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

tan trench coat crowned by a red baseball cap where the head would be. Kierk freezes.

“Are you alright?” Williams asks. His question releases Kierk, who spins on him. At first, perhaps due to a trick of the mind, or perhaps because he was confused by Kierk’s pause, Williams’ face is a truly unreadable canvas, disconcerting in its blank untranslatability, but then this flits away, replaced by an expression of benign concern as he meets Kierk’s eyes. Kierk examines that face, that expression, with all the detailed intensity of a portraiture artist, attempting to match it to his brief opaque memories of the man he had glimpsed in the subway.

“I actually have a few more questions, professor. Have you ever heard of the Following Brothers of Christ?”

“No. Should I have?”

“Do you ever get down to Bleecker Street Station?”

Williams is an enigmatic sphinx, paws on the arms of his chair.

“I don’t know what you mean. The subway stop?”

“Yes. Were you there Saturday before last?”

A brief flicker of anger. “Today is my first day back from the conference. As we discussed numerous times over email.”

“Oh. I’m sorry, professor. Forgive my absentmindedness.”

Kierk continues slyly watching Williams, as if about to say something, but then, with nothing forthcoming, he just nods and nearly bows out of the room, closing the door and retreating to the stairwell where he paces about on one of the landings.

Questions in his mind: did Williams mean for him to see it? Was it a sign, and if so, what did it signify? Threat? Complicity? Informing Kierk that he knew that Kierk knew?

Rushing back to his computer he pulls up information about the conference Williams had been attending. Online Kierk thumbs through the photos of the conference, looking at the timestamps, looking up flights from Chicago (the conference location) to New York, and finally concludes that Williams really had attended the conference, and in fact had given a talk the day before Atif’s body had been found. The immediate closure is disappointing to him—surely it was unlikely for someone in Chicago to appear in a photograph one day, and then to have traveled to New York the next night to commit a murder with no motive? And then pretend to be away the rest of the time? And should he tell Carmen all this? After all, this would only inflame her in a quest that Kierk did not fully believe in. It could also prove merely a distraction, more noise injected into the search for signal. Eventually he decides not to tell her, for now. Like a proper scientist he would wait for more evidence.

Waiting for the elevator to go down for lunch, Kierk hears a squeaking noise. Down the hall, trundling quickly but seeming to take forever, there glides like a specter on wheels a chaired macaque. It is pushed by a scientist in a blue lab coat and face mask. The macaque is encased in a rectangular and see-through plastic box, its head jutting out from a beveled plastic top. Squat, it is turned toward Kierk during its passage; it looks down the corridor at him with intense concentration as it slides past on wheels. The protuberances of little humanoid hands grasp and press against the box, the installed plastic chimney is a pink tube rising from its skull, its irises black stones that watch Kierk like a totem. Grinning, it is an obscene magician’s trick of biology disappearing around the corner.

Kierk stands watching the space where it was. He wants to rip the gunk from its stupid, primitive head. To free it, even briefly, from this attempt at understanding. He feels monumental embarrassment for it—even its thoughts will be naked soon, nothing hidden, an unclothed brain among clothed ones, hinting that our sense of agency is maybe just a sartorial illusion cast by our skulls not being splayed and violated with a recording needle, the worst kind of rape, a discarding of an entire ontology. But at the same time he knows that it’ll win in the end anyway, outlast all these buildings and face masks and tetrodes—consciousness will still be here after all this is gone, undefeated, smiling as wide as the Cheshire Cat, because it’s the only game in town. Experience comes before, and will last longer, than any science.

Kierk enters the elevator and watches the doors close. The floor numbers tick down and he’s lost in thought—why does anyone wake up with the same consciousness they went to sleep with? Why does this “I” continue each time? It cannot be mere continuity, as that is disrupted by a dreamless sleep. So then it must be something else that maintains continuity, like memories, or the motifs and structures unique to your experience. But this leaves open the possibility of a theory of consciousness that tells us that, from within a perspective, there is no difference between one C. elegans and another, that the phenomenology of watching an elevator door close at the center of your field of vision is recreated a billion times a day all over the world by a billion different people watching elevator doors close and at the level of description that makes a difference there is no difference between any of them, all just amalgamations of the same motifs, the same concepts, the same memories and feelings, the same self-narratives and acts all reoccurring across history, each conscious moment constructed of subsets of others that have been experienced by others before, like dolls with detachable parts, mere bundles that share contents, and when old motifs are instantiated, or two motifs are drawn to one another into an ancient pattern, or when the same immemorial problems confronted, then phenomenological selves can skip and jump from similarity to similarity across space and time and people like a stone across water. Metempsychosis. Reincarnation, but only in parts.

The elevator doors ding open.

At the entrance to the CNS Carmen and Kierk have a brief interaction but are heading separate ways. He had brought her no