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

Kierk holds up the small scar of a dot on his forearm. “Hi, remember me, you took some of my DNA?”

She laughs. He continues—“We’re on weirdly intimate terms because you’re growing neurons made from my skin cells, but I’m afraid I don’t remember your name.”

“Amanda. But come in, come in, sample number three.”

He’s ushered into the bright white lab space, which is also pulsing with loud pop music from some unseen speaker system.

“So where are the mini-brains? Or rather, where am I?”

“They’re not really visible yet. Tomorrow we’re going to move them to the bioreactor so they can grow a 3D structure. So maybe a few weeks from now they’ll be good-sized. I can, however, show you this.” Amanda guides him back to a row of shelves bearing long terrariums, the panes of glass steamy and revealing the shadowed outlines of flowers. Amanda opens a pane and Kierk, with a sound of amazement, reaches in to touch one of the fleshy petals, which is as blue as the sky on a perfectly clear day.

“But roses can’t naturally be blue,” he says, delicately playing his hand over them. “These must be transgenic.”

“A thousand-year dream. Kind of a pet lab project.”

There’s the sound of footsteps and Amanda quickly closes the terrarium as another researcher arrives, giving Kierk a questioning glance. So he takes off, promising Amanda he’ll be back to check on the organoids when they’re fully grown.

Karen looks at him as he enters and he knows she’s wondering where he’s been. It’s three in the afternoon. Kierk, mercurial, spins slowly in his chair. People come and go, images change on screens, pixels rearrange themselves. He’s so bored he considers jumping off the roof of the building just to have something to do. Instead he finds a bathroom, and after locking the door behind him, masturbates thinking about both Amanda and Carmen, the two switching places in his fantasy like the sides of a Necker cube.

What the nature of that final stage is—how an individual invents (or finds he had invented) a new way of giving order to data now assembled—must here remain inscrutable and maybe permanently so. Let us note only one thing about. Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change. And perhaps that point need not have been made explicit, for obviously these are the men who, being little committed by prior practice to the traditional rules of normal science, are particularly likely to see that those rules no longer define a playable game and to conceive another set that can replace them.

Kierk sets down Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and leans against the stacks in the cooler airs of the library. He repeats the passage, two, three times to himself to recommit it to memory. He’s spent the last hour browsing the stacks or in the reading room with his feet up, balancing his chair on its back legs, reading Husserl.

When he heads back to the lab the passage plays on repeat in his mind. He stops on a sidewalk bisected by the sharply thrown evening shadows of buildings, completely still, as a vision comes to him. His readings have prompted a series of abstract visualizations as he realizes that science itself can be seen as a kind of continuous metaphoric riff, a poem that starts with base everyday concepts and then proceeds by mapping them onto nature in ever more complex combinations, an endless metaphor proclaiming that x is like y is like z, that atoms are like solar systems, that nature takes the place of the breeder in natural selection, that the human brain operates hydraulically via tubes like an aqueduct, or with mechanistic gears like a clock, or carries digital information like a computer . . . this is like this is like that, a staircase of mappings, with Parnassus always retreating before the canticle of science. The Long Song. And when it’s over? At the end of science, when all the questions have been answered, is that not when humankind’s work truly begins in the construction of the one true religion? What will those cathedrals look like? Erected on strange worlds, against skies so different from our own . . . Looking up at the blinding coin of the sinking sun Kierk imagines a firmament filled instead by the dense cluster of the center of the galaxy, against which grand temples stand in sharp twilight silhouette.

At that moment, if you zoomed out above Kierk, the surrounding city blocks would be cinemas of motion, with the blurs of people flowing like red blood cells through an artery as the shadows retreat and lengthen, and at the foci of the camera would be Kierk, an unmoving dot, a fixed point.

Seven stories up in the CNS Mike Benson is staring intently out a window holding a can of soda. On his way back from the vending machines to the fMRI lab something had caught his eye. Mike is pretty sure that motionless figure a block down is Kierk. He’s just standing in the middle of the sidewalk, looking down at . . . nothing?

“What the fuck?”

Mike shakes his head and mouths something under his breath. At Harvard he had met plenty of people who thought they were smarter than they were, but none of them had pissed him off quite as much as Kierk. And at least at Harvard there had been the great equalizer, those widely used study drugs like Modafinil, Ritalin, and Adderall. Before midterms or finals he would take a handful in the afternoon and study straight into the night, taking breaks only to do drum solos with his pencils. It was like catching fire. The neuroscience major had both a hard-core advanced calculus requirement and the GPA-destroying organic chemistry. Classes that seemed intractable but which he burned through with Adderall. Taking it was as if a