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

“I’m sorry but why are you asking about this? Why now?”

“Oh, just personal curiosity on my part. But at an institutional level . . . Well let’s just say that the timescale we’re operating on is perhaps a bit longer than you’re used to. Maintaining the individuality of consciousness is essential for the continuation of democracy as we know it. And thus America as we know it. Eventually a confrontation may be inevitable in regard to ourselves.”

The DARPA agent gestures to the passersby on the street, all unique, brushing past one another in all colors, complexions, genders, classes, clothing; the movement chaotic at the local level but each trajectory perfectly sorting into a pattern absent of collisions, people self-organized into a fluid.

The agent says—“This period of personal and individuated consciousnesses may just be a historical interlude. The next emergent step may be inevitable. Brain-to-brain group minds will be the norm. Maybe even in just a few hundred years they’ll think we were primitive barbarians because of the antiquated individuated way we lived. How to communicate to such a future what it was like to be an individual, to have just one body, to wake up alone in your own head every day?”

Kierk doesn’t know what to say to this so he just takes out a cigarette and proffers it, but the agent shakes his head.

“Well, sorry this was such a short meeting, Kierk. I wish it had been longer but I’ve enjoyed our conversation . . . So I will say to you what I came to say. And that is that we’d encourage you, strongly, to stay on. That is, we’d like you to get one of the positions. However, our influence is not infinite. Everything is bureaucracy, in the end.”

“Why do you want me to get one of the positions?” Kierk asks, blowing smoke that dissolves in the light.

“There may be, in the near future, certain . . . think tanks, appropriate for you. But you don’t even officially have a PhD yet. That’s problematic. Please, if you can, keep your head down, and it may be possible to secure you a position. Or even something bigger.”

“Bigger like what?”

“DARPA and the DoD view the problem of consciousness as central to maintaining technological sovereignty. Of course, this is also a concern for NASA. Perhaps a sort of Manhattan project will be set up. I’m sorry I can’t be more definite. I advocate for the problem’s importance within the organization but I am merely one voice. Anyways it’s been a pleasure—”

“Wait wait wait. There’s something I need to ask you. Concerning Atif.”

The DARPA agent frowns. “Yes, we had high hopes for Atif as well. That was very unfortunate.”

“Too unfortunate. Some of the Crick Scholars, myself included, suspect . . . how do I say this . . . foul play?”

The DARPA agent looks askance at Kierk. “You believe that Atif was murdered?”

“And you . . . DARPA . . . wouldn’t have had anything to do with it,” Kierk probes.

“My my, you truly do believe it. Interesting. No. To answer your question. Of course not. DARPA and the DoD have no interest in murdering scientists, just funding them.”

“He was Indian. Ethnically and nationally.”

“Atif was a citizen of the world. According to his file he was probably more loyal to Britain than India. He had no nationalistic leanings.”

“Perhaps you were scared that he had figured it out. You want the secret of consciousnesses to yourself. Like the A-bomb. Think what you could do with it.”

The DARPA agent laughs easily. “Like I said, given that Atif was chosen specifically as part of our funded program to work on this problem, what sense would it make to . . . eliminate him?” With no answer forthcoming from Kierk he says—“I’ll tell you what. I’ll look into it. Although it certainly wasn’t DARPA or the DoD. And I can’t promise anything. This may just be your imagination.”

“We understand that.”

“Alright, well, I could make a phone call to some friends in the FBI.” He shakes out his sweat-stained Hawaiian shirt, squints up at the sky. “It’s been a pleasure, Kierk.”

“Wait. I never got your name.”

“Well, it’s not like I’m some sort of secret agent,” he says, and lets out a hollow laugh. “Anyways, keep cool. Get out of this heat. I’m sure we’ll see each other again.”

Slipping back on his sunglasses the DARPA agent nods promptly to Kierk and then merges into the stream of individual passersby and is quickly enveloped, just one of the crowd, utterly average-looking, until Kierk loses sight of him.

Wandering, smoking, watching, Kierk eventually heads over to Washington Square Park and begins to trace out a continual circle around the fountain as the families and street performers play around him and the arch dusks itself orange before the curtain of dark is drawn down over the city’s game of faces. The conversation has left Kierk spun; he’s become a revolving galaxy of thoughts, watching a future history bloom on fast-forward as considerations of post-biological group minds run away with him, clash with the normality of the busyness of the park, the comings and goings; he feels like he has just brushed up against something beyond that is straining to get in, a Second Coming hundreds of years hence that could not be described as either beautiful or horrific for it will be just a roar beyond human comprehension, speeding toward them all backward in history, its manifestations echoing in retrograde through time like ripples spreading out in the small pond of space-time. And who will cast that first stone?

His peripatetic wandering, cut with wonderment and fear, has taken him once more to Bleecker Street Station. Entering down the stairs is like descending into a clay oven that is simultaneously an organ breathing away in machine dreams. Even through his dress shoes the ground radiates an organic heat and the metal he touches hums hot. In this aquarium air he swims about, misting,