Recursion

by Blake Crouch

  He hears more gunfire.

  Helena shouting, “Sergei, don’t make me do this. You know me!”

  Then two shotgun blasts.

  Followed by screaming.

  From his sideways perspective, he sees several people run through the intersection of corridors, heading back toward the elevators—guests and other crew members fleeing the mayhem.

  He tries to get up, but he can barely move his hand. His body feels cemented to the ground.

  The end is coming.

  It’s the hardest thing he’s ever done to simply rise up onto his elbows. He somehow manages to crawl, dragging himself back around the corner of the windowed corridor that leads to the lab.

  He hears more gunshots.

  His vision swings in and out of focus, the glass shards on the floor from the shot-out windows slicing into his arms and a cold rain blowing into the building. The walls are peppered with bullet holes, and a haze of smoke permeates the air with a taste like metal and sulfur in the back of his throat.

  Barry crawls through a scattering of his .40-caliber shell casings, and he tries to call out to Helena, but her name leaves his lips as nothing but a whimper.

  He pulls himself the rest of the way to the entrance. It takes a moment for his vision to sharpen into focus. Helena stands at the terminal, her fingers flying across an array of keyboards and touchscreens. Summoning his voice, he wills it to project her name.

  She glances back at him. “I know you’re hurting. I’m going as fast as I can.”

  “What are you doing?” Barry asks, each breath more agonizing than the one before it, and carrying less oxygen to his brain.

  “I’m going back to the memory of cutting myself in that hotel room.”

  “Jee-woon and Sergei are gone.” He coughs up blood. “Just…destroy everything now.”

  “Slade’s still out there,” Helena says. “If he escapes, he could build another chair. I need you to guard the door. I know you’re hurting, but can you do that? Let me know if he comes.” She moves away from the terminal, climbing onto the curved body of the memory chair.

  “I’ll try,” Barry says.

  He rests his head against the cool floor.

  “We’ll get the next one right,” Helena says. Reaching up, she carefully pulls down the MEG microscope.

  As she secures the chin strap, Barry fights to keep his eyes on the corridor, knowing if Slade comes, there’s nothing he can do to stop him. He doesn’t even have the strength to raise his weapon.

  The dead memories of him dying in the last timeline finally shred into his consciousness.

  The elevator doors opening to the entryway of Slade’s penthouse.

  Slade standing in his immaculate living room of windows pointing a revolver into the elevator car.

  Barry thinking, Fuck. He knew.

  A burst of light without sound.

  Then—nothing.

  Through the fog of death, Barry struggles to glance one last time into the lab, sees Helena tearing off her shirt, sliding her jeans down her legs, and climbing into the deprivation tank.

  * * *

  Barry is sprinting down a corridor, his nose bleeding, head throbbing. The pain of getting shot in the previous timeline is gone, the memories of this new one cascading into place.

  He and Helena came up from Room 825.

  Stepped off the elevator onto 17, took a different route to the lab, intending to catch Jee-woon and Slade coming off the elevator.

  But they ran into Sergei instead and lost way too much time getting through him.

  Now they’re racing for the lab.

  Barry wipes the blood from his nose and blinks through the saltwater sting of sweat in his eyes.

  They round a corner and reach the door to the lab, which Helena opens with a shotgun blast. Barry charges in first, two thunderous gunshots erupting that miss his head by less than a foot. To his surprise, the shots came from a man he’s seen once before—eleven years ago, on the night he was sent back into a memory.

  Marcus Slade is standing twenty feet away by the terminal, wearing a white tank top and gray shorts, as if he just came from the gym, his curly, dark hair slicked back with sweat.

  He’s holding a satin stainless revolver and staring at Barry with total recognition.

  Barry puts a round through his right shoulder, Slade stumbling back into the array of control panels, the gun slipping from his grasp as he slides down onto the floor.

  Helena rushes to the deprivation tank and pulls the emergency release lever.

  By the time Barry reaches the tank, she’s already opening the hatch to expose Jee-woon floating on his back in the saltwater, desperately trying to pull the IV port out of his left forearm.

  Barry holsters the Glock, reaches into the warm water, and hauls Jee-woon out, throwing him across the room.

  Jee-woon hits the floor and rights himself, looking up at Barry and Helena, on his hands and knees, naked and dripping on the tile. He looks at Slade’s gun, eight feet away, and lunges for it, Barry tracking him, and as he fires, so does Helena, the full load of buckshot slamming Jee-woon against the wall, his chest a gaping wound, and his strength rushing out of him apace with his blood.

  Barry moves carefully toward him, keeping the gun trained on the man’s ruined center mass, but Jee-woon is gone by the time he reaches him—eyes glassing over with that final emptiness.

  HELENA

  November 7, 2018

  It is one of the most gratifying moments of her fragmented existence to site Slade down the barrel of the shotgun.

  She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a thumb drive. “I’m going to wipe every line of code. Then I’m going to dismantle the chair, the microscope—”

  “Helena—”

  “I’m talking now! The stimulators. Every piece of hardware and software in the building. It’s going to be like the chair never existed.”

  Slade is leaning against the base of the terminal, pain in his eyes. “It’s been a minute, huh?”

  “Thirteen years for me,” she says. “How long for you?”

  He seems to consider the question as Barry moves toward him and kicks the revolver across the room.

  “Who knows?” he says finally. “After you ghosted off my oil platform—well done, by the way, never understood exactly how you pulled that off—it took me years to rebuild the chair. But since then, I’ve lived more lifetimes than you can possibly fathom.”

  “Doing what?” she asks.

  “Most of them were quiet explorations of who I am, who I could be, in different places, with different people. Some were…louder. But this last timeline, I discovered that I could no longer generate a sufficient synaptic number to map my own memory. I’ve traveled too much. Filled my mind with too many lives. Too many experiences. It’s beginning to fracture. There are entire lifetimes I’ve never remembered, that I only experience in flashes. This hotel isn’t the first thing I did. It’s the last. I built it to let others experience the power of what is still, what will always be, your creation.”

  He takes a strained breath and looks at Barry, Helena thinking that his eyes, even through the obvious pain, contain the composed depth of a man who has lived a long, long time.

  “Helluva way to thank the man who gave you your daughter back,” Slade says.

  “Well, now she’s dead again, you fucking asshole. The shock of remembering her own death and that building appearing yesterday pushed her over the edge.”

  “I’m truly sorry to hear that.”

  “You’re using the chair destructively.”

  “Yes,” Slade says. “It will be destructive at first, like all progress. Just as the industrial age ushered in two world wars. Just as Homo sapiens supplanted the Neanderthal. But would you turn back the clock on all that comes with it? Could you? Prog
ress is inevitable. And it’s a force for good.”

  Slade glances at the entry wound in his shoulder, touches it, grimaces, then looks back at Barry. “You want to talk about destructive? How about being locked in our little fishbowls, in this joke of an existence imposed on us by the limits of our primate senses? Life is suffering. But it doesn’t have to be. Why should you be forced to accept your daughter’s death when you can change it? Why shouldn’t a dying man go back to his youth with full wisdom and knowledge instead of gasping out his last hours in agony? Why let a tragedy unfold when you could go back and prevent it? What you’re defending isn’t reality—it’s a prison, a lie.” Slade looks at Helena. “You know this. You have to see this. You’ve ushered in a new age for humanity. One where we no longer have to suffer and die. Where we can experience so much. Trust me, your perspective changes when you’ve lived countless lives. You’ve allowed us to escape the limitations of our senses. You’ve saved us all. That’s your legacy.”

  “I know what you did to me in San Francisco,” Helena says. “In the original timeline.” Slade stares back at her, unblinking. “When you told me about accidentally discovering what the chair could do, you left out the part where you murdered me.”

  “And yet here you are. Death no longer has any hold over us. This is your life’s work, Helena. Embrace it.”

  She says, “You can’t possibly think humanity can be trusted with the memory chair.”

  “Think of the good it could do. I know you wanted to use this technology to help people. To help your mom. You could go back and be with her before she died, before her mind destroyed itself. You could save her memories. We can undo the killings of Jee-woon and Sergei. It’d be like none of this happened.” His smile is filled with pain. “Can’t you see how beautiful a world that would be?”

  She takes a step toward him. “You might be right. Maybe there is a world where the chair makes all our lives better. But that’s not the point. The point is, you might be wrong too. The point is, we don’t know what people would do with this knowledge. All we know is that once enough people know about the chair, or how to build it, there’s no going back. We’ll never escape the loop of universal knowledge of the chair. It will live on in every subsequent timeline. We’ll have doomed humanity forever. I’d rather take the chance at passing up something glorious than risk everything on one roll of the dice.”

  Slade smiles that I-know-more-than-you-realize smile that takes her back to her years with him on the oil platform.

  He says, “You’re still being blinded by your limitations. Still not seeing the whole picture. And maybe you never will, unless you can travel the way I’ve traveled….”

  “What does that mean?”

  He shakes his head.

  “What are you talking about, Marcus? What do you mean, ‘the way I’ve traveled’?”

  Slade just stares at her, bleeding, and then the hum of the quantum processors fades away, the room suddenly silent.

  One by one, the monitors in the terminal go dark, and as Barry looks quizzically at Helena, all of the lights flicker out.

  BARRY

  November 7, 2018

  He sees the afterimages of Helena, Slade, and the chair.

  Then nothing.

  The lab stands pitch-black.

  No sound but the thrumming of his heart.

  Straight ahead, where Slade sat just seconds ago, Barry hears the noise of someone scrambling across the floor.

  A shotgun blast illuminates the room for a deafening splinter of a second—enough time for Barry to see Slade disappear through the doorway.

  Barry takes a tentative step forward, his retinas still reeling from the muzzle flash of Helena’s gun, the darkness tinged with orange. The doorway materializes into view as lights from the surrounding buildings slink in through the windows of the hallway.

  His hearing has recovered just enough from the gunshot to register the sound of quick footsteps rushing away down the corridor. Barry doesn’t think Slade had time, in those few seconds of darkness, to get his hands on the revolver, but he can’t be certain. More likely—Slade’s making a mad dash for one of the stairwells.

  Helena’s voice emerges from the doorway, a whisper: “You see him?”

  “No. Hang back until I figure out what’s going on.”

  He jogs past the windows that peer out into a rainy, Manhattan night. From somewhere on the floor comes a rat-a-tat like a snare drum being played.

  He turns the next corner into pure darkness, and as he approaches the main corridor, his foot strikes something on the floor.

  Bending down, he touches the bloodied cloth of Slade’s tank top. He still can’t see a thing, but he recognizes the high-pitched wheezing of a punctured lung failing to fully inflate, and the softer gurgles of Slade drowning in his own blood.

  A cold terror engulfs him. Running his hand along the wall, he reaches the junction of corridors.

  For a moment, the only sound is Slade dying right behind him.

  Something whips past the tip of his nose and thunks into the wall behind him.

  Suppressed gunshots and muzzle fire reveal a half dozen officers by the bank of elevators, all in full tactical helmets and body armor, assault weapons shouldered.

  Barry pulls back around the corner, shouts, “Detective Sutton, NYPD! Twenty-fourth precinct!”

  “Barry?”

  He knows that voice.

  “Gwen?”

  “What the fuck is going on, Barry?” Then to those around her: “I know him, I know him!”

  “What are you doing here?” Barry asks.

  “We had a report of shots fired in this building. What are you doing here?”

  “Gwen, you have to get your team out of here and let me—”

  “It’s not my team.”

  “Whose is it?”

  A male voice booms down the hall, “Our drone is showing a heat signature in one of the rooms behind you.”

  “They aren’t a threat,” Barry says.

  “Barry, you need to let these guys do their job,” Gwen says.

  “Who are they?” Barry asks.

  “Why don’t you step out and talk to us? I’ll make the introductions. You’re making everyone very nervous.”

  He hopes Helena has realized what’s happening and fled. He needs to buy her more time. If she can get to her Red Hook lab, in four months, she can finish building the chair and return to this day and fix this.

  “You’re not hearing me, Gwen. Take everyone back down to the garage and leave.” Barry turns and screams down the corridor toward the lab, “Helena, run!”

  The sound of rattling gear starts down the corridor—they’re moving toward him.

  Barry juts around the corner and fires a shot at the ceiling.

  The return of gunfire is an instantaneous overreaction—a maelstrom of bullets strafing the corridor all around him.

  Gwen screaming, “Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

  “Helena, go! Get out of the building!”

  Now something rolls down the corridor and stops three feet from Barry. Before he even has time to wonder what it is, the flash-bang cracks open, a blinding ribbon of light and smoke unfurling, his vision bright white and the high-pitched tone of temporary hearing loss blocking out all other noise.

  When the first bullet hits him, he doesn’t feel any pain—only impact.

  Then comes another and another, tearing into his sides, his leg, his arm, and as the pain comes, it occurs to him that Helena won’t be saving him this time.

  He who controls the past controls the future.

  He who controls the present controls the past.

  —GEORGE ORWELL, 1984

  HELENA

  November 15, 2018–April 16, 2019

  Day 8

  It is the s
trangest captivity.

  The apartment is a one-bedroom near Sutton Place, spacious and high-ceilinged, with a million-dollar view of the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, East River, and the distant sprawl of Brooklyn and Queens.

  She doesn’t have access to a phone, Internet connection, or any other mode of contact with the outside world.

  Four cameras, mounted to the walls, keep watch over every square inch of space, their red recording lights glowing above her even while she sleeps.

  Her captors, a couple named Alonzo and Jessica, carry themselves with a calm collectedness. In the beginning, it eased her nerves.

  Day one, they sat her down in the living room and said, “We know you have questions, but we aren’t the ones to answer them.”

  Helena asked anyway.

  What happened to Barry?

  Who raided Marcus Slade’s building?

  Who’s keeping me here?

  Jessica leaned forward and said, “We’re expensive prison guards, OK? Nothing more. We don’t know why you’re here. We don’t want to know why you’re here. But if you’re cool, we, and the other people working with us, who you will never meet, will be cool.”

  They provide her meals.

  Every other day, they make a run to the grocery store and bring back whatever she writes down on a piece of paper.

  On a surface level, they’re friendly enough, but there’s an undeniable hardness in their eyes—no, a detachment—which makes her fairly certain they would hurt her, or worse, if the order ever came down.

  She watches the news first thing in the mornings, and with each passing cycle, FMS occupies less bandwidth in the endless parade of tragedies and scandals and celebrity gossip.

  When another school shooting takes nineteen lives, it is the first day since the Big Bend appeared that FMS isn’t mentioned in the top headlines.