Recursion - Blake Crouch Page 0,94

on this one, his perspective of their work during the last ten years is paradoxically and simultaneously brand-new and intimately familiar. He sees it, both with fresh eyes and a total loss of objectivity.

He spent much of this life studying black-hole physics. While Helena was right there with him in the beginning, these last five years, as April 16, 2019, drew closer with no breakthrough in range, she started to withdraw.

The knowledge that she would have to do this all over again simply broke her.

On the window glass overlooking the woods, the fundamental questions he wrote in black magic marker many years ago still taunt him, unanswered—

What is the Schwarzschild radius of a memory?

A wild notion…when we die, does the immense gravity of our collapsing memories create a micro black hole?

A wilder notion…does the memory-reactivation procedure—at the moment of death—then open a wormhole that connects our consciousness to an earlier version of ourselves?

He’s going to lose all of this knowledge. Not that it was ever really more than a theory—an attempt to pull back the curtain and understand why Helena’s chair did what it did. None of his knowledge means anything without scientific testing. Only in the last couple of years has it occurred to Barry that they should bring their equipment to the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, and kill someone in the tank in the presence of the Large Hadron Collider particle detectors. If they could prove the appearance of the entrance to a micro wormhole at the moment someone died in the tank, and a wormhole exit at the moment their consciousness re-spawned in their body at an earlier point in time, they might begin to understand the true mechanics of memory return.

Helena hated the idea. She didn’t believe the knowledge payoff was worth the risk of their technology getting out in the wild again, which would almost certainly happen if they shared their knowledge of the chair with the scientific community at the LHC. Besides, it would take years to convince the powers-that-be to give them access to a particle detector, and years on top of that, plus teams of scientists to write algorithms and software to pull the physics data out of the system. At the end of the day, it was going to be far more difficult and time consuming to study the particle physics of the chair than it was to actually build the thing.

But time is what they have.

“Barry.”

He turns.

Helena stands in the doorway, and the shock of seeing this iteration of his wife, in contrast to the previous two, sounds an alarm inside of him. She looks like a disintegrating version of the woman he loves—too thin, her eyes dark and hollowed out, her orbital bones a touch too pronounced.

A memory takes hold—she tried to kill herself two years ago. The white scars running down her forearms are still visible. He found her in the old claw-foot tub in the windowed alcove with a view of the sea, the bathwater turned the color of wine. He remembers lifting her nearly lifeless, dripping body out of the water and setting her on the tile. Frantically wrapping her wrists in medical gauze just in time to stop the bleeding.

She almost died.

The hardest part was there was no one she could talk to. No psychiatrist with whom she could share the burden of her existence. She only had Barry, and the guilt of not being enough for her has been eating him away for years.

In this moment, staring at her in the doorway, he is overcome by his devotion to this woman.

He says, “You are the bravest person I’ve ever known.”

She holds up her phone. “The missiles launched ten minutes ago. We failed again.” She takes a sip from the glass of red wine in her hand.

“You shouldn’t be drinking that before you get in the tank.”

She polishes off the rest. “It’s just a nip to calm my nerves.”

It’s been hard between them. He can’t remember the last time he slept in her bed. The last time they had sex. The last time they laughed at something stupid. But he can’t begrudge her. For him, their relationship begins each iteration in that Portland bar, when he’s twenty-one and she’s twenty. They spend twenty-nine years together, and while each loop feels brand-new to him (until they reach this doomsday moment and gain memories of the prior timelines), from her perspective, she’s been with the same man for eighty-seven years, reliving, over and