked. "Or historical accounts?"

"Some day," he said earnestly, "we might get there. But you're right when you say my campaign has an interest in this. How would it look if I'm out there trying to protect the sanctity of memory while my little brother is voyeuristically playing back the life experiences of our dead mother? How gruesome is that? How unmoored from plain and simple decency?"

"You know, you're hardly the sort who can justify an obsession with imposing moral conduct on others," I told him. "Trying to outlaw marriage between humans and Siliconians?"

"Marriage should be between two intelligent organic beings," Bryce said. "Marriage is sacred and exclusive to actual human beings. It's obvious, isn't it?"

"Is it?" I snapped. "And even if it is, how obvious can the 'sanctity' of marriage be to someone who's on his third divorce and fourth fianc�e?"

"Donald - "

"Don't interrupt me!" I shouted, heat rising in my body. "You think I haven't heard of your other legislative tricks? Trying to reassign major life choices for certain classes of people? Artists? Religious minorities? Atheists?"

"They're sick," Bryce said. "Who would choose the kind of depravity that comes with an acting career, or a life spent painting pictures? What kind of moral defective is actually - " His face puckered. " - an atheist?"

"And how convenient," I said, "that the law you've proposed provides the guardians of such people complete control over the disposition of their money and their property."

Bryce's gaze didn't even flicker. "People like that are by definition unfit to manage their own affairs and have to be looked after by rational people so they don't hurt themselves," he said. "Or others."

"Do you even hear yourself?" I asked him.

"What do you mean?"

"You sound like someone manufacturing arguments that are so empty, and so ridiculous, that the people who believe them won't look through them, and the people who don't buy into them will be distracted from looking at what's underneath them. Don't try to tell me that you're protecting the public interest, Bryce. For one thing, I know you too well. You couldn't give a howling monkey fuck for the public interest. And I'll tell you something else: I get the very distinct impression that those memories Mother left for me include something about you that you don't want escaping Mother's grave."

Bryce dropped all pretense. There was nothing theoretical or ideological about him when he said, flatly, "I'll stop you." He was speaking from the core of his being, his need to control, dominate, and dictate.

"You'll stop me? I don't think so. Not in time," I said. "You can pursue an injunction, but the will has been read and the distribution of property and effects takes place today. By the time your injunction comes down, I will have played the gel-drive and remembered whatever it is Mother wanted me to know... and you don't."

"Okay." Bryce's voice, suddenly edgy, stopped me as I was about to leave the office. "Okay... you're right. But only half right. I am trying to protect someone here, only it's not me. Well, not entirely me. I am more thinking about you."

"Me?"

Bryce looked like he was trying to find some other story to tell, something that wasn't the truth. But then he seemed to surrender. I'd seen him go through those same changes of posture and expression before. I was inclined to believe whatever he would say next would be the truth.

"There are things you don't remember," Bryce said. "You know those dreams you told me about, years ago? The ones where people are coming up to you and talking about things that sound familiar, and yet you have no memory of them?"

Of course I remembered those dreams. I had them often. I still do.

"Those dreams are telling you the truth," Bryce said. "When we were very young, Mother got your memory edited. There were things... traumatic things... that she didn't want you having to struggle with. She got those memories blotted from your cortex."

Memory blotting can only be done seamlessly with children under the age of six. Otherwise, it leaves discernable gaps, and those gaps tend to prey on people's minds. That's why its use for older trauma survivors isn't... well, wasn't allowed. Now days, of course, anything and everything is allowed for which the free market can find a buyer and a seller, even if the product makes things bad, or makes them worse. A plasma weapon. Intellinetrics. Bliss jism and other narcotics and hallucinogens. God modules. Caveat emptor.

"Okay," I said, feeling like he'd just sucker-punched me... which, in a manner of speaking, he had.

The dreams had recurred all throughout my teens and twenties, becoming less frequent as I entered my thirties. They always featured some person, man or woman, I'd wanted to sleep with. The dream followed the same script no matter who the guest star might be on any given night. He or she would stand in front of me naked, and we'd start to have a conversation. At some point, it would occur to me to ask, "Why are you naked?" Then the other person would smile and say, "Why, lover, don't you like me this way?" And I'd be confused because although I might have wanted to sleep with him, or with her, we never would have. So I'd say, "But we never had sex." Then I'd begin to doubt myself. "Did we?" I'd ask. And they'd smile. "There are things you don't remember," they'd say, "things no one is telling you about..."

I'd wake up from those dreams filled with a spectrum of emotions: Lust, regret, anguish, terror. I felt a prickly of anxiety sweep over my body. Was Bryce about to tell me some outrageous tale of sexual abuse? I scowled at him, thinking that if he were I was pretty sure I could guess who the perpetrator was.

"Those memories aren't in your brain any more because she had them removed," Bryce said, "but they were still in her memory. She knew what happened. She suffered by knowing it."

"But then... why... why would she want me to have her memories of... whatever happened to me... why would she want me to have those memories now?"

Bryce just shrugged. "I don't know for sure that those memories are there, but what else could she have wanted you to know? Why did she create a memory share for you and no one else?"

Because, I thought, she and I had similar loves and tastes. We shared a love of art, and of literature. I had thought she was leaving me her memories of museum trips, or concerts, or plays. Or maybe memories of her reading great masterworks of fiction - this was my fondest hope. It was the only way I might have a chance to read literature again, now that books had been outlawed.

I looked at Bryce and tried to formulate a way to say all this, but then I saw something else in is face - some evil glimmer, some trace of a gloat.

My suspicions flared anew. "It was you," I said. "Whatever happened, whatever you're afraid those memories will reveal - you were the perpetrator, weren't you? What was it? Buggering your little brother? Huh? What the fuck did you do, you sick freak?"

Bryce closed down. His eyes were cold and hostile. "I'll get that injunction," he said. "Go right ahead and play it. I'll get a gag order, too, if I have to." He pushed back from the table and strode toward the door.

"Afraid that if I find out the truth I'll spoil your squeaky clean image, Mr. Sexual Morality?" I called after him. "Mr. 'Sanctity of Memory?' Mr. 'Siliconians Can't Be Parents?' Mr. 'Marriage Is For Biologicals, Not Mechanoids?' "

Bryce was out in the hall by this point, and heading with a furious stride to the big meeting room.

I soothed myself, got composed, took deep breaths. I ran through all the calming exercises and biofeedback techniques I knew. A few minutes later I was ready to follow.

***

The meeting didn't take long. My lawyers and Mother's lawyers were joined in force against my brother's lawyers. Bryce's side didn't have a compelling reason to prevent the gel-drive and the memory share it contained from coming into my possession, as Mother had specified in her will.

Bryce and his goons were the first to leave. Then my lawyers followed. Finally, mother's lawyers also left the room, except for one senior associate, a fellow named Thrindle, who lingered a few moments. The gel-drive sat on the table before me, an ugly and utilitarian device. Thrindle rounded the large table to join me on my side, and sat in the leather chair next to mine.

"You can't play that back without a cerebrex," he said.

"A what?" I asked, startled.

He pulled a clear plastic strip from his jacket pocket. "This is not illegal... not yet," he said. "But it is frowned upon, except in more libertarian circles. We're a very old, very conservative firm, so I wouldn't want to be seen giving you this."

I took the strap from him and nestled it between my hands, out of sight of anyone passing in the hall, on the other side of the room's large windows.

"It's synced to the gel-drive," Thrindle said. "And it's wireless. All you have to do is put it on."

"How?" I asked.

"It's obvious once you try it," he said. "Your brother has the money and influence he needs to get that injunction. I'm going to give you client privileges for the next few hours. This room is yours. I'll black out the windows."

"Surveillance cams?" I asked him.

"Never in a meeting room," he smiled. "This is, as I say, quite the old-fashioned firm."

Once alone, I tried the cerebrex on. I later researched cerebrex technology and found out they'd been invented as a way to experience film and literature from a first-hand perspective. They'd created such a social furor that the manufacturer had backed off mass producing them, rather than risk legislative intervention. But what the crowded masses could not enjoy was still readily available to those with the means, anything from white sand beaches along coves of crystalline teal water to smoky brothels shuddering with concussively loud music. The manufacturer produced a few thousand cerebrexes each year and sold them as high-end specialty items to Owners and rich citizens. I know that sounds ridiculous, now that everyone has a cerebrex... now that they are practically mandated. But that's how things were back then. You see how impermanent and polymorphous the so-called foundational points of morality are. What's now regarded as essential to life in a well-run society was, at one time, feared and reviled.

I'd never used a cerebrex before. The technology had been available for something like thirty years, but for most of that time it had been suppressed - limited in availability, and made the target of hysterical propaganda. Good cerebrex models were expensive, and the licenses to possess them were just as costly; bad models weren't hard to find on the black market, but they were notoriously dangerous and could leave a user insane, or vegetative, or hopelessly addicted... or dead. I'd never had the slightest interest in using one before, and even though it was a point of honor for me to access the memories Mother had left me, I was nervous about using one now. I'd not thought it through, and neglected to ask myself exactly how one replays memory records. A cerebrex seemed the obvious answer now it had been explained.

The device was intimidating, both for its technical power and the aura of mystique that society bestowed upon it. It might as well have been a handful of hallucinogenic mushrooms. It was transgressive, and therefore frightening and appealing in equal measure. But it wasn't hard to work out. Thrindle was right about its operation being intuitively obvious. I got the cerebrex on my scalp and it automatically synced up with the gel-drive. Then Mother's memories started.

They were far more explosive and scandalous than any record of incestuous sex trauma. If Mother had memories of me suffering such abuses, she had elected not to burden me with them all over again. Instead, she gave me the most wonderful, and most dangerous, memories imaginable.

There were two suites of recollection. The first was experiential. The memories must have originally been made when Mother was quite young; not that I knew it at the time, but the memories were obviously sweetened, bolstered, and partially reconstructed in terms of sense registry. Their emotional core, however, was absolutely genuine. I felt a surging in her young, small body, a wild energy, a mood furious in its exuberance and overpowering in its sheer strength of presence. These were the physical sensations of childhood, emotions so raw and uncorralled that they had bodily impact.

I had no read on Mother's thoughts, however. Memory recording didn't exist when Mother was a child, so the memories I was experiencing had not been captured in the process of being stored in her living mind moment by moment. These memories were retrieved from her synapses and committed to gel long after the fact - that's what I mean when I say they were "sweetened" and "bolstered." Retrieved memories without benefit of such artificial polishing are prone to hiccups in flow and sequence and other problems; their resolution tends to be unsteady, with hazy and missing details. Sensory elements waver, sound growing unbearably loud fading into near-silence; or light increasingly intense, colors shifting hue and brightness.

Such effects are artifacts of how the original sensory input was perceived and prioritized; retrieved memories are, in a manner of speaking, recollections of how sensory input was received, rather than a record of the input itself and the mental sensations it stirred. There was some disagreement among experts as to how much fidelity retrieved memories retained. Retrieved memories can be fifty percent, even eighty percent fabricated, incorporating details heard afterwards from others, or conflating different occasions into a single recollection. The human brain is not a gel drive, and the process of accessing old memories - whether in the privacy of one's own thoughts, or with the goal of committing them to a gel drive - has an altering effect on the memories in question.

Even so, the experience of her memories was so immersive, so complete and immediate, that I felt overwhelmed. Mother's memories had a sensibility of their own - color and sounds familiar and yet somehow different from the way I was used to. Of course; being two different people, there was no reason to think our internal experience of the outside world would be identical. I had hoped for the full rush of my mother's thoughts and feelings - what would it be like to be within my mother once more, but in a different way? To be within her identity? These retrieved memories offered erratically intermittent, tantalizingly faint whispers of her consciousness - enough to intrigue me, but nothing more than that.

Still, there was enough of Mother there for me to know it was her, and to get a sense for her youth. She was only a girl, and she was wading in a stream in her bare feet. Overhead, the sky was blue. Yellow sunlight dappled pine needles and trees rose up all around her. I noticed that the color green was uniformly faded and dusty; I'd always appreciated the vibrant lucidity of leaves and pine needles, but that intensity of hue was missing from my mother's visual perception. It took a moment to place the reason: I had a slight tendency toward synaesthesia. If I visited an arboretum or an agricultural greenplex, the smell of vegetation, of chlorophyll, registered in my consciousness as a keenly present, almost living force, and it was that force that my brain re-processed into a more intensely verdant hue.

But her perception of other things was so much deeper, so much richer - I almost couldn't grasp some of what she was seeing and feeling. The air was fresh and cool, its clean moisture a silver presence in the air - like a spirit, or a holy word. The water was cold and yet not painful. Mud forced itself between her toes with each step - slick, soothing, dark and friendly. Pebbles pressed into the soles of her feet, irruptions in the smooth uniformity of the mud, in the hue and fiber of its tactile character.

Evidently, I was not the only one in the family with some form of synaesthesia. The way the world felt to her - from the warm lick of sunlight on her arms to the way scents effervesced in her nose - was so much more detailed than anything my own skin could register. When she started hunting for tadpoles, the mud and plants and pebbles all carried gorgeous aromas and colors; the tadpoles themselves had a distinctly different odor. They smelled alive. Their very movements under the water, or flopping in her hands, had a wet, organic bouquet. She was breathing scented air right into her lungs, the air of the planet's atmosphere itself, direct and miraculous; she wasn't using a filter or a rebreather.

She meandered and splashed and chased a frog. She was in constant movement and yet she wasn't doing anything - not unless grabbing for and then releasing tadpoles was a mission in itself. I saw deep, endless blue through the lattice of branches overhead, and in that blue there were massive, rounded volumes of cloud - stark white, crisp and distinct, clouds with crumples and folds, not at all like the smeared-over grey of the misty sky I was used to seeing, with its attenuated tatters of vapor. Beyond the trees sunlight fell on... what? More trees. A path. Patches of ground where other plants grew, all of them in shades of that washed-out green.

Her parents were under a nearby tree, talking and eating. When she joined them and partook of the food, it was sensational... meat. Real meat, rather than the soy version produced in the vats and aquaplariums. Milk, too - from a cow, I realized. It had a smell about it, an animal smell. Nothing like the artificial version. An apple, its red skin vivacious in her sight and striated, flecked, layered with gold and black and flecks of white. A few nuts - I don't know what kinds. Their meat was shaped and firm; the contours of one nut resembled those of a human brain, and its flesh was brownish gold. Another was a darker color, rounded at one end and then sweeping to a point at the other. Its convex sides were furrowed; it snapped into pieces between my... between her teeth, crunching with deep jolts of bone induction. The nuts were salty, but there another flavor also-something delicious that I could not even describe. I don't think she knew either, at that age, what the nuts were, but they were exquisite. They're extinct now, of course... all nuts are, because all trees are gone. And they were extinct back then, forty-some years ago, that afternoon in the law office, when I first tasted my Mother's gift, when I walked through a world imperfectly preserved, and yet so stunning. Every detail sank itself into my mind and being. Even if Bryce managed to get his injunction or wrest the memory record away from me, it was too late now. Her memory was mine. An afternoon in her childhood was now a cherished memory - a day in my own life.

My brother never got the memory share from me. I told him that his sexual abuse was right there on the record and he was going to be sorry, and he overreacted to my angry lie by killing himself. Well, or maybe didn't overreact. Maybe he administered to himself the justice he had coming. I had only guessed at the reason for Bryce's fear and anger around the memory share; it turned out I was partially correct, but only partially. I only pieced things together later on, by talking to my sister, Shala. It wasn't me Bryce had abused. It was her. Mother had caught him at it. She never told anyone, and it became a secret between the three of them. Shala never forgave her for keeping her silence around the episode, but neither did Shala ever break that silence - not until I asked her what it was Bryce had done that he feared would come to light through our mother's memories.

What do my own dreams man in that case? That I am carrying incomplete memories? That I fear the idea of such gaps? Did mother really have memories edited out of me, or was that one more lie from Bryce, a genus among liars?

It didn't matter to me any more. Memory shares became illegal a year or so later, and I could see why. When you never knew what you no longer have, you don't think to hold to account those who took it from you. But once you've waded with bare feet in a mountain stream and breathed fresh forest air and eaten real food from a picnic basket...

And yes, you're right to remind me. There was a second suite of memories. They began with a room - a study, I think, a place with sunlight flooding in through windows, a place with shelves full of books. A room with a closet, and inside that closet a wooden box. No, a chest. A chest that, when opened, contained more books, along with movies. How can a movie be contained, like a book, in some sort of format external to the nets and feeds? Well, you'll see. But the wonderful thing was that the books were of poetry, and forbidden literature, and even a few sacred scriptures... not the mandated scriptures, but sacred writings that belonged to other religions. The faiths they tell us were eradicated, the "untrue" and "unclean" faiths that only the faithless and perverse believed in. These memories were more recent - deliberately created, not retrieved after the fact. They contain a background hum of Mother's thoughts, beliefs, and responses. They contain her way of cross-referencing and thinking about the books as she reads them, and even the way she sees the action described in the books and hears the voices of the characters.

And the movies! Only a few, all by the same director - a man she knew, a man named Dominic Chavez. He was taken to Decatur, where his life ended. His murder infuriated her, sparked a burning hatred and defiance in her. Worse than how his life was taken was how his art was targeted. His films were banned and destroyed. Mother kept his movies hidden away, and years after the Winfield Kirsch and The Terror she got hold of a cerebrex and watched them, committing them to memory. Racial memory, family memory. Watching Dominic's films, she thought of him. She connected to the humor and the irony of his work because she knew he was humorous and ironic. She sensed his mind in the films, just as I sensed her mind in the memory shares she prepared of herself watching his films. I sense her love and friendship for Dominic Chavez. I know his name only because she remembered him and preserved those memories. And, no, they never had an affair. Dominic Chavez was that sort of person, more rare than literature or poetry... he was gay. It's not the perversion that you think. Mother knew him. She understood. She held him in her heart as a rare, honorable man.

There was something else in that box, too, the most dangerous thing of all. Old newspapers and magazines. These were like newsfeeds, only printed on paper... well, never mind, you'll see what I mean. The papers were a trove Mother must have collected over many years. Some of them dated from the 1970s. But here's the thing they all had in common: Articles on the Earth's changing climate, and the role that human industry played in that change. They still like to say that the science isn't settled about what it was, exactly, that caused the Earth's mean temperature to increase so much. Only lately have government researchers admitted publicly that solar fluctuations weren't the cause, but they still won't say that it was industrial and automotive emissions of massive amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere - gases that trapped the sun's heat, so that year after year the planet got hotter and hotter. Even now, of course, news pundits and ministry officials talk about the complex interrelationships between planetary warming and crop failures, disease outbreaks, the rise of theocracies and the fall od democracies, civil war, mass human migration... all the problems that beset us now, all the conflicts that have led to the slaughter of more than half the world's population over the last thirty-six years. And yet here... in my mother's memories... were the documents, lost to us now in the real world thanks to the Data Purges of the '40s and then again in the '60s. The documents that showed our ancestors knew all along, the documents that prove they steered us into this catastrophe with t heir eyes wide open while they clouded the public's vision with phrases like "the science isn't settled."

I'm still not sure whether Bryce knew about these old newspapers and magazines. If he did, they must have terrified him even more deeply than the record of his own sexual misconduct. Even now these memories have the capacity to spark riot, revolt, bloody revolution. Maybe some day it will come to that. But that's not why I am giving them to you.

After Bryce killed himself no one ever asked after the memories that Mother willed me. It must have been because of the old fashioned values her law firm clung to - confidentiality, that sort of thing. Inspired by Mother, I hid the gel drive away and even now - now that cerebrexes and gel drives and memory shares are commonplace - I have only seldom brought this drive out of its place of safety.

Until now. What good is memory if it's not shared? And so, my dear, if you want it, this storehouse of memory... of Mother, your great-great-grandmother... is yours now. I trust you with this precious heirloom, this sliver of Mother's soul, because you're the only grandniece among all my young relations who has a taste for art, for a world not spoiled, for things as they should be, if only people of my - and my Mother's - generations had preserved the world. You'll see why I have taken such extraordinary care with this equipment. The bishops and Theopublicans continue to destroy memories such as these, raw memories from decades ago, organic memories that were not invented. These are not artificial memories of electronic origin, with their thin, flat mentalities, but part of Mother's living spirit. These memories are sacred, and you must protect them, learn from them, and accept them.

Yes, the laws ban memories such as these, because they're the truth of a vanished world. They speak to a heritage wrongly denied you. Yes, the magistrates and pastors insist that they are dangerous, unnatural, and morally evil. Of course they do. This is the proof - all but living truth - of the lie they've told over and over again, the lie that destroyed the garden that once was our birthright.

Shelter and shield these memories, child, but most of all take them into yourself. Cherish them. Pass them along if you can. Give them life; remember them. Let Mother live again.