Recursion

by Blake Crouch

The surrounding skyscrapers of the Upper West Side look mystical in their luminous shrouds of fog. The noise of the city is loud and close—car horns ricocheting between the buildings and distant ambulances racing toward some other tragedy. The pinnacle of the Poe Building is less than fifty feet above—a crown of glass and steel and gothic masonry.

“What does what feel like?” “Your false memories of this Vermont life.” “I don’t just remember my wedding. I remember the fight over the design for the cake. I remember the smallest details of our home. Our son. Every moment of his birth. His laugh. The birthmark on his left cheek. His first day of school and how he didn’t want me to leave him. But when I try to picture Sam, he’s in black and white. There’s no color in his eyes. I tell myself they were blue. I only see black.

I don’t just remember my husband. I remember the smell of his breath in the morning when he rolled over and faced me in bed. How every time he got up before I did to brush his teeth, I knew he’d come back to bed and try to have sex. That’s the stuff that kills me. The tiniest, perfect details that make me know it happened.”

Four hours later, deep in the neuroscience building in Palo Alto, Helena is examining the image of a mouse’s memory of being afraid—fluorescently illuminated neurons interconnected by a spiderweb of synapses—when the stranger appears in her office doorway.

“OK,” she says, and it suddenly dawns on her that this man is bearing witness to the hoarder’s dream that is her office—windowless, cramped, painted-over cinder-block walls, everything only made more claustrophobic by the bankers’ boxes stacked three feet high and two deep around her desk, filled with thousands of abstracts and articles. “Sorry about the mess. Let me get you a chair.”

Jee-woon drags a folding chair over and takes a seat across from her, his eyes passing over the walls, which are nearly covered in high-resolution images of mouse memories and the neuronal firings of dementia and Alzheimer’s patients.

Sometimes, late in the night, he imagines elaborate conversations with Julia. Exchanges where he says everything that has been festering all these years in his heart—the pain, the anger, the love—and then listens as she does the same. A clearing of air to the point where he finally understands her and she understands him.

Intriguing

He has made peace with the idea that part of life is facing your failures, and sometimes those failures are people you once loved.

Beautiful but also crushing to experience. Like a secret window into the person he used to know.

He tries to push the idea out of his mind that it’s Meghan, somehow haunting him on today of all days. It’s a stupid notion, of course, but the thought persists. Like the time a robin followed him for eight blocks in NoHo. Or on a recent walk with his dog in Fort Washington Park, when a ladybug kept landing on his wrist.

The truth is he does it constantly. He is always looking back, living more in memories than the present, often altering them to make them prettier. To make them perfect.

Life is nothing how he expected it would be when he was young and living under the delusion that things could be controlled. Nothing can be controlled. Only endured.

Thought he would never get over her. He would often dream of her and wake to the ache of her absence eating him alive. The dreams cut him deeply—half memory, half fantasy—because in them, she felt like the Julia of old. The smile. The unhesitating laugh. The lightness of being. She was the person who stole his heart again. All through the following morning, she’d be on his mind, the totality of that loss staring him down, unblinking, until the emotional hangover of the dream finally released its hold on him like a slowly lifting fog.

Cigarette in the rain

They met and bonded during a bank robbery turned hostage situation a few years back. The next Christmas, they hooked up in one of the more embarrassing moments of Barry’s existence.

What?!!?

It is the lonely hour of the night, one with which he is all too familiar—when the city sleeps but you don’t, and all the regrets of your life rage in your mind with an unbearable intensity.

Real

“What’s more precious than our memories?” he asks. “They define us and form our identities.”

She says, “Just so you know, my primary goal is to help people. I want to find a way to save memories for deteriorating brains that can no longer retrieve them. A time capsule for core memories.” “I hear that. Can you think of any reason this can’t be both a philanthropic and commercial endeavor?”

The fine line between the fulfillment of altruistic endeavors and profitable ventures

Work is the only thing that makes her feel alive, and she’s wondered, on more than one occasion, if that means she’s broken.

“I think balance is for people who don’t know why they’re here.” She considers that. In high school, in college, she was encouraged again and again to find her passion—a reason to get out of bed and breathe. In her experience, few people ever found that raison d’être. What teachers and professors never told her was about the dark side of finding your purpose. The part where it consumes you. Where it becomes a destroyer of relationships and happiness. And still, she wouldn’t trade it. This is the only person she knows how to be.

Relatable

Anything she needs, she gets. There are no bills to pay, no relationships to maintain. Nothing to do but single-mindedly pursue her research.

Helena is leading the group tackling the main problem, which also happens to be her area of specialization—tagging and cataloging the neuron clusters connected to a particular memory, and then reconstructing a digital model of the brain that allows them to track memories and map them out.

The sun is plunging into the ocean, turning the clouds and the sea into shades of gray and pink she has never seen before, and she’s sitting on the edge of the platform, westward-facing, her legs swinging out over the water.

The MEG microscope is nearly finished, and the reactivation apparatus has progressed as far as it can while everyone waits for mapping to get their arms around the cataloging problem. Helena is frustrated with the delay. Over dinner with Slade in his palatial suite, she levels with him—the team is failing because their obstacle is a brute-force problem. Since they’re scaling up from mice brains to human brains, the computing power they’re working with is insufficient to map something as prodigiously complex as human memory structure. Unless she can figure out a shortcut, they simply don’t have the CPU cycles to handle it.

He smiles, and something about the way he studies her across the table leaves her with the unnerving sense that he knows more about her than she should be comfortable with. Her past. Her psychology. What makes her tick. But she can hardly blame him if in fact he has peeled back some of the layers. He’s investing years and millions in her mind.

Wow

Wednesday evenings have become designated party nights in an attempt to develop some level of workplace camaraderie. It’s a challenge for Helena, a hardcore introvert who, until recently, has led the life of a solitary scientist. They play paintball, volleyball, and basketball on the platform. Grill out by the pool and tap kegs of shipped-in beer. They blast music and get drunk. Sometimes they even dance. The courts and grilling area are enclosed by tall panels of glass to cut the near-constant barrage of wind. But even with the barriers, they often have to shout to be heard.

An introvert's worst nightmare

“Because memory…is everything. Physically speaking, a memory is nothing but a specific combination of neurons firing together—a symphony of neural activity. But in actuality, it’s the filter between us and reality. You think you’re tasting this wine, hearing the words I’m saying, in the present, but there’s no such thing. The neural impulses from your taste buds and your ears get transmitted to your brain, which processes them and dumps them into working memory—so by the time you know you’re experiencing something, it’s already in the past. Already a memory.” Helena leans forward, snaps her fingers. “Just what your brain does to interpret a simple stimulus like that is incredible. The visual and auditory information arrive at your eyes and ears at different speeds, and then are processed by your brain at different speeds. Your brain waits for the slowest bit of stimulus to be processed, then reorders the neural inputs correctly, and lets you experience them together, as a simultaneous event—about half a second after what actually happened. We think we’re perceiving the world directly and immediately, but everything we experience is this carefully edited, tape-delayed reconstruction.”

We are technically living in the last, as it takes a couple of seconds to process every interval of our existence

Slade asks, “What about flashbulb memories? The super-vivid ones imbued with extreme personal significance and emotion?” “Right. That gets at another illusion. The paradox of the specious present. What we think of as the ‘present’ isn’t actually a moment. It’s a stretch of recent time—an arbitrary one. The last two or three seconds, usually. But dump a load of adrenaline into your system, get the amygdala to rev up, and you create that hyper-vivid memory, where time seems to slow down, or stop entirely. If you change the way your brain processes an event, you change the duration of the ‘now.’ You actually change the point at which the present becomes the past. It’s yet another way that the concept of the present is just an illusion, made out of memories and constructed by our brain.”

Helena sits back, embarrassed by her enthusiasm, suddenly feeling the wine going to her head. “Which is why memory,” she says. “Why neuroscience.” She taps her temple. “If you want to understand the world, you have to start by understanding—truly understanding—how we experience it.”

But the chair is a thing. Something she can touch. The physical manifestation of the goal she has been driving toward for ten long years,

How does one define a “simple” memory anyway? Is there even such a thing when it comes to the human condition?

Perhaps none?

It’s a mere flicker of thought in her mind that will one day be cast out into that wasteland of oblivion where forgotten memories die. And yet it contains the smell of the sea. The white, wet feathers of the bird glistening in the early sun. The pounding of her heart from the exertion of the run. The cold slide of sweat down her sides and the burn of it in her eyes. Her wondering in that moment where the bird considered home in the unending sameness of the sea.

When every memory contains a universe, what does ...

While he can’t begin to guess why, he is certain of one thing—Joe Behrman is lying.

Joe doesn’t respond, doesn’t get up, doesn’t even look at Barry. He’s holding his hands in his lap—to stop them from trembling, Barry knows—and staring intently into the fire.

His eyes are too alert, and the bulge beneath his leather jacket suggests a shoulder holster. He has the concealed intensity of a cop or a soldier—eyes never still, always darting, always processing, even though his head never moves. It’s conditioning you can’t unlearn.

When he tries to look these alternate memories squarely in the eye, he finds that they carry a different feel from any memory he’s ever known. They’re lifeless and static, draped in hues of black and gray, just as Ann Voss Peters described.

There are so few things in our existence we can count on to give us the sense of permanence, of the ground beneath our feet. People fail us. Our bodies fail us. We fail ourselves. He’s experienced all of that. But what do you cling to, moment to moment, if memories can simply change. What, then, is real? And if the answer is nothing, where does that leave us?

The rain striking his hands is turning to slush, his fingers are freezing, but he wants them that way. The cold is the only thing keeping him tethered to reality.

“I don’t disagree that it’s a more intense experience than remembering something on my own, but it isn’t nearly as dynamic as I’d hoped.”

Never enough?

“I love your passion, and I want to destroy this disease too. But first, I want: Immersive platform for projection of long-term, explicit, episodic memories.” The exact title of her dream patent application from years ago, the one she hasn’t filed yet. “How’d you know about my patent?”

Sketchy

Buried deep inside our brain is a rice-size gland called the pineal, which plays a role in the creation of a chemical called dimethyltriptamine, or DMT. You’ve heard of it?” “It’s one of the most potent psychedelics known to man.”

So we're going there?

She watches him go. Before, it was always just far enough below the surface of consciousness to ignore. Now it’s staring her in the face. She doesn’t know how, but Slade knows things he shouldn’t, that he couldn’t possibly—the full details of her vision for memory projection, right down to the name of the patent application she would’ve one day filed.

Even more alarming, the way Slade drops these little hints, it’s almost like he wants her to know that he knows things he shouldn’t. Like he wants her to be worried about the scope of his power and knowledge. It occurs to her that, if this friction continues, a day may come when Slade revokes her access to the memory platform. Perhaps she can persuade Raj to build her a clandestine, secondary user account just in case.

“You have to understand, I never thought anyone would find out. They promised me it would never happen.”

Taking a breath, he tells himself—You are Barry Sutton. You are on a train from Montauk to New York City. Your past is your past. It cannot change. What is real is this moment. The train. The coldness of the window glass. The rain streaking across the other side of it. And you. There is a logical explanation for your false memories, for whatever happened to Joe and Ann Voss Peters. To all of it. It’s just a puzzle to be solved. And you are very good at solving puzzles.

A man Barry has never seen before is seated on a stool beside him. He has a long, wild beard, stark blue eyes that radiate intelligence, and an uncomfortable intensity.

The last two members of Infrastructure left yesterday, before the storm’s arrival. Her people didn’t just object to Slade’s new directive to “put people in a deprivation tank and stop their heart.” With the exception of her and Sergei, they resigned en masse and demanded to be returned to the mainland immediately. Whenever she feels guilty for staying, she thinks of her mom and others like her, but it’s a small consolation.

Out here on the platform, it’s like the world is screaming in her ear. Lifting her face to the sky, she screams back.

He takes a seat on the ottoman of an oversize chair, beside the windows that look out into a world of infinite sea.

“Why won’t you let me talk to my parents? Why won’t you let me leave?” “You aren’t well, Helena. You’re in no state of mind to protect the secrecy of this place.”

Manipulation