Recursion - Blake Crouch Page 0,78
adjacent lane, and Alonzo reaches over, grabs the steering wheel from the passenger seat, and whips the vehicle back into its lane.
Straight ahead, a bus drifts into their lane, sideswiping three cars and crushing them into the divider in a spray of sparks and shattering glass.
Jessica cranks the steering wheel, just missing the pileup as the car momentarily leans over on two wheels.
“Look behind us,” she says.
Helena glances back, sees massive columns of smoke rising out of Midtown.
“It’s some false-memory thing, isn’t it?” Jessica says.
Helena dials Shaw, holds the phone to her ear, thinking, Someone’s using the chair to shift reality from one disaster to the next.
“All circuits are busy, please try your call again.”
Alonzo turns on the radio.
“—getting reports that two semitrucks exploded near Grand Central Terminal. There’s quite a bit of confusion. There were reports earlier of some type of accident at the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, and I remember seeing the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge go down, but…I don’t know how this is possible—I see it standing in perfect condition on our tower cam right—”
* * *
—and they’re stopped on East Fifty-Seventh Street, the air choked with smoke, her ears ringing.
Another headache.
Another nosebleed.
Another shift.
The tunnel never happened.
The bridge never happened.
Grand Central Terminal was never bombed.
Only the dead memories of those events remain, stacked in her mind like the memories of dreams.
She woke up, made breakfast, got dressed, and rode down to the parking garage under her building with Jessica and Alonzo, just like every other morning. They were heading west on East Fifty-Seventh to loop around onto the bridge when a blinding flash split the sky, coupled with a sound like a thousand synchronized cannon blasts ricocheting off the surrounding buildings.
They’re stuck in traffic now, and all around her, people are standing on the sidewalk, looking in horror at Trump Tower, which is billowing clouds of smoke and flame.
The lower ten floors are sagging like a melting face, the interiors of individual rooms exposed like cubbyholes. The ones higher up are still largely intact, with people inside of them staring over the newly made precipice into the crater that used to be the intersection of Fifty-Seventh and Fifth Avenue.
As the city screams with incoming sirens, Jessica shrieks, “What’s happening? What is happening?”
Straight ahead, a human being falls out of the sky and crushes in the roof of a cab.
Another person crashes through a car windshield directly behind the Suburban.
A third plummets through the awning of a private sports club, Helena wondering if people are throwing themselves off buildings because this is too much for their psyches to bear. It wouldn’t surprise her. If she didn’t know about the chair, what would she think was happening to the city, to time, to reality itself?
Jessica is crying.
Alonzo says, “It feels like the end of everything.”
Helena looks up at the building out her window as a blond-haired woman leaps from an office whose glass was shattered by the blast. She falls like a rocket, headfirst, screaming toward impact, and Helena starts to turn away, but she can’t.
The movement of everything decelerates again.
The roiling smoke.
The flames.
The falling woman grinding down into extreme slow-motion, her head inching closer and closer to the pavement.
Everything stops.
This timeline dying.
Jessica’s hands eternally clutch the steering wheel.
Helena can never look away from the jumper, who will never hit the ground, because she’s frozen in midair, the top of her head one foot from the pavement, her yellow hair splayed out, eyes closed, face in a perpetual grimace, bracing for impact—
* * *
And Helena is walking through the double doors of the DARPA building, where Shaw stands just outside security.
They stare at each other, processing this new reality as the accompanying set of replacement memories clicks in.
None of it happened.
Not the tunnel, the bridge, Grand Central, or Trump Tower. Helena woke up, got ready, and was driven here like every other morning, without incident.
She opens her mouth to speak, but Shaw says, “Not out here.”
Raj and Albert are sitting at the conference table in the lab, watching the news on a television embedded in the wall. The screen has been divided into four live images from tower cams showing the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, Grand Central Terminal, Trump Tower, and the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, all untouched, over the banner, “MASS MEMORY MALFUNCTION IN MANHATTAN.”
“What the fuck is going on?” Helena asks.
She’s physically shaking, because, although it never happened, she can still feel the impact from the wall of water slamming into her. She can hear the bodies striking cars all