Recursion

by Blake Crouch

  And he’s running down the broken sidewalk past a collection of old buildings that will gentrify into loft space, a coffee shop, and a distillery in the coming decade. But for now, they loom dark and abandoned.

  Several hundred yards away, he sees a figure emerge from the darkness of this undeveloped area and into the well-lit outer edge of the business district.

  Turquoise sweater. Ponytail.

  He shouts his daughter’s name. She doesn’t look back, and he’s sprinting now, running as hard as he’s ever run in his life, screaming her name between gulps of air, even as he wonders—

  Is any of this real? How many times has he fantasized about this moment? Being given a shot at preventing her death…

  “Meghan!” She’s fifty yards ahead of him now, and he’s close enough to see that she’s talking on her phone, oblivious.

  Tires squeal somewhere behind him. He glances back at fast-approaching headlights and registers the growl of a revving engine. The restaurant Meghan never reached is in the distance, on the opposite side of the street, and now she takes a step into the road to cross.

  “Meghan! Meghan! Meghan!”

  Three feet into the street, she stops and looks back in Barry’s direction, the phone still held to her ear. He’s close enough now to see the pure confusion on her face, the noise of the approaching car right on his heels.

  A black Mustang blurs past at sixty miles per hour, the car streaking down the middle of the street and weaving across the centerline.

  And then it’s gone.

  Meghan is still by the curb.

  Barry reaches her, out of breath, his legs burning from the half-mile sprint.

  She lowers her phone. “Dad? What are you doing?”

  He looks up and down the road. It’s just the two of them standing in the yellow light of an overhanging streetlamp, no cars coming, and quiet enough to hear dead leaves scraping across the pavement.

  Was that Mustang the car that hit her eleven years ago, which is also, impossibly, tonight? Did he just stop it from happening?

  Meghan says, “You’re not wearing shoes.”

  He hugs her fiercely, still gasping for air, but there are sobs mixing in now, and he can’t hold them back. It’s too much. Her smell. Her voice. The sheer presence of her.

  “What happened?” Meghan asked. “Why are you here? Why are you crying?”

  “That car…it would’ve…”

  “Jesus, Dad, I’m fine.”

  If this isn’t real, it’s the cruelest thing a person could ever do to him, because this doesn’t feel like some virtual-reality experience or whatever that man subjected him to. This feels real. This is living. You don’t come back from this.

  He looks at her, touches her face, vital and perfect in the streetlight.

  “Are you real?” he asks.

  “Are you drunk?” she asks.

  “No, I was…”

  “What?”

  “I was worried about you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, because that’s what fathers do. They worry about their daughters.”

  “Well, here I am.” She smiles uncomfortably, clearly and rightly questioning his sanity in this moment. “Safe and sound.”

  He thinks about the night he found her, not far from where they’re standing. He had been calling her for an hour, and her phone just kept ringing before going to voicemail. It was while walking down this street that he’d seen the cracked screen of her phone lighting up where it had been dropped in the middle of the road. And then he’d found her body, broken and sprawled in the shadows beyond the sidewalk, the trauma indicating she’d been thrown a great distance after having been struck at a high rate of speed.

  It’s a memory that will never leave him, but which now possesses a gray and fading quality, just like the false memory that plagued him in that Montauk diner. Has he somehow changed what happened? That can’t possibly be.

  Meghan looks up at him for a long moment. Not annoyed anymore. Kind. Concerned. He keeps wiping his eyes, trying not to cry, and she seems simultaneously freaked out and moved.

  She says, “It’s OK if you cry. Sarah’s dad gets emotional about everything.”

  “I’m very proud of you.”

  “I know.” And then, “Dad, my friends are waiting on me.”

  “OK.”

  “But I’ll see you later?” she asks.

  “Definitely.”

  “We still going to the movies this weekend? For our date?”

  “Yes, of course.” He doesn’t want her to go. He could hold her in his arms for a solid week and it wouldn’t be enough. But he says, “Please be careful tonight.”

  She turns away and continues walking up the street. He calls her name. She looks back.

  “I love you, Meghan.”

  “Love you too, Dad.”

  And he stands there trembling and trying to understand what just happened, watching her move away from him and then across the street, and then into Dairy Queen, where she joins her friends at a table by the window.

  Footsteps approach from behind.

  Barry turns, sees a man dressed in black coming toward him. Even from a distance, he looks vaguely familiar, and as he draws near, the full recognition hits. He’s the man from the diner, Vince, who escorted him to the room after he’d been drugged in the hotel bar. The one with the neck tattoo, except he doesn’t have it anymore. Or yet. Now, he has a full head of hair, a leaner build. And looks ten years younger.

  Barry instinctively backs away, but Vince holds up his hands in a show of peace.

  They face each other on the empty sidewalk under the streetlamp.

  “What’s happening to me?” Barry asks.

  “I know you’re confused and disoriented, but that won’t last. I’m here to fulfill the final piece of my employment contract. Are you getting it yet?”

  “Getting what?”

  “What my boss did for you.”

  “This is real?”

  “This is real.”

  “How?”

  “You’re with your daughter again, and she’s alive. Does it matter? You won’t see me after tonight, but I have to tell you something. There are ground rules, and they’re simple. Don’t try to game the larger system with your knowledge of what’s to come. Just live your life again. Live it a little better. And tell no one. Not your wife. Not your daughter. No one.”

  “What if I want to go back?”

  “The technology that brought you here hasn’t even been invented yet.”

  Vince turns to go.

  “How do I thank him for this?” Barry asks, his eyes filling with tears again.

  “Right now, in 2018, he’s looking in on you and your family. Hopefully, he’s seeing that you made the most of this chance. That you’re happy. That your daughter is well. And most importantly, that you kept your mouth shut and played by the rules I just explained to you. That’s how you can thank him.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Right now, in 2018’?”

  He shrugs. “Time is an illusion, a construct made out of human memory. There’s no such thing as the past, the present, or the future. It’s all happening now.”

  Barry tries to let that sink in, but it’s too much to process. “You went back too, huh?”

  “A bit further than you. I’ve been reliving my life for three years already.”

  “Why?”

  “I messed up when I was a cop. Got in business with the wrong people. I own a fly-fishing shop now, and life is beautiful. Good luck with your second chance.”

  Vince turns away and walks off into the night.

  We are homesick most for the places we have never known.

  —CARSON MCCULLERS

  HELENA

  June 20, 2009

  Day 598


  Helena sits on the sofa in her apartment, trying to comprehend the magnitude of the last thirty minutes of her life. Her knee-jerk reaction is that it can’t possibly be true, that it’s some trick or illusion. But she keeps seeing the finished tattoo of Miranda on the heroin addict’s shoulder; the unfinished tattoo of it in the video Slade just showed her. And she knows that somehow, even though she has a rich and detailed memory of the experiment this morning—right down to throwing a chair at a window—none of it happened. It exists as a dead branch of memory in the neuronal structure of her brain. The only thing she can compare it to is the remembrance of a very detailed dream.

  “Tell me what’s going through your mind right now,” Slade says.

  She fixes her stare on him. “Can this procedure—dying in the deprivation tank as a memory reactivates—actually alter the past?”

  “There is no past.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “What? You can have your theories, but I can’t have mine?”

  “Explain.”

  “You said it yourself. ‘Now’ is just an illusion, an accident of how our brains process reality.”

  “That’s just…freshman philosophy shit.”

  “Our ancestors lived in the oceans. Because of how light travels through water versus air, their sensory volume—the region in which they could scan for prey—was limited to their motor volume—the region they could actually reach and interact with. What do you think the result of that might be?”

  She considers the question. “They could only react to immediate stimuli.”

  “OK. Now, what do you think happened when those fish finally crawled out of the ocean four hundred million years ago?”

  “Their sensory volume increased, since light travels farther in air than in seawater.”

  “Some evolutionary biologists believe this terrestrial disparity between motor and sensory volume set the stage for the evolution of consciousness. If we can see ahead, then we can think ahead; we can plan. And then we can envision the future, even if it doesn’t exist.”

  “So what’s your point?”

  “That consciousness is a result of environment. Our cognitions—our idea of reality—are shaped by what we can perceive, by the limitations of our senses. We think we’re seeing the world as it really is, but you of all people know…it’s all just shadows on the cave’s wall. We’re just as blinkered as our water-dwelling ancestors, the boundaries of our brains just as much an accident of evolution. And like them, by definition, we can’t see what we’re missing. Or…we couldn’t, until now.”

  Helena remembers Slade’s mysterious smile that night at dinner, so many months ago. “Piercing the veil of perception,” she says.

  “Exactly. To a two-dimensional being, traveling along a third dimension wouldn’t just be impossible, it’d be something they couldn’t conceive of. Just as our brains fail us here. Imagine if you could see the world through the eyes of more advanced beings—in four dimensions. You could experience events in your life in any order. Relive any memory you want.”

  “But that’s…it’s…ridiculous. And it breaks cause and effect.”

  Slade smiles that superior smile again. Still one step ahead. “Quantum physics is on my side here, I’m afraid. We already know that on the particle level, the arrow of time isn’t as simple as humans think it is.”

  “You really believe time is an illusion?”

  “More like our perception of it is so flawed that it may as well be an illusion. Every moment is equally real and happening now, but the nature of our consciousness only gives us access to one slice at a time. Think of our life like a book. Each page a distinct moment. But in the same way we read a book, we can only perceive one moment, one page, at a time. Our flawed perception shuts off access to all the others. Until now.”

  “But how?”

  “You once told me that memory is our only true access to reality. I think you were right. Some other moment, an old memory, is just as much now as this sentence I’m speaking, just as accessible as walking into the room next door. We just needed a way to convince our brains of that. To short-circuit our evolutionary limitations and expand our consciousness beyond our sensory volume.”

  Her head is spinning.

  “Did you know?” she asks.

  “Did I know what?”

  “What we were actually working toward from the beginning. That it was so much more than memory immersion.”

  Slade looks at the floor, then up at her again. “I respect you too much to lie to you.”

  “So…yes.”

  “Before we get to what I’ve done, can we just take a moment to relish what you’ve accomplished? You are now the greatest scientist and inventor who ever lived. You’re responsible for the most important breakthrough of our time. Of any time.”

  “And the most dangerous.”

  “In the wrong hands, certainly.”

  “My God, you’re arrogant. In any hands. How did you know what the chair could do?”

  Slade sets his Champagne on the coffee table, gets up, and moves to the window. Several miles out to sea, storm clouds are billowing toward the platform.

  “First time we met,” he says, “you were leading an R&D group for a company in San Francisco called Ion.”

  “What do you mean ‘the first time’? I’ve never worked—”

  “Just let me finish. You hired me on as a research assistant. I would type up reports based on your dictation, track down articles you wanted to read. Manage your calendar and travel. Keep your coffee hot and your office clean. Or at least navigable.” He smiles with something that approximates nostalgia. “I think my official title was lab bitch. But you were good to me. You made me feel included in the research, like I was a real part of your team. Before we met, I was in a bad way with drugs. You might have saved my life.

  “You built a great MEG microscope and a decent electromagnetic stimulation network. You had far superior quantum processors to what we’re using here, since Qbit technology was much further along. You had figured out the deprivation tank and how to make the reactivation apparatus operational inside. But you weren’t satisfied. Your theory all along was that the tank would put a test subject into such an intense state of sensory deprivation that when we stimulated the neural coordinates for a memory, the 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.”