BARRY
November 6, 2018
The woman with fiery hair takes Barry by the arm and pulls him down the sidewalk, away from the entrance to the subterranean garage.
“We’re not safe here,” she says. “Let’s walk to your car. Penn Station, right?”
Barry pulls his arm away from her and starts moving in the opposite direction.
She calls after him, “Standing on the driveway of your home in Portland, watching a total solar eclipse with your father. Spending summers with your grandparents at their farmhouse in New Hampshire. You’d sit in the apple orchard and tell yourself elaborate stories.”
He stops and looks back at her.
She continues, “While you were devastated when your mother died, you were also grateful, because you knew when her time was coming, and you had a proper chance to say goodbye. To make sure she knew you loved her. You didn’t have that with your father, who died suddenly when you were fifteen. You still wake up in the middle of the night sometimes, wondering if he knew.”
He’s shivering by the time they reach his Crown Vic. Helena gets down on her knees on the wet pavement and runs her hands across the car’s undercarriage.
“What are you doing?” Barry asks.
“Making sure there’s no tracking device on your car.”
They climb in out of the rain, and he turns on the heat and waits for the engine to warm the frigid air blowing through the vents.
On the forty-minute walk down from Fiftieth, she told him a crazy story he isn’t completely sure he believes, about how she accidentally built the chair on a decommissioned oil platform in a previous timeline.
“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 what 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 back 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.
The rancid-smelling Diplomat is surprisingly busy, and every bit as soulless as she remembers. Barry’s badge gets the diminutive bartender’s attention. It’s the same guy she and Barry met four months from now in a dead future—an asshole with a Napoleon complex, but one who helpfully carries a healthy fear of cops. She stands next to Barry as he introduces himself, and then Helena as his partner, explaining they need access to the cellar because a sexual assault was reported to have taken place there late last night.
For five seconds, Helena thinks this isn’t going to work. The bartender stares at her like he’s not totally buying her place in all of this. He could ask to see a warrant. He could cover his ass and call the owner. But instead, he yells for someone named Carla.
A waitress sets a bus tray of empty pint glasses on the bar and wanders over.
The bartender says, “These are cops. They need to see the cellar.”
Carla shrugs, then turns without a word and heads down the length of the bar into a room of cold storage. She leads them through a maze of silver kegs to a narrow door in the farthest corner of the refrigerated room.
Plucking a key off a nail in the wall, she opens the padlock on the door. “Word of warning—there are no lights down there.”
Barry unzips the duffel, pulls out a flashlight.
She says, “The man came prepared. Well, then, I’ll leave you to it.”
Barry waits until she’s gone to open the cellar door.
The flashlight beam reveals a claustrophobic stairwell of questionable integrity, descending into darkness. The old, pervasive dampness is overwhelming—the smell of a long-forgotten place. Helena takes a deep breath to still the frenzy of her racing pulse.
“This is it?” Barry asks.
“This is it.”
She follows him down the creaking steps, which spill into a cellar containing racks of collapsed shelving and a rusted-out oil drum filled with burnt garbage.
At the far end of the room, Barry pulls another door open with a nerve-shattering creak. They cross the threshold into an arched corridor with walls of crumbling brick.
It’s colder down here beneath the city streets, the air dank with mildew and restless with the trickle of running water and the distant, unseen scratching of what she fears are rats.
Helena leads the way.
Their footsteps make echoing splashes.
Every fifty feet, they pass disintegrating doors leading into the underbellies of other buildings.
At the second junction, she turns down a new passage, and after a hundred feet or so, stops and shows Barry a door like all the rest. It takes a fair amount of pressure to get the handle to turn, and when it does, he forces his shoulder into the door, jarring it open.
They move out of the tunnel, into another cellar, where Barry drops the duffel bag onto the stone floor and unzips it. Out comes a crowbar, a package of zip ties, a box of twelve-gauge shells, a shotgun, and four spare magazines for his Glock.
He says, “Grab as many extra cartridges as you can carry.”
Helena tears open the box and starts cramming shells into the inner pockets of her leather jacket. Barry checks the load on the Glock, removes his trench coat, and jams the extra magazines into his pockets. Then he takes up the crowbar and crosses the room toward a newer door. It’s locked from the other side. He works the end of the crowbar deep into the jamb and torques back as hard as he can.
At first, there’s nothing but the sound of him straining. Then comes the deep splintering of wood and the shriek of metal failing. When the door cracks open, Barry reaches through the opening and pulls off a broken, rusted padlock. Then he carefully opens the door wide enough for them to squeeze through.
They emerge into the hotel’s old boiler room, which looks to have been out of commission for at least the last half century. Threading their way through a labyrinth of ancient machinery and gauges, they finally pass the massive boiler itself, then move through a doorway to the bottom of a service stairwell that spirals up into darkness.
“What floor is Slade’s penthouse again?” Barry whispers.
“Twenty-four. The lab is on seventeen, servers on sixteen. You ready?”
“Wish we were taking the elevators.”
Their plan is to go straight for Slade, hoping he’ll be in his residence in the penthouse. The moment he hears gunfire or catches wind of anything suspicious, he’ll likely be running for the chair so he can go back and stop them before they even set foot inside his building.
Barry begins the ascent, keeping the flashlight trained on their feet. Helena follows closely behind, trying to step as softly as she can, but the old wood of the stairs flexes and groans under their weight.
After several minutes, Barry stops at a door with the number 8 painted on the wall beside it, and turns off the light.
“What is it?” Helena whispers.
“Heard something.”
They stand listening in the dark, her heart pounding and the shotgun growing heavier by the second. She can’t see a thing, can’t hear a thing but a faint, low moan that’s like breath passing over the opening of a bottle.
From high above, a single beam of light shoots down the center of the stairwell and slants toward them across the checkered floor.
“Come on,” Barry whispers, opening the door and pulling her into a corridor.
They move quickly down a red-carpeted hall of hotel rooms, whose numbers are projected onto the doors by lights in the opposing wall.
Halfway down the corridor, the door to Room 825 swings inward and a middle-aged woman steps out, wearing a navy robe with “HM” embossed on the lapel and carrying a silver ice bucket.
Barry glances over at Helena, who nods.
They’re ten feet from the hotel guest now, who hasn’t seen them yet.
Barry says, “Ma’am?”
When she looks in their direction, he aims his gun at her.
The ice bucket falls to the floor.
Barry brings a finger to his lips as they quickly close in.
“Not a word,” he says, and they push her back through the doorway and follow her into the room.
Helena locks the dead bolt, hooks the chain.
“I have some money and credit cards—”
“We’re not here for that. Sit on the floor and keep your mouth shut,” Barry says.
The woman must’ve just stepped out of the shower. Her black hair is damp, and there’s not a speck of makeup on her face. Helena doesn’t meet her eyes.
Dropping the duffel bag on the floor, Barry unzips it and pulls out the zip ties.
“Please,” she begs. “I don’t want to die.”
“No one’s going to hurt you,” Helena says.
“Did my husband send you?”
“No,” Barry says. He looks at Helena. “Go put some pillows in the bathtub.”
Helena grabs three pillows off the decadent four-poster bed and lays them in the claw-foot tub, which stands on a small platform with a view of dusk falling on the city and the buildings beginning to glow.
When she walks back out into the bedroom, Barry has the woman on her stomach and is binding her wrists and ankles. He finally lifts her over his shoulder and carries her into the bathroom, where he lays her gently in the tub.
“Why were you here?” he asks.
“You know what this place is?”
“Yes.”
Tears run down her face. “I made a bad mistake fifteen years ago.”
“What?” Helena asks.
“I didn’t leave my husband when I should’ve. I wasted the best years of my life.”
“Someone will come for you,” Barry says. Then he rips a piece from the roll of duct tape and pats it over her mouth.
They close the door to the bathroom. The gas-log fireplace is putting out a welcome heat. The bottle of Champagne the woman was apparently about to drink stands on the coffee table beside a single glass and an open journal, both pages filled with handwriting.
Helena can’t help herself. She glances at the elegant scrawl and realizes it’s the narrative of a memory, perhaps the one the woman in the bathtub was going back to.
It begins—The first time he hit me I was standing in the kitchen at ten p.m., asking him where he’d been. I remember the redness on his face and the smell of bourbon on his breath and his watery eyes
Helena closes the journal and goes to the window, sweeping aside the curtain.
Anemic light creeps in.
Peering eight stories down onto East Forty-Ninth, she can see Barry’s car a little ways down the block.
The city is wet, dreary.
The woman is crying in the bathroom.
Barry walks over, says, “I don’t know if we’ve been made. Regardless, we should go after Slade right now. I say we take our chances with the elevator.”
“Do you have a knife?”
“Yeah.”
“May I see it?”
Barry reaches into his pocket and pulls out a folding knife as Helena removes her leather jacket and rolls up the sleeves of her gray shirt.
She takes it from him, sits down in one of the armchairs, and opens the blade.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“Making a save point.”
“A what?”
She inserts the tip of the knife into the side of her left arm above the elbow and draws the blade across her skin.
As the pain comes and the blood begins to flow—
BARRY
November 7, 2018
“What the hell are you doing?” Barry asks.
Helena’s eyes are shut, her mouth hanging slightly open, perfectly still.
Barry carefully pries the knife out of her hands. For a long moment, nothing happens. Then her bright-green eyes snap open.
Something in them has changed. They exude a newfound fear and intensity.
“You OK?” Barry asks.
Helena surveys the room, glances at her wristwatch, and then wraps her arms around Barry with a startling ferocity.
“You’re alive.”
“Of course I’m alive. What happened to you?”
She leads him over to the bed. They sit, and Helena removes one of the pillowcases and tears off a strip of cloth, which she begins to tie around her self-inflicted wound to stop the bleeding.
“I just used the chair to return to this moment,” she says. “I’m starting a new timeline.”
“Your chair?”
“No, the one up on seventeen. Slade’s chair.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’ve already lived the next fifteen minutes. The pain of cutting myself just now was a breadcrumb back to this moment. It left me a vivid, short-term memory to return to.”
“So you know what’s about to happen?”
“If we go to the penthouse, yes. Slade knows we’re coming. He’ll be waiting for us. We won’t even make it out of the elevator before a bullet goes through your eye. There’s so much blood, and I start shooting. I must hit Slade, because suddenly he’s crawling across his living room.
“I take the elevator down to seventeen, find the lab, and shoot the door open as Jee-woon is climbing into the tank. He starts toward me, saying he knows I would never hurt him after all he did for me, but he’s never been more wrong about anything in his life.
“At the terminal, I log in with some backdoor credentials. Then I map a memory, climb into the tank, and return to the memory of cutting myself in this room.”
“You didn’t have to come back for me.”
“To be completely honest, I wouldn’t have. But I didn’t know where Sergei was, and there wasn’t enough time to destroy all the equipment. But I am very glad you’re alive.” She looks at her watch again. “You’re going to have an awful memory of all of this in about twelve minutes, and so is everyone else in the building, which is a problem.”
Barry rises from the bed, gives Helena a hand up.
She lifts the shotgun.
He says, “So Slade is in the penthouse, anticipating that’s where we’ll go first—which we did the first time around.”
“Correct.”
“Jee-woon is already heading for the chair on seventeen, probably waiting to hear if there’s been a security breach so he can jump into the deprivation chamber and overwrite this timeline. And Sergei is…”
“Unknown. I say we go straight to the lab and deal with Jee-woon first. No matter what, he can’t be allowed to get in the tank.”
They head out of the room and into the corridor. Barry keeps compulsively touching the extra magazines in his pockets.
At the bank of elevators, he calls for a car, listening to the gears turning on the other side of the doors and holding his Glock at the ready.
Helena says, “We’ve done this part already. There’s no one coming down.”
As the light above the elevator illuminates, the bell dings.
Barry raises his gun, finger on the trigger.
The doors part.
Empty.
They step into the small car, and Helena presses the button for 17. The walls of this elevator are old, smoke-stained mirrors, and staring into them creates a recursive illusion—an infinite number of Barrys and Helenas in elevator cars bending away through space.
As they begin to climb, Barry says, “Let’s stand against the wall. Want to offer the smallest targets possible when the doors open. What weapon did Slade have?”
“A handgun. It was silver.”
“Jee-woon?”
“There was a gun that looked more like yours by the terminal.”
The button for each floor illuminates as they pass through it.
Nine.
Ten.
A wave of nausea hits him—nerves. There’s a taste of fear in his mouth from the adrenaline dumping into his bloodstream.
Eleven.
Twelve.
Thirteen.
He marvels that Helena doesn’t look as scared as he feels. Then again, from her perspective, she’s already waded into the fray once before.
“Thank you for coming back for me,” he says.
Fourteen.
“Just, you know, try not to die this time.”
Fifteen.
Sixteen.
“Here we go,” she says.
The elevator grinds to a halt at seventeen.
Barry raises the Glock.
Helena shoulders the shotgun.
The doors slide apart to reveal an empty corridor that runs the length of the building, with other hallways branching off a little ways down.
Barry steps carefully over the threshold.
The faint hum of lights burning overhead is the only sound.
Helena comes alongside him, and as she brushes her hair out of her face, Barry is overcome by a savage, protective impulse that terrifies and bewilders him. He’s known her barely twenty-four hours.
They advance.
The lab is a sleek, white space, filled with recessed lighting and glass. They pass a window that peers into a room containing more than a dozen MEG microscopes, where a young scientist is soldering a circuit board. She doesn’t see them slip past.
As they approach the first junction, a door closes somewhere nearby. Barry stops, listening for the sound of footsteps, but all he can hear are those lights.
Helena leads them down another corridor that ends at a long wall of windows overlooking the blue Manhattan gloom of this raw evening, the lights of surrounding buildings shining through the misty dusk.
“The lab is just ahead,” Helena whispers.
Barry’s hands are sweating. He wipes his palms on the sides of his pants to get a better grip on the Glock.
They stop at a door equipped with keypad entry.
“He may already be inside,” she whispers.
“You don’t know the code?”
She shakes her head, raises the shotgun. “But this worked last time.”
Barry catches movement swinging around the corner at the end of the corridor.
He steps in front of Helena, who screams, “Jee-woon, no!”
Gunshots explode the silence, the muzzle flash bursting from a barrel aimed at Barry, who empties his Glock in a blitzkrieg of noise.
Jee-woon has vanished.
It all happened in five seconds.
Barry ejects the empty magazine, slams in a fresh one, thumbs the slide.
He looks at Helena. “You OK?”
“Yes. Because you stepped in front of…oh God, you’re shot.”
Barry staggers back, blood pouring down his abdomen, down his leg under his pants, flowing across the top of his shoe and onto the floor in a long, burgundy smear. The pain is coming, but he’s too jacked on adrenaline to register its full effect—only an intensifying pressure in the middle-right section of his torso.
“We have to get out of this corridor,” he groans, thinking, There’s a bullet in my liver.
Helena drags him back around the corner.
Barry sinks to the floor.
Bleeding profusely now, the blood nearly black.
He looks up at Helena, says, “Make sure…he isn’t coming.”
She peeks around the corner.
Barry lifts his gun, which he hadn’t noticed slip from his grasp, off the floor.
“They could already be in the lab,” he says.
“I’ll stop them.”
“I’m not going to make it.”
There’s movement on his left; he tries to raise the Glock, but Helena beats him to the punch, firing an earsplitting blast from the shotgun that forces a man he hasn’t seen before back into the corridor.
“Go,” Barry says. “Hurry.”
The world is darkening, his ears ringing. Then he’s lying with his face against the floor and the life rushing out of him.
He hears more gunfire.
Helena shouting, “Sergei, don’t make me do this. You know me!”
Then two shotgun blasts.
Followed by screaming.
From his sideways perspective, he sees several people run through the intersection of corridors, heading back toward the elevators—guests and other crew members fleeing the mayhem.
He tries to get up, but he can barely move his hand. His body feels cemented to the ground.
The end is coming.
It’s the hardest thing he’s ever done to simply rise up onto his elbows. He somehow manages to crawl, dragging himself back around the corner of the windowed corridor that leads to the lab.
He hears more gunshots.
His vision swings in and out of focus, the glass shards on the floor from the shot-out windows slicing into his arms and a cold rain blowing into the building. The walls are peppered with bullet holes, and a haze of smoke permeates the air with a taste like metal and sulfur in the back of his throat.
Barry crawls through a scattering of his .40-caliber shell casings, and he tries to call out to Helena, but her name leaves his lips as nothing but a whimper.
He pulls himself the rest of the way to the entrance. It takes a moment for his vision to sharpen into focus. Helena stands at the terminal, her fingers flying across an array of keyboards and touchscreens. Summoning his voice, he wills it to project her name.
She glances back at him. “I know you’re hurting. I’m going as fast as I can.”
“What are you doing?” Barry asks, each breath more agonizing than the one before it, and carrying less oxygen to his brain.
“I’m going back to the memory of cutting myself in that hotel room.”
“Jee-woon and Sergei are gone.” He coughs up blood. “Just…destroy everything now.”
“Slade’s still out there,” Helena says. “If he escapes, he could build another chair. I need you to guard the door. I know you’re hurting, but can you do that? Let me know if he comes.” She moves away from the terminal, climbing onto the curved body of the memory chair.
“I’ll try,” Barry says.
He rests his head against the cool floor.
“We’ll get the next one right,” Helena says. Reaching up, she carefully pulls down the MEG microscope.
As she secures the chin strap, Barry fights to keep his eyes on the corridor, knowing if Slade comes, there’s nothing he can do to stop him. He doesn’t even have the strength to raise his weapon.
The dead memories of him dying in the last timeline finally shred into his consciousness.
The elevator doors opening to the entryway of Slade’s penthouse.
Slade standing in his immaculate living room of windows pointing a revolver into the elevator car.
Barry thinking, Fuck. He knew.
A burst of light without sound.
Then—nothing.
Through the fog of death, Barry struggles to glance one last time into the lab, sees Helena tearing off her shirt, sliding her jeans down her legs, and climbing into the deprivation tank.
Barry is sprinting down a corridor, his nose bleeding, head throbbing. The pain of getting shot in the previous timeline is gone, the memories of this new one cascading into place.
He and Helena came up from Room 825.
Stepped off the elevator onto 17, took a different route to the lab, intending to catch Jee-woon and Slade coming off the elevator.
But they ran into Sergei instead and lost way too much time getting through him.
Now they’re racing for the lab.
Barry wipes the blood from his nose and blinks through the saltwater sting of sweat in his eyes.
They round a corner and reach the door to the lab, which Helena opens with a shotgun blast. Barry charges in first, two thunderous gunshots erupting that miss his head by less than a foot. To his surprise, the shots came from a man he’s seen once before—eleven years ago, on the night he was sent back into a memory.
Marcus Slade is standing twenty feet away by the terminal, wearing a white tank top and gray shorts, as if he just came from the gym, his curly, dark hair slicked back with sweat.
He’s holding a satin stainless revolver and staring at Barry with total recognition.
Barry puts a round through his right shoulder, Slade stumbling back into the array of control panels, the gun slipping from his grasp as he slides down onto the floor.
Helena rushes to the deprivation tank and pulls the emergency release lever.
By the time Barry reaches the tank, she’s already opening the hatch to expose Jee-woon floating on his back in the saltwater, desperately trying to pull the IV port out of his left forearm.
Barry holsters the Glock, reaches into the warm water, and hauls Jee-woon out, throwing him across the room.
Jee-woon hits the floor and rights himself, looking up at Barry and Helena, on his hands and knees, naked and dripping on the tile. He looks at Slade’s gun, eight feet away, and lunges for it, Barry tracking him, and as he fires, so does Helena, the full load of buckshot slamming Jee-woon against the wall, his chest a gaping wound, and his strength rushing out of him apace with his blood.
Barry moves carefully toward him, keeping the gun trained on the man’s ruined center mass, but Jee-woon is gone by the time he reaches him—eyes glassing over with that final emptiness.
HELENA
November 7, 2018
It is one of the most gratifying moments of her fragmented existence to site Slade down the barrel of the shotgun.
She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a thumb drive. “I’m going to wipe every line of code. Then I’m going to dismantle the chair, the microscope—”
“Helena—”
“I’m talking now! The stimulators. Every piece of hardware and software in the building. It’s going to be like the chair never existed.”
Slade is leaning against the base of the terminal, pain in his eyes. “It’s been a minute, huh?”
“Thirteen years for me,” she says. “How long for you?”
He seems to consider the question as Barry moves toward him and kicks the revolver across the room.
“Who knows?” he says finally. “After you ghosted off my oil platform—well done, by the way, never understood exactly how you pulled that off—it took me years to rebuild the chair. But since then, I’ve lived more lifetimes than you can possibly fathom.”
“Doing what?” she asks.
“Most of them were quiet explorations of who I am, who I could be, in different places, with different people. Some were…louder. But this last timeline, I discovered that I could no longer generate a sufficient synaptic number to map my own memory. I’ve traveled too much. Filled my mind with too many lives. Too many experiences. It’s beginning to fracture. There are entire lifetimes I’ve never remembered, that I only experience in flashes. This hotel isn’t the first thing I did. It’s the last. I built it to let others experience the power of what is still, what will always be, your creation.”
He takes a strained breath and looks at Barry, Helena thinking that his eyes, even through the obvious pain, contain the composed depth of a man who has lived a long, long time.
“Helluva way to thank the man who gave you your daughter back,” Slade says.
“Well, now she’s dead again, you fucking asshole. The shock of remembering her own death and that building appearing yesterday pushed her over the edge.”
“I’m truly sorry to hear that.”
“You’re using the chair destructively.”
“Yes,” Slade says. “It will be destructive at first, like all progress. Just as the industrial age ushered in two world wars. Just as Homo sapiens supplanted the Neanderthal. But would you turn back the clock on all that comes with it? Could you? Progress is inevitable. And it’s a force for good.”
Slade glances at the entry wound in his shoulder, touches it, grimaces, then looks back at Barry. “You want to talk about destructive? How about being locked in our little fishbowls, in this joke of an existence imposed on us by the limits of our primate senses? Life is suffering. But it doesn’t have to be. Why should you be forced to accept your daughter’s death when you can change it? Why shouldn’t a dying man go back to his youth with full wisdom and knowledge instead of gasping out his last hours in agony? Why let a tragedy unfold when you could go back and prevent it? What you’re defending isn’t reality—it’s a prison, a lie.” Slade looks at Helena. “You know this. You have to see this. You’ve ushered in a new age for humanity. One where we no longer have to suffer and die. Where we can experience so much. Trust me, your perspective changes when you’ve lived countless lives. You’ve allowed us to escape the limitations of our senses. You’ve saved us all. That’s your legacy.”
“I know what you did to me in San Francisco,” Helena says. “In the original timeline.” Slade stares back at her, unblinking. “When you told me about accidentally discovering what the chair could do, you left out the part where you murdered me.”
“And yet here you are. Death no longer has any hold over us. This is your life’s work, Helena. Embrace it.”
She says, “You can’t possibly think humanity can be trusted with the memory chair.”
“Think of the good it could do. I know you wanted to use this technology to help people. To help your mom. You could go back and be with her before she died, before her mind destroyed itself. You could save her memories. We can undo the killings of Jee-woon and Sergei. It’d be like none of this happened.” His smile is filled with pain. “Can’t you see how beautiful a world that would be?”
She takes a step toward him. “You might be right. Maybe there is a world where the chair makes all our lives better. But that’s not the point. The point is, you might be wrong too. The point is, we don’t know what people would do with this knowledge. All we know is that once enough people know about the chair, or how to build it, there’s no going back. We’ll never escape the loop of universal knowledge of the chair. It will live on in every subsequent timeline. We’ll have doomed humanity forever. I’d rather take the chance at passing up something glorious than risk everything on one roll of the dice.”
Slade smiles that I-know-more-than-you-realize smile that takes her back to her years with him on the oil platform.
He says, “You’re still being blinded by your limitations. Still not seeing the whole picture. And maybe you never will, unless you can travel the way I’ve traveled….”
“What does that mean?”
He shakes his head.
“What are you talking about, Marcus? What do you mean, ‘the way I’ve traveled’?”
Slade just stares at her, bleeding, and then the hum of the quantum processors fades away, the room suddenly silent.
One by one, the monitors in the terminal go dark, and as Barry looks quizzically at Helena, all of the lights flicker out.
BARRY
November 7, 2018
He sees the afterimages of Helena, Slade, and the chair.
Then nothing.
The lab stands pitch-black.
No sound but the thrumming of his heart.
Straight ahead, where Slade sat just seconds ago, Barry hears the noise of someone scrambling across the floor.
A shotgun blast illuminates the room for a deafening splinter of a second—enough time for Barry to see Slade disappear through the doorway.
Barry takes a tentative step forward, his retinas still reeling from the muzzle flash of Helena’s gun, the darkness tinged with orange. The doorway materializes into view as lights from the surrounding buildings slink in through the windows of the hallway.
His hearing has recovered just enough from the gunshot to register the sound of quick footsteps rushing away down the corridor. Barry doesn’t think Slade had time, in those few seconds of darkness, to get his hands on the revolver, but he can’t be certain. More likely—Slade’s making a mad dash for one of the stairwells.
Helena’s voice emerges from the doorway, a whisper: “You see him?”
“No. Hang back until I figure out what’s going on.”
He jogs past the windows that peer out into a rainy, Manhattan night. From somewhere on the floor comes a rat-a-tat like a snare drum being played.
He turns the next corner into pure darkness, and as he approaches the main corridor, his foot strikes something on the floor.
Bending down, he touches the bloodied cloth of Slade’s tank top. He still can’t see a thing, but he recognizes the high-pitched wheezing of a punctured lung failing to fully inflate, and the softer gurgles of Slade drowning in his own blood.
A cold terror engulfs him. Running his hand along the wall, he reaches the junction of corridors.
For a moment, the only sound is Slade dying right behind him.
Something whips past the tip of his nose and thunks into the wall behind him.
Suppressed gunshots and muzzle fire reveal a half dozen officers by the bank of elevators, all in full tactical helmets and body armor, assault weapons shouldered.
Barry pulls back around the corner, shouts, “Detective Sutton, NYPD! Twenty-fourth precinct!”
“Barry?”
He knows that voice.
“Gwen?”
“What the fuck is going on, Barry?” Then to those around her: “I know him, I know him!”
“What are you doing here?” Barry asks.
“We had a report of shots fired in this building. What are you doing here?”
“Gwen, you have to get your team out of here and let me—”
“It’s not my team.”
“Whose is it?”
A male voice booms down the hall, “Our drone is showing a heat signature in one of the rooms behind you.”
“They aren’t a threat,” Barry says.
“Barry, you need to let these guys do their job,” Gwen says.
“Who are they?” Barry asks.
“Why don’t you step out and talk to us? I’ll make the introductions. You’re making everyone very nervous.”
He hopes Helena has realized what’s happening and fled. He needs to buy her more time. If she can get to her Red Hook lab, in four months, she can finish building the chair and return to this day and fix this.
“You’re not hearing me, Gwen. Take everyone back down to the garage and leave.” Barry turns and screams down the corridor toward the lab, “Helena, run!”
The sound of rattling gear starts down the corridor—they’re moving toward him.
Barry juts around the corner and fires a shot at the ceiling.
The return of gunfire is an instantaneous overreaction—a maelstrom of bullets strafing the corridor all around him.
Gwen screaming, “Are you trying to get yourself killed?”
“Helena, go! Get out of the building!”
Now something rolls down the corridor and stops three feet from Barry. Before he even has time to wonder what it is, the flash-bang cracks open, a blinding ribbon of light and smoke unfurling, his vision bright white and the high-pitched tone of temporary hearing loss blocking out all other noise.
When the first bullet hits him, he doesn’t feel any pain—only impact.
Then comes another and another, tearing into his sides, his leg, his arm, and as the pain comes, it occurs to him that Helena won’t be saving him this time.