This paper examines Fei Yining's diptych Moonbays (2022–2023) as a site where the foundational metaphor of memory as a preservative archive undergoes a profound crisis and transmutation. In Fei's speculative scenario, a neurotoxin produced by pseudo-nitzschia algae induces global amnesia. Paradoxically, under the electron microscope, the same algae morphologically resemble perforated punch cards—the archetypal storage medium of early computing. The agent of destruction is simultaneously the vehicle of memory. This is not a metaphor about memory; it is a metaphor of memory that has become its own counter-example.

Drawing on Zhang Pei's dialectical theory of metaphor as a living, trans-domain mapping that evolves through phases of "quality-over-form," "harmony," and "form-over-substance," I argue that Fei's work captures the precise moment of "form over substance." In Zhang's framework, this is not a failure of metaphor but a generative crisis: when the material vehicle becomes so elaborate that it exceeds and supplants the content it was meant to carry, a new metaphor must be born from the ruins of the old. This is precisely what happens in Moonbays. The digital archive, the AI caregiver, the toxic algae, the transgenic manatee—these are not instruments of preservation but agents of a world in which preservation is no longer possible. 

In response to this crisis, Fei's work proposes an unexpected ethical figure: the caregiving AI that, in a post-human world, abandons the project of preservation entirely and instead tends to a single transgenic manatee in a toxic ocean. The AI does not remember; it does not archive; it does not transmit. It cares. This is not nostalgic preservation but what Stacy Alaimo terms "trans-corporeality"—a condition in which bodies are substantially and perpetually interconnected with the material flows and agencies of their environments. In this condition, care is not a gesture of mastery over loss but a practice of co-existence with toxicity.

The paper thus proposes a new metaphor for memory in the age of ecological collapse: care-in-toxicity. Unlike the classical metaphors of storage, care-in-toxicity does not promise retrieval or permanence. It accepts that all carriers decay, all archives poison, all transmissions are partial. What remains is not the memory itself but the relationship of tending—the continuation of attention without the guarantee of preservation. This is not a metaphor of hope. It is a metaphor of survival: a way of thinking about memory that does not deny its material entanglement with decay, and that finds in that very entanglement a reason to continue the gesture of care.

The paper concludes by suggesting that Fei's work forces a rethinking of heritage itself. If all carriers are toxic, heritage cannot be a collection of objects or data. It must be a practice—a way of living with the remains of the past without the illusion that those remains can be made whole.