Out of Many Scattered Things: Failing the Solo Trial

“Tell me, in absolute honesty, what is the state of your living quarters?” Hermann says.

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

Text iteration: Witching hour.

Additional notes: None.

Failing the Solo Trial

Five hours into a morning on the tenth day of the sixth month of the twenty-second year of the second millennium, Dr. Hermann Gottlieb decides the following.

He has missed any window for sleep that might have existed.

It’s useless to continue to pretend it’s Tuesday night.

He should change his clothes, shower, and reset himself for Wednesday morning.

Therefore, he leaves his lab, passing through deserted halls in a haze of exhausted preoccupation. He leans heavily on his cane, one hand passing repeatedly over vision that won’t retain its usual clarity. He keys in the entry code to his room, strips off his jacket, shirt, and slacks, steps into the tepidity of a distracted shower, dons a clean set of clothes, leaves his room in its usual pristine state, obtains his third cup of coffee for the night, or, rather, for the morning, and retraces his steps back the way he came. 

By six o’clock he has reentered his lab and re-seated himself at his desk, his back aching, his shoulders knotted, his vision possessed of a faintly askew quality that the world seems to take on whenever he has had too little sleep.

He resumes his work.

There’s a terrible pull to the spread of his spiraling data, an abyss-like conceptual flow that no one but him can yet feel. He folds equations out and back in an endless series of unpacking and repacking of variables, uncovering an horrific mathematical topography that he checks, re-checks, triple checks, checks obsessively, checks over and over again, unable to look away, and he thinks of Caitlin Lightcap, disappearing to the women’s locker room for hours on end, emerging, finally, with chapped hands and bleeding nail beds and he thinks, ‘I did not give you enough credit for all you did and I am sorry, I am sorry, I am sorry and I will be sorry for the rest of my life.’

Soon, he will move to chalk. 

Soon he will write it out for himself in mineral calcite spread against a green board, crushing the empty husks of small, dead creatures of the sea.

He works, uninterrupted, for a span of hours.

He works, uninterrupted, until someone sets a familiar cellphone directly atop the first half of the equation he’s in the midst of scribing neatly across the paper that spreads in a layered stream over his desk.

Hermann slams his pen down and glares upward. 

“Oh give it a rest,” Newton says, imperious, backlit, holding a coffee cup like a piece of personal hagiographic iconography, “for a day in your life. Please.”

Hermann’s broken focus collapses under its own weight straight into anger, hyperdense, brilliant, white-hot, nearly uncontrolled. Nearly. His jaw realigns, he shifts his spine, he rolls his shoulders, trying to sublimate the shreds of too much mental energy into a bounded physical outlet. He cannot get the viciousness to clear from his voice as he hisses, “Ah, Dr. Geiszler. What a pleasant surprise. Nine in the morning and you already have your clothes on. What’s the occasion?”

“Read it,” Newton snaps. 

Hermann picks up Newton’s phone and scans the subject line. 

Special Initiative 352: PPDC Resource Reallocation. 

It is from a person whose name Hermann doesn’t recognize.

He glances up at Newton. 

Newton looks back at him in silence with a slight and portentous quirk of his brows.

Dear Dr. Geiszler, the message begins. Please be advised that due to the resources required for the scheduled completion of the Costal Wall, we have regretfully elected to shift funding from your current scientific endeavors to other projects deemed higher priority at this time. After careful review by the Financial Allocations Branch of the PPDC, we have determined that your current operating budget will be reduced by seventy-five percent. Your subdivision will fuse with its sister subdivision, creating a single budget for the single department known as K-Science.

Further details on this merge and subsequent budgetary changes will be explained to you and to Dr. Gottlieb at a Reallocation Meeting next week. At this juncture, you should be preparing your staff for this departmental downsizing. Regretfully, we will only have sufficient funding to retain positions for two science staff members within the entire division—yourself and Dr. Gottlieb. 

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, but we expect the pair of you to be winding down your existing research projects within the span of the next three years, to coincide with the completion of the Costal Wall Project. Should you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact our central office in Tokyo. 

Hermann looks up at Newton.

“Yeah,” Newton says, in response whatever it is he sees in Hermann’s face.

“I have not been contacted yet,” Hermann says, hating the hope in his own voice.

Newton drops his eyes and then collapses into a seat on the opposite side of Hermann’s desk, wordlessly throwing up a hand as if to ask, ‘and what do you think that means?’

It means nothing.

Hermann sits forward, thrusting the heels of his hands against his eyes, unable to yet feel the full despair that hangs hangs over him, waiting to crush him to death in the long term. Possibly, in the medium term. Possibly in the short term. Possibly right in this very moment. He is not certain how he is supposed to accomplish any of this; his staff has already been stripped down and stripped down and stripped down until there is nothing left; he’s working with only a single tech—how is he supposed to—Newton cannot perform his experiments without technical help, it is literally impossible—how does anyone expect that anything might be accomplished under conditions such as these; they ask too much without being cognizant of asking anything at all; they do not understand—

Newton is speaking.

Newton, it seems, has been speaking for quite some time, but a particular phrase breaks through Hermann’s iterating despair.

“—not freak out about this; it’s not productive. I—”

“As if you are an authority on productivity, Dr. Geiszler,” Hermann snarls, bringing his hands from face to desk with an audible crack. “I assure you that I am acutely aware of—”

“Chill,” Newton snaps, trying to speak over him.

“Do not tell me to chill,” Hermann screams at him.

“Stop it,” Newton shouts. 

They breathe heavily, staring at one another for a brief, wild-eyed interval.

“Get out of my office,” Hermann says. 

“Have you been sleeping?” Newton asks, his eyes narrowed.

“Out,” Hermann snaps, pointing at the door.

“I have a takedown experiment today so don’t bother me,” Newton says, getting to his feet, sliding straight back under a mantle of academic disdain.

“I’m sure I can arrange as much if you’ll kindly avoid impaling yourself with your own sample,” Hermann hisses.

Newton glares at him in naked and total ire, retrieves his phone from Hermann’s desk, and leaves the room, slamming the door behind him in needless punctuation.

Good riddance.

He does not see Newton all day.

He does not see Newton all day, and he finds this something of a relief after the tempestuous week they’ve spent in the aftermath of the attack on Central America, the loss of another Jaeger team, and the associated political setbacks that emerged from the fallout of that loss. Newton is absolutely intolerable in periods of crisis; too certain of himself, perpetually trying to reorganize failing systems without adequate peripheral preparation, consistently introducing notes of inappropriate levity, too easily upset by what he perceives as the intellectual failings of others, full of a reflex superiority that he does not shake until systems have been restored to their resting state, advocating for solutions that are too ambitious in scope—in short, being himself. 

And so, it is a relief to operate on his own, even if Hermann spends his morning taking up the slack for those who have left, for those who have died, for those who have been asked to pack their bags due to lack of funding. He now attends meetings in departments with which he never used to concern himself, as he tries to relieve some of the terrible, unremitting pressure that has been placed, unfairly, upon Dr. Choi’s shoulders. The man is regularly covering LOCCENT now; it is truly beyond belief.

All through the morning and all through the afternoon, in the back of his thoughts, the unfinished spread of his waiting mathematics torments him to distraction, because while the tasks he completes are essential in the short term it is the evolving spread of conceptual thought that must be finished in order to make any difference at all in the sweep of unfolding events. 

He has been working on this particular progression for years. 

Post this most recent data from the breach, he’s had the opportunity to re-run his model. 

To examine the trends he’s been trying to abstract for years. 

And he’s almost got the pattern. 

Almost.

Nearly.

Very nearly.

He’s very nearly got it. 

There is something there that will yield to prediction, there is. In a way, the blur of recent days has felt like a contest; like a pitting of his mind against his body; like a week-long microcosm of his entire life. Nothing outside the confines of his central nervous system has ever been any good to him at all and so there is a kind of cosmic justice to that which he is now requiring of his corporeal form. His back and his leg and his shoulders and his eyes and his skull can take what he deigns to hand them and they can see how they like it; it is no more than they deserve for betraying him so consistently for so long.

This attitude serves him well and has served him well for his entire life. 

There is no reason to change it. 

If one could drop dead from physical exhaustion, he would have discovered that long ago. He’s not sure how he’ll die—he’s outlasted every endurance trial that man can invent. Something will have to kill him.

He can think of several somethings that would be only too happy to oblige. 

In the late afternoon he finds himself standing on the main floor of the shatterdome, looking up at the towering silhouette of a three-armed Jaeger, listening to Hercules Hansen go over the logistical schedule needed to refit Crimson Typhoon with cannibalized parts from the dead husk of Vulcan Specter. He’s running waveforms in the back of his thoughts, trying to ignore the burn of fatigued muscle and ineffective nerves, wondering, abruptly, why it is that the lights have begun to dim down around the edges of the vaulted room.

He spends several seconds trying to puzzle that one out. 

It does not occur to him that he’s losing consciousness until it is, mostly, a fait accompli.

He tries to save it, tries to shift his position, put his head down, but it’s too late for that; the floor falls away, Dr. Choi whispers, “Hey, are you—” 

And then there is nothing.

Until he wakes up, spine pressed against cold concrete, feeling wretched, feeling confused, feeling vaguely sick, with a group of people staring at him from what seems like a great distance away. It takes him several seconds to determine that they are standing and he is lying on the floor.

“Dr. G. Hey.”  Dr. Choi is kneeling next to him. “You fainted, buddy. We called medical. You want me to call Newt?”

“No,” Hermann snaps, or, attempts to snap. It comes out as a cracked whisper.

“Go do something useful,” Dr. Choi says, waving a hand in the direction of the interested J-tech personnel who are hovering above them, blocking out the light. “We’ll restart in fifteen.”

“Not with you, though,” Hansen says, dropping into a crouch on Hermann’s left, across from Dr. Choi to fix him with a look that is almost friendly. “You need to get checked out by medical.”

Hermann pushes himself to his elbows.

“The leg?” Hansen asks him, because Hansen, of course, knows. 

“It’s nothing,” Hermann snaps.

“Working too hard,” Dr. Choi says.

“It’s nothing,” Hermann insists, but they make him lie there until he can be transported to the medical bay, where he is given intravenous fluids, a meal, and a muscle relaxant for the spasm in his back and only then, his mind pharmacologically stripped of willpower, do his thoughts collapse in a disorganized spiral. He shuts his eyes halfway through an attempt to continue his work on the backs of the tissues located on his nightstand.

When Hermann wakes, his disorientation is complete.

He cannot remember how he arrived here, in this unfamiliar cement room with its dim lights and the quiet whir of foreign ventilation. He scrambles for context, for things that happened recently; he flips a through a disordered set of memories—Bavaria and Berlin and Alaska and Hong Kong, whiteboards and chalkboards and Jaegers run too long. He can’t—he can’t quite piece everything together; his thoughts feel like they’re tangled in something he can’t see.

But he is not entirely lacking for reference frames.

Newton is sitting less than a meter away, humming quietly to himself, illuminated by the light that comes from the glowing screen in his lap. The man’s hair is ungelled. He’s atypically attired—in black sweatpants and a black track jacket with small white letters embroidered onto the left shoulder in sans serif font reading: IHTFP. He’s not wearing any shoes. While he feels oriented by Newton’s presence he feels disoriented by the man’s unusual appearance and he thinks wildly and inappropriately of branches in the quantum foam, of waking up on an adjacent D-brane where Dr. Geiszler is an introvert with pedestrian hair and a personal style best described as—athletic?  Ridiculous. Nevertheless, the computer that the man staring at with a singular focus is the only thing about him that seems familiar.

Which, after a moment of consideration, makes as much sense as anything is likely to make, because it is, in fact, Hermann’s computer.

The universe is awry in some way. This is not right. He doesn’t know where he is, he can’t remember how he got here, and why Newton would be sitting quietly in the dark, humming a song that Hermann hasn’t heard since the autumn of 2018, wearing something that looks like normal sleepwear, his feet propped on Hermann’s bed. 

“Transmit this,” Newton sings absently, the rest of the words fading back into humming and then coming forward again with, “Come get me,” only to fade into nothing as something on the screen he is studying catches his interest. 

It comes back to Hermann then. The chain of events that had brought him here: the long days, the sleepless nights, the email that morning, the despairing span of hours that followed, and then—fragments of memory. The subtle arch to his spine that was so difficult to maintain. The way it had been suddenly so hard to stand. The phantom pressure across his shoulders and the manner in which the floor had seemed to slope away on all sides.

He shuts his eyes.

Newton, humming, continues to search his way through Hermann’s computer, looking, no doubt, for some way to help, for some insight into Hermann’s recent and total preoccupation with the time-course of quantum fluctuations.

This is not ideal. 

Hermann can guess what the man has found on the hard drive under his hands. What he will find. What he is, even now, working his way through.

Stop, he wants to say. This is not a thing for you to find, alone, in a darkened room as you make pass after pass at quantum mechanics that you should have never tried to shoulder and that shouldn’t yield to you at all, you sloppy, quixotic nightmare of a scientist. Don’t look at what you’ll find there, it’s not for you; it’s never been for you, go back to where you came from; teach cell-lines not to die. 

“Go all,” Newton sings, “go all or none—” before he fades back into humming.

Hermann feels entirely overwhelmed, incapable of dealing with any aspect of his own life, not the least of which is the dissolution of funding, the probable end of his species, the catastrophic weight of his own expectations, and what to do about Dr. Geiszler, who will, it is certain, torment Hermann into an early grave simply by existing.

Hermann shifts, trying to sit using muscles with the consistency of cooling toffee.

“Whoa,” Newton says, dropping his feet, sitting forward, nearly sending a computer that is not his own into unforgiving concrete as he leans forward to plant a hand directly in the center of Hermann’s chest. “You’re awake. Hi. Hi,” he says in a way that can only be described as both subdued and genuinely warm.

Hermann opens his mouth, but Newton lifts his hand, shakes his head, and whispers, “Nope. I’m not even here. Don’t talk to me. Go back to sleep.”  

Hermann does not go back to sleep, he forces himself into a sitting position and makes a nearly successful grab for his own computer. 

“Nooooo,” Newton says, managing to shut the laptop and set it gently on the floor before Hermann can wrest it from his grip. “This is not for you right now.”

“What are you doing?” Hermann hisses.

“Doing?  Like, fifty different things in blazing simultaneity,” Newton whispers. “It’s very attractive. What’s wrong. Relax. You totally fainted during a three hour meeting with Herc Hansen, it was very dramatic, just lie down, dude, lie down.”

“Do not,” Hermann says, falling back onto one elbow. “Do not look at—” he can’t continue, and he shakes his head.

“What you were working on?” Newton asks, completing Hermann’s thought.

Hermann nods.

“Too late,” Newton whispers, with that smile of the knowingly damned that he adopted circa 2019,  “I’m already halfway there.”  

Hermann shakes his head. The man is not. He can’t be. He would not sit here like this if he knew.

“I could fight through your files for hours,” Newton says. “I could fight through them for days. Or, you could just tell me.”

“I will tell you,” Hermann says. “Not at this precise moment. But I will tell you. I will, in fact, show you.”

“Hand-held quantum mechanics,” Newton murmurs, “my favorite kind.”

“Your only kind.”  Hermann falls back against the pillow.

“My only kind,” Newton agrees, unmistakably conciliatory. “You used to flatter me so much. Why is that not a thing that still happens, hmm?”

“That was when I thought I knew you,” Hermann replies flatly.

“That is either too deep or too shallow for me right now,” Newton replies, with a magnetic resignation that draws Hermann’s gaze. “I have no idea which.”

Hermann does not reply.

It occurs to him then that he ought to be kinder to Newton, that he does not know where all his pent up anger comes from, that he has never known where it comes from, that that is a lie, that he knows, he knows exactly where it comes from, it comes from the long trail of years in which no one listened to him, it derives from the observation that no one is listening now for reasons he does not understand, that none of them are listening, and why can he not be like Dr. Lightcap, who burned like a torch every moment of every day, who fluxed into all that was required of her, who had certainly never felt like something half-dead even when she was, who could shift the course of history, kill a kaiju with a machine of the mind, and still retain the energy to scream. 

Something of this must be written on his face.

Something of it must be there because Newton sits forward, reaches across the space that separates them, grabs Hermann’s hand and says, “Hey,” like he can fix everything if only he can exert a nonsensical, unending hold on the vector of Hermann’s attention. “I want you to know,” he says, slow and intent, like he’s trying to broadcast through static, “that you don’t have to break it to me. I can see where you’re going with your spread of math; I can tell what it is, even if it’s too sophisticated for me to parse in detail. I know it’s the timetable. I know it is. That’s okay. That’s great. That’s useful. Do you hear me?  It’s useful. We need to know it. You do not have to finish this by yourself, okay?  It’s a lot. It’s too much; it would be too much for anyone and you take these things hard. You take them with the sort of intensity that I have never seen. You don’t have to do this by yourself; I can help you. I will help you; it’s not a thing I’m asking you, okay?  This is not an offer; this is information. I am capable of helping you and I am going to help you.”

Hermann presses his free hand over his eyes as his expression breaks away from fragile neutrality. 

Newton cannot help him.

Newton already has too much to do, too much to handle alone, and Hermann refuses to unburden himself on anyone who has shouldered as much as Newton has already shouldered; the man is at his absolute limit; if he weren’t he wouldn’t be picking fights with Hansen and storming out of meetings. Absolutely not. At the same time, Hermann cannot go on, not like this, entirely alone, asked to do too much, unable to rest until he has his terrible answer, while time predictably pours away. 

He shakes his head.

“Nope,” Newton says quietly. “Do not give me that; you had your solo trial and you failed it. So you either walk me through the whole thing and then we continue together or you don’t walk me through it, you just continue doing it, except this time in front of me. Either way, at the end, we’ll go over it together, I’ll ask you some wishful questions, you’ll give me some depressing answers, and then we’ll go drinking. It will be epic, this night of drinking. We’ll give it a name. Hong Kong Gone Wrong. The Sherry Setback. The Trial by Tequila. And then, when we’re modestly hung over, only then we will brief the machismo-soaked upper echelons that have been running us into the ground, presuming the date you calculate isn’t, like, next week, in which case we should probably just go right to the briefing. And see?  You say I’m not responsible. Anyway, what do you say?  There is a right answer, so try your best.”

“I believe the time frame will be something on the order of two to three years,” Hermann whispers.

Newton drops his eyes then looks back at Hermann. “So there’s definitely time for drinking then, is what I’m hearing,” he says.

“I suppose so,” Hermann replies.

“Great,” Newton says. “Silver lining takes the form of epicurean excess. That’s my favorite kind.”

Hermann smiles faintly. “You were singing,” he says.

“I have been known to do that,” Newton agrees. “Are you feeling okay?”

“Just now,” Hermann elaborates, ignoring his question. “Here. In the medical bay.”

“I wasn’t,” Newton whispers. “Lies. Inaccuracy.”

“I have not heard you sing for years,” Hermann says. “Since 2018.”

“I didn’t realize you’d been keeping track,” Newton says, lifting his eyebrows, looking away.

“Not as such,” Hermann whispers.

“Fewer opportunities,” Newton explains. “My karaoke buddies are dead or gone.”

“Ms. Mori is not gone,” Hermann says, even though she is, and has been for a quite some time.

Newton gives him a look of dry skepticism. “It’s okay. She’s got her own deal going now. That’s the thing with kids, or so I hear. They grow up into the people they’re going to be I guess or whatever, no big deal. Plus, you have to admit that I am very irritating, too irritating for cool, teenaged Mako.”  

“That is true,” Hermann says, smiling faintly at him. “I would never dispute that particular assertion.”

“Why are we talking about this?” Newton asks him.

“Because I have had a terrible day,” Hermann says, his free hand pressed against his aching temple.

“A spread and span of terrible days,” Newton murmurs.

“And it was certainly the nicest thing that’s happened to me in quite some time.”

“What was?” Newton asks.

“You have the attention span of a firefly,” Hermann says, not without some level of fondness.

“You know, Dr. Gottlieb, before coming to this infirmary to do quantum mechanics at your bedside, I spent eighteen hours up to my elbows in toxins performing a takedown, so I could use a little bit of slack when it comes to my working memory, okay?”  

“Your singing was the nicest thing to have happened to me in quite some time,” Hermann explains.

“Oh,” Newton replies, taken aback. “Well—thank you?”

Hermann closes his fingers around Newton’s hand and says nothing.

“You are the worst, by the way,” Newton says. “Just the worst. How dare you do everything it is that you do. I mean really. I do not approve. You can’t file dozens of noise complaints against me for years and then tell me that you like my singing. God. You are the unmitigated master of presenting the mixed message as the pure message.”

Hermann thinks there might be substantive substrata that underlie Newton’s faux outrage. He suspects the man is speaking more globally than he is advertising, but they have neither the time nor the leeway to excavate all they’ve buried in the conceptual ground that they’ve shared for ten years. 

Afterwards, he thinks at Newton, after all of this, if we are not dead, if we somehow survive all that I’ve calculated is coming, I will ask you to walk down the street for two blocks to that strange coffee shop you like so much. The one with the abstract representations of fish on the walls. And I will not explain any of it to you. I won’t explain a single thing. I will not ask you to forgive me for any of the things I need to be forgiven for and I will not tell you any of the things I have come to understand about who you are. I will not rationalize, summarize, or analyze my own behavior. Or yours. I will simply sit there, drinking my coffee, starting over from the beginning, the way I might have started in Geneva, in 2015 had things gone differently. Because you, like anyone, deserve such an effort. Not a retroactive apology—but a new and genuine and sustained effort to build that which we should have always had. An effort that I cannot make now, an effort that you cannot meet now. We will sit in the window, facing one another, and I will say that I did not think we would make it, and you will say that you always knew that we would, and I will look at the wall and say that I am curious about why it is that you have such a clear affection for fish, of all things, and you will explain it to me, and later I will ask you to dinner and you will say yes. And at some point during the evening it will occur to you that the nature of our interaction has shifted and you will ask me, ‘Is this a date, Dr. Gottlieb?’ and I will say, ‘Yes, of course it is,’ and you will be unable to entirely hide your surprise though you will try very hard. It will probably be you who brings up the subject of future plans, it will probably you who says, ‘It would be such a shame to part ways now; we work so well together,’ because you are braver than I am. And I will agree with you and I will say that I plan to return to theoretical physics and, given that I could work anywhere with a decent infrastructure of moderately intelligent people, I would say, ‘Why don’t you suggest a list of places that could support the kind of research that you’d prefer to be doing—cellular senescence, or neuroscience, perhaps, after all your work on the Drift.’  And we will discuss our academic plans as we pack up what little our stripped down funding has left us and every night I will take you out to dinner and you will perseverate on Nietzsche for hours and I will allow you to attempt to change my mind about the merits of Queen and after exactly five nights I will ask you if you object to pursuing a romantic relationship and you will say, ‘I hate you so much right now, you have no idea,’ and then you will kiss me and I will kiss you back and eventually we will move in together and we will get a cat that I name ‘Laplace’ and that you christen with fifteen different and equally ridiculous titles. And every day for the rest our lives my comportment will confuse you because you will never fully understand what happened in that first decade of our acquaintance, when I could not separate who you were from the misleading, transient ephemera that you so vocally claimed for yourself. You will never know that felt I’d rather die alone than watch someone I love struggle to live. You will fail to understand that I had finite resources that were nearly unequal to the task I had been set, the task I set myself. I will never tell you that I considered you to be magnificently difficult, difficult enough to struggle with for decades, perfect for anyone who feels the need to fight their way through life, as I have always felt the need to do. And if it does not end this way, with espresso grounds and science books, with something long and peaceful; if it ends the other way, then perhaps if I say nothing we will be able to separate as we may need to do, when they pull Jaegers out of graveyards and pilots from our people.

“I apologize,” Hermann says, with a sincerity that is nearly too acute to bear.

Newton sighs, as well he might. “Oh stop. I’m not serious. I get it. I get the whole thing.”  

Hermann is not sure that’s true, but Newton understands orders of magnitude more than anyone else ever has or ever will. “You do not,” he whispers. “You atrocious man. Don’t say such things, or I will begin to believe you.”

“All of it,” Newton murmurs. “Every part. Inductively, reductively, deductively, constructively, minutiae to gestalt, on every scale, with total scope—”

“Shut up, will you?” Hermann whispers.

“Oh you love it,” Newton says.

“Untrue,” Hermann replies.

“Very true. Extremely true. The most true. I’m going to let you off the metaphorical hook though, because you’re convalescing.”

Hermann sighs. “What are you doing here?”

Newton sits back, pulls his fingers out of Hermann’s grasp, presses his hands to his face, runs them through his hair, and fixes Hermann with a faintly irritated expression.

“What am I ‘doing here’?  I’m going to take that as literally as possible, because otherwise I would have to be deeply offended and I’ve spent my entire day in a state of offense, and I’m getting a little tired of it. So. Literally, I’m rocking a bedside vigil in the historical tradition. If you want a rundown the past twenty hours of my life, it goes like this. I picked a fight with my co-division chief, I performed an eighteen-hour takedown with Erika, who told me, like the perfect champ she is, that she would continue to work for me without pay until her savings run out, I consequently cried tears of guilt/relief onto my sterile field, we then finished the takedown at which point I decon’d myself and found about five messages waiting for me—one from Medical, one from Hansen, one from Tendo, one from Mako, and one from the team in Auxilliary Lab Three. I ascertained that something less than ideal had happened concerning you and so I came down here. They told me you were sleeping, which, knowing medical, who may or may not be able to tell ‘sleep’ from ‘coma,’ I didn’t believe until presented with evidence, which was, namely, you sleeping. At that point I attempted to elicit a cogent explanation re: what happened to you, with eventual success. I had to take things up the medical chain five rungs or so before I was satisfied because I was pretty sure collapsing of ‘exhaustion’ only happened to people strapped into corsets back in the day. You’ll be interested to know that no one has provided me with an account I find satisfactory. The best guess is that you were dehydrated, hypoglycemic and standing too long in the presence of Herc Hansen, so, understandably, you weren’t doing a great job perfusing your brain. Consequently you vasovagaled yourself into a free trip to the infirmary. I would faint too, if Hansen were giving a three hour presentation. I applaud your life choices. Anyway, post my infirmary investigation, I left, ate dinner, stole your laptop, changed my clothes, and came back. That’s the aerial view of my day.”

“What is IHTFP?” Hermann asks, reading the lapel of Newton’s shirt.

“An MIT thing,” Newton replies, waving a hand. “Not important. This is my sleepwear, not my leisurewear. I haven’t done laundry in eight weeks, but this is neither here nor there. Let me just turn your question right back around. What are you doing Dr. Gottlieb?  Care to airbrush any detail into my narrative paint-job?”

“No,” Hermann says.

“Hermann.”

Hermann shoots him a dark look.

“Okay, okay. It’s a little bit—weird to lose consciousness in front of people; I get it. I definitely get it; we can bond over the tragic sequelae of our academic machismo. My embarrassment threshold is not as trigger happy as yours is, but even so, ugh. It was the worst. I don’t have super clear memories of that briefing, you know the one I mean, but I remember being pretty on top of things, feeling awful, yes, but entirely on top of my conceptual hand of cards until I had an episode of intense deja-vu. I still remember this part of it—I was talking about projected funding and I remember thinking to myself, ‘Wow, this is boring,’ and I had an intense experience of having lived that exact moment before. Maybe because I was turning hypoxic?  The parallelism of my present and possibly past boredom in the moment was so intense, that it actually made me seriously doubt whether I was repeating myself within the context of the briefing. I still don’t know. I then remember trying to look away from my slide for some kind of situational cue that would let me work it out, but not controlling the vector of my gaze very well, forgetting what I would be looking for specifically, plus, my vision was starting to go around the edges. Narrowing down into a fraying tunnel. That was throwing me off. It was weird, I felt super calm about the whole thing, just really blasé, and I remember you saying, ‘Newton,’ and I remember thinking, ‘I must be giving a really bad talk, if Hermann is interrupting me,’ and then I realized I wasn’t, at that moment, speaking at all. That’s pretty much it, except for some weird fragments of things, Pentecost saying, ‘yes, you did,’ in response to—something?  You standing up?  The dust in the light of the projector?  I don’t know. I didn’t at the time and still do not feel great about the whole thing.”

Hermann shifts slightly against the bed. “It was a combination of factors,” he admits. “All the things you mentioned, plus—I had been on my feet for quite some time, we had been rounding on J-tech’s repair work. I was having a significant amount of back pain, which I attempted to alleviate by moving as little as possible, which likely did not help matters very much. I felt a sort of pressure, the sense of the floor falling away even though I knew intellectually that no such thing could be the case and then—” he waves a non-communicative hand.

“Syncope,” Newton finishes for him.

“Yes,” Hermann says dryly. 

“Did you, like—expeditiously wake up?” Newton asks.

“I did,” Hermann replies.

“Oh no. That sounds like the worst. I don’t think I woke up right away. Did I?  Not waking up improved the experience for me. Psychologically.”

“No,” Hermann says darkly. “You, to literally everyone’s dismay, did not regain consciousness in an expeditious manner because you were drowning in your own secretions. I, on the other hand, did regain consciousness in time to experience the entire senior staff of J-tech staring at me while I was assessed and then carted off the floor of the shatterdome. It was a terrible experience, I literally wish to never discuss this again.”

“Okay, fair enough, but at least tell me that Hansen looked guilty. Ridden. Wracked. Torn apart by intense, inner, tempestuous culpability. Like his brain was shredding with remorse for driving you to this juncture. At least tell me that.”

“He looked, perhaps, inconvenienced,” Hermann replies. 

“What a dick,” Newton opines.

“Will you please,” Hermann snaps at him.

“Sorry,” Newton says, sounding less ‘sorry’ than sullen. “I dropped by his office.”  

“You did not,” Hermann says, horrified. “Please tell me you did nothing of the kind.”  

“I just—wanted to express an opinion,” Newton says, looking away. “Anyway, it did not go like you’re picturing.”  

“Oh Gott,” Hermann whispers.

“I’ll thank you to leave god out of this,” Newton says. “There’s no need for that kind of thing. I’m not under military arrest, am I?”

“If it did not go ‘like I’m picturing’ then I would very much appreciate you telling me how it did go.”

“In a word?  Weird. In more than a word?  Very weird. I walked into his office and he said, ‘Geiszler. Great. Have a seat.’  This confused me, so I did not sit, I instead said, ‘Just what the hell is it you think you’re doing around here?’ and he said, ‘I don’t even know what that means,’ and I said, ‘You know perfectly well what it means; I have made my views on resource allocation abundantly clear,’ and he said, ‘Yes, I remember the incident with the table,’ and I said, ‘You have seized on something entirely irrelevant,’ and he said, ‘Would you just sit down,’ and I said, ‘Oh, did you have several sentences worth of points that you’d like to make, what a notable and historic day,’ while taking a seat, and he said, ‘If you can keep a lid on your personality disorder for two minutes, there’s something I’d like to ask you,’ and I said, ‘Typical,’ and he said, ‘What is,’ and I said, ‘Fire away, mon capitaine, throw your pile of rocks, shatter someone’s glass house, hopefully it will be mine and not your own,’ and he said, ‘Sometimes, Geiszler, I almost like you,’ and I said, ‘If only that sentiment were mutual this moment would ‘almost’ be so touching,’ and then he said, straight up, point blank: ‘Do you think Dr. Gottlieb is working too hard’.”  

It is here that Newton pauses and looks up at the ceiling with a curious expression that Hermann cannot immediately identify. “Well don’t stop there,” he prompts.

“Well, I mean—how would you have answered that question?  If it were about me?”

“The word ‘yes’ comes to mind,” Hermann says.

“Welllllllllll,” Newton replies. “That, while an appropriate answer, did not occur to me just right then.”

“Did you flip over his desk?” Hermann enquires politely.

“Nope,” Newton replies. “I did not do that either. I pulled a Geiszlerian variant of a prototypical Lightcap move. I didn’t mean to,” Newton continues, “it just, somehow, happened. I mean the question was so stupid, right?  So stupid. So I just—I mean—”  the man’s expression cracks wholly and entirely into unconcealed, wild-edged amusement.

Hermann raises his eyebrows, shakes his head once. 

“You had to be there,” Newton says, “it was just—he asked it like he really wanted to know. Like it was some secret. Some thing that only I could determine. And he gives me this look, like, kind of appealing, borderline nice, I guess he must like you, and I just—I couldn’t—like; how could he not know?  He just wanted to help. Oh my god, I need to breathe air, I need to not do the same thing again,” Newton says, pulling in a calming breath, “but I just sat there, in the chair, laughing. Laughing until I was also crying a little bit and hanging onto the edge of his desk so that I wouldn’t fall on the floor because even I am aware that that is not professional. And then he comes around his desk, pulls me up, and I assume that we are going to see Pentecost so he can exhibit my unprofessional behavior as yet more reason to fire me, but we end up in the cafeteria and he gets me some cranberry juice, and he sits down across from me and he says, ‘Everyone’s stressed, Newt. Keep it together.’ Then he claps me on my shoulder, really hard, and walks out of the room. He called me Newt!  That set me off again; he sounded so uncomfortable when he said it. Oh god, you should have been there. It was glorious. I had to put my head down on the table and give myself a personal time-out for, like, five minutes before I could finish my juice and go get dinner.”

“You are a disaster,” Hermann says, with unconcealed fondness.

“I will not argue with that. In summary, K-science did not have a banner day in terms of our interface with the PPDC hierarchy. I think without our personnel we’re going to turn eccentric to the point of caricature. Discuss.”

“You’re half right, in that you are already there,” Hermann informs him. “Fortunately, that will never happen to me.”

Newton leans back in his chair and looks at Hermann through half-lidded eyes. “Suuuure. Well—good. Someone needs to be keeping up appearances so that the military types don’t get in the habit of not listening to us. Or?  They should listen to us, is the point. Because I, for one, fully intend on saving the day on whatever day it is that needs to be saved. I don’t know about you, but that is exactly my plan.”

Hermann sighs.

“Go back to sleep,” Newton whispers. “I’m giving you the day off tomorrow.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Hermann replies. “After an eighteen-hour takedown experiment followed by an apparently sleepless night, I mandate that you take the day off tomorrow. For reasons of safety.”

“Well, we can both get what we want,” Newton says, “because Pentecost emailed us about an hour ago. Barring any breach activity?  We are to take the next three days off entirely. I’m not sure it’s a request. But, I figured that would be a great opportunity for you to finish your math and then hold my hand through the subsequent explanation.”

“Actually,” Hermann begins, somewhat impressed.

“I know. It’s brilliant. Working vacation! Or, technically speaking, just working. But on only one thing! Secretly! Not in the lab! It’ll be great. Let’s order take-out. Whose room? Mine or yours? I can do my laundry. And also clean. We could switch it up—”

“Tell me, in absolute honesty, what is the state of your living quarters?” Hermann says.

“Ummm,” Newton replies.

“My room, then.”

“Perfect,” Newton says, tipping his head back. “I am so tired. I did not want to do my laundry. I would have done it though, man. For you. Out of respect. And fear of ridicule. Mostly respect though. Everyone is going to think we’re sleeping together. I’m excited. Can we keep that going for a little while, possibly?  Just with Tendo. And maybe also Jad, the superfluous IT guy who doesn’t wear shoes and shouts out the color of my aura every time he sees me?  You know the guy I’m talking about. Jad has been hitting on me really subtly for a while, I think. He’s leaving next week with the next round of personnel cuts. I want to let him down gently. He’s giving me his plants. And his terrarium. I think it might be my terrarium anyway seeing at it was built out of materials from my lab in the floorspace of my lab because he thought I’d appreciate it—oh god, now that I’ve laid it out like this, I think that Jad maybe made a terrarium for me?  Wow. That is so nice. No one’s ever made me a terrarium before. No one’s ever made me anything before. I’m so touched. I love that terrarium. This is awkward. I’m not interested in Jad, full disclosure, just FYI. I wish I had not said so much of this out loud.”

“To answer your original question,” Hermann says. “You may not disingenuously imply to the incompetent head of the formerly extant IT department that we are romantically involved so that you can avoid an uncomfortable conversation.”

“Well when you put it that way,” Newton says, with a theatrical sigh, “I look like a Prince of Dicks. Which I am, a little bit.”  He raises his eyebrows in Hermann’s direction. “So are you the new IT Department then?”

“Yes,” Hermann says, closing his eyes. “Though this is not an undue burden, as I have functionally been the IT Department for something like seven years.”

“Riiiigghttt,” Newton says. “I feel like I knew this at one point and then forgot it after we both started wearing so many ill-fitting hats. But we digress. What am I going to do while you silently do quantum mechanics?” 

“Certain though I am that you have an infinite number of things on which you might work—” Hermann begins.

“Please say it,” Newton whispers.

“I am willing to explain—”

“Yessssss, oh my god, I will write things on your personal chalkboard for you, I will be so—”

“—my thought processes up to a certain point so that you may attempt to follow the final stages of—”

“—so soooo useful, you do not even know, okay, I will give you real-time admiration—”

“Will you please contain yourself,” Hermann snaps. “I have said I will allow you to follow along.”

“Victory,” Newton whispers to the ceiling, spreading his arms wide.

“So please stop spending hours in a no-doubt fruitless attempt to work through my disorganized thoughts, such as they are, for the sole purpose of saving me three minutes of explanation to you tomorrow, Newton. Just go to bed.”  

“That’s not even what I was doing,” Newton says dismissively.

“It was. Please also keep in mind that this is going to be truly horrible experience.”

“I love going on Frenemy Bedroom Retreat Staycations with you,” Newton whispers, giving him an askew grin. “Let’s do it every year.”

“The end product will be an answer that we find disturbing,” Hermann says.

“I know,” Newton replies. “Sartre could write a one act play about the existential horror intrinsic to calculating the timetable for the end of the world in a boxlike metal room with no windows. But on the less horrifying side, we can get take-out from the restaurant down the street that serves Japaneseified Indian food, so there will be that. I love their curry.”

Hermann sighs, and neither of them speak. He cannot relate to Newton’s aggressive optimism, to the perpetual arrogant edge that he persistently cultivates, to his immature abandon, to his calculated non sequiturs, to so many of the things he uses to conceal whatever it is that he actually feels but only occasionally expresses.

“Believe me,” Newton says apropos of Hermann’s incommunicative silence. “I get it. I do.”

Hermann raises his eyebrows but Newton is not looking at him. “I have my doubts about your insight level,” he confesses, perhaps unwisely.

“And no one, including me, could possibly blame you for that,” Newton says. “My point, I suppose, is that you can tell me whatever it is that you’re thinking, whatever it is that’s driving you straight into the ground, you don’t have to wait until the point that I belatedly call you on it. While Herc Hansen, admittedly, is not a guy who is going to easily pass Go in a Geiszlerian game of Psychological Monopoly, you, on the other hand are holding all kinds of favorable Chance cards.”

“It is not complicated,” Hermann whispers. “I simply do not want to fail and die along with my species.”

“Well yeah,” Newton says. “Same here. I’m talking short term here though, man. Like when I waltz into your office with bad news and a bad attitude, you can just tell me to cut it out and I may do just that, especially if you look like you haven’t slept in days. Because I am not necessarily the most sensitive to situational cues but I do pretty okay with the really obvious ones.”

“I very much value your ability to give as good as you get, Newton, I am aware that I am not the easiest person to—”

Newton cuts him off by waving an unimpressed hand. “That’s a whole different discussion about your totally unique and somewhat scary personal style. That’s not what I’m trying to get at here, don’t distract me, I’m very distractable.”

“True,” Hermann agrees, “but I don’t understand what you’re driving at.”

“What I’m driving at is the local topography,” Newton says, nearly inexplicably.

Nearly.

Dear Hermann, Newton had written years ago and continents away. It is terrible here. Truly terrible. The days are spent exploring the local topography of a previously generalized fear. Specifically my previously generalized fear. I am not sure that I will make it out of Manila. 

“I feel, at times, I can picture too well how it will be,” Hermann says. “The fall of the Wall. The inland exodus, the spread to the wilderness, the thinning out, the horrific sequelae, the loss of everything our species has built and only then the actual end. If we live to see that part of it. Have you thought about that you would do? The choices you might make? Do such things preoccupy you?”

“Well,” Newton says, leaning back, tipping his head towards the ceiling as he considers the inside of his own mind, “not in the way it preoccupies you, I don’t think. I can see myself consumed with the emerging granularity of small decisions on a local level, readjusting scales to the point that hour-by-hour fate choices take on the same cast that year-by-year resource allocation decisions have now. I don’t picture anything in particular for myself, because I’ll always want to be right at that wave front, and I don’t have a reason not to be. I picture other people though, sometimes. I try to avoid it, but, you know, some people stick in my head for various reasons. My mother, for instance, will not do well with the fall of our civilization. A friend of mine from Prague—he won’t do well either. Mako will smash herself into something at some point; that will be hard to take. You and I though, we’ll be okay, right up until the point when we’re not, and then that will be the end of it. There are so many ways to die; on the level of the organism, on the level of the species, on the level of clades and kingdoms and planets and cultures. Everything has its peak and fall. You know that intellectually. Now you just have to translate that into something that lets you sleep at night. Maybe this is the end of something, but it’s the beginning of something else. Our understanding of the kaiju is nearly contextless. They have their own story, even if it might be one without an attendant consciousness. So we’ve played out our time and we fold back down. That’s okay. That’s a part of it. A part of the whole package deal.”        

“That is not comforting,” Hermann whispers. “Do you genuinely find that comforting?”

“Well yeah,” Newton says, looking straight at him with an endearing tilt of the head. “But intellectualization is the shiniest of my personal defense mechanisms.”

That is certainly true.

“Thank you for the effort,” Hermann says, “but there is nothing that will make the intervening interval easier. I simply wish for it to be over, no matter the outcome.”

“But that uncertain, transient struggle is all there is,” Newton says. “All that there ever is or can be.”

“I hope that you don’t believe that,” Hermann whispers.

“Of course I don’t, entirely; who can live like that?  But I’m making an effort to live with uncertainty a little better, because it might be all we get.”

“I don’t disagree with you,” Hermann replies.

“So we’re definitely getting that Japanese curry is what you’re saying,” Newton says, with a faint smile, sliding lower in his chair.

“Go to sleep, you atrocious man,” Hermann replies. “I cannot believe you attempted to console me with the argument that at least the kaiju will live on after we die.”  

“I’m sure they have a whole thing going,” Newton says quietly. “A whole cultural thing. A species thing. One day, we’ll figure out how to talk to them and we’ll say, ‘can you not play on our lawn, kids?  You’re wrecking the flowers,’ and they’ll apologize and go home and then we’ll be pen pals.”

Hermann shakes his head and shuts his eyes.

“Everything will be fine,” Newton whispers. 

Hermann says nothing.

“You’ll show me your math,” Newton whispers, “and I’ll watch you finish it.”

“This is not necessary,” Hermann says.

“Very few things are,” Newton replies. “Now, for real, go back to sleep; you are demonstrably exhausted; you’re making me tired just looking at you.”

“You are tired because it is extremely late,” Hermann says, cracking an eye.

“Nah man, I’m nocturnal at night and diurnal in the day. Also?  I’m not going to talk to you anymore because I am, evidently, too interesting for your currently delicate state of health. Good night. I will see you in the morning; let’s go out to breakfast, just give me a yes/no on the breakfast thing real quick and then I legit will stop talking to you, I’m just really hungry right about now and I want to anticipate my next meal. Dim sum?  Yes/no?”

“Yes,” Hermann says, “all right.”

“Excellent. Quantum breakfast. We don’t know where, we don’t know with what momentum, but statistically there’s something out there, some future—”

“Newton,” Hermann says.

“Stop talking to me, please, Hermann. Control yourself. Honestly,” Newton says, as he reaches beneath his chair to pull Hermann’s computer back onto his lap. 

Hermann is about to advise him that there is certainly no earthly reason for him to stay, no earthly reason for him to be here at all, why is he here—but before he can quite work out how to do it, Newton begins quietly humming Strange Attractor and Hermann decides he ought to be left to it.