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

listens for a while longer, standing there wondering if all of them really believe in the narrative that Karen has spun up with a few neuroimaging studies that probably weren’t even replicable, if the human capacity for self-preservative delusion is really this powerful, or if they were all enthusiastic liars. Then Carmen pictures Karen sitting on the edge of her hotel bed, her laptop open, making this call, and what Karen is going to do when she hangs up and is left alone in that empty, impersonal room. Everything around her will be an uncaring alien hum, and she will have no shield against a world which takes and takes from you, unsparing even to pet theories. I want a family—Carmen thinks suddenly—I wasn’t sure until right now, but I want a family. If I am making this call in ten years, I want to be able to hang up and make another call.

To clear his head Kierk has laced up his sneakers and bolted down the stairs out into dew-laced New York, the sun a white bowl hovering, the morning light angular and precise. Breathing and small-puddle hopping become priorities; everything is lost in the pace of his sneakers and the lope of his stride, his body happy to be used. As he runs he introspects on his consciousness, the majority of which is not the sense data of how hard each heel strikes or the cool air on his legs, but the feeling of control, of access, the feeling of availability composed of the fluid shifting of counterfactuals and the navigation through them—left leg, right leg, jump, lean in, go hard now, ease back, turn right—all in a realm of control far abstracted from the domain of twitch muscle-fibers and synapses calculating how much acetylcholine to release. He spends a little while working out how problematic this is for theories of consciousness—for why would it be at one particular spatial and temporal level that experience makes its home at, why not any other, why not Planck time and space, and why these exact contents specifically? In what scripture are such rules written?

After finishing the subsequent shower Kierk stands in his living room where all the boxes have been torn apart and books are everywhere. His legs are achy and feel twangy and used. Kierk loves the feeling. Not just for the pleasure/pain of it, but also for the concept: having broken down, having torn and ripped, his entire frame was now riddled with micro-tears throughout—but it is only by tearing everything down that one can build anything that lasts . . .

Notes have been piling up on the floor in the form of scribbles, drawings, equations, the tentative tendrils of his latest assault on consciousness. Crouching down on the balls of his feet in the middle of it all, idly turning over a page of notes, Kierk glances around before speaking to the empty apartment.

“How do you like it now, gentlemen?”

The scene starts, plays out all the way to the end, then starts again, an ouroboros. Kierk’s in the elevator with that distinct vestibular sensation informing him that he is moving, moving down. The floor numbers tick in red. Everything is skipping around, his perception is blurry, focusing occasionally, a shaky camera. And as the display ticks down from impossibly large numbers he realizes that someone is in the elevator with him. Standing right behind him to his left, in the corner. There is a flicker of the lights, fluctuating power. Kierk looks over his left shoulder at the figure in the corner, hoodie on a sweatshirt pulled down to conceal the face, hands in the pockets, jeans, looking at the elevator floor. The killer! The figure remains motionless, the lights flicker again. Kierk reaches out a single, trembling hand to touch the hood—the lights go off in the elevator. Kierk jumps back in the complete darkness, retreating frantically until he feels the cold metal wall behind him. He is sure that the killer has moved from the corner. Kierk lashes out with his leg, kicking into the dark at different places and at different levels—if it approaches, he’ll feel it coming with his sneakers, the blow will reveal location and give forewarning—mid-kick, the lights come back on in the empty elevator. Breathing hard, Kierk regains his composure. He has escaped, he knows this. Again he watches the floor numbers, now a melancholy yellow. He’s twitchy, he paces back and forth, waiting as the countdown continues. Nervously he watches the door, now realizing it will open and that the thing will be waiting for him there, at the basement level. The tension builds, the lower digits go by, he’s nearly on his knees now, crying. The elevator dings open and he cries out in anticipation. The macaque, totem-headed and grinning, sits in its plastic see-through box. Kierk falls back in mortal terror against the far elevator wall. But it remains stationary, left there, alone, rapidly breathing, its arms and legs scampering inside the box like the legs of a frantic centipede, pressing and smearing against the glass from all angles while its head remains fixed facing Kierk, looking directly into his eyes. Its lips are moving, and there is the hissing sound of syllables that reveal flashes of canines. It is whispering something. Something just beyond Kierk’s hearing. Kierk steps toward it in trembling trepidation and curiosity. He leans down to listen, puts his ear right up against its whispering thin lips, hearing just snatches of mathematics and foreign scientific terminology. His eyes, at first confused, begin to widen and then change into a look of incalculable awe. Kierk’s brains are blown out through the back of his skull and splatter against the wall of the elevator in thick chunks.

WEDNESDAY

Kierk wakes up suddenly, startling. A sound is receding, unidentifiable. What had woken him? There’s light through the window, but checking his phone he finds it blinking 6:00 a.m. A long low groan . .