Recursion - Blake Crouch Page 0,58
creaking as she pulls the blankets to her neck. It isn’t lost on her how strange it is to remember the future. The memory of her and Barry’s goodbye in this very room, four months from now, is still a throbbing ache. She was floating in the deprivation tank, and Barry leaned down and kissed her. There were tears in his eyes as he closed the hatch. In hers too. Their future seemed so full of promise, and she was killing it.
The Barry she left behind already knows if she’s been successful. He’ll have known the moment she died in the tank, his reality instantly shifting to align with this new reality she’s creating.
She resists the urge to wake the Barry of the present and tell him. It would only make breaking into Slade’s lab more difficult tomorrow, throwing an emotional wrench into things. And what would she say? There were sparks? Chemistry? Best to keep to the plan. All that matters is that tomorrow goes well. She can’t undo the damage her mind has wrought on the world, but perhaps she can seal the wound, stanch the bleeding.
She once had such immense dreams—eradicating the effects of memory-ravaging disease. Now, with her mom and dad gone and no real friends to speak of besides a man four months in the unreachable future, her dreams have reset from world-changing to the desperately personal.
She would simply like to be able to lie down at night, in peace, with a quiet mind.
She tries to sleep, knowing that she needs it more tonight than perhaps any other night of her life.
So of course sleep eludes her.
* * *
In the evening, they slip out the back of her building, taking a moment to study the nearby streets before venturing into the open. The district is mostly abandoned industrial buildings, and there’s little traffic to speak of, and nothing that looks suspicious.
As Barry takes them on a route through Brooklyn Heights, he glances at her across the center console. “When you were showing me the chair last night, you mentioned you had built it twice before. When was the first time?”
She takes a sip of the coffee she brought along—her talisman against the previous night of sleepless misery.
“In the original timeline, I was head of this R&D group for a San Francisco–based company called Ion. They weren’t interested in the medical applications of my chair. They only saw the entertainment value and the dollar signs that came with it.
“I was spinning my wheels, burned out, getting nowhere. Ion was on the verge of pulling the plug on my research when a test subject had a heart attack and died inside the deprivation tank. We all experienced a slight reality shift, but no one understood what had happened. No one except my assistant, Marcus Slade. Got to hand it to him—he realized what I’d created even before I did.”
“What happened?”
“A few days later, he asked to meet me at the lab. Said it was an emergency. When I showed up, he had a gun. He forced me to log into the system and load a reactivation program for a memory we had mapped for him. And when I had done that, he killed me.”
“When was this?”
“Two days ago. November 5, 2018. But, of course, it happened several timelines ago.”
Barry takes the exit for the Brooklyn Bridge.
“I don’t mean to second-guess you,” he says, “but couldn’t you have gone back into a different memory?”
“Like stop myself from being born so the chair was never made?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I can’t go back and stop myself from being born. Someone else can, and then I become a dead memory. But there’s no grandfather paradox or any temporal paradox when it comes to the chair. Everything that happens, even if it’s changed or undone, lives on in dead memories. Cause and effect are still alive and well.”
“OK, then what about returning to a memory on the oil rig? You could’ve pushed Slade off the platform or something.”
“Everything that happened on the rig exists in dead memories. You can’t return to them. We’ve tried—with disastrous results. But yes. I should’ve killed him when I had the chance.”
They’re halfway across the river now, the overhanging crossbars rushing past overhead. Maybe it’s the coffee, probably it’s their proximity to the city, but she is suddenly wide-awake.
“What are dead memories?” Barry asks.
“It’s what everyone thinks of as false memories. Except they aren’t false. They just happened on a timeline that someone ended.