Designations Congruent with Things: Chapter 23

The kids hiss with polite, venomous interest.

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

Text iteration: Witching hour.

Additional notes: None.

Chapter 23

The sun is on the other side of the building, the Wall is a mostly-misted obscurity across the haze of the bay, and Dr. Newton Geiszler of the mostly-there dexterity and the cognitive celerity is having an awesome time. 

Yup.

So it’s slightly lonely during the day, with only the fish kids and the thought kids and the memory of actual kids keeping him company. Perhaps, if he can’t get himself together reliably enough to return to the rigors of academia, he should consider becoming a camp counselor slash middle school mentor of some kind. Graduate students had always liked him, though they’d had weird and vindictive ways of showing it. Newt imagines middle schoolers to be like graduate students, just shorter, a little bit more tuned into the popular zeitgeist, a little less enriched for masochistic intellectuals on a population level, and, ideally, a lot less inclined to creatively prank him. 

Ideally.

Still, Newt reflects, opening the supposedly sterile kit he bought from a reasonably legit online supplier, kids like science, I like science, ergo kids should like me, ergo this is a good backup career.

That’s a logical fallacy, his Gottliebian neural pathways inform him. Furthermore, do you like kids?

Yes? he replies. 

Newt, who lacked a coeval peer group for his formative years, hasn’t had much experience with kids. Really, the only kid he’s ever known is Mako, and that went pretty okay, until she turned too cool for him circa age eighteen or so, but that’s generally a thing that kids do, turn too cool for people, and Mako’s not really prototypical in any respect, so yeah. 

He adjusts his glasses, washes his hands, and positions his kit just off-center on the kitchen table before unwrapping the thing like a sterile flower, pulling away green leaves that he contaminates with his touch as he folds them down, exposing their clean and contiguous inner surfaces that conceal the autoclaved internal contents of this particular pre-fab’d collection of materials. 

You make a terrible role model. I really don’t think that socially accepted activities for children include your current pursuits, his brain says, being Hermann, as it is so wont to do.

I make an epically awesome role model, actually, Newt says, using his fingernails to pick up the edge of a sterile gel packet. I am a literal rock star and an intellectual rockstar.

His brain does not have a smartass response to that one.

Ha.

Newt sterilizes his hands with the ethanol-based gel.

He rolls his shoulders, mostly for show, and then sits down at the table, not contaminating anything that is supposed to be sterile. Obviously. 

He puts a sterile glove on his right hand and leaves his left hand bare. 

Your motor control is soooooo good, Newt’s brain says.

I know, Newt replies, putting his left hand down on his work surface. He layers a sterile piece of adhesive over his skin, pressing it down so it sticks. 

Historically, he might not have bothered with buying the online kit, he’d probably just have bought a pneumatic loader, and even if he had bought this kit, he probably wouldn’t have done this in a full-out sterile field kind of way, but now he just wants to, with a vaguely Hermannesque want. Everything in his head is a compromise that he’s getting increasingly good at snapping down into categorized capitulation to him as a personal overlord. He’s arranged a joint concession here, because while he’s said a resounding yes to sterility in a Gottliebian fashion, he’s said an equally resounding no to rolling up his left shirt-sleeves and sterilizing his arms to the elbow in submission to certain Geiszlerian limitations.

He does a once-over of his array of sterile instruments, as he lays them out over the green-draped kitchen table. Marking pen. Check. Scalpel. Check. Forceps. Check. RFID tag with correct orientation marked. Check. Surgical grade dermal glue. Check. Sterile gauze. Check. 

This chip is going in his hand.

You are just so awesome so much of the time, his brain says, sounding like his brain.

I know, Newt replies. 

The kids hiss with polite, venomous interest, looking forward to this whole Newt-cutting-Newt-open business.

Now kids, Newt thinks, in his best camp-counselor voice, this is not meant to be fun for you. This is meant to be fun for me, partially, and also a little bit of a totally thoughtful while yet very badass ‘present’, as it were, for our roommate, presuming this pilot experiment turns out well and I don’t throw up from cognitive dissonance or slice open my entire arm in kaiju-derived personal rage, so any vicarious pleasure you may get out of this is totally incidental. 

The kids keep hissing, sort of enigmatically, like, maybe, they’re plotting something.

No plots, Newt thinks at them, marking the line he’s going to cut with the pen. It’s short and positioned in the middle of the webbing between his thumb and index finger.

He picks up the scalpel.

He waits for cognitive dissonance.

He’s got nothing. Everyone is still cool with this. Apparently, for the parts of him that are Hermann, the awesomeness of this idea outweighs the nausea that would normally accompany self-modification. 

He waits for some kind of murderous impulse.

Any kind.

Nope, he’s got nothing.

Ugh, brain, you give me hope, Newt says.

He begins humming Evangeline while making a shallow cut along the line he marked, which yesssssssss, actually, kind of hurts a lot, he knew it would of course; the hand has a lot of nerves for evolutionary reasons. The kids are super interested in this as a concept—the whole deal: the slicing, the pain, the biohacking ethos—they’re identifying hardcore with this scalpel work he’s doing in a fascinated, horrified, empathetic, traumatized way, but they’re holding things together, doing a weird, subtle thing to his brain that he’s not sure he likes but not sure he objects to either; there’s some kind of reward-based thing going on here, because the acute and noxious scalpel stimuli is blending with something cognitively satisfying, not in the hive-mind-style intense reward for drifting way, but in a way that instead approximates intense satisfaction.

Newt isn’t sure how he feels about this, other than awesome with a side of horrified fascination.

Try to be Newt, team, he thinks. Don’t be a disaffected, body-dysmorphic kaiju, please.

Based on previous experience, his brain replies, I would not think about the hive-mind right now, champ.

“Noted,” Newt says.

He intersperses the Evangeline humming with some straight-up singing, because yes. Everyone likes the singing. Newt, the kids, not-Hermann, his brain—everyone. 

Literal branching coral,
Ground up, it scrubs you clean.
Evange—

Aaaaand he finishes his first pass with the scalpel right as his phone rings.

This is unfortunate. 

He is, somewhat, occupied. 

“Really?” Newt asks his phone. “Are we serious right now?”

His phone keeps ringing, and the lit-up display tells him that the identity of the caller is, alas, ‘Maks InSocks’.

You made a semi-personal vow, his brain reminds him.

Semi-personal? Newt replies, with all the Gottliebian acidity he can bring to bear while keeping his admirably steady hands in a continuing state of rock-solid steadiness. He takes a look at his incision, pulling skin back with his forceps. This is delicate work, really, and not something he should be doing while answering phone calls from Mako, but Mako’s calls have decreased in frequency lately and, really, Newt should really, he should really just, he should really.

“Answer,” he snaps at his phone, because he doesn’t exactly have a free hand at the moment. “Speaker.”

His phone does not respond. 

“Answer,” he shouts at it, with all the diction he can bring to bear. “Speaker.”

His phone lights up in acknowledgement.

“Hey Maks,” he says, looking intently at his hand and picking up the scalpel to extend the incision slightly on the medial side while making a real and profound and intense effort to make this normal, to be normal, because he is normal; this is normal for him and, also, normal for Mako. Talking on the phone. After weeks. They saved the world. In pieces, they did. He should probably keep talking. “Sorry I’ve missed all your calls. Full disclosure, this isn’t a great time for me, I kind of have a scalpel in my hand at the moment. That’s misleading. Or rather, it’s accurate, but it really only gives you fifty percent of the picture. Look, the point is, I am holding a scalpel handle with my non-dominant hand and I have a (sterile) scalpel blade in my dominant hand. Biohacking. It’s my new thing. I’m not killing myself or anything. That would be awkward. I wouldn’t have answered the phone if that were the case, so, er, don’t worry about that. How are you, though. I like the new hair. Lookin’ suave. Fierce. Fiercely suave.”

There is silence on the other end of the line.

“Yup,” Newt says pathetically.

There is still silence on the other end of the line.

Newt winces as he angles the scalpel blade and uses its tip to make a delicate dissection of his tissue plane, just under his dermis. It’s looking good, feeling kind of outrageously painful, there are a lot of nerves in the hand it turns out, and it also turns out that doing this kind of thing to ones self just really wants to make one stop doing it immediately, but he has willpower and it’s helping him out that the kids are still really into this in a kind of hypnotized, justified, justice-y way. This isn’t really news to him, per se, but experientially, as an ongoing phenomenon, it’s notable. He eyes the small, cylindrical, sterile RFID transmitter he ordered online and extends the cut just slightly—

It is at this point that Mako begins screaming at him in Japanese.

Miraculously, Newt does not so much as twitch.

Ugh, his motor control is so great right about now.

But.

This is really terrible and also distracting and also horrible, because, yes, Mako.

Mako, Mako, Mako, Mako, MAKO, he thinks, but Mako isn’t in his head and can’t hear him. 

The worst part about it is that, other than the first ten words or so, it’s really, it’s just really, oh god, the thing is, is that it’s not screaming, it’s just this high pitched Japanese, too fast for him to follow and laced with increasing Mako distress rather than, say, hypothetically, extreme Mako anger; he doesn’t think he’s heard her or seen her or can remember her distressed without being angry for years; for years and years and years. 

Oh god, his brain says, somehow she’s not pissed at you; this is the worst case scenario for you, dude, I’m not sure you can handle this because Hermann has been very stiff-upper lip about everything because he’s literally the perfect human but this is—

“You’re a dick,” someone says, cutting short his runaway exothermic emotional panic with a short yet accurate observation delivered in a hostile manner by, definitely, a guy. A male variety of Homo sapiens, ostensibly. Newt is pretty unsure what the sapience level of this particular hominid is.

“Yeah,” Newt replies in a long, glossy pull of grade A sarcasm, stretching gloriously into the available conversational space like warm tar. “Who’s this. Captain Thoughtless Destruction. The Avengers called, they need their most boring junior member back. Can I talk to Mako, please—Guy? Newt says, putting down the scalpel. “Remind me of your name. I just, well, I tend to forget things I don’t care about at all. So yeah, that would be my bad.” 

Mako is now in the background, snapping at someone who is not Newt.

“You know my name, Dr. Geiszler,” whomever it is says. 

Before he can respond, he hears Mako say, “Newt,” hard and desperate, like she’s reclaimed the phone after some kind of physical struggle.

“Hiiii,” Newt replies, drawing out the word. 

Mako says nothing.

The bones of Newt’s face ache, and he tips his head ceiling-wards and tries, tries, tries to salvage something, anything from the wasteland of rejected messages he’s dictated into the air and then erased. 

His hand throbs in time with his heart.

Explain, his brain advises. 

“So, before you say anything, I haven’t read any of your emails because I was and maybe arguably still am having a nervous breakdown a little bit. Not really but kind of. In the historical sense. What is a nervous breakdown, really. I think that statement is clinically and scientifically meaningless nowadays, so it’s perfect for me. Also, I was visually impaired for a while. More visually impaired. More than usual. I couldn’t read, is the thing, Maks. 

“That’s okay,” Mako says, and her voice sounds small and high.

Newt grits his teeth and stares determinedly at the ceiling, because he’s not going to contaminate his sterile field by crying on it, because he is fine; he has been fine this entire time, it was Mako, Mako who was probably not fine,Mako. Mako was the one who—was the one—

Mako. 

Becket is right, his brain says, in a static hiss of tripled distress. You are a dick. But you can save this, you can save it, you can. You have to. You can because she called you, she kept calling you, it’s not too late; you can save this, you can maybe have a thing with Mako where there’s not a boxing up and a moving on but a thing that maybe stays even after the world didn’t end, there must still be a chance to save this, there must be, there must be, because she called you. 

“Um,” Newt says, his voice cracking and his vision blurring. “How are you?”

“I’m doing well,” Mako says, lying, lying, lying, lying. Lying.

Okay, good, well, he, too, can lie. 

Lying is the easiest. 

Newt shakes his head to get the saline out of his eyes and picks up his only slightly blurred tweezers. “Cool, yeah, me too,” he replies, in a slightly stronger version of his voice as he misleadingly represents relative measures as absolute ones.

“Newt,” Mako says, her voice torquing back up into acute distress. “I read an article in Wired.”

“Ah,” Newt says, full of trepidation because Mako doesn’t usually read Wired and also because there’s some kind of terrible momentum behind her words that he can only guess at because he hasn’t read anything but Descartes in weeks. 

What was in Wired?

What was in Wired that bothered her so much that it would be the first real thing she said to him after years of put-upon-eye rolling and weeks of zero contact.

Mako doesn’t continue.

Newt slides his RFID tag home beneath the web of skin between his thumb and index finger. “Wired’s a pretty good rag if you’re into that kind of thing, I guess,” he says, continuing heroically. “What was it about?”

“You,” Mako says. 

“Wired wrote an article on me?” Newt asks, tweaking the positioning of his RFID tag with his forceps. “Like, a full length piece. Literally on just me?”

“Yes,” Mako says.

“Sweet,” Newt replies, vaguely confused, not sure if this is the end of Mako’s story, not sure why she’s brought it up at all. 

“It speculated that you had retreated from public scrutiny for medical rather than personal reasons. It speculated that you couldn’t withstand the physiological requirements of an alien drift,” Mako says in a quiet rush.

In the back of his thoughts, the kids hiss, vengeful and yearning, at the acute anamnesis of an alien, altered consciousness.

It occurs to Newt that Mako is worried about him, that she has been, possibly, extremely worried about him, extremely worried for weeks now. Somehow, he hadn’t thought about that part of things, the Mako-being-worried part; he’d thought mostly about the Marshal, and about the people who were dead, and about the green bottle of Midori that Mako had held in her hand the day after the breach had been, had been—had been not just shut but annihilated; but not about himself in the context of Mako Mori’s worldview, because, well, ever since Mako had turned eighteen and she had not been put in a Jaeger, things had been different between them because Newt had been, he had been just so relieved because the Jaeger pilot thing, with a few notable exceptions. It was a thing for life and then your life was short; but Mako had been so angry and Newt had gotten that, he had, because, man, her simulator scores, but—he was pretty sure that once Mako had stopped being a kid, had totally stopped, well, she had never been a kid, not really, but once she’d burned away all those parts of her, well, Newt had been pretty sure that she’d started to find him eight million kinds of annoying, and he gets that, he does, or, rather, he thought he did. So this is a little confusing but it does explain all the phone calls. 

“Ah,” Newt says, with a tonal trend towards delicacy but not quite getting himself there.

Mako says nothing.

Newt finds her silence totally agonizing. 

“Please tell me if you are all right or not,” Mako whispers. 

“Um,” Newt says heroically, “am I brain-damaged. Well, it depends on how you define ‘brain damage’, right. Like, did I literally have destruction or damage of brain cells resulting in unwanted short term and long term behavioral or cognitive sequelae. Technically?”

Mako says nothing.

“Okay, technically, yes. Do I have epilepsy. Maybe, a little bit, kind of, the jury is still out on that one but from a medical criteria standpoint I arguably have it a little bit. Do I have some ocular scarring and a new and exciting predisposition for future glaucoma secondary to an alien drift. Yeah, sort of. Am I pretty much totally fine. Yes. Yes, Mako. Am I, even marginally, less intelligent. No. Arguably, post-drift Newt is even more intelligent than pre-drift Newt. Is my scintillating personality still intact. I don’t know, you tell me. Am I still devastatingly good looking in a neohipster getup whilst playing the guitar. I can’t make an objective assessment on that one but indirect evidence indicates Dr. Gottlieb seems to think so and he’s actually somewhat difficult to please, aesthetically. So. Yes. I’m fine, Maks; I am, actually, really sorry that maybe you thought I was a little bit dead or suffering horribly for weeks, but, mostly, I was fine.”

“I missed you,” Mako whispers.

“Me too, except reverse style,” he replies, his voice cracking, but not that much, just slightly, just a little bit, as he picks up his surgical-grade glue.

“Please don’t read any of my emails,” Mako says, high and fast. 

Newt spreads a thin line of glue over the shallow cut he’s made in his skin and then uses his forceps to delicately appose the two edges. It looks awesome. It’s probably not even going to scar. Everything is back on track. They got the brain-damage thing out of the way, he’s talking to Mako, his hand is glued together, no one is throwing up, there has been only a small amount of crying; everything is good. 

Yup. 

Really good.

Great even.

Everything.

“Why shouldn’t I read your emails?” Newt asks, mostly steadily. 

“Because I thought you were in a coma,” Mako says, at the neutral and unreadable apex of emotional vulnerability in the Ms. Mori tradition. “Or that maybe you hated me. I wasn’t thinking of an outcome like this when I wrote them.” 

“And by ‘outcome like this’ I am going to infer that you’re referring to me ‘being a dick’ as that guy you saved the world with so charmingly put it. Okay, that’s fair, except did you miss the part where I copped to actual brain damage, maybe, because—wait. Newt’s stupid brain is a little slow right now and a verbal warning flag rises, but belatedly. Belatedly. He backtracks. “Did you say ‘hated’. Why would I hate you?”

Over the open line, he can hear her draw in a preparatory breath and it yanks him straight out of the solidifying and safe trajectory he was trying to put them both on. 

“Because I didn’t do the right things,” Mako says, like the words are choking her.

Newt stares at the misted line of the distant Wall, being throttled by the braided phrases of possible future sentences.

“Because I didn’t do the right things,” Mako says again. “And because you did.” 

Newt isn’t sure how to have this conversation, gluing his hand together, trying not to cry, the trend-line of his thoughts heading into territory that feels psychologically dangerous. He’s not sure Mako knows how to do it either; Mako, who has turned increasingly internally; Mako, who has sharpened herself on the grindstone of her own willpower into something without needless parts.

“I think everyone did the right things,” Newt manages to say, a little too smooth at the beginning and a little too rushed at the end, his words sliding up a frictionless wall of rising pitch right to the point that the potential energy of his phrase is maxed out to a full stop. “I think everyone did all the right things. Um, especially, especially you, Maks. You most of all.”

“It doesn’t feel that way,” Mako replies.

“Well it never does, really, I don’t think,” Newt says, valiantly philosophical. “It’s always like, ‘well, I spent four years trying to get this freaking tissue to regenerate, and now it has, great, but hey, there are all these new problems like poorly controlled proliferation verging on neoplastic transition, so yay. Kind of. But also not yay. Not yay at all. If you’re lucky enough not to get dealt an inherently unwinnable hand by the stochastic cruelty of life, you can get what you work for, sometimes, mostly, but, in return, you make certain tradeoffs along the way. That doesn’t mean you weren’t right to make those choices, to trade those trades. That doesn’t mean that the costs aren’t costly. You know. But you do the best on-the-fly analysis that you can, and, afterwards, you hope that you can quietly glue yourself together in a relatively secluded apartment rather than being idolized and turned into a mischievous fashion icon who’s expected to evince happiness about the final fallout of the emotional evisceration that brought her to the point that she was able to turn her entire life into a beautiful weapon. Because, to me. That sounds like it might be rough.” 

Newt is out of air, so he breathes in and shuts his stinging eyes. 

“I love you so much,” Mako says, extremely sincerely, and crying, like, really obviously crying.

“Ugh, Maks, you’re killing me here,” he says, totally unintelligibly, weeping subtly and quietly and kind of messily onto his sterile field, but, importantly, doing it in a style that befits a Portal player of his caliber who doesn’t get told very often, or really hardly ever at all, that people love him. 

“What?” Mako says, with the high pitch of a woman whose vocal chords are trying to drawstring their way down to silence.

“Yeah,” Newt says, somewhat more clearly, in a way that sounds like words. “Love reciprocity. I have that for you. Meaning, specifically, that I, also, love you. Thanks for saving the world or whatever.”

“It wasn’t just me,” Mako says.

“Myeah I get that,” Newt replies, wiping saline solutions of various viscosities off his face and onto the sleeve of his sweater because both his hands are still busy and in a part of his sterile field he hasn’t cried on. “But you looked the best doing it, so what do you want from me, Mako, honestly. You’re my favorite Jaeger pilot okay, by like, a lot. You directly saved me from getting eaten, or, maybe a different thing, I’m not sure about the story there.”

“I did?” Mako asks.

“You did,” Newt confirms, and he is doing awesome, the whole crying thing is doing a slow fade like a maudlin Jeff Buckley song, both for him and for Mako; all the hard parts of this conversation are done, the rest of this will be easy because Mako loves him, that is epic and strange and a thing that has probably even been true for a whole lot longer than the two minutes he’s known about it. 

“We did,” Mako says. 

“Meh,” Newt says. “You and Guy, you mean. Technically, I guess, it was a ‘dual’ thing, but the whole operation had a very Mako Mori vibe for me, very lateral, very well timed, very coming out of the shadows like truck full of swords. But ah, suave subject change, what is the deal—are you or are you not dating your blonde friend. What’s the story there?”

“What ‘blonde friend?” Mako asks.

“Maks. Come on. You know the one I mean. Tall, somewhat lexically limited, very square jaw. Your erstwhile copilot. The one you saved from the anteverse. May or may not have grabbed the phone from you for the express purpose of calling me a ‘dick’ a few minutes ago?”

“His name is Raleigh, and who I am dating is none of your business,” Mako says, with a reassuringly crisp primness that wavers only slightly.

“I have it on good authority that we are biological half siblings,” Newt says, hoping that this is relatively common false knowledge and won’t sound weird, inappropriate, aspirational, or inappropriately and weirdly aspirational. “I can’t believe you never told me we were related. Just think how much more annoying I could have been. We’ve wasted decades, Mako. Okay, a single decade. Okay, technically, not quite a decade.”

“You were already much too annoying,” Mako says, for some reason straying a little bit away from the non-weeping thing they’ve had going for a good half-minute now.

“Yeah,” Newt says, pretty sure he knows where her train of thought is headed and not really sure what to do about it. “Listen, Maks—”

Do not even think of mentioning the Marshal, you utterly insensitive cretin, his brain snaps, sounding like his uber sensitive life partner who probably gives great advice in situations like these, where people are dead and other people are trying to integrate that knowledge into whole swaths of behavioral programs that presuppose the aliveness of other parties.

Yeah, agreed dude, do not go there, someone else says, ostensibly his brain, Newt is a little too stressed to keep track of who is whom while he’s trying not to cry about anything and supergluing his hand together with sterile epoxy.

It’s probably better if we don’t say anything, Newt advises everyone in his head.

“Newt?” Mako says.

Except right, he had started to say something and then stopped. Great.

“Yeah,” he says, trying to fix this disaster he’s sliding toward, “no, I just—”

Mako waits him out, ugh, because she’s Mako; this really isn’t fair, he should have done condolence-offering as a tag-team with Hermann because together they almost make a relatively normal if super conflicted human being, but maybe that’s just the post-drift state talking. 

Get it together, his brain advises. You’re going to have to say something other than meaningless, place-holder words.

I’m sorry that the Marshal died via self-annihilation during that underwater battle for the future of mankind, Newt tries. I know he was kind of, not explicitly, your dad, a little bit. On the plus side, it probably doesn’t hurt that much to be instantly atomized, if that makes you feel better. My guess is that it sucks less than drowning, so. 

Even the kids hiss in suspect disapproval, which is weird; he’s not sure he appreciates their commentary.

“I was just thinking,” Newt says, in helpless anticipation of imminent total failure, “about the day after we did that world-saving thing.”

“I have also thought about that day,” she replies. “I have thought about it many times.”

“Yeah,” Newt says, remembering Mako with her blue-framed black hair and her green Midori and her red eyes, and the way she’d come alone, without Becket, looking incomplete and wronged in her incompletion.

“I’m sorry we didn’t drink that Midori,” Newt says in a blind rush, because it’s what he would have done if things hadn’t spiraled so strange and so out of his control, at the end. “Because I would have told you some stuff, Maks, I’m sure. Some stupid, pointless stuff about the Marshal yelling at me about you, like about how flagrantly and totally irresponsible it was for me to make you a shot when you were only seventeen, and the way I said, ‘no, dude, I’m the responsible one, it’s that truculent Hansen kid you’re going to want to watch out for—so square jawed and Australian and stuff,’ which was not a strong defense, let me tell you, because I found out later that Chuck had, like, taken a vow of chastity and chemical purity or something until all kaiju were dead, which sucks because I really hope he at least drank a beer at some point before—ugh, oh man, this is the worst, but okay, anyway, the Marshal then said something along the lines of, ‘one—Geiszler, I will literally kill you if you ever give Mako alcohol again, two—why can’t you be more like Dr. Gottlieb, three—I will literally kill you, four—there will be killing of the literal kind, five—they will find your dead body in an alley somewhere, I want you to be able to picture this, Geiszler, in exact detail—“

Mako is laughing.

Well, either laughing or crying, or maybe it’s laughing and crying; from a logic perspective he’s being very sloppy right now, but Newt is pretty sure that the smart money is, mostly, on Mako laughing. 

“Mako,” Newt says, “Mako, why are you laughing, this is an extremely serious story, okay. I was threatened with death. Your kind-of-dad gave me the kind-of-shotgun-talk, which is inappropriate because a) you could take me in a fight ten out of ten times from age fourteen onward, b) we were not then nor would we ever be dating because no, c) shotgun talks, as a class, are from an outdated heteronormative paradigm that really everyone should be trying to subvert including PPDC field marshals, as a class, and d) ha, who were they going to hire to replace me after my untimely hypothetical death. No one, Mako, that’s the answer. No one.”

“What else?” Mako says, with a gloss of wistful eagerness and god that takes him straight back to when she was a kid because she’s still a kid, she’s not a kid at all, she’d never been a kid; she’d been a miniature containment case for memories of her family, whose names she wouldn’t speak.

“Don’t you ‘what else’ me, Maks,” he replies, putting down his forceps and carefully prodding his glued-shut surgical cut. It’s slightly sticky, but intact. “You’re the one with the alcohol, displaced in space and time, undrinkable by me, and very green.”

“You’re so weird,” Mako says.

“I’m one of the most normal guys ever,” Newt says, peeling back the transparent sterile guard from his left hand. “Everyone else is just complicated, lying, and slightly-to-significantly less intelligent than I am. In point of fact, I happen to be the standard against which alien invaders measure all humans, so, ergo, in conforming to myself, I am actually the apex of normality in the colloquial sense and, therefore, I win. Newt sighs. “If only we could be drunk, Maks, this would probably be easier, but, wait—I actually don’t think I’ve ever seen you drunk. Have you ever been drunk. I think I might find it really alarming.” 

“I have,” Mako says.

“Mako, stop changing the subject, with all this ‘you’re so weird, Newt’, ‘ask me about my drunken escapades, Newt’. He positions a piece of sterile gauze over the incision in his hand and tapes it down. 

“I don’t know what the subject is,” Mako says.

“Yes you do, you badass little liar.” 

“I—” Mako says. “On that day, I—“ she stops.

Newt says nothing. He pulls the glove off his right hand and starts breaking down his sterile field. The scalpel blade slots into its blade guard, and the whole set of materials is rolled up into the paper drape that the kit had been wrapped in. 

“On that day, on the day after, I mean,” she continues, speaking quietly and high pitched and muffled, like she is cupping a hand over her mouth. “I wanted to be me. I wanted to be who I was and not half of someone I didn’t know. I wanted to be myself but not be by myself. I wanted to be with someone who would let me be sad, because you always—”

She stops speaking and Newt is smart enough not to say anything.

“You let me be sad,” she continues. “Do you know that’s what I told him. When he asked me why I spent so much time with you. I was thirteen.”

“Yeah?” Newt says, because he doesn’t know the right thing to say, because he never knows the right thing to say.

“Yeah,” Mako whispers back. “Remember when we watched Blue Planet twelve times in a row. Eight episodes, twelve times. In the lab. An hour a night. For ninety-six nights?”

“It’s burned into my brain, actually,” Newt replies. “If I slowly lose touch with reality and die, it’ll be one of the last things to go.” 

“Not funny,” Mako says, her voice cracking.

Not actually meant to be, his brain says.

“Er, yeah,” Newt replies. 

“But he, the Marshal, he asked me why I spent so much time with you. He said there were better people.”

“So true,” Newt says, smiling askew, picking up his phone in his aching left hand and putting the green, bundled remains of his sterile field in the trash. 

“No, he didn’t mean it like that,” Mako corrects, “he just meant that there were better people for me to spend time with. People my own age.”

“Kids,” Newt says, returning to the kitchen table and dropping into a chair. “They’re calling them ‘kids’ these days, Maks.”

“Shut up,” she says. “Will you shut up?”

“Historically,” Newt begins, but she just talks over him.

“He asked me why I liked you so much, and that’s what I told him. I told him that you knew how not to be sad, but that you let other people be sad, if that’s what they wanted to be.”

Newt slides an elbow onto the wood of the table and presses his head against his hand. “First of all, ‘not sadness’ has a word, and that word is ‘happy’, or a more erudite synonym. Second of all, do you say this kind of stuff in interviews, Maks. Does anyone really get you. Don’t tell me it’s Becket, even if it’s true.”

“Knowing how to be not sad isn’t the same as knowing how to be happy,” Mako says.

“Well,” Newt says, his head coming up, his gaze snapping to the Wall as though vision could be magnetized. “That’s true enough, I suppose.”

For a moment they say nothing, as Newt stares at the Wall and Mako looks at something he will never see. 

“So are you seriously going to leave me hanging?” Newt asks. “What the heck did the guy say to that?”

“He said, ‘Mako, are we talking about the same Geiszler. Are you sure you know which one Geiszler is. He’s the short one. The one with glasses. The one with the green in his hair and tasteless tattoos who shouts a lot. That’sGeiszler. I think maybe the person you’re talking about is Dr. Gottlieb. Are you actually spending time with Dr.Gottlieb?’. 

“The important thing is that we never tell the end of this story to Hermann,” Newt says. “Ever, Mako. Ever. Not ever.”

“He liked you,” Mako says. “The Marshal.” 

“Myeah, okay,” Newt replies. 

“It was hard for him,” she says. 

“I—I am totally sure it was, Maks.”

“It was very hard,” she says, sounding strained again, sounding like she’s been strained, horribly strained, for weeks now. “It was very hard, in the end, for him.”

“Yeah,” Newt replies, feeling overwhelmed, feeling like he needs to rest his head on his own crossed arms, and so he does, sliding the phone very close to him, turning the volume down. “Not just for him, though. For you too.”

“Yes but I—“ Mako says, breaking off. “Raleigh knows, but I—” 

She pauses.

She pauses for a long time.

Newt sits there, head down on the table, trying not to picture Mako, not as she was, not as she is, and failing. Failing. 

“I wanted to be a shark,” she whispers.

“Maks,” Newt whispers back, feeling like the ache in his throat might consume him, “you’re the sharkeyest. You are the most shark. You—”

“You said ‘trades’,” she says.

Newt tries to remember saying anything at any time about ‘trades’ and tries to determine how this might relate to metaphorical sharks. His brain is totally failing him because it’s also trying really hard not to get upset in the face of oncoming Mako-related upset, because it is oncoming, oh is it ever; he can hear it in her voice, he can feel it in his own mind. 

“You said we make ‘trades’. You said that. You said it just now, but you’ve always said it. I remember you always saying it. You think about trade-offs.”

“I will cost/benefit myself right into the grave,” Newt replies.

That was classlessly literal, his brain says, sounding like Hermann. You very nearly did that. Please try to remember that other people have feelings, Newton.

“I made trades that were painful to me,” Mako says. “I didn’t say things that I should have said because I didn’t think that I could say them and still be who I wanted to be. What I wanted to be.”

“Maybe you couldn’t,” Newt replies, feeling like someone needs to stick up for poor, past-Mako, who had tried so hard and who wanted so much and so little. “A lot of people were watching you, Maks, a lot of people were waiting for you to fail. There was a reason you didn’t step into a Jaeger at eighteen, kiddo, and a reason you were pulled off the bench in the endgame, when it’s time to swing for the metaphorical fences or go die in a hole.”

“I wish that I had said more to him,” Mako whispers. “I—I sometimes—it is difficult for me to remember my father’s face. My real father. Or the face of my mother. I turned them into my anger. He tried to tell me not to do that; he tried to tell me in many small ways but I did it anyway, I had to, that was one of my trades, so that I could be what I wanted, so that I could be a shark.”

“Aw Maks,” Newt says. 

“When he died, he did not know everything I would have said, if I had been a person who could say it,” Mako finishes. “That was another trade.” 

“Oh come on,” Newt replies. “He knew, dude. He totally knew.”

“This is said often of the dead,” Mako whispers. “But it is nothing more than a polite courtesy of the living. I have only ever truly known one other person, and that person is not the Marshal. The dead do not know, Newt. What they knew is uncertain. What they know is nothing, because they are dead. 

Newt tries not to give in to this new variety of totally overwhelming despair as he hopes that Mako won’t turn whatever she is feeling, her grief, her guilt, her anger—into yet another indictment against herself. 

“Yeah,” Newt says. “Okay, yes, I get what you’re saying, at least conceptually, and I’m not really experienced with the magnitude of loss that you’re talking about, I’m just gonna throw that one out there as a caveat, but Maks,Maks, come on, the guy took you out for American-style chocolate milk shakes when Skye McLeod the Improbably Dreamy Intern went back to MIT. I mean, don’t try to tell me he didn’t know exactly what he was doing there. So yeah, did you ever start calling him ‘Dad’. No. Did he buy you miniature plastic ponies or whatever it is that adorably out of touch dads buy for their female offspring. No. Did he mostly call you Ms. Mori. Yes. Did he cry a little bit in a totally manful, jaw-clenching way when eleven-year-old-you drew him a picture of Coyote Tango before you learned much English and he learned much Japanese. Yes. I don’t know, dude, but to me. The whole thing that you guys had going never looked like some kind of artificial distance imposed by you. It looked like an admiration thing. So don’t tell me that I’m being polite to you when I say I think he knew how you felt, Mako, because I am not polite. I’m just not a polite guy, I mean, I’m not sure if you know this but sometimes, historically, previously, I would roll up my shirt sleeves just to be a jerk and not because I was hot, temperature wise. The point is, I think he knew because he did the parent stuff for you; he did the hardest stuff Maks, right, like, I mean, right. He did the thankless stuff, he did the stuff that they always talk about with the ‘boundary setting’ and he taught you the stuff that you should know in life, right, like how to knee a guy in the crotch and then, I don’t know, how to pull out his larynx or something; the stuff where he filled out paperwork for you and took you to doctors appointments that you hated and taught you scary levels of self discipline and he did all of that without most of the fun stuff where he just, like, buys you a guitar and listens to you talk about monsters for half an hour and then says, ‘see you later, kid,’ you know. He did all the crap stuff and you guys got to have so little of the good stuff, but it was in there, like that time we went for karaoke and you guys sang Sweet Caroline like conventional, adorkable losers, so Maks,” Newt says, not quite holding it together entirely, “Maks, do not tell me that you think he didn’t know whole giant swaths of all that unsaid stuff, and don’t tell me that’s a courtesy because it’s not. It’s not. You guys had what you had and it doesn’t matter what you called it, it matters what it was. And it was awesome. 

“I wish I had stated it all of it clearly,” Mako whispers. “I wish he could have known what I wanted to express in the way that I now want to express it. In the end, I had time to say only one thing.” 

“But you said it,” Newt replies.

“In the next moment it was gone,” Mako whispers. “Because he was.” 

Newt tries to rub away the ache in his jaw and does not say anything to negate her statement. 

“I have learned from the trades that I made,” Mako says, “and from the things I have gotten in return, and from how Raleigh carries the things he’s learned and the people that he’s lost. This is why I called you seventeen times and why I sent you thirty-one emails. I have a dead brother, Newt, but he isn’t mine. He isn’t mine. He isn’t anyone from my life that you could ever erase by stepping into the place where he used to be. My dead brother is Raleigh’s dead brother. Raleigh’s. Mako Mori had no brother to turn into her anger, no one had left any shoes for you to fill, you overwrote no one’s story, you were your own person with your own place in the life that I tried to be too angry to live. That was why I came to your lab. That was why I brought the Midori. I wanted to tell you that you were stupid and that I cared if you died and that I wanted to have a family again and that you were the only one left to be in it, but that I wanted you there, I wanted you. But Dr. Gottlieb was anxious and you looked so tired and so I didn’t tell you. I didn’t say any of those things, and I didn’t do the right things and I thought that maybe you had brain damage like that article said. Like the one said in Wired. I thought that maybe you hated me, I hoped that you hated me, I hoped so much that you hated me, I said, ‘please let this be anger,’ because I know what that’s like. Because that would be all right. It would be all right if it were anger, because anger can be pure. Anger can be beautiful. Anger can be like a sword, sharpened to a single purpose. But I didn’t think it was anger. And I tried to say to Raleigh, ‘I’m sure he’s just angry at me,’ but Raleigh knows everything and Raleigh can see when I’m lying and he couldn’t say anything and I wanted to talk to you and I wanted to tell you all the things that I never told you and I wanted to do it before you were dead, before you weren’t you and so that’s why I called you. That’s why I called. That’s why I called and that’s why I said at a party one night that you were my half-brother, and to please tell no one. I wanted to read it in the tabloids because I wanted it to seem as real as the rest of it. Because I wanted it. Because no one but me wanted it. Just Mako. It was just a thing that Mako wanted. To read that.”

Mako starts audibly sobbing.

Mako, Newt tries to say, Mako I am so sorry. I didn’t know, but I guess that was your whole point. That I didn’t know. But he doesn’t say it, because he doesn’t think he can get his jaw to unlock and even if he did, he’s not sure if Mako would be able to hear him anyway.

When he finally comes up with something to say, and when he’s finally able to reliably force it past his aching throat and sinuses, and when Mako can hear it, it’s: “I’m, ah, pretty sure that story’s true, actually.”

“What?” Mako says, with an audible sniff.

“No, I mean, yep, I think it’s true,” Newt says, his voice a cracked mess. “Your story. I’m pretty sure my mom was touring in Tokyo like—“

“Tanegashima,” Mako corrects.

“Yeah,” Newt says. “Tanegashima. Sounds just like Tokyo to the non-native speaker. I’m pretty sure my mom was touring in Tanegashima in 1989, and I mean, your dad, he was probably really into the whole German Opera Singer thing in his youth. Because. You know. Germans. Opera. Hot. Just unreasonably sexy. My mom, let me tell you, was, and still is, kind of an unreasonable looker, Maks. Newt wipes his face on his shirt for something like the eighth time.

“Yes,” Mako says thickly. “Yes, I also think that’s how it must have happened.” 

“Tragically, I was left with a kindly but somewhat flighty German pop singer turned piano tuner and his more responsible brother cum musical engineer for a few years before relocating myself to the new world and choosing to spend my formative years in a den of academic wolves. This explains why you’re cooler than me.”

“I do not think we need to explain that,” Mako says. “Some things just are.”

“Mako, ugh,” Newt says, cracking an unsteady smile, “look, I’m just being nice, because clearly an argument can be made for me being the cool one. For example, I had a band. Where’s your band. Your band that you had that repopularized science for the first time since the Cold War?”

“I had a cover shoot with Vogue,” Mako replies, with a cultivated innocence.

“Waaait, did you really? Newt asks.

“Just me,” she says. “No Raleigh. Mako only. Planet savior and international fashion icon. Little girls all over the world are putting streaks in their hair.”

“Okay, yeah, but I saw a seventh grader with my glasses, and my general iconoclastic demeanor, so, um, I think maybe we’re just tied.”

“For now,” Mako says, with airy, self-possessed threat. “Better watch it.”

“Don’t you ‘better watch it’ me, Maks, okay. I can hold my own. Kind of. Historically I could, maybe. Arguably. In certain arenas. Soooo,” he says, skillfully quantum tunneling himself out of the conversational hole he’s digging, “where are you. What are you doing right now?”

“I am in a fancy ladies room in Berlin, refusing to appear on a popular German talk show.”

“Wait, you’re blowing off an interview for this?” Newt asks.

“Do you know how many times I have been interviewed?” Mako whispers.

“A lot of times?” Newt guesses.

“Yes,” Mako says. “And I have tried to talk to you for weeks.”

“Yes, but—“

“Raleigh is talking with them,” Mako says. “So that I can talk with you. “Where are you? Mako continues. “Can you please tell me your address?”

“I’ll email it to you,” Newt says.

“Can you please tell me your address,” Mako says, more emphatically this time, less like a question, more like a demand. “I want to send you things and I want to know where to go when this publicity tour is over or if you don’t answer your phone for another three weeks.”

“I’ll answer my phone,” Newt says, guiltily and mildly aggrieved, before he gives her his address.

“Now,” Mako says, stepping laterally into the role of bossy-kid sister so effortlessly that Newt’s throat aches with it. “You will tell me again what you said at the beginning of this call, but slower.”

“Um,” Newt says, trying to run his thoughts backward through a maze of conversational tangents before he says, “biohacking. It’s more like ‘biohacking-lite’, I don’t want to alarm Hermann, he is easily alarmed these days, let me tell you, especially when it comes to things that involve me being somewhat cavalier with—”

“No,” Mako says. “Not that. After that. The part where you explained why you didn’t answer your phone for three weeks.”

“Ah,” Newt says. “Well—“

That’s about as far as he’s going to easily get. 

Mako says nothing.

Newt says nothing.

“I think the bottom line is that things are mostly fine now,” Newt says, with reliable, perfect brilliance. 

“I believed Dr. Gottlieb to be very angry after the breach was closed,” Mako says delicately. 

“That is true,” Newt says. “That is extremely true. He’s not pissed at you though, Maks. He’s not pissed at anyone, really, other than unfairly and kind of ludicrously at himself, I think, because he didn’t illogically and metaphorically throw himself in front of me, getting us both hit by the oncoming and inevitable train. Everyone was just doing the things that had to be done. You know. The impersonal thrust and slash of the ‘i’ dotting and ‘t’ crossing bureaucracy in which we live our lives. If someone goes and demonstrates mental continuity with the anteverse, then someone else is going to need to at least demonstrate a prayer of discontinuity, because of social contracts and reasonable expectations of civilization safety and continuation of our species and stuff. You know. I know. I get it. It’s fine. Hermann—well, he’s a purist in a lot of ways, Maks; he doesn’t like the cost/benefit scenario, he doesn’t like the aleatory whims of nature, red in tooth and claw, or institutionalized policies that screw people over now and again, for very, very excellent proof-of-principle reasons, he likes things to be neat and fair and whatnot. So yeah. He’s a little angry right now.”

“So you were not all right,” Mako says, her voice small. 

“Meh,” Newt says, totally casual, totally suave. “Life is about trajectories, dude. Absolute values are meaningless without context. Context-wise, things are looking awesome. Also, what is it with literally everyone who talks to me conveniently forgetting that we were almost all eaten by giant alien dinosaur-equivalents. Why is that never the worst-case scenario. Like, people never say, ‘aw, Newt, you arguably fit the clinical criteria for a seizure disorder, but at least you weren’t eaten. No. It’s always, ‘oh god you look like you’re going to die, why don’t you just lie down over here and cry for a while, I’ll get you a graham cracker and take your blood pressure. I mean, not that I haven’t done some of that Maks, not gonna lie, and you know how I feel about graham crackers, namely really good, but I think the part where I avoided being eaten, individually and also kind of on behalf of my civilization, isimportant, Maks, like, it should not be left out of the whole picture. Everyone keeps doing that; it makes me feel tragically misunderstood.”

“Do you have seizures now?” Mako asks.

“I don’t, actually,” Newt replies. “I had three total, all while hooked up to some invasive equipment, but, apparently, if you are a trained neurologist and you look at my baseline EEG, it is totally terrifying and seems easily perturbable into something incompatible with consciousness, so the official verdict is ‘you probably have an excitable cerebral cortex now, let’s just call it a seizure disorder in the chart and how about you never drink coffee or alcohol again’. That’s an exaggeration. I get to pick one of those two to empirically test pretty shortly. I’m definitely going with coffee, even though Hermann has been trying to subtly influence me in the alcohol direction, mainly because his tolerance for insomniac me is surprisingly low and alcohol supposedly mimics GABA while caffeine, it is true, is not going to help my sleeplessness. Maks, god, you don’t care about this, um, GABA is like an inhibitory neurotransmitter, breaks for the brain, whatever, the point is, my life is not actually that hard; it’s just a little weird right now. I’m fine. You should not be worried about me, you have other things going on, whole swaths of other things.”

“You drifted,” Mako says quietly, “with them.”

“Myeahh,” Newt says, drawing out the word, feeling weird, feeling kind of not okay, feeling like the kids are getting restless, the actual kids, er, the fake kids, the neural copy of the kids in his head, like they’re a thing separate from him, like they can pay attention to Mako, like they can learn who she is, like they care who she is; he doesn’t like that. 

Kids, Mako, Newt thinks in polite introduction, feeling more than a little anxious. Mako, kids. 

You could do it again, the kids hiss. You could do it again; she could help you. She would help you. You could come back to the drift.

Noo, Newt thinks at them firmly, showing them who’s boss. No that’s not a thing. You’re on the team now, kids. The Geiszler team. Team Geiszler. Drifting is not good for the team. Drifting will probably kill this team, actually, or give this team intractable epilepsy and even more of hive-mind withdrawal problem. 

Good, the kids seethe. 

Aw kids, Newt thinks, I get that, I do. But you’re not in charge of the team. The rest of the team votes no to death.

“It’s not as weird as it sounds,” Newt continues, skating on thin psychological ice, gripping the edge of the table, because the kaiju, in general, he can talk about now pretty well, the Wall he can handle in some ways, even thebreach, he can sort of, sort of, well, oh god, he has complicated feelings about it but he can sort of handle that but the drift, the drift, that’s hard for him; round three is hard for him, because they were just, they were just, so sad, so sad and so angry and so cut apart, and so wanting his agonized death and also wanting him to just tell them what to do, to make them whole and he can’t, no, he can’t do that, they came here, they came to destroy and he won and he said no, he wouldn’t let them, he stopped them and he cut them up. “It’s actually,” he says, and he can hear the vagueness in his own voice, he can hear that he doesn’t sound ‘good’ in the classical sense of the word, “it’s actually, Mako, it’s a little bit hard for me to—” he trails off because he’s not sure what to say in this post-drift slurry of thought and color and sensory impressions that aren’t his, and sensory impressions that aren’t sensory, not really, how could they be, when they come from disembodied neural tissue in—

“Newt?” Mako says.

Yeah, Newt thinks about saying, as the room fades.

I think your vision’s starting to go, champ, his brain says, anxiously checking in. I’m not sure if you’re breathing right now. You should probably start that back up.

Team player, Newt says, in vague if appreciative annotation. 

Come back to us, the kids hiss with a serpentine sadness.

Go team, Newt thinks vaguely, flashing back to a remembered blue-edged conflict he’d had with networked shreds of minds, not his tamer neural copies, but their real and angry peers.

“Newt?” Mako says, sharp and high over the speaker on the phone he can’t see behind a homogenous field of gray static.

“Yeah,” he says.

Why does your vasovagal response manifest visually like cosmic background radiation, do you think?” Carl Sagan asks.

Dude, I have no idea, Newt thinks, confused. This isn’t my area. I gave astrophysics a pass.

Half of you did, maybe, Sagan replies reasonably. If only exobiology could be parsed into a working knowledge of medicine and astrophysics. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make any conceptual sense. But then, why would it. I believe you’re losing consciousness, and your capacity for critical thought is decreasing exponentially. 

Um? Newt replies, confused, his hand throbbing with a local acuity in the context of general sensory loss. 

LIE DOWN, his brain advises.

“Newt,” Mako says again and again, an incomplete half of a call-and-response verse structure.

Newt grabs his phone and gets out of his chair in a poorly-controlled, blind slide to the floor. 

“Newt,” Mako says. “Answer me.”

Hey Mako, Newt thinks.

“Newt,” she says.

“Mako,” he says.

“Newt,” she says.

“Mako,” he says.

“What is wrong with you?” she snaps.

“Nothing is wrong with me, Maks, come on,” he replies, because actually he’s doing pretty awesome relative to how he thought this might go, “I just have a thing that happens to me sometimes; I’m not sure what it is; it’s a little bit panick-attackish, eh, that’s a pretty dece band name, Panic Attackish, I’ll let you take that one if you want to start up a rival band, but look, it’s just kind of like, well, okay do this, Mako, pretend instead of Captain Jawline’s memories in your head you have a little bit of an alien collective in there instead, well, er, actually, memories of them, memories, pretty sure they’re not actually there, Maks, full disclosure, but it’s a little weird and sometimes you find out things about yourself, like how you just maybe don’t do that well with destruction on large scales; it’s like a little too overwhelming and sometimes the guys in your head want to kill you a little bit but they also just think you’re so interesting, maybe because they themselves think that, or maybe just because you’re a narcissist that folds like a deck of cards in the face of real chaos because that’s not what you’re about, you’re not about the chaos, really, you kind of enjoy it if it looks pretty, but when it comes right down to it you’re just a guy who always liked plants and building guitars and maybe watching high definition footage of cataclysms a little bit more than was socially acceptable, but being there, mid-cataclysm, is a little too much for you even if you weren’t actuallythere, and also maybe there’s some kind of creepy hive-mind reward thing, it’s weird; it’s hard to explain, it’s a little bit like stepping into an alternate dimension and getting a courtesy heroin shot for coming, like, 'hey, thanks, hope we see you in our collective again, we know how to have a good time over here, make sure you come back so we can torture your disembodied consciousness for an eternity. It will feel so so good, and so so bad. But er, I’m doing great, Mako, actually I’m doing really well. They like me, a little bit, the parts of my brain that hate me, mainly because they’re lonely here, all alone, in my head. I win people over. Even enraged alien brains that I maybe cut apart a little bit because of misunderstandings about the nature of death. Also it’s kind of hard for me to handle my own brain right now while very sleep deprived, which I am, Mako, kind of constantly; not a ton of sleeping happening for me, lately, full disclosure, so that makes it slightly harder when it comes to responding appropriately to all environmental cues, but everything is normalizing towards my historical baseline.”

“Oh,” Mako says. “Okay.”

“That’s a little bit why I didn’t call you,” Newt confesses, staring at the ceiling that he can see now, that’s cool, and feeling wrung out, totally drained of vital humors, Hippocrates-style. “That thing that just happened. A little bit. Kind of. It used to be worse.”

“I’m sorry I asked you about it,” Mako says. “I should have known not to ask.” 

“Nah,” Newt says. 

“Are you living with Dr. Gottlieb?” Mako asks.

“Heyyy,” Newt says, in unconcealed exhaustion that he tries to correct by manifesting indignation out of the ether with limited success. “I pay rent. We are living together. With each other. I’m not living with him. I’m independently wealthy now through a quirk of the cultural zeitgeist, Mako, okay. It’s totally normal.”

“Yes,” Mako agrees. “I’m sure that it is.”

“He likes me, it turns out,” Newt adds. “He didn’t dramatically and eloquently confess it to me or anything likesome people I could name, but it is, nevertheless, a reproducible phenomenon. I am not sure if you knew that. But it’s a thing. And active, ongoing thing.” 

“I knew that,” Mako says. “I am glad you are not alone.” 

“Myeah,” Newt says. “So, speaking of not-alone-ness, what is the deal with ‘Raleigh,’ I think you said it was. Was that his name. Yeah, so what’s the story there because—“

“No,” Mako says.

“Maks we’re related, basically.”

“No,” Mako says.

“Mako, you just assaulted me with your words like three minutes ago, you have to make it up to me.”

“No,” Mako says.

“But Mako he’s boring.”

“He is not boring,” Mako says.

“Ha!” Newt replies, inevitably victorious. “I demand evidence.” 

“He likes your band,” Mako says. “Without irony. 

“Okay, that’s unexpected,” Newt says. “Both that he likes my band and the implication that he’s capable of appreciating something ironically.”

“You confuse him,” Mako says, “because his own brother is dead.”

Mako counters emotional manipulation with emotional evisceration and, yes, he deserved that a little more than a little bit, because he is kind of a dick sometimes, but still.

“Ugh, Mako, god, just stab me in the heart, will you. Just take a sword and drive it right in there. I don’t think you cut open all four chambers, maybe twist it a little or something, if you can, yeah. Twist.”

“Well don’t call him boring then,” Mako replies, “because he is not. He can’t help what he looks like. 

“What he looks—“ Newt trails off in total incredulity, wondering what Mako thinks Raleigh Becket, Captain Explosion, looks like, other than a conventional, clean-cut, enviable winner of evolution by natural selection. “All right, all right, all right, fine, I give up. You can bring him when you come visit,” Newt says. “I guess. If he wants to come. I get this whole drift partner confusion thing, Mako, I get it a lot, er—”

You did not drift with Hermann, his entire team, kids included, snarls at him in an outraged choir.

“Er, like, I sort of get it, kind of, in an alien way, and I have a great, extrapolative imagination and so I get it thatway as well. The theoretically extrapolative way. Very theoretical. Highly extrapolative. To be clear, not empirically. Because I would not know about human drifting. You are being sympathy’d rather than empathy’d right now. Your brain must be confusing; tell me more about that Maks, how is your brain these days. Confusing?” 

“Yes,” Mako says, slowly and suspiciously and insightfully, as if she’s slicing carefully through a resistanceless opacity.

You never used to be this genuinely stupid, his brain informs him. 

Well it’s just that it’s Mako, Newt says, defending himself. And being team leader is harder than it looks from your point of view, okay. It’s so easy to criticize when you’re not the guy getting confused about fainting versus not fainting, panicking versus not panicking, what to say when, and who is who and who wants what and whether those wants are team wants, or player wants, okay?

Well maybe end this call before you say something you shouldn’t be saying because clearly your ability to conceal what you’re supposed to be concealing is at a minimum right now, his brain points out.

“Mako, hey, got to go, I sort of turned the kitchen table that I share with Hermann into a sterile field so that I could implant myself with an RFID chip and I probably should clean that up before the guy gets home, because it looks a little weird,” he says, only half lying.

“Don’t go,” Mako says, high and fast and unconsidered.

Well, nope, he can’t go now.

What is he, made of stone?

No. Dr. Newton Geiszler of the sextupled Ph.Ds. is, at his best and most emotionally sturdy, made of a classic candy shell that will melt at mouth but not skin temperatures. 

“Someone needs a Blue Planet marathon,” Newt says.

“I—“ Mako says. “I could help you. If you needed it. I could also help Dr. Gottlieb, if, for some reason, he needed it. If, for some reason, something happened to him in the alley where you drifted. If something happened to him there.”

“Nope,” Newt says, not panicking, because it’s okay, because it’s just Mako, but what if other people know, what if other people find out. He does not think that Hermann would do well with the kids in his head; Hermann is a littletoo good at integrating disparate neural patterns to not break down into sympathetic insanity if that happens to him; they are lucky that it didn’t; no, they are not lucky because it was skill, because Newt had known ahead of time that it had to be him, that it should be him, that if it had to be one of them that he was the only one who made sense. Maximum risk, maximum benefit; best odds of best outcome. 

Don’t panic, his brain says. Don’t panic, you did it. You did what you wanted, it’s done. No one wants to slot you there, back into that local insanity collective, no one wants that, not for either of you, everything is fine.

“Or,” Mako continues, "if one day, you want to say, ‘Mako, is it normal to hide food from your drift partner and cry when he finds it’.”

“Um,” Newt says, feeling insufficiently on point to understand what she’s getting at.

“Or if you want to say, ‘Mako, is it normal to dream of bar fights on the same night at the same time as your drift partner’.”

“Ah,” Newt says, his thoughts snapping into place, relieving some of his understandable but probably needless anxiety. 

“If you want to know about those things,” Mako says, “I can tell you about those things. When I come to see you, we can go for a walk, where no one will hear us and we will wear sunglasses and I will wear a scarf over my hair and you will wear a hat that I pick for you and we will talk where no one can hear us and you will tell me the things that you wish to tell me.”

“Aw Maks,” Newt says. 

“I missed you,” Mako says.

“Yeah,” Newt says. 

“Don’t ignore my calls,” she says, her tone a frost, imperious and thick.

“Nope,” Newt whispers.

Saying goodbye is protracted and slow and turns out to be one of the least goodbyeish goodbyes in the entirety of his sphere of human interactions, which is weird, but a good weird, an unambiguously good variant of ‘weird’. Mako texts him four times in quick succession after she hangs up, as if she doesn’t believe that he still exists on the other end of the set of circuits in her hand, but Newt texts her back, dictating to his phone because his eyes hurt too much to type. He feels like an overdrawn account, like he’s not going to get up off this floor very easily, like he’s a guy who’s coming down off a weeks-long terror high to find that his bone marrow has let demand outstrip supply and whose central processor is burning through metaphorical power reserves and fusing more than a few relays in the process.

What is the deal with Mako, anyway, he asks his brain.

It’s not that complicated, his brain replies. She’s like you, but cooler. She had more ripped away, but faster. She had a cleaner goal, a sharper edge, her life was better ordered. She said no to things you wished you could reject, but couldn’t, because you didn’t have them. 

Newt reaches up to adjust his glasses and the movement feels laborious, the air suspiciously viscous with resistance.

“Do not fall asleep here,” he says, letting gravity drag his hand straight back toward the core of the earth, feeling the normal force at every point of his spine that is pressed against the wood of the floor. “That would be sostupid.”

Ugh, on a scale of Stoic to post-Aeneas-Dido-killing-herself-on-a-Carthaginan-funeral-pyre, how emo is this? 

Newt gives his current floor-lying post-weeping a solid seven point five on the Emo Scale.

You’re putting the sigh in scientist again, his brain says, quoting Caitlin Lightcap.

“Myeah,” Newt says. “A little bit.”

It’s fine, he’s tired, and it’s not like anyone will ever know about his post-weeping exhausted floor-lying; it’s not like he’s going to fall asleep here or anything, that would be a near statistical improbability and incredibly stupid.

Really, really, really stupid.

And, therefore, he will make it a point not to do that.

Newt comes awake in a slow disentanglement from blue-edged dreaming in cognitive fugues; each throughline of his thoughts snapping individually and sequentially into silence as he wrests his way back to alertness.

Kind of.

Kind of alertness.

The room is rendered in a dark and silhouetted monochrome that doesn’t look quite right to him, perspective-wise.

He can feel which way is west; his thoughts torque with an unpleasant directional vector that he hopes is oneiric, but fears is not.

“Relax,” Hermann says, very smooth, very careful, very close, and so upset that he does not sound upset at all.

Oh.

Okay then.

Someone, probably Dr. Gottlieb, is pressing cool fingers to Newt’s lateral throat.

Carotid territory.

Newt blinks and shifts his gaze from ceiling-ward to colleague-ward. He can’t see Hermann’s face in the dim light, just his outline, dark against the minimal backlight that comes from the windows that overlook the bay and setting sun. The frames of Newt’s glasses break the continuity of Hermann’s profile. 

Well this doesn’t seem like the best, his brain comments slowly, and, tragically, Newt’s not really sure what it means by ‘this’ or ‘best’. He’s flustered by the dim light trending toward darkness and the surface that he’s lying on and the ache in his sinuses that exerts a strange press on his face.

I’m on the floor right now? he surmises, making slow sense of his skewed perspective.

Yes, his brain replies. I think you are.

“OhIwasnotgoingt’dothis,” Newt says in a moderately intelligible slide, trying to come up on one elbow, but getting held down by Hermann, who shifts his hand from Newt’s neck to his chest in a clear gambit to maximize his unfair positional advantage.

Newt could hold people down one handed too, if he wanted to, and the hypothetical people were tired, and he could sort of kneel on them and get his whole force vector to be perfectly vertical. 

When there is no subsequent talking, Newt realizes that Hermann is doing a thing with a phone. 

A thing like calling someone, maybe.

That thought sharpens him up appreciably. 

Newt gives up on his elbow-levering plan and replaces it with a quick, lateral, Gottliebian-style open hand swipe, that, miraculously, and most likely entirely because Hermann was not expecting anything of the kind, manages to land him Hermann’s phone, smack in the palm of his left hand. He closes his fingers around it, transfers it across his body, and pins it to the floor beneath his palm, out of Hermann’s easy reach.

“Newton,” Hermann snaps, like a guy who had been planning to call emergency services.

Dr. Geiszler, man; dude is a winner.

“I fell asleep,” Newt says, pointedly, clearly, articulately, reasonably, and, hopefully, reassuringly.

“Did you?” Hermann says, in a slow slide of soothing skepticism. “I’m not certain of that, Newton. I believe that you may have fainted.”

“Nah,” Newt says. 

He’s pretty sure that’s wrong.

He’s mostly sure.

Okay, admittedly, he’s maybe not entirely sure.

“You look very much like you fell out of your chair,” Hermann replies. 

That particular observation triggers a nice set of synaptic firing to the tune of some heroic not-fainting while trying to talk to Mako (oh god, Mako) and then a subsequent episode of lying on the floor (lying on the floor, he’s come undone) thinking ‘I should probably not fall asleep here’ and then (alas) doing precisely that. 

There had, most certainly, been no fainting though. 

“No,” Newt says, from the apex of intellectually elite dismissiveness. He throws in a courtesy oh-so-painful-but-oh-so-worth-it eye roll. 

Hermann doesn’t say anything in response to Newt’s erudite if monosyllabic sass attack, but Newt can tell the guy is unconvinced from the pressure he’s currently applying to Newt’s sternum. 

Newt tries to reassure him by sitting in the face of sternal pressure, but Hermann, apparently still very unconvinced about Newt’s ‘sleeping’ story, makes it pretty clear that if Newt wants to get up he’s going to have to turn this into a grappling match. 

Newt has a little more class than that. 

Not a lot more, it’s true, but a little more. 

“There was no fainting, Hermann,” he says, relaxing back against the floor in exhausted, temporary defeat. “There was just some feeling weird and then some lying down and then some falling asleep in what turned out to be a bad idea cascade.” 

Hermann is silent.

Hermann is silent for a long time, quietly freaking out, or simmering down, or running cost/benefit analyses that center around fighting Newt for his phone, because Newt will put up a fight to hang onto that phone, there’s a cosmic truth if there ever was one.

Newt is about to say something totally normal, like, ‘it’s dark in here,’ or, ‘did you make any freshmen cry today?’ or, ‘what are you going to make for dinner, not that you have to make dinner, but if you were planning on it I would not say no to spätzle,’ but Hermann beats him to it.

“You’re cold,” he says, like he’s driving a fatal strike of a spike into the vampire heart of Newt’s ‘sleeping’ story, when really it’s nothing of the kind; the currently unimpressive temperature of Newt’s extremities is a totally normal consequence of losing thermal energy for hours to the heat sink of the floor and replacing it by metabolism at a slightly lower rate than normal in the context of peripheral vasoconstriction. His peripheral vasculature isn’t going to be nicely dilated if he’s lying on a surface that’s below the temperature that his hypothalamus would like to be setting. 

Obviously.

“Meh,” Newt says, unimpressed. “It’s a predictable consequence of my behavior and says good things about the functionality of my cardiovascular system. Not everyone equates cold with inevitable illness and death. Calm down about it already.”

“Stop being purposefully inflammatory,” Hermann says. “You aren’t carrying it off very well.” 

“I am carrying it off just fine,” Newt replies, admittedly slightly listless relative to his historical norm. 

Mako, his brain offers, in a strange and skeptical blend of hope and dread.

Yes, brain, Newt says politely. Thank you. 

“Can you sit?” Hermann asks, like a guy who has not been and is not currently literally pinning Newt to the floor.

Newt looks at Hermann in pointed incredulity that maybe errs more on the incredulous side than the pointed side, because come on. Of course, it’s dim enough in the room that it may be impossible for Hermann to appreciate the look that Newt is directing at him.

“Are you going to let me sit. Of course I can sit, dude,” Newt says, making a tonal show of being aggrieved. “I’m fine. I was sleeping, admittedly in kind of an alarming pose, on the floor. Is it late. Sorry if you thought I was unconscious or dead.”

“It is nearly six o’clock,” Hermann replies, switching teams from anti-sitting to pro-sitting and backing off on the sternal pressure. 

Newt sits, mostly under his own power. Hermann helps him when the whole operation starts to look a little bit jeopardized as the increasing angle between Newt's back and the floor reaches the forty-five degree mark and his initial momentum runs out, undoubtedly because he is cold and stiff and tired and maybe just a little bit filled with misery under the crush of having let Mako down so completely for the past set of weeks.

Mako, who loves him.

“I am such a jerk,” Newt announces, leaning forward, resting his forehead on Hermann’s nearest shoulder.

“You are thoughtless,” Hermann says, trying to warm Newt up with some semi-vigorious bilateral lateral arm-rubbing that, truth be told, kind of hurts, because Newt is sore from his recent Wall climbing and floor-lying. “That is not the same thing.” 

“Thoughtless,” Newt says, miserably. “Yes. I am a thoughtless, inconsiderate, brash, irresponsible narcissist.”

“That,” Hermann says, inexcusably gently, “is my line. Do not get over-zealous in this new trend toward self-chastisement, Newton, or it will rob me of roughly eighty percent of my conversational satisfaction.”

Newt says nothing. He spends a moment in silent, intense yearning for a reset-to-factory-settings-button for his brain.

The kids hiss in edgeless discontent. 

“I’m going to turn on a light,” Hermann says.

“Nah,” Newt replies, lifting his head off Hermann’s shoulder, adjusting his glasses into their proper alignment. “I got it.” 

He snaps, left handed, once, and, with a twinge of pain, the lights come on.

Hermann observes the change in illumination and reacts by flinching. He then correlates his observation with Newt’s snapping and looks at Newt, eyebrows pressed together, mouth open slightly. He then realizes that causation between the finger snap and the illumination is implied, but not explained by any conventional mechanism, at which point his expression changes from ‘startled hypothesizing’ to ‘total astonishment,’ which is, by far, the rarest of expressions in the Gottliebian Catalogue. Newt has, in fact, only witnessed this expression on three other occasions. One—the first time Hermann had connected Newt in the flesh with Newton Geiszler, Ph.D. Two—the time that a dermal sample from Yamarishi had, surprisingly, contained a macro version of a (fortunately detoxified) nematocyst that had, um, kind of discharged into Newt’s forearm and pinned him to his own lab bench until he’d had the Improbably Dreamy Intern unbolt the bone saw from the wall to cut through the thing. Three—the time that Newt had articulately, politely, and successfully advocated for funding Hermann’s quantum cartography project at the expense of kaiju immunological susceptibility profiling.

This is time number four, and it is unambiguously the best because when not mixed with horror or skepticism, Newt finds Gottliebian absolute astonishment to be ridiculously endearing. 

This is improving his mood by about eight thousand percent,

“What?” he says, in his most perfect approximation of absent-minded innocence, pure as unsplit light. “What’s that look?” 

“How did you—” Hermann begins, then looks at Newt again, his expression changing from astonishment into something Newt finds confusing—like he’s pulling answers straight off Newt’s face or out of his brain. It’s a weird look, a weird one; a look Newt doesn’t like. With the extreme caution of a guy sitting on an explosive stack of insight-disparity, Hermann asks, “have you been crying?”

This snaps him, straight and brief, to outrage-veiled despair.

“What?” Newt demands. “No. No, how can you even ask me that. That’s what you’re going to ask me. Out of all the things that you could be asking at this precise moment, that’s what you’re going with, the crying thing. What happened to you. A drive-by starvation diet. You look awful. Take a nap and eat a piece of pie or something. Stop being so compensatorily abstemious all the damned time. He tries for a dramatic exit, he tries hard, but Hermann is something like eight times faster than he is when it comes to reflexive responses and that’s on a goodday, so all Newt manages to do is shift backwards in preparation for a vertical energy expenditure before Hermann yanks one of his ankles forward and gets a hand clenched around a whole swath of Newt’s stupid sweater in a weirdly badass maneuver. Who reflexively destabilizes someone. These are some Jaeger-pilot level skills that Hermann is evincing, but Newt doesn’t care, Newt isn’t envious, Newt doesn’t think that’s cool, Newt has his own things going, his own things, like a rationalism vacation and helping the fish kids live up to their full intellectual potentials, and ignoring Mako, and being a jerk to nice people. 

He tries to communicate all of this to Hermann, EPIC Rapport style, by glaring, but even that’s not working out very well because he can’t get his glares up to maximum wattage when he’s exhausted, and it’s hard to hold on to the glaring wattage he does have when his face hurts and his eyes hurt, and when he is tired, god he is tired, he is justvery tired, very, and he does not particularly care for the way that he is being looked at right now by his colleague, not that it’s not a nice look, it is a nice look, that’s the problem with it, it’s a little too nice; it’s one that’s full of way too much sympathy and empathy and pity and Newton-I-get-your-soul-in-a-literal-way-a-way-so-literal-that-I-will-in-fact-give-you-a-five-hour-hug-as-you-weep-continuously-all-over-my-fancy-math-professor-outfit-with-narrow-lapels-or-not-it’s-up-to-you-buddy-you-take-your-time-and-decide-when-you-want-your-nervous-breakdown-to-be-I’ll-just-stay-over-here-helping-you-put-it-off-I’d-do-that-indefinitely-for-you-because-of-hard-to-explain-reasons-like-intellectual-admiration-and-the-guitar-thing-whatever-that-is-don’t-ask-me-I’ll-just-deny-it-and-also-I’d-do-it-out-of-professional-solidarity-and-respect-in-memory-of-all-those-times-we-tried-so-hard-to-map-the-boundaries-of-human-thought-and-extend-the-edges-of-human-knowledge-for-the-purpose-of-saving-our-species-those-were-some-good-times-and-worth-a-shoulder-cry-or-two-for-sure-also-keep-in-mind-that-we-live-in-the-future-and-dudes-can-cry-now-sometimes-it’s-a-thing-just-don’t-question-it-you-play-Portal-like-a-champ-that’s-literally-the-only-thing-that-matters-everyone-is-envious-of-you-so-it’s-fine-if-you-want-to-spend-weeks-and-weeks-just-sort-of-leaking-from-the-eyes-because-your-Portal-skills-and-your-academic-pedigree-just-allow-for-that-sort-of-thing-there’s-no-need-for-all-of-this-self-castigation-you’re-doing. 

Newt snaps his fingers again, and the lights go off.

That takes care of Dr. Gottlieb and his razor-edged, freakishly-specific, unspoken compassion quite nicely.

Newt will now lie back down and surrender all his remaining body heat to this floor in total thermal equilibration.

He does exactly that, turning away from Hermann, lying on his side, his cheek pressed to the cool wood of the floor, still holding his colleague’s phone.

“I do not understand why you are so upset,” Hermann says, sounding pretty upset himself. 

Newt does not clarify things for him.

Misery-silence ensues.

“Or, rather,” Hermann says, after giving misery-silence a good and respectful run, “I can think of many reasons for you to be chronically and acutely upset, but you. Newton, I do not understand why you can control the lights. I am extremely concerned that you are upset because you can control the lights.” 

Yeeeeeaaaaahhhhh, his brain says, following Hermann’s totally reasonable train of thought. Electric field manipulation as an epiphenomenon of the post-drift state. It would be a biological stretch, but I could see it; kaiju can generate EM pulses and communicate telepathically over unknown distances/dimensions, so it’s potentially plausible for Dr. Geiszler to get in on that game secondary to neural manipulation alone. The main barrier to successful electric field manipulation is straight up going to be your skull though, friend, bone is not very conductive. It’s going to block, not boost, signals originating from your cortex. It would be sick if you could turn your peripheral nervous system into some kind of transmitter of electromagnetic waves, but you lack a mechanism and you probably will, forever, because there are no more intact kaiju to study. Ever. So. Yeah. Have fun theorizing. Alternatively, lace your skull with something conductive and see if you can telepathically communicate with the real kids.

His neural copy chorus shrieks in longing anticipation of kaiju, redivivus. 

“Oh god,” Newt whispers, in response to his own brain.

“You can manipulate electric fields,” Hermann says in a hollow whisper. 

Pay attention to your external environment, his internal Hermann snaps. And to me. The real me. He is clearly quite worried because you are allowing him to proceed with a mistaken assumption. Tell him you put a chip in your hand, you insensitive cad. Because it is the chip. The chip sends a signal to the sensors you interfaced with the light switch, do not confuse yourself about this; do not confuse your colleague about this. 

“Er, yes,” Newt confirms, feeling overwhelmed by the conflict in his thoughts. He has a raging visceral urge to modify the plates of his skull into something electrically conductive, and he is simultaneously so terrified by the horrific, promising scope of his idea that he can’t quite organize a way to communicate to Hermann that he’s biohacked himself so well that it looks like an ability conferred by the drift, but it’s not. 

“Did you just discover this?” Hermann asks, taking this whole thing like a champ, super calm, minimally horrified.

The kids in his head hiss at him in wordless, sibilant demand.

No kids, he thinks. This is the team. The team is real me, fake you. The team is not real you, real me, and real holes drilled into my skull for the purposes of thought broadcast; we humans have a word for that scenario and that word is NEVER.

“Well, 'discover' isn’t really the word I’d pick,” Newt says, distracted, his thoughts fracturing as he tries to backtrack and correct his tergiversationist tendencies. He cannot think over the tide of alien demand in his head. “I just effected it.” 

“You—did this to yourself, in some way?” Hermann asks, increasingly perplexed but trying to hide it.

“I did it to myself in a controlled and precise manner,” Newt confirms, pressing his cheek to the cold floor, curling up, and attempting to map the current borders of Team Geiszler. “Yes. Not a—not a hive-mind thing. Don’t freak out.”

“How did you do it?” Hermann asks.

Newt would love to say any one of about eight thousand things in response to that question. 

Unfortunately, there are other things happening in his head right now. 

There would be two options, his brain says, torturing him. The first would be to just drill yourself a massive cranial window and see if that got you anywhere. Maybe, if you didn’t have a skull, you could hear them. The real kids. The real kids. You put them where they are and you can’t help them; the least you can do is listen. Listen to them. Listen.

Listen, the kids hiss. 

The least you can do is talk to them, his brain says.

The least you can do, the kids echo. Talk.

Stop, Newt replies, his head snapping back, both hands coming to his temples. Stop stop stop stop stop. Please stop.

Pay attention, not-Hermann snaps.

The second option, his brain continues, would be to drill multiple holes, small ones, and then wire yourself up, dura to dermis. Reception, transmission, it might work, what it really would depend on, what both solutions would depend on, would be your ability transduce over-the-air electromagnetic waves into sensical thoughts. 

“Newton,” Hermann says.

This is insane, kiddo, Caitlin Lightcap chimes in.

No more biohacking, Newt shouts at his mental chorus.

I wasn’t suggesting you’d do it, his brain says. Someone else can do the drilling. I’m not completely reckless.

‘Are you kidding me?’ he snaps, bringing one hand down on the mental conference table, ‘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,’ but something’s putting tension on his nervous system and searing stereo loathing or stereo longing straight into his head; no one knows which it is, not the cut-up 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—

“Newton,” Hermann shouts, short and sharp and forceful in an azure tinted tone. “Newton, you are fine. Please relax; it does not matter if you can affect electric fields, it does not matter—”

He is—

He isn’t.

What is happening, exactly?

He feels strange.

His thoughts come warm and slow; his heart beats wild and fast.

“Newton,” Hermann says. “Say something.”

“Something?” Newt echoes, not sure what he’s doing here, lying half on the floor and half on top of his colleague; is this a thing they do now. Why is it so dark? 

“Something else,” Hermann says,

I think you had a thing, his brain says. One of those things that sometimes you have.

Sometimes I have. Newt echoes his brain.

The kids hiss, vengeful and remote.

“Um,” Newt says, trying to think of literally anything and choking slightly on the surprise blood that’s coming down the back of his oropharynx. “Why is it so dark?”

“Because the Earth rotates on its axis, and you insist on turning off the lights by snapping,” Hermann says, pulling him up into a semi-seated position, Newt’s back to his chest. 

That’s weird—what’s the deal with that, exactly?

Newt can sit, thanks.

Probably he can?

It’s kind of nice though, so Newt’s not going to start a fight about it or anything. He’s not a huge fan of misery and strange brain phenomena and possibly losing his mind, but he is a fan of people being nice to him; he’s getting used to it, so he just kind of goes with the whole thing and doesn’t fight to retain his muscle tone. 

Verticalness. 

This is good.

The ratio of blood going down the back of his throat to blood coming out the front of his face has shifted to favor the latter. 

He presses a sweater sleeve to his nose. 

Hermann yanks a handkerchief out of his jacket pocket and hands it to Newt. “Do make an effort to put an expeditious stop to your epistaxis, won’t you?”

“Yeah,” Newt says, because that seems like a good idea. 

It’s dark.

Hermann had said something about that.

Something including ‘Earth’ and ‘rotation’ and ‘lights’ and ‘snapping.’

Concepts slot back into place and drag whole swaths of context with them—his six degrees, RFID, a lonely day, and Mako. Someone in his head had been thinking about cranial windows, but only Spider-Man villains biohack their way to imagined telepathic restitution.

“Hermann,” he says, kind of indistinctly through the handkerchief he’s holding to his face. “Don’t freak out.”

“Oh?” Hermann says. “You have enough theory of mind to realize that the past twenty minutes of my existence has consisted of finding you in a state of collapse, observing you control our light fixtures remotely, and failing to prevent your descent into total panic of unknown etiology that looked suspiciously akin to a seizure prodrome but fortunately was not. How gratifying for me.”

“Well,” Newt says, feeling slightly sharper, like a guy with a conjunct mnemonic landscape and ever-increasing cognitive capacity, “I had an unusual day. 

“Every day is an unusual day for you,” Hermann says. “Give me my phone.”

“No,” Newt says, tightening his grip on the appropriated piece of Gottliebian hardware that he is, miraculously, still holding. “I can explain.”

“Please do so,” Hermann says.

“The thing with the lights is not a creepy post-drift epiphenomenon thing; I did that myself. With technology. Human technology made by humans. Conventional. Clever, but conventional.”

Hermann immediately snaps his fingers like the baller hypothesis-tester that he is.

The lights do not go on.

Newt smiles faintly in the dark. “Good thought,” he says. “The other thing, the silent-freak-out thing, that’s been happening with decreasing frequency for weeks now, is like, it’s like, well, I think it’s a metabolically expensive state. A lot of pathways get revved up at the same time and I just don’t think I can neurochemically support that and keep talking and maintaining total situational awareness and stuff; I am guessing my EEG looks like crap when that happens, but it’s getting better and it’s always self-limited.”

“So far,” Hermann snaps.

“So far,” Newt agrees politely. 

Hermann makes a very precise show of straightening Newt’s half turned up collar and aligning it with his overlayered sweater. “It looks very alarming,” he says, “if you care to know.”

“Well it feels very alarming,” Newt replies. “Though, maybe not as alarming as the hunting thing.”

“Are you still bleeding?” Hermann asks.

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

“Are you guessing?” Hermann asks.

“No,” Newt says, balling the cloth up in one hand and tipping his head back against Hermann’s shoulder. 

Hermann sighs and adjusts the grip he has on Newt to something that more approximates I-am-trying-to-assist-your-peripheral-circulation-by-repetitive-arm-rubbing than I-am-clutching-your-dead-body. “Try not to bleed,Newton, honestly.”

“Can I tell you a thing?” Newt asks.

“I wish you would,” Hermann says.

“I feel pretty bad about the whole Mako situation,” Newt says. “Pretty outrageously, excruciatingly bad.”

If this evident non sequitur surprises Hermann, he doesn’t let on. 

“Ah,” Hermann replies delicately. “I thought you might, once you communicated with her. But you should feel nothing of the kind. You have been. You should not feel that you acted inappropriately in any way. Because you have not.”

“You are going to ruin me,” Newt says. “You can’t give me this kind of latitude, dude, I will walk all over you and the rest of the world. I will do it more.”

“How insightful,” Hermann says dryly. “What makes you mention Ms. Mori. Did you read her letters?”

Oh god, Newt thinks. Her letters.

“No,” Newt says. “No, she called me. I answered.”

“Ah,” Hermann says. “How did that go?”

“She is—“ Newt says, trying to finish his sentence but not doing it because his face is a little bit paralyzed with total misery and his vocal chords have spasmed shut. 

Good thing he doesn’t need air.

Oxygen, man, his brain says. So weird. Metabolic poison turned respiratory requirement.

Myeah, Newt replies weakly, trying not to dissolve in his own acute psychological distress. 

“I imagine she is quite unhappy,” Hermann says, “despite having achieved so much of what she desired for so long.”

Newt nods, because yes. 

“I would also imagine that she was relieved to hear from you,” Hermann says. 

Newt nods, because also yes.

Hermann leaves it there and says nothing more.

Newt also says nothing because there’s nothing he can say that won’t read as a pathetic insight into his own personal insecurities and because he thinks Hermann won’t get it; Hermann has had to break away from people instead of spending his life in obnoxious attempts to get in on something, anything, that had the feel of a real and permanent deal. Mako, though, Mako was different, Mako is different, Mako has done both the breaking free and the getting in because Mako is a baller, Mako is great at everything, Mako is kind of like Newt but better, so much better, and she loves him, not because he is smart, but because he is stupid sometimes and because he watchedBlue Planet with her and because of the things that they did together, just Newt and Mako, doing those things. Hermann won’t get it, or, maybe, Hermann won’t get why Newt never got it, or maybe it’s just that Hermann has always gotten the whole thing too well because he emailed Newt’s parents and his uncle out of courtesy to let them know Newt wasn’t dead, but Hermann never emailed Mako and maybe that was because he didn’t want to talk to the PPDC in any capacity but maybe it was for another reason, another reason all together. 

Hermann pats his shoulder in an encouraging uber-British way, as if Newt is holding a cup of tea with admirably steady hands rather than lying in his lap in the near dark, not talking, slightly crying, like an emo Jedi-hipster. 

Ugh.

All the emo Jedi go bad.

“Please don’t compare yourself to a fantasy franchise in a misleadingly futuristic setting in which worth is genetically determined,” Hermann murmurs. “You do not belong in the Star Wars universe. No one with a rational thought in their head belongs there.”

“SPECTER Effectered,” Newt replies, his voice doing a familiar misery crack. “You think I’m rational?”

“Extremely,” Hermann says.

“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” Newt offers.

“It most certainly is not,” Hermann replies. 

“Tempted though I am to make you list, I’ve maxed out my friend-tormenting quota for the day. So I therefore submit to you that while ‘ghost-drifting’ in the colloquially understood sense of the word is not real, the SPECTER Effect totally is. Come on. I definitely didn’t say that emo Jedi thing aloud. That is super specific, dude.”

“When you are upset, you tend to perseverate on determinism in the Star Wars universe,” Hermann says, fixing Newt’s hair and then immediately fixing it again in the same manner, and then again, and again, and again, in a slow, evolving iteration of continuous hair-fixing. “I know this about you. I did not even need to drift to know this about you. You have been doing it for years.”

“Well it just seems so unfair,” Newt says. “All those Skywalkers just having miserable times of it for no real reason other than pseudo-mystical cosmic suckage. They just loved people, you know. Leia doesn’t even want to get in on that crap it’s so messed up.”

“Well,” Hermann says, humoring him way way way way way more than usual. “Princess Leia is terribly discerning.”

“I just object,” Newt says, in displaced misery. “I object to the whole thing.”

“And yet,” Hermann says, “here you are, still perseverating.”

“You think you’re so great,” Newt says. “Just living your life with no Star Wars related personal baggage.”

“If you do not feel inclined to elaborate upon your conversation with Ms. Mori, I would appreciate it if you would instead explain your ability to affect the lights by snapping.” Hermann says.

“Myeah,” Newt says, gearing up. 

He’s thought a lot about how to explain this to Hermann, because, at a first approximation, if he were to just straight-up say ‘biohacking’, or even the more technically accurate 'dermal RFID chip implantation', Hermann is not going to go for that. Not at all. Hermann has a thing about anything even remotely related to self-experimentation. Newt really isn’t sure where this particular personal weirdness comes from, because self-experimentation is something of an historic norm, at least in the life sciences, (rock on Barry Marshall, Albert Hofmann, and literally every Spider-Man villain ever) but Hermann is not into that.

Or rather, previously he wasn’t. 

Newt thinks he might be now though, if Newt plays his cards right. 

“It’s a computational-based efficiency thing,” he says, like a mostly-dead total champion. “I just wanted to do some algorithmic optimization of daily life, it’s actually more a you thing than a me thing. It’s radio frequency based. No weird hive-mind/Jedi-mind-trick stuff, dude, just computational efficiency. Old school.”

“Meaning?” Hermann says, sounding not at all opposed. 

This is the tricky part, because there’s no way around mechanistic explanations here, and if Hermann freaks out about the biohacking now, he will continue to freak out about it for the foreseeable future, which will be unfortunate, because Hermann stands to benefit a lot from this. 

So. 

Strategy. 

Newt couldn’t ask for a better set-up than his current one, in which his total, observable exhaustion has stripped the edge right off Hermann’s argumentative tendencies to the point that the guy is totally rocking a, ‘no, Scully, don’t turn into an alien and die in this Antarctic space ship,’ type vibe at the moment. Other than the obvious benefits, extreme Gottliebian solicitousness is always a good sign because Hermann has so much thought-momentum that he can’t pull an emotional one-eighty and shift his mood on a dime, at least he couldn’t, pre-drift. Newt’s not sure about how emotionally labile post-drift Hermann might be. Probably there’s no difference, unless the guy’s brain turns Absolut Geiszler on him. So. Now all Newt needs to do is just say the perfect thing in the perfect manner. He can’t conceal the part about the chip being in his hand. That would be a mistake. If Hermann has to work for a mechanism, he’s going to be pissed about it. 

So. A perspicuous mechanistic explanation delivered with all the Victorian Suffering that Newt can bring to bear should do the trick. 

“Eh,” Newt says, tipping his head back fractionally against Hermann’s shoulder and going for maximum enervated pathos. “It’s pretty pedestrian—there are sensors in our wiring that now respond to a dermal RFID chip in my dominant hand.”

“Hmm,” Hermann says, unimpressed.

Newt is an amazing, interpersonal savant when it comes to his drift-partner turned life-partner.

“So this is not a side effect of your unique cortical wiring? Hermann says dryly, still iteratively fixing Newt’s hair in a very acceptable way. 

“No,” Newt admits, betraying no victorious sentiments. “I have no cool powers post-brain scrambling, other than a whole bunch of your skill sets. Some of which are pretty good, I guess, if one enjoys kicking ass at Go and a desires a flair for aggressive driving, which I do not desire, actually.”

“Well I must say I’m relieved,” Hermann replies. 

“You like it?” Newt says snapping twice in quick succession and flaring the lights. “I did it for you.” 

“I fail to see how such a thing could possibly be the case,” Herman replies, catching Newt’s hand in time to abort snap number three and examining the small square of taped-down gauze in the dim light.

“I did myself first, to make sure the hardware was functional,” Newt says, cleverly avoiding the tag ‘pilot experiment’, which is, of course, how he had conceptualized it to himself. “I figured you’d like it. I figured you would not like the snapping though, so you can do a silent flick, if that’s your preference. The flick is pretty robust, but since you don’t have the simultaneous sound cue you’ve got to be a little more directional about it. If you’re right next to the switch you can do a proximity wave. So, to summarize, for the overhead lights you have a triple choice of cue. Sound,” he says, pulling his hand out of Hermann’s grip and snapping twice, “rapid directional vector,” he says, flicking twice, “or proximity. For the coffee machine, stove, and isolated lights it’s proximity only.” 

“You’ve been busy,” Hermann says, in poorly concealed xeric envy. 

“Meh,” Newt replies, not above twisting the knife of intellectual superiority when he finds it in his hand. “It wasn’t hard.”

So suave, his brain says encouragingly. You are doing awesome.

Hermann is probably rolling his eyes right now.

“You want one?” Newt asks. 

“No,” Hermann says.

“You do a little bit,” Newt replies. 

“I don’t,” Hermann says, like a guy who is totally lying through his teeth.

“Dude,” Newt says. “I get that you have a front to maintain, but like, hear me out on this one. A) it’s convenient. B) it’s efficient. C) it saves time; this is a big thing for you. D) my ability to control our local environment by hand motions is going to irritate the heck out of you if you can’t do it too. E) you think it’s cool. F) it is cool. G) I did this for you actually, because I am thoughtful, so you can tell me that you don’t want it, but eventually you’re going to cave because you do want it, I know you do, it’s just a thing I know, so why wait. Why torment yourself with needless restraint for days while watching me gesturally influence electric fields like a baller. Also. I will do it in the most annoying way dude, the most,” he breaks off to snap twice, “annoying,” he does another double snap, “way.” 

Hermann says nothing.

Newt double snaps again. 

“Fine,” Hermann replies, in dignified defeat, “you may implant me with an RFID chip. Later. Not tonight. He resumes his attempt to fix Newt’s hair, an exercise that has about as much promise as a military campaign launched into a Siberian winter. 

“You are making the right choice,” Newt says, shutting his eyes. 

“Do you have any intention of getting off the floor at any point in the near future? Hermann asks.

“No,” Newt says, meaning ‘yes,’ meaning, ‘this is probably moderately physically uncomfortable for you,’ meaning, ‘I’m sensitive to the fact that you want me to be insensitive to the fact that this is uncomfortable for you,’ meaning, ‘I will get off this floor any time now, I’m surprised it hasn’t happened already,’ meaning, ‘this iterative hair fixing thing is kind of working for me, what’s that about even.’ 

Hermann sighs. 

“I’m going to start working on a talk,” Newt says, because it’s productive to procrastinate by engaging in academic goal setting. This proclivity explains a lot about him, possibly. “For UC Berkeley Neuroscience. Entirely prospective. Maybe they’ll let me give it to, ah, only the faculty?”

“Good,” Hermann says, like that wouldn’t be a violation of a scientific shibboleth; like it’s normal to abandon decades of work and switch fields entirely at age thirty-five; like a faculty-only presentation is common practice in academia, where the ethos of the enterprise is training up the new guard to slowly and metaphorically devour the old; like what he’s saying is reasonable; like what he’s doing is reasonable; and like this hair-petting thing is a thing they’ve always done, which it is not, except for the lying on the floor part, Newt does a lot of that, generally and historically speaking. 

“You’re so great,” Newt says, eyes closed, head tipped back, his core temperature increasing by the second. “Really terrible, but also great. Sui generis. They’re never going to let me do that.” 

“Probably not, no,” Hermann says. “But the odds are not zero. You are extremely well known. You may be able to use this as leverage to avoid a talk entirely.”

“I’ve never heard of anyone who was such an academic prima donna that they refused to give a job talk,” Newt says.

“I can only imagine what such a person might be like,” Hermann replies dryly.

Newt sighs.

“Do not fall asleep here, Newton,” Hermann says. 

“Impossible,” Newt says. “Categorically.”

“Incorrect,” Hermann replies. “Evidence directly contradicts your claim.”

“What, you’re an empiricist now?” Newt asks, yeah, maybe a little bit inarticulately.

“I have always been an empiricist, Newton,” Hermann replies. 

“Lies,” Newt says agreeably. Why are you repetitively fixing my hair?” he asks, as a stand-in for ‘why are you being so nice to me, I mean, I know you’re a nice guy but not generally into surface niceness because of its inherent interpersonal vulnerability, sooooo, is it that you trust me not to be a dick about it. Or is it that you literally find me so pathetic that you don’t think I have the capacity to make you feel bad about yourself because I do, dude, or at least I think I do?’

Newt says none of these things out loud.

Newt is so freaking smart. 

It’s unreal, actually.

“I confess I have been curious about whether your hair is practically fixable, since you seem to have so little success with it,” Hermann says, in non-answer to Newt’s non-question.

“We are so perfect for each other,” Newt announces, apropos of communication via miscommunication. “That’s why I bought you an RFID chip. 

“Well thank you, Newton, I appreciate the sentiment.”

“Mmm,” Newt says, reflected-appreciation style.

Hermann sighs in a totally world-weary way that Newt gets, that he gets hardcore, in the tired, packed together bones of his wrists, where all his restlessness usually lives. 

This is a weird vibe they’re rocking right now, at this moment, a new vibe, a totally different and weird vibrational frequency. But maybe their current waveform can just go from being an atypical thing to a typical thing; it could be a new trend, a sub-genre of the Decade of Mutual Admiration. He needs a name for it though, if he’s going to coin a phrase, set a trend. Science bonding. Eh, that’s no good, there’s actually no science happening now and they’re already pretty bonded, like, honestly, he doesn’t see them bonding more, because how would that even work. Misery cuddle. Eh, he’s pretty sure that they aren’t people who ‘cuddle’ even when they are, kind of definitely and unambiguously ‘cuddling. Overlapping Personal Environments for Neuronal Solidarity. OPENS. Nah, that’s definitely a super weird acronym. Co-Localization Of Self with Epic rapport Drift partner. CLOSED. That’s not better, but it wasn’t meant to be, it was just a demonstration to himself that he’s pretty great with acronyms, which, of course, he is. Obviously. What was he thinking about. Vibes. He was thinking about vibes, waveforms, string theory, new things, Leto Atreides the first and second, Star Wars VIII and its painful and metaphorical endurance trial of the soul, Mount Doom, a little bit, where they’re both Frodo and both Sam, if Sam had a little bit more of a body-art thing and Frodo cooked, or something like that, maybe reversed, there’s a good case to be made for Newt being Frodo, but Hermann’s the emo one, except for maybe today; it’s hard to say you’re not the emo one when you’re the one rolling around on the floor, but, on the other hand, Hermann shouts at military types about the ‘language of god’, and that is so emo Newt can’t even write a song about it, that’s how emo it is. So yeah, everyone has their own emocore days and their own stoic days, or, in Newt’s case, their own stoic sets of minutes. Stoicism. Yep. There are a lot of dead people in the sphere of humans known by Newt Geiszler, but he got, like, inverse adopted by Mako. Usually, he would be choosing her because he is older, and maybe, in a way, he had chosen her, but the thing about Mako is that Mako doesn’t get adopted, Mako adopts.

This explains everything perfectly. 

Newt has never been formally adopted before.

That’s neat.

He’s tired. 

The silence sounds much louder than it should, and every so often the kids flash disorganized images of carnage across the back of his mind like confused offerings. 

“Mako and I are half-siblings,” Newt says. “That’s a thing now.” 

“I think you are falling asleep,” Hermann replies, very quiet, not dry at all, still hair fixing.

“I’m not,” Newt says, cracking an eye. 

“You are, it is a minor miracle, and we should treat it as such,” Hermann replies. 

“But Mako,” Newt says.

Consciousness and cognizance, dead Caitlin Lightcap sings, in a recollected, drunken tribute half a decade old and half a world away. Combine to dissonance. You insightful bastard, Geiszler. You brilliant, absolute bastard. 

“Get up,” Hermann says, “you cannot sleep here.”

“Mako likes me though,” Newt says, as they help each other to their feet. “Did you know that she likes me?”

“I was aware of that, yes,” Hermann says, pressing him in the direction of the couch. 

“You should have told me that, probably,” Newt says. “I tell you when people like you. Like Flow. Flow thinks you’re the cool one. I’m not sure how she got that idea, but yeah.” 

Hermann sighs. “Lie down,” he says. “Literally everyone you meet spends a period of variable duration despising you before you eventually win them over. They then exist in a perpetual state of annoyed torment for the rest of their lives.”

“Well I’m going to be honest with you, that does not sound like ‘liking’,” Newt says, nonplussed and getting pushed onto the couch. He finds horizontalness to really be working for him. “You can see why I might be confused. But I think that only describes you actually,” Newt says.

“Possibly,” Hermann replies. 

“Mako likes me,” Newt says. 

“I, also, ‘like you’, Newton, you do realize that, correct?” Hermann says, sitting on the floor at the base of the couch one elbow propped on the cushions, his forehead pressed against his hand.

“Oh my god, dude,” Newt says, giving Hermann a semi-targeted shoulder pat. “Yes. Yes; have you not noticed that I am extremely intelligent. I get this whole Newt-I-will-save-your-brain, Newt-you-are-going-to-get-pneumonia, Newt-let-me-just-buy-you-a-wardrobe thing that you’ve got going. I get it, man. We have a whole, complicated, thing. You bought me fish.”

“Yes,” Hermann agrees.

Newt reaches up and rakes his own hair into instant disarray.

Hermann fixes it.