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

“Jesus!” Jessica says at the end, looking at the dot of a wound on Atif’s forearm before it’s covered up with a gauze wrapping. Carmen looks critically at Jessica’s expression, then steps forward and offers her arm.

Twenty minutes later everyone has gone through it except Greg. He’s saying—“I mean, do you really need us, specifically? And shouldn’t we be like, aware of any health risks?”

There comes an overlapping chorus of voices:

“It’s just a punch biopsy.”

“Come on, Greg, we all did it.”

“Greg, it’s just a punch biopsy, you’ll be fine,” Carmen says.

Greg looks at Carmen and after a moment acquiesces in a quick nod, proffering his arm to minor cheers.

When an afternoon break is announced Kierk finally escapes alone, leaving the building to stand relieved in the obliterating sunlight. He feels like he just ran a marathon of human interaction. He’s out to buy a phone and get a haircut during the downtime. As he runs his errands he can physically sense the weight of himself returning. An apparition is solidifying, becoming substantial again, returning to the world.

Later in the evening half the Crick Scholars, including Kierk, are scheduled for a tour of the primate research center at the basement level of the CNS. Over eighty primates are housed underground on the edge of Washington Square Park, a kind of surreal inversion of the constant stream of pedestrians above. Kierk, Atif, Alex, and Jessica assemble in the glass room that serves as an annex to the main animal lab. There is the thick musk of primates, dung and souring grapes, biscuits soggy with piss, cut carrots and stale green beans.

All four of them finish shrugging on soiled lab coats and strapping on face masks, pulling on thick bite-proof gloves, hopping on one foot to fit the little blue booties over their shoes. Soon Norman Bennett is leading them amid the veterinarians and technicians, yelling over the clanking and grinding.

“We’re splitting the tours because monkeys are so sensitive to crowds. They’re rhesus macaques, of which we have forty, and then twenty bonnet macaques, and a smattering of different species. We ‘chair them’ to move them up to the electrophysiology rigs upstairs for experiments. The chairs are those rectangular glass boxes that you’re right next to, Atif. Their heads poke out so they can look around. But we can also fix the tops of their heads so they only look straight ahead at whatever task they’re doing. They can be devils to get in.”

Amid the cages and occasional hiss from their occupants it is Atif who moves with the most certainty, a knowing look in his eyes, coolly surveying equipment. He’s worked in a primate lab the last several years and knows fundamentally they’re all the same. Mostly he spends time eyeing the other Crick Scholars, especially Kierk. Before the program had started Atif made a point of reading all the other Crick Scholars’ work. He’d been particularly impressed by Kierk’s attempts to develop an actual theory of consciousness; last night after reading a paper by Kierk he had gotten carried away late into the early morning with his own musings. Atif feels a competition brewing: which of them will get the tenure-track positions at one of the best research universities in the world, in one of the best cities in the world, at such a young age? No more being shipped around countries and programs, showing up in some strange city to work in a lab for a year before heading to the next, participating in the great global migration of postdocs. If this is indeed a competition Atif wants to know the other players and is already forming a ranking in his mind.

“. . . telling you now because that group is dangerous, and they do target individual researchers. They might threaten you, or try to scare you by coming to your apartment. One time a researcher was ambushed at night and chased by someone in a creepy costume. Some shamanistic monster outfit. We’re sure it was them. This SAAR, the Students Against Animal Research, they’re real and extremely serious. It’s not a legal student group anymore but they still picket outside a lot of our talks. They have a real fetish for neuroscience. It started when PETA filed a FOIA, a freedom of information fishing expedition. We happened to be developing a new surgery at the time, something for Professor Melissa Goldman. Atif, I know you’ve met her because you’re based in her lab here in the CNS. The surgery was done on one of the macaques here, whose name was Double Trouble. And unfortunately Double Trouble got an infection in her skullcap from the surgery. We’re not going to waste a brain so of course the vets decapitated Double Trouble and made brain slices. Pictures from the surgery were exposed when PETA filed the FOIA, which really got SAAR all riled up. So then of course both PETA and SAAR went crazy and accused us of killing Double Trouble. PETA even requested OLAW at the NIH to do an official investigation for violations of the Animal Welfare Act. This continued until SAAR actually distributed the addresses of some of the veterinarians and Melissa. PETA officially backed off, but SAAR didn’t. A few lab members were threatened personally. Then the chase by the monster, the costumed guy. Real serious horror-movie stuff. But what finally allowed me to get the president of the university to come down hard was what happened to Melissa Goldman. She found a bunch of supplies outside her house. Her child actually found them in the morning. A little girl. All these household items piled up in the driveway, things like orange juice, laundry detergent, baking powder and so on. Turns out it was all the ingredients you need to build a homemade bomb from scratch.”

Jessica gasps. “Her daughter found it?”

Norman sighs wearily. “SAAR’s funding was cut. PETA officially broke ties with SAAR and publicly condemned the