Remember More

Chapter 02

REMEMBER MORE

CHAPTER 02

The student smiled. He turned to his friends and chuckled. He sat down.

The professor smiled back. Taking out his keyboard from a pocket on the side of his wheelchair, he clicked something on the touch pad. The screen that had been hanging high over his head came to life.

Everyone in the audience looked up. It was a video of an animal swimming around underwater. A snake-like fish of some sort. And then the video went away. Now up on the screen, was a diagram of the same animal and dissected open with its internal organs labelled and displayed.

"Does anyone know what this is?"

A hand shot up. "An electric eel, sir."

"Correct and not correct. 'Eel' is not the official term. It is a misnomer, because the animal is actually categorized as a knife fish. It has an internal organ, as you can see here..." He encircled the area with his laser pointer. "...that allows it to develop an electrical charge, strong enough to kill a fully grown human being." He wheeled himself closer to the lip of the stage. "I remind you of one of the most basic tenets of physics. That electricity is the same thing as magnetism. That is why we have the term, 'electromagnetism'. I would…" The professor broke off and coughed. He coughed again.

As the man’s mini-spasm continued, the students broke off into a quiet mumbling amongst themselves. The professor fished out a bottle from somewhere and took a sip of water from it.

The same young man from before rose to his feet again. "Sir, is that what you think our bodies will look like in the future?"

Some of the students behind him laughed.

The professor finally got himself together and stopped coughing. "The future? What do I care of the future?” He cleared his throat. He took another sip of water from his bottle. “As you can probably tell, there's not a lot of future left in me." He chuckled and the class smiled along with him.

"The future will be what it will be and I am sure it will hold wonders enough in it with no thanks to me. Though I must say, on a more personal note, as it happens, it is not the future that intrigues me to no end." He stopped and thought about it for a moment. "Allow me to turn that question around and ask you this.” He sat forward in his chair and addressed the student who had remained standing all this time. “How do you know we didn't look like that in the past?"

The student started. He frowned. He drifted back down into his seat.

"I mean, how do we know anything?” The professor went on. “I can't even remember back to before I was two years old. And that's just me. How do we know anything about ourselves as a people? We only have reliable, written records that date back for a mere few thousands of years. What were we like before then? I mean, as a species? How do we know we didn't look like that?” He pointed above at the diagram. “Or have an extra organ or two or a special power and then evolution came along and decided we just didn't need them anymore?"

Another student at the other end of the hall stood up. “Professor, isn't there, in fact, a way that we could remember? Isn’t there such a thing as genetic memory?"

The hall went silent. For some minutes. Someone dropped a stylus. From within the labyrinth that were the wings to the side of the stage somewhere, a small kitten meowed like it was dying of loneliness.

Back on the wheelchair, the professor seemed lost for a moment. His licked his lips but they remained dry. Dry as a bone. “Genetic memory…”

He bent his head to his fist and coughed into it once. When he resumed speaking, his voice was far softer than before. "…that, my young friend, is still, even in our day, in this, the year of our Lord 2042, a question very much mired in controversy.” He began wheeling himself over to the student on the other end of the hall. “I believe there may have been a chance breakthrough some decades ago in the area and in this university, as a matter of fact, but in the end it…it led to…nothing.”