Upgraded by Peter Watts, Greg Egan, Ken Liu, Robert Reed, Elizabeth Bear, Madeline Ashby, E. Lily Yu

really did want to help me—otherwise he wouldn’t have bothered asking. I hesitated, and then said, “Abuse.”
    He glanced at me and wrote something down in his notebook. I thought: I’m so not good at lying.
    In the end, I accepted his proposal: since eliminating all memories having to do with the abuse would have left me with nothing, leaching the emotions from those memories would work much better.
    “Every memory would seem like a scene from a TV show,” the doctor said. “And you’ve turned the volume way, way down.”
    I suddenly found him attractive.
    We dated for a while, until he—like the others—left me because he could stand me no more. Most of the time we were together, I said nothing. Like other men, he tried to please me in various ways: trying to figure out why I was feeling low, plying me with good food, surprise presents, trips, music, sex, but nothing was particularly effective. Instead, I grew contemptuous of his apparent stupidity and excessive solicitousness and responded with manipulative gestures, such as suddenly cutting off all contact with him. When I imagined him almost driven to madness by my antics, my mood lifted—even I couldn’t explain why.
    “You’re sick,” he finally said.
    “You should have known that already,” I retorted.
    “But those memories have already been tuned!”
    “What you erased was only the shadow.”
    After the procedure, I could recall the time my mother and I spent together without becoming emotional, but my own life had become a bad copy of a flawed original. An irresistible force compelled me in her direction, to start down some fated path, towards self-destruction. I tried everything: psychotherapy, yoga, mystical Buddhism, vegetarianism, anti-depression medication, family systems therapy . . . nothing worked.
    I felt myself connected to my mother in some way that surpassed time and space. Or maybe it was what he said: epigenetic memory.
    The theory holds that stress from childhoods spent under the care of irresponsible, cold, short-tempered parents could increase the amount of DNA methylation experienced by children. Many important genes responsible for neural communications, brain development and functioning would then not express normally, resulting in difficulties for these children in perceiving and expressing love, substituting fear and desperation in its place.
    Worst of all, such damage is heritable.
    As I grew older, my friends got married and became parents, but I felt myself pulled away from this well-trodden path. I knew what that force was: I was afraid that I might become another nightmarish mother; I was afraid that my children would be like me. I might die, but the curse would be passed on, generation after generation.
    My mother contacted me through my friends. She was sick, and wanted to see me.
    I told her I didn’t want to see her.
    After a period of silence, I received another message. If you change your mind, you can find me here.
    I looked at the address. Resisting it was like resisting gravity.
    “I’m using Angelica oil this time. It can reduce tension and relieve stress-induced migraines and anxiety.” Doctor Qing’s voice drifted down to me from above. “But remember not to expose yourself to too much sun afterwards. Some of the components are light-sensitive.”
    I mumbled an acknowledgment, too focused on the feeling of her hands roaming about my neck and head. This was my fourth time here. Now that Doctor Qing and I knew each other better, there was a kind of doctor-patient trust between us. She was professional, experienced, and able to intuit meaning from my body’s slightest responses. I hadn’t told her about my mother yet; the right opportunity hadn’t arisen.
    Lulled by that grassy, slightly acrid scent, I again sank into semi-consciousness. My body floated, drifting along the ground. I couldn’t control the speed, altitude, or direction. Like a passenger on a rollercoaster, all I could do was to