Designations Congruent with Things: Chapter 14

His shoe. The sea.

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

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: None.

Chapter 14

The rear wall of the hotel elevator is a mirror, bisected horizontally by a narrow silver handrail. Across its base, etched in frosted glass, is a stylized representation of the sea.

Hermann doesn’t care for it.

Not at all.

He is, however, so exhausted post-breakfast and post-shopping that he leans against the dark paneling of the orthogonal wall, wedging himself into a corner, his bad leg braced against the cool surface of the mirror. The lateral border of his shoe presses against frosted waves.

His shoe.

The sea.

It’s a juxtaposition inappropriately absorbing, and he feels an echo in his mind of something not his own, something not derived from Newton, something else, something from a half-remembered dream, from the fading neural echo of a Drift that should never have come to pass.

What happens to a fraction of a hive mind?

He hears the question in Newton’s most unnerving turn of offhand revelation, but when he glances at the other man, Newton’s eyes are on the unlit panel near the sliding door. Hermann’s almost certain there’s been nothing said aloud.

He’s tired.

He is, in fact, so exhausted he can barely interpret the anxious hiss of thoughts that form and die beneath the too-sharp edge of his senses.

“Little help here?” Newton sounds strained. Impatient. Perhaps frustrated. In short, he sounds nothing like his semi-permanent avatar who has begun to make a habit of posing interesting questions in Hermann’s mind.

The elevator door slides shut.

“Sometime this century?” Newton says.

Belatedly, it occurs to Hermann that his colleague cannot read the wall display at which he’s staring. Hermann gives the other man a gentle swat with his cane to encourage his relocation in a propitious direction before he selects the correct floor with a well-placed jab.

Newton, petulant, folds against the wall and shoots Hermann an uninspired glare, the full, burning wattage of which is substantially filtered by Hermann’s own sunglasses. Newton must realize the fruitless nature of glowering behind tinted glass, because after only a few seconds he gives up and tips his head back. His hair audibly crunches against the wall as he says, “Do you think they wanted to eat me?”

“What?” Hermann snaps, shoving down, shoving back the memory of darkness, of cracking stone above a crowded room, of an empty space around him that feels dangerous, if only because it’s a product of collective terror.  

Newton looks at him, startled.

Hermann feels confused and guilty, his mind a haze of disordered feedback loops. He’s not sure where the moral high ground lies here—is it with him, a victim of elicited mnemonic hell, or is it with Newton, whose memories these are?

“As in, for food,” Newton explains, short, stressed, and dismissive. He pushes away from the wall, shifts his weight to one leg, then starts what appears to be a purposeful tremor in the contralateral foot.

“The kaiju?” Hermann asks, certain this a subject to be avoided at all costs, given the man has accidentally talked himself into four episodes of silent, disoriented panic, and seems to be in the process of commencing attempt number five. Hermann’s not certain what in god’s name he thinks he’s accomplishing. Could he be mapping the borders of his mental degrees of freedom, like a child with a toothache or a subpar undergraduate calculating a chi-squared test statistic? Is he failing to learn from past experience? Is he purposefully ignoring past experience in an attempt at intrapersonal control by staging pitched battles between his prefrontal cortex and his sympathetic nervous system?

Hermann has no idea.

“What other things do you know of that might realistically have tried to eat me recently?” Newton adjusts Hermann’s sunglasses, still fidgeting.

“Yesterday you asked me if your eyes were made of sand,” Hermann replies in frustrated, elliptical caution, trying to steer their conversation away from the kaiju. “So you will excuse me if I request clarification.”

“Did I really?” Newton swings the bag of drugstore toiletries he holds against the wall of the elevator for no reason Hermann can discern, aside from his baseline instinct for demolition. “Ugh. Was I, by any chance, super insightful while drugged? Because I could see things shaking out that way when my brain declutches. Y’know. Gear shift of the self?”

Hermann raises an eyebrow at that turn of phrase, but it is wasted because Newton isn’t looking at him.

“You were not,” Hermann says, quite truthfully. “I had a great deal of difficulty conversing with you, as you displayed only intermittent and partial insight into what was occurring around you, let alone the capacity for abstract thought.”

Hermann doesn’t add that those brief flickers of unconventional insight had been singularly difficult to hear, difficult to bear, difficult to respond to, stripped as they were of any typically fractious disputation. He doesn’t add that he likes Newton best with every layer of his defenses intact and aligned because then Hermann can have his own defenses in place as well. His defenses are better than Newton’s, if only because he needs his more. 

Given Newton’s fluctuating psychological fortifications, Hermann is equalizing their intellectual footing by omission. He is having mixed success with this strategy, primarily because Newton has now noticed it and is, of course, finding it irritating.

In the vernacular, Newton can “deal.”

The elevator slides open, revealing a fluorescently lit hall.

Hermann pushes himself away from the sea-scored mirror as Newton waves him forward, one boot pressed against the recessed doors.

“That’s disappointing,” Newton says philosophically, one hand trailing along the wall as they proceed down the hallway. “I expect better of my brain, even under duress.”

Hermann is frankly astounded that Newton is alive at all, let alone arguably compos mentis.

“I do not,” he replies dryly.

“Well you’re the irrationally pessimistic one,” Newton says. “I’m the visionary. Everyone knows that.”

“The one with visions, perhaps.” Hermann unlocks the hotel room door with the wave of an RFID card. “But that is not the same thing.”

“It’s nice to know that no matter what horrible psychological problems I end up with post-drifting, at least I can count on you to be an acerbic ass about them.” Newton angles his head at the planar surface of the desk before sweeping a pile of hard-drives aside with the careful imprecision of the glassesless. He deposits his bag of drugstore miscellany on the desk. “That’s comforting, Hermann, thank you. Thank you so much.”

“I am the first to admit that I am extremely ill-qualified for every aspect of what is happening here.” Hermann hooks his cane over the back of the desk chair. “Especially reassuring you regarding your current array of—challenges.” 

“I don’t need reassurance, man,” Newton says. “My life is awesome right now.”

Hermann collapses into a seat on the nearest bed.

Newton follows suit in a fashion more overstated, if only because his motor control is unfortunately underpowered. He belatedly checks his own momentum with a hand on Hermann’s shoulder before he ends up horizontal. “Magnificence,” he says, in ambiguous annotation.

Hermann sighs.

“That’s a tag. For you,” Newton continues. “For your job. Your job that you’re feeling crap about like the aggravating perfectionist you are. You rescued me, dude. You rescued me. From a Kafka novel, basically.”

“That is absolutely false,” Hermann snaps. “I disingenuously removed you from a voluntary collaboration to which you never should have consented before it transitioned to something compulsory.”

“Hermann. You’re literally repeating what I just said using different and less exciting words. I have never gone up against bureaucracy and won. They screw you every time, man. I haven’t gotten a raise since 2017.”

“Really?”  Hermann asks, distracted.

As soon as Newton points it out, Hermann can recall as much, but the idea seems incorrect to him, given he received a raise every year while in PPDC employ. He’d never been terribly enthusiastic about his salary keeping pace with inflation, since the world was likely going to end, making long-term accrual of resources pointless, but—

God he must be exhausted.

“That is hardly germane.” He tries not to blame Newton for the tangential behavior of his own brain.

“You asked. My point is—this is a better outcome than I ever thought I’d get. So um. Y’know. Thanks.”

Hermann stares at the ceiling and wishes Newton would stop thanking him.

“You should have told me what you were going to do. What you were doing,” he says, clipped and stiff, refusing to let Newton’s inappropriate, intolerable gratitude be the catalyst that transforms days of anxiety into a solid wall of misdirected rage.

“There was nothing to tell.” Newton’s hand tightens on Hermann’s shoulder.

Hermann is certain he has never hated anyone as much as he hates Dr. Newton Geiszler in this precise moment.

“What were you going to do?” Newton continues, atypically quiet, atypically considerate, and in exceptionally typical unawareness of his position at the vertex of intersecting trajectories of Hermann’s deeply personal miseries. “Advertise your complicity in the whole thing? Document your hive mind exposure in excruciating detail so that, maybe, they’d let you stand in for me? More than you already had?”

“We could have discussed it.” Hermann’s throat closes. “We might have—”

“I know.” Newton turns unmistakably conciliatory. “But I didn’t think you were going to let me get my own way, so I took advantage of my recently upped intellectual street cred and made a unilateral decision, which, again, turned out to be a good one.”

“Is that what you’d call this,” Hermann hisses, still, even now, not angry enough to ask him what happened, “a ‘good’ outcome?”

“No,” Newton says. “I would call it an epic, sweeping win on behalf of our species.”

Hermann looks away.

Perhaps Newton is right. What is the peace of mind, the sanity, the life expectancy of a single, meddlesome biologist when considered in the context of a decade of death and terror and desperation, the spending of lives and resources, the building of Walls, and the blending of minds?

Nothing of consequence.

But.

Hermann cannot quite make himself see it that way.

He had wanted to win without resorting to Newton’s clairvoyant closing gambit.

He’d wanted to win by using Jaegers, by mapping the Breach, even by building a blasted Wall of infinite potential energy. He’d wanted to win with anything but Newton’s ridiculous plan to make himself the fulcrum of an attempt to leverage a wartime advantage across dimensions.

“Yes,” Hermann manages. “Yes, you’re quite right.”

“Oh god,” Newton rasps, one hand pressed to his chest. “Hermann. Please. Give a guy a little warning.”

“I beg your pardon?” Hermann twists to look at him, mystified and alarmed.

“You can’t just call me right; you can’t just pull surprise validation out of thin air and expect me to—oh my god, is it hot in here? Like, do you feel hot, possibly? I think I’ll lie down.” Newton gives up on whatever battle he’s waging with his core muscles and collapses back onto the bed. “I feel light-headed. I feel strangely turned on and also really awful at the same time. I think I—”

“Shut up,” Hermann snaps, without any fondness at all, whatsoever, in any way, shape, or form.

“That would be unfair to the world, though.” Newton struggles to sit. “This was a bad decision. Why did I lie down? I’m pretty sure my muscles have been replaced with lactic acid. I literally can barely use them.”

Hermann rolls his eyes and pulls the other man up by his blazer.

“I can’t believe you chose this blazer over my leather jacket, by the way. I like that jacket. This makes me look like a shameless, pretentious hipster, rather than a cool, edgy hipster. The demographic of this blazer and denim combo is not my demographic. It’s not yours either. You just—assigned me to a new demographic and I don’t like it. I don’t want—I don’t want to be here I—”

Newton scalpels away the end of an increasingly brittle monologue.

“You burned that jacket,” Hermann says gently. “The day after.”

“I know.” Newton doesn’t look at him. “I remember.”

Hermann nods.

“It was not a lucky jacket,” Newton says.

“On the contrary, it was an extremely ‘lucky’ jacket,” Hermann replies dryly. “It was however, also a ‘ruined’ jacket, and I do nothing but commend your instinct to incinerate contaminated clothing.”

“Yeah,” Newton says, “though that might’ve been your influence. It’s hard to tell.”

“I suggest you avoid detailed analysis at present,” Hermann advises.

“Noted, dude,” Newton replies. “Already in practice. Like, for example, I’m not questioning the why of my loss of fine motor control, or my crappy smooth pursuit when it comes to visual tracking. I’m assuming there will be a time my musculoskeletal system starts taking orders from my brain again. Kinda makes you wonder what—” he breaks off, both hands coming up, his skin blanching, his breathing a sudden, shallow struggle.

“You are fine,” Hermann says for the fourth time that morning, his hand closed around Newton’s elbow, right above the joint.

More than anything he wants to know what Newton is experiencing in these moments. Is he panicking? Is he having an immersive mnemonic experience? Is it something else? 

“You are fine,” Hermann continues, lying to him, lying to him. Possibly. Possibly lying to him.

He doesn’t know.   

He wonders if it’s neurologically possible for Newton to get lost in his own mind, to become mired in a pathologic circuit that should not be there, that doesn’t belong, that should never have been laid down.

“You are fine.” Hermann shakes him gently. “We are in San Francisco. In a hotel room. We had a disconcertingly gratis breakfast.”

He has no idea if Newton is processing any of this.

“We then went shopping. You made a memorable impression on literally every single human being we crossed paths with, despite my advice to the contrary.”

“Yeah,” Newton manages after several more seconds. “No, I know. I’m—I get it.”

"Do you—" Hermann realizes mid-question that what he’s about to ask is poorly considered. He breaks his phrase in half and restarts his sentence. “Do you find it helpful if I orient you?” He leaves the context implied, hopes Newton will say ‘no,’ hopes they’ll both believe it.

“Yeah.” Newton resolutely studies the opposite wall. “Maybe a little.”

Hermann nods, trying recast this as progress of some kind. Of any kind.

The more that comes to light, the less he’ll like it. Of that much, he’s quite sure.

From the moment he’d predicted the timing of the triple event, he’d known his life would be abjectly, acutely miserable for the foreseeable future, and, while he is grateful he’s not in danger of ending his life in the maw of a kaiju, he’d hit that particular forecast straight on its proverbial head.

Breakfast had been awful.

Subsequent shopping had been worse.

He’d known it would be, of course, but he’d also known he was not capable of leaving Newton alone in a San Francisco hotel room for even a minimal amount of time while he purchased a toothbrush and analgesics. Not today. Not right now. Absolutely not. Entirely out of the question. Insupportable.  One hundred percent unthinkable in theory and in practice.

“What’s wrong with you?” Newton asks, in faintly puzzled irritation. “Something’s wrong with you.”

Hermann tries to bury the urge to vent his frustration in one of many innumerable and equally unfortunate ways, but it is difficult.

Newton is unforgivably stupid at times. Hermann could contend with that, could accept it as a given and work around it, if only it were always true. Alas, it is not, and so he can’t. 

“And you know I mean that in the nicest way,” Newton adds.

Newton is, in part, correct.

There are many things “wrong with him” at present. 

Hermann has no urge to start concatenating.

The entirety of his unrest reduces down to that which has always troubled him in one form or another—the shuttering of insight in the face of poorly defined bias. Ironically, it bothers him now in Newton, who, in the span of a week, has escaped Hermann’s admittedly flawed estimation of him (as a tangle of compensatory blindnesses) only to be revealed, intra-drift, as the eidetic empiricist with prodigious predictive capacity and a tendency to swing at conceptual fences he had always been, before being caught in a web of probable neural damage Hermann doesn’t think he’s fully capable of perceiving.

You think something is wrong with me? Hermann nearly shouts at him. Something is wrong with you. Do you understand that?

“Nicely.” Newton attempts to course correct with a strange mixture of condescension and anxiety. “I meant it nicely. Also respectfully. Did I mention respectfully?” 

Hermann despises bias.

He despises incomplete insight.

He sees both of these in Newton now—in his appropriation of Descartes and Riemann zeros, in the way he offers to pull Hermann out of a sinking boat and straight into the water with the absolute sincerity of a man who doesn’t understand he’s drowning.

Hermann can only guess at the warped edges of his own insight.

Perhaps this is what Newton means when he says that something’s wrong.

“I literally can’t tell if you’re trying not to freak out or trying not to yell at me,” Newton says. “Can you say something maybe? Like—which way are you leaning? Panic or pique, dude, come on, you’re making me nervous. Pick one.”

The unparsable distress Hermann feels breaks against the wall of his own exhaustion.

Nothing will ever clarify for him again.

Not like it once had.

Numbers, equations, the semiotics of the civilized mind—these can be misinterpreted, there are places they cannot go, there are unsolvable problems, there are limits to confidence intervals, there are boundaries on predictive power imposed by sensitive dependence of initial conditions. Even so, mathematics is consistent with itself. It’s the solid bone that supports physical laws that have had their phenomenological skin opened and peeled back.

Mathematics, understood perfectly, would allow for a shucking of all deceptions the human mind perpetrates against itself.

One can only be betrayed by one’s flawed understanding. One can be betrayed by it, driven mad by it, tortured by it endlessly. How he would love to divorce himself from his biology—from this inadequate chunk of tissue through which he’s forced to interface with the world. It’s his only interface. And it’s flawed. Flawed by the vagaries of natural selection. Flawed by physical limitations. Flawed by its solipsism and its base links to primitive responses, to the terror that turns on like a spigot as it tries to teach that which he already knows, to the shame that is built in simply to improve odds of survival by conformity to social norms. He doesn’t like it. He’s never liked it. And now he likes it less. It’s full of glitches and incompatibilities.

“Hermann!!” Newton shouts directly in his ear.

Hermann flinches, fixes Newton with is most wroth-filled glare, and snarls, “Yes,” with as much energy as total exhaustion and abject misery will grant him, “very astute. There’s always been something wrong with me.”

“Oh for the love.” Newton glares at the ceiling in vexatious relief.

Hermann has no idea what that incomplete phrase might imply. His improved insight into Newton’s disorganized consciousness extends only so far.

“What the hell was that?” Newton asks, clearly referring to Hermann’s brief descent into acute existential agony.

“I’ve always suspected that my brain, as an interface with reality, was deeply flawed. Now it is, unquestionably and post your influence, more flawed than ever.”

“Thanks,” Newton says dryly. “But you realize you’re doing my thing right now, right? It’s like, the anti-hedge. It’s the paralipsis defense. Run awaaay from the hedging down a paraliptical rhetorical path. I wonder if I can do your thing? The hedge you into a hedge garden thing? Do people even have gardens of hedges? Would that just be a maze?”

“You know,” Hermann says, “it would improve my mood a great deal if you would make an effort to enunciate and direct your train of thought to the extent you’re capable of doing so because I spent the better part of a day concerned you had lost touch with reality and might never regain it.”

“So hedging it is.” Obligingly, Newton crisps up his diction.

“I do not hedge,” Hermann replies. “As we discussed last week, ‘hedging’ is not a rhetorical device I ever employ.”

“So you want what?” Newton asks. “You have to want something for me to hedge for you, that’s how it works, Hermann, do you seriously not get hedging, as a concept, or are you just pretending not to get it in some display of misdirected virtue?”

“Allow me to clarify things for you: I do not want you to hedge anything, Newton.”

“You want a perfect brain,” Newton says. “Understandable. I totally get that, maybe a little too well right now. But you can only have a perfect, unbiased view of the nature of reality if you can abstract yourself from it, which is impossible. You’ll always be limited by your hardware. By the traversable surfaces of your interior eurhythmic architecture. By your resources.”

“I know that,” Hermann replies. “I have, in fact, always known it.”

“No kidding. You put your money down on the purely theoretical horse before you’d seen the real thing.”

Hermann rolls his eyes.

“Do NOT roll your eyes at me, you prosaic bastard; you committed fully to the quantitative and the abstract at about age eight, man, and that’s because no one ever cast physiology for you as anything more than an enemy. A barrier to be overcome.”

This is becoming too personal for Hermann’s taste, a sentiment he views with the self-aware irony that it deserves, given he’s in possession of Newton’s entire mnemonic landscape circa one week previous.

“Isn’t it?” Hermann asks dryly. “I thought you, of all people, would have particular insight into that.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.” There’s a strange trace of familiar and foreign stiffness in the tilt of Newton’s head, the line of his jaw. “My brain and I are a team, thank you. Stop taking a chainsaw to my hedging job. I’m not doing this for me, dude; I’m not doing this for my amusement.”

“What are you doing?” Hermann asks. “Because I’m sure I don’t know.”

“Demonstrating academic solidarity?” Newton replies. “Role reversal? Being nice to you, because it has not escaped my notice that you’ve been extremely nice to me?”

“Only because I pointed it out to you.”

“No one’s perfect, okay? Look, I’ll explain in a less implicit way: you’re upset because your brain is a mess, and that’s my fault in at least three ways. You say, ‘Newton, I’ve decided to drop my Victorian-era demeanor and sensibilities and confess to you I want Thing A, where Thing A is my brain returning to its former status as a fine-ass example of well organized, well ordered, intrapersonal control.’ Context wise, Thing A is tied up in your long history of wishing you could exchange your brain for hardware that’s a little less inherently limited and your acute history of tragically scrambling said brain with two other parties. You know you’re not getting Thing A, not really, but you want it so much you’ll never qualify Thing A for yourself, you’ll just let it piss you off endlessly. I, impersonating baseline-you—are you following this, dude? It’s confusing and you look tired. Okay, based on the look I’m getting, I assume your answer is yes. Continuing. So, I (impersonating you) hedge for you by presenting Idea B: divorcing yourself from the architecture of your own consciousness is not only impossible but also meaningless because you are your neural architecture, your entire experience derives from it, you have to drag it around and make it do what you want. I also hedge for you by presenting Idea C, which is that even though your perception of the world is flawed, we live in a universe of reproducible phenomena which permits the idea of absolute truth, at least in certain arenas. Yeah, you’ll never claw your way to a privileged frame of reference—so what, man? There’s something nice, something comforting, about the equality of observers. So you suck at having adequate self-insight right now. Big deal. Because, guess what, dude? You always sucked at it. You just didn’t know how much you sucked. Now you know. Now you can really tell. Because you know what I know. About your brain. And how it's a traitorous bastard most of the time. Not just yours. Everyone’s.”

“And that’s what you think this is?” Hermann asks hopelessly. “Some quixotic quest to find a superior mental reference frame? I hardly think we’re in an inertial state.”

“You’re the worst,” Newton informs him. “That might’ve been one of my sweetest, most rococo formal arguments ever, and you’re going to criticize it based on inertia?”

Hermann rolls his eyes. “I’m attempting to refine it.”

Mollified, Newton says, “I’ll allow that. Fine. Maybe our frame is non-inertial. This is weird, even for us. Sharing brains; you rescuing me, like, eight times from my own stupidity, me reassuring you with concepts borrowed from relativistic physics and improperly generalized to cognition; you avoiding your problems paralipsisically, me doing some theoretically suspect but aesthetically acceptable hedging for you in response; you wearing that bathrobe, me being ninety-five percent blind rather than eighty-five percent blind; you sticking it to The Man, me complying with the man and getting neurologically worked over for my trouble; you verbalizing inappropriate guitar thoughts, me being obsessed with the most straightforward coordinate plane out there; you not sleeping, like, at all, me sleeping a lot; us becoming rockstars but in kind of a suspicious way we want to minimize; not having to save the world anymore; it’s weird, dude, we’re changing our velocity that’s for sure, but I’m not sure if it’s an acceleration thing or a deceleration thing or just a really tight cornering to avoid an oncoming brick wall.”

“Several points,” Hermann says. “A) I do not hedge. B) I was not engaging in paralipsis. C) I do not have inappropriate thoughts about musical instruments, least of all your guitar from 2009. D) I’ve been sleeping adequately, thank you. E) I am sure drug-induced semiconsciousness does not count as sleep. F) Your entire premise that I am upset because my brain is, quote, ‘a mess,’ is flawed. My primary concern at the present time is, in actuality, your brain, Newton.”

“Oh.” This seems to set Newton back. “Really?”

“Yes.” Hermann isn’t sure what exactly it will take to firmly impart this knowledge to his colleague of the past decade if he’s not managed to successfully convey it already. 

“Myeah, there are some blown or blowing fuses in here, I’ll give you that.” Newton points to his own head. “But I think I’m cognitively operating at, eh, eighty percent? Don’t you think? I could see myself misjudging that, so I’ll believe you if you say I’m not, but like, come on. Non-inertial reference frames? I’m receiving what you’re transmitting. Not literally. Probably. I feel like eighty percent of my theoretical maximum plus weird thought-parity should put me in a pretty reasonable cognitive sphere from a usefulness and discourse oriented perspective. If you insist on considering the physical I’ll accept I’m operating at 64% of my historical norm. That’s the lowest value I’m gonna call reasonable though.”

Hermann feels vaguely sick.

This is partially attributable to an elevated coffee-to-omelette ratio hard on the heels of a sleepless night.

This is partially attributable to the content of Newton’s statement.

This is partially attributable to what he must say next.

He sees no way out, not ethically, not morally, not paraliptically. This demands to be confronted head on.

Do you not understand I do not care about your discourse level at the present moment? Hermann would like to ask. Do you think I don’t know your moral imperatives are more commonly cast as moral ideals? Do you think I’m incapable of parsing your rationale for nearly everything you have or will ever encounter? Do you think I will ever forget the slide of the tray that ended our last shared meal in Hong Kong?

“Newton,” he says. “I hope you realize—”

He isn’t certain he’ll continue; his mind is saying no to every thought he has.

“I hope you realize I didn’t pull you out of that lab for any discursive or analytic abilities you might possess,” Hermann manages.  

“Um.” Newton brings a hand to his head. “I know. Obviously. You pulled me out because you have a pathologic sense of loyalty and devotion, which is sometimes hilarious, sometimes tragic, and has already gotten you into way too much trouble. I’m just—pointing out side benefits you can enjoy as a result of continually bending the knee to the rigid ethics of your superego. Hopefully the benefits will end up outweighing the costs.”

“I would have done it at any cost,” Hermann whispers, looking at the far wall.

“Terrible plan.” Newton stares at the floor. “Evolutionary fail.”

“I will always make decisions that transcend biological imperatives,” Hermann replies.

“Show off.”

For a moment they are silent, sitting too close together on the edge of a nondescript bed in an anonymous room. Hermann looks out the floor-to-ceiling windows, past the dark metal rail of the balcony, and toward the distant Wall, pale gray in the light of a rising sun.

“You’re seriously giving a talk on Monday?” Newton asks. “I can’t even—yeah, I would not be able to do that, man. Are you sure you can? Maybe reschedule. Are you even sleeping? Have you slept anytime recently. Are you even a guy? Or are you, like, some kind of other thing? Are you infecting me with your thought parity? Can you not, maybe? Do you have a plan for how you’re going to structure it? The talk, I mean. Want to tell it to me? Kinda vaguely? Remember that time in Geneva, with the weirdly purple ambient lighting? That was a great talk you gave. I was sitting next to the editor of Nature Kaiju Science. Did I ever tell you about this? He basically started jerking off once you got to your first data slide. Metaphorically. It was very uncomfortable for me.”

“Charming.” Hermann recalls that meeting, the undercurrent of terror edging every question, sharpening every conflict, heightening every intellectual rivalry. Newton had gotten into a shouting match at the end of his own talk, his sleeves rolled up, the green of his progressively building body art black under the dim, violet lights. “I didn’t know you were there,” Hermann says slowly. “In fact, I’m certain you told me you skipped my talk.”

“Um.” The word is no more than a breath. “Yeah. I think I did tell you that.”

“But you didn’t. You didn’t skip it.” Hermann’s eyebrows pull together, as he remembers himself from outside his body and inside Newton’s, wedged into a seat at the back of the room, ragingly hung over, his thumb hooked under his jaw, two fingers pressing against his temple, the knuckles of his ring finger digging into the corner of his mouth.

“Don’t—” Newton says. “Don’t think of that—don’t think of that whole day, actually.”

“Too late,” Hermann murmurs, flashing back to an image of himself that comes not from his mind but from Newton’s, from the corner seat in the last row of a dim auditorium. He watches violet light reflect off the surface of his hair as he begins the final talk of the first plenary session. As he clicks through his slide deck, moving from his background on Quantum Field Theory to his first and most important data slide, he feels Newton’s thoughts close like calipers in tense, anticipatory simpatico, a mental aligning, his fingers pressing against his temple, against the arm of his chair, the muscles of his left leg contracting and releasing in a controlled tremor, until, finally, the transition comes in a moment of climax so intense that the audience shifts as one, a collective breath is released, and the man next to him says, “Oh god,” as the topology of the breach appears on the screen in irregular, pastel relief. He can relax then; something lets go in his mind, and he whispers, “Was it good for you too?” to his traumatized seatmate. 

Hermann shakes his head, fighting a flood of disorientation. “You are bizarre.”

“You too,” Newton replies.

He doesn’t understand the memory, can’t be sure if Newton’s tension was real, was actually how the man had felt in that moment, or whether the fidelity of Newton’s remembered experience is now infected with Hermann’s own memory of the same event—behind the podium, a wireless microphone clipped to his collar, uncomfortable at the idea of public speaking, as he always, always was, but, for once, feeling his own fears subsumed beneath the importance of the material he needed to communicate.

“Were you anxious?” Hermann asks. “Were you anxious on my behalf?” 

“No,” Newton says. “Yes. No. You get very anxious, man, it’s catching. A little bit. But not really. Look, it was memorable, that’s all.” He tries to run a hand through his hair and makes no headway through gel-petrified disarray. “Ugh, what did they put in my hair? Glue?”

“Yes,” Hermann confirms, dry and mild. “I believe that’s exactly what they used. Water-soluble glue. Consider a shower.”

“Myeeaaaah,” Newton says reluctantly.

“Do you have some objection to showering?” Hermann asks.

“No,” Newton replies. “No. That would be weird, why would you even ask me that? Showering is great. Hygiene is important. Glue is less good. Glue is not preferred. Did we buy a razor? I’m going to shower right now, actually. Do you think the PPDC will send us our stuff? Do you think we should ask for it, or is that just opening lines of communication that would better be left shut? Not that I don’t enjoy the lifestyle of an itinerant intellectual rover, but I could use more than two outfits, and I liked guitar number four, dude, and last time I saw it, it was leaning against the south wall of the lab. Do you think anyone will water my plants? Where are my glasses?”

“You do not need your glasses to take a shower,” Hermann says.

“Well I need them to find the hydrogen peroxide we bought and do an oxidative blood lift on all the things I’ve gotten blood on, which I can neither find nor identify without vision.” Newton sounds like he’s approaching vexation, if not quite there yet. 

“I will do that,” Hermann informs him.

“You’re going to throw up,” Newton says. 

“I will not,” Hermann replies.

“You will. I guarantee it. I will bet you five hundred and twelve dollars that the second you see catalase generated pink-tinged foam you’ll—”

“Fine.” Hermann pulls Newton’s glasses out of the front pocket of his own blazer and extending them in the other man's direction.

“Wait,” Newton says. “You had these? The whole time? In the diner? You jackass. We were on TV.”

“I will collect and curate an entire library of literally all references to you in the cultural lexicon and organize it for you,” Hermann snarls, “at a later date. As of right now, I did not think it wise to expose you to television coverage of recent events in an uncontrolled environment.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Newton winces as he swaps Hermann’s shades for his glasses.

“Use your ostensibly intact cognitive capacity to figure it out,” Hermann says, all the bite he’d meant to give the words undercut by his reaction to Newton’s bloodshot eyes and pained expression.

“Yeah.” Newton angles his head to favor his right eye as he digs through plastic shopping bags. “I already did. That was not a good-faith interrogative, dude.” He emerges with the hydrogen peroxide. “Do you even know me?”

That was not a good-faith interrogative either. Hermann’s quite clear on that point.

“Yes.” Hermann stands, unwilling to watch Newton attempt to read the label on the hydrogen peroxide. “What in god’s name could you possibly be trying to ascertain?” He snaps the bottle out of Newton’s grip.

“For one, whether I have enough visual resolution to read,” Newton replies. “For two, what percent—”

Hermann glances at the label. “Three.” He hands the bottle back. “It’s antiseptic grade, three percent hydrogen peroxide. Pour it on your shirt and be done with it.”

“Sit.” Newton pushes Hermann back a step, in the direction of the bed. “That’s step one. Then? Lie down. You’re ridiculously cranky right now, do you realize that? Leave the redox reactions to the guy who can consistently tell the difference between oxidation and reduction and go dream about four-dimensional cubes. I promise not to die in the shower.”

Hermann resists, but Newton increases his own insistence with direct, linear proportionality culminating in a functional shove, saying, “Just lie there, dude. Just lie there and sleep. Easy. The easiest thing ever.”

“I strongly object to being shoved onto a bed.”

“Noted.” Newton is already half across the room and half out of his blazer. “Noted, considered, and deemed wholly irrelevant on the following grounds: a) I gave you fair warning about this exact outcome; b) you’ve been dragging me all over the place for I don’t even know how long; c) you deserved it; and d) you deserved it.”

Newton struggles all the way out of his blazer and pitches it at Hermann, effectively preventing Hermann’s incipient retort.

“Will you stop?” Hermann pulls Newton’s blazer out of his face.

“Stop what?” Newton squints through his glasses as he pulls his bloodstained shirt and a bloodstained bathrobe from the closet. “I like that you hung these up.”

Hermann doesn’t dignify that with a response.

He waits for Newton to vanish around the corner, waits for the sound of a closing door, waits for the rush of the shower heard dimly through the wall before he pulls out the remote and turns on the television. He mutes it out of pure precaution, not because he thinks it’s necessary, not because he thinks that Newton, somehow, might hear it behind a wall and with the ambient sound of running water, but because it makes Hermann himself feel safer. As though he’s making rationally supportable decisions.

Which he is not.

He’ll endeavor to improve his performance in that regard.

Right now, he has an extreme bias against exposing Newton to any materials, images, or concepts too closely linked with the kaiju anteverse. He has only the vaguest of ideas regarding what is happening in his colleague’s head, and he prefers to err on the side of caution. Hopefully, Newton’s current difficulties consist of nothing more than a few understandable and biologically justified episodes of unremitting sympathetic activation.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t think that’s what’s happening.

Not exactly.

Not precisely.

He’s building a theory.

A theory he doesn’t particularly care for.

As he flips through channels with a quick, repetitive flick of the accelerometer in the remote he holds, Hermann lays it out for himself.

His own post-drift experience has been atypical relative to case reports compiled from Jaeger pilots. Hermann is now in possession of a repository of biological knowledge he didn’t work to acquire, a set of muscle memories that aren’t his own but nevertheless belong to him, and a collection of preferences built on a life he hasn’t lived. These things exist in simultaneous parallel to his own sets of knowledge and banks of skills, and, if he is not mistaken, aspects of these exogenous memories and skills and preferences are becoming insidiously incorporated into his current mental function.

He narrows his eyes at his left hand and transfers the remote he's holding to his right hand. Where it belongs. He continues flipping through channels.

EPIC Rapport is a concept he can’t yet parse. He understands its underpinnings imperfectly. He’d like more detail on the way these memories were laid down, why they were cemented so firmly when the Drift usually resulted in transient synchronization that faded with a velocity inversely proportional to the number of successful synchronizations achieved by the drifting pair. He may not be able to biochemically parse the mechanism by which EPIC Rapport has been initiated or is being maintained, but he’s certain he can lay elements of his subjective experience at its door, such as his inability to create ranked lists in the face of diametrically opposed preferences, his talent for isolating kaiju RNA without reference to a protocol, his facility with Nietzsche, his ability to pick up a guitar and play the central riff of Syncope, arguably the most successful hit of The Superconducting Supercolliders.

Newton, however, is not the only party with whom he shared his brain in a vulnerable, hyperexcitable state.

Alas.

He also shared his consciousness with a hive mind.

An alien one.

Is there any other kind?

His borrowed biological knowledge fails to provide him with an example, other than those derived from science fiction, a field in which Newton possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of readily available, useless, inspiring ephemera.

Hermann rolls his eyes at a man who is not even in the room, then returns to his train of thought.

If Newton’s neural patterns have been burned into his cortex in an expensive metabolic blaze of long term potentiation, Hermann isn’t certain what’s been left behind by the anteverse. Certainly, something has been, certainly some things are now altered, because otherwise he doesn’t think he’d dream of destruction on scales that make him ill in waking hours. He had, of course, worried about the integrity of his thoughts, right from the beginning, right from the moment he’d regurgitated bile in that dimly lit Hong Kong street, nauseated by the violence, by the savage instinct, that had, so recently, been a part of him.

This then, is a first approximation of his mental experience: EPIC Rapport with Newton coupled with the subjectively limited influence of the kaiju anteverse that’s manifesting primarily as dreams. At a second approximation: hyperexcitability of his neural pathways had facilitated a near duplication of Newton’s experiences in his own cerebral cortex and had effected changes unknown but more subtle and therefore, likely, more circumscribed in response to synchronization with a kaiju hive mind. He doesn’t have enough data to reach a third approximation. Not at this point.

This brings him to his working model of Newton’s current subjective experience.

One: Newton is experiencing EPIC Rapport with Hermann, as evidenced by his appreciation for rationalism, a newfound talent for engaging in mathematics-based wordplay, and the ability to locate Hermann’s sherry, amongst other examples. 

Two: Newton is operating under several acute psychological stressors. These consist of a) a level of sleep-deprivation at which Hermann can only guess and b) several notably horrid experiences in the past week, some of which Hermann can remember and some of which he’s forced to imagine. These things, taken together, may explain Newton’s episodes of what appears to be brief but all-consuming panic. Hermann doesn’t feel comfortable assuming either panic or causality. 

Three: Newton may be experiencing aspects of EPIC Rapport with the kaiju anteverse. Hermann doesn’t believe there is a real-time connection between Newton and the anteverse, doesn’t see how there possibly could be, given the Breach is not just shut but destroyed. However, as evidenced by his own experience with EPIC Rapport, the subjective sensation of another party existing within the framework of one’s own mental processes is both disruptive and confusing. He imagines that it would be worse, infinitely, unimaginably worse, if that other party was a mnemonically preserved representation of the kaiju hivemind.

Four: Hermann finds considering Newton’s subjective experience extremely upsetting.

Five: So does Newton, he would imagine.

Six: He’ll determine what, exactly, happened to Newton during the time he was “collaborating” with the PPDC, and, if warranted, he will grind careers into bureaucratic dust.

Seven: I think someone hijacked your working model, his mind offers, sounding distressingly like Newton. Because you transitioned straight from modeling to vengeful to-do lists.

Hermann shuts his eyes and threads his fingers through his hair at his temple.

When he opens his eyes again, he’s looking at Ms. Mori, in sharp, two-dimensional relief on the screen built into the wall. She is silent but speaking, wearing a red shirt, with red streaks in her hair, responding to a question with an earnest expression and measured hand gestures. Mr. Becket sits beside her. Their poses are nearly identical, from the subtle twist of their shoulders toward their interviewer, to their polite, reserved expressions. 

Hermann feels, for a moment, blindly and acutely envious.

Of what, exactly, he can’t say. 

He requires a moment to collect himself before reading the scrolling captions on the screen.

Let me say on behalf of all our viewers and our production team that we’re deeply sorry for the personal losses you both sustained over the past week. Their interviewer interlaces her fingers atop the surface of her desk.

Thank you, Ms. Mori replies.

Can you tell us a little bit about how you’re coping? the interviewer asks.

For a long interval, neither of them speak. The white words in the black caption box disappear.

No one has gone untouched by all that’s happened, Ms. Mori says finally.

There’s common ground in that, I think, Mr. Becket finishes for her.

Hermann flicks his wrist.

Capacitors discharge.

The channel changes.