Recursion

by Blake Crouch

It’s time to let the dream die and get the fuck out. But she can’t. Even if she made it out on one of the supply ships, the moment Slade realized she was gone, he’d simply return to a memory before she escaped and stop her. He could stop you before you even tried to escape. Before the idea even occurred to you. Before this moment. All of which means—there’s only one way off the platform now.

It isn’t quite perfect between them. She doesn’t carry the trauma of Meghan’s death and the destruction of their marriage, but for him there is no escaping how those events corroded their bond. In his previous life, it took him a long time to stop being in love with Julia, and even though he’s back to before everything imploded, it’s not just a light switch he can flip back on.

His father died when Barry was fifteen from an aortic aneurysm, sudden and unexpected. With his mom, he has years to say goodbye, to make certain she knows he loves her, to say all the things that are in his heart, and there is immeasurable comfort in that. He has wondered lately if that’s all living really is—one long goodbye to those we love.

It makes him wonder about the déjà vu that haunted his previous life—the perpetual sense that he was doing or seeing something he’d already seen before. And he wonders—is déjà vu actually the specter of false timelines that never happened but did, casting their shadows upon reality?

Those looking for peace. Those looking to hide. And, of course, those hoping for both. She misses the mental stimulation of her work. Misses being in a laboratory. Misses having a goal. It eats her up inside to wonder what her parents must make of her disappearance. She feels guilty every hour of every day that she isn’t building the memory chair that could preserve core memories for people like her mom.

There are days she wants desperately to start building the MEG microscope and the reactivation apparatus as a means for capturing and preserving the memories of the people she interviews, who are slowly losing themselves and the memories that define them. But the risk is too great. It could alert Slade to her work, or someone might, as she apparently did, accidentally make the leap from memory reactivation to memory travel. 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. Was she herself not changing the past now, and at her first opportunity?

The thought of killing herself has occurred to her on more than one occasion. It would be the ultimate insurance policy against Slade finding her and forcing her cooperation. She’s gone so far as to make potassium chloride tablets in the event that day ever comes. She keeps them with her at all times, in a silver locket around her neck.

Helena thinking—this disease is some sadistic, schizophrenic form of memory travel, flinging its victims across the expanse of their life, tricking them into thinking they’re living in the past. Cutting them adrift in time.

And then the oddest thing happens. Dorothy looks at her, and for a moment, her eyes have become clear, lucid, and fierce—as if the woman Helena has always known has somehow fought through the tangle of dementia and ruined neural pathways to see her daughter for a fleeting breath. “I was always proud of you,” her mother says. “You were?” “You are the best thing I ever did.” Helena wraps her arms around her mother, tears streaming. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save you, Mom.” But when she pulls away, the moment of clarity has passed. She’s staring into the eyes of a stranger.

But now, sitting in a café on the banks of the Hudson River with Julia and Meghan on the morning of his daughter’s twenty-sixth birthday, he has a blinding awareness of being in this moment for a second time. It all comes back to him in a rush of memory as clear as water. He and Julia sat at a table not far from this spot, imagining what Meghan would be doing if she were alive today. He had posited she would be a lawyer. They had laughed about that and reminisced about the time she drove his car through the garage door, before comparing memories of a family vacation to the headwaters of the Hudson.

three in the morning, roused by a pounding in his apartment. He rolls out of bed, slowly emerging from a shroud of sleep as he staggers out of his room. Jim-Bob, his rescue, is barking fiercely at the door. A glance through the peephole snaps him wide-awake—Julia is standing in the bleary light of the hall. He turns the dead bolt, throws the chain, pulls the door open. Her eyes are swollen from crying, her hair is catastrophic, and she’s wearing a trench coat over a pair of pajamas, her shoulders dusted with snow.

“An hour ago, I woke up with a splitting headache and a headful of memories of this other life. Gray, listless memories.” Her eyes fill with tears. “Meghan died in a hit-and-run when she was in high school. You and I divorced a year later. I married a man named Anthony. It was all so real. Like I had really lived it. You and I had brunch yesterday at that same café on the river, only Meghan wasn’t there. She’d been dead eleven years. I woke up tonight, alone in my bed, no Anthony, realizing that, in actuality, you and I had lunch with her yesterday. That she’s alive.” Julia’s hands are shaking violently. “What’s real, Barry? Which set of memories is the truth?” She breaks down. “Is our daughter alive?”

And then it hits him—if Julia has those memories, so does Meghan. He looks at Julia. “We have to go.” “Why?” He stands. “Right now.” “Barry—” “Listen to me—you’re not losing your mind, you’re not crazy.” “You remember her dying too?” “Yes.” “How is that possible?” “I promise I will explain everything, but right now, we have to go to Meghan.” “Why?” “Because she’s experiencing the same thing you are. She’s remembering her own death.”

does she recall the trauma of being struck by a two-ton object traveling sixty miles per hour? The moment her consciousness stopped? Whatever came after? What would it be like to remember your own death? How would someone even recall a state of unbeing? As blackness? Nothingness? It strikes him, like dividing by zero, as an impossibility.

Meghan’s eyes flit back and forth, like a computer processing data. She says, “I don’t know what’s real.” “You’re real. I’m real. This moment is real.” But even as he says it, he isn’t sure. Barry studies his ex, thinking how she looks like the Julia of old, that black weight of Meghan’s death back in her eyes. “Which set of memories feels more real to you?” he asks Julia. “One isn’t more real than the other,” she says. “It’s just that I’m living in a world that aligns with my daughter being alive. Thank God. But I feel like I’ve lived through both of them. What’s happening to us?”

Whether the expression on Julia’s face is disbelief or shock, he can’t tell. Meghan’s eyes have gone glassy. She says, “I should be dead.” He brushes her hair behind her ears the way he used to when she was a little girl. “No, you’re right where you should be. You’re alive. This is what is real.”

When he wakes, his phone is blowing up with notifications from half his contacts list—missed calls and voicemails, frantic texts about Meghan. He doesn’t respond to any of them. He needs to talk with Julia and Meghan first. They should be on the same page with what they’re telling people, although he can’t imagine what that page might look like.

“What do we tell people?” Julia asks. “I’ve gotten over a dozen calls today.” “Same here,” Barry says. “I think for now we stay with the idea that this is FMS. At least that’s something they might’ve heard of.”

“We have to keep all of this to ourselves for now. Just try to live a normal life again.” “How?” Meghan asks, her voice unraveling. “I don’t even know how to think about my life anymore.”

Nearby, a waiter drops a tray of drinks. Meghan’s nose begins to bleed. He feels a glint of pain behind his eyes, and across the table, Julia is clearly experiencing something similar. The bar goes silent, no one talking, everyone sitting frozen at their tables. The only sound is the music coming through the speakers and the drone of a television. Meghan’s hands are trembling. So are Julia’s. And his. On the television above the bar, a news anchor is staring into the camera, blood running down his face as he searches for words. “I, um…I’m going to be honest, I don’t exactly know what just happened. But something clearly has.”

There’s a building on West Fifty-Ninth Street that wasn’t there a moment ago. At well over two thousand feet, it’s easily the tallest thing in the city, and constructed of two towers, one on Sixth Avenue, the other on Seventh, which connect at the top to form an elongated, upside-down U.

They stare at the marvel of engineering called the Big Bend, Barry thinking that, up until this moment, FMS has flown largely under the radar—isolated cases wreaking havoc on the lives of strangers. But this will affect everyone in the city, and many around the world. This will change everything.

The longer he stares at it, the more it feels like an object that is a part of this reality. His reality. Whatever that even means anymore. “Dad?” “Yes?” His heart is pounding; he feels unwell. “Is this moment real?” He looks down at her. “I don’t know.”

Barry reads the closed captioning of the news anchor’s reporting. [AMOR TOWLES, RENOWNED ARCHITECT OF THE BIG BEND, WAS FOUND MURDERED IN HIS APARTMENT ONE HOUR AGO WHEN—]

When I was in that weird hotel, there was this guy, older gentleman. I believe he was dying. I overheard this conversation where he said that he was an architect, and when he got back into his memory, he was going to follow through on a building he always regretted not pursuing. In fact, he was scheduled to go in the chair today, which is when reality changed for all of us. I’m guessing they killed him for breaking the rules.” “What rules?” “They told me I was only supposed to live my life a little better. No gaming of the system. No sweeping changes.”

On CNN, an “expert” on False Memory Syndrome has been dredged up to speculate on what they’re calling the “memory malfunction” in Manhattan. She’s saying, “If memory is unreliable, if the past and the present can simply change without warning, then fact and truth will cease to exist. How do we live in a world like that? This is why we’re seeing an epidemic of suicides.”

“Our minds aren’t built to handle a reality that’s constantly changing our memories and shifting our present,”

Dad. I can’t do this anymore. I don’t know who I am. I don’t know anything except I don’t belong here. I’m so sorry. I love you always. He slides off the stool. “What’s wrong?” Gwen asks. And starts running for the door.

“There was a bottle of vodka and some pills on her bed. We think she took them and then tried to make tea, but lost consciousness soon after. Something on the counter got too close to the burner. It was accidental, but—” “Where is she?” “Let’s go sit down and—” “Where is she?” “On the sidewalk, on the other side of that truck.” Barry starts toward her, but suddenly the man’s arms are gripping him from behind in a bear hug.

People try to talk to him, to get him to come with them, to move, but he doesn’t hear them. He stares straight through them. Into nothing. Thinking—I’ve lost her twice now.

Clearly, some minds, like Meghan’s, cannot handle the changing of their reality, and the collateral damage is also tragic—in addition to his daughter, three people died in her building from the fire, and over the radio on his drive to Penn Station, he heard more reports of people—unbalanced by the appearance of the Big Bend—wreaking havoc in the city. Healthy minds are being made unwell; unwell minds are being driven over the edge.

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 says, “I know you were sent back into the worst memory of your life. The man who did that is Marcus Slade. He owns that building. And I know what just happened to Meghan. I’m so sorry, Barry. I know you want to do something about it.”

She looks up into his eyes with an intensity that sends a cool electricity down his spine. “I invented the chair.” “Who are you?” “Helena Smith, and if you go into Slade’s building with Gwen, it will lead to the end of everything.”

Time is what keeps everything from happening at once. —RAY CUMMINGS

You have to stop thinking linearly. You have no idea what he’s capable of.”

He says, “I love huevos rancheros.” “I know. And you really love mine, well, technically my mother’s recipe. Sit.”

“Eventually. You tell me that during the raid, before Slade was killed, he tried to destroy the chair and the processors, but that some of it was salvaged. Government agents—you don’t know who they worked for—came in and took everything. I have no way of knowing, but I assume they don’t know what the chair is, or how it works. Most of it is damaged, but they’re working day and night to reverse-engineer everything. Can you imagine if they’re successful?”

once people know the chair exists, their memories of it will always return, no matter how many times a timeline is changed. The same way Julia and Meghan remembered Meghan dying in a hit-and-run last night.”

“You and I take control of Slade’s lab tomorrow. Destroy the chair, the software, all the infrastructure, all trace of its existence. I have a virus ready to upload to his stand-alone network once we’re inside. It’ll reformat everything.”

Going back and living those eleven years again—it ultimately fixed nothing for my family.”

He didn’t see it until this moment—the weight she carries. The self-hate and regret. What must it feel like to create a thing that could destroy the structure of memory and time? What must it cost her to repress the weight of all that guilt and horror and terror and anxiety? Barry says, “No matter what, I got to see my daughter grow up because of you.” “I don’t mean this to sound the way it will, but you shouldn’t have. If we can’t rely on memory, our species will unravel. And it’s already beginning.”

Barry, crying softly across the room. She wishes she could climb into bed and comfort him, but it would be too soon—they’re essentially strangers. Perhaps he needs to grieve alone for now anyway.

The memory of her and Barry’s goodbye in this very room, four months from now, is still a throbbing ache. She was floating in the deprivation tank, and Barry leaned down and kissed her. There were tears in his eyes as he closed the hatch. In hers too. Their future seemed so full of promise, and she was killing it.

“Everything that happened on the rig exists in dead memories. You can’t return to them. We’ve tried—with disastrous results. But yes. I should’ve killed him when I had the chance.”

Their plan is to go straight for Slade, hoping he’ll be in his residence in the penthouse. The moment he hears gunfire or catches wind of anything suspicious, he’ll likely be running for the chair so he can go back and stop them before they even set foot inside his building.

The walls of this elevator are old, smoke-stained mirrors, and staring into them creates a recursive illusion—an infinite number of Barrys and Helenas in elevator cars bending away through space.

“Thirteen years for me,” she says. “How long for you?” He seems to consider the question as Barry moves toward him and kicks the revolver across the room. “Who knows?” he says finally. “After you ghosted off my oil platform—well done, by the way, never understood exactly how you pulled that off—it took me years to rebuild the chair. But since then, I’ve lived more lifetimes than you can possibly fathom.”

“Most of them were quiet explorations of who I am, who I could be, in different places, with different people. Some were…louder. But this last timeline, I discovered that I could no longer generate a sufficient synaptic number to map my own memory. I’ve traveled too much. Filled my mind with too many lives. Too many experiences. It’s beginning to fracture. There are entire lifetimes I’ve never remembered, that I only experience in flashes. 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.”

“You’re using the chair destructively.” “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.”

“You want to talk about destructive? 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? What you’re defending isn’t reality—it’s a prison, a lie.”