Recursion(17)
“Are you making this about your mom, Helena?”
“Of course I am! She’s going to reach a point in the next year when there won’t be any memories left to map. What do you think I’m doing here? Why do you think I’ve devoted my life to this?”
“I love your passion, and I want to destroy this disease too. But first, I want: Immersive platform for projection of long-term, explicit, episodic memories.” The exact title of her dream patent application from years ago, the one she hasn’t filed yet.
“How’d you know about my patent?”
Instead of answering her, he asks another question: “Do you think what you’ve built so far is anywhere close to immersive?”
“I’ve given this project everything I have.”
“Please stop being so defensive. The technology you’ve built is perfect. I just want to help you make it everything it can be.”
They turn the northwest corner, heading south now. Teams Imaging and Mapping are battling it out on the volleyball court. Rajesh is painting a watercolor en plein air beside the tarped-over pool. Sergei shoots free throws on the basketball court.
Slade stops walking and looks at Helena. “Instruct Infrastructure to build a deprivation tank. They’ll need to coordinate with Sergei to find a way to waterproof and stabilize the reactivation apparatus on a test subject who’s floating inside.”
“Why?”
“Because it will create the pure-heroin version of memory reactivation that I’m looking for.”
“How could you possibly know—?”
“Once you’ve accomplished that, devise a method for stopping a test subject’s heart once they’re inside the deprivation tank.”
She looks at Slade as if he’s lost his mind.
He says, “The more stress the human body endures during reactivation, the more intense their experience of the memory. Buried deep inside our brain is a rice-size gland called the pineal, which plays a role in the creation of a chemical called dimethyltriptamine, or DMT. You’ve heard of it?”
“It’s one of the most potent psychedelics known to man.”
“In tiny doses, released into our brains at night, DMT is responsible for our dreams. But at the moment of death, the pineal gland releases a veritable flood of DMT. A going-out-of-business sale. It’s the reason people see things when they die, such as racing through a tunnel toward a light, or their entire life flashing before their eyes. To have an immersive, dreamlike memory, we need bigger dreams. Or, if you will, a lot more DMT.”
“No one knows what our conscious minds experience when we die. You can’t be sure this will have any effect on the memory immersion. We might just kill people.”
“When did you become such a pessimist?”
“Who exactly do you think is going to volunteer to die for this project?”
“We’ll bring them back to life. Poll your team. I’ll pay well considering the risk. And if you don’t have enough sign-ups for trials, I’ll look elsewhere.”
“Will you volunteer to go inside the deprivation tank and have your heart stopped?”
Slade smiles, dark. “When the procedure is perfected? Absolutely. Then, and only then, you can bring your mother to the rig, and use all of my equipment and all of your knowledge to map and save her memories.”
“Marcus, please—”
“Then, and only then.”
“She’s running out of time.”
“So get to work.”
She watches him go. Before, it was always just far enough below the surface of consciousness to ignore. Now it’s staring her in the face. She doesn’t know how, but Slade knows things he shouldn’t, that he couldn’t possibly—the full details of her vision for memory projection, right down to the name of the patent application she would’ve one day filed. The quantum processors he somehow knew would solve the mapping problem. And now this mad notion of stopping the heart as a means to deepen the immersive experience. Even more alarming, the way Slade drops these little hints, it’s almost like he wants her to know that he knows things he shouldn’t. Like he wants her to be worried about the scope of his power and knowledge. It occurs to her that, if this friction continues, a day may come when Slade revokes her access to the memory platform. Perhaps she can persuade Raj to build her a clandestine, secondary user account just in case.
For the first time since setting foot on this rig, she wonders if she’s safe here.
BARRY
November 5–6, 2018
“Sir? Excuse me, sir?”
Barry rouses from sleep, eyes opening, everything momentarily blurry and no idea for five disorienting seconds where he is. Then he registers the rocking motion of the train. Light poles streaking past through the window across the aisle. The face of the elderly conductor.
“May I see your ticket?” the old man asks in a courtly manner refined in another age. Barry rifles through his coat until he finds his phone in the bottom of an inner pocket. Opening the MTA app, he holds his ticket up so the conductor can scan the bar code.
“Thank you, Mr. Sutton. Sorry to wake you.”
As the conductor moves on to the next car, Barry notices four missed call notifications on his phone’s display screen—all from the same 934 area code.