☘Misericordia☘ ⚡ϟ⚡⛈⚡☁ ❇️❤❣'s Reviews > Recursion

YAY! The proud GR 2019 Choice winner! For once, I'm in agreement with the voting!

Q: “You won’t even recognize me.”
“My soul knows your soul. In any time.” (c)
Q:
“This is some kind of hell,” she says, dark. “Ready to come down to the lab and kill me again, darling?” (c)

Don't let any chairs destroy the world. Even cushy ones.

A bit disjointed but nevertheless engrossing read.

The end... Hmmm, so did they live happily ever after or did the whole rigmarole restart?

Q:
I don’t want to look back anymore. I’m ready to accept that my existence will sometimes contain pain. No more trying to escape, either through nostalgia or a memory chair. They’re both the same fucking thing.
Life with a cheat code isn’t life. Our existence isn’t something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain.
That’s what it is to be human—the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other. (c)
Q:
...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.” (c)
Q:
Out here on the platform, it’s like the world is screaming in her ear.
Lifting her face to the sky, she screams back. (c)
Q:
Dark thoughts are whispering to her again. (c)
Q:
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. (c)
Q:
Everything stops.
This timeline dying. (c)
Q:
Are the rest of my many lives nothing more than trying to figure a way out of this inescapable loop? (c)
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Moments of exhilaration from knowing they were the only two people in the world fighting to save it.
Moments of horror from the same realization, and the knowledge they were failing. (c)
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On the window glass overlooking the woods, the fundamental questions he wrote in black magic marker many years ago still taunt him, unanswered—
What is the Schwarzschild radius of a memory?
A wild notion…when we die, does the immense gravity of our collapsing memories create a micro black hole?
A wilder notion…does the memory-reactivation procedure—at the moment of death—then open a wormhole that connects our consciousness to an earlier version of ourselves?
He’s going to lose all of this knowledge. (c)
Q:
If they could prove the appearance of the entrance to a micro wormhole at the moment someone died in the tank, and a wormhole exit at the moment their consciousness re-spawned in their body at an earlier point in time, they might begin to understand the true mechanics of memory return. (c)
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Your perspective changes when you’ve lived countless lives. (c)
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“I walked into this room five minutes ago and had no idea what those equations meant. Then I suddenly had memories from this timeline and understood partial differential equations.” ...
“Remember what Marcus Slade said when we had him at gunpoint in his lab in that hotel?”
“You do realize, from my perspective, that was almost a hundred years and three timelines ago.” (c)
Q:
Who knows how many lives Slade lived, and what he learned? (c)
Q:
If matter can neither be created nor destroyed, where will all this matter go when this timeline ceases to exist? What’s happened to the matter of all the dead timelines they’ve left behind? Are they time-capsuled away in higher, unreachable dimensions? And if so, what is matter without time? Matter that doesn’t persist? What would that even look like? (c)
Q:
He has one last realization before his consciousness is catapulted from this dying reality—this deceleration of time means that Helena might be alive somewhere, dying in the tank right this second in order to kill this timeline and begin another.
And a glimmer of joy rides through him at the possibility that she lives, and the hope that, in this next reality, even if only for a moment, he will be with her again. (c)
Q:
By midnight, he is the Barry of many lifetimes... (c)
Q:
I love you. I’ll see you at the bottom of the world. (c)
Q:
It’s just a product of our evolution the way we experience reality and time from moment to moment. How we differentiate between past, present, and future. But we’re intelligent enough to be aware of the illusion, even as we live by it, and so, in moments like this—when I can imagine you sitting exactly where I am, listening to me, loving me, missing me—it tortures us. Because I’m locked in my moment, and you’re locked in yours. (c)
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People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.’ Einstein said that about his friend Michele Besso. Lovely, isn’t it? I think he was right. (c)
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I would say it was worth it to accidentally build a world-destroying chair because it brought you into my life, but that’s probably bad form. (c)
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The ache of the memory is gone, but he doesn’t begrudge its visitation. He’s lived long enough to know that the memory hurt because many years ago, in a dead timeline, he experienced a perfect moment. (c)
Q:
Space is one of the few places where time makes sense to him. He knows, on an intellectual level, that when he looks at any object, he’s looking back in time. In the case of his own hand, it takes the light a nanosecond—one billionth of a second—to transport the image to his eyes. When he looks at the research station from half a mile away, he’s seeing the structure as it existed 2,640 nanoseconds ago.
It seems instantaneous, and for all intents and purposes, it is.
But when Barry looks into the night sky, he’s seeing stars whose light took a year, or a hundred, or a million to reach him. The telescopes that peer into deep space are looking at ten-billion-year-old light from stars that coalesced just after the universe began.
He’s looking back, not just through space but through time. (c)
Q:
This is nothing like returning to a memory on a live timeline. That is a process of slowly embodying yourself as the sensations of the memory wash over you. You come into action and energy.
Here, there is none.
And it occurs to him—I am finally in a moment of now.
Whatever he is or has become, Barry registers a freedom of movement he has never known. He is no longer in three-dimensional space, and he wonders if this is what Slade meant by—And maybe you never will, unless you can travel the way I’ve traveled. Was this how Slade experienced the universe? (c)
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What if he could restart a dead memory by the sheer force of his consciousness breathing life and fire into the gray? (c)
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Just another instance of longing for the unreachable past? (c)
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Every memory he has ever made.
Every memory that has made him. (c)
Q:
The timeline he’s on is the original, and he’s accelerating upstream against the river of his life, crashing through forgotten moments, understanding finally that memory is all he’s made of.
All anything is made of.
When the needle of his consciousness touches a memory, his life begins to play, and he finds himself in a frozen moment— (c)
Q:
What teachers and professors never told her was about the dark side of finding your purpose. The part where it consumes you. (c)
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It is evident the mind does not know things immediately, but only by the intervention of the ideas it has of them. (c)
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Goes to parties he’s already been to, watches games he’s already seen, solves cases he’s already solved.
It makes him wonder about the déjà vu that haunted his previous life—the perpetual sense that he was doing or seeing something he’d already seen before.
And he wonders—is déjà vu actually the specter of false timelines that never happened but did, casting their shadows upon reality? (c)
Q:
“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.” (c)
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Clearly, some minds ... cannot handle the changing of their reality... (c)
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If we can’t rely on memory, our species will unravel. And it’s already beginning. (c)
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Their future seemed so full of promise, and she was killing it. (c)
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It is late autumn in the city, Barry thinking this reality is feeling more solid by the minute. No shifts threatening to upend everything. (c)
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For everyone but him, the past is a singular concept. (c)
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What do you say to the bravest woman you’ve ever known, whom you lived a half dozen extraordinary lives with, whom you saved the world with, who saved you in every conceivable way, but who has no idea you even exist? (c)
Q:
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. (c)
Q:
“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.” (c)
Q:
We are homesick most for the places we have never known.
—CARSON MCCULLERS (c)