Designations Congruent with Things: Chapter 25

He’s committed casual, causal, quantum-mechanical calumnies.

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

Text iteration: Witching hour.

Additional notes: None.

Chapter 25

Newt is.

Newt is fine.

Newt is fine and washing his face.

Newt is fine and washing his face with water that goes on clear and comes off less and less blood tinged every time.

Newt is fine and washing his face in iterating variants of clear water turning progressively less pink post face contact.

Newt, a fully functional member of the International Intelligentsia, is currently iterating his way to a clean countenance by means of repeated applications dihydrogen oxide. 

Newt, a member of the Intellectual Underground turned Academic Overlord turned Highbrow Demimonde turned Lowbrow Genius turned Post Apocalyptic Albeit Subterranean Scholar aka Latter Day Brain, is currently making interesting and important investments in his future, including but not limited to: hemostasis, hygiene, grooming, and roommate appreciation by way of RFID chip gifting and subsequent managing of unforeseen, arguably negative sequelae. 

How’s it going there, champ? his brain asks solicitously.

Newt, Prodigy Rock Star MacArthur Fellow turned Apocalyptic Averter, has spent his day with dead rationalists and his evening making it possible for the local preeminent quantum physicist in residence to manipulate electric fields with his hand, which is an extremely civilized thing to spend one’s afternoon doing; everyone, when polled, would unanimously agree that a more sophisticated afternoon would be hard to come by and that small setbacks, including identity confusion and the interpersonal browbeating required to rectify said identity confusion, are inevitable and not to be perseverated upon because, to put it colloquially, as he is wont to do, there are times in a guy’s life when things don’t go according to plan. There are times in a guy’s life when maybe said guy freaks out a little bit and wants to have a hysterical breakdown in an empty room by himself but then, for better or worse, he accidentally has one all over a local mathematician instead, which is good, which is fine, which is totally understandable because there are times in a guy’s life when maybe said guy does some things to his own cerebral cortex that really should not be attempted either at home or in a lab with a substandard apparatus and the long-term sequelae of said ‘things’ include new and intense monster empathy on top of the old and intense monster sympathy that said ‘guy’ already had at baseline, some poorly defined medical problems, and maybe accidentally swapping brains with his roommate, Freaky-Friday style. 

It might be Friday, now that he thinks about it. 

Newt finishes washing away the remains of the leaking fluids that send sad, pathetic, don’t-kill-me-please evolutionary signals to hypothetical in-group members or whatever—it’s not really clear when you come right down to it, what the point of crying is—and he doesn’t care about evolutionary advantages very much right now because it’s just not relevant to him at the moment, by which he means this moment, this moment right now, when he would kind of like to lie down and wait for death but he’s not going to do that because he’s a grown-ass adult and he doesn’t really see Dr. H. G., Ph.D. and EtOH mixing all that well right now; hopefully it will just be more of an oil-and-water thing rather than, say, a pure cesium meets water type deal, but it could go either way, really.

Hermann and tequila could go either way.

Pure cesium and water—that ish is going to turn bad every time.

Newt dries his face, which is really the final test of how efficient his rounds of de-blooding have been, and yeah, not completely efficient, because the towel turns pink tinged. How fortunate; it will now match literally every other towel they collectively own; yup, Newt owns collective towels. That’s cool. That’s very adult. Or not. It depends on a lot of things, most of which are human social norms. Whatever. He’s already slightly, slightly, very slightly stressed so he doesn’t think he needs to be spending mental energy comparing himself to some hypothetical average that can never truly be defined. 

He re-dons his recently acquired fingerless gloves, puts his glasses back on, and makes a genuine effort to look less like his current self and more like his former self by fixing the mess Hermann has made of his hair; god, it’s so weird—Newt is becoming convinced that the guy is trying to make him look as ridiculous as possible, because half of his hair is neatly smoothed flat in the style of a nerd who’s looking for a pocket protector to go with his 1950s slicked-back central part and microwavable dinner, but then the other half of it has kind of a mad-scientist, post-electrocution, get-me-my-flux-capacitor look to it. Both of these paradigms are unacceptable; Newt has been styling his hair, for years, like a baller, in imitation of Randy Waterhouse from the 2018 film adaptation of Cryptonomicon and it’s a good look for him, okay, and it’s cool, just because Hermann doesn’t get it doesn’t mean Newt’s hair is a disaster, it is simply misunderstood.

His hair is fine with that, honestly.

His hair is actually fine with nothing, because it’s a collection of dead protein and therefore not sentient.

Newt restores his decorative mess of dead protein it to its appropriate state of aesthetically pleasing dishevelment, straightens his clothes, does, like, a combo shoulder/neck roll thing like someone who engages in physical activity, including walking around and playing racquetball and not just crying really hard for his workouts. Nope.

His phone buzzes.

He pulls the thing out of his pocket to see that Mako has texted him a picture of what looks like a fancy bar that might or might not be made out of ice, underlit by neon lights. Maybe the lights are frozen into it? Would it be possible to encase fluorescent lights in ice and have them reliably work. He’s going to need to think about that one. At a first approximation the answer is ‘maybe’, but it would be expensive. Whatever, the ice bar is not the point of this picture. Mako is holding a fiery red cocktail in a martini glass, her nails loosing their edges into the identical color of the drink.

::Pic!:: the accompanying text either tags or demands, it’s hard to be sure.

::Yes:: Newt texts in agreement.

::Send!:: Mako replies immediately.

::No:: Newt replies.

::Send send send send send:: Mako says.

::Are you drunk?:: Newt asks.

::SEND:: Mako replies.

::You’re drunk texting me right now:: Newt says. ::Admit it. You cannot hide these things from me. I am a genius. Genius half-sibling. This is your lot in life.::

::S:: Mako replies.

::No:: Newt manages to get in.

::E:: Mako says.

::N:: Mako says.

::D:. Mako says.

::I’m very busy, Mako, okay? Lots of science.::

::My name is Newt and I am SO SERIOUS:: Mako texts. ::That is who I am. Very serious. So serious. Serious for “science”::

::Put that drink down:: Newt says. ::Where is your kind-of-boyfriend? Why is science in QUOTES. Science deserves better from you, Maks.::

::SEND. PIC.::

::Why?::

::You have sent none:: Mako replies. ::Why not. Send now. Send right now::

Newt sighs, pushes his eyebrows down and his glasses up before glaring at the mirror in what he judges is hismost sober put-that-drink-down-right-now-young-lady way, takes a picture under day-spectrum lights that make him look like a vampire, and sends it to Mako.

::Sweater?:: Mako replies.

::Shut up:: Newt says.

::You own no sweaters:: Mako says. ::I don’t think that is YOUR sweater::

::It’s definitely mine:: Newt replies.

::Lies:: Mako says. 

::Not lies:: Newt counters. ::Bye Mako::

::You look sick:: Mako says.

::You look pretty:: Newt replies. ::That is what is called POLITE conversation, Maks. Now you try::

::Are you okay?:: Mako says.

::Maks, you’re not getting how this is supposed to go::

::Newt I am serious::

::I am FINE, Maks:: Newt replies, leaning back against the shut door of the bathroom and indulging himself in some moderately theatrical put-upon body language. ::Extremely robust. I challenge Becket to a game of Portal, to be played when we next meet::

::Newt I am very strong. All weak parts are gone. Please tell me if you are not fine::

Newt shuts his eyes and arches his back before he replies, ::Chill, Maks. There is a time for the kind of semi-sober rhetoric you’re rocking, and that time is when you and Becket and Hermann are playing D&D in a dungeon mastered by me and not before. I look a little bit like a vampire because I am one, obviously::

::Newt:: Mako texts.

Newt kind of slides down the bathroom door to sit on the floor because he’s tired.

::Newt Newt NEWT:: Mako texts.

::MAKO. What is the DEAL. Chill::

::Hey:: A text from an unknown number appears on his phone.

::And you are?:: Newt texts.

::Raleigh:: the person who is apparently Raleigh Becket texts, which is weird and not cool at all, Newt doesn’t think it’s cool to randomly get possibly-drunk texted by Raleigh Becket, Newt doesn’t care if Becket texts him, whatever, Becket is just some guy. Just because he, like, did that thing that one time, everyone thinks he’s so great, but Newt did things at times also, and so it’s not even a big deal. Becket is probably not even drunk. It doesn’t matter if he’s drunk or not because Becket is just a guy who pushed a button and yeah. Whatever.

::Hey:: Newt texts Raleigh.

::Don’t listen to Raleigh:: Mako texts. ::Raleigh does not have my permission text you::

::Why does Raleigh need your PERMISSION to text me?:: Newt texts Mako. ::Because you’re dating him. Because you two are a hot hot item?::

::Do you read the news, Geiszler?:: Raleigh asks.

::Because you are in my half of what we share:: Mako says. ::You are very annoying though, maybe I will transfer you to him for a while::

::You guys, this is too complicated for me:: Newt texts them both. ::I’m having a bad day. You can’t harass me in separate simultaneity I can’t take it. Well, I can, but I would prefer not to::

::Aw!:: Mako texts.

::Man up:: Raleigh adds.

::Uh oh:: Mako texts.

::Did you just tell me to ‘man up’?:: Newt replies, at a texting speed that approaches his theoretical maximum. ::How does one MAN UP exactly? Why don’t we just all engage in evolutionarily primitive posturing behaviors because THAT’S useful, because that’s really VALUABLE, that says great things about our species. Good thought, thank you, Guy::

::It’s an expression?:: Raleigh texts.

::A show of solidarity?:: Raleigh texts.

::In a masculine way. We are guys:. Raleigh texts.

::Not all of us:: Mako amends.

::Guy people are guys:: Raleigh texts. ::Guyszler and I are guys::

::Okay, admittedly my respect for you has simultaneously increased and decreased by eight million percent:: Newt texts. 

::Some people get called ‘Guy’ for no real reason:: Raleigh texts. ::Some people also get called ‘Ray’. Some people would like to just be called their actual name::

::I, NEWTON GEISZLER, CHALLENGE YOU, RALEIGH BECKET, TO AN EPIC PORTAL SHOWDOWN:: Newt texts.

::OH IT IS ON:: Raleigh replies.

::I thought we were playing D&D:: Mako texts. ::Also, I could beat you both at Portal::

::And that’s why Short-Science doesn’t go around challenging you:: Raleigh replies.

::Excuse me, but did. you. just.:: Newt says. ::Go chop down a tree with the blunted hatchet of your so called intellect. That wasn’t even a pun. You get zero respect for that one. On a related note, are you guys trashed?::

::No:: Mako says.

::We are liquored up, yes:: Raleigh says. ::What’s ‘D&D’?::

::Who ARE you?:: Newt asks. ::How do you live? What is your genus and species? Where can other native versions of you be found. ‘What’s D&D’. Please. Get away from me. Farther away.::

::I will explain later:: Mako says. ::It’s for nerds::

::Oh:: Raleigh texts. ::That would explain why I’ve never heard of it::

::Are you guys not sitting right next to each other?:: Newt replies. ::Did you not DRIFT::

::You’re so old:: Mako says.

::Extremely old:: Raleigh agrees.

::You don’t get the drift:: Mako says.

::Hilarious:: Newt replies. ::Look, I’m very busy. Why are you drunkenly harassing me?::

::I always harass you now:: Mako says.

::Because there was an article in Popular Science:: Raleigh says.

::There’s always an article:: Newt replies, somewhat mollified. ::You guys read Popular Science? Lowbrow much?::

::Literally every day people ask us what we think about the latest speculations regarding you:: Raleigh says. ::Some speculations are more plausible than others. Also, I don’t think you know what ‘lowbrow’ means.:: 

::You are not dying?:: Mako asks.

::Everyone is dying:: Newt replies.

::DICK:: Raleigh texts.

::What?:: Newt replies. ::Mortal people are mortal. Telomeres. Cellular senescence. It’s a whole field. Sirtuins. I’m not dying at an accelerated rate that I know of, okay. Chill, people. Is this why you wanted me to take a picture. CREEPERS. Both of you. I’m sure you’ll be very happy together::

::You look like hell, Guy(szler):: Raleigh says.

::Well I will be sure to take another picture when I feel more jaunty. Possibly tomorrow. Possibly after Dr. Gottlieb makes me dinner. Possibly a decade from now. Much as I would love to let you tell me how terrible I look, I have to go do some Gottliebian-themed damage control::

::Damage control?:: Mako says.

::So you and Doc G are an item now?:: Raleigh says. ::Called it.::

::We’ve always been an item, psuckers. Run along, kids. Go engage in text-based harassment elsewhere. Geiszler out::

He ignores the subsequent determined buzzing of his phone by leaving it in the bathroom. This is a legit great solution for him on every level, except for maybe the level where he ambiguously and flippantly involved his colleague in a whole Countervailed Harassment Campaign, but, honestly, Newt’s perfectly calibrated internal sensor regarding Things Likely to Piss Off Hermann Gottlieb says that while the guy does get very distressed about items such as: ‘I was eviscerating a kaiju and liquids flow down the slightly sloped floor to the drain which is maybe, yes, a little bit on your side of this open floor plan lab; who designs things like that, this is both inevitable and not my fault,’ Hermann is, weirdly, less distressed about things like: ‘so, Hermann, I was at a bar and accidentally provoked a band called A Clockwork Orange into starting a bar fight with me a little bit, I should have seen that one coming I know because, yikes, who names their band that, am I right? Also, could you come maybe pick me up, my current location would be jail right now, I think I might need stitches.’ Newt has a hard time explicitly defining the decision trees Hermann uses to determine whether he’s going to be enraged about something or not, and, yes, drifting helps when it comes to parsing that kind of thing, but it turns out that drifting is not a magical answer book because so much of life depends on external circumstances, so it’s hard to know if Hermann will object to the fact that Newt just implied to Mako and Raleigh that he and Newt are maybe a thing that they aren’t, but it’s also a little unclear because what are they even. Newt doesn’t know, and he’s not the best when it comes to figuring these things out. He’s ‘not the best’ at a lot of things, including reinventing the Grand Gesture from first principles if the totally horrifying hour he just had is any kind of evidence, but he does enjoy doing nice things for nice people; Newt has kind of always had a desire to get in on that deal in a waxing/waning type way, so, er, yes, with regard to all that he knows about being a human on paper, it’s probably for the best to disclose interpersonal weirdnesses before they get additionally weird; or, maybe everything is already weird, or, alternatively, nothing is, Newt doesn’t know, Newt’s not sure, Newt’s just a guy who really needs to start making a serious effort to bleed less from his face and maybe get a job.

He leaves the darkened hallway, rounds the corner, and gets halfway though an opening sentence that starts like: “so, for your information, I may have just implied to the aesthetic dream team that—” but ends in silence. 

Hermann is sitting at their kitchen table knocking back a shot of tequila like a freaking boss, which is notably badass, but also pretty distressing on levels and levels and levels because a) why, b) why, c) why, d) there had better not be any more brain switchery, e) because Newt can’t handle that, f) yes he can, g) that’s a lie, h) he can handle anything, i) well, maybe he can and maybe he should evaluate his capabilities on a moment-by-moment and case-by-case basis but honestly j) his capacity is pretty freaking high, k) it always has been, l) and it always will be, m) he’ll probably die or snap into insanity before admitting defeat, n) what happened to his list? o) it’s getting bastardized or p) more correctly, it’s just grown into his thought processes and q) that is a tactical error, but r) whatever, it’s over now, stuvwxyz) he’s terminating his concatenating. 

“Whoa,” Newt says, stepping forward to pull the bottle of tequila away from his erstwhile lab partner. He absconds with it to the opposite side of the table, where he drops into a chair, curls a hand pointedly around his appropriated alcohol, and fixes Hermann with what he hopes is a skeptically sympathetic look and not a look full of overt anxiety.

“You fixed your hair,” Hermann says, his diction already sliding slightly. 

“Yes,” Newt says, like this is a normal thing that they normally discuss like normal, normal people. 

Newt looks at the bottle of tequila and estimates that Hermann probably just did three consecutive shots in less than fifteen minutes.

This is bad, but the outstanding question is, of course, the magnitude of the implied badness. 

“Yup,” Newt continues, “I did fix my hair. Thank you for noticing. You’re ah—” he can feel the compensatory rise in his own heart rate, the crescendoing scream of a nervous system he could have sworn had been totally played out. His thoughts grind against one another, and if he’s not careful, if he’s not careful, he’s going to start bleeding again. It’s so easy to start bleeding. He just needs to sit here for a few seconds and make sure he’s not breathing in or breathing out against a closed glottis; he needs to ensure that all airways are open and all airflow is laminar. He is fine, he is fine, he is not a fraction from disequilibrium, there’s no cliff to fall off, there’s just the platform of the self and it is infinite.

He is fine. 

Fine, fine, fine.

“You’re sure you’re still you?” Newt says casually, casually, oh so casually, “because, not gonna lie, dude, this is a little more of an historical me thing than an historical you thing—the triplicated tequila shots in the absence of food, I mean. And, ah, I’m not at all confident that I can do that thing I just did twice in one night.”

In fact, Newt isn’t sure it will work ever again; he thinks that the brain—and, in particular, Hermann’s brain—will find ways to adapt, ways to circumvent and shut down Geiszlerian efforts, protean though they may be. He’s not sure that his traumatic-snap-back-to-the-self approach would have worked at all but for the crushing, total duty that Hermann feels and that Newt doesn’t understand and maybe never will except as an empirical reality, observable but unexplained, like the ‘why’ behind existence. It does make him wonder what part of what he’d done had worked—the part where he’d tried to effect a psychological track switch via lexical aggression? Or the part where he’d thought he couldn’t do it and had started screaming?

Now that he’s had a little bit of time to think about it?

He’s pretty sure it might have been the latter.

“Quite sure,” Hermann replies. “Were I you, my misery would be much less complete and crushing, nor would it have necessitated or merited the set of shots I just performed.”

The tangle of depressing realities and implied opinions in that comment makes Newt tired.

Newt is already tired.

“Let’s get food,” Newt says, feeling like he’d much rather dramatically sprawl atop the kitchen table and wait for unconsciousness than make an effort to acquire calories.

“I don’t require food,” Hermann says. “I require that you return my bottle of tequila.”

“Okay,” Newt says, involving his whole left arm in the defensive tequila curl he’s got going because he is surrendering this bottle over his dead body. “Yes. Deal. I accept. You can have this tequila back after you eat some food.”

“Do not pretend to be responsible,” Hermann snarls.

“I am, in fact, both reliable and responsible,” Newt replies, in justified hauteur. “I taught graduate school. I ran a department.”

“You are ineffectual and inflammatory. Befriending you is like rescuing a starving, juvenile cat covered with nitroglycerin,” Hermann says.

“Wow, um, that’s a really specific, ragingly inaccurate, and totally bizarre non sequitur. By ‘juvenile cat’ do you actually mean ‘kitten’? Because I am not seeing the connection between myself and a kitten. Really, I’m more of a fish person. You could be a cat. Of the two of us, you are more cat-like for sure. While I’m not seeing the explosives-doused-kitten thing, I am seeing an Erwin Schrödinger tie-in. Why does this always happen when we get drunk. My point is that you are feeling that tequila I think, buddy; why don’t we just get some Chinese food and watch Star Trek: Voyager like the erudite nerds that we are, a very very small bit, hardly at all really; we’re actually much too cool for Star Trek but maybe just this one time because we had a hard day and you have a little bit of a thing for B’Elanna Torres, so fiery and competent, rarr, and I have a little bit of a thing for Seven of Nine, so cool and competent, and also rarr. They would have made a great couple. And by great I mean terrible. In a spectacular way. We could just lie on the couch and watch it for like an hour or maybe eighteen of them in a row.”

“Do not do that,” Hermann says, shooting him a look that might actually be able to extinguish a small, non-oil-based fire.

“What?” Newt replies. “Tempt you with half-Klingon engineers?”

“You know exactly what I mean,” Hermann replies. 

Newt does a gratuitous, non-verbal r roll.

“Yes,” Hermann confirms. “That.. 

“I am taking this as tacit agreement to my plan,” Newt says. “Now. The only question is do we go with the legit but slow Chinese place or the less legit but speedy Chinese place.”

“I would like to recommence drinking in an expeditious manner,” Hermann says.

“Expeditious it is,” Newt replies. “Queue up the Trek, dude.”

Glasses on, weeping set to ‘nope’, hair set to ‘Randy Waterhouse’, effectiveness operating at theoretical maximum and inflammatory rhetoric dialed down to zero, Dr. Newton Geiszler of the personal uncertainty and the cognitive insurgency locates and peruses the relevant menu while Dr. Gottlieb resumes his head-down-misery pose at the kitchen table.

Okay then.

Ugh, his brain says, as Newt opens his fancy, new, overpowered, underutilized laptop and locates the relevant restaurant online. Menus.

Deciding on a single food item from a list of multiple food items is a thing that, alas, generally presents a vigorous, snarling, cognitive lightsaber vs. phaser duel between Geiszlerian and Gottliebian preferences. Even more alas, food selection turns out to be an area that the carbon copy, cut-up kids are interested in, because one of the things that the kaiju found (or, oh god, find?) ridic fascinating about humans was the amount of brainspace devoted to food, because, hi, if you’re just a giant, cloned, alien war machine, built to serve your purpose and then die, you don’t think about the deliciousness of what you’re consuming, it turns out. Who knew. Now Newt knows. The kids are turning into foodies, a little bit. It’s weird. And complicated. Anyway, Newt is not in the mood to have a mental fight—not with his inner Dr. Gottlieb, who is riding high today, and definitely not with the kids, who are simmering, low and interested and a little bit sadomasochisticallicexpialidociously in the back of his brain. So, instead of trying to decide on anything he just picks three random numbers from the vegetarian section of the menu and hopes that none of them include too much eggplant, because someone doesn’t like eggplant, but it’s not really clear to him who that might be just right now. 

Post heroic food ordering, Newt cannot help but notice that Hermann has not queued up the agreed-upon Trek, and has, instead, decided to just stay sitting at the table, his head buried in his arms. 

Fortunately, Newt does not find this stressful, because first of all, why would he; second of all, crushing depression on Hermann’s part seems really understandable right now; third of all, Newt totally gets the histrionically displayed misery vibe, though, historically that’s not really a Gottliebian thing, this makes him nervous. He doesn’t like it. There’s a little too much Geiszler in theatrical defeat, he thinks; but he’s not so sure that this defeat is actually ‘theatrical’; it might just be defeat.

He does not find this stressful.

Nope, not stressful.

This does not look good, his brain says, running some high level Geiszlerian analysis right here right now, running it hardcore.

This, in fact, looks extremely bad, his mental Hermann adds. 

The kids don’t have a strong opinion about Hermann, but they’re rolling around in Newt’s distress a little bit.

Or they would be, if he were distressed, which he’s not.

Newt doesn’t recall ever seeing this kind of overtly miserable body language from Hermann, and he’s known the guy for his whole life, in an artificial way, and for over a decade if one counts correspondence. So Newt stands there a while, kind of a long while, probably a little too long, just holding tequila that isn’t his but probably should be and staring at Hermann, who is putting in some literal face time with the surface of the table, maybe weeping. Maybe just kind of already starting to pass out a little bit from the three shots of tequila he just totally pounded all in a row in a span of less than ten minutes? And yeah, Newt will definitely hold his hair back for him, metaphorically, if he ends up throwing up in the next twelve minutes to twelve hours, or, really, ever because Newt kind of owes him that, kind of owes it to him hardcore and for life. Or maybe it’s his inner Hermann that feels like he owes the external and actual Hermann metaphorical and literal support post alcohol poisoning. Whatever. The point is that the current situation isn’t ‘good’ in the classical sense, and apparently Hermann is having the kind of day where he’s put a moratorium on reasonable decision making and has just decided to go with it, whatever ‘it’ is, whether it be surprise Geiszlerian sets of minutes, trying to use ethanol to kill his own brain, or doing any number of things that he normally wouldn’t do. 

“What,” Hermann says abruptly, lifting his head and covering his face with his hands and scaring the crap out of Newt a little bit, truth be told, because Newt has been a little bit twitchy lately, “are you doing?”

“Um, staring at you from close range like a creeper, thinking intensively and a little bit invasively about your current mental landscape, trying to read your thoughts from a distance of about a meter and a half, and kind of wondering if you have alcohol poisoning yet,” Newt replies.

“I do not,” Hermann replies, slurring slightly, dropping his hands, and giving Newt a semi-glazed glare. “Thank you for your interest.”

“Come on dude,” Newt says, “let’s invent a Voyager drinking game.”

Hermann looks like he’s torn pretty equally between being led into Trektation versus attempting to become one with their kitchen table, so Newt helps him decide by offering him a hand that Hermann’s way too polite to refuse. This is considerate professional assistance of the Geiszlerian school, which is, indeed, his school. Not grabby, imperious manhandling in the rustic and antiquated Gottliebian tradition.

Newt knows who he is.

Newt knows who everyone is.

Everyone that he knows, he knows to the extent that they can be known, which is to say he knows no one but himself and four-weeks-ago Hermann, and three-point-five weeks ago cut up kaiju kids, if that’s even what they are anymore, those throughlines in his head that are getting more and more Geiszler-spangled all the time.

Hermann takes his hand, because obviously.

Newt pulls him up and steadies him a little bit because, yup, no food, one month without much alcohol, and one hundred milliliters of tequila, give or take fifteen mLs (Newt’s realistic about his estimating and how many significant digits it may or may not deserve) will most definitely mess with the vestibular system of his esteemed colleague.

He gives Hermann a close range semi-hug versus a semi let-me-just-kind-of-turn-this-fake-hug-into-me-showing-you-to-the-couch-real-quick type thing that is super respectful but still gets him a pointed glare. The glare is a little bit staged and probably supposed to be somewhat reassuring and so Newt gives Hermann a don’t-you-try-to-reassure-me-with-your-glare-I-expect-more-from-you type look, which Hermann counters with a Newton-no-one-has-ever-made-me-want-to-roll-my-eyes-as-dangerously-and-shockingly-hard-as-you-make-me-want-to-roll-them cock of the head, which Newt counters with a that’s-what-the-intellectually-envious-say understated eyebrow raise, which Hermann does not now and never has had a good response to, because, hi, anyone with a brain in their head should be intellectually envious of Newt; it’s a mark of good taste, really. 

Newt makes a whole bunch of things happen, like sitting on the couch and teeing up Voyager season four, because while his own knowledge of Star Trek relative to Star Wars isn’t necessarily what one would call encyclopedic, he knows enough that if he wants to be watching Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix Zero-One, he’s going to need to go straight to Scorpion: Part Two. No one here needs Part One because Hermann has been carrying a super secret, super concealed, extreme love for Star Trek: Voyager for pretty much the entirety of his sentient existence, so Newt has all the ancillary knowledge he needs to cut straight to season four of a somewhat (never) obsolete TV show.

Newt also makes the food thing happen when it arrives, and he spends about fifteen minutes over vegetable lo mein laying down the ground rules of a nascent Voyager drinking game. Hermann’s not really into it, even though Newt very courteously and extremely gallantly throws an entire B’Elanna Torres subsection into the drinking game.

Hermann is not impressed.

Not that Newt actually thought he would be?

But still.

The guy is totally distracted, not really eating that much, kind of periodically looking at Newt, but not at intervals that make sense based on the flow of Newt’s scintillating Voyager monologuing. The guy isn’t saying much, which isn’t weird in and of itself because Hermann gets quiet when stressed, but the silence he’s rocking now is a different kind of silence than the kind of silence Newt had been expecting. It’s less miserable and more—threatening. Suspenseful? He feels a little bit like he’s the guy with dubious judgment from the Alien franchise who’s about to touch the mysterious egg-like objects he’s just found in a cave. Except not really, because he’s just awkwardly sitting on the couch, unnecessarily close to his lab partner turned roommate, trying pretty hard to generate some interest in this whole Trekquila Night he’s trying to have.

Newt is trying.

Trying hard.

Newt is failing.

Failing hard.

Eventually, mid-way through Newt’s freeform scientific retconning of Seven of Nine’s eventual wardrobe choices, Hermann mutes the Star Trek. He doesn’t turn it off, he just silences it, and there is something about that half-decision that seems both strange and ominous to Newt, because Hermann is a shut-off-the-television, I-make-binary-decisions type guy. 

Newt stops talking and looks over at Hermann.

Hermann is looking back at him in a super intense way.

“Don’t hunt me,” Newt says reflexively and arguably kind of insensitively, but in all seriousness he’s pretty sure they should not be messing around when it comes to the the predatory instincts thing, especially not on a night like tonight when everyone’s having a hard time staying in their right minds, some parties are drunk, and some parties maybe spent thirty minutes weeping and are kind of tired and maybe not entirely out of the post-catharsis emotional danger zone no matter how many backlit screens they stare at and how much lo mein they courageously order.

“I’m not hunting you,” Hermann replies, looking away, looking back to silent Voyager like he is too tired and too confused and too miserable for all of this to be anything other than much too much.

Newt gets that.

Newt gets it a lot.

Newt gets it emocore.

Newt is also a little bit done, a little bit overdone, a little bit scorched, a little bit reduced to a burning cinder, a little bit carbonized, a little bit dispersed by local air currents to really feel anything other than relieved, that (yay) Hermann is not hunting him, okay, good, his obligations are discharged and, actually, now that he’s thinking about it, the present moment would be a really good time to make an effort toward not being conscious anymore. His attempt probably won’t be successful, it will probably take hours and hours of Voyager, but hey if Hermann doesn’t want to actually do the Voyager drinking game, which it seems like he’s not excited about, then that’s fine, they can just quietly sit here, not really doing anything or talking, just being exhaustedly miserable in the same local environment. 

“No,” Hermann says, elbowing Newt as Newt, maybe, starts invading his personal space with a sleep-on-shoulder kind of vibe. “Retrieve my tequila, please.” 

Newt sighs. 

Newt has some misgivings about the alcohol, primarily because their night so far has been an arguable ‘disaster’ of an experience. But he owes Hermann, oh, an approximately infinite amount of mental slack in this department, so he gets up, retrieves the tequila, and two out of four shot-glasses that Mako had, apparently, purchased in New York City, and then carried with her until two days ago, when she had overnighted them from Berlin to San Francisco, which is really intense, but things have been intense lately; Newt’s not going to judge. 

The glasses themselves are pretty badass. They’re green, shot through with blue, slightly kaijuesque, but abstracted enough that it’s not tacky.

He puts both shot glasses on the table and pours Hermann, oh god, a fourth shot, and then pours himself half a shot.

Because he is responsible.

They do a pretty intense shot-glass vs. shot-glass impact before Hermann knocks his tequila back and Newt sedately sips his.

“Um?” Newt says. 

“I have been thinking, Newton,” Hermann says, getting a little more noticeably German and a little bit more noticeably aggressive at the same time.

“This is not a new thing for you,” Newt replies with significant trepidation. “About?”

“I think it’s impossible for us to prove or disprove the reality of the SPECTER Effect.”

Oh hey, Newt’s brain says, totally relieved and also totally surprised. Science!

Even the kids seem pleased at this left turn away from the contemplation of human misery. 

“No way,” Newt says. “No way. Just because I can’t livestream your sensory cortex or pull words out of books you’re looking at doesn’t mean that we aren’t capable of some kind of real-time information exchange. I have a theory about this. It’s kind of weird; I freaked out a little bit about it the other day, just so you know, but it’s empirically very satisfying, potentially. Admittedly, it’s a little disturbing, but I’m going to tell you anyway; I just want us both to be very clear on the fact that I don’t plan to actually do it, because I don’t see a way, mechanically, to do it safely and I care about safety, recent past proof-of-principle self experimentation aside, and also nematocyst incident aside, and also—“

“Will you get on with it,” Hermann snaps, in a way that’s probably meant to be totally British School Master-y but just comes off as maximally tired, moderately drunk, and vaguely fond.

“Myeah,” Newt says, “I’m psyching myself up because the kids—er, well, okay, full disclosure, or, actually, not full disclosure, never mind. Okay. Okay okay okay. The point is that I have an hypothesis,” he finishes, managing to pull everything out of the fire to watch it burn in the metaphorical pan.

“You are not already drunk, are you?” Hermann asks, looking over at him in unmistakable if understated amusement.

“What?” Newt says, being Newt and hanging onto his brain and just saying no to the interesting, interested chorus of undead kaiju parts that are hissing a little bit from where they’re curled on the floor of his skull. “No.”

“In that case pretend you want me to understand what you are saying,” Hermann says, solicitous to the point of insult.

That was uncalled for, his brain says.

Newt can do this. 

Newt can do all of this.

He knocks back what remains of his half shot of tequila, slams his glass on the table authoritatively, and says, “I hypothesize that we were neurally altered in such a way that we now have the capacity to send and receive electromagnetic signals that can be transduced into thoughts, but that ability is compromised or blocked entirely by the insulation provided by the bone of our skulls. Kaiju have the conductivity required for EM-based over-the-air thought broadcast built into their skeletal and integumentary systems. As evidence, please see giant EM pulse generated by Leatherback in Hong Kong.”

Hermann looks like he finds Newt’s statement a) surprisingly articulate, b) somewhat impressive, and also c) physically painful.

Newt decides he should get another half-shot of tequila for that exquisitely well-articulated hypothesis. He pours himself one, but Hermann takes it, sliding it across the coffee table away from Newt.

“One half-shot per hour,” Hermann says. “The goal is to avoid a seizure, Newton. I detest your theory.”

“Oh you detest it?” Newt says, letting the tequila go with a dece amount of grace. “You detest it, Hermann. Well—”

“I suspect, however,” Hermann says, speaking over him, “that you may be correct.”

In the back of Newt’s mind, the kids hiss in muted longing beneath the low amplitude, high frequency, alcohol-induced buzz that he’s feeling much, much too soon. 

“Okay,” Newt says, ridiculously mollified by Gottliebian suspicions of Geiszlerian correctness. “Okay okay okay, look. We’re being lazy about this. Really lazy. There are two potential mechanisms for real-time communication, kaiju-to-kaiju style, right? And you’re up to speed on this courtesy of our neural remix, yes?”

“Yes,” Hermann says dryly. “Both mechanisms occurred to you within minutes of your first drift, and, from what I can tell, you have not progressed them since.”

“I feel like there’s judgment in your voice, dude; please allow me to remind you that my abilities to test hypotheses have been limited by lack of samples, lack of vision, by which I literally mean ‘eyesight’, and lack of, er, psychological robustness that would, hypothetically, be required for me to cut apart yet more kaiju brains.. Newt readjusts his glasses and gives Hermann a disapproving look. “So you’ll excuse me if I don’t feel I need to defend myself to you in this respect.”

“You are literally the most ridiculous person I have ever encountered,” Hermann says. “Please stop ascribing your own insecurities about your recent work ethic to me. I am the person who has purchased for you an entire library on rationalism and who continuously suggests that you sleep rather than work.”

Myeah, his brain says, in indolent inarticulateness.

Newt feels a little bit strange in a way that would be consistent with mild intoxication but clearly is not that because it takes way more than half a shot of tequila to achieve mild intoxication. 

For him.

Because he is a badass.

“Yeah, okay, no,” Newt says. “I do not ascribe, Hermann.”

Hermann gives him an expression that is a resplendent if semi-drunken example of Grade A Gottliebian Offensive Solicitousness.

“Two mechanisms,” Newt says, getting them back on track with some appropriately emphatic words and gestures. “One: EM-based, over-the-air thought broadcast facilitated by kaiju physiology and mechanistically identical to, say, radio waves. Two: some freakyass quantum entanglement thing. These two possibilities aren’t mutually exclusive, necessarily, right. I mean, humans, for example, can see and hear, so what we would, classically and embarrassingly, consider ‘extra’ sensory perception isn’t necessarily unimodal. It could be EM based and quantum based. There could be overlap. There could be other mechanisms I haven’t yet conceived of. Tell no one I said this, Hermann, I actually cannot believe that just came out of my mouth. I think maybe I am drunk. I’m definitely abusing quantum mechanics.. Newt dramatically tips his head back and shuts his eyes.

“Charming,” Hermann says. “’Some quantum entanglement thing’. Ah yes. Very discerning. Well, you’ve certainly persuaded me, Dr. Geiszler, I applaud you. If you are referring to the simultaneous swapping of the spin states of entangled particles as a potential mechanism for thought transfer, then congratulations, you have explained telepathy at the cost of violating the concept of causality.”

Newt reopens his eyes.

Right.

Yeah.

Okay.

Causality violations.

Yes.

He has done that.

He’s violated causality.

He’s committed casual, causal, quantum-mechanical calumnies. 

It’s a mistake to go up against a quantum physicist when quantum physics is on the line, but right now his personal ontology pretty much resembles crème brûlée and apparently criticisms about causality are a little bit of a spoon straight to the cracking crust of his mind, so yes he feels a little bit upset right now, that’s fine. It’s fine if he weirdly, weirdly, super weirdly he feels a little bit like crying because quantum mechanics does not deserve to be applied to the macro scale; this is some kind of new intrapersonal low and he’s had, like, eight of them just today.

New lows, that is. 

Hermann is looking at him in a sort of horrified way. 

Aw, it’s okay champ, his brain says, I don’t think you’re going to a win an argument about the Non-Communication Theorem with one of the preeminent quantum physicists of your time without giving the guy any additional information. Nobody would win that argument. Literally no human could win it. Not even multi-degreed mathematicians-by-proxy who have recently become kaiju whisperers. 

“Newton,” Hermann says, “er, actually, upon reflection, there is, possibly, some merit to your supposition.”

Newt wants to look in a mirror or at least touch his own face to see what’s happening there that’s causing him to win this argument without talking. 

This is an argument that he shouldn’t be winning. 

Also, his brain adds, and I am so sorry to break this to you, friend, you’re a little bit drunk. Off half a shot. It’s possible you might look like you’re in danger of crying over causality violations, but that’s probably only because you are. 

Even the kids seem to feel sorry for him, if their sympathetic hissing is any kind of emotional surrogate endpoint.

No one in his head likes retrocausality.

He tries to rein in emotional upset of inappropriate magnitude. 

“Shut up,” Newt says thickly, “I will grant you your causality point, only because I have to, given the state of humanity’s understanding of quantum mechanics, which is probably, in the grand, objective scheme of things, pretty limited, but would it change your opinion at all if I told you that I knew that, er, that I suspected, that I strongly suspected that when the breach was shut, not annihilated, not, you know, destroyed via thermonuclear payload but before that, when it was shut you understand, that maybe, maybe—I’m pretty sure that the parts of kaiju that we kept alive, that we couldn’t really kill, that we never really killed, er, that we originally thought we killed but that, for better or worse, that we didn’t kill, that they, that those guys, that they, when the breach was shut, that they could, possibly, still—” Newt breaks off, unambiguously aware that he is making a mess of this, but finding it difficult to be intoxicated, make an argument, talk about this particular subject, and not weep all at the same time, “—contact the anteverse. Would that make you think there was some kind of quantum component. Because I personally cannot think of a way that you could possibly communicate between parallel verses through a closed, non-transiting portal, without some kind of entangled quantum state actually doing that transmitting. Right? Am I totally off base? Do I sound psychotic to you, possibly? Because, look, I’m willing to admit that as a possibility; I’m cognizant of my own cognitive fallibility, dude, I am.”

“Restate,” Hermann says, in a super gentle way, looking slightly horrified by Newt’s kaleidoscopic collection of semi-cogent clauses, “concisely, please.”

Oh god, Newt thinks. 

Get it together, his brain advises.

“I think I might be drunk,” Newt confesses, buying himself some time.

“You frequently sound intoxicated even when you are not,” Hermann replies. 

“Ugh,” Newt says, squeezing his eyes shut, one hand coming to the frames of his glasses, like he might be able use the things to lever open his mind. “Given real-time communication between kaiju tissue fragments and kaiju in the anteverse through a closed breach, the nature of that communication is likely to be quantum rather than electromagnetic, since, when shut, the breach transited nothing detectable.” 

“Yes,” Hermann says, “agreed. This is why I told you the night after the breach was collapsed that I could not rule out ongoing mental continuity with the anteverse. As a technical aside, I sincerely doubt the mechanism has to do with spin states. But more to the point—Newton, this presumes your premise is correct. Was there definitive and unambiguous real-time communication across the closed breach, or did we simply perceive a memory of the anteverse as the anteverse itself while interacting with a single kaiju mind. Subjective phenomena are difficult to interpret and human memory is flawed even for events of pedestrian scope.”

“Yeah,” Newt says in escapist agreement, the word cracking with relief.

It’s not a conceptual relief; it’s simply the relief that comes every time he standing-glissades his way around an ideological threat. He doesn’t particularly care to discuss this with Hermann, not here, not now, so he’ll take the out he’s been offered and is he lying a little bit when he says ‘yeah’. Yeah. He is. Kind of though. Only ‘kind of’, because what’s ‘real’, really, if it’s not that which is demonstrable and reproducible. Those are the things that matter. Those are the things that stand up to discussion—the things that are true. It doesn’t matter how he feels about something. Science-intuition and hunches do nothing more than guide reproducible decision-making, except when the insanity of pilot-experiment-as-first-and-last-attempt becomes necessary because the alternative is death in the short term.

Sometimes, then, science intuition can save civilization.

“But,” Hermann says.

Newt raises his eyebrows—edgy, disorganized, not a fan. 

Hermann looks back at him, locked eyes, locked jaw, locked-down mind; Newt can’t see what he might be thinking.

“My experience was not identical to yours,” Hermann continues. 

“No,” Newt says, vibrating one foot against the floor in a soothing release of nervous energy.

“I fall into the habitual error of assuming that it was the same, that it is the same, because I know all you knew entering the second drift. But that has been and remains an error,” Hermann says slowly. Slowly. Really quite slowly. 

Newt is feeling okay.

Newt is feeling suboptimal.

Newt is feeling okay.

It’s the kids who are feeling strange and subpar: liking Newt a lot right now because being Hermann scared them; not really used to alcohol; hating Newt with a vicious, endless anger; pining for old networks; feeling their inadequacy; feeling their rage; weirded out by the Trekquila in theory and in practice. They don’t like this, they don’t like this at all, no one does, no one likes it, none of those who live inside his head—why can’t it all just be how it used to be?

What ‘used to be’ was omnipresent incipient death.

That’s why. 

Newt wants to leave a little bit; be anywhere but here—his empty room, the Coastal Wall, on Voyager, in breaches.

His anxiety has a blunted edge; can half a shot of tequila do this to him now?

He looks around the room, waiting for a blue halation, but their fluorescent lights stay yellow. 

“Would you care to elaborate regarding how it is that you’ve come by your current working model?” Hermann asks him, with the air of an intoxicated guy trying to put his glassblown sentence down on a moving skateboard.

Nooooo, Newt’s brain offers.

“Yup,” Newt says.

This is very easy for him, he can delineate this whole thing; it will just be like all those times when rational people try to explain something super implausible that they ‘just know’ because that always goes very well for historically rational people, there are literally so many examples of that, probably, maybe, just because he cannot think of any, ever, in the history of mankind, does not mean that there aren’t any, yeah, no, like, this is going to go great. It’s just that, well, Hermann has, on multiple occasions, been somewhat ostensibly dismissive of Newt’s overall sanity level, but not lately, nope, not since drifting, Hermann’s outward respect for the reproducibility of Newt’s outlook has been unusually and atypically high relative to past trends and Newt can’t help but feel it’s slightly suggestive of the idea that Hermann, maybe, possibly, is now somewhat concerned Newt might be having real cognitive problems with constructing a reasonable, representative, rational, and reproducible representation of the world in his head. This makes him feel a little bit bad about himself and it also makes him kind of want to shout ‘I’m entirely rational,’ in Hermann’s face right about now, like he has for years but with more pathetic irony and uncomfortable desperation this time. It also wants to make him drink more tequila, but he’s already getting a little disorganized; someone’s been putting mental pens in his cognitive pencil cup, but Hermann is definitely drunk, and Newt is de facto the responsible party right now—the designated driver of their carless evening—and he’s pretty sure that screaming defensively about his sanity is something that upset, drunk, insecure Newt might do, not a thing that totally chill, not-really-drunk-at-all-because-of-reasons-of-impossibility, intellectually secure Dr. Geiszler is going to do, nope, that guy is going to think of something else other than, ‘yeah, I know the local network of disembodied brains was connected to the anteverse through a shut breach because I drifted with it after the breach was destroyed and I found out that they are so sad and so enraged and so lonely and I think they know where I am, I just think that’s a thing that they know, that’s not weird, that’s not creepy, that’s not me screaming, nope.’ 

You’re perseverating on your own anxieties, his brain says. Go orthogonally, friend.

Orthogonally.

Yes, okay, good call.

A lateral step leaves him feeling lost. It’s from the kids that insight comes.

Before we hated you, they hiss, we didn’t hate you. Have you ever seen a kaiju pause. Have you ever seen even incremental hesitation. Have you ever seen a kaiju extend a braided blend of blue conductive tissue and wait?

He/she/zhe/it/they had been waiting, then. 

Otachi.

He’s certain of it now, and certain that he had never wanted to be certain of anything of the kind.

Hermann is going to hate this. 

“It wasn’t a memory that we interfaced with,” Newt says, finding the line of argument he’ll trace for Hermann and simultaneously sandbagging his brain against his native Gottliebian sympathies, which are raging out of control in some kind of post-tequila flood. “It was the hivemind itself that I jacked into. It must have been, because, after my first drift, they came for me.”

Newt watches Hermann watching him.

“What do you mean they ‘came’ for you?” Hermann asks, like a man who’s already staring at an answer he can see but doesn’t care for.

“A double event in the breach, and both kaiju head straight for Hong Kong. And not just straight for Hong Kong, but straight to the public shelter where I just happen to be. The odds on that are astronomical.”

“The Wall was completed everywhere else, Newton, they might have pulled that from your thoughts—”

“Which would have required real-time thought exchange while the breach was closed,” Newt says, unambiguously victorious but, for once, not all that excited about it.

Hermann looks at him and sighs, two fingers pressed against his temple.

Newt raises his eyebrows and then looks away, toward the darkened Wall. 

“It seems, from my memories of the incident,” Hermann says, staring at nothing in particular, “that you certainlycould have been forcibly dragged from the remains of that shelter and consumed.”

“Yup,” Newt replies.

But you were not dragged, the kids hiss. You were not even touched. 

“I think—” he says, “I think that might have been some kind of offer.”

“Of what?” Hermann whispers.

“I’m not sure,” Newt replies.

You know, the kids hiss. 

You know, his brain says, you know just what they wanted, you knew it all along, but you said no because you’re a human scientist, and you like your little planet the way it is, not a ruined waste. You did what you had to do, you did what you signed on to do, so what if you destroyed your field and killed your samples and tortured the first alien life your world has ever seen even past the point of death because only decay can truly take them and even then they’re toxic?

His thoughts freeze there and don’t progress. 

“Whatever it was,” Newt says, shaking his head and adjusting his glasses, “I didn’t take it.”

“How atypically wise,” Hermann says. 

“Hey,” Newt replies in token protest, because that’s a little bit fair. 

“So,” Hermann says. “The implication is that your first drift, in isolation, was enough to modify your mind to the extent that you, in particular, became trackable by kaiju that had transited the breach?”

“Yes,” Newt replies. “Which, in turn, implies that I was and, likely, still am transmitting some kind of hive-mind readable signal. You probably are too.”

“I do not like this, Newton,” Hermann says in admirable understatement, pouring himself another shot of tequila with improbably steady hands. “I do not care for that supposition at all.”

“I’m not wild about it myself,” Newt replies. “But, I think I summoned you to San Francisco earlier in the week using our new anteverse circuitry, so I’m going to count that as a win.”

Hermann tilts his head and gives Newt a look that’s an insulting blend between superiority and sympathy.

“You,” Newt says, preemptively trying to shut his arch nemesis down before the guy gets up and running, “are inherently skeptical of the idea of a real time connection between us only because—”

“No,” Hermann says, with a volume escalation, unwilling to let Newt get away with unmatched verbal aggression. “You are the one with a fondness for paradigm destruction and an attendant—”

“Because you’re afraid,” Newt continues, plowing victorious over a decelerating counterargument. It’s decelerating because Hermann is afraid, he is certainly afraid, anyone with the capacity for higher thought would be afraid right now; if their brains were altered into receivers and transmitters then what else is waiting out there in the ambient, electromagnetic noise that surrounds them every waking moment of every day. “You don’t want it to be true, so you’re not looking with due diligence.”

Hermann sips his tequila and says nothing.

Lack of argument is as good as admitted defeat.

“I think it’s our skulls,” Newt says. I don’t think we have the kind of sensitivity, the kind of range that the kaiju would have, because human skin and bone and muscle are pretty good insulation for any EM signals we might be giving off at low levels. I bet the entire kaiju nervous system is built to facilitate broadcast and reception.”

“You just speculated that the nature of the connection involved quantum entanglement, making your insulation and range arguments irrelevant,” Hermann replies, in a tone that’s torn between concern and enthusiasm. 

“No,” Newt says, even though it’s kind of true. He’s not doing his best right now but things don’t feel tightly battened down in his mind. “Yes. I feel slightly—look I’m not excited to admit this to you, but I feel I might be slightly more sensitive to alcohol than I was. Previously. I mean, GABA, am I right. Also, by ‘slightly’ I actually mean kind of ‘significantly’. But look, I’m not sure how effective quantum-entanglement mediated instantaneous information transfer is for tracking purposes, right? It’s like a picture, and hey, sure, that picture might be your real-time location but, like, unless I know my GPS coordinates and I’m thinking about them continuously, and Otachi can interpret that human-based intel on the fly, pun intended just a little bit, instantaneous information transfer via, like, spin states or something, go with me here, doesn’t give you a transmitted signal to track, am I right, so I’m thinking it’s likely to be both. Quantum and classical tracking mechanisms. So to restate for clarity: while communication across the closed breach must be, must have been, quantum, Otachi’s literal hunting down of Dr. Newton Geiszler has got to be an EM-based thing, I’m thinking, yes? Agree. Disagree. You disagree. I can tell by your face. Get out of here. Literally get out. This makes total sense. I banish you to the balcony. Take your quantum mechanical insights and go. No one wants that here.”

Hermann is giving him a very narrowed-eyed kind of look. 

Newt points silently but emphatically at the balcony.

“You literally had half a shot of tequila,” Hermann says, slightly more than slightly slurring.

“You’ve had like a third of a bottle, dude,” Newt says. “I don’t see what your point is relevant to. I’m on an antiepileptic that facilitates GABAergic inhibitory transmission and that,” Newt says, pausing for dramatic effect, because he’s got great rhetorical technique, better than literally anyone he’s ever met in his life, like, so good that he could have been Demosthenes in a previous existence if he believed in that kind of thing, which he does not, thank you.

Philippic, the kids hiss in appreciative support.

Yes kids, Newt thinks. I could see you getting into the art of the fiery diatribe. Maybe a little too into it.

“Were you planning to complete your thought?” Hermann asks him, with extremely ill-mannered politeness. “Or shall I?”

“You’re a dick,” Newt informs him.

“I forbid you to have any more tequila,” Hermann says, emptying Newt’s set-aside half-shot into his own shot glass and then pointedly drinking it. 

“You’re going to get alcohol poisoning,” Newt points out helpfully. 

“I doubt very much that you are correct, Newton; my ability to metabolize alcohol has always been notably robust. This has been true for as long as you have known me, and you may pretend to remain unaware of this fact, but kindly stop indulging your penchant for hyperbole and deceiving yourself about your own ability to metabolically process alcohol which is, in point of fact, notably low, to the delight of literally every graduate student who has ever encountered the colocalization of you and ethanol-containing-beverages. Furthermore, were I to suffer alcohol poisoning, arguably that would be one of the more pleasant post-workday leisure activities that I have enjoyed this week,” Hermann says. 

“Can you not?” Newt asks.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to specify,” Hermann says, like a guy who’s feeling pretty secure in Newt’s inability to do just that.

Newt doesn’t care. Newt can choose a whole new conversational tangent. “I’m pretty sure that eventually I’m going to figure out how to read your mind, just so you know and are preparing yourself for this eventuality.” He flexes his fingers raises an eyebrow, and says, “okay, now hold still—I want to put my fingers on the exit points of your trigeminal nerve. Through, you know, the bones of your face.”

Your phrasing was slightly alarming there, champ, his brain informs him. 

“You want to do what?” Hermann says, squinting at him in an incredulously drunken way.

“Okay, no, that sounded bad,” Newt says, doing a super reassuring parting-of-the-atmosphere type hand gesture. “I just, like, okay, if I’m right about this, then maybe I can read your thoughts by trying to get some of my nerves close to a whole bunch of your nerves, and ideally it would be your cranial nerves because they’ve got a direct line to the brain without messing around in the spinal cord, right. I mean, ugh, what is that even; the spinal cord is like a telepathic death trap. Probably. Can you tell no one I said the word ‘telepathic’, I feel so weird about it; this is really embarrassing for me. Cranial nerves though. I’ve just got a good feeling about this. Let me touch your face,” Newt says, explaining things very clearly. 

“What?” Hermann says.

“Can you not treat everything I say as something super weird and surprising?” Newt says, reaching over, doing his thing, fingertips to Hermann’s face, doing a little more of a precise application of fingers to skin than he’s seen prototypical Vulcans rocking, because, hi, how much does the average Vulcan know about human biology, really. Probably not as much as Newt knows, that’s for sure. 

Newt is pretty sure that his brain would make even Vulcans jealous. 

Also, Vulcans are fictional.

Riiiight.

Whatever.

He sets his fingers down in three steps; thumb to chin, index finger to cheekbone, and middle finger to medial eyebrow.

Living skin always weirds him out; he forgets how warm it is.

“You are incredibly bizarre,” Hermann says, holding sculpture-still so that Newt doesn’t accidentally poke him in the eye.

Newt has great motor control these days though, so this is going to work out really well. 

“Don’t pretend you don’t understand what I’m doing here,” Newt says. “Like you’re so normal. Now, think of a number please. Literally any number.”

Hermann says nothing, but closes his eyes in what looks like annoyed submission.

Newt shuts his eyes and tries to pick up a number vibe, or, really any kind of vibe. A leg pain vibe. A Newton-I’ll-end-your-life-for-you vibe. He would settle for literally any vibe. 

Any.

Vibe.

He’s getting nothing.

“Eighteen,” he guesses, totally blindly.

“Negative one million, eight hundred forty eight thousand, six hundred and twelve,” Hermann says.

“Negative?” Newt says, opening his eyes and feeling slightly betrayed and moderately offended because come on—is it too much to ask that Dr. Gottlieb has the human decency not to pick a negative number. “Maybe if I put like, electroconductive gel on my fingers. I should order that online. Maybe if we hooked our skulls up with EEG wires. Maybe that’s why our EEGs look so weird; do you think? Maybe if we drilled holes in our skulls and laced the bones with a conductive material. That’s probably not worth it. Maybe if we removed part of our skulls and replaced them with metal. Again, probably not worth it. Maybe if one of us is super distressed it would work. Maybe if both of us were super distressed. Maybe if I was not on an anti-epileptic? Maybe if I had less GABA? Maybe if I was more drunk? Maybe if I was less drunk. Maybe if we were both super Zen. Maybe if we both mediated and, like, held hands and there was mutual effort? Maybe if we both stuck our hands in water full of ions. Maybe if—“

“Newton,” Hermann says, grabbing Newt’s hand and pulling it off his face. “Please realize that although literally prying the lid off your own skull to analyze what might be happening to your nervous system is a comforting thought for you, not everyone in this room views it that way. So will you please shut up about lacing the bones of your skull with a conductive material.”

“Er,” Newt says, thinking about that time he accidentally created EPIC Rapport, the time he almost died, the other times that happened, falling asleep on a floor, on this floor, accidentally scaling the Wall, that one time in Seattle that he flipped over Hermann’s table of math, the nematocyst incident, he bleeds a lot, that’s probably annoying and alarming in equal parts—

You are a bad life partner, his brain observes.

“I’m a bad life partner,” Newt echoes, feeling abruptly despondent at the still ongoing mental inventory of Stressful Things Done by Newt that his brain is sliding into his waking thoughts like an out of control cardsharp. 

“You have your advantages,” Hermann says philosophically. “I agree that I am superior, however, and I commend your interpersonal analytical judgment. You may attempt to make it up to me for the rest of our natural lives.”

“Okay,” Newt says, in grateful acquiescence.

“Oh my, you are intoxicated,” Hermann says. “Aren’t you?”

“Says the guy who’s having trouble with his ts,” Newt replies. “I’m not even.”

Eh, his brain says. Maybe a little.

“Eh,” Newt says. “Maybe a little.” 

“You are. You realize that you positioned your hand over an afferent nerve, don’t you?. Hermann asks. “I only point this out because you’re so clearly cognitively impaired.”

Oh shit, Newt thinks.

“Oh shit,” Newt says. “I did do that. Look it’s defensible to go afferent, but you’re probably right; if I’m trying to read your brainwaves, ha, I was not kidding about hating that term, despising it, loathing it, detesting it even, but I should probably go efferent, not that I’m expecting to jack into a metaphorical port or anything, like, it’s just about getting a little closer to the EM signals and seeing if there’s anything there my modified brain can parse, am I right. I don’t know I’m right, I just—well, directionality of transmission seems potentially important? In short, I agree with you. Very perspicacious. Perspicuous. You’re great.”

“Do not say ‘shit’,” Hermann replies. “'Jacking into a metaphorical port'? Your train of thought is nearly incomprehensible.” 

“Alas for perspicuity, may it rest in peaceful perpetuity,” Newt says. “Hold still.” He reaches over and presses three fingers to what he judges is the exit point of Hermann’s facial nerve, which carries efferent signals from the brain and not afferent signals to it. He’s not sure that will make a difference because he doesn’t care what Hermann’s facial muscles are doing right now, but it’s a propitious spot—right in front of the ear, and, just for the heck of it, he presses his ring finger against Hermann’s temple, where the bone thins down to a local minima.

Hermann glares at him but holds still.

Newt looks back at him.

Just at the point that this bidirectional gaze and unidirectional face-touching thing starts turning vaguely weird and really intense—

His brain sends him the vaguely parseable message of, oh god, what’s happening, as Newt watches a totally nonsensical disruption of his visual field.

Objects unmake.

He watches Hermann, the window, the wall, the couch, the ceiling, turn from objects into meaningless intersections of color and lines and then other things start to go—his brain feels odd and the room feels wrong and his proprioception splits right down the middle and tries to reweave and what were you thinking doing this now feels like an hallucination because it’s Gottliebian but Other, this is weird, this is wrong; his senses are mixing; someone is pushing on the back of his skull and he can see it while the sound of the heater drills out his teeth and he tenses in the hope that total contraction will keep him sitting. 

Someone’s got Strange Attractor playing on repeat in their head, but he’s not sure who it is and he’s not sure he’s hearing music, it’s a dermatographic sensory impression of the double-scroll attractor—oh god is he, possibly, thinking in phase space? No. Yes. Maybe? Partially?

Fractal rage makes a cage
That can’t be disengaged.

The kids don’t like this, his brain is not his brain, and so Newt sits there, gazing fixedly at nothing that makes sense but still feeling like himself, just a version of himself who’s balanced on the thin line between fascination and panic before his native drive toward inquiry wins out, as it is wont to do.

“This is fascinating,” he says.

Oh yikes.

Maybe he says it?

He can’t tell.

He’s hearing only unparsable sounds that are half mixed over into a confused morass of proprioceptive inputs and visual signals that also smell like wet cement. The experience bears no similarity to his memory of what it sounds like to hear the words he should be speaking, but he’s going to assume they are words, just like he’s going to assume the abstract mess of colors and lines without depth-perception or meaning is still Hermann sitting on the couch. It’s bizarre, it’s freaking him out a little bit, but he’s freaked out more in his life, that’s for sure.

“Think of a number,” Newt says.

Maybe he says that.

His entire sensory experience, sight, smell, sound, touch, proprioception, momentum, all of it is gone, split apart, made available to parse—

Eleven thousand, three hundred eighty four.

It’s not words, it’s a concept represented in a graphical, base-ten way but he gets it.

He pulls his hand away and his somatosensory cortex reknits itself into a visual field that’s reasonable and sensory modalities that are no longer mixed.

Yay.

Newt feels weird.

Newt feels weird and kind of elated and also kind of confused because what was that? That was so strange—he’s pretty sure that somehow his brain tore apart his somatosensory cortex in order to parse a new kind of input which is outrageously cool and simultaneously terrifying because, he has literally never heard of any kind of reasonable precedent for this kind of thing.

Was any of that even real?

There’s a way to tell, you realize, his brain says, deciding to channel Hermann.

Right. That had actually been the whole point.

Newt makes an effort to see what he’s been looking at, which is, of course, his life partner. 

Hermann is staring at him in a way that is only mildly concerned, which is awesome, because that means the whole epically, EPICally weird thing that just happened didn’t actually look as weird as it definitely, for sure, was. 

“Did I say it already?” Newt asks in a breathless sort of slur. 

“The number?” Hermann counter-queries, looking slightly more concerned at Newt’s garbage diction. “No.”

“Eleven thousand, three eighty four,” Newt says. 

Hermann stares at him. “A lucky guess.”

“Nope,” Newt says, grinning at him in a way that might look a little alarming if Hermann’s counter-expression is anything to judge by. But that’s not a priority right now because of important reasons. “You’ve got to try this; it’s so weird. Don’t freak out. Come on, come on, come on; don’t give me that face, just touch my face, trust me, it’s going to be worth it.”

Hermann looks like he has deep and profound misgivings, but he presses his fingertips against the skin immediately in front of Newt’s ear.

Newt watches him like a creeper. A hunting creeper. Some kind of creeper bird of prey. A velociraptor. A creeperaptor? A thirty-three percent kaiju creeper. Kaiper. Kaijuraptor. Creeju? Look, the point is, Newt is just really interested in what this is going to look like from the outside. The thing is though, is that Hermann is just kind of looking back at him, really sharp, pretty skeptical, not at all glazed, not at all like his whole somatosensory cortex is falling apart, unweaving like a prism-parsed lightbeam and rebraiding into something new and profound and awesome, nope, Hermann’s clearly a little weirded out and incrementally more concerned on Newt’s behalf.

“Nothing,” Hermann says, looking at Newt, clearly not having a totally kickass and weird sensory experience.

“What?” Newt says. “No no no no no.” He pulls off his glasses, grabs Hermann’s hand, repositions the guy’s fingers, making sure there’s some reasonable temple contact going on, and presses them against his own head in a way that’s a little more robust and more consistent with touching a human as opposed to touching some previously shattered porcelain bowl before the epoxy holding it together has fully set. 

“Still nothing,” Hermann says.

“Don’t drop your hand,” Newt says. “Let me try a thing.”

Hermann immediately drops his hand.

“I said don’t drop your hand,” Newt replies. “As in, do not do that. You did the opposite thing. The opposite thing of what I said.”

“Why don’t you tell me,” Hermann says waspishly, “using words, what it is that you’re going to ‘try’.”

“I was just going to think a number at you,” Newt says, not at all defensively. “It wasn’t going to be anything horrifying.”

“Forty-two,” Hermann says.

“Even I’m not that obvious, give me some credit please,” Newt says, definitely not going to think of that number (anymore). “Can you just put your hand back. I wasn’t thinking at you; what if there’s an element of intentinvolved, like both terminals need to be on, you know?”

“This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Hermann says.

“If that were true, I would be sad for you,” Newt says. “Fortunately, I know the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever done in your life was—”

“Stop talking immediately,” Hermann says. “Think of a number or I’m dropping my hand.”

Newt thinks of the square root of two with all the clarity and context he can bring to bear. Behind the words is all that he can organize of his understanding of the number as a concept, including right triangles, the unit circle, and the apocryphal murder of Hippasus of Metapontum. He tries to take all of that and get a good Gottliebian directionality to the thoughts he’s attempting to broadcast, and as he does it, hey, the room stays intact this time so that’s a plus or maybe a minus; it’s hard to—

Hermann yanks his hand away from Newt’s temple like he’s been burned, shouting, “Newton,” in a super irritated way, his hand going to his own head.

“Er,” Newt says, feeling abruptly guilty and, in retrospect, unsurprised because his brain is like a Mack Truck, probably, as brains go. “Did I hurt you?”

“Yes,” Hermann says, looking more freaked out and irritated than legit hurt. “There is no need to mentally shout.”

It worked? his brain asks, clearly skeptical.

“It worked?” Newt asks, less skeptical than incredulous. 

“Square root of two,” Hermann replies, pressing both hands to his temples. “Of course you would choose an irrational number.” 

Newt nods politely, waiting for Hermann to officially start having a nervous breakdown about the, hey, mindreading that is now for sure a thing. Alternatively, he is waiting for Hermann to tell him that he, Newt, was right all along, and that he, Hermann, is super impressed, again, hardcore, probably for life, because come on they could have gone years without figuring out that cranial nerve trick—slight of hand. More like slight of mind, mindfulness, theory of mind, self states, resist, transmit/you must know you’re a machine, neural transmission, signal transduction, second messengers, action potentials, depolarization, neural coopting of existing circuits, and if he dies/he dies a scientist in his prime, past his prime(?), what’s left for him, what’s left for them, those Riemann zeros, man, and one time the cult of Pythagoras killed that guy buy rowing him out into the Aegean sea and leaving him for dead all because he tried to apply the Pythagorean theorem to a field with a unit side of one, sucks to be that guy; Newt should really get a job in neuroscience in case the world tries to end again on his watch.

Newt is so great, honestly.

Hermann shoots Newt a what-are-you-looking-at kind of look, which is weird, or, maybe, Newt is misinterpreting that look. Newt is slightly confused, and pretty sure that all of the things that are happening are happening but maybe they aren’t?

More tequila would probably solve Newt’s problems.

Not.

“You’re being really blasé about this, dude,” Newt says, “and like, I know you are well, well on your way to trashed, but was that or was that not the freakiest thing ever. Like, what happened to our sensory cortex, it unweaves or something to accommodate telepathic signal transduction. Unweaving, rebraiding; historical rainbow style. John Keats can just screw off, am I right. I consider that guy a personal nemesis, he died young though, that was sad. ‘Unweaving the rainbow’. God. Put me out of my misery. Hand me that tequila. No, don’t, I’ll throw up if I think about Keats right now. However, the man was a dick to Isaac Newton, a trait I consider a plus because, as we have established, I don’t really personally like Sir Isaac all that much for various excellent reasons including alchemy, but no one can really dispute that his work in optics was, ha, pretty freaking great, even if he did end up having a huge intellectual rivalry with Hooke in that regard, I don’t know man—Hooke, Liebniz, such a pattern of truculent dickishness from that guy, yes?”

Hermann looks at him in a way that is most definitely nonplussed.

“What are you talking about?” Hermann asks.

“Isaac Newton,” Newt says. “Also, the outrageous somatosensory weirdness required to parse Transdermal Thought Transfer. TTT. T3? I think that’s a movie from the Terminator franchise. I’ll think of a better acronym.”

“What ‘somatosensory weirdness’?” Hermann asks. “Please make some effort toward explaining yourself. I realize you are more intoxicated than one might predict post half a shot of tequila, but, honestly Newton, your train of thought is intolerably tangential and while, on most occasions, I would simply ignore this proclivity of yours, I have the feeling you are, indeed, trying to communicate something, so focus, if you would. You certainly have the capacity if not the inclination.. 

“You didn’t,” Newt says, having lexical difficulty under the weight of too many instantaneous realizations and subsequent trains of thought and, yes, also, the (questionable) intoxication is not helping him, full disclosure there. “You didn’t have the thing where all your sensory modalities stopped making sense except for the thought-reading one?”

“No,” Hermann says, drawing out the word. “I was simply hit with a forceful, nuanced representation of the square root of two as a concept.”

“Yes but—” Newt says, his thoughts and words slowing down beneath the pressure of unfairness. “Your visual field didn’t get weird?” Newt asks, not slurring at all. “You didn’t stop identifying spoken words as words. You didn’t, like, have a whole bunch of proprioceptive inputs turning into other things. Like, it was not the weirdest and most confusing perceptual mash up you have ever experienced in your life?”

Hermann cocks his head at an angle that strikes Newt as trending toward distinctly alarmed.

Newt nonchalantly looks away.

Hermann reaches over, grabs his face, looks straight at him for a few seconds, and then does some finger-rearranging in a clear attempt to read Newt’s thoughts.

Not cool, his brain says.

“Not cool,” Newt says.

Hermann gives him a Newton-touch-my-face-and-we-can-eliminate-designations-congruent-with-things-aka-‘words’-and-cut-straight-to-the-thought-constructs-that-represent-the-things-themselves kind of look.

Newt is too smart to do exactly that, thanks very much. Hermann wants to try this thought-reading thing in a reciprocal manner, because yeah who wouldn’t? But Newt, being an outrageous genius even when slightly drunk and slightly possessed of a really unusual brain, is slightly more than slightly concerned about feedback loops, so he doesn’t grab Hermann’s face in return.

The kids stir restlessly at the back of his mind.

All parties tagged ‘Geiszler’ vote no to telepathic reciprocity.

Hermann still has a hand on his face though, and so Newt decides to snap on his thought terminal. 

No, he thinks at Hermann, hopefully at a lower telepathic volume this time, I will not be doing any reciprocal face-touching and peeling my somatosensory cortex apart for you as a demo; I just don’t see that going well, dude. I, too, am devastatingly curious about whether we can do this simultaneously and actually have a real-time conversation, but I am so serious about my goal of preventing your imminent nervous breakdown that I can actually keep said goal in my head, even in the, ha, literal face of telepathic temptation, which is your face to be clear. I’m fine, I can totally handle sensory weirdness, it was bizarre, but not in a terrifying way.

Newt cuts the connection just before the point that the cresting, avaricious interest of the kids breaks over into the channel that he’s opened.

Touch, the kids hiss, and his thoughts explode like a blown out window into image fragments—splintered, fast, and shredding everything they hit. His own memories of green tinged aldehydes blend into a chemical dark which cannot be understood from the inside, only perceived in pieces from recalled vivisections and from the perspective of the vicious, clever little human who put them where they will now forever stay. 

Touch what? Newt asks.

Touch, the kids hiss, but something’s putting tension on his nervous system and searing stereo loathing or stereo longing straight into his head; no one knows which it is; not the cut-up kaiju etching their cognitive daguerreotype straight into the folded glass of his cortex, or the little human they’re crowning king of their chemical underworld. He’s hurt them so much and they need him so badly that an agonizing death grip straight to mental dissolution is the only open option. Some guy’s neurons are trying to arc a connection before their circuitry’s been laid down. Some loser’s hand is closing an air gap. Geiszler’s back is starting to arch.

You touched it you touched it you touched it once go back, go back, go back, go back and touch again you do not need the wires, the wires are too much.

“Newton.”

He can’t escape what’s in his head.

“Yeah,” he says faintly, as the kids fade down and Newt fades up in his own mix.

Hermann has both hands on Newt’s upper arms. Newt isn’t clear on when exactly this happened, whatever, it’s cool, he can reengage his core, which he does, and then he holds up a hand and nods his head in a way that hopefully conveys something along the lines of, ‘myeah, I’m fine, just having a little bit of an emo Jedi hipster moment, but I’ve rebaselined myself.. Which is true.

Hermann doesn’t seem to be receiving what he’s sending though, because the next thing the guys says is, “can you speak?”

Offensive.

“Myeah,” Newt says.

“What,” Hermann snaps, “just happened?”

Newt tries to work that out for himself before he starts talking about it, but it’s tricky, it’s not totally clear, there’s some evidence that his head is one half of a two-way radio but there’s also some evidence that his head is just one sad little signal in the midst of a dangerous electromagnetic milieu with interference from within and from without. He’s not really sure how to explain this to his colleague. “To me?” he asks, “I’m not totally clear. Maybe a little bit of what’s going to turn into a proto PTSD-variant with a component of always-unverifiable realtime influence. It’s literally impossible for me to say.. Newt is sounding more and more fully-conscious all the time, recovering pretty well from the kids he hopes are carbon copies making a major play for message delivery. “It’s fine, I’m not even bleeding.”

Kids, he thinks, you need to not do that kind of thing, okay. It’s bad for the team.

The kids hiss restively, it’s hard to say if they agree or not.

No one is going to find cut-up brains and then have conversations with them by closing the air-gap between hand and conductive specimen container, okay? The team is not interested in that, Newt continues, getting his own counterpoint across, even while trying to decide whether he remembers touching that fluid-filled tube that held a piece of Yamarishi or if that’s a thing he wants to do so much it looks to him like he’s done it already. 

Hermann shakes him, one time, super gently.

“Hey,” Newt snaps. “What. Can you not. Use words.” 

“Are you all right?” Hermann asks him.

“Yes,” Newt says, because now he is. 

 Obviously.

“I think you have done quite enough experimenting for one day,” Hermann says, looking like he’s rating about an eight point five on the Something Is Wrong With Dr. Geiszler Scale.

“No, but—” Newt says.

“Newton,” Hermann says. 

“I just wonder what that means. The fact that my sensory cortex clearly tears itself apart into a whole new processing mode to do the thought-reading. I bet it means my brain got more of a makeover than yours did. Oh god, I hope I don’t turn evil. Do you think that I’ll turn evil. I bet it would be better with gel. The thought reading I mean. I bet it would be better with metal. Exterior metal. Sorry. I have a policy about drilling holes in my skull; I’m going to stick to it. Also, I respect your wishes about my skull. But what if they, like, hypothetically—do you think they could come back though? Could they open another breach, do you think? Because I think we’re straight-up cut off from them now, I can feel where they should be. But if they make another breach, what happens to that place in my mind that always knows which way the breach was. What if they make another portal while we’re still alive. What would happen then. What if we—”

“Newton,” Hermann says, damming the slow slide of Newt’s hydroxylated thoughts with a single word that sounds like, ‘stop,’ that sounds like, ‘wait,’ that sounds like any one of a thousand negations that herald coming analysis but, really, it’s just his name.

Newt stops.

“Newton,” Hermann says again, like a guy who’s staring down a set of waiting explosives. “After our drift, you expressed concern about the possibility of ongoing continuity with the kaiju anteverse.” 

“Yes,” Newt says.

“Last week, following intense sleep deprivation, you expressed some anxiety regarding real-time interference in your thought processes.”

Newt doesn’t reply, able to follow the likely trajectory of Hermann’s thoughts. He’s sure they go like this. one—Newt has evinced concern regarding external influence, two—Newt has just explained why he does not think that ongoing influence from the anteverse is likely, ergo, three—why is he so concerned. Hermann doesn’t know points four and five though. four—that he’s not overly concerned about what may still live beyond an annihilated breach, and five—that he is concerned by networks here on Earth, networks that communicate in real time, somehow, through formaldehyde and glass and over air in a way he cannot yet explain. How do they do it? Can they hear him. Could they, if he tried to let them in?

Are you, possibly, his brain says, like it is walking on eggshells of some kind, maybe garden variety eggs laid by some kind of bird, maybe freaky alien eggs from the movie Alien, maybe just, like, metaphorical eggs that are landmines of potential problems, ready to explode into creeperaptors of the consciousness, a little bit anxious, champ?

Yeahhhhh, maybe.

Touch, the kids hiss.

He has a wild urge to tear his sensory experience apart and try to find the local kaiju network just to see if he’s capable of doing it.

But that might be the last thing he ever does.

So he will not do that.

Not while he’s drunk at least.

Actually. He won’t ever do it.

Not while he’s drunk.

He won’t be doing that ever.

But definitely not while drunk.

But also not ever.

“Newton,” Hermann says, with so much respectful compassion that Newt can barely sit here and take it, “I believe there are aspects of your concerns that are either inconsistent, or that I do not understand.”

Myeah, his brain says, trying to crawl to one side of his skull. 

“Myeah,” Newt says, feeling his expression crack into an uncontrolled exposure of something he himself can’t see before he reins it back in and nails it back down. 

“To elaborate,” Hermann says, with a formality totally at odds with the fear in his expression. “you seem to be dismissing the possibility of mental communication from the anteverse while retaining concern about ‘turning evil’, which I interpret as a concern about exogenous mental influence. I’m not sure how to reconcile these two things.”

Newt feels like the things that Hermann doesn’t know might kill him, might kill them both; this is actually really stressful, he wants to get up to get off this couch but if he gives into that impulse he’s not sure where he might end up it could be anywhere, it could be dead, and he’s sweating.

Across the room from him, someone is surgically extracting exogenous implants from Seven of Nine.

“Yeah,” Newt says to Hermann, because yes.

He decides he will pour himself some more tequila. 

Hermann reaches over to stop him halfway through filling his shot glass, but doesn’t interfere in any other way.

Newt downs his half shot in one go.

Newt decides to watch some Voyager, those guys man, just trying to get home, and it’s such a good thing that Captain Janeway is nothing like Caitlin Lightcap in any way because that would be so horrible; Newt would not be able to handle that right now. De-borg’d Seven looks a little like Caitlin Lightcap, but she’s nothing actually like Caitlin Lightcap. Caitlin Lightcap was brilliant and unconventional and set a bad example Newt had followed. She probably would have drilled her way into his current secrets at the expense of both their minds, he can almost see her, looking like a strange blend of woman and Jaeger and borg and stranger screaming straight in his face, tell me, Geiszler, you bastard, you bastard, tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me. He can almost hear the shatter of bottles against the cement of the deployment dock, can almost see her face the day he’d looked at her in her Interface Suit and called her stupid with every fraction of profound viciousness that he could get to precipitate out of his supersaturated sense of anticipatory loss.

She would have pulled her answers out of him because she treated everyone the way she treated herself.

Hermann doesn’t do that.

That doesn’t mean that Hermann shouldn’t have his own answers, all the same. 

“I—” Newt says, and stops. “I believe I can clarify those inconsistencies for you.” 

“Please do not feel that I require such a thing,” Hermann says, turning to look at him, his gaze a lateral pressure against the silent Star Trek on which Newt’s eyes are fixed. “I am content to wait. Indefinitely, even.”

“There is some information that you’re missing,” Newt says, and he can nearly hear the flash freeze of Hermann’s crystal latticed interest.

“I thought that might be the case,” Hermann replies.

The throughlines of his thoughts are blending together in a dissolving knot of mental weirdness, leaving Newt in charge of an inarticulate soup that sort of hisses and thinks of math in graphic style and tastes like ironic self awaremess, or it would if Newt was in a habit of tasting brains. He’s not there yet.

He hesitates for a long moment on a conceptual precipice, trying to decide a lot of things—whether he can talk about this, whether his own brain is going to riot and tear down his consciousness into neuronal debris, whether his cortex might decide to trigger waves of synchronous electrical discharges that will kick him straight into a seizure, whether being drunk is protective or less protective or makes no mechanistic difference to his personal neurochemistry. He’s not aware of choosing yes or no, but his brain finds a set of words and arranges them in a way that’s going to work.

Having made a way, he can’t not take it. 

“I drifted a third time,” Newt manages to say around the dull roar of upset longing that comes straight from the kids.

“Did you,” Hermann says, with a painful amount of casual unconcern that’s totally at odds with the burning wattage of the lateral look that Newt can feel searing its way into his temple. “I thought as much.”

“The details,” Newt says, “are not—they’re a little bit unclear to me. I did determine that the existing neural tissue fragments remaining on this side of the breach have—er, they’ve been cut off from the anteverse. Totally cut off. They are—not happy about this. They were, actually, really pissed. At me. Specifically and collectively.”

He looks over to find Hermann staring at him like he’s an undiscovered manuscript inscribed on a lit stick of dynamite, which, yeah, seems about right, given the events of the past month. Hermann probably already knows he drifted, probably has figured that out from events or from Hypothetical Rain’s redacted medical records, but the guy doesn’t need to know how a foreign rig—too precise, too well aligned—tripped his mind straight into a premature electrical firestorm, he doesn’t need to know that Newt was, for better or worse, too drugged to remember anything about the third drift other than the way that they existed as a network that he had jacked straight into; the way they hated him and hate him still; the way they love him for his cognitive capacity and how he made them, for a span of seconds, feel less alone; the way they wanted him to die screaming; the way they wanted him to never leave. Hermann doesn’t need to know any of that, that’s not necessary here, and maybe one day it will be different, maybe in fifteen years they’ll be walking past the Math Building on UC Berkeley’s campus, carrying cups of coffee and Newt will say, ‘yes, did I mention it was a piece of Yamarishi that they brought?’ or maybe he’ll say, ‘I do, at times, wonder if it would have been different if I hadn’t been drugged out of my mind when it happened, perhaps I could have told them I was sorry,’ and Hermann will say, ‘you have nothing to be sorry for, please remember that Newton,’ and Newt will say, ‘I know,’ like he believes it and maybe, then, he will.

“They can still talk to each other,” Newt says, trying to pretend he’s fifteen years older, that he’s fifty, that he doesn’t care any more, that he’s still alive at fifty, that he can’t, even now, hear the anguished rage of his cut-up chorus hissing in the back of his thoughts. “I worry sometimes that they’ve got some kind of line to my head. The network of preserved parts that were supposed to die in formalin but didn’t. I don’t think they do, but I can’t tell, not really, and the fact that we’ve got this weirdness we can do makes me feel both better, because it’s weird and I feel like I’d notice if the local rage network was slotting itself into my cognitive ports, but also worse because it’s a proof-of-principle and maybe I wouldn’t know. The point is I can’t be sure of anything; this is making me anxious.” 

“I see,” Hermann says, like this, like all of this, is totally normal and he was expecting it, like he’s been expecting it for days and days and days, probably because he’s a little worried that Newt will just flip out if he so much as flickers an eyelash in an unexpected way, but Newt is more robust than that, thanks. Not a whole lot more robust, it’s true, but a little. 

“It’s okay,” Newt says, and—

Wow.

That was unexpectedly the wrong way to take the conversation because Hermann is giving him a look of total, stripped-down, wide-eyed horror that snaps over into the kind of rage that shuts down all capillary beds in the face and freezes facial muscles into a neutral mass that’s really unnerving, pun intended, kind of. 

This is fine.

Newt can fix this. 

No problem.

“I mean, sure,” Newt says, employing casual conversational course correction, “there were aspects of my experience that weren’t ideal but, ah, ultimately it turned out fine and—”

Again, this is not going well. Hermann is trending away from ‘pissed colleague’ and toward an impression of a statue that could be titled Mathematician in Occulted Extremis.

Newt course corrects again, with, “—a reasonable amount of objective and subjective data was collected—”

Hermann’s expression does not change even fractionally, though his eyes look like he might be able to melt plastic with them if he stared at it for long enough.

Maybe Newt should just stop talking.

“Look, the point is that I am fine with how things turned out, right?. Newt says, not following his self-directed advice.

Hermann says nothing. He just sits there, staring at Newt, looking increasingly upset and pissed.

Newt is not really sure how to fix this—the tequila and the, oh, thirty minutes of sobbing he did a few hours ago have collectively weakened his ability to wrap up his experiences with a plucky and nonchalant verbal summary, and he finds himself in the strange position of mounting an imminent and instinctive defense of the PPDC in the face of Hermann’s as yet unarticulated rage that’s clearly gathering itself in preparation for annihilating a target. 

“Hermann,” Newt says, with a tenuous grasp on his tone, “let’s take a step back, man, and think about this on a macro level—”

“A macro level?” Hermann snarls, standing up and pacing toward the kitchen, probably just to have somewhere togo, which is a dangerously Geiszlerian tendency. 

Newt follows him, going straight over the coffee table to keep pace. “Do not swap your brain twice in one night because I can’t—“

“A macro level?” Hermann snarls again, rounding on him in a way that’s totally surprising and sends Newt unbalancing laterally into a kitchen counter.

“Stop,” Newt shouts, coming right back into Hermann’s space so he doesn’t get hunted and also because that’s what he does. This is getting ridiculous; why are they doing this. “Chill,” he says, one hand closing around Hermann’s elbow. 

Hermann yanks free. “Chill. Chill? Do not make excuses for the PPDC, Newton. All they accomplished was the creation of a needless connection between an already damaged human mind and dead fragments of alien tissue so they could document a predictable deviation from a nearly contextless baseline that would then allow them to check a box on a form that must read ‘is Dr. Geiszler a danger to his species yes or no’. You will excuse me if I do not share your philosophical take on this. You will excuse me if I choose to remember that you correctly predicted exactly this outcome and explicitly labeled it as a thing you would like to avoid. You will excuse me if I literally never forget the genuine fear you displayed in the infirmary when you thought I might not omit information from my report. You will excuse me if I cannot bleach my thoughts of the exact angle of your fingers against a metal tray as you slid it across the table in the Hong Kong shatterdome. Because you knew, you knew, the inevitable outcome, you must have, you were ready, you were waiting for them, and it makes me wonder how long you knew it was coming. Was it from the moment they walked into the mess. Did you see them, that foreign team, and did you snap together a resolution from existing paradigms in your mind. Or did you know earlier. When I think about what you did, what you said, I cannot help but think that you knew from the moment you told me to lie. Did you know even earlier. Did you know in that alley what the requirements of red tape would be and did you resolve then to keep me out of it. Did you turn yourself over to them because you thought you had to or did you do it so that they wouldn’t look to me?”

“Both,” Newt shouts at him, “and neither. Did I want you out of it. Yes. I did. You think I wanted you exposed to a fraction of a hive mind, left behind after breach annihilation. You'd had the option to take the risk of drifting and you’d said no until I forced your hand by risking death or insanity right in front of you. But do you really think that’s all it was. Some magnificent act of selflessness in fulfillment of societal expectations and to protect you. Yeah, true, that was a part of it, but the real reason that I kept you out was because you had a prayer of a chance of extracting me, though I didn’t think you’d really do it. I’d have never gotten you out; I wouldn’t have wanted to; all I’d have done was join you as we burned straight through our brains. Because I wanted to see. I wanted to know. I had to know. What happens to a fraction of a hive mind?”

“You didn’t want what happened to you,” Hermann says, coming back at him with a thin veneer of control over the threatening boil of his rage. “I know you didn’t. You’re writing yourself a narrative where you had some kind, any kind, of real agency, but you weren’t even conscious when they interfaced you with that thing the second time.”

“How do you know that,” Newt breathes.

“Because I read your medical file,” Hermann shouts, his voice cracking as he steadies himself on the counter, his words running together. “With Dr. McClure.”

“I agreed,” Newt screams at him. “They asked me. I said yes. I helped them. I wanted to know. Nothing you say will ever change that.”

The kids hiss in approbation while somewhere deep in his mind mnemonic Caitlin Lightcap smashes her bottles of alcohol against conceptual barriers in Newt’s thoughts.

“You were coerced.”

“Get over it,” Newt replies, tearing open vocal chords trying to snap their way shut, “and accept the costs of living in a risk-averse bureaucracy with utilitarian rather than deontological ethics.”

“I will never,” Hermann shouts back, “‘get over it’.”

“Well not with that attitude,” Newt replies, managing to collect himself in the face of Gottliebian escalation. “Lose the untempered idealism, it’s not a feature of adulthood, even in a mathematician,” he snaps.

“As though you are qualified to offer any kind of opinion on ‘features of adulthood’,” Hermann seethes, entirely outraged. “Your emotional development arrested at the point you moved from Berlin to Massachusetts, circa age twelve.”

“Oh, we’re regressing to ad hominems are we?” Newt replies, his hands sweeping through the air between them in an ironically expansive gesture, his diction blurring into something that doesn’t sound quite right. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize that logical fallacies were an acceptable mode of discourse now.” 

“You started it,” Hermann snaps.

“I did not. Mine wasn’t an ad hominem because my criticism was directly relevant to your current rage problem. To your perpetual rage problem, actually, which is, currently, what we are fighting about, right?”

“No,” Hermann says through clenched teeth. “We aren’t having a rational argument, Newton.” 

“Well, yeah,” Newt says.

They look at one another, breathing hard. 

Newt feels a little bit confused.

Hermann has polished off almost half a bottle of tequila at this point, so.

Yeah.

Hermann is probably also confused.

“We are both distressed in the same vicinity. Vectors of upset have turned from antiparallel to head-on,” Hermann says. 

Newt definitely pulls his glasses off at that one, throws them on the counter, and turns away, covering his face briefly with both hands so that he does not burst out laughing in Hermann’s face because it would definitely be the kind of laughter that would end badly, and he is on edge today; he is not the only one, but he still has a limited capacity for deescalation left, and so he’s going to max it out.

Wow, you are excruciatingly pathetic right now, champ, his brain says, like a jerk.

“I know,” Newt replies, totally unintelligibly into his own hands.

The kids hiss in disappointed vexation at the decreasing likelihood of violence.

You are a terrible person, his inner Hermann informs him.

No one in his head is helping him, no one’s doing anything useful except Newt, who is outrageously awesome, actually, every day and for all time.

He drops his hands, puts his glasses back on, and says, “I feel like it’s not fun to scream at you when you cast our irrational arguments as misdirected distress.”

Hermann looks slightly calmer, as if he, too, is trying to initiate some negative feedback loops, or activate his parasympathetic nervous system, or use logic to trick his brain into a state that’s a little less activated. “I concur,” he says.

“Cool,” Newt replies, unbalancing sideways in a relief-tequila one-two combo and then using the counter for some hip-mediated stabilization. “We have literally made so many collective bad decisions tonight, I feel like this is some kind of relationship landmark.”

Hermann doesn’t respond to that one, he just half turns away from Newt, bracing both hands on the edge of the sink, and stares at something in his head that Newt isn’t currently invited to witness. It’s a misery stance if Newt’s ever seen one; the guy’s shoulders are tight, his weight shifted off his bad leg, his expression twisted into distracted torment.

Newt adjusts his glasses and then levers his hand into the air in a helpless, inviting gesture that he’s sure Hermann can see in his peripheral vision.

“I wish that it had not been you,” Hermann says, defeated and drunk in a particular and excruciatingly sad blend. “I wish it had been anyone but you because you are not like anyone, Newton.”

“That’s what individuality is though,” Newt replies, making an effort to be nice. “Different people are different. Ostensible snowflakes and junk. Special, crystalline, and eventually vanishing into the endless pull of entropy—disorder favored until decohesence and ultimate thermodynamic equilibrium—presuming you’re defining your system as the universe at large. Average temperature decrease. Zero Kelvin. Dead space. Death.”

You’re abusing thermodynamics, his brain says.

“Stop abusing thermodynamics,” Hermann slurs. “It’s extremely unattractive.”

“Hey,” Newt says.

“You are a different kind of different than most people,” Hermann says, definitely even more drunk than Newt had been thinking he was.

“Aw,” Newt says, giving Hermann a shoulder clap because he looks like he needs it.

“So what happens to a fraction of a hive mind?” Hermann asks quietly. Quietly. Very quietly.

“Cut up pieces of individual nervous systems link together across space via an unknown mechanism. They pool their cognitive resources and their knowledge and their emotional capacities for, ah, all it is that they know how to feel, which seems to be, in the absence of the hive mind and other exogenous input, only anger and fear and longing. They struggle to understand and conceptualize the new but agonizing experience of loneliness, which is not all that intuitive for a disabled fraction of a collective consciousness, it turns out.”

The kids hiss, a tragic static.

“And did they—I would imagine that when you drifted with them, your neural capacity at least briefly improved the extent of their understanding,” Hermann says, looking at him uncertainly. 

“Yeah,” Newt says, feeling weird, feeling kind of acutely miserable, feeling a little more than a little bit bad for the carbon-copy kids and their real-world counterparts who loathe him and who need him and who want him back. 

“Did they have the ability to identify you?” Hermann asks. “Did they recognize you?”

“Did they know I was the guy who was responsible for cutting most of them up and chemically caging them in formalin?” Newt says faintly, “myeah, they knew that a little bit.”

Hermann gives him a look that, at best, can be tagged as ‘dismayed’.

“Eh,” Newt says, in a gallantly reassuring manner, “I was also their best option to come along in a while, so they were pretty confused as to whether they wanted to kill me or keep me. It’s hard to say because I don’t have clear and contiguous memories of any drift, especially not that one, but my impression was that things most definitely started out in a ‘let’s torture this guy to a quick but agonizing death by flipping on every nociceptive circuit he has’ and then it sort of morphed into a ‘well, he does have a lot of cognitive capacity—maybe we could just keep him’ type deal. Of course, fortunately, my skull and distance and possibly my own intent keeps them out in a real-time way, though I do have periods of confusion about that, especially while sleep deprived, because, full disclosure, in addition to you in my head, I’ve got a whole chorus of super conflicted kaiju that I accidentally tortured who are kind of counter-torturing me on a long term basis, that’s fair though, plus, they’re getting a little friendlier over time, it seems like, which argues for them being a phenomenon of EPIC Rapport rather than a real-time transmission from the actual kids, you know. Full disclosure, I call them ‘kids’. It’s kind of not appropriate, definitely xenopolitically incorrect but what are you gonna do, am I right. I’ve got to think though that if the kids had any kind of autonomy, if they had kaiju skulls with their receptive equipment and also, you know, limbs and stuff, they’d be able to track me down just like Otachi did, by which I mean I suspect that we’re both forever trackable by kaiju who know what to look for, as it were. As for a real-time one-way or two-way connection. Who knows. Seriously, without samples, without equipment, who freaking knows.”

It is at this point that Hermann throws up in the sink.

Yup. 

So Newt has seen this moment coming since the instant he pulled the tequila out of a brown bag, but he himself is not feeling that great, and, post-drift, in possession of a little bit more of a sensitive gag reflex, myeah, his brain is just going to make sympathy emesis happen. 

He manages to make it to the garbage can and throw up tequila and bile flavored vegetable lo mein, which is really one of the worst-case regurgitation scenarios he can think of. Like, the only way this could be more awful is if he had broken ribs. Or if he were bleeding.

Aaand right on cue.

Yup, he is concomitantly vomiting and bleeding.

Increased pressure in his vascular beds. Works every time.

“Hermann,” he says, or, maybe, arguably ‘moans’, “why.”

“Shut up,” Hermann replies. 

“This night is the worst,” Newt says, prioritizing spitting into the trash and breathing over dealing with the blood situation. “I can’t believe you threw up in the sink.. It occurs to Newt as he says this that he is, possibly, being slightly hypocritical for a guy who’d gotten tears, blood, and mucus all over Hermann’s pristine dress shirt something like two hours ago.

Life is legit disgusting at times. That’s what happens when natural selection meets chemistry. Replicating organisms evolve disgust. Eventually. Most of the time. Disgust is useful for survival. Disgust, alas, is also really disgusting. He’s being circular. This is unforgivable. Even in extremis. Tautological reasoning is not acceptable to him; not even when is brain is having a hard time. 

A hard time. Yes. Thank you for noticing, his brain says. Thank you so much.

Shut up, brain, Newt thinks. You can’t relax your standards when the going gets tough.

Says the guy who spends his days reading about rationalism because empirical existence terrifies him.

Newt transfers more of his dinner from his GI tract to the trash.

I said shut up, Newt replies, with subpar erudition.

“You call them kids,” Hermann says, bleeding into a handkerchief, not even looking at Newt, looking at the air instead, like he’s reading something there. “You call them kids and they’ve been mentally torturing you for weeks.”

“Well that’s a little bit more dramatic than I phrased it, but yeah, a little bit,” Newt says, with pretty much the maximal manfulness that he can summon while staring at the partially digested remains of what was formerly his dinner.

He shuts the lid on the garbage. That makes him feel better.

“Newton—“ Hermann says faintly.

“Go,” Newt says, bleeding all over the juncture where fingerless gloves meet sweater-sleeve and and waving vaguely at Hermann with his free hand. “Get out of here; go think of kittens or infinite planes or irrational numbers slotting into a rational number line while you brush your teeth.”

“But,” Hermann says, probably because Newt looks like a revolting mess and Hermann does not like leaving him a revolting mess and never has, not even in the early days, back when so many more people were so much more alive and fewer parts of fewer kaiju were being what passed for dead.

“Go,” Newt says, literally shoving him out of the kitchen, because Newt, on his own, can probably keep it together long enough to clean things and then pour bleach on them without throwing up again, but Hermann most definitely can’t do that.

Newt proceeds with the cleaning pretty effectively, one hand pressed to his own bleeding face, sucking on a blood and bile flavored mint for the duration, which is not the best flavor combination he’s ever encountered in his life, he’s not going to lie to himself about that.

It becomes apparent after twenty minutes or so that Dr. Gottlieb is going to be taking his sweet Gottliebian time about things, which is fine, because Newt uses this opportunity to get the trash into the places where trash goes and establish an eau d’ ten-percent-bleach in the kitchen. 

At this point Hermann has not emerged from his room, but that’s fine because Newt is busy. Newt has lots of things to do, none of which are standing around, staring at shut doors and thinking thoughts about what might be going on in rooms and minds that aren’t open to him. So he really makes an effort to get his face bleeding stopped, and once that’s done he brushes his teeth and takes an eyes-shut shower and puts on sweatpants and a long sleeved shirt and re-dons his pointless, pretentious, fingerless gloves that would be defensible if he were playing the guitar right now, but in actuality are a way for him to not see the parts of his body art that extend down onto his right hand. He reclaims his phone from the bathroom, gives Mako a courtesy text, or not, since it’s now four in the morning in Sweden and then pretty much resigns himself to watching Voyager all alone in a haze of inevitable insomnia that one shot of tequila taken in two parts is not going to do much to mitigate.

He turns off the lights with a snap of his fingers and looks out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the almost invisible line of the distant Wall that’s faded into night beyond the stochastic sprinkling of artificial lights that spread out between his window and the dark water of the bay.

Regeneration I whistles through his teeth with minimal commitment.

Eventually, Newt turns away from the window and reinstalls himself on the couch in front of the still silent Voyager.

Aw kids, Newt thinks, his feet on the coffee table, his glasses on his face, and his headache in his head where it is wont to chillax—he wonders what it does and where it goes when it’s not living in the little fenestrations in his skull it likes so much. He’s feeling sorry for everyone right now, especially for the kids who are so sad and probably not even real; especially for Hermann who is most likely having a misery melt-down behind his closed bedroom door, or maybe enjoying some other kind of worse thing that Newt can only guess at; especially for the kids, the kids that he cut up and left alive; especially for Mako who can’t turn her terror into anger anymore; especially for the kids who begged him not to leave, they’d done that, hadn’t they? Begged him not to go?; especially for Caitlin Lightcap because he now can guess how it feels to die as neural circuits fuse and fail; especially for the kids who are slotting into a Geiszlerian paradigm; especially for the formerly Borg lady who is not doing a great job readjusting to non-collective life; and also especially egregiously bad for the kids a little bit, because it’s definitely possible to feel bad for an individual or a cut-up alien collective that just wants to go home while also simultaneously viewing it as incredibly terrifying—that’s actually been an underlying premise of Newt’s entire existence, though it has recently come to kind of an epic apogee of soul-slicing relevance, so yah.

Rock on, Seven of Nine.

Rock.

On.

Newt’s day has just been too hard to really sit here and think critically about anything, but if he were going to choose something to think about, it would be the fact that he can read his life-partner’s thoughts at the expense of splitting apart the experiential nature of the data processed by his somatosensory cortex. At the moment it’s nothing more than a super bizarre parlor trick, but it’s interesting and it makes him feel validated regarding his suspicions concerning the post-kaiju-drift state. 

Too bad they can’t write a paper.

Maybe in fifty years.

If they live that long.

He feels like he might drop dead at any time.

Newt curls up in a misery ball on the couch, unmutes the television, and doesn’t cry at all over how everyone onVoyager is trying to be nice to Seven of Nine but she’s just having a really bad, really dysphoric, post collective time. 

He does this for a while.

He’s not really sure how long his misery-haze of Voyager sympathy lasts, but, eventually, his traumatized colleague makes a reappearance in a startling, lateral way when he deposits a pile of bedding-type material on top of Newt.

Hey, his brain says.

“Hey,” Newt also says. He’s too exhausted for his sympathetic nervous system to even be upset about the surprise-towel that just landed in his lap. 

“Please don’t slowly bleed to death,” Hermann says, wearing PJs that are kind of confusing because Newt thinks that they’re somehow the product of the J-tech uniform mating with historical mens pajamas of the 1940s and artificially creating a child that was adopted and raised by a major clothing sporting goods store.

“Er,” Newt says, wiping his face with his shirt-sleeve, deciding not to comment on the atypical evening wear that Hermann apparently chose for himself at some point in the past several weeks. Newt is not in a position to make any comments about confused sleep-wear choices. “I don’t think it works that way. I’m making more blood, you know. Making it all the time.”

“I don’t think it will go very well for me if you die or lose touch with reality,” Hermann says, crossing his arms and looking down at Newt in a forbidding way that’s most definitely undercut by the guy’s PJs, the bedding that Newt is now inexplicably half-covered with, and the general ridiculousness of the situation as a whole.

“Well, likewise, dude,” Newt replies, sitting up, appropriating a pillow, and shifting to make room for Hermann on the couch if he wants to do the couch thing again; Newt’s not pressuring, Newt doesn’t need Hermann to stay, Newt’s got Seven of Nine to keep him company, and a whole cognitive chorus who have just been way too chatty today for anyone’s good.

Hermann sits, propping one leg on the coffee table with outrageous nonchalance, like he’s not the guy who just walked in and summarily dropped a pile of bedding on the local self-possessed biologist.

Newt looks at him, lateral and close-range style, and spends too long considering whether it would be super creepy to whisper, ‘I can read your thoughts’.

Hermann gives him a look that strongly implies he’s made a pretty good guess as to what Newt’s currently thinking, and doesn’t want to go there right now because he’s not done talking about Newt and mortality and the concept of not dying in a premature manner. 

“I could be hit by a truck at literally any time,” Newt says, just to keep things in perspective. 

Hermann tips his head back and stares at the ceiling. “False,” he says. “You rarely leave this apartment and you are extremely risk averse when it comes to crossing roads.”

“Metaphorically, dude,” Newt says. “The ‘truck’ is a metaphor for the cruel stochasticity of life. Feeling particularly concrete this evening, are we, Dr. Gottlieb?”

“Of the pair of us, you are certainly the more concrete thinker, Newton” Hermann says. 

“Oh no,” Newt says. “No no no. I’m not going to let you twist this into some kind of argument that ends with you placing yourself at the apex of the quantitative hierarchy, while I build you a temple to rational thought out of biological bricks that I fashion out of decaying plant material with my bare hands. You call me concrete, I’m going to call you linear. I haven’t done it yet, but I will. No one backhands a compliment like I backhand a compliment, do not even try to outmanipulate me in this regard because you will lose. You think your skill with subtle insults is superior to mine only because I’ve never revealed the full extent of—”

“Would you care for an example of concreteness?” Hermann asks.

“No, not really—” Newt begins.

“Well I’ll provide you with one,” Hermann replies with notably poor diction. “It is very difficult for me, Newton, not to make a list of everyone responsible for how you were treated and then go down it, ending careers and causing personal misery to the utmost extent of my ability and political connections.”

“Um,” Newt says, not sure that Hermann’s example of ‘concreteness’ actually has anything to do with literal-mindedness. He buys himself some time by spreading a towel over his appropriated pillow and then lying down on it. By the time he does this, he’s decided that he should not engage over semantics, as is his usual instinct. “Thank you. But don’t do that.”

“I want,” Hermann says, “some kind of compensation on your behalf.”

“I think we’ve gotten that,” Newt says. “We’re out, aren’t we. They let you break me out. Someone let you drag me out of the shatterdome. Someone let us get in a cab. No one stopped us at the airport. All of those things seem pretty outrageous to me, given the problems inherent to our brains.”

“That will never be sufficient,” Hermann says. 

Newt sighs, wedges his feet partway under Hermann’s good leg and says, “god, you are emo. Ridic emo. Emocore.”

“Do not die,” Hermann says. “Don’t lose what remains of your sanity. Don’t have a seizure after a single shot of tequila.”

“Myeah,” Newt says. “Likewise. Don’t lose your cool and accidentally kill a passing math professor in a fit of rage because you’re a repressed and vengeful badass with cloned alien war machines in your head. Because that would ruin both our lives.”

Hermann spreads the blanket Newt’s been ignoring over both of them.

“Think of a number,” Newt says, shoving his feet slightly further beneath Hermann’s thigh.

“No,” Hermann says. 

“Do you think it’s just efferent cranial nerve outlets the transmit thoughts?”

“Yes,” Hermann says, patting Newt’s ankle in a manner that’s a little bit offensive.

“Why?” Newt says.

“Shh,” Hermann replies.

“You’re so boring,” Newt says.

“I am extremely tired,” Hermann replies. “Close your eyes and lie there quietly.”

“Hermann,” Newt whispers.

“What?” Hermann replies, watching B’Elanna Torres angst about personal identity in an intellectually smokin’ kind of way.

“Think of a number though,” Newt says.

Hermann looks over at him, eyebrows raised, expression unimpressed, his eyes reflecting the glare of the changing panorama of science fiction on the opposite side of the room. 

“But a number,” Newt says.

“I will think of a number at some point in the next several hours,” Hermann says. “Just silently pay attention so you don’t miss it.”

“I’m not even going to,” Newt replies. “I have some dignity.” 

“Well that’s certainly your prerogative,” Hermann murmurs.