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

away. It is crouched on a flat disk that rotates and wobbles with its movements—it is affixed at its head to a metal beam that gives enough space for the mouse to crouch between the beam and the disk, while the disk itself is on top of an adjustable stand, all of this part of what Kierk recognizes now as a giant amped-up microscope, nearly as large as Kierk himself, a thousand times as large as the mouse, towering above the scrabbling mammal trying to keep its balance with splayed-out feet; a machine with so many buttresses and overhangs and protuberances that the mouse looks like a biological outgrowth of the machine itself, a fact especially vivid because the top of the mouse’s skull has been scalped away, even the bone, and a glass skull has been surgically installed instead. The technological eye of a giant camera extends down to just a few inches above the affixed mouse. The mouse with the glass skull, thrust into a surreal situation beyond its ken, is surprisingly calm and adapted—it follows the movements of the pink giants with glass black orbs.

Vlad’s accent cuts out rough Russian syllables—“It’s a calcium imaging setup. Since the mice are transgenic they express green florescent protein intracellularly at the synapse. It fluoresces when it encounters calcium. So neurons fire, calcium is released internally to trigger synaptic vesicle release, the florescence gets triggered, and I can watch in real time the neural activity of thousands of neurons with the microscope. It’s a ten-hour operation to replace the mouse’s cranium with glass. And I can see activity across all six layers. See, I also embedded thin prisms in its brain when I performed the initial surgery. The prisms span the entire cortex and reflect up whatever cortical layer I want onto the ’scope. I can image millions of neurons, in theory.”

“I remembered your story, Kierk,” Alex interrupts. “One of the reasons I called you up here. The one you told about the Greek gods making a robotic man with a window in his head? Look at what we can do now. Greeks gods got nothing on us.”

Kierk leans over to get a view directly over the mouse and there it is, the transparent curving pane, not bone but pure glass, the open wound of a craniotomy clearly visible underneath, the rosy pink of the tiny brain within.

“Let me show you some of the raw data.” Vlad summons up various videos. “First is when the animal is under anesthesia. See, I put the mask on him.” Vlad gestures to a plastic tube that protrudes toward the mouse, mounted on small wheels with a hose sticking out the back, calibrated in size to be pushed forward and encompass the mouse’s face. The playback under anesthesia is just a grainy image flecked with white against a black background. “So nothing, right? But then, see, the animal is waking up.” On the recording a spot on the grainy surface lights up into a small white blob, small tendrils snaking out. Nearly all at once, hundreds of other white blobs flash and then fade—and then they are firing intermittently against the background gray of the interstitial space, and under each wave of firing the dendrites and axons come into view briefly like the structure of the network was being photographed with paparazzi flashes as groups go on and off. The whole thing looks as random as the blinking of white Christmas tree lights.

“Mmm,” mutters Kierk.

“What’s that?” Alex points to a two-prong device that looks like it can be medievally wheeled in.

“I show it images on the screen here. When it sees one type of image, it is trained to lick to the right, and for the other it licks to the left.” Vlad’s tongue flickers out in a mouse-like slurp, testing the air one way and then quickly darting the other way. Alex laughs, catching his balance on Vlad as he’s righted. Under the florescent light Kierk frowns, and as Alex continues speaking to Vlad, Kierk bends down to closer investigate the mouse, which causes it to scramble at its wobbling wheel. To Kierk the whole setup seems almost ontological in its significance—the mouse is crouched, splayed on the wheel, which rests on the adjustable pedestal, which rests on the microscope bolted to the table, which rests on the floor of the boxcar-size room, which rests on the entire superstructure of the CNS with all its levels and rooms underneath, which rests on the underground sewage and waterways and abandoned pneumatic tube systems and ossuaries, which rests on the Manhattan bedrock, which rests on sight-unseen worm-ridden earth until even that fades away and there is just an endless nothingness that somehow in its black bulk supports the whole edifice, a great layered tower, a biological totem that ends in this pinnacle: the small, fast-breathing, eye-darting form of the mouse with the glass skull. All of it hangs in blackness . . .

There is a squeak that breaks into a tinnitus-inducing hiss. The mouse is contorting, as much as it can with its head still tightly affixed, and then it suddenly freezes, not even breathing, its whiskers rigid, the wheel underneath it trembling.

“Whoa! What’s going on, guy?” Vlad says, looking around confused. “That’s a fear response. As if there’s a predator around. These are human raised so I’ve never seen one do it unless you expose them to cat urine.”

The mouse, they all realize, is not actually still. Despite its pinioned head it is attempting to crouch lower and lower until it is in complete supplication, its eyes rolling up so that there is pink exposed underneath those black orbs, and it is shifting, trying to flatten even more, but since it cannot it only engages in a slow undulate movement, tracing out a circle one creeping haunch movement at a time, its eyes rolling ever upward.

All three humans crane their necks to stare perplexed up at the totally empty and unthreatening expanse of the concrete