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

is now trying to grow into a brain. But it can’t self-organize well. No morphogenic cues.”

“Well, I mean, technically . . . yes.”

“So what’s this white bubble growing off of mine?” Carmen says, pointing. “It looks like a little cup or saucer or . . .”

“Oh,” Todd says, stopping to lean over Carmen. “It’s trying to grow an eye.”

The look on Carmen’s face. She backs away, shivering suddenly. “It’s trying to see?”

“Don’t worry! It’s not like the eye is going to be functional,” Todd says.

“Did you test it?” she asks. “I mean, it might have working photoreceptors. It might be able to distinguish light and dark, that kind of thing. Maybe even simple outlines . . .”

Todd appears disconcerted. Carmen continues—“And what about internal neural signals?”

“Oh, yes! Absolutely. Recordings definitely show neural activity.”

“What type of activity. Dreaming?”

“Dreaming of things they’ve never seen,” Kierk says quietly. “Dreams made of ancestral memories. The genetically pre-programmed connectivity of the network. A blueprint left behind by all the humans who ever lived. Ancestral memory. Predators and prey. Mother and father. Comfort and cold. Food. Lovers . . .”

“Well, I mean . . .” Todd starts to respond but no one is listening to him because Jessica has approached the first bioreactor in the line of eight, staring down at it, and soon everyone is silent, realizing. All the gazes of the Crick Scholars are drawn to the first vat and its small gray-white content, the slow stir of it, almost like it was breathing through the thrumming fans of the room.

“Atif was really nice to me,” Jessica says quietly. Then she lets out a soft sob and Carmen rushes over, hugging her from the side, stroking her hair and saying—“Oh, honey. Oh, honey.”

“It’s not like they’re conscious,” Alex says, somewhat nervously, glancing in the direction of his vat.

Kierk, now down in front of Atif’s organoid, so close he is micrometers from pressing his nose up against the glass—“Now how could you possibly know that?”

Carmen lags behind as everyone leaves. She’s thinking that it’ll be easier to get the truth out of Greg if it’s just the two of them—it’s not like she’s unaware of the effect she has on him, and though sometimes the way she looks slips her mind (or of course when she internally feels underdressed or bloated and gassy or awkward or fat, and so on), she’s currently very cognizant of it, expressing it, right now trying to radiate an interested look. So when she tugs on Greg’s shirt he pauses, hooked, his worry replaced by consternation combined with hope.

“Could I talk to you a moment?”

“Of course! What’s up?”

“Privately.”

Carmen beckons him into a nearby break room, closing the door behind them. Greg stands nervously, fidgeting.

“What’s, um, what do you need?”

“I didn’t know you used to work in astronomy, Greg.”

His face drops. “I . . . don’t do that anymore. I switched to computer science in graduate school.”

“Because the paper on anomalous star dimming was retracted.”

Now Greg’s face pales to an even purer shade of egg white.

“How’d you find out?”

“The internet.”

He lets out a breath. “Does Kierk know?”

Carmen’s eyes narrow. “No one else knows. So far.”

“Please don’t tell anyone. I switched to my mother’s maiden name. And it follows you around! Forever! It’s impossible to shake, a stain on me, a stain on that name. And now it’s followed me here. Fuck. Just . . . Fuck.”

“Why’d you do it?”

“I really did lose that data. The files! The files became corrupted. Some sort of virus. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Carmen shakes her head softly, holding up her hands. “Stop, Greg. That’s impossible.”

“It actually happened! Someone did it to me on purpose. Framed me.”

“You lost all the data. That’s just not possible.”

Greg moans. “Oh, Carmen, you don’t . . . You don’t know these people.”

“What? What people?”

He looks around like he’s checking the room for listening devices, which makes Carmen nearly laugh aloud.

“If someone signs a nondisclosure agreement, they can’t even say if they’ve signed one. Is all I’m saying.”

“Wait. DARPA? You’re talking about DARPA.”

“. . .”

“You’re lying.”

“Did they make you retract?”

“No!”

“Did something happen? What?”

Greg, his face red, looks like he’s about to cry. One of his hands clenches, drawing her attention. Carmen suddenly realizes they are alone in the room and Greg is between her and the door. And that this man is deeply emotionally unstable right now. At the completion of that thought, Carmen splits into three personas: one of whom is scientific and calm and giving a mini-lecture on the physiological fact that men have 50 percent more muscle mass than women, and due to their muscle fibers being larger, their muscles are pound for pound stronger as well, and that even a flabby guy like Greg is probably much faster too, because men’s sensory frame shifting and reaction times are quicker, their grips larger, their weight distributed better for fighting and capable of producing far more power per movement, and all that is because beneath the veneer of civilization women like me have been mating with men who are good at killing other men and slowly breeding a weaponized sex to protect us and now here I am paying the price for that sexual selection that all my female ancestors enjoyed . . . while the second part of her is becoming itself violent, a heated demon, a cartilaginous message, a bone spear losing language in its flight and fear and reactivity. The further third, which is being shunted all the emotional intelligence, becomes a flirtatious psychologist, a concerned matron with the whiff of sex, a pretty face with big eyes.

“Hey, Greg,” she says, smiling at him, tilting her head, feeling herself adopt a posture with her chest out, entering a standing lordosis, one leg crossing behind the other. “I didn’t mean to interrogate you. But I need to know: what exactly happened? That’s what I want.”

“Why do you even care?” he cries angrily, gesturing. “Who made you a detective? I know what you’re doing by the