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

great sigh, filling up his plate with cheese. He shakes his head, gestures with his toothpick over at Moretti’s table.

“Lot of bloviating over there. I’ll be honest, I think Kierk’s a dick. Then again, he might be a genius. But the complaints have reached the funders now so tell your boyfriend . . . I did what I could. I’m sorry.”

Max moves off into the crowd, grabs at a champagne glass and immediately begins to drain it. Carmen, with one look at the still-animated table, is already heading the other direction toward the exit, leaving Alex glancing around bewildered.

The tennis ball ricochets angrily off the wall, and Kierk slumps down to a sitting position on his mattress. He’s looking at his hands and feeling this space-time world line slip from his grasp, a rope falling away into darkness. He hasn’t been able to stop the mental replay of the fight, his words, Moretti’s words overlapping—and Kierk’s hatred is a sickly tide, a green and red synesthetic torrent; and high above it, from a tight, protected place, a small low voice of logic, telling him that he will remember the moment he made the decision to speak to Antonio, that he will remember it in a month, a year, in ten. That the decision will be one of the defining events of his life. Such a small movement on the tree of possibilities has destroyed everything, and he wishes desperately the world was like the video games he had played as a teenager so that he could reload some previous save—why should this be so irrevocable?

A knock on the door. He jerks up from his slump, his mind focused for the first time since he’d left the CNS. Right before he looks through the peephole he hears a questioning call—“Kierk?”—so he throws the door open to Carmen in a dress clutching her purse to her chest and looking worried.

To her, Kierk looks wild, his eyes emotional, tired and angry. When he sees her he just puzzles his face, waiting for her to act, and Carmen doesn’t know what to do.

“I wanted to come by, I heard . . .” she starts, but he just waits, leaning there against the door, so she continues—“Did you eat dinner? ’Cause I was thinking of making something, maybe I could do that here, or if you wanted to get a drink . . .”

“Come in,” Kierk finally says, waving her in, and Carmen enters his apartment for the first time. Initially what Carmen notices is the spartan nature of it. She surveys the white walls of the small living room area, a place unfurnished except a worn, standard-issue couch. On the floor there are books forming small towers, bibliocolonies spread out and constructed into parapets and castles, falling into spilled arrays, interspersed with a few tennis balls—she reads titles like Nonlinear Dynamical Systems Theory and An Introduction to Set Theoretic Paradoxes and Moby-Dick; or, The Whale and Causation: a Mathematical Exploration and Introduction to Quantum Physics: Vol 2 and Connectionist Principles and Crime and Punishment and The Logical Structure of Reality and Conscious Experience and Short Biographies of Prominent Intellectuals and Timaeus and Information Theory Proofs and Infinite Jest and En glish Poetry: 16–19th Centuries and on and on. She notices in a corner there is one of those blocks of printer paper they sell at UPS stores that had been torn open and half emptied, which accounts for the scribbled-on sheets laid out everywhere, so many that she had, she now realizes, originally mistaken the floor for tiling but actually at its edges there’s a scruffy carpet. The floor-covering layer of paper forms almost a canvas and on it those harsh scribbles and diagrams, unreadable and hieroglyphic. Kierk is silent behind her leaning against the wall in the hallway as she takes it all in, then she slowly steps over to the kitchen and opens the refrigerator door to find it bright and humming and empty but for a packet of butter, and in the freezer only a plastic ice-cube tray, and after she closes it she gives up on looking like she’s examining the apartment by happenstance and now openly catalogs the contents of his kitchen, rummaging through empty drawer after empty drawer, finding only a single salt shaker, one pan, a stack of paper plates in ripped plastic. Sitting drying on the counter is a single plastic fork that Carmen picks up and holds in her hands, looking at the small tines. On cradling it she feels a wave of inconsolable sadness sweep over her—an ache in her heart pulls at her eyes and mouth like there is a string between the pit in her chest and her face. At the same time she feels an anger toward this man who has been so studiously ignoring her, pretending nothing happened.

“Predators run for their supper. Prey run for their lives,” he says, then gestures one hand around like what he just said was an explanation for the state of the apartment.

“What is all this? What are you working on?” She already knows the answer. She sees it in the arrows and diagrams and equations in his haphazard scrawl; even the air feels hothouse-hot from thinking, from the growth of invisible things, as if in the small one-bedroom apartment an entire jungle had grown up, died out without a trace, grown up again, on and on, cyclic with Kierk’s moods, thoughts, ravings, the boom and bust lifecycle of ideas rushing in to fill the space, failing, detritivores rushing in again to trigger pullulate growth. An ecology of mind. Inhalation wets her lungs.

“In every field I look I find the same thing . . . I fought with Moretti about it today . . .” He rubs at his face violently. “Here, let me give you an example. Neuroscience relies on information theory, but information theory presupposes an observer. A conscious observer. Causation presupposes a . . . a set of counterfactuals, a set