by Blake Crouch
* * *
They head out at dawn through the backyard to put Helena in the deprivation chamber. They bought this property fifteen years ago and renovated every square inch. The house is more than three hundred years old, and from the surrounding fields, the view is of the North Sea, where it edges in around the peninsula at the Cromarty Firth, and in the opposite direction, the mountains of the northern Highlands.
It rained all night, everything dripping.
The sun is still below the sea, but the sky is filling with light. Despite the horrors on the news, it all feels shockingly normal. The sheep watching them from the pastures. The cold quiet. The smell of wet earth. Moss on the stone walls. Their footfalls on the gravel walking path.
They stop at the entrance to the guesthouse, which they transformed into their lab, both looking back at the home they poured their lives into, which they will never see again. Of all the places they’ve made their home together, of all the lifetimes, Barry has loved this one most.
“We have a plan, right?” he says.
“We do.”
“I’ll come down with you,” he says.
“No, why don’t you go look out over the fields until it’s done. You love that view.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure. That’s how I want to leave you in this life.”
She kisses him.
He wipes her tears.
* * *
In the next life, Barry walks with Helena toward the stable. The night air is sweet, and the rolling hills surrounding their valley are shining under the stars.
“Still nothing?” she asks.
“No.”
They reach the door in the timber-frame barn and move inside, through a tack room, and then down a corridor of vacant stalls that haven’t housed horses in more than a decade.
The entryway is hidden behind a pair of sliding doors. Helena punches in the code, and they descend the spiral staircase into a soundproofed basement.
The cell is enclosed on two sides by stone walls, and the other two by sheets of ultrastrong glass pocked with ventilation holes. Inside the cell, there’s a toilet, a shower, a small table, and a bed, upon which lies Marcus Slade.
He closes the book he’s been reading and sits up, staring at his captors.
In this timeline, they made their home in the countryside of Marin County, thirty minutes north of San Francisco, in order to be close to Slade and prepare for this exact moment. They abducted him before he could overdose last Christmas, and brought him back to the ranch.
Slade woke up in this cell beneath the barn, where they’ve held him ever since.
Barry pulls a chair over to the glass and takes a seat.
Helena paces the perimeter of the cell.
Slade watches them.
They haven’t told him why he’s here. Not about the previous timelines or the memory chair. Nothing.
Slade rises from the end of the bed and approaches the glass. He stares down at Barry, wearing sweatpants and no shirt. His beard is unruly, his hair an unwashed tangle, eyes both fearful and angry.
As Barry watches him through the glass, he can’t help feeling pity for the man, despite what he did in older timelines. He has no idea why he’s here. Barry and Helena have promised him on multiple occasions that they have no intention of hurting him, but those assurances undoubtedly rang hollow.
If Barry is honest, he’s deeply uncomfortable with what they’re doing. But between Helena’s prescience and her building of the memory chair with its incredible capability, he trusts his wife implicitly. Even when she told him they needed to kidnap a man named Marcus Slade before he died of a drug overdose in his Dogpatch loft.
“What?” Slade asks. “Are you finally here to tell me why you’re doing this?”
“In a matter of moments,” Helena says, “you will understand everything.”
“What the fuck does that…”
Blood trickles out of Slade’s nose. He staggers back, gripping his temples, his face screwed up in pain, and now a stabbing, pulsating agony hits Barry behind the eyes, doubling him over in the chair.
The timeline anniversary has arrived, and both men groan as the prior lifetimes begin to catch up with them.
* * *
Now Slade is seated on the end of his bed. The fear is gone from his eyes. Even his body language has changed to reflect an inner confidence and poise that wasn’t there before.
He smiles, his head nodding.
“Barry,” he says. “Nice to see you again, Helena.”
Barry is reeling. It’s one thing to have been told what happened on all those other timelines, another entirely to own the memories of his dead daughter and of watching the world destroy itself again and again. Of dying in the middle of Central Park as a shockwave hit. He doesn’t remember the last timeline yet. Helena has told him that it took place in Scotland, which was apparently where he came up with this idea, but the memories are coming in as slowly as an IV drip.
Barry looks at Slade and says, “Do you remember your hotel in Manhattan?”
“Of course.”
“Do you remember the night you died there? What you said to Helena right before?”
“Might need a little refresh on that one.”
“You told her that the dead memories of older timelines could be undone if she knew how to travel the way you did.”
“Ah.” Slade smiles again. “You two have built your own chair.”
Helena says, “After you died in your hotel, DARPA came in and took everything. Things were OK at first, but on April 16, 2019, six timelines ago today, the technology broke out into the wild. There were memory chairs being used all over the world. The schematics were published on WikiLeaks. Reality began constantly shifting. I went back thirty-three years to start a new timeline, so I’d have a chance to find a way of stopping the dead memories. But they always come. The world always remembers the chair, no matter what we do.”
“So you’re looking for a way out of this loop? A reset?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because exactly what I told you would happen happened. Pandora’s box has been flung open. I don’t know how to close it.”
Slade goes to the sink, splashes water in his face.
He comes back over to the glass.
“How do we stop the dead memories?” she asks.
“You got me killed in one life. Abducted in another. So let me ask you—why would I help you?”
“Because maybe you still have a shred of decency?”
“Humanity deserves a chance to evolve beyond our prison of time. It deserves a chance at true progress. Your life’s work was the chair. Giving it to humanity was mine.”
Barry registers a wave of rage flooding through him.
“Marcus, listen to me,” he says. “There is no progress happening. Right now, the world is remembering the existence of the memory chair, and those dead memories will trigger a nuclear apocalypse.”
“Why?”
“Because our enemies think the US is altering history.”
“Know what that sounds like to me?” Slade asks. “Bullshit.”
Barry rises and moves toward the glass. “I’ve seen enough horror for a thousand lifetimes. Helena and I were nearly killed in Denver when the missiles hit. I watched New York City vaporize. Hundreds of millions of people have four distinct memory sets of dying in a nuclear holocaust.”
Helena looks at Barry and holds up her phone. “The alert just came through. I have to get to the lab.”
“Just wait a second,” Barry says.
“We’re too close to San Francisco. We’ve talked about this.”
Barry glares at Slade through the glass. “What is this special way of traveling?”
Slade takes a step back
and eases down onto the end of the bed.
Barry says, “I have lived almost seventy years to ask you this, and you’re just going to stare at the floor?”
He feels Helena touch his shoulder. “I have to go.”
“Hang on.”
“I can’t. You know this. I love you. I’ll see you at the bottom of the world. We’ll keep after the micro wormholes. I guess it’s all we can do, right?”
Barry turns and kisses her. She hurries up the spiral staircase, her footfalls clanging on the metal steps.
Then it’s just Barry and Slade in the basement.
Barry pulls out his phone, shows Slade the emergency alert, advising of a ballistic missile threat inbound to multiple US targets.
Slade smiles. “Like I said, you killed me, abducted me, you’re probably lying to me right—”
“I swear I’m telling you the truth.”
“Prove it. Give me evidence that’s not a fake alert you could’ve sent to your phone. Let me see it with my own eyes or fuck off.”
“We don’t have time.”
“I have all the time in the world.”
Moving to the glass door in the cell, Barry takes out the key and unlocks the dead bolt.
“What?” Slade asks. “Think you can beat it out of me?”
Barry would certainly like nothing more than to bounce Slade’s skull off the stone wall until there is nothing left.
“Let’s go,” Barry says.
“Where?”
“We’ll watch the world end together.”
They head upstairs, past the stalls, out of the barn, and climb through the long grasses of a hill until they’re high above the ranch.
The moon is up, the countryside bright. To the west, several miles away, the dark sprawl of the Pacific is shimmering.
The lights of the Bay Area glitter to the south.
They sit in silence for a moment.
Then Barry asks, “What made you kill Helena in that first timeline?”
Slade sighs. “I was nothing. Nobody. I’d sleepwalked through life. And then I was presented with this…gift of an opportunity. To do it all over. Think what you will about me, but I didn’t keep the chair to myself.”
A ball of white-hot light blossoms near the Golden Gate Bridge, illuminating the sky and the sea brighter than the brightest midday. So blinding Barry can’t help but look away. When he turns back, a shockwave is spreading across the bay and the Presidio, expanding toward the Financial District.
As a second warhead bursts over Palo Alto, Barry looks at Slade. “How many people do you think just died in that split-second flash? How many more will suffer an agonizing death from radiation poisoning over the next few hours if Helena doesn’t reset this timeline? What’s happening to San Francisco is happening all across America. To the major cities of our allies. And we’re unloading our arsenal on Russia and China. This is where your grand dream has taken us. And it’s the fifth time it’s happened. So how do you just sit there knowing the blood of all these people is on your hands? You aren’t helping humanity evolve, Marcus. You’re torturing us. There is no future for our species after this.”
Slade’s face is expressionless as he watches two towers of fire climb into the sky like torches. The light grids of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose have gone dark, but the cities smolder like the remains of a dying fire.
The concussive blast of the first warhead reaches them, and at this distance, it sounds like a cannon echoing off the hillsides. It makes the ground tremble beneath them.
Slade rubs his bare arms. “You have to go back to what happened first.”
“We tried that. Multiple times. Helena went back to 1986—”
“Stop thinking linearly. Not to the beginning of this timeline. Not even the last five or six. You have to return to the event that started all of this, and that’s on the original.”
“The original timeline only exists in a dead memory.”
“Exactly. You have to go back and restart it. That’s the only way to stop people from remembering.”
“But you can’t map a dead memory.”
“Have you tried?”
“No.”
“It will be the hardest thing you’ve ever done. You’ll probably fail, which means you’ll die. But it is possible.”
“How do you know?”
“Helena figured out how to do it on my oil rig.”
“That’s not true. If she had, we would’ve—”
Slade laughs. “Try to keep up here, Barry. How do you think I know it works? As soon as we discovered the technique, I used it. I went back into a dead memory and reset the timeline just before she figured it out.” He snaps his fingers. “And, poof, it erased her memories of the discovery. Hers and everyone else’s.”
“Why?”
“Because anyone who knew could do just what you’re proposing now. They could take the chair away from me, make it so it never existed.” He looks Barry in the eye, the firelight of burning cities glinting from his pupils. “I was nothing. A junkie. My life wasted. The chair made me into something special. Gave me a chance to do something that would change the course of history. I couldn’t risk all that.” He shakes his head, smiles. “And there’s a certain elegance to the solution, don’t you think? Using the discovery to erase itself.”
“What’s the event that started all of this?”
“I killed Helena on November 5, 2018, on the original timeline. Go back as close to that date as possible…and stop me.”
“How do we—”
Another blink of light, a hundred miles to the south, lights up the entire sea.
“Go,” Slade says. “If you don’t make it to Helena before she dies in the tank, you won’t remember what I just told you until the next—”
And Barry is up and running, sprinting back down the hill toward the main house, digging his cell phone out of his pocket, falling, scrambling back onto his feet, finally dialing Helena’s number.
He holds the phone to his ear as he runs toward the lights of their home.
Ringing.
Ringing.
The sound wave from the second blast reaches him.
The phone still ringing.
Going to voicemail.
He throws it down as he reaches level ground, sweat stinging in his eyes, the house straight ahead.
Screaming, “Helena! Wait!”
The house is a massive country home built alongside a stream that meanders through the valley.
Barry runs up the porch steps and bursts through the front door, yelling Helena’s name as he races through the living room, knocking over an end table and spilling a glass of water that shatters on the tile.
Then down the east-wing corridor, past the master suite, toward the end of the hall, where the vault door to the lab has been left open.
“Helena, stop!”
He tears down the stairs toward the subterranean lab that houses the memory chair and deprivation tank. They have the answer. Or at least something to try that doesn’t require another thirty-three years. The look on Slade’s face, glowing in the light of distant nuclear fires, was not the look of a lying man, but of one who had suddenly come to terms with what he’d done. With the pain he was causing.
Barry comes off the last step into the lab. Helena is nowhere to be seen, which means she’s already in the deprivation chamber. The terminal screens support this, one of them flashing the message in red: DMT RELEASE DETECTED.
He reaches the deprivation chamber, puts his hands on the hatch to pull it open—
The world grinds to a halt.
The lab bleeds of color.
He’s screaming on the inside, he has to stop this from happening, they have the answer.
But he can’t move, can’t speak.
Helena is gone, and so is this reality.
* * *
He becomes aware of lying on his side in total darkness.
Sitting up, Barry’s movement triggers a panel of light above him, dim at first, then slowly brightening, warming into existence a small, windowless room containing the bed, a dresser, and a nightstand.
He throws back the blankets and climbs out of bed, unsteady on his feet.
Goes to the door and steps out into a sterile hallway. After fifty feet, it emerges onto a main artery that accesses this corridor and three others while also opening on the other side to a living space one floor below.
He sees a full kitchen.
Table tennis and pool tables.
And a large television with a woman’s face paused on the screen. He has some vague recognition of her face, but he can’t conjure her name. The entire history of his life lurks just below the surface, but he can’t quite grasp it.
“Hello?”
His voice echoes through the structure.
No answer.
He heads down the main hallway, passing a placard affixed to the wall beside the opening to the next corridor.
Wing 2—Level 2—Lab
And another.
Wing 1—Level 2—Offices
Then down some stairs and onto the main level.
There’s a gently sloping vestibule straight ahead that grows colder with every step, ending finally at a door that looks complex enough to seal a spacecraft.
A digital readout on the wall beside it displays real-time conditions on the other side:
Wind: from the NE 56.2 mph; 90.45 kph
Temp: -51.9 °F; -46.6 °C
Wind Chill: -106.9°F; -77.2 °C
Humidity: 27%
His socked feet are freezing, and in here the wind carries the moaning quality of a deep-voiced ghost. He grasps the lever on the door, and following the visual instructions, forces it down and counterclockwise.
