My mother remembers Africa as hot. She remembers near starvation, watching children die, and being terrified that the animals would get her.

My father remembers a completely different Africa, one with lush green forests and flowing rivers, and though disease and death feature in his Memories as well, he remembers being surrounded by a close family-tribe that were often brought gifts and tributes from other tribes in trade for the fish that his family-tribe was so good at catching.

We're pretty sure mom's memories are older.  There are no words in her memories of Africa. Just naked bodies, disease, and fear. Communication, yes, but not in words. Mom's memories of Africa are still nominally human, but not quite modern human. For awhile, she was famous for having the earliest clear memories of Africa.  Everyone remembers Africa, of course, it's where we all ultimately came from, but mom's Africa memories are so far back that they can only roughly be dated to about 200,000 years ago. 

Anthropologists loved her, and she was often invited to speak about her memories at symposiums and seminars, but as more and more people began to Remember further and further back, she became less and less important to researchers. There's even rumors of someone who Remembers being a fish crawling up onto land, though most people dismiss them as being a crackpot attention seeker.

I can't really even say crawling out of the ocean is a clear Memory in the way that my other Memories are. It's purely instinctual. I don't know that what I'm doing is anything special. That living in the shallows and crawling out of the water to escape predators will change my DNA so that my offspring and their offspring and so on will gradually become more and more comfortable out of water, adapt, and millions of years later, become humans.  I'm just chasing food, escaping predators, and trying to spread my genetic material as far and wide as I can.

There is no real clear thought that comes with those Memories.  Everything is dark and dim.  When I leave the water, all I feel is hot and dry and I want to go back, but I have to wait until the thing that wants to eat me is gone.  I'm almost dried out and dead by the time it does leave, so it's a struggle to get back to the water, but when I do, I feel relief.  That's when I find another shallow-dweller, one of my kind, signalling through the chemicals her body releases that her eggs are ready to be fertilized, and so I do the job, and that's where the Memory ends, as all Memory does, with the genes that contain the memory being passed on.

I don't tell most people about that Memory, of course. It's too controversial. While evolution is now accepted as fact - the wide spread of Remembrance cemented that - most people believe that pre-human genes are too diluted in us to produce clear memories.

I was born after the Remembrance began, so I don't have any first-hand memories of what it was like before.  Some people are starting to call those the Forgetting Times, when the only memories you had were those you had lived, and those memories were notoriously unreliable.

My grandmother is a Forgetter.  I love listening to her stories about what life was like before the Remembrance, when Archaeologists and Anthropologists and Historians argued about what happened in the past, because all they had to work with was what had been left in the ground and what writings had survived the ravages of time. When they spent their time digging in the ground and picking apart stories to discover what was fact and what was fiction. My grandfather was an Anthropologist, studying early human evolution, and he spent time in Africa before my mother was born, digging up bones and studying them to try to pinpoint when humans became human, and what it was that made them human. 

My mother and I have his memories of Africa, in addition to the ancient Memories that were locked in our DNA for so many years. Epigenetic memory is what it's called. Everything we experience encodes itself in the DNA, sometimes even changing that DNA and being passed on to offspring generation after generation.

Now, I have half my mother's Memories and half my father's Memories, and I spend most of my time training to unlock them.  I'm the designated Memory Keeper in my family, and so that is my entire life.  It's not a bad life, as things go, but it's exhausting. Much of human history is violent, brutal, full of disease and death and simply trying to survive.  We like to think of ourselves as above all that, as the species that's able to conquer all of that, but Memories show a different story.

I Remember when I was chosen as the family Memory Keeper.  My mother was pregnant with me, and so of course I have those Memories.  That's one of the quirks of Memories, actually.  You can remember everything your father did up until the point he banged your mom and got her pregnant with you, but you continue picking up your mother's memories until you're born; that umbilical connection does more than just provide sustenance.  I Remember being chosen in that dreamy sort of way that all Memories come to you.  You know that it's not you, you know that it's not something you experienced, but you Remember it as if you were there and it was happening to you.  You get all the emotions that come with the Memory as well, which can really suck when you're accessing a traumatic event.

The phone rings. My/Mom's belly is huge, and I/she could go into labor at any time, so any movement, even reaching for the phone is exhausting.

"Hello," I/she says, answering the phone after the fourth ring, just before it would go to voicemail.

"Mrs. Donovan?" a female voice says.

"Yes," I/she respond. "How may I help you?"

"You're daughter has the genetic markers for a Memory Keeper."

I/she sit(s) back down, hard.  This is not entirely unexpected, but it's entirely unwanted.  Memory Keeping is a brutal life of exhausting psychological training.  "Are you sure?" I/she say(s).

"We're certain.  We ran the tests multiple times to be sure.  Your daughter has an elevated level of epigenetic Memory markers, as well as the genetic coding for the increased brain matter that allows deeper access of the Memories." The  woman on the other end of the line sounds sympathetic.  Having a child chosen as a Memory Keeper is both a blessing and a curse.  Your child is on the forefront of delving deeper into human history than ever before, but it's a life sentence.

"When will she be taken?" I/Mom say(s).

"You'll have her until she's a year old. It's important that you breast feed, as this can add to her epigenetic Memories. You'll be given accommodations and support throughout that first year."

I don't like to dwell on that Memory. My mother's heart broke that day, knowing she wouldn't be able to raise me, and accessing that Memory is painful for me, because I feel her pain, her sadness, her despair as she realized that life would never be the same again. She wasn't surprised that I'd be a Memory Keeper.  She was part of the first generation of the Remembrance, and she had some of the clearest Memories of anyone in her generation, so she knew that it was possible her children would have the gift as well.  But the reality of something is different than knowing it might happen.

Not long after that phone call, my parents were moved into a secure facility where everything she did was monitored. Her comfort and safety were high priority, as was reducing her stress level.  For Memory Keepers especially, anything and everything affects the DNA coding, and the goal for Memory Keepers is to keep current life experience from diluting the epigenetic ancestral Memories.  My mother was allowed to breast feed for a year, then moved out of the compound, leaving me behind.  As part of the Memory Keepers program, my parents were given a house and a monthly income. The goal is to keep them as comfortable and happy as possible, so that I, as a Memory Keeper, don't get stressed out either. It doesn't really work, though.  Seeing your parents for only one month a year kind of sucks when you're growing up.

The difference between memories that are mine and Memories that belong to my ancestors can be fuzzy at times.  The further back in my own personal timeline I go, the more the memories fade, and without effort, the earliest  I can remember is the month I spent with my parents when I was three-years-old.  More specifically, I remember what it was like to have to leave them again.  Of course, I knew I'd see them again. We Skyped every evening, but talking to your parents over a video connection is completely different than seeing them in person.  For a three-year-old, it's like living hell.

I didn't understand why I had to leave my parents.  I wanted to stay with them, like my brother and sister got to.  They were twins, a year younger than me, and I hated that they got to stay with our parents and I had to go back to the compound after a month.

As we got older, and I realized that it wasn't their fault I was a Memory Keeper, I hated them less, and started to blame my parents.  I wondered why they didn't fight to keep me, why my mother had simply given in and given me up so easily.  Didn't they love me?  As a teenager, I skipped the month home three years in a row because I was so angry with them for letting me go.

While my parents were both first-generation Remembrance, I was one of the first Memory Keepers.  Not the first, there were about thirty brought into the program before me, but they were all within a year or two of my age.  We were sort of the first experiment in how to preserve those precious Memories that were locked so deeply within our genes.

The idea was that if they could create an idealistic, stress-free life, with careful monitoring and training to access the Memories, we'd be able to unlock further and further back into our past. And it worked, sort of.  Compared to the Memories that I was unlocking each day, my life was a breeze.  I got to sleep as long as I wanted, though as soon as I woke up, one of the facilitators was there to record my dreams, in case there were any Memories there.  I never went hungry, I was never threatened, I always felt safe, which compared to the Memories I have was heaven on Earth.  I had friends, other Memory Keepers, who understood what I was going through because they were going through the same thing.

It didn't take long, however, for everyone to notice that as different as Memory Keepers were from the rest of the world, I was just as different from the other Memory Keepers.  I could Remember further back than anyone else could.  This was sort of expected; my mother was, after all, the first one to remember the small tribe of pre-humans that became human. Her Memory came by accident; as first-generation Remembrance, she didn't train like I do.  She wasn't subjected to the strict daily routine of eat, play, Remember, Record, eat, play, Learn that I was subjected to.  Her father had been a respected Anthropologist and her mother was a Psychologist, so my mother had access to a vast network of academics who loved to hear her stories about people throughout human history.

As the Remembrance continued and more and more people began to experience Memories, things shifted.  Sometimes for the better, and sometimes not.