Aftermath: 30 - The Garland of the War (2027)

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

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

Text iteration: Witching hour.

Additional notes: None.

2027 (Thirty – The Garland of the War)

Newt and Jake are walking down a second-floor hallway on the way back from the latest Research in Progress talk when Newt takes a really good, really clear line of Johann Sebastian Bach straight to the brain. Honestly, he’d been pretty optimistic this wasn’t A Thing anymore, but he hadn’t tested it since 2025, and this is a hardcore fugue and it’s not like the kids aren’t around, little neural ghosts waiting for their time in the sun, so—

“Newt?” Jake says, probably because Newt has his hands over his ears. 

“Bach,” Newt says, maybe, but he can’t hear anything over the explosion of musical through-lines in his head. He’s trying to fight it, trying to stay at the top of his own consciousness, but it’s hard. He sinks into a crouch, hitting a knee on the floor, hands still clamped to his head, riding a rush of dopamine so intense he thinks his teeth might crack with it. Bach himself is reaching through three hundred years of spacetime to press down on every cognitive circuit Newt has in his repertoire. It’s kind of terrifying, getting mentally invaded by a dead composer, randomly, on a Friday afternoon, courtesy of alien monster neural pathways. 

He’s going to calm down about it real soon, unfortunately, because he’s pretty sure he’s about to lose what hold he has on who he is and why this sucks.

“Ummmm.” Jake looks at the open door, then back at Newt. He leaves Newt and crosses the hall to close the door. Smart kid. This helps. Not enough though. Newt’s body isn’t doing what he wants it to do. It’s possessed of a lassitude that’s dragging his hands down, pulling him toward the floor. 

Maybe Leibniz will save him? 

Leibniz is dead, though.

Bach is also dead; nothing’s stopping him.

Jake is alive and right next to him, wrenching Newt’s arm to get it over his shoulder, then dragging Newt to his feet and down the hall until, finally the Bach is totally inaudible. 

The kids hiss in longing.

Newt presses his shirt sleeve against his face and tries not to look for Gottfried Leibniz around every corner they pass. He feels acutely exhausted, his brain full of fading counterpoint. How long had that lasted? Probably a good twenty seconds. He feels weirdly accomplished. Kinda inappropriately so. A little euphoric. Or is that maybe the kids? Newt is probably the one who’s trembling and bleeding from his face. Everything has a weird glow. 

“Are you okay?” Jake says, like maybe not for the first time.

“Yeah,” Newt replies, trying for casual, overshooting, hitting dazed, though. Hitting that one dead on.

“Are you gonna have a seizure?” Jake asks.

“No,” Newt says.

“No offense,” Jake says, “but I think you might be wrong about that.”

“None taken,” Newt replies. “It’s possible. I have a problem with Bach.”

“Who doesn’t?” Jake says, companionably. Jake is the best. Newt would take a toxic alien dart to the myocardium for him any day. They make it to the lab, and Jake helps him to his desk before chasing everyone else away, except for Amy, who’s like, currently a budget doctor or something.

“I’m fine,” Newt tells them. “I just need a minute.”

“Okay,” Jake says. 

“Sure,” Amy agrees, awkwardly taking Newt’s pulse, less awkwardly handing him a box of tissues.

“By myself,” Newt clarifies, trading sleeve for Kleenex.

“Ha,” Jake replies. “No chance. Are you sick?”

“No,” Newt says. “I’m telling you, it was just the Bach.”

“Bach?” Amy says, frowning.

Jake provides some exposition for what could easily turn into episode four of the Jake and Amy Show. [Editorial note: a junior scientist and an anxiety-prone medical student investigate strange hallway phenomena! Now streaming on Netflix.] “We passed a room playing some classical station—Bach, I guess, and he kind of grabbed his head and dropped, then stopped talking until I shut the door and helped him down the hall a ways.”

“Guys,” Newt says, exasperated. “I’m fine. If I were going to have a seizure I’d be seizing right now. I just—” he tries to frame it in a way they’ll understand. “Bach is very triggering.” This is extremely true. Not in the way they’re probably interpreting it, but in a wholly inexplicable way that involves, like, undead kaiju he tortured accidentally and that haunt him to this day. 

The kids hiss at him, a little sympathetically.

Kids, any chance you can be Leibniz? Newt asks, feeling a little more than a little bit cognitively needy. Like, quite literally, he needs dopamine. He probably just used it all.

Continuity, the kids hiss, in what is unmistakably their best effort. 

Thanks, kids. Kind of a creepy word choice though. Newt doesn’t feel reassured. 

Jake and Amy make sounds of respectful empathy.

Newt needs to talk to the people in the room, not mentally summon alien hive mind incarnations of dead and optimistic rationalists. “So, um, Amy? Can you just—go tell everyone I’m not dying or seizing or anything and then, I don’t know, go to the departmental happy hour or something? Yay Friday.”

Amy, Junior Medical Professional, looks at Jake, First Officer of the Geiszler lab, and now Newt is SURE there’s something going on between them because there are whole novels of communication in the look they exchange. Maybe The Hallway Adventures of Jake and Amy is more like episode four of season two. 

“Okay.” Amy makes her exit.

Jake drops into the chair across from Newt and just kind of sits there while Newt tries to scrape himself up and dump himself into an Associate Professor shaped container, both elbows on his desk, his head in his hands. He should call Hermann, and he’s definitely going to, he just needs to make sure he won’t cry. It’s not like he hasn’t cried in front of Jake before, but he really tries to keep those times to a minimum. Jake gets it in a way that no one else gets it. Jake is the only one of them who knows what a mess Newt really is. Was. Mostly was, sometimes is. 

“Why did you join my lab?” Newt moans, mostly into his hands. 

“Glory?” Jake says. “Fame? Fortune?”

Newt doesn’t look up. He feels like crap. He feels like crap about feeling like crap. The kids miss the Bach. Newt misses Leibniz. The kids like to torture him. They deserve that, probably. He does. They all do? They don’t. They came to HIS planet. And like, marauded and stuff. He was not the aggressor here. They’re not even them. They’re him. The part of him that’s them. The part of them that was them died a fiery representational death underwater. Huh. That was probably how a lot of the kids actually died in the world, come to think of it. Awwww. Damn it, his goal was not to cry.

Leave me alone, he thinks, not really sure who he’s talking to. Maybe Bach. Maybe every software spirit the hardware of this brain has volunteered to host. Except for Leibniz. Newt would take that guy back any day. 

The kids sibilate restively. 

Newt can’t get his nose to stop bleeding, probably because he’s still freaking out a little bit.

“You want to talk about what happened back there?” Jake asks.

“No,” Newt says. 

“I can make a PSA to the entire floor,” Jake offers. “No Bach.”

“Don’t do that,” Newt says.

“Okay,” Jake says, in a way that means he’s gonna do it first thing Monday morning.

Newt gives him A Look.

Jake shrugs innocently. 

“What’d you think of the talk?” Newt asks.

“Um,” Jake says. “A little unfocused; it seemed kind of like a cool computational algorithm with no definite application. There was that other group that worked on multidimensional coding in the amygdala—I’m forgetting the institution—but if I recall correctly, they had a model with good predictive power. Their paper might be a good place to start looking for signals to refine from the noise.”

“Myeah,” Newt says. “Agree with number one, haven’t read the paper you’re talking about.”

“I’ll dig it up for you,” Jake says.

Newt nods. 

“Feel more like a PI now?” Jake asks. 

“A little.” Newt tries pulling the Kleenex away from his face, but nope, still bleeding. “Ugh this is the worst.”

“Yeah, you’re getting blood everywhere,” his second-year graduate student thoughtfully points out.

“Thanks, Jake,” Newt says.

“You gonna call your guy?” Jake asks.

“Yeah.” Newt pulls out his phone. He dials Hermann’s number. Jake politely looks away. 

“Newton,” Hermann says.

“Hi,” Newt says.

“What’s wrong?” Hermann snaps, because of course he does.

It’s unfair how sensitive Hermann is to even monosyllables that come out of Newt’s mouth. He doesn’t have a reciprocal skill. It makes him feel like a bad life partner. 

“Nothing,” Newt says. This is never the right answer, even when it’s true. It’s probably not true right now.

“Newton,” Hermann says, escalating because Newt sucks at talking about his day while simultaneously not crying in front of Jake. 

“Can you just—come get me?” Newt asks, his voice cracking slightly.

“Yes,” Hermann says.

“I’ll be in my office,” Newt says.

“I’ll see you shortly,” Hermann says, hanging up. 

“He’s coming,” Newt says pointlessly to Jake; who probably heard the other half of the call anyway.

“Good,” Jake says. 

Newt tries to focus on calming down and reducing his intracranial pressure so maybe he can get his nose to stop bleeding sometime this century. Calm down, he tells himself, sternly. 

Screw you, his brain replies, that was terrifying and I’ll calm down when I WANT to calm down, which is not right now.

Great. This’ll be a great night. Ugh. No. He needs to not knuckle under to this, he can still save it, he’s fine, it was just some Bach, it’s even happened before. Jake has seen way worse than this. Last winter, when it was just the two of them in the lab nothing set up, just boxes, and Newt had come in for half a day, still “slowed,” as Hypothetical Rain likes to put it, from his most recent bout with the kids and the hospital and the taper that comes after, but also getting sick again, and Newt had told Jake that he wasn’t allowed to affiliate and—

So you’re leaving, then? Jake had said, holding a bag of 50 mL conical tubes.

No, Newt had said, his head pounding, probably with all the misery trying to explode out of it, but you can’t join my lab.

Why? Jake had demanded.

Why would you want to?

Because I do, Jake had replied, going back to unloading the box at his feet.

Not good enough, Newt had intended to snap, but it had mostly come out slow and slightly more than slightly slurred.

Because, Jake had said, not looking at him, I know what I need out of a mentor. I don’t need someone breathing down my neck all the time, telling me what to do. I need someone inspiring, who can keep that love for science burning, so it doesn’t turn to drudgery. You’re definitely that guy, Newt.

Maybe, Newt had replied. It’s more likely I was that guy. But there are a lot of people like that here who are way more functional than I am. Jake, I’ve been out of commission for most of the winter, I’ve barely shown up to set up my own lab, I can’t—I can’t even handle going to the Friday talks, I never gave a job talk, they’ve already stacked the funding deck against me, they only hired me because the Math Department wanted my life partner so badly. I won’t get tenure; I’m a dead end. I like you. I want you to have an actual science career. And the way to do that? Join anyone else’s lab. Not mine.

Jake, unperturbed, stacks conical tubes in the supply cabinet. I might have believed all that crap you just told me if you hadn’t spent an afternoon talking me through the mechanics of synaptic transmission. And an afternoon on the action potential. And an afternoon on the classification and action of different families of neurotransmitters. Do you know how well I’m doing in Seminars in Neurobio? The way you synthesize information and the way you teach it—it’s worth it. All the drawbacks. All the downsides. Even if your lab crashes and burns after eighteen months, the teaching alone would be worth the time spent. There’s no one else in this department I’m willing to consider if you’re an option. You make me want to try harder than I’ve ever tried in my life, just so I can talk to you about this stuff.

“Newt,” Jake says. “I know that look. Stop it.”

“You don’t know this look.” Newt tips his head back, really making an effort on turning the epistaxis faucet to the off position.

“Yes I do. This is the look you get when you torture yourself about my scientific future. Or Charu’s. Or Daniel’s. Everything is fine. Sam Gordon is obsessed with you. He won’t shut up about your R01. I’m pretty sure he wants to be in your lab a little bit.”

Newt smiles faintly because that last part might be true.

It strikes him that his lab now is a more extreme version of every lab he’s ever run. He’s always attracted people the way he attracts them now—by being a high wattage incandescent bulb in the scientific dark. That part hasn’t changed. If anything, the years in the PPDC, the Drift with Hermann—these things have only sharpened his intellect and intuition. The people he attracts have always felt an intense personal loyalty to him because of his behavior, his age (though that won’t stay a thing forever), the way the world is always trying to crush something that lives a few sigmas from the mean. That, too, has intensified, turned into a new thing, even—a raging protectiveness that sometimes gets a little bit out of control. 

You don’t need to accompany me to every Research In Progress talk you know, Newt is about to tell Jake. But then, he stops himself. 

Because, um, hi, maybe Jake does need to accompany Newt to every talk if people are going to be irresponsibly playing Bach in the halls? This is a foreign concept for him a little bit, but maybe he should just—let the lab kids be how they want to be, go with it, and hmm, yeah, accept it as the exogenous functionality crutch it is a little bit. But they’re doing it for a reason, right, because he’s not some totally useless figurehead; he does things, like getting grants, having good ideas, teaching. He should maybe try a different model where he embraces he won’t be some kind of self-sufficient, mentally tough, paragon of academic machismo instead of just making pointless stands about things that aren’t even in his self-interest.

Oh, look at this new leaf, Newt’s brain says. Let’s see what’s on the other side.

Even the ghost-monster thought-children seem vaguely supportive.

“You look like you’re thinking way too hard,” Jake says, “especially for a guy who nearly passed out in the hallway over Bach not fifteen minutes ago.”

“Thanks for saving me from the fugue,” Newt says. 

“No problem,” Jake replies. 

“Thanks for going with me, generally, all the time,” Newt continues, and, instead of perseverating on his I-suck-and-have-low-self-esteem theme, he says, “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Jake.”

Jake looks at him, surprised, very clearly touched by this admission on Newt’s part, which, crap, means he should say this kind of thing more often to his lab in general. Now that he’s really thinking about it—they do a lot for him, a LOT, but more importantly, they do a lot for Hermann, who wouldn’t be so fine with leaving Newt across campus if he didn’t know that Newt had a whole lab full of people ready to step in and save him from The Well-Tempered Clavier at a moment’s notice.

Newt is reassured to see Jake at a loss for words. He’s, like, twenty-four or something, and already creepily mature. But not so mature he can handle watching his PI freak out over Bach, start bleeding, nearly pass out, recover, and thank him for, essentially, years of dedication and support. No twenty-four year-old should be able to take that with equanimity, and if they can, they probably had a childhood that was way too exciting. 

“Newt, I, uh—”

Newt waves him off. “On a scale of one to ten how bad do I look?”

“Like, a seven,” Jake says. “Dr. Gottlieb is going to, um, not be happy when he sees you.”

“Ugh.” Newt pulls the tissue away from his nose. No more blood. Great. “Well, seems like that’s done,” he says, throwing it in the trash.

“Sit tight,” Jake says. “I think we can get you down to a solid five.” He darts out of the room and is back about twenty seconds later with a bunch of damp paper towels. With Jake’s help, Newt gets the blood off his face.

“Better?” he says, throwing the last of the paper towels in the trash. 

“Better,” Jake says, “but still more six than five, because you’ve got blood all over your shirt. Don’t you keep a blazer around for surprise formality?”

“Yeah,” Newt says. “Back of the door.” 

Jake grabs it, and helps Newt into it, which Newt needs, because he still feels like crap and his motor pathways are confused. What is this, 2025? Sure feels like it. Maybe he needs to go on a five-mile walk. 

“You okay?” Jake yanks Newt’s blazer up over his shoulders, settles it properly.

“Myeah,” Newt replies. 

“You seem a little off.” Jake straightens his seams. “More than a little, actually.”

Newt sighs. “You know what I did, right? At the end of the war?” Seems like everyone knows but no one talks to him about it, which is great, which is preferred, actually. 

“Uh,” Jake says, helping him sit. “Yeah. You uh—"

“Yeah,” Newt says. “That. Drifting with a non-human thing can really screw up human motor patterns, and can leave one with ‘normal’ problems, like an excitable prefrontal cortex that enjoys making electrochemical waves incompatible with consciousness when my internal thermostat is cranked too high—but it can also leave one with ‘weird’ problems.”

“The Bach thing?”

“Myeah. I don’t know what that is—I, like, start to lose control of my ability to do anything.” 

“If I hadn’t been there?”

“Ugh, I don’t know, I think I might have just gone down and looked comatose for as long as it lasted? But, to be clear, I wouldn’t have been comatose. My brain overloads in the presence of musical counterpoint.”

“That sucks,” Jake opines, returning to the other side of his desk. “If it went on long enough, would you have a seizure?”

“Maybe,” Newt says. 

“What about other fugues?” Jake asks. “Ones not by Bach?”

“No idea,” Newt replies. “I haven’t been in the mood to experiment. Ugh.” He holds up a hand, shows Jake his resting tremor. “See that? That’s a relative dopamine deficit, my friend. I just burned through a shit-ton of the stuff I’m sure.”

“Dopamine, huh?” Jake says.

“I’m pretty sure.”

“Did it feel good?”

“Uh, yeah,” Newt admits. “Kinda. But also terrifying.”

“Do you get a resting tremor after you have a seizure?” Jake asks. 

“I couldn’t tell you,” Newt says. “My neurologist hits my higher cognitive processing with a pharmacologic club so hard that I lose at least four days of my life every time. By day five I don’t have one.”

“I guess what I’m getting at is: are there two entirely separate processes that explain the seizures and the Bach, or are they different manifestations of the same thing?”

“Hmmm,” Newt says. 

“Because seizures, classically, that would either be ramping up glutamate or falling GABA levels. Signaling thresholds could change when you’re feverish, but if the Bach thing is a different thing, and sucks all your dopamine dry, that’s actually probably going to—huh. Maybe we should ask Amy or your neurologist about this but I’m pretty sure Amy was telling me that when you block dopamine too hard you lower the seizure threshold. So you might want to double up on your seizure prophylaxis until you lose your resting tremor.”

“Jake,” Newt says, “I hate that theory. Tell no one.”

“Sorry,” Jake says. “At least it’s a weekend.”

“Why are you and Amy talking about seizures anyway?” Newt asks.

Jake’s eyes go very deer in very headlight. “I was helping her study. She takes the first step of her boards soon, and—”

Newt grins. “You were ‘helping’ her ‘study’?”

“It’s not like that,” Jake protests, squirming in his chair. 

“Lab romances can get awkward,” Newt warns. 

“You’re one to talk. You told me that you and Dr. Gottlieb had to share space for the last two years of the war.”

“We weren’t together then.” Newt leans back in his chair, crossing his arms against this resting tremor that he has NOT missed, by the way. He feels physically spent.

“Wait, what?” 

“Oh I might have ‘helped him study’ here or there,” Newt says, putting air quotes around the words with his tone alone. “But no. We didn’t get together until after the war.” 

When you hijacked his good judgment and possibly his romantic tastes with your stereotactic interface, Newt’s brain says, being a jerk. 

“But,” Jake says, “what if we’d all died?”

“Well, in that case, I imagine we’d probably have had more pressing regrets than not giving a romantic relationship a fair shot. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying don’t date Amy. I’m just saying think about it carefully.”

There’s a knock at Newt’s door. He looks meaningfully at Jake.

“You’re a solid five.” Jake gives him a double thumbs up. 

“Come in,” Newt says.