Free Interfictions 2 by Delia Sherman Page A

memory was always there.
    Why would smoked meat remind him of the moon?
    It was a mystery.
    * * * *
    Dunbar had turned sixty-eight earlier that year.
    He was here to get an award. The lifetime achievement award for the IAAS (the International Association for the Advancement of Science).
    Why they held the party on the moon was anybody's guess. Perhaps the association felt that the moon was more international.
    * * * *
    3. Third Memory
    It was the middle of February. The days had been bitter cold and relentlessly gray for weeks. The night before had dumped another ten inches of snow.
    But that day, it was sunny.
    Dunbar watched his students as they sat at their stations in the lab dissecting Aplysia s and running their experiments. He noticed that they never looked out the window at Mount Royal, which was shining bright with the pure untouched snow. It was the kind of day that Dunbar had loved as a child.
    Dunbar made a decision.
    "OK, everyone, lunchtime. Put your coats on,” he said. “We're going out."
    He marched his entire lab to the mountain, buying some toboggans on the way.
    Dunbar went sliding down the toboggan run successfully five times before the snow got so packed down that it exposed a root from a tree. The root made his red plastic sled crack in half, which sent Dunbar flying into the air and smashing straight into a tree.
    His students laid him on the other toboggan and slid him down the mountain so that the ambulance could take him away.
    He had broken his leg in three places.
    * * * *
    Sometimes during his lecture, he reminded his students that time had passed. That day-to-day lives were lived differently.
    "Imagine,” he said. “How much life was changed when these things were introduced."
    The push-button phone.
    The remote control.
    Cellular technology.
    The portable personal computer.
    The Internet.
    Nanotechnology.
    Retinal ID chips.
    Gene therapy.
    Civilian space travel.
    Dunbar believed in the collective memories of generations who had useless skills in their old age.
    In his youth, for an undergrad experiment, he had brought in groups of people at different ages and left them with old technology and new technology.
    Mostly, the old people could figure out the new technology, but the young people could not figure out how to use old technology.
    It was not a part of their collective memory.
    When he said this, the students did not look up from their desks. They just kept taking notes. He had meant to say these things to excite the students. To give them some pause. To make a big change in the synaptic pathways in their brains. To jog something loose.
    Nothing.
    They didn't even read scientific papers that were published over ten years ago. They thought old science was useless.
    Dunbar turned back to his Powerpoint presentation and clicked to the next slide.
    * * * *
    Slide 3: The Hippocampus
    * * * *

    * * * *
    Patient HM
    The hippocampus is the place in the brain where some types of memory begin to be formed and consolidated. Consolidation is the switching from short-term memory to long-term memory which happens when synaptic connections between neurons are made more permanent. In some diseases of the memory, the important step of passing from short-term to long-term is impaired. There is an inability to form any new long-term change of synaptic connections.
    Dunbar told his students about the case of the famous patient HM.
    His hippocampus had been removed to cure the recurrence of large seizures. The seizures stopped, but the brain operation resulted in a total collapse of the ability to store new information. Patient HM experienced every day, every moment as a completely new one. Patient HM could remember things that occurred in long-term memory, his childhood, how to read, how to make conversation, how to drive, but HM could not store any new information in the brain. The endless loop of meeting people for the first time happened every single day, even with the doctors who had cared