But Soobin knew now what the absence of those neural patterns must have meant for these newborns isolated in the lab. It meant that they would miss the milestones their peers out in the world would soon begin to meet, one after the next.
* * *
Let us indulge in a truly bizarre supposition: imagine that, unbeknownst to us, an extraterrestrial species has existed in symbiosis with humanity for millennia. After all, parasitic bacterium had to enter cells before beginning their permanent symbiosis with the host cells, all the while evolving into mitochondria containing its own DNA. In truth, this sort of arrangement is commonplace in nature, where organisms from two different species often live in a close, dependent relationship. Humans, for one, share a symbiotic relationship with a myriad of microbes living inside of us. We don’t consider them invaders. They are already an inalienable part of us.
But what if one of our partners in symbiosis was not native to the planet Earth? What if it had hailed from another planet, tens of thousands of years ago? What if it had settled into our brains to rule over our childhoods and infect us with its ethics? What if the unique qualities we’ve forever believed separated our species from all other beasts of the world were, in fact, not quite so intrinsically human?
“So . . . the traits we’ve prided ourselves for possessing all along are actually alien traits?” the team leader observed as Soobin finished presenting the theory. Among the rest of the team’s members, responses varied. Some gaped at the results, while others rejected the theory point-blank.
“It’s too unorthodox! Nobody would take it seriously,” someone remarked.
“I’m still having a hard time believing it myself,” Hannah conceded, “But how can we deny the data?”
Meanwhile, Soobin was itching with the desire to probe further into the infant brain. If it was true that they had taken up residence in there, shouldn’t we be able to observe them somehow? What might they be composed of? Shouldn’t there be something—anything—that we could measure? Of course, it was unlikely that she would get the chance to satisfy these queries any time soon. Probing the brain of a live subject raised significant ethical issues. Plus, blindly poking around in brain tissue in search of a speculative life-form whose material properties they knew nothing of wasn’t likely to result in any groundbreaking discovery. Most saliently, if they so readily rendered themselves to human inspection in the manner of parasitic organisms, then wouldn’t medicine have already discovered them long ago?
“I’d be shocked if we could observe them. If they had a physical basis we could detect, they would have been discovered ages ago, sometime during the long history of anatomical science,” said the team leader, voiding any half-hope that might have lingered. He was right, Soobin knew, and she nodded in resignation. Still, she would have stared at a sample all day long, if one had been made available for her inspection.
There was no shortage of other queries to mull over yet. Symbiotic coexistence didn’t always involve a mutually beneficial relationship. In some cases, one party benefited while the other was unaffected, and in others, one party actively harmed its partner for a unilateral gain. What was the nature of our symbiosis with them? What did this enigmatic species gain from operating inside a developing human brain? Might they be a carbon-based life-form, like humans were? What could they reap from presumably inculcating ethics and altruism in humans? And why had they chosen us, among all the species of the world?
“I happen to think that they’re space refugees who found a new home in our planet,” Hannah said. Despite the raised eyebrows of her colleagues, she continued, “They repeatedly refer to Ludmila’s Planet as ‘home,’ and we know for a fact it went up in flames a long time ago . . . ”
Ludmila’s Planet. A planet conceived and described in impossible detail by the eponymous artist. The idea that it could have been their home in some ancient eon might just be the clue leading to the truth of their being.
If these beings were so advanced as to manipulate the human species, it stood to reason they ought to have been able to predict their planet’s demise and evacuate in time. After that, while wandering about in space in search of a new home, they had arrived on planet Earth one day . . . and the rest was history.
“Their conversations clearly suggest exquisite intelligence,” said Soobin. “So much so that I have to wonder if a great deal of intricacy isn’t getting lost in translation due to the limitations of our own language. They’re likely a far superior species to humans, or that’s what I think. But then again, they seem entirely reliant on human neural networks. Could it be that they are a species that requires a host in order to actualize their intellect? That might explain why they chose the human species. For all its mystery, the human brain is known to be the most efficient on the planet, and if they’d discovered us tens of thousands of years ago, it is conceivable that the symbiosis triggered the birth of civilizations and the whole cascade of human evolution. Even if it hadn’t been their original intention to enlighten us, their intelligence could have been transferred to us over the long course of symbiosis.”
The room had fallen silent. If the symbiosis was truly as old as human history, there must be ample evidence outside the walls of the lab. In fact, there might be evidence everywhere, hiding in plain sight across human civilization, Soobin supposed.
“What if we ask them directly?” someone suggested.
The same thought had crossed Soobin’s mind, and probably the minds of a few others in the room as well. However, the prospect of actually doing so was dismal. The current research involved children. It was one thing to analyze the raw data collected from children going about their business in their natural environment, but a whole different proposition to attempt to connect with an enigmatic presence supposedly inhabiting their brains. It was anyone’s guess what sort of reward or punishment an attempt like that might provoke, and there was no guarantee that the gesture wouldn’t be perceived as hostile. In fact, how likely was it that they would welcome our sudden interrogation following millennia of unauthorized inhabitation inside of us? Any rash attempt risked inviting irrevocable harm.
“Following that line of thought . . . are we sure that they’ve actually left our brains?” someone asked, apparently bothered by a similar concern.
In the end, this risky proposal was rejected, and Soobin devised a new plan. If they had hailed from Ludmila’s Planet, then exposing them to paintings and simulations of their long-lost home should elicit some very particular responses. The danger it posed to the hosts was zero, as evidenced by the fact that no infants exposed to the breaking news on that day had been harmed by it. If anything, the data to be generated in this experiment ought to help illuminate the mysteries of these beings.
* * *
“It’s as we’ve predicted. The level of neural activity it triggered is . . . off the charts. We can barely keep up with the data stream.”
It was just as Hannah had suggested: when exposed to footage of Ludmila’s Planet, the infants ceased all fidgeting and fussing, their eyes silently tracking the moving landscape in rapt attention. Inside their brains, however, they seemed to be erupting with excitement, in a storm of discussion so lively, complex, and dense with information that its analysis became an unprecedented challenge. There was no doubt they were intimately connected to the Planet.
The question was whether or not to publish these findings yet.
“If we don’t, someone else will. We’re not the only ones pursuing a universal decoder. It’s extremely unlikely that other researchers won’t test it on infants, if they haven’t already,” Hannah said, “Even if people are appalled by the idea that extraterrestrials take up residence in infant brains, I don’t see how the knowledge would change anything anyway. Would it even be possible for us to suddenly evict them?”
“It wouldn’t do us any good,” Soobin said. Looking around the room, she continued, “I’m not alone in thinking that we’re the ones who should be begging them to stay, am I? Wit
hout them, we’d lose everything that we’ve forever believed made humanity unique!”
“Hmm . . . but how strong is our ego, as a species?”
Someone raised an important point, then. “Perhaps it’s hard for us to stomach the idea because we view ourselves as completely distinct from them? Would it make a difference if we found, in adult brains, some remaining vestige of their presence carried forward from childhood?”
If they’d left their fingerprints all over a child’s development while living inside her developing brain, her mature brain might still possess some evidence of the fact. Still, no neural patterns suggestive of them had been observed in an adult brain so far.
“This is just a hunch,” the team leader chimed in, “But they seem quite reluctant to leave the host at childhood’s end. Phrases like, ‘It’s difficult, but the time has come for us to leave,’ have come up more than a few times.”
“Yes, I know,” Soobin concurred. Then, pointing to the chart she’d been looking at, she continued, “Plus, I can’t stop thinking about the timing of their departure. Clearly, seven years of age bears some significance, given that’s when they seem to leave us for good. The data’s consistent. Only children seven years or younger exhibit neural patterns indicating their presence. After that, there’s nothing.”
For it was at the age of seven that, according to the chart, intercranial conversations disappeared completely. It was at this point that children’s neural signals and speech came to mirror each other perfectly, just as with adults. This suggested that they stayed inside human brains from infancy to early childhood before packing up shortly after the seventh birthday.
“I’m wondering if we could connect this to childhood amnesia. Very few of us are able to recall much of what happened during our formative years,” said Hannah. “The established theory holds that rapid development of the hippocampus around this age is responsible for the phenomenon—that a high rate of neurogenesis in the hippocampus somehow destabilizes the existing long-term memory.”
This much was true: by the time a child reaches the age of seven, most of his or her memories of earlier years, autobiographical memories in particular, have faded. Few adults, if any, remember events occurring between infancy and early childhood. Those who claim to are, in fact, most likely to be relying on false memories formed on the basis of what they heard about the event from others.
“But a little while ago, I read an interesting report in a neuroscience journal that disputed this theory,” Hannah continued. “Apparently, some researchers used the newest imaging technology to peer into the brains of kids around the time when childhood amnesia kicks in. What they discovered was that the rate of their neurological development and the degree of amnesia experienced didn’t track at all. There was zero statistical significance.”
Someone looked up the paper online and shared it to the room’s screen.
“The authors vaguely argued for an external cause, though they sounded pretty puzzled themselves. It’s surely a controversial finding that triggered a stream of papers disputing it. But if it’s true that childhood amnesia isn’t caused by rapid neurodevelopment, and that it can actually be attributed to an external factor . . . then what’s the external factor? What is it that’s taking away our memories? I have to wonder . . . ”
“It’s them,” Soobin chipped in. “They take it away with them when they leave us.”
* * *
In terms of their theory, what was most unexpected of all was Ludmila’s role.
She was the only human being who had retained any memory of them beyond early childhood. After all, she had only begun working on her planet series in earnest as an adolescent. This fact seems to suggest they might have remained within her and continued influencing her personality. That the planet had never ceased to be the subject of her art, and that she had been able to furnish exact and scientific detail regarding the planet (including its mass, volume, and so forth) seem to indicate two distinct possibilities: that she had been permitted to continue listening in on their conversations, or that their collective memory had been transferred to her in its entirety when, or if, they left her.
“Perhaps they stayed with each and every human being on Earth, but only Ludmila was let in on the truth of their origin?”
Investigation into Ludmila’s life unearthed nothing but the well-established fact that it had been a lonely one; in stark contrast to her colossal fame as an artist, precious little was known about her as a person.
“She had been an exceptionally creative child. And as creative children often are, she, too, must have been a sensitive soul inclined to introspection—which may have caused her to become aware of their presence early on. They might have taken special care of her, seeing that she really was alone in the world.”
Thus, in the end, it turned out that Ludmila had never once lied about her work after all. From the very beginning of her career as an artist, she had simply transferred to canvas the landscape they’d held up before her, inside her brain. Her mind eventually came to contain the entire planet as they remembered it, far beyond just the fragments of its landscape. In every practical sense, she had visited the planet—through them, with whom she’d shared a brain all her life.
“Ludmila’s memories of the planet may have been enhanced through the act of painting it,” Soobin said. “Motor memory may have boosted her episodic memory of the planet and vice versa, as the two types of memory are distinct, but not entirely separate.”
“Given how they abscond with childhood memories when they take their leave of the host, they seem extremely cautious about revealing themselves to humanity. But then, why risk exposure by encouraging her to recreate the planet through her work?”
“Well, their conversations make it clear that their planet is incredibly dear to them,” Soobin said. “I mean, whose home isn’t?”
To that explanation, nobody offered any objection.
Alien refugees, still mourning the loss of a homeworld that had been pulverized into cosmic dust eons ago . . . perhaps they just wanted for someone in their adoptive planet to carry its memory, even if all the rest lived in blissful ignorance. And they had found that person in Ludmila, who, with her capable hands, was able to resurrect it back to life in all its beauty.
A planet that had existed tens of thousands of years ago.
The team arrived at the ultimate question. What was it that caused people to obsess over Ludmila’s world, a place about which they themselves knew nothing? What was it about her world that moved everyone to tears—why such unexpected melancholy and longing for a place they had never even seen before? Of all the countless simulated worlds created during human history, why was it that Ludmila’s Planet alone had managed to leave such a powerful impression in the minds of people worldwide?
“Because each of us has served as a host to them before,” Hannah said.
And there lies the proof of this proposed symbiosis, Soobin thought to herself. A wholly amorphous memory, flickering at the edge of our consciousness, without ever vanishing completely. It was our vague yearning for those who had shaped us into who we are.
What people yearned for through Ludmila’s mesmerizing work was not the planet itself, but its former inhabitants who had once cared for them.
“That other series. Do you all remember? There’s another series by her,” Soobin said.
“Never Leave Me. It’s not as widely known, but just as beautiful, if you ask me.”
“Yes. That’s the one.”
It occurred to Soobin that the series, which remained largely indecipherable, might hold the key to Ludmila’s veiled interior.
“Perhaps it was Ludmila’s plea?”
“Plea?”
“Ludmila had become aware of their presence, and . . . ”
Without warning, a wave of emotion crashed over Soobin in that moment.
“It was her plea to them. Its title, and the infinite tenderness, sorrow, and loneliness that it stirs in people . . . L
udmila had lived her life in perpetual solitude. Their companionship must’ve meant everything to her: they were her only friends, family, and colleagues.”
She had been begging them not to leave her. Not to take away from her their world and its splendor. Please, oh, please, to stay with her forever.
“So they stayed,” Hannah mumbled to herself. Her voice was the only sound in the room, where every occupant was presently picturing the same place in their minds: that planet, awash in its mystical blue glow. Ludmila’s Planet. The ancient home of the unknowable beings, our partners in symbiosis for all these tens of thousands of years. In that moment, Soobin found herself seized by a wholly unexpected sense of grace. It felt somehow like a longing . . . for someone she’d never met before.
Originally published in Korean in Crossroads, January 2019.
Published with the support of Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea).
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