Recursion by Blake Crouch

PLOT

Barry Sutton, NYPD is on call for a woman attempting suicide by jumping off a building. When Barry reaches the floor to try to talk her off the suicide, she confesses that she has FMS, False Memory Syndrome. She tells him that one day she got a severe headache and nosebleed and she was in a place she had no idea how she got there. Also, she had memories of her life where she had a husband and a son and when she tried to contact her husband, she found out that he was married to his past wife who she remembers to have committed suicide by jumping off a building.

"Life is nothing how he expected it would be when he was young and living under the delusion that things could be controlled. Nothing can be controlled. Only endured."

Barry is unable to save the woman and decides to meet the husband she talked about. At first, the husband straight up denies remembering her but afterwards gives him a call about doing something bad in a hotel. Barry finds the hotel and enters; here he is drugged and is tied to a chair such that he is unable to move at all. The person who tied Barry asks him to remember his daughter’s death and then drowns him in a pool of saline water. Suddenly, with severe nosebleed Barry is at his home on the day that his daughter died. Barry manages to save his daughter from dying in the accident that day. AT first he is skeptical and thinks that this is just an ethereal dream which will end soon. When years pass without any glitch, he accepts this reality and continues living with his family; until the day he died in the pool in his previous reality when his daughter has memories of being dead years ago. So he goes to search for the hotel again where he was drowned when a woman asks him to decide against it.

Helena Smith’s field of work is neuroscience and she wants to make a system that will enable her to put memories in her Alzheimer suffering mother. She gets an offer from Marcus Slade, one of the world’s renowned businessman who has decided to grant her money to complete her project. On completing the project and successfully developing the chair, Marcus tells her of his ambition, where instead of planting a certain memory, he can send a person to the past reliving the whole memory. Helena doesn’t concur to this idea stating that this could create fracture in time and flees the lab. When she finds Barry outside the hotel, she knows Slade is operating from, she stops him because Slade can just escape to a different time. Later they use the chair is Slade’s possession to go back in time and build their own chair and stop Slade from taking the chair in the original timeline.

"We think we are perceiving the world directly and immediately but everything we experience is this carefully edited, tape-delayed construction."

"Dimethyltriptamine is responsible for our dreams. But at the moment of death, the pineal gland releases a veritable flood of DMT. It is the reason people see things when they die such as racing through a tunnel toward a light, or their entire life flashing before their eyes."

 Altering time to go back to the past creates much confusion due to false memories all over the world leading to other countries believing that America is changing the past to its favor, thus launch nuclear attacks on several cities. Living and re-living the past years to try to remove the memory of the chair from all people they still could no figure out how to do it. So they contact Marcus Slade when he confesses that he had killed Helena in the original timeline where she had successfully designed the chair and he was her assistant, had made money in the subsequent timelines with his knowledge of the future. On taking Slade in their belief by showing him the consequences of his actions, he tells Barry that they have to map the original timeline as a memory to remove the memory of the chair. He confesses that this was how he removed the memory of Helena inventing the chair in the original timeline from even her mind.

"Life with a cheat code isn't life. Our existence isn't something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain."

Barry undoes the false timelines and lives with the knowledge that his daughter died in the accident. He lives in his original life where he divorced his wife and never met Helena. On the day, Marcus Slade was going to kill Helena, he went to his house and killed him then he goes to the bar to meet with Helena.

"When a person dies, he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past...All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads n a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever."

Tried a new author, got a whole new type of thriller. Maybe the first sci-fi thriller I read, it was a deeply engaging read. A chair to go to the past to relive your best memories and even change the past.. Told from the perspective of two persons, and two different timelines, Blake Crouch has written an amazing piece of fiction and never did the story, for all its complexities, felt out of sync. Not a regular thriller, it left a huge impression and I am looking forward to reading Blake Crouch's other works. If you want to read the book and need an e-publication, please leave a comment and I will provide the book.

Links to Previous Posts

And Then There Were None

I Talk To The Universe About You

The Devotion of Suspect X