Designations Congruent with Things: Chapter 15

“You really could not be a better Spider Man villain if you tried,” Newt mutters at himself.

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 15

Newt shuts the bathroom door with a marginally cooperative foot and deposits all his materials in a disorganized slide across the limited counter space immediately adjacent to the sink.

He eyes himself dubiously in the painful glare of the mirror. He looks—maybe not his best? Not just right now, not with blood in his sclera and glue in his hair; no one looks their best like that, obviously, but that’s fine; he’s about to remedy this aberration of attractiveness, about to orchestrate a regression to his aesthetic mean, and yeah, he’ll run it like a protocol, or, if he’s going to be perfectly honest, a little bit like a pilot experiment which he will entitle: Toward an Effort to Calm the Heck Down, Attempt Number 262,144.

Yes, that’s an estimate.

With a misleading number of significant digits.

But.

Pilot experiments.

They are key.

Key like the keys that displace tumblers in locks and key like the keystones of arches, and just key, right? Right. Flagrantly, flamingly key. He’s a big fan of piloting things, and sometimes those things are patch clamping his way to the anteverse, sometimes those things are isolating kaiju RNA for gene expression profiling, sometimes, apparently, those things are just doing normal-person activities like the slightly cooler than average but yet totally regular guy that he is except for when he doesn’t want to be, and also excepting those areas in which he could be classified as just, well, there’s no point in being modest right? Not here, not with the baller in the mirror who looks like he needs a pep talk right about now, so just yes, just ragingly awesome, a little bit of a badass, totally suave. One hundred percent normal things are happening here; he’s just going to do some stuff that he typically does, he’s just going to do it slightly differently, not because he has to, right? Because, seriously, he doesn’t have to do anything differently, he could just, really he could just, seal the sink drain, slap some hydrogen peroxide on things that are bloody, get in the shower, and then go slide-tackle his day, carpe freaking diem style, he’s just—the thing is, he’s just going to run this slightly differently, he’s going to run it with a little more formality, it’s not going to be that much different, but he just—he needs a protocol for this because he just does, today, right now, honestly, honestly, honestly, perfectly perfectly honestly this is for his stupid brain; he really kind of owes it. That’s a Hermann-thing right there, that owing-thing, because Newt is not really into owing as a concept, or at least he hadn’t been, historically. Protocoling though, that’s a Newt thing. This style of protocoling is—it isn’t even difficult, the goal is defined, the problem is clear, and an appropriate sequence of steps has just snapped down into place. Perfect. Aligned. Extremely Newtonian. Eminently Geiszlerian. 

His eyes. 

Really hurt.

So does his head.

He actually thinks he might not have unlimited time before he’s going to have to reswap his glasses for shades. He leans forward, looking at his eyes in a little bit more of a clinical way, which makes them hurt more, probably because of the up-close focusing. His accommodation is pretty sluggish, he’s got some bilateral iritis but that’s not new, and his pupils look a little wide to him for how freaking bright this room is. No wonder his vision is garbage right about now. Has he seen an ophthalmologist at any point? Because the PPDC is not exactly known for their ophthalmological expertise. Hypothetical Rain is probably a better assessor than he is when it comes to the human eye, but he’s actually not one hundred percent positive about that because the eye is not the brain and Newt is a physiologist amongst other things. Someone had given him eyedrops, so someone had assessed his vision at some point. Really, this is incredibly annoying—not being sure what had happened over the past three days; it’s a new experience for him and he’s not a fan. Newt wishes he could literally remember anything that any doctor had—

Nope, his brain says.

Newt freezes, already halfway committed to what he’s not going to call a ‘flinch’. 

Nothing happens.

Oh hey, Newt says, backing away from the mirror and running a hand through glued-together hair without much success. Nice save, brain.

You’ve got things to do, his brain says. Go oxidize, young man.

“Oxidizing,” Newt mutters, squinting at the collection of materials next to and also sort of in the sink. 

He has all materials required, doesn’t he?

Moderately bloody shirt?

Check.

Marginally bloody bathrobe?

Check.

Outfit that will remain dry?

He’s wearing it.

Phone?

Not check. Hmm. Okay, well, he can live without a playlist. Also, where is his phone? He’ll worry about that one later.

Hydrogen peroxide?

Check.

Glasses?

They’re on his face.

Various human cleaning products?

Check.

Towels?

Check.

Stolen toothbrush?

Check.

Disposable razor?

All things check.

He depresses the sink drain, throws his shirt in, and dumps hydrogen peroxide over the bloodstain. He performs a more limited application of the chemical to the shoulder of the hotel’s bathrobe and watches effervescence in pink. He turns on the shower, kicks off his shoes with less than perfect coordination, peels off his socks without falling over, then extracts himself from his pants with increasing coordination trouble. Overuse is a concept that his musculoskeletal system is trying to teach him using some kind of primitive punitive-based learning system, or—

Or.

He grabs the edge of the sink, his brain balanced on the edge of throwing in with him or against him, because there is an ‘or’ here, a pretty profound ‘or’, no, it’s an ‘and/or’, actually, god, how irritating. How irritating. How irritating, not terrifying, because no, there’s nothing terrifying here, all the terrifying things are over and in his past not in his present, not in his future. Probably.

No guarantees there, his brain says, in an extreme example of pure unhelpfulness.  

He skids to a cognitive stop immediately before articulation of impending revelation.

Shh, he says to his brain. 

Have you considered the possibility that you’re not tired? his brain asks, driving forward, respecting only one of the barriers that Newt manages to throw up in its way, submitting only to the drag of articulation; that’s all Newt can do—delay, delay, delay—influence the manner of coming revelation because no matter what he does, his stupid brain can shove its stupid thoughts straight under the burning lights of his too-crowded, glam-rock consciousness, like this is a show, like a thing that must go on, in the style of certain singers he won’t name. Not just now. Have you considered the possibility that you aren’t coordinated because someone’s done some rewiring of your basal ganglia? It’s not quite classic, but it’s not quite not, either. You have a resting tremor and you’ve had one to varying degrees since your first drift. Someone’s dopaminergic pathways have been fried. Blown out, like a bad hit of a triple reuptake inhibitor. 

Someone drugged me, Newt says. I’m extremely tired. I’m sure that you’re wrong about everything.

Oh yeah, his brain replies. I’m usually wrong, dude. Wrong. That’s a thing that I am. 

He is coordinated, he is. He’s fine, actually. And even if he’s not, all costs are acceptable. Later he will talk about neural remodeling. With Hermann. Later. God, it would be just his luck if he got mentally remixed with a giant monster but, instead of living in the Marvel Universe where he’d be manifesting freakyass, awesome powers right about now, he just has a hard time with buttons, has panic attacks about destroying cities, gets headaches, and maybe has the odd epileptic episode here and there.

That’s it.

He’s never liked Peter Parker.

Now he hates him.

Out of envy.

“You really could not be a better spider-man villain if you tried,” he mutters at himself as he pulls off his boxers. “Conceptually. Motivationally. Practically though? You suck. You probably couldn’t even manage to kill a regular spider right now. Forget about some quantum mechanics teenage prodigy dreamboat who wastes his time in dead-end jobs.” 

Ugh what is he doing? He’s not going to kill Peter Parker. He’s not even going to kill a real spider. This is just a thought experiment about his capacity for the motor skills required for killing. “Oh my god, stop,” his reflection advises him. “Just stop.”

Also?

Peter Parker is fictional.

Newt gives up on his acute Marvel Universe envy and, out of complete spite for the miserable state that is his current dexterity, manages to shave, courtesy of some cross-hand stabilization. He’s able to turn shaving into a more complex and absorbing task than it needs to be by considering surface area and minimal path-length for complete coverage, because that’s both interesting and useful. Yup. In fact, he gets all the way through the shaving and the teeth brushing in this manner. It’s not until he’s faced with unbuttoning his shirt that he returns to the relatively pressing issue of trying to decide if his crap balance and his minor intention tremor have a normal or a creepy etiology and whether this tension he cannot shake is actually, possibly, rigidity, which is manifesting in the presence of too little dopamine. 

Oh hey.

Relative dopamine depletion.

Because, well, if he’s right about this, it could be very interesting, actually—is he compensating for too much activation by turning on inhibitory pathways? Is drifting a dopamine-expensive process? Is he biochemically withdrawing from the effects of the drift? He could see that happening. Maybe. Already he can feel the pressure of likely mechanistic explanations for his subjective and objective experiences bearing down on him in a wave of revelation that’s going to be hard for him to deal with, given that he’s standing on the beach of his mind holding a sieve and trying to stop a riptide from knocking him over and pulling him under. 

Crap, his brain whispers. 

It’s fine, actually, Newt replies, but his reflection is wincing, his brain isn’t talking to him anymore, and it’s the idea of reward mechanisms that hits him first because, like any behavior-based physiological process, individual reward for individual operators might, might, be a property of the hive-mind, the way that the Others induced and rewarded linkage, but that was assuming that linking into the hivemind, jacking into that collective port, was a thing that could be controlled on the level of a single mind, and he’s not sure whether it might be true for discrete kaiju, or any individual portion of the collective, but he knows one little jackass for whom it was true, boy does he ever. Could they have manipulated his reward pathways on purpose? Made him want to come back to the drift? Because he does, god he does. He doesn’t though, he doesn’t, he won’t, he can’t, he—it’s not the same, it wasn’t the same, not the third time, the third time—

He’s not sure where he is, oh god, he thinks, we’re networked, we’re networked, we’re networked, the net effect of this is that we’re worked. He’s got the most capacity, he’s slotting right into his role of central processor, glowing blue and glued to a board somewhere, his sense of self begins to shred beneath the weight of linking, desperate anger and ‘what do you think that means,’ ‘I think it means he’s seizing’. A ceiling is falling on him, he’s blending with Hermann, cut up homesick mutilated brains are shrieking a stereo chorus in his thoughts, a crescendo with a rising action that flings him into nothing.

At all.

And—

He’s.

He is now slightly confused?

Slightly.

Very slightly.

His thoughts feel warm and compressed.

This bathroom just doesn’t look all that familiar to him, and also he thinks that maybe he’s about to drop dead in it? Breathing seems really difficult, tragically, he’s not sure what’s happening with that just right now and also he’s holding hydrogen peroxide and de-blooding a bathrobe?

This is really not a good time to be confused—it’s actually never good to be confused while holding bloody articles of clothing. This is a universal truth of the human condition, he is one hundred percent positive of this. 

He’s cleaning blood off a bathrobe, though.

Statistically, that’s a few standard deviations from your average blood-lift as portrayed in crime procedurals that, as a human, he’s watched over the years. Crime procedurals. A fundamental aspect of human entertainment since Scheherazade’s Three Apples. 

Speaking of weird though, this is—

Hermann’s bathrobe?

Grasping for context he finds it—Hieronymus Bosch and Hermann backlit by a sunset artificially abridged by a wall—yes, okay, he remembers now, this is Hermann’s bathrobe which is technically the hotel’s bathrobe, and which is also a thing that Newt had previously bled on, earlier, while not getting a hug. That had been memorable. 

So.

Newt is cleaning his own blood out of a bathrobe that Hermann borrowed.

Okay that’s fine.

This cleaning job is he’s doing is a little bit confusing though, it’s somewhat nightmarish, and doesn’t seem to be obeying the laws of physics because for all the hydrogen peroxide he’s dumped on the thing, the blood doesn’t seem to be going away. In fact, if anything, it looks new. That doesn’t seem quite right to him; it makes him uneasy.

Things slot back into place slow and stepwise. This is a hotel; he had breakfast recently; Hermann is on the other side of the wall; Newt is Newt and holding hydrogen peroxide; he thinks he knows what year it is but he’s not sure so he’s not going to say; the breach is closed—he can feel it’s shut because he can feel the place it would be open in his mind if it were open and could take them home. 

Um, what?

No. 

Wires crossed, Geiszler, his brain says. You were the one who told your species exactly where their scalpel should be inserted and just how it should twist.

And I’d do it again, he replies reflexively, not even entirely sure what he means. I’d do it again.

He’d had a protocol. Yes, right, a protocol. He’s fine, actually, he’s fine, he’s not sure what just happened there, but now that he thinks about it, it seems like he’d sort of freaked out but his brain seems to be done with that for right now; everyone seems to agree that discussing things with Hermann is the best course of action, not thinking about said things right now, so much. 

Ideally he would just take a shower, but he’d wanted to clean this robe first, but there’s something wrong with it because it’s not cleaning and it’s making him doubt the sequential order of cause and effect and that’s freaking him out a little bit; he’s not going to lie about that. He needs causality—life without it is very distressing becausewhat is going on with this robe, he doesn’t understand, something entropicly backwards is happening here; oxidative reactions are going the wrong way, possibly. Someone broke the second law of thermodynamics and didn’t tell him, the arrow of time has been screwed around with, retrocausation is generally believed not to be a thing that should happen in bathrooms and on the macro-scale so what is happening here? He tries to think about it and figure it out. He’s staring at this bathrobe and he’s watching blood appear and he’s pouring hydrogen peroxide on that blood to oxidize it into foamed release but more blood just appears. That makes no sense, entropicly.

Entropicly it doesn’t.

He’s also tasting blood.

He brings a hand to his face on some instinct and that hand comes away covered in the stuff and what is this—a remake of Carrie courtesy of his brain? Who put him in a Stephen King novel? Why is there blood everywhere?

He’s panicking, he’s panicking, he’s panicking. He is just—this should not—

Dude—I think you’re bleeding, his brain suggests.

Oh.

Right.

Yes.

Of course he is.

Newt decides that maybe he will take a break from cleaning this bathrobe and possibly sit down? Except no, because, miraculously, he has not yet bled on his shirt and he really needs one shirt to wear because he can’t not wear a shirt right now, that would be a protocol deviation. 

He leans forward, over the sink, and pinches his nose shut and breathes through his mouth.

This is bad.

This is bad. 

This is terrible.

This is actually not that bad.

This is fine.

He’s concerned.

He’s mildly concerned. 

Newt is mildly concerned by how confusing he’s found the last thirty seconds or so. And by ‘mildly’ he means ‘extremely’. He’s also concerned he might be heading down a vasovagal road into syncopic sunset because he isdistressed, man, physiologically, psychologically, just extremely distressed right now. By his headache, by his eye pain, by his tendency to bleed with minimal provocation, by his brief incomprehension of causality, by his imminent failure at showering.

He tries to think of kittens and not about dopamine; it was thinking about dopamine that had caused this problem in the first place. He will think about the dopamine thing later. When he is not by himself. 

Is he still bleeding?

Yes.

It’s getting hot in this bathroom, the air is humid and feels hard to breathe and he can’t see the guy in the mirror anymore, he’s blurred beneath a film of condensation. That’s good. That’s preferred. He’s probably better off under there anyway. 

Good. 

Okay. 

Yes.

Condensation, Riemann zeroes, Peter Parker, tissue regeneration, Victor Frankenstein, panic, dopamine, kaiju, hotels, breakfasts, breaking news, Hypothetical Rain, reward circuitry, Hermann, cortical remapping, oxidation, hydrogen peroxide, epinephrine, Fear and Trembling, quantum foam, proofreading polymerases, error correction (quantum style), dermal tapestry stitched with an oscillating needle-gun, phenotypic plasticity, neural plasticity, plastic plasticity, neural architecture, phantom tears in space time, a screaming background chorus of disembodied tissue cross-linked into prisons of virescent aldehydes. 

All of it slots back into place, he is fine, he is fine, he doesn’t need Hermann to tell him that he’s standing in a hotel bathroom, cleaning up his clothes, he can figure it out for himself, it turns out, to no one’s surprise, no one’s at all, definitely not his; he is not surprised. 

Is he still bleeding?

No.

Awesome. 

Newt pulls the de-blooded and partially re-blooded bathrobe out of the sink and drapes it over the counter for future use. He turns his back to the mirror, shuts his eyes, and starts unbuttoning his shirt.  He’s not great at it, actually, this unbuttoning thing, he’s less good than he would have predicted, but that’s fine. It’s not like there are any time constraints except for the one where Hermann decides Newt’s dropped dead and breaks down the door with a shoulder-cane, one-two combination. He’s not sure when that particular time point would hypothetically go down, but he’s pretty sure it wouldn’t be before the forty-five minute mark. And he’s going to make this as fast as possible.

These buttons are really screwing with him.

Hold shirt, torque shirt, apply pressure to edge of button, slide through buttonhole, repeat.

Something is screwing with his motor cortex or his cerebellum or his basal ganglia or his spinal cord or his muscles and whether that element of screw is pharmacological, biological, drift-derived, kaiju-mediated, or just the first sign of imminent spider-man villainy, he really can’t say at this point. 

If Peter Parker really exists he is going to be so angry he’s not sure he’ll recover. Ever.

Kinesthetic feedback indicates that he’s done with his unbuttoning. 

Eyes still shut, he pulls off his shirt, sends it in the direction of the doorway with as much coordination as his cerebellum is capable of implementing at the moment, and then reaches behind him for the hydrogen peroxide covered bathrobe.

I like your style there, champ, his brain says, as if it’s not a deceitful bastard apt to plunge him into pure panic at the slightest provocation.

I wish I could say it was mutual, Newt replies, tying the robe shut and opening his eyes. I really wish I could. Unfortunately, your track record at the moment leaves a lot to be desired. A lot.  

He pulls of his glasses, sets them on the counter with a quiet click, and steps into the shower.

He sweeps the shower curtain shut.

Nope.

He immediately sweeps it open again.

There have been more efficient showers in the history of mankind, Newt will not dispute that.

The bathrobe becomes pretty heavy pretty immediately, given that it’s so absorbent. He’d thought about just showering in the clothes he’d worn to breakfast, but that had seemed, somehow, weirder than showering in a hydrogen peroxide soaked bathrobe. He can justify this to himself, because, really, the bathrobe could do with some cleaning; he’d managed to cumulatively get a decent amount of blood on the thing between round one and two. Hopefully round two will be the last bleeding round. He doubts that a little bit, but it’s good to have goals. 

Newt still maintains that the epistaxis thing is not serious. 

There is literally no way it could be.

Physiologically. 

Okay, that’s a lie, it could be serious, but a little too serious for his current level of serious, if that makes any sense. Newt isn’t sure it does. 

Waterlogged bathrobes are heavy, it turns out, and Dr. Geiszler is, improbably and suddenly, very tired.

Temperature-wise, this is nice though. He’s been cold for days, he thinks.

Newt pushes at his hair and tips his head back, trying to work the glue out of it. It’s not really happening—disappointingly his hair is now just a wet, stiff mess instead of a dry, stiff mess. Newt is not going to surrender to this though, at least not before he tries his hand at initiating some surfaction action, courtesy of complimentary shampoo. Following the application of some lavender-scented, violescent gel, he finally creates some weak points in the stubborn mat affixed to his scalp and makes some headway in working his hair into a state of freedom. Between the bathrobe and the being exhausted, he can’t release his hair entirely before taking a break and dropping his hands. 

He leans against the lateral wall of the shower, a hard surface that looks like stone but isn’t, shuts his eyes, presses his forehead against disorienting coolness, and says, “this is great.”

After a long interval, even though his eyes are shut, he feels the burn of shampoo.

This does not surprise him.

It does hurt quite a bit though.

He goes back to being an active participant in his own showering and manages to get the shampoo out of his eyes and out of his hair and into the back of the bathrobe he’s wearing, where presumably, given enough time under enough water, it’s going to work its way out of the material and into the drain. Newt pretty sure that there’s enough water exchange going on through this terrycloth matrix he’s wrapped himself in that he’s getting mostly clean. 

First approximation clean.

This is now his territory—first approximations, buffered showers, different colored filter cubes taking multichannel images of his thoughts:  Geiszler’s in green, Gottlieb’s in gold, and his residual Grotesquerie’s a catastrophe in kaiju blue.

He’s going to have to try really hard to not become either the bitter washed up narcissist or the paragon of bad decision-making a la Victor Frankenstein that all his data sets are trending toward. He’s going to have to figure out a third option, if only so he won’t slowly suck the life out of Hermann like an interpersonal vampire, because Hermann would let him do it, Hermann’s already letting him do it. Hermann is like—

It’s hard to say what Hermann is like exactly.

Hermann’s not really a guy who slots nicely into a paradigm. Not like Dr. Newton Geiszler of the Mary Shelley pedigree and the constant need for apogee. Hermann’s a little too complicated to be a straight up ascetic in the tradition of Sinclair Lewis, even if Hermann does share a surname with the most prototypical embodiment of scientific virtue in the entirety of western literary canon. Gottlieb. Scientist as secular saint. Oh sure, it’s true as far as it goes, but it’s only a different kind of armor than the kind Newt himself has cultivated. Everyone grows (and decorates?) a skin to deal with the too-sharp world, and that is Hermann’s—science virtue. Replicability, reproducibility, precision, accuracy, statistical power, Hermann weaves them together so seamlessly that one can almost forget that half the time the guy’s hardheadedness doesn’t come from quantitative exactitude but from some weird fusion at his core of total acceptance of externally imposed duty meeting some emotional state that’s way more emo than the guy’s wardrobe would lead one to believe. Newt is not the most emotionally intelligent guy on the planet, he knows that about himself, but even he can tell there’s something unusual in Hermann’s tendency to fire off needless salutes in the direction of nebulous authority figures with unreasonably full commitment. 

Pre-drift, this had seemed confusing and alarming to Newt, and had provoked an initial, horrified response that was somewhat similar to what Newt thought he might feel like if he watched Hermann jump into a shark tank covered with blood. 

God, he had said the first time he’d seen Hermann whip out that little piece of superfluous semiotics, can you not? They don’t have any power over you in a formal sense and nothing good can come of making them feel like they do. Did no one teach you how to navigate departmental politics? Flip over a table, maybe, I think it’ll serve you better in the long run. 

Post-drift, he finds it even more painful. 

Painful because he’d been right. He’d nailed it. He’d fired a nail out of a nail gun from a room away and nailed it right to the wall. Hermann signs on for things and then does not sign off. Not until he’s dead. Even though Newt had accurately assessed Hermann’s vulnerability when it came to the concept of duty, Newt hadn’t, at the time, been aware that he himself was one of those things that Hermann had signed on for. It’s occurring to him now, slow-motion style, as he’s watching the wave of the past decade he’s been surfing crest and break as it hits whatever it is he’s done to himself. Hermann gave up a decade of work, a set of authority figures he’d supplied with ten years of virtuous compliance, and half his own brain-space to Newt. To Newton Geiszler of the too frenetic work ethic and the constant quest to be a skeptic. 

Newt’s a little bit oblivious, sometimes, interpersonally and maybe even also intrapersonally, but he’s got enough raw capacity and a good enough feel for social norms that when he pays attention he can do a decent job at not being a total jerk. And he is now. Paying attention, that is. Not being a jerk. 

If his life were a romantic comedy, Newt would finish his shower and walk right out of this hotel room in a fit of misguided pure, interpersonal regard, spend an undetermined amount of time in a misery-montage, growing a beard, probably, before Hermann sees him one day while buying something picturesque, like a physical book or flowers in kaiju blue, or another piece of romantic varia, and then confesses to him the total misery of the Geiszler-deprived state, at which point they go out to breakfast, in a satisfying circle of returning to their beginnings and knowing the place for the first time. He might have accidentally remixed romantic comedies with erudite, inaccessible poetry right there. Whatever. He doesn’t have a stellar knowledge of the rom-com genre. If his life were a drama, again he’d walk out of this hotel room, but this time it would be from a sense of gritty realism regarding how completely his life is about to embody the phenomenon of controlled demolition, and then Hermann would maybe read his obituary later over some tragically symbolic coffee into which creamer is entropicly dispersed in a manner suggestive of death. If his life were an action movie, he’d still walk out of this hotel room except something would interrupt his misery montage, such as being kidnapped by Hannibal Chau's vengeance-obsessed-right-hand-man, or a group of kaiju worshippers, and Hermann would be forced to rescue him, using his secret sniper skills that he develops in an accuracy montage. In the Spiderman 12 variant of this action movie template, he’d turn evil and Peter Parker would probably send him to his death with a thin veneer of surface sympathy for the scientist he’d once been, and then he’d make out with one of his peer group for thirty seconds before the closing credits. Parker would make out. Not Newt. Because Newt would be dead. Hermann doesn’t even get to be in Spiderman 12: The Wrath of the Kaiju, except maybe as a bit part, shaking his head or something as he advises Peter Parker and maybe is introduced to his girlfriend. If this were a gritty indie film, Newt would walk out of this hotel room, lose touch with reality, and never realize that Hermann was continually making an attempt to drag him back from his fiery alternate landscape. If this were a tear-jerker, Newt wouldn’t leave this hotel room, he’d just die in a selfless, picturesque manner, while Hermann soldiered on without him—wait no, he’s got that backwards, because he is the protagonist here, god, Geiszler, get with it, will you please?—correction, Newt wouldn’t leave, but then Hermann would tragically die, leaving Newt to soldier on with much less personal style than Hermann would manage, he’s certain. If this were a Wes Anderson film, Newt would probably leave this hotel room with a neutral facial expression and Hermann would go on an intrapersonal and interpersonal quest to get him back and they’d talk less and be unintentionally both pathetic and extremely funny, and maybe at the end they’d take a nap in the same sleeping bag. If this were a fantasy movie, Newt would leave, but then someone would present him with a quest and he’d have to come back and collect Hermann with apologies and compliments before they could set out to do that thing that they’ve been charged to do. If this were a horror movie, Newt wouldn’t leave and he’d startliterally turning into a kaiju any time now. If this movie were primarily classified as ‘suspense,’ he wouldn’t leave either but he’d start displaying homicidal tendencies and the audience would be extremely nervous for Hermann as their sympathy for the increasingly alienated Newt diminished until the point where everyone would cheer when Becket saves the day by shooting him with something. God, he hopes that doesn’t happen. Becket? Really? He has mixed feelings about that guy. On one hand? Yes, cool, because hi, world-saving. On the other hand? Less cool, because the dude is a total bro. Although, he’s not positive about that label, because Becket drifted withMako and he doesn’t see Mako being drift compatible with a total bro, so somewhere in this train of judgmental thinking he’s made an error. Whatever. He tries to stay away from labeling people because he likes to lead by example. The point is? He hopes Mako finds the grit to do him in with a sword. That would be better. He’d rather be killed by Mako than by anyone. Maybe he should email her and request this, just so she knows? That’s probably not the email that she really wants to get right about now though. Later. Later he’ll email her. He’s not completely crass. 

Dear Mako, his brain suggests, I hope you’re doing okay. Again, nice job with the world saving, now you finally have time to improve your bass-playing skills, because, as you know, The Supercos are in need of you if we ever get our acts together for a nerd-rock West Coast tour. I know this is important to you. Also, I was thinking that if anyone ever needs to kill me, I’d prefer it to be you, ideally with a sword. Don’t let Becket commence with the ‘blowing to pieces’. Gosh, are you too famous to call me now or what? Pick up your phone, will you? I’d call you, but I’m not sure where my phone is. Probably Hermann has it. Full disclosure, I'm not looking at screens. Or talking to anyone, really. You could leave me a voicemail?

Yeah that’s going to be a no go for about eight different reasons.

Okay, it’s time for a tally.

Romantic comedy:  Leave.
Drama:  Leave.
Action movie:  Leave.
Marvel movie:  Leave.
Gritty indie film:  Leave
Tear-jerker:  Stay.
Wes Anderson film:  Leave.
Fantasy:  Leave.
Horror:  Stay.
Suspense:  Stay.

Seven to three. Supreme Court of the Cinema rejects his proposal to stay. 

Except for the fact that this is no rational way to make choices, so he’s not going to leave, that would be ridiculous even for him, and he knows it would just torture Hermann, because this life-partners thing that Newt had proposed some days ago in a more familiar room had been a two-way thing, he’s positive of that because Hermann had agreed pretty quickly and in pretty obvious relief, so yeah. Newt is just kidding himself if he thinks that leaving is going to do anything other than assuage his own guilt. He is way too smart to be a typical cinematic protagonist, and that is not arrogance, that is actual true fact. 

Newt’s eyes snap open as his vestibular system starts to warn him about something and he corrects a proprioceptive confusion before it has time to get out of hand and pitch him sideways. He really does not want Hermann to break down the bathroom door to find Newt passed out, concussed, and showering in a bathrobe, that would be hard to explain, and the reason for it would be painfully obvious. He’s pretty sure this is not a permanent state of affairs, this bathrobe thing, it’s just a thing he’s going to do, maybe one time, maybe eight times, maybe eight hundred times because he doesn’t regret the body art, really he doesn’t, he just didn’t foresee things turning out in exactly this way, where there’s a whole set of terror and misery laid down somewhere in his brain that likes to take over his entire mental circuitry here and there, roughly sixteen times a day, and would be happy to do just that when confronted with stylized representations of kaiju whose memories he now possesses, that’s inconvenient. That had been really difficult to foresee, he hadn’t known they had a hivemind, god, who would. 

Strike another thing down that Star Trek: The Next Generation had just mercilessly nailed, though.

Hiveminds. Freaking yikes.

The day that he can stare at the forming spread of Otachi as the last addition to the two-dimensional menagerie on his skin and not freak out will be a good day. Or, alternatively, a really bad one. 

What are you doing? his brain enquires with a polite snarl. Trying to drive yourself straight to your own personal Roche Limit? Trying to pass out in a too-hot, too-long shower? Get it together, dude, and leave the body-art rationalizing to a later date.

Newt shuts his eyes and does some readjusting of his difficult to manage bathrobe so as to facilitate some direct liquid-to-skin contact that he verifies by feel alone—the warm and rapid slide of thin streams of water that feel nothing, nothing at all, like cold and rapid sub-Pacific transit toward his death at the end of a swath of destruction he’s made through a fragile, alien city.

Nope.

Nothing like that.

Because he’s showering. 

Like a human.

A normal one.

A mostly normal one.

And, actually, he’s done showering. 

He turns off the water, but it doesn’t really result in much subjective change in his experience, since he’s still wearing a soaking wet bathrobe. Newt stands for a moment in this too-warm room in this too-heavy bathrobe, his too-crappy vision a little too close to fading to nothing for comfort. He steps out of the shower, locates a towel, shuts his eyes, pulls off his robe, and forces it into an arc back behind him, where it hits the floor of the shower with the wet clap of surface-tension meeting surface-tension. He flinches slightly, but keeps going, drying blind and then dressing blind, his eyes shut as he navigates by feel and with what coordination he has left to pull on the pile of clothes next to the door. The shirt gives him the most trouble and, of course, because he’s a slob, he’s left it inverted, and so he puts the thing on inside out and this causes him more emotional distress than is really appropriate, less because of the eyes-shut struggle of determining the clothing inversion and then correcting it, and more because he would like to get out of this dark, hot, bright bathroom. It doesn’t help him that he’s got a whole set of preferences for neatly folded clothing that are making themselves nauseatingly known. Honestly, Newt isn’t slovenly as a lifestyle choice; he’s slovenly because he just doesn’t care, or hadn’t. Now he does care, he cares a lot it turns out, because this is really unpleasant, actually, he will never leave his clothes in a state like this again and when he opens his eyes and opens the door he is going to clean this bathroom, because he just needs to right now, and no this isn’t him, and yes this comes from Hermann, but it’s his brain now, and it’s his subjective experience and if he wants to clean bathrooms he will because there are so many things he can’t and shouldn’t do that feel instinctive, such as drifting, such as drifting, such as drifting again, oh god—

No no no no no, he insists, pressing back against that which is pressing down. Nope. Stop that right now. Just stop, brain. Clean this bathroom if you’d like to and if you ever get your shirt buttoned. 

Oh I will, his brain says. You just watch. And that’s not all that’s going to happen. Not just bathroom cleaning. No it is not.

Meaning what? Newt asks with a mental, rather than physical, narrowing of the eyes.

Meaning rationality, as a lifestyle choice, is about to happen to you, friend. You are having a rational phase in your life. You need a rational phase. Your empirical phase has plunged you straight off the deep end of consciousness research. 

Empiricism is better, Newt replies weakly. This was a team decision. We made it a long time ago. Circa age ten and the commencement of Ph.D. le first. We can’t just—

Yes we can. It’s fine, his brain says. Picasso had his Blue Period and Geiszler can have his Rational Principles Period. Just—don’t reason yourself into anything ill advised.

“Well there’s your whole problem right there,” Newt mutters intelligibly through clenched teeth, halfway through his buttoning job, his eyes on fire with the pressure of keeping them closed. “Can you imagine what it would take to turn me into a rationalist?”

Oh, I don’t know, his brain replies airily. Synaptic remodeling on a catastrophic scale?

Good point, Newt replies. I’ll give you that one, you perspicacious bastard. I refuse to submit, though. Descartes can just put his clothes back on and stop trying to seduce me away from my empirical bros. Vhat vould von Helmholtz say if he could see me now?

What a rockstar? his brain suggests.

Um, maybe, Newt replies. Sure. Thanks brain. I will let you clean this bathroom as a gesture of goodwill, but we are not turning ourselves into logical positivists or rationalists, or really anyone whom Aristotle would approve of and Francis Bacon would dismiss, okay? That’s just not a thing that we’re going to do. 

You will read the entire canon of extant works by René Descartes, his brain says, taking an unmistakable turn for the Hermannesque.

No, Newt replies, no I don’t think I’ll be doing that.

You will do it as soon as you can read, his brain counters. Possibly, you will attempt it before that point.

You are not the boss of me, Newt replies. 

That is, in fact, my precise role.

Newt opens his eyes, puts on his glasses, buttons his sleeves at the wrist, which feels as weird as it does necessary, devotes three minutes of rapid, poorly coordinated energy towards straightening up the bathroom, including folding towels, relocating dry items to hang up wet ones, fastidiously removing the blood on the counter, drying wet surfaces with a sacrificed towel, straightening recently purchased toiletries, adjusting the angle of the bathmat relative to lines of the room so that it’s either perfectly parallel or perfectly orthogonal to all planes that define the space in which he finds himself. 

Happy now? he asks his brain.

Not particularly, no, his brain replies.

Yeah, I hear that, Newt replies, feeling vaguely sick and somewhat uncomfortable as he looks at the entropy reversal he has wrought for no real reason, but slightly less sick than when the room had been a mess.

He opens the bathroom door and moves on with his life.

As soon as he rounds the corner, Hermann shuts off the television like he’s been ready, and that annoys Newt, yes it does, because come on, he’s not quite the hummingbird at the end of its metabolic rope that Hermann is casting him as, like one wrong move will kill him or result in permanent insanity or something. Newt knows what kaiju look like, he has, in fact, studied them intensively for years, and he’s not going to forget, it’s not like being presented with video footage is going to—

“Whatever you’re about to say don’t,” Hermann says, with an unusual xeric urgency and an even more unusual confused expression, like he’s just cleaned a bathroom and felt weird about it.

Newt can relate.

Boy, can he ever.

“Likewise,” Newt snaps, not even a little bit defensively.

“You don’t look quite right,” Hermann says, eyeing Newt like a poorly performing wave function.

“Hermann. What did I just say?” Newt replies, because he’s pretty sure that aggravation is basically his only safe emotional landscape left, which is good, because it’s a place he has, historically, spent a lot of time. “And you look like crap, dude, so maybe just take an aspirin and lie down, I know you haven’t slept in days because you’ve got that look about you, that vampiric, Vlad-the-Impaler-style look, which is really inappropriate,” Newt says, finally making it to the desk and swapping his glasses for shades, “because we both know that if this is a horror movie, you’re the plucky protagonist and not the creeper in the dark stairwell, okay?”

“Okay,” Hermann says, like he’s using a word from a foreign language for the first time.

“Commit to it, dude, commit. Say it like you mean it. ‘Okay.’ ‘Joie de vivre.’ ‘Alfresco.’ ‘Schlock.’  This brain is schlock.”

“You are bizarre,” Hermann says. “And I quite like your brain. I have always liked it.”

“Stop being so nice,” Newt replies, settling his shades into place. “One of these days it’s going to catch me by surprise and I’m going to have an emotional breakdown all over whatever outfit you’re wearing and you only have one shirt right now so—” he trails off.

“I do not like the fact that you haven’t had one already,” Hermann says.

“A breakdown? Mmm how social sciences of you.” Newt unfolds his blazer in a swift pull of straightening lines from where Hermann has deposited it on the desk.

“Uncalled for,” Hermann replies. 

“I suppose so,” Newt admits. “You know what else is uncalled for? Me reading the entire body of extant work produced by René Descartes, that’s what. I’m not a rationalist, Hermann, I’ve never been a rationalist.”

“Oh I’m aware,” Hermann replies, sounding uncharacteristically confused and equally uncharacteristically tolerant as he watches Newt pull on his blazer. “You made this extremely clear to me when I proposed the reallocating of resources from your division to mine in our first year of mutual acquaintance. I believe your exact words to the funding committee were, ‘empiricism for life, rationalism for maladaptive inevitable death, which are you going to choose? I know which one I’d pick’.”

“Um, yeah,” Newt says, deciding he’ll cut his circulatory system some slack and let it operate for a while with his head and his heart in the same plane. “That was maybe a little bit inflammatory.”

“Newton, please tell me that at some point it occurred to you that I am not actually a rationalist.”

“You have rationalistic tendencies,” Newt says. “Move over. This is my bed. I claimed it when I passed out into it at some point. You have your own bed.”  He sits down next to Hermann and then effects horizontalness on the too narrow sliver of lateral bed-space that he’s trying to occupy.

“Yes,” Hermann says dryly, shifting marginally. “Most modern scientists have at least some, you realize. All modern scientists also have empirical tendencies.”

“All modern scientists are empiricists. Your rationalist preferences are obscenely close to the line of intellectual acceptability,” Newt replies. “That’s why, of the two of us, I’m the more scientifically minded.”

“Yes,” Hermann says dryly. “You. Tell yourself that if you wish, Newton, I have spent a decade listening to absolute nonsense come out of your mouth and I can certainly tolerate listening to it for another decade, it if you can tolerate producing it.”

“You’re the guy who’s almost an artist,” Newt says. “Don’t lie. I know you thought that triple event had a sort of cataclysmic elegance to it.” 

“False,” Hermann says, reaching over to straighten Newt’s blazer like it’s his own. “You are most certainly the one with the artistic tendencies.”

“Tendencies maybe,” Newt replies, swatting Hermann’s hand away. “I’m an engineer, dude, a cool one, admittedly, who plays the guitar, but still.”

“An engineer,” Hermann scoffs. “Hardly. I would never traverse a bridge built by you.” 

“Too late,” Newt says, sending a wild-edged grin in Hermann’s general, blurry direction. “And so excruciatingly, exquisitely, satisfyingly, demonstrably false. Did you know I enjoy you being wrong almost as much as I enjoy me being right?”

Hermann sighs, short and sharp. “I meant a literal bridge, as you very well know. Not a neural one. Biomedical engineering and structural engineering are extremely different, and I do not think it’s appropriate for you to pigeonhole yourself as an engineer when you have six advanced degrees in various fields.”

“It bugs you,” Newt says. “Doesn’t it. It just irritates the crap out of you that I win in the number of degrees category.”

“It does not,” Hermann says. “In fact, it never has. The only reason you have so many is because you’re intellectually indecisive to a fault. It’s a perpetual source of wonder to me that MIT hired you and I suspect they did so only because they were tired of funding you to sample disparate fields.”

“Well, we can’t all be like you, hating everything except math. In my opinion, everything is great,” Newt replies. “It physically pains me to limit myself. I should have been born independently wealthy circa 1750. That would have been fun.”

“I’d advise choosing a period for your life so that the peak of your intellectual prowess does not occur contemporaneously with the French Revolution.”

“Lavoisier’d,” Newt says agreeably. “I think I’ll go earlier. Wait no. I mean yes. Earlier. I’d overlap with Descartes, obviously. Maybe I am Spinoza, reincarnated, what do you think? Maybe I’d be Spinoza. Maybe I was.”

“I thought you were an empiricist,” Hermann replies.

“God, Hermann, this is my intellectual fantasy life, okay? Do I go around destroying your fantasies about grand unified theory and stuff? Don’t think I don’t know about your secret obsession with particle physics that started around July 4th, 2012. Don’t think I don’t know that you think about renormalization group running when you go on vacation, okay?”

“I don’t see how my entirely justifiable intellectual hobby translates into your sudden and borderline pathological latching onto rationalists from the turn of the sixteenth century. I want to be clear on this, Newton, whatever is happening between you and Descartes is no doing of mine.”

“Of course it’s doing of yours,” Newt says. “Interacting with doing of mine. Or whatever. I am an empiricist. That doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy rationalism. Or the philosophy espoused by the Jedi Order. Or the Prime Directive. It’s intellectual escapism into someone else’s worldview, man. You know?”

Hermann doesn’t answer and shifts uncomfortably.

Newt half turns, props the irregularly shaped volume of agony formerly known as his head on one hand, buries his fingers in his own wet hair and whispers, “are you thinking about my guitar?” with as much licentiousness as he can muster, which turns out to be quite a bit, actually. 

Hermann shifts laterally and says, “no,” too quickly to mean anything but yes.

“So there is justice in this world.” Newt lets Hermann off the hook and collapses back into horizontalness. “I wasn’t sure.”

“That’s a terribly specious conclusion. Your entire premise is flawed,” Hermann says stiffly.

“Your premise is flawed.”

“Very mature, Newton,” Hermann says. “Congratulations on your rhetorical victory.”

“What can I say?” Newt replies. “I’m a mature guy. Also, um, speaking of mature things I may or may not have done or said or recorded forever for posterity, did you happen to pack my digital voice recorder, by any chance?”

“I did,” Hermann replies.

“Ah, did you, possibly, at any point, listen to it, possibly?”

“No,” Hermann says, sounding like he’s doing some eye narrowing. “I don’t make it a habit to seek out further examples of your grandiloquent musings, and I, unlike some people, do not routinely commit invasions of privacy.”

“Okay, just checking. And yes, you’re still a better person than me.”

“Yes. Yes, I am, Newton,” Hermann snaps, “because if I had been in your position I certainly would not have blamed you for my own experiments in self-destruction, because I would be concerned about what effect such words might have on your psychological state.”

“I thought you said you didn’t—“

“I have your memories,” Hermann snarls, “of everything prior to one week ago at twenty-three hundred hours in a Hong Kong alley.”

“Ah,” Newt says. “So if I hadn’t brought it up—”

“I likely would not have realized it, no,” Hermann says, still on the upswing in his pissed-off trajectory.

“You’re doing the sentence completion thing, dude, I think you—”

“I think you should stop talking,” Hermann says, sitting abruptly, “before I murder you.” 

“I meant it as—”

“I know exactly how you meant it, Newton,” Hermann hisses, vacating the opposite side of the bed, and limping stiffly to the nearest window, where, presumably, he braces his hands against the sill and makes a concerted effort not to throttle Newt or upend a table. It’s hard to be positive about this, because Newt really cannot see much right now. 

“Okay, yeah, I know you do,” Newt says, not moving, talking to the silhouette with blurred borders that is the best Hermann-rendering his visual system can give him, “but I mean, really, you’ve been familiar with the depth of my stupidity for years, and look, it’s better that I brought this up now, right? Because I pretty much felt guilty about it right from the point that I said it, and then that guilt has only intensified to crippling levels in light of the fact that you ruined your life and your brain for me, basically. I get it dude, I do, but look, my point is that I’m a jerk and I’msorry—”

“Stop speaking,” Hermann says through clenched teeth.

“Okay,” Newt says, watching him in tense anticipation.

Nothing happens. 

“Are you going to start speaking, maybe?” Newt asks, after about two seconds, “because I was kind of under the impression that you had something in mind other than silence, because that’s not going to really work for me right now. I’m a jerk, seriously, I know this, you know this, but you like me anyway, kind of a lot, more than makes sense, really, because I did nothing to deserve it other than yell at you, more-or-less on your own discourse level, which, admittedly, is hard to find these days, but there’s a reason I brought this up, man, I just feel really confused, but unambiguously guilty about a lot of things; it’s the flip side of this sense of duty that I appropriated via horizontal transmission from you. Transposable-element-of-the-self’d, you know?”

“The problem, Newton,” Hermann says, still not looking at him, “is that you were quite correct. I did drive you to do exactly what you did.”

“What?” Newt replies, his voice cracking in half against the bar of incredulity it’s just run into. “No. Stop. Don’t even explain. You are extremely confused, dude, your brain is a scrambled, hot mess of fused circuits post massive neural induction, if mine is anything to go by. Even though you’re telling me I’m right, which, as we know, I love, in a borderline sexual way, you’re wrong about my rightness, okay? It was a stupid, throw-away comment, you didn’t drive me to anything.”

Hermann still says nothing.

Newt strangles a frustrated scream of macho vexation between clenched teeth, and presses a hand over his sunglasses. “Stop. Don’t freak out about this.”

“I’m not ‘freaking out’ about anything,” Hermann says icily. “I am stating a fact. I don’t fault my reasoning at the time, but it was biased and incorrect. You were probably the worst available candidate to enter the drift. In fact, as our species goes, I’d put you in the bottom decile.”

“You’d what now?”

“If I had believed, even for a moment, that you’d be successful, I would have insisted on doing it myself.”

“Ugh,” Newt replies. “Mathematical martyr complex much? Probably? Some military jock would have done it, and then where would we be. As if Becket could pull anything out of the anteverse experience other than the compulsion to blow it up, which is, come to think of it, exactly what he did.”

“As I said, I would vastly prefer Becket to you, given the choice.”

“Oh yeah,” Newt drawls, dredging up every microscopic particle of sarcasm he can find within his being. “Great plan. Stellar reasoning. I am. The. Most preeminent kaiju expert that our species has to offer, dude, so just check your inappropriate prejudice against biology, human volatility, necessary sacrifice on the alter of empiricism, inescapable bias, body art, glam rock, punk rock, Nietzsche, loquacity, eating sans utensils, and everything else that drives you up the wall about me.”

“I am complimenting you,” Hermann shouts back. “Not disparaging you.”

“Oh,” Newt says.

They look at one another breathing heavily.

“Look, in my defense,” Newt says, totally suavely and not at all sort of awkwardly breathless, “‘bottom decile’ does not sound like a compliment. Also? I still haven’t adjusted to the Decade of Mutual Admiration.”

“Clearly,” Hermann snaps. “Outside your inappropriate fits of insight, you are quite slow on the uptake.”

“I’m trying to make that into a compliment also, but it’s not really working,” Newt says.

Hermann sighs, sharp and short.

“What I’m trying to say when I’m not shouting at you,” Newt says, “is that I’d feel even more guilty, intolerably guilty, if I thought that you blamed yourself for whatever my outcome is, or turns out to be, post all this neural remixing. You feel me? First of all, this isn’t a blame thing. This is a credit thing. This is a good outcome. A great outcome, and—” his vocal chords snap shut for some reason before deciding to let him pass go, “and even if it doesn’t end up turning out that way for me, personally, I—look, I’ve already dumped enough of my crap on your doorstep for a lifetime, and there’s no reason for you to go stealing more of it from me to add to the pile. The less-than-ideal parts of this whole experience aren’t yours to take on, dude. They’re just not, so stop it. Stop it right now.”

“I could have intervened materially to prevent—a great deal of what happened to you,” Hermann says still not looking at him.  

“Maybe,” Newt replies, “but I think that would have been a zero-sum game. You could have stood in for me, but that wouldn’t make our net utility any different.”

“Stop it,” Hermann says, unmistakably mollified and slightly impressed by Newt’s skill at analogy-making, which had always been prodigious and is now just a temple to verbal amazingness constructed of glittering razor blades made of mathematical references. 

“What?” Newt replies. “Being a winner?”

“In effect, yes,” Hermann replies. 

“That’s impossible for me,” Newt replies. “But I can be magnanimous in my current state of perpetual victory. For example, I forgive you for your stupid self-blame,” Newt says. “In case you were curious.”

“Thank you,” Hermann says dryly. “Thank you so much.”

“Have you seen my phone, by the way?”

“Yes,” Hermann says, pulling Newt’s phone out of his own pocket. “You’ve missed forty-six calls.” 

“I am popular,” Newt says, holding out a hand.

Hermann tosses him his phone, a thing he finds out only as it smacks him in the hand. Needless to say, he fails to catch it.

“Hermann, I can’t see.”

“I’m aware of that,” Hermann replies. 

Newt sighs, looks hopelessly at his phone, and then drops his hand back to the bed. He’ll deal with it later. “Anyimportant calls?”

“I’m quite certain they’re all important,” Hermann replies, leaning against the wall, and probably looking at him.

“Go to sleep dude, even your vague visual representation filtered through my totally crap eyes looks exhausted.”

“What time is it?” Hermann asks.

“I don’t know, morning? Let’s reverse our circadian rhythms—sleep in the day and wander around San Fran at night, like noctivagant science vampires. Sciencepires. Nerdpires. In search of logical thinking to perpetuate our unlife. Remember when we did that our first week in Hong Kong and then Pentecost ordered us not to have jet-lag anymore because people needed daytime science and you listened?”

“No,” Hermann says, clearly lying, because Newt remembers dragging his inebriated colleague off the metal rail around the Jaeger launching dock at four in the morning. The man had been leaning over it, looking for interesting fish in black water, made visually impenetrable by the reflection of perpetually fluorescing lights.

Newt doesn’t remember any such incident from his own perspective, but then, he had been pretty drunk. He’s also not sure he was looking for fish, though, that was a reasonable assumption on Hermann’s part, he supposes.

Newt often looks for cool fish.

“Yes you do,” Newt says.

“If you are referring to the period in which we temporarily revised our work hours to maintain maximal productivity while adjusting to a twelve hour time change, and occasionally went out for dinner at four in the morning, then yes. I recall no aimless street wandering in some kind of bastardization of a baseless supernatural tradition.”

“You are such a good life partner for me,” Newt says, smirking at him. “I hope you know that. I order you to sleep, by the way. I order it.”

“Shut up,” Hermann says, still leaning against the wall.

“Why do I not get a snappy salute, hmm? Why do I not get immediate compliance? I deserve them, dude, I deserve all your salutes, way more than the PPDC does.”

“You are a disruptive nightmare, dwelling in the basement of human discipline.”

“A simple ‘no thanks, I’ll keep my salutes for the military,’ would have sufficed,” Newt replies. 

Hermann sort of slides down the wall and then does some angular adjustment into a sitting position on the edge of the bed, and if that doesn’t just scream total exhaustion to Newt, nothing ever has or will. The dude is wrecked.

Newt lies there in silence for a span of seconds, feeling his resting tremor and fidgeting.

“Can I confess a thing to you?” Newt asks.

“Well,” Hermann says, “if you think such a concept still has meaning after all that we’ve been through, certainly. ‘Confess’ away.”

“I think,” Newt says, slowing down, feeling edgy, feeling more edgy when Hermann picks up on his edginess and twists to look at him. “Well, no, let me do this a different way—have you noticed that my coordination isn’t worth crap right now?”

“It has been exceedingly difficult to miss,” Hermann says dryly. “I think you underestimate how much difficulty you’ve had over the past three days.” 

“Wait, meaning what?”

“Meaning I watched you stare at clothes without any clear idea of what you were to do with them. Meaning I watched you confused by closed doors. Meaning I spent twenty four hours helping you walk in straight lines and stand without fainting. Meaning countless other things that I’m not particularly inclined to discuss. In short, yes, Newton, I have noticed.”

“Um, yeah,” Newt says, feeling vaguely weird about this whole thing. “Good. So ah, well, what’s your interpretation of the fact that it takes me four minutes to button my shirt, for example?”

“My interpretation is that you are mentally and physically exhausted, still recovering from the PPDC’s attempt to break the seizure I’m certain you had as you were—doing whatever it was that you were doing.”

“Yeah, okay, so I think—” Newt breaks off, trying to gear himself up for communicating the dopamine conjecture that had caused him causality problems earlier. 

Hermann is absolutely motionless.

“So I think I might not just be tired,” Newt says. “I think I might have a relative dopamine deficit. I think I’m normalizing, just FYI, I’m pretty sure I’m normalizing pretty quickly, and I might even normalize all the way back to baseline, but um, a mildly dopamine-deprived state would explain this tremor and periods of rigidity, and certain subjective memories I have that are consistent with just a bucketload of dopamine release from my ventral tegmental area.” 

That was fine, he’d gotten through that just fine, with no creepy blue-tinged thought turning. None at all. 

Hermann readjusts his position on the bed and turns to face Newt. He pulls his good leg beneath him, leaving the bad one outstretched. Without speaking, he reaches over, pulls Newt’s hand up by the wrist, and releases it slowly, mid air.

Newt catches his drift, so to speak, and holds it there, in empty space, palm down, fingers spread, as steady as he can make it, which, alas, is not really 'steady' at all. 

They both watch it shake subtly, until Newt makes a fist and drops it.

“Yes,” Hermann says, with all the confidence of Newt’s neurochemical knowledge, “you could be correct.”

“I know,” Newt snaps. “I’m looking for an odds ratio, dude, not conceptual validation. Get with the program.”

“Impossible,” Hermann says crisply. “Conceptual validation is all I can give you.”

“Thanks,” Newt says, hearing the strain in his own voice. 

Hermann holds up a hand. “Whether your current motor difficulties are a result of exhaustion or of a dopamine-poor state within certain neural circuits, either way, Newton, you are vastly improved compared to yesterday at this time, when you could not unbuckle your own seatbelt.”

“Ugh,” Newt replies. “Was it necessary for me to know that?”

“Yes,” Hermann says. “I believe it was. For what it’s worth, however, I think you’re likely correct. In fact, I think that you experienced a similar state of shorter duration the first time you drifted, and again, post our combined drift in Hong Kong. I think we both did. I think your—”

Hermann cuts himself off.

“What?” Newt demands.

“Nothing,” Hermann says carefully.

“It doesn’t matter,” Newt says, “because I know what you’re thinking.”

“I am sure you do not,” Hermann snaps. “Will you stop being yourself for twenty seconds?”

“Not being myself is exactly what I’m doing, actually, most of the time now,” Newt says, speaking maybe more loudly than he should be speaking and coming up on one elbow, “take a look at the bathroom; you might find itinteresting you perfectionist bastard. You are going to endlessly piss me off if you keep omitting vital information out of some weird impulse to protect me from your pessimistic thoughts or whatever it is you’re doing. I don’t need protection from you. I need protection from me, okay, and I’m handling it. Handling my own protection detail.”

“You are an endlessly fascinating mess of mistaken assumptions,” Hermann snaps. “I’m trying to shield you from your own reaction to what I have to say.”

Wait.

“You find me endlessly fascinating?” Newt asks.

“No.”

“You just said you did,” Newt points out.

“That is hardly germane.”

“It’s a little bit germane.”

“By all means, take this conversation on a tangential path. I couldn’t be more pleased.”

“How did the drift feel to you?” Newt asks. “In a word.”

“Overwhelming,”

“Yeah, a different word.”

“Intoxicating.”

“The eighteen hundreds called, they want their lexicon back, but yes. Agreed. Euphoric. Here’s the thing, Hermann, the first drift? The first drift, didn’t feel that way. I don’t know what that implies exactly—“

Liar, his brain whispers. Liar.

“I don’t know in a factual way, but I know what it suggests to me, it suggests that there was some element of neurochemical synchronization, maybe even manipulation there, as if—”

“Newton,” Hermann says, sliding closer.

“As if they were adapting the principle of reward to reinforce the urge to integrate into a collective consciousness, as if they mapped it out, VTA to nucleus accumbens via the medial forebrain bundle, as if they laid it down, co-opted it in a neural trick of interfacing an ever-less-foreign piece of biological hardware—a software manipulation over a transient hardwired connection, a permanent coupling of reward-circuitry to the execution of a peer-to-peer protocol, human to kaiju, verse to anteverse, across the open breach—”

He’s not sure what’s happening, he doesn’t know these walls in double-overlay, in stereo. Oh god, he thinks, we’re networked, we’re networked, we’re networked, we’re net worked, the net effect of this is that we’re being worked. He’s got the most capacity, he steps straight onto the dark and glowing stage, standing on the nexus of disparate mental hardware, there is no rush like this rush, the rush of a one in a binary circuit, the focal point of a massive angry cloud of foreign screaming, yes I laid you down, he thinks, yes this was my doing—a decade-long riff that shreds the fabric of your inner lives in this dimension that is mine. It is mine you understand, you never should have come here. A ceiling is falling on him, he’s blending with Hermann, cut up, homesick, mutilated brains are shrieking a stereo chorus in his thoughts, ‘we have to break this,’ someone says, ‘we should have loaded him ahead of time,’ ‘Dr. Geiszler can you hear me Dr. Geiszler can you talk.’  Euphoria, elation, with a vicious lyric edge. His thoughts aren’t thoughts, not anymore, they’re polyphonic harmonies unifying that which he’d dissected into parts.

“—to my abject amazement,” Hermann is saying quietly. Conversationally. 

“What?” he whispers, allowing Hermann to pull his hands away from his temples.

“You are fine,” Hermann says. “We are in San Francisco. You have been successful in nearly every sphere you’d care to consider.” 

“San Francisco?” he slurs, feeling like someone has hulled out his brain and replaced it with alcohol. 

“Yes,” Hermann says. “In a hotel room, where you are, as is typical for you, thinking in a manner that is too rash for your current constitution.”

“Dopamine,” Newt says, feeling it, feeling it hardcore.

“Yes,” Hermann murmurs, fussing with Newt’s collars. “Apparently.”

“You know,” Newt says, still not entirely sure what’s happened, but flashing serially through Hong Kong, vague memories of Hypothetical Rain, sharper memories of pancakes, a bathrobe-clad shower, and days of wearing Hermann’s borrowed shades. “I—”  he breaks off and sits abruptly, as he feels the warm gush and the copper taste of nascent epistaxis.

Hermann doesn’t even ask him what’s wrong, just presses a tissue into his hand.

“EPIC Rapport,” Newt says weakly, giving the tissue a minimal flourish, knowing that Hermann will understand what he means.

“Entirely typical rapport,” Hermann counters. 

“Those opposing hypotheses just demand empirical testing,” Newt says indistinctly, pinching his nose shut. 

“Perhaps later,” Hermann replies.