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

her in on what Glia had said. Carmen’s eyes get wider and wider as the floors pass.

“Remember that Leon has an MD. In psychiatry,” she says.

“There could be a perfectly reasonable explanation,” he says, as the elevator opens.

“For Leon to be abducting the homeless from the park at night to perform experiments on?” Carmen replies incredulously.

They both stop just outside the fMRI room. They can hear the prosody of conversation through the door, the moving of something large.

Carmen and he nod to each other, and then the two burst through the door. At the far end is Leon, with a clipboard, and nearer to the door, a brown-haired young woman wearing a lab coat, and, sitting in the chair by the fMRI, eating a bag of chips, a clearly homeless man.

“Ummm, Institutional Review Board!” Kierk yells to the scene, and then, commandingly—“FREEZE.”

There’s a scream. Everyone looks at one another. The homeless guy smiles.

“Kierk?!” says Leon, putting down his clipboard.

“What are you doing?!” Carmen yells, pointing to the homeless man, who waves at her.

“We’re doing a study!” the brown-haired girl says. “What are you doing?! Who are you?!”

“They’re Crick Scholars, Sandra. Like me,” Leon says, moving toward them.

“Oh, so they’re those people.”

“What do you mean those people?” Carmen says.

“Consciousness researchers,” the girl says, making a face.

“Hey!”

“Oh, like regular neuroscientists are going to nearly break down the door at midnight and scare me half to death. Why can’t you people be normal?”

“What are you all doing here anyways?”

“A study, geniuses? What are you doing here?”

“We’re looking for someone. One of the homeless said one of their friends had been abducted.”

“And you believed them?”

“What’s going on?”

“They’re Crick Scholars.”

“So what are they doing here?”

“Shut the fuck up!” Kierk yells. Everyone quiets. “So you’re doing a study. You explain it to us, and then we’ll tell you why we’re here.”

Leon puts up his hands. “Alright. I’m assisting Sandra. Sandra is from the NYU School of Social Science. We’re doing work on profiling the neurological effects of homelessness. Right now we’re looking at the effects on disrupted sleep, so Mickey here is going to sleep in the scanner. Isn’t that right?”

Mickey grins over his chips, nodding. Kierk notices blankets piled up in the corner.

“But why are you here?”

“I wanted to get fMRI experience. They were kind enough to allow me to, ah, how you say, tag along.”

“Did you help recruit?”

Sandra nods at the two of them like they’re idiots. “Yes. Leon went out around with me to recruit a few times.”

“And . . . and the TMS?” Carmen asks.

“We don’t even use the TMS. We have been using the EEG, though. Look, you can see. Check out the IRB on the wall,” Sandra says.

There’s a big board labeled WALL O’IRBS with Institutional Review Board approval sheets tacked all over it. Carmen browses them, scanning the pages with her finger.

Turning, with a disbelieving look on her face, she nods to Kierk.

That’s when the power goes out. Darkness envelops them. Sandra yelps, there’s the sound of chips spilling to the floor, and for a moment absolute blackness descends until an emergency power light on the fMRI blinks on and casts them all in red.

“Well, there goes the study for tonight,” Sandra says. “Sorry, Mickey. Don’t worry, you’ll get paid anyways.”

Leon and Sandra start checking the machine. Carmen throws up her hands.

“Alright, well,” she says, “I need to go check the computers in the lab to make sure my data’s okay.”

“I can go with you,” Kierk says.

They turn to say goodbye but the other two are busy checking on the machine, and only Mickey, his face lit red, waves to them as they go.

The corridor is completely dark and Carmen and Kierk fumble for a moment to turn on the lights of their phones, creating bisecting cones of light that dance over the ceiling and sparsely illuminate the long hallway.

“Oh my god, the organoids!” Carmen exclaims suddenly, “They’ll die without power. We have to check on them.”

She grabs Kierk’s arm and pulls him to the elevator. Its chrome inanimately reflects the light and its digits above are dark.

“Do you really think—” Kierk begins.

“Why plan for a serious power outage in a Manhattan research facility?” she replies.

The two of them head to the stairwell, entering a labyrinthine darkness, their phone lights spearing wildly at it. The inside of the stairwell is pitch-black and on entering it they both pause, Kierk leaning over the railing with his phone; everything reveals itself only for a moment before vanishing and they cannot see the bottom. Once the door clangs shut behind them, sealing them in, it is possible to entertain the idea that the stairwell goes down forever, that there is a mind-bending infinity both below and above and that they have found themselves at some random location in a great unfathomable infinite structure, a thing ignoring all ideas of scale or meaning. Standing on the landing the two look up and down as the echo of the shut door fades into the depths. Carmen’s reason tells her that she is only five or six floors up but some other, deeper sense is screaming that she is entirely wrong, that she’s nowhere at all. That this goes all the way down and all the way up, forever. Kierk, madly, feels like laughing, or crying, or fucking, or reciting poetry into the abyss. Or letting loose some endless howl. Instead Carmen tugs him upward. Neither can bring themselves to utter a word during the time inside the utter black of the stairwell, both just breathing as quietly as they can, making their way through, and they don’t talk until the door slams shut behind them on the ninth floor.

The lock to the organoid lab beeps red to both their cards. Carmen is already calling before Kierk can suggest it. She paces the hall.

“Hey! Hey, it’s Carmen, from the CNS.”

“. . .” “Look outside. The power is out. All over Manhattan, I think. That’s why I’m calling. We’re here and the door is locked and