Recursion - Blake Crouch Page 0,75
they won’t.” Shaw polishes off his beer. He unbuttons his collar, loosens his tie. “I don’t want to freak you out, but it isn’t just the DoD who would exploit the chair. The CIA, NSA, FBI—every agency will want a piece of it if word gets out. We are a DoD agency, and that’ll provide some cover, but they’ll all demand a seat in the chair.”
“Jesus. Will word get out?”
“Hard to say, but can you imagine if the Justice Department had this tech? They’d turn this country into Minority Report.”
“Destroy the chair.”
“Helena…”
“What? How hard is this? Destroy it before any of this happens.”
“Its potential for good is too high. We’ve already proven that. We can’t destroy it because of fear for what might happen.”
It becomes silent in the apartment. Helena wraps her fingers around the cold, sweating bottle of beer.
“So what’s your plan?” she asks.
“I don’t have one. Not yet. I just needed you to know what’s coming.”
Day 136
It begins sooner than anyone anticipates.
Shaw walks into the lab on March 22 for their daily briefing of all the horrible shit that’s happened in the world in the past twenty-four hours and says, “We have our first mandated assignment.”
“From whom?” Raj asks.
“Way up the food chain.”
“So they know?” Helena asks.
“Yes.” He opens a manila file with Top Secret stamped in red on the cover. “This has not been in the news. On January fifth, seventy-five days ago, a sixth-generation fighter jet malfunctioned and went down near the Ukraine/Belarus border. They don’t think the aircraft was destroyed, and they’re pretty sure the pilot was captured. We’re talking about a Boeing F/A-XX, which is still in development, highly classified, and loaded with all sorts of bells and whistles we’d prefer the Russians not have.
“They’ve asked me to send an agent back to January fourth to tell me about this crash. Then I’m to deliver a message to the Deputy SecDef, who will make sure word gets down through the ranks so the aircraft is inspected before the test flight and not flown anywhere near Russian territory.”
“Seventy-six days?” Helena asks.
“Correct.”
Albert says, “Did you tell them we don’t use the chair to go back that far?”
“I didn’t put it quite that stridently, but yes.”
“And?”
“They said, ‘Do as you’re fucking told.’ ”
They send Timoney back at ten a.m. on March 22.
By eleven a.m., Helena and the team are in front of the TV, glued to CNN in shock. This is the first time they’ve used the chair to go back before the date of a previous intervention, and as far as they can gather from reports, it’s had an extraordinary effect. Until now, the false memory phenomenon has obeyed its predictable pattern, sticking to its individual timeline anniversaries. In other words, when an operative alters a timeline, the false memories of that “dead” timeline always arrive at the exact moment the operative died in the tank. This time, however, it seems those anniversary points have been overridden—not erased, but pushed back to ten a.m. this morning, the moment of the chair’s latest use when Timoney went back to give Shaw the message about the downed fighter jet. So instead of recalling each dead timeline as it happened, the public received the full hit of dead memories in a single gulp, at ten a.m. today, everyone simultaneously remembering all the averted massacres since January fourth, including Berkeley and the London Underground suicide bombing.
Inflicting these false memories one by one, over the course of several months, was disruptive enough. Hitting everyone with all of them, in a single instant, is exponentially more so.
So far, the media isn’t reporting any deaths or breakdowns as a result of the sudden onslaught, but for Helena it’s a stark reminder that her machine is far too mysterious, dangerous, and unknowable to exist.
Day 140
Shaw is still given free rein to intervene in civilian tragedies, but their work is becoming increasingly military-facing.
They use the chair to go back and undo a drone strike that hit a wedding, killing mostly Afghan women and children, and completely missing the intended target, who wasn’t even in attendance.
Day 146
They revise an airstrike from a B-1 Lancer bomber that misdirected its payload and killed an entire spec-ops team in Zabul Province instead of the Taliban force it had been called in to hit.
Day 152
Four dead soldiers, attacked by Islamic militants while on patrol in the Niger desert, are resurrected when Timoney dies in the tank and gives Shaw the details of the upcoming ambush.
They’re using the chair with