Recursion(49)
Healthy minds are being made unwell; unwell minds are being driven over the edge.
He pulls out his phone, opens contacts, scrolls to the g’s.
As his finger hovers over Gwen, someone shouts his name.
He glances across the street, sees someone running toward him.
A woman’s voice yells, “Don’t make that call!”
He’s already reaching into his jacket, thumbing off the button to his shoulder holster, getting a solid grip on his subcompact Glock, thinking she probably works for whoever built the chair, which means—fuck!—they know he’s scoping the building.
“Barry, don’t shoot, please.”
She slows to a walk, raises her hands.
They’re open, empty.
She approaches cautiously, barely five feet tall, wearing boots and a black leather jacket beaded with raindrops. A shock of red hair comes to her chin, but it’s damp. She’s been waiting for him in the rain. The thing that disarms him is the kindness in her green eyes, and something else, which strikes him—oddly—as familiarity.
She says, “I know you were sent back into the worst memory of your life. The man who did that is Marcus Slade. He owns that building. And I know what just happened to Meghan. I’m so sorry, Barry. I know you want to do something about it.”
“You work for them?”
“No.”
“Are you a mind reader?”
“No.”
“Then how could you possibly know what happened to me?”
“You told me.”
“I’ve never seen you before in my life.”
“You told me in the future, four months from now.”
He lowers the pistol, his brain twisting itself in knots. “You used that chair?”
She looks up into his eyes with an intensity that sends a cool electricity down his spine. “I invented the chair.”
“Who are you?”
“Helena Smith, and if you go into Slade’s building with Gwen, it will lead to the end of everything.”
Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.
—RAY CUMMINGS
BARRY
November 6, 2018
The woman with fiery hair takes Barry by the arm and pulls him down the sidewalk, away from the entrance to the subterranean garage.
“We’re not safe here,” she says. “Let’s walk to your car. Penn Station, right?”
Barry pulls his arm away from her and starts moving in the opposite direction.
She calls after him, “Standing on the driveway of your home in Portland, watching a total solar eclipse with your father. Spending summers with your grandparents at their farmhouse in New Hampshire. You’d sit in the apple orchard and tell yourself elaborate stories.”
He stops and looks back at her.
She continues, “While you were devastated when your mother died, you were also grateful, because you knew when her time was coming, and you had a proper chance to say goodbye. To make sure she knew you loved her. You didn’t have that with your father, who died suddenly when you were fifteen. You still wake up in the middle of the night sometimes, wondering if he knew.”
* * *
He’s shivering by the time they reach his Crown Vic. Helena gets down on her knees on the wet pavement and runs her hands across the car’s undercarriage.
“What are you doing?” Barry asks.
“Making sure there’s no tracking device on your car.”
They climb in out of the rain, and he turns on the heat and waits for the engine to warm the frigid air blowing through the vents.
On the forty-minute walk down from Fiftieth, she told him a crazy story he isn’t completely sure he believes, about how she accidentally built the chair on a decommissioned oil platform in a previous timeline.
“I have so much more to tell you,” Helena says, buckling her seat belt.
“We can go to my apartment.”
“It isn’t safe there. Marcus Slade is aware of you, of where you live. If, at any point in the future, he realizes you and I are working together, he’ll use you to get to me. He could use his chair to return to tonight and find us in this moment. You have to stop thinking linearly. You have no idea what he’s capable of.”
* * *
The lights of the Battery Tunnel stream past overhead, and Helena is explaining how she escaped Slade’s oil rig into her own memory, and fled to Canada.
“I was prepared to live out the rest of my life under the radar. Or kill myself if Slade ever found me. I was totally on my own—my mom died in 2011, my dad not long after. Then in 2016, the very first reports of a mysterious, new disease started surfacing.”
“False Memory Syndrome.”
“FMS didn’t come into the full public consciousness until recently, but I knew right away it was Slade. The first two years I was in hiding, he would’ve had no memory of our time together on the rig. In his mind, I had vanished after Jee-woon approached me with the job offer. But when we returned to 2009, specifically the night I escaped using the chair, Slade gained all of the memories of our time together. They were dead memories, of course, but—and here’s where I miscalculated—they contained enough information for him to eventually build the chair and all its components himself.