June: On the Nature Of Memory
My earliest memory is of sitting on a beach, sifting sand through pudgy toddler fingers. The sand is soft, and warm, and the air smells like salt. Wind ruffles my hair, soft in a different way from the sand.

I've never been on a beach in my life.

Someone was, once, and they remembered it into a box and the box remembered it into me, safely cleansed of personality to avoid rejection. The idea is, that now, if I ever do go to a place with a beach, I will know without being told that this is sun-touched sand, and this is how salt air smells, and, on a subtler level, to make me know that normal experience involves being born small and growing large over time.

I have a vocabulary of memories like that, mine because I posess them, not because I made them. A few have alien edges, where the personality was not quite filed off. I remember disliking sunflowers, and at the same time enjoy the memory of them. I wonder if the donors have any idea that cuttings of themselves have been transplanted in me, and if it would please or horrify them.

My earliest memory belongs to only me is of lying in a laboratory, eyes not yet open, murmuring an endless stream of infant babble. At certain sounds, I would feel flashes of approval or disaproval - the machines telling me which to keep and which to discard. I heard someone say, "watch the phoneme set - that almost turned into an accent, there." I only heard it as more random sounds, but once I knew words, I recognized them. Most of my early memories are fragments like that, until consciousness became continuous and unremarkable. Sometimes I remember knowing things that I've forgotten, because they pushed me in the wrong direction.

I think I remember the technician speaking because it was information that was not intended for me. It was something extra. The machines taught me to move and how to talk, but observation taught me that Dr. Fitzgerald always volunteered for the painful lessons, but was never allowed to administer them. Listening taught me that it was because he enjoyed himself too much and it upset the others. I learned to count and calculate as planned, and by quietly listening I learned that Dr. Mehta saw us as surrogates for the children she could never have. We're meant to be voracious learners, and I don't think that they quite realized that we do not confine our absorption to the assigned curriculum.

It was best not to mention things learned on our own, though, because there were things we were not meant to know, and that meant being erased. It was best to behave as expected, and to always assume we were being evaluated. Adjustments were never as pleasant as learning, and holes in your experience are very upsetting.