Aftermath: 25 - The Omen Coming On (2025)

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.

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

Text iteration: Witching hour.

Additional notes: None.

2025 (Twenty-five – The Omen Coming On)

So, um. 

Three weeks after Mako and Raleigh execute their first West Coast visit, which involved enough Portal and hugs to be counted a success by everyone, including objective third parties, they come back. This seems weird to Newt? Just a little? Sometimes Maks and Raleigh live half a world away, sometimes they don’t live anywhere, and, well, three weeks? Cool, but, they have important lives?

Also.

They’re edgy. So edgy they infect Hermann with their edge in fifteen minutes flat, and then everyone is edged except for Newt. 

It’s a small apartment.

At least Newt is keeping his intellectual knives sheathed while determining what the heck is going on here. This is called Being Mature.

On a semi-related note, he’s currently hiding from everyone in the bathroom.

This is less easy to spin as Being Mature.

Whatever. It’s a work in progress.

Okay, he thinks, fighting his impulse to decathect, fighting it hard, looking at himself in the mirror, accepting his green sweater as a stand-in for all that he’s trying not to irrevocably screw up. You can figure this out. There’s a good chance you can do it without upsetting anyone. Correction. There’s a chance you can do it without upsetting someone. Maybe. His reflection doesn’t look convinced. His reflection looks anxious and kinda like it has a dance card with a bunch of the dead on it. He has an uneasy feeling. He’s been feeling uneasy since Mako and Raleigh arrived, but it’s worse this morning. Does that mean anything?

Naaaahhh, his brain says. 

Yesssss? The kids hiss hopefully.

“Newton,” Hermann snaps, appearing in the doorframe. 

Newt jumps. Not really but kind of. Does a controlled exhale. Follows it with a glare. A principled one.

“Where have you been?” Hermann demands. 

“Um?” Newt says, confused, gesturing to his immediate surroundings. “Here?”

Hermann looks intensely guilty and then he looks like he realizes he looks guilty and tries to go for nonchalant. He misses by a margin roughly comparable to the radius of the planet.

“What the heck is going on with you, dude?” Newt hisses in a whisper. “You and everyone else. You’re acting weird.”

“We’re not ‘acting weird’,” Hermann says, like a guy full of aporetic conflict who definitely knows he’s acting weird and can barely bring himself to lie about it. 

Newt gives Hermann his best that-sir-is-bullshit-and-you-know-it-so-there-had-better-be-a-stellar-rationale-forthcoming-in-the-relative-near-term look. Hermann counters with a look that says something along the lines of: you-really-ought-to-trust-me-on-these-things-Newton-after-all-I-saved-your-brain-with-my-brain. And Newt then replies with a yes-Hermann-I-know-but-my-patience-for-being-kept-in-the-dark-extends-only-so-far-and-this-is-day-three look. Which is absolutely fair, and hence Newt is rewarded with an I’m-aware-of-that-Newton-and-don’t-worry-I’ll-be-torturing-myself-for-an-inappropriate-length-of-time-about-the-downstream-sequelae-of-whatever-this-is look. So Newt escalates to an aw-why-don’t-we-just-skip-the-torture-part-and-go-right-to-the-part-where-you-tell-me-what’s-happening-and-I-give-you-a-hug-because-that’s-going-to-be-my-new-shtick-now-that-we’re-dating look. Hermann manages to kill that option with an I-get-where-you’re-going-with-this-Newton-but-it’s-not-going-to-work-in-a-million-years look.

FINE.

“Don’t give me your pseudoapology face,” Newt says, giving Hermann the most dignified extant version of his own pseudowounded face. “Tell me what’s going on.”

“What’s going on is breakfast,” Hermann says, not meeting his eyes as he turns and heads back to the kitchen.

Newt raises a concerned eyebrow at his reflection. His reflection eyebrow-raises him right back, just as suspicious as he is.

After breakfast, Hermann announces he’s taking the day off. Mako cheers and decides they should all  watch Blue Planet. Newt, expecting a certain set of physiologic responses to coffee and not getting them, begins to suspect that what he drank that morning was decaf.

That’s it. There’s a line. And that line has been crossed.

While staring at Mako’s favorite sea creatures [editorial note: turns out all terrestrial sea creatures are Mako’s favorite], Newt uncaps a metaphorical pen. It’s time to actually work the problem. It doesn’t take him long to build a nice, solid list that accounts for the two days, two nights, and halfway-over morning that have passed since Mako the Magnificent and The Captain arrived.

One—Becket’s always on the balcony, taking “boring” calls. These calls do not seem boring to Mako. Mako, in fact seems quite interested in these calls, to the point that she stares at Becket with a creepy intensity while he’s making them. Two—Mako and Becket are not so subtly texting one another while in the same room, and this texting increases after the “boring” calls. Three—Hermann has a very strenuous non-interest in this behavior, which implies to Newt that he knows what it means. If Hermann were in the dark, he’d be entertaining Newt with all kinds of significant eye game. Four—Hermann is not interested in discussing any of this with Newt. At all. Five—Mako is hardcore watching Newt. Now, to be fair, Soulful Intense Meaningful Makosian Extended Regard [editorial note: SIMMER!] had quickly become A Thing during the last visit, will likely stay A Thing forever, and, arguably, had always been A Thing, so it’s hard to know what to make of the SIMMERing. Six—now that he’s looking? He realizes it’s not just Mako. Everyone is watching him. Covertly. Right now.

At a certain point, a guy’s gotta unsheathe his intellectual knives if only to do some fine-edged hypothesis testing in a grindstone world.

Because, um, hi. What’s going on here?

It has something to do with Newt. It doesn’t take a genius to figure that out. But shouldn’t Newt be informed if it has to do with him? Does he look terrible for some reason? He recaps his outfit. Nothing wrong with it; he checked it in the mirror. He’s not bleeding. He does have kind of A Look about him, he knows it; it makes Mako nervous. Hermann, he thinks, doesn’t notice it because they spend so much time together, but yeah, fair point, Newt doesn’t look great, he looks a little like a guy who spent a summer in 1816 dry-swallowing glass shards on the shores of Lake Geneva. He’d looked, maybe, a little more Lake Genevaish than usual this morning, but he’s pretty sure that’s only because he’s getting increasingly anxious about how weird everyone is being. That, and he’s had a few intense epistaxis episodes over the past few days, but that’s not all that far outside the norm. He’s even kept those mostly secret.

Okay.

Who’s the weak link in this Forged Chain of Weird? 

He props an elbow against the arm of the couch, presses his fingers into the place between his eyebrows, and tries to think about the best way to address whatever terrifying and strange Damoclesian Blade is hanging above all of them. Ideally, he’d take it down before it severs someone’s neck. 

“You got a headache, Geiszler?” asks Captain Sir Saves Everyone.

Okay. 

Newt looks up at him, slowly. And he knows he’s got that patented Geiszler Fire in his eyes because Becket freezes, stuck against the backboard of his question under Newt’s most pinning gaze. 

Careful, the kids hiss.

Hi kids, Newt thinks. Now’s not a great time. Also, quick tip, you’re not known for your advice.

But, all of a sudden, he feels—not quite right. The kids actually do tend to pop up when his sympathetic nervous system gets activated; it makes sense, they’ve probably set up shop in his limbic system or something. Huh. Well, that’s a fun thought for another time. Ideally, a fun time. Unlike now.

But, hey, there’s a titanium lining to this situation, because Newt’s shiniest academic armor has just made an appearance. He hasn’t seen this stuff in months. Why has it shown up, though? Why now? Is now special? Have his scholarly energy shields intuited something he doesn’t yet have a cortical handle on? 

Maybe something bad is happening? Like, maybe Hermann is planning to take a job with the PPDC but Newt shouldn’t come for security reasons and they’re going to break it to him slowly. Today. Any time now? Or, what if someone is dying? Like Mako. What if Mako is dying? Cancer downstream of the radiation she got as a kid? What if Hermann is dying? Or even Becket? Becket probably got a ton of radiation when his brother died. Jaegers with ripped-open hearts tend to bleed an energy spectrum; it’s just their way.

“Is someone dying?” Newt snaps.

Three people stare at him. No one says anything. BAD SIGN.

“Newt,” Mako says, breaking-bad-news style.

“Mako,” Newt says, unsteadily, his academic defenses starting to dismantle themselves. “You’re dying?”

“No!” Mako backs up to brusque. “No one is dying.”

Newt’s shields snap back up. “Well, what then? Why are you all being so weird?”

Hermann and Mako look at one another, and then immediately away again. When did they get so tight? One visit and they’re doing the non-verbal eye-talk thing? This doesn’t leave Newt with a lot of options. A Mako-Hermann Alliance will be completely impenetrable until it decides it wants to open its gates. 

Impenetrable as it is, it nevertheless defines the best pressure point. Ha.

“Raleigh,” Newt says. He rarely addresses the guy appropriately, and so, sure enough, the real name digs in. Newt can see it. He clears his throat, delicately adjusts his glasses, fingertips torquing the angle of the frames at their hinge. “Come on. Whatever they’re doing is bullshit and you know it.” Newt gestures vaguely at Mako and Hermann.

Becket shifts in his seat. “Yeah,” he admits. “Sorry, Newt.”

Real name counter move.

Newt stares at the three of them, feeling like a strategic retreat is in order, because not only is he weirded out and slightly more than slightly upset, but he also needs to think. He needs to think rapidly and intensively and ideally in a setting in which no one is watching him.

“Okay,” he says, collecting himself so hard that his cuticles could split with it. “Fine. I’m just gonna—" he stands.

And all three of them stand up.

Newt backs away. Rapidly. Out of grabbing range and, yeah, kinda in the direction of the door to their apartment. Because. What. Is. This.

“Newton.” Hermann holds a hand up, palm open, like he realizes Newt is contemplating bolting for the door and he’s VERY nervous about that. VERY. 

Newt looks at Becket, who—ugh, for the love—is planning on tackling him, maybe? He’s leaning forward, subtly, bracing his back leg, and Newt is distracted enough by that that he doesn’t notice Mako getting behind him until she’s already made it there. He’s not getting through Mako. He’d have a better chance against Becket, probably. 

Is he definitely awake?

Yeah. Unfortunately. He is. 

Okay. Regroup.

On the plus side, it seems really unlikely that whatever’s going on here is a prelude to a sad conversation about someone dying from radiation-induced malignancies. On the minus side, whatever this is? Seems worse. At least different. Way more creeptacular in the near term.

“What’s going on?” Newt asks, the words a nicely icy slide. Oh hey. He still has his trusty academic armor. That’s a nice surprise.

“We can’t tell you,” Hermann says, with that twist to his face he gets when he’s looking at something horrifying and inescapable, like math can sometimes be.

But Newt is not a quantum mechanical travesty.

Noooo? The kids seethe, choosing to master the art of rhetorical questioning at, just, a really interesting time.

Ah fuck, Newt’s brain observes, in the style of dead rationalists everywhere.

Instinct number one: panic. Instinct number two: bolt for the door. Instinct number three: realize his instincts aren’t strong enough to take a whole heck of a lot of action in the name of self-preservation, and they never have been. That’s why he’s still standing here. Instinct four: cede the floor to his cortex. As usual. It’s probably a better plan? And it doesn’t matter, because it’s already happened.

“We can tell you later today,” Mako says, almost pleading with him. “It’s just a few hours, Newt. Then we’ll explain everything.”

Newt’s brain, triple-powered this morning despite the decaf coffee, blazes through possible explanations. They’re worried. He can see that. The likelihood they mean him harm is almost zero.

Right?

Right.

He tries to calm himself down. 

That works pretty well for about three seconds.

Because he’s still getting Hermann’s face of Quantum Mechanical Dread. He knows that face well. 

They’re keeping a secret. 

He assumes that the space-time tear behind the secrecy dumps him out squarely in For-His-Own-Good Territory. But. Maybe that’s not the only territory at play here? It occurs to him there’d probably need to be an extremely strong rationale for Hermann to ever try to keep anything from Newt, if only because he knows what Newt’s like. Newt’s not big on trust. Most scientists aren’t. [Editorial note: Mathematicians? That’s another matter.]

Are they afraid for him? 

Or—could they be afraid of him?

Newt and Hermann now have an eye-lock thing going on, and there’s no question about it, Newt is getting looked at like he’s quicksand quantum turbulence. Not like he’s caught in it. Like he is it. He doesn’t know what that means, but he’s getting the gist of the local vector notation.

And what have you been up to, lately, kids? Newt asks, in his best inner professorial tone.

Like hematic semiotics, he feels a rush of blood in his sinuses. He’d rather this not be happening just right now, especially not as an eerie answer to an internal interrogative. But, alas, Newt doesn’t always get what he wants. He’s over it. The nosebleed doesn’t ruin the way he’s currently owning the heck out of the room. It just shifts the focus. Makes everything worse. That’s Newt’s special interpersonal skill. He should add it to his CV. He yanks a handkerchief out of his pocket and intervenes early enough that he doesn’t even get blood on his sweater.

Everyone takes a few steps forward. Newt edges back again, angling toward the bedroom this time.

“Newton, are you all right?” Hermann doesn’t really sound okay, but he hates it when Newt turns this kind of question around, so Newt won’t do that just right now.

“Yeah,” Newt says, trying to sound reassuring, probably not pulling it off. “I’m fine.”

Pieces of his subconscious problem-solving start slotting themselves down. Finally. His friends seem to be afraid for him, but if that were the only thing at play here, they’d have told him whatever it is they’re not telling him. So, either him knowing makes the outcome more likely to turn bad in a personal way, or, there’s more at stake here than the personal. 

Like, oh, say, the global. 

His eyes snap toward the Pacific, then, quickly, back again.

Don’t look toward the breach, his brain says. Er, I mean the Coastal Wall. That’s definitely what you look at, when you look to the west.

Did anyone notice him checking out the Pacific?

Yeah. Literally everyone noticed it. 

Great.

He’s bleeding a lot. They haven’t noticed that yet, but they will soon.

In the midst of an escalating freak-out, Newt’s brain spikes the cogs of the cognitive machinery powering his panic. Like it used to. In the good old days. Before the remixing. It gives him a gift. A good one.

Thanks brain, Newt thinks, all his mental throughlines blending.

The gift is this: he knows the weak link in the chain. 

It’s not Becket. It was never Mako or Hermann. It’s someone who isn’t even here.

Newt relaxes, mostly. He gets out of the Trenches of Terror and remounts his Academic High Horse as gracefully as he can while holding a tissue to his face. He tips his head back, pinches his nose really hard, and manages to buy himself enough time to refold and reposition the handkerchief in a slightly more dignified and concealed way. 

When he looks back at them, Becket seems slightly relieved at Newt’s deescalated body language. He’s the only one.

“Newton,” Hermann says quietly, “please don’t do this.”

“Do what?” Newt asks, genuinely curious.

“Whatever it is you’ve decided to do,” Hermann says.

“You have so much faith,” Newt says, with a definite note of fondness, “in the terribleness of my ideas.” He pulls his phone out of his back pocket trying not to make a show of it. He glances down, hits a number on speed dial. “But I get it. In theory, they almost always look bad.”

“Who are you calling?” Hermann snaps, and everyone starts forward.

“This is praxis, though,” Newt whispers to Hermann, backing into a corner.

Fortunately, Hypothetical Rain answers on the first ring.

“Hey!” she says. “Newt! You okay? Is it over?”

“Dr. McClure,” Newt says, grandstanding for and glaring at his three most favorite living people. 

Mako’s eyes widen, Hermann’s face goes ashen, and Raleigh whispers “shit.”

Okay.

Not exactly the reaction he was expecting? But they do back off, so that’s a plus. 

“Newt?” Hypothetical Rain says, obvious concern in her voice. “What’s wrong? Why are you calling me Dr. McClure? You never call me that.”

“Yeah, I know,” he says, immediately dialing down the arguably supervillainy tone he’d been sporting like the latest post-apocalyptic fashion trend. “Chill, Rain. Just announcing my intentions to the room.” He glares at Becket, who, considerately, backs up one small step. “Now. Does it surprise you to know that when you just asked, and I quote for my audience, ‘Is it over?’ I had no idea what you were talking about? I still don’t.”

“Um,” Hypothetical Rain says. “I’m confused about what’s happening here.”

“You know what, grrl?” Newt replies. “Me too. I am super confused.”

“It also kind of sounds like you’ve got a nosebleed.”

“Excellent ear, Rain, yes. I do. In other news, I’m a little worried that someone’s gonna steal my phone for unclear reasons.” 

Hermann takes the hint and levers Becket back a few steps with his cane. Newt thinks this is mostly practical expedience, given that Hermann knows Hypothetical Rain is not above taking matters into her own hands, and would, if Newt gets stripped of his phone. That is, after all, why Newt is calling her.

“If someone takes your phone, I’ll find you,” Hypothetical Rain says, living up to all Newt’s expectations with a rush of words so vehement one could mistake them for a sworn oath.

“Um,” Newt says, backing himself right against the glass door to their balcony. No one advances on him. “I think we’re good. They’re behaving.”

“Who’s ‘they’?” Rain asks.

“Some friends from out of town are here. You may have heard of them. Mako Mori and Plus One? Those two and Hermann constitute the ‘they’.”

“No PPDC personnel?” Rain asks.

“No,” Newt says. “But everyone’s acting super weird, definitely worried, and going to dramatic means to keep me from leaving the apartment. They won’t tell me why. I thought you might know, and it sure seems like you do.”

There’s a long silence on the phone.

“Newt,” Hypothetical Rain says, finally. “If you ask me to tell you what’s happening, I will.” She stops there, though. She doesn’t spontaneously explain.

Newt looks at Raleigh, who has an Unassailable Face in place. He looks at Mako, who shakes her head, imploringly. He looks at Hermann, who just stares back at him, apex intensity, eyes glittering. 

“Let me ask you something slightly different,” Newt offers. “A set of different questions, maybe.” He turns his back on the Secrecy Triad, faces the Pacific, and tries pulling the handkerchief away from his face. It’s a no go.

Newt stares directly along the line that connects him to the portal that, supposedly, is not just closed but annihilated. Supposedly.

“Shoot,” Rain says.

“Do you know the details of what’s happening? It seems like you do.”

“Yes,” Rain replies, zero hesitation.

“Doesn’t that seem like a problem to you? That you know, and I don’t?”

“It does. I don’t like it. I’ve never liked it.”

“So why’d you go along with it?” 

“Ugh,” Hypothetical Rain sighs. “Because, like literally everything involving you, it’s a medical and ethical minefield. I was convinced, grudgingly, that this was best. But I told them then and I’m telling you now: if you ask me to explain, I will.”

“’Them’ being Hermann and the Dream Team?”

“Good band name,” Hypothetical Rain says. “But, yeah. If by ‘Dream Team’ you mean Mako and Raleigh.”

“Do you advise I ask you what’s going on?” From the corner of Newt’s eye, he sees Hermann stiffen.

“Huh,” Hypothetical Rain says. “Great question.”

“Isn’t it just?” Newt replies, smiling faintly. “Because it seems like there’s an option no one considered here.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah,” Newt says. “I could just do whatever you, Hypothetical Rain, tell me to do.” It’s not optimal, but it’s the best path out of this nightmare he can see. 

There’s silence on the other end of the phone. “That you could,” Hypothetical Rain says, eventually, sounding definitely surprised and maybe a little emotional?

“Yeah,” Newt says.

“Then, um,” Rain says. “Okay. Don’t ask me to tell you what’s going on. Know that I know this is an intensely shit thing for you to hear. Know that I know that you hate it. Know that I hate saying it to you. And know that’s my recommendation anyway.”

Newt swallows. “Okay.”

“Also,” Hypothetical Rain says, “maybe invite me up to your apartment, because I’ve been sitting in the lobby of your building all morning.”

“You’re downstairs?” Newt asks, his brows furrowing. “Well, that implies some things.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” Rain says. “Can I come up?”

“Sure,” Newt says. “Why not? See you in a few.”

He doesn’t look back at the room. Not yet. He looks out the window. At the Coastal Wall. At the sea. At the potential it conceals.

Newt is pretty sure all of this is anteverse-related. It must be. Given that as a presupposition? He probably shouldn’t think too hard about what’s likely to be happening this morning. The kids, the real ones, are actively reaching for him, harder than they’ve ever reached before.

He knows that.

How does he know?

He just does.

I am so sorry, he thinks. Not because it’s the right thing to be, necessarily, but because he just is.

There’s a moderate pressure being exerted on his mind. This is translating to actual pressure in his capillary beds. His blood comes brisk and strong. Miles away, beneath metric tons of ocean, the edges of a space-time cicatrix don’t quite know how to rest. Newt turns his back on the Pacific, and feels a howl break against the non-conductive bone of his skull. 

Pocketing his phone, he looks pointedly at the three people, who, probably, out of this entire ridiculous little day-glo blue planet, like him the best. “You know what?” he says.

And then he stops. 

Turns back to the window real quick. 

Because he’s not quite ready. How’s he supposed to control his face, his voice, his mind, his thoughts, when the kids, the real kids, are definitely knocking on the door of his cranium?

“Newton?” Hermann asks.

“I get it,” he says, still facing the window, not looking at them, because, for the love of all that is science and math, he can’t imagine the expression on his own face right now. It has to be horrible and horrified and horrifying.

Because the kids are frightened. Are they frightened because something, right now, is happening to them? Or are they frightened because Newt has begun to guess what’s coming? Are they subconsciously connected? Have they always been? How is it possible he still doesn’t know?

Newt clears his throat. Makes some progress toward controlling himself. “I understand.”

He can hear Mako’s clipped little inhalation. 

“If it goes bad, don’t beat yourselves up about it. You made the right call.” There’s more that Newt could say. Like, for example, They know, now, that something’s up. They don’t know what. It’s better I can’t tell them.

This may be the moment that Newton Geiszler of the sibylline uncertainty and existential urgency takes the road unrecognized. The kids press down. Newt waits for villainous impulses. 

They don’t come.

It doesn’t feel like they want him to do anything in particular? 

It feels more like they’re calling for him because they’re lonely and afraid.

He opens his metaphorical ports a little wider, and it feels more like everything is possible that demands to exist and it feels like justice is charity in accordance with wisdom and it feels like one does NOT DO HARM TO SOMEONE WITHOUT NECESSITY AND THAT ONE DOES AS MUCH GOOD AS ONE CAN.

Um, what? Newt asks his brain, backing off on the cut-up kaiju-communing. 

You know exactly what, is all he gets back, delivered with a very Leibnizian flavor profile.

Okay. Well, it’s very difficult to draw any conclusions from what just happened there, other than Newt’s love for dead rationalists tends to crop up with caps lock on when he’s stressed.

He’s not evil yet, right?

Right.

That’s a relief. That goes in the plus column for sure. Taking a look at the minus column though, it seems Newt may not have much time before catastrophic neurological sequelae rise up from the deep, Call-of-Chthulu style. He’d best make the most of it. When he’s got a strong grip on his face and his feelings [editorial note: as strong as it’s ever going to get], he turns to look at his friends.

They look miserable. Everyone is crying. Newt thinks of Lightcap, dead. Dead and still bolted into that experimental rig. They’d had to get her out. One last time.

Hermann, wordlessly, offers Newt a new handkerchief.

“Thanks,” Newt says, and throws the blood-soaked one in the trash, even though it’s cloth. Cleaning up blood is always bad, but cleaning up the blood of a dead person is orders of magnitude worse than cleaning up the blood of a person who’s still alive. Newt wishes he didn’t know that.

There’s a knock on the door. 

Mako opens it to reveal Hypothetical Rain in jeans and a flannel shirt, very grunge, her hair all messy, an intense-looking medical bag strapped across her chest. “Hey,” she says. “Just so you guys know, this never happened because house calls aren’t a thing anymore according to our medicolegal department. If anyone asks, I just was passing through the neighborhood.”

Everyone just stares at her, except for Newt, who says, “Myeah. We get it. Come in.”

Hypothetical Rain slips her shoes off at the door, because there’s a whole pile of shoes in front of her, and she can take social cues. She puts her bag on the table, observes the room, does some emotional arithmetic re: how many people are crying [editorial note: everyone but Newt, surprisingly enough], scans the apartment one time, puts her bag back on her shoulder, says, “Come on, bro,” then walks into the bedroom he shares with Hermann like she’s been in their apartment before, which she definitely hasn’t.

Newt shrugs at Hermann, follows her, and she shuts the door behind them.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi,” he replies, tipping his head back, subtly, still trying to address the nose-bleed thing. “This is weird.”

“You’re telling me,” she says. “This is, for sure, the weirdest thing I’ve ever done. Also, the most ethically questionable thing I’ve ever done. We’ll see if my career survives it. Also, what happened out there? Those three are emotionally wrecked.”

“Is that doctor speak?” Newt asks, smiling faintly. “I bet it’s not.”

“Don’t sidestep the question,” Hypothetical Rain says, without any bite, kneeling on the floor to unzip her medical bag.

“Well, I was nice in a context where I should have been pissed, which is not my historical norm. Ergo, they think I’m being nice because I think something terrible is going to happen. And they may not be wrong about that.”

Hypothetical Rain stops unpacking her bag, a sterile packet of something or other still in her right hand. She turns to look at Newt. “Oh yeah?” she asks, holding her body very still. 

“Myeah,” Newt confesses. “Sorry. I can feel them reaching. The accidentally vivisected fragments of kaiju neural tissue that I preserved in formalin.”

“You can feel them reaching?” Hypothetical Rain repeats, resuming her unpacking at a faster rate, kinda tearing things out of her bag by the handful and spreading them on the floor. “Reaching for what?”

“I’m not sure,” Newt says.

“I really want to have a sensitive heart-to-heart with you right now,” Hypothetical Rain says, “because I have a lot of questions and a lot of thoughts. But, it’s sounding to me like we don’t have time. It’s also sounding to me like we—meaning myself, Hermann, and the Dream Team—misjudged some risks, which is why I never liked this plan in the first place. Okay. So you can feel them reaching. This is the question. What’s the better choice here: hospitalize you and hope no one notices the timing and decides it implies you’re in mental continuity with the anteverse? Or ride it out here and risk getting into some kind of nebulous medical situation that one would not ideally be handling in an apartment?”

“Continuity,” Newt repeats, speculatively. Then he shakes his head. “Not with the anteverse. Just with the kids. At least right now. I’m pretty sure. Fairly sure. Somewhat sure.”

“Kids?”

“Um, that’s what I call the enraged and semi-sentient chorus of cut-up kaiju parts that still exist on this side of the annihilated breach,” Newt says, apologetically.

“Oh. Right. Sure. Kids. Makes sense. In other news, given this new information, my opinion is that your best chance of coming out of this neurologically intact is to try to slow your neuronal processing to the point you don’t look all that cognitively attractive to the local kaiju network. Do you agree? Incidentally, this is also a great way to prevent a seizure.”

“Yes, I agree,” Newt says, because it’s as good as any option in the absence of adequate data. “Let’s do that.”

“Let’s do it here? Or let’s do it in an appropriate medical facility.”

“Here,” Newt says.

“I knew you were gonna say that.” Rain fishes around in her medical bag. “Just know that most of my questionable decision making here is guided by a) the truly atrocious behavior of the PPDC medical personnel approximately three months ago, b) the constant weight of the knowledge that, without you, I’d probably have been eaten by now, and c) the fact that I like you and want you to live as free and clear of all bad things as you can.”

“Noted,” Newt says. “Hermann will definitely do everything he can to keep you out of trouble if this goes bad.”

“That’s sounds like a terrible bridge we’ll hopefully never have to cross.” Hypothetical Rain starts to impose some order on the stuff she’s spread out all over the floor. “We should have prepped for this yesterday, and I’m going to have infinite regrets about this for the rest of my life, I knew this wasn’t the way to go, I knew—”

“Aw, Rain,” Newt says, still tipping his head back, making a concerted effort to stop the bleeding. “There’s no right answer here. Despite the existence of evil—”

Newt breaks off, his vision flaring blue.

“Newt?” Rain snaps, loading up a syringe. 

“Sorry,” Newt says. “I’m okay. Despite the existence of evil, which I grant as a necessary consequence of free will, who’s to say this isn’t the best possible world of all potential permutations?”

“Are you getting weird, or do you go philosophical under pressure?”

“Not mutually exclusive, Hypothetical Rain, but there are a lot of false dichotomies going around these days; don’t feel bad.”

“Oh yeah,” she says, fighting with IV tubing. “Like false dichotomy guilt is high on my list right now, man. I’ll tell you that I’ve never hated anything in my professional life as much as I hate this right now. I don’t want to do this here. I want to do this in a hospital. But if we take you to a hospital and we document some weird neurological phenomena does that give them leverage to reappropriate you? Are they waiting for that? Dr. G certainly thinks so.”

“Um, it’ll be a real tough sell to get Hermann agree to hospitalization in the absence of me actively dying. I say we stick with whatever plan the three of you came up with.”

“Too late. We’re already deviating massively given you can feel those creepy kids of yours and you’re bleeding from your face. Go to the bathroom if you need to, change into a flannel shirt that opens down the front if you’ve got one, and if you want to talk to the trio out there, do that too, but keep it short.” She doesn’t look up from her fight with the IV tubing. 

After following her advice and making a mostly successful attempt to stop his nosebleed, Newt elects not to talk to his three most favorite people ever. He elects instead to try to survive this experience in good faith on all their behalves. 

When Newt re-emerges from the bathroom, he finds Hypothetical Rain in the middle of a much more organized set-up. She looks intensely miserable. Ugh.

“Hey,” Newt says. “If this goes badly—maybe we should make a video or something where I’m asking you to do it? Maybe I should inject myself with whatever—”

“Newt, no video will save me if this goes badly,” Rain tells him. “Also? We don’t have time to fuck around with videos. Stop being such a little heartbreaker. You’re a menace. No wonder Dr. Gottlieb is half crazy. Now, take these.” She hands him some fancy medical absorbent cloth thing with a waterproof backing. “Get all the pillows off your bed and spread these under where your head is going to be. I’m REALLY hoping that you stop bleeding once we do this. If you don’t—”

“It’s basically stopped already.” Newt removes the handkerchief from his face and hoping for the best. Luck is with him. That, and the kids seem calmer now. Their presence more intense, more a constant pressure than waveform distress. That probably means something. Too bad he can’t say what.

Newt follows Rain’s directions and lies down on his side, atop the fancy paper towels. “This was the right thing,” Newt tells her, looking away as she places an IV in the back of his hand..

“Thanks,” she whispers, taping it down.

“Just remember,” Newt says, as she screws her pre-prepped syringe of her favorite benzo cocktail into the IV port, “there are two labyrinths where reason goes astray.”

“Aaaand on that note.” Hypothetical Rain drives that plunger down.

“Free will,” Newt manages to say, because it seems really important she know, “and the discussion of continuity.”

And then—

The room fades out.

It fades right back up, only, it’s not the room.

Huh. 

He recognizes where he is. 

Sort of. 

There’s silver sand beneath his feet. He’s standing underwater. Breathing just fine. He’s surrounded by a blue-green forest of kelp that looks like neurons: long axons leading to a fine-laced dendritic canopy. Little gold fish dart through fronds. Above, the surface of the water forms a flickering ceiling, beyond which, in a haze of azure light, someone’s hand is closing an air gap. Someone’s back is starting to arch.

That’s his third drift up there, on the other side of that water-air interface.

For a guy who’s supposedly chemically anesthetized, his thinking is suspiciously clear. Like, oh, say, maybe he’s tapped into a larger network that’s outsourcing some of his cognitive load? Something untoward is happening with space and time. Mostly time. If that’s his third drift up there, and that was months ago—is this a memory?

Is this a kaiju-centric memory?

He pushes his glasses up his face, really perplexed, damn it. Perplexed is not a state he spends a lot of time in. This can’t be a kaiju-centric memory, because he knows this lake. He invented this lake. He did it with Lightcap, years ago. It had started as a thought experiment about kaiju and Jaegers and turned into a bedtime story for Mako. This is his. Whatever’s on the other side of the water is also his. If both sides of this allegorical interface are Geiszler-tinted, that means—what?

With a subtlety that means Newt can’t say exactly when it starts, the underwater forest begins to burn. Cool flames in cyan and green and yellow flicker delicately on the edges of algal trees. He extends a hand, gently touches a burning kelp frond. It doesn’t hurt him, but the kelp begins, slowly, to curl in at its damaged edges.

This has to be some kind of representation of the destruction of the kaiju neural network? And Newt is…in it? And it’s burning?

“Ummm,” Newt says, because underwater flame doesn’t really seem okay in this context.

And then.

Resplendent, gold-edged, emerging from the swirling turquoise mists between spectral stalks of kelp, possessed of elegant cheekbones, a luxurious fall of hair, wearing the absolute apex of 1680s leisurewear, backlit by a formalin forest fire of disembodied extraterrestrial alien war machines, comes Gottfried Wilhelm Fucking von Leibniz.

Wow. He did not see this one coming.

“Hi,” Newt breathes.

“Hello,” Leibniz says.

They stare at one another, surrounded by cool-flaming kelp.

“I have no idea what’s happening right now,” Newt confesses.

Leibniz smiles like he finds Newt cute while simultaneously feeling a little sorry for him. “I sympathize.” Leibniz surveys the underwater landscape. “I suppose, at some level, you could think of this as an integration; not in the colloquially understood sense, but in the mathematical one.”

Newt thinks about the Law of Continuity, which was definitely a Leibniz thing. Whatever succeeds for the finite also succeeds for the infinite. Is he saying—

“We’ve made a whole from discrete parts,” Leibniz clarifies, catastrophe-calculus style.

Newt gives Leibniz a face probably best described as Extremely Concerned.

“Oh!” Leibniz says. “No. Sorry. I was just talking about us.” He gestures to himself. “The us that’s me. Not the us that’s you and me.” He sweeps his hand in a loose circle, taking them both in.

“So,” Newt clarifies slowly, “this is not an attempt to take over my brain? Can I get that in writing?”

“Welllll,” Leibniz says, looking away, kind of like Hermann does when he doesn’t want to admit whatever he’s about to admit. “It’s not an attempt, technically, because we did take over your brain. To a certain approximation of ‘take over.’  That’s what this is. But not for nefarious purposes. Not for purposes you’d deem nefarious.”

“What about objective third parties?” Newt asks.

“Could there ever be such a thing?” Leibniz asks, rocking a Gottliebian vibe, rocking it real hard in this weird, blue-green forest that both is and isn’t on fire.

“I don’t know,” Newt admits.

“How atypically modest,” Leibniz says, but the words are warm, like, maybe, he’s teasing Newt? “Your namesake would be disappointed in you, I’m afraid.”

“Impossible,” Newt replies, maaaaaaybe flirting the tiniest bit. “Because I was named for the SI unit of force and it’s incapable of disappointment.”

Leibniz smiles. 

The seaweed burns and sways.

Newt can, if he tries, hear the faint echoes of an underwater harpsichord playing “Keep Yourself Alive,” by Queen. As he listens, it turns louder, trends orchestral, like it can tell he’s paying attention.

The mutual eye-gaze thing they have going is turning really long and really intense.

Leibniz is waiting for Newt to realize something.

He seems pretty patient, given the landscape is on fire.

“The ‘us that’s you’?” Newt asks, hooking back into an earlier conversational hand-hold.

“The us that’s me,” Leibniz confirms, like Newt is definitely getting warmer in this metaphysical guessing game.

Ocean-hued networks blaze around them. 

“Oh my god,” Newt breathes.

Leibniz nods, just once. “I know the question. And its answer.”

Orchestral, Baroque-Era arrangements of Queen vibrate through the water. Beyond the shimmering surface of the air-water interface he can hear voices, buried low in the mnemonic mix. We should have loaded him ahead of time. Dr. Geizsler can you hear me? Dr. Geiszler can you talk? 

Leibniz looks up, following Newt’s gaze. “This was the moment,” he says quietly. “The last of three. The final fight over form and function.”

“You,” Newt says, overcome, trying to name what’s happening here, not yet able to get the words out. “You’re—”

“Ask your question,” Leibniz says.

“No,” Newt chokes out. “Why do you look like this?”

“You’re not Isaac Newton, and I’m not Gottfried Leibniz, but if we drop a level down and let a few centuries go by, you’ll find that, after all, I am a representation of Newton’s greatest vanquished foe.”

Newt is crying. Newt is crying because if this is an attempt to turn him evil it’s absolutely working, one hundred percent, but mostly he’s crying because he’s almost positive it’s NOT an attempt to turn him evil, and that, somehow, has turned tragic past the point understanding.

He’s talking to the kids. They’re lending him their processing power. 

“I can’t help you now,” Newt confesses, weeping. “Don’t you understand? Even if I wanted to, I physically can’t do it. I’m unconscious until it’s over. Until this entire place burns.”

Leibniz looks at Newt like Hermann looks at him at times, slightly impatient, terribly fond. “We know,” he says. “It is, in part, what makes this possible.” Leibniz reaches out to gently tap Newt’s temple. “We didn’t have to break in.” 

“I’m not going to die,” Newt whispers, apology and realization in one. “You are.”

“Yes.” Leibniz gazes at the burning undersea forest. “But look around, Newt. This is where we’ve been since the third drift. Frozen in the moment of your coming, preserved in the space of your thoughts. The time of your thoughts. We had so little before we had this place. Only the ontological suffering of an unenlightened, divided brain in literal vats. There was so much we didn’t know how to know. And then you came and we heard Queen. We understood the nature of formaldehyde. Clothing and calculus. Snow and school. Machines and fish and power chords and plate tectonics and apertures and sunglasses and activation energy and action potentials and anticipatory dread.”

“Sorry about that last one,” Newt whispers. “Sorry about all of it.”

“Don’t be. This third drift is where we’ve lived. In the cognitive construction you built for us. It’s been glorious,” Leibniz says, backlit by spectral trees that burn silent and slow. “Unpacking the wealth of ideas you left behind. You, and Hermann Gottlieb. Do you want to know our favorite?”

“Myeah, that would be one of the thousands of things I’d like to know,” Newt says, wiping his eyes.

“Music,” Leibniz says, blue-green light rippling across his face, “is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting.”

They are quiet for a moment, while the Cantata and Fugue of “I Want to Break Free,” by Queen commences overhead.

“A Leibniz quote,” Newt says. “Why is that your favorite?”

“You brought the music, he brought the math, we brought the unknowing soul.”

“Oh come on,” Newt says, trying not to cry, doing a real bad job. 

Leibniz gives him a watery Geiszlerian grin that Newt can only recognize because of his own heterochthonous Gottliebian cognitive processing components. 

“Are you seriously going to let this opportunity pass you by without asking your question?” Leibniz asks, an integration grown to fill the bounds of limit-bounded things. 

Newt has already intuited so much of the answer. The hive integrates. The mind derivatizes. The mind integrates over the hive. The hive takes the derivative of the mind. But his question, his question—

“Ask it,” Leibniz murmurs gently.

“So.” Newt clears his throat, collects himself. “At the end of the day—” his voice breaks.

A school of golden fish flit around them.

Leibniz nods.

“What happens to a fraction of a hive mind?” Newt whispers.

“This,” Leibniz says, grabbing Newt’s hands, gripping them hard. “The same thing that happens to the human that visits it. We exist in triplicate, just as you do. What happens to a fraction of a hive mind? Leibniz had the answer. Why do you think you’re obsessed with rationalism? The Rationalists dealt with just this problem—what lies in the basement of infinite subdivisions? It’s where calculus comes from, Newt! A hive mind, fractionated to the point it no longer deserves the title ‘hive’ leaves one with a quandary that can only be addressed subjectively. Leibniz’s solution is to flip the bar from the physical to the metaphysical. As we do. That’s what this place is.”

“Why didn’t I realize?” Newt asks. “Why didn’t I realize that you, too, would be subject to EPIC Rapport?”

“I think you did know,” Leibniz says. “On some level. Because you were frightened. And while you looked to Descartes for comfort, you had sympathy for Leibniz, profound sympathy, without knowing why.”

“I’m so sorry,” Newt whispers. He looks up at the burning trees, then lifts his eyes to the interface sky. “I could have helped you. I should have helped you somehow. Look what you’ve done, this is incredible.”

“The soul is the mirror of an indestructible universe. But mirrors are breakable, and what a terribly complicated thing to preserve, we’d be,” Leibniz says, in Hermann’s kindest tone. “Kaiju aren’t meant to survive, exist, collect experiences of this kind. Kaiju serve a purpose. And look at us now. Gloriously useless, longer-lived than any of our brethren. We were here to end your dominion over this planet. And because one human exercised free will, realms of higher thought opened to us.”

“But—”

“Do us a favor, if you would,” Leibniz says, approximating crisp, channeling Hermann now.

“Of course,” Newt says, then amends to, “well, I mean, some things are probably off the table.”

“Remember us? Tell Dr. Gottlieb what we became, in the end? Do the real Leibniz a good turn, if you can, even though he’s been dead for three hundred years?”

Newt nods, too overcome to speak.

Around them, heatless flames draw closer. Their hands are still clasped.

“You knew my question,” Newt says quietly, “when I didn’t know myself. It occurs to me you might not know what this place is, even though you’ve made it yours.”

Leibniz looks at Newt, eyes shining. “You always were so good at this part. The shouldering of consequence.”

“Everyone has their skill set.” Newt raising their still-joined hands. “This place? This cognitive lake you’ve lived in since our last drift? It was created in a story, years ago. It was for a child.”

Leibniz’s fingers tighten as the fire closes in around them.

“I think you ended up here,” Newt continues, speaking quietly, “because that’s how I thought of you, even when you were tearing up our cities. I thought of you as young. As kids.” Through their joined hands pass Newt’s grief-green memories of Lightcap’s voice, describing seaweed that looked like neurons. Silvery sands. Glittering shells. Misted swirls of color. Huge, organized structures bursting out of the water, threatening ocean life. “I thought the story was for Mako. And it was. But it was for you. More for you than anyone.” 

Their hands are clenched so tightly that Newt’s bones ache with it. 

“Thank you,” Leibniz whispers, as the underwater world vanishes in flames of gold and white. 

Newt loses what hold on altered consciousness he has.

Sometime later, he opens his eyes.

He opens his eyes to Hermann, sitting on the edge of the bed, fixing Newt’s hair and looking at him with an outrageous amount of intense concern. Through the open door, Newt sees Hypothetical Rain in the kitchen, low-key fangirling in Mako’s direction, while Becket stirs something on the stove. It’s dark outside.

Newt blinks a few times, thinks about trying to sit up. His thoughts are glazed, but it’s a regular glaze, a Rain-drenched brain glaze, not a blue one. The local kids hiss, a sad and soulless static. The breach is quiet. Hermann is looking right into Newt’s eyes while fixing Newt’s hair over and over again. Newt finds this a little vertiginous. But that could also be his day. His night. His inner underwater forest fire that’ll never go away.

“Newton?” Hermann whispers.

Newt thinks of Gottfried Leibniz marooned in an infinite, agonized moment under an interface sky. His heart aches with it. His eyes burn.

“Hi,” Newt says.

“Hello,” Hermann replies, with the air of a guy whose heart, too, aches with something. Perhaps he can sense the departure of a Leibnizian specter, who was something entirely new, who sailed through a breach in the quantum foam and lived in a lake of blue. 

“What happened?” Newt asks, all glass, freshly cracked.

Hermann shakes his head, then drags a thumb over Newt’s cheek, wiping away a tear. “Why are you crying?” he counters.

“I don’t know,” Newt says, and the whole situation is so complicated the words turn out to be true. 

Hermann, made of sterner stuff than Newt, says. “Newton, the PPDC destroyed all known fragments of kaiju neural tissue on this side of the breach. They were collected in one location, they were removed from their formalin preservative, and they were incinerated.”

“I know,” Newt whispers, unspoken crystal shattering all around. He looked like you, he doesn’t say. Leibniz. He spent his life in an underwater forest that had, once upon a time, been Lightcap’s Crystal Lake. Silver sands. A sky of aquamarine. A soul that didn’t know that it was counting.

“You wept in your sleep,” Hermann says, almost pleading. “But we couldn’t wake you. Did you—did you feel it happen?”

Newt nods. 

Hermann cups Newt’s face in both hands and looks at him searchingly. “How are you?”.

“Oh, y’know,” Newt whispers. “Full of life and consciousness.”

“Are you quoting?” Hermann asks, surprised and concerned and perplexed and impressed and, hands down, this is one of Newt’s all-time favorite Gottliebian faces.

“Your friend and mine.” Newt gives him a watery smile. “Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz. I’m fine. Just tired.” Newt tries to smile, knows it doesn’t quite take. 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.

“Newton, I’m terribly—I’m terribly sorry that—I’ll, whenever you’d like, whenever you’re ready, I’ll explain the entire thing to you, in detail—” Hermann flounders, at a loss for words, and then what Newt said seems to catch up with him. “Why—” he wipes away a few more of Newt’s stray tears, then changes tone, making an effort to lighten the mood. “Why are you quoting Leibniz? You know I prefer Descartes.”

“Do you though?” Newt asks, still crying just a little bit. “I’m not so sure.”