Recursion(78)

A soldier shouts, “There’s something back here!”

Helena pulls the vault door closed, types the locking code into the keypad on this side, and the ten dead bolts shoot home again.

When she hits the lights, they reveal a claustrophobic metal staircase, spiraling thirty feet down into the earth.

The temperature drops as they descend.

The soldiers pound on the vault door.

“They’ll find a way through,” Barry says.

“Then let’s hurry.”

Three stories underground, the staircase ends at a doorway that leads into a two-thousand-square-foot lab, where they’ve spent most of their waking hours for the last fifteen years. It is, for all intents and purposes, a bunker, with a dedicated air recirculation and filtration system, stand-alone solar-powered electrical system, a galley and sleeping quarters, and food and water rations for one year.

“How’s your leg?” Barry asks.

“It doesn’t matter.”

She limps past the Eames lounge chair, which they retrofitted into a memory chair, and then a region of the lab they used for brain imaging, and their study of dead-memory processing.

Helena sits down at the terminal and uploads the memory-reactivation program they always keep idling in case of emergencies. Since she already mapped the memory of her first solo drive when she turned sixteen, she can go straight to the deprivation chamber.

“I thought we’d have more time today,” Barry says.

“Me too.”

A detonation above them shakes the floor and rattles the walls. Plaster dust rains down from the ceiling like fine snow.

Barry rushes back through the lab to the foot of the stairwell. The air is full of dust, but he doesn’t hear incoming voices or footsteps yet.

As he moves back into the lab, he sees Helena pulling off her shirt and sports bra, and then sliding her shorts down her legs.

She stands naked before him, strapping on the skullcap, her right leg bleeding, tears streaming down her face.

He goes to his wife and embraces her as another blast shakes the foundation of their subterranean lab.

“Don’t let them in here,” she says.

She wipes her eyes and kisses him, and then Barry helps her into the tank.

When she’s floating in the water, he looks down at her, says, “I’ll be in that Portland bar in October of 1990, waiting for you.”

“You won’t even recognize me.”

“My soul knows your soul. In any time.”

He closes the hatch and moves over to the terminal. It’s gone quiet for a moment, no sound but the humming of the servers.

He initiates the reactivation program and leans back in the chair, trying to wrap his mind around what comes next.

An earth-shaking blast cracks the walls and the concrete floor beneath his feet, Barry wondering if the Black Hawk dropped a bomb on their house.

Smoke is pouring through the vents, and the light panels are flickering, but the reactivation program continues to run.

He goes to the stairwell again—the only way in or out of the lab.

Now he hears voices above and sees beams of light swinging through the dust-choked smoke.

They’ve breached the vault door, their boots clanging down the metal steps.

Barry slams the door to the lab and turns the dead bolt. It’s just a metal fire door—they could probably kick it in.

He returns to the terminal and studies the readout of Helena’s vitals. She’s been flatlined now for several minutes.

Something hits the other side of the door.

Again.

And again.

A machine gun fires and another boot or shoulder or battering ram slams into the metal.

Miraculously, it holds.

“Come on,” Barry says.

He hears voices yelling in the stairwell and then a deafening blast that sets his ears ringing—a grenade or a charge.

A wall of smoke appears where the door had been, and a soldier steps through over the flattened door, pointing an automatic rifle at Barry.

Barry raises his arms over his head and rises slowly from the chair as more soldiers pour into the lab.

The screen at the terminal, which shows the status of the stimulators, flashes an alert—DMT RELEASE DETECTED.

Come on. Come on.

Inside the tank, Helena is dying, her brain dumping the last of the chemical that will fling her back three decades into a memory.

The lead soldier is coming toward Barry, screaming something that he can’t understand over the ringing in his—



* * *





Blood is dripping from his nose, melting little burgundy holes in the snow.

He looks around at the dark evergreens, their branches sagging under the weight of a recent storm.

He looks at Helena, her hair different from the last time he saw her, in their basement lab in the Sonoran desert. It’s now equal parts white and red. She’s wearing it long and pulled back into a ponytail, and her face looks somehow harder.

“What day is it?” he asks.

“April 16, 2019. Second timeline anniversary since I died in the tank at DARPA.”

They’re standing in snowshoes in a glade on a mountainside, overlooking a city on a plain, ten miles distant.

“That’s Denver,” Helena says. “We built our lab here so I could be close to my parents.” She looks at him. “Nothing yet?”