Aftermath: 13 - The Garland of the War (2027)

In some D-brane of the multiverse, there’s a non-zero chance that Newton Geiszler, totally out of his pretty little mind, is reopening a transdimensional portal that should remain shut.

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 (Thirteen – The Garland of the War)

Newt is deep in the throes of R01 drafting. He may actually make the spring deadline. Aim 3 needs a little work. That’s fine. Everyone’s third aim always needs a little work. He should talk to Jake, see if they might be able to get some data from the patch clamp apparatus in the next few weeks—even just one channel, its voltage fluxing one time. Everything’s already solid, but, has he or has he not (in a not-so-past life) gotten about ten of these things? R01s, that is? He has. He’s probably fine, but demonstrating he can actually patch and actually clamp wouldn’t hurt. 

Whatever. Either way he’ll get it. Won’t he? It’s been a while since he tangled with the NIH. Everything during the PPDC days was NSF and JETF funded. Pretty much. Maybe he should have someone read it for him? Neuroscience isn’t exactly new territory for Newton Geiszler (of the academic trappings and the anteverse patch clamping), but he’s not as up on the literature as he’d be in an ideal world. It’ll be just his luck if someone’s done what he’s proposing a decade ago and he missed it.

Sam Gordon might read it. 

Sam has a vested interest in seeing Newt succeed anyway; it’s not like he’s gonna mind. All the same, Newt feels anxious about giving him the thing. Newt is kind of Getting Into This a little bit, where “Into This” he means invested in his life rather than just, y’know, waiting for death like ya do. His grant is good, but what if Sam doesn’t think it’s good? Sam could be—he might be a more conservative thinker. He might find Newt’s proposal too wild. 

Newt is pretty good at deciding what’s crazy and what’s not. Pretty good. Not great. 

Maybe he shouldn’t remind Sam of his existence?

He’s concerned he’s going to get fired.

He’d been out for eight weeks so far over the course of the winter. He still refuses to give a departmental talk. He’s cancelled a third of the classes he’s teaching. Taking even one more grad student is risky because his start-up package was pretty thin, and he may run out of funding in eighteen months. 

They didn’t want to hire him. 

He knows this. It’s a fact. He knows because they gave him almost nothing, definitely not enough to succeed for more than two years. They probably think he doesn’t realize they’re making it hard for him. That’s cute. At MIT, Newt had been a PI for five years, and had gotten tenure after three. He knows what he should be getting, he knows what he IS getting, and the disparity between the two is about an order of magnitude.

It’s okay though. He understands. He even sympathizes. He’s a wreck, and you don’t pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into a sinking ship, no matter how many planets that ship might have saved. Why? Because it’s sinking. That’s why.

Hermann would be pissed if he understood the details of this, but he doesn’t have a good sense re: how astronomically expensive biological science has become. Newt has no plans to tell him. 

Still. It’s kind of unbelievable Newt has to get tenure, again. They could have at least given him Pity Tenure [editorial note: more like Respect Tenure] without money. Ugh. He remains nominally pissed about that, but, again, he gets it. That’s the problem with science. The neuro people can barely spell tissue regeneration. There’s no way they’ve looked at his previous body of academic work in anything more than a cursory way. And, yeah, it’s one point five decades old. That, or it’s on kaiju, which are all dead and gone and hopefully not coming back. Now if Newt had wanted to stay in the same academic pasture, cloning kaiju cells, that would’ve been one thing. But—

They would grow for you. They would want to, for you, the kids hiss at the back of his thoughts, pretty much always. 

Newt has learned to bring his own mental discipline [editorial note: or maybe Hermann’s] to bear on his post-drift, er, arguable…psychosis? Self-limited though it is. What would’ve happened to him had he been left to his own devices? Probably something bad. He likes to think that he would NOT have walked the crazy evil genius road, but that’s, maybe, a little optimistic. In some D-brane of the multiverse, there’s a non-zero chance that Newton Geiszler, totally out of his pretty little mind, is reopening a transdimensional portal that should remain shut.

You know where it was, his sad little cut-up chorus comments. How could you know, if nothing of it remained?

Shh, Newt says, not without pity.

Anyway, to get back to the picture he’s trying to paint here: 1) he’s not doing tissue regeneration anymore; 2) the neuro people don’t care about his past work; 3) they also seem to think he’s slightly unstable (arguably true); but 4) interestingly, they don’t seem to entirely dislike him. [Editorial note: He’d kinda assumed they would? Because most people have disliked him over the past decade? But those people were MILITARY people; he keeps forgetting that.] It also turns out that 5) he’s beginning to fill a similar niche to the one he filled MIT. It’s happening naturally, probably no one’s really noticed yet that the grad students are coming find him when their experiments aren’t working, but 6) that won’t help him if he runs out of money and teaches only a fraction of the classes he’s supposed to teach.

He doesn’t want to get fired.

Most of what’s going wrong isn’t technically his fault. Newt straight up suuuuucks at being sick now. Will this ever go away? Probably not. His lungs are terrible, his brain gets hijacked, and Hypothetical Rain pharmacologically kicks him in the face every freaking time. He tries to look at things philosophically. This is his deal. This was the trade. He’ll be paying, in some way or another, for the rest of his life, but what he got in exchange was WORTH IT. Outstandingly worth it. He’d do it again a thousand times out of a thousand. Zero regrets. 

Hermann forgets this. Well, not true. Hermann never accepted it in the first place. 

Newt sighs. 

His life partner is having a hard time. WAY too hard for how great things have turned out. They need to work on that, because the guy is making himself miserable over something most days most of the time. Newt doesn’t have a handle on the nature of the problem. It never really seems like the right time to say: Hermann, the war, or whatever, is soooooo two years ago. Get over it already. You really should be over it by now. Why aren’t you? Exactly? Can you make a list?

Newt maybe could have gotten away with that circa 2025, but now he’s supposed to be more sensitive. He is more sensitive. Very responsible. He should be able to figure this out. It’s hard though, because Hermann’s brain got contaminated with HIS brain, which confounds a lot of baseline assumptions Newt would like to make. Newt himself is extremely tangled up in everything that’s bothering Hermann; this complicates the situation because Newt is pretty hopeless about his ability to realistically conceptualize himself. The biggest barrier to figuring Hermann out though, is Newt’s concern he’ll get it wrong.

He’s definitely gotten it wrong in the past. 

For example, he’s made a few serious efforts, really only two, to apologize to Hermann re: 1) being such an immature disappointment for, at a minimum, five years of their acquaintance 2) getting Hermann involved in the drifting and, consequently, 3) being the reason Hermann had to (sort of) commit a federal crime while fleeing Hong Kong and 4) double consequently, Newt turning into a really High Maintenance Life Partner [editorial note: in almost every way imaginable]. The first time Newt made a serious apology attempt, Hermann had been like, Stop it Newton, you’re repeat traumatizing me because you apologized profusely when I thought you had brain damage and it was very memorable. So, okay. Newt had tried again, more sneakily. VERY high-brow. That time had gone way better until Hermann realized what he was talking about, and then it had gone way worse. Hermann had yelled at him for about half an hour and then stopped talking to him for three days.

Surprisingly immature, in Newt’s opinion. And therefore? Troubling.

So. What to do? Nothing suggests itself. Nothing other than what he’s already been doing, which is, generally, trying to behave like a reasonable human being (new for him) and be an attentive romantic partner (also new, but less difficult). Not getting fired would probably be helpful. He’s tried asking Mako for help, but engaging Mako on this topic can be really intense. Mako, like Hermann, is very attached to Newt. She legit tells people the half-sibling story and not in jest. Newt isn’t sure what to say to her. Any hinting around the idea that Hermann is only with him because the drift remixed their brains is met with a solid wall of Makosian Newt-you’re-stupid.

Newt does worry about the remixing. It would be irresponsible not to.

Unfortunately, talking about post-drift cognitive bias as it relates to their relationship is also another thing that Hermann doesn’t like to engage on. The one time Newt had brought THAT idea up Hermann had gotten VERY concerned and Newt had had to suffer though a two-hour conversation about his own abandonment issues, and how he needs to keep in mind that his past experiences have been very atypical. Once Newt had made it clear that he understood that much, Hermann had proceeded with, like, trying to Good Will Hunting him by over and over hammering the idea that Newt Is Special, it’s not that people don’t like him because he’s annoying, Everyone Likes Him, especially Hermann, who is Not Going to Leave Him, not ever.

Yeah, okay.

So no apologizing, no talking about why Hermann is SUPER into him now even though that hadn’t been a thing before. 

Or had it?

It had and it hadn’t, mostly favoring hadn’t. Newt has tried remembering things as Hermann to get a handle on what the guy was feeling, but feelings don’t translate well in memory form, at least not for him, and Hermann’s perceptions of him seem to be all over the place. It’s confusing and probably misleading. Case in point, Newt remembered that Firecracker Sake Night pretty fondly but Hermann, it turns out, was super miserable and remembers Newt pretty unrealistically, all tragic and restrained with great hair and a Gottliebian cast to his diction. Second case in point, Newt remembers his Geneva talk in 2020 as a horrible disaster but Hermann found it inspiring, got all fired up about it, but then yelled at Newt all the same.

All he can say for sure from the total of the experience is: 1) Hermann has always and unambiguously loved his gesticulating (great; very helpful) 2) Gottliebian disapproval versus worry is hard to parse 3) at some point Hermann did begin to find him sexually attractive but that was not at the beginning. Ugh.

Memory is so unreliable. It’s a lost cause. 

So what’s a post-apocalyptic academician supposed to do?

Nothing?

It’s a radical idea. He thinks it might be the right one.

For the sake of argument, maybe he did mess up Hermann’s brain for life. Maybe he did remix them into this relationship. Maybe he did, accidentally, decrease the quality of Dr. Gottlieb’s days as a human on this pretty little water-covered rock.

Pretty, the kids echo, thinking of the ocean.

Thanks kids, thanks for that.

Anyway, he can’t unremix them. He can’t unruin Hermann’s life by going back in time and avoiding all that should’ve been avoided. For one, if he did that, the world would have ended (probably). For two, the whole prospect is a thermodynamic and relativistic impossibility.

He can be nice now though. As a solution? This is unsatisfying. As a practical strategy, it’s probably the best he can do.

He’d love to just go town apologizing, analyzing reasons why he’s the worst, laying them all out so they can talk about it and move on, or not. But clearly Hermann’s not interested in that. Maybe one day. Things the man is interested in right now seem to be 1) worrying about Newt, 2) watching Newt do a good job at life, 3) obsessing about the war and how it might have gone differently, 4) cuddling (Newt), and 5) math. Not necessarily in that order. 

It’s pretty clear Newt will make more progress with a strategy that involves maximizing hugging and minimizing worry than with one that involves detailed retrospective analyses. 

He should probably informally codify this for himself. Or something. Okay. What he should try, very hard, NOT to do, is get sick again this year. That’s number one. Number two is he should try, when possible, not to wring his hands, bleed from his face, and stare at the Pacific Ocean; he should instead stay in bed. Number three is he should probably cook more than he does; he’s kinda getting into it and he suspects Hermann may find it at least somewhat attractive because Newt gets a disproportionate amount of interest when he does it. Number four is Newt should try not to get fired. Number five is he should try to do more physical affection stuff because Hermann still sometimes struggles with an overly muscular sense of propriety and personal space.

So yeah, this list is not great compared to the magnitude of the perceived problem, but what else is he gonna do? This is probably one of those things he can’t fix. Much as he would like to convince himself otherwise. 

More cuddling, more cooking, do not have more seizures, do not get fired. Easy enough.

He goes back to the R01, throwing himself into revising. He gets in a good rhythm, and the logic of the grant flows well. He loses track of time until someone knocks on his door. Inhibition of inhibitory circuit diagrams resist falling apart in the presence of new stimuli; he has to shove them away, rip his focus free to look at his calendar with half his brain. 

Oh right. Speaking of not getting fired—

“Come in!” He saves his work and tries to snap himself clear of his visualized circuit diagrams. It’s hard to do. His ability to hyperfocus is coming back. Nice to know it didn’t vanish into the neural interface never to be seen again. 

He looks up as Charu slips through the door, shuts it behind her, and drops into a seat in front of his desk. Newt’s scientific career has a little bit of momentum now, and that mass x velocity vector is looking at him from behind thick glasses, staring him down in a super awkward, really intense, yet totally familiar way. 

She’s so much like Hermann. SO much. Thoughtful. Quiet, with that same tragic intensity, that same razor-sharp disdain for what she doesn’t understand.

He smiles. “Last day, huh?” Yikes. That sounded a little wistful. It was supposed to be dry. Usually something like that that would file the edge right off her Gottliebian intensity, but not today. Newt gets it. 

“Yes,” she says. 

Ugh. He likes her so much, but her rotation had not gone well. She’d rotated for the second block, the winter block. Newt had insisted on the winter block. Most first year grad students will affiliate with their last lab, the one they join in spring. And sure enough, the winter had not gone well. Not at all. He’d missed eight of her fifteen weeks, and another two were holidays.

He’d wanted it that way, so she’d know what she was getting herself into. Right now? The Geiszler lab consists of a single tech two years out of college, an unpaid UCSF undergrad, an ever-changing garden of hopeful rotators, and Jake, now in his second year. 

Jake, Newt had said, two weeks ago, arms crossed, leaning against Jake’s bench, twenty minutes overdue for some albuterol and feeling it right in the airways. You need to tell Charu what it’s really like.

Newt, Jake had replied, staring at a solution he’d put on the stir plate hours ago, then flipping off the magnetic field, watching the stir-bar slow to a stop. I don’t know what that means. 

Tell her it’s terrible, Newt had insisted, coughing. And a risky career move.

I’m not telling her that, Jake had said, rolling his eyes, decanting his buffer into multiple sterile glass bottles. I like her. She’d be a good fit.

But Jake, Newt had said, you’re—really weird. In the best way ever, don’t get me wrong, but when she figures out—

Newt. Come on. Figures out what? What do you think she’s gonna figure out? That you suck as a PI? You don’t. That you were out half the winter? Not a secret. You have a unique style, which, I get, is partly out of your control, and you don’t like that, but just because the experience isn’t what you want it to be, that doesn’t make it bad.

Jake had been giving Newt the kind of exasperated pep talk that Newt is supposed to be giving him in moments of scientific despair. Fine. Newt had gotten a hold of himself, a hold that he still has (mostly). If Charu doesn’t want to join his lab, he might cry, but he won’t cry in front of her; he’ll do it by himself, later, confused and alone in a closet somewhere. 

Great. 

Now that’s settled, he can move on. 

“Well,” Newt says, looking at her, metaphorically white-knuckling everything he can metaphorically grab. “How do you think it went?” 

Charu gathers herself for some sort of pronouncement. 

Newt braces himself. 

“I want to join your lab,” she tells him, point blank, extremely emphatic, overtly aggressive, no elaboration, zero pleasantries, half shouting. It’s incredibly off-putting, extremely awkward, and such a Hermann moment that Newt laughs. He can’t help it.

Present!Newt tries to remember MIT!Newt. Tries to determine whether or not he would have known what to do with her. He thinks not. MIT!Newt wouldn’t have taken her. Present!Newt is a different story. He knows exactly what to do. He puts his hands over his face, because his laughing is getting a little hysterical, GETS IT TOGETHER, drops his hands, and looks at Charu, staring at him with wide eyes.

“Thank god,” Newt says a little shakily. “Sorry. I thought you were gearing up to tell me thanks but no thanks.”

“You thought—I would tell you no?” Charu asks, confused.

 “Obviously you can join my lab! Charu, you’re amazing.” 

“Really? I can join?” she asks, thousand-watt face. Newt’s not sure he’s ever made anyone look so happy. Which, weirdly, includes the day when the countdown clock stopped. 

“Yes.”  

Newt should not be this relieved. She still has another rotation. Also, he maybe should try to talk her out of her decision? Is that the responsible thing? It’s just—she’s so elated right now that it seems like a huge buzzkill to remind her he’s a mess.

Too bad.

“But look,” he says, “you still have another rotation before the end of the academic year—technically you can’t decide yet, and who knows, you might change your—”

“No,” she says. “I won’t.”

“Okay, but—”

“No,” she says forcefully.

“Okay, but Charu—”

“No,” she says again. “You took six rotators for one slot and I know that for the four you’ve had so far, you’re their top choice. I’m positive that—”

“Charu!” Newt shouts, briefly losing the battle to contain his laughter. This girl and Hermann are going to get along SO WELL. He needs to introduce them immediately so Hermann can appreciate the stories Newt will inevitably tell him. “Stop. Let me finish.”

“Okay,” Charu says, still skeptical, not at all chastened.

“I won’t give your slot to anyone but you. I haven’t said yes to anyone else. Regardless of what you say now? I’ll still meet with you in May to make sure you haven’t changed your mind. And if you change your mind? That’s FINE.”

“I’m not going to—”

“I’m not done yet. I’m excited you’re excited. But you should give Sam Gordon’s lab a chance. He’s the department chair, he’s a good scientist, he has a lot of connections—his lab is more of a sure thing. To the extent a sure thing exists in science, he’s it.”

“Jake told me you would say something like this.”

“Oh he did, did he?” Newt leans back, crosses his arms, and smirks. “What else did Jake tell you?”

“He said your lab, at least right now, is high-risk, high-reward. It’s only a good fit for risk-tolerant people. I’m risk tolerant.” She informs him of this with a prim assertiveness so outrageously Gottliebian that Newt is now pretty sure that she and Hermann are, somehow, related.

“Geiszler lab: for the risk tolerant,” he says dryly. Iron that one on a T-shirt, he doesn’t say, because they might do it, and he’s not (yet) popular enough to have a weird cult graduate student following. That wouldn’t be appropriate. What he says instead is, “That’s a nice way of putting it.”

Charu shrugs, uncomfortable, probably because she doesn’t really want to listen to Newt be insecure about his physical health problems and also his mental health problems and also his personal style and also his future prospects in this department. 

They hired me out of pity, is something he won’t tell Charu. 

He’s told way way way too much of this to Jake, but Jake had to know. Charu doesn’t need to listen to a list of Newt’s insecurities, because there’s a good chance he’s gonna get this R01, and if he does, then it doesn’t matter why they hired him or what kind of start-up package they gave him. 

Certain things are outside his control, but at least when he’s here and on he can be really here and really on.

“Can we talk about a project?” Charu asks, “Because I had an idea.”

“Take it away,” Newt says.