Recursion - Blake Crouch Page 0,101
little refresh on that one.”
“You told her that the dead memories of older timelines could be undone if she knew how to travel the way you did.”
“Ah.” Slade smiles again. “You two have built your own chair.”
Helena says, “After you died in your hotel, DARPA came in and took everything. Things were OK at first, but on April 16, 2019, six timelines ago today, the technology broke out into the wild. There were memory chairs being used all over the world. The schematics were published on WikiLeaks. Reality began constantly shifting. I went back thirty-three years to start a new timeline, so I’d have a chance to find a way of stopping the dead memories. But they always come. The world always remembers the chair, no matter what we do.”
“So you’re looking for a way out of this loop? A reset?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because exactly what I told you would happen happened. Pandora’s box has been flung open. I don’t know how to close it.”
Slade goes to the sink, splashes water in his face.
He comes back over to the glass.
“How do we stop the dead memories?” she asks.
“You got me killed in one life. Abducted in another. So let me ask you—why would I help you?”
“Because maybe you still have a shred of decency?”
“Humanity deserves a chance to evolve beyond our prison of time. It deserves a chance at true progress. Your life’s work was the chair. Giving it to humanity was mine.”
Barry registers a wave of rage flooding through him.
“Marcus, listen to me,” he says. “There is no progress happening. Right now, the world is remembering the existence of the memory chair, and those dead memories will trigger a nuclear apocalypse.”
“Why?”
“Because our enemies think the US is altering history.”
“Know what that sounds like to me?” Slade asks. “Bullshit.”
Barry rises and moves toward the glass. “I’ve seen enough horror for a thousand lifetimes. Helena and I were nearly killed in Denver when the missiles hit. I watched New York City vaporize. Hundreds of millions of people have four distinct memory sets of dying in a nuclear holocaust.”
Helena looks at Barry and holds up her phone. “The alert just came through. I have to get to the lab.”
“Just wait a second,” Barry says.
“We’re too close to San Francisco. We’ve talked about this.”
Barry glares at Slade through the glass. “What is this special way of traveling?”
Slade takes a step back and eases down onto the end of the bed.
Barry says, “I have lived almost seventy years to ask you this, and you’re just going to stare at the floor?”
He feels Helena touch his shoulder. “I have to go.”
“Hang on.”
“I can’t. You know this. I love you. I’ll see you at the bottom of the world. We’ll keep after the micro wormholes. I guess it’s all we can do, right?”
Barry turns and kisses her. She hurries up the spiral staircase, her footfalls clanging on the metal steps.
Then it’s just Barry and Slade in the basement.
Barry pulls out his phone, shows Slade the emergency alert, advising of a ballistic missile threat inbound to multiple US targets.
Slade smiles. “Like I said, you killed me, abducted me, you’re probably lying to me right—”
“I swear I’m telling you the truth.”
“Prove it. Give me evidence that’s not a fake alert you could’ve sent to your phone. Let me see it with my own eyes or fuck off.”
“We don’t have time.”
“I have all the time in the world.”
Moving to the glass door in the cell, Barry takes out the key and unlocks the dead bolt.
“What?” Slade asks. “Think you can beat it out of me?”
Barry would certainly like nothing more than to bounce Slade’s skull off the stone wall until there is nothing left.
“Let’s go,” Barry says.
“Where?”
“We’ll watch the world end together.”
They head upstairs, past the stalls, out of the barn, and climb through the long grasses of a hill until they’re high above the ranch.
The moon is up, the countryside bright. To the west, several miles away, the dark sprawl of the Pacific is shimmering.
The lights of the Bay Area glitter to the south.
They sit in silence for a moment.
Then Barry asks, “What made you kill Helena in that first timeline?”
Slade sighs. “I was nothing. Nobody. I’d sleepwalked through life. And then I was presented with this…gift of an opportunity. To do it all over. Think what you will about me, but I didn’t keep the chair to myself.”
A ball of white-hot light blossoms near the Golden Gate Bridge, illuminating the sky and the sea brighter than the