Aftermath: 46 - Until Our City Be Afire (2017)

Here, and everywhere. Now and everywhen.

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

Text iteration: Witching hour.

Additional notes: None.

2017 (Forty-six – Until Our City Be Afire)

“Guten Tag, Wunderkind!” Lightcap exclaims, bursting through the door without knocking and causing Newt, who had been in the midst of penning fiery rebuttal to the Editor of Nature Kaiju Science, to startle so violently that he nearly tips his chair over, breaks his neck, and deprives with world of his glorious intellect for no real reason at all.

Newt is NOT enthused by this turn of events.

He manages to keep his balance, just barely, but his started intake of breath and subsequent, enraged, “Lightcap! Have you heard of knocking!?” kicks off a coughing spree that has Lightcap counting off under her breath and shouting down the hallway for water [editorial note: more like for WATER!!!!], which he doesn’t need, man. Newt is fiiiiine, and he’ll tell her that that just as soon as he can get his airways to calm down enough to do their jobs.

“I’m okay,” he rasps, taking the glass of water that someone brought to Lightcap so she could give it to him. 

She drags the chair formerly known as the One In Front of His Desk around to the back of the desk so she can sit next to him and creepily watch him breathe from a distance of zero point five meters until he has the cognitive and pulmonary bandwidth to fix her with an apex Geiszlerian Glare. At which point, she looks him dead in the eye, and says, in what is likely her best impression of the patient-yet-pedantic Den Mother she will never be, “NeewwWWT, what has Dr. Gottlieb told you about sitting in chairs? All four feet are supposed to be located where?”

“Fuck you,” Newt wheezes. “What has Dr. Gottlieb told you about knocking.”

“Okay, fair.” Lightcap waits while Newt albuterols himself. “You look like shit, Geiszler. Still. Shouldn’t you look less like shit by now?”

“I look great,” Newt informs her.

“Sure you do, kiddo,” Lightcap pats his shoulder.

“What’s going on?” Newt asks, his voice starting to make a reappearance.

“Nothing,” Lightcap whispers. “Literally nothing. It’s a secret. Shhh, tell no one.” She reaches out to knock on the wood of Newt’s desk, which is probably actually compressed sawdust under a coat of lacquer, but hey. It’s at least wood-adjacent. A forest family member. “I came by tell you to take the afternoon off.”

“That’s weird,” Newt says. “Why?”

“Because.” Lightcap leans forward conspiratorially. “I want Gottlieb to take the afternoon off. He’s working too hard.”

Newt narrows his eyes at Lightcap. 

“Seriously,” Lightcap says, earnestness incarnate. “Have you seen the guy? He’s worn to a thread. Tendo’s worried about him.”

“Really?” Newt says.

“Swear to God.” Lightcap places her hand on an invisible bible. “J-Tech thinks he’s close to some kind of mathematical breakthrough but it’s just not coming; he’s been snapping at the staff, won’t let anyone near him—” Lightcap trails off, and sends a tragic look in the direction of Hermann’s office.

“And that’s different from the status quo, how?” Newt asks, not buying a single word of this. All his credulous cash is staying in his cognitive wallet where it belongs. 

Lightcap drops the conspiratorial attitude, turns serious. “Actually, little minion,” she says. “I know I joke around with you about him a lot, but Tendo really is worried. This whole effort is a marathon, and Gottlieb has been sprinting for a while now. For, like, two years. He’s not looking good. If you want to know, what actually happened is—well—you know what? Never mind. I probably shouldn’t tell you.”

“This is terrible,” Newt tells her. “Stop manipulating me so badly. Do it better.”

Lightcap snorts. “Fine, fine. Seriously though, he’s been driving himself into the ground for, oh,” she looks at her watch. “About five weeks and some change. Namely right around the time you nearly bought it on the floor of the decon suite like the theatrical little twerp you are.”

“Can you stop giving me a hard time about that, please?”

“Hmm. Can I stop giving you a hard time about bad-judgmenting yourself to death? Let me see. Nope. Doesn’t look like that one’s in the cards. But I’m not the only one you scarred for life, Geiszler. He was there too. It was upsetting. You owe him this. In fact, this is a new policy. Any time you almost die, you have to buy Gottlieb a meal. Bring me the receipt. I’ll reimburse you.”

Newt gives Lightcap an unimpressed look over the rims of his glasses. 

“Okay,” Lightcap sighs. “Well, I tried. I guess if you’re busy I’ll try my luck with Herc—maybe he can get the guy to take a break.”

“Herc Hansen?” Newt asks, incredulous. 

“What?” Lightcap widens her eyes, innocent-flower style. “They’re friends. They were drift compatible, even.”

“They’re not friends. They’re barely acquaintances. That’s a terrible idea,” Newt says. “The worst idea I’ve heard all day. Get out of here.”

“Soooooo you’re going to—”

“Yes, Lightcap, and, for the record, I would have done it anyway, without the chocolate and vanilla swirl of psychological manipulation you just vended. I want you to know that I noticed, okay? I noticed and I grade your effort at a C-minus. A low C-minus. A D-plus in all but name, and that’s because I don’t want your rich parents calling my department chair to complain about how I tanked their child’s future in a world full of grade inflation.”

Lightcap smiles sweetly at him, “Whatever you say, babyface. Take your coat and your inhaler if you go outside. And text me where you’ll be. And don’t stay out past 9 o’clock.”

“Don’t push your luck.”

“You’re welcome,” Lightcap sings, as she ducks out of his office.

He sighs, re-tips his chair, because it’s his chair, and he wants to, and stares at the ceiling of his office.

So, yes, Dr. Newton Geiszler has, maybe, a little bit of a poorly defined thing for Hermann Gottlieb? Which is fine. Completely normal. If Newt were going to make a list, in his head, of what he’d want to want in a significant other, a lot of Hermann’s qualities would be high up there. Turns out that list also works if you replace “significant other” with “arch nemesis,” but that probably says more about Newt than it does about Hermann. 

Unfortunately, the romance thing just isn’t gonna happen, contrary to all of Lightcap’s coy commentary and recherché attempts to set them up [editorial note: of which this may be one].

On the plus side, the arch nemesis thing is shaping up well. He irritates Hermann in an Epic Rival sort of way, what with his music and his playing it loudly and his “slovenly habits” and his green streaked hair and his platonic bromance with Lightcap and his science-nannying of an orphaned Japanese girl and his fiery rhetoric and his hatred of military hierarchy. 

Newt has given up on the romance thing. Newt gave up in 2015. Really, he did, little flashes of hope in the Pan of Possibility here and there notwithstanding. 

Nevertheless, there’s no reason they shouldn’t be friends. Well, that might be going a little far for Dr. Gottlieb. But there’s no reason they shouldn’t be more friendly than they currently are. It’s taken a while for him to get to this place, where he can, maturely, have this realization. Nevertheless, here he stands. 

All alone. 

Probably forever.

Which is fine.

It’s better this way anyway. Newt isn’t made for the romantic relationship scene. It’s not really his deal; he never had any opportunity to practice with anyone in his peer group, so he’s not good at it. Plus, it’s not like he’s got a huge biological imperative banging down his door all the time demanding he get good at it.

So. Friendship. He’s pretty sure they could, eventually, get to a state that Hermann would, sometimes, on a good day, call “friendship,” if Newt is extremely chill about things. Arguably they’re already at “friendship,” from a Normal Person Viewpoint? So maybe they could get to be, like, superfriends? 

Hi, Newt, that’s not chill. Forget it.

Forgotten. 

New goal: maybe, one day, they can be arch nemeses who are really close and definitely secret friends, though that, of course, always remains unspoken. Like, not soon, but eventually?

Newt dons his jacket, checks his hair, reseats his glasses, and grabs his albuterol. The walk to Hermann’s office isn’t far, but once he gets there, he kind of stops in front of the closed door because what is he supposed to say? He’s working on the perfect plan, and it definitely involves math, but before he can finish outlining his strategy, Tendo walks up behind him, reaches over Newt’s shoulder, bangs on Hermann’s door, and then walks away. Like a jerk.

“Hey,” Newt says, weakly.

Tendo doesn’t even turn around.

Hermann’s door opens, but not very far. “Can I help y—oh. It’s you.”

“Yeah,” Newt says, already exasperated. “It’s me. Can I come in?”

“I don’t know,” Hermann replies, dry like a silicate packet. “Can you?” But he turns around without slamming the door in Newt’s face, so that’s basically the Gottliebian equivalent of: make yourself at home, sorry about the non-existent mess.

Newt rolls his eyes and drops into the seat across from Hermann’s desk. Hermann resumes building his Nest of Higher Math, as though he hasn’t just let Newt into his inner sanctum. The guy seems to be mid-thought, so Newt stays silent. It’s not his usual deal, but he’s unsettled to find that Lightcap might have been somewhat serious about the nature of Dr. Gottlieb’s latest intellectual sprint. He does look worn down. His eyes are red-rimmed, he’s got an igneous-type tension in his shoulders, and his hair looks like it’s been on the receiving end of some frustrated pulling.

Hmm.

“I’ll be back,” Newt says. 

Hermann doesn’t acknowledge his statement or his leaving. 

Newt heads over to K-Science Meeting Room Three, where they keep the good coffee. He makes himself a cup, and then makes tea for his esteemed colleague before heading back the way he’d come. He re-enters Hermann’s office without knocking and sets the tea down directly over some fancy-looking quantum combinatorics.

“I was—” Hermann begins, annoyed, until he realizes that the thing currently blocking his math is tea. “Oh. Thank you, Newton.” Finally, he looks up.

“You’re welcome,” Newt replies, reappropriating his seat and proceeding to immediately scald his mouth on the coffee he tries to drink.

“To what do I owe the—” there is a pointed pause, “—pleasure?” Hermann finishes.

Newt is never put off by low-level Gottliebian hostility, and, in any case, this doesn’t even really rate. “Are you okay?” Newt asks. “You look stressed.”

“I’m fine,” Hermann replies, brick-wall style.

Well, that settles that. Newt is going to get four thirds to nowhere if he tries to be solicitous. 

“Mathematical symmetry?” he asks. 

“What about it?” Hermann asks, softening perceptibly.

And this, right here, is why Tendo and Lightcap can never make any headway, but Newt can. It doesn’t actually have all that much to do with Newt, or whether or not Hermann likes him. When you get right down to it, it’s more that Newt is the only one who viscerally understands that Hermann has the most existentially terrifying job of them all. He’s the guy under the bed, looking out for the arrival of nightmares, monsters and all other things terrible. And there’s no one with him, most of the time. 

Math like this is a solo sport. 

Doesn’t mean there can’t be spectators, though.

Newt leans forward, taps the guy’s quantum combinatorics. Lifts his eyebrows. Waits.

Hermann looks a bit taken aback, his mouth falling open and sort of staying that way. It’s a little bit cute. So sue him. Friends can find other friends cute. It happens all the time. Case in point: he’s doing it right now. “Ah,” Hermann says, recovering. “Good eye. I didn’t know you had enough Group Theory in your armamentarium to recognize this.”

“At this point all my higher math knowledge is acquired and maintained purely for the end goal of appreciating your work,” Newt says, and yiiiiiiikesssss that sounded wistful. That’s Hermann’s fault. He was wistful first.

“Wanna help me brush up on symmetry?” Newt asks.

Hermann looks tempted, but he shakes his head. “What would be the point?”

“Oh I don’t know,” Newt says, dryly, draping an arm over the back of his chair. “Maybe you could use a little metaphorical hand holding in the face of the Quantum Crevasse out of which our Untimely Demise craws at semi-predictable intervals? If you’re busy, fine. All I’m saying is that I see the nature of what quantum cartography has become. Just because I gave it a cute moniker doesn’t mean I don’t realize how fundamentally unsettling it is.”

Hermann looks like Newt just slapped him straight across the face. 

They stare at each other.

Newt is surprised by Hermann’s surprise.

In the wake of what appears to be pure shock, Hermann displays a complicated series of emotions that go by too fast for Newt to parse. The whole chain ends with, “You’re very unfair, sometimes, Newton.”

“What?” Newt asks, confused and slightly annoyed. Newt is unfair? Newt is the unfair one?

“Never mind,” Hermann replies. “Yes. The modeling of breach mechanics requires the invention of techniques that, when correctly applied, may reveal something terrible about the lifespan of our species, and it’s not a pleasant thing. So, thank you, but I’m capable of handling it.”

“Obviously,” Newt says. “But let me point out that if you leave me too far behind I’m never going to catch up. Plus, it’s a nice afternoon and nothing,” he leans forward, knocks on the wood of Hermann’s desk, “is currently collapsing under its own weight or actively trying to eat us. You want to go to the roof?”

Hermann gives him a long, soulful look, and good lord, the guy must be absolutely exhausted.

A long span of seconds go by.

Hermann doesn’t say no.

Newt grins, and he knows he looks a little too happy about this so he tries to mask it by clapping his hands together, getting to his feet, and speaking with authority. “Get your coat. So, did you know that biologists have the concepts of both rotational and reflectional symmetry, but we call them radial and bilateral because we’re mathematical philistines?”

“Hmm.” Hermann stands, reaching for his coat. “I can’t say I’m surprised. How’s your set theory?”

“Eh,” Newt says. “I’m guessing you’re going to find it functionally bad but philosophically good?”

“Explain.” Hermann picks up his tea, and gestures Newt toward the door.

“Meaning, functionally, my notation is rusty, my understanding of operators is conceptual at best, but, like, I understand that the thing four ducks and four sea urchins have in common is the concept of “fourness” and that concept derives from the set; so ergo set theory forms a good portion of foundation of mathematics, maybe, probably.”

“It’s a start,” Hermann says, sounding almost fond.

“I like the idea of sets of symmetries, though. I can tell you that much.”

For some reason, this makes Hermann roll his eyes. “Of course you do. You would.”

“I have no idea why that’s hilarious, but I’m sure it is.” Newt gestures toward the door. “Roof?”

“After you,” Hermann says.

Once they emerge into the upper reaches of the Shatterdome, Hermann takes the lead. Of course he hangs out up here. He loves to find vistas and gaze at them. Such a Hermann thing. Kind of a Lightcap thing too, come to think of it—the only difference being one of elevation. Huh. Thus far, Newt hasn’t been invited to do any vista-gazing, but then again, they haven’t been in Seattle very long. They climb up to perch on a wide cement railing-thing that would, if this were medieval Europe, be best considered a “rampart.” Below, stretching away into the distance, is the Pacific. They sit loosely facing one another. Newt is cross-legged, with a great view of the Space Needle. Hermann has his bad leg draped over the lip of the concrete ledge.

If this is not the cutest fucking thing Newt has ever done with anyone he’ll surrender one of his doctorates back to MIT. Either Chemistry or Bioethics; he’ll flip a coin.

“What brought this on?” Hermann asks, sipping his tea.

I want to be your friennnnnndddd, Newt doesn’t say.

“When I was recovering from that proteolytic disaster, which, by the way, I think I can prevent in the future for both myself and humanity by use of a small molecule inhibitor of a dormant protease, Lightcap took away my computer and told me if I wanted to read the only thing she’d allow was Quantum Physics Letters. And it occurred to me—”

“Stop stop stop,” Hermann says. “What?”

“Yeah, well, Lightcap knows I love to fangirl about math, so—”

“No, not that part.” Hermann shoots him a significant look. “I’m well aware of your proclivities in that regard, but did you just casually insinuate that you can prevent delayed onset interstitial lung disease secondary to repeat Kaiju Blue exposure?”

“Okay,” Newt says, sipping his coffee. “So I’m not the only one reading outside my lane, apparently. I did imply that, but I’m not going to get credit for it. Well. I might get some credit for it. But I’m not pursuing it. I sent a bunch of emails back to my biomedical academician friends; this is more their deal anyway. It’s going to be at least a few years before it goes anywhere.”

“Would you mind terribly explaining what actually happened to you?”

“No,” Newt says, looking out at the ocean and then back at Hermann, wishing he’d brought sunglasses up here. The sun is kind of merciless. “If you’re, um interested?”

“I find that I very much want to know,” Hermann says. He’s in a much more advantageous sun-configuration than Newt is right now.

“Okay,” Newt pushes his glasses up his face and squints into the brightness of day and sky and sea. “We call it Blue, because it’s literally blue, but Blue isn’t one thing. It’s a whole mixture of small molecules that spontaneously assemble into the cellular version of lawnmower blades. It mows down whatever proteinaceous structure it comes into contact with. Kind of like the immunological inflammasome, but more aggressive. Plastic can contain Blue pretty well, depending on its molecular architecture, but if you put, like, a human hand or jaw bone or whatever into a bucket of Blue it would eventually dissolve into proteinaceous goo.”

“Lovely,” Hermann says, pulling sunglasses out of the pocket of his coat and handing them to Newt.

“Oh,” Newt says, taking them. “Thanks. Yeah, I’m weak to the daystar.” He swaps his glasses for Hermann’s shades. The Space Needle de-crisps.

“Don’t get distracted,” Hermann replies.

“Would I do that? So if you inhale aerosolized Blue, or ingest it, actually, and then survive, which more people do these days given the budget mobile bronchoscopy units now being deployed, it turns out if you get enough of a toxic load, Blue may leave something behind. At least in me it did, which I know, because they saved my bronchoalveolar lavage fluid, thank god, so I could do some immunohistochemistry with a whole panel of anti-kaiju antibodies. Long story short, I identified a small molecule that had set up shop in my alveolar membranes.”

“What do you mean ‘set up shop’?”

“Like, it got in there during my Manila adventure and never left.” Newt pauses, enjoying this life behind Hermann’s shades he’s living right now. Is the sunglasses thing a friends thing? Or would Hermann do this for his arch nemesis? Probably he would, damn it. “I thought maybe it would be a prion, but it’s not. I was a little sad about that. That would have been cool. This thing is more like an adaptor protein for one of these giant cleavage machines that activate cellular caspases. And to be clear when I say “giant” I mean subcellular. Just, like, giant relative to other intracellular protein conglomerates? Probably? You know what,  just replace the word ‘giant’ with the word ‘tiny’.” 

“So you had residual kaiju proteinaceous material inserted into the membranes of the cells in your lungs?” Hermann looks appalled.

“Yeah.”

“That’s appalling,” Hermann says. 

Nailed it. Can Newt read this guy’s face or what?

“Eh,” Newt says. “Yeah. So I didn’t actually have to inhale Blue. I only had to inhale some small molecule partners that triggered aggregation of the Blue that was already sitting in my lungs. I’m still surprised it happened, but I guess Crimson Typhoon did make a mess of the tail-based lymphatics, and so more chemically active stuff was aerosolized than usual in the area I was in. And then it started chopping up my lung tissue. But only a little. This was nothing relative to last time.”

“Newton, can I ask—” Hermann hesitates, sips his tea. There is a long pause. “Why did you allow her to send you out in the first place?”

“I really didn’t think it would be an issue.” Newt shrugs apologetically.

Hermann glares at him, but there’s hardly any heat behind it. “You need to make a habit of thinking critically about more than just your benchwork.”

“You’d miss our fights if I died, eh?” Newt says, trying not to show undue positive emotion about the fact that Hermann cares about him, at least a little.

“I’d miss more than our ‘debates,’ yes.” Hermann admits. 

Oh my god. This is going so well, Newt’s brain opines, unduly impressed with itself.

“Well on the plus side,” Newt says, “There aren’t that many people who survived the early rounds of Kaiju Blue, and even fewer who got re-exposed and lavaged, so it actually turns out to be an extremely useful case study. So, worth it, probably.”

Hermann shoots him a dark look, heavily implying that he finds Newt’s reasoning suspect.

“But that’s, like, so five weeks ago,” Newt says. “Let’s get back to the quantum, please. Your math downstairs looked like you were playing round with reflective symmetries of the transit pathway—”

Hermann looks like he’s trying very hard to avoid displaying even a trace amount of happiness, and it’s not working at all. “Hmm, well, I may have been sketching out some Coxeter group themed ephemera in the margins—”

“Coxeter group?” Newt says, sipping his coffee.

“A formal description of kaleidoscopic reflections.”

“Nice. Good song title. Don’t worry, I’ll credit you.”

“Group theory aside for the moment, I can tell by your comment that you’re too grounded in the presumed physicality of transit. For a time I was too, it’s a natural presupposition, but it will hold you back conceptually.”

“What do you mean?” Newt asks. “The presumed physicality of transit? There are things physically transiting the breach, Hermann. Giant monsters, in fact.”

“Yes, I don’t dispute the physicality of their arrival, but the breach is not a literal pathway,” Hermann explains. “As far as I can tell it doesn’t possess length or width in the way we intuitively understand it.”

“But your representational models—you’re mapping it, and you’re certainly representing it as three-dimensional. A spacetime landscape to be transited.”

“Yes but the ‘diameter’ is a topological representation of extremely complex quantum probabilities while the ‘length’ is proportional to the time required to tick off those probabilistic checkboxes, as it were.”

Newt groans. “Ugh, time?”

Hermann nods, sips his tea, but doesn’t say more.

“Fine, fine,” Newt says, thermodynamically knuckling under with poor grace. “‘Time’ as in sidereal time? Or ‘time’ as in arrow of time?” 

Time is the worst. It’s his least favorite.

Hermann actually smiles at him. A real smile. Better wattage than Newt’s ever really gotten from the guy. What the heck is happening here? Newt is so surprised that he grins back, even though he has no idea why he deserves this.

Time is the best. It’s his new favorite.

“The quantum arrow,” Hermann says. “Yes. And this, I think, is what you’ve been driving at all along, even if you weren’t quite aware of it. Because you opened with symmetries, yes? And the wave-function collapse required for breach transit happens in a time-asymmetric fashion.”

“Ohhhh,” Newt says, as pieces finally click into place. “And you’re getting fancy with Group Theory to try do some temporal combinatorics that improve the interval calculations for, specifically, the quantum decoherence portion of your model?”

Hermann stares at him. 

“What?” Newt says defensively. “I’m quantum literate. Mostly. Not sure I’m Group Theory literate. Is that not what you’re doing?”

“It is what I’m doing, but—how on earth did you intuit that?"

“I don’t know about ‘intuit.’ You have a whole stack of books on your desk about Group Theory, man, and you just told me the quantum arrow of time part yourself, more or less.”

“That’s still quite a leap. More like—" Hermann pauses, eyebrows raised. “A collection of leaps.”

“Eh,” Newt says, trying not to smile. “As they’re all a product of reflections on the nature of symmetry and could therefore be represented as a Coxeter group, it’s probably fair to count them as one.”

Hermann has to fight hard to avoid looking both amused and impressed, he fails on both counts, and Newt takes this as the huge victory it very clearly is. 

He raises his eyebrows at Hermann and, very archly, takes a sip of his coffee. Newt is fully intent on riding this silence into the conversational sunset, until something occurs to him.

“Waaaaait. So do you think there are partial transit events? Are there some kaiju getting, I don’t know, lost to the vacuum or smeared into superstrings or what have you? Like, could you start a transit and not tick the probabilistic tick boxes? And also on a related note, if the whole thing is a spectrum of probability does it mean anything to say the breach is ‘closed’?”

Hermann looks away, out at the ocean, because he’s smiling again, and he can’t do that and look at Newt, obviously; that would be poor form. When he finally gets his face under a little more control, he looks back, still extremely pleased, and says, “Newton, each of those questions would take hours to answer appropriately.”

“Hmm,” Newt says, looking at his watch. “We should probably get dinner then, what do you think?”

Hermann looks tragically undecided, and there are times when Newt could almost believe Hermann’s antipathy toward the world is a weird sort of armor; offense toward anything as defense against everything. But people are complex and fundamentally unknowable, so even if he did develop this as a working theory of Gottliebian psychology, which he won’t, there’s no way for him to ever verify its veracity. It’s not testable. 

Trying to understand what’s going on in anyone’s head is both a colossal waste of time, and sometimes, paradoxically, the only thing that seems to matter. 

It sucks to live like this, Newt is coming to realize, holding this depth of uncertainty about everything all the time. Are kaiju good or bad, in a Manichean sense, and should Cait-Science fight them? Does Hermann like Newt or not? Are they living in a computer simulation? Is light a particle or a wave? Are thinking and action causally coupled or is consciousness a neurologic epiphenomenon? Is there a point to any of this? Trying to live, waiting to die? Lightcap has God, and that’s great for her, but what does Newt have, really, at the end of the day? Nietzsche? [Editorial note: as company goes, Friedrich Wilhelm isn’t exactly the life of any given party.]

Nothing matters. And, at the same time and for the same reasons, everything does.

Hermann thinks that way. He must. He very obviously believes everything matters.

So. 

Newt can take a page out of that book. He’ll make an effort. We will, in fact, make The Effort. Here, and everywhere. Now and everywhen.

“Come on,” Newt encourages. “Don’t slide into the lonely math abyss. Topology abyss? Topological abyss. You know what I mean. Definitely other mathematicians have completely lost their minds over way less terrifying things. Look at Gödel. And, speaking  of the arrow of time, look at poor Boltzmann. Plus, you know that when you explain this stuff to me you give yourself a disproportionate number of new ideas. We should really do this, if only for the sake of your own efficiency.”

“Well,” Hermann says. “When you put it that way, Newton, it’s difficult to argue.”

“It really is, isn’t it?”