I Hope the Eldritch Horror Learns My Name (And Other Good Ideas): Hypercube Birds

In the face of cataclysm, one likes to be reminded of what one knows.

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

Text iteration: Witching Hour.

Additional notes: This is a draft of what was supposed to be the third chapter of Out of Many Scattered Things, but I had concerns that it might detract from the thematic whole as I was drafting it; or rather it introduced some new threads of themes that I felt I might be better explored elsewhere. It also deals with some topics that aren’t fully settled in my own mind, and so the writing wasn’t coming easily. 

Hypercube Birds

Dear Hermann,

It feels like autumn here, too. Mostly because I’m up late with the windows open, reading Specific Aim drafts for the mock grant proposals my first year graduate students will turn in at the end of the semester. I’m teaching Selected Topics in Biological Engineering. Their practice grants read as cute. Babyish and hopeful. Half of them are already dipping a toe (AKA the dreaded Third Aim) into xenoproteomics and I find myself tempted to write, “YOU WOULD DIE,” in every margin [editorial note: in tastefully small block letters]. Because they would. Most everyone has, who’s started studying these xenomaterials. 

Between the cutting edge aircraft and the cutting edge mathematics, I can’t imagine you mixing well with most grad students. What I CAN imagine is why TU Berlin is trying so hard to keep you. Sometimes departments get excited about particular students—their drive, their ideas, their raw intelligence—and they’ll pour resources into that person. Opportunities. Funding. It rarely works out all that well; it creates institutional pressures that are confining and hard to break free of once they’re established. Worse—incentivizing a chosen outcomes is kind of a death knell in science. I know you know as much from the way you’re talking about it. I’m sorry you’re in this position. You might want to start start exploring ways out? Not a suggestion, just a thought.

And HA. C’mon. Don’t you put “gamer” in quotes! I’m onto you. No one who wants to be a test pilot [editorial note: not sure I’ll ever be over that] can be in the dark about video games. I’m guessing something like War Thunder is your go to. Strategy. Aviation. Tactics. That kind of thing. May I suggest Portal? It’s full of puzzles, physics, polish, and, well, portals. It’s not at all the same as reading Thucydides, but there’s a conceptual similarity in that it’s not so far afield that it’s pure escapism. And you’re already doing your best to study the anomaly at the bottom of the Pacific, which could be, wait for it…a portal. Just saying.

Speaking of Thucydides, I’m at the end of Book 7. “To the victors the most brilliant of successes, to the vanquished to most calamitous of defeats…everything was destroyed, and, out of many, only few returned.” Rings a bell. This morning I was scanning the beginning of Book 8. Seems like back home in Athens the news of the expedition’s failure won’t be landing all that cleanly. Now that you’re done with Thucydides, what are you moving onto next?

Say what you will about little grad students coming up with ridiculous ways to end their own lives by studying Blue—at least they’re facing the problem. Academia’s Ivory Tower has pretty strong walls and it’s filled with people who aren’t ready to look up from whatever’s under their confocal microscope. I get it. You have to be singleminded to make progress. You can’t watch the news, get caught up in the times, react too strongly to what other people are doing if you want to read and write in the language of biology [here read: genes, proteins, RNA in all its flavors]. The way we do it in the States, science takes everything from its practitioners—every scrap of time, every dime of money. Still more energy is poured into the inefficiency of constant justification, the way the government forces an accounting of every hour and dollar. Endless petitions for more resources, endless reporting on what you’ve spent. It’s a small price to pay to look under the hood and see nature’s engine. I’m good at it. Good at all of it. You are too, I’m sure,

I’m taking a leave of absence from MIT. These mock grants will be the last I read for a while, I think.

One of my senators called this morning. It’ll take weeks for all the procedure to go through and for JETF to be created through an act of congress, but Trespasser cleanup efforts have stalled out. Radiation levels around the corpse itself preclude doing much at the site where they took it down, but there’s a long trail of Blue and other biological material in its wake. Something’s gotta be done about it. I volunteered as a temporary scientific liaison to a mobile biocontainment unit (MBU). There’s not much of a directive yet, other than “clean up the Blue” and “make faster progress.” No details yet about JETF structure, funding, roles, salary, but if they’re tapping me for the job before the job even exists, I’m pretty sure those will be forthcoming.

Guess I’m going to the west coast!

Also—you can’t dangle an “abbreviated biography” and not send it!!

In desperate need of something to read on a plane,

Newton

Dear Newton,

I sensed a tonal shift from the opening lines of your last letter but you certainly buried the lead. I can only imagine your state of mind. I’m happy to oblige spending a crisp autumnal evening crafting something substantial enough that reading it and drafting a reply would occupy a cross continental flight.

Let me begin this way: I’m writing this reply by hand, seated at my desk in front of an open window. A thermos of tea is ready to weigh down my finished pages. Later, I’ll convert it into email form. I live in Schöneberg, have I told you? I’m not far from Nollendorfplatz. You may know it, given your musical proclivities—David Bowie lived nearby in 1970s. Before that, during the Weimar era, it was known for its cabaret. Before that, it was home to one of the most important operetta houses in Berlin. Strange how stable the character of a place can remain over time. Such things aren’t always true, I know. Tonight, the wind is crisp and the street is loud. Both are keeping me awake.

Addressing your most superficial point first—no, I would not consider myself a gamer. I’ve certainly never heard of War Thunder. You rightly surmise, however, that I have some experience in virtual environments. Are you familiar with Orbiter? It’s a spaceflight simulation program that allows one to pilot spacecraft using realistic Newtonian physics. Multiple types of spacecraft and multiple flight regimes are included. One can fly historical missions:Sputnik launch, the Soyuz-Apollo docking, the Hubble deployment…the list goes on. If you find yourself with the time and inclination, (though I can’t imagine you would) the Space Shuttle Atlantis launch and docking to the ISS is a good place to start. It’s rare I find the time these days, but describing the simulator even in these broad strokes triggers some nostalgia for my virtual cockpit. 

Regarding my situation at TU Berlin, I believe you to be quite correct. You’ll have to forgive me for failing to summon the fortitude to describe the longitudinal history of my disputes with my father tonight; I’ll need something stronger than tea for such an effort. Suffice it to say that though I’m sure he believes his interference to come from a place of wisdom and Rechtschaffenheit (here read: righteousness meets virtue), such artificial pressures don’t belong in science.

I’ve developed an affection for the over-loud streets in the historic district below. It’s difficult to imagine leaving.

My thoughts are with you tonight, Newton. By the time I’ve transcribed this missive, it will be the early hours of the morning and you may very well be on your plane. You must think of my struggles as childish—a boy rebelling against his father in relative luxury, the Atlantic Ocean and half a continent between me and the very real catastrophe you’re traveling to assess. I keep leaving off this letter to access what data I can about radiation levels in various portions of the San Francisco Bay. The air currents. The safest places to be. I worry that the focus is so strongly on Kaiju Blue—don’t forget the radionuclides in the region as well. Is there anyone looking into this for you? The radioactive iodine will be gone by now, but cesium and strontium remain. Eat packaged foods. Don’t drink the tap water. Try not to walk on unpaved ground. Remove your shoes and outerwear at your door. Wipe down surfaces rather than sweeping or vacuuming. I hope someone gives you better guidance than mine. More will come to me. Shall I make you a checklist? Where will you be staying? You can’t live in a Mobile Biocontainment Unit, surely.

In regards to my next book, I’ve decided on another re-read. (It will be a re-reading era, I think.) In the face of cataclysm, one likes to be reminded of what one knows. I’ve decided upon The Silmarillion. It’s on my desk now. The fate of Númenor is what calls the book to mind—monsters, death by water, an historical bent—the story is told at a remove relative to the immediacy of The Lord of the Rings. I recall it as being a book about the importance of hope. The importance of hope within the paradigm of inescapable civilizational decline. Other details stick in my memory, call me back like a captured comet—the creation of beautiful things in times of great fear; a woman with a premonition of war who carved secret paths to save the people of her walled city; and I remember that in the days before the fall of Númenor, the rich met in secret to worship Melkor.

The streets below are beginning to quiet. It’s time to edit and condense my handwritten German into digital English. 

Tomorrow, I’ll follow your well-set example, sir, and look for places beyond TU Berlin where I might best apply my efforts. Attached, you’ll find the latest air gamma and ground-contaminations maps.

All my best,

Hermann

Dear Hermann,

You’re right about the tonal shift. The exuberant idea density of clauses shoved into clauses, nesting in 4D like hypercube birds gets hard to fake! Even with exclamation points!(!!!) I don’t have the most stable mood. Sometime’s it’s up and everything burns hot and glorious. Neurons (Newtrons? hmm.) on fire. But neurochemical resources are finite, and it’s a down time. Hate those. They’re usually when I switch fields. One would think it would happen during the highest highs rather than during the lows—all that momentum flying off the handle and into a different space. Maybe for some people it’s like that. It’s only during the lows that the ideas lose their grip and I’m free to walk away.

I’m worried. And I’ve got a foot out MIT’s door already. My department chair is beside himself.

Did you see the editorial in Nature calling for a 50 mile, 50 year quarantine along the trail Trespasser cut through northern California? This feels like it’ll have staying power. End up in a national paper somewhere. I don’t like it. I’m crafting a rebuttal (draft attached), but I’ll hold off on finalizing it until I get a better sense of the situation on the ground in California. Dispatches From a Biochemical Front. Something better will come to me, but that’s the working title.

I spent the first half of my flight staring at the seat 18 inches from my face trying to come up with a plan for what I’ll do once I’m on site. I mean, I’ll do what I’m told (maybe), but information is sparse, there’s not much direction, and the ideas coming from the top are bad. Cleanup has ground to a halt because everyone is, uh, dying. I know about six other scientists who’ve also volunteered to embed themselves with biocontainment units. We’ve started a text thread. Already we’re arguing like we’re in an NIH Study Section. Everyone agrees that reducing lethality on cleanup teams is priority one. But how?

I know I’ve be assigned to a region where Blue predominates rather than radioactivity in terms of toxic exposure. I need to get samples of contaminated groundwater and soil and start reactivity testing with controlled micro-samples. Without insight into how Blue interacts with a library of common materials, improvement will be slow and mostly guesswork. This is gonna be the best anyone can realistically do up front. No one has been able to distill or purify this stuff, and you can’t run chromatography or spectroscopy on lethal mud and expect to get useful results.

No one on my text thread likes the idea of playing with toxic mud. Everyone wants to to use nanomaterials to upgrade filters and hope for the best. Good luck to them, I guess. I’ll dip their new filters in whatever suspensions I end up using.

They’re scared. I get it. So am I.

Thanks for the radioactivity tips. I’ll do all those things. You asked where I’m living—temporary modular housing brought in for the cleanup crews (no local water, no local food; less due to radioactivity than to worries about Blue and related compounds contaminating the groundwater). I’m guessing that if I’m successful in drastically cutting lethality rates and moving the cleanup along, I’ll end up relocating to a region dealing with more of a mixed contaminant picture (ie more radioactivity, so keep those physics tips coming! I’d love a checklist. No vacuuming: check. Eat packaged foods: check. That’s half my lifestyle already!

The Silmarillion, eh? A friend of mine (the one who died in San Francisco) loved Tolkien, so even though I haven’t read it, I feel like I have: Fëanor (very punk rock for an elf), a really great dog, the curse of the Noldor, that one emo guy, that other emo guy. See? I’m basically an expert.

Flight’s over…

Wish me luck!

-Newton