by Blake Crouch
She rushes into the kitchen and answers the phone with, “Who’s using the chair?”
“It’s not us,” John says.
“Bullshit. I just shifted from dying in the Midtown Tunnel to standing in my apartment, watching this bridge burn.”
“Just get here as fast as you can.”
“Why?”
“We’re fucked, Helena. We are so fucked.”
The door to her apartment bursts open. Alonzo and Jessica rush inside, noses bleeding, looking scared out of their minds.
Helena senses a deceleration of all movement.
Another shift coming?
Jessica says, “What the hell is—”
* * *
Now Helena is staring through the tinted glass of the backseat window, looking north up the East River toward Harlem and the Bronx.
She never died in the tunnel.
The destruction of the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge didn’t happen.
In fact, they’re halfway across the upper level of the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, which stands fully intact at this moment.
From behind the wheel, Jessica says, “Oh God.”
The Suburban swerves into the adjacent lane, and Alonzo reaches over, grabs the steering wheel from the passenger seat, and whips the vehicle back into its lane.
Straight ahead, a bus drifts into their lane, sideswiping three cars and crushing them into the divider in a spray of sparks and shattering glass.
Jessica cranks the steering wheel, just missing the pileup as the car momentarily leans over on two wheels.
“Look behind us,” she says.
Helena glances back, sees massive columns of smoke rising out of Midtown.
“It’s some false-memory thing, isn’t it?” Jessica says.
Helena dials Shaw, holds the phone to her ear, thinking, Someone’s using the chair to shift reality from one disaster to the next.
“All circuits are busy, please try your call again.”
Alonzo turns on the radio.
“—getting reports that two semitrucks exploded near Grand Central Terminal. There’s quite a bit of confusion. There were reports earlier of some type of accident at the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, and I remember seeing the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge go down, but…I don’t know how this is possible—I see it standing in perfect condition on our tower cam right—”
* * *
—and they’re stopped on East Fifty-Seventh Street, the air choked with smoke, her ears ringing.
Another headache.
Another nosebleed.
Another shift.
The tunnel never happened.
The bridge never happened.
Grand Central Terminal was never bombed.
Only the dead memories of those events remain, stacked in her mind like the memories of dreams.
She woke up, made breakfast, got dressed, and rode down to the parking garage under her building with Jessica and Alonzo, just like every other morning. They were heading west on East Fifty-Seventh to loop around onto the bridge when a blinding flash split the sky, coupled with a sound like a thousand synchronized cannon blasts ricocheting off the surrounding buildings.
They’re stuck in traffic now, and all around her, people are standing on the sidewalk, looking in horror at Trump Tower, which is billowing clouds of smoke and flame.
The lower ten floors are sagging like a melting face, the interiors of individual rooms exposed like cubbyholes. The ones higher up are still largely intact, with people inside of them staring over the newly made precipice into the crater that used to be the intersection of Fifty-Seventh and Fifth Avenue.
As the city screams with incoming sirens, Jessica shrieks, “What’s happening? What is happening?”
Straight ahead, a human being falls out of the sky and crushes in the roof of a cab.
Another person crashes through a car windshield directly behind the Suburban.
A third plummets through the awning of a private sports club, Helena wondering if people are throwing themselves off buildings because this is too much for their psyches to bear. It wouldn’t surprise her. If she didn’t know about the chair, what would she think was happening to the city, to time, to reality itself?
Jessica is crying.
Alonzo says, “It feels like the end of everything.”
Helena looks up at the building out her window as a blond-haired woman leaps from an office whose glass was shattered by the blast. She falls like a rocket, headfirst, screaming toward impact, and Helena starts to turn away, but she can’t.
The movement of everything decelerates again.
The roiling smoke.
The flames.
The falling woman grinding down into extreme slow-motion, her head inching closer and closer to the pavement.
Everything stops.
This timeline dying.
Jessica’s hands eternally clutch the steering wheel.
Helena can never look away from the jumper, who will never hit the ground, because she’s frozen in midair, the top of her head one foot from the pavement, her yellow hair splayed out, eyes closed, face in a perpetual grimace, bracing for impact—
* * *
And Helena is walking through the double doors of the DARPA building, where Shaw stands just outside security.
They stare at each other, processing this new reality as the accompanying set of replacement memories clicks in.
None of it happened.
Not the tunnel, the bridge, Grand Central, or Trump Tower. Helena woke up, got ready, and was driven here like every other morning, without incident.
She opens her mouth to speak, but Shaw says, “Not out here.”
Raj and Albert are sitting at the conference table in the lab, watching the news on a television embedded in the wall. The screen has been divided into four live images from tower cams showing the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, Grand Central Terminal, Trump Tower, and the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, all untouched, over the banner, “MASS MEMORY MALFUNCTION IN MANHATTAN.”
“What the fuck is going on?” Helena asks.
She’s physically shaking, because, although it never happened, she can still feel the impact from the wall of water slamming into her. She can hear the bodies striking cars all around her. She can hear the shriek of the bridge tearing itself apart.
“Sit down,” Shaw says.
She takes the chair across from Raj, who looks completely shell-shocked.
Shaw remains standing, says, “The schematics for the chair, the tank, our software, the protocol—it all leaked.”
Helena points at the screen. “Someone else is doing this?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“It would take more than a couple of months to build the chair if you were just working from blueprints,” she says.
“It leaked a year ago.”
“How is that possible? You didn’t even have the chair a year—”
“Marcus was operating out of that hotel for more than a year. Someone got curious about what he was doing and hacked his servers. Raj just found evidence of the incursion.”
“It was a massive data breach,” Raj says. “They hid it well, and they got everything.”
Shaw looks at Albert. “Tell her what you found.”
“Other instances of reality shifts.”
“Where?”
“Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, Moscow, four in Paris, two in Glasgow, one in Oslo. Very similar to the way FMS stories first appeared in America last year.”
“So people are using the chair, and you know this for sure.”
“Yes. I even found a company in São Paulo using it for tourism.”
“Jesus Christ. How long has all this been happening?”
“Goes back almost three months.”
Shaw says, “The Chinese and Russian governments have both reached out to say they have this technology.”
“It’s like every new sentence you say is more terrifying than the one before it.”
“Well, in keeping with that trend…” He opens a laptop on the table and types in a URL. “This went live five minutes ago. No press coverage yet.”
She leans in toward the screen.
It’s the WikiLeaks homepage.
Under the “War & Military” heading, she sees a graphic of a soldier sitting in a chair that looks exactly like the one in the middle of this room, over the headline:
US Military Memory Machine. Thousands of pages containing full schematics to an apparatus that purports to send soldiers back into their memories may explain the spate of reversed tragedies over the last six months.
Her chest becomes tight.
Black stars burning across her field of vision.
She asks, “How is WikiLeaks connecting the chair to our government?”
“Unknown.”
Albert says, “To recap, Slade’s servers were hacked. Contents probably sold to multiple buyers. From one or more of those buyers, or the hackers themselves, the plans continued to leak. There are likely multiple chairs in use in many countries throughout the world at this moment. China and Russia have the chair, and now, with WikiLeaks publishing the schematics, any corporation, dictator, or wealthy individual with twenty-five million dollars lying around can build their own private memory machine.”
Raj says, “Don’t forget—a terrorist group of some sort appears to be one of the proud new owners of a chair, and they’re using it to repeat the same attack on different landmarks in one of the most densely populated cities in the world.”
Helena looks over at the chair.
The tank.
The terminal.
The air has a faint humming quality.
On the television screen, the news is now covering a new attack in San Francisco, where the Golden Gate Bridge is sending up plumes of black smoke into the early morning sky. Her mind is trying to wrap itself around the situation, but it’s too immense, too tangled, too fucked.
“What’s the worst-case scenario, Albert?” Shaw asks.
“I believe we’re experiencing it.”
“No, I mean in terms of what could happen next.”
Albert has always been unflappable, as if his great intelligence shielded and lifted him above it all. But not today. Today he looks scared.
He says, “It’s unclear whether Russia or China only have the blueprints to the chair, or if they’ve already built one. If it’s the former, rest assured they are racing to construct a chair, along with every other country in the world.”
“Why?” Helena asks.
“Because it’s a weapon. It’s the ultimate weapon. Remember our first meeting at this table, when we talked about sending a ninety-five-year-old sniper into a memory to change the outcome of a war? Who among our enemies—hell, even our friends—would benefit from using the chair against us?”
“Who wouldn’t?” Shaw says.
“So this is analogous to a nuclear standoff?” Raj asks.
“Quite the opposite. Governments don’t use nuclear weapons, because the moment they press the button, their opponent will do the same. The threat of retaliation is too great a deterrent. But there is no threat of retaliation or assured mutual destruction with the chair. The first government, or corporation, or individual, to successfully and strategically use it—whether by changing the outcome of a war or assassinating a long-dead dictator or whatever—wins.”
Helena says, “You’re saying it’s in everyone’s best interest to use the chair.”
“Exactly. And as soon as possible. Whoever rewrites history in their own interest first, wins. It’s too big a gamble to let someone else get there first.”
Helena glances at the television again.
Now the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco’s financial district is burning.
“Could be a foreign government behind these attacks,” Helena says.
“Nope,” Albert says, studying his phone. “An anonymous group just claimed responsibility on Twitter.”
“What do they want?”
“No idea. Often, the mere creation of mayhem and terror is itself the endgame.”
Now a woman is onscreen at the news-anchor desk, looking shaken as she speaks to the camera.
“Turn it up, Albert,” Shaw says.
“Amidst conflicting reports of terrorist attacks in New York and San Francisco, a report from The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald has just been published, alleging that the US government has been in possession of a new technology called a memory chair for at least six months, which it pirated from a private corporation. Mr. Greenwald contends the memory chair allows for the consciousness of its occupant to travel into the past, and according to his confidential sources, this chair is the actual cause of False Memory Syndrome, the mysterious—”
Albert mutes the television.
“We have to do something right now,” he says. “Any moment, reality could shift us into a completely different world, or out of existence altogether.”
Shaw has been pacing, but now he slumps down in his chair and looks at Helena. “I should’ve listened to you.”
“Now isn’t the time for—”
“I thought we could use it for good. I was ready to dedicate the rest of my—”
“It doesn’t matter. If you’d done what I said and destroyed the chair, we’d be helpless right now.”
Shaw glances at his phone. “My superiors are on their way.”
“How long do we have?” Helena asks.
“They’re on a jet up from DC, so about thirty minutes. They’ll take over everything.”
“We’ll never be allowed back in here,” Albert says.
“Let’s send Timoney back,” Shaw says.
“To when?” Albert asks.
“To before Slade’s lab was hacked. Now that we know the location of his building, we can raid it earlier. There will be no cyber theft, and we’ll be the sole custodians of the chair.”
“Until we arrive back at this moment,” Albert says. “And then the world will remember all the mayhem that happened this morning.”
Helena says, “And the people who currently have the chair will just rebuild it from a false memory. Like Slade did. It’ll be harder without blueprints, but not impossible. What we need is more time.”
Helena rises and heads over to the terminal, where she takes down a skullcap and climbs into the chair.
“What are you doing?” Shaw asks.
“What does it look like? Raj? Come give me a hand? I need to map a memory.”
Raj, Shaw, and Albert exchange glances across the table.
“What are you doing, Helena?” Shaw asks again.
“Getting us out of this jam.”
“How?”
“Will you just fucking trust me, John?” she shouts. “We are out of time. I have stood by, offered counsel, played by your rules. Now it’s your turn to play by mine.”
Shaw sighs, deflated. She knows the pain of letting go of the promise of the chair. It isn’t just the disappointment of all the unrealized scientific and humanitarian uses to which it might be put under ideal conditions. It’s the realization that, as a deeply flawed species, we will never be ready to wield such power.
“OK,” he says finally. “Raj, fire up the chair.”
* * *
It is the first real taste of freedom the girl has ever known.
In the early evening, she walks out of the
two-story farmhouse and climbs into the blue-and-white ’78 Chevy Silverado that is her family’s only vehicle.
She never expected her parents to give her one when she turned sixteen two days ago. Her plan is to work next summer lifeguarding and babysitting, and hopefully earn enough money to buy her own car.
Her parents are standing on the ever-so-slightly sagging front porch, watching proudly as she slides the key into the ignition.
Her mother takes a Polaroid.
As the engine roars to life, what strikes her most is the emptiness in the truck.
No Dad sitting in the passenger seat.
No Mom between them.
It’s just her.
She can listen to any music she wants, as loud as she wants. She can go anywhere she wants, drive as fast as she wants.
Of course, she won’t.
On her maiden voyage, her plan is to venture into the dangerous and distant wilds of the convenience store, a mile and a half down the road.
Buzzing with energy, she shifts the truck into drive and accelerates slowly down the long driveway, hanging her left arm out the window to wave at her parents.
The country road that runs in front of her home is empty.
She pulls out into the road and turns on the radio. The new song, “Faith,” by George Michael is playing on the college radio station out of Boulder, and she sings at the top of her voice as the open fields race past, the future feeling closer than ever. Like it might have actually arrived.
The lights of the gas station glow in the distance, and as she takes her foot off the brake pedal, she registers a piercing pain behind her eyes.
Her vision blurs, her head pounds, and she just avoids crashing the truck into the pumps.
