Designations Congruent with Things: Chapter 2

“I like your brain,” Newton says, a non sequitur that doesn’t feel like one.

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

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: None.

Chapter 2

The question of what one should do immediately post an averted apocalypse doesn’t have an intuitive answer.

This perhaps explains why, when Newton decides to proceed back to their shared laboratory space, Hermann labels that a “reasonable course of action” and follows him through knots of human exuberance and into the quiet lees of corridors less trafficked.

After weaving through the peripheral edges of the spontaneous chaos converging on the main hanger, it occurs to Hermann’s esteemed colleague that Hermann is along for the prototypical ride, again, and so Newton begins, or more correctly resumes, his perpetual monologue.

Hermann lets the man go at it unopposed, expecting that, despite his mixed verbal signals, Newton does have something specific in mind, if for no other reason than his pace through the metal corridors of the Shatterdome suggests a definite goal.  

Hermann supposes that after the events of the previous twenty-four hours, Newton deserves the benefit of the doubt.

That, or a sitter.

For god's sake, what had the man used to construct a personal, unapproved, modifiable, transportable, drift interface? Or, more appropriately, what vital piece of equipment did he dismantle in order to put the thing together?

Hermann ought to look into that.

In fact, that should be the first thing he looks into.

He attempts to find the answer in his own mind. The act of reaching back into Newton’s memories is instinctive, but the man has sat amidst the mechanical wreckage of his own hands, surrounded by things he’s pulled apart and rebuilt in so many iterating memories that Hermann is surrounded by a blur of radios, circuitry of electric guitars, patch-clamp apparatuses, microscopes, microphones, internal combustion engines, computers, a Volkswagen—

Hermann shakes his head and gets a reminder of his headache in reward.

He will look into Newton’s destruction of property in the conventional way, by examining the makeshift drift interface and determining from where its component parts have been stripped. 

This should, probably, be the first thing he looks into.   

He has the option of simply asking the man, but Newton is currently hypothesizing on the neural-net nature of hive minds in a vague stream of consciousness punctuated with a host of analogies to marine life, Star Wars, and variations on the theme of “but how would that even work, man?” sentence endings indicative of unfinished avenues of thought through which Hermann has no plans to be actively dragged.

Hermann has his own avenues of thought to wander, and most of those are converging on the idea that he and Newton have been irreparably altered and possibly physically damaged by the Drift. 

Perhaps it’s time to stop following Newton and instead make an effort to get Newton to follow him.

To the medical bay.

When they arrive at the laboratory, he’s sorted himself to the point he feels sufficiently organized to make such a suggestion and rationally back it with logical arguments, but his intention collapses when Newton proceeds not to his own side of their shared space, but to Hermann's.

This is rarely a good sign.

It’s also surprising.

It’s also surprising that he finds it surprising.

Somehow, Newton has ruined his thought processes.

In blithe unawareness of Hermann's multilayered misgivings, the other man simply stops, crosses his arms, and looks intently at the expansive, regimented mathematics covering the relocatable blackboards with an unfamiliar and therefore uninterpretable expression.

The man is still talking—he’s talking over and through whatever impulse has pulled him to Hermann’s blackboard. At some point in the last few minutes, neural-net conjecturing has morphed into speculations on the evolutionary inevitability of the bilateral form, which Hermann has heard before and finds less interesting than Newton’s newfound attentiveness to mathematics.

He blames the Drift.

Correction.

He credits the Drift.

“So we, at a fundamental level, saved the world, man.” Newton shifts away from science and into vague, if merited, self-congratulation, his eyes on Hermann’s chalk as if he’s simultaneously reading and talking. “I mean, at a minimum, we provided the theoretical underpinnings of a world-saving protocol, so I’m pretty sure that if there’s an after party, we’re invited. But the question is, where is it, what are the mechanics by which it’s being orchestrated, and how much consumable alcohol is there in the Shatterdome? Because we’ve got, I don’t know, a ridiculous amount of methanol, but I’m pretty certain that while methanol is great as a kaiju fixative, it will render humans blind if consumed.”

“Yes,” Hermann agrees, anything more he might have added scrambled and delayed by an extraneous memory that snaps to the fore at the mention of consciousness-altering organic compounds that shouldn’t be consumed. He spends a brief interval uncertain which of them had imbibed half a bottle of mouthwash in a strange, irrational attempt to gain some kind of mental relief after the first kaiju attack had indirectly dismantled his laboratory and his life at MIT.

Hermann has heard it said that, after the Drift, talking is often rendered superfluous. 

He now understands what the Jaeger pilots mean when they discuss this phenomenon. If he makes an effort, he can pull forward memories that aren't his own, but, more concerning, if he makes no effort they come forward anyway, at unpredictable intervals, offering insights he's not sure he's grateful for and interpretations fraught with unmappable bias. He feels he can and does communicate with Newton without words, forming interrogatives and receiving answers. It’s important to keep in mind, however, that he's not interrogating Newton. He's mentally interrogating his memory of Newton circa three hours previous, and that is quite a different and possibly misleading epiphenomenon of uncertain duration.

Nevertheless, it does result in the subjective perception that verbal communication is unneeded.

For most individuals it does.

It’s extremely apparent that Newton is experiencing no such phenomenon.

Or if he is, the man is hiding it well.

“So we’re agreed. We’ll suggest methanol to no one,” Newton says, verbally engaged but still staring at Hermann’s wall of mathematics, still disheveled, his hair a mess, his clothing torn, one eye bloodshot. “We need that methanol anyway. For science. Obviously. I’ve already requested specimens of each of the downed kaiju, but what we really need is some high quality, unfixed samples we might be able to set to work on cloning, I mean, if it works for sheep, it’ll work for giant alien sea monsters.”

That is enough to ensure the coupling and reengagement of Hermann's brain and mouth.

“What?” he snaps. “Newton. You cannot be serious. Did you put the word cloning and the word kaiju in the same sentence? You reckless, thoughtless, heedless—” Hermann trails off, unsettled by the uncharacteristic silence with which his list of irresponsible adjectives is being met.

Usually he doesn’t get so far before being interrupted with a countered catalogue of diametrically opposed descriptors.

He isn’t sure what to make of this.

Newton stands next to him, still staring, fixedly staring, at Hermann’s wall of mathematics.

Hermann wonders what has caught his attention amidst the logical progression of thoughts in chalk.

It's possible the man is looking for some error, some unexplored application or implication that he's seen or intuited via the Drift.

It's possible Newton is seconds away from rewriting or reworking the entire thing without so much as a by-your-leave.

It's possible that Newton's understanding of mathematics is now more nuanced, and he's mapping the borders of his borrowed biases, much as Hermann is struggling against opinions foreign and familiar, none of which he can call his own with certainty.   

It's also possible Newton is staring at Hermann's mathematics because he's exquisitely distractible when exhausted.

Upon reflection, the latter possibility seems the most probable.

“You wish there was certainty there,” Newton says, quietly arrogant, which is, admittedly, Hermann's favorite subtype of Geiszlerian arrogance, “but there’s not. There’s only probability and confidence intervals, especially when you’re dealing with something as complex as colliding spatial dimensions. The nature of the universe is statistical.”

Newton is correct, of course.

Hermann plans on admitting no such thing.

“So you did pick up something from my mind,” Hermann replies, a dry, verbal cover over his awareness that Newton has gathered more from the Drift than Hermann has ever been able to effectively communicate to anyone. By intention or necessity. 

It’s a depressing thought.

“Everyone knows that,” Newton says. 

Hermann doubts this pronouncement, but he does not doubt that Newton believes it.

“It’s quantum mechanically dictated, dude; you’d have to be living under a rock not to know.  There’s a nonzero probability the Breach reopens,” Newton continues. “There’s a nonzero probability that it opens again, somewhere else.” 

“Vanishingly small,” Hermann replies, with a stiff sweep of the hand.    

“But not zero.” Newton studies the wall of equations with an eerie familiarity and more naked interest than he usually displays. His fingers drum a quick sweep over the leather of his jacket.

Hermann looks away from him and at the lines in chalk. 

They stare at the mathematical spread, the one that should be his, the one that feels like theirs, and it occurs to Hermann that perhaps they’re both caught in a psychological defense that had always been his alone—to consider the mathematics in lieu of considering something else—so they look at it now because they don’t want to look at the disembodied, partially dissected brain of a kaiju on the other side of the lab, because, in tracing the ordered ranks of chalk, they can look away from the split open halves of their own minds. 

This is an impulse that should be solely his own, an impulse Newton has, in point of fact, disparaged—this look from life to math. But it’s now an impulse displayed by Newton; Hermann had been staring directly at it until he’d looked away from his own reflection in his conceptual opposite, a man who had likely buckled under an unidentified foreign influence, without even identifying it as such.

He doesn’t like the implications of Newton’s open appreciation for his mathematics.

Their historical posturing really ought to be maintained.

Hermann can’t fault him though, because he himself feels confused, briefly and entirely, not certain which of them it was who’d wanted to be a musician, which one of them had been tormented by his peers, which of them is bold, which of them is careful, which of them—

“I like your brain,” Newton says, a non sequitur that doesn’t feel like one.

Hermann likes Newton’s brain as well, creative, irregularly ordered, more rigorous than he’s ever openly credited, cheerfully and distressingly reckless, as if nothing could hold it in a defined track except for the ending of the world.

But he doesn’t say any of that.

“You are not to clone a kaiju,” he says.

“Aw,” Newton replies, but it is, unfortunately, more suggestive of monosyllabic endearment than disappointed acquiescence.