Recursion(50)

“I came to New York, which seemed to be ground zero for the FMS outbreak, figuring Slade had built his new lab in the city and was testing the chair on people. But I couldn’t find him. We’re almost here.”

Deep in Red Hook, Barry drives slowly past a row of warehouses along the water. Helena points out her building, but she makes Barry park five blocks away in a dark alley, backing into the shadows between a pair of overflowing dumpsters.

The rain has stopped.

Outside, it’s unnervingly quiet, the air redolent of wet garbage and standing puddles of rainwater. His mind’s eye keeps conjuring his last glimpse of Meghan—lying on the dirty sidewalk in front of her building, her bare feet sticking out from under the wet sheet.

Barry chokes down the grief, pops the trunk, and grabs his tactical shotgun and a box of shells.

They walk broken sidewalks for a quarter mile, Barry on alert for approaching vehicles or footsteps, but the only noise comes from the distant drone of helicopters circling the city and the deep-voiced horns of barges on the East River.

Helena leads him to a nondescript metal door in the side of a waterfront building that still bears the brewery signage of its former occupant.

She punches in the door code, lets them inside, and hits the lights. The warehouse reeks of spent grain, and the echo of their footsteps fills the space like a derelict cathedral. They move past rows of stainless-steel brewing tanks, a rusted-out mash tun, and finally the remnants of a bottling line.

They climb four flights to a sprawling loft with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the river, Governors Island, and the shimmering southern tip of Manhattan.

The floor is tracked with cables and a maze of disassembled circuit boards. There’s a rack of custom-built servers humming along an old brick wall, and what appears to be a chair in the throes of construction—a raw-wood frame with bundles of exposed wires running up the arms and legs. An object that vaguely resembles a helmet is clamped to a workbench and subsumed in a riot of unfinished circuitry.

“You’re building your own chair?” Barry asks.

“I outsource some coding and engineering work, but I’ve built it twice already, so I have some shortcuts up my sleeve and plenty from my investments. Advancements in computer processing have brought costs way down since my time on the rig. You hungry?”

“No.”

“Well, I’m starving.”

Beyond the servers, there’s a modest kitchen, and across from it, positioned along the windows, a dresser and a bed. With no real delineation between work and living space, the loft feels like exactly what it is—the lab of a desperate, possibly mad scientist.

Barry washes his face at the bathroom sink, and when he emerges, finds Helena at the stove, attending to a pair of skillets.

He says, “I love huevos rancheros.”

“I know. And you really love mine, well, technically my mother’s recipe. Sit.”

He takes a seat at a small Formica table, and she brings over a plate.

Barry isn’t hungry, but he knows he should eat. He cuts into one of the over-easy eggs, the yolk running into the beans and salsa verde. He takes a big bite. She was right—they’re the best he’s ever had.

Helena says, “Now I have to tell you about things that haven’t happened yet.”

Barry stares at her across the table, thinking there’s a haunted quality to her eyes, which look unmoored.

She says, “After the Big Bend, FMS mania will hit a fever pitch. Shockingly, it will still be viewed as a mysterious epidemic with no identifiable pathogen, although a handful of theoretical physicists will begin floating ideas about miniature wormholes and the possibility that someone is experimenting with space-time.

“Day after tomorrow, you will take a SWAT team into Slade’s hotel. He and most of his team will die in the raid. Newspapers will report that Slade has been disseminating a neurological virus that attacks areas of the brain that store memory. The news cycle will obsess on this for a while, but in a month, the public hysteria will die down. It will appear as though the mystery has been solved, order restored, and there will be no new cases of FMS.”

As Helena scarfs down a few bites, it dawns on Barry that he’s sitting across the table from a woman who is telling him the future. But that isn’t even the strangest part. The strangest part is that he’s starting to believe her.

Helena sets her fork down.

She says, “But I know it’s not over. I imagine the worst—that after your SWAT raid, the chair fell into the hands of someone else. So a month from now, I’ll come and find you. I’ll prove my bona fides by telling you exactly what you found in Slade’s lab.”

“And I believe you?”

“Eventually. You tell me that during the raid, before Slade was killed, he tried to destroy the chair and the processors, but that some of it was salvaged. Government agents—you don’t know who they worked for—came in and took everything. I have no way of knowing, but I assume they don’t know what the chair is, or how it works. Most of it is damaged, but they’re working day and night to reverse-engineer everything. Can you imagine if they’re successful?”

Barry goes to the refrigerator, a tremor in his hand as he pulls open the door and takes out a couple of cold longneck bottles.

He sits back down. “So my action of raiding Slade’s lab leads to this.”