Deadly Memory (Living Memory Book 2), page 4
The danger is real, she argued. We must do whatever it takes to survive.
Sometimes she could influence higher-ranked females through her intelligence and logic, but everyone around her was frightened. Deep genetic instincts made them run to the more powerful and dominant without considering if they were right or not. The swirling arguments moved gradually toward consensus, with her dissents increasingly overwhelmed.
She caught the scent of another dissenter, mild but distinct, and moved through the crowd in that direction. She found a male from her own roost, a brilliant researcher and one of the best modifiers she knew. “Come with me,” she told him.
They circled around the edge of the canyon toward where the representatives of the Ocean Roost had originally congregated. They found the scrawny male who had told the gathered council about the impending catastrophe.
She threw out a command scent to get his attention, and he leaped in the air as if she’d prodded him with a claw.
“I am called Distant Rain Sweeping Towards Home as Night Falls,” she told him.
The male touched his head to the ground. “May your teeth be sharp and your claws strong.”
“This is Fear Stink of Injured Mammal Limping Through the Sand,” she said.
“We think you’re right,” said Fear Stink. “Altering our bodies is the only way to survive this long-term.”
The scrawny male gave off a whiff of astonishment. “You believe me?”
Rain conveyed her assent. “What kind of modifications do you think we need?”
The canyon disappeared. Disoriented, Samira thrashed, snapping her jaws in every direction. Slowly, she took in the fluorescent lights, the drop ceiling, the machine and the technician and Paula, standing just where they had been. It seemed like hours had passed.
“What,” she said. “How long…?”
“Only a moment,” Paula said. “It just feels like longer.”
The technician released her arms. Samira sat up, still a bit dizzy. “It seemed so real.”
“It was real. It just happened to a maniraptor who died sixty-six million years ago.”
Samira shook her head in astonishment. “It was amazing. The way they used scent to reach consensus, like hundreds of people all talking at once and somehow understanding what everyone was saying.”
“It’s a radically different communication mechanism,” Paula agreed.
“I would have thought it was a bad one, compared to sound,” Samira said. “Smell lingers in the air. It’s like trying to have a conversation when everything you say echoes over and over again—you couldn’t keep it all straight. But they seemed to have turned that attribute into an advantage.”
“Brains are incredibly good at doing exactly that,” Paula said. “You haven’t learned to handle the echoing scenario, because that doesn’t happen in normal life. But you can understand the person across from you in a crowded restaurant, even though there are ten other tables of people talking, music playing, clinking silverware, and the hum of air conditioning. Your brain has no trouble filtering out the important from the unimportant.”
Samira stood up, then grabbed the bed to steady herself.
“Take your time,” Paula said. “Our brains aren’t used to experiences like this.”
Samira took deep breaths, trying to think through the things she’d seen. “Their mode of communication defined the kind of technology they developed,” she said. “Instead of a printing press or the telephone, they expanded the long-lasting nature of scent communication from marking their territory to sharing memories directly with others and storing them chemically for future generations.”
Paula’s expression grew wistful. “They must have had vast stores of those memories. We only have the tiniest sampling.”
“How many of these do you have?”
“Close to three hundred.”
Samira whistled. “Nothing like what they used to have, I’m sure, but that’s still a lot.”
“The problem is, it’s a limited supply. Every time someone breathes in one of these memories, we have a little less of the very complicated neurochemical cocktail that produces it. So I’ll have to ask you to take some time now and write down, in as complete detail as possible, everything that you saw. We have to translate it into our own form of long-term storage, or we’ll lose it.”
“You said you take scent chemical from Charlie twice a day. Don’t you get more memories when you do that?”
Paula shook her head. “That’s just the base chemical. It will produce the same sense of fear and will work to dominate others, but it doesn’t encode any memories. Presumably he could share memories with us if he wanted to, but he hasn’t.”
“Of course not. We’ve got him trapped behind glass and we’re wearing hazmat suits. He couldn’t share memories with us if he wanted to.”
“And for the time being, we’ll keep it that way.”
Samira let go of the bed and took a tentative step. The dizziness was gone. “But how does it work at all?” she asked. “How does a chemical meant for maniraptor brains get interpreted by ours? I wouldn’t have expected our brains to have the biological hardware to turn scent data into experience.”
Paula smiled. “Have I told you how nice it is to finally have you working with us? You ask good questions. Are you familiar with Noam Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar?”
“Um, maybe? The idea that the structure of language has a genetic basis?”
“Essentially, yes. He posited—and a lot of the linguistic community agrees with him—that the foundations of language are innate in human genetics. If so, then maybe these memories communicate at that foundational level.”
“But we’re not descended from dinosaurs. We’re on a radically different evolutionary branch.”
Paula shrugged. “Maybe our speech has more in common with animal communication than we think. Maybe Chomsky's theory is true because it's the underlying structure of memory formation and storage that's common to all creatures with a cerebral cortex.”
“In the memory I saw in Thailand, the males had another mode of speech,” she said. “A spoken one.”
Paula’s eyebrows shot up. “You never mentioned that before.”
“I didn’t know about any of this then,” she said with some heat. “I didn’t know you were involved. I was debriefed by a soldier and told to forget I was ever there.”
“Sorry about that,” Paula said. “I did what I could. It wasn’t easy to convince them to read you in.” She leaned forward. “Tell me about this spoken language, though. They communicated with sound? Not just emotional expression, but a true language?”
“It was just the males,” Samira said. “It was considered a bit crude, not something the more cultured females would use. They looked down on it as a less capable and sophisticated form of communication than scent.”
“Intriguing.”
“You never encountered that in any of these other memories?”
“No. The vast majority of the memories are from a female perspective. It’s never come up. There are other species that vocalize in various ways, as animals, but our maniraptor friends are generally silent.”
Samira began talking to Charlie. The room was split roughly in half, with the lab on one side and Charlie’s enclosure on the other. The lab included the air handling system to manage Charlie’s air supply or pump in the gas that sedated him, as well as the mechanism to open the enclosure to give him food or access him for any reason. As such, it shared Charlie’s environment, and so anyone in the lab had to wear hazmat gear. In addition, an elevated observation room above the lab allowed visibility into what was going on below without breathing the same air. It meant Samira didn’t have to wear a hazmat suit to see Charlie, or even to talk to him, but she always did anyway. She wanted to be in the same room with him, on his level. Even though her voice had to be transmitted through a microphone in either case, she wanted to be close enough to him that he could see her lips move and get a better sense of connection.
She said the same things every day. She repeated her name and his name. She identified her body parts. She held up objects and told him what they were called. While she did so, sensitive chemical sensors in his enclosure characterized the chemical composition of the air. She had hoped he would understand and respond with a lexicon of his own, allowing them to build up a shared language, even if it used different senses. But he never responded. He just watched her impassively, giving no indication that he comprehended her purpose at all.
Even so, she began to see his personality, to glimpse the individual inside the creature. He paid much more attention to her, for instance, than to any of the other researchers in the lab. Paula he gave some notice to, tracking her progress if she moved around the room. Alex he paid no attention to at all. He clearly resented being put to sleep. When they pumped gas into the enclosure, he crouched as far away from it as possible, growling through bared teeth.
She realized she still thought of him like she did about Wallace, however, or any of the clever birds in Paula’s ornithology center. Not as a person, not really. It surprised her how reluctant her mind was to accept him as a thinking being. She had seen through his eyes, after all. She’d experienced his memories. Despite that, looking at this prehistoric bird-reptile, part of her still wanted to draw a sharp line between humanity and him and say: We are what matters. You are just an animal.
Was it really just humans’ inability to understand other modes of communication that prevented them from recognizing intelligence in other species? Despite all she knew, she found it hard to accept Charlie. Were there only two examples, now, of reasoning, self-aware species? Or was that a false category? Were elephants and dolphins and ravens and parrots and dogs and cats aware of themselves as individuals? Were chickens? Mosquitos? Microbes? It seemed like an important moral distinction to make, but she wasn’t sure how to draw the line. She had been raised to think that only humans had souls, but she had always assumed that others were possible. Aliens from another planet, for instance.
Face to face with an example, though, she wanted to deny it. If that was a person on the other side of the glass, she had responsibilities to him beyond simple scientific exploration. Paula was right that he couldn’t just be released, but it meant they couldn’t just treat him like a lab animal either. It meant that what he wanted mattered.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Samira started to lose track of the world outside the facility. She worked late nights, worked weekends, often slept at the lab. She and Beth drove in together, but sometimes it didn’t seem worth the commute back to their apartment, and she told Beth to go ahead without her.
After several weeks of this, Beth showed up in the observation room at five o’clock and insisted that Samira come with her.
“It’s early yet,” Samira said. “He’ll be fed tonight. I’m always here when he’s fed.”
“He ate food before you even knew he existed,” Beth said. “You need food, too. You’re not eating well. I made misir wat last night; we just have to warm it up and eat it.”
It was Samira’s favorite Ethiopian comfort food, and Beth knew it. “You could have brought it to the lab and warmed it up here,” Samira said.
“No, I specifically did not do that. The whole point of making it was to lure you home for an evening. I’m worried about you. You’re working twenty hours a day sometimes. It’s not healthy. Wallace misses you, too.”
That got her. Wallace, her pet macaw, was a social creature who needed personal attention to thrive. She’d been neglecting him to spend time with Charlie. She’d even considered asking if she could keep him in the facility, but where exactly that would work wasn’t clear. Space was at a premium underground, and a macaw was too loud and demanding to keep in someone’s workspace.
Samira’s first instinct was to get angry. She was an adult; she didn’t need Beth to mother-hen her. Any paleontologist would sell their right arm for an opportunity like this. Of course she was going to give it everything she had. She didn’t need her sister to scold her about pet care.
She recognized that instinct, though, and took a deep breath before she lashed out. Beth loved this work, too, and she loved Samira. She might be overprotective, but that was no reason to attack her. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll come. But I’m staying late tomorrow.”
Beth beamed. “Good choice. I didn’t want to have to overpower you.”
“Just a minute,” Samira said. She faced the cage. As usual, Charlie watched her intently. “Goodbye,” she said. “I have to leave. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Charlie made no reaction.
“That’s it, then,” Samira said. “Let’s go.”
“I’m not a workaholic,” Samira said, as they climbed the flight of stairs and Beth unlocked the door to their apartment. “I’m dedicated. There’s a difference.”
“Do you even know what day it is?” Beth asked.
“Of course, I do. It’s, um…” She wasn’t actually sure.
The door swung open. Samira had just a moment to register that the lights were on and there were people in their apartment when her parents threw their arms in the air and shouted, “Surprise!”
Samira stood there, stunned, as her mom leaned in and kissed her cheek. “Happy birthday, honey.”
Beth smirked. “What day did you say it was?”
“Okay, maybe I haven’t been paying attention,” Samira said.
Her dad put an arm around her and led her into the room. Streamers hung from the ceiling, and a two-tier chocolate birthday cake sat on the counter with her name written inexpertly with icing.
When she and Beth were growing up in Ethiopia, birthday celebrations among their friends were rare. Birthdays would be remembered with a little popcorn or Dabo bread, if they were remembered at all. As they got older, though, at least in Addis Ababa, the tradition had spread, in imitation of the Western celebration they saw in Hollywood movies. So despite their cross-cultural background, their birthday memories were distinctly American: cakes, candles, streamers, presents, and the Happy Birthday song, which Beth and her parents now sang with gusto in Amharic. As the last melkam lidet echoed around the room, Wallace squawked his agreement, and Samira laughed and hugged each of them.
“Thank you,” she said. “This is wonderful.”
While shoveling delicious spoonfuls of spicy red lentils into her mouth, Samira had to admit Beth was right. She was overwhelmed and overtired, and a night of good food and good company was exactly what she needed. She didn’t even mind that the company was her parents, despite their fraught relationship. It meant she couldn’t talk about work, and that was a good thing. She realized that despite the incredible privilege she felt at getting to work with Charlie, she also felt an incredible pressure not to screw it up.
“How have you guys been?” she asked her parents.
“Overwhelmed,” her dad said. “This is a nice break.”
“We’ve been plugged into the virus relief efforts,” her mom explained. “Packaging up medical supplies and non-perishables, figuring out what kind of supply routes we can use to reliably get it into the hands of the people who need it.”
Samira realized she hadn’t read the news in weeks. Her parents were talking about the Julian virus that Gabby’s mother had died from in Argentina. “Is it getting bad?” she asked. “I haven’t really been paying attention.”
“Spread to West Africa now,” her dad said. “Cases in Nigeria, Niger, Benin. Lagos has it the worst. It spreads as aggressively as COVID, but kills more people than Ebola. And it spreads through animals, at least most mammals and birds. They don’t know how to stop it.”
It was just like her parents, to dive in headfirst to any humanitarian need around the globe. Sometimes it felt like they cared about children across the world more than they cared about her, but she pushed that thought aside. It was her birthday. They were here. They loved her, and they were showing that love right now. She could work through her insecurities another day.
She took her dad’s hand. “Just don’t go rushing off into a plague zone to help, will you?”
He laughed awkwardly and traded a look with her mom. “We’re staying right here,” he said. Though clearly they had thought about it.
“Good,” Beth said. “I don’t think ophthalmology is what those people need right now.”
Her dad laughed. “Right,” he said. “We can probably help more from here. We have contacts, we can organize relief efforts, work the system. Not everyone knows how to do that.”
“You sound like you’re trying to convince yourself,” Samira said.
“You know your dad,” Mom said. “Thinks he’s still thirty-five. Wherever the need is greatest, that’s where he wants to be.”
Samira did know. It was part of what made her relationship with her parents so difficult for her. They were heroes. They were willing to sacrifice anything for other people and had spent their career literally saving lives. Samira herself had been one of those saved lives, adopted off the streets when she had no one and nothing. She struggled not to feel like she was just one more of her parents’ third-world conquests.
She shook her head. Not now.
“I think he is still thirty-five,” she said. “I think he could still run a marathon.”
Her father huffed out a laugh, but he really did look remarkably hale for his sixty years. He stooped a little more than he used to, and his beard had gone gray, but his skin was unlined and he had more energy than many half his age.
Her mom put her hands to her cheeks, which were much more noticeably lined with age. “Unlike me,” she said. “I never should have married a younger man.”
Her mom was only eight months older than her dad, but it had been a running joke since Beth and Samira were little. The conversation continued that way, retreading old and comfortable paths, talking about nothing and yet communicating everything. Samira felt more relaxed around them than she had in years.
