Aftermath: 7 - Like an Ill-Sheathed Knife (2028)

These kids are so great.

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

Text iteration: Witching hour.

Additional notes: None.

2028 (Seven – Like an Ill-Sheathed Knife)

The architecture of UC Berkeley’s Neurosciences Building is a tip of the hat to the human mind. Full of natural light, glass everywhere, wide hallways, open floor-plan labs, areas that encourage socializing, windows that tint according to directionality of sun. The halls arch in appropriate places and stairways spiral like unwinding helices. The walls are lined with a forest landscape of microscopy-based artwork. All colors. It’s like a brain in here. A nice one.

Newt and Jake, sitting side-by-side, finally finish their figure formatting, double check the cover letter, and hit submit under the rare December sun. As Newt sends the paper away, he feels (in his mind) Hermann, across campus, focused on quantum topologies; Mako, on a plane, flying first class, her hair hidden, smiling as she watches passing clouds; the place in the Pacific Ocean where the breach would lie if it wasn’t folded into spacetime origami; the novel neural pathways described in their paper, firing in his own brain, and Jake’s. 

Come on Geiszler, you’re full of shit, his brain says, sounding like he and Lightcap had a monster child [editorial note: congratulations?]. That’s fun, and yes, true, good point brain; no one can feel things like that. Those aren’t things Newt can feel. Except for how he kinda can?

Huh.

“Done,” Newt murmurs. The release of focus that comes with pressing the button echoes back at him, strange waves. Mako now: looking out over the spread of the planet. Mako then: grabbing the hand of Skye McLeod, pulling him toward the observation platform. 

“Newt,” Jake says, sun glinting off his hair and off his glasses. It strikes Newt that Jake is Mako’s age. Jake, born years earlier, might have found his way to Newt after graduate school, would have stayed, he’s sure. Right to the end. Lisa, he thinks. Jake. He can almost remember saying goodbye in the rain, beneath the spinning blades of a black helicopter. Night. Dark water. Both of them had been there, hadn’t they?

“Newt,” Jake says, more insistently, his gaze a physical pressure. An analytical pressure. A presence more than a pressure? A manifestation of Jake’s profound capability giving his gaze momentum, if not mass? You need to lighten up, Newt thinks, in the general direction of Jake’s comet-tail stare. Have a better life than you’re giving yourself. You almost died with me in Manila, you almost left me in 2024. 

“Yeah,” Newt says. 

“You look like shit.” Jake looks super earnest about this observation.

“Jake,” Newt says, hurt. 

“Get up,” Jake says. “Get your stuff, we’re—”

Newt’s office door flies open and Amy bursts in without knocking, blonde hair falling out of a precarious updo, slow motion. Or, he’s fast. Geiszler, get your sweet ass down to lab four, we have a problem. Lightcap. But no. “FPLC machine’s backing up,” Amy says, then turns right back around, crossing the hall, heading for the lab. Afterimages blur. Don’t worry. I’ll never let them have you. I’ll never let anyone have you. Except for Gottlieb, and he’s a maybe. Fast Performance. Liquid Chromatography. All over the floor. 

“Damn it,” Newt and Jake say at the same time, Jake with an endearing amount of distress, Newt with a distantly philosophical vibe, because, really, what’s an FPLC machine in the grand scheme of things?

Nothing.

Plus, he feels amazing. 

They cross the hall, enter the lab, and there are so many things to look at: Amy is unscrewing the column the wrong way, without releasing the valve, the undergrad’s near tears, Charu’s reading an instruction manual, saying, “No, Amy, the other way,” and Ping is mopping up the suspension as it comes. It’s the color of snow, the consistency of turned milk. 

Waaaaay too much myelin in that prep.

“Amy. Amy,” Jake says, his hands over hers. “Stop.” He releases the valve and unclips the column, gives it to her, slips on a glove, then sticks his finger into the intake valve. He turns to show Newt. Purple glove, tipped with myelin-contaminated neuropeptide suspension.

“Myeah,” Newt says, arms crossed, leaning against a bench. “We’ll have to disassemble it.”

Sun in the lab, too. It streams in through windows. It’s been ten years since he had a lab with windows. In Shatterdomes, the offices ring the exterior of the structure. They did. Labs inside, medical inside, and then the construction bay, the loading dock. Nesting-doll divisions with a cut to the sea. Newt looks out the window and can see the Coastal Wall. The ocean beyond. Will they ever knock it down? 

“I am. SO. Sorry.” Daniel looks at Newt, wide eyed, horrified. 

These kids are so great. He likes them so much. He feels an overwhelming sense of relief he’s not still in some Shatterdome somewhere, watching twenty-somethings screw up and die, or almost. Air recirculators, Newt snaps at Lightcap. Or nothing. You can find someone else to kill your junior scientists for you. I’m not doing this job if you don’t give me what I need, I got enough of that garbage in JET Force to last me my entire life. And then Hermann, contemplative, graying hair, Germany, in autumn. Bavarian leaves fall. It escaped me at the time how dangerous your work was. On a daily basis. I’m glad I never knew. The air is crisp. Newt is sitting, drinking coffee. Was. Will be.

“Daniel,” Newt says. “Hey. It’s fine.”

“Uh, definitely not fine,” Daniel says, voice unsteady, watching Jake pull the cover plate off the FLPC machine. Metal wing. Part of one. Rocket-based propulsion systems.

Newt shrugs. “Honestly, on my scale of lab disasters, this doesn’t even rate. No one died. Remind me to tell you about the time I got pinned to my own lab bench by a toxic alien nematocyst and six people plus my summer intern had to unbolt a stationary bone saw to cut me loose. You know what the problem was with your prep?”

Bright and dark. This lab, these five, sun and glass, screwdrivers and sheet metal. Broken bottles on a dock. Lightcap in the dark. If you ever do anything like that again, you wingéd fucking imp, I’ll call your famous mom and ask her what hell dimension she bought you from so I can return you for a full refund. You don’t come in here and promise me you’ll take my job when I die and then proceed to get your bullshit arm bullshit impaled by a bullshit alien nematocyst. Everyone’s staring at Newt. Newt blinks slowly, feeling a warm pressure in his forearm. Those hairline fractures. Unstoppable thrust, but not more than could be accommodated. His arm aches, but not with pain. Longing, he thinks they call it. That’s weird.

“Er,” Daniel says.

“Can we back up to the bone saw thing?” Amy asks, still holding the column.

“Nope,” Jake says. “No bone saw stories right now. Veto.”

“Myelin.” Charu frowns at Daniel disapprovingly. Her lab coat blazes white under the sun. Her hair is braided down her back. “It was the myelin.” Of course she’s right. She always is. You’re awfully quiet, Dr. Geiszler, Hermann murmurs. Morning kitchen, just that day. Shhh, the kids whisper from Hong Kong, 2025. Still alive. We won’t hurt you. We would never, never hurt you, despite everything you’ve done. 

“Daniel, take this will you?” Jake staggers a little bit with the unwieldy piece of metal before handing it to the undergrad. “Lean it against the cabinet. Then grab some Kim-wipes and dry what you can. Gently. Uh Newt, can I talk to you?”

“Sure,” Newt says, his consciousness bursting into triplicate, processing on eight levels. He can see the quantum foam as Hermann must see it. Frost. Everywhere and nowhere. Thick, insubstantial. Counterintuitively warm. He’s operating at the apex of human potential right now. Yessssssssss, the kids confirm, striking a deep neurochemical chord of validation. 

Jake steps away from the bench but then he keeps going all the way into the hall, sparkling with quantum snow crystals. The sun is a pale disc through tinted windows. Newt follows, not sure what this is about. “Look,” Jake whispers next to the board where all the seminar talk titles and classes are posted, each one a different color. Is this wall a screen? He thinks so. It’s hard to tell. The secretaries really care here; it’s so obvious. Newt has a part time secretary. Her name is Elizabeth and she probably made this electronic display; he thinks she’s artistic; he’s seen her tracing patterns, vines and helices and other twisting things, while talking on the phone. “Newt, you have to help me out here,” Jake says. “I don’t know what to do.”

“I could reassemble that thing in my sleep,” Newt says, reassuring. “You are way too stressed about this. You need to learn to relax, Jake. I can take care of it. Very easily. You don’t have to do everything.” Newt has done more with less than Jake will ever be able to conceive of. Baby genius, how’d you pull this off? They have so much here, so much they don’t even need. Five years ago, brute forcing himself though manual multiplexing—it’d been so hard. Hermann, standing in his doorway late at night, eyes red with fatigue. This is too difficult for one person, Newton, even I can see that. Jake should remember. “We reverse the hydraulics, run the system backward, replace the driver. It comes with a replacement driver for this exact reason.” 

“No.” Jake’s backlit with a crown of winter sunfire. “That’s not what I mean. I think you need to go home. You look sick, Newt.”

Unlikely.

Newt’s IQ is doubling every three minutes, exploding outward. All of Hermann’s knowledge is at his fingertips, he can think in mod 8 mathematics, he has an instinct for relativity and all it might take to crush a city, snap a bridge. Everything he sees blazes with an infrared corona. Lightcap sighs, frustrated. Little minion. Hermann, speeding along Route One in his ridiculous car, too fast, top down, not watching the road, wearing an outfit that really should belong to Gottfried Leibniz.

“Jake.” Newt shakes his head. The pastel display on the wall breaks apart and reforms, colors bleeding together. “I’m fine. I’m definitely turning a corner. I feel great. Really really good.”

“Well, that’s weird, Newt, because you look really really bad.”

“People are always telling me that.” It’s true. The words are calming. They hit him like Hypothetical Rain’s strongest of pharmaco-cocktails, his voice, each word—he believes himself. He’s surrounded by alarmists. They don’t understand. The kids lick something broken in his brain. Newt, riding the triplicate consciousness wave, has more cognitive power at his disposal than any other human at any other time in the history of the world. True, the kids hiss, supportive. True. 

“Yeah—I just—don’t get offended, okay? But I wanna call Dr. Gottlieb.”

“No,” Newt says, firm this time, geodesic curves arcing through his mind, ways to fold spacetime on rolodex in his head. The kids are painting a blue-green gloss on his thoughts, seeping in through cracks Newt can’t map, lending him everything they have, in this place. At this time. 

“Okay, but do you get that you’re worrying me?”

“Jake,” Newt says, “you’re overreacting.” The colors in the poster display are swirling, he feels them on his skin, in his mind, turning thick with quantum ice, burning in the infrared. The floor presses itself against his feet. Demanding so much at that interface. Mako watches the sky, humming happily to herself. 

“With respect? I don’t think I am. You do this. You think you’re fine, you get—well, I don’t know, you get exactly the kind of look you have now—”

“Which is what?” Newt asks. 

“I don’t know, like, bizarrely confident for a guy who looks like he’s about to pass out? Kind of glassy? Your eyes are weird. Why do you keep staring at the seminar posters?”

Newt has enough mental power for anything, including restraint. He shoots Jake his most extreme academic look and raises an eyebrow. “They’re well-coordinated,” he says coolly. And so they are. 

“Okay, fine. Don’t get offended by this either, but what did we do this morning?”

“What do you mean?” Newt asks darkly. There are times when he’s confused, but this is not one of them. He can see anything he wants to see, whether it’s here or not. He can understand anything he wants to understand, no matter the difficulty level. He can access whole branches of mathematics that would normally be opaque to him, he could pilot a Jaeger, he could destroy that Jaeger. From within. From without. 

“Newt, what were we doing two hours ago?”

“Submitting your paper.”

“Okay and, um, how many figures did we upload?”

“Seven, Jake, and that is your last question,” Newt turns away from him, out of this hallway of freeze and frame and flame. 

Jake grabs his arm. Newt shivers. Don’t worry, baby. I’m fine. Lightning in Alaska. Everything is touching him. Everything. Math and music. Color. The cognition of others. The past in all its iterations, the present in all its possibilities. Lightcap drops a wrench that hits him in the chest. The hallway where Newt stands is a watercolor of bleeding pastels, pale wood, fluorescence.

You seem anxious, the kids comment, unusually articulate right now. We can fix that. So strange you call it the Pacific, your wildest, widest sea.

“Newt,” Jake is saying, a cascade of cognitive pressures. “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be insensitive, I just really don’t know what to do. Do I repair the FPLC machine, or do I call Dr. Gottlieb, or do I drive you home?”

He lets Newt’s arm go, and, in the sensory vacuum, Newt perceives everything. Lucid. Still but moving. Past. I like to think of you winning every lottery, he’d said to her, all of the time, for all time. Present. Jake, this is not your choice to make; there is no decision for you right now. Future. Come back to us, the kids ask, polite little ghosts.

“Jake,” Newt replies, the perfect mentor, “this is not your choice to make; there is no decision for you right now. We repair the FPLC machine, together. And then? You finish your work, you drink some champagne, or at least the champagne of beers, and feel good about your paper. Whatever you’re trying to do now—whatever this is? It’s not your job. So take a few minutes, cool off, then come back in there, or not, and help me replace the hydrostatic driver, or not.” 

Jake nods. Looks away, walks away.

Newt swallows, breathing shallowly, leaning against the wall beneath crystal windows that reveal a sky like the sea. Mako’s up there somewhere, paddling that boat. Is he underwater? What is this? King of the Salamander People! Lightcap announces. 

He is so incredibly on today that he has crossing wires crossing themselves, but synergistically. In the best way.

What do you think is happening? Leibniz asks.

I worry about you, baby, Lightcap says out of the past. 

Cait-Science, I miss you, Newt thinks, from the future. As much as I knew I always would. 

The world glitters, multifaceted and way too much.

Uh oh, Newt’s brain breaks in, a little late to this party, considering it’s his.

People don’t see the quantum foam, that’s not a thing people do. In fact, that’s probably not the quantum foam any more than it’s Lightcap, bleeding on the ice. Mako, crying in the rain. Hermann, staring out at the Alaskan tundra. His thoughts shimmer with the strain of hanging on to their own integrity. 

I’m sure we can figure it out, Leibniz says, quietly optimistic in an underwater world alight with mental fire, blue and green, silver and white. Let us calculate, shall we?

Jake may have been right about a thing or two. Best to start there.

Well reasoned, Leibniz says, backed by the echoed screaming of still-living tissue, formalin-fixed and ferocious. 

“Hey, Jake?”

Halfway to the lab, Jake turns, starts back toward him. “Yeah boss?”

“Um,” Newt says.