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

“How are you going to tell the Institutional Review Board?” she finally asks.

Melissa sighs, her mouth pursed. “With everything that’s going on this is exactly what I didn’t need.”

“They’re going to know it was an accident,” Karen reassures her. But Karen knows that this could spill beyond Melissa’s domain . . . There were joint department-wide grants to think about, and possible public blowback could influence whether those grants were renewed. Particularly the Crick Scholarship, which was up for review by DARPA at the beginning of next year. One Crick Scholar was dead, another had let a valuable research animal kill itself, and Kierk was a loose cannon . . . The entire program was beginning to look like a disaster. All those conservative neuroscientists who didn’t believe consciousness existed, and who had been extremely critical of the program, would be able to say that the first government-funded research into consciousness unraveled in ignominy.

Something in her field of vision makes her turn and she confronts Max’s face in the portal of the door. After a moment of eye contact he disappears. A vanishing that causes a stab in her chest.

Excusing herself from Melissa, Karen finds herself in pursuit of Max, tracking him through the CNS. In an empty stairwell she leans over the railing and calls his name. At the echo of it he stops one flight below her. He ascends slowly, she descends slowly, and they meet in the middle on the platform.

“So now you decide you want to talk to me?” he says furtively, glancing around to make sure they are alone.

“After what I just saw . . . I don’t know. Things haven’t been so great with me.”

She vaguely reaches out a hand, brushes against his thigh, but with no response forthcoming she drops it down to hang at her side. He’s staring at her in a defensive posture, his arms crossed. She doesn’t know how to articulate everything that’s churning inside her. There’s no obvious end or beginning, and no conclusion, because she doesn’t know anything now except what she wants at this moment.

Finally Max nods his head.

“I shouldn’t have booked it like that,” he says stiffly. “I won’t be so awkward in the future. You’ll have your professional atmosphere.”

“But what if I don’t want . . . things to be so professional,” Karen replies, moving forward, although she can’t muster any eroticism in her advance. Instead her voice betrays emotional need. And she knows immediately that it was a mistake. If she had said it in a flirtatious or sensual way, had tossed it off like this wasn’t the gravest matter in the world to her, then he probably would have smiled and moved closer as well, instead of giving her the pitying look he does now, his expression shifting to the sadly nostalgic, letting go in that instant.

“You’re saying you want to start up again?” he says. “Now? It’s been weeks. I needed you during that time. And you weren’t there.”

“I didn’t—”

“You did.”

Her voice is tremulous as she speaks—“But I need you now.”

A penitent nod of the head, trying to project grace like he had suddenly transmuted into a saint, a holy man who was trying to communicate by his body language the impossibility of the situation without breaking her heart. But his words are harsh.

“You need me now. I needed you then. Looks like we’re perpetually out of sync.”

Someone enters the stairwell below them and just like that he gives her a final glance and descends. The reality of the ending is upon her. Karen says his name twice. The first is loud enough for him to hear but the second is just for her.

Later, there she is utterly losing her shit behind the locked door of her office, losing her research program, losing Max, hell, who knows, maybe losing her own shot at tenure here if the Crick Program goes under, a total dissolution. All her failures beat at her like winged devils, and she realizes that the wolf of time has eaten up the hours of her life and it is too late to correct any of it.

Kierk is lying on the floor of his apartment next to a shrinking To Read pile and a rapidly growing Read pile. It’s everything he originally rescued from Atif’s desk. When Kierk gets to one of his own papers he lets out a laugh, thumbing through it with nostalgia. Some handwriting in the margin catches his eye.

He’s not going far enough. But perhaps there is a way. A real theory of consciousness could begin here.

Kierk pauses. The paper is not one of his better ones, he had thought. But maybe Atif had seen some way forward, or suspected something . . . Kierk couldn’t figure it out. Had Atif been secretly working on a theory of consciousness without telling the others? Kierk raked his mind, trying to remember the various conversations . . . Maybe he had been afraid to mention it? Fear of someone, specifically Kierk, stealing the seed of his idea and extrapolating it faster than he could? Had there been some hint that night, some way Atif had acted that showed that he was ripe with an ultimate notion? Had there been a dissertation blooming like a flower bed in his gut, a symphonic thesis playing behind his calm eyes? Honestly Kierk doubted it, but who really knew when it would come, and to whom. And what if it hadn’t been just any theory, but the correct theory, that paragraph of perfect language Kierk had been searching for . . . But maybe such a revelation wouldn’t have been so lucky. Maybe the thought of it was so intense, so shattering in its weight, its implications spinning out, Atif seeing all of it, drunk and underground in that yellow halving chamber, just him and the greatest scientific theory of all time, not beautiful but horrifying, the cruel joke exposed, turning into