by Blake Crouch
“Then it’s not a real memory. It’s…I don’t know what to call it. Fake. False.”
“Dead,” Slade says, glancing at his watch again.
“So this wasn’t an accident.” She glares at Slade across the table. “You knew.”
“Dead memories fascinate me.”
“Why?”
“They represent…another dimension of movement.”
“I don’t know what the fuck that means, but we agreed yesterday that you wouldn’t try to map a—”
“Every time Reed dies in the tank, he orphans a string of memories that become dead in our minds after we shift. But what really happens to those timelines? Have they truly been destroyed, or are they still out there somewhere, beyond our reach?” Slade looks at his watch again. “I remember everything from the experiment we did this morning, and the two of you will gain those dead memories any second now.”
They sit in silence at the table, a coldness enveloping Helena.
We are fucking with things that shouldn’t be fucked with.
She feels the pain coming behind her eyes. Reaching forward, she grabs a few tissues from the box of Kleenex to stop the nosebleed.
The dead memory of their failed test comes crashing through.
Reed coding in the tank.
Five minutes dead.
Ten minutes.
Fifteen.
Her yelling at Slade to do something.
Rushing into the testing bay, tearing open the hatch of the deprivation tank.
Reed floating peacefully inside.
Death-still.
Pulling him out with Slade and setting him dripping wet on the floor.
Performing CPR as Dr. Wilson says over the intercom, “There’s no point, Helena. He’s been gone too long.”
Continuing anyway, sweat pouring into her eyes as Slade vanishes across the hall, into the room with the chair.
She’s given up on saving Reed by the time Slade reenters—sitting in the corner and trying to come to terms with the fact that they really killed a man. Not just a man. He was her responsibility. Here because of something she built.
Slade begins to strip.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“Fixing this.” Then he looks toward the one-way glass between the testing bay and control room. “Will somebody get her out of here, please?”
Slade’s men burst in as he climbs naked into the tank.
“Please come with us, Dr. Smith.”
Rising slowly, walking out of her own volition into the control room, where she sits behind Sergei and Dr. Wilson as they reactivate Slade’s shaving-cut memory.
All the time thinking, This is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong, until…
She’s suddenly sitting right here, in this conference room, catching blood with the Kleenex.
Helena looks at Slade.
He’s watching Reed, who’s staring with a kind of entranced smile into nothing.
“Reed?” Slade asks.
The man doesn’t answer.
“Reed, can you hear me?”
Reed turns his head slowly until he’s staring at Slade, blood running over his lips, dripping on the table.
“I died,” Reed says.
“I know. I went back into a memory to save—”
“And it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
“What did you see?” Slade asks.
“I saw…” He struggles to put it into words. “Everything.”
“I don’t know what that means, Reed.”
“Every moment of my life. I was rushing through this tunnel that was filled with them, and it was so lovely. I found one I’d forgotten. An exquisite memory. I think it was my first.”
“Of what?” Helena asks.
“I was two, maybe three. I was sitting on someone’s lap on a beach, and I couldn’t turn around to see their face, but I knew that it was my father. We were in Cape May on the Jersey Shore, where we used to vacation. I couldn’t see her, but I knew my mother was behind me too, and my brother, Will, was standing in the distance in the surf, letting the waves hit him. It smelled like the ocean and sunscreen and the funnel cakes someone was selling behind us on the boardwalk.” Tears running down his face now. “I have never felt such love in my entire life. Everything good. Safe. It was a perfect moment before…”
“What?” Slade asks.
“Before I became me.” He wipes his eyes, looks at Slade. “You shouldn’t have saved me. You shouldn’t have brought me back.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I could’ve stayed in that moment forever.”
BARRY
November 2007
Each day is a revelation, every moment a gift. The simple act of sitting across the dinner table from his daughter and listening to her talk about her day feels like a pardon. How could he ever have taken even one second of it for granted?
He drinks in every moment—the way Meghan’s eyes roll when he asks about boys, the way they light up when they talk about the colleges she wants to visit. He cries spontaneously in her presence, but it’s easy enough to blame on quitting the cigarettes, on watching his little girl become a woman.
Julia’s antennae are slightly up. In these moments, he notices her watching him the way one might examine a painting hanging not quite straight.
* * *
Every morning, when consciousness first returns, he lies in bed afraid to open his eyes, fearing he’ll find himself back in his one-bedroom apartment in Washington Heights, with this second chance fading into oblivion.
But he’s always next to Julia, always watching the light come through the blinds, and his only connection to that other life exists in false memories, which he would love to forget.
HELENA
July 5, 2009
Day 613
After dinner, as Helena washes her face and gets ready for bed, she hears a knock at her door, finds Slade standing in the hallway, eyes dark and troubled.
“What happened?” she asks.
“Reed hanged himself in his room.”
“Oh God. Because of the dead memory?”
“Let’s not make any assumptions. The brain of an addict is wired differently from ours. Who knows what he really saw when he died. Anyway, I just thought you should know. But don’t worry. I’ll get him back tomorrow.”
“Get him back?”
“With the chair. I’ll be honest, I’m not looking forward to dying again. As you can imagine, it’s deeply unpleasant.”
“He made a choice to end his life,” Helena says, trying to keep her emotion in check. “I think we should respect that.”
“Not while he’s still under my employ.”
* * *
Lying in bed, hours later, she tosses and turns.
Thoughts rip through her mind, and she can’t shut them off.
Slade has lied to her.
Manipulated her.
Kept her from communicating with her parents.
Stolen a life from her.
While nothing has ever intellectually intrigued her more than the mysterious power of the chair, she doesn’t trust Slade with it. They have altered memories. Changed reality. Brought a man back from the dead. And yet he keeps pushing boundaries with an obsessive determination that makes her wonder what his real endgame is with all of this.
She climbs out of bed and walks over to the window, sweeps away the blackout curtains.
The moon is high and full and shining down on the sea, whose surface is a gleaming, blue-black lacquer, as still as a frozen moment.
There will never be a day when she flies her mother here and puts her in the chair to map whatever is left of her mind.
That was never going to happen. It’s time to let the dream die and get the fuck out.
But she can’t. Even if she made it out on one of the supply ships, the moment Slade realized she was gone, he’d simply return to a memory before she escaped and stop her.
He could stop you before you even tried to escape. Before the idea even occurred to you. Before this moment.
All of which means—there’s only one way off the platform now.
BARRY
December 2007
He is better at his job, partly because he remembers some of the cases and suspects, but mainly because he gives a shit. The powers that be try to promote him to a better-paying, supervisory desk job, but he declines. He wants to be a great detective, nothing more.
He stays off cigarettes, drinks only on weekends, runs three times a week, and takes Julia out every Friday night. It isn’t quite perfect between them. She doesn’t carry the trauma of Meghan’s death and the destruction of their marriage, but for him there is no escaping how those events corroded their bond. In his previous life, it took him a long time to stop being in love with Julia, and even though he’s back to before everything imploded, it’s not just a light switch he can flip back on.
* * *
He watches the news every morning, reads the papers every Sunday, and while he remembers the big moments—the candidate who will become president, the first tremors of a recession—the majority of it is granular and insignificant enough as to feel brand-new all over again.
* * *
He sees his mom every week now. She is sixty-six years old and in five years will exhibit the first symptoms of the glioblastoma brain cancer that will kill her. In six, she won’t recognize him or be able to carry a conversation, and she will die in hospice care soon after, a wasted husk of herself. He will hold her bony hand in her final moments, wondering if she is even capable of registering the sensation of human touch in the annihilated landscape of her brain.
Oddly, he finds no sadness or despair knowing how and when her life will end. Those last days feel untouchably remote as he sits in her Queens apartment the week before Christmas. In fact, he considers the foreknowledge a gift. His father died when Barry was fifteen from an aortic aneurysm, sudden and unexpected. With his mom, he has years to say goodbye, to make certain she knows he loves her, to say all the things that are in his heart, and there is immeasurable comfort in that. He has wondered lately if that’s all living really is—one long goodbye to those we love.
He’s brought Meghan along with him today, and his daughter and mother are playing chess while he sits by the window, his mother singing in that delicate falsetto that always stirs something deep inside of him, his attention divided between their game and the passersby on the street below.
Despite the old technology all around him and the occasionally familiar news headline, he doesn’t feel like he’s living in the past. This moment feels very much like now. The experience is having a philosophical impact on his perception of time. Perhaps Vince was right. Maybe it is all happening at once.
“Barry?”
“Yes, Mom?”
“When did you become so introspective?”
He smiles. “I don’t know. Maybe turning forty did it to me.”
She watches him for a moment, turning her attention back to the chessboard only when Meghan makes her next move.
* * *
He lives his days and sleeps his nights.
Goes to parties he’s already been to, watches games he’s already seen, solves cases he’s already solved.
It makes him wonder about the déjà vu that haunted his previous life—the perpetual sense that he was doing or seeing something he’d already seen before.
And he wonders—is déjà vu actually the specter of false timelines that never happened but did, casting their shadows upon reality?
HELENA
October 22, 2007
She is sitting at her old desk again in the musty depths of the neuroscience building in Palo Alto, caught in a transition between memory and reality.
The pain of dying in the tank is still fresh—the burn in her oxygen-starved lungs, the excruciating weight of her paralyzed heart, the panic and the fear, wondering if her plan would work. And then, when the memory-reactivation program finally engaged and the stimulators fired—pure exhilaration and release. Slade was right. Absent DMT, the experience of reactivating a memory was nothing more than watching a movie we’ve already seen a thousand times before. This is like living it.
Jee-woon is sitting across from her, his face coming into hard focus, and she wonders if he notices anything off about her, since she doesn’t have control of her body yet. But she’s catching words here and there—pieces of a familiar conversation.
“…very taken with the memory-portraiture article you published in Neuron.”
Her muscular control starts at her fingertips and toes, then works inward, up her arms and legs, until she can control her ability to blink and swallow. Suddenly, her body feels like something that belongs to her, and she is flooded with control, with the thrill of full possession, completely back inside her younger self again.
She looks around her office, the walls covered in high-resolution images of mice memories. A moment ago, she was 173 miles off the northern California coast, almost two years in the future, dying in the deprivation tank on the third floor of Slade’s oil platform.
“Everything OK?” Jee-woon asks.
It worked. My God, it worked.
“Yeah. I’m sorry. You were saying?”
“My employer is very impressed with your work.”
“Does your employer have a name?” she asks.
“Well, that depends.”
“On…?”
“How this conversation goes.”
Having this conversation for a second time feels both perfectly normal and mind-bogglingly surreal. It is, without question, the strangest moment of her entire existence, and she has to force herself to focus.
She looks at Jee-woon and says, “Why would I even have a conversation with someone when I don’t know who they’re speaking for?”
“Because your Stanford money runs out in six weeks.” He reaches into his leather satchel and takes out a document in a navy binder—her grant proposal.
As Jee-woon pitches her on coming to work for his boss for no-limit funding, she stares at that grant proposal, thinking, I did it. I built my chair, and it is so much more powerful than I ever imagined it could be.
“You need a team of coders to help you design an algorithm for complex memory cataloging and projection. The infrastructure for human trials.”
Immersive platform for projection of long-term, explicit, episodic memories.
She built it. And it worked.
“Helena?” Now Jee-woon is staring at her across the disaster zone that is her desk.
“Yes?”
“Do you want to come work with Marcus Slade?”
The night Reed killed himself, she crept down to the lab, and using a back-door access into the system she’d convinced Raj to embed before he left, mapped a memory of this moment—Jee-woon showing up at her Stanford lab. It had left a strong-enough neuronal footprint to be viable for return. Then she programmed the memory-reactivation sequence, the drug cocktail, and climbed into the tank at three thirty in the morning.
Jee-woon says, “Helena? What do you say?”
“I would love to work with Mr. Slade.”
He pulls another document out of his satchel and passes it to her.
“What’s this?” she asks, though she already knows. She signed it in what is now a dead memory.
“An employment and confidentiality agreement. Nonnegotiable. I think you’ll find the financial terms to be very generous.”
BARRY
January 2008–May 2010
And then life feels like life again, the days running together with a sense of sameness and acceleration, more and more of them passing without him ever thinking about the fact that he is living his life all over again.
HELENA
October 22, 2007–August 2010
The smell of Jee-woon’s cologne still lingers in the elevator as Helena rides up to the first floor of the neuroscience building. It’s been almost two years since she set foot on the Stanford campus. Since she set foot on land. The green of the trees and the grass almost moves her to tears. The way sunlight passes through trembling leaves. The smell of flowers. The sound of birds that don’t live at sea.
The fall day is bright and warm, and she keeps looking at the screen on her flip phone, staring at the date because a part of her still doesn’t believe it’s October 22, 2007.
Her Jeep is waiting for her in the faculty parking lot. She climbs onto the sun-warmed seat and digs the key out of her backpack.
Soon, she’s burning down the interstate, the wind screaming over the roll bars. The oil platform feels like a gray, fading dream, and even more so the chair, the tank, Slade, and the last two years, which have, because of something she built, not even happened yet.
At her house in San Jose, she packs a suitcase with clothes, a framed photograph of her parents, and six books that mean the world to her: On the Fabric of the Human Body by Andreas Vesalius, Physica by Aristotle, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy by Isaac Newton, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and two novels—Camus’s The Stranger, and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
At the bank, she closes her savings and checking accounts—a little under $50,000. She takes $10,000 in cash, puts the remaining $40,000 into a brokerage account, then walks out into the noonday sun with a white envelope that feels woefully slim.