Recursion(16)
“Did you do it?” Helena asks, her heart slamming in her chest.
“Did you experience something?” Slade asks.
“Yes, just now.”
“Describe it.”
“A vivid memory flash of the hook puncturing my thumb. Was that you guys?”
Cheers erupt from the control room.
Helena begins to cry.
Day 422
They begin recording and cataloging the autobiographical memories of everyone on the rig, keeping strictly to flashbulb memories.
Day 424
Lenore allows them to record her memory of the morning of January 28, 1986.
She was eight years old on a visit to the dentist’s office. The office manager had brought a television from home and set it up in the waiting room. Lenore was sitting with her mother before her appointment, watching coverage of the historic shuttle launch when the spacecraft disintegrated over the Atlantic Ocean.
The information that encoded most strongly for her was the small television sitting on a rolling stand. The camera footage of the looping white clouds moments after the explosion. Her mother saying, “Oh dear God.” The severe concern in Dr. Hunter’s eyes. And one of the dental hygienists coming out of the back to stare at the television as tears ran down her face and under the surgical mask she still wore.
Day 448
Rajesh remembers the last time he saw his father before moving to America. They had taken a safari, just the two of them, in Spiti Valley, high in the Himalayas.
He remembers the smell of the yaks. The sharp intensity of mountain sunlight. The frigid bite of the river. The light-headedness that plagued him from the 4,000-meter, oxygen-deprived air. Everything brown and barren, except the lakes like pale-blue eyes, and the temples with their vibrantly colored prayer flags, and the upper reaches of the highest peaks gleaming with bright snow.
But especially the night Raj’s father told him what he really thought about life, about Raj, Raj’s mother, everything, in a fleeting moment of vulnerability as the two of them sat before a dying campfire.
Day 452
Sergei sits in the chair remembering the moment a motorcycle clipped the back of his car. The sudden impact of metal on metal. Seeing the bike somersault down the highway out the driver-side window. The fear, the terror, the taste of rust in the back of his throat and a sense of time slowing to a crawl.
Then bringing his car to a stop in the middle of the busy Moscow street and stepping out into the smell of oil and gas leaking from the crushed motorcycle, and the biker sitting in the middle of the road, his chaps shredded down to skin, staring dumbfounded at his hands, most of the fingers shaved off, then shouting when he saw Sergei, the biker trying to stand and fight, then screaming when his leg, twisted impossibly underneath him, refused to work.
Day 500
It is one of the first temperate days of the year. All winter, the rig has been pounded by storm after storm, testing the limit of even Helena’s threshold for claustrophobic working environments. But today is warm and blue, and the sea calm enough for the entire surface to lie glittering beneath the platform.
She and Slade move leisurely around the running track.
“How do you feel about the progress we’ve made?” he asks.
“Great. It’s gone much faster than I had hoped. I think we should publish something.”
“Really.”
“I’m ready to take what we’ve learned and start changing people’s lives.”
He looks at her, leaner and harder since they first met almost a year and a half ago. Then again, she’s changed too. She’s in the greatest physical shape of her life, and her work has never been more engaging.
Nothing about Slade’s involvement in this project has matched her expectations. Since her arrival on the rig, he has left only once, and he’s been intimately involved during every step of the process. Both he and Jee-woon have attended every team meeting. Consulted on every material decision. She had assumed a man as busy as Slade would only parachute in occasionally, but his obsession has rivaled hers.
Now he says, “You’re talking about publishing, and I feel like we’ve hit a wall.” They turn the northeast corner of the track and head west. “The experience of reactivating a memory is a disappointment.”
“I’m shocked to hear you say that. Everyone who has undergone reactivation has come out reporting a memory experience far more vivid and intense than anything they’ve recalled on their own. Reactivation raises all vital signs, sometimes to the point of intense stress. You’ve seen their medical charts. You’ve had your memories lit up. You disagree?”
“I don’t disagree that it’s a more intense experience than remembering something on my own, but it isn’t nearly as dynamic as I’d hoped.”
She feels a flush of anger color her face. “We’re making progress at a blinding rate, and scientific breakthroughs in our understanding of memory and engrams that would light up the world if you agreed to let me publish. I want to start mapping memories of test subjects with stage-three Alzheimer’s, and when they hit stage five or six, reactivate the memories we’ve saved for them. What if that’s the path to synaptic regeneration? To a cure? Or at the very least, to preserving core memories for a person whose brain is failing them?”