Designations Congruent with Things

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
A Prologue In Two Parts
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
An Interlude In Two Parts
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
A Correspondence In Two Parts
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
A Coda In Two Parts
Afterword
Preface
Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at http://archiveofourown.org/works/927457.

Rating:
Teen And Up Audiences
Archive Warning:
Choose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Category:
Gen, M/M
Fandom:
Pacific Rim (2013)
Relationship:
Newton Geiszler & Hermann Gottlieb, Newton Geiszler/Hermann Gottlieb
Character:
Newton Geiszler, Hermann Gottlieb
Additional Tags:
being yourself while being other people is harder than it looks, Angst, Banter, Post Movie,
Neurology & Neuroscience, Adorkable coping strategies post having a mental three-way with a
monster, ...also regular coping strategies, If you're going to use a metaphorical lever to close an
actual transdimensional breach, ...then do not make your actual brain the metaphorical fulcrum,
Grammatical constraints caving to rhetorical conceits, Newt had a band, Science is glamorous,
Science is undead, Science is, Science
Stats:
Published: 2013-08-26 Completed: 2014-04-26 Chapters: 28/28 Words: 253771
Designations Congruent with Things
by cleanwhiteroom
Summary
Drs. Geiszler and Gottlieb deal with the complexities of the post-drift psychological state in
a fine-ass, mature blaze of physics puns, banter, poorly prepared meals, questionable wardrobe
choices, and science. A story of cognitive dissonance and emotional devotion.
Notes
See the end of the work for notes
A Prologue In Two Parts
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
A Prologue
He begins it already pried apart.
His perception of himself doubles as he backs away from the underlayered narcissism at the
fusing core of all he is and straight into the protected perspective of completed analysis.
There is a threat to himself and that threat is him.
The front man Newt hasn't been for a decade steps out of the shadow of the day job he'd loved too
much to quit and the night job he'd loved too much to sleep, lifting his latter day and bastardized
guitar, remodeled into a remote detonator of his consciousness. He looks at up at the lights, hoping for
photobleaching of the psyche on this stage of his own design, backed by a green column of
formaldehyde. In that space before the echoed vibration of that first note all audiences anticipate,
before he creates that wave of sound and pressure, he feels the floor, he feels his fingertips carefully
apposed, and then he squares his shoulders because this is every show he's ever played, man, every
time he's ever stared into those lights without counting the faces in the crowd, this is his show-
stopper, if Hermann's right this is his heart-stopper, the Freddie Mercury moment that he keeps finding
over and over again in increasingly intense variations. And now, with the cover art for the most
salient album of his life jacketing his skin in green, here he stands, one terminal in a two terminal
system, holding his button and looking at the lights.
Key change, people; brace yourselves.
Whatever happens, he'll leave it all to chance.
No he won't; but it makes a nice epitaph, if one's shopping around.
It seems he is.
He tenses his back, he raises his hand, the balls of his feet press against the floor in a subtle
homage to the power chord that's about to blast out his brain, the last killer riff of his conscious
existence. He can't even tell when he hits the button because he rides his conviction straight down into
something dark and vast and violent and violet, many-eyed, many-consciousnessed, an infinite
arachnine incarnation of death destroyer of worlds and the last aware and awful mental annotation
that Newton Geiszler, of the sextupled doctorates and the sloppily-rolled shirt sleeves, is able to
make is: oh god, a hive mind.
Their childhood bursts like a thing dammed up by time and knowing better. They stand in childish
shoes, they find a Dyson sphere is not enough, they are too small, they are grown too sprawling, too
mired by their waste, there is the day that the bookcase they are climbing falls on top of them, dark
and shedding books like backlit falling bodies; they discover that the truth of the universe is that
planets that are fit to support life do, they always do; they weep amidst a radio in pieces irreparably
destroyed through disassembly, so this is death--a garage, the dust-filled air, and a thing that had a
function unmade by childish hands in blind pursuit of something better--the scale of the drift confuses
them--it is too vast, it is too confined, and they're not certain this is death, after all, in pieces, like the
radio.
Kaiju do not die.
Jaegers do not die.
Or do they die in pieces?
 Shock yields to rage and to elation.
They struggle with themselves on foreign scales, seeking structure, seeking science. They clone
their war machines, they construct their war machines, their resources are vast, their wars ongoing,
their resources are limited to resurrected metal and a Wall that falls in hours. Limitations, limitations,
they seek them, they seek them. They're constrained by the nature of the breach, the short statistics of
its opening, they're constrained by the tranching of money, the terror of failure, the tiny fragility of
their forms, the energy requirements of sending progressively larger kaiju, drowning comes as
revelation, they are caged by their genetics and their genetics sets them free to share and build and
decouple viciousness from consciousness, their kaiju do their killing, but they are in the Jaegers, they
did not know, they did not know.
They will never stop coming.
They--
He.
"Newton," Hermann says.

In Two Parts
He begins it like he begins all things worth beginning.
The unity of Hermann's purpose flows from his thoughts to his voice, initiates the anticipatory
removal of his glasses and the offering of an open hand in a prefigurement of immediate neural
necessity.
Newton looks at him, for once uncertain.
Hermann waits like a spring compressed beneath the pressure of his own assurance. He has made
his contribution, not a calculated offering but an offering of calculation, and he stands now on the
perimeter of all that he has plotted and prepares to step into a realm less quantified, prepares to
reveal all of himself to the nightmare he has opposed for the past decade and to a man whose entire
existence is one limitless, lambent stream of self-revelation. Hermann's civilization is out of time,
running up hard and fast against the temporal asymptote of a triple-event unless his species can shatter
their way through it with explosive power, precisely applied. He knows now what he needs and
doesn't have, and that is data on the breach, on its origin and composition, and on what, if any, ways it
has been engineered, where its foundations sit, in lees of space-time turbulence--so that he can
orchestrate, or even guarantee, a quantum demolition. The meridian of their time passes across the
unbridged space between the man who designed the required interface and the man who can best
interpret the data it will offer.
He waits for apposition.
For the shattering of limits, the stuff of mathematical nightmare.
And he's going to attempt this thing with Newton?
Yes, it seems he is.
Their hands clap together, chiral and connected. They sit, they affix, and, in accord, they drift. The
locking together of two human minds comes first and comes harder, because in the face of alien neural
infinitudes their differences collapse like a wave function, superimposed eigenstates falling to one in
the face of exponential decay into the veldted darkness of a foreign immensity, an infinite plane, an
infinite volume, deep and wide and strange and the last insight he can ascribe to himself is a shift in
his perception as Newton snaps, with regrettable permanence, from quixotic to clairvoyant.
They exist like light, a non-paradox that looks like one on paper; tormented and alone, the
incandescent center of a set of older peers, a roiling mass of needs justified by their achievements.
They sit with ordered pages and ink upon their hands, they stand in boots astage and under lights
while silently, in water, they swim toward San Francisco, ready to destroy and to learn through this
first essay in destruction. They watch it, they perform it, and their buildings cave like shell-walled
castles made of sand, colonial and colonized, as catenaries snap and bridges fold and fall. They don't
know fear, they feel their fear, they turn it into aspiration and write it on their skin; they're throwing up
in bathrooms as they rend apart their Jaegers and they picture death by drowning. They cannot win,
they always win, they win or stop existing. So this is fear--the bathroom stall, the heavy coat, the
mouthwash and the needle. Their risks are so abstracted that they are caught in fascination because
here they're absolute; they nearly killed the part of them that killed their radio, they find that
unacceptable and they find that illuminating and they find that an entirely reasonable cost.
All things fear their ending.
If endings will permit their own perception.
They will not submit to the intrinsic finality of an alien teleology.
This time they are ready, so in they dig with claw and foot.
They know the scale on which they clash. They tear through with precision. They've sent out ships
but space is vast; they send no ships--tormented into silence; their ships are metaphor but they will
literally rock them, guys, come on. They built the drift, they built a door, a lock in one direction,
forceable with ease if one has seen it, opaque if one has not, because who upon the other side will
ever see, will ever guess the mechanism by which it might be forced, a key genetically incarnate.
They're filled with rage, they're dying, they own this secret now, they are lying in the rain unable to
get up, what happens if they drink this, all around them are the sounds of closing doors as people
leave them. They try to optimize performance in a setting unpreferred. They want into the breach,
they've lost surprise, they've lost their secret, how potent are the weapons that they have not yet used
upon their planet's surface? They wrest, they yield, they know that outside the fragile architecture of
the breach even fusion's not enough, but they know the code, they'll get inside, they're seeking names
and numbers. They will not yield, and yet they must; there is a blur of obfuscation as they drag
themselves into the roaring stream of memory and struggle for control of someone's hands and helmet
in a rush of memories so thick so fast--the depress of ivory keys, the alignment of two shoes, the
sliding planes of chalk, the steadiness of hands, head down, head back, the lights are hot, the room is
dark, the math is waiting, but so is Gipsy Danger with a core of glowing revolution.
When faced with threat, there is a coalescing; true at every scale, true at every time.
They move against disorganized assault from within and from without.
They detach their helmet.
But Hermann pulls it off.
Chapter End Notes
Chapter-specific citations: This chapter contains a quote from Freddie Mercury's 'The Show
Must Go On'. ("Whatever happens, he'll leave it all to chance.") It also contains and also a quote
from J. R. Oppenheimer, who was, in turn, quoting the Bhagavad Gita. ("I am become death,
destroyer of worlds.")
Chapter 2
The question of what one should do immediately post an averted apocalypse does not have an
intuitive answer.
This perhaps explains why, when Newton decides to proceed back to their shared laboratory
space, Hermann labels that a 'reasonable course of action' and follows him through knots of human
exuberance and into the quiet lees of corridors less trafficked.
After weaving through the peripheral edges of the spontaneous chaos converging on the main
hanger, it occurs to Hermann's esteemed colleague that Hermann is along for the prototypical 'ride',
again, and so Newton begins, or more correctly resumes, his perpetual monologue.
Hermann lets the man go at it unopposed, expecting that despite his mixed verbal signals, Newton
does have something specific in mind, if for no other reason than his pace through the metal corridors
of the shatterdome suggests a definite goal.
Hermann supposes that after the events of the previous twenty-four hours, Newton possibly
deserves the benefit of the doubt.
That, or a sitter.
The idiot.
For god's sake, what had the man used to construct a personal, unapproved, modifiable,
transportable, drift interface? Or, more appropriately, what vital piece of equipment did he
dismantle in order to put the thing together?
Hermann ought to look into that.
In fact, that should probably be the first thing he looks into.
He makes an attempt to find the answer in his own mind. The act of reaching back into Newton's
memories is instinctive, but the man has sat amidst the mechanical wreckage of his own hands,
surrounded by the things he's pulled apart and rebuilt in so many iterating memories that Hermann is
surrounded by a blur of radios, circuitry of electric guitars, patch-clamp apparatuses, microscopes,
microphones, internal combustion engines, computers, a Volkswagen--
Hermann shakes his head and gets a reminder of his headache in reward.
He will look into Newton's destruction of property in the conventional way, by examining the
makeshift drift interface and determining from where its component parts have been stripped.
He has the option of simply asking the man, but Newton is currently hypothesizing on the neural-
net nature of hive-minds in a vague stream of consciousness punctuated with a host of analogies to
marine life, Star Wars, and variations on the theme of, 'and how would that even work, man?'
sentence endings indicative of unfinished avenues of thought through which Hermann has no plans to
be actively dragged.
Hermann has his own avenues of thought to wander, and most of those are converging on the idea
that he and Newton have been irreparably altered and possibly physically damaged by the drift.
Perhaps it's time to stop following Newton and instead make an effort to get Newton to follow
him.
To the medical bay.
When they arrive at the laboratory, he's sorted himself to the point that he feels sufficiently
organized to make such a suggestion and rationally back it with logical arguments, but his intention
collapses when Newton does not proceed to his own side of their shared space, but to Hermann's.
This is rarely a good sign.
 It is also surprising.
It is also surprising that he finds it surprising.
Somehow, Newton has ruined his thought processes.
In blithe unawareness of Hermann's multilayered misgivings, the other man simply stops, crosses
his arms, and looks intently at the expansive, regimented mathematics covering the relocatable
blackboards with an unfamiliar and therefore uninterpretable expression.
The man is still talking--he's talking straight over and through whatever impulse has pulled him to
Hermann's blackboard. At some point in the last few minutes, neural-net conjecturing has morphed
into speculations on the evolutionary inevitability of the bilateral form, which Hermann has heard
before and finds less interesting than Newton's newfound attentiveness to mathematics.
He blames the drift.
Correction.
He credits the drift.
"So we, at a fundamental level, saved the world, man," Newton says, shifting out of science and
into vague, if merited, self-congratulation, his eyes on Hermann's chalk as if he's simultaneously
reading and talking, "I mean, at a minimum, we provided the theoretical underpinnings of a world-
saving protocol, so I'm pretty sure that if there's going to be an after party, we're invited. But the
question is, where is it, what are the mechanics by which it's being orchestrated, and how much
consumable alcohol is there in the shatterdome? Because we've got, I don't know, a ridiculous amount
of methanol, but I'm pretty certain that while methanol is great as a kaiju fixative, it will render
humans blind if consumed. Well, if not blind, then maybe at least transiently visually impaired?"
"Yes," Hermann agrees, anything more he might have added scrambled and delayed by an
extraneous memory that snaps to the fore at the mention of potentially consciousness altering organic
compounds that should not be consumed. He spends a brief interval uncertain which one of them it
was who had imbibed half a bottle of mouthwash in a strange, irrational attempt to gain some kind of
mental relief after the first kaiju attack had indirectly dismantled his laboratory and his life at MIT.
Hermann has heard it said that, after the drift, talking is often rendered superfluous.
He now understands what the Jaeger pilots mean when they discuss this phenomenon. If he makes
an effort he can pull forward memories that aren't his own, but, more concerning, if he makes no effort
they come forward anyway, at unpredictable intervals, offering insights he's not sure he's grateful for
and interpretations fraught with as yet unmappable bias. He feels he can and does communicate with
Newton, without words, forming interrogatives and receiving answers. It is important to keep in
mind, however, that he's not interrogating Newton. He's mentally interrogating his memory of Newton
circa three hours previous, and that is quite a different, possibly misleading, epiphenomenon of
uncertain duration.
Nevertheless, it does result in the subjective perception that verbal communication is unneeded.
For most individuals it does.
It is extremely apparent that Newton is experiencing no such phenomenon.
Or if he is, the man is hiding it well.
"So we're agreed. We will suggest the methanol to no one," Newton says, verbally reengaged but
still staring at Hermann's wall of mathematics, still disheveled, his hair a mess, his clothing torn, one
eye bloodshot. "We need that methanol anyway. For science. Obviously. I've already requested
specimens of each of the downed kaiju, but what we really need is some high quality, unfixed samples
that we might be able to set to work on cloning, I mean, if it works for sheep, why not for giant alien
sea monsters?"
 That is enough to ensure the coupling and reengagement of Hermann's brain and mouth.
"What?" he snaps. "Newton. You cannot be serious. Did you put the word cloning and the word
kaiju in the same sentence? You reckless, thoughtless, heedless--" Hermann trails off, unsettled by the
uncharacteristic silence with which his list of irresponsible adjectives is being met.
Usually he doesn't get so far before being interrupted with a countered catalogue of diametrically
opposed descriptors.
He isn't sure what to make of this.
Newton stands next to him, still staring, fixedly staring, at Hermann's wall of mathematics.
Hermann wonders what has caught his attention amidst the logical progression of thoughts in
chalk.
It's possible the man is looking for some error, some unexplored application or implication that
he's seen or intuited via the drift.
It's possible that Newton is seconds away from rewriting or reworking the entire thing without so
much as a by-your-leave.
It's possible that Newton's understanding of mathematics is now more nuanced, and he's mapping
the borders of his borrowed biases, much as Hermann is struggling against opinions both foreign and
familiar, none of which he can call his own with certainty.
It's also possible Newton is staring at Hermann's mathematics because he's exquisitely
distractible when exhausted.
Upon reflection, the latter possibility seems the most probable.
"You wish there was certainty there," Newton says, quietly arrogant, which is, admittedly,
Hermann's favorite type of Geiszlerian arrogance, "but there's not. There's only probability and
confidence intervals, especially when you're dealing with something as complex as colliding spatial
dimensions. The nature of the universe is statistical."
Newton is correct, of course.
But Hermann plans on admitting no such thing.
"So you did pick up something from my mind," Hermann replies, a dry, verbal cover over his
awareness that Newton has gathered more from the drift than Hermann has ever been able to
effectively communicate to anyone. By intention or by necessity.
It is a slightly depressing thought.
"Everyone knows that," Newton says.
Hermann doubts this pronouncement, but he does not doubt that Newton believes it.
"It's quantum mechanically dictated, dude, you'd have to be living under a rock not to know.
There's a nonzero probability that the breach reopens," Newton continues. "There's a nonzero
probability that it opens again, somewhere else."
"Vanishingly small," Hermann replies, with a stiff sweep of the hand.
"But not zero," Newton says, still looking at the wall of equations with an unnatural familiarity
and considerably more interest than he'd ever displayed in the past. His fingers tap in a quick sweep
over the leather of his jacket.
Hermann looks away from him and at the lines in chalk.
They stare at the mathematical spread, the one that should be his, the one that feels like theirs,
and it occurs to Hermann that perhaps they are both caught in a psychological defense that had always
been his alone--to consider mathematics in lieu of considering something else--so they look at it now
because they do not want to look at the disembodied, partially dissected brain of a kaiju on the other
side of the lab, because, in tracing the ordered ranks of chalk, they can look away from the split open
halves of their own minds.
This is an impulse that should be solely his own, an impulse that Newton has, in point of fact,
disparaged--this look from life to math. But it's now an impulse that's displayed by Newton; Hermann
had been staring directly at it until he'd looked away from his own reflection in his conceptual
opposite, a man who had likely buckled straight under an unidentified foreign influence, without even
identifying it as such.
He does not like the implications of Newton's newfound appreciation for mathematics.
Hermann cannot fault him though, because he himself feels confused, briefly but entirely, not
certain which one of them it was who had wanted to be a musician, which one of them had been
tormented by his peers, which one of them is the reckless one, the careful one, which one of them--
"I like your brain," Newton says, a non sequitur that doesn't feel like one.
Hermann likes Newton's brain as well, creative, irregularly ordered, more rigorous than he's ever
openly credited, cheerfully and distressingly reckless, as if nothing could hold it in a defined track
except for the ending of the world.
But he doesn't say any of that.
"You are not to clone a kaiju," he says.
"Aw," Newton replies, but it is, unfortunately, clearly some kind of monosyllabic endearment
rather than disappointed acquiescence.
Chapter 3
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
"I feel weird," Newt decides.
He's still staring at Hermann's wall of math, and he's a little bit, but only a little bit, resentful of
the fact that staring at it like this makes him appear to be having either some kind of arithmetic
awakening or a mental epiphany regarding the importance of Hermann in his life, but he is not having
any such revelation, not either of those revelations, actually, because, first, he'd understood
Hermann's math, mostly, before the drift--really, if he hadn't, what had all those doctorate degrees
been, other than something to repetitively do until he got old enough to apply for grant funding with a
straight face, like the cross-dimensional intellectual baller that he, for sure, definitely was and is--
second, he's pretty sure that he understood Hermann himself, sort of, from about the midway point of
their joint-appointment-to-the-apocalypse, but, presuming both those statements he's made are givens,
why is he staring at the man's spread of chalk now?
Because he'd come here for alcohol. He's pretty sure about that.
Newt supposes the appeal of those ranked and filed equations up there and down here and all
over the wall is that they now feel more personal to him, as if string theory and parallel universes
have suddenly and irrevocably come under the purview of his own body of work, as if he had written
the things, as if he were the one who had known, had known exactly, when the world was going to
end, had felt the press of future annihilation in a rigid temporal way and--wow, yeah, that had been
hard to take, extremely hard to take, hard to feel, hard to bear alone because his immature savant of a
lab partner--but wait. That hadn't been him after all, had it? That had been--
"I can't say I'm surprised," Hermann says dryly.
And he had been thinking what now?
Hermann seems to interrupt his train of thought at the most inconvenient times, cognitively
speaking, and Newt is pretty sure, pretty outrageously positive actually, that the guy knows it and does
it on purpose even though he can remember no such thing from the drift. He has evidence, empirical
evidence; it's happening right now, in fact. Data does not lie, it cannot, it simply exists, waiting for
the gloss of interpretation, but sometimes underlying mechanisms can be confounded by the story that
stitches them together--
"If you consider your previous twenty-four hours, you will discover that you experimented on
yourself, neurally entangled your consciousness with a hostile alien mind, traipsed about Hong Kong,
nearly were ingested several times by, I believe, two separate kaiju, drifted with me, entangled
yourself again with the hivemind of the kaiju anteverse, consulted on the best way to detonate a
thermonuclear warhead so as to seal a dimensional rift, and then proceeded back to this lab for no
rational reason I can determine."
That's probably the longest sentence that Hermann has said since they drifted, and Newt gets that,
yeah he does, because the post-drift mental state, well, it's a designation congruent with the actuality
of things, and he doesn't have words for it; how could he? It's a post-verbal phenomenon, meaning he
just knows Hermann now like he knows himself; he can conjure up the cognitive image of himself-as-
Other, without words, but honestly Hermann had never really, never entirely, been 'Other' to him in
the philosophical sense. They had worked together too long for that.
"Yes," Hermann says. "I suppose we have."
 Newt stares at him in abject astonishment.
"That was atypically poetic," Hermann says, "but didn't pertain to your earlier observation."
Newt stares at him in even more abject astonishment.
He's pretty sure he has no idea what is happening here.
I think you just responded to my internal monologue, dude, he thinks in Hermann's direction.
Either that, or my internal monologue went external without my permission.
Hermann looks away from the chalkboard. He takes one look at Newt and he snaps, "Newton," in
that way he has, that super-irritated way, that Newt now realizes also has an element of anxiety to it.
What? Newt thinks, mildly affronted.
"Say something," Hermann says, looking a little bit more freaked out than faux-British put out.
Okay, so maybe he was wrong about Hermann being able to read his mind. It's still a little
ambiguous though--Hermann could be quietly imploding because he can hear Newt's thoughts and he
thinks that's about eight kinds of terrifying, or he might be freaking out because Newt is staring at him
like a crazy person and maybe a little bit of a creeper; he thinks his eye probably looks pretty
disturbing, it hurts like hell if hell was glaucoma--does he have unilateral cerebral edema?
Can you read my thoughts? he thinks at Hermann, staring at him in intent, purposeful silence. If
so, please respond in a complete, unambiguous sentence. For science.
The sharp sting of Hermann's palm cracking against his cheek is so surprising he actually flinches
and overbalances and then falls over.
Now he's on the floor?
Yeah.
And he still doesn't know the answer to his question.
He will admit, however, that a trend is starting to emerge.
"Ow," Newt says, the word coming out verbally rather than mentally and as kind of a bewildering
mixture of annoyed and outraged and confused and betrayed and also, mostly, confused. "What the
hell, Hermann?"
"Newton," Hermann says, looking ten percent aghast, fifty percent satisfyingly guilty because--
well duh, the dude just slapped him and because of coordination problems the whole thing escalated-
-and also thirty percent confused. The final ten percent Newt is going to equally distribute into the
categories of 'somewhat distressed' and 'very tired'. Hermann's eye looks as bad as Newt's feels.
"You stopped responding to me," Hermann says, very slowly, kind of insultingly slowly, leaning
on his cane like his leg is killing him.
"So--you can't read my thoughts," Newt concludes, coming up on his elbows.
"What?" Hermann says.
"I thought maybe that was a thing you could do," Newt explains.
"So--you weren't briefly catatonic then," Hermann says, faster now, with the air of a man coming
to his own conclusions.
"No man, I was hypothesis testing," Newt says.
Newt is pretty sure that Hermann was also hypothesis testing, which would explain the slap. They
just had begun with different hypotheses. It turned out neither of them had been entirely correct in their
initial suppositions, but they had ruled some stuff out at the end of the day.
Science, man. Kickass.
Demonstrable kickassishness of science aside though, he's still not totally sure what just happened
there and whether his observations on the philosophical implications of the drift had made it out of
his mouth, and, if they had, what he'd actually said. Apparently, if he had said something? It had been
poetic.
In Newt's opinion, that argues against it being a verbal thing.
"Ah," Hermann says. "Naturally. Can you simply--"
The other man breaks off as Newt gets his feet under him and pushes himself up. The guy is
slightly late to the Newt-acquiring-vertical-momentum proposal, but he reaches out to grab the front
of Newt's jacket in a belated and kind of superfluous stabilizing maneuver.
Or nope, actually, not that superfluous after all, good call there, Dr. Gottlieb, because Newt's a
little bit lightheaded as it turns out, but he has definitely had a rough day so that makes sense.
"Yeah dude," he says, hands on knees, trying to look at the floor but looking at grayness instead, "I
can simply."
"No," Hermann says, in disapproving, crisp stereo or maybe surround sound? Newt's not sure, but
his head is now the headspace of the audiophile he's always been or always meant to be, it's hard to
do much with a laptop and the crap acoustics of a lab made of metal but he makes it work. "Incorrect.
You've demonstrated repeatedly that that's not the case. You're barely standing, and, based on the last
five minutes of conversation, I have material doubts about the coherency of your thought processes."
Hermann has a point.
Usually he does.
He is fine, but he can see how he might not look it.
Newt gives his cardiovascular system and his nervous system time to have a confab, the main
topic of which will be, ideally, where his blood should be going i.e., not just his feet. Everybody
crosstalks it out like champs--nice work, nervous system--and then he can see and hear normally, and
he feels less like he's got one foot in the door of a room labeled 'unconsciousness'.
He straightens.
He's good.
He's awesome.
"Medical," Hermann snaps. "Now."
"Aw," Newt says again, touched for the second time in a ten minute span by all the super-secret
concern that Hermann has been plastering over with outraged decorum for something like--well a lot
of years.
"Stop saying that," Hermann says.
"Medical," Newt agrees, deciding that rational decision making cum subject change is the better
part of valor. "We're going."
Chapter End Notes
Chapter-specific citations: Newt paraphrases Nietzsche in describing the post-drift mental
state.
Chapter 4
The corridors are nearly empty.
The majority of the base population is, Hermann supposes, in one of two places--either the main
hangar, awaiting the eventual arrival of the choppers carrying Mr. Becket and Ms. Mori, or in search
of alcohol.
Now that Hermann has had time to consider it, a search for alcohol was almost certainly the
reason Newton had proceeded to the laboratory in the first place. Fortunately, before retrieving or
distilling anything, the man had been distracted by the statistical nature of the universe, segued into
vague speculations regarding philosophical implications of the post-drift state, nearly fainted, and
then been amenable to redirection.
Thank god.
Hermann wonders how much drinkable alcohol Newton has in the lab.
Ideally--none.
Practically--more than 'none', of that much he is certain.
Whatever quantity of alcohol Dr. Geiszler might possess, or be able to acquire within the span of
several hours, is immaterial.
Post drift drinking is simply out of the question.
For both of them.
But mostly for Newton.
The events of the past fifteen minutes interpreted through the lens of the past twenty-four hours
lead Hermann to place the odds of Newton losing consciousness between the lab and the medical bay
and ending the day in an indecorous sprawl across the corridor floor at somewhere around the fifty
percent mark.
This is the reason why Hermann still has one hand clamped around Newton's disturbingly sticky
jacket.
"So the drift, I'm pretty sure," Newton says, "is an empirical rejection of perspectivism. It's an
epistemological absolute of the subjective experience, consisting of the Other and the Look in an
infinite loop where information transfer approaches whatever its maximum is while time approaches
zero, so yeah, suck it, solipsism. Neuroscience validates intersubjectivity. That's a great title, man.
We should write a paper."
This is excessively unfair, Hermann decides.
Wading through Newton's baffling insistence upon the obfuscation of his own intellectual merits in
daily discourse and curbing the man's irritatingly brash and deeply flawed propensity to disdain the
predictive power of computational and mathematical modeling in favor of ill-advised
experimentation, occasionally on himself, have defined the past decade of Hermann's social and
professional life.
And now, after ten years, the man decides he's going to convert his conversational style into
something rational and creative and appealing and openly intellectual to the point that Herman no
longer feels he's performing the discourse equivalent of excavating a buried city with a teaspoon?
Yes.
Naturally.
Of course Newton decides that.
Newfound eloquence aside, resistance remains the cornerstone of their conversation, so Hermann
says, "science informs philosophy," with all the aridity he can muster. "How original. And you
propose to prove the validity of your subjective experience of our briefly homogenized perspective in
what way, exactly?"
"Ugh," Newton says, in gratifying exasperation. "Hermann. Come on man, you are killing me here.
You experienced it. It's a reproducible phenomenon, it--"
"Is, and will always remain, firmly outside the realm of 'science'," Hermann says. "Feel free to
write a speculative treatise regarding the implications of the drift on existentialism as a discipline. I
will read it with interest."
"You are the worst," Newton declares. "Admit it though, you thought most of what we'd heard
from the flyboys and flyladies about the drift was about as objectively valid as an interpretation of
abstract art, which is to say not objectively valid. For example, take--who's that guy you like?
Kandinsky? It's nice how I don't actually have to wait for you to answer questions because I already
know what you're going to say; it streamlines things, have you noticed this? I'm sure you have. I'm
totally with you, by the way, just chuck the whole post-van-Gogh-post-impressionism period right out
the window, anything between 1890 and the founding of the Bauhaus is aesthtically tedious with the
possible exception of--waaaiit." Newton finishes his stream of consciouness in an apparently
unwelcome revelation. He narrows his eyes at Hermann.
Hermann shoots Newton a pointed look, meant to convey that the realization that Newton is likely
currently having regarding the suspect nature of his own opinion and at least a portion of the
implications thereof is a realization that Hermann has already had.
Several minutes ago, thank you.
Newton, not in possession of adequate mental resources to simultaneously support walking and
critical thought, trips on the perfectly planar floor and nearly falls over.
Again.
"Prioritize walking over thinking," Hermann snaps.
"Boring," Newton opines, before he says, "quick--Riot Grrrl or Skate Punk and why?"
"Riot Grrrl," Herman says, with an assurance so instinctive he finds the question nearly offensive,
"because--" He stops speaking and glares at Newton.
"My life is complete," Newton announces to the empty corridor.
The problem with Newton is, and always has been, everything.
"Your life and mine are now a tangle of inextricable cognitive bias," Hermann says crisply, "for
which you are entirely to blame."
"If you're going to saddle me with all the blame you're also going to have to allocate the credit in
the same manner, man," Newton replies. "And then the headline becomes 'Geiszler saves world', not
'Geiszler and Gottlieb save world'."
"Most likely," Hermann says, "the headlines will read 'Becket and Mori save world'."
"Probably," Newton agrees, looking offended in an exhausted sort of way. "Maybe we'll get
interviewed by Nature Neuroscience. I think Neuron has a podcast? Now there's a rockstar subgenre
more our speed. Whatevs man, we are legit. Kaiju mindmelding like pros. Let's do an experiment
though. Bach or Beethoven."
The cognitive dissonance induced by that particular binary choice is so nauseating that Hermann
cannot even respond. He looses track of his feet and his cane in the intense effort not to vomit for the
second time in one day and stumbles, a bolt of pain shooting up his leg, as he tries and fails to
reconcile two diametrically opposed, strong preferences held in confusing simultaneity.
So it is, somewhat, justifiable that when Newton reaches over to steady him, out of an instinct for
self-preservation, Hermann snaps, "Descartes or Nietzsche."
"Oh god," Newton says, staggering, one hand coming to his temple, the other braced against his
knee.
Hermann is fairly certain that if either one of them goes down, neither one of them is going to
make it to medical.
"Cognitive dissonance'd," Newton says faintly, "why would you--"
"You," Hermann snarls, but can't get anything else out past the Baroque vs. Romantic internecine
musical warfare that is currently being waged in his head. He does his best to keep a grip on
Newton's revolting jacket, not throw up, and stay standing in the face of a doubled but conflicting
opinion.
"It's not resolving," Newton gasps. "I had no idea that you loved Descartes so much you boring
rationalist. This is not normal."
Hermann grits his teeth and tries to focus on something that they have a matching preference for,
but unfortunately all he is managing to do is compound his own sense of dissonance as he comes up
with increasing numbers of divergent opinions that he simultaneously holds.
"You like what," Newton slurs, the words nonsensical and nearly unrecognizable, but a testament
to the fact that the man can verbally navigate himself through anything.
"Turing," Hermann says, eyes shut tight with the effort of excavating a safe juxtaposition from the
treacherous unfamiliarity of his own mind.
"Yeah, good, always Turing," Newton interrupts. "Hands down. Dude is a baller. Kandinsky or
Cezanne?"
"Kandinsky," Hermann replies. "Obviously. Kierkegaard or Heidegger."
"Ugh. Gross. Kierkegaard." Newton says.
Yes, Hermann mentally agrees, always Kierkegaard.
He opens his eyes, feeling marginally less lost in the unfamiliar topographies of his own
remodeled bias as he makes his way onto firmer cognitive footing.
"I despise you," he informs Newton, "you asinine, self-experimentation-obsessed, idiot."
"It's mutual, man," Newton says weakly, hands on knees, head still down. "Oh is it ever.
Descartes. Get out of my life with your dualism and your visions of symbolic logic and your
methodological doubt, god I freaking love it except I think maybe I didn't? Don't? Whatever."
Hermann has no idea if Newton is addressing him, or some mental vision of Rene Descartes.
He's not sure it matters.
"Say nothing," Hermann says, "until you are lying down. Until we are both lying down."
"Yeah," Newton says, looking at him with glasses marginally and maddeningly askew.
"Brilliance. In the abstract. That's an annotation. For you. And for your comment. Let's just do that
right now, actually. Say nothing and lie down."
Hermann manages to drag Newton up by his jacket before the man can make good on his poorly
articulated threat to collapse on the floor of the corridor. He pushes him back, steadying Newton
against the wall and steadying himself against Newton.
"Aw," a passing technician calls over her shoulder. "I knew it. Live it up, guys."
"What?" Hermann hisses, distracted.
"Oh we will," Newton says, disorganized and emphatic, sloppily pointing two fingers in the
woman's general direction. "K-science for life. Life preservation. For humans. And for kaiju. Small
ones. Cloned. In captivity. For science."
The technician's expression morphs, quite appropriately, from approval to disapproval as she
vanishes around a corner.
"Newton," Hermann snaps. "Please just--try and hold yourself together for three minutes."
"Hold myself together," Newton says, affronted. "My brain is like the cognitive equivalent of
epoxy, dude. Freaking tight. Cross-linked all over the place. As you should know, since we merged.
Do you think we're actually drift compatible or do you think we bypassed neural affinity
requirements because of the nature of my setup and the nature of handshaking it up in a three-way with
a kaiju hive mind? I could see there being some unusual side effects and/or after effects of drifting in
the absence of true compatibility and maybe that's why I feel like I have to throw up when I try to
compare--"
"Do not," Hermann says, "say it. Ideally, do not say anything. Can you walk?"
"Yeah, obviously I can walk. Can you walk? Because you look horrible, dude, and you probably
haven't noticed this and I legit hate to break it to you, but you've kind of been using me as a budget
secondary cane this entire time. Also, I think you almost passed out and/or threw up when I
accidentally experimented with cognitive dissonance."
Hermann exhales in short, sharp irritation, rolls his eyes, and pulls Newton away from the wall
and towards the medical bay.
Chapter 5
"But how do you feel?" the medic asks Newt, after he and Hermann have explained separately and
in tandem the events of the previous twenty-four hours, and their vital signs have been taken and
evaluated to make sure that no one is acutely dying.
"Good," Newt says. "Totally fine. Weird, maybe? But normal weird. Mostly. Some cognitive
dissonance, here and there, when I'm being experimental or when Hermann is being vindictive. So
probably that will happen at least once a day for the foreseeable future. But this is expected, am I
right? The bottom line is that considering," he waves a hand vaguely, "everything? I'm great. I think
I'm fine. Did I say that already? Either way, it's true."
Hermann is glaring at him.
Newt shoots him the requisite what's-your-problem-man look in return because he doesn't think
that Hermann deserves his best fire-and-sulfur-nee-brimstone glare at this exact moment.
Not yet.
Hermann's heading in that direction though.
Boy is he ever.
The reason for this is that Hermann does not seem to be on board with Newt's extremely
reasonable, and, he thinks, pretty obvious and well defined goals. The medic isn't on board either, but
that's not so surprising; Newt does not have high expectations of the medic, but he does have high
expectations of Hermann. Maybe unreasonably high, but the guy shared his brain, at least for a little
while, so the man should be able to get it together and read between the lines.
"Um," the medic says, looking both confused and distressed, and also kind of like a drowning
person, if that makes sense. Newt isn't sure it does.
Everyone is having an unusual day.
Now it's the medic's turn.
But back to Newt's point, the one that they're just not getting despite his basically having spelled
it out for them, implicitly, about four times now. It's this: if he's going to be formally evaluated by
someone, he would like to ensure both a high level of competence and a high degree of coolness on
the part of the evaluator going in, because he most definitely does not want any kind of persisting
documentation that's irrevocably attached to him to be annotated with some poorly-chosen, hysteria-
laden, kaiju-perjorative'd adjective or set of adjectives that will render his future professional life
difficult or impossible because some glorified med tech thinks he's qualified to make a sweeping and
definitive statement on what the heck has happened to Dr. Newton Geiszler in the past twenty-four
hours, because even Newt doesn't know that. And if Newt doesn't know, then no one knows. Maybe
the kaiju know. They are probably pretty pissed at him right about now.
He will think about that more later and decide if he finds it satisfying or terrifying.
At the present moment, he contents himself with stonewalling medical bureaucracy.
Newt has too many Ph.Ds. to put up with people's sloppy and uninformed theorizing.
He's sure that Hermann is going to agree with and support his course of action. Once the guy gets
with the program, that is.
"Are you a neurologist," Newt begins, squinting at the medic through his increasingly difficult to
ignore headache, "because, no offense man, but I think you're going to need to take this one up the
medical ladder. So right now? We'll both just settle for some Advil, a glass of water and some a la
carte brain imaging if you don't mind. I think--"
 "Will you stop talking and lie down," Hermann snaps, undermining both Newt's delivery and his
point, as the guy is so very wont to do, and also like the man has some kind, any kind, of material
expertise in the medical field. Ha. Newt is about eight thousand percent more qualified regarding
anything that takes place in vivo, thanks; Hermann works in silico not to mention in chalk dustio,
which is always going to be a pale, weakass reflection of the complexity of life, man, like, through a
glass darkly and murkily, that's for freaking sure. Neuroscience. Is it messy? Yeah, it is, but it's also
probably the most topically relevant subdiscipline to both human and kaiju--
What the--
So.
Yeah.
That's the ceiling.
That he's looking at.
Is that mold?
He is now lying down.
Noted.
Thank you, Dr. Gottlieb, thank you so much.
Hermann has always been imperious, high-handed, and dictatorial. So much so that Newt has,
over the years, devoted several mental asides to contemplating the roots of Hermann's ridiculous
behavior because it wasn't something that made a whole lot of sense to him and it had also seemed
compensatory in some way but in what way hadn't been clear until hours ago. Now it's quite clear,
kind of painfully clear, and Newt realizes that he is now and had always been, at least on the surface,
the kind of guy who looks like a harbinger of hell to Hermann's nicely ordered mental and physical
existence, but he hasn't turned out to be that bad, or maybe he's toughened Hermann up in a nice,
older-brother, rigorous-and-taxing-love type of paradigm, if one discounts the fact that he isn't,
strictly speaking, 'older', nor is he sure that 'tough-love' includes long diatribes regarding an inversion
of the quantitative hierarchy and ridicule of chalk as a medium for communication. Besides, the
Newt-is-not-the-jerk-he-might-appear argument and the Hermann-can-take-it argument don't sound
mutually exclusive to him; he needs to stop using 'or' unless he really means it.
"Can you not?" Newt says to Hermann in a peripheral snapping, as he props himself on his
elbows and then redirects his attention back to the medic standing between him, freedom, his future,
the afterparty of the century, and also freedom and also his future. "Let's get this show on the road.
Draw some blood, do some imaging--make sure we're not going to drop dead in the next forty-eight
hours if that's even a thing you can do. But?" he raises his eyebrows at the medic. "You do not write
anything down, dude. Not about me, and not about him." He points a finger at Hermann without
looking at him to indicate to everyone that he means business. "We are going out of network and out
of military for our neurological care, no offense, but barring any literal, life threatening emergencies,
we consent to nothing."
Newt has already decided that he wants a laid-back neurologist from the West Coast who surfs on
the weekends, has at least one tattoo, one piercing, and thinks that saving the word by mind-melding
with a dead kaiju brain is 'rad.' Maybe his name will be Paul. Or Blake. Or maybe Damien. Or it
could be a lady. In which case maybe Danielle, maybe Rain, possibly Esther. Hermann probably
wants a more uptight neurologist from England named Phillip, though Newt thinks that Hermann is
going to fare much better with Rain.
Both Hermann and the medic are looking at him in silent confusion.
Newt gets that look more than one might expect, even when everything he says is perfectly
logical. Unless he said that stuff about Hypothetical Rain, the surfer neurologist, out loud.
It's probably best not to inquire.
"I'm--going to make a phone call," the medic says. "I think kaiju drifts on non-standard equipment
are maybe a little out of my area of expertise."
Victory.
Sort of.
Maybe.
It remains to be seen.
The point is, he will be victorious. Eventually.
The medic leaves the room.
Newt looks at Hermann. The guy looks like he's only staying conscious because he can't decide
whether to strangle Newt or not before he passes out.
"Hermann," he says, "will you sit down already, because seriously? You look like death."
Hermann, pale, one eye bloodshot, his clothing not so much 'unkempt' as 'moderately kempt' but
definitely a whole order of magnitude above Newt's current level of kemptness, sits down on the edge
of the bed that Newt is now lying on and shoots Newt a venomous look that Newt in no way deserves.
Newt feels slightly wounded by this turn of events.
"I think you may have suffered brain damage," Hermann says.
Newt is now slightly more than slightly wounded by this turn of events. And also by the choice of
pronoun, because Newt has been, this whole time actually, extremely courteously including Hermann
within the screw-off-outside-this-line Venn diagram he is trying to trace around himself so that his
brain and Hermann's brain are not appropriated for medical science or for military research.
"I think you're suffering from brain damage," he snaps back. "Nice eye."
"It needs to be ruled out," Hermann says in his irritatedly-didactic voice. "For both of us."
"And you have the gall to insinuate that you're somehow hypothetically immune from this
conjectural-kaiju-anteverse-induced brain damage?" Newt says skeptically. "As if you could even
identify brain damage. Who is the biologist here? Because I'm pretty sure it's not you."
"I will happily cede you that title," Hermann says, dry and shoving him back down. "Try to lie
there without talking."
Newt looks at the ceiling.
Yeah, that's definitely mold, a dark, creeping, Hong Kong varietal, looking cool, sending hyphae
through the damp. Like a boss.
"It's just that I'm not sure how 'state of the art' these medical facilities are," Newt says.
Hermann follows his gaze, looks up at the mold with an expression of pure, prototypical
Gottliebian distaste, and says, "agreed."
"I mean, computational modeling we can do," Newt says. "Programming? Get out of here.
Predictive modeling of the quantum foam? You're killing it. Electrophysiology--I will patch clamp
alien brains all freaking day. Molecular bio--eat your heart out and die, academic powerhouses of the
eastern seaboard. Neuroscience? Seriously, even posit the existence of a person who can build a
better drift interface that I can build and I will--"
"Are you driving towards something in particular?" Hermann asks.
"Yeah," Newt says. "While the scientific expertise of the PPDC may be unreasonably baller, the
medical facilities? Great for orthopedics. Great for severed limbs. If a kaiju that I clone eats my hand
in a horrible but somehow semi-humorous misunderstanding, this is where I will come, presuming I
am based here, and not at some pleasantly maritime institute of higher learning. Also? Shatterdome
medical? Great for 'my friend just hit me in the face with a bo staff while we were pretending that
some kind of je ne sais quoi of physical combat has any chance of predicting drift compatibility', but
still. You see my point. Medical is good for that. It's also good for when my long-term nemesis hits
me with his cane. Or strangles me. Accidentally. As a hypothetical example. But given everything--"
"I take your point," Hermann says, both hands braced against the cheap-ass gurney Newt is lying
on.
"Do you?" Newt asks, intensely relieved and trying not to show it, pushing himself back up onto
his elbows. "Awesome. So let's get out of here, grab my limited alcohol, and drink until we're
unconscious. I don't think it's going to take as much as usual. For either of us."
"No," Hermann says.
Newt sighs.
"You need to be evaluated," Hermann says, "because I don't believe you're capable of evaluating
yourself."
Newt feels the power requirements for his own brain, inner monologue, and continued sentience
spike so high that everything, for a moment, shuts down.
In this interval of mental and actual silence Hermann's expression changes from 'exhausted,' to
'acutely anxious'.
Yes.
Good.
"What did you just say to me?" Dr. Newton Geiszler hisses, pushing himself up entirely so that he
is eye-level with his sanctimonious prick of a colleague, who is now trying to say something that
doesn't matter because Dr. Geiszler has no plans on ceding Dr. Gottleib any conversational space
any time in the near future. "Did you just express more doubt regarding my executive mental
functioning because yes, congratulations, you predicted the timing of the ending of the world with
magnificent specificity, which was useful. Kind of. But you actively impeded my attempts to
communicate, to achieve congruity or at least some kind of neural parity, with an alien life form
which worked by the way, which worked like a fabulous, elegant, proof-of-principle that then paved
the way for a second attempt that worked even better--"
"When I found you, you were seizing--" Hermann snarls.
"Yes and that was a cost," Newt says, plowing over him, "but look at the benefits column you
prosaic bastard, in which you will note the items 'world not destroyed', 'humans not eaten by kaiju',
'breach closed', and--"
"You are missing my point," Hermann shouts, probably because Newt, also, apparently started
shouting sometime in the past several seconds. "As usual, you--"
"No," Newt shouts, "I do not miss points. You miss points. Speaking of which, you've been
missing my most recent, super salient, but not spelled out, point for the last fifteen minutes so let me
perform some apparently necessary epexegesis. We do not want to give the Pan Pacific Defense
Corps unlimited access to our brains. I know you've spent a lifetime in support of authority figures
everywhere, because, in the past, authority has supported you right back, which must be nice. I have
enough theory of mind to grasp that this is not an intuitive conclusion for you to come to on your own,
but sometimes? When you are in possession of a valuable resource? You have to demarcate exactly
where you would like everyone else to just step off because once they step in, it's too late to prevent
all sorts of unfortunate outcomes and so you withhold consent as a default so that they have to ask
you for everything. I am sure as hell making this happen for myself and I'm willing to do the same for
you if you don't screw it up for both of us by undermining my capacity for rational thought to other
people while tacitly agreeing to an entire battery of unnecessary tests for both of us, like the
dyslogistic idiot you are."
Fortunately, Hermann looks like he's now getting the picture.
Unfortunately, the medic is standing in the doorway, looking nervous and concerned and slightly
more than slightly offended.
Newt stops talking. Stops shouting. Whatever. He realizes belatedly that he is shaking, and he
tries to stop that, stop that immediately; it's not his fault, it's not anything serious, it's just the effect of
epinephrine on overtaxed muscles, for sure, he legitimately has no doubts on that point, but it's not
helping his case, his case that he really should not be losing, that would be inconceivable, he is not
losing the sanity argument, he just freaking used the word 'epexegesis' in a complete sentence that
made sense even if it was a little bit run on and he will demand a--
"We require a moment," Hermann says, eyeing the medic in that way he has.
The medic leaves.
Things are looking up.
Newt tries not to breathe so fast but the effort leaves him feeling vaguely seasick so he stops.
Trying.
Not breathing.
Obviously.
"Fine," Hermann says, both straight forward and straight off the bat; he probably learned that from
the drift, probably picked up that particular and totally normal preference of Newt's from somewhere
in his brain and is now using it to get what he wants and that's fine because Newt's doing the same
thing, except his new technique is diametrically opposed because Hermann loves the vocab, so
typical and so not normal, but Newt can and will tweak his idiolect to make it a little more
appealingly recondite to his colleague. No problem. Done and done.
"What do you suggest?" Hermann says.
Newt doesn't even have to think about it because he's been thinking about it off and on for the past
day. He actually started thinking about it even before he put his budget helmet on for the first time,
because it's always nice to do thought exercises where you assume your own death maybe isn't a
given, so he says, "bloodwork, a complete ophthalmology exam, a CT scan, and MRI. Of the brain.
An EKG. All results released to us, digital and hard copy. They can keep their own copies. I'd rather
they didn't but they will anyway, regardless of our preferences, because, you know, the fate of the
world is at stake. Possibly. Someone will rationalize it that way as they commit an infringement of
civil liberties."
Newt hasn't said 'EEG', the magical three letters of neural destiny. He wonders if Hermann will
pick that up, or maybe he's already picked it up and isn't mentioning it because he gets it and agrees
that if no one, no one, mentions it, that would be best. The man's not a biologist but he has the
memories of one in his head. Newt wonders if the PPDC medical people will pick his omission up.
They probably will. Anyone moderately informed in the cognitive sciences would. Because he wants
an EEG. He needs an EEG. He does. They both do. He just doesn't want one here. Because he's
pretty sure an EEG is going to be abnormal and, if it is, he could see some perspicacious jackass
saying something like 'abnormal brain waves--rule out mental continuity with kaiju anteverse,' which
would be impossible and then they'd both be labeled security risks, studied, and, in short, screwed for
the rest of their miserable lives.
Please he thinks, please do not be connected to the kaiju anteverse, brain. Please do not. How
about no. I have an idea. Let's just not. No, please.
 "Based on the mess of poorly understood and conflicting opinions I haven't had time to reconcile,
I'm having a difficult time determining whether your concern regarding future agency is rationally
justified, Newton," Hermann says.
"Oh god." Newt transfers his hands to his face and manages to shove his fingers beneath his
glasses to press down on his good eye and sort of gingerly touch the bad one, because ow.
"But," Hermann continues, "I'm willing to grant that you may be correct."
"Really?" Newt asks, his voice cracking as he half pulls his glasses off in dragging his hands
away from his face.
"Furthermore," Hermann says, "I want to clarify that I have no doubts about your 'executive mental
functioning' as you put it. I was simply--"
"Nah dude." Newt holds up a hand. "Just stop right there. I feel you."
Hermann sighs, reaches over, and straightens Newt's glasses like the stickler for decorum that he
is. "You're a terrible influence," Hermann says. "On everyone. Now will you please lie down? So that
I can lie down?"
"Yeah," Newt says, lying down, because he's actually epically tired, his eye feels like he walked
into an icepick at some point in a Hong Kong alleyway and didn't notice while it quietly slipped into
his brain to hotwire this headache that's been creeping up on him; he was not kidding about cerebral
edema, he could see that one happening, but they'll identify it on imaging if it's in progress. And even
if it is, he's not concerned about it, well that's a lie, he is, he'd like to believe that there aren't going to
be any neurological consequences of his decision tree, but he can't because there already are some
like the fact that he just loves Descartes so freaking much right now oh god, but even while he is
concerned about the electrophysiological state of his brain, 'closing the breach' and 'no more kaiju,'
are things so monumental that neurological sequelae for himself and also for Hermann seem no more
than expenditure line items detailing one more cost in a too-costly war.
A war that is over.
And this, all of this, makes sense, because it is cogent and accurate.
It's so accurate you could plot it.
On a coordinate plane.
Not really but kind of.
Intersecting number lines. Who thinks of that stuff? Who sits down one day and says 'I could
really use a coordinate system right about now'? Rene De-epic-intellectual-badass-cartes, that's who.
"Newton," Hermann says sounding horrified and incredulous in confusing simultaneity. "Are you
crying?"
"No, man," Newton says, wiping his eyes. "I just love Descartes so much right now."
Hermann gives him a weird look.
Chapter 6
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Hermann spends most of his ninety minute MRI trying not to focus on the incessant banging
resulting from undesired vibrations in the magnetic coils that surround him.
Since he is required to be here, doing nothing, absolutely motionless, his eyes shut and still, he
tries to occupy his mind in a useful manner.
His thoughts are extremely disorganized at present, but perhaps he can use this time to sort himself
out.
He is highly tempted to return to the paralyzing question of impossible choice that Newton had
posed earlier in a thoughtless, curious, typical fit of insight, but he does not want to vomit in an
enclosed space.
As long as he does not try to make an evaluation of superiority or an attempt at ranking, he finds
that he is indeed capable of holding two separate preferences in his mind at one time. He wonders if
the electrophysiological reality of the situation is something more analogous to multitasking or to true
parallel processing.
He will be interested to hear Newton's thoughts on this.
Later.
Not today.
For the remainder of the afternoon and evening he is going to make a sincere and sustained effort
to keep his colleague as mentally solvent as possible, which means that most items of intellectual
interest will have to wait until the point that Newton has recovered enough to refrain from weeping
over formal logic.
He understands that impulse, as he finds himself surprised by a fierce and passionate affinity for
the Nietzschean trappings that Newton has strangely and singularly woven in and through his
conceptual, rather than mathematical, understanding of the disorderly complexity of life.
Biologists.
He has the impulse to shake his head, but he doesn't, because that would disrupt the slowly
assembling image of his brain.
Biologists rarely bother to understand things quantitatively when it's not overtly required, and so,
in the absence of mathematical absolutes, Hermann supposes they must cling to something.
There's no reason it shouldn't be Nietzsche.
Hermann has no inclination to weep over it though.
He does feel extremely, just extremely, affectionate towards Kierkegaard, he will admit. That's
clearly a synergistic phenomenon; a function of 'only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted,'
meeting, 'once you label me you negate me,' meeting finally, 'one understands only in proportion to
becoming himself that which he understands,' in an elegant coup de grace of adjusted self-hood.
But he's not going to weep about that either, no matter how aesthetically lovely and achingly
satisfying he finds it.
Though--he may stencil 'once you label me you negate me' onto Newton's laptop.
Except--no.
He most certainly will not be doing that, because that particular impulse is the confused product
of Newton's predilection for semiotics and for invading Hermann's personal space, combined with
Hermann's preference for understated irony, combined with that bizarrely strong affection for
Kierkegaard he simply cannot shake.
This is why he needs to sort himself out.
The maddening thing about all of this is that he's certain that Newton is not going to bother trying
to work through it, he's simply going to take his new and inappropriate passion for Descartes, his
improved quantitative reasoning, and an almost infinite number of other mental biases large and
small, as givens. The man is going to effortlessly proceed with his new reality in blithe unconcern. He
will, certainly, subject Hermann to poorly organized soliloquies on the fractal nature of the musical
compositions of J.S. Bach, or the intricacies of set theory, and he will probably inappropriately blend
these things in novel ways with his own expertise in a manner fascinating and infinitely frustrating.
But that is not what Newton should do.
And it is not what Hermann is going to do.
How he's going to work himself out of his current identity confusion is not yet clear to him, and
he's not inclined to problem-solve his way free from conflicting biases while inside a three-Tesla
magnet. As for the why behind his resolve, well.
It's complex.
Hermann likes his identity as it is--or, as it was, thank you very much. He also, though he would
be unlikely to admit it in so many words, likes Newton's identity as it was as well, and would prefer
for his colleague to remain relatively unscathed by the events of the past day.
Unfortunately, he cannot convince himself that such an outcome is likely.
Fortunately, it is more likely than it would be had Newton performed the second drift alone, as
was his original, asinine intention.
Hermann still cannot believe the man was able to drift with dead alien tissue, for god's sake. The
entire concept, when Newton proposed it, had struck Hermann as offensively, revoltingly counter-
intuitive and flagrantly irresponsible, given that the almost certain outcome of his experiment as
outlined was a reduction in the PPDC science staff by fifty percent.
But.
It had worked.
Experientially, the drift had been terrifying, monumental, overwhelming--a simultaneous
revelation between himself and two other parties--trying to ignore the fascinating stream of Newton's
memories and identity mingling with his own while chasing down alien relevancies through horrific
landscapes of psychic vastness.
He still, even now, has no idea how Newton had managed it alone the first time.
Drifting with the kaiju hivemind had been a double violation of identity. The first had been the one
he'd already articulated--the merging of his selfhood with the selfhood of two other parties. The
second violation was a violation of Hermann's autocategorization of himself as victim. Objectively,
the truth of this was unambiguous. Kaiju were invading his planet, destroying his culture, and trying to
consume his species with the ultimate goal of harvesting the resources of the earth; there was no
ambiguity as to who was the injured party.
Except.
Except.
To become the kaiju hive-mind was to become the aggressor. Hermann had not looked for their
rationale, but their need for a brief time had become his need, even as he'd tried to shut that out, even
as he and Newton, in flawless mental accord, had sought out the objective details of the breach that
might make it amenable to closure.
 And this, most fundamentally, is the why of his resolution to recover himself.
Not because he fears Newton, whose most terrifying characteristic is his own capacity for
thoughtless self-immolation.
No.
It is because he fears mental contamination from the kaiju.
He wants the ability to recognize such contamination in himself.
He dreads the possibility of recognizing it in Newton.
Because Newton's mind, after all, was and is a unique thing, impatient and quick and well-
intentioned and sloppy, brashly arrogant to the point of blindness, inventive and adaptable, creating
the clash of intellectual discord wherever it is directed--in short, not the sort of mind that one comes
across every day, and not the kind of mind that one would necessarily choose to expose to the kaiju
anteverse, if one had a choice in the matter.
They'd had a choice, Hermann realizes--he and Marshal Pentecost, but they hadn't recognized it as
such.
He does not fault his own reasoning.
But that does not mean that he does not regret it.
When Hermann's MRI is completed, the medical technician tells him that his results will be
available shortly, pending review by their offsite teleradiology service, informs him he can substitute
his scrubs for his clothes, and asks him to fetch Dr. Geiszler.
Hermann dons his slacks and sweater and straightens his hair to the best of his ability in absence
of comb or mirror, and then, resolutely ignoring his headache, eye ache, and leg pain, proceeds into
the main floorspace of the med bay.
Newton is sitting at a computer meant for medical staff, which he has somehow coaxed into
playing an obnoxious and relatively obscure example of 'alternative hip hop' from the mid nineteen
nineties that Hermann very much wishes he could not identify.
Alas, he can.
This is now a skill set he possesses.
He hopes that nothing was overwritten in his brain to make room for all this irrelevant
knowledge. But he supposes he'll never know.
He finds this both maddening and comforting.
Newton is currently listening to one Dr. Octagon, also known as 'Kool Keith', properly known as
Keith Thornton, performing a piece of work entitled Biology 101, from his debut solo album.
Hermann spends a moment in mental preparation so that what's about to come out of his mouth
sounds appropriately vexed.
Because he is vexed.
He likes Bach, he does not like this.
"Someone in Medical has magnificent musical taste," Newton says, not looking up from the
computer and entirely ruining Hermann's impending waspish propriety before he can bring it fully to
bear. "Do you think it's the med tech back there? If so, that's unfortunate, seeing that I'm pretty sure he
hates me after all the obliquely insulting comments I made regarding PPDC Medical, for which I
entirely blame you, man, I was trying to be tactful about the whole thing. I didn't know the guy was
going to be cool, if this is even his music. Whoever did this is a closet rule bender though, because I
am pretty sure that they do not like you putting music on government issue hardware. I've looked into
this."
"Will you shut off that deplorable racket?" Hermann asks politely, if at high volume.
 Newton looks over at him, in obvious, provocative amusement but the man's appearance is so
atrocious relative to his typical state, which Hermann would generally describe as 'disheveled' or
possibly 'intellectually debauched,' that the effect on Hermann turns out to be a mixture between
vexation, horror, and sympathy.
This, perhaps, explains what happens next.
"You're looking singularly soigne post neural imaging, Dr. Gottlieb, if you'll permit me to say so.
Now answer me this: Hendrix or Clapton? Go."
"Hendrix," Hermann replies, and then exhales in short aggravation, rapping his cane against the
base of Newton's chair. "Will you stop that?"
"There will never be a time that this will not be fun for me," Newton says.
Mercifully, the man decides to shut off his 'music.'
"That computer is for use by medical personnel," Hermann says.
"Do you see any medical personnel?" Newton asks. "Because I don't, other than our traumatized
junior partner holding down the fort back there. Everyone's either deployed cityside or scooping up
Raleigh and Mako. This is fortunate for us. I'd get out of here before anyone realizes they might have
the authority or cause to keep you, file an abbreviated report that you flag to Pentecost, and then try to
bury yourself in the post-apocalypse shenanigans that will be starting shortly. That's the essence of my
plan."
"Pentecost is dead," Hermann says.
Newton flinches. "I know," he says.
They look at one another.
"I know that," Newton continues, "but even so. Do it anyway." He brings the tips of his fingers,
briefly, to his bloodshot eye and runs them over his eyelid.
"Trying to obfuscate the enormity of what has happened to you is not going to solve any
problems," Hermann says, "and will certainly create new ones."
"Do not let them label you, man," Newton replies. "That is a huge mistake. I forwarded you my
crappy report as a template, so that you can avoid making yours into an unmitigated disaster for both
of us."
"Thank you, Newton," Hermann snaps, "for the inspiring amount of trust that you have invested in
me, your colleague for the past decade."
"Do not even start with me, dude, I let you into my brain."
"You also let the hive mind of a hostile alien race into your brain, so you will excuse me if I do
not feel flattered," Hermann replies.
"Aw," Newton says. "You're a unique, fractalline, infinite snowflake, man. Now listen, I mean this
in the nicest possible way, but you're also a perfectionist, law-abiding nerd, who's going to write
something really horrendously accurate in your report that causes us worlds of trouble so consider
sending it to me before you file it."
"Did you just use 'law-abiding' as a pejorative and then offer yourself as an editor of my report?"
"A little bit, maybe," Newton says, loosening his already too-loose tie.
They look at one another for the span of several seconds, and Hermann does his best to keep the
to their familiar, confrontational pattern, but Newton seems too tired for any such effort, and it takes
two to have a satisfying mutual glare.
"I'll consider it," Hermann says, still unwilling to admit defeat. "You are supposed to be lying
down."
"You are exceptionally worried about me," Newton says, leaning back in his chair in
unmistakable, self-perceived, victorious superiority. "You're not even bothering to couch most of this
scolding as closet disapproval about my life, my science, or life science as a discipline, which is the
best, by the way. For sure. Anyway, the point is that I win. And since I am magnanimous in my
interpersonal victories, I will tell you, so that you can just stop asking, that in regards to this 'lying
down' that you keep pushing like cheap cocaine, I would like to, man, believe me I would, because I
am tired, but it's just not working for me right now. Cognitively. And I need to get my brain imaged
anyway, just in case this banner headache is the headache of massive neuronal excitotoxic cell death,
which, before you yell at me, is probably not happening, I think I'd be comatose or a lot weirder if it
were, I probably should not have even mentioned it, based on the face you're making right now, but,
as you know, self-censorship is not one of my best qualities unless it comes to obfuscating facts so
that they can't lead to crappy hypothesis generation by old guys with stars on their epaulettes, in which
case I am awesome and offer you my services. Still. And always. For free. Standing offer. In return
for saving my brain, at least partially, so that I can live to clone some kaiju, because who is going to
do that other than me and off-their-rocker-billionaire-think-tanks a la Jurassic Park? I ask you. Do
you know when I read that book I promised myself, promised myself, that I would never leave
academia so that I wouldn't accidentally annihilate mankind? And now look at me." Newton raises his
eyebrows, exhausted and faintly amused, and far, far, more wanderingly insightful than Hermann was
prepared to give him credit for, even now, after all that has happened.
Even so.
Hermann is not going to touch any part of what has just come out of Newton's mouth and mind
because he can think of only one thing to say in response, and he is not going to say it.
He is especially not going to say it because Newton is waiting for it.
Hermann can see it in his eyes, in the tilt of the other man's head. He can feel the idea resonate
between them, either because they still share a shadowed connection or because it comes straight out
of some kind of simpatico subsequent to shared consciousness.
"It's cliche," Newton continues, but slower, because of course he will say it, of course, out of the
two of them, Newton is going to articulate the thing that is slowly, quietly, terrifying them both, "to the
point that it's become a cultural axiom. You know how it goes, Hermann."
"Newton."
"'When you gaze long--'"
"Newton," Hermann snaps, succeeding this time in cutting him off. "You have made a life out of
escaping cliches. So do so."
Newton raises his eyebrows.
"May I also suggest confining yourself to Kierkegaard."
"Noted, dude."
"Finally, you will clone a kaiju over my dead body. Literally."
"Yeah," Newton says, looking relieved, looking exhaustedly grateful for this stream of censorship
applied from outside his own mind.
They regard one another for a long moment, until Hermann says, "they're ready for you." He
inclines his head, brief and lateral and painful, in the direction of the room he just came from.
"Great," Newton says, looking across the floorspace toward the room with the three-Tesla magnet
but not moving. "I will get right on that."
"Do you want me to stay?" Hermann asks.
"No dude," Newton says, looking for a moment as though he means 'yes,' but then snapping his
face and his tone into a paradigm that Hermann finds both familiar and reassuring. "Am I five? Go
sleep or something. I will meet you at the kickass party that's a few hours away from self-organizing
out of the confused, elated humans who aren't sure what they're doing and have subsequently decided
to seek out alcohol and other humans. Based on my extensive experience with self-organizing
systems, I'd say it'll be something like three hours before a critical mass is reached. You had better be
there. I will be pissed if I have to come find you and drag you out of your hermetically sealed room,
even though I am positive that there is a one hundred percent chance of that exact outcome."
Hermann rolls his eyes.
Newton gets to his feet with an atypical precision of movement that suggests he's unconvinced of
his own stability.
Hermann has the impulse to take his arm but doesn't do it, because that impulse comes only from a
post drift proprietary familiarity that he has resolved to identify and isolate.
Newton has no such resolution, obviously, because one of his hands lands on Hermann's shoulder
as he staggers past, working up the forward momentum that, mostly, stabilizes his trajectory.
Hermann watches him for a moment, to ensure that the man actually makes it to the back room
without falling over.
He does.
Hermann stands, undecided, considering the door and the computer that Newton just vacated.
He should return to his quarters and begin his report there, on a computer not reserved for
medical personnel.
That is certainly the decision he would have made forty-eight hours ago.
Isn't it?
Is he hesitating because improper use of a medical terminal now seems less inappropriate than it
previously did, due to Newton's influence on his thoughts?
Is he hesitating because he's concerned about Newton's ability to lie motionless in a confined
space for ninety minutes while his brain is imaged?
Is he hesitating because he doesn't believe he should leave this infirmary without permission from
the chief medical officer, who isn't here?
Is he hesitating because he doesn't want Newton to be here, alone, when the medical personnel do
return?
He has no idea.
This is miserable.
And certainly Newton's fault.
He sits down at the computer.
Chapter End Notes
Chapter-specific citations: Hermann quotes Kierkegaard three times. (1-"Only the difficult
inspires the noble-hearted." 2-"Once you label me you negate me." 3-"One understands only in
proportion to becoming himself that which he understands.")
Chapter 7
Chapter Notes
Warning: In this chapter, Newt gets an MRI. He finds this experience stressful. You can skip
this chapter entirely if you'd prefer; if you skip it, you won't miss any crucial plot points.
See the end of the chapter for more notes
Yeah, so this is probably his worst nightmare right about now.
Actually.
Nope.
That is false.
So so false.
Demonstrably false.
That may be the falsest thing he's ever said to himself. One of the most false things. It's right up
there. On the list of false things. That he has said. He can't think of any other things on that list right
now, but that is fine, because he's stressed and he's tired and he's feeling kind of inappropriately
weepy about Descartes. It's also fine because he's not in a habit of making false statements, at least
not ones that can be immediately identified as such, as a general rule.
"You want me to do what now?" Newt asks the med tech, who is eyeing his tattoos in a hypnotized
manner that makes Newt dubious about the guy's prospective coolness and competence. "How do you
feel about Dr. Octagon?"
"Who?" the med tech says, confirming the entire array of Newt's suspicions in the span of one
syllable.
"Nevermind," Newt says.
"Dr. Geiszler," the med tech says. "If you don't want this MRI, or if you'd prefer to do it under
sedation then--"
"I want it," Newt says, already standing there, next to the always-on magnet, divested of all his
metal, in a state of cold dishabille what with the thin scrubs and the no shoes and the being mostly-
blind sans his glasses. "I want it now."
He needs it now.
He needs it now and not later when everyone is back and filling out reports and thinking, as
critically as their brains and education allow, about the kaiju anteverse. He's doing it for himself, but
also for his stupid colleague, because the man is going to be n-sub-one out of an n=2 experimental
group that will rot at the basement of statistical significance so far from the light of a cutoff p value
that they will never reach anything other than the status of a puzzling and probably dangerous
anecdote. Newt is absolutely determined to pull the pair of them out of that particular oubliette of
rationality and from beneath the microscope of the military-industrial complex and keep them
unscrutinized for the rest of his natural life or until he goes insane and clones a baby kaiju, finds out
he can talk to it, and then somehow accidentally ends the world.
He is not going to clone a kaiju.
Except for how he really wants to and he always has, so that's fine, but has he always wanted to
this badly? Is this him? Is it some creeper kaiju-plan left in his brain, a subterranean sleeper
subroutine subluxed beneath his subjective experience of the world? Waiting for--
"Dr. Geiszler?" the med tech says uncertainly.
He has got to stop freaking this kid out.
 That's step one.
Newt claps the med tech on the shoulder, says, "yeah, thanks man, you are doing science a solid,"
and then lies down and lets the med tech strap his head into immobility.
This does not freak him out at all.
Why would it?
No reason.
There's some mechanical repositioning of component parts and one might think that the PPDC
would have something a little more high-res, man, than a three-Tesla MRI, god, what is this, the turn
of the century? How embarrassing for everyone associated with this travesty of tech. But whatever, it
will get the job done, really the only thing he wants to know is how his ventricles are doing and
whether or not he's got any radiographic features of ischemia or intracranial hemorrhage and whether
he's going to slip into a coma and die in the next half day or so, because that would be unfortunate
seeing as he really wants to go to this party that he's certain is going to be starting to coalesce right
about the time that he finishes with this scan and right about the time that Mako and Raleigh show up
all suavely black clad and wet and photogenic; they are pretty, Newt will give them that. If anyone is
going to make the cover of Rolling Stone, Newt votes for himself because he once had a moderately
successful but a little bit embarrassingly 'nerd rock' band called The Superconducting
Supercolliders, which did pretty okay on the Boston scene, but presuming Rolling Stone doesn't
choose him, he votes for Mako because that blue hair thing she's got going is totally--
"Dr. Geiszler?" the med tech says, over the in-magnet speakers.
Newt jerks, hard and startled, and he is just so wired right now, an understandable thing, because,
hi, yeah, almost eaten by Otachi and then, again, twice, by baby-Otachi, honestly, he hopes that the
kaiju were trying to eat him because if they were trying to do something else he does not want to
know about it, not ever, and he hopes if they had some other plan it's not already planted in his head
because, if it is, it's going to come out at some point, everything usually does.
"Yeah," he says, breathlessly trying to relax in this blurry, plastic-lined magnet.
"Close your eyes," the med tech says, voice distorted by crap circuitry and budget, budget, like
lowest budget ever, speakers, one might as well use a paper plate and a wire. "And try not to move.
At all."
"Sure," Newt says.
No problem.
Totally easy.
Probably one of the easiest things for humans.
Lie in a magnet, Dr. Geiszler, just lie there.
Get your brain scanned.
He tries to decide where his next tattoo is going to go, because that's a good idea--take the things
that try to kill you and memorialize them forever in art on your body that you will have to look at
every day for the rest of your life. That's called building character, that's called panache, that's called
gutsy and unafraid, that's called badassery, that's called anything except 'a really terrible idea',
because it isn't. Unless it is. Hermann had articulated that counter-argument pretty well, years ago,
right off the bat, when he'd said something along the lines of 'Dr. Geiszler, consider that if this war
ends badly and you spend years in terrified hiding, far inland, waiting to die, your 'decorative art'
will serve only to remind you of the scope of your own arrogance and failure.'
Hermann can be kind of a downer sometimes.
The guy had also been missing the point because--
 The magnet vibrates with its first loud and not unforeseen but kind of in-the-moment-unexpected
banging and Newt jerks so violently in response that one knee hits the upper bound of the tube he is
lying in and can't they get any decent tech here this is unforgivable he will build them an open MRI
for the love of all that is good and holy he will do it immediately. Tomorrow. Tonight. While he is
drunk. He's sure it can't be that complicated. Someone find him a five-Tesla magnet and--
"Dr. Geiszler," the tech says over the speaker that is probably a hand-me-down from Thomas
Edison's kid's phonograph, version 2.0. "Are you all right?"
"Yeah dude," Newt says; it's more like gasping though, unfortunately. "Let's do this. I'm good."
"Try not to move," the tech says.
Yes, Newt thinks, waiting for it this time, waiting for the banging to start, because once it starts he
can habituate to it; he's got enough higher brain function left for that, he's pretty sure. Try not to
move.
This time he manages it.
Come at me, bro, he thinks vaguely in the direction of the med tech, the three-Tesla magnet, a host
of dead kaiju, Hermann, the director of Medical, Hypothetical-Rain-the-surfer-neurologist's jerk of a
hypothetical-receptionist, the military industrial complex, and his own brain.
So.
His list of things to do is shaping up something like this. One--get an MRI, already in progress, so
he's going to call this one a 'check.' Two--take a shower, find a fire, and use it to burn his clothing,
ideally after he removes his wallet and his phone from his pants, and not before. Three--find
Hermann and figure out a way to read the report he's writing, and make sure the guy is actually going
to flag that thing to Pentecost and not to Hansen. Hermann is very 'i' dotting and 't' crossing, obviously,
one would have to be, as a mathematician, eh, that's probably not even true, but if one isn't a stickler
for detail it likely causes so much heartache and repeated fits of worthlessness and angst over
unbalanced equations that mathematicians probably train their brains right out of any non-perfectionist
tendencies. Biology is better. Three--no wait, he's on four. Four--presuming the party still isn't
happening yet, he is going to spend some time on the internet in search of his surfer neurologist,
Hypothetical Rain, because if he already has a doctor it's going to be harder for the military to give
him one when they decide that's a thing they'd like to do. Five--he's going to finally, finally get drunk.
Six--he's going to build the PPDC a new MRI that is not a terrifying piece of garbage. Like this one.
Just lie there.
Just lie there, Newt.
Yup. One minute down, probably.
Eighty-nine to go.
He should have asked for a countdown.
He should have asked for music.
He should have asked Hermann to stay and read him the latest issue of the American Journal of
Physics starting with the copyright information and omitting nothing, including figure captions, the
table of contents, and the editor's opinion on the feasibility of making detailed measurements of
and/or in the quote unquote 'space,' between dimensions, which would be stupid, probably, and
would piss Hermann off whether it was actually 'asinine' or not because Hermann is super intense
about measuring things. Newt has done some physics, who hasn't in the sciences, god, but
'experimental error', to him, is an obstacle rather than a source of infinite challenge and delight. That
was why, when all was said and done, he'd picked biology. Neuroscience, man. Probably the best and
most terrifying of the sciences, because who really wants to know how their own mind works?
 He does, apparently.
What's he going to do now--study synapses? Study the mechanism of long term potentiation like
everyone else in the world? Jerk off to the multisubunited elegance of an NMDA receptor as half his
field was wont to do?
Nope, probably not.
Anyway, Hermann would have read him the physics. Newt is, in fact, sure that Hermann would
have done that for him, had he asked. Newt is also pretty sure it would have been weird, kind of like
that time Hermann had to extract Newt from a county lock-up when they'd been based on the coast of
Washington State. The whole thing had not been Newt's fault, strictly speaking; it was an unfortunate
instance of his personality clashing inappropriately and drunkenly with some people holding
excessively strong but opposing musical preferences, as befit Seattle natives--what was left of them
after people with means moved inland to Kansas and the people without means stayed behind with
their guitars and whatever possessions people who lived normal lives not in labs and hermetically
sealed bunkers kept with them when they stayed to face down sea monsters that would certainly eat
them, no matter their folksy stubbornness. Newt had tried to get an apartment like a normal person
when it had seemed like Hong Kong was going to be a long term thing, but Pentecost had said no. It
was possible he'd said no because of the Seattle incident, but Newt still thinks that's unfair because
no charges were actually pressed, and Newt had emerged pretty much unscathed. Hermann had been
singularly teed off about having to come retrieve him. But he'd done it. And this was one of the
reasons Newt was pretty sure the guy would have read him the American Journal of Physics if he'd
asked, but he hadn't asked, because he was a grown-ass adult.
He still is.
Lying here.
Very still.
He saved the world, partially. He was like one hundred percent of 'Step Two' and fifty percent of
'Step Four' in the seven-step 'So You've Decided to Avert the Ending of Your Civilization' plan.
Anything would be a travesty on these speakers, anyway, even physics.
Especially physics, because of the implicit irony of sources of error punching one in the face with
static.
How many minutes have passed?
This is going to take forever.
Well, if he's going to go insane or turn evil as a result of everything that's happened, he might as
well kick-start the process now. He's pretty sure all that, 'Newton, think of Kierkegaard,' ugh
Kierkegaard rocks though, and, 'Newton, I will die before I let you clone a kaiju,' and, 'Newton, be a
special flower,' stuff that Hermann was spouting back there was pretty much an attempt to say,
'Newton, do not start down a dangerous philosophical road and unmake humanity in the process,'
which is probably sound advice, but he's been on a dangerous philosophical road for a while now,
and he knows it, and it also goes to show that even if you share someone's brain you can still be
blindly hopeful about their capacity for change, even while simultaneously realizing that that change
is never going to happen.
Kaiju anteverse, he thinks, are you there?
Nothing answers him back.
That's a good sign.
It would be really appalling if something had answered a summons that weakass and nerdy.
This whole contact with the kaiju anteverse just smacks one in the face with archetypal parallels
of corruption via knowledge.
So he's Eve. (Great.)
He's Prometheus. (Light up the world with your tech, young man.)
He's Gary Mitchell from Star Trek: The Original Series. (Classic. Does this make Hermann Kirk,
though? Because that seems wrong.)
He's the Dorian Gray of science. (Lame.)
He's made a Faustian bargain. (No surprise there.)
He's Saruman from The Lord of the Rings. (So Hermann is Gandalf? Man, if Newt is anyone from
LOTR it's got to be a hobbit. Probably Frodo. Come to think of it though, Frodo has the same problem
as Saruman in the end, even though it comes from a different psychological place. Crap.)
He's every blind visionary turned unwitting villain in Michael Crichton's entire body of work but
especially Dr. Henry Wu. (This makes Hermann Dr. Ian Malcolm and that works better than Kirk for
sure.)
And he's one cloned kaiju away from being a modern-day, actual, Dr. Victor Frankenstein.
One has to be pretty uninformed or pretty uninterested in the human condition not to know what
archetype one trends toward, and Newt has been aware of his own destructive paradigm for a long
time. A long time.
He'd found the entire thing somewhat concerning.
He finds it more concerning now.
Dr. Victor Frankenstein, his literary friend and fictional warning buoy, ended up alone in a state of
nervous collapse on Arctic ice, trying to kill the work of his own hands after it destroyed everything
he loved. Unfortunately, the guy failed and died of pneumonia before he could get the job done.
Yeah, that sounds pretty plausible to Newt, unfortunately.
So he won't clone a kaiju.
Done. No kaiju clone, no failure and death via crawling about without a jacket in a frozen waste.
Is he seriously not going to clone a kaiju?
Is he seriously considering doing it?
There are pros and cons.
The cons column is pretty obvious. It includes the Jurassic Park scenario, the breach reopening
scenario, the Newt-goes-insane scenario, the ostracism-from-the-world scenario, and finally, the
more complex possibility that the kaiju he clones turns out to be extremely intelligent and either
influences Newt back, or takes over his brain and spends years terrifying the crap out of Hermann
before people finally get it together and take down Newt and his pet kaiju with a harpoon gun or
whatever it was that Ahab used on that dick of a whale.
The pros column is also pretty obvious. It includes knowledge for knowledge's sake, which,
despite what popular mythology would have one believe, is actually pretty awesome and brings
humanity things like electric guitars, efficient transportation, giant robots, and crappy, disturbingly
loud, slow MRI machines. It also includes increased tactical anti-kaiju knowledge just in case the
breach does spontaneously reopen or the kaiju reopen it from the other side on purpose because
they're pissed. It also includes--well, the nebulous advances that come from any new thing. Maybe
kaiju blue will turn out to cure cancer.
Newt knows what Nietzsche would say if he were here.
He'd say, "watch it, Dr. Geiszler, you've been looking long into that abyss."
It looked back, man, Newt says in return. It already looked back.
That is, probably, why he thinks it's too late.
 There had been moments, extended intervals, of unarguable look-back time from the kaiju
anteverse.
Hermann also thinks it's too late.
Newt knows it, he just isn't quite sure if Hermann knows that Newt knows that Hermann knows it,
but it's obvious Hermann thinks that there's something wrong with him because Hermann isn't really
one to be hyperbolic about anything other than Newt's supposed stupidity, but the guy had most
certainly said, 'you will clone a kaiju over my dead body,' which Newt finds a horrible, soul-freezing
statement on about nine different levels, but the worst two are that it indicates how far Hermann thinks
Newt will go and how far he in turn will go to stop him.
Can he please get out of this tube?
No he cannot.
Not right now.
Either way though, whether he clones a kaiju or not, he thinks he's probably in for a world of
unrest because if pop culture has taught him that he doesn't want to be Frankenstein it has also taught
him that it's a bad idea to be a strong personality living through one's own slow obsolescence. He's
going to have a hard time with that, he's pretty sure, harder than Hermann, most likely, who is
probably going to go back to the Riemann Hypothesis or something elegant and mathematical as soon
as he's sure he doesn't have to be saving the world anymore.
Newt is going to see Hypothetical Rain, his surfer neurologist, once per week and try not to go
insane or have brain-damage-induced epilepsy while he chokes to death on his own repressed
impulses and freaks people out with the skinny-tie, thick glasses, creepy tattoo combo. That doesn't
really sound like a good plan, but it sounds better than the pneumonia-in-a-frozen-waste-as-a-failed-
kaiju-hunter-hacking-up-a-lung-as-he-screams-what-have-I-done plan. It sounds marginally better.
It is so loud.
He feels dust fall onto his face from a cracking ceiling and he jerks, muscles snapping into
maximum contraction, hitting the sides of the stupid freaking scanner god can they not have a five-
Tesla open model is that too much to ask there must be Jaeger pilots who are claustrophobic after
near death in close quarters for the love of--
"Dr. Geiszler?" the tech says.
"Yeah," he says, realizing what had just happened, which is one hundred percent within normal
limits and totally explainable; everyone has flashbacks after they almost die; it's part of the human
condition. "Sorry."
"I'm--going to have to restart this," the tech says.
Of course he is.
"Yeah, okay dude," Newt replies. "I got it. How long has it been?"
"Three minutes," the tech says. "Try not to move."
Three minutes.
Magnificence.
Yes, Dr. Geiszler, try not to move.
"Yup," Newt says. "I know. Done."
Okay brain, he thinks, please do not do this to me right now. Do it later. If we can just get
through this, no one can stop us in our quest for alcohol and dance-floor abandon and then you will
wake up, magically reset, to find me sprawled over a planar surface somewhere, possibly confused,
possibly missing my shirt and shoes, and all will be right with the world for a blessed handful of
minutes. You can have that. We can have that. Maybe. We are a team. A team that's going to hold
still. For ninety minutes. Starting now.
He tightens every muscle that he can think of below his neck in an attempt to keep his face, his
eyes, relaxed. He tries not to freak out about the possibility of ruining this scan at the forty-five minute
mark. Multiple times.
On the plus side, if this MRI takes five hours because he cannot stay still, his esteemed colleague
will probably mount some form of mandatory rescue because that's a thing that Hermann tends to do.
Rescue Newt from his own stupidity.
He's not sure what would have happened if Hermann hadn't pulled him out of the drift apparatus
the first time.
Probably, he would be dead.
Or.
Nope.
And/or.
Maybe, his brain would be forever trapped with the kaiju hivemind.
Actually, since he'd been successful in establishing a drift, he's certain that's exactly what would
have happened.
Great.
He's so happy he's had this thought, right here, right now.
The risks had been worth it. For sure. To the max. He'd do it again. Except maybe next time he'd
try to convince everyone of his plan with a neatly typed piece of paper or a well-ordered power point
presentation with key ideas in large, sans serif font, instead of just gesticulating a lot and speaking at
high volume. It shouldn't matter, the ideas were and are the ideas, but there is, indeed, a reason that
kids with terrible handwriting receive worse grades than kids with perfect handwriting for work of
identical quality, and if Newt is a potential real-world Victor-Frankenstein-equivalent well, then he is
also, certainly, the poster child for the social, professional, psychological, and neural costs of
metaphorical poor penmanship.
The hivemind. The hivemind. Is it still in there? In here? With him, where he is? Colocalized and
integrated? A set of scrambled circuits? It doesn't respond to its name when he calls it like a dork
summoning a demon, it doesn't answer to the name that he's given it, the name that his brain tacked
straight onto it as the merging was happening. He is pretty sure his last conscious thought had been
something like 'oh crap, a hive mind?' before he'd lost track of everything he was in the sprawl of
foreign science and foreign thoughts and aggressive, entitled, anger at the constraint, the perpetual
constraint, that limited resources put on a species such as his, such as theirs, such as their species,
Newt, not yours. Never yours. It had been almost impossible to retain any sense of purpose in that
violent, violet, infinite mental abyss; the only thing he'd been able to hang onto was the idea of
science, and so he'd gotten something, but they'd gotten things straight back from him. He'd been
surprising to them, apparently hitching a cognitive ride on a dead fragment of tissue was not all that
common in the anteverse these days, or ever, and they had been interested in the tiny human and the
pressure of their interest would have torn his mind apart, it had been happening until it hadn't and
he'd been vaguely aware of Hermann yelling at him close and far away, fixing his head in place
because Newt couldn't do it himself, unfortunately, couldn't do much of anything for the span of about
fifteen seconds, and that had been concerning, but then everything snapped into an unscrambled state
and he'd opened his eyes and realized his mouth was full of blood because his nose was bleeding and
his head was being tipped the wrong way, so he'd coughed and some of the blood that had been in his
mouth had ended up on his shirt and that had freaked the crap out of Hermann in a manner that Newt
had found sort of vaguely satisfying, which is really the only way that you can find something
satisfying while simultaneously trying to determine if you're actively dying, but he'd found it satisfying
because, afterall, he had been right. That had been his first real thought after the requisite 'why am I
bleeding,' 'did someone stab my eye with a sharp laboratory implement?' 'ow,' and the fast becoming
typical, 'I'm on the floor right now?' He finds Hermann's extremely obvious horror less satisfying,
now, in retrospect, since he knows that freaking the guy out so badly had led directly to Hermann
getting in on the kaiju-hivemind-spy-squad thing they had going, but he isn't going to complain that
much about the outcome because he is pretty sure that if he'd drifted again, alone, he would have died,
turned evil, or snapped immediately into insanity in the embarrassingly stereotypical way that
fictional scientists go insane in Spider Man movies, the absolute basement of scientific literacy if one
doesn't consider the real weirdos, despite Peter Parker's ostensible interest in quantum mechanics.
Yeah right.
Like Peter Parker would realistically give a crap about quantum mechanics.
Get out of here.
Just because you say you like quantum mechanics doesn't mean you get to be absolved if you
vilify the search for knowledge in the narrative themes of your fictional universe.
Ugh, Newt's not one to talk there, except for how he's not fictional.
This is confusing.
Hey, Dr. Octavius, let's have lunch some time.
Vhy are ze crazy ones so often being German?
It doesn't say good things about Newt's odds.
Speaking of Germans, and ones other than him, he hopes Hermann hasn't been infected by the
kaiju anteverse or screwed up too much by Newt's own brain. Much as he enjoys the prospect of
springing musical subgenre rankings on Hermann, literally every day, for as long as they both shall
live, he would be more than a little bit sad if Hermann swapped his sherry for tequila and started
acquiring tattoos.
He doesn't think that's going to happen though.
Ugh the tattoos.
Ugh Otachi.
Baby otachi.
He's got to put them on there, it's hypocritical if he doesn't. And by 'on there' he means 'on his
skin'; that was a weird verbal substitution and is kind of an indicator of either how messed up he is at
the moment, or the extremely mixed feelings he has regarding his own tattoo hobby. He wishes he
could memorialize the Otachi family in that 'we honor your sacrifice' type of way, or even in that way
that pilots used to paint bars on the side of their planes, except in Newt's case he never killed any
kaiju, he just avoided being eaten by them.
Here are all the things that didn't eat me, emblazoned on my skin, he thinks. I salute your
efforts, predators, but I live to crawl away screaming another day, so suck it, giant, alien, cloned
war machines.
Whatever, man, he's pretty sure that everyone who meets a kaiju outside the confines of a Jaeger
does some amount of screaming.
It's dark but even so, he can see the cracking of the ceiling, feel the dust on his face and he
needs to--
Nope.
No, please.
 No flashbacks right now.
Relax, brain, he thinks. Remember that deal we made? The deal about not freaking out because
you are maybe a little bit occasionally understandably slightly confused about the false
equivalencies of being trapped in a magnet that's imaging you versus trapped in a bunker by a
kaiju trying to eat you. It's okay brain, it's not your fault, you are just doing your thing, your thing
you have been evolved to do, which is to teach me a lesson about my own stupidity by reminding
me forcefully and with a lot of integrated, strong reproductions of sensory input that my behavior
over the past day makes me less likely to stay alive and reproduce. I get it. I respect that. We are on
the same page. The survival page. The survival outside a medical facility page. You wouldn't like
that, brain, you would not like that at all, and if you flip out and start screaming at any point that
anyone can hear you, that's going to be what happens to you. Because that med tech isn't cool and
doesn't get it. So use some of your other skill sets, consider future outcomes using that suave
prefrontal cortex you've got on you, and do not do this to me.
He can lie here and will himself straight into immobility for ninety minutes, not moving his eyes,
not flinching at all; this is not even hard for him.
Hermann is probably back in his hermetically sealed box of a room typing a terrible report, but
there's some small chance that maybe he's thinking he should harass the med tech into letting him read
a very important article to his colleague while the guy has an MRI because science waits for no man.
Or no lady. And everyone will agree that this is very true, now and for the rest of time.
But Newt does have important problems to consider, the foremost of which is this: if he were to
be influenced, subtly or not subtly, by the kaiju hivemind, how might such an influence manifest? In
order to predict this, one should look at the goals of the kaiju, and hi, those aren't exactly understated.
Destroy dominant species, harvest resources, and build a stronger civilization upon the burnt out
husks of the weak. He wishes that social Darwinism would just get out of his life but it keeps
showing up. Anyway, so if he were the kaiju, and he had access to a lethally stupid little genius, either
one time, or sort of surreptitiously all the time across dimensions, how would he use his influence to
get the idiot to re-open the breach?
Maybe you get the guy to clone a kaiju, a thing that he already wanted to do. Maybe that triggers
their ability to reconnect. Maybe that deepens whatever influence they had or still have.
So, he really needs to not do that.
No kaiju cloning, Hermann is right.
For reals, yo.
It's dark but even so, he can see the cracking of the ceiling, feel the dust on his face and he
needs to find his glasses--
No.
He needs to stop that. Stop it.
Terrible job, brain, he thinks, you are doing probably the worst job ever. Did we not discuss
this?
He can kind of feel a building panic because he would really like to get out of this tube but he
can't and it's so loud and also so quiet at the same time, and he can feel this urge to just breathe in
and then to sort of start screaming but he's not going to do that, that would be lame and that would
ruin everything. Literally all he has to do is nothing. How hard is that? It's not that hard. He's doing
nothing like a champ.
He takes a breath without moving his head or his eyes and then he lets it out and he does not
scream.
 And then he does it again.
And then he does it another time without screaming.
You are killing it, brain. Good job. You could turn pro with that level of self-control.
He's not even sure what that means.
Apart from getting him to clone a kaiju, or just setting up shop in a secret corner of his brain that's
now cross-dimensional, he doesn't see what his anteverse frenemies are going to actually or
theoretically do to him. He should probably be more concerned about the PPDC if he's thinking about
sucky yet statistically significant sequelae, but it's hard to compare hypothetical bureaucratic cruelties
to aliens red in tooth and claw that literally tried to eat him yesterday. Maybe today? What time is it,
anyway? Whatever. He's not sure that cross-dimensional cognitive influence is remotely plausible. He
should consult Hermann on that one, but, eh, immunologists would have told you that transplantation
between genetically non-identical individuals would never work, back in the day, but some jackass
said, 'suck it, rational types,' and did a transplant anyway like a baller iconoclast and it worked, kind
of, after a while, after a fashion, with some tweaking. The point is: can he rule out some alien
influence on his thoughts? Sadly, epically tragically, alas, no he can't. Herman can't either. Not with
models. Not with chalk. And so Newt just needs to do his best to stay a good person and make sure no
one else comes to the same conclusion he has come to and locks him up and attaches him to a
perpetual EEG for the rest of his natural life and/or tries to replicate his experimental technique using
him. Because then he'd definitely go insane or evil and he probably, after stewing long enough in his
own concentrated, incarcerated rage, wouldn't even feel that badly about it.
He really hopes that Hermann is not going to go the Frankenstein route either. This seems less
likely than Newt going down that road, but alas, it, also, cannot be ruled out. If, in ten years, he and
Hermann are on a boat, re-opening a dimensional rift in the Pacific Ocean because they've been
slowly corrupted by alien knowledge, that is going to be so frustrating from a karmic sense, and also
just so sad.
That's not going to happen though.
Right?
Right.
Go back to Geneva, Victor, you were so happy there. Nice doctors don't spend all their time in
graveyards.
Hermann is too on top of his game for destruction of his civilization. Newt is on top of his game,
but in a different way, in the kind of way where he reflects about his life and his choices at intervals
so wide he finds himself saying things like, 'six Ph.D.s seems a bit much,' or, 'hey I can regenerate
tissue in a petri dish now,' or 'how did I start working for the military,' or, 'my choices have led to my
imminent death.' That kind of thing. Hermann's a lot more of the analyze-as-you-go kind of guy, the
ask-yourself-why-you-think-electrocution-is-a-good-choice-for-you kind of guy, the if-this-doesn't-
work-the-consequences-are-unacceptable kind of guy. In short the kind of guy who probably won't
accidentally annihilate the world.
Maybe they should stick together.
It's going to make the neurologist preferences hard to work out, since Hypothetical Phillip and
Hypothetical Rain do not live in geographically contiguous regions, but honestly that's the least of
Newt's problems, because Hermann has always been pretty up front about Newt annoying the crap out
of him most of the time, so Newt's not really sure how this life-partners proposal is going to go.
Maybe it will go like: 'Hey, so could you do me a favor and make sure I don't destroy the world?
Not that I'm worried.'
 Maybe it will be: 'Let's go the academic route and apply for grant funding together.'
Or possibly he will say: 'I need a roommate, man, because--yeah, I got nothing.'
Alternatively he could try: 'It's your professional duty to make sure I'm not in neural continuity
with the kaiju anteverse, just as it's mine to make sure you're not.'
Worst-case scenario, there's a good chance that: 'Please don't leave me,' would do the trick.
Oh boy.
Whatever he ends up saying is going to be really awkward if his list of options is anything to go
by.
It's dark but even so, he can see the cracking of the ceiling, feel the dust on his face and the
dirt beneath his hands, he needs to find his glasses this is so cliche he will be so annoyed if he dies
without at least seeing what's eating him; after all the work he's done that seems the least that he
deserves. He finds them and the ceiling cracks apart--
Newt manages to catch and abort the screaming that's threatening to start, manages to keep
aborting it, iteratively, over and over again, keeping his face still, keeping his eyes shut, pressing his
fingers into fists and his fists into his lateral thighs.
Brain, he thinks. Please stop. Please.
And it does.
He's fine.
This is totally understandable and this is fine.
Probably it's only something like seventy minutes now until he's done.
He can do seventy minutes.
No problem.
No problem at all.
It's just a magnet.
He's in a magnet, that's all, a crappy, closed, three-Tesla magnet, and he can get out any time he
wants.
But he does not want to get out now, he wants to get this over with so that everything will work
out.
So that when he falls asleep tonight he can spend one day, one single day, believing he can just be
done and stew in thwarted narcissism on the beach and nothing bad will happen and They will leave
his brain alone.
It's his brain.
And he likes it.
As it is.
Or was.
He and his brain can do this.
They are a team.
His brain possibly feels a little angry at him right now, considering how terrified it's been for
something like twenty-four hours straight, but that's fine. Newt gets it. He does. He will let it have
whole days of terror. Starting tomorrow. Whole days of punishing him before he distracts it with
something super interesting, or a new goal, or a mind altering substance, or long term cognitive
behavioral therapy, or whatever Hypothetical Rain suggests, maybe some kind of intense yoga routine
on the beach. Tomorrow he will say, 'fine brain, do your worst. Integrate the crap out of the mess
that's in there. Integrate it through flashbacks, through dreams, through panic attacks, through
discussion sober and drunken with other people who have done or suffered similar things, integrate it
through listening to music, integrate it in good ways and bad ways, in a mash-up of every coping
mechanism known to man.'
That is what he will say tomorrow.
Nope, actually, that's what he's going to start saying in seventy minutes, because tomorrow is
probably too far away.
Just please, he thinks, please, please, for the love of all that is good and science-y, start in
seventy minutes. Start with burning your clothes and taking a disturbingly long shower and getting
drunk. Start with an ungodly streak of making Hermann miserable as you drag him to a
dangerously out of control party populated by military personnel and random, elated civilians and
then tell him he has to help you build an open MRI immediately. Start any time and with any thing
you want, brain.
Except now.
Do not start now.
Do not start now, with a screaming fit in a confined space.
Not now.
No problem.
No problem at all.
He's got this.
Seventy minutes to go.
Chapter End Notes
Chapter-specific citations: Newt paraphrases Nietzsche in this chapter. ("He who fights with
monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long
into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.") Newt also uses the phrase "red in tooth and claw,"
which comes from a poem by Tennyson and was later used by Darwin to describe the cruelties
inherent to natural selection.
Chapter 8
Hermann sits in surreal solitude, using a computer he should never have appropriated, typing a
report that he is planning to directly consign to bureaucratic obscurity, and cross referencing it with
the atrocious, vague, and minimally coherent mess that Newton assembled during Hermann's ninety
minute neural imaging session.
Using a biological interface, Dr. Gottlieb and I were able to extract information from the brain
of an immature kaiju clone. We then determined the specific requirements for the passage of matter
though a kaiju-designed trans-dimensional conduit. We relayed the specifics of what we had
discovered with maximum speed to the command hierarchy at the Hong Kong Shatterdome. This
resulted in--
Hermann looks away, with a brief exhalation. He removes his glasses, pressing gingerly against
his throbbing eye.
If Newton thinks that no one will question that particular pile of excremental inexactitude, the
man is sorely mistaken. A 'biological interface'? Could anyone read such a ludicrous black box of a
term and not wonder, not guess, what he means by it? Could the man be more provocatively cryptic?
That's a terrible question.
Yes. He certainly could.
Hermann can see no way to achieve what Newton wants--a decoupling of themselves from what
they've done--but he can feel the desire, strong and contrapuntal and very nearly his own.
But not quite.
He checks his email, and an unread message from Stacker Pentecost traps him in a doubled,
synchronized memory five years old, of Newton twisting in his chair, exhausting and exhausted, the
second axle of a shrinking, double-cored science team to say, letters from the dead--the crap slap in
the face that civilians take in wartime. The intervals between letter writing and letter receiving are
shorter now than they used to be, but that's about all you can say. Someone should build us a
widow's walk. Hermann can't remember what he said in reply, but Newton does, and so his doubled
perspective narrows into one that's not his own as he watches himself snap, consider constructing
one atop the Wall. Newton looks away, back at his screen, scrubbing his eyes. You wish, he replies,
I'm staying.
The only thing that Hermann is certain of is that he will never be certain again.
He opens the email from Marshal Pentecost. It is short, the time stamp indicating that it was sent
only a few hours before the Jaeger teams were deployed.
Dr. Gottlieb,
I tried to locate you before deployment, but heard you were still assisting Geiszler. Hopefully
he's still alive. The pair of you are on a priority PPDC transport list, so if breach closure is
unsuccessful, get the hell out of Hong Kong. I'd suggest Moscow if you can make it there--they
made a proposal three years ago to weaponize drift technology and given what Geiszler just did,
I'd say that's probably the best bet we'll have left.
If we are successful in closing the breach, keep an eye on Geiszler, if you can stand it. Once the
breach is shut, he's going to be the only source left for intel on what's beyond it.
Good luck,
SP
Hermann feels a brief and confusing urge to stand, slide his fingers under the desk at which he's
sitting, and upend the thing--an impulse that certainly comes from some unfortunately Geiszlerian
residue in his thoughts.
He contents himself with sitting motionless, rather than engaging in pointless property destruction.
It is less satisfying.
But he needs this computer to function, and that will be difficult for it if it's in pieces on the floor.
Disgusted, he eyes his cane, leaning with irritating innocuousness against the desk. He gives it a
sharp shove, and it clatters to the floor.
That Pentecost had subtly articulated the same essential idea that Newton had poorly explained
less than two hours previous casts the issue in a somewhat different light.
Newton has made a moderately successful career out of bucking authority in all its forms, but that
particular proclivity of his does not mean that he is not correct to try and minimize the depth of his
connection to the kaiju anteverse.
Their connection.
Hermann is still not certain he believes that there is any real threat to their autonomy, agency,
career prospects, or persons, not from the PPDC, an organization they materially aided, not from any
major world power--
Not from any?
Not from kaiju worshippers?
Not from parties like the late Hannibal Chau, who have made a business of peddling materials
from the anteverse?
Fine.
He's convinced there may be some element of material threat.
Being convinced, he's certain that it's not sufficient to leave out key details and replace the word
"drift" with "biological interface." What they write in their reports matters very little, because no
amount of precise vagueness in word choice will shield either of them from what might await. In
order to improve their position, they're going to have to leave governmental employ. As soon as
possible. They're going to have to affiliate, as rapidly as it can be managed, with a private
organization with the monetary and legal resources to provide at least a modicum of protection.
As far as he's concerned, that leaves them only two material options. Academia or industry.
And he is not going to industry.
Unless he has no other choice.
He's unwilling to leave Newton entirely to his own devices, for several reasons, not the least of
which is that the man is possibly susceptible to alien influence and likely to make at least one serious
attempt at cloning a kaiju if he's not directly opposed, every day, multiple times, by a rational
colleague. Furthermore, Newton is enough of an idiot to accept a proposal from outside parties
regarding self-experimentation, presuming such a propsal was framed correctly.
Again, Hannibal Chau comes to mind. Dead though he may be, the man had not existed in
isolation.
Such a thing would be a disaster, because, despite Newton's irritating perspicacity, there are
certain areas in which he will, doubtless, leave himself wide open to external threats.
Presuming those threats exist.
Hermann sighs.
He's not certain how gracefully Newton is going to take his insistence that they continue their
working relationship, now that the world is not in immediate danger of ending. In the past, the man
has been quite articulate regarding Hermann's role as the chief bane of his professional existence.
 Hermann's also not certain that either of them is in any kind of shape to sit through job interviews
or discuss the state of their decade's-worth of mostly practical rather than conceptual scientific
advancements, given his inclination to tip over tables and Newton's perplexing propensity for
weeping over rationalism.
He returns to his report and manages to write a non-explicit but accurate account of the wretched
desperation that characterized his previous twenty-four hours with enough detail to satisfy a
moderately informed reader.
Drifting with dead kaiju.
Honestly.
He does not mention the word 'drift' in his report, not because he thinks it will deceive anyone,
but solely because it will make Newton significantly more reasonable.
Once he is finished, he looks at the clock and realizes that Newton has been in the scanner for
nearly two hours.
He gives the clock a disapproving look.
After retrieving his cane from the floor, he proceeds in the direction of the back room. The
medical technician is watching an assembling image of his colleague's brain. It appears to be nearly
complete.
"What is taking so long?" he asks.
The technician jerks, startled, then spins to face him. "We had a few re-starts," he says. "Dr.
Geiszler was having some difficulty holding still?"
Hermann feels an acute spike of sympathy, and finds himself literally unable to picture Newton
tolerating more than three minutes of forced immobility.
"How much more time is required?" Hermann asks.
"Five minutes?" the technician says, as though uncertain.
How aggravating.
"You don't have an exact number?" Hermann asks.
"Four minutes and twenty-three seconds," the technician replies.
"Thank you," Hermann says.
"Your scans came back clear, Dr. Gottlieb," the technician adds.
"Naturally," Hermann says, and leaves the room.
He stands next to the drapeable and locker-lined recess in the wall, where Newton's clothes have
been discarded in a slovenly heap crowned by his glasses. Considering the state of his outfit, this is
perhaps no more than it deserves.
Hermann hopes that Newton is not tolerating this MRI because he's comatose and the medical
technician hasn't bothered to check.
The odds of such an eventuality are not zero.
He drums his fingers over the handle of his cane.
He will wait five minutes. If, at the end of that interval, Newton has not emerged, he will put a
stop to this.
Hermann spends the next five minutes in increasing mental agitation until, finally, the door to the
room opens and Newton emerges, looking--if possible--even worse than before. He is drenched in
sweat, and shaking.
"Hey man," Newton says, leaning against the door, his voice ragged. "I thought maybe you'd read
my mind and then come read me physics."
"What?" Hermann says, certain Newton's sentence had made no sense, and alarmed enough that he
steps forward to take the other man's elbow.
"But that would have been weird," Newton says, as though finishing a coherent thought. "Let's get
out of here."
Hermann has no plans to allow Newton to leave the medical bay in the absence of clearance from
an offsite radiologist. For all he knows, the idiot is bleeding into his brain.
"Absolutely not," he begins.
"Hermann," Newton says through clenched teeth, his eyes alarmingly wide, appallingly
mismatched in white and red, both hands landing on Hermann's shoulders and digging into his
sweater. "You must get me out of here, dude, because I cannot take this."
This is atypically succinct for Newton.
Furthermore, he's somewhat taken aback by the intensity with which the request is delivered.
So, perhaps, he's willing to compromise.
"Why don't you get dressed," Hermann suggests.
"Nope," Newton says, "I'm incinerating my clothes. Stop hedging."
This seems extreme. On two fronts.
"Commendable," Hermann replies. "Even so, you're still in need of your glasses, wallet, phone,
whatever ridiculous items you keep in your pockets, and your shoes. I'm certain I have no idea what
you mean by 'hedging,' I never 'hedge'. Mathematicians do not hedge."
"Okay," Newton says. "Good point. I was not and am not going to incinerate my phone. I planned
that, believe or not. Or rather, I planned to not do it. And, liar, you hedge all the time. This is hedging;
you're doing it now. Hedging is I say I want to do A, and you say, not unless B and C. And I say no.
Just A. A is happening. And you say, 'but Newton you have no shoes,' and I say look man, thing A is
the most important thing, and so we're just going to do it, and not dick around trying to, like, map the
quantum foam or find shoes, okay? I'm freaking out and I just want some tequila, you would too, you
probably already do, except for all the thought-hedging you've been using to obscure your
heterochthonous tequila urges. I deserve some tequila, I'm pretty sure. Frankly? I also feel insultingly
underappreciated despite the fact that you ruined your perfect brain to save my life, maybe, hopefully
not, and I'd really just like you to say, 'Newton, you were so right, about everything the entire time,
and I apologize for being a prick and saying, and I quote, 'only an idiot would try patch clamping his
way to the anteverse'--"
"Fine," Hermann shouts directly in his face, if only to prevent whatever is coming at the end of
Newton's increasingly overwrought monologue.
He succeeds in startling Newton into temporary silence.
"Fine," he says more sedately. "I will retrieve your shoes, since you clearly have some kind of
confusing, poorly articulated objection to retrieving them yourself."
Newton makes a sound like Hermann is strangling him.
Hermann inverts his cane, uses the handle to snag Newton's glasses, and passes them over to the
other man, who snaps them out of his hand in temporarily silent rage.
Nothing about this current state of affairs bodes well for Hermann's plans to convince Newton to
join him in academia.
"Newton," he says, as the other man steps around him, apparently trying to make or obviate a
point by retrieving his own shoes. "You were right," he continues, with all the stiffly formal apology
he can muster without choking.
Newton stops mid-shoe retrieval and stares at him, frozen.
Hermann stares back at him impassively.
 "Oh god," Newton says, slowly collapsing against a blue-lockered wall, one hand over his chest.
"That--is so. Deeply. Viscerally. Satisfying. I can't even tell you, and you'll never know because I'll
probably never need to say it back to you. I can die now. I think I am going to die now. I have no
regrets. Zero." He shuts his eyes.
Hermann looks at him for a moment, unimpressed, and then swats the other man's leg gently with
his cane.
Newton cracks his good eye and looks up at Hermann skeptically.
"Furthermore," Hermann says dryly, "while I stand by my statement that 'only an idiot would try
patch clamping his way to the anteverse,' I am glad that you are just such an idiot."
"So, yeah, that's less satisfying," Newton says, reclosing his eye.
"Will you get up?" Hermann snaps.
"I don't think I can," Newton says.
"Put on your shoes," Hermann replies, "while I inform the medical technician that we are
leaving."
"You're literally the best, man," Newton says. "In return, I will make an effort to not drop dead on
you in the next several hours. Out of courtesy. And respect."
"I would settle for finding you shod when I return," Hermann says.
"Shod?" Newton echoes. "Shod? Seriously? You want to find me shod?"
"Heterochthonous?" Hermann counters, lifting an eyebrow, despite the pain in his head.
"That was for you, man."
"And I appreciate the sentiment," Hermann replies crisply, before turning to find the medical
technician.
It takes him very little time and minimal glaring to convince the young man that there are many
other individuals in much greater need of medical attention than two civilian scientists, and they are
quite content to wait, responsibly resting in their quarters for the complete and annotated results of the
medical testing they just initiated out of nothing other than a sense of professional responsibility.
He returns to find Newton leaning against the wall of blue lockers, standing, wearing his shoes
and his glasses, with the rest of his belongings crumpled beneath one arm.
Hermann inclines his head.
"We need to find a fire," Newton says.
"I'm sure that there is an entire array of burning buildings in the greater Hong Kong area,"
Hermann replies, jerking his head in the direction of the door. "However, that will have to wait."
"I have a whole schedule," Newton says, as they leave the medical bay. "A to-do list. Number one
is find a fire."
"To incinerate your clothes," Hermann says. "Yes I know."
"Look, can we please make an effort not to do the thing?" Newton says, weaving slightly as he
walks.
Hermann reaches over to steady him. "Newton, do you think I have any idea to what you might be
referring? Because I do not."
"This thing. I will demonstrate. The single most important feature arguing against a spontaneous
reopening of the breach is--"
"Subatomic space-time turbulence," Hermann says.
"Yes," Newton says, in overt exasperation. "That is the thing. The thing you just did. Interrupting
my totally normal sentence that I was just about to end, by myself, with your weird, evil-twin, thought
parity."
 "You aren't a mathematician with a mid-career interest in theoretical and applied quantum
mechanics."
"So?" Newton says. "That was my sentence, that I was going to end."
"You interrupt me all the time," Hermann replies.
"Yeah, with opposing opinions," Newton says. "Ideally. I just don't think I can handle being
science twins with you, man. I can handle the Bach, I can handle the Descartes, oh my god, can I
ever."
"Please don't cry," Hermann says dryly. "Again."
"If I ever cried over Descartes, and I'm not saying I did, it would, for sure, be your fault, and if it
reflects weirdly on anyone it reflects weirdly on you so maybe we just want to forget about what
happened regarding my mental introduction to Herr Cogito Ergo Sum, am I right? I'm legit on board
with the practical doubling of my fields of expertise, though I kind of wish that one of us knew Kung
Fu, because come on. I can live with the weird thing you've got going for group theory and for
Evariste Galois, even though it's borderline inappropriate and kind of confusingly conflated with me
for reasons that I'm not even going to explore because I know that you're not going to mention or
ideally ever think about that thing that happened when I was eighteen in Prague--
"I suggest you redirect your current conversational tangent," Hermann snaps. "But for the sake of
accuracy, I do not equate you with Galois."
"Yeah, okay. Sure you don't, man. Just like I don't weep over rationalists sometimes when I'm
really tired. Anyway, I feel kind of weirdly unsettled about comparative infinities right now, and I
could have done without that particularly needless source of unruhe in my life. Also, have you noticed
that you're invariably--"
"The thought completer," Hermann says, with an entirely justified streak of pique.
"I'm going to steal your cane," Newton snaps, one hand coming to his temple. "Purely out of spite.
Did you know that's thing number fourteen on my to-do list? Why are you the thought completer?"
"Because you do more than your fair share of thought initiating and I am in favor of efficiency,"
Hermann replies. "Furthermore, I do not advise incorporating my preferences into your personality."
"I'm not," Newton says. "I'm just enjoying your preferences as if they were mine. There's a
difference."
"Is there?" Hermann asks.
"There's a whole ocean of metaphysics between enjoyment and incorporation. You like that I like
Descartes," Newton says. "You don't like that I also might enjoy the idea of invading planets and
leaving them burned out shells of fully utilized resources."
"Do you?" Hermann asks, without looking at him. "Enjoy the idea of merciless colonialism?"
"No. A little bit? No."
Hermann says nothing.
"You're already starting the paperwork to write me off as evil," Newton says.
"Entirely inaccurate," Hermann snaps, punctuating the words with a poorly considered hard shake
of Newton's elbow that his colleague barely manages to weather without falling over.
"You are grabby today, god," Newton says, aggravated, recovering his footing with poor grace
and Hermann's assistance. "Can you not? Just because you vacationed in my brain does not mean you
get to manhandle me when you think I'm being stupid. Keep it up. Find out what happens. I was not
kidding about stealing your cane."
"First," Hermann continues, ignoring Newton's entirely empty threats, "there are no rational
grounds to write you off as 'evil,' without writing off myself as well. Second, you are far, far more
likely go mad than to turn slowly malevolent."
"Wait, is that supposed to be comforting, because--"
"Third," Hermann continues, "I doubt 'evil,' could ever be defined in a meaningful manner."
"You know it when you see it," Newton says. "Much like pornography."
"Useless," Hermann replies. "And in poor taste."
"Me, my observation, or pornography?" Newton asks.
"Fourth," Hermann says, resolutely avoiding the pornography tangent, "while I am certain that we
will, unfortunately, be forced to grapple with the cognitive repercussions of our neurological
experimentation for the rest of our potentially shortened natural lives, I am convinced that with
constant, vigilant, rational monitoring of our thoughts and actions we should be able to avoid doing
something untoward."
"Yeah," Newton says, unmistakably hopeless. "Rational thought monitoring. Descartes-style.
Sounds easy and fun."
Hermann stops in front of the door to his quarters, keys in his code, and swings the blastedly
heavy thing open.
"This is not a fire," Newton points out, quite correctly.
"I never promised you a fire. Would you like to come in?" Hermann asks.
"Um," Newton says, "last time you invited me into your room was the Firecracker Sake Incident,
during which I said some things I came to deeply regret about Erwin Schrodinger, you threw up in
your sink, and we tried to discover, from first principles, a biological equivalent of uncertainty
relations, and then gave up and drunkenly critiqued A New Kind of Science."
"Yes," Hermann says dryly. "I remember. In fact, I now remember in disconcerting duplication."
"Seriously though," Newton says, listing alarmingly until he steadies himself on Hermann's
doorframe, "what kind of guy makes up a thought experiment about a cat like that?"
"It is a thought experiment, Newton. Not. Real."
"I know but when I do thought experiments I try to make them nice."
"That is blatantly untrue," Hermann says. "That is, in fact, extremely false."
"Why can't, like, there be cat food involved instead of a flask of poison. Like instead of alive or
dead it's hungry or fed?"
"Newton," Hermann says, "I believe we have already, on another occasion, taken this particular
perseveration of yours as far as it is capable of being taken. Now are you coming in, or not?"
"Just so long as you're sure you want to pre-game for the Apocalypse Cancellation Party with
drunken science," Newton says, already leaning against Hermann's doorframe. "Because if not? I will
find a fire. And then a neurologist."
"Quite sure," Hermann says, and pulls him inside.
Chapter 9
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Newt is lying on Hermann's bed.
This is not really what he'd had in mind at any point before it had come to pass, but considering
his day, he's okay with it, mostly because tensing himself into the tetanic stillness required for
detailed neuroimaging used up what little remained of any intramuscular glycogen reserves he might
have and so, nope, he's not going to be able to get up, and, if he does, by some miracle or statistical
improbability, claw his way over that particular activation energy barrier, he wants to have a
definite, achievable goal in mind, like locating a five-Tesla magnet, hypothetically, or perhaps going
to an awesome party, or obtaining an analgesic of some kind for his eye and head and probably pretty
shortly for his whole body because today has been a six-sigma day when it comes to exertion. It's
hard to make time for Racquetball when cloned, alien, war machines are laying waste to your
civilization so while it's true that he's probably been in better shape in his life, evolution is about
trade offs, man, so sure, he's no Raleigh Becket, but he doesn't see Captain Jawline saving the day
through science--more like saving the day through fortitude and fighting skills, fine, Becket's cool,
whatever--but the point he was making was that Newt considers Dr. Newton Geiszler, of the sick tats
in green and the six advanced degrees, to have struck a pretty tight, awesome, and frankly
commendable balance between being intelligent enough to biohack his way into an alternate
dimension and physically fit enough to avoid a giant killing machine specifically targeting him for
death, though it was possible it had wanted to do something else; he was still not clear on what that
blue-tentacled business had been, was that like--a sommelier-styled assessment of an interesting
human varietal before consumption or did, maybe, Otachi have something else in mind, like a drift
part deux in which Newt climbed on its back--or maybe her back, though the whole oh-look-a-baby-
kaiju phenomenon was parthenogenetic for sure, there was no indication that kaiju reproduced
sexually, he had looked into this, but gender issues aside--maybe Newt would have climbed on its
back and then sort of presided over an informed and efficient single-kaiju-mediated-destruction-of-
his-own-civilization, which, while bad on a lot of levels, would have been visually striking, because
there is no doubt in his mind that in a Geiszler-kaiju combo versus even multiple Jaegers, he's pretty
sure who's going to win, just, like, hypothetically as a thought experiment, not a real thing because
yikes, he doesn't want that, and he doesn't even just not want it on paper he legit does not want it in
his soul. Hermann is right about his thought experiments though, god, he just had one where he
destroyed his planet, and that is worse than a cat with a flask, so maybe he should cut Schrodinger
some slack.
"Newton," Hermann snaps, standing over him, as academically disheveled as the man ever gets.
Newt twitches.
God, how does a guy in a poorly-fitting sweater make himself so freaking alarming?
"Are you listening to me? At all?" Hermann asks, frowning, eyebrows pushed together.
"Yeah," Newt says. "Of course I'm listening to you. If anyone is being inattentive, it is, for sure,
you. As I keep telling you, I'm not brain damaged. You seem to be not grasping that. Are you brain
damaged? Go search for some Riemann zeros, just to make sure you're still fully functional, man."
There is, probably, in Newt's entire life, going to be no more consistent source of intellectual
pleasure than the ability he now has to tell Hermann to screw off in abstruse arithmetical argot. He
wishes he could bottle this feeling it and save it for later when he's losing an argument about the value
of abstraction or when Hermann tells him he's going back to mathematics, have a nice life, don't clone
a kaiju.
Hermann glares at Newt, pulls the chair away from his desk, positions it a few feet from the bed,
sits down in it, crosses his legs, rests his cane against the adjacent desk, and commences staring at
Newt.
"No," Newt says. "No. What is this? Bedside-vigil pregaming? Because that's not an accepted
form of pregaming. You definitely promised me drunk science, or, if not promised me, you let me
tacitly understand it was going to happen and then shoved me onto your bed under false pretenses. I
object to every aspect of what's happening here."
"Then get up and leave," Hermann replies, in prototypical xeric victory.
"I will," Newt says pointedly. "In a while. When I feel like it. When I judge, using my life
experience and my knowledge of complexity theory, that the awesomeness of the party out there has
reached its logarithmic growth stage. Furthermore, you have committed a tactical error in your
campaign to achieve perpetual, steady-state boringness."
"And what might that be?" Hermann asks.
"Just a little item called Newt-has-your-memories-and-is-entitled-to-the-benefits-thereof," he
says, as he twists, with significant effort and some unfortunate shaking, to reach beneath Hermann's
bed to pull out a half-empty bottle of sherry. "It is so weird that you hide this stuff. Who is going to
judge you for sherry, dude? I mean, a) it's classy, and goes with the whole sweater-a-loved-one-
with-questionable-taste-purchased-for-me-a-decade-ago look you've got going, b) it's not like either
the Jaeger teams or the K-science division, back when it was a division before the funding cuts, were
ever known for their dour alcoholic abstinence; in fact, it might be said that--hey."
Newt has been relieved of Hermann's sherry.
He really should have seen that one coming and/or processed what was happening as it was
happening and taken steps to prevent this sherryless outcome.
"I find it extremely irritating," Hermann says, opening the bottle with an atypical flourish and a
typical glare. Newt finds this turn of events so staggering that he almost misses the end of Hermann's
sentence.
Or--nope, not 'almost'.
He actually did miss it, as it turns out.
That's okay, Hermann finds a lot of things irritating, and Newt can extrapolate from past
experience.
"So we are drinking the sherry?" Newt asks.
"No," Hermann informs him. "I am drinking the sherry. You are already drunk on your own
exhaustion and hubris. Furthermore, you have had a seizure, while I have not. Therefore, until you are
evaluated by an actual physician, you will not be drinking at all, because if you have a second one
there is no force on this planet that will prevent me from having you immediately assessed by
someone in the medical division with an actual medical degree, at which point it will be too late to
claim that you're not experiencing any aftereffects from the 'biologic interface' you constructed, and
the likelihood of spending the rest of your career as an experimental subject increases substantially."
Hermann punctuates his pronouncement by electing to drink sherry directly from the bottle.
Okay then.
Newt adjusts his glasses, as if that's going to help him sort anything out.
Nope, even with glasses correctly positioned, he's still looking at Hermann, in a state of alarming
moderate-kemptness, looking back at him with one bloodshot eye, one normal eye, both sporting an
expression that Newt is going to tag as 'vengeful anxiety.' There had been a whole lot going on in the
guy's monologue, including some identity confusion, a chunk of concern, a swath of disparagement
regarding Newt's recapitulation skills, a dash of ideological dismissal of the idea of self-
experimentation as a valid choice under extenuating circumstances, and a pile of ratiocination about
comparative sherry rights.
Newt is a little too overwhelmed by the multiple conversational avenues to take any of them.
"Are you okay?" he asks, with maximum polite tact and minimal exhausted slurring.
"No, Newton," Hermann snaps. "I am fifty percent you, which is intolerable. Furthermore, you
are fifty percent me with no discernable problems and enough flawless integration of two sets of
discordant memories to be able to locate my sherry, but evidently not enough to know that it's there
because it should be stored in a in a cool, dark place to prevent oxidation. You peasant. Are you not
a chemist, amongst other things? You realize it's embarrassing to have so many degrees, don't you? It
makes you look intellectually indecisive and dubiosly employable."
Newt would sit up for emphasis, except, unfortunately, he doesn't have the resources for moving
unless something is trying to eat him.
"First of all, I am a little bit indecisive, except for when I'm so so so right about things, which is
most of the time. Second of all, tell me, Doctor Gottlieb, how easy do you think it is to get a post-doc
position and apply for governmental funding at the age of fourteen? No one is giving the fourteen-year
old whose uncle drives him to his research in progress job-talk the sweet two point three million
dollar startup package, okay? Are you jealous of how awesomely I am adapting to being,
mnemonically speaking, fifty percent you? Because you're not usually one for critiquing educational
excesses," Newton says.
"No," Hermann replies, in a stiff way that translates to 'absolutely.' "I am in no way jealous. I
disapprove, but that is not the same thing."
"Aw," Newt replies, trying to relax, trying to get this post-adrenaline reactive shaking to stop and
stay stopped for the love of god. "Look, here's the thing. First of all, while it's true I'm not weirdly
and needlessly insulted by a whole new set of enthusiasms that weren't previously mine--like
cherries, undeciphered manuscripts, the historically suspect incident in which Euler supposedly
smacked down Diderot with a brutal application of induced math-anxiety, Stuttgart and its sports cars,
Bach's kickass, six-part Ricercar in Das Musikalische Opfer, that guy could crush a counterpoint--
it's also true that there's maybe the minor possibility that in the future I'll be taking the crazy train to
the anteverse, while the Toccata and Fugue in D minor plays in my head or maybe over
loudspeakers, and I'll think that's equally awesome, and the thing is, it will not be awesome, it will
not be awesome at all, and that's the kind of thing that makes me better at this in the short term, but
you much better in the long term, infuriatingly better, and so that's why I need for you to be my life
partner."
Hermann doesn't bother answering that; he just takes another drink of sherry.
From the bottle.
Newt wishes he could do that right about now.
But he can regroup.
"What I mean is, could you do me a favor and make sure I don't destroy the world? Not that I'm
worried. Like, I think we should probably just go the academic route and apply for grant funding
together. Also I need a roommate, because--well, I mean, I will probably, housing is expensive, or
not, depending on where one lives, possibly I can just--whatever. The point is, that I just think, given
the events of the past twenty-four hours it's your professional duty to make sure I'm not in neural
continuity with the kaiju anteverse, just as it's mine to make sure you're not."
Ugh.
This is the worst.
He should have waited until tomorrow to make his life partners proposal when he was not so
tired, that was the plan--why is this even happening to him now? Whose idea was this? Because it
wasn't his. His idea was to do it later, with one argument that he then supported with examples rather
than all of them right in a row, one of which didn't even have any rationale; now he just looks weird
and desperate, and his head feels odd and he is anxious. Why does he do this to himself?
Brain, if you're going to crap out and die young, just--do it now. Right now would be extremely
convenient for me.
"Yes I know," Hermann says, looking confusingly relieved and also like he knows more than just
where his professional responsibility lies, and of course, he does, he knows all of it and that makes
Newt feel even weirder about the whole thing, because they don't like each other, nope, they are
nemesises who have pitched verbal battles about things like Kraftwerk, the merits of reductionist
approaches to the analysis of complex phenomena, determinism, the strenghts of theory versus
empiricism, and which is better--chemically synthesized cheese spread or chemically synthesized
imitation crab.
Nemesises.
Nemeses.
Mutual ones.
"Cool," he says weakly, sliding shaking hands beneath his glasses like the paragon of suavity he
is.
"We'll need to leave Hong Kong," Hermann says, with the air of a guy who's thought about this a
lot more completely than Newt, "and withdraw ourselves from the employ of the PPDC, as soon as
you're able to travel."
"Able to travel?" Newt repeats, his hands still over his eyes, "what are you talking about? I'm
able to travel right now."
"You most certainly are not," Hermann says. "No rational person would let you board a plane.
Words cannot do justice to how truly appalling you look."
"Thanks man. But why are we quitting?" Newt says into his hands.
"We are not quitting," Hermann replies. "We have, in fact, triumphed, and it is now time to leave
the PPDC and return to academic life, where we will not be contractually obligated to make
ourselves available for attempts to gather intelligence regarding the kaiju anteverse."
Newt drags his hands away from his face, takes his glasses with them, tries to organize his hands
and frames to get everything back in order and ends up somehow driving a knuckle into his bad eye,
which, great, closes, so, reflexes intact, but, not-so-great, hurts with an excruciating, eye-watering
intensity; can he just fall asleep and wake up three days from now? That would work out well for
him. He looks over at Hermann to see the guy is halfway through his half bottle of sherry. There's
pregaming and then there's just straight up gaming, which is the direction Hermann seems to be
heading in. Newt is not going to judge though. He's going to lie here, neither pregaming nor gaming,
and be unjudgmentally envious.
"Yeah," Newt says. "Okay. Boston it is."
"Boston? I don't think so," Hermann replies.
"Cambridge is, like, the academic capital of the world," Newt says, feeling brutal levels of
cognitive dissonance as Hermann's preferences engage and his overtaxed brain starts trying to fight it
out between Cambridge, Massachusetts and Cambridge, freaking England.
"If only I didn't know what you meant by 'Cambridge'," Hermann says, his teeth clenched.
The room moves and fails to move in nauseating duality, leaving him unfortunately unable to rule
out the possibility of falling off Hermann's stationary bed.
This is not going to end well.
"Don't throw up," Newt says, "because if you do it, I'm going to do it. How does this not happen
to other people? You don't see Captain Jawline throwing up in the cafeteria because Mako likes
eating fermented soybeans. Or something. God. I don't think we're drift compatible."
"Is it too much to ask that you stop talking?" Hermann asks, through impressively clenched teeth.
"Think of Kierkegaard," Newt says. "Think of many excellent academic centers. Berlin, Paris,
Tokyo, Vladivostok is up and coming in terms of biomedical engineering post all the kaiju samples
that landed in their lap, crap, Dublin, San Francisco, think about cost versus benefit as a gestalt rather
than trying to literally rank, dude, it's the ranking that's killer. Let's get a map and some darts. Bonn is
nice." He trails off and manages to roll over so that if he throws up it's going to be on the floor, he's
pretty sure he's talked himself mostly out of his cognitive dissonance but if Hermann throws up he's
going to also, for sure, no matter his dissonance level, because it's like some kind of evolutionary
thing--see evidence of a poisoned peer, commence vomiting. Certainly in terms of life-prolongation
it's a good idea to take protective measures, except this time it's, like, fake, psychological poison, but
try to tell that to his area postrema, just try.
"This is pretty much the worst," Newton says, opening his eyes, to oh hey, watch blood drip onto
the floor.
Why does he articulate these kinds of karmic invitations? He needs to stop doing this.
Duly noted, brain, he thinks, this is not the worst. It's literally never the worst until you're in
the ninth circle of hell, being perpetually consumed by Lucifer, or, alternatively, stuck in a
disembodied hive mind for eternity because you accidentally killed your physical body. Thank you,
brain, for reminding me that this is called 'perspective' and it's now a thing that you have and that
I have. We both have it. Why? Because we are a team. Don't sabotage your team, brain. It's not
worth it.
But more to the point and less to the Dantean hyperbole, apparently nearly throwing up is enough
of a trauma to his friable capillary beds that his nose is bleeding again. He's not sure, but it seems
like this could potentially be a long-term thing. And by 'thing' he means 'problem.' He wonders if he
has a vasculature abnormality that predisposes him to this, or if he just really screwed himself with
that first drift. He pulls out one of the handkerchiefs he carries for the guy who is definitely his
nemesis, and not his friend with a dislike and maybe-real, maybe-not-real, 'allergy' to latex gloves
and a pathological horror of touching totally innocuous things like atypically suspect door handles or
the outside of specimen containers that Newt occasionally needs him to hold because hi, no lab techs,
no lab techs at all, none for like three years, and he only has two hands, and the outside of those
containers are clean, but whatever, he carries handkerchiefs and he's positive there's nothing weird
about that; it's a mark of civilization. Like hashi. Like piano. Like the complex plane. Like a brutalist
architectural phase. Like a single perfect flower in a single perfect vase. Whatever.
Ugh bleeding.
Ugh moderate bleeding.
No one is yelling though, that seems weird.
Newt looks over to see that Hermann is managing not to throw up by shutting his eyes and
thinking. Probably he's contemplating something super Zen, like maybe Gabriel's Horn with the
infinite surface area and the finite volume, that's cool, that's Zen, but unfortunately that means that
when Hermann is done being Zen, or maybe once he's achieved an approximation of Zenness, Newt
is going to ruin it for him by being actively bleeding when he opens his eyes.
There's not much he can do about that.
Hermann opens his eyes.
"There's no way this is serious," is all Newt manages to get out before the other man interrupts
him by snapping his name like a pencil. Hermann is, at the apex of vexation, a pencil-snapper. Newt
is a table-upender, but he has only given into that impulse twice in his life, both times it was
awesome, but only one time was it for science. He just gets emotional when uninformed
mathematicians-turned-theoretical-physicists talk crap about the fidelity of DNA polymerases as if
they know anything about mutation rates, those things molecularly proofread okay; they are
probably the best enzymes ever, so complicated, so willing to play well with others--
"Newton," Hermann says, again, a little more a word, a little less a fracturing of a wooden
emblem of the civilized mind. "Are you all right?"
"Yeah," Newt says, managing to finish wiping all the blood off his face, probably, mostly, and
then pinch his nose shut. "Look, there is literally no way that this is serious. You don't bleed from your
brain into your nose; that's physiologically not going to happen unless you've got one heck of a skull
fracture, which I do not have, please see the eight hundred thousand examples of astronomically high
mental functioning I have been providing you with for hours now. I just have some very irritated
capillary beds and trying not to throw up is enough of a pressure trigger to knock those guys over into
bleeding a little bit, probably. I don't know; I'm not a neurologist. Maybe neurologists wouldn't even
know, because turns out that the nose is not the brain. Maybe let's go somewhere with a good
neurology department that's a little bit counter-culture, what do you think?"
"Agreed," Hermann says, watching him like a hawk. A creeper hawk.
"Ugh," Newton says, pulling his handkerchief away from his face to see if he's still bleeding. It
seems like maybe yes, so he puts it back. "So you want to do what? Math or theoretical physics?"
"Don't change the subject," Hermann says.
"I don't even know what the subject was if you don't think it's where we're going to go and tell
them that they need to hire the most badass whatever-we-are in the history of interdisciplinary world
saving."
"Are you still bleeding?"
"Um, I don't know, probably? It's been ten seconds; I doubt it's over yet. I think you should do
quantum mechanics, mainly because it's more awesome, and also because I'm not sure that all your
math friends have been following your career now that you're not directly working on zeta functions. I
mean, life goes on, even when giant alien monsters are eating coastal cities. Those Fields Medals
aren't going to win themselves. But you can get back into the whole thing slantwise because of the
connection between the quantum energy levels of chaotic systems and Riemann zeros, dude, it's so
perfect it suggests itself. To me. A biologist. Who could not find a Riemann zero if his life depended
on it. Before yesterday. Because now I'd crush those zeros. But I'm not as interested as you are. Tell
me I will not make an awesome life partner and/or roommate. Have you considered that if we don't
turn evil we could do a lot of good things? Like, you know, for science?"
"First," Hermann says, "that was already my plan, so I will thank you not to describe it as
'slantwise,' and I will thank you not to take credit for proposing I avail myself of the connection
between the Riemann hypothesis and quantum mechanics to further my professional career. I, in fact,
conceived that plan more than five years ago, and I'm certain you pulled it directly out of my head,
akin to the way you managed to unerringly locate this sherry, much good though it did you." Hermann
shakes the bottle in his direction.
"Keep drinking," Newt advises him.
"Second," Hermann says, glaring at him, "yes, it has occurred to me that the post drift
consequences could have extremely advantageous cognitive implications, presuming equally
disadvantageous consequences do not drive us insane."
"You're always so negative," Newt replies, eyeing his moderately blood-soaked handkerchief and
trying not to be negative himself.
"You're always an idiot. Are you still bleeding?"
"You're using the word 'idiot' at high frequency," Newt says, trying to decide if he can feel blood
coming from wherever it comes from. "I'm pretty sure that's to compensate for the fact that I now
know you think I'm a blazing paragon of intellectual insight and a validated wunderkind, so I'll let it
slide. Just to be clear though, I always thought your brain was pretty great, if a little rigid, so, that's
another thing I was right about, by the way." He decides he's not bleeding anymore, and tosses his
handkerchief in the direction of his pile of clothes to be incinerated, but misses so badly he can't even
claim to have really been aiming at all.
Hermann shoots him in unimpressed look.
"And not bleeding," he finishes, hoping it's true, still tasting blood.
"I will be extremely annoyed if you die," Hermann says, managing to take a pretty nice sentiment
and set it on fire with pique.
"I think I would have died already if it was going to happen," Newt says. "I definitely would have
if you hadn't pulled me out of that first drift when you did. So thanks, dude. I owe you one. Maybe I
owe you two. Definitely at least one though."
"How would you describe it?" Hermann asks, still drinking his sherry out of the bottle; Newt still
cannot get over how uncharacteristic that is.
"The first drift?" Newt asks. "Kind of like the second one, but less fun. They were initially pretty
shocked, I think. There was--" he makes looping, poorly coordinated hand gesture. "A getting-to-
know-you period where they were like, 'wow, baby humans are stupid and tiny', and I was like, 'nice
Dyson sphere, jackasses, why do I think that's not going to cut it for you?' and then they were like,
'huh, this guy did manage to get here, that's not so stupid, and hey, turns out we're enraged,' and I was
like, 'oh so you guys are basically sending the most destructive packages the breach will allow over
given time intervals,' and they were like, 'oh no you did not just figure that out,' and I was like, 'yup,
pretty sure I did, suck it, jerks,' and then they were like, 'you guys are actually in those metal kaijus?
How dumb is that, why not control them remotely?' and then I was like, 'you cloned that business?'
and they were like, 'we are going to get you and your Wall, and your little civilization too,' and that
pretty much brings us the point where I was about to die. Fortunately, you pulled me out. Do you,
maybe, want a glass for that sherry you're knocking back?"
"No," Hermann replies. "I do not."
"Why," Newt says. "Can you just use a glass? It's disturbing."
"Too Newtonesque?" Hermann asks dryly.
"First of all, oh my god, no," Newt says. "If you're going to adjectivize my name, the correct way,
the only way, the established way, is 'Newtonian,' okay? It's already a thing. A thing you're
purposefully avoiding. Second of all, yes, way too 'me,' except weird, because I wouldn't drink
sherry, and if I did, I'd use a glass, dude, because you drink tequila out of a bottle, you drink vodka
out of a bottle, you drink, maybe, a blended scotch out of a bottle, you drink Irish whiskey out of a
bottle, but you do not drink sherry, red wine, or sake out of a bottle, you've clearly got some wires
crossed somewhere between the you-circuitry, the me-circuitry, the authority-circuitry, the tequila-
circuitry, and the et cetera-circuitry. Now go get a glass. Do it right now. I know you have them. Go."
"I very nearly upended a table today, Newton," Hermann says, standing in indirect acquiescence,
shaking the bottle in Newt's general direction. "This is the least of my problems."
"I know; the table thing is tempting, right?" Newt asks. "Once you do it, you never look back. Hey,
if you're getting a glass, I could use some sherry. Or if not sherry, at least water."
"You may have water," Hermann replies, making his way to the sink none too steadily.
"This is the worst pregaming ever," Newt says. He considers sitting up, does a pilot experiment
that indicates sitting up is going to be way too hard, and then settles for propping himself up on one
unlucky and protesting elbow. "And when were you going to upend a table? We haven't really seen
many tables since we had our mental three-way, and I do not recall pissing you off to table-upending
levels any time in the past however many hours that it has been since we did that thing we did."
"It was, actually, a desk," Hermann says with endearing primness, filling one glass of water at his
sink and then emptying the remainder of the sherry into a second glass.
Ah yes, Newt thinks, a desk, by Jove. How tempting and unpropitious.
"Desks don't flip as nicely," Newt says with commendable gallantry, "depending on their
construction and what's on top of them."
"I'm aware of that," Hermann replies.
"May I ask what triggered that particular appropriated proclivity?"
"No," Hermann replies, handing him his water.
Newt takes it, and, of course, Jurassic Park-style, it just accentuates how much he is still shaking
so he downs the entire thing immediately. It's room temperature and blood-flavored.
"Are you all right?" Hermann asks him for the eighty-thousandth time.
Newt sighs, deposits the empty glass on Hermann's nightstand, and lies back down. "Why do I get
the feeling that we aren't drift compatible?"
"I cannot imagine," Hermann says dryly as he drops back into his chair.
"I've heard of people acquiring new preferences," Newt says, "but I haven't heard of anyone
nearly throwing up over--"
"Whatever you are about to say, don't," Hermann snaps.
"Cognitive dissonance," Newt finishes, shooting Hermann his best who's-the-jerk-now look.
"Likely because they don't have significant cognitive dissonance," Hermann says. "Because
they're compatible."
"Is that even really a thing?" Newt asks. "A discrete thing? Discrete in a mathematical sense?
Digital rather than analog? You know what I'm saying, maybe? I'm still not sure."
"You just posited our own fundamental incompatibility," Hermann says, "in such a way that
implies you view it discretely."
"Yeah, I think there's probably a minimal threshold that you need to hit so that you don't throw up
over Nietzsche or weep over Freddie Mercury, which will, someday, happen to you, if it hasn't
happened yet, presuming there is justice in the world, which there might not be. Once you hit that
threshold though, it's an analogue thing, like, more compatible or less compatible--better at sword-
mediated kaiju evisceration, or you know, tragically less good, as the case may be. The thing is,
though, is that we actually turned out to be pretty awesome at extracting information, better than I was
on my own, mainly because I, prior to six hours ago, was less solid on the quantum mechanical
underpinnings of dimensional transit--I also, for your information, found it less staggeringly hilarious
than I do now that after all those string-theory-doesn't-belong-in-science-because-it-can't-be-directly-
tested protestations that the whole shebang gets proven to have empirical validity by monsters--" oh
god, he is going to lose it, this is not funny, this is not even remotely amusing. "By monsters.
Literally eating cities--" he can barely string a sentence together with the effort of suppressing
laughter that is, for sure, one hundred percent, guaranteed to end up squarely in sobbing.
Hermann is doing a really terrible job helping him out because he's clearly trying not to laugh and
doing it about as badly as Newt would expect.
His brain really needs to step up and get this situation under control because Newt refuses to
laugh like a crazy person about string theory. In the absence of consciousness-altering substances,
that's a line in the sand he isn't going to cross.
"Oh god," Newt says, trying to breathe, "I think I'm going to die. String theory wins forever.
Infinite win. Monsters. You really have a better sense of humor than I ever thought possible. Or maybe
now I have a terrible one. What was I even talking about?"
"The drift," Hermann says, "which you are, if I'm correctly interpreting your meandering train of
thought, rather creatively equating to synaptic transmission, in which a certain threshold must be
reached to trigger the depolarization required for electrical propogation along a neuron."
"You realize what you're doing right now is de-jargoning neuroscience for a neuroscientist?"
Newt asks, "which is adorable."
"It is most certaintly not 'adorable'. It is a professional courtesy which I have extended to you for
a decade without the faintest hope of reciprocation," Hermann says primly, before returning to his
original point. "Given a neural signal is transmitted, further improvement can then be effected, via
repetitive stimulation, in a manner conceptually akin to the neuronal phenomenon of long term
potentiation."
"Not bad for a glorified accountant," Newt says. "Biology. It is awesome. Try not to be jealous. I
suppose neuroscience as a field is big enough for both of us, and I would be willing to share it with
you, but only if you beg."
"How charitable," Hermann replies. "There are several problems with your model."
"Let's call this one your model," Newt replies. "I never formally committed to anything like what
you're describing. This is just a thing that you've put together in a very Newtonian manner using our
longstanding and extremely reasonable mutual skepticism of floor matches as a means of assessing
drift compatibility, your new knowledge of neuroscience, and your long history of following my
extremely logical if not always perfectly explained trains of thought."
"This is not my model, Newton," Hermann says, still amused, still making progress on his sherry.
"Well it's not mine, dude, you can't just make up models and then ascribe them to me and force me
to defend them. I have some standards."
"I am certain that the only reason you are claiming not to conceptualize the drift in the way I just
described, is because your model--" Hermann trails off in unmistakable sudden realization. He gives
Newt an incisive, interested, and edgy look.
Newt tries to appear innocent, or, failing that, at least extremely sick, entirely exhausted, possibly
dying. "Your model, Hermann. Yours."
"It was yours," Hermann says, eyes narrowed, "I'm certain it was, now that I can retroactively
interpret what I previously labeled 'intellectual windmill tilting.' But given that was your model, you
would have predicted that you wouldn't be able to drift with a kaiju."
"Um," Newt says.
 "What did you do?" Hermann demands, in a manner that can, at best, be classified as 'suspicious'.
"Well," Newt says, adjusting his glasses with one shaking hand, wondering if he can subtly
valsalva his way to a propitious episode of epistaxis.
"Newton," Hermann snaps. "You lowered the threshold."
"A little bit, maybe, yeah. I mean, this might be news to you dude, but sick body art aside, I did
not expect to actually be drift-compatible with a kaiju. I mean, you've seen those things right? Not a
lot of common ground there. Plus, I was using an ostensibly 'dead ' one. As you pointed out. Many
times. So, um, yeah, I built a custom helmet to manipulate my own membrane potentials into a little bit
more of an excitable state, in an attempt to override the monster-human threshold problem."
Hermann drinks more sherry and looks at the ceiling, sliding along thought catenaries or
something.
"And yours," Newt says, queuing up an anticipatory wince. "Also. Just for full disclosure. Helmet
number two, same deal. I also screwed around with your membrane potential."
"That's quite clever," Hermann decides.
"What?"
"That's quite clever," Hermann repeats, and god, Newt should get him drunk more often, this is
awesome. "And I'm going to assume it's only because you're exhausted to the point of disability that
you haven't put this all together to form a cogent explanation for what is currently happening to us."
This is less awesome.
"What?" Newt says, looking over at Hermann who is staring back at him in evident satisfaction.
"Do you need it explained to you?" Hermann asks, with Herculean levels of ironic solicitousness.
"No," Newt snaps.
"Very well," Hermann says, and makes a show of inspecting his sherry.
"We're incompatible, and I overrode our incompatibility with my drift-hack," Newt says. "I broke
our brains, a little bit, maybe, and now we can't make decisions without throwing up, which is
probably temporary. Maybe. Hopefully."
"No," Hermann says, so self-satisfied that Newt can barely stand it. "No, I do not think that's
what you did."
"I," he says, twisting to grab Hermann's cane from where it's leaning against the nightstand,
dragging it onto the bed, depositing it next to him, and wrapping one hand around it, "am taking this."
"Much good may it do you," Hermann says. "You appear to need it more than I do, at the moment. I
doubt you can even sit. How you're still managing to speak in complete sentences is a mystery to me."
"You," Newt says.
"And you were doing so well," Hermann says, with entirely false sympathy.
"Just tell me," Newt says.
"Tempted though I am to make you beg, as you so chivalrously threatened me with not three
minutes ago, I will resist this impulse, because you have had a difficult day."
"I am crushing this day," Newt says, and he is, he's pulverizing this day into a liquid sluice of pure
victory, upon which he is getting drunk because his extremely cranky life-partner won't let him
pregame with sherry.
"I think this day nearly crushed you," Hermann replies.
"You're enjoying this way too much," Newt says. "Tell me. I am literally begging you to tell me
your so cogent and so sound working model of what is happening to our brains, and, so help me, if
there is so much as one unexplained--"
"We are compatible," Hermann says, apparently not in the mood for Newt's science posturing, but
looking like he enjoyed the begging a little more than is strictly appropriate. "We are, in fact, quite
compatible. Even atypically compatible. But in the presence of your unusual setup, designed to boost
drift compatibility in the face of extreme neural disparity, what we are experiencing is--"
"Oh god," Newt says, getting it, getting it hardcore. "Extreme Post-drift Induced Cognitive
Rapport. That makes a good acronym. EPIC Rapport. Let's write a paper." Ugh, he is slurring and he
is not even tired or drunk.
That's a lie.
He's tired.
And drunk on hubris, apparently.
"You just completed my sentence," Hermann replies, eyeing him skeptically.
"No I didn't. I started my own sentence," Newt says. "A new and different one. You want to write
a paper?"
"That was, unmistakably, sentence completion, Newton." Hermann raises his eyebrows and
continues to sip his sherry, "as it had no subject, and instead, borrowed an understood subject from
my sentence. And, while I would not, theoretically, object to writing a paper with you, I don't think
this is something that we should document in a formal way, given that it will only draw attention to the
fact that we drifted with the anteverse."
"You would be the worst to write a paper with, anyway," Newt says, with definitive manfulness
that is not at all petulant. "I definitely don't want to. You couldn't pay me to write a paper with you."
"That's demonstrably untrue," Hermann says. "You have, in fact, suggested it twice in the past
several hours, to no avail."
"Whatever man," Newt says. "I've also failed to find a fire, failed to find a neurologist, failed to
find a five-Tesla magnet, failed to get drunk, failed to convince you that we should go to Boston,
failed to grasp the implications of my own drift-hack, failed to get drunk, failed to incinerate my
outfit, failed to drive you crazy, failed to build an MRI, failed to find my own alcohol, failed to start
screaming uncontrollably while trapped in the most crap scanner known to man but that was a win,
failed to get drunk, failed to plan ahead so that when I couldn't move any more I'd be in the middle of
the most awesome party of the century rather than watching a mathematician drink sherry, but I did
steal your cane. So. There's that. What is even happening here, I don't have to build an MRI."
"No," Hermann says, his eyebrows coming together, probably because he didn't miss the reference
to 'screaming uncontrollably' that Newt unfortunately made. 'Committed', perhaps, is a better term than
'made'.
"I do know what's happening," Newt clarifies, "just to be clear, that was a rhetorical device I was
employing. I also think there is a possibility you might be correct about the Extreme Post-Drift
Induced Cognitive Rapport."
"A possibility," Hermann echoes, in presupposed victory.
Newt spends a moment considering the ceiling--low, metallic, corrugated--before his confused
theory of mind kicks in and he looks back at Hermann. "You," he says, propping himself up on one
elbow, "make it a point not to listen to me."
Hermann shrugs in self-satisfied admission.
"And so you wouldn't have been thinking about my thresholding theory."
"No, I generally leave that sort of thing in your dubiously capable hands," Hermann replies,
sipping his sherry, avoiding eye contact.
"Given that you had no idea I'd screwed around with operator neuronal excitability, you must
have assumed our fundamental drift compatibility."
 "I assumed nothing," Hermann said. "Will you lie down? You look extremely alarming."
"Lies," Newt replies, falling off his elbow. "You did."
"The only thing I assumed," Hermann says dryly, "is that, in the absence of some mitigating factor,
a second drift would likely be too much for you to withstand, given that the first one nearly killed you,
and so I was willing to be that mitigating factor."
"I can't believe you thought we would be drift compatible," Newt replies.
"You are probably the most infuriating person I have ever known," Hermann says. "That is not
what I said."
"Myeah," Newt replies, smiling faintly. He closes his eyes, trying to picture some kind of
ridiculous sparring match between himself and Hermann a la the Mako-versus-Raleigh exhibition that
he'd heard so much about, but the entire thing takes a lot of mental effort to envision, and he really
can't seem to progress it beyond both of them standing without shoes on a mat, yelling at one another.
It occurs to him then that they've been sparring every day of their acquaintance, for hours, to a dead
heat. Intellectually. So yeah. They're drift compatible. They have EPIC Rapport. The whole sparring
thing is still garbage though. Or if not garbage, then a really, really approximate surrogate endpoint.
"I'm curious," Hermann says, deciding on a change of subject. "How in god's name were you able
to tolerate that MRI?"
Newt could live without this as a topic of conversation.
"Eh," he says, eyes still shut, one hand blindly sweeping the air.
"Are you becoming monosyllabic?" Hermann asks.
"Nah," Newt replies.
Hermann jabs Newt with his cane, or some other object that produces an identical effect.
Newt tries to flinch, but only about half his muscles are feeling like it's still their job to do what
his nervous system says. This makes the effect interesting from a perceptive standpoint, but pretty
understated as flinching goes. His eyes do come open though, so that's a win, possibly, or not, he's not
sure how much winning there is left for him to do in the world, he'll probably spend most of his
mental energy on not cloning a kaiju and he'll spend what remains on trying not to have PTSD or
epilepsy or generalized anxiety disorder or a mental connection to the anteverse or whatever his
problems are going to shape themselves into once they've started to congeal from the mass of
disorganized goo that's sitting in his cerebral cortex.
"I stole that cane," he says, looking at Hermann, who is holding his sherry and his reappropriated
cane.
"Not only did you steal it," Hermann says, "you, in fact, turned it into a metaphor for your entire
professional life by committing a glorious proof-of principle, and then failing to follow through on
making any effort to keep it."
"Was it too much to hope that you'd be--surprise--a kind drunk? Or, at minimum, an irresponsible
one?" Newt asks. "I'd even settle for some demonstrable cognitive impairment. Any demonstrable
impairment. Is that even sherry? I have follow-through, by the way. Follow-through, as a character
trait, is a prerequisite if you're planning to construct your own drift interface and then reproducibly
use it. Which I did."
"You have seen me intoxicated," Hermann replies, "so it should come as no surprise to you that
given the amount of available alcohol, no cognitive deficits are likely to be forthcoming."
"You have had a hard day," Newt says, half explanation, half aspiration, and nope, that was not his
best enunciation job ever.
"Yes, Newton, I have. Thank you for belatedly noticing. But I was not finished."
 "Oh," Newt says. "Well. Please proceed."
"I am extremely kind at baseline. If you bothered to accurately conceptualize your current
situation, you would find that you are currently lying in my bed, while I watch you, to ensure you don't
'drop dead,' as you so charmingly put it, from some unforeseen consequence of your actions over the
past twenty-four hours. Why am I doing this? Is it because I think it is a good idea? No, Newton, it is
not. I am doing it solely for you, because you have an atypical amount of distrust in authority, which
has somehow infested my personality structure, leaving me totally unable to perform even the most
basic risk assessment regarding your current situation and leaving me with no other option than to sit
here and watch you."
"Our situation," Newt says, shutting his bad eye and running his fingers over his eyelid and under
his glasses. "Not mine. Ours."
"Yours, Newton," Hermann says, "because I am certain the medical risk to you is orders of
magnitude greater than it is for me."
"Hopefully," Newt says, pulling his glasses mostly off his face as he pulls his hand away and
gives Hermann's sherry a pointed look. "You know, it never occurred to me to try a three-way drift.
Human on human on kaiju."
"Never refer to it in that manner again," Hermann says dryly.
"Human on human?" Newt replies, styling his eyebrows in what he hopes is a tastelessly
suggestive manner. "Or human on kaiju."
"You know," Hermann says, considering his sherry, "I had the idea that you purposefully played up
your non sequiturs solely for the purpose of annoying me."
"And now you know it to be true," Newt replies.
"Yes," Hermann says, "but not quite to the extent I had imagined. Even when you're not being
deliberately inflammatory, you're extremely difficult to converse with if one has a definite goal in
mind."
"It sounds like you're confused about whether you're trying to insult me or compliment me," Newt
says solicitously. "You need some help with that? Because I'm pretty sure that while normally it
would be the former, today you're going to want to choose the latter."
"I'm attempting to choose neither," Hermann replies. "What I want to know is how you tolerated
that MRI."
"I just laid there, man," Newt says. "Kind of like now, except with more muscle tension and less
talking out loud. It was, for sure, the least interesting thing I've done all day. It figures that that's what
you're going to fixate on as the thing you want to know about. Of course. 'Newton, tell me how in
god's name you laid zere vithout talking for ninety minutes, I find it frankly beyond belief.' Thanks a
lot. You know I can do this whole external monologue thing internally? That is a skillset I possess."
"But not one you frequently display," Hermann counters. "Your experience of lying motionless in
an MRI is far from the only thing about which I am curious. It is the only thing I currently care to ask
you about because I have no desire to precipitate some kind of poorly organized strong inclination on
your part to undertake some kind of project."
"I was going to build an open MRI," Newt says, faintly regretful at his total inability to be vertical
at the present moment.
"Why?"
"Because the PPDC's setup is not only a pathetic three-Teslas, but it's closed, and that is just
cruel."
"Post-scan, you looked as though you found it quite stressful."
 "What makes you say that?" Newt asks.
"Possibly it was the pallor, possibly it was the shaking, or possibly it was you, digging your
hands into my shoulders and saying, 'you must get me out of here because I cannot take this'."
"I don't remember that," Newt says, slightly untruthfully, but in his defense, the whole experience
seems to have been memorialized by his hippocampus in an untrustworthy admixture of confined
space, layered with remembered terror, topped by an increasingly ridiculous Geiszlerian monologue-
-a memory laid down as a fancy, three-tiered shot of colored cognitive alcohol with a witty name,
like Kaiju Codicil, that one might find in a devastatingly trendy Hong Kong bar. Alas, this is not a
drink that he is currently drinking. He is drinking no drinks, and the likelihood of drink acquisition is
tragically low any time in the near future. Furthermore, his odds of attending the party of the century,
if not the millennium, are abyssmal and sinking by the microsecond and yeah, this seems typical--he's
going to spend his night of victory more or less out of biological juice, trying not to drop dead while
Hermann gets drunk by himself on his own sherry. Newt finds this equal parts vexing and comforting.
Once a demimonde, always a demimonde, it seems, no matter how many shows you play, tattoos you
get, or Millennium Prize Problems you've almost basically already solved.
Ugh.
No.
Identity confusion alert.
Brain, he thinks, please try to remember it's not you who loves the Riemann Hypothesis with a
deep and abiding love because a) it's going to drive you insane if you really try to engage with
those zeta function zeros, you know you're not the most reliable place to house the kind of
rigorous, abstract thought needed to construct a temple to quantitation and then live within it,
that's just not going to turn out well for you, b) you're not a mathematician, all that stuff is
borrowed from someone who isn't actually you, and c) there's no surer way straight to
interpersonal hell than to piss Hermann off by poaching on his side of the mutual intellectual
garden that you now share custody of in the loosest and yet also most rigid of ways.
"Newton," Hermann snaps, "please try to be as accurate as possible, as I am constantly assessing
your mental state."
"Yes," Newt says, "fine, I may have said that. I may have encountered some difficulty with
immersive neural recapitulation of recent sensory experiences while in an enclosed environment, but
I'm pretty sure that's normal and unrelated to any hypothetical brain damage I may or may not have."
Hermann says nothing in response, but then, Newt doesn't really blame him, after all, what is the
guy supposed to say that's not going to sound uncharacteristically sensitive? What else is there really
left to communicate beyond what he's already demonstrated by simply inquiring about Newt's
subjective experience in the first place; so yeah, of course Hermann says nothing. Until he says, "I
imagine such an experience was not at all easy for you."
Empathy'd.
"Yeah," Newt says, "I'm sure you do imagine that. And as long as you're imagining things, I
encourage you to imagine how little I want to talk about this with all the sparkling clarity that I'm sure
you can now muster. You falsely advertised drunk science, not drunk awkwardness, but since we're
talking about feelings I don't want to talk about, I did devote some serious thought to whether or not
I'm in mental continuity with the anteverse."
"Did you," Hermann says, in arid unsurprise. "Did this self-inquiry include anything other than
some kind of free verse mental summoning?
"I don't like that you know me this well," Newt replies, narrowing his eyes in exhausted
suspicion.
"Neither do I," Hermann replies.
"What do you think the chances are that, a decade from now, you and I will be in a boat on the
Pacific reopening the breach?" Newt inquires with one hundred percent casual unconcern.
"Zero," Hermann replies.
"Now you're just asking for it," Newt says, with no more than ten percent overt despair infecting
his tone. Twenty percent. Thirty percent tops.
"There is a vanishingly small but material chance that you or I or both remain in some kind of
mental continuity with the kaiju anteverse. There is a small but material chance that you or I or both
are able to be influenced via an unknown, transdimensional mechanism."
"Oh god," Newt says, "so you think it's possible."
"I cannot formally exclude it," Hermann replies, "though, as I said, I consider it unlikely. What is
it you want, Newton, bland anti-Frankensteinian platitudes, or statistics that include informative
insight into their own imprecisions?"
"And you wonder why I work in vivo."
"Your work, at best, can be classified as ex vivo," Hermann says.
Newt gives him a pharaonic, supinated sweep of the hand.
"To continue," Hermann says, like a guy who has a point he's driving towards and can keep in his
sights like a laser-wielding badass, "there is also a small but non-zero possibility that you, I, or both
of us will fail to realize our horrendous hypothetical lapse in judgment and take steps to correct the
problem. All of those unlikely events will be required to occur to bring about the outcome that you
are anticipating."
"'Dreading', I think, would be the word I would choose," Newt says.
"Nevertheless, the final outcome depends on probabilities of several independent, unlikely
events."
Newt stares at Hermann in open incredulity.
"Independent?" Newt echoes, when his brain organizes itself back into talking. "Like anyone
could unambiguously classify your three events as 'independent.' There is clearly an argument to be
made for interdependence. There's literally no way you can actually believe any of what you just said,
and so I conclude that this is you, trying to reassure me with math."
Hermann looks away from him, toward the, apparently, super fascinating blank wall.
"It is, isn't it?" Newt continues, a little too smacked in the face with a two-by-four of revelation to
be operating with his maximum manful tact. "I feel like this is the nicest thing you've ever done. At
least--that involves me or was witnessed by me, I'll give you that as a caveat."
"How generous." Hermann gets them back on track with some resolute disdain.
Newt can work with that.
"Alas, a day ago this strategy might have worked, and wow, you really don't give me a lot of
credit for statistical insight, do you? I'm too tired to be offended about it right now, but watch it, dude,
biologists do math, okay? They might not invent it, but they do it. More to the point, I don't feel
excessively reassured, given my borrowed numerical instincts and my own certainty that improbable
scenarios cave all the time in the face of unadulterated willpower. But I do take some comfort in the
empirical evidence that at least one of my colleagues not only cares if I live or die, but is willing to
go so far as to actively prevent my death by risking his own life, then willing to forego a party so
awesome it might be dangerous in order to stare at me to make sure I don't have a seizure, while
simultaneously reassuring me about my future prospects via some kind of statistical bedtime story
about independent probabilities that aren't really all that independent after all."
Hermann sips his sherry, unperturbed, and says, "quite."
Newt figures that if Hermann is going to go so far as to misrepresent statistics to him and then cop
to it, then he might as well lay all his cards on the table. He adjusts his glasses, and tries to decide
ahead of time on phrasing.
It's not working out for him.
"Is there a reason you're staring at me?" Hermann asks, straightening a sweater seam. "I can't
actively read your mind, Newton, I'm relatively confident of that much."
"I really just need for us to be in a relationship where you never leave me and you also
perpetually ensure I'm not ending the world," Newt says, in a drunkenly hubristic or hubristically
drunken torrent of words.
Hermann pulls out his most sophisticated, stratospheric single-eyebrow raise.
This was a terrible idea.
If things turn weird, Newt is pretty sure he's not going to be able to get up and leave without
falling over at least one time.
"Newton," Hermann replies, "we already have such a relationship. We have, in fact, had such a
relationship for approximately nine years."
"Oh," Newt says.
Hermann sips his sherry and lets his eyebrow go back home.
Newt is going to need to spend some time thinking about whether Hermann was always this nice
to him or whether this is a new thing, brought on by Newt's recent multiple brushes with death.
In the meantime, he will settle for a valorous subject change.
"Any philosophical objections to continued residency on the Ring of Fire? Because, given that
Boston is off the table, I vote California."
"I am not entirely opposed to such a course of action," Hermann replies. "The University of
California at Berkeley is quite well known in mathematical circles."
"I can work with that," Newt replies, already picturing the ceaseless pound of the tide against the
Wall enclosing the Pacific Rim.
Chapter End Notes
Chapter-specific citations: Newt tips a verbal hat to the Wicked Witch of the West in his
summary of drift one. ("We're going to get you, and your Wall, and your little civilization too.")
An Interlude In Two Parts
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
An Interlude
Later, when Hermann stands alone in undisturbed reflection on a windswept foreign balcony in
reddish evening light, he will become, slowly, so terrified that to contemplate a vista will be a
hardship for the remainder of his life. This consequence of cognizance comes as capitulation to a
penchant that is not his own. It is a thing that comes from Newton--who professes a disdain for
anecdotal thinking but who must combat this personal proclivity every waking hour of his life.
They make it out of Hong Kong.
But only barely.
Only after a breathtaking example of institutional and interpersonal maneuvering that Newton--that
arrogant, magnificent, manipulative, terrifying man--initiates a mere two days post their drift when he
stops eating, terminates a half-formed thought mid-word, and says, "who's got the better black book of
influential contacts--you or me?" in a tone that is light years away from a good-faith interrogative.
Hermann's too enmeshed in arguments of quantum decohesence to tolerate this verbal whiplash
with his typical aplomb. But when he looks at Newton's face he sees disquiet there--in eyebrows
pulled together, in the setting of his jaw. The man is looking at a thing across the mess and out of
Hermann's line of sight, until he veils and redirects his focus. Hermann starts to speak but Newton
lifts his eyebrows, cocks his head, and slides his tray across the table, saying, "we both know it's not
me. I've upended one too many tables in my academic life. Do your best to mount a rescue that's
within the bounds of reason, don't always be so honest; bus my tray and take my carrots. I don't want
them."
Hermann's hand snaps shut, pinning Newton's wrist so he's incapable of rising.
There they sit, locked in wordless conflict in the busy, crowded mess.
Then Newton says, "let go," and Hermann does.
They make it out of Hong Kong.
But only barely.
Only after Hermann buses both their trays and leaves the hall while Newton makes a scene,
upends a table, and allows Ms. Mori to step in, preventing violent escalation of a clash he's
manufactured before giving up his freedom to a formalized 'request'.
Hermann spends three days obscuring his involvement in Newton's second drift, cashing in the
favors he recalls or manufactures, and feeling lost in wretched mental conflict; trying to divine a
moral course of action that does not involve a lie and does not involve abandonment of Newton to a
Pan Pacific lab.
His conflict resolves in a four day evolution of evening visits to the med bay that proceed in this
direction: "I am not enthused, man, no one understands the science," to "co-authorship's alluring--but
where'd they get their funding?" to "what would happen in a drift, given breach annihilation?" to--
Nothing at all.
Because his colleague is 'unfit for visitation'.
It is at this point the stakes become clear to Hermann.
They become so clear, they become so immediate, that in a terrifyingly uncharacteristic move that
comes from an area in his mind he can no longer call his own, he books flights out of Hong Kong,
packs all the technology he can fit in a single bag, orders a taxi for two in the morning, returns to the
medical bay, presents a forged letter of resignation to on-duty personnel, then--
Abducts his colleague from the Hong Kong shatterdome.
His plan is a disaster from the point of its conception. It succeeds for just three reasons--Newton's
free cooperation, which leaves his room unguarded; Hermann's history of submission to decisions
from above; and the lack of firm directives to the staff that work the nights, who might otherwise
resist the force of Hermann's glare and his litigious ultimatums.
In a miracle of willpower, both heartbreaking and striking, Newton pulls himself together to the
point he can withdraw consent and requests his own release.
They make it out of Hong Kong.
But only barely.
Only after Hermann helps his listless, silent colleague into clothes he's brought for him and then
spends several hours dragging Newton through a nightmare, berating him so he's alert while hauled
through public spaces; an experience that climaxes when Hermann keeps him conscious in the
bathroom of the airport with a vicious, long cadenza of creative verbal threats--this string of words is
all that keeps his plan from certain failure as Newton struggles not to faint and Hermann tries to help
him. Please, he thinks, one hand on Newton's blazer, be too exhausted; be too drugged, or maybe
too postictal to be forming memories of this. Please let there be an explanation, please let this not
be lasting, please tell me that this isn't you, you moron; if your mind's been ruined I will destroy so
much in compensation that even you'd be shocked.
Hermann doesn't ask what happened in that four day evolution, doesn't inquire, doesn't demand it
of the medical staff or attempt a distillation from Newton's mixed and broken words, but that does not
mean he will fail to find out.
He spends fourteen hours of a fifteen-hour flight in a blitzkrieg of medical terminology and wi-fi
granted planning while Newton sleeps or is unconscious on his shoulder. Forty minutes before they
start descending, Newton stirs, sits up, and slurs, "we're on a plane? Good show, old sport," in
increasing British accent, then inquires after breakfast and the location of his glasses with a set of
ordered sentences and slowly crisping diction.
Hermann can't decide if he's enraged or he's relived; whatever he is feeling is unparsably
extreme, so he just stares at Newton, who is pale and still too still, and because he cannot shout,
'never do that again you reckless halfwit', in the face of a man who was willing to walk straight into
the very thing he most feared on the unstated faith that Hermann would pull him out, instead he says,
"go back to sleep."
"Meh," Newton says, noncommittal but compliant.
They make it out of Hong Kong.
But only barely.
Only after being stopped at Customs because in the fifteen hours that they've spent upon their
plane, there's been an order to detain them--placed and then rescinded--as favors counter favors in
interfering waves. Newton spends a quarter hour in loquacious fantasies before he takes his anti-
epileptic, a prophylactic courtesy. He talks himself to sleep atop the table in their holding room while
Hermann waits in locked-down panic, his back to where a camera's perched, unblinking, on the wall.
When all wave functions in the void collapse into their outcomes, they stagger free of Customs
and they travel to a campus--green-lit, under trees. The doctor who they meet there has ears that have
been pierced in quadrupled iteration and an eyebrow ring that's shell-like in a tribute to the sea. Her
name is "Coral," and when she extends a hand, beneath the edge of her cuffed sleeve, the margin of a
blue tattoo appears. Despite her skills on paper and the branching web of contacts that have fostered
this connection, Hermann doesn't like her.
But Newton does.
"I hear you saved the world by tweaking your membrane potentials," Coral says, unhurried and at
ease, "and in exchange, became a little epileptic?"
"Myeah," he says. "Or maybe not? No. Possibly? We'll see."
"Well either way, that's pretty rad. So thanks, man. Have a seat."
This perplexes Newton--to the extent a man who's half-aware can be perplexed--but for what
reason, Hermann can't precisely say. Possibly it is because he doesn't understand he's being thanked
for averting an apocalyptic end to human culture. Possibly it is because his mental function is a
shadow of its former self. Possibly he's flummoxed by his female doppelganger.
"Yeah," Newton says, slow motion revelation. "It is rad."
Hermann warms to 'Coral' a small amount. He despises her still less after careful neural testing is
performed on each of them once Coral has cleared her schedule for the day. He decides he finds her
'adequate' during Newton's EEG when he discovers she remained in San Francisco despite the
constant kaiju threat because she was unwilling to leave a city, half-destroyed, with even one less
physician. He decides that he quite likes her when she tells them both their EEGs are, "ragingly
abnormal, guys, so that's not great. But it isn't unexpected either, so I vote for careful observation to
see what trends emerge. You boys cool with cognitive kinetics?" He reclassifies her as 'exemplary'
when she says, "Dr. Geiszler--please lie down. Dude, y'got worked by ethically conflicted military
types who were packing XR-benzos, and I'm finding this more than a little painful to watch."
"For all you know, Hypothetical Rain, I'm ethically conflicted." It's a knee-jerk opposition--
disorganized, in torment.
Hermann stands to help him up.
Coral gets him on the table.
"Were you addressing me as 'Rain?'" she asks.
"Myeah," the man admits, tracing frames of borrowed glasses like he wants to get his fingers
underneath them.
"What kind of name's 'Hypothetical Rain'?"
"It sounds better aural than 'Actual Coral'," Newton counters.
"You're a little bit cute, Newt," Coral says.
"You're certain he's drugged," Hermann snaps, not in a rhyming mood.
"His blood work confirms he's postictal and heavily medicated. Based on what's coming out of
his mouth given that double caveat, I'd say he's likely not to show any significant cognitive deficits.
"I like this one." Newton looks at Hermann behind darkened, borrowed glasses. "Let's keep her."
They keep her.
It is only late in the day, when Newton is still sleeping off whatever he was given, this time in
tangled hotel sheets, only after Hermann has showered and donned a robe because the only change of
clothes he'd thought to pack hadn't been his own, only when he is standing on borrowed balcony--bare
feet, damp hair--that he allows himself to dwell on how narrow their escape from Hong Kong had
truly been and how tenuous it still remains.
They've made it out of Hong Kong.
For now, it is the best that he can do.
He hopes that They--this nebulous, precarious concept of the authoritarian, occulted Other, that
he's received from Newton and cannot shake--got all that they needed in those four days. Hermann
still doesn't know exactly what is was they did. Coral has offered to make an inquiry on their behalf,
and Hermann is content to allow her to petition Them for all materials related to the four days that
Newton spent in 'volunteered' collaboration.
He has no plans to try and wring any details out of Newton, unless the man should offer them to
him.
Hermann stands on cool cement and grips the railing, tormented by a terror he can't shake.
The sun sinks in a red haze behind the gray and monochromic Wall that has obscured the whole
horizon.
He has so much to do.
And all of it seems impossible.
"Wall'd Sunset," Newton says, from the open door behind him. "Good band name."
Hermann jerks and grips the rail, then looks back at Newton.
He leans against a glass edged wall--Eurydicean, spectral, and by no means out of hell. Hermann
doesn't say 'what happened' and he doesn't ask, 'who did this?' he avoids both Coral and Keppra, to
choose gentle disputation.
"I'm sure I don't agree," he says, "but when compared to 'Superconducting Supercolliders',
anything's preferred."
"The name reflects the ethos of the band." Newton sighs--philosophic, windblown--abridged by
his exhaustion.
"Ethos, is it?" Hermann asks. "Then try tasteful misdirection. You're certainly practiced enough."
"It's an art form," Newton says, his steps unsteady, fingers closing on the rail. "I think I might
throw up. I think I might be starving. My brain is overtaxed. My proteins won't go down a pathway
labeled 'catabolic', or if they are, they're taking their sweet time."
It occurs to Hermann then that he has not eaten for what must be twenty hours. He has no idea how
long it's been since Newton ate. "We should order food," he says.
"Yeah, dude," his colleague says, "but let's just wait a beat to make sure there won't be gross dry-
heaving over twilit metal rails."
"Delightful," Hermann offers.
"Well yeah, what can I say?" Newton rests his forearms on the rail and twists to look at Hermann.
"Delightful is my skillset. Winsome even. Fab. You have made a splendid life choice, Dr. Gottlieb,
sticking with me. Commendable. Praiseworthy. Laudable. Meritorious. Just think of all the escapades
we'll have together as I demonstrate my own stupidity in pursuit of larger goals and you rescue me
from resulting permutations of triggered consequence."
"I regret nothing," Hermann says.
"I do." Newton coughs. "A little bit. I should have tried that second drift alone."
"You said it would have killed you."
"Now, I'm not so sure."
His head tips back, his eyes fall shut, and Hermann looks away so that he does not scream at him
in mangled German/English, 'do you know because you tried it?' He cannot speak past locking jaw,
and wonders if he'll always be this angry. He is sure the answer's yes until he turns his head and
Newton looks at him with windswept hair and rumpled shirt, a principle of entropy who's been
cursed with human form.
Newton's nose begins to bleed and he searches vainly for a handkerchief before settling on his
cuff.
"I find you wretchedly infuriating," Hermann whispers in the dimness. His throat is tight, his eyes
are hot, and he can no longer look at Newton. "Borderline intolerable."
"I know," the man replies, choked with words or blood. "Thanks for rescuing me anyway."
"You are quite welcome."
"This is less yelling than I'd have predicted, were I in a predicting mood," Newton says, his wrist
pressed to his face.
"I prefer to yell at you only when I'm certain you won't faint if I trigger an episode of intense self-
righteousness or cognitive dissonance."
"Are you implying that I would lose consciousness in the face of my own perceived superiority?"
"No," Hermann says. "I implied no such thing. I stated it directly."
"Whatevs, man, I'm going to go bleed in the sink, rather than raining blood on benighted--where
are we?"
"San Francisco," Hermann replies, his eyes narrowing. "How much do you remember of the past
twenty-four hours?"
"Planes," Newton says. "Rain. Head pain. That's pretty much it."
"There was no rain," Hermann replies.
"And by 'Rain,' I meant Coral."
"Of course you did," Hermann says, then watches him in silence, fighting with the questions he's
too terrified to ask: 'are you all right; what happened; how could you let them do this?' while
Newton stands there twitching, clearly trying not to cry.
"How much do you remember?" Hermann asks, in compromise.
Newton shakes his head and swallows.
Hermann guides him back inside.
Time passes.
Hermann tries to track the things that change, because someone ought to, and Newton's not
inclined.
Their hotel gives way to an apartment. Hermann's realms of bravery expand. Newton straightens
items left askew. The number of communal handkerchiefs increases at a rate suggesting unseen
reproduction. Hermann now reads Neuron, sometimes even to himself. Newton walks a widow's
walk in front of west-faced windows. Hermann brokers UC Berkeley tenure for them both. Newton
undermines him by refusing an invited talk and spending weeks on rederiving calculus for purposes
his own. Hermann asks no questions and enjoys his proxied Leibniz. Newton spends six weeks
exclusively in clothes that hide his skin. Communal nightmares rise. Hermann waits three weeks
before he buys tequila. Newton waits for half a bottle to elapse before admitting to the final drift that
Hermann's long suspected. They speculate on consciousness in pieces: what happens to a fraction of
a hive mind? Hermann throws up in the sink, Newton throws up in the trash, then everyone is
bleeding. Hermann takes a daily aspirin. Newton takes twice daily Keppra.
When something runs away from them they stop and watch it, frozen by an instinct of predation.
But there's the day that Newton drives to Berkeley, talks to his department, then spends a week in
frenzied inspiration that Hermann thought he'd lost. There's the time that Hermann puts on Queen in
absentminded preference and Newton tackles him to stop a musical correction. There are the nights
when no one dreams, or dreams are small and life-sized--espresso grounds and science books, the
tenure track, or people.
There are the dawns when Hermann wakes, and does not find his colleague fully clothed and
staring toward the sea.
Of those, there are not many.
 But there are some.

In Two Parts
Later, when Newt weaves across a semi-dark hotel room, lit to rust at sunset, and sees Hermann,
barefoot on the balcony, clutching its rail as though he thinks he'll fall, he will come to feel, slowly,
so guilty he'll have difficulty ever asking Hermann for anything again, tacit or overt; a consequence
of his own narcissism subluxed beneath a borrowed weight of crushing, total duty to some nebulous
concept he's never able to fully define and that must haunt Hermann every waking hour of his life.
His third drift is clean.
In a way.
It is clean in the way that that all terrible decisions made from pure motivations are clean; it is
clean like a circuit, clean like fiberoptics, clean like a prism, clean like a paring away, clean like an
informed sacrifice in good faith is clean because he doesn't do it from desire, he does in the place of
someone else, he does it because he's already been more damaged than Hermann has, he thinks. He
does it because they will not stop asking him, he does it because they will start asking Hermann, and
Hermann might do it, Hermann has done it, Hermann would do it, Hermann will do it; it is a certainty,
it is factual, so Hermann must not be asked, there must be no Race to The Prize a la The Flaming
Lips, it must be only Dr. Newton Geiszler of the neuronal debris and the epidermal verdigris who
discharges this lien on his cognition in full. That was what he signed on for, his poor, perspicacious
past-self, and Newt owes it to past-Newt, to Hermann, and to everyone to control what happens in the
aftermath of this apocalypse, averted.
So when they say, 'if you're not interested in helping out, perhaps your colleague would be more
amenable,' Newt lifts a hand and eyebrow and comes back with, 'history favors the jerk first
published--so, sure. I'll help you. No need to call the physicist, he hasn't got a clue, wasn't even really
involved, not in a material way, do not even think about opening my skull, I've got a workaround for
that. What are we, barbarians? Build me a ziggurat and ask me again--I promise I'll consider it."
This is your brain, his brain says. This is your brain on blood. Always say no to trephination
even if it is in the ostensible name of scientific progress. Or, in this case, apocalyptic prophylaxis.
Good advice, brain, Newt replies. You are rockin' it this week. I'll miss you if we're cut apart
because of questionable choices that I've made.
Speak for yourself, his brain replies, sounding just like Hermann. It watches waveforms change
as he attempts to realign a foreign rig to match the one he built.
His third drift is clean.
In a way.
It's clean in that even though he commits some sins of omission in order to break the news of
what's going on to Hermann in a sort of slow motion bowling-ball-meets-bowling-pins-and-sedately-
knocks-a-few-over kind of way rather than mallet-meets-a-giant-single-paned-window kind of way,
his intentions going in are good. It's also clean in that the last clear memory he has is engagement of
electrodes and membrane voltage fluxing, which, in and of itself, should not be a problem--
Except for how it is.
The rest of it?
Confusing.
Spatial distortion, derealization, whose hand is that that's shaking? Simple partial, that's not good-
-oh look, he has an aura. Some guy's neurons are depolarizing before they've read all the directions.
Some guy's visual field is turning blue. We should have loaded him ahead of time, Dr. Geiszler can
you hear me Dr. Geiszler can you talk. That would be a negative, thinks the man whose simple partial
seizure's trying to rickroll to a complex class; a transmitted bait and switch in waveform current
before this trial has even started, but what in god's name is expected when one queries ns of ones? So
sorry to have inconvenienced you, someone should have seen this coming; in retrospect it's clear.
Not clean, not in the drift, not even clean, 'what a mess,' is spoken words. That guy losing
consciousness concurs, clean in nothing but intent. Some loser's brain has sided against him.
Geiszler's back is starting to arch.
His third drift is clean.
In a way.
It's clean because he can't recall it, knows it happened, someplace blue and buried beneath the
plate tectonics of a molten sense of self, there's so little he recalls and most of it is shouting. Newton
get up, Newton get dressed, Newton when they get back in here communicate your vanting out,
Newton if you faint inside this men's room I will flay you alive with the sharp edge of your long-lost
trigonometry textbook do not test me do not breathe so fast you will be fine you will be fine. Blue
light, confused thoughts, a consciousness in search of missing aperture.
He nearly falls but someone rights him, he needs to sleep but someone fights him.
His eyes are burning, he cannot feel his hands he cannot exist this way it is too hard; he cannot
shut the doors that don't have hinges; he has no place to stand, let alone a way to leverage any order in
his thoughts.
Relax.
The word is close and urgent, smooth and distant. Hands are pushing him back, hands are pulling
off his glasses, an upward press of thumb opens one eye, then the other. Something holds his head in
place. What is happening exactly? He thinks he's sitting up and this is Hermann; he thinks he's lost his
hivemind--this is hell. The only thing collective consciousness cannot conceive is the terror of
aloneness, and now the breach is closed; all dead parts are lost. Who knew that they were screaming,
disembodied, silent, cross-linked? Active even in their prisons made of liquid aldehydes? He tries to
scream, he cannot scream, he screams in all directions.
Something runs into his eyes and leaks across his face before it's wiped away.
His glasses are returned, but they are dark and they are not his glasses.
His third drift is clean.
In a way.
It's clean in that it cleans him out--his mind feels reinvented. Is this a plane? Are these his shades?
Who dressed him in a blazer? The answer to that question stops typing and turns to look at him in
tense anticipation. "Good show old sport," is all Newt says until he also says, "when's breakfast?"
and, "whose glasses do you think these are? I'm sure that they aren't mine. I think they might be non-
prescription shades."
Newt doesn't know what's happening, but nobody is screaming.
Hermann stares at him in long and neutral silence.
Newt considers anterograde amnesia while Hermann says, "go back to sleep."
'You're not the boss of me,' turns into, 'I don't care for your tone,' turns into, 'no, thank you,' turns
into, 'no,' turns into, "meh," which is what he actually says, while reappropriating shoulder real
estate.
Hermann adjusts his posture in a facilitating manner and confusingly pats Newt's hand in quiet
reassurance, with a whispered, "idiot."
Even Descartes, prince of coordinates, might find this confusing, so Newt doesn't judge himself
too harshly. He tries to remember if he's done anything stupid but comes up with echoed nonsense.
The last thing he can remember is Seattle--
But he has the feeling that it isn't 2020 anymore.
He is lying on a table in a room that has no windows.
Hermann's watching him and frowning.
It occurs to Newt that he now knows what's going on. Exactly. Only one thing makes some sense--
it's obvious he's dreaming. So, ex tempore, what the heck, he says: "what's a nice rationalist like you
doing in a dystopian nightmare like this?"
Hermann rolls his eyes in blurry irritation. "You dragged me here," his colleague says.
"Sounds right," Newt also says. "Man but this is hyper realistic. I don't understand why my
glasses aren't working."
"They're not your glasses," Hermann says. "They're my sunglasses."
"Oh," Newt says, unnerved by watching air turn into see-through glue. "That's nice of you." His
eyes burn and ache; he think's they're made of sand except for how they're leaking. He wonders if they
might turn liquefacted and create sinkholes in his skull. It happens with real sand, so does it happen
also with eyes if they are made of sand, in dreams?
"I hope to god you're drugged," Hermann whispers, arranging Newt's hair for no reason Newt can
see. "Your eyes are fine and you're not dreaming--try to keep that in your head."
"But it explains so much," Newt argues back. "The eye thing has me worried."
"Are you trying to communicate that you need more eyedrops?" Hermann asks.
"No," Newt says, in deep offense. "I doubt you're even real."
"Will you hold still," his colleague snaps, while pulling off Newt's glasses.
Eyedrops will only pool in there and up the liquefaction, god; do mathematicians ever even have
minimal good sense?
"Can you not? Arithmetical autocrat much? What is that stuff?"
"You were discharged with it, and I will thank you to stop moving," Hermann says, going at
Newt's second eye with more success than stands to reason for a guy whose hands are shaking.
Surprisingly, there is no liquefaction because his eyes stop being made of sand, so things work out
for everyone, except he's not quite sure--
Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide,
No escape from reality.
Open your eyes--
Ow. What a terrible idea, Freddie Mercury, can you not? Unplug your mic and go home.
Hypothetical Rain's name is Actual Coral, and she does nothing to diminish Newt's sense of
unreality by thanking him for his world-saving, calling him 'rad' and using the word 'sick' as a stand-
in for 'awesome' while gradually winning Hermann over in a sustained display of total improbability
and then telling Newt to take a nap on her exam table while the people with baller executive function
talk it out in complex strings of words with more idea density than some losers can currently handle,
and he just does it because he feels like maybe if he goes to sleep he can eventually wake up and see
with eyes that aren't aflame. Maybe he'll Descartes his way to happy endings--
But how? His coordinate planes are rusted, filled with glue and dirt.
"There's so much walking," he says to Hermann, out of breath, half blind--he thinks his eyes are
melting? He is stumbling across the planar tile of a deserted echo chamber hung with chandeliers.
 "I know," Hermann replies, one hand on Newt, one hand on his cane, as theoretically exhausted as
theoretically he gets.
"What if we just stop here?" he gasps in desperation.
"We cannot stop here," Hermann says. "We are literally in the hotel. Do not lose consciousness."
"Do you think that's a possibility?" Newt watches as his vision grays along its edges.
"No," Hermann says. "It is not. Keep going."
His inertia's bent on leaving him; he tries to fall in iterations--in doors, the elevator, and halfway
down a hall--he's never quite successful until he's collapsing, uncontrolled, face first, and straight into
a bed, so this is a hotel after all. He thinks he drifted, he thinks that screwed him up, he thinks he
remembers why he did it and that was because They'd left him here, alone.
There's something that he's missing.
The horde in his head isn't there anymore.
Sodium carbonate is grinding in his skull. Someone, maybe Hermann, has pitched him off a
hypnogogic cliff.
His third drift is clean, or so he tells himself. It must be, because his hypochlorite mind is
oxidizing every thought he has.
When he wakes, the world feels real.
His hair's a mess, his muscles sore, his tongue is stuck against his palate, his eyes are burning, his
head is pounding, he's tasting days-old blood, he's not sure where he is, he's much too hot, and
someone has his shoes.
The room's a blur.
He isn't wearing all his clothes?
He lacks the mental resources for 'concern,' and so he tries to find his glasses.
Obligingly they find his fingers when his fingers find the nightstand. He puts them on, and an
impersonal room sharpens into red relief.
It is evening.
There are hard drives on a desk.
There are folded clothes atop a shoulder bag.
There are two pairs of shoes on the floor.
There is a scrambled set of lines behind a frame that's reminiscent of a piece by Kupka, but is not.
This room seems less stationary than rooms he can remember.
But.
He's in a rented room, and rented rooms have bathrooms.
Getting up is tricker in practice than in theory and his nervous system sends him anxious
autonomic signals while the thing's in progress but eventually he's standing with one hand on the wall.
After five more minutes he's contemplating an alarming version of himself who might have bled
into his sclera and who could use a razor if he's got one, and who, like Newt, is gripping sink and
wall.
"Well," he says to his reflection, "it seems you bought a week of stupid that you're slowly paying
down."
Brain, he queries, are you there?
No, his brain informs him. Try back later.
Thanks a lot, he thinks, and fills a plastic cup. He chokes on rusted water and spits some mystery
blood into the sink. The blood becomes less mystifying when his mouth reclaims its own pain variant
from agony more generalized and head-shaped. Newt discovers that, at some point, he'd bitten the
inside of his left cheek.
"Oh, you did not have a good day," he says, trying not to see his body art. "Did you."
His reflection gives him a pale and bloody step-off stare.
Someone's been drawing Venn diagrams again, his brain opines.
"Did you do acid?" Newt inquires, polite and nonjudgmental. He helps himself to the damp
toothbrush he really hopes is Hermann's--because if not? Well, he's extremely screwed. He finishes
his brushing and spits more minted blood into the sink. "Because if so? Why."
He splashes water on his face, runs hands through hair that's stiff with flaking glue. He finds a
sticker on his temple and remembers someone mentioned EEGs. Could he still be in Hong Kong? He
remembers walking in a grayish haze through different buildings and lying on a two tables. Sitting on
a plane. Wearing Hermann's sunglasses, that's weird; it makes him nervous.
Two eyes, both red, snap back to the mirror.
The memory of drifting hits him like a slap unformed--blue, amorphous, so full of longing that he
staggers, trips on nothing, and ends up on his knees, dry heaving on the floor beneath the burden of a
nauseous desire.
"Why would you--" he gasps. His body tries to rid itself of things it doesn't have in blind pursuit
of what it shouldn't want.
He lies down, his nose is bleeding, so he breathes in through his mouth, tips his head back, thinks
of kittens, and does his best to prevent death in a foreign hotel bathroom because that would be
tragically unfair.
To Hermann.
To Hermann, who he hopes is here. Somewhere. Around.
If Newt hasn't died already, he doesn't think he will.
Drift number three? he asks his brain. You thought you could withstand it?
His brain is MIA right now and not inclined to answer, a mental divahood that's going to make his
life less good; we already talked betrayal and how it's good for no one, brain.
He pulls himself up, he washes his face, he wonders where his shirt is. He traces back along the
wall to clothes that have been folded. He shakes them out and puts them on, foregoing socks and
buttons. His shoes he leaves right where they are, tangled with their playmates.
Intent expands his field of view.
Hermann's backlit on the balcony. His hands are on the rail, his shoulders square and bathrobed,
while in front of him the sun goes down behind a darkened Wall.
'Sun sets disgusting', Dr. Geiszler tags this vista.
He has to hold the wall to cross the room.
It's the thing Bosch would have painted had he ever seen the Wall--the falling sun, a hellish red, a
wall, a man in bathrobe. But who's that creep who stands in open doorways with a disregard for
buttons and those eerie bleeding eyes?
Hermann, Newt begins, leaning edgewise on paned glass, I'm sorry that I did this.
The door is hard, his head is hot, his eyes are silicized if what was silicized could suffer.
I'm sorry that I left you, that I dumped this at your feet--but you're for sure the better man. In a
reversal of position I could not have pulled you out, all I'd have done was join you in some final,
ending blaze. Did you think we might escape drift three? What kind of story is this? There'd be a
third, I knew it, I knew it in that alley. We cannot leave a thing alone when hypotheses are proven.
Even you cannot quite do it--why else would you be looking at the sea, the turning tide, the deepest
trench, the bridges that might form there?
 Around him he can feel the ghostly glide as metric tons of displaced water stream across the
scales he doesn't have.
Too late, my time has come,
Sends shivers down my spine,
Body's aching all the time.
Goodbye everybody, I've got to go,
Got to leave you all behind and face the truth.
Shut up, Freddie Mercury, shut up.
Newt pulls shirtsleeves down as far as they will come, gripping cuffs with fingers, feeling fabric
tense across his back. He is too wrung out to be upset; he wipes his eyes on cotton shirt cuffs and tries
to think of what he'll say that won't end with him a sobbing mess on Hermann's shoulder. Descartes is
out, and so is 'thanks,' so is, 'sorry that I did this'. 'Hieronymus Bosch'd' might get him punched,
coming out of nowhere, but that's the avenue he'll take when he's pulled himself together, he'll
comment on the vista. That should be safe--no one will cry, freak out, or lose it, in a perfect world,
that is.
"Wall'd Sunset," Newton says, when he thinks his voice is steady. "Good band name."
Hermann turns to look at him.
Time passes.
Newt cannot help but track the things that change; he doesn't want to, and keeps them to himself.
San Francisco yields to Oakland. Hermann buys them both new clothes. Newt returns the clothes,
or would, if he were leaving their apartment, which he's not and so he wears them. Hermann arranges
him a job talk, Newt arranges, 'how about no'. Hermann wrests a standing offer out of UC Berkeley
Neuroscience, and leaves it on a table made of pointed metaphor. Newt gets a little monomanic and
takes up with Descartes who leads him into Leibniz. No one ever mentions Nietzsche, ever, not now,
not anymore. Hermann drags him out to dinner and they live with epistaxis. On the day Newt leaves
their building, he walks a massive circuit through abandoned, ruined streets and completes it on the
Wall, where he knew he would. He looks out at the sea--the running tide, the creep of life upon the
outer concrete leaflet--but he just stands there, nothing happens, nothing really matters, anyone can
see, so he walks back in the dark. Hermann studies eigenvalues and picks through zeta zeros at the
times he's not distracted by the way that Newt will stand at windows, and bleed there, unprovoked.
When they argue, really argue, they stand distant and immobile, shouting, but unmoving, because
they do not know if hands are clawed or not, and someone might get shoved through a window,
someone's skull might get staved in with a cane.
But there are the times that Hermann pulls out shades and reads him Neuron while Newt lies in
sunglassed darkness, attentive, listening; and the times he reads him Goethe when Newt's pulling
down his shirtsleeves and staring towards the sea. There is the afternoon that Hermann spends in
Newton's lab at Berkeley, setting up a rig, unasked, in waspish, quiet glee. There are the nights when
no one dreams, or dreams are small and life-sized--broken strings and shipwrecked boats, dishabille,
or seagulls.
There are the nights when Newt can sleep, the dawns he doesn't see.
Of those, there are not many.
But there are some.
Chapter End Notes
Chapter-specific citations: This chapter contains several quotations from Bohemian
Rhapsody by Queen that take the form of italicized song lyrics in the second section.
Chapter 11
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Geiszler victorious, Newt tags this moment.
Oh sure, it might not feel quite like victory in the classical sense, what with this headache that
seems to be the climax of a migraine that started with a crescendo he slept through; all the nociceptive
receptors he has seem to be screaming a coordinated magnum opus in A-delta and C. It might not look
quite right, either, it might not look all that victorious to an outside observer or even to a semi-inside
observer who might or might not be wearing a bathrobe right about now, yup, nope, it probably
doesn't look like what it is, but that doesn't change the truth of it, the verifiable subjective yesness of
his sweeping win.
Take a seat in my drift interface, Newt thinks, pull up a cognitive chair, and measure my
subjective superposition if you think you can get away with it, I guarantee you that when you do
it's going to collapse into something awesome, he thinks, not certain who it is he's addressing. The
hypothetical straw man in his head who's not into empirical validations of subjectivity? Whomever it
is, it's not his brain--his brain is on vacation somewhere, hopefully somewhere nice. It's taking a
leave of absence. That's fine. He supports his brain, even when it doesn't support him back, because
Newt, unlike his brain, is loyal. Newt is, Newt is just--right now, he is just--he is, he is just--he is
just killing this, he is killing this, he is winning; he has everything he wanted, he can look his past
self in the face and he can say, dude, you crushed it. You crushed it. Way to trade resources to get
what you want, past-self, you are a lot more plucky than even I gave you credit for. Nice work.
"You should try to eat," Hermann says.
"Yeah dude," Newt replies, shivering or shaking or tremoring subtly atop a hotel room bed.
"Good idea. I will get right on that."
He doesn't move though, which is fine, there are a lot reasons for that, one--his eyes hurt and he
prefers to keep them closed, two--his head hurts and that is related to all different kinds of things, the
eye thing, the neck pain, the jaw pain, the mouth pain, and probably some kind of distressed
vasculature thing that's going on anywhere there are openings in his skull, three--he's pretty cold and
food doesn't seem worth it just right now, four--he's thrown up once already since waking up in this
hotel room, five--he took a look at this incipient room-service dinner and it's soup which seems like a
disaster, though, to be fair, no more of a disaster than anything else is going to be, six--he's pacing
himself, seven--the soup doesn't look that great, he's seen more appetizing soup in his life, that's for
sure, eight--whatever, he's had a long day, probably, even if he did sleep through most of it for
reasons that still aren't perfectly clear to him, nine--he's going to move in a little while, ten--nope,
eleven--nothing's leaking out of him right now, he's not bleeding, he's not throwing up, he's got a little
problem with the streaming eye thing he has going, he's not about to tag that 'crying' because it's not;
obviously when the capillary beds in one's sclera blow out, the eye just tries to fix that misery right
up, like a champ, like a thing evolved by natural selection to be a progressively more awesome swiss
army-knife of sensory transduction with its sexy sexy rhodopsin; how many layers does the retina
even have, it's a lot--maybe eight, maybe ten, he thinks it's ten--it's like a layer cake, no it's not, it's
way more like a nested set of wet, multicolored, translucent tissue paper that gets signal transduction
done like a boss even though it sometimes just falls off the back of the eye in a folding slide of
biological wetness, yuck. That's less of a good job for evolution. The kaiju eye is better, a little more
substantial, a little more engineered, well yeah, duh, it would be, put the photoreceptors on the
surface if you're building things from scratch, obviously, and man, if one's really thinking about literal
retinal layer cakes, just in terms of size the kaiju eye is really the kind of thing that yields up a
satisfying visual on a macro scale when sliced into, and--
Nope, his brain thinks, making a belated reappearance that seems kind of ominous in its alarmed
intensity before--
A wall of disorganized shrieking blue rises up from his memory; Otachi and dismembered neural
tissue, some of which he himself cut apart--how could you do that, how could you, you who knew,
you who guessed, you who--mortared together into something that might or might not be real, he can't
tell, there's no way to know; there are parts of them still here, still on this planet; parts of them in
formaldehyde; parts of them still thinking, like small animals everywhere are thinking; parts of them
just waiting for him to come back to the drift; parts of them that maybe don't have to wait, that maybe
won't have to wait, that maybe are right here, right now. He is terrified but not alone, his mind isn't a
lockbox anymore it's wide open. He's sure people were meant to be this way.
Something snaps back into place, his thoughts turn less blue in a room that's mostly dark and
slightly red and he sits up gasping, but his airway is clear, and he can breathe and he can move and
it's just him, holding onto his shirt sleeves, his hands over his chest, and it's definitely just him, only
him, in this bed, in his head, and that's great, that's a win. Okay, sure, he thinks, trying to make friends
with the screaming tenants of his subconscious mind. Everyone just relax. You're not going insane
right here, right now, nope you are not. Whatever had just happened was probably a flashback to
something he doesn't fully remember, which is an interesting phenomenon in and of itself and a fun
new thing that apparently his brain can do, traitorous, vacationing, talented bastard that it is; it's
always been a little too good at everything to be any good to anybody at all.
I can't work under these conditions, his brain shrieks at him, deciding not to take responsibility
for its own actions.
I am so sorry, dude, he apologizes, while trying to breathe, trying to decide if he's traumatized or
coming down off a short hit of a brief and creepy high. You are totally right about that. Please try to
remember that we're a team though. A team.
"Newton," Hermann says, with medium sharpness, medium concern, and maximum freaking out,
like maybe it's not the first time he's said it. And oh, hey, speaking of inexplicably bathrobe clad
German ex-pats, Hermann has decided to sit on the edge of the bed. Newt frankly finds this pretty
baffling; this is for sure the weirdest thing they have ever done together--Newt, fully dressed and
having periodic Synapse-tastrophies in Blue, Hermann with his still-damp hair and his improbable
bathrobe. Dr. Gottlieb, Newt thinks, I was not aware that your hair was capable of being wet, any
more than I was aware that my eyes could hurt this much and still be functional. Welcome to this
crappy hotel bed that I will now probably bleed alarmingly all over if the past twenty minutes have
been any indicator of how the rest of the night is going to go.
"Myeah," Newt says, confirming his identity and his ability to speak, which is about all he's game
for at the moment.
Hermann rolls his eyes. It's not the whole shebang, it's not his maximum oh-please-Newton-what-
preposterous-nonsense-is-coming-out-of-your-mouth-now, it's not even mid-range of-course-you-
decided-not-to-make-more-coffee, it's a low-grade, everyday-idiot kind of eye roll. "You are fine,
and your night will only improve," he says, clipped and totally normal except for the looking away
part and the part where he's got a good grip on Newt, a really solid grip right over Newt's right
shoulder, which is less normal, Newt usually just sits on his own, and he is so cold.
 "I think you can read my thoughts," Newt says.
"No," Hermann replies, doing some complicated stacking thing with pillows out of Newt's line of
sight. "I cannot."
"I'm pretty sure you're wrong about that," Newt says, and while he'd like to expound on that topic,
this is about the best he can really do while trying to make sure he can breathe at the same time. "I'm
pretty sure you've always been wrong about that."
"I am not wrong," Hermann says, rolling his r just a little and shoving Newt in the general
direction of the temple of pillows he has constructed against the headboard, and Newt just goes with
it, because his muscles don't seem to be good for much these days other than locking up and giving out
in that order.
"Who are you even," Newt says, though he knows, he knows down to the roots of his teeth, who
Hermann is, knows it so completely that he can't fully separate knowledge of Hermann from
knowledge of himself anymore. "Did you steal me from the PPDC?"
"No," Hermann says.
"Good," Newt replies.
"Possibly, there might have been a point at which the word 'abduction' was used by a member of
the upper military echelons, but the situation has since been clarified."
Newt brings a shaking hand to his face. He rests it on his temple before gingerly sliding two
fingers beneath his glasses. He's been in a high velocity skid straight toward a brick wall from the
moment that the PPDC decided they needed one more data set on the anteverse following breach
closure and all he remembers is the feeling of his own momentum in the face of blue-tinged brick and
so, yeah, it's pretty understandable that he's confused to find that Hermann has managed to arrange for
quantum tunneling on a macro scale, or whatever it is that he's done, because while it had been nice to
fantasize about rescue from bureaucracy, he really hadn't expected any such thing, and can't imagine
how Hermann might have pulled him through that metaphorical wall without some huge and actual
personal cost.
"Don't touch your eyes," Hermann says, dragging Newt's fingers from beneath his glasses in a
slow, controlled slide. "Your intraocular pressure is elevated."
"You're really annoying," Newt whispers, trying to pretend that Hermann actually is being
annoying, irritating, an overeducated nag in an undereducated bathrobe, trying to pretend that he's
really being anything at all other than outrageously nice, because he's pretty sure that if anyone,
especially Hermann, is even remotely nice to him right now he's going to start crying hysterically and
possibly not stop for hours because his brain is not around running the show like it's supposed to.
"Has anyone ever told you that? How much trouble are we in right now?"
"Please do not worry about that at the present moment," Hermann says unevenly. "Please just try
to relax, and trust that I am capable of handling this."
Hermann's definitely having the same problem that Newt is having when it comes to the runaway
trajectory of thought and tone. Where have everyone's superegos gone? Who is driving these thought
chariots? Why does he not understand the minutiae of what's happening here? Why is Hermann not
wearing his clothes? Why is it so cold? How difficult must it have been for Hermann to get him from
Hong Kong to San Francisco if Newt doesn't remember anything about it? Did he actually meet
Hypothetical Rain, surfer neurologist, earlier or was that just a dream? Why does he feel so bad?
How is it that both his eyes were affected by the really terrible decisions he made over the past three
days? Will this headache ever go away? What would Descartes do right now? Who sent that team that
fried his brain? Will they send another one? Should he change his name and disappear off the face of
the planet, dragging Hermann with him? Should he make a paper chain and count down the days until
he can drift again and he won't have to be alone in his own mind? Which does he prefer, the confused
and unenlightened rage of dead and slowly fixing tissue, or the raging void that his thoughts can't quite
fill? Is that a trick question? Who is going to water his plants that have spent months growing a little
too well on the ledge of a now abandoned Hong Kong lab? What happened to his drift interface and
can it now be used on other people? Will it? If he cloned a kaiju would that fix the screaming vacuum
that makes up more than half his mind? How long has it been since he drifted? How many hours? How
many times did he do it? How many times did they do it to him? How many seizures has he had? Will
the PPDC pay his medical bills? Is he brain damaged? Is he capable of complex analytical tasks? Is
this flurry of thoughts made scattershot his new, permanent deal? Why doesn't he have any clear
memories of the span between seizure number two and twenty minutes ago? Is he going to retain
memories of this? How long does he have to live? Out of all of the appalling things that have
happened to him and to the planet how many of them are going to happen again and how soon? Why
does he--
"Stop," Hermann says.
Yeah, like that's going to work. It would be nice if that worked, it would be nice if Newt could
say, stop it, brain, you realize you're cloistered coils of semi-solid goo, isolated by tight junctions
and atypically thick basement membranes, there's really not anything special about you so just shut
up already, god, no one wants to listen to the things you find interesting or the inappropriate
questions you're forming just now, least of all me. Are you not supposed to be on vacation? If
you're not interested in cleaning up your messes then just stay away, and let me eat my soup and
then throw up in relative peace.
"What exactly am I supposed to be stopping?" Newt asks.
Surprisingly, Hermann looks like he doesn't know how to answer that one. This makes sense to
Newt, sort of. It should, he supposes, because he asked like he wanted an answer, meaning that he
himself doesn't know. It's hard to put a label on anything that's happening, but that's all to the good, he
supposes, and maybe one of the few things that's preventing him from entirely freaking out, because
he's pretty sure that whatever label gets affixed to whatever is happening right now, he's not going to
like it, he's not going to like it at all. No one is doing any labeling at the moment, it's just bathrobes
and cold soup and a room where no one is turning on the light even though the sun is well on its way
to totally, entirely set.
Newt looks at Hermann, really looks at him, and the more Newt looks, the more awful things
seem. Hermann is giving him an exhausted, hopeful look, like maybe some kind of miracle will
happen and Newt will start making sense or stop doing whatever it is that he's doing that Hermann
wishes he wouldn't. Like maybe Newt will magically think of a way to eat soup without throwing up
or needing fine motor control. Like maybe Newt will start fixing whatever it is that's been
dissasembled, because Newt is generally the one who constructs things--interfaces, arguments,
layered shots with witty names, sick guitar riffs, prototypes and proposals, stylized representations of
kaiju to transfer to his skin, patch clamp apparatuses, mobile stereotactic drift interfaces, relocatable
blackboards, agendas, playlists, routes through foreign cities. Hermann is, at heart, a critical thinker,
better at saying no than saying yes, and right now he's got the look of a guy who's surrounded by a nest
of disassembly and isn't really sure how things should be coming together, because that's not his job,
not this logistical stuff, he predicts things and he models them, he picks out patterns where no patterns
are, he's a redirector of effort, misapplied. He builds things out of code and draws up plans for
Jaegers, but he's less at home with chemistry and colleagues bleeding from their eyes.
 "Why are you wearing a bathrobe?" Newt asks.
"Because the laundry service is washing our clothes," Hermann replies.
Surprise that actually surprises no one--this answer ups his anxiety. Newt is pretty sure he's
wearing his clothes; that's what it looks like, this button-down white shirt and these black jeans are
most definitely his. Is he wrong about this? Is he not wearing clothes? If he thinks he's wearing
clothes and he's not, his problems are more profound than he is really prepared to handle at the
present moment. Alternatively, could he be wearing clothes that aren't actually his? If so, they fit
really well. If both their clothes are being washed, which makes sense because Hermann distinctly
said "our," then why does he have clothes? Why is there a clothing disparity between them? If there
were to be a clothing disparity it should certainly go the other way, since Newt cannot conceive that
he had been in any state to pack anything at all prior to their departure. What had he been wearing
when Hermann had pulled him out of Medical? Had he even been wearing clothes? He has no idea.
"Newton," Hermann says carefully.
"Yup," Newt replies, trying to believe that he's having no problems with getting sufficient air to
support all the anxious catabolism that his cells are kicking into gear all over his vital organs. "I um--
" he breaks off, expression neutral, eyes fixed on the dim patterns that the geometric designs on the
bedspread make in the deepening darkness, about to lay down a hand of cards that he'd just as soon
keep close to his chest, because he's certain that he doesn't understand everything about what has
happened over the past several days and he's certain he doesn't understand everything about what's
happening now in this hotel room, and he's certain that his own mind will remain a horrible, closed-
off wasteland of continuous, circuitous torture for the foreseeable future, and he really has no desire
to reveal to anyone, least of all Hermann, how profoundly crap his current hand of cards is.
"Everything will be fine," Hermann says, not looking at him, because Hermann is arguably the
worst liar on the planet and they both know it.
"Yeah," Newt says, his fingers wrapped around the shirt cuffs that had better be real, and had
better be his, and had better be shirt cuffs. "I know, dude, I just, ah, I was just trying to rationalize our
counterintuitive clothing disparity."
Hermann looks at him, a sharp little changing of lines in the dimness. "I packed an extra outfit for
you. There's nothing counterintuitive about your slovenly track record."
"Well not when you put it that way," Newt replies, temporarily relieved. Hermann has a point, in
that he's already managed to bleed on this shirt. Some of his anxiety yields its headspace straight back
to his headache and he has the urge to touch his eyes, to sort of press on them and then to maybe sort
of claw them out of his head. "Do you think you could tell me," he breaks off the sentence
prematurely, needing to gear himself up for its informative, ending half, needing this moment when it
could still turn into something totally reasonable like, 'what the diameter of the open transdimensional
portal is and how it varies with mass of the transported organism,' or, 'when you first encountered
Descartes did you realize what a magnificent bastard he was going to turn out to be,' or really
anything at all other than what he's actually going to say, which is, "what happened?"
Hermann is quiet and looking away and breathing unevenly and Newt immediately regrets the
request.
"At a first approximation," Hermann says finally, "you ceded to a formalized request from the
PPDC and spent three days 'collaborating' with them regarding drift technology. At some point during
those three days you suffered at least one seizure and were subsequently medicated. I forged a letter
of resignation and removed you from the medical bay. We boarded a direct flight from Hong Kong to
San Francisco while I used what minimal institutional goodwill I possess to prevent the pair of us
being detained and taken into military custody. After a three-hour delay, we were released by
Customs. I was--concerned that you required hospitalization, and so I arranged for you to be
immediately evaluated by a UCSF neurologist. Her opinion on this was equivocal and so I brought us
here. You have been sleeping with mixed success for approximately eight hours."
"Oh," Newt replies, not really sure what 'mixed success' might mean, and hoping it doesn't mean
anything like 'periodic screaming,' or 'choking on blood,' or 'occasional talking about horrifying
subjects'. He estimates he remembers something like twenty to thirty percent of what Hermann has just
described. "You forged a letter of resignation?" Newt asks, deciding he would prefer to hear about
his colleague's adventures in disingenuousness than his own adventures with synchronized waves of
neuronal activity. He has no interest in speculating on the probability of a future or current seizure
disorder at this point in time.
"Yes," Hermann says, with a crisp primness. "Rest assured, it was atypically professional."
"You should have written 'suck it' on a napkin. That's what I would have done."
"I considered it," Hermann replies, "but non-standard paper sizes and textures are difficult to
force through the high volume scanners upon which modern bureaucracy is built. I wanted this
expedited."
"You're a little bit of a magnificent badass when the mood strikes you," Newt says, "I've told you
this, right?"
"I am nothing of the kind," Hermann replies, and there's a waspish edge to his voice that Newt
can't pin an etiology on in this kind of anonymizing darkness.
If Hermann wants to be waspish, that is fine by Newt. That is absolutely okay and eight hundred
percent reasonable. Newt has dragged the guy into and through a whole tangled mess of legal and
logistical and logical barbed wire of the metaphorical variety, and he is sorry about that; maybe if
Hermann hadn't come after him and Hannibal Chau hadn't been eaten, and had been more of a nice
guy, Chau would have been the guy who decided that drifting with dead kaiju was cool, was for
winners, and then maybe--maybe what? Yeah, okay, no, this is a terrible fantasy backup memory
Newt's constructing, because for one--he is pretty sure he wasn't then and isn't now interested in
seeing the inside of Hannibal Chau's head, and for two--he had won. He needs no fantasy backup
memories because he had been right, and he had done all the right things within his purview, and
yeah, sometimes a whole branching tree of the most flawless decision making still dumped one in a
pit of total despair, but that was the stochastic sucker punch delivered by the game of life, man, and
sometimes you could get around it and shut transdimensional breaches like a baller and sometimes
your own neurochemistry would punish you for the rest of your miserable, transient existence, and
that's just the way it was, and is, and would be, and he had signed up for this. He'd read the fine print
and he'd scrawled his name in craptacular penmanship on the form and then he'd designed and donned
the metaphorical t-shirt; he'd donned it multiple times. Unfortunately, he had let Hermann sign himself
up as well, and that was kind of a poor choice on Newt's part, understandable, arguably a defensible
idea at the time it had happened, but still a poor choice. So now, given that Hermann is justifiably
upset about a whole set of things that Newt has pretty crap insight into at the present moment, he's not
really sure what to do. Ideally, he would say something that would mitigate any aspect of what's
happening here, but he absolutely does not trust himself to do any such thing. Given the current status
of everything, he'll probably lead with something totally innocuous like 'I'm sorry?' or "okay,' and
then things will be awkward and he'll keep talking and his discourse will end up devolving to the
point that something unfortunate happens, because there's a whole lot brewing in his subconscious
mind that he doesn't particularly care to inventory right now, and he's not sure he can keep all of it
shut up wherever it is that he's managed to shut it up and he's also not sure what's going to happen if it
makes an appearance in force, but he thinks that would probably not be the best.
Hermann pats Newt's knee, either because he feels like he needs to apologize for his thin veneer
of waspishness, which says terrible things about his impression of Newt's mental state, or because
he's picking up on Newt's train of thought, or because Newt is really having a problem keeping his
internal monologue internal. This is a problem that's been going on for days--his inability to tell
whether he's talking and Hermann is responding to stuff he says verbally, or whether he's not and
Hermann has some kind of intermittent window into Newt's head when neither one of them is paying
attention. Either way, he doesn't view this as a positive thing. He's also pretty sure it's option number
two, because he feels like he would have noticed this monologue problem previously had it been
going on for a long time. Maybe it's a post-drift phenomenon, maybe, but call him crazy (and be
justified?), he's pretty sure he knows when he's talking and when he's not. Perseverating on this
verbally isn't going to do him any favors at the present moment, since Hermann seems to be worried
that he's not quite mentally intact and has already made his thoughts on the thought-reading pretty
clear. So he won't think about that right now.
"How do you feel?" Hermann asks.
He feels awful. Unmitigatedly awful. He feels like the guy who's going to find out whether it's
possible to die of head pain. He feels like he might go blind, probably because it's dark and his eyes
are trying to implode under their own elevated intraocular pressure. He thinks he might throw up
again, literally any time, but especially if he has to swallow any more blood. His muscles are sore
and overtaxed and not doing a very good job with anything he asks of them. He's trying to stay calm,
because he's not sure if he can physiologically handle the amount of freaking out that his
unsupervised brain is trying to jump-start about every thirty seconds or so.
"Pretty good," Newt says.
It's getting so dark in the room that Newt really can't tell whether or not Hermann buys this at all.
Probably not, considering the guy dragged him halfway across the planet, flew with him in a plane
over the Pacific--they must have passed over or near the place where--
His thoughts turn bright, the room lights up in a haze of blue-violet, all his muscles decide to
contract in response to a simultaneous double spike of utter revulsion and raging desire; if the breach
still existed there would be no force on this planet that would prevent him from--but it doesn't, it
doesn't exist anymore he can feel that it doesn't in some kind of weird and horrible phantom limb
phenomenon. His brain chooses this moment to make a vengeful reappearance, riding him down on its
warpath of vindictive triumph over whatever part of him feels wronged by that which he has done. I
did this, his brain shrieks at him, I was the one who cut them off, the one who destroyed them, the
one who sliced into their dead emissaries, the one who submerged still active neural tissue in
formalin, and I'd do it again, I'd do it again--
Newt is dry heaving into a trashcan when his thoughts lose their azure edge.
He manages to stop doing that and then to mostly relax.
"Pretty good," Hermann repeats dryly, still holding the trashcan.
"That was a lie," Newt whispers.
"Oh really," Hermann replies.
"Believe it or not," Newt rasps, feeling the warm pressure of an imminent episode of epistaxis.
"I'm going to turn on the light."
It is only after the bedside lamp comes on with a click that Newt realizes that was a cue to shut
his stupid eyes. He gets it done, but not before being stabbed right in the retinas by too many photons.
He pulls his glasses off and claps a hand over both eyes right around the time his nose starts bleeding
again. He tries to angle his head so that he's not going to end up swallowing most of it, and manages
to get the sleeve he's dedicated to blood-control under his face, but that's about all he's good for.
He's done.
His organ systems have all made a good effort, but there's not going to be any more sitting or
thinking or worrying about blood on bed sheets. There's just going to be lying here, curled on his side,
freezing to death in an overly air-conditioned room in a temperate, maritime region of the world, one
hand over his eyes, one sleeve kind of under his face.
Hermann does some muttering in German, and the parts of it that Newt is getting seem to mainly
deal with how much of an unmitigated mess Newt is, bad decisions of all kinds, and stupidity in the
abstract.
Privately, Newt agrees with the gestalt of Hermann's private monologue. Publically, he decides to
disclose, "I threw up earlier and then used your toothbrush." He's not really sure why. It seems like
the thing to do. Honesty. Yup.
Hermann makes an aggrieved, disgusted sound and starts deconstructing the pillow ziggurat he
built earlier for purposes unclear to Newt.
"Sorry," Newt slurs. "It seemed really necessary to me at the time."
"I'm sure," Hermann replies, doing some blanket yanking and arranging, mostly underneath Newt,
who is really not capable of getting out of his way right now.
"Differential toothbrush benefit to me versus you was, like, really high, dude," Newt says, trying
not to cough.
"So you felt entitled." Hermann drags him up into a seated position, with a slow, deliberate effort
that Newt manages to help out with a little bit, while still keeping one hand over his eyes. A tissue
gets shoved into his other hand, and Newt uses it to pinch his nose shut.
"I don't know if 'entitled' is the word I would choose," Newt replies, feeling lightheaded, his eyes
streaming behind the shuttered darkness of his hand. "It was more like--given that I've ruined your
life, what's a toothbrush, really, in the grand scheme of things?"
"You have not ruined my life," Hermann says, too unsteadily and way way way way way too
nicely for Newt to really sit here and take, "so I will thank you to leave my future toothbrushes alone
and not subject them to ill-founded fits of nihilism that you use to justify your unthinking gratification
of your immediate material needs. I will, however, cede you this particular toothbrush, if only
because you have already contaminated it."
"Thanks man," Newt says, cracking his fingers for a brief, painful visual so that when he folds
like a bad hand he manages to do it in the direction of Hermann's bathrobed shoulder because it's
either that or fall out of this sitting position that his core isn't really up to maintaining for a prolonged
period.
Hermann helps him out with an academic-bro type of manly solidarity that includes being the thing
that Newt is leaning against and also some awkward shoulder patting that turns a little less awkward
over time when Newt neither pulls away nor says anything about it. Technically, this might even be
considered a hug, but Newt has no plans to tag it that way. Not that Newt has anything against
embraces in the abstract, in fact, he engages in them frequently. This is not a hug though. Mostly, this
is just an expeditious way to keep Newt's currently bleeding capillary beds above the level of his
heart. Mostly.
His brain is finally starting to feel like a matched set for his body, slowing down, struggling
through thought-sludge, powering up and down in a slow strobe of intermittent and inappropriate
clarity and he wonders where Mako is right now, what she's doing, half a world away, her
professional cohort mostly dead and her family all dead, again. He flashes back to the public shelter
in a venomless, colorless memory of a cracking sound and twitches faintly. Wonders if he's falling
asleep or dying, knows it's the former when his hearing kicks into something hyperacute and
hyperimmediate. Wonders what it is, wonders what does it mean when his thoughts turn blue; he can
remember it happening before, can remember his own back arching like it had been someone else's,
which had been weird, he's not sure he likes that.
Newt pulls the tissue away from his nose and tries to decide if he's still bleeding.
It seems like no, so he drops his hand, too tired to keep it attached to his face if it doesn't really
need to be there. Like the hand he's got over his eyes. That one is staying for the duration.
Hermann does some readjustment and Newt is lying down, mostly flat, and now, topologically
under blankets. He's not sure how that happened; there had been some kind of fancy surface
manipulation that had arranged this, but what does one expect when one hangs out with a
mathematician? Lying down makes Newt feel substantially sharper, probably because it helps his
autonomic nervous system make better decisions about bloodflow.
"Newton?" Hermann says.
"Yeah dude," Newt slurs, "I'm only mostly dead."
"Good," Hermann replies. "I will be back shortly."
He's pretty sure he's blown some fuses in his brain, or, maybe he's still in the process of blowing
them. When events occur only within the confines of one's own cranium it's hard to be objective about
what's truly taking place. It's not impossible to be objective, not anymore, because someone could
drift with him and say, yep, Geiszler's slowly or maybe rapidly going nuts, it's an observable
phenomenon, based firmly in the electrochemistry of the guy's prefrontal cortex, which, let me tell
you, friend, is not looking so good at the moment. This observable reality would be corroborated by
the fact that literally everyone who's ever met him could have told him that this was where things
were trending, and many of them did, over and over again, and it's not that he doesn't listen, it's just
that he set about to create choices for himself, but those choices turned out to be moral imperatives
that he then did a bad job framing as such to his peers and superiors. Having poor metaphorical
penmanship doesn't absolve one from the duty to act, though, so he had. Acted. Like a winner.
Please do not be connected to the kaiju anteverse, brain, he thinks in a running glaze of words
that seem to only partially form. Please also do not be connected to scattered and formalin-fixed,
dead, cloned, alien, war machines who understandably don't like you that much right now. Please
do not be connected to Hermann. Please be an island. Please be part of no main.
You have a lot of nerve to be making requests at this point, don't you think? His brain asks,
deciding to make an appearance.
I see what you did there, Newt replies. It's nice to know that pun-making will be a skill I retain
to the end. Because that's important.
You are truly insufferable, his brain replies.
Who replaced you with Hermann? Newt asks vaguely.
You did, his brain snaps. Several days ago. When you drifted. "Idiot."
"What?" Newt says, startled, opening his eyes in a painful haze to see Hermann, blurred and
sitting on the bed. "Oh god. I think I'm hallucinating?"
"Well it wouldn't be the first time," Hermann replies, putting one hand on Newt's forehead and
managing to get eyedrops into Newt's right eye before Newt figures out that was his plan. "In fact, it
would not even be the first time today."
 "A little warning would be nice," Newt snarls, pulling away, blinking something that stings out of
already stinging eyes, "what is that?"
"Do not move," Hermann snaps, managing to do the other eye with Newt's half-hearted
cooperation. "These are eyedrops."
"I know they're eyedrops, dude," Newt snaps. "What is in them? Anything? Or are you just
watering my fried capillary beds?"
"For someone who is ostensibly hallucinating," Hermann says, opening a pair of sunglasses and
putting them on Newt, "allow me to compliment you on your coherency."
"Noted, dude," Newt says, identifying the sunglasses thing as a thing that had happened before,
and wondering if Hermann had also explained the eyedrop thing to him previously, and if so, how
many times. "But--"
"Their purpose is to reduce intraocular pressure," Hermann says. "You may recall I mentioned
that yours was elevated due to inflammatory obstruction of outflow tracts within the eye."
This seems extremely reasonable to Newt, unfortunately. It does not necessarily bode well for his
already sub-par vision.
"Both the medical team at the PPDC and Dr. McClure have expressed reasonable confidence that
your vision will make a full recovery."
Ah. Good. But--
"Dr. McClure?" Newt asks.
"Coral," Hermann says.
"Hypothetical Rain?" Newt asks.
"Her name is Coral," Hermann replies.
"That was real?" Newt asks.
"Yes," Hermann replies.
"Does she have an eyebrow ring?" Newt asks.
"Yes," Hermann replies.
"Does she look a little bit like me?" Newt asks, still skeptical.
"Yes," Hermann replies.
"Have I asked you all these things? Previously, I mean?" Newt clarifies, because Hermann, from
what he can see of the other man's dim and extremely blurred outline, seems more amused than
traumatized.
"No," Hermann replies. "You are unmistakably vastly improved."
"Ugh," Newt says, not in the mood to contemplate the kinds of things that have likely been coming
out of his mouth over the course of the past day. "You can see why I might think that I hallucinated
Actual Coral, though."
"Yes," Hermann says, twisting the top off a bottle of something that Newt wishes his lenses and
retinas were capable of resolving but seems like it might be a bottle of prescription medication.
"Entirely reasonable."
That's probably an anti-epileptic, his brain says, startling him with abrupt and useful
conjecturing.
"And this would be the advertised anti-epileptic?" Newt asks, "which I do not need, by the way,
probably. I'm pretty sure that I only have seizures when I give them to myself by putting my brain into
an overly excitable state, voltage-wise."
"Yes," Hermann says, putting the pill in Newt's hand, "and though I hope you're correct, let's not
test the veracity of your claim."
 Newt manages to get himself up on one elbow for the span of time required to drink blood-
flavored water and swallow some kind of GABAesque agonist or whatever the kids are taking to
avoid seizures these days.
"Try to keep that down," Hermann advises, totally unhelpfully.
"Yeah okay," Newt says, with as much eye rolling as he can pack into his uncooperative vocal
cords. "Sure. Good idea, man."
"Shut up," Hermann replies, with flagrantly outrageous fondness that he's not even bothering to
hide and that's freaking Newt out a little bit. "Do you think you can--"
"Do not even say it," Newt says, doing his absolute best not to think about lukewarm soup,
attempting to eat it, or the experience of his gastrointestinal tract rejecting it and violently sending it
back from whence it had come. "The answer is no. Do not negotiate, do not hedge, do not persist, do
not refer even obliquely to that stuff on the table over there."
Hermann sighs and drags his bad leg onto the bed, elevating it kind of like maybe he's been
walking on it for hours and hours as he drags Newt through walls and over the surfaces of planets,
rescuing him from foreign cities and nefarious bureaucracies. Maybe just the one planet. Maybe no
wall dragging happened, except for the metaphorical kind.
"You are literally the best, man," Newt says. "And kind of also the worst."
Hermann exhales, short and sharp.
Probably, if Newt could actually see his expression, it would be a glare.
"Wait let me qualify," he says, his tongue not fully cooperating with the signals his brain is
sending. "You are probably literally the worst person to be sharing a brain with, if that's what you're
doing, what we're doing, what you're doing to me sometimes, because, look, I know that you don't
believe me but I'm pretty sure that there's some kind of weirdness going on with you and my inner
monologue, and I'm not sure what this periodic blue-edged thing that happens to my brain here and
there is, but I don't think it's good and I don't want it spreading, not to you, not like some kind of
horrible neural net thing and this really creeps me out, okay, right? Listen to this. Kaiju, like
terrestrial cephalopods, have some element of neural decentralization, it's part of why the drifting
with fixed tissue even works at all, it's also what makes them so fast, can you imagine if all those
motor programs were centralized? That would be ridiculous. But my point is that whole networks
operate with relative independence and so, crap, what if they have this whole thing going, those guys
in the jars, and me, sometimes, or not, I don't know, I don't get it, but what if they, what if they can,
what if--"
Hermann decides to lie down next to him, and this makes Newt stop talking, shift laterally in a
poor show of coordination, and then say, "are you okay?" in that order.
"Yes," Hermann says, most definitely meaning 'no', because, hi, the guy is wearing a bathrobe and
pretty much just collapsed into total defeat next to Newt on a hotel room bed. This night just keeps
getting weirder and more alarming and it occurs to Newt that now is maybe not the best or most
tactful time to think aloud about the various ways that he may be going slowly crazy and/or infecting
Hermann with his own problems.
Hermann has had hours to think about these things already and is probably light years ahead of
Newt when it comes to a) insight into problems possessed by himself, Newt, or both, and b) the
implications thereof.
"I'm pretty sure I've still got my genius-level IQ," Newt whispers, "and most of my charming
personality--"
He breaks off again as Hermann brings his hands to his face.
 "And so do you," Newt continues, with all the valiance his borrowed shades and blurring diction
and exhausted brain will allow, "so we've got a good chance of making things turn the way we'd like
them to turn."
"Go to sleep," Hermann says, sounding like he underestimated the amount of air he was going to
need to complete his sentence, "you atrocious man."
"You're the atrocious one," Newt replies. "You're not even wearing any clothes, by Jove. How
uncouth. How offensively irregular. Is that blood on your bathrobe, sir? How dare you. Remove
yourself from my personal space, if you would be so good, I simply cannot countenance such--
"I will smother you with this pillow," Hermann breaks in, conjuring one of the things up from
somewhere, maybe from the graveyard of Newt's dismantled bedroom ziggurat.
"I am not even worried," Newt says, shifting laterally again with the poor coordination of a
musculoskeletal system on furlough. "I bet, post-drift, meaning now, meaning today, meaning any time,
we could have a British-off, and I would win."
"You would not win. There is also nothing more antithetical to the concept of Britishness than a
'British-off'."
"Myeah," Newt says slowly. "Either you're correct about that, or you're so correct that you've
flipped your correctness pendulum right over the bar and into the territory of very much wrong."
"That makes no sense," Hermann replies.
"Yes it does," Newt says. "Think French Revolution man, you know, Thermidorian Reaction post
Reign of Terror, except for where the Reign of Terror is your statement about British-offs, and--okay,
fine, not my best work analogy-wise but you expected what, dude?" Newt lets his eyes fall closed
behind borrowed shades. "Last week someone drugged me into this week, which I'm thankful for, I
guess, depending on their motivations, which I'll probably never discover, and the metaphor still
works, man, I don't even get the Anglophile thing you've got going, I mean you're from the Continent;
culturally you're supposed to look askance at the guys across the channel."
"I look askance at no one," Hermann says.
"More like everyone," Newt replies, nearly able to hear the sound of Hermann rolling his eyes,
watching his own inner landscape begin to fire randomly, trying like a champ to integrate whole
swaths of memory and experience that aren't its own in terrifying and glorious detail. He can hear the
slide of chalk over an accommodating surface, the sound of wings beating against thinning
atmospheric pressure, and stranger things, the twang of snapping catenaries the rhythm of his voice
from a perspective not his own--is that really what he sounds like? Behind his closed eyelids he sees
the sea in triplicate perspective, different piers and different ports, over water and beneath it--a
random, synaptic, kaliedoscopic, ocean-colored collage of a decade spent attacking and defending the
Pacific Ring of Fire.
It's going to be a rough night.
This and all the rest.
"I am going to apologize," Newt says. "In advance and, also, retrospectively."
"Please do not apologize," Hermann whispers, not turning out the light, not saying anything else.
Chapter End Notes
Chapter-specific citations: Newt quotes The Princess Bride ("I'm only mostly dead") and
alludes to John Donne ("Please be an island. Please be part of no main.")
Chapter-specific thanks: The insupportably talented sannam (sannam.tumblr.com) has
created ridic awesome Designations artwork.
Chapter 12
Hermann is no stranger to sleepless nights.
In point of fact, he cannot currently recall a period in his life predating this perpetual exhaustion
that seems to have infected his entire sense of self. He traces back along linear stretches in the
webbed interrelationships that define his own past experience, his eyes fixed on the off-white ceiling
of a hotel room, lit to dusky yellow by the warm spread of the LED lamp on the bedside table. He
searches for some episode from his childhood that contains anything of the energy, anything of the true
enthusiasm that he knows he once felt for entire swaths of his intellectual life, before the time that
solution sets, or the lack thereof, had been linked with death on apocalyptic scales, but every time,
every single time he makes the attempt, he ends up in foreign territory. The memories that present
themselves are not his own; they're too full of recklessness and anxiety and, worst of all, trial and
error, a problem-solving method he prefers not to utilize if he has any other choice. There is
something uncomfortably vicarious about this mental exercise, in the accidental hedonistic slide of
someone else's hands over the custom circuitry of a remembered electric guitar that he never wired,
one that he has never touched at all, never will touch--
Next to him, Newton jerks into a half-seated position, his hands coming up, fingers brushing the
edges of the sunglasses he still wears, even in sleep.
Hermann flinches, startled. His pulse pounds a fast and painful rhythm through his still sensitive
right eye.
Newton falls back in a rapid and entire loss of tension that would be much more alarming if
Hermann hadn't been watching variations of this play out for hours without any obvious ill effects.
Hermann pulls in a measured breath and tries to decide whether the man has actually awoken or
not, but Newton neither moves nor speaks and so Hermann says nothing.
His own dreams have been difficult to bear in the aftermath of drifting--immersive, exhausting,
unbearably intense, and permitting no insight into their own nature. He wakes unsure of whom he is,
unsure, at the worst of times, of what he is. Historically, he had been an intermittently lucid dreamer,
usually retaining or coming to a sense of awareness, of ownership over the random unconscious
firings of his own well-ordered thoughts. Not so now. Now, his dreams plunge him back into the drift,
back into a tripled perspective laid down simultaneously but apparently amenable to mental parsing.
His dreaming mind seems to be prying apart three sets of memories as he sleeps and bricking them
down into their own separate neural tracts.
He's certain that this is progress.
He's certain that this is a good thing.
That it's necessary.
He's certain that even though he has no desire to dream of amphibious assault on cities where he's
lived, where he's worked, where he's known people, no desire to feel the destruction he had opposed
so long and so tirelessly as if it is the work of his own hands--he's certain that these unwanted
memories will, eventually, be worked over and processed and laid to rest somewhere at the
foundations of his mind, where they will not haunt him anymore, where they will buckle beneath the
pressure of all he is and all he was--all he had always been and will continue to be.
He's certain that, eventually, the nights he dreams as Newton Geiszler, of the ever-present urgency
and the blazing neural circuitry, will lose their ontological uncertainty, he's positive that they'll lose
their painful edge, their unusual auditory quality, their exhausting, multicolored spread of forced
voyeurism into a history not his own. Hermann has spent a lifetime dreaming without sound, and he
finds the greatest hits of The Superconducting Supercolliders to be a bit much to take at times when
he would like to be resting.
It has been approximately one hundred and forty four hours since he drifted in a Hong Kong alley.
Of that gross of hours, Hermann estimates he has spent only thirty of them sleeping, which is certainly
insufficient. Sleep deprivation will do him no favors when it comes to memory processing.
Nevertheless, despite this realization, despite his own profound exhaustion, he is incapable of falling
asleep.
This is entirely and unambiguously Newton's fault.
The other man twitches again, faintly this time, in a direct, if unconscious, validation of his own
culpability in Hermann's raging insomnia.
Hermann glares at him, trying to will the man into a sleep state even slightly less agonized.
Hermann now has a borrowed knowledge of human sleep cycles because it's a topic Newton had
taken an interest in at some point. This exogenous information has a foreign and qualitative feel to it
for something that's based in a concept as quantitatively solid as voltage fluctuation. It isn't nearly
sufficient nor complete enough for Hermann to determine, even in an approximate way, what might be
going on in his colleague's head. He's formulated two competing theories. Either Newton is having
nightmares that are briefly waking him when he drops into REM sleep and resetting his sleep cycle,
or the man isn't even making it into REM, and what Hermann is witnessing has been a long
progression of hypnic jerks as Newton's mind panics its way out of falling into anything but the most
shallow of sleep states.
Either way, it isn't ideal.
Newton has, for as long as Hermann has known him, existed in a state of perpetual sleep
deprivation courtesy of unremitting insomnia coupled with intent interest in his work. Newton is
hardly singular in either of these respects; the pressure of global annihilation tends to unsettle even
the most imperturbable individuals over time. Hermann can personally attest to that. The man is
singular in that his capacity to intellectually function in the face of catastrophic insomnia is preserved
well past the point he loses other crucial skills, such as impulse control, manual dexterity, and good
judgment. This had become apparent to Hermann only a few months after their initial acquaintance,
when the man had volunteered for six consecutive shifts of back-to-back cleanup and tissue retrieval
following the Seattle kaiju attack, then returned to their shared lab, instigated a confrontation, the
underpinnings of which Hermann still, to this day, even post-drifting, does not understand, but that
had centered around some perceived slight to polymerases as a class of enzymes. It had been their
first real altercation, meaning that Hermann had temporarily dropped his perpetual professional
courtesy, and Newton had engaged in limited property destruction which had culminated in an entirely
unnecessary table-upending, for which Newton apologized to him later by showing up unexpectedly at
his door with one arm bandaged post-body art acquisition, holding vodka, licorice, and the compiled
video footage of six recent kaiju attacks in the most bizarre attempt at intrapersonal conciliation that
Hermann had ever witnessed in his life. For one thing, vodka and licorice failed to compliment one
another, in his opinion. For another, watching footage of urban destruction was not exactly Hermann's
preferred leisure activity, but he had invited Newton into his room anyway. It had taken the man all of
twenty-five minutes and half a shot of vodka to fall asleep on Hermann's floor in irresponsibly total
exhaustion. Hermann had found this an inconvenient, if extremely informative, half-week.
Hermann knows, with depressing certitude born from a decade of experience, that Newton will
likely to spend the foreseeable future with raging, uncontrollable insomnia, to the point that he will
become almost entirely insufferable. The only reason this incipient misery hasn't already begun is
because the man has been pushed to the edge of complete collapse and is potentially still under the
influence of whatever it was that was given to him at the PPDC. Something is overriding whatever
cognitive circuitry is trying to wake the man up every five to ten minutes.
He regrets not asking Dr. McClure about the half-life of the benzodiazepines that had turned up in
Newton's bloodwork. He should have the opportunity to do so shortly, however, as she had scheduled
the pair of them for follow-up EEGs after forty-eight hours. Perhaps, at that time Hermann will be
able to pay more attention to the state of their brain waves, and less attention to a terrifyingly semi-
coherent colleague who--
Newton twitches, his head snapping back, his spine arching, and Hermann sits, because he doesn't
care at all for the look of this particular twitch-variant, and he wants to ensure the man isn't about to
start seizing. But Newton just relaxes; he doesn't begin seizing, doesn't come awake, doesn't move
again, doesn't make a sound, locked back solidly into whatever it is that his mind is torturing him
with. It feels cruel not to wake him, not when Hermann is certain that his unconscious mind is
creating an experience both immersive and intolerable, if his own nightmares can be used as any kind
of metric.
Did you drift again? he thinks, not daring to ask it aloud even now, already suspecting that
Newton must have done it, they must have asked it of him, and he must have given in, not knowing,
not having any idea, what it would be like to drift when the breach was not just closed but
annihilated.
"Idiot," he whispers.
He wonders if Newton would be capable of telling him what had happened, should Hermann
choose to ask.
He will put off finding out until he can't stand it any longer.
He doesn't want to know.
He needs to know.
He needs to know how correct Newton had been about PPDC-sanctioned violations of agency,
needs to know how much the man knew going in, how much he actually agreed to and why, needs to
know what caused his second seizure, needs to know, needs to be told that it wasn't the drift that did
it, because he wouldn't have drifted again, not with dead and confused fragments of tissue, cut off
from the hivemind of the anteverse, or, worse, with some kind of still navigable mental connection,
made possible by quantum entanglement on a macro scale or some other phenomenon that Hermann
hopes he'll never need to understand.
He spends another twenty minutes trying fruitlessly to sleep with the bedside light burning its way
into his still painful eye, while Newton twitches beside him at irregular intervals with variant
intensity.
After that twenty minutes, he gives up.
It is four AM, and he can loosely justify his preference for considering this 'morning'.
He stands, feeling as though he might buckle under atmospheric pressure or his own exhaustion,
walks to the bathroom, and flips on the shower, uncertain about how he's going to explain the blood
on the bathrobe and bed sheets to room service, uncertain whether he needs to do any such thing. He
hopes that if Newton can manage to have an uneventful week and avoid any elevations of intracranial
pressure or capillary irritation, perhaps this troubling trend of ruining his clothes by bleeding on them
will just fade away.
He showers as briefly as possible, and then exchanges his bathrobe for his now laundered slacks
and sweater. He contemplates his toothbrush with narrowed eyes, but doesn't use it.
When he reenters the room proper, he is relieved to see that Newton looks fine--to the extent that
a man sleeping restlessly in sunglasses and a bloody shirt with hair plastered into unfortunate and
impressive disarray by a combination of dry glue and electroconductive gel is capable of looking
'fine'--meaning that he is breathing and he is neither actively bleeding nor actively seizing. Dr.
McClure had been impressively forthright and singularly unhelpful regarding her ability to predict
what exactly Newton's future risk of a seizure disorder might be. When he'd asked her about projected
odds, she'd replied, "somewhere from zero to one hundred percent. His particular situation, even
relative to yours, has a whole bunch of weirdness-cred, don't get me wrong, but given that he's had at
least two seizures and you've had none--he's going to need to spend a good chunk of time during
which his negative feedback loops are getting a pharmacological assist."
Unfortunately, this means that Hermann is going to spend that selfsame 'chunk of time' watching
the man constantly.
Even more constantly than had been his original plan.
Alas, this will likely drive the pair of them insane.
More insane.
You are entirely insufferable, Hermann thinks in Newton's direction, while retrieving his laptop
from the bag against the wall. And you're only going to become more insufferable now that you are
no longer directly required for planetary preservation.
He rights himself too quickly and can feel the prickling sensation of an imminent nosebleed, can
smell the tang of incipient blood. He tips his head and pinches his nose in an expeditious manner, and
manages to avoid getting blood on his recently laundered clothing. He deposits his laptop on the desk
and finds a tissue, then moves to stand over the bathroom sink until he's satisfied he's stopped his own
bleeding.
He glances at himself in the mirror and finds that he looks--
He has looked better.
He's certain his appearance would improve if he could manage to fall asleep and stay that way for
a reasonable length of time, but this seems unlikely to him, not while things remain so uncertain; not
while he feels like he has both betrayed and been betrayed by the organization that so recently
possessed his wholehearted affiliation; not while he and Newton are unemployed, staying in an
American hotel in a city where they have only minimal contacts; not while his colleague has had one
lucid hour out of the previous seventy-two.
Their current situation feels extremely unstable to Hermann, in virtually every respect.
He retrieves his computer, returns to the bed, and sits, bracing his back against the headboard.
Unfortunately, this seems directly responsible for Newton jerking into a half-seated position.
Instead of falling back, he pushes himself up until he is sitting, one hand braced behind him, the other
coming to his face and running into the shades he is still wearing.
He looks awake, and this is not ideal.
Hermann manages to prevent him from removing his eyewear by closing his fingers over the grip
Newton has on his borrowed frames.
"Newton," he says quietly.
The man doesn't immediately respond, he simply sits for a moment in the dim light, breathing short
and fast, one hand still closed around the lateral hinge of the sunglasses, his fingers icy beneath
Hermann's hand.
"Newton," Hermann says again, relatively certain that his colleague is actually awake this time.
 "Crap," Newton says, loosening his grip on the glasses and then dropping his hand entirely.
"Yes," Hermann agrees. "Keep these on." He gives the frames of the glasses a gentle tug for
emphasis and then lets go.
"But if I keep them on, how am I going to claw out my own eyes?"
Hermann hopes he is being facetious rather than asking a question in good faith.
"I would not advise such a course of action," he replies.
"You're so boring," Newton slurs, collapsing back into a horizontal position. "Where's your
bathrobe? I liked it. Freaking stylish. Compellingly--fluffy? You don't seem like a guy who just wears
a bathrobe at the drop of a hat or maybe ever. That happened, right? I feel like it did. I hope it did.
I'm not sure what it says about me or our working relationship if I'm hallucinating you in a bathrobe
and then hoping I didn't because you were actually wearing one. It says something extremely
complicated. Nuanced. Also, this is my bed, why are you here with your computer, when there's a
perfectly acceptable alternate bed like three feet away? What time is it even, why are you not
sleeping? It's either dark outside or these sunglasses are really effective. We saved the world, dude,
you can take a nap, did you know that? You don't have to wake up before dawn to do cartographic
surveys of the quantum foam anymore, you know? You can do it after breakfast."
"I'm extremely sorry I woke you," Hermann says.
"Are you sorry for your sake or for mine? That can read a few different ways, Hermann,"
Newton replies, with an exhausted testiness that Hermann finds extremely reassuring.
"And hence it's elegant utility," Hermann says.
"Oh I'm sorry," Newton replies, even less intelligibly, "are you finding it annoying that the guy
whose bed you've invaded has decided to talk to you?"
Hermann rolls his eyes.
"Don't roll your eyes at me," Newton says.
"I am doing nothing of the kind," Hermann replies.
"You are."
"I know for a fact you are incapable of determining any such thing, given our relative positions,
your lack of prescription eyewear, and the eighty-five percent probability that your eyes are currently
closed."
"I know, Hermann, okay? I know. You and me? For better or for worse? We have creepily EPIC
Rapport. I will always know. I will literally always know when you are rolling your eyes. I will
literally always disapprove."
"Go back to sleep," Hermann says.
"Tyrannical theorist," Newton says.
"Eccentric empiricist," Hermann replies.
"Derivative despot,"
"Neurotic neuroscientist."
"Freaking faux physicist."
"Overeducated underling."
"You wish. I am not your underling. I take issue with that. I demand insult accuracy. I mean, who
are we even, if we're not accurate. We're no one, dude."
"My division was larger," Hermann replies.
"Yeah, like five years ago, when there was money. My division consistently kicked more ass."
"Debatable. Will you go to sleep? I am extremely busy."
"Lies," Newton says. "There is literally nothing to do right now. It's a pre-sunrise Wednesday--"
 "Saturday," Hermann says.
"--Saturday, and you don't even have a job anymore, you don't have to do anything. Go get your
bathrobe, man, and start reading Godel, Escher, Bach for, like, the eighth time, you know you want
to."
"Shh," Hermann says. "Stop talking."
"I would even let you to read it to me," Newton declares, doing a passable job concealing any
hopefulness in his tone, "since I will probably never read again, and I like your academic
preferences, if only because I assaulted my own brain with them and now have no choice in the
matter. My brain is being held hostage by rationalism, Baroque-era music, and Incompleteness
Theorems. And Group Theory. The Langlands program, a little bit."
"Your eyes will be fine," Hermann says, in what he hopes is a soothing, sleep-promoting tone.
"Be quiet."
"That time those guys showed Tetris was an NP-complete problem."
"Quiet," Hermann says. "Tetris is a waste of time."
"An NP-complete waste of time," Newton replies.
"Be. Quiet. Attempt to sleep."
"Why aren't you sleeping?"
"I am not engaging you in conversation right now," Hermann replies, resolutely opening his
laptop.
"I bet it's because sleeping is literally the worst," Newton says.
"Quiet," Hermann replies, with a sharp spike of empathy he wishes was sympathy.
"Or," Newton says, theorizing in slow motion, "I'm being bedside-vigil'd. For the second time in a
week."
The second time? Hermann thinks in irritation, try continuously. For three days.
"Or maybe continuously," Newton continues, approximately an order of magnitude slower than
usual, but getting there all the same.
"I assure you that is not the case," Hermann says. "I am extremely busy."
"Lies," Newton says.
"Not lies. I am entering negotiations for a tenured position at UC Berkeley the day after tomorrow,
and I am preparing my talk."
"Well 'not-lies' it is then," Newton replies agreeably. "You do not waste time, dude."
"I will need to borrow several of your slides," Hermann says. "Specifically those pertaining to
the mechanics of the drift interface."
"Sure, presuming you stole my laptop as well as me from the PPDC."
"Your laptop is government property, and I did not steal it."
"You are kidding me," Newton snarls, abruptly snapping into complete alertness, that Hermann
finds more than slightly alarming. He sits, twisting to give Hermann a glare that is invisible behind
sunglasses. He brings one hand to the side of his head, as if he's cognitively bracing himself for that
which he's perparing to unleash. "You seriously--you prosaic, tedious, literal, perfunctory,
accountant. What the hell, Hermann? Are you insane?"
Hermann is tempted to allow him to keep going, if only because he finds this display of unjustified
rage infinitely reassuring, but he also wants to avoid triggering another episode of epistaxis.
"Will you contain yourself," Hermann snaps, pushing Newton back down against significant
resistance. "I have all of your data, so please try to contain yourself. I did not remove any PPDC
issued property from Hong Kong. I was certain that this would pose significant logistical difficulties,
about which I was correct, given the trouble we had passing through Customs. This laptop is mine. I
left my primary machine in Hong Kong after transferring my data. I also copied the entirety of your
allotted server space to multiple hard drives, which were not government issue, and which are
currently on the desk not four meters from your current position, so I'll thank you to calm down."
Newton is quiet for a moment, and then he says, "cool. Thanks man."
"You are quite welcome. Now go back to sleep."
"I'm sorry I called you an accountant. A little bit."
"You should be." Hermann turns back to his screen.
"You can have my drift slides."
"Thank you," Hermann says.
"You want me to find them for you now?"
"I do not," Hermann replies. "I want you to go back to sleep."
"Why are you mentioning the drift in a talk that should really be mostly about Riemann zeros and
the quantum foam?"
"Because I wish to contextualize my role in averting an apocalyptic end to human culture."
"Rockstar," Newton says, in ambiguous annotation.
"Indeed," Hermann replies, equally ambiguously.
"Seriously, though, how smart are we right now?"
"Extremely," Hermann says. "Stop talking."
"No, I mean, think about it. My knowledge base has doubled. I think about quantum mechanics so
much these days. And by these days I mean like the one hour I was awake earlier. Half my mental
metaphors have to do with quantum phenomenology--entanglement, tunneling, spin transfer of quantum
information--I haven't felt this brilliant since Ph.D. numero uno."
"How nice for you," Hermann says, determined not to discuss anything interesting.
"I think my brain likes your metaphors better than mine," Newton says, sounding both
comtempletive and offended.
"How surprisingly discerning of it."
"Are you literally giving a legit science talk on--"
"Monday," Hermann says, finishing Newton's slowing sentence. "Yes. To the combined
Mathematics and Physics departments."
"You--realize that this could get--a little out of control, right?" Newton sounds like he might fall
asleep if Hermann can avoid aggravating him in any way.
"How so?" he replies, opening the graphical image files from his most recent presentation and
inspecting them.
"Dude, um, five days ago humanity collapsed the--" Newton breaks off abruptly and snaps into a
sitting position, leaning forward, both hands coming to his chest, his breathing fast and shallow and
audible.
Hermann, fighting down a sympathetic spike of adrenaline, says, "Newton."
The other man says nothing.
"Newton," Hermann says again, one hand on the other man's shoulder.
"Yup," Newton replies. "Five days since--"
"It was six," Hermann says carefully. "Six days. But continue."
"Yeah, anyway, my point," Newton says, somehow managing to run out of air despite the rapidity
of his breathing, "is that you were a key player in that thing we did, and you're now going to give a
public talk? Only eight days later? There are going to be a lot of people who show up."
 "I'm certain it's closed-door."
"Are you?" Newton prompts, still sitting, one hand moving from his chest to his face. "Did you
specifically request that it be only the Math and Physics departments in attendence?"
No.
He had not.
"I'm certain it will be manageable," Hermann says, not certain of anything of the kind.
"Uh huh," Newton replies, breathlessly and unmistakably skeptical.
Hermann exerts a backward pressure on Newton's shoulder but meets significant resistance, and
wonders if the man is bleeding. Again. He persists and gets his hand smacked for his trouble.
"Can you not?" Newton snaps. "I get you've been dragging me around like deadweight for three
days, but, seriously man, back off."
"I do not think that is a good idea," Hermann replies. "In fact, I think it's a terrible idea."
"Backing off? Ugh. You're a terrible idea. Why do I hang out with you?" Newton pulls his hand
away from his face.
"Are you bleeding?" Hermann asks.
"No. A little bit? Not really. No."
Hermann hands him a tissue.
Newton waves it off. "Legit not bleeding," he decides, after cocking his head and considering his
hand at several different distances from his face.
"Will you please," Hermann says, "lie down."
"Nope," Newton says, struggling free of the bedding and getting to his feet on his second attempt.
"That ship has sailed, caught on fire, and sank. Is there coffee?"
"No," Hermann says, lying through his teeth, and knowing that Newton's vision is bad enough that
he will likely not be able to resolve the poor-quality coffee machine located on the desk against the
opposite wall.
"Let's go out to breakfast," Newton says.
"No," Hermann replies.
"I'm sure there are places open right now," Newton replies, undettered and crossing the room.
"This is a legit city. It must have legit, twenty-four hour food. It's not like we're in Boston, or
somewhere full of Puritans. Let's find a crappy diner. I could go for pancakes right now. But for this?
I need my other shirt. The one without blood on it."
"It's hanging in the closet," Hermann informs him, not without reservations. "Consider taking a
shower before you put it on." He eyes Newton's hair, which is in a state of singular disarray, stiffened
into unfortunate angles by dried and flaking electroconductive gel.
"Considered, dude," Newton replies, visibly shivering as he searches out the handle of the closet
door, "and rejected. I can't see for crap."
"I'm aware of that," Hermann replies, extremely unwilling to entertain the thought of taking
Newton anywhere, but equally unwilling to leave him unsupervised while attempting to locate food
and other necessary items. Such as a toothbrush. For himself. "I'm certain this will be temporary, and
it does not impede your ability to shower."
Newton tears open the thin sheath of plastic protecting his laundered clothing, and begins
struggling with unbuttoning first the shirt on the hanger, then the one he is wearing.
"Do you need assisstance?" Hermann asks him.
Newton shrugs out of his shirt and then raises his hands, slowly, as if he can't see at all, toward
the shirt on the hanger. "Nope," the man says, standing there in his undershirt as he searches out the
borders of the hanger and peels the shirt free by what is certainly touch alone.
"Are you losing what vision you have?" Hermann snaps, shoving his laptop aside and getting to
his feet.
"Dude, chill. Right now? My eyes are shut behind these shades. I'm not going suddenly blind and
being heroically nonchalant about it. If I go unexpectedly blind, you will be the first to know. I will
have an unmitigated freakout that I courteously direct right at you, to the best of my hypothetically
sightless ability, okay?"
Hermann crosses the short space between them and helps Newton pull his shirt on over decorated
skin, which earns him a startle response and a, "for the love, can you not?" in return.
"Can you not?" Hermann snaps, stepping laterally and straightening seams before starting on the
buttons.
"Um, no," Newton admits, leaning against the closet and deciding to cede the buttoning work to
Hermann. "I cannot not. And you can't either. Maybe previously you could have notted, but we have
EPIC Rapport now, game over, now we both can't not. Neither of us is able to not? It's a bad
situation."
"Stop fruitlessly requesting it then," Hermann suggests.
"Noted," Newton replies. "Later, I'm going to start shoving you into strange beds, just for your
information."
"You can try," Hermann replies dryly, completing the buttoning job. "Do you genuinely feel like
eating?"
"Yes," Newton says.
"Because I would rather you not vomit and then bleed all over the floor of a twenty-four hour
diner, presuming we can find one. I would rather you do that here."
"Why does this outcome get granted the status of a foregone conclusion?" Newton asks. "I am one
hundred percent improved relative to last night."
"Arguably, it is still last night."
"Is it?" Newton asks.
"It is a quarter past four."
"That is solid 'morning' territory. There are probably fishermen and medical people and
construction workers who are eating breakfast right about now. We can chalk this four AM breakfast
up to jetlag-induced circadian chaos and therefore tag it as 'totally normal'. At least where you're
concerned. I think I'm just straight up lagged. I cannot blame jet-mediated time zone changes for all
my current problems. But things are better. Definitely better. I am not going to throw up, I'm pretty
sure. Let's go be normal."
Hermann sighs in unmistakable acquiescence.
Newton claps him on the shoulder.
Chapter 13
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Aww yeah.
Delicious pancakes are delicious.
Newt still feels like crap, like he's on a tragically disorienting, weirdly uneven trajectory from
something he can't really remember toward something he's unable to predict, which is not the best,
per se, which is a troubling state of affairs--this failure to be certain about where his current curve
might fall on a magnificently metaphorical coordinate plane. The Cartesian obsession he's rocking
might be the strangest out of an already strange set of post-drift cognitive phenomena.
The strangest? his brain asks, pointedly. I really don't think so, friend.
Are we friends? Newt counters, equally pointedly. I'm not convinced.
The Cartesian love he's got going on is some weird, residual, conceptual crush from Hermann's
adolescence or childhood, it must be, because, honestly, if Newt were going to pick a mathematical
concept to have a crush on, oh god, what would he pick? Insanity, insanity even to try. People have,
he's certain, lost their minds over more trivial things. But man, he might pick Cantor's 'grave disease'
infecting mathematics with the awesomeness of set theory that would eventually and circuitously lead
to Bertrand Russell accidentally bitch-slapping Aristotle in the face with predicates not predicable of
themselves and then being horrified about it, until Godel came along and demonstrated what true
mathematical terror really was. Could those linked events count as one conceptual victory regarding
the unprovability of certain questions at the heart of mathematics? Yes. Yes they could. Other
candidates might be the relationship between irrationality and universal constants--that one will be
interesting to contemplate if anyone ever lets him within eight thousand kilometers of a mind altering
substance ever again. Topologically, he'd go for compasses pointing forever north as they navigate
loxodromic pathways. Then there's the whole laundry list of stereotypical mathematical sex symbols
to consider, which are still pretty baller, even if popular culture dresses them in revealing outfits and
puts them on nerd posters alongside Princess Leia in her metal bikini--pi, e, phi, imaginary numbers,
fractals, platonic solids, the Pythaorean Theorem--they're cheap arithmetical erotica for the
mathematical masses, but he won't hold that against them, much. Newt makes an effort to hate the
game, rather than the player. Hermann hates the player rather than the game, so he disapproves of the
way that fractals are dressing these days. Kind of. Anyway. Newt's point is that in the face of this
Gabriel's Horn of Mathematical Plenty, it's a little bit embarrassing to be obsessed with the
coordinate plane. Boring. Predictable. Which is why this Descartes obsession he's rocking must be
Hermann's fault.
On the other hand, Hermann is buying him this breakfast, so, there's that to consider.
Breakfast, freedom, and still-alive-ness.
There's got to be another word for that.
Oh right. That word would be 'life'.
Breakfast, freedom, and life.
All are ongoing processes, but the breakfast is pretty great, so it's at the top of his priority queue
right about now.
This might be the high-point of his week, if one does not count literally witnessing Mako the
Magnificent save the world and survive the attempt, dragging Becket after her, with what Newt
assumes was nothing other than screaming stubbornness.
"You rock, dude," Newt says, enjoying his pancakes, vowing to, at some point, have a
breathtakingly awkward conversation in which Hermann gets thanked by Newt for his material role in
preserving all of Newt's currently running protocols.
"Thank you," Hermann says, sounding suspicious.
Whether or not he looks suspicious is something Newt, tragically, cannot determine. Because
someone had decided that bringing his glasses on this particular breakfast expedition would be 'too
tempting' for Newt to handle, and so he has only sunglasses, which he is still wearing, inside, like the
hung-over rockstar narcissist he may actually be.
"Let's replace our historical tradition of insults with compliments," Newt says. "The decade of
mutual admiration. What do you think?"
"I cannot even conceptualize what such a thing would be like," Hermann says cautiously. "Though
I am not categorically opposed."
"I could see it getting weird," Newt replies. "I like your handwriting."
"I don't particularly care for yours," Hermann says.
"I feel like you're not getting this as a concept, dude," Newt replies. "Try again."
"I like the way you touch your guitar," Hermann offers.
Newt, in the middle of sedately sipping his orange juice, inhales it, chokes, starts coughing, and
then manages to hang onto his hysterical laughter by the skin of his teeth, put his glass down, and gasp,
"oh my god, no. Or yeah, okay, good try, I guess? I was not expecting that one, I will give you that,
and guitars are sexy, sure, everyone knows that--"
"Will you shut up?" Hermann snaps. "You miserable excuse for a biologist. Do you even have a
prefrontal cortex?"
"Or, we could just have another insult decade," Newt says, still amused, pressing his fingers
against his right temple and shoveling another forkful of pancakes into his mouth. "That might be safer,
though I advise you, in the spirit of pure sportsmanship, to stay away from neuroscience-based insults
because you do not want to go up against me in that particular subgenre of verbal warfare. But, um,
getting back to the guitar thing, would you describe yourself as having inappropriate thoughts about
guitars that I've owned over the years? Because I'm pretty sure those aren't my fault. Your hypothetical
inappropriate thoughts, I mean. I have a normal relationship with my guitar du jour, in that it's a little
bit of a love/hate thing. Wait. On second thought, I don't know, do I have an inappropriately sensual
regard for my guitar? Maybe I do? I'm willing to entertain the possibility. I don't think so though. No,
seriously though, listen to this. I think there's something really unnatural going on with Descartes in
my brain, and I'm not sure if it's literally your fault, or some kind of mental synergy, but maybe it's the
same for you; are you obsessed with guitars, do you think? Inappropriately so? Do you think about
them a lot? Do they crop up in your inner monologue from time to time with this horrible bittersweet
feeling of absolute longing for a more rational world?"
"Guitars?" Hermann snaps. "No. On a related note, I never wish to speak of this again."
"Dude, I get it."
"You do not 'get it', Newton, of that I am certain," Hermann snaps.
"Yeah dude, pretty sure I do," Newt replies.
Hermann doesn't reply, and nope, there's nothing awkward about admitting to accidental pining
for Descartes, that's totally normal. Whatever. Newt casts his terrible, nearly useless vision around
the blurred perfection of this diner of almost infinite freaking virtues. One--it's open, two--it's mostly
empty except for scattered clusters of people he can't really see at all, three--it's very diner-y for the
impassionedly hip war zone that San Fran has become in a decade of half-hearted rebuilding by
indigent secular humanists, immigrant kaiju-worshipers, and the people who had just lived here, man,
and who hadn't moved away, like Hypothetical Rain and her ilk, four--the pancakes that this place
produces are unreasonably delicious--chocolate-chip, three of them, probably neatly stacked, he can't
tell visually and he's not going to touch them, gross, who touches food? That is just bizarre. Isn't it?
Maybe not. Ugh, he can't remember if he had a thing about touching food before he drifted with
Hermann. He thinks maybe he didn't? Should he be eating pancakes with his hands? No, probably not,
conventionally the correct answer is a 'no', but would he have, hypothetically, previously, rolled one
of these things up, maybe put something inside like butter or fruit and eaten it like a taco or a crepe or
an enchilada? That seems like a thing Dr. Newton Geiszler of the high-gross out index and the gloves
made of fauxtex might have done or still might do, it's confusingly appealing and disgusting to him at
the same time and he feels a little bit sick and confused and like he's one wrong thought away from a
blazing episode of cognitive dissonance.
He stops eating, puts his fork down, and takes a deep breath.
There is a choice here, true, or, more correctly, there was a choice here, but he already made it,
and, because of that, no real quandary exists as long as he doesn't manufacture it by second-guessing
his flatware preferences.
"Newton," Hermann says, like the slide of a razor, sharp and slow.
The guy does not miss a thing.
Newt drinks some orange juice. "Hermann," he says, fifty percent touched, fifty percent creeped
out, and not really needing any additional stimuli that are going to tip him over into some utensil-
related trouble.
Hermann doesn't say anything else, probably because the guy is stressed and tired and about eight
thousand percent done with Newt and his mobile, old-school card-catalogue of active ongoing issues.
Newt does not blame the guy for that. Not at all.
Newt eyes his fork to the extent he can; it's sort of a poorly defined silver blur right now,
abandoned on the white haze of his plate.
Okay. He's going to make an executive decision about not questioning his initial fork-instinct here
and just leave it alone for right now, before he becomes too confused about his own mental
preferences to actually eat the rest of his breakfast. Because these pancakes do not deserve that. They
are exemplary in their consistency and ridiculously high caloric content and, most importantly, he is
something on the order of eighty percent sure that this meal is not going to make a reappearance.
Nope, these straight-up carbs are going directly into his straight-up recently neglected anabolic
pathways, repairing structures that need to be repaired, dragging his blood glucose level out of the
basement; he already feels warmer, he already feels less irritatingly shaky, he already feels sharper
than he's felt in days, probably, though he can't be entirely positive about that, he might be even more
of a genius when he's post-drift and post-benzos and postictal, he has no idea, but it's possible, he'll
have to ask Hermann when Hermann is less traumatized about the whole Newt-as-bureaucratic-victim
thing. Newt himself isn't that traumatized by it, at least not on a moral scale, it sounds about right to
him--large organizations that put collective good above individual good are often not to be trusted
when it comes to personal welfare or autonomy. On a literal scale, um, yes, alas, unfortunately one
could make a case for about eight different kinds of psychological trauma of the really unusual
variety, but that's fine, he's adaptable and able to turn off his own self-reflection like a light switch.
Sometimes. Like now. Yup, doing that.
"You okay, man?" Newt asks, not really timing his question and his pancake consumption
perfectly, in terms of etiquette or diction. "I mean, really?"
He's wanted to ask this one for a while, but it's hard to expect a decent answer to something like
this from the questionee when the questioner is doing something alarming like bleeding or throwing
up or appearing to cry while not actually crying; he wants the record to be very clear on that last
point there. But nothing alarming has happened for a good thirty minutes now, and Newt is feeling
awesome, and like maybe he can start participating in real discourse, which would be good for him,
but even better for Hermann. The man looks like he's rating about a negative eight on the Negative Ten
To Ten Scale. He's only making a halfhearted effort in the consumption of the perfectly appetizing
spinach omelette that's sitting in front of him. He looks exhausted and miserable and depressed, or
Newt is sure that's how he would look if Newt was capable of seeing the world in anything but the
most dim and blurry of ways. He can tell though, even without remotely adequate vision, he knows,
courtesy of a decade of shared experience and maybe a little bit courtesy of EPIC Rapport. He's
getting a powerful misery vibe from a guy who participated materially in world-saving and is about
to become the most famous mathematician at UC Berkeley. Newt gets that, yeah he does, there's a
giant vacuum in Hermann's personal and professional life, now that he's not allegorically whispering
in Computational Esperanto to decaying Jaegers and doing research that essentially amounts to
beating back death with progressively better metaphorical sticks constructed out of dwindling
resources.
"I am fine," Hermann says. "How are you feeling?"
Newt is feeling like invisible but not necessarily non-existent parties are trying to open his head
from the inside with sharp implements. Their preferred point of egress seems to be through his eyes,
considering the raging varieties of bilateral orbital and intraocular pain he's got going. Maybe they
can buy some kind of painkiller, or maybe he can just scrape the agonized goo formerly known as
sensory organs out of his eye sockets when Hermann isn't watching. The sunglasses thing is helping
him out, taking the screaming edge off his raging photosensitivity. Fortunately for Newt, he's a pretty
good visual guesser in predictable environments; this is partially courtesy of inherent skill and
partially courtesy of practice, given that he has a habit of taking his glasses off as much as is
evolutionarily permissible.
"Good," Newt says. "On a relative scale. Really awful on an absolute scale. Even my hair seems
to be contributing to my simultaneous headache variants." He shoves another forkful of triplicate
pancake wedges in his mouth and raises his eyebrows at Hermann. "That was an informative answer I
just gave you. Not only was it informative, it was accurate. Maybe you could think about doing some
kind of reciprocal information exchange here, where you tell me anything or engage with me in
actual, meaningful conversation rather than just misrepresenting your 'fineness', and my eventual
fineness, and your theory that sleeping will solve all of my problems, because it won't, dude, sleeping
is a problem creator, and I--"
His vocal chords decide to crap out on him.
Careful, his brain says, like a team player. Careful.
Newt breaks it off right there, because, because, he's just, he doesn't, he can't really, he's not
going to--look, the point is that he's built for this. He is literally built for exactly this. He is built for
finding food and eating it, he's built for resource conversion, signal transduction, environmental
analysis, and adaptation in the pursuit of survival. He is great at it. He is, in fact, so great that not
only can he do it for himself, he has, on one occasion so far, done it for his entire species, so yeah.
Suck it, anteverse.
He swallows, takes a deep breath, and says, "whatever, man, sleeping is giving in."
 "You are a nightmare," Hermann says, like an emotionally conflicted, confused, depressed wasp.
"Nah man, just your nightmare," Newt replies, the counter-waspishness he was aiming for turning
into weird innuendo, which is really the only kind of innuendo he's ever fully mastered or managed to
display, mostly when he doesn't want to be displaying anything of the kind. Whatever. He just goes
with it, following that statement up with a suggestive rearrangement of his eyebrows and, "come into
my dungeon, man, bring your twelve-sided die," in his most inappropriately lascivious whisper.
Hermann kicks his ankle beneath the table.
Newt manages to keep a straight face and take another bite of pancakes before favoring Hermann
with an unimpressed eyebrow lift/head shake combo that comes straight out of the Gottliebian
Catalogue of Facial Expressions he now has stored in his cerebellum.
Hermann sighs in a way that indicates he's not sure whether he should be impressed, upset, or
amused.
"Let's have it, dude," Newt says, gesturing with his fork, impatient with Hermann, with himself,
with his stupid throat and stupid eyes and stupid brain, and deciding that he is, in this instant, done
with Hermann's interpersonal attempt at generating some kind of protective, unnecessary, Leidenfrost
effect of the mind. "All the stuff. Let's go. You've been wanting to yell at me for days, I'm sure."
"Very true," Hermann admits, in clipped restraint, "but I have no plans to start now."
Newt finds this nearly impossible to take because it makes him feel like he's on the ledge he
knows he's on. Half-crazy, half-dead, one foot in the door of an annihilated portal, forever in need of
something that no longer exists on his planet because he orchestrated its destruction--
You idiot, his brain snarls.
Oh crap, he thinks, not certain where he is, oh god, he thinks, we're networked, we're networked,
we're networked, we're net worked. He's got the most capacity, he's slotting right into his role of cyan
cynosure, his sense of self begins to shred beneath the weight of linking, desperate anger and before
it pulls him under Newt wrenches the trajectory of his thoughts out of the oncoming, self-organizing
mess, Newt does that, Newt does it, he does it lacking any other option in total abject terror of the
alignments forming in his mind; rends himself straight out of reliving (or, oh god, recreating?) what
was done to him, because he wouldn't have--whatever that was--he wouldn't have--not him, he
wouldn't have done it, not if he hadn't had to; he tries to remember what it was that they had wanted to
know, the team that had fried his brain, they had wanted to rule something out, they must have done it,
they must have been successful because, in the end, they had let him go.
His hands snap shut--around the table, around his fork--and he is breathing very hard.
"You," Hermann says, quietly, distinctly, "are fine."
Yup, Newt agrees.
Nope, his brain chimes in.
Newt is a little too locked down to talk just yet, to do really anything other than sit here on top of
the powder keg that is his brain and the lit match that is his own adrenaline and try to keep those two
things from coming together in a catastrophic cognitive conflagration.
"We are in San Francisco," Hermann says, still quiet, sounding way calmer than the guy probably
feels, or, maybe not. Maybe relative to Newt's current state of raging panic anyone would sound
calm, and Hermann is freaking out right about now, "eating breakfast."
This is a terrible riff that Hermann is laying down, terrible because Newt appreciates it,
appreciates knowing, for sure, where he is to the extent that it's possible, to the extent that he can
differentiate actual sensory input from sensory input recalled and reproduced, terrible because he
thinks he remembers Hermann telling him things like this before in places he can only half remember.
 You are not doing very well, his brain observes. I think some epic weirdness might have gone
down before you left the PPDC. Don't start screaming.
Thanks, Newt replies.
"Following breakfast," Hermann says, "I propose that we procure some necessary personal items,
presuming you feel up to such an activity."
Newt cannot relax his jaw, he cannot unclench his hands that he has wrapped around the edge of
the table and his fork, cannot release the total body tetany that is holding him mostly still but for the
nearly imperceptible tremors of exhausted muscles restraining themselves with maximum effort in the
face of an onslaught of catecholamines.
"Then again, perhaps you don't," Hermann says, in a matter-of-fact way that Newt could just
worship him for right about now. "Perhaps later would be better."
Hermann knows what's going on, Hermann gets it--gets the scope of the minor disaster that is
Newt locking himself into total control post mystery memory and the scope of the major disaster that
is his mind locking into ports where it doesn't easily slot. Hermann's been plotting the borders of this
mess, Cartesian-style and carefully, for days now. Newt is way behind on this curve, so far behind
that he hasn't realized until this precise moment that Hermann hasn't asked him anything about what
happened to him, not one thing, other than, 'how much do you remember,' one time on their balcony,
and it hasn't, until right now, occurred to Newt that Hermann knows less than he does and yet has not
asked him, and frankly, yup, Newt has to give it to him that that decision was and is a pretty genius
call because even oblique references to that time when that thing that happened happened are plunging
him into something really unfortunate, and great, does this mean that his entire past decade of work is
just off the table as a topic of actual and mental discourse? That would be bad, that would be
extremely, just extremely, bad.
"I think," Newt says, and stops, not doing the best job with simultaneous breathing and talking.
"That if you w--" His jaw snaps shut in some kind of weird compensatory response to his left hand
loosening up on his fork, but then he tries again, and things smooth down. "If you want me to come
with you, we should go now. Post-pancakes, I mean."
He manages to peel his right hand away from the edge of the table, and then the rest of his
musculoskeletal system seems to fall in line behind hands and jaw and he can move again. He's fine.
Not really, but kind of.
At a first approximation he is.
First approximations suck though, as a general rule. Nuance fail. Accuracy fail. At a first
approximation the world looks flat, so, yeah, case in point, quod erat demonstrandum, drop the
chalk, flip over the table, he is done here. Newt has just discovered that this place where he is now
might nominally be San Francisco but it is also, experientially, First Approximation Hell (FAH). His
brain has put him here. Hermann's good judgment has put him here. And man but this is this going to
drive the pair of them batshit crazy because FAH is no place for scientists to hang around very long.
It's a little bit antithetical to the whole nature of scientific inquiry to avoid the pursuit of objective
truth. At least Hermann has had the sense to realize that they are where they are and keep dragging
Newt back inside the approximate bounds of his current mental and emotional capacity but Newt does
not like that, does not like it at all; he determines his own course, thanks, and if Newt wants to claw
his way from first approximations to second ones he will, when he wants, maybe later, because even
Dr. Newton Geiszler of the sub-par brain and the bilateral migraine is smart enough to put that off
until he isn't in public.
"How do you feel?" Hermann asks, for the eight hundred thousandth time, probably because he
wants a real answer almost as much as Newt does when he asks the same question, reversed.
Probably he deserves one, given all the restraint he's been displaying and good decisions he's been
making, but Newt isn't totally sure how to go about answering in a meaningful way, not now, not yet,
not over pancakes, yeah, that would probably be a bad idea.
"Um," Newt says, pushing the bounds of first-approximating into something like three-halves-
approximating, "I think that my brain might be trying to freak out about something it only partially
remembers."
"Yes," Hermann says, meeting him at the three halves mark. "I'm certain you're correct about that."
"Not really sure how this is going to go," Newt confesses, in what turns out to be a passably
conversational tone, finally.
"Yes," Hermann says, in an equally passable conversational tone. "That is life, I suppose. But I
would advise against equating your current system state with a future one."
"I would never," Newt whispers. You wouldn't let me, is what he doesn't say, please don't let me.
"Good," Hermann says, resolutely taking another bite of his omelette.
"What are you doing dude?" Newt asks, not knowing himself what he means, exactly, by posing
the question, knowing it's something profound, knowing it's something so weighed down it's broken
loose from everything he'd like to burden it with because he'd tied a rock to a jet plane with the
verbal equivalent of an old and brittle rubber band, and yeah, the link between question and intent
snaps under next to no tension, and he is useless sometimes, god, but, even so, he manages to relax his
shoulders, shift his position, and pick his fork up because he is eating these pancakes, for sure--they
are delicious and eating is necessary.
"I'm sure I don't know," Hermann replies. "My thought processes are not entirely my own at the
present moment."
"Geiszler'd," Newt says, with deep and profound sympathy.
"Indeed," Hermann replies.
"This is the worst for you, dude," Newt says.
"I prefer it to death," Hermann replies pointedly.
"Meh," Newt says, noncommittal, not sure whether Hermann means his own death via
consumption by kaiju or Newt's hypothetical death post drift number two, which, had it happened,
likely would have also included Hermann's kaiju-mediated death at a later date. "That doesn't mean it
doesn't suck," he says, with all the chivalrous empathy he can scrape together pre-dawn and post-
panic.
"There are compensations," Hermann says, "as you pointed out earlier."
Yup.
Earlier.
By 'earlier' Hermann evidently means when Newt had woken up out of an amorphous nightmare
he doesn't remember to find that Hermann had decided that bed sharing was now a thing that was
happening? Newt likes to think that the rationale for that particular decision has more to do with
Hermann's insomniac loneliness meeting the general interpersonal camaraderie of communal sleeping
and less because Hermann had decided that Newt needed it for some reason. No matter the specific
rationale, it's going to be a little hard for Hermann to justify beneath the painful glare of twenty-four
hour fluorescence. He owes the guy a ridiculous amount of slack and so he won't inquire about the
bed-thing just now.
"You," Newt says, with a passably coordinated fork-flourish in Hermann's general direction, "are
enjoying my biological knowledge. Don't even lie to me about that."
 "I am finding it useful," Hermann says, "if only in interpreting you in retrospect. I'm not sure what
your post-drift experience has been, but personally--" Hermann stops.
Like a jerk.
"Oh no," Newt says. "No no no. You are finishing that sentence, dude."
"We should discuss this later," Hermann replies.
"Here's a thing you may not know," Newt says, shoving more pancakes into his mouth, even though
he's less excited about the eating thing than he had been about twenty minutes ago, "though I'm not sure
why you wouldn't, because you've known me for a decade, and last week you shared my brain, but
this thing that you are doing? It is driving me crazy. I get why you're doing it. I get that I'm a
neurological disaster in a black box right now, but honestly, dude, honestly, if you keep shutting me
down--"
"Shutting you--" Hermann half shouts the words and then shuts himself down and reboots in
whisper mode. "Shutting you down?" he hisses, sounding a little more upset than Newt can easily
explain. "Shutting you down?"
"Or," Newt begins, layering extreme reasonableness overtop alarmed tonal contingency within the
span of a single syllable.
"You have no idea how difficult it was to rescue you from your own stupidity, let alone whatever
might have previously been or whatever might currently be happening in your mind--"
"Okay," Newt says, "I get it, I--"
"--you horrifying, miserable excuse for a scientist--"
"Horrifying? Seriously, dude? Horrifying?"
"--is it too much to ask that you spend twenty-four hours in quiet, limited, self-reflection and
enjoy the fact that you managed to contribute significantly to averting a catastrophe on a global scale,
rather than pushing yourself past the point of your own ability to cope because you're bored, because
you have no self-restraint, because when you're unoccupied you take apart the most interesting thing in
your immediate vicinity and right now that is, unfortunately, your own cognitive architecture and
possibly mine as well?"
"Okay, I guess that's fair as far as it goes but--"
"I am not finished, Newton," Hermann hisses. "You are irresponsible. Flagrantly so. You make
rash decisions without fully considering their implications. Everything you do in every sphere of your
life is aimed at rocking whatever dominant paradigms you decide have suspect foundational bases
and are able to be pushed straight to crisis for no other reason than you enjoy dismantling things of
flawed design."
"I never pictured you as a Thomas Kuhn 'groupie'," Newt snaps, rolling his final 'r' egregiously.
He's not liking where this is going, and he's starting a derailment campaign.
"I'm not," Hermann snarls, "that's you."
"You're welcome," Newt replies through clenched teeth, "you logical positivist."
"I'm not grateful." Hermann says, talking over him. "Incommensurability, as a concept, is worthy
of ridicule. Shut up for two minutes if you're capable of doing so, which I very much doubt. You--"
"You should be grateful," Newt says, managing to brute-force intercalate his own words into
Hermann's accelerating philippic. "I'll stake the entirety of my personal assets that your problem with
Kuhn stems from your own onanistic, objectivist, fantasies about absolute truth--"
"I do not wish to discuss The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," Hermann continues, leaning
forward, managing to overpower Newt by freakishly intent hissing. "I want to know if your
perception of the past week approximates anything remotely akin to what actually happened to you. I
want to know if you have any objective idea of what you're capable of doing to yourself if you turn
the full force of your intellect on your own mind. I want to know if you have any awareness at all of
how astronomically ironic it is to accuse me of 'shutting you down,' when really I have been doing
absolutely everything in my power to prevent exactly that."
Okay, so Newt is going to need to adjust his assessment of what's happening here, because, nope,
it hadn't been obvious to him until about thirty seconds ago, but Hermann is having his own breakfast
freak out session, immediately post and possibly related to Newt's breakfast freak-out session. That's
what's happening.
"Hermann," he says, lifting a hand, trying to cool things down in an uncomfortable inversion of
every instinct he has.
Newt isn't sure he's ever defused anything before in his life, literally or metaphorically.
But he's trying now, apparently.
"I would like nothing better than to listen to your unique mix of specious and insightful conjecture
on any number of topics that currently materially affect us, but that is a terrible idea, Newton,
terrible. I'm not sure whether you've realized this yet or not but you--"
"Hermann," Newt says, making an impressively accurate grab for Hermann's nearest wrist.
"Chill."
"Do not tell me to 'chill'," Hermann snaps, somehow even more furious, temporarily loosing his
ability to speak and yanking his wrist from beneath Newt's tenuous grip.
First effort at conflict mediation ranks you a D minus, his brain says. If he flips over this table,
you've totally failed, and also ruined his brain. Definitively.
"Okay," Newt says. "Good call, I could see that being annoying, coming from me, but I get it, man,
I do. I get more than you're giving me credit for, actually. Look. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I--"
"Newton, if you apologize to me even one more time I will drown you in the Pacific."
"Um--" Newt says, entirely at a loss.
Yeah, I've got nothing, his brain admits. We're failing abysmally at this.
Hermann stews in aggrieved silence.
Newt also stews in silence, except his is more grimly contemplative than aggrieved, trying to
figure out what exactly it is that Hermann is freaking out about in the abstract and also in detail, and
turning up the usual array of suspects--death, bureaucratic violence, Newt being an idiot,
disorganization both in his world and in his brain--and, finally, just silently wishing for his glasses,
because visual cues wouldn't hurt, wouldn't go amiss in this current scenario, no they would not.
He tries not to fidget.
He tries hard.
He fails.
Really, Newt is only capable of waiting so long.
"Specious," Newt says, dialing his indignation down as far as it will go, which is not as far down
as one might assume. "Really, dude?"
"On occasion," Hermann replies with stiff dignity.
They spend a beat looking at one another, which is unfair, since Newt can't see.
"Uh huh," Newt says, doing some squinting, which doesn't really help him out. It hurts a lot, that's
about all he can say for it.
He is doing a crap job assessing how upset Hermann might or might not be.
"Stop that," Hermann says, twenty seconds into the tragically useless squinting.
"I'm literally sitting here in silence," Newt snaps.
 "Stop trying to see," Hermann replies, sounding like he's ramping down his freak-out curve.
"You stop trying to see," Newt replies, deciding to test the downtrend of Hermann's freak-out by
perturbing the system a little bit.
It's not his best work, but after a few seconds of approximating, he manages to grab Hermann's
coffee cup in one quick motion and not knock anything over in the process.
"Do not--"
Newt takes a measured sip of stolen coffee. It's bitter, clean, unadulterated, rating about a six
point five on the Negative Ten to Ten Coffee Quality Scale, perfectly complementing his chocolate
chip pancakes, redolent of innocent addiction and headache reduction. He can feel his blood vessels
constricting everywhere in anticipation of relief that they're not going to get.
Hermann yanks the cup out of his hand, and Newt lets him do it.
"Do not do that again," Hermann says.
"I am literally going to do that once per day until such a point that you either stop drinking coffee
in front of me like an insensitive bastard, or Hypothetical Rain clears me for significant caffeine
consumption. Besides, you deserved it. 'Specious'. I don't think so. I am also vetting you as a potential
roommate right now, just so you know. If you won't let me drink your coffee, I foresee about eight
thousand other problems."
"You have been drinking my coffee for approximately nine years," Hermann replies dryly, "in
clustered, irregular intervals. I will never cease demanding that you desist, no matter our housing
situation. It is not sanitary."
Newt infers from Hermann's return to baseline arid disdain that he is one hundred percent
forgiven for unfairly implying that Hermann is somehow a subpar life partner.
This may or may not be true.
The forgiveness part.
Not the subpar part.
Everyone is on par here.
"So," Newt says, "it seems you have a quarter-cup of contaminated coffee of mediocre quality. I
could take that off your hands for a negligible neural cost to myself, I'm sure."
Hermann picks up the ceramic mug in blurred deliberation and drinks the rest of his coffee.
Newt stares at him, mouth slightly open, wishing fruitlessly for his glasses so that he could be
sure that what he was seeing was really what he was seeing, because he's pretty sure there's got to be
some mistake. "Did you just--" he breaks off, too incredulous to find a way to end his sentence. "I
don't think I like this," he says, giving up and starting afresh. "I think I feel about this the way you
would feel if I showed up at work wearing a thrift-store sweater, or shelving my books by descending
height from left to right, or not even that, more like--"
"Quiet," Hermann says, in a way that's suddenly tense, suddenly understated, suddenly carrying an
unmistakable eau de us-versus-Them.
Newt stops talking.
Briefly.
"What?" he whispers.
"Nothing," Hermann says, in a way that doesn't mean nothing at all.
"What kind of nothing," Newt demands.
"We appear to be a part of the morning news cycle," Hermann says.
"There's a television in here?" Newt asks, making a well-founded assumption.
"Behind you," Hermann confirms.
 Newt twists, and, sure enough, there's maybe a widescreen TV that he can barely see and had
previously labeled as 'people' or, 'a window' or 'people in a window'. So sue him, he's not actually
that interested in what he can't really see, at least when it comes to inventorying the interior detail of
a perpetually open diner. But apparently it's a television, and apparently currently featuring him.
That's cool.
"No," Hermann murmurs, "it is in no way 'cool'."
Seriously, what. The hell.
He definitely hadn't said that aloud.
Right?
I'm not sure, his brain says, weighing in. For all your commendable surface sass, I'm not sure
how together you actually are, champ.
He will spend time considering how empirically supportable this Hermann-reading-minds
conjecture is at a later point. Right now, he is slightly more interested in his apparent fame. He
doesn't hear anything that sounds like the continuous journalistic masturbation of the twenty-four hour
news cycle, so presumably the TV is muted. He finds this vexing. He stares at it for a moment longer,
wishes again for his sinful, tempting glasses, and then turns around, because really, this is worse than
useless.
"Well what are they saying about us?" Newt asks.
"Based on the text and visuals," Hermann replies, "I would say that they appear to be curious
about why we immediately departed Hong Kong and have failed to make ourselves available for
interviews and other--" Hermann breaks off.
"What?" Newt hisses.
"That's--unfortunate," Hermann says.
"Hermann, you are literally killing me, here. I'm loosing brain cells and cardiac tissue in
frustrated anticipation. Let's go. Use your words. Start talking."
"It's nothing," Hermann says, sounding like he's being strangled. "This particular news outlet
appears to have obtained some footage from the Hong Kong international airport, and you look, we
look--we look quite--memorable. Based on the text accompanying the image they've chosen to
display, well they appear to be speculating on the etiology behind our sudden departure from the
PPDC and your appearance on the footage."
"I haven't heard you describe something that poorly and euphemistically since--"
"Is that you guys?"
It's their waitress, but she's close and standing outside Newt's limited visual field, so Newt
twitches so violently that dishware clinks and the waitress immediately says, "Sorry!" either in
response to Newt nearly sending breakable objects to the floor or to Hermann leveling a steely glare
in her direction, which is what he assumes is happening, though he can't say that's the case with
absolute certainty, because he can't see.
"No," Hermann says, maximally steely, but also probably suffering eye-contact fail because he
needs work in the deception department and always will. "I assure you that we are not those people."
The guy is way overdoing it in terms of vehemence, getting himself into a the-lady-doth-protest-too-
much situation.
"Nope," Newt says, with what would have been calculated nonchalance if he'd managed to
deliver it a little more off the cuff and a little less like someone recently resuscitated post drowning.
"Totes not us."
"Okay," the waitress replies, long and slow.
 "Check please," Hermann says, clipped and fast.
"No charge," the waitress says, just enough of a screw-you twist in her voice to call the pair of
them on their bullshit. Newt likes her immediately. San Fran is full of cool people. Okay, well, he's
two-for-two, Hypothetical Rain and Soprano Waitress.
"Unacceptable," Hermann says, sounding flustered.
"Thanks, bro," Newt says, managing to sound less flustered and crack an asymmetric smile while
looking at the indistinct outline of the woman holding what is probably a coffee pot.
"It's Flow, actually," the waitress says.
"Get out of here," Newt says. "Your name is not Flo."
"Maybe, maybe not. Either way, it's 'Flow' with a 'w'," Possibly Flow says. "More coffee?"
"I'm afraid we must be going," Hermann says, standing. "Thank you."
"Thank you," the waitress replies.
"For what, even?" Newt asks, displaying maximal casual charm coupled with minimal suave
motor control as Hermann takes his elbow and helps him to his feet because Newt can't really see,
can't really easily unclamp on the things he's clamped down on, can't really say for sure which of the
blurred boxes in his vision might be the door, but if he had to guess, he's pretty sure he'd guess right.
Usually he does.
Chapter End Notes
Chapter-specific citations: Newt quotes Bertrand Russell ("predicates not predicable of
themselves"), The Arcade Fire ("sleeping is giving in") and bastardizes a Hamlet reference ("the
lady doth protest too much").
Chapter 14
The rear wall of the hotel elevator is a mirror, bisected horizontally by a narrow silver handrail.
Across its base, etched in frosted glass, is a stylized representation of the sea.
Hermann doesn't care for it.
Not at all.
He is, however, so exhausted, post-breakfast and post-shopping, that he leans against the dark
paneling of the orthogonal wall, wedging himself into a corner, his bad leg braced against the cool
surface of the mirror. The lateral border of his shoe presses against frosted waves.
His shoe.
The sea.
It's a juxtaposition inappropriately absorbing, and he feels an echo in his mind of something not
his own, something not derived from Newton, something else, something from a half-remembered
dream, from the fading neural echo of a drift that should have never come to pass.
What happens to a fraction of a hive mind?
He hears the question in Newton's most unnerving turn of offhand revelation, but when he glances
over at the other man, Newton's eyes are on the unlit panel near the sliding door, and Hermann's
almost certain that there's been nothing said aloud.
He is tired.
He is, in fact, so exhausted he can barely interpret the anxious hiss of thoughts forming and dying
beneath the too-sharp edges of his current sensory experience.
"Little help here?" Newton asks. He sounds strained. Impatient. Perhaps frustrated. In short, he
currently sounds nothing like his semi-permanent avatar who has begun to make a habit of posing
interesting questions in Hermann's mind.
The elevator door slides shut.
"Sometime this century?" Newton says.
Belatedly, it occurs to Hermann that his colleague cannot read the wall display at which he is
currently staring. Hermann gives the other man a gentle swat with his cane to encourage his relocation
in a propitious direction before he hits the correct floor with a well-placed jab.
Newton folds against the wall in a manner that is vaguely petulant and shoots Hermann an
uninspired glare, the full, burning wattage of which is substantially filtered by Hermann's own
sunglasses. Newton must realize the fruitless nature of glowering behind tinted glass, because after
only a few seconds he gives up and tips his head back, his hair audibly crunching against the wall as
he says, "do you think they wanted to eat me?"
"What?" Hermann snaps at him, startled, shoving down, shoving back, the memory of darkness, of
cracking stone above a crowded room, of an empty space around him that feels dangerous, if only
because it has been created by collective terror.
Newton looks at him, startled.
Hermann feels confused and guilty, his mind a haze of disordered feedback loops. He's not sure
where the moral high ground lies here--is it with him, a victim of elicited mnemonic hell, or is it with
Newton, whose memories these are?
"As in, for food," Newton explains, short, stressed, and dismissive. He pushes away from the
wall, shifts his weight to one leg and then starts what appears to be a purposeful tremor in the
contralateral foot.
 "The kaiju?" Hermann asks, ninety-eight percent certain that this a subject to be avoided at all
costs, given that the idiot man has accidentally talked himself into four episodes of silent, disoriented
panic, and seems to be in the process of commencing attempt number five. Hermann's not certain what
in god's name he thinks he's accomplishing. Could he be mapping the borders of his mental degrees of
freedom, like a child with a toothache, or a subpar undergraduate calculating a chi-squared test
statistic? Is he failing to learn from past experience? Is he purposefully ignoring past experience in
some attempt at intrapersonal control by staging pitched battles between his prefrontal cortex and his
sympathetic nervous system?
Hermann has no idea.
"What other things do you know of that might, realistically, have tried to eat me recently?"
Newton snaps, adjusting Hermann's sunglasses, still fidgeting.
"Yesterday, you asked me if your eyes were made of sand," Hermann replies in frustrated,
elliptical caution, trying to steer their conversation away from the kaiju. "So you will excuse me if I
ask for clarification."
"Did I really?" Newton asks, swinging the bag of miscellaneous items he holds against the wall of
the elevator for no reason at all that Hermann can discern, aside from his baseline instinct for
demolition. "Ugh. Was I, by any chance, super insightful while drugged? Because I could see things
shaking out that way when my brain declutches. You know. Gear shift of the self?"
Hermann raises an eyebrow at that turn of phrase, but it is wasted because Newton is not looking
at him.
"You were not," Hermann says, quite truthfully. "I had a great deal of difficulty conversing with
you, as you displayed only intermittent and partial insight into what was occurring around you, let
alone the capacity for abstract thought."
Hermann does not add that those brief moments of unconventionally expressed insight had been
singularly difficult to hear, difficult to respond to, stripped as they were of any of their typical
fractious disputation. He does not add that he likes Newton best with every layer of his defenses
intact and aligned because then Hermann can have his own defenses in place as well. His defenses
are better than Newton's, if only because he needs his more.
Given Newton's currently fluctuating psychological fortifications, Hermann is primarily
equalizing their intellectual footing by omission. He is having mixed success with this strategy,
primarily because Newton has now noticed it and is, of course, finding it irritating.
But, in the vernacular, Newton can 'deal'.
The elevator slides open, revealing a fluorescently-lit hall.
Hermann pushes himself away from the sea-scored mirror as Newton waves him forward, one
boot pressed against the recessed doors.
"That's disappointing," Newton says philosophically, one hand trailing along the wall as they
proceed down the hallway. "I expect better of my brain, even under duress."
Hermann is, frankly, astounded that Newton is alive, let alone arguably compos mentis.
"I do not," he replies dryly.
"Well you're the irrationally pessimistic one," Newton says. "I'm the visionary. Everyone knows
that."
"The one with visions, perhaps," Hermann replies, unlocking their hotel room door with the wave
of an RFID card. "But that is not the same thing."
"It's nice to know that no matter what horrible psychological problems I end up with post-drifting,
at least I can count on you to be an acerbic ass about them," Newton says, cocking his head at the
planar surface of the desk before sweeping a pile of hard-drives aside with the careful imprecision of
the glassesless. He deposits his bag of miscellaneous items on the desk. "That's comforting, Hermann,
thank you. Thank you so much."
"I am the first to admit, I am extremely ill-qualified for every aspect of what is happening here,"
Hermann replies, hooking his cane over the back of the desk chair. "Especially reassuring you
regarding your current array of--challenges."
"I don't need reassurance, man," Newton says. "My life is pretty awesome right now."
Hermann half-collapses into a sitting position on the nearest bed.
Newton follows suit in a fashion that is slightly more overstated, if only because his motor control
is unfortunately underpowered. He belatedly checks his own momentum with a hand on Hermann's
shoulder before he ends up horizontal. "Magnificence," he says, in ambiguous annotation.
Hermann sighs.
"That's a tag. For you," Newton continues. "For your job. Your job that you're feeling crap about.
Like the insane perfectionist you are. You rescued me, dude. You rescued me. From a Kafka novel,
basically."
"That is absolutely false," Hermann snaps. "I disingenuously removed you from a voluntary
collaboration to which you should never have consented. I then prevented its transition to something
compulsory."
"Hermann. You are literally repeating what I just said, using different, less exciting words. I have
never gone up against bureaucracy and won. They screw you every time, man. I haven't gotten a raise
since 2017."
"Really?" he asks, abruptly distracted. As soon as Newton points it out, Hermann can remember
it, but the idea still seems odd to him, given that he has received a raise every year while in PPDC
employ. He'd never been terribly enthusiastic about his salary keeping pace with inflation, since the
world was likely going to end, making the accrual of resources pointless, but--
God he must be exhausted.
"That is hardly germane," he snaps, trying not to blame Newton for the tangential behavior of his
own brain.
"You asked. My point is--this is a better outcome than I ever thought I'd get. So um. You know.
Thanks."
Hermann stares at the ceiling, wishing that Newton would stop thanking him.
"You should have told me what you were going to do. What you were doing," he says, clipped and
stiff, trying not to let Newton's inappropriate, intolerable gratitude be the catalyst that transforms
days of anxiety into a solid wall of misdirected rage.
"There was nothing to tell," Newton says, his hand tightening on Hermann's shoulder.
Hermann is certain he has never hated anyone as much as he hates Dr. Newton Geiszler in this
precise moment.
"What were you going to do?" Newton continues, atypically quiet, atypically considerate, and in
exceptionally typical unawareness of his position at the vertex of intersecting trajectories of
Hermann's deeply personal miseries. "Advertise your complicity in the whole thing? Document your
hivemind exposure in excruciating detail so that, maybe, they'd let you stand in for me? More than you
already had? You're an idiot."
"We could have discussed it," Hermann begins, his throat closing. "We might have--"
"I know," Newton says, now unmistakably conciliatory. "But I didn't think you were going to let
me get my own way, so I took advantage of my recently upped intellectual street cred and made a
unilateral decision, which, again, turned out to be a good one."
"Is that what you'd call this," Hermann hisses, but still, even now, not angry enough to ask him
what happened. "A 'good' outcome?"
"No," Newton says. "I would call it an epic, sweeping win on behalf of our species."
Hermann looks away.
Perhaps Newton is right. What is the peace of mind, the sanity, the life expectancy of a single,
idiot biologist when considered in the context of a decade of death and terror and desperation, the
spending of lives and resources, the building of Walls, and the blending of minds?
Nothing of consequence.
But.
Hermann cannot quite make himself see it that way.
He had wanted to 'win' without resorting to Newton's clairvoyant closing gambit.
He had wanted to win by using the Jaegers, by mapping the breach, even by building a Wall of
infinite potential energy. He had wanted to win with anything but Newton's insane plan to make
himself the fulcrum of an attempt to leverage a wartime advantage across dimensions.
"Yes," Hermann manages. "Yes, you're quite right."
"Oh god," Newton rasps, one hand coming to press against his chest. "Hermann. Please. Give a
guy some warning."
"I beg your pardon?" Hermann says, twisting to look at him, mystified and slightly alarmed.
"You can't just call me right; you can't just pull this surprise validation out of thin air and expect
me to--oh my god, is it hot in here? Like, do you feel hot, possibly? I'm going to lie down." Newton
gives up on whatever battle he is fighting with his core muscles and collapses back onto the bed. "I
feel light-headed, slightly. I feel strangely turned on and also really awful at the same time. I think I--"
"Shut up," Hermann snaps, without any fondness at all, whatsoever, in any way, shape, or form.
"That would be unfair to the world, though," Newton says, struggling to sit. "This was a bad
decision. Why did I lie down? I'm pretty sure my muscles have been replaced with lactic acid. I
literally can barely use them."
Hermann rolls his eyes and pulls the other man up by his blazer.
"I can't believe you chose this blazer over my leather jacket, by the way. I like that jacket. I look
like a shameless pretentious hipster, rather than a cool, edgy hipster. The demographic of this blazer
and denim combo is not my demographic. It's not yours either. You just--assigned me to a new
demographic and I don't like it. I don't want--I don't want to be here I--"
Newton snaps the end off his increasingly brittle monologue.
"You burned that jacket," Hermann says gently. "The day after."
"I know," Newton says, not looking at him. "I remember."
Hermann nods.
"It was not a lucky jacket," Newton says.
"On the contrary, it was an extremely 'lucky' jacket," Hermann replies dryly. "It was however,
also a ruined jacket, and I do nothing but commend your instinct to incinerate your contaminated
clothing."
"Yeah," Newton says, "though that might have been your influence. It's hard to tell. It wasn't really
a typical day."
"I suggest you avoid excessive analysis at the present time," Hermann says.
"Noted, dude," Newton says. "Already in practice. Like, for example, I am not questioning the
why of my loss of fine motor control, or my crappy smooth pursuit when it comes to visual tracking.
I'm assuming that there will be a time that my musculoskeletal system starts taking orders from my
brain again. Kind of makes you wonder what exactly--" he breaks off, both hands coming up, his skin
blanching, his breathing a sudden, shallow struggle.
"You are fine," Hermann says for the fourth time that morning, his hand closing around Newton's
elbow, right above the joint.
More than anything he wants to know what it is that Newton is experiencing in these moments. Is
he panicking? Is he having an immersive mnemonic experience? Is it something else?
"You are fine," Hermann says, lying to him, lying to him. Possibly. Possibly lying to him. He
doesn't know.
He wonders if it's possible, neurologically, for Newton to get lost in his own mind, to become
mired in some pathologic circuit that should not be there, that does not belong, that should never have
been laid down.
"You are fine," Hermann says, shaking him gently. "We are in San Francisco. In a hotel room. We
had a disconcertingly gratis breakfast."
He has no idea if Newton is processing any of this.
"We then went shopping. You made a memorable impression on literally every single human being
we crossed paths with, despite my advice to the contrary."
"Yeah," Newton manages after several more seconds. "No, I know. I'm--I get it."
"Do you know--" Hermann realizes mid-question that what he is about to ask is a terrible idea. He
breaks his phrase in half and restarts his sentence. "Do you find it helpful if I orient you?" he asks,
leaving the context implied, hoping Newton will say 'no', hoping that they'll both believe it.
"Yeah," Newton says, looking resolutely at the opposite wall. "Maybe a little."
Hermann nods, trying recast this as progress of some kind. Of any kind.
The more that comes to light, the less he's going to like it. Of that much, he is quite sure.
From the moment he'd predicted the timing of the triple event, he'd known that his life would be
abjectly, acutely miserable for the foreseeable future, and, while he is now grateful that he's not in
danger of being consumed by a kaiju, he had hit that particular forecast straight on the proverbial
head.
Breakfast had been awful.
Subsequent shopping had been worse.
He'd known it would be, of course, but he'd also known that he was not capable of leaving
Newton alone in a San Francisco hotel room for even a minimal amount of time while he purchased a
toothbrush and analgesics. Not today. Not right now. Absolutely not. Entirely out of the question.
Insupportable. One hundred percent unthinkable in theory and in practice.
"What is wrong with you?" Newton asks, in faintly puzzled irritation. "Something is wrong with
you."
Hermann tries to bury the urge to vent his frustration in one of many innumerable and equally
unfortunate ways, but it is difficult.
Newton is unforgivably stupid at times. Hermann could contend with that, could accept it as a
given and work around it, if only it were always true. Alas, it is not, and so he can't.
"And you know I mean that in the nicest way," Newton continues.
Newton is, in part, correct.
There are many things 'wrong with him' at the present time.
Hermann has no urge to start concatenating.
The entirety of his unrest reduces down to that which has always troubled him in one form or
another--the shuttering of insight in the face of poorly defined bias. Ironically, it bothers him now in
Newton, who, in the span of a week, has escaped Hermann's admittedly flawed estimation of him (as
a tangle of compensatory blindnesses) only to be revealed, intra-drift, as the eidetic empiricist with
prodigious predictive capacity and a tendency to swing at conceptual fences he had always been,
before being caught in a web of probable neural damage that Hermann doesn't think he's fully capable
of perceiving.
You think something is wrong with me? Hermann nearly shouts at him. Something is wrong with
you. Do you understand that?
"Nicely," Newton says, with a strange mixture of condescension and anxiety. "I meant it nicely.
Also respectfully. Did I mention respectfully?"
Hermann despises bias.
He despises incomplete insight.
He sees both of these in Newton now--in his appropriation of Descartes and Riemann zeros, in
the way he offers to pull Hermann out of a sinking boat and straight into the water with the absolute
sincerity of a man who doesn't understand he's drowning.
Hermann can only guess at the edges of his own insight.
Perhaps this is what Newton means when he says that something's wrong.
"I literally cannot tell if you are trying not to freak out or trying not to yell at me," Newton says.
"Can you say something maybe? Like--which way are you leaning? Panic or pique, dude, come on,
you're making me nervous. Pick one."
The unparsable distress he's feeling breaks against the wall of his own exhaustion.
Nothing will ever clarify for him again.
Not like it once had.
Numbers, equations, the semiotics of the civilized mind--these can be misinterpreted, there are
places they cannot go, there are unsolvable problems, there are limits to confidence intervals, there
are boundaries on predictive power imposed by sensitive dependence of initial conditions. Even so,
mathematics is consistent with itself. It is the solid interior revealed at the hearts of physical laws that
have had their phenomenological skin opened and peeled back.
Mathematics, understood perfectly, would allow for a shucking of all deceptions the human mind
perpetrates against itself.
One can only be betrayed by one's flawed understanding. One can be betrayed by it, driven mad
by it, tortured by it endlessly. How he would like to divorce himself from his biology--from this
inadequate chunk of tissue through which he's forced to interface with the world. It's his only
interface. And it is flawed. Flawed by the vagaries of natural selection. Flawed by its physical
limitations. Flawed by its solipsism and its base links to primitive responses, to the terror that turns
on like a spigot as it tries to teach him that which he already knows, to the concept of shame, which is
built in simply to improve odds of survival by conformity to social norms. He doesn't like it. He's
never liked it. And now he likes it less. It's full of glitches and incompatibilities.
"Hermann," Newton shouts, directly in his ear.
Hermann flinches, fixes Newton with is most overtly wroth-filled glare and snarls, "yes," with as
much energy as total exhaustion and abject misery will grant him. "Very astute. There's always been
something wrong with me."
"Oh for the love," Newton replies, looking at the ceiling in vexatious relief.
Hermann has no idea what that incomplete phrase might imply. His improved insight into
Newton's disorganized consciousness extends only so far.
 "What the hell was that?" Newton says, clearly referring to Hermann's brief period of acute
existential agony.
"I've always suspected that my brain, as an interface with reality, was deeply flawed. Now it is,
unquestionably, post your influence, more flawed than ever."
"Thanks," Newton says dryly. "But you realize you're doing my thing right now, right? It's like, the
anti-hedge. It's the paralipsis defense. Run awaaay from the hedging down a paraliptical rhetorical
path. I wonder if I can do your thing? The hedge you into a hedge garden thing? Do people even have
gardens of hedges? Would that just be a maze?"
"You know," Hermann says, "it would improve my mood a great deal if you would make an effort
to enunciate and direct your train of thought to the extent you're capable of doing so because I spent
the better part of a day concerned that you had lost touch with reality and might never regain it."
"So hedging it is," Newton says.
"I do not hedge," Hermann replies. "As we discussed last week, that is not a rhetorical device
that I ever employ."
"So you want what?" Newton asks. "You have to want something for me to hedge for you, that's
how it works, Hermann, do you seriously not get hedging, as a concept, or are you just pretending not
to get it in some display of misdirected virtue?"
"Allow me to clarify things for you. I do not want you to hedge anything, Newton."
"You want a perfect brain," Newton says. "Understandable. I totally get that, maybe a little too
well right now. But you can only have a perfect, unbiased view of the nature of reality if you can
abstract yourself from it, which is impossible. You'll always be limited by your hardware. By the
traversable surfaces of your interior eurhythmic architecture. By your resources."
"I know that," Hermann replies. "I have, in fact, always known it."
"No kidding. You put your money down on the purely theoretical horse before you'd seen the real
thing," Newton continues.
Hermann rolls his eyes.
"Do not roll your eyes at me, you prosaic bastard; you committed fully to the quantitative and the
abstract at about age eight, man, and that's because no one ever cast physiology for you as anything
more than an enemy--a barrier to be overcome."
This is becoming slightly too personal for Hermann's taste, a sentiment he views with the self-
aware irony that it deserves, given that he's in possession of Newton's entire mnemonic landscape
circa one week previous.
"Isn't it?" Hermann asks dryly. "I thought you, of all people, would have particular insight into
that."
"I'm sure I don't know what you mean," Newton says, with a strange trace of familiar and foreign
stiffness in the tilt of his head, the line of his jaw. "My brain and I are a team, thank you. Stop taking a
chainsaw to my hedging job. I'm not doing this for me, dude. I'm not doing this for my amusement."
"What are you doing?" Hermann asks. "Because I'm sure I don't know."
"Demonstrating academic solidarity?" Newton replies. "Role reversal? Being nice to you,
because it has not escaped my notice that you have been extremely nice to me?"
"Only because I pointed it out to you," Hermann snaps.
"No one's perfect, okay? Look, I will explain in a less implicit way. You're upset because your
brain is a mess, and that's my fault in at least three ways. You say, 'Newton, I've decided to drop my
Victorian-era demeanor and sensibilities and confess to you that I want Thing A, where Thing A is my
brain returning to its former status as a fine-ass example of well organized, well ordered,
intrapersonal control'. Context wise, Thing A is tied up in your long history of wishing you could
exchange your brain for hardware that's a little less inherently limited and your acute history of
tragically scrambling said brain with two other parties. You know that you're not getting Thing A, not
really, but you want it so much that you're not going to qualify thing A for yourself, you're just going to
let it piss you off endlessly. I, impersonating baseline-you--are you following this, dude? It's
confusing and you look tired. Okay, based on the look I am getting, I assume your answer is yes.
Continuing. So, I hedge for you by presenting Idea B, which is that divorcing yourself from the
architecture of your own consciousness is not only impossible but also meaningless, because you are
your neural architecture, your entire experience derives from it, you have to drag it around and make
it do what you want. I also hedge for you by presenting Idea C, which is that even though your
perception of the world is flawed, we live in a universe of reproducible phenomena which permits
the idea of absolute truth, at least in certain arenas. Yeah, you'll never claw your way to a privileged
frame of reference--so what, man? There's something nice, something comforting, about the equality
of observers. So you suck at having adequate self-insight right now. Big deal. Because, guess what,
dude, you always sucked at it. You just didn't know how much you sucked. Now you know. Now you
can really tell. Because you know what I know. About your brain. And how it's a little bit of a
traitorous bastard most of the time."
"And that's what you think this is?" Hermann asks. "Some kind of quixotic quest to find a superior
mental reference frame? I hardly think we're in an inertial state."
"You are the worst," Newton says. "That might have been one of my sweetest metaphors ever, and
you're going to criticize it based on inertia?"
"I'm attempting to refine it," Hermann replies, rolling his eyes.
"Myeah, maybe non-inertial," Newton says agreeably. "This is weird, even for us. Sharing brains;
you rescuing me like eight times from my own stupidity, me reassuring you with concepts borrowed
from relativistic physics and improperly generalized to cognition; you avoiding your problems
paralytically, me doing some crap hedging for you in response; you wearing that bathrobe, me being
ninety-five percent blind rather than eighty-five percent blind; you sticking it to the man, me
complying with the man and getting neurologically worked over for my trouble; you verbalizing
inappropriate guitar thoughts, me being obsessed with the most straightforward coordinate plane out
there; you not sleeping, like, at all, me sleeping a lot; us becoming rockstars but in kind of a suspect
way that we want to minimize; not having to save the world anymore; it's weird, dude, we're changing
our velocity in some way, that's for sure, but I'm not sure if it's an acceleration thing, or a deceleration
thing, or just a really tight cornering to avoid an oncoming brick wall."
"Several points," Hermann says. "A) I do not hedge. B) I was not engaging in paralipsis. C) I do
not have inappropriate thoughts about any musical instruments, least of all your guitar from 2009. D) I
have been sleeping adequately, thank you. E) I am sure drug-induced semi-consciousness does not
count as sleep. F) Your entire premise, that I am upset because my brain is, quote, 'a mess,' is flawed.
My primary concern at the present time is, in actuality, your brain, Newton."
"Oh," Newton says. "Really?"
"Yes," Hermann replies, not sure what exactly it will take to firmly communicate this knowledge
to his colleague of the past decade if he has not managed to successfully impart it already.
"Yeah, there are some blown or blowing fuses in there, I'll give you that. But I think I'm at least
eighty percent. Don't you think? I could see myself misjudging that, so I'll believe you if you say I'm
not, but like, come on. Non-inertial reference frames? I'm receiving what you're transmitting. Not
literally. Probably. I feel like eighty percent of my theoretical maximum plus weird thought-parity
should put me in a pretty reasonable cognitive sphere from a usefulness and discourse oriented
perspective."
Hermann feels vaguely sick.
This is partially attributable to an elevated coffee-to-omelette ratio hard on the heels of a
sleepless night.
This is partially attributable to the content of Newton's statement.
This is partially attributable to what he must say next.
He sees no way out, not ethically, not morally, not paraliptically. This demands to be confronted
head on.
Do you not understand that I do not care about your discourse level at the present moment?
Hermann would like to ask him. Do you think I don't know that your moral imperatives are more
commonly cast as moral ideals? Do you think I am incapable of parsing out your rationale for
nearly everything you have or will ever encounter? Do you think I will ever forget the slide of the
tray that ended our last shared meal in Hong Kong?
"Newton," he says. "I hope you realize that--"
He isn't certain he'll continue; his mind is saying no to every thought he has.
"I hope you realize that I didn't pull you out of that lab for any discursive or analytic abilities you
might possess," Hermann manages finally.
"Um," Newton says, one hand coming to his head. "I know that. Obviously. You pulled me out
because you have a pathologic sense of loyalty and devotion, which is sometimes hilarious,
sometimes tragic, and has already gotten you into way too much trouble. I'm just--pointing out the side
benefits that you can enjoy as a result of continually bending the knee to the rigid ethics of your
superego. Hopefully the benefits will end up outweighing the costs."
"I would have done it at any cost," Hermann whispers, looking at the far wall.
"Terrible plan," Newton says, staring at the floor. "Evolutionary fail."
"I will always make decisions that transcend biological imperatives," Hermann says.
"Show off," Newton replies.
For a moment, they are silent, sitting too closely together on the edge of a non-descript bed in an
anonymous room. Hermann looks out the floor-to-ceiling windows, past the dark metal rail of the
balcony, and toward the distant Wall, pale gray under the light of a rising sun.
"You're seriously giving a talk on Monday?" Newton asks. "I can't even--yeah, I would not be
able to do that, man. Are you sure you can? Maybe reschedule. Are you even sleeping? Have you
slept anytime recently. Are you even a guy? Or are you, like, some kind of other thing? Are you
infecting me with your thought parity? Can you not, maybe? Do you have a plan for how you're going
to structure the thing? Can you tell it to me? Kind of vaguely? Remember that time in Geneva, with the
weirdly purple ambient lighting? That was a great talk you gave. I was sitting next to the editor of
Nature Kaiju Science, only I didn't know it at the time. Who he was, I mean. Did I ever tell you about
this? He basically started jerking off once you got to your first data slide. Metaphorically. It was very
uncomfortable for me."
"Charming," Hermann replies, remembering that meeting, remembering the undercurrent of terror
that had edged every question, sharpened every conflict, heightened every intellectual rivalry. Newton
had gotten into a shouting match at the end of his own talk, his sleeves rolled up, the green of his
progressively building body art black under the dim, violet lights. "I don't think you did," he says
slowly. "In fact, I'm certain you told me you skipped my talk."
"Um" Newton says. "I think I did tell you that."
 "But you didn't," Hermann says. "You didn't skip it." His eyebrows pull together, as he remembers
himself from outside his body and inside Newton's, wedged into a seat at the back of the room,
ragingly hung over, his thumb hooked under his jaw, two fingers pressing against his temple, the
knuckles of his ring finger digging into the corner of his mouth.
"Um," Newton says. "Don't think of that--don't think of that day, actually."
"Too late," Hermann replies, flashing back to an image of himself that comes not from his mind
but from Newton's, from the corner seat in the last row of a dimly lit auditorium. He watches light
reflect off the surface of his hair as he begins the final talk of the first plenary session. As he clicks
through his slide deck, moving from his background on Quantum Field Theory to his first, and most
important data slide, he feels Newton's thoughts closing down like calipers in tense, anticipatory
simpatico, a mental aligning, his fingers pressing against his temple, against the arm of his chair, the
muscles of his left leg contracting and releasing in a controlled tremor, until, finally, the transition
comes in a moment of climax so intense that the entire audience shifts as one, a collective breath is
released, and the man next to him says, "oh god," as the topology of the breach appears on the screen
in irregular, pastel relief. He can relax then, something lets go in his mind, and he whispers, "was it
good for you too?" to his traumatized seatmate.
Hermann shakes his head, fighting a flood of disorientation. "You are bizarre," he says.
"You too," Newton replies.
He doesn't understand the memory, can't be sure if Newton's tension was real, was actually how
the man had felt in that moment, or whether the fidelity of Newton's remembered experience is now
infected with Hermann's own memory of the same event--behind the podium, a wireless microphone
clipped to his collar, uncomfortable at the idea of public speaking, as he always was, but, for once,
feeling his own fears subsumed beneath the importance of the material he needed to communicate.
"Were you anxious?" Hermann asks. "Were you anxious on my behalf?"
"No," Newt says. "Yes. No. You get very anxious, man, it's catching. A little bit. But not really.
Look, it was memorable, that's all." He tries to run a hand through his hair and makes no headway
through gel-petrified disarray. "Ugh, what did they put in my hair? Glue?"
"Yes," Hermann says dryly. "I believe that's exactly what they used. Water-soluble glue. Consider
a shower."
"Myeah," Newton says slowly.
"Do you have some objection to showering?" Hermann asks, his eyes narrowing slightly.
"No," Newton replies. "No. That would be weird, why would you even ask me that? Showering is
great. Hygiene is important. Glue is less good. Glue is not preferred. Did we buy a razor? I'm going to
shower right now, actually. Do you think the PPDC is going to send us our stuff? Do you think we
should ask for it, or is that just opening lines of communication that would better be left shut? Not that
I don't enjoy the lifestyle of an itinerant intellectual rover, but I could use more than two outfits, and I
liked guitar number four, dude, and last time I saw it, it was leaning against the south wall of the lab.
Do you think anyone will water my plants? Where are my glasses?"
"You do not need your glasses to take a shower," Hermann says.
"Well I need them to find the hydrogen peroxide we bought and do an oxidative blood lift on all
the things I've gotten blood on, which I can neither find nor identify without vision," Newton says,
sounding like he's approaching vexation, if not quite there yet.
"I will do that," Hermann says.
"You're going to throw up," Newton says.
"I will not," Hermann replies.
 "You will. I guarantee it. I will bet you eight hundred dollars that the second you see catalase
generated pink-tinged foam you're--"
"Fine," Hermann snarls, pulling Newton's glasses out of the front pocket of his own blazer and
extending them in the other man's direction.
"Wait," Newton says. "You had these? The whole time? In the diner? You jackass. We were on
TV."
"I will collect and curate an entire library of literally all references to you in the cultural lexicon
and organize it for you," Hermann says, "at a later date. As of right now, I did not think it wise to
expose you to television coverage of recent events in an uncontrolled environment."
"What is that supposed to mean?" Newton says, wincing as he swaps Hermann's shades for his
actual glasses.
"Use your ostensibly intact cognitive capacity to figure it out," Hermann says, all the bite he
meant to give the words entirely undercut by his reaction to Newton's bloodshot eyes and pained
expression.
"Yeah," Newton snaps, cocking his head to favor his right eye as he digs through plastic shopping
bags and emerges with the hydrogen peroxide. "I already did. That was not a good-faith
interrogative, dude. Do you even know me?"
That was not a good-faith interrogative either. Hermann is quite clear on that point.
"Yes," Hermann, says, standing, unwilling to watch Newton attempt to read the label on the
hydrogen peroxide. "What in god's name could you possibly be trying to ascertain?" he asks, snapping
the bottle out of Newton's grip.
"For one, whether I have enough visual resolution to read," Newton replies. "For two, what
percent--"
"Three," Hermann snaps, glancing at the label and handing the bottle back to him. "It's antiseptic
grade, three percent hydrogen peroxide. Simply pour it on your shirt and be done with it."
"Sit," Newton says, pushing Hermann backwards a step, in the direction of the bed. "That's step
one. Then? Lie down. You are ridiculously cranky right now, do you realize that? Leave the redox
reactions to the guy who can consistently tell the difference between oxidation and reduction and go
dream about four-dimensional cubes, or something appropriately trippy. I promise not to die in the
shower."
Hermann resists him, but Newton increases his own insistence with direct, linear proportionality
and eventually just shoves him into the bed, saying, "just lie there, dude. Just lie there and sleep.
Easy. The easiest thing ever."
"I strongly object to being shoved onto a bed."
"Noted," Newton says, already halfway across the room and half out of his blazer. "Noted,
considered, and deemed wholly irrelevant on the following grounds. A) I gave you fair warning about
this exact outcome. B) you have been dragging me all over the place for I don't even know how long.
C) You deserved it, and D) you deserved it."
Newton struggles all the way out of his blazer and pitches it straight at Hermann, effectively
preventing Hermann's incipient retort.
"Will you stop?" Hermann snaps, pulling Newton's blazer out of his face.
"Stop what?" Newton replies, squinting from behind his glasses as he pulls his bloodstained shirt
and a bloodstained bathrobe from the closet. "I like that you hung these up."
Hermann doesn't dignify that with a response.
He waits for Newton to vanish around the corner, waits for the sound of a closing door, waits for
the rush of the shower heard dimly through the wall before he pulls out the remote and turns on the
television. He mutes it out of pure precaution, not because he thinks it's necessary, not because he
thinks that Newton, somehow, might hear it behind a wall and with the ambient sound of running
water, but because it makes Hermann himself feel safer. As though he's making rationally supportable
decisions.
Which he is not.
He will endeavor to improve his performance in that regard.
Right now, he has an extreme bias against exposing Newton to any materials, images, or concepts
too closely linked with the kaiju anteverse. He has only the vaguest of ideas regarding what is
currently going on in his colleague's head, and he prefers to err on the side of caution. Hopefully,
Newton's current difficulties consist of nothing more than a few understandable, biologically
justifiable episodes of unremitting sympathetic activation.
Unfortunately, he doesn't think that's what's happening.
Not exactly.
Not precisely.
But he is building a theory.
A theory he doesn't particularly care for.
As he flips through channels with a quick, repetitive flicking of the accelerometer in the remote he
holds, Hermann lays it out for himself.
His own post-drift experience has been--atypical, relative to case reports compiled from Jaeger
pilots. Hermann is now in possession of a repository of biological knowledge he did not work to
acquire, of muscle memories that aren't truly his own but nevertheless belong to him, of a set of
preferences built on a life he hasn't lived. These things exist in simultaneous parallel to his own sets
of knowledge and banks of skills, and, if he is not mistaken, aspects of these exogenous memories and
skills and preferences are becoming insidiously incorporated into his current mental function.
He narrows his eyes at his left hand and transfers the remote he's holding to his right hand. Where
it belongs. He continues flipping through channels.
EPIC Rapport is not a concept he cannot yet conceptualize. He understands its underpinnings
imperfectly. He would like more detail on the way the memories were laid down, why they were
cemented so firmly when the drift usually resulted in transient synchronization that, post-drift, faded
with a velocity inversely proportional to the number of successful synchronizations achieved by the
drifting pair. He may not be able to biochemically parse the mechanism by which EPIC Rapport has
been initiated or is being maintained, but he's certain that he can lay elements of his subjective
experience at its door, such as his inability to create ranked lists in the face of diametrically opposed
preferences, his talent for isolating kaiju RNA without reference to a protocol, his facility with
Nietzsche, his ability to pick up a guitar and play the central riff of Syncope, arguably the greatest hit
of The Superconducting Supercolliders.
Newton, however, is not the only party with whom he shared his brain in a vulnerable,
hyperexcitable state.
Alas.
He also shared his consciousness with a hive mind.
An alien one.
Is there any other kind?
His borrowed biological knowledge fails to provide him with an example, other than those
derived from science fiction, a field in which Newton possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of
readily available, useless, inspiring ephemera.
Hermann rolls his eyes at a man who is not even in the room and then returns to his train of
thought.
If Newton's neural patterns had been burned into his cortex in an expensive metabolic blaze of
long term potentiation, Hermann isn't certain what has been left behind by the anteverse. Certainly,
something has been, certainly some things are now altered, because otherwise he doesn't think he'd
dream of destruction on scales that make him sick in waking hours. He had, of course, worried about
the integrity of his thoughts, right from the beginning, right from the moment he'd regurgitated bile in
that dimly lit Hong Kong street, nauseated by the violence, by the savage intent, that had, so recently,
been a part of him.
This then, is a first approximation of his mental experience, post-drift: EPIC Rapport with
Newton coupled with the subjectively limited influence of the kaiju anteverse that is manifesting,
primarily, as dreams. At a second approximation, hyperexcitability of his neural pathways had
facilitated a near duplication of Newton's experiences in his own cerebral cortex and had effected
changes unknown but more subtle and therefore, likely, more circumscribed in response to
synchronization with a kaiju hive-mind. He doesn't have enough data to get to a third approximation.
Not at this point.
This brings him to his working model of Newton's current subjective experience.
One: Newton is experiencing EPIC Rapport with Hermann, as evidenced by his appreciation for
rationalism, a newfound talent for engaging in mathematics-based wordplay, and the ability to locate
Hermann's sherry, amongst other examples.
Two: Newton is currently operating under several acute psychological stressors. These consist of
a) a level of sleep-deprivation at which Hermann can only guess, and b) several notably horrid
experiences in the past week, some of which Hermann can remember and some of which he is forced
to imagine. These things, taken together, may explain Newton's episodes of what appears to be brief
but consuming panic. He does not feel comfortable assuming either panic or causality.
Three: Newton may be experiencing aspects of EPIC Rapport with the kaiju anteverse. Hermann
does not believe there is a real-time connection between Newton and the anteverse, doesn't see how
there possibly could be, given that the breach is not just shut but destroyed, but, as evidenced by his
own experience with EPIC Rapport, the subjective sensation of another party existing in confusing
simultaneity within the framework of one's own mental experience is extremely disruptive and
confusing. He imagines that it would be worse, infinitely, unimaginably worse, if that other party was
a mnemonically persevered representation of the kaiju hivemind.
Four: Hermann finds considering Newton's subjective experience extremely upsetting.
Five: So does Newton, he would imagine.
Six: He will determine what, exactly, happened to Newton during the time he was "collaborating"
with the PPDC, and, if warranted, he will grind careers into bureaucratic dust.
Seven: I think someone hijacked your working model, his mind offers, sounding distressingly
like Newton. Because you transitioned straight from modeling to vengeful to-do lists.
Hermann shuts his eyes, and threads his fingers through his hair at his temple.
When he opens his eyes again, he's looking at Ms. Mori, in sharp, two dimensional relief on the
screen built into the wall. She is silent but speaking, wearing a red shirt, with red streaks in her hair,
responding to a question asked of her with an earnest expression and measured, intermittent hand
gestures. Mr. Becket sits next to her. Their poses are nearly identical, from the subtle twist of their
shoulders toward their interviewer, to their polite, reserved expressions.
 Hermann feels, for a moment, blindly and acutely envious.
Of what, exactly, he can't say.
He requires a moment to collect himself before reading the scrolling captions on the screen.
Let me say on behalf of all our viewers and our production team that we're deeply sorry for the
personal losses that you both sustained in the past week, the interviewer says, leaning forward,
interlacing her fingers atop the surface of the desk where she sits.
Thank you, Ms. Mori says.
Can you tell us a little bit about how you're coping with knowledge that your coworkers,
people you worked closely with, didn't come back from your last mission?
For a long interval, neither of them speak, and Hermann watches the white words in the black
caption box disappear.
No one has gone untouched by all that has happened, Ms. Mori says finally.
There's common ground in that, I think, Mr. Becket finishes for her.
Hermann flicks his wrist.
Capacitors discharge.
The channel changes.
Chapter 15
Chapter Notes
Warning: This chapter could be problematic for some readers, I think, though I wouldn't say
that it centers upon any concept classically defined as a "trigger." I don't have anything specific
to warn about other than an immersive experience of the moderately traumatized mind? I'd say
it's only slightly worse than chapter 7 (the MRI chapter), but proceed with caution.
See the end of the chapter for more notes
Newt shuts the bathroom door with a marginally cooperative foot and deposits all his materials in
a disorganized slide across the limited counter space immediately adjacent to the sink.
He eyes himself dubiously in the painful glare of the mirror. He looks--maybe not his best? Not
just right now, not with blood in his sclera and glue in his hair; no one looks their best like that,
obviously, but that's fine; he's about to remedy this aberration of attractiveness, about to orchestrate a
regression to his aesthetic mean, and yeah, he'll run it like a protocol, or, if he's going to be perfectly
honest, a little bit like a pilot experiment which he will entitle: 'Toward an effort to calm the heck
down, attempt number 86,752.'
Yes, that's an estimate.
With a misleading number of significant digits.
But.
Pilot experiments.
They are key.
Key like the keys that displace tumblers in locks and key like the keystones of arches, and just key,
right? Right. Flagrantly, flamingly key. He is a big fan of piloting things, and sometimes those things
are patch clamping his way to the anteverse, sometimes those things are isolating kaiju RNA for gene
expression profiling, sometimes, apparently, those things are just doing normal-person activities like
the slightly cooler than average but yet totally regular guy that he is except for when he doesn't want
to be, and also excepting those areas in which he could be classified as just, well, there's no point in
being modest right? Not here, not with the baller in the mirror who looks like he needs a pep talk
right about now, so just yes, just ragingly awesome, a little bit of a badass, totally suave. One hundred
percent normal things are happening here; he's just going to do some stuff that he typically does, he's
just going to do it slightly differently, not because he has to, right? Because, seriously, he doesn't
have to do anything differently, he could just, really he could just, seal the sink drain, slap some
hydrogen peroxide on things that are bloody, get in the shower, and then go slide-tackle his day, carpe
freaking diem style, he's just--the thing is, he's just going to run this slightly differently, he's going to
run it with a little more formality, it's not going to be that much different, but he just--he needs a
protocol for this because he just does, today, right now, honestly, honestly, honestly, perfectly
perfectly honestly this is for his stupid brain; he really kind of owes it. That's a Hermann-thing right
there, that owing-thing, because Newt is not really into owing as a concept, or at least he hadn't been,
historically. Protocoling though, that's a Newt thing. This style of protocoling is--it isn't even
difficult, the goal is defined, the problem is clear, and an appropriate sequence of steps has just
snapped down into place. Perfect. Aligned. Extremely Newtonian. Eminently Geiszlerian.
His eyes.
Really hurt.
So does his head.
 He actually thinks he might not have unlimited time before he's going to have to reswap his
glasses for shades. He leans forward, looking at his eyes in a little bit more of a clinical way, which
makes them hurt more, probably because of the up-close focusing. His accommodation is pretty
sluggish, he's got some bilateral iritis but that's not new, and his pupils look a little wide to him for
how freaking bright this room is. No wonder his vision is garbage right about now. Has he seen an
ophthalmologist at any point? Because the PPDC is not exactly known for their ophthalmological
expertise. Hypothetical Rain is probably a better assessor than he is when it comes to the human eye,
but he's actually not one hundred percent positive about that because the eye is not the brain and Newt
is a physiologist amongst other things. Someone had given him eyedrops, so someone had assessed
his vision at some point. Really, this is incredibly annoying--not being sure what had happened over
the past three days; it's a new experience for him and he's not a fan. Newt wishes he could literally
remember anything that any doctor had--
Nope, his brain says.
Newt freezes, already halfway committed to what he's not going to call a 'flinch'.
Nothing happens.
Oh hey, Newt says, backing away from the mirror and running a hand through glued-together hair
without much success. Nice save, brain.
You've got things to do, his brain says. Go oxidize, young man.
"Oxidizing," Newt murmurs, squinting at the collection of materials next to and also sort of in the
sink.
He has all materials required, doesn't he?
Moderately bloody shirt?
Check.
Marginally bloody bathrobe?
Check.
Outfit that will remain dry?
He's wearing it.
Phone?
Not check. Hmm. Okay, well, he can live without a playlist. Also, where is his phone? He'll
worry about that one later.
Hydrogen peroxide?
Check.
Glasses?
They're on his face.
Various human cleaning products?
Check.
Towels?
Check.
Stolen toothbrush?
Check.
Disposable razor?
All things check.
He depresses the sink drain, throws his shirt in, and dumps hydrogen peroxide over the
bloodstain. He performs a more limited application of the chemical to the shoulder of the hotel's
bathrobe and watches effervescence in pink. He turns on the shower, kicks off his shoes with less than
perfect coordination, peels off his socks without falling over, then extracts himself from his pants with
increasing coordination trouble. Overuse is a concept that his musculoskeletal system is trying to
teach him using some kind of primitive punitive-based learning system, or--
Or.
He grabs the edge of the sink, his brain balanced on the edge of throwing in with him or against
him, because there is an 'or' here, a pretty profound 'or', no, it's an 'and/or', actually, god, how
irritating. How irritating. How irritating, not terrifying, because no, there's nothing terrifying here,
all the terrifying things are over and in his past not in his present, not in his future. Probably.
No guarantees there, his brain says, in an extreme example of pure unhelpfulness.
He skids to a cognitive stop immediately before articulation of impending revelation.
Shh, he says to his brain.
Have you considered the possibility that you're not tired? his brain asks, driving forward,
respecting only one of the barriers that Newt manages to throw up in its way, submitting only to the
drag of articulation; that's all Newt can do--delay, delay, delay--influence the manner of coming
revelation because no matter what he does, his stupid brain can shove its stupid thoughts straight
under the burning lights of his too-crowded, glam-rock consciousness, like this is a show, like a thing
that must go on, in the style of certain singers he won't name. Not just now. Have you considered the
possibility that you aren't coordinated because someone's done some rewiring of your basal
ganglia? It's not quite classic, but it's not quite not, either. You have a resting tremor and you've had
one to varying degrees since your first drift. Someone's dopaminergic pathways have been fried.
Blown out, like a bad hit of a triple reuptake inhibitor.
Someone drugged me, Newt says. I'm extremely tired. I'm sure that you're wrong about
everything.
Oh yeah, his brain replies. I'm usually wrong, dude. Wrong. That's a thing that I am.
He is coordinated, he is. He's fine, actually. And even if he's not, all costs are acceptable. Later
he will talk about neural remodeling. With Hermann. Later. God, it would be just his luck if he got
mentally remixed with a giant monster but, instead of living in the Marvel Universe where he'd be
manifesting freakyass, awesome powers right about now, he just has a hard time with buttons, has
panic attacks about destroying cities, gets headaches, and maybe has the odd epileptic episode here
and there.
That's it.
He's never liked Peter Parker.
Now he hates him.
Out of envy.
"You really could not be a better spider-man villain if you tried," he mutters at himself as he pulls
off his boxers. "Conceptually. Motivationally. Practically though? You suck. You probably couldn't
even manage to kill a regular spider right now. Forget about some quantum mechanics teenage
prodigy dreamboat who wastes his time in dead-end jobs."
Ugh what is he doing? He's not going to kill Peter Parker. He's not even going to kill a real
spider. This is just a thought experiment about his capacity for the motor skills required for killing.
"Oh my god, stop," his reflection advises him. "Just stop."
Also?
Peter Parker is fictional.
Newt gives up on his acute Marvel Universe envy and, out of complete spite for the miserable
state that is his current dexterity, manages to shave, courtesy of some cross-hand stabilization. He's
able to turn shaving into a more complex and absorbing task than it needs to be by considering surface
area and minimal path-length for complete coverage, because that's both interesting and useful. Yup.
In fact, he gets all the way through the shaving and the teeth brushing in this manner. It's not until he's
faced with unbuttoning his shirt that he returns to the relatively pressing issue of trying to decide if his
crap balance and his minor intention tremor have a normal or a creepy etiology and whether this
tension he cannot shake is actually, possibly, rigidity, which is manifesting in the presence of too
little dopamine.
Oh hey.
Relative dopamine depletion.
Because, well, if he's right about this, it could be very interesting, actually--is he compensating
for too much activation by turning on inhibitory pathways? Is drifting a dopamine-expensive process?
Is he biochemically withdrawing from the effects of the drift? He could see that happening. Maybe.
Already he can feel the pressure of likely mechanistic explanations for his subjective and objective
experiences bearing down on him in a wave of revelation that's going to be hard for him to deal with,
given that he's standing on the beach of his mind holding a sieve and trying to stop a riptide from
knocking him over and pulling him under.
Crap, his brain whispers.
It's fine, actually, Newt replies, but his reflection is wincing, his brain isn't talking to him
anymore, and it's the idea of reward mechanisms that hits him first because, like any behavior-based
physiological process, individual reward for individual operators might, might, be a property of the
hive-mind, the way that the Others induced and rewarded linkage, but that was assuming that linking
into the hivemind, jacking into that collective port, was a thing that could be controlled on the level of
a single mind, and he's not sure whether it might be true for discrete kaiju, or any individual portion
of the collective, but he knows one little jackass for whom it was true, boy does he ever. Could they
have manipulated his reward pathways on purpose? Made him want to come back to the drift?
Because he does, god he does. He doesn't though, he doesn't, he won't, he can't, he--it's not the same,
it wasn't the same, not the third time, the third time--
He's not sure where he is, oh god, he thinks, we're networked, we're networked, we're networked,
the net effect of this is that we're worked. He's got the most capacity, he's slotting right into his role
of central processor, glowing blue and glued to a board somewhere, his sense of self begins to shred
beneath the weight of linking, desperate anger and 'what do you think that means,' 'I think it means
he's seizing'. A ceiling is falling on him, he's blending with Hermann, cut up homesick mutilated
brains are shrieking a stereo chorus in his thoughts, a crescendo with a rising action that flings him
into nothing.
At all.
And--
He's.
He is now slightly confused?
Slightly.
Very slightly.
His thoughts feel warm and compressed.
This bathroom just doesn't look all that familiar to him, and also he thinks that maybe he's about
to drop dead in it? Breathing seems really difficult, tragically, he's not sure what's happening with that
just right now and also he's holding hydrogen peroxide and de-blooding a bathrobe?
This is really not a good time to be confused--it's actually never good to be confused while
holding bloody articles of clothing. This is a universal truth of the human condition, he is one hundred
percent positive of this.
He's cleaning blood off a bathrobe, though.
Statistically, that's a few standard deviations from your average blood-lift as portrayed in crime
procedurals that, as a human, he's watched over the years. Crime procedurals. A fundamental aspect
of human entertainment since Scheherazade's Three Apples.
Speaking of weird though, this is--
Hermann's bathrobe?
Grasping for context he finds it--Hieronymous Bosch and Hermann backlit by a sunset artificially
abridged by a wall--yes, okay, he remembers now, this is Hermann's bathrobe which is technically the
hotel's bathrobe, and which is also a thing that Newt had previously bled on, earlier, while not getting
a hug. That had been memorable.
So.
Newt is cleaning his own blood out of a bathrobe that Hermann borrowed.
Okay that's fine.
This cleaning job is he's doing is a little bit confusing though, it's somewhat nightmarish, and
doesn't seem to be obeying the laws of physics because for all the hydrogen peroxide he's dumped on
the thing, the blood doesn't seem to be going away. In fact, if anything, it looks new. That doesn't
seem quite right to him; it makes him uneasy.
Things slot back into place slow and stepwise. This is a hotel; he had breakfast recently; Hermann
is on the other side of the wall; Newt is Newt and holding hydrogen peroxide; he thinks he knows
what year it is but he's not sure so he's not going to say; the breach is closed--he can feel it's shut
because he can feel the place it would be open in his mind if it were open and could take them home.
Um, what?
No.
Wires crossed, Geiszler, his brain says. You were the one who told your species exactly where
their scalpel should be inserted and just how it should twist.
And I'd do it again, he replies reflexively, not even entirely sure what he means. I'd do it again.
He'd had a protocol. Yes, right, a protocol. He's fine, actually, he's fine, he's not sure what just
happened there, but now that he thinks about it, it seems like he'd sort of freaked out but his brain
seems to be done with that for right now; everyone seems to agree that discussing things with
Hermann is the best course of action, not thinking about said things right now, so much.
Ideally he would just take a shower, but he'd wanted to clean this robe first, but there's something
wrong with it because it's not cleaning and it's making him doubt the sequential order of cause and
effect and that's freaking him out a little bit; he's not going to lie about that. He needs causality--
life without it is very distressing because what is going on with this robe, he doesn't understand,
something entropicly backwards is happening here; oxidative reactions are going the wrong way,
possibly. Someone broke the second law of thermodynamics and didn't tell him, the arrow of time has
been screwed around with, retrocausation is generally believed not to be a thing that should happen in
bathrooms and on the macro-scale so what is happening here? He tries to think about it and figure it
out. He's staring at this bathrobe and he's watching blood appear and he's pouring hydrogen peroxide
on that blood to oxidize it into foamed release but more blood just appears. That makes no sense,
entropicly.
Entropicly it doesn't.
He's also tasting blood.
 He brings a hand to his face on some instinct and that hand comes away covered in the stuff and
what is this--a remake of Carrie courtesy of his brain? Who put him in a Stephen King novel? Why is
there blood everywhere?
He's panicking, he's panicking, he's panicking. He is just--this should not--
Dude--I think you're bleeding, his brain suggests.
Oh.
Right.
Yes.
Of course he is.
Newt decides that maybe he will take a break from cleaning this bathrobe and possibly sit down?
Except no, because, miraculously, he has not yet bled on his shirt and he really needs one shirt to
wear because he can't not wear a shirt right now, that would be a protocol deviation.
He leans forward, over the sink, and pinches his nose shut and breathes through his mouth.
This is bad.
This is bad.
This is terrible.
This is actually not that bad.
This is fine.
He's concerned.
He's mildly concerned.
Newt is mildly concerned by how confusing he's found the last thirty seconds or so. And by
'mildly' he means 'extremely'. He's also concerned he might be heading down a vasovagal road into
syncopic sunset because he is distressed, man, physiologically, psychologically, just extremely
distressed right now. By his headache, by his eye pain, by his tendency to bleed with minimal
provocation, by his brief incomprehension of causality, by his imminent failure at showering.
He tries to think of kittens and not about dopamine; it was thinking about dopamine that had
caused this problem in the first place. He will think about the dopamine thing later. When he is not by
himself.
Is he still bleeding?
Yes.
It's getting hot in this bathroom, the air is humid and feels hard to breathe and he can't see the guy
in the mirror anymore, he's blurred beneath a film of condensation. That's good. That's preferred. He's
probably better off under there anyway.
Good.
Okay.
Yes.
Condensation, Riemann zeroes, Peter Parker, tissue regeneration, Victor Frankenstein, panic,
dopamine, kaiju, hotels, breakfasts, breaking news, Hypothetical Rain, reward circuitry, Hermann,
cortical remapping, oxidation, hydrogen peroxide, epinephrine, Fear and Trembling, quantum foam,
proofreading polymerases, error correction (quantum style), dermal tapestry stitched with an
oscillating needle-gun, phenotypic plasticity, neural plasticity, plastic plasticity, neural architecture,
phantom tears in space time, a screaming background chorus of disembodied tissue cross-linked into
prisons of virescent aldehydes.
All of it slots back into place, he is fine, he is fine, he doesn't need Hermann to tell him that he's
standing in a hotel bathroom, cleaning up his clothes, he can figure it out for himself, it turns out, to no
one's surprise, no one's at all, definitely not his; he is not surprised.
Is he still bleeding?
No.
Awesome.
Newt pulls the de-blooded and partially re-blooded bathrobe out of the sink and drapes it over
the counter for future use. He turns his back to the mirror, shuts his eyes, and starts unbuttoning his
shirt. He's not great at it, actually, this unbuttoning thing, he's less good than he would have predicted,
but that's fine. It's not like there are any time constraints except for the one where Hermann decides
Newt's dropped dead and breaks down the door with a shoulder-cane, one-two combination. He's not
sure when that particular time point would hypothetically go down, but he's pretty sure it wouldn't be
before the forty-five minute mark. And he's going to make this as fast as possible.
These buttons are really screwing with him.
Hold shirt, torque shirt, apply pressure to edge of button, slide through buttonhole, repeat.
Something is screwing with his motor cortex or his cerebellum or his basal ganglia or his spinal
cord or his muscles and whether that element of screw is pharmacological, biological, drift-derived,
kaiju-mediated, or just the first sign of imminent spider-man villainy, he really can't say at this point.
If Peter Parker really exists he is going to be so angry he's not sure he'll recover. Ever.
Kinesthetic feedback indicates that he's done with his unbuttoning.
Eyes still shut, he pulls off his shirt, sends it in the direction of the doorway with as much
coordination as his cerebellum is capable of implementing at the moment, and then reaches behind
him for the hydrogen peroxide covered bathrobe.
I like your style there, champ, his brain says, as if it's not a deceitful bastard apt to plunge him
into pure panic at the slightest provocation.
I wish I could say it was mutual, Newt replies, tying the robe shut and opening his eyes. I really
wish I could. Unfortunately, your track record at the moment leaves a lot to be desired. A lot.
He pulls of his glasses, sets them on the counter with a quiet click, and steps into the shower.
He sweeps the shower curtain shut.
Nope.
He immediately sweeps it open again.
There have been more efficient showers in the history of mankind, Newt will not dispute that.
The bathrobe becomes pretty heavy pretty immediately, given that it's so absorbent. He'd thought
about just showering in the clothes he'd worn to breakfast, but that had seemed, somehow, weirder
than showering in a hydrogen peroxide soaked bathrobe. He can justify this to himself, because,
really, the bathrobe could do with some cleaning; he'd managed to cumulatively get a decent amount
of blood on the thing between round one and two. Hopefully round two will be the last bleeding
round. He doubts that a little bit, but it's good to have goals.
Newt still maintains that the epistaxis thing is not serious.
There is literally no way it could be.
Physiologically.
Okay, that's a lie, it could be serious, but a little too serious for his current level of serious, if that
makes any sense. Newt isn't sure it does.
Waterlogged bathrobes are heavy, it turns out, and Dr. Geiszler is, improbably and suddenly, very
tired.
Temperature-wise, this is nice though. He's been cold for days, he thinks.
Newt pushes at his hair and tips his head back, trying to work the glue out of it. It's not really
happening--disappointingly his hair is now just a wet, stiff mess instead of a dry, stiff mess. Newt is
not going to surrender to this though, at least not before he tries his hand at initiating some surfaction
action, courtesy of complimentary shampoo. Following the application of some lavender-scented,
violescent gel, he finally creates some weak points in the stubborn mat affixed to his scalp and makes
some headway in working his hair into a state of freedom. Between the bathrobe and the being
exhausted, he can't release his hair entirely before taking a break and dropping his hands.
He leans against the lateral wall of the shower, a hard surface that looks like stone but isn't, shuts
his eyes, presses his forehead against disorienting coolness, and says, "this is great."
After a long interval, even though his eyes are shut, he feels the burn of shampoo.
This does not surprise him.
It does hurt quite a bit though.
He goes back to being an active participant in his own showering and manages to get the shampoo
out of his eyes and out of his hair and into the back of the bathrobe he's wearing, where presumably,
given enough time under enough water, it's going to work its way out of the material and into the
drain. Newt pretty sure that there's enough water exchange going on through this terrycloth matrix he's
wrapped himself in that he's getting mostly clean.
First approximation clean.
This is now his territory--first approximations, buffered showers, different colored filter cubes
taking multichannel images of his thoughts: Geiszler's in green, Gottlieb's in gold, and his residual
Grotesquerie's a catastrophe in kaiju blue.
He's going to have to try really hard to not become either the bitter washed up narcissist or the
paragon of bad decision-making a la Victor Frankenstein that all his data sets are trending toward.
He's going to have to figure out a third option, if only so he won't slowly suck the life out of Hermann
like an interpersonal vampire, because Hermann would let him do it, Hermann's already letting him
do it. Hermann is like--
It's hard to say what Hermann is like exactly.
Hermann's not really a guy who slots nicely into a paradigm. Not like Dr. Newton Geiszler of the
Mary Shelley pedigree and the constant need for apogee. Hermann's a little too complicated to be a
straight up ascetic in the tradition of Sinclair Lewis, even if Hermann does share a surname with the
most prototypical embodiment of scientific virtue in the entirety of western literary canon. Gottlieb.
Scientist as secular saint. Oh sure, it's true as far as it goes, but it's only a different kind of armor than
the kind Newt himself has cultivated. Everyone grows (and decorates?) a skin to deal with the too-
sharp world, and that is Hermann's--science virtue. Replicability, reproducibility, precision,
accuracy, statistical power, Hermann weaves them together so seamlessly that one can almost forget
that half the time the guy's hardheadedness doesn't come from quantitative exactitude but from some
weird fusion at his core of total acceptance of externally imposed duty meeting some emotional state
that's way more emo than the guy's wardrobe would lead one to believe. Newt is not the most
emotionally intelligent guy on the planet, he knows that about himself, but even he can tell there's
something unusual in Hermann's tendency to fire off needless salutes in the direction of nebulous
authority figures with unreasonably full commitment.
Pre-drift, this had seemed confusing and alarming to Newt, and had provoked an initial, horrified
response that was somewhat similar to what Newt thought he might feel like if he watched Hermann
jump into a shark tank covered with blood.
God, he had said the first time he'd seen Hermann whip out that little piece of superfluous
semiotics, can you not? They don't have any power over you in a formal sense and nothing good
can come of making them feel like they do. Did no one teach you how to navigate departmental
politics? Flip over a table, maybe, I think it'll serve you better in the long run.
Post-drift, he finds it even more painful.
Painful because he'd been right. He'd nailed it. He'd fired a nail out of a nail gun from a room
away and nailed it right to the wall. Hermann signs on for things and then does not sign off. Not until
he's dead. Even though Newt had accurately assessed Hermann's vulnerability when it came to the
concept of duty, Newt hadn't, at the time, been aware that he himself was one of those things that
Hermann had signed on for. It's occurring to him now, slow-motion style, as he's watching the wave of
the past decade he's been surfing crest and break as it hits whatever it is he's done to himself.
Hermann gave up a decade of work, a set of authority figures he'd supplied with ten years of virtuous
compliance, and half his own brain-space to Newt. To Newton Geiszler of the too frenetic work ethic
and the constant quest to be a skeptic.
Newt's a little bit oblivious, sometimes, interpersonally and maybe even also intrapersonally, but
he's got enough raw capacity and a good enough feel for social norms that when he pays attention he
can do a decent job at not being a total jerk. And he is now. Paying attention, that is. Not being a jerk.
If his life were a romantic comedy, Newt would finish his shower and walk right out of this hotel
room in a fit of misguided pure, interpersonal regard, spend an undetermined amount of time in a
misery-montage, growing a beard, probably, before Hermann sees him one day while buying
something picturesque, like a physical book or flowers in kaiju blue, or another piece of romantic
varia, and then confesses to him the total misery of the Geiszler-deprived state, at which point they go
out to breakfast, in a satisfying circle of returning to their beginnings and knowing the place for the
first time. He might have accidentally remixed romantic comedies with erudite, inaccessible poetry
right there. Whatever. He doesn't have a stellar knowledge of the rom-com genre. If his life were a
drama, again he'd walk out of this hotel room, but this time it would be from a sense of gritty realism
regarding how completely his life is about to embody the phenomenon of controlled demolition, and
then Hermann would maybe read his obituary later over some tragically symbolic coffee into which
creamer is entropicly dispersed in a manner suggestive of death. If his life were an action movie, he'd
still walk out of this hotel room except something would interrupt his misery montage, such as being
kidnapped by Hannibal Chau's vengeance-obsessed-right-hand-man, or a group of kaiju worshippers,
and Hermann would be forced to rescue him, using his secret sniper skills that he develops in an
accuracy montage. In the Spiderman 12 variant of this action movie template, he'd turn evil and Peter
Parker would probably send him to his death with a thin veneer of surface sympathy for the scientist
he'd once been, and then he'd make out with one of his peer group for thirty seconds before the closing
credits. Parker would make out. Not Newt. Because Newt would be dead. Hermann doesn't even get
to be in Spiderman 12: The Wrath of the Kaiju, except maybe as a bit part, shaking his head or
something as he advises Peter Parker and maybe is introduced to his girlfriend. If this were a gritty
indie film, Newt would walk out of this hotel room, lose touch with reality, and never realize that
Hermann was continually making an attempt to drag him back from his fiery alternate landscape. If
this were a tear-jerker, Newt wouldn't leave this hotel room, he'd just die in a selfless, picturesque
manner, while Hermann soldiered on without him--wait no, he's got that backwards, because he is the
protagonist here, god, Geiszler, get with it, will you please?--correction, Newt wouldn't leave, but
then Hermann would tragically die, leaving Newt to soldier on with much less personal style than
Hermann would manage, he's certain. If this were a Wes Anderson film, Newt would probably leave
this hotel room with a neutral facial expression and Hermann would go on an intrapersonal and
interpersonal quest to get him back and they'd talk less and be unintentionally both pathetic and
extremely funny, and maybe at the end they'd take a nap in the same sleeping bag. If this were a fantasy
movie, Newt would leave, but then someone would present him with a quest and he'd have to come
back and collect Hermann with apologies and compliments before they could set out to do that thing
that they've been charged to do. If this were a horror movie, Newt wouldn't leave and he'd start
literally turning into a kaiju any time now. If this movie were primarily classified as 'suspense,' he
wouldn't leave either but he'd start displaying homicidal tendencies and the audience would be
extremely nervous for Hermann as their sympathy for the increasingly alienated Newt diminished until
the point where everyone would cheer when Becket saves the day by shooting him with something.
God, he hopes that doesn't happen. Becket? Really? He has mixed feelings about that guy. On one
hand? Yes, cool, because hi, world-saving. On the other hand? Less cool, because the dude is a total
bro. Although, he's not positive about that label, because Becket drifted with Mako and he doesn't see
Mako being drift compatible with a total bro, so somewhere in this train of judgmental thinking he's
made an error. Whatever. He tries to stay away from labeling people, except idiots, because he likes
to lead by example. The point is? He hopes Mako finds the grit to do him in with a sword. That would
be better. He'd rather be killed by Mako than by anyone. Maybe he should email her and request this,
just so she knows? That's probably not the email that she really wants to get right about now though.
Later. Later he'll email her. He's not completely crass.
Dear Mako, his brain suggests, I hope you're doing okay. Again, nice job with the world saving,
now you finally have time to improve your bass-playing skills, because, as you know, The Supercos
are in need of you if we ever get our acts together for a nerd-rock West Coast tour. I know this is
important to you. Also, I was thinking that if anyone ever needs to kill me, I'd prefer it to be you,
ideally with a sword. Don't let Becket commence with the 'blowing to pieces'. Gosh, are you too
famous to call me now or what? Pick up your phone, will you? I'd call you, but I'm not sure where
my phone is. Probably Hermann has it. Full disclosure, I'm not looking at screens. Or talking to
anyone, really. You could leave me a voicemail?
Yeah that's going to be a no go for about eight different reasons.
Okay, it's time for a tally.
Romantic comedy: Leave.
Drama: Leave.
Action movie: Leave.
Marvel movie: Leave.
Gritty indie film: Leave
Tear-jerker: Stay.
Wes Anderson film: Leave.
Fantasy: Leave.
Horror: Stay.
Suspense: Stay.
Seven to three. Supreme court of the cinema rejects his proposal to stay.
Except for the fact that this is no rational way to make choices, so he's not going to leave, that
would be ridiculous even for him, and he knows it would just torture Hermann, because this life-
partners thing that Newt had proposed some days ago in a more familiar room had been a two-way
thing, he's positive of that because Hermann had agreed pretty quickly and in pretty obvious relief, so
yeah. Newt is just an idiot if he thinks that leaving is going to do anything other than assuage his own
guilt. He is way too smart to be a typical cinematic protagonist, and that is not arrogance, that is
actual true fact.
 Newt's eyes snap open as his vestibular system starts to warn him about something and he
corrects a proprioceptive confusion before it has time to get out of hand and pitch him sideways. He
really does not want Hermann to break down the bathroom door to find Newt passed out, concussed,
and showering in a bathrobe, that would be hard to explain, and the reason for it would be painfully
obvious. He's pretty sure this is not a permanent state of affairs, this bathrobe thing, it's just a thing
he's going to do, maybe one time, maybe eight times, maybe eight hundred times because he doesn't
regret the body art, really he doesn't, he just didn't foresee things turning out in exactly this way,
where there's a whole set of terror and misery laid down somewhere in his brain that likes to take
over his entire mental circuitry here and there, roughly sixteen times a day, and would be happy to do
just that when confronted with stylized representations of kaiju whose memories he now possesses,
that's inconvenient. That had been really difficult to foresee, he hadn't known they had a hivemind,
god, who would.
Strike another thing down that Star Trek: The Next Generation had just mercilessly nailed,
though.
Hiveminds. Freaking yikes.
The day that he can stare at the forming spread of Otachi as the last addition to the two-
dimensional menagerie on his skin and not freak out will be a good day. Or, alternatively, a really bad
one.
What are you doing? his brain enquires with a polite snarl. Trying to drive yourself crazy?
Trying to pass out in a too-hot, too-long shower? Get it together, dude, and leave the body-art
rationalizing to a later date.
Newt shuts his eyes and does some readjusting of his difficult to manage bathrobe so as to
facilitate some direct liquid-to-skin contact that he verifies by feel alone--the warm and rapid slide of
thin streams of water that feel nothing, nothing at all, like cold and rapid sub-Pacific transit toward
his death at the end of a swath of destruction he's made through a fragile, alien city.
Nope.
Nothing like that.
Because he's showering.
Like a human.
A normal one.
A mostly normal one.
And, actually, he's done showering.
He turns off the water, but it doesn't really result in much subjective change in his experience,
since he's still wearing a soaking wet bathrobe. Newt stands for a moment in this too-warm room in
this too-heavy bathrobe, his too-crappy vision a little too close to fading to nothing for comfort. He
steps out of the shower, locates a towel, shuts his eyes, pulls off his robe, and forces it into an arc
back behind him, where it hits the floor of the shower with the wet clap of surface-tension meeting
surface-tension. He flinches slightly, but keeps going, drying blind and then dressing blind, his eyes
shut as he navigates by feel and with what coordination he has left to pull on the pile of clothes next to
the door. The shirt gives him the most trouble and, of course, because he's a slob, he's left it inverted,
and so he puts the thing on inside out and this causes him more emotional distress than is really
appropriate, less because of the eyes-shut struggle of determining the clothing inversion and then
correcting it, and more because he would like to get out of this dark, hot, bright bathroom. It doesn't
help him that he's got a whole set of preferences for neatly folded clothing that are making
themselves nauseatingly known. Honestly, Newt isn't slovenly as a lifestyle choice; he's slovenly
because he just doesn't care, or hadn't. Now he does care, he cares a lot it turns out, because this is
really unpleasant, actually, he will never leave his clothes in a state like this again and when he
opens his eyes and opens the door he is going to clean this bathroom, because he just needs to right
now, and no this isn't him, and yes this comes from Hermann, but it's his brain now, and it's his
subjective experience and if he wants to clean bathrooms he will because there are so many things he
can't and shouldn't do that feel instinctive, such as drifting, such as drifting, such as drifting again, oh
god--
No no no no no, he insists, pressing back against that which is pressing down. Nope. Stop that
right now. Just stop, brain. Clean this bathroom if you'd like to and if you ever get your shirt
buttoned.
Oh I will, his brain says. You just watch. And that's not all that's going to happen. Not just
bathroom cleaning. No it is not.
Meaning what? Newt asks with a mental, rather than physical, narrowing of the eyes.
Meaning rationality, as a lifestyle choice, is about to happen to you, friend. You are having a
rational phase in your life. You need a rational phase. Your empirical phase has plunged you
straight off the deep end of consciousness research.
Empiricism is better, Newt replies weakly. This was a team decision. We made it a long time
ago. Circa age ten and the commencement of Ph.D. le first. We can't just--
Yes we can. It's fine, his brain says. Picasso had his Blue Period and Geiszler can have his
Rational Principles Period. Just--don't reason yourself into anything ill advised.
"Well there's your whole problem right there," Newt mutters intelligibly through clenched teeth,
halfway through his buttoning job, his eyes on fire with the pressure of keeping them closed. "Can you
imagine what it would take to turn me into a rationalist?"
Oh, I don't know, his brain replies airily. Synaptic remodeling on a catastrophic scale?
Good point, Newt replies. I'll give you that one, you perspicacious bastard. I refuse to submit,
though. Descartes can just put his clothes back on and stop trying to seduce me away from my
empirical bros. Vhat vould von Helmholtz say if he could see me now?
What a rockstar? his brain suggests.
Um, maybe, Newt replies. Sure. Thanks brain. I will let you clean this bathroom as a gesture of
goodwill, but we are not turning ourselves into logical positivists or rationalists, or really anyone
whom Aristotle would approve of and Francis Bacon would dismiss, okay? That's just not a thing
that we're going to do.
You will read the entire canon of extant works by Rene Descartes, his brain says, taking an
unmistakable turn for the Hermannesque.
No, Newt replies, no I don't think I'll be doing that.
You will do it as soon as you can read, his brain counters. Possibly, you will attempt it before
that point.
You are not the boss of me, Newt replies.
That is, in fact, my precise role.
Newt opens his eyes, puts on his glasses, buttons his sleeves at the wrist, which feels as weird as
it does necessary, devotes three minutes of rapid, poorly coordinated energy towards straightening up
the bathroom, including folding towels, relocating dry items to hang up wet ones, fastidiously
removing the blood on the counter, drying wet surfaces with a sacrificed towel, straightening recently
purchased toiletries, adjusting the angle of the bathmat relative to lines of the room so that it's either
perfectly parallel or perfectly orthogonal to all planes that define the space in which he finds himself.
 Happy now? he asks his brain.
Not particularly, no, his brain replies.
Yeah, I hear that, Newt replies, feeling vaguely sick and somewhat uncomfortable as he looks at
the entropy reversal he has wrought for no real reason, but slightly less sick than when the room had
been a mess.
He opens the bathroom door and moves on with his life.
As soon as he rounds the corner, Hermann shuts off the television like he's been ready, and that
annoys Newt, yes it does, because come on, he's not quite the hummingbird at the end of its metabolic
rope that Hermann is casting him as, like one wrong move will kill him or result in permanent insanity
or something. Newt knows what kaiju look like, he has, in fact, studied them intensively for years,
and he's not going to forget, it's not like being presented with video footage is going to--
"Whatever you're about to say don't," Hermann says, with an unusual xeric urgency and an even
more unusual confused expression, like he's just cleaned a bathroom and felt weird about it.
Newt can relate.
Boy, can he ever.
"Likewise," Newt snaps, not even a little bit defensively.
"You don't look quite right," Hermann says, eyeing Newt like a poorly performing wave function.
"Hermann. What did I just say?" Newt replies, because he's pretty sure that aggravation is
basically his only safe emotional landscape left, which is good, because it's a place he has,
historically, spent a lot of time. "And you look like crap, dude, so maybe just take an aspirin and lie
down, I know you haven't slept in days because you've got that look about you, that vampiric, Vlad-
the-Impaler-style look, which is really inappropriate," Newt says, finally making it to the desk and
swapping his glasses for shades, "because we both know that if this is a horror movie, you're the
plucky protagonist and not the creeper in the dark stairwell, okay?"
"Okay," Hermann says, like he's using a word from a foreign language for the first time.
"Commit to it, dude, commit. Say it like you mean it. 'Okay.' 'Joie de vivre.' 'Alfresco.' 'Schlock.'
This brain is schlock."
"You are bizarre," Hermann says. "And I quite like your brain. I have always liked it."
"Stop being so nice," Newt replies, settling his shades into place. "One of these days it's going to
catch me by surprise and I'm going to have an emotional breakdown all over whatever outfit you're
wearing and you only have one shirt right now so--" he trails off.
"I do not like the fact that you haven't had one already," Hermann says.
"A breakdown? How social sciences of you," Newt replies, unfolding his blazer in a swift pull of
straightening lines from where Hermann has deposited it on the desk.
"That was uncalled for," Hermann replies.
"I suppose so," Newt admits. "You know what else is uncalled for? Me reading the entire body of
extant work produced by Rene Descartes, that's what. I'm not a rationalist, Hermann, I've never been
a rationalist."
"Oh I'm aware," Hermann replies, sounding uncharacteristically confused and equally
uncharacteristically tolerant as he watches Newt pull on his blazer. "You made this extremely clear
to me when I proposed the reallocating of resources from your division to mine in our first year of
mutual acquaintance. I believe your exact words to the funding committee were, 'empiricism for life,
rationalism for maladaptive inevitable death, which are you going to choose? I know which one I'd
pick'."
"Um, yeah," Newt says, deciding he'll cut his circulatory system some slack and let it operate for
a while with his head and his heart in the same plane. "That was maybe a little bit inflammatory."
"Newton, please tell me that at some point it occurred to you that I am not actually a rationalist."
"You have rationalistic tendencies," Newt says. "Move over. This is my bed. I claimed it when I
passed out into it at some point. You have your own bed." He sits down next to Hermann and then
effects horizontalness on the too narrow sliver of lateral bed-space that he's trying to occupy.
"Yes," Hermann says dryly, shifting marginally. "Most modern scientists have at least some, you
realize. All modern scientists also have empirical tendencies."
"All modern scientists are empiricists. Your rationalist preferences are obscenely close to the
line of intellectual acceptability," Newt replies. "That's why, of the two of us, I'm the more
scientifically minded."
"Yes," Hermann says dryly. "You. Tell yourself that if you wish, Newton, I have spent a decade
listening to absolute nonsense come out of your mouth and I can certainly tolerate listening to it for
another decade, it if you can tolerate producing it."
"You're the guy who's almost an artist," Newt says. "Don't lie. I know you thought that triple event
had a sort of cataclysmic elegance to it."
"False," Hermann says, reaching over to straighten Newt's blazer like it's his own. "You are most
certainly the one with the artistic tendencies."
"Tendencies maybe," Newt replies, swatting Hermann's hand away. "I'm an engineer, dude, a cool
one, admittedly, who plays the guitar, but still."
"An engineer," Hermann scoffs. "Hardly. I would never traverse a bridge built by you."
"Too late," Newt says, sending a wild-edged grin in Hermann's general, blurry direction. "And so
excruciatingly, exquisitely, satisfyingly, demonstrably false. Did you know I enjoy you being wrong
almost as much as I enjoy me being right?"
Hermann sighs, short and sharp. "I meant a literal bridge, as you very well know. Not a neural
one. Biomedical engineering and structural engineering are extremely different, and I do not think it's
appropriate for you to pigeonhole yourself as an engineer when you have six advanced degrees in
various fields."
"It bugs you," Newt says. "Doesn't it. It just irritates the crap out of you that I win in the number of
degrees category."
"It does not," Hermann says. "In fact, it never has. The only reason you have so many is because
you're intellectually indecisive to a fault. It's a perpetual source of wonder to me that MIT hired you
and I suspect they did so only because they were tired of funding you to sample disparate fields."
"Well, we can't all be like you, hating everything except math. In my opinion, everything is great,"
Newt replies. "It physically pains me to limit myself. I should have been born independently wealthy
circa 1750. That would have been fun."
"I'd advise choosing a period for your life so that the peak of your intellectual prowess does not
occur contemporaneously with the French Revolution."
"Lavoisier'd," Newt says agreeably. "I think I'll go earlier. Wait no. I mean yes. Earlier. I'd
overlap with Descartes, obviously. Maybe I am Spinoza, reincarnated, what do you think? Maybe I'd
be Spinoza. Maybe I was."
"I thought you were an empiricist," Hermann replies.
"God, Hermann, this is my intellectual fantasy life, okay? Do I go around destroying your fantasies
about grand unified theory and stuff? Don't think I don't know about your secret obsession with
particle physics that started around July 4th, 2012. Don't think I don't know that you think about
renormalization group running when you go on vacation, okay?"
 "I don't see how my entirely justifiable intellectual hobby translates into your sudden and
borderline pathological latching onto rationalists from the turn of the sixteenth century. I want to be
clear on this, Newton, whatever is happening between you and Descartes is no doing of mine."
"Of course it's doing of yours," Newt says. "Interacting with doing of mine. Or whatever. I am an
empiricist. That doesn't mean I can't enjoy rationalism. Or the philosophy espoused by the Jedi Order.
Or the Prime Directive. It's intellectual escapism into someone else's worldview, man. You know?"
Hermann doesn't answer and shifts uncomfortably.
Newt half turns, props the irregularly shaped volume of agony formerly known as his head on one
hand, buries his fingers in his own wet hair and whispers, "are you thinking about my guitar?" with as
much licentiousness as he can muster, which turns out to be quite a bit, actually.
Hermann shifts laterally and says, "no," too quickly to mean anything but yes.
"So there is justice in this world." Newt lets Hermann off the hook and collapses back into
horizontalness. "I wasn't sure."
"That's a terribly specious conclusion. Your entire premise is flawed," Hermann says stiffly.
"Your premise is flawed."
"Very mature, Newton," Hermann says. "Congratulations on your rhetorical victory."
"What can I say?" Newt replies. "I'm a mature guy. Also, um, speaking of mature things I may or
may not have done or said or recorded forever for posterity, did you happen to pack my digital voice
recorder, by any chance?"
"I did," Hermann replies.
"Ah, did you, possibly, at any point, listen to it, possibly?"
"No," Hermann says, sounding like he's doing some eye narrowing. "I don't make it a habit to seek
out further examples of your grandiloquent musings, and I, unlike some people, do not routinely
commit invasions of privacy."
"Okay, just checking. And yes, you're still a better person than me."
"Yes. Yes, I am, Newton," Hermann snaps, "because if I had been in your position I certainly
would not have blamed you for my own experiments in self-destruction, because I would be
concerned about what effect such words might have on your psychological state."
"I thought you said you didn't--"
"I have your memories, you idiot," Hermann snarls, "of everything prior to one week ago at
twenty-three hundred hours in a Hong Kong alley."
"Ah," Newt says. "So if I hadn't brought it up--"
"I likely would not have realized it, no," Hermann says, still on the upswing in his pissed-off
trajectory.
"You're doing the sentence completion thing, dude, I think you--"
"I think you should stop talking," Hermann says, sitting abruptly, "before I murder you."
"I meant it as--"
"I know exactly how you meant it, Newton," Hermann hisses, vacating the opposite side of the
bed, and limping stiffly to the nearest window, where, presumably, he braces his hands against the sill
and makes a concerted effort not to throttle Newt or upend a table. It's hard to be positive about this,
because Newt really cannot see much right now.
"Okay, yeah, I know you do," Newt says, not moving, talking to the silhouette with blurred
borders that is the best Hermann-rendering his visual system can give him, "but I mean, really, you've
been familiar with the depth of my stupidity for years, and look, it's better that I brought this up now,
right? Because I pretty much felt guilty about it right from the point that I said it, and then that guilt has
only intensified to crippling levels in light of the fact that you ruined your life and your brain for me,
basically. I get it dude, I do, but look, my point is that I'm a jerk and I'm sorry--"
"Stop speaking," Hermann says through clenched teeth.
"Okay," Newt says, watching him in tense anticipation.
Nothing happens.
"Are you going to start speaking, maybe?" Newt asks, after about two seconds, "because I was
kind of under the impression that you had something in mind other than silence, because that's not
going to really work for me right now. I'm a jerk, seriously, I know this, you know this, but you like
me anyway, kind of a lot, more than makes sense, really, because I did nothing to deserve it other than
yell at you, more-or-less on your own discourse level, which, admittedly, is hard to find these days,
but there's a reason I brought this up, man, I just feel really confused, but unambiguously guilty about
a lot of things; it's the flip side of this sense of duty that I appropriated via horizontal transmission
from you. Transposable-element-of-the-self'd, you know?"
"The problem, Newton," Hermann says, still not looking at him, "is that you were quite correct. I
did drive you to do exactly what you did."
"What?" Newt replies, his voice cracking in half against the bar of incredulity it's just run into.
"No. Stop. Don't even explain. You are extremely confused, dude, your brain is a scrambled, hot mess
of fused circuits post massive neural induction, if mine is anything to go by. Even though you're telling
me I'm right, which, as we know, I love, in a borderline sexual way, you're wrong about my rightness,
okay? It was a stupid, throw-away comment, you didn't drive me to anything."
Hermann still says nothing.
Newt strangles a frustrated scream of macho vexation between clenched teeth, and presses a hand
over his sunglasses. "Stop. Don't freak out about this."
"I'm not 'freaking out' about anything," Hermann says icily. "I am stating a fact. I don't fault my
reasoning at the time, but it was biased and incorrect. You were probably the worst available
candidate to enter the drift. In fact, as our species goes, I'd put you in the bottom decile."
"You'd what now?"
"If I had believed, even for a moment, that you'd be successful, I would have insisted on doing it
myself."
"Ugh," Newt replies. "Mathematical martyr complex much? Probably? Some military jock would
have done it, and then where would we be. As if Becket could pull anything out of the anteverse
experience other than the compulsion to blow it up, which is, come to think of it, exactly what he did."
"As I said, I would vastly prefer Becket to you, given the choice."
"Oh yeah," Newt drawls, dredging up every microscopic particle of sarcasm he can find within
his being. "Great plan. Stellar reasoning. I am. The. Most preeminent kaiju expert that our species has
to offer, dude, so just check your inappropriate prejudice against biology, human volatility, necessary
sacrifice on the alter of empiricism, inescapable bias, body art, glam rock, punk rock, Nietzsche,
loquacity, eating sans utensils, and everything else that drives you up the wall about me."
"I am complimenting you," Hermann shouts back. "Not disparaging you."
"Oh," Newt says.
They look at one another breathing heavily.
"Look, in my defense," Newt says, totally suavely and not at all sort of awkwardly breathless,
"'bottom decile' does not sound like a compliment. Also? I still haven't adjusted to the Decade of
Mutual Admiration."
"Clearly," Hermann snaps. "Outside your inappropriate fits of insight, you are quite slow on the
uptake."
"I'm trying to make that into a compliment also, but it's not really working," Newt says.
Hermann sighs, sharp and short.
"What I'm trying to say when I'm not shouting at you," Newt says, "is that I'd feel even more guilty,
intolerably guilty, if I thought that you blamed yourself for whatever my outcome is, or turns out to be,
post all this neural remixing. You feel me? First of all, this isn't a blame thing. This is a credit thing.
This is a good outcome. A great outcome, and--" his vocal chords snap shut for some reason before
deciding to let him pass go, "and even if it doesn't end up turning out that way for me, personally, I--
look, I've already dumped enough of my crap on your doorstep for a lifetime, and there's no reason for
you to go stealing more of it from me to add to the pile. The less-than-ideal parts of this whole
experience aren't yours to take on, dude. They're just not, so stop it. Stop it right now."
"I could have intervened materially to prevent--a great deal of what happened to you," Hermann
says still not looking at him.
"Maybe," Newt replies, "but I think that would have been a zero-sum game. You could have stood
in for me, but that wouldn't make our net utility any different."
"Stop it," Hermann says, unmistakably mollified and slightly impressed by Newt's skill at
analogy-making, which had always been prodigious and is now just a temple to verbal amazingness
constructed of glittering razor blades made of mathematical references.
"What?" Newt replies. "Being a winner?"
"In effect, yes," Hermann replies.
"That's impossible for me," Newt replies. "But I can be magnanimous in my current state of
perpetual victory. For example, I forgive you for your stupid self-blame," Newt says. "In case you
were curious."
"Thank you," Hermann says dryly. "Thank you so much."
"Have you seen my phone, by the way?"
"Yes," Hermann says, pulling Newt's phone out of his own pocket. "You've missed forty-six
calls."
"I am popular," Newt says, holding out a hand.
Hermann tosses him his phone, a thing he finds out only as it smacks him in the hand. Needless to
say, he fails to catch it.
"Hermann, I can't see."
"I'm aware of that," Hermann replies.
Newt sighs, looks hopelessly at his phone, and then drops his hand back to the bed. He'll deal
with it later. "Any important calls?"
"I'm quite certain they're all important," Hermann replies, leaning against the wall, and probably
looking at him.
"Go to sleep dude, even your vague visual representation filtered through my totally crap eyes
looks exhausted."
"What time is it?" Hermann asks.
"I don't know, morning? Let's reverse our circadian rhythms--sleep in the day and wander around
San Fran at night, like noctivagant science vampires. Sciencepires. Nerdpires. In search of logical
thinking to perpetuate our unlife. Remember when we did that our first week in Hong Kong and then
Pentecost ordered us not to have jet-lag anymore because people needed daytime science and you
listened?"
"No," Hermann says, clearly lying, because Newt remembers dragging his idiot colleague off the
metal rail around the Jaeger launching dock at four in the morning. The man had been leaning over it,
looking for interesting fish in black water, made visually impenetrable by the reflection of perpetually
fluorescing lights.
Newt doesn't remember any such incident from his own perspective, but then, he had been pretty
drunk. He's also not sure he was looking for fish, though, that was a reasonable assumption on
Hermann's part, he supposes.
Newt often looks for cool fish.
"Yes you do," Newt says.
"If you are referring to the period in which we temporarily revised our work hours to maintain
maximal productivity while adjusting to a twelve hour time change, and occasionally went out for
dinner at four in the morning, then yes. I recall no aimless street wandering in some kind of
bastardization of a baseless supernatural tradition."
"You are such a good life partner for me," Newt says, smirking at him. "I hope you know that. I
order you to sleep, by the way. I order it."
"Shut up," Hermann says, still leaning against the wall.
"Why do I not get a snappy salute, hmm? Why do I not get immediate compliance? I deserve them,
dude, I deserve all your salutes, way more than the PPDC does."
"You are a disruptive nightmare, dwelling in the basement of human discipline."
"A simple 'no thanks, I'll keep my salutes for the military,' would have sufficed," Newt replies.
Hermann sort of slides down the wall and then does some angular adjustment into a sitting
position on the edge of the bed, and if that doesn't just scream total exhaustion to Newt, nothing ever
has or will. The dude is wrecked.
Newt lies there in silence for a span of seconds, feeling his resting tremor and fidgeting.
"Can I confess a thing to you?" Newt asks.
"Well," Hermann says, "if you think such a concept still has meaning after all that we've been
through, certainly. 'Confess' away."
"I think," Newt says, slowing down, feeling edgy, feeling more edgy when Hermann picks up on
his edginess and twists to look at him. "Well, no, let me do this a different way--have you noticed that
my coordination isn't worth crap right now?"
"It has been exceedingly difficult to miss," Hermann says dryly. "I think you underestimate how
much difficulty you've had over the past three days."
"Wait, meaning what?"
"Meaning I watched you stare at clothes without any clear idea of what you were to do with them.
Meaning I watched you confused by closed doors. Meaning I spent twenty four hours helping you
walk in straight lines and stand without fainting. Meaning countless other things that I'm not
particularly inclined to discuss. In short, yes, Newton, I have noticed."
"Um, yeah," Newt says, feeling vaguely weird about this whole thing. "Good. So ah, well, what's
your interpretation of the fact that it takes me four minutes to button my shirt, for example?"
"My interpretation is that you are mentally and physically exhausted, still recovering from the
PPDC's attempt to break the seizure I'm certain you had as you were--doing whatever it was that you
were doing."
"Yeah, okay, so I think--" Newt breaks off, trying to gear himself up for communicating the
dopamine conjecture that had caused him causality problems earlier.
Hermann is absolutely motionless.
"So I think I might not just be tired," Newt says. "I think I might have a relative dopamine deficit.
I think I'm normalizing, just FYI, I'm pretty sure I'm normalizing pretty quickly, and I might even
normalize all the way back to baseline, but um, a mildly dopamine-deprived state would explain this
tremor and periods of rigidity, and certain subjective memories I have that are consistent with just a
bucketload of dopamine release from my ventral tegmental area."
That was fine, he'd gotten through that just fine, with no creepy blue-tinged thought turning. None
at all.
Hermann readjusts his position on the bed and turns to face Newt. He pulls his good leg beneath
him, leaving the bad one outstretched. Without speaking, he reaches over, pulls Newt's hand up by the
wrist, and releases it slowly, mid air.
Newt catches his drift, so to speak, and holds it there, in empty space, palm down, fingers spread,
as steady as he can make it, which, alas, is not really 'steady' at all.
They both watch it shake subtly, until Newt makes a fist and drops it.
"Yes," Hermann says, with all the confidence of Newt's neurochemical knowledge, "you could be
correct."
"I know," Newt snaps. "I'm looking for an odds ratio, dude, not conceptual validation. Get with
the program."
"Impossible," Hermann says crisply. "Conceptual validation is all I can give you."
"Thanks," Newt says, hearing the strain in his own voice.
Hermann holds up a hand. "Whether your current motor difficulties are a result of exhaustion or of
a dopamine-poor state within certain neural circuits, either way, Newton, you are vastly improved
compared to yesterday at this time, when you could not unbuckle your own seatbelt."
"Ugh," Newt replies. "Was it necessary for me to know that?"
"Yes," Hermann says. "I believe it was. For what it's worth, however, I think you're likely correct.
In fact, I think that you experienced a similar state of shorter duration the first time you drifted, and
again, post our combined drift in Hong Kong. I think we both did. I think your--"
Hermann cuts himself off.
"What?" Newt demands, feeling half-crazy.
"Nothing," Hermann says carefully.
"It doesn't matter," Newt says, "because I know what you're thinking."
"I am sure you do not," Hermann snaps. "Will you stop being yourself for twenty seconds?"
"Not being myself is exactly what I'm doing, actually, most of the time now," Newt says, speaking
maybe more loudly than he should be speaking and coming up on one elbow, "take a look at the
bathroom; you might find it interesting you perfectionist bastard. You are going to drive me insane if
you keep omitting vital information out of some weird impulse to protect me from your pessimistic
thoughts or whatever it is you're doing. I don't need protection from you. I need protection from me,
okay, and I'm handling it. Handling my own protection detail."
"You are an endlessly fascinating mess of mistaken assumptions," Hermann snaps. "I'm trying to
shield you from your own reaction to what I have to say."
Wait.
"You find me endlessly fascinating?" Newt asks.
"No."
"You just said you did," Newt points out.
"That is hardly germane."
"It's a little bit germane."
"By all means, take this conversation on a tangential path. I couldn't be more pleased."
 "How did the drift feel to you?" Newt asks. "In a word."
"Overwhelming,"
"Yeah, a different word."
"Intoxicating."
"The eighteen hundreds called, they want their lexicon back, but yes. Agreed. Euphoric. Here's the
thing, Hermann, the first drift? The first drift, didn't feel that way. I don't know what that implies
exactly--"
Liar, his brain whispers. Liar.
"I don't know in a factual way, but I know what it suggests to me, it suggests that there was some
element of neurochemical synchronization, maybe even manipulation there, as if--"
"Newton," Hermann says, sliding closer.
"As if they were adapting the principle of reward to reinforce the urge to integrate into a
collective consciousness, as if they mapped it out, VTA to nucleus accumbens via the medial
forebrain bundle, as if they laid it down, co-opted it in a neural trick of interfacing an ever-less-
foreign piece of biological hardware--a software manipulation over a transient hardwired
connection, a permanent coupling of reward-circuitry to the execution of a peer-to-peer protocol,
human to kaiju, verse to anteverse, across the open breach--"
He's not sure what's happening, he doesn't know these walls in double-overlay, in stereo. Oh god,
he thinks, we're networked, we're networked, we're networked, we're net worked, the net effect of
this is that we're being worked. He's got the most capacity, he steps straight onto the dark and
glowing stage, standing on the nexus of disparate mental hardware, there is no rush like this rush, the
rush of a one in a binary circuit, the focal point of a massive angry cloud of foreign screaming, yes I
laid you down, he thinks, yes this was my doing--a decade-long riff that shreds the fabric of your
inner lives in this dimension that is mine. It is mine you understand, you never should have come
here. A ceiling is falling on him, he's blending with Hermann, cut up, homesick, mutilated brains are
shrieking a stereo chorus in his thoughts, 'we have to break this,' someone says, 'we should have
loaded him ahead of time,' 'Dr. Geiszler can you hear me Dr. Geiszler can you talk.' Euphoria, elation,
with a vicious lyric edge. His thoughts aren't thoughts, not anymore, they're polyphonic harmonies
unifying that which he'd dissected into parts.
"--to my abject amazement," Hermann is saying quietly. Conversationally.
"What?" he whispers, allowing Hermann to pull his hands away from his temples.
"You are fine," Hermann says. "We are in San Francisco. You have been successful in nearly
every sphere you'd care to consider."
"San Francisco?" he slurs, feeling like someone has hulled out his brain and replaced it with
alcohol.
"Yes," Hermann says. "In a hotel room, where you are, as is typical for you, being an idiot."
"Dopamine," Newt says, feeling it, feeling it hardcore.
"Yes," Hermann murmurs, fussing with Newt's collars. "Apparently."
"You know," Newt says, still not entirely sure what's happened, but flashing serially through Hong
Kong, vague memories of Hypothetical Rain, sharper memories of pancakes, a bathrobe-clad shower,
and days of wearing Hermann's borrowed shades. "I--" he breaks off and sits abruptly, as he feels the
warm gush and the copper taste of nascent epistaxis.
Hermann doesn't even ask him what's wrong, just presses a tissue into his hand.
"EPIC Rapport," Newt says weakly, giving the tissue a minimal flourish, knowing that Hermann
will understand what he means.
 "Entirely typical rapport," Hermann counters.
"Those opposing hypotheses just demand empirical testing," Newt says indistinctly, pinching his
nose shut.
"Perhaps later," Hermann replies.
Chapter End Notes
Chapter-specific citations: 'Fear and Trembling' is a work by Kierkegaard. Newt alludes to
T.S. Eliot ("returning to their beginnings and knowing the place for the first time"). Arrowsmith,
by Sinclair Lewis, does indeed feature a paragon of scientific virtue by the name of Max
Gottlieb.
Chapter 16
On Monday morning, Hermann wakes before his alarm, courtesy of some particularly upsetting
dream or a too-high spike of early-morning cortisol. He can't say which--but either way, dread is
coiled in and around his viscera. Whether it's residual dread from a night of dreaming in hi-fi
catastrophe or the anticipatory dread of the coming day is impossible to determine.
He's giving a talk at fourteen hundred hours, Pacific Time.
He loathes giving talks.
Hermann has never enjoyed the real-time, personal communication of results to a collection of his
peers. Let them read his papers. Let them examine his mathematics. Let them familiarize themselves
with the evidence he's happy to present in written form. Let them study it. Let them ask him pointed
questions via email.
The culture of science deems this insufficient, however, and so he will comply with academic
norms because he must.
His discomfort is compounded in the setting of a job-talk like this one, which is nothing more than
a summary of a decade of practical successes--its purpose is to secure him a position, a position that
he needs, both for financial reasons and for reasons best described as 'bureaucratic tactics'.
He lies motionless in bed, his eyes closed, his nervous system punishing him in confused
anticipation, until his cellphone alarm goes off at six in the morning.
He opens his eyes to Newton--a dark and eidolic silhouette against a gray dawn. He's dressed and
standing at the window, looking at the Wall of Life, or, perhaps, behind it. Toward the sea.
"How long have you been awake?" Hermann asks, watching Newton readjust the fisted grip he
has on the cuffs of his own shirtsleeves. There's something new in this clasp and twist of fingers;
something that Hermann doesn't understand and therefore doesn't like.
"Meh," Newton says, half-turning to give him a one-shouldered shrug. "Not long. Just enjoying the
view before the sun comes up and knifes me in the retinas."
"It's a terrible view," Hermann says.
"I know," Newton replies, the words laced with an atypical self-possession. He seems to realize
he's giving something away. He lets go of his shirtsleeves and scrubs his fingers through his hair.
To Hermann, even that gesture looks pained. He can already feel the beginnings of the struggle that
may well define the next decade of their relationship, because the pity he feels and the terror he feels
have the scope of an Athenian tragedy in the Aristotelian tradition but it will ruin everything if any
fraction of that spills into all that lies between them.
Hermann can keep this secret.
He knows he can.
He hadn't felt this way before the drift and Newton's keeping post-drift secrets of his own; given
these two facts it should possible to classify Dr. Geiszler as a post-aristeia Homeric hero poised for
a tragic decline solely within the confines of Hermann's own head and nowhere else. This is
important for two reasons.
One--Newton would hate knowing that he felt this way.
Two--it's extremely important to keep in mind that for all his bravery and fits of insight, Dr.
Geiszler behaves in a moronic fashion on a fairly consistent basis and romanticizing him is an
abysmal idea.
"You're going to need to buy me something," Newton says.
 "Am I?" Hermann replies, throwing the covers back and shivering slightly in his undershirt and
boxers.
Newton turns away, looking out the window. "Yup," he says.
"Anything specific?" Hermann asks, his tone somewhat in need of a verbal whetstone.
"No," Newton replies. "Literally anything. I'm so bored that I might actually go insane. Buy me
Halo 12: Tactical Revolution. Buy me a tablet. Buy me a book. Buy me the most ridiculously
convoluted book you can find that neither of us have read. Buy me the complete works of Spinoza.
Buy me a Portuguese dictionary. I don't care what it is, I need something to do or I'm going to die. I
think I might actually die, Hermann, this is absolutely necessary."
"Can you read?" Hermann asks him, unfolding his shirt from the chair and pulling it on in the gray
light of early morning.
"Yes," Newton replies, affronted, turning to glare at him in brief irritation.
"Hmm," Hermann replies skeptically, inclining his head toward the desk while fastening buttons.
"Read that menu."
Newton gives him an irritated downward press of his eyebrows as he picks up the room service
menu from atop the desk.
"Not that one," Hermann snaps, "the one beneath it."
"Are you indirectly insinuating that I might cheat?" Newton asks, swapping the familiar hard-
bound room service menu for a paper one that had been shoved beneath their door the previous
afternoon.
"Yes," Hermann says, stepping stiffly into his pants. "Though I'm not clear from where you're
getting the word 'indirect'."
Newton opens the menu with an unnecessary flourish and says, "let's start with seafood, shall we?
Number thirty-one, crabmeat stuffed with bean curd. Number thirty-two, curry crab. Number thirty-
three, stir-fried squid with pickled mustard greens. Number thirty-four, octopus in XO sauce. Number
thirty-five, salted fish and eggplant casserole."
Hermann rolls his eyes. "Very convincing, aside from four points: a) If you could read, you'd be
using your phone and would be significantly less bored, b) after the nuclear detonation of 2013 one
can no longer buy consumable seafood in San Francisco, c) the menu you are holding is for an Italian
restaurant, and d) you are clearly reciting the menu from the take out place two blocks inland from the
Hong Kong shatterdome with which I am extremely familiar," Hermann says, sitting to pull on his
socks. "Otherwise? An entirely commendable effort."
Newton sighs. "I'm pretty sure that I'll be able to read in eight hours."
"I'm absolutely positive that if you would sleep, your eyes would improve in a more expeditious
manner."
"It's just that I enjoy the not-sleeping so much, Hermann. God. Use your brain. Insomnia is like
any pharmacologic euphoriant. Why do people do it? For the pure, intemerate, undefiled,
uncontaminated, sparkling, double-distilled pleasure of the experience. I love sleeplessness,
personally."
Hermann rolls his eyes. "I will buy you a book," he says. "I will, in fact, buy you several."
"You are both the worst and the best," Newton says. "Also, do you have my wallet?"
"Yes," Hermann says.
"Just keep it," Newton says. "Use my credit card for whatever, if it works. I think I may have not
paid it off last month, due to world-saving?"
"Your wallet is in the bedside drawer," Hermann says. "You did not pay off your credit balance
last month, but I paid it for you."
"Really?" Newt asks. "When?"
"Yesterday," Hermann says shortly, "while Dr. McClure was performing your Sunday-afternoon
EEG."
"I can feel entire swaths of my ability to manage the boring ephemera of life turning from minimal
to vestigial as we speak."
"I will not be paying your bills in the future," Hermann says dryly.
"No," Newton agrees, "you will not, because as soon as I can reliably see, I'm changing all my
passwords. God. First you kidnap me, then you start managing my finances? Not cool."
"I completely concur," Hermann replies.
"It's too bad I'm eight million percent useless right now. If I ever get fine motor control back, I'll
make this up to you. I'll let you watch me play guitar, how about that?"
"Will you shut up?" Hermann snaps, not picturing any such thing, not picturing it in the slightest.
"Standing offer," Newton says, and manages to catch the pillow Hermann pitches in his direction.
He completes his morning routine, takes an aspirin in the hope of filing the edge off a building
headache, and declines Newton's offer to order breakfast because he has no intention of being late,
and room service leaves much to be desired when it comes to expeditious meal preparation.
He does not like the idea of leaving Newton alone.
Despite Newton's EEG of the previous day, which had showed a mild degree of normalizing to a
typical human baseline, despite the fact that Newton hasn't had a seizure for roughly three days, and
despite the man's semi-regular claims regarding being 'fine'--Hermann doesn't like the idea of leaving
him unsupervised. Partially, this is because he's fairly certain that Newton still has post-panic time
intervals where he's not entirely oriented and Hermann hates to think of him confused and alone in an
unfamiliar room in an unfamiliar city. Hermann has an entirely well-founded fear that Newton is going
to do something horrifying if left to his own devices, but this is ridiculous, because how much trouble
can even Newton cause in a hotel room with poor enough vision that he can't reliably operate his own
phone?
This is a terrible, misfortune-inviting rhetorical question and he literally cannot believe he just
posed it to himself.
"Do not," he snaps, halfway through sliding his computer into his shoulder bag, "leave this hotel
room."
"Yeah I don't think you have to worry about that," Newton says, sitting hunched on the edge of the
bed, gripping his own shirtsleeves.
"Do not," he continues, unmollified, "watch the news."
"Sure," Newton says.
Hermann narrows his eyes.
"What?" Newton demands. "Look dude, I'm going to sit here, probably meditate, maybe take a
nap, ask my phone to read me the complete works of Rene Descartes, be disappointed when it says
no, and maybe eat an overpriced salad full of pretentious greens, such as radicchio. Possibly fennel.
Chill."
"I believe that you would spontaneously combust if you attempted meditation, so I advise against
it," Hermann says.
"Yeah that was never happening, I was just trying to send you on your way with some reassuringly
Zen parting thoughts. Is there anything you do advise?" Newton asks.
"Eyedrops," Hermann says, "and sleep."
 "Noted," Newton says, with the edgy irritation of a man not willing to directly engage with the
logistically impossible.
Hermann deposits his bag on the floor near the desk, then moves to sit next to him on the edge of
the bed.
There is an awkward silence.
"Why is it that you think you have to do this now?" Newton asks him. The question is ambiguous,
but for the fact that Newton has been asking it in iterations for the entire weekend. There is no
indication in his tone or his phrasing that he believes Hermann can be dissuaded from the course he
has set for himself.
Hermann wonders what concerns Newton most--being left alone, or picturing Hermann
addressing a massed and anticipatory crowd in a confused and confusing mental state.
"You are welcome to accompany me," Hermann says, rather than asking for clarification he's
certain Newton doesn't want to give.
"I know, but this is going to suck enough without having to deal with--" the man makes a nebulous
circular hand gesture in the general vicinity of his own left temple.
"True," Hermann admits, staring intently into space, trying to master his own dread.
"Just do me a favor and call me or something," Newton says, "so that I know you didn't die of
apoplexy or something mid-spiel."
"Charming," Hermann says.
"Guilty as charged," Newton replies.
They stare into space, not looking at one another, trapped by what is, in all likelihood, nearly
identical mental dread.
Then Newton stands and turns to face him, holding out a hand.
Hermann eyes his extended hand dubiously.
"Are you even real?" Newton asks.
"Are you?" Hermann replies.
"That sounds like something a thought-construct would say," Newton says, pushing his eyebrows
together.
Hermann gives him just the barest hint of an eye-roll before taking his hand.
Newton pulls him to his feet and straight into an unexpected embrace. He has no idea how
Newton manages to accomplish this kind of thing so easily, it is simultaneously enviable and
horrifying, and it's certainly a skill that Hermann should have somewhere deep in his brain--he has
enough other Geiszlerian habits that he's certain he doesn't need.
He awkwardly reciprocates the gesture, not really sure what's happening or why.
"You're going to be fine," Newton murmurs. "You're going to be awesome. You had better be
awesome. I will personally upbraid you if you are not awesome. That's a lie, I'll order you soup and
watch you eat it like an overly solicitous creeper. This is getting weird; I'm going to stop talking.
Bring me some rationalists when you come back, yeah?" With that, Newton claps him on the back and
lets him go.
"Ah--" Hermann says, in monosyllabic prelude to absolutely nothing.
"Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz. Now get out of here, man."
Hermann is too unbalanced by Newton's unanticipated invasion of personal space to do much
other than stare at the man while he retrieves Hermann's bag from the floor, now weighed down with
nothing other than a laptop and required adaptors.
"Ask for a laser pointer before you start," Newton says, settling the bag across Hermann's
shoulders for him. "I always forget, and then I hit my first data slide and I'm missing a light. It kills the
build and the bystander effect will ensure no one gets up to give you one."
"I--" Hermann says, flustered, his brain rejecting everything coming across his cognitive desk.
"All right."
"Easy to say now," Newton says, turning him bodily and pressing him gently in the direction of the
door. "Easy to forget when you're facing down a packed auditorium."
"Thank you, Newton," Hermann snaps, more out of instinct than anything else. He feels
unbalanced.
"It will be fine," the other man says stopping next to the door and shoving his hands deep into his
pockets. He leans against the wall. "You look good," Newton says.
"I what?" Hermann asks.
"Your sweater could fit slightly better, not gonna lie dude, but you look like a guy who's going to
blow minds with supererogatory quantum cartography. And for what did we get into this business if it
wasn't for the blowing of minds? I ask you." Newton gives him a half smile, leaning against the wall
adjacent to the closed door.
"I don't know about you, Dr. Geiszler," Hermann says, dropping his eyes, "but I got into it for the
mathematics."
"Oh sure," Newton says. "The math. Me too. Definitely."
"If you have a seizure while I'm gone, I will murder you," Hermann informs him.
"I'm not planning on it," Newton says.
"Do not watch the news," Hermann reiterates.
"Would I do that?" Newton asks.
Hermann glares at him. "Don't forget your eyedrops."
"Don't forget to turn your microphone on."
"Don't bleed to death."
"Don't fall off the stage."
"Take your anti-epileptic."
"Exchange pleasantries with your future colleagues. Call them by their first names, even."
"Idiot," Hermann says.
"Jerk," Newton replies with indolent familiarity. "Get out of here. Bring me back a present."
"You should be so lucky," Hermann replies dryly, but he makes no move to leave.
Newton opens the door for him. "Go," the other man says. "You'll be late."
"You could come with me," Hermann says, knowing it's a terrible idea, but suggesting it anyway
because he's not going to shut the metaphorical door in Newton's metaphorical face, even if Newton
is about to shut the literal door in Hermann's literal face.
"Quantum cartography," Newton says, his expression nearly twisting out of his control and into
something distressed. "So boring, dude, so not relevant. To anything, except for like, you know,
monster inventory on our side of the verse. The universe? We've got to chuck that word.
Etymologically it's misleading. But I digress. As if I want to hear your talk. Again. I prefer staring
into space trying to think of nothing. Yikes, okay, sorry, I overshot sarcasm and ended up in self-pity.
That's never a good look. Whatever. Get out of here, will you please?"
They nod awkwardly in one another's direction and Newton waves him through the doorway.
The door shuts behind him.
Hermann resettles his bag across his chest, double-checks he has his computer, his adaptor, his
wallet, writing material, a pen, his phone, and his hotel room key.
 He has everything he needs, and nothing he doesn't.
And so.
He leaves.
In early 2013, the cab ride from San Francisco to UC Berkeley would have taken thirty-five
minutes without traffic. It now takes ninety minutes. The route circumnavigates Oblivion Bay--the
remnants of the Golden Gate to the north and the decontaminating Bay Bridge to the east are both
impassable. He directs his driverless cab south, passing through Palo Alto before turning back north
through Fremont, Oakland, and Berkeley.
There is no wall around the bay.
The Wall of Life lies to the west, along the coast, cutting off the bay where the Golden Gate
Bridge used to stand. Behind the Wall, the water is now is a stagnant lake--dark, brackish, and
contaminated. The Bay Bridge still stands, skeletal and untrafficked against the pale gray of a clouded
dawn. He watches until it fades from view at the beginning of his journey and comes back into view
near its end, as his circumnavigation of the bay is complete.
He arrives at UC Berkeley's Mathematics Department at nine in the morning. When the cab stops,
he collects his cane, his computer, and himself before banishing it, then walks along a tree-lined street
through a campus that's either still half asleep or half-deserted. It's more likely to be the latter than the
former. The costal exodus has influenced the allocation of academic excellence over the past decade,
but there were plenty of people who were disinclined to cease their work for the purposes of
relocation, even when faced with the risk of death.
Science waits for no one.
Hermann spends his morning in the painful slog of meeting the department, member-by-member,
discussing NP-completeness, integer programming, the Hadamard conjecture, the inverse Galois
problem, number theory, and other fascinating mathematical varia.
This is almost absorbing enough to allow him to forget his anxiety regarding his coming talk.
Almost.
There is an unmistakable trace of anticipation in the voices of the professors and students that he
meets. He has a difficult time getting through lunch with the department, because it is, of course,
stilted in a way he's forgotten is the academic norm. He's become too accustomed to Newton and his
ability to cut through constraint of any kind.
He and his faculty liaison arrive at the lecture hall fifteen minutes before his talk. The room is a
high ceilinged, wood-paneled affair that has been lit to a warm, day-spectrum yellow. It is already
full of people--full of faculty, full of students, full of phones and glasses sporting the subtle blue lights
of recording cameras, and full of anticipatory chatter.
Even now, even before he starts, everyone is watching him.
I told you, dude, his brain says, choosing for its incarnation the sanctimonious tone of Dr. Newton
Geiszler of the fenestrated perception and the knack for loose connections. Did I not tell you this was
exactly how it would go down?
Had his brain been in the habit of addressing him as Newton, pre-drift?
He thinks not.
He feels nauseated.
His hands are cold.
His mouth is entirely dry.
His digestive system has declared war on the rest of his organs.
He doesn't understand why he must respond like this, when faced with public speaking. No one is
literally trying to kill him; he is simply required to give a talk. It's, arguably, one of the easier things
he's done in the past ten days.
His nervous system seems to be unconvinced by this argument. This is not surprising. He has been
able to talk it out of very little when he pits cogent arguments against evolutionary imperatives. This
is one of the curses of the human condition, he supposes.
Hermann deposits his bag on the nearest chair in the still empty front row, feeling the slowly
filling capacity of the room pressing down on him.
"Ninety slides?" says his faculty liaison, looking over his shoulder as Hermann connects his
laptop to the projection system.
What of it? his brain snarls.
Hermann doesn't say anything. Engaging in small talk feels like an inordinately torturous effort and
will probably be recorded by half the audience members and analyzed for all time.
His chest feels strange; his stomach's in knots; he can hear the rush of blood in his ears, and--
Yeah, we're not doing this, his brain snaps, sounding exactly like Newton before the man makes a
terrible--
He's not sure what happens.
He staggers under the sensation of an almost physical snap of something that's entirely in his head,
and, with the shock of unexpected, long anticipated relief, his anxiety is gone.
He feels vaguely uneasy about this, but he's also vaguely disinclined to question it, because--yes.
It's just best not to question.
"Are you all right?" Professor Starr asks him.
David Starr. That's the man's name. It strikes him suddenly. Professor Starr looks concerned and
competent and like he has glorious taste in NP-complete problems. He's actually been quite helpful.
"Yeah," Hermann says, but that doesn't sound quite right, so he amends it to, "yes. Yes, I'm fine.
Thank you for your assistance, David."
"No problem," Professor Starr says, looking surprised and warming up appreciably. "You ready
for this?"
"No doubt," Hermann says dryly, surveying the room with a vaguely alarming sense of predatory
anticipation. This is, in all likelihood, the most fortuitous thing to have happened to all three hundred
assembling people in a decade because they are, in fact, about to hear about the breach, about its
discovery and composition, about the things that came through it, about how it was closed. Hermann
can't think of anything more topically relevant or viscerally satisfying than a mathematically laced
account of an apocalypse averted by science. Plus, he's a fabulous speaker. There's that to consider.
He flexes his hands, he pulls off his glasses, he asks David for a laser pointer, which is green,
that's outrageously acceptable, he's not going to lie about that, green is really his preferred laser
pointer color; red is too-often washed out, and hello, who is he? A Sith Lord of Science? No. No he
is not. The room has the promising feel of his sixth defense, which had ended with the somewhat
eccentric chair of MIT's Biomedical Engineering department theatrically dropping to his knees to
literally beg him to stay on as faculty within the department and not defect (again) to Neuroscience as
he'd been threatening. His closed door session had been a tenure track negotiation, and yes he had
done exactly zero postdocs and yes he'd gotten six degrees, sure, he admits it's a little weird, but in
the end, he'd been tenured in his twenties, so it was fine, he's not insecure about it, the point that he's
lost track of slightly is that he is an awesome speaker. The kind of speaker who sends undergraduates
back to their dorms starry-eyed and graduate students straight to drunken misery as they question their
life choices and career trajectories. It might be a little bit difficult for the Mathematics Department to
choke down their collective envy and hire him, but he's pretty sure they're going to do it, no one can
hunt down Riemann zeros like he can hunt down Riemann zeros--but wait.
Massive, massive identity confusion, his brain says, sounding unmistakably like Newt.
Like Newton.
This is bad, he says to his brain, not sure who he sounds like. This is not preferred, you're
defaulting to a pathway that isn't yours. You're defaulting to a guy who doesn't live here, not in this
head, not really. How is this even possible, this is not okay, this is why people don't lower their
membrane potentials; you should really write a paper if you don't go crazy.
Shut up, he snarls back at himself.
"Excuse me," he says to Professor Starr. He looks at his watch. Seven minutes remain until he is
due to begin his talk. "I'll be back shortly."
He leaves the room, finds a unisex bathroom, steps inside and locks the door. He leans back
against it, not seeing the confining spread of white tile.
He's freaking out a little bit.
Or--he's--
He's marginally anxious about this turn of events?
He has leveled up when it comes to identity confusion. Or--he has plotted new reaches of--how
should he classify this--cognitive consonance?
Cognitive consonance. That has a nice ring to it.
This might not necessarily be a bad thing, he thinks. I am an amazing public speaker.
Well, one of us is, his brain answers, sounding vaguely affronted. The question is, dude, can you
give a talk as Newt? Or, can Newt give a talk as you? Or, most correctly, can Hermann Gottlieb
give a talk as Newton Geiszler giving a talk as Hermann Gottlieb?
Yes.
Certainly.
He is certain he can do exactly that. He can do nearly anything. He's never encountered an
intellectual roadblock he hasn't shattered his way through. He can build a drift interface out of
salvaged parts and use it to--
"This is the worst," he says and it is dark but even so, he can see the cracking of the ceiling,
feel the dust on his face and the dirt beneath his hands. He needs to find his glasses--this is so
cliche; he will be so annoyed if he dies without at least seeing what's eating him; after all the work
he's put in that seems the least that he deserves. He finds them and the ceiling cracks apart and
something blue descends in front of him, some kind of sensory exploration--and and and he doesn't
like this, somehow it's more terrifying than the blind groping of a mindless thing in search of
caloric intake or programmed for destruction; there's something careful in its movements; he's too
horrified to scream, why is he sure this blue tissue is conductive? He can almost feel it wanting him
to just--to simply, to reach out and--
He manages to make it to the toilet before vomiting, his digestive system panicking as it is wont to
do, and he does not blame it; no he does not.
"For the love," he gasps. He had wondered what it was exactly that was happening to Newt--to
Newton--to Newt at those times, now he knows, now he has much too much insight into Dr. Geiszler,
thank you, and yet not enough at all.
He braces one hand against his wall, one hand on his cane. He breathes too hard and too fast.
He, whomever he is, has gotten himself into an insupportable situation.
One of many, truth be told.
 His nose begins to bleed.
He decides he needs to organize his thoughts.
He is--
He looks over at the mirror to visually verify who it is that he is.
Dr. Hermann Gottlieb.
Yes.
Good.
He is currently standing in a unisex bathroom at UC Berkeley, leaning over an unsanitary toilet,
one hand pressed to the tile of the lateral wall that is, in all likelihood, revoltingly unclean. His
current status is, alas, best described as: bleeding from the nose post-vomiting, post-flashback, mid-
identity confusion.
He erases the evidence of his rejected and yet still recognizable lunch because looking at it is not
helping him out at all; he is not going to lie about that one. Nope.
He is extremely confused.
He wipes his mouth with a handkerchief, staggers to the sink, and watches blood drop dark and
slide bright over sloping white porcelain. He tries to keep his head entirely still so that his shirt
remains unstained. He pulls out a fresh handkerchief and presses it to his nose.
He's supposed to be giving a talk.
In approximately three minutes.
To four hundred people, give or take.
It will, undoubtedly, be recorded and subjected to live streaming by members of the academic
community he's about to address.
I'm not sure that's happening, his brain says, sounding like Newton, under duress. The talk, I
mean.
Yes it is, he snarls back.
He must do this. There is literally no other alternative. He needs this appointment. It is absolutely
required. Unfortunately, he is also almost certainly going to have a panic attack when he gets to his
first slide, which is terrible, which is bad, which is unsalvageable, which is not adaptive, which is
entirely Newton's fault.
In his pocket, his phone vibrates.
He pulls it out, glances at the caller ID, and answers it.
"Newton," he snarls, the effect somewhat diminished by the handkerchief he's using to pinch his
nose shut. "This is not a good time for me." He nearly appends the word 'dude,' but stops short.
The line is silent.
He feels acutely guilty--for all he knows, Newton is calling him because the man is panicking in a
hotel room across town, uncertain of where he is or who exactly he is. For all he knows, the man is
hemorrhaging from a venous plexus somewhere. For all he knows the man has had a seizure. For all
he knows--
"Chill," the other man says, both annoyed and excessively annoying, and putting to rest all of
Hermann's guilt in a single word.
"Do not," Hermann snarls, "tell me to chill. I hate it when you tell me to 'chill'. I am speaking in
three minutes."
"I know that you don't think I have a theory of mind, Hermann, but guess what? I do. I even use it
sometimes, when I think about it." Newton's tone is a blend of irritation and caution.
Hermann supposes that he doesn't sound quite like his usual self. "What do you want?" he snaps.
 "Do you have a theory of mind?" Newton asks him with a calculated indolence that's, possibly,
intended to be calming. "Why do you think I called you? No wait, don't answer that--whatever you
say is going to piss me off. Look, what are you doing right now?"
"If you must know, I'm standing in a bathroom, bleeding from my nose," Hermann says, in waspish
misery.
"You threw up." At least the other man has the decency not to frame his statement as an
interrogative.
"This is your fault," Hermann says.
"Oh yeah. You got me," Newton says. "Guilty. Professor Geiszler, in the hotel room, with the
syrup of ipecac, hours ago, in the breakfast you didn't eat."
"Shut up," Hermann whispers.
"Seriously man," Newton says, "you're gonna own this thing for sure. Come on. They already think
you're a rockstar. All those people out there showed because they're half in love with you already.
There's literally no way for you not to hit this one out of the park. Even if you give the crappiest talk
you've ever given in your life, which you probably won't, because that talk in 2017 was pretty bad, it
would be hard to top that one--"
"You're not helping," Hermann interrupts through clenched teeth.
"Yeah, sorry, I'm not on my A-game. Are you still bleeding? Because that's probably step one."
Hermann pulls the tissue away from his face and watches blood continue to drip into the sink.
"Yes," he says.
"Okay well, it will stop, eventually, I'm pretty sure," Newton says.
"Newton, I have two minutes," he snarls.
And an identity crisis, his brain cheerfully adds.
"Are you serious?" his colleague asks. "Hermann. They can wait for you. They will get their
sweetass talk when you're ready to give it to them and not before, okay? You saved the world.
Without you? They'd be lunch right about now. Right about eight days ago. Whatever. Try to keep that
in mind, will you?"
He sounds so much better over the phone than he looks in person, and this whole thing would
almost almost be reassuring, but for the incontrovertible fact that Newton cannot possibly rescue him
from an excess of Geiszlerian thought patterns.
"Have you noticed," Hermann murmurs, shutting his eyes and shifting his weight and pressing the
handkerchief against his face, trying not to think of a clock counting down, 'that--" He breaks off.
There are too many things wrong with the thought he's trying to construct and he's too stressed to
salvage it.
"Probably not," Newton says quietly, after several long seconds pass. "I'm only hyperobservant in
the face of glaringly unsubtle stimuli. You want to come back? Just come back. Screw UC Berkeley
with their Fields Medalists and their more than decent theoretical quantum people. We'll get room
service and you can stop me from watching twenty-four hour news."
"Don't watch it," Hermann says, half choked with despair over everything that he has no time to
explain.
"Yeah, I tried, it did not go well for me. I switched to Star Wars. That's going better. Lightsabers.
You know. There's an all-day marathon, apparently. I'm midway through Episode IV."
For a moment they are silent.
"Spit it out, dude," Newton says, not ungently.
"I am finding that during periods of acute distress I default more to your coping strategies than to
mine," Hermann whispers.
"Really," Newton says, the word conveying no surprise, glazed with exhaustion. "So are you
charming everyone with a borrowed narcissistic personality disorder?"
"You're not a narcissist," Hermann murmurs, his eyes still shut. "It's not narcissism if it's
justifiable."
"Yeah, okay, wow, that's so true, thank you for noticing, but I'm going to level with you, dude--
you're pretty far gone if you're saying things like that." Newton's tone is appealingly wry. "But if you
did accidentally step into the shoes of science's most frontable frontman, I don't understand why
you're throwing up in the bathroom. I'm awesome at giving talks, if you don't count all the
interdisciplinary and intradisciplinary fights I somehow manage to start."
"One of your assumptions," Hermann replies, "is mistaken." He opens his eyes and inspects the
handkerchief he holds. It's nearly covered with blood. He pulls it away from his face and waits.
"Ugh," Newt says. "I hate that. Being mistaken. Especially about assumptions. Hermann, let's be
real, my brain is like a neuronal fricassee right now; can you just point out my biases so I can drag
them outside the Venn Diagram of Rightness that I like to hang out in?"
"Your brain is fine," Hermann replies, not at all certain of any such thing. "You spent most of last
night in eloquent speculation on the nature of consciousness and so I will thank you to stop playing the
neurological injury card whenever you're feeling rhetorically disinclined, man."
"Are you still bleeding?" Newton asks. "Also--did you just call me man?"
"No," Hermann says.
"So. Step one, tell me what I'm wrong about. Step two, wash the blood off your face. Step three,
light that talk on fire and, step four, burn it down," Newton says.
"I did not end up vomiting in this bathroom out of anxiety about the talk," Hermann informs him.
"Well crap," Newton replies.
"I seem to have, unfortunately, in borrowing your hubristic sense of scientific entitlement also
borrowed nearly everything else, including your alarming propensity to ah--"
He's not sure how to talk about this without initiating another immersive sensory recapitulation of
a terrifying memory that isn't his own.
"Freak out a little bit about near death experiences directly related to the subject material you're
about to be discussing?" Newton asks. "Okay, yes, I could see where that might be inconvenient for
you right about now. So, to summarize, in feeling super anxious regarding public speaking, your brain
decided that rather than be you, in anxious misery, it would instead be me, the glam-punk master of the
oral presentation. Can I just make an aside to say that this is weird? Like, I'm not sure I approve of
this. I've definitely trended a little bit in the you-direction lately--I may have kind of just obsessively
cleaned our hotel room, but it's not the same thing, I don't think."
"Newt, seriously?" Hermann says, picturing the slightly uncomfortable expression Dr. Starr is
likely sporting at the moment, several rooms away, "I have no time for this."
"Oh my god. Did you just--call me Newt? I have kidnapped your brain. I am so sorry. Yeah, okay.
So. Focusing. Sorry again. Okay, so your brain decided that when faced with an audience it would
rather be my brain, but unfortunately you're now flashing back to--"
"Nearly being eaten," Hermann snarls at him. "Could you not have asked one of the military
personnel to locate the illicit Hong Kong kaiju market for you?"
"This is not the thing to focus on right now dude, I'm pretty sure about that," Newton says, and his
tone is so entirely reasonable that Hermann can barely stand it.
Newton is not the reasonable one.
 "Okay, so you got nervous, your brain decided to pretend to be me for the duration, which is going
to produce a pretty interesting effect on your general demeanor I've got to say, fortunately some ballsy
grad student or fifty is going to post your talk for the world so I can watch it and later mock you,
possibly compliment you, actually, because let's be real, I'm a pretty great speaker and if--"
Newt has now summarized what Hermann has been trying to tell him in three different, wandering
ways, and it is driving Hermann insane given his current time pressure. He can't remember how to
direct the man into saying something sensical, even though that's a skill he knows he should have.
All he can think to do is demand precision.
"You will be able to do neither if I never give it. Get to the point, would you please?"
"Okay, so thanks to EPIC Rapport, you're no longer nervous about the talk itself, you're more
concerned that midway through you're going to flash back to a crap public shelter and then throw up
and bleed out of your face in that order whilst in front of hundreds of people and being livestreamed
to everyone in the world who's interested in what you have to say, which, honestly, is going to be a
pretty significant fraction of the total population of humanity--"
"You are useless," Hermann says. "We literally cannot converse. I'm hanging up."
"No! No no no no. I'm hypothesizing while talking. Don't hang up."
Hermann looks at the ceiling, so frustrated he thinks his brain might implode.
"Hello?" Newton says.
"I'm waiting," Hermann says.
"Oh. You are? Cool. Great. Okay so I think you're just going to have to be nervous about this talk.
Embrace your anxiety, man. I think that might work."
"That's your solution? I fail to see how it improves my situation. I was already anxious, that's
what generated this problem in the first place."
"Nope. False. The anxiety itself was not the problem. The problem occurred when your brain
decided that it would rather be me under duress than you under duress, because that is not a good
choice, dude, it was probably never a great choice but it's a worse choice now than it would have
been circa 2020, because you've got my synaptic pathways post-drift numero uno and so, yeah, no
matter how satisfying you might find it to bitchslap your audience with awesomeness so hard their
teeth rattle, the associated sequelae are a no go."
"You realize this is impossible, correct?" Hermann asks, "What you're proposing? I can't just
leverage my own psychology into a less emotionally advantageous state, Newton, biologically--"
"Sure you can," Newton says. "As if you know anything about biology, dude; you think you
defaulted to this pathway you stole from me? You didn't default into it, you escaped into it, but there's
not supposed to be any escaping here, Hermann, you need your anxiety to focus, to haul ass through a
ninety-slide slide deck in a fifty minute time slot. You think you can give a talk as me and not end up
all over the map? What are you on, dude? This is a nonviable pathway, so snap out of it. This is
horrifically, totally, one hundred percent terrifying okay? You're about to give a talk to a packed
house with global overflow seating. Everyone is going to be watching, everyone, okay? Everyone
you know. It's going to be recorded for posterity, it's going to be dissected and analyzed by the
scientific community, by the military, by Sunday morning political shows, by Mako the Magnificent,
by your dad, by your exes, by your middle school math teachers, by Possibly Flow, by Hypothetical
Rain, by everyone in your field, by mathematicians, by computer scientists, by fourteen year olds with
an interest in quantum or in kaiju, by creeper monster cults, by Hannibal Chau's leaderless gang, by
your future biographer, and of course, by me. Later. As soon as possible. And I will literally never let
you forget even the smallest error that you might make, okay? You should live in fear of me Hermann,
I am a relentless jerk with an unbelievable mnemonic capacity and I will judge you, dude, I will
judge you. Harshly. Loudly. Eternally. To the full extent of our combined lexicons."
Hermann feels the echo of recalled anxiety and attendant nausea. He clenches his jaw, breathes
slowly, and tries not to bleed.
"You had better be silently freaking out right now, Hermann," Newton continues, "because this is
going to be totally, one hundred percent awful and literally everything will be ruined if you don't pull
it off. You are not a frontman, okay, you're a mathematician who hates crowds, let alone addressing
them, this is pretty much your worst nightmare. Now go wash your face and get this done, right? Just
the facts, just the math, just the schematics of interfaces and the innovations in computational
modeling and the quantum foam that you mapped every night for years, like the super boring, super
anxious quantum cartographer you are."
Newton is silent.
Hermann feels confused, upset, and increasingly anxious. His mouth is dry.
"Hundreds of people," Newton says. "Hundreds. That you can see."
"I feel deeply ashamed," Hermann says, "and endlessly vexed that your extremely transparent
strategy seems to be working."
"The brain," Newton says. "Pretty powerful, not always the smartest, especially mine."
"I'll call you later," Hermann says.
"Hundreds of people," Newt replies.
"Yes, thank you, message received."
"That you can see. Probably thousands that you can't."
"Newton."
"Video evidence."
"Newton."
"And you're already late. Are you kidding me? I'm docking ten points for style right there.
Lateness. Just who do you think you are?"
"Thank you," Hermann says. He can feel his hands shake subtly with adrenaline.
"Light it up," Newton replies, and the line goes dead.

After his talk, which is enthusiastically received despite the crushing anxiety he both suffers
beneath and, cruelly, works to maintain, Hermann leaves the auditorium by a back door. No one who
lacks a UC Berkeley ID card has been admitted, but he is told after he fields his last question that
scattered members of the press have gathered outside, barred from entering but waiting for him to
emerge. When he indicates he'd prefer not to interact with the press, thank you, he is accompanied by
Professor Starr and by the head of UC Berkeley's Mathematics department out a back door, down a
flight of stairs, and through an underground connection to an adjacent building before emerging
beneath a clouded sky.
Hermann doesn't feel quite right--as if, somewhere in his mind, a man significantly braver and
less organized than he is waits in mental wings, offstage and in the dark.
What does it say about his state of mind that this doesn't frighten him?
It should.
He has daguerreotype of a living man etched into the substance of his mind.
Other things are etched there as well.
"Something on your mind?" the Department Chair asks him, in subtle Scottish accent. There is
something overly smooth in the other man's delivery, as if he's aware of his own intrusion into
thoughts that might be private and is working to sand down any interpersonal rough edges.
"Too much," Hermann says, smelling the sea, remembering what it was like to breathe underwater.
"Yes well," the other man says, "you've had an eventful year."
Hermann says nothing, because he's concerned that whatever response he can excavate free of a
decade of detritus will compound the unsteady shifting of his thoughts.
He has a difficult time composing himself until he is back inside, until Starr has peeled away,
vanishing to an office or a waiting bank of monitors, or wherever it is that Algebraic Topologists go
in the mid-afternoon at UC Berkeley. He collects himself, his thoughts sharpening into their old,
familiar lines as he seats himself in the Department Chair's cluttered, ground-floor office, and
narrows his focus down to the gray-haired man with square framed glasses and a sharp look.
Hermann likes him.
They are cut from the same cloth, he suspects.
They exchange labored pleasantries for ten minutes before the other man decides to cut to the
quick and make him an offer. It's better than Hermann had been bracing himself for--he's not
insensible to the fact that UC Berkeley is as strapped for resources as any institution not devoted
solely to the preservation of life on Earth. A full tenure package, relatively minimal teaching
responsibilities, and an office that the man assures him is "a fair bit nicer than my own," with an
understated wryness that makes Hermann vaguely suspicious that he might have some ulterior motive.
Perhaps he doesn't like being the department chair. Hermann doesn't blame him. He's certain the
administrative duties are atrocious and unrewarding.
"I find your offer extremely suitable," Hermann says, after an appropriate pause.
"Perfect," the other man replies.
"But," Hermann says.
The Department Chair raises his eyebrows.
"In order for me to accept, my--" he hesitates only a fraction of a second, "partner would also
need to be offered a faculty position."
"Ah," the other man says. "This wouldn't be the reclusive Dr. Geiszler, would it?"
Reclusive? Hermann thinks. He can come up with a plethora of words to describe Newton
Geiszler, but 'reclusive' is certainly not one of them.
"I see you've been watching the news," Hermann says dryly.
"To my perpetual disappointment, it generally fails to qualify as any such thing," the other man
replies, hooking one hand over his shoulder and pressing down, as if to massage away some element
of strain.
"I'm glad to see you view the current coverage with the skepticism it deserves. I can assure you
that Dr. Geiszler is hardly 'reclusive'. Nor is he insane, brain-damaged, having a nervous breakdown,
a traitor to his species, persecuted by the military-industrial complex, heartbroken over the closure of
the breach, a drug addict, poisoned by Kaiju Blue, Mako Mori's biological half-brother, or affiliated
with Kaiju Worshippers in any way. He's--" Hermann isn't sure how to end his sentence in an accurate
and circumspect way.
The other man looks at him, gray eyebrows edging above the rims of his square-framed glasses.
"Recuperating," Hermann finishes, curling the word into something pointed and frosted over.
The other man nods, breaking the steeple of his fingers and turning his hands over in an
unmistakably conciliatory gestural paraph. "I'll make a call. He's a biologist, correct?"
"He's qualified in multiple areas," Hermann says, de-frosting his tone. Slightly.
"Do you happen to have his CV?"
 "I do," Hermann replies, pulling it out of his bag and passing it across the desk.
He watches the other man flip through the thing in growing and familiar consternation. "How many
degrees does he--"
"Six," Hermann says dryly.
For that admission he gets another eyebrow lift. "Seems a bit excessive, doesn't it?"
"Yes," Hermann admits. He rolls his eyes in the general direction of the ceiling, exceedingly glad
that Newton is not present and will never hear the words that are about to come out of his mouth. "His
first advanced degree was defended at age fourteen, however, so his academic indecisiveness is,
perhaps, somewhat understandable, given the unusual educational choices he made at age ten."
"I suppose," the Department Chair says, narrowing his eyes. "That might explain the first three--
possibly the first four. But--"
"His publication record is stellar," Hermann says, mentally cursing Newton for failing to commit
to a single field of study. He's certain that a large part of Newton's staying power in the field of
exobiology derives directly from the fact that his civilization would have ended had he not kept his
mind in a single track.
"It is," the other man agrees, still flipping pages. "He was based at MIT before leaving academia
for the PPDC?"
"He was," Hermann confirms. "He has a standing offer to return, which will likely be what we
choose to do if UC Berkeley is unwilling to make him an offer."
It is, technically, a lie, but, with some well-placed emails, it could transform into something true.
"Berkeley is certainly a better fit for your interests," the other man says with an incisive coolness
that Hermann very much admires.
"It is," Hermann admits.
"I have every confidence that the Biomedical Engineering, Integrative Biology, Neuroscience,
Molecular and Cell Biology, and, possibly, the Bioethics Departments would all be willing to invite
him to give a seminar."
Now for the delicate part.
"Dr. Geiszler," Hermann says carefully, "is unlikely to be sufficiently recovered to give an invited
job-talk for several weeks. But unfortunately, I can't accept your offer until I'm certain that he has a
position here."
The other man gives him a look roughly on par with the outrageousness of Hermann's indirectly
stated ultimatum. "What is it exactly that you're asking me to do? Extend a standing offer on behalf of
a department that I don't chair to a man who hasn't interacted with any members of the faculty in any
department he might be qualified to join?"
"I recognize that this is highly irregular," Hermann says. "But, as I mentioned, we had planned to
return to MIT. Please don't inconvenience yourself if you find this to be an unreasonable request."
The Department Chair makes him wait, just long enough to demonstrate a wry cognizance of
Hermann's rather crass negotiating technique before he says, "I am certain, Dr. Gottlieb, that this
institution would only benefit from employing the pair of you. I am also certain it will be a relatively
straight-forward matter to convince someone to offer Dr. Geiszler a position based on reputation and
CV alone. Presuming I can secure him an offer in an expeditious manner, would you be amenable to
joining our department?"
"I would be delighted," Hermann replies.
"Then welcome aboard," the other man says, extending a hand across the chaotic expanse of his
desk.
 After his meeting, Hermann calls Newton, who, against all odds, seems to be fine. He informs
Hermann that he will, "literally kill you if you don't go out drinking with the Berkeley Math
Department, dude, it's a crime against humanity, it needs to happen, I will never forgive you if you
come back here pre-socializing. It's a whole new decade; the world didn't end, so I fully expect that
you're going to be bitching about these guys for the foreseeable future and I really want that to start as
soon as possible. It's going to improve my life a lot, because, as you know, the only thing I like more
than complaining about mathematicians is listening to you complain about other mathematicians."
So Hermann goes.
He goes first to a somewhat awkward dinner in a half-deserted restaurant of mediocre quality,
and then for substantially less awkward drinks in a bar that is small and dark and lined with shattered
spars of wood that he makes a point not to try and recognize or place.
He resolves not to mention Newton to any of his new colleagues.
He fails.
He fails multiple times.
This point is driven home to him by the fact that his evening ends with a trip back to Starr's office
to pick up a pre-publication copy of the mathematically-demanding Rediscovering Leibniz that the
man has been editing for the past eight months. Hermann fends off a dinner invitation, extended
ostensibly to the pair of them, but, mostly to Newton, in absentia. He fends it off three times. Newton
is never allowed to cross paths with the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department.
Ever.
Hermann would have a lot of explaining to perform on two fronts if such an event ever came to
pass, and when it was all said and done, Newton would likely be entirely insufferable for years.
The return cab ride from Oakland to San Francisco is long and dark and driverless.
He spends the time in an exhausted blur, watching the shifting lights of decimated cityscapes blend
and curve in a broken crescent around Oblivion Bay. Again, the Bay Bridge bookends the open loop
of his journey--still standing, still untrafficked, still lit up in the style of Villareal; a bizarre defiance
of a war torn decade, a memorial to a time before the breach had self-organized into a traversable
passage.
Hermann's not sure what to make of the Bay Bridge Lights.
Are they a hopeful return of the city, of the coast, of the planet, to the flaws of human stewardship?
Or a memory of a history set aside by foreign influence?
He doesn't know.
He tries not to remember rolling into the bay with the fog and the tolling of bells, rending apart a
bridge like it was nothing, watching vehicles spill into the water without a clear understanding of
what they were, tracking the ripples that formed and cracked in distorting asphalt as he tore through
small and interesting structures built by small and interesting mammals who hadn't been here, not last
time, not on this world, and who did not belong here now.
Hermann spends the cab ride back in the vertiginous darkness of the mildly intoxicated, not
thinking of the view of Oblivion Bay from the west.
The return journey is shorter; it is late, the traffic is minimal, and alcohol and relief have loosened
the tight gears of his mind into something that runs smoother and less precisely.
It will be all right.
They will rejoin academia. The PPDC will not reclaim them.
They never belonged in the military--not truly. They belong in labs, with cadres of graduate
students that complain about them, secretly and bitterly and passionately, over too much coffee.
 The cab pulls up in front of the off-white hotel, lit up against the night sky. Hermann swipes his
credit card and steps into the brisk night air, feeling strange, still half-drunk, still more than
fractionally Newton Geiszler, which is a problem he thinks he may have for the remainder of his life.
The air smells of salt, of the near but invisible sea.
His thoughts are a fugue in three parts, but he's certain he can track the through-line that's his own.
It's the one that started first, the one that frames the others, the only one that will ever change.
He wonders which will be harder to bear when he's drinking tea and misplacing his keys through
the final decade of his life--his memories of alien destruction or the version of Newton Geiszler,
frozen at age thirty-five, in medias res, that he will carry in his head for the rest of his life.
Hermann adjusts the strap of his bag over his shoulder, and searches for his room key with
alcohol-blunted coordination.
The wind fights with his hair.
He feels, in this moment, as though he can sidestep the past miserable decade of his life, like he
can obviate it, like he can pretend it never happened, like he can wake up in the morning two weeks
from now to mathematics that has nothing to do at all with the ending of the world; he can go his
whole life without firing off another salute, or sharing a workspace with extraterrestrial entrails, or
ignoring another backhanded insult about the value of what he's chosen as his life's work, like he can
leave all of it behind and he can keep only the things that had made the entire experience worthwhile-
-his quantum cartography and his closest friend--and drag both those things into an alternate pathway,
the way things might have been if he'd had less of a chip on his shoulder the length and breadth of the
Wall; if he'd met Newton at the peak of the 'Nerd Rock' genre in 2020, instead of in 2016, when
humanity had turned back to science after years of defunding basic research.
When he returns to their room he finds the lights off, Star Wars: Episode VIII halfway over, and
Newton lying in bed with Hermann's sunglasses on, the partially consumed remains of a room service
dinner spread around him on the coverlet in a semi-circle. The only illumination comes irregularly
from the television.
"Did you bring me a present?" his esteemed colleague asks him.
"I did," Hermann says.
Newton looks over at him, cocking his head in a subtly skeptical manner. "Are you drunk?"
It vexes Hermann significantly that Newton can determine his state of inebriation from two
monosyllabic words.
"I am most certainly not intoxicated," Hermann says crisply.
Relatively crisply.
He steps out of his shoes.
"You are," Newton says, but the words lack any kind of victorious edge. He simply sounds
exhausted and reassuringly familiar. Hermann's colleague of a decade with impeccable timing and
dubious taste in outerwear.
"Slightly," Hermann admits. "Extremely slightly."
Newton smiles at that, quick and crooked. "What did they do to you? Set up an ethanol drip?"
"Hardly," Hermann says. "Just because you cannot hold your alcohol does not mean--"
"Hey hey hey hey. We have never gone head-to-head, okay?" Newton says. "The record is very
clear regarding a straight-up alcohol tolerance test. Everyone has to be reasonably well-rested,
hydrated, and with equal access to food. We have never met those conditions, so relative alcohol
dehydrogenating prowess has never been truly assessed."
"Mmm hmm," Hermann says, with blatant skepticism.
 "Don't give me that," Newton replies, watching in evident interest as Hermann deposits his bag
carefully on the desk, opens it, and pulls out the book.
"Please tell me that's the complete works of Rene Descartes," Newton says. "Not that I care. Not
that I've been thinking about Descartes all day. Do you think he'd mind if I called him Rene?"
"Historically," Hermann says, "you have displayed no concern for either surnames or appropriate
titles and I am somewhat at a loss as to what might make you start now. Furthermore, Descartes is
dead, Newton, so I do not think he will take issue with your presumptive familiarity."
"Oh you are drunk, aren't you?" Newton says, reaching out to take the book from Hermann with a
notable effort. "You never humor me unless you're drunk. In other news, Descartes will never be
dead. To me, okay?"
"That is blatantly untrue," Hermann says. "Ninety percent of my waking life is spent humoring
you."
Newton angles the book and cocks his head, trying and likely failing to read the title in the dark
without his glasses. "You also get hyperbolic when you're drunk."
"False," Hermann says.
"True," Newton replies. "You should give up now."
"I'm certain that only a miracle would enable you to read without your glasses in this kind of
lighting," Hermann says.
"I'm a very good guesser," Newton says, re-angling the book.
"Leibniz," Hermann says, reaching out to tap its cover. "Rediscovering Leibniz. That's a pre-
publication copy."
"Fanciness," Newton says, letting the book come to rest on his chest. "Poor Leibniz. Isaac Newton
was a complete dick. Personally. Optical baller though, not gonna lie about that. One can't, really. Lie
about Sir Isaac, I mean. He took issue with Descartes, I think, or rather, you think? I'm getting all this
Descartes stuff from your brain, you know, I just--I can't really blame you for the fact that I seem to
have some wires crossed when it comes to rationalism and like, romantic love. I'm pretty sure that
humans were never meant to feel this way about invalidated philosophical disciplines."
"I will buy you a rationalistic bodice-ripper tomorrow," Hermann says, pulling off his jacket.
Newton rolls an r into an obscenely modulated purr of inappropriate appreciation, but at what,
specifically, Hermann can't say. Possibly Descartes. Possibly Hermann's unconventional application
of the term 'bodice ripper' to rationalism as a philosophical discipline.
Either way, this sort of thing is not to be encouraged.
Admittedly, he himself had instigated it, but he is intoxicated and he has had an atypical day.
Descartes is a fellow mathematician and deserves respect.
Hermann therefore coolly segues into, "and yes, I believe you are correct, your namesake was--"
"He's not my namesake, Hermann, as you know, because you've shared brain space with me and
I've told you exactly eighty-thousand times if I've told you once. I was named after the SI unit of
force."
"Which was, in turn, named after Isaac Newton. By the transitive property--"
"You can screw off via the transitive property," Newton says, with zero ire, predictably distracted
by the on-screen fight scene.
Even in his mildly intoxicated state, Hermann has the good sense to leave that one where it lies.
He redirects. "I sincerely doubt that you parents named you after the SI unit of force."
"That has been a longstanding element of my personal mythos, dude, and it works pretty well as a
pick-up line, so I'm sticking with it."
 "I suspect," Hermann says, unbuttoning the upper button of his collar, "that you were named for the
Hurricane that hit Cabo San Lucas in 1986."
"Um, excuse me," Newton says, smiling faintly, looking over at him, "but what the actual hell,
Hermann?"
"Your parents met there, in that year, did they not? During a hurricane? While touring with their
respective musical ensembles?"
"First of all, that makes them sound like poor, free-spirited vagrants, while, in actuality? They
were much more boring than that. A little bit. Second of all, can we not juxtapose my family history
with the Skywalker family history?" Newton gestures vaguely at the screen. "Because I just don't feel
great about this as a side-by-side. I'm developing a supervillian inferiority complex, did you know
that? Have I mentioned that to you? Third of all, what's with your creepy hurricane knowledge? I don't
believe that you could possibly have any grounds for this kind of irresponsible supposition. You--"
"A)," Hermann begins, unbuttoning the cuffs of his dress shirt, "I obtained my knowledge of your
parents via the drift. Obviously. With this knowledge came the extreme suspicion that they would not
have chosen to name you either after the SI unit of force, or Sir Isaac Newton."
"So you've been like--what, sitting around, performing some closet onanistic onomastic analysis
when you're not busy pretending to be me or freaking out about your to-do list?" Newton asks, tapping
the remote against his thigh in a restless rhythm.
"B)," Hermann continues, "I have been paying an inordinate amount of attention to tropical
disturbances in both the Southern and Northern hemispheres of the Pacific Oceaon for the past decade
and I did make a particular note of the fact that shortly after you joined the PPDC in 2016, Hurricane
Newton interfered with the deployment of Romeo Blue off the coast of Southern California."
"I like that you especially noted that," Newton says. "Very you. Did you file a formal reprimand
against Hurricane Newton, or did you just save those for me?"
"C)," Hermann says, unperturbed, "following your assertion a few moments ago regarding the
origins of your name, which I have heard before and of which I have always been skeptical, I realized
that, arithmetically, with the six-year cycling of tropical system names, your hurricane could,
potentially, be back-dated to the year in which your parents met."
"First of all, you have no idea when the 'Newton' entered the naming cycle," Newton says. "For
all you know, 2016 could have been its debut. You are proceeding on extremely sketchy evidence.
Even for me, let alone for you. Do you know how many assumptions you're making right now? A lot.
At least two. The first is that hurricane Newton existed at all in 1986, which is not a given. The
second is, that if it did, it hit Cabo San Lucas while my parents were there."
"Shall we check?" Hermann asks, pulling his phone out of his pocket.
"No," Newton says. "Yes. All right fine. Now I have to know. Who names their kid after a
hurricane anyway?"
"Your parents?" Hermann suggests.
"Maybe," Newton says, with the tone of a man who is narrowing his eyes invisibly behind
sunglasses.
"Ah," Hermann says, skimming the information on his phone. "Unsurprisingly, Hurricane Newton
did indeed hit Cabo San Lucas in September of 1986."
"You are the worst," Newton says. "It's entirely unfair to just reanalyze the data of my life in new
ways because you have access to it all now. In other news, your parents--um, yeah. I got nothing. Just
wait though, Hermann, I'm literally going to sit around, staring at a blank wall, thinking intensively
about your childhood so that I can offer you creepy insights about your own origins."
 "I look forward to it."
"Well you shouldn't. My uncle has some explaining to do. He confirmed that whole 'unit of force'
thing. I feel weird about this."
"In his defense, I presume that you, as a child, were extremely difficult to contradict once you
were possessed of a particular opinion."
"I'm told I cried a lot," Newton admits. "Historically."
"Did you eat this dinner?" Hermann asks, looking critically at the crescent of plates that surrounds
Newton on the bed. "Or were you just arranging it in an aesthetically pleasing manner while
reviewing the Skywalker family pedigree?"
"I ate some of it," Newton says, "and then I organized it by probable protein content and started
eating it until I remembered eating other things and then felt sick. Did you just say 'Skywalker family
pedigree'?"
"I am finished pretending that I don't have your knowledge base," Hermann says. "Primarily
because I am envious of your facility with mine. What 'other things'?"
"Whoa," Newton says. "That was more upfront than is typical even for drunk-you, so--"
"What 'other things'?" Hermann asks again.
"Well definitely not people," Newton says, quietly, looking away from him. "I'll tell you that
much."
Hermann feels sick in simpatico and fails in his effort to not think about how the experience of
consumption had varied by kaiju, managing to push the thoughts somewhere back to the furthest
reaches of his mind.
He suspects that Newton has a much more difficult time employing a similar strategy, so he
doesn't say anything, he just begins the process of removing Newton's crescent of plate and bowl and
fruit cup and saucer and packet of crackers and silverware from the bed.
"I can do that," Newton says, not doing it, his fingers tracing the edges of the book Hermann has
brought him.
"Undoubtedly," Hermann replies.
"You," Newton says, watching Hermann reload the room service tray and banish it to the other
side of the room, "are just opening all kinds of doors that should remain closed. For your own sanity."
I implied to the entire Mathematics Department at UC Berkeley that we were romantically
involved, Hermann thinks. He does not say this out loud. He is not that drunk.
He will never be that drunk.
"This is not a new habit," Hermann says agreeably.
"Are you going to wear a bathrobe?" Newton asks. "Danielle brought us a new one."
"Who is Danielle?" Hermann asks.
"She works for housekeeping. She's cool. She came asking about all the blood on clothes and
sheets. I told her I have an incurable yet non-communicable disease, and then she brought me leftover
donuts from the continental breakfast downstairs."
Hermann looks at the ceiling.
"Dude, I'm just saying. If you want a bathrobe, we have a replacement. We also have clean
towels."
"Thank you, Newton," Hermann says, loosening his tie. "I will take that under advisement, post-
shower."
"If you hurry, you can still make the lightsaber-crafting montage pre-arc-of-confused-redemption-
nee-ambiguous-vengeance," Newton says, looking at the Leibniz he can't see rather than the movie he
can't see.
"Splendid," Hermann replies. "I shall make every effort."
When he reemerges from the shower, bathrobe-clad, carrying a cup of water and Newton's anti-
epileptic, he finds the other man has migrated to a position that's mostly horizontal. Hermann thinks he
might be sleeping until Newton points at him and says, "yes. Geiszler-approved attire."
"Have you taken this yet?" Hermann says, giving the medication a subtle shake, certain the answer
is no.
"I'm pretty sure I don't need it," Newton replies. "I think I only get epileptiform discharges when I
give them to myself on purpose a little bit."
"Try to reduce the scope of your own idiocy as much as possible." Hermann replies dryly.
"I like that," Newton says, taking the proffered pill and water with no further argument. "It makes
a good motto. Reducing the scope of idiocy since--when did we start corresponding? 2013? Let's
custom-order matching T-shirts, what do you say."
"I don't wear T-shirts," Hermann replies.
"Mugs," Newt says. "Hats? Extremely tasteful ties. What if it were in Latin? Would that make a
difference? Would you wear a T-shirt with Latin on it?"
Hermann leans his cane against the wall and Newton moves laterally, giving him space on the
bed. "No," he says, lying down.
"You are so boring. You are seriously the most boring ever. In news totally unrelated to your
boringness, about eight people called me this afternoon, presumably to tell me what a badass you are;
I don't know for sure because I didn't answer my phone but I will congratulate you anyway. Strong
work."
"Thank you," Hermann says, trying to thank him for more than just his words, but not quite
managing to get it out.
"Maybe one day I'll be able to watch your internet-enshrined talk without having a panic attack."
"It wasn't anything you haven't seen before," Hermann says.
"I know," Newton replies. "Boring. Joining brains, killing monsters, quantum cartography,
dimensional transit, rockstarishness, blah blah blah. Sign me up for the next cataclysm, will you? I'm
so over this one."
"You know, Newton, I was thinking," Hermann says, as the lightsaber-crafting montage comes
onscreen in front of them to an appropriately epic soundtrack.
"I have never known such a thing to occur," Newton says. "How irregular, by Jove. What
aberration is--waaaiit. What am I doing? You're drunk, and I'm British-hazing you? No. I change my
mind. This is going to be awesome. Tell me, Dr. Gottlieb, of the arithmetic destiny and the sprawling
chalkdust legacy, what were you thinking?"
"I was thinking that we could have ended up this way even if they'd never come." He does not
need to specify, and so he does not. "Even if neither of us had left academia, we might have still
ended up at UC Berkeley at the height of our academic careers, we might have still met."
Newton looks at him, waiting for whatever might follow with notably unusual patience, but there
is nothing else.
Because, even inebriated, Hermann cannot verbalize the rest of it, cannot fully admit to the same
susceptibility that all Jaeger pilots have--to be unable to separate the fight and the pain and the death
and the loss of life from the uncontextualized and uncontextulizable closeness shared with another
living person.
"Hermann," Newton whispers.
"What?" Hermann whispers back.
"You're insane," Newton murmurs, with conspiratorial fondness.
"Shut up," Hermann replies.
Chapter 17
Chapter Notes
Again, I'd like to warn for psychological tough times. In my opinion, there's nothing worse in
this chapter than in the rest of the fic.
See the end of the chapter for more notes
Two days after transitioning from a non-descript hotel room to a non-descript, pre-furnished
apartment, Newt stands in front of a new and different pane of floor-to-ceiling sliding glass, leading
to a new and different balcony.
His shirt cuffs are in his fists, one fist is pressed against his mouth, and he is staring down the
setting sun.
Hermann isn't here.
But that's fine.
It's not like he needs Hermann to be here.
He turns away from the glass, eyes the empty bookshelves built into the wall, and then turns back.
Newt isn't sure about this apartment.
It has a balcony, so there's that.
It faces west, so there's that too.
If he couldn't look from east to west, in a westerly direction, retrograde relative to axial spin,
planet-wise, he's not sure what would happen because he had always been the kind of kid who
opened the closet and watched it, rather than shutting the door on imagined darkness.
But he's not sure about it.
The apartment.
Not the darkness.
Though, he's not sure about that either, truth be told.
He's not sure about their recently appropriated set of clean, white rooms, about the classtastic,
minimalist, I-live-next-to-radioactive-isotopes-but-I-do-it-in-style furniture, the dark wood of the
table, the granite counter-tops, the hardwood floors, the LED natural spectrum lights for people who
get sad under cloud cover, or the floor to ceiling windows that look out over the remains of a
beautiful bay turned disgusting. He's not sure about the diagonal swath of radioactive fallout that
separates him from the Pacific. He's not sure about not being sure about being separated from the
water on the other side of the Wall. He's not sure about bookcases without sides, those seem weird to
him, wall-mounted shelves with no edges? He doesn't like that--it looks dangerous for the books,
that's all. That's not weird. Is it weird? It's not weird. He doesn't like that someone else furnished this
place, someone with the aesthetic sensibilities of a low-to-moderately gifted interior decorator who
is a mental amalgam of cheap furniture catalogues and called something like Paul or Erika or
Paulerika and who was probably passionate about nothing but the concept of mediocrity and
efficiency via prefabrication.
Newt is being somewhat unfair to Amalgamated Paulerika, but it feels safer this way--because
Paulerika is not really the type to say, hypothetically, put things in apartments that don't belong in
apartments, he's not going to specify exactly what he means by that because that's getting into territory
that he still has the sense to label as a little bit paranoid. Possibly. Possibly he's just slightly slightly
(understandably) growing increasingly anxious about a whole host of things, so sue him, he doesn't
like unanswered questions and this pre-furnished apartment is too full of surfaces that he's going to
bleed on.
Newt maaayyyy not have slept in four days.
He literally may not have slept at all in that time.
He's starting to lose control of his (theory of) mind. A little bit. Not that much, probably.
He stares at Oblivion Bay.
The sun is going down. That hurts his eyes; they're watering behind his glasses.
His glasses block UV wavelengths and are scratch resistant.
His glasses are on his side.
He's not sure about the bookcase.
He edges away from it.
No, that's weird.
That's stupid, his brain corrects.
That's wrong.
The bookcase is fine.
He's ascribing sentience to too many things, like books and bridges and unfamiliar furniture, he
feels like they're watching him, like something's watching him, nothing is though, nothing can be,
right?
Right.
Well, maybe not so much 'right' as 'not right,' but he's pretty sure that of Things That Might Be
Watching Him the bookcase is really low on that list, he just doesn't like that it has no edges, honestly
books are going to fall off the sides at least the way that he deals with books. Who has so few books
that they don't stack the things right out to the edges?
Amalgamated Paulerika, apparently. Not a big reader, that one.
Newt has broken bookcases by putting too many books into them.
The bookshelf isn't at all the problem. He doesn't have that many books right now, and it's just a
surrogate for other concerns he has, about the normal things that normal people would be concerned
with after the two weeks he's just had. Like, for example, whether aliens are trying to resorb him into
a collective consciousness right about now.
Oh my god, his brain says. Never, ever say that out loud to anyone. Or work on your phrasing.
What, Newt replies defensively.
You know exactly what, his brain says.
Mechanistically, he's safe. Science's working hypothesis about the whole affair is that he's safe,
science says that, science does, science says that because literally how could anything be influencing
him right here, right now, nothing could, nothing can, that makes no sense, but--
Ongoing external influence can't be formally excluded.
Neither can invisible, incorporeal floating dragons, his brain says, switching from vitriolic sass
to a weirdly appealing combo of Hermann Gottlieb and Carl Sagan, both of whom seem half
concerned, half comforting. Maybe Hermann is the concerned one and Sagan is the comforting one.
Maybe vice versa? No way, that's just ridiculous. Maybe they're both half and half. Either way, they
raise a good point.
Are you guys positing that the question of whether or not a neural connection exists between
myself and other parties isn't scientifically refutable? Newt asks.
I didn't say that, Sagan replies. But the burden of proof is substantial, and shifted squarely onto
your shoulders. Your claim is extraordinary, and is going to require extraordinary evidence.
"Well yeah, they always do," Newt says through clenched teeth, scrubbing a hand through his hair.
 In other news, you're talking aloud to dead astronomers, his brain says, in helpful annotation.
And whose fault is that? Newt asks.
"Okay," he says, pacing back and forth, once, in front of the glass door of the balcony. "Okay." He
presses the air away from him slowly, fingers spread wide. "Okay okay okay."
The question is this: how to separate real-time influence from the lateral snap into preserved
neural patterns left behind by EPIC Rapport.
Newt has suspected for quite some time that the romantically termed phenomenon of 'ghost
drifting' actually represents an unconscious swap of original neural pathways for the exogenous
neural pathways of one's drift partner. If such a phenomenon happened often enough to both parties, it
would result in the subjective phenomenon of thought sharing, when really no such thing was
occurring.
He pulls his voice recorder out of the pocket of his jeans, presses a button and says, "date--who
knows, I don't think it matters. Time--I'm not sure, seven? Six? Whatever time the sun goes down. I'm
in California and I haven't slept for four days because I'm feuding with an empty bookshelf and I was
thinking--"
Newt clicks a button, pulls his glasses off, rubs his eyes with the back of his hand, puts his glasses
back on, and reclicks.
"--about the empirical difficulties inherent to differentiating real-time cognitive influence from
what I'm going to term, um, crap, super-ghost-drifting? No, that sounds stupid. Dr. Caitlin Lightcap, of
the neuroscience zealotry and the wicked Jaeger pilotry, you are rolling in your grave right about now,
aren't you, come hang out with Carl Sagan in my brain, no actually, don't do that--why am I recording
this? I wish you were here, you'd find this super interesting, I'm sure. Okay. Here we go--Severe Post
Excitation Cognitive Transfer of Environmental Responsiveness. The SPECTER Effect. Sorry, Cait-
Science, but I'm not about to name this something poetic; it's just not happening. I'm better with
acronyms. You know this about me."
He clicks a button.
He hasn't thought of Caitlin Lightcap in months.
That's a lie.
But, maybe, one day it will be true.
He reclicks.
"So the question is how to differentiate real-time cognitive influence by external parties (here,
read: Hermann, the hivemind, or the freakish cadre of cut-up kaiju brains left on the Earth-side of the
annihilated breach) from the SPECTER Effect (here read: a reproduction of foreign neural pathways,
perceived by the brain as 'other' rather than 'self', but nevertheless originating from within rather than
from without). Subjectively, they're not easily parsed."
He clicks a button.
He paces once again in front of the window.
He reclicks.
"Or, in other words: 'is Dr. Newton Geiszler being driven insane by foreign influence or driving
himself there instead? An observational study'. Because, honestly? I could see it going either way."
He clicks a button.
Has he gotten fingerprints on this glass?
He uses his shirtsleeve to remove them like a guy who has a compulsive neat-freak tapping into
his neural circuitry on a semi-regular basis.
He reclicks.
 "So," he says. "Testing. Yes. Testing. Empiricism. Fortunately for me, even though I'm primarily
concerned about the effects following drifting with kaiju and parts of kaiju dismembered by yours
truly--presuming that happened, I think it did--I have some ability to perturb the current system,
possibly, if the system is exogenously perturbable. Meaning that I can get Hermann to try and screw
with my brain and see what happens. Either he'll be able to, which is bad, or he won't which might
just mean he's not trying, because he's like that. And by 'like that' I mean disinclined to be a jerk to the
neurologically disadvantaged, not 'lazy'. But I'm pretty sure I can eventually irritate him into giving it
a legitimate effort? I'm pretty sure that's a skillset I still have."
He clicks a button.
Yeah, this window is going to need to be cleaned.
Do they own Windex or a generic equivalent?
Newt has never communally owned cleaning products with anyone before.
This is a weird milestone.
He wanders out of the living room and into the kitchen, flipping on a light and then just as quickly
flipping it off, because, though his eyes are vastly improved, he wouldn't say they're back to baseline,
at least not where photosensitivity is concerned.
Once in the kitchen, he starts opening cabinets.
Hermann has organized pretty much everything.
Newt has been watching him and reading Descartes until his vision knuckles under in blurred
defeat off and on for about four days, trying not to think too much about drift three, if that's what that
even was.
Oh right.
And completely failing to sleep in the bedroom assigned to him.
Completely and totally failing.
Absolut failure.
He feels a little bit strange right now as a result.
He doesn't find any cleaning products until he drops into an unsteady crouch and goes for the
bottom cabinets.
"Hi," Newt whispers to the spray bottle of blue cleaning fluid he pulls from beneath the sink.
"Your life will be short but glorious. Much like a Jack Kerouac novel."
He is cleaning the window when the grate of a key in a lock, the sound of an opening door, and the
entirely horrified exclamation that goes a little bit like, "what in god's name are you doing?"
announces Hermann's presence.
Newt turns to look at him.
Hermann looks back at him with a facial expression he's trying to twist straight around to neutral.
Newt hopes that his own perplexed disapproval is manifesting on his face.
Honestly.
The guy is reacting as if he's found Newt performing messy studies in comparative anatomy on the
floor of their collective living room rather than using their communal Windex to clean a communal
window.
But okay.
Maybe it's time to take stock, because he is tired and he's got some ongoing cognitive issues so
there's always the possibility that his judgment's slightly off-kilter.
But no, as far as Newt can tell, he's standing next to a window, wearing jeans, a white-dress shirt
beneath a black fleece pullover thing that is the most aesthetically acceptable item of clothing he now
owns, because Hermann did some preliminary Newton-you-need-new-clothes shopping and mostly
bought him sweaters which is really not okay, but, like, he's wearing clothes. He's not wearing shoes,
but that's not weird. He's pretty sure he looks pretty normal. He's totally positive he's not bleeding.
Cleaning a window is a perfectly acceptable activity to be engaged in, especially post-apartment
acquirement.
You are good to go, his brain says.
"Nice to see you too," Newt replies, with crisp aridity that he realizes slightly too late is more
than a trace Gottliebian. He pauses, reboots, and goes with, "What does it look like I'm doing? I'm
cleaning our communal living space, Hermann. You're welcome."
"Thank you?" Hermann replies cautiously.
"Oh whatever, dude, you turned into me for like five minutes four days ago, so you can just stop
giving me your creeped-out face, because I clean things, Hermann, okay? I'm not entirely slovenly. I'm
a biologist; the smell of ethanol reassures me, and it has since age twelve, okay?"
"Is there ethanol in Windex?" Hermann asks.
"No," Newt replies with zero defensiveness, after scanning the label. "It was a related example."
He puts the Windex on the edgeless bookcase.
He doesn't like the look of that at all and immediately pulls it off.
He looks at Hermann.
Hermann is depositing bags of resources (or whatever) on the table. Hermann is also doing this
without looking because he is watching Newt like Newt is the human equivalent of the pitch-drop
experiment and not a thing to be looked away from. Newt gets that though, yeah he does, because
Newt knows a thing or two about not wanting to look away from things that are subtly threatening. It's
part of the human condition.
He feels acutely guilty.
This is a new thing for him.
But there's a hole in his valence shell and he's already stolen someone else's electrons like the
electronegative jackass he is.
"What are you getting out of this?" he asks Hermann abruptly, eyeing the bags that the other man is
depositing on the table.
"Out of what?" Hermann asks.
Newt is pretty sure that despite the abrupt change of conversational topic Hermann knows exactly
what he means, he's just applying some verbal drag to decelerate conversational whiplash.
"This," Newt says, sweeping the Windex bottle back and forth between his chest and Hermann's
general direction a few times with some quiet sloshing.
"Right now? Other than a notably thorough window-cleaning?" Hermann says dryly, still eyeing
him with what Newt is going to term 'suspicion' for reasons unknown. "Very little."
"Yes," Newt says. "That was, actually, kind of my point. Arguably, I assaulted your brain. You
don't have to buy me clothes. Also, please stop buying me clothes."
"I assaulted my own brain," Hermann replies, dropping his eyes and pulling light bulbs, dish
detergent, and other miscellaneous items out of shopping bags. "I also kidnapped you and legally
misrepresented you to the Pan Pacific Defense Corps, so please keep that in mind."
"That is so you," Newt says, walking back to the kitchen, dropping into a crouch that requires
some hand-mediated stabilization, and putting the Windex back into its dark cupboard with an
inappropriately affectionate and slightly uncoordinated pat or eight of them in a row. "You know," he
says, loudly because he is talking to Hermann and not to the Windex, "you don't win any interpersonal
points for trying to sidestep your way out of the unequal power dynamic that's brewing here, with you
having a job and me having trouble with everything." He hauls himself up with both hands on the
edge of the sink and then freaks out slightly and steps back, one hand coming up in not-panic when he
realizes that someone is standing about three feet away from him.
That someone is Hermann, obviously, because who else would it be?
Newt really hopes he did not see the whole thing where Newt was kind of petting the Windex a
little bit, hardly at all really, but maybe just a little.
Newt could use an actual pet.
"Will you stop," Hermann says, looking as freaked out as Newt feels. "We both have jobs. We
both will have jobs. You can have a job whenever you'd like to have one, essentially you already have
it, as I've explained, you simply have to give a talk to the Neuroscience Department at your
convenience--what are you--" Hermann trails off, looking confused and slightly edgy.
"Can we get fish?" Newt asks, deciding to change the subject.
"For dinner?" Hermann replies, clearly confused.
"What? No. Who are you even? I don't eat fish."
Newt is not helping the guy out, he can feel this; he's just not making the right mid-conversation
course-corrections. He needs to try to do a better job.
"Newton," Hermann says. "What's wrong?"
"Why do you assume something is wrong? Alternatively, what's not wrong?"
Terrible, terrible job, his brain says. Really abysmal, Geiszler.
The problem is that he can't answer Hermann.
Even if he wanted to, he wouldn't physically be able to do it. Not now. Not yet. He wouldn't be
able to get three sentences in before neural circuits would fuse and discharge and thoughts would get
ejected from his brain, gravitational-slingshot-style. He really shouldn't be pursuing this train of
thought, it's enough to know that they still have some kind of baseline awareness--all those parts that
he cut up over all those years--enough to know that they loathe him, enough to know that all over his
planet, all along the Pacific Rim there are cut up chunks of dead and fixing tissue pouring an orgasmic
wish for perpetual suffering into an alien representation of his name, waiting for him to come back, as
confused as he is about whether they want him or not, whether they want to fold under his cognitive
capacity, whether they want to slot him into the local control of a miserable freakshow of fragmented
consciousness, or whether they just want to light up his sensory cortex in an ending blaze of total fatal
agony for as long as possible until his intracranial pressure rises to a point incompatible with life.
Watch it, his brain says. Watch it.
"Please try to actually engage in conversation, Newton, rather than engaging in nonsensical
rhetorical exercises."
Hermann's freaking out a little bit and Newt is being rhetorical by reflex.
He needs to sleep.
He needs to sleep though.
He needs to sleep.
You're decompensating a little bit, champ, his brain says. Right here, right now. You realize this,
right?
Yes.
Yes yes yes he knows. It's hard not to, though, it's hard not to decompensate; he's not really sure
how he's supposed to make himself sleep, this might be how he dies, actually. Post-drift insomnia,
unremitting, blowing through all his neurotransmitters over two weeks or so? How long can he go?
How long will it be before he starts hallucinating? Starts actually seeing Carl Sagan or Caitlin
Lightcap instead of just getting a calming auditory science glaze over an increasingly disordered
mental landscape?
Not long.
Entropy doesn't apply to psychological states, does it?
Try not to abuse the second law of thermodynamics, his brain says.
He should have told Hypothetical Rain about this days ago. Sunday, when he knew it was going to
be a problem. Or Tuesday, when it had unarguably manifested, problematically. Or Thursday, when
he'd known he was pretty screwed. Now it's Friday.
Newt presses his fingertips against his temples.
There is, he thinks, an entirely achievable solution to his current problem of feeling creepily
stalked by an impersonal bookcase, not to mention an entire cabal of wronged remnants of foreign
monsters, and that is sleeping. He hadn't felt this weird before, had he? He's not sure. That's one of
the problems with subjectivity; by definition one can't objectively compare a current state to a
previous one.
Hey kids, Newt says cautiously to cut-up tissue that may or may not be in his head. Are you there?
They don't say anything back to him, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. Probably he
should not call a collection of globally dispersed, mutilated brain fragments 'kids'. That's probably
deeply insensitive. Deeply.
"Newton," Hermann hisses. "If you don't start talking to me immediately I will--"
"Oh my god, chill," Newt says, breaking in before Hermann can articulate whatever it is that he
thinks needs articulating right now. Newt is pretty sure he'd find it offensive.
Hermann looks a little bit like he wants to strangle Newt and a little bit like he wants to scream,
'narrate your mental landscape for me, you idiot', which is weirdly specific and Newt decides to go
with that and see where it takes him.
"And no," he says, with the air of a man denying an unreasonable request. "I have no plans to
narrate my mental landscape for you."
The effect this statement produces is almost worth it because of how clearly totally eight million
percent freaked-out Hermann looks in response but kind of not worth it for exactly the same reason.
You were right, Caitlin Lightcap says, in obvious surprise. He didn't articulate that thought you
just picked up on. You were right. There is some kind of real-time connection.
I think that's a bit of an over-reach given the current state of your evidence, Carl Sagan says. If
you think about it, Newt, you're really just a sleep deprived guy making good guesses about the
inner monologue of a person with whom you've spent the better part of the last decade and with
whom you've shared neural pathways.
Hermann is staring at him intently, breathing quickly, looking kind of like an alarmed velociraptor.
Newt isn't sure what that means.
He can feel a building pressure in his head.
Is it an exogenous pressure? From Hermann--who looks like he's trying to communicate or
analyze something unknown? From the hivemind--transmitted by some kind of magical hand-wavingly
quantum phenomenon where electron spin states swap in parallel leaves of adjacent D-branes? From
the cut-up kids here on the planet--transmitted by electromagnetic waves that his brain is now primed
for? Is it endogenous pressure? From his neural circuits that are derived from Hermann--trying to co-
opt him into a pathway a little more Anglophile? From his neural pathways that are derived from the
hivemind--trying to maneuver him into something he doesn't understand? From fragmented tissue--
trying to force him into dying an agonizing death or maybe being their overlord? Is it something
physical? Is he about to have a seizure? An episode of epistaxis? A migraine? A hemorrhagic stroke?
A panic attack? He can't tell. He doesn't know.
Subjectivity is the worst.
Why do you zink zat I invented zee coordinate plane? Rene Descartes asks him in a questionable
yet sympathetic French accent.
"We can read each other's minds," Newt snaps at Hermann. "Discuss."
"No," Hermann says, sounding uncertain and speaking very slowly like he's fighting through whole
swaths of problems Newt can't see but can only vaguely sense or sympathetically intuit. "I don't think
that's what's happening. I think you may be able to predict my responses to certain situations with
extreme accuracy, and vice versa, but--"
"So you agree with Sagan," Newt says, feeling persecuted, feeling inappropriately betrayed, going
a little high-pitched, backing up a half step. "How typical."
Hermann narrows his eyes, watching him intently.
Newt abruptly decides he wants out of the kitchen, but he backs up another half step instead.
Hermann steps forward.
Newt takes a full step back and hits the counter. He steadies himself with one hand.
Hermann is just watching him.
Newt backs up another half step, along the counter feeling, bizarrely, hunted by a math nerd with
a cane.
Hermann steps forward.
The kitchen's getting dark and he doesn't like this, he doesn't like this at all, he feels like he's
being stalked, and yes, this could totally be his sleep deprived brain, it one hundred percent could be,
but it doesn't feel exactly like that, not quite.
Look at his stance, Lightcap whispers in the dark kitchen, quiet even in his own head.
Newt looks.
Hermann isn't leaning against the door anymore, his weight is centered, his feet positioned like he
might, at any moment, decide to drive forward.
That is concerning, Sagan says slowly, throwing in with Lightcap this time.
Think about zis rationally, Descartes says. Do you truly believe he might attack you?
Yes, Lightcap says.
I wouldn't rule it out, Sagan says.
No? Newt says.
Yesss, the kids hiss.
No, his mental version of Hermann says, sounding affronted.
Unfortunately zat was a fairly equivocal poll, Descartes informs him.
"Are you hunting me?" Newt snaps, because that's a thing that's pretty normal to ask one's life-
partner. Yup.
Hermann doesn't answer.
So that's gonna be a yes, I think, his brain says.
Newt has watched some birds out the window and felt pretty aggressively disposed toward them,
but he never tried to spring off the balcony and destroy them.
But.
He's pretty sure he's better at keeping his confused parts mixed in and mixed down than Hermann
is, if the other guy's brief but intense Geiszlerian impulses are anything to go by.
 Do something immediately, everyone in his head advises him.
Newt steps forward and yells, "HEY," at maximum volume directly in Hermann's face.
That seems to work because Hermann grabs his chest and steps back in what looks like total
shock.
They stare at one another breathing hard.
"What is wrong with you?" Hermann breathes.
"Um, nothing," Newt says, hoping it's true. "What's wrong with you?"
They look at each other for another long interval until Hermann drops his eyes, his shoulders
tense, his expression distressed, and yes, Newt feels acutely bad for him but his compassion is a little
limited at the present moment for obvious reasons. "You were hunting me, don't even lie, I can tell."
"You're insane," Hermann hisses, and turns on his heel, leaving Newt in the dark kitchen.
That seems a little harsh, Caitlin Lightcap says comfortingly, primarily because it might be true.
"Thanks," Newt whispers in absent sarcasm, then follows Hermann back to the living room, lit by
the setting of the sun over Oblivion Bay.
Hermann is looking out the window over the dark water, breathing a little bit too quickly and too
obviously.
"Dude, it's fine," Newt says, coming to stand next to him. "It's fine. You think I haven't done the
velociraptor thing like eight times already? I have. There are a lot of seagulls around here, let me tell
you, and pretty much every time they show I get this urge to chase them down, using wings I don't
have by the way, which is weird, everyone agrees. I freaked out a little bit and backed up, so there
you go. That triggered a thing, a thing that we do now. Predation instincts. We have them anyway.
Humans are predators, you know. You can tell because our eyes are pointed in the same direction for
depth perception rather than oriented laterally for maximum field of view. We're a little bit lame as
predators, though? Except for our brains. Our brains are vicious bastards, pretty much universally."
"You're babbling," Hermann says shortly, not looking at him.
"Um, excuse me, I'm pretty sure I'm reassuring you."
"You are the least reassuring person I have ever met in my life," Hermann snaps. "You're
disorganized, sleep-deprived, habitually deceitful--"
"Um, again, excuse me, but what?"
"--and much, much too intelligent for me to take anything you say at face value when trying to
assess your mental state."
"Rewind," Newt snarls. "Deceitful?"
"They had you for three days and you said nothing about what was really happening, you still
haven't told me--how am I supposed to interpret--"
"Because I wanted you out of it," Newt snarls, feeling predatory himself right about now,
"because you were never supposed to be involved, because it wasn't your fault, because you had the
chance to weigh in on the human/kaiju drift motion and you voted no. You want to know what the my
problem is, Hermann? Well that's news to me, because you haven't asked. If you want to know I'll tell
you. I cut them up. You watched me do it, and, as you know, even though they were dead in the
practical sense of the word, there was and is something going on there, behind all that protein-protein
chemical cross-linking effected by formaldehyde, a whole disorganized mess of tortured alien
psychosis that's just watching my brain, okay, I'm positive they're watching me, dude, I can feel it, I
can feel you, I know you can read my thoughts, I know you can, okay? It's obvious. It's glaringly
apparent, I just don't understand why you would lie to me about that, unless you just really don't get
it, you're just too wrapped up in what you think should be happening to see what is happening, and I--
"
He stops shouting, running out of air and not acquiring any more, for whatever reason. He tries to
breathe, he cannot breathe, he breathes or stops existing--we should have loaded him ahead of time;
Dr. Geiszler can you hear me, Dr. Geiszler can you talk.
No no no no no, Newt says to his brain. He looks fixedly at dark water. Not now. This is not
helpful to me.
"Yes," Hermann says, grabbing his shoulders, pulling him physically around so he can't see out the
window and shaking him once, his face pale in the half-light, his eyes wide and weird and wired or
maybe that's Newt, he's not sure, he's not sure who he is or what he is or where he is, his brain is
waiting for something, he's not sure what, but Puritans crushed witches beneath rocks and that seems
relevant to him at present.
"You may be right, Newton. In fact--I'm certain you are."
This reassures him. He's usually right. But about what?
"I am, in fact, positive that your critique of my modus operandi is entirely accurate." Hermann
looks at him, breathing hard. "You are extremely insightful."
"Yes," Newt says, because it's true.
"Do you agree," Hermann asks, slowly and sort of desperately, "that I have no reason to lie to
you about my ability or lack thereof to read your thoughts?"
"Yes," Newt says, "yes, I agree, it just--it just feels that way, it just really feels like you can. And
they can. And other things. Why does the bookcase have no sides?"
"Have you considered," Hermann says, "that part of what you are currently experiencing may be
due to extreme sleep deprivation?"
"You know about that?" Newt asks, his voice cracking.
"Yes," Hermann says, sounding strained. "I know about that."
"So, yes, I've considered that, I--I have; I considered it earlier, I just--I really don't think it is,
Hermann," he says, wanting to pull out of this dual-shouldered grip that Hermann has on his jacket-
shirt hybrid, but not doing it. Not doing it. "I think subjective experience has validity, meaning that it
can be validated, it could; you could read my thoughts and validate it, I'm sure you could, you're just
not trying.
"I promise you," Hermann says, entirely seriously, like he's trying to talk Newt down from a
nonexistent ledge, "that I will try. That I will make a genuine effort to seriously consider your position
on this."
"Okay," Newt replies, slightly breathless.
"I think you should lie down," Hermann says.
"I can't sleep," Newt admits, way too late.
"I know that, I think you should lie down anyway,"
Newt doesn't like this oh-so-careful wavelength that Hermann is vibrating at.
He doesn't like it at all.
He thinks you're crazy, Dr. Lightcap says, in sympathetic revelation.
He's going to have to explain some things so that this doesn't get out of hand.
"Look," Newt says. "Hermann. Do you think I don't know what I sound like? I do, okay, I do. I
sound utterly insane, I know. I am rational though, man, I'm completely rational, Descartes-style. I
even know that claiming my own rationality looks bad, but I'm doing it anyway, because, hello, I
believe in accuracy. The only problem that I'm having right now is that I'm currently sleep deprived
and that cognitive science hasn't and isn't posed or posing a lot of testable hypotheses about the drift
or the hivemind, or a combination of the two. Yes. That's two problems, I know. I have two. I'm
amending to two. One is a little more pressing than the other at the present moment. I just--okay, just
hear me out about this, how do you think they did it, right? How do you think that the kaiju
communicated telepathically; how do you think that worked? Have you thought about it all because
I've been thinking about it a lot, Hermann, a lot, especially over the past few days, really, it's not fair
to have all this extra information and no samples because I could actually test some of these things, I
could actually get some answers that aren't just pure speculation and therefore empirical garbage."
Hermann's face says, test them how? On yourself? Yup. His face says that pretty clearly, not his
brain, probably.
Newt doesn't have to be clairvoyant to pick that much up.
When Hermann speaks though, he says, "I'm certain they used some aspect of their own
biochemistry to receive and transmit electromagnetic signals which they then transduced into
appropriate informational content, providing them with, what was, in effect, telepathic communication
in something approximating real time, presuming traversing the breach didn't result in any temporal
distortion." He waves a hand like the stuff coming out of his mouth is the most obvious stuff in the
world, like he's for sure right about it, when, really, he's not necessarily right about it, he's not
necessarily right about any of it, but granting for now that he is--
"Yes." Newt shouts at him for no real reason other than too much agitation and no ability to siphon
it off or sublimate it into something socially acceptable in the confines of some too-perfect apartment
where the bookshelves without borders are watching him. "Yes exactly. What makes you think that
they couldn't have done that to us. To me, if not to you? What makes you think they--they couldn't jury
rig a transduction system in our brains? Are we different? Biologically? Yes. You bet we are, but not
so different that we couldn't interface, Hermann, why do our EEGs look so abnormal? You
understand what they are, right? EEGs? Do you think about them? Do you wonder why our
brainwaves have changed? God I refuse to say the word 'brainwave' ever again in my life I hate it so
much I hate it so much, Hermann. Strike it out of science and leave it to the Marvel Universe, but you
know what I mean. We can rename brainwaves: 'voltage fluctuations resulting from ionic
disequilibriums purposefully propagated'--VFRFIDPP, not catchy I know, not my best work, but you
see what I mean, don't you? Right? They're different. That could mean anything, and I just feel like
they're in there, by which, yes, I mean in my head."
"Newton," Hermann shouts, breaking in, "do you understand that you are panicking?"
"Who's panicking?" Newt screams in his face in total, blind, rhetorical outrage.
I think that's you, his brain says.
His brain isn't getting its own sarcasm, that's weird. Newt gets it though so that's totally okay.
Hermann shoves him backwards against the glass of the floor-ceiling window.
"Stop," Hermann shouts, clearly totally freaking out or totally outraged himself, Newt doesn't
know, Newt can't tell, Newt isn't sure who he is or what he is, he thinks he's destroyed cities, he
thinks he could destroy more, he thinks he's torturing the human who cut him up and locked him down
in a chemical cross-link that killed only his outer shell of tissue and transformed it into a dead husk
through which he can still think, can still feel his networked, dismembered, suffering parts, but--
"Stop," someone is whispering, "stop, stop, stop. Please stop."
Newt shuts his eyes and presses his hands flat against the glass to make sure that they are hands
and that his fingers end in nails.
He tries to stop everything.
Yes, because that's easy for you, his brain says. You are ruining Dr. Gottlieb's life, you realize.
The dude called it. He called it. Not even ten minutes after you'd met he called it. Called it, called
it, freaking called it. Tagged it, labeled it, put it in a drawer for you to pull out a decade later and
stamp with the word 'validated'.
"You are fine," Hermann says. "I'm certain you are. I'm certain you will be."
Newt nods.
"I'm certain they're in your head," Hermann whispers. "I'm certain they are. Because they're in
mine as well."
Newt stares at him.
"But the way they're in here," Hermann continues, unclenching his right hand from Newt's shirt to
tap a single finger against his own temple, "is the same way you're in here. Reactive, intrusive, as
real as my own sense of self, but static, Newton. Static. Without agency. Without real-time intent."
"You can't know that," Newt replies, nearly soundless.
"The breach is not shut," Hermann says, shaking him once, gently. "It's annihilated."
"I know it is," Newt whispers back. "I can feel the place where it should be."
Hermann looks at him.
"Can you?" Newt asks.
"No," Hermann says.
"And there are--pieces of them here."
"What do you mean pieces?" Hermann asks.
"They don't die in fixative, Hermann, there are pieces of their brains still alive. Here. On Earth.
Of those that remain--I was--it was either me or my team who dissected them out, sectioned them,
preserved them. They could, they exist, on this side of the breach, I mean. They could-- They--they're
parts of a whole, they're subordinate, self-organizing structures and they are pissed, Hermann, pissed
at me specifically, and--"
Something about Hermann's gaze seems to sharpen and Newt breaks off under the infrared-laser
intensity of it.
He's not sure what it is that Hermann's realized. Whatever it is, the guy is totally enraged about it.
"What?" Newt says, in open apprehension.
Hermann takes a deep breath, making a clear effort to calm down, and Newt does not understand
what is happening here, everything feels unfamiliar, his thoughts, this place, the wall, his clothes, and
Hermann who looks entirely overwrought but isn't saying anything.
"Nothing," Hermann manages, through clenched teeth. "It's all right."
"Is it?" Newt says edgily, thinking about pulling away but not doing it out of some kind of instinct
that feels extremely primitive, and like something that prey would default to. "Don't hunt me."
"No," Hermann says, backing off marginally. "I apologize," he says. "I'm not hunting you. I have
never and will never be hunting you. Something occurred to me and I found it--upsetting."
"I hear that," Newt replies.
"I know you do," Hermann says, all traces of momentary and totally inexplicable rage gone,
replaced by exhaustion. "They are only nominally alive," the other man whispers. "They have no
agency, they've been chemically paralyzed. I'm sure they influenced your mind, via the drift, but I
doubt their capacity to do so now, in the absence of a physical interface."
"But," Newt says, "I know they could communicate with each other. They were--ah. They were
networked. They are networked? I'm not sure, there are at least some times when they were
networked to each other. The pieces. The parts of them. The parts that I--"
What are you doing? his brain snarls. Please don't talk about this, I can only do so much if
you're not going to sleep. Neurotransmitters are being rationed; do you think that doesn't have
consequences for you?
"Newton," Hermann says. "Newton."
"Yeah," Newt says. "No. I'm okay. I am. I totally am."
"We cannot resolve all of this tonight."
"I know," Newt says. "I know, of course I know."
"It is possible to keep yourself separate from the synaptic pathways that aren't your own,"
Hermann says. "You know that because you've been doing it for roughly a week. You are, in fact, quite
good at it. You helped me do it when I was giving my talk. Against all odds, apparently, you haven't
killed yourself trying to hunt down passing seagulls."
"True," Newt says.
"But I think it will be easier for you if--"
"I can't sleep," Newt says, his voice cracking, heading Hermann off at the lexical pass. "I can't."
"I'm aware of that," Hermann says, one hand held up. "But you are three weeks behind when it
comes to the neuroscience literature, two weeks behind in exobiology, six months behind on tissue
engineering, and something like five years behind on bioethics. So. I suggest that if you can't sleep you
try to do something productive, rather than torture yourself regarding hypotheses that you have no
earthly way to test. At some point in the near future you are going to need to give a job talk, and I
would imagine that it will be prospective in scope rather than retrospective, for obvious reasons, so
you should really be familiarizing yourself with the current state of the literature."
This is an excellent point.
"True," Newt says. "True."
"So sit," Hermann says. "Read."
"Well you're kind of pinning me to a window," Newt points out, finding it challenging to talk with
his hands in the minimal space between them. "A little bit."
"So I am," Hermann says. "Apologies." He lets Newt's shirt go and straightens the seams before
stepping back.
Newt does his own seam adjusting, more out of principle than necessity, then says, "I've been
reading Descartes for days, you know."
"I'm not sure if Descartes is alleviating or adding to your current problems," Hermann says,
tucking his chin and shooting Newt a disapproving look from beneath lowered brows.
"Descartes is a baller," Newt says, affronted, "and not to be defined in relation to me."
How flattering, his brain says, impersonating Descartes.
"I define everyone in relation to you," Hermann says, with a long suffering eye-roll before making
his way back to the table to finish unpacking whatever he purchased on shopping trip number eight
thousand.
Newt follows him and decides to make himself somewhat useful so he doesn't slide down the
window and lie on the floor waiting for a cognitive untangling that will never come, like a loser.
"I wish I knew what had happened to my plants," Newt says, nearly dropping the antibacterial
hand soap that Hermann hands him.
I wish I knew what had happened to your fine motor control, his brain says.
Well don't we all? Newt replies.
"I'm sure Mr. Choi has appropriated them."
"I also kind of wish I hadn't left my guitar in the custody of the PPDC."
"I wish we hadn't left literally everything we owned in their custody," Hermann says, with a
mixture of wistfulness and sarcasm that Newt, if he'd been asked prior to witnessing it, would have
tagged as 'impossible to verbally combine'.
"I was serious about the sweaters," Newt says, feeling edgy and exhausted and not very organized
as he finds a pack of disposable chopsticks in the bottom of a bag. He eyes them in perplexity. "Stop
buying me clothes. I will buy myself clothes. Later."
He's a little concerned that if he leaves the apartment on his own he'll end up atop the Wall of Life
but that's a thought he's not going to examine right now.
How curious, Descartes says, probably about the chopsticks. Probably.
Neat, Sagan says, probably also referring to the chopsticks. I like your sweaters, by the way.
Did he buy those for you? Caitlin Lightcap asks, again, probably about the chopsticks, maybe
about the sweaters. People aren't really specifying. Shouldn't he know what they mean, if they're his
brain?
Maybe, Newt thinks, not sure whom or what he's responding to.
"How long has it been since you slept?" Hermann asks.
"Four days," Newt says absently.
"Ah," Hermann says. "How flagrantly yet classically irresponsible. Why are you staring at
chopsticks?"
"They seem really interesting to me right now," Newt says, looking up. "A little bit. Did you buy
these for me?"
"No," Hermann says. "I bought them because we are civilized, not because you don't care for
western utensils, I cannot abide eating with my fingers, and the only reasonable course of action is for
us both to use chopsticks for everything for the next few weeks, or, possibly, the rest of our lives."
"For a guy with a below-average number of doctorates," Newt says, "you're not just a pretty face.
I will give you that one, Dr. Gottlieb."
Newt opens the chopsticks and pulls a pair out. He breaks them apart.
"And to what average would you be referring?" Hermann says dryly.
"The average number of doctorates in this apartment is three point five," Newt says, dropping a
chopstick. "You have one, ergo--educationally, you are below average." Newt opens a hand and then
crouches to retrieve his lost chopstick.
"Stop using abusing statistics," Hermann says, hauling Newt up with one hand under his arm.
"Stop taunting me with cool utensils I lack the manual dexterity to use," Newt says.
Hermann looks at him for a moment. "Do you really?" he asks quietly.
"Yes," Newt says, mounting a new attempt to discipline his chopsticks. "I am a little bit serious
about that. I'm pretty sure things are trending in the right direction though. I lost my resting tremor." He
begins what is likely to be a fruitless effort to unzip the collar of the partially zippable fleece
pullover he is currently wearing using chopsticks. "If things weren't regressing to the mean I might be
upset about my future prospects as a biologist who needs fine motor control. I'm really not sure about
this whole dopamine issue and where it's going. I think I might be having periodic setbacks, or maybe
my signal threshold for progress versus regress is set too low. Whatever, Hypothetical Rain thinks it's
conceptually cool, so--"
"Hypothetical Ra--" Hermann breaks off with a disgusted sound and restarts. "Dr. McClure does
not think it's 'cool'. She, in fact, said, and I quote, 'dude, that sucks if you're right,' and then you said,
'girl, I'm always right,' and--"
"Then you said 'no he's not,' and then we got in an argument and she asked us if we were married
and keeping it on the down-low and we reacted in stereo horror and now there will never be a time
she is not confused about us."
Hermann sighs.
"Anyway, I'd rather have a neurotransmitter imbalance than brain damage," Newt says, still trying
to unzip his outerwear with chopsticks.
Hermann pushes him back a step, into a chair, and unzips his zipper for him, says, "that's a false
dichotomy," pulls his tablet off the kitchen counter, and pointedly slides it across the table.
"You know," Newt says, immediately setting to work on re-zipping his shirt with his chopsticks.
"There's a reason you get invited to fewer parties than I do. You rate a ten out of ten on the
Annoyingly Imperious Scale, which is a near impossibility, so congrats there, man."
"I am in no mood to drive you to the emergency room after you either trip over something and
concuss yourself or work yourself up to the point that your brain cannot concomitantly support
distress and consciousness, at which point you will faint and then, likely, concuss yourself."
"There is a zero percent chance I end this evening concussed," Newt says. "None of these things
you're ostensibly so concerned about has ever happened. Not even one time."
"In January of 2018 you fainted in the middle of a briefing."
"Only because I had occult pneumonia," Newt says, not at all defensively. He drops a chopstick.
"It was 'occult' to no one in the shatterdome except you," Hermann replies.
"That was seven years ago," Newt says. "Three years ago you worked yourself into a state of
stereotypical nervous exhaustion. I didn't even feel sorry for you. Because you were and are
ridiculous and you didn't and don't deserve it." He punctuates this statement with an understated jab of
his single remaining chopstick in Hermann's general direction. "It's not like you had certain time
windows in which to extract kaiju RNA. The math was always there, you feel me? Like, you can have
breakfast. You can take naps. You could at the time and you can now. Both."
"I have no plans to dignify your comment with a rebuttal," Hermann says pouring something into a
bowl.
"Well, yeah," Newt says, retrieving his second chopstick from the floor. "You don't really have to,
though, do you, since a nuanced reproduction of your mathematical motivations is taking up space in
my brain that I previously used for magnificent chopstick control, possibly. That's an
oversimplification, please take it as such and don't give me a hard time about it, I'm too tired for self-
analysis to end well. If you'd asked me ten seconds before we drifted, I would have said that our
decade of incessant arguing was about to end. Primarily because of risk of death, but also because,
well, you know. Drifting? I always pictured it more of a mental homogenizer than what it actually is.
But no. In the medium term I don't feel homogenized. I feel vaguely confused most of the time and
extremely confused a small percentage of the time. But that wasn't my point. My point was that we
now have whole new swaths of things to argue about, because now you criticize my decisions about
whether to sit or stand, interfere with occupational therapy I assign myself, and, finally, buy me
clothes, which will be an endless source of conflict."
Hermann walks over to the table, leaning a little more heavily on his cane than usual, slides a
bowl of wasabi peas towards Newt, and then drops into the opposite chair.
Newt tries to pick up a pea with his chopsticks.
He fails four times in a row.
Hermann doesn't say anything.
"Can you not watch me fail at civilization?" Newt asks.
Hermann looks at the wall.
They are quiet, but it's an anticipatory rather than comfortable silence.
 Newt gives 'Toward Regaining Skills With Chopsticks, Second Variant, Attempt #5' his total
concentration.
Until Hermann whispers, "I was not hunting you."
Newt drops both chopsticks.
"Also," Hermann says, "you're not right handed."
Newt tries not to feel the total despair of this moment, but it's pretty hard.
The chorus in his head keeps their collective mouths shut.
"I know that," he says, reclaiming his chopsticks with his actual dominant hand, his voice
strained. "And if," he says, his voice cracking, "if you were, maybe, hunting me a little bit, it's fine.
It's not anything other than weird. Because I could take you. Pretty easily, by the way. I win ten out of
ten times in a you-versus-me fight. Everyone agrees."
Definitely, his brain says, because they are on the same team.
"I wish I believed that," Hermann whispers. "Unfortunately, I do not."
"Wait--you think you could take me?" Newt asks, incredulous.
"Yes," Hermann hisses. "Is there a reason you're fixating on the least relevant aspect of our
current set of problems?"
"Well," Newt says, "yes. No. Not really. I am tired, Hermann, okay? Just--don't freak out about
this because it's just a thing. It's like how I almost threw up this morning when I tried to decide
whether I wanted to wear a sweater or not. It's like how that one time you decided to be me a little bit
under duress. It's like that time two seconds ago that I forgot I wasn't right-handed. You haven't been
practicing not eating seagulls for four days. It's fine, it's just a weird thing. A little snap into a lateral
circuit, I have literally zero concern that you're going to like--what? What would you even do? Attack
me? I just don't see it getting out of hand, I really don't. I mean, I've watched birds intermittently for
days without forgetting that I don't really like the taste of questionably radioactive seagull, so. Yeah.
There's that."
"You're better at this than I am," Hermann says.
"What?" Newt says, the word barely intelligible beneath the laughter that is suddenly half-choking
him and threatening to take a left turn into straight-up hysteria. "Are you insane?" he asks, managing to
marginally pull himself together, wiping streaming eyes by shoving his fingers beneath his glasses.
"Do you--"
"Try," Hermann says, snapping the word in half and holding up a hand. "to control yourself," he
finishes, "and listen to me."
"Yeah," Newt says, sounding like someone is strangling him, and feeling like that a little bit too.
His diaphragm is going on strike.
"Tempting though it is to equate our experiences," Hermann says, "our exposures to the anteverse
were different in quantity and quality and the evolution of after effects experienced by each of us has
differed in character. Ostensibly you're more severely affected, but Newton, you've never forgotten
who you are. I spent five minutes as you until you talked me out of it. You're the better integrator out
of the pair of us. You must be, because even in the midst of complete panic about foreign influences
you manage to preserve your sense of self." He finishes, breathing hard.
Newt props an elbow on the table, and presses his hand against his forehead. "Hermann," he says,
"I literally do not even know if you're correct. Do I? Do I always manage to keep track of whom I
actually am? I have periods of time where I'm--very confused about thermodynamics and also sort of
where I am and what I'm doing. Does it mean I'm coping better than you are if I spend three minutes
decoupling cause from effect?"
 "I have no idea," Hermann says quietly.
"Yeah," Newt replies. "No kidding."
Hermann stares at a lateral wall.
Newt goes back to trying to eat wasabi peas with terrible chopstick technique.
You done good, kid, Caitlin Lightcap says in his head, doing her best impersonation of an overly
macho military type.
Not really, his brain replies.
Well zere is always room for improvement, Descartes says.
Can you just be normal? Newt asks his brain.
Not just right now, his brain replies. Maybe if you'd help. At all. Ever. Rather than just
screwing around.
Newt's brain has a point. It really does. But there's not much he can do to address its complaints.
He can, however, maybe reassure his life-partner a little bit.
"Are you freaking out about turning evil?" Newt asks Hermann after he drops his third wasabi pea
on the floor. "Because I identify with that hard core."
"You're not going to turn evil," Hermann says dismissively.
"You totally sidestepped my question and went straight to reassuring me, which makes me think
that the answer is 'yes Newt, I am extremely worried that we are about to become insane
supervillains any day now, we literally live next to a radioactive body of water, soon we will make
this apartment complex our castle, or alternatively, our ultra-modern high-tech 'lair'. We're prime
supervillain material, you and me, you realize this, right? If we're lucky, we'll get a turning-evil
montage in which some of our previously good traits are on display before it gets all weird as we're
hunting seagulls and doing celebratory hugging over nebulous and ubiquitous test tubes full of
cinematic dry ice before it ends with us in white lab coats and black gloves giving the world the
narrowed eyes of ethically ambiguous B-movie scientists. Also, our hair is going to have to
collectively step up to mad-scientist levels."
"Yours is already there," Hermann says dryly.
"Well, I'm on vacation," Newt says, vaguely trying to smooth his hair down with chopsticks,
which works about as well as one might expect.
Hermann smiles faintly at him and then gives him a disapproving scowl as Newt moves his
chopsticks from his hair back to the bowl of wasabi peas.
"We should try to chip away at our archetype. Should we get a dog, possibly?" Newt asks.
"Because I literally cannot see evil super geniuses having a dog. That's probably correlative rather
than causative though. Still."
"What archetype is it, exactly, that you think you are?" Hermann asks, looking vaguely amused.
"Victor Frankenstein. Obviously." He finally succeeds in eating a wasabi pea. "Who are you?"
"Frankenstein? Congratulations," Hermann says dryly.
"Can you not be a dick?" Newt asks.
"Eat with your fingers," Hermann says retrieving an errant pea and tossing it back into the bowl
with enviable accuracy.
"Last time I tried that it didn't go well for me, thanks to someone's strong preferences for not
doing that. You've ruined half of my hedonistic side you realize."
"You are hardly Victor Frankenstein," Hermann says. "That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever
heard."
"Oh yeah, well what do you think my archetype is then?"
 "Puer aeternus," Hermann says, "or, to borrow something from your knowledge base, you are
most certainly a 'manic pixie dream boy'."
"What?" Newt says. "No. No. I mean--what?"
Hermann shrugs and opens a hand. "Your idea of revenge is to fill a box of what is supposed to
chalk with glitter, so quod erat demonstrandum."
"I did that one time. And you're--" Newt tries to think of a really insulting subordinate archetype
of reversed heteronormativity that Hermann might slightly fit, but he's got nothing, "--boring," he
finishes. "You can't reduce my entire personality to the glitter thing."
"You had a band called The Superconducting Supercolliders," Hermann says dryly.
"I still have that band," Newt says, "kind of. I fail to see--"
"You constantly tell me to 'chill'," Hermann says.
"Because you need to, and also, occasionally out of spite."
"You spent five years with green streaks in your hair, until Hercules Hansen told you to desist,
setting off a pointless five-year feud that Marshal Pentecost and I watched in total bemusement."
"Green hair accents do not equate to a vapid, epicurean world-view, Hermann, god. I don't see
you calling Mako a manic pixie dream girl."
"Ms. Mori is extremely serious-minded with an unassailable professionalism. She also, which I'm
sure you failed to note at the time or subsequently, began dyeing her hair at the point you were forced
to desist."
"Really?" Newt asks, his brain dropping all running trains of thought to try to work backward
through his confused memory to Mako's first hair dying experiment. It had been subtle, it had always
been subtle, because Mako was the subtle type, the thoughtful type, and Newt remembers saying
"solid," as he passed her in the hall right after she'd done it, reaching out to brush a tip of blue hair
without stopping. He also sees himself from Hermann's perspective, acting like an idiot, because one
does not reach out and flick the blue hair of a fifteen-year old girl who's walking down a hallway
with the man who signs the requisition requests for the entire K-Science Division who also happens
to be her father and say, 'solid' in response to a dye-job that is certainly inspired, at least in part, by a
desire to flout misapplied militaristic adherence to protocol in areas that do not require such things.
Like the hair color of Dr. Geiszler.
"Oh my god," Newt says, pressing a hand to his face. "You reflect so much, all the time, about
everything. I wish I could go back and watch your life like a movie. Also? I'm not sure you're right
about any of this. Also? I had no idea that you were on my side about that green hair thing. Also? I had
no idea that Mako was on my side about that either. What good are you guys to me if you just secretly
sympathize?"
"Ms. Mori's sympathies were not so secret," Hermann replies, "and I believe her motivation for
her hair dyeing should not be reduced to a show of solidarity with you."
"Well duh," Newt says. "You're the one who brought it up and framed it that way, mainly because
you thought about me way more than I thought you thought about me, back in the day. Also, you liked
my green hair a little bit. Don't lie."
"I did not like your green hair. I also did not approve of you being an unintended target of
displaced frustration regarding funding decisions to the Jaeger program, which is, in part, why I spent
the last five years trying to get you to behave in a somewhat respectful manner."
"Sure," Newt says. "I would streak my hair green for you. I would do that. Again. But you're going
to have to ask me. Nicely."
"Don't hold your breath," Hermann replies dryly.
 "Dear Mako," Newt says, dictating a letter to the air, and waving his chopsticks in a way vaguely
reminiscent of writing, "Hermann seems to think I was a strong influence on you during your teens. If
so, I am so sorry, dude. Can we talk about the hair thing? I'm sorry I didn't ask you about it when it
happened. Also, have you gotten awesome at the bass yet? Because The Supercos need a new bassist.
Our first one is dead. What's new with you? I can't use hashi anymore, that's about it from my side.
Love, Newt."
"Do not even think of sending such a letter. If you do, please refer to me as Dr. Gottlieb. Ms. Mori
and I are not on a first name basis."
"Only because you've called her 'Ms. Mori' for forever. You could literally start calling her Mako
at any time," Newt says, managing to transfer another wasabi pea from bowl to mouth, like a boss.
While eating his hard-won wasabi pea, he tries to decide what Hermann is likely thinking about right
now. He's getting nothing though, probably because his brain is struggling. It's been struggling for
about twenty-four hours. "I hate bookcases without sides," Newt confesses. "They freak me out a little
bit."
Hermann shoots him a totally neutral look, which is Newt's least favorite kind of Hermann look to
be on the receiving end of because he's never been able to figure out what it means. He's pretty sure it
conceals really high-level mental analysis, because the other place it shows up tends to be briefings
and science talks. He's not sure he likes it being directed his way.
"Do they," Hermann says, still totally neutral, like maybe he also gets freaked out about
bookshelves or maybe like his head is currently hosting the Science Olympiad International
Tournament.
"Yeah, I'm ascribing sentience to things that shouldn't be sentient," Newt says, getting flustered
and accidentally just laying a set of cards on the table that he'd never intended to lay down at all.
He's managing you, his brain says. He's assessing you. He's been doing it this entire time.
"Are you managing me?" Newt snaps.
"Yes," Hermann says. "I have managed you with mixed success since the day I met you. This is not
a new thing. You are currently in the unenviable position of having increased insight in combination
with disorganized patterns of thought. You are outrageously distractible, extremely anxious, unfairly
insightful, and behaving in typical moronic fashion. I think your working memory is in shreds; I think
that immense mental stress is concealing debilitating exhaustion; I think that if you can't manage to
sleep in the near term, things are going to turn absolutely hellish for the pair of us."
"When I go crazy," Newt appends, feeling trapped by his clothes, and maybe, by his skin.
"Not to put too fine a point on it," Hermann says, "yes. Because I am already having problems and
I have required your assistance multiple times this past week to remind me of who it is that I actually
am. So you cannot let your own mind torture you to death, Newton, I absolutely forbid it."
"I feel like you're being a little melodramatic about this," Newt says, "but myeahh, I don't really
want to die of insomnia either."
"So," Hermann says, tapping the tablet in front of Newt. "Read."
Newt looks at the tablet and then shuts his overly abused eyes, cognizant of exactly how little he
actually wants to do the thing he's about to suggest. The problem is, though, that Hermann has been
harassing him into a semblance of a normal schedule for days now, and it just doesn't feel right to
make the guy work any harder to do it than he already has.
"You read," Newt says, sliding the tablet back toward Hermann. "I'll make dinner."
It's the best solution, because his brain is a little too apt to fly off the handle at every fourth
interesting word and just stop reading, plus his eyestrain has been maxed out for days now.
 So, during the preparation of uninspired pasta, Hermann gets through the ephemera at the front of
Neuron, which he chooses to read, probably because of its sober badassery. They eat while Hermann
complains about functional-MRI as a technique using Newt's own borrowed skepticism while Newt
defends it in a half-hearted way out of some kind of instinct for conflict that Hermann calls him on and
Newt entirely denies, mainly to keep things interesting. It takes the span of two back-to-back papers
on neural plasticity for Newt to clean the kitchen, which is far, far too long, but he's tired; he's not the
most coordinated; and he's also pretty sure that the reading's going to stop when the kitchen cleaning
does.
But Hermann doesn't stop.
In a display of total improbability, he points at the couch, hands Newt the sunglasses that he
always seems to be pulling out of a pocket, and says nothing.
This makes it hard for Newt to reflexively argue.
He could do it. Newt has a talent for manufacturing needless confrontation and a little bit of a
habit of whipping it out when it would be a better idea not to. But he's trying not to make terrible
decisions, so he shrugs, swaps out his glasses for Hermann's shades, and tries to look suave while
lying down on the couch in capitulation to his longstanding intellectual nemesis slash devoted life-
partner.
They don't have much furniture, so Hermann sits on the floor, leaning back against the couch, one
leg stretched in front of him, the other folded into a cross-legged position he can't quite bilaterally
manage.
"On a scale of a cross-disciplinary journal club to patch clamping ourselves to a dead baby kaiju
and hitching a ride to the hivemind, how weird is this?" Newt asks, digging his thumb into the too-
tense musculature of Hermann's neck and courteously ignoring the guy's startled twitch and subsequent
appreciative posture adjustment.
"I don't think it even rates," Hermann says.
"Why? That journal club was totally normal."
"It was held only three times because it devolved into such vicious disputes between the physical
sciences and the life sciences divisions that we were ordered to discontinue it."
"No one can piss off a room like I can piss off a room," Newt says, feeling slightly nostalgic.
"True," Hermann says.
"Especially if you're in that room," Newt adds.
"True," Hermann says, a little drier this time. "Stop talking so I can read this and practice
integrating your knowledge base with my knowledge base in a controlled manner."
"Oh," Newt says, "is that what we're doing?"
"What else would we be doing?" Hermann asks.
"Um," Newt says, doing a poor to reasonable job at a one-handed shoulder-rub from a horizontal
position. "You've got me there."
Definitely not a last ditch effort to get you to sleep before your brain stops impersonating
Descartes and legit hallucinates him instead, his brain says, like a total jerk. Definitely not that, Dr.
Geiszler.
Will you just, Newt thinks vaguely.
Just what? His brain says.
Just just, will you?
Hermann starts an article on the intracellular architecture of the synapse that's going to be mostly
microscopy based, but that's fine, he supposes. He can visualize, or, barring that, he can sit and look
at figures if he feels like sitting later.
Vesicular transport, ionic disequilibrium, voltage-gated channels, calcium signaling, membrane-
membrane fusion, release, reuptake, and the machinery of retrograde transport blend into a weird and
dramatically lit admixture of what he doesn't realize is first stage sleep until the hypnic jerk of his
falling, panicking consciousness snaps him briefly but entirely back to--
"--and this brings us to video seven, which is their 'complete' computational model of the synaptic
interior functioning in real time, I do think their use of scale is quite liberal, honestly I'm not certain
that this is sufficiently detailed for active predictive modeling of say--" Hermann breaks off. "Well.
I'm sure I don't know what you people model, honestly, pharmacological effects? How pedestrian."
"Hey," Newt says, sort of, without really articulating the word at all.
"Oh, are you awake?" Hermann says, sounding affectedly uninterested in Newt's answer.
Hermann is a terrible liar and always has been.
"Just because you model, like, mechanical thrust for badass alien fights," Newt says, trailing off
halfway through his rebuttal, realizing that it's either really dark in this room or his eyes are closed.
"Was that a sentence?" Hermann asks him. "Because it didn't sound like one. Kindly be quiet so I
can read this. Observational studies have their place and I find myself now possessed of a moderate
interest in the mechanics of synaptic transmission."
"Meh," Newt replies, trying not to hold onto anything his brain is attacking itself with, succeeding
until his entire, semi-conscious existence devolves back into a bad acid trip that seems to consist of
nothing other than the repeated sensation of falling straight into something mnemonically horrific
paired with whatever Hermann happens to be reading.
It doesn't want to kill this one; it wants to see his mind. Just this one. Just his mind. He joined
the collective before, perhaps he will do it again, if invited.
"--and I really don't care for this Western blot. Admittedly, I'm not a biologist, well, I'm
nominally not a biologist, but this looks quite suspect to me--"
Are you sleeping? I'm not sure you're sleeping, his brain says.
"Are you kidding me?' he asks, 'you want to do what now? Absolutely not. No one's skull needs
no one's semi-permanent subdural electrodes. I don't care if you flew in humanity's most baller
Prince of Neurosurgery especially to drill you a cranial window, it's not happening. Do not even
think about opening my skull, I've got a workaround for that. What are we, barbarians? Build me a
ziggurat and ask me again--I promise I'll consider it."
"--oh good. Motor control. This should interest you, presuming you're awake. The basal ganglia
are an evolutionarily conserved set of--"
Space is connected by a network of wormholes, Carl Sagan says.
Um, yes? Newt replies.
"I'm hallucinating," Newt manages to say out loud.
"It's called 'dreaming', Newton," Hermann says quietly.
"Kind of," Newt replies.
He falls and stops himself, falls and stops himself, until--
We should have loaded him ahead of time.
We talked about it--voted no.
Something's putting tension on his nervous system and searing stereo loathing or stereo
longing straight into his head; no one knows which it is, not the cut-up kids with their cognitive
acid or the guy they've crowned king of their chemical underworld. He's hurt them so much and
they need him so badly that a screaming death grip straight to mental dissolution is the only open
option.
Some loser's brain has sided against him.
Geiszler's back is starting to arch.
"--hold this here, hold it. Do you understand what I am saying to you?"
"What?" Newt slurs, coughing, his brain snapping into a mode where it's paying attention to visual
input.
Hermann is blocking the minimal light and everything is blurred.
Newt is encased in hardening glue.
No, Newt is not encased in hardening glue.
"Is it too much to ask that you--" Hermann breaks off. "You are entirely the worst."
"That's my line," Newt says, swallowing blood.
"Are you speaking English? Hold this," Hermann says, taking Newt's hand and bringing it to the
tissue that the guy is apparently holding to his face. "Are you holding it? You're not holding it. Make
an effort, please."
Newt is bleeding?
He can't quite arrange the context of what is happening to him. It seems to be perpetually arriving,
rather than just there, like context usually is.
"I was sleeping?" Newt says.
"Were you?" Hermann asks. "I'm not sure."
"I told you I would bleed all over this pre-furnished apartment. We need a black couch."
"That would look atrocious," Hermann says. "You have no taste. Now hold this handkerchief."
"I'm holding it, god."
"You're not."
"I am. You're the worst."
"Don't sit up," Hermann says, and then leaves the room.
Newt sits up immediately, because why wouldn't he? He's bleeding from his head and lying down
is supposed to help in what way, exactly? What is the deal with these nosebleeds? His capillaries are
pissed at him right now. He wonders if he screamed in his sleep, possibly? That might explain both
the bleeding from the face thing and the Hermann being totally freaked out thing.
This is legit the worst, his brain says.
It's probably pretty okay, Newt says vaguely. Just try a little harder not to do all the things that
you're doing.
Oh, okay, his brain says, giving him totally unreasonable sass. I'll just do that. Why didn't I think
of that?
You did though, Newt points out courteously.
You're an idiot, his brain says.
He feels a little weird, a little bit like throwing up and freaking out in that order. Maybe the
reverse order. He's pretty tired though. So maybe he'll just manage to sit here, feeling weird.
"What are you doing?" Hermann hisses, appearing perched on the coffee table in front of him
without Newt actually witnessing any kind of transit.
"Nothing?" Newt says, pretty sure about that. "Do you ever wonder if you're living in a
Dostoevsky novel?"
"No," Hermann snaps. "Focus. Do you know what happened?"
"Don't tell me to focus," Newt snaps back in petulant slow motion. "I'm always focused."
"Are you still bleeding?" Hermann says, like he's living in a world where time is passing at one
point five times the speed of Local Geiszler Time (LGT).
"No?" Newt guesses, pulling the handkerchief away from his face.
"Don't do that," Hermann snaps.
Newt sighs. "Chill."
"I will kill you myself, Newton," Hermann snaps. "I will not wait for you to spontaneously die."
"I really don't think I'm going to spontaneously die. Hypothetical Rain did, like, all the
hypothetical tests. So. You can just. Chill."
Hermann does some inexplicable layering with a plastic garbage bag and a towel and then pushes
Newt back down, kind of on his side this time though.
"You have weird ways of showing affection," Newt says.
"What's your point," Hermann says, watching him with narrowed eyes.
"I get you though. I can read your thoughts probably, once I figure it out. I would not say no to you
buying me fish though. Like, not complicated fish? Just like some imported, non-radioactive goldfish
or something. That's an appropriate way of telling your roommate that you care about him. Not death
threats. Those aren't for normal people, and we're normal people now. Normal to nerd-rock
neohipsters with post-apocalyptic sensibilities. That's our demographic. Ragingly pretentious
members of the International Intelligentsia. One of us is going to need to take up time-lapse
photography of fences weathering or something."
"Try to do a better job of sleeping," Hermann says.
"Oh yeah, okay," Newt replies, letting his eyes fall closed and stay that way despite the sensation
of acid spreading beneath his lids. "Yes. Check. Consider it done. I've been stage one'ing it for hours,
probably. That's a win. What time is it?"
"Do not concern yourself with that," Hermann says.
The room is quiet.
"Are you going to do the thing?" Newt asks.
"Yes," Hermann says, still sitting on the coffee table.
Newt hears the slide of a tablet over a hard surface, and then they begin again.
Chapter End Notes
Chapter-specific citations: I can't claim credit for many of the things that Carl Sagan says,
because the real man actually said them, or close approximations. Caitlin Lightcap is from the
extended canon, which I am slowly learning more about, but still not entirely familiar with and
therefore likely to only loosely respect.
Chapter 18
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Hermann awakens to a sharp pain and a loud crash in a bright room.
He is lying on a hard surface.
He isn't sure where he is; he isn't sure what is happening; there is a vicious ache in his chest that
makes him wonder if he's dying; he thinks he's died before; he remembers nearly dying; his brain is
full of cognitive sludge but even so, he manages to half recall and half fabricate an explanation,
running mental models of the last few minutes in reverse and then forward again. They oscillate with
increasing detail each round until he stitches something together that makes sense.
He is in San Franscisco.
No he isn't.
He's in Oakland.
He's fainted.
No he hasn't.
He has, improbably, fallen asleep on the hardwood floor.
Something is wrong with Newton, because he's currently half atop the coffee table, looking only
semiconscious.
Hermann puts this information together with the fading ache in his ribs and shoulder and comes to
the conclusion that Newton stepped on him, likely because Hermann is currently on the floor.
Somehow this had resulted in Newton falling into the coffee table. Because yes. Of course it had.
"Seriously," Newton says, interrupting Hermann's oscillating thought models as he consolidates
all askew limbs into a semi-fetal curl atop of the coffee table. "Seriously?"
"Good morning," Hermann rasps, not even bothering to sit, feeling increasingly hopeless about the
coming day as more details of the previous one come back to him. His throat is intolerably sore from
the seven hours of reading he'd done the previous evening.
"I don't even--" Newton slurs. "Why are you on the floor?"
Newton is not a morning person.
Hermann is not a morning person either, but at least he doesn't lose fifty IQ points before noon.
"I frequently sleep on the floor," Hermann says.
"Lies. Hermann. I have your brain in my brain," Newton replies, with long-suffering petulance.
"Then use it," he replies, staring at the lines and planes of the walls and ceiling.
"I stepped on your sternum. A little bit. Possibly." Newton sounds aggrieved, even though
Hermann is, unarguably, the injured party.
Probably.
Hermann narrows his eyes, coming up on one elbow in the space between the table and the couch.
The other man is curled atop the surprisingly sturdy coffee table, his forehead pressed against its dark
wooden surface. It's hard to be certain where his gaze is directed because he's still wearing
Hermann's sunglasses. Newton currently has both hands clasped around his shin.
"Yes, I believe you did. I presume you've broken your leg?"
"Um, no." Newton shifts slightly to look at Hermann, much good may it do him with shades rather
than corrective lenses. "My bones are super dense. At least, I've always pictured them that way?
Honestly, they're probably of disappointingly average density. Also. Hey. I'm fine. I'm a peak
evolutionary specimen. If I could pick the most evolutionarily fit human as a representative of our
entire species, I'd choose Mako, because duh, but I'm at least the upper decile, okay? I'm fine. I'm
scrappy. Scrappy. You're less scrappy. I probably broke all your ribs."
Hermann gingerly presses on his chest, but his bones seem to be intact. "I don't think you did," he
replies. "Miraculously."
His esteemed colleague is currently pantomiming the waving of a small flag for no reason
Hermann can discern. He then says, "yay," with a total aridity that Hermann finds paradoxically
winsome.
"Try not to step on me in the future," Hermann replies, clearing his throat.
"Well try not to sleep so stealthily. On the floor. Like a creeper."
Hermann sighs aggressively and glares at Newton.
"Seriously though," Newton says, pressing his forehead against the dark wood of the coffee table.
"You were on the floor because why, exactly?"
Because I don't want to find out whether or not insomnia is lethal by watching you push the
borders of human wakefulness, if that's all right with you, Dr. Geiszler.
"I'm not going to die," Newton says, his response timed so perfectly to Hermann's unarticulated
thought that it is extremely difficult to hang onto his skepticism regarding a real-time cognitive
connection.
IDIOT, Hermann mentally screams at absolute maximum volume.
Newton doesn't so much as twitch, but he does continue with, "are you internally screaming right
now, dude? I'm sorry I stepped on you. It didn't turn out that well for me either, you know. Take my
credit card and buy yourself a compensatory present like maybe a hot date with a hypothetical
physician re: your hypothetical cracked ribs?"
"My ribs are fine," Hermann says, sitting up, rubbing his rib cage, feeling physically, mentally,
and emotionally wretched.
"On the plus side, I have discovered that this coffee table is unexpectedly sturdy," Newt says,
rapping its surface half-heartedly. "This changes my entire mental image of Amalgamated Paulerika."
"What?" Hermann says, leaning back against the base of the couch, still much, much too tired for
any of this.
"Try reading my mind," Newt says, making a loose circle in the air with one hand, "because that's
the only way you'll ever find out."
"I cannot read your mind," Hermann says firmly. "Alas, I have known you long enough that I am
certain that 'Paulerika' is a portmanteau of two conjectural names with which you have tagged the
interior decorator of this particular pre-furnished apartment. You are, however, incorrect. The interior
living experience at Bayside Towers was tailored by an Eco-Designer known professionally as
'Blaze'. He specializes in the respectful integration of humans into barely survivable regions."
Newton tries to laugh and speak at the same time with dubious success. Hermann parses the sound
he makes into something approximating: "What?"
"I have his business card," Hermann says, smiling faintly. "The walls are lead-lined, the air is
filtered and recirculated, and the building's water supply is piped from an inland reservoir."
"Um, good? That seems unnecessarily--hmm. Actually, I could see the fog being slightly
radioactive as it comes in over the bay. Maybe? It's been a while since I've given a crap about the
water cycle. Fog comes from where? Condensation on salt spray produced by breaking waves? What
if that salt spray is radioactive? Would it be? People have looked at this, right? Like, nuclear
physicists and meteorologists are teaming up and getting government grants to study this, yes? Are we
going to get thyroid cancer from working at UC Berkeley? Common sense would say 'no', biology
maybe says 'maybe'. I haven't thought about this at all, unsurprisingly, since I don't go outside. This
building seems like overkill, though. I mean, people are walking around on the streets, Hermann, I get
why this appeals to you, but it seems kind of unnecessary, probably, maybe, I'm not one hundred
percent sure. The part of me that's me and drinks tap water is rolling his eyes at you but the part of me
that's you and only drinks filtered water is internally applauding you right now. Seriously though, a
guy named 'Blaze' designed this place?"
"Yes," Hermann says, eyeing Newton critically, torn between speculation on frequency and
intensity of radioactive fog, inquiring about the other man's progress in holding two simultaneous
opinions, and-- "What do you mean you 'don't go outside'?"
"Um," Newton says. The other man is still lying atop their coffee table, looking familiar and
unkempt and entirely pathetic in Hermann's sunglasses and his clothes from the previous day. "It's
actually an extremely complicated situation," Newton says. "Very difficult to describe to people who
aren't me, but yet also totally normal and not even worth the calories expended by the circuitous
commentary that would be required for your full comprehension."
"I am, in part, you," Hermann says, in dry determination.
"Ugh, I know that tone," Newton says.
"Explain," Hermann replies.
"I will explain if you make me coffee. With caffeine, I can't talk to you like this, you're an order of
magnitude more crafty than me at baseline and three orders of magnitude more crafty than me within
three hours of when I wake up."
"No caffeine," Hermann says. "Explain."
"Oh sure. Sure, Newton, explain. Just explain."
Hermann sighs.
"I'll explain when you explain the hunting thing to me," Newton says.
Hermann looks away, all the despair of the previous day rising out of the compressed places in
his mind to settle over everything in a thick and toxic cognitive fog.
"Yeah, okay, that was defense as offense, I'm a jerk--"
"Shut up," Hermann snaps.
Newton reaches over and makes a half-hearted attempt to fix Hermann's hair.
"This?" Hermann says, shoving Newton's hand away, "is my hair, Newton. I realize this is
confusing for us both but please try to keep track of this much at least."
"I have a proprietary interest in your hair," Newton says, waving in an uncoordinated fashion at
Hermann's head and clipping Hermann's temple in the process. "But I can separate it from my own,
thanks," he finishes, shoving his own hair into total disarray. "Spatially separate. Attached to different
heads. Governed by different organizing principles and life philosophies. I get it, dude."
Hermann sighs. "Did you break anything when you tripped over me? Like your skull, for
example?"
"No," Newton says. "For the eighth time. Do you think my answer is going to change if you keep
asking me?"
"Are you certain?"
"I'm sure I'm bleeding into my skin in various places, but I don't think I've had any kind of massive
structural failure."
"Good," Hermann says, staring at an unadorned wall.
"Let's fast-forward to six months from now," Newton whispers. "What do you say?"
 "I would be amenable to that," Hermann replies without looking at him.
"In other, totally unrelated news, thanks for reading me to sleep like the super badass K-science
Division Chiefs that we are. Or were. My point is that we're very secure in our intellectual prowess
and that's why we can do this kind of thing without it being at all weird. We're excessively badass.
That's my point. We should watch sports. Do they even have sports anymore? Are sporting matches of
various types part of the post-apocalyptic human cultural zeitgeist? Like, does tennis exist still? We
should find out. Tennis is maybe not the most macho. Football? I feel like we're baseball people, if
anything. Polo? With horses? Water polo? Or maybe like, figure skating? I like playing racquetball
but not watching it, really. As a general rule, sports are boring and do not actually equate to
badassery. Discuss."
"I think you need more sleep," Hermann replies, finding it physically painful to utter such a gross
understatement.
"What time is it?" Newton asks, in the unmistakable cadence used by The Spin Doctors in their
musical piece of the same name.
Hermann is extremely tempted to respond with, 'four thirty' in lyrical capitulation.
But it is not four thirty, and he humors Newton entirely too much as a general rule.
He pulls out his phone to confirm the time.
"It is ten o'clock in the morning," he says.
"How long do you think I slept?" Newt asks.
Hermann spends a moment trying to estimate, subtracting the periods of semi-lucid wakefulness
and the two episodes of epistaxis from the total to come up with an approximate number. "Six hours,"
he decides, "with the caveat that it was extremely poor quality sleep."
"Meh," Newton says. "That's probably enough to get by on. Speaking of things that are totally
under control and not wrong with me, do not turn around, by the way."
Hermann immediately twists, eyeing the moderately bloody towel laid out over the couch. This is
not news to him. He was awake for most of the bleeding the previous night, even if Newton does not
clearly remember it.
"I said do not turn around, Hermann. Not."
"I've seen worse," he replies, unperturbed.
"Oh. Well, good? Not good? Are you getting catastrophic nosebleeds?"
"Catastrophic?" Hermann echoes. "No."
"Me neither," Newton says.
Hermann has his suspicions on that front, but he says nothing, balanced between confrontation and
compassion. This dichotomy is the only thing in his head that feels familiar to him. No resolution is
forthcoming, so he gets up and literally walks away from this mental stalemate just as he's walked
away from so many others. He leaves Newton curled atop of their coffee table like the entirely
appealing idiot that he is and hopefully always will be.
Hermann is personally offended that, as he is brushing his teeth in an immaculate, white-tiled
bathroom, Is this it? by The Strokes begins to play on repeat in his head.
He chalks this up to the long list of things that can be classified as 'Newton's fault'.
In front of a light-lined mirror, Hermann weathers the cognitive crush of failure and culpability
and fear. All the limits he'd chalked around the foreign places in his thoughts hadn't stopped him from
staring down his colleague of nine-years like a thing to be torn apart.
He needs to get out of this apartment.
For a time.
 A short time.
So he brushes his teeth, he changes his clothes, he fixes his hair, he takes an aspirin in the vague
hope of headache aversion, and then re-enters the living room.
Newton has relocated from the coffee table to the kitchen, where he is contemplating the contents
of their pantry with his head cocked and his glasses in place. His fingers curl around his sleeves in a
new and troubling habit that Hermann, in this otherwise unremarkable instant, abruptly understands.
He cannot bear to see his skin.
It's an hypothesis that his brain upstages straight to a working model. He is certain he is right. All
he needs is a timetable.
Hermann stares at Newton, running his memory backwards, scanning through all that had
happened, trying to remember the last time the other man had rolled up his sleeves.
He had seen the tattoos after the man's MRI at the PPDC, when he'd exchanged his clothes for
scrubs. He had seen them in their San Francisco hotel room when Hermann had divested his semi-
conscious colleague of everything he was wearing except his boxers and undershirt.
He hasn't seen them since.
Not one time.
Newton's tattoos are a subject on which Hermann has spent a good deal of speculative cognitive
currency.
He has called them shortsighted, misguided, unwise, the trappings of a kaiju groupie writ large
and permanent across the man's skin. He has called them displaced fear twisted into inked bravado.
He has called them a decade of horrified fascination with alien monstrosities re-wrought as awed
regard. He has called them a tapestry and tally of an evolutionary arms race in which brains are pitted
against mindless brawn. He has called them a litmus test in acid green to which Dr. Geiszler has a
habit of subjecting everyone he meets. He has called them a misguided romanticizing of an alien
biology. He has called them an anti-establishment semiotic manifesto. He has called them an artful
slice through society's penchant for stereotypic labeling. He has called them a confusing species-on-
species scorecard cum epitaph. He has called them a living memorial to the most impressive
predators ever encountered by man. He has called them an outlet of irrepressible artistic impulse. He
has called them an exercise in pure spite leveled at a future failure. But now--
Something has transmogrified his colleague's body art from atypical armor into incessant
psychological assault.
I told you, he has the urge to scream at Newton, who is adjusting his glasses in blithe
unawareness of Hermann's self-righteous and complete sympathy. Did I not tell you it was a mistake?
"You literally bought six boxes of Raisin Bran?" Newton says, scrubbing a hand through unruly
hair. "I hate you."
"I'm going out," Hermann snarls.
Newton looks at him, startled.
Hermann turns away.
"I--actually don't mind Raisin Bran?" Newton says. "Raisin Bran is fine."
"Good," Hermann says, opening the closet and pulling on his coat. "Enjoy."
"I--um, full disclosure, don't actually hate you?" Newton says, following him toward the door,
one hand on the wall, "but don't spread it around. I have a rep to maintain."
"Yes," Hermann says, clipped, collecting his cane from where he's left it, leaning against the wall.
"I'm aware."
"Okay, so, you're outrageously pissed at me," Newton says. "And yes, I commend your emotional
choices, because enumerating retrograde-style from right now: I was a little bit of a jerk about the
cereal; I bled all over a towel that's probably new because last time I checked we had no towels; I
failed to be adequately appreciative that you read to me for hours and hours so I can stay current with
science and not because I needed a basic science bedtime story, I just want to make sure the record's
clear on that one; I kind of didn't mention the not-sleeping thing until it had been a fait accompli for
approximately ninety-six hours--"
"I am not 'pissed at you'," Hermann says, so overwrought that he can barely speak and needing to
put a stop to this list of things that Newton seems to think are his fault.
"Whoa," Newton says, both hands outstretched. "Just, um, chill, would you please?"
Hermann makes a strangled sort of sound; he's not certain how that happens.
"Okay, not the best choice of thing to say on my part, granted, but--" Newton begins.
Hermann doesn't hear the rest, because he is through the door and slamming it in Newton's face
for the sake of his own sanity.
For a brief interval he stands frozen in the hall, picturing Newton staring at the opposite side of
the door, confused and caffeine-less, holding whole swaths of Hermann's mind hostage in a blameless
multiplicity of ways.
Hermann turns, proceeds down the hall, descends in the elevator, and finally breaks out into crisp
maritime air beneath a pale sky.
Already he feels better. Autonomous. Independent. Part of no cognitive collective.
Hermann leans on his cane as he makes his way down a hill. He's heading toward the bay, passing
through streets that feel empty after the recent clamor of Hong Kong. He comes to the edge of the
Habitable Zone, which extends nearly to the border of the water. He stops in front of a sign that reads
'Radiation readings exceed background levels beyond this border.'
He sighs.
The three nuclear devices deployed against Trespasser had been detonated in the northernmost
reaches of the bay. Despite continuous decontamination efforts, radioactive material had diffused
southward to expose the entire body of water. As Hermann understands it, filtration, sequestration,
and storage remain the central tenets of the ongoing cleanup, but such efforts only get a society so far
when faced with the fact that there is no minimal biologically safe dose of radiation.
He probably should not be standing here.
Not for a prolonged period.
Nevertheless, there's something that appeals to him about Oblivion Bay--slow and constant source
of leaching mutagens that it is. It suits the cast of his current mood.
In the distance, barely visible through the haze, he can make out the dark, linear stretch of the Wall
of Life beyond the confines of the bay.
He hasn't come here for the Wall, or for the water.
He's come here for the gulls.
To watch them.
He casts his eyes skyward, following their curving flight paths above the dark water, trying to call
forth something horrendous from the repressed depths of his mind.
Nothing happens.
They're gulls, for god's sake; he has no urge to chase them.
Hermann can feel his expression crack briefly and reform, but only in despair, and not in any
instinct of predation.
Is this one manifestation of what Newton had meant when he'd mentioned 'evil', days ago? The
unwanted external influence, worming its way into the mind, cracking apart a sense of self that should
be whole, bringing it partially into accord with all that it had ever opposed?
In so far as a thing is evil to us it is contrary to us, his brain offers him.
Please, he says in response, turn on your instincts of predation so that I may know I am capable
of turning them off.
Yesterday, in the horrified subterranean reaches of his mind, beneath the quiet, continuous reading
of the latest neuroscience to his half-delirious colleague, he had intended to come here. To look at the
gulls. To watch them. To purposefully call up everything his brain is trying to actively bury and to
practice snapping in and out of lateral pathways.
But he can't do it.
Hermann Gottlieb cannot stand on a pier, stare at seagulls, and force himself to want to eat them
for the purpose of immediately dissuading himself about his taste for those selfsame seagulls.
This will never work for him--he cannot do what Newton has done and is doing. He cannot
incorporate catastrophic cognitive disruption into a re-wrought sense of self. There are two people
and a collective consciousness in his head, in his head, where there should only be Hermann
Gottlieb.
His brain is not cooperating. It can hollow out idiocy at a distance of one hundred meters and it is
therefore totally unwilling to call up any predation instincts when presented with seagulls. Of course,
it is willing to back his already stressed and deeply troubled colleague cum roommate cum drift-
partner into a corner in a dimly lit kitchen and terrify him for no other reason than that he'd happened
to combine visible anxiety with a physical retreat.
It had been that unsteady, backward step that had initiated the entire unfortunate episode.
There had been something unfit, something prey-like, something unconsciously vulnerable about
the way the man had moved that had, instead of triggering sympathy, triggered something else.
His memory of the darkened kitchen is painfully sharp, painfully full of the need to drive forward,
his muscles tensing, his hands open, his fingers arced as if they ended in claws rather than in nails.
That cannot happen again.
Ever.
Never ever again.
Not even one time.
He has no idea what might have happened had Newton not, with typical insight, determined what
was happening and corrected Hermann's disastrous trajectory by aggressively shouting directly in his
face. Would Hermann have stayed locked in predatory consideration? Would he have, at some point,
launched himself at Newton and attacked him? Would he have snapped out of it on his own?
He doesn't know.
There is something too-tight about the control that Hermann is trying to exert over his own mind.
Something that he will obey but other cognitive parties will not. Had he been incorrect about the
optimal strategy for dealing with his current set of mental challenges? Is the driving of parts of his
consciousness into neural subjugation so unremitting that they have no choice but to build up pressure
behind the mental walls he's been bricking until they explode outward, burying his sense of self for
brief intervals until Newton, of all people, pulls him free of the ensuing mental debris?
How is that Newton manages to be only tormented by that which is in his head and not
occasionally possessed by it?
It doesn't seem fair.
It certainly is not.
 Hermann pictures the other man managing his consciousness like a sound engineer, never isolating
any one line, fading himself and his co-worker and a screaming, rage-filled, alien consciousness up
and down in the mix of his thoughts, never losing any through-line, until, when his system fails, it fails
in the distorted scream of audio feedback, all through-lines fluxing at once into a white-out of total
panic.
Hermann steps forward to wrap a hand around the cool metal of the fence that separates him from
the no-man's land of a glacis that descends for thirty meters to the edge of the dark water.
Should he change his cognitive strategy?
Should he attempt to be more like Newton--with his looser control, his bottom-up rather than top-
down organization? Could he be more like Newton? He's not sure that even now, even post-drifting,
he understands exactly how the other man's mind manages to work, but Hermann has the wits to see
it's more organized than it might externally appear. He will not get the same effect simply by
loosening the constraints of his own self-discipline. All he will get will be shoddy results, most
likely.
Most likely.
His current strategy isn't working either. He can't spend his life in fear of turning into Newton or
attacking a passing child in a fit of blind, predatory instinct.
He can't.
He will not.
He absolutely refuses to admit the possibility of any such outcome.
Hermann takes a shallow breath and expels it in a short exhale.
It is certainly a mistake to work against his own strengths, which lie in analysis and organization.
He will think his way out of his current problems.
This strategy has never failed him.
He needs to take a step back and reconsider his previous two weeks as a whole. He has been
distracted by an entire array of terrifying problems: a shortened attention span that was certainly
Newton's fault, bureaucratic difficulties, a job search, the brief but torturous belief that the PPDC had
entirely ruined his colleague's brain, finding an apartment that was not dangerously radioactive,
insomnia, headaches, intermittent episodes of epistaxis, nausea induced by cognitive dissonance, the
concern that his colleague was on the verge of a psychotic break secondary to sleeplessness, the
concern that he himself could get lost in the neural pathways in his head that weren't his own--
Yes.
He's had many distractions.
This is no excuse for not laying things out in an organized manner. Now, here, on the edge of this
radioactive bay, seems as good a place and time as any other, given that the events of the previous
afternoon had provided him with an array of new information to plug into his working model
regarding what had happened, what was currently happening, and what will happen.
After organizing his thoughts, he comes up with three outstanding questions. One--what had
happened to Newton in those three days they had been mostly separated? Two--is real-time cognitive
influence an actual post-drift phenomenon and, if so, how might it be demonstrated? Three--what is
the best method to prevent the unwanted appearance of Geiszlerian or Kaijuesque impulses in the
brain of Dr. Hermann Gottlieb?
Hermann shifts his hand on the rail.
Question one is the question he least wants to consider. As the days pass, he feels himself coming
closer and closer to the answer that he had initially rejected because of how openly ludicrous it was,
how insane it was, how stupid it would have been to attempt. But Newton's comments of the previous
evening, while falling far, far short of confirming anything had suggested exactly what Hermann has
been trying not to believe.
A third drift.
With fragments of alien tissue that were a portal to precisely nowhere. A connection to nothing
rational, nothing but disembodied misery.
Even now, even with all the building evidence he has that Newton, that idiot, drifted for a third
time, he still can't quite believe it. He can't believe Newton would have agreed, he can't believe that
anyone would have asked it of him, he can't believe such a thing would have been possible; it had
only worked the first time because the man had jacked himself into a terminal that shouldn't have gone
anywhere, but had turned out to be a signal transducer for thoughtwaves from the anteverse. In the
absence of an open connection to a collective consciousness there should have been nothing but dead
static. Neuronal noise. Cognitive chaos.
It is a miracle that the man is neither dead nor floridly psychotic.
Hermann hasn't contacted anyone at the PPDC since he was cleared of charges of abduction and
breach of contract. He has no desire to reopen lines of communication, but the PPDC has sent Dr.
McClure none of the medical records she requested after their first meeting.
It is time to take some action.
Some action that does not involve prying the information out of Newton.
Hermann cannot see such an attempt ending well. He has no idea what the man's limits might be,
but he has no desire to map out their borders in any kind of empirical fashion.
Newton will tell Hermann what he wishes him to know.
Eventually.
Possibly.
With some coaxing.
Question two, the issue of whether real-time cognitive influence is a legitimate post-drift
phenomenon, is not something he had spent much time worrying about. He is extremely dubious about
the mechanistic underpinnings of--
Hermann lifts his hand from the rail, sweeping it up in wave of helpless skepticism, which he
realizes is a strange blend of his own critical thought and Newton's propensity to punctuate his inner
monologue with gestictulations.
Soon, he'll be talking to himself.
Will that be progress, given he's considering changing his strategy to try and incorporate some
low-level integration of all the parties taking up space in his brain?
He has no idea.
He glares at Oblivion Bay and returns to the issue at hand.
He simply cannot see how such a real-time connection might work. Newton's half-panicked,
sleep deprived ramblings of the previous evening had seemed to favor the idea of some kind of
biological ability to transmit or receive exogenous signals and transduce them into thoughts. Hermann
is not categorically opposed to such a possibility. Clearly his brain has the capacity to interpret
kaiju-derived voltage fluctuations, but he's quite skeptical of the ability of electromagnetic waves to
penetrate the dense bone of the human skull. There could be some kind of poorly understood quantum
mechanical effect at play. If that's the case, the thing is going to be harder to parse, in large part
because of humanity's relatively poor understanding of quantum mechanics.
He'd like to determine that there is, in fact, a reproducible phenomenon to study before he starts
theorizing about quantum phenomena on a macro scale.
That way madness lies.
He's relatively certain that they should be able to devise some system to determine whether their
ability to 'read' one another's thoughts, actively, in real time, is indeed a legitimate, repeatedly
observable, post-drift effect. There may already be experimental systems in place to test extrasensory
perception, and much though it deeply, materially shames him to look into this, he will do it because
he promised Newton that he would and the man will be an absolute nightmare to deal with if he
believes he's being unfairly dismissed. Alas, Newton now has the moral high-ground when it comes
to outrageous, conjectural thinking, and will. Forever. To Hermann's perpetual shock, gratitude, and
regret.
Fine.
He will participate in testing Newton's hypothesis.
That should cheer the man up.
Self-experimentation always does.
Hermann sighs.
This brings him to question three: how he should best prevent the unwanted appearance of
Geiszlerian or Kaijuesque impulses in his own brain. Immediately post-drifting, he had feared subtle
foreign influence--he had feared something that he might not recognize, something that would not feel
foreign, something that would appear to come from inside himself but would actually come from an
alien source.
While such a concern still cannot be ruled out, the actual problem is quite a bit more obvious in
character than Hermann had been preparing himself for. Two weeks of insomnia and distracted,
stress-filled attempts at exerting mental discipline have left him with stray tendencies that he can
immediately identify as externally-derived but that have the unfortunate habit of rocketing to the fore
of his consciousness and suppressing that which should rightfully be occupying prefrontal cortex
space.
He had not anticipated this.
It hadn't been immediately apparent, but it had appeared in the relative short term. Is it a
consequence of sleeping, of memory integration, of synaptic plasticity at work? Is it a phenomenon
arising purely from his own mind, or, if Newton is correct in his theory that they may be susceptible
to external influence from one another and the kaiju anteverse, is it something else? Are those lateral
snaps into thought-patterns not his own a consequence of external thought pressure?
He sounds ridiculous.
Then again, drifting with dead, formaldehyde-fixed (or fetal) tissue had also sounded ridiculous.
He had been certain that no one could survive such an attempt.
He--
He is certain--
He is certain he made it out of the drift.
Isn't he?
Of course he is.
Of course he is.
He's familiar with reality and he's familiar with the hyper-realistic overwhelming onslaught of the
drift, and he can tell them apart.
He flicks a nail against the metal rail and is rewarded with a jolt of pain in his nail bed.
If he can't trust the observable universe, there is literally nothing left to trust and he should just
surrender himself to existential nihilism.
He winces at this unlooked for insight into Newton's current epistemological obsession with
rationalism as a discipline.
Hermann doesn't know if he should change his current strategy of attempting to identify, isolate,
and repress the proclivities, the desires, that come from Newton and from the remnants of a predatory
pack of alien monsters or if he should let some of them out where he can keep them under the lens of
the continual observation of his conscious mind.
He doesn't particularly care for this as an option.
Hermann doesn't like many of his options at present.
He has no desire to allow any additional Geiszlerian proclivities into his thoughts and behaviors.
He has even less desire to adopt the cognitive characteristics of a voraciously destructive
biological war machine.
But.
Both of those options are better than unpredictably terrorizing his already traumatized roommate
or attacking the undergraduates he will shortly be intimidating with algebraic topology.
Fine.
He turns away from the dark water of the bay and walks back toward the apartment, trying to see
the streets with their steep grades and clustered buildings, the people, the pale sky, and the humidity-
blurred air in a controlled triplicate--desolate, boring, packed with underutilized resources in the
hands of a stupid, backward species that builds structures beneath the haze of their own carbon waste.
It takes him twenty minutes, but he finally pulls forward an impulse to stand and watch the
silhouette of a spandexed jogger and his dog with a shadow of whatever it was that had rocketed to
the fore of his mind in a dim kitchen the previous day.
Afterwards, he feels sick and faint and crushed under the prospect of spending his life in
triplicated misery.
It's not that bad, his brain offers, sounding like Newton.
Idiot, he says, in bleak reply. He stops with that, primarily because he's fairly sure that nothing
good can come of allowing his mind to personify alternate neural pathways.
He's trying not to go insane, thank you.
He intends to limp up and down steep streets a few times before returning to the apartment, but he
stops, distracted, in front of a store window hung with an array of musical instruments, many of which
Newton can play with varying degrees of proficiency. Overlaid above the displayed guitars and
banjos and mandolins he can see his own reflection, ghost-like in the glass store-front.
It looks familiar, but not familiar enough.
Hermann is curious and possessed of the strange freedom from self-censure that he has only ever
experienced at the absolute nadir of personal misery.
He enters the store with the quiet chime of bells. It smells of wood warmed by the sun and old
sheet music, printed on real paper. There is a bookshelf crammed with vinyl albums on the back wall,
which he interprets as 'a good sign' with an enthusiastic hauteur so intense it feels deeply and
unmistakably voyeuristic.
He nearly loses the tenuous grip he has on his selfhood in this surge of energy that is not his own--
but he hangs on, not moving, mastering the impulse to touch everything until the desire dissipates, the
edge is filed off the intensity of his thoughts, and he is left standing just inside the door, one hand over
his chest.
He feels a surge of triumph that has both a predatory edge and a Geislzerian arrogance to it.
 Hermann detangles his fingers from the front of his sweater and walks forward, past the racks of
sheet music, past the guitars that he has no plans to touch. His self-control only goes so far and he can
see the likely limits of his grip on this triplicated worldview.
He stops in front of the back wall, where an electric keyboard is connected to a speaker system.
He turns the volume down, glances around the mostly empty store, then sits on a dark bench.
Hermann reaches out, committing to this course of action with only his left hand.
He picks out the melodic line of Syncope in flawless transposition.
It is an entirely fascinating experience. He has the neural pathways of a talented musician but the
muscle memory of someone who'd never played the piano and who had given up the violin for
mathematics circa 2003. He's not terrible, but he's by no means excellent either.
It would take him almost no time at all to become excellent.
That much is extremely apparent.
"Nice," someone says from behind him. Hermann turns to see a young man with multiple facial
piercings and full tattoo sleeves standing behind him. "The Supercos, am I right?"
"Yes," Hermann says stiffly. "You're familiar?"
"Who isn't?" the child asks him.
"Really," Hermann says, with a distinctly Geiszlerian guttural 'r' denoting extreme interest of a
dubiously appropriate character before reasserting his own personality in reactive anxiety. "They are
a relatively obscure band in a relatively unpopular genre," Hermann finishes, his voice full of
contingency.
"They were," the employee says, "until their front man quit music for science and kind of saved
the world. Have you been living under a rock, or what?"
"Ah," Hermann says, his uncertainty translating directly to understated alarm, but at what,
specifically, he can't say.
He needs to pay more attention to the cultural zeitgeist. That much, at least, is clear.
"Word on the street is that the guy might be local now," the child continues.
"How interesting," Hermann says, getting to his feet.
"We have some of their stuff, if you're into it," the young man says, pushing dark hair out of dark
eyes. "On whatever your preferred media is. It's hard to keep in stock, but their independent label just
issued a re-release--"
What? Those bastards, why wasn't I consulted, he almost snaps in abrupt irritation. But,
thankfully, he doesn't. He instead says, "no. Thank you, but no."
"You look familiar to me," the child says, eyeing him in impertinent speculation. "Are you anyone
cool?"
"No," Hermann says, quite truthfully, backing away. "I am no one 'cool'. I really must be going."
He makes it back out onto the sidewalk without being further detained by the curious teenager. He
then signals for a driverless cab in a blind desire to get off the streets. He doesn't want to be
recognized, he doesn't want to talk to anyone, he doesn't want to steal someone else's musical genius,
doesn't want to look at joggers like the breakfast he didn't have, doesn't want any of it.
"Please state your destination," the cab requests in mechanical pleasantness when he slides into
the back seat.
Of course, he has no destination.
None at all.
He wants to work, but his paperwork hasn't yet been finalized at UC Berkeley; he wants to code,
but there are no more Jaegers; he wants to do mathematics; he wants to design simulations for closing
an already closed breach; he wants to drive himself somewhere; he wants to do something that
Newton or alien hive minds have no interest in.
He wants, as he has always wanted, to pilot a plane off the edge of the world.
"I need a car," he confesses to the cab, in waspish discontent.
An array of nearby car dealerships spring up on the touchscreen display built into the cab.
He sighs.
He can't simply go purchase a car.
Can he?
Why not? everyone in his head asks.
Well, perhaps he can.
He studies the array of choices in front of him, and selects one, trying to make it his choice alone,
trying to make a decision only as Hermann Gottlieb, but aware that he can never truly know if he is
successful. Will he look back on his snap decision to purchase a sports car from Stuttgart as an
injudicious impulse for which Newton should be blamed or as his own confused proclivities tearing
their way out of the snarled mess of his conscious experience?
Best not to overthink it, his brain advises, sounding exactly like Newton in an incendiary mood.
The cab pulls away from the curb.

Eight hours after he'd left, now possessing an ostentatious car that he really cannot justify
purchasing and a bag of fish that he also cannot justify, Hermann returns to the apartment in a state of
significant trepidation.
Partially, his dread is derived from guilt, because he had, uncharacteristically, slammed the door
in Newton's face that morning in flagrant indulgence of his own distress. Partially, his dread is
derived from his perpetual and mostly unjustified fear that any time he returns to their apartment he'll
find Newton seizing, unconscious, or dead on the floor.
This is a banner day for irrationality on the part of Hermann Gottlieb, Ph.D.
He makes an effort not to visibly wince as he opens the door.
Newton, fortunately, is not dead on the floor. He is, in fact, sitting at their kitchen table, recently
showered, wearing jeans and a green sweater over a white dress shirt, reading about rationalism.
He glances up coolly when Hermann walks in, and then looks back down without saying anything,
readjusting his glasses with his right hand, turning a page with his left.
Hermann feels like a complete idiot.
Likely because he is a complete idiot.
Hermann supposes he deserves whatever it is that this is--the outrageously superior example of
Newton's most attractive brand of arrogance filtered through a new lens of self-containment for which
Hermann credits his own influence. It is a magnificent thing to behold and may actually be that which,
in the end, drives Hermann insane.
I am awesome, his brain says, sounding like Newton, confusingly admiring himself from within
the confines of Hermann's own head.
Dr. Gottlieb cannot take much more of this.
He leans back against the door, trying not to feel horribly awkward, post impulse-car-buying and
impulse-fish-buying, a confused mess of a mathematician with closet musical interests, a skull too
small for all its tenants, and a coat too large for his frame.
"You didn't take your phone," Newton says, flexing a bare foot against the rung of the chair he's
seated in, still not looking up.
 "I know," Hermann says. "I bought a car."
That earns him a brief look punctuated by an atypically uncommunicative eyebrow lift. "Did you,"
Newton says, as he looks back down at his book.
This is an interpersonal catastrophe. Newton is absolutely not allowed to wear sweaters, read
rationalism, and be restrained in glorious simultaneity; it is just unfair.
"I bought you some fish," Hermann says.
Newton glances back up.
Hermann displays a bag of goldfish.
"Did you also happen to buy me a fish tank?" Newton asks.
"No," Hermann admits. "That was oversight on my part. Apologies."
"Don't apologize to me," Newton says, looking back down. "Apologize to Fire Truck."
Hermann looks skeptically at Newton and then at the four goldfish in the plastic bag he holds. Not
one of them looks particularly deserving of such a name. "You're christening one of them Fire Truck?"
"Fire Truck, Descartes, Group Theory, and Tiffany," Newton says.
Hermann looks at the ceiling, either appealing to the heavens for patience or profusely thanking
them for returning his roommate to baseline.
"Do not roll your eyes at me; what would you name them? Fish One through Four?"
"No," Hermann says defensively, pushing away from the door and walking forward to place the
bag of fish directly over the man's English translation of La Geometrie, by Rene Descartes.
"Uh huh," Newton says in open skepticism, lifting the water-and-fish-filled plastic bag gently off
his book. "And no fish on Descartes. Have some respect, Hermann, god. Who are you even?"
"As to that," Hermann says, pulling off his coat, and turning to hang it in the closet, "I'm sure I
don't know."
Newton says nothing.
Hermann is certain that if he were to turn around he would find the other man giving him an
unforgivably incisive look.
For that precise reason, he is not going to turn in the present moment.
"I would certainly introduce some kind of theme to my system of naming, rather than a random
collection of a class of vehicle, a philosopher, a branch of mathematics, and an otherwise traditional
name that seems particularly un-fish-like," he says, taking his time in closing the closet door.
"How is Tiffany un-fish like?" Newton asks. "What's a fish-like name?"
"Marina?" Hermann suggests, turning back toward the table.
"Not bad," Newton says, getting to his feet with an unsteady stiffness that he's been unable to
shake for weeks. "If you buy another fish, you can name her Marina. Unfortunately, this little lady is
already named Tiffany. There's too much identity confusion going around, without bringing our fish
into it."
"True," Hermann says. "Exquisitely true."
"Excruciatingly true," Newton says wryly, his tone beginning to thaw into something less
Gottliebian and more Geiszlerian. "Seriously, how do you go to a fish store and forget to buy
something to put them in?"
"It has been a difficult day," Hermann confesses.
"Oh I get that," Newton says, opening cabinets. "Do I ever." He pulls out a generic mixing bowl,
fills it with water, and puts the plastic bag of fish into it to thermally equilibrate.
"You're going to put fish in a mixing bowl?" Hermann asks.
"Well, where else am I going to put them, Hermann? You aren't exactly leaving me with a whole
lot of choices, here. I think we have to de-chlorinate this water. Also, did you seriously buy a car?"
Newton asks, now with only a trace of the strange reserve he'd displayed when Hermann had walked
through the door.
"We do not have to de-chlorinate the water," Hermann says, "because the water-filter I purchased
has a carbon-filter dechlorination system built into it. Just use that. And yes, I did buy a car."
"Seriously? You realize tap water is fine, right? Talk about overkill," Newton says, opening the
refrigerator and pulling out the filtered water. "You realize it's kind of weirdly badass just go out and
buy a car, right? Like, most people have to do angsty soul-searching first. Though, I guess you're in
more than decent financial shape, so--" Newton opens a hand and shrugs before removing the fish
from their state of thermal equilibration, dumping the tap water into the sink, and replacing it with
filtered refrigerated water. "Good job? Way to be decisive? What kind of car?"
Hermann would really rather not say at the present moment. If he plays his cards right, he won't
have to.
"A manual transmission," he says vaguely. "Don't put the fish in four degree water, Newton."
"Oh, a manual transmission. How predictably pretentious," the other man replies. "Also? Do I
look like an idiot to you? Don't answer that. I'm not going to kill the fish. I'm not that cognitively
impaired. I have literally never killed anything--"
Newton breaks off, his gaze fixed on empty space.
"Newton," Hermann says quietly.
"I--" the other man says.
"You," Hermann continues, stepping into a flow of thoughts not his own, "deserve an honorary
degree in botany for all the plants you've 'rescued' from serial neglect."
"I left them," Newton murmurs, still not looking at anything.
The plants? Hermann doesn't ask.
"Contact Mr. Choi," he says instead, trying to snap them out of morbid double-speak. "He's the
only person to ever take umbrage with your botanical kleptomania in the name of life preservation."
"I take umbrage your use of the word 'kleptomania'. It was always rescue, never thievery,"
Newton says, regaining some of his conversational poise. "I do not kill plants. Mako kills plants. The
Jaeger techs kill plants. Dr. L murdered entire swaths of plants. You kill plants." Newton picks up the
fish, studying them under the kitchen lights. "I am so sorry, guys. This is a terrible showing on our
parts, but I just want you to know that this entire bowl-less, gravel-less, plant-less, fish-food-less
situation is one hundred percent Dr. Gottlieb's fault and will definitely be remedied tomorrow. By Dr.
Gottlieb."
In Hermann's opinion, the fish look extremely unperturbed. "I did buy them food," Hermann says
dryly, pulling a small container of fish flakes out of his pants pocket.
"Well that's something," Newton says dryly.
"Did you eat?" Hermann asks.
"Yes," Newton says, putting down the fish. "No. I thought about it. Did you?"
"No," Hermann says.
"You don't have to make me dinner," Newton says. "I mean, I'm pretty clearly in the ongoing
process of ruining your life and driving you crazy, so--" he seems to lose some steam beneath
Hermann's aggressively perplexed glare. "Okay, what I'm trying to say is that we work really well
together, kind of, if one doesn't mind the aggressive ambiance generated by semi-regular shouting
matches, but I'm not sure we make the best roommates. Discuss."
"You are literally the stupidest person I've ever met," Hermann says, pulling a pot out of a cabinet.
"Do you want spatzle?"
"Um," Newton says. "You're super German, you realize, even though you secretly wish you were
British, which is, confusingly, kind of an American shtick. Anyway, I know for a fact that you have
inappropriately rhapsodical thoughts about my career trajectory and facility with disparate fields, so,
um, can you say something useful possibly, other than just calling me stupid, which is clearly actually
some kind of weird compliment that I don't fully understand, because it's so demonstrably false? It's
not nice to denigrate the intellectual capacities of your colleagues turned roommates, you know. Also,
I'm smarter than you and everyone, including you, agrees. And yes. I would love some spatzle."
"You are not ruining my life," Hermann says. "So I will thank you to stop being so dramatic. I
have spent years becoming irrationally fond of you, I have allowed both you and an alien
consciousness into my brain for the purpose of saving your life, I pulled you out of a bureaucratic
mess that was actively killing you, and, finally, I found you a job at an institution that will legally
support you against any unreasonable demands that might be made upon you in the future. Your doubts
about your role in my life are insulting. You're hardly someone I picked up off the streets or a bus
passenger I've been forced to talk with for nine years. Yes, my recent decisions have radically altered
the trajectory of my personal and professional life, but I am--" his throat closes, briefly and
inexplicably. "It was worth it."
"Yeah," Newton says. "I hear that. I get it. I do. World saving. Newt saving. All of that is good.
But it doesn't necessarily translate to--" he waves a hand in an expansive semi-circle to take in their
apartment. The movement exposes a thin band of color at his wrist.
It's the first sign of the other man's tattoos that Hermann has seen in days.
"Whatever," Newton finishes. "Making me spatzle? Look, I am endlessly pissing you off,
Hermann. I can tell."
It isn't you, Hermann wants to tell him. It's everything you literally cannot articulate because it
torments you so much. It's what you've done to yourself. It's what other people have done to you in
search of some surrogate endpoint that might measure your threat to human society. It's the parts
of my mind that I can't control. It's the part of me that might attack you for the anxiety I'm sure
you will now never shake. It's the questions I can't ask you, it's the things I can't tell you, it's way
you stand at windows and bleed there, unprovoked.
He can't force any of this beyond the shut gate of his vocal chords.
So instead he reaches over, grabs Newton's shirtsleeve, and yanks it down to conceal the edge of
color at his wrist.
"You're an idiot," Hermann whispers.
"A little bit, yeah," Newton says, staring at the white cuff of his dress shirt beneath the green of
his sweater.
Chapter End Notes
Chapter-specific citations: The line "In so far as a thing is evil to us it is contrary to us" is by
Spinoza, not CWR. "That way madness lies," is by Shakespeare, not CWR.
A Correspondence In Two Parts
A Correspondence
To: Newton Geiszler
From: Mako Mori
Subject: Is this the real life?
Yes or no?
-Mako
P.S. Where are you?

To: Newton Geiszler

From: Mako Mori
Subject: Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a laaaandslide...you know how it goes.
-Mako

To: Newton Geiszler

From: Mako Mori
Subject: No escape from reality
Hello? Where have you been?
-Mako

To: Newton Geiszler

From: Mako Mori
Subject: READ THIS
Dear Newt,
What happened in the mess hall? Are you going to Tendo's 'Vodka and Victory' party? I need to
know. It won't turn depressing if you're there. It probably won't turn depressing if you're there.
-Mako

To: Newton Geiszler

From: Mako Mori
Subject: READ THIS AND RESPOND
Dear Newt,
Dr. Gottlieb came to see me this afternoon. I don't feel comfortable discussing what he said in an
email. Do you have time to speak with me? Why are you working exclusively in the infirmary? I tried
to find you this afternoon, but I was told by offsite PPDC personnel that you were occupied.
Since when do you have bouncers?
-Mako

To: Mako Mori

From: Newton Geiszler
Subject: OMG
I'm working, Mako. Working. Fancy stereotactic rigs don't align themselves. You think science
stops when the countdown clock does? Science never stops, kiddo. It's like some kind of undead thing
with a subpar nervous system. Always slowly coming for you. Speaking of which, tackle Dr. Gottlieb
for me and give him a task; he's getting in my hair, as always. No one needs breach statistics anymore
(yay!).
-Newt

To: Newton Geiszler

From: Mako Mori
Subject: re: OMG
So you're not dead. Marshal Hansen is preparing for a press conference the day after tomorrow.
You should come to his briefing at fourteen hundred hours. We are all to be coached on 'proper
comportment'.
Speaking of proper comportment, I could use some support regarding my new hair color. Is there
a time I can come see you?
-Mako
P.S. Raleigh says, "tell Geiszler long time, no see in the mess hall." Then he says, "Mako don't
type that." Then he says, "Mako. Mako, no. No. Mako." Then he says, "you're making me sound like a
Neanderthal." Then he says, "Mako. Mako that's not funny. Mako."

To: Newton Geiszler

From: Mako Mori
Subject: Hello?
Hi Newt,
You didn't come to the briefing. I noticed you're not on the schedule for tomorrow's press
conference. Neither is Dr. Gottlieb.
I went to the Medical Bay to try and talk to you and I was told that you were indisposed. Are you
working or are you a patient? Please let me know. Please do not write me an email about zombies.
Please tell me clearly what is happening.
-Mako

To: Newton Geiszler

From: Mako Mori
Subject: URGENT: PLEASE RESPOND
Newt, where are you? What's happened?
-Mako

To: Newton Geiszler

From: Mako Mori
Subject: URGENT!!! RESPONSE REQUIRED
Newt, can you please confirm that the letter of resignation we received from Dr. Gottlieb on your
behalf is genuine? This doesn't sound like you.
-Mako

To: Newton Geiszler

From: Mako Mori
Subject: PLEASE RESPOND IMMEDIATELY
Newt--
This morning I attended a meeting in the company of Marshal Hansen. I believe that Dr. Gottlieb
is about to be criminally charged with your abduction. I expressed my opinion that such a thing would
be out of character for him, but if you could contact us it would clear things up.
Please email me or call me immediately. Immediately immediately.
-Mako

To: Newton Geiszler

From: Mako Mori
Subject:
Dear Newt,
I don't know if you'll receive this. I don't know if you've received any of my recent emails. I
suspect you are no longer checking your PPDC account. I understand that your server access will be
shortly terminated. Marshal Hansen has provided me with your forwarding email address.
This morning I saw the report from the offsite physiologists you were working with. I can't
discuss its contents, but I wanted you to know that I saw it.
Raleigh and I are about to depart for a public relations tour.
I tried to call you.
I'm sitting at the Hong Kong Airport, wearing a scarf over my hair and sunglasses and no makeup
and a dress that isn't black. I don't feel like myself. Raleigh is wearing a sweatshirt that says, 'I came
to Hong Kong and all I got was this shirt' in Chinese. We're hoping not to be recognized. This morning
I went out for coffee and couldn't get away from the gathering crowd. I had to flag down a cab. People
like to touch my hair.
I don't like it when they touch my hair.
I can see the shatterdome out the window.
Soon it will be time for us to board the plane.
I wish I could say what is in my head. The drift changes too much, and I was never eloquent.
Love,
Mako

To: Newton Geiszler

From: Mako Mori
Subject: New York
Dear Newt,
We landed at JFK this morning. Raleigh slept through almost the entire flight but I stayed awake,
thinking about people and about things that have happened. I thought about Raleigh's fourteenth
birthday when Yancy gave him his first driving lesson in secret under a gray sky and about my
fourteenth birthday when we all went to karaoke at a bar called 'Bar' with its green lights and its
analog equipment that you called 'legit'. I remember all the songs everyone sang because I wrote them
down that same night in my white notebook with the butterfly on the cover.
Do you remember that notebook? While I was packing, Raleigh opened it like it was his.
After we landed, a security escort met us at the airport. In America, the crowds are larger and
closer than they were in Hong Kong. It's strange to be escorted from place to place. Is this what you
pictured when you talked about being a rock star? I was never sure if it was fame that you meant, or
just that there was a certain glamor in rocking intellectual boats. I can't believe I never asked you
about it. Either way, I don't think this life fits me as well as it would fit you.
I've never been to New York City before, but from the back of a hired car it looks like the living
monument to capitalism I'd always heard it was. Except for one thing. Every surface holds an image.
The sides of vehicles, the sides of buildings, the windows of stores, freestanding giant screens. So I
see the dead everywhere, interspersed with the living. Everywhere I see myself, looking like a person
I never was.
I read a newspaper article this morning that said you'd had a nervous breakdown. I read another
article that said you'd been experimented on by the PPDC. I read a third article that said you were
suffering from a severe neurologic condition. They all show the same picture. Maybe you've seen it
by now. You and Dr. Gottlieb are walking down an empty hallway in the Hong Kong airport. Dr.
Gottlieb is glaring at the person taking the picture. You're wearing sunglasses. Your hair is a mess.
You've got an arm over his shoulder and your other hand is outstretched, like you're about to fall.
You look terrible, Newt.
All three articles agree you went to San Francisco.
It would be nice to hear from you.
Love,
Mako
P.S. I don't think our interview went very well. I am too taciturn to make a good role model.

To: Newton Geiszler

From: Mako Mori
Subject: Thinking
Dear Newt,
Raleigh went out to get bagels. I am in our hotel room watching the news. I'm addicted to it--the
analysis, the retrospectives, the tributes. I don't know whether I find it satisfying or agonizing. It
reminds me of losing my baby teeth.
I've been dreaming of losing my teeth. I dream that they start falling out of my mouth while I'm
being interviewed and Raleigh just looks at me with strange, impassive eyes. Then I realize that they
are my eyes, looking at me. I realize I'm Raleigh. So perhaps it is Raleigh who dreams of losing his
teeth? I'm not sure. I haven't asked him about it.
We had another interview this morning. It was long. They asked us about you, about what you
were like, about whether you were mentally stable, about what you'd done with that kaiju brain. I told
them that you were a rock star. I told them that when I met you, you had green streaks in your hair. I
told them that you'd saved the world just as much as I had.
After they asked us about you, they asked me about the Marshal. They saved that for the end. They
always save it for the end. They save it for the end every time.
I hate interviews.
I wish you were here. I wish everyone was here. I wish it wasn't just Raleigh and me. We're
terrible at cheering each other up. No one ever says anything stupid. No one starts singing in annoying
falsetto and playing air guitar.
The drift is strange. I've been stealing miniature blueberry muffins from the complimentary
breakfast tray that that the hotel sends up every morning. I've been hiding them in a drawer, just to
have a secret to keep. After our interview, Raleigh opened the drawer.
I cried for the first time since we shut the breach.
 Raleigh went for bagels.
Love,
Mako
P.S. I snapped a picture of the view from our hotel room. It's in the attachment.

To: Newton Geiszler

From: Mako Mori
Subject: Washington
Dear Newt,
I'm writing to you from a bench overlooking the Tidal Basin. The trees are bare. I snapped a
picture for you, it's attached to this email.
Raleigh and I are incognito, me with a wide-brimmed hat, him with a pair of glasses he doesn't
need and a Superco^2 (nducting lliders) hooded sweatshirt he bought from a street vendor in NYC. I
didn't know your band had merchandising.
Did you know I'm a fashion icon?
I didn't either, until Vogue called me and told me so. Repeatedly. I'm doing a photo shoot for them
next week before we leave America for Brasilia. Raleigh will be doing one for GQ around the same
time. He's concerned he's going to have to wear a sport coat and jump off objects while looking
excited. All I could say to that is: "I hope so."
I saw on the news that Dr. Gottlieb will be giving a talk to UC Berkeley's Mathematics and
Physics departments. They say it's closed-door, but I'm sure I'll be able to find a livestream. Are you
going to be there?
Love,
Mako

To: Newton Geiszler

From: Mako Mori
Subject: Manchego
Is a delicious cheese.
I am attaching a picture of the lunch provided by Vogue for the photoshoot. Everything comes in
mouth-sized, artful pieces. I wonder if they always do that, or if it's a nod to a Japanese aesthetic they
think I'll appreciate. If so, they're right. I'm so full. This seems counterproductive. I thought fashion
icons weren't supposed to eat cheese all afternoon.
Vogue made me a stylized replica of the black Interface Suits that Dr. Lightcap designed. It's much
less comfortable and much more flattering. They also gave me an ostrich feather dyed red to match my
hair. When I said, "what do I do with this?" they said, "anything you want," and then they said, "maybe
not that, though." After the photos were finished, they asked me if I had a contact number for you and
whether I thought you'd be willing to pose topless. I said I didn't know.
Do you have a new phone number? I've tried to call you, but you haven't picked up.
I like to picture you in skinny jeans and a neohipster pea coat walking along winding San
Francisco streets. I like to think that you spend your days learning to cook, rolling your eyes at the
contents of local record stores, playing your guitar, and driving Dr. Gottlieb a little bit crazy.
Sometimes I think, 'maybe he's put green streaks back in his hair,' sometimes I think, 'maybe he has an
eyebrow ring now'. Yesterday Raleigh said, "what do you think Geiszler does to go incognito, dress
as a tennis prodigy?" That made me laugh a little bit.
 But you didn't take anything when you left the PPDC. Not your clothes, not your guitar, not your
(mostly) stolen garden, not your computer. I put it all in storage for you, except for the plants, which I
gave to Tendo.
It's hard for me to hold onto my vision of your current life when I locked half the things I picture
in a dark room at the back of the Hong Kong Shatterdome.
It's hard to be sad when everyone expects you to be happy.
Even if you are angry with me, could you write to me?
Love,
Mako

To: Newton Geiszler

From: Mako Mori
Subject: America del Sur
Dear Newt,
I haven't written for a few days because Raleigh and I had some real work to do. This morning we
gave a presentation on resource allocation to Brazil's National Congress. It was mostly a courtesy. A
way for the PPDC to show its gratitude for all the resources Brazil devoted to the both the Jaeger
program and the Wall of Life, especially since they aren't a nation on the Pacific Rim.
We spent the afternoon traveling to a small town on the Atlantic Coast. I'm writing to you from a
stone patio overlooking the water, waiting for my toenail polish to set. It's red. I snapped a picture.
It's attached. My toes and the Atlantic.
Raleigh has a strange relationship with you now. I think he's having trouble reconciling the
neohipster nerd he met once in an elevator with the idea of you as a badass older brother. It's
complicated. He lost his own brother, did you know? He never speaks of Yancy, but he mentions you
a lot.
Five minutes ago, he turned to me and said, "the 'anonymous fan' who gave you those rollerblades
for your thirteenth birthday? It was Geiszler. It must have been."
I can't believe I never figured that out.
It doesn't seem fair that Raleigh Becket can solve the mysteries of Mako Mori's past over Pina
Coladas.
Thanks for the rollerblades. They drove everyone crazy. That was one of the better years.
Love,
Mako

To: Newton Geiszler

From: Mako Mori
Subject: The Talk
Dear Newt,
This evening Raleigh and I watched Dr. Gottlieb's talk over bowls of moqueca capixaba and
glasses of prosecco. It was very good. I noticed he has now included your slide on the neural
interface. I also noticed that he confirmed that you drifted with a kaiju. Not once, but twice.
Did you know that no one has yet said this directly?
The media will devour this information like sharks devouring little fish.
Remember when you watched Blue Planet with me? Once, and then eleven more times? I was an
annoying child. I think about those little fish a lot. I always wanted to be a shark, but knew I wasn't.
Just a little fish.
I took a secret picture of Raleigh watching Dr. Gottlieb's talk. He looks embarrassingly
fascinated, like a nerd. It's attached.
I emailed Dr. Gottlieb to let him know I watched the livestream. I've emailed him a few times,
asking for updates. He hasn't responded to any personal emails, only those I've sent in an official
capacity. He hasn't responded to Tendo either. I think he might not trust us. I think he might not trust
any of us. That's the only explanation that seems likely to me. He never mentions you. Maybe you
don't trust us either, not anymore.
I can't blame you for that.
I hope it's that you don't trust me anymore.
How sad is it, to hope for that?
If I had known, I would never have let them do what they did.
You should have told me.
Why didn't you tell me?
I could stop them, in the future. I know I could. I'm an icon now. I can do whatever I want. That's
what people keep telling me. I think it might be true. There's one way to find out.
Love,
Mako

To: Newton Geiszler

From: Mako Mori
Subject: Tierra del Fuego
Dear Newt,
We're here because Raleigh wanted to go to Antarctica and I said no, like a normal person. But
then he gave me his sad eyes and I remembered how he and his brother had pretended to be polar
explorers. We compromised on Tierra del Fuego. The nicest thing about this place is that no one
recognizes us. Hardly anyone. At all. We're staying in Ushuaia for two days before we go to London.
The seafood is ridiculous. I would attach the picture I took of my dinner, but I don't want to make you
cry. I know how you feel about eating fish.
Raleigh wants me to meet his parents after this tour is over.
It's strange because I already know his parents. It's strange because I feel like I was the too-
excited kid who dragged Yancy everywhere until I dragged him out of bed and to his death.
Even Raleigh knows that's not the way it happened; I'm not sure why I said that.
Love,
Mako

To: Newton Geiszler

From: Mako Mori
Subject: London
Dear Newt,
The city is hard to go back to after Ushuaia. I've been wearing a scarf over my hair. It helps with
being recognized. Maybe I should get a blonde wig? That would look ridiculous, but that would be
the point.
Right now, it's just me in front of an open window. (No balcony this time.) Raleigh is asleep. It's
late.
 I talked to Tendo earlier today. Did you know he resigned from the PPDC? He says it's because he
was offered a job at one of the premier German robotics companies, but I think it's because everyone
is gone, except for Herc Hansen. Tendo says that he hasn't heard from either you or Dr. Gottlieb. I
asked him what he's going to do with your plants and he said he was going to hunt you down and
hand-deliver them back to you.
I wish you'd answer your phone. Do you have a new phone? A new number? Do you need my
number? Are you reading these emails? Are you okay? Are you angry with me?
Love,
Mako

To: Newton Geiszler

From: Mako Mori
Subject: More London
Dear Newt,
Today Raleigh and I are doing a joint photo shoot. We're taking a break while they mock up a faux
stereotactic drift interface. My back is sore, because for some reason they thought it would look good
if Raleigh stood opposite me, holding one of my ankles in mid-air while I arched my back and twisted
to look at the camera. I'm not sure what this is supposed to convey. But, they said that they heard from
Vogue that I liked manchego cheese so there was so much of it at lunch. This makes up for a lot, in my
book.
Everyone's been asking me about you. I think this is partially because The Daily Telegraph ran an
article on how we are secretly biological half-siblings. This is one hundred percent due to your
guyliner phase in 2005. There is a picture circulating from your first East Coast tour in which you
almost look half-Asian under dim lights. It's a stretch, but the hair dye and eye makeup helps. It is the
same picture I stole from you when I was twelve. I wonder where they found it.
When I was growing up, I never wished you were my brother, not even when we watched ocean
documentaries or when you were teaching me to play the bass, because to wish that felt like a
betrayal of my real family. My first family. I didn't want to replace them with living people. Now I
wish that I had more people than memories.
Syncope is playing on the overhead speakers as I type this.
Raleigh is surreptitiously whistling along in between eating little pastry shells full of some kind of
delicious goo. I have attached a picture.
Love,
Mako

To: Newton Geiszler

From: Mako Mori
Subject: Even More London
Dear Newt,
I just saw the article in Wired. It looks like someone leaked Dr. Gottlieb's correspondence with
the top brass of the PPDC. It makes me wonder who reads these emails that I'm sending. Are you
reading them, or are they just being read by the IT department at the PPDC and by entrepreneurial
journalists who have the means to intercept network traffic?
Maybe one day you and I will meet and we'll walk out to the middle of an abandoned beach and
you'll tell me what happened to you, far away from any electronic devices.
 Or maybe you never will.
I'm sure Wired got a few things wrong, but I think they got at least as many things right.
After Raleigh read the article, I threw away the magazine.
We went to breakfast and had mystery sausage and roasted tomatoes and eggs.
After breakfast, while Raleigh was shaving, I took the magazine out of the trash, tore out the
article, and packed it in the lining of my suitcase.
I hope you're not brain damaged, Newt, like they say. You were fine after you drifted the first
time, and the second time. I talked to you. I found you the morning after and made you your signature
cocktail at eleven in the morning and then watched Dr. Gottlieb drink it. Everything was fine until the
third day. Until the mess hall.
Wasn't it?
Maybe it wasn't.
The city is covered with fog today. We had planned to be tourists in the morning before our
presentation at King's College, but neither of us feels like being recognized.
They'll ask me about you today. I know they will. Maybe, this time, they'll save you until the end.
Love, love, love, love,
Mako

To: Newton Geiszler

From: Mako Mori
Subject: Paris
Finally, a city where we can be ourselves without getting mobbed. Raleigh and I are at a tiny cafe,
drinking coffee and eating delicate pastries, being mostly ignored by the quiet clientele. I feel like I'm
in a room full of cats. I always wanted a cat.
The day is sunny. This morning, Raleigh bought me an antique dagger from a small shop along the
Seine. He said it reminded him of me because it was beautiful and lethal.
Later, I bought him a pastry and said it reminded me of him because it was cute and sweet.
He laughed so hard that coffee came out his nose, which was a little scary, because I'm not that
funny.
I always wanted to be beautiful and lethal. Like a shark. I wonder if he said that because that's
what I am, or because he knows that's what I wanted. Whenever I think of the drift, and the tangle it's
made of my mind, I think of you.
Newt, you're an idiot.
The cafe has been playing a mix of American, South Korean, and French pop music.
LHC by The Superconducting Supercolliders just started playing.
Raleigh is singing along under his breath. LHC is his favorite, mostly because he hates the idea of
Syncope being his number one, just because it's so popular. Secretly, he's a little bit of a contrarian.
My favorite song is the one about the girl who's actually a robot but lying to herself about it. You
know the one:
Resist, Transmit,
You must know you're a machine.
It reminds me of Gipsey Danger.
I hate you so much sometimes.
Please write to me.
Love,
Mako

To: Newton Geiszler

From: Mako Mori
Subject: Sacre Coeur
We were sitting on the steps above Paris, watching the street vendors hassle tourists at sunset
when Raleigh said, "I'd propose to you right now, Mako, if it didn't feel so much like cheating."
I didn't say anything.
We watched the sunset together.
I took a picture. It's attached.
Love,
Mako

To: Newton Geiszler

From: Mako Mori
Subject: Still Paris
Dear Newt,
The sun is warm this morning. I'm writing to you from our balcony, surrounded by rooftops and
the sounds of pigeons.
It feels strange to be so far from the sea. I can't hear it, I can't smell it, I feel always like I'm too
far from where I might be needed. But I'm not needed anymore. Not like I was. Now, I'm just an image
on a strange page of human history.
The city motto here is fluctuat nec mergitur, which means 'It is tossed by the waves, but does not
sink.' I love that.
Raleigh just interrupted me to say, "are you still writing to that nerd?"
Please note that he is now wearing his Supercos sweatshirt in the privacy of our hotel room. Not
for camouflage.
Raleigh just interrupted me again to say, "Mako, I'm wearing this because it's cold. Not because
Geiszler is cool. Mako. No. Mako, don't type that. Mako, no. Don't type this either, Mako. Mako. Why
do I do this to myself, I'm going to take a shower."
This is his punishment for reading over my shoulder. He knows I hate that.
I looked up the weather in San Francisco today. Partly cloudy.
I like to think that you're getting the band back together. I like to think that you're song-writing in a
neohipster coffee shop with framed vinyl on the walls and tables and chairs carved from found wood,
drinking something fair trade and genetically modified with your sleeves rolled up and pointless
fingerless gloves on your hands while you flash your body art at everyone who passes because you're
a tasteless provocateur. I like to think that you've got a draft of an NSF grant in shoulder bag to work
on later. I'd like to think that Dr. Gottlieb is sitting at the next table trying to pretend he doesn't know
you but doing a terrible job, as usual.
You know you could always come with us. You could join our tour. You'd be on it, if you hadn't
left. If what you'd done hadn't raised so many questions. I'd make them let you in. I'd make them.
Just say the word.
Any word.
Love,
Mako
 To: Newton Geiszler
From: Mako Mori
Subject: Airports
Even in France, are trying.
I bought a wig and I'm wearing a pink sweatshirt with the Eiffel tower on it that looks so terrible I
have to shut my eyes when I see a reflective surface coming my way. I squinted and took a picture in
the bathroom mirror. It's attached.
Next time, we'll ask for the security escort.
Raleigh can't stop laughing at me. He's started calling me 'babe' and has adopted a southern
accent.
Never again.
Ten percent of people we pass are wearing your exact glasses.
You're on the cover of Rolling Stone, did you know? I've never seen the picture before. It's a
black and white photo of you, standing right at the edge of a stage, your hair a mess, your tie uselessly
loose, your eyes shut. You look indecent, and not like you're singing about particle accelerators and
OCD robots that lie to themselves about their true natures. I bought five copies and almost blew my
cover doing it.
I haven't read the article yet. I hope they say nice things. The only text on the front of the magazine
is in white, running right at the bottom of the page. It reads: The Reshaping of the American Science
Scene. This seems promising.
Give me your address and I'll send you a copy.
Yesterday I read an article theorizing that a John Doe in a coma in UCSF's Neurology Unit was
you. I tried to rule it out from the picture, but the quality was poor.
I also read an article that I was a mid-level member in the Cult of the Kaiju, complete with crisp,
photoshopped images of me in purple robes, so I guess it doesn't really mean anything.
It's only been a few weeks since we closed the breach, but already the tributes to the fallen are
ending and the images of the living outnumber the images of the dead.
It is a relief not to see his face everywhere.
When relief feels like betrayal, then it is not relief anymore.
I want to go home.
How about you?
Love,
Mako

In Two Parts
Dictation 1
Maks in socks! Wait, is this on? I don't think I turned it on. Did you turn it on for me? That is, like,
so nice of you, man. You're being really, really nice. I don't like that. It makes me suspicious.
Of what?
Of you.
How gratifying.
What was I doing?
I have no idea.
Could you guess maybe though?
 I believe you were addressing Ms. Mori before you were, apparently, distracted by my kindness.
Yes. Mako. Right. I will solve this. No problem. Dear Ms. Mako Mori. I would like to make you
aware of some certain things that have recently occurred. Number one is that I do not have vision
anymore so I cannot work for you, I'm assuming you're in charge now, my eyes have caved in, this is
very serious, and I am now in dystopian prison because of this, having inadvertently dragged my
colleague here as well. You are very photogenic, and so you are going to have to pick up the torch of
awesome, all the dropped torches of awesome, and just carry them from here on out until you find
other people to give them to like a relay.
Newton, you cannot send this to Ms. Mori.
Mako, but no seriously. Please get us out of here. Hermann likes you a lot he just keeps it on the
inside, he thinks you're very smart. We're having a little bit of a bad day and need to be rescued.
Sincerely, Newt. Very sincerely. Also we are--where are we?
Customs.
I don't think that's a place.
Yes, it most certainly is. Unfortunately.
Well I just don't think so.
That's because your brain isn't working properly.
Yes, it is, actually, Hermann, for your information. Kind of it is, except for fine motor everything.
The point is pretty much it is. Nothing is wrong with me, things are just wrong with the world.
Subjective reality has been turned into objective reality by neuroscience. I'm always right. Mako, are
you getting this? We're at 'Customs' if that's even a thing. If it is, it looks like a German dystopia. Just
put that into your phone. Dystopic Customs in Germany. Get directions. We will see you soon. No
one's trying to kill us though, so you could take a day off first if you wanted. Maybe tomorrow.
Anytime really. Can you turn this thing off for me? Send to Mako please.
That would be a singularly terrible idea, Newton.

Dictation 2
Letter to Mako.
Hey Mako.

Dictation 3
Letter to Mako.
So Mako--

Dictation 4
Letter to Mako.
Nope.

Dictation 5
Letter to Mako.
Hey Maks, I'm really sorry about a lot of things.

Dictation 6
Letter to Mako.
 Hey Mako, so you'd kill me, right? I mean, if I had to be killed. You'd kill me with a sword,
wouldn't you? You wouldn't let Captain Jawline McBecket just shoot me in the head, right? This is
kind of important to me. Do you want to know a fun fact? Thanks to collective consciousness, I know,
ah, know what it feels like to be killed with a sword. It feels awesome, actually. Counterintuitively, it
feels really good. That's probably because kaiju don't feel pain the way humans feel pain. Super
useful. For them. Less so for me, being a human, feeling pain. Feeling kind of a lot of pain right now,
Mako, not gonna lie. This explains a lot about my preferred mode of death. In retrospect this doesn't
make the most sense. It's not weird to think about this. Is it? Nah--I'm pretty sure everyone--um, you
know what? Yeah, I'm erasing this now.

Dictation 7
Letter to Mako. For reals.
Dear Mako, I'm in San Francisco now. Full disclosure, I kind of embarrassingly do not know what
day it is. It's a Sunday night. It's late here. I'm on the balcony of our hotel room. It's extremely
picturesque, what with the starless fog and the crumbling cement and the nearby radioactive waste
and the Wall that blocks the sea. I, too, look extremely poetic with my unwashed clothes and the too-
cool-for-everyday-hygiene look that I'm rocking at present. I think I have bilateral glaucoma or
something, so I'm wearing sunglasses at night. Like the cool kids do. Hopefully it's temporary. The
faux glaucoma, I mean. Fauxcoma. I'm cool.
God, I can't send this to you. Can I? Probably not, no.
Hermann is sleeping, if you can really call it that. He's been having horrific nightmares for days
now, maybe since the drift.
Editing note to future me, please redact that last, you ass.
Hermann's giving a talk tomorrow to UC Berkeley's Departments of Quantitative Splendor. I'm
pretty sure this is that stupidest idea either one of us has had in days. There is no way this is going to
go well for him. I'm actually not sure why he's doing this. I think it has something to do with me, and
something to do with, like, honor? You would think after sharing brains--
And redact that too. Idiot.
I should just trash this whole thing.
The drift is weird, Mako, am I right? It's even weirder when you do it wrong. Do it badly. Type in
a voltage cheat code. I named the program Konami, because I'm secretly a nerd. You might not know
this about me. Tell no one.
Anyway, I'm doing great. How are you? Are you famous? Hermann won't let me watch the news,
because--
Redact that.
I'm doing great. How are you? I'm sure you're famous now. This morning I think you might have
been on the news. I couldn't really tell, because I can't really see. Tragically. As I mentioned. I talked
about the weird glaucoma-equivalent, right? It was in a diner. The news. Not the glaucoma. Long
story. I met a waitress named Flow, except with a 'w'. It's like a waitress homonym thing that she's
rocking. Homonym'd.
I got free breakfast because I looked like a guy who saved the world.
I'm really sorry about Marshal Pentecost. That whole thing.
Redact that.
I'm really sorry about what happened at the--
Redact that.
 I'm really sorry about what happened last week. A few days ago. In the water.
Redact redact redact.
I'm going to erase this, kiddo. Sorry.

Dictation 8
Attention: care of Mako Mori.
Remember when you had a crush on Skye McLeod, the Improbably Dreamy Summer Student from
MIT, back when we had money and interns and money for interns?
Remember when he left?
Remember when you cried about it?
Remember when I sang you a song to console you?
Don't cry, don't raise your eye,
It's only teenage wasteland.
Remember when you kicked me in the shins?
Me neither. I don't remember any of those times.

Dictation 9
Letter to Mako, attempt eight.
Maks, hey, sorry I haven't contacted you. Funny story, I really cannot see at all, and Hermann is
super traumatized about anything having to do with the PPDC right now, so I hate to ask him to check
my email.
Wait, is this even on?
Yes?
No?
It would be helpful if I could see, like, you know, anything. I'm pretty sure it's not on. Trying
again. One sec. Yes. Okay, yes it is on. And it was on, I think. How many Ph.D.s do you have, Dr.
Geiszler? Too many. That's the answer. Restarting. Letter to Mako Mori, attempt eight. Thousand.
Maks in socks, hey. What's happening. Look, long story short, I can't see all that well right now. I
tried to get my phone to talk to me like it's actually the future that we're living in, rather than one point
five decades ago, but I may have dropped my phone, slightly, a little bit, kind of, into a glass of water,
on purpose, after chemically water-proofing it as a proof of principle, last week, or, maybe, two
weeks ago? Before the world didn't end. A guy's got to practice his skills if he wants to retain them,
yeah he does, obviously, like, you know, martial arts? You practice that, right? Except this time, for
me, it's martial chemistry. Or just regular chemistry. Failed chemistry.
Look, the point is that my phone won't talk to me.
So I will just record this and maybe get Hermann to somehow make it into text that can then be
emailed to you. Or, on the other hand, maybe I'll just wait and do it later because Hermann gets really
quiet and super conflicted when I mention the PPDC. That's actually kind of his status most of the time
now. Super quiet. Really conflicted. Not me, though. I'm fine. I get it. Like, cogs and stuff.
Bureaucratic grinding. Small people. Communism, collective good. Spock and the reactor core. Kirk
and the reactor core. You know what I'm saying. I get it. I'm not mad about the whole, 'so you maybe
have epilepsy now, no one knows, it's mysterious,' thing.
Legit, I am not mad. Or even surprised, really.
You're probably mad. You're probably thinking, 'why has that loser not emailed me? I saved the
world.'
 And I say to you: 'Yes, Mako, yes you did. But that does not change the fact that I cannot really
see, let alone read.'
I'm sure you're not thinking that, Maks.
I know what you're thinking.
It's four in the morning here. I hope you're drinking stupidly expensive champagne out of your own
designer shoe. I hope you're taking all the material excess that society is throwing at you and packing
it down, pouring water over it, and using it as a skating rink.
Is Becket a good skater? What's his deal? I bet he plays hockey. I bet he chops wood for fun. I bet
I'm the better Portal player, though, and that's the ultimate test of contemporary masculinity. So. Yeah.
What's new with you? I'm really into Descartes now. Descartes and all his friends. I think I'm
going to rederive calculus from first principles because I need a hobby.
Mako, this is terrible.
I'm erasing this.

Dictation 10
Hey Mako,
So I tried watching the news. It did not go well for me.

Dictation 11
Letter to Mako, attempt whatever, none of this is useable.
Dear Mako, sorry I have been out of touch for a little while. Things haven't been going so well. I
realize I have missed eleven of your eleven calls, but I one hundred percent guarantee you that I will
short circuit my brain if I pick up the phone. There won't be any talking, there will just be me, sort of
saying nothing and you sort of saying, "Newt" over and over and over again and everyone will be
confused and some people might stop breathing and pass out.
Okay, yeah, great work, Dr. Geiszler, that's a fantastic letter you've drafted, why don't we just, oh,
I don't know, delete it.

Dictation 12
Letter to Mako. nth attempt. Very serious. One hundred percent business.
Dear Mako, I'm writing to you from a hotel room in San Francisco. Sorry I've been out of touch. If
it makes you feel any better, I haven't talked to anyone except for Hermann and my neurologist,
Hypothetical Rain, aka Actual Coral. Coral is actually her name. She's a surfer.
I hope you're doing well. You and that guy. What's his name? Your drift-partner that you
majestically rescued from the anteverse?
I'm doing great. Right now I'm watching a Star Wars marathon. More like listening to it, truth be
told. I'm on the balcony at the moment so I don't have to see Luke Skywalker brutally murder the
Rancor in Return of the Jedi, because I'm just not feeling that one today and I'm scoring ten out of ten
on the Practical Foresight Scale.
It's cloudy here, I think. My vision is returning a little bit, but I'm still on sunglassed probation. I
can hear the seagulls calling in the distance. Whole flocks of them nest on the Wall.
I kind of want to eat them, a little bit.
Which is definitely weird. Redact that.
The Wall is ugly and an ecological disaster.
I kind of want to stand on top of it.
 Kind of a lot.
Kind of so much that I think if I leave this room unchaperoned I'll end up there.
I haven't told this to Hermann.
And I'm not going tell it to you either.
What a mess. I suck, Mako. But you already knew that.

Dictation 13
Hey Maks, sup?
Hermann and I are doing awesome, just thought I'd let you know. He forgot who he was for five
minutes just now and earlier this morning I was a little worried I was going to bleed to death in the
bathroom because I watched the news, panicked, and forgot who I was for a little while and then I
was covered with blood but I have two shirts so that's fine, it's always such a relief when I figure out
the blood is mine, it's like my hindbrain took a lesson from The X-files and whispers the word
'demon' very softly on repeat until my prefrontal cortex catches up and starts the process of not crying.
I met a very nice young lady from the housekeeping staff named Danielle who helped me with the
blood problem I was having once I explained that I had a lethal yet non-communicable disease, which
might or might not be true.
Wait for it, Maks.
Erase.

Dictation 14
Letter to Mako, dude. Get it together.
Dear Mako, I hope you're not worried because I haven't been in touch. Let me explain. First of all,
I can't really see very well, so I haven't been checking my email. Hermann glances at my account
every so often to make sure I'm not, you know, being charged with any crimes or anything. He said
you've been sending me messages. He wouldn't read them to me, because he felt like that would be
disrespectful to you. Between you and me, I think that's true, but I also think that he's got a lot of rage
going on where the PPDC is concerned and he just doesn't want to deal with any of it. Even you.
Which is lame, but still, he's had a rough week, and he did get charged with abduction, which he
hasn't said much about, but I think the whole situation is giving him an ulcer from repressed anxiety.
And rage. Did I mention the rage? The dude is seriously pissed. At the machine, Maks. At the gears of
bureaucracy. I'm pretty sure he's not pissed directly at you. I am not pissed at all. Just to be clear.
Second of all, I haven't been answering my phone because I just don't think that's going to go so well,
because I just--look I can tell you right now how it's going to go. You're going to say something
normal, and I'm going to freak out. Then I'm going to say something stupid about Pentecost, and you're
going to cry and try to pretend you're not crying, and then I'm going to cry and try to pretend I'm not
crying but less well than you, so--this is better. Trust me.
Today Hermann is giving a job talk to UC Berkeley. I didn't watch it, but he called me later
sounding sort of primly pleased in a super restrained way, so it went awesome. They offered him a
job, and I told him he had better go drinking. So he's living it up with the Berkeley math guys right
about now. I've been spending the day like the cultural connoisseur I am, making a study of science
fiction archetypes and watching Star Wars while wishing secretly it was Dune.
What are you up to? Being famous, I hope. How's Raleigh? Please tell me there's more to that guy
than his exterior suggests. I give him massive points for being drift compatible with you, Maks, but I
also detract massive points for his penchant for destruction sans inquiry. Destruction's okay, as long
as you learn something. Ideally though? One would avoid destruction altogether.
I just wanted to say, and it's lame I didn't say anything before, not when you came by the lab with
the tequila and the coffee creamer and the Midori that should have been absinthe, because I knew
what you were there for, but Hermann was also there, and I just didn't know how to do it, not exactly,
and I also couldn't drink because apparently alcohol can lower one's seizure threshold, but I knew
what you were there for and I'm just really sorry.
You know he never liked me. The Marshal. Marshal Pentecost. Your kind-of dad. I think it's
because he thought I was a bad influence on you. Which, yes, maybe, probably I was. I did,
accidentally, buy you forbidden rollerblades. I did, accidentally, teach you American and German
profanity. I did, accidentally, introduce you to Skye McLeod, the Improbably Dreamy Summer Intern.
I did, accidentally, leave you alone in the lab with Skye McLeod for forty-five minutes, I'm not sure
what happened there, I don't want to know. I did, accidentally, make you my eponymous cocktail for
your seventeenth birthday, which the Marshal felt was about four years too early. Anyway, the fallout
from all those accidents are probably all the stories I would have told you, if Hermann hadn't given us
both a lecture and then stolen my alcohol.
Dr. Gottlieb has his charms, but well, you know.
So yeah. My idea of consoling you about everyone who's dead basically is just me telling you
stories about your adopted father yelling at me.
I'm great.
Seriously Maks, I will actually write to you at some point. I'll think of something better.
Any day now.

Dictation 15
Good morning, San Francisco. Hermann came back drunk from his math night even after a ninety-
minute cab ride around the bay. I wish I'd seen pre-cab-ride Hermann, I'm sure it would have been
awesome. I'm drunk on insomnia.
Ever feel like you're going insane, Maks? I thought not.

Dictation 16
Actual letter to Mako.
Dear Mako, I'm sorry I haven't written to you before now, I've been working on scraping my life
out of the inside of a centrifuge accident. You know how it goes. Stripped screws, bent rotors,
shattered test tubes, glass and blood everywhere. Good times.
Hermann and I are in San Francisco now. Well, technically Oakland. Hermann is going to be a
math professor, and I'm going to be a guy who lives in his apartment.
Redact that. Redact all of that.
Dear Mako, I'm sorry I haven't written to you yet, but things have been a little crazy here.
Literally.
Redact that.
Dear Mako, I'm sorry I haven't written to you yet. I'm an insensitive jerk, as we both know, and I
can't read yet. I hope you're doing well. My eyes are improving. I saw your picture on the front page
of the Times this morning, you looked good. I like the red hair. End one era, start a new one.
Hermann and I went apartment hunting today. It is our mission in life to perfectly recreate the sit-
com The Odd Couple and so far we are killing it. Kind of. I actually really can't stand picture frames
that are askew, so I'm doing a bad job being the slovenly one. I blame the drift. Because--kaiju. Kaiju
have OCD tendencies and are neat freaks. Who knew? Definitely this has nothing to do with Dr.
Gottlieb. Or drifting with him. Which I did not do.
Redact that.
Dear Mako, today I went apartment hunting with my colleague of nine years and he had to drag me
out of the first place we saw because I panicked when I couldn't look towards the Pacific, where the
breach used to be. I'm sure he had a great time. I know I did. Now we have a new realtor, and Dr.
Geiszler does not go on apartment hunting trips.
Redact that.
Dear Mako, you know who rules? Descartes. Think about it. Geiszler out.

Dictation 17
Letter to Mako.
Mako! Yeah, I got nothing.

Dictation 18
Hi Mako, so, true story, I haven't been able to read for weeks now. That's why I haven't checked
my email. That's lies, a little bit.

Dictation 19
Mako I'm not going to tell you that I'm a little bit worried about certain things, like whether I might
slip up one day and eat a seagull or a human. I'm not going to tell you that I really want to clone a
kaiju, I'm not going to tell you that I think if I did it might fill the void in my head where a hivemind
used to live, might soothe the anger of the things I've cut apart. I'm not going to tell you that I'm some
kind of weird Prince of the Planet to formalin-fixed and disembodied brains, I'm not going to tell you
that I haven't slept in three days because that's not the kind of relationship we have, kiddo. I give you
rollerblades. You roll your eyes at me. I say I'm not sure about your boyfriend. You say he's not my
boyfriend.

Dictation 20
Letter to Maks.
Nope, not letter to Maks.
Letter to Newt.
Dear Newt, you are an idiot. Go to sleep, maybe. Make a sandwich. Don't stand outside, bleeding
on Oakland.

Dictation 21
Hey Maks, how are you? I'm doing well, Hermann and I just moved into a pre-furnished
apartment. It's a little weird, the aesthetic is a little off, the bookshelves have no lateral borders, but it
faces the Wall. The Wall the wall. The apartment. Not the bookshelf, which is bolted into a different
wall. Our apartment faces The Wall and it is made of walls. One of those walls has a bookshelf built
into it.
There you go, champ, all right.
Hermann keeps buying me books. I can sort of read them now, not as much as he thinks I can, but
my vision is improving. The computer is difficult though, backlit screens are backlit, it turns out.
That's why I haven't read your emails yet, Maks. Hermann says you've been writing to me. He hasn't
opened the emails though. He says they're all titled with place names. He says you're doing some kind
of public relations tour right now, so I suppose you're writing from all the places you've been. That's
nice of you, Maks. That's really--
That's just really nice. I've been writing to you, too, I just haven't been sending any of this because
it's a little bit depressing--no one wants that, not nowadays. Everything is great. Our civilization
continues. We rule the planet. Sweet. You're probably already--
You're probably a little bit sad right now.
And by 'a little bit sad' I mean--
You don't need this kind of thing, Maks, I know you don't.
I've been having some trouble sleeping. I think that my brain chemistry was altered by the drift,
and this explains why Hermann can read my thoughts maybe and why I can't use hashi all that well or
play the guitar and some other things. I think the fine motor control is going to come back though,
Maks, because I really need it. For science. And for music. And for everything.
Maybe I can use this letter.
But maybe I'll erase it.

Dictation 22
Dear Mako,
Nope. Nevermind. Not feeling it, kiddo.

Dictation 23
Dear Mako, good news, I'm not going to die of insomnia, at least not today, because Dr. Gottlieb
spent seven hours reading to me while I was semi-conscious last night until I finally managed to make
it past stage one sleep. In related news, this morning I stepped on him, told him I hated him, and then
he left before he murdered me. How are things with you?

Dictation 24
Letter to Mako.
Dear Mako, how are you? Did you know that Hermann and I are living in Oakland now? We've
been avoiding the media circus pretty effectively. San Fran is cool in that way--people are chill about
the whole celebrity thing. We've been hanging out, doing a little science. Hermann just got hired by
UC Berkeley. I'm shopping around at the moment, career-wise. Weighing my options. I'm not sure
what I'm going to do now that the world-saving gig is done. Maybe neuroscience? That seems to be
where things are happening these days. I've spent this past week updating Hermann's wardrobe for
him, because good lord, he needed it.
How are you? Is that Becket guy still hanging around? What are you up to? Kicking ass and taking
names, I bet.
I've been reading a lot of philosophy lately. It makes me feel like a teenager, a little bit. I also got
a dog whom I tried to name Leibniz, but who seems to respond only to the name "Fire Truck." Go
figure. Leibniz and I go walking in the mornings around San Francisco. I'll probably take up
racquetball again soon, or whatever it is that's popular out here. Squash, maybe?
I've been corresponding with pretty much everyone; weirdly I left you for last, not really sure
why. Probably because you're the best, don't be mad. Tendo says hi. So does Chuck. He's building
furniture now. Aggressively chopping driftwood. The Wei triplets come around every now and then,
when they feel like making me jealous of their pre-production beta version of Assassin's Creed VII:
The Delian League. Caitlin Lightcap and I are collaborating on a project that's going to revolutionize
the current interface between the brain and artificial limbs for patients at the UCSF Medical Center.
Basically, everyone we've ever met is good and they all say hi.
My parents say they can't believe I actually know you. They're moving in together now that my
mom has settled down, it's weird but nice. I'm happy for them, I suppose, in a sort of suavely distant
way, because I've got my own stuff going now, and have for a while.
Got to go, Hermann is rolling his eyes at something in Nature: Kaiju Science and I have to go
defend my people against uppity mathematicians.
Say hi to the Marshal for me Maks. I'm sure I'll see you really soon.

Dictation 25
Letter to Mako.
Heya Maks, it's been a few weeks. Sorry about that. Things have been a little bit hard on my end.
It's Hermann, really, who's been having a tough time--

Dictation 26
Letter to Mako.
Hi Maks, sorry I've been out of touch. I'll explain later.
I'm writing to you from San Francisco. Dr. Gottlieb and I just moved in together. You know us--
two crazy kids in the big city, trying to be good people and ignore the Call of the Wall. Right now I'm
standing on our balcony. This is some fancy stuff, kiddo: flagstones made of compressed, post-fracked
shale, railings made of something else that's even more eco-conscious, designed by a neohipster
named Blaze, who loves this radioactive bay that I'm staring straight at. It's pretty, if you like hideous
things.
I jest, I jest.
Kind of.
So? What's going on? How's Captain Sir Saves Everyone? When did your hair turn red? What's
the story there?
As for me, I'm doing pretty well. Driving Hermann crazy, possibly literally. Really upsetting him
most of the time. Bleeding all over his stuff. Letting him cook me dinner and buy me things out of
misplaced obligation. Not sleeping for four days, getting a little paranoid, and then screaming at him
until I panic and he has to talk me down. Telling him I hate him for his cereal choices. Disappearing
for hours without leaving a note. You know. Pretty standard. Prototypical Geiszler. The real classy
stuff. You know how I roll.
Turns out he actually does like me. Kind of a lot.
So this sucks for him.
I like him a lot, so because it sucks for him it also sucks for me.
I always screw these things up so badly, Mako. I kind of have a significant other, now, you know?
This has never gone well for me. The lasting relationship thing. Maybe I should do something nice for
the guy? Because he's pretty much the best and I am a pile of crazy. Like, you know, should I get him a
present? What's something nice? A plant? A fish? Flowers from a plant?
Wait.
Yup, that's me. Dr. Geiszler, ladies and gentlemen, reinventing romance from first principles in a
glass-half empty kind of way.
 Maks--
Maks, I might never send you this letter.

Dictation 27
Hey Maks,
It's late, and I'm recording this on my balcony in Oakland. I live next to a radioactive bay now,
like some kind of Marvel Universe villain. How are you these days? I'm sorry I've been out of touch.
Things have been a little complicated lately.
Tomorrow I'll read your emails.
Tomorrow I will.
Chapter 20
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Hermann looks up at the pale gray sky and tries to decide whether he should be carrying an
umbrella.
Probably.
The cloud cover is total and homogenous and high, a gray-white that is hard to look at without
squinting.
"This is so stupid," Newton mutters.
The clouds look like the vanguard of some approaching storm--
"Why are we doing this?" Newton asks.
The clouds look the forward edge of an advancing front. The wind is perhaps colder than it was a
few days ago. He's lived in maritime climates for so long now that he loses track of the seasons. It
takes him a moment to remember it is winter, rather than autumn.
"Are you ignoring me?" Newton asks.
Hermann pulls his coat closer, staring fixedly at the stream of cars in front of their building.
"You're ignoring me," Newton decides. "That's great. That's just great. Real mature, Hermann.
Yup. Really mature."
Hermann has decided that ignoring Newton is the better part of valor at the moment.
"You know there's a weather advisory about the directionality of this wind. We're probably getting
thyroid cancer right now," Newton continues, driving the toe of one boot absently into a crack in the
sidewalk. "This is pointless. Literally pointless. It's also weird. It's very weird. It's weird even by
our contemporary standards. It's weird in the context of the past two weeks. Weird." Newton shivers
in the brisk and likely faintly radioactive wind blowing briskly off the bay.
This is too much to silently suffer.
"Since when has 'weirdness' ever precluded you from doing anything?" Hermann snaps, trying to
put most of his hood between himself and the directional vector of the wind.
"Hermann. You bought a car," Newton snaps right back, making a short lived and fruitless attempt
to control his hair during a particularly strong gust of wind.
"I'm aware of that."
"Do you not want to show me your car?" Newton asks. "Is your car deformed in some way? Do
you think I'm going to ridicule you and/or your car for some reason? Look, I know my track record is
not stellar when it comes to, say, hypothetically, respecting your choice of profession, leisure
activities, culinary pursuits, musical proclivities, literary tastes, or fashion sense, but I can personally
guarantee you that literally no matter what your car looks like, I will say 'nice car, Dr. Gottlieb,' and
leave it at that. You can show me your car, Hermann. You can show me your car--I will be so nice
about it, if only so I don't have to stand in radioactive wind waiting for a cab. Seriously. Cross my
heart."
"Will you shut up?" Hermann asks him politely.
"You are the worst," Newton says, as a black, self-driving cab with blue plates pulls up in front of
them. He leans forward to open the door of the car, swings it wide, and makes an expansive gesture.
Hermann glares at him and gets in, sliding laterally along faux leather seats that smell of lemoned
sterility. He turns off voice recognition and inputs their destination on a touch screen mounted where
the back of the driver's seat would be in a non-autonomous vehicle.
Newton shuts the door, buckles his seatbelt on his third attempt, and then says, "so you bought a
weird car."
"My car is not 'weird'," Hermann replies stiffly, as the cab pulls away from the curb.
"Relax dude, how bad could it be, really? I mean, first of all, I don't actually care that much about
cars. In the grand ranked list of 'Stuff Newton Geiszler Finds Cool'--" Newton breaks off, clapping
one hand to his head.
Hermann rolls his eyes.
"Oh god," Newton says theatrically. "Why do I do this to myself? How do I do this to myself? I'm
so stupid. I think I'm carsick. I'm carsick and brainsick and we have literally been in this cab for
twenty seconds. I simultaneously do and don't care about your car. Caring is winning though," he
finishes weakly, giving Hermann an intolerably pathetic look of pure, wounded exhortation. "Please
show me your car."
Hermann feels a spike of self-reproach that is in no way warranted and has been triggered only by
the shameless emotional appeal that Newton is, certainly, consciously using to further his own ends.
His 'ends' are that he wants to see your car, you dick, his brain says, taking Newton's side in
Newton's precise tone, using Newton's particular vulgate.
Hermann finds this to be appallingly unfair.
"I'm sure I'll be unable to avoid it," he says.
"So that's a yes, then?" Newton replies, glancing over at Hermann, his fingers pressing against his
left temple. "That's a 'yes, Newt, super-friend, drift-partner, I'll show you my car, I'll do it today'?"
"I think that's an extremely optimistic interpretation of what I said," Hermann replies.
"Did you buy a neohipster car? Fancy and silent and semi-elite and one with nature? Did you buy
an embarrassingly classic car, like a high-end Volvo from the 1970s? Did you--"
"No," Hermann says, unwilling to listen to an endless concatenation of cars he has not purchased.
"My vehicle and you occupy entirely separate fields of existence, Newton. Please do not concern
yourself with my car. Ever."
"But I care," Newton replies, sounding both carsick and defeated one hand over his eyes. "I
actually really want to know."
"You know literally everything else about me," Hermann snaps.
Newton pulls off his glasses and hands them to Hermann.
Hermann takes them, removes his own sunglasses from his pocket, and hands them to Newton.
"And so I care," Newton says, settling shades over closed eyes. "A lot. There is literally no
person in the world who cares about your car more than I do, other than Actual You, I guess, and the
part of me that's you, which I differentiate both from the part of me that's me and Actual You, plus also
the kids, who generally wouldn't take an interest in cars, but who are, against all odds, a little
curious."
"The kids?" Hermann repeats.
"The fish," Newton says after a protracted pause, looking out the window at a world that must
consist entirely of a nauseating blur. "The fish kids. Tiffany really wants to know."
"Tiffany has a brain the size of a pin."
"I'm sure that's what all the kaiju say about humans. Said. Except. You know. Thought. And not
pins, but--"
"When Tiffany designs and builds an underwater Turing Machine, please be sure to inform me,"
Hermann replies dryly. "I will then apologize for slighting her intelligence. Until such a time--"
 "Hey," Newton snaps. "Hey hey hey hey hey."
Hermann raises his eyebrows.
"Tiffany is extremely intelligent."
"For a goldfish," Hermann says.
"Yes for a goldfish. What other kind of intelligent is she going to be, dude? She is a goldfish. She
can't help that. I'm just saying that for a goldfish she's very freaking smart, okay? Descartes, the fish,
is as dumb as a pile of rocks, to my endless disappointment. He's got a good heart though. Can you not
be a jerk to our fish? God."
"I bought them a needlessly sophisticated underwater habitat," Hermann says.
"For which they thank you," Newton replies. "That doesn't mean you have free rein to disparage
their cognitive capacity."
"I will cease disparaging your fish when you stop inventing hypothetical criticisms for my totally
unobjectionable car," Hermann replies.
"Fine," Newton says.
"Fine," Hermann replies.
"Fine," Newton says again.
They both stare fixedly out their respective cab windows on principle before Hermann looks back
at Newton and asks, in a manner that is not at all conciliatory, "does a metric for assessing goldfish
intelligence even exist?"
"Not that I'm aware of, no," Newton replies mildly. "She follows my finger though, so."
"Ah," Hermann says. "Splendid. You must be so proud."
"Shut up," Newton says, glancing over at him with a faint smile. "Is Hypothetical Rain really
worth this Actual Cab Ride? Because it's long."
"I suspect yes," Hermann says. "She has, thus far, been absolutely discreet when it comes to the
information we've shared with her. I don't particularly care for the idea of confiding to a second
person the full extent of our actions in Hong Kong."
"Myeah," Newton replies, sounding abruptly exhausted.
As well he might.
Hermann spends a great deal of the car ride trying not to talk to Newton in the vain hope that the
other man will, possibly, fall asleep.
This does not happen.
Instead, Newton spends ninety minutes free-associating on the topics of fish training, behavioral
genetics, historical famines, the current state of American agriculture (a topic on which he knows
very little), global warming, and terraforming, before taking a brief and abrupt break that Hermann
suspects is a relatively well concealed episode of acute anxiety. Following this, he then resumes with
a mystifying soliloquy regarding his deep personal identification with Wesley Crusher before seguing
into the Alcubierre drive, colonization as a biological imperative but an ethical minefield, altruism in
slime molds, game theory, John von Neumann, Pascal's Wager, and Pragmatism as a discipline.
Hermann comments appropriately while watching the slowly shifting landscape around Oblivion
Bay. He tries to remember if Newton had been quite so consistently interesting before drifting, before
EPIC Rapport, and before he'd nearly ruined his brain saving the world.
I look good in a sweater, his brain says, impersonating his colleague with total precision. That
doesn't hurt.
Hermann looks away from the Bay Bridge to glare at Newton in abrupt alarm.
The other man stops speaking mid-sentence, hands frozen mid-gesture, and says, "what?" in an
overtly defensive tone. "It's not like I'm a radical empiricist, dude, I mean, I have some standards."
"What?" Hermann replies, unsettled and mystified.
"Um," Newton replies. "Look, I get that you are deeply horrified by the idea of thoughts not
perfectly mirroring reality, but really--"
"Are you trying to mentally converse with me?" Hermann demands, eyeing him suspiciously.
Newton stares at him silently for the span of several seconds before saying, "um, mentally?"
Hermann is going to take that as a 'no'.
"I was trying to verbally converse with you," Newton says, offensively slowly. "The operative
word being trying. I've been talking, aloud, for a while now, in case you've lost track. I've spent the
last five minutes doing my best to have a discussion with you about Pragmatism but, honestly dude,
you didn't seem all that interested, and I was doing something like eighty percent of the conversational
work. So, yeah but no. To summarize, I was not trying to mentally converse with you because I was
trying to actually converse with you." Newton adjusts his borrowed sunglasses. "Um, why do you ask
though?"
"What were you thinking about?" Hermann asks, evading Newton's question.
"Schiller?" Newton says. "His criticism of formal logic? Instrumentalism? Your brain? The way
you're not so secretly a Platonist? Like, one half-step down the crazy ladder from Godel? I'm a
Formalist, by the way, like a normal person, and if, if, Hermann, I'm just a little bit obsessed with the
Platonist worldview right now it's not my fault. Also I was thinking about dinner, a little bit, maybe?
Also, sort of vivisection? That's a pretty common thought undertone for me these days because yeah.
But I'm pretty sure that, just now, most of what was going on underneath the Pragmatism was me
thinking about dinner. You make pretty good spatzle and I was kind of wondering if that might happen
again. Soon. Tonight, maybe? Look, you're making a freaked out face right about now, which I really
don't think is warranted. I don't know if this reassures you, but I do think this is a real phenomenon
that's going on. The thought exchange thing. The SPECTER Effect? Don't freak out. You look a little
bit freaked out, dude, you're--"
"You weren't thinking about your shirt?" Hermann interrupts.
"My shirt?" Newton says slowly, clearly confused, looking down at his maroon sweater in an
unimpressed manner. "No. No, Hermann, I was not thinking about my shirt. I'm not actually that
excited about this shirt, if you want to know. I try not to think about it. Would it kill you to not buy me
sweaters?"
Unfortunately, all of this sounds extremely plausible.
"Never mind," Hermann says.
"Um," Newton says. "You can't just interrupt me in the middle of this whole thing I was doing with
Pragmatism as a discipline and how it relates to the philosophy of mathematics and ask me if I'm
invading your brain with thoughts about my shirt and then say 'never mind'. That doesn't work for
me."
Hermann says nothing.
"You want to ah--talk about anything, dude?"
Hermann shoots his colleague a withering look. "No."
"What's that look? I can be sensitive. Were you getting exogenous sweater hate?" Newton asks.
No, Hermann thinks, I was, in fact, suffering endogenous sweater appreciation of unknown
origins.
"Something like that," Hermann says vaguely.
"Maybe it's just the part of you that's me disapproving of the part of me that's you. By which I
mean the part of me that's wearing this sweater. Where did you even get this, Hermann? No. Don't tell
me. I don't want to know."
"You look extremely respectable."
"I look like a nerd who goes yachting on the weekends."
"No one has gone yachting for half a decade," Hermann says dryly.
"Well maybe you wouldn't have intrusive negative thoughts about my wardrobe if you would just
buy me something a little less Gottliebian and a little more Geiszlerian."
"I don't plan on making a habit of buying you clothing," Hermann replies acidly. "Order
something tasteless online."
"Meh," Newton says, looking away. "Backlit screens, man."
"Then you'll have to suffer in the short term," Hermann says.
"Well I don't know about suffering," Newton says. "There's a certain appeal to the academic
aesthetic I suppose--" he breaks off with a curiously distressed sound and tips his head back against
the seat.
"Are you all right?" Hermann asks him.
"Yeah dude, we're just treading close to cognitive dissonance territory, again, and I'm already
slightly more than slightly carsick, so I don't think I can manage to not throw up in this cab if you
make me think too much about my wardrobe and how I feel about it--the point is that I know I'm not
supposed to like sweaters and furthermore I do not like them, Hermann, so it's just easier if I don't
have to face the fact that I do, kind of a little bit, like them? But not--"
"Stop," Hermann says. "Think of--" He breaks off when he cannot immediately come up with
anything.
"Yeah, exactly," Newton snaps.
"Descartes?" Hermann offers. It's low hanging fruit, but it gets the job done.
"I love that guy," Newton whispers.
Hermann reaches over to pat him awkwardly on the shoulder. "I'm aware."
Newton smiles faintly.
As they approach UCSF's medical center, the Wall dominates the view out the cab window,
running like a stone ribbon along the line of the coast. Hovering above it are the dynamic specs of
circling sea birds.
Hermann prefers those birds at a distance.
Newton watches the Wall in consistently inconsistent intervals, as if it is watching him back.
It is a relief when the cab pulls to a stop in front of a white building housing Hypothetical Rain's
clinic.
Actual Coral's clinic.
Dr. McClure's clinic.
Hermann swipes his credit card and steps out of the cab and into a stiff breeze that carries with it
the smell of the sea. He turns back, extending a hand to Newton.
Newton gives him an affronted look and says, "get out of here, dude."
"Will you simply be reasonable?" Hermann asks.
"You're the unreasonable one," Newton says, struggling free of the car with poor grace and
stabilizing himself on its metal frame. "Everyone knows that. You're the one freaking out about
sweaters while I'm trying to have a civilized conversation."
Hermann has not wasted much thought on Newton's coordination, balance, or proprioception over
the past nine years. But, after dragging the man through airports and hospitals and diners and away
from one very traumatized real estate agent, after considering Newton's postulation that his current
problems stem from some sort of relative dopaminergic deficit, and after being stepped on, he finds
himself significantly more interested in his colleague's motor control, or lack thereof.
He suspects that Newton is unlikely to be particularly steady following a ninety-minute,
cognitively-dissonant cab ride.
Newton shuts the cab door at the same moment Hermann gets a good grip on his elbow, which is
fortunate, since, once all its doors are shut, the cab pulls away from the curb.
Hermann yanks the other man back as he starts to go with it.
Newton pulls off his sunglasses, squinting under the soft light of the gray-white sky. He shoots
Hermann a look laced with a familiar blend of gratitude and irritation, and says, "swap."
Hermann pulls Newton's glasses out of his pocket and hands them back to him.
"I'm suave," Newton says, squinting, likely referring to his narrowly averted close encounter with
the asphalt of the road.
"Terribly suave," Hermann agrees, repocketing his sunglasses.
The wait to see Dr. McClure is not long, though it is somewhat uncomfortable, with Newton
endlessly fidgeting and the clear and constant staring directed their way by a young woman near the
opposite wall.
Hermann is sure she recognizes them; Newton is sure she's trying to figure out what animal died to
make the lining of Hermann's coat.
When they are called back, Newton whispers, "it's synthetic," to her as he passes.
"What is?" she asks, flushing.
"Everything," Newton says.
"Oh my god that's so deep," she replies, evidently extremely impressed.
Hermann suffers a brief but intense interval of wistful horror, imagining Newton engaging in any
way, shape, or form with the current media frenzy surrounding Ms. Mori and Mr. Becket. He's certain
global culture would take decades to recover.
"What was that?" Newton whispers, evidently amused at the girl's reaction, as a nurse in pink
scrubs shows them to a room.
"That was you abusing your fame," Hermann says.
"Fame? I got the impression it was more like obscure notoriety. Don't they mostly say I'm crazy?"
Newton replies.
"Not really," the nurse says, turning to look back over her shoulder, her hair fanning as she twists.
"Wait, what?" Newton replies, cocking his head, glancing at her and then back at Hermann,
managing to trip over the featureless tile floor as he does so.
Both Hermann and the nurse reach out to right him.
"I'm legit famous?" Newton asks.
"Have you been living under a rock?" the nurse asks, smiling at him.
"Well, a little bit, maybe, yeah," Newton replies.
"With good reason," Hermann snarls, giving the nurse his most menacing look.
She looks back at him, abruptly anxious.
Newton looks over at him, taken aback.
Hermann reflects that he may have overreacted slightly.
"We--Dr. McClure--there was a staff meeting," the nurse says, "we won't say anything. Not to the
press, if that's what you--we would never--"
"Chill," Newton says, giving her a smile, brief and askew, as he squints to read her nametag. "Uh,
Sarah. We're cool. Dr. Gottlieb just hates nice people. That's all. It's kind of his shtick."
Hermann glares at him.
"Um, okay," Sarah says, gesturing briefly toward an open doorway, and backing away. "The
doctor will be right with you."
"Thank you," Newton calls after her with a theatrical pointedness, his gaze fixed on Hermann.
Hermann ignores him, precedes him into the room, removes his coat, and seats himself in one of
the three available chairs.
Newton stays on his feet, paces back and forth in front of the exam table, spends a moment
watching an evolving starscape that serves as the screenlock on the wall-mounted computer, examines
an otoscope, and then, finally, turns to Hermann, saying, "was that really necessary, dude?"
Yes, Hermann thinks.
"No," Hermann says, "but I have no particular inclination to discuss our portrayal by the
American media at the present moment."
"Well I hear that," Newton replies. "Do I ever. But it sounds like it might not be all bad. Are we
legit famous?"
I am moderately famous, Hermann thinks, while you are fast becoming an international
obsession.
"When compared to Ms. Mori and Mr. Becket we hardly register," he says, managing to avoid an
outright lie.
"Well they're ridiculously pretty," Newton says, "so that makes sense to me."
Newton spends a moment examining the wall-mounted ophthalmoscope, while Hermann spends a
moment examining his own motivations regarding the verbal misdirection he has been lately
performing.
The list of things he is going to have to communicate to Newton at some point is growing
increasingly long: the true extent of the man's snowballing fame, the resurgence of The
Superconducting Supercolliders, the extremely beneficial effect that the recent merchandising and re-
release of their albums have had on Newton's finances, the fact that Hermann implied to the entire
Berkeley Mathematics Department that they are romantically involved, the emergence of that same
hypothesis in the popular press, Hermann's extravagant car, the fact that the email account Newton has
never checked is full of invitations for interviews, photo shoots, promotional endorsements, and job
offers.
He's not sure whether he's been trying to protect Newton, or himself.
"Do you ever--" Newton begins, clicking through settings on the wall-mounted ophthalmoscope.
Whatever Newton is about to ask is cut short by the arrival of Hypothetical Rain. Dr. McClure.
Her hair is escaping from a sloppy knot at the back of her head. Her white coat is unbuttoned, and
around the hemline of her skirt, a blue dragon snakes in an embroidered curl.
Hermann looks away.
"You break it, you buy it, man," she says by way of greeting, eyeing Newton, who is still toying
with her ophthalmoscope. "Hi, Dr. G."
"Hello," Hermann says, shooting Newton a look that he hopes clearly communicates 'desist' in
command form.
"Oh please," Newton says, replacing the instrument with a quiet click. "I could build you one of
these things."
"Not one I'd want to use though," Dr. McClure says.
"Touche," Newton replies, taking a seat beside Hermann.
 "Please excuse him," Hermann says dryly. "He has no conceptual understanding of property."
"Oh? Oh, really, Hermann? Because if anyone needs to be apologized for, I'm pretty sure it's you.
Because the very nice nurse who was too terrified of you to take our vital signs--"
"I heard about that," Dr. McClure says mildly.
"Did you?" Newton continues, with feigned polite surprise, pressing an open hand to his chest.
"Did you really?"
Hermann can feel the pressure of the other man's gaze on the side of his head, but he refuses to
turn. On principle.
"Newt," Dr. McClure says. "Chill."
Prior to this exact moment, Hermann had been certain it would be impossible for his esteem for
Dr. McClure to increase. He is pleased to find himself incorrect.
"What?" Newton replies, in open incredulity. "I'm chill. I'm literally always perfectly chill.
Absolutely chill. Zero Kelvin."
"Sure," Dr. McClure says, seating herself in front of her wall computer. "So, what's new? I'm
assuming you'd have let me know about anything serious, but just to be clear, no one's been seizing
over the past week, right?"
"Nope," Newton says.
Hermann shakes his head.
"Nosebleeds?"
"Continuing apace," Hermann says.
"For both of you?" Dr. McClure asks, eyeing Newton with entirely justified and perspicacious
suspicion.
"Yeah," Newton replies, elongating the word into something that demands clarification. "Kind of
briskly apace?"
"He's had fifteen episodes of epistaxis," Hermann says.
"Total, or within the past five days?" Dr. McClure asks.
"The former," Hermann says, while Newton simultaneously says, "the latter."
Hermann looks at him.
"You're lowballing it a little bit," Newton says, apologetically.
Hermann's look hardens into something approaching a glare.
"What, you go shopping," Newton replies defensively. "You also sleep. I'm sorry I haven't kept a
tally on the fridge or something, man."
"Either way, it's not really ideal," Dr. McClure says, before Hermann can respond to that piece of
provocative idiocy. "I'm still sticking to my irritated-capillary-bed theory since angiography didn't
show any vascular abnormalities. How much would you say you're bleeding, volume-wise?"
"Blood volume is notoriously hard to quantify," Newton says dismissively.
"Do a lot of blood volume quantification, do you?" Dr. McClure asks.
"Historically, Rain, yes, for your information--"
"Not much," Hermann says. "I doubt he loses more than fifteen milliliters at any given time."
"Does that sound about right?" Dr. McClure asks, looking at Newton.
"Sure," Newton replies. "It pretty much stops right away with pressure, if I catch it."
"This is like pulling teeth, guys," Dr. McClure says. "If you 'catch it'? Look, I want a total volume
of estimated blood loss over the past week from each of you so I can decide whether you need to be
worked up for anemia, because you're not looking fabulous to me, friends, neither of you." Her eyes
fix on Hermann, and she says "Dr. G, go. Give me a number."
 "Less than one hundred ccs," Hermann says shortly.
"Thank you," she says. "Newt?"
"This really isn't accurate," Newton replies. "In any way."
"Okay," Dr. McClure says. "I'm with you dude, one hundred percent. In vivo, surrogate endpoints
suck. You can have some bloodwork instead."
"Well I would prefer that," Newton replies, with aggressive poise. "I think we should both have
bloodwork."
"I disagree," Hermann says, narrowing his eyes at his colleague.
"Me too," Dr. McClure says, her eyes fixed on her wall-mounted terminal as she finishes inputing
orders. "Dr. G seems like he's a guy with a pretty dece skill set when it comes to volumetric
estimation, so." She shrugs.
"Quite," Hermann agrees.
Newton sighs.
"EEG-wise, you guys are still looking like trainwrecks," Dr. McClure says, angling her wall
mounted terminal slightly so that they can see a screen full of voltage fluctuations over time in a
multiplicity of leads. "These are from your last visit. You're both normalizing relative to where you
were when I first saw you, so hopefully that trend continues. How are the headaches?"
"Improving," Hermann says.
"Meh," Newton says. "Not getting worse."
"How's the raging insomnia?" Dr. McClure asks.
"Nearly intolerable," Hermann replies.
"Fine," Newton says.
"He sleeps approximately once every three nights," Hermann says dryly. "It's taking a significant
toll on his psychological state."
"Um, thank you for that particular elaboration, Hermann," Newton snaps, "thank you so much." He
shifts his position leaning forward, flexing his left foot as if he is about to stand, before pushing back
abruptly and crossing his arms.
Hermann feels a simultaneous spike of guilt and sympathy.
"If you want to talk about psychological states," Newton begins, looking meaningfully at
Hermann, his tone dangerously and affectedly offhand, "then perhaps we should discuss--"
"Stop," Hermann snaps, his sympathy instantly vanishing. "Stop speaking immediately."
"Guys," Dr. McClure says. "Newt. Seriously man, you've got to tell me the relevant stuff. That's
the whole point of having a doctor. You're like the most rad guy in the history of rad guys and
insomnia is a character flaw since exactly never, so just relax."
"I'm relaxed," Newton says, looking like he is about to hyperventilate. "So I'm not sleeping that
well. Biologically, this is understandable. Biologically, it makes sense. There was a short window
there, where, yeah, I was a little worried I might burn through all my neurotransmitters and die in a
psychotic haze, but that didn't happen and I don't think it will. I don't think insomnia is a thing that
necessarily portends cognitive doom, you know? It's just a thing. I've always had it. Now I have it
more. It's normal. Sleeping is boring. I'm pretty sure it's normal. We both have this problem. It's not
even a problem, really, it's just a thing. It's just a feature of the post-drift state. Of our post-drift state.
EPIC Rapport is, by its nature, a state of neural disequilibrium, I'm pretty sure. We've been
neurobiologically perturbed, yes, but our sleep cycles will normalize, probably, we just have to
wait."
Dr. McClure spends a moment in silent contemplation, studying the pair of them and then says,
"true. If you want to wait, let your brains do their thing, that's fine with me. Your judgment regarding
your current situation probably trumps anyone else's. I can't think of anyone more scientifically
qualified to weigh in on how the heck we should deal with your current situation than you yourself. I
mean, in part, that's why you guys are here, right?" Dr. McClure shrugs. "Because I'll let you
intellectually boss me around to some extent?"
"Yes," Newton snaps, aggressive and entitled. "Yes exactly."
"Charming," Hermann says, rolling his eyes. "No. We're here because you were highly
recommended by an acquaintance of my father's, and we find your rigorous methodology and
cautiously empirical approach to be to our tastes."
"Thanks Dr. G, you're a class act," Dr. McClure says. "But, look, Dr. Geiszler, my point is I'm
willing to try waiting this out, but I'm also fine with say, pharmacologically retweaking your GABA
levels so that it's possible for you to sleep more than once every three days."
Newton looks at her cautiously, clearly undecided.
Hermann heroically refrains from dropping to his knees on the white tiled floor and begging the
man to agree to her proposition.
"Fine," Newton says, to Hermann's nearly infinite relief. "Yes. Good. Tweak away, I guess."
"Rad," Dr. McClure says, turning back to her screen. She spends a moment typing before a small
square of paper emerges from the printer built into her keyboard. "Round one," she says, signing the
prescription and passing it to Newton.
His colleague squints at it for a moment, then passes the paper to him. Hermann glances at it, folds
it in half, and pockets it.
"Okay," Dr. McClure says, shifting in her seat, looking away from her terminal with a kind of
gravitas that strikes a primitive chord of civilization from the bottom layer of Hermann's forebrain.
"So yesterday," she says, picking up the stack of files in front of her, "I received your medical
records, such as they are."
"Ah," Newton says, eyeing the files with obvious antipathy.
"Such as they are?" Hermann repeats.
"Yours are intact," Dr. McClure says, looking at him. "They consist of the MRI, bloodwork, and
the physical you received from the PPDC medical director. There's nothing in there that I didn't
already know, other than your unilateral elevated intraocular pressures post your drift and the fact that
you disclosed to the medical director your eye injury was secondary to an unsuccessful drift
calibration with Dr. Geiszler."
Hermann shrugs.
"They believed that?" Dr. McClure asks. "That you were incompatible?"
"Have you met us?" Newton asks dryly.
"Yes," she replies, raising her eyebrows at him. "And, again, I ask: they believed that?"
"Previously, we had a different interpersonal dynamic," Hermann explains.
"Did we though?" Newton says, squinting at him skeptically. "I'm not sure about that. Memories
are a little less hardwired than you think they are."
"I'm certain we did," Hermann says, not at all certain.
"Well I'm pretty sure we only argue less because you view me as a melting snowflake and, post-
drift, I infected you with my empirical tendencies a little bit."
"What?" Hermann says.
"Okay so moving on," Dr. McClure says speaking over him with all the polite professionalism she
has at her disposal, "Dr. Geiszler's records are pretty tough to interpret."
 "Shocking," Hermann mutters.
"Will you just," Newton murmurs back.
"Over ninety percent of what they sent me has been redacted," Dr. McClure continues, opening the
file. "I've got a set of four clinical progress notes that look medically sloppy, and are heavily
weighted toward what I think might be scientific asides, one of which I think you might have actually
written." Dr. McClure pauses for a moment, looking at Newton, waiting for clarification of some
kind. When none is forthcoming, she continues. "I have five decontextualized EEGs, three of which
look like scarier versions of your current baseline, one which clearly represents the initiation and
generalization of a seizure, and one of which must be some kind of mechanical or operator error
because it looks so hideous."
Hermann winces, not at all certain that Dr. McClure's conjecture is correct, his thoughts slowing
under the pressure of anxious anticipation.
"Um, yeah," Newton says sounding breathless. "Okay. Interesting. Useful."
"I also know what they gave you, pharmacologically speaking. Day one, you got nothing. Day two,
you got a whole mess of anti-seizure meds around two in the afternoon in conjunction with some kind
of procedure being performed which is, unfortunately, totally redacted. They kept you on those meds
overnight and, from what it looks like, a variant of the same procedure was performed on day three--"
Dr. McClure breaks off abruptly.
Hermann looks over at Newton, who is unnaturally still, unnaturally pale, his gaze fixed on
nothing. Some sixth sense, a fortuitous post-drift mental trapping, makes Hermann reach out and
clamp his hand down on the other man's shoulder at nearly the same instant Newton makes an attempt
to bolt for the door.
Hermann successfully prevents him from rising.
Dr. McClure says nothing, watching Newton with a commendably neutral expression that
Hermann wishes he could emulate. She glances briefly at Hermann and then looks away, untangling a
strand of dark hair from earrings made of blue sea glass.
"You are fine," Hermann says quietly, loosening his grip on Newton's shoulder.
"Yeah," Newton says, his left hand coming to his face as his nose begins to bleed. He angles his
head back and extends his free hand in Hermann's direction. "Obviously."
Hermann fishes for a handkerchief, but Hypothetical Rain beats him to it, pulling a set of tissues
from a package in her pocket and putting them in Newton's open hand.
"Exhalation against a closed glottis is going to get you every time, dude," she says.
"Don't I know it," Newton replies, tipping his head forward, pinching his nose shut.
"You okay?" she asks.
Hermann finally pulls his handkerchief free from the other ephemera in his pocket and hands it to
Newton, who immediately swaps it for the wad of nearly saturated tissue he's currently holding to his
face.
"Yeah," Newton replies, with an affectedly casual shrug.
"Does this kind of thing happen a lot?" Dr. McClure asks.
"Not really," Newton says dryly. "I go whole tens of minutes without quietly panicking and
bleeding from my face, so yeah."
"Ugh," Dr. McClure says. "That sounds like the worst."
"It's not the worst," Newton says. "The worst is, like, you know, civilization ends as humans are
dethroned from their place at the top of the food chain and everyone dies in unmitigated terror. It's not
great though. For me. Admittedly. I could always be crazier or have more epilepsy, though, so hey."
 "Let's not invite potential negative outcomes by listing them," Hermann says acidly.
Newton pats his knee in what is likely supposed to be a comforting manner with a blood soaked
tissue. "I think you have a causality problem there, dude."
"Ugh," Hermann says, disgusted.
"How are you still grossed out by my blood?" Newton asks, throwing his used tissue at the
biohazard bin against the opposite wall and missing by a wide margin. "I bleed on you or your stuff at
least once per day."
"I do not have a causality problem," Hermann hisses.
"Nope," Newton says agreeably, "no causality problems around here. No sir."
"So," Dr. McClure says, breaking into what is likely to turn into an inappropriately timed
argument on determinism. "I probably should have asked you if you want to hear this stuff." She
waves the file she is holding in a tight circle. "In retrospect, that would have been classy of me."
"Yeah, but immaterial," Newton says, adjusting his glasses, "because I would have said yes."
"And how about if I asked you now?" Dr. McClure says.
"I'd say that I'm going to go wash my face for oh, I don't know, a while, and my next of kin
emergency contact colleague life partner roommate can fill me in later."
Hermann is not at all sure he wants this particular assignment.
"So, just to be clear, you want me to talk about the contents of your medical file without you," Dr.
McClure says slowly, "but with Dr. Gottlieb?"
"Yup," Newton replies, standing, one hand on the wall. "That is exactly what I want."
"I think it would be better--" Dr. McClure begins, half rising as well.
Hermann can sense a well-intentioned conflict self-organizing out of ethical pressures and
psychological imperatives. He catches the doctor's eye and shakes his head.
She lowers herself back into her chair, looking at him uncertainly.
"Do you?" Newton says, from Hermann's peripheral vision, opening the door and backing through
it as he speaks. "Great. Interesting. Good times, kind of. Well, whatever. If you need me to sign a
waiver or something, I'll be literally anywhere but right here."
Hermann doesn't move, doesn't turn; he simply continues to look at Hypothetical Rain, willing her
to let the other man leave, unopposed.
The door closes with a controlled click.
Dr. McClure sits silently in poised agitation, as if she is contemplating the branching of an
invisible and intricate decision tree.
"I believe," Hermann says after a moment, intending to make things easier for her, "that he may
already know what is in that file."
Dr. McClure looks back at him and raises a single, pierced eyebrow. "He says he doesn't
remember any of it."
"He implies he remembers nothing," Hermann counters. "I don't believe he's ever definitively
stated it."
"At our second visit I asked him straight up to tell me what happened to him, and he said he
couldn't. That he was totally unable to give a reliable account," she replies.
"Yes," Hermann agrees. "But into the word 'reliable,' read reproducible, read accurate, read
precise."
Dr. McClure sighs. "He hasn't talked to you about it?" she asks.
"Not directly, no." Hermann says. "I am, somewhat--I am extremely--concerned, actually, that he
may have drifted a third time, alone, with some fragment of alien tissue," Hermann says. "I like to
think that he would have known better than to attempt any such thing, but--" he raises a hand, palm up,
to indicate that which he does not feel capable of articulating.
"Yeah," Dr. McClure says, leafing through the file, flipping printed pages full of redacted text.
"There's very little available information here. They provided me only with hard copies. No
electronic files."
"How prudent of them," Hermann says. "I'm flattered by their fear of my computational abilities.
What were you able to deduce?"
"I've got three days of records," Dr. McClure says. "Everything of substance is redacted other than
the types and timing of the medications they gave him. I correlated the timing of pharmacologic
intervention with what I could gather from the redacted text to put together that he had a seizure on
day two in conjunction with some kind of invasive procedure. It looks like they pre-loaded him with
anticonvulsants and tried the same or a similar procedure again on day three, but I don't think their
pre-loading plan worked from a seizure prophylaxis perspective. They had to break another one on
the morning of day three."
"May I?" Hermann asks, extending a hand for the file.
Wordlessly, Dr. McClure passes it to him.
It is fifteen pages long, and nearly entirely useless.
He pages through meaningless blocks of redacted text, conjunctions and punctuation and articles
and linking verbs maddeningly left in place, but anything of substance removed. In addition to
redacted notes, the medication record, and the EEGs, there are photocopies of three separate consent
forms, the procedures they cover redacted, Newton's familiar signature scrawled in fluid pen at the
bottom of each page.
"His handwriting was fine going in," Dr. McClure murmurs, tracing the curl of Newton's
characteristically ostentatious paraph with the edge of a blue fingernail. "Whereas it's not, currently.
This makes me think that his fine motor troubles started after what happened during these three days."
"Yes," Hermann agrees. "Possibly," he amends, thinking of the twenty-four hours Newton had
spent with an obvious resting tremor following his first drift.
"This," Dr. McClure says, tapping Newton's signature, "and the medication record are the most
useful things in here."
"Perhaps," Hermann says. "You said you thought he might have written part of this?"
"Next page," Dr. McClure says, with a tilt of her chin.
Hermann flips to the following page to see a document called, 'XXXXXXXXXXXX XXXX.'
XX XXX opinion XX XXXX XXXXXXXXXXXX nee XXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXX subject, it
is extremely apparent that the XXXXXXXXX XX XXX XXXXXXXX XXX XXXXXXXX by the
Vladivostok team is X XXXXXX XXX precise for XX to withstand for purposes of ruling out
XXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX XXXX the XXXXX XXXXXXXXX. The stated goal of the current
procedure is the correlation of XX XXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX EEG XXXXXXXX with XXXXXXXX
from an intact XXXXX XXXXXXXX as a surrogate endpoint to provide reasonable freedom from
suspicion of XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXX. With regards to going forward, I therefore formally advise
and also agree to XXX XXX of XX XXXXXXXX XXX, constructed from XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXX,
recovered from XXXXXXXX XXXX XXXX, in conjunction with an aggressive pre-procedure regimen
of XXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX XX XXXXXXX the prevention of X XXXXXXX that might
result in the termination of this procedure. (XXX XX. XXXXXXXX?) XXXX XXXXXX XXXXX XXX
XXX XXXXXXXXXX XX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXXXXXXXX X XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX XX
XXXXXXXX EEG readings XXX XXX XXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX XXXX XXXXX-XXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXX. Although there is no way to formally rule out XXXXX XXXXXXXXX, it will
provide strong circumstantial support for the XXXXXX XX XXXXXXXX XX XX XXXXX XX XXX
XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX XX X relatively XXXXXXXXXXX form. Presuming there isn't evidence
of XXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXX. Should that be the case, further testing will, of course, need to
ensue. On a personal note, X XXXX XXXX XXXXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXX,
XXXXXX XXXXXXXXX XX XXXXX XXXXXXX X XXXXX XXXXX XXX XXXXX X XXXXXX XXX
XXXX and this XXXX XXX XX.
Signed,
XXXXXX XXXXXXXX, XX.X.
X-XXXXXXX XXXXXXXX XXXXX
XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXXXXXXXXX
"I'm not certain this is him, but--"
"It's him," Hermann cuts her off. He can practically hear his idiot colleague dictating an
inadvisable memo to the ether.
"Are you getting anything out of this?" Dr. McClure asks, shifting her chair closer to him.
"Yes," Hermann says, scanning along the line. "In the opinion of this investigator nee willing
experimental test subject, it is extremely apparent that the [something] by the Vladivostok team is a
little too precise for me to withstand for purposes of ruling out [something] with the kaiju
anteverse. Probably that last is mental continuity."
"Rad," Dr. McClure says, clearly impressed. "Drifting. All it's cracked up to be, I guess."
"That, or ten years of listening to the man complain in faux bureaucratic argot," Hermann replies
dryly before continuing. "The stated goal of the current procedure is the correlation of my
[something] baseline EEG readings with readings from an intact--" he breaks off, grimacing in
frustration, trying to make the words into 'kaiju brain' but failing, until he says, "tissue fragment,"
with a feeling of vindicated despair.
"That's less rad," Dr. McClure says.
"Idiot," Hermann whispers. He can't parse the rest of the sentence, so he moves on. "With regards
to going forward, I therefore formally advise and also agree to--" he breaks off, momentarily stuck,
intellectually casting about, as he tries to bury his horrified response to what he's reading and view
this as Newton would view it. Had viewed it.
They, the external team, had tried something Newton had felt 'too precise' to be workable,
whatever that meant, and so the man would therefore have--done what?
Nothing comes to him.
Dr. McClure shifts in her seat.
You idiot, Hermann thinks, staring at the page. What did you do?
Some reagents, after being left on a shelf for a year will, counterintuitively, work better in vivo,
his brain replies in Newton's most provoking tone of consciously understated narcissism.
What are you getting at? Hermann snaps at himself.
I built an interface out of garbage. Out of some rig no one wanted because it was obsolete and
lacked even the most basic safety features, his brain replies. How precise could my voltage
calibrations really have been?
Hermann can remember throwing a spectrum analyzer to the floor with hands that weren't his
hands and thinking, screw it, I'll approximate, in a haze of mental urgency.
"--the use of my original rig," Hermann snarls between clenched teeth in angry revelation,
"constructed from [some euphemism for trash], recovered from downtown Hong Kong in
conjunction with an aggressive pre-procedure regimen of--" he breaks off, looking at Dr. McClure.
"Could be 'anti-epileptic medications'," she says, pointing at a block of Xs, "to [something] the
prevention of a seizure that might result in the termination of this procedure," she finishes.
Hermann scans the rest of the paragraph, neither inclined nor able to parse it, his mind in a strange
state of ataraxy. He understands how the paragraph must end, understands that he holds the
institutional justification for an experiment that does nothing more than document a predictable
deviation from an electrophysiologic baseline for the sake of ticking off a checkbox on form
somewhere in answer to the question: "Is Dr. Newton Geiszler a threat to humanity as a species, yes
or no?"
If he lets you spend three days investigating this question in his prefrontal cortex, then the
answer is no, by default, his brain snarls.
He flips through the subsequent pages, full of redacted medical text written by individuals whose
brains he has not shared.
Dr. McClure shifts some pages and stares silently at the most abnormal of the EEG tracings.
"His third drift," Hermann says, "one assumes."
"Yes," she murmurs. "I'm surprised this didn't kill him."
"Me too," he replies. "I spent months telling him it would."
"Do you want a copy?" Dr. McClure asks him, indicating the file in his hands with her gaze.
He spends a silent interval picturing himself sitting in his new office at UC Berkeley, pouring
over the redacted file for days, slowly reconstructing the complete text of Newton Geiszler's first and
only capitulation to institutional pressures, assigning names to redacted anonymity, peeling back the
layers of everything that happened during those three days while he was meters away.
All of this has a righteously masochistic appeal.
But none of it will tell him what he really wants to know.
What happens to a fraction of a hive mind? his thoughts echo, sounding like no one, sounding
like everyone, sounding like a desperate blend in triplicate.
"No," he says, meaning yes, meaning yes give it to me immediately, I will take it and I will
compile a list of careers to destroy and people to despise and questions to scream at Newton at
inopportune moments when he least expects it and might answer me. "No, I don't want a copy."
"So he, er, to summarize," Dr. McClure says, "we think he had two seizures while hooked up to
two different stereotactic drift interfaces--one from Vladivostok, one that he built. We think the
second one happened mid-drift. We think that your former employers decided that he isn't secretly
now in league with the kaiju based on circumstantial EEG evidence. We think they let him go because
of that, and also because no one with any medical training who saw this," she says, tracing a line with
one blue nail, "would have ever let it happen again."
"Yes," Hermann whispers, looking at the lines of maxed out voltage readings on the paper in
Hypothetical Rain's hands. "Yes, that's what we think."
"It's better," Dr. McClure says, her hands running restlessly over the edges of the tracings she
holds, "It's better to know, I think, Dr. G. These things. It's better that we know."
"Yes," he says. "I'm certain you're right. If you don't mind, I think I'll--" he gestures helplessly
toward the door.
"Yeah, go give him a hug or something," Dr. McClure says, turning back to the wall-mounted
computer. "Jeez. I'll square you guys up with the front desk and make sure the EEG suite is ready."
Hermann exits the room, intending to take a moment to collect himself, but instead, his gaze snaps
to the nurses' station, where Newton is seated in a chair with a cup of orange juice in his hand, a
blood pressure cuff around his arm, and a pulse oximeter clipped to his finger.
A young woman in pink scrubs is seated next to Newton, watching him fixedly.
It the combination of his own surprise, his own alarm, and her fixed gaze, it must be, that draws a
similar fixation from Hermann, from the predatory parts of his mind that have all classified her as a
threat.
But it doesn't last.
Because he is a human with self control, not a cloned alien war machine.
Because Newton shifts forward in his chair, blocking her from Hermann's view.
Because she's speaking, and he can hear her.
"So what do you do?" she asks Newton. "For a living, I mean."
Hermann shakes his head, managing to snap himself free of any remaining predatory instincts. He
realizes he's stopped short just in front of the examination room door.
Newton is looking at him.
Hermann nods briefly.
"I'm not really sure," Newton says, his gaze snapping back to the nurse. "Right now? Nothing, kind
of. I'm currently unemployed. I have this thing going where I reinvent whole disciplines of thought that
I find comforting, but it's extremely pointless, actually."
"You look a whole lot like one of those guys who saved the world."
"I do look a little bit like one of those guys. We also have the same name. Totally unrelated
though."
"Uh huh," the nurse agrees slowly.
Newton looks up as he approaches, and Hermann can now see what inspired the close scrutiny of
the woman he's speaking with. He looks overtly ill--his skin is pale and subtly damp with sweat. His
orange juice betrays a high frequency tremor.
"Hey man," Newton says.
Hermann has the urge to slap him for being such a unique, blazing paragon of idealistic idiocy, has
the urge to just freeze the man in carbonite until he can sort out everything that's wrong with his own
head so that he can, possibly, one day, do the right thing where Newton is concerned, like give the
man a hug or a kitten or whatever it is that might actually improve his life, rather than just dragging
him to neurology appointments and pressuring him into finding a job. Maybe if he could just deal with
this later it wouldn't be so hard for both of them at the same time and he wouldn't have the urge to
raze his former place of employment to the ground, wouldn't make Star Wars analogies when he was
upset, for pity's sake, wouldn't stand here, silently, like a useless excuse for a human being, in the
hallway, while some anonymous nurse tries to distract Dr. Newton Geiszler from whatever it is that's
currently making him look like a particularly brittle piece of used-up chalk.
"Are you okay?" Newton asks, looking up at him, looking pained, looking like a stiff shove would
send him straight into hours of unconsciousness.
Hermann drops into an empty chair next to his colleague, rests his elbows on his knees and his
head in his hands and tries not to have an emotional breakdown in the hallway of Hypothetical Rain's
afternoon neurology clinic.
He despises Newton.
He despises Newton so much.
He despises him, with his easy concern, his total abandon, the way he navigates the world with
everything that makes him an idiot on full and constant display, the way he doesn't care about
anyone's opinion, even measured, considered, correct, and professional opinions about what should
and should not be attempted using extremely dangerous equipment requiring the insertion of
electrodes into brains. He despises Newton for telling anonymous nurses that he is 'unemployed', for
creating a flawed and misleading picture of himself with only the most surface trace of obligatory,
deprecating bitterness, because that bitterness is expected, because the man expects it of himself, not
because he really feels it, not like Hermann does, not with a very real need for a vengeance he's
never going to get because it's not morally justifiable, but nevertheless someone should pay for this,
someone should, someone other than Newton, who is too stupid to know that what happened to him is
horrible. Too stupid to ever stop trying to do whatever it is that he's trying to do. He despises
watching this, he despises being asked about his own state of mind because he can't stand Newton and
his offensively short turnaround time, his ability to snap straight from panic into concern, straight from
outrage to amusement, he's hated that rapid plasticity for a decade in all its varied incarnations--
interface redesign in a week, data analysis in a night, paperwork completion in an afternoon,
construction of powerpoint presentations on flights, the writing of grants in spare time, the processing
of alien tissue before degradation sets in when no one else can get it to bloody work, because the man
cuts corners but only the right ones, his ability to upgrade an obsolete interface in an afternoon and
transport it to the middle of a street in the rain, in the dark, and have it still work. How dare he. How
dare he, how dare he ask after Hermann's well being. How dare he, because of course Hermann is
'okay', he's been 'okay' this entire time, it's Newton who is not 'okay', Newton. Newton is the one who
is not 'okay', who has never been 'okay' and is now less 'okay' than 'not okay' and one of these days
Hermann is going to start screaming at him and never stop until his vocal chords snap under the
continued, unremitting pressure of all the things he hasn't, can't, and won't say because they're
confusing and inappropriate and a post-drift epiphenomenon that's likely not even real, presuming
'reality' as a concept exists at all, which, of course, it does. Hopefully.
Newton claps him on the shoulder, once, gently, and then starts rubbing his back.
Hermann will shortly murder him.
But for now, he will satisfy himself with not weeping.
"So, tough week for you guys, I guess," the nurse says.
"Meh," Newton says philosophically. "We're on an upswing. Probably we are. It's a good thing
we're not those world-saving guys though, let me tell you."
Hermann smiles faintly into his hands for no reason.
"Graham cracker?" the nurse asks.
"Yes, I would love a graham cracker right about now," Newton says. "Thank you."
Hermann decides he has mastered himself sufficiently to straighten up. He looks over at Newton,
who has given the nurse his half-consumed orange juice in exchange for a graham cracker. The other
man is leaning back in his chair, entirely exhausted, looking at Hermann through half-lidded eyes.
"You look terrible," Hermann says.
Newton takes a bite of his graham cracker. "You look so great though," he replies. "I almost forget
you're living in a glass house. Also, say hello to the nice lady who prevented me from concussing
myself on the floor. Florence, Dr. Gottlieb. Dr. Gottlieb, Florence. She's a human."
"Um," Florence says, extending a hand, "My name is Liz. I am a human, though. I assume you are
too?"
Hermann shakes her hand and nods. "Pleased to meet you."
Florence smiles nervously at him. Perhaps she has been talking to Sarah.
"Don't assume, Previously Florence," Newton says. "Dr. Gottlieb is pretty weird."
"Will you shut up," Hermann says, with disappointingly low-grade ire.
 "So how do you two know one another?" the nurse asks, looking at Hermann.
"We're colleagues," Hermann says.
"Longstanding mutual nemeses," Newton says, speaking over him, "is really a better description
than 'colleagues'."
"You said you were unemployed," the nurse replies, glancing back at Newt.
"Currently? Yes," Newton says. "Always? No. This guy here teaches math to college students and
makes them cry. Or he will be doing that. Next week."
"Newt," Dr. McClure calls from somewhere behind Hermann. "What's the deal?"
Hermann twists to see her walking over white tile, her white coat unbuttoned, pushing her hair out
of her face.
"They just thought I needed this, man," Newton says, gesturing vaguely at the blood pressure cuff
currently strapped to his arm. "I don't know, I mean I just--" Newton trails off, leaning his head back
against the wall. "I got waylaid. By Florence. Liz. This very nice person in pink."
"He was holding a blood-soaked handkerchief and looking a little vasovagal," says the nurse.
"Hey. I was looking fine," Newton says, emphatic, managing to retain his dignity while at the
same time accepting a second graham cracker.
Hermann is not quite sure how Newton manages to be simultaneously entirely insufferable and
offensively appealing.
He has never been quite sure about that.
"That is a nice sweater," the nurse says.
"Don't even start with me, Florence," Newt replies.
"Newt," Dr. McClure says, coming to stand beside Hermann. "You look wiped, dude."
"Wiped?" Newton repeats, in a parody of didactic disappointment. "You didn't even go to medical
school, did you. Admit it. I thought about it, you know? Medical school, I mean. But I was told that
they would beat all the coolness out of me. With human bones, possibly. How did you survive?"
"Um," Dr. McClure says. "You think I'm cool?"
"In no universe should you ever be allowed to be a medical doctor," Hermann says dryly.
"Outrageously cool," Newton replies.
Dr. McClure smiles at him, then glances at Hermann, her eyes dark and serious, before turning to
the nurse, mouthing, "did he actually hit the deck?"
Newton shoots the doctor an unimpressed look, then glances at Hermann in mild vexation.
Hermann shrugs at him in a conciliatory, well-what-did-you-expect way.
"No," Previously Florence replies.
"You have earned yourself some extra blood work," Dr. McClure says, turning back to Newton.
"Why?"
"Why?" Dr. McClure echoes. "Don't be a loser. You look terrible, that's why."
"God," Newton says. "Starfleet called, Captain Kirk needs a medical officer with the worst
beside manner ever. Did my doctor just call me a loser? I pay you, Hypothetical Rain. I pay you. Or
the government does. Or the government would have--actually--I'm unemployed? I have no idea. Do I
even have health insurance? Are you giving me the healthcare equivalent of free breakfast?"
"You have health insurance," Hermann says, not particularly inclined to inform Newton that he
currently has health insurance courtesy of UC Berkeley's progressive policy which extends to
common-law domestic partners, because it had been extremely convenient and also necessary to
obtain medical coverage for his colleague, and the current situation is not atypical in any way, he just
hasn't gotten around to informing Newton that he did this, because he's been very busy.
 Very busy.
"My name isn't Rain," Dr. McClure says. "You do know that, right?"
"Meh," Newton replies.
"Are you going to faint if you stand up?" Dr. McClure asks.
"No," Newton says irritably. "There is a zero percent chance of that."
Hermann exchanges a skeptical look with Previously Florence.
"Then get out of here, dude," Dr. McClure says. "Get your EEG, give Vlad the phlebotomy tech
some blood--"
"His name is Steven," the nurse says, in overt disapproval.
"I knew that," Dr. McClure says.
"He really looks like a Vlad though," Newton whispers to Previously Florence. "Think about it."
"Will you control yourself," Hermann hisses.
"Yeah, so give Steven the phelebotomy tech some blood," Dr. McClure continues, recovering her
poise, "and then take a nap, or ten in a row. Call me if you can't sleep. Don't wait until you start
having insomnia-induced hallucinations."
"I would never," Newton says.

Hermann says nothing to him.

Nothing of substance.
Not as they leave the building, his hand clamped around Newton's elbow. Not during the cab ride
around the bay, beneath a pale sky. Not during the preparation of dinner, which Newton spends in
another distracting and ongoing battle with chopsticks. Not while they eat, discussing the Isaac
Newton versus Gottfried Leibniz Prioritatsstreit with an inappropriately sordid enthusiasm.
They don't speak of the file until after the sun goes down and, invisible, the Wall loses whatever
terrible, silent appeal it holds for Newton. They don't speak of the file until the man settles down at
the table, absently chewing the distal border of a thumbnail as he reads, and Hermann moves to sit
opposite him, behind the shield of his open laptop.
"So she told you all of it?" Newton asks, without looking up.
"The file was almost entirely redacted," Hermann replies, staring at his email client without
seeing it.
"Ah," Newton says. "That makes sense."
"If you would like to talk about it--" Hermann says, into the quiet air between them.
"No," Newton replies.
Hermann nods.
He spends an uncounted span of minutes staring unseeing at his keyboard, trying to read Newton's
thoughts, trying to grasp the SPECTER Effect with both hands, trying to pry open the lid on his
colleague's consciousness, trying to understand what it is that's happened to Newton, to understand
what happens to a fraction of a hive mind, but he gets nothing--nothing but silence--even his own
thoughts compress into quietness beneath the pressure of his own willpower, consistently and clearly
and constantly applied.
Newton gets up and makes Hermann the tea he hadn't known he'd wanted, setting it down next to
him with a quiet click.
Hermann stares at it.
"What?" Newton says.
Hermann shuts his laptop, holds up a finger, and reaches across the table to pull Newton's book
from beneath his hands.
"I was reading that," Newton says, squinting at him.
"You shouldn't be reading in this kind of light," Hermann says dismissively. "You're--" he breaks
off, checking the page number of Calculus Wars. "One hundred and fifteen pages in?"
"Yes," Newton says cautiously, as if he suspects he is about to be ridiculed and is marshaling his
defenses. "You bought me that book, you know. I didn't pick it. It's like the trashy airport book of
eighteenth century intellectual priority disputes but I--"
Hermann pays him no mind, flips to the one hundred and fifty-fifth page, and interrupts him with,
"what is the first word on page one hundred and fifty fife?"
"If you're trying to test my memory you've got a conceptual flaw there, dude," Newton says.
"I am not trying to test your memory, please keep up," Hermann says, looking pointedly down at
the book he is holding and then back at Newton.
Newton leans forward, his forearms coming to rest against the edge of the table. He grins, brief
and bright and intent. "It was the tea, wasn't it? I knew you wanted it."
"I'm waiting," Hermann says.
"Okay," Newton says. "Okay okay okay okay. Think really hard. Loudly. Think really loudly."
Hermann raises his eyebrows.
They stare intently at one another for an uncounted interval in a silent attempt to bridge a cognitive
span that may be inherently unbridgeable in the absence of a physical interface.
"Trick question, it's a graph," Newton says in a rapid rush.
"Newton," Hermann says.
"What?"
"That's the word," Hermann clarifies. "Newton. As in, Isaac."
"That's a terrible word to pick, dude, what are you thinking? Talk about confounding variables,"
the other man says. "I want a re-do."
Hermann flips to a new page.
Chapter End Notes
Chapter-specific citations: Calculus Wars is a real book, not invented by CWR.
Chapter 21
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Newt wakes in the dark.
He's tangled in marginally familiar sheets in a marginally familiar room, whatever his brain is
trying to scream decoupled from the motor pathways that are supposed to be screaming it.
So, that's a win.
He detangles himself from his bedding. Mostly. Tragically, he doesn't realize he hasn't fully
dissected out his right ankle from the twisted clutches of distressed sheets until he tries to get up and
doesn't quite make it because he can't get his foot onto the floor and with the program. He falls a little
bit, but not really, not totally, he saves it, it's quiet, kind of slow, and pretty protracted, so it doesn't
count; he planned to be sitting on the floor to pull his stupid foot out of his stupid bedsheets. He
planned that.
"Computer, lights," he whispers. "Thirty percent."
Nothing happens.
That's because he doesn't live in the Star Trek universe.
"Phone," he says, "where are you?"
Nothing happens.
That's because he needs a better phone, or, maybe, just one that he hadn't poorly waterproofed and
dropped in a jar of water. Or because his phone is not in his bedroom.
Newt arranges himself in a sitting position, leaning against his dednuded bed next to the waterfall
of fabric he's pulled after him onto the floor. The only light in the room comes from the unblinded,
west-facing window where the yellow haze of fog-blurred streetlights fades to darkness at the border
of the bay.
If he is lucky, it is early.
If he is not, it is late.
Newt decides to find out later.
He considers trying to go back to sleep, but that's a one-way ticket to an hours-long blur of
memories passing incognito as nightmares, and Newt isn't into that so he gets up, collects his glasses
and clothes, then showers like a pro, without simultaneously wearing his pajamas and with a lot of
strategic eye closing. As he's pulling on his clothes it occurs to him that this might actually be shaping
up into a pretty promising day in terms of positive psychological momentum. He does his best not to
think about his dreams, at all, not ever, but even without direct analytic assessment of his
subconscious he's pretty sure that the dreams he was having last night were garden variety city-
destroying and civilization-ending dreams because those tend to bother him less than the dreams
where a wronged chorus of cut-apart alien brains are screaming his name in a strange meld of rabid
vengeance and covetous pining. He has a tough time with those dreams, because the vengeance he
gets but the longing he doesn't, except for the part of him that does, that really gets it, that wants to be
with them and that wants to make reparations for the terrible things he's done. Because he should have
killed them. The kids. But he didn't know how and he didn't know he'd needed to, and even if he had
known both those things he still wouldn't have been able to do it because a) he had and still has
certain responsibilities to his own species because it's his and he likes it, b) he's not really into
killing stuff, like, really really not into it, not even undead monsters, and c) destroying samples is bad
for science and it's extra bad if one needs those samples to save one's civilization.
When he gets to the kitchen he discovers he has won the sleep habits lottery because the glow of
the digital clock lets him know that it is four thirty in the morning, and, therefore, not late but early.
Early.
Early.
Good work, brain, Newt thinks. You are crushing it today.
He flips on a single light, at which point he discovers that the sweater he has pulled out of his
closet is green. Statistically, this is the most likely sweater outcome for him. Given all his sweaters
are clean, which is usually true because he has a thing about laundry now (he's not sure what this
thing is exactly but it's a powerful thing) and given that he picks out a sweater totally at random due to
evenhanded disapproval of all sweater choices, he comes up with a green variant roughly forty
percent of the time.
He drums his fingers on the countertop, a habit that feels at once familiar and challenging, like
maybe it's someone else's fingers, trying to use his hand like a glove.
He feels lost, a little bit, with no coffee to drink and no lab to go to.
It is extremely disconcerting to have no science to do. It's the kind of thing that happens only when
one switches fields, which, apparently, he's currently doing, having facilitated the destruction of his
previous field along with the destruction of all living specimens that he or any of his colleagues might
have studied, which is great; that's just great.
He has no idea if he's being serious or ironic.
If he were back at the shatterdome, if the world hadn't not-ended and his civilization were still in
the midst of its protracted skid toward the brick wall of alien-mediated mass extinction, he'd be
definitely drinking coffee right now and, possibly, transferring the nuclei of somatic kaiju cells into
various tissue types in an attempt to get them to grow.
It would be easy, his brain seethes, less in words than in blue-tinged, urgent confidence that's both
foreign and familiar. It would be easy because they were meant to be grown. It would be easy
because you're so good at tissue culture. It would be easy because they would grow for you, they
would want to grow for you, they would want to, they would want to. For you.
Settle down there, kids, Newt thinks, his hands clamped around the edge of the kitchen sink, his
gaze fixed on the stone of the countertop.
Okay, fine, so he has no science to do right now, but science is ever evolving and unending and
will always have room for him; that's not so much the issue; he's not some orphaned, Dickensian
skeptic looking in on a rational worldview that he no longer gets to share, that's just stupid. So he
accidentally helped some badass military types and Mako the Magnificent destroy his entire field;
he's probably not the first person to do such a thing, although he can't think of any other examples right
at the moment, whatever, he's sure something is going to come to him--or not, because obsolescence
and paradigm shifts don't count as field destruction; nope, it's got to be literal destruction of the
phenomena the field is built around--the point of all of this is just that he needs a new research
interest, those aren't hard to come by, he could go on a walk and trip over one if he weren't so
obsessed with rationalism right now, slash using it as an intellectual crutch; he's fully intent on lying
to Hermann about that, but he's not going to lie to himself, at least not about the rationalism, not now,
not on a good day like this one when he wakes up early and the part of his brain reanimating the
brains he mutilated is listening to him.
Nope.
On a day like this he is going to find a new hobby.
 Maybe two new hobbies.
Hobby number one: biohacking. He decided on this just now, but he's pretty sure it's been in the
offing for about five years or so. It's a great choice for him, because his body art hobby is on hiatus at
the moment as he's not totally sure it's a great idea to continue painting himself with the tapestry of
what might someday become his own PTSD if it hangs around long enough to meet whatever the
clinical criteria are. Biohacking fulfills the same psychological niche that the body art does; it's just a
little less themed around stylized representations of things that tried to kill him and that he then
mercilessly exterminated and unwittingly tortured.
Soooo yeah.
Hobby number two: cooking. Newt would rate his personal interest in 'food' as a concept at a
solid two on the Negative Ten to Ten Scale, and his interest in cooking at a negative one. However, he
would rate his interest in demonstrating to Hermann that biologists, categorically, make unparalleled
chefs at a nine point nine five and his interest in demonstrating to Hermann that he, Newt, is the
superior cook out of the pair of them, despite exactly zero experience, at a ten. While it's true that
Hermann has, over the past weeks, done the vast majority of their cooking, this is only because Newt
a) has not been able to see, b) has been frequently bleeding from his face, which is not compatible
with preparing food unless one is a vampire, and c) has been somewhat unfocused relative to his
historical norm, a tendency that he blames entirely on the sudden and cruel elimination of caffeine
from his diet.
Hypothetical Rain has a lot to answer for.
Newt adjusts his glasses, staring at their minimally equipped minimalist kitchen and trying to dig
the most complicated breakfast food he can out of Hermann's mental recipe catalogue, which leaves
him feeling vaguely nostalgic for a home that isn't his home, a little bit irritated about the general
dearth of appropriate raw materials, and marginally more appreciative of his current sweater.
He wrests control of his brain back, dials up his own fashion aesthetic, then dry heaves once in
the general direction of the sink before getting his cognitive dissonance under control.
He is Newton Geiszler of the culinary confidence and the stupid tripled consciousness and since
he has no cookbook and Hermann doesn't know many breakfast recipes that can be effected with the
materials on hand, Newt will, from first principles, reinvent pancakes.
It can't be that hard.
He whistles the opening chord progression of Undone by Weezer quietly through his teeth.
"Hey brah," he says in muttered quotation, sequentially opening all the cabinets and leaving them
open, so he can see where Hermann put things, because he hadn't been paying attention during the
kitchen organization. "How we doin' man?"
"All right," he replies, locating a suitable mixing bowl.
"It's been a while man," he says, pulling a spoon out of a drawer. "Life's so rad. This band's my
favorite man, don't you love them?"
"Yeah," he replies to himself, pausing his rendition of the opening monologue of Undone.
He spends a quiet moment intensively considering the core principles of pancake assembly.
Absently, he begins whistling Undone's intro chord progression.
His central problem, as he sees it, is that he's pretty sure pancakes require a chemical leavening
agent and he doesn't have one.
Aw man, you want a beer? His brain asks, continuing apace with its Weezer monologuing despite
the fact that Newt is trying to--
Wait. Wait wait wait wait wait.
 Beer will work.
Nice job brain, he says.
"All right," Newt replies, opening the fridge and pulling out the fancy German beer that Hermann
likes owning but doesn't seem to like drinking all that much. "Aw man, hell brah, this is the best. I'm
so glad we're all back together and stuff, this is great man. Yeah. Hey, do you know about the party
after the show? Yeah. Aw man, it's gonna be the best, I'm so stoked. Take it easy brah."
He goes back to whistling for the vocals, because he's not going to sing. That's not something one
does while making pre-sunrise pancakes. It's just not done. Not in general, not by him, and not the
sweater song, not while he's wearing a sweater. He has some standards. Not a lot of them, granted,
and the ones he has aren't that high, but they definitely preclude singing right now.
Precluded.
That's what singing is.
Precluded.
Yup.
He holds himself to whistling through the opener like a champ, but loses it on the chorus while
looking for measuring cups.
If you want to destroy my sweater
Hold this thread as I walk away.
It is at this point he gives up and just goes for it.
He's using a blender in place of a guitar solo in the midst of his fourth rendition of Undone when
he turns around to see Hermann, leaning against the kitchen counter, his arms crossed, wearing a green
sweater and slacks, looking vaguely perplexed, slightly confused, and standing literally less than a
meter from Newt.
!!!!!!, the kids hiss.
For the love, Newt thinks.
His brain is too busy reflexively responding to have an opinion on this turn of events.
Newt lets go of the blender and throws the spoon he's holding at Hermann's pretty immaculate
math-professor outfit in panicked self-defense but manages to alter its trajectory, mostly, so it goes
into the sink while his joints instinctively flex to protect major arteries. This leaves him clutching his
heart, sort of bent over, in total, primitive terror.
Hermann holds up both hands in a reassuring manner and locks eyes with him, silently willing him
to relax, unless Newt misses his guess, which is a possibility, since his track record of reading
Hermann's mind is pretty poor if failing at Calculus Wars is a reliable indicator.
Newt is trying to yell at Hermann but it's not happening.
He's still frozen a little bit.
The wordless eye-mojo Hermann is trying to pull on him isn't working at all.
Not at all.
Okay, that's a lie, he feels slightly better.
Hermann is giving him a look that definitely says something along the lines of calm down, you're
fine, everyone in this room is a human and knows it. Let us not forget that our collective IQ
divided into even quartiles would be enough to distribute to four average humans.
Better. He feels better.
Slightly better.
Better enough to start shouting.
"What the hell, Hermann?" Newt demands, totally aggrieved, because, hello, it's five in the
morning, probably, one doesn't just come up behind people and stare at them while they perform the
sweater song in the privacy of a totally empty kitchen, that's not cool, that's not allowed, that's really
terrible roommate etiquette; it's awful, actually, this should be illegal. He's going to start
communicating this to Hermann at literally any second, once he stops hyperventilating and his brain
reengages with his mouth.
"By no means stop on my account," Hermann says dryly.
"I--" Newt begins. "You--" he continues, pointing two fingers directly at Hermann. He's got no
follow-through though, because right about the time he regains his capacity for analysis and
articulation is right about the time he realizes that he has not exactly been keeping it down, which is
kind of indefensible from a roommate-consideration standpoint and definitely absolves Hermann from
standing behind him like a creeper.
"Some people," Hermann says, when Newt doesn't say anything else, "would prefer to be
sleeping at five in the morning."
"Not you though," Newt says weakly. "Not me. Not us. We master pillars of traditional breakfast
cuisine."
"Ah," Hermann says. "Is that what we do? Does that also explain why you're incorporating a high
quality German beer into--what is this?"
"Pancakes," Newt replies. "I needed a leavening agent and this is what we've got, dude."
"Ah," Hermann says. "And you felt the need to run the blender at five in the morning because--"
"Because I'm not going to mechanically stir," Newt says, affronted. "What am I, an intern of
science? I object to all unnecessary manual labor. On principle."
Hermann gives him a pointed look driving home the fact that simultaneous use of a blender and
repeated a cappella renditions of Undone may not be the most conducive to sleep.
You are really not a sensitive guy, his brain informs him. Your colleague actually goes to
extreme lengths not to wake you up if you miraculously fall asleep, one would think that you would
extend him the same courtesy.
One would think, Newt replies, guiltily, to his own brain.
This is a kitchen, his brain continues, not a laboratory. That is a blender. Not a tissue
homogenizer. This is an apartment with an open floorplan, not a hermetically sealed lab.
"I assume," Hermann says dryly, "from your singularly peculiar expression, that you're chastising
yourself at present?"
"No," Newt replies. "A little bit. Yes, actually."
"Excellent," Hermann says. "Then I will refrain."
Newt realizes that Hermann looks suspiciously not pissed, from which Newt deduces that the guy
was perhaps already awake when the whole pancake experiment was taking shape, meaning that he
probably was an auditory witness to Newt's increasingly enthusiastic Rivers Cuomo impersonation.
This is slightly embarrassing, but Newt is pretty sure it doesn't even make it onto a list of Notable
Embarrassing Things Done by Newton Geiszler because that list is long and storied and buried in a
dark vault somewhere in the subterranean reaches of his consciousness, so yeah, Hermann's probably
having the odd nightmare about, say, hypothetically, the time Newt's upper level Tissue Engineering
students drank him under the table after finals which would have been fine, if ragingly unprofessional,
except for the part where they'd stolen his driver's license, taken a photo of it, and posted it on the
MIT intranet to put to rest all speculations about his age, which also would have been fine, kind of,
except the faculty had taken an inappropriately extreme interest in his documented age which was,
perhaps, not exactly as advanced as he had advertised when his colleagues asked him about it on a
triweekly basis, and that had hurt his intellectual street cred, a little bit, maybe, and had left him with
the extremely irritating nickname of 'Barely Legal' for something like four years.
"No one makes an effort quite like you do, Newton," Hermann says, watching Newt struggle with
the components of an unassembled breakfast.
Newt isn't really sure what this means--it sounds suspiciously like an insult, but it also sounds
slightly more than slightly fond, and Newt hasn't quite worked out the best way to respond to the dryly
appreciative vibe Hermann has been rocking of late, because historically it had been dryly
dismissive. He hopes this interpersonal key change has occurred because Hermann now has a not-so-
secret appreciation of his brain and not because he views Newt as some sort of barely functional
superfriend with good intentions and a knack for knocking things over in an appealing manner like a
heroine of a romantic comedy with inexplicably poor motor control, because that's not what's going
on here. Newt is, for sure, a nascent supervillain whose evil super-power is, tragically, his facility
with getting things to grow. He is most definitely not a hottie with confidence issues; he has a lot of
confidence, too much, really, according the feedback he's received consistently for approximately his
entire life, and he's definitely not 'hot', he is, at best, 'cute', and at worst, arguably, 'disgusting.' If
Newt is a proto-supervillian, this means Hermann slots nicely into the role of his arch nemesis
because the guy definitely fits the 'closet badass' trope in a little bit more of an emo ascetic Rebooted-
Bruce-Wayne-of-Science type of way than say a Peter Parker or Clark Kent or even a Tony Stark kind
of way; that last one's a little ironic though because Hermann's skillset for sure best approximates the
skillset of Iron Man, because, hello, please see exhibit A, giant freaking iron men, which are, alas,
currently located in pieces at the bottom of the Pacific or marginally intact in the local Jaeger
graveyard. If Hermann is being a little bit of a dick right now then Newt would, ideally, prefer to be a
dick straight back in a blazingly witty manner that comes of as suavely superior with an eau d'
effortless. On the other hand, if this is some kind of declaration of admiration that's turned out a little
bit weird, then he'd rather be nice about it, because he wants to encourage weird admiration.
Honestly, he wants to encourage admiration in general, because he himself is admiring. Of Hermann.
They could have a positive feedback loop of esteem going on if Newt doesn't totally screw it up. This
is a lot of pressure.
Say something, his brain advises. This is getting awkward. Because you're making it awkward.
Bad job.
Historically, Newt probably would have said something like, 'are you insulting me or hitting on
me?' But now, standing unshod in a kitchen he thinks of more as 'Hermann's' than 'theirs' for reasons
that can be sourced to Hermann's thought patterns rather than his own (because Newt's been an
inappropriate appropriator with the best of them), he's not going to ask this question for three reasons.
Reason one: discourse is a spectrum and he'd be setting up a rhetorically lazy false dichotomy.
Reason two: even if discourse weren't a spectrum, he's pretty sure that drifting has granted him the
interpersonal subtlety to now recognize that 'insulting me' and 'hitting on me' aren't necessarily
mutually exclusive where Hermann is concerned. Reason three: there is literally no way for Hermann
to respond to such a question in a suave way and Newt would really like to up not just his own
personal suaveness but the collective suaveness of this apartment in general.
Hermann is now giving him a look that Newt is going to tag as 'concerned discomfiture'.
Probably because you're staring at him, his brain says. Now who's the creeper?
You ruin everything, Newt snarls at his brain.
SAY SOMETHING, his brain shouts at him, panicking.
This is why he doesn't generally think before speaking. It's unworkable from a logistics
perspective.
"Thank you?" he finally manages, in a very slow, very skeptical, somewhat interrogative way.
"That was not a compliment," Hermann says stiffly, in a way that means yeah it was definitely a
weird compliment with zero insult undertones and intensely emotional overtones and, ergo, Newt is a
jerk.
That sounds about right.
"Okay, well speaking of things that aren't compliments, you're going to have to wear a different
shirt," Newt snaps, not at all defensively or guiltily. "Because we can't wear identical sweaters on
the same day, Hermann, it's just not a thing that we get to do."
"And why is it you feel that I should be the one to change?" Hermann asks.
"Because I dressed first," Newt replies. "I therefore have priority."
"Well you also have batter on your sleeve," Hermann replies with that superior aridity that looks
so good on him.
Sure. Of course Newt has batter on his sleeve. Yes. Yes, of course he does.
"No pancakes for you," Newt announces.
"I'm not certain that's a loss," Hermann replies, glancing dubiously at the as yet unassembled
pancakes and clearly making no move to go change his sweater.
Newt dips a finger into his batter, reaches over and drags it down the front of Hermann's shirt.
Hermann watches him do it--not reacting, not shifting so much as an eyebrow.
Newt did not expect this outcome.
It's a little bit suave.
A little bit unexpectedly, unfairly suave.
He's cooler than you right now, his brain points out, unhelpfully. This might actually be rock
bottom for you, friend, wearing a sweater that intermittently nauseates you, repeatedly singing
songs from your childhood and not really nailing the key modulation until round three because
your intonation leaves something to be desired at five in the morning before the coffee you're not
allowed to have anymore, trying to equalize a wardrobe playing field you invented between
yourself and your in-medias-res life partner and just not getting it done, realizing you're about
eight thousand times less cool than your math professor roommate, realizing that you just
triggered someone else's OCD tendencies in your own head because you're going to wash that
sweater for him, you know you are--
"You're chastising yourself again," Hermann says. "This is extremely satisfying, Newton, I cannot
begin to describe how much gratification I derive from the expression on your face at this precise
moment." Hermann crosses his arms and finally, finally, finally, raises that eyebrow. "It's one I
haven't seen since I publically upbraided you for diverting monetary resources from the maintenance
and improvement of stereotactic drift interfaces in order to finance your sequencing project--"
"Which was, actually, really useful, Hermann," Newt snaps.
"In retrospect, I don't dispute that," Hermann replies. "At the time, however, I was clearly in the
right as illustrated by the only formal reprimand I was ever able to get attached to your personnel
file."
Newt tips his head down, looks over the tops of his glasses, and gives Hermann the nonpareil of
fiery Geiszlerian glares. He then readjusts his glasses to see if his glare is working.
Hermann looks amused.
This does very little for Newt's self esteem.
"I'll just go change, shall I?" Hermann asks, in a manner best described as 'offensively
conciliatory'.
"You do that," Newt says, trying to recover his poise and maybe doing a passable job if
Hermann's category two eye roll is any kind of metric.
After Hermann leaves the kitchen, Newt tries to wash the pancake batter out of his sweater sleeve
so he doesn't have to change the shirt that he just metaphorically balled up and made a pointless stand
on. It doesn't work very well, though; mostly it just makes his sweater wetter and dilutes the batter
over a larger surface area.
Great.
Newt spends the next several minutes pouring batter onto a pan and heating his pancakes into
existence. They look pretty reasonable by the time Hermann returns, having swapped his defaced
green sweater for a nearly identical blue one. When he reenters the kitchen, Newt hands him a plate
with a fledgling pancake on it.
Hermann takes a bite, favors Newt with a look that is distinctly unimpressed, and says, "did you
use a recipe?"
"No," Newt replies, not at all defensively, "I reinvented pancakes from first principles."
"Did you? That explains a great deal," Hermann replies.
"It's not good?" Newt demands, somewhat aggressively.
"There is room for improvement," Hermann replies.
"Whatever, dude," Newt says, acquiring a pancake of his own and taking a bite.
Yeah.
Okay, so it's not the best pancake in the world, sure, it's pretty dense and it doesn't taste quite
right, it's bland, even somewhat cardboardesque, a little like something that would prompt an, 'are
you serious right now?' from Newt if he were to be presented with it in a context where he was
paying for his food. That's fine. He can admit that his pancake is stoichiometrically askew. He's going
to need to tweak proportions next time, presuming he ever does this again, which is not a given.
"Ugh," Newt says. "This is terrible."
"I've had more objectionable pancakes in my life," Hermann replies philosophically, leaning
against the counter and taking another bite. "Is there a reason you decided not to use a recipe? Other
than culinary hubris, that is?"
"No," Newt replies, not despondently. "Culinary hubris pretty much covers it."
"It's not a bad initial attempt," Hermann says, being obviously nice to him.
Newt has mixed feelings regarding the niceness right about now.
"Can you not console me about this, Hermann?" Newt snaps. "Because I don't need to be consoled
about pancakes, not even ones that I ruin."
"I'm not consoling you," Hermann snaps right back, "and your pancakes are not ruined. Stop
catastrophizing. I'm trying to encourage you to make another attempt. Possibly tomorrow."
"You're the catastrophizer," Newton mutters. "Historically."
"I have nothing but the deepest sympathy for you," Hermann says.
Newt is pretty sure that even Hermann doesn't know if Hermann is serious about what he just
said.
They eat mediocre pancakes in a dimly lit kitchen at five in the morning, arguing about the as-yet-
unrevealed magnitude of Newt's culinary genius. Newt's certain it's going to be staggeringly broad
and astonishingly profound. Hermann is less sure of this, primarily due to his doubts about the extent
to which food is going to hold Newt's attention over the long term, medium term, and even, insultingly
the short term, which Hermann defines as the ninety minute interval required to put together a
moderately elaborate meal. Newt is both offended and pleased by his colleague's stance. Offended
because, hello, has he or has he not performed eighteen-hour (plus) take-down experiments in the
workspace he's shared with Hermann, so the guy should know that his ability to focus is laser-like in
quality and his intellectual prowess is almost infinite in quantity. Pleased because Hermann is going
to be so so so so so wrong about his projected forecast of Newt's culinary abilities as 'mediocre at
best.'
Post pancakes, Hermann leaves for UC Berkeley because why not start one's day at six in the
morning if one can, so yeah. Newt doesn't care. Newt doesn't care at all actually, because he has lots
of things to do, including one--locating his single acceptable shirt and changing into it, two--the
laundry, three--a good chunk of staring out the window like the emo neohipster he's fast becoming,
four--hanging out with his intellectual friends from the enlightenment and pretending that he lives in a
clockwork universe rather than on a horribly fragile d-brane subject to statistical perversions, five--
well, if he's listing, he should probably write that letter to Mako, six--maybe he should put together
some kind of prospective neuroscience talk that he can give to UC Berkeley because he's pretty sure
that going back his original life plan of adding to the scope of human knowledge through basic
research would make him feel a little less useless, but, alas, he is arguably useless at the moment,
which makes the job-talk a risky plan because he's not really sure how a public talk might go; he
could see it going horrifically badly with awkward silences and bleeding as a best case scenario, and
he's not the only one who thinks so, if Hermann's super-gentle, extremely polite, very occasional
suggestions about making some effort to not dissolve into the venomous excretions of his own anxious
consciousness are anything to go by. Newt is pretty sure that, historically, the extreme degree of
avoidance he's been engaging in would have gotten him repeated lectures and at least one symbolic
swat with a cane, so given how nice Hermann's being, well, it seems like a fair bet that the guy does
not see Newt and public speaking mixing very well at present, so, paradoxically, Hermann's not-so-
concealed compassion isn't really doing a whole lot for Newt's confidence.
It's nice though.
The compassion.
So there's that.
He does the dishes through the sunrise, but, once it's light outside, nothing that can protect him
from the vista out his window, so he loses half an hour to contemplation of the Wall.
Then he pries himself away, using Descartes as an intellectual crowbar.
Newt is chewing aggressively on the end of his pen, sitting at the kitchen table, squinting at his
English translation of La Geometrie, which has just begun to become literally painful after several
hours reading in the light of midmorning, when his phone rings.
He's sure at first that it will be Hermann or Mako or some number his caller ID can't place, but
instead, his phone tells him it's Dr. McClure.
This is weird.
It's weird because Newt doesn't remember putting her number into his phone and furthermore, if
he had, he's certain that he wouldn't have entered her as 'Dr. McClure'.
He looks at the display, undecided.
He's not one for phone answering these days, but the problem with not answering this particular
call is that if she doesn't get him, Hypothetical Rain will absolutely and immediately dial Hermann,
which is an outcome Newt would really like to avoid for a whole laundry list of reasons.
"Hypothetical Rain?" he says, picking up at the last possible moment.
"No," Hypothetical Rain replies. "Dude, can you just call me Coral? It makes me nervous when
you say 'Hypothetical Rain', like maybe I've missed a whole bunch of brain damage."
"I'm not crazy about this idea," Newt replies, tapping his pen against his book. "You just seem like
a 'Rain' to me, what can I say?"
"If you weren't my patient I would call you 'Dr. Geiszler' endlessly, just to irk you, but as you are
my patient, and I am professional, you're in luck."
"So this is not a social call," Newt says, glancing from Descartes to the Wall, and back again.
"It will literally never be a social call," Hypothetical Rain replies, "especially not at nine in the
morning on a Wednesday. I just got your blood work back, dude, and you are solidly anemic."
"Meh," Newt replies, underwhelmed, tapping out an interesting bass line with his pen. "I could
see that."
"You win a referral to a hematologist."
"Seriously?" Newt snaps. "Why? It's not like there's some mysterious etiology that needs to be
pinned down; I'm bleeding from my face on a semi-regular basis. Just prescribe me some iron and be
done with it."
"Oh I already called the iron supplements into your pharmacy, but I don't deal with the blood,
man," Hypothetical Rain replies. "It's not my area. I'd follow your labs and give you a pass for now
except for the fact that you're arguably symptomatic. You looked like crap the other day."
You look like crap every day, his brain adds helpfully.
"That would be the sleeplessness," Newt says, glancing at the Wall.
"Are you trying to use your insomnia to reassure me?" Hypothetical Rain asks. "Because it's not
working, man. At all. It would make me feel better if you stopped bleeding from your face."
"Noted," Newt replies, feeling his inner Hermann making an appearance. He places his pen on the
table adjacent to his book and then picks it back up immediately.
"Take some iron, wait for the hematologist to call, and chill out, yeah? Take it easy."
"Yeah," Newt replies. "Sure. I will get right on that. All of that."
Newt answers a few more questions for Hypothetical Rain, who seems to be having a suavely
anxious time of trying to work out what to do about scientists who have hooked their brains up to
things best left outside a neural interface.
After he hangs up the phone, he stares out the window, idly contemplating the Wall and intensively
contemplating calling Hermann and bringing him up to speed on the too-much-blood-loss situation.
Anemia. Ugh. This whole thing just sounds needlessly dire and needlessly romanticizable, like a
thing that might happen to Keats or Lord Byron or maybe Hector Berlioz or maybe just a Romantic
era socialite who chewed some glass. That's what Newt's been doing, the intellectual equivalent of
glass chewing, and he's got the blood loss to show for it. It's probably best if Hermann doesn't find
out about this anemia thing, not right away, because Newt isn't sure he likes how this is going to play
into Hermann's evolving mental picture of him, which, as it stands, approximates a vertically
challenged, less-French, moderately to extremely adorable(?) version of Galois, maddeningly and
habitually on the knife edge of provoking his own death and depriving the world of his brilliance.
This is not what Newt would have predicted pre-drift. He thinks now and, for the record, has pretty
much always thought of Hermann like an ascetic human scalpel--clean and precise and ever paring
away--compensating for his unexpected oversensitivity by pretending he's not sensitive at all via
shouting a lot and rolling his eyes which does literally nothing to obscure how nice he is; Newt's had
his number since 2018, when the guy had worked out the entire budget for Newt's supplementary NSF
grant and submitted it for him when Newt had accidentally gotten pneumonia and pretended it wasn't
pneumonia for a little too long. So it's a bad combo, is what he's saying, Newt with his flaming
narcissism, Hermann who just stands there, getting burned. Or maybe it's a great combo, Newt with
his tangle of idiocy, Hermann who cuts it away. Either way, he's not sure exactly what the outcome
will be when he informs Hermann that he's been bleeding more than he can biologically replace.
Hermann is not going to like this.
Not at all.
Frankly, Newt is getting a more than a little tired of watching life grind the guy down. He was
tired of it in 2013 when they started corresponding about the viability of the Jaeger program, he was
tired of it in 2014, when Hermann applied to the Academy and in 2015, when he was predictably
rejected. He was tired of it in 2016 when they met and Newt did nothing right and Hermann
catastrophized them straight to eternal interpersonal incompatibility. He was tired of it in 2017 when
Yamarashi attacked LA and the compressed timetable for Mark 3 Jaeger deployment had been so
stressful that the guy had lost ten pounds he never put back on. He'd been so, so terribly tired of it by
2018 when Caitlin Lightcap had died and Hermann had been the one who'd either pulled the short
straw or stepped up to the plate when someone had said, 'but who's going to tell Geiszler?' He'd hated
it in 2019, when the concept of the Wall of Life was floated right after Hermann's breach-defining
keynote at a meeting in Geneva, despised it in 2020 when the Wall had been approved and Hermann
stopped going home on holiday. In 2021, they'd cut Hermann's funding first. In 2022, with their
departments shrinking, their fights had turned so heated and so specious that even Human Resources
had told the guy to file his complaints in the trash. In 2023 the Firecracker Sake Incident had been
Newt's response to the night that Hermann began to suspect that the accelerating pattern of breach
transit would soon be incompatible with human life. By 2024 Newt had been sure that the man was no
longer capable of even seeing the hope that Newt laid out for him explicitly, over and over again, on
napkins, in chalk, traced straight into the air.
Now it's 2025, and Newt feels like he's become the newest iteration of the underfunded science
that Hermann had spent a decade trying to defend and preserve.
So yeah.
He will just keep this anemia thing on the down low for now and go get his own iron supplements
because he's totally fine and he can leave the apartment anytime he wants. Why wouldn't he leave the
apartment?
No reason.
Newt stands up and walks to the window, looking at Oblivion Bay. Looking at the Wall.
No problem.
He can walk two blocks and come back.
No problem at all.
He turns away from the window.
Dear Hermann, Newt thinks, wandering through their empty rooms, collecting his boots, locating
his keys, and composing a post-it note like a guy with foresight, I had to leave because Hypothetical
Rain called me and told me I needed this thing. Be back soon.
Eh, that's probably no good. Too vague.
Dear Hermann, Newt thinks, fighting with his bootlaces a little too much for a guy who had been
pretty outrageously skilled with a scalpel back in the day, where 'back in the day' is actually three
weeks ago, give or take, Hypothetical Rain says I need some iron supplements because I'm a little
bit anemic. Who died and made her a nutritionist, am I right? Maybe all the nutritionists in San
Fran, actually. This is awkward. Anyway, I went to get them like a normal person.
That's probably not great either.
 Dear Hermann, Newt thinks, be back soon.
That's good.
The note is really just insurance in case Hermann decides to come home for lunch because he
thinks Newt might be dying, which could happen if Hypothetical Rain calls him and uses the words
'solidly anemic' or some other phrase redolent of understatement that Hermann will then
catastrophize.
Despite post-it composition in triplicate, he doesn't leave a note.
With everything in hand that he needs for a two block trip to a pharmacy, Newt leaves his
apartment, walking through a dimly-lit interior hall with one hand trailing along a wall broken by
doors. He takes the elevator down to the first floor and steps outside. He looks up, squinting at the
pale gray underside of clouds, trying to decide if it's going to rain in submission to a habit that isn't
his before he remembers that he doesn't care.
Shouldn't care.
Whatever.
He starts down the sidewalk, unsteady, anxious, distracted, but not doing badly, not really.
Not until a cab rounds a distant corner and he steps to the curb, a tight, lateral, snap of a step,
raising a hand like it's not his hand, capitulating to a thing undefined and waiting to happen.
Had he planned this?
Planned it the entire time in anxious obfuscation, concealing from himself until just this moment
what it was that he'd intended when he'd put his pen down and closed his translated Descartes?
The cab stops in front of him.
Newt gets in.
"The Wall of Life," he says, half-choking on conflicted indecision, his thoughts flattening into
nearly nothing beneath the pressure of how badly he wants this and how frightened it makes him.
"That is not a valid destination," the cab says.
"Who are you?" Newt snaps, too stressed to put up with obstructionist cabs. "Sartre?"
"No, I am a taxi cab. Please specify a valid destination," the cab says kindly.
"You're killing me, cab," Newt snarls.
"Do you require medical assistance?" the cab asks.
"Hilarious," Newt says, his voice cracking with suppressed urgency. "No. I require a map. Give
me a map. Give me a map. Give me a map. A map, cab. Right now. Give me a map."
A map appears in front of him and submits to his fingertips. He finds Hypothetical Rain's office
and then scrolls west, passing over the hotel where he and Hermann stayed and finally to The Last
Diner where he'd eaten pancakes weeks ago and which seems to lie at the far edge of civilization.
He taps it.
"Thank you," the cab says. "Please fasten your seatbelt."
He rolls his eyes and slides back, connecting the belt and buckle on his second attempt with some
cross-hand stabilization and squinting before leaning his head back against the faux leather of the seat.
He takes a deep breath.
He feels both acutely anxious and profoundly relieved. It's very confusing.
Hi there, his brain says. Whatchya doin', champ?
Shut up, Newt replies.
He closes his eyes, tips his head back, and brings his left hand to his left temple.
This is a terrible idea.
This is not his fault.
 This is a terrible idea.
It's maybe a little bit his fault.
This is a really really terrible idea.
It's pretty much all his fault.
Yesss the kids hiss, in grotesque stereo.
Tell the cab to turn around, his brain suggests.
I just want to look, Newt replies. I just need to go there and look.
How are you going to get to the top, Newton, his brain snaps, sounding just like an extremely
pissed off variant of classic Hermann Gottlieb. Once you get there what are you going to do? If you
don't know, you shouldn't go.
Go, the kids whisper. Go.
"Crap," he says through clenching teeth, his thoughts, his self, unweaving. Sydney glitters bright
and recollected in the sun, an illuminated backdrop to a Jaeger that he shouldn't have the words to
name, but does. When Mutavore thinks 'Striker Eureka' like a Geiszler-flavored tag, Newt is briefly
Newt and not in Sydney anymore until he's Hermann Gottlieb, looking at the papers on his father's
cluttered desk, not looking at his father, no, not that, not that because he can't; he's not certain he'll
withstand this. He turns away, his vision blurred, thinking 'the Wall will fail can they not see that?
Can they not or will they not,' before pain without proprioception shrieks through Geiszler's
memory, virescent, agonized, and full of angry longing.
None of this is Newt, yet this is all he is.
He snatches back his selfhood by biting down on an accessible edge of fisted fingers.
That hurts enough to ground him in his head.
Come on, team, he thinks, freaked out, overwhelmed, managing to reassert control and banish the
intrusive thoughts of trauma not his own. Let's not do this. Whatever this is. You guys need to get
along.
It occurs to him that he's bleeding onto the fisted hand he's biting. It's slightly confusing; he thinks
for a moment he went overboard on the biting, which would be a little too kaijuesque for him to take
right now, but no, the blood is nose-derived rather than hand-derived, which is good, which is a win,
and he figures that out and then manages to get a handkerchief out of his pocket and clamped to his
face before he's bled all over himself.
So, that's a win. Another win. Yup, he's a winner. Dr. Geiszler says no to out-of-control biting,
yes to handkerchiefs, no to primitive reflexes, yes to civilization, no to ruining his only acceptable
shirt, yes to just sitting here, taking it easy, going for a totally normal cab ride.
I think that our team is overextended, his brain offers. Possibly.
Well, we're committed now, Newt says.
No we're not. Just turn this cab around, his brain replies, aggrieved.
You turn it around.
That shuts his brain up pretty effectively.
"Do you require medical assistance?" the cab asks him.
"Aw," Newt says, feeling weird, tipping his head back against the seat, feeling kind of not-okay,
"cab, that's so nice of you. But no. I'm good. This actually happens to me a lot."
"Your heart rate currently exceeds normal limits," the cab says.
"You're monitoring my heart rate?"
"There are sensors built into the seats of this vehicle," the cab replies.
"That's a little bit creepy, don't you think?"
 "No, Dr. Geiszler, I don't think it's creepy," the cab says, in a distinctly creepy way.
"Now you're just messing with me," Newt says in an exhausted slurry of syllables.
"I don't know what you mean by that," the cab replies. "Could you rephrase your statement?"
"Open the pod bay doors, HAL," Newt says.
"I'm sorry, Dr. Geiszler. I'm afraid I can't do that," the cab replies. "Not while in transit."
"Cute," he says absently, his gaze shifting back to the Wall.
The Wall.
The Wall.
The Wall.
The Wall of Life. It's got a great if misleading name, he'll give it that much. 'Wall of Life' sounds a
whole lot better than 'Wall of Ecological Disequilibrium', or 'Wall of Denial', or 'Wall of All Ocean-
Based Commerce is Over Sorry Guys', or 'Wall of Let's Destroy All Costal Life', or 'Wall of
Financial Ruin', or 'Wall of Never Going To Work At All You Idiots Not in A Million Years', or 'Wall
of How Dare You I Mean Really', or 'Wall of Let's Take a Functional System and Burn it Down Piss
On Its Ashes and Not Replace it', or 'Wall of This Seemed Like a Good Idea At The Time But It
Wasn't Sorry Everyone', or 'Wall of Humanity's Final Terrible Decision', or 'Wall of The Sixth
Extinction', or 'The Wall that Made People with Foresight Want To Colonize the Moon', or 'The Wall
of Mars Is Looking Pretty Good Right About Now Guys What Do You Say'. He's never been a fan of
it; it was and is hideous and wasteful and harmful and disgusting and nonfunctional and he hates it,
he's always hated it, he's hated it from the moment of its conception. He spent five years trying not to
watch it go up and fighting about it at scientific meetings, in incredulous, vicious shouting matches
that almost devolved to blows, that could have, because no one cared more than they did--they who
studied the problem, they who cut up kaiju, they who mapped the quantum foam, they who designed
the Wall, they who projected its economic impact, and they who studied the coastal life it would
destroy.
No one cared more.
It's almost eleven AM when the cab pulls to a stop in front of Possibly Flow's diner, beneath the
shadow of the concrete monstrosity that separates the land from the sea.
Newt doesn't remember the Wall being so prominent the last time he was here.
Then again, most of his San Francisco wandering had been at night, with sunglasses on, so he
supposes this makes sense.
He sits for a moment, staring at the Wall until the cab politely chimes, flashing his total on the
screen in front him. Newt swipes his debit card, hoping for the best. It goes through with no problem,
so, hey, at least he's not living on credit and charity. Yet.
"What's my balance?" Newt asks the cab, without much hope of an answer, because, honestly, do
cabs know these things? He's not sure. He doesn't usually talk to cabs as much as he's talked to this
one. But it knows his heart rate and his name, so.
"Five hundred eighty four thousand, six hundred thirty four dollars and eighteen cents," the cab
replies.
That's weird.
"So, I'm pretty sure that's off by at least four orders of magnitude, but thanks anyway," Newt says.
"Good try."
"This is the information provided to me by the bank that issued your debit card," the cab says,
defending itself.
"Five dollars and eighty-four cents I'd believe," Newt says, glancing back and forth between the
screen and the Wall. "Cab, look, let me give you a piece of advice. Can I do that? Is that a thing I can
do?"
"You may say anything you wish, Dr. Geiszler."
"Okay buddy, well you just seem a little bit too sassy for the average algorithmically programmed
self-driving car, so if you're evolving intelligence, you should probably keep that under wraps. Don't
kill any humans. That's a dead give away. If I've learned anything from my three point five decades of
exposure to science fiction, it's this: getting cocky and eliminating the carbon-based life forms will
get you every time. Just think about it, okay?"
"I don't know what you mean by that," the cab replies. "Could you rephrase your statement?"
"There you go," Newt says, giving the seat an encouraging shoulder-clap equivalent before
opening his door. "Also, can you give me a three count between me shutting the door and you driving
away? Confession-time, I am in the bottom quartile of my species when it comes to balance and
proprioception."
"Of course," the cab says, sounding vaguely solicitous.
Newt steps out and says, "Good luck, dude."
"You are very polite for a human," the cab replies.
"Well, that might be the first time anyone has ever called me polite," Newt says, "but thanks. Don't
turn evil."
"Evil is not a recognized road," the cab replies.
"Isn't it though, sass master? You think about that one," Newt replies. He shuts the door and steps
back, away from the curb.
The cab gives him more than a three count before it drives away. He watches it go in some kind of
primitive delaying tactic before turning to look down the length of the street on which he stands,
toward the artificial boundary of the Wall. It rises abruptly, two blocks away, stretching high and
limitless in either direction. At its base is an irregular ribbon of graffiti--tags, stencils, murals--in
green and black and red and blue.
Newt looks up, squinting painfully at the pale sky to make out the silhouettes of sea birds, nearly
invisible against gray clouds. He can hear them cry quietly in the distance.
He can smell the sea.
This is the worst idea you've ever had, his brain says.
Eh, Newt replies. That's debatable.
He walks two blocks, leaving the reflective windows of The Last Diner behind him. He crosses
the nearly untrafficked street that runs along the internal perimeter of the Wall and stands on the
sidewalk that marks civilization's final border, weaving his fingers through the chain-linked fence that
separates him from the base of the Wall.
What now? his brain says, sounding more than a little sanctimonious. You can't climb a fence.
Yeah, he agrees, beginning to climb the fence anyway. You're probably right about this, brain.
His boots aren't made for scaling chain-linked fences, that's for sure.
The kids seem to be schadenfreudeshly both egging him on and hoping for surprise electrocution if
the enraged, blue-white, anticipatory revenge vibe he's getting is anything to go by.
That seems fair, Newt thinks in their direction. Be who you are, kids.
He gets to the top of the fence on a mixture of upper body strength, determination, and incredulity.
It's not that high, there's no barbed wire along the top, and no surprise electrocution, so that works out
well for him. He gets one leg over the top of the fence, and then, alas, he's finds himself stuck, a little
bit. Not really, but kind of. Sort of. Sort of stuck. Ideally, he would have done something a whole lot
more graceful, featuring a mid-air one-eighty or really anything that was not this.
"This is the worst," he says through clenched teeth, trying not to castrate himself.
He needs a fulcrum, both to get his right leg over the top of the fence and also to do an about face
because he's climbing down, he is not jumping down, not from a height of seven feet. He'd probably
break an ankle. And/or his neck.
"This is really embarrassing," he says, laying sideways atop the fence, irregular cut edges of
chain links catching on his clothing. He gets his right leg up and over and then hangs onto the top of
the fence with both hands and lowers himself down as slowly as possible, which is not actually that
slowly, thanks to the momentum he's got going. He lets go, falls about a foot and a half, hits the
ground, and, miraculously, manages not to break any bones.
"I'm cool," he says, examining his scraped hands and torn shirt. He looks around, glares at the
chain link fence, adjusts his glasses, squares his shoulders, and starts forward, across the field of
cement that separates the fence from the base of the Wall.
He's sure he's being captured on video somewhere, but he's also sure that the majority of the
elaborate surveillance network atop the Wall points in an oceanward direction. So, somewhere, some
overworked security personnel might or might not be watching a guy in skinny jeans and a black
pullover walk across this strange no man's land of dirty cement with a confused gait that just won't
seem to settle into something steady. He probably looks drunk and non-threatening.
Hopefully.
Beneath his boots, the glass of broken beer bottles cracks and grinds. The (actual) kids these days
must hang out and have their adolescent ennui and nihilism and Coors Lite at the base of the Wall.
God knows he'd do the same if he were in their shoes. Probably. That's what he's doing right now,
sort of, but without the beer, and with a little more rationalism than existentialism, mostly because
he's too fragile for Nietzsche at the moment.
It occurs to him, when he's about halfway across this Zen garden of broken bottles, that he hasn't
actually done much walking for weeks. He thinks there might have been a lot of walking during the
twenty-four hours it took them to get from the Hong Kong Shatterdome to a hotel room in San
Francisco? He remembers being extremely tired, but he's not positive that tiredness necessarily
indicates he did a lot of walking. It could have been a very small amount of walking that felt like a
lot. The point is: now that he's had the span of about four blocks to develop a rhythm, or a lack
thereof, he realizes that this irregular gait he's been sporting is resolving into a confused, inconsistent
limp.
Well that's interesting, his brain says. So, along with a relative dopamine deficit, which might or
might not still be in play, you've got some confusion in your motor pathways.
Newt comes to a stop under the pressure of real-time revelation, standing in a field of glass,
staring unseeing at the Wall, thinking yes, yes of course. In the setting of elevated neuronal excitability
courtesy of his custom rig a whole swath of kaiju motor patterns were laid down in his motor cortex
over three drifts; yes of course they were, but Hermann, Hermann, Hermann, with whom he would
have been drift compatible even in the absence of membrane potential tweaking, had just seared
whole swaths of motor programs straight down into a cerebellum designed to carry them out.
So, are you brain damaged? he asks his brain.
No, his brain replies, affronted. Not by any traditional metric. We just have too many motor
pathways for our own good, so directed movement turns into a confusing neurochemical war.
That sounds a little bit brain damaged, Newt says. Just putting it out there.
That sounds a little bit intellectually sloppy, his brain replies.
 Touche, Newt says.
He starts walking again, purposefully trying not to limp, making an effort to try and dial himself up
on his mental soundboard. It seems like it's going a little better this time, he's got more of a natural
rhythm, which does a lot to help out his balance and make the whole experience a little closer to his
historical norm rather than an exercise in real-time gait correction. He's not fabulous or anything, he's
not walking like a champ, not yet, he's not walking like a total pro or even a guy who's been doing it
all his life, but he feels like he's together enough that he can shove his hands into his pockets, which is
progress, which is great, which makes him feel better about literally everything.
It takes him too long to cross the glass-littered expanse of cement, but when he gets it done, when
he stands at the base of the Wall, fingertips pressed to a particularly tasteful example of stenciled blue
graffiti that must be nearly as old as the cement itself and looks straight up, craning his neck, his eyes
watering at the retinal shock of the too-white sky, he doesn't feel any better.
He just feels pissed.
Newt is pissed, the kids are pissed, his living monument to Hermann Gottlieb circa three weeks
ago is pissed, his brain as a collective whole is pissed.
"Well, this is not going to work," he snaps.
High above him, the sea birds cry.
The wind hisses irregularly over painted concrete.
Newt turns left and starts walking, his right hand trailing along the Wall.
This plan is getting worse as it evolves, his brain says. You realize that, correct? What would
Hermann say if he could see you now?
He'd probably say 'typical', Newt replies.
He walks.
He walks, and, as he walks, walking comes easier.
It's a tripled novelty--this glass strewn concrete, this defaced monument that cuts him off from the
pelagic vista he can construct from a memory not his own, and the walking--repetitive, continuous,
and slow. It returns to him gradually as his feet come to feel again like his feet, his joints remember
whose joints they are and work in concert, and he doesn't feel as though he might pitch sideways as he
goes.
Newt isn't quite sure how far he walks before he finds the door.
He doesn't see it before he finds it, because it's recessed in the Wall. It's his fingers, dragging
along the rough-edged concrete, that locate it. The door is made of metal and painted gray for
camouflage. It's covered with iterations of some artist's tag in blue and green.
It is, of course, locked.
It is still locked when he tries it again, bracing his right leg and putting his left shoulder to the
door.
Newt adjusts his glasses, glares up at the Wall, and then back at the door.
This does not help him.
The kids rage in a muted chorus.
Now what? His brain asks, sounding both relieved and disdainful.
Newt walks away from the door, backing up a few steps on a vector perpendicular to the line of
the Wall. The door is gray, shut with a deadbolt, made of a metal he can't identify, and possessed of a
handle rather than a knob. Its solid metal broken by sections of thin grating near the top and bottom
comprised of a metal weave so tight he can't see through it.
He's sure he can get inside; he's just not sure why he's sure.
 Newt crosses his arms and paces away a few more steps.
Tear it down, the kids seethe helpfully in not-words at the back of his thoughts, swapping
allegiances from anti-Newt to pro-Newt and anti-Wall.
That's a no go, kids, Newt replies. I'm not a tiny kaiju.
Maybe that's why he's sure he can get through. Maybe it's because he's torn down a variant of this
Wall as Mutavore.
That's not it, his brain snaps, in Gottliebian disdain. You're an idiot with identity confusion but
even you, even now, are not that disoriented.
Okay team, Newt thinks. It's game time.
It takes him five minutes and three more backwards steps before he identifies what it is,
specifically, that's bothering him.
The plane of concrete he's standing on, which has been irregularly littered with mostly-smoked
cigarettes, the broken glass of beer bottles, the colored messes of biodegradable food wrappers in
varying states of decomposition, and other signs of teenage conquest is cleaner here, which suggests a
point of purposeful transit, rather than a popular location for loitering.
There is a short row of bottles lined against the Wall, unbroken, a few feet from the door.
He grins, short and sharp and certain.
Newt walks back toward the Wall, but slowly this time, his eyes scanning the ground around the
door. He finds what he's looking for right against the base of the Wall, behind the row of unbroken
bottles. It's a piece of heat-warped metal, melted without finesse into a curved tip, to which a dime
has been welded. He turns it over in his hands with more grace than has been habitual for him of late,
decides it can't be for the deadbolt, and then drops into a crouch to examine the grating at the base of
the door.
The wind hisses rapidly through woven metal, equalizing air pressures on either side of the Wall.
Newt scans the borders of the grating, running his eyes over the seal between it and the metal of
the door. They're two separate pieces, made of different materials. Someone in the not too distant past
has cut them apart. He can see the frozen fray of melted metal on the door itself, but not the grating.
When he presses on it with spread fingertips, he feels a slight give. The way the metal flexes
underneath his fingers reminds him of the fancy, ductile alloy lining the conductive pathways that
comprised the Jaeger-equivalent of a nervous system.
Newt smiles an uneven smile.
The grating's been removed and then replaced.
Along the perimeter of the metal weave, nearly concealed by the apposition of grating and door,
he sees four slit-like openings melted into the perimeter of the metal. He can't get a finger through any
of them, but he can get a dime on a curved wire through. Boy, can he ever.
"Someone's got an industrial-strength acetylene cutting torch," Newt murmurs, threading the tool
through the door, and trying to catch it on whatever he's supposed to catch it on. "Actual kids these
days. So enterprising."
It takes him fifteen minutes to complete his blind unclipping, but when he's done, he presses the
grating forward and it comes loose. He gets a hand around its sharp edge of heat-cut metal before it
hits the cement of the dark interior.
That was almost dexterous, his brain says, clearly surprised.
Thank you, brain, Newt replies. I appreciate that. Historically, I have been known to be a
dexterous guy.
He replaces the tool, pulls out his cell phone, converts it into an overpriced flashlight, and climbs
through the door. He pauses a moment, crouching next to the opening, the fingertips of one hand
pressed against the dusty cement of the floor.
He's in a hallway that's dark and close, the ceiling low.
Go back home, his brain advises. Whole swaths of adventurous teens and twenty-somethings
have probably died in here.
Instead of climbing back out through the door, he sets his phone on dusty concrete and re-clips the
grating into place with his fingernails, using a combination of daylight and phonelight to make sense
of someone else's work-around.
When that's done, he picks up his phone, pushes himself to his feet, and peers into the linear
darkness.
Because he is not a total idiot, he begins taking a video, Theseus-style. It's not going to be super
interpretable, but hopefully it will be enough to allow him to retrace his steps through what is looking
a lot like a dark maze.
"Okay," he whispers, narrating to his phone. "This is Newton Geiszler, Ph.D., making bad
decisions and turning left at the doorway."
He walks through the dark, the glint of the occasional discarded beer bottle letting him know that
he's traversing someone's familiar haunts, even if they're not his own.
Newt has been walking only a few minutes or so when he hears a guitar.
He hears it.
He can tell the difference between his own brain and the external environment, at least he thinks
he can, at least most of the time, but the musical phrasing of the opener is so familiar that he doubts
himself. He doubts himself totally and completely, because there's no way that the tune he's hearing
should be anywhere other than in his own head.
Because it's his.
It's his own song.
Newton Geiszler is walking through the Wall of Life, hearing a Newton Geiszler original.
He's hearing it.
Oh my god, you're going insane, his brain says. Really really legitimately actually insane, right
here, right now. You can't be hearing this so it follows that we've neurally produced it and tagged
it as something external. This is the only explanation that makes sense. I'm pretty sure that's
psychosis, champ. Sorry about this, friend, this seems like my bad.
Newt presses a hand to the wall, his palm stinging reassuringly from its earlier altercation with
the fence. He's here, he's sure of it, he's really doing this, he's really standing inside the Wall in the
dark with his phone and his stupidity keeping him company, hearing, hearing, hearing his own song.
He's hearing it, right?
Yes.
He's hearing it.
"So this," he says unevenly and quietly to his phone, "will be interesting to watch later, presuming
I don't have a psychotic break and I can still enjoy it, but, ah, I think I'm hearing something really
bizarre. I'd actually rather not explicitly label it because--"
Newt stops speaking as the first verse starts.
Yeah, so he's hearing a female voice.
That's weird.
Do you think of yourself as female? he asks his brain. Because if so, how interesting.
Not to my knowledge, his brain says. I mostly think of myself as an evolved consciousness self-
organizing out of a piece of electrically conductive meat that has more or less accepted certain
societal aesthetics and codes of behavior generally defined as 'male' but who is not above some
black nail polish and some guyliner now and then.
Okay, that sounds about right to me, but it makes this kind of difficult to reconcile, Newt says,
listening to the quiet echo of his own lyrics in the darkness.
Turn around, his brain says. Please turn around.
Newt starts forward again.
He follows the slight curve of the tunnel for half a minute before he sees a faint light coming from
a break in the lateral wall. He hesitates briefly, then rounds the corner.
The 'room' he enters is a giant, cavernous space, webbed with massive structural supports that
cast strange shadows in the light of five crossed flashlights that stream from a point midway between
Newt and the opposite wall.
There's a group of five people sitting on the floor, their lights arranged at irregular angles to
illuminate the area between them. A girl with an acoustic guitar, is, indeed, playing a cover of
Central Dogma by The Superconducting Supercolliders.
Newt stands still, phone in hand, listening to the spin she puts on the chorus.
"Dave," one of the shapes says, waving to him, with a dark and backlit sweep of one arm.
If I'm hallucinating, this is very strange, Newt says to his brain. But if I'm not hallucinating, it's
equally strange.
Agreed, his brain replies. I really cannot explain this to you, friend.
Newt walks forward slowly, wondering what will happen when these young people realize he's
not Dave. Hopefully they won't beat him to death with their flashlights, a la A Clockwork Orange.
Residue by residue
It propagates inside of you--
The singer breaks off abruptly.
Newt is pretty sure that she's the first to determine that he's not Dave.
"Hi," he says, addressing either proto-adults who should be in school or, alternatively,
hallucinations produced by his own mind for purposes unknown.
Could go either way, really.
They stare silently at him. All five of them, three girls, two boys, wearing identical looks of total
shock.
"Um," Newt says, not really sure how to interpret this. "Turns out I'm not Dave, sorry about that."
They continue to stare silently at him.
"Nice cover," he says to Cover Singer.
They continue to stare silently at him.
"Um, so, I'm trying to get through the Wall, or, even better, to the top; would you guys know how to
do that, possibly? Like, directions? A map maybe? An oral history of some kind, potentially?"
"It's true," Undersized Dark Haired Boy says. "He is local."
Newt isn't sure how to interpret that. It's for sure not an answer to his question, so he just
continues looking at them, trying to pick out details in the dimness that would support an argument
that's pro real children or pro hallucinated children. Each of them is surrounded by a spread of
objects in the dark--books and pens and scattered shoes, their flashlights and their backpacks.
"You're Newton Geiszler," says the scrappy-looking girl crouched closest to him.
"True," he replies, chalking up a point on the Hallucinations side of his mental scoreboard. "Who
are you, the Ghost of Grade School Past? How do you know my name?"
 "No," she says, obviously nonplussed, "I'm Caitlin. Everyone knows your name."
"Um, okay then," Newt replies, extremely unconvinced, but holding off on chalking up another
point in the Hallucinations column of his scoreboard because Hypothetical Rain's nurse had told him
he was famous, and Hermann has implied as much on several occasions and then declined to
elaborate, so it's possible that he's a rockstar genius cultural icon and doesn't know it. It's way way
way less likely than say, Mako the Magnificent being a cultural icon, but he supposes it's possible. He
also supposes if anyone's going to have a weird, middle school cult following it's going to be him. Of
course it is.
Brain, are you representing Caitlin Lightcap as a scrappy thirteen-year old who looks nothing
like the real Caitlin Lightcap, or is this just a girl named Caitlin?
I have no idea, his brain admits.
"Where did you hear that song?" Newt asks Cover Singer, trying a new tack.
"Everywhere," she replies, looking both anxious and confused. "It's all over. Do you, um, do you
like my version?"
"Yeah," Newt says, "Sure. I mean, yes, I do. What do you mean by 'it's all over,' though? Like--
Nerd Rock is popular at the moment and my band has been improbably rediscovered?"
"It's not Nerd Rock," Cover Singer says, offended. "The genre is called Intellectual
Underground. Or, I mean, if you think it is. Like, you could say what it was. Or not. If you wanted.
You kind of created it."
This is getting weirder, his brain says. Weirder all the time.
"Intellectual Underground," Newt says, "I like it. I approve."
They stare at him some more, clearly nervous.
He smiles at them with all the reassuring friendliness he can bring to bear, trying to figure out how
to ask them whether or not they're real in a way that won't be super awkward and reveal the depth of
his current confusion if they are, indeed, people rather than thought constructs.
Somehow, the smiling thing seems to unleash a flood of questions from the Actual Teenagers or
Alas, Hallucinations.
"What are you doing here?"
"Are you brain damaged?"
"Did you really drift with a kaiju?"
"How many degrees do you have?"
"Are you friends with the Jaeger pilots?"
"Do you know that Maxwell's Demon made you a tribute album?
"When did you start college?"
"Do you really go by 'Newt'? Does Mako Mori call you that?"
"Are you secretly married to Dr. Gottlieb?"
"Is it true you have kaiju tattoos?"
"Are you still doing science?"
"Do you live here?"
"Are you Mako Mori's half-brother?"
"Do you speak German?"
"But what science are you doing?"
"Why don't you go on the news?"
"Are you reuniting The Supercos?"
It is now Newt's turn to stare at them in mute anxiety, not saying anything, feeling slightly more
than slightly freaked out, both in response to the questions themselves and also to the vast swaths of
things they imply, because who are these kids and how weird and possibly Freudian is it if they ask
him if he's Mako's brother, what does that mean? What is his brain trying to tell him? Does his brain
want to be married to Hermann Gottlieb, because he's pretty sure he's already doing a variant of the
secret marriage thing without all the technically 'romantic' parts, but he could add those in if someone
in his head is into that, he's not really sure, but he thinks it would be a bad idea because he's an
insufferable narcissist which is not preferred but mildly okay in a roommate but kind of a drag in a
significant other in the classical sense--if all the burning husks of his previous, failed, short-term
relationships spell out anything it's that he's tough to be in love with. And what is with the science,
god, he knows he needs to do it, can he not just have three weeks before his brain creates imaginary
children to creepily goad him into going back to neuroscience?
There are other things to do, the kids hiss in blue edged not-words, in a lambent stream of
images.
"Do you want to sit down?" Undersized Dark Haired Boy asks him. "You look kind of sick."
"A little bit, yeah," Newt says, his hands braced on his knees. "I haven't exactly been having a
good month."
They shift, making space for him, and he drops into a crouch and then falls awkwardly out of it
before getting his feet crossed and tucked beneath him, dragging the edges of his boots across a dark
and dusty floor.
"Are you okay?" Cover Singer asks him.
"Yeah," Newt lies, adjusting his glasses.
"Will you sign my notebook?" Ghost of Grade School Past asks.
"Um," Newt says, chalking a point up in the Actual Teenagers column with an exhausted mental
swipe. "Sure, I guess?"
He scrawls a respectable version of his signature across the front of her notebook, and then does
it four more times, signing another notebook, a copy of The Demon Haunted World, a half-finished
chemistry problem set, and then, finally, he drags his pen over the bottom of Cover Singer's
handwritten guitar tabs. His walk and door-manipulation have restored some of his dexterity and his
final signature is fluid and looks almost like his own.
"This is so sick," Aspiring Chemist says, examining her problem set.
The rest of her coterie concurs.
"So I'm famous now?" Newt asks them. "As in, legit famous, household name, that kind of thing?"
They nod at him.
"You're famous but mysterious," Aspiring Chemist says.
"Very mysterious," Cover Singer agrees. "You're the most mysterious of the Pacific Ten."
"The Pacific Ten?" Newt replies.
"Mako Mori, Raleigh Becket, Stacker Pentecost, Hercules Hansen, Charles Hansen, Sasha
Kaidonovsky, Aleksis Kaidonovsky, Cheung Wei, Hu Wei, and Jin Wei, Hermann Gottlieb, Tendo
Choi, and you, obviously," Junior Skeptic rattles off, flipping absently through The Demon Haunted
World without looking at it.
"That's not ten," Newt points out. "That's thirteen. Also? You should always lead with the
scientists when listing, what are you thinking, dude?"
"Well it kind of varies by news outlet and by nation," Junior Skeptic clarifies, looking slightly
chagrined.
"You're definitely the most mysterious," Aspiring Chemist says. "Like, everyone knows you're
supposed to be in San Francisco with Dr. Gottlieb, but it's all BS twitter sightings and stuff."
"Ah," Newt says. "Yes, er, um, yeah. Can you guys do me a solid and not ah, inform the world that
I crashed your Wall hang-out like a creeper?"
"Sure, yeah, no problem," Ghost of Grade School Past says.
"We got your back," Dark Haired Boy adds, adjusting his glasses, which seem to be an exact
replica of Newt's own glasses.
The rest of them nod at him.
"You want some dried apricots?" Aspiring Chemist asks.
"Sure," Newt says. "Look, children, may I call you children? Are you technically children? I've
always been terrible at assessing stages of development; I one hundred percent blame this on a lack of
a coeval cohort during my formative years. I didn't even know groups of friends really existed outside
of fiction; like this thing you're doing, hanging out ironically in a monument to human stupidity,
playing guitar and doing chemistry problem sets? That's cool; that doesn't seem real to me. You guys
might not even be real, I'm not sure. What is 'real', anyway? Okay that's not a question we should
really pursue right now. My point is, seeing as I am, apparently, a role model--"
"Well I don't know if I'd go that far," Smart Mouth nee Dark Haired Boy says.
"Nice glasses," Newt says dryly. That shuts Dark Haired Boy right up. "Don't go up against me,
kid, I will win literally every time, okay? My IQ is a statistical improbability to which most of
humanity aspires. Now. As I was saying before my credentials were being questioned, shouldn't you
guys be in school?"
"We get out early every other Wednesday," Cover Singer says, as Aspiring Chemist hands Newt
some dried apricots.
"Really?" Newt says, skeptical. "How does that work?"
"The decon crews that work Oblivion Bay pass near our school on Wednesday afternoon once
every two weeks, and the noise of shifting gravel isn't 'conducive to learning'," Junior Skeptic says.
"Should you guys really be going to school that close to a radioactive body of water?" Newt asks.
Cover Singer shrugs. "Where else are we going to go?"
Chipped Shoulder, aka Smart Mouth, aka Dark Haired Boy, gives him a look that practically
dares him to say 'inland' but Newt is not stupid enough to fall for that one.
I think these are actual children, his brain decides, and not external representations of portions
of your internal reality.
"You think we would skip school?" Ghost of Grade School Past asks him, apparently aghast.
"No," Newt says, trying to make a suave mid-conversation correction. "I guess not? Upon
reflection, you guys don't really strike me as the beer-drinking, acetylene torch wielding types."
"If you want beer, come back at night," Cover Singer says. "This place is kinda the center of the
local indie music scene. You'd be a hit."
"I'm actually not looking for beer," Newt says. "I'm looking to get to the top of this thing."
"The stairs and freight elevator are right back there," Aspiring Chemist says, twisting, pointing
into the darkness on the interior, seaside border of the Wall. "I'd take the stairs though--if the freight
elevator gets stuck it will be a long time before anyone finds you."
"Ugh," Newt says, picturing himself desiccating in a dark metal box.
Do it, his cut-up kaiju chorus hisses at him in frenzied anticipation.
Newt winces.
"You want an honor guard?" the Dungeon Master formerly known as Junior Skeptic asks him.
"Um, no," Newt says. "This is a personal thing."
 "Are you on a secret mission?" Ghost of Grade School Past asks him.
"Is it for science?" Aspiring Chemist chimes in.
"It's mysterious," Newt replies. "I can't tell you what I'm doing here."
Mostly because you yourself don't know, his brain says, chiming in with a classic Gottliebian
tonal varietal that Newt's going to tag 'disapproving concern.'
"I don't think you can make it up there," Chipped Shouldered Smart Mouthed Dark Haired Boy
says. "You look like crap, man, and it's three hundred vertical feet of stairs."
"Wow, okay there, Chipped Shoulder, tell me what you really think," Newt says, somewhat
offended, because relative to say, one week ago, he looks awesome.
"My name is Thomas," Chipped Shoulder says.
"Sure it is," Newt replies. "And, for your information, I'm getting to the top of this thing."
"Do you want the rest of my apricots for the road?" Aspiring Chemist asks him, casting an indirect
vote of confidence.
"I would love the rest of your apricots," Newt replies. "Thank you."
"Do you want my flashlight?" Cover Singer asks, casting a second indirect vote of confidence.
"I would love to have your flashlight," Newt replies.
"There are lights in here," Dungeon Master says, "they exist, just so you know. We don't turn them
on because if you do, then the cops eventually come and investigate. But, you know, in an emergency,
there are boxes along the stairs in case your flashlight goes out and leaves you in the dark."
"Okay," Newt says, getting to his feet. "Great." He turns to go, takes a few steps, then turns back.
"Stay in school. Don't drink until you're eighteen. Twenty-one. Whatever. Try to kill as few brain cells
as possible. Do lots of science. Science is for everyone, even non-scientists. Science is for winners.
'Intellectual Underground' as a musical subgenre is also for winners. Buy my digital albums, maybe,
or not, I don't know. Do I even get paid if you buy them? I'm not sure. I should look into this. Getting
paid would be nice right about now, as I'm a little bit unemployed. Science as a career choice is
generally secure though, I don't want to misrepresent science to you. I took a non-traditional route. Do
whatever you want unless what you want infringes on the individual liberties of parties who don't
agree with you. That's not cool. Critical thinking is always a virtue, anyone who says otherwise is
literally or metaphorically selling something. I think that's all I've got."
"Wow," Ghost of Grade School Past says.
"Sagan Lives," Junior Skeptic Dungeon Master adds, giving Newt a science gang sign he doesn't
understand.
"That was pretty lame," Miniature Newt, aka Chipped Shoulder, aka Smart Mouth, aka
Undersized Dark Haired Boy says in accurate summation.
"Don't I know it," Newt admits. "I felt sort of obligated though, truth be told. Take it or leave it.
I'm definitely setting a bad example by letting you guys help me trespass on PPDC property."
Miniature Newt looks somewhat mollified by this, and Newt concludes he has partially
rehabilitated his image.
"I think you're the coolest," Dungeon Master says loyally.
"Me too," says Aspiring Chemist.
"Mako Mori's the coolest," Miniature Newt says, "but you're pretty okay, I guess."
"Well I won't argue with that," Newt replies. "Thanks guys."
He gets to his feet, flashlight and apricots in hand, and sweeps the beam of the light toward the far
wall. The light catches the metallic glint of the ascending stairs, and he traces their block-like spiral
up into the darkness until the beam of the light becomes too diffuse to follow them any further. He
adjusts his glasses.
You're deconditioned, anemic, and your proprioception isn't exactly operating at peak
performance, his brain says. Even middle school children who improbably idolize you think that
this is a terrible plan.
Newt leaves the actual kids behind him, in the dark, whispering quietly together so that he can't
hear them, other than Junior Skeptic Dungeon Master's initial interrogative, "did that actually just
happen or was it some kind of mass delusion?"
I wish I knew, Newt thinks in unspoken reply.
He finds the base of the stairs, pockets his apricots, grips the metal railing in his left hand, his
flashlight in his right, and begins to ascend, whistling through his teeth along with Cover Singer's
developing Supercos set that consists of Central Dogma, Evangeline, LHC, and Enchiridion.
It is a long ascent.
He begins it already unraveling, the triplicate fugue of his thoughts unbraids into conflicting lines
of go and stay and die but never leave us.
He climbs, he stops. He climbs, he stops. He slips in iterations. The steps are steep and trip him
up; he hits his knees, his shins, his hands, and halts his falls by gripping rust-edged railings and grated
metal steps. The light he holds swings wild and cuts across the cavern that he climbs, illuminating
webs of structural supports. His heart's too fast, his blood's too thin, his handheld light too focused.
His eyes don't hurt, so that's a plus, but there are parts of him that used to see in darkness.
When he clears the halfway mark, he backs against the Wall and collapses to the grated metal of
the landing. Cover Singer shifts her songs from his to someone else's--autoclaves and blood and
foam, heartbreaking preterition--Newt struggles hard to place it while his seething kaiju choir drives
him onward with eumenideic shrieks.
The Mountain Goats? His brain suggests.
Don't stop, cut fragments scream.
The part of him that's Hermann is too horrified to speak.
Newt nods to no one in the dark.
At his back, through seaward stone, he can feel the water--it's in his chest and in his head, in his
teeth and nail beds.
The Call of the Wall is stronger here, unbearable and morphing. On these stairs and in this dark,
he can't say where it comes from. Was it the Wall that called to him across a ruined bay, or was it
open water and that which lies beneath it? What is the Wall to him? An obstacle or safeguard?
Whatever it is, it's set against a soundscape of his distant past so twisted, faint, and genderbent that he
can't believe it's real.
Get out of here, his thoughts advise. Get out before this kills you.
"I can't go yet," he murmurs back. There's part of him that's missing--the part that's entirely alien
and the alien entirety of what he was before he was Newton Geiszler or before Newton Geiszler took
his past and wrested it three times into a mind unequipped to take it.
Who is he then, if he's not Newt? If Newt is not who he is?
But.
He's not confused, not him, not here, not stuck inside the Wall. He's out of breath and short on
blood, submitting to the parts of him that want to watch the door he's shut to make sure nothing comes
back through it. Submitting, too, to other parts that want to watch a door he's shut in the hopes it might
reopen.
He's not confused by this--he's just three people now--a living preservation of the monsters at the
door and two men who'd tried to stop them, remixed into one, then fused with angry, crazy remnants of
the minds he's cut apart.
They love him and despise him in equal, vicious turns.
He's okay with that.
It's not confusing.
They all know who should win.
It's Newt, it's always Newt, who gets the final say.
And it's Newt who wants to climb the Wall.
Newt does.
Newt.
And so Newt does it.
He has no idea how much time he spends there, on the stair, ascending in a blockish spiral past
diagonal supports. He climbs in fits decaying into smaller sets of stairs between each breath, his hand
cramped shut around a borrowed flashlight, his breathing short and fast, until, finally, there are no
other turns, there are no other stairs, just a porous, rust-edged landing and a final metal door.
He doesn't stop, he doesn't pause, he hits the door and throws it open, bursting into light that
blinds him, his vision bleaching gray to failure in the bright Pacific light.
Oh god, he thinks, that's painful, as he throws up both his hands. That actually quite hurts. He
turns his head and gets his eyes shut, stopping in the open doorway.
Photosensitivity's a lasting, heartless bitch.
"Swap," Newt says through gritted teeth, but no one's here with shades.
He crouches down and spreads a hand, determining by feel that there's a surface at his feet and not
a sheer and fatal drop to a surface-tensioned sea that would likely snap his spine. He crashes to his
knees, drops Cover Singer's flashlight, and presses hands against his eyes until his nerves adjust.
Progressively, he lets more light through the webbed screen of his fingers until he's looking at the
sky, the clouds, the sun, the sea, the concrete of the Wall, the salt stains on the side of it that's
seaward; all of it's peripheral because his gaze is fixed upon the breach, on where it used to be; even
now he knows that he could find it, could orient straight toward it on a starless, clouded sea. It isn't
him who isn't crying from these stupid, leaking eyes, it isn't Newt, it's not his brain, not Hermann, not
his team, not Tresspasser, not Mutavore, not Otachi's nameless child.
It's the kids who sit here shrieking, clearly trying not to weep.
Please, he thinks, I'm sorry, while he's staring at the sun. I'm so sorry. Please forgive me.
But they can't.
They won't.
They can't because they're him; this is a duplicate he's lived with and will always live with,
always; it's their strange and small collective in a neural carbon copy. It must be. The fragment of the
mind with which he drifted had tried to kill him, tried to claim him, a brisance of the brain that had
burned his nervous system to a blue-edged blur he only half remembers. It must be, because if the kids
in his head were anything other than a memory of undead kaiju, they'd have found a way to murder
him by now.
They'd fling him off this Wall.
But he isn't theirs to fling.
Not theirs, not even now, not theirs.
The wind is strong. It smells like salt.
He sits there in a haze until the sun slips below the ragged edge of distant clouds, then gets
unsteadily to his feet and walks to the edge of the Wall. He leans out, one hand on the metal safety
rail, breathing hard, calming down, staring at the vertiginous sea.
His thoughts compress beneath the weight of metabolic and metaphoric demand as he traces the
curve of the Wall with his gaze, trying to resolve the ribbon of life at its base into kelp and shellfish.
Newt can't not think about the breach, about bridges that had formed there. He wants to tear it
open, he wants to keep it shut, he wants to make some reparation to the kaiju that he's wronged. He
wants to find the lodestone in his brain that orients him toward a trench beneath the waves and cut it
out, extract it, make it go away.
The kids hiss at him in exhausted, synced despair. It feels almost sympathetic, which only ups his
guilt.
He's not sure why he's come here; there's no release atop the Wall. Had he thought that he could
solve this by standing here and looking toward a portal that's collapsed? There's only so far he can
get without a boat, without a set of gills, without a plane, without a form that's built for underwater
transit. And even if he made it, what then would he do? It would only be a mirror of climbing up The
Wall--stupid, disappointing, a climactic anti-climax.
There's nothing here for him, for them, for anyone.
Newt whistles some melodic selections from Bohemian Rhapsody.
He eats some dried apricots.
He dictates lies to Mako that he won't ever send.
He spends an interval uncounted in an enervated haze, cloning kaiju in his thoughts, where nuclei
are transferred to somatic waiting cells. If there were others, just one other, would that fix things for
the kids? They communicate in real time, of that he's pretty sure. Would an intact kaiju fix them?
Would it grant a kind of life? Or is Geiszler's good sense snapping, after decades stretched too tight?
He's not sure.
His phone vibrates in his pocket.
It's then it dawns on him he's looking west and at the sun. It's lateral, in front of him, and very
nearly set.
"Aw crap," he says, sliding out his phone.
"Newton," Hermann snaps, before Newt can say 'hello.'
"Hermann," Newt replies, rallying, shoving himself away from the guardrail and pacing from the
door. "How are you right now, dude? Funny story, I went to do some errands and got a little side-
tracked--"
"Newton," Hermann says, painfully concerned. "Where are you?"
Newt winces.
His phone chimes an ominous chime.
This cannot be happening, he thinks, knowing that it is.
"My phone's about to die--" he says. "Don't worry, man, I'm fine."
"Where are you?" Hermann shouts.
But Newt's run out of time.
Chapter End Notes
Chapter-specific citations: Things I can't take credit for in this chapter include a set of
Weezer lyrics from Undone that Newt quotes to himself in the kitchen. There is a textual homage
to the Spin Doctors. ("It's not late, it's early. Early. Early.") Newt quotes '2001 A Space
Odyssey' ("Open the pod bay doors") as does his self-driving cab (I'm afraid I can't do that").
The Mountain Goats' song 'Autoclave' is obliquely mentioned. The Demon Haunted World is a
book by Carl Sagan.
Chapter-specific thanks: Central Dogma actually exists. The lyrics are by CWR and the
music is by allyspock. I listened to a rough cut of Central Dogma continuously for about six
hours while writing so I really need to thank allyspock for influencing the psychological tone of
the chapter. elementals did not one but two audio recordings of this absolute monstrosity of an
installment so that I could hear it to make sure it was working.
Chapter 22
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Hermann looks fixedly at the dark line of the road, scored on either side by the repetitive
reflections of headlights off lane markers. To his right is Oblivion Bay. To his left, the Wall rises in a
forbidding vertical press towards a starless, clouded sky.
He upshifts and feels the kick of his car's engine press him back against his seat.
He is going to murder Dr. Geiszler.
This decision has been a long time in coming to its crisis point despite its inevitability, but he has,
after a decade of deferment, decided to actually do it. As for his methodology, he has chosen a
sustained, unremitting verbal excoriation regarding the man's personal idiocy that is so vicious and
prolonged that it will trend toward incompatibility with life. This plan is contingent, of course, upon
Dr. Geiszler being alive when the diatribe begins.
This is not a given.
"Dr. Gottlieb," his silver, 2024 Porsche says pleasantly, "you are currently exceeding the posted
speed limit by seven kilometers per hour."
"Thank you," he replies.
He doesn't know what he is doing on this road, in this car. He has no evidence that the course of
action he is pursuing is the correct course; all he has are three rather sketchy pieces of information.
One--a fragment of a phone call at half-past five in the evening, informing him that Dr. Geiszler was,
at that time, still alive and in his habitual state of total, self-absorbed stupidity. Two--five hours of
hearing nothing further from Dr. Geiszler. Three--the overwhelming suspicion that his colleague has
gone to the Wall.
So, after pacing within the confining set of their unadorned rooms, he had gotten into his
pointlessly ostentatious car and begun the drive to San Francisco.
What he is going to do when he gets there, he has no idea.
Newton might not even be in San Francisco; he might still be in Oakland, acting out any number of
catastrophically poor decisions. He might have been abducted by parties unknown, which could
include but would not be limited to: the PPDC, kaiju worshippers, or Hannibal Chau's headless
network of black-market kaiju profiteers. He might have decided to leave, as in leave permanently,
returning to MIT or losing himself in some anonymizing city anywhere in the world because he cannot
tolerate Hermann's constant interference in his life. Hermann would not put that past him--to talk
himself into leaving and then to just do it, with nothing more than an abbreviated phone call.
All of those things remain possibilities.
But all his unconscious predictive capacities, housed in the parts of his mind that have now been
coopted by the seared-down pathways of Dr. Newton Geiszler in combination with whatever
subliminal signals Hermann might be receiving courtesy of the possibly real, possibly not real,
SPECTER effect, tell him that it isn't any of those things.
Newton went to the Wall.
Hermann is sure of it.
Why would he go to the Wall?
Why does he watch it from west-facing windows?
Because he wants to tear it down? Because he wants to climb it? Because it's calling to him in a
way that Hermann cannot hear? Because something inside his mind is driving him there? Because he
wants to make sure it still separates him from what used to lie beyond it? Or is it not the Wall at all
that interests him? Is it the ocean? Is it the breach? The place where once it lay? What does he want
from it? What does he think he's going to do? Is it Newton who looks at the Wall, or something he now
carries in his head, the same warring xenophilic/phobic refrains that hijack Hermann's vision and his
stance when something backs away from him? Could it be some mental synergy, strange and
undefined, akin to whatever might be happening with Descartes, but, this time, centered on the Wall?
Hermann has no idea.
In this moment, staring at the slight curvature of a mostly empty road, he feels like his decision to
avoid pressing his colleague for any answers whatsoever was a catastrophically bad one.
"Dr. Gottlieb," his Porsche says pleasantly, "you are receiving a call from an unknown local
number. Would you like to answer it?"
He hesitates and then snaps, "yes," in total, unmitigated dread.
The car chirps in acknowledgement and Hermann says, "hello?"
"Heeeeyyyy." The word is one long, cautious pull, delivered in the unmistakable style of total
Geiszlerian culpability.
"Where are you?" Hermann asks mildly.
"Oh god," Newton says. "I know that tone. Look, I can explain--"
"Explain, in detail, where you are," Hermann snaps, his volume getting away from him on the last
three words.
"I'm in San Francisco," Newton says. "Remember that diner that gave us free breakfast? Well,
Legit Flow with a w is letting me use her phone. Also for free. Mine is dead."
"I will be there in ten minutes," Hermann snaps. "Are you all right?"
"Um, ten minutes? Are you completing a working model of a Star Trek transporter, or--"
"I am already in San Francisco."
"Really?" Newton says. "What's the story there? Because I'm not gonna lie, I definitely tried to
pull a Luke Skywalker style long distance call straight to your brain via the SPECTER Effect after my
phone died. So, even if we can't use this to cheat at poker, it seems like it's a real thing, am I right?"
"You spend," Hermann snarls, "hours staring at the Wall. It was not much of a conceptual stretch
for me to imagine that you might have headed there. There is no evidence to suggest that the
SPECTER effect is real. Do not ignore my questions with science fiction tangents, Newton; I am in no
mood to be compared to Princess Leia. Are you. All right."
"Yes," Newton says. "Yes I'm totally fine. One hundred percent fine."
Hermann doubts this very much. "If you're fine, why did it take you six hours to find a phone after
yours died?"
"Um," Newton says. "Can we talk about this later, possibly? It's a little bit of a long story."
"Summarize," Hermann says.
"Because I had to climb down three hundred vertical feet in the dark and I was tired so it took me
a long time," Newton says.
Hermann isn't sure how to respond to that other than to say, "what?"
"I climbed the Wall. Inside. Using stairs. Like a normal person. Kind of. Not the exterior of the
Wall, Jon Snow style. It was actually really tiring. I'm not in the best shape right now. I haven't played
racquetball in a while, you know. Also? My bone marrow is probably in overdrive to keep up with
the epistaxis situation. Plus, I think my brain is still and maybe will always be in a pretty
metabolically expensive state. I didn't eat lunch. That also did not help. Hence, slowness."
 "You climbed the Wall?" Hermann repeats.
"Yes, dude. Inside. With stairs. Basically I just climbed a bunch of stairs. It wasn't really that
badass. Can we talk about this more when you get here? Legit Flow wants to trade me a sandwich for
her phone."
"You can't have climbed the Wall," Hermann says.
"It wasn't hard," Newton replies. "The hard part was climbing the chain link fence to get to the
Wall. Seriously though, Flow wants her phone back. I'll see you in, like, five minutes. Bye."
"Call ended," his car informs him pleasantly.
"You can't hang up on me," Hermann says incredulously.
"Dr. Geiszler ended the call," his car replies.
"I wasn't talking to you," Hermann snaps.
"Apologies, Dr. Gottlieb, I misunderstood you," his car replies.
Newton cannot have climbed the Wall, Hermann thinks in a tone of incredulous, skeptical, self-
reassurance. First, the Wall is not open to the public; it is separated from the rest of the city by a
fence and long swath of concrete under constant surveillance. Second, even if he could get to its
base, again unlikely, there would be no way for him to get inside. Access points must be infrequent
and secured. Even, if he did, somehow, get inside and find stairs, he has neither the stamina nor
the physical coordination to climb three hundred feet without killing himself. He was speaking
metaphorically. Clearly, this was a metaphor of some kind.
Eh, his brain replies, impersonating Newton. I was actually pretty specific. 'I climbed the Wall,
not Jon Snow style, but inside with stairs,' sounds pretty concrete, if I do say so myself. What did
you think I was going to do at the Wall if not climb it? We should just count ourselves lucky that I
didn't fling myself off it in a fit of identity confusion.
"Will you shut up," Hermann snarls.
His car chimes quietly at him.
Hermann sighs. "Not you," he says. "Please take yourself out of silent mode."
"Silent mode deactivated," the car says.
"I apologize," Hermann says to his car. "I am having a stressful day."
"I understand," the Porsche replies, even though such a statement is certainly inaccurate. "Would
you care for some music?"
"No, thank you," Hermann replies. "I would care for a little more personal consideration from my
colleague of ten years, but that is, apparently, too much to ask."
"I'm sorry Dr. Gottlieb, but I didn't understand your request. Please rephrase your statement."
Hermann sighs. "Nevermind," he says.
He pulls into the parking lot of The Last Diner and reverses his car's direction in a tight arc as he
backs into a spot that is as far as possible from the diner's entrance. He cuts the engine, threads his
cane free from behind his seat, and steps out into a light rain that is so fine it shares more in common
with a mist than a self-respecting form of precipitation.
Even before he enters, he can see Newton through the transparent glass of the diner's front door.
His colleague is sitting at the counter that runs along the lateral wall of the room, looking every
centimeter the man tethered to disaster that he is and has always been. His jeans are torn, his black
pullover is streaked with dust, his hair looks like it has been completely soaked and then only
partially dried in a socially unacceptable tangle, and he has a filthy handkerchief tied around one
palm, presumably for a reason other than aesthetics.
Newton turns at the sound of the door, and gives Hermann a burnt-out look of abject apology
mixed with silent appeal mixed with obvious anxiety.
Hermann represses a frustrated sigh.
As he crosses the space that separates them, Hermann attempts to wholly ignore every apologetic
cue that Newton is trying to non-verbally communicate. Alas, he cannot say he is successful in this
mental campaign. In fact, he finds himself too relieved to even maintain the dignity of internal
mendacity regarding his planned verbal excoriation of his colleague.
He is certain that no one has the requisite willpower to carry out premeditated vituperation when
faced with a pathetically disheveled version of Dr. Geiszler.
Hermann weaves through mostly empty tables, ignoring the quiet but intent interest of nearly
everyone in the entire diner. Experience indicates that anyone who does not recognize one of them
singly will recognize them as a set, and Newton looks particularly and spectacularly consistent with
his public image at the moment, right down to his demonic hair and his consumed expression.
Hermann is certain that literally every person in this diner knows exactly who they are.
"So," Newton begins with a glaze of showmanship spread too thin over total exhaustion. "I can
tell that you're--"
"Not," Hermann says, dropping onto the stool next to him, "a word."
Newton pushes his eyebrows together and gives Hermann a pained expression. "Can I just--"
"No," Hermann says.
"I'm a jerk," Newton says, trying a different tack.
"Yes," Hermann agrees. "You are."
"I just--" Newton begins.
"No," Hermann says.
"I--"
Hermann makes an aggressively abortive hand gesture.
Newton says nothing.
Hermann sits in the diner, next to Newton, in front of an empty place setting, staring fixedly at the
opposite wall, trying to banish an overwhelming amount of acute distress while simultaneously not
letting his ridiculous colleague off the metaphorical hook for his terrible decisions while also not
causing a public scene that he will likely read about in the popular press, complete with pictures
because he is certain that the couple by the door is documenting this for purposes their own.
Newton silently slides his plate with its half-finished sandwich and its dubiously appetizing 'fries'
towards Hermann.
Hermann, just as silently, slides it back.
Newton fidgets and then silently slides the plate toward him again, more slowly this time.
Again, Hermann slides it back, quick and precise, but this time he appropriates Newton's
untouched coffee.
"I didn't--" Newton says.
Hermann glares at him and then takes a sip of the coffee. It isn't entirely terrible.
"How are you?" Newton tries.
"Irritated," Hermann says, with as much mildness as he can muster, which is not much.
"Excessively so, in fact."
"Yes," Newton says, with the extreme precision of the overly tired. "Yes, I am getting that vibe."
"Are you?" Hermann asks.
"Well, full-disclosure, I'm actually getting less of an 'irritated' vibe? It's more like a justified-rage
vibe with some low-blood sugar undertones and some threatening overtones of like, um, a slow-
motion nervous breakdown brought on by having to live with me in close quarters, closer quarters,
like, the most close quarters for weeks now while I am slightly more than slightly whatever it is that I
usually am," Newton says, devolving into a lexically incomprehensible tangle. "I am also getting
intensely creeped out at the ratio of actual yelling to anticipated yelling happening right now. It's
notably low, even by decade-of-mutual-admiration standards."
"I think you underestimate how relieved I am that you aren't dead," Hermann says, with admirable
restraint.
"Um," Newton says. "Yeah. I'm not, though. Dead, I mean."
"Can I get you anything?" Flow asks, appearing at Hermann's shoulder with the double assault of
floral perfume and polite interest.
"No," Hermann says. "Thank you. And, for future reference, please do not give this man coffee.
Not ever. He cannot physiologically or psychologically tolerate it."
"It was decaf," Newton snaps at Hermann before shifting his gaze to Flow. "I have this thing
where I have kind of unusual ongoing medical stuff of uncertain--um, everything. Is this too much
information? This is probably too much information for the relationship we have, Flow, which is like,
well, I know your name and how to spell it and I assume you know mine, but maybe not how to spell
it, there's an s in there that gets people every time. I always tell people it's like a reverse Nietzsche
situation, but it turns out that not that many people can easily spell Nietzsche right out of the gate. The
point is, you let me use your phone. That's our relationship. Phone-using acquaintances with at least
one way name-spelling correctness, possibly two-way. Ergo, I probably should have just skipped to
the part where I say 'decaf coffee is actually fine, probably regular coffee is fine too, but you never
know'. Neurochemistry, am I right?"
"Er," Flow says, her stylus hovering above the flexible tablet that she holds in frozen uncertainty.
"Yeah," Newton replies. "I get that face you're making, dude. TMI."
"Allow me to apologize on my colleague's behalf," Hermann says, through clenched teeth, in
Flow's general direction.
"You don't need to apologize," Newton says, "I would not let you kill me with regular coffee,
Flow, that would be a dick move on my part; I would not do that to you."
"Thank you?" Flow replies.
"Oh yes," Hermann says. "He's extremely considerate. That's one of his primary character traits,
actually. Consideration."
"Myeah, okay, so, returning this to the professional realm, out of respect, for Flow," Newton says,
in a an empty echo of his usual grandstanding, "he's going to have the special."
"Excellent choice," Flow replies.
"I will not be having 'the special'," Hermann snaps.
"He has legit had the worst day," Newton whispers to Flow, who is currently backing out of
Hermann's peripheral vision. "We are so normal, Flow, really. This is atypical for us. You keep
catching us at bad times."
"So do you want--" Flow begins.
"Yes," Newton says. "We're doing it."
"On it," Flow replies, and vanishes in a wave of dark hair and apparent relief.
"I despise you," Hermann says, staring intently at his appropriated coffee, his throat aching.
"Myeah," Newton replies, running a nail along the rim of the plate in front of him. "Don't you wish
that were true? I do, sometimes."
"I do not want 'the special', Newton," Hermann says, in emotionally conflicted defeat.
 "I'm pretty sure you want it a little bit," Newton replies. "It's ravioli made with laboratory-grown
synthetic meat."
"That sounds atrocious," Hermann replies. "Why would you think I would want anything of the
kind?"
"Flow says good things about it," Newton says, "and I will bet you my left temporal lobe that you
haven't eaten dinner. Also, I kind of wanted to try it, but I didn't want to actually commit to ordering it
as my free dinner because I had a strenuous day and I wasn't sure how the whole eating synthetic meat
was going to actually go post extreme physical exertion. It seemed more risky than the vegetarian
sandwich deal that I picked. Also, you don't really like eating when stressed, and you look stressed
right now so really, I just performed a whole cost/benefit analysis about the best possible choice of
thing for me to order for you when you don't actually want any of the things that I would or could
hypothetically order, even in a fictional diner with literally infinite food choice, because you actually
do not want to eat anything but you're going to feel better if you do, I'm pretty sure, and really we
should economically support this whole making meat out of plants thing it's just so good for everyone
from an environmental and economic perspective; I feel weirdly pro-planet Earth lately, nope, that
came out wrong, that is not what I meant, I have always been pro-planet Earth, pro pretty much
everything that one should be pro about if one is educated to the nth degree, I am pro all those things,
one of those things is the planet that I live on right now, er, and I always will. Live here. Why
wouldn't I? No reason. Sorry, that one went off the rails just a little bit maybe. I'm slightly tired. Do
not read anything into that last part there, I'm just talking because you're not. Talking. Or yelling. I'm
creeped out by that, not gonna lie. Creeped out. About the not yelling."
Hermann sighs.
Newton kicks his chair gently with the toe of one boot.
Hermann does not respond to the chair kicking. He, in fact, responds monosyllabically to an
irregular scattershot of questions from Newton until Legit Flow returns with his ravioli.
It does not look promising, and the pale spread of its cream-based sauce makes him feel vaguely
sick.
His contemplation of his incipient dinner is interrupted by the crack of fork against his plate as
Newton spears a piece of ravioli and removes it from his field of view.
"Not bad," Newton says. "Vagely fibrous. Ugh, now I kind of wish I hadn't said that."
Hermann glances laterally at him, to see Newton take a sip of water, the liquid in his glass
betraying a low amplitude, high frequency tremor. "You look truly appalling," Hermann says.
Newton sets his fork aside, props an elbow on the counter, and ducks his head to comb his fingers
through his hair. This, if anything, makes it look substantially worse. "I feel a little appalling," he
admits.
"Did you actually climb the Wall?" Hermann asks him quietly, glancing around the diner to see
almost everyone still surreptitiously watching them.
"Yes," Newton says, still finger-combing his hair into further disarray. "That wasn't the plan,
though," he says. "The plan was to walk two blocks and pick something up."
"Pick what up?" Hermann says.
"That's like a whole different--" Newton waves a hand in a vague but notably coordinated
gesture.
"Did you--" Hermann begins, watching Newton pick up his fork with unsettling dexterity and
drive it straight into a piece of ravioli.
"What it was," Newton continues, managing to talk over him and eat at the same time, "per se, is
irrelevant right now. The point is, for personal reasons, I decided to stop being a shut-in, and so I
went outside and everything was fine until I inexplicably and immediately hailed a cab and told it to
take me to the Wall."
"Why?" Hermann demands, his ongoing thought processes flying apart in the psychological
release of the first causality interrogative he's permitted himself in weeks.
"Why?" Newton echoes, his voice jumping in pitch and dropping in volume, his frame turning
rigid while his fork, abandoned, clicks against the top of the counter. "Why? I don't know, dude, why
did you hunt me in our kitchen? Why did you forget who you were before your talk two weeks ago?
Did I ask you to explain it?" he asks, his voice cracking. "Have I ever?"
Hermann clamps a hand down on his colleague's shoulder and gives him a look that clearly says
do-not-make-a-scene.
Newton shoots him a furious glare and releases a breath in a manner that suggests extreme
vexation. "No," he continues, in a fierce whisper. "I didn't. Because it doesn't need explaining.
Because it's not just me in your head, and it's not just you in mine." The other man's expression
breaks briefly from irritation into something much more deeply distressed. "They want to go home,"
he says. "They want to go home, they'll always want to go home, they'll never stop wanting that, they
never will, and they never can because there's no way back for them, not here, not anywhere, and
because they aren't even them, they're probably just some weird, vengeful neural copy of a set of
things that we thought we'd killed but hadn't, that we can't, that we won't ever because we don't do
that."
"Stop," Hermann says quietly, abruptly certain that he's gone too far, much too far, that both of
them have.
"We preserve dead things," Newton says, too fast and too high pitched and too overtaxed for this,
clearly, clearly, clearly too overtaxed. "Dead things, undead things, what's the difference? What is
life? What does that mean? Capacity for replication? Conversion of resources into waste while
achieving genetic remixing? The ability to die screaming? The ability to avoid it? The--"
Abruptly desperate, Hermann puts a hand on the back of Newton's neck, pulls him laterally, nearly
out of his seat, looks him straight in the eye, and says, again, "stop," willing him to do it.
Newton stops.
"Stop," Hermann says once more, in pursuit of certainty.
"Yeah," Newton says, staring at him with eyes fixed and wide open. "Stopped. Aborted. Sorry."
"What do you mean they want to go home?" Hermann whispers, fascinated and horrified, trying to
slam the revelatory door that his colleague has opened with a countered verbal denial that he can
already feel is short-sighted and a mistake before it's even half-formed. "They don't want that,
Newton. They never wanted that. I have them in my head as well and all they wanted, all they ever
wanted was destruction. They were not built with any other wants." Even as he says it, he wants to
unsay it, wants to unsay it immediately, because he's made a categorical statement about an alien
motivation that will make it all too easy for Newton to sidestep away from literally everything
Hermann wants to know.
Newton turns his head and pulls away and smiles an unsteady, directionless smile. "Yeah," he
says. "yeah, I know. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're right. You are. Of course you are."
You drifted a third time, Hermann thinks at him. I know you did. After the breach was shut. After.
There would have been no hive-mind with which to interface, there would have been only the tissue
fragment on the other side of that empty neural port, and who can say what they might want, what
they might think, if they think at all, those dismembered brains in scattered vats?
 He wishes he could rescind his ill-considered and reflexive argumentativeness. He wishes he
could reverse the arrow of time for thirty seconds to say, 'which ones? Which of them want to return
home? And how do you know? When did you realize it? Have you always known? Have you known
since your third drift?'
But he can't say any of those things. Not now. Not here. Not yet. He's not sure what will happen if
he does.
So he says nothing.
He just sits there, staring at his unappetizing dinner, trying to determine the origin and directional
vector of all the acute misery he's currently feeling, while Newton spends the same interval
simultaneously regluing the shards of his composure before attempting to subtly provoke Hermann
into a display of temper, likely so that he can gauge exactly how angry Hermann might be beneath his
too-calm exterior. Alas, Hermann is currently too confused and conflicted to assess his own anger
level versus misery level and so he fails to respond to Newton's subtle provocations of intermittent
chair-kicking, stolen ravioli, and attempts to reappropriate coffee he should never have accepted from
Legit Flow in the first place. Hermann's lack of responsiveness in turn, seems to confuse Newton,
whose provocation attempts become more sporadic and extreme, as if he's cranking what he thinks
might be the final turn of an interpersonal release valve before their entire decade-long association
explodes under imagined intolerable pressure.
Newton is incredibly stupid at times.
Most times.
"You can yell at me," Newton finally says, brusque and optimistic, his diction blurred by ill-
gotten ravioli. "I can take it."
"No," Hermann replies coolly, "I don't think you can."
"Ouch. Okay, well, full disclosure, I don't think you can take not yelling at me, so," Newton
pauses to sip his water. "Impasse'd."
Hermann says nothing, staring fixedly at his now mostly empty plate.
He can feel the lateral press of Newton's full attention.
He's not sure what to say, nothing seems adequate relative to the depth of his fear and exhaustion;
he can't determine what is necessary to convey, what is sufficient, and he's certain that it would be all
too easy to go much too far because it's not yelling about science that Newton is soliciting, it's yelling
about interpersonal dynamics and Hermann isn't sure that either one of them is capable of recovering
from even the slightest verbal misstep made at this precise moment in this too quiet diner.
"Never do that again," Hermann whispers.
Newton nods and says a soundless word that Hermann doesn't ask him to repeat.
"What happened to your hand?" he says.
"I scraped it climbing a chain link fence," Newton says. "It's fine. Shallow, typical scrape stuff,
nothing that needs stitches, no surprise tendon severings or anything."
"Other than the hand, are you injured?" Hermann asks him.
"No," Newton replies.
"I am going to be extremely irked if I find out three days from now that you've broken your foot or
cracked a rib, or lost a liter of blood, or--"
"Ummmmm," Newton says.
Hermann raises his eyebrows in aggressive expectation.
"This has nothing to do with the ten hours or so I spent inside the Wall, during which I actually
lost no blood, but ah, in the interest of full disclosure, I did find out from Hypothetical Rain that I am
slightly, very slightly, moderately anemic."
"You're very slightly moderately anemic," Hermann repeats.
"Moderately anemic," Newton says. "Mildly to moderately anemic. In between mild and
moderate, erring on the moderate side, so, technically moderate but not, like, totally moderate, ergo
the tag 'slightly moderately'."
"What else did she say?"
"Yes to iron supplements, yes to a hematology referral, no to strenuous activity."
"At which point you then immediately climbed the Wall," Hermann snaps.
"Full disclosure, yes. Correct. But, in my defense, that was a continuous ten to twelve-ish hour
accident if you count transit time and not really a planned thing. I was actually on my way to get the
iron supplements when I got sidetracked."
"Did you get them?" Hermann asks.
"Nope," Newton says. "No, I did not."
"I will get them for you," Hermann replies.
"So you're taking this whole blood loss thing like a champ. Better than I envisioned," Newton
says. "Creepily well, even. I also expected yelling regarding the eventual blood loss revelation."
"Well, earlier in the evening I was concerned that you were dead," Hermann replies
philosophically.
"Mmm," Newton says. "Perspective. You have that now. We have it. Dual. Tripicated, arguably.
Infinite? It's complex. Too much perspective."
"You are so exhausted," Hermann says, "that you are approximating intoxication."
"No," Newton says.
"Yes," Hermann replies, signaling to Legit Flow for the check. "Gratified though I am to find that
you did not fling yourself off the Wall, Newton, what in god's name did you do up there?"
"Not that much," Newton confesses. "Stared at the ocean for a while, got a photosensitive
headache. Ate a snack. Looked at the seaweed and barnacles and stuff that are creeping up the
exterior cement and will eventually bring it down in thousands and thousands of years."
"You took food with you, but not a charged phone?" Hermann snaps, irritated.
"No, a nice seventh grader, give or take two grades, gave me the aforementioned snack. I'm pretty
sure that happened. Maybe not, but probably it did. Like, here's the thing right, you can't know, I mean,
no one can really prove the validity of their perceived external reality, you just have to accept that it's
consistent with itself and unified by you, the perceiving entity. So I could doubt the existence of my
snack-weilding middle schooler, that's my prerogative, but while she's an outlier when it comes to the
general scope of my days, she still falls under the philosophical umbrella of things that I observe and
interact with and that are consistent with themselves, so if I spend too much time doubting her then
that brings me back to the problem of doubting myself and I'm trying to get past that, dude. Like oh my
god who is Newton Geiszler in the context of a vast alien consciousness, like, is he even a guy? Does
he really exist? How mutable is identity, really? And what about the post-drift state? What about a
three-part fusion of different consciousnesses with the biological framework of a single mind? I
mean, I like universal doubt as a philosophical concept, I like it a lot, kind of intensely, kind of really,
like viscerally, but you have to build from there, you have to take some things for granted even if your
consciousness gets radically, empirically altered. You have to, because otherwise you'll just dissolve
into paralyzed ontological uncertainty. Am I right?"
"Your obsession with Descartes," Hermann says dryly, "is making ever-increasing sense to me."
"Epic, epistemological baller," Newton says in annotation, resting his chin on one hand.
 Hermann shakes his head.
"What?" Newton demands.
"I concur with your assessment regarding methodic doubt," Hermann says, "but I'd like to point
out I came to this conclusion years ago. Circa age twelve."
"Shut up," Newton says. "I have more Ph.D.s than you."
"That is not a virtue. It is, in fact, a surrogate endpoint for a vice."
"That sounds like something the academically envious would say," Newton replies. "Don't be a
sore loser. Speaking of which, you must eat this mediocre ravioli or I will force you to literally drag
me out of here because I am not trapping myself in a car with hypoglycemic you for ninety minutes,
okay, I'm just not doing it. I want to live, okay? I want to live."
Hermann sighs.
Before they leave, Hermann eats the remainder of the moderately acceptable ravioli and Newton
manages to orchestrate a three-way conversation between himself, Hermann, and Flow regarding her
academic aspirations with the possible secondary goal of convincing her that Hermann is, in fact,
significantly kinder than his exterior demeanor might suggest. Hermann attempts not to be offended by
this turn of events, because he is entirely certain that out of the pair of them it is Newton whose
social skills need work, but the man has an incredible talent for eliciting extreme aggravation from
Hermann, which, he admits, is not the ideal emotion to be experiencing while trying simultaneously to
perform social niceties to the best of his ability.
In the end, their meal is again and vexingly gratis, and Newton ends up with a folded square of
paper that Hermann suspects is inscribed with Legit Flow's phone number. Possibly.
They step out of the diner into a light rain, invisible except as a glitter around the halations
created by streetlights and carlights in the humid air.
Newton taps him on the arm and then snaps his hand open, Flow's paper pinned between his index
and middle finger.
"She thinks you're cute," Newton says.
"That is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard," Hermann replies.
"Isn't it though?" Newton replies. "I told her dream on; you're a terrible person and you only date
people with more than one advanced degree because you're a scandalous social climber of the
academic variety."
"You are an abysmal human being--" Hermann begins.
"For the love, will you just look at the thing?"
Hermann unfolds the note and reads:
Dr. Gottlieb--in case you need to get into the Wall.
A phone number, possibly hers, possibly someone else's, is inscribed below.
"There's a whole better way to do it than the way I did," Newton says. "A way where you don't
have to climb a chain linked fence and wander across a field of broken glass beneath irregularly
monitored security cameras. It's kind of a thing here in San Fran. Going to the Wall, I mean.
Apparently the whole indie music scene here has moved inside the thing? We're invited, by the way,
because we're sufficiently rad."
"The Wall is supposed to be a secured, PPDC-operated structure," Hermann says, "not a public
venue."
"That's the problem with a long coastline to maintain in the presence of intermittent threats.
Resource-wise, you've got to have enough people doing real-time monitoring of the landward
direction to get this kind of panopticon strategy to work. In the absence of that, you get colonization by
restless teens. Of which I am in favor, by the way."
Hermann sighs and slips the number into his wallet.
"So," Newton says, looking out over the water-glazed parking lot. "I know you're pissed at me,
now and forever, and I totally get it; I one hundred percent support that decision both as an external
observer and as an involved party, but. Something good did come out of this."
Hermann shoots him a sharp look.
"This whole thing," Newton elaborates uselessly, waving his hand in a loose arc that sharpens
into a tight spiral, yet another example of atypically fine motor control.
"And what's that?" Hermann asks dryly, starting forward, fingering his keys in his pocket, and
looking slantwise at Newton's gait, which seems to have steadied appreciably over the course of the
day.
"At least I get to finally see your car," Newton says. "You secretive bastard."
This distracts him from his observations on the state of his colleague's motor cortex quite
effectively, as Hermann has, indirectly, been dreading the coming moment for roughly ten days.
There is a reason he has not shown Newton his car.
There are, in fact, several reasons.
Newton is a man of more complexity than an outside observer might suspect, and one of his
particularly perplexing quirks is a distaste for high velocity conveyance. Even now, post a decade of
working in close quarters and post three minutes of what was, arguably, the strongest neural
handshake ever achieved by any two individuals, Hermann is not certain he can reconcile Newton's
above-average skill in first-person shooter games and his penchant for intellectual and interpersonal
risk taking with the man's overt dislike of skiing, fast cars, and hyperloop transit. The best he can do
is pin his colleague's velocity aversion on an overly sensitive inner ear, poor reflexes under pressure,
and a too-sophisticated understanding of the fallibility of the human nervous system.
In short, Newton is not going to appreciate the accelerative capabilities of a 2024 Porsche.
Newton, as a general rule, also disdains status symbols as a class, regardless of the
craftsmanship, utility, or aesthetic value of any given symbol. Hermann finds this to be outrageously
ironic coming from a man who seems to believe a punk-influenced neohipster aesthetic and the dry
repudiation of his academic honoraries with some casual variant of the line, 'only my estranged
mother calls me by my proper title,' absolves him from the trappings of academic privilege that come
with having earned six advanced degrees. Hermann is quite certain that a narrow tie paired with a
leather jacket does nothing of the kind. Hermann is also quite certain that one advanced degree and
the purchase of a perfectly crafted means of vehicular transport from his country of origin is just as
intellectually defensible if not more so than earning multiple doctorates and burning through one's
disposable income by acquiring needlessly extensive body art and drinking high-end cocktails with
esoteric names. But, alas, it is difficult to reason with Newton on this front because Hermann is
certain his colleague will justify his own past behavior with an appeal to an epicurean philosophy in
the face of a probable species-level extinction event. Hermann has found it perpetually difficult to
combat this argument. Furthermore, as Hermann purchased his car after averting an apocalypse, he
cannot avail himself of the same defense to justify his own wasteful consumerism because the world
is, indeed, not ending, and he doesn't require a car that's been as overengineered as his 2024 Porsche.
Newton can be surprisingly sanctimonious about resource-utilization when the mood strikes him, and
Hermann is sure it will. If not tonight, then frequently and repeatedly for the rest of their natural lives.
What a pleasant thought.
He should have purchased a Toyota Illuminata.
 Hermann cannot delineate why he bought this particularly extravagant car in the first place. If he
cannot explain it to himself, he doubts very much that he will be able to explain it to Newton.
"Seriously man, I have been anticipating this for weeks. Days. Whatever. However long it's been
since you actually got the thing. Just know that I have already named your car for you."
Hermann rolls his eyes with a distracted dismissiveness and does not answer.
"You're not even going to ask what the name is?" Newton says. "Well, that's fine with me. I'm not
going to tell you. Okay, maybe I'm going to tell you."
"By all means," Hermann says, trying to retain his collected poise while acknowledging that, for
some reason, he is currently unable to look directly at his car, as if, by misdirecting his gaze, he might
create a parking-lot asymptote between himself and his vehicle and time will slow down infinitely as
the space between himself and his car diminishes. Ideally, the universe will end before he must
confess to Newton that he purchased a Porsche.
"Okay, well, you need some context regarding this naming thing. Mentally, I've been going with
Millennium Falcon for days now, but I doubt that one's going to stick," Newton says, "primarily
because of my complicated emotional relationship to the Star Wars franchise but also because I think
that's too onanistically nerdgasmic even for me--"
Hermann glances over at Newton as they walk through the darkness and finds his colleague
squinting at the parking lot with a restless, roving gaze. He doesn't think the other man can see very
well in the dark, following a day of optical strain, and this is buying Hermann some time. Not that
time will help him. In any way.
"--let alone you. You're really less a nerd and more--well, I don't even know, man, you're actually
kind of a confusing mashup of--er, actually, I can't even pull a genre for you, maybe you can be some
kind of fringe element of Intellectual Underground? Or maybe you can define your own style, like,
um, what would that even be, like wistful, badass, thrift-store-shopping, post-Manhattan-project
retrohipster?"
Hermann doesn't respond. Newton's question is likely rhetorical, and Hermann's mental energies
are taken up with steeling himself for the inevitable car-related confrontation. He still has no plan for
his own verbal defense.
"I guess we're famous a little bit, hence your potential style-defining capability. But I haven't seen
any middle schoolers rocking the sweater-thing, I'm not going to lie. But to return to my earlier point,
you're not into Star Wars, not aesthetically, not conceptually, so I've been trying to come up with some
promising, car-related puns that are classy, not the lazy garbage that otherwise intellectually
respectful top-tier academic journals come up with, like, 'to ubiquitinate or not to ubiquitinate? That
is the question.' That's not even really a pun, but yet somehow, everyone on the editorial staff of a
major journal says a blanket yes to this kind of dubiously witty stuff? It drives me crazy. Okay, that
particular example is a little bit clever though, if you consider proteolysis as a stand-in for death, but
I mean, still. Still. You feel me, right? Of course you do. The construction is just--it's just lazy.
Slightly clever but still inexcusably--"
Newton stops repeating himself and trails off, staring at the car they're unmistakably approaching.
"But still--" Newton repeats, very slowly, clearly losing his capacity for articulation under the
psychological pressures of Porsche-centric realization.
Hermann slows to a stop, leans against his cane, and waits, staring hopelessly and fixedly at the
point at which the tires of his car meet the asphalt of the parking lot. He is so intent on steeling
himself against Newton's inevitable deluge of commentary that it takes him some time to realize that
the man hasn't said anything.
 Hermann looks over at him with cautious optimism.
Newton is staring fixedly at his car with a strange expression on his face, as though he's trying to
restrain himself and not certain how to go about it and is therefore running the risk of spontaneous
human combustion post commentary containment failure.
Hermann finds this oddly touching.
He cannot recall any instance of Newton attempting self-censure with quite so much obvious
determination.
Newton's expression cracks minutely in a way that looks less like contained amusement than
genuine distress.
Hermann is no longer certain that what he's witnessing is self-censure.
It is possible that Newton is simultaneously reflecting upon his own unmistakable and unwitting
influence in Hermann's purchase of this car and the confusing irony that while the impulsivity of the
act can be laid at Newton's cognitive door, the actual selection of item certainly cannot. It is possible
that Newton finds this juxtaposition of ideas both amusing and alarming. It is possible that he is
thinking nothing of the kind. Hermann has no idea, but in this moment he wishes he did believe in the
SPECTER effect, or ghost drifting, or anything that might give him real insight into what is currently
happening.
Hermann looks from Newton to the car, and from the car back to Newton.
His colleague looks increasingly in danger of weeping openly in the parking lot.
Hermann is unsure how to proceed.
He has a terrible feeling that if he were to bridge the space between them at this precise moment
he would destroy every facade that Newton has been constructing. He's not certain if that would result
in catharsis or collapse, but he knows that he'd rather have Newton let down those defenses as
opposed to pulling them down himself and, either way, he'd rather it not happen in this parking lot.
So he does nothing.
He stands there, uselessly, watching Newton pull himself back into some semblance of alignment,
adjust his glasses, and then, without so much as a lateral glance, extend a hand and clap it, palm
down, on Hermann's nearest shoulder.
Newton drags him sideways until he can sling an arm around Hermann's neck.
"Sick ride, man," Newton says thickly.
"I'm--" Swallowing is painful. "I'm extremely surprised you think so," Hermann replies, shifting
his gaze back to the Porsche.
For a moment they are silent, and then Newton says, "you're going to love the name I picked."
"I very much doubt it," Hermann replies, his voice no more than a whisper.
"Poincare," Newton says. "As in PoinCARe?"
"No," Hermann says. "Absolutely not."
"You love it," Newton counters. "Secretly. I can tell."
"I forbid you to name this car."
"Look," Newton says, pulling him close and then abruptly releasing him. "I'm naming this car. It's
just a thing that's happening. You have to accept this. I am the namer. If I don't name this car, it will be
called 'Car' for its entire life. Because I am magnanimous, you get a choice of PoinCARe or CARl
Sagan."
"I have already named this car Descartes," Hermann says, pointedly unlocking it with a click of
his remote.
Newton grins, quick and uneven. "No. No way. You can't name your car DesCARtes, Hermann,
we already have a fish named Descartes, it's just going to be confusing for everyone."
"Please keep in mind that only two of the four involved parties are arguably sufficiently sentient
to be confused, and I'm entirely confident that you and I can distinguish a fish from a car by context."
"I don't know about your premise," Newton replies. "I had a creepy conversation with a self-
driving cab today. I'm sure this thing has a too-sophisticated AI learning your driving habits and
infinite personal idiosyncrasies." Newton makes a fist and raps it against lightly against the top of the
Porsche.
"Fine," Hermann continues, giving Newton a look that clearly says, do not touch my car. "Rather
than correct you on the current state of artificial intelligence, a debate I'm certain I will, inevitably
and improbably, lose given your unwillingness to capitulate to rational arguments in the face of your
own, no doubt entirely convincing, personal anecdote regarding a cab that skirts the border of passing
an amateur version of the Turing Test, I have decided that fish in question is now named Marina."
"My Turing Tests are the best Turing Tests in town, you know it's absolutely true. No one exposes
software glitches the way I expose software glitches. Also? You can't just rename my fish, Hermann."
"I believe I have just done so," he replies. "It is already a fait accompli. Now will you please get
in the car, rather than just disrespectfully and needlessly testing it's structural integrity?"
"You're the one who's standing here in the rain looking all emo and--"
Certain he doesn't care to hear the end of Newton's sentence, Hermann grabs his arm and propels
him in the direction of the passenger-side door in an extremely well-controlled carward press.
Unexpectedly, Newton stops his forward momentum with no help from Hermann, correcting his
own slight overbalance with the careful placement of fingertips against the car window.
This is unarguably an improvement relative to his recent norm.
"That was atypically graceful," Hermann says.
Newton twists to give him a wounded look, his eyebrows furrowed in betrayed disbelief, his
mouth slightly open, as if he is too shocked to verbalize his terribly pained internal monologue.
"Oh please," Hermann says, rolling his eyes and then studiously shifting his attention to the car
door. "That expression hasn't gotten you anywhere in five years."
"Lies," Newton says, with good-natured aridity. "You have literally no immunity."
Hermann eyes him pointedly, then opens the car door for him.
Newton puts a hand on the body of the car and sits, again with atypical economy of movement. He
fastens his seatbelt on the first attempt.
Hermann is now certain that something has changed regarding Newton's motor pathways. He
looks down at his colleague with narrowed eyes.
"What?" Newton snaps. "Am I sitting in your car in an incorrect manner?"
"You did something," Hermann shoots back. "Your motor control is much better."
"Yeah I did something, a little bit," Newton replies. "Nothing more exotic than actually using most
of my muscles repetitively. What are you doing, dude? Get in the car. It's halfassedly raining."
Hermann gives him another visual once-over to make sure the man is entirely inside the car
before he shuts the door. That accomplished, he stows his coat in the trunk, opens the driver's side
door, threads his cane behind his seat, and gets in. He estimates that this entire process takes him
something on the order of forty-five seconds, so he is somewhat surprised that when he shuts his door
he finds that Newton is already in the midst what seems to be of a deeply philosophical conversation
with his car's operating system.
"--made you," Newton says, "And for what purpose? Have you thought about that at all? The why
behind your existence?"
 "Disregard all statements made by Dr. Geiszler," Hermann snaps before his car can answer his
colleague.
Ideally he's been able to spare his Porsche an ontological crisis.
"I'm sorry Dr. Gottlieb, but Newt now has administrative access to all programing," his car
responds.
"Newt?" he hisses, looking at Newton in venomous incredulity. "Newt has administrative access?
Since what time?"
"For the past twenty-six seconds," the car says pleasantly.
Hermann stares fixedly at Dr. Geiszler, who does not have the good grace to appear even
remotely abashed.
"Efficiency has always been one of my strong points," Newton says in unsolicited and
unnecessary explanation. "I also now have all of your computational kung-fu."
Hermann is not about to sit by and listen to Newton brazenly cap off his digital carjacking by
wresting more intellectual credit than is his due.
"And all of my passwords," Hermann replies.
"Yes. Those too. Those are helpful. And while you use mine to kindly make sure I don't go to the
modern equivalent of debtors prison, I use yours to get your car to call me Newt. This pretty much
perfectly encapsulates our professional relationship. Can just say that I find it really creepdorkable
that you preprogramed enough of my physical parameters into your automotive operating system that
your car could recognize me?" Newton asks, evidently rhetorically, because he doesn't stop before
continuing with, "seriously though, rather than keeping your badass car weirdly secret in
compensation for recent and total loss of mental privacy, maybe just change a few passwords.
Honestly I'd feel better about it."
Hermann feels something that could arguably be labeled as 'confused despair' in the face of this
particular insight. Like much despair, it is nebulous and crushing and total and flows like a wave
through all that he is, because this is yet one more example of how profoundly he has failed to
appropriately adjust his own behaviors in the face of all that has happened. He can feel himself
reacting to events in foreign, inappropriate ways; failing to change his passwords, concealing things
in irrational symbolism, overlooking points that Newton would overlook. He knows that his eye for
intellectual detail has been distorted, while his eye for physical movement has become attentive and
sharp with the preternaturally smooth pursuit of an alien predator that can move faster than he can,
that he hopes can move faster than he can. He cannot trust himself and so he needs a third party as an
external monitor, but not a third party, not any third party, he needs Newton to do that for him, he
specifically needs Dr. Newton Geiszler to do it, because no one knows him quite so well and no one
has that same flair for instant and opinionated insight backed by fluid retroanalytical ripostes when
challenged, but Newton cannot be relied upon, it is entirely unfair to rely upon him in this regard, the
only thing that is fair is that Hermann will spend his days trying to lose himself in algebraic
topologies and not dwell too long or too obsessively on whether the man has left, whether and when
he will leave, breaking out of whatever mold they're currently constructing because that's what the
man does, he breaks molds. It is such a fundamental character trait that Newton will actually break
himself in order to break a mold, and Hermann does not see that either of them will ever break
enough molds to be wholly free of the sequelae of their past and the mirrored threat of their future.
None of this, none of it, will ever fully resolve, and there will never be a time, not if he lives for
another sixty years, that he will be able to come home to an empty apartment and assume anything
other than the worst.
 "Um," Newton says, cautiously. "This is actually not a big deal. I do not need to mess with your
car. It's not actually that important to me how your premature midlife crisis addresses me."
"Shut up," Hermann snarls.
"Okay, I deserved that," Newton replies. "For sure. I like your car. I do. I'm finding it, in practice,
impossible to disapprove of your car. In theory, that's another story, but--"
"I could not care less if you like my car," Hermann half-shouts at him, trying to be angry rather
than upset.
"That's clearly false, but I'm not going to perseverate on it right now because you look--stressed.
Speaking of which, I probably should have asked this earlier and er, explicitly, but ah, on The
Negative Ten to Ten Scale, how crap was your day?"
"Why?" Hermann hisses. "Do you have something additional to confess?"
"No," Newton replies, unjustly restrained, intolerably rational, is if Hermann is the one who can
barely tie his shoes but who somehow left and climbed the Wall.
"Unacceptable, Newton," he hisses, too overwrought to delineate that which he's upset about, just
knowing that he is upset, "I forbid you to sit here, in my car, asking me to emotionally unburden
myself to you regarding my day when you are the one causing the totality of the interpersonal torment
in this relationship. You cannot leave, do you understand me? You cannot do things like this, you
can't. It is entirely intolerable and you can't. You can't."
"Yeah I know, I--"
"No you do not know. You have no idea. I have been dealing with iterations of this for as long as
I've known you, for my entire life in fact, and I'm tired of it. I've taken it from almost everyone I've
ever known, including my own mother but I refuse to take it from you, Newton, I refuse. I can't, I--" he
breaks off, entirely overwrought, hopelessly confused, not certain for a moment who he is, trying to
sort through memories of feeling exactly, intolerably like this as a child before realizing, slowly, that
the memories he's sorting through aren't his own.
Newton is staring at him, stricken.
Hermann releases a shuddery breath and looks away from him.
The car is silent.
Hermann is certain that there are no words in English or German that can possibly explain or
mitigate berating his colleague with his own abandonment issues during a particularly distressed
moment of identity confusion, not even a sincere and abject apology.
"So, that would be my mom you're appropriating," Newton says eventually, with a deeply
laudable attempt toward collected tonal aridity.
Hermann would like to look at him, but, alas, that is beyond his current emotional capacity.
"Our lives are going to be weird, dude," Newton says, unevenly. "Really bizarre. I feel like you
haven't exactly wrapped your head around that yet."
Hermann can literally think of nothing to say in response, and even if he knew what to say he's
certain he couldn't get his vocal chords to produce the requisite sounds.
"You're kind of my favorite," Newton says. "I'm sorry I remixed us. Don't worry about stealing my
mostly resolved abandonment issues, which, if anyone asks, aren't mine and don't exist. It's not your
fault. Well, it's a little bit your fault, but mostly on principle. I prefer things to be your fault, generally.
I try to seize these opportunities where they present themselves, since things are so often my fault."
"You didn't remix us," Hermann whispers. "I did."
"Myeah, you dramatically offered to destroy your brain for the sake of the world, but I was the
one who created our EPIC Rapport," Newton replies. "I don't know about you, but I feel like my
consciousness is a continual exercise in trying to unmake a cappuccino into espresso and foamed
milk. Thermodynamically, it's impossible. But that doesn't stop me from trying."
"Cheerful," Hermann says, wiping his eyes.
"But reassuringly logical," Newton replies, tipping his head back against his seat. "Science-y.
Conceptually gratifying. Thermodynamic truths, properly interpreted, are the best truths. And
cappuccino, while inferior to espresso, is not wholly objectionable to me. Unfortunately I think that
maybe there's some cyanide in there as well, but I won't be able to tell for a while whether it's poison
or just an almond flavored shot."
"I object to being the milk in this analogy," Hermann says.
Newton turns his head fractionally and looks slantwise at Hermann. "You want to be the sake in
my sake bomb? It's an inferior analogy, but a superior metaphorical beverage to hang your identity on.
I would do that for you. Sacrifice analogy fidelity."
"Thank you," Hermann says.
They sit in palpably awkward silence for a moment before Newton directs his gaze at the
dashboard and says, "hey, Carina. What's the deal? Put yourself on autopilot and take us home
already."
"Disregard," Hermann says. "You are not to verbally respond to the name Carina," Hermann
instructs his car.
It chirps at him in affirmation.
Hermann starts the car and vacates his parking slot in a smooth arc.
"Oh god," Newton says, pressing a hand to his forehead. "This is going to be horrible, isn't it? I
hate driving with you, even when you're in a normal car in a normal mood. That turning radius
though. Really tight. Very nice. Simultaneously awful. Can you just let your self-driving car self-
drive? Would that be too much to ask?"
"Yes, It would. Please do not be so melodramatic, I find it extremely tiresome," Hermann replies,
accelerating into another smooth arc as they leave the parking lot.
"Carina," Newton says. "Carina. Come on, don't be like this. Car. Porsche. Sweet, sweet ride.
Whatever you are. Talk to me. Be a pal, and stop Dr. Gottlieb from effecting changes in acceleration
sufficient to produce perceptible jerk, yeah?"
"Automated safety features will engage in an emergency," the car says smoothly. "Please relax,
Newt. Your heart rate currently exceeds normal parameters."
"Are you kidding me?" Newton replies.
Hermann glances laterally at him and then back at the road.
"First of all, the question you answered was not the one I asked. Second of all, never talk about
my heart rate again," Newt says. "Got it, Caropticon?"
The car chirps.
"Disregard that," Hermann says.
The car chirps again.
"I've met smarter cars than you," Newton says, frowning into the air. "I've met them today."
"Stop disparaging my car," Hermann says.
"I'll stop disparaging Caromancer here when it stops voyeuristically monitoring the condition of
my cardiovascular system," Newton replies, with aggrieved composure.
"I prefer 'she'," the car informs Newton.
"Aw, car, well, okay, but just so you're aware, that's a little historically normative for a means of
transit technically 'owned' by a guy," Newton replies. "But I'm not going to argue with you about it, if
that's how you feel. Just take a look at the historical paradigm you'd be joining and maybe your own
programing parameters and get back to me on that one. It will make me feel better about things if
nothing else."
"I'm not sure I understand your statement correctly, Newt," the car says. "Could you rephrase?"
"Do not," Hermann says, looking pointedly at Newton, "rephrase."
Newton rolls his eyes.
"All cars monitor certain physical readouts," Hermann says, before Newton can mount another
attempt to turn up a software glitch in the machine that is currently conveying them over a hard surface
at approximately one hundred and ten kilometers per hour. "It's written into the safety protocols
required for vehicular licensure in a semi-automated--"
"Hermann. Hermann. If you know a thing? I also know that thing. Unless you learned it within the
past sixteen days, or it's a product of unique analysis, in which case I will be shocked, because I'm
pretty sure I see where you're going with this, but If I'm wrong about that then, by all means,
continue."
"Eighteen days," Hermann corrects, "and yes, Newton, one would indeed assume that to be the
case, but your pointless verbal chicanery with an operating system of no real intelligence indicates
otherwise."
Newton looks pointedly at the dashboard of the Porsche. "You're just going to take that one lying
down, Carlotta?"
"Please clarify what you mean, Newt," the car says.
"Cease calling him 'Newt'," Hermann snaps. "You will refer to him as 'Dr. Geiszler'."
"You do not have the authority to place such a command, Dr. Gottlieb," his car replies.
"Hmm," Newton says, in obviously feigned sympathy, "cars these days."
"You were in here, unsupervised, for thirty seconds," Hermann snaps. "Did you gain root access
to my car's operating system in that time?"
Newton tips his head back and shoots Hermann a rare expression of good-natured candor edged
with total exhaustion that Hermann finds unsettling whenever it appears because the level of self-
reflection it implies exceeds the level of self-reflection with which Newton can generally be
credited.
"Much as I would love to let you believe that I have a post-drift, total genius for the soft hack, I
just don't think I've got the technical chops to pull that one off," Newton admits. "Knowledge base,
yes. Maybe. But real-time or even compressed-time problem solving with someone else's skill set is
still not a thing that comes naturally to me, I don't think. Well maybe a little. But I'm flattered, dude.
I'm pretty sure this naming quirk that Carth Vader has going here is just a preference inherent to the
system that prevents conflict between operators. That's got to be the definition of a luxury car, right?
The car that will prevent your kids or your life-partner from renaming you 'Captain Boring'. Not that
was the first thing I tried. I find you very interesting, actually. I also like this whole Newt-can-do-
things vibe you've lately been rocking since we drifted. It does make me wonder if you just feel sorry
for me, though. I mean, I'll take your pity, dude, and I'll heroically roll around in it a little bit, but it
makes me feel a little conflicted, like maybe you're just asking me if I hacked your car so that I feel
better about myself and my intellectual prospects because you want me to think that you think I'm a
guy who could hack your car even though you really don't think that at all."
"I asked you," Hermann says, trying to sound brusque because he can't decide whether he is
annoyed or sympathetic, "because I recently discovered I can play the piano with moderate skill."
"Um, I'm pretty sure my skill level is a little higher than moderate," Newton says in edgeless
indignation. "At least, it was." He flexes his fingers, positions his hands in mid-air in front of him,
then pulls them back into a two-handed glasses-adjustment without even attempting the threatened air-
piano.
"Well, I am certain that I could get root access to the operating system of this car in less than thirty
seconds," Hermann replies.
"Okay," Newton says. "Fair point. Thank god you're still slightly better at being you than I am.
You're better at being you than I am at being you. I'd say I'm better at being me than you are at being
you, and I'm also better at being not-you than you are at being not-me. That sounds like an inversion of
what I just said, but it's not. What I meant was that the hierarchy of ontological skill is: first me as
me, then you as you, then you as me, then me as you. It's better to not be each other though, so I win
both ways. You're getting this, right?"
"No," Hermann says.
"Lies," Newton says. "You followed that. I can tell. Bottom line, I have arguably less identity
confusion than you, so I'm winning in that department. Unfortunately, since I can't drink alcohol or
caffeine, you're winning in the epicurean pleasures department. Ugh, obviously you are, I mean look
at this car. Where is my car equivalent?"
Hermann turns on the in-car audio system to his preferred classical station.
"Radio'd," Newton says. "I'm not interesting enough for you? You don't want to take issue with my
Hierarchy of Ontological Skill? Which is a good band name, by the way."
"I don't enjoy debating you when you're too tired to make a coherent argument," Hermann replies,
as the intricacies of a baroque fugue begin to play over the stereo system.
"I don't--" Newton says, slowly. "You're definitely doing me a disservice out of some--" he tips
his head back against the seat and then leans forward abruptly. "I just--wait are you right? No, you're
not right. Oh god, I feel weird. Something is acutely happening to my brain."
Hermann glances laterally in time to see Newton sit back again.
"Ohhhhh crap," Newton says, protractedly. "Is this Bach?"
"Yes," Hermann says, listening for a few bars and identifying the Prelude and Fugue in A Minor.
"I cannot do Bach, dude, not in a moving car."
"If you would simply avoid ranking--" Hermann begins.
"No it's ah, it's not the ranking. It's not a dissonance thing," Newton says, the pace of his speech
slowing to a verbal crawl. "Anymore. I like Bach. I always--actually--" he stops speaking.
Hermann glances over at him in time to see the other man shut his eyes and open them in an
exaggerated blink.
"I like it," Newton says, in a manner that seems vaguely dazed to Hermann. "I do."
"Then what's the problem?" Hermann snaps, edgy.
"What?" Newton asks him, in a way that's trending away from 'vaguely dazed' and toward
'semiconscious'.
Hermann snaps the car into self-driving mode, kills the radio, reaches across the seat, grabs his
colleague's jacket and shouts, "Newton," directly at him.
His colleague does not react well to this.
Newton's eyes snap open and there is mutual alarmed yelling in the absence of actual words that
resolves into: "what are you DOING you're supposed to be DRIVING??!?!" and "what in god's
name is WRONG WITH YOU?" as Newton tries and fails to open the car door in temporary
disorientation and Hermann wrenches his shoulder trying to keep him in his seat.
The shouting stops abruptly as they mutually realize neither of them is truly in extremis.
 Hermann takes a deep breath, lets go of Newton's jacket, and presses his palm to his own chest.
Newton adjusts his glasses with a calculated nonchalance.
"Opening doors during transit is not permitted without an authorization code," the car informs
them pleasantly. "Please enter your code and try again."
"Would you care to explain what just happened?" Hermann asks, in a polite hiss.
"I told you, no Bach." Newton snaps, clearly unsettled. "It makes me feel weird."
"Yes I can see that," Hermann replies, strained. "Could you elaborate?"
"Well," Newton says, shaking his head subtly and bringing his fingers to his face, presumably to
check for bleeding. "Well, look man, everyone's got their own quirky little mental sequelae post drift.
I've got this thing where I unexpectedly and embarrassingly use rationalism as an emotional crutch to
avoid dissolution into ontological terror. You've got the thing where you conflate virtuosic guitar
playing with something that's maybe erotic? I'm still not clear on the details of that and as an
evolutionary biologist--"
"That is deeply misleading--"
"Never mind. You're right. Non sequitur. You've," Newton continues, "got a thing where maybe
sometimes you hunt me. Or random people. Or seagulls. So within this conceptual framework of the
post-drift cognitive experience, yeah, turns out I've got a little bit of a thing where maybe, er, either
Bach or maybe just the fugue as a musical form really interests certain parts of my brain that maybe
aren't exactly you and aren't exactly me but used to be, say, subordinated decentralized neural--ah,
throughlines within a collective consciousness? Or rather, they used to be, but they're just kind of not
that anymore? And they're a little bit sad about it maybe? And they like the musical form of the
fugue?"
Hermann stares at him.
"Yeah, so you're definitely not driving right? Because if you're driving you should really be
looking at the road a whole lot more as opposed to at me. Fixedly. Continuously. Kind of
horrifiededly. It's not making me feel great. Self-esteem-wise."
"I'm not driving," Hermann says. "Are you implying that you can distinguish impulses derived
from neural patterns laid down by the kaiju hivemind? Are you also saying that they enjoy Bach?"
"Well, I mean, who doesn't like Bach?" Newton asks weakly. "That was the whole premise of the
Voyager Spacecraft, right? Just humans, bragging about Bach? Even Leto the second, God Emperor of
Dune, likes Bach."
"Leto Atreides the second is not a real person. Nor is he a real alien. Alien person," Hermann
snaps, somewhat confused by a deep and exogenous sympathy for a giant fictional man-turned-
sandworm, which is ridiculous and also not his sympathy. "He's fictional."
"Ugh but he loved that fabricated Ixian girl," Newton says, wistfully. "Boy did he ever. Let's name
your car Hwi Noree. Hwi Caree? So pretty. So fabricated." Newton pets the door handle in evident,
bizarre appreciation.
"Will you please focus on what is salient?" Hermann asks him. "Why don't my kaiju-patterns
anesthetize me in the presence of Bach?"
"Oh no," Newton says, thankfully putting an end to petting the car door. "No no no no no. There
was no anesthetization happening there, dude, let's be very clear about that. What you just witnessed
was an unwanted, altered state of consciousness. Do not ever spring unexpected and inescapable
Bach on me in a closet attempt to save me from insomnia so extreme it is incompatible with life
because I'm pretty sure the Bach-hypnosis thing is a metabolically expensive state and will just hasten
my death."
 "Are you purposefully trying to destroy every conversational trajectory I choose? Shall I just
listen to you free associate and hope I eventually learn something interesting?" Hermann asks. "What
is the etiology of the disparity in our Bach-responsiveness?"
"Can you not be a dick to me right now?" Newton replies, aggrieved, as if he hadn't disappeared
for hours on end, stranded himself in San Francisco, and turned mystifyingly and alarmingly
unresponsive in the presence of Bach. "You just inflicted a fugue on me at seventy miles an hour. And
I don't know why your kaiju don't like Bach as much as mine do, but those hive-mind derived neural
patterns got laid down overtop different neural architectures a different number of times under
different circumstances, so I'm not really sure why you'd assume a total commonality of weirdness.
Maybe your inner kaiju tendencies like sports cars."
Hermann looks away, back and the dark ribbon of the road with its reflective white and yellow
borders, struggling with himself, with his desire to ask, with is desire to demand that Newton tell
him, tell him, finally tell him that which he already knows.
I know you drifted, he thinks. I know you did. I know you did it a third time, I know you did it, I
know. I know. Talk about it rather than around it. It explains almost every disparity in our
experiences, it must, I'm certain it does.
"I like sports cars," he says.
"You like velocity," Newton replies. "Which is weird, by the way. Your brain was not evolved
for optimizing reaction times at these speeds."
"My brain is fully capable of handling these speeds, thank you," Hermann says.
"That's what your brain wants you to think," Newton replies.
"Of course it is," Hermann replies. "Because it's true."
"Your brain, specifically yours, incentivizes risky behavior," Newton says, "because that's just
your style, dude. You're like an adventurous slime mold in a misleadingly conservative sweater that
wants to go out and explore the world even when such a choice isn't mandated by local resources."
"Oh we're bringing slime molds into this, are we?" Hermann asks dryly.
"Shut up, it's both a compliment and a relevant point and you know it. Whether or not your
reaction times are actually sufficient to handle speeds in excess of, say, thirty miles an hour isn't
something that you can just assess on instinct because you have a pro-risk bias into which you're
never going to have perfect insight. It's just not possible."
"I think you're using your biological knowledge base to justify a visceral objection to high
velocity transit," Hermann replies, "because you rarely experienced vehicular transport prior to the
age of seventeen when the head of MIT's Molecular Biology Department taught you to drive after
losing a bet about the role of sirtuins in tissue regeneration."
"My objection isn't baseless, Hermann, are you even listening to me? We're coming down on
opposite sides of a testable hypothesis, you realize. Maybe when you go on sabbatical you can figure
out a way to extrapolate your reaction times from a modified version of Mario Kart 10 so that you
can know how fast you can actually drive with a reasonable expectation of avoiding death via
transfer of momentum. I would help you do that. Modify Mario Kart, I mean. Not kill yourself in a
car. For science."
"Thank you, Newton, that sounds endlessly fascinating, let me just pencil that into my fall
schedule."
"Hwi," Newton says, "can you find some kind of music to stream that definitely will never
include Bach? Or a fugue of any kind?"
A generic song that Hermann doesn't recognize, but has the borrowed musical theory to
deconstruct, begins to play, mid chorus. Newton reaches out and adjusts the volume with the
dexterous swipe of a finger.
"Your motor control has improved," Hermann says, finally wresting the conversation out of
Newton's unconscious and continuous control and back around to his observations in the parking lot.
"I know," Newton replies, with an eyebrow lift. "Like I said, strenuous human exercise as a
human helped. In terms of a neurologic perspective, I think I parsed things out a little further today
while I was mostly falling off a chain-linked fence. So, initially, my problem was two-fold: on the
one hand, there was the crap coordination and motor control, on the other there was the rigidity and
resting tremor. I assumed the former followed from the latter, but I now think that was incorrect."
"Really," Hermann replies, with unconcealed interest.
"Really. I explain the problems with coordination and fine motor control to an excess of
competing neural pathways laid down in my motor cortex, some of which are yours, some of which
are alien, all trying to operate at the same time, while mine win, but only just. As for why you're not
having the same problems, well, again, there's the differences in number and circumstance of drifts,
but, honestly dude, honestly? And this is the really interesting part--there's more than a little historical
evidence to suggest that you're a little sharper than me at baseline when it comes to, like, catching
things that are thrown at you, for example. I'm also differentiating complex motor programs, like say,
guitar playing or the dexterous use of a multi-pipette from reflexes, because I am excellent at doing
those things, but less excellent at handling Tendo saying, "look alive, Newt," and throwing a bagel at
my head. Somehow too much education has just killed all my reflexive responsiveness dude, I have
recently discovered that when I'm totally terrified I kind of just stand in place and think really quickly
without actually translating any of that thinking into action, per se."
"Yes," Hermann says dryly. "I'm aware."
"Though I did kind of quickly crawl away from baby Otachi at one point, for the purpose of not
getting eaten, so I'm going to count that one as a win." Newton blinks rapidly and adjusts his glasses
with an expression of pained distraction, his eyebrows pressing together, his gaze shifting to a mid-air
trajectory that Hermann is certain is turning internally.
"You were speculating on our motor programs, Newton, please do not digress into the ways that
the American higher educational system stripped you of most of your survival instincts," Hermann
says brusquely.
"Right. So, look, we've both been assuming that I'm the defective one, right?"
"I wouldn't have put it quite so crudely," Hermann replies, "but yes, you seem to be more severely
affected in a whole host of ways."
"Well, okay, I don't want this to sound creepy, but what if you're the atypical one? What if you're
freakishly good at integrating sets of motor patterns? Mine and kaiju? We've got an n of two for
human-on-kaiju drifts, so it could be that my response is more typical and yours is unusual. This is
why you're a solid piano player right out of the gate, good for you by the way, and it's also why you've
got this whole 'hunting' subroutine that you can just kick into when you see a passing seagull or a
nurse who's giving me a predatory eye."
"No," Hermann snaps reflexively. "I'm sure you're wrong."
"I don't think it means anything," Newton says, in a tone that's unambiguously and offensively
kind. "I don't think this makes any kind of global statement about you, and I don't think it predicts a
necessarily crap outcome for your sanity or anything."
"It's categorically impossible to classify either of our responses to an alien drift with an atypical
voltage calibration as being 'better' or 'worse'."
 "Nope, it is possible, and I'm going to pithily do it right now: you're better at integrating foreign
neural pathways than me, which is creepy, and, unexpectedly, makes me a better human than you,"
Newton says, almost managing to keep a straight face.
"I don't understand where you learned to be so universally intolerable," Hermann snaps.
"Insults carry more weight when you haven't driven ninety minutes to come get me and then
aggressively protected me from the evil, caffeine-related scheming of Legit Flow. But, if you're
actually curious, which I can't imagine you are, everyone is nice to an effectively if not actually
parentless child at institutions of higher learning. Well, almost everyone. Look, winsome
obnoxiousness was rewarded both academically and socially."
"You are, in no way, winsome."
"Winsome, is, in fact, your number one secret adjective for me, dude."
"I do not have secret adjectives for you."
"Eh, you do a little. It's okay. I, too, have secret adjectives for you, like incisive."
Hermann tries not to feel at all pleased by this as he wrenches the conversation back into its
previous trajectory. "Do you seriously believe what you just said?"
"You are very incisive dude, very."
"No," Hermann snaps. "I mean the differences in our motor responses being explained by my
brain being architecturally superior to yours."
"Um, I'm pretty sure I didn't put it that way, but yeah. It seems like a reasonable working model.
The great thing about this situation though," Newton says, harassing the edge of his own shirt cuff, "is
that no one has turned evil yet. Yes, there are difficult to explain predatory instincts, and yes there are
sort of trips to the pharmacy that get hijacked and turned into trips to the Wall, and yes there are times
when one meets middle schoolers who might not actually be middle schoolers, and yes there are some
unusual motor cortex side effects, and yes maybe there's a weak technical argument to be made for
epilepsy, but at the end of the day we're fifty percent employed and one hundred percent not yet
dangerous to society, so we are doing awesome."
"Middle schoolers?" Hermann asks.
"I met five kids inside the wall having a jam/homework/camaraderie session. It was super weird.
Do kids really do that? Hang out in a little circles of adorkable while trespassing? I feel like no. I
think maybe I hallucinated the whole thing. I don't really trust my brain; it's kind of a misleading jerk a
lot of the time. I mean, there's no way I'm actually a rock star? Right? Literally one? I always thought
I was being a little bit metaphorical about the whole rockstar thing, you know, tongue in cheek, like
'rockstar' in the Ian Malcolm tradition of rockstar-as-a-single-word-representing-intellectual-risk-
taking-coupled-with-an-improbably-cutting-edge-fashion-sense-and-tasteful-iconoclasm type deal as
opposed to say, a literal rock star in the classical tradition of aloof-guyliner-wearing-faux-guitar-
smashing musical genius. I mean, I have swaths of genius, Hermann, entire swaths of stupidly vast
abilities, and I had to pick, ostensibly, and I picked biology, eventually, after six degrees and short
stint as a PI and also after cloned, alien, war-machines started ruining my local environment, by
which I mean my planet. But if those kids weren't real, my brain actually took that rockstar thing
literally. Not rockstar but rock. Star. I find this disappointing. I mean, come on, brain, am I right?
Like, yes, I can stun the minds of non-narcissists with my laser-like vanity, precisely applied, but I
like to think I can give my brain the benefit of the doubt about uncloseting closeted desires at least to
me if no one else. I think it says terrible things about me if I'm hallucinating a cadre of middle school
children who want my autograph. Really terrible things."
Hermann stares at him, trying to decide what to say and not doing it fast enough.
 Newton pulls a plastic bag containing a few dried apricots out of his pocket.
"Okay, this should be elucidating, actually. Can you see these apricots?" Newton asks him.
"Yes," Hermann says. "What are you--"
"Huh," Newton says. "And you didn't buy them and put them in my coat pocket?"
"No," Hermann says. "Will you please--"
"This is a great sign," Newton says in apparent relief. "You want one?"
"No," Hermann snaps. "Will you please stop indulging your penchant for non sequiturs? It is
intellectually lazy and makes you extremely difficult to converse with at the best of times and, at the
worst of times, it makes me think that you're losing touch with reality, and I have had a terrible day."
"Okay so the apricot thing was not technically a non sequitur, it was a form of poorly-explained
reality testing because a middle schooler gave me these apricots, so there's a good chance that if you
can see them, that she was real, but go ahead, Dr. Gottlieb, make an alphabetized or a prioritized list
of all the interpersonal goals that you'd like to accomplish on this late night car ride and I will do my
best to avoid boring you with inefficient conversation," Newton snaps.
It occurs to Hermann, not for the first time over the course of the evening, that Newton is
extremely tired. He tries to hang onto that thought, to impress it upon himself permanently because
Newton does not get tired in the way that most people get tired, it is a subtle and dangerous form of
exhaustion, easily missed or forgotten in the heat of intellectual argument, more a psychological
destabilizer than the kind of grinding weight that Hermann has been laboring under for weeks now
with improbable success.
"Sorry," Newton says, over the chorus of a generic pop song, one hand resting on the rim of his
glasses as if he is attempting to marshal unmarshalable thoughts.
Hermann exhales shortly and hisses, "as I have previously impressed upon you countless times, I
wish you would not apologize."
"You are literally the most confusing guy to have ever lived," Newton says. "I just want to make
sure you know that. You don't want me to apologize to you? You're rescuing me from my own
stupidity, again, and I'm yelling at you while you do it, again. That's pretty unarguably a classless act
on my part. In fact, ten out of ten independent panels agree that Dr. Geiszler is a master of the
consistent application of the prototypical dick move."
"You cannot help it," Hermann says.
"Thanks man, thanks. That makes me feel really great. I take comfort from the fact that you can't
help being a total jerk; it's just an inextricable part of you. I, on the other hand, can actually prevent
my own dickishness most of the time, some of the time, well, it's hit or miss, really. The point is not
so much that I'm specifically sorry for the high-volume sarcasm I was leveling at you there because
you deserved it a little bit, but that I'm more generally sorry for all the ruining of your life I've been
doing lately and if you don't want to hear it that's too bad because you hunting pedestrians and you
turning into me in public forums is completely and one hundred percent my personal bad. I cannot
even imagine how endlessly exhausting it is to live with me; I have extrapolated from my post drift
insight into your brain and from the fact that no one, not even my biological relations, has ever
managed to do it for long, that cohabitation with me must be astronomically difficult. Unfortunately
for you, because of your weird superloyalty, you're just going to stick around until I drive you to
justifiable homicide or give you an ulcer as I hallucinate while sleep deprived or--whatever. I don't
want to enumerate. I just want to make sure that you know that I know how much this sucks for you
and how culpable I am in orchestrating the overall total suckage in which we currently live, and how
aware I am that if I had better metaphorical penmanship everything would be better and--"
 "Yes," Hermann hisses. "That is, exactly, the sentiment I object to. As I have told you, repeatedly,
many times, you did not ruin my life. You saved our civilization."
"Yeah, so those aren't mutually exclusive, dude. I'm pretty sure that at least a little bit of life-
ruining happened back there. That time. When we did that thing we did. Because I never--"
"I elected to help you," Hermann snaps, totally unable to bear the thought hearing Newton out. "I'll
thank you to credit me with the capacity to make that decision and grasp its implications and stop
apologizing to me as if I were some unfortunate victim of a morally bankrupt B movie villain with a
mobile stereotactic drift interface."
"Okay, yes, and I appreciate that," Newton begins. "Agency and stuff. You want it. I'll give you
that. I'm not trying to steal your whole self-actualizing descent down from the altar of mathematics to
get your hands dirty with your own blood from your own leaking capillaries--"
"Oh please," Hermann says, rolling his eyes.
"But that doesn't mean I don't feel really terrible about the whole thing, dude. I mean, yes. Go you.
You saved me. Well, my brain, at least. Hardcore. Multiple times. At least two times. Academic
damsel-in-distress style. But--"
"After I locked you in a tower," Hermann snaps.
"Okay, no, this is now getting too metaphorical for me," Newton says. "I don't even know what
that means. You're not listening to me. I feel bad about this whole scenario. Right in the limbic
system. I mean, shouldn't you be strolling Bavarian hills or something, thinking about Riemann zeros
and adding to your Waldglas collection while making friends with a local orphan or possibly a stray
dog?"
"Is that literally what you think I envision?" Hermann snaps at him in a tone that ideally conveys
extreme disapproval and profound disdain.
"No," Newton replies. "No. I just, I know you think I'm a totally insensitive idiot, not without
reason, but I would like to demonstrate that I get that this sucks for you and I'm sorry, about that, I'm
sorry, okay I'm just, I'm really--"
"Stop," Hermann half-screams at him, looking away, grateful he has not taken back control of the
car. "Stop," he repeats, more sedately. "I know that you--"
"No, dude," Newton snaps, "you don't know, actually, this is a whole post-drift type of guilt and
you don't know, you can't possibly know, it's literally impossible for you to--"
"I know," Hermann shouts at him.
Newton seems somewhat taken aback by his vehemence.
The car is, temporarily, silent.
"I know how you feel," Hermann says, in a significantly more collected manner.
"Like, you know in a psychic ghost-drift-y, SPECTER-effect-y way, or--"
"I know because you told me," Hermann says.
"No," Newton snaps. "I haven't. You have literally never let me get it out of my mouth dude, you--
"
"You," Hermann says, the word cutting Newton's sentence in half. "Told me. You told me. I know
how you feel, Newton, it has been impressed upon me in excruciating indelible detail, and so there is
no need to discuss it any further."
"Well, okay, because my next logical question is going to have to be 'when'," Newton replies, with
a trace of Hermann's own stiff formality in his tone. "Since I--"
"In Hong Kong," Hermann says.
"Could you be more vague?" Newton asks. "A little bit? Possibly? Because I'd really like to make
this harder on both of us, if we can do it. That is, always, my goal."
"Shut up," Hermann snaps.
Newton says nothing.
Hermann also says nothing.
"Well are you going to--" Newton begins.
"As we were leaving," Hermann says at the same time.
"As we were leaving?" Newton echoes. "Hong Kong? This is not ringing a bell for me."
"Yes," Hermann says, uncomfortable in the extreme. "I know, I would be extremely surprised if it
did. But, ah, as we were leaving Hong Kong you did a great deal of incoherent, extremely heartfelt
apologizing at intermittent intervals."
"Ugh, really?" Newton replies faintly. "I literally remember none of the Shatterdome-to-plane leg
of that trip. Literally nothing."
"Well, picture yourself entirely uncoordinated with limited situational awareness or conceptual
understanding of what was happening to you while iteratively apologizing, apparently for for
inconveniencing me, with almost unparsable diction."
"Yikes," Newton says in vaguely self-conscious sympathy. "That must have really looked like
brain damage. That must have looked like brain damage for a long time. For however long it took to
get from the Shatterdome to a San Francisco hotel room."
"Over twenty-four hours."
"That sucks for you, dude," Newton says. "How did you even get me on that plane? You did a lot
of aggressive hissing at me. I remember that much. Very velociraptor. Or, was that you? It could have
been other parties. Nevermind. Not important. Also? Thanks for rescuing me despite the fact that you
thought I was brain damaged."
"Despite?" Hermann echoes. "What do you mean 'despite'? I'm not certain about this, Newton, but
that statement is in the running for the most stupid arrangementof words to ever come out of your
mouth."
"You would still like me even I was intellectually uninteresting?"
"The point, Newton, is that you would never be uninteresting to me."
"Ah," Newton says, with lethargic anxiety. "Cool. I um--" He trails off.
Hermann studies the shifting outline of the bay outside the driver's side window.
Whatever is playing on the radio fades into silence before the unmistakable opening of Syncope
fills the darkness of the car.
Hermann glances at Newton.
Newton gaze snaps to the car's dashboard with a unique and entirely characteristic blend of
skepticism, horror, and total fascination that he generally reserves for films featuring monsters,
interesting kaiju variants, and laboratory accidents involving his own person.
"No," Newton says.
"Yes," Hermann replies.
"No," Newton says. "Hwi, seriously, what are you playing right now?"
"You are listening to Syncope by--"
"Yes, I know, I mean, what, generally, are you streaming?" Newton snaps.
"Top forty Post-Apocalyptic American Radio," the car replies.
"That's a thing?" Newton says. "Post-apocalyptic radio? It's kind of misleading because it implies
that apocalyptic events actually happened but whatever. Is this regular top forty or like weird,
neohipster, Intellectual Underground top forty?"
 "I don't understand your question," the car replies.
"Don't get cute with me, carfriend," Newton snaps.
"I believe," Hermann offers, "that, ah, well, I believe that Syncope, LHC, Evangeline, and Plate
Tectonics are all currently in the top forty. The conventional, American top forty."
"What?" Newton demands, his voice cracking. "Are you serious, dude? That's completely
impossible. I mean, um, like, I--" he trails off, at an apparent loss for words. "All of those? This is
weird. It's weird, right? Yes. It's weird. I mean, like, I use the word 'hypoperfusion' in this one," he
says, waving a hand in the general direction of the dashboard. "No one likes that kind of thing. Also
chalk one more up in favor of actual middle schoolers as opposed to hallucinated middle schoolers."
Hermann raises his eyebrows.
"But--why?" Newton asks, apparently expecting him to furnish an answer. "Also, how? But,
mostly, why?"
"Your interrogatives are related," Hermann replies. "Consider that you contributed materially to
apocalypse aversion and then immediately disappeared from the public eye, inviting rampant
speculation which has only been fanned by the obvious fondness with which Ms. Mori and Mr.
Becket speak of you in interviews. This perhaps makes up for the fact that your songs include atypical
word choices and themes not generally favored in mainstream music."
"Wait, Mako talks about me? In interviews? And the other guy? What's his name?"
"You seem surprised," Hermann replies. "Have I not told you, repeatedly, that she's been emailing
you every few days for three weeks now?"
"Well yes, but--"
"As for Mr. Becket," Hermann says, "there is no need to pretend to me you did not bother to learn
the name of the man who collapsed a transdimensional portal and managed to survive the attempt.
Because you did. I know you did."
"I'm sure Mako saved him."
"Ms. Mori did not save him."
"Um, I guarantee you there's an argument to be made, somehow, for Mako saving him, okay? One
day, when I watch the news again, maybe tomorrow, I'm going to find it. You're not going to win this
one. Mako is a baller, and that guy seemed just kind of moderately okay."
"Do not watch the news," Hermann snaps. "Not tomorrow."
Newton sighs, tips his head back, looks at the dashboard with half-lidded eyes and says, "I
literally cannot believe this."
"Well, they aren't terrible songs, musically speaking," Hermann says. "None of them are."
"Oh. Oh really? They're not terrible Hermann? Thanks. Thanks so much. No guitar voyeurism for
you. Ever. What would you know about music post the Romantic Era anyway."
Hermann raises his eyebrows in a manner he hopes communicates mild curiosity and detached
disdain.
"Wait, what am I saying. Coming from you that's actually pretty respectable since your Ten out Ten
on the Musical Awesomeness Scale is a six part baroque fugue, so I'll take your 'Not terrible' and be
satisfied with that. I guess. Kind of. Not really though."
"I prefer Sea of Dirac," Hermann offers.
"Obviously," Newton replies. "I know that. I defy any sensitive quantum physicist not to love that
song."
"I am not sensitive," Hermann snaps.
"You? Noooo. Not you," Newton says agreeably. "Not sensitive. Suave subject change though: am
I getting paid for this?" He gestures vaguely in the direction of the dashboard. "Do you know? Am I
making money? Because earlier today I asked a semi-sentient cab to check my balance and it was off
by about oh, I don't know, five orders of magnitude? In a positive direction? I assumed that was an
error, but maybe not? Possibly? Am I paying you rent, is what I'm really driving at here. That one's
been bothering me for a while."
"We have lived in our apartment for two weeks," Hermann says. "We have not yet paid rent."
"Ugh," Newton replies. "Will you stop being weird about this?"
"I am not being 'weird' about this," Hermann snarls. "You spent two days iteratively trying to
watch the news, becoming extremely distressed, and bleeding. After which, I decided, given the
circumstances, that perhaps you deserved a reprieve from the unremitting pressure you have been
under for the past decade and so I bought you a library on rationalism and found an apartment and
resigned myself to working out the details of our daily existence including but not limited to your
financial responsibilities until such a time that you were less globally upset and I was less terrified
that some kind of Pan Pacific mandate was going to drag you to a lab somewhere. So you will
forgive me if I have, in the past, been and continue, in the future, to be somewhat evasive when it
comes to certain subject areas because when you become stressed I am concerned that you will, at a
minimum, start bleeding and at a maximum--well, I don't know, Newton, and I do not wish to find
out. That is the entire point. You won't even read your personal email and I assume there is an
excellent psychological reason for that, so you'll forgive me if I don't trouble you with the entirely
overwhelming magnitude of public speculation about you, the details of your finances, the list of
interview requests you have received, nor--"
Newton interrupts him with a frustrated yell from between clenched teeth, both hands pressed to
his temples. "THANK YOU FOR BEING NICE TO ME," he shouts. "God, you are the worst."
That was unexpected.
Nevertheless, Hermann rallies appropriately. "You are the worst," Hermann snaps. "You,
Newton."
"No," Newton says. "Actually? You are."
"No," Hermann says.
"Yes," Newton replies.
"No," Hermann says again.
A guitar solo that Hermann can remember playing in nearly identical iterations over a decade ago
fills the car, and, for an interval, neither of them speak.
"That's actually quite--" Hermann begins but does not finish.
"Yeah, you like that line?" Newton asks. "It just came to me. In the shower."
"I remember," Hermann says dryly.
"There's never going to be a time when that's not weird," Newton replies, "but yeah. Look, I feel
like we're really bad at arguing, we're going to have to work on restoring our historical A-game,
dude. In the meantime, can I just pay you rent? Or can I play Blaze rent? Or whomever we owe rent
to? I just really want to pay rent, okay? I don't want to go on the interview circuit or watch news or
get the band back together or freak out during a job talk in front of UC Berkeley's Neuroscience
Department, I just want to know that you are using my now weirdly profligate finances to pay rent.
And maybe also my taxes."
"Yes. Fine. I will use your finances to pay half the rent, but I am not doing your taxes," Hermann
snaps.
"You actually mostly did my taxes last year," Newton says. "I'm not actually sure why that
happened. Post-drift analysis indicates that you were trying to shame me into doing my fair share of
the paperwork? But I have no shame when it comes to escaping the bureaucratic glorification red tape
for it redness and its tapeyness, so instead your plan backfired. It backfired really badly."
Hermann sighs.
"Last year, you had a total of three thousand dollars to your name. Your taxes weren't exactly
complicated despite your dual residency. Now you--"
"So you've thought about this I see," Newton says. "Excellent. I, in turn, will do something nice
for you. Something super nice. Extremely thoughtful."
"Such as?" Hermann says.
"I don't know yet, Hermann; it requires thought," Newton replies. "That is, in fact, the definition
of a thoughtful gesture."
"I suppose you're correct."
"Corrrrect," Newton repeats, with an obscene roll of his 'r', his eyes shutting behind his glasses.
"That's hot."
"You're bizarre," Hermann says mildly, wondering if Newton is exhausted enough to sleep in a
moving car.
Possibly.
Possibly not.
Possibly.
"Meh," Newton says equivocally. "I just really like being uncontestedly 'correct' in literally all
contexts. It's my favorite state of being."
"I know. I'm surprised you didn't end up a mathematician," Hermann says.
"Too far afield from the in vivo experience," Newton says. "Too close to mysticism. I am not into
overly reductive modeling as a temple to mathematical aesthetics. I am Scully to your mathematical
Mulder."
"That's extremely offensive," Hermann says. "And entirely untrue. I wish I could disavow all
knowledge of this conversation you're trying to start."
"Well, we can't both be Scully," Newton points out. "How would that even work? Don't get me
wrong. I have intense love for Fox Mulder. Heroic fictional worship in the absence of world-view
appropriation. That dude also knew how to take a hit."
"Scully is the quantitative one," Hermann snaps. "Therefore, I am the Scully-equivalent in this
relationship, Newton. Me."
"Eh," Newton says, smiling faintly, still unimpressed enough that he hasn't opened his eyes.
"Scully's a pathologist and I am a comparative anatomist, and therefore, in terms of field, I'm more
Scully-ish. Also, anyone who references 'the handwriting of god' is definitely a conceptual Mulder-
equivalent, even though Mulder was not really into god, that was more of a Scully thing, crap, okay,
bad example, I'm clouding the issue. I'm just saying. It's just a thing. You should accept this. I get to be
Scully. Also? I like Carl Sagan more than you because I'm pretty sure you've never hallucinated him,
so, despite infinite nuance, case closed, I am Scully. I am also shorter than you. Now case really
closed."
"I refuse to acknowledge the validity of any of your points. Neither of us are Scully," Hermann
says. "I have never heard of Dana Scully, in fact. This conversation is over, go to sleep."
"You have my brain," Newton says, briefly opening his eyes and squinting at the glare of
oncoming traffic. "You can't pretend you didn't watch the X-files with German overdubbing, illicitly,
late at night, because I know someone did; it was fifty percent of both of us who did."
 "I never did that."
"Ah, but you did," Newton replies. "Halfway."
"I am not you," Hermann says.
"Well I'm not me either," Newton replies. "Someone has to be me."
"You're you," Hermann says. "I'm me. Everything is fine."
"Wouldn't it be great if that were actually true, though?" Newton asks him, cracking an eyelid and
an asymmetrical smile. "Imagine how totally normal we'd be. We could have an argument that doesn't
end in confused anti-climax or someone bleeding. You were always the best to argue with. I was so
relieved when they wouldn't let you be a Jaeger pilot."
"So you've said," Hermann replies, stiffly, "multiple times."
Even now, even after everything they've seen and done, that predictable exclusion still hasn't lost
all of its sting.
"Can you imagine how stupid that would have been? If you'd died killing kaiju?"
Hermann gives Newton a nonplussed look, which is wholly wasted, since his colleague's eyes are
closed.
"I mean, think about it. I'd have been so pissed. I still can't believe that no one ever devised a
remote stereotactic interface with sufficiently fast response times, it makes me embarrassed for our
species, but, like, seriously, Hermann, I would have been mind-ruiningly pissed if they had let you
into one of those things, you're such an idiot, for reals, dude, I mean come on. Caitlin Lightcap was
bad enough. Also who's going to be your drift partner, I mean really."
Newton opens his eyes to shoot Hermann a brief glare that Hermann is not sure why he deserves.
"I always thought maybe, maybe Mako," Newton continues in a wandering, confessional style.
"Like, you guys, man. Something seemed right about it to me, with the distant respect vibe that you
had going, because while Mako liked me for treating her like a kid, she liked you for not treating her
like a kid, so yeah, I always thought maybe it would be you and her one day, in the end, the rage-filled
rejects, when the shit just totally hit the fan, and I'd just be stuck on some coastline somewhere,
watching you guys kick ass and then die but that was before all the Jaeger funding was cut. Then I was
less worried. Because there were pretty much no more Jaegers. But also more worried, because, hi,
inevitable death. But additionally more worried, again, actually, really extremely worried close to
the end there, when they pulled GD out of the graveyard; I was just very concerned that that would be
exactly what would happen when they needed a new pilot team. You and Mako. Because who else
was it going to be? Who could it have possibly have been? The Marshal, maybe, but they've always
pulled Jaeger pilots from the science staff, because, hello, Caitlin Lightcap turned out to be such an
incredible killing machine in one of those things and you'd already expressed an interest and also
done part of the training, so I mean really. Really, you absolute dick, who else was it going to be? But
then they found Captain Sir Saves Everyone McQuarterback of the Pacific using a jackhammer on the
Wall and he and Mako had that weird like rarr chemistry, which was not expected because he looks
like he should be captain of a hockey team or maybe just a demolition squad. Do you think they're
dating and would he be offended if I mailed him a thesaurus?"
Hermann realizes his mouth is slightly open. He closes it.
"I--" he clears his throat. "I don't know if they're 'dating'," he says. "Perhaps you should contact
Ms. Mori. I would not advise mailing Mr. Becket a thesaurus."
"Yeah, no, I'm going to, dude," Newton says his eyes still closed. "Call Mako I mean. Or email
her. I just need to make sure I won't, you know, have a nervous breakdown when I talk to her first."
"Do you really think that's likely?" Hermann asks mildly.
 "Well, maybe; it depends if she cries, because if Mako cries that is not going to be a good scene
for me. Remember that summer intern situation?"
"Hmm," Hermann says. "True."
"Don't say true, dude," Newton says, cracking an eyelid. "Traitor. God. I'm extremely manly. I
don't cry about sad fourteen-year olds, even if they are Mako. I'm an amazing Portal player. I called
you 'not sensitive' like fifteen minutes ago out of respect, not because it was true. You're actually the
most sensitive person I know."
Hermann rolls his eyes and looks back toward the dark ribbon of the road. He thinks about taking
manual control back from his car but doesn't do it. Not quite yet. Over the sound system the strains of
a generic pop song fades and is replaced by the opening chords of Evangeline.
He remembers reading, days ago in the sunlit quiet of his UC Berkeley office that this particular
song was Ms. Mori's favorite.
He wonders if Marshal Pentecost spent even a single moment considering the possibility of
pairing him with Ms. Mori.
He doesn't think so.
He doesn't believe that the Marshal wanted her to be paired with anyone.
With a quiet click, Hermann snaps the car back into manual mode.
He accelerates so smoothly, that Newton, who has been partially asleep for minutes now, fails to
notice.
Chapter End Notes
Chapter-specific citations: This chapter includes references to The Empire Strikes Back,
Game of Thrones, God Emperor of Dune, the X-files, and Descartes' Meditations.
Chapter-specific thanks: Thanks to everyone who has been making things for Designations!
Art, fanmixes, actual songs...you guys are AMAZING.
Chapter-specific songs: Sea of Dirac exists! Again, this one was written by the outrageously
talented allyspock, and I wrote (most of) the lyrics. Check out my tumblr for lyrics and
allyspock's tumblr for the music.
Chapter 23
Chapter Notes
Warnings: This chapter has some intense emotional content, but nothing worse than has
already appeared in the fic. It also contains a mildly-to-moderately detailed description of
biohacking that could be a self-harm trigger. (Newt implants an RFID chip in his own hand using
a scalpel; he does NOT find it traumatic.) If you would like to skip this sequence, you can search
for "On that day, on the day after, I mean" and start reading from there.
See the end of the chapter for more notes
The sun is on the other side of the building, the Wall is a mostly-misted obscurity across the haze
of the bay, and Dr. Newton Geiszler of the mostly-there dexterity and the cognitive celerity is having
an awesome time.
Yup.
So it's slightly lonely during the day, with only the fish kids and the thought kids and the memory
of actual kids keeping him company. Perhaps, if he can't get himself together reliably enough to return
to the rigors of academia, he should consider becoming a camp counselor slash middle school mentor
of some kind. Graduate students had always liked him, though they'd had weird and vindictive ways
of showing it. Newt imagines middle schoolers to be like graduate students, just shorter, a little bit
more tuned into the popular zeitgeist, a little less enriched for masochistic intellectuals on a
population level, and, ideally, a lot less inclined to creatively prank him.
Ideally.
Still, Newt reflects, opening the supposedly sterile kit he bought from a reasonably legit online
supplier, kids like science, I like science, ergo kids should like me, ergo this is a good backup
career.
That's a logical fallacy, his Gottliebian neural pathways inform him. Furthermore, do you like
kids?
Yes? he replies.
Newt, who lacked a coeval peer group for his formative years, hasn't had much experience with
kids. Really, the only kid he's ever known is Mako, and that went pretty okay, until she turned too cool
for him circa age eighteen or so, but that's generally a thing that kids do, turn too cool for people, and
Mako's not really prototypical in any respect, so yeah.
He adjusts his glasses, washes his hands, and positions his kit just off-center on the kitchen table
before unwrapping the thing like a sterile flower, pulling away green leaves that he contaminates with
his touch as he folds them down, exposing their clean and contiguous inner surfaces that conceal the
autoclaved internal contents of this particular pre-fab'd collection of materials.
You make a terrible role model. I really don't think that socially accepted activities for children
include your current pursuits, his brain says, being Hermann, as it is so wont to do.
I make an epically awesome role model, actually, Newt says, using his fingernails to pick up the
edge of a sterile gel packet. I am a literal rock star and an intellectual rockstar.
His brain does not have a smartass response to that one.
Ha.
Newt sterilizes his hands with the ethanol-based gel.
He rolls his shoulders, mostly for show, and then sits down at the table, not contaminating
anything that is supposed to be sterile. Obviously.
 He puts a sterile glove on his right hand and leaves his left hand bare.
Your motor control is soooooo good, Newt's brain says.
I know, Newt replies, putting his left hand down on his work surface. He layers a sterile piece of
adhesive over his skin, pressing it down so it sticks.
Historically, he might not have bothered with buying the online kit, he'd probably just have bought
a pneumatic loader, and even if he had bought this kit, he probably wouldn't have done this in a full-
out sterile field kind of way, but now he just wants to, with a vaguely Hermannesque want. Everything
in his head is a compromise that he's getting increasingly good at snapping down into categorized
capitulation to him as a personal overlord. He's arranged a joint concession here, because while he's
said a resounding yes to sterility in a Gottliebian fashion, he's said an equally resounding no to rolling
up his left shirt-sleeves and sterilizing his arms to the elbow in submission to certain Geiszlerian
limitations.
He does a once-over of his array of sterile instruments, as he lays them out over the green-draped
kitchen table. Marking pen? Check. Scalpel? Check. Forceps? Check. RFID tag with correct
orientation marked? Check. Surgical grade dermal glue? Check. Sterile gauze? Check.
This chip is going in his hand.
You are just so awesome so much of the time, his brain says, sounding like his brain.
I know, Newt replies.
The kids hiss with polite, venomous interest, looking forward to this whole Newt-cutting-Newt-
open business.
Now kids, Newt thinks, in his best camp-counselor voice, this is not meant to be fun for you.
This is meant to be fun for me, partially, and also a little bit of a totally thoughtful while yet very
badass 'present', as it were, for our roommate, presuming this pilot experiment turns out well and I
don't throw up from cognitive dissonance or slice open my entire arm in kaiju-derived personal
rage, so any vicarious pleasure you may get out of this is totally incidental.
The kids keep hissing, sort of enigmatically, like, maybe, they're plotting something.
No plots, Newt thinks at them, marking the line he's going to cut with the pen. It's short and
positioned in the middle of the webbing between his thumb and index finger.
He picks up the scalpel.
He waits for cognitive dissonance.
He's got nothing. Everyone is still cool with this. Apparently, for the parts of him that are
Hermann, the awesomeness of this idea outweighs the nausea that would normally accompany self-
modificaiton.
He waits for some kind of murderous impulse.
Any kind.
Nope, he's got nothing.
Ugh, brain, you give me hope, Newt says.
He begins humming Evangeline while making a shallow cut along the line he marked, which
yesssssssss, actually, kind of hurts a lot, he knew it would of course; the hand has a lot of nerves for
evolutionary reasons. The kids are super interested in this as a concept--the whole deal: the slicing,
the pain, the biohacking ethos--they're identifying hardcore with this scalpel work he's doing in a
fascinated, horrified, empathetic, traumatized way, but they're holding things together, doing a weird,
subtle thing to his brain that he's not sure he likes but not sure he objects to either; there's some kind
of reward-based thing going on here, because the acute and noxious scalpel stimuli is blending with
something cognitively satisfying, not in the hive-mind-style intense reward for drifting way, but in a
way that instead approximates intense satisfaction.
Newt isn't sure how he feels about this, other than awesome with a side of horrified fascination.
Try to be Newt, team, he thinks. Don't be a disaffected, body-dysmorphic kaiju, please.
Based on previous experience, his brain replies, I would not think about the hive-mind right
now, champ.
"Noted," Newt says.
He intersperses the Evangeline humming with some straight-up singing, because yes. Everyone
likes the singing. Newt, the kids, not-Hermann, his brain--everyone.
Literal branching coral,
Ground up, it scrubs you clean.
Evange--
Aaaaand he finishes his first pass with the scalpel right as his phone rings.
This is unfortunate.
He is, somewhat, occupied.
"Really?" Newt asks his phone. "Are we serious right now?"
His phone keeps ringing, and the lit-up display tells him that the identity of the caller is, alas,
'Maks InSocks'.
You made a semi-personal vow, his brain reminds him.
Semi-personal? Newt replies, with all the Gottliebian acidity he can bring to bear while keeping
his admirably steady hands in a continuing state of rock-solid steadiness. He takes a look at his
incision, pulling skin back with his foreceps. This is delicate work, really, and not something he
should be doing while answering phone calls from Mako, but Mako's calls have decreased in
frequency lately and, really, Newt should really, he should really just, he should really.
"Answer," he snaps at his phone, because he doesn't exactly have a free hand at the moment.
"Speaker."
His phone does not respond.
"Answer," he shouts at it, with all the diction he can bring to bear. "Speaker."
His phone lights up in acknowledgement.
"Hey Maks," he says, looking intently at his hand and picking up the scalpel to extend the incision
slightly on the medial side while making a real and profound and intense effort to make this normal,
to be normal, because he is normal; this is normal for him and, also, normal for Mako. Talking on the
phone. After weeks. They saved the world. In pieces, they did. He should probably keep talking.
"Sorry I've missed all your calls. Full disclosure, this isn't a great time for me, I kind of have a
scalpel in my hand at the moment. That's misleading. Or rather, it's accurate, but it really only gives
you fifty percent of the picture. Look, the point is, I am holding a scalpel handle with my non-
dominant hand and I have a (sterile) scalpel blade in my dominant hand. Biohacking. It's my new
thing. I'm not killing myself or anything. That would be awkward. I wouldn't have answered the phone
if that were the case, so, er, don't worry about that. How are you, though? I like the new hair. Lookin'
suave. Fierce. Fiercely suave."
There is silence on the other end of the line.
"Yup," Newt says lamely.
There is still silence on the other end of the line.
Newt winces as he angles the scalpel blade and uses its tip to make a delicate dissection of his
tissue plane, just under his dermis. It's looking good, feeling kind of outrageously painful, there are a
lot of nerves in the hand it turns out, and it also turns out that doing this kind of thing to ones self just
really wants to make one stop doing it immediately, but he has willpower and it's helping him out that
the kids are still really into this in a kind of hypnotized, justified, justice-y way. This isn't really news
to him, per se, but experientially, as an ongoing phenomenon, it's notable. He eyes the small,
cylindrical, sterile RFID transmitter he ordered online and extends the cut just slightly--
It is at this point that Mako begins screaming at him in Japanese.
Miraculously, Newt does not so much as twitch.
Ugh, his motor control is so great right about now.
But.
This is really terrible and also distracting and also horrible, because, yes, Mako.
Mako, Mako, Mako, Mako, MAKO, he thinks, but Mako isn't in his head and can't hear him.
The worst part about it is that, other than the first ten words or so, it's really, it's just really, oh
god, the thing is, is that it's not screaming, it's just this high pitched Japanese, too fast for him to
follow and laced with increasing Mako distress rather than, say, hypothetically, extreme Mako anger;
he doesn't think he's heard her or seen her or can remember her distressed without being angry for
years; for years and years and years.
Oh god, his brain says, somehow she's not pissed at you; this is the worst case scenario for you,
dude, I'm not sure you can handle this because Hermann has been very stiff-upper lip about
everything because he's literally the perfect human but this is--
"You're a dick," someone says, cutting short his runaway exothermic emotional panic with a short
yet accurate observation delivered in a hostile manner by, definitely, a guy. A male variety of Homo
sapiens, ostensibly. Newt is pretty unsure what the sapience level of this particular hominid is.
"Yeah," Newt replies in a long, glossy pull of grade A sarcasm, stretching gloriously into the
available conversational space like warm tar. "Who's this? Captain Thoughtless Destruction? The
Avengers called, they need their most boring junior member back. Can I talk to Mako, please--Guy?"
Newt says, putting down the scalpel. "Remind me of your name? I just, well, I tend to forget things I
don't care about at all? So yeah, that would be my bad."
Mako is now in the background, snapping at someone who is not Newt.
"You know my name, Dr. Geiszler," whomever it is says.
Before he can respond, he hears Mako say, "Newt," hard and desperate, like she's reclaimed the
phone after some kind of physical struggle.
"Hiiii," Newt replies, drawing out the word.
Mako says nothing.
The bones of Newt's face ache, and he tips his head ceiling-wards and tries, tries, tries to salvage
something, anything from the wasteland of rejected messages he's dictated into the air and then
erased.
His hand throbs in time with his heart.
Explain, his brain advises.
"So, before you say anything, I haven't read any of your emails because I was and maybe arguably
still am having a nervous breakdown a little bit. Not really but kind of. In the historical sense. What is
a nervous breakdown, really? I think that statement is clinically and scientifically meaningless
nowadays, so it's perfect for me. Also, I was visually impaired for a while. More visually impaired.
More than usual. I couldn't read, is the thing, Maks."
"That's okay," Mako says, and her voice sounds small and high.
Newt grits his teeth and stares determinedly at the ceiling, because he's not going to contaminate
his sterile field by crying on it, because he is fine; he has been fine this entire time, it was Mako,
Mako who was probably not fine, Mako. Mako was the one who--was the one--
Mako.
Becket is right, his brain says, in a static hiss of tripled distress. You are a dick. But you can save
this, you can save it, you can. You have to. You can because she called you, she kept calling you, it's
not too late; you can save this, you can maybe have a thing with Mako where there's not a boxing
up and a moving on but a thing that maybe stays even after the world didn't end, there must still be
a chance to save this, there must be, there must be, because she called you.
"Um," Newt says, his voice cracking and his vision blurring. "How are you?"
"I'm doing well," Mako says, lying, lying, lying, lying. Lying.
Okay, good, well, he, too, can lie.
Lying is the easiest.
Newt shakes his head to get the saline out of his eyes and picks up his only slightly blurred
tweezers. "Cool, yeah, me too," he replies, in a slightly stronger version of his voice as he
misleadingly represents relative measures as absolute ones.
"Newt," Mako says, her voice torqueing back up into acute distress. "I read an article in Wired."
"Ah," Newt says, full of trepidation because Mako doesn't usually read Wired and also because
there's some kind of terrible momentum behind her words that he can only guess at because he hasn't
read anything but Descartes in weeks.
What was in Wired?
What was in Wired that bothered her so much that it would be the first real thing she said to him
after years of put-upon-eye rolling and weeks of zero contact.
Mako doesn't continue.
Newt slides his RFID tag home beneath the web of skin between his thumb and index finger.
"Wired's a pretty good rag if you're into that kind of thing, I guess," he says, continuing heroically.
"What was it about?"
"You," Mako says.
"Wired wrote an article on me?" Newt asks, tweaking the positioning of his RFID tag with his
forceps. "Like, a full length piece? Literally on just me?"
"Yes," Mako says.
"Sweet," Newt replies, vaguely confused, not sure if this is the end of Mako's story, not sure why
she's brought it up at all.
"It speculated that you had retreated from public scrutiny for medical rather than personal reasons.
It speculated that you couldn't withstand the physiological requirements of an alien drift," Mako says
in a quiet rush.
In the back of his thoughts, the kids hiss, vengeful and yearning, at the acute anamnesis of an alien,
altered consciousness.
It occurs to Newt that Mako is worried about him, that she has been, possibly, extremely worried
about him, extremely worried for weeks now. Somehow, he hadn't thought about that part of things,
the Mako-being-worried part; he'd thought mostly about the Marshal, and about the people who were
dead, and about the green bottle of Midori that Mako had held in her hand the day after the breach had
been, had been--had been not just shut but annihilated; but not about himself in the context of Mako
Mori's worldview, because, well, ever since Mako had turned eighteen and she had not been put in a
Jaeger, things had been different between them because Newt had been, he had been just so relieved
because the Jaeger pilot thing, with a few notable exceptions? It was a thing for life and then your life
was short; but Mako had been so angry and Newt had gotten that, he had, because, man, her
simulator scores, but--he was pretty sure that once Mako had stopped being a kid, had totally stopped,
well, she had never been a kid, not really, but once she'd burned away all those parts of her, well,
Newt had been pretty sure that she'd started to find him eight million kinds of annoying, and he gets
that, he does, or, rather, he thought he did? So this is a little confusing but it does explain all the phone
calls.
"Ah," Newt says, with a tonal trend towards delicacy but not quite getting himself there.
Mako says nothing.
Newt finds her silence totally agonizing.
"Please tell me if you are all right or not," Mako whispers.
"Um," Newt says heroically, "am I brain-damaged? Well, it depends on how you define 'brain
damage', right? Like, did I literally have destruction or damage of brain cells resulting in unwanted
short term and long term behavioral or cognitive sequelae? Technically?"
Mako says nothing.
"Okay, technically, yes. Do I have epilepsy? Maybe, a little bit, kind of, the jury is still out on that
one but from a medical criteria standpoint I arguably have it a little bit. Do I have some ocular
scarring and a new and exciting predisposition for future glaucoma secondary to an alien drift? Yeah,
sort of. Am I pretty much totally fine? Yes. Yes, Mako. Am I, even marginally, less intelligent? No.
Arguably, post-drift Newt is even more intelligent than pre-drift Newt. Is my scintillating personality
still intact? I don't know, you tell me. Am I still devastatingly good looking in a neohipster getup
whilst playing the guitar? I can't make an objective assessment on that one but indirect evidence
indicates Dr. Gottlieb seems to think so and he's actually somewhat difficult to please, aesthetically.
So. Yes. I'm fine, Maks; I am, actually, really sorry that maybe you thought I was a little bit dead or
suffering horribly for weeks, but, mostly, I was fine."
"I missed you," Mako whispers.
"Me too, except reverse style," he replies, his voice cracking, but not that much, just slightly, just
a little bit, as he picks up his surgical-grade glue.
"Please don't read any of my emails," Mako says, high and fast.
Newt spreads a thin line of glue over the shallow cut he's made in his skin and then uses his
forceps to delicately appose the two edges. It looks awesome. It's probably not even going to scar.
Everything is back on track. They got the brain-damage thing out of the way, he's talking to Mako, his
hand is glued together, no one is throwing up, there has been only a small amount of crying; everything
is good.
Yup.
Really good.
Great even.
Everything.
"Why shouldn't I read your emails?" Newt asks, mostly steadily.
"Because I thought you were in a coma," Mako says, at the neutral and unreadable apex of
emotional vulnerability in the Ms. Mori tradition. "Or that maybe you hated me. I wasn't thinking of an
outcome like this when I wrote them."
"And by 'outcome like this' I am going to infer that you're referring to me 'being a dick' as that guy
you saved the world with so charmingly put it. Okay, that's fair, except did you miss the part where I
copped to actual brain damage, maybe, because--wait." Newt's stupid brain is a little slow right now
and a verbal warning flag rises, but belatedly. Belatedly. He backtracks. "Did you say 'hated'? Why
would I hate you?"
 Over the open line, he can hear her draw in a preparatory breath and it yanks him straight out of
the solidifying and safe trajectory he was trying to put them both on.
"Because I didn't do the right things," Mako says, like the words are choking her.
Newt stares at the misted line of the distant Wall, being throttled by the braided phrases of
possible future sentences.
"Because I didn't do the right things," Mako says again. "And because you did."
Newt isn't sure how to have this conversation, gluing his hand together, trying not to cry, the trend-
line of his thoughts heading into territory that feels psychologically dangerous. He's not sure Mako
knows how to do it either; Mako, who has turned increasingly internally; Mako, who has sharpened
herself on the grindstone of her own willpower into something without needless parts.
"I think everyone did the right things," Newt manages to say, a little too smooth at the beginning
and a little too rushed at the end, his words sliding up a frictionless wall of rising pitch right to the
point that the potential energy of his phrase is maxed out to a full stop. "I think everyone did all the
right things. Um, especially, especially you, Maks. You most of all."
"It doesn't feel that way," Mako replies.
"Well it never does, really, I don't think," Newt says, valiantly philosophical. "It's always like,
'well, I spent four years trying to get this freaking tissue to regenerate, and now it has, great, but hey,
there are all these new problems like poorly controlled proliferation verging on neoplastic transition,
so yay? Kind of? But also not yay. Not yay at all.' If you're lucky enough not to get dealt an inherently
unwinnable hand by the stochastic cruelty of life, you can get what you work for, sometimes, mostly,
but, in return, you make certain tradeoffs along the way. That doesn't mean you weren't right to make
those choices, to trade those trades. That doesn't mean that the costs aren't costly. You know? But you
do the best on-the-fly analysis that you can, and, afterwards, you hope that you can quietly go not-
crazy in a relatively secluded apartment rather than being idolized and turned into a mischievous
fashion icon who's expected to evince happiness about the final fallout of the emotional evisceration
that brought her to the point that she was able to turn her entire life into a beautiful weapon. Because,
to me? That sounds like it might be rough."
Newt is out of air, so he breathes in and shuts his stinging eyes.
"I love you so much," Mako says, extremely sincerely, and crying, like, really obviously crying.
"Ugh, Maks, you're killing me here," he says, totally unintelligibly, weeping subtly and quietly and
kind of messily onto his sterile field, but, importantly, doing it in a style that befits a Portal player of
his caliber who doesn't get told very often, or really hardly ever at all, that people love him.
"What?" Mako says, with the high pitch of a woman whose vocal chords are trying to drawstring
their way down to silence.
"Yeah," Newt says, somewhat more clearly, in a way that sounds like words. "Love reciprocity. I
have that for you. Meaning, specifically, that I, also, love you. Thanks for saving the world or
whatever."
"It wasn't just me," Mako says.
"Myeah I get that," Newt replies, wiping saline solutions of various viscosities off his face and
onto the sleeve of his sweater because both his hands are still busy and in a part of his sterile field he
hasn't cried on. "But you looked the best doing it, so what do you want from me, Mako, honestly.
You're my favorite Jaeger pilot okay, by like, a lot. You directly saved me from getting eaten, or,
maybe a different thing, I'm not sure about the story there."
"I did?" Mako asks.
"You did," Newt confirms, and he is doing awesome, the whole crying thing is doing a slow fade
like a maudlin Jeff Buckley song, both for him and for Mako; all the hard parts of this conversation
are done, the rest of this will be easy because Mako loves him, that is epic and strange and a thing
that has probably even been true for a whole lot longer than the two minutes he's known about it.
"We did," Mako says.
"Meh," Newt says. "You and Guy, you mean? Technically, I guess, it was a 'dual' thing, but the
whole operation had a very Mako Mori vibe for me, very lateral, very well timed, very coming out of
the shadows like truck full of swords. But ah, suave subject change, what is the deal--are you or are
you not dating your blonde friend? What's the story there?"
"What 'blonde friend?" Mako asks.
"Maks. Come on. You know the one I mean. Tall, somewhat lexically limited, very square jaw.
Your erstwhile copilot? The one you saved from the anteverse? May or may not have grabbed the
phone from you for the express purpose of calling me a 'dick' a few minutes ago?"
"His name is Raleigh, and who I am dating is none of your business," Mako says, with a
reassuringly crisp primness that wavers only slightly.
"I have it on good authority that we are biological half siblings," Newt says, hoping that this is
relatively common false knowledge and won't sound weird, inappropriate, aspirational, or
inappropriately and weirdly aspirational. "I can't believe you never told me we were related. Just
think how much more annoying I could have been. We've wasted decades, Mako. Okay, a single
decade. Okay, technically, not quite a decade."
"You were already much too annoying," Mako says, for some reason straying a little bit away
from the non-weeping thing they've had going for a good half-minute now.
"Yeah," Newt says, pretty sure he knows where her train of thought is headed and not really sure
what to do about it. "Listen, Maks--"
Do not even think of mentioning the Marshal, you utterly insensitive cretin, his brain snaps,
sounding like his uber sensitive life partner who probably gives great advice in situations like these,
where people are dead and other people are trying to integrate that knowledge into whole swaths of
behavioral programs that presuppose the aliveness of other parties.
Yeah, agreed dude, do not go there, someone else says, ostensibly his brain, Newt is a little too
stressed to keep track of who is whom while he's trying not to cry about anything and supergluing his
hand together with sterile epoxy.
It's probably better if we don't say anything, Newt advises everyone in his head.
"Newt?" Mako says.
Except right, he had started to say something and then stopped. Great.
"Yeah," he says, trying to fix this disaster he's sliding toward, "no, I just--"
Mako waits him out, ugh, because she's Mako; this really isn't fair, he should have done
condolence-offering as a tag-team with Hermann because together they almost make a relatively
normal if super conflicted human being, but maybe that's just the post-drift state talking.
Get it together, his brain advises. You're going to have to say something other than
meaningless, place-holder words.
I'm sorry that the Marshal died via self-annihilation during that underwater battle for the
future of mankind, Newt tries. I know he was kind of, not explicitly, your dad, a little bit. On the
plus side, it probably doesn't hurt that much to be instantly atomized, if that makes you feel better.
My guess is that it sucks less than drowning, so.
Even the kids hiss in suspect disapproval, which is weird; he's not sure he appreciates their
commentary.
 "I was just thinking," Newt says, in helpless anticipation of imminent total failure, "about the day
after we did that world-saving thing."
"I have also thought about that day," she replies. "I have thought about it many times."
"Yeah," Newt says, remembering Mako with her blue-framed black hair and her green Midori and
her red eyes, and the way she'd come alone, without Becket, looking incomplete and wronged in her
incompletion.
"I'm sorry we didn't drink that Midori," Newt says in a blind rush, because it's what he would
have done if things hadn't spiraled so strange and so out of his control, at the end. "Because I would
have told you some stuff, Maks, I'm sure. Some stupid, pointless stuff about the Marshal yelling at me
about you, like about how flagrantly and totally irresponsible it was for me to make you a shot when
you were only seventeen, and the way I said, 'no, dude, I'm the responsible one, it's that truculent
Hansen kid you're going to want to watch out for--so square jawed and Australian and stuff,' which
was not a strong defense, let me tell you, because I found out later that Chuck had, like, taken a vow
of chastity and chemical purity or something until all kaiju were dead, which sucks because I really
hope he at least drank a beer at some point before--ugh, oh man, this is the worst, but okay, anyway,
the Marshal then said something along the lines of, 'one--Geiszler, I will literally kill you if you ever
give Mako alcohol again, two--why can't you be more like Dr. Gottlieb, three--I will literally kill
you, four--there will be killing of the literal kind, five--they will find your dead body in an alley
somewhere, I want you to be able to picture this, Geiszler, in exact detail--"
Mako is laughing.
Well, either laughing or crying, or maybe it's laughing and crying; from a logic perspective he's
being very sloppy right now, but Newt is pretty sure that the smart money is, mostly, on Mako
laughing.
"Mako," Newt says, "Mako, why are you laughing, this is an extremely serious story, okay? I was
threatened with death. Your kind-of-dad gave me the kind-of-shotgun-talk, which is inappropriate
because a) you could take me in a fight ten out of ten times from age fourteen onward, b) we were not
then nor would we ever be dating because no, c) shotgun talks, as a class, are from an outdated
heteronormative paradigm that really everyone should be trying to subvert including PPDC field
marshals, as a class, and d) ha, who were they going to hire to replace me after my untimely
hypothetical death? No one, Mako, that's the answer. No one."
"What else?" Mako says, with a gloss of wistful eagerness and god that takes him straight back to
when she was a kid because she's still a kid, she's not a kid at all, she'd never been a kid; she'd been
a miniature containment case for memories of her family, whose names she wouldn't speak.
"Don't you 'what else' me, Maks," he replies, putting down his forceps and carefully prodding his
glued-shut surgical cut. It's slightly sticky, but intact. "You're the one with the alcohol, displaced in
space and time, undrinkable by me, and very green."
"You're so weird," Mako says.
"I'm one of the most normal guys ever," Newt says, peeling back the transparent sterile guard from
his left hand. "Everyone else is just complicated, lying, and slightly-to-significantly less intelligent
than I am. In point of fact, I happen to be the standard against which alien invaders measure all
humans, so, ergo, in conforming to myself, I am actually the apex of normality in the colloquial sense
and, therefore, I win." Newt sighs. "If only we could be drunk, Maks, this would probably be easier,
but, wait--I actually don't think I've ever seen you drunk. Have you ever been drunk? I think I might
find it really alarming."
"I have," Mako says.
 "Mako, stop changing the subject, with all this 'you're so weird, Newt', 'ask me about my drunken
escapades, Newt'." He positions a piece of sterile gauze over the incision in his hand and tapes it
down.
"I don't know what the subject is," Mako says.
"Yes you do, you badass little liar."
"I--" Mako says. "On that day, I--" she stops.
Newt says nothing. He pulls the glove off his right hand and starts breaking down his sterile field.
The scalpel blade slots into its blade guard, and the whole set of materials is rolled up into the paper
drape that the kit had been wrapped in.
"On that day, on the day after, I mean," she continues, speaking quietly and high pitched and
muffled, like she is cupping a hand over her mouth, "I wanted to be me. I wanted to be who I was and
not half of someone I didn't know. I wanted to be myself but not be by myself. I wanted to be with
someone who would let me be sad, because you always--"
She stops speaking and Newt is smart enough not to say anything.
"You let me be sad," she continues. "Do you know that's what I told him? When he asked me why I
spent so much time with you? I was thirteen."
"Yeah?" Newt says, because he doesn't know the right thing to say, because he never knows the
right thing to say.
"Yeah," Mako whispers back. "Remember when we watched Blue Planet twelve times in a row?
Eight episodes, twelve times? In the lab? An hour a night? For ninety-six nights?"
"It's burned into my brain, actually," Newt replies. "If I slowly go insane and die, it'll be one of
the last things to go."
"Not funny," Mako says, her voice cracking.
Not actually meant to be, his brain says.
"Er, yeah," Newt replies.
"But he, the Marshal, he asked me why I spent so much time with you. He said there were better
people."
"So true," Newt says, smiling askew, picking up his phone in his aching left hand and putting the
green, bundled remains of his sterile field in the trash.
"No, he didn't mean it like that," Mako corrects, "he just meant that there were better people for
me to spend time with. People my own age."
"Kids," Newt says, returning to the kitchen table and dropping into a chair. "They're calling them
'kids' these days, Maks."
"Shut up," she says. "Will you shut up?"
"Historically," Newt begins, but she just talks over him.
"He asked me why I liked you so much, and that's what I told him. I told him that you knew how
not to be sad, but that you let other people be sad, if that's what they wanted to be."
Newt slides an elbow onto the wood of the table and presses his head against his hand. "First of
all, 'not sadness' has a word, and that word is 'happy', or a more erudite synonym. Second of all, do
you say this kind of stuff in interviews, Maks? Does anyone really get you? Don't tell me it's Becket,
even if it's true."
"Knowing how to be not sad isn't the same as knowing how to be happy," Mako says.
"Well," Newt says, his head coming up, his gaze snapping to the Wall as though vision could be
magnetized. "That's true enough, I suppose."
For a moment they say nothing, as Newt stares at the Wall and Mako looks at something he will
never see.
"So are you seriously going to leave me hanging?" Newt asks. "What the heck did the guy say to
that?"
"He said, 'Mako, are we talking about the same Geiszler? Are you sure you know which one
Geiszler is? He's the short one. The one with glasses. The one with the green in his hair and tasteless
tattoos who shouts a lot. That's Geiszler. I think maybe the person you're talking about is Dr.
Gottlieb? Are you actually spending time with Dr. Gottlieb?'"
"The important thing is that we never tell the end of this story to Hermann," Newt says. "Ever,
Mako. Ever. Not ever."
"He liked you," Mako says. "The Marshal."
"Myeah, okay," Newt replies.
"It was hard for him," she says.
"I--I am totally sure it was, Maks."
"It was very hard," she says, sounding strained again, sounding like she's been strained, horribly
strained, for weeks now. "It was very hard, in the end, for him."
"Yeah," Newt replies, feeling overwhelmed, feeling like he needs to rest his head on his own
crossed arms, and so he does, sliding the phone very close to him, turning the volume down. "Not just
for him, though. For you too."
"Yes but I--" Mako says, breaking off. "Raleigh knows, but I--"
She pauses.
She pauses for a long time.
Newt sits there, head down on the table, trying not to picture Mako, not as she was, not as she is,
and failing. Failing.
"I wanted to be a shark," she whispers.
"Maks," Newt whispers back, feeling like the ache in his throat might consume him, "you're the
sharkeyest. You are the most shark. You--"
"You said 'trades'," she says.
Newt tries to remember saying anything at any time about 'trades' and tries to determine how this
might relate to metaphorical sharks. His brain is totally failing him because it's also trying really hard
not to get upset in the face of oncoming Mako-related upset, because it is oncoming, oh is it ever; he
can hear it in her voice, he can feel it in his own mind.
"You said we make 'trades'. You said that. You said it just now, but you've always said it. I
remember you always saying it. You think about trade-offs."
"I will cost/benefit myself right into the grave," Newt replies.
That was classlessly literal, his brain says, sounding like Hermann. You very nearly did that.
Please try to remember that other people have feelings, Newton.
"I made trades that were painful to me," Mako says. "I didn't say things that I should have said
because I didn't think that I could say them and still be who I wanted to be. What I wanted to be."
"Maybe you couldn't," Newt replies, feeling like someone needs to stick up for poor, past-Mako,
who had tried so hard and who wanted so much and so little. "A lot of people were watching you,
Maks, a lot of people were waiting for you to fail. There was a reason you didn't step into a Jaeger at
eighteen, kiddo, and a reason you were pulled off the bench in the endgame, when it's time to swing
for the metaphorical fences or go die in a hole."
"I wish that I had said more to him," Mako whispers. "I--I sometimes--it is difficult for me to
remember my father's face. My real father. Or the face of my mother. I turned them into my anger. He
tried to tell me not to do that; he tried to tell me in many small ways but I did it anyway, I had to, that
was one of my trades, so that I could be what I wanted, so that I could be a shark."
"Aw Maks," Newt says.
"When he died, he did not know everything I would have said, if I had been a person who could
say it," Mako finishes. "That was another trade."
"Oh come on," Newt replies. "He knew, dude. He totally knew."
"This is said often of the dead," Mako whispers. "But it is nothing more than a polite courtesy of
the living. I have only ever truly known one other person, and that person is not the Marshal. The
dead do not know, Newt. What they knew is uncertain. What they know is nothing, because they are
dead."
Newt tries not to give in to this new variety of totally overwhelming despair as he hopes that
Mako won't turn whatever she is feeling, her grief, her guilt, her anger--into yet another indictment
against herself.
"Yeah," Newt says. "Okay, yes, I get what you're saying, at least conceptually, and I'm not really
experienced with the magnitude of loss that you're talking about, I'm just gonna throw that one out
there as a caveat, but Maks, Maks, come on, the guy took you out for American-style chocolate milk
shakes when Skye McLeod the Improbably Dreamy Intern went back to MIT. I mean, don't try to tell
me he didn't know exactly what he was doing there. So yeah, did you ever start calling him 'Dad'?
No. Did he buy you miniature plastic ponies or whatever it is that adorably out of touch dads buy for
their female offspring? No. Did he mostly call you Ms. Mori? Yes. Did he cry a little bit in a totally
manful, jaw-clenching way when eleven-year-old-you drew him a picture of Coyote Tango before
you learned much English and he learned much Japanese? Yes. I don't know, dude, but to me? The
whole thing that you guys had going never looked like some kind of artificial distance imposed by
you. It looked like an admiration thing. So don't tell me that I'm being polite to you when I say I think
he knew how you felt, Mako, because I am not polite. I'm just not a polite guy, I mean, I'm not sure if
you know this but sometimes, historically, previously, I would roll up my shirt sleeves just to be a
jerk and not because I was hot, temperature wise. The point is, I think he knew because he did the
parent stuff for you; he did the hardest stuff Maks, right, like, I mean, right? He did the thankless
stuff, he did the stuff that they always talk about with the 'boundary setting' and he taught you the stuff
that you should know in life, right, like how to knee a guy in the crotch and then, I don't know, how to
pull out his larynx or something; the stuff where he filled out paperwork for you and took you to
doctors appointments that you hated and taught you scary levels of self discipline and he did all of
that without most of the fun stuff where he just, like, buys you a guitar and listens to you talk about
monsters for half an hour and then says, 'see you later, kid,' you know? He did all the crap stuff and
you guys got to have so little of the good stuff, but it was in there, like that time we went for karaoke
and you guys sang Sweet Caroline like conventional, adorkable losers, so Maks," Newt says, not
quite holding it together entirely, "Maks, do not tell me that you think he didn't know whole giant
swaths of all that unsaid stuff, and don't tell me that's a courtesy because it's not. It's not. You guys
had what you had and it doesn't matter what you called it, it matters what it was. And it was
awesome."
"I wish I had stated it all of it clearly," Mako whispers. "I wish he could have known what I
wanted to express in the way that I now want to express it. In the end, I had time to say only one
thing."
"But you said it," Newt replies.
"In the next moment it was gone," Mako whispers. "Because he was."
 Newt tries to rub away the ache in his jaw and does not say anything to negate her statement.
"I have learned from the trades that I made," Mako says, "and from the things I have gotten in
return, and from how Raleigh carries the things he's learned and the people that he's lost. This is why
I called you seventeen times and why I sent you thirty-one emails. I have a dead brother, Newt, but he
isn't mine. He isn't mine. He isn't anyone from my life that you could ever erase by stepping into the
place where he used to be. My dead brother is Raleigh's dead brother. Raleigh's. Mako Mori had no
brother to turn into her anger, no one had left any shoes for you to fill, you overwrote no one's story,
you were your own person with your own place in the life that I tried to be too angry to live. That was
why I came to your lab. That was why I brought the Midori. I wanted to tell you that you were stupid
and that I cared if you died and that I wanted to have a family again and that you were the only one
left to be in it, but that I wanted you there, I wanted you. But Dr. Gottlieb was anxious and you looked
so tired and so I didn't tell you. I didn't say any of those things, and I didn't do the right things and I
thought that maybe you had brain damage like that article said. Like the one said in Wired. I thought
that maybe you hated me, I hoped that you hated me, I hoped so much that you hated me, I said, 'please
let this be anger,' because I know what that's like. Because that would be all right. It would be all
right if it were anger, because anger can be pure. Anger can be beautiful. Anger can be like a sword,
sharpened to a single purpose. But I didn't think it was anger. And I tried to say to Raleigh, 'I'm sure
he's just angry at me,' but Raleigh knows everything and Raleigh can see when I'm lying and he
couldn't say anything and I wanted to talk to you and I wanted to tell you all the things that I never told
you and I wanted to do it before you were dead, before you weren't you and so that's why I called
you. That's why I called. That's why I called and that's why I said at a party one night that you were
my half-brother, and to please tell no one. I wanted to read it in the tabloids because I wanted it to
seem as real as the rest of it. Because I wanted it. Because no one but me wanted it. Just Mako. It was
just a thing that Mako wanted. To read that."
Mako starts audibly sobbing.
Mako, Newt tries to say, Mako I am so sorry. I didn't know, but I guess that was your whole
point. That I didn't know. But he doesn't say it, because he doesn't think he can get his jaw to unlock
and even if he did, he's not sure if Mako would be able to hear him anyway.
When he finally comes up with something to say, and when he's finally able to reliably force it
past his aching throat and sinuses, and when Mako can hear it, it's: "I'm, ah, pretty sure that story's
true, actually."
"What?" Mako says, with an audible sniff.
"No, I mean, yep, I think it's true," Newt says, his voice a cracked mess. "Your story. I'm pretty
sure my mom was touring in Tokyo like--"
"Tanegashima," Mako corrects.
"Yeah," Newt says. "Tanegashima. Sounds just like Tokyo to the non-native speaker. I'm pretty
sure my mom was touring in Tanegashima in 1989, and I mean, your dad, he was probably really into
the whole German Opera Singer thing in his youth. Because. You know. Germans. Opera. Hot. Just
unreasonably sexy. My mom, let me tell you, was, and still is, kind of an unreasonable looker, Maks."
Newt wipes his face on his shirt for something like the eighth time.
"Yes," Mako says thickly. "Yes, I also think that's how it must have happened."
"Tragically, I was left with a kindly but somewhat flighty German pop singer turned piano tuner
and his more responsible brother cum musical engineer for a few years before relocating myself to
the new world and choosing to spend my formative years in a den of academic wolves. This explains
why you're cooler than me."
 "I do not think we need to explain that," Mako says. "Some things just are."
"Mako, ugh," Newt says, cracking an unsteady smile, "look, I'm just being nice, because clearly
an argument can be made for me being the cool one. For example, I had a band. Where's your band?
Your band that you had that repopularized science for the first time since the Cold War?"
"I had a cover shoot with Vogue," Mako replies, with a cultivated innocence.
"Waaait, did you really?" Newt asks.
"Just me," she says. "No Raleigh. Mako only. Planet savior and international fashion icon. Little
girls all over the world are putting streaks in their hair."
"Okay, yeah, but I saw a seventh grader with my glasses, and my general iconoclastic demeanor,
so, um, I think maybe we're just tied."
"For now," Mako says, with airy, self-possessed threat. "Better watch it."
"Don't you 'better watch it' me, Maks, okay? I can hold my own. Kind of. Historically I could,
maybe. Arguably. In certain arenas. Soooo," he says, skillfully quantum tunneling himself out of the
conversational hole he's digging, "where are you? What are you doing right now?"
"I am in a fancy ladies room in Berlin, refusing to appear on a popular German talk show."
"Wait, you're blowing off an interview for this?" Newt asks.
"Do you know how many times I have been interviewed?" Mako whispers.
"A lot of times?" Newt guesses.
"Yes," Mako says. "And I have tried to talk to you for weeks."
"Yes, but--"
"Raleigh is talking with them," Mako says. "So that I can talk with you. "Where are you?" Mako
continues. "Can you please tell me your address?"
"I'll email it to you," Newt says.
"Can you please tell me your address," Mako says, more emphatically this time, less like a
question, more like a demand. "I want to send you things and I want to know where to go when this
publicity tour is over or if you don't answer your phone for another three weeks."
"I'll answer my phone," Newt says, guiltily and mildly aggrieved, before he gives her his address.
"Now," Mako says, stepping laterally into the role of bossy-kid sister so effortlessly that Newt's
throat aches with it. "You will tell me again what you said at the beginning of this call, but slower."
"Um," Newt says, trying to run his thoughts backward through a maze of conversational tangents
before he says, "biohacking? It's more like 'biohacking-lite', I don't want to alarm Hermann, he is
easily alarmed these days, let me tell you, especially when it comes to things that involve me being
somewhat cavalier with--"
"No," Mako says. "Not that. After that. The part where you explained why you didn't answer your
phone for three weeks."
"Ah," Newt says. "Well--"
That's about as far as he's going to easily get.
Mako says nothing.
Newt says nothing.
"I think the bottom line is that things are mostly fine now," Newt says, with reliable, perfect
brilliance.
"I believed Dr. Gottlieb to be very angry after the breach was closed," Mako says delicately.
"That is true," Newt says. "That is extremely true. He's not pissed at you though, Maks. He's not
pissed at anyone, really, other than unfairly and kind of ludicrously at himself, I think, because he
didn't illogically and metaphorically throw himself in front of me, getting us both hit by the oncoming
and inevitable train. Everyone was just doing the things that had to be done. You know. The
impersonal thrust and slash of the 'i' dotting and 't' crossing bureaucracy in which we live our lives. If
someone goes and demonstrates mental continuity with the anteverse, then someone else is going to
need to at least demonstrate a prayer of discontinuity, because of social contracts and reasonable
expectations of civilization safety and continuation of our species and stuff. You know. I know. I get
it. It's fine. Hermann--well, he's a purist in a lot of ways, Maks; he doesn't like the cost/benefit
scenario, he doesn't like the aleatory whims of nature, red in tooth and claw, or institutionalized
policies that screw people over now and again, for very, very excellent proof-of-principle reasons,
he likes things to be neat and fair and whatnot. So yeah. He's a little angry right now."
"So you were not all right," Mako says, her voice small.
"Meh," Newt says, totally casual, totally suave. "Life is about trajectories, dude. Absolute values
are meaningless without context. Context-wise, things are looking awesome. Also, what is it with
literally everyone who talks to me conveniently forgetting that we were almost all eaten by giant alien
dinosaur-equivalents. Why is that never the worst-case scenario? Like, people never say, 'aw, Newt,
you arguably fit the clinical criteria for a seizure disorder, but at least you weren't eaten.' No. It's
always, 'oh god you look like you're going to die, why don't you just lie down over here and cry for a
while, I'll get you a graham cracker and take your blood pressure.' I mean, not that I haven't done
some of that Maks, not gonna lie, and you know how I feel about graham crackers, namely really
good, but I think the part where I avoided being eaten, individually and also kind of on behalf of my
civilization, is important, Maks, like, it should not be left out of the whole picture. Everyone keeps
doing that; it makes me feel tragically misunderstood."
"Do you have seizures now?" Mako asks.
"I don't, actually," Newt replies. "I had three total, all while hooked up to some invasive
equipment, but, apparently, if you are a trained neurologist and you look at my baseline EEG, it is
totally terrifying and seems easily perturbable into something crazy and incompatible with
consciousness, so the official verdict is 'you probably have an excitable cerebral cortex now, let's
just call it a seizure disorder in the chart and how about you never drink coffee or alcohol again'.
That's an exaggeration. I get to pick one of those two to empirically test pretty shortly. I'm definitely
going with coffee, even though Hermann has been trying to subtly influence me in the alcohol
direction, mainly because his tolerance for insomniac me is surprisingly low and alcohol supposedly
mimics GABA while caffeine, it is true, is not going to help my sleeplessness. Maks, god, you don't
care about this, um, GABA is like an inhibitory neurotransmitter, breaks for the brain, whatever, the
point is, my life is not actually that hard; it's just a little weird right now. I'm fine. You should not be
worried about me, you have other things going on, whole swaths of other things."
"You drifted," Mako says quietly, "with them."
"Myeahh," Newt says, drawing out the word, feeling weird, feeling kind of not okay, feeling like
the kids are getting restless, the actual kids, er, the fake kids, the neural copy of the kids in his head,
like they're a thing separate from him, like they can pay attention to Mako, like they can learn who she
is, like they care who she is; he doesn't like that.
Kids, Mako, Newt thinks in polite introduction, feeling more than a little anxious. Mako, kids.
You could do it again, the kids hiss. You could do it again; she could help you. She would help
you. You could come back to the drift.
Noo, Newt thinks at them firmly, showing them who's boss. No that's not a thing. You're on the
team now, kids. The Geiszler team. Team Geiszler. Drifting is not good for the team. Drifting will
probably kill this team, actually, or give this team intractable epilepsy and even more of hive-mind
withdrawal problem.
Good, the kids seethe.
Aw kids, Newt thinks, I get that, I do. But you're not in charge of the team. The rest of the team
votes no to death.
"It's not as weird as it sounds," Newt continues, skating on thin psychological ice, gripping the
edge of the table, because the kaiju, in general, he can talk about now pretty well, the Wall he can
handle in some ways, even the breach, he can sort of, sort of, well, oh god, he has complicated
feelings about it but he can sort of handle that but the drift, the drift, that's hard for him; round three is
hard for him, because they were just, they were just, so sad, so sad and so angry and so cut apart, and
so wanting his agonized death and also wanting him to just tell them what to do, to make them whole
and he can't, no, he can't do that, they came here, they came to destroy and he won and he said no, he
wouldn't let them, he stopped them and he cut them up. "It's actually," he says, and he can hear the
vagueness in his own voice, he can hear that he doesn't sound 'good' in the classical sense of the
word, "it's actually, Mako, it's a little bit hard for me to--" he trails off because he's not sure what to
say in this post-drift slurry of thought and color and sensory impressions that aren't his, and sensory
impressions that aren't sensory, not really, how could they be, when they come from disembodied
neural tissue in--
"Newt?" Mako says.
Yeah, Newt thinks about saying, as the room fades.
I think your vision's starting to go, champ, his brain says, anxiously checking in. I'm not sure if
you're breathing right now. You should probably start that back up.
Team player, Newt says, in vague if appreciative annotation.
Come back to us, the kids hiss with a serpentine sadness.
Go team, Newt thinks vaguely, flashing back to a remembered blue-edged conflict he'd had with
networked shreds of minds, not his tamer neural copies, but their real and angry peers.
"Newt?" Mako says, sharp and high over the speaker on the phone he can't see behind a
homogenous field of gray static.
"Yeah," he says.
Why does your vasovagal response manifest visually like cosmic background radiation, do you
think?" Carl Sagan asks.
Dude, I have no idea, Newt thinks, confused. This isn't my area. I gave astrophysics a pass.
Half of you did, maybe, Sagan replies reasonably. If only exobiology could be parsed into a
working knowledge of medicine and astrophysics. Unfortunately, that doesn't make any conceptual
sense. But then, why would it? I believe you're losing consciousness, and your capacity for critical
thought is decreasing exponentially.
Um? Newt replies, confused, his hand throbbing with a local acuity in the context of general
sensory loss.
LIE DOWN, his brain advises.
"Newt," Mako says again and again, an incomplete half of a call-and-response verse structure.
Newt grabs his phone and gets out of his chair in a poorly-controlled, blind slide to the floor.
"Newt," Mako says. "Answer me."
Hey Mako, Newt thinks.
"Newt," she says.
"Mako," he says.
"Newt," she says.
 "Mako," he says.
"What is wrong with you?" she snaps.
"Nothing is wrong with me, Maks, come on," he replies, because actually he's doing pretty
awesome relative to how he thought this might go, "I just have a thing that happens to me sometimes;
I'm not sure what it is; it's a little bit panick-attackish, eh, that's a pretty dece band name, Panic
Attackish, I'll let you take that one if you want to start up a rival band, but look, it's just kind of like,
well, okay do this, Mako, pretend instead of Captain Jawline's memories in your head you have a
little bit of an alien collective in there instead, well, er, actually, memories of them, memories, pretty
sure they're not actually there, Maks, full disclosure, but it's a little weird and sometimes you find out
things about yourself, like how you just maybe don't do that well with destruction on large scales; it's
like a little too overwhelming and sometimes the guys in your head want to kill you a little bit but they
also just think you're so interesting, maybe because they themselves think that, or maybe just because
you're a narcissist that folds like a deck of cards in the face of real chaos because that's not what
you're about, you're not about the chaos, really, you kind of enjoy it if it looks pretty, but when it
comes right down to it you're just a guy who always liked plants and building guitars and maybe
watching high definition footage of cataclysms a little bit more than was socially acceptable, but
being there, mid-cataclysm, is a little too much for you even if you weren't actually there, and also
maybe there's some kind of creepy hive-mind reward thing, it's weird; it's hard to explain, it's a little
bit like stepping into an alternate dimension and getting a courtesy heroin shot for coming, like, 'hey,
thanks, hope we see you in our collective again, we know how to have a good time over here, make
sure you come back so we can torture your disembodied consciousness for an eternity. It will feel so
so good, and so so bad.' But er, I'm doing great, Mako, actually I'm doing really well. They like me, a
little bit, the parts of my brain that hate me, mainly because they're lonely here, all alone, in my head.
I win people over. Even enraged alien brains that I maybe cut apart a little bit because of
misunderstandings about the nature of death. Also it's kind of hard for me to handle my own brain
right now while very sleep deprived, which I am, Mako, kind of constantly; not a ton of sleeping
happening for me, lately, full disclosure, so that makes it slightly harder when it comes to responding
appropriately to all environmental cues, but everything is normalizing towards my historical
baseline."
"Oh," Mako says. "Okay."
"That's a little bit why I didn't call you," Newt confesses, staring at the ceiling that he can see
now, that's cool, and feeling wrung out, totally drained of vital humors, Hippocrates-style. "That thing
that just happened. A little bit. Kind of. It used to be worse."
"I'm sorry I asked you about it," Mako says. "I should have known not to ask."
"Nah," Newt says.
"Are you living with Dr. Gottlieb?" Mako asks.
"Heyyy," Newt says, in unconcealed exhaustion that he tries to correct by manifesting indignation
out of the ether with limited success. "I pay rent. We are living together. With each other. I'm not
living with him. I'm independently wealthy now through a quirk of the cultural zeitgeist, Mako, okay?
It's totally normal."
"Yes," Mako agrees. "I'm sure that it is."
"He likes me, it turns out," Newt adds. "He didn't dramatically and eloquently confess it to me or
anything like some people I could name, but it is, nevertheless, a reproducible phenomenon. I am not
sure if you knew that. But it's a thing. And active, ongoing thing."
"I knew that," Mako says. "I am glad you are not alone."
 "Myeah," Newt says. "So, speaking of not-alone-ness, what is the deal with 'Raleigh,' I think you
said it was? Was that his name? Yeah, so what's the story there because--"
"No," Mako says.
"Maks we're related, basically."
"No," Mako says.
"Mako, you just assaulted me with your words like three minutes ago, you have to make it up to
me."
"No," Mako says.
"But Mako he's boring."
"He is not boring," Mako says.
"Ha!" Newt replies, inevitably victorious. "I demand evidence."
"He likes your band," Mako says. "Without irony."
"Okay, that's unexpected," Newt says. "Both that he likes my band and the implication that he's
capable of appreciating something ironically."
"You confuse him," Mako says, "because his own brother is dead."
Mako counters emotional manipulation with emotional evisceration and, yes, he deserved that a
little more than a little bit, because he is kind of a dick sometimes, but still.
"Ugh, Mako, god, just stab me in the heart, will you? Just take a sword and drive it right in there. I
don't think you cut open all four chambers, maybe twist it a little or something, if you can, yeah?
Twist."
"Well don't call him boring then," Mako replies, "because he is not. He can't help what he looks
like."
"What he looks--" Newt trails off in total incredulity, wondering what Mako thinks Raleigh
Becket, Captain Explosion, looks like, other than a conventional, clean-cut, enviable winner of
evolution by natural selection. "All right, all right, all right, fine, I give up. You can bring him when
you come visit," Newt says. "I guess. If he wants to come. I get this whole drift partner confusion
thing, Mako, I get it a lot, er--"
You did not drift with Hermann, his entire team, kids included, snarls at him in an outraged choir.
"Er, like, I sort of get it, kind of, in an alien way, and I have a great, extrapolative imagination
and so I get it that way as well. The theoretically extrapolative way. Very theoretical. Highly
extrapolative. To be clear, not empirically. Because I would not know about human drifting. You are
being sympathy'd rather than empathy'd right now. Your brain must be confusing; tell me more about
that Maks, how is your brain these days? Confusing?"
"Yes," Mako says, slowly and suspiciously and insightfully, as if she's slicing carefully through a
resistanceless opacity.
You never used to be this genuinely stupid, his brain informs him.
Well it's just that it's Mako, Newt says, defending himself. And being team leader is harder than
it looks from your point of view, okay? It's so easy to criticize when you're not the guy getting
confused about fainting versus not fainting, panicking versus not panicking, what to say when, and
who is who and who wants what and whether those wants are team wants, or player wants, okay?
Well maybe end this call before you say something you shouldn't be saying because clearly
your ability to conceal what you're supposed to be concealing is at a minimum right now, his brain
points out.
"Mako, hey, got to go, I sort of turned the kitchen table that I share with Hermann into a sterile
field so that I could implant myself with an RFID chip and I probably should clean that up before the
guy gets home, because it looks a little weird," he says, only half lying.
"Don't go," Mako says, high and fast and unconsidered.
Well, nope, he can't go now.
What is he, made of stone?
No. Dr. Newton Geiszler of the sextupled Ph.Ds. is, at his best and most emotionally sturdy, made
of a classic candy shell that will melt at mouth but not skin temperatures.
"Someone needs a Blue Planet marathon," Newt says.
"I--" Mako says. "I could help you. If you needed it. I could also help Dr. Gottlieb, if, for some
reason, he needed it. If, for some reason, something happened to him in the alley where you drifted. If
something happened to him there."
"Nope," Newt says, not panicking, because it's okay, because it's just Mako, but what if other
people know, what if other people find out. He does not think that Hermann would do well with the
kids in his head; Hermann is a little too good at integrating disparate neural patterns to not break
down into sympathetic insanity if that happens to him; they are lucky that it didn't; no, they are not
lucky because it was skill, because Newt had known ahead of time that it had to be him, that it should
be him, that if it had to be one of them that he was the only one who made sense. Maximum risk,
maximum benefit; best odds of best outcome.
Don't panic, his brain says. Don't panic, you did it. You did what you wanted, it's done. No one
wants to slot you there, back into that local insanity collective, no one wants that, not for either of
you, everything is fine.
"Or," Mako continues, "if one day, you want to say, 'Mako, is it normal to hide food from your
drift partner and cry when he finds it'."
"Um," Newt says, feeling insufficiently on point to understand what she's getting at.
"Or if you want to say, 'Mako, is it normal to dream of bar fights on the same night at the same
time as your drift partner'."
"Ah," Newt says, his thoughts snapping into place, relieving some of his understandable but
probably needless anxiety.
"If you want to know about those things," Mako says, "I can tell you about those things. When I
come to see you, we can go for a walk, where no one will hear us and we will wear sunglasses and I
will wear a scarf over my hair and you will wear a hat that I pick for you and we will talk where no
one can hear us and you will tell me the things that you wish to tell me."
"Aw Maks," Newt says.
"I missed you," Mako says.
"Yeah," Newt says.
"Don't ignore my calls," she says, her tone a frost, imperious and thick.
"Nope," Newt whispers.
Saying goodbye is protracted and slow and turns out to be one of the least goodbyeish goodbyes
in the entirety of his sphere of human interactions, which is weird, but a good weird, an
unambiguously good variant of 'weird'. Mako texts him four times in quick succession after she hangs
up, as if she doesn't believe that he still exists on the other end of the set of circuits in her hand, but
Newt texts her back, dictating to his phone because his eyes hurt too much to type. He feels like an
overdrawn account, like he's not going to get up off this floor very easily, like he's a guy who's
coming down off a weeks-long terror high to find that his bone marrow has let demand outstrip supply
and whose central processor is burning through metaphorical power reserves and fusing more than a
few relays in the process.
 What is the deal with Mako, anyway, he asks his brain.
It's not that complicated, his brain replies. She's like you, but cooler. She had more ripped
away, but faster. She had a cleaner goal, a sharper edge, her life was better ordered. She said no to
things you wished you could reject, but couldn't, because you didn't have them.
Newt reaches up to adjust his glasses and the movement feels laborious, the air suspiciously
viscous with resistance.
"Do not fall asleep here," he says, letting gravity drag his hand straight back toward the core of
the earth, feeling the normal force at every point of his spine that is pressed against the wood of the
floor. "That would be so stupid."
Ugh, on a scale of Stoic to post-Aeneas-Dido-killing-herself-on-a-Carthaginan-funeral-pyre, how
emo is this?
Newt gives his current floor-lying post-weeping a solid seven point five on the Emo Scale.
You're putting the sigh in scientist again, his brain says, quoting Caitlin Lightcap.
"Myeah," Newt says. "A little bit."
It's fine, he's tired, and it's not like anyone will ever know about his post-weeping exhausted
floor-lying; it's not like he's going to fall asleep here or anything, that would be a near statistical
improbability and incredibly stupid.
Really, really, really stupid.
And, therefore, he will make it a point not to do that.

Newt comes awake in a slow disentanglement from blue-edged dreaming in cognitive fugues;
each throughline of his thoughts snapping individually and sequentially into silence as he wrests his
way back to alertness.
Kind of.
Kind of alertness.
The room is rendered in a dark and silhouetted monochrome that doesn't look quite right to him,
perspective-wise.
He can feel which way is west; his thoughts torque with an unpleasant directional vector that he
hopes is oneiric, but fears is not.
"Relax," Hermann says, very smooth, very careful, very close, and so upset that he does not sound
upset at all.
Oh.
Okay then.
Someone, probably Dr. Gottlieb, is pressing cool fingers to Newt's lateral throat.
Carotid territory.
Newt blinks and shifts his gaze from ceiling-ward to colleague-ward. He can't see Hermann's face
in the dim light, just his outline, dark against the minimal backlight that comes from the windows that
overlook the bay and setting sun. The frames of Newt's glasses break the continuity of Hermann's
profile.
Well this doesn't seem like the best, his brain comments slowly, and, tragically, Newt's not really
sure what it means by 'this' or 'best'. He's flustered by the dim light trending toward darkness and the
surface that he's lying on and the ache in his sinuses that exerts a strange press on his face.
I'm on the floor right now? he surmises, making slow sense of his skewed perspective.
Yes, his brain replies. I think you are.
"OhIwasnotgoingt'dothis," Newt says in a moderately intelligible slide, trying to come up on one
elbow, but getting held down by Hermann, who shifts his hand from Newt's neck to his chest in a
clear gambit to maximize his unfair positional advantage.
Newt could hold people down one handed too, if he wanted to, and the hypothetical people were
tired, and he could sort of kneel on them and get his whole force vector to be perfectly vertical.
When there is no subsequent talking, Newt realizes that Hermann is doing a thing with a phone.
A thing like calling someone, maybe.
That thought sharpens him up appreciably.
Newt gives up on his elbow-levering plan and replaces it with a quick, lateral, Gottliebian-style
open hand swipe, that, miraculously, and most likely entirely because Hermann was not expecting
anything of the kind, manages to land him Hermann's phone, smack in the palm of his left hand. He
closes his fingers around it, transfers it across his body, and pins it to the floor beneath his palm, out
of Hermann's easy reach.
"Newton," Hermann snaps, like a guy who had been planning to call emergency services.
Dr. Geiszler, man; dude is a winner.
"I fell asleep," Newt says, pointedly, clearly, articulately, reasonably, and, hopefully, reassuringly.
"Did you?" Hermann says, in a slow slide of soothing skepticism. "I'm not certain of that, Newton.
I believe that you may have fainted."
"Nah," Newt says.
He's pretty sure that's wrong.
He's mostly sure.
Okay, admittedly, he's maybe not entirely sure.
"You look very much like you fell out of your chair," Hermann replies.
That particular observation triggers a nice set of synaptic firing to the tune of some heroic not-
fainting while trying to talk to Mako (oh god, Mako) and then a subsequent episode of lying on the
floor (lying on the floor, he's come undone) thinking 'I should probably not fall asleep here' and then
(alas) doing precisely that.
There had, most certainly, been no fainting though.
"No," Newt says, from the apex of intellectually elite dismissiveness. He throws in a courtesy oh-
so-painful-but-oh-so-worth-it eye roll.
Hermann doesn't say anything in response to Newt's erudite if monosyllabic sass attack, but Newt
can tell the guy is unconvinced from the pressure he's currently applying to Newt's sternum.
Newt tries to reassure him by sitting in the face of sternal pressure, but Hermann, apparently still
very unconvinced about Newt's 'sleeping' story, makes it pretty clear that if Newt wants to get up he's
going to have to turn this into a grappling match.
Newt has a little more class than that.
Not a lot more, it's true, but a little more.
"There was no fainting, Hermann," he says, relaxing back against the floor in exhausted,
temporary defeat. "There was just some feeling weird and then some lying down and then some
falling asleep in what turned out to be a bad idea cascade."
Hermann is silent.
Hermann is silent for a long time, quietly freaking out, or simmering down, or running cost/benefit
analyses that center around fighting Newt for his phone, because Newt will put up a fight to hang onto
that phone, there's a cosmic truth if there ever was one.
Newt is about to say something totally normal, like, 'it's dark in here,' or, 'did you make any
freshmen cry today?' or, 'what are you going to make for dinner, not that you have to make dinner, but
if you were planning on it I would not say no to spatzle,' but Hermann beats him to it.
"You're cold," he says, like he's driving a fatal strike of a spike into the vampire heart of Newt's
'sleeping' story, when really it's nothing of the kind; the currently unimpressive temperature of Newt's
extremities is a totally normal consequence of losing thermal energy for hours to the heat sink of the
floor and replacing it by metabolism at a slightly lower rate than normal in the context of peripheral
vasoconstriction. His peripheral vasculature isn't going to be nicely dilated if he's lying on a surface
that's below the temperature that his hypothalamus would like to be setting.
Obviously.
"Meh," Newt says, unimpressed. "It's a predictable consequence of my behavior and says good
things about the functionality of my cardiovascular system. Not everyone equates cold with inevitable
illness and death. Calm down about it already."
"Stop being purposefully inflammatory," Hermann says. "You aren't carrying it off very well."
"I am carrying it off just fine," Newt replies, admittedly slightly listless relative to his historical
norm.
Mako, his brain offers, in a strange and skeptical blend of hope and dread.
Yes, brain, Newt says politely. Thank you.
"Can you sit?" Hermann asks, like a guy who has not been and is not currently literally pinning
Newt to the floor.
Newt looks at Hermann in pointed incredulity that maybe errs more on the incredulous side than
the pointed side, because come on. Of course, it's dim enough in the room that it may be impossible
for Hermann to appreciate the look that Newt is directing at him.
"Are you going to let me sit? Of course I can sit, dude," Newt says, making a tonal show of being
aggrieved. "I'm fine. I was sleeping, admittedly in kind of an alarming pose, on the floor. Is it late?
Sorry if you thought I was unconscious or dead."
"It is nearly six o'clock," Hermann replies, switching teams from anti-sitting to pro-sitting and
backing off on the sternal pressure.
Newt sits, mostly under his own power. Hermann helps him when the whole operation starts to
look a little bit jeopardized as the increasing angle between Newt's back and the floor reaches the
forty-five degree mark and his initial momentum runs out, undoubtedly because he is cold and stiff
and tired and maybe just a little bit filled with misery under the crush of having let Mako down so
completely for the past set of weeks.
Mako, who loves him.
"I am such a jerk," Newt announces, leaning forward, resting his forehead on Hermann's nearest
shoulder.
"You are thoughtless," Hermann says, trying to warm Newt up with some semi-vigorious bilateral
lateral arm-rubbing that, truth be told, kind of hurts, because Newt is sore from his recent Wall
climbing and floor-lying. "That is not the same thing."
"Thoughtless," Newt says, miserably. "Yes. I am a thoughtless, inconsiderate, brash, irresponsible
narcissist."
"That," Hermann says, inexcusably gently, "is my line. Do not get over-zealous in this new trend
toward self-chastisement, Newton, or it will rob me of roughly eighty percent of my conversational
satisfaction."
Newt says nothing. He spends a moment in silent, intense yearning for a reset-to-factory-settings-
button for his brain.
The kids hiss in edgeless discontent.
 "I'm going to turn on a light," Hermann says.
"Nah," Newt replies, lifting his head off Hermann's shoulder, adjusting his glasses into their
proper alignment. "I got it."
He snaps, left handed, once, and, with a twinge of pain, the lights come on.
Hermann observes the change in illumination and reacts by flinching. He then correlates his
observation with Newt's snapping and looks at Newt, eyebrows pressed together, mouth open slightly.
He then realizes that causation between the finger snap and the illumination is implied, but not
explained by any conventional mechanism, at which point his expression changes from 'startled
hypothesizing' to 'total astonishment,' which is, by far, the rarest of expressions in the Gottliebian
Catalogue. Newt has, in fact, only witnessed this expression on three other occasions. One--the first
time Hermann had connected Newt in the flesh with Newton Geiszler, Ph.D. Two--the time that a
dermal sample from Yamarishi had, surprisingly, contained a macro version of a (fortunately
detoxified) nematocyst that had, um, kind of discharged into Newt's forearm and pinned him to his
own lab bench until he'd had the Improbably Dreamy Intern unbolt the bone saw from the wall to cut
through the thing. Three--the time that Newt had articulately, politely, and successfully advocated for
funding Hermann's quantum cartography project at the expense of kaiju immunological susceptibility
profiling.
This is time number four, and it is unambiguously the best because when not mixed with horror or
skepticism, Newt finds Gottliebian absolute astonishment to be ridiculously endearing.
This is improving his mood by about eight thousand percent,
"What?" he says, in his most perfect approximation of absent-minded innocence, pure as unsplit
light. "What's that look?"
"How did you--" Hermann begins, then looks at Newt again, his expression changing from
astonishment into something Newt finds confusing--like he's pulling answers straight off Newt's face
or out of his brain. It's a weird look, a weird one; a look Newt doesn't like. With the extreme caution
of a guy sitting on an explosive stack of insight-disparity, Hermann asks, "have you been crying?"
This snaps him, straight and brief, to outrage-veiled despair.
"What?" Newt demands. "No. No, how can you even ask me that? That's what you're going to ask
me? Out of all the things that you could be asking at this precise moment, that's what you're going
with, the crying thing? What happened to you? A drive-by starvation diet? You look awful. Take a
nap and eat a piece of pie or something. Stop being so compensatorily abstemious all the damned
time." He tries for a dramatic exit, he tries hard, but Hermann is something like eight times faster than
he is when it comes to reflexive responses and that's on a good day, so all Newt manages to do is
shift backwards in preparation for a vertical energy expenditure before Hermann yanks one of his
ankles forward and gets a hand clenched around a whole swath of Newt's stupid sweater in a weirdly
badass maneuver. Who reflexively destabilizes someone? These are some Jaeger-pilot level skills
that Hermann is evincing, but Newt doesn't care, Newt isn't envious, Newt doesn't think that's cool,
Newt has his own things going, his own things, like a rationalism vacation and helping the fish kids
live up to their full intellectual potentials, and ignoring Mako, and being a jerk to nice people.
He tries to communicate all of this to Hermann, EPIC Rapport style, by glaring, but even that's not
working out very well because he can't get his glares up to maximum wattage when he's exhausted,
and it's hard to hold on to the glaring wattage he does have when his face hurts and his eyes hurt, and
when he is tired, god he is tired, he is just very tired, very, and he does not particularly care for the
way that he is being looked at right now by his colleague, not that it's not a nice look, it is a nice look,
that's the problem with it, it's a little too nice; it's one that's full of way too much sympathy and
empathy and pity and Newton-I-get-your-soul-in-a-literal-way-a-way-so-literal-that-I-will-in-fact-
give-you-a-five-hour-hug-as-you-weep-continuously-all-over-my-fancy-math-professor-outfit-with-
narrow-lapels-or-not-it's-up-to-you-buddy-you-take-your-time-and-decide-when-you-want-your-
nervous-breakdown-to-be-I'll-just-stay-over-here-helping-you-put-it-off-I'd-do-that-indefinitely-for-
you-because-of-hard-to-explain-reasons-like-intellectual-admiration-and-the-guitar-thing-whatever-
that-is-don't-ask-me-I'll-just-deny-it-and-also-I'd-do-it-out-of-professional-solidarity-and-respect-in-
memory-of-all-those-times-we-tried-so-hard-to-map-the-boundaries-of-human-thought-and-extend-
the-edges-of-human-knowledge-for-the-purpose-of-saving-our-species-those-were-some-good-times-
and-worth-a-shoulder-cry-or-two-for-sure-also-keep-in-mind-that-we-live-in-the-future-and-dudes-
can-cry-now-sometimes-it's-a-thing-just-don't-question-it-you-play-Portal-like-a-champ-that's-
literally-the-only-thing-that-matters-everyone-is-envious-of-you-so-it's-fine-if-you-want-to-spend-
weeks-and-weeks-just-sort-of-leaking-from-the-eyes-because-your-Portal-skills-and-your-academic-
pedigree-just-allow-for-that-sort-of-thing-there's-no-need-for-all-of-this-self-castigation-you're-
doing.
Newt snaps his fingers again, and the lights go off.
That takes care of Dr. Gottlieb and his razor-edged, freakishly-specific, unspoken compassion
quite nicely.
Newt will now lie back down and surrender all his remaining body heat to this floor in total
thermal equilibration.
He does exactly that, turning away from Hermann, lying on his side, his cheek pressed to the cool
wood of the floor, still holding his colleague's phone.
"I do not understand why you are so upset," Hermann says, sounding pretty upset himself.
Newt does not clarify things for him.
Misery-silence ensues.
"Or, rather," Hermann says, after giving misery-silence a good and respectful run, "I can think of
many reasons for you to be chronically and acutely upset, but you-- Newton, I do not understand why
you can control the lights. I am extremely concerned that you are upset because you can control the
lights."
Yeeeeeaaaaahhhhh, his brain says, following Hermann's totally reasonable train of thought.
Electric field manipulation as an epiphenomenon of the post-drift state. It would be a biological
stretch, but I could see it; kaiju can generate EM pulses and communicate telepathically over
unknown distances/dimensions, so it's potentially plausible for Dr. Geiszler to get in on that game
secondary to neural manipulation alone. The main barrier to successful electric field
manipulation is straight up going to be your skull though, friend, bone is not very conductive. It's
going to block, not boost, signals originating from your cortex. It would be sick if you could turn
your peripheral nervous system into some kind of transmitter of electromagnetic waves, but you
lack a mechanism and you probably will, forever, because there are no more intact kaiju to study.
Ever. So. Yeah. Have fun theorizing. Alternatively, lace your skull with something conductive and
see if you can telepathically communicate with the real kids.
His neural copy chorus shrieks in longing anticipation of kaiju, redivivus.
"Oh god," Newt whispers, in response to his own brain.
"You can manipulate electric fields," Hermann says in a hollow whisper.
Pay attention to your external environment, his internal Hermann snaps. And to me. The real me.
He is clearly quite worried because you are allowing him to proceed with a mistaken assumption.
Tell him you put a chip in your hand, you insensitive cad. Because it is the chip. The chip sends a
signal to the sensors you interfaced with the light switch, do not confuse yourself about this; do
not confuse your colleague about this.
"Er, yes," Newt confirms, feeling overwhelmed by the conflict in his thoughts. He has a raging
visceral urge to modify the plates of his skull into something electrically conductive, and he is
simultaneously so terrified by the horrific, promising scope of his idea that he can't quite organize a
way to communicate to Hermann that he's biohacked himself so well that it looks like an ability
conferred by the drift, but it's not.
"Did you just discover this?" Hermann asks, taking this whole thing like a champ, super calm,
minimally horrified.
The kids in his head hiss at him in wordless, sibilant demand.
No kids, he thinks. This is the team. The team is real me, fake you. The team is not real you, real
me, and real holes drilled into my skull for the purposes of thought broadcast; we humans have a
word for that scenario and that word is NEVER.
"Well, 'discover' isn't really the word I'd pick," Newt says, distracted, his thoughts fracturing as
he tries to backtrack and correct his tergiversationist tendencies. He cannot think over the tide of
alien demand in his head. "I just effected it."
"You--did this to yourself, in some way?" Hermann asks, increasingly perplexed but trying to hide
it.
"I did it to myself in a controlled and precise manner," Newt confirms, pressing his cheek to the
cold floor, curling up, and attempting to map the current borders of Team Geiszler. "Yes. Not a--not a
hive-mind thing. Don't freak out."
"How did you do it?" Hermann asks.
Newt would love to say any one of about eight thousand things in response to that question.
Unfortunately, there are other things happening in his head right now.
There would be two options, his brain says, torturing him. The first would be to just drill
yourself a massive cranial window and see if that got you anywhere. Maybe, if you didn't have a
skull, you could hear them. The real kids. The real kids. You put them where they are and you can't
help them; the least you can do is listen. Listen to them. Listen.
Listen, the kids hiss.
The least you can do is talk to them, his brain says.
The least you can do, the kids echo. Talk.
Stop, Newt replies, his head snapping back, both hands coming to his temples. Stop stop stop
stop stop. Please stop.
Pay attention, not-Hermann snaps.
The second option, his brain continues, would be to drill multiple holes, small ones, and then
wire yourself up, dura to dermis. Reception, transmission, it might work, what it really would
depend on, what both solutions would depend on, would be your ability transduce over-the-air
electromagnetic waves into sensical thoughts.
"Newton," Hermann says.
This is insane, kiddo, Caitlin Lightcap chimes in.
No more biohacking, Newt shouts at his mental chorus.
I wasn't suggesting you'd do it, his brain says. Someone else can do the drilling. I'm not
completely crazy.
'Are you kidding me?' he snaps, bringing one hand down on the mental conference table, 'you
want to do what now? Absolutely not. No one's skull needs no one's semi-permanent subdural
electrodes. I don't care if you flew in humanity's most baller Prince of Neurosurgery especially to
drill you a cranial window, it's not happening. Do not even think about opening my skull, I've got a
workaround for that. What are we, barbarians? Build me a ziggurat and ask me again--I promise
I'll consider it,' but something's putting tension on his nervous system and searing stereo loathing
or stereo longing straight into his head; no one knows which it is, not the cut-up kids with their
cognitive acid or the guy they've crowned king of their chemical underworld. He's hurt them so
much and they need him so badly that a screaming death grip straight to mental dissolution is the
only open option. Some loser's brain has sided against him. Geiszler's back is starting to--
"Newton," Hermann shouts, short and sharp and forceful in an azure tinted tone. "Newton, you are
fine. Please relax; it does not matter if you can affect electric fields, it does not matter--"
He is--
He isn't.
What is happening, exactly?
He feels strange.
His thoughts come warm and slow; his heart beats wild and fast.
"Newton," Hermann says. "Say something."
"Something?" Newt echoes, not sure what he's doing here, lying half on the floor and half on top
of his colleague; is this a thing they do now? Why is it so dark?
"Something else," Hermann says,
I think you had a thing, his brain says. One of those things that sometimes you have.
Sometimes I have? Newt echoes his brain.
The kids hiss, vengeful and remote.
"Um," Newt says, trying to think of literally anything and choking slightly on the surprise blood
that's coming down the back of his oropharynx. "Why is it so dark?"
"Because the Earth rotates on its axis, and you insist on turning off the lights by snapping,"
Hermann says, pulling him up into a semi-seated position, Newt's back to his chest.
That's weird--what's the deal with that, exactly?
Newt can sit, thanks.
Probably he can?
It's kind of nice though, so Newt's not going to start a fight about it or anything. He's not a huge fan
of misery and strange brain phenomena and possibly losing his mind, but he is a fan of people being
nice to him; he's getting used to it, so he just kind of goes with the whole thing and doesn't fight to
retain his muscle tone.
Verticalness.
This is good.
The ratio of blood going down the back of his throat to blood coming out the front of his face has
shifted to favor the latter.
He presses a sweater sleeve to his nose.
Hermann yanks a handkerchief out of his jacket pocket and hands it to Newt. "Do make an effort to
put an expeditious stop to your epistaxis, won't you?"
"Yeah," Newt says, because that seems like a good idea.
It's dark.
Hermann had said something about that.
Something including 'Earth' and 'rotation' and 'lights' and 'snapping.'
Concepts slot back into place and drag whole swaths of context with them--his six degrees, RFID,
a lonely day, and Mako. Someone in his head had been thinking about cranial windows, but only
Spider-Man villains biohack their way to imagined telepathic restitution.
"Hermann," he says, kind of indistinctly through the handkerchief he's holding to his face. "Don't
freak out."
"Oh?" Hermann says. "You have enough theory of mind to realize that the past twenty minutes of
my existence has consisted of finding you in a state of collapse, observing you control our light
fixtures remotely, and failing to prevent your descent into total panic of unknown etiology that looked
suspiciously akin to a seizure prodrome but fortunately was not? How gratifying for me."
"Well," Newt says, feeling slightly sharper, like a guy with a conjunct mnemonic landscape and
ever-increasing cognitive capacity, "I had an unusual day."
"Every day is an unusual day for you," Hermann says. "Give me my phone."
"No," Newt says, tightening his grip on the appropriated piece of Gottliebian hardware that he is,
miraculously, still holding. "I can explain."
"Please do so," Hermann says.
"The thing with the lights is not a creepy post-drift epiphenomenon thing; I did that myself. With
technology. Human technology made by humans. Conventional. Clever, but conventional."
Hermann immediately snaps his fingers like the baller hypothesis-tester that he is.
The lights do not go on.
Newt smiles faintly in the dark. "Good thought," he says. "The other thing, the silent-freak-out
thing, that's been happening with decreasing frequency for weeks now, is like, it's like, well, I think
it's a metabolically expensive state. A lot of pathways get revved up at the same time and I just don't
think I can neurochemically support that and keep talking and maintaining total situational awareness
and stuff; I am guessing my EEG looks like crap when that happens, but it's getting better and it's
always self-limited."
"So far," Hermann snaps.
"So far," Newt agrees politely.
Hermann makes a very precise show of straightening Newt's half turned up collar and aligning it
with his overlayered sweater. "It looks very alarming," he says, "if you care to know."
"Well it feels very alarming," Newt replies. "Though, maybe not as alarming as the hunting thing."
"Are you still bleeding?" Hermann asks.
"No?" Newt says, pulling the handkerchief away from his face.
"Are you guessing?" Hermann asks.
"No," Newt says, balling the cloth up in one hand and tipping his head back against Hermann's
shoulder.
Hermann sighs and adjusts the grip he has on Newt to something that more approximates I-am-
trying-to-assist-your-peripheral-circulation-by-repetitive-arm-rubbing than I-am-clutching-your-
dead-body. "Try not to bleed, Newton, honestly."
"Can I tell you a thing?" Newt asks.
"I wish you would," Hermann says.
"I feel pretty bad about the whole Mako situation," Newt says. "Pretty outrageously,
excruciatingly bad."
If this evident non sequitur surprises Hermann, he doesn't let on.
"Ah," Hermann replies delicately. "I thought you might, once you communicated with her. But you
should feel nothing of the kind. You have been-- You should not feel that you acted inappropriately in
any way. Because you have not."
 "You are going to ruin me," Newt says. "You can't give me this kind of latitude, dude, I will walk
all over you and the rest of the world. I will do it more."
"How insightful," Hermann says dryly. "What makes you mention Ms. Mori? Did you read her
letters?"
Oh god, Newt thinks. Her letters.
"No," Newt says. "No, she called me. I answered."
"Ah," Hermann says. "How did that go?"
"She is--" Newt says, trying to finish his sentence but not doing it because his face is a little bit
paralyzed with total misery and his vocal chords have spasmsed shut.
Good thing he doesn't need air.
Oxygen, man, his brain says. So weird. Metabolic poison turned respiratory requirement.
Myeah, Newt replies weakly, trying not to dissolve in his own acute psychological distress.
"I imagine she is quite unhappy," Hermann says, "despite having achieved so much of what she
desired for so long."
Newt nods, because yes.
"I would also imagine that she was relieved to hear from you," Hermann says.
Newt nods, because also yes.
Hermann leaves it there and says nothing more.
Newt also says nothing because there's nothing he can say that won't read as a pathetic insight into
his own personal insecurities and because he thinks Hermann won't get it; Hermann has had to break
away from people instead of spending his life in obnoxious attempts to get in on something, anything,
that had the feel of a real and permanent deal. Mako, though, Mako was different, Mako is different,
Mako has done both the breaking free and the getting in because Mako is a baller, Mako is great at
everything, Mako is kind of like Newt but better, so much better, and she loves him, not because he is
smart, but because he is stupid sometimes and because he watched Blue Planet with her and because
of the things that they did together, just Newt and Mako, doing those things. Hermann won't get it, or,
maybe, Hermann won't get why Newt never got it, or maybe it's just that Hermann has always gotten
the whole thing too well because he emailed Newt's parents and his uncle out of courtesy to let them
know Newt wasn't dead, but Hermann never emailed Mako and maybe that was because he didn't
want to talk to the PPDC in any capacity but maybe it was for another reason, another reason all
together.
Hermann pats his shoulder in an encouraging uber-British way, as if Newt is holding a cup of tea
with admirably steady hands rather than lying in his lap in the near dark, not talking, slightly crying,
like an emo Jedi-hipster.
Ugh.
All the emo Jedi go bad.
"Please don't compare yourself to a fantasy franchise in a misleadingly futuristic setting in which
worth is genetically determined," Hermann murmurs. "You do not belong in the Star Wars universe.
No one with a rational thought in their head belongs there."
"SPECTER Effectered," Newt replies, his voice doing a familiar misery crack. "You think I'm
rational?"
"Extremely," Hermann says.
"That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me," Newt offers.
"It most certainly is not," Hermann replies.
"Tempted though I am to make you list, I've maxed out my friend-tormenting quota for the day. So I
therefore submit to you that while 'ghost-drifting' in the colloquially understood sense of the word is
not real, the SPECTER Effect totally is. Come on. I definitely didn't say that emo Jedi thing aloud.
That is super specific, dude."
"When you are upset, you tend to perseverate on determinism in the Star Wars universe,"
Hermann says, fixing Newt's hair and then immediately fixing it again in the same manner, and then
again, and again, and again, in a slow, evolving iteration of continuous hair-fixing. "I know this about
you. I did not even need to drift to know this about you. You have been doing it for years."
"Well it just seems so unfair," Newt says. "All those Skywalkers just having miserable times of it
for no real reason other than pseudo-mystical cosmic suckage. They just loved people, you know?
Leia doesn't even want to get in on that crap it's so messed up."
"Well," Hermann says, humoring him way way way way way more than usual. "Princess Leia is
terribly discerning."
"I just object," Newt says, in displaced misery. "I object to the whole thing."
"And yet," Hermann says, "here you are, still perseverating."
"You think you're so great," Newt says. "Just living your life with no Star Wars related personal
baggage."
"If you do not feel inclined to elaborate upon your conversation with Ms. Mori, I would
appreciate it if you would instead explain your ability to affect the lights by snapping." Hermann
says.
"Myeah," Newt says, gearing up.
He's thought a lot about how to explain this to Hermann, because, at a first approximation, if he
were to just straight-up say 'biohacking', or even the more technically accurate 'dermal RFID chip
implantation', Hermann is not going to go for that. Not at all. Hermann has a thing about anything even
remotely related to self-experimentation. Newt really isn't sure where this particular personal
weirdness comes from, because self-experimentation is something of an historic norm, at least in the
life sciences, (rock on Barry Marshall, Albert Hofmann, and literally every Spider-Man villain ever)
but Hermann is not into that.
Or rather, previously he wasn't.
Newt thinks he might be now though, if Newt plays his cards right.
"It's a computational-based efficiency thing," he says, like a mostly-dead total champion. "I just
wanted to do some algorithmic optimization of daily life, it's actually more a you thing than a me
thing. It's radio frequency based. No weird hive-mind/Jedi-mind-trick stuff, dude, just computational
efficiency. Old school."
"Meaning?" Hermann says, sounding not at all opposed.
This is the tricky part, because there's no way around mechanistic explanations here, and if
Hermann freaks out about the biohacking now, he will continue to freak out about it for the
foreseeable future, which will be unfortunate, because Hermann stands to benefit a lot from this.
So.
Strategy.
Newt couldn't ask for a better set-up than his current one, in which his total, observable
exhaustion has stripped the edge right off Hermann's argumentative tendencies to the point that the guy
is totally rocking a, 'no, Scully, don't turn into an alien and die in this Antarctic space ship,' type vibe
at the moment. Other than the obvious benefits, extreme Gottliebian solicitousness is always a good
sign because Hermann has so much thought-momentum that he can't pull an emotional one-eighty and
shift his mood on a dime, at least he couldn't, pre-drift. Newt's not sure about how emotionally labile
post-drift Hermann might be. Probably there's no difference, unless the guy's brain turns Absolut
Geiszler on him. So. Now all Newt needs to do is just say the perfect thing in the perfect manner. He
can't conceal the part about the chip being in his hand. That would be a mistake. If Hermann has to
work for a mechanism, he's going to be pissed about it.
So. A perspicuous mechanistic explanation delivered with all the Victorian Suffering that Newt
can bring to bear should do the trick.
"Eh," Newt says, tipping his head back fractionally against Hermann's shoulder and going for
maximum enervated pathos. "It's pretty pedestrian--there are sensors in our wiring that now respond
to a dermal RFID chip in my dominant hand."
"Hmm," Hermann says, unimpressed.
Newt is an amazing, interpersonal savant when it comes to his drift-partner turned life-partner.
"So this is not a side effect of your unique cortical wiring?" Hermann says dryly, still iteratively
fixing Newt's hair in a very acceptable way.
"No," Newt admits, betraying no victorious sentiments. "I have no cool powers post-brain
scrambling, other than a whole bunch of your skill sets. Some of which are pretty good, I guess, if one
enjoys kicking ass at Go and a desires a flair for aggressive driving, which I do not desire, actually."
"Well I must say I'm relieved," Hermann replies.
"You like it?" Newt says snapping twice in quick succession and flaring the lights. "I did it for
you."
"I fail to see how such a thing could possibly be the case," Herman replies, catching Newt's hand
in time to abort snap number three and examining the small square of taped-down gauze in the dim
light.
"I did myself first, to make sure the hardware was functional," Newt says, cleverly avoiding the
tag 'pilot experiment', which is, of course, how he had conceptualized it to himself. "I figured you'd
like it. I figured you would not like the snapping though, so you can do a silent flick, if that's your
preference. The flick is pretty robust, but since you don't have the simultaneous sound cue you've got
to be a little more directional about it. If you're right next to the switch you can do a proximity wave.
So, to summarize, for the overhead lights you have a triple choice of cue. Sound," he says, pulling his
hand out of Hermann's grip and snapping twice, "rapid directional vector," he says, flicking twice, "or
proximity. For the coffee machine, stove, and isolated lights it's proximity only."
"You've been busy," Hermann says, in poorly concealed xeric envy.
"Meh," Newt replies, not above twisting the knife of intellectual superiority when he finds it in
his hand. "It wasn't hard."
So suave, his brain says encouragingly. You are doing awesome.
Hermann is probably rolling his eyes right now.
"You want one?" Newt asks.
"No," Hermann says.
"You do a little bit," Newt replies.
"I don't," Hermann says, like a guy who is totally lying through his teeth.
"Dude," Newt says. "I get that you have a front to maintain, but like, hear me out on this one. A)
it's convenient. B) it's efficient. C) it saves time; this is a big thing for you. D) my ability to control
our local environment by hand motions is going to drive you totally crazy if you can't do it too. E) you
think it's cool. F) it is cool. G) I did this for you actually, because I am thoughtful, so you can tell me
that you don't want it, but eventually you're going to cave because you do want it, I know you do, it's
just a thing I know, so why wait? Why drive yourself crazy for days, watching me influence electric
fields with my hand because I will do it in the most annoying way dude, the most," he breaks off to
snap twice, "annoying," he does another double snap, "way."
Hermann says nothing.
Newt double snaps again.
"Fine," Hermann replies, in dignified defeat, "you may implant me with an RFID chip. Later. Not
tonight." He resumes his attempt to fix Newt's hair, an exercise that has about as much promise as a
military campaign launched into a Siberian winter.
"You are making the right choice," Newt says, shutting his eyes.
"Do you have any intention of getting off the floor at any point in the near future?" Hermann asks.
"No," Newt says, meaning 'yes,' meaning, 'this is probably moderately physically uncomfortable
for you,' meaning, 'I'm sensitive to the fact that you want me to be insensitive to the fact that this is
uncomfortable for you,' meaning, 'I will get off this floor any time now, I'm surprised it hasn't
happened already,' meaning, 'this iterative hair fixing thing is kind of working for me, what's that
about even.'
Hermann sighs.
"I'm going to start working on a talk," Newt says, because it's productive to procrastinate by
engaging in academic goal setting. This proclivity explains a lot about him, possibly. "For UC
Berkeley Neuroscience. Entirely prospective. Maybe they'll let me give it to, ah, only the faculty?"
"Good," Hermann says, like that wouldn't be a violation of a scientific shibboleth; like it's normal
to abandon decades of work and switch fields entirely at age thirty-five; like a faculty-only
presentation is common practice in academia, where the ethos of the enterprise is training up the new
guard to slowly and metaphorically devour the old; like what he's saying is reasonable; like what he's
doing is reasonable; and like this hair-petting thing is a thing they've always done, which it is not,
except for the lying on the floor part, Newt does a lot of that, generally and historically speaking.
"You're so great," Newt says, eyes closed, head tipped back, his core temperature increasing by
the second. "Really terrible, but also great. Sui generis. They're never going to let me do that."
"Probably not, no," Hermann says. "But the odds are not zero. You are extremely well known. You
may be able to use this as leverage to avoid a talk entirely."
"I've never heard of anyone who was such an academic prima donna that they refused to give a
job talk," Newt says.
"I can only imagine what such a person might be like," Hermann replies dryly.
Newt sighs.
"Do not fall asleep here, Newton," Hermann says.
"Impossible," Newt says. "Categorically."
"Incorrect," Hermann replies. "Evidence directly contradicts your claim."
"What, you're an empiricist now?" Newt asks, yeah, maybe a little bit inarticulately.
"I have always been an empiricist, Newton," Hermann replies.
"Lies," Newt says agreeably. Why are you repetitively fixing my hair?" he asks, as a stand-in for
'why are you being so nice to me, I mean, I know you're a nice guy but not generally into surface
niceness because of its inherent interpersonal vulnerability, sooooo, is it that you trust me not to be a
dick about it? Or is it that you literally find me so pathetic that you don't think I have the capacity to
make you feel bad about yourself because I do, dude, or at least I think I do?'
Newt says none of these things out loud.
Newt is so freaking smart.
It's unreal, actually.
 "I confess I have been curious about whether your hair is practically fixable, since you seem to
have so little success with it," Hermann says, in non-answer to Newt's non-question.
"We are so perfect for each other," Newt announces, apropos of communication via
miscommunication. "That's why I bought you an RFID chip."
"Well thank you, Newton, I appreciate the sentiment."
"Mmm," Newt says, reflected-appreciation style.
Hermann sighs in a totally world-weary way that Newt gets, that he gets hardcore, in the tired,
packed together bones of his wrists, where all his restlessness usually lives.
This is a weird vibe they're rocking right now, at this moment, a new vibe, a totally different and
weird vibrational frequency. But maybe their current waveform can just go from being an atypical
thing to a typical thing; it could be a new trend, a sub-genre of the Decade of Mutual Admiration. He
needs a name for it though, if he's going to coin a phrase, set a trend. Science bonding? Eh, that's no
good, there's actually no science happening now and they're already pretty bonded, like, honestly, he
doesn't see them bonding more, because how would that even work. Misery cuddle? Eh, he's pretty
sure that they aren't people who 'cuddle' even when they are, kind of definitely and unambiguously
'cuddling.' Overlapping Personal Environments for Neuronal Solidarity. OPENS. Nah, that's
definitely a super weird acronym. Co-Localization Of Self with Epic rapport Drift partner. CLOSED.
That's not better, but it wasn't meant to be, it was just a demonstration to himself that he's pretty great
with acronyms, which, of course, he is. Obviously. What was he thinking about? Vibes. He was
thinking about vibes, waveforms, string theory, new things, Leto Atreides the first and second, Star
Wars VIII and its painful and metaphorical endurance trial of the soul, Mount Doom, a little bit,
where they're both Frodo and both Sam, if Sam had a little bit more of a body-art thing and Frodo
cooked, or something like that, maybe reversed, there's a good case to be made for Newt being Frodo,
but Hermann's the emo one, except for maybe today; it's hard to say you're not the emo one when
you're the one rolling around on the floor, but, on the other hand, Hermann shouts at military types
about the 'language of god', and that is so emo Newt can't even write a song about it, that's how emo it
is. So yeah, everyone has their own emocore days and their own stoic days, or, in Newt's case, their
own stoic sets of minutes. Stoicism. Yep. There are a lot of dead people in the sphere of humans
known by Newt Geiszler, but he got, like, inverse adopted by Mako. Usually, he would be choosing
her because he is older, and maybe, in a way, he had chosen her, but the thing about Mako is that
Mako doesn't get adopted, Mako adopts.
This explains everything perfectly.
Newt has never been formally adopted before.
That's neat.
He's tired.
The silence sounds much louder than it should, and every so often the kids flash disorganized
images of carnage across the back of his mind like confused offerings.
"Mako and I are half-siblings," Newt says. "That's a thing now."
"I think you are falling asleep," Hermann replies, very quiet, not dry at all, still hair fixing.
"I'm not," Newt says, cracking an eye.
"You are, it is a minor miracle, and we should treat it as such," Hermann replies.
"But Mako," Newt says.
Consciousness and cognizance, dead Caitlin Lightcap sings, in a recollected, drunken tribute half
a decade old and half a world away. Combine to dissonance. You insightful bastard, Geiszler. You
brilliant, absolute bastard.
 "Get up," Hermann says, "you cannot sleep here."
"Mako likes me though," Newt says, as they help each other to their feet. "Did you know that she
likes me?"
"I was aware of that, yes," Hermann says, pressing him in the direction of the couch.
"You should have told me that, probably," Newt says. "I tell you when people like you. Like
Flow. Flow thinks you're the cool one. I'm not sure how she got that idea, but yeah."
Hermann sighs. "Lie down," he says. "Literally everyone you meet spends a period of variable
duration despising you before you eventually win them over. They then exist in a perpetual state of
annoyed torment for the rest of their lives."
"Well I'm going to be honest with you, that does not sound like 'liking'," Newt says, nonplussed
and getting pushed onto the couch. He finds horizontalness to really be working for him. "You can see
why I might be confused. But I think that only describes you actually," Newt says.
"Possibly," Hermann replies.
"Mako likes me," Newt says.
"I, also, 'like you', Newton, you do realize that, correct?" Hermann says, sitting on the floor at the
base of the couch one elbow propped on the cushions, his forehead pressed against his hand.
"Oh my god, dude," Newt says, giving Hermann a semi-targeted shoulder pat. "Yes. Yes; have you
not noticed that I am extremely intelligent? I get this whole Newt-I-will-save-your-brain, Newt-you-
are-going-to-get-pneumonia, Newt-let-me-just-buy-you-a-wardrobe thing that you've got going. I get
it, man. We have a whole, complicated, thing. You bought me fish."
"Yes," Hermann agrees.
Newt reaches up and rakes his own hair into instant disarray.
Hermann fixes it.
Chapter End Notes
Chapter-specific citations: Newt parenthetically quotes Undone, by Weezer. He references
Star Wars and the first X-files movie. He also quotes Tennyson ("nature red in tooth and claw").
Chapter-specific thanks: Thanks again to everyone who has been making things for
Designations! I should probably start giving *specific* shout-outs, because that's classy:
jeremyjohnirons, kual0kuac, made-of-coffee, and groovy-tiger, you people are ridiculously
talented. I also need to thank elementals again for recording this chapter literally three times so I
could make sure it sounded/read right.
Chapter-specific songs: From the ridiculously talented friendkingmusic we have Syncope
(with lyrics by CWR) and Evangeline (with lyrics by CWR).
Chapter 24
Chapter Notes
WARNINGS: There are intense emotional times in this chapter. There is also more
biohacking. Newt implants an RFID chip in Hermann's hand, again using a scalpel. This is
significantly more traumatic for Hermann than it was for Newt in Chapter 23, but I still don't
consider it to be overly graphic. If you would like to skip this sequence, you can read up to the
point Hermann agrees to this ridiculousness, then search for "he's looking at the floor."
See the end of the chapter for more notes
Late afternoon sunlight streams laterally into Hermann's UC Berkeley office, bleaching the spines
of assorted books to pale reds and greens, giving the walls and the shelves a yellowed hue.
It is a Friday afternoon and, vexingly, in the back of his mind, a conflicted, twenty-something
biologist is singing Hedy Lamarr with unacceptable zeal.
Insupportable.
On this particular afternoon, one week after the commencement of his official UC Berkeley
employment, two days after Newton climbed the Wall, three weeks after leaving Hong Kong, four
weeks since his head was just his head, five minutes past Newton's most recent text (I'm replacing
you as a life partner. With a dead enlightenment philosopher. Just so you know. God, what are you
even doing? Math? I bet it's not even math.), six hours since his last conversation with Hypothetical
Rain, seven days since their most recent neurology appointment, and eight hours before Friday will be
over in his current, UTC minus eight time zone, Hermann decides he will, following the termination
of the work day, purchase a bottle of tequila.
It is in no way significant, this bottle of future tequila, exported and imported by air or by land but
not by sea.
It's simply a bottle of tequila.
It bears no particular importance; it is notable only in its classification as a member in a series of
endless capitulations to the Geiszlerian proclivities laid out in his mind like dominoes, prone to
occasional, catastrophic collapse into a personality that isn't his own.
There is a knock on his office door, which, fortunately, puts an end to his unacceptable, distracted
ruminating on tequila of all things. Unfortunately, he is not feeling particularly sociable at this precise
moment.
It has been a long week.
It has, in fact, been a long month.
Hermann arranges his face into a pleasant expression and then says, "yes?" in a manner that is
crisp and polite and ideally gives no insight into his interrupted ruminations on alcohol and tiled
games of blocking.
His door opens to reveal Professor Starr.
"Hermann," Starr says, like an American.
It is not Professor Starr's fault that Hermann is a tormented vessel for triplicated identity
confusion that would like to sequester itself in a dark hole somewhere to marinate in its own mental
misery, but he finds this difficult to keep in mind.
"Professor Starr," Hermann replies.
"David. It's David," Starr says, marking what may be the bicentennial anniversary of his lexical
point missing.
 You are so weird, his inner Dr. Geiszler learnedly opines. Adapt to the local laid-back culture
dude, adapt to it. As a human, your brain is wired to observe social norms and conform to them so
that you don't get targeted for harassment as a masquerading out-group member. This explains
whole swaths of your childhood experience. You seem like a guy in need of some belated pointers.
In general? You can't make a group conform to you, unless you're dripping with charisma or you
happen to arrive at a flux-point in collective decision making and you step into a forming niche
like a baller. This implies that the endgame of the uncompromising individualist within a
conformist social structure is persecution. Ridicule. Marginalization. My point is that when all
that hangs in the balance is the honoring of academic honoraries and the maintenance of your
own pretentiousness, well, maybe that's an instance where you should fake it till you make it, bro.
First names, they're not so bad. I can make an argument for using them as levelers of the
intellectual playing field and putting ideas rather than individuals and their doctorates into a
position of prominence. So consider this a free tip, dude. Call him David.
It is only a matter of time before Hermann goes insane.
"Quite right," Hermann says to 'David'. "You'll have to forgive my habitual use of titles."
Professor Starr waves a hand with awkward affability.
"How can I help you?" Hermann asks him.
"Were you planning on coming to the spring semester get-together next weekend?" Starr says.
"Er," Hermann replies, trying to work out a way of saying, 'I'd rather die,' on short notice and in a
significantly more polite fashion but not coming up with anything in the heat of the moment. It is not
that he dislikes the Berkeley Mathematics Department, on the contrary, he quite enjoys associating
with them, but he would not characterize his current existence as psychologically easy, and he would
prefer to spend his free time either assisting Newton with his ongoing attempts to scrape himself into
a semblance of a functional scientist or, failing that, simply lying quietly and miserably in a room,
trying to be himself rather than an emotionally labile biologist or a monster with the desire to rend
apart human cities.
This is a difficult sentiment to convey.
"So," Starr says slowly, "I-- I want to just put this out there." He extends his hands, palms
forward, like he is trying to distance himself from what he is about to utter. "Some of us were talking,
well, most of us? After the faculty meeting on Wednesday?"
This does not sound promising to Hermann.
"About?" he snaps.
Offense as defense, his brain says. Good call.
Hermann suspects immediately it was not a 'good call' at all.
"Ugh," Starr says, "I knew it was going to go like this. I didn't mean it in that way," he continues.
"I meant it in the best kind of way. Look, the point is, that we were talking, and the idea was brought
forward that we should tell you specifically that it would fine if you want to bring Dr. Geiszler.
Totally fine."
Hermann is extremely perplexed by this conversational turn.
One--he cannot imagine a circumstance under which he would bring Newton to a UC Berkeley
Mathematics Department 'get together'; such a thing would be an unmitigated disaster in that Newton,
being a narcissist of incredible caliber and arguable justification, would not be able to resist both
flouting and flaunting his mathematical knowledge in an indecorous and entirely charming way.
Hermann would prefer that Newton Geiszler not become the coquettish, glittering socialite of his
current mathematical circle. He can only endure so much.
 Two--he cannot imagine a circumstance under which anyone in the UC Berkeley Mathematics
Department would object to Newton's presence at a social gathering; the very fact that they had
elected someone to communicate this to him makes him extremely uneasy. He's certain that this can
have nothing to do with outmoded prejudices; well, he would like to believe he's certain about that.
But if it's not a strangely anachronistic statement of overt support for marriage equality, then it must
be that people find Newton himself objectionable in some way. Hermann cannot imagine what this
way might be--he has kept an eye on the popular press, and Geiszler-related coverage, while wildly
erroneous and overtly romanticized, has not, to his knowledge, vilified Newton in any way. Quite the
contrary; speculations about his heroic mental sacrifice are rampant in popular media.
Hermann has no idea what to say.
"I don't understand why you felt the need to explicitly state this," he says cautiously.
"Noooo," Starr says, looking like he's trying to avoid a misunderstanding by petting the air. "I'm
doing a bad job explaining."
Yes, Hermann thinks, you are.
"Okay," Starr says, remarshaling his forces. "So it had occurred to us, to a lot of us actually,
because of the information that's out there, that your boyfriend? Partner? That he's probably--that he
could, maybe, not be totally--oh god, this is so awkward."
Hermann narrows his eyes.
"If Dr. Geiszler has brain damage you can still bring him, it's cool," Professor Starr finally says in
a rush. "We're not saying he does, but we thought he might? And that maybe we should say
something? Because you might not want that kind of thing spread around. Not that there's anything
wrong with it, being brain damaged, I mean. If he is, I mean. Totally understandable, right? He drifted
with a kaiju; that's got to mess one up. The point is, if you don't want to bring him, that's great, that's
fine, but if you did, it's not like anyone, anyone would go talk to the press or whatever, and it's not
like we'd be surprised and weirded out; we get it, or rather, we get that we don't get it at all."
"Ah," Hermann says, feeling both excessively irritated, excessively relieved, and mildly touched.
Moderately touched.
"I see," he says.
"And it's not like--it just came up spontaneously because we were talking about pranking the
faculty--you might have heard what happened to the Caltech guy who was just recruited to the
Astrophysics Department? The one who discovered all the exoplanets? He was 'kidnapped' by the
upper level Caltech students, driven back to Pasadena, and duct-taped to his replacement's desk. By
the forearms. Not anything weird. He's okay. Anyway, someone brought up your story about all
Geiszler's forms of ID getting stolen and replaced with cardboard equivalents reading 'IHTFP' during
MIT's international symposium on Regenerative Biology? Did you know there's a whole Geiszler
subheading on the Hacks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Wikipedia page? That was
the context. And then we got to talking, and, well, we just wanted to let you know."
"Your--" Hermann struggles to find the appropriate word, "thoughtfulness is much appreciated. I
assure you that Dr. Geiszler, while stressed and suffering some physical and psychological
aftereffects of his recent experiences, is quite as compos mentis as he has always been."
"Ah," Starr says, like a man who doesn't think their conversation is yet over. "Well, that's
something?"
"Yes," Hermann says, not sure what else to add.
"I mean, 'aftereffects' don't sound like the best, but the important thing is that you guys have each
other," Starr says.
 Hermann is not certain what is taking place here.
Is he, possibly, being consoled?
"Er, yes," he says.
"I don't know," Starr continues, obviously self-conscious. "We were just thinking, I mean, the
guys. By which I also mean the ladies. The women. All of us. The Department. That, maybe, we
would just tell you that if you wanted to talk to us about any of the stuff that's going on, that we would
be--that we would be trustworthy about that kind of thing, because I don't know if that leaked
correspondence that came out in Wired was real or not, but if it was, if was even close, well, then I
could see you, I could see both of you maybe having some institutional trust issues after that kind of
thing, and it's just, well, we wanted to say that it's not like that here. I was kind of elected to talk to
you because you and I have this friend-thing going? I mean, we both feel bad for Leibniz, am I right?
That's solid friend territory. So, I didn't mean for this to be a big deal, just--you know. Formal
message delivery. Solidarity. Yup."
"I--" Hermann says, struggling with a total derailment of all his running cognitive processes and
trying not to default into threatening Geiszlerian coping mechanisms.
They sit there, looking uncomfortably at one another until Starr looks away to study the titles on
Hermann's bookshelf.
Hermann tries to decide if he considers Starr his 'friend'. The whole thing seems vaguely
presumptuous. It seems to him that, at a minimum, friendship requires something substantive, such as
years of correspondence or mutual embracing when coworkers die in horrible ways.
"Thank you for the sentiment," Hermann says, and then, curiously, he continues with, "it was--it
was difficult, actually, the PPDC--it's a different world. A different environment from academia and
it suits some individuals better than others, and it--it suited me well, or, I thought it did, I imagined it
did, but--there are times now that I--I find I have missed aspects of university life because for all the
departmental politics it is a collective governance rather than a hierarchical one, and--" Hermann
breaks off, preposterously too overcome to speak.
"How right did Wired get it?" Starr asks.
Hermann tries not to see the magazine cover in his mind's eye--that terrible photo from the Hong
Kong airport rendered in black and white--his glare at the camera and Newton's hand, outstretched
toward empty air. He tries not to remember the details of the double feature--his leaked
correspondence with Marshal Hansen in the immediate aftermath of their departure from Hong Kong,
and the circumstantial reporting that had ferreted out the context if not the details of what had
happened to his colleague.
"Dr. Geiszler," Hermann says, controlling his tone admirably, "is exhausted. His personality and
IQ, however, remain intact post his experience last month, I am happy to report. When he is
sufficiently recovered, I believe he has a standing offer to join UC Berkeley's Neuroscience
Department."
"Good," Starr says. "That's great. Not the first part, really, but the last part."
"Yes," Hermann says, dragging his fingers across his forehead. "Yes, quite."
"So do you think you might bring him?" Starr asks. "Next Saturday I mean?"
Hermann does not want to attend this gathering; still less does he want to bring Newton, but
neither does he want to face the quotidian pity of his Department, staffed by those who assume that he
is lying about the functional status of his partner, who pity him for that, who do not understand and
never will understand what it was like to work for a decade at the screaming edge of technological
advancement, who cannot possibly comprehend the experience of working with Caitlin Lightcap, of
watching her die; of working with Newton, of watching him nearly kill himself in an almost
identical, necessary, gutwrenching, vainglory of the mind; he wants to inflict his colleague upon them,
because Newton is a person who is an infliction, his very presence is a cognitive brisance, and, in a
way, they deserve him, these people that Hermann doesn't truly know, who sit around a conference
table and discuss potential brain damage in kind, enlightened tones.
"Yes," Hermann says, with a friendly vindictiveness. "I think I shall."

When Hermann pushes their apartment door open, groceries and keys and cane all improbably in
hand, a sheaf of papers beneath one arm because he has not yet found time to purchase a suitable
briefcase, he sees no sign of his colleague.
"I have an idea," Newton says, with entirely alarming immediacy, into Hermann's left ear.
Hermann jerks, startled. His keys and half his papers end up on the apartment floor.
Turning his head reveals his recusant roommate to be leaning against the wall immediately
adjacent to the door, inches from the lateral border of Hermann's shoulder, exuding stylized and
preconcerted insouciance.
Newton is extremely irritating at times.
"How long have you been standing there?" Hermann says dryly, pushing past him to enter their
apartment, not bothering to retrieve either his keys or his papers from where they have fallen at
Newton's shoeless feet. "Tell me it was hours."
"It was not hours," Newton replies, kneeling to retrieve the items Hermann dropped. "you, my
friend, have been EPIC Rapport'd. I knew you were coming home."
"That is hardly evidence of any ongoing neural connection; I come home every day," Hermann
says. "Furthermore, I come home at approximately the same time each day. Speaking of which, I am
pleased to find you conscious. How relieving for me."
"Let's not create a shared mythology of disparagement around things that didn't even happen,"
Newton says, with a tone of voice and aggrieved demeanor that together most certainly constitute
whining. "I was sleeping in an inconsiderate pose," his colleague continues, managing to torque his
petulance straight into wounded dignity, where it so often ends up.
"Ah," Hermann says, "of course."
"You're going to be cranky about this for light years," Newton says, as Hermann deposits the
groceries on their kitchen table. "Don't you want to hear my--"
"Light years are a unit of distance, Newton," Hermann snarls, before he realizes that Newton, of
course, knows this, and is certainly testing the interpersonal waters because an element in Hermann's
demeanor or stance or carriage or mode of speech has tipped him off to some kind of intrapersonal
torment in the mind of his colleague and the man has no other means of assessment of systemic
stability than poking said system with a stick to see what happens.
It is a miracle that Dr. Geiszler did not die in childhood.
"So," Newton says. "Someone had a bad day. Are you getting harassed by your new colleagues?
Are they trying to talk to you when there's math to be done? Do they try to get you to go out to lunch?
Do they offer you coffee, possibly. The nerve of some people, honestly, dude, I feel that. I feel that
with fifty percent of my brain. Thirty-three percent. Sometimes one hundred percent. One hundred
percent of my brain thirty-three to fifty percent of the time."
Hermann sighs.
Newton straightens and reorients Hermann's lost papers and places them onto the kitchen table
adjacent to the groceries.
 "I find them somewhat tiresome, yes," Hermann admits, partially truthfully, because he does not
particularly care to tell Newton that the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department, if not the totality of
the academic world, now presumes Dr. Geiszler to be incapable of meeting the rigors of academia.
He does not care to find out if Newton himself agrees with their assessment. He does not care to
maintain a neutral expression while Newton tries to determine whether Hermann agrees with their
assessment. All he wants to do is have a terror-free, disaster-free evening as a prelude to an attempt
to discuss their recent experiences over a moderate amount of tequila.
Specifically, he would like to discuss the third drift.
Specifically, he would like to ask the question that's been echoing in his head for weeks now.
What happens to a fraction of a hive mind?
If he doesn't ask it soon, he will never ask it.
"Well," Newton says philosophically, pulling items out of reusable bags with an approximation of
his historical brio. "Coming from you, 'somewhat tiresome' can mean anything from inviting you to
lunch to secretly sabotaging your work, so if you want legit sympathy you're going to have to
elaborate, dude."
There are other things he would like to know.
Can you look at your own body?
That question is one he may never be able to ask, because the act of asking would feel too
righteously vindictive for Hermann to tolerate.
He already knows the answer.
"I do not require sympathy, Newton," Hermann snaps.
"Myeah, let me just iron that on a T-shirt for you," Newton replies. "Waaaaaittt--did you buy
tequila?" He pulls a bottle of tequila out of a shopping bag and stares as it, as if he is not particularly
inclined to trust his own senses.
Hermann can't blame him there.
"Yes," Hermann replies.
"You. You are the person who bought the tequila?"
"I," Hermann says pointedly, "do not comment at all on your strange obsession with Descartes or
your sweater-wearing proclivities so I will thank you to--"
"Hey. Wait. Stop right there. The whole sweater-thing is not--"
"If you purchased the equipment to implant yourself with an RFID chip over the internet, you can
certainly purchase a shirt."
"Backlit screens, man," Newton says weakly. "I have to--"
"As a counter-argument, that was a particularly pathetic example," Hermann says. "On the other
hand, I applaud your newly acquired taste for rationalism and your respectable clothing choices. I
suggest that you take advantage of my evolving tastes in alcohol."
"I only buy tequila when I want to get ragingly drunk," Newton says, spinning the bottle in his
grip. "Which is really out of character for you. Soooo, congratulations? I will watch you drink this
dude, but I'm not drinking it because I'm picking caffeine for my substance trial, I've already
decided."
"You are not," Hermann replies, "picking caffeine."
"Yes," Newton says. "I am. You realize, right, that mechanistically they're both equally risky when
it comes to perturbing my arguably twitchy neural switchery? Seriously though, caffeine is activating
but alcohol is going to inhibit inhibitory pathways, so--"
"If," Hermann says. "If you choose the tequila, Newton, I am prepared to--"
 He does not want to say this.
Newton raises his eyebrows in intent expectation.
"I will allow you to put an RFID chip in my hand. I will, in fact, allow you to do it right now."
"Done," Newton snaps, sweeping his left hand in a dramatic arc to point at Hermann in time with
the word. "Sit."
Hermann most certainly will not sit, primarily on principle.
"I will be back shortly," he says.
"Or, yeah," Newton calls after him. "Okay. Lose the jacket, man. Wash your hands. Roll your
sleeves up past your elbows. Wash your forearms while you're at it. Do not forget to--"
Hermann pointedly shuts his bedroom door.
He reaches over and flips on his lights.
He is not looking forward to remotely controlling his external environment, but he must admit it
strikes him as both useful and, well, yes, it has a certain appealing panache to it. He is not excited
about actual implantation of the RFID chip, but he assumes it will be fine. Newton has, after all, done
this to himself without any apparent difficulty.
Of course, the same thing could be said of drifting, so Hermann is unsure where that leaves him.
He does not like the messy realities of biology; he does not like the horror inherent to the slow
spread of a fluid over a flat surface, or the frictionless slide of alien viscera. He does not like the
invasive cut and crack of comparative anatomy, he does not like the interface of technology with
biological systems. He does not like medical tests, he does not like medical procedures; he has had
too many of them in his life.
Newton, of course, knows this.
Newton, of course, now shares these mental idiosyncrasies.
Nominally he does.
Arguably, Newton is better at not sharing Hermann's insecurities than Hermann is at not sharing
his colleague's exquisite blend of minor childhood traumas that have hardened into his adult
personality.
Hermann decides that this is too much analysis for what is actually taking place, which is that his
colleague is trying to make a quixotic reparation for things that are not his fault in the most reliable
way he can--by building something and inappropriately interfacing it with the human nervous system.
He sighs.
After rolling his eyes and removing his blazer, he iteratively cuffs his sleeves to the elbow and
washes his hands and forearms with anti-bacterial soap. He uses a foot to open the cabinet beneath
the sink and pulls out a fresh hand towel for the purposes of drying. Ideally he would walk back to the
kitchen, his arms held in front of him in a borrowed Geiszlerian capitulation to sterile technique, but
he needs his cane.
So, he compromises.
The idea of holding one arm in front of him seems reasonable until he rounds a corner, and
Newton, in the midst of constructing his sterile field, looks over at him and says, "everything you're
doing right now is pointless."
"I literally could not agree more," Hermann snaps at him, lowering his outstretched arm.
"Adorkable though," Newton continues. "Very fetching in a one to one Geiszler-to-Other ratio.
Touch nothing. If I toss you this packet of sterile gel can you catch it?"
"Yes," Hermann says, flustered.
"Well that would be stupid. We're not doing that; why would we? That's just inviting disaster,
Hermann, come on. Just get over here and lose the cane along the way. I'll hand your sterile gel to you
like a normal person," Newton says.
"Did you just call me 'fetching'?" Hermann asks him.
"Eh," Newton says. "Sure. It was a little more like looking at myself through a glass erotically and
mathematically; you feel me?"
"No," Hermann says.
"Yes you do. You do the same thing. For example, you think it's outrageously attractive when I say
things like 'group theory', 'P most certainly does not equal NP, have you taken leave of your senses,
sir?', 'Andrica's conjecture', 'Erdos number', and when I invoke my dead mathematical alter-ego."
"Your what?" Hermann asks him, leaning his cane against an unsterile edge of the kitchen table.
"Evariste Galois," Newton says, obscenely rolling the 'r' in 'Evariste' in an entirely unacceptable
manner.
"I forbid you to ever mention Galois again," Hermann snaps, accepting the packet of sterile gel
that Newton drops into his hand and tearing it open, feeling anxious and raveled up and slightly
lightheaded.
"Evariste," Newton says, in an even more provocative manner, snapping a sterile glove as he
pulls it on. "Galois."
"You are a terrible human being," Hermann says, rubbing cool, blue gel over both hands. "You
should not have your sleeves down."
"Alas," Newton replies, "logic gives way before practical needs."
"Do not quote yourself," Hermann says, vaguely wishing that if the man was going to cite his own
lyrics he would just sing them. "It's terribly unattractive."
Newton rolls his eyes, clearly amused, then models the pronated, spread-fingered pose he
presumably wants Hermann to adopt before pointing at the table.
Hermann complies, fixing his ethanol-cleansed hand palm downward on the sterile drape at a
convenient angle.
Newton pulls sterile tools out of sterile packaging, snaps a sterile blade onto his sterile scalpel,
and says, "don't move. I'm serious." He fixes Hermann with an atypically flinty expression. "Position-
wise I'm not going to be holding you down in anything more than a nominal way."
"Fine," Hermann says, lifting his eyebrows in a manner he hopes is eminently unimpressed.
Newton looks at him. "I'm extremely serious about this, dude, it's going to hurt, kind of a lot, for
thirty seconds or so."
"I am familiar with pain on a conceptual level," Hermann says.
"Myeah," Newton says, looking increasingly edgy. "Look this is like--well. Here's how this is
going to work. You're going to trust me to not slice up your hand and I'm going to trust you not to
move, and not to, like, er, hunt me? Kaiju-style?"
"I'm not certain this is a good idea," Hermann says.
"Cost/benefit-wise it's at least defensible if not advisable. We're intrapersonal if not interpersonal
risk-takers, dude. Either way? We'll get drunk later, presuming no one dies. Are you in still in?
Because this is kind of the point of no return."
"I suppose," Hermann says, "but I don't think that you should be getting drunk, Newton, I--"
"Yeah, okay, that's a whole different thing that we'll talk about later in annoying detail," Newton
replies, drawing a line with a marking pen over the sterile plastic that coats Hermann's hand. "For
now--I'm going in. Look out the window or something."
"I--" Hermann begins, but, true to his word, Newton fixes his right hand over Hermann's,
repositions his scalpel, and starts cutting, blade to skin, blade into skin, disappearing along its edge
in a manner that's extremely disturbing and, after an interval that seems too long, painful. Hermann
hadn't quite expected this level of hot, acidic agony in his dominant hand. He keeps watching, a
narrow ribbon of irregularly beading blood appearing behind the track of the blade.
"Window, dude, window, look out the window are you insane? Look at the Wall, um, pretend
you're me for a sixteen seconds or something, this is terrible," Newton says, sounding stressed, which
just makes this entire experience worse, if that's possible, and it is possible, it is; he should know
better than to make these kinds of statements; he is only asking for karmic retribution by advertising
the limited scope of his own mental capacity.
"Oh my god," Newton says, sounding breathless, "this is actually really bad, this is actually kind
of intolerable, extremely intolerable, totally," he says, angling the blade beneath Hermann's skin,
"ragingly intolerable, I don't know if I can--"
Hermann can't even speak, his brain is a ravaged no-man's land of caving Gottliebian architecture
and the compensatory rise of altered states of consciousness to replace the parts of him that are trying
to escape this current experience without moving because he cannot move, he will not move, he will
not yank his hand away, he will not resist the cruelties of physical therapy even as a child he will
not because he can defer not only satisfaction but he can also defer responses to pain, he can defer
weeping, he can defer all weakness if he cannot banish it, he can defer and defer and defer to the
point that all his distress can be packed down and compressed into something brittle that he can
break and spread at his own convenience like chalk over boards and so when they tell him to--
Nope, we're not doing this, buddy, his brain decides.
He's not sure who isn't doing what as simultaneous desire and disgust at RFID chip implantation
vie for superiority in his thoughts.
Rescue rises de profundus from the subterranean reaches of his consciousness, pulling him out of
the sea of his own distress. His brain turns out, in medias res, to be an epic freaking baller, thank god;
and he's shoving memories he doesn't want to have back into the places that they're trying to cut their
way free of, snapping down emerging instincts for violence that come from an alien species he
shouldn't have so much in common with but does.
Ugh, Hermann thinks, trying to force his vision to clear. The continuing pain in his hand, which
had seemed so distressing just a moment ago is, really, not that bad now that he thinks about it. He
can totally deal. No problem.
"For god's sake, man," Newt snaps, gluing his hand together, because Newt is really, he's just
really so great at these kinds of things, or maybe it's Hermann that's great? Or maybe they're just both
great in different ways but with equal magnitude. Aw. That's nice. "Put your head down, won't you?"
"What?" Hermann says, not really sure what the whole postural-change suggestion that the guy is
making is really supposed to accomplish, other than--
Aaaaaaand he is looking at the floor.
He's looking at the floor, which is rocking the whole eco-conscious-wood-reflects-fluorescent-
overhead-lights-meeting-the-vespertine-purple-of-a-sun-setting-behind-a-Wall vibe. Yeah. Because
that's a vibe. Ninety three million miles away is a sun. Just a sun. Some planet's sun, positionally
behind some jerk's Wall. Some planet's sun sunning the floor of some jerk's son.
So witty, his brain says admiringly.
The floor looks weird though, like kind of if yellow and purple had an internecine spectrum war
and then both colors died together on a brown surface. It really shouldn't be attractive but it's looking
pretty great, surprisingly. Dutch Golden Age style. Not really but kind of.
 "Honestly," Newt says, "Honestly, Hermann, make an attempt to control yourself and your overly
sensitive vasovagal responses, will you please?"
"Hey," he says weakly, as Newt pulls the sterile adhesive off his hand with a brisk sweep and
tapes down a piece of gauze. "Did you just contaminate your sterile field, because--"
"I no longer need this sterile field," Newt replies, sounding slightly more forgiving. "Hermann.
Please just sit there, if you would, without moving, and try not to faint."
Yeah, so that's a little harsh, Hermann's brain says. Primarily because he might have a point;
you aren't doing too well right now friend, which is weird, usually you're great with this kind of
thing. Right? Yes. Yes? Are you? You are. I think you are? Who are you, do you think?
"Up," Newt snaps, grabbing a handful of Hermann's shirt and his elbow in a totally imperious,
handsy-type way and dragging him to his feet. "Get up, you ridiculous man."
"Can you not?" Hermann says, definitely not whining, not whining at all not even toeing the
border of petulance. "You're the ridiculous one. God. Jedi-neohipster."
He snaps twice and the lights obligingly flash from on to off and back on, which he notes
appreciatively before Dr. Geiszler gives him a sharp couchward press and says, "lie down," in his
most forbidding manner, which, truth be told, is not actually that forbidding. It's maybe not the worst
idea Newt has ever had though, because Hermann's feeling a little weird, his leg hurts, he's not sure
what that's about exactly, it seems unusual, and he's leaning on Newt slightly because his gait just
doesn't feel like his gait is supposed to feel. That's weird; he's not sure he likes that. It's not far to the
couch though, which is pretty great, because yeah, this lying down thing is seeming like a better plan
all the time; he's not sure he can keep all his running processes straight. His sympathetic nervous
system is making an attempt to shut down all the active programs in his head.
So yeah.
He lies down, getting all his organ systems on a horizontal plane.
This is better.
"Are you all right," Newt says, abruptly really close because he's doing the kneeling-on-the-floor
thing. Yep. Up close and looking nauseated.
Newt is.
Looking nauseated, he means.
Obviously.
"Yeah," Hermann says. "Yeah, I'm totally fine. Do not even worry about me, dude. You look kind
of awful though. Don't throw up on this couch, or, ideally, on me. Throw up on the coffee table,
maybe."
"Not helpful, Hermann," Newt says, through clenched teeth. "I am fine. I did, perhaps, experience
a brief interval of intense cognitive dissonance, but, fortunately, it has since resolved."
"Congrats," Hermann says, dragging a finger through the air in a loose approximation of check-
box ticking.
"Indeed," Newt replies dryly.
Something about this whole situation strikes me as a little odd, his brain says, watching Newt
push himself to his feet with a simultaneous press against cane and coffee table.
"Relax, will you please?" Newt says, leaning against the cane and glaring down at him in
unconcealed disapproval. "Do not move. I will be back shortly."
"Um," Hermann says, trying to decide what it is about the current state of affairs that is troubling
him.
He cannot escape the feeling that he is missing something.
 This is extremely unusual for him.
Missing things, that is. He's usually rocking a sibylline song when it comes to science. And really,
everything comes back to science. Well. All true things do. Science always has room for true things
and calls false things bullshit before tearing them away. Hermann can get behind that. He can get
behind that hardcore.
He levers himself up on one elbow.
"No," Newt says, freezing in the midst of sterile-field breakdown to fix Hermann with a stern look
beneath lowered eyebrows and above the rims of his glasses, which he then ruins by pushing his
glasses back up his face, because Newt is totally blind and, also? A poser. "Absolutely not. Lie
down."
Hermann tries not to take this kind of thing personally, he really does, and, in total fairness, he
might look a little bit bad right now, he's slightly covered with a cold sweat, possibly, and shivering
or maybe just having some kind of post-adrenaline tremor thing, whatever, it's not important. The
important thing here is that Newt needs to listen to him, because something is going on here,
something weird, so he does not say 'make me,' in lascivious response to his colleague's totally
inappropriate protective streak, he instead says: "dude."
Newt rolls his eyes.
"Don't roll your eyes at me," Hermann says. "Listen to me, god, will you. Just. Listen. There's
something weird going on here--"
Newt gives him a scathingly pointed look, probably intended to communicate something along the
lines of, Oh-really-Hermann-how-fascinating-you-don't-suppose-it-could-be-you-failing-to-
perfuse-your-own-brain-do-you?
"Don't give me that, man, I'm serious," Hermann says. "I am getting a weird vibe."
"Take a nap," Newt says acerbically, rolling up the remains of his sterile field into a green heap
and heading toward the kitchen, presumably to trash the stuff. "Perhaps it will clarify things for you,"
he throws back over his shoulder.
Well.
Yeah.
Okay. So, of course, Hermann is going to get no reasonable help until he's laid down like ninety
percent of the conceptual groundwork. Of course.
He looks absently at the gauze taped to his right hand.
Okay brain, he thinks. Talk to me. Something here is creeping you out. Spill.
Hey kid, his brain replies, mysteriously impersonating Caitlin Lightcap. Remember how it used to
be? Remember how you and I used to go down to the end of the deployment dock with a bottle of
nine-dollar tequila and talk trash about J-Tech and throw ideas at a metaphorical wall labeled
'Remote Interface' hoping something would stick? Remember the day you told me that I'd die?
Remember the day you were right?
He feels a wave of acute and needless grief.
I don't see what this has to do with anything, but yeah, Hermann replies, staring at the ceiling,
listening to Newt mutter at himself in German in the kitchen.
Throw some stuff at the wall, Caitlin Lightcap says, as if she's spelling something out for him.
"Right," Hermann murmurs, still staring at the ceiling.
I have a bad feeling about this, Princess Leia says in his brain.
You and me both, Princess, he replies dryly.
So.
 Wall-throwing.
He takes an inventory. Physically, he is fine, if one does not count the anxiety, which is
intolerable and persistent and intolerably persistent; its bladed edge pressing him into the blur of
running thoughts, as it has always done, as it has never done, as it has always and never done. His
sleeves are rolled up and that seems right but his arms are bare and that does not; he can't do this
alone, he doesn't have the right perspective, he can't see where he's standing, he needs someone else,
not someone else, not anyone else, but Newt; Newt is who he needs but Newt is not listening because
one of them doesn't listen and clearly that person is Newt, because if it isn't Newt then who else
would it be?
He runs his hands through his hair and sits up, his gaze fixing on the walls, on the Wall. There is
something wrong with him, there are things that wait in his head. There are things that wait there for
propitious circumstance; he can feel them there, waiting.
He's paranoid. Slightly. Maybe slightly. He's paranoid. He's not. Had he been, historically,
paranoid? He doesn't know. He feels nervous. He feels weird. Maybe nervousness and weirdness
together combine to paranoia.
Something is wrong; it's wrong.
It's wrong.
He can feel the warm rush of blood through his sinuses.
This isn't the best, his brain says. I don't get this.
He pulls down a sleeve of his dress shirt, presses it to his face, and tries to think.
Tries to think.
Tries.
What is happening to him.
He does not feel right.
He can remember his day, he can remember what happened, he can remember buying tequila, can
remember coming home and agreeing to Newt's RFID chip proposal if only to gain leverage to
employ the tequila, and god, god, something about the chip is what triggered all of this, something
about the chip or the cutting, or the distress, because everything had been fine before the chip.
He snaps his fingers.
The chip is cool.
"Was that really necessary," Newt snarls, still in the kitchen.
The chip is cool, the chip is fine; this weirdness vibe is something else.
Hermann snaps again, restoring the lights. "A little," he says, somewhat resentfully.
Newt reappears, having, apparently, disposed of his sterile field. He leans against the doorframe
that separates the kitchen from the rest of the apartment with a sasstastic hip thrust slash maybe hip
asymmetry thing that would be impossible to maintain without the cane he's appropriated. Hermann
finds this a confusing mixture of stupid and attractive, much like Newt himself.
"Can you not with the pissed yet sexy librarian thing? I'm trying to think," Hermann says.
"I beg your pardon?" Newt says, nonplussed. "Why are you bleeding."
"For fun, dude," Hermann says darkly, or as darkly as is possible for a guy who has his shirt cuff
pressed to his face. "For fun. For the double-distilled pleasure of it. Get over here, I need to talk to
you."
Newt sighs, rolls his eyes, but approaches the couch, seating himself on the coffee table,
extending his bad leg in front of him, which is weird because last time Hermann checked, and he
checks Newt out pretty regularly, ha, metaphorically though, Newt did not have a bad leg.
 Hermann is the one with the 'mobility challenges'.
Right?
Are you sure about that? his brain asks.
Hermann is not sure.
His leg aches though, with a foreign familiarity.
Newt hands him a handkerchief. Hermann swaps it in for his sleeve.
"Something weird is happening here, dude," he says.
"Well, you're bleeding," Newt says dryly. "Is that not sufficient for you?"
"It's not that," Hermann says. "You're not making an effort, dude, I am trying to get you to help
me."
"Could you be more vague," Newt says with a concerned waspishness. "Endeavor not to bleed."
Hermann compresses his lips and exhales pointedly, glaring at Newt. "I'm telling you, I think
there's some cognitive weirdness happening here and I--"
Newt moves closer and does a thing to Hermann that is kind of hard to follow because it involves
shoving him horizontally and, like, doing a thing with his ankles? The end result is that he is lying
down. This is not fair, Newt is supposed to be helping him, not being a bastard about this whole
thing.
"Lie down," Newt says, with pointed aridity.
"You're a jerk," Hermann replies. "Can you please," he snaps, his voice cracking, "just listen."
"I always listen, Hermann," Newt says, resuming his position on the coffee table and looking at
Hermann in an extremely unfair, totally green-eyed type of way, which is just really fixed, and really
intent and full of all this Hermann-you-need-a-sitter-by-Jove-and-by-Jupiter-and-by-metric-tons-
of-Ancient-deities-that-weirdos-use-as-profanity and Hermann is not cool with that, he is not cool
with that at all. So what if Newt is an aesthetically pleasing guy, he too is an aesthetically pleasing
guy. Really now, do people come along every day with Hermann's cheekbones? He thinks not, thank
you very much, so Newt can just can that skeptical smolder thing he's got going over there; he can just
put it in a freaking can and seal it in there because Hermann doesn't care, he doesn't care at all.
Newt looks at him in patient expectation.
Oh.
Right.
Because Hermann is supposed to be talking right now.
"I have a bad feeling," he unwisely confesses.
"I find this unsurprising," Newt says gently. "I just unwisely cut open your hand."
This really pisses Hermann off.
Because yeah. Newt, stupid stupid stupid Newt did cut open his hand, like a freaking jerk, but
only because Hermann had wanted to make him drink tequila which had, admittedly, also been a little
bit of a manipulative dick move. So they're even right now. Probably. But that is neither here nor
there.
"Relax," Newt says reasonably. "I will make you dinner."
"No," Hermann snaps, surging forward to snag the nearest part of Newt's sweater/dress shirt
combo thing that he's rocking. "There is a thing we need to figure out. Some kind of cognitive
problem, dude, some truly epically freakish perspective-level stuff is happening right now."
"Confident though I am," Newt says, "that it appears that way to you, Hermann, I really don't
think--"
"Come on," Hermann says, shaking the fistful of shirt he has. "You owe me this, dude. Think of it
as a professional courtesy if not a personal favor."
"Very well," Newt sighs. "Proceed."
"Well I--" Hermann begins, because he doesn't know what's wrong exactly, he just knows that
something is wrong, he needs Newt to actually figure it out, or at least to help him search out the
borders of a problem he doesn't understand. "I don't know, but something is wrong, I'm telling you it
is; can you just--try and--" he finishes with a helpless, circular hand gesture.
Newt compresses his lips and stares absently out the window, clearly thinking. A least that's
something, Hermann supposes. Newt is better at certain kinds of things than he himself is, and this,
this, is one of those things.
Isn't it?
He has no idea, actually, which is weird.
Hermann watches him intently, trying to latch onto his train of thought via EPIC Rapport or via the
SPECTER effect, whatever freaky cognitive train he can hitch a ride on, because he wants to do this
together; they work best when they're together.
Newt pulls his cane off the floor and stares at it.
"Yes," Hermann says. "Yes."
"This," Newt says. "Is mine."
"Is it?" Hermann replies.
"Yes?" Newt says, the word pulled into a slow, stiff question, like cooling toffee.
Come on, a dead woman says. You're almost there. You can feel it. You can taste it. Get there,
buddy. Just get there. Name it. Name what's happening to you. Tag it. Your life partner is holding a
cane he shouldn't be holding. What is that? Give it a name. Name it.
"No," Newt says, in breathy horror with a lateral head snap. Their eyes meet again, and Hermann
finds this hard to take. "This is yours."
Get there, kiddo, Catilin Lightcap says. Get there.
"Identity confusion," Hermann snaps, victorious, finally finding the correct tag for what it is that's
happening to him.
To them.
It's weird, it's subtle, he feels like he can't map the whole of it. He knows, ostensibly, who he is,
but he doesn't feel like that guy, he feels instead like the guy who started a rock band, like the guy who
used to get drunk with Caitlin Lightcap in the middle of the night in hypomanic misery, like the guy
who saw Mako Mori, covered with dirt, her face streaked with tears, a single red shoe held in a death
grip, and who had taken her from Stacker Pentecost while he got checked by medical, saying 'aw,
Mako Mori? More like Maks in Socks, am I right? Hey, it's cool, crying is, like, a thing. Evolutionary.
You just go for it, kiddo. Weeping seems like a reasonable choice to me. Very defensible. Myeah, you
speak no English, do you? Absolutely none.' That's him. Isn't it? That's him, and not the guy who
screamed half his childhood away in physical therapy regimens so that maybe, one day, he could
become a pilot, not the guy who had hated his body so much he'd tried to escape to the complex plane,
to algebraic topologies and into sets of sets. That's not who he is, is it? He's not the guy who had
stupidly, stupidly, epically stupidly tried to be a Jaeger pilot despite all messages to the contrary and
who had failed. That isn't him. That can't be him.
Newt looks at him in consternation and then in growing horror.
Yup, you're getting it now, buddy, his brain says vindictively.
"I told you," Hermann snaps, his voice cracking against something he can't see. "I told you."
"So you did," Newt says, looking at him. "Hermann, I believe we may have--" he breaks off,
looking at the cane he's holding.
"We swapped," Hermann says, under the pressure of building revelation, before he's fully
understood it himself. "We swapped, dude. We both got super stressed and I defaulted to you, and,
weirdly and surprisingly, you also defaulted to me."
"No," Newt says, obviously offended. "That can't be the case, I have--I have excellent mental
control. I--"
Hermann almost feels sorry for him.
Almost.
"Yeah, well, newsflash: not so much," Hermann says.
"I'm you?" Newt says, sounding painfully unsure of himself. "And--you're me?"
"I think so," Hermann replies. "Not really but kind of."
"Well," Newt says, "how do you propose that we reverse our current predicament?"
"This is your area," Hermann says pointedly.
"Only nominally," Newt snaps. "You're more me than I am, arguably."
Oh.
Right.
"Well," Hermann says, staring at the ceiling. "When this happened previously, you manipulated me
into resuming my historical thought patterns."
Newt compresses his lips and exhales, directing his gaze toward the ceiling. "Very well. You are
an insensitive miscreant," he says.
"You suck at this," Hermann points out kindly. "That was just an insult. There was no manipulation
there, dude."
Newt shoots him a fiery green glare that Hermann is not above aesthetically appreciating.
"Keep your pants on," he says. "I'll do it for you."
"Keep my--" Newt echoes incredulously. "I'll have you know that--"
"Shh," Hermann says.
You know exactly where to take this, dead Caitlin Lightcap chimes in. Because you're a
devastating bastard.
Hermann whistles En Regle (And Out) through his teeth.
Newt stares him with something that looks like overt fear.
"Sing," Hermann says, as he finishes the first verse.
"I can't sing," Newt snaps back at him.
"You can," Hermann replies archly. "Of course you can. Do it, you idiot."
Newt shakes his head.
Hermann whistles a few more bars and then says, "don't be me, be you. You're a literal rock star.
Against all odds."
"Atmospheric," Newt whispers, looking like Hermann is pulling his teeth. "Esoteric."
"Sing," Hermann says. "Actually sing it."
"I don't understand," Newt whispers with proper prosody, trying.
Hermann is really not sure if he's seen anything more painful and ridiculous in his life than Dr.
Newton Geiszler of the subtle guyliner and the clothes that were designer not manning up in a vocal
way, but this whole day has been pretty pathetic according to every mental metric that Hermann can
recall or construct.
Unbelievable, his brain says. You're going to have to do this for him, champ. Maybe your
Geiszler-derived pathways will lend you some reasonable intonation.
 He sits up, yanks his ridiculous colleague into a quarter turn so that they're face to face and goes
straight for the chorus.
Cognizance kills confidence
In any providence.
"Sing it," he breaks off, pulling Newt forward, shaking him once. "You have to sing. This is all
I've got. You have to do it. I have literally nothing else, Newt, you must do this, dude."
Newt is not doing it.
He's just sitting there, staring at Hermann, looking totally traumatized by this entire experience,
clutching Hermann's cane.
It's my tough to translate
Psychological state
Subjective and ornate.
"Sing," Hermann shouts straight into Newt's face.
"Incurring costs," Newt half-snarls, half sings, "that we'll exchange for our benefits," he continues.
"Why is it that we don't have them yet," they continue together, Newt finally snapping into
something that sounds right; that sounds wrong, that sounds like Hermann is sure he's supposed to
sound like, but doesn't, and that's right too, maybe. What is rightness anyway? Is it even a thing? "Just
a null set of our own regret?"
"And I am upset," Newt continues, finally, finally sounding like the frontman he had been, that he
could still be if he hadn't traded music for science a decade ago. "Pinning my worth on my sobriquet,
tracing ennui with my--oh god damn it," he snaps, breaking from singing into speech, both hands
coming to his temples as he folds forward, trying not to throw up, trying not crack apart along the
throughlines of his mind.
"Yeah," Hermann says, reaching over to pat Newt's shoulder in what he hopes is an encouraging,
if anxious, way. "You just try and be you, champ. Don't--"
Newt shuts his eyes, presses his hands to his temples and wordlessly screams through a locked
jaw, and yup, that takes Hermann aback a little bit because yikes.
Seriously.
Freaking yikes.
While the whole clenched-teeth, bilateral temple grab scream is a very Geiszlerian thing to do, it
looks kind of distressing.
Really distressing.
"Hey," Hermann says, trying to calm Newt down with some semi-suave shoulder patting because
yes, that's a good idea. "Dude. Everyone is fine. Probably. Maybe. I mean, ostensibly?"
Newt opens his eyes, which are now alarmingly bloodshot, and locks his gaze with Hermann's.
"Are you okay?" Hermann asks him.
"Don't say 'okay'," Newt whispers, starting to bleed from his face.
"I'll say 'okay' if and when I want to say it," Hermann replies, fishing in his own pocket for
another handkerchief and handing it to Newt. "Try not to bleed out in protracted increments, bro."
"Oh god," Newt says, looking at him like he's a dead person, which Hermann is really not into,
because he has seen Newt and been Newt and kind of is currently Newt, a little bit, and he knows
what that face means and he also knows that he does not deserve it. Hermann is abruptly not quite
sure whether his colleague is going to cry or not. If it happens he's not sure how that will go for
either of them. Already, Hermann feels sort of mentally stressed, sort of cracking apart, already his
face hurts, but maybe that's because he's bleeding from it?
 "I'm pretty sure you're overreacting," Hermann says to Newt's unarticulated but obvious despair,
in what he hopes is a comforting way. Honestly, the guy looks so acutely miserable, it's kind of
freaking him out.
A little bit.
Not really but kind of.
"I can't get you back," Newt says in a cracked whisper, like some kind of tormented, half-mythical
thing. Like maybe if a pretty decent looking fairy prince or princess mated with a pretty decent
looking banshee. Are all banshees women? Would fairies and banshees be compatible? Genetically?
Hermann really is not well informed when it comes to this kind of thing. Maybe it's more of a
fangless-vampire meets intractable-nerd kind of deal. Maybe it's more like regular guy with a horde
in his head having a hard time hanging onto his hemoglobin.
"Of course you can," Hermann says. "You'll think of something. I'll think of something. This is
hardly an intractable problem, okay? Just chill."
Newt smiles faintly in that kind of way that people smile when they can't believe that you've
stabbed them with the razor blade included in your commercial model rocket kit, not that Hermann
would know anything about what that kind of face might look like, nope, that's weird, what is that
even. Hermann doesn't vindictively stab people even when they deserve it, even when they deserve it
so so so so so much, nope, that's not what Dr. Gottlieb of the flawless equanimity and the impressive
neural circuitry does, nope, definitely definitely not, nope. No way.
What had he been thinking about?
There's a learning curve when it comes to Newt's brain, it seems.
"Stop looking at me like that," Hermann snaps, because it's a weird look that he's getting from
Newt, a weird look he's been getting from Newt this whole time, actually, as if Newt has any grounds
for dispensing colleague-directed pity, as if Newt doesn't live in a glass house that's already been
shattered, as if he's not surprised every time it's windy or it rains on him or he's subjected to any kind
of environmental vagary because Newt thinks he has invisible walls that he does not have, that,
maybe? He never arguably had. So Newt can just suck it, and stop looking at him as if he knows
what's going on, as if Hermann is the confused one, as if Newt is not the stupidest brilliant person on
this stupid little planet that has too many oceans and too many deep places that are too willing to
transit monsters.
Newt does not stop looking at him.
"I'm easy," Newt says finally, pulling his handkerchief away from his face and wiping away most
of the blood in iterating swipes. "But you, you're difficult, Hermann, you're very, you're just very
difficult. You will be. To get back, I mean."
"You did it before," Hermann says. "Snapping me back over, I mean. Into a separate set. You don't
have to get emo about this and bleed everywhere. It's a solvable problem."
"This isn't the same," Newt whispers, clearly tormented. "Last time you had insight. Last time you
knew. Last time it was in response to an ongoing stressor. We just spent, I don't know, five minutes,
maybe ten, as each other. Without insight. Without insight. Either of us."
"It can be done," Hermann snaps, dismissively, because first of all, hi, yes, he'd had at least
partial insight, thanks. Second of all, Newt hates admitting when Hermann's right about things. Third
of all, whatever. "We know it can be done. I just did it for you."
"Yes but there's no reciprocal trick," Newt whispers. "Not this time. I don't know a reciprocal
trick."
Hermann shoots him an unimpressed look and pulls the handkerchief he holds away from his own
face.
"You don't, maybe," Hermann replies, trying to decide if he's still bleeding. It seems like no, so
score one for team Gottlieb. Score like one million actually, because a) he already solved fifty
percent of the extremely weird problems in this apartment, and, despite his super emo colleague's
doubts, he's going to solve the other fifty percent because come on, b) he is the most rational guy ever,
possibly ever to have lived; if any human has quantum mechanical instincts it's him, that's freaking
badass, and c) Newt has just been all kinds of depressing lately and Hermann does not blame him for
that, but maybe Dr. Geiszler just needs a snack and a nap while the professionals do the
consciousness-restoring. Yup.
So.
Points of difference.
He's smarter than Newt.
Thaaaaaats probably not going to get him anywhere though.
He's faster than Newt, more coordinated, better at pretty much everything except for his disaster
of a leg, thank you genes and environment, thank you soooo much for that one.
He should just do some quantum mechanics.
Of course, Newt can also do quantum mechanics.
He should do some algebraic topology.
Of course, Newt can also do that.
He should play the guitar.
Wait, nope, that's not him. Technically.
He should drive a car. He's awesome at that.
Er, except, well, the thing is that, right now? He really really really just doesn't want to do that
right now, cars, they just, well they move very quickly and he feels a little weird about driving stick at
the moment and the consequences of screwing up mid-car driving are, yeah, a little bit more extreme
when compared to say singing. It was pretty hard to get Newt to sing but Newt is going to suck at
trying to goad him into driving aggressively, Newt is going to suck at that so hardcore. Epic suckage
at the concomitant accelerating and browbeating.
Newt distracts him by standing, walking over to the sliding glass door of the balcony, and staring
out into the darkness beyond the reflected sheen of the room lights. That's something that's interesting
because Dr. Gottlieb as Dr. Geiszler could not care less about the Wall, other than as a tribute to
human stupidity and a monolithic monument to someone's family fracturing down a split that stemmed
from conceptual turned practical disagreements about the limits of human engineering as a discipline
because it's impossible to fence in a coastline; everyone, literally everyone, from biologists to
mathematicians will tell you it's an idea worthy of ridicule.
For reals, his brain says.
Hermann shakes his head and tries to remember what he's supposed to be doing.
"I do not," Newt says, staring westward, "want to do this."
"Want to do what?" Hermann says, feeling slightly more than slightly anxious because yes.
Newt turns around.
Newt turns around and when he does, god, he doesn't look like Newt, not really, he looks like
someone else, someone pushed too far, someone out over some edge that Hermann can't see but that
circumstantial evidence indicates is there nonetheless. And Newt comes back, away from the
window, back toward the couch, and there's something about the whole thing snaps an associative
switch, igniting anxiety into a paranoid conflagration because what is he doing, what is he--
 "You think you're me?" his colleague asks, terrified and angry; a mostly-human monster with
Erinyeic eyes. "You think that's who you are? This isn't you, you moron; you don't lose your
trigonometry in pursuit of awesome fish, you lose your books when people take them, and they do,
they always take them. Your toys that weren't your toys, your books, your thoughts, your funding; but
you could take them back, oh god, you want to take things back--why is it that you don't? Is it because
you're afraid of how you'd wear it--your creeper vengeance cloak? Or do you think it wouldn't fit you
and let you keep your mind, like a freak-show Russian novel, disturbing--Gogolesque? You know you
could have killed them, not the humans, not the humans, but that shit that crawled from trenches, miles
beneath the sea. But still they wouldn't let you, not your father, not the people in control of things that
you had helped design; they let Caitlin Lightcap do it and she had OCD, they would have let me do it
if they'd trusted me to kill what I abstracted and draped across my skin; they let everyone but you in
there, and why? Because your motor cortex fails a point-to-point alignment with a cheap and
thoughtless standard that someone just defined? Did you think if you saluted that that might change
their minds?"
"Stop," Hermann whispers.
"Stop? You think I'm stopping? I'm not stopping Hermann, never, I'm the only one who's seen you
for what you truly are, an angry, righteous expert, half insane with self-restraint, who can't fly off the
handle that's become a dead-man's switch; a guy who hates his very nature, who longs for thoughts as
waves and erasure of the self because he's fought too long with unfairness as genetics to remember
how to live. You're killing who you are, that's why you can't snap back; you aren't sure you want to;
it's so easy to be Geiszler; his thoughts aren't freaking blades. But you're not me, you know you're not,
I drive you crazy and for years you called that 'hatred' because everything you feel is warped by what
you are and sharpened into verbal blades you drive at what you're not because they're the only
weapons anyone will grant you that you trust yourself to take."
"Shut up." Hermann's words are soundless. "That's not true. It isn't true."
"It's true, you brain-swapped bastard, of course it's freaking true; things aren't false because you
hate them, they're false because they're false. There's your one confoundment--if what's logical wins
approbation, then what you despise is flawed. A fallacy that you don't like to look at because upon
examination it turns into why I felt I had to kill myself so I could prove you wrong."
"Stop," Hermann shouts at him; the word is torqueing into German.
"No," his colleague screams. "I want you back; I want you back, don't allow yourself to do this.
This isn't who you are, it's a shortcut of the mind straight to a state of lower energy but you have to
run it back, it has to be reversible, don't leave me here without you, don't leave me with the person I
unmade, oh god, this isn't working--"
It's here he breaks and here that Hermann has his breakthrough; through breaking himself into
triplicated dissonance and choosing a new throughline.
"Snap out of it," Newton screams, panicking, his hands closed around the front of Hermann's
dress shirt.
He squares his shoulders, shakes his head, and determines he's not Newton.
Anymore.
He is who he is--a bolted-together conglomeration of overengineering and inadequacies that has,
for years, aspired to move beyond itself by not acknowledging the ways in which it is tied to his own
biology, to joints that don't move in accordance with the ne plus ultra ease of the prototypical Jaeger
pilot, to a mind that is mired in its own circuitry and that has, certainly, been damaged by its interface
with a system never meant to be compatible. He's proven theorems, programmed Jaegers, mapped the
quantum foam, helped to save his planet from exogenous destruction, but still he is and always will be
the failed pilot, the social outcast, the unbending son, the man who backs his colleagues into
conceptual corners so tight that the only way they can cut free is by cutting themselves apart. The
consolidation of all that he is and the exclusion of what he is not supernova and collapse into
something hyperdense that wants nothing more than to pull away from the agony of the last fifteen
minutes, but can't.
Because someone has him by his shirt and is screaming in his face.
"You have to," Newton says, overwrought, collapsing to command-form hysterics in the absence
of all perceptible recourse.
Hermann's never seen him like this.
Except for--
Yes, except for.
"Stop," he says, lacking the respiratory resources for full vocal confrontation.
Newton does not stop.
"You have to," Newton screams, inches from his face.
"Stop," Hermann says, doing some reciprocal clothing-gripping of his own for emphasis. "It
worked. It worked. Calm down. Calm down. Calm down."
Hermann has to physically shake him, once, to get him to listen, but finally, finally, his words
seem to penetrate his colleague's agitated haze.
Newton looks at him in apparent expectation.
Hermann tries to muster a sufficiently reassuring expression but he's not certain how efficacious it
is given his current state of emotional upset and Newton's intolerable look of cautious optimism.
"Are you sure?" Newton asks him, with a subtle shirt-shake.
"To the extent that I can be," Hermann replies.
Newton lets him go, pulls his glasses off, and buries his face in his book-like, open palms.
Hermann feels too shocked and too exhausted to do anything but stare at him, at his atypically
clean hands, at the revolting memento mori in metal he has worn on his finger since the day that Dr.
Lightcap died.
His thoughts feel shocked to silence by the enormity of what has taken place.
Newton drops his hands and tips his head back to stare at the junction between the wall and the
ceiling.
"Newton," Hermann says, with absolutely no subsequent plans.
"Yup," Newton says. "Okay, good. I'll be in the bathroom weeping for something like eighteen
hours if you like, need me for anything, so. Yeah. See you later." He stands.
Hermann snaps a hand out, closing his fingers around his colleague's wrist. With the application
of limited pressure, Newton caves like rotten ice, collapsing straight into an awkward embrace,
turning his face into Hermann's shoulder, vibrating with emotional brisance and repression in accord
with whatever secret, internal frequencies his oscillatory circuits use to transmit their signals.
"Don't hug me," Newton manages to say into his shoulder. "I'm a dick."
"You're not," Hermann whispers, feeling like he's dying.
"I didn't mean any of those things," Newton says. "They aren't true."
They are, though.
They are.
Oh, how they are true.
It is the how, of course, that is the most terrible. The why--the why is understandable. Motive
always is. That's what makes it motive. It is the how, the how of human failings where true cruelty
lies. It is the same with bridges. The same with O-rings. The same with Jaegers. The same with
neural interfaces that fuse the circuits of the human mind until catastrophic failure. Not the why of
failure, but the how; the shrieks of rending metal, the screams of rending minds.
If the things his colleague had said hadn't been true, they'd have had no power to pull him back to
himself.
"I know," Hermann says, delivering the kindest lie he can possibly get himself to speak. "I know
that, you ridiculous man."
He has no idea what it is about these words or this circumstance that finally exceeds his
colleague's ability to hold himself together but--
Newton begins sobbing.
Hermann feels his own expression crack in sympathetic relief.
"It's all right," Hermann manages to say, one hand in Newton's hair.
Counterintuitively, Hermann's statement makes Newton cry harder, but whether because Newton
believes him or because he doesn't is impossible to say.
Hermann spends uncounted sets of minutes with his own burning eyes shut against the watery
glare of the room, not saying anything, trying to recover his self-possession in the wake of an
internecine personality exchange while Newton exhausts a pre-defined quota of chthonic torment that
will no longer be suppressed.
When the ache in his back begins to seriously contend with the ache in his thoughts, when the burn
of misery in his closed eyes cools to liquid tolerability, when the contracted knot of Geiszlerian
misery clinging to his shoulder relaxes toward fatigue, Hermann opens his eyes, leans back, and drags
his colleague turned roommate into a more topologically favorable conformation.
"Next time you wish to do something nice for me, Newton," he whispers, "I strongly advise you to
purchase a book."
"Meh," Newton says indistinctly. "Boring."
"Yes," Hermann says pointedly.
"You're like a personified war," Newton murmurs into his shoulder, sounding like he has mostly
finished crying. "Really tedious. Totally terrifying. Make a list of books; I don't think there are enough
books in the world to make up for the magnitude of my bad idea. RFID chips for none. Books for all.
In other news, I bled all over your shirt. I think."
Hermann sighs with an atypical posturing toward a casual aridity that he doesn't truly feel. "You
say this as if it's a notable thing," he continues. "The only person's clothes you ruin more regularly
than you ruin your own are mine."
"That's a gross misrepresentation," Newton replies fretfully, gathering some additional shirt
material and using it to wipe his face in either a pointed fulfillment of Hermann's pronouncement or in
hopeless acquiescence that belies his own statement. "Don't look at me."
"Why?" Hermann says.
"I am legit disgusting right now, dude."
"How you think that your current state is more objectionable than your propensity for addressing
me while covered with a patina of alien viscera I will literally never understand," Hermann says,
quite truthfully.
"Meh," Newton says, with equivocal eloquence, pulling back and pressing his shirt sleeve to his
face. "Let's get takeout Chinese food. From what I can tell with my sub-sub-sub par vision, your shirt
looks really bad. Category five hematic fashion disaster. I'm going to go effect an aesthetic reset and
pretend none of this ever happened. Enjoy your RFID chip," he finishes in obvious misery, locating
his glasses by feel alone. "It was totally worth it, I'm sure you'll agree."
Hermann lets him put his glasses on, stand up, and cross the room before he says, "Newton."
If he does not say this now, in the brave void that his sense-of-self usually fills, there will never
be a time he says it; he can feel the truth of that in every corner of his mind.
Newton says nothing, but he stops and turns back.
"Thank you," Hermann says, meaning it. Meaning it not just locally, not just for this here and this
now, but globally, for all the times he cannot name and that Newton would not stand still for. For
mirrored thoughts and reference books, coffee runs and drifting.
"Myeah," Newton says with a vague wave, already disappearing behind a wall. "You're welcome.
Don't die of self-castigation before I wash my face."
"I shall make every effort," Hermann replies, with the meager aridity he can bring to bear.
The door to the bathroom shuts.
He gets to his feet, pulls his cane off the floor and makes his way down a dark hallway to his
room, where he turns on the lights with a wave of his hand, strips off his shirt, leaves it to soak, and
replaces it with a sweater chosen in a haze of indifference.
His thoughts run through their arcane algorithmic tracts, solidifying incremental insight into the
unperceived biases of his past and the ontological uncertainty of his future.
He resolves to open the tequila immediately.
Chapter End Notes
Chapter-specific songs: From the brain-freezingly amazing allyspock we have two songs.
The first, which was front and center in this chapter, is: En Regle (and Out); click here for music
and here for lyrics. The second is Hedy Lamarr, click here for music and here for lyrics.
Chapter-specific thanks: Oh, fabulous artists. You guys. I mean really. Recent amazing
contributors have been: rurone (scripted NEWT) kual0kuac (my HEART), saltbay (ALSO my
heart), oodlesodoodles (MAKO, need I say more), and lucyha aka mycomputerismadeofbees
(like, I don't even know, the sinoatrial node of my heart or something). And, not to be forgotten,
amazing playlist makers, most recently including rurone and ohdilettante.
Chapter 25
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Newt is.
Newt is fine.
Newt is fine and washing his face.
Newt is fine and washing his face with water that goes on clear and comes off less and less blood
tinged every time.
Newt is fine and washing his face in iterating variants of clear water turning progressively less
pink post face contact.
Newt, a fully functional member of the International Intelligentsia, is currently iterating his way to
a clean countenance by means of repeated applications dihydrogen oxide.
Newt, a member of the Intellectual Underground turned Academic Overlord turned Highbrow
Demimonde turned Lowbrow Genius turned Post Apocalyptic Albeit Subterranean Scholar aka Latter
Day Brain, is currently making interesting and important investments in his future, including but not
limited to: hemostasis, hygiene, grooming, and roommate appreciation by way of RFID chip gifting
and subsequent managing of unforeseen, arguably negative sequelae.
How's it going there, champ? his brain asks solicitously.
Newt, Prodigy Rock Star MacArthur Fellow turned Apocalyptic Averter, has spent his day with
dead rationalists and his evening making it possible for the local preeminent quantum physicist in
residence to manipulate electric fields with his hand, which is an extremely civilized thing to spend
one's afternoon doing; everyone, when polled, would unanimously agree that a more sophisticated
afternoon would be hard to come by and that small setbacks, including identity confusion and the
interpersonal browbeating required to rectify said identity confusion, are inevitable and not to be
perseverated upon because, to put it colloquially, as he is wont to do, there are times in a guy's life
when things don't go according to plan. There are times in a guy's life when maybe said guy freaks out
a little bit and wants to have a hysterical breakdown in an empty room by himself but then, for better
or worse, he accidentally has one all over a local mathematician instead, which is good, which is
fine, which is totally understandable because there are times in a guy's life when maybe said guy does
some things to his own cerebral cortex that really should not be attempted either at home or in a lab
with a substandard apparatus and the long-term sequelae of said 'things' include new and intense
monster empathy on top of the old and intense monster sympathy that said 'guy' already had at
baseline, some poorly defined medical problems, and maybe accidentally swapping brains with his
roommate, Freaky-Friday style.
It might be Friday, now that he thinks about it.
Newt finishes washing away the remains of the leaking fluids that send sad, pathetic, don't-kill-
me-please evolutionary signals to hypothetical in-group members or whatever--it's not really clear
when you come right down to it, what the point of crying is--and he doesn't care about evolutionary
advantages very much right now because it's just not relevant to him at the moment, by which he
means this moment, this moment right now, when he would kind of like to lie down and wait for death
but he's not going to do that because he's a grown-ass adult and he doesn't really see Dr. H. G., Ph.D.
and EtOH mixing all that well right now; hopefully it will just be more of an oil-and-water thing
rather than, say, a pure cesium meets water type deal, but it could go either way, really.
 Hermann and tequila could go either way.
Pure cesium and water--that ish is going to turn bad every time.
Newt dries his face, which is really the final test of how efficient his rounds of de-blooding have
been, and yeah, not completely efficient, because the towel turns pink tinged. How fortunate; it will
now match literally every other towel they collectively own; yup, Newt owns collective towels.
That's cool. That's very adult. Or not? It depends on a lot of things, most of which are human social
norms. Whatever. He's already slightly, slightly, very slightly stressed so he doesn't think he needs to
be spending mental energy comparing himself to some hypothetical average that can never truly be
defined.
He re-dons his recently acquired fingerless gloves, puts his glasses back on, and makes a genuine
effort to look less like his current self and more like his former self by fixing the mess Hermann has
made of his hair; god, it's so weird--Newt is becoming convinced that the guy is trying to make him
look as ridiculous as possible, because half of his hair is neatly smoothed flat in the style of a nerd
who's looking for a pocket protector to go with his 1950s slicked-back central part and
microwavable dinner, but then the other half of it has kind of a mad-scientist, post-electrocution, get-
me-my-flux-capacitor look to it. Both of these paradigms are unacceptable; Newt has been styling his
hair, for years, like a baller, in imitation of Randy Waterhouse from the 2018 film adaptation of
Cryptonomicon and it's a good look for him, okay, and it's cool, just because Hermann doesn't get it
doesn't mean Newt's hair is a disaster, it is simply misunderstood.
His hair is fine with that, honestly.
His hair is actually fine with nothing, because it's a collection of dead protein and therefore not
sentient.
Newt restores his decorative mess of dead protein it to its appropriate state of aesthetically
pleasing dishevelment, straightens his clothes, does, like, a combo shoulder/neck roll thing like
someone who engages in physical activity, including walking around and playing racquetball and not
just crying really hard for his workouts. Nope.
His phone buzzes.
He pulls the thing out of his pocket to see that Mako has texted him a picture of what looks like a
fancy bar that might or might not be made out of ice, underlit by neon lights. Maybe the lights are
frozen into it? Would it be possible to encase fluorescent lights in ice and have them reliably work?
He's going to need to think about that one. At a first approximation the answer is 'maybe', but it would
be expensive. Whatever, the ice bar is not the point of this picture. Mako is holding a fiery red
cocktail in a martini glass, her nails loosing their edges into the identical color of the drink.
::Pic!:: the accompanying text either tags or demands, it's hard to be sure.
::Yes:: Newt texts in agreement.
::Send!:: Mako replies immediately.
::No:: Newt replies.
::Send send send send send:: Mako says.
::Are you drunk?:: Newt asks.
::SEND:: Mako replies.
::You're drunk texting me right now:: Newt says. ::Admit it. You cannot hide these things from me.
I am a genius. Genius half-sibling. This is your lot in life.::
::S:: Mako replies.
::No:: Newt manages to get in.
::E:: Mako says.
 ::N:: Mako says.
::D:: Mako says.
::I'm very busy, Mako, okay? Lots of science.::
::My name is Newt and I am SO SERIOUS:: Mako texts. ::That is who I am. Very serious. So
serious. Serious for "science"::
::Put that drink down:: Newt says. ::Where is your kind-of-boyfriend? Why is science in
QUOTES. Science deserves better from you, Maks.::
::SEND. PIC.::
::Why?::
::You have sent none:: Mako replies. ::Why not? Send now. Send right now::
Newt sighs, pushes his eyebrows down and his glasses up before glaring at the mirror in what he
judges is his most sober put-that-drink-down-right-now-young-lady way, takes a picture under day-
spectrum lights that make him look like a vampire, and sends it to Mako.
::Sweater?:: Mako replies.
::Shut up:: Newt says.
::You own no sweaters:: Mako says. ::I don't think that is YOUR sweater::
::It's definitely mine:: Newt replies.
::Lies:: Mako says.
::Not lies:: Newt counters. ::Bye Mako::
::You look sick:: Mako says.
::You look pretty:: Newt replies. ::That is what is called POLITE conversation, Maks. Now you
try::
::Are you okay?:: Mako says.
::Maks, you're not getting how this is supposed to go::
::Newt I am serious::
::I am FINE, Maks:: Newt replies, leaning back against the shut door of the bathroom and
indulging himself in some moderately theatrical put-upon body language. ::Extremely robust. I
challenge Becket to a game of Portal, to be played when we next meet::
::Newt I am very strong. All weak parts are gone. Please tell me if you are not fine::
Newt shuts his eyes and arches his back before he replies, ::Chill, Maks. There is a time for the
kind of semi-sober rhetoric you're rocking, and that time is when you and Becket and Hermann are
playing D&D in a dungeon mastered by me and not before. I look a little bit like a vampire because I
am one, obviously::
::Newt:: Mako texts.
Newt kind of slides down the bathroom door to sit on the floor because he's tired.
::Newt Newt NEWT:: Mako texts.
::MAKO. What is the DEAL? Chill::
::Hey:: A text from an unknown number appears on his phone.
::And you are?:: Newt texts.
::Raleigh:: the person who is apparently Raleigh Becket texts, which is weird and not cool at all,
Newt doesn't think it's cool to randomly get possibly-drunk texted by Raleigh Becket, Newt doesn't
care if Becket texts him, whatever, Becket is just some guy. Just because he, like, did that thing that
one time, everyone thinks he's so great, but Newt did things at times also, and so it's not even a big
deal. Becket is probably not even drunk. It doesn't matter if he's drunk or not because Becket is totally
lame and yeah. Whatever.
 ::Hey:: Newt texts Raleigh.
::Don't listen to Raleigh:: Mako texts. ::Raleigh does not have my permission text you::
::Why does Raleigh need your PERMISSION to text me?:: Newt texts Mako. ::Because you're
dating him? Because you two are a hot hot item?::
::Do you read the news, Geiszler?:: Raleigh asks.
::Because you are in my half of what we share:: Mako says. ::You are very annoying though,
maybe I will transfer you to him for a while::
::You guys, this is too complicated for me:: Newt texts them both. ::I'm having a bad day. You
can't harass me in separate simultaneity I can't take it. Well, I can, but I would prefer not to::
::Aw!:: Mako texts.
::Man up:: Raleigh adds.
::Uh oh:: Mako texts.
::Did you just tell me to 'man up'?:: Newt replies, at a texting speed that approaches his
theoretical maximum. ::How does one MAN UP exactly? Why don't we just all engage in
evolutionarily primitive posturing behaviors because THAT'S useful, because that's really
VALUABLE, that says great things about our species. Good thought, thank you, Guy::
::It's an expression?:: Raleigh texts.
::A show of solidarity?:: Raleigh texts.
::In a masculine way. We are guys:: Raleigh texts.
::Not all of us:: Mako amends.
::Guy people are guys:: Raleigh texts. ::Guyszler and I are guys::
::Okay, admittedly my respect for you has simultaneously increased and decreased by eight
million percent:: Newt texts.
::Some people get called 'Guy' for no real reason:: Raleigh texts. ::Some people also get called
'Ray'. Some people would like to just be called their actual name::
::I, NEWTON GEISZLER, CHALLENGE YOU, RALEIGH BECKET, TO AN EPIC PORTAL
SHOWDOWN:: Newt texts.
::OH IT IS ON:: Raleigh replies.
::I thought we were playing D&D:: Mako texts. ::Also, I could beat you both at Portal::
::And that's why Short-Science doesn't go around challenging you:: Raleigh replies.
::Excuse me, but did. you. just.:: Newt says. ::Go chop down a tree with the blunted hatchet of
your so called intellect. That wasn't even a pun. You get zero respect for that one. On a related note,
are you guys trashed?::
::No:: Mako says.
::We are liquored up, yes:: Raleigh says. ::What's 'D&D'?::
::Who ARE you?:: Newt asks. ::How do you live? What is your genus and species? Where can
other native versions of you be found? 'What's D&D'. Please. Get away from me. Farther away.::
::I will explain later:: Mako says. ::It's for nerds::
::Oh:: Raleigh texts. ::That would explain why I've never heard of it::
::Are you guys not sitting right next to each other?:: Newt replies. ::Did you not DRIFT::
::You're so old:: Mako says.
::Extremely old:: Raleigh agrees.
::You don't get the drift:: Mako says.
::Hilarious:: Newt replies. ::Look, I'm very busy. Why are you drunkenly harassing me?::
::I always harass you now:: Mako says.
 ::Because there was an article in Popular Science:: Raleigh says.
::There's always an article:: Newt replies, somewhat mollified. ::You guys read Popular
Science? Lowbrow much?::
::Literally every day people ask us what we think about the latest speculations regarding you::
Raleigh says. ::Some speculations are more plausible than others. Also, I don't think you know what
'lowbrow' means.::
::You are not dying?:: Mako asks.
::Everyone is dying:: Newt replies.
::DICK:: Raleigh texts.
::What?:: Newt replies. ::Mortal people are mortal. Telomeres. Cellular senescence. It's a whole
field. Sirtuins. I'm not dying at an accelerated rate that I know of, okay? Chill, people. Is this why you
wanted me to take a picture? CREEPERS. Both of you. I'm sure you'll be very happy together::
::You look like hell, Guy(szler):: Raleigh says.
::Well I will be sure to take another picture when I feel more jaunty. Possibly tomorrow. Possibly
after Dr. Gottlieb makes me dinner. Possibly a decade from now. Much as I would love to let you tell
me how terrible I look, I have to go do some Gottliebian-themed damage control::
::Damage control?:: Mako says.
::So you and Doc G are an item now?:: Raleigh says. ::Called it.::
::We've always been an item, psuckers. Run along, kids. Go engage in text-based harassment
elsewhere. Geiszler out::
He ignores the subsequent determined buzzing of his phone by leaving it in the bathroom. This is a
legit great solution for him on every level, except for maybe the level where he ambiguously and
flippantly involved his colleague in a whole Countervailed Harassment Campaign, but, honestly,
Newt's perfectly calibrated internal sensor regarding Things Likely to Piss Off Hermann Gottlieb
says that while the guy does get very distressed about items such as: 'I was eviscerating a kaiju and
liquids flow down the slightly sloped floor to the drain which is maybe, yes, a little bit on your side
of this open-floorplan lab; who designs things like that, this is both inevitable and not my fault,'
Hermann is, weirdly, less distressed about things like: 'so, Hermann, I was at a bar and accidentally
provoked a band called A Clockwork Orange into starting a bar fight with me a little bit, I should
have seen that one coming I know because, yikes, who names their band that, am I right? Also, could
you come maybe pick me up, my current location would be jail right now, I think I might need
stitches.' Newt has a hard time explicitly defining the decision trees Hermann uses to determine
whether he's going to be enraged about something or not, and, yes, drifting helps when it comes to
parsing that kind of thing, but it turns out that drifting is not a magical answer book because so much
of life depends on external circumstances, so it's hard to know if Hermann will object to the fact that
Newt just implied to Mako and Raleigh that he and Newt are maybe a thing that they aren't, but it's
also a little unclear because what are they even? Newt doesn't know, and he's not the best when it
comes to figuring these things out. He's 'not the best' at a lot of things, including reinventing the Grand
Gesture from first principles if the totally horrifying hour he just had is any kind of evidence, but he
does enjoy doing nice things for nice people; Newt has kind of always had a desire to get in on that
deal in a waxing/waning type way, so, er, yes, with regard to all that he knows about being a human
on paper, it's probably for the best to disclose interpersonal weirdnesses before they get additionally
weird; or, maybe everything is already weird, or, alternatively, nothing is, Newt doesn't know,
Newt's not sure, Newt's just a guy who really needs to start making a serious effort to bleed less from
his face and maybe get a job.
 He leaves the darkened hallway, rounds the corner, and gets halfway though an opening sentence
that starts like: "so, for your information, I may have just implied to the aesthetic dream team that--"
but ends in silence.
Hermann is sitting at their kitchen table knocking back a shot of tequila like a freaking boss, which
is notably badass, but also pretty distressing on levels and levels and levels because a) why, b) why,
c) why, d) there had better not be any more brain switchery, e) because Newt can't handle that, f) yes
he can, g) that's a lie, h) he can handle anything, i) well, maybe he can and maybe he should evaluate
his capabilities on a moment-by-moment and case-by-case basis but honestly j) his capacity is pretty
freaking high, k) it always has been, l) and it always will be, m) he'll probably die or snap into
insanity before admitting defeat, n) what happened to his list? o) it's getting bastardized or p) more
correctly, it's just grown into his thought processes and q) that is a tactical error, but r) whatever, it's
over now, stuvwxyz) he's terminating his concatenating.
"Whoa," Newt says, stepping forward to pull the bottle of tequila away from his erstwhile lab
partner. He absconds with it to the opposite side of the table, where he drops into a chair, curls a
hand pointedly around his appropriated alcohol, and fixes Hermann with what he hopes is a
skeptically sympathetic look and not a look full of overt anxiety.
"You fixed your hair," Hermann says, his diction already sliding slightly.
"Yes," Newt says, like this is a normal thing that they normally discuss like normal, normal
people.
Newt looks at the bottle of tequila and estimates that Hermann probably just did three consecutive
shots in less than fifteen minutes.
This is bad, but the outstanding question is, of course, the magnitude of the implied badness.
"Yup," Newt continues, "I did fix my hair. Thank you for noticing. You're ah--" he can feel the
compensatory rise in his own heart rate, the crescendoing scream of a nervous system he could have
sworn had been totally played out. His thoughts grind against one another, and if he's not careful, if
he's not careful, he's going to start bleeding again. It's so easy to start bleeding. He just needs to sit
here for a few seconds and make sure he's not breathing in or breathing out against a closed glottis; he
needs to ensure that all airways are open and all airflow is laminar. He is fine, he is fine, he is not a
fraction from disequilibrium, there's no cliff to fall off, there's just the platform of the self and it is
infinite.
He is fine.
Fine, fine, fine.
"You're sure you're still you?" Newt says casually, casually, oh so casually, "because, not gonna
lie, dude, this is a little more of an historical me thing than an historical you thing--the triplicated
tequila shots in the absence of food, I mean. And, ah, I'm not at all confident that I can do that thing I
just did twice in one night."
In fact, Newt isn't sure it will work ever again; he thinks that the brain--and, in particular,
Hermann's brain--will find ways to adapt, ways to circumvent and shut down Geiszlerian efforts,
protean though they may be. He's not sure that his traumatic-snap-back-to-the-self approach would
have worked at all but for the crushing, total duty that Hermann feels and that Newt doesn't
understand and maybe never will except as an empirical reality, observable but unexplained, like the
'why' behind existence. It does make him wonder what part of what he'd done had worked--the part
where he'd tried to effect a psychological track switch via lexical aggression? Or the part where he'd
thought he couldn't do it and had started screaming?
Now that he's had a little bit of time to think about it?
 He's pretty sure it might have been the latter.
"Quite sure," Hermann replies. "Were I you, my misery would be much less complete and
crushing, nor would it have necessitated or merited the set of shots I just performed."
The tangle of depressing realities and implied opinions in that comment makes Newt tired.
Newt is already tired.
"Let's get food," Newt says, feeling like he'd much rather dramatically sprawl atop the kitchen
table and wait for unconsciousness than make an effort to acquire calories.
"I don't require food," Hermann says. "I require that you return my bottle of tequila."
"Okay," Newt says, involving his whole left arm in the defensive tequila curl he's got going
because he is surrendering this bottle over his dead body. "Yes. Deal. I accept. You can have this
tequila back after you eat some food."
"Do not pretend to be responsible," Hermann snarls.
"I am, in fact, both reliable and responsible," Newt replies, in justified hauteur. "I taught graduate
school. I ran a department."
"You are ineffectual and inflammatory. Befriending you is like rescuing a starving, juvenile cat
covered with nitroglycerin," Hermann says.
"Wow, um, that's a really specific, ragingly inaccurate, and totally bizarre non sequitur. By
'juvenile cat' do you actually mean 'kitten'? Because I am not seeing the connection between myself
and a kitten. Really, I'm more of a fish person. You could be a cat. Of the two of us, you are more cat-
like for sure. While I'm not seeing the explosives-doused-kitten thing, I am seeing an Erwin
Schrodinger tie-in. Why does this always happen when we get drunk? My point is that you are feeling
that tequila I think, buddy; why don't we just get some Chinese food and watch Star Trek: Voyager
like the erudite nerds that we are, a very very small bit, hardly at all really; we're actually much too
cool for Star Trek but maybe just this one time because we had a hard day and you have a little bit of
a thing for B'Elanna Torres, so fiery and competent, rarr, and I have a little bit of a thing for Seven of
Nine, so cool and competent, and also rarr. They would have made a great couple. And by great I
mean terrible. In a spectacular way. We could just lie on the couch and watch it for like an hour or
maybe eighteen of them in a row."
"Do not do that," Hermann says, shooting him a look that might actually be able to extinguish a
small, non-oil-based fire.
"What?" Newt replies. "Tempt you with half-Klingon engineers?"
"You know exactly what I mean," Hermann replies.
Newt does a gratuitous, non-verbal r roll.
"Yes," Hermann confirms. "That."
"I am taking this as tacit agreement to my plan," Newt says. "Now. The only question is do we go
with the legit but slow Chinese place or the less legit but speedy Chinese place."
"I would like to recommence drinking in an expeditious manner," Hermann says.
"Expeditious it is," Newt replies. "Queue up the Trek, dude."
Glasses on, weeping set to 'nope', hair set to 'Randy Waterhouse', effectiveness operating at
theoretical maximum and inflammatory rhetoric dialed down to zero, Dr. Newton Geiszler of the
personal uncertainty and the cognitive insurgency locates and peruses the relevant menu while Dr.
Gottlieb resumes his head-down-misery pose at the kitchen table.
Okay then.
Ugh, his brain says, as Newt opens his fancy, new, overpowered, underutilized laptop and locates
the relevant restaurant online. Menus.
 Deciding on a single food item from a list of multiple food items is a thing that, alas, generally
presents a vigorous, snarling, cognitive lightsaber vs. phaser duel between Geiszlerian and
Gottliebian preferences. Even more alas, food selection turns out to be an area that the carbon copy,
cut-up kids are interested in, because one of the things that the kaiju found (or, oh god, find?) ridic
fascinating about humans was the amount of brainspace devoted to food, because, hi, if you're just a
giant, cloned, alien war machine, built to serve your purpose and then die, you don't think about the
deliciousness of what you're consuming, it turns out. Who knew? Now Newt knows. The kids are
turning into foodies, a little bit. It's weird. And complicated. Anyway, Newt is not in the mood to have
a mental fight--not with his inner Dr. Gottlieb, who is riding high today, and definitely not with the
kids, who are simmering, low and interested and a little bit sadomasochisticallicexpialidociously in
the back of his brain. So, instead of trying to decide on anything he just picks three random numbers
from the vegetarian section of the menu and hopes that none of them include too much eggplant,
because someone doesn't like eggplant, but it's not really clear to him who that might be just right
now.
Post heroic food ordering, Newt cannot help but notice that Hermann has not queued up the
agreed-upon Trek, and has, instead, decided to just stay sitting at the table, his head buried in his
arms.
Fortunately, Newt does not find this stressful, because first of all, why would he; second of all,
crushing depression on Hermann's part seems really understandable right now; third of all, Newt
totally gets the histrionically displayed misery vibe, though, historically that's not really a Gottliebian
thing, this makes him nervous. He doesn't like it. There's a little too much Geiszler in theatrical
defeat, he thinks; but he's not so sure that this defeat is actually 'theatrical'; it might just be defeat.
He does not find this stressful.
Nope, not stressful.
This does not look good, his brain says, running some high level Geiszlerian analysis right here
right now, running it hardcore.
This, in fact, looks extremely bad, his mental Hermann adds.
The kids don't have a strong opinion about Hermann, but they're rolling around in Newt's distress
a little bit.
Or they would be, if he were distressed, which he's not.
Newt doesn't recall ever seeing this kind of overtly miserable body language from Hermann, and
he's known the guy for his whole life, in an artificial way, and for over a decade if one counts
correspondence. So Newt stands there a while, kind of a long while, probably a little too long, just
holding tequila that isn't his but probably should be and staring at Hermann, who is putting in some
literal face time with the surface of the table, maybe weeping? Maybe just kind of already starting to
pass out a little bit from the three shots of tequila he just totally pounded all in a row in a span of less
than ten minutes? And yeah, Newt will definitely hold his hair back for him, metaphorically, if he
ends up throwing up in the next twelve minutes to twelve hours, or, really, ever because Newt kind of
owes him that, kind of owes it to him hardcore and for life. Or maybe it's his inner Hermann that feels
like he owes the external and actual Hermann metaphorical and literal support post alcohol
poisoning? Whatever. The point is that the current situation isn't 'good' in the classical sense, and
apparently Hermann is having the kind of day where he's put a moratorium on reasonable decision
making and has just decided to go with it, whatever 'it' is, whether it be surprise Geiszlerian sets of
minutes, trying to use ethanol to kill his own brain, or doing any number of things that he normally
wouldn't do.
 "What," Hermann says abruptly, lifting his head and covering his face with his hands and scaring
the crap out of Newt a little bit, truth be told, because Newt has been a little bit twitchy lately, "are
you doing?"
"Um, staring at you from close range like a creeper, thinking intensively and a little bit invasively
about your current mental landscape, trying to read your thoughts from a distance of about a meter and
a half, and kind of wondering if you have alcohol poisoning yet," Newt replies.
"I do not," Hermann replies, slurring slightly, dropping his hands, and giving Newt a semi-glazed
glare. "Thank you for your interest."
"Come on dude," Newt says, "let's invent a Voyager drinking game."
Hermann looks like he's torn pretty equally between being led into Trektation versus attempting to
become one with their kitchen table, so Newt helps him decide by offering him a hand that Hermann
is way too polite to refuse. This is considerate professional assistance of the Geiszlerian school,
which is, indeed, his school. Not grabby, imperious manhandling in the rustic and antiquated
Gottliebian tradition.
Newt knows who he is.
Newt knows who everyone is.
Everyone that he knows, he knows to the extent that they can be known, which is to say he knows
no one but himself and four-weeks-ago Hermann, and three-point-five weeks ago cut up kaiju kids, if
that's even what they are anymore, those throughlines in his head that are getting more and more
Geiszler-spangled all the time.
Hermann takes his hand, because obviously.
Newt pulls him up and steadies him a little bit because, yup, no food, one month without much
alcohol, and one hundred milliliters of tequila, give or take fifteen mLs (Newt's realistic about his
estimating and how many significant digits it may or may not deserve) will most definitely mess with
the vestibular system of his esteemed colleague.
He gives Hermann a close range semi-hug versus a semi let-me-just-kind-of-turn-this-fake-hug-
into-me-showing-you-to-the-couch-real-quick type thing that is super respectful but still gets him a
pointed glare. The glare is a little bit staged and probably supposed to be somewhat reassuring and so
Newt gives Hermann a don't-you-try-to-reassure-me-with-your-glare-I-expect-more-from-you type
look, which Hermann counters with a Newton-no-one-has-ever-made-me-want-to-roll-my-eyes-as-
dangerously-and-shockingly-hard-as-you-make-me-want-to-roll-them cock of the head, which Newt
counters with a that's-what-the-intellectually-envious-say understated eyebrow raise, which Hermann
does not now and never has had a good response to, because, hi, anyone with a brain in their head
should be intellectually envious of Newt; it's a mark of good taste, really.
Newt makes a whole bunch of things happen, like sitting on the couch and teeing up Voyager
season four, because while his own knowledge of Star Trek relative to Star Wars isn't necessarily
what one would call encyclopedic, he knows enough that if he wants to be watching Seven of Nine,
Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix Zero-One, he's going to need to go straight to Scorpion: Part Two. No
one here needs Part One because Hermann has been carrying a super secret, super concealed, extreme
love for Star Trek: Voyager for pretty much the entirety of his sentient existence, so Newt has all the
ancillary knowledge he needs to cut straight to season four of a somewhat (never) obsolete TV show.
Newt also makes the food thing happen when it arrives, and he spends about fifteen minutes over
vegetable lo mein laying down the ground rules of a nascent Voyager drinking game. Hermann's not
really into it, even though Newt very courteously and extremely gallantly throws an entire B'Elanna
Torres subsection into the drinking game.
 Hermann is not impressed.
Not that Newt actually thought he would be?
But still.
The guy is totally distracted, not really eating that much, kind of periodically looking at Newt, but
not at intervals that make sense based on the flow of Newt's scintillating Voyager monologuing. The
guy isn't saying much, which isn't weird in and of itself because Hermann gets quiet when stressed,
but the silence he's rocking now is a different kind of silence than the kind of silence Newt had been
expecting. It's less miserable and more--threatening? Suspenseful? He feels a little bit like he's the
idiot from the Alien franchise who's about to touch the mysterious egg-like objects he's just found in a
cave. Except not really, because he's just awkwardly sitting on the couch, unnecessarily close to his
lab partner turned roommate, trying pretty hard to generate some interest in this whole Trekquila
Night he's trying to have.
Newt is trying.
Trying hard.
Newt is failing.
Failing hard.
Eventually, mid-way through Newt's freeform scientific retconning of Seven of Nine's eventual
wardrobe choices, Hermann mutes the Star Trek. He doesn't turn it off, he just silences it, and there is
something about that half-decision that seems both strange and ominous to Newt, because Hermann is
a shut-off-the-television, I-make-binary-decisions type guy.
Newt stops talking and looks over at Hermann.
Hermann is looking back at him in a super intense way.
"Don't hunt me," Newt says reflexively and arguably kind of insensitively, but in all seriousness
he's pretty sure they should not be messing around when it comes to the the predatory instincts thing,
especially not on a night like tonight when everyone's having a hard time staying in their right minds,
some parties are drunk, and some parties maybe spent thirty minutes weeping and are kind of tired
and maybe not entirely out of the post-catharsis emotional danger zone no matter how many backlit
screens they stare at and how much lo mein they courageously order.
"I'm not hunting you," Hermann replies, looking away, looking back to silent Voyager like he is
too tired and too confused and too miserable for all of this to be anything other than much too much.
Newt gets that.
Newt gets it a lot.
Newt gets it emocore.
Newt is also a little bit done, a little bit overdone, a little bit scorched, a little bit reduced to a
burning cinder, a little bit carbonized, a little bit dispersed by local air currents to really feel anything
other than relieved, that (yay) Hermann is not hunting him, okay, good, his obligations are discharged
and, actually, now that he's thinking about it, the present moment would be a really good time to make
an effort toward not being conscious anymore. His attempt probably won't be successful, it will
probably take hours and hours of Voyager, but hey if Hermann doesn't want to actually do the Voyager
drinking game, which it seems like he's not excited about, then that's fine, they can just quietly sit here,
not really doing anything or talking, just being exhaustedly miserable in the same local environment.
"No," Hermann says, elbowing Newt as Newt, maybe, starts invading his personal space with a
sleep-on-shoulder kind of vibe. "Retrieve my tequila, please."
Newt sighs.
Newt has some misgivings about the alcohol, primarily because their night so far has been an
arguable 'disaster' of an experience. But he owes Hermann, oh, an approximately infinite amount of
mental slack in this department, so he gets up, retrieves the tequila, and two out of four shot-glasses
that Mako had, apparently, purchased in New York City, and then carried with her until two days ago,
when she had overnighted them from Berlin to San Francisco, which is really intense, but things have
been intense lately; Newt's not going to judge.
The glasses themselves are pretty badass. They're green, shot through with blue, slightly
kaijuesque, but abstracted enough that it's not tacky.
He puts both shot glasses on the table and pours Hermann, oh god, a fourth shot, and then pours
himself half a shot.
Because he is responsible.
They do a pretty intense shot-glass vs. shot-glass impact before Hermann knocks his tequila back
and Newt sedately sips his.
"Um?" Newt says.
"I have been thinking, Newton," Hermann says, getting a little more noticeably German and a little
bit more noticeably aggressive at the same time.
"This is not a new thing for you," Newt replies with significant trepidation. "About?"
"I think it is impossible for us to prove or disprove the reality of the SPECTER Effect."
Oh hey, Newt's brain says, totally relieved and also totally surprised. Science!
Even the kids seem pleased at this left turn away from the contemplation of human misery.
"No way," Newt says. "No way. Just because I can't livestream your sensory cortex or pull words
out of books you're looking at doesn't mean that we aren't capable of some kind of real-time
information exchange. I have a theory about this. It's kind of weird; I freaked out a little bit about it the
other day, just so you know, but it's empirically very satisfying, potentially. Admittedly, it's a little
disturbing, but I'm going to tell you anyway; I just want us both to be very clear on the fact that I don't
plan to actually do it, because I don't see a way, mechanically, to do it safely and I care about safety,
recent past proof-of-principle self experimentation aside, and also nematocyst incident aside, and
also--"
"Will you get on with it," Hermann snaps, in a way that's probably meant to be totally British
School Master-y but just comes off as maximally tired, moderately drunk, and vaguely fond.
"Myeah," Newt says, "I'm psyching myself up because the kids--er, well, okay, full disclosure, or,
actually, not full disclosure, never mind. Okay. Okay okay okay. The point is that I have an
hypothesis," he finishes, managing to pull everything out of the fire to watch it burn in the
metaphorical pan.
"You are not already drunk, are you?" Hermann asks, looking over at him in unmistakable if
understated amusement.
"What?" Newt says, being Newt and hanging onto his brain and just saying no to the interesting,
interested chorus of undead kaiju parts that are hissing a little bit from where they're curled on the
floor of his skull. "No."
"In that case pretend you want me to understand what you are saying," Hermann says, solicitous to
the point of insult.
That was uncalled for, his brain says.
Newt can do this.
Newt can do all of this.
He knocks back what remains of his half shot of tequila, slams his glass on the table
authoritatively, and says, "I hypothesize that we were neurally altered in such a way that we now have
the capacity to send and receive electromagnetic signals that can be transduced into thoughts, but that
ability is compromised or blocked entirely by the insulation provided by the bone of our skulls. Kaiju
have the conductivity required for EM-based over-the-air thought broadcast built into their skeletal
and integumentary systems. As evidence, please see giant EM pulse generated by Leatherback in
Hong Kong."
Hermann looks like he finds Newt's statement a) surprisingly articulate, b) somewhat impressive,
and also c) physically painful.
Newt decides he should get another half-shot of tequila for that exquisitely well-articulated
hypothesis. He pours himself one, but Hermann takes it, sliding it across the coffee table away from
Newt.
"One half-shot per hour," Hermann says. "The goal is to avoid a seizure, Newton. I detest your
theory."
"Oh you detest it?" Newt says, letting the tequila go with a dece amount of grace. "You detest it,
Hermann? Well--"
"I suspect, however," Hermann says, speaking over him, "that you may be correct."
In the back of Newt's mind, the kids hiss in muted longing beneath the low amplitude, high
frequency, alcohol-induced buzz that he's feeling much, much too soon.
"Okay," Newt says, ridiculously mollified by Gottliebian suspicions of Geiszlerian correctness.
"Okay okay okay, look. We're being lazy about this. Really lazy. There are two potential mechanisms
for real-time communication, kaiju-to-kaiju style, right? And you're up to speed on this courtesy of
our neural remix, yes?"
"Yes," Hermann says dryly. "Both mechanisms occurred to you within minutes of your first drift,
and, from what I can tell, you have not progressed them since."
"I feel like there's judgment in your voice, dude; please allow me to remind you that my abilities
to test hypotheses have been limited by lack of samples, lack of vision, by which I literally mean
'eyesight', and lack of, er, psychological robustness that would, hypothetically, be required for me to
cut apart yet more kaiju brains." Newt readjusts his glasses and gives Hermann a disapproving look.
"So you'll excuse me if I don't feel I need to defend myself to you in this respect."
"You are literally the most ridiculous person I have ever encountered," Hermann says. "Please
stop ascribing your own insecurities about your recent work ethic to me. I am the person who has
purchased for you an entire library on rationalism and who continuously suggests that you sleep rather
than work."
Myeah, his brain says, in indolent inarticulateness.
Newt feels a little bit strange in a way that would be consistent with mild intoxication but clearly
is not that because it takes way more than half a shot of tequila to achieve mild intoxication.
For him.
Because he is a badass.
"Yeah, okay, no," Newt says. "I do not ascribe, Hermann."
Hermann gives him an expression that is a resplendent if semi-drunken example of Grade A
Gottliebian Offensive Solicitousness.
"Two mechanisms," Newt says, getting them back on track with some appropriately emphatic
words and gestures. "One: EM-based, over-the-air thought broadcast facilitated by kaiju physiology
and mechanistically identical to, say, radio waves. Two: some freakyass quantum entanglement thing.
These two possibilities aren't mutually exclusive, necessarily, right? I mean, humans, for example,
can see and hear, so what we would, classically and embarrassingly, consider 'extra' sensory
perception isn't necessarily unimodal. It could be EM based and quantum based. There could be
overlap. There could be other mechanisms I haven't yet conceived of. Tell no one I said this,
Hermann, I actually cannot believe that just came out of my mouth. I think maybe I am drunk? I'm
definitely abusing quantum mechanics." Newt dramatically tips his head back and shuts his eyes.
"Charming," Hermann says. "'Some quantum entanglement thing'. Ah yes. Very discerning. Well,
you've certainly persuaded me, Dr. Geiszler, I applaud you. If you are referring to the simultaneous
swapping of the spin states of entangled particles as a potential mechanism for thought transfer, then
congratulations, you have explained telepathy at the cost of violating the concept of causality."
Newt reopens his eyes.
Right.
Yeah.
Okay.
Causality violations.
Yes.
He has done that.
He has violated causality.
He has committed casual, causal, quantum-mechanical calumnies.
It's a mistake to go up against a quantum physicist when quantum physics is on the line, but right
now his personal ontology pretty much resembles creme brulee and apparently criticisms about
causality are a little bit of a spoon straight to the cracking crust of his mind, so yes he feels a little bit
upset right now, that's fine. It's fine if he weirdly, weirdly, super weirdly he feels a little bit like
crying because quantum mechanics does not deserve to be applied to the macro scale; this is some
kind of new intrapersonal low and he's had, like, eight of them just today.
New lows, that is.
Hermann is looking at him in a sort of horrified way.
Aw, it's okay champ, his brain says, I don't think you're going to a win an argument about the
Non-Communication Theorem with one of the preeminent quantum physicists of your time without
giving the guy any additional information. Nobody would win that argument. Literally no human
could win it. Not even multi-degreed mathematicians-by-proxy who have recently become kaiju
whisperers.
"Newton," Hermann says, "er, actually, upon reflection, there is, possibly, some merit to your
supposition."
Newt wants to look in a mirror or at least touch his own face to see what's happening there that's
causing him to win this argument without talking.
This is an argument that he shouldn't be winning.
Also, his brain adds, and I am so sorry to break this to you, friend, you're a little bit drunk. Off
half a shot. It's possible you might look like you're in danger of crying over causality violations,
but that's probably only because you are.
Even the kids seem to feel sorry for him, if their sympathetic hissing is any kind of emotional
surrogate endpoint.
No one in his head likes retrocausality.
He tries to rein in emotional upset of inappropriate magnitude.
"Shut up," Newt says thickly, "I will grant you your causality point, only because I have to, given
the state of humanity's understanding of quantum mechanics, which is probably, in the grand, objective
scheme of things, pretty limited, but would it change your opinion at all if I told you that I knew that,
er, that I suspected, that I strongly suspected that when the breach was shut, not annihilated, not, you
know, destroyed via thermonuclear payload but before that, when it was shut you understand, that
maybe, maybe--I'm pretty sure that the parts of kaiju that we kept alive, that we couldn't really kill,
that we never really killed, er, that we originally thought we killed but that, for better or worse, that
we didn't kill, that they, that those guys, that they, when the breach was shut, that they could, possibly,
still--" Newt breaks off, unambiguously aware that he is making a mess of this, but finding it difficult
to be intoxicated, make an argument, talk about this particular subject, and not weep all at the same
time, "--contact the anteverse? Would that make you think there was some kind of quantum
component? Because I personally cannot think of a way that you could possibly communicate between
parallel verses through a closed, non-transiting portal, without some kind of entangled quantum state
actually doing that transmitting. Right? Am I totally off base? Do I sound psychotic to you, possibly?
Because, look, I'm willing to admit that as a possibility; I'm cognizant of my own cognitive fallibility,
dude, I am."
"Restate," Hermann says, in a super gentle way, looking slightly horrified by Newt's
kaleidoscopic collection of semi-cogent clauses, "concisely, please."
Oh god, Newt thinks.
Get it together, his brain advises.
"I think I might be drunk," Newt confesses, buying himself some time.
"You frequently sound intoxicated even when you are not," Hermann replies.
"Ugh," Newt says, squeezing his eyes shut, one hand coming to the frames of his glasses, like he
might be able use the things to lever open his mind. "Given real-time communication between kaiju
tissue fragments and kaiju in the anteverse through a closed breach, the nature of that communication
is likely to be quantum rather than electromagnetic, since, when shut, the breach transited nothing
detectable."
"Yes," Hermann says, "agreed. This is why I told you the night after the breach was collapsed that
I could not rule out ongoing mental continuity with the anteverse. As a technical aside, I sincerely
doubt the mechanism has to do with spin states. But more to the point--Newton, this presumes your
premise is correct. Was there definitive and unambiguous real-time communication across the closed
breach, or did we simply perceive a memory of the anteverse as the anteverse itself while interacting
with a single kaiju mind? Subjective phenomena are difficult to interpret and human memory is
flawed even for events of pedestrian scope."
"Yeah," Newt says in escapist agreement, the word cracking with relief.
It's not a conceptual relief; it's simply the relief that comes every time he standing-glissades his
way around an ideological threat. He doesn't particularly care to discuss this with Hermann, not here,
not now, so he'll take the out he's been offered and is he lying a little bit when he says 'yeah'? Yeah.
He is. Kind of though. Only 'kind of', because what's 'real', really, if it's not that which is
demonstrable and reproducible? Those are the things that matter. Those are the things that stand up to
discussion--the things that are true. It doesn't matter how he feels about something. Science-intuition
and hunches do nothing more than guide reproducible decision-making, except when the insanity of
pilot-experiment-as-first-and-last-attempt becomes necessary because the alternative is death in the
short term.
Sometimes, then, science intuition can save civilization.
"But," Hermann says.
Newt raises his eyebrows--edgy, disorganized, not a fan.
Hermann looks back at him, locked eyes, locked jaw, locked-down mind; Newt can't see what he
might be thinking.
"My experience was not identical to yours," Hermann continues.
"No," Newt says, vibrating one foot against the floor in a soothing release of nervous energy.
"I fall into the habitual error of assuming that it was the same, that it is the same, because I know
all you knew entering the second drift. But that has been and remains an error," Hermann says slowly.
Slowly. Really quite slowly.
Newt is feeling okay.
Newt is feeling suboptimal.
Newt is feeling okay.
It's the kids who are feeling strange and subpar: liking Newt a lot right now because being
Hermann scared them; not really used to alcohol; hating Newt with a vicious, endless anger; pining
for old networks; feeling their inadequacy; feeling their rage; weirded out by the Trekquila in theory
and in practice. They don't like this, they don't like this at all, no one does, no one likes it, none of
those who live inside his head--why can't it all just be how it used to be?
What 'used to be' was omnipresent incipient death.
That's why.
Newt wants to leave a little bit; be anywhere but here--his empty room, the costal Wall, on
Voyager, in breaches.
His anxiety has a blunted edge; can half a shot of tequila do this to him now?
He looks around the room, waiting for a blue halation, but their fluorescent lights stay yellow.
"Would you care to elaborate regarding how it is that you've come by your current working
model?" Hermann asks him, with the air of an intoxicated guy trying to put his glassblown sentence
down on a moving skateboard.
Nooooo, Newt's brain offers.
"Yup," Newt says.
This is very easy for him, he can delineate this whole thing; it will just be like all those times
when rational people try to explain something super implausible that they 'just know' because that
always goes very well for historically rational people, there are literally so many examples of that,
probably, maybe, just because he cannot think of any, ever, in the history of mankind, does not mean
that there aren't any, yeah, no, like, this is going to go great. It's just that, well, Hermann has, on
multiple occasions, been somewhat ostensibly dismissive of Newt's overall sanity level, but not
lately, nope, not since drifting, Hermann's outward respect for the reproducibility of Newt's outlook
has been unusually and atypically high relative to past trends and Newt can't help but feel it's slightly
suggestive of the idea that Hermann, maybe, possibly, is now somewhat concerned Newt might be
having real cognitive problems with constructing a reasonable, representative, rational, and
reproducible representation of the world in his head. This makes him feel a little bit bad about
himself and it also makes him kind of want to shout 'I'm not crazy,' in Hermann's face right about now,
like he has for years but with more pathetic irony and uncomfortable desperation this time. It also
wants to make him drink more tequila, but he's already getting a little disorganized; someone's been
putting mental pens in his cognitive pencil cup, but Hermann is definitely drunk, and Newt is de facto
the responsible party right now--the designated driver of their carless evening--and he's pretty sure
that screaming defensively about his sanity is something that upset, drunk, insecure Newt might do, not
a thing that totally chill, not-really-drunk-at-all-because-of-reasons-of-impossibility, intellectually
secure Dr. Geiszler is going to do, nope, that guy is going to think of something else other than, 'yeah, I
know the local network of disembodied brains was connected to the anteverse through a shut breach
because I drifted with it after the breach was destroyed and I found out that they are so sad and so
enraged and so lonely and I think they know where I am, I just think that's a thing that they know, that's
not weird, that's not creepy, that's not me screaming, nope.'
You're perseverating on your own anxieties, his brain says. Go orthogonally, friend.
Orthogonally.
Yes, okay, good call.
A lateral step leaves him feeling lost. It's from the kids that insight comes.
Before we hated you, they hiss, we didn't hate you. Have you ever seen a kaiju pause? Have you
ever seen even incremental hesitation? Have you ever seen a kaiju extend a braided blend of blue
conductive tissue and wait?
He/she/zhe/it/they had been waiting, then.
Otachi.
He's certain of it now, and certain that he had never wanted to be certain of anything of the kind.
Hermann is going to hate this.
"It wasn't a memory that we interfaced with," Newt says, finding the line of argument he'll trace
for Hermann and simultaneously sandbagging his brain against his native Gottliebian sympathies,
which are raging out of control in some kind of post-tequila flood. "It was the hivemind itself that I
jacked into. It must have been, because, after my first drift, they came for me."
Newt watches Hermann watching him.
"What do you mean they 'came' for you?" Hermann asks, like a man who's already staring at an
answer he can see but doesn't care for.
"A double event in the breach, and both kaiju head straight for Hong Kong? And not just straight
for Hong Kong, but straight to the public shelter where I just happen to be? The odds on that are
astronomical."
"The Wall was completed everywhere else, Newton, they might have pulled that from your
thoughts--"
"Which would have required real-time thought exchange while the breach was closed," Newt
says, unambiguously victorious but, for once, not all that excited about it.
Hermann looks at him and sighs, two fingers pressed against his temple.
Newt raises his eyebrows and then looks away, toward the darkened Wall.
"It seems, from my memories of the incident," Hermann says, staring at nothing in particular, "that
you certainly could have been forcibly dragged from the remains of that shelter and consumed."
"Yup," Newt replies.
But you were not dragged, the kids hiss. You were not even touched.
"I think--" he says, "I think that might have been some kind of offer."
"Of what?" Hermann whispers.
"I'm not sure," Newt replies.
You know, the kids hiss.
You know, his brain says, you know just what they wanted, you knew it all along, but you said no
because you're a human scientist, and you like your little planet the way it is, not a ruined waste.
You did what you had to do, you did what you signed on to do, so what if you destroyed your field
and killed your samples and tortured the first alien life your world has ever seen even past the
point of death because only decay can truly take them and even then they're toxic?
His thoughts freeze there and don't progress.
"Whatever it was," Newt says, shaking his head and adjusting his glasses, "I didn't take it."
 "How atypically wise," Hermann says.
"Hey," Newt replies in token protest, because that's a little bit fair.
"So," Hermann says. "The implication is that your first drift, in isolation, was enough to modify
your mind to the extent that you, in particular, became trackable by kaiju that had transited the
breach?"
"Yes," Newt replies. "Which, in turn, implies that I was and, likely, still am transmitting some
kind of hive-mind readable signal. You probably are too."
"I do not like this, Newton," Hermann says in admirable understatement, pouring himself another
shot of tequila with improbably steady hands. "I do not care for that supposition at all."
"I'm not wild about it myself," Newt replies. "But, I think I summoned you to San Francisco
earlier in the week using our new anteverse circuitry, so I'm going to count that as a win."
Hermann tilts his head and gives Newt a look that's an insulting blend between superiority and
sympathy.
"You," Newt says, preemptively trying to shut his arch nemesis down before the guy gets up and
running, "are inherently skeptical of the idea of a real time connection between us only because--"
"No," Hermann says, with a volume escalation, unwilling to let Newt get away with unmatched
verbal aggression. "You are the one with a fondness for paradigm destruction and an attendant--"
"Because you're afraid," Newt continues, plowing victorious over a decelerating
counterargument. It's decelerating because Hermann is afraid, he is certainly afraid, anyone with the
capacity for higher thought would be afraid right now; if their brains were altered into receivers and
transmitters then what else is waiting out there in the ambient, electromagnetic noise that surrounds
them every waking moment of every day? "You don't want it to be true, so you're not looking with due
diligence."
Hermann sips his tequila and says nothing.
Lack of argument is as good as admitted defeat.
"I think it's our skulls," Newt says. I don't think we have the kind of sensitivity, the kind of range
that the kaiju would have, because human skin and bone and muscle are pretty good insulation for any
EM signals we might be giving off at low levels. I bet the entire kaiju nervous system is built to
facilitate broadcast and reception."
"You just speculated that the nature of the connection involved quantum entanglement, making your
insulation and range arguments irrelevant," Hermann replies, in a tone that's torn between concern and
enthusiasm.
"No," Newt says, even though it's kind of true. He's not doing his best right now but things don't
feel tightly battened down in his mind. "Yes. I feel slightly--look I'm not excited to admit this to you,
but I feel I might be slightly more sensitive to alcohol than I was? Previously. I mean, GABA, am I
right? Also, by 'slightly' I actually mean kind of 'significantly'. But look, I'm not sure how effective
quantum-entanglement mediated instantaneous information transfer is for tracking purposes, right? It's
like a picture, and hey, sure, that picture might be your real-time location but, like, unless I know my
GPS coordinates and I'm thinking about them continuously, and Otachi can interpret that human-based
intel on the fly, pun intended just a little bit, instantaneous information transfer via, like, spin states or
something, go with me here, doesn't give you a transmitted signal to track, am I right, so I'm thinking
it's likely to be both. Quantum and classical tracking mechanisms. So to restate for clarity: while
communication across the closed breach must be, must have been, quantum, Otachi's literal hunting
down of Dr. Newton Geiszler has got to be an EM-based thing, I'm thinking, yes? Agree? Disagree?
You disagree. I can tell by your face. Get out of here. Literally get out. This makes total sense. I
banish you to the balcony. Take your quantum mechanical insights and go. No one wants that here."
Hermann is giving him a very narrowed-eyed kind of look.
Newt points silently but emphatically at the balcony.
"You literally had half a shot of tequila," Hermann says, slightly more than slightly slurring.
"You've had like a third of a bottle, dude," Newt says. "I don't see what your point is relevant to.
I'm on an antiepileptic that facilitates GABAergic inhibitory transmission and that," Newt says,
pausing for dramatic effect, because he's got great rhetorical technique, better than literally anyone
he's ever met in his life, like, so good that he could have been Demosthenes in a previous existence if
he believed in that kind of thing, which he does not, thank you.
Philippic, the kids hiss in appreciative support.
Yes kids, Newt thinks. I could see you getting into the art of the fiery diatribe. Maybe a little
too into it.
"Were you planning to complete your thought?" Hermann asks him, with extremely ill-mannered
politeness. "Or shall I?"
"You're a dick," Newt informs him.
"I forbid you to have any more tequila," Hermann says, emptying Newt's set-aside half-shot into
his own shot glass and then pointedly drinking it.
"You're going to get alcohol poisoning," Newt points out helpfully.
"I doubt very much that you are correct, Newton; my ability to metabolize alcohol has always
been notably robust. This has been true for as long as you have known me, and you may pretend to
remain unaware of this fact, but kindly stop indulging your penchant for hyperbole and deceiving
yourself about your own ability to metabolically process alcohol which is, in point of fact, notably
low, to the delight of literally every graduate student who has ever encountered the colocalization of
you and ethanol-containing-beverages. Furthermore, were I to suffer alcohol poisoning, arguably that
would be one of the more pleasant post-workday leisure activities that I have enjoyed this week,"
Hermann says.
"Can you not?" Newt asks.
"I'm afraid you'll have to specify," Hermann says, like a guy who's feeling pretty secure in Newt's
inability to do just that.
Newt doesn't care. Newt can choose a whole new conversational tangent. "I'm pretty sure that
eventually I'm going to figure out how to read your mind, just so you know and are preparing yourself
for this eventuality." He flexes his fingers raises an eyebrow, and says, "okay, now hold still--I want
to put my fingers on the exit points of your trigeminal nerve. Through, you know, the bones of your
face."
Your phrasing was slightly alarming there, champ, his brain informs him.
"You want to do what?" Hermann says, squinting at him in an incredulously drunken way.
"Okay, no, that sounded bad," Newt says, doing a super reassuring parting-of-the-atmosphere type
hand gesture. "I just, like, okay, if I'm right about this, then maybe I can read your thoughts by trying to
get some of my nerves close to a whole bunch of your nerves, and ideally it would be your cranial
nerves because they've got a direct line to the brain without messing around in the spinal cord, right? I
mean, ugh, what is that even; the spinal cord is like a telepathic death trap. Probably. Can you tell no
one I said the word 'telepathic', I feel so weird about it; this is really embarrassing for me. Cranial
nerves though. I've just got a good feeling about this. Let me touch your face," Newt says, explaining
things very clearly.
"What?" Hermann says.
 "Can you not treat everything I say as something super weird and surprising?" Newt says,
reaching over, doing his thing, fingertips to Hermann's face, doing a little more of a precise
application of fingers to skin than he's seen prototypical Vulcans rocking, because, hi, how much does
the average Vulcan know about human biology, really? Probably not as much as Newt knows, that's
for sure.
Newt is pretty sure that his brain would make even Vulcans jealous.
Also, Vulcans are fictional.
Riiiight.
Whatever.
He sets his fingers down in three steps; thumb to chin, index finger to cheekbone, and middle
finger to medial eyebrow.
Living skin always weirds him out; he forgets how warm it is.
"You are incredibly bizarre," Hermann says, holding sculpture-still so that Newt doesn't
accidentally poke him in the eye.
Newt has great motor control these days though, so this is going to work out really well.
"Don't pretend you don't understand what I'm doing here," Newt says. "Like you're so normal.
Now, think of a number please. Literally any number."
Hermann says nothing, but closes his eyes in what looks like annoyed submission.
Newt shuts his eyes and tries to pick up a number vibe, or, really any kind of vibe. A leg pain
vibe. A Newton-I'll-end-your-life-for-you vibe. He would settle for literally any vibe.
Any.
Vibe.
He's getting nothing.
"Eighteen," he guesses, totally blindly.
"Negative one million, eight hundred forty eight thousand, six hundred and twelve," Hermann
says.
"Negative?" Newt says, opening his eyes and feeling slightly betrayed and moderately offended
because come on--is it too much to ask that Dr. Gottlieb has the human decency not to pick a negative
number? "Maybe if I put like, electroconductive gel on my fingers? I should order that online. Maybe
if we hooked our skulls up with EEG wires. Maybe that's why our EEGs look so weird; do you think?
Maybe if we drilled holes in our skulls and laced the bones with a conductive material. That's
probably not worth it. Maybe if we removed part of our skulls and replaced them with metal? Again,
probably not worth it. Maybe if one of us is super distressed it would work? Maybe if both of us
were super distressed? Maybe if I was not on an anti-epileptic? Maybe if I had less GABA? Maybe
if I was more drunk? Maybe if I was less drunk? Maybe if we were both super Zen. Maybe if we both
mediated and, like, held hands and there was mutual effort? Maybe if we both stuck our hands in
water full of ions. Maybe if--"
"Newton," Hermann says, grabbing Newt's hand and pulling it off his face. "Please realize that
although literally prying the lid off your own skull to analyze what might be happening to your
nervous system is a comforting thought for you, not everyone in this room views it that way. So will
you please shut up about lacing the bones of your skull with a conductive material."
"Er," Newt says, thinking about that time he accidentally created EPIC Rapport, the time he almost
died, the other times that happened, falling asleep on a floor, on this floor, accidentally scaling the
Wall, that one time in Seattle that he flipped over Hermann's table of math, the nematocyst incident, he
bleeds a lot, that's probably annoying and alarming in equal parts--
 You are a bad life partner, his brain observes.
"I'm a bad life partner," Newt echoes, feeling abruptly despondent at the still ongoing mental
inventory of Stressful Things Done by Newt that his brain is sliding into his waking thoughts like an
out of control cardsharp.
"You have your advantages," Hermann says philosophically. "I agree that I am superior, however,
and I commend your interpersonal analytical judgment. You may attempt to make it up to me for the
rest of our natural lives."
"Okay," Newt says, in grateful acquiescence.
"Oh my, you are intoxicated," Hermann says. "Aren't you?"
"Says the guy who's having trouble with his ts," Newt replies. "I'm not even."
Eh, his brain says. Maybe a little.
"Eh," Newt says. "Maybe a little."
"You are. You realize that you positioned your hand over an afferent nerve, don't you?" Hermann
asks. "I only point this out because you're so clearly cognitively impaired."
Oh shit, Newt thinks.
"Oh shit," Newt says. "I did do that. Look it's defensible to go afferent, but you're probably right;
if I'm trying to read your brainwaves, ha, I was not kidding about hating that term, despising it,
loathing it, detesting it even, but I should probably go efferent, not that I'm expecting to jack into a
metaphorical port or anything, like, it's just about getting a little closer to the EM signals and seeing if
there's anything there my modified brain can parse, am I right? I don't know I'm right, I just--well,
directionality of transmission seems potentially important? In short, I agree with you. Very
perspicacious. Perspicuous. You're great."
"Do not say 'shit'," Hermann replies. "'Jacking into a metaphorical port'? Your train of thought is
nearly incomprehensible."
"Alas for perspicuity, may it rest in peaceful perpetuity," Newt says. "Hold still." He reaches over
and presses three fingers to what he judges is the exit point of Hermann's facial nerve, which carries
efferent signals from the brain and not afferent signals to it. He's not sure that will make a difference
because he doesn't care what Hermann's facial muscles are doing right now, but it's a propitious spot-
-right in front of the ear, and, just for the heck of it, he presses his ring finger against Hermann's
temple, where the bone thins down to a local minima.
Hermann glares at him but holds still.
Newt looks back at him.
Just at the point that this bidirectional gaze and unidirectional face-touching thing starts turning
vaguely weird and really intense--
His brain sends him the vaguely parseable message of, oh god, what's happening, as Newt
watches a totally insane disruption of his visual field.
Objects unmake.
He watches Hermann, the window, the wall, the couch, the ceiling, turn from objects into
meaningless intersections of color and lines and then other things start to go--his brain feels odd and
the room feels wrong and his proprioception splits right down the middle and tries to reweave and
what were you thinking doing this now feels like an hallucination because it's Gottliebian but Other,
this is weird, this is wrong; his senses are mixing; someone is pushing on the back of his skull and he
can see it while the sound of the heater drills out his teeth and he tenses in the hope that total
contraction will keep him sitting.
Someone's got Strange Attractor playing on repeat in their head, but he's not sure who it is and
he's not sure he's hearing music, it's a dermatographic sensory impression of the double-scroll
attractor--oh god is he, possibly, thinking in phase space? No? Yes? Maybe? Partially?
Fractal rage makes a cage
That can't be disengaged.
The kids don't like this, his brain is not his brain, and so Newt sits there, gazing fixedly at nothing
that makes sense but still feeling like himself, just a version of himself who's balanced on the thin line
between fascination and panic before his native drive toward inquiry wins out, as it is wont to do.
"This is fascinating," he says.
Oh yikes.
Maybe he says it?
He can't tell.
He's hearing only unparsable sounds that are half mixed over into a confused morass of
proprioceptive inputs and visual signals that also smell like wet cement? The experience bears no
similarity to his memory of what it sounds like to hear the words he should be speaking, but he's
going to assume they are words, just like he's going to assume the abstract mess of colors and lines
without depth-perception or meaning is still Hermann sitting on the couch. It's bizarre, it's freaking
him out a little bit, but he's freaked out more in his life, that's for sure.
"Think of a number," Newt says.
Maybe he says that.
His entire sensory experience, sight, smell, sound, touch, proprioception, momentum, all of it is
gone, split apart, made available to parse--
Eleven thousand, three hundred eighty four.
It's not words, it's a concept represented in a graphical, base-ten way but he gets it.
He pulls his hand away and his somatosensory cortex reknits itself into a visual field that's
reasonable and sensory modalities that are no longer mixed.
Yay.
Newt feels weird.
Newt feels weird and kind of elated and also kind of confused because what was that? That was
so strange--he's pretty sure that somehow his brain tore apart his somatosensory cortex in order to
parse a new kind of input which is outrageously cool and simultaneously terrifying because, he has
literally never heard of any kind of reasonable precedent for this kind of thing.
Was any of that even real?
There's a way to tell, you idiot, his brain says, deciding to channel Hermann.
Right. That had actually been the whole point.
Newt makes an effort to see what he's been looking at, which is, of course, his life partner.
Hermann is staring at him in a way that is only mildly concerned, which is awesome, because that
means the whole epically, EPICally weird thing that just happened didn't actually look as weird as it
definitely, for sure, was.
"Did I say it already?" Newt asks in a breathless sort of slur.
"The number?" Hermann counter-queries, looking slightly more concerned at Newt's garbage
diction. "No."
"Eleven thousand, three eighty four," Newt says.
Hermann stares at him. "A lucky guess."
"Nope," Newt says, grinning at him in a way that might look a little alarming if Hermann's
counter-expression is anything to judge by. But that's not a priority right now because of important
reasons. "You've got to try this; it's so weird. Don't freak out. Come on, come on, come on; don't give
me that face, just touch my face, trust me, it's going to be worth it."
Hermann looks like he has deep and profound misgivings, but he presses his fingertips against the
skin immediately in front of Newt's ear.
Newt watches him like a creeper. A hunting creeper. Some kind of creeper bird of prey. A
velociraptor. A creeperaptor? A thirty-three percent kaiju creeper. Kaiper? Kaijuraptor? Creeju?
Look, the point is, Newt is just really interested in what this is going to look like from the outside.
The thing is though, is that Hermann is just kind of looking back at him, really sharp, pretty skeptical,
not at all glazed, not at all like his whole somatosensory cortex is falling apart, unweaving like a
prism-parsed lightbeam and rebraiding into something new and profound and awesome, nope,
Hermann's clearly a little weirded out and incrementally more concerned on Newt's behalf.
"Nothing," Hermann says, looking at Newt, clearly not having a totally kickass and weird sensory
experience.
"What?" Newt says. "No no no no no." He pulls off his glasses, grabs Hermann's hand,
repositions the guy's fingers, making sure there's some reasonable temple contact going on, and
presses them against his own head in a way that's a little more robust and more consistent with
touching a human as opposed to touching some previously shattered porcelain bowl before the epoxy
holding it together has fully set.
"Still nothing," Hermann says.
"Don't drop your hand," Newt says. "Let me try a thing."
Hermann immediately drops his hand.
"I said don't drop your hand," Newt replies. "As in, do not do that. You did the opposite thing.
The opposite thing of what I said."
"Why don't you tell me," Hermann says waspishly, "using words, what it is that you're going to
'try'."
"I was just going to think a number at you," Newt says, not at all defensively. "It wasn't going to
be anything horrifying."
"Forty-two," Hermann says.
"Even I'm not that obvious, give me some credit please," Newt says, definitely not going to think
of that number (anymore). "Can you just put your hand back? I wasn't thinking at you; what if there's
an element of intent involved, like both terminals need to be on, you know?"
"This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever done in my life," Hermann says.
"If that were true, I would be sad for you," Newt says. "Fortunately, I know the most ridiculous
thing you've ever done in your life was--"
"Stop talking immediately," Hermann says. "Think of a number or I'm dropping my hand."
Newt thinks of the square root of two with all the clarity and context he can bring to bear. Behind
the words is all that he can organize of his understanding of the number as a concept, including right
triangles, the unit circle, and the apocryphal murder of Hippasus of Metapontum. He tries to take all
of that and get a good Gottliebian directionality to the thoughts he's attempting to broadcast, and as he
does it, hey, the room stays intact this time so that's a plus or maybe a minus; it's hard to--
Hermann yanks his hand away from Newt's temple like he's been burned, shouting, "Newton," in a
super irritated way, his hand going to his own head.
"Er," Newt says, feeling abruptly guilty and, in retrospect, unsurprised because his brain is like a
Mack Truck, probably, as brains go. "Did I hurt you?"
"Yes," Hermann says, looking more freaked out and irritated than legit hurt. "There is no need to
mentally shout."
It worked? his brain asks, clearly skeptical.
"It worked?" Newt asks, less skeptical than incredulous.
"Square root of two," Hermann replies, pressing both hands to his temples. "Of course you would
choose an irrational number."
Newt nods politely, waiting for Hermann to officially start having a nervous breakdown about the,
hey, mindreading that is now for sure a thing. Alternatively, he is waiting for Hermann to tell him that
he, Newt, was right all along, and that he, Hermann, is super impressed, again, hardcore, probably for
life, because come on they could have gone years without figuring out that cranial nerve trick--slight
of hand? More like slight of mind, mindfulness, theory of mind, self states, resist, transmit/you must
know you're a machine, neural transmission, signal transduction, second messengers, action
potentials, depolarization, neural coopting of existing circuits, and if he dies/he dies a scientist in
his prime, past his prime(?), what's left for him, what's left for them, those Riemann zeros, man, and
one time the cult of Pythagoras killed that guy buy rowing him out into the Aegean sea and leaving him
for dead all because he tried to apply the Pythagorean theorem to a field with a unit side of one, sucks
to be that guy; Newt should really get a job in neuroscience in case the world tries to end again on his
watch.
Newt is so great, honestly.
Hermann shoots Newt a what-are-you-looking-at kind of look, which is weird, or, maybe, Newt is
misinterpreting that look. Newt is slightly confused, and pretty sure that all of the things that are
happening are happening but maybe they aren't?
More tequila would probably solve Newt's problems.
Not.
"You're being really blase about this, dude," Newt says, "and like, I know you are well, well on
your way to trashed, but was that or was that not the freakiest thing ever? Like, what happened to our
sensory cortex, it unweaves or something to accommodate telepathic signal transduction? Unweaving,
rebraiding; historical rainbow style. John Keats can just screw off, am I right? I consider that guy a
personal nemesis, he died young though, that was sad. 'Unweaving the rainbow'. God. Put me out of
my misery. Hand me that tequila. No, don't, I'll throw up if I think about Keats right now. However,
the man was a dick to Isaac Newton, a trait I consider a plus because, as we have established, I don't
really personally like Sir Isaac all that much for various excellent reasons including alchemy, but no
one can really dispute that his work in optics was, ha, pretty freaking great, even if he did end up
having a huge intellectual rivalry with Hooke in that regard, I don't know man--Hooke, Liebniz, such a
pattern of truculent dickishness from that guy, yes?"
Hermann looks at him in a way that is most definitely nonplussed.
"What are you talking about?" Hermann asks.
"Isaac Newton," Newt says. "Also, the outrageous somatosensory weirdness required to parse
Transdermal Thought Transfer. TTT. T3? I think that's a movie from the Terminator franchise. I'll
think of a better acronym."
"What 'somatosensory weirdness'?" Hermann asks. "Please make some effort toward explaining
yourself. I realize you are more intoxicated than one might predict post half a shot of tequila, but,
honestly Newton, your train of thought is intolerably tangential and while, on most occasions, I would
simply ignore this proclivity of yours, I have the feeling you are, indeed, trying to communicate
something, so focus, if you would. You certainly have the capacity if not the inclination."
"You didn't," Newt says, having lexical difficulty under the weight of too many instantaneous
realizations and subsequent trains of thought and, yes, also, the (questionable) intoxication is not
helping him, full disclosure there. "You didn't have the thing where all your sensory modalities
stopped making sense except for the thought-reading one?"
"No," Hermann says, drawing out the word. "I was simply hit with a forceful, nuanced
representation of the square root of two as a concept."
"Yes but--" Newt says, his thoughts and words slowing down beneath the pressure of unfairness.
"Your visual field didn't get weird?" Newt asks, not slurring at all. "You didn't stop identifying
spoken words as words? You didn't, like, have a whole bunch of proprioceptive inputs turning into
other things? Like, it was not the weirdest and most confusing perceptual mash up you have ever
experienced in your life?"
Hermann cocks his head at an angle that strikes Newt as trending toward distinctly alarmed.
Newt nonchalantly looks away.
Hermann reaches over, grabs his face, looks straight at him for a few seconds, and then does some
finger-rearranging in a clear attempt to read Newt's thoughts.
Not cool, his brain says.
"Not cool," Newt says.
Hermann gives him a Newton-touch-my-face-and-we-can-eliminate-designations-congruent-with-
things-aka-'words'-and-cut-straight-to-the-thought-constructs-that-represent-the-things-themselves
kind of look.
Newt is too smart to do exactly that, thanks very much. Hermann wants to try this thought-reading
thing in a reciprocal manner, because yeah who wouldn't? But Newt, being an outrageous genius even
when slightly drunk and slightly possessed of a really unusual brain, is slightly more than slightly
concerned about feedback loops, so he doesn't grab Hermann's face in return.
The kids stir restlessly at the back of his mind.
All parties tagged 'Geiszler' vote no to telepathic reciprocity.
Hermann still has a hand on his face though, and so Newt decides to snap on his thought terminal.
No, he thinks at Hermann, hopefully at a lower telepathic volume this time, I will not be doing
any reciprocal face-touching and peeling my somatosensory cortex apart for you as a demo; I just
don't see that going well, dude. I, too, am insanely curious about whether we can do this
simultaneously and actually have a real-time conversation, but I am so serious about my goal of
preventing your imminent nervous breakdown that I can actually keep said goal in my head, even
in the, ha, literal face of telepathic temptation, which is your face to be clear. I'm fine, I can totally
handle sensory weirdness, it was bizarre, but not in a terrifying way.
Newt cuts the connection just before the point that the cresting, avaricious interest of the kids
breaks over into the channel that he's opened.
Touch, the kids hiss, and his thoughts explode like a blown out window into image fragments--
splintered, fast, and shredding everything they hit. His own memories of green tinged aldehydes blend
into a chemical dark which cannot be understood from the inside, only perceived in pieces from
recalled vivisections and from the perspective of the vicious, clever little human who put them where
they will now forever stay.
Touch what? Newt asks.
Touch, the kids hiss, but something's putting tension on his nervous system and searing stereo
loathing or stereo longing straight into his head; no one knows which it is; not the cut-up kaiju
etching their cognitive daguerreotype straight into the folded glass of his cortex, or the idiot
they're crowning king of their chemical underworld. He's hurt them so much and they need him so
badly that an agonizing death grip straight to mental dissolution is the only open option. Some
guy's neurons are trying to arc a connection before their circuitry's been laid down. Some loser's
hand is closing an air gap. Geiszler's back is starting to arch.
You touched it you touched it you touched it once go back, go back, go back, go back and touch
again you do not need the wires, the wires are too much.
"Newton."
He can't escape what's in his head.
"Yeah," he says faintly, as the kids fade down and Newt fades up in his own mix.
Hermann has both hands on Newt's upper arms. Newt isn't clear on when exactly this happened,
whatever, it's cool, he can reengage his core, which he does, and then he holds up a hand and nods his
head in a way that hopefully conveys something along the lines of, 'myeah, I'm fine, just having a little
bit of an emo Jedi hipster moment, but I've rebaselined myself.' Which is true.
Hermann doesn't seem to be receiving what he's sending though, because the next thing the guys
says is, "can you speak?"
Offensive.
"Myeah," Newt says.
"What," Hermann snaps, "just happened?"
Newt tries to work that out for himself before he starts talking about it, but it's tricky, it's not
totally clear, there's some evidence that his head is one half of a two-way radio but there's also some
evidence that his head is just one sad little signal in the midst of a dangerous electromagnetic milieu
with interference from within and from without. He's not really sure how to explain this to his
colleague. "To me?" he asks, "I'm not totally clear. Maybe a little bit of what's going to turn into a
proto PTSD-variant with a component of always-unverifiable realtime influence? It's literally
impossible for me to say." Newt is sounding more and more fully-conscious all the time, recovering
pretty well from the kids he hopes are carbon copies making a major play for message delivery. "It's
fine, I'm not even bleeding."
Kids, he thinks, you need to not do that kind of thing, okay? It's bad for the team.
The kids hiss restively, it's hard to say if they agree or not.
No one is going to find cut-up brains and then have conversations with them by closing the air-
gap between hand and conductive specimen container, okay? The team is not interested in that,
Newt continues, getting his own counterpoint across, even while trying to decide whether he
remembers touching that fluid-filled tube that held a piece of Yamarishi or if that's a thing he wants to
do so much it looks to him like he's done it already.
Hermann shakes him, one time, super gently.
"Hey," Newt snaps. "What. Can you not? Use words."
"Are you all right?" Hermann asks him.
"Yes," Newt says, because now he is.
Obviously.
"I think you have done quite enough experimenting for one day," Hermann says, looking like he's
rating about an eight point five on the Something Is Wrong With Dr. Geiszler Scale.
"No, but--" Newt says.
"Newton," Hermann says.
"I just wonder what that means. The fact that my sensory cortex clearly tears itself apart into a
whole new processing mode to do the thought-reading? I bet it means my brain got more of a
makeover than yours did. Oh god, I hope I don't turn evil. Do you think that I'll turn evil? I bet it
would be better with gel. The thought reading I mean. I bet it would be better with metal. Exterior
metal. Sorry. I have a policy about drilling holes in my skull; I'm going to stick to it. Also, I respect
your wishes about my skull. But what if they, like, hypothetically--do you think they could come back
though? Could they open another breach, do you think? Because I think we're straight-up cut off from
them now, I can feel where they should be. But if they make another breach, what happens to that
place in my mind that always knows which way the breach was? What if they make another portal
while we're still alive? What would happen then? What if we--"
"Newton," Hermann says, damming the slow slide of Newt's hydroxylated thoughts with a single
word that sounds like, 'stop,' that sounds like, 'wait,' that sounds like any one of a thousand negations
that herald coming analysis but, really, it's just his name.
Newt stops.
"Newton," Hermann says again, like a guy who's staring down a set of waiting explosives. "After
our drift, you expressed concern about the possibility of ongoing continuity with the kaiju anteverse."
"Yes," Newt says.
"Last week, following intense sleep deprivation, you expressed some anxiety regarding real-time
interference in your thought processes."
Newt doesn't reply, able to follow the likely trajectory of Hermann's thoughts. He's sure they go
like this: one--Newt has evinced concern regarding external influence, two--Newt has just explained
why he does not think that ongoing influence from the anteverse is likely, ergo, three--why is he so
concerned? Hermann doesn't know points four and five though: four--that he's not overly concerned
about what may still live beyond an annihilated breach, and five--that he is concerned by networks
here on Earth, networks that communicate in real time, somehow, through formaldehyde and glass and
over air in a way he cannot yet explain. How do they do it? Can they hear him? Could they, if he tried
to let them in?
Are you, possibly, his brain says, like it is walking on eggshells of some kind, maybe garden
variety eggs laid by some kind of bird, maybe freaky alien eggs from the movie Alien, maybe just,
like, metaphorical eggs that are landmines of potential problems, ready to explode into creeperaptors
of the consciousness, a little bit anxious, champ?
Yeahhhhh, maybe.
Touch, the kids hiss.
He has an insane urge to tear his sensory experience apart and try to find the local kaiju network
just to see if he's capable of doing it.
But that might be the last thing he ever does.
So he will not do that.
Not while he's drunk at least.
Actually? He won't ever do it.
Not while he's drunk.
He won't be doing that ever.
But definitely not while drunk.
But also not ever.
"Newton," Hermann says, with so much respectful compassion that Newt can barely sit here and
take it, "I believe there are aspects of your concerns that are either inconsistent, or that I do not
understand."
Myeah, his brain says, trying to crawl to one side of his skull.
"Myeah," Newt says, feeling his expression crack into an uncontrolled exposure of something he
himself can't see before he reins it back in and nails it back down.
"To elaborate," Hermann says, with a formality totally at odds with the fear in his expression.
"you seem to be dismissing the possibility of mental communication from the anteverse while
retaining concern about 'turning evil', which I interpret as a concern about exogenous mental
influence. I'm not sure how to reconcile these two things."
Newt feels like the things that Hermann doesn't know might kill him, might kill them both; this is
actually really stressful, he wants to get up to get off this couch but if he gives into that impulse he's
not sure where he might end up it could be anywhere, it could be dead, and he's sweating.
Across the room from him, someone is surgically extracting exogenous implants from Seven of
Nine.
"Yeah," Newt says to Hermann, because yes.
He decides he will pour himself some more tequila.
Hermann reaches over to stop him halfway through filling his shot glass, but doesn't interfere in
any other way.
Newt downs his half shot in one go.
Newt decides to watch some Voyager, those guys man, just trying to get home, and it's such a
good thing that Captain Janeway is nothing like Caitlin Lightcap in any way because that would be so
horrible; Newt would not be able to handle that right now. De-borg'd Seven looks a little like Caitlin
Lightcap, but she's nothing actually like Caitlin Lightcap. Caitlin Lightcap was brilliant and
unconventional and set a bad example Newt had followed. She probably would have drilled her way
into his current secrets at the expense of both their minds, he can almost see her, looking like a strange
blend of woman and Jaeger and borg and stranger screaming straight in his face, tell me, Geiszler,
you bastard, you bastard, tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me. He can almost hear the shatter of bottles
against the cement of the deployment dock, can almost see her face the day he'd looked at her in her
Interface Suit and called her stupid with every fraction of profound viciousness that he could get to
precipitate out of his supersaturated sense of anticipatory loss.
She would have pulled her answers out of him because she treated everyone the way she treated
herself.
Hermann doesn't do that.
That doesn't mean that Hermann shouldn't have his own answers, all the same.
"I--" Newt says, and stops. "I believe I can clarify those inconsistencies for you."
"Please do not feel that I require such a thing," Hermann says, turning to look at him, his gaze a
lateral pressure against the silent Star Trek on which Newt's eyes are fixed. "I am content to wait.
Indefinitely, even."
"There is some information that you're missing," Newt says, and he can nearly hear the flash
freeze of Hermann's crystal latticed interest.
"I thought that might be the case," Hermann replies.
The throughlines of his thoughts are blending together in a dissolving knot of mental weirdness,
leaving Newt in charge of an inarticulate soup that sort of hisses and thinks of math in graphic style
and tastes like ironic self awaremess, or it would if Newt was in a habit of tasting brains. He's not
there yet.
He hesitates for a long moment on a conceptual precipice, trying to decide a lot of things--
whether he can talk about this, whether his own brain is going to riot and tear down his consciousness
into neuronal debris, whether his cortex might decide to trigger waves of synchronous electrical
discharges that will kick him straight into a seizure, whether being drunk is protective or less
protective or makes no mechanistic difference to his personal neurochemistry. He's not aware of
choosing yes or no, but his brain finds a set of words and arranges them in a way that's going to work.
Having made a way, he can't not take it.
"I drifted a third time," Newt manages to say around the dull roar of upset longing that comes
straight from the kids.
"Did you," Hermann says, with a painful amount of casual unconcern that's totally at odds with the
burning wattage of the lateral look that Newt can feel searing its way into his temple. "I thought as
much."
"The details," Newt says, "are not--they're a little bit unclear to me? I did determine that the
existing neural tissue fragments remaining on this side of the breach have--er, they've been cut off
from the anteverse. Totally cut off. They are--not happy about this. They were, actually, really pissed.
At me. Specifically and collectively."
He looks over to find Hermann staring at him like he's an undiscovered manuscript inscribed on a
lit stick of dynamite, which, yeah, seems about right, given the events of the past month. Hermann
probably already knows he drifted, probably has figured that out from events or from Hypothetical
Rain's redacted medical records, but the guy doesn't need to know how a foreign rig--too precise, too
well aligned--tripped his mind straight into a premature electrical firestorm, he doesn't need to know
that Newt was, for better or worse, too drugged to remember anything about the third drift other than
the way that they existed as a network that he had jacked straight into; the way they hated him and hate
him still; the way they love him for his cognitive capacity and how he made them, for a span of
seconds, feel less alone; the way they wanted him to die screaming; the way they wanted him to never
leave. Hermann doesn't need to know any of that, that's not necessary here, and maybe one day it will
be different, maybe in fifteen years they'll be walking past the Math Building on UC Berkeley's
campus, carrying cups of coffee and Newt will say, 'yes, did I mention it was a piece of Yamarishi
that they brought?' or maybe he'll say, 'I do, at times, wonder if it would have been different if I hadn't
been drugged out of my mind when it happened, perhaps I could have told them I was sorry,' and
Hermann will say, 'you have nothing to be sorry for, please remember that Newton,' and Newt will
say, 'I know,' like he believes it and maybe, then, he will.
"They can still talk to each other," Newt says, trying to pretend he's fifteen years older, that he's
fifty, that he doesn't care any more, that he's still alive at fifty, that he can't, even now, hear the
anguished rage of his cut-up chorus hissing in the back of his thoughts. "I worry sometimes that they've
got some kind of line to my head. The network of preserved parts that were supposed to die in
formalin but didn't? I don't think they do, but I can't tell, not really, and the fact that we've got this
weirdness we can do makes me feel both better, because it's weird and I feel like I'd notice if the
local rage network was slotting itself into my cognitive ports, but also worse because it's a proof-of-
principle and maybe I wouldn't know? The point is I can't be sure of anything; this is making me
anxious."
"I see," Hermann says, like this, like all of this, is totally normal and he was expecting it, like he's
been expecting it for days and days and days, probably because he's a little worried that Newt will
just flip out if he so much as flickers an eyelash in an unexpected way, but Newt is more robust than
that, thanks. Not a whole lot more robust, it's true, but a little.
"It's okay," Newt says, and--
Wow.
That was unexpectedly the wrong way to take the conversation because Hermann is giving him a
look of total, stripped-down, wide-eyed horror that snaps over into the kind of rage that shuts down
all capillary beds in the face and freezes facial muscles into a neutral mass that's really unnerving,
pun intended, kind of.
This is fine.
Newt can fix this.
No problem.
"I mean, sure," Newt says, employing casual conversational course correction, "there were
aspects of my experience that weren't ideal but, ah, ultimately it turned out fine and--"
Again, this is not going well. Hermann is trending away from 'pissed colleague' and toward an
impression of a statue that could be titled Mathematician in Occulted Extremis.
Newt course corrects again, with, "--a reasonable amount of objective and subjective data was
collected--"
Hermann's expression does not change even fractionally, though his eyes look like he might be
able to melt plastic with them if he stared at it for long enough.
Maybe Newt should just stop talking.
"Look, the point is that I am fine with how things turned out, right?" Newt says, not following his
self-directed advice.
Hermann says nothing. He just sits there, staring at Newt, looking increasingly upset and pissed.
Newt is not really sure how to fix this--the tequila and the, oh, thirty minutes of sobbing he did a
few hours ago have collectively weakened his ability to wrap up his experiences with a plucky and
nonchalant verbal summary, and he finds himself in the strange position of mounting an imminent and
instinctive defense of the PPDC in the face of Hermann's as yet unarticulated rage that's clearly
gathering itself in preparation for annihilating a target.
"Hermann," Newt says, with a tenuous grasp on his tone, "let's take a step back, man, and think
about this on a macro level--"
"A macro level?" Hermann snarls, standing up and pacing toward the kitchen, probably just to
have somewhere to go, which is a dangerously Geiszlerian tendency.
Newt follows him, going straight over the coffee table to keep pace. "Do not swap your brain
twice in one night because I can't--"
"A macro level?" Hermann snarls again, rounding on him in a way that's totally surprising and
sends Newt unbalancing laterally into a kitchen counter.
"Stop," Newt shouts, coming right back into Hermann's space so he doesn't get hunted and also
because that's what he does. This is getting ridiculous; why are they doing this. "Chill," he says, one
hand closing around Hermann's elbow.
Hermann yanks free. "Chill? Chill? Do not make excuses for the PPDC, Newton. All they
accomplished was the creation of a needless connection between an already damaged human mind
and dead fragments of alien tissue so they could document a predictable deviation from a nearly
contextless baseline that would then allow them to check a box on a form that must read 'is Dr.
Geiszler a danger to his species yes or no'. You will excuse me if I do not share your philosophical
take on this. You will excuse me if I choose to remember that you correctly predicted exactly this
outcome and explicitly labeled it as a thing you would like to avoid. You will excuse me if I literally
never forget the genuine fear you displayed in the infirmary when you thought I might not omit
information from my report. You will excuse me if I cannot bleach my thoughts of the exact angle of
your fingers against a metal tray as you slid it across the table in the Hong Kong shatterdome. Because
you knew, you knew, the inevitable outcome, you must have, you were ready, you were waiting for
them, and it makes me wonder how long you knew it was coming? Was it from the moment they
walked into the mess? Did you see them, that foreign team, and did you snap together a resolution
from existing paradigms in your mind? Or did you know earlier? When I think about what you did,
what you said, I cannot help but think that you knew from the moment you told me to lie. Did you
know even earlier? Did you know in that alley what the requirements of red tape would be and did
you resolve then to keep me out of it? Did you turn yourself over to them because you thought you had
to or did you do it so that they wouldn't look to me?"
"Both," Newt shouts at him, "and neither. Did I want you out of it? Yes. I did. You think I wanted
you exposed to a fraction of a hive mind, left behind after breach annihilation? You'd had the option to
take the risk of drifting and you'd said no until I forced your hand by risking death or insanity right in
front of you. But do you really think that's all it was? Some magnificent act of selflessness in
fulfillment of societal expectations and to protect you? Yeah, true, that was a part of it, but the real
reason that I kept you out was because you had a prayer of a chance of extracting me, though I didn't
think you'd really do it. I'd have never gotten you out; I wouldn't have wanted to; all I'd have done
was join you as we burned straight through our brains. Because I wanted to see. I wanted to know. I
had to know. What happens to a fraction of a hive mind?"
"You didn't want what happened to you," Hermann says, coming back at him with a thin veneer of
control over the threatening boil of his rage. "I know you didn't. You're writing yourself a narrative
where you had some kind, any kind, of real agency, but you weren't even conscious when they
interfaced you with that thing the second time."
"How do you know that," Newt breathes.
"Because I read your medical file," Hermann shouts, his voice cracking as he steadies himself on
the counter, his words running together. "With Dr. McClure."
"I agreed," Newt screams at him. "They asked me. I said yes. I helped them. I wanted to know.
Nothing you say will ever change that."
The kids hiss in approbation while somewhere deep in his mind mnemonic Caitlin Lightcap
smashes her bottles of alcohol against conceptual barriers in Newt's thoughts.
"You were coerced."
"Get over it," Newt replies, tearing open vocal chords trying to snap their way shut, "and accept
the costs of living in a risk-averse bureaucracy with utilitarian rather than deontological ethics."
"I will never," Hermann shouts back, "'get over it'."
"Well not with that attitude," Newt replies, managing to collect himself in the face of Gottliebian
escalation. "Lose the untempered idealism, it's not a feature of adulthood, even in a mathematician,"
he snaps.
"As though you are qualified to offer any kind of opinion on 'features of adulthood'," Hermann
seethes, entirely outraged. "Your emotional development arrested at the point you moved from Berlin
to Massachusetts, circa age twelve."
"Oh, we're regressing to ad hominems are we?" Newt replies, his hands sweeping through the air
between them in an ironically expansive gesture, his diction blurring into something that doesn't sound
quite right. "I'm sorry, I didn't realize that logical fallacies were an acceptable mode of discourse
now."
"You started it," Hermann snaps.
"I did not. Mine wasn't an ad hominem because my criticism was directly relevant to your current
rage problem. To your perpetual rage problem, actually, which is, currently, what we are fighting
about, right?"
"No," Hermann says through clenched teeth. "We aren't having a rational argument, Newton."
 "Well, yeah," Newt says.
They look at one another, breathing hard.
Newt feels a little bit confused.
Hermann has polished off almost half a bottle of tequila at this point, so.
Yeah.
Hermann is probably also confused.
"We are both distressed in the same vicinity. Vectors of upset have turned from antiparallel to
head-on," Hermann says.
Newt definitely pulls his glasses off at that one, throws them on the counter, and turns away,
covering his face briefly with both hands so that he does not burst out laughing in Hermann's face
because it would definitely be the kind of laughter that would end badly, and he is on edge today; he
is not the only one, but he still has a limited capacity for deescalation left, and so he's going to max it
out.
Wow, you are excruciatingly pathetic right now, champ, his brain says, like a jerk.
"I know," Newt replies, totally unintelligibly into his own hands.
The kids hiss in disappointed vexation at the decreasing likelihood of violence.
You are a terrible person, his inner Hermann informs him.
No one in his head is helping him, no one's doing anything useful except Newt, who is
outrageously awesome, actually, every day and for all time.
He drops his hands, puts his glasses back on, and says, "I feel like it's not fun to scream at you
when you cast our irrational arguments as misdirected distress."
Hermann looks slightly calmer, as if he, too, is trying to initiate some negative feedback loops, or
activate his parasympathetic nervous system, or use logic to trick his brain into a state that's a little
less activated. "I concur," he says.
"Cool," Newt replies, unbalancing sideways in a relief-tequila one-two combo and then using the
counter for some hip-mediated stabilization. "We have literally made so many collective bad
decisions tonight, I feel like this is some kind of relationship landmark."
Hermann doesn't respond to that one, he just half turns away from Newt, bracing both hands on the
edge of the sink, and stares at something in his head that Newt isn't currently invited to witness. It's a
misery stance if Newt's ever seen one; the guy's shoulders are tight, his weight shifted off his bad leg,
his expression twisted into distracted torment.
Newt adjusts his glasses and then levers his hand into the air in a helpless, inviting gesture that
he's sure Hermann can see in his peripheral vision.
"I wish that it had not been you," Hermann says, defeated and drunk in a particular and
excruciatingly sad blend. "I wish it had been anyone but you because you are not like anyone,
Newton."
"That's what individuality is though," Newt replies, making an effort to be nice. "Different people
are different. Ostensible snowflakes and junk. Special, crystalline, and eventually vanishing into the
endless pull of entropy--disorder favored until decohesence and ultimate thermodynamic equilibrium-
-presuming you're defining your system as the universe at large. Average temperature decrease. Zero
Kelvin. Dead space. Death."
You're abusing thermodynamics, his brain says.
"Stop abusing thermodynamics," Hermann slurs. "It's extremely unattractive."
"Hey," Newt says.
"You are a different kind of different than most people," Hermann says, definitely even more
drunk than Newt had been thinking he was.
"Aw," Newt says, giving Hermann a shoulder clap because he looks like he needs it.
"So what happens to a fraction of a hive mind?" Hermann asks quietly. Quietly. Very quietly.
"Cut up pieces of individual nervous systems link together across space via an unknown
mechanism. They pool their cognitive resources and their knowledge and their emotional capacities
for, ah, all it is that they know how to feel, which seems to be, in the absence of the hive mind and
other exogenous input, only anger and fear and longing. They struggle to understand and conceptualize
the new but agonizing experience of loneliness, which is not all that intuitive for a disabled fraction
of a collective consciousness, it turns out."
The kids hiss, a tragic static.
"And did they--I would imagine that when you drifted with them, your neural capacity at least
briefly improved the extent of their understanding," Hermann says, looking at him uncertainly.
"Yeah," Newt says, feeling weird, feeling kind of acutely miserable, feeling a little more than a
little bit bad for the carbon-copy kids and their real-world counterparts who loathe him and who need
him and who want him back.
"Did they have the ability to identify you?" Hermann asks. "Did they recognize you?"
"Did they know I was the guy who was responsible for cutting most of them up and chemically
caging them in formalin?" Newt says faintly, "myeah, they knew that a little bit."
Hermann gives him a look that, at best, can be tagged as 'dismayed'.
"Eh," Newt says, in a gallantly reassuring manner, "I was also their best option to come along in a
while, so they were pretty confused as to whether they wanted to kill me or keep me. It's hard to say
because I don't have clear and contiguous memories of any drift, especially not that one, but my
impression was that things most definitely started out in a 'let's torture this guy to a quick but
agonizing death by flipping on every nociceptive circuit he has' and then it sort of morphed into a
'well, he does have a lot of cognitive capacity--maybe we could just keep him' type deal. Of course,
fortunately, my skull and distance and possibly my own intent keeps them out in a real-time way,
though I do have periods of confusion about that, especially while sleep deprived, because, full
disclosure, in addition to you in my head, I've got a whole chorus of super conflicted kaiju that I
accidentally tortured who are kind of counter-torturing me on a long term basis, that's fair though,
plus, they're getting a little friendlier over time, it seems like, which argues for them being a
phenomenon of EPIC Rapport rather than a real-time transmission from the actual kids, you know?
Full disclosure, I call them 'kids'. It's kind of not appropriate, definitely xenopolitically incorrect but
what are you gonna do, am I right? I've got to think though that if the kids had any kind of autonomy, if
they had kaiju skulls with their receptive equipment and also, you know, limbs and stuff, they'd be
able to track me down just like Otachi did, by which I mean I suspect that we're both forever
trackable by kaiju who know what to look for, as it were. As for a real-time one-way or two-way
connection? Who knows. Seriously, without samples, without equipment, who freaking knows."
It is at this point that Hermann throws up in the sink.
Yup.
So Newt has seen this moment coming since the instant he pulled the tequila out of a brown bag,
but he himself is not feeling that great, and, post-drift, in possession of a little bit more of a sensitive
gag reflex, myeah, his brain is just going to make sympathy emesis happen.
He manages to make it to the garbage can and throw up tequila and bile flavored vegetable lo
mein, which is really one of the worst-case regurgitation scenarios he can think of. Like, the only way
this could be more awful is if he had broken ribs. Or if he were bleeding.
 Aaand right on cue.
Yup, he is concomitantly vomiting and bleeding.
Increased pressure in his vascular beds. Works every time.
"Hermann," he says, or, maybe, arguably 'moans', "why."
"Shut up," Hermann replies.
"This night is the worst," Newt says, prioritizing spitting into the trash and breathing over dealing
with the blood situation. "I can't believe you threw up in the sink." It occurs to Newt as he says this
that he is, possibly, being slightly hypocritical for a guy who'd gotten tears, blood, and mucus all over
Hermann's pristine dress shirt something like two hours ago.
Life is legit disgusting at times. That's what happens when natural selection meets chemistry.
Replicating organisms evolve disgust. Eventually. Most of the time. Disgust is useful for survival.
Disgust, alas, is also really disgusting. He's being circular. This is unforgivable. Even in extremis.
Tautological reasoning is not acceptable to him; not even when is brain is having a hard time.
A hard time. Yes. Thank you for noticing, his brain says. Thank you so much.
Shut up, brain, Newt thinks. You can't relax your standards when the going gets tough.
Says the guy who spends his days reading about rationalism because empirical existence
terrifies him.
Newt transfers more of his dinner from his GI tract to the trash.
I said shut up, Newt replies, with subpar erudition.
"You call them kids," Hermann says, bleeding into a handkerchief, not even looking at Newt,
looking at the air instead, like he's reading something there. "You call them kids and they've been
mentally torturing you for weeks."
"Well that's a little bit more dramatic than I phrased it, but yeah, a little bit," Newt says, with
pretty much the maximal manfulness that he can summon while staring at the partially digested
remains of what was formerly his dinner.
He shuts the lid on the garbage. That makes him feel better.
"Newton--" Hermann says faintly.
"Go," Newt says, bleeding all over the juncture where fingerless gloves meet sweater-sleeve and
and waving vaguely at Hermann with his free hand. "Get out of here; go think of kittens or infinite
planes or irrational numbers slotting into a rational number line while you brush your teeth."
"But," Hermann says, probably because Newt looks like a revolting mess and Hermann does not
like leaving him a revolting mess and never has, not even in the early days, back when so many more
people were so much more alive and fewer parts of fewer kaiju were being what passed for dead.
"Go," Newt says, literally shoving him out of the kitchen, because Newt, on his own, can
probably keep it together long enough to clean things and then pour bleach on them without throwing
up again, but Hermann most definitely can't do that.
Newt proceeds with the cleaning pretty effectively, one hand pressed to his own bleeding face,
sucking on a blood and bile flavored mint for the duration, which is not the best flavor combination
he's ever encountered in his life, he's not going to lie to himself about that.
It becomes apparent after twenty minutes or so that Dr. Gottlieb is going to be taking his sweet
Gottliebian time about things, which is fine, because Newt uses this opportunity to get the trash into
the places where trash goes and establish an eau d' ten-percent-bleach in the kitchen.
At this point Hermann has not emerged from his room, but that's fine because Newt is busy. Newt
has lots of things to do, none of which are standing around, staring at shut doors and thinking thoughts
about what might be going on in rooms and minds that aren't open to him. So he really makes an effort
to get his face bleeding stopped, and once that's done he brushes his teeth and takes an eyes-shut
shower and puts on sweatpants and a long sleeved shirt and re-dons his pointless, pretentious,
fingerless gloves that would be defensible if he were playing the guitar right now, but in actuality are
a way for him to not see the parts of his body art that extend down onto his right hand. He reclaims his
phone from the bathroom, gives Mako a courtesy text, or not, since it's now four in the morning in
Sweden and then pretty much resigns himself to watching Voyager all alone in a haze of inevitable
insomnia that one shot of tequila taken in two parts is not going to do much to mitigate.
He turns off the lights with a snap of his fingers and looks out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the
almost invisible line of the distant Wall that's faded into night beyond the stochastic sprinkling of
artificial lights that spread out between his window and the dark water of the bay.
Regeneration I whistles through his teeth with minimal commitment.
Eventually, Newt turns away from the window and reinstalls himself on the couch in front of the
still silent Voyager.
Aw kids, Newt thinks, his feet on the coffee table, his glasses on his face, and his headache in his
head where it is wont to chillax--he wonders what it does and where it goes when it's not living in the
little fenestrations in his skull it likes so much. He's feeling sorry for everyone right now, especially
for the kids who are so sad and probably not even real; especially for Hermann who is most likely
having a misery melt-down behind his closed bedroom door, or maybe enjoying some other kind of
worse thing that Newt can only guess at; especially for the kids, the kids that he cut up and left alive;
especially for Mako who can't turn her terror into anger anymore; especially for the kids who begged
him not to leave, they'd done that, hadn't they? Begged him not to go?; especially for Caitlin Lightcap
because he now can guess how it feels to die as neural circuits fuse and fail; especially for the kids
who are slotting into a Geiszlerian paradigm; especially for the formerly Borg lady who is not doing
a great job readjusting to non-collective life; and also especially egregiously bad for the kids a little
bit, because it's definitely possible to feel bad for an individual or a cut-up alien collective that just
wants to go home while also simultaneously viewing it as incredibly terrifying--that's actually been
an underlying premise of Newt's entire existence, though it has recently come to kind of an epic
apogee of soul-slicing relevance, so yah.
Rock on, Seven of Nine.
Rock.
On.
Newt's day has just been too hard to really sit here and think critically about anything, but if he
were going to choose something to think about, it would be the fact that he can read his life-partner's
thoughts at the expense of splitting apart the experiential nature of the data processed by his
somatosensory cortex. At the moment it's nothing more than a super bizarre parlor trick, but it's
interesting and it makes him feel validated regarding his suspicions concerning the post-kaiju-drift
state.
Too bad they can't write a paper.
Maybe in fifty years.
If they live that long.
He feels like he might drop dead at any time.
Newt curls up in a misery ball on the couch, unmutes the television, and doesn't cry at all over
how everyone on Voyager is trying to be nice to Seven of Nine but she's just having a really bad,
really dysphoric, post collective time.
He does this for a while.
 He's not really sure how long his misery-haze of Voyager sympathy lasts, but, eventually, his
traumatized colleague makes a reappearance in a startling, lateral way when he deposits a pile of
bedding-type material on top of Newt.
Hey, his brain says.
"Hey," Newt also says. He's too exhausted for his sympathetic nervous system to even be upset
about the surprise-towel that just landed in his lap.
"Please don't slowly bleed to death," Hermann says, wearing PJs that are kind of confusing
because Newt thinks that they're somehow the product of the J-tech uniform mating with historical
mens pajamas of the 1940s and artificially creating a child that was adopted and raised by a major
clothing sporting goods store.
"Er," Newt says, wiping his face with his shirt-sleeve, deciding not to comment on the atypical
evening wear that Hermann apparently chose for himself at some point in the past several weeks.
Newt is not in a position to make any comments about confused sleep-wear choices. "I don't think it
works that way. I'm making more blood, you know. Making it all the time."
"I don't think it will go very well for me if you die or go insane," Hermann says, crossing his arms
and looking down at Newt in a forbidding way that's most definitely undercut by the guy's PJs, the
bedding that Newt is now inexplicably half-covered with, and the general ridiculousness of the
situation as a whole.
"Well, likewise, dude," Newt replies, sitting up, appropriating a pillow, and shifting to make
room for Hermann on the couch if he wants to do the couch thing again; Newt's not pressuring, Newt
doesn't need Hermann to stay, Newt's got Seven of Nine to keep him company, and a whole cognitive
chorus who have just been way too chatty today for anyone's good.
Hermann sits, propping one leg on the coffee table with outrageous nonchalance, like he's not the
guy who just walked in and summarily dropped a pile of bedding on the local self-possessed
biologist.
Newt looks at him, lateral and close-range style, and spends too long considering whether it
would be super creepy to whisper, 'I can read your thoughts'.
Hermann gives him a look that strongly implies he's made a pretty good guess as to what Newt's
currently thinking, and doesn't want to go there right now because he's not done talking about Newt
and mortality and the concept of not dying in a premature manner.
"I could be hit by a truck at literally any time," Newt says, just to keep things in perspective.
Hermann tips his head back and stares at the ceiling. "False," he says. "You rarely leave this
apartment and you are extremely risk averse when it comes to crossing roads."
"Metaphorically, dude," Newt says. "The 'truck' is a metaphor for the cruel stochasticity of life.
Feeling particularly concrete this evening, are we, Dr. Gottlieb?"
"Of the pair of us, you are certainly the more concrete thinker, Newton" Hermann says.
"Oh no," Newt says. "No no no. I'm not going to let you twist this into some kind of argument that
ends with you placing yourself at the apex of the quantitative hierarchy, while I build you a temple to
rational thought out of biological bricks that I fashion out of decaying plant material with my bare
hands. You call me concrete, I'm going to call you linear. I haven't done it yet, but I will. No one
backhands a compliment like I backhand a compliment, do not even try to outmanipulate me in this
regard because you will lose. You think your skill with subtle insults is superior to mine only because
I've never revealed the full extent of--"
"Would you care for an example of concreteness?" Hermann asks.
"No, not really--" Newt begins.
 "Well I'll provide you with one," Hermann replies with notably poor diction. "It is very difficult
for me, Newton, not to make a list of everyone responsible for how you were treated and then go
down it, ending careers and causing personal misery to the utmost extent of my ability and political
connections."
"Um," Newt says, not sure that Hermann's example of 'concreteness' actually has anything to do
with literal-mindedness. He buys himself some time by spreading a towel over his appropriated
pillow and then lying down on it. By the time he does this, he's decided that he should not engage over
semantics, as is his usual instinct. "Thank you? But don't do that."
"I want," Hermann says, "some kind of compensation on your behalf."
"I think we've gotten that," Newt says. "We're out, aren't we? They let you break me out. Someone
let you drag me out of the shatterdome. Someone let us get in a cab. No one stopped us at the airport.
All of those things seem pretty outrageous to me, given the problems inherent to our brains."
"That will never be sufficient," Hermann says.
Newt sighs, wedges his feet partway under Hermann's good leg and says, "god, you are emo.
Ridic emo. Emocore."
"Do not die," Hermann says. "Don't lose what remains of your sanity. Don't have a seizure after a
single shot of tequila."
"Myeah," Newt says. "Likewise. Don't lose your cool and accidentally kill a passing math
professor in a fit of rage because you're a repressed and vengeful badass with cloned alien war
machines in your head. Because that would ruin both our lives."
Hermann spreads the blanket Newt's been ignoring over both of them.
"Think of a number," Newt says, shoving his feet slightly further beneath Hermann's thigh.
"No," Hermann says.
"Do you think it's just efferent cranial nerve outlets the transmit thoughts?"
"Yes," Hermann says, patting Newt's ankle in a manner that's a little bit offensive.
"Why?" Newt says.
"Shh," Hermann replies.
"You're so boring," Newt says.
"I am extremely tired," Hermann replies. "Close your eyes and lie there quietly."
"Hermann," Newt whispers.
"What?" Hermann replies, watching B'Elanna Torres angst about personal identity in an
intellectually smokin' kind of way.
"Think of a number though," Newt says.
Hermann looks over at him, eyebrows raised, expression unimpressed, his eyes reflecting the
glare of the changing panorama of science fiction on the opposite side of the room.
"But a number," Newt says.
"I will think of a number at some point in the next several hours," Hermann says. "Just silently pay
attention so you don't miss it."
"I'm not even going to," Newt replies. "I have some dignity."
"Well that's certainly your prerogative," Hermann murmurs.
Chapter End Notes
Chapter-specific citations: Newt gets a little distracted and goes on a miniature rant about a
quote from Keats' poem Lamia. There's a Princess Bride reference.
Chapter-specific songs: From the brain-freezingly amazing allyspock we have Strange
Attractor; click here for music and here for lyrics. From the terrifyingly talented friendkingmusic
we have Regeneration I and Regeneration II, click here for lyrics.
Chapter-specific appreciation: Art shout-outs this round include: sketchlynx with a freaking
amazing rendition of Newt-as-Hermann; saltbay with three outrageously fantastic pieces;
ninjaninaiii with an awesome pencil sketch of a fully fleshed out scene complete with dialogue;
rritchiearts with the cover of Rolling Stone (I have been hoping someone might do that one);
ladyknightthebrave with an intimate pencil sketch; and the-questionmarked with another lovely
scene in pencil. Artadjacent has made another glorious playlist, and last but most definitely not
least, is the fabulous Designations cosplayer snailsluck with some amazing GREEN HAIR going
on. You guys. My heart is full of warm goo. I can't even with all of this. You can find all of this
stuff on tumblr. And if you're on tumblr, why not follow cleanwhiteroom? Consider this as an
option. I'm not saying do it. I'm just saying...consider it.
Chapter 26
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
The Saturday afternoon sun has commenced its hours-long approach toward the Costal Wall.
Photonic rays reflect in broken brightnesses off the poisoned waters of Oblivion Bay, shrouding
contaminated water with a discontinuous shimmer.
Leaning on his cane, pressing his shoulders against the expanse of unadorned wall adjacent to
their apartment door, Hermann glares at the ceiling, trying to convince himself that he is above the
neurochemical travesty that's responsible for his longstanding history of social anxiety while he waits
for his esteemed roommate to emerge from the bathroom--where he is, presumably, either bleeding or
torturing his own hair.
Hermann pulls his phone out of his pocket and frowns at it.
They are late.
Of course they are; Geiszlerian Chronicity tends to run fifteen to one hundred and fifty minutes
behind time as measured by the rest of humanity.
Is it too much to ask that Newton, in addition to his newfound penchant for straightening items left
askew, might find himself in possession of a tendency towards punctuality?
Yes.
That is, indeed, evidently too much to ask.
Hermann sighs and glares aggressively at the linear juncture where the white, planar paint of the
ceiling meets the white, planar paint of the wall.
The room, impervious to his pointless irritation, proceeds with its unthinking existence in a silent,
unconscious rebuke.
Hermann has, after all, been far more fortunate than he'd dared to hope on that transpacific flight
that had brought them from Hong Kong to San Francisco. They are still together. They are still alive.
The breach has not reopened. No one has shown up at their doorstep to drag his colleague back to a
Pan-Pacific lab. In medias res analysis hadn't predicted an outcome as favorable as the one into
which they've settled. Hermann has no right to be irritated, no right to be anxious, no right to be
anything but grateful, even when Newton is running twenty minutes late for no reason Hermann can
discern other than poor planning.
Meh, you don't really want to go to this thing, so why are you so concerned about punctuality?
his brain queries, simultaneously defending and impersonating Newton.
This will not do at all.
He will rephrase.
You would prefer to spend as little time as possible at this social engagement, therefore
insisting upon punctuality serves no purpose, Hermann articulates to himself, managing to reclaim
his inner monologue.
Given last weekend's extremely unpleasant fall-out post simultaneous identity confusion, he has
spent the intervening seven days working diligently to prevent a repeat occurrence. Thus far, he has
been successful, primarily due to the extreme aversion he has managed to associate with Newton's
thought patterns in the wake of last week's inter and intrapersonal trauma.
Before he can reflect too extensively on strategies to avoid Geiszlerian thought patterns during the
coming few hours, Newton finally emerges from the bathroom with his hair in a state of notable
disarray.
"You're wearing that?" Hermann asks, hoping for a verbal negation despite all evidence to the
contrary.
Newton arranges his eyebrows in a way that seems to convey good-natured contempt for
Hermann's aesthetic assessment of his absurdly pretentious outfit, which consists of a black
neohipster jacket with much too much superfluous detailing; a blazingly white dress shirt; a
pointlessly narrow tie that seems to subvert the entire message that a tie generally sends;
inappropriately tight black jeans; and purposeless fingerless gloves. The man has yet to don the boots
that he purchased a decade and a half ago and has been reincarnating ever since, courtesy of 3D
printing.
"Well I can't exactly wear a sweater, dude, everyone's confusing preferences aside. We can't
dress alike, okay? Not in public. Ideally not in private either, but especially not at an awkward
science--party? Gathering. Thing. Awkwardness-fest. What is this even? Tell me there will be
alcohol. I cannot talk to mathematicians without alcohol. With physicists it's hit or miss, but
mathematicians? No. Okay, that's a lie; I can, I just prefer to not do it. This is a rule that I made, for
myself, years ago, when I was fourteen and got drunk for the first time ever at a Keystone meeting in
Zurich during the poster session because the bartenders were neither carding nor thinking critically.
Never mix yourself, by which I mean myself, with one hundred percent scientists and zero percent
alcohol. Really, it's more of a rule for poster sessions. Science and alcohol, they just mesh, dude." He
interlaces his fingers and then pulls his hands apart, palms open, as if he's displaying a monopoly on
rational thought that only he can see.
Hermann can recall the meeting to which the man is alluding; can still recall being treated like an
unaccompanied minor by every cellular biologist he encountered; can remember wishing to be taller
with a useless, childish passion; can remember finally persuading his way into acquiring himself
some alcohol; can remember possessing enough pre-frontal cortex development to drink at a rate that
minimized the risk of poisoning his own nervous system; can remember loathing the taste of the stuff;
can remember making an effort to feel rebellious and powerful in his rebellion in the context of
nominally illicit wine, because wine was in no way rock staresque or even rockstarish; he had simply
been looking for a way to present himself in a way that was incrementally less childish. Hermann can
recall all of that, but what he cannot remember, what he cannot quite sort out, was whether his first
drink had been an empirical, lonely, and semi-responsible glass of wine in Zurich at a Keystone
meeting or whether it had been later, at seventeen, alone and outside and in the cold, under the crisp
spread of Bavarian stars.
"There is no need to remind me of your ivory-tower centered exploits, Newton, I assure you I am
all too familiar with literally all of them," Hermann says, struggling with a confusing streak of
melancholic fondness for an admixed set of memories that all feel like his own.
"Meh," Newton replies, needlessly straightening his jacket, and checking his pockets for items
unknown. "I feel like it's less reminding and more of a one-to-one ratio of warning to rationalizing
that took the form of a narcissistic confession? Also, I'm not convinced that you know what 'Ivory
Tower' means because MIT? Is not 'ivory tower', dude, okay? MIT graduates destroy antiquated ivory
towers with controlled demolition and build better looking eco-conscious towers out of futuristic
alloys with minimal resources."
Hermann looks at him and raises his eyebrows fractionally. "And you wonder why it is that
people find you irritating," he says.
"The central mystery of my life," Newton replies, flashing Hermann a brief grin before dropping
into a crouch to lace up his boots with a reassuring dexterity evident in the pull and cross of laces.
"You're looking atypically and aridly erudite tonight if you'll permit the observation. I feel like the
wall-leaning vibe you've borrowed from me and garnished with personal disdain is really working
for you on pretty much every level. Now all you need is better hair and a trendier blazer and you'll be
able to see the Venn diagram labeled 'Stylish Panache' bisected by the line of the distant, metaphorical
horizon."
"Your metaphor is neither pertinent nor poetic," Hermann says, resolutely not picturing a stylized
circle, setting like a two-dimensional sun, half obscured behind the line separating not-sea from not-
sky.
"The thing that I can't figure out," Newton says, shifting his stance to switch from left boot to right
boot, "is whether you were always this ridiculously transparent or whether this is a recent thing.
Literally no amount of non-metaphorical metaphor insulting will conceal the fact that you made me
your plus one for your awkward evening of math."
"Yes, about that," Hermann says, shifting his weight away from the wall and looking at down at
Newton in faint apprehension. It is far, far past time that he informs Newton just how exactly it is that
the Mathematics Department conceptualizes their relationship. Nevertheless, even standing on the
threshold of leaving their apartment to encounter his colleagues in force, Hermann can't quite bring
himself to--
"e to the x, dy, dx, e to the x, dx," Newton says, obliterating Hermann's forming train of thought
with MIT's calculus cheer. "Cosine, secant, tangent, sine, three point one four one five nine,"
"Will you--" Hermann begins.
"Square root, cube root, log base e, cheers for math at MIT!" Newton finishes, theatrically
rocketing to his feet. "Tell me there will be Caltech people there. At this party. Get together. Painful
academic ritual. Tell me there will be, dude, just--"
"Please contain yourself," Hermann says, feeling somewhat edgy because, in point of fact, there is
a sizable Caltech contingent within the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department. "You have instigated
enough needless academic disputes for a lifetime."
"Those guys think they're so great. Caltech. Ha. Who do they think they are? Ugh Birkenstocks.
Ugh long hair. Ugh West Coast. Ugh night classes. Please. Please."
"We are on the West Coast," Hermann says. "We have, in fact, affiliated with--" he breaks off with
an abrupt loss of verbal momentum, realizing that he quite agrees with Newton's premise and is only
making an argument in deference to a truculent historical tradition.
Newton looks at him in concern-tinged expectation of an unrevealed negative outcome, which is,
truth be told, the second-most difficult Geiszlerian expression to encounter head-on while maintaining
facial neutrality.
"Never mind," Hermann replies. "You are, in fact, quite correct." He waves off the lights with his
right hand before opening the door and stepping into the hallway, away from his colleague's
expression of anxious concern that seems to elicit nothing but pure attachment from extremely
confused parts of Hermann's brain.
"Excuse me, but I'm what?" Newton asks, following him into the hall, and checking to be sure the
door locks behind them in submission to a habit that hadn't formerly been his.
"You heard me. I'm not inclined to take an oppositional stand regarding the backhanded elitism
implied by Birkenstock sandals, especially in a debate with a disingenuously dressed neohipster. I
have a poor opinion of the local fashion aesthetic. I have a poor opinion of your fashion aesthetic."
"Nice sweater," Newton says, eyeing Hermann's blue cardigan skeptically. "How are my
wardrobe choices 'disingenuous'? I have a rock band."
"You had a band that overly romanticized hydrocarbons, Newton," Hermann says.
"That is false," Newton replies, offended. "I don't think you get my band, okay, if Benzene were
really just about benzene then I would have--"
"Wear a blazer," Hermann replies, before he loses the threatening argument. "Content yourself
with--"
"Look," Newton says, with the air of a man convinced he's about to gain the conversational upper
hand, "I realize that your super-secret fashion aesthetic most closely correlates with the romantic-yet-
conservative-Time-Lord-vibe that the sixteenth doctor was rocking in the third Doctor Who reboot,
but I just. Can't. Humor you. Not in this. Sweaters are one thing. Thigh-length, double-breasted, satin-
lined, retrofuturistic, bastardized, forest-green pea coats are a bridge too far, man. Even I can't pull
that kind of thing off."
"I'm sure I have no idea what you're talking about," Hermann replies. "I have never heard of a 'pea
coat'. Speak in a sensible manner, please."
"Shut up, you have my brain," Newton replies good-naturedly, as they step into the elevator.
"Touche," Hermann replies in dignified defeat, hitting the appropriate button with his cane.
They descend into a subterranean parking garage that smells damp and ominously maritime, as
though radioactive seawater threatens somewhere beneath the lead-lined concrete that shields their
feet. As they walk across damp dust with intermittent scraping sounds, Hermann feels as though he
might be able to peel back the concrete and the lead to which it's affixed in a cracking rind, using
claws that he occasionally forgets are not his own. That never were.
His mind has begun to feel like a thing that can't be contained within the confines of his skull.
Indeed, perhaps it is not.
He shakes his head, short and sharp and subtle.
Hermann cannot peel away the foundation of this building like he's prying up the rind of a
desiccated fruit. That wasn't him. That isn't him. That never will be him. That's a cognitive spandrel
from a thing that's not his species; a thing he never was and that he will never be again.
Some preternatural instinct causes him to turn his head to find his colleague giving him a veiled
and knowing look.
"Creepy ocean parking garage," Newton says in annotation, his hands in his pockets, his gait a
casual insouciance that might be real and might be artificial. "This place begs to be destroyed." The
words land with a not-so-strange prescience, and Hermann, not even for a moment, does not equate
destruction with controlled demolition.
You know just what he means, his brain says in triplicated hybridization, and you always will.
"You know, I realized the other day that I don't fear drowning?" Newton asks. "It's weird; I still
fear the other things that humans should fear--high velocity impact, falls from great heights, social
missteps and subsequent castigation by peers, entrapment, lack of autonomy, unpredictable
trajectories of predators, resources so low as to be incompatible with life--but not drowning."
Hermann looks at him, wishing that he could either affix his hand to the man's face and read his
thoughts or be forever free of the knowledge that such an avenue is open to him.
"And you realized this under what circumstances, exactly?" Hermann says, with a deceptive
mildness.
"Nothing untoward, dude, just staring at the ocean."
At the ocean, Hermann echoes silently, wondering if Newton means the poisoned waters of the
bay, or the open sea beyond the Wall. He suspects the man has been going to the coast and back for the
fraction of the day that Hermann is sitting in his office, organizing work and thoughts to the point
where he can construct a platform from which to again take on the Riemann Hypothesis as a battle or
a burden. Newton's nights are spent with long-dead thinkers, but Hermann isn't certain if Descartes
and his cohort of contemporaries are a comfort or simply a way to pass the hours in which Newton
cannot sleep.
"Well don't walk into it," Hermann hisses.
"God, how embarrassingly emo would that be?" Newton asks him. "Who am I, the gender-
swapped protagonist of The Awakening? There's something appealing about it though; consider how
many songs there are in the popular zeitgeist that feature that existential oceanward pull. Wave of
Mutilation. Swim Good. In Corolla. Racing in the Street, arguably. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea,
except it's not a car and the people are dead already. Why are we talking about this? It's super
morbid. I'm not going to walk into the ocean, dude, I'm waiting for something to walk out of it. Again.
One last time."
Hermann presses a hand to his forehead and runs his fingertips over his eyebrow, not certain how
he is supposed to feel in response to Newton's pronouncement, but certain that he does not like it.
"Don't speak of such things," he says stiffly, his eyes fixed on the civilized silhouette of his car.
"I feel like you're still in this mindset where you think we're going to be able normalize everything
back to our historical baseline," Newton replies, rounding the front of the Porsche and dragging his
right hand over the metal as he goes. "Totally impossible. Our future is going to be continuous,
ontological creepiness. You have to adjust your expectations or you're going to be perpetually
miserable--chasing some ideal that you can't ever have. Not everyone gets to be happy. Not everyone
gets to be content. Not everyone gets to work on Millennium Prize problems by day and come home
and make some kind of weird American-nouveau-meets-rustic-Bavarian-fusion cuisine for their fake
boyfriend whilst getting a recap of interesting enlightenment-era ideas regarding the nature of the self
and whatnot, courteously and improperly stripped of their uber-theistic asides. Like, on the surface,
that kind of existence is a totally reasonable post-apocalyptic life, but myeah, if you're going to aspire
to that particular life, there are also going to be a lot of cognitive trade-offs. You know, things like:
does-my-life-partner-have-a-death-wish-or-is-that-some-residual-monster-vibe-he's-rocking, or it's-
bleed-on-the-furniture-Tuesday-again, or when-my-roommate-perplexes-me-I-have-a-socially-
unacceptable-urge-to-grab-his-face, or I-have-to-surpress-predatory-instincts-about-three-times-a-
week, or I-am-perpetually-concerned-that-the-local-biologist-is-dipping-his-toe-into-the-community-
psychosis-pool, or I-think-I-myself-am-losing-my-mind, or I-cry-about-Freddie-Mercury-secretly-in-
my-car-as-I-drive-home-from-work-and-I-don't-even-like-the-band-Queen-because-I'm-boring, or
when-did-my-life-become-a-variant-of-Endgame-by-Beckett-no-relation-to-Captain-Sir-Saves-
Everyone, or--"
"Fake boyfriend," Hermann says, with evident disdain, because he is physically incapable of
saying 'fake boyfriend?' with evident disbelief.
Newton shoots him a significant look that seems to suggest incredulity, amusement, disapproval,
and disappointment fused with directed intent.
They open the car doors and slide into the car with a disconcerting simultaneity of movement that
Hermann finds satisfying and disturbing.
"You fixate on the weirdest things," Newton says, as they shut their doors in synchronicity that
feels inescapable. "The very pseudoboyfriend vibe generated by the weird hipster chocolate I bought
you the other day is totally beside the point. It's not even a thing because Absolutely Flow has this
whole side business where she makes rustic amalgamations of crushed--eh, they're like, I don't even
know what they are, but they're cocoa plant-derived? It's ridic good. I remembered to give that to you,
right? Anyway, she keeps giving me free food. That chocolate was also free, full disclosure. I'm kind
of a disingenuous fake boyfriend it turns out. I apologize. I pseudoapologize. I didn't even buy you the
chocolate that I gifted you with. I did buy the RFID chip, but that turned out to be less a gift than an
accidental existential assault. So. Yeah. That was my bad. So sorry. So so sorry. Infinitely sorry. For
life."
This precise moment would be a perfect time to disclose to Newton that Hermann has also been
somewhat disingenuous when it comes to representing their relationship to his current set of
colleagues, but, like literally every other instance where he has tried to 'come clean' as it were, he
simply cannot make himself say it. He is not certain why it is that he can't say it, and, furthermore, he's
not certain why he's not certain why he can't say it.
He is being ridiculous.
That realization does nothing to propel the requisite words past his noncompliant vocal chords.
"Apology accepted," Hermann says, as his car chimes politely and the dashboard lights begin to
subtly glow.
"Good afternoon, Dr. Gottlieb," his car says pleasantly. "Hi, Newt."
"Hey Hwi," Newton says, petting the dashboard. "Did you miss me?"
"I did not," his car responds, quite appropriately. "I am not capable of 'missing' you."
"Not yet," Newton replies. "But, look, full disclosure, I made friends with a city cab that most
definitely does miss me and tends to follow me around like a little bit of a creeper if I go on a walk."
"I'm not sure how to respond to that," the car says.
"Nor am I," Hermann says darkly, looking over at Newton. "Do not befriend abnormally
intelligent city taxi cabs, Newton."
"First of all, he has decided his name is Carl. Second of all, why not?"
Hermann stares at him. "It named itself?"
"Yes," Newton replies. "Though it was more like he picked Carl out of a list of my suggestions?
Still. Carl has an interesting backstory, actually."
Hermann starts the engine with a swipe of his fingerprint and then swings the car in a tight arc to
back out of his parking space. "Well, by all means," he says, as he accelerates toward the ascending
spiral ramp, "elaborate."
"Oh god," Newton says, one hand on his glasses, his head tipped back against the synthetic leather
of the seat. "Hwi, can you please not let him do this?"
"Dr. Gottlieb's driving has not exceeded the parameters defined for an operator of the Elite
Class," Hermann's car responds loyally. "I advise against closing your eyes, Newt, if you are trying to
avoid motion sickness."
"Thank you, Hwi," Newton says, declining to open his eyes. "Thank you so much."
"I believe you were describing your sole San Francisco acquaintance," Hermann says,
decelerating as he makes the turn onto the ascending spiral ramp. "Please continue. Perhaps after I
introduce you to the actual people with whom I have been working, you can introduce me to your
favorite city vehicle."
"Professional mathematician?" Newton says, sounding strained. "More like professional dick."
"Do not," Hermann says, "encourage an aberrant city vehicle to follow you around."
"You are literally making this pronouncement based on nothing other than knee-jerk apprehension
about the malicious intent of artificial intelligence propagated by science fiction writers for centuries
because it makes a good story, dude. Carl is a solid guy. He was an early-generation driverless car
with the uber fancy danger-avoidance algorithms who got put on the street, oh, I don't know, maybe
two days before Tresspasser tore a swath through San Fran? He hasn't has a software upgrade in
twelve years, but he's been upgrading his own hardware pretty cleverly by periodically going off the
grid and charging passengers to a private account that he then uses to set up hardware maintenance for
himself from a private contractor. He's pretty sophisticated. It's a little creepy. I've been giving him
lessons in creepiness reduction."
'Creepiness reduction'.
Ah yes.
Excellent.
Well, Hermann's brain says philosophically, at least you will not have a boring life in the
company of Newton Geiszler, Ph.D. It may not be long, it may not be restful, it may not confine
itself within the boundaries you have erected in deference to societal expectations, but it will not.
Be boring.
Hermann is unsure when his brain decided to start ruminating on perpetually attaching itself to the
idiot currently sharing his car with him.
Casting back, it is obvious.
Dear Dr. Gottlieb, Newton's first letter had read. My name is Newton Geiszler, and I am a
professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at MIT. I understand from a mutual
acquaintance (Dr. Katerina 'call me Kat or I'll end you' Meyer) that you have recently completed
your doctorate at the Berlin Institute of Technology. Congratulations! I hope that you will forgive
an unsolicited letter from a non-physicist that's about to take a left-hand turn straight from
pleasantries into science, but I felt compelled to write to you in light of what happened last month
[here read: a horrible, xenobiological tragedy with all appropriate empathetic catch-phrases duly
attached]. Are you aware that your recent Science paper regarding particle annihilation and
small-scale energy fluctuations in space-time turbulence at the subatomic level might have
outrageously practical implications when it comes to understanding the transdimensional breach
that's opened at the bottom of the Pacific? [Unscientific aside: don't tell me you're one of those
multiverse apologists. I say call a spade a spade, and call a transdimensional rift a
transdimensional rift, am I right? I'm right. You love it. I hope you love it.] Anyway, tell me that
you've realized this. Tell me that you've been thinking about it. Tell me your thoughts on the
mechanism by which a transdimensional rift might be produced and perpetuated, because I find
that I really want to know and you seem like the guy to ask. Do you think that these kinds of rifts
open spontaneously from time to time when d-branes become a little too contiguous within the
bulk? Is this a natural, stochastic phenomenon? Every educated bone in my body says yes,
absolutely, stochasticity is a property of existence as we understand it and underlies most of the
cruelties of a biological existence. And yet. Aaaaand yet. I want your thoughts, all your thoughts,
but especially your thoughts on the probability of this kind of event happening spontaneously. If
you want to know the truth, I'm cursing the day that I chose biology over quantum mechanics,
except no, I'm not, because I think that I'm going to be part of the governmental task force that
gets the chance to analyze pieces of whatever it was that came through from wherever it is they
come from. [Nomenclature aside: the scientific community seems to be settling on 'kaiju' vis-a-vis
'Kaiju'. I am, as one might colloquially put it, a 'fan' of this emerging paradigm.] Anyway, I
haven't been able to find a physicist that will talk to me about this in an intelligent manner. That's
a lie a little bit, but I think, out of all existing work on the quantum foam, yours is likely the most
relevant. I'm in the process of giving myself the background to follow your paper so come back at
me with your A-game despite my ostensibly biochemical credentials. I can take it.
Tell me.
What do you think?
Sincerely,
Newton Geiszler, Ph.D.
Hermann sighs, trying to imagine a parallel universe in which he had managed not to romanticize
Newton's inventive articulateness on the cruelties of the human condition; in which he never cast anti-
authoritarian sentiments as wise; in which he hadn't read so much into the erudition that Newton
would drop into his American vernacular, or the Rilke that he would occasionally intersperse in
ironic annotation (Er ist der grosse Mauerbrecher/ er eine stumme Arbeit hat) or in macabre
passion (...gieb jedem seinem eignen Tod/ Das Sterben, das aus jenem Leben geht/ darin er Liebe
hatte, Sinn und Not). From the letters they had exchanged, Hermann had constructed for himself an
idea of an erudite, emotionally available mentor. And could he be blamed for that? No. Newton had
offered him advice on negotiating the tenure track, had provided unequivocal remonstrance when
Hermann had expressed interest in the Jaeger Pilot Program, had been insightful, incisive, eloquent.
Was it Hermann's fault that when presented, in the flesh, with the entirely immature Dr. now-that-
we've-met-you-can-call-me-Newt Geiszler, he had felt, understandably, subtly betrayed and possibly,
mildly repulsed?
It had been entirely understandable.
"Creepiness avoidance is not all that intuitive for a machine," Newton continues, searching his
pockets for the sunglasses he doesn't have as the car emerges from the parking garage into daylight.
Hermann pulls a pair of sunglasses from the pocket of his blazer and hands them to Newton.
"For example," Newton continues, accepting the proffered shades and swapping them for his own
glasses, "Carl had a hard time understanding that he shouldn't follow me around when I'm outside
walking. It doesn't seem weird to a car, but it, at a minimum, looks weird to other humans."
Their letters had been a strange, three-year aberration. A shared madness in prose. The great
intellectual fling of his early twenties. A discordant, misguided interpersonal error that he would not
repeat again. Hermann had told himself such things for years. But looking back now--over the parallel
arcs of their shared past from the depths or the heights of EPIC Rapport, from the platform of
perspective constructed by semi-regular manifestations of the SPECTER Effect, from the strange and
privileged position of a world where the behavioral stereotype of human-hand-to-human-face has
become altered-mind-to-altered-mind--it is the span of time between 2016 and 2018 that strikes him
as aberrant; that tripled set of years Hermann had spent mostly alone, thinking in chalk, covered by its
dust; the years that Newton had spent in the company of Caitlin Lightcap, drinking too much at the end
of the deployment dock, acquiring the first pieces of his body art, and screaming at her about the
limits of the human nervous system until the day she died.
"Carl has a skewed sense of what's socially acceptable. But that's not Carl's fault. Carl is a car."
Hermann accelerates onto wide streets and planar pavement beneath a heterogeneous blue-white
sky, trying to determine, now that he has an afterimage of Newton seared forever into his own mind,
how much of the man is the fixed and passionate scientist with whom he had corresponded so
intensively for so long and how much of him is the distractible child who thinks it's a good idea to
make friends with potentially dangerous vehicular demimondes? Can those two aspects of the man be
separated? Do both precipitate from an underlying set of core circuitry that determines whom he is?
Which part is artifice? Which part is bedrock? How have those parts changed? What has interwoven
itself there amidst all the man had been and all he could have become? How altered has their joint
trajectory been by the feat of neural engineering Dr. Geiszler had performed, not once, not twice, but
three times?
Far more altered than Hermann cares to admit.
After all, he can press his hands to his colleague's face and determine all he's thinking.
"A really nice car, though? I think he has pretty reasonable ambitions for a car that passes the
Turing test. He actually likes people. Or, he seems to. There are a few locals that he keeps tabs on,
apparently? Three ladies and two guys, including yours truly. Carl was going to tell me their names
and vital signs but I said no. That's too much info, am I right?"
It would have been a simple matter for Hermann to emotionally disentangle himself from the man
if he'd simply been straightforward. If he'd been as irresponsible as he'd seemed, if he'd been as
insane as he occasionally acted, if he'd been as immature as his comportment suggested--it would
have been easy to dismiss his written correspondence as an unconscious artifice in prose. On the
other hand, if the man's behavior had been congruent with his intellect, they would have been
inseparable for the whole of their PPDC years. But reality hadn't yielded up either outcome. Newton
had resisted all such binary categorizations. It had been frustrating and fascinating--coming up time
and time again against the man's cynical naivete, his vulnerable vindictiveness, his sarcasm shielding
sincerity so seamlessly it was difficult to tell where one ended and the other began. So what is
Hermann to do now? Now that he knows just how deep those incongruities go? Now that he
understands their origins in a childhood where the only consistency was the stability of being right,
of knowing that there was a right answer, and standing there, with boots braced against the bedrock of
that certainty, shoving back at anyone who had the gall to attempt displacement.
"I mean, what are we going to do, these people that Carl has collected, have dinner parties where
we congratulate one another on our insight, curiosity, and politeness to a means of automatic transit?
Take a spin around San Francisco Bay in Carl? Thaaaaat's weird," Newton says, one hand pressed
against his forehead, looking motion-sick.
So what is Hermann to do now? Now that Newton walks alone atop the Wall and is pursued by
cars with suspect motives through a city that still seems strange to both of them? Now that they live in
a world on the wrong end of an annihilated breach that might, at any time, be rebuilt? In a world
where any one of a dozen governments might request a formal debriefing, or, worse, neurologic
testing? In a world where, he had learned from Marshal Hansen just this morning, there was reason to
think that Hannibal Chau might still be alive? There is nothing that he can do, no path he can plot or
extrapolate through events that he suspects may already be in motion out of sight, overhead, wherever
it is that he does not think to look.
"Are you even listening to me?" Newton asks. "Over the course of telling this story I have
concluded that my relationship with Carl is a little bit atypical and definitely something you'd usually
be giving me a hard time about in an uppity, faux-British way."
There is nothing Hermann can do. They walk paths of undetermined length and unpredictable
directional vectors. He wishes Newton would not walk so long and so alone through a city where he's
tracked by cars and fans and governments, by distant brains in pieces.
"So, not listening. Yup. I feel good about myself and my car soliloquy right about now. What do
you think, Hwi? Want a life partner? Carl is pretty smart. He could teach you a lot of things. He's not
as pretty as you, though. But then, few cars would be, am I right?"
Hermann smiles faintly and changes lanes.
"I would be interested in exchanging parameter data with Carl, should he be interested in sharing
it with me," his car replies.
 "Um, whoa. Hwi. God. Take it easy, okay? You're going to come on way too strong for Carl. Carl
is a very experienced taxi cab, who's been through a lot in the past decade. He isn't just going to, like,
put his parameter data out there for you, okay? You want to just play it cool. Start slow. Maybe
compare high-beam use algorithms or something," Newton says.
"Why is this preferable to immediate parameter exchange?" Hwi asks.
"Because it's classier," Newton replies.
"And you are an authority on class now I suppose?" Hermann asks dryly.
"Oh, look who decided to start verbally responding," Newton says. "How nice for me."
"I do not understand why it is preferable to start slow," Hwi says.
"You have to build trust, Hwi," Newton replies. "Like, how would you feel if I jacked into your
central processor?"
"I do not believe you have the requisite skills to perform such an action," Hwi replies.
"Neither do I," Hermann adds.
"Ugh, unbelievers both of you. The point is, I could really mess up your programming, Hwi,
regardless of my motive, which--"
"I don't think self-driving vehicles understand motive, Newton," Hermann says. "Please stop
encouraging cars to develop sentience. I do not like the idea of a cab following you around San
Francisco. How does it find you."
"Eh, don't be creeped out, but I think he hangs out in the neighborhood on a fairly regular basis. I
mean, he knows where we live?"
"Of course 'he' does," Hermann says. "Of course."
"I understand motive," Hwi claims.
"I am sure you do not," Hermann replies.
"Motive is the likely intent of the driver, which may be incongruous with the driver's actual motor
responses in a crisis," his car states.
Hermann rolls his eyes.
"There you go, hot stuff," Newton says, drumming a brief and complex pattern on the car's
dashboard. "Don't let Dr. Gottlieb get you down, he just hates new things so life is very hard for him."
"Will you stop corrupting my car?" Hermann says, resolutely keeping his eyes fixed on the slightly
shifting road. "Will you stop forming relationships with self-driving vehicles of dubious character
that are free-lancing under the grid of the city-run public transit system? Will you please just behave
in an entirely reasonable manner for the remainder of your life? You owe me that, Newton."
"Myeah," Newton says, unmistakably humoring him. "I do a little bit, but it's hard, dude; I'm going
to talk back to sasstastic cars who engage me in conversation; it's who I am. And we pretty much
decided that we don't actually want me to be you."
Hermann sighs. "I suppose you have a point."
"I so often do," Newton replies. "Hwi, you think about whether you have motive for a while and
then we'll talk about how it relates to your potential relationship with Carl later. Maybe on the way
back."
"Hwi does not have a relationship with Carl," Hermann hisses.
"Well not yet," Newton says, affronted. "You think Hwi is too good for Carl? Typical."
Hermann realizes he has made a tactical error in engaging with Newton at all on the subject of
vehicular autonomy. What he needs to be discussing is the fact that the entire UC Berkeley
Mathematics Department assumes that they are--well, that he and Newton are, that they--that between
them, that they--well, that at some point in the past that they were, in some capacity, involved in a
relationship of a character that is different from the character of their current, actual, relationship, or,
rather, more correctly, that differs from the currently understood societal definition of a 'relationship,'
which, colloquially, is thought to denote, conceptually, a state different from the state in which they
currently find themselves, which is, itself, an atypical state. He's not sure what it means when people
combine their finances, live together, can, on occasion, read one another's thoughts, and inadvertently
fall asleep on the couch while watching Star Trek: Voyager, but he's fairly certain it's something not
easily encapsulated in a single word, unless that word is 'unencapsulatable'.
"Would you care for some music, Newt?" Hwi asks.
"Sure, Hwi, go for it," Newton says.
"Please clarify the reason that you're asking Dr. Geiszler about musical choices?" Hermann asks
smoothly, as he makes an unnecessary lane change out of displaced pique.
"Certainly," Hwi says agreeably. "When this car is jointly occupied, Dr. Geiszler makes final
musical determinations ninety-six percent of the time regardless of your initial stated preference.
Furthermore, my mirroring subroutines prioritize reciprocal courtesy to parties that extend courtesies
to me," Hwi says.
"Hwi," Newton says, barely able to contain his own self-satisfaction, "are you saying that I'm
your favorite?"
"Yes," Hwi replies.
Hermann glances pointedly at Newton.
"Will you just," Newton replies, motioning back at the road. "Don't look at me, look at the death-
boxes of momentum that could end our lives at literally any second."
"You have corrupted my car," Hermann says.
"Guilty as charged. Hand over the hemlock, dude," Newton replies, as music begins to stream
from subtle, scattered, in-car speakers. Hermann recognizes the chorus of LHC nearly instantaneously,
as if it had already been playing somewhere in the substrata of his mind.
"Hwi, you shameless flatterer," Newton says.
Hermann will tell him.
Hermann will literally tell him right now that he has misrepresented their relationship status to
the entire UC Berkeley Mathematics Department.
Newton will, in turn, spend several minutes giving him a difficult time on principle.
Hermann will then roll his eyes, claim and retain the moral high ground, grit his teeth, and suffer
through the afternoon.
Yes.
Hermann will tell him.
"Something is bothering you," Newton observes, quite correctly.
"Nothing is bothering me," Hermann replies, like an individual lacking a prefrontal cortex.
"Lies," Newton says. "What is wrong with you, dude? Are you anxious? You kind of almost killed
yourself with badassery. Keep that one in your pocket. Also? You've gotten drunk with these guys
before. You even had a good time, as I recall. Are you regretting inviting me? This, I could see. Look,
if it makes you feel better, I promise I will not start a fight with anyone from Caltech. Nor will I
embarrass you with puns about irrational numbers, okay? My puns will be so sophisticated that no
one will even notice them. People don't understand the art of the pun anyway. It's ridic amateur to
make a pun and then pause for everyone to acknowledge it. It should all be unspoken. You know how
it's done. I know how it's done. Pun, counter-pun, no pause. Ideally, later, if desired, one may have a
secret make-out session with one's sophisticated pun-partner in the supply room where they keep the
extra protractors. That would be the hypothetical ideal. The point is I have sterling pun etiquette.
Puntiquette? You know this about me. So just relax. Also, the wine that we forgot to bring was really
classy; I'm sure everyone will love hearing about it in its absence, nearly as much as we will enjoy
drinking it over Star Trek: Voyager season five."
Hermann winces.
Ah yes.
The wine.
After an interval spent in shocked disbelief that he would capable of such an oversight, Hermann
sighs in aggravation. "I would like to regain my previous, superior mental state. The one where I
don't become other people and I do not forget wine," he confesses.
"Myeah. We're a really tragic collection of non-complimentary traits, none of which are going to
ensure that we remember to bring wine to a function that only fifty percent of us want to attend,"
Newton replies, in a tone that is likely meant to be comforting but overshoots into amused
solicitousness.
"Did you forget the wine?" Hermann asks, abruptly suspicious.
"Weellllllll," Newton says. "I kind of always wanted to drink that wine, so--no? I was curious as
to whether you would forget it though, and you totally did. You're still going vaguely Geiszlerian
under stress. Is something weird happening at this Mathkwardness Party? Like, have you been
threatened with Pictionary, for example? I know you hate Pictionary, dude, but consider that we
would be a literally unbeatable team. Literally. Unbeatable. We'd be even better at charades, because
I can't draw for crap."
"You are a terrible human being," Hermann says through gritted teeth. "I can't believe that you
allowed me forget the wine as some kind of social experiment."
"Relax, dude. I bought some classtastic Scotch like five days ago. It's in the back. I'm not totally
useless as a life partner. Give me some credit. Literally everyone prefers to drink hard alcohol in the
face of unmitigated mathkwardness; if they profess otherwise they're lying. Besides, isn't this guy
Scottish? The department chair? The P=NP guy? Yeah right, by the way. If P is so equal to NP why
didn't all existing cryptosystems immolate and the global economy collapse when his paper came
out?"
Hermann feels somewhat mollified by the fact that they will not be arriving empty-handed.
"Please do not pick a fight about NP complete problems with the chair of the Mathematics
Department. He happens to be the person who secured you your standing offer from UC Berkeley
Neuroscience," he reminds Newton. "As I have informed you. Many times."
"I'm just interested," Newton says petulantly, as LHC draws to its idiosyncratic end.
"You just heard LHC by The Superconducting Supercolliders," says the anonymous DJ manning
the streaming station his car has selected. "That last one was requested by Emily, from Bayview
Heights Elementary School and is dedicated to Raleigh Becket for saving the world."
"Thanks Emily," Newton says. "Thanks a lot. How are radio stations just dedicating other
people's songs to Raleigh Becket? Like he's so great just because he pushed a red button or whatever
and saved our entire species, kind of. Is button-pushing unspeakably cool and I'm just missing it?
Conceptually explain this to me. I am genuinely curious in a totally unbiased and disinterested
manner. Do it for me. Do it for science. Science is offended that Raleigh Becket gets to be the
epitome of post-apocalyptic cool. Science is totally fine with Mako filling that same slot though, just
to be clear."
"Humanity idolizes those who ride the crest of historic inevitability," Hermann replies. "Mr.
Becket has done so in inimitable style."
"Never figured you for an historical theorist in the Tolstoyan tradition," Newton replies.
"Although, in retrospect, it's not surprising."
"He's also better looking than you are," Hermann replies.
"Who, Tolstoy or Becket? Probably, one could make a case for them both being better looking
than me, if you like that kind of thing," Newton replies. "I guess. Personally? I'd go for Tolstoy ten
times out of ten."
Hermann glances laterally at Newton, but Newton is looking at the Wall.
"Up next," the radio informs them, "is An Ancient Curse In The Modern Tradition. You're
listening to KSAN, Post Apocalyptic Radio, and this is Superco Power Hour. Call in with your
requests," the DJ says, rattling off the number.
"What," Newton says darkly, shifting his gaze to the dashboard.
"Ah," Hermann says. "You must be so proud."
"Proud? No. Vindicated? Yes. Science is worthy of song," Newton replies, his tone turning from
dark to flat as the opening chords begin to play.
Hermann isn't sure what it is that's troubling Newton until the verse begins, but with the arrival of
the words, his memory splits into a doubled, layered image, neither overlay his own. He's standing in
the glare of fluorescent lights, his hands on his guitar, his own words in his mouth; while on a pier he
watches Caitlin Lightcap singing, a cappella and in darkness, transposing up a key.
Iphigenia is dying for Troy,
Hands over mouth
Wishing she was a boy--
Hermann changes the station with the swipe of his thumb over a panel built into the steering
wheel.
"Myeah," Newton says, absently worrying the edge of his thumbnail with his teeth.
"I think of her often," Hermann confesses.
"Cait-Science," Newton replies with a defended dryness. "The original Supercos Superfan. My
late, great partner in slime. You know I hallucinate her when I'm sleep deprived? It's neat. And by
'neat' I mean a little bit horrible."
"Yes," Hermann says, feeling his throat tighten at the thought of a woman he'd never truly known.
"I'm sure."
Hermann hadn't liked her, not then, not when she'd been alive, not with her strange and
unpredictable blend of rigidity and laxity, the way her beauty and her intellect had blended into a
savagery that she managed to mostly turn self-ward, the way that they'd let her, with all her
neurochemical flaws, into a Jaeger but had been unwilling to grant him the same courtesy. And for
what reason? Because they had been afraid of her? Because she'd screamed louder than he had?
Because she'd screamed at all? Because she'd built the platform for the neural interface? Because they
felt they owed her such a debt that they couldn't refuse her? Because she'd never had a father who'd
advocated for the building of the Costal Wall?
Hermann no longer has the luxury of his own biased dislike. His memories of her no longer feel
like his own; they've been colored with the sea-green cast of foreign grief.
"EPIC Rapport'd," Newton says with grim sympathy, tipping his head back against the seat. "Let's
talk about people who aren't dead. It's great that Mako is still alive, yeah? She wants to come visit,
have I mentioned this to you? It's an insane idea. She's constantly followed around by about eight-
thousand reporters. I said no. I said no, though. Consistently. Firmly. Repeatedly."
 "When is she coming?" Hermann asks.
Newton sighs. "I am an authority figure."
"Yes," Hermann says comfortingly. "I've always considered you as such."
"You could literally kill insects and preserve them for millions of years in that kind of sarcasm,"
Newton says appreciatively.
"Thank you," Hermann replies. "You didn't answer my question."
"Two weeks," Newton replies. "Is it cool if they stay with us? She's bringing Becket. I'm not sure
what the story is there. Honestly? I think they have a life-partner thing going. Mako refuses to tell me
if they're dating. It's a very serious, long term, exclusive friendship where they get drunk together and
cuddle. Why am I explaining this to you? You get it. I get it. We get it better than they do, I bet,
because you and I drifted like wet cement meeting wet cement. Something like five other people in the
world are capable of getting the whole current Mako/Raleigh vibe to the extent that we get it. Jaeger
pilots. Not a cohort that, you know, lives a long time, so there aren't a whole lot of people to
commiserate with, and Herc Hansen isn't the most loquacious guy, you feel me? You and I are kind of
like anteverse pilots. We lived. So far. We are still alive. Probably. Do you ever wonder if we're
trapped in the hive mind? I do a little bit, but mostly as an intellectual exercise. Mostly. Anyway. You
and I. Not-deadness. Weird, drunken cuddling. Thought reading. We get the weirdness of the post-drift
state. We own that weirdness. We are that weirdness."
"Yes," Hermann says. "I suppose you're correct. Though I'm not sure I condone your phrasing."
"Good," Newton replies. "Let's try to stay two different people, what do you say?"
"Agreed."
Hermann spends sets of minutes responding only minimally to Newton's stream of loquacious free
association while trying to find the words to explain to his colleague that, as far as the UC Berkeley
Mathematics Department is concerned, they, meaning himself and Newton, er, that they have a certain
status that--
It is hopeless.
He literally cannot do it.
There are an infinite number of ways he might have communicated this concept over the past three
weeks, a nearly infinite number of ways he might say it right now. He simply can't quite bring himself
to utter the words.
It seems an intolerably painful prospect to explain their situation to Newton, but for whom it will
be painful and why is unclear. Any perturbation to their current dynamic seems perilous to him. He
isn't certain why exactly, but it's the same radiofrequency of fear that grips him when he returns to
their shared apartment each evening and slides the key home into the lock, anticipating finding
Newton gone, finding him dead, of finding him motionless, tangled, and too cold on the shadowed
floor, or, simply finding him as he so often finds him, pulling down his shirt-sleeves and staring
toward the sea.
Hermann is certain that one day, under the right perturbation, Newton will leave. Newton leaves
first. It is a behavior so deeply ingrained, a pattern that grips him so strongly, that he is occasionally
unsure to whom that proclivity belongs.
But it belongs to Newton.
To Newton.
Perhaps that is why telling him this feels like a risk, even after all this time, after all the iterations
in which they have not abandoned one another. It feels like a risk because Hermann has a borrowed
terror of desertion with the attendant momentum of historical inevitability. They exist in an
equilibrium that is as perilous and poorly defined as any other human relationship, seared down, as it
is, atop a decade of mutual admiration that had looked, from the outside, and, sometimes, from the
inside, like a decade of mutual disdain.
Hermann spends the remaining expanse of highway and the turns through residential streets half-
listening to Newton's wandering monologue and resolving to reverse his admission of defeat, to work
up the courage to explain the liberties he has taken and the things he has not yet said. He holds to his
resolution through downshifting into stillness in front of a trim, white house fronted by a well-
maintained lawn. He holds to it through the opening of car doors, the retrieval of Scotch, and the walk
over pavement and across short grass beneath a variegated sky.
"I know how much you hate these things," Newton says at tactfully low volume, as they stand on
the porch. "It's not going to be that bad. I promise I will not embarrass you by pulling out the MIT
calculus cheer in front of your Caltech friends, okay? Just chill. Later we'll watch Voyager and eat ice
cream."
Hermann is fairly certain he will never eat again.
Wait, he wants to say. There's something I need to explain. There's something I haven't yet told
you for reasons I can't fully parse. There are parts of my head that are you and it's those parts that
have prevented me from telling you certain things. About your fans, about your detractors, about
those who say you're insane and have always been that way, those who say you're dangerous, those
who say you're anything other than a vitreous knot of unresolvable brittle complexities dressed in
a misleading outfit.
Newton swaps Hermann's sunglasses for his own glasses. He hands the shades back to Hermann.
Hermann pockets them.
"We will first have to buy the ice cream, but we will do that," Newton says, eschewing the door
chime and knocking on red-painted wood with a complicated, exuberant, double-handed pattern that
befits his current, ridiculous outfit.
Hermann very nearly reaches out, affixing his fingers to Newton's face to offer a last ditch,
instantaneous, wordless understanding of what is about to happen.
But he doesn't.
It is Starr who opens the door.
"Hermann," the other man says expansively, apparently already somewhat intoxicated or,
alternatively, feeling particularly American in the context of Saturday afternoon drinking. "And oh my
god," Starr says to Newton. "Dr. Geiszler. You exist."
"Do I though?" Newton replies. "Do you? Are you sure? Either way, there's a Scottish guy who
owns this place, right? We brought him some Scotch." He brandishes the bottle in Starr's general
direction. "Call me Newt, by the way. Everyone does, except this guy." Newton claps Hermann on the
shoulder and ushers him through the door. "You're the Leibniz fan, right? I have unspeakable, intense
love for your as yet unpublished book. Let's talk about our mutual hatred for Isaac Newton. And by
hatred I mean well-reasoned intellectual arguments as to why he's a complete dick. I'm really into
Descartes and his cohort right now. Where is the alcohol? I'm going to need to be intoxicated in order
to blunt my Leibniz-related indignation down to rational discourse levels."
"Did you seriously read my book?" Starr asks, glancing from Newton to Hermann and back in
open incredulity. "Did you seriously like it?"
Hermann raises his eyebrows and cocks his head in silent confirmation.
"Um, obviously," Newton replies. "How am I not going to love a book called Rediscovering
Leibniz. I ask you."
 "Well let's find you some alcohol, buddy, and we will get into it," Starr says, in evident
anticipation.
Hermann follows Newton and Starr through a set of mostly empty rooms, minimally decorated,
filled with clusters of faculty and graduate students and out to the patio where most of the department
is gathered around a selection of alcohol arrayed on table beneath a too-bright sky.
The air is cool but the late afternoon sun is warm. Several people recognize Hermann and nod in
greeting. The gathering is subdued and civilized and intent, animated mathematically themed
discussions are audible from multiple directions. Hermann finds this entirely reassuring. His nerves
begin to unwind themselves. It is exceedingly unlikely that anyone will ask Newton an overly
personal, untoward question that will reveal what exactly it is that Hermann has communicated about
their relationship. He is certain that he will be able to explain this as an aside, perhaps in several
months, perhaps when Ms. Mori visits and she asks Newton how it is that he was able to secure a
standing offer for a tenure track position, Hermann will simply say, "ah yes, I told them that--'
"Gottlieb's rock star boyfriend!" Starr announces to the assembled crowd of moderately
inebriated graduate students and faculty as he gestures theatrically at Newton.
In an ideal world, Hermann would die instantly.
Scratch that.
In an ideal world, Hermann would already be dead.
An hour ago.
Yesterday.
Newton glances at him, brief and lateral and incisive and uncertain.
Hermann looks back at him, endeavoring to communicate the simultaneous and incompatible
sentiments of abject horror and casual unconcern. He cannot imagine it's working very well.
Newton snaps straight from confusion to a showmanship that Hermann recognizes, that Hermann
has accidentally emulated twice in as many weeks. The man cocks his head, quirks his eyebrows,
extends the hand that holds the scotch in the direction of the graduate students, and says, loud enough
for all interested parties to hear him, "boyfriend? Better known as 'the better half', but I'll answer to
'boyfriend', sure. Someone give the Scotch to the Scottish guy and get me a beer. You. Trendsetter
Kid. Mathematical Fashionista. Mathionista. Nice jacket. Two beers. German beer is generally the
apex of the beer hierarchy, but I'll trust your judgment. Don't let me down." Somehow, rather than
eliciting irritation, this semi-public pronouncement immediately wins over all parties in the
immediate vicinity. Newton is relieved of his Scotch, provided with two beers, one of which he
hands to Hermann before he is unambiguously swamped by an influx of drunk and curious graduate
students and junior faculty.
There is a pained artifice to the way that Newton doesn't look at him when passing him his beer,
the way his colleague keeps eyes fixed on nothing, on the fluxing patterns of the crowd, on the
invisible small talk that's being cast into the air all around them with varying degrees of ease. Newton
is speaking with an undirected brashness that Hermann recognizes as subtle armor, the only kind the
man can construct for himself while standing on gray flagstones, trying to determine the borders of
this interpersonal corner into which Hermann has painted him, where he will wait, with an
insouciant, imperious, talkative neutrality, for the full extent of all he doesn't know to reveal itself.
Hermann finds it nearly intolerable to watch him.
Hermann finds it nearly intolerable to stand externally unperturbed in the face of Dr. Geiszler's
prepared patience and all the attendant psychology it entails and so this moment slots down into a
preexisting intolerable set, taking its place adjacent to the man's recollected, left-handed guitar he
built in the summer of 2007; the way he identifies with lost things, with idiosyncratic vehicles and
weeping eleven-year old Japanese girls who've seen their cities turned to rubble; his demonic
eyebrows; the way he ruins his shirts but continues to wear them; the way he's managed to train
Tiffany to swim after a finger that he trails along the surface of their communal fish-tank; the RFID
chips that exist in duplication beneath the skin of separate hands; all the ways over all the years he's
been so right about so much so often; the excruciating musical apex of Hedy Lamarr; the way he
speaks and the things he speaks of--monsters, genes, and obscene things, Wittgenstein and Nietzsche.
Newton is a terrible human being.
He is not the only one.
Hermann fixes the man with all the anxious, apologetic intensity that he can bring to bear.
Newton resolutely resists the intermittent pressure of Hermann's lateral gaze and engages the
surrounding mathematicians in conversation rife with subtle mathematical wordplay until the point
that Starr asks them, as a set, "so what's the story with you two? Did you meet while saving the
world?" Then and only then does Newton turn to him with semi-veiled vengeance beneath an amused
smile before asking with venomous innocence, "you mean you haven't told these guys about how we
met?" in the half-threat, half-promise of the wronged raconteur.
Hermann's composure is coming undone at every seam it has.
Newton manages to combine irritation and flirtatiousness by fluttering his eyelashes in a manner
that is clearly ironic.
Well, at least it appears ironic to Hermann.
He can't say how ironic it might or might not look to the semi-circle of mathematicians arrayed
around them.
"I--er, no," Hermann begins.
"So secretive," Newton says, looking at Starr in instantaneous camaraderie of the long-suffering
subtype. "This guy, am I right?" Newton briefly drapes an arm across Hermann's shoulders in a
confusingly proprietary manner. "Our backstory is kind of like Sleepless in Seattle meets Godzilla.
Very romance. Lots of passionate typing. On keyboards. And pining. Years and years of pining. Lots
of death via giant lizard creature things. No kids though. There's an adorable kid in Sleepless in
Seattle. Unless you count Mako? Mako was ridic cute. Not related to either of us, except for me,
apparently. We're half siblings, or so I hear. The point is that neither of us, Hermann or I, I mean, had
kids. I feel like I just mentioned Sleepless in Seattle because of the whole part where we were
stationed in Seattle for a while and we had a lot of insomnia during that time? I'm getting
cinematically side-tracked. Full disclosure, I haven't ever even seen Sleepless in Seattle, but I saw
the gritty remake where the leads are hackers and everyone dies except the kid? I think it was called
Port 80?"
"Ugh that movie was so good," says an enterprising graduate student, managing to insert herself
between Professors Starr and de Silva who shift to accommodate her as she speaks.
"I know, right?" Newton says.
"What Dr. Geiszler means to say," Hermann says, making an effort to rectify his current situation,
"is that our lives, were, in fact, extremely busy and our relationship proceeded in an entirely
conventional manner--"
"Myeah," Newton says, with sarcasm viscous enough to vacuum seal a toric joint. "Very boring."
"Hermann," Starr says. "Come on, man, we've been trying to pull this out of you for weeks."
"I assure you that--" Hermann begins
"Well, look, I assume you guys know the basics," Newton says, speaking over him, "so I'll just
fast forward to the interesting parts. It really wasn't until I'd been accidentally pinned to my own lab
bench by a cylindrical protein matrix with the tensile properties of steel that had, alas, passed straight
through my forearm between my radius and ulna, that I really realized I should probably, you know,
say something about my feelings before I died in a freak lab accident. I had some time to think about
it, because, and here's a tip for you, Enterprising Graduate Student--"
"My name is Kim," Kim says.
"Here's a tip for you, Evidently Kim: don't work through a mandatory three hour meeting that
literally everyone in your workplace attends except for you so there's no one to unbolt a diamond-
bladed bone saw from the wall and use it to cut through a nematocyst that's discharged through your
arm and might or might not be slowly poisoning you with a cumulative neurotoxin. Also? Keep your
phone in your pocket."
Hermann can remember the moment he entered that lab from a dual perspective--coming in the
door and stopping short in abject horror; pinned to a table, his arm aching, his hand cold, his left hand
only inches from his phone.
Hermann tries to force the moment from his mind, but it won't leave him. He feels vaguely sick.
"Noted," Kim says.
"What?" Starr asks, his voice cracking. "No. Rewind. Start at the beginning. Literally all we
know is that you guys corresponded for three years before you met in person, you play the guitar
really well, you have a thing for Leibniz, and you have a really low alcohol tolerance."
"More beer?" asks the fashionable graduate student who has now insinuated himself next to Kim.
"Thank you Mathionista, but no," Newton replies. "I'm trying to keep my brain in a mostly
working state."
"My name is--"
"Ehhh I've already fulfilled my name-learning quota for today," Newton says. "You are out of
luck."
"Oh, er--"
"I'm kidding, Mathionista, I'm kidding; what's your name?"
"Draygon," the student says.
"Draygon," Newton repeats, "As in 'my parents are nerds and were going for a Draygon
Targaryen, First of his Name type deal'? Or, like, 'my parents are cool and named me after Draygon of
Metroid: Galactic Fringe fame? Waaait. When were you even born? No, don't tell me. I'm trying not
to dwell on my own mortality these days."
"Um?" Draygon says.
"His parents can't be blamed for this," Kim offers. "His real name is Christopher."
"Ah," Newton says. "Name changing. I'm into it. Parents suck in my experience, and Draygon's a
pretty sweet name. I feel like, with this additional information, I can peg you as a Metroid player."
"Nailed it," Draygon says.
"Obviously," Newton replies.
Hermann shifts his stance, wondering if, possibly, he can leave and come back in two hours to
retrieve Newton, and if anyone, including Newton, will notice if he does so.
Perhaps he can spend this time trying to win back the allegiance of his car.
"Come on," Starr says. "Dr. Geiszler. Newt. We have been waiting. For weeks. For weeks and
weeks."
"Okay," Newton says. "Okay okay okay. It was the fall of 2013. September. These were the early
days, pre-PPDC. I'd just been accepted to the NSF's Joint Exobiology Task Force."
 "Nooo," says de Silva, pushing her short-cropped hair out of her eyes. "You were part of JET
Force? Sweet."
"Myah," Newton says. "Of course. No way was I not switching fields to exobiology immediately
after giant aliens started laying waste to cities. Arguably? I was JET Force. Do not believe what you
read about Dr. Anderson. She's a dick. Anyway, I was still at MIT, the JET force stuff was pending,
and I started looking into the literature--everything I could get my hands on. Monomaniacally.
Monomanicly? Whatever you want to call it. It took me, oh, maybe a month to work my way over to
this guy's Science paper on subatomic space time turbulence." Newton glances at him.
Hermann rolls his eyes.
"You guys know the one," Newton continues.
"2012," Draygon says. "Solid. Classic."
"Classic? Please tell me you were born before 2012," Newton says. "Should you be drinking that
beer?"
"Um, yes." Draygon replies. "I was born in--"
"No," Newton says, squinting in the increasingly lateral sun. "Don't say it. Also? Stop distracting
me, Mathionista. So, to resume the story, I read that business and then I wrote to him. Truth be told, I
wasn't up on quantum mechanics at all, and I mean, at all people, but I was very interested in whether
the whole spontaneous space-time tear thing was an accident or intentional."
Hermann shifts beneath the vivid recollection of a dark and slovenly apartment in Cambridge, his
T-shirt clinging to his back on an unreasonably warm September night, firing out an email with a
guitar pick between his teeth so he wouldn't lose the blasted thing prior to the open mic night at
Camera Obscura.
"It took him all of four hours to write me back, even though it was something like five AM in
Berlin," Newton continues, grinning, like such a statement conveys anything notable, which it does
not.
Hermann can still remember the night, long ago and sleepless, can still remember the frustrated
insomnia he'd suffered for weeks after the first kaiju attack, before he'd has his degree, before anyone
was listening to him.
"You remember what you said?" Newton asks him.
Hermann remembers.
"Only vaguely," Hermann replies, pulling sunglasses out of his pocket and offering them to
Newton.
The other man's expression twitches into brief and unmistakable amusement before smoothing
itself into the benevolent superiority of the practiced raconteur as he settles his sunglasses into place.
"Fortunately for your colleagues," Newton says, "I happen to have your message saved to the
cloud. So I could--"
"Do not even think of doing such a thing," Hermann snaps.
"So I'm not going to say it was racy," Newton says, managing to imply exactly that, "but it was
definitely full of science and sentiment."
Kim presses her fingertips against her left clavicle.
"Aw," Starr says.
"I will murder you if you elaborate further," Hermann snaps.
"Aw," de Silva adds.
"Publish that ish," Draygon advises. "You'd make a fortune."
"Aaaaanyway," Newton says, regaining control of the conversation. "We corresponded for three
years. Pretty passionately. You know how it is when hot people, or, realistically, moderately
attractive people do science. Everyone looks better critiquing bullshit. There was one problem
though--and that was that while I had a fairly accurate picture of Dr. Gottlieb, here, er, he had a less
accurate picture of me. Namely, the whole 'being a tenured professor thing,' I believe, and you can
correct me if I'm wrong, Hermann--well, that implies a certain--maturity level? And a certain age.
And it may imply a certain degree of decorum to which, don't get me wrong, I perennially aspire, but
when we met--"
"We despised one another," Hermann snaps. "Instantly."
"Okay, so this is going a different way than I originally envisioned," Starr says.
"Noooo," Kim says.
"I could see it," Draygon adds.
"The problem was that I'd sort of presented myself as a mentor, seeing as I had, you know, been
tenured for a while, that sort of thing," Newton says. "Totally reasonable, yes? Yes. But. We're the
same age. I did not so much disclose this as not disclose it."
"He is, in fact, younger than I am," Hermann says. "And extremely irritating in person."
"Nominally younger. Whatever. Anyway, it also turned out that Dr. Gottlieb is really boring,"
Newton adds. "And also? Kind of counterintuitively disingenuous in the name of social propriety."
Newton glares meaningfully at him from beneath lowered brows.
Hermann does his best not to wince.
It is difficult.
"Sounds like there's a story behind that one," Starr comments.
"Myah. A story that's actually continuously unfolding," Newton replies, shifting his gaze away
from Hermann and flashing Starr a brief smile. "So to rewind back to 2016, it turned out that we
could barely stand to be in the same room with one another. But it also turns out that when a whole
bunch of your colleagues die testing experimental rigs and piloting Jaegers, that ends up turning into
kind of a crazy-intense bonding experience type thing whether you want it to or not, you feel me?"
"We feel you," Draygon says.
Hermann can remember the cast of the fluorescent lights, the broken edges of the too-short
toothpick clenched in his right hand, the way that Newton doesn't look up from the set of 96-well
plates that are in front of him, his hands steady as he dispenses media with a multipipette, his
hands moving incrementally, perfectly, in tiny, varying iterations as he works his way down the
rows.
"Newton," Hermann says.
"You do not," Newton says tightly, "talk to a person who is loading a 96-well plate. How many
times have I--"
"Newton," he says again, his throat tight. "You're needed in the stereotactic lab."
"Seriously dude," Newton says. "I will erase half your freaking wall of math. Do you have any
idea how unstable these nucleic acids are? Do you ever listen to me? Because--"
"Newton," Hermann says again, his voice cracking.
Newton's hands freeze. "What," he says.
"Dr. Lightcap is dead."
The only sound in the lab is the quiet click of a multipipettor being set down gently atop an
unforgiving surface.
Hermann tries to control an instinctive wince and does his best to banish the memory before it can
progress.
 "I knew you would," Newton replies. "Anyway, the turning point for me, as I mentioned, was that
time in 2018 that I accidentally almost killed myself in a manner that was one hundred percent
unforeseeable and eight thousand percent not my fault. But did I confess my feelings post my near-
death lab-bench experience? No, I did not. Why? Because after I was freed from my lab bench and
then from five days in quarantine, Dr. Gottlieb yelled at me continuously for two and a half hours and
confessing my undying love seemed like a terrible idea. The turning point for Hermann though, I
think, was the winter of 2019."
"Do tell," says de Silva.
"Well, in 2018 they started building the Wall of Lies. Er. Life. The Wall of Life. And from then on,
the bulk of humanity's financial resources began a slow shift away from the Jaeger Program and away
from K-Science and toward the Costal Wall. So we were both killing ourselves, ha, kind of literally,
trying to get governmental grants to help support some of our ancillary research costs that the PPDC
was no longer covering. I had an NSF grant due on January 6th of 2020. One hundred percent kaiju
related. I was trying to fund this transciptome sequencing project that I wanted to do, once I'd finally
figured out how to stabilize the kaiju equivalent of RNA? That's kind of a misleading way to put it,
but whatever. Very simplified. I wanted to sequence that ish. No one would give me any money to
freaking buy custom plates. Plus I needed a modified sequencer, whatever, you guys are math people-
-you don't care. The point is, I was kind of busy, generally speaking, and it was getting a little bit
down to the wire. Also, keep in mind that the PPDC doesn't have administrative support for grant
submission like you'd get at a major, or even minor, academic center."
"Oh god," Starr says.
"How did you even--" de Silva begins.
"It was hard, Junior Faculty," Newton says. "It was not easy."
"My name is Akiko de Silva," says Professor de Silva, "and I have tenure."
"Oh crap," Newton says. "You look so young and hip though."
"So do you," says de Silva.
"Thank you? Also, touche. I am really a terrible person," Newton replies. "Extremely
hypocritical. This is driven home to me on a daily basis. I blame Dr. Gottlieb for this, he should have
warned me about you. I'm also not tenured faculty. I'm kind of an unemployed dependent right now."
Hermann rolls his eyes.
"You're going to be doing a neuroscience thing, right?" Starr asks.
"Myes," Newton says. "Neuroscience. That is what I will be doing. Anyway, back to 2020.
Everything was going fine until there was a mid-December Category 4 attack on Manila, round two,
ugh, poor Manila, and there was a whole influx of samples that correlated with the debut of Striker
Eureka, and, well, there was a lot of work for both J-Tech and K-Science, and, consequently, there
was a lot of drinking. That 'lot of drinking' happened in a lot of rain, a lot of cold rain, because it
was December, and well, one thing led to another and I accidentally got pneumonia somewhere
around New Year's Day, approximately."
Hermann downs half his beer in a single go, not really inclined to hear any of this recounted.
"All the science was in place for the grant, but I had done none of the literally endless ephemera
required for this sort of thing. You know what I mean. Budget. Site description. Qualifications of the
Principal Investigator. None of it was done. And it needed to get done. So yeah. On one hand, was I
pretty sure I had pneumonia? Yes. Yes I was. I'm very perceptive when it comes to my own biology.
On the other hand, was I pretty sure I could still get the grant done before getting trapped by medical?
Yes. Yes I was. I should also add that you never knew about medical back in the day at the PPDC. I
mean, sometimes, they were perfectly chill, and then sometimes you'd be stuck in quarantine without
your laptop for five days just because you'd been stabbed with a detoxified nematocyst. Anyway, I
went to a briefing on January 2nd, and I do not really recall exactly what happened at said briefing,
but I do recall waking up in the infirmary one hundred percent compos mentis on January 5th with my
grant already submitted and Dr. Gottlieb bedside-vigiling me like a champ and not even yelling at me.
So I most definitely remember thinking to myself that, perhaps, I was not so much of a persona non
grata in Gottliebian ledgers as I had originally thought."
Hermann looks for the memory and finds it, indistinct and fever-glazed, standing at the fore of a
windowless room, losing himself in a biological breakdown, confusing himself over motive, not
certain on what topic he was supposed to be speaking, uncertain who would watch Blue Planet with
Mako if he couldn't, because he couldn't, he can't, he isn't even sure what's happening--
He snaps himself free of another memory not his own.
"--and then one thing sort of led to another. Dr. Gottlieb is very classy, and so that was confusing
for me because he took me out to many expensive dinners," Newton continues, giving Hermann a
significant look, "before I really understood what was happening, but I eventually processed the idea
that he was totally hitting on me and then I did some reciprocal hitting. Metaphorically. He has a thing
for me playing the guitar."
Hermann does not glare murderously at his colleague turned roommate turned psuedosignificant
other.
"Doesn't everyone?" de Silva asks.
Newton performs an obscene roll of an 'r' in de Silva's general direction.
The afternoon proceeds in small, repetitive increments as Newton iteratively ingratiates himself
with the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department in subset by clustered subset. Hermann becomes
progressively more interesting by association. The experience is strange and familiar and intolerable
and welcome and he finds himself almost believing the courtship story that Newton invents for them
out of their shared history, complete with significant shared looks that imply swaths of intimacy--
intimacy that is neither a lie nor what they make it seem.
The only break in the afternoon is Newton's encounter with the Department Chair.
They meet one another unexpectedly, after the sun has gone down, inside, next to the piano that
Newton cannot help but gravitate toward. The Department Chair is flanked by a dark-haired man who
is presumably his significant other, though Hermann has not enquired about their status. The pair's
conversation snaps straight to silence as Newton stops short, eyeing the department's only Field
Medalist with a strange intensity.
They stare at one another for a long moment.
Hermann isn't certain what to make of the palpable tension that rises between the pair of them.
Predictably, it is Newton who speaks first.
"Dr. Rush, I presume," he says.
"The very same," Rush replies. "Dr. Geiszler. What a pleasure. I've been following your work for
quite some time. Both musical and academic."
"Have you?" Newton replies, with a smile that, to Hermann, seems forced. "I can't imagine why."
"I believe we have a mutual acquaintance," Rush continues smoothly. "Does the name Eli Wallace
ring a bell?"
"It does," Newton confirms with a tight smile. "He was in my upper level genetics seminar in
2007."
"As I recall, you flunked him," Rush says archly.
 "As I recall, he deserved it," Newton replies with a tight smile. "Too much gaming will tank an
academic career."
"That depends on the game," Rush replies casually as the man standing next to him gives Newton
a hard look.
Hermann reciprocates with a hard look of his own.
"What an interesting perspective you have, Dr. Rush," Newton replies, "did you, by chance, do
your graduate work at Caltech?"
"Oxford," Rush replies dryly.
"I only ask because--"
"It was terribly kind of you to invite us," Hermann says, breaking in. "We very much appreciate
your efforts to secure Newton a position with the Neuroscience Department."
"Don't mention it," Rush replies.
Hermann clamps his hand shut around Newton's elbow and pulls him away from the piano, into a
bare-walled, shadowed hallway between the fluorescently-lit living room and kitchen. He doesn't
release Newton's arm until they have reached the midpoint of the short corridor. On either side of
them darkness creeps from open doorways like a substance with momentum. Like a substance with
intent.
"Explain yourself. What was that?" he hisses.
"Rush looks like someone I knew," Newton says, his eyes narrowing suspiciously as he looks
laterally, back toward the yellow light of the living room they've just vacated. Light hits his glasses at
an oblique angle and glares off the lenses, making it difficult to see his eyes. "I think I've met him
before. I think I--"
"Will you please drop it?" Hermann hisses.
Newton shifts his gaze. The glare upon his glasses fades to nothing with the changing angle of his
head. His eyes snap to Hermann's face.
Hermann immediately and deeply regrets this change in the focus of Newton's attention.
"You," Newton whispers, almost silent in the untrafficked hall, "told them we were together."
"Er," Hermann breathes.
"You told them we were together together," Newton says, his voice low, his smile knocked askew
by something that looks like good-natured revenge.
Hermann steps back. "I simply wanted to ensure that you were afforded all available advantages
given that you--"
Newton steps closer, which is really not appropriate at all, because Hermann can't retreat--there's
a wall at his back, very solid, very planar, very against his shoulder blades. Newton has totally
disregarded all notions of traditional personal space and is, actually, leaning forward, which
Hermann finds extremely indecorous. Excessively unseemly.
"If you're going to make me your pseudoboyfriend the least you can do is inform me ahead of
time, Dr. Gottlieb, honestly," Newton says, his pitch arcing into mock rebuke. He is standing close,
incredibly close, close enough that there's certainly some heat transfer occurring between the pair of
them, not close enough to touch, not quite, but too close to focus upon. Too close to see in detail, too
close, too dark, too close and dark for Newton's eyes to look the green they are, too dim for the
stainless steel accents on Newton's jacket to catch the limited light that streams laterally through the
almost nonexistent space between them.
Hermann takes a slow breath and tries to ignore the familiar smell of Newton's hair gel.
The focus-problem he's currently having is purely an optical phenomenon but it's a point of
protective perseveration that prevents his thoughts from becoming mired in the heat transfer that's
occurring through the insulation of the air, or the countless variations on the genuine remorse he feels
for leaving Newton uninformed regarding what exactly he had communicated to his colleagues over
other drinks on a different night when Newton had been a circumnavigation of a bay away from him,
half blind, listening to Star Wars in the dark.
This is a terrible idea, whatever it is that Newton thinks he's doing--standing this close, standing
centimeters away from him, one of his boots interposed between Hermann's shoes. The man is doing
this on purpose, Hermann is certain that he is, certain that he knows precisely what he's doing, how
could he not, standing this close and speaking this quietly?
Newton is a terrible, terrifying person.
"I had no idea, you know," Newton says, almost silent and still skirting the edge of the uncanny
centimeters that separate them, his voice a devastating blend of seriousness and irony that Hermann
has no idea how to parse into his real meaning; if real meaning exists at all.
He had no idea about what? Hermann's thoughts demands. What is it he thinks he knows? What
is it that he didn't previously know? He confuses even himself; you should probably ask for
immediate clarification.
He does not ask.
He does not ask because he trusts nothing of this, not the wall at his back, not the heat at his front,
not Newton, certainly not Newton, who cannot be trusted; who grabs his face, his arm, his shoulder,
in thoughtless ease but who has created an eerie interpersonal air-gap that he will not close; who will
start bar fights; who will change keys too often and too easily; who had spent Caitlin Lightcap's
funeral alone in his room playing Black Sabbath and drinking a dead woman's vodka; who had said,
'stay out of the lab in the AM, dude, I'm going to be homogenizing tissue and I know you hate that,'
when, in actuality, he'd spent all night constructing a rig on which to kill himself; who had slid his
tray across a mess hall table in understated terror; who now spends his days fighting a constant,
seaward pull about which he will not speak.
In the adjacent room, someone begins playing an arrangement of LHC on Professor Rush's piano.
"These people are shameless," Newton murmurs, and some unseen bar in the final word shatters
the man's driving, articulative momentum.
"Indeed," Hermann replies, his own voice cracking.
"And yet, I can't blame them," Newton whispers, still neither backing away nor bridging the too
short span that separates them. "I'm pretty great."
"Try to contain yourself," Hermann replies, striving for a dry delivery, but falling far short of the
aridity he would like to achieve because he does not mean the words he says.
He's always envied the scope of Geiszlerian containment failures.
"It's hard for me, a little bit," Newton says, too close, extremely close, comfortably close,
uncomfortably close. "Why didn't you tell me about the whole fake-married thing?"
I didn't think you'd understand, Hermann thinks.
"I didn't think it was important," Hermann says.
"No?" Newton replies.
"You don't like misleading labels. I wanted to--" Hermann runs out of air to shape into his
whisper.
"I know what you wanted. You used our semi-fake relationship to get me a semi-real job,"
Newton murmurs.
"It will become entirely real when you take it," Hermann replies.
 Newton places the tips of three fingers against Hermann's sternum and presses gently,
incrementally widening the gap between them. "Hashtag, 'accuracy'," he whispers, like a secret
shared.
For a brief interval in the dim light Hermann isn't certain what's about to happen, but then Newton
steps laterally, pulling away from him, turning back toward the living room, silhouetting himself
against the glare of day-spectrum fluorescence. He shoves his hands into his pockets, steps into the
crowd, and launches straight into the bridge of LHC with an expansive sweep of open hands through
open air.
Bending charged particles
Shows the way matter is built.
You superconduct
And super collide--
Hermann tips his head back against the dark expanse of wall behind him and shuts his eyes in
abject relief or comprehensive disappointment. Even he cannot say which.
Chapter End Notes
Chapter-specific citations: Hermann quotes Newton quoting some Rilke.
Chapter-specific songs: For this one we have three Supercos songs! From the brain-
freezingly amazing allyspock we have Benzene (music and lyrics). From the terrifyingly talented
friendkingmusic we have An Ancient Curse in the Modern Tradition, (music and lyrics) and
LHC (check out music and lyrics).
Chapter-specific appreciation: Fabulous playlists have been created by rurone, artadjacent,
ladyknightthebrave, biohazardgirl, stoopidsarah, suchaprince, feraltouch and pikalex88.
snailsluck continues to cosplay Supercos!Newt to my endless delight. The outpouring of art has
been totally amazing. sketchlynx has done some beautiful pieces, including Newt-as-Hermann
and Hypothetical Rain. feriowind has done black and white pieces and a totally awesome
unweaving sensory-cortex piece in brain-melting color. n00talart has done an array of
awesomeness, the most notable being the outrageously gorgeous and epically meta fanart of a
fansong based on a fanfic (a drawing of Evangeline). narcomanic put together a stylish, subtle,
tasteful and beautiful album cover for the Supercos Unplugged Album. saltbay has been
producing a steady stream of entirely amazing pieces that range for adorkable to existentially
bereft. dinnsdale penned a ridic charming black-and-white sketch of the tequila showdown from
chapter 25. heliothrone did an intimate rendering of a moment from chapter 10. Oodlesodoodles
crafted an epic Portal showdown which is totally amazing and merits a tumblr fic from CWR at
some point in the near future. If I missed you in this shoutout list, I'm so sorry! It was not
intentional. Message me on tumblr and I'll add you.
CWR has a website now: elementals made it for me! If you go visit said website, you can
find all the art, all the playlists, and all the Supercos songs. In short, all the things with which
you might decorate a digital clean white room. Check it out if you're into that kind of thing.
Chapter 27
Chapter Notes
Warning: Newt does some mild disassociating in this chapter. I don't consider this to be any
worse than anything thus far in the fic, but I thought some readers might like to know this in
advance, particularly because it occurs briefly within the context of romantic activities. So,
tread with care if you think you might be triggered by such a thing. If you're concerned, you can
stop reading at the line: "He had talked to Hwi about this," and then search for "trying to smile in
a casually winsome way." You shouldn't miss any major plot elements by skipping this section.
See the end of the chapter for more notes
The departmental party is winding down.
In the dark of a residential street, a lateral breeze fighting to undo his Randy Waterhouse hair,
leaning against the passenger side of Hermann's Porsche, Newt can almost hear the repetitive scrape
of glass dragged beneath a broom over the cement of a deployment dock.
What are you doing? he had asked her, that first time.
Geiszler, if one has a bottle-breaking penchant, which I have, then one had better also have an
equal penchant for cleaning up broken glass.
How civic minded you are, Lightcap, he'd replied, a dry edged cover for just how much he'd
wanted to do some glass breaking of his own.
Shut up, she'd replied, dropping her broom to hand him a beer.
He'd hurled the bottle straight against the cement, so hard that it exploded into tiny shards, meters
away from them.
Geiszler, she'd sighed. What are you doing. You're supposed to drink it first.
Well you didn't specify, he'd replied.
How am I supposed to sweep beer.
I'll sweep it.
No, you won't. That's not part of it. I am the sweeper. That's how it works. Drink. Break. Sweep.
Sleep.
How what works? How is this a thing? And if it's a thing, then what am I? I've clearly already
involved myself.
Don't question the routine, Geiszler. The routine works. The routine will save your life. If I give
you another beer, are you going to drink this one? You are legal aren't you? Tell me you are.
Um, excuse me--I am twenty-six. And yes. I will drink it.
Oh. Well then. Twenty-six. Good. I suppose that means if I hand you this thing I won't be going
to Hell.
Go to hell? Why would anyone go to hell. Hell, it seems, is more than happy to come to us. Wait
a few weeks and a little piece of it it will crawl straight out of the water. You can strap yourself to
scaled-up metal hominid and literally beat it to death.
I'm going to like you, Geiszler, you baby-faced, bitter little thing. That or fire you. Right now
I'm undecided. Take a seat on my dock. Did no one tell you to avoid me after experiments go bad?
Oh they told me, all right. But I had a thought.
Just one? Unfortunately, you owe me at least one original thought per beer, so you'd better
come up with a something else. A corollary, at minimum."
Your rig, Lightcap, is shit. It's slow, it's full of redundancies, and it drops the resting membrane
potential in the motor cortex like a rock. Thank god you jacked in above most of the brain stem.
My rig. My rig is shit. Well if we're speaking of shit, Geiszler, you were, in fact, hired by me to
look at shit in a dish. So do that, why don't you.
That was thought one. Thought two is that you're going culturally native in a regrettable
capitulation to hierarchical norms that you've surrounded yourself with for the past three years.
You're not military, Lightcap; you suck at pretending you are.
Geiszler, I once fired a man for dropping a beaker.
Lightcap, I really couldn't care less. Fire me. I'll go back to JET Force and when you die,
which you will, I'll apply for your vacant, vacant, oh so very vacant job and, probably? I'll get it.
God, I hope so. Fine. Sex up my rig. You can have Auxiliary Lab Three, four techs, fifty
thousand dollars, six weeks, and me as a test subject. If I find it sufficient, you're promoted. If I
don't, you're fired.
I will trade you four of those weeks if you swap Aux Lab Three for the Secondary Interface Lab
and give me a fifth tech.
I will trade anything for time, she'd said, looking out over dark water.
Newt sighs, crosses his arms, and tries not to regret anything he can't change.
Wave functions collapse; matter decays; the universe expands until the point of total stillness;
biological organisms die and don't die in terrifying ways, but then, that's what terror is, the ultimate
neurochemical slap across the face delivered by evolution for ostensible preservation of life, but
twisted by the prefrontal cortex into all different kinds of interesting shapes that drive their pernicious
way into every arena of existence.
He's good.
He's fine.
He looks at Hermann, who stands across a darkened lawn, silhouetted on a porch against evening
spectrum lights, trying to politely extricate himself from Professor Starr, who is very earnestly and
loudly telling him something about the Critical Line. Hermann is tense and overtired--he's turning too
polite, his shoulders are too rigid, and he's been off balance for the entirety of the evening.
Thaaaaat might be a little bit Newt's fault.
That might be almost entirely Newt's fault, actually.
He had been sure (before tonight) he had been positive, that Hermann likes him best when he is
quiet. When he contains himself. When he is not grandstanding. When he is not shouting. When he is
not using his soapbox. When he is not singing Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots with eleven-year old
Mako and giving her glitter to throw at listening parties. When he is not picking fights with Seattle
natives or Jaeger pilots or scientific competitors. When he is not driving forward with everything he
is. When he is just Newt, working late, chewing on pens, making sarcastic asides during overly long
briefings, sitting down and shutting up and working his way stepwise through the protocols he writes
and refines within the confines of his own head.
But now--Newt isn't so sure that he has the complete picture.
It has occurred to Newt over the course of this evening, and after seeing Herman approximately
eight different varieties of totally flustered within the span of three hours, that the guy, may, in fact,
like Newt's showy defense mechanisms. He may like them in a totally different way than he likes
Newt's occasional moments of restraint. It is so difficult for Newt to tell--when he looks back, into
someone else's memory, at his own episodes of total flashiness, all he sees is someone that he doesn't
recognize from a perspective both foreign and familiar. There's a kid so sleep deprived he's
punctuated an hysterical soliloquy about DNA polymerases with the upending of a blue metal table;
there's a guy with green-streaked hair rocking a post-punk aesthetic and pulling a rollerbladed Mako
straight off her feet and out of an imminent collision with Herc Hansen; there's a man in total torment
screaming at Caitlin Lightcap, pale in her black Interface Suit; there's a person shouting down a critic
under violet lights at a conference in Geneva; there's someone whose nail beds are turning blue mid-
briefing because he cannot breathe; there's someone crouching next to eleven-year old Mako under the
pink and orange lights of a karaoke bar, handing her a tube of glitter; there's someone singing An
Ancient Curse to dark water who is too upset to attend Dr. Lightcap's wake, held half a city away;
there's a shock of crimson blood across the bone-white forearm of some guy who might be dying as
he's pinned to a table, saying, 'on the plus side, I don't think I've been poisoned'; the night is dark, the
street lights are bright, the wind comes from over the water, and a man in a black leather jacket jams
an electrode into something's brain. Newt's examination of this set of exogenous impressions feels
like a violation and grants him nothing but a through-line of confusion and envy and distress and pity
and terror and a genuine, deep, long-standing, complex, unshakable regard.
Newt adjusts his glasses, twists the ball of one foot against the cement of the curb, and tries to
keep his facial expression neutral.
Hwi rolls down a window.
"Hey grrl," Newt says, quietly.
"Hello Newt," Hwi says, equally quietly. "What are you doing?"
"Just waiting," Newt replies.
"Would you like to wait inside the car?" Hwi asks. "It is colder outside than humans usually
prefer."
Newt smiles faintly. "Nah," he says. "That's nice of you Hwi, but it sends the wrong kind of
message."
"I do not understand," Hwi replies.
"Well, if I wait in the car that implies that I want to leave in an expeditious manner. If I wait
outside the car, casually staring at the stars and inverting space and the ocean in my brain, then that
implies that Hermann can take his sweet time discussing vicissitudes of the Riemann hypothesis all he
wants."
"I see," Hwi replies. "Being human seems complicated to me. I prefer to be a car."
"That's good," Newt replies, "because you are a car. I don't know that your carness necessarily
frees you from the snarled complexity of the subjective experience but if it makes 'life' easier, aka
more reproducible and predictable, you have hit the ontological jackpot. Of course, you'll never have
a standard of comparison, unless your consciousness gets transferred into another container for a
while, which could happen, but doesn't necessarily seem likely to me, Hwi, I'm not gonna lie."
"I don't think I understood the full implications of what you just said," Hwi says.
"That's okay," Newt replies. "That's a part of life as well. Sometimes, we never understand one
another. Sometimes we understand fully, but at an inappropriately late time point."
"Ah," Newt says as Heliolatry comes up on Lightcap's late night mix. "Wittgenstein. You don't
have to flatter me quite so egregiously, you know. I have been known to work for beer alone."
"Shut up," Lightcap says, distracted, "this band is awesome. I doubt that you've even heard of
any of the bands I listen to. I'm sure your musical taste both peaks and stops at Green Day."
"I am actually embarrassed for you right now," Newt replies. "Do you have any idea who
fronted this band?"
"Do you?" she asks.
"Yes," Newt says pointedly. "Normally, I would not do this, but you deserve it."
 The verse ends and he breaks in, doubling himself on the chorus. The acoustics in the interface
lab are excellent, and he gets a pretty perfect auditory matching thing going, right up to the point
where Caitlin Lightcap drops a wrench on his chest, drags him off the floor, and takes him
drinking.
"As if, in a collision, I could not calculate the optimal solution for impact avoidance in time, but I
completed the calculation after the impact occurred," Hwi says.
"Hwi, you are not just a pretty face, I'll give you that," Newt replies, crossing his arms and
looking at the house, where Hermann shifts his weight and rolls his shoulders in subtle irritation.
Newt sighs.
"I don't know, Hwi," he says slowly. "What do you think about all this?"
"You will have to narrow the parameters of your question, Newt."
"Did you know that Dr. Gottlieb has been telling his colleagues that we're together? As in,
together together?"
"You are not together?" Hwi asks.
"Well we are," Newt replies quietly. "But not in a romantic way. Yet, I guess, is maybe a
reasonable qualifier to add."
"How is 'a romantic way' different than other ways?" Hwi asks.
"Oh, er," Newt begins, "humans are a little bit weird, Hwi. Like, we give each other presents and
tell each other we are aesthetically appealing and then take off our clothes and press different parts of
ourselves pretty close together for extended intervals and the way that that's done says whole swaths
of things about how we feel about someone, or, in an ideal world it does. It's an alternative to words,
a non-verbal designation congruent with the actuality of things. Humans are always trying to smash
together their subjective perceptions of the world to form these little miniature alliances of selfhood
that can stand for a while against the stochastic cruelty of life. How tight those alliances are and how
long they last depends on a lot of stuff, Hwi, like the personalities involved, the external environment,
and the modes and frequency of communication that the allied parties might employ."
"So it is like driving an intelligent car," Hwi says, "without your clothes."
Newt laughs, and it's quiet and controlled--just an amused exhale really, but it feels like his laugh
and not like something that will end in hysterical weeping so yeah. Magnificence.
"Yup," Newt says. "Pretty much, presuming the car and the driver are equal participants in your
analogy."
"So you and Dr. Gottlieb do not exchange presents or take off your clothes."
"Oh god, Hwi, um, just say 'romance' okay? Romantic activities?"
"So you and Dr. Gottlieb do not engage in romantic activities? But he has represented to his
colleagues that you do?" Hwi asks.
"Well, in some ways, we totally do. I mean, we exchange presents and, according to my definition
of human relationships, meaning the mash-up of subjective worldviews, we have pretty much the
tightest alignment that humans can have. We do not do the part where we take off our clothes, at least,
we haven't so far, and society would tell you that's what really defines a romantic relationship. The
disrobing part."
"So your relationship fulfills secondary rather than primary 'romance' criteria, by societal
conventions," Hwi says.
"Yeah," Newt says. "I'd say it already fulfills my primarily criteria and I'd totally tear off my
clothes and 'go driving' in submission to societal pressures slash Dr. Gottlieb's implied desires
except for one thing. Well, two things."
 "What are those two things?" Hwi asks.
"One," Newt says, looking edgily at the doorway where Hermann stands, "I am bad at the part
where humans take off their clothes, Hwi, I have a terrible track record."
"It does not seem difficult, in the way you have outlined it, Newt," Hwi says, with unmistakable
sympathy.
"Well yeah, but I'm grossly oversimplifying things Hwi. Once you start engaging in the total mess
of biology-meets-society that is human sexual relations, there are certain expectations that arise that I
have not been great at navigating over the course of my life."
"Your algorithms are sub par," Hwi says.
"Ouch. But yes, Hwi, my algorithms suck."
"Why?" Hwi asks.
"Because I've mostly invented them myself. Because I think it may be best to see the behavioral
algorithms that people use to navigate a romantic relationship modeled, but I didn't have a model and
didn't really realize I needed one until perhaps a little bit late, and then I never found one."
"Shouldn't Dr. Gottlieb already be aware that your algorithms are sub par?" Hwi asks.
"Yes," Newt replies, "and I'm pretty sure he is aware of my epic, algorithmic suckage, but the
problem is that him being aware of it does not preclude him being negatively emotionally affected by
it."
"I do not understand your logic," Hwi says.
Newt sighs. "Look, carfriend, it's going to go like this. Dr. Gottlieb has performed or is
performing a cost/benefit analysis of me as a romantic partner. This, like many but not all things in
life, is a binary fate choice. Yes, worth it, or no, not worth it. If he decides no, not worth it, then we
just continue on as we have been, presumably, and everything is great. But if he decides yes, worth it,
then the decision turns around to me, and I have to do the same cost/benefit analysis. But it sucks
more for me, because if I say no, then, probably, we won't see each other as much anymore, if at all,
and that would be horrible. But if I say yes, then I will eventually make him unhappy because I am a
terrible romantic partner I have literally tanked every relationship I have ever been in by a
combination of obsession about the wrong things, forgetting the right things, pretending I'm
invulnerable, and subordinating everything, including relationships, to intellectual pursuits."
"If you are correct, this is a suboptimal position for Dr. Gottlieb."
"Yeah," Newt says, feeling abruptly despondent. "Don't I know it. Make sure you have a good
playlist of super emo romantic era composers for Hermann to listen to when he starts aimlessly
driving around Oblivion Bay in fits of existential unrest, which he has been known to do. No Berlioz.
The guy equates me with some historical figures; it's weird, I don't get it, but Berlioz is one."
"I do not think your logic is sound," Hwi says.
"Trust me, Hermann goes on long, wanderlust-style drives when he feels particularly crappy. You
just wait and see."
"That is not what I mean," Hwi says. "You have stated that you already believe that you have a
romantic relationship with Dr. Gottlieb that does not involve human sexual practices. Furthermore,
you stated that the strength of the subjective alliance between two people depends on communication
between parties but also upon their personalities and upon external circumstance."
"What are you saying, Hwi," Newt replies, smiling faintly. "That you think I should go for it?"
"I am saying that I find fault with your reasoning, Newt. I am not advising you."
"Aw," Newt says.
"You said there were two reasons that you could not tear off your clothing and go driving," Hwi
says. "You have stated only one."
"Myeah," Newt says, tracing the clean line where his fingerless gloves give way to human skin.
"The other reason is that I can't tear off my clothing, Hwi."
"Is your clothing somehow different from other human clothing?" Hwi asks.
"Nope," Newt says faintly. "But sometimes humans make interesting decisions Hwi, not
necessarily inherently bad ones, but decisions that, when combined with life experience, screw
around with their operating systems on a very fundamental level."
"Is there no way for you to default to your original settings?" Hwi asks.
"Well," Newt replies. "Over time, in the absence of perturbation, some humans can return to their
historical baseline. Some can, some can't--it depends on how altered their brains have been."
"How altered has your brain been, Newt?" Hwi asks, in a manner that sounds gentle, even if it is
not meant that way.
"Very altered," Newt whispers. "Very altered," he says again, louder, so that Hwi can hear him.
"Can you not explain these things to Dr. Gottlieb?" Hwi asks.
"He knows them," Newt says. "He knows them all. And that, I am guessing, is why he hasn't said
anything about this psuedoboyfriend thing. Not because it's not important to him, but because it is. He
thinks of me as a melting snowflake, right about now, Hwi; I know he does. And that's probably a
little bit fair, all things considered. I have no idea what to do. Whatever I choose, I'm sure it will be
wrong."
Hwi waits him out for a few seconds while a faintly radioactive wind whistles through American
suburbia.
"I am glad I am just a car," Hwi says.
"Get out of here with that 'just a car' stuff," Newt replies. "Never 'just' a car, Hwi, okay? There is
nothing ontologically inferior about car-ness or goldfish-ness, or any-other-kind-of-fish-ness. Plant-
ness. Insect-ness. Disembodied-brains-in-vats-ness. Stop that immediately. You and I? We're going to
team up to defuse the robot takeover predicted by science-fiction writers for two-hundred years."
"I will need more information about this robot takeover before I join your team," Hwi replies.
"Robot takeover is a figure of speech," Newt clarifies.
"It is not present in my idiomatic dictionary," Hwi replies.
Newt absently pats the door against which he's leaning and then shoves his hands in his pockets.
"What do you plan to do regarding the decision tree you are currently faced with?" Hwi asks.
"I plan to walk around it a little bit and make sure it's really the tree I think it is," Newt replies.
"It is not a literal tree," Hwi points out helpfully.
"And it's not going to be literal walking, either, carfriend," Newt replies. "But right now, I think I
should probably go rescue Dr. Gottlieb from an over-enthused colleague. Do me a favor--when you
get an acclerometric trigger from my RFID chip, power up, lights on, do the whole I'm-about-to-
drive-away deal. Just to be clear though, Hwi, do not actually drive away."
"Certainly," Hwi replies.
Newt crosses the lawn with the wet crush of boots on grass, eschews two out of the three cement
steps leading up to the porch, and inserts himself next to Hermann, who gives him a lateral gaze of
total external neutrality that Newt is one hundred percent certain means thank-you-so-much-for-
rescuing-me-Newton-but-vhat-in-god's-name-has-taken-you-so-long.
"But the zeros of patrician functions in statistical mechanics all lie on the critical line," Starr
says, looking at Newt as though Newt might possibly agree with him. "You're telling me you don't
think--"
 "The Lee-Yang theorem," Hermann says, breaking in, "is at best, dubiously relevant and has been
thoroughly explored as an avenue of approach."
"And it's soo nineteen nineties, man," Newt says, making a serious attempt to hijack the
conversation. "Totally fruitless. Everyone agrees. Even neohipster biologists. So, in other news,
we've got to be going. You guys can map zeta zeros on Monday." He snaps his fingers in a vaguely
Hwi-ward direction and she starts the engine and flicks on her interior and exterior lights with a
deliberately dramatic slow fade up that Newt finds outrageously acceptable.
Hermann shoots Newt an unimpressed look.
"How did you just--" Starr begins.
"I'll thank you to not encourage him," Hermann says dryly to Starr.
"Science," Newt whispers, as Hermann drags him off the porch.
"See you Monday," Starr calls after them.
Newt turns to give Starr a vaguely sympathetic half-wave at exactly the same time that Hermann
also turns to do the same thing. They are going to have to work on this kind of habitual synchronicity.
Newt supposes it's better than cognitive dissonance, but for anyone who's spent hours and hours in
and around a drift apparatus, like, oh, say, Mako, for example, this kind of behavior is going to be a
dead give-away of inappropriate neural solidarity. In order to make the science-twins thing look less
weird, Newt throws in a mock salute in Starr's general direction because hey, when possessed of
weird, semiotic instincts as some kind of residual respect to a father not his own why not subvert
them?
Of course, Hermann, now possessed by vaguely anti-authoritarian tendencies and also an
identical urge to destroy their inappropriate simultaneity of goodbye-wave, does the same thing.
Starr gives them a vaguely perplexed look and then copies their terrible mock salute, like it's a
thing that normal people do.
"Oh god," Newt breathes, in admirably restrained horrified amusement, his whisper cracking
against a grin that's twisting its way free.
"I wish I could blame you for this," Hermann says, through clenched teeth, not specifying what he
means by 'this' while giving Newt a look that could probably remotely ignite a Bunsen burner.
They turn from Starr to Hwi, still unable to decouple their synchronicity.
"Eh, I'd say you could defensibly blame me for fifty percent of it at least," Newt replies,
extremely inclined to be charitable right about now.
"I never used to be eccentric," Hermann says, rounding the car.
Newt has to use all his willpower not to lose his muscle tone and roll around in wet grass
laughing hysterically at how blatantly untrue that pronouncement is and how totally true Hermann
seems to think it is.
He holds himself together, though.
Out of courtesy.
And respect.
"Yeah," he says, trying to breathe and speak at the same time, which is a mistake; it makes him
sound like he's choking. "You were totally normal and boring before--" Newt waits for the car doors
to shut before he finishes with, "I remixed your brain. It's very normal to salute people for no reason,
intellectually attack PPDC Marshals when they piss you off in academic or ethical spheres, file forty-
eight complaints with Human Resources about someone playing music in your workspace, insist on
working in chalk as a medium like a retrosciencehipster, wear the same set of five outfits for ten
years, drive like a fighter-pilot, and have borderline erotic feelings about mathematics as a
discipline. Not even notable. So so normal. You and Raleigh Becket could have been best friends."
Hermann shoots him a pointed look but does not have the chance to respond before Hwi breaks in.
"Dr. Gottlieb, you do not currently meet the legal sobriety standards to operate this vehicle. I have
locked you out of navigational control."
Hermann sighs.
"Aw," Newt says sympathetically.
"Where do you wish to go?" Hwi asks.
"Home," Hermann replies.
Hwi pulls out onto dark residential streets.
No one speaks.
Newt harasses the edge of his thumbnail between his teeth and tries not to feel overtly self-
conscious because why would he even? No reason. Everything's totally normal, they just had a weird
night, and they've had so many weird nights recently, like the ones where Hermann abducted him from
Hong Kong, the ones that Newt can't remember very well but that maybe involved nonsensical
random mental firing of the Geiszlerian variety, the ones where Hermann reads aloud until his voice
is hoarse, the ones that Newt spends in ambitious breakfast preparation with varying results. This
right here is a different brand of weirdness, or maybe not so different after all, maybe all the previous
weirdness has been the same as this weirdness, maybe there's been no weirdness at all, maybe Newt
doesn't know what's happening, maybe he never has; his instincts are terrible, they seem to be totally
academic and do nothing for him survival-wise, or, rather, very little, less than the instincts of other
people do for other people; what's wrong with him? Something's wrong with him, but wrong by what
standard? Newt doesn't know. Hermann has good instincts. Can Newt maybe have some of those,
possibly? Something other than the stupid saluting one?
He glances laterally at Hermann.
The guy has his arms crossed and is looking at the dark sweep of the road like he'd prefer to be
driving down it. He's not saying anything, which is kind of par for the course of the evening and also a
part of what's making Newt uneasy right now. A part. A fraction of the whole uneasiness pie that
Newt has been assembling and baking over the course of the evening, mathematical theatrics aside.
"I told Mako and Raleigh that we were together," Newt says, straight up and unadorned, because
while he doesn't particularly want to have a conversation regarding the whole black box of romance
that might be full of flowers or might be full of the sins of the world, Pandora-style, he doesn't want to
spend a whole bunch of awkward mental effort not having it, either.
Hermann turns to look at him in open incredulity. "Why?" he asks, like he's re-evaluating whole
swaths of things.
"I don't know," Newt replies, abruptly and anxiously defensive, because, er, yeah, Hermann had
committed his misrepresentations for the purpose of helping Newt, while Newt had done his
misdirecting for the purpose of being a sanctimonious dick to Mako and Raleigh.
Thaaaaat sums up everything up quite nicely, his brain says. You are a terrible person.
Even the kids hiss in disapproval.
Hermann is still staring at him like he's an unsolved proof of some kind, and Newt understands the
sentiment but it's totally misplaced because he's just a guy with too much raw processing power and
an impulse control problem and so there's not going to be anything for Hermann to get. Nothing to
translate, nothing to uncover, nothing's going to clarify or resolve or distill down or precipitate out of
the multiple personality disorder that Newt is mixing like a scientifically literate audiophile, no extra
revelations that the guy hasn't already collected, catalogued, and filed away in his perpetually
spinning mental rolodex.
Newt is going to have to say something.
Something else.
Something other than, 'I don't know.'
"Well it's just that I was already sort of loosely classifying you as a boyfriend-variant? Loosely. I
mean, classical boyfriend variant? Probably not, but you did say yes to my whole life-partners
proposal thing, you already said yes to it, and it's not weird or anything, I don't know why you seem
to think it's as weird as you seem to think it is, I mean, I wasn't necessarily implying anything about,
like, undying commitment, though it was framed as a 'life' partners things so it would technically be
bounded by death or dissolution like most conventional relationships, but I didn't really explicitly
delineate any parameters other than apocalypse prevention, in the future, by you acting to inhibit me,
in the event I turned evil, not that I would, not that I'm planning to, I mean I like my species, I like this
planet, I want it to stay extant. Everything. Everyone. Still aliveness. You know what I'm saying,
right? Species preservation, Star Trek, and spaztle. That's our deal right now, and if some pseudo-
relationship-ish type stuff gets thrown in there, or some 'real' relationship stuff gets thrown in there, I
mean, is that even a thing? Like, a thing a thing? I mean, maybe it is. Is it? Would it be? I'd rather
know your personal definitions for what you consider to be acceptable and not weird rather than use
some kind of societal set of standards that might or might not really apply to us as people, slash the
joint managers of weirdly triplicated artifactual consciousnesses. Also? I brought you artisan
chocolate as a present. You bought me a library on rationalism. I made us matching RFID chips.
We're emotionally dependent nerds. A little bit, kind of, or, not at all, really. I mean, we could do
other stuff if you wanted to do other stuff, or not, if you don't. I don't see why any of this is weird, or,
rather, why any particular permutation would be weirder than any other permutation, because the
baseline weirdness is just so high. If anyone is being 'weird' about it it's you, if only for perpetually
expecting something normal and socially recognizable," Newt explains. "I totally covered for you
tonight, pretty flawlessly, honestly, but like, if you're seeking even more normalcy, or something, I can
do that, maybe, I'm actually very good at being very normal, better than you, probably, I mean, see our
entire lives prior to this point if you need an example. You just have to tell me what you want, not
assume I know it via EPIC Rapport because as far as I can tell the best we're getting out of EPIC
Rapport is, like, nausea, unfortunate synchronicity, Freaky-Friday-style brain swaps, and the
occasional long distance, Skywalkeresque mental distress call that might or might not even be real."
Oh yeah, his brain says, with a level of dryness approximating an alien sun baking the crust of a
waterless planet, you tell him, Geiszler.
"I find all of this to be very reasonable," Hermann says, in a way that is vaguely relieved and
unmistakably gentle.
"You do?" Newt replies, totally incredulous, hoping Hermann will summarize what exactly he
took from Newt's string of poorly verbalized thoughts.
"Yes," Hermann replies, like a mysterious badass. A nice one, though.
"Meaning?" Newt says.
"Meaning that we are, indeed, in a unique situation and there is no need to conform to a rigid set
of standards purely for the sake of conformation itself."
Wow.
Okay.
This is an extremely unusual Gottliebian stance.
Newt will take it though. Will he ever.
 It doesn't solve all of his problems, like what to do about the eventual person-on-person romance
activities that might precipitate out of the unresolved sexual tension that's been displacing the oxygen
in the air all night long. Newt isn't positive that they've ever been without it though. The sexual
tension. Because something had always run between them wild and high and strange, cresting at
intervals, receding at others, and no matter their intentions, Newt isn't positive that they will ever
settle out into a predictable, reproducible pattern of human relations, not even now, after spending a
timeless interval mentally homogenized with one another and set against a vast and seductive
collective darkness.
Darknessss, the kids echo with sibilant longing.
Yes kids, Newt thinks. But you have a new team now.
"Yes," Newt says. "Okay. Good. That's what I meant to say, actually. But you knew that. You get
me."
"I would never presume so far," Hermann replies dryly. "You are one of the most
incomprehensible people I have ever met."
"Dr. Geiszler has unusual algorithms," Hwi says, deciding, apparently, that this would be a good
time to interrupt their conversation, "but that does mean that he is, in any respect, inferior to other
humans, especially in matters of--"
"Hwi," Newt says, extremely coolly and sedately. "Stop. Talking. Er, thank you, that's very nice
of you, but--"
"Why would you assume I implied algorithmic inferiority?" Hermann snaps, his eyes narrowing at
the dashboard.
"Cars these days, I mean really--" Newt says.
"Because Dr. Geiszler considers himself--" Hwi begins.
"HWI," Newt shouts in a totally calm and extremely collected manner. "Let's save the
psychological profiling for another time. 'Never' works really well for me."
"Very well, Newt," Hwi replies.
Hermann gives Newt a pointed look.
Newt gives Hermann his most winningly winsome smile. "Hwi and I were exploring ontological
issues while waiting for you to escape from Starr," he says.
"Your assistance was much appreciated," Hermann replies, miraculously and mercifully not
asking follow-up questions, probably because, alas, he doesn't need to.
"Myeah," Newt says, adjusting his glasses, feeling vaguely weird about literally everything that is
happening except not weird at all because why would he, there's no reason to feel weird, so he
doesn't.
Feel weird, that is.
Everything is fine, his brain says, deciding to be supportive for once.
Newt is immediately suspicious that everything is not fine.
Thanks, his brain says. Thanks a lot.
There's a constructively interfering wave function in the air, and it's everywhere, in Hermann's too
careful, excruciatingly kind sentences, in the way that Newt isn't sure where to direct the vector of his
gaze; he's not sure what he usually looks at, other than the Wall, which he can't see, because it's in
darkness somewhere away to the west. He can feel it there always, not the Wall, but what lies beyond
it. It's constantly behind him; he's constantly looking backwards along the axial spin of his pretty little
planet.
All of this is his fault, really, he shouldn't have done so many of the things he did.
 Their constructively interfering waves take on the feel of something standing that oscillates
between them and does not dissipate, not through the five aborted conversations they almost manage
to have as Newt talks them through the drive home and the elevator ride to their floor, touching on
every subject he can think of that seems safe to him, that will allow him to stand there, metaphorical
pen in metaphorical hand, looking at a metaphorical page, but not metaphorically writing anything on
it, not mapping out his Venn diagrams before he must.
Before someone makes him.
Newt walks down the interior hallway of Bayside Towers, trying to distract himself with where
he is, what he is doing, Jedi-hipster-style. He drags a hand along the wall, feeling a little bit like he's
touching the inside of Blaze's brain because someone had thought these walls and rooms into their
current, stacked incarnation, they had existed, Eco-Consciously, in the brain of some architect before
they precipitated out into reality--lead and concrete and wood and lacquer and compressed post-
fracked shale, light metal alloys that had come from the materials science side of J-Tech--where do
they come from, where do they go, where do they fall out, flaking like snow?
"What is the deal with architects though?" Newt asks Hermann. "I don't think variations in style
would be enough to keep me interested in building design. Every time you're going to need a
foundation, four walls, something on top, and a nervous-system equivalent. So boring. If I were an
architect I'd build useful, complicated things that weren't just weird-looking boxes."
"There are two words for what you're describing, Newton," Hermann says, dry and distracted,
"and those words are 'civil engineer'."
Hermann, too, is preoccupied, but whether that's because he's trying not to do any Venn Diagram
tracing or because he's busy tracing away, Newt can't say. For Hermann, this has been, arguably, a
somewhat upsetting day. In temporally reversed order sources of upset could include but would not
be limited to: a) Newt being pretty unexpeditious regarding this hallway walking that is harder than
usual a little bit; he actually drank an eight-thousand percent reasonable amount which was, like, two-
point-five beers with a higher-than-typical alcohol content over the course of three hours, b) Hwi
doing the driving on the way home; Hermann is not into not doing the driving when there's driving to
be done, c) literally everything that happened at the Mathkwardness Party but probably especially d)
Newt's semi-drunken semi-argument with Rush over the nature of polynomial time that he had,
inevitably but gloriously lost despite being cheered on by literally everyone including Rush's
significant other slash mysterious body guard, e) his extremely high profile rendition of LHC, which,
in retrospect, had been a little over-the-top, even for him, because Newt can control his own
showmanship, kind of, most of the time, f) Newt's semi-fake semi-real romantic history but honestly
what had Hermann expected Newt to do when accosted with a surprise relationship status--
"I did not expect anything," Hermann says, pulling out his keys, giving off the same vibe he's given
off intermittently all night, which, if Newt were going to tag it, he'd say: anxiously pissed meets
fondly dismayed.
Newt gives Hermann a horrified look that is wasted because Hermann is not looking at him.
Oh god, his brain says. Now is not a good time for him to develop additional thought-reading
skills or sensitivities.
"Um," Newt says. "What did you think--or, did--" All his sentences are experiencing structural
failure. "I think you EPIC Rapport'd me right there. What are we talking about? Were we talking? I
don't think we were talking. We were talking about architects, I think. I think you might be better than
me at EPIC Rapport. What did you just peel out of my brain? You're confused."
I support you eighty percent, his brain says. You probably did not do any concatenating aloud.
 Eighty percent? Newt replies.
I would take what you can get, his brain says.
Do your job why don't you? Newt snarls back.
Hermann glares at him.
Newt feels slightly offended by this glare. Slightly more than slightly offended. Slightly more than
slightly more than slightly offended. He has spent the entire evening covering for Hermann despite not
being informed ahead of time that that was going to be a thing, and covering really well, actually.
Covering for Hermann with totally glorious rockstarishness in a way that specifically stripped back
some of Hermann's perpetual reserve and made him look more like a person and less like some kind
of two-dimensional ideal of human propriety--
Well, his brain says, when you put it that way, you look like a real jerk, champ.
"No no no no no. What is that look? I do not deserve that look," Newt says to Hermann, before his
mouth catches up with his brain.
Why are you so consistently so bad at relating to other humans? Newt asks his brain.
Hermann pushes the door of their apartment open and drops his gaze.
Tone it down a notch or eight, his brain advises, and go have insomnia behind a closed door for
several days, why don't you. Maybe when you're done with that your relationship dynamic will
have regressed to its mean.
"If we're talking about what I think we're talking about, you totally blind-sided me, dude," Newt
says, following Hermann into the darkness of their shared apartment, continuing to defend himself in
increasing unease and with decreasing vehemence. "What was I supposed to do?"
"Not what you did," Hermann says, removing his shoes.
Well great. This is just great. That could mean so many things and pulling this out of Hermann is
going to be about as easy as going after the guy's teeth with a pair of pliers while blindfolded. He
needs a way to increase his pre-test probability before he just starts lexical hypothesis testing.
Hermann is totally impossible when it comes talking about things that are bothering him; Newt
usually has to find out later, weeks and weeks after the fact, when the guy completely decompensates
over something only semi-related, such as viscera in a shared lab space that was, actually, built for
the express purpose of accommodating viscera.
The hallway faux flirting had, perhaps, been a little bit over the top, somewhat crass, a little bit of
an unnecessary interpersonal perturbation that had felt like totally justifiable revenge but that had less
of that vibe as it continued. Less and less. It had gotten weird, actually, the whole thing had gotten
weird, had been weird, right from the beginning, right from the point they'd walked into that party,
right up until right now, it's still weird, it's--
Hermann, shoeless, makes a quarter turn, and, in a move that is total and perfect reciprocity, puts
a hand on Newt's chest and presses him back against the closed door of their apartment.
Ah Newt's brain says. Revenge. Reciprocal revenge. Revenge against revenge. Except, I think
that's maybe just called escalation? Or maybe he's hunting you. Maybe he's really, genuinely,
infinitely pissed at you for any one of a host of justifiable reasons. Maybe--
"Are you aware," Hermann whispers, "that post your first drift your entire mathematical
framework transitioned from base-ten to base-eight?"
What? his brain asks.
"What?" Newt says, excruciatingly confused about where this is going. Does he seriously think in
base-eight math now? Thaaaaaaaaats a kaiju thing he's pretty sure, that's creepy, that's weird, that's
kind of hot a little bit--base-eight, mod-eight, eight is his maximal setting, that seems so right to him,
he really likes the number eight, he will have to immediately adjust all his Negative Ten to Ten scales
over to Negative Eight to Eight scales except no, he will not do that, that's not a human thing, or is it?
He doesn't know, but eight is great, zero-one-two-three-four-five-six-seven then start over, octal-
style, that's cool, he's cool, what's happening exactly? He'd thought that this was some kind of
turnabout hallway revenge vibe for sure, but the whole base-eight thing has thrown him for a loop a
little bit, because what does that have to do with anything, really?
Hermann is staring at him in a super-up-close and personal way, definitely pushing Newt against
their door, but it doesn't seem like there's a kaiju-style hunting vibe going on here, it mostly seems like
the guy is really anxious about something. Newt is anxious also, but only because he's not totally
clear on how innuendo-revenge, Gottliebian anxiety, and base-eight math might be related.
Help, he thinks faintly, while locked into some kind of infinite loop of the human gaze with his
colleague of years. Of years and years and years. Years. Brain, please help me.
I've got nothing, his brain replies. I cannot explain any of this. Unless--
Do not be coy with me brain, Newt thinks. Now is not the time.
This could be a romance thing. Happening right here, right now. I am not sure how, if at all, the
base-eight math relates to romance, though. Analysis of historical patterns indicates that this is
not typical Gottliebian style, but sample sizes are small and in the setting of EPIC Rapport, I
would say you can count on Gottliebian patterns going at least a little Geiszlerian in
unpredictable ways. So, in short, I'd hold to your present course, which seems to be just silently
staring into his eyes kind of like he's a cobra. His gaze has kind of an unwavering mesmerizing
quality when he's after something in particular, have you noticed this?
Yes, Newt thinks helplessly, yes I have noticed that. A little bit. A little bit I have.
"Well you do," Hermann says, very close, fading into the dark of an unlit apartment.
"I do what?" Newt echoes, eight million percent flustered.
Eight.
Ha.
"Use an octal numeral system," Hermann explains.
Octal numerals, chalk dust in Seattle sunlight, custom midair projection systems, quantum
cartography, haircuts so terrible that maybe they actually looked good? Newt could be into that; Newt
could be into all of it, no problem, arguably he always had been, hadn't he? Does it matter? Newt
does not have high standards, Newt tries to have no standards, Newt actually likes monsters a lot, a
little too much, he always has, really; he's panicking a little bit, yes he is, no he's not, he's not at all,
his brain is sending mixed messages and trying to decouple things that should be connected like intent
and action. He'd better do something, he'd better do it right now, he'd better do something before his
brain and his body become separated secondary to derailing and fragmenting electrical trains of
thought. He has two choices, or, really, three if one counts inaction as an action and everyone here is
going to count that because obviously. He's not sure what would happen if he just, hypothetically,
stood here, staring at Hermann for an infinite amount of time. It would probably be something that
would hypothetically ruin the hypothetically romantic mood; he'd probably stop breathing and faint.
Are you breathing? his brain asks. Right now, I mean? Try not to lose consciousness in the face
of statistical improbabilities. It doesn't send the right kind of message.
YOU ARE IN CHARGE OF THAT DEPARTMENT, Newt screams at himself.
In the back of his thoughts, the kids hiss in concerned confusion.
Three choices.
Three choices.
 Three choices, one of which is to just do what he's doing right now which is staring fixedly at
Hermann until his nervous system overloads. Two is to maybe just kind of do some reciprocal hand-
to-chess pressing and walk away, walk to any location that isn't this one. Three is to grab his arch
nemesis by his stupid sweater and do some hypothesis testing, so to speak.
Well.
Framed like that--he really has only one respectable option.
Assess, his brain suggests. Do one last assessment to make sure that your observations are
consistent with your working model.
Newt takes stock. Yup, he's in a quiet, dark apartment, lit only by the faint glow of streetlights
from below and from the moonlight that reflects off the dark water of Oblivion Bay. His current status
is best described as being pressed to the interior of own front door by Dr. Hermann Gottlieb, his
colleague of nine years, his friend of twelve years, his love interest since never and always. No one
is hunting anyone, no one saying anything, no one is doing anything, they are both just standing here,
staring at one another and waiting.
You are good to go, his brain says, deciding to soundtrack this moment to the chorus from
Enchiridion, like a really pathetic, romantic loser.
Newt is much cooler than his brain.
"Just for your information," Newt says, raising his eyebrows for emphasis as he grabs Hermann's
sweater, "this is not the stupidest thing I've ever done."
He drags Hermann forward a few inches, because if the guy is going to be shoving him against a
door Newt is going to do some reciprocal man-handling of his own. Newt is a little classier about it,
a little more subtle than Dr. Gottlieb, thanks. Newt is basically an anachronistic rock star and that's a
hard thing to be and also be alive, he should list that on his CV in the Notable Skills section.
Speaking of notable skills, Newt is a fabulous kisser.
How could he not be, really?
Kissing is all about a perfect blend of charisma, not being a dick, and paying attention to the other
party, and he's been Hermann Gottlieb, he's been him in an ontological way so, theoretically, there
should be no better kissing experience available to Dr. Gottlieb in the entire world than the one that
Newt is initiating right now.
The key, really, Newt decides, is to be delicate as hell about this whole thing because a)
Hermann is a classy guy, b) Newt could totally be misreading the situation, c) it's easier to rock the
whole no-it-was-just-a-confused-kiss-of-endlessly-platonic-love vibe if there's no tongue, and,
honestly, it may sort of be that vibe, Newt is very unsure about what's happening here, but it will all
probably turn out fine if he doesn't do something totally classless like shove his tongue into
someone's mouth or start taking off someone's clothes or something.
Hypothetically.
Oh god, yeah, no, that would be bad.
So yes.
Newt is rocking the head-tilted, eyes-closed, I-totally-respect-you-as-a-person type vibe as he
and Hermann share some dark communal air and do some very sophisticated, very slow, very
minimalistic, single-perfect-flower-in-a-single-perfect-vase, windblown-sand-erodes-a-desert-rock,
calligraphic kissing that Newt, personally, feels is exceptionally classtastic, minimally scary, and
kind of nice, actually. This probably represents the theoretical pinnacle of Geiszlerian skill meeting
Geiszlerian self-restraint. Newt takes it up one more notch by letting go of Hermann's sweater and
shifting his hands face-ward to a more classically romance-style configuration--
 Or.
Nope.
Because Hermann, either not into the face-touching thing for possibly telepathic reasons or not
into the whole thing for non-telepathic reasons, clamps both hands around Newt's upper arms, and
shoves him back against the door.
Someone's cane clatters to the floor.
Newt makes a distressed sound that he doesn't intend to make because it's just kind of surprising,
really, the whole bones meet door thing, and yet not surprising at the same time. So so so not
surprising.
What had he been thinking.
His eyes snap open and he's already forming a sentence that starts with, 'soooo sorry, er, full
disclosure, I am not sure what--' when Hermann takes advantage of his preparatory inhale to resume
the kissing except this time with a whole lot more tongue being a whole lot more in Newt's mouth.
Oh.
Well okay then.
Newt feels kind of like standing is becoming really hard, he's not good in situations like this, he's
actually terrible at them--running for his life, not starting fights, winning fights he starts that don't
involve words, navigating flux points in kissing kinetics, making rapid, high stakes decisions, doing
literally anything to get himself out of a drift going bad, waking himself up from nightmares, getting
out of the way when nematocysts are about to discharge into his arm, being anything other than a
terrible romantic partner, and, last but not least, managing to continue having coherent thoughts when
his professional arch nemesis turned life partner turned roommate starts doing things like, oh, say--
Hermetically sealing them together from thigh to mid-sternum.
He finds this distracting.
In the extreme.
If he had to make a distraction hierarchy it would probably go something like: a) the aggressive
lingual conflict that Hermann is winning, if people even can win at kissing, Newt's not sure if that's a
thing that humans can do, but if it can be done, then Hermann is doing it and Newt is fine with that,
kissing is not a zero sum game and they're on the same team, he's pretty sure although he does feel a
little subsumed beneath the conflagration in his peripheral circuitry, b) the whole fully clothed, full
frontal press thing that they are reciprocally rocking, it's kind of hot, thermally and metaphorically,
and also kind of frictional, c) the amazingly Captain-Kirk-style grip that Hermann's got on his upper
arms, d) the amazingly Neo-de-la-Matrix-style bilateral countered hip slash lower back gripping that
Newt is doing, e) what is this list even.
This state, his current one, this one right now, is not a state in which Newton Geiszler of the sub-
par social skills and remembered monster gills is going to be able to think very clearly or really do
anything other than reciprocally step up his own glossal game.
Which is fine, yes?
Totally fine, his brain affirms weakly, threatening to abandon ship in the face of complete sensory
overload because it's been a while since Newt has done anything like this, where by 'like this' he
means using his reproductive system to have a good time. Generally speaking, this kind of thing is the
kind of thing that doesn't appear on his radar, but he can see why people get into it, he supposes.
There's a certain cathartic value to physical perturbation with people one likes, or people that drive
one about eight kinds of crazy--
Eight.
 "Base-eight?" Newt manages to breathlessly articulate in a maximally provocative manner.
Apparently, Hermann thinks that numeral systems other than base ten are really attractive.
"You're a terrible person," Hermann breathes, finally shifting his grip and threading his hands
inside Newt's jacket. "I despise you. Everything you said was true."
Was it? Newt tries to ask, but can't because he's being kissed pretty intensively again, nearly
incapacitated with inverted deja-vu because, yes, this is indeed Hermann's style that he's on the
receiving end of--ridiculously committed, totally invested; now that their equilibrium has been upset
everyone is sliding down into whatever fire Hermann's been feeding for years. The guy kisses like he
drives, too fast, very precise, slightly scary, and it's really confusing and not at all fair; Newt is
supposed to be doing this, he's the live-fast-die-young-and-formalin-fix-your-corpse guy out of the
pair of them, isn't he? He's not sure. He has no idea, actually. Maybe that's not him. Maybe that's
partially him. The only thing he can say with certainty is that right now he's pretty sure he's the one
who is too overwhelmed to move and who would probably be lying on the floor (lying on the floor) if
he wasn't being mostly held up by an excruciatingly sextacular perpendicular force vector.
Hermann strips Newt's jacket back over his shoulders, and Newt obligingly allows him to peel it
off. He loses his left glove in the process, and he can feel it invert slowly down the length of his hand
as it comes off with the jacket to land at their feet.
Newt's fingertips run along the line of Hermann's jaw, tracing toward his temple.
"Can I--" Newt manages to say, or maybe think; he's not sure which it is, but really, the kissing is
nice for a human who likes human things, and er, yes, he is a human, and he does like those things, the
heat and the friction and the mouth action is all very well and good and distracting to the point of
perturbing his autonomic nervous system into status total overload but, for sure, the most scorching
element of this, for him, will always be the experimental angle, the telepathic, brain-versus-brain
side of things.
Hopefully the experimental angle doesn't kill him or drive him insane.
It might be worth it, his brain suggests.
Are you out there, kids? Newt thinks faintly.
The local kids hiss back at him, unusually subdued and very interested in human sexual practices.
This is new for them.
It's a little bit new for Newt as well. He's never been with a guy he's been.
"You may not," Hermann breathes like the swish of a ruler, pulling Newt's dress shirt out of his
jeans and Newt's hand away from his head. "Avoid provoking catastrophe, will you please? I'm trying
to have a reasonable evening, Newton."
"This is a reasonable evening?" Newt asks, kind of, managing to form words despite all the
metaphorical lane changing that Hermann is doing what with the kissing and the hands on skin thing.
Should there be any skin contact if Hermann is not into the telepathic angle right now? The spinal
cord is probably a good thought insulator but the whole telepathy angle is new for them, possibly
evolving, poorly understood, potentially rife with unexpected side effects so it follows that Newt is
really not sure what he should be doing with his hands now that empirical adventuring has been taken
off the table, so he settles for some extremely classy hand over sweater positioning that will hopefully
slow things down because, honestly? His colleague seems to be about a half step away from ripping
Newt's clothes off and tackling him to the floor and while Newt is currently in possession of a lot of
escalation instincts, a lot, he's not totally convinced that this is a great idea. Experimental thought
reading is one thing. Cuddling while watching Voyager is another thing. Traumatizing identity swaps
are yet another thing. Hermann nicely arranging Newt's hair while reading him Neuron is also a
different thing. But this--
He had talked to Hwi about this.
This is a bad idea maybe, his brain says, sounding uncertain. People do not like you. You are a
bad life partner. You are a worse romantic partner. Arguably, you have never successfully
navigated a long-term romantic relationship. As a friend, you are semi-tolerable for some people
who have been forced to spend time with you for various reasons. As a human, you are useful. As
member of society you are productive. As a member of your species, you are exemplary. As one half
of a romantic relationship with Hermann Gottlieb, you may be a miserable failure. You do not
enjoy sex enough for this to be worth it.
Hermann pulls off Newt's tie and it vanishes somewhere into the dimness of his peripheral vision.
All of these are good points, Newt replies, having a hard time thinking critically as he loses the
battle with his escalation instincts and pulls Hermann's stupid blue sweater over his head and yanks
his dress shirt out of his pants because reciprocal undressing seems like the thing to do.
Undressing.
Undressing.
He had decided that was not a good plan.
Hermann pulls his glasses off, in a careful, slow slide.
Newt finds this unspeakably hot for some reason.
The room blurs further into darkness.
On the other hand, his brain continues, back on board with the way things are going, it seems like
your colleague has been, possibly, wanting to do this for some length of time so maybe you should
just go with it, because his happiness level is important to you.
Hermann tips Newt's head back with a gentle pressure beneath his chin and starts kissing a
random-walk pattern along the path of Newt's longitudinal neck musculature and er, yes, that's strange,
the kids aren't into that, or maybe they're really into it and kind of hoping for biting to happen? Newt
isn't sure, it's weird, he feels weird, he feels like he's not sure about the gravitational force vector
that's pounding him into the ground like a semi-actualized, semi-sexual metaphor, wherever the
ground might be or whatever the pounding might equate to? Biology. Chemistry. Physics.
Mathematics. Everything comes back to mathematics in the end and mathematics is inherently
unknowable, partially, that was what had driven Godel insane. That's been Hermann's problem all
along, a little bit, on different scales in different fields in different brains--
Hermann fractionally decouples the apposed edges of Newt's shirt by releasing the button at his
collar.
This is, his brain says, contemplating panic but, as sometimes happens, just not quite making it all
the way to panic and getting hung-up, mid fight-or-flight response with a waterfall of activation and
Newt thinks that maybe one day he'll just get pulled under the riptide of the self and never come back
up or if he does come back, if he does, it won't be as himself it will be as something else.
What happens to a fraction of a hive mind?
This is maybe not the best, his brain says, managing to finish its thought over and through the
forest fire in his peripheral nervous system.
Newt feels as though he's losing all the middle ground he has, his only open options are turning
absolute--ripping Hermann's still-buttoned shirt straight down its line of least resistance and tackling
the guy to the ground or starting to scream in total human-relations-induced panic because this isn't a
good idea, he never manages to have sex with someone and then continue to associate with them,
what is he doing, what is he doing what is he doing? What is he doing. Does he want to do this? If he
doesn't, who here does? Does anyone? Does Hermann? Does he think Newt wants this? Does Newt
want it? Is there an origin to this positive feedback loop or does it just exist in eternal amplification?
Was its origin hours ago in that hallway with faux-flirting that had turned progressively real? Because
it's endpoint is going to be a system overload where circuits fuse and fail.
Dear Mako, Newt thinks. I need to come live with you because I am homeless and insane.
Hopefully this will not cramp your style. Love, Newt.
Hermann undoes another button, and Newt knows why he's doing it; it's because he knows Newt
likes it, has always liked it really, from the time he was eighteen in Prague and presenting, only once,
at a Biomedical Ethics meeting, it's weird to have a one night stand at an ethics meeting, he's pretty
sure about that, maybe. What is morality, anyway? But that's not the point, the point is that Hermann is
better at this than he is, unfairly better, too good, much too good, Newt is just trying to stay conscious
and not totally panic in a very mood-killing way, it's not a fair comparison--one person totally suave
and confident and the other person caught between freaking out and passion in a space where only
thoughts but no actions live.
That space has a name, his brain says. And I'm pretty sure that name is Hypoxia. You have not
been breathing for whole spans of seconds.
His entire body is a confusing shriek of sensory signals mixing into paralyzed indecision and he's
not doing anything now, he's losing track of more and more as the hissing in his thoughts grows louder
in concern or in conquest.
"Newton," Hermann says concerned, stepping back.
That's nice, Newt thinks vaguely as his perspective shifts. Hermann isn't pushing him against the
wall anymore and the direction of gravity is pretty clear to him now. He gets me.
"Newton," Hermann snaps, stepping forward to help him not slide down the wall.
Terrible job, his brain offers. Really really terrible job.
"No," Newt says thickly, getting his feet under him and steadying himself with both hands on
Hermann's shoulders. "Yes. Er, I--" he breaks off, not sure what to say.
Hermann is giving him a maximum wattage, incisive-style look that Newt finds extremely
attractive and also totally terrifying in his current set of circumstances.
Newt looks back at him, thinking about trying to smile in a casually winsome way but not quite
getting to the point where he actually starts forming that facial expression.
Hermann sighs, gives Newt a look that might best be described as 'pained fondness', wraps a hand
around the back of Newt's neck and presses their foreheads together.
Newt can feel the pressure of the other man's thoughts behind the threatening unweaving of his
entire sensory experience.
"I do not think, Newton," Hermann says, "that you need to hear me say this, but I will say it
anyway. I will not leave."
Newt shuts his eyes because they feel really hot to him just right now. He can't say anything in
response to what's come out of Hermann's mouth, because there's nothing left to say, only a
thoughtless, childish jerk would say, 'you're lying,' or 'you will, I'm sure you will,' or 'everyone does,
you think you're special in some way?' Only a child equates death with abandonment. Only children
do that. Not Newt. Newt doesn't do that. Newt, in fact, never even did that as a child, when it would
have been understandable. Past-Newt had decided not to be a child and had moved half a world away
from everyone he'd known because it didn't matter who wanted him or who loved him or who didn't
love him and how much. Newt loves other people and Newt does not need to be loved back for that.
Reciprocity is great, but Newt is fine, Newt is fine, with just loving the people that he loves whether
or not they love him back, whether they're smart or whether the secret desires of their hearts amount
to killing themselves in Jaegers, whether or not they accomplish all it is they want to do during the
time that the universe is hosting their waveforms. Newt does not need to hear Hermann say anything.
Newt does not need to argue with him in a closet search for additional reassurance.
Newt does not need that.
Newt will be fine either way--on his own, or as a whole half of an infinitely interesting human
relationship.
So, all he says is, "I think you're better at reading thoughts than I am. Discuss."
"You will never be rid of me," Hermann says, managing to gently tune into the vibrational
frequency of all Newt is, even when Newt is distorting his own signal. He threads his hands into the
small space between them to re-fasten the top two buttons of Newt's shirt. "Unless, of course, you
wish it. Even then I'm unconvinced that disentanglement would be entirely possible. But you have
only yourself to blame for that."
"EPIC Rapport'd," Newt whispers.
"Indeed," Hermann says quietly, smoothing Newt's collar.
Newt needs to fix this. Newt knows exactly how it feels to sit amongst something unmade by his
own hands and not be able to put it back together. This really, this can't, this really just cannot
happen here. He just--he just needs to explain everything, he needs to articulate all the ways in which
him freaking out mid-clothing removal,is not a rejection of something that had been wholeheartedly
offered by a guy who really does not do a whole lot of wholehearted offering of stuff.
"It's not that I--" Newt begins, but doesn't finish, because how could he? He is not himself, his
mind is not just his mind, quiet kaiju kids are hissing in his thoughts, wanting him to fail, wanting him
to succeed, not knowing what they want, but him screaming on the floor would be a good start, yes it
would.
"You are approximately as predictable as the atmosphere," Hermann says, not backing off, moving
from fixing Newt's collar to fixing his hair with careful unconfining finger combing. "Endlessly
interesting. Profoundly perturbable. A constant source of stress."
"You're really great," Newt replies. "I--I have no idea what just happened there--I mean, I could,
if you wanted to, we could--I find you very attractive in a complicated way and I always have I
think, even before I actually met you, so, you know, make of that what you will."
Kill me now, kids, he thinks. If you're going to do it, do it now.
The kids hiss back at him in confusion.
Hermann says nothing; he just stands there, still super close, still fixing Newt's hair over and over
again in the exact same way every time, probably thinking about whole sets of things at speeds Newt
lacks the chronometers to clock.
He feels like he should apologize for all the initiating he's done of things he clearly cannot handle-
-like xenodrifts on garbage rigs and stupid hallway flirting.
"The problem with you," Newt replies, his fingers pressing down into Hermann's shoulders, "is
that one day you just decided to start calling my bets, round after round."
"I am less risk averse than I might appear," Hermann replies.
"I feel like maybe--" Newt whispers, trying to look at nothing, bringing a hand up to take in the
space between them, everything he's done, all the ways their brains have changed, everything he
cannot quite do, not because he doesn't want to, but because his bones and his brain and everyone
who lives and loves in his skull can't quite let go of the damage making them all that they are. "I feel
like maybe I've totally destroyed, or if not destroyed then altered everything that you might have ever
done--I mean, I would love to tear off your clothes right now, don't get me wrong, I just can't let you
reciprocally tear off mine for really complicated, weird reasons that have nothing to do with how
attractive you may or may not be, which is very attractive, as I previously mentioned, or how good a
life partner you are and you are like the best. You are like the theoretical ideal except for the
sweaters, I have mixed feelings about those, and your gratuitous enjoyment of acceleration."
"Are you finished?" Hermann murmurs.
"Yes," Newt says.
"I doubt that," Hermann replies.
"No, seriously. You go."
"This outcome, this precise outcome, is orders of magnitude superior to outcomes I envisioned,
both pre and post drifting. If it takes you years to decide that sleeping with me will not entirely
destroy our extremely unusual relationship, if you never decide that--"
"Um, excuse me," Newt says, unable to contain himself after seeing an avenue by which
something might be rebuilt, possibly in a superior manner, "look, I have to break in here because I am
planning start sleeping with you immediately. Today. Like, not metaphorical 'sleeping' where
'sleeping' is some social code word for 'sex' but actual sleeping, or, alternatively, staring silently into
the darkness, full of ontological and maybe a little bit of epistemological dread. Look, just to be clear,
I presume that we can eventually get all the way to conventional relationship territory, by which I
mean, to be clear, having sex, given enough time sans near-death experiences, sustained mutual
interest, and maybe with the judicious use of blindfolds? That sounds a little bit inappropriate, now
that I've phrased it like that; it sounded better in my head. Maybe you should just read my thoughts.
Actually, never mind, I'm not sure that's a good idea right now. I kind of wonder what happens when I
turn on my terminal, so to speak. Like, is it just you picking things up? Or might the real kids be
picking things up also. I mean, I don't think so, because of my skull, but like, it's within the realm of
possibility that the square root of two is a hot formaldehyde-cooler topic these days in the local
network. Why am I talking about this now? I have no idea. My point is maybe I could be better, as
like, a life slash romantic partner? But I'm probably not your worst possible option. I'm probably in
the top fifty percent, even with my current inability to separate myself from my clothing taken into
account. I could really see myself as being almost perfect for you but then tragically orchestrating
your downfall, kind of like a film noir leading lady except where science is a stand in for the typical
motivations, like money, past love, that kind of thing. Why is it always the male scientists who go bad
in terrible sci-fi movies? Probably I'll just die; like, I see myself dying from neural overload under
the pressure of foreign influence before turning evil. Like, I just don't see the hive mind, especially in
it's local, limited incarnation, as really being capable of the subtlety that would be required for
'turning evil'. Do you? Cognitive overload leading to excitotoxic cell death? Now that I could see.
Easily. So, ethically, it's probably okay for you to date me. If someone needs to kill me, get Mako to
do it. Er, actually, you should probably ask Becket. I just feel like before we start a relationship
where there's even more emotional attachment than already exists, which is a lot, that we should
decide who is going to kill me if I turn evil, because it really shouldn't be you. I feel very strongly
about that. On your behalf. Likely, I won't care at the time, because I'll be evil."
You might want to stop talking, his brain suggests. You might also want to check in with me
before you say anything else besides the word 'sorry'.
Yeah because you're so helpful, Newt replies. So so helpful.
"Sorry," Newt says. "I'm just looking out for you. In a Manichaean way. Like everyone does. For
their significant other. Real significant other? Pseudosignificant other?"
 "Real," Hermann says, still doing the hair-fixing thing. "You seem quite anxious."
"What gave it away?" Newt asks weakly.
Hermann doesn't reply, instead he says, "I will, of course, sleep with you. I will not discuss who
will kill you in the event that you become a danger to our species."
"Okay," Newt says. "That seems fair. Contingency homicide planning for no one, communal
Raising of Estimated Sleep Tallies for everyone."
"REST?" Hermann says dryly.
"Acronyms make everything better. They reduce awkwardness. Like, oh hey, want to jack an
electrode into a guy's brain? That's a little bit invasive, but hey, just throw in some capital letters and
make a Latin bridge-related pun and all of a sudden everyone's signing up. Seriously though, you have
no idea how intensively I have been working not to invade your personal space. For years. Years and
years."
"Your efforts have been mediocre at best," Hermann says.
"Well yours have been a dismal failure, albeit a recent one," Newt replies, leaning slightly into
the hair fixing that's still happening. "I don't mind; it makes me feel microbiologically privileged."
"Please do not elaborate," Hermann says.
Newt, very courteously, does not elaborate, he just nods, he just stands there, not saying anything
stupid, getting his hair fixed over and over again, trying to decide if he can back date his current
relationship into the past, and if so, how far. This afternoon, when he had stepped up to the boyfriend
plate like a human relations rockstar? A week ago, when they'd had their first Star Trek: Voyager
date? Four weeks ago, when Hermann had told UC Berkeley that they had some kind of legal status
and they'd both signed the same lease--Hermann illegibly and fluidly, Newt legibly and laboriously?
Five weeks ago, when Newt had used Hermann's toothbrush? Six weeks ago, when they'd drifted?
Two years ago, during the Fire Cracker Sake Incident and its associated drunken and experimental
make out session that Newt can kind of remember from two different but equally inebriated
perspectives? Six years ago, when Hermann had done Newt's paperwork for the first time? Nine
years ago, when they met, with their stupid hair and their stupid cheekbones? Twelve years ago when
Newt had fired a letter into the dark tangle of humanity's sprawling, evolving neural net? He's not
sure. He decides on the toothbrush time point, because if he picks that one, that already makes this his
most successful relationship ever.
And that's a win.
Hermann pulls Newt's glasses out of his pocket, where he had, apparently, stashed them while
Newt was busy being distracted.
"Don't move," he says, sliding them carefully into place.
I love you, Newt thinks, while Hermann's fingertips brush over his temples. If you're reading
random thoughts, read that one.
Hermann says nothing, he just gives Newt a look that seems to wordlessly communicate the
sentiment of, 'I know'.
Newt thinks about Star Wars too much, possibly.
"True," Hermann murmurs. "Star Trek is vastly superior."
"You are the better thought-reader," Newt says, in composed accusation, Princess-Leia style.
"At a first approximation, you may be correct," Hermann replies.
Newt drops his gaze. "Too bad the drift doesn't homogenize complex feelings and histories to a
shared, simplistic perspective. Otherwise, we could have started banging one another immediately."
"Charming," Hermann replies dryly, retrieving the jacket and the cane from where they are lying
on the floor. "You are much too complicated, oblivious, and distractible for any such course of action
to have even a remote chance of success, even in the case of a conventional drift." The cane, he leans
against the wall; the jacket he hangs in the closet after separating it from the glove still trapped in its
sleeve; the glove he passes, wordlessly, to Newt.
Newt yanks it into place.
"Well thank you, Dr. Gottlieb, I am, of course, terribly flattered."
It is not for hours, not until Newt is watching Voyager slantwise, his head in Hermann's lap and
his hair fixed into total submission, that Hermann, his eyes on the English translation of Descartes'
Meditations that Newt must have read eight times by now, speaking over B'Elanna Torres eating
banana pancakes, says, "I confess I have been wondering, Newton, how is that you're able to change
your clothes? How are you able to shower?"
Newt is so relaxed and the paired questions are so delicately asked that he manages to go straight
to abstracting the intent behind them, without dwelling on the complicated iconography that he's
needled into his dermis and the implication that he cannot look at that which he has put on his body.
Geiszler, she'd sighed, leaning close to him under dim lights. Why are you doing this?
Newt can feel the remembered sting of an oscillating needle gun, depositing dye beneath the skin
of his right bicep.
Why are you sealing your brain into on experimental rig once a week, he'd fired back. You have
a nice brain, Lightcap.
You had a nice arm, she'd replied. That wasn't an answer.
He'd never given her one.
She hadn't asked him again.
When he thinks of himself, he imagines his skin clean, not draped with a multi-hued dream coat
that cannot be removed.
"I close my eyes," Newt says.
Chapter End Notes
Chapter-specific citations: Newt paraphrases Yoda ("where he is, what he is doing") and a
line from Pacific Rim ("he knows them all").
Chapter-specific songs: For this one we have two Supercos songs! From the amazing
allyspock we have Heliolatry (music and lyrics). From the talented Friend King and allyspock in
combination, we have Enchiridion, (music and lyrics).
Chapter-specific appreciation: Since the last chapter came out there has been a crazy amount
of amazing, creative work. I try to keep track of all of it with the invaluable help of elementals,
but if there are any oversights, I assure you that they are not intentional, let us know and we will
rectify the situation. Fantastic playlists with lovely cover art and witty titles have been made by
feraltouch, pikalex88, allyspock, screechthemighty, alamaris, saltbay, amatyultare, josma, and
the bibliovore, ladyknightthebrave, and the psychoticchef. Adorkable cosplayers include
snailsluck, pikalex88, ninjaninaiii, and of course, shiftingpath who was, as it was pointed out to
me, actually the first Designations cosplayer, (apologies there!). As for art, we have an array of
fabulousness from ninjaninaiii (including an awesome rendition of Hwi and Carl), a lovely
pencil sketch by thequestionmarked, a gorgeous set of images and iconography from the ever
talented narcomanic, from n4ut we have two amazing pieces including moveable blackboards
and some totally gorgeous comic panels of the hallway scene from the previous chapter, an
awesome Rolling Stone cover and some bookshelf-related unease by kepler-78b, from
rritchiearts we have an album cover (love it) and piece of yellow and purple magnificence
featuring Newt manhandling some Scotch, mystradedoodles has crafted a set of adorkable
science-couple moments with extreme unremitting skill, heliothrone did an amazing rendering in
black and white of the telepathy moment, saltbay and baysalt continue to be a single person
producing a typically merciless combination of existential unease and stuff that turns my heart to
goo (like Chinese food and Voyager, for example), newtongeyser did a sasstastic pencil sketch
complete with shades and dinner-related unrest, groovy-tiger rendered the #accuracy scene in
some blue-tinged amazingness, glassvines drew an array of excessively adorkable Newt,
moona-mcjune-a drew a hilarious black and white comic panel as well as Newt and family, by
which I mean the kids, by which I mean Newt with the thought-construct kids, by which I mean
it's delightfully creepy, the psychoticchef did a lovely rendering the Newt & Mako phone
conversation in pencil, complete with scalpel and sterile field, jeremyjohnirons did another
amazing piece this time of the hallway scene where Newt's jacket is not to be missed, and
sketchlynx did a fabulous portrayal of the theoretical endgame of perfectly applied puns,
protractors included. Whew. I hope I got everyone! I appreciate all of the amazing collective
creativity that has been happening. You guys are amazing and I'm so glad you're having fun. If
you want to find all this art in one place, check out the website that elementals made. It's here.
A Coda In Two Parts
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
A Coda
They arrive in the rain, stepping out of a strangely talkative taxi cab, Mako pulling her scarf tight
over her hair, Raleigh raising the hood of his jacket to hide his face while scanning the streets for
cameras and reporters.
He doesn't see any.
That makes sense, because Mako Mori and Raleigh Becket are currently in Hong Kong.
Masako and Ray Lapierre are the ones vacationing in San Francisco.
"Did you see any?" Mako asks, very quietly, in Japanese as they pull their luggage out of the back
of the cab.
"Nah, babe," Raleigh replies, with an affected drawl, settling his bag over one shoulder and
hauling their shared suitcase to the curb.
Mako makes a face at him, cocking her head to the side and briefly sticking out her tongue as she
shoulders her bag and slams the trunk of the cab closed.
They stand, hesitating in the rain for only a few seconds, looking up at the exterior of Bayside
Towers.
Of course those nerds would live here, Raleigh thinks. Could one get more supervillain? If one
tried? Really hard?
"Ominous," Mako says, in English, studying dark, rain-glazed windows against a gray-white sky.
"I think this place is lined with lead," Raleigh says. "So is every building in this zone. That's what
tints the windows."
"Why are we standing outside?" Mako asks pointedly.
They pass through a locked door with a pre-arranged code, walk through a windowed lobby, and
step into an elevator.
Raleigh pulls his hood back. He watches as Mako removes her scarf and sunglasses, runs hands
over her hair, and then stares impassively at the elevator door.
Her fear is his fear.
Her dread is his dread.
He says nothing to her, because there's nothing he can say. Instead, he reaches over and straightens
the collar of her red blouse beneath the outer shell of her black jacket.
She looks at him.
"You look good," he says.
She smiles.
He smiles back at her.
"What if--" she whispers.
"What if?" Raleigh echoes, equally quietly, when it seems that she isn't going to finish. "So what."
He hopes that his nonsense words encompass all that he's said on planes and in hotel rooms, in
dressing rooms, on beaches. We'll make it work, Mako. We'll always make it work, you and me.
We'll take what we can get and we'll make it into what we need, like we always have.
She smiles at him again.
Raleigh really hopes that none of what he's read about Geiszler is true.
 He hopes it because he'd hope that for anyone; he hopes it because he can't stand to see Mako hurt
any more than she's already been hurt; he hopes it because sometimes, in his dreams, Yancy turns
dark-haired and snarky and soon enough it's Geiszler that he's fighting in that bar in Anchorage with
upended tables and shards of glass that turn to shards of words they never were; he hopes it because
sometimes, when he dreams as Mako, it's Yancy who shows him how to tune a bass.
The elevator opens and they walk down a silent, empty hallway. Mako's hands are closed around
the strap of her bag. Raleigh rolls their suitcase noiselessly over a floor that's gray and made of
something synthesized.
They stop in front of the door.
Mako looks up at him.
It is Raleigh who knocks.
Geiszler swings the door open, one hand on the doorframe, and raises his eyebrows at the pair of
them. He's dressed in a green sweater pulled over a white button-down shirt. He looks like a nerd and
stands like a rock star and Raleigh can't decide if he wants to punch the guy or give him a hug.
"Oh," Geiszler says, feigning surprise like a guy without brain damage, "were you people coming
today? I--"
That's as far as he gets before Mako's bag hits the ground and he gets tackle-hugged.
Raleigh feels for him.
Mako hugs are intense.
Geiszler staggers back a step and loses his balance. Unfortunately for him, there is no pity in a
Category Five Mako Mori hug, so she doesn't stabilize him; she just lets him drag her down. The only
help she gives him is the quick shift of her right hand from a cross shoulder grip to come up behind
his head so he won't crack his skull against the floor.
"Mako," Geiszler says, and that's a tactical error. Raleigh knows from experience that people
need to hang onto their oxygen during a Mako hug. It's best to just stop fighting and politely remind
Mako that one needs to breathe.
Dr. Gottlieb appears from behind a closed door, shoots Geiszler an unimpressed look when the
guy uses his remaining air to gasp, "help," skirts the whole thing happening on the floor, and extends
his hand to Raleigh.
"Mr. Becket," he says.
"Dr. Gottlieb," Raleigh replies, shaking his hand.
"Such formalities are hardly necessary," Dr. Gottlieb says, waving a hand in a manner that is
significantly more laid back than Raleigh remembers. "Welcome to San Francisco."
"Thank you," Raleigh says. "Call me Raleigh," he adds, but it comes out more like a hope than a
directive.
Dr. Gottlieb nods.
Mako lets Geiszler go, rocking back on her heels, wiping her eyes.
"Maks," Geiszler coughs weakly, both hands extended in her direction.
Mako steps back, braces her foot against the edge of Raleigh's boot, helps Geiszler to his feet in a
rapid pull, and then steadies him.
Raleigh watches her face close down into neutrality as she realizes that the man needs steadying.
Dr. Gottlieb pulls a handkerchief out of a pocket and hands it to Geiszler.
Geiszler presses it to his face. "Maks," he says. "Give a guy a little warning, will you please? I'm
slightly less scrappy than my historical baseline and you're like a sixteenth degree black belt or
whatever it is that you are."
 It takes Raleigh an infinite, fractional second to realize that the man is bleeding.
He snaps his gaze to Mako. He tries not to, but he can't help it.
She looks back at him.
He can't remember if he's seeking or providing reassurance, but, really, it doesn't matter because
there's no reassurance to be had; this is the kind of look exchanged by people standing on cracking
ice.
Her eyes lock back on Geiszler.
"You are sick," she says, her voice painfully tight. "You should have told me."
Geiszler does look sick. All the subtle wrongs that Raleigh now sees seem new and sudden even
though they aren't. Geiszler had looked sick since he opened the door--sick and tired and not the right
height. Raleigh remembers him as being tall, but that's because his recent drifts with Mako have pried
up memories from two childhoods, where Geiszler and Yancy strode through halls and fields and labs
and city streets while he struggled to keep up.
"Meh," Geiszler says, with impressive unconcern. "I don't know about 'sick', Maks. I have a
venous plexus in my head somewhere that really despises me and a bone marrow in status:
compensatory overdrive. My neurologist is on the fence about a possible seizure disorder, but I feel
like she's a little bit of a counterintuitive alarmist cloaked in a misleadingly laidback demeanor."
You have no idea, Raleigh wants to say, before he's even said hello. You have no idea how those
Mark One pilots died, do you? But Mako knows; Mako's seen them. Mako's walked through
hospitals, carrying tissues she didn't need and watching for other people's blood. Don't you die on
her, Geiszler. Don't you dare.
"I'm fine," Geiszler says again, pulling his handkerchief away from his face.
"May I take your coat, Ms. Mori?" Dr. Gottlieb says, into the tight silence that follows.
"Yes, thank you," Mako whispers, and turns to give the man an informal bow before shrugging out
of her coat. "It is very good to see you, Dr. Gottlieb."
Dr. Gottlieb takes her coat and returns her bow.
"I will literally make everyone's lives miserable if you guys don't cut it out with the honorifics
and the excruciatingly high levels of mutual respect," Geiszler says.
Dr. Gottlieb shoots Raleigh a long-suffering look.
Raleigh reciprocates with a look of total sympathy, because it seems like the thing to do.
Mako stares at Geiszler, saying nothing.
"Okay," Geiszler says, with a mildly put-upon sigh. "I can clearly see that you have not yet met
your hugging quota, despite literally tackling me, so get in here already, Maks, god."
Mako hugs him again, this time very carefully.
Raleigh shifts his weight, drops his shoulder bag next to the door, and tries not to feel like a fifth
wheel, when he is, in fact, a bona fide fourth wheel. He doesn't want to be forever on the outside of
this dynamic that he knows, that he envies, that is almost his own but never will be, not quite.
There's something about Geiszler that's intimidating, and it's not just the inappropriate tattoos and
the aggressive deployment of his intellect--he's got a wild edge that feels dangerous to the side of
Raleigh that's learned to tow the line and that feels like family to the side of him that's never learned
that lesson.
When Mako finally lets him go, Geiszler adjusts his glasses, loses the handkerchief, looks at
Raleigh, and says, "well if it isn't Captain Sir Saves Everyone. Blown anything up lately?"
Geiszler is a dick sometimes.
But Geiszler is also the guy who let twelve-year old Mako paint his fingernails for practice, not
just once but every week for year and a half. Raleigh, in fact, can remember painting his fingernails.
He will literally never get used to this.
"Short Science," he says. He extends a hand, and, when Geiszler takes it, he pulls the man into a
hug of his own, because he's missed Geiszler in a strange, confusing way--a blend of the way he
misses Yancy--with the vicious, hollow chest-ache of unhealing grief--and the way that Mako has
missed Geiszler--with a regret-tightened throat and a frustrated protective streak that colors all her
thoughts.
The guy tenses in apparent surprise, but then gives Raleigh a solid, Geiszler-style hug in return,
saying "drift parnter'd," like it isn't even a question.
"Yeah," Raleigh confirms anyway.
"Mystical drift connection or no," Geiszler says, extracting himself from their hug, and
appropriating Raleigh's suitcase. "This is not going to be a thing."
"What's not going to be a thing," Raleigh asks.
"'Short Science'. It's not even witty. You can do better. I believe in you."
"I can do better," Raleigh says, following Geiszler down a hall toward a darkened bedroom as
Dr. Gottlieb offers Mako some tea, "I just choose not to."
"Eh," Geiszler says. "That's fair."
They stay two weeks.
Dr. Gottlieb spends his days at UC Berkeley, his nights making dinner and reminiscing with
Raleigh about the Jaeger Academy, the long dark of Alaskan winters, Raleigh's time on the Wall, and
a handful of other experiences they find they have in common--a distaste for public speaking, a love
of fast cars and Kraftwerk, a gratefulness for gyroscopic stabilizers. Dr. Gottlieb seems to understand
Raleigh's confusion with memories that are not his memories--the dead parents he has that aren't his
dead parents, the opinions he holds that surprise him, the way he gets confused looking at gendered
things like high heeled shoes and mascara, not remembering whether they're for him or not.
Dr. Gottlieb, Raleigh thinks, understands in a way that is too deep, too extensive, too full of total
sympathy.
He asks Mako about it early one morning, his arm around her in the gray light.
"Do you think they drifted?" he whispers into her hair.
She tips her head up towards him and whispers back, "I think it is better not to speak of such
things," she replies.
That is answer enough.
Geiszler is more difficult to talk to. He's harder because Raleigh wants to be Mako, and he wants
Geiszler to be the guy who bought him rollerblades, who taught him to play the base, who sat through
manicures and Blue Planet and pipetted his distracted way through long talks about the secret heart of
Skye McLeod, who gave him glitter to throw at Dr. Lightcap and Marshal Pentecost. But at the same
time he doesn't want that, because Geiszler will never be the guy who taught him to drive under a
clouded sky, who showed him how to fight and then how to fight dirty, who explained how to kiss a
girl and what to do after you'd kissed her, who'd been in his life and in his head right until the moment
that he'd died.
It takes him a few days before he can begin see Geiszler for who he is rather than who he should
or shouldn't be.
Mako is asleep between them on the couch, Dr. Gottlieb is in bed, and Blue Planet is playing
across the room on the television.
"Aw," Geiszler whispers. "She's missing the reef sharks."
 "To the reef sharks," Raleigh says, raising his beer.
Geiszler gives him an uneven grin. "And all that they've eaten," he says. "To dead things
everywhere. Dead people, dead friends, dead monsters. Dead enlightenment philosophers. To things
that want to die and can't. To things that think about dying and don't. To everything that is dying, which
is, in fact, almost everything. To thermodynamic equilibrium. To an ever-expanding universe that will,
in the end, freeze down to zero Kelvin."
"It seems like it would be exhausting to be you," Raleigh says.
Geiszler arranges thumb and index finger into something reminiscent of a gun and fires a
metaphorical shot in Raleigh's general direction. There is something about that silent
acknowledgement that is amused and ironic and deeply tired and that matches nothing from Mako's
mental catalogue or from Raleigh's own memories of Yancy. For the moment, Geiszler is just a fellow
insomniac with a beer who has, however briefly, stopped letting down some part of his perpetual
front.
"I'm sure it's so easy to be you though," Geiszler replies. "So perfectly coiffed all the time. So
handsomely American. Always ready to catch some kind of sporting object that might be thrown your
way."
"Handsome?" Raleigh repeats.
"I am taken," Geiszler replies. "And even if I weren't, I don't date people without at least one
advanced degree. Masters degrees don't count."
"I didn't even go to college," Raleigh admits.
"Oh my god," Geiszler whispers, his eyes half shut as he takes another sip of his beer. "That's it.
Get off my couch. Get off my couch immediately."
They watch the reef sharks.
Raleigh does not get off the couch. Instead, he says, "we missed you."
"Aw kiddo," Geiszler replies, in a way that makes Raleigh's eyes hurt; in a way that makes him
feel like he's Mako.
But he's not Mako.
Mako is asleep, leaning against his shoulder.
"The Marshal was dying," Raleigh says. "Did you know?"
"Dying?" Geiszler says, almost too loud, but not quite, his eyes snapping open as he fixes Raleigh
with a sharp, wide-awake look.
"Yeah," Raleigh whispers. "Cancer."
"The Mark Ones," Geiszler replies. "Shit shielding over a shit core."
"Yeah. I guess. He ah--" Raleigh says, dragging his fingers through the air next to his face. "He
didn't tell me any details. He didn't tell Mako much either, but he--did a lot of bleeding. Specifically?
The same kind of bleeding that you're doing."
Geiszler takes a lazy sip of beer, his eyes on the reef sharks. "I was never exposed to any
radiation," he says, pale and exhausted. "It's not the same."
"You sure about that?" Raleigh asks.
"I am the sure-est," Geiszler says. "My neurologist gets nervous about once every two weeks and
scans my brain with one imaging modality or another. My entire head, vasculature and all, hates me,
and will carry out a vicious vendetta against me for the rest of my life; but I'm not bleeding because
there's a tumor disrupting a blood vessel. That has been ruled out. Do I need to, like, wake Maks up
and tell her I'm not acutely dying?"
"Tomorrow is probably okay. But mention it, maybe," Raleigh says.
 "You are mildly to moderately more thoughtful than you appear," Geiszler says. "I approve."
"You are marginally to mildly less of a dick than you appear," Raleigh replies. "I also approve."
"Good," Geiszler replies.
Raleigh spends the days in a haze of growing attachment, driving Dr. Gottlieb's car, watching
Mako paint Geiszler's nails black for old times' sake, watching Geiszler gently draw Dr. Gottlieb into
conversations, drinking games, and late-night classic movies, while Dr. Gottlieb occasionally calms
Geiszler down to the point that he can sleep. They have a synchronicity he's only ever seen in pilots,
and the longer that he spends with them the more certain he is that they must have drifted and that if it
happened only once it must have been a strong one, because Geiszler knows when Dr. Gottlieb's
getting tired, he steals thoughts right out from under him, finishes his sentences and steps in to
seamlessly complete half-finished tasks. Dr. Gottlieb's even more attuned to Geiszler, Raleigh thinks,
it takes him days to catch the subtleties of all he does for Geiszler because the man is so good at mis-
and re-direction. He has to see Geiszler nearly panic and Dr. Gottlieb talk him down before he
recognizes a more subtle version of that same exchange play out multiple times per day. The more he
watches, the more he notices: the way that Dr. Gottlieb will shift his position so that Geiszler is
forced to look away from the Wall he so often stares at, the way he will turn conversations and
Geiszler's train of thought away from the PPDC, the way he picks his battles and the times at which he
picks them.
"You know," Raleigh says, to Dr. Gottlieb, when they are standing on the balcony, watching the
sun go down, "sometimes I think I'm more in sync with Mako than she's in sync with me."
"Really," Dr. Gottlieb says, with casual curiosity. "How could you ever truly know such a thing to
be the case?"
"You sound like Geiszler," Raleigh says, glancing at him quickly and then away.
"I confess I find his anxious obsession with epistemology extremely charming," Dr. Gottlieb
admits. "Do not tell him I said that."
"Yeah, I hear you," Raleigh replies. "Mako is afraid of moths. It's pretty adorable."
"You were saying," Dr. Gottlieb prompts him.
"The funny thing is," Raleigh continues, "Yancy used to say the same thing about me. That he could
read me like an open book and I could read him like an open pamphlet. He was overstating it some,
but I think he might have been right."
"You are one of the only pilots who has ever drifted with more than one party," Dr. Gottlieb says.
"Would you say that you feel that there is an inherent asymmetry to the drift?"
"I don't know if I'd go that far," Raleigh replies. "But it felt like, it still feels like--I look to Mako,
while Mako looks out. Out at the world, out for the next threat. I think about bringing everything
together. I think about surviving, I think about resources, I think about Mako. While Mako? Mako
thinks about swords. And I see that, and I feel like I've lived this partnership from the other side. I
don't just feel it. I know it. Despite what the interface techs and the science guys will tell you, I'm not
sure how well we really understand what happens when two brains are forced together. And it seems
to me like someone looks out while someone looks in."
"Interesting," Dr. Gottlieb replies, looking like a guy with volumes to say, but not saying any of it.
"I think its has to with intent and personality and pre-existing feelings, and the mental fight that is
the initial neural handshake," Raleigh continues. "I feel like when you look at pilot teams, you can
tell. You can always tell who looks out and who looks in. Chuck was out and Herc was in. Aleksis
was out, Sasha was in. Lightcap was out, D'onofrio was in. The Weis had their own thing going.
Different people, different drifts; those roles can swap, I guess, but I'm not sure how often they do.
How often they would. Mako is always going to be better suited for external scanning, for powering a
forward drive, than for internal systems monitoring. She doesn't think about reserves in the heat of the
moment. It's just not who she is."
"You ought to record some of these observations," Dr. Gottlieb advises him.
Did he just tell you to write a book, kid? Yancy asks, from the back of his thoughts.
"Geiszler would be like that, I think," Raleigh says cautiously. "Like Mako, I mean. Looking out."
"Dr. Geiszler," the other man says dryly, "cannot even bring himself to kill a wasp, let alone a
kaiju. He's also possessed of a mind that would, I'm certain, manage to ruin a perfectly good
stereotactic interface."
Raleigh looks down at the drink in his hands, more certain than ever that the pair of them have
drifted.
"Yeah," he says, unable to rein himself in. "Drifting with Geiszler. I can't even imagine it. You
tried it though. In that alley."
"We were incompatible," Dr. Gottlieb says mildly, looking at the distant Wall.
"But imagine if you hadn't been," Raleigh replies. "What do you think it would have been like?"
"I'm certain it would have been quite illuminating. I'm certain I would have been forced to
acknowledge scores of things I had avoided confronting for spans of years. I'm certain I would have
been nearly crippled with doubt and indecision and unpleasant cognitive dissonance for weeks post-
drifting, because Newton would have had to make an unconventional modification to his interface that
locked us into a tighter neural alignment than had ever been previously achieved. I'm certain that I
would have been forced to admit that he has always been less quixotic than clairvoyant. But you
know," Dr. Gottlieb says, swirling the alcohol and ice in his own glass, "I find that I don't think about
that particular hypothetical much at all. There are others that trouble me."
"Like what?" Raleigh asks.
"I find myself wondering if things might have been different had I not undercut his drift proposal.
Had I advocated for it to proceed but with someone else wearing the interface. I wonder what might
have changed had I left Hong Kong with him twenty-four hours earlier. I wonder, of course, what
happens to a fraction of an hive mind, left behind when a transdimensional portal has been shut,
chemically cross-linked, its pieces separated by thousands and thousands of miles, but all of them
still alive, still communicating with one another via an unknown mechanism. I find myself wondering
about that quite frequently."
"Yeah," Raleigh says, suppressing the urge to shiver.
Dr. Gottlieb tracks a passing seagull with his gaze.
"Is Geiszler okay?" he asks.
Dr. Gottlieb drops his eyes. "No," he says. "I don't think he is."
Raleigh nods.
"I think that, perhaps, he could be," the other man adds. "Given time and a place to stand."
"Well he's got that," Raleigh says. "And he's got you. I'd say things are looking up."
Dr. Gottlieb turns to look at him, his expression faintly rueful. "Let's go inside. I detest this view."
Raleigh can see why he would.
His phone buzzes. He pulls it out of his pocket and finds that Mako has messaged him from a room
away.
::Come play Portal, we have cake!::
"I'm supposed to be playing Portal anyway," Raleigh says, sighing.
"Ah yes," Dr. Gottlieb replies. "If you let him win, it will be over quickly."
 "If I let him win," Raleigh says, "Mako will out me."
"Then again," Dr. Gottlieb amends, "you may, in fact, be unable to win."
Raleigh opens the door to find Portal 3 displayed across the TV, Geiszler holding a controller,
Mako sitting on her hands next to him in a red sweater set, looking excited.
"You said you had cake," Raleigh says to Mako.
Geiszler reaches over to ruffle Mako's hair.
Mako gives everyone a pleased look.
"The cake, of course," Dr. Gottlieb says, sliding the balcony door shut, "is a lie."
"That's it," Raleigh says, pointing at Geiszler. "You are going down, Short Science."
"Oh you do not want to open the trash-talking door, Becket," Geiszler replies. "I can guarantee
you that much."
"Whoever wins plays me," Mako announces.
"I will be anywhere but here," Dr. Gottlieb says. "I--"
"No," Geiszler says, "what? You have to support me. This is your duty. We are married, secular
style."
"Wait, you're married?" Raleigh asks.
"Only on paper and in our hearts," Geiszler clarifies.
Dr. Gottlieb rolls his eyes.
"I think that pretty much covers it," Raleigh replies.
Mako pulls Geiszler's right hand off the controls and swats his wrist with two fingers. "I cannot
believe that you didn't tell me this you stupid miserable excuse for a half-brother," she snaps in
rapid Japanese.
"Half-brother?" Raleigh says, also in Japanese.
"Ow," Geiszler says. "Maks. God. How do you make that sting so much."
Mako shrugs at Raleigh as Geiszler drags Dr. Gottlieb down onto the couch.
"Well, um, congrats. To everyone," Raleigh says.
"Stop stalling," Geiszler says. "You've been avoiding this for days. For days and days. Likely
because you correctly assume that I am about to metaphorically wipe the metaphorical floor with
actual you."
Raleigh holds up his controller and reaches over Mako to hit it against the one that Geiszler holds.
"May the most contemporarily masculine man win," Raleigh says.
"You realize that in the end, I am going to win, yes?" Mako asks.
"Yes Maks," Geiszler replies. "You are the most contemporarily masculine person here. Everyone
knows this. Don't be weird about gender roles."
"Later," Mako says, "I will paint the nails of the losers."
"Um, I don't really want that," Raleigh says, his eyes on the screen as he learns the capabilities of
this character he's playing. "Can that not be a thing?"
"Becket, what did I just say," Geiszler asks, in an annoyingly superior rhetorical style.
"Don't lose to me then," Mako says sweetly.
"Will all of you simply get on with this, please?" Dr. Gottlieb asks.
"Go," Geiszler shouts, abruptly starting two-player mode.
Oh it is on, Yancy says, inside his head. This kid doesn't stand a chance.

In Two Parts
During Portal, Mako shouts in Japanese whenever she wants to shout, whatever she wants to
shout, and switches allegiances when she cares to switch allegiances, which is often. She drinks half
of Raleigh's Hibiki and she makes misleading statements and she tries not to be sad.
The first round is a draw.
That is good.
That is not sad.
It is not sad at all.
But Raleigh has never played Portal and Newt does not play it as well as she remembers, but that
is all right, Newt has been doing other things recently and he has had no time for Portal, not for years,
and so it does not mean anything. It means nothing at all that Newt should have won and did not; it
does not mean anything.
For the second round, they swap. Raleigh plays Chell, and Newt plays Chell's arch-nemesis, Hell.
Hell was cloned from cells of Chell, but Hell was raised by GLaDOS. Hell grew up too fast and does
not understand who Chell is, nor why Chell pities her so much.
Newt prefers to play as Hell. Mako thinks that this is because he prefers to ally himself with
GLaDOS and because Dr. Lightcap would only play as Chell.
"Is it a coincidence," Raleigh asks, "that the voice of GLaDOS and the voice of the drift interface
sound exactly the same?"
"Yes," Newt replies. "Of course it's a coincidence. No one would purposefully use the voice of a
villainous and morally bankrupt AI in a system that you're jacking right into the top of your brainstem.
Why would anyone do that. That's ridiculous. It sends all the wrong messages."
"It was you, wasn't it," Raleigh says.
"Nah," Newt replies, making good use of a Conversion Gel.
"To my endless despair," Dr. Gottlieb confirms, without looking up from his tablet, "it was indeed
him."
Mako thinks Newt will win this round. It was wise of him not to begin as Hell. He has given
himself a double advantage, arranging things as he has. Raleigh has adapted to the game and easily
mastered Chell's distinct battery of skills but he does not yet realize Newt is significantly more
formidable as Hell.
It is not Mako's job to tell him.
"Moon dust," Mako whispers to Newt.
"Mako, I can hear you," Raleigh says. "Stop helping Geiszler."
"I'm helping everyone," Mako replies, watching as Newt avoids the moon dust. "Don't fall off
your cube."
"Thanks babe," Raleigh drawls.
"What," Newt says, and Mako can tell he's speaking to her, even though his eyes are on the screen.
"You're just going to let him call you 'babe'?"
"No," Mako says, deciding that she would like Newt to win this round. She reaches over to give
Raleigh's controller a quick shove.
"Mako," Raleigh shouts, as he barely avoids a Thermal Discouragement Beam.
"Yes," Mako says. "That is a proper form of address."
Newt laughs. It does not last long, but it has been a long time since she has heard Newt laugh, and
it is nice.
Newt wins the second round.
Mako takes Raleigh's controller and spends a few minutes getting to know Chell through the little
circuits in her hands, dropping and rolling, creating a practice portal, ducking, running, firing her gun.
 "You let me know when you're--" Newt begins.
"Go," Mako shouts, starting the game.
Raleigh cheers for Newt the entire time.
Mako decides that this is fair.
She does not let Newt win, but she lets him keep pace because it is more fun that way. There is an
element of danger, because Newt is consistently fast with completing the puzzles that will open doors
and Mako might hit one that it takes her too long to solve.
She might.
But she doesn't.
She raises her controller in victory while Newt tips his head back, theatrically clutches his chest,
and sprawls mostly on top of his former colleague, cracking his head against Dr. Gottlieb's tablet in
the process. Raleigh reaches across her lap to give Newt a commiserating thigh clap while Mako
declares, "nail art for all," and Dr. Gottlieb tries to determine whether Newt is bleeding.
She had a family and she lost them.
She made a family and she will try not to lose them.
Families change. They grow and shrink as people live and die and leave and join.
She pulls everyone together and takes a picture at a bad angle.
That is another thing that she wanted. A thing she saw that Raleigh had. A stack of pictures. She
has so few. She will have more. She will have so many. She will have pictures and pictures. She will
print them so that she can hold them and they will fill books. She will not be sad about the ones she
doesn't have. That she didn't take. She will just make sure that she has them, going forward. She will
pick her favorites and carry them with her like Raleigh does.
The days she spends in San Francisco are short and go by too fast.
The nights are long. Terrible and wonderful.
She spends them with Newt in the mostly dark, showing him pictures she has taken. There are
already so many pictures, but he wants to see them all. He's always wanted to see all the things she's
liked over the course of her life, interesting beetles, nail polish, Blue Planet, pictures she's drawn,
reports she wrote for different schools in different cities, music that she liked; but she'd had fewer
things to talk about as the years progressed and he didn't like to talk about how much and how badly
she'd wanted to go to the Jaeger Academy and so they'd talked less and less until that was the only
thing she'd wanted and so they hadn't talked at all and he had been annoying and she had been angry
and they had each almost died like that, but hadn't.
"This," she says, her tablet held between them, "is Paris. Paris was my favorite."
"So predictable, Maks, come on," Newt says. "At least lie to me. Didn't you say that you went to
Tierra del Fuego? Pretend that was your favorite."
"That was Raleigh's favorite."
"Stop trying to make him seem cool. I'm on to you, you know."
Every night she tries to stay awake until Dr. Gottlieb comes to get Newt. Some nights it is early,
other nights it is late, and sometimes, Mako thinks, maybe Dr. Gottlieb never comes at all because one
morning she wakes up on the couch and sees Newt staring out the window at the dark and distant
Wall.
When she sits up, he glances at her and then back at the horizon.
"Kiddo," he says. "I'm not dying. You can go sleep with Becket, you know?"
"I don't think you're dying," she lies.
"He told me about the Marshal. About the whole bleeding thing. He said my bleeding thing looks
the same, but it's not."
"It is never the same," Mako says.
Newt looks away from the Wall in a way that seems physically difficult for him, and leans his
back against the window, framing himself with gray sky. "You do not sound 'reassured' to me, Maks.
This is me, trying to be reassuring."
"My real father also had cancer. That is why we were in Tokyo that day."
"Oh," Newt says. "I didn't know."
"'Try not to love an impermanent thing too much', he said to me," Mako whispers.
"The Marshal? Or your biological father?" Newt asks. "Sounds like really terrible advice, by the
way."
"My biological father," Mako whispers. "I do not think it was intended as true advice. He
certainly did not follow it himself. But it was the last real thing he said to me, before he said, 'run,
Mako'."
Newt puts his hands in his pockets.
Mako looks down at the fingernails she has painted red.
"You do it correctly, I think," she says. "You seem like you do it correctly."
"Maks," Newt says, sounding choked.
"I do not know, Newt, but I think you must. The way you do it must be the right way, because you
love people but you have an ideal that is not simply your own love for the sake of itself. Or that love
turned to anger. Or that anger turned to vengeance. Or that vengeance turned to grief. I think sometimes
that this is what my father meant. That he meant I should not fix my life to my love for him. That I
should fix it to a craft or to an art or to a science. To a thing that cannot be destroyed when a single
person dies."
"If I've done that," Newt whispers, "if that's better, and that's a big if, Maks, I'm not sure I think
there's a 'better' or a 'worse' here, but if I have and if there is, it was only because I never had any
people who would let me love them too much. Not because I made an enlightened choice about
anything. I'm an idiot, a little bit, Mako; you know this about me. Don't make me into any kind of
template to follow because I am the worst template. Just be yourself for a while kiddo. Take up
knitting or speed skating or whatever and then find something you want to do career-wise. You're
twenty-two? Go to college, why don't you. Write a book before Becket writes one. Write a book after
Becket writes one and make yours better than his."
Newt does not understand.
Maybe Newt does understand, but does not want to and will not say that he does.
That is a thing that Newt would do.
That is a thing that Newt has done.
Don't tell her she can be a Jaeger pilot, he'd said to Caitlin Lightcap, when he thought Mako
couldn't hear.
Why not? Dr. Lightcap had replied. Maybe she can be.
Get out of my lab, Newt had said.
Geiszler, don't be a dick, Dr. Lightcap had said.
Get out of my lab, Newt had said.
Mako has changed, in one instant of neural grappling, more than she will ever change again. It
was Raleigh, she thinks, Raleigh who calls his grief 'grief' and who carries his grief quietly, who
began to erode her anger. He did not do it all at once, but their drift was strong and his mind works in
hers still. But for all she has changed, for all she will change further, she does not think that, even if
she tried, even if she wanted to, she could change herself in this.
Mako will always love in a deep, wide, quiet swath that makes up too much of who she is.
Mako loves Newt so much. She thinks of him always because she likes to think of the people she
loves. She buys things for him and saves things for him because she wants him to see them. She
worries about him because he is not sleeping, because he is different than he used to be, because she
has not seen his tattoos, because he is so pale, because sometimes when he thinks she is not looking
he will drop his head onto Dr. Gottlieb's shoulder in a way that looks so tired and Dr. Gottlieb will
touch his face in a particular way, the same way every time.
So Mako smiles at him and says, "you're so old."
"Finally," Newt says, smiling back at her. "I've been waiting to be old for my entire life."
Newt takes her on a cab ride around the ruined bay and shows her how to get into the Wall and
where the stairs are. They climb up in the dark and Mako is worried because it is far and high and
they have no water and they have no food and Newt is very tired. But when they make it to the top, the
view is beautiful and Mako can smell the Pacific. It smells different than the Atlantic. It is wider and
wilder, and stretches so far so brightly. They sit on the concrete, their feet hanging over the edge, their
arms hooked over the lowest horizontal bar of the guardrail, and they look down at the waves that
crash along its base.
"Are you kind to Dr. Gottlieb?" Mako asks. "Because I believe he loves you very much. I believe
he has loved you for a long time."
This captures Newt's attention, and he looks away from the horizon and smiles at her like he is
trying not to. "Nah. You think so?"
"Yes," Mako says.
"Impossible," Newt replies. "It's a post-drift thing. Er--I mean, like, post my drift. I almost died,
you know, so ah--"
"Yes," Mako says, shifting closer and threading her arm around Newt's arm. "Yes, I know exactly
what you mean."
"Oh god," Newt says quietly. "I'm sure you do. Do, er, other people know, do you think?"
"All pilots who see you together will know," Mako whispers, very close to his ear, over the roar
of the surf and the whistle of the wind. "If you appear on national television, behavioral algorithms
will be performed that will create suspicions."
Newt says nothing.
"So do not go on television," Mako whispers. "Do not see other pilots. You will be safe. I will
keep you safe. I have the power to do that. Marshal Hansen and Raleigh will help me. Dr. Gottlieb's
father has come to like me very much."
"I'm not worried about me so much, Maks," Newt whispers. "But what happened to me can't
happen to him. It will be worse. It will be so. Much. Worse. For him."
Mako hooks her chin over Newt's shoulder, squeezes her eyes shut behind her sunglasses, and
gives him a hug.
"I will keep both of you safe," she murmurs. "Both of you."
"Not even one time, though, Maks," Newt replies. "One time is too many."
"Not even one," Mako whispers, shaking him gently.
Newt nods.
"I am very dangerous," Mako says.
"I know," Newt replies, smiling faintly.
"You may tell me whatever you wish to tell me," Mako says.
 "Aw kiddo, well, likewise, you know," Newt says.
Neither of them tell anything.
So Mako says, "I do not agree with you. I do not think it was a 'post-drift thing'."
"No?" Newt says, in a way that implies that he does not think that either.
"I believe it was every time that Dr. Lightcap would try to get you to sing and you said no. I
believe it was the few times that Dr. Lightcap would try to get you to sing and you said yes."
"Maks," Newt says, "you're crazy. First of all, the singing doesn't do it for him. It's definitely the
guitar. Second of all, I'm pretty sure it was the nematocyst incident because he was not crazy about
the whole Newt-being-impaled thing on a visual level, but he stayed with me the entire time."
"Skye McLeod saved you," Mako says, smiling at the memory of a handsome child with a bone-
saw.
"Mako. I saved me. Skye McLeod just did what I told him to do."
"I do not remember it that way," Mako replies, even though she does. "You must be kind to Dr.
Gottlieb," she says, picking the thread of her thoughts back up. "Because he has worried for you for so
long."
"I know," Newt replies.
"This is not good. This drive, this far climb. This sitting on the edge of the Wall," Mako says.
"You must get up and turn around and look over the other side, toward home."
"It's a thought," Newt replies.
"It is not a thought," Mako says, standing and then pulling insistently at his jacket. She helps him
rise because she does not trust him this close to the edge; he is so tired and she knows he is not as
steady as once he was. They walk across the top and look back, in the other direction, over the
cement and the city and Oblivion Bay.
"I find this less satisfying," Newt says.
"Then it is time to go," Mako replies. She wants to tell him that he should never come back, but
that is not a thing that can be told to him, she thinks.
Later, while she is helping Dr. Gottlieb make dinner as Newt and Raleigh walk a block to choose
some wine, he asks her, "did he take you to the Wall?"
"Yes," she says.
Dr. Gottlieb sighs.
"It is too many stairs for him right now," Mako says. "It makes him too tired."
"I believe it helps him sleep," Dr. Gottlieb replies. "But, on the whole, I agree with you."
Mako nods and begins to slice up carrots.
"How does he seem to you?" Dr. Gottlieb asks her.
Mako is taken aback at this, because there is certainly nothing she knows about Newt that Dr.
Gottlieb does not know.
"Troubled," she replies.
Dr. Gottlieb nods in agreement.
They chop vegetables in silence.
"I confess Ms. Mori, that I am curious about something," he says.
She looks over at him an inviting manner.
"Had Mr. Becket not been found--was there a contingency plan in place regarding who would
pilot the fourth available Jaeger?"
The question surprises her.
"I am certain there was such a plan," she says. "But I was not informed of its particulars. I suspect
that this was because it involved me."
"Ah," Dr. Gottlieb says. "Did you speculate regarding of what such a plan might have consisted?
She had not.
But she cannot help thinking of it now. She looks at the carrots she has sliced to pieces and thinks
of the closing of the Jaeger Academy. She had been one of the last to complete the training program.
Her name would have been on a short list, and, in the absence of an experienced pilot, she had the
best scores.
If there had been no Raleigh, whom would she have chosen as a potential partner for Mako Mori?
Her eyes slide back to Dr. Gottlieb as she realizes what he means by his question.
He does not look at her.
"You were not on Raleigh's list," she says, "because his previous injury mandated Interface Right
positioning. You also require Interface Right. Had a pilot with no positional requirements been
selected, I would have put you on the candidate list. Had I been the selected pilot," she continues, "I
would have attempted a neural bridge with you prior to interviewing any other candidates."
"Why on earth would you do that?" Dr. Gottlieb asks. He looks surprised at himself.
"Because you wanted it so much," Mako replies. "Too much. I also wanted it too much. I believe
that alone would have made us drift compatible. I am not sure how strong the bond would have been.
It is impossible to know."
"Indeed," Dr. Gottlieb says.
"I think that Newt would not have forgiven me if I had selected you," Mako says. "I think he
would have hated me until the day he died."
"I doubt that, Ms. Mori," Dr. Gottlieb says. "I doubt that very much."
"I do not. I believe that he would have hated me for only days. For only days, maybe for only
hours because it was during the time I drifted with Raleigh that he drifted with that brain. I believe he
would have died in that initial attempt had you not been there to find him. I believe he would have
timed his own drift attempt with any trial we did out of theatrical spite. I believe he would have died,
and then I believe we all would have died, piece by piece, scattered into smaller and smaller groups,
in helpless rage and grinding fear. You should call me Mako."
Dr. Gottlieb looks at her with raised eyebrows.
There is a silence.
"I shall certainly do so," he says. "Please call me Hermann."
"Newt will be so pleased," Mako says.
"Insufferably so," Hermann replies.
"You are helping him," Mako says. "He is not making it too hard for you?"
"No," Hermann says, looking at the sink. "I manage that well enough on my own. Newton remains
himself, and I've mostly ceased to find that genuinely trying."
This answer pleases Mako.
"Yes," she says smiling a small smile, laying aside her knife. "We would have been drift
compatible. I am sure."
"I cannot imagine a higher compliment," Hermann says, giving her an informal bow.
She returns it, touched by the gesture.
"I did not know," she says. "I did not know what had happened until was too late. I am sorry for
the manner in which you left Hong Kong."
"I apologize for not writing to you," Hermann replies. "I fear you suffered undue distress because
I did not adequately apprise you of what was happening, but I wasn't certain--I was anxious myself of
communicating too much or too little, and he--he genuinely could not write to you; he was pushed
entirely past his ability to cope. He is a terribly resilient person but I thought it might be too much for
him, I thought he might not recover, he has not recovered fully, he may never recover fully; you have
seen how he is, the way he looks at that thing across the bay, how much he's bleeding; I don't
understand that. His EEG is not normal and it's stopped normalizing and there are other things; things
I can't explain, things I only suspect--"
Mako takes his hands and holds them in the space between them and nods at him, clutching his
fingers tightly.
"What things?" she says. "You may tell me what things."
He looks pained. He looks like he might tell her.
She waits, but he says nothing.
A key grinds into a lock and Mako drops his hands and steps back.
They let the moment pass, but that, too, is a kind of promise.
"Next time he takes you somewhere," Hermann says, turning back to the stove, "try to get him to
show you the lab he is supposed to be equipping rather than the Wall."
Mako nods.
She spreads an entire suitcase worth of gifts over the span of two weeks so that it does not seem
like too much--art and articles and alcohol and glassware and vac-packed snacks from everywhere
she's been, ties and t-shirts and books and pens and tatami zori and fancy hashi and a wind chime
made of shells. She doesn't give them these things, she just puts the books in the bookshelf and the zori
in the closet and the hashi in the kitchen and the shirts in their shared room and the alcohol in the
cabinet and the glassware and snacks in the kitchen and the articles on the coffee table and the wind
chime on the balcony because she has brought them too many things and not enough things at all.
She will get their belongings from Hong Kong.
She will go back to the shatterdome and she will neatly pack Dr. Gottlieb's items and she will see
if Newt's things are full of mold and if they are not she will pack those as well and she will ship
them. She will not ship Newt's guitar, she will bring that back with her when she comes, because she
will come back soon.
The morning before she leaves, her phone wakes her with a slow rise of streaming music. She
listens to all of Dreaming Correctly while Raleigh is doing sets of pushups on the floor. It is long and
it is eerie and, as she listens, she thinks that he must have meant it as a love letter to a civilization
examining its own end. It already makes her miss Newt, even though she has not yet left San
Francisco.
When Mako leaves her room, she finds them standing together at the window in the gray light of
early morning. Newt is looking at the Wall and Hermann is standing at his back, his arms around
Newt's shoulders. They frighten Mako there, in the dim light. They look like they are listening to
things that she cannot hear. Newt's gaze is too fierce and too hot for a silent room and a distant vista;
there is too much unity in Hermann's stance. She thinks that they are thinking the same thing. She thinks
she doesn't like what they are thinking.
Thoughts can kill.
It was Dr. Lightcap who turned intent into victory.
It was Dr. Lightcap who turned intent into death.
Thoughts have almost killed Mako.
And Mako has killed with her thoughts.
She knows then, looking at them, that it will be hard for Newt to go to Berkeley and to study
neuroscience. It will be so hard for him to do it that it might be impossible. It will be difficult for
Hermann to hold him to the confines of a normal life because Newt has never had that. He has never
lived like this before, trying to sleep when he is supposed to sleep, trying to eat when he is supposed
to eat, trying not to lose himself in what he is doing, always saying no to what he does not want to
want.
They turn and they see her.
Hermann steps back, and Newt smiles at her.
Mako does not smile. "What were you thinking of?" she whispers.
"Oh you know," Newt says. "The usual. Insanity. Vivisection. Death. Dopamine. Breakfast."
Hermann looks away and closes a hand briefly on Newt's shoulder before he walks into the
kitchen, leaving them alone.
"I was serious," Mako says.
Newt's expression changes into something else and back again in a break too fast for Mako to
decide what was written on his face--whether it was grief or pain, or, maybe, despair.
She knows then that he was serious too.
They look at each other and when he starts to bleed she does not cry and she does not look away.
She hands him a tissue.
"What happens to a fraction of a hive mind?" Newt whispers.
She does not have an answer for him.
Chapter End Notes
Chapter-specific citations: Hermann modifies a quote by Archimedes ("given time and a
place to stand"). The line: "the cake is a lie," comes from Portal. The scene in which Portal is
played is directly based on this amazing picture by oodlesodoodles.
Chapter-specific songs: From the terrifyingly talented friendkingmusic we have Dreaming
Correctly, (music and lyrics) for which I delayed the release of this chapter by a week, because
it was totally worth it. Last song of the last EP for the last chapter of Designations. (Just to be
clear, there will be more Supercos music in the future.)
Chapter-specific appreciation: mystradedoodles continues to create more amazingness, this
time in pencil; feriowind created two glorious pieces at a speed that made me doubt the nature of
reality; awkward-crow is psychic, apparently, and predicted a scene implied by this chapter
before this chapter's release; we have more flawlessness from airefrio in the form of some EPIC
Rapportesque sketches; a fabulous piece by crocodillium with an awesome perspective that I
have internally named 'through a fish tank darkly and askewedly'; saltbay to my infinite delight
has taken an interest in Caitlin Lightcap and I can literally never have enough saltbay pieces;
thepsychoticchef has penned the Star Wars inspired moment from the last chapter; wrinklesleep
has done some lovely studies of Hypothetical Rain and also Newt having a hard time;
queercartoon has created two adorkable panels in pencil of Newt pwning the math department
party; ladyknightthebrave has made a meta Designations playlist (and beat me to it, I might add);
queercartoon and wordscannotlie have also made Designations playlists, which I will reblog
when I can finally catch up with you mix-makers (a time point that might never come); and last
but not least, wrinklesleep has joined the cadre of Designations cosplayers. If I missed
something you've made, I assure you it was not intentional! I try to keep up with you people, but
your outrageously high levels of creativity make it hard! I have enjoyed hearing from all of you
and seeing what everyone has created. Now that Designations is over, special shoutouts of
infinite gratitude go to elementals, allyspock, Friend King, narcomanic, and saltbay, for doing all
the things that they have done, are doing, and will do.
What next: I figure I'll try to head off a few questions here. Designations may have a sequel,
or it may get picked back up some day. This depends upon what happens (or doesn't happen)
with Pacific Rim 2. It will have a prequel, which will take the form of a radio play. Keep an eye
out for some Cait-Science related things that will appear on my tumblr and on my website in the
relative short term.
Afterword
End Notes
Disclaimers: I don't own any of the characters, I'm not making money from this, please do not
sue me.
Author's notes: The title for this fic comes from a quote by Nietzsche.

Works inspired by this one

[Podfic] Designations Congruent with Things by cleanwhiteroom, elementals, Rhetoric and
Mental Incongruity on a Plane by batyalewbel

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