Day 8

It is the strangest captivity.

The apartment is a one-bedroom near Sutton Place, spacious and high-ceilinged, with a million-dollar view of the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, East River, and the distant sprawl of Brooklyn and Queens.

She doesn’t have access to a phone, Internet connection, or any other mode of contact with the outside world.

Four cameras, mounted to the walls, keep watch over every square inch of space, their red recording lights glowing above her even while she sleeps.

Her captors, a couple named Alonzo and Jessica, carry themselves with a calm collectedness. In the beginning, it eased her nerves.

Day one, they sat her down in the living room and said, “We know you have questions, but we aren’t the ones to answer them.”

Helena asked anyway.

What happened to Barry?

Who raided Marcus Slade’s building?

Who’s keeping me here?

Jessica leaned forward and said, “We’re expensive prison guards, OK? Nothing more. We don’t know why you’re here. We don’t want to know why you’re here. But if you’re cool, we, and the other people working with us, who you will never meet, will be cool.”

They provide her meals.

Every other day, they make a run to the grocery store and bring back whatever she writes down on a piece of paper.

On a surface level, they’re friendly enough, but there’s an undeniable hardness in their eyes—no, a detachment—which makes her fairly certain they would hurt her, or worse, if the order ever came down.

She watches the news first thing in the mornings, and with each passing cycle, FMS occupies less bandwidth in the endless parade of tragedies and scandals and celebrity gossip.

When another school shooting takes nineteen lives, it is the first day since the Big Bend appeared that FMS isn’t mentioned in the top headlines.

---

Her eighth day in the apartment, Helena sits at the kitchen island, eating a breakfast of huevos rancheros and watching sunlight pour through the window that overlooks the river.

This morning, in the reflection of the bathroom mirror, she inspected the row of stitches across her forehead and the fading, black-and-yellow bruise from the SWAT officer who knocked her unconscious on the stairwell of Slade’s building while she was trying to escape.

Each day, the pain lessens as the fear and uncertainty grow.

She eats slowly, trying not to think of Barry, because when she imagines his face, the abject helplessness of her situation becomes unbearable, and the not knowing what’s happening makes her want to scream.

The dead bolt turns, and Helena looks down the short hall into the foyer as the door swings open to reveal a man who, up until now, has existed only in a dead memory.

Rajesh Anand says to someone in the hall, “Close the door and turn off the cameras.”

“Holy shit, Raj?” She leaves her stool at the island and meets him where the hall opens into the living room. “What are you doing here?”

“Came to see you.” He stares at Helena with an air of confidence he didn’t have when they worked together on the rig, looking better with age, his clean-shaven features at once delicate and handsome. He’s wearing a suit and holding a briefcase in his left hand. The corners of his brown eyes crinkle with a genuine smile.

They move into the living room and sit across from each other on a pair of leather sofas.

“You’re comfortable here?” he asks.

“Raj, what’s happening?”

“You’re being held in a safe house.”

“Under whose authority?”

“The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.”

Her stomach tightens. “DARPA?”

“Is there anything I can get for you, Helena?”

“Answers. Am I under arrest?”

“No.”

“So I’m being detained.”

He nods.

“I want a lawyer.”

“Not possible.”

“How is that not possible? I’m an American citizen. Isn’t this illegal?”

“Possibly.”

Raj lifts his briefcase and sets it on the table. The black leather has worn through in places and the brass hardware is deeply tarnished. “I know it’s not much to look at,” he says. “It was my father’s. He gave it to me the day I left for America.”

As he begins to fumble with the locking mechanism, Helena says, “There was a man with me on the seventeenth floor of that—”

“Barry Sutton?”

“They won’t tell me what happened to him.”

“Because they don’t know. He was killed.”

She knew it.

Felt it in her bones all week locked in this luxurious prison.

And still it breaks her.

As she cries, her face screws up with grief, and she can feel the stitches pulling across her forehead.

“I’m very sorry,” Raj says. “He shot at the SWAT team.”

Helena wipes her eyes and glares across the table.

“How are you mixed up in all of this?”

“It was the mistake of my life abandoning our project on Slade’s oil platform. I thought he was mad. We all did. Sixteen months later, I woke up one night with a nosebleed. I didn’t know how, or what it meant, but our entire time together on the rig had turned into false memories. I realized you’d achieved something incredible.”

“So you knew what the chair was even then?”

“No. I only suspected you had figured out some way to alter memories. I wanted to be a part of it. I tried to find you and Slade, but you’d both vanished. When False Memory Syndrome first cropped up on a mass scale, I went to the one place I knew would be interested in my story.”

“DARPA? You seriously thought that was a good idea?”

“All the government agencies were discombobulated. The CDC was trying to find a pathogen that didn’t exist. A RAND physicist wrote a memo theorizing FMS could be micro changes in space-time. But DARPA believed me. We started tracking down victims of FMS and interviewing them. Last month, I found someone who claimed to have been put into a chair and sent back into a memory. All they knew was that it had happened in a hotel somewhere in Manhattan. I knew it had to be you or Slade, or the two of you working together.”

“Why would you go to DARPA with something like this?”

“Money and resources. I brought a team to New York. We started looking for this hotel, but we couldn’t find it. Then after Big Bend appeared, we heard chatter that an NYPD SWAT team was planning a raid on a building in Midtown that might have some connection to FMS. My team took over.”

Helena looks out the window across the river, the sun warm on her face.

“Were you working with Slade?” Raj asks.

“I was trying to stop him.”

“Why?”

“Because the chair is dangerous. Have you used it?”

“I’ve run a few diagnostics. Mainly I’ve been getting myself up to speed on the functionality.” Raj pops the lock on the briefcase. “Look, I hear your concerns, but we could really use you. There’s so much we don’t know.” From the briefcase, he pulls out a sheaf of paper and tosses it on the coffee table.

“What’s this?” she asks.

“Employment contract.”

She looks up at Raj. “Didn’t you hear what I just said?”

“They know the chair is capable of memory return. Do you actually think they’re not going to use it? That genie is never going back into the bottle.”

“Doesn’t mean I have to help them.”

“But if you are willing, you’ll be treated with the respect that’s owed to the genius who invented this technology. You’ll have a seat at the table. Be a part of making history. That’s my pitch. Can I count you in?”

Helena looks across the table with a razor-blade smile. “You can get fucked.”

Day 10

It’s snowing outside, a fragile inch already collected on the windowsill. Traffic creeps along on the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, which appears to pass in and out of existence depending upon the intensity of the snowfall.

After breakfast, Jessica unlocks the dead bolt and tells her to get dressed.

“Why?” Helena asks.

“Now,” Jessica says, with the first hint of menace Helena has heard from either of them in the ten days they’ve been together.

Down the freight elevator to the underground parking garage and a row of pristine black Suburbans.

They take the Queens-Midtown Tunnel like they’re heading out to LaGuardia, Helena wondering if they’re flying somewhere, but not daring to ask. They pass by the airport and continue into Flushing, past the rainbow-colored storefronts of Chinatown, then finally pull into a collection of low-rise office buildings that defines nondescript.

Once outside, Alonzo takes Helena by the arm and escorts her up the walkway to the main entrance, through the double doors, then deposits her by the front desk, where a very tall man—at least six and a half feet—stands waiting.

He dismisses Alonzo with a deep-voiced “I’ll text you,” and turns his focus on Helena.

“So you’re the genius?” the man asks. He has a magnificent beard and thick, dark eyebrows that run together like a hedge below his forehead. He extends his hand. “I’m John Shaw. Welcome to DARPA.”

“What do you do here, Mr. Shaw?”

“I suppose you could say I’m in charge. Come with me.” He starts toward the security checkpoint, but she doesn’t move. After five steps, he glances back at her. “That wasn’t a suggestion, Dr. Smith.”

He badges them both through sliding glass doors and leads her down a hallway of baize carpeting. While from the outside the building resembled a sad office park, the interior, with its grim lighting and utilitarian design, is a soulless government labyrinth to the bone.

He says, “We gutted Slade’s lab and brought everything here so we could properly secure it.”

“Did Raj not convey my thoughts on helping you?”

“He did.”

“So why am I here?”

“I want to show you what we’re doing.”

“If it involves using the chair, I’m not interested.”

They arrive at a revolving door of impenetrable-looking glass and a biometric security system.

Shaw looks down at Helena, towering over her by more than a foot. His face might be friendly under different circumstances, but in this moment, he looks intensely annoyed.

The smell of cinnamon-flavored Altoids wafts over her as he says, “I want you to know, there is no place safer in the width and breadth of the entire world than the other side of that glass. It may not look like it, but this building is a goddamn fortress, and at DARPA, we keep our secrets.”

“That glass can’t contain the chair. Nothing can. Why do you want it anyway?”

The right side of his mouth curls up, and for an instant, she glimpses the steel cunning in his eyes.

“Do me one favor, Dr. Smith,” Shaw says.

“What’s that?”

“For the next hour of your life, try to keep an open mind.”

---

The chair and deprivation chamber stand side by side as centerpieces under the burn of the floodlights, in the most exquisite lab Helena has ever seen.

Raj is already seated at the terminal when they enter, and behind him stands a woman in her mid-twenties in black military fatigues and boots, her arms sleeved with tattoos and her black hair pulled back into a ponytail.

Shaw brings Helena over to the terminal.

“This is Timoney Rodriguez.”

The soldier nods to Helena. “Who’s this?”

“Helena Smith. She created all of this. Raj, how’re we doing?”

“Full steam ahead.” He swivels his chair around and looks up at Timoney. “You ready?”

“I think so.”

Helena looks at Shaw. “What’s happening?”

“We’re sending Timoney back into a memory.”

“For what purpose?”

“You’ll see.”

Helena turns to Timoney. “You realize they’re about to kill you in that tank?”

“John and Raj briefed me on everything when they brought me on board.”

“They’re going to paralyze you and stop your heart. Having experienced it four times, I can assure you it’s an agonizing process, and there’s no way to circumvent the pain.”

“Cool, cool.”

“The changes you make will affect other people and cause all kinds of pain for them. Pain they’re not ready for. Do you think you have a right to do that?”

No one acknowledges Helena’s question.

Raj rises and motions to the chair. “Take a seat, Timoney.”

He grabs one of the silver skullcaps in the cabinet beside the terminal and carries it over to the chair. Then he fits it on Timoney’s head and begins to fasten the chin strap.

“This is the reactivation apparatus?” Timoney asks.

“Exactly. It works with the MEG microscope to record the memory. Then when you move over to the tank, it saves the neural pattern for reactivation by the stimulators.” He lowers the MEG over the skullcap. “Have you thought about which memory you want to record?”

“John said he’d give me some guidance.”

“Only parameter on my end is that it needs to be three days old,” Shaw says.

Raj opens the compartments embedded in the chair’s headrest and unfolds the telescoping titanium rods, which he locks into housings on the exterior of the microscope.

He says, “The memory doesn’t have to be extensive. It just needs to be vivid. Pain and pleasure are good markers. So is strong emotion. Right, Helena?”

She says nothing. She’s watching her worst nightmare unfold—the chair in a government laboratory.

Raj walks over to the terminal, tees up a new recording file, and carries over the tablet that functions as a remote control.

Taking a seat on the stool beside Timoney, he says, “Best way to record a memory, especially in the beginning, is to talk your way through it. Try to go deeper than just what you saw and felt. The memory of sounds, tastes, and smells are all critical for a vivid retrieval. Whenever you’re ready.”

Timoney closes her eyes, takes a deep breath.

She recalls standing at the copper-topped bar of a whiskey place she frequents in the Village, waiting for a bourbon she ordered. A woman squeezed in beside her to flag down the bartender, and bumped into Timoney, close enough for Timoney to smell the fragrance she wore. The woman looked over to apologize, and they locked eyes for three seconds. Timoney knew that any day now, she’d be climbing into the tank to die. She was excited and terrified by the prospect. In fact, the reason she’d gone out that evening was because she needed some physical connection.

“Her skin was the color of coffee and cream, and her lips just slayed me. I wanted to touch her so badly. God, I needed to get rag-dolled, but I just smiled and said, ‘It’s fine, don’t worry about it.’ Life’s made up of a thousand little regrets like that, isn’t it?”

Timoney opens her eyes. “How was that?”

Raj holds up the tablet to show everyone—SYNAPTIC NUMBER: 156.

“Is that sufficient?” Shaw asks.

“Anything above 120 is in the safe zone.”

He runs an IV line into Timoney’s left forearm and mounts the injection port. Then Timoney strips out of her fatigues and heads over to the tank.

Raj opens the hatch, and Shaw gives her a hand as she climbs in.

Looking down at his soldier floating in the saltwater, Shaw says, “You remember everything we discussed?”

“Yes. I’m not sure what to expect.”

“To be honest, none of us are. We’ll see you on the other side.”

Raj closes the hatch and moves to the terminal. Shaw sits beside him, and Helena comes over to study the monitors. The reactivation protocol is already initiating, Raj double-checking the dosages for the Rocuronium and sodium thiopental.

“Mr. Shaw?” Helena says.

He looks up at her.

“Right now, we are the only people in the world who control the chair.”

“I would hope so.”

“I am begging you. Show restraint. Its use has only ever caused mayhem and pain.”

“Maybe the wrong people were at the controls.”

“Humanity doesn’t have the wisdom to handle this sort of power.”

“I’m about to prove you wrong.”

She needs to stop this, but there are two armed guards just outside the door. If she tried anything, they’d be on her in a matter of seconds.

Raj lifts the headset and speaks into the microphone, “We’re starting in ten seconds, Timoney.”

The woman’s breathing comes fast over the speaker. “I’m ready.”

Raj activates the injection port. Slade’s equipment has improved vastly since their days on the rig, when it required a medical doctor to be on hand to monitor test subjects and advise when the stimulators should be fired. This new software automates the drug sequence based on real-time vital sign reporting and engages the electromagnetic stimulators only when the dimethyltriptamine release is detected.

“How long before the shift?” Shaw asks.

“Depends on how her body responds to the drugs.”

The Rocuronium fires, followed thirty seconds later by the sodium thiopental.

Shaw leans in toward a split-screen that displays Timoney’s vital signs on the left, and a night-vision camera feed of her inside the tank on the right.

“Her heart rate is off the charts, but she looks so calm.”

“Yours would be too if you were suffocating while your heart was stopped,” Helena says.

They all watch Timoney’s heart rate flatline.

Minutes elapse.

A line of sweat runs down the side of Shaw’s face.

“Should it be taking this long?” he asks.

“Yes,” Helena says. “This is how long it takes to die after your heart quits beating. I promise you it feels much longer to her.”

The monitor that shows the status of the stimulators flashes an alert—DMT RELEASE DETECTED. The previously dark image of Timoney’s brain explodes with a light show of activity.

“Stimulators are firing,” Raj says.

After ten seconds, a new alert replaces the DMT notice—MEMORY REACTIVATION COMPLETE.

Raj looks over at Shaw and says, “Any moment—”

---

Instead of the terminal, Helena is suddenly at the conference table on the other side of the lab. Her nose is bleeding, head throbbing.

Shaw, Raj, and Timoney are also seated around the table, everyone’s nose bleeding except for Timoney’s.

Shaw laughs. “My God.” He looks at Raj. “It worked. It fucking worked!”

“What did you do?” Helena asks, still trying to sort out dead memories from the new, real ones.

“Think about the school shooting two days ago,” Raj says.

Helena tries to remember the news coverage she watched the last few mornings in her apartment—hordes of students evacuating the school, horrifying videos taken on students’ phones showing the rampage as it unfolded inside the cafeteria, devastated parents pleading for politicians to do something, to never let this happen again, law enforcement briefings and vigils and—

But none of that happened.

Those are dead memories now.

Instead, as the shooter walked up the steps of the school, an AR-15 slung over his shoulder and carrying a black duffel bag loaded with homemade bombs, handguns, and fifty high-capacity magazines, a 7.62 NATO round fired from an M40 rifle at a distance of approximately 300 yards entered the back of his head and exited through his left sinus cavity.

More than twenty-four hours later, the identity of the would-be school shooter’s killer remains unknown, but the anonymous vigilante who snuffed him out is being heralded across the world as a hero.

Shaw looks at Helena. “Your chair saved nineteen lives.”

She’s speechless.

He says, “Look, I know there’s an argument to be made that the chair should be eradicated from the face of the Earth. That it’s an affront to the natural order of things. But it just saved nineteen kids and erased the unfathomable pain of their families.”

“That’s…”

“Playing God?”

“Yeah.”

“But isn’t it also playing God not to intervene when you have that power?”

“We shouldn’t have that power.”

“But we do. Because of something you created.”

She’s reeling.

“It’s like you only see the harm your chair might do,” Shaw says. “When you were first starting out with your research, way back when you were experimenting on mice, what was your guiding purpose?”

“I’d always been interested in memory. When my mom got Alzheimer’s, I wanted to build something that could save core memories.”

“You’ve gone way beyond that,” Timoney says. “You didn’t just save memories. You saved lives.”

“You asked me why I wanted the chair,” Shaw says. “I hope today has given you a window into who I am, what I’m about. Go home, enjoy this moment. Those kids are alive because of you.”

---

Back at the apartment, she sits in bed all afternoon, watching breaking news coverage of the school shooting that “unhappened.” Students who were murdered stand in front of cameras, recounting false memories of being gunned down. A weeping father speaks of going to the morgue to identify his dead son, a broken mother tells of being in the midst of planning her daughter’s funeral only to shift into a moment of driving her to school instead.

Helena wonders if she’s the only one who sees the slight unhinging behind the eyes of one of the previously murdered students.

As she witnesses the world attempting to come to terms with the impossible, she wonders what the masses make of it.

Religious scholars speak of ancient times, when miracles happened with great frequency. They speculate that we have returned to such an era, that this could be a precursor to the Second Coming.

While people flock to churches in droves, the best scientists can come up with is that the world experienced another “mass memory incident.” And though they talk of alternate realities and the fragmenting of space-time, they look more baffled and rattled than the men of God.

She keeps coming back to something Shaw said to her in the lab. It’s like you only see the harm your chair might do. It’s true. All she’s ever considered is the potential damage, and that fear has informed the trajectory of her life since her time on Slade’s oil rig.

As night falls on Manhattan, she stands by the floor-to-ceiling window, looking out at the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, its trusses illuminated and spectacularly reflected in a swirl of shimmering color on the surface of the East River.

Tasting what it feels like to change the world.

Day 11

The next morning, she’s delivered to the DARPA building in Queens, where Shaw is waiting for her again outside security.

As they head back toward the lab, he asks, “Did you watch the news last night?”

“A bit of it.”

“Felt pretty good, didn’t it?”

In the lab, Timoney, Raj, and two men Helena has never seen before are seated at the conference table. Shaw introduces her to the newcomers—a young Navy SEAL named Steve, whom he describes as Timoney’s counterpart, and an impeccably groomed man in a bespoke black suit named Albert Kinney.

“Albert’s defected here from RAND,” Shaw says.

“You designed the chair?” Albert asks, shaking her hand.

“Unfortunately,” Helena says.

“It’s astonishing.”

She takes one of the last unoccupied seats as Shaw moves to the head of the table, where he stands, surveying the group.

“Welcome,” he says. “I’ve spoken to each of you individually over the last week about the memory chair my team recovered. Yesterday afternoon, we successfully used the chair to revise the outcome of the school shooting in Maryland. Now, there is a philosophy, which I respect, that says we can’t trust ourselves with something of such raw power. I don’t mean to speak for you, Dr. Smith, but even you, the chair’s creator, hold that opinion.”

“That’s right.”

“I have a different perspective, emboldened by what we achieved yesterday. I believe that, as technology arises in the world, we’re entrusted to find its best use for the continuation and betterment of our species. I believe the chair contains an awesome potential to bring good into the world.

“In addition to Dr. Smith, we have at this table Timoney Rodriguez and Steve Crowder, two of the bravest, most capable soldiers ever produced by the US military. Raj Anand, the man responsible for finding the chair. Albert Kinney, a RAND systems theorist with a mind like a diamond. And me. As deputy director for DARPA, I have the resources to create, under the veil of absolute secrecy, a new program, which we’re starting today.”

“You intend to keep using the chair?” Helena asks.

“Indeed.”

“To what end?”

“The mission statement for our group is something we’ll craft together.”

Albert asks, “So you’re thinking of us as a kind of brain trust?”

“Precisely. And the parameters of use are also something we’ll decide on together.”

Helena pushes her chair back and rises. “I won’t be a part of this.”

Shaw looks up at her from the head of the table, his jaw tensing.

“This group needs your voice. Your skepticism.”

“It’s not skepticism. Yes, we saved lives yesterday, but in doing so, we created false memories and confusion in the minds of millions of people. Every time you use the chair, you’ll be changing the way human beings process reality. We have no idea what those long-term effects might be.”

“Let me ask you something,” Shaw says. “Do you think any decent person is sad right now that nineteen students weren’t, in fact, murdered? We aren’t talking about swapping out good memories for bad or randomly altering reality. We’re here for one purpose—the undoing of human misery.”

Helena leans forward. “This is no different from how Marcus Slade was using the chair. He wanted to change how we experienced reality, but on a practical level, he was letting people go back and fix their lives, which was good for some people, and catastrophic for others.”

Albert says, “Helena raises a legitimate concern. There’s already quite a bit of literature out there on the effects of FMS on the brain, issues of excess memory storage, and false memories in people with mental disorders. I’d recommend we have a team research every serious paper that’s been published on the subject, so we can stay informed moving forward. In theory, if we limit the age of the memories we send our agents back to, we’ll limit the cognitive dissonance between the real and false timelines.”

“In theory?” Helena asks. “Shouldn’t you move forward on better information than the theoretical if you’re talking about changing the nature of reality?”

“Albert, are you proposing we take travel into the distant past off the table?” Shaw asks. “Because I have a list here”—he touches a black leather notebook—“of atrocities and disasters from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I’m just spitballing, but what if we found a ninety-five-year-old with sniper training in their past. A sharp mind. Clear recollection. Helena, what’s the earliest age you’d feel comfortable sending someone back into a memory?”

“I can’t believe we’re even discussing this.”

“We’re just talking here. There are no bad ideas at this table.”

“The female brain is fully mature at twenty-one,” she says. “The male brain, a few years later. Sixteen could probably handle it, but we’d need testing to be sure. There’s a potential that if we sent someone back into their memories at too young an age, their cognitive functioning would simply collapse. An adult consciousness being shoved into an underdeveloped brain could be disastrous.”

“Are you suggesting what I think you are, John?” Albert asks. “That we send agents forty, fifty, sixty years back to assassinate dictators before they go on to murder millions?”

“Or to stop a killing that’s the catalyst for an epic tragedy—for instance, when Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb, murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, and in so doing, tipped over the first domino in a chain that would ultimately trigger the First World War. I’m simply raising the possibility for discussion. We are sitting in a room with a machine of incredible power.”

A sobering silence falls on the group.

Helena sits back down. Her heart is racing, her mouth gone dry.

She says, “The only reason I’m still at this table is because someone needs to be a voice of reason.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Shaw says.

“It’s one thing to change the events of the last few days. Don’t get me wrong, that’s still dangerous and you should never do it again. It’s another entirely to save the lives of millions half a century ago. For the sake of argument, what if we figured out some way to stop World War Two from happening? What if, because of our actions, thirty million people lived who would’ve otherwise died? Maybe you think that sounds amazing. Look closer. How do you begin to calculate the good and the evil potential of those who died? Who’s to say that the actions of a monster like Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot didn’t prevent the rise of a much greater monster? At the very least, an alteration on this scale would certainly change our present beyond comprehension. It would undo the marriages and births of millions of people. Without Hitler, an entire generation of immigrants would never have come to the US. Or, simpler still, if your great-grandmother’s high school sweetheart doesn’t die in the war, she marries him instead of your great-grandfather. Your grandparents are never born, your parents are never born, and—fucking obviously—neither are you.” She looks across the table at Albert. “You’re a systems theorist? Is there any modeling you can conceive of that would even begin to extrapolate the changes to the population of the planet at this level of magnitude?”

“Yes, I could develop some models, but to your point, tracking cause and effect with such an immense dataset is virtually impossible. I agree with you that we’re flying dangerously close to the law of unintended consequences. Here’s a thought experiment off the top of my head.

“If England didn’t go to war with Germany because of something we did, then Alan Turing, the father of the computer and artificial intelligence, wouldn’t have been pushed to break Germany’s ciphering technology. Now, maybe he still would’ve gone on to lay a foundation for the modern, microchip-driven world we live in. Then again, maybe not. Or to a lesser degree. And how many lives have been saved based on all this technology that protects us? More than the lives lost in the Second World War? The ‘what-ifs’ snowball out into infinity.”

Shaw says, “Point taken. These are the types of discussions we need to be having.” He looks at Helena. “This is why I want you here. You aren’t going to stop me from using the chair, but maybe you can help us use it wisely.”

Day 17

They spend the first week hammering out ground rules, among them—

The only people allowed to use the chair are trained agents, such as Timoney and Steve.

The chair can never be used to alter events in the personal histories of the team members, or their friends and families.

The chair can never be used to send agents further back than five days into the past.

The chair’s sole use is for the undoing of unthinkable tragedies and disasters, which can be circumvented easily and anonymously by one agent.

All decisions to use the chair will be put to a vote.

Albert has taken to calling their group the Department of Undoing Particularly Awful Shit, and like many names that start as a bad joke without a quick replacement, the name sticks.

Day 25

A week later, Shaw submits the next mission candidate for the group’s consideration, even bringing in a photograph to make his case.

Twenty-four hours ago, in Lander, Wyoming, an eleven-year-old girl was found murdered in her bedroom, with the MO eerily similar to five previous murders that had occurred over an eight-week period in remote towns across the American west.

The perpetrator had broken into the bedroom at some point between eleven p.m. and four a.m. using a glass cutter. He gagged his victim and violated her while her parents slept unknowing in a room across the hall.

“Unlike previous crimes,” Shaw says, “where the victims weren’t found until days or weeks later, this time he left her in her bed, tucked in under the covers for her parents to find her the next morning. Which means we have a definitive window of time for when the murder occurred, and we also know the precise place. There seems to be little question this monster will do this again. I’d like to propose a vote to use the chair, and I vote yes.”

Timoney and Steve are instant yeses.

Albert asks, “How would you propose Steve dispatch the killer?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, there’s a quiet way of doing it, where he intercepts the guy and takes him out into the middle of nowhere and puts him in a hole in the ground where no one will ever find him. And then there’s the noisy way, where the would-be killer is found with his throat slit in the bushes under the very window he was on the verge of climbing through, with the glass cutter and knife still in his possession. With the noisy version, we would be, in effect, announcing the existence of the Department of Undoing Particularly Awful Shit. Maybe we want to make that announcement, maybe we don’t. I’m merely raising the question.”

Helena has been staring at the most disturbing photograph she’s ever seen, and rational thought is disintegrating beneath her. In this moment, all she wants is for the person who did this to suffer.

She says, “My vote is that we take this lab apart and wipe the servers. But if you decide to go through with this—I realize I can’t stop you—then kill this animal and leave him with his incriminating tools under the girl’s window.”

“Why, Helena?” Shaw asks.

“Because if people know that someone, some entity, is behind these reality shifts, then the awareness of your work begins to take on a mythic stature.”

“You mean like Batman?” Albert asks, smirking.

Helena rolls her eyes, says, “If your aim is to repair the evil that men do, maybe it’s in your interest for evil men to fear you. Also, if they find this guy near the scene of the crime, ready to break into a house, authorities will link him to the other murders, and hopefully give closure to the other families.”

Timoney says, “You’re saying we become the bogeyman?”

“If someone chooses not to commit an atrocity because they fear a shadow group with the ability to manipulate memory and time, that’s a mission you’ll never have to face, and false memories you’ll never have to create. So yes. Become the bogeyman.”

Day 24

Steve finds the child murderer at 1:35 a.m. as he’s beginning to cut a hole in the window of Daisy Robinson’s bedroom. He tapes his mouth and wrists and cuts him slowly ear to ear, watching as he writhes and bleeds out in the dirt beside the house.

Day 31

The following week, they decline to intervene in a train derailment in the Texas hill country that kills nine people and injures many more.

Day 54

When a regional jet crashes in the evergreen forest south of Seattle, they again opt not to use the chair, the group reasoning that, as in the case of the derailment, by the time the cause of the accident is determined, too much time will have passed to send Steve or Timoney back.

Day 58

Day by day, it’s becoming clearer the types of tragedies they are most suited to fix, and if there’s any hesitation, any doubt whatsoever, to Helena’s relief, they err on the side of noninterference.

She continues to be held captive in the apartment building near Sutton Place. Alonzo and Jessica have allowed her to begin taking walks at night. One of them trails a half block behind; the other stays half a block ahead.

It’s the first week of January, and the air whipping between the buildings is a polar blast in her face. But she basks in the faux-freedom of walking in New York at night, imagining she is truly on her own.

She becomes contemplative, thinking of her parents, of Barry. She keeps returning to the last image she holds of him—standing in Slade’s lab just before the lights went down. And then a minute later, the sound of his voice, screaming at her to go.

Tears run cold across her face.

The three most important people in her life are gone, and she will never see them again. The stark loneliness of that knowledge cuts her to the bone.

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 swept 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.

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.

In a parking space beside the store, she kills the engine and pushes her thumbs into her temples against the searing pain, but it keeps building and building—so intense she’s afraid she’s going to be sick.

And then the strangest thing happens.

Her right arm moves toward the steering column and grasps the keys.

She says, “What the hell?”

Because she didn’t move her arm.

Next, she watches as her wrist turns the key and restarts the engine, and now her hand is moving over to the gear shift and sliding the lever into reverse.

Against her own will, she looks over her shoulder, out the rear window, backing the truck through the parking lot, and then shifting into drive.

She keeps thinking, I’m not driving, I’m not doing any of this, as the truck speeds down the highway, back toward home.

A darkness is creeping in at the edges of her vision, the Front Range and the lights of Boulder dimming away and getting smaller, as if she’s falling slowly into a deep well. She wants to scream, to stop this from happening, but she’s just a passenger in her own body now, unable to speak or smell or feel a thing.

The sound of the radio is little more than a dying whisper, and all at once, the pinprick of light that was her awareness of the world winks out.