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

also the audience, a double act as it both creates and gives meaning to the creation. If left unexplained, so far does its reach extend that no aspect of reality can be said to be truly understood. Not anything that flies or crawls. For what snapping amphibious creature first contained that divine spark? Did it first wink on in the neural nets of swimming hydras or did it slowly accumulate like dust over all biological processes? Was it brought about by predation, by the need for ambulation, avoidance, and planning on the millisecond timescale? Could it have arisen from such dark origins, as biblical as freedom arising only from the Fall? And what of its fate forward in time? What beautiful consciousnesses will one day occupy the tangled bank of our solar system if we can only persevere? Consciousness spreading the torch of its internal light from Earth to Mars, to Europa and then Enceladus then even beyond, past the Oort cloud, to that beckoning bright density at the center of the Milky Way. Beginning in one ocean and after a landlocked interlude ending in another, a wine-dark sea far more vast. Yes, the history of the world has been, and ever will be, written in consciousness, and they are the only words that matter! Imagine then what that final theory will entail, what it will give us: a sensorium syntax as pristine as mathematics, a dialect of pure consciousness. Imagine what type of alien utterances it will allow, for to write in such a language, to speak in such a language . . . No poet has ever come close. Words blow away as empty signs next to the white-hot heat of it! There is something it is like to be! And it is not just mere being, which alone is no different from its antimony of nothingness, but rather the awareness of being, for that is sublimity itself! What greater gift can be given? I ask you this: what is a finer property? And how is it that of all imaginable properties we happen to have the sweetest? Roll the dice of all possible worlds and we stand upon the infinitesimally small face that happens to not just be but to also vividly experience being? How finely tuned this instrument of a universe! And thus with the perfection of consciousness comes its mystery, that ever-retreating hooded phantom, that which stokes the fire within me, nay, which sets me aflame.

The pen falls from his cramping fingers. His mind is a machine whirring down, and, the notebook on the pillow beside him, Kierk, spent, nods off in bed. As he approaches the edge of awareness everything becomes images, castaway dreams, the phantasmagoria remainders of the night’s thoughts. His breathing slows. And somewhere in this state the thing that haunts him rears again; it comes upon him as his mind becomes less constrained, liquefies, becomes a world without a physics. And it is here that the mystery of consciousness approaches him now with its impossible body, that body which has forever fled before him, sounding into the deepest pelagic depths, but which now is a barn-size white outline distorted under the surface of the ocean; he paddles around to face it in the dark rolling sea, his hair plastered back with ocean water, his nude and pale kicking legs white in the moonlight, white as its totemic face during its massively silent approach; he can see it coming, filling his view, it looks unflappable, terrifying in its bovine complacency, its total imperturbability by any act of his, white and hanging like a mountain as it comes upon him, its face smooth and placid like that of a newborn, those wise eyes bearing incommunicable knowledge, its tight mouth keeping unspeakable secrets, a mouth that does not move even as its words boom in Kierk’s mind. O small silly fish, you have learned nothing, says that whale, that leviathan, his muse.

WEDNESDAY

Kierk wakes up in the slow sluggish pools of himself. There had been no alarm. As he flexes the long extensions of limbs there is an unfolding as feeling rushes down to inhabit each moved appendage, like an insect unfurling at dawn and rubbing its legs sticky with dew into a high whine. Kierk begins to go about the business of waking up; his feet touching the cold floor, brushing his teeth, splashing lukewarm water on his face, finding clothes—and by the time he gets to the lab it is lunchtime. He can tell because when he walks in there are twenty heads fixated on their monitors, all with earbuds in, masticating the lunches in front of them as they stream TV shows.

The scene disgusts him so much he makes a U-turn and wanders the CNS, eventually stopping in to visit Jessica, who is eating pistachios and analyzing fMRI data. They chat as she shows him the data from a preliminary study she just ran. In front of her the computer displays a heat-map of all the areas of the brain where there is a statistically significant difference in blood flow between when subjects saw a visual stimulus and when they didn’t.

“What’s that?” Kierk asks, pointing to an aurora borealis on the screen that stretched beyond the brain into the surrounding black.

“Oh, that’s the air. There are always statistically significant differences in the air around the head. But see, I picked this as my region of interest.” She points to a small patch of the brain. “I mean, otherwise you’d get responses to the stimuli, like, everywhere, even outside the skull.”

Kierk rubs at his forehead, moans.

Later in his peripatetic wanderings he remembers the cerebral organ-oids. It takes a while to find the molecular biology lab, and the door has an electronic lock which he swipes his card at but it beeps red. Then through the window he sees the girl who had helped collect the samples at the first meeting, whose name Kierk forgets. She’s pipetting something, but on seeing him