Recursion - Blake Crouch Page 0,64
trained on the man’s ruined center mass, but Jee-woon is gone by the time he reaches him—eyes glassing over with that final emptiness.
HELENA
November 7, 2018
It is one of the most gratifying moments of her fragmented existence to site Slade down the barrel of the shotgun.
She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a thumb drive. “I’m going to wipe every line of code. Then I’m going to dismantle the chair, the microscope—”
“Helena—”
“I’m talking now! The stimulators. Every piece of hardware and software in the building. It’s going to be like the chair never existed.”
Slade is leaning against the base of the terminal, pain in his eyes. “It’s been a minute, huh?”
“Thirteen years for me,” she says. “How long for you?”
He seems to consider the question as Barry moves toward him and kicks the revolver across the room.
“Who knows?” he says finally. “After you ghosted off my oil platform—well done, by the way, never understood exactly how you pulled that off—it took me years to rebuild the chair. But since then, I’ve lived more lifetimes than you can possibly fathom.”
“Doing what?” she asks.
“Most of them were quiet explorations of who I am, who I could be, in different places, with different people. Some were…louder. But this last timeline, I discovered that I could no longer generate a sufficient synaptic number to map my own memory. I’ve traveled too much. Filled my mind with too many lives. Too many experiences. It’s beginning to fracture. There are entire lifetimes I’ve never remembered, that I only experience in flashes. This hotel isn’t the first thing I did. It’s the last. I built it to let others experience the power of what is still, what will always be, your creation.”
He takes a strained breath and looks at Barry, Helena thinking that his eyes, even through the obvious pain, contain the composed depth of a man who has lived a long, long time.
“Helluva way to thank the man who gave you your daughter back,” Slade says.
“Well, now she’s dead again, you fucking asshole. The shock of remembering her own death and that building appearing yesterday pushed her over the edge.”
“I’m truly sorry to hear that.”
“You’re using the chair destructively.”
“Yes,” Slade says. “It will be destructive at first, like all progress. Just as the industrial age ushered in two world wars. Just as Homo sapiens supplanted the Neanderthal. But would you turn back the clock on all that comes with it? Could you? Progress is inevitable. And it’s a force for good.”
Slade glances at the entry wound in his shoulder, touches it, grimaces, then looks back at Barry. “You want to talk about destructive? How about being locked in our little fishbowls, in this joke of an existence imposed on us by the limits of our primate senses? Life is suffering. But it doesn’t have to be. Why should you be forced to accept your daughter’s death when you can change it? Why shouldn’t a dying man go back to his youth with full wisdom and knowledge instead of gasping out his last hours in agony? Why let a tragedy unfold when you could go back and prevent it? What you’re defending isn’t reality—it’s a prison, a lie.” Slade looks at Helena. “You know this. You have to see this. You’ve ushered in a new age for humanity. One where we no longer have to suffer and die. Where we can experience so much. Trust me, your perspective changes when you’ve lived countless lives. You’ve allowed us to escape the limitations of our senses. You’ve saved us all. That’s your legacy.”
“I know what you did to me in San Francisco,” Helena says. “In the original timeline.” Slade stares back at her, unblinking. “When you told me about accidentally discovering what the chair could do, you left out the part where you murdered me.”
“And yet here you are. Death no longer has any hold over us. This is your life’s work, Helena. Embrace it.”
She says, “You can’t possibly think humanity can be trusted with the memory chair.”
“Think of the good it could do. I know you wanted to use this technology to help people. To help your mom. You could go back and be with her before she died, before her mind destroyed itself. You could save her memories. We can undo the killings of Jee-woon and Sergei. It’d be like none of this happened.” His smile is filled with pain. “Can’t you see how beautiful a world that would be?”
She takes a step toward him.