A Very Old Song — Part Three
By Wen Yu
Old Yu’s condition deteriorated. Initially, Ming noticed that he was forgetting things often. After a few months, he began having difficulty finding the right words. Last week, he even forgot his way home from grocery shopping. Ming took him to see a doctor.
“It is Alzheimer's. It might be related to a gene called APOE-e4,” said the doctor. “For now, we can slow down its progress, but we do not have an effective treatment to reverse it.”
As if an eraser was rubbing, Old Yu’s memory faded. He forgot his computer password and his home address. He forgot Ming’s name.
Ming had wondered in many sleepless nights: He composes wonderful music, but why would He design the human body with so many painful diseases? Why must all memories, good and bad, be lost? Why start when it's all going to end?
Sitting by her father's bed one night, Ming watched as he slept, the clock ticking on the wall. She walked to her room, opened a cardboard box and took out a square metal device. A black hat was connected to the metal box through a wire: it was a portable EEG recorder. She had taken it from her lab.
Gently, she put the hat on her father’s head and turned on the recorder. The screen lit up, and a waveform appeared. Spikes emerged from time to time as waves jumped on the calm sea.
What was he dreaming about? Childhood games? Old friends? Grandma’s nursery rhythms?
If a piano rusts, why can’t the melody be preserved? If a computer breaks down, why can’t the data be backed up? If a book falls apart, why can’t the poems inside it continue to exist?
It should be possible. It must be possible.
She pressed the “record” button on the screen. The melody of memory, turned into a stream of zeros and ones, was written into the micro-SD card.
Wen Yu is an engineer by day. He hated writing when he grew up in China. But for reasons not clear to him, he started writing science fiction recently. He is curious to see where this inexplicable mid-life passion will lead him.
Copyright © 2025 Wen Yu
This is heart wrenching