Recursion

“He is always looking back, living more in memories than the present, often altering them to make them prettier. To make them perfect. Nostalgia is as much an analgesic for him as alcohol.”

At lunch for Meghan’s 26th birthday, Julia and Barry compare their memories of a camping trip they took as a family. Barry remembers the night being clear and beautiful, but Julia corrects him, saying they were caught in a rainstorm that ruined the whole experience. This passage indicates the subjectivity of memory that will continue to be important in Barry’s character arc, and it also sets up his eventual decision to let go of his nostalgia and embrace reality.

“Nothing can be controlled. Only endured.”

Barry thinks this while reminiscing about Meghan with Julia. He reflects that his life didn’t turn out the way he expected or wanted, and that the best way to survive is to grit your teeth through difficult moments. By the end of the novel, Barry’s perspective has changed. He begins to understand that he can celebrate his life, and that it’s never too late to pursue the kind of life he wants.

“Being in her presence slashed through the dream-withdrawal; he didn't want her. It was a liberating revelation, even as it devastated him. Liberating because it meant he didn't love this Julia—he loved the person she used to be. Devastating because the woman who haunted his dreams was truly gone. As unreachable as the dead.”

Barry realizes that, although he has missed Julia for a long time, he is no longer in love with her. This highlights the trouble with nostalgia: it encourages longing for something that doesn’t exist. This passage also indicates that Barry might be closer than he thinks he is to moving on and forming a new romantic relationship.

“No, I mean when a person is infected with FMS, some of the people they know become infected. Their parents will share the same false memories, but to a lesser degree. Their brothers, sisters, close friends.”

Here, Barry is recounting what he knows of FMS to Gwen. This conversation gives an important clue about the source of alternate memories. People who share social groups also share alternate memories, because these memories do not actually come from an ailment that a single individual “catches.” Rather, it’s an entire alternate life.

“The despair is only an illusion, a trick the darkness plays.”

Barry, drunk in Gwen's apartment, thinks about Meghan and his father, who died when Barry was a teenager. He wonders if his father knew that Barry loved him. Barry’s idea that “despair is an illusion” echoes statements Slade, Vince, and Helena will make about linear time being an illusion that depends on environment and circumstance. This line also foreshadows Barry’s opportunity to say goodbye to his mother before she dies, and the gratitude he will feel that he can at least make sure she knows he loves her.

“Because memory…is everything. Physically speaking, a memory is nothing but a specific combination of neurons firing together—a symphony of neural activity. But in actuality, it’s the filter between us and reality. You think you’re tasting this wine, hearing the words I’m saying, in the present, but there’s no such thing. The neural impulses from your taste buds and your ears get transmitted to your brain, which processes them and dumps them into working memory—so by the time you know you’re experiencing something, it’s already in the past. Already a memory.”

Helena explains her passion for memory research to Slade. Although Helena doesn’t know it yet, she is the brains behind Slade’s success, and passages like this make it clear that she is more educated about memory than Slade will ever be. The way she talks about memory is also slightly different from Slade, who repeatedly dismisses linear time as “just an illusion.” To Helena, everything is a memory, meaning the present is something of an illusion, but it’s also critically important to making sense of the world.

“It occurs to her that, if this friction continues, a day may come when Slade revokes her access to the memory platform. Perhaps she can persuade Raj to build her a clandestine, secondary user account just in case.”

Helena is beginning to realize that Slade knows more than he is revealing, and t he is intentionally putting her in a position where she could be ousted from the project. Although Helena is starting to plan ways to rebel against Slade, she still doesn’t realize that she is truly the brains behind the chair. She will grow more self-assured as the novel progresses, but for now, her instinct is still to solicit help from Raj.

“Time is an illusion, a construct made out of human memory. There’s no such thing as the past, the present, or the future. It’s all happening now.”

After Barry goes back to 2007, Vince explains his understanding of time. This is Barry’s introduction to non-linear time, and it is also one of the clearest explanations of the novel’s philosophy on time. Many theorists and philosophers have explored similar ideas, including Gilles Deleuze, who described “sheets of past” that laid atop one another, rather than events existing on a linear timeline.

“Consciousness is a result of environment. Our cognitions—our idea of reality—are shaped by what we can perceive, by the limitations of our senses. We think we’re seeing the world as it really is, but you of all people know…it’s all just shadows on the cave’s wall.”

Slade explains his philosophy to Helena as he tries to get her on board with his plans for time travel. In this quote, Slade is referencing Plato’s allegory of the cave, which likens the human understanding of reality to the experience of captives chained to the side of a cave. These captives can see shadows projected on the wall, but they cannot see their source and therefore take the shadows for reality. Slade is suggesting that the way people experience time is similarly limited, and time travel could lead to an advanced form of cognition.

“Helena thinking—this disease is some sadistic, schizophrenic form of memory travel, flinging its victims across the expanse of their life, tricking them into thinking they're living in the past. Cutting them adrift in time.”

Helena visits her mother in her care facility and sees that her Alzheimer’s has greatly progressed. Although Helena initially created the chair with the hope of saving her mother, she begins to see parallels between the confusion of Alzheimer’s and the confusion generated by fractured timelines. 

“You are the best thing I ever did.”

This is what Dorothy says to Helena during her one moment of lucidity during Helena’s visit. It’s an important moment of love and affirmation for Helena, who has spent so much of her life trying to help her mother, and who now feels she has failed her. This moment also echoes Barry’s love for Meghan and his sense that everything he went through was worth it if he got to be her father.

“He had always blamed Meghan’s death for his and Julia’s demise. It was their family—the three of them—that united him and Julia. When Meghan died, that bond disintegrated in the span of a year. His second journey through their marriage had just been a slower, less dramatic death, brought on by Meghan growing up and pulling back and making her own way in life.”

This passage marks the beginning of Barry’s overall acceptance of his life. Although he doesn’t yet know that he will eventually return to a timeline in which Meghan has died, he starts to understand that time is complicated, and not everything in the past can or should be changed.

“If memory is unreliable, if the past and the present can simply change without warning, then fact and truth will cease to exist. How do we live in a world like that?”

This statement comes from an “FMS expert” speaking on CNN during the first timeline convergence that affects the entire city of New York. Counter to Slade’s position that embracing the unreality of linear time will lead to higher cognition, this speaker points out that linear time is necessary for humans to make sense of their world.

“The thing that disarms him is the kindness in her green eyes, and something else, which strikes him—oddly—as familiarity.”

Seeing Helena for the first time, Barry is immediately drawn to her, foreshadowing their romantic relationship. The familiarity he senses from Helena is entirely real, as she has already experienced a timeline in which they met and fell in love. Like Déjà vu, this sense of familiarity might occur naturally (i.e., as an expression of romantic attraction), but it comes from time travel and alternate timelines.

“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.”

1.   After telling Barry the whole story of building the chair and of how they met, Helena explains their plan to take control of Hotel Memory. This passage indicates the degree to which Helena feels responsible for the memory chair and its resulting chaos, and it highlights her dedication to destroying the chair. This is the attitude Helena will maintain through the rest of the novel, informing all her future actions.

“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.”

Slade explains how his overuse of the chair resulted in him not being able to use it at all. This foreshadows Book Five, in which Helena travels across timelines so many times she eventually loses her ability to do so and eventually dies.

“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.”

Working with DARPA, Helena begins to consider that time travel might be used for good. This is the closest Helena comes to condoning the chair’s use in the novel, which also serves as a reminder that even the most principled individuals have trouble refusing the chair’s power. 

“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.”

In this passage, Helena convinces John to exercise some discretion when using the chair. With this thought exercise, she illustrates how making major changes to history can have unintended and dire consequences, regardless of how well-intended they might be. This is the speech that convinces John to limit time travel to five days.

“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 way of assassinating a long-dead dictator of whatever—wins.”

After the chair’s schematics leak, John realizes that there is nothing stopping anyone with the ability from building a chair of their own. He has finally fully realized the weight of the chair’s power. This terrifying prophecy is what motivates Helena to return to age 16 for the first time and try to erase the chair from the world.

“‘I’ll be in that Portland bar in October 1990, waiting for you.’ ‘You won’t even recognize me.’ ‘My soul knows your soul. In any time.’”

This exchange between Barry and Helena articulates their devotion to one another. Barry tells Helena that when she restarts the timeline, he will be “waiting for her,” even though he will not, technically, know who she is. Barry insists that no matter how difficult the next timeline is, he wants to share the burden with Helena. He is right, as there is never another timeline in which he meets Helena and doesn’t love her. 

“I've experienced over two hundred years, and at the end of it all, I think Slade was right. 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 this 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.”

After Helena loses her ability to map memories and dies in Antarctica, she leaves Barry a video of herself to comfort him. In this passage, Helena integrates multiple philosophies on the nature of time: she concedes that linear time is an illusion, but the illusion is still important. Acknowledging that time is illusory doesn’t make it any less real, and it does not erase grief. There may be comfort in knowing that a loved one still exists in the past, but grief derives from separation.

“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 as the universe began. He's looking back, not just through space but through time.”

Barry gazes up at stars after Helena's death, preparing to commit suicide. Even while his personal understanding of time has evolved enormously, his understanding of looking at space has remained constant. Space, he realizes, gives everyone the opportunity to consciously witness the past from the present. Even prior to the chair’s invention, phenomena like this has complicated the human experience of time.

“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. That's what it is to be human—the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.”

While traveling through his memories of the original timeline, Barry consciously realizes how tempting it is to sink into warm memories and avoid his present reality. He reflects that pain, even the immense pain of losing his daughter, is part of what forms his life. Love and death are not oppositional, but they help to define one another.