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Chapter Text

Dear Dr. Gottlieb,

My name is Newton Geiszler, and I am a professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at MIT. I understand from a mutual acquaintance (Dr. Katerina “call me Kat or I’ll end you” Meyer) that you have recently completed your doctorate at the Berlin Institute of Technology. Congratulations!  I hope you’ll forgive an unsolicited letter from a non-physicist that’s about to take a left-hand turn straight from pleasantries into science, but I felt compelled to write to you in light of what happened last month [editorial aside: here read a horrible, xenobiological tragedy with all appropriate empathetic catch-phrases duly attached].

Are you aware that your recent Science paper regarding particle annihilation and small-scale energy fluctuations in spacetime turbulence at the subatomic level might have outrageously practical implications when it comes to understanding the transdimensional rift that’s opened at the bottom of the Pacific? [Unscientific aside: don’t tell me you’re one of those multiverse apologists. I say call a spade a spade, and call a transdimensional rift a transdimensional rift, am I right? I’m right. You love it. I hope you love it.] Anyway, tell me you’ve realized this. Tell me that you’ve been thinking about it. Tell me your thoughts on the mechanism by which such a transdimensional rift might be produced and perpetuated, because I find that I really want to know and you seem like the guy to ask.

Do you think these rifts open spontaneously from time to time when D-branes become a little too contiguous within the bulk? Is this a natural, stochastic phenomenon? Every educated bone in my body says yes, absolutely, stochasticity is a property of existence as we understand it and underlies most of the cruelties of biology. And yet. Aaaaand yet. I want your thoughts, all your thoughts, but especially your thoughts on the probability of this kind of event happening spontaneously. If you want to know the truth, I’m cursing the day I chose biology over quantum mechanics, except no, I’m not, because I think I’m going to be part of the governmental task force that gets the chance to analyze pieces of whatever it was that came through from wherever it is they come from. [Nomenclature aside: the scientific community seems to be settling on “kaiju” vis-à-vis “Kaiju.” I am, as one might colloquially put it, a “fan” of this emerging paradigm.]

I haven’t been able to find a physicist who will talk to me about this in an intelligent manner. That’s a lie a little bit, but I think, out of all existing work on the quantum foam, yours is the most relevant. I’m in the process of giving myself the background to follow your paper so come back at me with your A-game despite my biochemical credentials. I can take it.

Tell me.

What do you think?

Sincerely,
Newton Geiszler, PhD

Dear Dr. Geiszler,

You must pardon the indecorous enthusiasm of the response you are about to read, but I must confess I was thrilled to receive your letter. I cannot tell you how frustrated I have been, trying to communicate the relevancies of my model to a pedestrian academic hierarchy of an indentured faculty who distrust applicability purely on principle. I have run into an undue amount of resistance when conjecturing regarding what I feel to be obvious practical extensions of my studies in quantum-field topology. The only parties lending me an ear are a subset of string theorists whose work borders on the metaphysical and, frankly, this is not improving my outlook. There are times I’ve been made to feel as though I’ve lost my grip on rational discourse when I draw a parallel between my thesis work and that which may be sitting at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. It is, of course, difficult to stop discussing it with my colleagues because of the overwhelming urgency and relevancy of the question—is the “Breach” a quantum-mechanical phenomenon manifesting itself on the macro scale, or is it something else? The limited data available preclude a definitive answer, but I will outline my argument for you in a colloquial manner within the text of this email and attach a document with a technical version of the same. Depending on your background, it may or may not be comprehensible to you—I confess that in its current form it contains some conceptual shorthand that likely will strike you as recherché.

Allow me to preface my argument with the following comment: it’s a common assumption in the popular press that the emergence of Trespasser is sufficient evidence for physical continuity between the depths of the Pacific and an extraterrestrial location. This is not technically true. There are a host of alternative explanations that cannot be logically excluded—each more ridiculous than the last and none of which deserve real credence (though I would be curious as to your thoughts on this topic, as I would imagine, from what you’ve said of your background, this lies within your domain of expertise). The point I’m attempting to make is that any kaiju-centric arguments ought to be separated from the paired questions of: A) does the Breach exist (constantly or periodically), and B) if it exists, what is its nature?

In practice, these questions are functionally inextricable. Establishing the existence of the Breach requires one to hypothesize about its nature, then look for evidence to support said hypothesis, if only because it didn’t announce itself to global seismic, atmospheric, or oceanic monitoring systems. (Correct?) It was only retrospective analysis of geological data that allowed detection of the faintest seismic signal that something unusual might be occurring within the fabric of spacetime. Even considering the report from the Japanese seismology group (published in Nature—you must have seen it), a strange seismic pattern does not a spacetime tear make, no matter how notable the observed pattern. It, like the appearance of the kaiju itself, is only suggestive. Circumstantial.

The theory I favor (which you have doubtless already surmised, based on the content of your letter), is that the nature of the Breach is best described as a local apposition of two branes of the multiverse, allowing unidirectional or bidirectional travel for an unknown period of time between two separate but closely apposed universes, possibly with different physical laws. An alternate possibility would be an Einstein-Rosen bridge. Considering the second proposal first—quantum field theory posits that there could, within the quantum foam, exist certain regions of space with a negative energy density (the Casimir effect) that might allow for a transient spontaneous bridge. It’s also possible that a sufficiently advanced civilization(??) might construct such a bridge out of exotic materials. I consider all of this unlikely, primarily because there’s been no detection of exotic matter and no evidence of time dilation from any of the deep-sea teams combing the bottom of the Pacific with every array of instrumentation that humanity’s collective ingenuity can bring to bear. So, while an Einstein-Rosen bridge is not impossible, I don’t consider it likely. [See pages 4-10 of the attached file for my technical argument.] This returns us to the idea of D-brane apposition.

The mechanism you so charmingly described as “D-branes becom[ing] a little too contiguous within the bulk,” is not precisely what I proposed in my paper. Your word choice is inspired by the conceptual underpinning of detecting a D-brane/D-brane collision using temperature variations in cosmic background radiation (a proposal for testing the validity of the multiverse that has yet to be empirically demonstrated). In any case, I believe you’re thinking about the conceptual underpinnings correctly, in that your word choice communicates you are interested in learning more about a process, any process, that might conceivably create a dimensional rift large enough to transit the thing that laid waste to San Francisco. My paper doesn’t formally demonstrate but strongly implies waveform continuity between two D-branes on the level of quantum-scale spacetime turbulence at ground state energy in a vacuum. [See pages 16-28 of the attached file for a more detailed explanation.] What does this mean? I’m not certain.

However, I confess I have been deeply troubled—for a month now—regarding the exact questions you posed to me in your email. “Is this a natural, stochastic phenomenon?” If so, what is its empirical frequency, its empirical scale? And the counter question you didn’t pose, but rather implied: does the existence of this rift preclude a natural phenomenon, and if so—what then are the consequences of that particularly poisonous realization? Unfortunately, sir, I cannot give you definitive answers. I suspect this phenomenon is not purely natural—if only because of the scale of the entity that came through. I’m the first to admit I have an imperfect understanding of quantum phenomena, but this—this is something else again entirely. The ideas proposed in my paper explain how such a rift could arise spontaneously—on the quantum level. They do not explain how such a rift could be extended, expanded, and made stable (if indeed it is stable). I am very much anticipating the results of the group from Caltech who have been combing the ocean floor with the high-grade electromagnetic detection equipment humanity usually points into space. I’m hopeful there will be evidence, if not of an extant rift, at least an anomalous EM signature that could be further studied.

On a personal note, may I also add that I found your “unsolicited email” to be an enormous conceptual relief. At times I’ve felt like I am the only person who genuinely takes this connection between quantum mechanics and the appearance of Trespasser seriously and has not gone back to business as usual post the events of this past August. Perhaps it is because San Francisco is half a world away from Berlin, perhaps it is because theoretical physics is a somewhat insular discipline, but I confess to feeling misunderstood by my colleagues, who view me as indulgently perseverating on a link between my work and what will certainly end up being one of the defining events of the century. I do not feel as though I am being taken seriously. Indeed, I am not. It is not as though they are not interested, just not interested enough to arrest their current pursuits in order to spend time, mental energy, and financial resources redirecting the avenue of their intellectual pursuits. There has been much discussion here regarding my ideas, the relevancy of my paper—but very little material support, and I am being continuously advised not to hitch my career to understanding a single, if cataclysmic, empirical event. Perhaps because it was an isolated incident in another country? Perhaps because, like so many other things, it may fall outside the purview of theoretical physics? I am certain that my Doktorvater (in America you say, “thesis advisor?”) has my best interests at heart, but it is frustrating to be encouraged away from one’s scientific instincts. Maddening, really. I’ve had a terrible day—there is no excuse for this paragraph. I should delete it, but I will leave it in, if only to contextualize what has become an unforgivably long missive with an unforgivably dense attachment. Suffice it to say: I found your email perceptive and—how to put this—well…it restored some of my wavering faith in my own ideas, I suppose.

I do find it notable that your scientific interests range so widely—I must confess, I have never met a biologist with the inclination or training to read primary physics literature. In fact, it’s unusual to find anyone reading outside his or her discipline of choice these days. I admit I don’t know the first thing about “Chemical and Biological Engineering;” but, then again, I’m quite up to date with what has been discovered regarding the biochemistry of Trespasser, though, granted, I have obtained most of my information from the kaiju-centric issue of Nature, which admittedly includes summary reviews at the non-specialist level. So perhaps that is the connection—an interest in what happened in August that sparked your interest in quantum mechanics and mine in xenobiology? In any case, I am curious as to how you came across my paper. Did you encounter it by chance in your review of the literature? Did Dr. Meyer point it out? I’d very much like to know.

Sincerely,
Hermann Gottlieb, PhD

Dear Dr. Gottlieb,

Indecorousness pardoned now and forever. In fact, I actively encourage indecorousness at every opportunity. That sounded unpardonably lascivious; allow me to rephrase. The turnaround time on your exquisitely worded “missive” was unbelievable. It will take me a few days (years?) to navigate through the document you sent—I do not math the way you math, I don’t think. But with some supplementary…er, everything, maybe I’ll at least marginally appreciate the way you’re (obviously) doing the conceptual equivalent of bridge building. I’m getting the gestalt but not the details, and that VEXES me, sir, I’ll have you know. [Inquisitive aside: I can make it through this document of yours with graduate-level P-chem, right? I can teach myself quantum field theory, yes? Yes. No problem. The quantum vacuum state is Lorentz invariant, right? I’m losing you when you renormalize for thermal fluctuations…or at least that’s where I THINK I’m losing you. I’m dying. I’m a biologist, man, not a quantum physicist. (Help me.)]

The point of the above paragraph, in case it wasn’t clear, is that I need a few days to collect my thoughts. I did, however, want to expeditiously email you and say the following:

One. Thank you. This is an amazing piece of work. It’s also shockingly laudable that you’d just—send me this without any caveats or reservations or swearing me to secrecy—in short, without knowing me at all. You realize this is a little bit insane? Don’t send your groundbreaking thoughts to potential competitors. You know this, right? Someone HAS told you this? Right? At some point? Send them to your friends and colleagues and then let your competitors read them after publication and grind their teeth. Not that I’m your competitor, but Dr. Meyer could potentially be considered your competitor. The point is, just—well, way to do science like it’s supposed to go, kid, and not like it actually goes. In case you’re regretting sending me this in a fit of intellectual nihilism because no one is listening to you—I won’t show this to anyone.

Two. Oh my GOD, yes, okay, just yes. I love this with a passionately voyeuristic kind of love. “Passionately” because of passion; “voyeuristic” because of voyeurism—this pure and secret math isn’t really the kind of thing I run across every day and it makes me feel very scientifically cosmopolitan to be checking out the quantitative ground floor of something that might have turned into a lovely and concise paper in Quantum Physics Letters but will now probably evolve into something even more concise with a sort of eau de démolition that lands in an even better journal given the inevitable practical applications of what you’re discussing.

Three. I think you’re so right by the way. Just to be clear, I already thought you were right when I emailed you; I just didn’t know if YOU knew how right you were, but it seems like you definitely do, so congratulations there (ha). I liked your laid-out argument, though I submit to you that given the results of the paper I’m attaching, which has been submitted to my superfriends at Nature [Accuracy aside: the editorial board of Nature may actually deeply and genuinely despise me because I argued with them so much about a paper on cellular senescence I submitted eighteen months ago or so…I’m not sure they’ve forgiven me yet; but they will. Eventually. I can be very charming. But in a totally above-the-board, ethical way. Full disclosure. Too much disclosure], the kaiju, having a biochemical makeup incongruous with terrestrial biochemistry [Accuracy aside: by which I mean the existence of nucleic acid monomers that differ markedly from our local walking, talking collections of organized primordial ooze] in and of itself comprises a piece of evidence that is no longer circumstantial. For example, the, er, optimistic people who search for the Loch Ness monster might tell you the oceans are full of waiting carnage, but principle-of-parsimony-wise, no terrestrial ocean is going to be full of waiting xenocarnage unless there’s alien continuity.

Four. With regards to everyone patting your head and saying “nice job” as you communicate civilization-altering hypotheses; dude, this is an uber-common feature of la vie en académie as a young scientist, except (in your case) writ large as unbelievably high stakes meet your relatively junior position. People aren’t supposed to care about the hierarchy, and, to some extent in academia we’re freer [grammatical aside: that’s a word, right? Free-er?] of this proclivity than other fields are, but it’ll be the non-issue it should be. Speaking of positions and optimizing them, what are you doing right now, by the way? Finishing up more quantum-foam thinking? Looking for a postdoc? Working this giant document you sent me into a paper? That’s what I’d do if I were you; it’s almost like…a mathematical opinion piece that’s going to make you look like an outrageous quantum mechanical savant if you publish it before the empirical data that everyone’s waiting on, and like a prepared mathematical badass if you wait. You should probably wait. [Enthusiastic aside: don’t wait! Responsible aside: wait.] Honestly though, if you wanted to step into the position of quantum savant I have no idea where you’d send such a thing. If you’d already won the Nobel Prize (or something) then you’d have the leverage to get yourself a platform, but as a relatively unknown, recently minted doctorate, yup, I think the reality is you’ll need to wait for more factual parameters to hit the published literature before you take this thing into the public sphere, especially considering how much attention [editorial aside: here read “negative attention”] you’re likely to get when you publish. When another one of those things crawls out of the Pacific I bet your quantum mechanical clout will only increase, which is not exactly a happy thought, but it’s a progressive thought. That’s the thing about science, am I right? You keep saying the correct thing over and over and people will eventually have to notice, and you’ll accrue more resources as they do. So hang in there.

As for the question of how I came across your paper—it was indeed during a literature search. Even as I type this I feel like it makes me sound like a little bit of a crackpot quantitative dilettante. But I typed it anyway. YOLO. I’ve been following every rational scientific throughline pertaining to what the heck happened in August because, full disclosure, as I mentioned in my original email I’d really like to jump ship and switch fields to exobiology. Really really. A lot. I’m just obsessed [confessional aside: probably not an exaggeration] with where that thing came from and what it is. Anyway, I found your paper and took it to Kat, who is my go-to quantum person for these sorts of things, meaning I met her at a really boring and really mandatory training session at MIT (we both joined the faculty at the same time and hit it off within the impersonal nightmarish milieu of “setting up a lab”). Anyway, she’s willing to humor my quantum mechanical interests and we went through your paper. She mentioned she knew you and I asked her if she knew you well enough for me to cold-call you, as it were, and she said yes, and so here we are. Honestly, I would have contacted you anyway. I’ve been writing intermittently to other quantum people, but no one has so much “written back to me” as “ignored me.” Not that I necessarily blame them; if some quantum physicist tried to get my attention regarding nucleic acids, I’ll be honest, I’d look at them in a way most mildly described as “askance.”   So I get it, but at the same time? Come on. This is awesome.

Sincerely,
Newton Geiszler, PhD

P.S. Can I…kind of send you back your document with notes attached, whereby “notes” I just mean brackets next to question marks annotated with the words: “what IS this even.”

P.P.S. What if you sent me your entire thesis. Not even an impertinent suggestion—just an uncensored thought? I read German.

P.P.P.S. Did you see commentary on abnormal plate tectonics that came out in Geology Today? Soooo not my area, but some of the synthesized geological data might be of interest to you.

P.P.P.P.S. I hope you’re having a better day [time zone corrected: night] than you were yesterday [time zone corrected: last night].

Dear Dr. Geiszler,

I confess I was somewhat preoccupied the morning after sending you my initial communication because you are correct—I did, essentially, write you in a fit of “intellectual nihilism.” Consequently, I was more personally forthcoming than was perhaps advisable. You are very kind to have responded as you did to my lapse in decorum. Rest assured, I will be more considered with my comments in the future. This being said, I am grateful to have been on the receiving end of your thoughts. I very much appreciate your points on the social architecture of my academic frustrations. I surmise from your comments that you must have at least some experience with the struggle to be taken seriously. I took the liberty of looking up your h-index (I hope you don’t mind), and it seems that whatever your past struggles might have been you have more than “arrived” in an academic sense. Should you feel inclined to soliloquize further on the fine points of institutional politics, you would have an interested listener in me. I have more ostensible mentors than I know what to do with, but as they are all affiliated with my home institution or related to me by blood (my father has quite definite ideas about my career trajectory) I am not sure I can consider them free from bias.

To address your third postscript first, I missed the article you mentioned in Geology Today, thank you for bringing it to my attention. Let me return the favor. Were you aware that there’s a recently established international repository of geologic data pertinent to the Breach? (The appropriate link is pasted beneath my signature.) It was created using open source software by a graduate student from Tokyo with more free time than I have. I’ve found it useful for computational modeling projects, though the elegance of the interface leaves something to be desired.

Thank you for sending me your as-yet unpublished manuscript. I assure you that I will treat it with the same level of confidentiality you have so thoughtfully displayed towards my unpublished work. I must confess that some of the finer points of your experimental technique are lost on me, but I believe I have understood the main conceptual thrust of the thing—which is that you have identified six nucleotides, all of which are silicon-based, correct? And therefore clearly distinct from terrestrial nucleic acids? (I believe you implied as much in your last email, but you occasionally break into a German style with English words and I confess it is not the easiest task to follow the throughline of your thoughts.) This has all the markings of a seminal paper and I do not doubt it will provide the leverage you’re looking for in order to gain a foothold in xenobiology.

Please feel free to annotate the file I sent and return it to me with notes attached; I will clarify where I can. It would be helpful for me to know what kind of experience you’ve had in higher mathematics (if any) so that my comments can be better calibrated. I have attached my graduate thesis for your eventual perusal. It has been described as “dense” by members of the faculty at TU Berlin, so if you find it uninterpretable you will be in good company.

Again, my apologies for a somewhat unprofessional message, I assure you it will not happen again.

Sincerely,
Hermann Gottlieb, PhD

Dear Dr. Gottlieb,

YOU apologize? How about I apologize. For the thing I’m attaching to this email. It’s my comments on the document you sent. I am SO sorry. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. I’m going to ignore all your questions about my mathematical background and just…send you this thing. Respond how you will, when you will. My notes are best described as “extensive.”

Sincerely,
Newton Geiszler, PhD

P.S. I’m not great with rocks but thank you for the database link.

P.P.S. Yes, your thesis is uninterpretable.

P.P.S. But not for long.

P.P.P.S. That’s a lie.

P.P.P.P.S. With regards to the xenobiochemistry I sent your way…you’ve got it, kid. If the book of one’s life is written in silicon, then, categorically, one did not arise from the local (carbon) sludge. Ergo, alien monsters are alien. Quod erat demonstrandum. BAM. Mic drop.

P.P.P.P.P.S.  Excuse me but my English is flawless, clear, and well explicated. Every time

Dear Dr. Geiszler,

Your credentials are extremely misleading. This is NOT what I was expecting.

Sincerely,
Hermann Gottlieb, PhD

Dear Dr. Gottlieb,

I’m not sure how to interpret your most recent email. Are you appalled by my mathematical illiteracy? [Reality-check aside: I’m a biologist, you realize.] Are you messing with me? Either way, keep in mind…I did apologize in advance?

-Newton

Dear Dr. Geiszler,

You grossly misrepresented yourself to me—this is NOT the commentary of a biologist having trouble recalling a distant class in physical chemistry. Your understanding of quantum field theory is professionally passable, which is—shocking, frankly. You owe me an explanation. I insist. In fact, I insist upon it before I return your notes to you with further notes. Did you begin in the physical sciences and switch fields? I hope you did, but I’m skeptical because of the unconventional terminology/notation you’re using to express yourself. Are you, possibly, something of an autodidact when it comes to applied quantum mechanics? This is the explanation I favor, though it seems wholly implausible given your days must be taken up with the business of cellular regeneration or biochemistry or whatever it is that you particularly specialize in—I made a real effort to determine this by looking at your list of publications and couldn’t easily do it—were you publishing in organic chemistry circa 2006? Were you publishing in bioethics before this? Is there another scientist who shares your name? Are there several?

To formally answer your question, I’m neither appalled by your mathematical literacy nor purposefully being obstructive. I’m delighted to encounter an askew mathematical twist upon a too-familiar problem, and I’m impressed at the degree to which you’re able to follow my work. Your grasp of quantum field theory is sounder than it has any right to be, I find your notation to be wholly charming, and I await a delineation of your mathematical/quantum mechanical credentials with much anticipation. 

Sincerely,
Hermann Gottlieb, PhD

Dear Dr. Gottlieb,

Whew. Okay. GREAT.

First. I can’t believe that you’re ransoming your thoughts for details on my mathematical history. Ha! It’s making my day.

Second. If you’re going to be ransoming thoughts, at least hold out for something better. There’s got to be more you want to know. My favorite color is all of them. My favorite day is Tuesday because people forget about Tuesday all the time and I anthropomorphize things too much, including days of the week so I end up feeling sympathy for Tuesday. My favorite philosopher is Nietzsche. My favorite book is much too embarrassing for me to report to you at this juncture so don’t even ask me, stop it, stop it right now, okay fine, we’ll compromise; I’ll tell you if you guess it. Did you guess Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea? You did? You’re wrong. Too topical. Did you guess Frankenstein? You’re also wrong. Did you guess Jurassic Park? Excuse me, but I have better taste than that. Or do I?

Third. My mathematical history is pretty boring, I’m sorry to report. I have [since you’re intent upon wresting the details out of me] picked up the typical array of college level mathematics along my adventures in higher education...multivariable calculus, differential equations, linear algebra, and more statistics than one could shake a stick at. That’s pretty much it for pure and applied math. As for the P-chem side of things, I keep encountering it; I’ve come at it from the physics side, the chemistry side, the biochemistry side, the biomechanics side; that’s probably why my notation looks weird[ly charming!] to you. Ultimately, though, I can follow your math because I’ve spent the past month obsessively reading all available literature on string theory, dimensional rifts, dimensional transit, and the topology of the quantum foam. I give Kat a lot of credit for holding my hand for several weeks [again, to be clear, I did not show Kat your unpublished theorizing]. Long story short, I’m just interested in this sort of thing and possessed of a lot of raw processing power when it comes to my cerebral cortex.

Fourth. My publication history is a little all over the map; it’s true. I did switch fields from organic chem/biochemistry to biomedical engineering/neurobiomechanics and before that, yes, I did dabble in bioethics just a bit, but my most substantial work has been in the field of tissue regeneration, and that’s where I’ve been publishing (last-author style) for about four years or so. In terms of understanding me, as a scientist, you should probably just look at the spread of years from 2007 to present, because that spans the last two years of my PhD. I’ve been a PI for four years now (to anticipate and avoid your next question—I didn’t do a postdoc because my funding situation worked out). In order to answer your implied question, technically speaking, the main thrust of my lab is breaking the limits of cellular senescence while avoiding neoplastic transformation. We work in cell lines. It’s…less exciting than exobiology. And so. Here we are.

Fifth. Charming? Because there’s more where that came from. More science charm, that is. I have an endless supply!

Send me those notes,
Newton

Chapter Text

Dear Dr. Geiszler,

At times I feel as though you have a firmer grasp on the conceptual underpinnings of quantum physics than many of my colleagues, though one would hope this isn’t truly the case. Perhaps a better way to put this is: you are a reductionist who presents himself inductively. By this, I mean that while I can, occasionally, trace the evolution of your train of thought via your annotated questions, your observations strike me as having an intuitive quality by virtue of your failure to annotate logical leaps that must appear obvious to you(?). It is quite striking. There is something of an arithmetical aesthetic when it comes to ascertaining which steps to skip and which to denote. While I would not go so far as to use the word “hubris,” there is certainly an element of glamor to your logical leaps.

Such leaps bring to mind the maddening study of mathematical history—the sketchy outline of group theory contained in a letter, Fermat’s margin notes, et cetera. Do you take an interest in such things? I find accounts from the history of science to be a source of intellectual companionship—like Machiavelli in exile, who would sit down each evening in his best formalwear and, alone, interrogate texts of the past, I occasionally spend my evenings examining the thoughts of other mathematicians. I would not describe this as a common pastime amongst my colleagues, but it is not altogether rare, either. There is something about mathematics particularly that invites it, I think, especially when applicability is lacking.

I would imagine applicability is something with which you never need to struggle, working in the life sciences. Does it bring you any particular satisfaction to read works by Darwin, for example? Do you read works by Darwin? Most likely, you do nothing of the kind. I can’t imagine when you’d find the time. I am and have always been an avid reader, in spite of the—how to put this—disapproval that extra-scientific pursuits elicit from driven colleagues. I have less time for reading now than I once did, but I find it psychologically helpful in uncertain times. The end of this summer has been nothing if not an incredibly uncertain span of months. I have just begun History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. It strikes me as topical, and I have a fondness for exiled authors. I’m concerned my projected reading time may be shorter than what average German life expectancies indicate.

Apologies for the wandering dark of the previous paragraph. I confess it is, again, quite late here, and I have spent the last six hours responding to your notes on my manuscript while drinking Oettinger (lest you form a mistaken impression: this is a matter of economy and not reflective of the sophistication of my palate). Reading your notes, I cannot help but wonder how long it took you to work through what I sent. It doesn’t appear that you completed it all in one sitting. Tell me it was longer than six hours; if it wasn’t, I am resolved to throw away my academic prospects, give up on them entirely, and pursue an alternate career. (A practical one. One with enough financial compensation that I’ll no longer feel compelled to drink Oettinger for god’s sake.)

Frustrated hyperbole aside, I have very much enjoyed this our exchange. Please feel free to send back another round of comments if any of my explanations are unclear, or fall outside your realms of mathematical familiarity. I tried to pitch them based on your revised (though still not wholly forthcoming) disclosure of your mathematical background. There is no reason to minimize your qualifications; or, perhaps I should clarify—there is no reason to minimize your qualifications within the confines of this particular set of correspondences. I cannot speak to the intellectual climate you might encounter on the eastern seaboard of the United States.

Socially, I am familiar with the concept of academic minimization—if I have to attend one more family gathering at which I am asked whether I am “still in school” I refuse to be held responsible for my actions. I hear that in the United States anti-intellectual sentiment is more extreme than it is here. I’m not certain how true this might be—we are always hearing such things about the state of American science; perhaps it is just a story we tell ourselves to maintain a sense of psychological superiority. At the very least, funding for the basic sciences is more available in Germany; that I do know for certain. I have heard, however, that the NSF has received a large allocation from the U.S. Congress to fund xenobiological research and to establish a new governmental branch dedicated to specimen collection, disposal, and cleanup. Have you heard anything more about this?

Along these same lines, I am incredibly interested to hear your take on what is known of the physiologic effects of kaiju blood. There has been nothing but yellow journalism here regarding the topic—primarily, I suspect, because all the scientists who attempted to collect samples perished in the attempt. I am certain you’ve thought extensively on the subject. Do you know if even basic epidemiological data are available? I can’t imagine the stories related by the popular press are true. For instance, the claim that aerosolized blood can permeate a filtered respirator. Is this actually the case?

I shall leave off my rambling here and resign myself to making yet another fruitless appeal for funding tomorrow. Think stochastically favorable thoughts in my direction at 03:00 EST if you are awake.

Sincerely,
Hermann Gottlieb, PhD

Dear Dr. Gottlieb,

I talk a good game it’s true, but I think (I think) a better one! You, on the other hand, seem to mean what you say and say what you think and so I’m terribly flattered by your analysis of my analysis, or, rather, your analysis of my analytical style. In short: right back at ya, but inverted.

I won’t call your thought processes inherently “inductive” because that would be terribly impolite science etiquette [personal aside: I forgive you, by the way, for dressing up my annotative laziness as inductive reasoning, that’s very polite. “Sloppy” might be more accurate], but I’ll whip out and dust off the overused label of “intuitive” to describe your jury-rigged levering of quantum mechanics into a geophysics-shaped box. I very much enjoyed trying to follow your conceptual leaps, which are more interesting and wider than you make them out to be. To answer your question—you do not need to give up your academic pursuits. Going through your document took me days. My graduate students thought I’d died. [Accuracy aside: not actually true, but I did cancel a day of (mostly) superfluous meetings to go over the thing, plus the addition of, er, about four nights or so. I also needed to help myself by going back to my old friend Physical Chemistry: A Molecular Approach, so all things included, full disclosure, it took me about forty hours all told. We’ll round up to forty-two and that gives us a quantum mechanics annotation disparity of seven to one. I’d say you should stay in business.] 

There may be a certain amount of impropriety in what I’m about to admit, but I’m a little bit of an imprompritizer [editorial aside: yes, Dr. Gottlieb, that is, for sure, an American word, no need to look it up]. You are ridiculously satisfying as a correspondent, I can’t even tell you. Are you seriously a graduate student? You don’t seem like a graduate student to me—and I’ve mentored about [accuracy aside: where ‘about’=exactly] twelve of them by this point, so I speak with a reasonable amount of experience here. It’s not a raw intelligence thing (because that’s no surrogate endpoint when it comes to successfully running a lab); it’s your attitude. You seem like a guy who should be allocating vast quantities of resources, not giving job talks. Is there a back-story here? Did you go through the German education system in the typical way? [Congratulatory aside: I can’t believe you implied that I’m full of academic hubris; do you have any idea how blazingly correct you are in that assessment?]

While I’m on the topic of impropriety, I will also cop to drinking whilst typing. Alas, I can’t claim to be doing anything as civilized as reading Thucydides [inquisitive aside: are you serious? You’re serious.]  I’m at a faux dive bar in Cambridge (Boston) called Camera Obscura. I say “faux” because while it disingenuously looks like a dive bar, it’s actually just full of people pursuing or sporting post-grad degrees and looking for a decent music scene. I’m listening to sincerely:sam sing about the heat death of the universe. Don’t be jealous. I—listen to nerd rock a little bit. Not all the time. Let me guess. You’re less into Nerd Rock as a genre than you are into people who were writing music in the 1700s. That’s the vibe I get.

I’m drinking tequila. I’m out on the town, at a bar, with Kat, as, like, a confused wingman? I didn’t realize this would be part of the deal? I’m here under false pretenses. I’ve definitely been turned into an accessory to Kat’s attempt at trying to get it on with the hottest little number in the Department of Biochemistry (here read: a newly tenured faculty member with attractive hair and fashion-forward shoes). Consequently, I’m now responding at length to a very important “work email” while Kat and Liz stare into one another’s eyes and talk about the broader cultural influence of Radiohead. It’s going well. Kat says to say hi, by the way. She says YOU have notable hair. What’s “notable hair?” Don’t ignore this question. I really want to know.

Do I read Darwin? Well, short answer: yes. Long answer: no. Here’s the thing. I read The Origin of Species out of a sense of professional obligation, and I liked it. I remember especially liking the chapter involving bees and hexagonal honeycombing? Honestly though, it’s not the kind of thing that really yanks my extracurricular chain, if that’s not incomprehensibly idiomized. If I’m reading for science, I like my science to be crisp and contemporary. If I’m not reading for science I prefer to be not reading for science. I gravitate toward tales of existential torment, so for highbrow I go with Nietzsche, for middlebrow I go with Lovecraft, Stephenson, and Philip K. Dick, and for lowbrow, I go with…well, no need to go there at this point. I’m embarrassingly well versed in manga; we’ll leave it at that. I’ve taken a strange interest in scientists screwed over by their contemporaries and historical figures who have been scooped/screwed by bigger-name scientists. Rosalind Franklin, Alfred Russell Wallace, Lise Meitner, Gottfried Leibniz. The list goes on. I wish I could give you a psychological explanation for this, but, alas, I can’t. I’m neither particularly worried about being scientifically cast aside nor about misappropriating the quantitative/empirical spotlight. I just—feel badly for them is the bottom line. Like you and your exiled authors? Maybe. I don’t mean to presume.

Now that I find myself pointed back in a vaguely science-ward direction—Kaiju Blue. Capitalize that Proper Noun. That’s the way to go. The stuff terrifies me. I’ll lay out what’s available in the current literature, which is almost nothing, so don’t get excited:

One. Yes. Aerosolized Blue can pass through standard-issue respirators. There was some speculation early on that it wasn’t passing through, that instead it was an organic solvent that could permeate human skin, but ah, you remember the PI from UCSF who took his lab out to collect samples? Well, after they died, a lab in the same department retrieved their personal protective equipment, hermetically sealed it, and sent it to the CDC, where it was re-opened in a BSL-4 lab. I’ll send you the Nature paper, but long story short, Blue was found throughout and on the inside of the filter. No one’s been able to perform chromatography or mass spec on this stuff yet, but it’s got an interesting chemistry to its aerosolization. You need a mask with a ridiculously small filter size to prevent breathing it in. They’ve started production and testing on a new filter model for research and cleanup. It’ll be hard to do arduous work in them because if there’s any particulate matter in the air (which there will be), those tiny pores will clog. I have some ideas about filter modification I’ve been working on in my free time; we’ll see if it goes anywhere.

Two. The epidemiology data are just—really depressing.

Three. The epidemiology data are unequivocal. Uniform lethality with time to fatality directly proportional to extent of exposure. [An anecdote: the bass player in my band (Rob) was interviewing for a postdoc at Berkeley during the Trespasser attack. He was exposed to Kaiju Blue and didn’t make it. He emailed me a first-hand account, as clinical as he could make it. Hate thinking about it. Still trying not to. He had some interesting speculations on xenoproteases that I passed on to an MD colleague of mine; hoping the case report in JAMA includes those. So ultimately Rob absolutely did contribute to science, but god, I mean really I mean god.]

Four. I’ll keep you posted on Blue. As unsettled as I am, Blue stands at the Venn diagram overlap region of multiple areas of expertise that I’ve accumulated. I intend to switch fields. Xenobiology, here I come. I think.

I guess.

I have three graduate students. One’s close to finishing. She’ll be fine. But the other two…they signed up for stopping neoplastic transformation in regenerating tissue. Not research on a thing that kills most of the people who try to study it.

Gotta make a better filter before I make the switch.

It’s raining outside, and it’s three in the morning here. All my vibes are stochastically favorable and Berlin-directed, sir. Good luck with your funding pitch. I’ll send you another round on your notes re: my notes re: your notes. I am slightly too intoxicated to be mathing in the immediate present, but certainly not intoxicated enough to be late for a nine AM thesis defense. Good vibes to graduate students, every one.

Oh. And for the love of secular humanism will you please address me as,
Newton

Dear Dr. Geiszler,

Much though I appreciate your Berlinward vectored well-wishes, I regret to inform you that they were insufficient to persuade my department that I should be granted a year of discretionary funding in order to pursue a project on the spatiotemporal mechanics of the anomaly at the bottom of the Pacific. The objections to my proposal centered around two themes.

The first objection was the dearth of evidence that there is real spacetime distortion at the site in question. I suppose this is a germane point. I attempted to combat it not with data (all of which I had already presented), but with a cost/benefit analysis of pursuing the project. This did not avail me very well, I regretfully admit.

The second objection was that the intellectual course I’m attempting to set for myself is unrelated to my field of inquiry and therefore a possible dead-end when it comes to my career (and a sizable allotment of departmental “crush” funding—that is the best translation I can come up with; it’s somewhat peculiar to our particular department and meant as a bridge to support transitioning investigators). I countered that, as no extant scientific fields can explain the events of this past summer, such an argument would preclude all research into whatever emerged from the Pacific.

The meeting lasted three hours, prolonged due to my stubborn refusal to let them out of the room, and their strange reluctance to go until they had convinced me of the error of my ways. Suffice it to say, we were all disappointed in one another. Should I wish to continue pursuing my present avenue of inquiry, my academic options at TU Berlin appear to be limited.

You asked about my personal history. I assure you it is a nearly conventional story. I say nearly because my attendance at a Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliches Gymnasium was, perhaps, briefer than one might expect due to a childhood illness combined with accelerated private tutoring. I matriculated early, then spent a year between university and my graduate studies pursuing an alternate career pathway that was ultimately not a viable choice for me due to physical requirements I wasn’t able to meet. Ultimately, I settled on the pursuit of mathematics. As you can see, my personal history is not particularly notable. My presentation of myself in text to an American scientist I’ve never met is more unencumbered by the trappings of institutional hierarchy than my exterior comportment in reality. If only you were making funding decisions at TU Berlin. Ah well.

So you are not a reader of Thucydides. Perhaps you should be. I don’t know quite how to express myself without sounding overly familiar or overly melodramatic, neither of which appeals. Nevertheless, I’ll proceed.

I was struck by a palpable sense of unrest in your last message; I’ll elaborate no further, I will only say that I, too, have felt unsettled in a personal, societal, and philosophic sense by the appearance of Trespasser. I take no comfort in the specious, wandering suppositions posed by media pundits. Nor do vacuous conspiracy theories hold my attention. But I very much appreciate reading the thoughts of those who faced similar levels of apocalyptic uncertainty with an equanimity I’d like to emulate. As an illustration, I include this passage, which resonates with some of my darker thoughts of late:

“In other respects also Athens owed to the plague the beginnings of a state of unprecedented lawlessness. Seeing how quick and abrupt were the changes of fortune which came to the rich who suddenly died and to those who had been penniless but now inherited their wealth, people now began openly to venture on acts of self-indulgence which before they used to keep dark. Thus they resolved to spend their money quickly and to spend it on pleasure, since money and life alike seemed equally ephemeral. As for what is called honour, no one showed himself willing to abide by its laws, so doubtful was it whether one would survive to enjoy the name for it. It was generally agreed that what was both honourable and valuable was the pleasure of the moment and everything that might conceivably contribute to that pleasure. No fear of god or law of man had a restraining influence. As for the gods, it seemed to be the same thing whether one worshipped them or not, when one saw the good and the bad dying indiscriminately. As for offenses against human law, no one expected to live long enough to be brought to trial and punished: instead everyone felt that already a far heavier sentence had been passed on him and was hanging over him, and that before the time for its execution arrived it was only natural to get some pleasure out of life. This, then, was the calamity that fell upon Athens, and the times were hard indeed, with men dying inside the city and the land outside being laid waste.”

You can see why I sent you this, I’m sure. While this is an excerpt from Book 2, I’m finding the whole account to be acutely and painfully relevant. It’s a clear-eyed view of a flawed city that an exiled man so clearly loved. It’s a story of stochastic disasters, the misappropriation of resources, of deeply flawed but charismatic leaders. If you find yourself in the mood to engage with such a thing at present, I suspect it might strike a chord for you. What particular chord I can’t say, because I don’t genuinely know you (at present), no matter how much it feels like I do.

The end of your last letter sparked some curiosity about your experiences during and in the aftermath of Trespasser’s landfall. I assume you were in Massachusetts at the time? I spent most of the attack watching international coverage, like nearly everyone on the planet. I will never forget my fellow doctoral colleague’s tone of voice when she looked up from the screen in her hand and said, “Something’s come out of the ocean.”

Give all my best to Dr. Meyer, and also tell her I’ll thank her to stop maligning my perfectly respectable hair.

Sincerely,
Hermann 

Dear Hermann,

I’m dropping your title even though you didn’t drop mine…apologies. I suspect you might be waiting for me to drop your title before you drop my title because you view me as a step up on some invisible, international, cross-discipline Science Hierarchy, but, full disclosure, I’m not a hierarchical guy. That’s not my lifestyle. I can do the formal address (I suppose) if you feel strongly about it, but if you’re going to send me long passages penned by dead Athenian exiles you’ll need to justify a continuing preference for the use of honorifics (if such a preference exists) because those two things seem mutually exclusive to me.

I am outrageously irritated on your behalf. Not surprised, alas. Here’s my question for you though—why are you applying for money from your department at all? Why aren’t you applying directly for an external grant? Ideally, a transitional award of some kind? You’ve defended, correct? Wrap up whatever remains of your doctoral work and go. Do a postdoc, don’t do a postdoc; someone will, for sure, fund you to do this stuff. If not within academia [discursive aside: somewhere within academia most certainly will, by the way] then outside it. Ugh. As I think about this—what you’ve said, what I’m saying—I’m getting the vibe that there’s something else going on here; some other subtext of which I’m unaware. So. Spill. [Obligatory aside: if you’d like to spill.]

If I were to indecorously speculate, I’d say you’re tethered in some way—to TU Berlin, to your department, to your thesis advisor—and that tie is personal in nature. If it weren’t, there’d be no reason to persist in courting a department that isn’t taking you seriously. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you as much. In fact, I should probably delete this entire trail of speculation but I won’t because I’m concerned there’s something professionally untoward going on, and there are a lot of barriers to discussing that sort of thing within academia, not the least of which is it’s an apprenticeship-based system with unequal power dynamics that can be and are exacerbated in a multiplicity of ways by the occasional dick/idiot/creeper of a feudal science overlord.

Okay, I’m done now. But details. Details. Let’s have them.

This email took time for me to put together; apologies for making you wait. I struggled with how to word a personal account of August Tenth, and I never did come up with a variant I was satisfied with. Ask me again down the road. For now, you’ll have to content yourself with just a little shave off the beginning.

I was giving my spiel on the Geiszler Lab to my department’s new grad students. I was halfway through outlining the novel signaling pathway we’d just identified when one of them said something like, “Holy shit,” and I said something along the lines of, “I know, right?” but she was less talking about my science and more about what was happening online. She said, “Something’s attacking San Francisco,” and I said, “Something? Some thing is attacking San Francisco?” then she said, “Yes—like—like a sea monster?” So I said: “A+ for attitude and interest sets; D- for topical relevance; monsters are cool, it’s important to have hobbies, but a little more focus please, kids.” At that point though, everyone had started checking their phones, and pretty soon we were all watching live on my laptop. Me and a room full of terrified baby academics trying to take the whole thing like champs, practicing professionalism to varying degrees. It was awful. Two out of eight of them were from California, including the kid who’d interrupted my lecture. She’d been texted by a family member in Pasadena. Her twin brother was at Caltech. He died the second day. She’s rotating in my lab.

I feel uncomfortable with what happened, uncomfortable with the coexistence of my personal academic passion [politically incorrect aside: that thing was, biologically speaking, amazing] and the horrible social sequelae of the aftermath of K-day.

As for Thucydides, you’ve won me over. He’s winning me over as well. I liked him right from the beginning. I’m up to Pericles’ Funeral Oration:  “…the man who can most truly be accounted brave is he who best knows the meaning of what is sweet in life and of what is terrible, and then goes out undeterred to meet what is to come.” I don’t even need to annotate that one. It stands on its own.

Attached you will find the next round of my notes on your notes on my notes on your draft. Happy Quantum Field Tuesday; you have been science charm’d.

You’d better address me as,
Newton

Dear Newton,

I feel the need to provide some explanation for the document I am attaching. You have now sent me two rounds of extensive comments and I feel I’m gaining an understanding of the seat of your approach. You are relying on a limited knowledge of certain properties of quantum field theory (derived from your experience in physical chemistry and also, no doubt, from your conversations with Dr. Meyer), but you’re trying to fill in certain gaps in your understanding by extrapolating from what you know of classical field theory. Entirely understandable!

There is no need to remedy this, as I can intuit what you’re attempting to convey. However, it occurred to me that you might want to extend your knowledge base. It also occurred to me that extending your knowledge base might open a few conceptual doors. I have, therefore, provided a short (by some standards) introduction to quantum field theory by adapting a set of four lectures I developed for the Masterstudiengänge at the Physikalische Institute. I’ve tailored it to your skill level and interests, but I think it should provide you with a grounding that is significantly broader than your conceptual array appears to be at present. Feel free to read it or not, according to your time and interest level. It is certainly not necessary; I will continue to read any future comments with enthusiasm either way. Also, please do not take this as a negative judgment on your proficiency level. You are not a quantum physicist, but you might have been one. It is extraordinary.

As for your speculations regarding my current situation at TU Berlin—you’re correct. My difficulties stem from a family situation. My father is a prominent scientist with a position of some import within the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF). [I have been meaning to ask—you stated you could read German—are you a native speaker? Because if you are, I would prefer to be conversing in German.]

My father wields considerable influence at TU Berlin, and while he is interested in the biology and physical origins of Trespasser, he’s disinclined to see me hitch my personal career to an aberrant, sensationalistic event. He and I came to an agreement, of sorts, when I was seventeen. He agreed to financially support me while I pursued my choice of profession to the extent I was able to do so, sans interference; but in the event of my failure, we agreed I would attend TU Berlin. As I mentioned, I was ultimately rejected from the experimental aviation program I entered at age seventeen, and so, true to my word, I enrolled at TU Berlin, where I have, thus far, been very well mentored by my thesis advisor who also happens to be a close friend of my father’s.

It is only now that I’m running into professional difficulty because of this association. I should have known better, but I admit that disappointment had clouded my judgment at the time I matriculated at TU Berlin. So when I say I am being opposed by my department, I do mean this, in as far as it goes, but I also mean that my department is in large part funded by a governmental branch that contains a member of my own family who has, ostensibly, my best wishes at heart and an unfortunate proclivity for interfering in my affairs.

I will spare you a quarter century of detail on this count. In fact, enough of this entirely.

I have never had any particular interest in biology. I think this comes in part because of the lack of quantitative rigor within the life sciences (apologies; present company excluded of course), and because I have a personal dislike for the medical establishment, having interacted with them far too many times at an impressionable age. However, I’ve been inspired by your notes on my manuscript to look a bit further into your corpus of academic work if only because I am curious as to where you’ve been expending your intellectual resources, if not the field of quantum mechanics.

I have confined myself thus far to your work in tissue regeneration, specifically focusing on your paper from 2010, which I believe describes the novel biochemical pathway you mentioned in passing in your last email. The experimental complexity and sophistication of your paper makes me relieved at my choice of mathematics! It seems though, that you’re not unique in this—I picked up a copy of Cell yesterday and nearly every article has the idea density of a post-modern novel and requires the GDP of a small nation. It is not that the reading in my field lacks density—far from it; I had just underestimated the technical sophistication of cutting edge life science.

In addition, I have been specifically looking for commentary upon your work within the broader scientific community and it seems you have been exceedingly well received; well, this is certainly an understatement—I had no idea you were so prominent. Were you aware that there is an editorial in Science this week that outlines a set of personnel recommendations for the soon-to-be-assembled Joint Exobiology Task Force? Were you aware that you’re being recommended for consideration as Chief Scientific Advisor? I’m certain you must. You are not their top choice—do you know the woman who is? She appears to be a direct competitor of yours.

I suppose what I’m trying to convey with this stack of likely rhetorical questions is that I’d not say no to some elaboration on these topics…your work, your professional milieu, and your future plans.

Sincerely,
Hermann

Dear Hermann,

Soooo, just to be clear:

One—you wrote me a personalized textbook by hand.

Two—your original career plan was to be a TEST PILOT for EXPERIMENTAL AIRCRAFT?!?!

Three—your father, the German Cabinet Minister, is the one who’s been brain-blocking you??!?!?!

This is too much for me to take, you have to prepare me for these things, you can’t just drop them like rocks, I’m somewhat excitable,
Newton

Dear Newton,

One—you are grossly misrepresenting my notes.

Two—yes.

Three—yes.

Please explain your email in an expeditious manner,
Hermann

Dear Hermann,

Will you give me five seconds? I’m writing expeditiously, sir. Also? No, I will not chat in real time with you, so don’t you dare ever, ever ask me. Not ever. You’ll ruin my life.

Get out of my inbox and go to bed; it’s three AM in Berlin,
Newton

Dear Newton,

Duly noted.

-Hermann

Dear Hermann,

One. You’ll need to parse this whole thing with your father and your department a little bit further, because it’s extremely interesting and I’m tempted to say all sorts of things that I won’t actually say at this point, unenlightened as I am regarding the context in which all of this is taking place.

Here’s my best guess: you thought you had a better chance of tapping into your department’s discretionary funding than you did with a doomed external grant proposal no one will put their stamp on because of fear of political reprisal? From your father?

That’s a difficult position. A total mess, some might say. Also, it sounds like a thing that’s not your fault.

Are you sure this whole situation can’t be torqued to your advantage? It’s probably too soon for me to be metaphorically machinating in your general direction, but you’ve got a giant personal fulcrum; maybe you can reverse the direction of leverage, if that makes sense. I’ll stop strategizing about this until I know more.

I suppose I’m just surprised that this is the nature of the block you’re encountering. Your description of departmental stagnation sounded so much more pedestrian at a first level of approximation. Your father politically trying to influence your science career is less pedestrian. But that’s the thing about first level approximating, am I right? [Editorial aside: I’m right.]  The weirdest part about this, (in my opinion) is that your father seems to be trying to shove you in a theoretical pure math/pure physics direction, rather than toward a practical real world application. That seems…almost, nice? I suppose I wouldn’t want my biological offspring to go after sea monsters? [Accuracy aside: that’s a lie. Yes, I absolutely would be so proud if Little Sally became Captain Nemo. (Um, I do not have a child; if I had a child, I would not name it Sally.) I would deeply question my parenting skills if Sally became unreasoningly obsessed with living at the bottom of the sea and acquired some anti-Imperialist tendencies that were so extreme that…wait, now that I’ve put it this way, it seems like I was a great parent. Rock on Sally. I’m getting off topic. So, Sally can wait. She knows it’s too late as we’re walking on by. [Editorial note: I know what I’m singing tomorrow when Dr. Meyer and her new girlfriend drag me to karaoke.] In any case, I’m glad your PI isn’t behaving like an absolute dick and you haven’t been pressed into indentured science servitude.

Two. Experimental test pilot. Experimental test pilot? Do you realize—like, I seriously have the urge to yell in your face: “DO YOU UNDERSTAND HOW DANGEROUS THAT IS?” But I’m assuming you’ve heard this multiple times, so I won’t do it. It’s hard for me. I’m always dispensing unnecessary life advice to graduate students. I’ll suppress the urge. This career option, aside from being ridiculously lethal also has a streak of badassery the width of a light-year? I’m having a hard time putting together a complete picture that encompasses you, Thucydides, your uber-suave quantum field theorizing, and the experimental test pilot thing; who are you even? I don’t understand how you can get more interesting all the time; you’ll have to tell me how to do that; I, like almost all humans, definitely become less interesting with time; literally everyone agrees. Your mystique trajectory is skyrocketing.

All this commentary could seem wildly insensitive given the outcome of your initial career plans. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry you had some kind of physical limitation placed on your personal/professional goals; that is the worst, that is so unfair, that should not be allowed, I hate being trapped by my genes on the level of the individual, the group, the society, the species. It’s such a striking biological insult; that locking of the conscious mind to a decaying arrangement of carbon. Striking like a work of art, striking like a slap in the face. Like getting turned into sea foam as a consolation prize in the original version of The Little Mermaid. I can empathize. I can sympathize. I can feel your position at least a little bit. [Explanatory aside: my stupid brain has the habit of locking me into certain psychological states that may or may not be professionally and personally advantageous; no one wants details, but gestalts are always pretty with that smooth slide of a generalized edge.] In short, I resonate right on that frequency. I really do.

Three. I’m probably not conversant enough to switch to German—or, put another way, I’m not as capable of expressing myself in German as you are in English. I lived in Berlin and spoke exclusively German until about age seven, at which point it became very apparent I wasn’t meshing well with German primary school education. I went stateside, where my mother pulled strings to sort out an educational situation for me that was a bit more well suited to my personality and skillsets. So, my spoken German is respectable; but my technical vocabulary is lacking. [Editorial aside: this is part of what’s taking me so long to get through your thesis. In a year or so, I may have the technical vocab amassed to swap away from English.]

On the subject of families; I don’t have the closest relationship with mine. My mother is actually a little bit of a celebrity depending on the circles you run in. Her name is Maria Schwartz. Google her. I’ve spoken to her about twenty times over the course of my life; she adores the idea of me (most of the time), and I like the idea of her (most of the time), but that’s about as far as it goes. I know my dad a bit better—but it was my uncle who raised me. When I was born, both my parents were married to other people (not each other). That was awkward for them. My uncle stepped up to the plate for reasons that I’ve never understood; I think he may just have an overactive sense of responsibility. That, or I was really adorable before I started speaking. Anyway, he’s the guy who gets a call from me on holidays, not my biological parents.

Four. I’ve lost track of so many conversational threads. I have been meaning to mention JET Force to you, but I’m going to defer this discussion for now because it will be more meaningful to talk about it a few weeks when all the bureaucracy that’s in the air has had time to crash to the ground and the subsequent dust to settle. In the meantime I’ll say yes, I did see that article, it was, in fact, tacked to my office door by someone in my lab with DON’T YOU DARE written in red sharpie with all caps. I don’t think my lab fears me like they ought to. I’m always trying and failing to inspire fear, Machiavelli style. [Accuracy aside: that is an absolute lie; I’m just bitter right now because I took them paintballing a week ago and they all turned on me; my clothes were ruined, and my lab manager had to drive me home because not all my joints were working anymore; how dare they issue me ultimatums after that kind of thing, I ask you.]

I do know Dr. Anderson. Yes, she’s my principal competitor and she likes to go after me with casual ad hominems within our group of collective peers; which I haaaaate. There are different kinds of science-styles but the one she’s using has gotta be my least favorite. She does good work (I guess); sometimes our results don’t perfectly jive, but that’s the nature of the empirical beast, and the field will hammer it out as it paves down the current paradigm; I just happen to not appreciate the attitude she brings to bear towards me specifically. I think she’s a little bit afraid of me and so she’s trying to cast me as someone who’ll be a great scientist in ten years or so when it’s time for her to retire but that’s just her personal spin on the reality of the situation, which is that I am, at worst, her peer, and at best, peerless (ha). [Editorial aside: I’m a little bit arrogant; so sorry about that.] This would bother me less except for the part where she’s the number one JET Force pick, probably partially BECAUSE of that Geiszler-directed condescension. People internalize that garbage and it is just. Maddening. She’s trying to get the larger cell biology community to think of me as a rising star with a lot of potential, which is annoying because sure, that’s true as far as it goes, but I’m also kind of in my prime already.

I am excited to read your Quantum Field Bedtime Story.

Very Sincerely,
Newton

P.S. Seriously though, “notable hair?” What does it look like? I’ve already tried to google you like a creeper and you must be social-media averse or have everything locked down because I can’t find anything!

P.P.S. If you were an aspiring pilot are you, by any chance, a gamer?

P.P.P.S. The Athenians are about to launch the Sicilian Expedition and I have a bad feeling about this. I have a great feeling about Alcibiades though. Love that guy. I’m sure nothing will go wrong when he’s involved.

P.P.P.P.S. I’m feeling really nostalgic about Nonexistent Sally right about now.

Dear Newton,

Do you know that I own a recording of Puccini’s Tosca (recorded in 2004) with your mother on the cover? I’m looking at it right now. It was given to me by my sister Karla, who saw her perform a decade ago in London. Several exchanges back, you speculated I’d prefer music written in the 1700s. Puccini, however, was not born until 1850, so you’ll need to expand the bounds of your estimation. I do, admittedly, prefer classical to contemporary music. I am particularly fond of early twentieth century composers—Stravinsky, Debussy, Ravel. I’m terribly curious—did you inherit any of your mother’s innate musical talents? I seem to recall you mentioning that you have a band. What is it that you play? I have always admired musical skill. They say it accompanies mathematical talent, but I never possessed it myself. I was a mediocre violinist for years before I gave it up. I don’t lack discipline, but practicing failed to hold my interest and willpower is a currency I considered best applied elsewhere (in my case).

Are you genuinely interested in the details of my relationship with my father? I can’t imagine you are, and yet, I find myself terribly curious about the minutiae of your personal history, if only because your observations are so compelling; not only when it comes to quantum field theory, but universally. You have an unusual way of looking at the world. You must know this about yourself. (I hope you know this about yourself.) If you still want a second approximation of detail regarding my father and his habit of exerting unwanted influence on my career trajectory, I will give it to you. But, as you’ve been rather sparse on the particulars of your own personal life, I’d rather not overstep the bounds of familiarity. Were I to describe the situation with the level of detail you seem to be requesting, you’d receive something of an abbreviated biography given so many of my life experiences are tied up in my relationship with my family.

The piloting of experimental aircraft is much easier to explain. Yes, of course it would have been dangerous, but no more dangerous than hands-on-exobiology (specifically JET Force) is likely to be. I enjoy the idea of pushing exploratory boundaries. This is, of course, the connection between cutting edge aircraft and cutting edge mathematics. There is nothing so mysterious about any of it. I am simply a lonely wanderer of the outer perimeters of humanity’s purview, keeping myself company with like-minded others who happen to have lived hundreds of years ago. Hence, the Thucydides. All of it is logically consistent when viewed through such a lens.

Speaking of Thucydides, tonight I finished the book. It’s beginning to feel like autumn here; the odd precocious Linden tree has begun to turn yellow. The nights are growing cold. For the first time in months I had to close a window. In the immediate aftermath of finishing Thucydides’ account I find myself possessed of a bit more mental equanimity. His city fell, but it’s remembered, all the same. Humanity as a whole has endured things of great scale and scope. We lose what we had in gaining what we become. Loss is a requisite part of change, but even so, some of us remember Pericles.

Sincerely,
Hermann

P.S. My hair is not notable, and I pay a fee to a professional company to remove references to me online.

P.P.S. I’m not sure I know what you mean by “gamer.”

Chapter Text

Caitlin Lightcap stands in a small and underutilized ladies’ room, head bowed, arms crossed, touching nothing, staring at her shoes. She waits here with herself because it’s not time to go. She’s never early. She’s never late. If one is early, then one is not punctual. She is punctual. It’s important to her. Punctuality. So what. It’s not a big deal. It doesn’t mean anything. She has an intimate relationship with time. She calls it by its first name and it ticks back at her second by second by second: cait, cait, cait, cait, cait, cait. It’s who she is. How she is. Those Protestants. It’s their fault, probably. She’ll have to ask her father about that one. The Calvinists, maybe. Or maybe just the person who first invented an accurate timepiece.

Lightcap wishes she was a sailor, tackling the problem of arcseconds of longitude. Different seas, different problems.

She would have liked to be a pirate. She’s a nerd. She probably would’ve had to be a pirate’s smartass whore, whispering good ideas in his ear. That’s depressing. But if she’d been good enough with a sword…she’s pretty fucking sure she would have been good enough with a sword. Mutiny! she thinks. The captain’s wench hath taken up a cutlass! All must fall in line or be consigned to a watery grave!

Her phone vibrates in her hand.

It’s time to go.

She stands there.

It’s time to go.

Time to go. Time to go, Lightcap, Caity, angel-child, darling, most brilliant, last of her line, first in her family, the prettiest, the bravest, the smartest, the best, the best, always the best, even in closets, even in corners, even under desks, even in bathrooms, staring at her shoes.

There have been times in her life when this would not have been possible.

But it is possible now.

It is.

She knows it’s possible because she’s here. She’s here already. The record plays on. The disc hasn’t skipped. She’s not caught in a track. She’s playing the album. Right through to the end. Track one: Cait Awake. Track two: Lightcap More Like Showercap. Track three: Exit Definitely Does Exist. Track four: Water Leaves Hair/Hair Leaves Apartment. Track five: Farewell to Cat. Track six: Alive on I-495. Track seven: Metal Detector.

The album’s shaping up pretty well. It’s no Abbey Road. It’s no The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust. It’s no Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven. But it’s a weird little gem in the garbage of recent days and weeks. Oh look, there’s some fused volcanic glass in this post-eruption ash pile. Oh look, there’s a little album by a little band that she found by happenstance inside a computer allocated to her by an ex-lover.

Superconduct, she thinks. And supercollide. One two three four. Two two three four, three two three four, four two three four, go. One two three four, two two three four, three two three four, four two three four, go. One two three four, two two three four, three two three four, four two three four, go. One two three four, two two three four, three two three four, four two three four, go. One two three four, two two three four, three two three four, four two three four, fucking go, Lightcap, go go just go. Just go. You’re better than this. You’re better than this. You’re better than this. You’re better than this; you’re better.

She’s afraid.

No no no no. Erase that thought. Count to four, erase it. Get another chance. Count to four and get another chance. Count to four and see.

One two three four.

She’s not “afraid,” she wouldn’t know fear if she felt it, so that’s not what this is; this is something else. Categorically, it’s not fear because fear isn’t a thing she feels. She jumps into the teeth of anything that might consume her and so this thing, this thing she feels, well, it’s excitement, it’s pressure, it’s a hyperbaric chamber of the consciousness, it’s familiar, it’s appropriate.

This is so important. That’s why she needs to go.

She’ll go.

She won’t get stuck on track nine: Bathroom Pep Talk Slash Inappropriate Pirate Fantasy.

Lifting her head, she looks at herself in the mirror. She’s beautiful. She’s as beautiful as she gets and she gets very beautiful. Her hair is swept into a tight twist and her glasses are clean and there is no lipstick on her teeth and there are no lines in her unfamiliar new suit. The love child of Eris and Aphrodite, skating on a shell, playing only Chell…

She can’t do this.

She’ll fail.

Thinking of failure is failure.

No it’s not. Erase it.

Count to four and make another chance.

Count to four and take another chance.

On the fifth four she’ll pretend to be the person who can do this. The person who can leave this bathroom.

One two three four, two two three four, three two three four, four two three four.

She goes.

Lightcap dries her hands, straightens her spine, pulls herself to her full height and strides out of the bathroom, her black stilettos cracking against the floor like the measured, repetitive cracks of a measured, repetitive cracking thing. Glaciers calving on a timer. A pencil-snapping metronome. This will not be the hardest thing she’s ever done, but it will be hard.

It will be hard.

Things that matter can be like this, she remembers her mother whispering, beautiful nails combing Lightcap’s hair in the dark. I won’t say they should be like this, but they can. You can let them be this way. It means you care, baby. That’s all. It means you care. That’s all we have really; the caring about things. That’s what makes us all the same. That’s what makes us all a part of God.

When she wears heels she walks in a line, pushing off, swinging her back foot out and around in an arc to land in front of the new back foot. It’s lucky. It’s lucky to do it that way. To walk in a line. In high heels, walking a line looks right. The higher the heel, the righter it looks. The arcs of her steps slow her down, make her look better in a skirt. Comportment isn’t everything but comportment is something. It must be; attractive people have a better lot in life, everyone loves to stare down a perfect double-helix, and Lightcap owns the phone she owns because she finds it beautiful. Medium and message. Her shirt is pale pink but her jacket is black and her skirt is black and her shoes are black and her bag is black. She wears no jewelry and her nails are bare.

Crack crack crack, her shoes against the floor.

Crack crack crack, toward a nearing door.

You can do this, Cait, Jasper had said, weeks ago, over the phone. You have to do it. No one can do it but you. No one. No one but you. She’d been standing in her kitchen in bare feet, a spoon of peanut butter in her mouth, her cat half wound around her left ankle, her phone in her hand and her gaze directed out, across the Potomac, towards the center of the city. Yes, she’d said, swallowing peanut butter. You might be right about that.

She counts her final four steps to clean the slate in her head.

With a lifted hand and a well-timed step she blows through the doors like a cyclone, making an entrance, making heads turn, making conversations waver and stop with her sexy librarian outfit, her milk and crystal beauty. She smiles into the entrance she’s made; it’s who she is, how she feels comfortable, a way to lever a crowbar underneath a waiting weight. She’s the last to arrive and she scans the room, identifying her seat just as Jasper says, “Cait,” like she’s a long-lost friend, an academic rockstar, and the most important person he knows; not the woman who’d screamed at him in the middle of his ten AM Tuesday morning lab meeting two years ago. That’s great. Jasper can do things like that. Things like forgive people and forgive himself by not thinking very hard about anything, letting time grow over the past like ice thick enough to go skating on.

She rounds the table with its warm wood paneling, its built-in lights. “You magnificent bastard,” Lightcap says, striding like a man, speaking with the faux jocularity of a man, extending a hand like a man so that Jasper can’t hug her. “This is all it takes to get you to DC, then? A California-sized apocalypse?”

“Gentlemen,” Jasper says, “Dr. Lightcap. Dr. Lightcap, gentlemen.”

“Hello, room.” Lightcap pulls her tablet from her purse. “I hear you’re looking for non-nuclear anti-xenobiological options; shall we get right to it?”

There are wary looks but she’s winning them over all the same, keeping their attention, interjecting commentary into introductions, into the setting of the afternoon’s agenda, into the discussion of the merits of the Defense Department’s coffee, because she’s taking risks, she’s swinging for the outfield; if she comes back from this it’ll be crowned with laurels or on her own shield; they’ll love her or they’ll hate her attempt to make them love her. She has to try. Her science is sound but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have to sell the idea, sell her certainty, sell the ethos, sell the passion; but that’s not right at all—there can’t be selling here, there’s only giving. They’ve given her half a day and in return she’ll give them everything she has, everything she is, all she can or might be, because there’s no point in holding back, this is her one shot, and everything, everything depends on this. So she shows them who she is, she makes her witty asides and she makes her emotional appeal and she talks quickly and clearly about the state of robotics as it is, and the state of robotics as it could be with a massive influx of funding, and she makes herself into all she’ll need to be to pull this off. She holds her best self together. She strips it of everything except her pure, fiery certainty that she will make her vision real.

Tell me about a time you’ve failed, Caitlin, they’d said to her when she’d interviewed at DARPA. And she’d told them, I’ve never failed. And it’d been true because they’d never asked her about pain, about metabolizing the uncontrollable in a war against her own body, her own mind.

It’s like in the book, her mother had said to her, sitting in the closet, knee-to-knee. It’s not your fault. It’s part of life for you. It’s like how in The Neverending Story Bastian can change things, but every time he does, he forgets a little bit of himself. It’s not his fault he forgets and there’s nothing he can do about it. It’s just a thing that happens as he makes wishes. It’s part of the package. He does his best anyway. Like you. Do you know what I mean, little bug?

She runs ninety minutes over, fielding questions. They like the idea of robotics. They like the idea of the Jaegers. They like her: the strength of her message, the chime in her voice, the ambition of her ideas, the curve of her ass, the complete package she comes as. They’re concerned about the limits of the human nervous system, but only because she’s concerned. They envision what she already sees—the towering outline of a machine that will combat a xenobiological lifeform on its own terms, without nuclear fallout, without risk to existing military investments. An addition. Not a replacement.

When the silences between interjections grow longer and thicker she says, “If there are no more questions, I’d like to make one more comment before this meeting adjourns.”

No one speaks, and she feels the weight of their collective attention focus, narrow, bore down on her. She rests her hands on the cool, planar surface of the table and leans forward. In her head she runs a quick and quiet four count.

“A Jaeger is a mechanized solution to an organic threat.” She holds their attention with the roving magnet of her gaze, feral and monstrous. “It takes its form from the nature of that which it’s designed to oppose. It tests the limits of human ingenuity. Human ingenuity that has never failed our species. It’s fitting. It’s right. It will work. It’s a direct and proportional answer to a novel problem. It’s worthy of our collective resources. Worthy of our sustained effort.” She drops her eyes then looks back up, a pretty girl again. “That’s all,” she says.

She collects her belongings in a single sweep, and strides out of the room without looking back at the table, without waiting for permission to leave. She passes through the doors, leaving a silent room behind her, counting the deliberate double-beat of her own steps, the strike of her heel and her toe in near simultaneity, walking that perfectly straight line that only stilettos allow.

One two three four, two two three four, the corridor stretches long and lonely and abandoned ahead of her, a dystopian tunnel in a five-sided building with wide hallways and fluorescent lights, three two three four, four two three four, five two three four, twenty steps gone and no one has called her back. She wants to run, she wants to run out of this building and across the parking lot, get her car and drive home to her cat and her music and her four walls that don’t judge her and to a shower that will peel off a layer of her skin and to a new bar of soap and a dark room and a bottle of wine she’ll drop on her floor and not by accident; she doesn’t want it to end imperfectly, she wants the end she wants; is that so wrong? There’s nothing wrong with that. Nothing. Nothing. Six two three four, seven two three four, eight two three four, nine two three four, ten two three four; forty steps. Forty more and she’ll be at the security station.

I understand you can’t let it go, her mother had said. It’s okay if you can’t. We all live with who we are.

She’s twenty steps out, maybe nineteen, maybe eighteen, when someone she doesn’t know calls her name.

“Dr. Lightcap.”

It’s strange, it’s not a question, it’s not a command, it’s delivered in a circumflex of warning that makes the back of her neck prickle with portent—propitious or ominous; it’s impossible to say. It’s a man who speaks, and his tone gives the impression he’s about to append something to her surname. “You forgot your keys,” perhaps, or “you’re going the wrong way,” or, worst of all, “you haven’t been dismissed.”

But her keys are in her bag.

She never goes the wrong way.

And she doesn’t wait for dismissal.

She stops walking and turns one hundred and eighty degrees, gathering the full force of her personality to—

“Whoa,” the man says.

He’s nearly crashed into her.

He’d been behind her for sets of steps, the sound of his footfalls subsumed beneath the snapping of her shoes.

Lightcap regards him with a neutral expression. He’s a few inches taller than she is, but he’s broad. Physically powerful, imposing by virtue of the space he occupies and by the weight of his gaze. Lightcap likes that density of presence; Jasper had it, Jasper had always had it; it makes her feel at home. It makes her feel like she’s not frightening.

They lock eyes and battle it out, hot and silent and intent and she knows, she knows absolutely that he didn’t leave that room of identical uniforms to come out here to hand her forgotten keys or to call her back. He’s come to her. He wants something. It’s a dark vortex beneath the calm neutrality of his expression, but it seeps unconcealed right into the shared air between them. In that moment Lightcap feels like she can give him anything he wants, anything he asks for, because all that she is burns so hot and so fierce through the resistors of her selfhood that it will melt every circuit board that makes her up if she doesn’t find places to ground.

“Yes?” she says, not crisp and cool but quiet and conspiring, as if he’s already said to her, Cait, I have a secret; Cait, I need your help.

“I—” he starts, off balance.

She waits for him.

“My name is Stacker Pentecost,” he says quietly, so quietly that the security guard couldn’t hear him if he tried.

“What can I do for you?”

“I’d like to speak with you privately,” he says, “regarding your proposal.”

Lightcap hesitates. For two reasons. One, his British accent has caught her attention as being out of place in a meeting and institution as thoroughly and overwhelmingly American as this one. Two, his word choice suggests a terrible pick-up line and that would be so deeply, deeply disappointing that it would take days for her to recover. But there’s an unmistakable gravitas to this man that doesn’t come from his height or his uniform but that comes from his eyes, his bearing, his quiet steps in a long hallway.

“Strictly professionally,” he adds, as if sensing her concern. “Just—not in this building.”

She nods.

He pulls out a business card, which is notably sparse on details of rank and affiliation, writes a mobile number on its reverse side, hands it to her, and says, “Anytime tonight after twenty-one hundred hours. Call. We’ll meet where you like.”

“I’ll call you at ten,” she says. “Exactly at ten.”

She spins again and walks away, feeling lighter, like she’s set aside the weight of her own thoughts in the aftermath of her talk, her quiet conversation. In this moment, nothing threatens her bright and sliding sense of self. She doesn’t feel the need to count her slate to clean.

She drives up the west bank of the Potomac, past the lights reflecting on twilit water on her right and the huge swath of cemetery on her left. Between the river and the dead. She crosses the Lincoln Memorial Bridge and drives north through the city until she comes to Adams Morgan and its little labyrinth of streets around a triangular park. She circles, scouring the streets for parking until she finds a spot.

She kills her engine and watches the last of the sunset. The spectacular red disk of her local star looks like a glowing communion wafer. It’s the pollution that does it; the shit in the air that blocks the shorter wavelengths of light, that’s warming the planet, that’s screwing up the ice caps, that’s giving kids asthma in inner cities, that’s making the turn of the planet so god damn pretty right now.

“We did that to you,” Lightcap whispers to the sun. “How do you like your new outfit?”

The sun doesn’t care. It burns and burns.

She hears the subtle vibration of her phone and she pulls it out of her bag in the passenger’s seat.

The screen says “Jasper Schoenfeld,” white against a decade-old picture of him, the wind in his hair, on the deck of a small sailboat he’d named Parity.

Even now, even after the long shattering break and the longer shellac of a repair job, his name makes her mouth go dry with a mix of ash and honey. Anger and desire. She gives herself a fast little count, just for the momentum she needs, completes a rapid, mental set of four, and picks up.

“Hello?” She pretends, as she always does, that she’d erased his number ages ago.

“Cait,” Jasper says. “Hi. You disappeared after your presentation.”

“I didn’t see a reason to stay and glad-hand the room,” she says, all sweet-faced irk. “That’s what you’re for.”

“Thanks,” Jasper replies, too much of a beige carpet to show any irritation at her words. “Anyway, I called to tell you that you did a phenomenal job.”

“I know.” She watches the last sliver of red sun sink beneath the jagged line of the DC cityscape.

“Well,” Jasper says, at a loss. “Good. We’ll have their answer in a few days, I think.”

“Let me know as soon as you hear anything.”

“I will,” Jasper says.

There is an awkward silence.

“Goodnight,” Lightcap says.

At the same time Jasper asks, “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she says like someone who is entirely, genuinely, absolutely fine. Like she’s never been the person who cried with a stormy righteousness in a Pittsburgh lab years ago. That’s not her. That person is dead inside her, wisteria creeping over her lonely little grave, replaced by Lightcap 4.0. Her product reviews get better with every round of upgrades.

“You don’t need anyone to talk you through—things? Your evening?”

Oh, the things she’d love to say to that. Fuck you, comes to mind. How dare you speak to me as if you’re my friend? As if you’ve ever been my friend, you disingenuous piece of execrable humanity, also presents itself as a possibility. Let’s keep things professional, Dr. Schoenfeld, seems too kind. Yes, please come over; please come to my apartment and do everything that you used to do in exactly the same way that you used to do it. Keep me company and understand that all of what you see is a just a part of me, that it can only be modified so far, that I can’t stop it entirely, though I wish I could, that it’s the thing that I have had to ride and tame for my whole life long, never quite banished by pharmacology and reason, the shadow I’ll wrestle with for all of my days. Please come. Please come every day. Never leave me. We’ll talk about science and art while I keep a silent count of little things. You’ll cook and I’ll clean and we’ll be together, together always, the way we should’ve been together right from the beginning. And where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. The LORD do so to me, and more also if aught but death part thee and me.

But that won’t happen; she doesn’t speak from the rotting graves of her dead selves.

“It’s a kind offer, Jasper.” Lightcap feels atmospheres of pressure in the bones of her face. “I’m grateful for your efforts to maintain our collegial relationship, but I’d prefer it if you never said anything like that again.”

She can hear him sigh over the line before he says, “Okay. I’m sorry. I know I asked a lot of you on short notice, I know how destabilizing that can be—”

“Goodnight,” she says, and ends the call.

She stares at her phone. She should have told him she was meeting someone in the tradition of 90s conspiracy movies. A man named Pentecost. It’s a propitious name. The book of Acts. Chapter 2. Verses one through six. And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. Very very good. She likes it. It’s a great name. She doesn’t think she’s in any danger. She feels like she’s leaning forward, her fingertips on the track, her feet braced against starting blocks, her eyes fixed on the finish line, waiting for someone, somewhere, to fire a gun.

She has hours to kill. Hours to assassinate. Hours to coldly and precisely put down in the tradition of business-suited badasses real and fictional. She spends it walking the streets of Adams Morgan in uncomfortable shoes, taking herself out to dinner, and listening to the latest song by her favorite obscure band, whoever they are. One day, she promises this absolute bastard who thinks he’s so witty, singing about string theory and breaking bridges. One of these days. I’ll meet someone who knows your name.

She listens to the new song over and over and over again in 4.3-minute increments until it’s time to call Stacker Pentecost. She tells him where to meet her and heads to her favorite bar, a place where lights are low, the clientele is quiet, where the cocktails are over-engineered and named after chemical compounds.

After twenty minutes, he walks through the door.

His uniform is gone. He wears a blazer, casually unbuttoned. He carries a leather-bound folder in one hand. So he’s attractive. So he’s incredibly attractive. So he’s probably the most attractive man she’s seen for—well, hmm. Three years? Five? Her whole life? No reason not to enjoy the spark of enchantment at the base of her brain. It’s fun. It won’t last. What will last is the ocean and what might come out of it. Cut rings. Fucked up strings. What they transit. The way the suspension cables of the Golden Gate Bridge had snapped. The way they had just snapped. Like that. She remembers the sound. She remembers how they looked as the tension they were under was released. The terrible wildness of the rebound. Everyone remembers. That’s what people say. When she asks them. Everyone remembers the bridge. The snapping. The look of it. The sound.

She stands and offers her hand.

Pentecost glances at her hand then looks into her eyes as if he knows, as if someone’s told him. Sensitive. Rude. Her permission is inherent in the extension of her hand and it isn’t fear of physical contamination that makes her wash; it’s fear of what she’s done, thoughts she’s had, and even though this is a night that’s sitting at a crisis point, she’s riding the cresting wave of her time and waves are clean, the ocean is clean, she’s clean. She’s okay.

Pentecost takes her hand. “Dr. Lightcap.”

“Please, call me Cait,” she says.

“Stacker,” he replies.

They sit. He reads through the drink menu, amused and tired and skeptical all at once.

“The Dopamine Dream is particularly good.” Lightcap smiles. “Packs quite the punch, though. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“Can one just get a whisky here?”

“Back page,” Lightcap says, “if you’re dead set on being boring.”

“I can’t pronounce half of these.” Pentecost gives her an assessing look, maybe trying to determine if she’s flirting.

“And I can’t tell a general from a sergeant.” She turns brusque. “Yet.”

He rotates his menu and points at the cocktail that’s second from the bottom.

“Salicylated Sorrow.” Lightcap smirks. “Just tell them you want the ‘Painkiller’.”

“Right,” he replies, dry and self-contained and British.

They struggle through small talk about the city and the bar and the weather in Washington until they’ve ordered their drinks, at which point Lightcap says, “I can’t help but notice you’re British. And, while DC is a melting pot in one of the better traditions of a nation with an admittedly hit-or-miss collection of traditions, it strikes me as unusual to encounter you behind closed doors in the five-sided heart of the American military hierarchy?”

He smiles—a brief, bright flash of teeth.

“American interests are a part of what I’m meant to represent,” he replies, “but only a part.”

Lightcap sips iced tap water while reconsidering her preconceptions. She’d assumed she was speaking to a junior member of the collection of brass-adorned men in the room, because he’s younger than most, and because his uniform wasn’t as ostentatiously decorated as others she’d seen.

Thinking back, she’s not sure he’d been wearing an American uniform at all.

She sets her water on the table. “Well. You have my attention.”

“I work on behalf of an organization that won’t be publicly unveiled for weeks yet. This puts me at a disadvantage. I’m not at liberty to tell you all of what I’d like to tell you.”

“Why are we speaking at all?” Lightcap asks him.

“I believe in your proposal,” he says. “I believe in you. But even your tremendous vision—the creation of a colossal machine—is not great enough in scope.”

“Not great enough in scope?” Lightcap echoes, astounded. “That’s your criticism? Insufficiency of scope?”

“You don’t need one machine, Cait,” Pentecost says. “You need dozens.”

“The resources for a project of that magnitude would be…” Lightcap trails off.

“Global,” Pentecost finishes. “It’s not just America that has a stake in what might be coming.”

“I know,” Lightcap says.

A waitress brings their drinks. Lightcap slides the frosted pink glass towards her and takes a sip. It’s cool and sweetbitter, candyflood fading to an astringency that requires another sip, a chase, like the best of her dreams.

“I want you to leave your job at DARPA,” Pentecost says. “I want you to work for the organization I represent. I want you to come immediately. Let’s leave tonight, if you can. We’ll modify your proposal and you’ll present it again, this time in New York City. At the UN.”

Lightcap sips her drink, sweetbitter, sweet. Bitter. “I won’t sign my life away to an unnamed group with an unnamed ethos.”

Bold words, but the claim they stake is weak. She trusts this man. The weight of his gaze. The weight of his words. God wants this. He must.

“The non-disclosure clause is only until the organization goes public,” Pentecost says. “A few more weeks. Then tell anyone you like. You won’t be able to keep it quiet. You’ll be on the front page of every newspaper in the world. You’ll hire whomever you want. You’ll have as many resources as the world can bring to bear in as short a time as can be managed.”

“Me?” Lightcap asks.

“You,” Pentecost says.

“Why not Jasper? He has more experience.”

“Don’t think I need Dr. Schoenfeld.” Pentecost smiles, small and polite, masking real amusement. “But you can bring him if you want him.”

Lightcap can’t help smiling back, a feral twist of her mouth she tries to straighten but can’t. One two three four, she thinks.

She wants this. She wants to surf the cresting wave into all that’s coming. She wants to turn her vision into something she’ll touch with her hands, feel with her mind. She wants to trust Stacker Pentecost, the weight of his gaze, the sorrow in his chosen cocktail. She wants to build machines, to fuse the fire of Prometheus to the mind of man to whom he gave it, she wants to find the person who will stitch the torn threads of string theory back together, she wants robotics and neuroscience, coders and chemists; Jaeger Tech, Kaiju Science, she wants everything she can have so she can give it all she is.

She’ll take it all into herself and reform it into a dynamic shield for her whole species. Something that makes children feel safe at night.

“I have no experience organizing something of this magnitude,” she says, low and tight and too fierce for a trendy little bar. “I can build you the machines you need—but what you’re describing is also administration. Distribution. Industry.”

“You’d run our Jaeger Division. You’ll literally build the things, Cait. You’ll build as many of them as you can with every scrap of metal we can mine, every semiconductor we can buy. You’ll get them to work. Anything you don’t know how to do, you hire someone to do for you. This is your DARPA project, scaled up.”

“What if there’s never another K-day?” Lightcap presses. “You’d distort global industry and commerce for decades to build a collection of these things.”

“We know,” Pentecost says.

Lightcap lifts a brow and sips her drink, silently demanding more.

“You feel the stakes,” Pentecost says, like it’s an explanation. “Just like I do. That’s another reason I wanted you instead of Dr. Schoenfeld. You feel the reality of the stakes and, in the face of enormous risk, you’re prepared to go all-in.”

“The pilot who died,” Lightcap, filterless, thinks of the news, of a beautiful woman with a serious face, a warm smile, her Sidewinder missile, her RAF jet, sliced in half by Trespasser. “Luna Pentecost.”

“My sister,” he confirms.

Lightcap puts her elbows on the table, offering him her open hands.

He takes them.

She closes her fingers, squeezing his hands in silent solidarity.

“She wasn’t just brave.” Lightcap forces her throat to relax. “She was inventive.”

“A born dragon slayer,” Pentecost says, dry-voiced and wet-eyed.

“And you?” Lightcap asks.

Pentecost shakes his head.

“A made dragon slayer then.” Lightcap squeezes his hands for emphasis, then lets him go.

Pentecost picks up his Salicylated Sorrow. “I’d feel more optimistic if you’d build me some armor.”

She drums the short edges of her bare nails on the wood of the table in one quick sweep of four. Then another. So they want you, she thinks at herself. You and not Jasper. Do they know? Do they know you’re better? Do they know you slept with him? Do they mean to reach out a bureaucratic hand and pull you from beneath him? How unusual. But do they have any idea who you really are? Do they know all they need to know?

Another sweep of four.

And Stacker does not say, “Tell me what you’re thinking.” He waits.

He waits for Cait.

Waitin’ for Caitlin.

Everyone dies, she thinks. Everyone dies. Everyone dies, everyone dies, so how will you do it, Lightcap? You have nothing but who you are, the work you’ve done, your parents who love you, and Jasper who loved you too, but never enough. That’s not so many weights to tie you down. You could watch this unfold from the sidelines in front of your DC TV with your cat and a jar of peanut butter crying vicarious tears for growing rents in your civilization or you could grab what you can and hold the tapestry of the only existence you’ll ever know with your own hands and with mechanical hands you build. But if you step up, you can’t hit pause. You can’t. It might consume you—the endless groove of the non-progressing needle you can’t always control, can’t always repress. They’ll need to understand.

“I have OCD,” Lightcap throws three words and three letters down in perfect neutrality. They feel unfinished. Waiting for a fourth thing.

Algorithmically banish all your guilt, she thinks.

“I know that,” Pentecost replies. “It’s part of your classified file.”

“But you’d choose me anyway?”

“Your record speaks for itself.”

And the four-month leave of absence I took in the spring, Lightcap thinks. Does that speak for itself as well? What she says is, “It’s controlled. But I’ll need people around me who can step up were my performance to be compromised in any way. Everyone will need to know. It’s not a thing that can be held against me on an institutional level. Do you understand what I mean by that?”

“I think I do.” Pentecost takes a sip of his sad, vodka-laced, ice-in-milk drink.

“Do you?” Lightcap says. “I’m difficult to work with. I have high standards. I’m a perfectionist to the point of genuine pathology. I can be mercurial. My work ethic has been most kindly described as ‘grueling’. I’ve achieved what I’ve achieved by force of will and it shows in my personal leadership style. No one likes me.”

“Are you trying to convince me not to offer you this opportunity?” Pentecost says, not smiling, asking a genuine question. “I can’t think of a more stressful job on the planet than the one I’m proposing you take. If you don’t want it, we’ll make an offer to Dr. Schoenfeld.”

Lightcap could ride a horse naked through the out he’s offering her in the style of Lady Godiva.

“I want it,” she says, low and fierce. “I can do it. I just want you to understand what it will be like if you choose me rather than Jasper. We’re very different. Very.”

“Thanks for the warning.” Pentecost slides the folder over the wood of the table.

“I like your style, Stacker,” Lightcap says, pulling a pen out of her bag and flipping open the folder. “You’d better buy me another round and turn less cryptic once you’ve got your documents signed.”

“We’ll talk on the way,” Pentecost says. “There’s a military jet waiting.”

Lightcap raises her eyebrows. “You weren’t kidding about resource allocation.”

“No, I was not,” Pentecost says dryly.

“I have a cat.” Lightcap’s pen hovers above the page. “I’m bringing that cat. This is non-negotiable.”

“You can keep your cat,” Pentecost says.

“Non-negotiable,” Lightcap repeats. “The cat comes with me always.”

“You can bring your cat to work for the rest of your life for all we care,” Pentecost says, with an amused aggravation that hints at the personality beneath the professional exterior. “It can ride on your shoulder. The cat is a non-issue. We can go get your cat right now.”

“I love that cat,” Lightcap informs him with maximum poise, then uncaps her pen.

She begins scanning and signing, scanning and signing, with a flourished L and a wild cross of the t in her surname. Across the tops of the pages, the words “Pan-Pacific Defense Corps” appear over and over again.

When they leave the bar and step outside, Lightcap looks up, past the haze of light pollution, toward the distant stars.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Pentecost says.

“It’s ours, you know. All of it. Every problem. Every piece of garbage. Every work of art. We’ve claimed this planet in our hubris. We’ll defend it with the full force of our collected civilization.”

Pentecost smiles, understated, unreadable.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Lightcap says.

“Ask me again someday,” Pentecost replies. “After we’ve built our Jaegers.”

“Jaegers. Plural. Ours. I like the sound of that, Stacker, I do.”

“Me too,” he says.

“Well let’s get going.” She threads her arm through his. “My car is this way.”

They walk into crisping air of a September night. Pentecost matches her stride. Lightcap counts silently in her head in time with her steps, just for luck, the chords of an obscure band playing in her head, her shoes clicking against the pavement, already planning the call she’ll make to Tendo Choi, what she’ll say, how she’ll say it; already adjusting the flow of her presentation, scaling things up, growing them organically from already overwhelming beginnings—she’ll need quantum physicists to study the anomalies in the Pacific and she’ll need biologists to study Trespasser’s corpse, and she’ll need Jaeger pilots: people ready to look death in the face on behalf of their whole species.

Maybe she’ll get to do it herself.

She swallows a fierce longing and refocuses on the present, one stilettoed shoe in front of the other; push-off, swing, land, repeat. One, she must get in her car. Two, she must pack up her life and her cat. Three, she must win her right to her resources, and four she must begin to build her Jaegers. As easy as that.

One, two, three, four; then reset and take on more.