Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [320]
But the practical difficulties of ecphorization— of remembering all one’s past, or even some particular part of it— were great. Not just finding the anamnestics that might stimulate such a process, but finding as well the time it would take! When one had lived two centuries, it seemed possible that it might take years to ecphorize all the significant events of one’s life.
Clearly a sequential chronological run-through was impractical, in more ways than one. What would be preferable was some kind of simultaneous flushing of the system, strengthening the entire network without consciously remembering every component of it. Whether such a flushing was electrochemically possible was unclear; and what such a flushing might feel like was impossible to imagine. But if one were to electrically stimulate the perforant pathway to the hippocampus, and get a great deal of adenosine triphosphate past the blood-brain barrier, for instance, thus stimulating the long-term potentiation that aided learning in the first place; and then impose a brain-wave pattern stimulating and supporting the quantum oscillations of the microtubules; and then direct one’s consciousness to review the memories that felt most important to one, while the rest were being reinforced as well, unconsciously. . . .
He ran through another accelerando of thought on this issue, then crashed blank on it. There he was, sitting in his apartment living room, blanked, cursing himself for not at least trying to mutter something into his AI. It seemed that he had been onto something— something about ATP, or was it LTP? Well. If it was a genuinely useful thought, it would come back. He had to believe that. It seemed probable.
As it did, more and more as he studied the issues, that the shock of Maya’s amnesiac moment had somehow propelled Michel into the quick decline. Not that such an explanation could ever be proved, or that it even really mattered. But Michel would not have wanted to survive either his memory or hers; he had loved her as his life project, his definition of himself. The shock of Maya blanking on something so basic, so important (like the key to memory restoration). . . . And the mind-body connection was so strong— so strong that the distinction itself was probably false, a vestige of Cartesian metaphysics or earlier religious views of the soul. Mind was one’s body’s life. Memory was mind. And so, by a simple transitive equation, memory equaled life. So that with memory gone, life was gone. So Michel must have felt, in that final traumatic half hour, as his self tumbled into a fatal arrhythmia, under the anguish of grieving for his love’s death-of-mind.
They had to remember to be truly alive. And so ecphorization, if he could figure out the appropriate anamnestic methodology, was going to have to be tried.
• • •
Of course it might be dangerous. If he did manage to work up a memory reinforcer, it would flush the system all at once, perhaps, and no one could predict what that would feel like subjectively. One would just have to try it. It would be an experiment. Self-experimentation. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time. Vlad had given himself the first gerontological treatment, though it could have killed him; Jennings had inoculated himself with live smallpox vaccine; Arkady’s ancestor Alexander Bogdanov had exchanged his blood for that of a young man suffering from malaria and tuberculosis, and had died while