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

at only in the reflection of his shield else he be turned to stone.

Karen greets him with a surprising hug.

“All the faculty heard about last night! I am so sorry that happened to you. What a crazy thing. Just horrible. We have the police investigating and the university is going to crack down. What those people will stoop to!”

“I’m not sure it was . . .” Kierk trails off when he sees her face. “Yeah, it was terrible. I’m just glad I was there I guess.”

A hand on his arm, she shows Kierk his computer terminal.

“I’m going to have to make some modifications,” he says, examining it.

“Why don’t you have a look first . . .” but already Kierk is hunting around for CPU towers to drag over to his desk. Carmen comes over and clears chairs out of the way as Kierk lugs over the last one.

“We’re in the same lab!” she says, brushing off the desk as he sets it down with a grunt.

“Yeah, it’s great,” Kierk says, sorting out a cord, then diving down underneath the desk into a forest of wires.

“So,” Carmen says, perching up on the desk above him, “what exactly are you doing with all these?”

“. . . network . . . neural sim . . . need . . . blue wire? . . . little doohickey on the end . . . look?”

She opens the drawers of nearby desks until she finds a tangled bunch of different covered cables to hand down to Kierk.

“So what are you doing?”

Kierk comes up for air. “I’m networking the computers together. Then I’ll model different regions of the cortex independently on each.” He brushes the dust off the top of one of the hard drives, then goes back down.

Carmen nods solemnly—“So the hardware will mimic the architecture of the neural network being simulated. Since there’s more intra-regional connections than inter-regional. Clever.”

Kierk immediately sits back onto one knee and looks up at her, surprised. “Yes, that’s exactly right.”

He’s been staring just a second too long when Karen saves him by tapping on his shoulder. “I come bearing MATLAB keys.”

Later Karen takes them on a tour, detailing the available equipment: electroencephalography (EEG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). At the same time she launches into her standard research spiel. In all scientists this is a practiced presentation as worn and automatic as a politician’s stump speech. Carmen gives Kierk a subtle look and he whispers—“Call Stockholm,” to which she stifles a laugh.

“. . . and using fMRI we’ve shown that changes in consciousness are accompanied only by changes in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Meaning that only a tiny, evolutionary-recent frontal part of the brain is actually doing any experiencing . . .”

Kierk lags behind, thinking—what a ridiculous and old hypothesis, that the entirety of mind is just a play of sartorial metaphysics, as if by adding a hat the entire outfit became conscious . . .

Carmen tugs his shirt, and Kierk, breaking from thought, follows her into the room dominated by the giant white children’s toy of the fMRI. Karen is talking about the time that she, as a graduate student, had the surreal experience of giving H. M., the man without a hippocampus and therefore infamous for his inability to form new memories, a similar tour of the lab, knowing that he would forget it all in several minutes. Carmen is reminded of the anecdote about what H. M. had kept in his wallet. A small, well-handled slip of paper that read—DAD’S DEAD. That struck her so hard she had nearly cried in class when her professor told them about it. But with Karen holding court she doesn’t mention it.

In the next room a medieval contraption occupies the center. It consists of a leather chair next to a table, and on the table is a buckled stand of hinged joints, like the bottom of a hideously heavy lamp, a base that rises up into a maw of metal and a wired-up football helmet with a tube-like tongue. Long hoses of wire snake around in loose nests. Arrays of monitors surround the homiletic contraption like withdrawn worshippers.

“It uses a fluctuating magnetic field to excite the neurons in the inferior temporal lobe. Subjects report feelings of religious hallucinations. We have another standard one for regular experiments, but this one is specially designed. It’s called the God Helmet.”

The three of them stand at the entrance of the room but do not enter.

“Did you know,” Karen continued, “that this machine simulates what some neurologists think happened to Saint Paul? On the road to Damascus. His conversion, his revelation. Just epilepsy. A localized temporal lobe seizure.”

“So do you want to try it?” she asks Kierk, who is staring at her.

He examines himself, searching.

“No, no. I don’t think I would, actually.”

Karen looks at him with sly eyes, as if he has told her a great secret.

“What about you, Carmen?” she asks.

“No. I guess I don’t want to either.”

Karen sighs. “Neither did I,” she finally says, and turns off the lights. As the door closes and the contraption is left to blink alone in the dark of the room its slavering outline looks to Kierk almost biological, like a creature crouching on its haunches in wait.

Later in the standard TMS and EEG lab Karen assesses Carmen’s technique as Carmen maneuvers the mesh net of recording electrodes onto Kierk’s hair, which leaves tufts of it sticking out like a captured sea anemone. Then Carmen pulls down the coil that is attached to a suitcase-size battery.

“Where are we going with that thing?” He eyes the coil.

“You don’t have any history of seizures, right?” Carmen says playfully.

“No, but—”

“Don’t worry, I’m just calibrating it.” She flicks on some dials. “I’ll start with a low, subthreshold pulse, very weak, in your motor cortex. Then build up slowly to find the right threshold until we get a motor result.”

Kierk makes a face. “Okay, but just keep that damn thing away from my Broca’s area. It’s