Designations Congruent with Things: Chapter 5

Who sits down one day and says, “I could really use a coordinate system right about now?” René De-epic-intellectual-badass-cartes, that’s who.

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

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: None.

Chapter 5

“But how do you feel?” the medic asks Newt, after he and Hermann have explained separately and in tandem the events of the previous twenty-four hours, and their vital signs have been taken and evaluated to make sure no one is acutely dying.

“Good,” Newt says. “Totally fine. Weird, maybe? But normal weird. Mostly. Some cognitive dissonance, here and there, when I’m being experimental or when Hermann is being vindictive. So probably that’ll happen at least once a day for the foreseeable future. But this is expected, am I right? The bottom line is that considering,” he waves a hand vaguely,  “everything? I’m great. I think I’m fine. Did I say that already? Either way, it’s true.”

Hermann glares at him.

Newt shoots him the requisite what’s-your-problem-man look in return because he doesn’t think Hermann deserves his best fire-and-sulfur-née-brimstone glare at this exact moment.

Not yet.

Hermann’s heading in that direction though.

Boy is he ever.

The reason for this is Hermann doesn’t seem to be on board with Newt’s extremely reasonable, and, he thinks, pretty obvious and well-defined goals. The medic isn’t on board either, but that’s not so surprising; Newt does NOT have high expectations of the medic, but he does have high expectations of Hermann. Maybe unreasonably high, but the guy shared his brain so the man should be able to get it together and read between the lines.

“Um,” the medic says, looking confused and distressed, and also kinda like a drowning person, if that makes sense. Newt isn’t sure it does.

Everyone’s having an unusual day.

Now it’s the medic’s turn.

Back to Newt’s point, the one they’re just not getting despite his basically having spelled it out for them, implicitly, about four times now. It's this: if he’s going to be formally evaluated by someone, he’d like to ensure both a high level of competence and a high degree of coolness on the part of the evaluator going in, because he most definitely does not want any kind of persisting documentation irrevocably attached to him to be annotated with some poorly-chosen, hysteria-laden, kaiju-perjorative’d adjective or set of adjectives that will render his future professional life difficult or impossible because some glorified med tech thinks he’s qualified to make a sweeping and definitive statement on what the heck has happened to Dr. Newton Geiszler in the past twenty-four hours, because even Newt doesn’t know that. And if Newt doesn't know, then no one knows.

Maybe the kaiju know.

They’re probably pretty pissed at him right about now.

He’ll think about that more later and decide if he finds it satisfying or terrifying.

At present, he contents himself with stonewalling medical bureaucracy.

Newt has too many PhDs to put up with people’s sloppy and uninformed theorizing.

He's sure Hermann will agree with and support his course of action. Once the guy gets with the program, that is.

“Are you a neurologist,” Newt begins, squinting at the medic through his increasingly difficult to ignore headache, “because, no offense man, but I think you’ll need to take this one up the medical ladder. So right now? We’ll both settle for some Advil, a glass of water, and some à la carte brain imaging if you don’t mind. I think—”

“Will you stop talking and lie down,” Hermann snarls, undermining Newt’s delivery and his point, as the guy is so very wont to do, and also like the man has some kind, any kind, of material expertise in the medical field. Ha. Newt is about thirty-two thousand seven hundred and eighty-six percent more qualified regarding anything that takes place in vivo, thanks; Hermann works in silico not to mention in chalk dustio, which will always be a pale, weakass reflection of the complexity of life, man, like, through a glass darkly and murkily, that’s for freaking sure. Neuroscience. Is it messy? Yeah, it is, but it’s also probably the most topically relevant subdiscipline to both human and kaiju—

What the—

So.

Yeah.

That’s the ceiling.

That he’s looking at.

Is that mold?

He’s now lying down.

Noted.

Thank you, Dr. Gottlieb, thank you sooo much.

Hermann has always been imperious, high-handed, and dictatorial. So much so that Newt has, over the years, devoted several mental asides to contemplating the roots of Hermann’s ridiculous behavior because it wasn’t something that made a whole lot of sense to him and it had also seemed compensatory in some way but in what way hadn’t been clear until hours ago. Now it’s quite clear, kind of painfully clear, and Newt realizes he is now and has always been, at least on the surface, the kind of guy who looks like a Harbinger of Hell to Hermann’s nicely ordered mental and physical existence, but he hasn’t turned out to be that bad, or maybe he's toughened Hermann up in a nice, older-brother, rigorous-and-taxing-love type of paradigm, if one discounts the fact that he isn't, strictly speaking, “older,” nor is he sure that “tough-love” includes long diatribes regarding an inversion of the quantitative hierarchy and ridicule of chalk as a medium for communication. Besides, the Newt-is-not-the-jerk-he-might-appear argument and the Hermann-can-take-it argument don't sound mutually exclusive to him; he needs to stop using “or” unless he really means it.

“Can you not?” Newt says to Hermann in a peripheral snapping as he props himself on his elbows and redirects his attention to the medic standing between him, freedom, his future, the Afterparty of the Century, and also freedom and also his future. “Let’s get this show on the road. Draw some blood, do some imaging, make sure we’re not going to drop dead in the next forty-eight hours if that’s even a thing you can do. But?” He raises his eyebrows at the medic. “You do NOT write anything down, dude. Not about me and not about him.” He points a finger at Hermann without looking at him to indicate to everyone he means business. “We’re going out of network and out of military for our neurological care, no offense, but barring any literal, life-threatening emergencies, we consent to nothing.”

Newt’s already decided he wants a laidback neurologist from the West Coast who surfs on the weekends, has at least one tattoo, one piercing, and thinks that saving the word by mind-melding with a dead kaiju brain is, “Rad, man.” Maybe his name will be Paul. Or Blake. Or maybe Damien. Or it could be a lady, in which case maybe Danielle, maybe Rain, possibly Esther. Hermann probably wants a more uptight neurologist from England named Phillip, though Newt thinks that Hermann will fare much better with Rain.

Hermann and the medic look at him in silent confusion.

Newt gets that look more than one might expect, even when everything he says is perfectly logical. Unless he said that stuff about Hypothetical Rain, surfer neurologist, out loud.

Probably best not to inquire.

“I’m…gonna make a phone call,” the medic says. “I think kaiju drifts on non-standard equipment are a little out of my league.”

Victory.

Sort of.

Maybe.

It remains to be seen.

The point is, he will be victorious. Eventually.

The medic leaves the room.

Newt looks at Hermann. The guy looks like he’s only staying conscious because he can’t decide whether to strangle Newt or not before he passes out.

“Hermann,” he says, “will you sit down already, because seriously? You look like death.”

Hermann, pale, one eye bloodshot, his clothing not so much “unkempt” as “moderately kempt” but definitely a whole order of magnitude above Newt’s current level of kemptness, sits down on the edge of Newt’s bed and shoots Newt a venomous look that Newt in no way deserves.

Newt feels slightly wounded by this turn of events.

“I think you may have suffered brain damage,” Hermann says.

Newt is now slightly more than slightly wounded by this turn of events. And also by the choice of pronoun, because Newt has been, this whole time actually, extremely courteously including Hermann within the screw-off-outside-this-line Venn diagram he’s trying to trace around himself so that his brain and Hermann’s brain aren’t appropriated for medical science or for military research.

“I think you’re suffering from brain damage,” he snaps back. “Nice eye.”

“It needs to be ruled out,” Hermann says in his irritatedly-didactic voice.

“And you have the gall to insinuate you're somehow hypothetically immune from this conjectural-kaiju-anteverse-induced brain damage?” Newt says skeptically. “As if you could even identify brain damage. Who’s the biologist here? Because I’m pretty sure it’s not you.”

“I’ll happily cede you that title,” Hermann says, dry and shoving him back down. “Try to lie there without talking.”

Newt looks at the ceiling.

Yeah, that’s definitely mold, a dark, creeping, Hong Kong varietal, looking cool, sending hyphae through the damp. Like a boss.

“It’s just that I’m not sure how ‘state of the art’ these medical facilities are,” Newt says.

Hermann follows his gaze, looks up at the mold with an expression of pure, prototypical Gottliebian distaste, and says, “Agreed.”

“I mean, computational modeling we can do,” Newt says. “Programming? Get out of here. Predictive modeling of the quantum foam? You’re killing it. Electrophysiology? I will patch clamp alien brains all freaking day. Molecular bio—eat your heart out and die, academic powerhouses of the Eastern Seaboard. Neuroscience? Seriously, even posit the existence of a person who can build a better drift interface that I can build and I’ll—”

“Are you driving towards something in particular?” Hermann asks.

“Yeah,” Newt says. “While the scientific expertise of the PPDC may be unreasonably baller, the medical facilities? Great for orthopedics. Great for severed limbs. If a kaiju that I clone eats my hand in a horrible but semi-humorous misunderstanding, this is where I will come, presuming I am based here, and not at some pleasantly maritime institute of higher learning. Also? Shatterdome Medical? Great for ‘my friend just hit me in the face with a bo staff while we were pretending that some kind of je ne sais quoi of physical combat has any chance of predicting drift compatibility,’ but still. You see my point. Medical is good for that. It’s also good for when my long-term nemesis hits me with his cane. Or strangles me. Accidentally. As a hypothetical example. But given everything—”

“I take your point.” Hermann braces his hands against the cheap-ass gurney Newt is lying on.

“Do you?” Newt asks, intensely relieved and trying not to show it, pushing himself back onto his elbows. “Awesome. So let’s get out of here, grab my limited alcohol, and drink until we’re unconscious. I don’t think it’ll take as much as usual. For either of us.”

“No,” Hermann says.

Newt sighs.

“You need to be evaluated,” Hermann says, “because I don’t believe you’re capable of evaluating yourself.”

Newt feels the power requirements for his own brain, inner monologue, and continued sentience spike so high that everything, for a moment, shuts down.

In this interval of mental and actual silence Hermann’s expression changes from “exhausted,” to “acutely anxious.”

Yes.

Good.

“What did you just say to me?” Dr. Newton Geiszler hisses, pushing himself up so he’s eye-level with his sanctimonious prick of a colleague, who is, even now, trying to say something that doesn’t matter because Dr. Geiszler has no plans on ceding Dr. Gottleib any conversational space any time in the near future. “Did you just express more doubt regarding my executive mental functioning because yes, congratulations, you predicted the timing of the ending of the world with magnificent specificity, which was useful. Kind of. But you actively impeded my attempts to communicate, to achieve congruity or at least some kind of neural parity, with an alien life form which worked by the way, which worked like a fabulous, elegant, proof-of-principle that paved the way for a second attempt that worked even better—”

“When I found you, you were seizing—“ Hermann snarls.

“Yes and that was a cost,” Newt plows over him, “but look at the benefits column you prosaic bastard, in which you will note the items ‘world not destroyed,’ ‘humans not eaten by kaiju,’ ‘Breach closed,’ and—”

“You are missing my point,” Hermann shouts, probably because Newt, also, apparently started shouting sometime in the past several seconds. “As usual, you—”

“NO,” Newt shouts, “I do not MISS POINTS. YOU miss points. Speaking of which, you’ve been missing my most recent, super salient, but not spelled out, point for the last FIFTEEN MINUTES so let me perform some necessary epexegesis. We do not want to give the Pan Pacific Defense Corps unlimited access to our brains. I KNOW you’ve spent a LIFETIME in support of authority figures everywhere, because, in the past, authority has supported you right back, which must be nice. I have enough theory of mind to grasp that this is not an intuitive conclusion for you to come to on your own, but sometimes? When you’re in possession of a valuable resource? You have to demarcate exactly where you’d like everyone else to STEP OFF because once they step in, it’s too late to prevent all sorts of unfortunate outcomes and so you withhold consent as a default so they have to ask you for EVERYTHING. I’m sure as HELL making this happen for myself and I’m willing to do the same for you if you don’t screw it up for both of us by undermining my capacity for rational thought to other people while tacitly agreeing to a battery of unnecessary tests for both of us, like the dyslogistic jerk you are.”

Fortunately, Hermann looks like he’s now getting the picture.

Unfortunately, the medic is standing in the doorway, looking nervous and concerned and slightly more than slightly offended.

Newt stops talking. Stops shouting. Whatever. He realizes belatedly that he’s shaking, and he tries to stop that, stop that immediately; it’s not his fault, it’s not anything serious, it’s just the effect of epinephrine on overtaxed muscles, for sure, he legitimately has no doubts on that point, but it’s not helping his case, his case that he really should not be losing; that would be inconceivable, he is not losing the sanity argument, he just freaking used the word “epexegesis” in a complete sentence that made sense even if it was a little bit run on and he’ll demand a—

“We require a moment.” Hermann eyes the medic in that way he has.

The medic leaves.

Things are looking up.

Newt tries not to breathe so fast but the effort leaves him feeling vaguely seasick so he stops.

Trying.

Not breathing.

Obviously.

“Fine,” Hermann says, straightforward and straight off the bat; he probably learned that from the Drift, probably picked up that particular and totally normal preference of Newt’s from somewhere in his brain and is now using it to get what he wants and that’s fine because Newt’s doing the same thing, except his new technique is diametrically opposed because Hermann loves the vocab, so typical and so not normal, but Newt can and will tweak his idiolect to make it a little more appealingly recondite to his colleague.

No problem. Done and done.

“What do you suggest?” Hermann asks.

Newt doesn’t even have to think about it because he’s been thinking about it off and on for the past day. He actually started thinking about it even before he put his budget helmet on for the first time, because it’s always nice to do thought exercises where you assume your own death maybe isn’t a given, so he says, “bloodwork, an ophthalmic exam, a CT scan, and MRI. Of the brain. An EKG. All results released to us, digital and hard copy. They can keep their own copies. I’d rather they didn’t, but they will anyway, regardless of our preferences, because, y’know, the fate of the world is at stake. Possibly. Someone will rationalize it that way as they commit an infringement of civil liberties.”

Newt hasn’t said “EEG,” the magical three letters of neural destiny. He wonders if Hermann will pick that up, or if he’s already picked it up and isn’t mentioning it because he gets it and agrees that if no one, no one, mentions it, that would be best. The man’s not a biologist but he has the memories of one in his head. Newt wonders if the PPDC medical people will pick his omission up. They probably will. Anyone moderately informed in the cognitive sciences would. Because he wants an EEG. He needs an EEG. He does. They both do. He just doesn’t want one here. Because he’s pretty sure an EEG is going to be abnormal and, if it is, some perspicacious jackass will say something like, “Abnormal brain waves: rule out mental continuity with kaiju anteverse,” which would be impossible and then they’d both be labeled security risks, studied, and, in short, screwed for the rest of their miserable lives.

Please he thinks, please do not be connected to the kaiju anteverse, brain. Please do not. How about no. I have an idea: let’s just not. No, please.

“Based on the mess of poorly understood and conflicting opinions I haven’t had time to reconcile, I’m having a difficult time determining whether your concern regarding future agency is rationally justified, Newton,” Hermann admits.

“Oh god.” Newt transfers his hands to his face and shoves his fingers beneath his glasses to press down on his good eye and sort of gingerly touch the bad one, because ow.    

“But,” Hermann continues, “I’m willing to grant that you may be correct.”

“Really?” Newt’s voice cracks and he accidentally pulls his glasses askew as he drags his hands away from his face. 

“Furthermore,” Hermann says, “I want to clarify that I have no doubts about your ‘executive mental functioning’ as you put it. I was simply—”

“Nah dude.” Newt holds up a hand. “Stop right there. I feel you.”

Hermann sighs, reaches over, and straightens Newt’s glasses like the stickler for decorum he is. “You’re a terrible influence. On everyone. Now will you please lie down? So I can lie down?”

“Yeah,” Newt says, lying down, because he’s epically tired, his eye feels like he walked into an icepick in a Hong Kong alleyway and didn’t notice while it quietly slipped into his brain to hotwire the headache that’s been creeping up on him; he was not kidding about cerebral edema, he could see that one happening, but they’ll identify it on imaging if it’s in progress. Even if it is, he’s not concerned about it, well that’s a lie, he is, he’d like to believe that there won’t be any neurological consequences of his decision tree, but he can’t because there already are some, like the fact that he just loves Descartes so freaking much right now oh god, but even while he is concerned about the electrophysiological state of his brain, “closing the Breach” and “no more kaiju,” are things so monumental that neurological sequelae for himself and even for Hermann seem no more than expenditure line items detailing one more cost in a too-costly war. 

A war that’s over.

And this, all of this, makes sense, because it’s cogent and accurate.

It’s so accurate you could plot it.

On a coordinate plane. 

Not really but kind of. 

Intersecting number lines. Who thinks of that stuff? Who sits down one day and says, “I could really use a coordinate system right about now?”

René De-epic-intellectual-badass-cartes, that’s who.

“Newton,” Hermann says, horrified and incredulous in confusing simultaneity, “are you crying?”

“No, man,” Newt says, wiping his eyes. “I just love Descartes so much right now.”

Hermann gives him a weird look.