by Blake Crouch
“I have so much more to tell you,” Helena says, buckling her seat belt.
“We can go to my apartment.”
“It isn’t safe there. Marcus Slade is aware of you, of where you live. If, at any point in the future, he realizes you and I are working together, he’ll use you to get to me. He could use his chair to return to tonight and find us in this moment. You have to stop thinking linearly. You have no idea what he’s capable of.”
* * *
The lights of the Battery Tunnel stream past overhead, and Helena is explaining how she escaped Slade’s oil rig into her own memory, and fled to Canada.
“I was prepared to live out the rest of my life under the radar. Or kill myself if Slade ever found me. I was totally on my own—my mom died in 2011, my dad not long after. Then in 2016, the very first reports of a mysterious, new disease started surfacing.”
“False Memory Syndrome.”
“FMS didn’t come into the full public consciousness until recently, but I knew right away it was Slade. The first two years I was in hiding, he would’ve had no memory of our time together on the rig. In his mind, I had vanished after Jee-woon approached me with the job offer. But when we returned to 2009, specifically the night I escaped using the chair, Slade gained all of the memories of our time together. They were dead memories, of course, but—and here’s where I miscalculated—they contained enough information for him to eventually build the chair and all its components himself.
“I came to New York, which seemed to be ground zero for the FMS outbreak, figuring Slade had built his new lab in the city and was testing the chair on people. But I couldn’t find him. We’re almost here.”
Deep in Red Hook, Barry drives slowly past a row of warehouses along the water. Helena points out her building, but she makes Barry park five blocks away in a dark alley, backing into the shadows between a pair of overflowing dumpsters.
The rain has stopped.
Outside, it’s unnervingly quiet, the air redolent of wet garbage and standing puddles of rainwater. His mind’s eye keeps conjuring his last glimpse of Meghan—lying on the dirty sidewalk in front of her building, her bare feet sticking out from under the wet sheet.
Barry chokes down the grief, pops the trunk, and grabs his tactical shotgun and a box of shells.
They walk broken sidewalks for a quarter mile, Barry on alert for approaching vehicles or footsteps, but the only noise comes from the distant drone of helicopters circling the city and the deep-voiced horns of barges on the East River.
Helena leads him to a nondescript metal door in the side of a waterfront building that still bears the brewery signage of its former occupant.
She punches in the door code, lets them inside, and hits the lights. The warehouse reeks of spent grain, and the echo of their footsteps fills the space like a derelict cathedral. They move past rows of stainless-steel brewing tanks, a rusted-out mash tun, and finally the remnants of a bottling line.
They climb four flights to a sprawling loft with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the river, Governors Island, and the shimmering southern tip of Manhattan.
The floor is tracked with cables and a maze of disassembled circuit boards. There’s a rack of custom-built servers humming along an old brick wall, and what appears to be a chair in the throes of construction—a raw-wood frame with bundles of exposed wires running up the arms and legs. An object that vaguely resembles a helmet is clamped to a workbench and subsumed in a riot of unfinished circuitry.
“You’re building your own chair?” Barry asks.
“I outsource some coding and engineering work, but I’ve built it twice already, so I have some shortcuts up my sleeve and plenty from my investments. Advancements in computer processing have brought costs way down since my time on the rig. You hungry?”
“No.”
“Well, I’m starving.”
Beyond the servers, there’s a modest kitchen, and across from it, positioned along the windows, a dresser and a bed. With no real delineation between work and living space, the loft feels like exactly what it is—the lab of a desperate, possibly mad scientist.
Barry washes his face at the bathroom sink, and when he emerges, finds Helena at the stove, attending to a pair of skillets.
He says, “I love huevos rancheros.”
“I know. And you really love mine, well, technically my mother’s recipe. Sit.”
He takes a seat at a small Formica table, and she brings over a plate.
Barry isn’t hungry, but he knows he should eat. He cuts into one of the over-easy eggs, the yolk running into the beans and salsa verde. He takes a big bite. She was right—they’re the best he’s ever had.
Helena says, “Now I have to tell you about things that haven’t happened yet.”
Barry stares at her across the table, thinking there’s a haunted quality to her eyes, which look unmoored.
She says, “After the Big Bend, FMS mania will hit a fever pitch. Shockingly, it will still be viewed as a mysterious epidemic with no identifiable pathogen, although a handful of theoretical physicists will begin floating ideas about miniature wormholes and the possibility that someone is experimenting with space-time.
“Day after tomorrow, you will take a SWAT team into Slade’s hotel. He and most of his team will die in the raid. Newspapers will report that Slade has been disseminating a neurological virus that attacks areas of the brain that store memory. The news cycle will obsess on this for a while, but in a month, the public hysteria will die down. It will appear as though the mystery has been solved, order restored, and there will be no new cases of FMS.”
As Helena scarfs down a few bites, it dawns on Barry that he’s sitting across the table from a woman who is telling him the future. But that isn’t even the strangest part. The strangest part is that he’s starting to believe her.
Helena sets her fork down.
She says, “But I know it’s not over. I imagine the worst—that after your SWAT raid, the chair fell into the hands of someone else. So a month from now, I’ll come and find you. I’ll prove my bona fides by telling you exactly what you found in Slade’s lab.”
“And I believe you?”
“Eventually. You tell me that during the raid, before Slade was killed, he tried to destroy the chair and the processors, but that some of it was salvaged. Government agents—you don’t know who they worked for—came in and took everything. I have no way of knowing, but I assume they don’t know what the chair is, or how it works. Most of it is damaged, but they’re working day and night to reverse-engineer everything. Can you imagine if they’re successful?”
Barry goes to the refrigerator, a tremor in his hand as he pulls open the door and takes out a couple of cold longneck bottles.
He sits back down. “So my action of raiding Slade’s lab leads to this.”
“Yes. You’ve experienced the chair. You know its power. From what I can tell, Slade is just using it to send a select few back into their memories. Who knows why? But look at the fear and panic it’s causing. Won’t take much of messing with reality for humanity to go completely off the rails. We have to stop him.”
“With your chair?”
“It won’t be operational for another four months. The longer we wait, the greater the chance someone finds Slade’s lab before we get in there. You’ve already put it on Gwen’s radar. And once people know the chair exists, their memories of it will always return, no matter how many times a timeline is changed. The same way Julia and Meghan remembered Meghan dying in a hit-and-run last night.”
“Their memories only arrived when we reached the moment I had used the chair in the last timeline. Does it always work that way?”
“Yes, because that was the moment their consciousness and memories from the prior timeline merged into this one. I think of it as a timeline anniversary.”
“So w
hat are you proposing we do?”
“You and I take control of Slade’s lab tomorrow. Destroy the chair, the software, all the infrastructure, all trace of its existence. I have a virus ready to upload to his stand-alone network once we’re inside. It’ll reformat everything.”
Barry drinks his beer, a tightness ratcheting down in his stomach.
“Did Future Me agree with this plan?”
Helena smiles. “In fact, we came up with it together.”
“Did I think you and I have a chance?”
“Honestly? No.”
“What do you think?”
Helena leans back in her chair. She looks bone weary. “I think we’re the best chance the world has.”
* * *
Barry stands at the wall of windows near Helena’s bed, looking across the ink-black river to the city. He hopes Julia is OK, but he doubts it. When he called her, she broke down crying on the phone, hung up, and refused to take his calls. He’s guessing there’s a part of her that blames him.
The Big Bend now dominates the skyline, and he wonders if he’ll ever grow used to it, or if it will always—for him and others—represent the unreliability of reality.
Helena comes up beside him.
“You OK?” she asks.
“I keep seeing Meghan dead on the sidewalk. I could almost see her face through the wet sheet they had draped over her. Going back and living those eleven years again—it ultimately fixed nothing for my family.”
“I’m so sorry, Barry.”
He looks at her.
Breathes in, breathes out.
“Have you ever handled a gun?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“Recently?”
“Future You knew it would just be you and me charging into Slade’s building, so you started taking me to the range.”
“You sure you’re up for this?”
“I built the chair because my mom got Alzheimer’s. I wanted to help her and others like her. I thought if we could figure out how to capture memories, it would lead us to understanding how to stop them from erasing altogether. I didn’t mean for the chair to become what it became. It’s not only destroyed my life, now it’s destroying the lives of others. People have lost their loved ones. Have had entire lifetimes erased. Children erased.”
“You didn’t mean for any of this to happen.”
“Yet here we are, and it was my ambition that put this device in the hands of Slade, and later, others.” She looks at Barry. “You’re here because of me. The world is losing its collective mind because of me. There’s a fucking building out there that wasn’t there yesterday because of me. So I don’t really care what happens to me tomorrow so long as we destroy every trace of the chair’s existence. I’m ready to die if that’s what it takes.”
He didn’t see it until this moment—the weight she carries. The self-hate and regret. What must it feel like to create a thing that could destroy the structure of memory and time? What must it cost her to repress the weight of all that guilt and horror and terror and anxiety?
Barry says, “No matter what, I got to see my daughter grow up because of you.”
“I don’t mean this to sound the way it will, but you shouldn’t have. If we can’t rely on memory, our species will unravel. And it’s already beginning.”
Helena stares at the city across the water, Barry thinking there’s something overwhelming about her vulnerability in this moment.
“We should probably get some sleep,” she says. “You can have my bed.”
“I’m not taking your bed from you.”
“I sleep on the couch most nights anyway, so I can fall asleep to the sound of the television.”
She turns to go.
“Helena.”
“What?”
“I know I don’t really know you, but I’m certain your life is more than that chair.”
“No. It defines me. First part of my life I spent trying to build it. I’ll spend the rest of whatever’s left trying to destroy it.”
HELENA
November 7, 2018
She lies facing the television, the light of the screen flickering against her closed eyelids and the volume just high enough to engage her ever-restless mind. Something drags her into full and sudden consciousness. She jerks up into a seated position on the couch. It’s just Barry, crying softly across the room. She wishes she could climb into bed and comfort him, but it would be too soon—they’re essentially strangers. Perhaps he needs to grieve alone for now anyway.
She settles back down on the cushions, the couch springs creaking as she pulls the blankets to her neck. It isn’t lost on her how strange it is to remember the future. The memory of her and Barry’s goodbye in this very room, four months from now, is still a throbbing ache. She was floating in the deprivation tank, and Barry leaned down and kissed her. There were tears in his eyes as he closed the hatch. In hers too. Their future seemed so full of promise, and she was killing it.
The Barry she left behind already knows if she’s been successful. He’ll have known the moment she died in the tank, his reality instantly shifting to align with this new reality she’s creating.
She resists the urge to wake the Barry of the present and tell him. It would only make breaking into Slade’s lab more difficult tomorrow, throwing an emotional wrench into things. And what would she say? There were sparks? Chemistry? Best to keep to the plan. All that matters is that tomorrow goes well. She can’t undo the damage her mind has wrought on the world, but perhaps she can seal the wound, stanch the bleeding.
She once had such immense dreams—eradicating the effects of memory-ravaging disease. Now, with her mom and dad gone and no real friends to speak of besides a man four months in the unreachable future, her dreams have reset from world-changing to the desperately personal.
She would simply like to be able to lie down at night, in peace, with a quiet mind.
She tries to sleep, knowing that she needs it more tonight than perhaps any other night of her life.
So of course sleep eludes her.
* * *
In the evening, they slip out the back of her building, taking a moment to study the nearby streets before venturing into the open. The district is mostly abandoned industrial buildings, and there’s little traffic to speak of, and nothing that looks suspicious.
As Barry takes them on a route through Brooklyn Heights, he glances at her across the center console. “When you were showing me the chair last night, you mentioned you had built it twice before. When was the first time?”
She takes a sip of the coffee she brought along—her talisman against the previous night of sleepless misery.
“In the original timeline, I was head of this R&D group for a San Francisco–based company called Ion. They weren’t interested in the medical applications of my chair. They only saw the entertainment value and the dollar signs that came with it.
“I was spinning my wheels, burned out, getting nowhere. Ion was on the verge of pulling the plug on my research when a test subject had a heart attack and died inside the deprivation tank. We all experienced a slight reality shift, but no one understood what had happened. No one except my assistant, Marcus Slade. Got to hand it to him—he realized what I’d created even before I did.”
“What happened?”
“A few days later, he asked to meet me at the lab. Said it was an emergency. When I showed up, he had a gun. He forced me to log into the system and load a reactivation program for a memory we had mapped for him. And when I had done that, he killed me.”
“When was this?”
“Two days ago. November 5, 2018. But, of course, it happened several timelines ago.”
Barry takes the exit for the Brooklyn Bridge.
“I don’t mean to second-guess you,” he says, “but couldn’t you have gone ba
ck into a different memory?”
“Like stop myself from being born so the chair was never made?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I can’t go back and stop myself from being born. Someone else can, and then I become a dead memory. But there’s no grandfather paradox or any temporal paradox when it comes to the chair. Everything that happens, even if it’s changed or undone, lives on in dead memories. Cause and effect are still alive and well.”
“OK, then what about returning to a memory on the oil rig? You could’ve pushed Slade off the platform or something.”
“Everything that happened on the rig exists in dead memories. You can’t return to them. We’ve tried—with disastrous results. But yes. I should’ve killed him when I had the chance.”
They’re halfway across the river now, the overhanging crossbars rushing past overhead. Maybe it’s the coffee, probably it’s their proximity to the city, but she is suddenly wide-awake.
“What are dead memories?” Barry asks.
“It’s what everyone thinks of as false memories. Except they aren’t false. They just happened on a timeline that someone ended. For instance, the timeline where your daughter was hit by a car is now a dead memory. You ended that timeline and started this one when Slade killed you in the deprivation chamber.”
They ride into Midtown, head north up Third Avenue, and then left onto East Forty-Ninth before finally pulling over onto the curb just shy of the ostensible entrance to Slade’s building—a false-fronted lobby with a bank of elevators that go nowhere. The only real way inside is through the underground parking structure on Fiftieth.
It’s raining bullets when they step out of the car. Barry pulls a black duffel bag out of the trunk, and Helena follows him onto the sidewalk and a little ways down to the entrance of a bar they’ve been in once before, four months from now, when they came to scope out the tunnel access to Slade’s building and discuss their plans for this exact moment.
