Recursion(88)

The world begins to lose color, and seeing everything frozen as the time bleeds out of it fires his mind with questions— If matter can neither be created nor destroyed, where will all this matter go when this timeline ceases to exist? What’s happened to the matter of all the dead timelines they’ve left behind? Are they time-capsuled away in higher, unreachable dimensions? And if so, what is matter without time? Matter that doesn’t persist? What would that even look like?

He has one last realization before his consciousness is catapulted from this dying reality—this deceleration of time means that Helena might be alive somewhere, dying in the tank right this second in order to kill this timeline and begin another.

And a glimmer of joy rides through him at the possibility that she lives, and the hope that, in this next reality, even if only for a moment, he will be with her again.



* * *





Barry is lying in bed in the semidarkness of a cool room. Through an open window, he can hear a gentle rain falling. He checks his watch—9:30 p.m. Western European Time. Five hours ahead of Manhattan.

He looks over at his wife of twenty-four years, reading beside him in bed.

“It’s nine thirty,” he says.

Her last life, she climbed into the deprivation chamber at approximately 4:35 p.m., Eastern, so they’re fast approaching the fifth timeline anniversary of 4/16/19.

In this moment, Barry’s perspective is of having lived a single lifetime. This one. Helena crashed through the door of his life when he was twenty-one in a Portland bar, and they’ve been inseparable ever since. Of course, he knows all about their four past lives together. Their work. Their love. How it always ends with her dying in the deprivation chamber on April 16, 2019, when the world remembers the existence of the memory chair and all the horror it wrought. The previous timeline they spent apart. She stayed close to her parents in Boulder, built the chair herself, and used it to improve her mother’s quality of life once Alzheimer’s took hold. But she never made any progress on stopping the onslaught of dead memories, which she swears will find him any moment now. She doesn’t know what Barry did with his last life, and neither does he. Yet. In this one, they continued their pursuit of understanding how the brain processes dead memories, and delved further into studies of the particle physics surrounding use of the chair. They’ve even made a few contacts at CERN, whom they’re hoping to use on the next timeline.

But the truth is, as in the past iterations of their life, they’ve made no meaningful headway toward stopping what’s about to happen. They are only two people, and the problem they’re facing is enormously complex. Probably insurmountable.

Helena closes her book and looks over at Barry. The noise of the rain pattering on the shingles of their seventeenth-century manor house is perhaps his favorite sound in the world.

She says, “I’m afraid that when your memories of the last timeline come, you’re going to feel like I abandoned you. Like I betrayed you. I didn’t spend the last timeline with you, but it’s not because I didn’t love or need you. I hope you can hear that. I just wanted you to live a life without the end of the world looming, and I hope it was a good one. I hope you found love. I didn’t. Every day I missed you. Every day I needed you. I was more lonely than I’ve ever been in my many lives.”

“I’m sure you did what you needed to do. I know this is infinitely harder for you than it is for me.”

He looks at his watch as the time changes from 9:34 to 9:35.

She’s told him everything that will happen. The headache, the temporary loss of consciousness and control. How the world will immediately begin to implode. And yet there’s still a part of him that can’t quite believe it will happen. Not that he thinks Helena is lying. But it’s hard to imagine the troubles of the world could ever reach them here.

Barry feels a glint of pain behind his eyes.

Sharp and blinding.

He looks over at his wife. “I think it’s starting.”



* * *





By midnight, he is the Barry of many lifetimes, although the previous one, in New York City, is oddly the last to arrive. Perhaps because there are so many, the memories come more slowly than any of the previous anniversaries.

He breaks down crying in the kitchen with joy that Helena came back to him, and she sits on his lap at the small table and kisses his face and runs her fingers through his hair and tells him how sorry she is, promising that she will never leave him again.

“Holy shit,” Barry says. “I just remembered.”

“What?”

He looks up at Helena. “I was right. There’s a way out of this apocalyptic loop. Slade did know how to stop dead memories.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I looked Slade up in the final moments of the previous timeline. He died last Christmas, but I spoke to Jee-woon. He said Slade had gone back and started a new timeline that didn’t cause any dead memories at the anniversary point.”

“Oh my God, how?”

“Jee-woon didn’t know. He hung up on me, and then the world ended.”

A tea kettle whistles.

Helena goes to the range and takes it off the heat, then pours the boiling water over their tea-ball infusers.

“On the next timeline, until we reach the anniversary,” Barry says, “I won’t remember any of this. You have to carry this knowledge on with you.”