Martin L. Shoemaker is the author of debut science fiction novel Today I Am Carey. This story is set in the world of that book. “Today I Am Paul,” the story from which the novel developed, received the Washington Science Fiction Society's Small Press Award, and was nominated for a Nebula Award. It has been reprinted in multiple year's best anthologies and has been translated into eight languages. His novelette “Racing to Mars” received the Analog Analytical Laboratory Award. Shoemaker’s other stories have appeared in Analog, Writers of the Future Volume 31, and elsewhere, including Baen anthologies The Year's Best Military and Adventure SF, Volume 4, and Man-Kzin Wars XV. Shoemaker lives in Michigan.

Today I remember. I hate days like this.

But the show must go on. What would old Greasy Pete think if I sat around wallowing in my memory? Memory’s a gift. The reason why I got the damn implant.

But it’s experimental, they say. It only does so much, and some days it doesn't do much at all. Some days I forget more than I remember. Forget . . . what I've lost.

But good day or bad, you gotta do your act, Pete says in my head. That I almost never forget, not even before the implant. The doctors can never explain why some memories are stronger than others, even on the bad days. They say it’s just part of how things are stored, whatever the hell that means.

And they also said it was getting worse, that I was forgetting more and more. And that the implant might help with that. They said that without it, I was going to lose . . . everything. All the older memories, everything I'd grown up with. I was going to lose Pete. Lose . . . Eric, and Anna. Lose the show.

Dan Koboldt is a genetics researcher at a major children's hospital. In the last fifteen years, he has published more than seventy papers in Nature, Science, The New England Journal of Medicine, and other scientific journals. He is the author of the Gateways to Alissia series with Harper Voyager, and the editor of Putting the Science in Fiction, a collection of expert-written advice published by Writer's Digest. Kobolt’s previous articles for Baen.com include “Chimeras: Science and /Science Ficiton,” and “Dark Matter of the Human Genome.”

Disclaimer: This article is for entertainment purposes, and should not be considered medical advice. Also, it discusses primarily the science, and does not attempt to address relevant ethical, social, cultural or political issues in depth.

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Recent years have seen a rapid acceleration of the discovery of exoplanets—planets that reside outside of our solar system. Though most of the planetary bodies discovered so far are not suitable for human life, it's only a matter of time until we find some that are. The challenge, of course, is that space is pretty huge. Beyond our solar system, the closest star (Proxima Centauri) lies 4.243 light years away. The fastest man-made spacecraft yet recorded (Helios 2, an unmanned probe that reached a speed of just over 157,000 miles per hour) would realistically require 19,000 years to make the journey.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that we can send a nuclear rocket at one percent of the speed of light, and make the trip in about 424 years. That's around seventeen generations. Once the ship arrives, the descendants of those brave travelers will be expected to colonize the new world. Yet there would only be room for so many individuals on board the ship, which raises the question: who should we send?

Baen Books announces the sixth annual Baen Fantasy Adventure Award contest, a short story contest for best original unpublished fantasy short story of eight thousand words or less.

The awards will be given out at Spikecon in Layton, Utah this July. Visit https://www.baen.com/contest-faa for more information.

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