12
NEWT FINISHED HIS BREAKFAST AND SHOVED THE sandwich wrapper and potato salad cup out of the way. He set up the recording software and took a deep breath. Go time. Newt Geiszler was about to reach for immortality.
He hoped that when his biographers took up the task of memorializing this moment, they would make sure to point out that Newt had spent all night cobbling together a Pons setup from bits of junk-room scrap and various components littering his side of the lab. He was a tinkerer in a lineage of tinkerers that led back through Edison and Tesla to da Vinci, all the way to whichever caveman had first decided that if he put a rock in a piece of hide, he could throw it farther.
As of this moment, he was ninety-five percent sure it would work.
Those were good enough odds for him. Hell, he’d done riskier things with the stats against him… well, no. He hadn’t. But what the hell.
Newt started a portable recorder.
“Oh eight hundred hours,” he said. “Kaiju/Human Drift Experiment. Take one.”
Newt picked up the squid cap from the tabletop. He worked it down over his head and checked the fit of the liquid-core trunk cable that led to the processor. It was solid.
Next to the chair he’d selected to be his Drift pilot’s seat was the makeshift Pons, an aggregation of cables and switches that he hoped would approximate the more polished setups in each Jaeger’s Conn-Pod. The jar of kaiju brain put him in mind of an old movie with Erich von Stroheim. He couldn’t remember the title, which irritated him momentarily until he reminded himself that he had more important things to do. He picked up the recorder again.
“Brain segment. Frontal lobe. Chances are the sample is far too damaged to Drift with. However, neural activity is still detectable.”
This was the conservative assessment. Newt’s intuition was, in fact, quite a bit more radical. He didn’t believe the brain was dead at all. It was dormant, maybe, but Newt was certain that if you stuck that brain back into a kaiju, the kaiju would get up and walk around and level Honolulu or Melbourne.
He just needed this experiment to prove his theory.
He rested his finger on the switch that would activate the neural handshake between the brain of Newt Geiszler and the kaiju brain formerly belonging to the exo-being known as… well, he didn’t know. In fact he didn’t know if the kaiju had names, or considered themselves individuals. Maybe he was about to find out.
“Unscientific aside,” he said. “Hermann, if you’re listening to this, I’m either alive and proving what I’ve just done, in which case ha! I won!”
Ungrammatical, yes. Satisfying, also yes.
“Or I’m dead,” Newt went on, “and you need to know that it’s you who drove me to this, and it’s all your fault. In which case… ha! I won. Kind of.”
He kept the recorder on and rested finger and thumb against the activation switch.
“I’m going in… five, four, three, two… One!”
Click.
Newt had never Drifted, so at first he didn’t know he was Drifting. He thought he was dreaming, even though in the midst of the dream his conscious mind observed— until it was blown away by the welter of sensations at the beginning of the Drift.
He was a boy. It was summer. He and his parents were on holiday, at one of the lower-Alpine resorts that aspired to be Lake Como. His mother had a concert that night. Newt felt wet sand between his toes. He swam, closed his eyes, envisioned the water around him as a matrix of flow equations. He wondered if there were fish looking at him, and what they thought.
Oh right I’m Drifting.
His uncle’s study, where Newt had learned both music and tinkering. Gunter, we dig this, can we take it? We’ll pay you when we’re back from tour.
Gunter’s laugh, from his belly, roughened along the way by cigarettes. Uncle Gunter who gave people things before they could steal from him. The gear in his studio. A new sound, one that nobody had ever made before. Lines on a monitor danced out the data, expressing it. Ecstasy of sound and idea, endlessly dividing inside Newt’s mind.
The lake in the summer, the skies growing dark and the water surging, getting heavier and thicker
Oh no, Newt thought, like a dreamer knowing his dream is about to become nightmare. He wasn’t looking at the lake of his childhood anymore. The scene in his mind, no human had ever seen it before. Sky turning red and the lake was a heaving sea of bio-slurry stirred and channeled into great sacs inside the sacs things moved and grew
This satisfied him and it satisfied the Precursors
The word speared its way into Newt’s consciousness and he could not fight it off. Precursors that is not who is who is where did I get that word oh god the kaiju it’s talking to me
Looking down with mind cold and empty save for hunger to conquer, Precursors
Around them a city made of bone and flesh, bred and grown not built now dying as the world around them was dying he was one of them he was not one of them they realized they were being watched
From a sac surged a monster, slick with fluid it shambled forward the Precursor saw it and beckoned
Behind it the factory
Factory
Spread under a dying sky sacs and watchers and the churning pools from which they sprang
Like Mutavore but larger, it spread wings deformity thought the precursor dying the kaiju fell back into the bio-slurry and was absorbed another sac split and another kaiju rose from within like Mutavore but larger, it spread wings
Mother never left the lake she fell in love there and
And died
Realization shattered the intensity of the Drift and for a moment Newt had clarity. Oh God, I understand
The kaiju died the first time around
The Precursor looked at him it looked at him and knew him they were ready this new world was ready for them they had waited a time for the world to prepare itself and now it had
They were coming now they were certain and they were coming
Pay you when we get back from tour
Another and another another another
Laughter of the Precursor from its bone belly roughened by brutal exhilaration of conquest the sound was bits and waves and
Newt
He was coming back. Was he coming back? Slowly.
was a brain Drifting in Lake Como below him fish burst from their sacs and
Newt
All those fish were probably dead from pollution acidification runoff pesticides estrogen mimics the world was dying Earth was dying, yes. But that other place, too… Their world was dying
Was that a voice calling him? Newt!
“Newt!”
The world was shaking around him. No, he was shaking.
No, someone was shaking him.
Hermann. Shaking him. Also he was shaking, spasming, making sounds.
“Newt!” Hermann shouted again. He tore the squid cap off Newt’s head and slapped him hard.
Newt froze. The world fell into place around him again. He had two thoughts at once.