You are listening to a Clarksworld magazine podcast with your host and narrator Kate Baker.

Greetings Clarksville Citizens. I hope this podcast finds you extraordinarily well.

This is our final story for the month of December 2019, issue 159.

Again, as we close out this year, I wanted to say thank you to each and every one of you who has written me, who has sent out a tweet, and who have subscribed, or supported us via Patreon.com forward slash Clark's World.

I love being able to narrate these stories for you each and every month,

and with your support, it ensures that we're able to do that long into the future and into the next decade.

So our last story is titled Symbiosis Theory and is by Choyop Kim, translated by Jungmeen-Lee Comfort.

Schoyop Kim is an award-winning Korean science fiction author

with a background in biochemistry.

She enjoys converting intangible ideas such as memory, emotion, minds, and

relations into tangible items. She wants to write about the abstract components of life in a specifically scientific language while discovering new questions in the process.

So, my dear listeners, I hope you can sit back, relax, and let me tell you a story. Ludmila Markov had memories of a place she'd never been.

It was unclear when those memories established themselves inside her.

The memoir of one of her teachers at the orphanage, where she'd spent her early years,

contained the following recollection.

Somewhere around five years. the following recollection.

Somewhere around five years of age she began saying that she'd come from that place.

We didn't think much of it since pretend play in talking about imaginary things are common behaviors among normally developing children.

However, Ludmila seemed somewhat obsessed with her make-believe world. Whenever any of us

playfully challenged its existence, she became very upset. As a result, an

unspoken rule developed regarding Ludmilla, that one ought to just go ahead and play along with her.

As long as we did that, there was never any problem.

...