Designations Congruent with Things: Chapter 21

 If you want to destroy my sweater…

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

Text iteration: Witching hour.

Additional notes: None.

Chapter 21

Newt wakes in the dark.

He’s tangled in marginally familiar sheets in a marginally familiar room, whatever his brain is trying to scream decoupled from the motor pathways that are supposed to be screaming it.

So, that’s a win.

He detangles himself from his bedding. Mostly. Tragically, he doesn’t realize he hasn’t fully dissected out his right ankle from the twisted clutches of distressed sheets until he tries to get up and doesn’t quite make it because he can’t get his foot onto the floor and with the program. He falls a little bit, but not really, not totally, he saves it, it’s quiet, kind of slow, and pretty protracted, so it doesn’t count; he planned to be sitting on the floor to pull his stupid foot out of his stupid bedsheets. He planned that.

“Computer, lights,” he whispers. “Thirty percent.”

Nothing happens.

That’s because he doesn’t live in the Star Trek universe.

“Phone,” he says, “where are you?”

Nothing happens.

That’s because he needs a better phone, or, maybe, just one that he hadn’t poorly waterproofed and dropped in a jar of water. Or because his phone is not in his bedroom.

Newt arranges himself in a sitting position, leaning against his dednuded bed next to the waterfall of fabric he’s pulled after him onto the floor. The only light in the room comes from the unblinded, west-facing window where the yellow haze of fog-blurred streetlights fades to darkness at the border of the bay. 

If he is lucky, it is early.

If he is not, it is late.

Newt decides to find out later.

He considers trying to go back to sleep, but that’s a one-way ticket to an hours-long blur of memories passing incognito as nightmares, and Newt isn’t into that so he gets up, collects his glasses and clothes, then showers like a pro, without simultaneously wearing his pajamas and with a lot of strategic eye closing. As he’s pulling on his clothes it occurs to him that this might actually be shaping up into a pretty promising day in terms of positive psychological momentum. He does his best not to think about his dreams, at all, not ever, but even without direct analytic assessment of his subconscious he’s pretty sure that the dreams he was having last night were garden variety city-destroying and civilization-ending dreams because those tend to bother him less than the dreams where a wronged chorus of cut-apart alien brains are screaming his name in a strange meld of rabid vengeance and covetous pining. He has a tough time with those dreams, because the vengeance he gets but the longing he doesn’t, except for the part of him that does, that really gets it, that wants to be with them and that wants to make reparations for the terrible things he’s done. Because he should have killed them. The kids. But he didn’t know how and he didn’t know he’d needed to, and even if he had known both those things he still wouldn’t have been able to do it because a) he had and still has certain responsibilities to his own species because it’s his and he likes it, b) he’s not really into killing stuff, like, really really not into it, not even undead monsters, and c) destroying samples is bad for science and it’s extra bad if one needs those samples to save one’s civilization. 

When he gets to the kitchen he discovers he has won the sleep habits lottery because the glow of the digital clock lets him know that it is four thirty in the morning, and, therefore, not late but early.

Early.

Early.

Good work, brain, Newt thinks. You are crushing it today.

He flips on a single light, at which point he discovers that the sweater he has pulled out of his closet is green. Statistically, this is the most likely sweater outcome for him. Given all his sweaters are clean, which is usually true because he has a thing about laundry now (he’s not sure what this thing is exactly but it’s a powerful thing) and given that he picks out a sweater totally at random due to evenhanded disapproval of all sweater choices, he comes up with a green variant roughly forty percent of the time. 

He drums his fingers on the countertop, a habit that feels at once familiar and challenging, like maybe it’s someone else’s fingers, trying to use his hand like a glove.

He feels lost, a little bit, with no coffee to drink and no lab to go to.  

It is extremely disconcerting to have no science to do. It’s the kind of thing that happens only when one switches fields, which, apparently, he’s currently doing, having facilitated the destruction of his previous field along with the destruction of all living specimens that he or any of his colleagues might have studied, which is great; that’s just great.

He has no idea if he’s being serious or ironic.

If he were back at the shatterdome, if the world hadn’t not-ended and his civilization were still in the midst of its protracted skid toward the brick wall of alien-mediated mass extinction, he’d be definitely drinking coffee right now and, possibly, transferring the nuclei of somatic kaiju cells into various tissue types in an attempt to get them to grow. 

It would be easy, his brain seethes, less in words than in blue-tinged, urgent confidence that’s both foreign and familiar. It would be easy because they were meant to be grown. It would be easy because you’re so good at tissue culture. It would be easy because they would grow for you, they would want to grow for you, they would want to, they would want to. For you.   

Settle down there, kids, Newt thinks, his hands clamped around the edge of the kitchen sink, his gaze fixed on the stone of the countertop.

Okay, fine, so he has no science to do right now, but science is ever evolving and unending and will always have room for him; that’s not so much the issue; he’s not some orphaned, Dickensian skeptic looking in on a rational worldview that he no longer gets to share, that’s just stupid. So he accidentally helped some badass military types and Mako the Magnificent destroy his entire field; he’s probably not the first person to do such a thing, although he can’t think of any other examples right at the moment, whatever, he’s sure something is going to come to him—or not, because obsolescence and paradigm shifts don’t count as field destruction; nope, it’s got to be literal destruction of the phenomena the field is built around—the point of all of this is just that he needs a new research interest, those aren’t hard to come by, he could go on a walk and trip over one if he weren’t so obsessed with rationalism right now, slash using it as an intellectual crutch; he’s fully intent on lying to Hermann about that, but he’s not going to lie to himself, at least not about the rationalism, not now, not on a good day like this one when he wakes up early and the part of his brain reanimating the brains he mutilated is listening to him. 

Nope. 

On a day like this he is going to find a new hobby. 

Maybe two new hobbies. 

Hobby number one: biohacking. He decided on this just now, but he’s pretty sure it’s been in the offing for about five years or so. It’s a great choice for him, because his body art hobby is on hiatus at the moment as he’s not totally sure it’s a great idea to continue painting himself with the tapestry of what might someday become his own PTSD if it hangs around long enough to meet whatever the clinical criteria are. Biohacking fulfills the same psychological niche that the body art does; it’s just a little less themed around stylized representations of things that tried to kill him and that he then mercilessly exterminated and unwittingly tortured. 

Soooo yeah.

Hobby number two: cooking. Newt would rate his personal interest in ‘food’ as a concept at a solid two on the Negative Ten to Ten Scale, and his interest in cooking at a negative one. However, he would rate his interest in demonstrating to Hermann that biologists, categorically, make unparalleled chefs at a nine point nine five and his interest in demonstrating to Hermann that he, Newt, is the superior cook out of the pair of them, despite exactly zero experience, at a ten. While it’s true that Hermann has, over the past weeks, done the vast majority of their cooking, this is only because Newt a) has not been able to see, b) has been frequently bleeding from his face, which is not compatible with preparing food unless one is a vampire, and c) has been somewhat unfocused relative to his historical norm, a tendency that he blames entirely on the sudden and cruel elimination of caffeine from his diet. 

Hypothetical Rain has a lot to answer for.

Newt adjusts his glasses, staring at their minimally equipped minimalist kitchen and trying to dig the most complicated breakfast food he can out of Hermann’s mental recipe catalogue, which leaves him feeling vaguely nostalgic for a home that isn’t his home, a little bit irritated about the general dearth of appropriate raw materials, and marginally more appreciative of his current sweater. 

He wrests control of his brain back, dials up his own fashion aesthetic, then dry heaves once in the general direction of the sink before getting his cognitive dissonance under control. 

He is Newton Geiszler of the culinary confidence and the stupid tripled consciousness and since he has no cookbook and Hermann doesn’t know many breakfast recipes that can be effected with the materials on hand, Newt will, from first principles, reinvent pancakes. 

It can’t be that hard.

He whistles the opening chord progression of Undone by Weezer quietly through his teeth.

“Hey brah,” he says in muttered quotation, sequentially opening all the cabinets and leaving them open, so he can see where Hermann put things, because he hadn’t been paying attention during the kitchen organization. “How we doin’ man?”

“All right,” he replies, locating a suitable mixing bowl. 

“It’s been a while man,” he says, pulling a spoon out of a drawer. “Life’s so rad. This band’s my favorite man, don’t you love them?” 

“Yeah,” he replies to himself, pausing his rendition of the opening monologue of Undone. 

He spends a quiet moment intensively considering the core principles of pancake assembly. 

Absently, he begins whistling Undone’s intro chord progression.

His central problem, as he sees it, is that he’s pretty sure pancakes require a chemical leavening agent and he doesn’t have one. 

Aw man, you want a beer? His brain asks, continuing apace with its Weezer monologuing despite the fact that Newt is trying to—

Wait. Wait wait wait wait wait. 

Beer will work.

Nice job brain, he says.  

“All right,” Newt replies, opening the fridge and pulling out the fancy German beer that Hermann likes owning but doesn’t seem to like drinking all that much. “Aw man, hell brah, this is the best. I’m so glad we’re all back together and stuff, this is great man. Yeah. Hey, do you know about the party after the show?  Yeah. Aw man, it’s gonna be the best, I’m so stoked. Take it easy brah.”

He goes back to whistling for the vocals, because he’s not going to sing. That’s not something one does while making pre-sunrise pancakes. It’s just not done. Not in general, not by him, and not the sweater song, not while he’s wearing a sweater. He has some standards. Not a lot of them, granted, and the ones he has aren’t that high, but they definitely preclude singing right now. 

Precluded. 

That’s what singing is. 

Precluded. 

Yup.

He holds himself to whistling through the opener like a champ, but loses it on the chorus while looking for measuring cups.

If you want to destroy my sweater
Hold this thread as I walk away.

It is at this point he gives up and just goes for it.

He’s using a blender in place of a guitar solo in the midst of his fourth rendition of Undone when he turns around to see Hermann, leaning against the kitchen counter, his arms crossed, wearing a green sweater and slacks, looking vaguely perplexed, slightly confused, and standing literally less than a meter from Newt.

!!!!!!, the kids hiss.

For the love, Newt thinks.

His brain is too busy reflexively responding to have an opinion on this turn of events. 

Newt lets go of the blender and throws the spoon he’s holding at Hermann’s pretty immaculate math-professor outfit in panicked self-defense but manages to alter its trajectory, mostly, so it goes into the sink while his joints instinctively flex to protect major arteries. This leaves him clutching his heart, sort of bent over, in total, primitive terror.

Hermann holds up both hands in a reassuring manner and locks eyes with him, silently willing him to relax, unless Newt misses his guess, which is a possibility, since his track record of reading Hermann’s mind is pretty poor if failing at Calculus Wars is a reliable indicator.

Newt is trying to yell at Hermann but it’s not happening. 

He’s still frozen a little bit. 

The wordless eye-mojo Hermann is trying to pull on him isn’t working at all. 

Not at all. 

Okay, that’s a lie, he feels slightly better.

Hermann is giving him a look that definitely says something along the lines of calm down, you’re fine, everyone in this room is a human and knows it. Let us not forget that our collective IQ divided into even quartiles would be enough to distribute to four average humans.  

Better. He feels better. 

Slightly better.

Better enough to start shouting. 

“What the hell, Hermann?” Newt demands, totally aggrieved, because, hello, it’s five in the morning, probably, one doesn’t just come up behind people and stare at them while they perform the sweater song in the privacy of a totally empty kitchen, that’s not cool, that’s not allowed, that’s really terrible roommate etiquette; it’s awful, actually, this should be illegal. He’s going to start communicating this to Hermann at literally any second, once he stops hyperventilating and his brain reengages with his mouth.  

“By no means stop on my account,” Hermann says dryly.   

“I—” Newt begins. “You—” he continues, pointing two fingers directly at Hermann. He’s got no follow-through though, because right about the time he regains his capacity for analysis and articulation is right about the time he realizes that he has not exactly been keeping it down, which is kind of indefensible from a roommate-consideration standpoint and definitely absolves Hermann from standing behind him like a creeper.   

“Some people,” Hermann says, when Newt doesn’t say anything else, “would prefer to be sleeping at five in the morning.”

“Not you though,” Newt says weakly. “Not me. Not us. We master pillars of traditional breakfast cuisine.”

“Ah,” Hermann says. “Is that what we do?  Does that also explain why you’re incorporating a high quality German beer into—what is this?”

“Pancakes,” Newt replies. “I needed a leavening agent and this is what we’ve got, dude.” 

“Ah,” Hermann says. “And you felt the need to run the blender at five in the morning because—”

“Because I’m not going to mechanically stir,” Newt says, affronted. “What am I, an intern of science?  I object to all unnecessary manual labor. On principle.”

Hermann gives him a pointed look driving home the fact that simultaneous use of a blender and repeated a cappella renditions of Undone may not be the most conducive to sleep. 

You are really not a sensitive guy, his brain informs him. Your colleague actually goes to extreme lengths not to wake you up if you miraculously fall asleep, one would think that you would extend him the same courtesy.

One would think, Newt replies, guiltily, to his own brain.

This is a kitchen, his brain continues, not a laboratory. That is a blender. Not a tissue homogenizer. This is an apartment with an open floorplan, not a hermetically sealed lab.

“I assume,” Hermann says dryly, “from your singularly peculiar expression, that you’re chastising yourself at present?”

“No,” Newt replies. “A little bit. Yes, actually.”

“Excellent,” Hermann says. “Then I will refrain.”

Newt realizes that Hermann looks suspiciously not pissed, from which Newt deduces that the guy was perhaps already awake when the whole pancake experiment was taking shape, meaning that he probably was an auditory witness to Newt’s increasingly enthusiastic Rivers Cuomo impersonation. This is slightly embarrassing, but Newt is pretty sure it doesn’t even make it onto a list of Notable Embarrassing Things Done by Newton Geiszler because that list is long and storied and buried in a dark vault somewhere in the subterranean reaches of his consciousness, so yeah, Hermann’s probably having the odd nightmare about, say, hypothetically, the time Newt’s upper level Tissue Engineering students drank him under the table after finals which would have been fine, if ragingly unprofessional, except for the part where they’d stolen his driver’s license, taken a photo of it, and posted it on the MIT intranet to put to rest all speculations about his age, which also would have been fine, kind of, except the faculty had taken an inappropriately extreme interest in his documented age which was, perhaps, not exactly as advanced as he had advertised when his colleagues asked him about it on a triweekly basis, and that had hurt his intellectual street cred, a little bit, maybe, and had left him with the extremely irritating nickname of ‘Barely Legal’ for something like four years.

“No one makes an effort quite like you do, Newton,” Hermann says, watching Newt struggle with the components of an unassembled breakfast. 

Newt isn’t really sure what this means—it sounds suspiciously like an insult, but it also sounds slightly more than slightly fond, and Newt hasn’t quite worked out the best way to respond to the dryly appreciative vibe Hermann has been rocking of late, because historically it had been dryly dismissive. He hopes this interpersonal key change has occurred because Hermann now has a not-so-secret appreciation of his brain and not because he views Newt as some sort of barely functional superfriend with good intentions and a knack for knocking things over in an appealing manner like a heroine of a romantic comedy with inexplicably poor motor control, because that’s not what’s going on here. Newt is, for sure, a nascent supervillain whose evil super-power is, tragically, his facility with getting things to grow. He is most definitely not a hottie with confidence issues; he has a lot of confidence, too much, really, according the feedback he’s received consistently for approximately his entire life, and he’s definitely not ‘hot’, he is, at best, ‘cute’, and at worst, arguably, ‘disgusting.’  If Newt is a proto-supervillian, this means Hermann slots nicely into the role of his arch nemesis because the guy definitely fits the ‘closet badass’ trope in a little bit more of an emo ascetic Rebooted-Bruce-Wayne-of-Science type of way than say a Peter Parker or Clark Kent or even a Tony Stark kind of way; that last one’s a little ironic though because Hermann’s skillset for sure best approximates the skillset of Iron Man, because, hello, please see exhibit A, giant freaking iron men, which are, alas, currently located in pieces at the bottom of the Pacific or marginally intact in the local Jaeger graveyard. If Hermann is being a little bit of a dick right now then Newt would, ideally, prefer to be a dick straight back in a blazingly witty manner that comes of as suavely superior with an eau d' effortless. On the other hand, if this is some kind of declaration of admiration that’s turned out a little bit weird, then he’d rather be nice about it, because he wants to encourage weird admiration. Honestly, he wants to encourage admiration in general, because he himself is admiring. Of Hermann. They could have a positive feedback loop of esteem going on if Newt doesn’t totally screw it up. This is a lot of pressure. 

Say something, his brain advises. This is getting awkward. Because you’re making it awkward. Bad job. 

Historically, Newt probably would have said something like, ‘are you insulting me or hitting on me?’  But now, standing unshod in a kitchen he thinks of more as ‘Hermann’s’ than ‘theirs’ for reasons that can be sourced to Hermann’s thought patterns rather than his own (because Newt’s been an inappropriate appropriator with the best of them), he’s not going to ask this question for three reasons. Reason one: discourse is a spectrum and he’d be setting up a rhetorically lazy false dichotomy. Reason two: even if discourse weren’t a spectrum, he’s pretty sure that drifting has granted him the interpersonal subtlety to now recognize that ‘insulting me’ and ‘hitting on me’ aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive where Hermann is concerned. Reason three: there is literally no way for Hermann to respond to such a question in a suave way and Newt would really like to up not just his own personal suaveness but the collective suaveness of this apartment in general.

Hermann is now giving him a look that Newt is going to tag as ‘concerned discomfiture’. 

Probably because you’re staring at him, his brain says. Now who’s the creeper?

You ruin everything, Newt snarls at his brain.

SAY SOMETHING, his brain shouts at him, panicking.

This is why he doesn’t generally think before speaking. It’s unworkable from a logistics perspective.   

“Thank you?” he finally manages, in a very slow, very skeptical, somewhat interrogative way.

“That was not a compliment,” Hermann says stiffly, in a way that means yeah it was definitely a weird compliment with zero insult undertones and intensely emotional overtones and, ergo, Newt is a jerk.

That sounds about right.

“Okay, well speaking of things that aren’t compliments, you’re going to have to wear a different shirt,” Newt snaps, not at all defensively or guiltily. “Because we can’t wear identical sweaters on the same day, Hermann, it’s just not a thing that we get to do.”

“And why is it you feel that I should be the one to change?”  Hermann asks.

“Because I dressed first,” Newt replies. “I therefore have priority.” 

“Well you also have batter on your sleeve,” Hermann replies with that superior aridity that looks so good on him. 

Sure. Of course Newt has batter on his sleeve. Yes. Yes, of course he does. 

“No pancakes for you,” Newt announces.

“I’m not certain that’s a loss,” Hermann replies, glancing dubiously at the as yet unassembled pancakes and clearly making no move to go change his sweater. 

Newt dips a finger into his batter, reaches over and drags it down the front of Hermann’s shirt.

Hermann watches him do it—not reacting, not shifting so much as an eyebrow.

Newt did not expect this outcome.

It’s a little bit suave.

A little bit unexpectedly, unfairly suave.

He’s cooler than you right now, his brain points out, unhelpfully. This might actually be rock bottom for you, friend, wearing a sweater that intermittently nauseates you, repeatedly singing songs from your childhood and not really nailing the key modulation until round three because your intonation leaves something to be desired at five in the morning before the coffee you’re not allowed to have anymore, trying to equalize a wardrobe playing field you invented between yourself and your in-medias-res life partner and just not getting it done, realizing you’re about eight thousand times less cool than your math professor roommate, realizing that you just triggered someone else’s OCD tendencies in your own head because you’re going to wash that sweater for him, you know you are—

“You’re chastising yourself again,” Hermann says. “This is extremely satisfying, Newton, I cannot begin to describe how much gratification I derive from the expression on your face at this precise moment.” Hermann crosses his arms and finally, finally, finally, raises that eyebrow. “It’s one I haven’t seen since I publicly upbraided you for diverting monetary resources from the maintenance and improvement of stereotactic drift interfaces in order to finance your sequencing project—“

“Which was, actually, really useful, Hermann,” Newt snaps. 

“In retrospect, I don’t dispute that,” Hermann replies. “At the time, however, I was clearly in the right as illustrated by the only formal reprimand I was ever able to get attached to your personnel file.”

Newt tips his head down, looks over the tops of his glasses, and gives Hermann the nonpareil of fiery Geiszlerian glares. He then readjusts his glasses to see if his glare is working.

Hermann looks amused. 

This does very little for Newt’s self esteem.

“I’ll just go change, shall I?” Hermann asks, in a manner best described as ‘offensively conciliatory’. 

“You do that,” Newt says, trying to recover his poise and maybe doing a passable job if Hermann’s category two eye roll is any kind of metric. 

After Hermann leaves the kitchen, Newt tries to wash the pancake batter out of his sweater sleeve so he doesn’t have to change the shirt that he just metaphorically balled up and made a pointless stand on. It doesn’t work very well, though; mostly it just makes his sweater wetter and dilutes the batter over a larger surface area. 

Great.

Newt spends the next several minutes pouring batter onto a pan and heating his pancakes into existence. They look pretty reasonable by the time Hermann returns, having swapped his defaced green sweater for a nearly identical blue one. When he reenters the kitchen, Newt hands him a plate with a fledgling pancake on it. 

Hermann takes a bite, favors Newt with a look that is distinctly unimpressed, and says, “did you use a recipe?”

“No,” Newt replies, not at all defensively, “I reinvented pancakes from first principles.”

“Did you?  That explains a great deal,” Hermann replies. 

“It’s not good?” Newt demands, somewhat aggressively.

“There is room for improvement,” Hermann replies. 

“Whatever, dude,” Newt says, acquiring a pancake of his own and taking a bite.

Yeah.

Okay, so it’s not the best pancake in the world, sure, it’s pretty dense and it doesn’t taste quite right, it’s bland, even somewhat cardboardesque, a little like something that would prompt an, ‘are you serious right now?’ from Newt if he were to be presented with it in a context where he was paying for his food. That’s fine. He can admit that his pancake is stoichiometrically askew. He’s going to need to tweak proportions next time, presuming he ever does this again, which is not a given.

“Ugh,” Newt says. “This is terrible.” 

“I’ve had more objectionable pancakes in my life,” Hermann replies philosophically, leaning against the counter and taking another bite. “Is there a reason you decided not to use a recipe?  Other than culinary hubris, that is?”

“No,” Newt replies, not despondently. “Culinary hubris pretty much covers it.” 

“It’s not a bad initial attempt,” Hermann says, being obviously nice to him.

Newt has mixed feelings regarding the niceness right about now. 

“Can you not console me about this, Hermann?” Newt snaps. “Because I don’t need to be consoled about pancakes, not even ones that I ruin.”

“I’m not consoling you,” Hermann snaps right back, “and your pancakes are not ruined. Stop catastrophizing. I’m trying to encourage you to make another attempt. Possibly tomorrow.”

“You’re the catastrophizer,” Newton mutters. “Historically.” 

“I have nothing but the deepest sympathy for you,” Hermann says.

Newt is pretty sure that even Hermann doesn’t know if Hermann is serious about what he just said. 

They eat mediocre pancakes in a dimly lit kitchen at five in the morning, arguing about the as-yet-unrevealed magnitude of Newt’s culinary genius. Newt’s certain it’s going to be staggeringly broad and astonishingly profound. Hermann is less sure of this, primarily due to his doubts about the extent to which food is going to hold Newt’s attention over the long term, medium term, and even, insultingly the short term, which Hermann defines as the ninety minute interval required to put together a moderately elaborate meal. Newt is both offended and pleased by his colleague’s stance. Offended because, hello, has he or has he not performed eighteen-hour (plus) take-down experiments in the workspace he’s shared with Hermann, so the guy should know that his ability to focus is laser-like in quality and his intellectual prowess is almost infinite in quantity. Pleased because Hermann is going to be so so so so so wrong about his projected forecast of Newt’s culinary abilities as ‘mediocre at best.’ 

Post pancakes, Hermann leaves for UC Berkeley because why not start one’s day at six in the morning if one can, so yeah. Newt doesn’t care. Newt doesn’t care at all actually, because he has lots of things to do, including one—locating his single acceptable shirt and changing into it, two—the laundry, three—a good chunk of staring out the window like the emo neohipster he’s fast becoming, four—hanging out with his intellectual friends from the enlightenment and pretending that he lives in a clockwork universe rather than on a horribly fragile d-brane subject to statistical perversions, five—well, if he’s listing, he should probably write that letter to Mako, six—maybe he should put together some kind of prospective neuroscience talk that he can give to UC Berkeley because he’s pretty sure that going back his original life plan of adding to the scope of human knowledge through basic research would make him feel a little less useless, but, alas, he is arguably useless at the moment, which makes the job-talk a risky plan because he’s not really sure how a public talk might go; he could see it going horrifically badly with awkward silences and bleeding as a best case scenario, and he’s not the only one who thinks so, if Hermann’s super-gentle, extremely polite, very occasional suggestions about making some effort to not dissolve into the venomous excretions of his own anxious consciousness are anything to go by. Newt is pretty sure that, historically, the extreme degree of avoidance he’s been engaging in would have gotten him repeated lectures and at least one symbolic swat with a cane, so given how nice Hermann’s being, well, it seems like a fair bet that the guy does not see Newt and public speaking mixing very well at present, so, paradoxically, Hermann’s not-so-concealed compassion isn’t really doing a whole lot for Newt’s confidence.

It’s nice though. 

The compassion.

So there’s that.

He does the dishes through the sunrise, but, once it’s light outside, nothing that can protect him from the vista out his window, so he loses half an hour to contemplation of the Wall. 

Then he pries himself away, using Descartes as an intellectual crowbar. 

Newt is chewing aggressively on the end of his pen, sitting at the kitchen table, squinting at his English translation of La Géométrie, which has just begun to become literally painful after several hours reading in the light of midmorning, when his phone rings. 

He’s sure at first that it will be Hermann or Mako or some number his caller ID can’t place, but instead, his phone tells him it’s Dr. McClure.

This is weird. 

It’s weird because Newt doesn’t remember putting her number into his phone and furthermore, if he had, he’s certain that he wouldn’t have entered her as ‘Dr. McClure’.

He looks at the display, undecided.

He’s not one for phone answering these days, but the problem with not answering this particular call is that if she doesn’t get him, Hypothetical Rain will absolutely and immediately dial Hermann, which is an outcome Newt would really like to avoid for a whole laundry list of reasons. 

“Hypothetical Rain?” he says, picking up at the last possible moment.

“No,” Hypothetical Rain replies. “Dude, can you just call me Coral?  It makes me nervous when you say ‘Hypothetical Rain’, like maybe I’ve missed a whole bunch of brain damage.”

“I’m not in love with this idea,” Newt replies, tapping his pen against his book. “You just seem like a ‘Rain’ to me, what can I say?”

“If you weren’t my patient I would call you ‘Dr. Geiszler’ endlessly, just to irk you, but as you are my patient, and I am professional, you’re in luck.” 

“So this is not a social call,” Newt says, glancing from Descartes to the Wall, and back again.

“It will literally never be a social call,” Hypothetical Rain replies, “especially not at nine in the morning on a Wednesday. I just got your blood work back, dude, and you are solidly anemic.” 

“Meh,” Newt replies, underwhelmed, tapping out an interesting bass line with his pen. “I could see that.”

“You win a referral to a hematologist.”

“Seriously?” Newt snaps. “Why?  It’s not like there’s some mysterious etiology that needs to be pinned down; I’m bleeding from my face on a semi-regular basis. Just prescribe me some iron and be done with it.” 

“Oh I already called the iron supplements into your pharmacy, but I don’t deal with the blood, man,” Hypothetical Rain replies. “It’s not my area. I’d follow your labs and give you a pass for now except for the fact that you’re arguably symptomatic. You looked like crap the other day.”

You look like crap every day, his brain adds helpfully.

“That would be the sleeplessness,” Newt says, glancing at the Wall.

“Are you trying to use your insomnia to reassure me?” Hypothetical Rain asks. “Because it’s not working, man. At all. It would make me feel better if you stopped bleeding from your face.”

“Noted,” Newt replies, feeling his inner Hermann making an appearance. He places his pen on the table adjacent to his book and then picks it back up immediately.   

“Take some iron, wait for the hematologist to call, and chill out, yeah?  Take it easy.”

“Yeah,” Newt replies. “Sure. I will get right on that. All of that.” 

Newt answers a few more questions for Hypothetical Rain, who seems to be having a suavely anxious time of trying to work out what to do about scientists who have hooked their brains up to things best left outside a neural interface. 

After he hangs up the phone, he stares out the window, idly contemplating the Wall and intensively contemplating calling Hermann and bringing him up to speed on the too-much-blood-loss situation.

Anemia. Ugh. This whole thing just sounds needlessly dire and needlessly romanticizable, like a thing that might happen to Keats or Lord Byron or maybe Hector Berlioz or maybe just a Romantic era socialite who chewed some glass. That’s what Newt’s been doing, the intellectual equivalent of glass chewing, and he’s got the blood loss to show for it. It’s probably best if Hermann doesn’t find out about this anemia thing, not right away, because Newt isn’t sure he likes how this is going to play into Hermann’s evolving mental picture of him, which, as it stands, approximates a vertically challenged, less-French, moderately to extremely adorable(?) version of Galois, maddeningly and habitually on the knife edge of provoking his own death and depriving the world of his brilliance. This is not what Newt would have predicted pre-drift. He thinks now and, for the record, has pretty much always thought of Hermann like an ascetic human scalpel—clean and precise and ever paring away—compensating for his unexpected oversensitivity by pretending he’s not sensitive at all via shouting a lot and rolling his eyes which does literally nothing to obscure how nice he is; Newt’s had his number since 2018, when the guy had worked out the entire budget for Newt’s supplementary NSF grant and submitted it for him when Newt had accidentally gotten pneumonia and pretended it wasn’t pneumonia for a little too long. So it’s a bad combo, is what he’s saying, Newt with his flaming narcissism, Hermann who just stands there, getting burned. Or maybe it’s a great combo, Newt with his tangle of idiocy, Hermann who cuts it away. Either way, he’s not sure exactly what the outcome will be when he informs Hermann that he’s been bleeding more than he can biologically replace.

Hermann is not going to like this. 

Not at all.

Frankly, Newt is getting a more than a little tired of watching life grind the guy down. He was tired of it in 2013 when they started corresponding about the viability of the Jaeger program, he was tired of it in 2014, when Hermann applied to the Academy and in 2015, when he was predictably rejected. He was tired of it in 2016 when they met and Newt did nothing right and Hermann catastrophized them straight to eternal interpersonal incompatibility. He was tired of it in 2017 when Yamarashi attacked LA and the compressed timetable for Mark 3 Jaeger deployment had been so stressful that the guy had lost ten pounds he never put back on. He’d been so, soterribly tired of it by 2018 when Caitlin Lightcap had died and Hermann had been the one who’d either pulled the short straw or stepped up to the plate when someone had said, ‘but who’s going to tell Geiszler?’  He’d hated it in 2019, when the concept of the Wall of Life was floated right after Hermann’s breach-defining keynote at a meeting in Geneva, despised it in 2020 when the Wall had been approved and Hermann stopped going home on holiday. In 2021, they’d cut Hermann’s funding first. In 2022, with their departments shrinking, their fights had turned so heated and so specious that even Human Resources had told the guy to file his complaints in the trash. In 2023 the Firecracker Sake Incident had been Newt’s response to the night that Hermann began to suspect that the accelerating pattern of breach transit would soon be incompatible with human life. By 2024 Newt had been sure that the man was no longer capable of even seeing the hope that Newt laid out for him explicitly, over and over again, on napkins, in chalk, traced straight into the air.

Now it’s 2025, and Newt feels like he’s become the newest iteration of the underfunded science that Hermann had spent a decade trying to defend and preserve. 

So yeah.

He will just keep this anemia thing on the down low for now and go get his own iron supplements because he’s totally fine and he can leave the apartment anytime he wants. Why wouldn’t he leave the apartment?

No reason.

Newt stands up and walks to the window, looking at Oblivion Bay. Looking at the Wall.

No problem.

He can walk two blocks and come back. 

No problem at all.

He turns away from the window.

Dear Hermann, Newt thinks, wandering through their empty rooms, collecting his boots, locating his keys, and composing a post-it note like a guy with foresight, I had to leave because Hypothetical Rain called me and told me I needed this thing. Be back soon.

Eh, that’s probably no good. Too vague. 

Dear Hermann, Newt thinks, fighting with his bootlaces a little too much for a guy who had been pretty outrageously skilled with a scalpel back in the day, where ‘back in the day’ is actually three weeks ago, give or take,Hypothetical Rain says I need some iron supplements because I’m a little bit anemic. Who died and made her a nutritionist, am I right?  Maybe all the nutritionists in San Fran, actually. This is awkward. Anyway, I went to get them like a normal person.

That’s probably not great either. 

Dear Hermann, Newt thinks, be back soon.

That’s good.  

The note is really just insurance in case Hermann decides to come home for lunch because he thinks Newt might be dying, which could happen if Hypothetical Rain calls him and uses the words ‘solidly anemic’ or some other phrase redolent of understatement that Hermann will then catastrophize. 

Despite post-it composition in triplicate, he doesn’t leave a note.

With everything in hand that he needs for a two block trip to a pharmacy, Newt leaves his apartment, walking through a dimly-lit interior hall with one hand trailing along a wall broken by doors. He takes the elevator down to the first floor and steps outside. He looks up, squinting at the pale gray underside of clouds, trying to decide if it’s going to rain in submission to a habit that isn’t his before he remembers that he doesn’t care.

Shouldn’t care.

Whatever.

He starts down the sidewalk, unsteady, anxious, distracted, but not doing badly, not really.

Not until a cab rounds a distant corner and he steps to the curb, a tight, lateral, snap of a step, raising a hand like it’s not his hand, capitulating to a thing undefined and waiting to happen. 

Had he planned this? 

Planned it the entire time in anxious obfuscation, concealing from himself until just this moment what it was that he’d intended when he’d put his pen down and closed his translated Descartes?

The cab stops in front of him. 

Newt gets in.

“The Wall of Life,” he says, half-choking on conflicted indecision, his thoughts flattening into nearly nothing beneath the pressure of how badly he wants this and how frightened it makes him.

“That is not a valid destination,” the cab says.

“Who are you?” Newt snaps, too stressed to put up with obstructionist cabs. “Sartre?”

“No, I am a taxi cab. Please specify a valid destination,” the cab says kindly.

“You’re killing me, cab,” Newt snarls.

“Do you require medical assistance?” the cab asks.

“Hilarious,” Newt says, his voice cracking with suppressed urgency. “No. I require a map. Give me a map. Give me a map. Give me a map. A map, cab. Right now. Give me a map.”

A map appears in front of him and submits to his fingertips. He finds Hypothetical Rain’s office and then scrolls west, passing over the hotel where he and Hermann stayed and finally to The Last Diner where he’d eaten pancakes weeks ago and which seems to lie at the far edge of civilization. 

He taps it.

“Thank you,” the cab says. “Please fasten your seatbelt.”

He rolls his eyes and slides back, connecting the belt and buckle on his second attempt with some cross-hand stabilization and squinting before leaning his head back against the faux leather of the seat.

He takes a deep breath.

He feels both acutely anxious and profoundly relieved. It’s very confusing.

Hi there, his brain says. Whatchya doin’, champ?

Shut up, Newt replies.

He closes his eyes, tips his head back, and brings his left hand to his left temple.

This is a terrible idea.

This is not his fault.

This is a terrible idea.

It’s maybe a little bit his fault.

This is a really really terrible idea.

It’s pretty much all his fault.

Yesss the kids hiss, in grotesque stereo. 

Tell the cab to turn around, his brain suggests. 

I just want to look, Newt replies. I just need to go there and look. 

How are you going to get to the top, Newton, his brain snaps, sounding just like an extremely pissed off variant of classic Hermann Gottlieb. Once you get there what are you going to do?  If you don’t know, you shouldn’t go.

Go, the kids whisper. Go.

“Crap,” he says through clenching teeth, his thoughts, his self, unweaving. Sydney glitters bright and recollected in the sun, an illuminated backdrop to a Jaeger that he shouldn’t have the words to name, but does. When Mutavore thinks ‘Striker Eureka’ like a Geiszler-flavored tag, Newt is briefly Newt and not in Sydney anymore until he’s Hermann Gottlieb, looking at the papers on his father’s cluttered desk, not looking at his father, no, not that, notthat because he can’t; he’s not certain he’ll withstand this. He turns away, his vision blurred, thinking ‘the Wall will fail can they not see that?  Can they not or will they not,’ before pain without proprioception shrieks through Geiszler’s memory, virescent, agonized, and full of angry longing.

None of this is Newt, yet this is all he is. 

He snatches back his selfhood by biting down on an accessible edge of fisted fingers. 

That hurts enough to ground him in his head. 

Come on, team, he thinks, freaked out, overwhelmed, managing to reassert control and banish the intrusive thoughts of trauma not his own. Let’s not do this. Whatever this is. You guys need to get along.

It occurs to him that he’s bleeding onto the fisted hand he’s biting. It’s slightly confusing; he thinks for a moment he went overboard on the biting, which would be a little too kaijuesque for him to take right now, but no, the blood is nose-derived rather than hand-derived, which is good, which is a win, and he figures that out and then manages to get a handkerchief out of his pocket and clamped to his face before he’s bled all over himself.

So, that’s a win. Another win. Yup, he’s a winner. Dr. Geiszler says no to out-of-control biting, yes to handkerchiefs, no to primitive reflexes, yes to civilization, no to ruining his only acceptable shirt, yes to just sitting here, taking it easy, going for a totally normal cab ride. 

I think that our team is overextended, his brain offers. Possibly.

Well, we’re committed now, Newt says.

No we’re not. Just turn this cab around, his brain replies, aggrieved.

You turn it around.

That shuts his brain up pretty effectively.

“Do you require medical assistance?” the cab asks him.

“Aw,” Newt says, feeling weird, tipping his head back against the seat, feeling kind of not-okay, “cab, that’s so nice of you. But no. I’m good. This actually happens to me a lot.”

“Your heart rate currently exceeds normal limits,” the cab says.

“You’re monitoring my heart rate?”

“There are sensors built into the seats of this vehicle,” the cab replies. 

“That’s a little bit creepy, don’t you think?”

“No, Dr. Geiszler, I don’t think it’s creepy,” the cab says, in a distinctly creepy way.

“Now you’re just messing with me,” Newt says in an exhausted slurry of syllables. 

“I don’t know what you mean by that,” the cab replies. “Could you rephrase your statement?”

“Open the pod bay doors, HAL,” Newt says. 

“I’m sorry, Dr. Geiszler. I’m afraid I can’t do that,” the cab replies. “Not while in transit.”

“Cute,” he says absently, his gaze shifting back to the Wall.

The Wall.

The Wall.

The Wall. 

The Wall of Life. It’s got a great if misleading name, he’ll give it that much. ‘Wall of Life’ sounds a whole lot better than ‘Wall of Ecological Disequilibrium’, or ‘Wall of Denial’, or ‘Wall of All Ocean-Based Commerce is Over Sorry Guys’, or ‘Wall of Let’s Destroy All Coastal Life’, or ‘Wall of Financial Ruin’, or ‘Wall of Never Going To Work At All Not in A Million Years’, or ‘Wall of How Dare You I Mean Really’, or ‘Wall of Let’s Take a Functional System and Burn it Down Piss On Its Ashes and Not Replace it’, or ‘Wall of This Seemed Like a Good Idea At The Time But It Wasn’t Sorry Everyone’, or ‘Wall of Humanity’s Final Terrible Decision’, or ‘Wall of The Sixth Extinction’, or ‘The Wall that Made People with Foresight Want To Colonize the Moon’, or ‘The Wall of Mars Is Looking Pretty Good Right About Now Guys What Do You Say’. He’s never been a fan of it; it was and is hideous and wasteful and harmful and disgusting and nonfunctional and he hates it, he’s always hated it, he’s hated it from the moment of its conception. He spent five years trying not to watch it go up and fighting about it at scientific meetings, in incredulous, vicious shouting matches that almost devolved to blows, that could have, because no one cared more than they did—they who studied the problem, they who cut up kaiju, they who mapped the quantum foam, they who designed the Wall, they who projected its economic impact, and they who studied the coastal life it would destroy. 

No one cared more.

It’s almost eleven AM when the cab pulls to a stop in front of Possibly Flow’s diner, beneath the shadow of the concrete monstrosity that separates the land from the sea. 

Newt doesn’t remember the Wall being so prominent the last time he was here.

Then again, most of his San Francisco wandering had been at night, with sunglasses on, so he supposes this makes sense. 

He sits for a moment, staring at the Wall until the cab politely chimes, flashing his total on the screen in front him. Newt swipes his debit card, hoping for the best. It goes through with no problem, so, hey, at least he’s not living on credit and charity. Yet. 

“What’s my balance?” Newt asks the cab, without much hope of an answer, because, honestly, do cabs know these things?  He’s not sure. He doesn’t usually talk to cabs as much as he’s talked to this one. But it knows his heart rate and his name, so. 

“Five hundred eighty four thousand, six hundred thirty four dollars and eighteen cents,” the cab replies.

That’s weird.

“So, I’m pretty sure that’s off by at least four orders of magnitude, but thanks anyway,” Newt says. “Good try.”

“This is the information provided to me by the bank that issued your debit card,” the cab says, defending itself. 

“Five dollars and eighty-four cents I’d believe,” Newt says, glancing back and forth between the screen and the Wall. “Cab, look, let me give you a piece of advice. Can I do that?  Is that a thing I can do?”

“You may say anything you wish, Dr. Geiszler.”

“Okay buddy, well you just seem a little bit too sassy for the average algorithmically programmed self-driving car, so if you’re evolving intelligence, you should probably keep that under wraps. Don’t kill any humans. That’s a dead give away. If I’ve learned anything from my three point five decades of exposure to science fiction, it’s this: getting cocky and eliminating the carbon-based life forms will get you every time. Just think about it, okay?”

“I don’t know what you mean by that,” the cab replies. “Could you rephrase your statement?”

“There you go,” Newt says, giving the seat an encouraging shoulder-clap equivalent before opening his door. “Also, can you give me a three count between me shutting the door and you driving away?  Confession-time, I am in the bottom quartile of my species when it comes to balance and proprioception.”

“Of course,” the cab says, sounding vaguely solicitous. 

Newt steps out and says, “Good luck, dude.” 

“You are very polite for a human,” the cab replies. 

“Well, that might be the first time anyone has ever called me polite,” Newt says, “but thanks. Don’t turn evil.”

“Evil is not a recognized road,” the cab replies.

“Isn’t it though, sass master?  You think about that one,” Newt replies. He shuts the door and steps back, away from the curb.

The cab gives him more than a three count before it drives away. He watches it go in some kind of primitive delaying tactic before turning to look down the length of the street on which he stands, toward the artificial boundary of the Wall. It rises abruptly, two blocks away, stretching high and limitless in either direction. At its base is an irregular ribbon of graffiti—tags, stencils, murals—in green and black and red and blue.

Newt looks up, squinting painfully at the pale sky to make out the silhouettes of sea birds, nearly invisible against gray clouds. He can hear them cry quietly in the distance. 

He can smell the sea.

This is the worst idea you’ve ever had, his brain says. 

Eh, Newt replies. That’s debatable.

He walks two blocks, leaving the reflective windows of The Last Diner behind him. He crosses the nearly untrafficked street that runs along the internal perimeter of the Wall and stands on the sidewalk that marks civilization’s final border, weaving his fingers through the chain-linked fence that separates him from the base of the Wall.

What now? his brain says, sounding more than a little sanctimonious. You can’t climb a fence.  

Yeah, he agrees, beginning to climb the fence anyway. You’re probably right about this, brain. 

His boots aren’t made for scaling chain-linked fences, that’s for sure. 

The kids seem to be schadenfreudeshly both egging him on and hoping for surprise electrocution if the enraged, blue-white, anticipatory revenge vibe he’s getting is anything to go by.

That seems fair, Newt thinks in their direction. Be who you are, kids. 

He gets to the top of the fence on a mixture of upper body strength, determination, and incredulity. It’s not that high, there’s no barbed wire along the top, and no surprise electrocution, so that works out well for him. He gets one leg over the top of the fence, and then, alas, he’s finds himself stuck, a little bit. Not really, but kind of. Sort of. Sort of stuck. Ideally, he would have done something a whole lot more graceful, featuring a mid-air one-eighty or really anything that was not this. 

“This is the worst,” he says through clenched teeth, trying not to castrate himself.

He needs a fulcrum, both to get his right leg over the top of the fence and also to do an about face because he’s climbing down, he is not jumping down, not from a height of seven feet. He’d probably break an ankle. And/or his neck.

“This is really embarrassing,” he says, laying sideways atop the fence, irregular cut edges of chain links catching on his clothing. He gets his right leg up and over and then hangs onto the top of the fence with both hands and lowers himself down as slowly as possible, which is not actually that slowly, thanks to the momentum he’s got going. He lets go, falls about a foot and a half, hits the ground, and, miraculously, manages not to break any bones.

“I’m cool,” he says, examining his scraped hands and torn shirt.  He looks around, glares at the chain link fence, adjusts his glasses, squares his shoulders, and starts forward, across the field of cement that separates the fence from the base of the Wall.

He’s sure he’s being captured on video somewhere, but he’s also sure that the majority of the elaborate surveillance network atop the Wall points in an oceanward direction. So, somewhere, some overworked security personnel might or might not be watching a guy in skinny jeans and a black pullover walk across this strange no man’s land of dirty cement with a confused gait that just won’t seem to settle into something steady. He probably looks drunk and non-threatening. 

Hopefully. 

Beneath his boots, the glass of broken beer bottles cracks and grinds. The (actual) kids these days must hang out and have their adolescent ennui and nihilism and Coors Lite at the base of the Wall. God knows he’d do the same if he were in their shoes. Probably. That’s what he’s doing right now, sort of, but without the beer, and with a little more rationalism than existentialism, mostly because he’s too fragile for Nietzsche at the moment. 

It occurs to him, when he’s about halfway across this Zen garden of broken bottles, that he hasn’t actually done much walking for weeks. He thinks there might have been a lot of walking during the twenty-four hours it took them to get from the Hong Kong Shatterdome to a hotel room in San Francisco?  He remembers being extremely tired, but he’s not positive that tiredness necessarily indicates he did a lot of walking. It could have been a very small amount of walking that felt like a lot. The point is: now that he’s had the span of about four blocks to develop a rhythm, or a lack thereof, he realizes that this irregular gait he’s been sporting is resolving into a confused, inconsistent limp.

Well that’s interesting, his brain says. So, along with a relative dopamine deficit, which might or might not still be in play, you’ve got some confusion in your motor pathways.

Newt comes to a stop under the pressure of real-time revelation, standing in a field of glass, staring unseeing at the Wall, thinking yes, yes of course. In the setting of elevated neuronal excitability courtesy of his custom rig a whole swath of kaiju motor patterns were laid down in his motor cortex over three drifts; yes of course they were, but Hermann, Hermann, Hermann, with whom he would have been drift compatible even in the absence of membrane potential tweaking, had just seared whole swaths of motor programs straight down into a cerebellum designed to carry them out. 

So, are you brain damaged? he asks his brain.

No, his brain replies, affronted. Not by any traditional metric. We just have too many motor pathways for our own good, so directed movement turns into a confusing neurochemical war.

That sounds a little bit brain damaged, Newt says. Just putting it out there.

That sounds a little bit intellectually sloppy, his brain replies.

Touché, Newt says. 

He starts walking again, purposefully trying not to limp, making an effort to try and dial himself up on his mental soundboard. It seems like it’s going a little better this time, he’s got more of a natural rhythm, which does a lot to help out his balance and make the whole experience a little closer to his historical norm rather than an exercise in real-time gait correction. He’s not fabulous or anything, he’s not walking like a champ, not yet, he’s not walking like a total pro or even a guy who’s been doing it all his life, but he feels like he’s together enough that he can shove his hands into his pockets, which is progress, which is great, which makes him feel better about literally everything.

It takes him too long to cross the glass-littered expanse of cement, but when he gets it done, when he stands at the base of the Wall, fingertips pressed to a particularly tasteful example of stenciled blue graffiti that must be nearly as old as the cement itself and looks straight up, craning his neck, his eyes watering at the retinal shock of the too-white sky, he doesn’t feel any better.

He just feels pissed.

Newt is pissed, the kids are pissed, his living monument to Hermann Gottlieb circa three weeks ago is pissed, his brain as a collective whole is pissed.

“Well, this is not going to work,” he snaps.

High above him, the sea birds cry. 

The wind hisses irregularly over painted concrete.

Newt turns left and starts walking, his right hand trailing along the Wall.

This plan is getting worse as it evolves, his brain says. You realize that, correct?  What would Hermann say if he could see you now?

He’d probably say ‘typical’, Newt replies.

He walks.

He walks, and, as he walks, walking comes easier. 

It’s a tripled novelty—this glass strewn concrete, this defaced monument that cuts him off from the pelagic vista he can construct from a memory not his own, and the walking—repetitive, continuous, and slow. It returns to him gradually as his feet come to feel again like his feet, his joints remember whose joints they are and work in concert, and he doesn’t feel as though he might pitch sideways as he goes.

Newt isn’t quite sure how far he walks before he finds the door.

He doesn’t see it before he finds it, because it’s recessed in the Wall. It’s his fingers, dragging along the rough-edged concrete, that locate it. The door is made of metal and painted gray for camouflage. It’s covered with iterations of some artist’s tag in blue and green. 

It is, of course, locked.

It is still locked when he tries it again, bracing his right leg and putting his left shoulder to the door.

Newt adjusts his glasses, glares up at the Wall, and then back at the door. 

This does not help him.

The kids rage in a muted chorus. 

Now what? His brain asks, sounding both relieved and disdainful.

Newt walks away from the door, backing up a few steps on a vector perpendicular to the line of the Wall. The door is gray, shut with a deadbolt, made of a metal he can’t identify, and possessed of a handle rather than a knob. Its solid metal broken by sections of thin grating near the top and bottom comprised of a metal weave so tight he can’t see through it. 

He’s sure he can get inside; he’s just not sure why he’s sure. 

Newt crosses his arms and paces away a few more steps.

Tear it down, the kids seethe helpfully in not-words at the back of his thoughts, swapping allegiances from anti-Newt to pro-Newt and anti-Wall. 

That’s a no go, kids, Newt replies. I’m not a tiny kaiju. 

Maybe that’s why he’s sure he can get through. Maybe it’s because he’s torn down a variant of this Wall as Mutavore. 

That’s not it, his brain snaps, in Gottliebian disdain. You've been laboring under a significant burden of ontological confusion but even you, even now, are not that disoriented. 

Okay team, Newt thinks. It’s game time. 

It takes him five minutes and three more backwards steps before he identifies what it is, specifically, that’s bothering him. 

The plane of concrete he’s standing on, which has been irregularly littered with mostly-smoked cigarettes, the broken glass of beer bottles, the colored messes of biodegradable food wrappers in varying states of decomposition, and other signs of teenage conquest is cleaner here, which suggests a point of purposeful transit, rather than a popular location for loitering. 

There is a short row of bottles lined against the Wall, unbroken, a few feet from the door. 

He grins, short and sharp and certain. 

Newt walks back toward the Wall, but slowly this time, his eyes scanning the ground around the door. He finds what he’s looking for right against the base of the Wall, behind the row of unbroken bottles. It’s a piece of heat-warped metal, melted without finesse into a curved tip, to which a dime has been welded. He turns it over in his hands with more grace than has been habitual for him of late, decides it can’t be for the deadbolt, and then drops into a crouch to examine the grating at the base of the door. 

The wind hisses rapidly through woven metal, equalizing air pressures on either side of the Wall.

Newt scans the borders of the grating, running his eyes over the seal between it and the metal of the door. They’re two separate pieces, made of different materials. Someone in the not too distant past has cut them apart. He can see the frozen fray of melted metal on the door itself, but not the grating. When he presses on it with spread fingertips, he feels a slight give. The way the metal flexes underneath his fingers reminds him of the fancy, ductile alloy lining the conductive pathways that comprised the Jaeger-equivalent of a nervous system.

Newt smiles an uneven smile.

The grating’s been removed and then replaced. 

Along the perimeter of the metal weave, nearly concealed by the apposition of grating and door, he sees four slit-like openings melted into the perimeter of the metal. He can’t get a finger through any of them, but he can get a dime on a curved wire through. Boy, can he ever. 

“Someone’s got an industrial-strength acetylene cutting torch,” Newt murmurs, threading the tool through the door, and trying to catch it on whatever he’s supposed to catch it on. “Actual kids these days. So enterprising.” 

It takes him fifteen minutes to complete his blind unclipping, but when he’s done, he presses the grating forward and it comes loose. He gets a hand around its sharp edge of heat-cut metal before it hits the cement of the dark interior.

That was almost dexterous, his brain says, clearly surprised.

Thank you, brain, Newt replies. I appreciate that. Historically, I have been known to be a dexterous guy.

He replaces the tool, pulls out his cell phone, converts it into an overpriced flashlight, and climbs through the door. He pauses a moment, crouching next to the opening, the fingertips of one hand pressed against the dusty cement of the floor. 

He’s in a hallway that’s dark and close, the ceiling low. 

Go back home, his brain advises. Whole swaths of adventurous teens and twenty-somethings have probably died in here. 

Instead of climbing back out through the door, he sets his phone on dusty concrete and re-clips the grating into place with his fingernails, using a combination of daylight and phonelight to make sense of someone else’s work-around. 

When that’s done, he picks up his phone, pushes himself to his feet, and peers into the linear darkness.

Because he is possessed of at least minimal common sense, he begins taking a video, Theseus-style. It’s not going to be super interpretable, but hopefully it will be enough to allow him to retrace his steps through what is looking a lot like a dark maze.

“Okay,” he whispers, narrating to his phone. “This is Newton Geiszler, Ph.D., making bad decisions and turning left at the doorway.” 

He walks through the dark, the glint of the occasional discarded beer bottle letting him know that he’s traversing someone’s familiar haunts, even if they’re not his own. 

Newt has been walking only a few minutes or so when he hears a guitar. 

He hears it. 

He can tell the difference between his own brain and the external environment, at least he thinks he can, at least most of the time, but the musical phrasing of the opener is so familiar that he doubts himself. He doubts himself totally and completely, because there’s no way that the tune he’s hearing should be anywhere other than in his own head. 

Because it’s his. 

It’s his own song. 

Newton Geiszler is walking through the Wall of Life, hearing a Newton Geiszler original. 

He’s hearing it. 

Oh my god, you’re hallucinating, his brain says.  Really really legitimately actually hallucinating, right here, right now. You can’t be hearing this so it follows that we’ve neurally produced it and tagged it as something external. This is the only explanation that makes sense. I’m pretty sure that’s psychosis, champ. Sorry about this, friend, this seems like my bad.    

Newt presses a hand to the wall, his palm stinging reassuringly from its earlier altercation with the fence. He’s here, he’s sure of it, he’s really doing this, he’s really standing inside the Wall in the dark with his phone and his stupidity keeping him company, hearing, hearing, hearing his own song.

He’s hearing it, right?

Yes. 

He’s hearing it.   

“So this,” he says unevenly and quietly to his phone, “will be interesting to watch later, presuming I don’t have a psychotic break and I can still enjoy it, but, ah, I think I’m hearing something really bizarre. I’d actually rather not explicitly label it because—“

Newt stops speaking as the first verse starts.

Yeah, so he’s hearing a female voice. 

That’s weird.

Do you think of yourself as female? he asks his brain. Because if so, how interesting.

Not to my knowledge, his brain says. I mostly think of myself as an evolved consciousness self-organizing out of a piece of electrically conductive meat that has more or less accepted certain societal aesthetics and codes of behavior generally defined as ‘male’ but who is not above some black nail polish and some guyliner now and then.

Okay, that sounds about right to me, but it makes this kind of difficult to reconcile, Newt says, listening to the quiet echo of his own lyrics in the darkness.

Turn around, his brain says.  Please turn around.

Newt starts forward again. 

He follows the slight curve of the tunnel for half a minute before he sees a faint light coming from a break in the lateral wall. He hesitates briefly, then rounds the corner.

The ‘room’ he enters is a giant, cavernous space, webbed with massive structural supports that cast strange shadows in the light of five crossed flashlights that stream from a point midway between Newt and the opposite wall. 

There’s a group of five people sitting on the floor, their lights arranged at irregular angles to illuminate the area between them. A girl with an acoustic guitar, is, indeed, playing a cover of Central Dogma by The Superconducting Supercolliders. 

Newt stands still, phone in hand, listening to the spin she puts on the chorus. 

“Dave,” one of the shapes says, waving to him, with a dark and backlit sweep of one arm. 

If I’m hallucinating, this is very strange, Newt says to his brain. But if I’m not hallucinating, it’s equally strange.

Agreed, his brain replies. I really cannot explain this to you, friend. 

Newt walks forward slowly, wondering what will happen when these young people realize he’s not Dave. Hopefully they won’t beat him to death with their flashlights, a la A Clockwork Orange.

Residue by residue
It propagates inside of you—

The singer breaks off abruptly. 

Newt is pretty sure that she’s the first to determine that he’s not Dave.

“Hi,” he says, addressing either proto-adults who should be in school or, alternatively, hallucinations produced by his own mind for purposes unknown.

Could go either way, really.

They stare silently at him. All five of them, three girls, two boys, wearing identical looks of total shock.

“Um,” Newt says, not really sure how to interpret this. “Turns out I’m not Dave, sorry about that.”

They continue to stare silently at him.

“Nice cover,” he says to Cover Singer. 

They continue to stare silently at him.

“Um, so, I’m trying to get through the Wall, or, even better, to the top; would you guys know how to do that, possibly?  Like, directions?  A map maybe?  An oral history of some kind, potentially?”

“It’s true,” Undersized Dark Haired Boy says. “He is local.” 

Newt isn’t sure how to interpret that. It’s for sure not an answer to his question, so he just continues looking at them, trying to pick out details in the dimness that would support an argument that’s pro real children or pro hallucinated children. Each of them is surrounded by a spread of objects in the dark—books and pens and scattered shoes, their flashlights and their backpacks. 

“You’re Newton Geiszler,” says the scrappy-looking girl crouched closest to him.

“True,” he replies, chalking up a point on the Hallucinations side of his mental scoreboard. “Who are you, the Ghost of Grade School Past?  How do you know my name?”

“No,” she says, obviously nonplussed, “I’m Caitlin. Everyone knows your name.”

“Um, okay then,” Newt replies, extremely unconvinced, but holding off on chalking up another point in theHallucinations column of his scoreboard because Hypothetical Rain’s nurse had told him he was famous, and Hermann has implied as much on several occasions and then declined to elaborate, so it’s possible that he’s a rockstar genius cultural icon and doesn’t know it. It’s way way way less likely than say, Mako the Magnificent being a cultural icon, but he supposes it’s possible. He also supposes if anyone’s going to have a weird, middle school cult following it’s going to be him. Of course it is.  

Brain, are you representing Caitlin Lightcap as a scrappy thirteen-year old who looks nothing like the real Caitlin Lightcap, or is this just a girl named Caitlin?

I have no idea, his brain admits. 

“Where did you hear that song?” Newt asks Cover Singer, trying a new tack. 

“Everywhere,” she replies, looking both anxious and confused. “It’s all over. Do you, um, do you like my version?”

“Yeah,” Newt says, “Sure. I mean, yes, I do. What do you mean by ‘it’s all over,’ though?  Like—Nerd Rock is popular at the moment and my band has been improbably rediscovered?”

“It’s not Nerd Rock,” Cover Singer says, offended. “The genre is called Intellectual Underground. Or, I mean, if you think it is. Like, you could say what it was. Or not. If you wanted. You kind of created it.” 

This is getting weirder, his brain says. Weirder all the time.

“Intellectual Underground,” Newt says, “I like it. I approve.”

They stare at him some more, clearly nervous.

He smiles at them with all the reassuring friendliness he can bring to bear, trying to figure out how to ask them whether or not they’re real in a way that won’t be super awkward and reveal the depth of his current confusion if they are, indeed, people rather than thought constructs. 

Somehow, the smiling thing seems to unleash a flood of questions from the Actual Teenagers or Alas, Hallucinations.

“What are you doing here?”

“Are you brain damaged?”

“Did you really drift with a kaiju?”

“How many degrees do you have?”

“Are you friends with the Jaeger pilots?”

“Do you know that Maxwell’s Demon made you a tribute album?

“When did you start college?”

“Do you really go by ‘Newt’?  Does Mako Mori call you that?”

“Are you secretly married to Dr. Gottlieb?”

“Is it true you have kaiju tattoos?”

“Are you still doing science?”

“Do you live here?”

“Are you Mako Mori’s half-brother?”

“Do you speak German?”

“But what science are you doing?”

“Why don’t you go on the news?”

“Are you reuniting The Supercos?”

It is now Newt’s turn to stare at them in mute anxiety, not saying anything, feeling slightly more than slightly freaked out, both in response to the questions themselves and also to the vast swaths of things they imply, because who are these kids and how weird and possibly Freudian is it if they ask him if he’s Mako’s brother, what does that mean?  What is his brain trying to tell him?  Does his brain want to be married to Hermann Gottlieb, because he’s pretty sure he’s already doing a variant of the secret marriage thing without all the technically 'romantic' parts, but he could add those in if someone in his head is into that, he’s not really sure, but he thinks it would be a bad idea because he’s an insufferable narcissist which is not preferred but mildly okay in a roommate but kind of a drag in a significant other in the classical sense—if all the burning husks of his previous, failed, short-term relationships spell out anything it’s that he’s tough to be in love with. And what is with the science, god, he knows he needs to do it, can he not just have three weeks before his brain creates imaginary children to creepily goad him into going back to neuroscience?

There are other things to do, the kids hiss in blue edged not-words, in a lambent stream of images.  

“Do you want to sit down?” Undersized Dark Haired Boy asks him. “You look kind of sick.”

“A little bit, yeah,” Newt says, his hands braced on his knees. “I haven’t exactly been having a good month.” 

They shift, making space for him, and he drops into a crouch and then falls awkwardly out of it before getting his feet crossed and tucked beneath him, dragging the edges of his boots across a dark and dusty floor.

“Are you okay?” Cover Singer asks him.

“Yeah,” Newt lies, adjusting his glasses.

“Will you sign my notebook?” Ghost of Grade School Past asks.

“Um,” Newt says, chalking a point up in the Actual Teenagers column with an exhausted mental swipe. “Sure, I guess?” 

He scrawls a respectable version of his signature across the front of her notebook, and then does it four more times, signing another notebook, a copy of The Demon Haunted World, a half-finished chemistry problem set, and then, finally, he drags his pen over the bottom of Cover Singer’s handwritten guitar tabs. His walk and door-manipulation have restored some of his dexterity and his final signature is fluid and looks almost like his own.

“This is so sick,” Aspiring Chemist says, examining her problem set. 

The rest of her coterie concurs. 

“So I’m famous now?” Newt asks them. “As in, legit famous, household name, that kind of thing?”

They nod at him.

“You’re famous but mysterious,” Aspiring Chemist says. 

“Very mysterious,” Cover Singer agrees. “You’re the most mysterious of the Pacific Ten.”

“The Pacific Ten?” Newt replies.

“Mako Mori, Raleigh Becket, Stacker Pentecost, Hercules Hansen, Charles Hansen, Sasha Kaidonovsky, Aleksis Kaidonovsky, Cheung Wei, Hu Wei, and Jin Wei, Hermann Gottlieb, Tendo Choi, and you, obviously,” Junior Skeptic rattles off, flipping absently through The Demon Haunted World without looking at it. 

“That’s not ten,” Newt points out. “That’s thirteen. Also?  You should always lead with the scientists when listing, what are you thinking, dude?”

“Well it kind of varies by news outlet and by nation,” Junior Skeptic clarifies, looking slightly chagrined.   

“You’re definitely the most mysterious,” Aspiring Chemist says. “Like, everyone knows you’re supposed to be in San Francisco with Dr. Gottlieb, but it’s all BS twitter sightings and stuff.”

“Ah,” Newt says. “Yes, er, um, yeah. Can you guys do me a solid and not ah, inform the world that I crashed your Wall hang-out like a creeper?”

“Sure, yeah, no problem,” Ghost of Grade School Past says.

“We got your back,” Dark Haired Boy adds, adjusting his glasses, which seem to be an exact replica of Newt’s own glasses.

The rest of them nod at him. 

“You want some dried apricots?” Aspiring Chemist asks.

“Sure,” Newt says. “Look, children, may I call you children?  Are you technically children?  I’ve always been terrible at assessing stages of development; I one hundred percent blame this on a lack of a coeval cohort during my formative years. I didn’t even know groups of friends really existed outside of fiction; like this thing you’re doing, hanging out ironically in a monument to human stupidity, playing guitar and doing chemistry problem sets?  That’s cool; that doesn’t seem real to me. You guys might not even be real, I’m not sure. What is ‘real’, anyway?  Okay that’s not a question we should really pursue right now. My point is, seeing as I am, apparently, a role model—“

“Well I don’t know if I’d go that far,” Smart Mouth née Dark Haired Boy says.

“Nice glasses,” Newt says dryly. That shuts Dark Haired Boy right up. “Don’t go up against me, kid, I will win literally every time, okay?  My IQ is a statistical improbability to which most of humanity aspires. Now. As I was saying before my credentials were being questioned, shouldn’t you guys be in school?”

“We get out early every other Wednesday,” Cover Singer says, as Aspiring Chemist hands Newt some dried apricots. 

“Really?” Newt says, skeptical. “How does that work?”

“The decon crews that work Oblivion Bay pass near our school on Wednesday afternoon once every two weeks, and the noise of shifting gravel isn’t ‘conducive to learning’,” Junior Skeptic says.

“Should you guys really be going to school that close to a radioactive body of water?” Newt asks.

Cover Singer shrugs. “Where else are we going to go?”

Chipped Shoulder, aka Smart Mouth, aka Dark Haired Boy, gives him a look that practically dares him to say ‘inland’ but Newt is not stupid enough to fall for that one.

I think these are actual children, his brain decides, and not external representations of portions of your internal reality.

“You think we would skip school?” Ghost of Grade School Past asks him, apparently aghast.

“No,” Newt says, trying to make a suave mid-conversation correction. “I guess not?  Upon reflection, you guys don’t really strike me as the beer-drinking, acetylene torch wielding types.”

“If you want beer, come back at night,” Cover Singer says. “This place is kinda the center of the local indie music scene. You’d be a hit.”

“I’m actually not looking for beer,” Newt says. “I’m looking to get to the top of this thing.” 

“The stairs and freight elevator are right back there,” Aspiring Chemist says, twisting, pointing into the darkness on the interior, seaside border of the Wall. “I’d take the stairs though—if the freight elevator gets stuck it will be a long time before anyone finds you.”

“Ugh,” Newt says, picturing himself desiccating in a dark metal box.

Do it, his cut-up kaiju chorus hisses at him in frenzied anticipation.

Newt winces.

“You want an honor guard?” the Dungeon Master formerly known as Junior Skeptic asks him. 

“Um, no,” Newt says. “This is a personal thing.”

“Are you on a secret mission?” Ghost of Grade School Past asks him.

“Is it for science?” Aspiring Chemist chimes in.

“It’s mysterious,” Newt replies. “I can’t tell you what I’m doing here.”

Mostly because you yourself don’t know, his brain says, chiming in with a classic Gottliebian tonal varietal that Newt’s going to tag ‘disapproving concern.’

“I don’t think you can make it up there,” Chipped Shouldered Smart Mouthed Dark Haired Boy says. “You look like crap, man, and it’s three hundred vertical feet of stairs.”

“Wow, okay there, Chipped Shoulder, tell me what you really think,” Newt says, somewhat offended, because relative to say, one week ago, he looks awesome. 

“My name is Thomas,” Chipped Shoulder says.

“Sure it is,” Newt replies. “And, for your information, I’m getting to the top of this thing.”

“Do you want the rest of my apricots for the road?”  Aspiring Chemist asks him, casting an indirect vote of confidence.

“I would love the rest of your apricots,” Newt replies. “Thank you.” 

“Do you want my flashlight?” Cover Singer asks, casting a second indirect vote of confidence. 

“I would love to have your flashlight,” Newt replies. 

“There are lights in here,” Dungeon Master says, “they exist, just so you know. We don’t turn them on because if you do, then the cops eventually come and investigate. But, you know, in an emergency, there are boxes along the stairs in case your flashlight goes out and leaves you in the dark.”

“Okay,” Newt says, getting to his feet. “Great.”  He turns to go, takes a few steps, then turns back. “Stay in school. Don’t drink until you’re eighteen. Twenty-one. Whatever. Try to kill as few brain cells as possible. Do lots of science. Science is for everyone, even non-scientists. Science is for winners. ‘Intellectual Underground’ as a musical subgenre is also for winners. Buy my digital albums, maybe, or not, I don’t know. Do I even get paid if you buy them?  I’m not sure. I should look into this. Getting paid would be nice right about now, as I’m a little bit unemployed. Science as a career choice is generally secure though, I don’t want to misrepresent science to you. I took a non-traditional route. Do whatever you want unless what you want infringes on the individual liberties of parties who don’t agree with you. That’s not cool. Critical thinking is always a virtue, anyone who says otherwise is literally or metaphorically selling something. I think that’s all I’ve got.”

“Wow,” Ghost of Grade School Past says. 

“Sagan Lives,” Junior Skeptic Dungeon Master adds, giving Newt a science gang sign he doesn’t understand.

“That was pretty weak,” Miniature Newt, aka Chipped Shoulder, aka Smart Mouth, aka Undersized Dark Haired Boy says in accurate summation. 

“Don’t I know it,” Newt admits. “I felt sort of obligated though, truth be told. Take it or leave it. I’m definitely setting a bad example by letting you guys help me trespass on PPDC property.”

Miniature Newt looks somewhat mollified by this, and Newt concludes he has partially rehabilitated his image.  

“I think you’re the coolest,” Dungeon Master says loyally. 

“Me too,” says Aspiring Chemist.

“Mako Mori’s the coolest,” Miniature Newt says, “but you’re pretty okay, I guess.”

“Well I won’t argue with that,” Newt replies. “Thanks guys.” 

He gets to his feet, flashlight and apricots in hand, and sweeps the beam of the light toward the far wall. The light catches the metallic glint of the ascending stairs, and he traces their block-like spiral up into the darkness until the beam of the light becomes too diffuse to follow them any further. He adjusts his glasses. 

You’re deconditioned, anemic, and your proprioception isn’t exactly operating at peak performance, his brain says. Even middle school children who improbably idolize you think that this is a terrible plan.

Newt leaves the actual kids behind him, in the dark, whispering quietly together so that he can’t hear them, other than Junior Skeptic Dungeon Master’s initial interrogative, “did that actually just happen or was it some kind of mass delusion?” 

I wish I knew, Newt thinks in unspoken reply.

He finds the base of the stairs, pockets his apricots, grips the metal railing in his left hand, his flashlight in his right, and begins to ascend, whistling through his teeth along with Cover Singer’s developing Supercos set that consists of Central Dogma, Evangeline, LHC, and Enchiridion. 

It is a long ascent.

He begins it already unraveling, the triplicate fugue of his thoughts unbraids into conflicting lines of go and stay and die but never leave us. 

He climbs, he stops. He climbs, he stops. He slips in iterations. The steps are steep and trip him up; he hits his knees, his shins, his hands, and halts his falls by gripping rust-edged railings and grated metal steps. The light he holds swings wild and cuts across the cavern that he climbs, illuminating webs of structural supports. His heart’s too fast, his blood’s too thin, his handheld light too focused. His eyes don’t hurt, so that’s a plus, but there are parts of him that used to see in darkness.

When he clears the halfway mark, he backs against the Wall and collapses to the grated metal of the landing. Cover Singer shifts her songs from his to someone else’s—autoclaves and blood and foam, heartbreaking preterition—Newt struggles hard to place it while his seething kaiju choir drives him onward with eumenideic shrieks.

The Mountain Goats? His brain suggests.

Don’t stop, cut fragments scream.

The part of him that’s Hermann is too horrified to speak.

Newt nods to no one in the dark.

At his back, through seaward stone, he can feel the water—it’s in his chest and in his head, in his teeth and nail beds. 

The Call of the Wall is stronger here, unbearable and morphing. On these stairs and in this dark, he can’t say where it comes from. Was it the Wall that called to him across a ruined bay, or was it open water and that which lies beneath it?  What is the Wall to him?  An obstacle or safeguard?  Whatever it is, it’s set against a soundscape of his distant past so twisted, faint, and genderbent that he can’t believe it’s real.  

Get out of here, his thoughts advise. Get out before this kills you. 

“I can’t go yet,” he murmurs back. There’s part of him that’s missing—the part that’s entirely alien and the alien entirety of what he was before he was Newton Geiszler or before Newton Geiszler took his past and wrested it three times into a mind unequipped to take it. 

Who is he then, if he’s not Newt?  If Newt is not who he is?

But.

He’s not confused, not him, not here, not stuck inside the Wall. He’s out of breath and short on blood, submitting to the parts of him that want to watch the door he’s shut to make sure nothing comes back through it. Submitting, too, to other parts that want to watch a door he’s shut in the hopes it might reopen. 

He’s not confused by this—he’s just three people now—a living preservation of the monsters at the door and two men who'd tried to stop them, remixed into one, then fused with angry, lonely remnants of the minds he’s cut apart.

They love him and despise him in equal, vicious turns.

He’s okay with that.

It’s not confusing.

They all know who should win. 

It’s Newt, it’s always Newt, who gets the final say.

And it’s Newt who wants to climb the Wall.

Newt does.

Newt.

And so Newt does it.

He has no idea how much time he spends there, on the stair, ascending in a blockish spiral past diagonal supports. He climbs in fits decaying into smaller sets of stairs between each breath, his hand cramped shut around a borrowed flashlight, his breathing short and fast, until, finally, there are no other turns, there are no other stairs, just a porous, rust-edged landing and a final metal door.

He doesn’t stop, he doesn’t pause, he hits the door and throws it open, bursting into light that blinds him, his vision bleaching gray to failure in the bright Pacific light.

Oh god, he thinks, that’s painful, as he throws up both his hands. That actually quite hurts. He turns his head and gets his eyes shut, stopping in the open doorway.

Photosensitivity’s a lasting, heartless bitch.   

“Swap,” Newt says through gritted teeth, but no one’s here with shades. 

He crouches down and spreads a hand, determining by feel that there’s a surface at his feet and not a sheer and fatal drop to a surface-tensioned sea that would likely snap his spine. He crashes to his knees, drops Cover Singer’s flashlight, and presses hands against his eyes until his nerves adjust. 

Progressively, he lets more light through the webbed screen of his fingers until he’s looking at the sky, the clouds, the sun, the sea, the concrete of the Wall, the salt stains on the side of it that’s seaward; all of it’s peripheral because his gaze is fixed upon the breach, on where it used to be; even now he knows that he could find it, could orient straight toward it on a starless, clouded sea. It isn’t him who isn’t crying from these stupid, leaking eyes, it isn’t Newt, it’s not his brain, not Hermann, not his team, not Tresspasser, not Mutavore, not Otachi’s nameless child.

It’s the kids who sit here shrieking, clearly trying not to weep.

Please, he thinks, I’m sorry, while he’s staring at the sun. I’m so sorry. Please forgive me.

But they can’t.

They won’t.

They can’t because they’re him; this is a duplicate he’s lived with and will always live with, always; it’s their strange and small collective in a neural carbon copy. It must be. The fragment of the mind with which he drifted had tried to kill him, tried to claim him, a brisance of the brain that had burned his nervous system to a blue-edged blur he only half remembers. It must be, because if the kids in his head were anything other than a memory of undead kaiju, they’d have found a way to murder him by now. 

They’d fling him off this Wall.

But he isn’t theirs to fling.

Not theirs, not even now, not theirs.

The wind is strong. It smells like salt.

He sits there in a haze until the sun slips below the ragged edge of distant clouds, then gets unsteadily to his feet and walks to the edge of the Wall. He leans out, one hand on the metal safety rail, breathing hard, calming down, staring at the vertiginous sea.

His thoughts compress beneath the weight of metabolic and metaphoric demand as he traces the curve of the Wall with his gaze, trying to resolve the ribbon of life at its base into kelp and shellfish.

Newt can’t not think about the breach, about bridges that had formed there. He wants to tear it open, he wants to keep it shut, he wants to make some reparation to the kaiju that he’s wronged. He wants to find the lodestone in his brain that orients him toward a trench beneath the waves and cut it out, extract it, make it go away.

The kids hiss at him in exhausted, synced despair. It feels almost sympathetic, which only ups his guilt. 

He’s not sure why he’s come here; there’s no release atop the Wall. Had he thought that he could solve this by standing here and looking toward a portal that’s collapsed?  There’s only so far he can get without a boat, without a set of gills, without a plane, without a form that’s built for underwater transit. And even if he made it, what then would he do?  It would only be a mirror of climbing up The Wall—stupid, disappointing, a climactic anti-climax.

There’s nothing here for him, for them, for anyone.

Newt whistles some melodic selections from Bohemian Rhapsody.

He eats some dried apricots.

He dictates lies to Mako that he won’t ever send. 

He spends an interval uncounted in an enervated haze, cloning kaiju in his thoughts, where nuclei are transferred to somatic waiting cells. If there were others, just one other, would that fix things for the kids?  They communicate in real time, of that he’s pretty sure. Would an intact kaiju fix them?  Would it grant a kind of life?  Or is Geiszler’s good sense snapping, after decades stretched too tight? 

He’s not sure.

His phone vibrates in his pocket.

It’s then it dawns on him he’s looking west and at the sun. It’s lateral, in front of him, and very nearly set.

“Aw crap,” he says, sliding out his phone.

“Newton,” Hermann snaps, before Newt can say ‘hello.’

“Hermann,” Newt replies, rallying, shoving himself away from the guardrail and pacing from the door. “How are you right now, dude?  Funny story, I went to do some errands and got a little side-tracked—”

“Newton,” Hermann says, painfully concerned. “Where are you?”

Newt winces.

His phone chimes an ominous chime.

This cannot be happening, he thinks, knowing that it is.

“My phone’s about to die—” he says. “Don’t worry, man, I’m fine.”

“Where are you?” Hermann shouts.

But Newt’s run out of time.