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

“. . .”

“Should we break the glass?”

“. . .”

“Alright, we’ll sit tight.”

She hangs up, then leans with Kierk against the glass.

“Why isn’t there a backup generator?”

“There is one. The MRI gets juice. This is a big building. Apparently it’s limited.”

Carmen’s phone buzzes and she says—“Alex is on his way.”

Kierk realizes something. “God, what do you think is going on with the monkeys in the basement?”

“I don’t know. Maybe chaos. Or they’re all asleep. Maybe there’s emergency power there too?”

They sit illumed by phone screens, both very aware of their touching knees, looking online for the causes of the outage—there were a lot of different claims going around social media, but the most oft-repeated cause was some kind of freak blowout at a power station north of Manhattan, and then like dominoes the overstressed nodes in the network had gone down one by one.

Minutes pass. Carmen keeps standing up and peering through the glass, trying to see if there’s any sign of power from inside. She feels energetic despite the late hour, full of nervous excitement at the commotion, but some smaller part of her is getting flashes of tiredness, like she is two reservoirs and one is filling up as the other drains away.

At one point they hear the voices of Leon and someone they don’t recognize stomping up the stairwell but the voices pass in echoes and soon ascend into silence. At another point the door opens and stepping halfway through, freezing when he sees them, is the pale face of Greg. On seeing them he’s clearly startled, immediately withdraws back into the darkness like a wraith, a ghostly presence slinking away without language.

Finally, they hear a clattering from the stairwell and then through the door comes Todd and Amanda, looking flushed and breathing heavily. Kierk and Carmen immediately ply them with questions about what’s going on outside, getting only that the two had just biked here (Carmen didn’t remark on what a coincidence it was that they both got here at the same time, unless they left from the same location) and that the city, past midnight on an early Monday morning during a blackout, had been completely empty, and that they hadn’t seen a single living soul as they flew through the streets of Manhattan on their bikes.

“It was like one of those children’s books where someone casts a spell and the whole kingdom goes to sleep,” Amanda says breathlessly as the four head inside, past the stocked shelves and shadows of microscopes, to the inner sanctum, which is opened with a trepidatious intake of breath.

It is completely black inside the room, and to Todd’s cry of—“No, no, no!”—Carmen pans her light over the far table where the eight Erlenmeyer flasks sit silently like tombs. With the heat lamps off it’s much cooler, and on closer examination the Matrigel inside the flasks has already begun to separate. The organoids are perfectly still at the bottom, strange planetoids out there alone, glinting and fleshy and white.

“They’re dying,” Carmen says sadly, crouching down to examine hers. When she holds the phone light up to it she swears that the white puckering cup of its eye darkens slightly, as if attempting to dilate.

“We have to do it now,” Todd says grimly. “Accelerated timetable. More than a month’s work . . . Damn!” He slams his hand down on the table and the Matrigel jiggles slightly. Then he disappears into the larger outside room.

“What are you going to do?” Carmen asks Amanda. “Can’t you just restart the heat lamp and the stirring mechanisms, the bioreactors or whatever?”

Amanda shakes her head sadly as she snaps gloves on—“No, they’re irrecoverable at this point. And even if they were savable, how can we be sure this didn’t affect the results? If we do the slices right now, then we can at least run histology, look at the cytoarchitecture.”

“Slices? You’re going to cut them up?”

“Yes, and thank god you called us. I mean, we were asleep, we never would have known—” Amanda cuts off, looking at the two of them, shocked at herself. Carmen is already shaking her head, rubbing at Amanda’s arm. “Don’t worry. We’re not going to tell anyone about it. I know how things are now.”

“I might never even be back in this building so I wouldn’t worry too much about me,” Kierk says sardonically.

Amanda looks at him quizzically but then the form of Todd, backlit, comes through the door. He grabs up the first flask, Atif ’s, and heads back out. Carmen lets out a low moan of protest. With a sympathetic look Kierk grabs up his. Carmen looks extremely torn, and Kierk briefly wonders if Carmen is going to make a break for it with hers, but soon she’s joining him in delivering their mini-brains to the outer room.

Todd has set up the brain slicer, a vibratome, on one of the lab benches where he’s also got the one lamp up, so bright after so much darkness that Kierk and Carmen shield their eyes with their free hand. Both the lamp and the vibratome are plugged into a big silver battery with TESLA on the side. The vibratome is a long metal malocclusion, a decked-out and sinister deli slicer. On the front is an open jaw area sporting a silver metal pad, immersed in some buffer liquid, while tiny blades like needles wait to be lowered down. Todd has laid the flask down on the table next to it. He reaches down into the ooze of the Matrigel with his gloved hand, a grimace on his face. Amanda passes him surgical scissors and carefully he pulls Atif’s cerebral organoid up off the base of the glass, and, cupping its underside, uses the scissors to cut the anchor of its ingrown tree, releasing it from its roots.

“But the branches,” Carmen begins, and then her eyes widen as Todd, with a look of intense concentration, begins to steadily pull the trunk of the tree. It slowly emerges from the