The year is 2090, and a young boy named Seth happens to find his American History textbook sitting in the corner. He flips to page 217. It is finally sixth grade after a long, hot summer, and he has nothing better to do than to occupy himself with his assigned homework. He takes his daily assigned dose of concentration medications delivered in the daily mail to everyone on his street. The chapter is about social media and its implications circa 2020. Boring.

He reads about an ancient artifact known as "the meme." His mother had frequently warned him to stay away from memes, returning his questions and curiosities with a shudder and shake of her head.

“I never want to hear you talk about that again, okay, Seth? Go to your room and finish your independent study about Planet Thirteen,” she commanded.

He never did, though. Planet Thirteen was a lie. Everything was.

“An element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by non-genetic means, especially imitation,” reads the textbook definition.

Non-genetically passed on? An element? A system? Hmm. Sounds scientific.

The next day at school, Seth skips recess and instead decides to attend office hours with his teacher about what he had read. At first, Mr. Jeffries was reluctant to satisfy the young student's curiosity. Never before had a student asked about this element of culture, and the teacher was nearing his seventy-first year.

“There was a pastime, long ago, that students of yesteryear used to occupy themselves with. The process of tagging friends in memes. In your biology class, young Seth, you’ve learned about fluorescent tagging and solubilization tags with proteins,” Mr. Jeffries begins. “This is not unlike that."

"Tagging?" inquired Seth.

"Yes. Tagging. If you want to tag a protein for degradation, use ubiquitination. If you want to, I guess, degrade your friends in the sense that they 'can't even' or are 'dead' from laughter, tag them in a meme," explained Mr. Jeffries.

It is this sudden bestowment of knowledge upon him that inspires Seth to pursue his own form of independent research. A social experiment, if you will. The town library had been shut down five years ago in an attempt to funnel more funds into the military, but the town had been too lazy to actually get rid of the building or the books in it. So on Friday, April 13th at 9:00 p.m., young Seth snuck in through the window of the abandoned library and decided to do some heavy reading into the wee hours of the night.

There was a rich array of books on social media and technology, to the point where piles of books were enveloping him, nearly overwhelming his mind. He kept searching and perusing, but he was eventually struck with the sudden realization that despite all of these readings about internet accounts and social networks, there was not a single written word about the meme. Insanity. Was this merely an unfortunate failure to find the book he was looking for? Or was it something bigger? Was the meme a forgotten aspect of society? Did the human race want to erase it from history, thus censoring any semblance of storytelling about it?

Something had to be done about this. His curiosity could not be stifled. Over the course of the next few months, he conducts investigative interviews, deep research in the undercurrents of the internet graveyard Reddit, and travels to different cities in pursuit of specific knowledge.

Soon enough, he acquires enough information to publish a fifty-seven-page thesis on the nature of the meme and its implications over the course of history. They tried to stop him. He incurred opposition along the way. It was something that they thought history could erase. But nevertheless, he persisted.

The premise was simple: he wanted to know how the world works. And did he? Yes. He learned a lot. He learned that the meme was something that captured the essence of feelings themselves. It united society in a shared sense of struggle and hopelessness. It romanticized sarcasm and puns. It induced laughter and a subtle understanding between groups of people. It made everyone feel a little less alone. For elucidating a once forgotten element of daily life and for unearthing the once vital power of the meme, Seth went down in history as one of the greatest authors and researchers of his time.

The whole situation begs the question: how will future generations view the meme? Will creative humor still be respected? Will we pass on an understanding of the concept of tagging? Only time will tell.