Designations Congruent with Things: Chapter 17

Absolut failure.

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 17

Two days after transitioning from a nondescript hotel room to a nondescript, pre-furnished apartment, Newt stands in front of a new and different pane of floor-to-ceiling sliding glass, leading to a new and different balcony.

His shirt cuffs are in his fists, one fist is pressed against his mouth, and he’s staring down the setting sun.

Hermann isn’t here.

But that’s fine.

It’s not like he needs Hermann to be here. 

He turns away from the glass, eyes the empty bookshelves built into the wall, then turns back.

Newt isn’t sure about this apartment.

It has a balcony, so there’s that. 

It faces west, so there’s that too. 

If he couldn’t look from east to west, in a westerly direction, retrograde relative to axial spin, planet-wise, he’s not sure what would happen because he’d always been the kind of kid who opened the closet and watched it rather than shutting the door on imagined darkness. 

But he’s not sure about it. 

The apartment.

Not the darkness.

Though he’s not sure about that either, truth be told. 

He’s not sure about their recently appropriated set of clean, white rooms, about the classtastic, minimalist, I-live-next-to-radioactive-isotopes-but-I-do-it-in-style furniture, the dark wood of the table, the granite countertops, the hardwood floors, the LED natural-spectrum lights for people who get sad under cloud cover, or the floor-to-ceiling windows that look out over the remains of a beautiful bay turned disgusting. He’s not sure about the diagonal swath of radioactive fallout that separates him from the Pacific. He’s not sure about not being sure about being separated from the water on the other side of the Wall. He’s not sure about bookcases without sides, those seem weird to him. Wall-mounted shelves with no edges? He doesn’t like that—it looks dangerous for the books, that’s all. That’s not weird. Is it weird? It’s not weird. He doesn’t like that someone else furnished this place, someone with the aesthetic sensibilities of a low-to-moderately gifted interior decorator who is a mental amalgam of cheap furniture catalogs and called something like Paul or Erika or Paulerika and who is probably passionate about nothing but the concepts of mediocrity and efficiency via prefabrication.

Newt is being somewhat unfair to Amalgamated Paulerika, but it feels safer this way—because Paulerika isn’t really the type to, say, hypothetically, put things in apartments that don’t belong in apartments; Newt won’t specify exactly what he means by that because it’s creeping into territory he still has the sense to label as A Little Bit Paranoid. Possibly. Possibly he’s just slightly slightly (understandably) growing increasingly anxious about a whole host of things, so sue him, he doesn’t like unanswered questions and this pre-furnished apartment is too full of surfaces he’ll definitely bleed on.

Newt maaayyyy not have slept in four days.

He literally may not have slept at all in that time.

He’s starting to lose control of his (theory of) mind. A little bit. Not that much, probably.

He stares at Oblivion Bay. 

The sun is going down. That hurts his eyes; they’re watering behind his glasses. 

His glasses block UV wavelengths and are scratch-resistant. 

His glasses are on his side.

He’s not sure about the bookcase. 

He edges away from it.

No, that’s weird.

That’s stupid, his brain corrects.

That’s wrong.

The bookcase is fine.

He’s ascribing sentience to things that shouldn’t have it, like books and bridges and unfamiliar furniture, he feels like they’re watching him, like something’s watching him, nothing is though, nothing can be, right?

Right.

Well, maybe not so much “right” as “not right,” but he’s pretty sure that of Things That Might Be Watching Him the bookcase ranks really low on the list; he just doesn’t like that it has no edges, honestly books are going to fall off the sides at least the way he deals with books they will. Who has so few books they don’t stack the things right to the edges?

Amalgamated Paulerika, apparently. Not a big reader, that one. 

Newt has broken bookcases by wedging too many books into them.

The bookshelf isn’t at all the problem. He doesn’t have that many books right now. The bookshelf is just a surrogate for other concerns about the normal things normal people would be concerned with after the two weeks he’s just had. Like, for example, whether aliens are trying to resorb him into a collective consciousness right about now?

Oh god, his brain says. Never, ever say that out loud to anyone. Or work on your phrasing.

What, Newt replies defensively.

You know exactly what, his brain says.

Mechanistically, he’s safe. Science’s working hypothesis about the whole affair is that he’s safe, science says that, science does, science says that because literally how could anything be influencing him right here, right now, nothing could, nothing can, that makes no sense, but—

Ongoing external influence can’t be formally excluded.

Neither can invisible, incorporeal floating dragons. His brain switches from vitriolic sass to a weirdly appealing combo of Hermann Gottlieb and Carl Sagan, both of whom seem half concerned, half comforting. Maybe Hermann is the concerned one and Sagan is the comforting one. Maybe vice versa? No way, that’s just ridiculous. Maybe they’re both half and half. Either way, they raise a good point.

Are you guys positing that the question of whether or not a neural connection exists between myself and other parties isn’t scientifically refutable? Newt asks.

I didn’t say that, Sagan replies. But the burden of proof is substantial and shifted squarely onto your shoulders. Your claim is extraordinary and will require extraordinary evidence.

“Well yeah, they always do,” Newt mutters, scrubbing a hand through his hair.

In other news, you’re talking aloud to dead astronomers, his brain says, in helpful annotation. 

And whose fault is that? Newt asks. 

“Okay.” He paces back and forth in front of the glass door to the balcony. “Okay.” He presses the air away from him slowly, fingers spread wide. “Okay okay okay.”

The question is this: how to separate real-time influence from the lateral snap into preserved neural patterns left behind by EPIC Rapport.

Newt has suspected for quite some time that the romantically termed phenomenon of “ghost drifting” actually represents an unconscious swap of original neural pathways for the exogenous neural pathways of one’s drift partner. If such a phenomenon happened often enough to both parties, it would result in the subjective phenomenon of thought sharing, when really no such thing was occurring.

He pulls his voice recorder out of the pocket of his jeans, presses a button and says, “Date—who knows. I don’t think it matters. Time—I’m not sure, seven? Six? Whatever time the sun goes down. I’m in California and I haven’t slept for four days because I’m feuding with an empty bookshelf and I was thinking—”

Newt clicks a button, pulls his glasses off, rubs his eyes with the back of his hand, puts his glasses back on, reclicks.

“—about the empirical difficulties inherent to differentiating real-time cognitive influence from what I’ll term, um, crap, super-ghost-drifting? No, that sounds stupid. Dr. Caitlin Lightcap, of the neuroscience zealotry and the wicked Jaeger pilotry, you are rolling in your grave right about now, aren’t you, come hang out with Carl Sagan in my brain, no actually, don’t do that—why am I recording this? I wish you were here, you’d find this super interesting, I’m sure. Okay. Here we go—Severe Post-Excitation Cognitive Transfer of Environmental Responsiveness. The SPECTER Effect. Sorry, Cait-Science, but I’m not about to name this something poetic; it’s just not happening. I’m better with acronyms. You know this about me.”

He clicks a button.

He hasn’t thought of Caitlin Lightcap in months.

That’s a lie.

But, maybe, one day it’ll be true.

He reclicks.

“So the question becomes how to differentiate real-time cognitive influence by external parties (here read: Hermann, the hive mind, or the freakish cadre of cut-up kaiju brains left on the Earth-side of the annihilated Breach) from the SPECTER Effect (here read: a reproduction of foreign neural pathways, perceived by the brain as “other” rather than “self,” but nevertheless originating from within rather than from without). Subjectively, they’re not easily parsed.”

He clicks a button.

He paces another line in front of the window.

He reclicks.

“Or, in other words, ‘Is Dr. Newton Geiszler being driven off the rational playing field by foreign influence or driving himself there instead? An observational study.’ Because, honestly? I could see it going either way.”

He clicks a button.

Has he gotten fingerprints on this window glass? 

He uses his shirt cuff to remove them like a guy with a compulsive neat-freak tapping into his neural circuitry on a semi-regular basis.

He reclicks.

“So,” he says. “Testing. Yes. Testing. Empiricism. Fortunately for me, even though I’m primarily concerned about the effects following drifting with kaiju and parts of kaiju dismembered by yours truly—presuming that happened, I think it did—I have some ability to perturb the current system, possibly, if the system is exogenously perturbable. Meaning I can get Hermann to try and screw with my brain and see what happens. Either he’ll be able to, which is bad, or he won’t, which might just mean he’s not trying, because he’s like that. And by ‘like that’ I mean disinclined to be a jerk to the neurologically disadvantaged, not ‘lazy.’ But I’m pretty sure I can eventually irritate him into giving it a legitimate effort? I’m pretty sure that’s a skillset I still have.”

He clicks a button.

Yeah, this window needs to be cleaned.

Do they own Windex or a generic equivalent?

Newt has never communally owned cleaning products with anyone before.

This is a weird milestone.

He wanders out of the living room and into the kitchen, flipping on a light and then just as quickly flipping it off, because, though his eyes are vastly improved, he wouldn’t say they’re back to baseline, at least not where photosensitivity is concerned.

Once in the kitchen, he starts opening cabinets.

Hermann has organized pretty much everything.

Newt has been watching him and reading Descartes until his vision knuckles under in blurred defeat off and on for about four days, trying not to think too much about Drift Three, if that’s what that even was.

Oh right.

And failing to sleep in his assigned bedroom.

Completely and totally failing.

Absolut failure.

He feels a little bit strange right now as a result.

He doesn’t find any cleaning products until he drops into an unsteady crouch and goes for the bottom cabinets. 

“Hi,” Newt whispers to the spray bottle of blue cleaning fluid he pulls from beneath the sink. “Your life will be short but glorious. Much like a Jack Kerouac novel.” 

He’s cleaning the window when the grate of a key in a lock, the sound of an opening door, and the entirely horrified exclamation that goes a little bit like, “What in God’s name are you doing?” announce Hermann’s presence.

Newt turns to look at him.

Hermann looks back with a facial expression he’s trying to twist straight around to neutral. 

Newt hopes his own perplexed disapproval is manifesting on his face.

Honestly.

The guy is reacting as if he’s found Newt performing messy studies in comparative anatomy on the floor of their collective living room rather than using their communal Windex to clean a communal window. 

But okay.

Maybe it’s time to take stock, because he is tired and he’s got some ongoing cognitive issues so there’s always the possibility his judgment’s slightly off-kilter.

But no, as far as Newt can tell, he’s standing next to a window, wearing jeans and a white dress shirt beneath a black fleece pullover thing, which is the most aesthetically acceptable item of clothing he now owns because Hermann did some preliminary Newton-you-need-new-clothes shopping and mostly bought him sweaters, which is really not okay, but, like, he’s wearing clothes. He’s not wearing shoes, but that’s not weird. He’s pretty sure he looks pretty normal. He’s totally positive he’s not bleeding. Cleaning a window is a perfectly acceptable activity to be engaged in, especially post-apartment acquisition. 

You are good to go, his brain says.

“Nice to see you too,” Newt replies with crisp aridity that he realizes slightly too late is more than a trace Gottliebian. He pauses, reboots, and goes with, “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m cleaning our communal living space, Hermann. You’re welcome.”

“Thank you?” Hermann replies cautiously. 

“Oh whatever, dude, you turned into me for like five minutes four days ago, so you can just stop giving me your creeped-out face, because I clean things, Hermann, okay? I’m not entirely slovenly. I’m a biologist; the smell of ethanol reassures me, and it has since age twelve.”

“Is there ethanol in Windex?” Hermann asks. 

“No,” Newt replies with zero defensiveness after scanning the label. “It was a related example.” 

He puts the Windex on the edgeless bookcase.

He doesn’t like the look of that at all and immediately pulls it off.

He looks at Hermann.

Hermann is depositing bags of resources (or whatever) on the table. Hermann is also doing this without looking because he is watching Newt like Newt is the human equivalent of the pitch drop experiment and not a thing to be looked away from. Newt gets that though, yeah he does, because Newt knows a thing or two about not wanting to look away from things that are subtly threatening. It’s part of the human condition.

He feels acutely guilty. 

This is a new thing for him.

But there’s a hole in his valence shell and he’s already stolen someone else’s electrons like the electronegative jackass he is. 

“What are you getting out of this?” Newt eyes the bags the other man is depositing on the table.

“Out of what?” Hermann asks.

Newt is pretty sure that despite the abrupt change of conversational topic Hermann knows exactly what he means, he’s just applying some verbal drag to decelerate conversational whiplash.

“This.” Newt sweeps the Windex bottle back and forth between his chest and Hermann’s general direction a few times with some quiet sloshing. 

“Right now? Other than a notably thorough window cleaning?” Hermann is still eyeing him with what Newt will term “suspicion” for reasons unknown. “Very little.”

“Yes,” Newt says. “That was, actually, kind of my point. Arguably, I assaulted your brain. You don’t have to buy me clothes. Also, please stop buying me clothes.”

“I assaulted my own brain.” Hermann drops his eyes and pulls light bulbs, dish detergent, and other miscellaneous items out of shopping bags. “I also kidnapped you and legally misrepresented you to the Pan Pacific Defense Corps, so please keep that in mind.”

“That is so you.” Newt walks back to the kitchen, drops into a crouch that requires some hand-mediated stabilization, and puts the Windex back into its dark cupboard with an inappropriately affectionate and slightly uncoordinated pat or eight of them in a row. “You know,” he says loudly, because he’s talking to Hermann and not to the Windex, “you don’t win any interpersonal points for trying to sidestep your way out of the unequal power dynamic that’s brewing here, with you having a job and me having trouble with everything.” He hauls himself up with both hands on the edge of the sink then steps back, one hand coming up in not-panic when he realizes someone is standing about three feet away from him. 

That someone is Hermann, obviously, because who else would it be?

Newt really hopes he didn’t see the whole thing where Newt was kind of petting the Windex a little bit, hardly at all really, but maybe just a little.

Newt could use an actual pet. 

“Will you stop.” Hermann looks as freaked out as Newt feels. “We both have jobs. We both will have jobs. You can have a job whenever you’d like to have one; essentially you already have it. As I’ve explained, you simply have to give a talk to the Neuroscience Department at your convenience—what are you—” Hermann trails off, confused and edgy.

“Can we get fish?” Newt decides to change the subject.

“For dinner?” Hermann replies, clearly confused.

“What? No. Who are you even? I don’t eat fish.”

Newt is NOT helping the guy out, he can feel this; he’s just not making the right mid-conversation course-corrections. He needs to do a better job. 

“Newton,” Hermann says, “what’s wrong?”

“Why do you assume something is wrong? Alternatively, what’s not wrong?” 

Terrible, terrible job, his brain says. Really abysmal, Geiszler. 

The problem is that he can’t answer Hermann. 

Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t physically do it. Not now. Not yet. He wouldn’t get three sentences in before neural circuits would fuse and discharge and thoughts would get ejected from his brain, gravitational-slingshot-style. He really shouldn’t be pursuing this train of thought, it’s enough to know that they still have some kind of baseline awareness—all those parts he cut into over all those years—enough to know they loathe him, enough to know that all over his planet, all along the Pacific Rim, there are cut-up chunks of dead and fixing tissue pouring an orgasmic wish for perpetual suffering into an alien representation of his name, waiting for him to come back, as confused as he is about whether they want him or not, whether they want to fold under his cognitive capacity, whether they want to slot him into the local control of a miserable freakshow of fragmented consciousness, or whether they just want to light up his sensory cortex in an ending blaze of total fatal agony for as long as possible until his intracranial pressure rises to a point incompatible with life.

Watch it, his brain says. Watch it.

“Please try to actually engage in conversation, Newton, rather than engaging in nonsensical rhetorical exercises.”

Hermann’s freaking out a little bit and Newt is being rhetorical by reflex.

He needs to sleep.

He needs to sleep though.

He needs to sleep.

You’re decompensating a little bit, champ, his brain says. Right here, right now. You realize this, right?

Yes.

Yes yes yes he knows. It’s hard not to, though, it’s hard not to decompensate; he’s not really sure how he’s supposed to make himself sleep, this might be how he dies, actually. Post-drift insomnia, unremitting, blowing through all his neurotransmitters over two weeks or so? How long can he go? How long will it be before he starts hallucinating? Starts actually seeing Carl Sagan or Caitlin Lightcap instead of just getting a calming auditory science glaze over an increasingly disordered mental landscape? 

Not long. 

Entropy doesn’t apply to psychological states, does it?

Of course it does.

Try not to abuse the second law of thermodynamics, his brain says.

He should have told Hypothetical Rain about this days ago. Sunday, when he knew it was going to be a problem. Or Tuesday, when it had unarguably manifested problematically. Or Thursday, when he’d known he was pretty screwed. Now it’s Friday.

Newt presses his fingertips against his temples. 

There is, he thinks, an entirely achievable solution to his current problem of feeling creepily stalked by an impersonal bookcase, not to mention an entire cabal of wronged remnants of foreign monsters, and that is: sleeping. He hadn’t felt this weird before, had he? He’s not sure. That’s one of the problems with subjectivity; by definition one can’t objectively compare a current state to a previous one. 

Hey kids, Newt says cautiously to cut-up tissue that may or may not be in his head. Are you there?

They don’t answer, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Probably he shouldn’t call a collection of globally dispersed, mutilated brain fragments “kids.” That’s probably deeply insensitive. Deeply.

“Newton,” Hermann hisses. “If you don’t start talking to me immediately I will—”

“Oh my god, chill.” Newt breaks in before Hermann can articulate whatever it is he thinks needs articulating right now. Newt is pretty sure he’d find it offensive. 

Hermann looks a little bit like he wants to strangle Newt and a little bit like he wants to scream, “Narrate your mental landscape for me, you ridiculous man,” which is weirdly specific and Newt decides to go with that and see where it takes him.

“And no,” he says, with the air of a guy denying an unreasonable request. “I have no plans to narrate my mental landscape for you.”

The effect this statement produces is almost worth it because of how clearly totally two point one million percent freaked-out Hermann looks in response but kind of not worth it for exactly the same reason. 

You were right, Caitlin Lightcap chimes in, musical and surprised. He didn’t articulate that thought you just picked up on. There is a real-time connection.

That’s a bit of an over-reach given the current state of your evidence. Carl Sagan cools things down. If you think about it, Newt, you’re really just a sleep-deprived guy making good guesses about the inner monologue of a person with whom you’ve spent the better part of the last decade and with whom you’ve shared neural pathways.

Hermann is staring at him intently, breathing quickly, looking kind of like an alarmed velociraptor.

Newt isn’t sure what that means.

He feels a building pressure in his head. 

Is it an exogenous pressure? From Hermann—who looks like he’s trying to communicate or analyze something unknown? From the hive mind—transmitted by a magical hand-wavingly quantum phenomenon where electron spin states swap in parallel leaves of adjacent D-branes? From the cut-up kids here on the planet—transmitted by electromagnetic waves that his brain is now primed for? Is it endogenous pressure? From his neural circuits that are derived from Hermann—trying to co-opt him into a pathway a little more Anglophile? From his neural pathways that are derived from the hive mind—trying to maneuver him into something he doesn’t understand? From fragmented tissue—trying to force him into dying an agonizing death or maybe becoming their Neural Overlord? Is it something physical? Is he about to have a seizure? An episode of epistaxis? A migraine? A hemorrhagic stroke? A panic attack? He can’t tell. He doesn’t know. 

Subjectivity is the worst.

Why do you zink zat I invented zee coordinate plane? René Descartes asks in a questionable yet sympathetic French accent.

“We can read each other’s minds,” Newt snaps. “Discuss.”

“No,” Hermann says, uncertain and speaking slowly, like he’s fighting through whole swaths of problems Newt can’t see but can only vaguely sense or sympathetically intuit. “I don’t think that’s what’s happening. I think you may be able to predict my responses to certain situations with extreme accuracy, and vice versa, but—”

“So you agree with Sagan.” Newt feels persecuted and inappropriately betrayed. He goes a little high-pitched, backs up a half step. “How typical.”

Hermann narrows his eyes.

Newt decides he wants out of the kitchen, but he backs up another half step instead.

Hermann steps forward.

Newt takes a full step back and hits the counter. He steadies himself with one hand.

Hermann is just watching him.

Newt backs up another half step, edging along the counter, feeling (bizarrely) hunted by a math nerd with a cane.

Hermann steps forward.

The kitchen’s getting dark and he doesn’t like this, he doesn’t like this at all, he feels like he’s being stalked, and yes, this could totally be his sleep-deprived brain, it one hundred percent could be, but it doesn’t feel exactly like that, not quite.

Look at his stance, Lightcap whispers in the dark kitchen, quiet even in his own head.

Newt looks. 

Hermann isn’t leaning against the door anymore. His weight is centered, his feet positioned like he might, at any moment, decide to drive forward.

That is concerning. Sagan throws in with Lightcap this time.

Think about zis rationally, Descartes says. Do you truly believe he might attack you?

Yes, Lightcap says.

I wouldn’t rule it out, Sagan says.

No? Newt says.

Yesss, the kids hiss.

No, his mental version of Hermann says, sounding affronted.

Unfortunately zat was a fairly equivocal poll, Descartes informs him. 

“Are you hunting me?” Newt snaps, because that’s a thing that’s pretty normal to ask one’s life partner. Yup.

Hermann doesn’t answer.

So that’s gonna be a yes, I think, his brain says. 

Newt has watched some birds out the window and felt pretty aggressively disposed toward them, but he never tried to spring off the balcony and destroy them.

But.

He’s pretty sure he’s better at keeping his confused parts mixed in and mixed down than Hermann is, if the other guy’s brief but intense Geiszlerian impulses are anything to go by.

Do something immediately, everyone in his head advises him.

Newt steps forward and yells, “HEY,” at maximum volume directly in Hermann’s face.

That seems to work.

Hermann grabs his chest and steps back in what looks like total shock.

They stare at one another, breathing hard.

“What is wrong with you?” Hermann breathes.

“Um, nothing,” Newt says, hoping it’s true. “What’s wrong with you?”

They look at each other for another long interval until Hermann drops his eyes, his shoulders tense, his expression distressed, and yes, Newt feels acutely bad for him but his compassion is a little limited at the present moment for obvious reasons. “You were hunting me, don’t even lie, I can tell.”

“You’re insane.” Hermann turns on his heel, leaving Newt in the dark kitchen.

That seems a little harsh, Caitlin Lightcap says comfortingly, primarily because it might be true.

“Thanks,” Newt whispers in absent sarcasm, then follows Hermann back to the living room, lit by the setting sun over Oblivion Bay. 

Hermann looks out the window at the dark water, breathing a little too quickly and too obviously.

“Dude, it’s fine.” Newt comes to stand next to him. “It’s fine. You think I haven’t done the velociraptor thing like eight times already? I have. There are a lot of seagulls around here, let me tell you, and pretty much every time they show I get this urge to chase them down using wings I don’t have, by the way, which is weird, everyone agrees. I freaked out a little bit and backed up, so there you go. That triggered a thing, a thing we do now. Predation instincts. We have them anyway. Humans are predators, you know. You can tell because our eyes are pointed in the same direction for depth perception rather than oriented laterally for maximum field of view. We’re a little bit unimpressive as predators, though? Except for our brains. Our brains are vicious bastards, pretty much universally.”

“You’re babbling,” Hermann says, not looking at him.

“Um, excuse me, I’m pretty sure I’m reassuring you.”

“You are the least reassuring person I have ever met in my life,” Hermann snaps. “You’re disorganized, sleep-deprived, habitually deceitful—”

“Um, again, excuse me, but what?”

“—and much, much too intelligent for me to take anything you say at face value when trying to assess your mental state.”

“Rewind,” Newt snarls, “deceitful?” 

“They had you for three days and you said nothing about what was really happening. You still haven’t told me—how am I supposed to interpret—”

“Because I wanted you out of it,” Newt shouts, feeling predatory himself right about now, “because you were never supposed to be involved, because it wasn’t your fault, because you had the chance to weigh in on the human/kaiju Drift motion and you voted no. You want to know what my problem is, Hermann? Well that’s news to me, because you haven’t asked. If you want to know I’ll tell you: I cut them up. You watched me do it, and, as you know, even though they were dead in the practical sense of the word, there was and is something going on there, behind all that protein-protein chemical cross-linking effected by formaldehyde, a whole disorganized mess of tortured alien psychosis that’s just watching my brain, okay? I’m positive they’re watching me, dude, I can feel it, I can feel you, I know you can read my thoughts, I know you can. It’s obvious. It’s glaringly apparent; I just don’t understand why you would lie to me about that, unless you just really don’t get it, you’re too wrapped up in what you think should be happening to see what is happening, and I—”

He stops shouting, running out of air and not acquiring any more, for whatever reason. He tries to breathe, he cannot breathe, he breathes or stops existing—we should have loaded him ahead of time; Dr. Geiszler can you hear me, Dr. Geiszler can you talk.

No no no no no, Newt says to his brain. He looks fixedly at dark water. Not now. This is not helpful to me. 

“Yes.” Hermann grabs his shoulders and physically pulls him around so he can’t see out the window, then shakes him once, his face pale in the half-light, his eyes wide and weird and wired or maybe that’s Newt, he’s not sure, he’s not sure who he is or what he is or where he is; his brain is waiting for something, he’s not sure what, but Puritans crushed witches beneath rocks and that seems relevant to him at present.

“You may be right, Newton. In fact, I’m certain you are.”

This reassures him. He’s usually right. But about what?

“Your critique of my modus operandi is entirely accurate.” Hermann studies him, breathing hard. “You are extremely insightful.”

“Yes,” Newt says, because it’s true. 

“Do you agree,” Hermann asks, slowly and sort of desperately, “that I have no reason to lie to you about my ability or lack thereof to read your thoughts?”

“Yes,” Newt says, “yes, I agree, it just—it just feels that way, it just really feels like you can. And they can. And other things. Why does the bookcase have no sides?”

“Have you considered,” Hermann says, “that part of what you’re currently experiencing may be due to extreme sleep deprivation?”

“You know about that?” Newt’s voice cracks.

“Yes,” Hermann says, equally strained. “I know about that.”

“So, yes, I’ve considered that, I—I have; I considered it earlier, I just—I really don’t think it is, Hermann,” he says, wanting to pull out of this dual-shouldered grip that Hermann has on his jacket-shirt hybrid, but not doing it. Not doing it. “I think subjective experience has validity, meaning that it can be validated, it could; you could read my thoughts and validate it, I’m sure you could, you’re just not trying.”

“I promise you,” Hermann says, like he’s trying to talk Newt down from a nonexistent ledge, “that I will try. That I will make a genuine effort to seriously consider your position on this.”

“Okay,” Newt replies, slightly breathless.

“I think you should lie down,” Hermann says.

“I can’t sleep,” Newt admits, way too late.

“I know that. I think you should lie down anyway.”

Newt doesn’t like this oh-so-careful wavelength that Hermann is vibrating at. 

He doesn’t like it at all.

He thinks you’re crazy, Lightcap says in sympathetic revelation.

He’ll need to explain some things so this doesn’t get out of hand. 

“Look,” Newt says. “Hermann. Do you think I don’t know what I sound like? I do, okay, I do. I am rational though, man, I’m completely rational, Descartes-style. I even know that claiming my own rationality looks bad, but I’m doing it anyway, because, hello, I believe in accuracy. The only problem that I’m having right now is that I’m running a sleep deficit and cognitive science hasn’t and isn’t posed or posing a lot of testable hypotheses about the Drift or the hive mind, or a combination of the two. Yes. That’s two problems, I know. I have two. I’m amending to two. One is a little more pressing than the other at the present moment. I just—okay, just hear me out about this, how do you think they did it, right? How do you think the kaiju communicated telepathically; how do you think that worked? Have you thought about it at all? Because I’ve been thinking about it a lot, Hermann, a lot, especially over the past few days, really, it’s not fair to have all this extra information and no samples because I could actually test some of these things, I could get answers that aren’t just pure speculation and therefore empirical garbage.”

Hermann’s face says, Test them how? On yourself?

Yup. His face says that pretty clearly, not his brain, probably.

Newt doesn’t have to be clairvoyant to pick that much up. 

When Hermann speaks though, he says, “I’m certain they used some aspect of their own biochemistry to receive and transmit electromagnetic signals, which they then transduced into appropriate informational content, providing them with what was, in effect, telepathic communication in something approximating real time, presuming that traversing the Breach didn’t result in any temporal distortion.” He waves a hand like the stuff coming out of his mouth is the most obvious stuff in the world, like he’s for sure right about it, when, really, he’s not necessarily right about it, he’s not necessarily right about any of it, but granting for now that he is—

“YES.” Newt shouts for no real reason other than too much agitation and no ability to siphon it off or sublimate it into something socially acceptable in the confines of some too-perfect apartment where the bookshelves without borders are watching him. “Yes, exactly. What makes you think that they couldn’t have done that to us? To me, if not to you? What makes you think they—they couldn’t jury-rig a transduction system in our brains? Are we different? Biologically? Yes, you bet we are, but not so different we couldn’t interface, Hermann, why do our EEGs look so abnormal? You understand what they are, right? EEGs? Do you think about them? Do you wonder why our brainwaves have changed? God, I refuse to say the word ‘brainwave’ ever again in my life I hate it so much I hate it so much, Hermann. Strike it out of science and leave it to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but you know what I mean. We can rename brainwaves: Voltage Fluctuations Resulting From Ionic Disequilibria Purposefully Propagated—VFRFIDPP. Not catchy, I know, not my best work, but you see what I mean, don’t you? Right? They’re different. That could mean anything, and I just feel like they’re in there, by which, yes, I mean in my head.” 

“Newton,” Hermann shouts, breaking in, “do you understand that you are panicking?”

“Who’s panicking?” Newt screams in his face in total, blind, rhetorical outrage.

I think that’s you, his brain says.

His brain isn’t getting its own sarcasm, that’s weird. Newt gets it though, so that’s okay.

Hermann shoves him back against the glass of the floor-to-ceiling window.

“Stop!” Hermann shouts, clearly freaking out or outraged himself, Newt doesn’t know, Newt can’t tell, Newt isn’t sure who he is or what he is, he thinks he’s destroyed cities, he thinks he could destroy more, he thinks he’s torturing the human who cut him up and locked him down in a chemical cross-link that killed only his outer shell of tissue and transformed it into a dead husk through which he can still think, can still feel his networked, dismembered, suffering parts, but—

“Stop,” someone is whispering, “stop, stop, stop. Please stop.” 

Newt shuts his eyes and presses his hands flat against the glass to make sure they’re his hands and that his fingers end in nails.

He tries to stop everything.

Yes, because that’s easy for you, his brain says. You’re ruining Dr. Gottlieb’s life, you realize. The dude called it. He called it. Not even ten minutes after you’d met, he called it. Called it, called it, freaking called it. Tagged it, labeled it, put it in a drawer for you to pull out a decade later and stamp with the word VALIDATED.

“You are fine,” Hermann says. “I’m certain you are. I’m certain you will be.”

Newt nods.

“I’m certain they’re in your head,” Hermann continues. “I’m certain they are. Because they’re in mine as well.” 

Newt stares at him.

“But the way they’re in here,” Hermann continues, unclenching a hand from Newt’s shirt to tap a single finger against his own temple, “is the same way you’re in here. Reactive, intrusive, as real as my own sense of self, but static, Newton. Static. Without agency. Without real-time intent.”

“You can’t know that,” Newt whispers, nearly soundless. 

“The Breach is not shut.” Hermann shakes him gently. “It’s annihilated.”

“Is it?” Newt whispers back. “I can feel the place where it should be.”

Hermann looks at him.

“Can you?” Newt asks.

“No,” Hermann says.

“And there are—pieces of them here.”

“What do you mean ‘pieces’?” Hermann asks. 

“They don’t die in fixative, Hermann; there are pieces of their brains still alive. Here. On Earth. Of those that remain—I was—it was me or my team who dissected them, sectioned them, preserved them. They could—they exist, on this side of the Breach, I mean. They could— They— They’re parts of a whole, they’re subordinate, self-organizing structures and they are pissed, Hermann, pissed at me specifically, and—”

Hermann’s gaze sharpens and Newt breaks off under the infrared-laser intensity of it.

He’s not sure what Hermann’s realized. Whatever it is, the guy is totally enraged about it. 

“What?” Newt asks in open apprehension.

Hermann takes a deep breath, making a clear effort to calm down, and Newt does not understand what is happening here. Everything feels unfamiliar: his thoughts, this place, the wall, his clothes, and Hermann, who looks wholly overwrought but isn’t saying anything.

“Nothing,” Hermann manages through clenched teeth. “It’s all right.”

“Is it?” Newt asks, thinking about pulling away but not doing it out of some kind of instinct that feels extremely primitive and like something prey would default to. “Don’t hunt me.”

“No.” Hermann backs off. “I apologize. I’m not hunting you. I have never and will never be hunting you. Something occurred to me and I found it—upsetting.”

“I hear that,” Newt replies. 

“I know you do.” All traces of Hermann’s momentary and inexplicable rage are gone, replaced by exhaustion. “Any formalin-fixed remnants of kaiju on this side of the Breach are only nominally alive,” he continues. “They have no agency. They’ve been chemically paralyzed. I’m sure they influenced your mind via the Drift, but I doubt their capacity to do so now, in the absence of a physical interface.”

“But,” Newt says, “I know they could communicate with each other. They were—ah. They were networked. They are networked? I’m not sure; there are at least some times when they were networked to each other. The pieces. The parts of them. The parts that I—”

What are you doing? his brain snarls. Please don’t talk about this, I can only do so much if you won’t sleep. Neurotransmitters are being rationed; do you think that doesn’t have consequences for you?

“Newton,” Hermann says. “Newton.”

“Yeah,” Newt says. “No. I’m okay. I am. I totally am.”

“We cannot resolve all of this tonight.”

“I know,” Newt says. “I know, of course I know.”

“It’s possible to separate yourself from synaptic pathways that aren’t your own,” Hermann says. “You know as much because you’ve been doing it for roughly a week. You are, in fact, quite good at it. You helped me do it when I was giving my talk, and, against all odds, you haven’t killed yourself hunting down passing seagulls.”

“True,” Newt says.

“I think it will be easier for you if—”

“I can’t sleep,” Newt says, voice cracking, heading Hermann off at the lexical pass. “I can’t.”

“I’m aware of that.” Hermann holds up a hand. “But you are three weeks behind when it comes to the neuroscience literature, two weeks behind in exobiology, six months behind on tissue engineering, and something like five years behind on bioethics. So. I suggest that if you can’t sleep, you do something productive, rather than torture yourself regarding hypotheses you have no earthly way to test. At some point in the near future, you will need to give a job talk, and I would imagine it will be prospective in scope rather than retrospective, for obvious reasons, so you should really be familiarizing yourself with the current state of the literature.”

This is an excellent point. 

“True,” Newt says. “True.”

“So sit,” Hermann says. “Read.” 

“Well, you’re kind of pinning me to a window.” Newt finds it challenging to talk with his hands in the minimal space between them. “A little bit.”

“So I am.” Hermann steps back. “Apologies.” He straightens the seams of Newt’s shirt.

Newt does his own seam adjusting, more out of principle than necessity, then says, “I’ve been reading Descartes for days, you know.”

“I’m not sure if Descartes is alleviating or adding to your current problems.” Hermann tucks his chin and shoots Newt a disapproving look from beneath lowered brows.

“Descartes is a baller,” Newt says, affronted, “and not to be defined in relation to me.”

How flattering, his brain says, impersonating Descartes.

“I define everyone in relation to you,” Hermann says, with a long-suffering eye-roll before returning to the table to finish unpacking whatever he purchased on shopping trip number four thousand ninety-six.

Newt follows him and decides to make himself somewhat useful so he doesn’t slide down the window and lie on the floor waiting for a cognitive untangling that will never come, like a loser. 

“I wish I knew what had happened to my plants.” Newt nearly drops the antibacterial hand soap that Hermann hands him.

I wish I knew what had happened to your fine motor control, his brain says.

Well, don’t we all? Newt replies.

“I’m sure Mr. Choi is tending to them.”

“I also kind of wish I hadn’t left my guitar in the custody of the PPDC.”

“I wish we hadn’t left literally everything we owned in their custody,” Hermann says, with a mixture of wistfulness and sarcasm that Newt, if he’d been asked prior to witnessing it, would have tagged as “impossible to verbally combine.”

“I was serious about the sweaters.” Newt feels edgy and exhausted and not very organized as he finds a pack of disposable chopsticks in the bottom of a bag. He eyes them, perplexed. “Stop buying me clothes. I’ll buy myself clothes. Later.”

He’s a little concerned that if he leaves the apartment on his own he’ll end up atop the Wall of Life, but that’s a thought he’s not going to examine right now.

How curious, Descartes says, probably about the chopsticks.

Probably.

Neat, Sagan says, probably also referring to the chopsticks. I like your sweaters, by the way.

Did he buy those for you? Caitlin Lightcap asks, again probably about the chopsticks, maybe about the sweaters. People aren’t really specifying. Shouldn’t he know what they mean, if they’re his brain?

Maybe, Newt thinks, not sure whom or what he’s responding to.

“How long has it been since you slept?” Hermann asks.

“Four days,” Newt says absently. 

“Ah,” Hermann says. “How flagrantly yet classically irresponsible. Why are you staring at chopsticks?”

“They seem really interesting to me right now.” Newt looks up. “Did you buy these for me?”

“No,” Hermann says. “I bought them because we are civilized, not because you don’t care for western utensils. I cannot abide eating with my fingers, and the only reasonable course of action is for us both to use chopsticks for everything for the next few weeks, or, possibly, the rest of our lives.”

“For a guy with a below-average number of doctorates,” Newt says, “you’re not just a pretty face. I’ll give you that one, Dr. Gottlieb.”

Newt opens the chopsticks and pulls a pair out. He breaks them apart.

“And to what average would you be referring?” Hermann asks dryly.

“The average number of doctorates in this apartment is three point five.” Newt drops a chopstick. “You have one, ergo—educationally, you’re below average.” Newt opens a hand, then crouches to retrieve his lost chopstick.

“Stop abusing statistics.” Hermann hauls Newt up with one hand under his arm.

“Stop taunting me with cool utensils I lack the manual dexterity to use,” Newt says. 

Hermann looks at him for a moment. “Do you really?” he asks quietly. 

“Yes.” Newt mounts a new attempt to discipline his chopsticks. “I’m a little bit serious about that. I’m pretty sure things are trending in the right direction though. I lost my resting tremor.” He begins a likely fruitless effort to unzip the collar of the partially zippable fleece pullover he’s wearing, using only chopsticks. “If things weren’t regressing to the mean I might be upset about my future prospects as a biologist who needs fine motor control. I’m not sure about this whole dopamine issue and where it’s going. I think I might be having periodic setbacks, or maybe my signal threshold for progress versus regress is set too low. Whatever. Hypothetical Rain thinks it’s conceptually cool, so—”

“Hypothetical Ra—” Hermann breaks off with a disgusted sound and restarts. “Dr. McClure does not think it’s ‘cool.’ She, in fact, said, and I quote, ‘Dude, that sucks if you’re right,’ and then you said, ‘Girl, I’m always right,’ and—”

“Then you said, ‘No he’s not,’ and then we got in an argument and she asked us if we were married and keeping it on the down-low and we reacted in stereo horror and now there will never be a time she’s not confused about us.”

Hermann sighs.

“Anyway, I’d rather have a neurotransmitter imbalance than brain damage.” Newt’s still trying to unzip his outerwear with chopsticks.

Hermann pushes him back a step, into a chair, unzips his zipper for him, says, “That’s a false dichotomy,” then pulls his tablet off the kitchen counter and pointedly slides it across the table.

“You know,” Newt begins, immediately setting to work on re-zipping his shirt with his chopsticks, “there’s a reason you get invited to fewer parties than I do. You rate a ten out of ten on the Annoyingly Imperious Scale, which is a near impossibility, so congrats there, man.”

“I am in no mood to drive you to the emergency room after you either trip over something and concuss yourself or work yourself up to the point that your brain cannot concomitantly support distress and consciousness, at which point you will faint and then, likely, concuss yourself.”

“There’s a zero percent chance I end this evening concussed,” Newt says. “None of these things you’re ostensibly so concerned about has ever happened. Not even one time.”

“In January of 2020 you fainted in the middle of a briefing.”

“Only because I had occult pneumonia.” Newt drops a chopstick.

“It was ‘occult’ to no one in the Shatterdome except you,” Hermann replies.

“That was five years ago,” Newt says. “Three years ago you worked yourself into a state of stereotypical nervous exhaustion. I didn’t even feel sorry for you. Because you were and are ridiculous and you didn’t and don’t deserve it.” He punctuates this statement with an understated jab of his single remaining chopstick in Hermann’s general direction. “It’s not like you had certain time windows in which to extract kaiju RNA. The math was always there, you feel me? Like, you can have breakfast. You can take naps. You could at the time and you can now. Both.”

“I have no plans to dignify your comment with a rebuttal.” Hermann pours something into a bowl. 

“Well, yeah.” Newt retrieves his second chopstick from the floor. “You don’t really have to, though, do you, since a nuanced reproduction of your mathematical motivations is taking up space in my brain that I previously used for magnificent chopstick control, probably. That’s an oversimplification. Please take it as such and don’t give me a hard time about it; I’m too tired for self-analysis to end well. If you’d asked me ten seconds before we drifted, I would have said our decade of incessant arguing was about to end. Primarily because of risk of death, but also because, well, y’know. Drifting? I always pictured it more of a mental homogenizer than what it actually is. But no. In the medium term I don’t feel homogenized. I feel vaguely confused most of the time and extremely confused a small percentage of the time. But that wasn’t my point. My point was that we now have whole new swaths of things to argue about, because now you criticize my decisions about whether to sit or stand, interfere with occupational therapy I assign myself, and, finally, buy me clothes, which will be an endless source of conflict.”

Hermann walks over to the table, leaning a little more heavily on his cane than usual, slides a bowl of wasabi peas toward Newt, then drops into the opposite chair.

Newt tries to pick up a pea with his chopsticks. 

He fails four times in a row.

Hermann doesn’t say anything.

“Can you not watch me fail at civilization?” Newt asks. 

Hermann looks at the wall.

They’re quiet, but it’s an anticipatory rather than comfortable silence.

Newt gives “Toward Regaining Skills With Chopsticks, Second Variant, Attempt #5” his total concentration.

Until Hermann whispers, “I was not hunting you.”

Newt drops both chopsticks. 

“Also,” Hermann says, “you’re not right-handed.”

Newt tries not to feel the total despair of this moment, but it’s pretty hard. 

The chorus in his head keeps its collective mouths shut.

“I know that,” he says, reclaiming his chopsticks with his actual dominant hand, his voice strained. “And if,” he continues, his voice cracking, “if you were, maybe, hunting me a little bit, it’s fine. It’s not anything other than weird. Because I could take you. Pretty easily, by the way. I win ten out of ten times in a you-versus-me fight. Everyone agrees.”

Definitely, his brain says, because they’re on the same team.

“I wish I believed that,” Hermann whispers. “Unfortunately, I do not.”

“Wait—you think you could take me?” Newt asks, incredulous.

“Yes,” Hermann hisses. “Is there a reason you’re fixating on the least relevant aspect of our current set of problems?”

“Well,” Newt says, “yes. No. I’m tired, Hermann, okay? Just—don’t freak out about this. Any of this. Because it’s just a thing. Things. Like how I almost threw up this morning when I tried to decide whether I wanted to wear a sweater or not? Thing. That one time you decided to be me a little bit under duress? Thing. That time two seconds ago I forgot I wasn’t right-handed? Thing. You haven’t been practicing not eating seagulls for four days. It’s fine, it’s just weird. A little snap into a lateral circuit, I have literally zero concern you’d like—what? What would you even do? Attack me? I just don’t see it getting out of hand, I really don’t. I mean, I’ve watched birds intermittently for days without forgetting I don’t really like the taste of questionably radioactive seagull, so. Yeah. There’s that.”

“You’re better at this than I am,” Hermann says.

“What?” The word is barely intelligible beneath the laughter that’s suddenly half-choking him and threatening to take a left turn into straight-up hysteria. “Are you nuts?” he asks, wiping streaming eyes by shoving his fingers beneath his glasses. “Do you—”

“Try,” Hermann snaps the word in half and holds up a hand, “to control yourself and listen to me.”

“Yeah.” Newt sounds like someone is strangling him and feels like that a little bit too. His diaphragm is on strike.

“Tempting though it is to equate our experiences,” Hermann says, “our exposures to the anteverse were different in quantity and quality and the evolution of aftereffects experienced by each of us has differed in character. Ostensibly, you’re more severely affected, but Newton, you’ve never forgotten who you are. I spent five minutes as you until you talked me out of it. You’re the better integrator out of the pair of us. You must be, because even in the midst of panic about foreign influences you manage to preserve your sense of self,” he finishes, breathing hard. 

Newt props an elbow on the table, and presses his hand against his forehead. “Hermann,” he says, “I literally don’t know if you’re correct. Do I? Do I always manage to keep track of whom I actually am? I have periods of time where I’m—very confused about thermodynamics and also sort of where I am and what I’m doing. Does it mean I’m coping better than you are if I spend three minutes decoupling cause from effect?”

“I have no idea,” Hermann admits.

“Yeah. No kidding.”

Hermann stares at a lateral wall.

Newt goes back to trying to eat wasabi peas with terrible chopstick technique. 

Y’done good, kid. Caitlin Lightcap does her best impersonation of an overly macho military type.

Not really, his brain replies.

Well zere is always room for improvement, Descartes says. 

Can you just be normal? Newt asks his brain.

Not just right now, his brain replies. Maybe if you’d help. At all. Ever. Rather than screwing around.

Newt’s brain has a point. It really does. But there’s not much he can do to address its complaints. He can, however, maybe reassure his life partner a little bit. 

“Are you freaking out about turning evil?” Newt drops his third wasabi pea on the floor. “Because I identify with that hard core.”

“You won’t turn evil,” Hermann says dismissively. 

“You totally sidestepped my question and went straight to reassuring me, which makes me think the answer is, ‘Yes, Newt, I’m extremely worried we’re about to become supervillains any day now; we literally live next to a radioactive body of water, soon we’ll make this apartment complex our castle, or alternatively our ultra-modern high-tech “lair.” We’re prime supervillain material, you and me. You realize this, right? If we’re lucky, we’ll get a turning-evil montage in which some of our previously good traits are on display before it gets all weird as we’re hunting seagulls and doing celebratory hugging over nebulous and ubiquitous test tubes full of cinematic dry ice before it ends with us in white lab coats and black gloves giving the world the narrowed eyes of ethically ambiguous B-movie scientists. Also, our hair will need to collectively step up to mad-scientist levels.”

“Yours is already there,” Hermann says dryly. 

“Well, I’m on vacation.” Newt tries to smooth his hair down with chopsticks, which works about as well as one might expect.

Hermann smiles faintly, then gives him a disapproving scowl as Newt moves his chopsticks from his hair back to the bowl of wasabi peas.

“We should try to chip away at our archetype. Should we get a dog, possibly?” Newt asks. “Because I literally cannot see evil super geniuses having a dog. That’s probably correlative rather than causative though. Still.”

“What archetype is it, exactly, that you think you are?” Hermann looks amused.

“Victor Frankenstein. Obviously.” Newt finally succeeds in eating a wasabi pea! “Who are you?”

“Frankenstein? Congratulations,” Hermann says dryly. 

“Can you not be a dick?” Newt asks.

“Eat with your fingers.” Hermann retrieves an errant pea and tosses it back into the bowl with enviable accuracy.

“Last time I tried that it didn’t go well for me, thanks to someone’s strong preferences for not doing that. You’ve ruined half of my hedonistic side you realize.”

“You are hardly Victor Frankenstein,” Hermann says. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Oh yeah, well, what do you think my archetype is then?”

“Puer aeternus,” Hermann says, “or, to borrow something from your knowledge base, you are most certainly a ‘manic pixie dream boy’.”

“What?” Newt says. “No. No. I mean—what?”

Hermann shrugs and opens a hand. “Your idea of revenge is to fill a box of chalk with glitter, so quod erat demonstrandum.”

“I did that one time. And you’re—” Newt tries to think of a really insulting subordinate archetype of reversed heteronormativity that Hermann might fit, but he’s got nothing, “—boring,” he finishes. “You can’t reduce my entire personality to the glitter thing.”

“You had a band called The Superconducting Supercolliders,” Hermann says dryly.

“I still have that band,” Newt says. “Kind of. I fail to see—”

“You constantly tell me to ‘chill’,” Hermann continues.

“Because you need to, and also, occasionally out of spite.”

“You spent five years with green streaks in your hair until Herc Hansen told you to desist, setting off a pointless five-year feud that Marshal Pentecost and I watched in total bemusement.”

“Green hair accents do not equate to a vapid, epicurean world-view, Hermann, god. I don’t see you calling Mako a manic pixie dream girl.”

“Ms. Mori couples a serious mind with unassailable professionalism. She also, which I’m sure you failed to note at the time or subsequently, began dyeing her hair at the point you were forced to desist.”

“Really?” Newt’s brain drops all running trains of thought to work backward through his confused memory to Mako’s first hair dyeing experiment. It had been subtle, it had always been subtle, because Mako was the subtle type, the thoughtful type, and Newt remembers saying “Solid,” as he passed her in the hall right after she’d done it, reaching out to brush a tip of blue hair without stopping. He also sees himself from Hermann’s perspective, with some par-for-the-course(-of-his-life) acting sans thinking, because one doesn’t flick the blue hair of a fifteen-year-old girl walking down a hallway with the man who signs the requisition requests for the entire K-Science Division who also happens to be her father and say, “Solid!” in response to an ill-considered dye job certainly inspired by a desire to flout misapplied militaristic adherence to protocol in areas that do not require such things. Like the hair color of Newton Geiszler. 

“Oh god,” Newt moans, pressing a hand to his face, “you reflect so much, all the time, about everything. I wish I could go back and watch your life like a movie. Also? I’m not sure you’re right about any of this. Also? I had no idea that you were on my side about that green hair thing. Also? I had no idea that Mako was on my side about that either. What good are you guys to me if you just secretly sympathize?”

“Ms. Mori’s sympathies were not so secret,” Hermann replies, “and I believe her motivation for her hair dyeing should not be reduced to a show of solidarity with you.”

“Well duh,” Newt says, “but you’re the one who brought it up and framed it that way, mainly because that’s how you thought about it, and moreover, you thought about me way more than I thought you thought about me back in the day. Also, you liked my green hair a little bit. Don’t lie.”

“I did not like your green hair. I also did not approve of you being an unintended target of displaced frustration regarding funding decisions to the Jaeger program, which is, in part, why I spent the last five years trying to get you to behave in a somewhat respectful manner?”

“Sure.” Newt dredges a glitter!academia smile from his earliest MIT days through the decade-deep swamp left by marauding alien war machines. “I would streak my hair green for you. I would do that. Again. But you’ll need to ask me. Nicely.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” Hermann replies dryly.

“Dear Mako.” Newt leans back in his chair, dictating a letter to the air and waving his chopsticks in a way vaguely reminiscent of writing. “Hermann seems to think I was a strong influence on you during your teens. If so, I am so sorry, dude. Can we talk about the hair thing? I’m sorry I didn’t ask you about it when it happened. Also, have you gotten awesome at the bass yet? Because The Supercos need a new bassist. Our first one is dead. What’s new with you? I can’t use hashi anymore, that’s about it from my side. Love, Newt.”

“Do not even think of sending such a letter. If you do, please refer to me as ‘Dr. Gottlieb.’ Ms. Mori and I are not on a first-name basis.”

“Only because you’ve called her ‘Ms. Mori’ for forever. You could literally start calling her Mako at any time.” Newt transfers another wasabi pea from bowl to mouth, like a boss. While crunching down on his hard-won pea, he tries to decide what Hermann is likely thinking about right now.

He’s getting nothing, probably because his brain is struggling. It’s been struggling for about twenty-four hours. “I hate bookcases without sides,” Newt confesses. “They freak me out a little bit.”

Hermann shoots him a neutral look, which is Newt’s least favorite kind of Hermann look to be on the receiving end of because he’s never been able to figure out what it means. He’s pretty sure it conceals high-level mental analysis, because the other place it shows up tends to be briefings and science talks. He’s not sure he likes it being directed his way.

“Do they,” Hermann says, still neutral, like maybe he also gets freaked out about bookshelves or maybe like his head is currently hosting the International Mathematical Olympiad.

“Yeah, I’m ascribing sentience to things that shouldn’t be sentient.” Newt gets flustered and accidentally lays a set of cards on the table he’d never intended to lay down at all.

He’s managing you, his brain says. He’s assessing you. He’s been doing it this entire time.

“Are you managing me?” Newt snaps.

“Yes,” Hermann says. “I have managed you with mixed success since the day I met you. This is not new. You are currently in the unenviable position of having increased insight in combination with disorganized patterns of thought. You are outrageously distractible, extremely anxious, unfairly insightful, and behaving in typical moronic fashion. I think your working memory is in shreds; I think immense mental stress is concealing debilitating exhaustion; I think that if you can’t manage to sleep in the near term, things are going to turn absolutely hellish for the pair of us.”

“When I lose touch with reality due to sleep deprivation,” Newt appends, feeling trapped by his clothes, and maybe by his skin. 

“Not to put too fine a point on it,” Hermann says, “yes. Because I am already having problems and I have required your assistance multiple times this past week to remind me of who it is that I actually am. So you cannot let your own mind torture you to death, Newton, I absolutely forbid it.”

“I feel like you’re being a little melodramatic about this,” Newt says, “but myeahh, I don’t really want to die of insomnia either.”

“So.” Hermann taps the tablet in front of Newt. “Read.” 

Newt looks at the tablet, then shuts his overly abused eyes, cognizant of exactly how little he actually wants to do the thing he’s about to suggest. The problem is, though, that Hermann has been harassing him into a semblance of a normal schedule for days now, and it just doesn’t feel right to make the guy work any harder to do it than he already has.

“You read.” Newt slides the tablet back to Hermann. “I’ll make dinner.”

It’s the best solution, because his brain is a little too apt to fly off the handle at every fourth interesting word and just stop reading, plus his eyestrain has been maxed out for days now.

So, during the preparation of uninspired pasta, Hermann gets through the ephemera at the front of Neuron, which he chooses to read probably because of its sober badassery. They eat while Hermann complains about fMRI as a technique using Newt’s own borrowed skepticism while Newt defends it in a half-hearted way out of an instinct for conflict that Hermann calls him on and Newt denies, mainly to keep things interesting. It takes the span of two back-to-back papers on neural plasticity for Newt to clean the kitchen, which is far, far too long, but he’s tired, he’s not the most coordinated, and he’s also pretty sure the reading will stop when the kitchen cleaning does.

But Hermann doesn’t stop.

In a display of total improbability, he points at the couch, hands Newt the sunglasses he always seems to be pulling out of a pocket, and says nothing.

This makes it hard for Newt to reflexively argue.

He could do it. Newt has a talent for manufacturing needless confrontation and a little bit of a habit of whipping it out when it would be a better idea not to. But he’s trying not to make terrible decisions, so he shrugs, swaps out his glasses for Hermann’s shades, and tries to look suave while lying down on the couch in capitulation to the preferences of his longstanding intellectual nemesis slash devoted life partner.

They don’t have much furniture, so Hermann sits on the floor and leans back against the couch, one leg stretched in front of him, the other folded into a cross-legged position he can’t quite bilaterally manage.

“On a scale of a cross-disciplinary journal club to patch-clamping ourselves to a dead baby kaiju and hitching a ride to the hive mind, how weird is this?” Newt digs his thumb into the too-tense musculature of Hermann’s neck and courteously ignores the guy’s startled twitch and subsequent appreciative posture adjustment. 

“I don’t think it even rates,” Hermann says. 

“Why? That journal club was totally normal.”

“It was held only three times because it devolved into such vicious disputes between the physical and life sciences divisions that we were ordered to discontinue it.”

“No one can piss off a room like I can piss off a room,” Newt says, feeling slightly nostalgic. 

“True,” Hermann says. 

“Especially if you’re in that room,” Newt adds.

“True,” Hermann says, a little drier this time. “Stop talking so I can read this and practice integrating your knowledge base with my knowledge base in a controlled manner.”

“Oh,” Newt says, “is that what we’re doing?”

“What else would we be doing?” Hermann asks.

“Um.” Newt does a poor-to-reasonable job at a one-handed shoulder rub from a horizontal position. “You’ve got me there.”

Definitely not a last-ditch effort to get you to sleep before your brain stops impersonating Descartes and legit hallucinates him instead, his brain says, like a total jerk. Definitely not that, Dr. Geiszler.

Will you just, Newt thinks vaguely.

Just what? His brain says.

Just just, will you? 

Hermann starts an article on the intracellular architecture of the synapse that’ll be mostly microscopy-based, but that’s fine, Newt supposes. He can visualize, or barring that, he can sit and look at figures if he feels like sitting later.

Vesicular transport, ionic disequilibrium, voltage-gated channels, calcium signaling, membrane-membrane fusion, release, reuptake, and the machinery of retrograde transport blend into a weird and dramatically lit admixture of what he doesn’t realize is stage 1 sleep until the hypnic jerk of his falling, panicking consciousness snaps him briefly but entirely back to—

“—and this brings us to video seven, which is their ‘complete’ computational model of the synaptic interior functioning in real time, I do think their use of scale is quite liberal; honestly I’m not certain this is sufficiently detailed for active predictive modeling of say—” Hermann breaks off. “Well. I’m sure I don’t know what you people model, honestly. Pharmacological effects? How pedestrian.”

“Hey,” Newt says, sort of, without really articulating the word at all. 

“Oh, are you awake?” Hermann sounds affectedly uninterested in Newt’s answer.

Hermann is a terrible liar and always has been.

“Just because you model, like, mechanical thrust for badass alien fights,” Newt trails off halfway through his rebuttal. It’s either really dark in this room or his eyes are closed.

“Was that a sentence?” Hermann asks. “It didn’t sound like one. Kindly be quiet so I can read this. Observational studies have their place and I find myself now possessed of a moderate interest in the mechanics of synaptic transmission.”

“Meh.” Newt tries not to hold onto anything his brain is attacking itself with, succeeding until his entire, semiconscious existence devolves back into a bad acid trip that consists of nothing other than the repeated sensation of falling into something mnemonically horrific paired with whatever Hermann happens to be reading.

It doesn’t want to kill this one; it wants to see his mind. Just this one. Just his mind. He joined the collective before; perhaps he will do it again, if invited.

“—and I don’t care for this Western blot. Admittedly, I’m not a biologist, well, I’m nominally not a biologist, but this looks suspect to me—”

Are you sleeping? I’m not sure you’re sleeping, his brain says.

“Are you kidding me?” he asks. “You want to do what now? Absolutely not. No one’s skull needs no one’s semi-permanent subdural electrodes. I don’t care if you flew in humanity’s most baller Prince of Neurosurgery especially to drill you a cranial window, it’s not happening. Do not even think about opening my skull, I’ve got a workaround for that. What are we, barbarians? Build me a ziggurat and ask me again—I promise I’ll consider it.”

“—oh good. Motor control. This should interest you, presuming you’re awake. The basal ganglia are an evolutionarily conserved set of—”

Space is connected by a network of wormholes, Carl Sagan says.

Um, yes? Newt replies.

“I’m hallucinating,” Newt manages to say aloud.

“It’s called ‘dreaming,’ Newton,” Hermann says quietly. 

“Kind of,” Newt replies.

He falls and stops himself, falls and stops himself, until—

We should have loaded him ahead of time. 

We talked about it—voted no.

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 kids with their cognitive acid or the guy they’ve crowned king of their chemical underworld. He’s hurt them so much and they need him so badly that a screaming death grip straight to mental dissolution is the only open option. 

Some loser’s brain has sided against him.

Geiszler’s back is starting to arch.

“—hold this here, hold it. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

“What?” Newt slurs, coughing, his brain snapping into a mode where it’s paying attention to visual input.

Hermann blocks the minimal light. Everything is blurred. 

Newt is encased in hardening glue.

No, Newt is not encased in hardening glue. 

“Is it too much to ask that you—” Hermann breaks off. “You are entirely the worst.”

“Hey. That’s my line.” Newt swallows blood.

“Are you speaking English? Hold this.” Hermann takes Newt’s hand and brings it to the tissue that the guy is holding to his face. “Are you holding it? You’re not holding it. Make an effort, please.”

Newt is bleeding?

He can’t quite arrange the context of what’s happening. It seems to be perpetually arriving rather than just there, like context usually is.

“I was sleeping?” Newt says. 

“Were you?” Hermann asks. “I’m not sure.”

“I told you I’d bleed all over this pre-furnished apartment. We need a black couch.”

“That would look atrocious,” Hermann says. “You have no taste. Now hold this handkerchief.”

“I’m holding it, god.”

“You’re not.” 

“I am. You’re the worst.”

“Don’t sit up,” Hermann says, then leaves the room. 

Newt sits up immediately, because why wouldn’t he? He’s bleeding from his head. Lying down is supposed to help in what way, exactly? What’s the deal with these nosebleeds? His capillaries are pissed at him right now. He wonders if he screamed in his sleep? That might explain both the bleeding from the face thing and the Hermann being totally freaked out thing. 

This is legit the worst, his brain says.

It’s probably pretty okay, Newt says vaguely. Just try a little harder not to do all the things you’re doing.

Oh, sure, his brain says, giving him totally unreasonable sass. Great suggestion. Why didn’t I think of that?

You did though, Newt points out courteously.

I hate you, his brain snarls.

He feels a little weird, a little bit like throwing up and freaking out in that order. Maybe the reverse order. He’s pretty tired though. So hopefully he’ll just manage to sit here, feeling weird.

“What are you doing?” Hermann appears, perched on the coffee table without Newt actually witnessing any kind of transit.

“Nothing?” Newt’s pretty sure about that. “Do you ever wonder if you’re living in a Dostoevsky novel?”

“No,” Hermann snaps. “Focus. Do you know what happened?”

“Don’t tell me to focus,” Newt snaps back in petulant slow motion. “I’m always focused.”

“Are you still bleeding?” Hermann asks, like he’s living in a world where time is passing at one point five times the speed of Local Geiszler Time (LGT). 

“No?” Newt guesses, pulling the handkerchief away from his face. 

“Don’t do that.” 

Newt sighs. “Chill.”

“I will kill you myself, Newton,” Hermann snaps. “I will not wait for you to spontaneously die.”

“I really don’t think I’m gonna spontaneously die. Hypothetical Rain did, like, all the hypothetical tests. So. You can just. Chill.”

Hermann does some inexplicable layering with a plastic garbage bag and a towel, then pushes Newt back down, kind of on his side this time though. 

“You have weird ways of showing affection,” Newt says. 

“What’s your point?” Hermann watches him with narrowed eyes. 

“I get you though. I can read your thoughts probably, once I figure it out. I wouldn’t say no to you buying me fish though. Like, not complicated fish? Just like some non-radioactive goldfish or something. That’s an appropriate way of telling your roommate that you care about him. Not death threats. Those aren’t for normal people, and we’re normal people now. Normal to nerd-rock neohipsters with post-apocalyptic sensibilities. That’s our demographic. Ragingly pretentious members of the International Intelligentsia. One of us will need to take up time-lapse photography of fences weathering or something.”

“Try to do a better job of sleeping,” Hermann says. 

“Oh yeah, okay.” Newt lets his eyes fall closed and stay that way despite the sensation of acid spreading beneath his lids. “Yes. Check. Consider it done. I’ve been stage-1-ing it for hours, probably. That’s a win. What time is it?”

“Don’t concern yourself with that,” Hermann says.

The room is quiet. 

“Are you going to do the thing?” Newt asks. 

“Yes,” Hermann says.

Newt hears the slide of a tablet over a hard surface, and they begin again.