In a Clean White Room

There is no pity in a Category Five Mako Mori hug.

Hwi rolls down a window.

“Hashtag ‘accuracy’,” Newton whispers, like a secret shared.

He’s committed casual, causal, quantum-mechanical calumnies.

“Evariste.” Newton provocatively snaps a sterile glove as he pulls it on. “Galois.”

All the emo Jedi go bad.

“Do not ignore my questions with science fiction tangents, Newton; I am in no mood to be compared to Princess Leia.”

If you want to destroy my sweater, hold this thread as I walk away.

“When Tiffany designs and builds an underwater Turing Machine, please be sure to inform me,” Hermann says.

Resist. Transmit. You must know you’re a machine.

Hermann is personally offended that, as he’s brushing his teeth in an immaculate, white-tiled bathroom, Is this it? by The Strokes begins to play on repeat in his head.

Absolut failure.

Somewhere in his mind, a man significantly braver and less organized than he waits in mental wings, offstage and in the dark.

“You really could not be a better Spider Man villain if you tried,” Newt mutters at himself.

His shoe. The sea.

Delicious pancakes are delicious.

Hermann is no stranger to sleepless nights.

It’s going to be a rough night. This and all the rest.

They make it out of Hong Kong.

Extreme Post-drift Induced Cognitive (EPIC) Rapport.  

Mathematicians do not hedge.

Lie in a magnet, Dr. Geiszler, just lie there. Get your brain scanned.

Ugh. Biologists.

Who sits down one day and says, “I could really use a coordinate system right about now?” René De-epic-intellectual-badass-cartes, that’s who.

The problem with Newton is, and has always been, everything.

“I feel weird,” Newt decides.

“I like your brain,” Newton says, a non sequitur that doesn’t feel like one.

Their ships are metaphor but they will literally rock them, guys, come on.

“Like,” Newton says, in helpless appeal, “wave functions, man.”

“Tell me, in absolute honesty, what is the state of your living quarters?” Hermann says.

THE WALL OF LIFE. All caps, to better match the shouting.

“I can’t believe it,” everyone says, in voices that are not surprised.

I like to think of you winning every lottery. All of the time. For all time.

“I can’t believe I drove a metacognitive car into your brain like a total badass,” Lightcap says.

The love child of Eris and Aphrodite, skating on a shell, playing only Chell…

Happy Quantum Field Tuesday; you have been science charm’d.

I say call a spade a spade, and call a transdimensional rift a transdimensional rift, am I right?

Together, they look out at the sky, over the land, as if from the cockpit of a Jaeger.

“He’s working his magic on you.” Mako wipes her eyes, returns to her scones. “You were a tough customer.”

He flings the flowers along the vector of the wind. They fall, end over end, toward the sea.

“Were you thinking about math ,” Newton breathes suggestively.

Here, and everywhere. Now and everywhen.

Something out of dreams he’d had a dozen years ago: Dr. Geiszler, world-weary and sad, carrying a terrible equanimity.

Spontaneously, Mako throws her arms around him, hugs him hard.

Hermann, low on willpower, high on misery, decides to watch Newton’s talk. It’s a terrible idea.

Hermann thinks, with compassion, of Gottfried Leibniz, fallen out of favor in November of 1716.

To her profound credit, Mako retreats from nothing.

Hermann believes himself to be prepared. Alas, he is not.

“You think you started yesterday with your word differences?” Newton says. “You’ve been doing word differences for a long time.”

“Oooh Demonic Hold. Sounds like a really fun thing to do to a library book.”

Maybe they’re dead, standing in an infinite cold wind, waiting for Lightcap.

“I’ll buy you beer for the rest of my life,” Lightcap promises him.

NEWTON IS NOT THE CALM ONE.

“Bitch Prince of the Xenome!!” Lightcap announces.

The pieces come like shards, stay like shards.

Newton takes a pointed bite of his graham cracker.

“For all I know,” Newton says, “you’re mapping our salvation in the quantum foam.”

Bach himself is reaching through three hundred years of spacetime to press down on every cognitive circuit Newt has in his repertoire.

Newton types: Supererogatory Quantum Cartography <3 in a text box.

The xenoepilepsy thing feels, at times, like a process that must go to completion.

Radishes. Honestly.

The arguments feel like a natural evolution of their correspondence.

He can’t stop the tears that come for Leibniz, for the kids, for all the unknown things that will ever fade with grace before their day and after their time.

“I see you’re conscious again,” Hermann says. “Felicitations.”