by Blake Crouch
She is forty-nine, and she wonders if this is what feeling old really means—not just a physical deterioration, but an interpersonal. A growing silence caused by the people you most love, who have shaped you and defined your world, going on ahead into whatever comes after.
With no way out, no endgame in sight, and everyone she loves gone, she is unsure how much longer she will keep doing this.
Day 61
Timoney returns to a memory to stop a deranged fifty-two-year-old insurance salesman from walking into a political demonstration at Berkeley and massacring twenty-eight students with an assault rifle.
Day 70
Steve breaks into an apartment in Leeds while the man is assembling his vest, slides the blade of a combat knife through the base of his skull, and scrambles his medulla oblongata, leaving him facedown on the table atop a pile of nails, screws, and bolts that would’ve torn twelve people to shreds in the London Underground the following morning.
Day 90
On the program’s three-month anniversary, a report in the New York Times profiles their eight missions, speculating that the deaths of would-be murderers, school shooters, and one suicide bomber suggest the work of an enigmatic organization in possession of a technology beyond all understanding.
Day 115
Helena is in bed, right on the cusp of sleep, when a hard knocking on the front door sets her heart racing. If this were her apartment, she could pretend to be out and wait for the latecomer to go away, but alas, she lives under surveillance, and the dead bolt is already turning.
She climbs out of bed, dons her terrycloth robe, and emerges into the living room as John Shaw is opening the front door.
“Come right in,” she says. “By all means.”
“Sorry, and sorry about the late visit.” He moves down the hall into the living room. “Nice apartment.”
She can smell the cinnamon-spiced fire of bourbon on his breath—a fair amount of it. “Yeah, it’s rent-controlled and everything.”
She could offer him a beer or something; she doesn’t.
Shaw climbs onto one of the cushioned stools at the kitchen island, and she stands across from him, thinking he looks more pensive and troubled than she’s ever seen him.
“What can I do for you, John?”
“I know you have never believed in what we’re doing.”
“That’s true.”
“But I’m glad you’re in the conversation. You make us better. You don’t know me that well, but I haven’t always…hey, do you have anything to drink?”
She goes to the Sub-Zero, pulls out a couple of bottles from Brooklyn Brewery, and pops the caps.
Shaw takes a long swig and says, “I build shit for the military to help them kill people as efficiently as possible. I’ve been behind some truly horrific technology. But these last few months have been the best of my life. Every night, while I fall asleep, I think about the grief we’re erasing. I see the faces of the people whose lives or loved ones we’re saving. I think about Daisy Robinson. I think about all of them.”
“I know you’re trying to do what’s right.”
“I am. First time in my life, maybe.” He drinks his beer. “I haven’t said anything to the team, but I’m getting pressure from people in high places.”
“What kind of pressure?”
“Because of my history, I’m afforded a long leash and minimal oversight. But I still have my masters. I don’t know if they suspect something, but they want to know what I’m working on.”
“What can you do?” she asks.
“There’s a few ways to play it. We could create a false-front program, give them something shiny to look at, which bears no actual resemblance to what we’re doing. It’d probably buy us a little time. The better play is just telling them.”
“You can’t do that.”
“DARPA’s primary objective is to make breakthroughs in technologies that will strengthen our national security, with a focus on military applications. It’s only a matter of time, Helena. I can’t hide it from them forever.”
“How would the military use the chair?”
“How wouldn’t they? Yesterday, a platoon from the 101st was ambushed in Kandahar Province. Eight marines KIA. That’s not public information yet. Last month, a Black Hawk crashed on a night training mission in Hawaii. Five dead. You know how many missions fail because you missed the enemy by a few days or hours? Right place, wrong time? They would see the chair as a tool that would give commanders the ability to edit warfare.”
“What if they don’t share your perspective on how the chair should be used?”
“Oh, they won’t.” Shaw polishes off his beer. He unbuttons his collar, loosens his tie. “I don’t want to freak you out, but it isn’t just the DoD who would exploit the chair. The CIA, NSA, FBI—every agency will want a piece of it if word gets out. We are a DoD agency, and that’ll provide some cover, but they’ll all demand a seat in the chair.”
“Jesus. Will word get out?”
“Hard to say, but can you imagine if the Justice Department had this tech? They’d turn this country into Minority Report.”
“Destroy the chair.”
“Helena…”
“What? How hard is this? Destroy it before any of this happens.”
“Its potential for good is too high. We’ve already proven that. We can’t destroy it because of fear for what might happen.”
It becomes silent in the apartment. Helena wraps her fingers around the cold, sweating bottle of beer.
“So what’s your plan?” she asks.
“I don’t have one. Not yet. I just needed you to know what’s coming.”
Day 136
It begins sooner than anyone anticipates.
Shaw walks into the lab on March 22 for their daily briefing of all the horrible shit that’s happened in the world in the past twenty-four hours and says, “We have our first mandated assignment.”
“From whom?” Raj asks.
“Way up the food chain.”
“So they know?” Helena asks.
“Yes.” He opens a manila file with Top Secret stamped in red on the cover. “This has not been in the news. On January fifth, seventy-five days ago, a sixth-generation fighter jet malfunctioned and went down near the Ukraine/Belarus border. They don’t think the aircraft was destroyed, and they’re pretty sure the pilot was captured. We’re talking about a Boeing F/A-XX, which is still in development, highly classified, and loaded with all sorts of bells and whistles we’d prefer the Russians not have.
“They’ve asked me to send an agent back to January fourth to tell me about this crash. Then I’m to deliver a message to the Deputy SecDef, who will make sure word gets down through the ranks so the aircraft is inspected before the test flight and not flown anywhere near Russian territory.”
“Seventy-six days?” Helena asks.
“Correct.”
Albert says, “Did you tell them we don’t use the chair to go back that far?”
“I didn’t put it quite that stridently, but yes.”
“And?”
“They said, ‘Do as you’re fucking told.’ ”
They send Timoney back at ten a.m. on March 22.
By eleven a.m., Helena and the team are in front of the TV, glued to CNN in shock. This is the first time they’ve used the chair to go back before the date of a previous intervention, and as far as they can gather from reports, it’s had an extraordinary effect. Until now, the false memory phenomenon has obeyed its predictable pattern, sticking to its individual timeline anniversaries. In other words, when an operative alters a timeline, the false memories of that “dead” timeline always arrive at the exact moment the operative died in the tank. This time, however, it seems those anniversary points have been overridden
—not erased, but pushed back to ten a.m. this morning, the moment of the chair’s latest use when Timoney went back to give Shaw the message about the downed fighter jet. So instead of recalling each dead timeline as it happened, the public received the full hit of dead memories in a single gulp, at ten a.m. today, everyone simultaneously remembering all the averted massacres since January fourth, including Berkeley and the London Underground suicide bombing.
Inflicting these false memories one by one, over the course of several months, was disruptive enough. Hitting everyone with all of them, in a single instant, is exponentially more so.
So far, the media isn’t reporting any deaths or breakdowns as a result of the sudden onslaught, but for Helena it’s a stark reminder that her machine is far too mysterious, dangerous, and unknowable to exist.
Day 140
Shaw is still given free rein to intervene in civilian tragedies, but their work is becoming increasingly military-facing.
They use the chair to go back and undo a drone strike that hit a wedding, killing mostly Afghan women and children, and completely missing the intended target, who wasn’t even in attendance.
Day 146
They revise an airstrike from a B-1 Lancer bomber that misdirected its payload and killed an entire spec-ops team in Zabul Province instead of the Taliban force it had been called in to hit.
Day 152
Four dead soldiers, attacked by Islamic militants while on patrol in the Niger desert, are resurrected when Timoney dies in the tank and gives Shaw the details of the upcoming ambush.
They’re using the chair with such frequency—at least once a week now—that Shaw brings on a new agent to lighten the burden on Steve and Timoney, who are beginning to experience the first signs of mental degradation from the stress of dying again and again.
Day 160
Helena rides down to the parking garage of her building and heads for the black Suburban with Alonzo and Jessica, feeling more hopeless than she can ever recall. She can’t keep doing this. The military is using her chair, and she is powerless to stop them. The chair itself is kept under 24/7 surveillance, and she doesn’t have access to the system. Even if she managed to escape from Alonzo and Jessica, considering what she knows, the government would never stop hunting her. Besides, Shaw could simply send an agent back into a memory to prevent her escape from ever happening.
Dark thoughts are whispering to her again.
Her phone vibrates in her pocket as they head south on FDR Drive—Shaw calling.
She answers, “Hey, I’m on my way in.”
“I wanted to tell you first.”
“What?”
“We got a new assignment this morning.”
“What is it?”
The sky disappears as they pass through the Manhattan portal of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel.
“They want us to send someone back almost a year.”
“Why? For what?”
Jessica hits the brake pedal hard enough for Helena to jerk forward against her shoulder harness. Through the windshield, a sea of red taillights illuminates the tunnel ahead, accompanied by the cacophony of drivers beginning to honk their horns.
“An assassination.”
There’s a distant burst of light, followed by a sound like thunder, deeper in the tunnel.
The windows rattle; the car shudders beneath her; the overhead lights wink out for a terrifying second before flickering back on.
“The hell was that?” Alonzo asks.
“John, I’ll call you right back.” Helena lowers her phone. “What’s going on?”
“I think there was a wreck up ahead.”
People are beginning to get out of their cars.
Alonzo opens his door, steps out into the tunnel.
Jessica follows him.
The odor of smoke pushing through the vents snaps Helena into the present. She glances back through the rear window at the cars gridlocked behind them.
A man runs past her window, sprinting for daylight, and the first flicker of fear slides down Helena’s spine.
More people are coming now, and they all look terrified, rushing between the cars back toward Manhattan, trying to get away from something.
Helena opens her door, steps outside.
The commotion of human fear and despair echoes off the tunnel walls, and it’s rising, drowning out the idling of a thousand car engines.
“Alonzo?”
“I don’t know what happened,” he says, “but it’s something bad.”
The air smells wrong—not just of engine exhaust but of gasoline and melting things.
Smoke rolls out of the tunnel ahead, and the people stumbling toward her look shell-shocked, their faces bleeding and blackened.
The air quality is deteriorating fast, her eyes beginning to burn, and now she can barely see what lies ahead.
Jessica says, “We need to get out of here, Alonzo. Right now.”
As they turn to go, a man emerges from the smoke, limping and holding his side, in obvious pain.
Helena rushes toward him, coughing now, and as she draws near she sees that he’s holding a fragment of glass that’s embedded in his side. His hands are drenched in blood, and his face is smoke-blackened and wrenched in agony.
“Helena!” Jessica yells. “We are leaving!”
“He needs our help.”
The man falls into Helena, gasping for breath. Alonzo hurries over, and he and Helena each take one of his arms and drape it around their shoulders. He’s a big man, at least two-fifty, and he wears a half-incinerated shirt with the name and logo of a courier service across the lapel pocket.
It’s a relief to be heading for the exit. With every step, the man’s left foot squishes in his shoe, which is filling up with blood.
“Did you see what happened?” Helena asks.
“These two semis stopped in traffic. They were blocking both lanes a little ways ahead of me. Everyone was laying on their horns. It didn’t take long for people to start getting out of their cars and approaching the trucks to see what was wrong. Just as this guy stepped up onto one of the rigs, I saw a bright flash and then the loudest sound I ever heard. Suddenly this ball of fire is rushing over the tops of all the cars. I got down in the floorboard a second before it reached my van. The windshield exploded and then the inside was on fire. I thought I was going to burn to death, but somehow I…”
The man stops talking.
Helena stares down at the pavement, which is vibrating under her feet, and then they all look down the tunnel toward Queens.
It’s hard to tell at first because of the smoke, but soon the movement in the distance becomes clear—people are running toward them, the sound of screams rising and reverberating off the walls.
Helena looks up as a fracture opens down the middle of the ceiling, twelve feet overhead and breaking at right angles, chunks of concrete falling all around her, smashing windshields and people. There’s a cool wind in her face, and now, over the screams of terror, a sound like white noise and thunder, growing exponentially louder with every passing second.
The deliveryman whimpers.
Alonzo says, “Fuck.”
Helena feels mist on her face, and then a wall of water blasts out of the smoke carrying cars and people.
It hits Helena like a wall of freezing bricks, sweeping her off her feet, and she’s tumbling in a vortex of frigid violence, slamming into walls, the ceiling, then crashing into a woman in a business suit, their eyes meeting for two surreal seconds before Helena is speared through the windshield of a FedEx truck.
* * *
Helena stands at the window in her living room, her nose bleeding, head throbbing, trying to process what just happened.
Though she can still feel the terror of being swep
t through the tube in a debris-wave of water, cars, and people, her death in the tunnel never happened.
It’s all a dead memory.
She woke up, made breakfast, got ready, and was heading out the door when she heard two explosions so loud and close they shook the floor and rattled the glass.
She ran back into the living room, and through the window, watched in stunned amazement as the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge burned. After five minutes, she gained the false memories of dying in the tunnel.
Now, the two towers of the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge that frame Roosevelt Island are engulfed in twisting columns of flame reaching hundreds of feet into the air and burning hot enough for her to feel the heat, even from a thousand feet away and through the window.
What the fuck is happening?
The span of bridge between Manhattan and Roosevelt Island is draped across the East River like a severed tendon, its trusses still clinging to the Manhattan tower. Cars are sliding down the steep pavement into the river, people clinging to the railing as the current slowly pulls the bridge segment out of socket with a torqueing shriek she can feel in her fillings.
She wipes the blood from her nose as it hits her—I experienced a reality shift. I died in the tunnel. Now I’m here. Someone is using the chair.
The span connecting Roosevelt Island and Queens has already torn completely off, and downriver, she sees a thousand-foot section of burning roadway crash into a container ship, impaling its hull with spearlike jags of sheared-off metal trussing.
Even inside the apartment, the air smells of things burning that shouldn’t be able to burn, and the wail of the sirens of hundreds of incoming emergency vehicles is deafening.
As her phone vibrates behind her on the kitchen island, the last threads of metal pull loose from the Manhattan tower like whips cracking, and with a tremendous groan, the bridge segment breaks free, plummeting a hundred and thirty feet, the double-decker roadway smashing through concrete into FDR Drive, crushing traffic, leveling trees by the shoreline, then scraping slowly across the eastern terminus of Fifty-Ninth and Fifty-Eighth Streets, gouging out the entire northeast aspect of a skyscraper, and just missing Helena’s building before sliding into the East River.
