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: Midnight.

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.

Deserted halls pass in a haze of exhausted preoccupation. He leans heavily on his cane, one hand passing repeatedly over a visual field 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 a tepid and 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, his first of the morning, and retraces his steps.

By six o’clock he’s reentered his lab and seated himself at his desk, his back aching, his shoulders knotted, the world possessed of a faintly askew quality that it takes on whenever he’s had too little sleep.

He resumes his work.

There’s a terrible pull to his spiraling data, an abyss-like conceptual flow that no one but him can yet feel. He folds equations out and back, unpacking and repacking variables, uncovering horrific mathematical topographies that he checks, re-checks, triple checks, checks obsessively, unable to look away, and he thinks of Caitlin Lightcap, disappearing into the women’s locker room for hours on end and emerging with chapped hands and bleeding nail beds and he thinks, “I didn’t give you enough credit for all you did, and I am sorry, I am sorry.”

Soon, he will move to chalk.

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

He works uninterrupted for hours.

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

Hermann slams his pen down and glares upward.

“Oh give it a rest,” Newton says, imperious, backlit, and 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 and into anger, hyperdense, brilliant, white-hot, uncontrolled. Nearly. His jaw realigns, he shifts his spine, he rolls his shoulders, trying to sublimate his shredded 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.”

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. Be advised that due to the resources required for the scheduled completion of the Coastal 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, we have determined 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 additional forthcoming budgetary changes will be explained to you and to Dr. Gottlieb at a Reallocation Meeting next week. Please prepare your staff for the expectation of departmental downsizing. Regretfully, we will only have sufficient funding to retain positions for two science staff members—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 Coastal Wall Project. Should you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact our central office in Tokyo.

Dismayed, Hermann looks up at Newton.

“Yeah,” Newton says, in response to whatever 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 collapses into a seat on the opposite side of Hermann’s desk, wordlessly throwing up a hand as if to ask, “And how much do you think that means?”

Nothing.

It means nothing.

Hermann sits forward, thrusting the heels of his hands against his eyes, unable to feel the full despair that hangs over him. It’s enough to crush him to death in the long term. Possibly, in the medium term. Possibly in the short term. He is supposed to accomplish any of this? His staff has already been stripped down and stripped down and stripped down until there’s nothing left; he’s working with 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 has likely 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.”

“DO NOT TELL ME TO CHILL!” Hermann shouts at him.

“STOP SHOUTING!” Newton shouts back. 

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.

“OUT.” Hermann points at the door.

“Okay. Well, I have a takedown experiment today so don’t bother me.” Newton stands, wrapping himself in a mantle of academic disdain that simultaneously curls Hermann’s toes and sets his teeth on edge.

“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, sweeps his phone from Hermann’s desk, and leaves the room, slamming the door behind him in needless punctuation.

A glorious exit, that Hermann is not above aesthetically appreciating.

But, more pertinently: good riddance.

He doesn’t see Newton all day.

It’s 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 that loss. Newton is intolerable in periods of crisis; too certain of himself, trying to reorganize failing systems without adequate peripheral preparation, introducing notes of inappropriate levity, too easily upset by what he perceives as the intellectual failings of others, full of reflex superiority that he won’t shake until systems have been restored to their resting state, advocating for solutions that are staggering in scope—in short, being himself. 

So it’s 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 attends meetings in departments with which he never used to concern himself as he tries to relieve some of the terrible pressure that has been placed, unfairly, upon Dr. Choi’s shoulders. The man is regularly covering LOCCENT now; it is beyond belief.

All through the day, in the back of his thoughts, his waiting mathematics torments him to distraction, because while the tasks he completes are essential in the short term, a menacing theory disturbs the deeper waters of his mind and he must track it to its depths, wherever it leads.

And he’s very nearly got it. 

There is something there that will yield to prediction, there is. 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 whole life. His back, his leg, his shoulders, his eyes, his neck, his skull can take what he deigns to hand them and they can see how they like it; it’s no more than they deserve for betraying him so consistently for so long.

If one could drop dead from physical exhaustion, he’d have done it 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 in the Shatterdome docking bay, 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. Wave functions slither through the back of his thoughts. Propagating. Collapsing.

The lights at the edges of the vaulted room begin to dim, but when he looks at them they brighten. Others dim instead. Always at the edges of his vision.

He spends several seconds trying to puzzle that one out. 

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

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

And then—nothing.

Nothing until he wakes up, spine pressed to 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.

He’s on the floor.

“Dr. G. Hey.” Dr. Choi kneels next to him. “We called medical. You want me to call Newt?”

“No.” In his mind, the word is dismissive, scoffing, haughty. It comes out as a cracked whisper.

“Go do something useful.” Dr. Choi waves a hand at the hovering J-tech personnel. “We’ll restart in fifteen.”

“Not with you, though.” Herc Hansen drops into a crouch next to Dr. Choi. “You need to get checked out by medical.”

Hermann levers himself to his elbows.

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

“It’s nothing.” Hermann’s tone isn’t as cool as he’d like, but it’s getting there.

“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. 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 on his nightstand.

When Hermann wakes, his disorientation is complete.

He can’t remember how he arrived here, in this unfamiliar cement room with its dim lights and the quiet whir of constant ventilation. He scrambles for context and flips through a disordered set of memories—Bavaria and Berlin and Alaska and Hong Kong, whiteboards and chalkboards and Jaegers long gone. He can’t piece everything together; his thoughts are tangled in something he can’t see.

But he is not wholly lacking in reference frames.

Newton sits less than a meter away, humming quietly to himself, illuminated by the light of his laptop screen. The man’s hair is ungelled. He’s clad in black—sweatpants and a track jacket with small white letters embroidered on the left shoulder in sans serif font, reading: IHTFP. His bare feet are propped on Hermann’s bed.

Hermann 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.

This must be his sleepwear.

The computer the man studies with a singular focus is the only thing about him that seems familiar.

And there’s a reason for that.

Newton is staring at Hermann’s computer.

Hermann’s disorientation deepens. He doesn’t know where he is or how he got here. Why is Newton studying his computer in the dark, clad in touchingly normal sleepwear and singing softly to himself? Hermann hasn’t heard him do that in years, not since—

Not since.

Reality collapses around him.

The last of Lightcap’s funding is going. Gone. They’ve been stripped to nothing. The Jaegers are being decommissioned. The Wall is going up.

And something horrible waits in the files on Hermann’s laptop.

He shuts his eyes.

Stop, he wants to say. This is no thing for you to find, alone, in a dim room as you make pass after pass at quantum mechanics 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. 

Hermann shifts. He tries to sit using muscles that have the strength and consistency of cooling toffee.

“Whoa.” Newton drops his feet and sits, nearly sending the computer to the concrete as he plants a hand on Hermann’s chest. “You’re awake. Hi. Hi.” The man is subdued, genuinely warm, wearing academic sleepwear, and—

Hermann needs him OUT of here.

He opens his mouth to demand as much, Newton lifts a finger to his lips, gives Hermann a stern look, and shakes his head. “Nope. I’m not even here. Don’t talk to me. Go back to sleep.”  

Hermann forces himself into a sitting position and makes a nearly successful grab for his own computer.

“Nope.” Newton shuts the laptop and slides it beneath his chair before Hermann can wrest it from his grip. “You don’t have computer privileges yet.”

“What are you doing?” Hermann hisses.

“Doing? Me? Like, fifty different things in blazing simultaneity,” Newton smirks. “It’s very attractive. What’s wrong? Relax. You fainted during a three hour meeting with Herc Hansen, and I…” he pauses, leaving the cadence open, relishing his own building melodrama, then finishes with an understated: “…yelled at him.”

Hermann tries not to let his amused surprise show on his face. He falls back onto one elbow.

Newton smirks. “Oh yeah. You missed a show.”

“Are you still employed?” Hermann tries for dry, doesn’t quite make it.

Newton settles himself back in his chair. “Far as I know.”

They look at one another in the quiet medical bay. The light is dim, the staff are sparse, and—

He knows, Hermann realizes.

The thought is excruciating.

“We gonna do some hand-held quantum mechanics?” Newton asks, keeping his tone light, “My favorite kind?”

“Your only kind.”

“My only kind,” Newton agrees, conciliatory and intolerable. “Y’know, 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.

Newton allows true resignation to bleed into his tone. “That is either too deep or too shallow for me right now. I have no idea which.”

It occurs to Hermann, as it often does in brief moments of sanity, that he ought to be kinder to Newton; the man is not responsible for the long chain of years in which no one listened to him, he’s not responsible for the fact that no one is listening now. Why can’t Hermann 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 come home and write a fundable grant.

Something of this must be written on his face, because Newton sits forward, reaches across the space that separates them, grabs Hermann’s hand and says, “Hey,” like he can fix everything. “I want you to know,” he says, like he’s trying to broadcast through static, “that you don’t have to break it to me. I got your laptop off your desk, which is covered with Coxeter groups. I can see where you’re going. I know it’s the timetable. I know it is. That’s okay. That’s great. That’s useful.”

Hermann cannot bear to look at him any longer. He turns his head, his vision swimming, but Newton goes on. Kind. Merciless.

“It’s useful. We need to know. You don’t have to finish it by yourself, okay? It’s a lot. It’s too much; it would be too much for anyone. I can help you. I will help you; it’s not a thing I’m asking. You get me? This isn’t an offer; it’s information.”

Hermann presses his hand to his face.

Newton can’t help him.

Newton already has too much to do, too much to handle alone. The man is at his absolute limit and about to lose his remaining staff.

He shakes his head.

“Nope,” Newton says. “You had your solo trial and you failed it. So you’ll walk me through what you’ve done, I’ll ask some wishful questions, you’ll give some depressing answers, and then we’ll go drinking. It’ll be epic. We’ll give it a name. Hong Kong Gone Wrong. The Sherry Setback. The Trial by Tequila. Only afterwards, when we’re hung over, will brief the machismo-soaked upper management that’s been running us into the ground. Presuming the date you’ve calculated 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.”

Hermann hesitates, then, “Two years,” he says. “Three at the outside.”

When Newton doesn’t speak, Hermann looks up. He finds the other man watching him with a wistful expression. His green eyes are piercing, but all he says is, “So there’s definitely time for drinking then, is what I’m hearing.”

“I suppose so,” Hermann replies.

They are quiet for a moment.

Newton watches him with concern, visibly bracing for more bad news.

“You were singing,” Hermann says.

Newton quirks a brow.

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

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

“I haven’t heard you sing in years,” Hermann says.

Newton looks away. “Didn’t realize you’d been keeping track.”

“Not as such,” Hermann whispers.

“Fewer opportunities, I guess,” Newton says. “My karaoke buddies are dead or gone.”

“What about Ms. Mori?”

Newton gives him a look of dry skepticism. “I’m too irritating for cool, teenaged Mako.”  

“Well,” Hermann smiles faintly at him, “she is very discerning.”

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

“Because I’ve had a terrible day.” Hermann presses his fingertips to his aching temple. “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, trying for brusque, landing squarely in fond.

“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 lethal neurotoxins performing a takedown, so I could use a little bit of slack when it comes to my working memory, okay?”  

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

Newton tries to hide his shock. Almost, he succeeds, spinning genuine surprise and a flicker of hurt into a smirk and faux outrage. He pulls away from Hermann, sits back, and crosses his arms. “You are the worst, Dr. Gottlieb. I don’t approve. You can’t file noise complaints against me for years and then tell me that you like my singing.”

Hermann aches to bridge the gap between them, knows he won’t. 

Afterwards, he promises Newton, if we somehow survive all I’ve calculated is coming, I’ll ask you to walk down the street to that strange coffee shop you like so much. The one with the abstract representations of fish on the walls. And I won’t explain any of it to you. I won’t ask you to forgive me and I won’t tell you all I’ve come to understand about who you are. I’ll simply sit there, drinking my coffee, starting over from the beginning, the way I might have started in Geneva, in 2015 had I been wiser. Because you, like anyone, deserve such an effort. Not a retroactive apology—but a new and genuine effort to build what we should have always had. We’ll sit in the window, and I’ll say I didn’t think we would make it, and you’ll say you always knew that we would. I’ll look at the art on the walls and ask you about your affection for fish. You’ll explain at length. I’ll ask you to dinner. You’ll say yes. At some point during the evening you’ll ask, “Is this a date, Dr. Gottlieb?” and I’ll say, “Of course it is,” and you’ll be unable to hide your surprise though you’ll try hard. It will probably be you who brings up the subject of future plans, you who says, “It would be such a shame to part ways now; we work so well together,” because you’re braver than I, and you always have been. I’ll tell you I plan to return to theoretical physics, so I could work from anywhere. I’ll let you pick where we go. We’ll discuss our academic plans as we pack up what little our stripped-down funding has left us. Every night I’ll take you to dinner and you’ll perseverate on Nietzsche and I’ll allow you to argue the merits of Queen and after five nights of this I’ll ask you if you object to pursuing a romantic relationship and you’ll say, “I hate you so much right now, you have no idea.” You’ll kiss me and I’ll kiss you back and we’ll move in together and we’ll get a cat that I name Laplace and that you christen with fifteen different and equally ridiculous titles. Lord Meow Meow. Kittycat Prime. Sir Catnip Catgaryan, First of His Name. And every day my comportment will confuse you because you’ll never understand what happened during the first decade of our acquaintance, when I couldn’t see you beneath the person I’d imagined you to be. You’ll never know I felt I’d rather die alone than watch someone I love struggle to live. I’ll never tell you I considered you to be magnificently difficult, difficult enough to struggle with for decades, perfect for anyone with the need to fight their way through life, as I have felt and done. And if it doesn’t 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’ll be able to separate, when they pull Jaegers out of graveyards and pilots from our people.

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

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

“You do not,” Hermann whispers. “You atrocious man. Don’t say such things, or I’ll begin to believe you.”

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

“Shut up, will you?” Hermann whispers.

“You love it,” Newton says.

“Untrue,” Hermann replies.

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

Hermann sighs. “What are you doing here?”

Newton runs his hands through his hair, and fixes Hermann with a long-suffering expression. “What am I ‘doing here’? I guess I’ll take that as literally as possible, because otherwise I’d have to be offended and I’ve spent my entire day in a state of offense, so I’m getting tired of it. Literally, Hermann, I’m rocking a bedside vigil in the historical tradition because medical is short-staffed and I’m pretty sure six PhDs in biological fields make me at least thirty percent a physician.”

Hermann snorts. “Bioethics doesn’t count.”

“Are you kidding me? Bioethics counts the most.”

“Let me rephrase. I’m sure your day was as exhausting as mine. You ought to be resting.”

“Oh yeah. I had a day. 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’d continue to work for me without pay until her savings run out. I’m not too proud to admit I cried a few tears of guilt/relief onto my sterile field about that. After the takedown, 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 Auxiliary Lab Three. I ascertained something less than ideal had happened to you, so I came down here.”

“And I’m fine,” Hermann says.

“Medical,” Newton continues, “told me you were ‘sleeping,’ which 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. I had to take things up the medical chain five links 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.”

“It’s happened to you,” Hermann says.

“No. That was pneumonia. Totally different.”

Hermann sends a low wattage glare in the man’s direction.

“Best guess from medical was that you were dehydrated, hypoglycemic and standing too long in the presence of Herc Hansen. Understandably, you weren’t doing a great job perfusing your brain. Consequently, you vasovagaled yourself into a free trip to the med bay. I’d faint too, if Hansen was talking at me for three hours. I applaud your life choices. Anyway, post my infirmary investigation, I left, ate dinner, yelled at Hansen, saw your group theory, stole your laptop, changed my clothes, and came back. That’s the aerial view of my day.”

“Oh Gott,” Hermann sighs.

Newton smiles cheekily. “I’ll thank you to leave your German god out of this.”

“What did you say to Hansen?”

“It didn’t go like you’re picturing. I’m not under military arrest, am I?”

“If it didn’t go ‘like I’m picturing’ then I’d very much appreciate knowing how it did go?”

“I walked into his office and he said, ‘Geiszler. Great. Have a seat.’ I, of course, did not sit. Instead I yelled ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?” and he said, ‘I don’t know what that means,’ and I said, ‘You know perfectly well what it means; I’ve made my views on resource allocation crystal clear,’ and he said, ‘Would you just sit down?’ and I said, ‘Why, do you have several sentences worth of points you’d like to make? What a notable and historic day,’ 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, ‘Clock’s ticking,’ and then he said, straight up, point blank: ‘Do you think Dr. Gottlieb is working too hard’?”  

Newton pauses and looks up at the ceiling with a curious expression that Hermann can’t easily parse. “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, didn’t occur to me just right then.”

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

“Nope. I pulled a Lightcap.”

“Meaning?”

“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 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 then he comes around his desk, pulls me up, and I assume we’re going to see Pentecost so he can exhibit my unprofessional behavior as yet another 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’re a disaster,” Hermann says with unconcealed fondness.

“I won’t 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 support staff we’ll turn eccentric to the point of caricature. Discuss.”

“You’re half right, in that you’re 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 the military types don’t get in the habit of not listening to us. Because I, for one, fully intend on saving the day whenever that day 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 a 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 get the next three days off. I’m not sure it’s a request. But, I figured it’ll be a great opportunity for you to finish your math, then hold my hand through the subsequent explanation.”

“Actually,” Hermann begins, 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 tips his head back. “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. But what am I going to do while you silently finish quantum mechanics?” 

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

Newton perks up.

“I am willing to explain—”

“Yessssss, oh my god, I will scribe 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’ll give you real-time admiration—”

“Contain yourself,” Hermann cuts him off. “I’ve said I’ll 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 ten minutes of explanation to you tomorrow, Newton.” Hermann eyes the laptop beneath Newton’s chair.  

Newton rolls his eyes.

“Please keep in mind that this will be a truly horrible experience?” Hermann continues.

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

“The end product will be an answer we find disturbing,” Hermann reminds him.

“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 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. Neither of them speak. He can’t relate to Newton’s aggressive optimism, to the perpetual arrogant edge he cultivates, to his immature abandon, to his calculated non sequiturs, to so many of the things he uses to conceal what he feels.

“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,” 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 into the ground, you don’t have to wait until I belatedly call you on it. While Herc Hansen, admittedly, is not a guy who will easily pass Go in a Geiszlerian game of Psychological Monopoly, you, on the other hand, are holding all kinds of favorable Chance Cards.”

“It’s not complicated,” Hermann says. “I simply don’t 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 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’m not necessarily the most sensitive to situational cues but I do pretty okay with the obvious ones.”

“I very much value your ability to give as good as you get, Newton, I’m 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 don’t understand what you’re driving at.”

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

Dear Hermann, Newton had written years ago and continents away. It’s terrible here. The days are spent exploring the local topography of a previously generalized fear. Specifically my previously generalized fear.

“I can picture too well how it will happen,” Hermann says. “The fall of the Wall. The inland exodus, the scatter to the wilderness, the thinning out, 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 what you would do? The choices you might make? Do such things preoccupy you?”

“Well,” Newton leans 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 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, happening with increasing frequency and escalating stakes. I don’t picture anything in particular for myself, because I’ll always want to be right under that breaking wave, and I don’t have a reason not to be. I picture other people though, sometimes. My mother, for instance, won’t do well with the fall of civilization. A friend of mine from Prague—he won’t do well either. Mako will smash herself into something at some point; that’ll be hard to take. You and I though, we’ll be okay, right up until the point when we’re not, and that’ll 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, 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. So we’ve played out our time, and we fold back down. That’s okay.”        

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

Newton smiles, but can’t hold it. “So we’re definitely getting that Japanese curry is what I’m hearing.”

“Go to sleep, you atrocious man,” Hermann breathes, doing his best to shatter the profundity of small pleasures in terrifying times. “I can’t 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. Then we’ll be pen pals.”

Hermann shakes his head and shuts his eyes.

“Everything will be fine,” Newton says. “Now, go back to sleep; you’re making me tired just looking at you.”

“You’re tired because it is extremely late,” Hermann cracks 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 to resist. Good night. I’ll 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—”

“Newton,” Hermann says.

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

Hermann is about to protest that there’s no earthly reason for him to stay, no reason for him to be here at all—but before he can quite work out how to word it, Newton begins quietly humming Strange Attractor.

Hermann decides he ought to be left to it.