Recursion - Blake Crouch Page 0,45
of course, those hoping for both.
She misses the mental stimulation of her work. Misses being in a laboratory. Misses having a goal. It eats her up inside to wonder what her parents must make of her disappearance. She feels guilty every hour of every day that she isn’t building the memory chair that could preserve core memories for people like her mom.
It has crossed her mind that one solution to all of this would be to kill Slade. It’d be easy enough to get close to him—she could call Jee-woon, say she’s reconsidered the offer. But she doesn’t have it in her. For better or worse, she simply isn’t that person.
So she comforts herself with the knowledge that every day she remains in this secluded corner of the world, undiscovered by Slade, is a day she keeps the world safe from what she has the potential to create.
* * *
After two years, she procures fake credentials and identification documents from the Dark Web and moves to Anchorage, Alaska, where she volunteers as a research assistant for a neuroscientist at the university—a kind man who has no idea that one of his underlings is the preeminent research scientist in the world. She spends her days interviewing Alzheimer’s patients and recording their deteriorating memories over weeks and months as the disease progresses through its cruel, dehumanizing stages. The work is hardly groundbreaking, but at least she’s lending her intellect to a field of study she’s passionate about. The boredom and purposelessness of her time in the Yukon had driven her to the brink of depression.
There are days she wants desperately to start building the MEG microscope and the reactivation apparatus as a means for capturing and preserving the memories of the people she interviews, who are slowly losing themselves and the memories that define them. But the risk is too great. It could alert Slade to her work, or someone might, as she apparently did, accidentally make the leap from memory reactivation to memory travel. Humans cannot be trusted with technology of such power—with the splitting of the atom came the atomic bomb. The ability to change memory, and thereby reality, would be at least that dangerous, in part because it would be so seductive. Was she herself not changing the past now, and at her first opportunity?
But the chair has been unmade, she has vanished, and there is no threat to memory and time but the knowledge in her own mind, which she will take to the grave.
The thought of killing herself has occurred to her on more than one occasion. It would be the ultimate insurance policy against Slade finding her and forcing her cooperation. She’s gone so far as to make potassium chloride tablets in the event that day ever comes.
She keeps them with her at all times, in a silver locket around her neck.
* * *
Helena parks in a visitor’s space near the entrance and steps out into the sweltering August heat. The grounds are well kept. There are gazebos and water features and picnic areas. She wonders how her father is affording this place.
She checks in at the main desk and has to write her name on a visitor’s sign-in form. As the admin makes a copy of her driver’s license, Helena looks around, nervous.
She’s been three years on this new timeline. Slade’s false memories of their time together on his oil platform would have found him early in the morning on July 6, 2009, the same moment (in the previous timeline) when she died in the deprivation tank and returned to the memory of Jee-woon coming to her lab at Stanford.
If Slade wasn’t looking for her prior to that, he will be now. In all likelihood, he’s paid off someone here to alert him if Helena ever turns up.
Which she just has.
But she didn’t come here ignorant of the risk.
If Slade or one of his men tracks her down, she’s prepared to handle it.
Reaching up, she clutches the locket hanging from her neck.
“Here you are, hon.” The admin hands Helena a visitor’s badge. “Dorothy’s in Room 117, end of the hall. I’ll buzz you through.”
Helena waits as the doors to the Memory Care wing slowly open.
The smells of cleaning products and urine and cafeteria food comingle to conjure the memory of the last time she set foot in an adult-care facility—twenty years ago, during the final months of her grandfather’s life.
She passes a common area, where residents in a heavily medicated stupor sit around