Recursion(96)
Barry presses Record and remembers.
When he’s finished, he waits for the program to calculate the memory’s synaptic number. It occurs to him that if the number comes back too low, he’ll have to dig into the software and disable the firewall, and that’s going to take more time than he has.
The tablet flashes a number.
121.
Just barely in the safe zone.
Barry affixes an injection port to his left forearm and loads the drug cocktail into the mechanism.
He keeps thinking he feels the first signs of oxy as he programs the memory-reactivation sequence at the terminal, but soon he’s naked and climbing into the tank.
Floating on his back in the water, he reaches up and pulls the hatch closed over the top of him.
His mind going in a thousand different directions.
This is going to fail and you’re just going to die in this tank.
Fuck the world, save Meghan.
Go back out there and die beside your wife like you’ve been intending for the last two months.
You have to keep trying. Helena would want this.
There’s a subtle vibration in his left forearm. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, wondering if it will be his last.
BARRY
The world stands as still as a painting—no movement, life, or color—and yet, he is aware of his own existence.
He can see only in the direction he’s facing, staring across an arrangement of tables west toward the river, the water almost black.
Everything is frozen.
Everything in shades of gray.
Straight ahead, a waiter—dark as a silhouette—carries a pitcher of ice water.
People occupy tables shaded by umbrellas, caught in moments of laughter, eating and drinking, holding napkins to their mouths. But there is no motion. They might as well be carvings on an urn.
Straight ahead, he sees Julia, already seated at their table. She’s waiting for him, paused in a pensive, anxious moment, and he registers a terrifying fear that she will forever be waiting.
This is nothing like returning to a memory on a live timeline. That is a process of slowly embodying yourself as the sensations of the memory wash over you. You come into action and energy.
Here, there is none.
And it occurs to him—I am finally in a moment of now.
Whatever he is or has become, Barry registers a freedom of movement he has never known. He is no longer in three-dimensional space, and he wonders if this is what Slade meant by—And maybe you never will, unless you can travel the way I’ve traveled. Was this how Slade experienced the universe?
Impossibly, he turns around inside of himself and stares back through…
He doesn’t know what it is exactly.
Not right away, at least.
He’s caught at the leading edge of something that reminds him of a time-lapsed star path, only it’s a part of him, as much an extension of his being as his arm or his mind, falling away and spiraling in on itself into a glowing, fractal-like form more beautiful and mysterious than anything in his experience. And he knows, on a level he cannot begin to explain, that this is his original worldline, and that it contains the breadth of his existence as formed by memory.
Every memory he has ever made.
Every memory that has made him.
But this is not his only worldline. Others branch off from this one, twisting and turning in on themselves through space-time.
He feels the worldline of memories where he saved Meghan from the hit-and-run.
A trio of minor worldlines, each of which ended in his death at Slade’s hotel.
The subsequent lifetimes he and Helena lived in their attempts to stave off the end of reality.
Even the branches he created in their last life in the Antarctic—spokelike radials of memory forming the ten times he died in the tank to be with her again.
But none of those matter anymore.
The timeline he’s on is the original, and he’s accelerating upstream against the river of his life, crashing through forgotten moments, understanding finally that memory is all he’s made of.
All anything is made of.
When the needle of his consciousness touches a memory, his life begins to play, and he finds himself in a frozen moment— The smell of dead leaves and the cool bite of autumn in the city, sitting in the Ramble in Central Park, crying after signing his divorce papers.
Moving again—
Faster now—
Through more memories than he can count.
As numerous as stars—like staring across a universe that is him.
His mother’s funeral, looking down into her open casket, his hands on hers and the cool stiffness of them as he studies her face, thinking, That isn’t you….
Meghan’s body on the slab—her crushed-in torso covered in a black bruise.
Finding her on the side of the road near their house.
Why these moments? he wonders.
Driving through the suburbs on a cold, dark night between Thanksgiving and Christmas, Julia in the front passenger seat beside him, Meghan in the back, everyone quiet and content, watching Christmas lights through the windows—an exhale in the midst of life’s journey, between storms, where everything has settled into fleeting alignment.
Ripped away again, now hurtling through a tunnel whose walls of memory are rifling down on him.
Meghan behind the wheel of his Camry, the back half punched through the garage door, her face red and tears streaming down it as she white-knuckle clutches the steering wheel.