Helena Smith is a brilliant neuroscientist who can't bear to watch her mother slowly lose her mind to Alzheimer's Disease. Like other dementia patients, Helena's mom is losing her memories, and will eventually recall nothing of her life or family.
In an effort to help her mother and other people suffering from Alzheimer's, Helena is trying to develop a technology that will capture a person's memories, so they can be retrieved at a later time.
Put very simply, the proposed device is a chair with a helmet that maps the hundreds of millions of neurons that fire during a memory, like when you remember going to Baskin Robbins.
Later on, stimulation of those exact neurons will vividly reactivate the memory of going to the ice cream shop.
By 2007 Helena's research money is running out and multi-billionaire Marcus Slade makes an offer she can't refuse. So Helena is soon living and working on a re-purposed oil rig in the middle of the ocean, hundreds of miles from shore. There Helena is supervising teams of scientists and computer engineers.....all of whom are working to perfect the chair.
Slade has a huge secret, however - an ulterior motive for funding Helena's research. He wants to couple the chair with a sensory deprivation tank which - through the magic of (made up) science - will physically send a subject back to the time of the memory.
So, if a subject's recollection is sitting on a lounge chair ten years ago, watching a baseball game - and they use the chair and deprivation tank - they WILL BE ten years younger, sitting on a lounge chair watching a baseball game. The subject can then re-live their life from that point on.
This allows the subject to go to a different college; marry a more compatible spouse (or stay single); choose an alternate career; live in another state; and so on. The original timeline becomes 'dead' and doesn't continue. The thing is, everyone in the subject's orbit (spouse, friends, children, colleagues, teachers, etc.) is set back ten years. Get it?
The fly in the ointment is this: When the subject ages ten years and reaches the moment they went back in time, all the dead memories come flooding back (for everyone). This leads to a phenomenon called 'False Memory Syndrome' (FMS), where people recall having two very different lives, both of which seem completely real.
This occurrence is extremely upsetting. It leads to disorientation, psychosis, suicide, and so on.
*****
Jump ahead to 2018 and NYPD Detective Barry Sutton is called to the top of the Poe Building in Manhattan, where a woman named Ann Voss Peters is threatening to commit suicide.
Ann tells Barry that she's suffering from FMS. She goes on to say she's single and living in New York, but she has vivid memories of being married, having a son, and residing in Vermont. The dissonance is too much, and Ann ends her life.
Barry is upset by the incident and decides to look into Ann's story about a 'phantom husband and child.' This brings Barry to the attention of people who lure him to 'Hotel Memory', a nondescript building in Manhattan with a high-security entrance.
There Barry gets the opportunity to go back 11 years and undo the hit-and- run death of his teenage daughter while she was walking to Dairy Queen.
*****
The book alternates back and forth between the 2007 time period and the 2018 time period. Barry and Helena eventually meet, and their combined tale drives a good bit of the story.
True to the law of unintended consequences, rearranging history tends to have dire results. Even with the best of intentions, humans mess things up....and not everyone has good intentions.
I like the imaginative premise of the book, and the explanations of the 'science', which is interesting. However, the last third of the story is overly repetitive and has too much treacly romance for my taste.
Overall this is good speculative science fiction, recommended to fans of the genre.
Thanks to Netgalley, the author (Blake Crouch), and the publisher (Crown) for a copy of the book.
Rating: 3.5 stars
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