In the spring of 2080, filled with the scent of data, I touched the memory chip at the back of my neck, watching my mother’s virtual projection spin in a field of dandelions. Her skirt lifted countless glowing binary codes, a “perfect memory” generated by the chip based on her images from life—yet the real mother would intentionally blow the fluff into my neck while blowing dandelions, laughing like a child who had stolen honey.
This is the fifth year since the widespread use of the “Symbiotic Chip” developed by my father, where everyone has a chip implanted at birth, converting important memories into shareable digital particles. After my mother passed away, I locked her smile in the chip, allowing me to see her anytime on the holographic screen. But my father kept staring blankly at the chip’s instructions, which stated: “Over-reliance on virtual memories will gradually blur real memories.”
At first, I didn’t believe it. Until that day when I found my mother’s notebook in the old house, the yellowed pages illustrated with crooked dandelions, next to which was written: “Daughter blew dandelions for the first time, inhaling seeds into her nose, tearfully saying, ‘Mom, spring has gone into my nose.'” But the memories in the chip only showed perfect slow-motion scenes, lacking the image of me sneezing or the sound of my mother laughing until her belly hurt.
Even more frightening was when my father began to forget my mother’s habit of adding an extra half spoon of sauce when cooking noodles. He said, “The chip has a record, no need to think.” Until one stormy night, his chip suddenly malfunctioned, and my father, holding his head and crying, asked me, “Your mother… when she wore her wedding dress, did she have dandelions in her hair?” At that moment, I realized my father had become overly reliant on the chip.
I took my father back to the real dandelion field. The May wind carried the scent of grass, and real dandelion seeds, covered in morning dew, fell into our hair. My father squatted down and blew on a dandelion, the seeds tumbling and flying into the sky, some sticking to his glasses. “That’s right!” he suddenly laughed, “Your mother always said dandelions are flying stars. That year she tricked you into thinking that swallowing the seeds would grow wings, and you waited on the balcony for three days.”
Science once gave us wings, allowing memories to be permanently preserved and replayed at any time. But we forgot that real seeds need the wind and rain, and real memories require the warmth of forgetting and remembering.
The chip was put away in a drawer, but the dandelions outside continued to fly. They carried imperfect fluff, flying towards the sunlight and the stormy distance—just like our memories, filled with laughter and tears, forever flying freely in the real passage of time.
Excerpt from Class 6, 2019 <With the Wings of Science>