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

Much later, out of a void passing over itself in silence, there is quietly and surprisingly something small, right there, a little light in the black that soon balloons into a new, weaker cosmos. It is here that Kierk finds himself alone in a strange labyrinth. From a floating aerial viewpoint he watches himself investigate the corridors. How odd that he looks like an animal moving about down there scrounging and foraging for something. Then time passes in jerks and Kierk is suddenly underneath a heavy moving weight, a form. He wrestles it in the dark, something big and horned and bull-faced and huffing as it uses its muscular human body to pin Kierk down as he bats his hands against its wet snout and wide mouth. It breathes onto his face its hot breaths and he feels its human hands searching for his eyes, it wants to jelly his eyes so he cannot see, and then he is running in terror from that center of a labyrinth, running until he emerges into the woods of the city, and there is night coming down now like a great charioteer, whooping as it descends so loudly and then. Kierk can’t find his way out of the city at night like an alien hive looming silent around him until the thing from the maze comes back and it runs him down through the abandoned streets, and it is wrestling him and huffing from its animal nose as it blinds him with its thick thumbs and jellies his eyes and he screams and cannot see and only has the confused tactile sensations of its human limbs and its wet bull face and when Kierk finally awakens he will not remember any of this but will have the feeling that his waking life is only one among his many.

WEDNESDAY

Kierk wakes up to the urgent feeling of needing to be somewhere, but not knowing where. How long has it been since he’s woken on a mattress? Then he’s up, remembering the world, rummaging through the shopping bags; he picks out slacks, a belt with matching brown shoes, an olive-green shirt, hesitates over tie color. Swearing because he forgot to buy socks, he uses the ones with huge holes he came with. After dressing and making sure he’s gotten all the tags off he stands in the bathroom trying to wet down his hair. Leaving, he’s careful to blow his cigarette smoke away from the new clothes.

The route to work is from Union Square Park to nearby Washington Square Park and takes him down Broadway. Myriads of smells ride in boats, the sick pine of roasted nuts, the trash blown about, the scent of sweat per-fusing into the air. On Washington Place he finds the blocky brick tower reaching twenty stories, with only small and sparse murder holes for windows. Inside it is dark and cold as a cathedral.

In the elevator up he’s tapping his foot nervously, one hand pulling down his shirtsleeve to cover the writing on his forearm. But Kierk ends up wandering lost through multiple intersections of corridors. The room numbers aren’t in the right order, and he grows more and more nervous until he catches a group of people entering a glass-walled room.

Kierk is mildly late to the orientation. There is a man standing behind a small podium preparing to speak to an almost full room. Separated at the front sit a handful of people whom Kierk assumes are the other seven Crick Scholars. He grabs a seat among them as his eyes slide over, drawn to one of them, a young woman who turns in her chair to look at him, who is brushing the strands of blonde hair from her face, who has strong, flashing teeth when she smiles briefly at Kierk, like a ping of sound in the middle of a quick searching glance of curiosity that flits away on contact—all this in an instant before she turns back away and he sits, adjusting, nearly knocked into his seat. A young Indian man, tall and steady of movement, bends his mane of black hair slightly in greeting to Kierk.

The man behind the podium begins to speak. Kierk recognizes the voice from over the phone.

“Welcome to the official start of the Francis Crick Scholarship Program. I’m Norman Bennett, the director of the program. To me this is a truly momentous day, because when I was just beginning in neuroscience you couldn’t mention the word ‘consciousness’ without drawing derisive laughter or strange looks. This skepticism began to end due to the efforts of Francis Crick, whom I counted among my close friends. After discovering DNA he figured he could do whatever he wanted. He also noticed we don’t actually have any scientific laws that relate consciousness to neurological states. So in the early nineties he started a research program to investigate this mystery, with this working definition: by ‘consciousness’ we mean the inner domain of sensations and perceptions and thoughts, all centered around a self, that make up your life. The world of experience that begins when you wake up in the morning and vanishes when you enter a deep dreamless sleep. Your consciousness is what it is like to be you. Now Francis was smart enough to avoid being bogged down in philosophical arguments, so he called it ‘the search for the neural correlates of consciousness.’ Neuroscience can start by merely correlating brain states to particular conscious states. It’s a mark of how far this research program has come that we are being supported by the Department of Defense, specifically the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA. It should be obvious why they’re interested: solving the mystery of consciousness might lead to general artificial intelligence. Or discovering how to directly intervene on people’s minds. And there are other fantastical possibilities, like brain uploading, brain-to-brain communication, and curing long-standing diseases. They’ve recognized that being ahead of other nations on this