Recursion

by Blake Crouch

we can experience so much. Trust me, your perspective changes when you’ve lived countless lives. You’ve allowed us to escape the limitations of our senses. You’ve saved us all. That’s your legacy.” “I know what you did to me in San Francisco,” Helena says. “In the original timeline.” Slade stares back at her, unblinking. “When you told me about accidentally discovering what the chair could do, you left out the part where you murdered me.” “And yet here you are. Death no longer has any hold over us. This is your life’s work, Helena. Embrace it.”

we don’t know what people would do with this knowledge. All we know is that once enough people know about the chair, or how to build it, there’s no going back. We’ll never escape the loop of universal knowledge of the chair. It will live on in every subsequent timeline. We’ll have doomed humanity forever. I’d rather take the chance at passing up something glorious than risk everything on one roll of the dice.”

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past. —GEORGE ORWELL, 1984

She watches the news first thing in the mornings, and with each passing cycle, FMS occupies less bandwidth in the endless parade of tragedies and scandals and celebrity gossip. When another school shooting takes nineteen lives, it is the first day since the Big Bend appeared that FMS isn’t mentioned in the top headlines.

I only suspected you had figured out some way to alter memories. I wanted to be a part of it. I tried to find you and Slade, but you’d both vanished. When False Memory Syndrome first cropped up on a mass scale, I went to the one place I knew would be interested in my story.” “DARPA? You seriously thought that was a good idea?” “All the government agencies were discombobulated. The CDC was trying to find a pathogen that didn’t exist. A RAND physicist wrote a memo theorizing FMS could be micro changes in space-time. But DARPA believed me. We started tracking down victims of FMS and interviewing them. Last month, I found someone who claimed to have been put into a chair and sent back into a memory. All they knew was that it had happened in a hotel somewhere in Manhattan. I knew it had to be you or Slade, or the two of you working together.”

“I want you to know, there is no place safer in the width and breadth of the entire world than the other side of that glass. It may not look like it, but this building is a goddamn fortress, and at DARPA, we keep our secrets.” “That glass can’t contain the chair. Nothing can. Why do you want it anyway?” The right side of his mouth curls up, and for an instant, she glimpses the steel cunning in his eyes. “Do me one favor, Dr. Smith,” Shaw says. “What’s that?” “For the next hour of your life, try to keep an open mind.”

“The changes you make will affect other people and cause all kinds of pain for them. Pain they’re not ready for. Do you think you have a right to do that?” No one acknowledges Helena’s question.

“I am begging you. Show restraint. Its use has only ever caused mayhem and pain.” “Maybe the wrong people were at the controls.” “Humanity doesn’t have the wisdom to handle this sort of power.” “I’m about to prove you wrong.”

“What did you do?” Helena asks, still trying to sort out dead memories from the new, real ones. “Think about the school shooting two days ago,” Raj says. Helena tries to remember the news coverage she watched the last few mornings in her apartment—hordes of students evacuating the school, horrifying videos taken on students’ phones showing the rampage as it unfolded inside the cafeteria, devastated parents pleading for politicians to do something, to never let this happen again, law enforcement briefings and vigils and— But none of that happened. Those are dead memories now.

More than twenty-four hours later, the identity of the would-be school shooter’s killer remains unknown, but the anonymous vigilante who snuffed him out is being heralded across the world as a hero. Shaw looks at Helena. “Your chair saved nineteen lives.” She’s speechless.

“That’s…” “Playing God?” “Yeah.” “But isn’t it also playing God not to intervene when you have that power?” “We shouldn’t have that power.” “But we do.

breaking news coverage of the school shooting that “unhappened.” Students who were murdered stand in front of cameras, recounting false memories of being gunned down. A weeping father speaks of going to the morgue to identify his dead son, a broken mother tells of being in the midst of planning her daughter’s funeral only to shift into a moment of driving her to school instead. Helena wonders if she’s the only one who sees the slight unhinging behind the eyes of one of the previously murdered students.

Helena leans forward. “This is no different from how Marcus Slade was using the chair. He wanted to change how we experienced reality, but on a practical level, he was letting people go back and fix their lives, which was good for some people, and catastrophic for others.”

Albert says, “Helena raises a legitimate concern. There’s already quite a bit of literature out there on the effects of FMS on the brain, issues of excess memory storage, and false memories in people with mental disorders. I’d recommend we have a team research every serious paper that’s been published on the subject, so we can stay informed moving forward. In theory, if we limit the age of the memories we send our agents back to, we’ll limit the cognitive dissonance between the real and false timelines.”

I have a list here”—he touches a black leather notebook—“of atrocities and disasters from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I’m just spitballing, but what if we found a ninety-five-year-old with sniper training in their past. A sharp mind. Clear recollection. Helena, what’s the earliest age you’d feel comfortable sending someone back into a memory?”

“The female brain is fully mature at twenty-one,” she says. “The male brain, a few years later. Sixteen could probably handle it, but we’d need testing to be sure. There’s a potential that if we sent someone back into their memories at too young an age, their cognitive functioning would simply collapse. An adult consciousness being shoved into an underdeveloped brain could be disastrous.”

For the sake of argument, what if we figured out some way to stop World War Two from happening? What if, because of our actions, thirty million people lived who would’ve otherwise died? Maybe you think that sounds amazing. Look closer. How do you begin to calculate the good and the evil potential of those who died?

It would undo the marriages and births of millions of people. Without Hitler, an entire generation of immigrants would never have come to the US. Or, simpler still, if your great-grandmother’s high school sweetheart doesn’t die in the war, she marries him instead of your great-grandfather. Your grandparents are never born, your parents are never born, and—fucking obviously—neither are you.”

“If England didn’t go to war with Germany because of something we did, then Alan Turing, the father of the computer and artificial intelligence, wouldn’t have been pushed to break Germany’s ciphering technology. Now, maybe he still would’ve gone on to lay a foundation for the modern, microchip-driven world we live in. Then again, maybe not. Or to a lesser degree. And how many lives have been saved based on all this technology that protects us? More than the lives lost in the Second World War? The ‘what-ifs’ snowball out into infinity.”

You aren’t going to stop me from using the chair, but maybe you can help us use it wisely.”

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.

“If your aim is to repair the evil that men do, maybe it’s in your interest for evil men to fear you. Also, if they find this guy near the scene of the crime, ready to break into a house, authorities will link him to the other murders, and hopefully give closure to the other families.” Timoney says, “You’re saying we become the bogeyman?” “If someone chooses not to commit an atrocity because they fear a shadow group with the ability to manipulate memory and time, that’s a mission you’ll never have to face, and false memories you’ll never have to create. So yes. Become the bogeyman.”

Day by day, it’s becoming clearer the types of tragedies they are most suited to fix, and if there’s any hesitation, any doubt whatsoever, to Helena’s relief, they err on the side of noninterference.

the New York Times profiles their eight missions, speculating that the deaths of would-be murderers, school shooters, and one suicide bomber suggest the work of an enigmatic organization in possession of a technology beyond all understanding.

Shaw takes a long swig and says, “I build shit for the military to help them kill people as efficiently as possible. I’ve been behind some truly horrific technology. But these last few months have been the best of my life. Every night, while I fall asleep, I think about the grief we’re erasing. I see the faces of the people whose lives or loved ones we’re saving. I think about Daisy Robinson. I think about all of them.”

“How would the military use the chair?” “How wouldn’t they? Yesterday, a platoon from the 101st was ambushed in Kandahar Province. Eight marines KIA. That’s not public information yet. Last month, a Black Hawk crashed on a night training mission in Hawaii. Five dead. You know how many missions fail because you missed the enemy by a few days or hours? Right place, wrong time? They would see the chair as a tool that would give commanders the ability to edit warfare.”

it isn’t just the DoD who would exploit the chair. The CIA, NSA, FBI—every agency will want a piece of it if word gets out. We are a DoD agency, and that’ll provide some cover, but they’ll all demand a seat in the chair.” “Jesus. Will word get out?” “Hard to say, but can you imagine if the Justice Department had this tech? They’d turn this country into Minority Report.” “Destroy the chair.” “Helena…” “What? How hard is this? Destroy it before any of this happens.”

“Seventy-six days?” Helena asks. “Correct.” Albert says, “Did you tell them we don’t use the chair to go back that far?” “I didn’t put it quite that stridently, but yes.” “And?” “They said, ‘Do as you’re fucking told.’ ”

Shaw is still given free rein to intervene in civilian tragedies, but their work is becoming increasingly military-facing.

They’re using the chair with such frequency—at least once a week now—that Shaw brings on a new agent to lighten the burden on Steve and Timoney, who are beginning to experience the first signs of mental degradation from the stress of dying again and again.

She rushes into the kitchen and answers the phone with, “Who’s using the chair?” “It’s not us,” John says. “Bullshit. I just shifted from dying in the Midtown Tunnel to standing in my apartment, watching this bridge burn.” “Just get here as fast as you can.” “Why?” “We’re fucked, Helena. We are so fucked.”

Helena dials Shaw, holds the phone to her ear, thinking, Someone’s using the chair to shift reality from one disaster to the next. “All circuits are busy, please try your call again.” Alonzo turns on the radio. “—getting reports that two semitrucks exploded near Grand Central Terminal. There’s quite a bit of confusion. There were reports earlier of some type of accident at the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, and I remember seeing the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge go down, but…I don’t know how this is possible—I see it standing in perfect condition on our tower cam right—”

They’re stuck in traffic now, and all around her, people are standing on the sidewalk, looking in horror at Trump Tower, which is billowing clouds of smoke and flame. The lower ten floors are sagging like a melting face, the interiors of individual rooms exposed like cubbyholes. The ones higher up are still largely intact, with people inside of them staring over the newly made precipice into the crater that used to be the intersection of Fifty-Seventh and Fifth Avenue. As the city screams with incoming sirens, Jessica shrieks, “What’s happening? What is happening?”

A third plummets through the awning of a private sports club, Helena wondering if people are throwing themselves off buildings because this is too much for their psyches to bear. It wouldn’t surprise her. If she didn’t know about the chair, what would she think was happening to the city, to time, to reality itself? Jessica is crying. Alonzo says, “It feels like the end of everything.”

Raj and Albert are sitting at the conference table in the lab, watching the news on a television embedded in the wall. The screen has been divided into four live images from tower cams showing the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, Grand Central Terminal, Trump Tower, and the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, all untouched, over the banner, “MASS MEMORY MALFUNCTION IN MANHATTAN.”

although it never happened, she can still feel the impact from the wall of water slamming into her. She can hear the bodies striking cars all around her. She can hear the shriek of the bridge tearing itself apart.

“Marcus was operating out of that hotel for more than a year. Someone got curious about what he was doing and hacked his servers. Raj just found evidence of the incursion.” “It was a massive data breach,” Raj says. “They hid it well, and they got everything.” Shaw looks at Albert. “Tell her what you found.” “Other instances of reality shifts.” “Where?” “Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, Moscow, four in Paris, two in Glasgow, one in Oslo. Very similar to the way FMS stories first appeared in America last year.”

“The Chinese and Russian governments have both reached out to say they have this technology.”

with WikiLeaks publishing the schematics, any corporation, dictator, or wealthy individual with twenty-five million dollars lying around can build their own private memory machine.”

it’s a weapon. It’s the ultimate weapon. Remember our first meeting at this table, when we talked about sending a ninety-five-year-old sniper into a memory to change the outcome of a war? Who among our enemies—hell, even our friends—would benefit from using the chair against us?” “Who wouldn’t?” Shaw says. “So this is analogous to a nuclear standoff?” Raj asks. “Quite the opposite. Governments don’t use nuclear weapons, because the moment they press the button, their opponent will do the same. The threat of retaliation is too great a deterrent. But there is no threat of retaliation or assured mutual destruction with the chair. The first government, or corporation, or individual, to successfully and strategically use it—whether by changing the outcome of a war or assassinating a long-dead dictator or whatever—wins.”

Whoever rewrites history in their own interest first, wins. It’s too big a gamble to let someone else get there first.”

“Let’s send Timoney back,” Shaw says. “To when?” Albert asks. “To before Slade’s lab was hacked. Now that we know the location of his building, we can raid it earlier. There will be no cyber theft, and we’ll be the sole custodians of the chair.” “Until we arrive back at this moment,” Albert says. “And then the world will remember all the mayhem that happened this morning.” Helena says, “And the people who currently have the chair will just rebuild it from a false memory. Like Slade did. It’ll be harder without blueprints, but not impossible. What we need is more time.”

“What are you doing, Helena?” Shaw asks again. “Getting us out of this jam.” “How?” “Will you just fucking trust me, John?” she shouts. “We are out of time. I have stood by, offered counsel, played by your rules. Now it’s your turn to play by mine.”

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.