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

“Whoa!” Alex says, as Mars Bars continues to eye Kierk angrily.

“Monkey,” Kierk says soothingly, “if you keep shaking your head, you are going to lobotomize yourself. Please, don’t shake your head.”

Mars Bars is looking at Kierk with a fierce intensity, still giving off a harsh hiss from thin lips. Kierk is struck by its frantic grin, its vivid maniacal expression. He feels like he has seen this before. Its lips look like they are whispering, and it seems it is trying to communicate something through its manic graze, like the macaque has just been being seized by something, possessed by a secret it wants to tell, filled with a preacher’s mania, a theological energy, a cosmological terror and ecstasy. Mars Bars, with his face stuck in a rictus of this expression, and his eyes locked on Kierk, begins to shake uncontrollably.

To shake and shake and shake.

Alone and outside the CNS, Carmen lights up a cigarette she had taken from Kierk’s desk. Her hands give off only the slightest tremor. The night outside is a thick cloud being relieved of heat by the breeze. Groups mingle as they head to local bars. She feels estranged from their laughter over simple things. They are not confronted, pushed against, by things beyond our current conceptions of the world. Normally she didn’t envy them, but right now she’d envy anyone who hadn’t seen that.

A deep drag. A flash of an image. It’s burned onto her visual cortex: the shaking and grinning form of Mars Bars, viewed through the portal window of the door. The short clip of memory has been running in her mind like an internet GIF played over and over—the top of him unhinging, dissolving into a cloud, a whiplash of pieces, a whirlwind of matter. And throughout it all, that grin.

The veterinarian, after arriving in profound shock, was apparently going to list the cause of death as “aggressive self-lobotomization.”

Kierk and Alex were still inside getting some kind of emergency immunizations, given their experiences in the room. Quarantine from which Carmen had been spared. Kierk hadn’t said much afterward, like he was avoiding her.

The whole thing reminded her of the dummy’s head in her apartment, her own fear. Had the monkey done it on purpose? Realized that this was his way out? Mars Bars had been, according to Alex at least, a relatively happy monkey who liked his treats and comforts. More probably, she thinks, he simply hadn’t had the ability to understand his situation. Which makes her think that maybe, in a way, everyone is like that. How are we all not just monkeys? Primates playing around with things we don’t understand, congratulating ourselves at being able to predict things better and better but irrevocably tainted by our primate-like nature, by the fact that we are evolved beings viewing only that tiny sliver of reality which maximized our fitness values. How was science not just better eyes for seeing more of the spectrum, or smaller fingers for manipulating more accurately, sonic amplifiers for greater hearing, logic an extension of our primitive reasoning abilities, statistics to pick up on correlations in nature better than we naturally could, and so on—just tools to supplement our bodies so we could survive a bit better, a bit longer. How was science not merely a collection of mental prostheses? And that’s so problematic, she thinks, because how could this trumped-up ape, aided only by some mechanical devices strapped to its limbs to extend its senses and a few calculating devices to extend its thinking, all modifications built on a limited foundation anyways, discover the real truth about the fundamental nature of reality? Maybe that’s horrible, or maybe that’s wonderful and beautiful, she thinks. Because to solve this great mystery of consciousness we therefore need something qualitatively different, as if the history of science has actually all been children playing with toys on the floor, and while I don’t know what consciousness is, my hope, my unsupportable hypothesis, a beautiful dream worth having, is that it’s a phenomenological signal, a qualitative bonfire etching itself onto reality. That people are transmitters and that consciousness is a radio to God. And it’s sending up our thoughts, always sending up our thoughts . . . all the feelings of the people passing me, everyone in the city, the entirety of the world, going up now, each conscious moment a kind of prayer, a rain in reverse . . .

There had been some sort of accident. Melissa Goldman had been waiting outside the recording room to greet Karen, her face lined with worry. As Karen approaches she decides to consciously break the normal workplace boundaries and takes Melissa’s anxious hands in her own. The two women stand this way as Melissa fills her in on the situation. Throughout, Karen can hear a low murmuring of voices from within, the quiet phonetic downward turns of instructions at an autopsy.

Eventually she and Melissa go inside, where the vets look up grimly from behind their personal protective gear. At the center of the room is slumped the body of Mars Bars. Karen flits away her glance but the image stays with her long after—the strange weight of the body, all of it tilted downward, its placid white-eyed death mask sending a visceral shock through her, the unnatural hang of its open mouth with the red tongue already blackening, all of it obscene in its slouching, all protuberances and parts made unfamiliar by death. The rest of the room isn’t much better. Bits of gore and brain are still being scooped up by the vets. One is taking pictures like a crime scene investigator.

“Kierk?” Karen asks.

“Currently being cleaned up.”

“Why is it always Kierk?” she says.

“No, he was in the room when it happened, but it wasn’t his fault. Mars Bars was in Alex’s care. Kierk got called in after, came to help, and was here for the worst of it.”

“Mm,” Karen replies,