Recursion - Blake Crouch Page 0,107
feels like looking into space from space. On a night like this—no wind, no weather, no moon—the smear of the Milky Way looks more like a celestial fire, brimming with colors you’d never see from anyplace else on Earth.
Space is one of the few places where time makes sense to him. He knows, on an intellectual level, that when he looks at any object, he’s looking back in time. In the case of his own hand, it takes the light a nanosecond—one billionth of a second—to transport the image to his eyes. When he looks at the research station from half a mile away, he’s seeing the structure as it existed 2,640 nanoseconds ago.
It seems instantaneous, and for all intents and purposes, it is.
But when Barry looks into the night sky, he’s seeing stars whose light took a year, or a hundred, or a million to reach him. The telescopes that peer into deep space are looking at ten-billion-year-old light from stars that coalesced just after the universe began.
He’s looking back, not just through space but through time.
He’s colder than he was hiking out to their gravesite, but not cold enough. He’s going to have to open his parka and remove some layers.
He sits up, pulls off the outer shell of his right glove, and digs into his pocket.
He takes out a flask of whiskey, kept somewhat warm by proximity to his body and the air trapped between layers of clothing. Out in the open, it’s more than cold enough to freeze solid inside of a minute.
Next, he takes out the bottle of oxy. It contains five 20 mg tablets, and if they don’t kill him outright, they’ll certainly put him into a deep slumber while the cold finishes him off.
He opens the bottle and dumps the pills into his mouth, rinsing them down with several swallows of ice-cold whiskey that still feels hot when it hits his stomach.
He’s been imagining this moment obsessively since Helena died.
The loneliness has been unbearable without her, and the world beyond has nothing left for him, should it even continue to exist. He no longer wants to know what will happen next.
He lies back in the grave, thinking he’ll wait to open his jacket until he feels the first effects of the drug, when a memory comes.
He thought he had them all, but now the last moments of the previous timeline flash in.
Slade saying—
“You have to go back to what happened first.”
“We tried that. Multiple times. Helena went back to 1986—”
“Stop thinking linearly. Not to the beginning of this timeline. Not even the last five or six. You have to return to the event that started all of this, and that’s on the original.”
“The original timeline only exists in a dead memory.”
“Exactly. You have to go back and restart it. That’s the only way to stop people from remembering. I killed Helena on November 5, 2018, on the original timeline. Go back as close to that date as possible…and stop me.”
Holy fuck.
He remembers racing down the hill, into the house, screaming her name. His hands frozen on the deprivation chamber hatch as the timeline ended.
What if Slade was right? What if those old timelines are still out there? Take his memory of Lake Tear of the Clouds. He could see the faces of Julia and Meghan clearly. He remembered their voices. What if he could restart a dead memory by the sheer force of his consciousness breathing life and fire into the gray?
Is there a chance it might also skid everyone else’s consciousness back onto that dead timeline as well?
And if he could return, not just to a prior timeline, but to the original, there would be no false memories from subsequent timelines, and none from earlier ones either.
Because there are no timelines that pre-date the original.
It’d be like none of this ever happened.
He already took the pills. Probably has a half hour, maybe longer, before the drug takes over.
He sits up in the grave, sharp-awake.
Thoughts racing.
Maybe Slade was lying, but isn’t staying here, killing himself next to Helena’s body as he drowns in the memory of her the same fetishizing of nostalgia he did with Meghan? Just another instance of longing for the unreachable past?
* * *
Back at the station, Barry grabs a skullcap and the tablet that remotely controls the terminal. He climbs onto the chair and lowers the MEG microscope onto the skullcap, which begins to hum softly.
He sprinted the half mile from Helena’s gravesite to the station,