Recursion(39)

Her muscular control starts at her fingertips and toes, then works inward, up her arms and legs, until she can control her ability to blink and swallow. Suddenly, her body feels like something that belongs to her, and she is flooded with control, with the thrill of full possession, completely back inside her younger self again.

She looks around her office, the walls covered in high-resolution images of mice memories. A moment ago, she was 173 miles off the northern California coast, almost two years in the future, dying in the deprivation tank on the third floor of Slade’s oil platform.

“Everything OK?” Jee-woon asks.

It worked. My God, it worked.

“Yeah. I’m sorry. You were saying?”

“My employer is very impressed with your work.”

“Does your employer have a name?” she asks.

“Well, that depends.”

“On…?”

“How this conversation goes.”

Having this conversation for a second time feels both perfectly normal and mind-bogglingly surreal. It is, without question, the strangest moment of her entire existence, and she has to force herself to focus.

She looks at Jee-woon and says, “Why would I even have a conversation with someone when I don’t know who they’re speaking for?”

“Because your Stanford money runs out in six weeks.” He reaches into his leather satchel and takes out a document in a navy binder—her grant proposal.

As Jee-woon pitches her on coming to work for his boss for no-limit funding, she stares at that grant proposal, thinking, I did it. I built my chair, and it is so much more powerful than I ever imagined it could be.

“You need a team of coders to help you design an algorithm for complex memory cataloging and projection. The infrastructure for human trials.”

Immersive platform for projection of long-term, explicit, episodic memories.

She built it. And it worked.

“Helena?” Now Jee-woon is staring at her across the disaster zone that is her desk.

“Yes?”

“Do you want to come work with Marcus Slade?”

The night Reed killed himself, she crept down to the lab, and using a back-door access into the system she’d convinced Raj to embed before he left, mapped a memory of this moment—Jee-woon showing up at her Stanford lab. It had left a strong-enough neuronal footprint to be viable for return. Then she programmed the memory-reactivation sequence, the drug cocktail, and climbed into the tank at three thirty in the morning.

Jee-woon says, “Helena? What do you say?”

“I would love to work with Mr. Slade.”

He pulls another document out of his satchel and passes it to her.

“What’s this?” she asks, though she already knows. She signed it in what is now a dead memory.

“An employment and confidentiality agreement. Nonnegotiable. I think you’ll find the financial terms to be very generous.”





BARRY





January 2008–May 2010

And then life feels like life again, the days running together with a sense of sameness and acceleration, more and more of them passing without him ever thinking about the fact that he is living his life all over again.





HELENA





October 22, 2007–August 2010

The smell of Jee-woon’s cologne still lingers in the elevator as Helena rides up to the first floor of the neuroscience building. It’s been almost two years since she set foot on the Stanford campus. Since she set foot on land. The green of the trees and the grass almost moves her to tears. The way sunlight passes through trembling leaves. The smell of flowers. The sound of birds that don’t live at sea.

The fall day is bright and warm, and she keeps looking at the screen on her flip phone, staring at the date because a part of her still doesn’t believe it’s October 22, 2007.

Her Jeep is waiting for her in the faculty parking lot. She climbs onto the sun-warmed seat and digs the key out of her backpack.

Soon, she’s burning down the interstate, the wind screaming over the roll bars. The oil platform feels like a gray, fading dream, and even more so the chair, the tank, Slade, and the last two years, which have, because of something she built, not even happened yet.

At her house in San Jose, she packs a suitcase with clothes, a framed photograph of her parents, and six books that mean the world to her: On the Fabric of the Human Body by Andreas Vesalius, Physica by Aristotle, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy by Isaac Newton, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and two novels—Camus’s The Stranger, and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

At the bank, she closes her savings and checking accounts—a little under $50,000. She takes $10,000 in cash, puts the remaining $40,000 into a brokerage account, then walks out into the noonday sun with a white envelope that feels woefully slim.

Near Highway 1, she stops at a convenience store to gas up her Jeep. When the transaction is complete, she throws her credit card in the trash, lowers the soft-top, and climbs in behind the wheel. She doesn’t know where she’s going. This is as far as she planned last night on the rig, and her mind is racing with both exhilaration and terror.

There’s a dime in one of the cup holders. She flips it in the air and catches it against the top of her left hand.