experience would escalate into this completely immersive, transcendental event.”
“Wait, so this all happened when?”
“On the original timeline.”
It takes a moment for the magnitude of what he’s saying to hit her.
“Was I pursuing my Alzheimer’s time capsule application?” she asks.
“I don’t think so. Ion was keen on pursuing the entertainment application of the chair, and that’s what we were working on. But much like what we’ve discovered here, all you could do is give someone a slightly more vivid experience of a memory, without them having to retrieve it themselves. Tens of millions had been spent, and this technology you had staked your career on wasn’t materializing.” Slade turns away from the glass and looks at her. “Until November second, 2018.”
“The year 2018.”
“Yes.”
“As in, nine years in the future.”
“Correct. On that morning, something tragic and accidental and amazing happened. You were running a memory reactivation on a new test subject named Jon Jordan. The retrieval event was a car accident where he had lost his wife. Everything was humming along, and then he coded inside the deprivation tank. It was a massive cardiac arrest. As the medical team rushed to pull him out, something extraordinary happened. Before they could get the tank open, everyone in the lab was suddenly standing in a slightly different position. Our noses were all bleeding, some of us had splitting headaches, and instead of Jon Jordan in the tank, you were running an experiment on a guy named Michael Dillman. It all happened in the blink of an eye, like someone had flipped a switch.
“No one understood what had happened. We had no records of Jordan ever setting foot in our lab. We were rattled, trying to make sense of it all. Call it misguided curiosity, but I couldn’t let it go. I tried to locate Jordan, to see what had happened to him, where he had gone, and it was the strangest thing—that car-accident memory we were reactivating? Turns out he had actually died in that wreck alongside his wife, fifteen years earlier.”
Rain begins to strike the glass with a ticking sound that is just barely perceptible from inside Helena’s apartment.
Slade returns to the ottoman.
“I think I was the first one to realize what had happened, to understand that you had somehow sent Jon Jordan’s consciousness back into a memory. Of course, we’ll never know, but I’m guessing the disorientation of returning to his younger self altered the outcome of the accident to kill both him and his wife.”
Helena looks up from the patch of carpeting she’s been staring into while she braced against the horror of this revelation.
“What did you do, Marcus?”
“I was forty-six years old. An addict. I had squandered my time. I was afraid you’d destroy the chair if you figured out what it was capable of.”
“What did you do?”
“Three days later, the night of November fifth, 2018, I went to the lab and reloaded one of my memories into the stimulators. Then I climbed into the tank and shot a lethal dose of potassium chloride into my bloodstream. Christ, it burned like fire in my veins. Worst pain I have ever experienced. My heart stopped, and when the DMT hit, my consciousness shot back into a memory I’d made when I was twenty years old. And that was the start of a new timeline that branched off from the original in 1992.”
“For the entire world?”
“Apparently.”
“And that’s the one we’re living?”
“Yes.”
“What happened to the original?”
“I don’t know. When I think about it, those memories are gray and haunted. It’s like all the life was sucked out of it.”
“So you still remember the original timeline, where you were my forty-six-year-old lab assistant?”
“Yeah. Those memories traveled with me.”
“Why don’t I have them?”
“Think about our experiment just now. You and I had no memory of it until we caught back up to the precise moment when Reed died in the egg and traveled back into his tattoo memory. Only then did your memories and consciousness from that previous timeline, where you tried to throw a chair through the glass, slide into this one.”
“So in nine years, on the night of November 5, 2018, I’m going to remember this whole other life?”
“I believe so. Your consciousness and memories from that original timeline will merge into this one. You’ll have two sets of memories—one live, one dead.”
Rain is sheeting down the glass, blurring away the world beyond.
Helena says, “You needed me to make the chair a second time.”
“That’s true.”
“And with your knowledge of the