Designations Congruent with Things: Chapter 8

Mathematicians do not hedge.

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

Text iteration: Witching hour.

Additional notes: None.

Chapter 8

Hermann sits in surreal solitude, using a computer he should never have appropriated, typing a report that he is planning to directly consign to bureaucratic obscurity, and cross referencing it with the atrocious, vague, and minimally coherent mess that Newton assembled during Hermann’s ninety minute neural imaging session.

Using a biological interface, Dr. Gottlieb and I were able to extract information from the brain of an immature kaiju clone. We then determined the specific requirements for the passage of matter though a kaiju-designed trans-dimensional conduit. We relayed the specifics of what we had discovered with maximum speed to the command hierarchy at the Hong Kong Shatterdome. This resulted in—

Hermann looks away, with a brief exhalation. He removes his glasses, pressing gingerly against his throbbing eye.

If Newton thinks that no one will question that particular pile of excremental inexactitude, the man is sorely mistaken. A “biological interface?” Could anyone read such a ludicrous black box of a term and not wonder, not guess, what he means by it? Could the man be more provocatively cryptic?

Terrible question.

Yes. He certainly could.

Hermann can see no way to achieve what Newton wants—a decoupling of themselves from what they’ve done—but he can feel the desire, strong and contrapuntal and very nearly his own. 

But not quite.

He checks his email, and an unread message from Stacker Pentecost traps him in a doubled, synchronized memory five years old, of Newton twisting in his chair, exhausting and exhausted, the second axle of a shrinking, double-cored science team to say, letters from the dead—the crap slap in the face that civilians take in wartime. The intervals between letter writing and letter receiving are shorter now than they used to be, but that’s about all you can say. Someone should build us a widow’s walk.  Hermann can’t remember what he said in reply, but Newton does, and so his doubled perspective narrows into one that’s not his own as he watches himself snap, consider constructing one atop the Wall. Newton looks away, back at his screen, scrubbing his eyes. You wish, he replies,I’m staying.

The only thing that Hermann is certain of is that he will never be certain again.

He opens the email from Marshal Pentecost. It is short, the time stamp indicating that it was sent only a few hours before the Jaeger teams were deployed. 

Dr. Gottlieb,

I tried to find you before deployment, but heard you were still assisting Geiszler. Hopefully he’s still alive. The pair of you are on a priority PPDC transport list, so if breach closure is unsuccessful, get the hell out of Hong Kong. Get to Moscow. They made a proposal three years ago to weaponize drift technology and given what Geiszler just did, I’d say that’s probably the best bet we’ll have left. 

If we close the breach, keep an eye on Geiszler, if you can stand it. Once the breach is shut, he’ll be the only source left for intel on what’s beyond it. 

Good luck,
SP

Hermann feels a brief and confusing urge to stand, slide his fingers under the desk at which he’s sitting, and upend the thing—an impulse that certainly comes from some unfortunately Geiszlerian residue in his thoughts.

He contents himself with sitting motionless, rather than engaging in pointless property destruction.

It is less satisfying.

But he needs this computer to function, and that will be difficult for it if it’s in pieces on the floor.

Disgusted, he eyes his cane, leaning with irritating innocuousness against the desk. He gives it a sharp shove, and it clatters to the floor. 

That Pentecost had subtly articulated the same essential idea that Newton had poorly explained less than two hours previous casts the issue in a somewhat different light. 

Newton has made a moderately successful career out of bucking authority in all its forms, but that particular proclivity of his does not mean that he is not correct to try and minimize the depth of his connection to the kaiju anteverse.

Their connection. 

Hermann is still not certain he believes that there is any real threat to their autonomy, agency, career prospects, or persons, not from the PPDC, an organization they materially aided, not from any major world power—

Not from any?

Not from kaiju worshippers?

Not from parties like the late Hannibal Chau, who have made a business of peddling materials from the anteverse?

Fine.

He’s convinced there may be some element of material threat.

Being convinced, he’s certain that it’s not sufficient to leave out key details and replace the word “drift” with “biological interface.”  What they write in their reports matters very little, because no amount of precise vagueness in word choice will shield either of them from what might await. In order to improve their position, they’re going to have to leave governmental employ. As soon as possible. They’re going to have to affiliate, as rapidly as it can be managed, with a private organization with the monetary and legal resources to provide at least a modicum of protection.

As far as he’s concerned, that leaves them only two material options. Academia or industry.

And he is not going to industry. 

Unless he has no other choice.

He’s unwilling to leave Newton entirely to his own devices, for several reasons, not the least of which is that the man is possibly susceptible to alien influence and likely to make at least one serious attempt at cloning a kaiju if he’s not directly opposed, every day, multiple times, by a rational colleague. Furthermore, Newton is thoughtless enough to accept a proposal from outside parties regarding self-experimentation, presuming such a proposal was framed correctly. 

Again, Hannibal Chau comes to mind. Dead though he may be, the man had not existed in isolation. 

Such a thing would be a disaster, because, despite Newton’s irritating perspicacity, there are certain areas in which he will, doubtless, leave himself wide open to external threats.

Presuming those threats exist.

Hermann sighs.

He’s not certain how gracefully Newton will take his insistence they continue their working relationship, now the world is not in immediate danger of ending. In the past, the man has been quite articulate regarding Hermann’s role as the chief bane of his professional existence. 

Hermann’s also not certain that either of them is in any kind of shape to sit through job interviews or discuss the state of their decade’s-worth of mostly practical rather than conceptual scientific advancements, given his inclination to tip over tables and Newton’s perplexing propensity for weeping over rationalism.

He returns to his report and manages to write a non-explicit but accurate account of the wretched desperation that characterized his previous twenty-four hours with enough detail to satisfy a moderately informed reader.

Drifting with dead kaiju. 

Honestly.

He does not mention the word ‘drift’ in his report, not because he thinks it will deceive anyone, but solely because it will make Newton significantly more reasonable.

Once he is finished, he looks at the clock and realizes that Newton has been in the scanner for nearly two hours. 

He gives the clock a disapproving look.

After retrieving his cane from the floor, he proceeds in the direction of the back room. The medical technician is watching an assembling image of his colleague’s brain. It appears to be nearly complete.

“What’s taking so long?” he asks.

The technician jerks, startled, then spins to face him. “We had a few re-starts,” he says. “Dr. Geiszler was having some difficulty holding still?" 

Hermann feels an acute spike of sympathy, and finds himself literally unable to picture Newton tolerating more than three minutes of forced immobility.

“How much more time is required?” Hermann asks. 

“Five minutes?” the technician says, as though uncertain.

How aggravating.

“You don’t have an exact number?” Hermann asks.

“Four minutes and twenty-three seconds,” the technician replies. 

“Thank you,” Hermann says.

“Your scans came back clear, Dr. Gottlieb,” the technician adds.

“Naturally,” Hermann says, and leaves the room.

He stands next to the drapeable and locker-lined recess in the wall, where Newton’s clothes have been discarded in a slovenly heap crowned by his glasses. Considering the state of his outfit, this is perhaps no more than it deserves. 

Hermann hopes that Newton is not tolerating this MRI because he’s comatose and the medical technician hasn’t bothered to check.

The odds of such an eventuality are not zero. 

He drums his fingers over the handle of his cane.

He will wait five minutes. If, at the end of that interval, Newton has not emerged, he will put a stop to this.

Hermann spends the next five minutes in increasing mental agitation until, finally, the door to the room opens and Newton emerges, looking—if possible—even worse than before. He is drenched in sweat, and shaking.

“Hey man,” Newton says, leaning against the door, his voice ragged. “I thought maybe you’d read my mind and then come read me physics.”

“What?” Hermann says, certain Newton’s sentence had made no sense, and alarmed enough that he steps forward to take the other man’s elbow. 

“But that would have been weird,” Newton says, as though finishing a coherent thought. “Let’s get out of here.”

Hermann has no plans to allow Newton to leave the medical bay in the absence of clearance from an offsite radiologist. For all he knows, the man is bleeding into his brain.

“Absolutely not,” he begins.

“Hermann,” Newton says through clenched teeth, his eyes alarmingly wide, appallingly mismatched in white and red, both hands landing on Hermann’s shoulders and digging into his sweater. “You must get me out of here, dude, because I cannot take this.”

This is atypically succinct for Newton.

Furthermore, he’s somewhat taken aback by the intensity with which the request is delivered.

So, perhaps, he’s willing to compromise.

“Why don’t you get dressed,” Hermann suggests. 

“Nope,” Newton says, “I’m incinerating my clothes. Stop hedging.”

This seems extreme. On two fronts.

“Commendable,” Hermann replies. “Even so, you’re still in need of your glasses, wallet, phone, whatever ridiculous items you keep in your pockets, and your shoes. I’m certain I have no idea what you mean by ‘hedging,’ I never ‘hedge’. Mathematicians do not hedge.”

“Okay,” Newton says. “Good point. I was not and am not going to incinerate my phone. I planned that, believe or not. Or rather, I planned to not do it. And, liar, you hedge all the time. This is hedging; you’re doing it now. Hedging is I say I want to do A, and you say, not unless B and C. And I say no. Just A. A is happening. And you say, ‘but Newton you have no shoes,’ and I say look man, thing A is the most important thing, and so we’re just going to do it, and not dick around trying to, like, map the quantum foam or find shoes, okay? I’m freaking out and I just want some tequila, you would too, you probably already do, except for all the thought-hedging you’ve been using to obscure your heterochthonous tequila urges. I deserve some tequila, I'm pretty sure. Frankly? I also feel insultingly under appreciated despite the fact that you ruined your perfect brain to save my life, maybe, hopefully not, and I’d really just like you to say, ‘Newton, you were so right, about everything the entire time, and I apologize for being a prick and saying, and I quote, ‘only an idiot would try patch clamping his way to the anteverse’—”

“Fine,” Hermann shouts directly in his face, if only to prevent whatever is coming at the end of Newton’s increasingly overwrought monologue.

He succeeds in startling Newton into temporary silence.

“Fine,” he says more sedately. “I will retrieve your shoes, since you clearly have some kind of confusing, poorly articulated objection to retrieving them yourself.”

Newton makes a sound like Hermann is strangling him. 

Hermann inverts his cane, uses the handle to snag Newton’s glasses, and passes them over to the other man, who snaps them out of his hand in temporarily silent rage.

Nothing about this current state of affairs bodes well for Hermann’s plans to convince Newton to join him in academia.

“Newton,” he says, as the other man steps around him, apparently trying to make or obviate a point by retrieving his own shoes. “You were right,” he continues, with all the stiffly formal apology he can muster without choking.

Newton stops mid-shoe retrieval and stares at him, frozen.

Hermann stares back at him impassively.

“Oh god,” Newton says, slowly collapsing against a blue-lockered wall, one hand over his chest. “That—is so. Deeply. Viscerally. Satisfying. I can’t even tell you, and you’ll never know because I’ll probably never need to say it back to you. I can die now. I think I am going to die now. I have no regrets. Zero.”  He shuts his eyes.

Hermann looks at him for a moment, unimpressed, and then swats the other man’s leg gently with his cane.

Newton cracks his good eye and looks up at Hermann skeptically. 

“Furthermore,” Hermann says dryly, “while I stand by my statement that ‘only an idiot would try patch clamping his way to the anteverse,’ I am glad that you are just such an idiot.”

“So, yeah, that’s less satisfying,” Newton says, reclosing his eye.

“Will you get up?” Hermann snaps.

“I don’t think I can,” Newton says.

“Put on your shoes,” Hermann replies, “while I inform the medical technician that we are leaving.” 

“You’re literally the best, man,” Newton says. “In return, I will make an effort to not drop dead on you in the next several hours. Out of courtesy. And respect.”

“I would settle for finding you shod when I return,” Hermann says.

“Shod?” Newton echoes. “Shod? Seriously? You want to find me shod?”

“Heterochthonous?” Hermann counters, lifting an eyebrow, despite the pain in his head.

“That was for you, man.”

“And I appreciate the sentiment,” Hermann replies crisply, before turning to find the medical technician.

It takes him very little time and minimal glaring to convince the young man that there are many other individuals in much greater need of medical attention than two civilian scientists, and they are quite content to wait, responsibly resting in their quarters for the complete and annotated results of the medical testing they just initiated out of nothing other than a sense of professional responsibility.

He returns to find Newton leaning against the wall of blue lockers, standing, wearing his shoes and his glasses, with the rest of his belongings crumpled beneath one arm.

Hermann inclines his head.

“We need to find a fire,” Newton says.

“I’m sure that there is an entire array of burning buildings in the greater Hong Kong area,” Hermann replies, jerking his head in the direction of the door. “However, that will have to wait.”

“I have a whole schedule,” Newton says, as they leave the medical bay. “A to-do list. Number one is find a fire.”

“To incinerate your clothes,” Hermann says. “Yes I know.”

“Look, can we please make an effort not to do the thing?" Newton says, weaving slightly as he walks.

Hermann reaches over to steady him. “Newton, do you think I have any idea to what you might be referring? Because I do not.”

“This thing. I will demonstrate. The single most important feature arguing against a spontaneous reopening of the breach is—”  

“Subatomic space-time turbulence,” Hermann says.

“Yes,” Newton says, in overt exasperation. “That is the thing. The thing you just did. Interrupting my totally normal sentence that I was just about to end, by myself, with your weird, evil-twin, thought parity.”

“You aren’t a mathematician with a mid-career interest in theoretical and applied quantum mechanics.”

“So?” Newton says. “That was my sentence, that I was going to end.”

“You interrupt me all the time,” Hermann replies. 

“Yeah, with opposing opinions,” Newton says. “Ideally. I just don’t think I can handle being science twins with you, man. I can handle the Bach, I can handle the Descartes, oh my god, can I ever.”

“Please don’t cry,” Hermann says dryly. “Again.”

“If I ever cried over Descartes, and I’m not saying I did, it would, for sure, be your fault, and if it reflects weirdly on anyone it reflects weirdly on you so maybe we just want to forget about what happened regarding my mental introduction to Herr Cogito Ergo Sum, am I right? I’m legit on board with the practical doubling of my fields of expertise, though I kind of wish that one of us knew Kung Fu, because come on. I can live with the weird thing you’ve got going for group theory and for Évariste Galois, even though it’s borderline inappropriate and kind of confusingly conflated with me for reasons that I’m not even going to explore because I know that you’re not going to mention or ideally ever think about that thing that happened when I was eighteen in Prague—

“I suggest you redirect your current conversational tangent,” Hermann snaps. “But for the sake of accuracy, I do not equate you with Galois.”

“Yeah, okay. Sure you don’t, man. Just like I don’t weep over rationalists sometimes when I’m really tired. Anyway, I feel kind of weirdly unsettled about comparative infinities right now, and I could have done without that particularly needless source of unruhe in my life.  Also, have you noticed that you’re invariably—”

“The thought completer,” Hermann says, with an entirely justified streak of pique. 

“I’m going to steal your cane,” Newton snaps, one hand coming to his temple. “Purely out of spite. Did you know that’s thing number fourteen on my to-do list? Why are you the thought completer?”

“Because you do more than your fair share of thought initiating and I am in favor of efficiency,” Hermann replies. “Furthermore, I do not advise incorporating my preferences into your personality.”

“I’m not,” Newton says. “I’m just enjoying your preferences as if they were mine. There’s a difference.”

“Is there?” Hermann asks.

“There’s a whole ocean of metaphysics between enjoyment and incorporation. You like that I like Descartes,” Newton says. “You don’t like that I also might enjoy the idea of invading planets and leaving them burned out shells of fully utilized resources.”

“Do you?” Hermann asks, without looking at him. “Enjoy the idea of merciless colonialism?”

“No. A little bit? No.”

Hermann says nothing. 

“You’re already starting the paperwork to write me off as evil,” Newton says.

“Entirely inaccurate,” Hermann snaps, punctuating the words with a poorly considered hard shake of Newton’s elbow that his colleague barely manages to weather without falling over. 

“You are grabby today, god,” Newton says, aggravated, recovering his footing with poor grace and Hermann’s assistance. “Can you not? Just because you vacationed in my brain does not mean you get to manhandle me when you think I’m being stupid. Keep it up. Find out what happens. I was not kidding about stealing your cane.”

“First,” Hermann continues, ignoring Newton’s entirely empty threats, “there are no rational grounds to write you off as ‘evil,’ without writing off myself as well. Second, you are far, far more likely go mad than to turn slowly malevolent.”

“Wait, is that supposed to be comforting, because—”

“Third,” Hermann continues, “I doubt ‘evil,’ could ever be defined in a meaningful manner.”

“You know it when you see it,” Newton says. “Like pornography.”

“Useless,” Hermann replies. “And in poor taste.”

“Me, my observation, or pornography?” Newton asks. 

“Fourth,” Hermann says, resolutely avoiding the pornography tangent, “while I am certain that we will, unfortunately, be forced to grapple with the cognitive repercussions of our neurological experimentation for the rest of our potentially shortened natural lives, I am convinced that with constant, vigilant, rational monitoring of our thoughts and actions we should be able to avoid doing something untoward.”

“Yeah,” Newton says, unmistakably hopeless. “Rational thought monitoring. Descartes-style. Sounds easy and fun.” 

Hermann stops in front of the door to his quarters, keys in his code, and swings the blastedly heavy thing open.

“This is not a fire,” Newton points out, quite correctly.

“I never promised you a fire. Would you like to come in?” Hermann asks.

“Um,” Newton says, “last time you invited me into your room was the Firecracker Sake Incident, during which I said some things I came to deeply regret about Erwin Schrödinger, you threw up in your sink, and we tried to discover, from first principles, a biological equivalent of uncertainty relations, and then gave up and drunkenly critiqued A New Kind of Science.”

“Yes,” Hermann says dryly. “I remember. In fact, I now remember in disconcerting duplication.”

“Seriously though,” Newton says, listing alarmingly until he steadies himself on Hermann’s doorframe, “what kind of guy makes up a thought experiment about a cat like that?”

“It is a thought experiment, Newton. Not. Real.”

“I know but when I do thought experiments I try to make them nice.”

“That is blatantly untrue,” Hermann says. “That is, in fact, extremely false.”

“Why can’t, like, there be cat food involved instead of a flask of poison. Like instead of alive or dead it’s hungry or fed?”

“Newton,” Hermann says,  “I believe we have already, on another occasion, taken this particular perseveration of yours as far as it is capable of being taken. Now are you coming in, or not?” 

“Just so long as you’re sure you want to pre-game for the Apocalypse Cancellation Party with drunken science,” Newton says, already leaning against Hermann’s doorframe. “Because if not? I will find a fire. And then a neurologist.”

“Quite sure,” Hermann says, and pulls him inside.