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

There’s a knock on the lab door, and Carmen peeps in at the scene: a stainless steel expanse, the thin alien elegance of surgical equipment, reflective pans, maneuverable lights, tubing and optrode-preparation kit, and Kierk, looking very serious in his white lab coat, sitting in the middle of it all. He glances up from the mouse he just anesthetized, which is shifting about on the metal tray it lies splayed on, its little feet flexing as if dreaming.

“Came in right at the worst part,” he says.

Her hands in the deep pockets of her lab coat make her look like a child in a too-big suit. “I assume this involves some kind of pissing contest between you and Max?” Seeing Kierk’s surprise, she says—“It was inevitable. Want some help?”

“Pull up a chair then.”

They both look down at the little animal slowly breathing under Kierk’s hand, its small pouch of a stomach rising and falling. Whenever Carmen sacrifices an animal she says a little prayer, like a Native American kneeling over a kill—thank you for giving yourself so that we might gain knowledge about the universe, and I’m sorry little mouse you had a short and confusing life and here we are at the very end of your mystery but maybe really it’s not ending because time is an illusion created by our primitive mammalian consciousness, yes, that would be nice, then nothing, not even you, would be lost . . .

Kierk puts his thumb in the hollow on the back of the mouse’s neck and grabs its tail with his other hand and with a simultaneous push on its neck and jerk on its tail, breaks its neck, which sounds like stepping on a small branch in the woods. The legs scramble around for a while as Kierk presses it down on the table. As the neurons within the mouse’s half-gram brain necrotize and burst their ionic insides out into the interstitial space, the state-space of neural activity flexes into wild impossible shapes, a hallucination, the smell of its mother, the first and the last scent, her great mouse body curled over him and he is small again and blind in a richness of warmth and wood shavings and his siblings heaving around him like an ocean of belonging—neural networks are structured to be the most creative when they are dying, as if evolution was trying to ease the countless deaths it was built on.

Finally the legs stop convulsing and it lies still under the lamplight.

“I hate it when they do that,” Kierk says, looking down at the still body that somehow already looks smaller. Here is the machine but where is the ghost?

Carmen hands him the trauma shears, which he holds in one hand while the other expertly stretches out the ruff of the neck. He snips the head off. Carmen notices how the muscles in his tanned wrist flex during the movement. He takes the head between gloved fingers, red and slippery now, and walks to the cryogenic storage. A single fat drop of blood hits the white floor.

Chatting as they do so, Carmen and Kierk go to get another mouse, trundling the anesthesia cart down the halls, pushing a little too fast, both laughing as the gas tank and monitor sway dangerously around corners and through doorways. Another mouse is retrieved, fished from its cage sleepy with droppings and shavings, put into the glass box, and goes under from the gas while scrambling against the sides. This time they harness it on the surgery table to keep it absolutely still. It looks identical to the last one, as the mice are as close as non-clones can get to a genetic monoculture. It’s also transgenetic, bioengineered from conception to be a tool in research. Kierk opens one of its little milky eyes, uses a penlight to check that it’s deep under anesthesia. First, as Carmen’s gloved fingers pinch the ruff of the sedated mouse, Kierk uses surgical scissors to scalp it, cutting off the top of the animal’s head skin all the way out to the ears. The bloody flap is removed, revealing the pink interior bulb. Carmen swabs away the little rivulets of blood using Q-tips dipped in alcohol diluted in water. Then both begin to scrub, clearing away not only the welling blood but also the slice-thin veneer of muscle and fascia that clings to the skull. Occasionally their hands meet as they both reach for something, sharing space perhaps more than necessary, occluding one another, bloody gloved fingers touching, a digital dance done in red. After a few minutes the mouse looks totally obscene, the most naked an animal can be with its revealed skullcap of solitary bone a shiny bulb reflecting the surgical lamps. Carmen forages for a bottle of bone softener while Kierk uses a scalpel to etch lines in the skull, digging little troughs that will help the bone dissolve easier. It’s the same technique used by construction crews to break up a road. Carmen takes the bone softener and applies it liberally to the etched bare dome. While waiting for it to work she prepares the multi-array optrode implant, which will sit in the mouse’s parietal lobe, serving as both a recorder of neuronal activity with its micro-tetrode core, as well as a diode which will shine light onto the local brain region, perturbing the genetically engineered light-responsive neurons around it. When the timer dings Kierk scrapes away the weakened bone like he’s chipping away the flaking top of an egg. Together they follow the laminated notes over the desk (smeared with blood) for how to lower the optrode in. A complicated claw controlled by dials is used to descend the array to the appropriate cortical depth. Carmen gets the giggles at one moment when both of them are holding three different things in each hand, steadying the limbed machine that positions the electrode, just as the mouse briefly stirs,