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

“I don’t blame you. Did you get some sleep?”

“Actually yes. And we’ve got to get up because we’ve got to attend the conference.”

“Conference?”

“There was an email. Saying we should go to it instead of Professional Development.”

“An email?” Kierk says, squinting over at her, propped up on one elbow.

“We have to attend the NYU neuroscience conference.”

“NYU neuroscience conference?”

“Stop echoing me!” Carmen says, giggling again, hitting him with her pillow. He wrestles the pillow away, throws it across the hotel room. He slumps back with an arm over his face groaning—“Noooo the fucking conference. The fucking conference . . .”

“Oh, does poor Kierk need to go to an adult place?”

Kierk is muttering under his breath—“Officious, meddling, interfering . . .”

“You’re half acting,” Carmen playfully calls back to him as she pads away. Kierk sits back up in the bed, surprised that she knows him that well.

“Half real though!” he calls back, hearing the bathroom door close.

Kierk folds up the conference schedule on Promega letterhead, which he had been reading in the dim light of the auditorium, trying to figure out what the hell the speaker’s been talking about. Earlier Carmen and he had gotten their complimentary breakfasts together. Since the incident with the mannequin she has seemed sensibly reluctant to be alone. But this morning it became obvious to Kierk that she knows he is aware of her reluctance and fear, and that today she’s putting on a brave face and pretending everything is fine, and so is off somewhere networking and doing everything she ordinarily would, determined to have an absolutely normal day.

Sitting in the back alone Kierk has reached a point of complete indifference after four straight hours of listening to undifferentiated drivel. He reads the tattooed writing on his left forearm. Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

He finds himself staring at an empty seat in the front row. Atif had always sat up front. Maybe that would have been his seat right there . . . He looks around the darkened rows of quiet figures, all still alive, but suddenly so fragile in the context of Atif’s empty seat. Morbid from boredom, Kierk wonders what Atif had thought at that last moment. What will all these people think? What will they think in that panic-attack moment where the great unfair equation comes into full view? As the PowerPoints run together Kierk can’t help but view everyone around him as mere biological ticking timebombs waiting to go off, some internal imbalance or closure or pressure buildup or asynchrony in their parts, some tiny minuscule mistake in the transcription of an oncogene, to be drunk and woozy in the underground heat while above a storm raged and then to trip or be shoved from behind and land in a drunken and dazed heap as a thing a thousand times bigger than you and made of materials a thousand times harder slams into you with a planetary roar, or for a surgical scar abutting an artery in the back of your throat to aggravate and aggravate until it punctures through and blood spurts out in great arcs in time to your heartbeat.

The lights switch on and everyone perks up, stirring like autotrophs under the glare.

“Time for lunch! We’ll reconvene after.”

People shuffle out, stretching and yawning, bearing Promega tote bags and Promega name tags. Kierk follows the crowd and finds some lunch laid out. As he’s filling up his plate he finds himself across from Max, who nods to him.

“So what do you think of the talks so far?” he says to Kierk, taking a stab at small talk.

“I’ve been more focused on consciousness, lately. Stuff about the molecular machinery of an individual neuron . . . I don’t think it’s helpful.”

“Why not?”

“Because neurons are neurons.”

“That’s a tautology.”

“Look, nearly all that stuff is already worked out. Neurons are just anything that can integrate across thousands of inputs, funnel the input into a single binary output, and that are plastic in certain ways. That’s it. They don’t do anything special that makes minds work. They’re too simple. But when you get millions of them, billions of them, they start to do really, really interesting things. Have you ever seen flocks of starlings?”

“Yes, Kierk, I know about the starlings analogy.”

Kierk continues as if Max hadn’t spoken—“When the flock forms different shapes they’re all acting at once. There’s no hierarchy, no starling leaders. Same with neuronal activity, but it’s not thousands of birds, it’s hundreds of millions of neurons. Neurons themselves are completely uninteresting.”

“I know, Kierk, but there are questions of memory and attention and all these things that—”

Not looking in Max’s direction Kierk waves a hand as if shooing away a fly. “Memory, attention? What are these things if not synonyms for selection? Selection of a change to keep. Selection of one stimulus above others. And we already know the physiological correlates of this selection: the literal selection of neural connections, their random growth providing variation and their preferential survival based on their utility, their use. All those neu-rites growing, pruning, triumphing, dying, forming alliances, and carving out the territory of gray matter. Render a monkey’s arm inert by tying it to its side, and in a week the neighboring neurons will have taken over the neural territory that belonged to that arm. Playing out the only game in town. The elegance of our genome is carved out of the violence of selection. Did you think that the elegance of our thoughts was any different? Oh fall to your knees, you lovers of peace, for the brain is a war!”

Kierk shoots his gaze to Max, a wild Celtic look in his eyes. This should annoy Max, but something in the desperate look of Kierk’s eyes makes it not. Max has realized that none of this is directed at him anyways, and that Kierk is always talking to himself.

“It’s just gotten so much clearer to me lately!” Kierk goes on. “There’s