Recursion(70)
Another headache.
Another nosebleed.
Another shift.
The tunnel never happened.
The bridge never happened.
Grand Central Terminal was never bombed.
Only the dead memories of those events remain, stacked in her mind like the memories of dreams.
She woke up, made breakfast, got dressed, and rode down to the parking garage under her building with Jessica and Alonzo, just like every other morning. They were heading west on East Fifty-Seventh to loop around onto the bridge when a blinding flash split the sky, coupled with a sound like a thousand synchronized cannon blasts ricocheting off the surrounding buildings.
They’re stuck in traffic now, and all around her, people are standing on the sidewalk, looking in horror at Trump Tower, which is billowing clouds of smoke and flame.
The lower ten floors are sagging like a melting face, the interiors of individual rooms exposed like cubbyholes. The ones higher up are still largely intact, with people inside of them staring over the newly made precipice into the crater that used to be the intersection of Fifty-Seventh and Fifth Avenue.
As the city screams with incoming sirens, Jessica shrieks, “What’s happening? What is happening?”
Straight ahead, a human being falls out of the sky and crushes in the roof of a cab.
Another person crashes through a car windshield directly behind the Suburban.
A third plummets through the awning of a private sports club, Helena wondering if people are throwing themselves off buildings because this is too much for their psyches to bear. It wouldn’t surprise her. If she didn’t know about the chair, what would she think was happening to the city, to time, to reality itself?
Jessica is crying.
Alonzo says, “It feels like the end of everything.”
Helena looks up at the building out her window as a blond-haired woman leaps from an office whose glass was shattered by the blast. She falls like a rocket, headfirst, screaming toward impact, and Helena starts to turn away, but she can’t.
The movement of everything decelerates again.
The roiling smoke.
The flames.
The falling woman grinding down into extreme slow-motion, her head inching closer and closer to the pavement.
Everything stops.
This timeline dying.
Jessica’s hands eternally clutch the steering wheel.
Helena can never look away from the jumper, who will never hit the ground, because she’s frozen in midair, the top of her head one foot from the pavement, her yellow hair splayed out, eyes closed, face in a perpetual grimace, bracing for impact—
* * *
And Helena is walking through the double doors of the DARPA building, where Shaw stands just outside security.
They stare at each other, processing this new reality as the accompanying set of replacement memories clicks in.
None of it happened.
Not the tunnel, the bridge, Grand Central, or Trump Tower. Helena woke up, got ready, and was driven here like every other morning, without incident.
She opens her mouth to speak, but Shaw says, “Not out here.”
Raj and Albert are sitting at the conference table in the lab, watching the news on a television embedded in the wall. The screen has been divided into four live images from tower cams showing the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, Grand Central Terminal, Trump Tower, and the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, all untouched, over the banner, “MASS MEMORY MALFUNCTION IN MANHATTAN.”
“What the fuck is going on?” Helena asks.
She’s physically shaking, because, although it never happened, she can still feel the impact from the wall of water slamming into her. She can hear the bodies striking cars all around her. She can hear the shriek of the bridge tearing itself apart.
“Sit down,” Shaw says.
She takes the chair across from Raj, who looks completely shell-shocked.
Shaw remains standing, says, “The schematics for the chair, the tank, our software, the protocol—it all leaked.”
Helena points at the screen. “Someone else is doing this?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“It would take more than a couple of months to build the chair if you were just working from blueprints,” she says.
“It leaked a year ago.”
“How is that possible? You didn’t even have the chair a year—”
“Marcus was operating out of that hotel for more than a year. Someone got curious about what he was doing and hacked his servers. Raj just found evidence of the incursion.”
“It was a massive data breach,” Raj says. “They hid it well, and they got everything.”
Shaw looks at Albert. “Tell her what you found.”
“Other instances of reality shifts.”
“Where?”
“Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, Moscow, four in Paris, two in Glasgow, one in Oslo. Very similar to the way FMS stories first appeared in America last year.”
“So people are using the chair, and you know this for sure.”
“Yes. I even found a company in S?o Paulo using it for tourism.”
“Jesus Christ. How long has all this been happening?”
“Goes back almost three months.”
Shaw says, “The Chinese and Russian governments have both reached out to say they have this technology.”