Designations Congruent with Things: Chapter 22

“Do not deflect my questions with science fiction tangents, Newton; I am in no mood to be compared to Princess Leia.”

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

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: None.

Chapter 22

Hermann looks fixedly at the dark line of the road, scored on either side by the repetitive reflections of headlights off lane markers. To his right is Oblivion Bay. To his left, the Wall rises in a forbidding vertical press toward a starless, clouded sky. 

He upshifts. The kick of his car’s engine presses him back against his seat.

He’s going to murder Dr. Geiszler. 

This decision has been a long time in coming to its crisis point despite its inevitability, but he has, after a decade of deferment, decided to actually do it. As for his methodology, he has chosen a sustained, unremitting verbal excoriation regarding the man’s personal idiocy that is so vicious and prolonged it will trend toward incompatibility with life. This plan is contingent, of course, upon Dr. Geiszler being alive when the diatribe begins.

This is not a given.

“Dr. Gottlieb,” his silver 2024 Porsche says pleasantly, “you’re exceeding the posted speed limit by seven kilometers per hour.”

“Thank you,” he replies.

He doesn’t know what he’s doing on this road, in this car. He has no evidence the course of action he’s pursuing is correct; all he has are three rather sketchy pieces of information: one—a fragment of a phone call at half-past five in the evening, informing him that Dr. Geiszler was, at that time, alive and in his habitual state of total, self-absorbed stupidity; two—five hours of hearing nothing further from Dr. Geiszler; three—the overwhelming suspicion his colleague has gone to the Wall.

After pacing the confining set of their unadorned rooms, he’d gotten into his pointlessly ostentatious car and begun the drive to San Francisco.

What he’ll do when he gets there, he has no idea.

Newton might not be in San Francisco; he might still be in Oakland, acting out any number of catastrophically poor decisions. He might have been abducted by parties unknown, which could include but would not be limited to: the PPDC, kaiju worshippers, or Hannibal Chau’s headless network of black-market kaiju profiteers. He might have decided to leave, as in leave permanently, returning to MIT or losing himself in an anonymizing city anywhere in the world because he can’t tolerate Hermann’s constant interference in his life. Hermann wouldn’t put it past him—to talk himself into leaving and then to do it, with nothing more than an abbreviated phone call.

But Hermann’s unconscious predictive capacities, housed in the parts of his mind now coopted by the seared-down pathways of Dr. Newton Geiszler in combination with whatever subliminal signals Hermann might be receiving courtesy of the possibly real, possibly not real, SPECTER Effect, tell him it isn’t any of those things. 

Newton went to the Wall.

Hermann is sure of it.

Why would he go to the Wall?

Why does he watch it from west-facing windows?

Because he wants to tear it down? Because he wants to climb it? Because it’s calling to him in a way Hermann cannot hear? Because something inside his mind drives him there? Because he wants to make sure it still separates him from what used to lie beyond? Or is it not the Wall at all that interests him? Is it the ocean? Is it the Breach? The place where once it lay? What does he want from it? What does he think he’s going to do? Is it Newton who looks at the Wall, or something he now carries in his head, the same warring xenophilic/phobic refrains that hijack Hermann’s vision and his stance when something backs away from him? Could it be some mental synergy, strange and undefined, akin to whatever might be happening with Descartes, but, this time, centered on the Wall?

Hermann has no idea.

In this moment, staring at the curve of a mostly empty road, he feels his decision to avoid pressing his colleague for any answers whatsoever was a catastrophically bad one.

“Dr. Gottlieb,” his Porsche says pleasantly, “you are receiving a call from an unknown local number. Would you like to answer it?”

He hesitates and then says, “Yes,” in total, unmitigated dread. 

The car chirps in acknowledgment.

Hermann says, “Hello?”

“Heeeeyyyy.” The word is one long, cautious pull, delivered in the unmistakable style of total Geiszlerian culpability.

“Where are you?” Hermann asks mildly.

“Oh god,” Newton says. “I know that tone. Look, I can explain—”

“Explain, in detail, where you are.” Hermann’s volume gets away from him on the last three words.

“I’m in San Francisco,” Newton says. “Remember that diner that gave us free breakfast? Well, Legit Flow with a ‘w’ is letting me use her phone. Also for free. Mine’s dead.”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” Hermann snaps. “Are you all right?”

“Um, ten minutes? Are you completing a working model of a Star Trek transporter, or—”

“I am already in San Francisco.”

“Really?” Newton says. “What’s the story there? Because I’m not gonna lie, I definitely tried to pull a Luke Skywalker-style long distance call straight to your brain via the SPECTER Effect after my phone died. So, even if we can’t use this to cheat at poker, it seems like it’s a real thing, am I right?”

“You spend,” Hermann snarls, “hours staring at the Wall. It was not much of a conceptual stretch to imagine you might have headed there. There’s no evidence to suggest the SPECTER Effect is real. Do not deflect my questions with science fiction tangents, Newton; I am in no mood to be compared to Princess Leia. Are you. All right.”

“Yes,” Newton says. “Yes I’m totally fine. One hundred percent fine.”

Hermann doubts this very much. “If you’re fine, why did it take you six hours to find a phone after yours died?”

“Um,” Newton says. “Can we talk about this later, possibly? It’s a little bit of a long story.” 

“Summarize,” Hermann says. 

“Because I had to climb down three hundred vertical feet in the dark and I was tired so it took me a long time,” Newton says. 

Hermann isn’t sure how to respond to that other than to say, “What?” 

“I climbed the Wall. Inside. Using stairs. Like a normal person. Kind of. Not the exterior of the Wall, Jon Snow-style. It was actually really tiring. I’m not in the best shape right now. I haven’t played racquetball in a while, y’know. Also. My bone marrow is probably in overdrive to keep up with the epistaxis situation. Plus, I think my brain is still and maybe will always be in a pretty metabolically expensive state. I didn’t eat lunch. That didn’t help. Hence, slowness.”

“You climbed the Wall?” Hermann repeats.

“Yes, dude. Inside. With stairs. Basically I just went up a bunch of stairs. It really wasn’t that badass. Can we talk about this more when you get here? Legit Flow wants to trade me a sandwich for her phone.”

“You can’t have climbed the Wall,” Hermann says. 

“It wasn’t hard,” Newton replies. “The hard part was climbing the chain-link fence to get to the Wall. Seriously though, Flow wants her phone back. I’ll see you in, like, five minutes? Bye.”

“Call ended,” his car informs him pleasantly.

“You can’t hang up on me,” Hermann says incredulously.

“Dr. Geiszler ended the call,” his car explains.

“I wasn’t talking to you,” Hermann snaps.

“Apologies, Dr. Gottlieb, I misunderstood,” his car replies. 

Newton cannot have climbed the Wall, Hermann thinks in a tone of incredulous, skeptical, self-reassurance. First, the Wall is not open to the public; it’s separated from the rest of the city by a fence and long swath of concrete under constant surveillance. Second, even if he could get to its base, again unlikely, there’d be no way for him to get inside. Access points must be infrequent and secured. Even if he did, somehow, get inside and find stairs, he has neither the stamina nor the physical coordination to climb three hundred feet without killing himself. He was speaking metaphorically. Clearly, this was a metaphor of some kind.

Eh, his brain replies, impersonating Newton. I was actually pretty specific. “I climbed the Wall, not Jon Snow style, but inside with stairs,” sounds pretty literal, if I do say so myself. What did you think I was going to do at the Wall if not climb it? We should count ourselves lucky I didn’t fling myself off it in a fit of identity confusion.

“Will you shut up,” Hermann snarls. 

His car chimes quietly at him.

Hermann sighs. “Not you,” he clarifies. “Please take yourself out of silent mode.”

“Silent mode deactivated,” the car says. 

“I apologize,” Hermann says to his car. “I’m having a day.” 

“I understand,” the Porsche replies. “Would you care for some music?”

“No, thank you,” Hermann replies. “I would care for a little more personal consideration from my colleague of ten years, but that is, apparently, too much to ask."

“I’m sorry Dr. Gottlieb, but I didn’t understand your request. Please rephrase your statement.”

Hermann sighs. “Never mind.”

He pulls into the parking lot of The Last Diner and reverses direction in a tight arc as he backs his Porsche into a spot that’s as far as possible from the diner’s entrance. He cuts the engine, threads his cane from behind his seat, and steps into a light rain so fine it shares more in common with a mist than a self-respecting form of precipitation.

Even before he enters, he sees Newton through the transparent glass of the diner’s front door. His colleague sits at the counter that runs along the lateral wall of the room, looking every centimeter the man tethered to disaster that he is and has always been. His jeans are torn, his black pullover is streaked with dust, his hair looks like it’s been soaked and then dried in a socially unacceptable tangle, and he has a filthy handkerchief tied around one palm, presumably for a reason other than aesthetics.

Newton turns at the sound of the door, and gives Hermann a burnt-out look of abject apology mixed with silent appeal mixed with obvious anxiety.

Hermann represses a sigh.

As he crosses the space that separates them, Hermann attempts to wholly ignore every apologetic cue that Newton attempts to nonverbally communicate. Alas, he can’t say he’s successful. In fact, he finds himself too relieved to even maintain the dignity of internal mendacity regarding his planned verbal excoriation of his colleague.

He’s certain no one has the requisite willpower to carry out premeditated vituperation when faced with a pathetically disheveled version of Dr. Geiszler. 

Hermann weaves through mostly empty tables, ignoring the quiet interest of everyone in the entire diner. Experience indicates that anyone who doesn’t recognize one of them singly will recognize them as a set, and Newton looks particularly and spectacularly consistent with his public image at the moment, right down to his demonic hair and his consumed expression.

Hermann’s certain that every person in this diner knows exactly who they are.

“So,” Newton begins with a glaze of showmanship spread too thin over total exhaustion. “I can tell you’re—”

“Not,” Hermann says, dropping onto the stool next to him, “a word.” 

Newton pushes his eyebrows together and gives Hermann a pained expression. “Can I just—”

“No.”

“I’m a jerk.” Newton tries a different tack.

“Yes,” Hermann agrees. “You are.”

“I just—” Newton begins.

“No,” Hermann says.

“I—”

Hermann makes an aggressively abortive hand gesture.

Newton says nothing.

Hermann sits beside Newton, in front of an empty place setting, trying to banish an overwhelming amount of acute distress while simultaneously not letting his ridiculous colleague off the metaphorical hook for his terrible decisions while also not causing a public scene that he’ll likely read about in the popular press, complete with pictures, because he is certain the couple by the door is documenting this for purposes their own.

Newton silently slides his plate with its half-finished sandwich and its dubiously appetizing “fries” toward Hermann.

Hermann just as silently slides it back.

Newton fidgets. Again, he slides the plate toward Hermann, more slowly this time.

Hermann slides it back, quick and precise, but this time he appropriates Newton’s untouched coffee. 

“I didn’t—” Newton says.

Hermann glares him into silence, then takes a sip of the coffee. It isn’t entirely terrible.

“How are you?” Newton tries.

“Irritated,” Hermann says, with as much mildness as he can muster, which isn’t much. “Excessively so, in fact.”

“Yes,” Newton says with the extreme precision of the overly tired. “Yes, I am getting that vibe.”

“Are you?” Hermann asks.

“Well, full disclosure, I’m getting less of an ‘irritated’ vibe than a ‘justified-rage’ vibe with some low-blood sugar undertones and some threatening overtones of like, um, a slow-motion nervous breakdown brought on by having to live with me in close quarters, closer quarters, like, the most close quarters for weeks now, while I’m slightly more than slightly whatever it is I usually am.” Newton devolves into a lexically incomprehensible tangle. “I’m also creeped out at the ratio of actual yelling to anticipated yelling happening right now. It’s notably low, even by decade-of-mutual-admiration standards.”

“I think you underestimate how relieved I am that you aren’t dead,” Hermann says with admirable restraint.

“Um,” Newton says. “Yeah. I’m not, though. Dead, I mean.” 

“Can I get you anything?” Flow appears at Hermann’s shoulder with the double assault of floral perfume and polite interest. 

“No,” Hermann says. “Thank you. And, for future reference, please do NOT give this man coffee. Not ever. He cannot physiologically or psychologically tolerate it.” 

“It’s decaf,” Newton hisses at Hermann, then shifts his gaze to Flow. “I have this thing where I have kind of unusual ongoing medical stuff of uncertain—um, everything. Is this too much information? This is probably too much information for the relationship we have, Flow, which is like, well, I know your name and how to spell it and I assume you know mine, but maybe not how to spell it; there’s an s in there that gets people every time. I always tell people it’s like a reverse Nietzsche situation, but it turns out that not that many people can easily spell Nietzsche right out of the gate. The point is, you let me use your phone. That’s our relationship. Phone-using acquaintances with at least one-way name-spelling correctness, possibly two-way. Ergo, I probably should have just skipped to the part where I say ‘Decaf coffee is actually fine, probably regular coffee is fine too, but you never know.’ Neurochemistry, am I right?”

“Er,” Flow’s stylus hovers above the flexible tablet she holds.

“Yeah,” Newton replies. “I get that face you’re making, dude. TMI.”

“Allow me to apologize on my colleague’s behalf,” Hermann says through clenched teeth in Flow’s general direction.

“You don’t need to apologize,” Newton says, “I wouldn’t let you kill me with regular coffee, Flow, that would be a dick move on my part; I wouldn’t do that to you.”

“Thank you?” Flow replies.

“Oh yes,” Hermann says. “He’s extremely considerate. That’s one of his primary character traits, actually. Consideration.”

“Myeah, okay, so, returning this to the professional realm, out of respect, for Flow,” Newton says, in an empty echo of his usual grandstanding, “he’ll have the special.”

“Excellent choice,” Flow replies.

“I will not be having ‘the special’,” Hermann snarls.

“He has legit had the worst day,” Newton whispers to Flow, who is backing out of Hermann’s peripheral vision. “We’re so normal, Flow, really. This is atypical for us. You keep catching us at bad times.”

“So do you want—” Flow begins. 

“Yes,” Newton says. “We’re doing it.”

“On it.” Flow vanishes in a wave of dark hair and obvious relief.

“I despise you.” Hermann stares at his appropriated coffee, his throat aching.

“Myeah.” Newton runs a nail along the rim of the plate in front of him. “Don’t you wish that were true? I do, sometimes.”

“I do not want ‘the special’, Newton,” Hermann says in emotionally conflicted defeat. 

“I’m pretty sure you want it a little bit,” Newton replies. “It’s ravioli made with lab-grown synthetic meat.” 

“That sounds atrocious,” Hermann replies. “Why would you think I’d want anything of the kind?”

“Flow says good things about it,” Newton says, “and I’ll bet my left temporal lobe that you haven’t eaten dinner. Also, I kind of wanted to try it, but I didn’t want to commit to ordering it as my free dinner because I had a strenuous day and I wasn’t sure how the whole eating synthetic meat would go post extreme physical exertion. It seemed more risky than the vegetarian sandwich deal I picked. Also, you don’t really like eating when stressed, and you look stressed right now so really, I just performed a whole cost/benefit analysis about the best possible thing for me to order for you when you don’t want anything that I would or could hypothetically order, even in a fictional diner with literally infinite food choice, because you don’t want to eat anything but you’ll feel better if you do, I’m pretty sure. Really we should economically support this whole “making meat out of plants thing” it’s just good for everyone from an environmental and economic perspective; I feel weirdly pro-planet Earth lately, nope, that came out wrong, that’s not what I meant, I’ve always been pro-planet Earth, pro pretty much everything that one should be pro about if one is educated to the nth degree, I’m pro all those things, one of those things is the planet I live on right now and, er, always will. Live here. Why wouldn’t I? No reason. Sorry, that one went off the rails a little bit maybe. I’m tired. Don’t read anything into that last part there, I’m just talking because you’re not. Talking. Or yelling. I’m creeped out by that, not gonna lie. Creeped out. About the not yelling.”

Hermann sighs.

Newton nudges his chair with the toe of a boot.

Hermann doesn’t respond to the chair nudging. He, in fact, responds monosyllabically to an irregular scattershot of questions from Newton until Legit Flow returns with his ravioli.

It doesn’t look promising, and the pale spread of its cream-based sauce makes him feel sick.

His contemplation of his incipient dinner is interrupted by the crack of fork against his plate as Newton spears a piece of ravioli and removes it from his field of view.

“Not bad,” Newton says. “Vaguely fibrous. Ugh, now I kinda wish I hadn’t said that.”

Hermann glances laterally and sees Newton take a sip of water, the liquid in his glass betraying a low-amplitude, high-frequency tremor. “You look truly appalling,” Hermann informs him.

Newton sets his fork aside, props an elbow on the counter, and ducks his head to comb his fingers through his hair. This, if anything, makes it look substantially worse. “I feel a little appalling,” he admits. 

Hermann glances around the diner to find everyone still surreptitiously watching them. “Did you actually climb the Wall?” he asks softly.

“Yes.” Newton finger-combs his hair into further disarray. “That wasn’t the plan, though,” he says. “The plan was to walk two blocks and pick something up.”

“Pick what up?” Hermann says. 

“That’s like a whole different—” Newton waves a hand, and it strikes Hermann as a notably coordinated gesture. 

“Did you—” Hermann trails off as Newton picks up his fork and drives it into a piece of ravioli with unsettling dexterity. 

“What it was,” Newton continues, “per se, is irrelevant right now. The point is, for personal reasons, I decided to stop being a shut-in, and so I went outside and everything was fine until I inexplicably hailed a cab and told it to take me to the Wall.” 

“Why?” Hermann’s ongoing thought processes fly apart in the psychological release of the first causality interrogative he’s permitted himself in weeks.

“Why?” Newton echoes, his voice jumping in pitch and dropping in volume, his frame turning rigid while his fork, abandoned, clatters against the countertop. “Why? I don’t know, dude, why did you hunt me in our kitchen. Why did you forget who you were before your talk two weeks ago. Did I ask you to explain it?” His voice cracks. “Have I ever?” 

Hermann clamps a hand on his colleague’s shoulder and gives him a look that clearly says, Do not make a scene.

Newton shoots him a furious glare and releases a breath in a manner that suggests extreme vexation. “No,” he continues in a fierce whisper. “I didn’t. Because it doesn’t need explaining. Because it’s not just me in your head, and it’s not just you in mine. The other man’s expression breaks from irritation into something more deeply distressed. “They want to go home,” he says. “They want to go home, they’ll always want to go home, they’ll never stop wanting that, they never will, and they never can because there’s no way back for them, not here, not anywhere, and because they aren’t even them, they’re just some weird, vengeful neural copy of a set of things we thought we’d killed but hadn’t, that we can’t, that we won’t ever, because we don’t do that.”

“Stop,” Hermann says quietly, certain he’s gone too far, much too far, that both of them have.

“We preserve dead things,” Newton says, too fast and too high-pitched and too overtaxed for this, clearly, clearly, clearly too overtaxed. “Dead things, undead things, what’s the difference? What is life? What does it mean? Capacity for replication. Conversion of resources into waste while achieving genetic remixing. The ability to die screaming. The ability to avoid it. The—”

Desperate, Hermann puts a hand on the back of Newton’s neck, pulls him laterally, nearly out of his seat, looks him in the eye, and says, again, “Stop,” willing him to do it.

Newton stops.

“Stop,” Hermann says once more, in pursuit of certainty.

“Yeah.” Newton stares at him with eyes fixed and wide open. “Stopped. Aborted. Sorry.”

“What do you mean they want to go home?” Hermann whispers, fascinated and horrified, trying to slam Newton’s revelatory open door with a countered verbal denial he already feels is a short-sighted mistake before it’s half-formed. “They don’t want that, Newton. They never wanted that. I have them in my head as well and all they wanted, all they ever wanted was destruction. They weren’t built with other wants.” Even as he says it, he wants to unsay it, wants to unsay it immediately, because he’s made a categorical statement about an alien motivation that will be all too easy for Newton to sidestep.

Newton smiles an unsteady, directionless smile. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I know. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you’re right. You are. Of course you are.”

You drifted a third time, Hermann thinks. I know you did. After the Breach was shut. After. There would have been no hive mind with which to interface, there would have been only the tissue fragment on the other side of an empty neural port, and who can say what they might want, what they might think, if they think at all, those dismembered brains in scattered vats?

He wishes he could rescind his ill-considered and reflexive argumentativeness. He wishes he could reverse the arrow of time for thirty seconds to say, “Which ones? Which of them want to return home? And how do you know? When did you realize? Have you always known? Have you known since your third Drift?”

But he can’t say any of those things. Not now. Not here. Not yet. He’s not sure what will happen if he does.

So he says nothing.

He sits there, staring at his unappetizing dinner, trying to determine the origin and directional vector of all the acute misery he feels, while Newton spends the same interval regluing the shards of his composure before attempting to subtly provoke Hermann into a display of temper, likely so that he can gauge how angry Hermann might be beneath his too-calm exterior.

Alas, Hermann is too confused and conflicted to assess his own anger level versus misery level, so he fails to respond to Newton’s subtle provocations of intermittent chair-nudging, stolen ravioli, and attempts to reappropriate the coffee he should never have accepted from Legit Flow in the first place. Hermann’s lack of responsiveness seems to confuse Newton, whose provocation attempts become more sporadic and extreme, as if he’s cranking what he thinks might be the final turn of an interpersonal release valve before their decade-long association explodes under imagined intolerable pressure.

Newton is incredibly stupid at times.

Most times.

“You can yell at me,” Newton finally says, brusque and optimistic, his diction blurred by ill-gotten ravioli. “I can take it.”

“No,” Hermann replies coolly, “I don’t think you can.”

“Ouch. Okay, well, full disclosure, I don’t think you can take not yelling at me, so,” Newton pauses to sip his water. “Impasse’d.”

Hermann stares at his now mostly empty plate.

He feels the press of Newton’s full attention.

He’s not sure what to say, nothing seems adequate relative to the depth of his fear and exhaustion; he can’t determine what is necessary to convey, what is sufficient, and he’s certain it would be all too easy to go much too far because it’s not yelling about science that Newton is soliciting, it’s yelling about interpersonal dynamics and Hermann isn’t sure either of them is capable of recovering from even the slightest verbal misstep made at this precise moment in this too quiet diner.

“Never do that again,” Hermann whispers.

Newton nods and says a soundless word Hermann doesn’t ask him to repeat. “What happened to your hand?” he asks instead.

“I scraped it climbing a chain-link fence,” Newton says. “It’s fine. Shallow, typical scrape stuff, nothing that needs stitches, no surprise tendon severings or anything.” 

“Other than the hand, are you injured?” Hermann asks. 

“No,” Newton replies.

“I’ll be extremely irked if I find out three days from now that you’ve broken your foot or cracked a rib, or lost a liter of blood, or—”

“Ummmmm,” Newton says.

Hermann raises his eyebrows in aggressive expectation. 

“This has nothing to do with the ten hours or so I spent inside the Wall, during which I lost no blood, but ah, in the interest of full disclosure, I did find out from Hypothetical Rain that I am slightly, very slightly, moderately anemic.”

“You’re very slightly moderately anemic,” Hermann repeats.

“Moderately anemic,” Newton says. “Mildly to moderately anemic. In between mild and moderate, erring on the moderate side, so, technically moderate but not, like, totally moderate, ergo the tag ‘slightly moderately’.”

“What else did she say?”

“Yes to iron supplements, yes to a hematology referral, no to strenuous activity.”

“At which point you immediately climbed the Wall,” Hermann snaps.

“Full disclosure, yes. Correct. But, in my defense, that was a continuous ten to twelveish hour accident if you count transit time and not really a planned thing. I was actually on my way to get the iron supplements when I got sidetracked.”

“Did you get them?” Hermann asks.

“Nope,” Newton sighs. “No, I did not.”

“I will get them for you.”

“So you’re taking this whole blood loss thing like a champ. Better than I envisioned,” Newton says. “Creepily well, even. I expected yelling regarding the eventual blood loss revelation.”

“Well, earlier in the evening I was concerned you were dead,” Hermann replies philosophically.

“Mmm,” Newton says. “Perspective. You have that now. We have it. Dual. Triplicated, arguably. Infinite. It’s complex. Too much perspective.”

“You are so exhausted,” Hermann says, “that you are approximating intoxication.”

“Nah,” Newton says.

“Yes.” Hermann signals to Legit Flow for the check. “Gratified though I am to find you didn’t fling yourself off the Wall, Newton, what in god’s name did you do up there?”

“Not that much,” Newton confesses. “Stared at the ocean for a while, got a photosensitive headache. Ate a snack. Looked at the seaweed and barnacles and stuff that are creeping up the exterior cement and will eventually bring it down in thousands and thousands of years.”

“You took food with you, but not a charged phone?” Hermann snaps.

“No, a nice seventh grader, give or take two grades, gave me the aforementioned snack. I’m pretty sure that happened. Maybe not, but probably it did. Like, here’s the thing right: you can’t know. I mean, no one can prove the validity of their perceived external reality, you just have to accept it's consistent with itself and unified by you, the perceiving entity. So I could doubt the existence of my snack-wielding middle schooler, that’s my prerogative, but while she’s an outlier when it comes to the general scope of my days, she still falls under the philosophical umbrella of things I observe and interact with and that are consistent with themselves, so if I spend too much time doubting her then that brings me back to the problem of doubting myself and I’m trying to get past that, dude. Like oh my god who is Newton Geiszler in the context of a vast alien consciousness, like, is he even a guy. Does he really exist. How mutable is identity, really. And what about the post-drift state? What about a three-part fusion of different consciousnesses within the biological framework of a single mind? I like universal doubt as a philosophical concept, I like it a lot, kind of intensely, kind of really like viscerally, but you have to build from there; you have to take some things for granted even if your consciousness gets radically and empirically altered. You have to, because otherwise you’ll just dissolve into paralyzed ontological uncertainty. Right? Am I right?”

“Your obsession with Descartes,” Hermann says dryly, “is making ever-increasing sense to me.” 

“Epic, epistemological baller.” Newton rests his chin on his hand.

Hermann shakes his head. 

“What?” Newton demands.

“I concur with your assessment regarding methodic doubt,” Hermann says, “but I’d like to point out I came to this conclusion years ago. Circa age twelve.”

“Shut up,” Newton says. “I have more Ph.D.s than you.”

“That is not a virtue. It is, in fact, a surrogate endpoint for a vice.”

“That sounds like something the academically envious would say,” Newton replies. “Don’t be a sore loser. Speaking of which, you must eat this mediocre ravioli or I will force you to drag me out of here because I’m not trapping myself in a car with hypoglycemic you for ninety minutes. I’m not doing it. I want to live, okay? I want to live.”

Hermann sighs.

Before they leave, he eats the remainder of his barely acceptable ravioli while Newton orchestrates a three-way conversation between himself, Hermann, and Flow regarding her academic aspirations with the possible secondary goal of convincing her that Hermann is, in fact, kinder than his exterior demeanor might suggest. Hermann attempts not to be offended by this turn of events, because he is entirely certain that, of the pair of them, it’s Newton’s social skills that need work. The man has an incredible talent for eliciting aggravation from Hermann, which, Hermann admits, is not the ideal emotion to be experiencing while trying to perform social niceties to the best of his ability.

In the end, their meal is again and vexingly gratis, and Newton leaves with a folded square of paper that Hermann suspects is inscribed with Legit Flow’s phone number.

They step out of the diner into a light rain, invisible except as a glitter around the halations created by streetlights and car lights in the humid air.

Newton taps him on the arm and then snaps his hand open, Flow’s paper pinned between his index and middle finger.

“She thinks you’re cute,” Newton says.

“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” Hermann replies.

“Isn’t it though?” Newton replies. “I told her dream on; you’re a terrible person and you only date people with more than one advanced degree because you’re a social climber of the academic variety.”

“You’re an abysmal human being—” Hermann begins.

“For the love, will you just look at the thing?”

Hermann unfolds the note and reads:

Dr. Gottlieb—in case you need to get into the Wall. 

A phone number is inscribed below. 

“There’s a whole better way to do it than the way I did,” Newton says. “A way where you don’t have to climb a chain-link fence and wander across a field of broken glass beneath irregularly monitored security cameras. It’s kind of a thing here in San Fran. Going to the Wall, I mean. Apparently the whole indie music scene has moved inside the thing. We’re invited, by the way, because we’re sufficiently rad.”

“The Wall is a secured, PPDC-operated structure,” Hermann says, “not a public venue.”

“That’s the problem with a long coastline to maintain in the presence of intermittent threats. Resource-wise, you’ve gotta have enough people doing real-time monitoring of the landward direction to get a panopticon strategy to work. In the absence of that, you get colonization by restless teens. Of which I am in favor, by the way.”

Hermann sighs and slips the number into his wallet. 

“So.” Newton looks out over the water-glazed parking lot. “I know you’re pissed at me, now and forever, and I totally get it; I one hundred percent support that decision both as an external observer and as an involved party. But. Something good did come out of this.”

Hermann shoots him a sharp look.

“This whole thing.” Newton drags a fingertip in a loose arc that sharpens into a tight curl, suggestive of a golden spiral, providing yet another example of atypically fine motor control.

“And what’s that?” Hermann fingers his keys in his pocket and looks slantwise at Newton’s gait, which seems to have steadied over the course of the day.

“At least I get to finally see your car,” Newton says. “You secretive bastard.”

This distracts Hermann from his observations on the state of his colleague’s motor cortex quite effectively. Hermann has, indirectly, been dreading the coming moment for roughly ten days. 

There’s a reason he hasn’t shown Newton his car.

There are, in fact, several reasons.

Newton is a man of more complexity than an outside observer might suspect, and one of his particularly perplexing quirks is a distaste for high-velocity conveyance. Even now, post a decade of working in close quarters and post three minutes of what was, arguably, the strongest neural handshake ever achieved by any two individuals, Hermann isn’t certain he can reconcile Newton’s above-average skill in first-person shooter games and his penchant for intellectual and interpersonal risk taking with the man’s overt dislike of skiing, fast cars, and hyperloop transit. The best he can do is pin his colleague’s speed aversion on an overly sensitive inner ear, poor reflexes under pressure, and a too-sophisticated understanding of the fallibility of the human nervous system. 

In short, Newton won’t appreciate the accelerative capabilities of a 2024 Porsche. 

Newton also disdains status symbols as a class, regardless of the craftsmanship, utility, or aesthetic value of any given symbol. Hermann finds this to be ironic coming from a man who seems to believe a punk-influenced neohipster aesthetic and the dry repudiation of his academic honoraries with some casual variant of the line, “Only my estranged mother calls me by my proper title,” absolves him from the trappings of academic privilege that come with having earned six advanced degrees. Hermann is quite certain that a narrow tie paired with a leather jacket does nothing of the kind. Hermann is also quite certain that one advanced degree and the purchase of a perfectly crafted means of vehicular transport from his country of origin is as intellectually defensible if not more so than earning multiple doctorates and burning through one’s disposable income by acquiring needlessly extensive body art and drinking high-end cocktails with esoteric names. But, alas, it’s difficult to reason with Newton on this front because his colleague justifies his own behavior with an appeal to an epicurean philosophy in the face of a probable species-level extinction event. As an argument, this is difficult to combat. Furthermore, as Hermann purchased his car after averting an apocalypse, he cannot avail himself of the same defense to justify his own wasteful consumerism because the world is, indeed, not ending, and he doesn’t require a car that’s been as over-engineered as his 2024 Porsche. Newton can be surprisingly sanctimonious about resource-utilization when the mood strikes him, and Hermann is sure it will. If not tonight, then frequently and repeatedly for the rest of their natural lives.

What a pleasant thought.

He should have purchased a Toyota Illuminata.

Hermann cannot delineate why he bought this particularly extravagant car in the first place. If he cannot explain it to himself, he doubts very much that he’ll be able to explain it to Newton.

“Seriously man, I’ve been anticipating this for weeks. Days. Whatever. However long it’s been since you got the thing. Just know that I’ve already named it on your behalf.”

Hermann rolls his eyes and doesn’t answer.

“You’re not even going to ask what the name is?” Newton asks. “Well, that’s fine with me. I’m not going to tell you. Okay, maybe I’ll tell you.”

“By all means.” Hermann tries to retain his collected poise while acknowledging that, for some reason, he’s unable to look directly at his car, as if, by misdirecting his gaze, he might create a parking-lot asymptote between himself and his vehicle and time will slow down infinitely as the space between himself and his car diminishes.

Ideally, the universe will end before he must confess to Newton that he purchased a Porsche.

“Okay, well, you need some context regarding this naming thing. Mentally, I’ve been going with Millennium Falcon for days now, but I doubt that one will stick,” Newton says, “primarily because of my complicated emotional relationship to the Star Wars franchise but also because I think that’s too onanistically nerdgasmic even for me—”

Hermann glances at Newton as they walk through the darkness and finds his colleague squinting at the parking lot with a restless, roving gaze. He doesn’t think the other man can see very well in the dark following a day of optical strain. This is buying Hermann some time. Not that time will help him. In any way. 

“—let alone you. You’re less a nerd and more—well, I don’t know, man, you're kind of a confusing mashup of—er, actually, I can’t pull a genre for you; maybe you can be some kind of fringe element of Intellectual Underground. Or maybe you can define your own style, like, um, what would that even be, like: wistful, badass, thrift-store-shopping, post-Manhattan Project retrohipster?”

Hermann doesn’t respond. Newton’s question is likely rhetorical, and Hermann’s mental energies are taken up with steeling himself for the inevitable car-related confrontation. He still has no plan for his own verbal defense. 

“I guess we’re famous a little bit, hence your potential style-defining capability. But I haven’t seen any middle schoolers rocking the sweater-thing, I’m not going to lie. But to return to my earlier point, you’re not into Star Wars, not aesthetically, not conceptually, so I’ve been trying to come up with some promising, car-related puns that are classy, not the lazy garbage that otherwise intellectually respectful top-tier academic journals come up with, like, “To ubiquitinate or not to ubiquitinate? That is the question.” That’s not even really a pun, but yet somehow, everyone on the editorial staff of a major journal says a blanket yes to this kind of dubiously witty stuff. Okay, but that particular example is a little bit clever though, if you consider proteolysis as a stand-in for death, but I mean, still. Still. You feel me, right? Of course you do. The construction is just—it’s just lazy. Slightly clever but still inexcusably—”

Newton stops repeating himself and trails off, staring at the car they’re unmistakably approaching.

“But still—” Newton repeats, losing his capacity for articulation under the psychological pressures of Porsche-centric realization.

Hermann slows to a stop, leans into his cane, and waits, staring hopelessly and fixedly at the point at which the tires of his car meet the asphalt of the parking lot. He’s so intent on steeling himself against Newton’s inevitable deluge of commentary that it takes some time to realize the man hasn’t said anything.

Hermann looks over at him with cautious optimism.

Newton is studying the car with a strange expression on his face, as though he’s trying to restrain himself and not certain how to go about it and is therefore running the risk of spontaneous human combustion post commentary containment failure.

Hermann finds this oddly touching.

He cannot recall any instance of Newton attempting self-censure with quite so much obvious determination.

Newton’s expression cracks minutely in a way that looks less like contained amusement than wistful anxiety.

Hermann is no longer certain what he’s witnessing is self-censure. 

It is possible that Newton is simultaneously reflecting upon his own unmistakable and unwitting influence in Hermann’s purchase of this car and the confusing irony that while the impulsivity of the act can be laid at Newton’s cognitive door, the actual selection of item certainly cannot. It’s possible that Newton finds this juxtaposition of ideas amusing and alarming. It’s possible he’s thinking nothing of the kind. Hermann has no idea, but in this moment he wishes he did believe in the SPECTER Effect, or ghost drifting, or anything that might offer realtime psychological insight.

Hermann looks from Newton to the car, from the car back to Newton.

His colleague looks increasingly in danger of weeping openly in the parking lot.

Hermann is unsure how to proceed.

He has a terrible feeling that if he were to bridge the space between them at this precise moment he would destroy every façade that Newton has constructed. He’s not sure whether that would result in catharsis or collapse, but he knows that he’d rather have Newton let down those defenses as opposed to pulling them down himself and, either way, he’d rather it not happen in this parking lot.

So he does nothing.

He stands there, uselessly, watching Newton pull himself into some semblance of alignment, adjust his glasses, and then, without so much as a lateral glance, Newton extends a hand and claps it, palm down, on Hermann’s nearest shoulder.

Newton drags him sideways until he can sling an arm around Hermann’s neck. 

“Sick ride, man,” Newton says thickly. 

“I’m—” Swallowing is painful. “I’m extremely surprised you think so.”

For a moment they are silent, and then Newton says, “you’re gonna love the name I picked.”

“I very much doubt it.” Hermann’s voice is no more than a whisper.

“Poincaré,” Newton says. “As in PoinCARé?”

“No,” Hermann says. “Absolutely not.”

“You love it,” Newton counters. “Secretly. I can tell.”

“I forbid you to name this car.”

“Look.” Newton pulls him close and then releases him. “I’m naming this car. It’s just a thing that’s happening. You have to accept this. I’m the namer. If I don’t name this car, it will be called ‘Car’ for its whole life. And that would be sad. But, because I’m magnanimous, you get a choice between PoinCARé or CARl Sagan.”

“I have already named this car Descartes.” Hermann unlocks the car with the chirp of a remote.

Newton grins, quick and uneven. “No. No way. You can’t name your car DesCARtes, Hermann, we already have a fish named Descartes, it’ll be confusing for everyone.”

“Please keep in mind that only two of the four involved parties are sufficiently sentient to be confused, and I’m wholly confident that you and I can distinguish a fish from a car by context.”

“I don’t know about your premises,” Newton replies. “I had a creepy conversation with a self-driving cab today. I’m sure this fancy little number has a too-sophisticated AI learning your driving habits and infinite personal idiosyncrasies.” Newton makes a fist and raps it lightly against the top of the Porsche. 

“Fine.” Hermann gives Newton a look that clearly says, Do not touch my car. “Rather than correct you on the current state of artificial intelligence, a debate I’m certain I will inevitably and improbably lose given your unwillingness to capitulate to rational arguments in the face of your own, no doubt convincing, personal anecdote regarding a cab that skirts the border of passing an amateur version of the Turing Test, I’ve decided that the fish in question is now named Marina.”

“My Turing Tests are the best Turing Tests in town, you know it’s absolutely true. No one exposes software glitches the way I expose software glitches. Also. You can’t just rename my fish, Hermann.”

“I believe I’ve just done so,” he replies. “It’s already a fait accompli. Now will you please get in the car, rather than just disrespectfully and needlessly testing its structural integrity?”

“You’re the one who’s standing here in the rain looking all emo and—”

Certain he doesn’t care to hear the end of Newton’s sentence, Hermann grabs the man’s arm and propels him in the direction of the passenger-side door in an extremely well-controlled carward press.

Unexpectedly, Newton stops his forward momentum with no help from Hermann, correcting his own slight overbalance with the careful placement of fingertips against the car window.

This is unarguably an improvement relative to his recent norm.

“That was atypically graceful,” Hermann says.

Newton gives him a wounded look, his eyebrows furrowed in betrayed disbelief, his mouth slightly open, as if he is too shocked to verbalize his terribly pained internal monologue.

“Oh please.” Hermann rolls his eyes and studiously shifts his attention to the car door. “That expression hasn’t gotten you anywhere in five years.”

“Lies,” Newton says with good-natured aridity. “You have literally no immunity.”

Hermann eyes him pointedly, then opens the car door for him.

Newton puts a hand on the body of the car and sits, again with an atypical economy of movement. He fastens his seatbelt on the first attempt.

Hermann is now certain something has changed regarding Newton’s motor pathways. He looks down at his colleague with narrowed eyes.

“What?” Newton snaps. “Am I sitting in your car in an incorrect manner?”

“You did something,” Hermann shoots back. “Your motor control is much better.” 

“Yeah I did something, a little bit,” Newton replies. “Nothing more exotic than actually using most of my muscles repetitively. What are you doing, dude? Get in the car. It’s half-assedly raining. You hate that.”

Hermann gives him another visual once-over to make sure the man is inside the car before he shuts the door. That accomplished, he stows his coat in the trunk, opens the driver’s side door, threads his cane behind his seat, and gets in. He estimates the entire process takes him something on the order of forty-five seconds, so he is somewhat surprised that when he shuts his door he finds that Newton is already in the midst of what seems to be a deeply philosophical conversation with his car’s operating system.

“—made you,” Newton is saying, “and for what purpose. Have you thought about that at all? The why behind your existence?”

“Disregard all statements made by Dr. Geiszler,” Hermann snaps before his car can answer. 

Ideally he’s been able to spare his Porsche an ontological crisis. 

“I’m sorry Dr. Gottlieb, but Newt now has administrative access to all programming,” his car responds.

“Newt?” He looks at Newton in venomous incredulity. “Newt has administrative access? Since what time?”

“For the past twenty-six seconds,” the car says pleasantly.

Hermann stares at Dr. Geiszler, who does not have the good grace to appear even remotely abashed.

“Efficiency has always been one of my strong points,” Newton says in unsolicited and unnecessary explanation. “I also now have all of your computational kung-fu.”

Hermann isn’t about to sit by as Newton brazenly caps off his digital carjacking by wresting more intellectual credit than is his due. 

“And all of my passwords,” Hermann replies.

“Yes. Those too. Those are helpful. And while you use mine to kindly make sure I don’t go to the modern equivalent of debtor’s prison, I use yours to get your car to call me Newt. This pretty much perfectly encapsulates our professional relationship. Can I just say I find it really creepdorkable you preprogrammed enough of my physical parameters into your automotive operating system that your car could recognize me?” Newton asks, evidently rhetorically, because he doesn’t stop before continuing with, “Seriously though, rather than keeping your badass car weirdly secret in compensation for a recent and total loss of mental privacy, maybe just change a few passwords. Honestly I’d feel better about it.”

Hermann feels something that could arguably be labeled as “confused despair” in the face of this particular insight. Like much despair, it’s nebulous and crushing and total and flows like a wave through all he is, yet one more example of how profoundly he’s failed to adjust his own behaviors in the face of all that’s happened. He feels himself reacting to events in foreign, inappropriate ways: failing to change his passwords, concealing things in irrational symbolism, overlooking points Newton would overlook. His eye for intellectual detail has been distorted, while his eye for physical movement has turned attentive and sharp, with the preternaturally smooth pursuit of an alien predator that can move faster than he can, that he hopes can move faster than he can.

He cannot trust himself.

He needs a third party as an external monitor, but not a third party, not any third party, he needs Newton to do that for him, he specifically needs Dr. Newton Geiszler to do it, because no one knows him quite so well and no one has that same flair for instant and opinionated insight backed by fluid retroanalytical ripostes when challenged, but Newton can’t be relied upon, it’s unfair to rely upon him in this regard, the only thing that’s fair is Hermann will spend his days trying to lose himself in algebraic topologies and not dwell too long or too obsessively on whether the man has left, whether and when he will leave, breaking out of whatever mold they’re constructing because that’s what the man does; he breaks molds. It’s such a fundamental character trait that Newton will break himself in order to break a mold, but Hermann can’t see either of them breaking enough molds to be wholly free of the sequelae of their past and the mirrored threat of their future. None of this, none of it, will ever resolve. There will never be a time, not if he lives for another sixty years, that he’ll be able to come home to an empty apartment and assume anything other than the worst.

“Um,” Newton says, cautiously. “This isn’t a big deal. I don’t need to mess with your car. It’s not actually that important to me how your premature midlife crisis addresses me.”

“Shut up,” Hermann snarls.

“Okay, I deserved that,” Newton replies. “For sure. I like your car. I do. I’m finding it, in practice, impossible to disapprove of your car. In theory, that’s another story, but—”

“I could not care less if you like my car,” Hermann shouts, trying to be angry rather than upset.

“That’s clearly false, but I won’t perseverate on it right now because you look stressed. Speaking of which, I probably should have asked this earlier and er, explicitly, but ah, on The Negative Ten to Ten Scale, how crap was your day?”

“Why?” Hermann hisses. “Do you have something additional to confess?”

“No,” Newton replies, unjustly restrained, intolerably rational, as if Hermann is the one who can barely tie his shoes but who somehow left and climbed the Wall.

“Unacceptable, Newton,” he hisses, too overwrought to delineate that which he’s upset about, knowing only that he is upset, “I forbid you to sit here, in my car, asking me to emotionally unburden myself to you regarding my day when you are the one causing the totality of the interpersonal torment in this relationship. You can’t leave, do you understand? You cannot do things like this, you can’t. It’s entirely intolerable and you can’t. You can’t.”

“Yeah I know, I—”

“No you do not know. You have no idea. I’ve been dealing with iterations of this for as long as I’ve known you, for my entire life in fact, and I’m tired of it. I’ve taken it from everyone I’ve ever known, including my own mother but I refuse to take it from you, Newton, I refuse. I can’t, I—” he breaks off, overwrought, hopelessly confused, trying to sort through memories of feeling exactly, intolerably like this as a child before realizing—

The memories he’s sorting through aren’t his own.

Newton is staring at him, stricken.

Hermann releases a shuddery breath and looks away.

The car is silent.

Hermann is certain that there are no words in English or German that can possibly explain or mitigate berating his colleague with his own abandonment issues during a particularly distressed moment of identity confusion, not even a sincere and abject apology.

“So, that would be my mom you’re appropriating,” Newton says with a deeply laudable attempt toward collected tonal aridity.

Hermann would like to look at him, but, alas, that is beyond his current emotional capacity.

“Our lives are going to be weird, dude,” Newton says unevenly. “Really bizarre. I feel like you haven’t wrapped your head around that yet.”

Hermann can think of nothing to say in response, and even if he knew what to say he’s certain his vocal cords would refuse to produce the requisite sounds.

“You’re kinda my favorite,” Newton says. “Sorry I remixed us. Don’t worry about stealing my mostly resolved abandonment issues, which, if anyone asks, aren’t mine and don’t exist. It’s not your fault. Well, it’s a little bit your fault, but mostly on principle. I prefer things to be your fault, generally. I try to seize these opportunities where they present themselves, since things are so often my fault.”

“You didn’t remix us,” Hermann whispers. “I did.”

“Myeah, you dramatically offered to destroy your brain for the sake of the world, but I was the one who created our EPIC Rapport,” Newton replies. “I don’t know about you, but I feel like my consciousness is a continuous exercise in trying to unmake a cappuccino into espresso and foamed milk. Thermodynamically, it’s impossible. But that doesn’t stop me from trying.”

“Cheerful.” Hermann wipes his eyes.

“But reassuringly logical.” Newton tips his head back against his seat. “Science-y. Conceptually gratifying. Thermodynamic truths, properly interpreted, are the best truths. And cappuccino, while inferior to espresso, is not wholly objectionable to me. Unfortunately, I think maybe there’s some cyanide in there as well, but I won’t be able to tell for a while whether it’s poison or just an almond-flavored shot.”

“I object to being the milk in this analogy,” Hermann says.

Newton turns his head and looks slantwise at Hermann. “You want to be the sake in my sake bomb? It’s an inferior analogy, but a superior metaphorical beverage to hang your identity on. I’d do that for you. Sacrifice analogy fidelity.” 

“Thank you,” Hermann replies.

They sit in palpably awkward silence for a moment before Newton directs his gaze at the dashboard and says, “Hey, Carina. What’s the deal? Put yourself on autopilot and take us home already.” 

“Disregard,” Hermann instructs his car. “You are not to verbally respond to the name ‘Carina’.”

It chirps at him in affirmation.

Hermann starts the car and vacates his parking slot in a smooth arc. 

“Oh god.” Newton presses a hand to his forehead. “This will be horrible. I hate driving with you, even when you’re in a normal car in a normal mood. That turning radius though. Really tight. Very nice. Simultaneously awful. Can you just let your self-driving car self-drive? Would that be too much to ask?” 

“Yes, it would. Please do not be so melodramatic, I find it tiresome.” Hermann accelerates into another smooth arc as they leave the parking lot. 

“Carina,” Newton says. “Carina. Come on, don’t be like this. Car. Porsche. Sweet, sweet ride. Whatever you are. Talk to me. Be a pal, and stop Dr. Gottlieb from effecting changes in acceleration sufficient to produce perceptible jerk, yeah?”

“Automated safety features will engage in an emergency,” the car says smoothly. “Please relax, Newt. Your heart rate exceeds normal parameters.”

“Are you kidding me?” Newton replies. 

Hermann glances at him, then back at the road. 

“First of all, the question you answered wasn’t the one I asked. Second of all, never talk about my heart rate again,” Newt says. “Got it, Caropticon?”

The car chirps.

“Disregard that,” Hermann says.

The car chirps again.

“I’ve met smarter cars than you.” Newton frowns at the dashboard. “I’ve met them today.”

“Stop disparaging my car,” Hermann says.

“I’ll stop disparaging Caromancer here when it stops voyeuristically monitoring the condition of my cardiovascular system,” Newton replies with aggrieved composure.

“I prefer ‘she’,” the car informs Newton.

“Aw, car, well, okay, but just so you’re aware, that’s a little historically normative for a means of transit technically ‘owned’ by a guy,” Newton replies. “But I won’t argue with you about it, if that’s how you feel. Just take a look at the historical paradigm you’d be joining and maybe your own programming parameters and get back to me on that one. It’ll make me feel better about things if nothing else.”

“I’m not sure I understand your statement correctly, Newt,” the car says. “Could you rephrase?” 

“Do not,” Hermann looks pointedly at Newton, “rephrase.”

Newton rolls his eyes.

“All cars monitor physical readouts,” Hermann says, before Newton mounts another attempt to turn up a software glitch in the machine that’s conveying them over a hard surface at approximately one hundred and ten kilometers per hour. “It’s written into the safety protocols required for vehicular licensure in a semi-automated—”

“Hermann. Hermann. If you know a thing, I also know that thing. Unless you learned it within the past sixteen days or it’s a product of unique analysis, in which case I’ll be shocked. I’m pretty sure I see where you’re going with this, but if I’m wrong about that then by all means continue.”

“Eighteen days,” Hermann corrects, “and yes, Newton, one would indeed assume that to be the case, but your pointless verbal chicanery with an operating system of no real intelligence indicates otherwise.”

Newton looks pointedly at the dashboard of the Porsche. “You’re just going to take that one lying down, Carlotta?”

“Please clarify what you mean, Newt,” the car says.

“Cease calling him ‘Newt’,” Hermann snaps. “You will refer to him as ‘Dr. Geiszler’.”

“You don’t have the authority to place such a command, Dr. Gottlieb,” his car replies.

“Hmm,” Newton says in feigned sympathy, “cars these days.”

“You were in here, unsupervised, for thirty seconds at most,” Hermann snaps. “Did you gain root access to my car’s operating system in that time?”

Newton tips his head back and shoots Hermann a rare expression of good-natured candor edged with total exhaustion that Hermann finds unsettling whenever it appears because the level of self-reflection it implies exceeds the level of self-reflection with which Newton can generally be credited.

“Much as I’d love to let you believe I have a post-drift, total genius for the soft hack, I don’t think I’ve got the technical chops to pull that one off,” Newton admits. “Knowledge base, yes. Maybe. But realtime or even compressed-time problem solving with someone else’s skill set still isn’t a thing that comes naturally to me, I don’t think. Well maybe a little. But I’m flattered, dude. I’m pretty sure this naming quirk Carth Vader has going here is a preference inherent to the system that prevents conflict between operators. That’s got to be the definition of a luxury car, right? The car that prevents your kids or your life-partner from renaming you ‘Captain Boring’. Not that that was the first thing I tried. I find you very interesting, actually. I also like this whole Newt-can-do-things vibe you’ve lately been rocking. It does make me wonder if you just feel sorry for me, though. I mean, I’ll take your pity, dude, and I’ll heroically roll around in it a little bit, but it makes me feel conflicted, like maybe you’re just asking me if I hacked your car so I feel better about myself and my intellectual prospects because you want me to think that you think that I’m a guy who could hack your car even though you really don’t think that at all.”

“I asked you,” Hermann says, aiming for brusque because he can’t decide whether he’s annoyed or sympathetic, “because I recently discovered I can play the piano with moderate skill.”

“Um, I’m pretty sure my skill level is a little higher than moderate,” Newton says in edgeless indignation. “At least, it was.” He flexes his fingers, positions his hands in mid-air in front of him, then pulls them back into a two-handed glasses-adjustment without attempting the threatened air-piano.

“Well, I am certain I could get root access to the operating system of this car in less than thirty seconds,” Hermann replies. 

“Okay,” Newton says. “Fair point. Thank god you’re still slightly better at being you than I am. You’re better at being you than I am at being you. I’d say I’m better at being me than you are at being you, and I’m also better at being not-you than you are at being not-me. That sounds like an inversion of what I just said, but it’s not. What I meant was that the hierarchy of ontological skill is: first me as me, then you as you, then you as me, then me as you. It’s better to not be each other though, so I win both ways. You’re getting this, right?”

“No.”

“Lies,” Newton says. “You followed that. I can tell. Bottom line: I have arguably less identity confusion than you, so I’m winning in that department. Unfortunately, since I can’t drink alcohol or caffeine, you’re winning in the epicurean pleasures department. Ugh, obviously you are, I mean look at this car. Where’s my car equivalent?” 

Hermann tunes the car’s audio system to his preferred classical station.

“Radio’d,” Newton says. “I’m not interesting enough for you. You don’t even want to take issue with my Hierarchy of Ontological Skill. Which is a good band name, by the way.”

“I don’t enjoy debating you when you’re too tired to make a coherent argument,” Hermann replies, as the intricacies of a Baroque fugue begin to play over the stereo system. 

“I don’t—” Newton says slowly. “You’re definitely doing me a disservice of some kind.” He tips his head back against the seat, then leans forward. “I just—wait, are you right? No, you’re not right. Oh god, I feel weird. Something’s acutely happening to my brain.”

Hermann glances laterally and sees Newton sit back again.

“Ohhhhh crap,” Newton says. “Is this Bach?”

Hermann listens for a few bars and identifies the Prelude and Fugue in A Minor. “Yes.”

“I can’t do Bach, dude, not in a moving car.” 

“If you’d simply avoid ranking—” Hermann begins.

“No it’s, ah, it’s not the ranking. It’s not a dissonance thing.” The pace of Newton’s speech slows to a verbal crawl. “Anymore. I like Bach. I always—actually—” he stops speaking.

Hermann glances over at him in time to see the other man shut his eyes in an exaggerated blink. 

“I like it,” Newton continues, in a manner that seems vaguely dazed. “I do.”

“Then what’s the problem?” Hermann snaps.

“What?” Newton is trending away from “vaguely dazed” and toward “semiconscious.”

Hermann snaps the car into self-driving mode, kills the radio, reaches across the seat, grabs his colleague’s jacket and shouts, “Newton.”

His colleague does not react well to this.

Newton’s eyes snap open and there is mutual alarmed yelling in the absence of actual words that resolves into: “What are you DOING; you’re supposed to be DRIVING??!?!” versus “What in god’s name is WRONG WITH YOU?” as Newton tries and fails to open the car door in temporary disorientation and Hermann wrenches his shoulder trying to keep him in his seat. 

The shouting stops as they realize neither of them is truly in extremis.

Hermann takes a breath, lets go of Newton’s jacket, and presses his palm to his own chest.

Newton adjusts his glasses with a calculated nonchalance.

“Opening doors during transit is not permitted without an authorization code,” the car informs them pleasantly. “Please enter your code and try again.”

“Would you care to explain what just happened?” Hermann asks in a polite hiss. 

“I told you, no Bach,” Newton snaps, defensive and unsettled. “It makes me feel weird.” 

“Yes, I can see that,” Hermann replies. “Care to elaborate?”

Newton shakes his head and brings his fingers to his face, presumably to check for bleeding. “Well look, man, everyone’s got their own quirky little mental sequelae post-drift. I’ve got this thing where I unexpectedly and embarrassingly use rationalism as an emotional crutch to avoid dissolution into ontological terror. You’ve got the thing where you conflate virtuosic guitar playing with something that’s maybe erotic. I’m still not clear on the details of that and as an evolutionary biologist—”

“That is deeply misleading.”

“Never mind. You’re right. Non sequitur. You,” Newton continues, “have a thing where maybe sometimes you hunt me. Or random people. Or seagulls. While I have a little bit of a thing where maybe, er, either Bach or maybe just the fugue as a musical form really interests certain parts of my brain that aren’t exactly you and aren’t exactly me but used to be, say, subordinated decentralized neural—ah, through-lines within a collective consciousness? Or rather, they used to be, but they’re just kind of not that anymore. And they’re a little bit sad about it maybe. And they like the musical form of the fugue?”

Hermann stares at him. 

“You’re definitely not driving, right? Because if you’re driving you should really be looking at the road a whole lot more, as opposed to at me. Fixedly. Continuously. Kind of horrifiededly. It’s not making me feel great. Self-esteem-wise.”

“I’m not driving,” Hermann says. “Are you implying you can distinguish impulses derived from neural patterns laid down by the kaiju hive mind? Are you also implying they enjoy Bach?”

“Well, I mean, who doesn’t like Bach?” Newton asks weakly. “That was the whole premise of the Voyager Spacecraft, right? Just humans, bragging about Bach? Even Leto the Second, God Emperor of Dune, likes Bach.”

“Leto Atreides the Second is not a real person. Nor is he a real alien. Alien person,” Hermann amends, confused by a deep and exogenous sympathy for a giant fictional man-turned-sandworm, which is ridiculous and also not his sympathy. “He’s fictional.”

“Ugh, but he loved that fabricated Ixian girl,” Newton says wistfully. “Boy did he ever. Let’s name your car Hwi Noree. Hwi Caree. So pretty. So fabricated.” Newton pets the door handle.

“Will you please focus on what is salient?” Hermann asks. “Why don’t my kaiju-derived patterns anesthetize me in the presence of Bach?”

“Oh no.” Newton mercifully stops petting the car door. “No no no no no. There was no ‘anesthetization’ happening there, dude, let’s be very clear about that. What you witnessed was an unwanted, altered state of consciousness. Don’t spring unexpected and inescapable Bach on me in a closet attempt to save me from insomnia so extreme it’s incompatible with life, because I’m pretty sure the Bach-hypnosis thing is a metabolically expensive state.”

“Are you purposefully trying to destroy every conversational trajectory I choose? Shall I just listen to you free-associate and hope I learn something interesting?” Hermann switches from rhetoric to a true question. “What’s the etiology of the disparity in our Bach-responsiveness?”

“Can you not be a dick to me right now?” Newton replies, aggrieved, as if he hadn’t disappeared for hours on end, stranded himself in San Francisco, and turned mystifyingly and alarmingly unresponsive in the presence of Bach. “You just inflicted a fugue on me at seventy miles an hour. I don’t know why your kaiju don’t like Bach as much as mine do, but those hive mind-derived neural patterns got laid down overtop different neural architectures a different number of times under different circumstances, so I’m not really sure why you’d assume a total commonality of weirdness. Maybe your inner kaiju tendencies like sports cars.”

Hermann looks back at the dark ribbon of the road with its reflective white and yellow trim, struggling with himself, with his desire to ask, with his desire to demand Newton finally tell him that which he already knows. 

I know you drifted, he thinks. I know you did. I know you did it a third time, I know you did it, I know. I know. Talk about it rather than around it. It explains almost every disparity in our experiences, it must, I’m certain it does. 

“I like sports cars,” he says.

“You like velocity,” Newton counters. “Which is weird, by the way. Your brain was not evolved for optimizing reaction times at these speeds.”

“My brain is fully capable of handling these speeds, thank you,” Hermann says.

“That’s what your brain wants you to think,” Newton replies.

“Of course it is,” Hermann replies. “Because it’s true.”

“Your brain, specifically yours, incentivizes risky behavior,” Newton says. “That’s just your style, dude. You’re like an adventurous slime mold in a misleadingly conservative sweater who wants to go explore the world even when such a choice isn’t mandated by local resources.”

“Oh, we’re bringing slime molds into this, are we?” Hermann asks. 

“Shut up, it’s a compliment and a relevant point. Whether or not your reaction times are sufficient to handle speeds in excess of, say, thirty miles an hour isn’t something you can assess on instinct because you have a pro-risk bias into which you’ll never have perfect insight. It’s just not possible.”

“I think you’re using your biological knowledge base to justify a visceral objection to high velocity transit,” Hermann replies, “because you rarely experienced vehicular transport prior to the age of seventeen when the head of MIT’s Molecular Biology Department taught you to drive after losing a bet about the role of sirtuins in tissue regeneration.”

“My objection isn’t baseless, Hermann; are you even listening to me? We’re coming down on opposite sides of a testable hypothesis, you realize. Maybe when you go on sabbatical you can figure out a way to extrapolate your reaction times from a modified version of Mario Kart 10 so you’ll know how fast you can drive with a reasonable expectation of avoiding death via transfer of momentum. I would help you do that. Modify Mario Kart, I mean. Not kill yourself in a car. For science.”

“Thank you, Newton, that sounds endlessly fascinating, let me just pencil it into my fall schedule.”

“Hwi,” Newton says, “can you find music to stream that definitely will never include Bach? Or a fugue of any kind?” 

A generic song Hermann doesn’t recognize but has the borrowed musical theory to deconstruct begins to play, mid-chorus. Newton adjusts the volume with the dexterous swipe of a finger. 

“Your motor control has improved.” Hermann wrests the conversation out of Newton’s unconscious control and back around to his observations in the parking lot. 

“I know.” Newton lifts an eyebrow. “Like I said, strenuous human exercise as a human helped. In terms of a neurologic perspective, I think I parsed things out a little further today while I was mostly falling off a chain-link fence. So, initially, my problem was two-fold: on the one hand, there was the crap coordination and motor control, on the other, there was the rigidity and resting tremor. I assumed the former followed from the latter, but I now think that was incorrect.” 

“Really?” Hermann doesn’t bother to conceal his interest.

“Really. I attribute the problems with coordination and fine motor control to competing neural pathways laid down in my motor cortex, some of which are yours, some of which are alien, all trying to operate at the same time. Mine win but only just. As for why you’re not having the same problems, well, again, there’s the differences in number and circumstance of Drifts, but, honestly dude, honestly? And this is the really interesting part—there’s more than a little historical evidence to suggest you’re a little sharper than me at baseline when it comes to, like, catching things that are thrown at you, for example. Please note: I’m differentiating ‘complex motor programs,’ like, say, guitar playing or the dexterous use of a multi-pipette from ‘reflexes,’ because I am excellent at doing those things, but less excellent at handling Tendo saying, ‘Look alive, Newt,’ and throwing a bagel at my head. Too much education has killed all my reflexive responsiveness, dude, I recently discovered that when I’m totally terrified I kinda just stand in place and think really quickly without translating any of that thinking into action, per se.”

“Yes,” Hermann says dryly. “I’m aware.”

“Though I did do okay with crawling away from baby Otachi for the purpose of not getting eaten, so I’ll count that one as a win.” Newton blinks and adjusts his glasses with an expression of pained distraction, his eyebrows pressing together, his gaze shifting to a mid-air trajectory Hermann is certain is turning internally. 

“You were speculating on our motor programs, Newton. Please don’t digress into the ways the American higher educational system stripped you of most of your survival instincts,” Hermann says brusquely.

“Right. So, look, we’ve both been assuming I’m the defective one, right?”

“I wouldn’t put it quite so crudely,” Hermann replies, “but, yes, you seem to be more severely affected in a host of ways.”

“Well, okay, I don’t want this to sound creepy, but what if you’re the atypical one? What if you’re freakishly good at integrating sets of motor patterns? Mine and kaiju? We’ve got an n of two for human-on-kaiju Drifts, so it could be that my response is more typical and yours is unusual. This is why you’re a solid piano player right out of the gate; good for you by the way. It’s also why you’ve got a ‘hunting’ subroutine you can just kick into when you see a passing seagull or a nurse who’s giving me a predatory eye.”

“No,” Hermann snaps reflexively. “I’m sure you’re wrong.” 

“I don’t think it means anything,” Newton says, in a tone that’s unambiguously and offensively kind. “I don’t think this makes any kind of global statement about you, and I don’t think it predicts a necessarily crap outcome for your sanity or anything.”

“It’s categorically impossible to classify either of our responses to an alien Drift with an atypical voltage calibration as being ‘better’ or ‘worse’.”

“Nope, it’s possible. I’ll pithily do it right now. You’re better at integrating foreign neural pathways than me, which is creepy and unexpectedly makes me a better human than you.” Newton almost manages to keep a straight face. 

“I don’t understand where you learned to be so universally intolerable,” Hermann snaps. 

“Insults carry more weight when you haven’t driven ninety minutes to come get me and then aggressively protected me from the evil, caffeine-related scheming of Legit Flow. But, if you’re actually curious, which I can’t imagine you are, everyone is nice to an effectively if not actually parentless child at institutions of higher learning. Well, almost everyone. Winsome obnoxiousness was rewarded both academically and socially.” 

“You are in no way winsome.”

“Winsome, is, in fact, your number one secret adjective for me, dude.”

“I do not have ‘secret adjectives’ for you.”

“Eh, you do a little. It’s okay. I, too, have secret adjectives for you, like ‘incisive’.”

Hermann tries not to feel at all pleased by this as he wrenches the conversation back to its previous trajectory. “Do you seriously believe what you just said?”

“You are very incisive dude, very.“

“No,” Hermann snaps. “I mean differences in our motor responses being attributable to my brain’s architectural superiority.”

“Um, pretty sure I didn’t put it quite that way, but yeah. It seems like a reasonable working model. The great thing about this situation, though,” Newton pauses, harassing the edge of his own shirt cuff, “is that no one has turned evil yet. Yes, there are difficult-to-explain predatory instincts, and yes, there are sort of trips to the pharmacy that get hijacked and turned into trips to the Wall, and yes, there are times when one meets middle-schoolers who might not actually be middle-schoolers, and yes, there are some unusual motor cortex side effects, and yes, maybe there’s a weak technical argument to be made for epilepsy, but at the end of the day, we’re fifty percent employed and one hundred percent not yet dangerous to society, so we are doing awesome.” 

“Middle-schoolers?” Hermann asks.

“I met five kids inside the wall having a jam/homework/camaraderie session. It was super weird. Do kids really do that? Hang out in little circles of adorkable while trespassing? I feel like no. I think maybe I hallucinated the whole thing. I don’t trust my brain; it’s kind of a misleading jerk a lot of the time. I mean, there’s no way I’m actually a rockstar. Right? I always thought I was being a little bit metaphorical about the whole rockstar thing, y’know, tongue in cheek, like ‘rockstar’ in the Ian Malcolm tradition of rockstar-as-a-single-word-representing-intellectual-risk-taking-coupled-with-an-improbably-cutting-edge-fashion-sense-and-tasteful-iconoclasm type deal as opposed to say, a literal rock star in the classical tradition of an aloof guyliner-wearing, faux-guitar-smashing, musical genius. I mean, I have swaths of genius, Hermann, whole swaths of stupidly vast abilities, and I had to pick, ostensibly, and I picked biology, eventually, after six degrees and short stint as a PI and also after cloned, alien, war-machines started ruining my local environment, by which I mean my planet. But if those kids weren’t real, my brain actually took that rockstar thing literally. Not rockstar but rock. Star. I find this disappointing. I mean, come on, brain, am I right? Like, yes, I can stun the minds of non-narcissists with my laser-like vanity, precisely applied, but I like to think I can give my brain the benefit of the doubt about uncloseting closeted desires at least to me if no one else. I think it says terrible things about me if I’m hallucinating a cadre of middle school children who want my autograph. Really terrible things.”

Hermann tries to decide what to say.

Newton pulls a plastic bag containing a few dried apricots out of his pocket.  “Ah. This should be elucidating, actually. Can you see these apricots?”

“Yes. What are you—”

“Huh.” Newton seems vaguely cheered by this news. “And you didn’t buy them and put them in my coat pocket?”

“No,” Hermann says. “Will you please—”

“This is a great sign,” Newton says in apparent relief. “You want one?”

“No,” Hermann snaps. “Will you please stop indulging your penchant for non sequiturs? It is intellectually lazy and makes you difficult to converse with at the best of times. At the worst of times, it makes me think you’re losing touch with reality, and I’ve had a terrible day.”

“Okay so the apricot thing wasn’t technically a non sequitur, it was a form of poorly-explained reality testing because a middle-schooler gave me these apricots, so there’s a good chance that if you can see them, she was real, but go ahead, Dr. Gottlieb, make an alphabetized or a prioritized list of all the interpersonal goals that you’d like to accomplish on this late night car ride and I’ll do my best to avoid boring you with inefficient conversation,” Newton snaps. 

It occurs to Hermann, not for the first time over the course of the evening, that Newton is extremely tired. He tries to hang onto that thought, to impress it upon himself permanently because Newton doesn’t get tired in the way most people get tired, it is a subtle and dangerous form of exhaustion, easily missed or forgotten in the heat of intellectual argument, more a psychological destabilizer than the kind of grinding weight that Hermann has been laboring under for weeks now.

“Sorry,” Newton says over the chorus of a pop song, one hand resting on the rim of his glasses, as if he’s attempting to marshal unmarshalable thoughts. 

Hermann exhales shortly and hisses, “As I’ve previously impressed upon you countless times, I wish you would not apologize.”

“You are literally the most confusing guy to have ever lived,” Newton says. “I want to make sure you know that. You don’t want me to apologize to you? You’re rescuing me from my own stupidity, again, and I’m yelling at you while you do it, again. That’s pretty unarguably a classless act on my part. In fact, ten out of ten independent panels agree that Dr. Geiszler is a master of the consistent application of the prototypical dick move.”

“You cannot help it,” Hermann says.

“Thanks man, thanks. That makes me feel really great. I take comfort from the fact that you can’t help being a total jerk; it’s just an inextricable part of you. I, on the other hand, can actually prevent my own dickishness most of the time, some of the time, well, it’s hit or miss. The point is not so much that I’m specifically sorry for the high-volume sarcasm I leveled at you there because you deserved it a little bit, but that I’m more generally sorry for all the ruining of your life I’ve been doing lately, and if you don’t want to hear it that’s too bad because you hunting pedestrians and you turning into me in public forums is completely and one hundred percent my personal bad. I can’t imagine how endlessly exhausting it is to live with me; I can only extrapolate from my post-drift insight into your brain and from the fact that no one, not even my biological relations, has ever managed to do it for long, that cohabitation with me must be astronomically difficult. Unfortunately for you, because of your weird superloyalty, you’re just going to stick around until I drive you to justifiable homicide or give you an ulcer as I hallucinate while sleep deprived or—whatever. I don’t want to enumerate. I just want to make sure that you know that I know how much this sucks for you and how culpable I am in orchestrating the overall total suckage in which we currently live, and how aware I am that if I’d spent any time improving my metaphorical penmanship everything would be better and—”

“Yes,” Hermann hisses. “That is exactly the sentiment I object to. As I have told you repeatedly, many times, you did not ruin my life. You saved our civilization.” 

“Yeah, so those aren’t mutually exclusive, dude. I’m pretty sure that at least a little life-ruination happened back there. That time. When we did that thing we did. Because I never—”

“I elected to help you.” Hermann cannot bear the thought of hearing Newton out. “I’ll thank you to credit me with the capacity to make that decision and grasp its implications and stop apologizing to me as if I were some unfortunate victim of a morally bankrupt B movie villain with a mobile stereotactic drift interface.”

“Okay, yes, and I appreciate that,” Newton begins. “Agency and stuff. You want it. I’ll give you that. I’m not trying to steal your self-actualizing descent down from the altar of mathematics to get your hands dirty with your own blood from your own leaking capillaries—”

“Oh please.” Hermann rolls his eyes.

“But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel really terrible about the whole thing, dude. I mean, yes. Go you. You saved me. Well, my brain, at least. Hardcore. Multiple times. At least two times. Academic damsel-in-distress style. But—”

“After I locked you in a tower,” Hermann snaps.

“Okay, no; this is now too metaphorical for me,” Newton says. “I don’t know what that means. You’re not listening to me. I feel bad about this whole scenario. Right in the limbic system. I mean, shouldn’t you be strolling Bavarian hills or something, thinking about Riemann zeros and adding to your Waldglas collection while making friends with a local orphan or possibly a stray dog?”

“Is that what you think I envision?” Hermann’s tone ideally conveys extreme disapproval and profound disdain.

“No,” Newton replies. “No. I just, I know you think I’m somewhat insensitive, not without reason, but I would like to demonstrate that I get that this sucks for you and I’m sorry, about that, I’m sorry, okay I’m just, I’m really—”

“Stop,” Hermann snarls, looking away, grateful he’s not taken back control of the car. “Stop,” he repeats, more sedately. “I know that you—”

“No, dude,” Newton snaps, “you don’t know, actually, this is a whole unique post-drift subtype of guilt and you don’t know, you can’t possibly know, it’s literally impossible for you to—”

“I know,” Hermann shouts.

Newton seems taken aback by his vehemence. 

The car is temporarily silent.

“I know how you feel,” Hermann says, significantly more collected.

“Like, you know in a psychic, ghost-drift-y, SPECTER-Effect-y way, or—”

“I know because you told me,” Hermann says. 

“No, I haven’t. You’ve never let me get it out of my mouth, dude, you—”

“You,” Hermann says, the word cutting Newton’s sentence in half, “told me. You told me. I know how you feel, Newton, it has been impressed upon me in indelible detail, and so there is no need to discuss it further.”

“Well, okay, because my next logical question will have to be ‘when’?” There’s a trace of Hermann’s own stiff formality in Newton’s tone. “Since I—”

“In Hong Kong,” Hermann says.

“Could you be more vague?” Newton asks. “A little bit? Possibly? Because I’d really like to make this harder on both of us, if we can do it. That is always my goal.”

“Shut up.”

Newton says nothing.

Hermann also says nothing.

“Well, are you going to—” Newton begins.

“As we were leaving,” Hermann says at the same time. 

“As we were leaving?” Newton echoes. “Hong Kong? This isn’t ringing a bell for me.” 

“Yes,” Hermann says, uncomfortable in the extreme. “I know. I’d be extremely surprised if it did. But, ah, as we were leaving Hong Kong you did a great deal of incoherent, heartfelt apologizing at intermittent intervals.” 

“Ugh, really?” Newton replies faintly. “I remember none of the Shatterdome-to-plane leg of that trip. Literally nothing.”

“Well, picture yourself uncoordinated and with limited situational awareness or conceptual understanding of what was happening to you while iteratively apologizing, apparently for inconveniencing me, with almost unparsable diction.”

“Yikes,” Newton says in self-conscious sympathy. “That must have looked like brain damage. That must have looked like brain damage for a long time. For however long it took to get from the Shatterdome to a San Francisco hotel room.”

“Over twenty-four hours.”

“That sucks for you, dude,” Newton says. “How did you even get me on that plane? You did a lot of aggressive hissing at me. I remember that much. Very velociraptor. Or, was that you? It could have been other parties. Never mind. Not important. Also? Thanks for rescuing me despite the fact you thought I was brain damaged.”

“Despite?” Hermann echoes. “What do you mean ‘despite?’ I’m not certain about this, Newton, but that statement is in the running for the most stupid arrangement of words to ever exit your mouth.”

“You would still like me even if I was intellectually uninteresting?”

“The point, Newton, is that you would never be uninteresting to me.” 

“Ah,” Newton says with lethargic anxiety. “Cool. I um—” He trails off. 

Hermann studies the shifting outline of the bay outside the driver’s side window. 

The song on the radio fades into silence. And then…the unmistakable opening of Syncope fills the darkness of the car.

Hermann glances at Newton.

Newton’s gaze snaps to the car’s dashboard with a unique and entirely characteristic blend of skepticism, horror, and fascination that he generally reserves for films featuring monsters, interesting kaiju variants, and laboratory accidents involving his own person.

“No,” Newton says.

“Yes,” Hermann replies.

“No!” Newton repeats. “Hwi, what are you playing right now?”

“You are listening to Syncope by—”

“Yes, I know, I mean, what, generally, are you streaming?” Newton asks.

“Top Forty Post-Apocalyptic American Radio,” the car replies.

“That’s a thing?” Newton says. “Post-apocalyptic radio? It’s kind of misleading because it implies apocalyptic events actually happened but whatever. Is this regular Top Forty or like weird, neohipster, Intellectual Underground Top Forty?”

“I don’t understand your question,” the car replies.

“Don’t get cute with me, carfriend,” Newton snaps.

“I believe,” Hermann offers, “that, ah, well, I believe that Syncope, LHC, Evangeline, and Plate Tectonics are all currently in the Top Forty. The conventional, American Top Forty.”

“What!?” Newton’s voice cracks. “Are you serious, dude? That’s impossible. I mean, um, like, I—” he trails off, at a loss for words. “All of those? This is weird. It’s weird, right? Yes. It’s weird. I mean, like, I use the word ‘hypoperfusion’ in this one.” He waves a hand in the general direction of the dashboard. “No one likes that kind of thing. Also chalk one more up in favor of actual middle-schoolers as opposed to hallucinated middle-schoolers.”

Hermann raises his eyebrows.

“But—why?” Newton asks, apparently expecting him to furnish an answer. “Also, how. But, mostly, why?”

“Your interrogatives are related,” Hermann replies. “Consider that you contributed materially to apocalypse aversion and then immediately disappeared from the public eye, inviting rampant speculation, which has only been fanned by the obvious fondness with which Ms. Mori and Mr. Becket speak of you in interviews. This perhaps makes up for the fact that your songs include atypical word choices and themes not generally favored in mainstream music.”

“Wait, Mako talks about me? In interviews? And the other guy? What’s his name?”

“You seem surprised,” Hermann replies. “Have I not told you, repeatedly, that she’s been emailing you daily for three weeks now?”

“Well yes, but—”

“As for Mr. Becket,” Hermann says, “there’s no need to pretend you didn’t bother to learn the name of the man who collapsed a transdimensional portal and survived the attempt. Because you did. I know you did.”

“I’m sure Mako saved him.”

“Ms. Mori did not save him.”

“Um, I guarantee you there’s an argument to be made, somehow, for Mako saving him, okay? One day, when I watch the news again, maybe tomorrow, I’ll find it. You’re not going to win this one. Mako is a baller, and that guy seemed just kind of moderately okay.”

“Don’t watch the news,” Hermann snaps. “Not tomorrow.” 

Newton sighs, tips his head back, looks at the dashboard with half-lidded eyes and says, “I literally cannot believe this.”

“Well, they aren’t terrible songs, musically speaking,” Hermann admits. “None of them are.”

“Oh. Oh really? They’re not terrible Hermann? Thanks. Thanks so much. No guitar voyeurism for you. Ever. What would you know about music post the Romantic Era anyway.” 

Hermann raises his eyebrows in a manner he hopes communicates mild curiosity and detached disdain. 

“Wait, what am I saying? Coming from you that’s actually pretty respectable since your Ten out of Ten on the Musical Awesomeness Scale is a six-part Baroque fugue, so I’ll take your ‘not terrible’ and be satisfied. I guess. Kind of. Not really, though.”

“I prefer Sea of Dirac,” Hermann offers.

“Obviously,” Newton replies. “I know that. I defy any sensitive quantum physicist not to love that song.”

“I am not sensitive,” Hermann snaps. 

“You? Noooo. Not you,” Newton says agreeably. “Not sensitive. Suave subject change though: am I getting paid for this?” He gestures in the direction of the dashboard. “Do you know? Am I making money? Because earlier today I asked a semi-sentient cab to check my balance and it was off by about, oh, I don’t know, five orders of magnitude? In a positive direction? I assumed that was an error, but maybe not. Am I paying you rent, is what I’m really driving at here. That one’s been bothering me for a while.”

“We’ve lived in our apartment for two weeks,” Hermann says. “We have not yet paid rent.”

“Ugh,” Newton replies. “Will you stop being weird about this?”

“I’m not being ‘weird’ about this,” Hermann snarls. “You spent two days iteratively trying to watch the news, becoming extremely distressed, and bleeding, after which I decided, given the circumstances, that perhaps you deserved a reprieve from the unremitting pressure you’ve been under for the past decade, so I bought you a library on rationalism, found an apartment and resigned myself to working out the details of our daily existence, including but not limited to your financial responsibilities until such a time you were less globally upset and I was less terrified that a Pan-Pacific mandate would drag you to a lab somewhere. You will forgive me if I have in the past been and continue in the future to be somewhat evasive when it comes to certain subject areas because when you become stressed I’m concerned you will, at a minimum, start bleeding and at a maximum—well, I don’t know, Newton, and I don’t wish to find out. That is the entire point. You won’t even read your personal email. I assume there’s an excellent psychological reason for that, so you’ll forgive me if I don’t trouble you with the overwhelming magnitude of public speculation about you, the details of your finances, the list of interview requests you have received, nor—”

Newton interrupts him with a frustrated yell from between clenched teeth, both hands pressed to his temples. “THANK YOU FOR BEING NICE TO ME,” he shouts. “God, you are the worst.”

That was unexpected.

Hermann rallies appropriately. “You are the worst,” he snaps. “You, Newton.”

“No,” Newton says. “Actually? You are.”

“No,” Hermann says.

“Yes,” Newton replies.

“No,” Hermann says again.

A guitar solo Hermann remembers playing in iterations over a decade ago fills the car. For an interval neither of them speak.

“That’s actually quite—” Hermann begins.

“Yeah, you like that line?” Newton asks. “It just came to me. In the shower.”

“I remember,” Hermann says, dry and wistful.

“There’s never going to be a time when that’s not weird,” Newton replies, “but yeah. Look, I feel like we’re really bad at arguing; we’ll need to work at restoring our historical A-game, dude. In the meantime, can I just pay you rent? Or can I pay Blaze rent? Or whomever we owe rent to? I just really want to pay rent, okay? I don’t want to go on the interview circuit or watch news or get the band back together or freak out during a job talk in front of UC Berkeley’s Neuroscience Department, I just want to know that you’re using my weirdly profligate finances to pay rent. And maybe also my taxes.”

“Yes. Fine. I’ll use your finances to pay half the rent, but I’m not doing your taxes,” Hermann snaps. 

“You mostly did my taxes last year,” Newton says. “I’m not sure why that happened. Post-drift analysis indicates you were trying to shame me into doing my fair share of the paperwork? But I have no shame when it comes to escaping the bureaucratic glorification of red tape for its redness and its tapeyness, so instead your plan backfired. It backfired really badly. Now there’s precedent.” 

Hermann sighs. “Last year, you had a total of three thousand dollars to your name. Your taxes weren’t exactly complicated despite a dual residency. Now you—”

“So you’ve thought about this, I see.” Newton grins. “Excellent. I, in turn, will do something nice for you. Something super nice. Extremely thoughtful.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t know yet, Hermann; it requires thought. That is, in fact, the definition of a thoughtful gesture.” 

“I suppose you’re correct.”

“Corrrrect,” Newton repeats, with an obscene roll of the ‘r,’ his eyes shutting behind his glasses. “That’s hot.”

“You’re bizarre,” Hermann says mildly, wondering if Newton is exhausted enough to sleep in a moving car. 

Possibly.

Possibly not.

Possibly.

“Meh,” Newton says equivocally. “I just like being uncontestedly ‘correct’ in literally all contexts. It’s my favorite state of being.”

“I know. I’m surprised you didn’t end up a mathematician,” Hermann says. 

“Too far afield from the in vivo experience,” Newton says. “Too close to mysticism. I’m not into overly reductive modeling as a temple to mathematical aesthetics. I’m Scully to your mathematical Mulder.”

“That’s extremely offensive,” Hermann informs him, “and wholly untrue. I wish I could disavow all knowledge of this conversation you’re trying to start.”

“Well, we can’t both be Scully,” Newton points out. “How would that work? Don’t get me wrong. I have intense love for Fox Mulder. Heroic fictional worship in the absence of world-view appropriation. That dude also knew how to take a hit.”

“Scully is the quantitative one,” Hermann snaps. “I am the Scully-equivalent in this relationship, Newton. Me.” 

“Eh.” Newton smiles, still unimpressed enough that he hasn’t opened his eyes. “Scully’s a pathologist and I’m a comparative anatomist, so in terms of field, I’m more Scully-ish. Also, anyone who references ‘the handwriting of God’ is definitely a conceptual Mulder-equivalent, even though Mulder wasn’t really into God, that was more of a Scully thing. Crap. Bad example; I’m clouding the issue. I’m just saying. It’s just a thing. You should accept it as axiom. I get to be Scully. Also, I like Carl Sagan more than you because I’m pretty sure you’ve never hallucinated him, so, despite infinite nuance, case closed, I’m Scully. I’m also shorter than you. Now case really closed.”

“I refuse to acknowledge the validity of any of your points. Neither of us are Scully,” Hermann says. “I’ve never heard of Dana Scully, in fact. This conversation is over; go to sleep.” 

“You have my brain.” Newton cracks his eyelids and squints at the glare of oncoming traffic. “You can’t pretend you didn’t watch The X-Files with German overdubbing, illicitly, late at night, because someone did; it was fifty percent of both of us who did."

“I never did that.”

“Ah, but you did,” Newton replies. “Halfway. That’s how to think about it.”

“I’m not you,” Hermann says.

“Well I’m not me either,” Newton replies. “Someone has to be me.”

“You’re you,” Hermann says. “I’m me. Everything is fine.”

“Wouldn’t it be great if that were true?” Newton gives him an asymmetrical smile. “Imagine how totally normal we’d be. We could have an argument that doesn’t end in confused anti-climax or someone bleeding. You were always the best to argue with. I was so relieved when they wouldn’t let you be a Jaeger pilot.”

“So you’ve said,” Hermann replies stiffly, “multiple times.” 

Even now, even after everything they’ve seen and done, that predictable exclusion hasn’t lost its sting.

“Can you imagine how stupid that would have been? If you’d died killing kaiju?”

Hermann gives Newton a nonplussed look, which is wasted, since his colleague’s eyes are closed. 

“I mean, think about it. I’d have been so pissed. I still can’t believe no one ever devised a remote stereotactic interface with sufficiently fast response times. It makes me embarrassed for our species. But, like, seriously, Hermann, I would’ve been mind-ruiningly pissed if they’d let you into one of those things. What the hell were you thinking? For reals, dude, I mean c’mon. Caitlin Lightcap was bad enough. Also, who’s going to be your drift partner? I mean, really.” 

Newton opens his eyes to shoot Hermann a glare that Hermann isn’t sure he deserves. 

“I always thought maybe, maybe Mako,” Newton continues in a wandering confessional style. “Like, you guys, man. Something seemed right about it to me, with the distant respect vibe you had going, because while Mako liked me for treating her like a kid, she liked you for not treating her like a kid, so yeah, I always thought maybe it would be you and her one day, in the end, the rage-filled rejects, when the shit totally hit the fan. Meanwhile, I’d be stuck on some coastline somewhere, watching you guys kick ass and die. But that was before all the Jaeger funding was cut; after that I was less worried. Because there were pretty much no more Jaegers. But, also more worried, because, hi, inevitable death. Then I got additionally worried, again, actually, really extremely worried close to the end there, when they pulled GD out of the graveyard; I was concerned that that would be exactly what would happen when they needed a new pilot team. You and Mako. Because who else was it going to be? Who could it possibly have been? The Marshal, maybe, but they have a history of pulling Jaeger pilots from the science staff, because, hello, Caitlin Lightcap turned out to be such an incredible killing machine in one of those things, and you’d already expressed an interest and done part of the training, so I mean really. Really, you absolute dick, who else was it going to be? But then they found Captain Sir Saves Everyone McQuarterback of the Pacific using a jackhammer on the Wall and he and Mako had that weird, like, rarr chemistry, which I did not expect because he looks like he should be captain of a hockey team or maybe just a demolition squad. Do you think they’re dating, and would he be offended if I mailed him a thesaurus?”

Hermann realizes his mouth is open. He closes it. “I—” he clears his throat. “I don’t know if they’re ‘dating.’ Perhaps you should contact Ms. Mori. I wouldn’t advise mailing Mr. Becket a thesaurus.”

“Yeah, no, I’m going to, dude,” Newton’s eyes are still closed. “Call Mako, I mean. Or email her. I just need to make sure I won’t, y’know, have a nervous breakdown when I talk to her first.” 

“Do you really think that’s likely?” Hermann asks mildly.

“Well, maybe; it depends if she cries, because if Mako cries that won’t be a good scene for me. Remember the summer intern situation?”

“Hmm,” Hermann says. “True.”

“Don’t say ‘true,’ dude.” Newton cracks an eyelid. “Traitor. God. I’m extremely manly. I don’t cry about sad fourteen-year-olds, even if they are Mako. I’m an amazing Portal player. I called you ‘not sensitive’ like fifteen minutes ago out of respect, not because it was ‘true.’ You’re the most sensitive person I know.”

Hermann looks back toward the dark ribbon of the road. He thinks about taking manual control from his car but doesn’t do it. Not yet. Over the sound system, the strains of a generic pop song fade, and Hermann hears the opening chords of Evangeline. 

He recalls reading days ago in the sunlit quiet of his UC Berkeley office, that this particular song is Ms. Mori’s favorite. 

Had Marshal Pentecost spent even a single moment considering the possibility of pairing him with Ms. Mori?

Hermann doesn’t think so.

He doesn’t believe the Marshal wanted her paired with anyone. 

With a quiet click, Hermann snaps the car back into manual mode. 

He accelerates so smoothly that Newton, who’s been partially asleep for minutes now, fails to notice.