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Recursion
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Book 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 4
Chapter Summary: “HELENA - November 15, 2018-April 16, 2019”
Two guards, Alonzo and Jessica hold Helena captive in a New York apartment. Rajesh visits. He explains that Barry is dead, and DARPA is detaining Helena. He offers Helena employment. She refuses.
Days later, Jessica drives Helena to meet DARPA employee John Shaw, who has been reconstructing the chair. Raj is in the DARPA lab, along with Timoney Rodriguez, a young soldier. John sends Timoney into a memory.
After Timoney flatlines, Helena discovers that a recent school shooting has become a dead memory. In this timeline, the shooter was immediately killed by an anonymous vigilante.
Despite her objections, Helena begins working with DARPA. The team is joined by Steve Crowder, a young Navy SEAL, and Albert Kinney, a systems theorist. They agree to cap memories at five days old and vote on every assignment. They use the chair to stop a child killer, a college shooting, and a terrorist attack.
John is pressured to disclose their work. Soon, they receive a military-related mandated assignment from 76 days ago. The memories vanishing and reappearing disorients the public. The team receives more military assignments.
On her way to DARPA one day, Helena is caught in a bombing and killed. She wakes up in a new timeline in her apartment. The Big Bend is on fire. John calls, saying DARPA is not responsible for the shifts.
The timeline rapidly shifts four times, showing scenes of the bombing. Panicking, many people commit suicide.
The timeline changes. Helena is in DARPA. The bombing never happened. John announces the chair’s schematics leaked a year ago. An anonymous group has claimed credit for the bombing. John admits Helena was right.
Helena maps a memory of driving at age 16. She gets into the tank.
Chapter Summary: “HELENA - October 15, 1986”
Helena, in her 16-year-old body, drives home in her family car in Colorado. She talks to and embraces her dad, then finds her young mother smoking and reading a romance novel. Helena hugs Dorothy and cries. She goes into her room, which is just like she remembers it. Helena opens a notebook, feeling afraid that she will somehow lose her memories. She writes herself a note, saying that on April 16, 2019, the world will remember the chair. She has 33 years to stop this from happening.
Book 4 Analysis
Book Four is the first section of the novel told exclusively from a single character’s perspective. Barry is dead for the entire duration of this section, which changes the format of the section: instead of being divided into alternating chapters, the only chapter break in Book Four occurs when Helena goes back in time to her childhood. The change in format both highlights Helena’s isolation and underscores her anxiety about not knowing when her work with DARPA will ever conclude.
A major theme of this section is the moral grayness of using potentially dangerous technology. Helena is now completely opposed to the chair being used in any situation. At first, she refuses to work with DARPA at all. She only agrees to join the team once she is convinced that they need a skeptical voice to keep the use of the chair limited. To an extent, this section explores what the world could be like if the chair was used in an ideal way: if it was only controlled by individuals with truly good intentions, and if every use was carefully considered and controlled. John Shaw doesn’t want to believe Helena when she insists that the chair will always lead to destruction, but he and the rest of the team remain sympathetic characters. Unlike Slade, John is genuinely trying to make the world a better place.
Even Helena, who repeatedly argues that they should destroy the chair, sometimes believes they can use the chair to make a positive difference. The first time the team agrees to use the chair, they kill a serial killer and rapist who has been attacking children. Helena is so emotionally affected by this story that she advises the team to leave the body somewhere visible to make an example of the killer. Even though Helena opposes using the chair, she also wants the world to know that someone is exacting justice against people who commit atrocities.
Ironically, this desire could be read as Helena confirming her own worst fear: that the power of the chair is too much for even well-intentioned people to resist. Helena strongly insists that humans cannot be trusted with technology that has the power to completely change the world. The co-option of the chair by the military, and then the use of the technology by the anonymous terrorist organization, confirms this belief.
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By Blake Crouch
