One day, at about 6:07 Eastern Standard Time, everybody forgot everything.
          Sex was forever changed. Hangups and prohibitions all gone, all the most basic biological urges were indulged. The proportions of every individual’s desires were exuberantly measured and explored. Pornography! New heights of inventiveness! A sociosexual experiment on a global scale, if only there had been a scientist around to witness it.
          The first new children tended to die in huge numbers. Then people looked for ways to get serious. Instructional images and crude diagrams were shared on the rudimentary communication channels. To offer a feeding breast was simple enough and demanded nothing from memory. To clean a child, though: How frequently, how thoroughly? Rashes, flushes, textures on skin strange and discolored. To introduce new food was an exercise in fear. Lists circulated widely and were corrected and refined. To encourage a child to walk was not so hard for these people, who had done many similar things themselves, and speech itself—the crude and contradictory things that these people understood as speech—was picked up with relative ease by the fresh tiny plastic brains.
          Language, of a sort, formed along the Earth. Parents were learning almost as much, daily, as their offspring. How does this word sound? To what object in space does it refer? We connect these sounds together in a certain order, or another order, or another, like bodies we grope for in the dark. Sometimes, at the park, next to the swings and slides in the autumn noonlight, it seemed like every family, chatting holding their coffees and teas and hot drinks of every nature, smiling (though they didn’t know about the resemblance) their primate smiles, each had their own clannish answers to these questions.
          Some years later now, the offspring grew biologically old enough to have offspring of their own. Now there were strictures, now there were taboos. Parental laws, hangups and shan’ts. These kids never knew (though they were born with the gift of fresh memory), how good their parents had it, and the parents remembered this very well, when they had awoken that morning or evening, or had erupted wide awake in the middle of the afternoon from the all-consuming blank that had devoured their past, and discovered all around them now an entire earthly globe of desiring flesh and wills, and no one standing around, nobody at all, to tell them no to anything.
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