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

glance back to the bowl of lamplight with the vibratomes set up side by side and Todd and Amanda conferring in fast whispers.

Outside Carmen leans against the wall, her fists clenched.

“It’s been a long intense night. Just cool down, maybe you can talk to him in the morning.”

“Shit. I lost it,” she laughs, brushing away tears. “Maybe they’re right about us consciousness researchers. We aren’t exactly stable.”

“Believe me, the talk tomorrow is going to be about me and about the blackout, not about you.”

“Maybe the blackout will obscure everything and they won’t even be talking about you. You never know.”

Kierk shrugs wearily, rubs at his head. At this point the existential dread over his future has been turned over enough times it feels dulled by repeated handling. Though just the mention of it now still makes him feel vaguely nauseous.

“Do you need to check on anything before you leave?”

Carmen nods tiredly. “Yeah, I could check on stuff in the lab. Unplug the computers and confirm my backup. I should, probably . . .”

The two of them head once again to the stairwell. Again it is pure dark except for the flashlights of their phones, ascending. Carmen walks first, slightly slumped. They’re quiet the whole way there.

In the lab she starts booting up her computer from a buffer system. Meanwhile Kierk goes over to his station but doesn’t see anything he wants to keep. In the dark it looks abandoned, like he’s been gone for weeks already.

Coming back to her, he sees that Carmen has found a working emergency outlet under a blinking light and is dragging over extension cords. Soon she’s got her monitor hooked up and is busily clicking about in the blue light.

“Hey. I’m going up to the roof. I want to see the city.”

Carmen looks up, drained. “Alright, I gotta stay here for another fifteen or twenty minutes to make sure the backups are okay and secure. Just in case there’s a surge or something.”

Her phone buzzes.

“Apparently things are insane in the animal rooms. Alex says the monkeys are all freaking out. Throwing themselves against the cages. Fighting one another. No one knows why. He says not to come down though, it’s a madhouse and they’ve got enough vets there.”

“Alright . . . well . . . Maybe find me up there when you’re done?”

“Okay, see you soon.”

The moon hangs above the roof like pure science fiction. The city before him is dark all the way south but lit up like a beacon to the north by the throbbing egg of light that is Times Square. The power ends there, at a line drawn via the negotiations of electrical companies decades before; it seems a barrier built of light, a spell cast by a wizard. Kierk leans off over the side and can’t see ground—it’s just a dark abyss populated by meaningless and indiscriminate shapes, objects without names. Wind whips at his face, then dies down to stillness. On the building opposite he can see the rising and landing outlines, maybe bats, as bits of black moving in a bulk of night. The city is a spun sculpture, airless and hot and onyx, the metal a mythology so pressured it had become architecture. From his sleeve he withdraws the transgenic blue rose. He had secretly plucked it from the lab while attempting to save the organoids. Pressing his thumb against one of the thorns, bleeding just one drop, Kierk’s thoughts, philosophical from the fantastical cityscape, romantic from the beauty of the night, in tune with the sleeping burrowed giant of the city, wild from the lack of sleep and adrenaline of events, circle yet again around consciousness, drawn to that ever-fleeing attractor, unable to break his own trajectory—and that’s when her face flashes yet again, distractor stimuli, but this time he, instead of pushing the thoughts of Carmen away, accepts them, begins with them . . . Carmen laughing, all that beauty, the stunning cheekbones and emotive mouth, the large eyes electric blue—and everyone Carmen would ever meet would agree on the fact of her beauty, and since her beauty was agreed upon, was it truly a subjective issue, like asking whether chocolate ice cream is better than vanilla, or Hemingway a better prose stylist than Joyce? Rather her beauty is real, objective, a fact, having ceased long ago to be merely a matter of opinion—but was it really real? Because the fact of her beauty was, after all, a fact dependent in its existence on human consciousness, without which Carmen’s face may as well be a rock structure on Mars, and therefore is not her beauty observer-dependent in its reality? Frame-variant, a relational property really, just as they’d discussed at the bar originally and then again in his room yesterday. And weren’t other entities that seem so naively real in the scientific world actually observer-dependent in precisely the same way as Carmen’s beauty, even things normally considered so obvious like neurons and livers and circuits and plants and cells and suns and species . . . all observer-dependent . . . not that they were in their properties arbitrary, but just that, without conscious minds to give them relations, to read into them borders and scale and roles and functions and causal structure and information and theoretical relevance, these groupings, without some kind of observer-operator, would all fall away back into the colorless nameless stream of reality, and it’s striking him that science as practiced is just the ugly and messy assortment of all the conceptual tools that could possibly allow for the better prediction or manipulation of nature for egocentric purposes, not carving nature at its true joints at all, and thus stands in stark ersatzism to consciousness, which is self-defining and precisely frame-invariant, given, true, ultimate, really real, and therefore, following this logic, Kierk reasons that the difficulty of developing a theory of consciousness is so hard precisely because of the mismatch between these frame-variant scientific entities and the frame-invariant reality of consciousness,