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

Cortex VII, The Human Amygdala, The Hippo-campus, Rat Barrel Cortex IV— stacked about in the same way that works of cartographers and navigators were historically stacked on ships, but these are for charting coastlines of gyri, straights of sulci. On the computers themselves there are pretty-colored heat maps of cortical activity, the hum of Fourier transformations running away on a minimized MATLAB tab, and sometimes the neuron spike sorting from electrophys rigs that impaled the monkey’s open brains downstairs like single-armed sewing machines. Programs all trying to get that signal, that signal from the noise. But the most obvious indications of the provenance of the lab come from the rarer moments—someone walks in with an unconnected EEG cap on and the thick multicolored ribbon of wires dangles down their back like an external spinal cord, or one of the lab members, not having time to change from the animal rooms, runs in wearing a white lab coat, blue booties, and a face mask, or when there is that low bouncing rumble that signifies an animal chair being maneuvered down the connecting hallway, heavy with the macaque stuffed like an embryo between the clear plastic planes. A hallway that smells vaguely of musk and strongly of chlorine. All the real scientific action happens in the recording rooms (for monkeys) or the experimental rooms (for humans). The recording rooms are giant Faraday cages, dissipative vaults safe from the electromagnetic noise of the city—although it was a running joke that nothing could keep out the subway directly below, so that whenever one of those metallic caterpillars crawled on its electric track underneath them the whole CNS vibrated minutely, and the vibrating plus a passing surge of electromagnetism or shifting masses or something that nobody could really figure out would interfere with the EEG, the fMRI, even the electrophysiology equipment enclosed by the copper aegis of the Faraday cage, which meant that the terabyte of data produced annually by the CNS had edited-out gaps at ten-minute intervals marking the subway’s passing. The lab, despite being a coordinating center for all of this data collection, all this science, is recognizably human, what with its little kitchen with the refrigerator that always stank of forgotten food left by one of its thirty-plus users, stuffed also with big bags of frozen blueberries (for the monkeys) and refrigerated Cheetos (for the rats). Currently the whole lab is preparing for the Day in the Lab outreach tomorrow. Carmen is actually looking forward to it because she can spend some more one-on-one time with Karen, as they’re going to have a booth or something together. Some confrontation between them is probably inevitable. Carmen is technically a member of Karen’s lab in a sense, and so there is a weird implicit expectation of joint publication (which Carmen is dreading, because Carmen thinks that Karen’s best publications might be behind her, that Karen will slow her down)—and all of this is too precarious of a situation not to collapse into some angle of response, so the only thing Carmen can do is hope that when that happens it is a steady, load-bearing heap. But such a conflict is a ways off, and besides, the Crick Scholars are in vogue in the CNS and Carmen is pretty sure that she can win, or at least not be crushed by, any internal power struggles. Kierk, though, she’s not too sure about. If he’s as smart as he believes he’ll probably publish something amazing that’ll make the rest of them look like minnows. But if he’s not, or is just plain unlucky . . . She wonders if there is anything she can do to help him as she rummages around in the disgusting refrigerator past the monkeys’ blueberries and the rats’ Cheetos for the little plastic container filled with olives she got from a local bodega.

On Karen’s way to lunch Kierk passes her, his flip-flops smacking in echoes, his tie-dye shirt a walking illusion. She stifles a laugh as he moves out of sight, now wondering if there’s some costume party she doesn’t know about. Leaving the CNS into the glare, she realizes that laugh was the first in a while. She needs fresh air. Even passing Max in the hallway earlier had caused her to flee to the bathroom. Now she takes refuge at a nearby cafe.

Karen is used to ghosts over her shoulder. After all, she had passed thirty-five. Ex-lovers, family members she feels estranged from, friends who were once like sisters whom she never speaks with anymore, all her grandparents gone now as well . . . But she’s never been haunted like she has been for the past few days. And she’s shocked to discover that there is apparently this whole level of regretful haunting she never even knew existed. This whole thing has been a huge mistake. And it’s only becoming clear to her now. At first, while the pregnancy had still existed, she’d had no idea what to do, none at all. And it wasn’t that she’d listed out the pros and cons and weighted them accordingly and then couldn’t make a decision, no, it was that when she had even tried to think about it in terms of options, of choosing among alternatives, there had instead been this blankness, a white frictionless surface so smooth every thought of hers had slid off it. Not that there hadn’t been feelings, but there’d been no explicit naming of the decisions possible, no enumeration; when her consciousness called for plans of action her unconsciousness simply refused to serve her up anything. When she had cast her nets of thought no fish were caught. Today she has been reassuring herself that nothing was wrong with her, and that one-third of all pregnancies ended in spontaneous abortion. She hadn’t wanted it, not at all, but she felt like something darkly momentous had happened and she had been changed for the worse somehow, tainted. Even now, looking around, it is as if