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

things, as objective relations, and so right now all we see is this gray lump, this cauliflower mass. We think that’s what the brain is because we’re seeing it the only way we know how. But one day we’re going to be able to see the sphere. We’ll be able to see your mind for what it really is. And everything will be different.”

Ari, his little face condensed in nervousness, nods his head at Kierk, backing away.

“Remember that, Ari. Remember that!” Kierk calls after him, causing Ari to turn back slightly as if he was going to address Kierk but then he changes his mind and shuffles quickly into the milling group, the rounded hunch of his backpack soon lost amid all the others.

Mike is looking at Kierk with a sneer on his face. He throws up his hands.

“What the hell, Kierk.”

“Oh, you think I’m wrong, Mike? I bet I could squash whatever petty worldview you have with one hand tied behind my back. Want to talk population coding and macro causation? Chaos theory and computational irreducibility? Copenhagen vs. many-world? Supervenience and negentropy?”

“Kierk, you were basically yelling at that kid. What the hell is wrong with you?”

“I wasn’t yelling, I was correcting you. You, who somehow solved the mind-body problem and didn’t bother telling anyone.”

“We’re not here to confuse them.”

“No, we’re here to protect them from morons who—”

“Kierk.” Carmen, who’s come up behind him, puts a hand on his arm because the two are now within a foot of each other.

“Come here, help me with this, we need to break down our table.” Kierk laughs suddenly and explosively, claps Mike on the arm so fast and hard that Mike flinches, then the humor vanishes from Kierk’s face. He and Carmen walk away as the remaining children trickle out the door, leaving a mess of a room with people dismantling their stations.

“It’s not worth it, Kierk, it’s not,” Carmen says.

He stops, grabbing her arm. Turning her to him and looking her deep in the eye he says—“It’s not?”

Kierk upends the nearest heavy table in a single movement, blocking its momentous downward swing with his foot, then, the table on its side, he shoves in those metal rings that keep its legs from collapsing, getting one up before moving to the next, but it won’t budge, so Kierk, with a grimacing glance up at Mike, slams it in with his heel to a resounding clang.

Deadened lights. Trouble with the microphone. Kierk has his Hello Kitty notebook over his knee. The lecture by Max (who introduces himself as “Dr. Pierce” to a scoff by Kierk) is on optogenetics and in vivo controllability. Kierk already knows this stuff so he sits in the back and amuses himself by writing avalanching sentences that come down the mountain and flatten the tree line.

Max is describing the full process that Kierk and Carmen had initiated in the surgery of the transgenic mouse last week—a virus is injected into the mouse embryo which inserts a gene into the DNA of neural precursor cells, a gene which is eventually expressed in the development of those cells’ ion channels. This gene makes channels express rhodopsin, the same molecule found in the light-sensitive rods of the eye. These mutant rhodopsin sit like tiny alligator eyes all over the surface of the neurons. Kierk imagines the ever-dark of that organic jungle, the nocturnal glia, the thoughts curled up like napping jungle cats, a thousand sleeping thoughts with their claws retracted, the little mutant channels doing nothing in the natural dark of the brain. But one day there is a loud drilling and bone dust sprinkles down and then—for the first time—light coming in through a crack in the world, something beyond (but what could be beyond the world?) peeking in, the giant faces of Kierk and Carmen wearing surgical masks, a view which is immediately swallowed up by a snaking fiberoptic cable, which descends like a predator and then waits. Weeks later, after the healing process has run its course, some sleep-deprived graduate student says—“Let there be light.” And with that the fiberoptic cable blinks on, illuminating the fibrous cave, and those rhodopsin channels open and the genetically designed neurons start firing. Max shows a video at the end of his lecture of a rat with a cable snaking from its head, and everyone chuckles as it runs around in clockwise circles.

“And to the left . . . annnnd to the right now. It’s remote control.”

The chuckling breaks into laughter as the rat pivots, its little body heaving with exertion. Kierk looks around at the crowd, mouth agape, and thinks about what it must have been like to sit in the room while the physicists and engineers were taking bets on whether the first nuclear bomb would be a “boy” and set the atmosphere on fire or a “girl” and not. To control something without understanding it . . . He feels sick. But then the lights are on to applause and everyone heads out in groups to get lunch.

Sleep refuses to claim Kierk even as he lies still, all the rituals of going to bed completed. Instead he is lost in a cycle of mind, a tumbling over of the same problem. Getting up in the hot dark he flips on the light, yellowing everything, and starts to unpack the boxes that have taken up his bedroom floor. It becomes a slow browsing process that stretches on into the night—the unpacking is done as reverently as if lighting candles for Christmas mass. His hands touch spines, check inscriptions, flip to sections he knows. He lights a cigarette and takes a drag while looking down at the growing piles stacked around him, evincing an order only he can see. Slowly a bibliophilic recrudescence takes place, a real resurrection. My soul, he thinks, has been untethered by so unorganized a library.

He picks up a neuroscience textbook marked by odd stains, realizing where it’s from—a neuroanatomical lab his first year of graduate