Designations Congruent with Things: Chapter 23

All the emo Jedi go bad.

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

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: None.

Chapter 23

The sun is on the other side of the building, the Wall is a 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 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 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 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 prefabbed collection of materials. 

You make a terrible role model. I don’t think that socially accepted activities for children include your current pursuits, his brain says, being Hermann, as it’s 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’m a literal rock star and an intellectual rockstar.

His brain doesn’t have a smartass response to that one.

Ha.

Newt sterilizes his hands with the ethanol-based gel.

He rolls his shoulders, mostly for show, then sits at the table, not contaminating anything. 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 places his left hand 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 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 personal overlord. He’s arranged a joint concession here, because while he’s said a resounding, “Yes to sterility!” in good Gottliebian fashion, he’s said an equally resounding, “No to rolling up shirt-sleeves and sterilizing 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 on 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 and 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 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 marks the line he’ll cut with the pen. It’s short and positioned in the center 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 he’s not sure he likes but not sure he objects to either; there’s some reward-based neurochemistry going on here, because the acute and noxious scalpel stimulus is blending with something cognitively satisfying, not in the hive mind-style intense reward for drifting way, but in a way that instead approximates gratification.

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 wouldn’t 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’s 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 (punk) rock solidity. 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, because he doesn’t exactly have a free hand at the moment. “Speaker.”

His phone doesn’t respond.

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

His phone lights up in acknowledgment.

“Hey Maks.” He uses the scalpel to extend the incision just 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. The point is, I’m holding a scalpel handle with my non-dominant hand and I have a (sterile) scalpel blade slicing into 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’s silence on the other end of the line.

“Yup,” Newt says pathetically.

There’s 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 the 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 oneself 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’s at this point that Mako begins screaming at him in Japanese.

Miraculously, Newt doesn’t 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 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, 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 in English, 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 puts 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 in the background, snapping at someone who isn’t 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 a physical struggle.

“Hiiii.” Newt draws out the word. 

Mako says nothing.

The bones of Newt’s face ache, and he tips his head ceiling-ward and tries, tries, tries to salvage something, anything from the wasteland of rejected messages he’s dictated to 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? As a term, it’s 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’s voice is 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 wasn’t 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 maybe have a thing with Mako where there’s not a boxing up and a moving on but a thing that lasts even after the world didn’t end. There must still be a chance to save this, there must be, because she called you. 

“Um.” Newt’s voice cracks and his vision blurs. “How are you?”

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

Okay, good. He, too, can lie.

Lying is the easiest. 

Newt shakes the saline out of his eyes and picks up his only slightly blurred tweezers. “Cool, yeah, me too,” he replies, misleadingly representing relative measures as absolute ones.

“Newt.” Mako’s voice torques back up into acute distress. “I read an article in Wired.”

“Ah.” Newt is full of trepidation because Mako doesn’t usually read Wired and also because there’s a terrible momentum behind her words 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 the 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 continues heroically, “What was it about?”

“You,” Mako says. 

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

“Yes,” Mako says.

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

“It speculated you retreated from public scrutiny for medical rather than personal reasons. It speculated 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 particular angle, the Mako-being-worried angle; he’d thought about the Marshal, and about the people who were dead, and about the green bottle of Midori Mako had held in her hand the day after the Breach had been, had been—had been not just shut but annihilated; he hadn’t thought about himself in the context of Mako Mori’s worldview, because, well, ever since Mako had turned eighteen and hadn’t been put in a Jaeger, things had been different between them. Newt had been, he’d been just so relieved, because the Jaeger pilot thing, with a few notable exceptions, was a thing for life, and then your life was short. But Mako had been so angry and Newt had gotten that, yeah he had, because, man, her simulator scores, but—he was pretty sure that once Mako had stopped being a kid, had totally stopped, once she’d burned away every childish part of her—well, Newt had been pretty sure she’d started to find him 16.78 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’s out on that one, but from a medical criteria standpoint I arguably do have it, yeah. 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. 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 really sorry that you thought I was a little bit dead or suffering horribly for weeks. Because mostly I was fine.”

“I missed you,” Mako whispers.

“Me too, except reverse style.” Newt’s voice cracks but not much, just slightly, just a little bit. 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, then uses his forceps to delicately appose the two edges. It looks awesome. It probably won’t even 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’s throwing up, there’s 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’ll 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 hears her draw a preparatory breath and it yanks him out of the solidifying and safe trajectory he thought he’d put them 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, 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 psychologically dangerous territory. He’s not sure Mako knows how to do it either; Mako, who’s turned increasingly internally; Mako, who’s sharpened herself on the grindstone of her own willpower into something without needless parts.

“I think everyone did the right things,” Newt says, 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 to the point that the potential energy of his phrase maxes out to a full stop. “I think everyone did all the right things. Um, especially you, Maks. You most of all.”

“It doesn’t feel like it,” Mako replies.

“Well it never does, really,” 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 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 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 she was able to turn her whole 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,” Newt says 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’s vocal cords 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 wipes 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 saved me from getting eaten or maybe a different thing; I’m not sure about the story there.”

“I did?” Mako sniffs.

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

“We did,” Mako says. 

“Meh. 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. And uh, suave subject change: what’s the deal? Are you or are you not dating your blond friend? What’s the story there?”

“What ‘blond friend’?” Mako asks.

“Maks. Come on. You know the one I mean. Tall, 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’m 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’re biological half siblings.” Newt hopes 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, for some reason, strays a little bit from the non-weeping thing they’ve had going for a good half-minute now.

“Yeah.” Newt’s pretty sure he knows where her train of thought is headed but he’s 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 some people are dead while other people try 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’s 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 asks.

Except right, he’d started to say something, then stopped. Great.

“Yeah,” he says, trying to fix the 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 need to say something other than meaningless placeholder words.

I’m sorry the Marshal blew himself up during that underwater battle for the future of mankind, Newt tries. I know he was kind of though not explicitly, your dad, a little bit. On the plus side, it probably doesn’t hurt 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’ve 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 by 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 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 need to watch out for—so square jawed and Australian and stuff,’ which wasn’t 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; I 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 detail—”

Mako is laughing.

Well, either laughing or crying, or maybe it’s laughing and crying; his logic gates are turning very sloppy right now, but Newt is pretty sure that the smart money is, mostly, on Mako laughing. 

“Mako,” Newt says, “why are you laughing? This is a 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 that takes him straight back to when she was a kid. 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 puts down his forceps and carefully prods his glued-shut surgical cut. It’s 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 peels 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’m 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 don’t think I’ve ever seen you drunk. Have you ever been drunk? I think I might find it 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 begins. “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 rolls into the paper drape the kit had been wrapped in. 

“On that day, on the day after, I mean.” Mako speaks quietly and high-pitched and muffled, like she’s 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. 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 doesn’t know the right thing to say. 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 lose touch with reality and die, it’ll be one of the last things to go.” 

“Not funny.” Mako’s voice cracks.

Not 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.”

“Soooo true,” Newt smiles an askew smile and picks up his phone in his aching hand. He puts the green bundled remains of his sterile field in the trash. 

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

“Kids.” Newt returns to the kitchen table and drops back into his chair. “They’re calling them ‘kids’ these days, Maks.”

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

“Historically,” Newt begins, but she 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’s head comes up, his gaze snapping to the Wall as though vision can 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’ll never see. 

“So are you 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’s Geiszler. 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. “Never, Mako. Not ever.”

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

“Myeah, okay,” Newt replies. 

“It was hard for him,” she says. 

“I—I am sure it was, Maks.”

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

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

“Yes but I—” Mako breaks 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 feels 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,” then tries to determine how this might relate to metaphorical sharks. His brain is 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 hears it in her voice, he feels 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 tradeoffs.”

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

That was classlessly literal. His brain sounds 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 I should have said, because I didn’t think I could say them and be who I wanted to be. What I wanted to be.”

“Maybe you couldn’t.” Newt feels like someone needs to stick up for poor, past-Mako, who’d tried so hard and who’d 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 was time to swing for the metaphorical fences or go die in a hole.”

“I wish that I’d said more to him,” Mako whispers. “I—I sometimes—it’s 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 didn’t know everything I would have said, if I’d 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 don’t 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 overwhelming despair. He hopes Mako won’t turn whatever she’s feeling—her grief, her guilt, her anger—into yet another indictment against herself. 

“Yeah.” Newt musters his defense of Mako against Mako. “Okay, sure, I get what you’re saying, at least conceptually, and I’m not really experienced with the magnitude of loss you’re talking about, I’ll just 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 Junior Intern went back to MIT. Don’t try to tell me he didn’t know what he was doing there. So, yeah, did you ever call 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, to me the whole thing you guys had going never looked like an artificial distance imposed by you. It looked like an admiration thing. So don’t tell me I’m being ‘polite’ when I say I think he knew how you felt, Mako, because I’m not polite. I’m not sure if you know this, but sometimes, historically, previously, I’d 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 they always talk about with ‘boundary setting’ and he taught you what you need to know to get through life, right? Like how to knee a guy in the crotch and then pull out his larynx or something; the stuff where he filled out paperwork for you and took you to doctors appointments you hated and taught you scary levels of self discipline. He did all 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.’ 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 finishes, not quite holding it together, “Maks, do NOT tell me you think he didn’t know whole giant swaths of all that unsaid stuff. You guys had what you had. It doesn’t matter what you called it, it matters what it was. And it was awesome.”

“I wish I’d said it all clearly,” Mako whispers. “I wish he could have known what I wanted to express in the way 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 doesn’t say anything to negate her statement. 

“I’ve learned from the trades I made,” Mako says, “and from the things I’ve 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 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 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 I tried to be too angry to live. That’s 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 you were the only one left to be in it. I wanted you to know 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 anything, and I didn’t do the right things and I thought maybe you had brain damage like that article said. Like the one said in Wired. I thought maybe you hated me, I hoped 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. 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 I never told you. 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 again and again. That’s why I said at a party one night that you were my half-brother. I wanted to read it in the tabloids. 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 Mako Mori 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. 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 Mako would be able to hear him anyway.

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

Mako sniffs. “What?”

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

“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 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 don’t think we need to explain that,” Mako says. “Some things just are.”

“Mako, ugh.” Newt cracks an unsteady smile, “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 repopularized science for the first time since the Cold War?”

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

“Waaait, did you really?”

“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 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. 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.”

“You’re blowing off an interview for this?” Newt asks.

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

“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 I can talk with you. Where are you? 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. He gives her his address.

“Now,” Mako says, stepping 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 runs 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’s easily alarmed these days, let me tell you, especially when it comes to things that involve me being cavalier with—”

“No,” Mako says. “Not biohacking. 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 finishes, with reliable, perfect brilliance. 

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

“That’s true,” Newt admits. “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. Y’know. The impersonal thrust and slash of the ‘i’ dotting and ‘t’ crossing bureaucracy in which we live our lives. If someone demonstrates mental continuity with the anteverse, then someone else will need to at least demonstrate a prayer of discontinuity, because of social contracts and reasonable expectations of civilizational 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’s voice is 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 everyone who talks to me is conveniently forgetting we were almost 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, 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, is important, Maks, like, it shouldn’t be left out of the picture. Everyone keeps doing that. It makes me feel tragically misunderstood.”

“Do you have seizures now?” Mako asks.

“I don’t, actually,” Newt replies. “So far, I mean. I had three total, all while hooked up to some invasive equipment, but, apparently, if you’re a trained neurologist and you look at my baseline EEG, it’s 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 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 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’s true, won’t help my sleeplessness. Maks, god, you don’t care about this. Um, GABA is like an inhibitory neurotransmitter, brakes for the brain, whatever, the point is, my life isn’t that hard; it’s just a little weird right now. I’m fine. You shouldn’t worry about me. You have other things going on. Whole swaths of other things.”

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

“Myeahh.” Newt draws out the word, feeling weird, feeling kinda 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 isn’t good for the team. Drifting will probably kill this team actually, or give this team intractable epilepsy and even more of a 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 skates 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 most ways, even the Breach, 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, 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, but he won and he said no, he stopped them and he cut them up. “It’s actually,” he says, and he hears the vagueness in his own voice, he hears 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—” 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.

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 and appreciative annotation. 

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

Go team! Newt flashes 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 replies, confused. This isn’t my area. I gave astrophysics a pass.

Half of you did, 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 shouts.

“Nothing is wrong with me, Maks, come on,” he replies, because 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 panic-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 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 kinda 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, even if you weren’t actually there, 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; 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 hard for me to handle my own brain right now while 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 stares at the ceiling he can see now; that’s cool. He feels 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 with unconcealed exhaustion that he tries to correct by manifesting indignation out of the ether with limited success. “I pay rent. We live 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 like some people I could name, but it is, nevertheless, a reproducible phenomenon. I’m not sure if you knew that. But it’s a thing. And active, ongoing thing.” 

“I knew that,” Mako says. “I’m glad you aren’t alone.” 

“Myeah,” Newt says. “So, speaking of not-alone-ness, what’s 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 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’s not boring,” Mako says.

“Ha!” Newt replies, 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 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’s 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.”

“Don’t call him boring then,” Mako replies, “because he isn’t. 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 that way as well. The theoretically extrapolative way. Very theoretical. Highly extrapolative. To be clear, not empirically. Because I wouldn’t know about human drifting. You’re 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 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?

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

“Mako, hey, gotta go, I sort of turned the kitchen table that I share with Hermann into a sterile field so 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 PhDs 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 doesn’t think Hermann would do well with the kids in his head; Hermann’s a little too good at integrating disparate neural patterns to not break down into sympathetic insanity if that happens to him; they’re lucky it didn’t. No, they’re 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, he was the 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’s 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’s thoughts snap 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’ll wear sunglasses and I’ll wear a scarf over my hair and you’ll wear a hat that I pick for you and we’ll talk where no one can hear us and you will tell me the things you wish to tell me.”

“Aw Maks,” Newt says. 

“I missed you,” Mako says.

“Yeah.”

“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 goodbye-ish 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 he still exists on the other end of the set of circuits in her hand.

Newt texts her back, dictating to his phone because his eyes hurt too much to type. He feels like an overdrawn account, like he won’t get up off this floor very easily, like he’s a guy coming down off a weeks-long terror high to find his bone marrow has let demand outstrip supply while his central processor burns through metaphorical power reserves, fusing more than a few relays in the process.

What’s 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. The movement feels laborious, the air suspiciously viscous with resistance.

“Don’t fall asleep here,” he says, letting gravity drag his hand back toward the core of the Earth, feeling the normal force at every point of his spine pressed against the wood of the floor. “That would be so stupid.”

Ugh, on a scale of Stoic to post-Aeneas-Dido-immolating-herself-on-a-Carthaginian-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 observes, 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. He won’t fall asleep here. 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 snaps 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 he doesn’t 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 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. Tragically, Newt’s not sure what it means by “this” or “best.” He’s flustered by the dim light trending toward darkness and the hard surface 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 with his whole force vector being perfectly vertical. 

When there’s no subsequent talking, Newt realizes 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 Gottliebian open-hand swipe that, miraculously and most likely because Hermann wasn’t 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’d 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 asks in a slow slide of soothing skepticism. “I’m not certain of that, Newton. I believe you may have fainted.”

“Nah.”

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 talking 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 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 applying to Newt’s sternum. 

Newt tries to reassure him by sitting in the face of sternal pressure, but Hermann, still unconvinced by Newt’s “sleeping” story, makes it pretty clear that if Newt wants to get up he’ll need 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 relaxes 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 wouldn’t 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 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 with a temperature below the one 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’m carrying it off just fine,” Newt replies, admittedly 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 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 Newt is directing at him.

“Are you going to let me sit? Of course I can sit, dude.” Newt makes 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’s nearly six o’clock.” Hermann switches teams from anti-sitting to pro-sitting and backs off on the sternal pressure. 

Newt sits, mostly under his own power. Hermann helps him when the 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’s 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 leans forward to rest his forehead on Hermann’s nearest shoulder.

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

“Thoughtless,” Newt repeats miserably. “Yes. I’m a thoughtless, inconsiderate, brash, irresponsible narcissist.”

“That,” Hermann says, inexcusably gently, “is my line. Don’t 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’ll turn on a light,” Hermann says.

“Nah.” Newt lifts his head off Hermann’s shoulder and adjusts his glasses into proper alignment. “I got it.” 

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

Hermann observes the change in illumination and reacts by flinching. He correlates his observation with Newt’s snapping and looks at Newt, eyebrows pressed together, mouth open. He 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 “abject 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, PhD. Two—the time a dermal sample from Yamarashi had, surprisingly, contained a macro version of a (skillfully 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 Junior Intern unbolt a bone saw from the wall to cut through the thing. Three—the time 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 astonishment to be ridiculously endearing. 

This is improving his mood by about four thousand ninety-six 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 changes from astonishment into something Newt finds confusing, like he’s pulling answers 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 Newt, 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 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 good day, 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 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’s tired, he is just very tired, very, and he doesn’t particularly care for the way he’s 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 full of way too much sympathy and empathy and pity and Newton-I-get-your-soul-in-a-literal-way-a-way-so-literal-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 doesn’t 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 Newton—I do not understand why you can control the lights. I’m concerned you are upset because you can control the lights.” 

Yeeeeeaaaaahhhhh. His brain follows 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 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 isn’t all that conductive. It’ll block, not boost, signals originating from your cortex. It would be sick if you could turn your peripheral nervous system into an EM transmitter, 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’s clearly quite worried because you’re 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, don’t confuse yourself about this; don’t confuse your colleague about this. 

“Er, yes.” Newt feels 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’s 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 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 the word I’d pick,” Newt says, distracted, his thoughts fracturing as he tries to backtrack and correct his tergiversationist tendencies. He can’t think over the tide of alien demand in his head. “I 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. “It’s not a—not a hive mind thing. Don’t freak out.”

“How did you do it?” Hermann demands.

Newt would love to give any one of about thirty-two thousand answers 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 drill yourself a cranial window and see if that gets you anywhere. Maybe, if you didn’t have a skull, you could hear them. 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’s head snaps back, both hands come 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, 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 brings a hand down on a 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.” 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 doesn’t matter—”

He is—

He isn’t.

What’s happening, exactly?

He feels strange.

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

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

“Something?” Newt’s not sure what he’s doing here, lying half on the floor and half atop 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 on the surprise blood 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 pulls him 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 won’t 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.”

“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 tightens his grip on the appropriated piece of Gottliebian hardware he’s miraculously still holding. “I can explain.”

“Please do so,” Hermann says.

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

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

The lights don’t 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 don’t think I can neurochemically support that and keep talking and maintaining total situational awareness and stuff; I’m guessing my EEG looks like crap when it happens, but it’s getting better and it’s always self-limited.”

“So far,” Hermann snaps.

“So far,” Newt agrees politely. 

Hermann makes a 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 pulls the handkerchief away from his face. 

“Are you guessing?” Hermann asks.

“No.” Newt balls up the cloth up in one hand and tips his head back against Hermann’s shoulder. 

Hermann sighs and adjusts the grip he has on Newt to something that more approximates I’m-trying-to-assist-your-peripheral-circulation-by-repetitive-arm-rubbing than I’m-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 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 shouldn’t feel that you acted inappropriately in any way. Because you haven’t.”

“You’re 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’ll 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,” he says. “No, she called me. I answered.”

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

“She’s—” Newt tries to finish his sentence but can’t do it because his face is a little bit paralyzed with total misery and his vocal cords 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’s quite unhappy,” Hermann says, “despite having achieved so much of what she desired for so long.”

Newt nods, because yes. 

“I’d also imagine 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 like Newt but better, so much better, and she loves him, not because he’s smart, but because he’s stupid sometimes and because he watched Blue Planet with her and because of the things 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 altogether. 

Hermann pats Newt’s shoulder in an encouraging and 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 with 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’s voice does 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. 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. C’mon. 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 fixes Newt’s hair and then immediately fixes 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. You’ve been doing it for years.”

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

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

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

“If you don’t feel inclined to elaborate upon your conversation with Ms. Mori, I would appreciate an explanation of your ability to affect the lights by snapping.”

“Myeah.” Newt gears up. 

He’s thought a lot about how to explain this to Hermann, because, at a first approximation, if he just straight-up says, “biohacking,” or even the more technically accurate “dermal RFID chip implantation,” Hermann won’t 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 a  historic norm, at least in the life sciences, (rock on Barry Marshall, Albert Hofmann, and literally every Spider-Man villain ever) but Hermann isn’t 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 arguably more a you thing than a me thing. It’s radio frequency based. No weird hive/Jedi mind-trick stuff, dude, just computational efficiency. Old school.”

“Meaning?” Hermann sounds 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’ll 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 off Hermann’s argumentative tendencies to the point 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 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’ll be pissed about it. 

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

“Eh.” Newt tips his head back against Hermann’s shoulder and goes for maximum enervated pathos. “It’s pretty pedestrian. There are sensors in our wiring that now respond to a dermal RFID chip in my hand.”

“Hmm,” Hermann says, unimpressed.

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

“So this isn’t a side effect of your unique cortical wiring?” Hermann is still iteratively fixing Newt’s hair in a very acceptable way. 

“No.” Newt betrays 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 desires a flair for aggressive driving, which I don’t, actually.”

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

“You like it?” Newt snaps twice in quick succession to flare the lights. “I did it for you.” 

“I fail to see how such a thing could possibly be the case.” Hermann catches Newt’s hand in time to abort snap number three. He examines 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’d 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 need 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 pulls his hand from Hermann’s grip and snaps twice, “rapid directional vector,” he flicks 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 lying through his teeth.

“Dude,” Newt says. “I get you have a front to maintain, but hear me out. 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 with hand motions will 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’m thoughtful, so you can tell me you don’t want it, but eventually you’ll 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 with dignified defeat, “you may implant me with an RFID chip. Later. Not tonight.” Hermann 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’re making the right choice.” Newt shuts his eyes. 

“Do you have any intention of getting off the floor 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 you want me to be insensitive to the fact that this is uncomfortable for you,” meaning, “I’ll get off this floor any time now, I’m surprised it hasn’t happened already,” meaning, “This iterative hair fixing thing is kinda 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, uh, 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 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’s 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’ll never let me do that.” 

“Probably not, no,” Hermann says, “but the odds are not zero. You’re 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.

“One 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 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 find me so pathetic 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 aloud.

Newt is so freaking smart. 

It’s unreal, actually.

“I confess I’ve 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. 

“Thank you, Newton, I appreciate the sentiment.”

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

Hermann sighs in a 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 subgenre 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 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 they aren’t people who “cuddle” even when they’re definitely and unambiguously cuddling. Overlapping Personal Environments for Neuronal Solidarity. OPENS. Nah. Co-Localization Of Self with EPIC Drift partner. CLOSED. That’s not better, but it wasn’t meant to be, it was just a demonstration 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 claim 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’s 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 adopted before.

That’s neat.

He’s tired. 

The silence sounds much louder than it should. 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’re falling asleep,” Hermann replies, very quiet, not dry at all, still hair fixing.

“I’m not.” Newt cracks 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 drunken tribute half a decade old and half a world away. Combine to dissonance. You absolute bastard, Geiszler. You brilliant little biospawn.

“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 she likes me?”

“I was aware of that, yes.” Hermann presses 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. Not sure how she got that idea, but yeah.” 

Hermann sighs. “Lie down. 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 natural lives.”

“I’ll be honest with you, that doesn’t sound like ‘liking’.” Newt, nonplussed, gets 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.”

“Possibly,” Hermann replies. 

“Mako likes me,” Newt says. 

“I also ‘like you,’ Newton, you do realize that, correct?” Hermann sits 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 gives Hermann a semi-targeted shoulder pat. “Yes. Yes; have you not noticed that I’m 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 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 disarray.

Hermann fixes it.