going into my thumb.” Helena holds up the finger in question to show them the tiny white scar. “It wouldn’t come out because of the barb, so my father opened his pocket knife and cut the skin. I remember crying, his telling me to hold still, and when the hook was finally out, he held my thumb in the freezing water until it went numb. I watched the blood flowing out of the cut into the current.”
“What is your emotional connection to that memory?” Rajesh asks. “The reason you chose it.”
Helena looks into his big, dark eyes, says, “The pain of the fishhook, but mainly because it’s my favorite memory of my father. The moment when he was most quintessentially him.”
Day 370
They put Helena back in the chair and have her recall the memory again and again, breaking it down into segments until Rajesh’s team is able to assign individual synaptic patterns to specific moments.
Day 420
The first reactivation attempt occurs on Helena’s second Christmas Eve on the rig. They put her into the chair and fit her with a headpiece embedded with the network of electromagnetic stimulators. Sergei has programmed the apparatus with the synaptic coordinates of a single segment of Helena’s fly-fishing memory. When the lights go down in the main testing bay, Helena hears Slade’s voice in the headrest speaker.
“You ready?”
“Yes.”
They’ve all decided not to tell Helena when the reactivation apparatus will fire, or which memory segment they’ve selected, the concern being if she’s anticipating the memory, chances are she may inadvertently retrieve it on her own.
Helena closes her eyes and begins the mind-clearing exercise she’s been practicing for a week now. She sees herself walking into a room. There’s a bench in the middle, the kind one might find in an art museum. She takes a seat and studies the wall in front of her. From floor to ceiling, it transitions imperceptibly from white to black, passing through shades of subtly deepening gray. She starts at the bottom, taking her time scanning slowly up the length of the wall, fully observing the color of one section before moving on to the next, each subsequent region barely darker than the one before—
The sudden pinch of a barbed hook jabbing into her thumb, her voice a shriek of pain, a red bubble of blood filling in around the hook as her father comes running.
“Did you do it?” Helena asks, her heart slamming in her chest.
“Did you experience something?” Slade asks.
“Yes, just now.”
“Describe it.”
“A vivid memory flash of the hook puncturing my thumb. Was that you guys?”
Cheers erupt from the control room.
Helena begins to cry.
Day 422
They begin recording and cataloging the autobiographical memories of everyone on the rig, keeping strictly to flashbulb memories.
Day 424
Lenore allows them to record her memory of the morning of January 28, 1986.
She was eight years old on a visit to the dentist’s office. The office manager had brought a television from home and set it up in the waiting room. Lenore was sitting with her mother before her appointment, watching coverage of the historic shuttle launch when the spacecraft disintegrated over the Atlantic Ocean.
The information that encoded most strongly for her was the small television sitting on a rolling stand. The camera footage of the looping white clouds moments after the explosion. Her mother saying, “Oh dear God.” The severe concern in Dr. Hunter’s eyes. And one of the dental hygienists coming out of the back to stare at the television as tears ran down her face and under the surgical mask she still wore.
Day 448
Rajesh remembers the last time he saw his father before moving to America. They had taken a safari, just the two of them, in Spiti Valley, high in the Himalayas.
He remembers the smell of the yaks. The sharp intensity of mountain sunlight. The frigid bite of the river. The light-headedness that plagued him from the 4,000-meter, oxygen-deprived air. Everything brown and barren, except the lakes like pale-blue eyes, and the temples with their vibrantly colored prayer flags, and the upper reaches of the highest peaks gleaming with bright snow.
But especially the night Raj’s father told him what he really thought about life, about Raj, Raj’s mother, everything, in a fleeting moment of vulnerability as the two of them sat before a dying campfire.
Day 452
Sergei sits in the chair remembering the moment a motorcycle clipped the back of his car. The sudden impact of metal on metal. Seeing the bike somersault down the highway out the driver-side window. The fear,