Recursion - Blake Crouch Page 0,104

of her.

She smiles at the camera and brushes a wisp of white hair out of her face, his heart kicking at the sight of her.

“This is weird.” She laughs nervously. “You should be watching this on April 16, 2019—our favorite day in history. Your consciousness and memories from the last timeline have just shifted over. Or should have. With each new iteration, your memories are coming in more slowly and erratically. Sometimes you miss entire lifetimes. So I made this video—first, to tell you not to be afraid, since you’re probably wondering why you’re in a research station in Antarctica. And secondly, because I want to say something to the Barry who remembers all timelines, who’s quite different from the one I’m living with now. So please, pause me until your memories arrive.”

He pauses the video.

It is so quiet here.

Nothing but the roar of the wind.

He goes to the kitchen, and as he brews a cup of coffee, a tightness forms in his chest.

There’s a storm of emotion on the horizon.

His head pounds at the base of his skull, and a nosebleed hits.

The Portland bar.

Helena.

Her slow revelation of who she was.

Buying this old research station at the turn of the millennium.

They refurbished it, then flew the chair and all its component parts down here on a privately chartered 737 that stuck a harrowing landing on the polar runway.

They brought a team of particle physicists with them whom they had apparently scoped out in a prior timeline, who had no concept of the true nature of their research. They drilled out 1.5 foot–diameter cores 8,000 feet deep into the polar cap and lowered highly sensitive light detectors more than a mile below the ice. The sensors were designed to detect neutrinos, one of the most enigmatic particles in the universe. Neutrinos carry no charge, rarely interact with normal matter, and typically emerge from (and therefore indicate) cosmic events such as supernovae, galactic cores, and black holes. When a neutrino hits an atom on Earth, it creates a particle called a muon, that’s moving faster than light in a solid, causing the ice to emit light. These light waves caused by muons passing through solid ice is what they looked for.

Barry’s theory, carried over from prior timelines, was that if micro black holes and wormholes were flashing in and out of existence when someone’s consciousness re-spawned in an earlier memory, these light detectors would register the light waves caused by muons caused by neutrinos ejecting from the black holes and smashing into the nucleus of earthbound atoms.

They got nowhere.

Discovered nothing.

The team of particle physicists went home.

Six lifetimes pursuing a deeper understanding of the memory chair, and all they had managed to do was postpone the inevitable.

He looks up at the screen, where Helena is frozen mid-gesture.

Now come the dead memories of prior timelines. Their lives in Arizona, Denver, on the rugged coast of Maine. His life without her in New York City, their life together in Scotland. But there are still holes. He has flashes of the last timeline near San Francisco, but it’s incomplete—he can’t remember the last days of it, when the world remembered.

He presses Play.

“So you’ve remembered? Good. The only way you’re watching this is because I’m gone.”

Tears release. It’s the weirdest sensation. While the Barry of this timeline knows she’s dead, simultaneously the Barrys of the prior timelines register the pain of her loss for the first time.

“I’m sorry, honey.”

He remembers the day she died, eight weeks ago. She had become almost childlike by that point, her mind gone. He had to feed her, dress her, bathe her.

But this was better than the time right before, when she had enough cognitive function left to be aware of her complete confusion. In her lucid moments, she described the feeling as being lost in a dreamlike forest—no identity, no sense of when or where she was. Or alternatively, being absolutely certain she was fifteen years old and still living with her parents in Boulder, and trying to square her foreign surroundings with her sense of place and time and self. She often wondered if this was what her mother felt in her final year.

“This timeline—before my mind started to fracture—was the best of them all. Of my very long life. Do you remember that trip we took—I think it was during our first life together—to see the emperor penguins migrate? Remember how we fell in love with this continent? The way it makes you feel like you’re the