Recursion(15)
Did I catch this from her?
His nose has stopped bleeding, but his hands have begun to shake. Throwing some money on the counter, he heads out into the night, trying to stay calm, but he’s reeling.
There are so few things in our existence we can count on to give us the sense of permanence, of the ground beneath our feet. People fail us. Our bodies fail us. We fail ourselves. He’s experienced all of that. But what do you cling to, moment to moment, if memories can simply change. What, then, is real? And if the answer is nothing, where does that leave us?
He wonders if he’s going mad, if this is what it feels like to lose your mind.
It’s four blocks to the train station. There are no cars out, the town is dead, and as a creature of a city that never sleeps, he finds the silence of this off-season hamlet unnerving.
He leans against a streetlamp, waiting for the doors of the train to open, one of four people on the platform, including the man from the diner.
The rain striking his hands is turning to slush, his fingers are freezing, but he wants them that way.
The cold is the only thing keeping him tethered to reality.
HELENA
October 31, 2008–March 14, 2009
Day 366
Two days after the first use of the chair, Helena sits in the control room, surrounded by the Imaging Team, staring at a huge monitor that shows a static, 3D image of her brain, the synaptic activity represented by varying shades of luminous blue.
She says, “The spatial resolution is stunning, guys. Beyond what I ever dreamed of.”
“Just wait,” Rajesh says.
He taps the space bar, and the image comes alive. Neurons glowing and fading like a trillion lightning bugs brightening a summer evening. Like the smoldering of stars.
As the memory plays, Rajesh magnifies the image to the level of individual neurons. Threads of electricity arcing from synapse to synapse. He slows it down to show the activity over the span of a millisecond, and still the complexity remains unfathomable.
When the memory ends, he says, “You promised you’d tell us what we’ve been looking at.”
Helena smiles. “I was six years old. My father had taken me fly-fishing to this stream he loved in Rocky Mountain National Park.”
Rajesh asks, “Can you be specific in terms of exactly what you were remembering during these fifteen seconds? Was it the entire afternoon? Certain moments?”
“I would describe it as flashes, which, in the aggregate, comprise the emotional return to the memory.”
“For instance…”
“The sound of water babbling over the rocks in the streambed. Yellow aspen leaves floating in the current, and how they look like gold coins. My father’s rough hands tying a fly. The anticipation of hooking a fish. Lying in the grass on the bank, staring down into the water. Bright-blue sky and the sun coming through the trees in shards of light. A fish my father caught quivering in his hands and his explaining that the red coloration under its lower jaw is why they call it a cutthroat trout. Later that afternoon, a hook going into my thumb.” Helena holds up the finger in question to show them the tiny white scar. “It wouldn’t come out because of the barb, so my father opened his pocket knife and cut the skin. I remember crying, his telling me to hold still, and when the hook was finally out, he held my thumb in the freezing water until it went numb. I watched the blood flowing out of the cut into the current.”
“What is your emotional connection to that memory?” Rajesh asks. “The reason you chose it.”
Helena looks into his big, dark eyes, says, “The pain of the fishhook, but mainly because it’s my favorite memory of my father. The moment when he was most quintessentially him.”
Day 370
They put Helena back in the chair and have her recall the memory again and again, breaking it down into segments until Rajesh’s team is able to assign individual synaptic patterns to specific moments.
Day 420
The first reactivation attempt occurs on Helena’s second Christmas Eve on the rig. They put her into the chair and fit her with a headpiece embedded with the network of electromagnetic stimulators. Sergei has programmed the apparatus with the synaptic coordinates of a single segment of Helena’s fly-fishing memory. When the lights go down in the main testing bay, Helena hears Slade’s voice in the headrest speaker.
“You ready?”
“Yes.”
They’ve all decided not to tell Helena when the reactivation apparatus will fire, or which memory segment they’ve selected, the concern being if she’s anticipating the memory, chances are she may inadvertently retrieve it on her own.
Helena closes her eyes and begins the mind-clearing exercise she’s been practicing for a week now. She sees herself walking into a room. There’s a bench in the middle, the kind one might find in an art museum. She takes a seat and studies the wall in front of her. From floor to ceiling, it transitions imperceptibly from white to black, passing through shades of subtly deepening gray. She starts at the bottom, taking her time scanning slowly up the length of the wall, fully observing the color of one section before moving on to the next, each subsequent region barely darker than the one before— The sudden pinch of a barbed hook jabbing into her thumb, her voice a shriek of pain, a red bubble of blood filling in around the hook as her father comes running.