The Revelations by Erik Hoel (some good books to read TXT) 📗

body of an albino pigeon, its feathers ruffled and claws curled up in death, thick with itself. Shoes step around it. Having stopped so suddenly in the moving crowd he is jostled from behind, hears a muttered exclamation. But Kierk is entranced. Its eyes are clenched shut, its head bowed into its fluffed chest. It is a bright white and surprisingly compact and solid in its physiology. He glances up at the building that towers over the sidewalk, a great glass plane extending up and up. Had the pigeon, only minutes ago, thwacked into the building and plummeted to the crowd? Kierk wonders—Did you become sun-blind from the glare? Or did you think as you sped forward that the other pigeon would swerve away at the last second, only to find it was your reflection all along? Or did you see the glass as a transparent barrier, a thing you could breach if you tried hard enough, but in your velocity you fundamentally mistook its substance and the impact snapped your poor neck . . .

Kierk maneuvers through the crowd and grabs from a nearby crate two newspapers. Returning he again guards the albino pigeon with his feet, people giving him strange stares as they pass. In a forest of legs he crouches down. From on high he is a still, bent dot amid a moving arterial stream of pedestrians.

He uses one of the newspapers, rolled up, to scoot the pigeon onto the other one that he holds flat. Then he carefully maneuvers out of the crowd with it. By the trash bin off to the side of the flow he gives it a tiny burial, wrapping it firmly up in the newspaper, a small package he places softly into the bin, quietly saying a prayer over it, and gives a final plea for its little bird consciousness to have lived a good life expressive of platonic pigeon essence.

Subject line: Urgent! Missing brain

Subject body: Going over inventory after Day in the Lab we are short one of our example human brains. It was stored in ethyl alcohol. These are really difficult to get, guys. We need it returned promptly, so please check your cars, desks, and home for the brain.

Carmen clicks out of the email and at the same time gives a squeeze with her left hand to a tiny squishy foam brain. For stress. She looks over at Kierk, but he’s preoccupied reading papers at his desk. She approaches him and he takes out earbuds. In the relative silence of the lab, she can hear the tinny sound of classical music coming from them.

“What’s up?”

“Whatcha reading about?” She gestures to the screen.

“Oh, it’s just some technical stuff on causation. You’d think this would all be worked out, but actually no one has a damn idea what causation is or how it works.”

“So did you get the email about the talk on Saturday?”

“Is it required to attend?”

“No. But I think you’ll want to. Antonio Moretti is flying in to give a talk on his theory of consciousness.”

“So?”

“So you’re going to go see him, right? I mean, he must know you’re here. And you haven’t seen him since you left after telling him his theory was wrong and this talk means he’s still going around peddling his theory, so what—”

“I never thought he would stop.”

“Well do you want to come with me because—”

“Alright. That’s fine.”

Carmen is put off by Kierk’s curtness. She says, hesitantly—“Maybe we could do something afterward?”

A very long pause. “Yeah, we’ll see what happens.”

“Is everything okay?” she leans down to whisper to him.

“Oh, it’s fine. I’m just concentrating on this. Sorry.”

“Okay,” she says, straightening. “Just checking.” He doesn’t look at her as she makes her way back to her desk.

Sitting, still thinking about Kierk’s distance, another email arrives. It takes Carmen a moment to absorb what she is casually reading:

Subject line: something you should know . . .

Subject body: his real name isn’t Greg Monroe. It’s Greg Alpern. And he’s a liar.

Clicking on the embedded link takes her to a site called Retraction Watch, which she’d heard about before but never visited: a tongue-in-cheek listing of the constant stream of retractions from scientific journals. Papers were retracted for sundry reasons, everything from having improperly analyzed data to outright fraud or misrepresentation, and the entire spectrum in between.

Totally regular star dimming: missing data leads to retraction of weird astronomical ~ndings.

Apparently, there was a little mishap involving how bright stars are at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The journal Nature has issued a retraction of “Anomalous star dimming in the Milky Way.” The now-unavailable paper claimed that various instances of star dimming could not be explained by comets, solar dust storms, or any other natural cause. Obviously, that only leaves aliens! Apparently the paper advocated that such dimming anomalies might be because of Dyson spheres: structures alien civilizations would build around a sun to extract more and more energy from it. They even said this increased the chances that aliens would have visited earth. But an internal investigation carried out by the funding agency of the study, DARPA, concluded that the authors could produce no lab notebooks nor any electronic copies of the data reported in this article in any form. The authors claimed that the electronically-stored data had been accidentally deleted and that the physical lab notebooks had been lost. Therefore, under suspicion of data fabrication, the paper was withdrawn. The first author on the paper, Greg Alpern, is a 2nd year PhD student at MIT. We’ve contacted Greg, his principle investigator, and DARPA, and will let you know if we hear back with any updates.

The entry was dated three years ago. Carmen digs around the internet some more and turns up a host of innocuous information about Greg Alpern confirming that it really was Greg. The email had come from an anonymous address. She fires back a quick email asking, “Who the hell sent this?”

So Greg had faked data. And had previously been funded by DARPA, although that