The Revelations by Erik Hoel (e ink ebook reader txt) 📕

off in secrets, and after the headlights of Antonio’s car pulled out Kierk had been left alone, just him, the low-hanging moon, and an owl landing like a horned messenger in the trees. Kierk had followed its tufted shadow as it had winged from tree to tree, followed it as it followed the moon, and he himself then became a whipping form, a thing left running, a poet of the secrets kept by the grasses and the trees and the owl, real things casting shadows which were words which were thoughts, the living park a great mystery speaking to itself in the dark, a hued eye cracking, an old Egyptian myth reincarnated again, an irreducible animus, all of it alive, part of some larger structure, and everything had seemed possible to his running form as he sprinted across a field and into the soft bulk of night yelling at the moon, which yelled back in its stone language. He was right where he should be. All was phenomenon.

Now those early experiences under Antonio Moretti seem like another life. He can’t believe it’s only been weeks since he moved to New York. The city is already familiar to him: its frenetic pace, the clockwork and machina of it, the curbs littered with garbage, the food trucks, the skateboarders, the beautiful women in their summer dresses, the yellow cabs glinting like beetles in the sun, the lances of buildings, the feeling of possibility. Lately every day has seemed voluminous in its contents. Comparatively, the last few months in California had been a trickle, a blur. He can pick out individual events but not days. Kierk knows that this is a common psychological effect. A week of vacation is clear and extended, lingering and rich, while a week of normal routine flies by. An exemplar case: Kierk as a skinny kid, his hair everywhere, his limbs thin around knobby red knees and elbows, up in a tree, his hands sticky with sap. Not sticky enough. The branch in one hand had broken and he had slipped off, a long fall where he somehow had the time to maneuver his body so that he rolled down into pine needles when he hit. Thought he was dying before his breath came back. Time during that fall had been like a big bubble. The current neuroscientific explanation for the effect is that memories are laid down in greater detail and in greater number during novel experiences, so it really just seems as if subjective time slows. But to Kierk this can’t be the entire explanation; rather, it has to be that each conscious moment is actually deeper, richer—there is a greater volume of consciousness. Or in a more Jamesian phrasing, time is the depth of the river of consciousness. And normal language doesn’t have that distinction at hand, so people say time slowed down, when really they should have said—“There was more me. I existed more.” In which case the amount of time experienced is a function of the richness of the experience. Maybe a bug’s life, with its consciousness of tiny volume, rushes by in a subjective blink. Maybe a dog’s days are like water, the stream of their entire life rushing by intrinsically at the same speed at which a year passes for humans. In the reduced consciousness of dreams the events are compressed, happening over and over in an impossible time frame. What about for a cerebral organ-oid? Kierk’s deformed clone, its life one contextless dream, its fluttering experience a thin fast-flowing liquid. And for a hypothetical being with an infinitely rich consciousness time would never pass—frozen, it would live forever in its own subjective moment even as the rest of the universe spun the way toward heat death.

Kierk, shuffling out papers with equations scrawled on them, chewing on a pencil, spirals once again, moth to flame.

THURSDAY

Kierk wakes up rapidly expanding from a smaller trickle. He’s leaving a dream filled with only the vaguest outlines, tall creatures lacking all definite form or identity, sensed not by vision but almost as if by vibration. Giant figures that had emitted nonsensical sounds crouched before him. And then some force brought him from the dream and deposited him into sunlight and a fully grown body pleasurably resting under a cool sheet.

The walk to the CNS is so windy it actually slows him down. Above the clouds are streaking and rolling across the sky, furrows and troughs of them, blurring together. He thinks that clouds are all pulling a neat trick on us, fooling us into thinking them separate, when really there is only one cloud . . .

Arriving at the CNS his mind is all maths, the problem of consciousness a great puzzle laid out before him. He feels on the verge of a critical avalanche. There’s a momentum behind everything he’s doing and he doesn’t want to lose it, he wants to keep this cognitive engine running as long as possible, putting in everything to burn, filling it with the buckshot of his meager young life, stuffing it with everything he has left.

Busting through doors suspended an inch from their frame, racing down corridors, bounding off corners. Faces he doesn’t recognize jump out of his way. The text from Alex had just read HELP ME ASAP REC ROOM. Only a brief stop to yell at an undergrad about where the recording rooms for primate research are.

Turning another corner, he sees the door to the recording room just as Carmen skids into him.

“You got the—”

“Go!”

They sprint down the hall together—Kierk body-slamming the last door open so that Carmen can race through—and find Alex standing outside the entrance to a recording chamber in full personal protective gear, his mask pulled down to reveal a wild look on his face.

“Oh, thank god!”

“What’s going on?”

“Mars Bars. It’s Mars Bars.”

Carmen, after a moment where she considers whether she just had a stroke—“Your damn monkey?” She exchanges glances with Kierk.

“We thought—”

Alex makes a face—“What? No. I have a