Recursion

by Blake Crouch

She says, “I don’t want to do this anymore. You have ruined my dream. You have blocked me from trying to help my mom and others. I want to go home. Are you going to continue keeping me here against my will?”

“Do you remember what I asked you the first day you got here?” She shakes her head, tears coming. “I asked if you wanted to change the world with me. We are standing on the shoulders of all the brilliant work you’ve done, and I came here this morning to tell you that we’re almost there. Forget everything that’s happened in the past. Let’s cross the finish line together.”

Like a salesman

“Just a guy getting paid twenty grand a week to make the ultimate sacrifice for science.”

Audacity

Barry is caught in the strangest juxtaposition of emotion. He wants to break this man in half, but the thought of Meghan that night is on the verge of breaking him.

“I don’t remember. Probably.” Barry is suddenly aware of a pressure in his chest, the intensity of which is nearly crushing. He says, “I haven’t talked about that night in years.”

Trauma

She looks at Slade and says, “This is way outside the bounds of responsible scientific testing.” “I agree.” “And you just don’t care?” “The kind of breakthrough I’m looking for today doesn’t happen in the shallow end of the pool.”

And then he smells something. It’s odd, because it conjures an emotional response he can’t quite name, but which carries the ache of nostalgia. It takes a moment, but he realizes it’s what his house used to smell like after he and Julia and Meghan had finished dinner. In particular, Julia’s meatloaf and roasted carrots and potatoes. Next he catches the scent of yeast and malt and barley. Beer, but not just any beer. The Rolling Rocks he used to drink out of those green bottles.

and he thinks perhaps there’s a reason our memories are kept hazy and out of focus. Maybe their abstraction serves as an anesthetic, a buffer protecting us from the agony of time and all that it steals and erases.

And he’s running down the broken sidewalk past a collection of old buildings that will gentrify into loft space, a coffee shop, and a distillery in the coming decade. But for now, they loom dark and abandoned.

“You’re with your daughter again, and she’s alive. Does it matter? You won’t see me after tonight, but I have to tell you something. There are ground rules, and they’re simple. Don’t try to game the larger system with your knowledge of what’s to come. Just live your life again. Live it a little better. And tell no one. Not your wife. Not your daughter. No one.”

“Time is an illusion, a construct made out of human memory. There’s no such thing as the past, the present, or the future. It’s all happening now.”

We are homesick most for the places we have never known. —CARSON MCCULLERS

Beautiful and relatable

If we can see ahead, then we can think ahead; we can plan. And then we can envision the future, even if it doesn’t exist.”

“That consciousness is a result of environment. Our cognitions—our idea of reality—are shaped by what we can perceive, by the limitations of our senses.

Imagine if you could see the world through the eyes of more advanced beings—in four dimensions. You could experience events in your life in any order. Relive any memory you want.”

Julia smiles and pats the bedspread beside her, and Barry enters their room, his eyes drifting over wedding photos, a black-and-white of Julia holding Meghan on the night of her birth, and finally a print over the bed of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, which they bought at MoMA ten years ago after seeing the original. He climbs onto the bed and sits against the headboard next to Julia.

“Why aren’t you watching your game?” she asks. The last time they sat on this bed together was the night she left him.

Then he sits on the porch drinking his coffee in the cold, hoping his head will clear and wondering if the man responsible for sending him here is watching him right now. Perhaps from some higher plane of existence? From beyond time? The fear returns. Will he be suddenly ripped out of this moment and thrown back into his old life? Or is this permanent?

We are fucking with things that shouldn’t be fucked with.

On the Fabric of the Human Body by Andreas Vesalius, Physica by Aristotle, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy by Isaac Newton, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and two novels—Camus’s The Stranger, and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Humans cannot be trusted with technology of such power—with the splitting of the atom came the atomic bomb. The ability to change memory, and thereby reality, would be at least that dangerous, in part because it would be so seductive.

“Our minds aren’t built to handle a reality that’s constantly changing our memories and shifting our present,” Gwen says. “What if this is only the beginning?”

She approaches cautiously, barely five feet tall, wearing boots and a black leather jacket beaded with raindrops. A shock of red hair comes to her chin, but it’s damp. She’s been waiting for him in the rain. The thing that disarms him is the kindness in her green eyes, and something else, which strikes him—oddly—as familiarity.

She looks up into his eyes with an intensity that sends a cool electricity down his spine. “I invented the chair.”

Won’t take much of messing with reality for humanity to go completely off the rails.

“Did Future Me agree with this plan?” Helena smiles. “In fact, we came up with it together.” “Did I think you and I have a chance?” “Honestly? No.” “What do you think?” Helena leans back in her chair. She looks bone weary. “I think we’re the best chance the world has.”

Flirting?

The Big Bend now dominates the skyline, and he wonders if he’ll ever grow used to it, or if it will always—for him and others—represent the unreliability of reality.

The world is losing its collective mind because of me.

She takes a sip of the coffee she brought along—her talisman against the previous night of sleepless misery.

This hotel isn’t the first thing I did. It’s the last. I built it to let others experience the power of what is still, what will always be, your creation.”

“Yes,” Slade says. “It will be destructive at first, like all progress. Just as the industrial age ushered in two world wars. Just as Homo sapiens supplanted the Neanderthal. But would you turn back the clock on all that comes with it? Could you? Progress is inevitable. And it’s a force for good.”

He ain't wrong but ain't right

How about being locked in our little fishbowls, in this joke of an existence imposed on us by the limits of our primate senses? Life is suffering. But it doesn’t have to be. Why should you be forced to accept your daughter’s death when you can change it? Why shouldn’t a dying man go back to his youth with full wisdom and knowledge instead of gasping out his last hours in agony? Why let a tragedy unfold when you could go back and prevent it?

While from the outside the building resembled a sad office park, the interior, with its grim lighting and utilitarian design, is a soulless government labyrinth to the bone.

“That’s…” “Playing God?” “Yeah.”

Wow

“But isn’t it also playing God not to intervene when you have that power?” “We shouldn’t have that power.” “But we do. Because of something you created.”

Religious scholars speak of ancient times, when miracles happened with great frequency. They speculate that we have returned to such an era, that this could be a precursor to the Second Coming.

“I have a different perspective, emboldened by what we achieved yesterday. I believe that, as technology arises in the world, we’re entrusted to find its best use for the continuation and betterment of our species. I believe the chair contains an awesome potential to bring good into the world.

Not a bad perspective either

“In theory?” Helena asks. “Shouldn’t you move forward on better information than the theoretical if you’re talking about changing the nature of reality?”

“Are you suggesting what I think you are, John?” Albert asks. “That we send agents forty, fifty, sixty years back to assassinate dictators before they go on to murder millions?” “Or to stop a killing that’s the catalyst for an epic tragedy—for instance, when Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb, murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, and in so doing, tipped over the first domino in a chain that would ultimately trigger the First World War. I’m simply raising the possibility for discussion. We are sitting in a room with a machine of incredible power.”

Albert has taken to calling their group the Department of Undoing Particularly Awful Shit, and like many names that start as a bad joke without a quick replacement, the name sticks.

Hilarious

A growing silence caused by the people you most love, who have shaped you and defined your world, going on ahead into whatever comes after.

Shaw sighs, deflated. She knows the pain of letting go of the promise of the chair. It isn’t just the disappointment of all the unrealized scientific and humanitarian uses to which it might be put under ideal conditions. It’s the realization that, as a deeply flawed species, we will never be ready to wield such power.

She pulls out into the road and turns on the radio. The new song, “Faith,” by George Michael is playing on the college radio station out of Boulder, and she sings at the top of her voice as the open fields race past, the future feeling closer than ever. Like it might have actually arrived.

She realizes that children are always too young and self-absorbed to really see their parents in the prime of their lives. But she sees her father in this moment like she never has before.

A trip, just the two of them, to Antarctica in the summer of 2001 to witness the migration of emperor penguins, which they would both come to see as the best moment of their life together—a respite from the ever-present race to fix the looming future.

He looks down at her, framing her jaw in his hands. “I have an idea,” he says. “Let’s forget all of this.” “What are you talking about?” “Let’s just be together today. Let’s just live.” “We can’t. This is all happening. This is what is real.”

“Let me say this! It’s enough that I have to see the chair destroying the entire world. People throwing themselves off of buildings because of something I made. It’s another to see it ruin the life of the man I love.” “Life with you isn’t a life ruined.”

He stares into her emerald eyes, clear and bright in the sun.

When she’s floating in the water, he looks down at her, says, “I’ll be in that Portland bar in October of 1990, waiting for you.” “You won’t even recognize me.” “My soul knows your soul. In any time.”

Their first meeting at the Portland bar. For a second time. The claims of clairvoyance. He fell in love with her even faster, because she seemed to know him better than he knew himself.