Aftermath: 5 - Chimes at Midnight (2015)

He can feel his spectral company.

Chapter warnings: Realistic depictions of neurological, physical, and bureaucratic trauma. War. Grief. Death. Mental illness. Regular illness.

Text iteration: Witching hour.

Additional notes: I re-read this one, sometimes.

2015 (Five – Chimes at Midnight)

Manila is yellow gold and half crushed. Visibility’s poor. Shells of buildings well on their way to ruins appear and disappear as gusts of wind shift the turbid air.

Newt’s on his knees, sweat in his eyes, so hot he’s almost cold again, pulling air through a mask of his own design (thank you very much) and buried up to his elbows in the left hind-limb of the kaiju with the TBD name. His mask digs into his skin, his protective suit is stained with alien exudate, he’s dehydrated to the point of possible danger, and he’s wielding a scalpel.

Yup. Just another JET-Force Tuesday; no big deal.

He’s not loving this, but he’s kinda loving the experience of not loving it?

Dr. Newton Geiszler, king of the anatomies of alien monstrosities, has located the kaiju equivalent of the femoral artery and is tracing it up toward the pelvic girdle when, buried in some unobjectionable looking viscera, he finally unearths (unfleshes? ewwww) what he’d been looking for. Kaiju lymphatics! Well, not really “lymphatics” in the terrestrial sense; it’s the transit system for Blue. But hey. It runs where lymphatics run and it looks like lymphatics look, so even though it’s not really equivalent at all—waaaaaaaaait.

Or?

Is it?

Okay.

Um, this is kind of making sense to him?

This could be the dehydration talking, and (against all odds) he’s not an immunologist, BUT what if Blue was conceptualized more as Immunological Aggression, meaning rather than acting as pathogenic defense for the kaiju it’s more like proteolytic offense? Angry little enzymes unleashed upon the world, chewing shit up?

He stops moving, all currently burning sugars in his brain shunting directly to his cerebral cortex, because, because, because—that’s exactly what it is! What’s immunity other than a chemical and cellular defense of a host’s genome? What’s Blue but a chemical and cellular offense against terrestrial genomes? This means something, this means more than he’s already intuited, because it’s weird they’re so entirely alien and yet in some ways similar, why do their arteries and their nerves and their lymphatics all run together? That has to mean something, man, that implies—what?

What does it imply?

The wind shifts. He can see the shards of a skyscraper. He almost has it. People are are working on kaiju comparative anatomy. There’s an International Anatomic Dream Team that’s got paleontologists on it, even. He should contact them? He WILL contact them. They’re missing something. He should stop obsessing about this right now, but they’re missing something and he almost has it. There’s a faint yellow coating over the face-shield of his suit. He almost has it. His eyes burn. He almost has it though. He can feel his clothes plastered to his skin with sweat and he almost has it. He’s staring at the rope-like length of tissue in his hands and he almost has—

Ah fuck.

He doesn’t have it.

What he DOES have, with shocking suddenness, is a face full of Blue. Pressure shifts in a dead and damaged alien war machine, a small weakness in the lymphatics, and now he’s dead, probably. On a Tuesday that, damn it, had been almost successfully over.

As usual, his brain, distracted by genius-level insight, catches up to real-world problems in slow motion.

This is not good.

This is not good at all.

This is, in fact, quite bad.

His new filters are state of the art, but they’re coated in Blue; the chance they block everything is zero. 

The question’s probably not if he’s going to die, but when. 

He’s breathing too fast.

He tries to slow it down. 

Newt gets hit by a wave of cold. Whether it’s emotional dread or heat exhaustion or Blue-induced autonomic instability is anyone’s guess.

He skids into panic, then straight past it, because this is how he dies. There’s not a whole lot he can do about it. Panicking won’t help, and so, like a boss, his cortex shuts his midbrain down (to the extent it’s appropriate) and steps up to a metaphorical lectern.

That arrow of time, he’d said, not so long ago to his adorably earnest German pen-pal who loves talking about camaraderie with Thucydides, it comes for us all.

So it does, and here it is.

He’s unusually aware of his physical body right now; that’s weird, he doesn’t like it. All of a sudden he’s questioning everything he feels. Is he losing focus? Is the world supposed to look this way? His muscles ache; had they been doing that thirty seconds ago? His throat is slightly sore; is that because he’s dehydrated or is that an early effect of the Blue? He has a headache—that’s normal with dehydration, right? He needs to cough. No he doesn’t. Yes he does? If he can avoid it, that’d be best. Right?

Hey, his cortex says, perched atop the lectern it should be standing behind. Quit it. Even if you got a lethal load it’ll take days to kill you. You have some time. Practically? In this moment? Try not to cough. It’ll create pressure differentials across the filter that will make matters worse. On a more theoretical note, do your best to keep in mind that this is, after all, Your Profession. It’s not like you haven’t prepared yourself intellectually and emotionally for the possibility of your own death. In the moment, it may feel a little more terrifyingly acute than you imagined, but that’s not surprising. If you die, it’s fine! Everyone does. This is what you wanted, anyway. Doing science, right to the end.

He closes his eyes, opens them, and, yeah, Blue is still all over the face shield of his Biolevel Five suit. This is really happening. He takes a slow breath in. It burns. Faintly now. 

What would Hermann say about this? Probably he’d say that Newt’s not the first or only person to be taken out this way. He won’t be the last. He can feel his spectral company. Other people have made similar choices, shared a similar fate: the California team that died six months ago because no one understood Blue, what it could do to the lungs; those poor bastards in the late nineteenth century who didn’t, couldn’t know the true nature of radiation; the doctors who worked on diseases that killed them—all of them are here with him now.

And that’s how he keeps it together.

Louis Slotin, Canadian ghost in aviators and short shorts, screwdriver in pocket, steps out of the ghosting crowd to hold Newt’s metaphorical hand from beyond the grave. This was the deal, Slotin doesn’t exactly say. You always knew it was. Something slips, maybe it’s your fault, maybe it’s bad luck, maybe it’s both. That’s how it went for me. You’re not alone. Welcome home, buddy.

How long did it take you to die? Newt doesn’t need to ask him.

It was nine days.

He reaches up, wipes enough Blue off his face shield to be able to see, then backs himself against the nearest brick wall. He calls for some assistance on the short wave. Already, feels a subtle burning, deep in his chest. He decides to sit.

“I was almost done,” Newt mutters.

But it’s always late in the day. It’s always when you’re about to finish. Slotin slides down the wall with him, shoulder to shoulder.

And yeah. Of course it is. Tragedy power hour.

You aren’t alone, Slotin’s spirit tells him, spinning a screwdriver adroitly through his fingers as they sit and contemplate the turbid sky. You never were. You never could be. Not when you’re a part of an effort like this. He sweeps his screwdriver in an arc that spans the city.

“Thanks,” Newt says, as swallowing turns painful in a burning throat. He looks up at the poisoned sky, thinking of Alaska, his friend who maps the quantum foam, and the Things I Should Have Told Him that Now I Never Will.

Slotin, contemplating the monstrous corpse in front of them, says, Hell of a demon core, though, kid, I’ll give you that.

Later, after Newt has made a few Quarantine Friends, taken a shower, and been given a nice set of clean scrubs, he does what he can with his phone. He cross checks the data on Blue and compares his symptoms to the published case series from UCSF.

His subconscious was right on the money, picking Slotin for company. Newt probably has about nine days to live. Plus or minus an entire lifetime.

Maybe he’ll be lucky. No point in giving up hope altogether. He’s young, he has no health problems, he’s in great shape. He had the best possible filter on the literal planet between his airways and the amount of Blue that, yeah, unfortunately, pretty much drenched him.

He can get a lot done in nine days.

Well, he probably has more like five functional days.

He can get a lot done in five days.

Newt thinks about his adorkable German grad student. Too bad they won’t ever meet. Newt probably should have tried harder to arrange that. 

“Dear Hermann,” he dictates into his phone. “I’m ah—” 

Ugh. He’s already short of breath. His vocal cords are irritated and not super excited about being used. Dictating is going to be a pain. Literally. Maybe best to compose something mentally, rather than just extemporizing, per usual.

Dear Hermann, what’s going on with you? Alas, I got a face full of Blue this afternoon and I’m now quarantined and under observation. The Good News is I was wearing a top-of-the-line filter of my personal design. The Less Good News is I got hit with a huge load of toxin, and the filter corroded. I had some exposure; probably about a 50% chance of survival if I’m optimistic. I’m attaching some files, hang onto them for me. Feel free to take a look, mostly half-finished papers. If you don’t hear from me maybe you could—

“Well that’s terrible,” Newt mutters to himself.

Maybe improvising is the way to go after all.

He fires up his phone again.

“Dear Hermann. Tell me about Alaska already, will you? It’s cold there, right? Sounds nice. I could be into that. My day wasn’t the best. I ended up with some Blue exposure. Not bad. Well.”

Um, that is ALSO terrible.

“Damn it,” Newt rasps.

He lets his head fall back against his pillow.

He glares at the ceiling.

It doesn’t help.

Hermann’s just a kid. A super brilliant kid with a penchant for math and historical chronicles detailing the fall of civilizations. Newt has a strong instinct to protect him from all of this. But a) he can’t do that, and b) Hermann has signed up for the freaking Jaeger Academy, which Newt still maintains is the worst idea in the history of Mathematicians with Bad Ideas and if he successfully makes it through their frankly ludicrous training program without brain damage he’ll be rewarded with a TERRIBLE LIFE EXPECTANCY AND AN AWFUL DAY JOB.

Also? People should probably try to learn about kaiju and not necessarily karate them to death immediately. 

Focus, Geiszler. He’s getting sidetracked from the extremely depressing job of telling Hermann he’s not gonna make it out of Manila. 

Newt stews about how to word things. He searches “breaking bad news.” All sources agree that doing this over the phone would be better. Theoretically, sure, but praxis-wise using the phone introduces all kinds of problems given Newt sounds terrible and they’ve never talked. 

The one useful thing he does hit upon in his searching is that there can be real value in doing a good job of communicating something intensely awful. He can, maybe, help this kid out a little bit.

It’s a nice thought.

“Dear Hermann,” he begins again, “I have some bad news. I got exposed to Blue today. I’m currently in quarantine.” He takes a long, very slow breath in, saving up his air for the next part. “My best back-of-the-envelope estimate says I got a dose hovering right around the human LD50.” 

He does some compensatory breathing to pay for that long, multisyllabic, comma-free sentence he just accomplished. 

“Based on my demographics, I’m hoping my odds are a little better than that. Maybe a 55% chance I make it?”

God, it’d been a lot for the filter to take. 

“A lymphatic duct exploded in my face. The filter took care of probably 99% of it. I stand by that filter design. But it’s a real exposure. I could feel it. Shortly after it happened. Right in the airways.”

Newt coughs (quite a lot), drinks some water, and watches his oxygen saturation level drop to the low nineties and slowly climb back up. It takes its sweet time.

“It took maybe thirty minutes to get back to the base. And through the decon. I’m in quarantine because. I’m still coughing up detectable Blue. We’ll see what happens. I was thinking of you because—sorry. These sentences are gonna get shorter. Albuterol’s wearing off. I was thinking of you.”

Newt takes a break, contemplates this next part.

“You reading about the war. Between Athens and Sparta. Your historical friend-making. It got under my skin I guess. It helped me. In that moment, standing there. What a personal disaster, right? Definitely a catastrophe. For me. And yet. Also. What a relief to share an experience like that. With other people. Even if those people are dead. Even if they’ve been dead for a long time.”

The waxing moon glows overhead, lighting the thickened air outside with an ethereal gleam.

Newt tips his head back, shuts his eyes, breathes for a while.

“Anyway, how’s Alaska? Tell me about it maybe.”

Newt undertakes another arduous coughing journey, then tries to calm his vocal cords by breathing slowly and evenly. He’d better wrap this up soon. 

He hopes that, even though this letter will be short, he’ll get a ridiculously epic missive in response. Something that would span pages and pages if it were to be written out by hand. He hopes it’s full of math and philosophy and detailed descriptions of the Alaskan countryside. He’d really like to be in Alaska right now. Alaska sounds incredible.

Cold, dry air would be much easier to breathe, for one thing.

“Over the next few days,” Newt continues, when continuing is possible, “I’ll be working. A lot. Quickly. I assume Anderson will try to get me out. To an area with more resources. Don’t know how easy that’ll be.” 

“My phone isn’t in great shape. If it dies, I’m really lost,” Newt whispers. “In case it does die. Please. Continue the quantum cartography. Your idea. It’s good. Very few people. Do what you can. So just. Do that. Instead. Not the Jaeger thing. Consider it.”

Newt tries for a few deep breaths in a row. He coughs, recovers, and ponders how to finish his letter. 

“Almost time to go. It’s been great. Strange, but epic. Like the times themselves. Never did get around to the Rilke. But it always. Would’ve been something. Love forever, Newt.”