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

who were just friends before the blackout stop in the middle of the street to kiss, phones change from information-processing devices to flashlights bobbing up and down. Unfriendly faces appear out of the darkness, startling those they approach, only to break into smiles after eye contact. As if, Kierk thought, everything could be rolled back, and when we lost power we also discarded all our postmodern irony and practiced apathy and solipsism and empty physicalism and we found again the rough sensuous core of the human.

In all the windows lining the street one by one a candle is placed. People are smoking out on fire escapes, calling to those below them. From the sidewalk he looks up to a second-story window across from him and sees a girl gazing out, probably younger than him, college-aged, illuminated by a single candle she’s holding. She opens her window to let the air in, sets down the candle on the sill, and then strips off her shirt and unclasps her bra, looking out with defiant seductiveness.

Kierk, wheeling from everything around him, grinning madly, continues on his trek into those tunnels, that subnivean world underneath the darkness, thinking—all these consciousnesses don’t need manufactured light. They make their own.

He ends up sitting on the steps at Union Square having been given a cigarette by a passerby. Away in the dark he hears the chants of “Hare Krishna” as outlines of robes move back and forth. Craning his neck up he can see that there are now stars over Manhattan. Exhaling smoke, listening to the babble of the human river around him he thinks that he’s close. Closer than he’s ever been since leaving Madison. After all, he’s really been doing his own research on consciousness since coming to New York. His claiming to do anything else here has been merely a halfhearted ruse, he knows now. Maybe this time with the right momentum he will jump the explanatory gap on the horse of the city, and so with the blackened outlines of gothic spires looming around him Kierk decides that from here on he will only work to solve the mystery of consciousness, and damn them, damn them all if they didn’t like it.

FRIDAY

Kierk wakes up and immediately regrets it. He’s actually unsure exactly how long he has been awake. He may have come to consciousness moments ago or maybe this is his second or third resurgence. There is a timelessness to his thoughts, such that he begins one only to realize he’s already thought this thought and arrived at its conclusion and is starting it again. Beyond him, threatening, the day promises pointless toils, and there are umbrages of the quotidian menacing from yonder his blanket, taking form before his sleepy impossible-to-open eyes in the image of the busy lab, with people bustling about and sitting down and standing up and then sitting down again and looking at screens and moving pixels of light around on the screens into different configurations, and it seems so pointless and stupid that there is just no reason to do anything but drowse within this warm pool of sheets and comfort. Kierk does not want to get up.

But he does. He has to. After flipping the light switch up and down to no effect he brushes his teeth in the dark before leaving for work.

About a block away from his place the power is already back on, but it’s spotty; he sees at least two blocks with no power during his walk. The streets are so hot that everyone has their lips pulled back like the day is performing oral surgery on them. The light lances at everything, stabs at the city on its table.

At the CNS Kierk spends the entire day sitting in front of his computer, reading article after article, catching up on everything he’s missed in the field of consciousness research. It feels like unhinging his jaw and sticking a fire hose in his mouth. After hours of marking up research articles and philosophy papers he slowly begins to categorize the dozens that he’s read today, beginning to start some short notes, the making of connections: he sees several which could be made into papers but he feels that this is a waste of his time, too small fish, so he does a catch-and-release program and keeps the ideas for himself on pieces of scrap paper, knowing that they might service something greater. At three in the afternoon he realizes that he hasn’t eaten all day so gets takeout and returns quickly, eating heaps of Thai food at his desk as the articles continue to play across his monitor like the pages of some alien codex.

Bleary-eyed and sporting a headache from the long assault of his low-Hz monitor on his visual system, with one hand massaging at his lower lumbar because of his non-ergonomic chair, Kierk is trying to find Alex, who just texted him TRAPPED ON 11TH FLOOR WITH WEIRDO PLS HALP, quickly followed by JUST COME SEE. After asking some PhD students Kierk finds the bank-vault-heavy door with the blinking sign above that reads EXPERIMENT ONGOING in computronic green. Outside hangs a whiteboard reading COME IN below an evocative drawing in red marker of a mouse’s anthropomorphized head with a cartoon sword and a pirate patch over one eye.

Inside is a windowless boxcar-size room full of shelves of equipment, or rather pieces of equipment, like the entire room had been caught in flagrante during a promiscuous act of creation. Alex and another man are standing in front of a computer screen positioned at standing height on a messy shelf. The heavy door slams shut behind him. Alex beckons him over in the small space—“Kierk, this is Vlad, Vlad, Kierk.”

After shaking hands—“So what did you want to show me?” Even as Kierk says this he hears the briefest of scrambles and his attention is drawn to his left. There is a mouse at chest level to him, not even two feet