Designations Congruent with Things: Chapter 9

Extreme Post-drift Induced Cognitive (EPIC) Rapport. 

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

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: None.

Chapter 9

Newt is lying on Hermann’s bed.

This isn’t really what he’d had in mind at any point before it had come to pass, but considering his day, he’s okay with it, mostly because tensing himself into the tetanic stillness required for detailed neuroimaging used up what little remained of any intramuscular glycogen reserves he might’ve and so, nope, he’s not going to be able to get up, and, if he does, by some miracle or statistical improbability, claw his way over that particular activation energy barrier, he wants to have a definite, achievable goal in mind, like locating a 5-Tesla magnet, hypothetically, or going to an awesome party, or obtaining an analgesic of some kind for his eye and head and probably pretty shortly for his whole body because today has been a six-sigma day when it comes to exertion. It’s hard to make time for racquetball when cloned, alien, war machines are laying waste to your civilization so while it's true he’s probably been in better shape in his life, evolution is about trade offs, man, so sure, he’s no Raleigh Becket, but he doesn’t see Captain Jawline saving the day through science—more like saving the day through fortitude and fighting skills, fine, Becket’s cool, whatever—the point he was making was that Newt considers Dr. Newton Geiszler, of the sick tats in green and the six advanced degrees, to have struck a pretty tight, awesome, and frankly commendable balance between being intelligent enough to biohack his way into an alternate dimension and physically fit enough to avoid a giant killing machine specifically targeting him for death, though it was possible it had wanted to do something else; he was still not clear on what that blue-tentacled business had been, was that like—a sommelier-style assessment of an interesting human varietal before consumption or did, maybe, Otachi have something else in mind, like a drift part deux in which Newt climbed on its back—or maybe her back, though the whole oh-look-a-baby-kaiju! phenomenon was parthenogenetic for sure, there was no indication kaiju reproduced sexually, he’d looked into this, but gender issues aside—maybe Newt would’ve climbed on its back and then sort of presided over an informed and efficient single-kaiju-mediated-destruction-of-his-own-civilization, which, while bad on a lot of levels, would have been visually striking, because there’s no doubt in his mind that in a Geiszler/kaiju combo versus even multiple Jaegers, he’s pretty sure who’ll win, just, like, hypothetically as a thought experiment, not a real thing because yiiiikes, he doesn’t want that, and he doesn’t even just not want it on paper he legit does not want it in his soul. Hermann is right about his thought experiments though, god, he just had one where he destroyed his planet, and that is worse than a cat with a flask, so maybe he should cut Schrödinger some slack.

“Newton.” Hermann stands over him, as academically disheveled as the man ever gets. 

Newt twitches.

God, how does a guy in a poorly-fitting sweater make himself so freaking alarming? 

“Are you listening to me? At all?” Hermann, already frowning, pushes his eyebrows together.

“Yeah,” Newt says. “Of course I’m listening to you. If anyone’s being inattentive, it is, for sure, you. As I keep telling you, I’m not brain damaged. You seem to be not grasping that. Are you brain damaged? Go search for some Riemann zeros, just to make sure you’re still fully functional, man.” 

There is, probably, in Newt’s entire life, going to be no more consistent source of intellectual pleasure than the ability he now has to tell Hermann to screw off in abstruse arithmetical argot. He wishes he could bottle this feeling it and save it for later when he’s losing an argument about the value of abstraction or when Hermann tells him he’s going back to mathematics, have a nice life, don’t clone a kaiju. 

Hermann glares at Newt, pulls the chair away from his desk, positions it a few feet from the bed, sits down, crosses his legs, rests his cane against the adjacent desk, and commences staring at Newt. 

“No,” Newt says. “No. What is this? Bedside-vigil pregaming? Because that’s not an accepted form of pregaming. You definitely promised me drunk science, or, if not promised me, you let me tacitly understand it would happen then shoved me onto your bed under false pretenses. I object to every aspect of what’s happening here.”

“Then get up and leave,” Hermann replies in prototypical xeric victory.

“I will,” Newt says. “In a while. When I feel like it. When I judge, using my life experience and my knowledge of complexity theory, that the awesomeness of the party out there has reached its logarithmic growth stage. Furthermore, you’ve committed a tactical error in your campaign to achieve perpetual, steady-state boringness.”

“And what might that be?” Hermann asks.

“Oh, just a little item called: Newt-has-your-memories-and-is-entitled-to-the-benefits-thereof.” Newt rolls over and, with significant effort and some unfortunate shaking, reaches beneath Hermann’s bed to pull out a half-empty bottle of sherry. “It is so weird that you hide this stuff. Who’s going to judge you for sherry, dude? I mean, a) it’s classy, and goes with the whole sweater-a-loved-one-with-questionable-taste-purchased-for-me-a-decade-ago look you’ve got going, b) it’s not like either J-tech or K-science, back when we had our own divisions before the funding cuts, were ever known for their dour alcoholic abstinence; in fact, it might be said that—hey.”

Newt has been relieved of Hermann’s sherry.

He really should’ve seen that one coming and/or processed what was happening as it was happening and taken steps to prevent this sherryless outcome.

“I find it extremely irritating,” Hermann says, opening the bottle with an atypical flourish and a typical glare…

Newt finds this turn of events so staggering he almost misses the end of Hermann’s sentence.

Or—nope, not “almost.”

Yeah, he actually did miss it, as it turns out. 

That’s okay, Hermann finds a lot of things irritating and Newt can extrapolate from past experience.

“So we are drinking the sherry?” Newt asks.

“No,” Hermann informs him. “I am drinking sherry. You are already drunk on your own exhaustion and hubris. Furthermore, you’ve had a seizure, while I have not. Therefore, until you are evaluated by an actual physician, you will not be drinking at all, because if you have a second neurological event there’s no force on this planet that will prevent me from having you immediately assessed by someone in the medical division with an actual degree, at which point it will be too late to claim you’re not experiencing any aftereffects from the ‘biologic interface’ you constructed, and the likelihood of spending the rest of your career as an experimental subject increases substantially.” Hermann punctuates his pronouncement by electing to drink sherry directly from the bottle.

Okay then.

Newt adjusts his glasses, as if that’s going to help him sort anything out. 

Nope, even with glasses correctly positioned, he’s still looking at Hermann in a state of alarming moderate-kemptness looking back at him with one bloodshot eye, one normal eye, both sporting an expression Newt will tag as ‘vengeful anxiety.’ There’d been a whole lot going on in the guy’s monologue, including some identity confusion, a chunk of concern, a swath of disparagement regarding Newt’s recapitulation skills, a dash of ideological dismissal of the idea of self-experimentation as a valid choice under extenuating circumstances, and a pile of ratiocination about comparative sherry rights.

Newt is a little too overwhelmed by the multiple conversational avenues to take any of them.

“Are you okay?” he asks, with maximum polite tact and minimal exhausted slurring.

“No, Newton,” Hermann snaps. “I am fifty percent you, which is intolerable. Furthermore, you are fifty percent me with no discernible problems and enough flawless integration of two sets of discordant memories to be able to locate my sherry, but evidently not enough to know that it’s there because it should be stored in a in a cool, dark place to prevent oxidation. You peasant. Are you not a chemist, amongst other things? You realize it’s embarrassing to have so many degrees, don’t you? It makes you look intellectually indecisive and dubiously employable.”

Newt would sit for emphasis, except, unfortunately, he doesn’t have the resources for moving unless something’s trying to eat him.

“First of all, I am a little bit indecisive, except for when I’m so so so right about things, which is most of the time. Second of all, tell me, Doctor Gottlieb, how easy do you think it is to get a post-doc position and apply for governmental funding at the age of fourteen? No one is giving the fourteen-year old whose department chair drives him to his research in progress job-talk the sweet two point three million dollar startup package, okay? Are you jealous of how awesomely I’m adapting to being, mnemonically speaking, fifty percent you? Because you’re not usually one for critiquing educational excesses,” Newton says. 

“No,” Hermann replies, in a stiff way that translates to “absolutely.” “I’m in no way jealous. I disapprove, but that is not the same thing.”

“Aw.” Newt tries to relax, tries to get this post-adrenaline reactive shaking to stop and stay stopped for the love of god. “Look, here’s the thing. First of all, while it’s true I’m not weirdly and needlessly insulted by a whole new set of enthusiasms that weren’t previously mine—like cherries, undeciphered manuscripts, the historically suspect incident in which Leonhard Euler supposedly smacked down Denis Diderot with a brutal application of induced math-anxiety, Stuttgart and its sports cars, the way the Epimenides Paradox informs Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems, sweaters, Bach’s kickass, six-part Ricercar in Das Musikalische Opfer, man that guy could crush a counterpoint—it’s also true there’s maybe the minor possibility that in the future I’ll be taking the Crazy Train to the anteverse while the Toccata and Fugue in D minor plays in my head or maybe over loudspeakers, and I’ll think that’s equally awesome, and the thing is, it will not be awesome, it will not be awesome at all, and that’s the kind of thing that makes me better at this in the short term, but you much better in the long term, infuriatingly better, and so that’s why I need for you to be my life partner.”

Hermann doesn’t bother answering that; he just takes another drink of sherry.

From the bottle.

Newt wishes he could do that right about now.

But he can regroup.

“What I mean is, could you do me a favor and make sure I don’t destroy the world? Not that I’m worried. Like, I think we should probably just go the academic route and apply for grant funding together. Also I need a roommate, because—well, I mean, I will probably, housing is expensive, or not, depending on where one lives, possibly I can just—whatever. The point is, I just think, given the events of the past twenty-four hours it’s your professional duty to make sure I’m not in neural continuity with the kaiju anteverse, just as it’s mine to make sure you’re not.”

Ugh.

This is the worst.

He should have waited until tomorrow to make his life partners proposal when he wasn’t so tired, that was the plan—why is this even happening to him now? Whose idea was this? Because it wasn’t his. His idea was to do it later, with one argument that he then supported with examples rather than all of them right in a row, one of which didn’t even have any rationale; now he just looks weird and desperate, and his head feels odd and he’s anxious. Why does he do this to himself?

Brain, if you’re going to crap out and die young, just—do it now. Right now would be extremely convenient for me.

“Yes I know,” Hermann says, looking confusingly relieved and also like he knows more than just where his professional responsibility lies, and of course, he does, he knows all of it and that makes Newt feel even weirder about the whole thing, because they don’t like each other, nope, they are nemesises who have pitched verbal battles about things like Kraftwerk, the merits of reductionist approaches to the analysis of complex phenomena, determinism, the strengths of theory versus empiricism, and which is better, chemically synthesized cheese spread or chemically synthesized imitation crab.

Nemesises.

Nemeses.

Mutual ones.

“Cool,” he says weakly, and slides shaking hands beneath his glasses like the paragon of suavity he is.

“We’ll need to leave Hong Kong,” Hermann says with the air of a guy who’s thought about this a lot more completely than Newt, “and withdraw ourselves from the employ of the PPDC as soon as you’re able to travel.”

“Able to travel?” Newts hands are still over his eyes, “what are you talking about? I’m able to travel right now.”

“You most certainly are not,” Hermann says. “No rational person would let you board a plane. Words cannot do justice to how truly appalling you look.”

“Thanks man. But why are we quitting?” Newt says into his hands.

“We are not quitting,” Hermann replies. “We have, in fact, triumphed, and it is now time to leave the PPDC and return to academic life, where we won’t be contractually obligated to make ourselves available for attempts to gather intelligence regarding the kaiju anteverse.”

Newt drags his hands away from his face, takes his glasses with them, tries to organize his hands and frames to get everything back in order and ends up somehow driving a knuckle into his bad eye, which, great, closes, so, reflexes intact, but, not-so-great, hurts with an excruciating, eye-watering intensity; can he just fall asleep and wake up three days from now? That would work out well for him. He looks over at Hermann to see the guy halfway through his half bottle of sherry. There’s pregaming and then there’s just straight up gaming, which is the direction Hermann’s heading in. Newt is not going to judge though. He’s going to lie here, neither pregaming nor gaming, and be unjudgmentally envious.

“Yeah,” Newt says. “Okay. Boston it is.”

“Boston? I don’t think so,” Hermann replies.

“Cambridge is, like, the academic capital of the world.” Newt bends a cognitive knee to a brutal wave of cognitive dissonance as Hermann’s preferences engage and his overtaxed brain starts fighting it out between Cambridge, Massachusetts and Cambridge, freaking England.

“If only I didn’t know what you meant by ‘Cambridge’,” Hermann says, teeth clenched.

The room moves and fails to move in nauseating duality, leaving Newt unfortunately unable to rule out the possibility of falling off Hermann’s stationary bed.

This won’t end well.

“Don’t throw up,” Newt says, “because if you do it, I’ll do it. How does this not happen to other people? You don’t see Captain Jawline throwing up in the cafeteria because Mako likes fermented soybeans. Or something. God. I don’t think we’re drift compatible.” 

“Is it too much to ask that you stop talking?” Hermann asks through impressively clenched teeth.

“Think of Kierkegaard,” Newt says. “Think of many excellent academic centers. Berlin, Paris, Tokyo, Vladivostok is up and coming in terms of biomedical engineering post all the kaiju samples that landed in their lap, crap, Dublin, San Francisco, think about cost versus benefit as a gestalt rather than trying to literally rank, dude, it’s the formal ranking that’s killer. Let’s get a map and some darts. Bonn is nice.” He trails off and rolls over so if he throws up it’ll be on the floor, he’s pretty sure he’s talked himself mostly out of his cognitive dissonance but if Hermann throws up he’s going to also, for sure, no matter his dissonance level, because it’s some kind of evolutionary thing—see evidence of a poisoned peer, commence vomiting. Certainly in terms of life-prolongation it’s a good idea to take protective measures, except this time it’s, like, fake, psychological poison, but try to tell that to his area postrema, just try. 

“This is pretty much the worst.” Newt opens his eyes, to oh hey, watch blood drip onto the floor.

Why does he articulate these kinds of karmic invitations? He needs to stop doing this.

Duly noted, brain, he thinks, this is not the worst. It’s literally never the worst until you’re in the ninth circle of hell, being perpetually consumed by Lucifer, or, alternatively, stuck in a disembodied hive mind for eternity because you accidentally killed your physical body. Thank you, brain, for reminding me that this is called “perspective” and it’s now a thing you have and I have. We both have it. Why? Because we’re a team. Don’t sabotage your team, brain. It’s not worth it.

More to the point and less to the Dantean hyperbole: nearly throwing up is enough of a trauma to his friable capillary beds that his nose is bleeding again. He’s not sure, but it seems like this could potentially be a long-term thing. Where by “thing” he means “problem.”  He wonders if he has a vasculature abnormality that predisposes him to this, or if he just really screwed himself with that first Drift. He pulls out one of the handkerchiefs he carries for the guy who’s definitely his nemesis and not his friend with a dislike and maybe-real, maybe-not-real, “allergy” to latex gloves and a pathological horror of touching totally innocuous things like suspect door handles or the outside of specimen containers Newt occasionally needs him to hold because hi, no lab techs, no lab techs at all, none for like three years, and he only has two hands, and the outside of those containers are clean, but whatever, he carries handkerchiefs and he’s positive there’s nothing weird about that; it’s a mark of civilization. Like hashi. Like piano. Like the complex plane. Like a brutalist architectural phase. Like a single perfect flower in a single perfect vase. Whatever.

Ugh bleeding.

Ugh moderate bleeding.

No one is yelling though; that seems weird.

Newt looks over to see Hermann managing not to throw up by shutting his eyes and thinking. Probably he’s contemplating something super Zen, like maybe Gabriel’s Horn with the infinite surface area and the finite volume, that’s cool, that’s Zen, but unfortunately that means that when Hermann’s done being Zen, or maybe once he’s achieved an approximation of Zenness, Newt’s going to ruin it for him by being actively bleeding when he opens his eyes.

Not much he can do about that.

Hermann opens his eyes.

“There’s no way this is serious,” is all Newt manages to get out before the other man interrupts him by snapping his name like a pencil. Hermann is, at the apex of vexation, a pencil-snapper. Newt’s a table-upender, but he’s only given into that impulse twice in his life, both times it was awesome, but only one time was it for science. He just gets emotional when uninformed mathematicians-turned-theoretical-physicists talk crap about the fidelity of DNA polymerases as if they know anything about mutation rates, those things molecularly proofread okay; they are probably the best enzymes ever, so complicated, so willing to play well with others—

“Newton,” Hermann says, again, a little more a word, a little less a fracturing of a wooden emblem of the civilized mind. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” Newt says, managing to wipe all the blood off his face, probably, mostly, then pinch his nose shut. “Look, there’s literally no way this is serious. You don’t bleed from your brain into your nose; that’s physiologically not going to happen unless you’ve got one heck of a skull fracture, which I do not have, please see the two hundred and sixty-two thousand examples of astronomically high mental functioning I’ve been providing you with for hours now. I just have some irritated capillary beds and trying not to throw up is enough of a pressure trigger to knock those guys over into bleeding a little bit, probably. I don’t know; I’m not a neurologist. Maybe neurologists wouldn’t even know, because turns out the nose is not the brain. Maybe let’s go somewhere with a good Neurology Department that’s a little bit counter-culture, what do you think?”

“Agreed,” Hermann says, watching him like a hawk. A creeper hawk.

“Ugh.” Newt pulls his handkerchief away from his face to see if he’s still bleeding. It seems like maybe yes, so he puts it back. “So you want to do what? Math or theoretical physics?”

“Don’t change the subject,” Hermann says.

“I don’t even know what the subject was if you don’t think it’s where we’re going to go and tell them they need to hire the most badass whatever-we-are in the history of Interdisciplinary World Saving.”

“Are you still bleeding?”

“Um, I don’t know, probably? It’s been ten seconds; I doubt it’s over yet. I think you should do quantum mechanics, mainly because it’s awesome, and also because I’m not sure that all your math friends have been following your career now that you’re not directly working on zeta functions. I mean, life goes on, even when giant alien monsters are eating coastal cities. Those Fields Medals aren’t going to win themselves. But you can get back into the whole thing slantwise because of the connection between the quantum energy levels of chaotic systems and Riemann zeros, dude, it’s so perfect it suggests itself. To me. A biologist. Who could not find a Riemann zero if his life depended on it. Before yesterday. Now I’d crush those zeros. But I’m not as interested as you are. Tell me I will not make an awesome life partner and/or roommate. Have you considered that if we don’t turn evil we could do a lot of good things? Like, y’know, for science?”

“First,” Hermann says, “that was already my plan, so I’ll thank you not to describe it as ‘slantwise,’ and I’ll thank you not to take credit for proposing I avail myself of the connection between the Riemann Hypothesis and quantum mechanics to further my professional career. I, in fact, conceived that plan more than five years ago, and I’m certain you pulled it directly out of my head, akin to the way you managed to unerringly locate this sherry, much good though it did you.” Hermann shakes the bottle in his direction. 

“Keep drinking,” Newt advises. 

“Second,” Hermann says, with a gloriously Gottliebian glare, “yes, it has occurred to me that post-drift cognitive enhancements could have extremely advantageous intellectual implications, presuming equally disadvantageous weaknesses don’t precipitate catastrophic psychological outcomes."

“You’re always so negative.” Newt eyes his moderately blood-soaked handkerchief and tries not to be negative himself.

“And you’re always an idiot. Are you still bleeding?”

“You’re using the word ‘idiot’ at high frequency.” Newt tries to decide if he can feel blood coming from wherever it comes from. “I’m pretty sure that’s to compensate for the fact that I now know you think I’m a blazing paragon of intellectual insight and a validated wunderkind, so I’ll let it slide. Just to be clear though, I always thought your brain was pretty great, if a little rigid, so, that’s another thing I was right about, by the way.” He decides he’s not bleeding anymore, and tosses his handkerchief in the direction of his Pile of Items to be Incinerated, but misses so badly he can’t even claim to have been aiming at all.

Hermann shoots him in unimpressed look. 

“And not bleeding,” he finishes, hoping it’s true, still tasting blood. 

“I’ll be extremely annoyed if you die,” Hermann says, managing to take a pretty nice sentiment and set it on fire with pique.

“I think I would’ve died already if it was going to happen,” Newt says. “I definitely would have if you hadn’t pulled me out of that first Drift when you did. So thanks, dude. I owe you one. Maybe I owe you two. Definitely at least one though.”

Hard to put a number on a disembodied eternity of endless suffering.

“How would you describe it?” Hermann asks, still drinking sherry out of the bottle like Newt’s own ghost is driving each swig and swallow.

“The first Drift?” Newt asks. “Kinda like the second one, but less fun. They were initially pretty shocked, I think. There was—” he makes looping, poorly coordinated hand gesture. “A getting-to-know-you period where the general sentiment was like, ‘Wow, baby humans are stupid and tiny’, and I was like, ‘Nice Dyson sphere, jackasses, why do I think that’s not gonna cut it for you?’ and then they were like, ‘Huh, hello, this little guy did manage to get here, that’s not so stupid, and hey, turns out we’re enraged,’ and I was like, ‘Oh so you guys are basically sending the most destructive packages the breach will transit over given time intervals?’ and they were like, ‘No way, you did not just figure that out,’ and I was like, ‘Yup, pretty sure I did, suck it, jerks,’ and they were like, ‘Wait, you guys are actually in those metal kaijus? How shortsighted is that, why not control them remotely?’ and then I was like, ‘You cloned that business?’ and they were like, ‘We’re going to get you and your Wall, and your little civilization too,’ and that pretty much brings us the point where I was about to die. Fortunately, you pulled me out. Do you, maybe, want a glass for that sherry you’re knocking back?”

“No,” Hermann replies, “I do not.”

“Why,” Newt says. “Can you just use a glass? It’s disturbing.”

“Too Newtonesque?” Hermann asks dryly.

“First of all, oh my god, no,” Newt says. “Ew. If you insist on adjectivizing my first name, the correct way, the only way, the established way, is ‘Newtonian,’ okay? It’s already a thing. A thing you’re purposefully avoiding. Second of all, yes, way too ‘me,’ except weird, because I wouldn’t drink sherry, and if I did, I’d use a glass, dude, because you drink tequila out of a bottle, you drink vodka out of a bottle, you drink, maybe, a blended scotch out of a bottle, you drink Irish whiskey out of a bottle, but you do not drink sherry, red wine, or sake out of a bottle, you’ve got some wires crossed somewhere between the you-circuitry, the me-circuitry, the authority-circuitry, the tequila-circuitry, and the et cetera-circuitry. Now go get a glass. Do it right now. I know you have them. Go.”

“I very nearly upended a table today, Newton.” Hermann stands in indirect acquiescence, then shakes the bottle in Newt’s general direction. “This is the least of my problems.”

“I know; the table thing is tempting, right?” Newt asks. “Once you do it, you never look back. Hey, if you’re getting a glass, I could use some sherry. Or if not sherry, at least water.”

“You may have water.” Hermann makes his way to the sink none too steadily. 

“This is the worst pregaming ever,” Newt says. He considers sitting up, does a pilot experiment that indicates sitting up will be way too hard, then settles for propping himself on one unlucky and protesting elbow. “And when were you going to upend a table? We haven’t really seen many tables since we had our mental three-way, and I don’t recall pissing you off to table-upending levels any time in the past however many hours that it’s been since we did that thing we did.”

“It was, actually, a desk,” Hermann says with endearing primness, filling a glass of water at his sink and then emptying the remainder of the sherry into a second glass.

Ah yes, Newt thinks, a desk, by Jove. How tempting and unpropitious.

“Desks don’t flip as nicely,” Newt says with commendable gallantry, “depending on their construction and what’s on top of them.”

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

“May I ask what triggered that particular appropriated proclivity?”

“No.” Hermann hands him his water.

Newt takes it, and, of course, Jurassic Park-style, it just accentuates how much he’s still shaking so he downs the whole thing immediately. It’s room temperature and blood-flavored.

“Are you all right?” Hermann asks him for the thirty-two-thousandth time. 

Newt sighs, deposits the empty glass on Hermann’s nightstand, and lies back down. “Why do I get the feeling we aren’t drift compatible?”

“I cannot imagine,” Hermann drops back into his chair.

“I’ve heard of people acquiring new preferences,” Newt says, “but I haven’t heard of anyone nearly throwing up over—”

“Whatever you are about to say, don’t,” Hermann snaps. 

“—cognitive dissonance,” Newt finishes, shooting Hermann his best who’s-the-jerk-now look.

“Likely because they don’t have significant cognitive dissonance,” Hermann says. “Because they’re compatible.”

“Is that even really a thing?” Newt lets a decade of skepticism slow-melt into his tone. “A discrete thing? Discrete in a mathematical sense? Digital rather than analog?”

“You just posited our own fundamental incompatibility,” Hermann counters, “in such a way that implies you view it discretely.”

“Yeeeeaaaah, I think there’s probably a minimal threshold that you need to hit so you don’t throw up over Nietzsche or weep over Freddie Mercury, which will, someday, happen to you, if it hasn’t happened yet, presuming there is justice in the world, which there might not be. Once you hit that threshold though, it’s an analog thing, like, more compatible or less compatible—better at sword-mediated kaiju evisceration, or y’know, tragically less good, as the case may be. The thing is, though—we actually turned out to be pretty awesome at extracting information, better than I was on my own, mainly because I, prior to six hours ago, was less solid on the quantum mechanical underpinnings of dimensional transit. I also, for your information, found it less staggeringly hilarious than I do now that after all those string-theory-doesn’t-belong-in-science-because-it-can’t-be-directly-tested protestations the whole shebang gets proven to have empirical validity by monsters—” oh god, he’s going to lose it, this is not funny, this is not even remotely amusing. “By monsters. Literally eating cities—” he can barely string a sentence together with the effort of suppressing laughter that is, for sure, one hundred percent, guaranteed to end up squarely in sobbing.

Hermann’s doing a really terrible job helping him out because he’s also trying not to laugh and doing it about as badly as Newt would expect.

His brain really needs to step up and get this situation under control because Newt refuses to laugh uncontrollably about string theory. In the absence of consciousness-altering substances, that's a line in the sand he won’t cross.

“Oh god,” Newt pants, trying to breathe past the crunch-crunch-you’re-dead empirical validity of M-theory. “I think I’m gonna die. String theory wins forever. Infinite win. Monsters. You have a better sense of humor than I ever thought possible. Or maybe now I have a terrible one. What was I even talking about?” 

“Drift compatibility,” Hermann says, “which you are, if I’m correctly interpreting your meandering train of thought, rather creatively equating to synaptic transmission, in which a certain threshold must be reached to trigger the depolarization required for electrical propagation along a neuron."  

“You realize you’re de-jargoning membrane dynamics for a biologist?” Newt asks. “It’s adorable.”

“It’s most certainly not ‘adorable.’ It’s a professional courtesy, which I’ve extended to you for a decade without the faintest hope of reciprocation,” Hermann says primly, before returning to his original point. “Given a neural signal is transmitted, further improvement can then be effected, via repetitive stimulation, in a manner conceptually akin to the neuronal phenomenon of long term potentiation.”

“Not bad for a glorified accountant,” Newt says. “Biology: it’s awesome. Try not to be jealous. I suppose neuroscience, as a field, is big enough for both of us, and I’d be willing to share it with you, but only if you beg.”

“How charitable,” Hermann replies. “There are several problems with your model.”

“Let’s call this one your model,” Newt replies. “I never formally committed to anything like what you’re describing. This is just a thing that you’ve put together in a Newtonian manner using our longstanding and extremely reasonable mutual skepticism of floor matches as a means of assessing drift compatibility, your new knowledge of neuroscience, and your long history of following my extremely logical if not always perfectly explained trains of thought.”

“This is not my model, Newton,” Hermann says, still amused, still making progress on his sherry.

“Well it’s not mine, dude, you can’t just make up models then ascribe them to me and force me to defend them. I have some standards.”

“I’m certain the only reason you’re claiming not to conceptualize the Drift in the way I just described is because your model—” Hermann trails off in unmistakable realization. He gives Newt an incisive, interested, and edgy look.

Newt tries to appear innocent, or, failing that, at least extremely sick, entirely exhausted, possibly dying. “Your model, Hermann. Yours.”

“It was yours.” Hermann narrows his eyes. “I’m certain it was, now that I can retroactively interpret what I previously labeled ‘intellectual windmill tilting.’ But such a model predicts incompatibility even in most human-human drifting. The divergence between ‘living human’ and ‘dead kaiju’ would never meet your hypothesized drift threshold.”

“Um,” Newt says.

“What did you do?” Hermann demands.

“Welllllllllllll.” Newt adjusts his glasses with one shaking hand, wondering if he can subtly valsalva his way to a propitious episode of epistaxis.

“Newton,” Hermann snarls. “You lowered the threshold.”

“A little bit, maybe, yeah. I mean, this might be news to you dude, but sick body art aside, I didn’t expect to actually be drift compatible with a kaiju. I mean, you’ve seen those things right? Not a lot of common ground there. Plus, I was using a dead one. As you pointed out. Many times. So, um, yeah, I built a custom helmet to manipulate my own membrane potentials into a little bit more of an excitable state in an attempt to override the monster-human threshold problem.”

Hermann knocks back more sherry and looks at the ceiling, sliding along thought catenaries or something.

“And yours,” Newt says, queuing up an anticipatory wince. “Also. Just for full disclosure. Helmet number two, same deal. I also screwed around with your membrane potential.”

“That’s quite clever,” Hermann decides. 

“What?”  

“Quite clever,” Hermann repeats, and god, Newt should get him drunk more often, this is awesome. “I’ll assume it’s only because you’re exhausted to the point of disability that you haven’t put this all together to form a cogent explanation for what’s currently happening to us.”

This is less awesome. 

“What?”

“Do you need it explained to you?” Hermann asks, with Herculean levels of ironic solicitousness. 

“No,” Newt snaps.

“Very well.” Hermann makes a show of inspecting his sherry, glowing amber in the fluorescent light.

“We’re incompatible and I overrode our incompatibility with my drift hack,” Newt says. “I broke our brains, a little bit, maybe, and now we can’t make decisions without throwing up, which is probably temporary. Maybe. Hopefully.”

“No,” Hermann says, so self-satisfied Newt can barely stand it. “No, I don’t think that’s what you did.”

“I,” Newt grabs Hermann’s cane from where it’s leaning against the nightstand, drags it onto the bed, deposits it next to him, and wraps a hand around it, “am taking this.” 

“Much good may it do you,” Hermann says. “You appear to need it more than I do at the moment. I doubt you can even sit. How you’re still managing to speak in complete sentences is a mystery to me.”

“You,” Newt snarls.

“And you were doing so well,” Hermann says with false sympathy. 

Newt sighs. “Just tell me.”

“Tempted though I am to make you beg, as you so chivalrously threatened me with mere minutes ago, I’ll resist the impulse, because you’ve had a difficult day.”

“I’m crushing this day,” Newt says, and he is, he’s pulverizing this day into a liquid sluice of pure victory, upon which he’s getting drunk because his cranky life-partner won’t let him pregame with sherry.

“I think this day nearly crushed you,” Hermann replies.

“You’re enjoying this way too much,” Newt says. “Tell me. I’m literally begging you to tell me your so cogent and so sound working model of what’s happening to our brains, and, so help me, if there’s so much as one unexplained—”

“We are compatible,” Hermann says, not in the mood for Newt’s science posturing, but looking like he enjoyed the begging a little more than is strictly appropriate. “We are, in fact, quite compatible. Even atypically compatible. But, in the presence of your unusual setup, designed to boost drift compatibility in the face of extreme neural disparity, what we are experiencing is—”

“Oh god,” Newt says, getting it, getting it hardcore. “Extreme Post-drift Induced Cognitive Rapport. That makes a good acronym. EPIC Rapport.” He’s getting hit in the face by the idea and its implications. Coming too hard and too fast to organize. “Let’swriteapaper,” is all he can say.

Ugh, he is slurring and he is not even tired or drunk. 

That’s a lie.

He’s tired.

And drunk on hubris, apparently.

“You just completed my sentence,” Hermann eyes him skeptically.

“No I didn’t. I started my own sentence.” Newt slows himself down. “A new and different one. You want to write a paper?”

“That was, unmistakably, sentence completion, Newton.” Hermann arches his eyebrows and sips his sherry. “It had no subject, and instead, borrowed an understood subject from my sentence. And, while I would not, theoretically, object to writing a paper with you, I don’t think this is something that we should document in a formal way, given it will only draw attention to the fact we drifted with the anteverse.”

“You’d be the worst to write a paper with, anyway,” Newt says, with definitive manfulness that isn’t at all sulky or petulant. “I definitely don’t want to. You couldn’t pay me to write a paper with you.”

“That’s demonstrably untrue,” Hermann says. “You have, in fact, suggested it twice in the past several hours.”

“Whatever man,” Newt says. “I’ve also failed to find a fire, failed to find a neurologist, failed to find a 5-Tesla magnet, failed to get drunk, failed to convince you that we should go to Boston, failed to grasp the implications of my own drift hack, failed to get drunk, failed to incinerate my outfit, failed to irritate you to the point of irrationality, failed to build an MRI, failed to find my own alcohol, failed to start screaming uncontrollably while trapped in the most crap scanner known to man but hey that was a win, failed to get drunk, failed to plan ahead so when I couldn’t move any more I’d be in the middle of the most awesome party of the century rather than watching a mathematician drink sherry, but I did steal your cane. So. There’s that. What’s even happening here, I don’t have to build an MRI.”

“No,” Hermann says, his eyebrows coming together, probably because he didn’t miss the reference to “screaming uncontrollably” that Newt unfortunately made.

“Committed,” perhaps, is a better term than “made.” 

“I do know what’s happening,” Newt clarifies. “Just to be clear, that was a rhetorical device I was employing. I also think there’s a possibility you might be correct about the Extreme Post-Drift Induced Cognitive Rapport.” 

“A possibility,” Hermann echoes, in presupposed victory.

Newt spends a moment considering the ceiling—low, metallic, corrugated—before his confused theory of mind kicks in and he looks back at Hermann. “You,” he says, propping himself up on one elbow, “make it a point not to listen to me.”

Hermann shrugs in self-satisfied admission. 

“And so you wouldn’t have been thinking about my thresholding theory.”

“No, I generally leave such things in your dubiously capable hands.” Hermann sips his sherry, avoiding eye contact.

“Given you had no idea I’d screwed around with neuronal excitability on the operator end, you must have assumed our fundamental drift compatibility.”

“I assumed nothing,” Hermann said. “Will you lie down? You look extremely alarming."

“Lies.” Newt falls off his elbow. “You did.”

“The only thing I assumed,” Hermann says dryly, “was that, in the absence of some mitigating factor, a second Drift would likely be too much for you to withstand, given the first nearly killed you. I was willing to be that mitigating factor.”

“I can’t believe you thought we would be drift compatible.” Newt grins at the ceiling.

“You’re probably the most infuriating person I’ve ever known,” Hermann says. “That is not what I said.”

“Myeah.” Newt closes his eyes, trying to picture some kind of ridiculous sparring match between himself and Hermann a la the Mako-versus-Raleigh exhibition he’d heard so much about, but the whole thing takes a lot of mental effort to envision, and he can’t seem to progress it beyond both of them standing without shoes on a mat, yelling at one another. It occurs to him then they’ve been sparring every day of their acquaintance, for hours, to a dead heat. Intellectually. So yeah. They’re drift compatible. They have EPIC Rapport.

The whole sparring thing is still garbage though. Or if not garbage, then a really, really approximate surrogate endpoint.     

“I’m curious,” Hermann says, deciding on a change of subject. “How in god’s name were you able to tolerate that MRI?”

Newt could live without this as a topic of conversation. 

“Eh.” Eyes still shut, he sweeps a hand through the air, dismissing the entire field of discussion.

“Are you becoming monosyllabic?” Hermann asks.

“Nah,” Newt replies.

Hermann jabs Newt with his cane.

Newt tries to flinch, but only about half his muscles are feeling like it’s still their job to do what his nervous system says. This makes the effect interesting from a perceptive standpoint, but pretty understated as flinching goes. His eyes do come open though, so that’s a win, possibly, or not, he’s not sure how much winning there is left for him to do in the world, he’ll probably spend most of his mental energy on not cloning a kaiju and he’ll spend what little remains on trying not to have PTSD or epilepsy or generalized anxiety disorder or a mental connection to the anteverse or whatever his problems will shape themselves into once they’ve started to congeal from the mass of disorganized goo quivering in his cerebral cortex.

“I stole that cane,” he says, looking at Hermann, who is holding his sherry and his reappropriated cane.

“Not only did you steal it,” Hermann says, “you turned it into a metaphor for your entire professional life by committing a glorious proof-of principle, then failing to follow through on any effort to keep it.”

“Was it too much to hope that you’d be—surprise—a nice drunk? Or, at minimum, an irresponsible one?” Newt asks. “I’d even settle for some demonstrable cognitive impairment. Any demonstrable impairment. Is that even sherry? I have follow-through, by the way. Follow-through, as a character trait, is a prerequisite for constructing your own drift interface and then reproducibly using it. Which I did.”

“You’ve seen me intoxicated,” Hermann replies, “so it should come as no surprise to you that given the amount of available alcohol, no cognitive deficits are likely to be forthcoming.”

“You’ve had a hard day,” Newt says, half explanation, half aspiration, and nope, that was not his best enunciation job ever. 

“Yes, Newton, I have. Thank you for belatedly noticing. But I was not finished.”

“Oh,” Newt says. “Well. Please proceed.”

“I’m extremely kind at baseline. If you bothered to accurately conceptualize your current situation, you’d find you’re lying in my bed, while I watch you, to ensure you don’t ‘drop dead,’ as you so charmingly put it, from some unforeseen consequence of your actions over the past twenty-four hours. Why am I doing this? Is it because I think it’s a good idea? No, Newton, it is not. I am doing it solely for you, because you have an atypical amount of distrust in authority, which has somehow infested my personality structure, leaving me unable to perform even the most basic risk assessment regarding your current situation and leaving me with no other option than to sit here and watch you.” 

“Our situation.” Newt shuts his bad eye and runs his fingers over his eyelid and under his glasses. “Not mine. Ours.”

“Yours, Newton,” Hermann says. “I’m certain the medical risk to you is orders of magnitude greater than it is for me.”

“Hopefully,” Newt agrees, pulling his glasses mostly off his face as he drops his hand and gives Hermann’s sherry a pointed look. “Y’know, it never occurred to me to try a three-way drift. Human on human on kaiju.”

“Never refer to it in that manner again,” Hermann says. 

“Human on human on kaiju?” Newt styles his eyebrows in what he hopes is a tastelessly suggestive manner.

“You know,” Hermann says, considering his sherry, “I had the idea you purposefully played up your gift for non sequiturs solely for the purpose of annoying me.”

“And now you know it to be true,” Newt replies.

“Yes,” Hermann says, “but not quite to the extent I’d imagined. Even when you're not being deliberately inflammatory, you’re extremely difficult to converse with if one has a definite goal in mind.”

“It sounds like you’re confused about whether you’re trying to insult me or compliment me,” Newt says solicitously. “You need some help with that? Because I’m pretty sure that while normally it would be the former, today you’re going to want to choose the latter.”

“I’m attempting to choose neither,” Hermann replies. “What I want to know is how you tolerated that MRI.”

“I just laid there, man,” Newt says. “Kinda like now, except with more muscle tension and less talking out loud. It was, for sure, the least interesting thing I’ve done all day. It figures that’s what you’re going to fixate on as the thing you want to know about. Of course. ‘Newton, tell me how in god’s name you laid zere vithout talking for ninety minutes, I find it frankly beyond belief.’ Thanks a lot. You know I can do this whole external monologue thing internally? That is a skillset I possess.”

“But not one you frequently display,” Hermann counters. “Your experience of lying motionless within a 3-Tesla magnet is far from the only thing about which I’m curious. It is the only thing I currently care to ask you about because I have no desire to precipitate a poorly organized but strong inclination on your part to undertake some kind of project.”

“I was going to build an open MRI,” Newt sighs, faintly regretful at his total inability to be vertical at the present moment.

“Why?”

“Because the PPDC’s setup is not only a pathetic 3-Teslas, but it’s closed, and that’s just cruel. It’s 2025, man. We deserve better.”

“Post-scan, you looked as though you found it quite stressful.”

Totally suave, zero percent transparent, one hundred percent opaque, Newt says, “What makes you say that?”

“Possibly it was the pallor, possibly it was the shaking, or possibly it was you, digging your hands into my shoulders and saying, ‘You must get me out of here because I cannot take this’.” 

“Doesn’t sound familiar,” Newt says, philosophical and abstracted, lying about lying there, but in his defense, the whole experience has memorialized by his hippocampus in an untrustworthy admixture of confined space, layered with remembered terror, topped by an increasingly ridiculous Geiszlerian monologue—a memory laid down as a fancy, three-tiered shot of colored cognitive alcohol with a witty name, like Kaiju Codicil, that one might find in a devastatingly trendy Hong Kong bar. Alas, this is not a drink that he’s currently drinking. He’s drinking no drinks, and the likelihood of drink acquisition is tragically low any time in the near future. Furthermore, his odds of attending the party of the century, if not the millennium, are abysmal and sinking by the microsecond and yeah, this seems typical—he’ll spend his night of victory out of biological juice, trying not to drop dead while Hermann gets drunk by himself on his own sherry. Newt finds this equal parts vexing and comforting. Once a demimonde, always a demimonde, it seems, no matter how many shows you play, tattoos you get, or Millennium Prize Problems you’ve almost basically already solved.

Ugh. 

No. 

Identity confusion alert.

Brain, he thinks, please try to remember it’s not you who loves the Riemann Hypothesis with a deep and abiding love because a) it’ll drive you to despair if you really try to engage with those zeta function zeros, you know you’re not the most reliable place to house the kind of rigorous, abstract thought needed to construct a temple to quantitation and then live within it, that won’t turn out well for you, b) you’re not a mathematician, all that stuff is borrowed from someone who isn’t actually you, and c) there’s no surer way to interpersonal hell than to piss Hermann off by poaching on his side of the mutual intellectual garden you now share custody of in the loosest and yet also the most rigid of ways.

“Newton,” Hermann snaps, “please try to be as accurate as possible, as I’m constantly assessing your mental state.”

“Yes,” Newt admits, “fine, I may have said that. I may have encountered some difficulty with immersive neural recapitulation of recent sensory experiences while in an enclosed environment, but I’m pretty sure that’s normal and unrelated to any hypothetical brain damage I may or may not have.”

Hermann says nothing in response, but then, Newt doesn’t really blame him, after all, what’s the guy supposed to say that won’t sound uncharacteristically sensitive? What else is there really left to communicate beyond what he’s already demonstrated by simply inquiring about Newt’s subjective experience in the first place; so yeah, of course Hermann says nothing. Until he says, “I imagine such an  experience was not at all easy for you.”

Empathy’d.

“Yeah,” Newt says, “I’m sure you do imagine that. As long as you’re imagining things, I encourage you to imagine how little I want to talk about this with all the sparkling clarity I’m sure you can now muster. You falsely advertised drunk science, not drunk awkwardness, but since we’re talking about feelings I don’t want to talk about, I did devote some serious thought to whether or not I'm in mental continuity with the anteverse.”

“Did you,” Hermann says, all arid unsurprise. “Did this self-inquiry include anything other than a free verse mental summoning?”

“I don’t like that you know me this well.” Newt narrows his eyes in exhausted suspicion.

“Neither do I,” Hermann replies.

“What do you think the chances are that, a decade from now, you and I will be in a boat on the Pacific reopening the Breach?” Newt asks, with one hundred percent casual unconcern.

“Zero,” Hermann replies.

“Now you’re just asking for it,” Newt rasps, with no more than ten percent overt despair infecting his tone. Twenty percent. Thirty percent tops. 

“There’s a vanishingly small but material chance that you or I or both remain in some kind of mental continuity with the kaiju anteverse. There is a small but material chance that you or I or both are able to be influenced via an unknown, transdimensional mechanism.” 

“Oh god,” Newt breathes, “so you think it’s possible.”

“I can’t formally exclude it,” Hermann replies, “though, as I said, I consider it unlikely. What is it you want, Newton, bland anti-Frankensteinian platitudes or statistics that include insight into their own imprecisions?”

“And you wonder why I work in vivo.”

“Your work, at best, can be classified as ex vivo,” Hermann says. 

Newt gives him a pharaonic, supinated sweep of the hand.

“To continue,” Hermann says, like a guy who has a point he’s driving towards and can keep in his sights like a laser-wielding badass, “there’s also a small but non-zero possibility that you, I, or both of us will fail to identify a horrendous hypothetical lapse in judgment and take steps to correct the problem. All of those unlikely events will be required to occur to bring about the outcome you’re anticipating.” 

“’Dreading’, I think, would be the word I’d choose,” Newt confesses.

“Nevertheless, the final outcome depends on probabilities of several independent, unlikely events.”

Newt stares at Hermann in open incredulity.

“Independent?” he echoes, when his brain organizes itself back into talking. “Like anyone could unambiguously classify your three events as ‘independent.’ There’s clearly an argument to be made for interdependence. There’s literally no way you actually believe any of what you just said, so I’m forced to conclude that this is you, trying to reassure me with math?”

Hermann looks away, toward the super fascinating blank wall.

“It is, isn’t it?” Newt continues, a little too smacked in the face with a two-by-four of revelation to be operating with maximum manful tact. “I feel like this is the nicest thing you’ve ever done? At least—that involves me or was witnessed by me, I’ll give you that as a caveat.” 

“Generous.”  Hermann gets them back on track with some resolute disdain.

Newt can work with that.

“Alas, a day ago this strategy might have worked, and wow, you really don’t give me a lot of credit for statistical insight, do you? I’m too tired to be offended about it right now, but watch it, dude, biologists do math, okay? They might not invent it, but they do it. More to the point, I don’t feel excessively reassured, given my borrowed numerical instincts and my own certainty that improbable scenarios cave all the time in the face of unadulterated willpower. But I do take some comfort in the empirical evidence that at least one of my colleagues not only cares if I live or die, but is willing to go so far as to actively prevent my death by risking his own life, then willing to forego a party so awesome it might be dangerous in order to stare at me to make sure I don’t have a seizure, while simultaneously reassuring me about my future prospects via some kind of statistical bedtime story about independent probabilities that aren't really all that independent after all.”

Hermann sips his sherry, unperturbed, and says, “Quite.”

Newt figures that if Hermann is going to go so far as to misrepresent statistics to him and then cop to it, then he might as well lay all his cards on the table. He adjusts his glasses and tries to decide ahead of time on phrasing.

It’s not working out for him.

“Is there a reason you’re staring at me?” Hermann straightens a sweater seam. “I can’t actively read your mind, Newton; I’m relatively confident of that much.”

“I really just need for us to be in a relationship where you never leave me and you also perpetually ensure I’m not ending the world,” Newt says, in a drunkenly hubristic or hubristically drunken torrent of words.

Hermann pulls out his most sophisticated, stratospheric single-eyebrow raise.

This was a terrible idea. 

If things turn weird, Newt is pretty sure he won’t be able to get up and leave without falling over at least one time.

“Newton,” Hermann replies, “we already have such a relationship. We have, in fact, had such a relationship for approximately nine years.”

“Oh,” Newt says. 

Hermann sips his sherry and lets his eyebrow go back home. 

Newt will need to spend some time thinking about whether Hermann was always this nice to him or whether this is a new thing, brought on by Newt’s recent multiple brushes with death. 

In the meantime, he’ll settle for a valorous subject change.

“Any philosophical objections to continued residency on the Ring of Fire? Because, given Boston is off the table, I vote California.”

“I’m not opposed to such a course of action,” Hermann replies. “The University of California at Berkeley is quite well regarded in mathematical circles.”

“I can work with that,” Newt replies, already picturing the ceaseless pound of the tide against the Wall enclosing the Pacific Rim.