Designations Congruent with Things: Chapter 7

Lie in a magnet, Dr. Geiszler, just lie there. Get your brain scanned.

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

Text iteration: Witching hour.

Additional notes: None.

Chapter 7

Yeah, so this is probably his worst nightmare right about now.

Actually.

Nope.

That is false.

So so false.

Demonstrably false.

That may be the falsest thing he’s ever said to himself. One of the most false things. It’s right up there. On the list of false things. That he has said. He can’t think of any other things on that list right now, but that is fiiiiine, because he’s stressed and he’s tired and he’s feeling kinda inappropriately weepy about Descartes. It’s also fine because he’s not in a habit of making false statements, at least not ones that can be immediately identified as such, as a general rule. 

“You want me to do what now?” Newt asks the med tech, who is eyeing his tattoos in a hypnotized manner that makes Newt dubious about the guy’s prospective coolness and competence. “How do you feel about Dr. Octagon?”

“Who?” The med tech confirms the array of Newt’s suspicions in the span of one syllable. 

“Never mind,” Newt says.

“Dr. Geiszler,” the med tech says. “If you don’t want this MRI, or if you’d prefer to do it under sedation then—”

“I want it,” Newt says, already standing there, next to the always-on magnet, divested of all his metal, in a state of cold dishabille what with the thin scrubs and the no shoes and the being mostly-blind sans his glasses. “I want it now.”

He needs it now.

He needs it now and not later when everyone is back and filling out reports and thinking, as critically as their brains and education allow, about the kaiju anteverse. He’s doing it for himself, but also for his stupid colleague, because the man is going to be n-sub-one out of an n=2 experimental group that will rot at the basement of statistical significance so far from the light of a cutoff p value that they will never reach anything other than the status of a puzzling and probably dangerous anecdote. Newt is absolutely determined to pull the pair of them out of that particular oubliette of rationality and from beneath the microscope of the military-industrial complex and keep them unscrutinized for the rest of his natural life or until his self-restraint snaps and he clones a baby kaiju, finds out he can talk to it, and then somehow accidentally ends the world. 

He is not going to clone a kaiju.

Except for how he really wants to and he always has, so that’s fine, but has he always wanted to this badly? Is this him? Is it some creeper kaiju-plan left in his brain, a subterranean sleeper subroutine subluxed beneath his subjective experience of the world? Waiting for—

"Dr. Geiszler?" the med tech says uncertainly. 

He has got to stop freaking this kid out. 

That’s step one. 

Newt claps the med tech on the shoulder, says, “yeah, thanks man, you are doing science a solid,” and then lies down and lets the med tech strap his head into immobility.

This does not freak him out at all.

Why would it?

No reason.

There’s some mechanical repositioning of component parts and one might think that the PPDC would have something a little more high-res, man, than a three-Tesla MRI, god, what is this, the turn of the century? How embarrassing for everyone associated with this travesty of tech. But whatever, it will get the job done, really the only thing he wants to know is how his ventricles are doing and whether or not he’s got any radiographic features of ischemia or intracranial hemorrhage and whether he’s going to slip into a coma and die in the next half day or so, because that would be unfortunate seeing as he really wants to go to this party that he’s certain is going to be starting to coalesce right about the time that he finishes with this scan and right about the time that Mako and Raleigh show up all suavely black clad and wet and photogenic; they are pretty, Newt will give them that. If anyone is going to make the cover of Rolling Stone, Newt votes for himself because he once had a moderately successful but a little bit embarrassingly ‘nerd rock’ band called The Superconducting Supercolliders, which did pretty okay on the Boston scene, but presuming Rolling Stone doesn’t choose him, he votes for Mako because that blue hair thing she’s got going is totally—

“Dr. Geiszler?” the med tech says, over the in-magnet speakers. 

Newt jerks, hard and startled, and he is just so wired right now, an understandable thing, because, hi, yeah, almost eaten by Otachi and then, again, twice, by baby-Otachi, honestly, he hopes that the kaiju were trying to eat him because if they were trying to do something else he does not want to know about it, not ever, and he hopes if they had some other plan it’s not already planted in his head because, if it is, it’s going to come out at some point, everything usually does. 

“Yeah,” he says, breathlessly trying to relax in this blurry, plastic-lined magnet.

“Close your eyes,” the med tech says, voice distorted by crap circuitry and budget, budget, like lowest budget ever, speakers, one might as well use a paper plate and a wire. “And try not to move. At all.”

“Sure,” Newt says. 

No problem.

Totally easy.

Probably one of the easiest things for humans.

Lie in a magnet, Dr. Geiszler, just lie there. 

Get your brain scanned.

He tries to decide where his next tattoo is going to go, because that’s a good idea—take the things that try to kill you and memorialize them forever in art on your body that you will have to look at every day for the rest of your life. That’s called building character, that’s called panache, that’s called gutsy and unafraid, that’s called badassery, that’s called anything except ‘a really terrible idea’, because it isn't. Unless it is. Hermann had articulated that counter-argument pretty well, years ago, right off the bat, when he’d said something along the lines of ‘Dr. Geiszler, consider that if this war ends badly and you spend years in terrified hiding, far inland, waiting to die, your ‘decorative art’ will serve only to remind you of the scope of your own arrogance and failure.’ 

Hermann can be kind of a downer sometimes. 

The guy had also been missing the point because—

The magnet vibrates with its first loud and not unforeseen but kind of in-the-moment-unexpected banging and Newt jerks so violently in response that one knee hits the upper bound of the tube he is lying in and can’t they get any decent tech here this is unforgivable he will build them an open MRI for the love of all that is good and holy he will do it immediately. Tomorrow. Tonight. While he is drunk. He’s sure it can’t be that complicated. Someone find him a five-Tesla magnet and—

“Dr. Geiszler,” the tech says over the speaker that is probably a hand-me-down from Thomas Edison’s kid’s phonograph, version 2.0. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah dude,” Newt says; it’s more like gasping though, unfortunately. “Let’s do this. I’m good.”

“Try not to move,” the tech says.

Yes, Newt thinks, waiting for it this time, waiting for the banging to start, because once it starts he can habituate to it; he’s got enough higher brain function left for that, he’s pretty sure. Try not to move.

This time he manages it.

Come at me, bro, he thinks vaguely in the direction of the med tech, the three-Tesla magnet, a host of dead kaiju, Hermann, the director of Medical, Hypothetical-Rain-the-surfer-neurologist’s jerk of a hypothetical-receptionist, the military industrial complex, and his own brain.

So.

His list of things to do is shaping up something like this. One—get an MRI, already in progress, so he’s going to call this one a “check.” Two—take a shower, find a fire, and use it to burn his clothing, ideally after he removes his wallet and his phone from his pants, and not before. Three—find Hermann and figure out a way to read the report he’s writing, and make sure the guy is actually going to flag that thing to Pentecost and not to Hansen. Hermann is very ‘i’ dotting and ‘t’ crossing, obviously, one would have to be, as a mathematician, eh, that’s probably not even true, but if one isn’t a stickler for detail it likely causes so much heartache and repeated fits of worthlessness and angst over unbalanced equations that mathematicians probably train their brains right out of any non-perfectionist tendencies. Biology is better. Three—no wait, he’s on four. Four—presuming the party still isn’t happening yet, he is going to spend some time on the internet in search of his surfer neurologist, Hypothetical Rain, because if he already has a doctor it’s going to be harder for the military to give him one when they decide that’s a thing they’d like to do. Five—he’s going to finally, finally get drunk. Six—he’s going to build the PPDC a new MRI that is not a terrifying piece of garbage. Like this one.

Just lie there.

Just lie there, Newt.

Yup. One minute down, probably.

Eighty-nine to go.

He should have asked for a countdown.

He should have asked for music.

He should have asked Hermann to stay and read him the latest issue of the American Journal of Physics starting with the copyright information and omitting nothing, including figure captions, the table of contents, and the editor’s opinion on the feasibility of making detailed measurements of and/or in the quote unquote ‘space,’ between dimensions, which would be stupid, probably, and would piss Hermann off whether it was actually 'asinine' or not because Hermann is super intense about measuring things. Newt has done some physics, who hasn’t in the sciences, god, but ‘experimental error’, to him, is an obstacle rather than a source of infinite challenge and delight. That was why, when all was said and done, he’d picked biology. Neuroscience, man. Probably the best and most terrifying of the sciences, because who really wants to know how their own mind works? 

He does, apparently. 

What's he going to do now—study synapses? Study the mechanism of long term potentiation like everyone else in the world? Jerk off to the multisubunited elegance of an NMDA receptor as half his field was wont to do? 

Nope, probably not.

Anyway, Hermann would have read him the physics. Newt is, in fact, sure that Hermann would have done that for him, had he asked. Newt is also pretty sure it would have been weird, kind of like that time Hermann had to extract Newt from a county lock-up when they’d been based on the coast of Washington State. The whole thing had not been Newt’s fault, strictly speaking; it was an unfortunate instance of his personality clashing inappropriately and drunkenly with some people holding excessively strong but opposing musical preferences, as befit Seattle natives—what was left of them after people with means moved inland to Kansas and the people without means stayed behind with their guitars and whatever possessions people who lived normal lives not in labs and hermetically sealed bunkers kept with them when they stayed to face down sea monsters that would certainly eat them, no matter their folksy stubbornness. Newt had tried to get an apartment like a normal person when it had seemed like Hong Kong was going to be a long term thing, but Pentecost had said no. It was possible he’d said no because of the Seattle incident, but Newt still thinks that’s unfair because no charges were actually pressed, and Newt had emerged pretty much unscathed. Hermann had been singularly teed off about having to come retrieve him. But he’d done it. And this was one of the reasons Newt was pretty sure the guy would have read him the American Journal of Physics if he’d asked, but he hadn’t asked, because he was a grown-ass adult. 

He still is.

Lying here.

Very still.

He saved the world, partially. He was like one hundred percent of 'Step Two' and fifty percent of 'Step Four' in the seven-step ‘So You’ve Decided to Avert the Ending of Your Civilization’ plan.

Anything would be a travesty on these speakers, anyway, even physics.

Especially physics, because of the implicit irony of sources of error punching one in the face with static.

How many minutes have passed?

This is going to take forever.

Well, if he’s going to lose touch with reality and/or turn evil as a result of everything that’s happened, he might as well kick-start the process now. He’s pretty sure all that, ‘Newton, think of Kierkegaard,’ ugh Kierkegaard rocks though, and, ‘Newton, I will die before I let you clone a kaiju,’ and, ‘Newton, be a special flower,’ stuff that Hermann was spouting back there was pretty much an attempt to say, ‘Newton, do not start down a dangerous philosophical road and unmake humanity in the process,’ which is probably sound advice, but he’s been on a dangerous philosophical road for a while now, and he knows it, and it also goes to show that even if you share someone’s brain you can still be blindly hopeful about their capacity for change, even while simultaneously realizing that that change is never going to happen. 

Kaiju anteverse, he thinks, are you there?

Nothing answers him back.

That’s a good sign.

It would be really appalling if something had answered a summons that weakass and nerdy.

This whole contact with the kaiju anteverse just smacks one in the face with archetypal parallels of corruption via knowledge. 

So he’s Eve. (Great.)

He’s Prometheus. (Light up the world with your tech, young man.)

He’s Gary Mitchell from Star Trek: The Original Series. (Classic. Does this make Hermann Kirk, though? Because that seems wrong.)

He’s the Dorian Gray of science. (Thanks, but no thanks.)

He’s made a Faustian bargain. (No surprise there.)

He’s Saruman from The Lord of the Rings. (So Hermann is Gandalf? Man, if Newt is anyone from LOTR it’s got to be a hobbit. Probably Frodo. Come to think of it though, Frodo has the same problem as Saruman in the end, even though it comes from a different psychological place. Crap.)

He’s every blind visionary turned unwitting villain in Michael Crichton’s entire body of work but especially Dr. Henry Wu. (This makes Hermann Dr. Ian Malcolm and that works better than Kirk for sure.)

And he’s one cloned kaiju away from being a modern-day, actual, Dr. Victor Frankenstein. 

One has to be pretty uninformed or pretty uninterested in the human condition not to know what archetype one trends toward, and Newt has been aware of his own destructive paradigm for a long time. A long time. 

He’d found the entire thing somewhat concerning.

He finds it more concerning now.

Dr. Victor Frankenstein, his literary friend and fictional warning buoy, ended up alone in a state of nervous collapse on Arctic ice, trying to kill the work of his own hands after it destroyed everything he loved. Unfortunately, the guy failed and died of pneumonia before he could get the job done.

Yeah, that sounds pretty plausible to Newt, unfortunately.

So he won’t clone a kaiju.

Done. No kaiju clone, no failure and death via crawling about without a jacket in a frozen waste.

Is he seriously not going to clone a kaiju?

Is he seriously considering doing it?

There are pros and cons.

The cons column is pretty obvious. It includes the Jurassic Park scenario, the breach reopening scenario, the Newt-develops-psychosis scenario, the ostracism-from-the-world scenario, and finally, the more complex possibility that the kaiju he clones turns out to be extremely intelligent and either influences Newt back, or takes over his brain and spends years terrifying the crap out of Hermann before people finally get it together and take down Newt and his pet kaiju with a harpoon gun or whatever it was that Ahab used on that dick of a whale.

The pros column is also pretty obvious. It includes knowledge for knowledge’s sake, which, despite what popular mythology would have one believe, is actually pretty awesome and brings humanity things like electric guitars, efficient transportation, giant robots, and crappy, disturbingly loud, slow MRI machines. It also includes increased tactical anti-kaiju knowledge just in case the breach does spontaneously reopen or the kaiju reopen it from the other side on purpose because they’re pissed. It also includes—well, the nebulous advances that come from any new thing. Maybe kaiju blue will turn out to cure cancer. 

Newt knows what Nietzsche would say if he were here.

He’d say, “watch it, Dr. Geiszler, you’ve been looking long into that abyss.”

It looked back, man, Newt says in return. It already looked back.

That is, probably, why he thinks it’s too late.

There had been moments, extended intervals, of unarguable look-back time from the kaiju anteverse.

Hermann also thinks it’s too late.

Newt knows it, he just isn’t quite sure if Hermann knows that Newt knows that Hermann knows it, but it’s obviousHermann thinks that there’s something wrong with him because Hermann isn’t really one to be hyperbolic about anything other than Newt’s supposed stupidity, but the guy had most certainly said, ‘you will clone a kaiju over my dead body,’ which Newt finds a horrible, soul-freezing statement on about nine different levels, but the worst two are that it indicates how far Hermann thinks Newt will go and how far he in turn will go to stop him.

Can he please get out of this tube?

No he cannot.

Not right now.

Either way though, whether he clones a kaiju or not, he thinks he’s probably in for a world of unrest because if pop culture has taught him that he doesn’t want to be Frankenstein it has also taught him that it’s a bad idea to be a strong personality living through one’s own slow obsolescence. He’s going to have a hard time with that, he’s pretty sure, harder than Hermann, most likely, who is probably going to go back to the Riemann Hypothesis or something elegant and mathematical as soon as he’s sure he doesn’t have to be saving the world anymore. 

Newt is going to see Hypothetical Rain, his surfer neurologist, once per week and try not to have a breakdown or brain-damage-induced epilepsy while he chokes to death on his own repressed impulses and freaks people out with the skinny-tie, thick glasses, creepy tattoo combo. That doesn’t really sound like a good plan, but it sounds better than the pneumonia-in-a-frozen-waste-as-a-failed-kaiju-hunter-hacking-up-a-lung-as-he-screams-what-have-I-done plan. It sounds marginally better.

It is so loud.

He feels dust fall onto his face from a cracking ceiling and he jerks, muscles snapping into maximum contraction, hitting the sides of the stupid freaking scanner god can they not have a five-Tesla open model is that too much to ask there must be Jaeger pilots who are claustrophobic after near death in close quarters for the love of—

“Dr. Geiszler?” the tech says.

“Yeah,” he says, realizing what had just happened, which is one hundred percent within normal limits and totally explainable; everyone has flashbacks after they almost die; it’s part of the human condition. “Sorry.”

“I’m—going to have to restart this,” the tech says. 

Of course he is.

“Yeah, okay dude,” Newt replies. “I got it. How long has it been?”

“Three minutes,” the tech says. “Try not to move.”

Three minutes.

Magnificence.

Yes, Dr. Geiszler, try not to move.

“Yup,” Newt says. “I know. Done.”

Okay brain, he thinks, please do not do this to me right now. Do it later. If we can just get through this, no one can stop us in our quest for alcohol and dance-floor abandon and then you will wake up, magically reset, to find me sprawled over a planar surface somewhere, possibly confused, possibly missing my shirt and shoes, and all will be right with the world for a blessed handful of minutes. You can have that. We can have that. Maybe. We are a team. A team that’s going to hold still. For ninety minutes. Starting now.

He tightens every muscle that he can think of below his neck in an attempt to keep his face, his eyes, relaxed. He tries not to freak out about the possibility of ruining this scan at the forty-five minute mark. Multiple times. 

On the plus side, if this MRI takes five hours because he cannot stay still, his esteemed colleague will probably mount some form of mandatory rescue because that’s a thing that Hermann tends to do. Rescue Newt from his own stupidity.

He's not sure what would have happened if Hermann hadn’t pulled him out of the drift apparatus the first time.

Probably, he would be dead.

Or.

Nope.

And/or.

Maybe, his brain would be forever trapped with the kaiju hivemind.

Actually, since he’d been successful in establishing a drift, he’s certain that’s exactly what would have happened. 

Great. 

He’s so happy he’s had this thought, right here, right now.

The risks had been worth it. For sure. To the max. He’d do it again. Except maybe next time he’d try to convince everyone of his plan with a neatly typed piece of paper or a well-ordered power point presentation with key ideas in large, sans serif font, instead of just gesticulating a lot and speaking at high volume. It shouldn’t matter, the ideas were and are the ideas, but there is, indeed, a reason that kids with terrible handwriting receive worse grades than kids with perfect handwriting for work of identical quality, and if Newt is a potential real-world Victor-Frankenstein-equivalent well, then he is also, certainly, the poster child for the social, professional, psychological, and neural costs of metaphorical poor penmanship.

The hivemind. The hivemind. Is it still in there? In here? With him, where he is? Colocalized and integrated? A set of scrambled circuits? It doesn’t respond to its name when he calls it like a dork summoning a demon, it doesn’t answer to the name that he’s given it, the name that his brain tacked straight onto it as the merging was happening. He is pretty sure his last conscious thought had been something like ‘oh crap, a hive mind?’ before he’d lost track of everything he was in the sprawl of foreign science and foreign thoughts and aggressive, entitled, anger at the constraint, the perpetual constraint, that limited resources put on a species such as his, such as theirs, such as their species, Newt, not yours. Never yours. It had been almost impossible to retain any sense of purpose in that violent, violet, infinite mental abyss; the only thing he’d been able to hang onto was the idea of science, and so he’d gotten something, but they’d gotten things straight back from him. He’d been surprising to them, apparently hitching a cognitive ride on a dead fragment of tissue was not all that common in the anteverse these days, or ever, and they had been interested in the tiny human and the pressure of their interest would have torn his mind apart, it had been happening until it hadn’t and he’d been vaguely aware of Hermann yelling at him close and far away, fixing his head in place because Newt couldn’t do it himself, unfortunately, couldn’t do much of anything for the span of about fifteen seconds, and that had been concerning, but then everything snapped into an unscrambled state and he’d opened his eyes and realized his mouth was full of blood because his nose was bleeding and his head was being tipped the wrong way, so he’d coughed and some of the blood that had been in his mouth had ended up on his shirt and that had freaked the crap out of Hermann in a manner that Newt had found sort of vaguely satisfying, which is really the only way that you can find something satisfying while simultaneously trying to determine if you’re actively dying, but he’d found it satisfying because, after all, he had been right. That had been his first real thought after the requisite ‘why am I bleeding,’ ‘did someone stab my eye with a sharp laboratory implement?’ ‘ow,’ and the fast becoming typical, ‘I’m on the floor right now?’  He finds Hermann’s extremely obvious horror less satisfying, now, in retrospect, since he knows that freaking the guy out so badly had led directly to Hermann getting in on the kaiju-hivemind-spy-squad thing they had going, but he isn’t going to complain that much about the outcome because he is pretty sure that if he’d drifted again, alone, he would have died, turned evil, or snapped immediately into insanity in the embarrassingly stereotypical way that fictional scientists behave in Spider Man movies, the absolute basement of scientific literacy if one doesn't consider the real weird ones, despite Peter Parker’s ostensible interest in quantum mechanics.

Yeah right.

Like Peter Parker would realistically give a crap about quantum mechanics.

Get out of here.

Just because you say you like quantum mechanics doesn’t mean you get to be absolved if you vilify the search for knowledge in the narrative themes of your fictional universe.

Ugh, Newt’s not one to talk there, except for how he’s not fictional.

This is confusing.

Hey, Dr. Octavius, let’s have lunch some time.

Vhy are ze crazy ones so often being German?

It doesn’t say good things about Newt’s odds.

Speaking of Germans, and ones other than him, he hopes Hermann hasn’t been infected by the kaiju anteverse or screwed up too much by Newt’s own brain. Much as he enjoys the prospect of springing musical subgenre rankings on Hermann, literally every day, for as long as they both shall live, he would be more than a little bit sad if Hermann swapped his sherry for tequila and started acquiring tattoos. 

He doesn’t think that’s going to happen though.

Ugh the tattoos. 

Ugh Otachi.

Baby otachi.

He’s got to put them on there, it’s hypocritical if he doesn’t. And by 'on there’ he means 'on his skin’; that was a weird verbal substitution and is kind of an indicator of either how messed up he is at the moment, or the extremely mixed feelings he has regarding his own tattoo hobby. He wishes he could memorialize the Otachi family in that ‘we honor your sacrifice’ type of way, or even in that way that pilots used to paint bars on the side of their planes, except in Newt’s case he never killed any kaiju, he just avoided being eaten by them. 

Here are all the things that didn’t eat me, emblazoned on my skin, he thinks. I salute your efforts, predators, but I live to crawl away screaming another day, so suck it, giant, alien, cloned war machines. 

Whatever, man, he’s pretty sure that everyone who meets a kaiju outside the confines of a Jaeger does some amount of screaming.

It’s dark but even so, he can see the cracking of the ceiling, feel the dust on his face and he needs to—

Nope.

No, please.

No flashbacks right now.

Relax, brain, he thinks. Remember that deal we made? The deal about not freaking out because you are maybe a little bit occasionally understandably slightly confused about the false equivalencies of being trapped in a magnet that’s imaging you versus trapped in a bunker by a kaiju trying to eat you. It’s okay brain, it’s not your fault, you are just doing your thing, your thing you have been evolved to do, which is to teach me a lesson about my own stupidity by reminding me forcefully and with a lot of integrated, strong reproductions of sensory input that my behavior over the past day makes me less likely to stay alive and reproduce. I get it. I respect that. We are on the same page. The survival page. The survival outside a medical facility page. You wouldn’t like that, brain, you would not like that at all, and if you flip out and start screaming at any point that anyone can hear you, that’s going to be what happens to you. Because that med tech isn’t cool and doesn’t get it. So use some of your other skill sets, consider future outcomes using that suave prefrontal cortex you’ve got on you, and do not do this to me. 

He can lie here and will himself straight into immobility for ninety minutes, not moving his eyes, not flinching at all; this is not even hard for him.

Hermann is probably back in his hermetically sealed box of a room typing a terrible report, but there’s some small chance that maybe he’s thinking he should harass the med tech into letting him read a very important article to his colleague while the guy has an MRI because science waits for no man. Or no lady. And everyone will agree that this is very true, now and for the rest of time.

But Newt does have important problems to consider, the foremost of which is this: if he were to be influenced, subtly or not subtly, by the kaiju hivemind, how might such an influence manifest? In order to predict this, one should look at the goals of the kaiju, and hi, those aren’t exactly understated. Destroy dominant species, harvest resources, and build a stronger civilization upon the burnt out husks of the weak. He wishes that social Darwinism would just get out of his life but it keeps showing up. Anyway, so if he were the kaiju, and he had access to a lethally stupid little genius, either one time, or sort of surreptitiously all the time across dimensions, how would he use his influence to get the guy to re-open the breach? 

Maybe you get the guy to clone a kaiju, a thing that he already wanted to do. Maybe that triggers their ability to reconnect. Maybe that deepens whatever influence they had or still have. 

So, he really needs to not do that.

No kaiju cloning, Hermann is right.

For reals, yo.

It’s dark but even so, he can see the cracking of the ceiling, feel the dust on his face and he needs to find his glasses—

No. 

He needs to stop that. Stop it.

Terrible job, brain, he thinks, you are doing probably the worst job ever. Did we not discuss this? 

He can kind of feel a building panic because he would really like to get out of this tube but he can’t and it’s so loud and also so quiet at the same time, and he can feel this urge to just breathe in and then to sort of start screaming but he’s not going to do that, that would be poorly advised and that would also ruin everything. Literally all he has to do is nothing. How hard is that? It’s not that hard. He’s doing nothing like a champ. 

He takes a breath without moving his head or his eyes and then he lets it out and he does not scream.

And then he does it again.

And then he does it another time without screaming.

You are killing it, brain. Good job. You could turn pro with that level of self-control.

He’s not even sure what that means. 

Apart from getting him to clone a kaiju, or just setting up shop in a secret corner of his brain that’s now cross-dimensional, he doesn’t see what his anteverse frenemies are going to actually or theoretically do to him. He should probably be more concerned about the PPDC if he's thinking about sucky yet statistically significant sequelae, but it's hard to compare hypothetical bureaucratic cruelties to aliens red in tooth and claw that literally tried to eat him yesterday. Maybe today? What time is it, anyway? Whatever. He’s not sure that cross-dimensional cognitive influence is remotely plausible. He should consult Hermann on that one, but, eh, immunologists would have told you that transplantation between genetically non-identical individuals would never work, back in the day, but some jackass said, 'suck it, rational types,' and did a transplant anyway like a baller iconoclast and it worked, kind of, after a while, after a fashion, with some tweaking. The point is: can he rule out some alien influence on his thoughts? Sadly, epically tragically, alas, no he can’t. Herman can't either. Not with models. Not with chalk. And so Newt just needs to do his best to stay a good person and make sure no one else comes to the same conclusion he has come to and locks him up and attaches him to a perpetual EEG for the rest of his natural life and/or tries to replicate his experimental technique using him. Because then he could definitely see himself going evil and he probably, after stewing long enough in his own concentrated, incarcerated rage, wouldn’t even feel that badly about it.

He really hopes that Hermann is not going to go the Frankenstein route either. This seems less likely than Newt going down that road, but alas, it, also, cannot be ruled out. If, in ten years, he and Hermann are on a boat, re-opening a dimensional rift in the Pacific Ocean because they’ve been slowly corrupted by alien knowledge, that is going to be so frustrating from a karmic sense, and also just so sad.

That’s not going to happen though.

Right?

Right.

Go back to Geneva, Victor, you were so happy there. Nice doctors don't spend all their time in graveyards.

Hermann is too on top of his game for destruction of his civilization. Newt is on top of his game, but in a different way, in the kind of way where he reflects about his life and his choices at intervals so wide he finds himself saying things like, ‘six Ph.D.s seems a bit much,’ or, ‘hey I can regenerate tissue in a petri dish now,’ or ‘how did I start working for the military,’ or, ‘my choices have led to my imminent death.’   That kind of thing. Hermann’s a lot more of the analyze-as-you-go kind of guy, the ask-yourself-why-you-think-electrocution-is-a-good-choice-for-you kind of guy, the if-this-doesn’t-work-the-consequences-are-unacceptable kind of guy. In short the kind of guy who probably won’t accidentally annihilate the world.

Maybe they should stick together.

It’s going to make the neurologist preferences hard to work out, since Hypothetical Phillip and Hypothetical Rain do not live in geographically contiguous regions, but honestly that’s the least of Newt’s problems, because Hermann has always been pretty up front about Newt annoying the crap out of him most of the time, so Newt’s not really sure how this life-partners proposal is going to go. 

Maybe it will go like: ‘Hey, so could you do me a favor and make sure I don’t destroy the world? Not that I’m worried.’

Maybe it will be: ‘Let’s go the academic route and apply for grant funding together.’

Or possibly he will say: ‘I need a roommate, man, because—yeah, I got nothing.’

Alternatively he could try: 'It’s your professional duty to make sure I’m not in neural continuity with the kaiju anteverse, just as it’s mine to make sure you’re not.’

Worst-case scenario, there’s a good chance that: ‘Please don’t leave me,’ would do the trick. 

Oh boy.

Whatever he ends up saying is going to be really awkward if his list of options is anything to go by.

It’s dark but even so, he can see the cracking of the ceiling, feel the dust on his face and the dirt beneath his hands, he needs to find his glasses this is so cliché he will be so annoyed if he dies without at least seeing what’s eating him; after all the work he’s done that seems the least that he deserves. He finds them and the ceiling cracks apart—

Newt manages to catch and abort the screaming that’s threatening to start, manages to keep aborting it, iteratively, over and over again, keeping his face still, keeping his eyes shut, pressing his fingers into fists and his fists into his lateral thighs.

Brain, he thinks. Please stop. Please. 

And it does.

He’s fine.

This is totally understandable and this is fine. 

Probably it’s only something like seventy minutes now until he’s done.

He can do seventy minutes. 

No problem. 

No problem at all.

It’s just a magnet.

He’s in a magnet, that’s all, a crappy, closed, three-Tesla magnet, and he can get out any time he wants.

But he does not want to get out now, he wants to get this over with so that everything will work out.

So that when he falls asleep tonight he can spend one day, one single day, believing he can just be done and stew in thwarted narcissism on the beach and nothing bad will happen and They will leave his brain alone.

It's his brain.

And he likes it.

As it is.

Or was.

He and his brain can do this. 

They are a team.

His brain possibly feels a little angry at him right now, considering how terrified it’s been for something like twenty-four hours straight, but that’s fine. Newt gets it. He does. He will let it have whole days of terror. Starting tomorrow. Whole days of punishing him before he distracts it with something super interesting, or a new goal, or a mind altering substance, or long term cognitive behavioral therapy, or whatever Hypothetical Rain suggests, maybe some kind of intense yoga routine on the beach. Tomorrow he will say, ‘fine brain, do your worst. Integrate the crap out of the mess that’s in there. Integrate it through flashbacks, through dreams, through panic attacks, through discussion sober and drunken with other people who have done or suffered similar things, integrate it through listening to music, integrate it in good ways and bad ways, in a mash-up of every coping mechanism known to man.’

That is what he will say tomorrow. 

Nope, actually, that’s what he’s going to start saying in seventy minutes, because tomorrow is probably too far away.

Just please, he thinks, please, please, for the love of all that is good and science-y, start in seventy minutes. Start with burning your clothes and taking a disturbingly long shower and getting drunk. Start with an ungodly streak of making Hermann miserable as you drag him to a dangerously out of control party populated by military personnel and random, elated civilians and then tell him he has to help you build an open MRI immediately. Start any time and with any thing you want, brain.

Except now.

Do not start now.

Do not start now, with a screaming fit in a confined space.

Not now.

No problem.

No problem at all.

He’s got this.

Seventy minutes to go.