Recursion

Slade tells Helena that the human experience of time is just an evolutionary mechanism to help people respond to the world. Linear time is an illusion. Slade confirms he always planned to pursue time travel.

He says that he already met Helena in a previous timeline. In that timeline, she was working for a company called ION in San Francisco. He was 46, a drug addict, and ION hired him as Helena’s lab assistant. She had built a MEG microscope, deprivation tanks, and other equipment they now have on the rig. They made a breakthrough on November 2, 2018—nine years in the future from their current timeline.

On this day, Helena was running a memory reactivation on a subject named Jon Jordan. The memory was of Jon’s wife dying in a car accident. During the reactivation, Jon died of cardiac arrest. When he died, everyone in the lab suddenly appeared in different positions, with nosebleeds and some headaches. Jon, and all documentation of him, had vanished. The team discovered he had died in the car accident with his wife 15 years earlier.

Slade figured out that they had inadvertently sent Jon back in time. He worried Helena would realize this and destroy the chair.