Recursion - Blake Crouch Page 0,95
over, the same stretch of time from twenty to forty-nine years old.
Same fights.
Same fears.
Same dynamic.
Same…everything.
No real surprises.
Only now, in this brief moment, are they equals. Helena tried to explain before, but finally he understands, and this knowledge reminds him of something Slade said in his hotel lab, just before his death—Your perspective changes when you’ve lived countless lives.
Perhaps Slade had a point. You can’t truly understand yourself until you’ve lived many lives. Maybe the man wasn’t completely raving mad.
Helena steps into the room.
“You ready?” he asks.
“Can you fucking relax for a minute? Nobody’s sending a nuke into the coast of Maine. We’ll get Boston, New York, and Midwest fallout, but that’s hours away.”
They’ve fought about this exact moment—when it became clear in the last couple of years that they weren’t going to find a solution in this loop, Barry advocated for killing this timeline and sending Helena back before the world remembered its violent end on the previous timeline, and suffered a new one again on this one. But Helena argued that even the slightest chance no false memories would return was worth letting it play out. And more important, she wanted, if only for the briefest window of time, to be with the Barry who remembered all timelines and everything they’d been through together. If he was honest with himself, he wanted that too.
This is the only moment in the entirety of their shared existence when they can truly be together.
She comes over to the window and stands beside him.
With a finger, she begins to erase the writing on the glass.
“This was all a waste, huh?” she says.
“We should’ve gone to CERN.”
“And if your wormhole theory was proven right? Then what?”
“I stand by my belief that if we could understand how and why the chair is able to send our consciousness back into a memory, we would be in a better place to know how to stop the false memories.”
“You ever considered the possibility that it’s unknowable?”
“Are you losing hope?” he asks.
“Oh honey, it’s long gone. Aside from my own pain, every time I go back, I destroy the consciousness of that sixteen-year-old girl walking out to the truck into her first moment of real freedom. I’m killing her over and over and over. She has never gotten the chance to live her life. Because of Marcus Slade. Because of me.”
“Then let me carry the hope for both of us for a while.”
“You have been.”
“Let me keep carrying it.”
She looks at him. “You still believe we’ll find a way to fix this.”
“Yes.”
“When? The next iteration? The thirtieth?”
“It’s so strange,” he says.
“What?”
“I walked into this room five minutes ago and had no idea what those equations meant. Then I suddenly had memories from this timeline and understood partial differential equations.” A fragment of conversation from another lifetime flickers in the neuronal structure of his brain. He says, “Remember what Marcus Slade said when we had him at gunpoint in his lab in that hotel?”
“You do realize, from my perspective, that was almost a hundred years and three timelines ago.”
“You told him that if the world ever knew of the chair’s existence, that knowledge could never be put back. Just what we’re fighting against now. Remember?”
“Vaguely.”
“And he said you’d been blinded by your limitations, that you still weren’t seeing everything, and that you never would unless you had traveled the way he had.”
“He was crazy.”
“That’s what I thought too. But the difference between you on that first timeline, and you now—it might be driving you mad, but you’ve mastered whole fields of science, lived entire lives the first Helena never would’ve dreamed of. You see the world in ways she never did. It’s the same with me. Who knows how many lives Slade lived, and what he learned? What if he really did figure some way out? Some loophole around the dead-memory problem? Something you’d need however-many-more of these loops to figure out for yourself? What if this whole time, we’ve been missing something crucial?”
“Like what?”
“I have no idea, but wouldn’t you like to ask Slade?”
“How do you propose we do that, Detective?”
“I don’t know, but we can’t just give up.”
“No, I can’t give up. You can tap out anytime you want and live your life in blissful ignorance that this day is coming.”
“You’ve really come to think so little of my presence in your life?”
She sighs. “Of course not.”
A paperweight rattles on the table behind them.
A crack spider-webs across the window glass.
The low rumble of a distant