by Blake Crouch
The Reactivation Team is building an apparatus that is essentially a vast network of electromagnetic stimulators that forms a shell around the head for 3D pinpoint accuracy and precision-targeting of the hundreds of millions of neurons that are required to reactivate a memory.
And finally, Infrastructure is building the chair for human trials.
It has been a good day. Perhaps even a great one. She met with Slade, Jee-woon, and the project managers to review progress, and everyone is ahead of schedule. It is four o’clock in the afternoon in late January, one of those fleeting winter days of warmth and blue. The sun is plunging into the ocean, turning the clouds and the sea into shades of gray and pink she has never seen before, and she’s sitting on the edge of the platform, westward-facing, her legs swinging out over the water.
Two hundred feet below, waves swell and crash against the immense legs of this fortress in the sea.
She cannot believe she is here.
She cannot believe this is her life.
Day 225
The MEG microscope is nearly finished, and the reactivation apparatus has progressed as far as it can while everyone waits for mapping to get their arms around the cataloging problem.
Helena is frustrated with the delay. Over dinner with Slade in his palatial suite, she levels with him—the team is failing because their obstacle is a brute-force problem. Since they’re scaling up from mice brains to human brains, the computing power they’re working with is insufficient to map something as prodigiously complex as human memory structure. Unless she can figure out a shortcut, they simply don’t have the CPU cycles to handle it.
“Ever heard of D-Wave?” Slade asks as Helena takes a sip of a white burgundy, the best wine she has ever tasted.
“Sorry, I haven’t.”
“It’s a company out of British Columbia. A year ago, they released a prototype quantum processor. Its application is highly specific, but ideal for the sort of enormous data-set mapping problem we’ve run up against.”
“How much are they?”
“Not cheap, but I was interested in the technology, so I ordered a few of their advanced prototypes for future projects last summer.”
He smiles, and something about the way he studies her across the table leaves her with the unnerving sense that he knows more about her than she should be comfortable with. Her past. Her psychology. What makes her tick. But she can hardly blame him if in fact he has peeled back some of the layers. He’s investing years and millions in her mind.
Through the window behind Slade, she sees a single speck of light, miles and miles out to sea, and is struck, not for the first time, by how utterly alone they are out here.
Day 270
The midsummer days are long and sunny, and progress has halted while they await the arrival of two quantum-annealing processors. Helena misses her parents desperately, and their once-a-week talks have become the highlight of her existence here. The distance is having an odd effect on her connection to her father. She feels closer to him than she has in years, since before high school. The smallest details of their lives in Colorado carry a sudden significance. She drinks in the minutiae, and the more boring the better.
Their weekend hikes in the foothills. Reports on how much snow still lingers in the high country. A concert they saw at Red Rocks. Results of her mom’s neurologist appointments in Denver. Movies they’ve seen. Books read. The neighborhood gossip.
Most of the updates come from her dad.
Sometimes her mom is lucid, her old self, and they talk like they always have.
More often, Dorothy struggles to carry a conversation.
Helena is irrationally homesick for all things Colorado. For the long view from her parents’ deck across the plain toward the Flatirons, the start of the Rockies. For the color green, since the only foliage to be seen on the rig is the small garden in the greenhouse. But mostly for her mother. She aches to be with her during what must be the scariest time of her life.
The hardest part is not being able to share any details of her tremendous progress on the chair, all of which is covered under an ironclad NDA. She suspects Slade listens in on every conversation. Of course, when she asked him, he denied it, but she still suspects.
Because of confidentiality concerns, no visitors are allowed on the rig, and no crew are given shore leave before their contracts are up, with the exception of family or medical emergencies.
Wednesday evenings have become designated party nights in an attempt to develop some level of workplace camaraderie. It’s a challenge for Helena, a hardcore introvert who, until recently, has led the life of a solitary scientist. They play paintball, volleyball, and basketball on the platform. Grill out by the pool and tap kegs of shipped-in beer. They blast music and get drunk. Sometimes they even dance. The courts and grilling area are enclosed by tall panels of glass to cut the near-constant barrage of wind. But even with the barriers, they often have to shout to be heard.
In foul weather, they gather in the communal wing off the cafeteria to play board games, or hide-and-seek in the superstructure.
As almost everyone’s boss on the rig but Slade’s, she’s hesitant to get close to people on her team. But she’s in a desert of water for as far as anyone can possibly see, stranded twenty stories above the ocean. Eschewing friendship and intimacy feels like it would lead her down the path of psychotic isolation.
It’s during a game of hide-and-seek, in a top-floor linen closet, that she fucks Sergei—the genius electrical engineer and beautiful man who always destroys her at racquetball. They’re standing too close in the dark as the seekers run past their hiding place, and suddenly she’s kissing him and pulling him toward her and he’s tugging her shorts down and pinning her against the wall.
Marcus brought Sergei over from Moscow. He might be the purest scientist in the group, and he’s definitely the most competitive.
But he isn’t her “rig crush.” That would be Rajesh, the software engineer Slade recently hired in advance of the D-Wave’s arrival. There’s a warmth and honesty in his eyes that draw her in. He’s soft-spoken and hugely intelligent. Over breakfast yesterday, he suggested they start a book club.
Day 302
The quantum processors arrive on a vast container ship. It’s like Christmas morning, everyone standing on the deck, watching with a horrified fascination as the rig’s crane hoists $30 million worth of computing power two hundred feet up onto the main platform.
Day 312
Mapping is back, the new processors up and running, code being written that will map a memory and upload its neural coordinates into the reactivation apparatus. The sense of having stalled has passed. There is momentum again, Helena’s mood shifting from loneliness to exhilaration, but also a sense of wonder at Slade’s prescience. Not just at the macro level in predicting the immensity of her vision, but more impressively at the granular—the fact that he knew the perfect tool for handling the vast amount of data associated with mapping human memory. And he knew one processor wouldn’t be enough. He bought two.
At her weekly dinner with Slade, she informs him that if progress continues at this pace, they’ll be ready for their first human trial in a month.
His face lights up. “Seriously?”
“Seriously. And I’m just letting you know now, I will be the first to try it out.”
“Sorry. Way too dangerous.”
“How is that your decision?”
“A thousand ways. Besides, without you, we’d be lost.”
“Marcus, I insist.”
“Look, we can discuss this later, but in the meantime let’s celebrate.”
He goes to his wine fridge and takes out a ’47 Cheval Blanc. It takes him a moment to remove the delicate cork, and then he empties the bottle into a crystal decanter.
“Not too much of this left in th
e world,” he says.
The moment Helena lifts the glass to her nose and inhales the sweet, spicy perfume of the ancient grapes, her concept of what wine can be is irrevocably altered.
“To you, and to this moment,” Slade says, gently touching his glass against hers.
The taste of it is like what all the wine she’s ever had has been aspiring to be, the scales of what is good, great, and transcendent recalibrating in her head.
It is otherworldly.
Warm, rich, opulent, stunningly fresh.
Stewed red fruits, flowers, chocolate, and—
“Been meaning to ask you something,” Slade says, interrupting her reverie.
She looks at him across the table.
“Why memory? Obviously, you were into this before your mom got sick.”
She swirls the wine in her glass, sees the reflection of them sitting at the table in the two-story windows that look out into oceanic darkness.
“Because memory…is everything. Physically speaking, a memory is nothing but a specific combination of neurons firing together—a symphony of neural activity. But in actuality, it’s the filter between us and reality. You think you’re tasting this wine, hearing the words I’m saying, in the present, but there’s no such thing. The neural impulses from your taste buds and your ears get transmitted to your brain, which processes them and dumps them into working memory—so by the time you know you’re experiencing something, it’s already in the past. Already a memory.” Helena leans forward, snaps her fingers. “Just what your brain does to interpret a simple stimulus like that is incredible. The visual and auditory information arrive at your eyes and ears at different speeds, and then are processed by your brain at different speeds. Your brain waits for the slowest bit of stimulus to be processed, then reorders the neural inputs correctly, and lets you experience them together, as a simultaneous event—about half a second after what actually happened. We think we’re perceiving the world directly and immediately, but everything we experience is this carefully edited, tape-delayed reconstruction.”
She lets him sit with that for a moment as she takes another glorious sip of wine.
Slade asks, “What about flashbulb memories? The super-vivid ones imbued with extreme personal significance and emotion?”
“Right. That gets at another illusion. The paradox of the specious present. What we think of as the ‘present’ isn’t actually a moment. It’s a stretch of recent time—an arbitrary one. The last two or three seconds, usually. But dump a load of adrenaline into your system, get the amygdala to rev up, and you create that hyper-vivid memory, where time seems to slow down, or stop entirely. If you change the way your brain processes an event, you change the duration of the ‘now.’ You actually change the point at which the present becomes the past. It’s yet another way that the concept of the present is just an illusion, made out of memories and constructed by our brain.”
Helena sits back, embarrassed by her enthusiasm, suddenly feeling the wine going to her head. “Which is why memory,” she says. “Why neuroscience.” She taps her temple. “If you want to understand the world, you have to start by understanding—truly understanding—how we experience it.”
Slade nods, says, “ ‘It is evident the mind does not know things immediately, but only by the intervention of the ideas it has of them.’ ”
Helena laughs with surprise. “So you’ve read John Locke.”
“What?” Slade asks. “Just because I’m a tech guy, I never picked up a book? What you’re talking about is using neuroscience to pierce the veil of perception—to see reality as it truly is.”
“Which is, by definition, impossible. No matter how much we understand about how our perceptions work, ultimately we’ll never escape our limitations.”
Slade just smiles.
Day 364
Helena badges through the third-floor entrance and heads down a brightly lit corridor toward the main testing bay. She’s as nervous as she’s been since her first day here, her stomach so unsettled she only had coffee and a few pieces of pineapple for breakfast.
Overnight, Infrastructure moved the chair they’ve been building from their workshop into the main testing bay, where Helena now stops in the threshold. John and Rachel are bolting the base of the chair into the floor.
She knew this would be an emotional moment, but the intensity of seeing her chair for the first time takes her by storm. Until now, her work product has consisted of images of neuron clusters, sophisticated software programs, and a shit-ton of uncertainty. But the chair is a thing. Something she can touch. The physical manifestation of the goal she has been driving toward for ten long years, accelerated by her mother’s illness.
“What do you think?” Rachel asks. “Slade had us alter the blueprints to surprise you.”
Helena would be furious at Slade for this unilateral design change if what they had built weren’t so perfect. She’s stunned. In her mind, the chair was always a utilitarian device, a means to an end. What they’ve built for her is artful and elegant, reminiscent of an Eames lounge chair, except all one piece.
The two engineers are looking at her now, no doubt trying to ascertain her reaction, to see if their boss is pleased with their work.
“You’ve outdone yourselves,” she says.
By lunch, the chair has been fully installed. The MEG microscope, mounted seamlessly to the headrest, resembles an overhanging helmet. The bundle of cords running out of it has been threaded down the back of the chair and into a port in the floor, so the overall appearance is of a sleek, clean-lined device.
Helena won her fight with Slade to be the chair’s first occupant by withholding her knowledge about how high a synaptic number they would need in order to properly reactivate a memory. Slade pushed back, of course, arguing her mind and memory were far too valuable to take the risk, but that wasn’t a fight he or anybody ever had a chance of winning.
And so, at 1:07 p.m., she eases down onto the soft leather and leans back. Lenore, one of the imaging technicians, carefully lowers the microscope onto Helena’s head, the padding forming a snug fit. Then she fastens the chin strap. Slade watches from a corner of the room, recording on a handheld video camera with a big grin, as if he’s filming the birth of his first child.
“Does that feel OK?” Lenore asks.
“Yeah.”
“I’m going to lock you in now.”
Lenore opens two compartments embedded in the headrest and unfolds a series of telescoping titanium rods, which she screws into housings on the exterior of the microscope to stabilize it.
“Try to move your head now,” Lenore says.
“I can’t.”
“How does it feel to be sitting in your chair?” Slade asks.
“I kind of want to throw up.”
Helena watches as everyone files out of the testing bay and into an adjacent control room that is visually connected by a wall of glass. After a moment, Slade’s voice comes through a speaker in the headrest: “Can you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“We’re going to dim the lights now.”
Soon all she can see are the faces of her team, glowing a faint blue in the light of a dozen monitors.
“Try to relax,” Slade says.
She takes in a deep breath through her nose and lets it out slowly as the geometric array of SQUID detectors begins to hum softly above her, a soft whirring that feels like a billion nano-massages against her scalp.
They have endlessly debated what type of memory should be the first one they map. Something simple? Complex? Recent? Old? Happy? Tragic? Yesterday, Helena decided they were overthinking it. How does one define a “simple” memory anyway? Is there even such a thing when it comes to the human condition? Consider the albatross that landed on the platform during her run this morning. It’
s a mere flicker of thought in her mind that will one day be cast out into that wasteland of oblivion where forgotten memories die. And yet it contains the smell of the sea. The white, wet feathers of the bird glistening in the early sun. The pounding of her heart from the exertion of the run. The cold slide of sweat down her sides and the burn of it in her eyes. Her wondering in that moment where the bird considered home in the unending sameness of the sea.
When every memory contains a universe, what does simple even mean?
Slade’s voice: “Helena? Are you ready?”
“I am.”
“You have a memory picked out?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’m going to count down from five, and when you hear the tone…remember.”
BARRY
November 5, 2018
In summer, the train would be standing room only, packed with Manhattanites heading for the Hamptons. But it is a cold November afternoon, the gun-gray clouds threatening the season’s first snow, and Barry has the coach car on the Long Island Railroad almost entirely to himself.
As he stares through the window, watching the lights of Brooklyn shrink away through the dirty glass, his eyes grow heavy.
When he wakes, night has fallen. The view out the window is now darkness, points of light, and his own reflection in the glass.
Montauk is the last stop on the line, and he steps off the train at a little before eight p.m. into a frigid rain sheeting down through the illumination of the streetlamps. He tightens the belt of his woolen trench coat and turns up the collar, his breath steaming in the chill. He walks alongside the tracks to the station house, which has been shuttered for the night, and climbs into the taxi he ordered from the train.