Recursion(82)

Weak light filters in through the windows, revealing a place of utter ruin.

Most of the furniture has simply exploded.

The kitchen reeks of natural gas, and in the far corner of the building, smoke trickles through the open doorway to their bedroom, where the flickering of flames is visible on the walls.

As they rush through the house, Barry loses his balance in the archway between the dining and living room. He clutches the side of the archway to stop himself from falling and cries out in pain, leaving behind a handprint of blood and skin where he palmed the wall.

The access to their secure lab is another vault door, this time in the walk-in storage closet of what used to be the home office. The door itself is wired to the rest of the house, so using the keypad entry is out. Helena opens the flashlight app on her phone and sets the five-digit combination manually in the semidarkness.

She reaches for the wheel, but Barry says, “Let me.”

“It’s fine.”

“You still have to die in the tank.”

“Fair enough.”

He steps to the door and takes hold of the three-spoked handle, groaning with agony as he strains to crank the wheel. Nothing’s moving but the layers of skin he’s stripping away, and a horrifying thought occurs to him—what if the heat of the blast fused the innards of the door? A vision of their last day together—cooking slowly from thermal radiation in the burned-out husk of their home, unable to reach the chair, knowing that they failed. That when the next shift happened, if it ever did, they would either blink out of existence altogether or into a world of someone else’s making.

The wheel budges, then finally gives way.

The locks retract and the door swings open, exposing a spiral stairwell leading down into a lab that’s nearly identical to the one they built in the desert outside of Tucson. Only here, instead of digging into the earth, they lined the stone basement of the old firehouse with steel walls.

There’s no light.

Barry leaves part of his hand on the wheel as he pulls it away and follows Helena, corkscrewing down the stairs in the meager light of her phone’s sustained camera flash.

The lab is strangely silent.

No humming of the fans that cool the servers.

Or the heat pump that keeps the water in the deprivation tank at the steady temperature of human skin.

The phone light sweeps across the walls as they move toward the end of the server rack, where a power bank of lithium ion batteries is the only thing glowing in the lab.

Barry goes to a panel of switches on the wall that transfers power from the electrical grid to the batteries. He faces another moment of pure terror, because if the blast damaged the batteries or connectors to any of the equipment, this is all futile.

“Barry?” Helena says. “What are you waiting for?”

He flips the switches.

Overhead lights flicker on.

The servers begin to hum.

Helena is already easing down into the chair at the terminal, which has begun its boot-up sequence.

“The batteries will only give us thirty minutes of power,” she says.

“We have generators and plenty of gas.”

“Yeah, but it’ll take ages to reroute the power.”

He sheds his fire-burned parka and snow pants and takes the chair beside Helena, who’s already typing on the keypad as quickly as her scorched fingertips will let her, blood running out of the corners of her mouth and eyes.

As she begins to strip out of her winter clothes, Barry goes to the cabinet and takes the only remaining skullcap that has a full charge. He powers it on and places it carefully on top of his wife’s head, which is blistering over.

The second-degree burns on his face are entering the arena of excruciating. There’s morphine in the medical cabinet, calling to him, but there’s also no time.

“I’ll finish positioning the skullcap,” she says. “Just get the injection port.”

He grabs a port and turns it on, making sure the Bluetooth connection with the terminal is online.

In sharp contrast to her nuclear-sunburned hands, Helena’s forearms are creamy and smooth, protected from the initial flash by her parka and several layers of shirts and thermal underwear. It takes him several tries with his ruined fingers to thread the IV into her vein. He finally straps the port to her forearm and heads for the deprivation tank. The water is a degree and a half cooler than the ideal 98.6, but it will have to do.

He lifts the hatch and turns to face Helena, who’s stumbling toward him like a broken angel.

He knows he looks no prettier.

“I wish I could do this next part for you,” he says.

“It’s only going to hurt a little while longer,” she says, tears running down her face. “Besides, I deserve this.”

“That isn’t true.”

“You don’t have to walk this road with me again,” she says.

“I’ll walk it as many times as it takes.”

“You’re sure?”

“Completely.”

She grips the side of the tank and swings her leg over.

When her hands touch the water, she cries out.

“What is it?” Barry asks.

“The salt. Oh my God…”

“I’ll get the morphine.”

“No, it might fuck up the memory reactivation. Just hurry please.”