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

bottom, slipping from its biological host, until the last of the fine tips clears its rubbery underside and Todd discards the spiky translucent structure onto a paper towel that Amanda laid down. Then Amanda uses a small bottle to squirt a drop of superglue to the base of the organoid and affixes it to the metallic plate of the vibratome. Atif’s organoid, nearly four inches in diameter now, white as undifferentiated flesh, sits on the cutting plate like a wet tumor freshly removed. Amanda starts up the vibratome.

“Set it for fifty microns,” Todd says, and then the blades are lowered with a hum, just like an electric razor, and it takes the thinnest sliver off the top, almost impossible to see until Amanda, using a thin tweezers-like instrument, scoops it off. The slice hangs in the air, a tiny sheet, translucent tissue without visible structure, like the effluvia of a ghost. She lowers the slice into a small plastic container filled with a clear but viscous liquid. It floats to the bottom and then the vibratome hums and another slice is placed into the container, sinking down to join the first. This continues in silence, both Kierk and Carmen gripping their flasks with white knuckles, and in only a few minutes the organoid has been halved—Kierk, leaning over, can see white-matter tracts running in bands through the center. There had been neural activity. Meanwhile, Todd has scrounged around and come up with another vibratome, which he sets up next to Amanda, filling it with the same fluid. Amanda, finishing the last slice, scratches off the last of Atif’s organoid from the metal plate and chucks it into a biohazard bag. The two turn to Kierk and Carmen expectantly, and, after a moment’s hesitance, they hand over their flasks. In silence they step back and watch the same process unfold. First the organoids are extracted, their ingrown trees carefully pulled out, and then they are glued to the plate and the hum of the vibratomes start. Carmen’s hand searches and clasps Kierk’s. At the first slice Carmen gasps and her hand tightens, the two of them standing just inside the circle of light where the other two are carefully slicing, removing and storing the tissue, thin as paper, and there is a meditativeness to it, a silence, both Kierk and Carmen hypnotized by the pair leaning over their tasks Talmudically, like they were two medieval illustrators at their desks in the dim light of a monastery, accompanied by just the hum and the barest sound of liquid as the slices enter their respective containers. As this occurs a strange state has stolen over Kierk, perhaps from the nervousness of the night and the lateness of the hour but he feels almost out of his body, leaving it, hallucinatory. He keeps blinking away strange fantasies that come and go, indescribable, forms beyond language, like he is downloading dreams bit by bit, memories of pure space and pure consideration and attention but all with only the minimal outlines of any content, experiences coming in flashes of awareness which feel like they are from a different time or from a different self, and at the end of it all he feels changed, expanded, like he has discovered some extrasensory dimension closed off to him previously, the shock of another so close entering him slowly. He also knows that he must be imagining this, this bodily sensation, whatever it is, a mere trick of the mind, an influence from the gravitas of the setting and the strangeness of it all and his current suggestible state. But looking over at Carmen, who has tears running in tracks down her face, and whose eyes are wide, he wonders if she felt it too. He squeezes her hand reassuringly.

Todd wipes at his forehead with his wrist, turns to them.

“Listen, I appreciate you calling us, you really did save the whole experiment. But we’ve got this if you want to bug out. It’s going to be a long night of this.”

“We’ve got stuff to do anyways,” Carmen says quietly, wiping at her eyes discreetly.

“So what are you going to do with the slices? Will you be able to do a paper with the data?” Kierk asks.

“Probably not. This time around we’re just going to be checking the cytoarchitecture of the slices, making sure there really were neurons, that kind of thing.”

“What do you mean ‘this time around’?” Carmen says.

“Well, we’re going to be redoing the experiment of course,” Todd says. “And the original samples from your skin have all been reverted to pluripotency. They’re effectively stem cells, which we can use to make more if we want to.”

“How many more are there going to be?”

“I don’t know. People like to use cell lines that get established early on in the field, for replicability. That and you’re, well, you’re Crick Scholars so there’s the novelty aspect. They grew exceptionally well too, so I would imagine your lines will be extremely popular in the future. And the lines are kept around forever. So in theory people in a hundred years might still be using these. Congratulations, you’re immortal.” Todd laughs thinly.

There is stunned silence, and Carmen’s hand slips from Kierk’s.

“What? A cell line? A fucking cell line? Are you kidding me?”

Kierk is struck at the thought of all his clone’s brains growing, again and again, the same struggling pattern repeating until one day their total mass exceeded not just that of his own body, but exceeded this very building, the gigantic weight of existence of all those future hims grown in dishes all over the world, his own personal Boltzmann brains.

“Come on, Carmen, let’s go.” He tugs on her arm, backing away, glaring at Todd.

“But . . . You had no right!” Carmen raises her voice. “We didn’t know it’d be a cell line! You had no right!”

“What? What’s the problem?”

“You had—” Kierk tugs her away into the darkness as she yells “—no fucking right!”

Kierk, hustling Carmen out, takes one last