Recursion(86)
He pulls out his phone, checks the home screen: April 16, 2019.
The fourth timeline anniversary of Helena dying in that DARPA lab.
What the hell?
He rises out of his chair—substantially heavier than he was in Maine, Colorado, and Arizona—and inside his jacket, he feels the heft of something he hasn’t worn in ages—a shoulder holster.
An eerie silence has overtaken the entire fourth floor of cubicles.
No one typing.
No one talking.
Just a stunned silence.
He looks over at the woman across from him—a cop he remembers, not from this timeline, but the original, before time was fractured by Helena’s chair. She’s a homicide detective named Sheila Redling, who played shortstop for their softball league. She had a wicked arm, and was the best drinker on the team. Blood is running out of Sheila’s nose and down her white blouse, and the look on her face is unquestionably that of a woman in a state of sheer terror.
The man in the next cubicle over has a bloody nose as well and tears running down his face.
A gunshot explodes the pin-drop silence on the other side of the floor, followed by gasps and shrieks rippling across the maze of cubicles.
There’s another shot, this one closer.
Someone screams, “What the fuck is happening? What the fuck is happening?”
After the third shot, Barry reaches into his jacket to pull his Glock, wondering if they’re under attack, but he can’t see any threats in his vicinity.
Just a sea of bewildered faces.
Shelia Redling stands suddenly, draws her weapon, puts the gun to her head, and fires.
As she drops to the floor, the man who shares a cubicle wall with her lunges out of his chair, grabs her gun from the pool of blood, and puts it into his mouth.
Barry screams, “No!”
As he fires and falls on top of Sheila, Barry realizes this all makes some terrible kind of sense. His memories of the previous timeline are with Helena on the coast of Maine, but these people were in the midst of a nuclear attack on New York City, where they all died or were in the throes of an awful death, after having just suffered the same fate in the previous timeline, where another nuclear attack had just happened.
Now the memories of this timeline break like a crashing wave.
He moved to New York in his early twenties and became a cop.
He married Julia.
Climbed the ranks of the NYPD to make detective in the Central Robbery Division.
He lived his original life all over again.
And it hits him like a shot to the kidneys—Helena never came to him in that Portland bar. He has never met her. Never heard from her. For some reason, she chose to live this timeline without him. He only knows her in dead memories.
He pulls out his cell phone to call her, trying to remember her number, and realizes that it can’t possibly be the same on this timeline. He has no way to contact her, and the helplessness of that knowledge is almost more than he can bear in this moment, thoughts tearing through his mind— Does this mean she broke up with him?
Found someone else?
Finally had enough of living the same twenty-nine-year loop with the same man?
As more gunshots erupt around him and people start to flee the area, he thinks back to the last conversation he had with Helena at their home in Maine and his idea of finding Slade.
Stay focused on that. If the past lifetimes are any guide, you only have a limited amount of time before hell rains down on New York.
He shuts out the chaos and slides his chair toward his desk, waking his computer.
A Google search for “Marcus Slade” pulls up an obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle, detailing that Slade died of a drug overdose last Christmas.
Shit.
Next he searches “Jee-woon Chercover” and finds multiple hits. Chercover runs a VC firm on the Upper East Side called Apex Venture. Barry snaps a photo of the contact info off their website, grabs his keys, and rushes for the stairwell.
As he descends the stairs, he dials Apex.
“All circuits are busy, please try your call—”
He sprints through the ground-floor lobby, into the late afternoon, reaching the sidewalk of West 100th Street, short of breath, a new alert lighting up his phone’s home screen:
Emergency Alert
BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO MULTIPLE US TARGETS. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.
Slide for more
Jesus.
While he has memories of this timeline, his identity encompasses, fleetingly, all the lifetimes he’s ever lived. Unfortunately, that multi-timeline perspective will end when the missiles hit.
He wonders—what if this is all that’s left of his life?
Of everyone’s life?
A half hour of the same endless, repeating horror.
Some kind of hell.
Fifteen floors up, in a building across the street, a window breaks, glass showering the pavement, followed by a chair and then a man in a pinstripe suit.
He crashes headfirst through the roof of a car, whose alarm begins a piercing shriek.
People are running past Barry.
On the sidewalks.
In the streets.
More men and women plummeting out of skyscrapers, because they remember what it was like to die in a nuclear attack.
A civil defense siren begins to scream, and people are flooding out of the surrounding buildings like rats and pouring into an underground parking garage to take cover.