Recursion(33)

“No one understood what had happened. We had no records of Jordan ever setting foot in our lab. We were rattled, trying to make sense of it all. Call it misguided curiosity, but I couldn’t let it go. I tried to locate Jordan, to see what had happened to him, where he had gone, and it was the strangest thing—that car-accident memory we were reactivating? Turns out he had actually died in that wreck alongside his wife, fifteen years earlier.”

Rain begins to strike the glass with a ticking sound that is just barely perceptible from inside Helena’s apartment.

Slade returns to the ottoman.

“I think I was the first one to realize what had happened, to understand that you had somehow sent Jon Jordan’s consciousness back into a memory. Of course, we’ll never know, but I’m guessing the disorientation of returning to his younger self altered the outcome of the accident to kill both him and his wife.”

Helena looks up from the patch of carpeting she’s been staring into while she braced against the horror of this revelation.

“What did you do, Marcus?”

“I was forty-six years old. An addict. I had squandered my time. I was afraid you’d destroy the chair if you figured out what it was capable of.”

“What did you do?”

“Three days later, the night of November fifth, 2018, I went to the lab and reloaded one of my memories into the stimulators. Then I climbed into the tank and shot a lethal dose of potassium chloride into my bloodstream. Christ, it burned like fire in my veins. Worst pain I have ever experienced. My heart stopped, and when the DMT hit, my consciousness shot back into a memory I’d made when I was twenty years old. And that was the start of a new timeline that branched off from the original in 1992.”

“For the entire world?”

“Apparently.”

“And that’s the one we’re living?”

“Yes.”

“What happened to the original?”

“I don’t know. When I think about it, those memories are gray and haunted. It’s like all the life was sucked out of it.”

“So you still remember the original timeline, where you were my forty-six-year-old lab assistant?”

“Yeah. Those memories traveled with me.”

“Why don’t I have them?”

“Think about our experiment just now. You and I had no memory of it until we caught back up to the precise moment when Reed died in the egg and traveled back into his tattoo memory. Only then did your memories and consciousness from that previous timeline, where you tried to throw a chair through the glass, slide into this one.”

“So in nine years, on the night of November 5, 2018, I’m going to remember this whole other life?”

“I believe so. Your consciousness and memories from that original timeline will merge into this one. You’ll have two sets of memories—one live, one dead.”

Rain is sheeting down the glass, blurring away the world beyond.

Helena says, “You needed me to make the chair a second time.”

“That’s true.”

“And with your knowledge of the future, you built an empire on this timeline, and lured me with the promise of unlimited funding once I’d made my initial breakthroughs at Stanford.”

He nods.

“So you could completely control the creation of the chair and how it was used.”

He says nothing.

“You’ve basically been stalking me since you started this second timeline.”

“I think ‘stalking’ is a bit hyperbolic.”

“I’m sorry, are we on a decommissioned oil rig in the middle of the Pacific that you built solely for me, or did I miss something?”

Slade lifts his Champagne glass and polishes off the rest.

“You stole that other life from me.”

“Helena—”

“Was I married? Did I have kids?”

“Do you really want to know? It doesn’t matter now. It never happened.”

“You’re a monster.”

She gets up, goes to the window, and stares through the glass at a thousand shades of gray—the ocean near and the ocean far, stratified layers of cloud, an incoming squall. Over the last year, this apartment has felt more and more like a prison, but never more so than now. And it occurs to her as hot, angry tears run down her face that it was her own self-destructive ambition that carried her to this moment, and probably the one in 2018.

Hindsight is also having a clarifying effect on Slade’s behavior, especially with regards to his ultimatum several months ago that they start killing test subjects to heighten the memory-reactivation experience. At the time, she thought it was reckless on his part. It had resulted in the mass exodus of almost everyone on the rig. Now she sees it for what it was—meticulously calculated. He knew they were in the homestretch and wanted nothing but a dedicated skeleton crew to witness the chair’s true function. Now that she thinks about it, she isn’t even certain the rest of her colleagues made it back to shore.

Up until now, she has suspected her life might be in danger.

Now she’s sure of it.

“Talk to me, Helena. Don’t go inward again.”

Her response to Slade’s revelation will probably be the determining factor in what he decides to do with her.