Hypermnesia Dilemma

Outside the window, it was dim and gloomy. Snow had fallen at some point during the night, leaving a silver-white blanket draped over the bare branches of the oak trees.

He tossed his phone onto the nightstand, endured a splitting headache, and sat up on the bed. Propping a pillow behind his back against the wall, he gently rubbed his temples to ease the throbbing pain.

For those who suffer from it, hyperthymesia is usually more of a curse than a blessing.

This was especially true for Huang Xiuyuan. Countless irrelevant memories were crudely and chaotically piled up in his brain, and he often found himself involuntarily lost in recollection.

For instance, when he needed to recall information for an exam, his mind would instead pull up memories of playing in the mud at age five or eating watermelon at age eight. It was nothing short of a disaster.

And this condition would haunt a hyperthymesia patient for their entire life, never ceasing until death.

During elementary and middle school, Huang Xiuyuan was called a prodigy by those around him precisely because of his hyperthymesia.

At first, because he was young, the side effects of the condition weren't very obvious. But after graduating from high school and entering university, the related side effects began to manifest clearly.

Domestic research in this field was relatively behind that of Western countries.

After completing his three-year undergraduate degree at Harbin Institute of Technology, he applied for studies abroad at his own expense. He enrolled as a graduate student at Harvard University, and it was only after arriving there and reading various papers and library materials that Huang Xiuyuan realized he suffered from hyperthymesia.

His graduate advisor at Harvard, Mark Benjamin, had evaluated him as: an ordinary person with nothing but a good memory.

This indicated that Huang Xiuyuan was not a genius, but just an average person. Due to the impact of his hyperthymesia, he would only become more mediocre as time passed, all while suffering from the torment of mental health issues.

As soon as he calmed down, the jumbled mess of memories in his mind surfaced all at once, like a chaotic dance of demons.

At this moment, there was a glimmer of light outside the window. He glanced at his watch; the time was frozen at 6:53.

Dawn had arrived, and the sun in the east was slowly rising.

Despite tossing and turning for most of the night, Huang Xiuyuan didn't feel a shred of sleepiness. He now needed to solve a problem—the problem of his hyperthymesia.

In fact, the issue of hyperthymesia could be divided into three parts: uncontrollable memory, an overwhelming volume of information, and the inability to forget.

In this era, it was indeed an incurable and difficult condition, but in the future, it would no longer be a challenge.

In the future, hyperthymesia is also known as "Brain Cell Evolutionary Defect Syndrome." It refers to a small portion of humanity that, due to genetic mutations, has evolved hyperthymesia gene links within the genes related to brain cells.

Originally, this was a good thing, but the human genome is a unified whole; one could say that pulling a single hair affects the entire body.

Because of the appearance of the hyperthymesia gene links, brain cells gained the ability to never forget, but the "supporting infrastructure" for these gene links had not kept up.

The memory-erasing gene links and memory-regulating gene links that originally existed in the human genetic sequence were suppressed by the hyperthymesia gene links, making it difficult to keep this "super gene" in check.

If these related genes could be perfected, the side effects of hyperthymesia could be fundamentally avoided while perfectly retaining the ability of hyperthymesia.

However, Huang Xiuyuan knew clearly that with the current level of genetic engineering, wanting to engage in genetic evolution was nothing but a pipe dream; one wrong move and he could lose his life.

In fact, even in the future at the end of his memories, no practical genetic evolution technology had been developed.

Although there was no way to cure the root cause, there were quite a few ways to treat the symptoms.

Enduring the chaotic memories, he walked to the computer desk, opened his laptop, and his fingers danced across the keyboard.

He was searching for something on the internet. Among the thousands of threads of memory, he found the first-generation treatment drugs—and they were readily available, known substances.

On the official websites of several chemical reagent companies, he found the drugs he needed. Many chemical reagent companies sold these, and three of them had sales outlets in Cambridge.

He could have ordered them on their websites, and they would have been mailed to Harvard University.

But the moment he thought about the agonizingly slow speed of American couriers, he dismissed the idea of ordering online; going in person would be much faster.

Huang Xiuyuan confirmed the locations of the three sales outlets and found the nearest one. He checked the time; it was only 7:34.

He went to the bathroom, took off his sweat-soaked clothes, and took a hot shower. After brushing his teeth and washing his face, he felt a bit more refreshed. He changed into clean clothes and put on a down jacket.

He stuffed his dirty clothes into a laundry bag, grabbed a laundry pod, and carried the bag to the communal laundry room in the basement of the dormitory.

The washing machines in the communal laundry room could be used by inserting 25-cent coins, and the dryers nearby were free.

After drying his clothes, Huang Xiuyuan brought them back to his room and then grabbed his phone and wallet.

Because of the holiday, the area around the graduate dormitory building seemed deserted, and he only occasionally encountered a lone international student.

Huang Xiuyuan had a somewhat reclusive personality, and his few close friends had mostly returned home or to their home countries.

He walked out of the Harvard University gate, hailed a taxi, and headed straight for his destination.

When he arrived at the nearest chemical reagent sales outlet, the time had already reached 9:22. In the biting cold wind, the shop remained tightly shut.

He wasn't surprised by this; Uncle Sam had his own national conditions. Some shops usually opened around 10:00 AM, though there were also 24-hour convenience stores and fast-food joints.

Taking advantage of the spare time, he went to a McDonald's to buy a burger and a cup of hot milk, eating while waiting for the chemical reagent shop to open.

After finishing the burger, he strolled for about a kilometer. By the time it was nearly 10:30 AM, an employee at the chemical reagent shop finally yawned and lazily pulled up the rolling shutter.

The middle-aged white man with a thick beard saw the figure walking over and greeted him with a smile:

"Hello! Good morning, buddy."

He glanced at the man and spoke directly, handing over a slip of paper: "I need these things."

"Oh, this damn weather, the ground is like the toilet at Andrew's house, it's really terrible." The bearded man took the note while muttering incoherently.

"Glucose, Vitamin B3, Sodium Chloride, distilled water—these are all fine."

"Clonidine Hydrochloride, this one seems..." The somewhat puzzled bearded man turned his head and asked another young white man: "Little Dodge, is there a restriction on Clonidine Hydrochloride?"

Dodge, who was checking the storage status of various reagents, replied: "I need to check."

After saying this, he trotted over to the workstation computer and entered the name Clonidine Hydrochloride.

"Little Dodge, look up GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid) while you're at it."

"OK."

A moment later, Dodge looked up, rubbing his hands together as he said, "There are no sales restrictions on GABA, but Clonidine Hydrochloride is a prescription drug. May I ask what it's being used for?"

The last sentence was directed at Huang Xiuyuan.

He calmly pulled out his student ID: "This is my student ID; I intend to use it for experiments."

The bearded man glanced at the student ID: "Oh? Harvard? OK."

Half an hour later, over a dozen chemical reagents and pieces of glassware were packed up, and after paying directly, he returned to his dormitory immediately.

He did not choose the school's simple chemistry lab because it was inconvenient, and since he only needed to blend the drug components rather than conduct complex chemical reactions, he could do it just as well in his dorm.