Recursion

by Blake Crouch

“I have FMS.” Barry resists the urge to run. Of course he’s heard of False Memory Syndrome, but he’s never known or met someone with the affliction.

“One morning, about a month ago, instead of my home in Middlebury, Vermont, I was suddenly in an apartment here in the city, with a stabbing pain in my head and a terrible nosebleed. At first, I had no idea where I was. Then I remembered…this life too.

Here and now, I’m single, an investment banker, I live under my maiden name. But I have…”—she visibly braces herself against the emotion—“memories of my other life in Vermont. I was a mother to a nine-year-old boy named Sam. I ran a landscaping business with my husband, Joe Behrman. I was Ann Behrman. We were as happy as anyone has a right to be.”

“My son never existed. Do you get that? He’s just a beautiful misfire in my brain.”

“This isn’t your fault,” she says. “It was always going to end this way.” “Ann, no—” “My son has been erased.” And with a casual grace, she eases herself off the edge.

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

oof

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.

“No, they suddenly have two sets of memories. One true, one false. In some cases, patients felt like their memories and consciousness had moved from one life into another. In others, patients experienced a sudden ‘flash-in’ of false memories from a life they never lived.”

They haven’t identified a single physiological or neurological abnormality in those who are affected. The only symptoms are the false memories themselves. Oh, and about ten percent of people who get it kill themselves.”

There was this case study of a guy who woke up one day and had memories of an entirely different life. Being married to a different woman. Living in a different house, with different kids, working a different job. They reconstructed from his memory the guest list of his wedding—the one that he remembered, but never happened. They located thirteen from his list, and all of them also had memories of this wedding that never happened. Ever hear of something called the Mandela Effect?”

Weirddddd.

“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.”

We think we’re perceiving the world directly and immediately, but everything we experience is this carefully edited, tape-delayed reconstruction.”

“Yes, Dad.” Her last words. Now he remembers. Yes, Dad.

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.

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

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.”

What if his daughter had lived? What if his marriage had survived? What if everything had not derailed? What if… This isn’t real. This can’t be real.

if this is just a psychotic break? What if it all goes away? What if I lose Meghan again? Hyperventilating— What if— “Barry, you OK?” Quit thinking. Breathe. “Yeah.” Just breathe.

The image of Meghan’s body on the slab—her crushed-in torso covered in a black bruise—has never left him, although his memory of it has taken on the same haunted complexion as the other false memories.

She’s desperate to talk to them, but since the revelation two weeks ago that she and Slade built something far more powerful than a memory-immersion device, she hasn’t felt comfortable broaching the subject of communicating with her mom and dad again. She will when the time comes, but everything is still too fresh and raw.

“Dead memories fascinate me.” “Why?” “They represent…another dimension of movement.”

“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.”

“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.”

He has wondered lately if that’s all living really is—one long goodbye to those we love.

“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

And once people know the chair exists, their memories of it will always return, no matter how many times a timeline is changed.

“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.”

“You’re here because of me. The world is losing its collective mind because of me. There’s a fucking building out there that wasn’t there yesterday because of me. So I don’t really care what happens to me tomorrow so long as we destroy every trace of the chair’s existence. I’m ready to die if that’s what it takes.”

“What are dead memories?” Barry asks. “It’s what everyone thinks of as false memories. Except they aren’t false. They just happened on a timeline that someone ended. For instance, the timeline where your daughter was hit by a car is now a dead memory. You ended that timeline and started this one when Slade killed you in the deprivation chamber.”

“What are you doing?” he asks. “Making a save point.” “A what?” She inserts the tip of the knife into the side of her left arm above the elbow and draws the blade across her skin. As the pain comes and the blood begins to flow—

Helena comes alongside him, and as she brushes her hair out of her face, Barry is overcome by a savage, protective impulse that terrifies and bewilders him. He’s known her barely twenty-four hours.

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.”

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.

“Don’t forget—a terrorist group of some sort appears to be one of the proud new owners of a chair, and they’re using it to repeat the same attack on different landmarks in one of the most densely populated cities in the world.”

“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.”

Watching her, it’s apparent that her obsession with the memory chair has fully consumed her, and it breaks his heart.

What do you say to the bravest woman you’ve ever known, whom you lived a half dozen extraordinary lives with, whom you saved the world with, who saved you in every conceivable way, but who has no idea you even exist?

Questions avalanching through his mind— Will you know me? Will you believe me? Will you love me? Scared, exhilarated, senses heightening, heart thrumming, he turns finally to Helena, who, feeling his attention, looks over at him through those jade-green eyes. And he says—