Recursion

by Blake Crouch

Who else was going to be there? A list of names, most of which I knew. I remember checking my watch—it was eight thirty and still in the early innings of the game—and I told her she could go, but that I wanted her home no later than ten. She made her arguments for eleven. I said, ‘No, it’s a school night, you know your curfew,’ and then she let it go and headed for the door. “I remember calling out to her just before she left, telling her I loved her.” Tears release, his body shaking with emotion, but the straps hold him tight against the chair. Barry says, “The truth is, I don’t know if I called out to her. I think probably I didn’t, that I simply went back to watching the game and didn’t think of her again until ten p.m. had come and gone, and I wondered why she wasn’t home yet.”

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.”

A new window has appeared on the doctor’s primary monitor. Time Since Heart Death: 15 seconds. When the clock passes one minute, the doctor says, “DMT release detected.” Slade says, “Sergei.” “Initiating memory-reactivation program. Firing the stimulators…”

he keeps trying to move—arms, legs, fingers, anything—but nothing responds. He might as well be trying to control a single strand of hair. And that’s all before the real horror hits: he is unable to contract his diaphragm. Which means he can’t draw breath. A maelstrom of panic washes over him, and finally pain, everything distilling down to a second-by-second escalation of the desperate need to inhale oxygen. But he is locked out of the controls of his own body. He cannot cry out or flail or beg for his life, which he would be more than willing to do if he could only speak.

He can only lie in the utter darkness, listening to the screaming of his mind and the torrent of racing thoughts while the sole sound is the thunderous pounding of his heart as it beats faster and faster.

“I just stopped your heart, Barry. Please listen. You have to maintain focus during the next few moments, or we will lose you. If you make it to the other side, remember what I did for you. Don’t let it happen this time. You can change it.” Explosions of color detonate in Barry’s oxygen- and blood-starved brain—a light show for a dead man, each flash closer and brighter than the one before.

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. Other smells emerge and merge in an aroma more complex than any wine. It’s one he would recognize anywhere—the house in Jersey City he once lived in with his ex-wife and his dead daughter. The smell of home. Suddenly, he tastes the beer and the constant presence in his mouth of the cigarettes he used to smoke. His brain fires an image that cuts through the dying whiteout—blurry and fuzzy at the edges, but quickly sharpening into focus. A television. And on the screen, a baseball game. The image in his mind’s eye as clear as sight, gray-scale at first, but then color bleeding into everything he sees.

It’s as if a memory is being built before him. First the foundation of smell and taste. Then the scaffolding of visuals. Next comes an overlay of touch as he feels, actually feels, the cool softness of the leather chair he’s sitting in, his feet propped up on the extended footrest, his head turning, and a hand—his hand—reaching for the bottle of Rolling Rock resting on a coaster on the table beside the chair.

the taste and the smell overwhelm him with the power of actuality. Not of a mere memory, but an event that is happening now.

It is unlike any recollection he has ever experienced, because he is in it, peering through the eyes of his younger self and watching the movie of his old life unfold before him as a fully immersed observer.

he hears her voice—too faint, too distant to make out any specific words, only to hear that familiar tone that has been quietly fading in his memory for eleven years. She is beautiful. She is vital. Standing in front of the television, blocking the screen, with her backpack slung over one shoulder, blue jeans, a turquoise sweater, her hair pulled back into a ponytail.

This is too intense. Worse than the torture of asphyxiating and equally out of his control, because this is not a memory he is retrieving of his own volition. It’s somehow being projected for him, against his will, 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.

He feels his lips curling up in a smile, remembers acutely the long-lost feeling of losing a negotiation with his daughter. The annoyance, but also the pride that he was raising a woman of grit, who knew her own mind and fought for the things she wanted. Remembered hoping she would carry that fire into her adult life.

Stop her. Stop her! “Yes, Dad.” Her last words. Now he remembers. Yes, Dad. Barry’s younger self is staring at the television again, watching Brad Hawpe rifle a ball straight up the middle. He can hear Meghan’s footsteps moving away from him, and he’s screaming inside, but nothing’s happening. It’s as if he’s inhabiting a body over which he exerts no control. His younger self isn’t even watching Meghan as she moves toward the door. Only cares about the game, and he doesn’t know he just looked into his daughter’s eyes for the last time, that he could stop this from happening with a word.

His left pinkie moves. Or rather, he is aware of having moved it. Of the action being a result of his intention. He tries again. The entire hand moves. He extends one arm, then the other. He blinks. Takes a breath. He opens his mouth and makes a sound like a grunt—guttural and meaningless—but he made it.

By all appearances, it is, impossibly, October 25, 2007, the night his daughter was killed in a hit-and-run. She never made it to Dairy Queen to meet up with her friends, which means this tragedy will happen in the next ten minutes. And she already has a two-minute head start. He isn’t wearing shoes, but he’s wasted enough time already. Pulling the front door to the house closed, he steps down into the lawn, leaves crunching under his bare feet, and heads off into the night.

Slade takes the DVD from the coffee table to the entertainment center. He loads it into the player and turns up the volume. Onscreen: a tall, emaciated man she has never seen before is reclined in the memory chair. Jee-woon Chercover is leaning over him, inking a tattoo of letters—M-i-r-a-n—into his left shoulder. The emaciated man lifts an arm and says, “Stop.” Slade steps into the frame. “What is it, Reed?” “I’m back. I’m here. Oh my God.” “What are you talking about?” “The experiment worked.” “Prove it to me.” “Your mother’s name is Susan. You told me to tell you that right before I got into the egg.” Onscreen, a huge grin spreads across Slade’s face. He asks, “What time did we do the experiment tomorrow?” “Ten a.m.” Slade turns off the television and looks at Helena. She says, “Was that supposed to make any sense to me?” “I guess we’ll know in a minute.”

Slade keeps looking at his watch, a bit of worry now creeping into his eyes. Helena says, “Look, whatever this was supposed to be, I’m ready for you to leave. What time can the helicopter fly me back to California?” Blood slides out of Slade’s nose. Now she tastes rust, realizes blood is trickling out of hers as well. Reaching up, she tries to catch it in her hands, but it seeps through her fingers and onto her shirt. She rushes into the powder room, grabs a couple of washcloths out of the drawer, and holds one to her nose as she carries the other back out to Slade. As she hands it to him, she feels a stabbing agony behind her eyes, like the worst ice-cream headache of her life, and she can see by the look on his face that Slade is experiencing the same sensation.

At first, she thinks he’s talking about the pain, but it’s not that. She is suddenly aware of an entirely new memory of the last half hour. A gray, haunted-looking memory. In it, Slade didn’t come here with a bottle of Champagne. He invited her to come down to the testing bay with him. She remembers sitting in the control room and watching a heroin addict climb into the deprivation tank. They fired a memory of him getting a tattoo, and then they killed him. She was trying to throw a chair through the window between the control room and the testing bay when, suddenly, she’s here instead—standing in her apartment with a nosebleed and a killer headache.

“Helena, you didn’t just build a chair that helps people relive their memories. You made something that can return them to the past.”

he’s sprinting now, running as hard as he’s ever run in his life, screaming her name between gulps of air, even as he wonders— Is any of this real? How many times has he fantasized about this moment? Being given a shot at preventing her death… “Meghan!” She’s fifty yards ahead of him now, and he’s close enough to see that she’s talking on her phone, oblivious.

“Meghan! Meghan! Meghan!” Three feet into the street, she stops and looks back in Barry’s direction, the phone still held to her ear. He’s close enough now to see the pure confusion on her face, the noise of the approaching car right on his heels. A black Mustang blurs past at sixty miles per hour, the car streaking down the middle of the street and weaving across the centerline. And then it’s gone. Meghan is still by the curb.

If this isn’t real, it’s the cruelest thing a person could ever do to him, because this doesn’t feel like some virtual-reality experience or whatever that man subjected him to. This feels real. This is living. You don’t come back from this. He looks at her, touches her face, vital and perfect in the streetlight.

It’s a memory that will never leave him, but which now possesses a gray and fading quality, just like the false memory that plagued him in that Montauk diner. Has he somehow changed what happened? That can’t possibly be.

“Yes, of course.” He doesn’t want her to go. He could hold her in his arms for a solid week and it wouldn’t be enough. But he says, “Please be careful tonight.” She turns away and continues walking up the street. He calls her name. She looks back. “I love you, Meghan.” “Love you too, Dad.”

Barry turns, sees a man dressed in black coming toward him. Even from a distance, he looks vaguely familiar, and as he draws near, the full recognition hits. He’s the man from the diner, Vince, who escorted him to the room after he’d been drugged in the hotel bar. The one with the neck tattoo, except he doesn’t have it anymore. Or yet. Now, he has a full head of hair, a leaner build. And looks ten years younger.

“I know you’re confused and disoriented, but that won’t last. I’m here to fulfill the final piece of my employment contract. Are you getting it yet?” “Getting what?” “What my boss did for you.” “This is real?” “This is real.” “How?” “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.” “What if I want to go back?” “The technology that brought you here hasn’t even been invented yet.”

“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

Her knee-jerk reaction is that it can’t possibly be true, that it’s some trick or illusion. But she keeps seeing the finished tattoo of Miranda on the heroin addict’s shoulder; the unfinished tattoo of it in the video Slade just showed her. And she knows that somehow, even though she has a rich and detailed memory of the experiment this morning—right down to throwing a chair at a window—none of it happened. It exists as a dead branch of memory in the neuronal structure of her brain. The only thing she can compare it to is the remembrance of a very detailed dream.

“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. We think we’re seeing the world as it really is, but you of all people know…it’s all just shadows on the cave’s wall. We’re just as blinkered as our water-dwelling ancestors, the boundaries of our brains just as much an accident of evolution. And like them, by definition, we can’t see what we’re missing. Or…we couldn’t, until now.”

“Exactly. To a two-dimensional being, traveling along a third dimension wouldn’t just be impossible, it’d be something they couldn’t conceive of. Just as our brains fail us here. 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.”

“Quantum physics is on my side here, I’m afraid. We already know that on the particle level, the arrow of time isn’t as simple as humans think it is.” “You really believe time is an illusion?” “More like our perception of it is so flawed that it may as well be an illusion. Every moment is equally real and happening now, but the nature of our consciousness only gives us access to one slice at a time. Think of our life like a book. Each page a distinct moment. But in the same way we read a book, we can only perceive one moment, one page, at a time. Our flawed perception shuts off access to all the others. Until now.”

Some other moment, an old memory, is just as much now as this sentence I’m speaking, just as accessible as walking into the room next door. We just needed a way to convince our brains of that. To short-circuit our evolutionary limitations and expand our consciousness beyond our sensory volume.”

“First time we met,” he says, “you were leading an R&D group for a company in San Francisco called Ion.” “What do you mean ‘the first time’? I’ve never worked—” “Just let me finish. You hired me on as a research assistant. I would type up reports based on your dictation, track down articles you wanted to read. Manage your calendar and travel. Keep your coffee hot and your office clean. Or at least navigable.” He smiles with something that approximates nostalgia. “I think my official title was lab bitch. But you were good to me. You made me feel included in the research, like I was a real part of your team. Before we met, I was in a bad way with drugs. You might have saved my life. “You built a great MEG microscope and a decent electromagnetic stimulation network. You had far superior quantum processors to what we’re using here, since Qbit technology was much further along. You had figured out the deprivation tank and how to make the reactivation apparatus operational inside. But you weren’t satisfied. Your theory all along was that the tank would put a test subject into such an intense state of sensory deprivation that when we stimulated the neural coordinates for a memory, the experience would escalate into this completely immersive, transcendental event.” “Wait, so this all happened when?” “On the original timeline.”

Tens of millions had been spent, and this technology you had staked your career on wasn’t materializing.” Slade turns away from the glass and looks at her. “Until November second, 2018.” “The year 2018.” “Yes.” “As in, nine years in the future.” “Correct. On that morning, something tragic and accidental and amazing happened. You were running a memory reactivation on a new test subject named Jon Jordan. The retrieval event was a car accident where he had lost his wife. Everything was humming along, and then he coded inside the deprivation tank. It was a massive cardiac arrest. As the medical team rushed to pull him out, something extraordinary happened. Before they could get the tank open, everyone in the lab was suddenly standing in a slightly different position. Our noses were all bleeding, some of us had splitting headaches, and instead of Jon Jordan in the tank, you were running an experiment on a guy named Michael Dillman. It all happened in the blink of an eye, like someone had flipped a switch. “No one understood what had happened. We had no records of Jordan ever setting foot in our lab. We were rattled, trying to make sense of it all. Call it misguided curiosity, but I couldn’t let it go. I tried to locate Jordan, to see what had happened to him, where he had gone, and it was the strangest thing—that car-accident memory we were reactivating? Turns out he had actually died in that wreck alongside his wife, fifteen years earlier.”

“Three days later, the night of November fifth, 2018, I went to the lab and reloaded one of my memories into the stimulators. Then I climbed into the tank and shot a lethal dose of potassium chloride into my bloodstream. Christ, it burned like fire in my veins. Worst pain I have ever experienced. My heart stopped, and when the DMT hit, my consciousness shot back into a memory I’d made when I was twenty years old. And that was the start of a new timeline that branched off from the original in 1992.” “For the entire world?” “Apparently.”

You and I had no memory of it until we caught back up to the precise moment when Reed died in the egg and traveled back into his tattoo memory. Only then did your memories and consciousness from that previous timeline, where you tried to throw a chair through the glass, slide into this one.” “So in nine years, on the night of November 5, 2018, I’m going to remember this whole other life?”

“You stole that other life from me.” “Helena—” “Was I married? Did I have kids?” “Do you really want to know? It doesn’t matter now. It never happened.” “You’re a monster.”

Her response to Slade’s revelation will probably be the determining factor in what he decides to do with her. “I’m angry,” she says. “That’s fair. I would be too.” Prior to this moment, she had assumed Slade possessed an immense intellect, that he was a master manipulator of people, as all industry leaders tend to be. Perhaps that’s still true, but the lion’s share of his success and fortune is simply attributable to his knowledge of future events. And her intellect.

now you know the truth, so now I’m asking for a third time, and I hope the answer will be yes.” “What question?” He comes over and takes hold of her hands, close enough now that she can smell the Champagne on his breath. “Helena, do you want to change the world with me?”

The last time they sat on this bed together was the night she left him. Stared into his eyes and said, I’m sorry, but I can’t separate you from all this pain. “Honey. What’s wrong? You look like someone died.”

Is it possible that the loss he’s carried since Meghan’s death is bleeding from his soul through his eyes and into this impossible moment? That on some lower frequency, Julia senses that shift in him? Because the absence of tragedy is having an inverse, proportional effect on what he sees when he looks into her eyes. They astound him. Bright and present and clear. The eyes of the woman he fell in love with. And it hits him all over again—the ruinous power of grief.

The sensory experience of it is what’s killing him. The smell of their room. The softness of Julia’s hands. All the things he’d forgotten. Everything he lost.

But there she is, and here he is, feeling more at home in this body with every passing second. That clipped line of memories of his other life is receding, as if he’s just woken from the longest, most horrific nightmare. An eleven-year-long nightmare.

“No shit he died,” she says. “That isn’t a real memory.” “What do you mean?” “That version of events never happened. Reed never got a tattoo. He changed that memory when he died in the tank.” Now she looks at Reed, starting to put the pieces together. “Which means there was nothing for you to return to.” “But I remember it,” Reed says. “What does it look like in your mind’s eye?” she asks. “Dark? Static? Shades of gray?” “Like time had been frozen.” “Then it’s not a real memory. It’s…I don’t know what to call it. Fake. False.” “Dead,” Slade says, glancing at his watch again. “So this wasn’t an accident.” She glares at Slade across the table. “You knew.” “Dead memories fascinate me.” “Why?” “They represent…another dimension of movement.”

“Every time Reed dies in the tank, he orphans a string of memories that become dead in our minds after we shift. But what really happens to those timelines? Have they truly been destroyed, or are they still out there somewhere, beyond our reach?”

He’s watching Reed, who’s staring with a kind of entranced smile into nothing. “Reed?” Slade asks. The man doesn’t answer. “Reed, can you hear me?” Reed turns his head slowly until he’s staring at Slade, blood running over his lips, dripping on the table. “I died,” Reed says. “I know. I went back into a memory to save—” “And it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” “What did you see?” Slade asks. “I saw…” He struggles to put it into words. “Everything.” “I don’t know what that means, Reed.” “Every moment of my life. I was rushing through this tunnel that was filled with them, and it was so lovely. I found one I’d forgotten. An exquisite memory. I think it was my first.”

Tears running down his face now. “I have never felt such love in my entire life. Everything good. Safe. It was a perfect moment before…” “What?” Slade asks. “Before I became me.” He wipes his eyes, looks at Slade. “You shouldn’t have saved me. You shouldn’t have brought me back.” “What are you talking about?” “I could’ve stayed in that moment forever.”

“Reed hanged himself in his room.” “Oh God. Because of the dead memory?” “Let’s not make any assumptions. The brain of an addict is wired differently from ours. Who knows what he really saw when he died. Anyway, I just thought you should know. But don’t worry. I’ll get him back tomorrow.” “Get him back?” “With the chair. I’ll be honest, I’m not looking forward to dying again. As you can imagine, it’s deeply unpleasant.” “He made a choice to end his life,” Helena says, trying to keep her emotion in check. “I think we should respect that.” “Not while he’s still under my employ.”