Recursion(31)
“I love you, Meghan.”
“Love you too, Dad.”
And he stands there trembling and trying to understand what just happened, watching her move away from him and then across the street, and then into Dairy Queen, where she joins her friends at a table by the window.
Footsteps approach from behind.
Barry turns, sees a man dressed in black coming toward him. Even from a distance, he looks vaguely familiar, and as he draws near, the full recognition hits. He’s the man from the diner, Vince, who escorted him to the room after he’d been drugged in the hotel bar. The one with the neck tattoo, except he doesn’t have it anymore. Or yet. Now, he has a full head of hair, a leaner build. And looks ten years younger.
Barry instinctively backs away, but Vince holds up his hands in a show of peace.
They face each other on the empty sidewalk under the streetlamp.
“What’s happening to me?” Barry asks.
“I know you’re confused and disoriented, but that won’t last. I’m here to fulfill the final piece of my employment contract. Are you getting it yet?”
“Getting what?”
“What my boss did for you.”
“This is real?”
“This is real.”
“How?”
“You’re with your daughter again, and she’s alive. Does it matter? You won’t see me after tonight, but I have to tell you something. There are ground rules, and they’re simple. Don’t try to game the larger system with your knowledge of what’s to come. Just live your life again. Live it a little better. And tell no one. Not your wife. Not your daughter. No one.”
“What if I want to go back?”
“The technology that brought you here hasn’t even been invented yet.”
Vince turns to go.
“How do I thank him for this?” Barry asks, his eyes filling with tears again.
“Right now, in 2018, he’s looking in on you and your family. Hopefully, he’s seeing that you made the most of this chance. That you’re happy. That your daughter is well. And most importantly, that you kept your mouth shut and played by the rules I just explained to you. That’s how you can thank him.”
“What do you mean, ‘Right now, in 2018’?”
He shrugs. “Time is an illusion, a construct made out of human memory. There’s no such thing as the past, the present, or the future. It’s all happening now.”
Barry tries to let that sink in, but it’s too much to process. “You went back too, huh?”
“A bit further than you. I’ve been reliving my life for three years already.”
“Why?”
“I messed up when I was a cop. Got in business with the wrong people. I own a fly-fishing shop now, and life is beautiful. Good luck with your second chance.”
Vince turns away and walks off into the night.
We are homesick most for the places we have never known.
—CARSON MCCULLERS
HELENA
June 20, 2009
Day 598
Helena sits on the sofa in her apartment, trying to comprehend the magnitude of the last thirty minutes of her life. Her knee-jerk reaction is that it can’t possibly be true, that it’s some trick or illusion. But she keeps seeing the finished tattoo of Miranda on the heroin addict’s shoulder; the unfinished tattoo of it in the video Slade just showed her. And she knows that somehow, even though she has a rich and detailed memory of the experiment this morning—right down to throwing a chair at a window—none of it happened. It exists as a dead branch of memory in the neuronal structure of her brain. The only thing she can compare it to is the remembrance of a very detailed dream.
“Tell me what’s going through your mind right now,” Slade says.
She fixes her stare on him. “Can this procedure—dying in the deprivation tank as a memory reactivates—actually alter the past?”
“There is no past.”
“That’s crazy.”
“What? You can have your theories, but I can’t have mine?”
“Explain.”
“You said it yourself. ‘Now’ is just an illusion, an accident of how our brains process reality.”
“That’s just…freshman philosophy shit.”
“Our ancestors lived in the oceans. Because of how light travels through water versus air, their sensory volume—the region in which they could scan for prey—was limited to their motor volume—the region they could actually reach and interact with. What do you think the result of that might be?”
She considers the question. “They could only react to immediate stimuli.”
“OK. Now, what do you think happened when those fish finally crawled out of the ocean four hundred million years ago?”
“Their sensory volume increased, since light travels farther in air than in seawater.”
“Some evolutionary biologists believe this terrestrial disparity between motor and sensory volume set the stage for the evolution of consciousness. If we can see ahead, then we can think ahead; we can plan. And then we can envision the future, even if it doesn’t exist.”
“So what’s your point?”