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

“What’s above us?” Kierk asks.

Vlad shrugs. “Just the roof.”

Of course it takes Kierk forever to find Williams’ office again—where he had thought it located is now occupied by a janitorial closet. But Kierk has found that the best strategy for locating anything in the CNS is not a purposeful search but rather a random drunkard’s walk. Only after he’s been meandering about does he find the door with Williams’ name on it. But as he goes to knock he realizes that he has been hearing something as he approached in the background of his consciousness, a stream of steady sound from behind the door. It’s oddly constant, not like a conversation at all. Leaning in at first the mumbling is indistinct. Then Kierk crouches down and presses his ear directly against the keyhole, and the mumbling, which is actually more of a chant, comes into aural focus. It is definitely Williams’ voice but speaking strangely in low constant tone:

“. . . to lay with the sinner is to eat of the apple and smote the tree of knowledge and to eat of the sinner’s body is to enter the womb of the earth for there is cultivated the sin of cannibalism of the worm of one’s own self and so it is from our birthplace we will travel through the black gulf to bring the song of warning to stop the fruit being plucked and stop the worm of self from being eaten as we bear wisdom beyond ken that lo shall put an end to a terrible mewling and striving that must not be . . .”

Kierk pulls away in shock. It is definitely Williams’ voice but quickened and nonsensical. He doesn’t recognize anything but vague biblical allusions—what it had sounded like was the free verse of a man possessed. His face puzzled, he withdraws, the mumbling becoming a continuous low drone, until Kierk, backing away, leaves the portent of the door. Everything but suspicion forgotten he searches for a way out.

Later, Kierk is browsing the internet for the snippets he remembers from the stream-of-consciousness chant, but the specifics of it are quickly fading from his memory and each variation gets no results. No origin is forthcoming. Indeed, he thinks at his desk, nothing is lately—

The lights automatically shut off, causing him to jump. Looking around he’s alone. His confusion clears when he remembers how late in the day it is. Outside the windows of the dimly lit lab there is void as dark as deep space.

Kierk, having gone home to change into one of his new shirts and wash up and shave and load up on deodorant, heads to the martini bar near St. Marks Place where Carmen suggested they meet. He arrives early. The general theme of the bar is prominently displayed on the walls filled with old crumbling historical maps. Kierk picks a seat at the bar under a large map that he likes, with beautiful arabesques scalloping around its edges and in the blank frayed territory where the Indian Ocean should be is a large-snouted sea serpent entangled in a banner on which is writ in stylish lettering: HERE BE DRAGONS. He spends a while playing around with a few ideas in his notebook before Carmen taps him on the shoulder. She is wearing a blue cocktail dress and looks radiant. Kierk instinctively pulls out a stool for her. They order two martinis and watch as the drinks get made in front of them. They spend a little while catching each other up on things. Carmen tells Kierk about the blog incident when Karen was away at the conference (Kierk is conspicuously silent as she speculates over who the writer of the post was), which leads to them discussing Carmen’s grand dream: to show that the entire cortex participates in each conscious experience, like a large spider’s web where every part vibrates in response to the smallest perturbation of any part. That the apparent modularity that ruled current thinking was just an illusion brought about by the coarse-graining effects of neuroimaging and lesions. But she can only do one or two experiments at a time and so Carmen feels frustration at the limits of it, like she’s always cleaning a smudged glass with a rag that is itself dirty. There are so many variables beyond the experimenter’s control, so many background assumptions have been made, and consciousness is always squirming away, impossible to isolate as an experimental variable. When Kierk keeps asking about experimental designs—“Yes, but what does it really tell us?”—she can feel her own skepticism rising. His questioning in this is like some monomaniacal alembic, distilling things down to their essences. Carmen freely admits that her experiments and methodologies aren’t going to offer up a theory of consciousness, but maintains that they might tell us something if the string of assumptions that the field has constructed holds up. Yet it all suddenly seems so tenuous. Alex has spoken to Carmen about this before: Kierk imparts this sense that all you have been doing in neuroscience is useless and pointless and it’s like this contagious mood of depressive realism that can’t be shaken off. At the same time Carmen greatly enjoys these types of conversations because there is the sense of movement to them, like eventually everything, the departments, the grants, all could be torn down and the two of them could stand looking at the naked brain, erased of all assumptions, and consciousness would be suddenly as obvious as if the brain’s folds were lit by the light of a clear summer day.

After Carmen has stuffed the napkins containing summaries of their conversation into her clutch they order another martini and Kierk fills Carmen in on what happened between him and Ben, which he tells in a humorous manner, but it is clear that he intends Carmen get the serious subtext of it. He also tells her about what he overheard at Williams’ office door, to which Carmen perks up, fascinated,