{"id":2367,"date":"2022-01-13T12:14:31","date_gmt":"2022-01-13T12:14:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=2367"},"modified":"2022-01-15T12:26:11","modified_gmt":"2022-01-15T12:26:11","slug":"a-mastery-of-german-by-marian-denise-moore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=2367","title":{"rendered":"A Mastery of German by Marian Denise Moore"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A Mastery of German<\/em><\/strong> by Marian Denise Moore (Dominion<\/em>, Volume One, 2020) opens with a woman called Candace being appointed as the project leader of an R&D project called Engram. Her boss tells her to either \u201ckill it or bring it to a conclusion\u201d.
The next part of the story sees Candace learn, from both Helene, the previous project leader, and Dr Walker, the team leader, that the project is about genetic memory:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[Dr Walker] hummed thoughtfully, leaned back in his chair and asked, \u201cWhat do you want to know about Engram?\u201d
\u201cAll I know is that it is some type of research on memory enhancement or memory retrieval. I looked online but the closest that I could find were some studies done around 2010. Some researchers taught rats how to run a maze and then found that their descendants were able to run the same maze without training.\u201d
\u201cDid you find anything else?\u201d
I grimaced. \u201cFive years later, some researchers were saying that the experience of American slavery was passed on to the descendants of the enslaved via the same process.\u201d
\u201cYes,\u201d Dr. Walker said. \u201cThat\u2019s one of the few follow-ups to the research at Emory University.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The rest of the story develops this idea further and (spoiler), when Walker realises that Candace is now his boss (something that she didn\u2019t reveal in their first meeting) he gives her a much more detailed explanation about the project, starting first with parental genetics\u2014haplogroups\u2014and then revealing that his project has made it possible for people to share their memories with those in similar groups. So Candace would be able to share her German language ability with anyone in her (for example) L1b group. Of course, the wider reveal is that the human race is a descendant of one person, L0, so there is the possibility that, with further development, people could share their memories with everyone, and possibly access their ancestors\u2019 memories too.
Wrapped around this plot thread is a lot of characterisation-related material that nicely balances the above (e.g. Candace talks on a couple of occasions with her widowed father, who is doing family tree research but is struggling to track down their black ancestors because of societal conditions at the time, etc.)
Unfortunately, though, all of this just peters out: at the start of the story there is brief section about one of the project\u2019s janitors who is imprinted with Candace\u2019s German skills but, in another short passage at the end of the story, he just wanders off. So the piece ends with the development of a major technological invention that will have profound societal implications, but there is no account of any of the subsequent changes that result. It all feels like we have been served up the opening chapters of a longer novel. Still, it\u2019s probably a worthwhile piece for all that.
*** (Good). 8,400 words.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Mastery of German by Marian Denise Moore (Dominion, Volume One, 2020) opens with a woman called Candace being appointed as the project leader of an R&D project called Engram. Her boss tells her to either \u201ckill it or bring it to a conclusion\u201d.The next part of the story sees Candace learn, from both Helene, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[629],"tags":[296,24,632,631,630,534,7],"class_list":["post-2367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-marian-denise-moore","tag-296","tag-3-2","tag-ancestral-memory","tag-dominion-1","tag-marian-denise-moore","tag-memory-transfer","tag-novelette"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2367"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2367\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2429,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2367\/revisions\/2429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}