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

of possible world and distance and difference relations. Again provided by an observer. In computation: a readout, or code. Again provided by an observer. In biology there’s teleology and function, the notion of some fundamental unit of selection . . . again provided by an observer. In physics it’s all over the place. Quantum physics, possibly. But also maybe renormalization group theory. The flow of time. Some other issues. All of science has these . . . classical conscious observer mechanics. Do you remember our conversation at the bar together? That first night? We talked about how the relations of the brain, the relationships between the neurons, the, the damn meaning of it all, where all the consciousness must be hidden, is itself dependent on some consciousness. Dependent on an observer consciousness to carve out those relations. To say what’s what. And it’s true everywhere I look. In every science I find the same thing: frame-variance. Trace back any field for long enough and you’ll find observers standing at the end of a long regression. I thought maybe I could define the phenomenon as a kind of operator that conscious beings apply to systems to give them definitiveness. Then you can apply this hypothesized observer-operator to get semantic contents from mere syntax. You can apply it in the form of interventions to get causal structure. To get borders from chaos. Spatiotemporal scale. Functions. Probability. Difference. That sort of thing. The operator really triggers a form of collapse, in a sense. Ontological collapse brought about by conscious observation. I don’t mean in physics, I’m not talking about that, but something resting at the heart of nearly every scientific field. And this can all be formalized mathematically!”

For Carmen, sympathy mixes with awe. Once mixed, they cannot be separated. Careful not to sound accusative, she says—“Kierk . . . When was the last time you ate?”

He looks confused, then shakes his head vaguely.

She continues—“All the easy stuff was figured out first. And here you are. You’ve chosen what might just be the most difficult problem in all the universe and declared you will throw your life against it like your existence is just some sort of weapon. Is this why you’ve been . . . you’ve been . . . ?”

When she looks like she might cry, he shakes more viciously. “No, you don’t know. There is a duty to genius.” One finger points to the floor, to all of it. He expels the words with force. “There. Is. A. Duty.”

“I know. I know. But are you okay?”

“Does it look like it?”

“Kierk, he has so much control over you. Don’t let him. Just stop. Stop seeking his approval.”

His face is tortured. “He’s still the smartest person I’ve ever met.”

Carmen starts to cry. She sits down beside him, grabbing at his arm.

“I’m out, Carmen. I’m out of the program. Karen saw Moretti and me in a shouting match. I can already see it coming. Karen is going to get the committee together and we’re all going to have a little chat . . . I can’t go through this again.”

“No,” she says, grabbing his arm. “You have to stay and fight. You have to. It’s not fair. And we’re so close. Listen, listen. Moretti, he was here. He was in town the night that Atif died.”

Kierk’s face transforms from sadness to confusion, then to something like pity.

“What are you talking about, Carmen?”

“Well, I . . .”

“No. What are you talking about?”

“I just meant . . .”

“That’s insane. He’s many things, but he’s not a murderer. There is no murderer.”

“. . . What do you mean?”

“How long do you want to do this, Carmen?”

“Do what? Us? The investigation? You staying and fighting for a position here? What?”

“This so-called investigation, Carmen. How long do you want to keep chasing these supposed leads? And why? Why this?”

“Longer! We can figure it out. Listen, Atif’s death was mysterious. And you can feel it too, that there’s something mysterious going on in the CNS. Something is so . . . wrong there. I know there is. You know there is.”

“Just because two things are mysterious doesn’t mean they are related.”

“Don’t you think that, just perhaps, a mystery in one area might be related to a mystery in another?”

“It’s time to let it go. Why is this . . . puzzle that you’ve constructed so important to you? I know you got an email, and you knew the man. Briefly. But why? Really, why?”

This is something Carmen herself has been thinking a lot about lately, so she’s ready with her answer.

“In the end how we orientate ourselves to mystery defines how we live our lives. You’re asking me to abandon something that’s important to me.”

“It shouldn’t be. Because one of these mysteries doesn’t even exist. It’s mere pareidolia. It’s seeing faces in the rock structures of Mars. There’s only one mystery here, Carmen. And it’s mine.”

SUNDAY

Kierk wakes up alone. A dream leaves him . . . a series of strange metamorphoses, the morphing of his body and consciousness as he had been taken from stag to bat to sparrow to woman to laurel tree . . .

One hand goes out, pats the space next to him, before the night comes back to him in flashes, a great weight. Groaning, he rises. Sitting on the edge of the bed he considers how lucky it is that most of his things are still in boxes. He remembers Carmen leaving angry, her disappointment in him.

“Fuck.”

A cigarette is lit as he looks around the apartment, which is itself a failure, an incompletion. If only that infinite-sided die would have landed on just a slightly different number. He can still feel the younger version of himself for whom the future was all promise. Zoom in on Kierk’s brain and there it all is, the portrait of an artist as a young neural network, containing a whole world kept in miniature: there’s his hometown street, a long wooded cul-de-sac composed of ill-kept lawns that