In a Clean White Room

The problem with Newton is, and has always been, everything.

“I feel weird,” Newt decides.

“I like your brain,” Newton says, a non sequitur that doesn’t feel like one.

Their ships are metaphor but they will literally rock them, guys, come on.

“Like,” Newton says in helpless appeal, “wave functions, man.”

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

THE WALL OF LIFE. All caps, to better match the shouting.

“I can’t believe it,” everyone says, in voices that are not surprised.

Note to self, or, more probably, note to person who finds my dead body: I’ve discovered something interesting.

“I can’t believe I drove a metacognitive car into your brain like a total badass,” Lightcap says.

The love child of Eris and Aphrodite, skating on a shell, playing only Chell…

Happy Quantum Field Tuesday; you have been science charm’d!

I say call a spade a spade, and call a transdimensional rift a transdimensional rift, am I right?

Together, they look out at the sky, over the land, as if from the cockpit of a Jaeger.

“He’s working his magic on you.” Mako wipes her eyes, returns to her scones. “You were a tough customer.”

He flings the flowers along the vector of the wind. They fall, end over end, toward the sea.

“Were you thinking about math? ” Newton breathes suggestively.

Here, and everywhere. Now, and everywhen.

Something out of dreams he’d had a dozen years ago: Dr. Geiszler, world-weary and sad, carrying a terrible equanimity.

Mako throws her arms around him, hugs him hard.

Hermann, low on willpower, high on misery, decides to watch Newton’s talk. It’s a terrible idea.

Hermann thinks with compassion of Gottfried Leibniz, fallen out of favor in November 1716.

To her profound credit, Mako retreats from nothing.

Hermann believes himself to be prepared. Alas, he is not.

“You think you started yesterday with your word differences?” Newton says. “You’ve been doing word differences for a long time.”

“Oooh Demonic Hold. Sounds like a fun thing to do to a library book.”

Maybe they’re dead, standing in an infinite cold wind, waiting for Lightcap.

“I’ll buy you beer for the rest of my life,” Lightcap promises him.

NEWTON IS NOT THE CALM ONE.

“Bitch Prince of the Xenome!!” Lightcap announces.

The pieces come like shards, stay like shards.

Newton takes a pointed bite of his graham cracker.

“For all I know,” Newton says, “you’re mapping our salvation in the quantum foam.”

Bach himself is reaching through three hundred years of spacetime to press down on every cognitive circuit Newt has in his repertoire.

Newton types: Supererogatory Quantum Cartography <3 in a text box.

The xenoepilepsy thing feels, at times, like a process that must go to completion.

Radishes. Honestly.

The arguments feel like a natural evolution of their correspondence.

He can’t stop the tears that come for Leibniz, for the kids, for all the unknown things that will ever fade with grace before their day and after their time.

“I see you’re conscious again,” Hermann says. “Felicitations.”

Newt holds out his hand because in for a penny, in for imperious-dick mode.

The reality of death and destruction is fading. How terribly nice that should seem.

Curse the arrow of time, anyway.

“You think you’re so charming,” Hermann says testily.

Meridians and mermaids. Field lines and fairies. Lively little ghosts and loop quantum gravity. String theory and song.

Overhead, Queen plays.

Newt loooooooves discovering design flaws in the field.

::Kiss!::

These are no tears of joy, despite the way the world won’t end.

The monsters we slay come back.