Recursion(75)

They had been together almost two years when he demanded she tell him how she could possibly know these things. It wasn’t the first time he’d asked. They were sitting at a bar in Seattle, watching the 1992 general election returns come in. And because of how she had gone about it—proving her bona fides before ever asking Barry to believe an insane story about a memory chair and a future they had already lived—he believed her, even when she told him he wouldn’t remember any of his past lives for another twenty-seven years, and that technology sufficient for her to build the chair wouldn’t exist for another fifteen.

“Are you OK?” Helena asks.

His focus is back in the moment, sitting on their concrete patio, watching a bee helicoptering around the remains of breakfast.

“It’s the weirdest feeling,” he says.

“Can you try to describe it?”

“It’s like…two separate people, two distinct consciousnesses, with vastly different histories and experiences, are merging inside of me.”

“Is one more dominant than the other?”

“No. At first I felt like the me who was shot in the hotel, but now I’m feeling equally at home in this reality.”

Remembering a lifetime in the span of sixty seconds is a hell of a thing.

He faces a tsunami of memories, but it’s the quiet moments that hit with the most force—

A snowy Christmas with Helena and her parents at their farmhouse in Boulder, Dorothy forgetting to put the turkey in the oven and everyone but Helena laughing it off, because she knew it was the beginning of her mother’s mental deterioration.

Their wedding in Aruba.

A trip, just the two of them, to Antarctica in the summer of 2001 to witness the migration of emperor penguins, which they would both come to see as the best moment of their life together—a respite from the ever-present race to fix the looming future.

Several bitter fights about having children and Helena’s insistence that they not bring a child into a world that would likely destroy itself in two decades.

The funerals of his mother, her mother, and most recently, her father.

The time she asked Barry if he wanted to know anything about his old life, and Barry saying that he didn’t want to know any reality but this one.

The first time she demonstrated the power of the chair.

Now the full arc of their time together is coming into focus.

They spent their lives constructing the memory chair in secret and trying to find a way to prevent the world from remembering how to build it. Although the chair had been used on countless occasions on prior timelines, the most “recent” use of the chair by Helena (in the DARPA lab) overrode all of the other false memory anniversary points. Which meant no one, not even Slade, would have knowledge of those prior timelines.

Until April 16, 2019.

Then, and only then, would the false memories of all that had happened come crashing down on everyone.

With a fortune amassed by 2001, they had an operational chair by 2007.

Once the chair was built, they spent a decade running experiments with it and imaging each other’s brains, studying neural activity at the moment a reality shift occurred and dead memories flooded in, searching for the accompanying neuron cascade of new information.

Their hope was to find a way to prevent dead memories from older timelines from flashing in without harming the brain. But all they accomplished was the recording of neural activity associated with dead memories. They made no progress toward finding a method of shielding the brain from those memories.

Barry looks over at his wife of twenty-four years, a completely different man from who he was just moments ago.

“We failed,” he says.

“Yeah.”

The other half of his duality, the one that lived every moment of this timeline, has just experienced the false memories of Meghan and Julia. His life as a detective in New York City. The death of his daughter, his divorce and descent into depression and regret. Meeting Slade and going back eleven years to save Meghan. Losing her a second time. Helena coming into his life. Their connection. His death in Slade’s hotel.

“You’re crying,” Helena says.

“It’s a lot.”

She reaches over, takes his hand in hers.

He says, “I finally remember it.”

“What?”

“Those handful of months in New York with you after I raided Slade’s hotel with Gwen the first time. I remember the end of that timeline, leaning down and kissing you as you floated in the deprivation tank, about to die. I was in love with you.”

“You were?”

“Madly.”

They’re quiet for a moment, looking out across the Sonoran desert, a landscape they have come to love together—so different from the lush, Pacific Northwest woods of his youth and the evergreen forests of Helena’s.

This has been a good place for them.

“We should look at the news,” Helena says.

“Let’s wait,” Barry says.

“What good will waiting do?”

“Let us live a little while longer with the hope that no one else remembered?”

“You know that’s not going to happen.”

“You always were the realist.”

Helena smiles, tears glistening in the corners of her eyes.

Barry rises from the chair and turns to face the back of their sprawling desert home. Built of rammed earth and expansive panes of glass, it blends seamlessly into its environment.