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1-Page Summary of Recursion
Overall Summary
A detective with the NYPD named Barry Sutton witnesses a woman named Ann Voss Peters commit suicide in 2018. She had something called FMS, which is a mysterious ailment that causes people to gain alternate memories.
Barry (the protagonist) has lunch with his ex-wife, Julia. This is a bittersweet occasion because it’s the day of their daughter Meghan’s birthday, who died in 2007. Barry investigates Ann and her false memories. He ends up at Hotel Memory where he meets Marcus Slade (a villain). When Barry goes back to save Meghan, he discovers that she committed suicide after living through the same life as him all over again.
A neuroscientist, Helena Smith, is hired by an oil rig inventor named Marcus Slade. She creates a chair that allows the subject to re-experience a previously recorded memory. However, Slade is not satisfied and pushes the team to invent a deprivation tank that makes it possible to literally reenter memories by dying in the present and traveling back in time. Believing Slade is dangerous, Helena uses the tank to travel back in time and goes into hiding with Barry (a man she had met earlier). During this timeline, she meets Barry and together they plan to stop Slade from gaining control of her technology for his own purposes. Helena realizes that in a previous timeline she had invented time travel inadvertently while working on another project for Slade; he then killed her so he could have sole control over it. In 2018 she returns from 2028 hoping to warn Barry about storming Hotel Memory where many people will be hurt or killed if they try fighting against Slade’s forces directly as planned before going into hiding again without telling him why due to their romance having caused complications during her previous attempt at stopping him.
Helena and Barry attempt to take over Hotel Memory in 2018. They fail at this, but during the mission a SWAT team kills Barry, while DARPA detains Helena. She starts working with DARPA to rebuild the chair for good purposes, but they eventually take over the project. The numerous time shifts lead to mass confusion among everyone involved. Eventually schematics of how to build memory chairs leak out onto the Internet, allowing governments and terror organizations to make their own versions of these devices. In an effort to find a solution that will stop all this madness from happening again, Helena goes back in time and spends her life looking for answers until she’s 16 years old.
Barry wakes up in a new timeline, but he remembers the previous one. He and Helena have been trying to erase the fractured memories for years with no success. Barry decides that he has to go back in time before Slade kills Helena, but she dies during his first attempt at changing history. Barry goes back again and again until finally they succeed.
Barry remembers having lunch with Julia and killing Slade. He finds Helena at a bar.
Chapter: “BARRY – November 2, 2018”
A robbery detective arrives at an office building. He’s responding to a suicide threat. When he gets to the 41st floor, he finds a woman who says she has FMS—false memory syndrome. The detective is alarmed because he knows that FMS is something that isn’t real and can be dangerous for the person who thinks they have it.
Ann tells Barry that she has memories of a life where she was married to Joe Behrman and had a son named Sam. She got headaches and nosebleeds when these memories came back, but they’re in black-and-white. She desperately wants to get back into this alternate life, so she tracked down Joe Behrman, but he acted like he didn’t know her.
