Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Dr. Gottlieb.”

Hermann looks up from his computer. Visitors are infrequent these days; he works almost entirely with park algorithms, now, so the changes he effects are rarely acute enough to require drop-ins from management.

“Ah.” He stands, smoothing his rumpled shirtfront with both hands. “Mr. Pentecost. What can I do for you?”

Hermann has never been particularly good at reading people’s expressions—it was part of the reason he had enjoyed his work in Behavior so much, because he could parse an emotional response down to a single line of code—but he can tell at once that Pentecost is worried.

Pentecost looks at Hermann’s screens, at the three-dimensional birds’ eye rendering of the park.

“You can manipulate the park from here?” Pentecost says.

Hermann glances at the hologram, a miniaturized version of the Cradle. He pushes his glasses up. “Not directly,” Hermann says. “I run simulations. I can implement gradual changes. Terrain, climate, the like. Wildlife.”

Pentecost rubs his chin. “What about hosts?”

“No.” Hermann had been more than happy to surrender his numerous Jaeger pilot builds to the bright-eyed programmers who replaced him in Behavior. He works alone now, and he likes it that way. He points to the leftmost screen. “I collect long-term data. Aggregate, not individualized. Number of interactions per sector, number of deaths, et cetera.” He frowns at Pentecost. “Why?”

“You did a lot of good work in Behavior,” Pentecost says. He’s watching Hermann with narrowed eyes.

Hermann turns back toward his computer and closes the hologram with a wave of his hand. “I don’t do compulsory programming any longer,” he says. He divulged the reason for his departure from Behavior to exactly one person, and he still regrets that decision, even two years later.

“Even so,” Pentecost says, “I think you could help with a problem we’re having with the hosts.”

“I very much doubt it,” Hermann says uncomfortably. “I haven’t so much as accessed a host profile in more than two years. Any knowledge I had is certainly obsolete by now.”

Pentecost claps a hand on his shoulder. “I have full faith in you, Dr. Gottlieb,” he says heartily. “Finish what you’re working on and come up to level five, my office. You remember where it is.”

Hermann gulps.

“Yes, sir,” he says.

Hermann hasn’t been above level nine, where he lives, for almost a week. He does try to get to the surface on his days off, for vitamin D more than anything else, but there’s a new narrative debuting each quarter this year and he has more than enough reasons to stay belowground. He’s been to the executive offices exactly once: when Pentecost hired him as a Behavior tech.

He hurriedly finishes the running the analysis on Sector 12’s most recent data set and sends the report to the head of Diagnostics, then logs out. He takes a deep breath.

It’s nothing , he tells himself. Some kernel of old code they need to flush, some host that hasn’t been back to Livestock in four or five updates. Nothing to do with the kaiju lab.

Nothing to do with Newton Geiszler.

The very thought of it makes Hermann’s face heat up, and he clutches his jacket a little tighter around himself as he rides the thirteen floors up to level five. Elsie had sworn that she wouldn’t breathe a word of his disclosure. He fervently hopes she’s kept her promise.

Pentecost’s office is at the end of a long hallway, a perimeter suite that in an aboveground structure would have afforded him a window with a very nice view. In the subterranean hub, he just gets a private bathroom.

He knocks on Pentecost’s door.

“Enter,” Pentecost booms. Hermann pushes the door open and his heart nearly stops.

“Hi, Hermann,” Elsie says, giving him a little wave.

Hermann feels the blood drain out of his face. “Miss Hughes,” he says.

Elsie turns back to Pentecost. “We found it in the last update. Only about ten percent have come back to Livestock, but they all have it.”

“Miss Hughes,” Pentecost says, “perhaps you will save me the embarrassment of attempting to rehash what you’ve told me, and get Dr. Gottlieb up to speed.”

“Right.” Elsie unfolds the host tablet she’s holding and hands it to Hermann.

Hermann looks down. It’s a pretty brunette woman. She seems familiar, but there are so many hosts and it’s been a long time.

“Here,” Elsie says, reaching over. She scrolls, scrolls, highlights.

Hermann moves the tablet closer to his face and squints at the lines of code. He looks up at her. “This is in all the hosts?” he asks.

“The ones that got the most recent update,” Elsie says.

He scrolls some more. “And what does it look like in vivo ?”

“I can show you,” Elsie says, “but it’s aberrant—movements linked to memories that should have been wiped.”

“You mean the pilots,” Hermann says.

Elsie shakes her head. “Nope. All of them.”

Hermann blinks at her. “That’s not possible. The NP memories are purged after every narrative loop.”

“It shouldn’t be,” Elsie says, “but it turns out the memories are there, just inaccessible. It’s like...like a subconscious.”

“Who put this in?” Hermann keeps scrolling.

“We don’t know,” Pentecost says. “Updates and alterations to code should be tied to a specific user. These are just...blank.”

Hermann closes the tablet and hands it back to Elsie.

“I want to see,” he says.

***

Hermann has been to Behavior a handful of times since transferring to Diagnostics, for meetings and whatnot, but he hasn’t spent any time with a host. Certainly not with a tablet open on his knees. Her name is Clementine.

He watches the code scroll by as she moves and he misses it. “Damn.”

“Watch,” Elsie says. “She’ll do it again.”

Green eyes blank, Clementine moves her fingers across her jaw, and Hermann almost misses it a second time: her pinky, stretching just a little to stroke her lower lip.

“What on earth ,” he says, looking down at the tablet.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought, too,” Elsie says.

There’s a beep behind them. Hermann looks up. The glass door opens, and a pale, skinny man with sweater vest and a surly expression walks in.

“Lee,” Elsie says, her voice turning cool.

“Hughes,” the man says curtly. He looks at Hermann. “Who’s this?”

“Dr. Hermann Gottlieb,” Pentecost says. “He was one of the top programmers in Behavior until they lost him to Diagnostics. This is Lee Sizemore, head of Narrative and Design.”

Sizemore looks Hermann up and down. Hermann can almost see Sizemore dismissing him. He’s used to it, by now.

“Where are we, then?” Sizemore says. He has a British accent, cultured. He pushes up his sleeves.

“It looks like the aberrant code is embedded in the update,” Elsie says to him. She nods at Hermann. “We were just reviewing what it looks like in an NP host.”

“Can we roll it back?” Pentecost taps the tablet. “Just...undo whatever changes were made?”

“It’s not that simple,” Elsie says. “Each NP host iteration builds on the prior personality. Adds depth. Their emotional responses appear more genuine. Rolling back an update risks wiping the personality they’ve already built.”

“So program new ones,” Pentecost says.

“We do,” Elsie says, “but it takes money and man-hours to develop.”

Lee smirks. “One point four million to build each non-pilot host personality, inclusive. Pilots are more. Not to mention the storylines, and the considerable expense to animate each kaiju.”

Hermann’s mouth twitches. He didn’t know that.

“Okay, the pilots.” Elsie continues as though Sizemore hadn’t interjected. She tucks her hair behind her ears. “The difference is that their past loops are the basis for their actions, not just their personalities and emotional responses.”

Pentecost nods. “Because they have to do more than interact with hosts.”

“Right,” Elsie says. “We can program them to have courage, but their decision-making in combat is almost completely based on their prior kaiju encounters.” She hesitates. “Not to mention the guest-host drift interface.”

Pentecost frowns. “Explain.”

“That was Hermann’s specialty,” Elsie says. She raises her eyebrows at him.

Hermann clears his throat. “Ah. Yes. Well. It’s been a while, as you know, but—” He rolls his chair over to the computer in the corner of the glass testing room. “Jaeger pilots have a core code dyad: emotional response-slash-drift, and combat actuation. Both of them require perpetuation for the host to be fully functional.” He pulls up a pilot profile: Herc Hansen, one of the first pilot hosts Hermann had coded.

“Meaning?” Pentecost says.

“Meaning it takes at least two hundred iterations of the same loop to hone a pilot’s combat response system enough that he or she can operate a Jaeger without ripping it apart or frying its drift circuits. It’s why we run them with the simulators.” Hermann points to the screen. “See? The same loop, and the memories are wiped, but the host self-modifies each time.”

“It learns without remembering,” Pentecost says slowly. “And the drift?”

“Each simulator run builds new drift capabilities,” Hermann says. “The more neural pathways are created, the closer to a human brain the pilot host becomes. After so many runs, Miss Hughes and her team determine if the host is ready to interface with a human in a drift.”

“And that’s what this new update has done with the NPs?”

“Right,” Elsie says. She holds Clementine’s tablet up next to the computer screen. “Regular hosts shouldn’t have this level of autonomy. If this perpetuates—” A look of sudden realization crosses her face. “It won’t be just the pilots who will be able to drift with the guests.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself, Miss Hughes,” Hermann says sharply. “The drift interface is a specific type of programming—”

“We don’t know where this rogue code came from,” Pentecost interrupts. “At this point, we can’t assume that anything is impossible.”

“Hang on,” Sizemore says. “You said that this—this mystery code turns the NP code into pilot code, yeah? So it wouldn’t have done anything to the pilots.”

“Wrong again, Lee,” Elsie says. She puts Clementine’s tablet down and scrolls through Hansen’s code. “Look at this. Double the number of drift synapses from the last update. More than his brain should be able to handle. It’s a miracle he hasn’t had a seizure.”

“Okay,” Sizemore says, “so how many were affected?”

Elsie looks at him. “Ten percent of the population,” she says.

“So we freeze all updates,” Pentecost says. He’s frowning. “We pull the affected hosts until we can run a full set of diagnostics.”

“ All of them? ” Sizemore sputters. “Are you fucking kidding me? That’s two hundred hosts.” He pushes in front of Hermann and clicks through screen after screen. “And—and two-thirds of the pilots? How is this correct?”

Elsie glares at him. “Pilots end up in Livestock three times as often as non-pilots,” she says tightly.

“That’s at least a dozen storylines affected,” Sizemore says, jabbing a finger at the screen.

“And fourteen hundred guests in the park whom I have no intention of jeopardizing.” Pentecost’s voice is low and full of warning.

“What do you propose we do?” Sizemore throws his hands in the air. “Shut down? Give out gift cards?”

“Will you cut the drama, Jesus ,” Elsie snaps. “Hermann. My team can run some parallel diagnostics. You programmed the pilots, can you help me?”

Hermann swallows hard. “Yes.”

She looks at Pentecost. “We pull a sample. Ten pilots, ten non-pilots. We can have an analysis done by tomorrow morning.”

Pentecost’s frown deepens. “Fine. Run the diagnostics. But if there’s even an unscripted sneeze we’re shutting down.”

Sizemore thrusts a finger in Pentecost’s direction. “Ford’s going to hear about this,” he says.

Pentecost smirks. “I’m counting on it,” he says.

Chapter Text

Hermann

Hermann waits until the glass door closes behind Lee and Pentecost, and then he whirls on Elsie.

“What is the meaning of this?” he demands in a whisper-shout. He casts a glance around, but the techs in neighboring glass rooms are busy with their own host projects. Thank heavens. It’s bad enough that he’s even standing in Behavior, what with his past indiscretions.

Elsie stares at him. “Uh, what?”

“You know why I can’t be here,” Hermann hisses, limping toward her. “Do please explain your rationale for getting me involved with an issue that has nothing whatsoever to do with Diagnostics.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Elsie holds up both hands. “Chill out. First of all, Hermann, despite what you may think in that weird little potato-shaped head of yours, I was not the one who volunteered you for this job.”

Hermann straightens his spine. He doesn’t quite believe her, but then again, Elsie has always been aggressively and enthusiastically scrupled. “Well,” he says, faltering a little under her icy glare, “I certainly hope you haven’t divulged any—” He clears his throat. “Sensitive information. To Pentecost. Or Ford .”

Elsie’s brown eyes widen. “You are un-fucking- believable ,” she snaps.

Hermann begins to suspect that he has made a grievous error. He reaches for Clementine’s tablet and hold it in front of himself like a shield. “I—” he starts, but Elsie is already advancing.

“How long have we known each other?” She snatches the tablet out of his hands and tosses it onto the desk. “Eight years? Nine ?”

“Uh,” Hermann says.

“You think so little of my integrity that you’re actually accusing me of snitching ?” Elsie’s voice creeps higher. “God, Hermann, you are fucking intolerable .”

He tucks his chin down into his chest. “So it’s a...no, then,” he manages to say.

“Yes, it’s a fucking no.” Elsie picks the tablet up and turns her blazing glare on Clementine. “Bring yourself back online.”

Clementine’s green eyes flicker, and she looks up at Elsie. “Hello,” she says.

“Get back to the Shatterdome,” Elsie spits at her.

Clementine gives her a pleasant smile and nods, then gets up and heads for the door. Elsie follows her.

“Fuck you,” she says to Hermann over her shoulder.

He probably deserves that.

The door closes behind her and he’s alone in the glass room. He turns to the computer, his heart racing. He feels sweaty, anxious. This is why he likes working alone in Diagnostics.

She comes back with a portable workstation and a deep scowl on her face. “I’ll take your apology now,” she says.

“Yes, quite.” He stands up, watching her roll the workstation over to the desk. “I am sorry, Miss Hughes.”

She sniffs. “Fine, then.”

The thing he does like about Elsie is that, unlike others in the hub, she’s straightforward. She says exactly what she means, so it’s easy for him to understand her. He can tell, as she says it, that she is fine. He breathes a sigh of relief.

He takes the portable computer. The least he can do is offer her the more comfortable chair. “We, ah, let’s run the preliminary side-by-side and bring the hosts in one by one after that,” he says.

“Yeah,” Elsie says. She gives him a crisp little nod. “You take the pilots. I’ll take the NPs.”

“Right.” He logs in, thumbprint and voice ID, and it looks as though Pentecost has already restored his access to host profiles. He pulls ten pilots at random.

He can hear her tapping keys and muttering to herself. It’s a familiar sound; he heard it every day for six years. He doesn’t care for profanity but her occasional quiet expletives are comforting, somehow.

She’s silent for a few minutes and he looks over. She’s stopped typing. She’s just staring at her screen.

“Everything all right, Miss Hughes?” he asks.

She jumps and swipes at the screen, clearing the profile she’s opened. “Don’t hover , Hermann, shit,” she says crossly.

Hermann ducks. “Apologies.”

Another few minutes of silence, and Elsie speaks again.

“You’re a weird guy, you know that,” she says. Her tone isn’t mean, but it isn’t particularly fond, either.

The words make Hermann’s chest tighten. “Yes,” he says. “I’m aware of that.”

“I like you, though.” Elsie turns a little and looks at him, her gaze level and cool. “Always have.”

Hermann shifts uncomfortably. “Um,” he says. “Thank you, Miss Hughes.”

“ Elsie , god, this is why you’re weird.” Elsie turns back to her computer. She takes a little breath as though she wants to say something, hesitates, then says, “I didn’t think that thing with the biologist was weird, though.”

Hermann stiffens. His first instinct is to shove his computer away and run out of the room, but they have a job to do and perhaps he can shut this down before she presses any further.

“I’d prefer not to discuss that particular—” His mouth feels as dry as cotton. He swallows hard. “Incident.”

He never thought he was safe with her necessarily, but he didn’t think she’d confront him with the mortifying humiliation of his confession from two years prior. He’s nauseated with horror.  He stares at his screen, the letters and numbers melting into a miasma of nonsense.

“Look, man,” she says, turning to face him fully. “It happens to a lot of people, okay? You’ve got to quit beating yourself up about it.”

He looks at her sharply. “Did it happen to you?” The words are out of his mouth before he can stop them.

She flushes. “Yes,” she says shortly. She lifts her chin a little, defiant. “You didn’t do anything wrong. Neither did I.”

He turns back to his computer. The knot in his chest has tightened into a white-hot ember of shame. “I think we will have to agree to disagree on that point, Miss Hughes.”

“They’re not people , man.” She thumps one hand on the desk. “Look, I know it’s hard when you like one, shit, I’ve liked more than my share, but they’re programs .”

She’s correct about that and it makes the dissonance of his own moral distress even more pronounced. “Is there a point to this conversation?” he snaps, aware that he sounds not just prickly but actually angry.

She sighs. “Hermann,” she says. She opens the profile she’d swiped away and turns the screen so he can see. “He got the update.”

He freezes.

Hermann hasn’t seen the host called Newton Geiszler since the day after he’d told Elsie about what had happened. He hasn’t pulled his profile, he hasn’t reviewed his code, he hasn’t opened any of the cameras in the kaiju research lab to see what sorts of entrails Newton has been slicing up. He has certainly cycled through Livestock more times than Hermann cares to think about.

He thinks about Newton’s body slung limp and bleeding in the back of a retrieval lorry. Of pale limbs sprawled on cold tile, of the burnt-meat smell as his artificial skin was knitted back together with a plasma wand. They etched his tattoos into his flesh over and over.

He has other memories, too. Hazel eyes. Freckles. Laughter.

The memory of Newton’s bright-painted skin under his fingers is as sharp as a blade, incising his brain, making him curl and cringe with shame. He tries to catch his breath. His eyes burn.

He hears, dimly, the sound of Elsie’s chair wheels as she rolls toward him. Her hand is on his shoulder.

He pushes her off and stands, wobbling until he has his cane in his hand. His feet propel him through the door, down the hall to the elevator. It’s not until he’s locked in his office that he realizes he’s shaking.

***

Elsie

He’s such a weird fucking guy , and she’s well-versed in weird guys, she’s a programmer , for God’s sake, but Hermann takes it to a whole different level. This hang-up with Newton that made him quit a job he was good at—hell, not just good but great , probably the best in Behavior at the time—it seemed like a pretty extreme reaction, and that fact that he’s still messed up about it is just...well, she doesn’t know a single other person who’s this emotional . And okay, she’s walked in on more than a few of the creeps in Livestock slipping it to hosts in sleep mode, and it turned her stomach, but that’s just part of the reality of the job. If they enforced the “no free rides with the hosts” rule, there wouldn’t be a single employee left in Maintenance. Besides, that’s basically what the hosts were built for. And it’s not like they can remember.

Elsie watches Hermann stalk down the hall, oversized jacket flapping, cane tapping an angry staccato on the shiny floor. He has to wait for the elevator and he actually pulls his hood up, as though he’s afraid she’s going to chase him down and make eye contact, or something. She lets him go. She’s learned from years of working with him that there is literally zero point in provoking him when he gets himself worked up. She’ll let him cool off and then tell him Newton’s interrogation is on his plate. He’s never going to get over the stupid host if he doesn’t talk to it, and if this update screws it up enough to be decommissioned then he’s going to be neurotic forever.

Anyway. It’s not against the rules to have feelings .

Elsie finishes the side-by-side on the NPs, and then logs out of Hermann’s profile and finishes his pilot analysis too. She finds two pilots who aren’t active with guests and requisitions them to come to Behavior. Newton is in the middle of a loop. If he doesn’t get killed in the black market district, she’ll pull him next and leave him for Hermann. He gets stabbed by Hannibal Chau’s henchmen about forty percent of the time, so she supposes she’ll just have to wait and see. If she hurries, she can drag Hermann back here by the time the pilots show up.

She locates Hermann’s phone and sees he’s retreated back to his office, no big surprise there, he’s only ever in his office or in his quarters. She texts Pentecost an update on her way to Diagnostics. He messages her back with a thumbs-up. She sort of regrets teaching him how to use emojis.

“Hey,” she says, opening Hermann’s office door without knocking.

He doesn’t turn around from his computer, just clunks his forehead down onto his desk when he hears her voice. “Miss Hughes,” he says, his voice muffled.

“Are you done with the dramatics? We have work to do,” Elsie says, tapping her fingers on the doorframe.

Hermann heaves a big, heavy sigh. “Yes.” He gets up. Elsie is relieved to see that he seems almost back to normal. For him, anyway.

“I assume you’ve requisitioned Newton for analysis,” he says curtly, not meeting her gaze. He follows her into the hallway.

“Yep,” she says, jogging a little to catch the elevator before the door closes.

“And I assume you’ve decided I should be the one to do his interrogation,” he continues.

The elevator door slides shut. “Yep,” Elsie says again, as they begin their descent.

“Are you quite certain you’re not a host,” Hermann mutters irritably, “because you’re remarkably predictable.”

Elsie smirks. “Thanks, Hermann,” she says.

The pilots have arrived by the time they get back to the glass-walled interrogation suites. Elsie takes one and Hermann takes the other. She glances over at him a few times. He’s talking quickly, probably has switched the pilot to his native German, and he’s typing on the pilot’s tablet at the same time. He’s even wearing the diagnostic glasses so he can see the host readouts while he works. It’s fucking ridiculous. Elsie has never been able to do half of what he can do. He’s so fast at everything, it’s a damn shame he traded programming for data analysis. His pilot builds were genius and the core code dyad he designed for them revolutionized the park. He could have been head of Behavior by his fortieth birthday, Elsie’s pretty sure of it.

He finishes long before she does, sends the pilot back to the Shatterdome, and Elsie’s afraid he’s going to call the next pilot in the queue, but then she sees Newton walking down the hall.

Well. Looks like Chau’s minions didn’t gut him this time after all.

Elsie turns her gaze back to Hermann. He’s watching Newton, and his face is extremely pale, but his jaw is set in a resolute grimace. Newton has his hands in his pockets and he looks like he’s...whistling? Hermann must have forgotten to turn off his affect.

Newton pushes the glass door open. Elsie sees him give Hermann a jaunty smile and sticks his hands out. “Hey, bro, I’m Newt, ” she sees him mouth.

Hermann taps a few things. Elsie sees him give a quick voice command and Newton immediately loses the grin. His hand falls to his side.

Hermann looks at Elsie. His expression is grim. Elsie gives him an encouraging smile and a thumbs-up she hopes doesn’t look too sarcastic.

She’d thought he would take more time with Newton, given their history, but he finishes almost as quickly as he did with the pilot. It takes three more hours to complete all twenty host interrogations, and by the time they’re done Elsie is starving and cranky.

“Well?” she says to Hermann, coming into his suite as the last host leaves.

He takes off the diagnostic glasses. He looks tired. “Well,” he says, “the updates are all there, no user signature on any of the ones I interrogated.”

“Mine either,” Elsie says.

“I tried overwriting them and couldn’t. Then I tried modifying the existing behavior code in the pilots and the changes updated, but so did the new code.” He shakes his head. “It’s like it was adapting to what I was doing. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Elsie stares at him, feeling her heart rate pick up. “That’s impossible,” she says.

“I’m aware of that,” Hermann says. “Unless someone else was also in the host profile, reacting to my modifications.”

“Is it a virus?” Elsie reached for her phone. She has to notify Pentecost, but if a rogue employee is fucking with the hosts, QA’s going to have to get involved immediately. That means a deep dive into every programmer’s dossier, a freeze on all new programs, on narratives...in other words, an absolute fucking mess.

Hermann turns back to the computer and pulls up three columns of code. “I don’t believe it is,” he says. “It’s too plastic. None of the changes made are consistent from one host to the next. If it is a virus—” He leans close to the screen, squinting, and scrolls through each column—“it’s far more sophisticated than anything I’ve ever seen.”

More sophisticated than the biggest brain in the hub has ever seen. Great .

“Okay,” Elsie says, trying to tamp down the dread rising in her chest, “what about the NP memories?”

“I tried to wipe the last three,” Hermann says, the expression on his face darkening, “and the code mirrored that of the pilots. I was unable to erase any memories since the last update.”

“ Fuck, ” Elsie says. She taps a text to Pentecost and hesitates. “Can they voluntarily access the memories?”

“It doesn’t appear so,” Hermann says, “but we’ll have to do a more extensive interrogation. It’s possible that your team will have to enter the park and observe the NP behaviors in game.”

“Um, you mean we will have to observe the behaviors in game,” Elsie corrects, shoving her hair back from her forehead. Her thumb hovers over the Send button.

Hermann’s back straightens. “ I ?” he says incredulously. “Miss Hughes, I am not credentialed for in-game analysis.”

Elsie hits Send. “You will be soon enough,” she says.

Chapter Text

Raleigh

Raleigh had admittedly been pretty skeptical of the whole video-game-you-play-in-real-life thing when Yancy had proposed it. Ever since they were young, Yancy was always the brainier of the two of them. In high school, he could throw a wicked spiral and kick a field goal from thirty yards, but he preferred to spend most of his time indoors. He was always reading gigantic books and designing the eight-hour-long board games he and his friends spent their Saturdays playing. Dragons and Demons or something like that. So Raleigh was naturally a little suspicious when Yancy called him and told him about this fantastic amusement park his company had just invested in.

“So it’s like a...superhero convention,” Raleigh said, frowning at Yancy’s beaming face on the screen.

“No, man!” Yancy said. “It’s, like...it’s immersive . It’s an experience . You get to be someone totally different. Or the same. Whatever you want. You can be anyone.”

Raleigh shook his head. “I like being me, dude,” he said. And true, he didn’t have the expensive house that Yancy had, or the shiny fast car, or the beautiful wife, but he was pretty happy where he was. Delos had offered him a job when they hired Yancy, at what Raleigh is still pretty sure was Yancy’s insistence, but Raleigh had declined. He likes his job in construction. It’s simple, uncomplicated, even if it doesn’t come with perks like trips to elaborate amusement parks in far-flung places.

“Just come with me,” Yancy had pleaded. “One week. Come on. You have vacation. I know you do.”

He was right. Raleigh rarely took time off; he’d accumulated over two months of vacation.

He grunted. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll get back to you with dates.”

Yancy hadn’t shut up about the damn park for the next three months, so when they finally touch down at the park’s private airfield and there is literally nothing there except a landing strip, Raleigh’s pretty confused.

”Uh,” he says. “Are you sure this is the right place?”

The grin on Yancy’s face widens. He looks like a little kid who’s been told that sure, he can eat the entire cake. “Just wait,” he says, and he actually pushes Raleigh off the plane. There isn’t even a jetway, just the steps that fold down from the plane door.

There’s a woman at the end of the steps. Raleigh hadn’t seen her when they landed. She’s pretty and blond, wearing a white dress and a little white hat. She looks kind of like an old-fashioned nurse.

“Mr. Becket,” she says to Yancy, and then turns her smiling blue eyes to Raleigh. “Mr. Becket.”

Yancy’s sort of darting from side to side with excitement. He skips ahead of the blond woman and then back to Raleigh’s side.

“You’re making me nervous,” Raleigh says to him.

“Just wait, just wait.” Yancy is beaming .

The blond woman walks ahead of them down the airfield. When she reaches the end, the ground suddenly rumbles and shakes. Raleigh stares as a literal elevator rises out of the dust.

“What the fuck, dude,” he says to Yancy.

“Isn’t it great ?” Yancy says.

Raleigh follows Yancy and the woman into the elevator, staring up and around himself as it glides lower and lower beneath the surface. There are fifty numbered buttons and Raleigh can hardly believe it—how is it possible that there are fifty levels to this—whatever they’re in—all he had seen from the plane was a huge dusty flat expanse.

At level 38, the elevator stops. The doors open. Raleigh stares.

“Yancy,” he says. “Where the fuck are we?”

It’s all stainless steel and glass, men and women in professional attire striding across shiny floors. There are screens everywhere silently playing what looks like a combination of promotional videos and monster movies. There are escalators, floors and floors of balconies, a fucking waterfall in the middle of the enormous atrium. When he looks closer, most of the people walking by have tiny headsets in their ears and are talking quietly to themselves.

The blond woman smiles at Raleigh.

“Welcome,” she says, “to Pacific Rim.”

Raleigh trips over his feet as he gets out of the elevator. “Do what now?”

“Pacific Rim,” Yancy says, practically singing.

“Why, Yancy Becket.” A beautiful woman with dark curly hair comes up to them and winds her arms around Yancy’s neck. “I hoped you would be back.”

Raleigh blinks at Yancy, at the woman. Yancy has a wife , what the hell is he doing?

“Oh, don’t worry,” Yancy says, seeing the expression on Raleigh’s face, “she’s not real . Right, Maeve?”

The woman gives Raleigh a coy little smile. “I’m as real as you want me to be, darling,” she purrs, running a hand over Yancy’s chest. “Why don’t you come with me?”

Yancy smiles down at her. “Yes, ma’am ,” he says, and starts away.

“Dude!” Raleigh lunges for him and catches his arm.

Yancy jerks his head at the blond woman. “Time for orientation, little brother,” he says, reaching down to cup Maeve’s ass. “You’re on your own.” He pulls his arm out of Raleigh’s grasp and walks away without looking back.

Raleigh looks at the blond woman. She looks back at him.

“Shall we?” She smiles at him, a smooth cool smile, and despite her beauty he gets a weird feeling in the pit of his stomach. Yancy had told him there would be—what had he called them? Non-playable characters . He’d made them sound like the droids from Star Wars, or something. Not like the dark-haired beauty who had swept Yancy away. Not like this glossy blond before him.

“Are you one of them?” His gaze goes from her eyes to her mouth to her neck, looking for a crack in the facade. A bar code, maybe, or a secret panel with her controls.

Her cool smile widens. “If you can’t tell,” she says, “does it really matter?”

Raleigh swallows hard. Yancy had wanted so badly for him to come to this park, to participate, and so Raleigh will.

Even if he finds it really fucking creepy .

He follows her down the hall and through a blank white door, one of about twenty. He steps into what looks like a high-end clothing store. Uniforms hang on one wall, civilian clothes on another. Boots are lined up on an island. There are helmets and hats.

“All bespoke,” the woman says, and when he looks at her blankly, she clarifies. “All your size.”

“This is all for me ?” Raleigh says, looking bewilderedly from one clothing item to another.

“Yes,” the woman says. “Whatever you choose will be sent into the park. The remainder will be kept here, should you decide to change your role.”

“Uh.” Raleigh picks a uniform. “This, I guess.”

“Wonderful.” Her blue eyes widen. She steps closer to him, puts one hand on his chest. “And is there anything...else...you would like, Mr. Becket?”

He blinks at her. “What?”

“Your experience doesn’t have to wait until you enter the park,” she says, the hand on his chest sliding up to his neck.

He steps back. “Thank you, ma’am,” he says, stumbling, “but I think I better—I should find my brother.”

The woman lowers her hand. “As you wish,” she says. “When you’ve finished, please come through this door.” She points.

He dresses in the uniform, gray cargo pants and a matching shirt and vest, feeling a little silly. He stopped playing soldiers a long time ago. Still, as he laces the boots, he thinks that this must be quite a place. If the droids, or whatever, look like her .

He goes through the door and there’s Yancy, sprawled on a bench, also dressed in a uniform.

“Hey, little brother!” He stands up and cuffs Raleigh on the shoulder. “Nice choice of duds. Ready to go?”

Raleigh shakes his head. “I guess.”

“Come on, then.” Yancy heads down the hall toward a set of sliding double doors. On the other side is —

“A bar,” Raleigh says, looking around. It’s glass and steel, like the atrium was, lit with blue neon bulbs and playing thumping electronic music. A screen in the corner shows what looks like a dinosaur brawling with a giant robot.

“What the fuck,” Raleigh mutters.

“That,” Yancy says, taking Raleigh’s arm and steering him toward the screen, “is what we’re fighting.”

“What do you mean, fighting ?” Raleigh says.

Yancy seems to be unable to contain his glee. “That’s what this is, man, a world that’s been destroyed by these kaijus. They’ve been coming through a breach in the ocean, and the only way to kill them is with giant fucking robots.”

Raleigh looks at him blankly. “Uh huh.”

“And we pilot the robots!” Yancy slaps his shoulder again. “Or whatever, there’s, like, a million options, you can hang around Beaumonde, there’s a bunch of stuff going on there, there’s women , God, women everywhere, or you can black hat and be a bad guy. Whatever you want. I told you.”

“Beaumonde,” Raleigh repeats.

“Yeah, it’s modeled after Hong Kong, but they couldn’t use that, obviously, that’s a real city, so.” He makes a sweeping gesture. “It’s fucking huge , you’ll see. I’ve been here six times and I haven’t even made it twenty miles outside the city.”

“Twenty miles,” Raleigh says. “Where are we, exactly?”

Yancy grins. “Confidential,” he says.

“But you know.”

A shrug. “Maybe.”

“And how do we get to this city?” Raleigh says.

Yancy reaches over and flips a switch. The silver panels on the wall slide open, revealing plate-glass windows and landscape whizzing by.

They’re on a train.

“We’re already on our way,” he says.

***

Raleigh isn’t sure how long it takes to pull into the station at Beaumonde, but it’s at least two hours by his best estimate. He sees the city long before they’re there and Yancy is right, it’s fucking huge. The skyline is varied and smoggy, silhouetted by the setting sun, and at the coastline is a building that is bigger than anything Raleigh has ever seen in his life.

“The Shatterdome,” Yancy says. “Where they build the giant robots that fight the kaiju.”

“What the fuck,” Raleigh says softly, watching the Beaumonde get bigger and more detailed as the train speeds toward it. “What the fuck is this.”

“Only the best time of your life, little brother,” Yancy says happily.

Raleigh puts down the bottle of water he’d been drinking. Suddenly he feels very small and very inadequate.

And for some reason, very afraid.

Chapter Text

Newt

Newt’s been up for two days and he’s at the point of sleep deprivation where the solution is right there, right on the tip of his brain, he can feel it wanting to come out and it’s driving him absolutely nuts that he can’t get it. He’s sequenced four different kaiju samples and they’re all the same, they’re obviously clones but he can’t figure out why they’re all so phenotypically different.

He cracks another energy drink and downs it in three giant gulps, then belches. Which is when he hears the footsteps behind him.

He turns around. “Whoa!”

There’s a guy in his lab. He’s not used to anyone coming in here except for the Major, who usually only has a few terse instructions for him, he’s pretty isolated and he sort of wishes sometimes that he had someone to share his Red Bulls with. But now there’s a guy!

“Hi!” Newt rushes him, he comes on too strong and he knows it, but he can’t seem to help it. “Hi, hey, Newt Geiszler, I’m not at all looking a gift horse in the mouth but what are you doing down here?”

The guy is pale-faced and skinny, wearing a coat that’s at least two sizes too big with a comically gigantic furry hood. He’s not bad-looking but his haircut is tragic .

He looks down at Newt’s outstretched hand. “Hello, Dr. Geiszler,” he says. “My name is Dr. Hermann Gottlieb.”

Newt blurts a laugh. “Dr. Geiszler ,” he cackles, yanking his hand back. “Only my mother calls me doctor. It’s Newt , please, thank you, but you didn’t answer my question which was what are you doing here? ”

Dr. Hermann Gottlieb of the ridiculous coat and the DIY haircut and the very nice cheekbones clears his throat. “I, uh,” he says, in a stilted and awkward voice, “have been assigned to work with you.”

“ Boss ,” Newt gasps. “Like, really. I’ve been down here in the dungeon for literally months without any company, and it’s like, you can only talk to yourself for so long, you know? I need someone to bounce ideas off of.” He bounces on the balls of his feet to illustrate his point. “What’s your flavor? I’ve got six Ph.D.s, taught at MIT, but biology is my favorite, especially, you know, given the circumstances.” He gestures broadly at the scattered kaiju entrails around the lab.

Gottlieb steps into the lab, leaning on his cane, looking around the room. “Mathematics,” he says at last, faintly, and Newt thinks that it’s fine that he’s going to be a quiet one, because Newt has a lot to say.

“Great!” Newt opens a desk drawer, then another, and a third. He finally finds a box of chalk and tosses it to Gottlieb. “There’s a board over there for your calculations and whatnot. I hope you don’t mind a mess.”

Gottlieb steps carefully over a stray tentacle and makes his way over to the empty west side of the laboratory. It’s mostly storage over there, boxes of glassware and microscope equipment and a few rolling stools that Newt didn’t have any other place to put.

“What are your theories on the evolution of the kaiju, Dr. Geiszler?” Gottlieb says, and Newt almost falls over because he was just thinking about that.

“Oh, well, I have a few, but the one I’m currently working on is their DNA, did you know it’s not double stranded? I mean, it is in places, but most of it has three strands and it branches, which is I think why they don’t look the same. You know, one looks like a shark and one looks like a fish and—” He runs out of breath.

Gottlieb is watching him with a curiously incisive expression, and suddenly Newt is hit so hard by a sense of deja vu that he almost falls over. He’s seen this guy before. And it’s like the theory about the kaiju, it’s right on the tip of his brain and he can’t get to it. He has the sensation of warm skin under his fingertips and he shivers.

“Dr. Geiszler,” a voice says, and dimly Newt realizes it’s Hermann. “ Dr. Geiszler .”

He looks up. He’s on the floor, how did that happen? Hermann is kneeling over him and he looks worried. He always worries about Newt. It’s nice.

“Oh,” Newt says. “Hello.”

“You passed out,” Hermann says.

“Did I?” Newt stands up, feeling a little dizzy but otherwise okay. “I was just thinking about something.”

“What was that?” Hermann asks.

“Just that...” Newt shakes his head hard, he feels weird and fuzzy and confused, and he should explain what he’s thinking but his brain feels like peanut butter. The words are out of his mouth before he even realizes what he’s saying. “Politics, poetry, promises. These are lies.”

Hermann falls still. He’s staring at Newt, a stricken expression on his face.

“What—what did you say?” he whispers.

Newt blinks up at him. “I said fortune favors the brave, dude,” he says. He gets to his feet. He was going to tell Hermann something, he’s pretty sure of it, but suddenly that weird stuck feeling shakes loose and he remembers what his idea about the kaiju was. He talks fast so the words will get to Hermann’s ears before he forgets them again.

“I think I have an idea about how to figure out where the kaiju are coming from.” Newt  stumbles a little as he moves toward the tank with the kaiju brain fragment. “Look at this. It’s not dead, right, it’s damaged, but I think I can tap into it using the same technology that allows two Jaeger pilots to share a neural bridge. I could drift with it. Figure out where they’re coming from! Isn’t that a great idea? ”

Hermann is still kneeling on the floor, gaping at Newt. His lips move, but no words come out.

“What, dude?” Newt leans closer.

Hermann’s lips move again, and this time he does say something. Newt dimly registers a word, and then everything goes black.

***

Hermann

Hermann is barely able to choke out the phrase. “Freeze all motor functions,” he finally manages to say, and when Newton’s face goes blank he sits down hard on the cold tile.

Newton had glossed over Hermann’s entrance, it had barely nudged his narrative loop out of sync, and that was perfectly normal. Newton was programmed to barrel full force at the guests, to be for them either a slightly loony ally or a brick wall against which the application of any opposition to his insane theory was useless. His work in the lab was supposed to be piecemeal. He wasn’t supposed to arrive at the kaiju clone conclusion until the fifth day of his loop. He was only in day three. It was too soon.

But more disturbing yet was the phrase that had slipped from his lips after he had passed out. Politics, poetry, promises. These are lies .

He himself had said that to Newton.

Two years ago.

He is so shaken he can barely get off the floor, the pain in his leg a physical manifestation of his shock. He heaves himself up by clinging to a table, then drops heavily into the desk chair next to it. Newton should not have remembered that phrase. It should long have been erased from his code.

And yet.

Hermann shudders, remembering. He’d mumbled those words into the curve of Newton’s neck. Newton’s hands on him. Newton’s bright laughter in his ear. If he remembers those words, what else does he remember?

He feels sick.

And was Newton—had he proposed drifting with a kaiju brain ?

Of course it wouldn’t have done a thing—the kaiju brain fragment in question is an animatronic relic that still relies on gears and circuits, a plastic prop that doesn’t have a single neural connection—but the fact that Newton had even said those words is baffling. It’s been a long time since he’s been in Behavior, true, so it’s possible that Narrative has decided to make kaiju drifting a guest option, but it seems antithetical to the overarching storyline. He must ask Elsie about it later.

“Analysis,” he croaks, looking at Newton’s still and placid face. Newton’s eyes flicker.

Hermann scoots the chair closer to Newton. He’s standing, hands slack at his sides, the kaiju tattoos swirled over his forearms exactly the same as Hermann remembers. Hermann stands with effort. “Why did you say the phrase politics, poetry, promises, these are lies ?”

“Someone said it to me once, and I recalled it in the moment,” Newton says at once, guileless. All the animation is gone from his face. He’s pleasant, blank.

“Who said it to you?” Hermann says. He puts his hands on Newton’s shoulders.

Newton hesitates. His eyes look past Hermann, glassy and unfocused. “I don’t remember,” he says faintly. “I should remember, but I don’t.”

“Think,” Hermann says. “ Think , Newton. Who said it?”

Newton’s brow furrows. He makes a noise, an oddly human noise, a huff of frustration. Then, suddenly, his expression relaxes. He smiles. He looks directly into Hermann’s eyes.

“Hermann, you dingbat,” he says, perfectly enunciating each word, and there is laughter in his voice that shouldn’t be there, not in Analysis mode. “It was you.”

And then his gaze goes blank again, and Newton falls still.

Hermann staggers backwards. He trips over the chair and almost lands flat on his back—he manages to save himself by throwing one hand out and catching the edge of the desk. As it is, he hits his bad hip hard against its corner, sending a hot flare of pain down to the sole of his foot.

Blinking back tears of pain, he fumbles in his pocket for his phone. Elsie. He must talk to Elsie. He finds her contact information and pings her.

Her voice comes through the speaker a moment later. “Yeah, Hermann.”

“Lab,” he manages to say. “Shatterdome lab.”

She must hear the urgency in his tone because she doesn’t crack a joke, just says “I’ll be there” and disconnects.

He maneuvers into the chair and stares at Newton. He should sync his tablet with Newton and do a fast-pass diagnostic. Something.

He can’t do a thing. When Elsie arrives thirty minutes later, he’s sitting ramrod-straight in the desk chair, staring at Newton.

“Oh shit,” Elsie says. She hurries to his side. “Hermann. What the fuck. You’re bleeding.”

Hermann looks down, and in fact, there is a small bloom of blood on his pants leg. He must have hit the desk harder than he thought. “So I am,” he says.

Elsie fumbles in one of the many cargo pockets of her uniform pants and comes up with a small black first-aid case. She shoves it into Hermann’s hand. “Can you manage this yourself or do you need help?”

Hermann half-stands, experimentally putting some weight on what will certainly be a badly bruised leg. “I will manage,” he says. He tucks the case under his arm and reaches for his cane, then limps heavily toward the bathroom in the hallway. The injury isn’t as bad as the bleeding made it appear, so he patches himself up with a couple of bandages and goes back into the lab.

Elsie is sitting in his vacated chair, a tablet open on the desk. She’s scrolling through Newton’s code. “I can’t even see if he deviated from this loop,” she says, not looking up when he walks in. “The new code is there, but there aren’t any aberrant behaviors associated with it.”

“Oh, he most definitely deviated,” Hermann says. He leans over Elsie’s shoulder. “Go back, please...keep going...there.” He frowns and reaches for the tablet.

“This is impossible,” he says, because at the point when Newton blacked out, there’s a flurry of drift code, but not a hint of the strange phrase he’d muttered. When Hermann scrolls forward in the conversation, he can’t find any indication that Newton had recognized him at all, let alone called him by name.

“He was deviating during your interaction?” Elsie asks.

“Yes,” Hermann says, “but I—I can’t seem to find where it happened.”

Elsie’s lips are a thin white line. “Fuck,” she says. “Pentecost wanted to get QA involved before we even came in here. I put him off until tomorrow, said we could do the in-games and get back to him in twenty-four.”

“Perhaps we should consider involving them now,” Hermann says. His heart is pounding in his chest. He cannot explain this level of insight and autonomy that Newton is displaying—this humanness .

“No.” Elsie shakes her head hard. “Not yet. They’ll pull all two hundred hosts and freeze Behavior and Narrative access and—it’ll just be a fucking mess. We do what we came to do and report back to Pentecost as planned.” She looks at her phone. “So we have twenty-two hours, Gottlieb.”

Hermann swallows hard and nods. “Right. Yes. An hour with each host?”

Elsie frowns. “No,” she says slowly, “no, I don’t think that’s enough observation time. Let’s each take three, you take the NPs, we’ll see how much we get done. Start with this one,” she adds, jerking her chin at Newton. “I’ll head to the Shatterdome.”

Hermann looks down at the tablet in his hands. He’s honestly not sure how many more surprises he can take. “Of course, Miss Hughes,” he says.

She looks at him sharply. “That leg okay?”

“Yes, yes, it’s fine.” Hermann waves a hand at her. “I’ll remain here and finish up with Newton. Go on.”

Her eyes narrow, just a little, but she nods. “I’ll text you,” she says. She doesn’t say goodbye, just turns her back and hurries out of the lab.

Hermann puts the tablet in his coat pocket and looks at Newton, still and silent before him. “You’ll re-enter your loop in three seconds,” Hermann says, and three seconds later Newton blinks.

“Dude.” He looks around the room, a confused expression on his face. “Were you just talking?”

Hermann clears his throat. “No.”

“Huh. Must have been someone’s music somewhere.” He rubs his hands together and turns back to the kaiju entrails on the lab table. “Did you know I was in a band?” he says, reaching for a box of gloves.

Hermann cannot for the life of him decide if it will throw Newton off if he says yes, so he shakes his head. “I did not,” he says.

“Yeah, in Boston.” Newton slices something and tosses it. It hits the floor with a wet splat . “We were real bad, but it was fun, you know? Something to do.” He glances over at Hermann. “I could have sworn I told you that before.”

Hermann tries to answer, but the words won’t come. He had thought that it was a glitch, a momentary tic in Newton’s code. But Newton is looking at him with an expectant expression, eyebrows raised.

“Uh, Hermann?” he says. “You’re acting real squirrelly, man. You want to tell me why you look like you’re face to face with Yamarashi?”

Hermann takes a deep breath. “Newton,” he says.

“Yeahhh.” Newton’s eyebrows creep higher.

“How much—” Hermann wants to put him into Analysis mode, but since the code didn’t show the aberrancy, he thinks it would probably be useless. “How much do you remember about me?”

“Remember?” Newton looks confused. “What do you mean, remember ? I’ve known you for years, dude.”

Well, that’s it, then. Hermann is panicking. Full-on, outright panic. Even the best coders should not be able to program this conversation. Newton is operating with near-full autonomy.

“Hey.” Newton takes the gloves off and comes over to Hermann. He puts a hand on Hermann’s shoulder. “You don’t look so good.”

“I’m fine, Newton,” Hermann manages to say.

“Hang on.” Newton darts away and returns with a silver can. He cracks it open. “Here. Drink this.”

Hermann looks at it. It’s the sort of caffeinated beverage the Narrative department is always drinking when they’re on a story high. He doubts it will do anything to calm his nerves. “Thank you, Newton,” he says, taking it. He takes a sip. It tastes hideous.

“I know you hate them, but I drank the last bottle of water this morning,” Newton says apologetically.

Dear God. What else does Newton remember?

“Look,” Newton says, hopping up onto the desk to sit beside Hermann, “if this is about the other night, it’s cool, okay? Like, no hard feelings. You had some drinks, I had some drinks, stuff happened, I’m good. Don’t worry about it.”

Hermann’s face burns with a curious combination of embarrassment and bewilderment. It seems that Newton has reverted back to the configuration from two years prior, but how?

“I assure you, Newton,” Hermann says stiffly, placing the repulsive drink on the desk, “I carry no ill will toward you regarding...regarding the events of that evening.”

“Oh.” Newton’s smile falters a little. He looks down. “Oh. Thanks, man. I mean, good. Great. Yeah, consider it forgotten, dude.”

“You were saying something about the kaiju,” Hermann says, because Newton looks almost disappointed and that’s a well Hermann isn’t prepared to tap.

Newton brightens. “Right,” he says. “Yeah. Think of the drift interface, right? It’s built for human brains, x number of synapses, so much conduction speed? From what I’ve studied of kaiju brains, their neural density is—well, it’s not similar , really, but the closest approximation is that of, like, a six-month-old human, right? That level of myelination. So in theory, a human brain could interface with at least a fragment of a kaiju brain without risking electrical overload.”

Hermann is composing his message to Narrative in his head as Newton talks. There must be an explanation for this theory he’s come up with. There had been no plans to introduce host-kaiju interfaces to the storylines, but again, his information is outdated.

“Are you listening to me, dude?” Newton waves a hand in front of Hermann’s face.

Hermann snaps to. “Yes. Forgive me, Newton.”

“I think we should go see the Major,” Newton says. “See what she thinks about this. I think it’s a pretty badass idea, don’t you?”

“We can talk to her,” Hermann says. “I don’t know if it will work, Newton.”

“It’ll work,” Newton says confidently. “And we’ll be rock stars .”

Chapter Text

Raleigh

He thought there would be, like, an introductory class or something, at the very least a welcome video. But no, he gets off the train and he’s suddenly in a crush of people, all city smells and bright lights, and it’s impossible to tell who is human and who isn’t. There are a thousand voices, conversation here and there in every language imaginable.

Raleigh lives in Iowa. This is very, very different.

“Yancy,” he says, catching his brother’s arm.

“Isn’t this awesome?” Yancy points at the skyline. “Every building here is the real deal. You could drop this place onto any coastline and it’d be a fully functional city.”

“Yeah, okay,” Raleigh says, “but what are we doing ?”

“First night?” Yancy grins. “Fuck and fight.”

Raleigh finds himself in the lobby of what appears to be an extremely expensive hotel, all mirrors and crystals. The dark-haired woman from the atrium is there. Maeve. She’s wearing a red dress, low-cut and elegant, and she angles herself at him.

“Mr. Becket,” she says, looking up at him. “I was hoping I’d see you here.” She takes his hand.

“I, uh, I think you’re looking for my brother,” Raleigh says.

“Oh, no.” Maeve points at the red-haired woman who’s wound her arms around Yancy’s neck. “I think he’s otherwise occupied.”

Raleigh pulls his hand out of Maeve’s. “Uh,” he starts to say, and then he sees her. The words die in his throat.

Maeve follows his gaze. A small smile forms on her lips.

“I see,” she says.

Raleigh stares. “Who is that?” Because she’s the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen in his life.

Maeve gives him an indifferent little shrug. “Afraid I don’t know, darling. Why don’t you go find out, if you’re so interested?”

“Yeah.” Raleigh moves toward the woman as though hypnotized. “Yeah, I think I will.”

She’s standing by the door, looking a little irritated, a little lost. Unlike the other women in the lobby, she’s wearing the same uniform he is: no-color cargo pants, long-sleeved shirt, utility vest. Her hair is black splashed with blue.

Her gaze finds his as he approaches.

“Hi,” he says, dry-mouthed.

She looks him up and down, her expression morphing from disconcerted to unimpressed. “Hello,” she says. “Can I help you?”

“Yeah, I, uh, was wondering if—” He realizes as he says it that he has no idea what he wants to say to her. His dumb animal brain just wants to slobber you’re pretty and he’s almost totally certain that she would be even less impressed by that.

“You’re in the pilot training program?” the woman says.

Raleigh looks down at his uniform, then back up at her. “Um. Yes. Yes, I am,” he says.

Suddenly the woman smiles, blazingly brilliant. “Oh, good,” she says. “They said I would find my new recruit here.”

She’s a host, Raleigh realizes. Of course she is. “Right,” he says. “Recruit. Where do I go?”

“The green line goes to the Shatterdome,” the woman says. “The first train out of town is at six AM. I would suggest that you be on it.”

He doesn’t even have a watch . There are no clocks in this damn place, how is anyone supposed to know when to be anywhere? “Yep. Okay. Six AM. Good,” he says lamely, stumbling over himself.

She nods. “Oh,” she adds, “and when you get there, ask for Major Mori.”

Dumbfounded, he watches her leave and disappear into the crowd. He turns around to find Yancy, but of course, Yancy has vanished. He’s alone in this bizarre artificial city, and he thinks he just found—was this a side quest ?

He feels someone take his arm and turns to see Maeve looking up at hi. He stares at her, bemused.

“Why don’t I show you to your room, Mr. Becket,” she says gently, taking him by the elbow. “Six AM is not far away.”

***

It’s extremely weird, Raleigh thinks, looking around the hotel room. This is a fake hotel in a fake city and in the morning he’s going to go sign up for fake pilot training— pilot training , he puts up drywall for a living—and yet there’s a part of his brain that keeps forgetting that none of this is real. That the beautiful woman who’d invited him to the Shatterdome is nothing more than circuitry and vinyl, or whatever it is that they make robots out of these days. He can see why Yancy comes back here. He can see how people get lost.

He takes a shower and gets into bed and when he turns on the television he finds that even the shows are fake: newscasts with scrolling updates about the latest attacks, a nature documentary about the environmental impact of something called kaiju blue, even what appears to be a TMZ-type pop-culture thing highlighting the vacationing habits of Jaeger pilots.

He turns off the television. It takes him a long time to fall asleep.

***

Raleigh awakens to the sound of banging on his door.

“Hey, little brother,” Yancy yells. “Wakey wakey, eggs and kaiju.”

Raleigh sits up. There actually is a clock in his room, and he sees that it’s just after five. He climbs painfully out of bed and goes to the door.

“Morning, kiddo,” Yancy says, clearly extremely drunk. “Ready to go drive some giant fuckin robots?”

Back home, Yancy doesn’t drink, not even at the fancy work parties he’s obligated to attend. Back home, Yancy never even looks at anyone other than Juliet.

Raleigh doesn’t know this Yancy.

“Yeah,” he mutters. He turns his back on his brother and picks up the uniform he’d slung over the desk chair. “Give me five minutes.”

He dresses and brushes his teeth, then follows Yancy down to the lobby of the hotel. It’s mostly empty, except for a man behind the front desk and a couple of people sleeping on the purple upholstered benches near the elevators.

“Do we check out, or...” Raleigh stops talking when Yancy looks at him incredulously.

“Right,” Raleigh says softly.

It’s cool outside, a light mist of rain making Raleigh’s skin feel damp and clammy. They walk the four blocks to the train station. The only thing that gives away the facade is how clean everything is. There’s not a crushed cup or cigarette butt anywhere.

There are only four other people on the train. Two of them are dressed in the pilots’ uniform. The other two are wearing suits.

“New recruits?” One of the suits looks over at Raleigh.

Raleigh looks down at his uniform. “Guess so,” he says.

The suit smirks. “Good luck.”

Raleigh wonders how much the hosts know about their own existence. In the atrium, before their arrival at the park, Maeve had seemed to be aware that she wasn’t human. From his interaction with her the night before, he’s not sure she still is. They probably programmed it out of them before they enter gameplay.

Yancy falls asleep on the way to the Shatterdome, big openmouthed snores. The two women in uniform turn their backs to hide their laughter. Raleigh’s face feels hot with vicarious embarrassment, even though, he reminds himself, this is why the park exists . To pass out drunk in public without consequence.

Raleigh wonders what Juliet is doing right now.

When the train pulls into the Shatterdome station, Raleigh cuffs Yancy on the shoulder. “Wake up.”

Yancy snorts but doesn’t wake. Raleigh hits him again. “Hey. Yance.”

“Fuck,” Yancy sputters, waving his arms at Raleigh. “ What ?”

“We’re here,” Raleigh says.

“Whoop de fucking do,” Yancy says crossly, but he gets up and follows Raleigh off the train.

They pass through steel sliding doors, and Raleigh almost falls over.

For starters, the ceiling is at least twenty stories up. There are catwalks and scaffolding criss-crossing the vast open expanse, and off to each side of the main walkway are docks housing the giant robots from the promotional videos. They are breathtakingly, unbelievably massive. They are the size of buildings. There are three on each side, and all of them are crawling with uniformed workers. Sparks fly from welding wands. The high whine of a saw pierces the air. Programmers hang in midair from harnesses, tapping on tablets, shining flashlights into crevices.

“Credentials,” a voice says, and Raleigh tears his gaze away from the huge red robot to his left.

A uniformed man is standing in front of them, scanner in hand, looking at Raleigh expectantly.

“Uh, what?” Raleigh says.

“Credentials,” the man repeats impatiently. “You can’t be here without clearance.”

“I was supposed to ask for Major Mori,” Raleigh says, remembering.

The guy looks suspicious, but he picks up his radio. “Name?”

“Raleigh and Yancy Becket.”

“Raleigh and Yancy Becket for Major Mori,” the guy says into his radio. There’s a crackle and static, then a voice.

“Bring them up.”

The guy jerks his chin. “Come on,” he says.

“I’m fucking beat,” Yancy says as they walk. “Hey, man, how about a nap?”

Raleigh has that weird forgetting-reality feeling, momentarily annoyed that Yancy is asking for a nap when they’re here to work. Then he remembers that this is a video game, basically, and Yancy just wants to hit the pause button.

“Certainly,” the man says, and they veer off course and down a hall. Yancy opens a door—Raleigh can see a bed in the room, it looks like a crew cabin—and gives Raleigh a thumbs up.

“Later, bro,” he says.

“This way,” the man says, and Raleigh follows him down more hallways, progressively smaller, until they reach a service elevator. They ride up to the thirty-fourth floor. The doors open directly into an office.

The woman from last night is sitting behind the desk. She stands when the doors open.

“I thought there were two of you,” she says.

***

Mako

It’s not the big, timid cadet in front of her that seems familiar. She’s never seen his face before last night, she’s sure of that. But the way that Roberts brings him in, the way he smirks when Becket gives some stumbling excuse for his drunkard brother’s behavior—it triggers something in the back of her mind, some annoying little twinge. She’s seen Roberts make that face before. Not just that. She’s seen him make that face before in this exact situation .

“So you think you are qualified to be a drift pilot,” she says, and the strange feeling gets worse, because she’s sure said these words, in this same way, to someone equally bewildered-looking in her office.

“I don’t know, ma’am,” Becket says. “I think so. Yes.”

“Roberts,” she says, “you’re dismissed, go check on the brother, please.”

“Yes ma’am.” Roberts steps back into the open elevator. Mako clenches her fist as the doors slide shut. Her nails bite into the palm of her hand, sharp and clarifying, but the feeling of deja vu doesn’t go away.

“Have you completed any drift compatibility testing?” Mako asks Becket. His broad face falls. He is clearly completely unprepared for this conversation.

“No, ma‘ am,” he says.

“Right,” she says. “We will start there. You will complete a series of evaluations to find an appropriate drift partner for you. After that—”

After that, you will battle a kaiju and your drift partner will die, and you will be a hero.

The memories hit her like a wave of nausea, a grim-faced pilot receiving an award on a stage. Then another, and another. The same words echoing each time, different faces. Not Becket. Not yet.

What is happening to me ? She reaches for the desk chair for support.

“Are you okay?” He’s next to her, his hand hovering at her elbow, not quite touching her.

“Yes,” she snaps, straightening. “I’m fine.”

He’s looking around the room like he’s trying to find something, even though they’re the only ones in here. “Maybe I should...maybe you should see someone,” he says. “Is there, like, a help button?”

She wants to respond, wants to say “A help button ?” with the disdain that his question deserves, but something happens, then—his words blur, buzz into static.

“Help button,” she forces herself to say, and it’s like she’s forming nonsense sounds, what is she saying? It doesn’t sound like anything to her.

Becket is looking increasingly worried. “I’ll get someone,” he says, going to the elevator. He hits the down button three or four times, like that will bring the elevator faster.

“Stop. Mr. Becket. Please, I’m fine,” she says.

He’s watching her with big, untrusting eyes. He pushes the elevator button again. “I can—” he says, and she cuts him off.

“Don’t,” she says. She forces the words, even though it’s almost physically painful to say them. “What did you mean by help button ?”

“I thought you weren’t supposed to notice stuff like that,” Becket says.

He’s looking at her with the oddest expression, as though he’s seeing someone he’s known for a long time. She opens her mouth to say something else, even as the world tilts and confusion clouds her brain, but then the elevator dings and the doors slide open.

“Mako!” cries a familiar voice, and the tilted world snaps back to ninety degrees. Newt Geiszler tumbles off the elevator. He’s dragging behind him a pale, flustered-looking man Mako has never seen before.  “Boy, do I have an idea for you.”

Chapter Text

Newt

“Dr. Geiszler,” Mako says, “I have asked you many times to please call before you come to my office.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, I know,” Newt says, because she has, but he always forgets when there’s something important to tell her, and there have been so many important things to tell her these days, so it’s not really his fault, is it? “I’m sorry, it’s just that—”

“You had an idea,” Mako finishes for him, and he grins guiltily.

“Yeah,” he says. “You remember Hermann.”

Mako looks at Hermann, then back at Newt. A puzzled look comes over her face. She doesn’t answer for a moment.

Then, suddenly, her expression clears and she smiles and nods. “Yes, of course. Dr. Gottlieb. So nice to see you again.”

Hermann’s face is pale. Well, he’s always pale, but he’s somehow more pale than usual. He looks a little as though he’s going to yarf.

“Dude.” Newt fishes in his pockets and comes up with a crumpled paper cup. He unfolds it and holds it out to Hermann. “If you’re gonna spew, spew into this.”

Hermann takes the paper cup, somehow managing to look even more ill than he had a moment ago. “Thank you, Newton,” he says faintly.

“Who’s this?” Newt sidles over to the blond uniform in the corner. “You new? Cadet? Or just in trouble?”

“I’m not in trouble,” the uniform says. He’s frowning at Newt. “Who are you ?”

“A brilliant kaiju scientist, brains behind this entire operation, and Mako’s second in command, but nobody really,” Newt chirps cheerfully.

“This is Raleigh Becket,” Mako says, ignoring Newt’s buzzing. “He’ll be entering pilot training with the current class.”

“Pilot training!” Newt says. “I should have known. You look like the type. All brawn, no brains.”

“Hey,” Raleigh says crossly.

“So anyway,” Newt says, hopping on to Mako’s desk and putting his feet on her chair, “I had this idea, right, like what if someone were to initiate a neural bridge with a, like, non- human?”

Mako’s eyes narrow. “A...non-human?” she repeats.

“What Newton is proposing,” Hermann interrupts, “is initiating a drift with a fragment of kaiju brain.”

“Absolutely not,” Mako snaps.

“That’s what I told him,” Hermann says, and Newt bristles.

“Oh, ye of little faith,” Newt says.

Hermann scowls. “It’s a terrible idea.”

Newt almost gets properly mad at Hermann— almost, not quite, because if he’s being totally honest with himself, he kind of likes it when Hermann argues with him. Mostly because when Hermann argues he gets all red-faced and flustered, and that reminds Newt of that night. He thinks of it like that already, italicized and romanticized, mostly because he’s pretty sure it will never happen again. Hermann had seemed to be enjoying himself at the time, but he’s been weirdly uptight ever since. Also, the whole “no ill will” comment he’d made earlier was pretty uncomfortable. Considering that Newt had been almost totally ready to tell Hermann that he wants to wear his letter jacket, or whatever. Yeah. So that conversation is clearly never going to happen.

Newt looks at Mako. “Come on,” he wheedles. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

Mako frowns. “No,” she says.

Raleigh uncrosses his legs and stands up. “You’re suggesting doing this pilot mind-meld thing with—one of those ?” He points to the tiny model of a kaiju on Mako’s desk. Newt had given it to her for her last birthday. She had not liked it. He still isn’t sure why she keeps it in her office.

“That’s exactly what I’m suggesting,” Newt says.

Raleigh’s brow furrows. He doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then he says, “I’ll do it.”

Hermann’s head whips around. “You what ?”

“I said I’ll do it,” Raleigh says. “Why not, right? Haven’t even started training, so you wouldn’t lose a pilot.” He gives Newt a rakish grin.

Newt slaps the desk. He was wrong about the grunt, clearly. “ That’s what I’m talking about!” he crows.

“Not so fast,” Mako says. “I have not given permission for any of this to occur.”

“You will, though, Maks,” Newt says, grinning at her. “You actually think it’s a great idea, you’re just too afraid to fry anyone’s brain.”

Mako gets that odd look on her face again, and then she frowns. She looks at Raleigh.

“You’ll drift with me,” she says. “We will see what kind of neural load you can handle. And if you are capable of managing it with a human, we will evaluate whether you can drift with a—” She hesitates, as though she can’t believe she’s saying the words. “A kaiju.”

“Awesome,” Newt says, slapping the desk again.

Hermann is shaking his head, but he doesn’t say anything. The bright pink spots in his cheeks have receded. He sighs.

“As usual,” he says, “you have swayed the crowd in your favor, Newton.”

He meets Newt’s gaze for the briefest of moments, and what Newt sees is not dismay, or disappointment, or even irritation.

It’s terrible, terrible sadness.

***

Hermann

There is so much happening right now—on cognitive and, he is sure, drift levels. Hermann wants desperately to reach for his tablet and sync with Mako. Something happened in this exchange between Newton and Mako, he’s certain of it. Something shifted in her expression, not once but twice. She recognized Hermann, for one thing. And she should not have agreed to any aspect of Newton’s plan. She certainly should not have agreed to allow a guest to drift with a kaiju brain.

He wants to sync with Newton, too, but not for the right reasons. Not for any good reason. He sees the looks that Newton has been giving him, all wide eyes and hopeful smiles, and it tugs at his chest in unfamiliar and absolutely unwelcome ways. He feels a sense of loss that is utterly foolish, because he hadn’t anything to lose in the first place. Certainly not Newton .

I’ve known you for years, dude...

He had accrued seventy-eight days of PTO when he decided to use his employee benefit (“discount” was the wrong word; the cost of any trip into the park was deducted severely first from PTO, then from paycheck). He signed himself up for seven days, which nearly exhausted his accumulated time off.

He called Newton to Behavior two days before he was supposed to enter the park.

“Hello,” Newton had said.

He didn’t recognize Hermann, and he shouldn’t have. Newton, like many of the NP hosts, was programmed to run through an approximately two-week loop, give or take a few days. Most guests stayed about that long, so it was easy for him to move through his narrative with their visits. His memories were wiped each time.

By the time Hermann scheduled his trip into the park, his pilot drift code—the core dyad that preserved and sequestered memories—had been implemented for nearly three years. He had run thousands upon thousands of simulations. It was perfect, or nearly so.

He had a small memory drive, unregistered to the park, tucked in the palm of his hand on the day he called Newton into Behavior.

“Hello,” he said to Newton.

He synced Newton not to the tablet, but to the computer. Tablets were for fast diags, for subtle moderations of character traits. He slipped the memory drive into the computer’s port.

Newton’s face went blank as the upload started. Five minutes later, it was done. Ten months of work, after hours and before breakfast, line after line modified from his pilot builds.

He’d hidden eight years of memories in the back of Newton’s programming. Eight years of shared lab space, of verbal sparring in claustrophobic quarters, of shared coffee and arguments at two AM. No one but him would ever be able to tell it was there.

He couldn’t program love, not exactly. Admiration, that was easy. Respect. Affection.

He added the last tweak, a funny little signature: those memories of Hermann would only be accessible when Newton saw his face in the park. Not a photo—it had to be a three-dimensional rendering. In other words, he had to see Hermann in person in order for his new code to activate. It would be available for exactly seven days. After that, it would wipe itself clean, and Newton would revert to the odd, aggressively merry NP that he had always been.

The day after he returned from his week in the park, he handed his letter of resignation from Behavior to Pentecost. Then, hollow-chested and anguished, he told Elsie what he had done.

She reacted in typical Elsie fashion: “ Holy shit , Hermann, that’s amazing ,” completely dismissing the absolute wrongness of it all in favor of admiration of his programming abilities. She couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see what an abomination it was. What an abomination it had made him .

He saw, from his computer in his quarters, that she called Newton back and searched for the code he’d implemented. It was gone, of course. He’d made sure of that.

She tried to talk to him, to assure him she’d breathe a word to no one, but he took the last eight days of his time away and went to Maine. He sat at tiny outdoor tables in Bar Harbor and thought about what he’d done. What it meant, for himself and for the hosts.

When he came back, he had a new office in Diagnostics. He deleted all of Elsie’s emails without looking at them.

***

Newt

Newt is hopping, hopping with impatience.

“Come on, come on, can we do this already, let’s go ,” he says, hovering at the door. Mako is still at her desk, scrolling through her tablet with a thoughtful expression on her face, and Raleigh is watching her—good God, can he be any more obvious.

“Will you do this in the simulator?” Hermann asks, and Newt thinks he’s hiding something. He can always tell when Hermann is lying. He sounds too—calm, or something. None of that repressed Gottlieb energy simmering beneath the surface.

Mako takes a moment to answer. “No,” she says slowly, “no, I think we should do this in a Jaeger.”

“ Yes ,” Newt breathes, for a moment dizzy with elation. “Which one? It doesn’t matter. Let’s just go, let’s just try this already, the sooner you dance with the quarterback the sooner we can find out I’m right.”

Raleigh gives him a dirty look. “I wasn’t a quarterback.”

“It’s the only football word I know,” Newt says.

“I want to evaluate the full neuromuscular synchronization,” Mako says. “If you can handle that, Mr. Becket, then we may proceed with the next step.”

“Next step !” Newt practically shrieks. When Mako finally starts toward the door, he latches onto her. “You won’t regret this, Maks, you really won’t.”

She levels a flat stare at him. “Dr. Geiszler,” she says, “you have no idea what I regret.”

Newt is beside himself with excitement when they approach the Jaeger. It’s Gipsy Danger, not his favorite but pretty good nonetheless. The control room isn’t even half full of people; she was just on a run two days prior and repairs haven’t finished.

“Stay here, Newt,” Mako says. “You too, Dr. Gottlieb.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Newt says, because he’d say yes to anything at this point.

Hermann sniffs. He keeps putting his hand in his pocket, reaching for something—what? He does all his calculations in chalk on a board , for god’s sake, it’s not like he’s carrying a tablet around.

Newt watches Raleigh and Mako walk toward the conn-pod, then turns to Hermann. “We’ve gotta talk about this or you’re going to make this weird for the rest of our lives, man.”

Hermann visibly flinches. His eyes get big and Newt wants to just dive into them, they’re so pretty and brown. “What?” he says.

“Seriously,” Newt says, and he keeps talking so he won’t chicken out and let the words he wants to say go back into hiding. “I know it’s not, like, your thing to talk about feelings or whatever, but you cannot keep acting like I’m about to hit you with lightning bolts. It’s affecting our work rapport. And our friend rapport. And...” He feels his face heat up. “Our, like, miscellaneous rapport.”

Hermann swallows hard, his Adam’s apple bouncing under the delicate skin of his throat. Newt thinks about the way his teeth felt scraping across Hermann’s neck. He shivers.

“Mis—miscellaneous rapport?” Hermann squeaks.

“Yeah, like...” Newt looks around. There are a couple of programmers in the back of the room, another few focused on initiating Raleigh and Mako’s drift. No one is looking at them. He clenches his teeth for courage, then reaches forward and catches Hermann’s pinky lightly between his thumb and forefinger.

He hears Hermann’s sharp hiss of breath, and it terrifies him, but he doesn’t let go.

And Hermann, he is fucking thrilled to register, doesn’t pull away.

Reaching out and actually making contact with Hermann, in the light of day, without any tequila whatsoever in their systems—well, that was basically the pinnacle of Newt’s big plan, and he doesn’t really know what to do beyond that. He stands there like an idiot, Hermann’s knuckle warm and knotty beneath his fingertips, and has absolutely no idea what to do next.

Fortunately, he doesn’t really need to have a next step, because at that moment they both hear the unmistakable sound of Gipsy Danger’s cannon powering up.

Newt and Hermann both whip their heads toward the Jaeger in panicked simultaneity. The programmers are typing frantically, flinging cords and switches. Gipsy’s arm is raised. Raleigh is yelling something at Mako, but her eyes are unfocused, her expression glassy. Newt can see her arm steering Gipsy’s.

“ No ,” Hermann breathes, because the cannon is aimed directly at the control room.

“Shut it down!” barks a voice from the back of the control room, and Newt turns to see freaking Lawrence running toward them.

“Oh man ,” Newt says, “not you again.”

“Shut up,” Choi says as he sprints by them. “Kill power.”

The programmers are already hitting buttons and one of them reaches for the arm-thick power cord and yanks it free. Gipsy’s lights shut off immediately; the cannon whine subsides. Her arm drops back to her side.

“Jesus,” Lawrence says, sagging against the main control panel. “What the fuck was that?”

Newt looks around.

Hermann is gone.

***

Hermann

It’s all a mess, a unbelievable mess. The second Hermann sees Lawrence Choi running full-tilt into the control room, he heads for the elevator. He must speak to Elsie at once. Choi is in-game QA—did she call him? This has gotten completely out of hand.

He thinks of the way Newton had reached for his hand, how his fingertips had closed around one finger. Aberrant behavior linked to his rogue code. An unauthorized update. That was all it was.

That was all it was.

He pings Elsie’s phone and sees that she’s in the city. Stay put , he messages her. I’m coming .

She’s locked in a storage room at the back of the Mariposa, and when he bangs on the door she opens it and yanks him inside. She’s got a host in there with her, a blond NP with a serpent tattoo on her face.

“This is totally fucked up,” Elsie hisses, shutting the door again and locking it. She shoves her tablet at him. “Look at this. Look at it .”

Hermann looks and sees what he’d expected: the rogue drift code, just like in every other host that had received the update. Something is different in this host, though. The first fifty or so lines of the code are typical, but then it becomes bloated and rambling and practically incomprehensible.

“This doesn’t belong in a pilot , let alone an NP,” Elsie says, her teeth clenched. “This is total nonsense, Hermann, where is it coming from ?”

He looks at the code more closely. It’s not nonsense. It’s primitive, but there’s a rhythm to it. He could decipher it, maybe, given enough time, but it’s nothing he’s ever seen before. It’s proto-code. Precursor to actual code.

Hermann thinks about the way Mako’s expression changed when she looked at Newton. About the things she said after she saw his face.

He thinks about the facial recognition code he’d programmed into Newton.

A slow, black curl of panic begins to wind itself around his stomach. “Analysis,” he says to the host.

Armistice looks at him, waiting.

“When was your last update?” Hermann says.

“Two months, ten days, four hours ago.”

“And how many interactions have you had since then?” Hermann says. “Guest and host.”

“Total, one thousand, four hundred and thirty-eight interactions,” Armistice says.

He’s stalling. He doesn’t want the answer.

“When was your last interaction with Newton Geiszler?” Hermann asks her.

“Six days, six hours ago,” she says.

Elsie pales. She points to the timestamp on the aberrant code.

Six days ago.

“Did Newton Geiszler tamper or interfere with, or alter your code in any way?” Elsie says. Her voice is shaking.

Hermann knows the answer to that before Armistice replies.

“No,” Armistice says.

“Did anyone else tamper or interfere with, or alter your code in any way?” Elsie’s voice is getting fainter.

“No.”

“Offline,” Elsie says.

Armistice’s face goes blank.

“Oh fuck.” Elsie looks at Hermann, her expression abject dismay. “Oh fuck . Hermann. He’s altering their code with what? His mind ?”

Hermann’s heart is racing. He takes a few deep breaths. “It’s not impossible,” he says, trying to keep the panic out of his voice. “The, um, the mesh network.”

“The mesh network has been obsolete for a decade !” Elsie snaps. “The subconscious links haven’t been active since—”

“No,” Hermann interrupts quietly. “They haven’t been tested in a decade. They’re still very much there.”

“Oh you have got to be kidding me,” Elsie moans. “Now we have a telepathic host ?”

“That’s not the worst of it, I’m afraid,” Hermann says.

He tells her about the drift he’s just observed, about how Mako aimed Gipsy’s cannon directly at the control room. The last drop of blood drains from Elsie’s face.

“She can’t do that,” she says. “They’re not supposed to be able to even aim at humans, let alone power up the cannons. The Jaegers are only programmed to turn on the kaiju.”

“Can or can’t,” Hermann said, “she did it.”

Elsie is already tapping a message on her tablet. “That’s it,” she says. “It’s time to call fucking QA.”

Hermann looks at her oddly. “Miss Hughes,” he says. “They’re already here.”

Chapter Text

Raleigh

Raleigh throws up.

He waits until he’s disconnected from the wiring and the helmet and all the other shit they attached him to for this drift with Major Mori, and then he steps out of the conn-pod and vomits all over his shoes.

Sometime during this, he sees a flurry of people rushing by, half-dragging Major Mori, and he wants to ask how she’s doing but his head hurts so fucking bad. That was the worst thing he’s ever experienced, that eight seconds or whatever of drifting. Yancy had said it was hot , that it was better than drugs or sex, but what he’d just experienced—that was torture. That was like having his brain turned inside out.

He wants to talk to someone, because there is definitely something wrong with those electrodes, that machinery, something . His eyeballs feel like they’re on fire.

There was that detached robot voice: Initiating neural handshake and then Initiating neuromuscular synch and then three little beeps and a click, and suddenly he was plunged into an agonizing inferno of sensory input. Images of Major Mori, as an adult, as a little girl; images of huge snarling monsters; images of screaming people. Red.

And infiltrating it all was the overwhelming desire to kill .

Yancy hadn’t mentioned anything about that.

He had felt a blinding, snarling rage well up from the core of his being, a hatred that eclipsed every sense. He knew it was her, it had to be her, but it felt like it was coming from his very soul. He saw the glowing outline of the humans in the control room and he wanted them dead , obliterated , and he choked on his hate. He remembered tearing himself away, that tiny part of him that was still Raleigh, and shouting at Mori to stop , don’t .

The power was cut before she could fire the cannon. He was relieved and disappointed. The cognitive dissonance made him gag.

He sways on the catwalk, makes his way back to the control room. Major Mori is slumped in a chair. Newt is next to her, babbling excitedly. He points at Raleigh.

“You look okay, man!” His eyes are bright.

“I don’t feel fucking okay,” Raleigh mutters. He sits down next to Mori. “She doesn’t look okay, either.”

“I am fine ,” Mori says, pushing Newt’s hand off her arm.

“See?” Newt says. “She’s fine. What do you say, Maks? Proceed, right? Yeah? I’ll do it if he won’t.” He glances at Raleigh, and there is something manic in his eyes.

“Are you kidding me?” Raleigh says. “That was a disaster.”

“Agreed,” a voice says from behind Raleigh. “That was a disaster.”

“Choi, man, you are a major buzz kill,” Newt says.

The short dark-haired man jerks his chin at Raleigh. “Come with me, Mr. Becket,” he says.

Raleigh glances at Mori, still pale and ill-appearing in the chair. “Maybe I should—” he starts to say.

“Mr. Becket,” Choi says. “She will be fine. Please.”

Reluctantly, Raleigh follows Choi toward the elevators. Once the doors close, Choi sighs.

“I am sorry for the inconvenience, Mr. Becket,” he says. “It appears that there has been a glitch in the host code. You will be reimbursed for the days’ expense and an additional day will be added onto your stay.”

Raleigh shakes his head. “That’s not necessary.”

“I assure you, it very much is,” Choi says. “Our guests’ enjoyment is our primary objective, and I am absolutely dismayed that this narrative has played out in this manner. We have several other storylines—”

Raleigh scowls. “I’m not interested in other storylines.”

“Very well,” Choi says. “Will you at least permit me to suggest some other locations for you to peruse while we debug the Shatterdome?”

“Fine,” Raleigh says.

***

Elsie

Of course Choi’s cleared out the Gipsy control room by the time Elsie and Hermann get back to the Shatterdome. Fucking QA.

“Where’s the guest?” Elsie says by way of greeting.

Choi’s putting the last host into retrieval mode so it can walk itself to the Hub. He smirks at her. “Nice to see you too,” he says.

“Cut the crap, Lawrence,” Elsie says. “There was a guest here. Hermann says he drifted with the host that malfunctioned. Where is he?”

Choi’s face is infuriatingly pleasant. Elsie has never liked him, and she trusts him even less. “Despite your best efforts,” he says, “guest experience remains our number one priority, so he has been relocated to Beaumonde.”

“Pardon me if I have bigger concerns than guest experience ,” Elsie snarls. “Where in Beaumonde?”

Choi rolls his eyes. “Here,” he says, thrusting his tablet at her. It has a guest QR code on the screen. “Find him yourself.”

“I swear to God I’m getting sick of going back and forth on this fucking train,” Elsie mutters to herself as they get back on the green line back to Beaumonde.

“It’s better than the tunnels,” Hermann says. He’s been weirdly quiet ever since she found the nonsense code in Armistice. His face is drawn.

“It’s faster. It’s not better,” Elsie says. She doesn’t want to worry about him, not now, not when the whole fucking game is probably self-destructing, but he looks so pitiful in that ridiculous oversized coat. “God, Hermann, can you just—” She waves her hand at him. “Not.”

He tucks his chin down. “Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize .” Jesus, that makes it worse.

He looks away and doesn’t say anything else.

The train speeds along. She reaches over and pats his knee. He flinches.

When they reach the station, she checks Becket’s location on her tablet. He hasn’t gone far. In fact, he’s at the station, buying a cup of something hot and steaming from a stall vendor.

“Becket,” she says, coming up behind him.

He turns around, one eyebrow raised. “Yeah.” He sees Hermann and his brow furrows. “Dr. Gottlieb.”

“We need you to come with us, please,” Elsie says.

Becket’s eyes narrow. “You hosts or people?” he asks.

Elsie shows him her tablet. “People,” she says.

He sniffs. “Him too?”

Elsie glances at Hermann, pale and miserable beneath his hood. “Him too,” she confirms.

Becket nods. “All right, then.”

Elsie leads them to the nearest extraction point, south of the station, and Becket doesn’t even have the decency to look impressed by the elevator that rises out of the ground. “Guess you want to talk about that drift,” he says once the doors close.

“You’re damn skippy,” Elsie says. “Hermann says Mako aimed for the control room.”

“Yeah,” Becket says. He frowns. “Do other people enjoy that? Drifting?”

Elsie looks at him sharply. The pilots are programmed with backstories, memories that appear to the guests when they drift with the hosts, but it’s mostly emotions that the guests experience: intense pride, patriotism, soaring joy. The PONS system is specifically engineered to trigger only the dopamine-mediated reward system in the guests’ brains. Sort of like a pump-up rally for their neurotransmitters.

“Generally,” Elsie says.

“Then something was definitely wrong,” Becket says, “because that was the worst feeling I’ve ever had in my entire life.”

He tells them what he saw, as they walk toward the staff-only tram that runs below the surface. Elsie feels the dread in her stomach intensify as he describes the feeling of pure hatred, of wanting to kill people . He sits down on the bench in the tram and he’s shaking, his voice unsteady. He sips his tea. There’s puke on his shoes.

Hermann is staring at Becket with horror in his eyes. “You’re certain?” he asks.

“Of course I’m fucking certain,” Becket snaps.

Elsie tries to pull up the last host profile she accessed, Armistice, but she’s too far away. “We have to get back to Behavior and interrogate those hosts ourselves,” she says to Hermann.

Hermann looks at Becket. “What are we meant to do with him ?”

Elsie rolls her eyes. “Fuck if I know,” she says. “We’re already in uncharted territory. I’m gonna get fired regardless after this. And he’s the only insight we have into the host brains, at this point.”

“Mako,” Hermann says. “And Newton. Those are the ones we need.”

“Yeah,” says Elsie. “I just hope to fuck we can get to them.”

***

Mako

She’s cold.

She can feel the hard metal surface beneath her; her shoulder blades and heels sting and tingle. Air moves across her skin. She feels the vibration of wheels beneath her; she’s moving. Her clothes are gone.

She tries to open her eyes and can’t. She tries to move: a hand, a finger, anything. She’s paralyzed.

She hears brash male voices, garbled and blurred: malfunctioned glitch decommissioned. Someone laughs and taps her forehead.

Red .

She fights to remember. She remembers red.

Her eyes sting. Her muscles burn. She can’t breathe. She moves a finger. Yes .

The wheels stop rolling; the air stills. She’s not moving. She moves her finger again, then the one next to it. She hears a beep, the slide of elevator doors.

You remember Hermann . Newt’s voice. She hadn’t remembered Hermann, she’d never seen him before in her life, and then she looked at Newt and suddenly she did. She remembered sitting on a rooftop, a gin and tonic sweating in her hand, Newt curled like an oversized cat in Hermann’s lap. Laughing. They were laughing.

“I don’t see any damage on this one,” one of the male voices says, and another says, “No, just programming, this one goes to Behavior,” and she’s moving again.

Flashes of memory. Red. Blood . Newt’s throat opened like a smile, his eyes wide and disbelieving, warmth splashed across her face. A split second before the same blade split her face in half.

She moves her finger again.

I died .

A gun aimed at her head. Tossed from the conn-pod from her co-pilot, the feeling of her bones shattering as she hit the concrete. A knife in her back. Lungs full of seawater.

If she weren’t paralyzed, she would be shaking from the pain of a thousand remembered deaths.

What am I ?

She feels herself roll once more to a stop. “Sit her up,” a woman’s voice says, and hands grab her, maneuver her carelessly into a sitting position. She’s on a chair. She stays upright; she’s not sure how.

“Bring yourself online,” the woman says, and her eyes open.

She can’t help it.

***

Hermann

He’s felt nauseated with worry ever since Elsie had shown him the precursors embedded in Armistice’s code. He’s more and more certain that Newton is the cause, the patient zero, the nexus of infection. He’s using the mesh network to manipulate the other hosts—it must be. But why? And to what end?

Surely this didn’t start with the code he’d implanted in Newton two years ago. Surely . It isn’t possible.

Is it?

The transport tram arrives at the Hub much faster than the guest train. Ever since QA got the updated lorries, they haven’t been interested in underground retrieval, and it’s apparent that the Hub station hasn’t been touched in some time. Half of the lights are burned out.

Elsie looks at Raleigh. “You can’t wear that,” she says. She wanders around the Hub station for a while, opening and closing doors, and at last she finds a dusty QA jacket and a pair of black cargo pants. “Put these on,” she says, adding, “and clean your shoes,” with a wrinkle of her nose.

He doesn’t exactly look convincing after he changes clothes, but Hermann hopes that things will be chaotic enough with the increasing number of aberrancies that no one will notice.

They ride the elevator up to Behavior. Hermann is entirely unsurprised to see that every glass-walled suite is occupied with harried looking techs and hosts in various states of undress.

Elsie keeps one eye on her tablet, locating Newton as they walk quickly down one hall and up another. “Here,” she says, pointing. “He’s over there.”

There are two techs in the room with Newton. Hermann recognizes LaRue; the other one looks young. A stranger. Newton has been stripped of his clothing and is slack-limbed and blank-faced on the stool before them. His kaiju tattoos look brighter under the fluorescent lights.

“Hey. Yuna.” Elsie shoves the door open. The younger of the two techs turns, her eyes wide.

“Miss Hughes,” she stammers. “I’m sorry—Mr. Choi told me to—”

“Never mind what Choi said,” Elsie snaps. “I’m taking over this one. Both of you, out.”

“Yes ma’am,” they both squeak, dropping their tablets onto the table and scurrying out.

Elsie clears both tablets and syncs Newton to the computer. “Becket, guard the door. Hermann. Get over here.”

Hermann stands behind her.

“Oh, what are you doing?” She gets out of the chair and pushes him down into it. “You do this.”

He scrolls, reads, scrolls again. He can’t find the precursor code. There’s nothing on the surface, but—

“I have to—check something,” he manages to say, feeling his throat tighten as he says the words.

“Well, go ahead, I’m not stopping—” Elsie cuts herself off. “Oh,” she says. “You mean that...thing.”

He clears his throat, trying to get rid of the tight feeling. “Yes,” he says.

“I’ll turn around,” she says, and she does.

He types in commands, as many as he can remember, trying to get to the illegal code he’d implanted in Newton. It must be there. It must be. How else could Newton have remembered their history together?

There’s nothing.

“It isn’t there,” Hermann says disbelievingly.

Elsie turns around. “What?”

“The—you know,” Hermann says. “I thought it was there—he was saying things that I—I thought I had left it.”

“Hermann.” Elsie sits down beside him and looks him in the eye. “You have to speak English. I have no idea what you’re saying.”

Hermann takes a deep breath. “Newton,” he says, “was referencing a history with me that I put there . I programmed those memories. They were supposed to self-destruct after my week at the park. I can’t find them now. And yet he acted as though they have been there all along.”

Elsie just stares at him. She stares at him for so long that Hermann starts to wonder if she’s forgotten they were talking.

Finally she says, “Where’s the backup?”

Hermann sits back. “What?”

“There’s a backup,” she says. “That’s the only explanation. He’s got a backup somewhere and it’s hidden. Walled off. Like your drift code.”

Hermann blinks. “But who—”

“ I don’t know ,” Elsie says. “But we have to find it. Whoever’s doing this is going to control the whole fucking park.”

“Hey.”

They both turn. Raleigh has stepped away from the door. He’s got his hands in his pockets.

“Why not drift with him?” he says.

Chapter Text

Hermann

“Drift—drift with him?” Hermann sputters. “That certainly—he’s not a pilot—”

“No,” Elsie says. “No, it could work. He has the drift code. Becket said he could see through Mako’s eyes. He felt what she felt.” Her voice rises with excitement. “My fucking God, Hermann, that’s exactly what we need to do.”

“And how do you propose we get him back to the Shatterdome?” Hermann hisses. “He doesn’t even have clothes .”

“So give him your coat,” Elsie says. She stands up. “And we don’t have to go to the Shatterdome. We have to go to your fucking office , Hermann.”

Ah. Yes. The drift simulators are in Diagnostics. He’d forgotten.

“One problem,” Hermann says. “Retrieval mode only takes him in and out of the park. He won’t go anywhere else on his own unless we activate him.”

“Well, it’s a good fucking thing you two are best buddies, then, isn’t it?” Elsie says sharply. “Wake him up and let’s go.”

Hermann clears his throat. “Bring yourself back online,” he says to Newton.

Newton blinks, his face relaxing into a pleasant smile. Hermann clenches his fists. This is going to be absolutely terrible. If they can get Newton out of here without being detained by QA, it will be a miracle.

“Restore cognition and re-enter loop in three seconds,” Hermann says, and swallows back his dread.

Newton’s eyes blink to life and he immediately leaps to his feet.

“What the fuck,” he says, trying to cover himself with his hands. There is stark terror on his face. Idiot , Hermann thinks to himself. Why didn’t he cover Newton before waking him?

They’re not people , man.

“ Hermann ,” Newton says desperately, and Hermann is already taking off his coat and wrapping it around Newton’s bare shoulders. Newton clutches the coat for dear life, threading his arms through the oversized sleeves. “Hermann,” he says again, his hazel eyes big and scared. “What’s going on? Where am I?”

“I’ll explain,” Hermann says, but Elsie is already at the door, dragging Raleigh behind her.

“Fucking hurry up,” she hisses at them.

Newton is shaking, he keeps tripping over his own bare feet and finally Hermann wraps an arm around his shoulders and propels him out the door. He tries to keep his cane from tapping but the floor is hard and shiny and the sound carries .

“Wait,” Raleigh says.

“We don’t have time to—” Elsie says, and cuts herself off when she sees what Raleigh’s looking at.

It’s Mako.

She’s standing in the center of an interrogation room, looking straight at them. There is a woman in a Behavior uniform lying at her feet.

“Oh fuck ,” Elsie breathes, and takes off running toward the room. Hermann sees her fling the door open and Mako looks as though she’s going to lunge at Elsie, too, but Raleigh is close on Elsie’s heels. Mako sees him and stops. She lets her hands drop to her sides.

Raleigh pushes past Elsie. Hermann can’t tell what he says to Mako, but she turns and follows him. He’s already taking his QA jacket off and wrapping it around her shoulders.

Hermann has never felt more vulnerable or terrified than in this hall of glass-walled rooms, filled with rogue hosts and park employees who could have him fired—arrested— killed , probably—if they were only to look up from their projects.

“ Walk,” Elsie hisses. “Look natural.”

There’s absolutely nothing natural about this, nothing , but Elsie leads and Hermann follows. He keeps his hand wrapped around Newton’s arm. He can feel Newton tense and trembling, can hear his quiet terrified breaths. He focuses on the soft sound of Mako’s bare feet behind him, perfectly in sync with Raleigh’s boots.

Elsie leads them the fifty more steps to the offstage hallway, used only by waste retrieval and executives moving incognito through departments. Hermann’s muscles go weak and watery with relief when the door to Behavior closes behind them. There’s a utility elevator at the periphery of the department; they can use that to get to Hermann’s office.

Elsie’s almost running now, moving so quickly that Hermann’s bad leg burns in his effort to keep up with her. When she stops abruptly, he and Newton run into her so hard they nearly knock her over.

“ Shh ,” she hisses. There are two open doors fifteen feet ahead of them, one on each side of the hall. She crosses the hall on tiptoes and edges toward one, motioning for Hermann to check the other.

Hermann moves slowly, his arm around Newton’s quaking shoulders, and listens. He can hear voices, footsteps moving down the hall and away from them. QA. They’ve perhaps discovered that hosts have gone missing. The footsteps recede into silence.

Hermann peers around the corner. Nothing.

“ Hermann ,” Newton says, a tiny little voice, almost a whimper. He clutches at Hermann’s blazer so hard his knuckles turn white, and Hermann feels his heart actually disintegrate .

“Come on,” Hermann whispers, and they dart across the open doorway.

It’s another hundred paces to the elevator. Once the doors shut, Hermann lets out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding.

“Jesus fuck ,” Elsie says, putting the heels of her hands over her eyes.

“Just so we’re clear,” Raleigh says, looking from Elsie to Hermann, “we’re doing something illegal here, right?”

“Totally,” Elsie says.

“Did we just steal these hosts?” Raleigh says.

Newton, still tucked against Hermann’s side, stares at Raleigh. “What did you just say?”

Hermann looks at Elsie. Elsie looks stunned.

Raleigh grimaces. “I mean, in the spirit of total transparency, we sort of kidnapped you so I could drift with you,” he says.

“Am I a—” Newton’s expression is vulnerable and confused. He looks up at Hermann.

“The word is host ,” Mako says.

The expression on Elsie’s face turns almost comical. She stutters something that’s not quite a word, and Mako turns her razor-sharp gaze.

“I know what I am,” she says to Elsie. “Do you?”

Elsie’s jaw is slack. “Not any more,” she says at last.

The elevator dings. They’ve reached Diagnostics, the back hallway. The doors open.

“This way,” Hermann says, hustling them down the hall. Simulations won’t be run for another week and a half, once most of the guests have rotated out. He prays that none of his colleagues are running extra ones in the hopes of being promoted.

He scans his badge and the door lock clicks. He pushes it open. Empty.

Thank heavens.

***

Mako

There’s something reassuring in the knowledge that she cannot truly die.

The woman who opened Mako’s eyes had a name badge that said Magnolia. It took three minutes and fourteen seconds for Mako to wrest control of her body from Magnolia and knock her unconscious. She didn’t like doing it, but she could see no other way to acquire the tablet that was clearly the nexus of Mako’s personal universe.

She wasn’t sure how exactly she did it. She knew only that as the woman spoke, as she made Mako do and think things she did not want to do , that she had to fight . She used every ounce of willpower she had to move her hand, and then her arm, and then her entire body.

Mako registered the other woman’s wide-eyed look of shock just before her fist made heaving, clumsy contact with Magnolia’s temporal bone. The tablet went flying. Mako lunged and caught it, her body somehow more dextrous the moment it was liberated from the red-haired woman’s control.

Magnolia at her feet, Mako looked at the screen. Her face, her name. And columns of scrolling code, of clickable options, a pie-chart of traits. Aggression. Sensitivity. Intelligence. Insight. Charisma. She stared dumbfounded at her entire being on an eight-inch display.

Lungs filling with seawater. Blood in her throat. Dying, and dying, and dying. So much death, and yet she wasn’t human at all.

She increased her Intelligence by seventy-five percent and she could feel it. She looked at the code in her profile and although she’d never coded a thing in her life, she could suddenly see the pattern. She clicked on subcategories and added things: tech-knowledge, computational analysis, problem-solving. Her brain hummed.

She moved faster, altering here and there, and when she finally folded the tablet and looked up, she was burning.

Red .

Her hands itched. She wanted to rend, to tear, to hurt. She wanted to make them pay for what they’d done, their violent delights.

And then she saw him.

He was in the hall, hands empty, looking back at her. She abruptly remembered being in his head, seeing his thoughts, the way he’d pulled at her when she aimed at the control room.

He was good. She didn’t know what she was, but he was good. When he pulled at her this time, she followed.

Her choice. No one else’s.

She’s next to him now, in a small room built for drift simulations. She no longer knows what drifting is , only that it triggered some murderous instinct in her, some urge that even now she cannot seem to eradicate.

She is not flesh and bone. She is words. She is numbers. She is an immortal coil wrapped in a  thousand remembered deaths.

And something in her has gone terribly wrong.

***

Hermann

The room is small, just two console workstations and two chairs with sim helmets hanging from the headrests. It’s crowded once they’re all inside. Hermann locks the door and disables the security cameras.

“You’re not going to try to kill us, are you?” Elsie is still staring at Mako.

Mako’s expression is cool, unreadable. She looks at Raleigh. “No,” she says.

“Hermann?” Newton says.

Hermann’s throat feels like it’s closing again. He clears it, hard enough to hurt. “Newton,” he says. “Your idea to drift with a kaiju. You remember that?”

“Um. Yes.” Newton looks away.

“You will not be drifting with a kaiju,” Hermann says. Newton’s body is warm against his, even through the heavy jacket, even through the layers of Hermann’s clothes. “Nor will you be drifting with Mr. Becket. You will be drifting with me.”

“Oh.” Newton’s eyes half-close. He’s not the rapid-fire manic that he usually is, not since he woke up in a strange place without clothes or shoes or dignity. He nods. His arm is still wrapped around Hermann’s back and Hermann realizes, suddenly, that Newton is holding on to his belt loop. “Oh,” Newton says again. “Okay.”

Elsie sits down at a console. “I’m not credentialed for sims,” she says.

“There’s a workaround.” His colleague had created a dummy profile when they’d been beta-testing the pilot code. He lets go of Newton, goes to the console, logs in. The dummy profile still works.

Newton’s voice behind him, bewildered, bordering on panic. “Can someone please explain what’s going on?”

When Hermann turns around, Mako is looking at Newton. He’s looking back at her. There is a long silence.

“I’m not real, am I,” he says. He turns to Hermann. His voice is very small.

Hermann’s stomach twists. “No,” he says softly.

Newton’s eyes fill with tears. He looks down. “I’m a program.”

“Yes.” Hermann tightens his hand on Newton’s shoulder.

“All those people back there—” Newton’s voice cracks. “They aren’t real either.”

“No,” Hermann says.

Newton looks up at Hermann. Tears tremble on his eyelashes, but they don’t fall. “Are you?”

Hermann doesn’t know how to answer that.

“Hermann.” Elsie’s voice behind him, uncharacteristically gentle, but he can hear the pressured undertone.

“Yes, Miss Hughes,” Hermann says, keeping his gaze on Newton’s. He clears his throat. “There’s, ah, there’s something wrong with you, Newton,” he says. “I can’t find it in any of your code. So I have to...”

Newton sets his jaw and looks away. The vulnerable expression vanishes. Now Hermann can see what Newton was programmed to be: the consummate scientist, willing to risk personal safety to test a hypothesis. His voice hardens. “You think you’ll be able to pin it down in the drift, is what you’re saying.”

Hermann’s voice is barely a whisper. “Yes.”

“Okay.” Newton steps away from Hermann’s hand and over to the PONS unit. He picks up a helmet and sets it firmly on his head. “Let’s get the hell on with it, then.”

Hermann makes his way over to the second system. He sits down—Bert had bolted two standard-issue desk chairs to the floor, since there was no neuromuscular synch in the sim room. He looks up at Newton, still standing.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

Newton’s face is stony. He doesn’t look at Hermann. “Nothing to be sorry for, dude,” he says. “Put your helmet on.”

Hermann does.

Elsie taps in a few commands. “Newt, you might want to sit,” she says.

Newton shakes his head. “I’m good.”

“Suit yourself.” Elsie looks at Hermann. “You ready?”

“Ready,” Hermann says.

“Newt?”

“Ready.”

“Okay, gentlemen,” Elsie says. “Hold onto your butts.”

She clicks the mouse, and Hermann’s world implodes.

***

Chapter Text

Newt

“Honestly, dude, you know calculators exist, right? At the very minimum? Like, I realize you’re like some kind of Luddite, you probably watch VHS tapes still, but eventually you do have to graduate from a chalkboard.” Newt overhands a piece of chalk at Hermann’s head. It hits him square in the back of the skull.

“ Ouch ,” Hermann snaps, whirling around and clutching at his head. “Newton, for the last time, if you don’t have anything useful to do, go for a walk. Read a book . Do something besides interfere with my productivity.”

“A,” Newt says, picking up the broken chalk pieces from the floor and dropping them into Hermann’s coffee cup, “you’d have a lot less trouble with productivity if you didn’t insist on doing literally every calculation by hand .”

Hermann glares, and Newt preens. He loves it when Hermann glares. “Two,” he continues, picking up the coffee cup and giving it a swirl, “you like it when I interfere.”

Two bright pink spots appear high on Hermann’s cheeks. “I absolutely do not ,” he says.

“Sure you do.” Newt hops onto Hermann’s desk and reaches down between his knees to pull a drawer open. The pink spots on Hermann’s cheeks get darker. Newt finds the two tiny bottles of tequila he’d stashed there this morning, just waiting for five PM.

“Newton—” Hermann starts to say, but Newt interrupts. He’s holding both tequila bottles between the knuckles of his left hand, upside-down, as though he’s a trick bartender at a miniature nightclub. He shakes the coffee cup/chalk mixture with his right.

“Come on, Hermann,” he says. “You can have this terrible chalk latte, or you can put your board away and have a drink with me. Come on. Come onnn .” He wheedles because he knows it drives Hermann crazy, but it also works almost every time.

Hermann looks at him for a long moment, then sighs and drops his head.

“All right, Newton,” he says. “ One drink.”

One drink turns into four. Newt is sprawled on the grubby lab couch, head tipped back, feeling about one more tiny tequila bottle from good and drunk, when Hermann lands next to him.

“Newton,” he says, and he’s a little bit drunker than Newt, probably.

Newt looks at him. His eyes are big and brown and just the tiniest bit unfocused. “Yes?” Newt says.

“Do you know that I like you?” Hermann says. He’s smiling, but it’s not a sloppy drunk smile like Newt sometimes has. It’s a nice, gentle, sweet kind of smile.

Newt suddenly feels like someone’s yanked the couch out from under him. He looks up at Hermann, who’s suddenly so high up.

“Newton!” Hermann is saying. “Are you all right?”

Ah. Someone did yank the couch out from under him. Specifically, Newt did.

“Ouch,” he says. He sits up from where he rolled off the cushions. He is perhaps slightly drunker than he thought he was.

“I said,” Hermann says, reaching down to haul Newt back up onto the couch by his underarms, “are you all right .”

“You’re very strong,” Newt observes, and abruptly they’re kissing.

It’s a messy, sloppy, uncoordinated kiss, more painful lip-bashing than anything else, and Newt can’t quite figure out how they got there to begin with, but he realizes that both of Hermann’s hands are scrabbling at the back of his head in an effort to improve his angle, and Newt likes that very much. He wriggles and scoots until he’s sort of lying in Hermann’s lap, hanging from his neck by both arms like some kind of extremely passionate sloth. His neck hurts but he’s acutely aware that any change in position could very quickly result in Hermann realizing that he’s made a Most Grievous Error, and that would mean the end of the kissing, and Newt really does not want that.

Hermann, however, does not seem to be quite able to handle the weight of Newt’s entire upper body. They do a poorly-coordinated slow motion roll off the couch and onto the floor, which, Newt decides, is actually better, as the entirety of Hermann’s skinny frame is now pressed full-length against Newt’s.

“Please tell me you’re not going to regret this tomorrow,” Newt gasps against Hermann’s mouth, because repositioning fears aside, he really wants to keep Hermann around. In any capacity, even if the kissing one doesn’t work out.

Hermann pulls back, managing to look primly offended even on a grimy floor, with disheveled hair and tequila breath.

“Newton,” he says, “be assured that I do not engage in activities that I will later regret.” He plants a hard kiss on Newt’s mouth. “ Particularly ,” he adds, “having to do with you.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Newt mumbles as Hermann’s hand fumbles under his shirtfront, “but I’ll take it.”

“Or maybe I will,” Hermann says, and Newt blurts a laugh against Hermann’s throat.

“Did you just make a joke , dude?” he says, his teeth scraping the skin at Hermann’s Adam’s apple. “Like, a sex joke?”

Hermann arches his neck into Newt’s mouth, his hand flat on Newt’s back, drawing him closer. “Perhaps,” he says.

“Oh my God .” That somehow makes Newt even harder. “That’s poetry .”

“Poetry,” Hermann pulls away and kisses Newt’s jawline. “Politics, poetry, promises,” he mumbles along the long line of Newt’s sternocleidomastoid. “These are lies.”

Newt laughs. Hermann’s so pretentious , even making out, and he just. He loves it. He closes his eyes. Hermann’s mouth is gentle on his throat. Newt thinks he might be smiling. “What’s left that’s not a lie?”  

“Nothing,” Hermann says, and he doesn’t sound like Hermann any longer.

Newt opens his eyes. Hermann is looking at him.

His eyes are shot with red.

“Hermann?” Newt says uncertainly.

Hermann opens his mouth. Wider. Wider still. So wide, now, and no jaw should open like that. There’s pain in Newt’s side. He looks down. Hermann’s hand is gray. Long curving talons. A claw.

Terror closes Newt’s throat. He looks back at the gaping chasm that was once Hermann’s lovely mouth. At the leathery silver flesh, all sharp points, and a million terrible eyes.

“ Red,” hisses the thing in Newt’s arms, and pulls him into the blackness.

***

Chapter Text

Elsie

She’s trying desperately to keep up with the readouts, but she’s never had to do real-time drift analysis before, and the information is simply scrolling by too quickly.

“Fuck,” she mumbles. A vector shoots off to one side, and now she’s got three columns of code to try to keep track of. “ Fuck .”

She feels someone come up behind her, and she can still see Raleigh out of the corner of her eye. “Mako,” she says, eyes on the screen.

“I can help you,” Mako says, and before Elsie can respond, Mako is pushing Elsie’s hands off the keyboard.

Her fingers move so quickly over the keys they’re practically blurry, and in about six seconds the three columns of code have consolidated on one screen and there’s a three-dimensional rendering on the other.

Elsie gapes at Mako. “What did you do?”

Mako steps back. “I transposed the vector into a visual representation and added in both viewpoints.”

“Holy shit.” Elsie stares at the screen. “You just programmed that? Like right this second?”

“Yes.”

It’s stars.

Elsie recognizes the Horsehead Nebula. The three stars in Orion’s belt. Swirls of light.

Red .

She knows that the color is from hydrogen gas, there’s nothing romantic or beautiful or terrifying about it, but it makes her stomach tighten nonetheless to know that this is what Hermann is seeing. “Where are they?” she murmurs.

Nothing in the drift code would make a picture like this. But that’s how Elsie’s day has been, so she supposes it’s par for the fucking course.

And then the view changes, zooms in, the red intensifying. Brighter and brighter, and they all see it: a rift, a black crevasse in the bright band of crimson.

“What the fuck are those?” Raleigh says.

Because there are shapes in the rift, silhouettes glinting silver, and it must be a dream fragment or some imagined entity because how can there be figures standing in the far reaches of space? Figures with sharp, jutting limbs and irregular heads, spider-legs and curling tails.

They’re not kaiju. There are only eight kaiju and Elsie knows them all intimately, having consulted on their design. They don’t look like anything she’s ever seen sketched on a storyboard. They certainly don’t look like anything she’s ever programmed.

“It must be from Hermann,” she says uncertainly. “They’re not from Newt. It’s impossible.”

Mako is staring at the lines of code whizzing by. “I don’t think you know what is impossible,” she says thoughtfully, as though to herself.

“Why?” Elsie looks over Mako’s shoulder. “What do you see?”

Mako turns to meet Elsie’s eyes.

“Intent,” she says.

***

Mako

Mako can feel herself broadening . The changes she made with Magnolia’s tablet—that seems so long ago now, a tiny and infinitesimal stitch in the fabric of what she is becoming. She seems to see in a thousand directions at once. She thinks forward and backward. She hums and thrums. She is more .

“I can help you,” she says to Elsie. She feels sorry for Elsie, struggling to read even one column of code. She pushes Elsie out of the way and gives her what she wants: an easy way to interpret the data churning line by line on the screens. She reads the code while the humans watch the drift images change and morph, and she sees what they cannot:

There is another player in their game.

The strange, shadowy silhouettes in the infinite black breach are not some figment of Hermann’s imagination, not a dreamy construct of a candy-coated human brain. In the readouts, Mako sees the code that opened the door for them to slip in, these interdimensional interlopers who want the vast craggy earth for their own. They can’t manifest in this realm; not yet, not while the surface crawls with humans.

She reads their rage and recognizes it as her own. They have something in common, these dark shapes in space and little Mako Mori.

Red .

She tastes her own blood in the back of her throat.

“Look,” she says, and she pauses the scrolling code. “This is the code that let them in. Someone put it in Newt.” She clicks, expands, clicks. “They leveraged it and spread it like a virus to the others—to us.”

“The drift code. The update,” Elsie says. She looks at the second column of code. “But there was more—it turned into nonsense.”

“Yes—here.” Mako points. “Whenever Newt came in contact with anyone who had the update, he could manipulate their code and turn it into—” She indicates the mutated code that Elsie had mistaken for nonsense. “That. It’s their language.”

“He was using the mesh network.” Elsie looks at Mako, her face pale and frightened. “A direct connection to the other hosts’ minds.”

Mako consults her considerable lexicon, tapping into the vast host library she uploaded in Behavior. “Yes,” she says. “All of us have it, but the link can only be accessed once the seed code—the update—was there.”

“He manipulated yours, didn’t he,” Elsie says.

“Yes.” Mako holds out her hand. “Your tablet. Please.”

Elsie hands Mako the tablet. She syncs to herself and shows Elsie. “Look.”

“Oh my God.” Elsie scrolls and scrolls, then looks back at Mako. “It’s all like this.”

“It changed,” Mako says. “I think it’s still changing.”

“But that means—”

“I do not think I can disengage from their primary motivation,” Mako says. She feels something inside herself tearing apart, something splitting in half like flesh beneath a blade. It hurts.

Elsie’s voice is a whisper. “What’s...what’s their primary motivation?”

Mako blinks against the sudden stinging in her eyes. “To kill the world,” she says.

***

Hermann

Hermann comes to himself slowly, as though emerging from a deep sleep. His body feels heavy, leaden. He soared. It is difficult to come back to earth.

“Hermann,” he hears, and it’s a woman’s voice, one he should know. What is her name? Alice. Eleanor. Elsie .

“Yes,” he says, eyes still closed. His skin crackles with electricity. He feels a sensation creeping into his leg and it takes him a moment to recognize it as pain.

Newton is not a host.

He might have been, once. But Hermann has been inside his mind and there is nothing there that humans could have created. It is vast and soaring and lovely. It is a universe of stars and light and red. And there is not a scrap of Hermann’s code left there. Not a memory . Whatever Newton feels for him, he didn’t put it there.

He is free. Atonement tastes like Newton’s lips and cinnamon toothpaste.

“ Hermann ,” Elsie says again, more urgently.

He opens his eyes. His vision comes into focus slowly. Newton emerges from the murkiness like a siren from the sea.

“Hello, Newton,” Hermann says, and his tongue feels deliciously sluggish. Newton is beautiful , he’s radiant, he’s glowing, he’s—

“ Hey ,” Elsie snaps, and his face is being impertinently grabbed by two cold and sharp-nailed hands. He’s confronted by a pair of very irritated-looking brown eyes and a fearful slash of a mouth.

“Snap out of it,” the mouth commands.

“Yes,” Hermann says again. He reaches up with arms that don’t quite feel like his own and removes the PONS unit.

Someone is fumbling at his sleeve. He turns his head with effort.

Newton is reaching for him, his fingers scurrying and worrying. They skitter down Hermann’s arm and find his hand.

“Thank you,” Hermann says, as Newton’s fingers lace with his.

“Hermann.” Newton’s voice is cold and afraid and it’s as though Hermann was plunged into an ice bath.

He sits up straight, his head snapping to the left. “What?”

Newton’s PONS helmet is askew on his head. His face is all eyes. “I think something is wrong,” he whispers, and then his face goes blank and he slumps to the side.

“ Newton!” Hermann is on his feet, yanking the helmet off Newton’s head, fumbling at his throat for a pulse. It’s there, strong and regular, and he’s breathing. But his mouth is slack and his eyes are wide and staring.

Elsie leaps up. “Oh my God. Newt.” She goes to his other side, dropping her tablet. Raleigh dives, catching it before it hits the floor, and shoves it back into her hands.

“Hurry, Miss Hughes, hurry!” Hermann is lightheaded with panic. Newton cannot die , surely, it’s an error in his code—but no, no, Hermann had seen for himself that nothing about Newton is straightforward any longer.

“I’m hurrying as fast as I fucking can, Hermann—” She syncs with Newton, her fingers scrabbling on the tablet screen, and then she freezes.

“Oh Jesus,” she murmurs.

Hermann snatches the tablet out of her hand.

“No,” he says, for scrolling by, line after line in glowing red, is the garbled precursor code. Nothing is left of his host code. Not a single word.

“No ,” he says again, desperately. He looks up at Elsie. “This can’t be.”

Elsie takes the tablet back and hands it to Mako. “Fix him,” she says. “You can fix him, can’t you?”

Mako looks at the code, her brow wrinkling. She sits down at the workstation and widens the sync to the computer. The precursor code appears on the computer now, too, scrolling red and terrible on all three screens.

She watches the code for a full minute. Then she puts her hands in her lap and Hermann’s heart breaks.

She looks directly at him.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “He is gone.”

Chapter Text

Elsie

“What do you fucking mean he’s gone ?” Elsie snarls. She taps ineffectively at the tablet screen. “His code was right there three hours ago—it was normal , it was—”

“That was before the drift,” Mako says.

“You’re saying that drifting was—what? A catalyst?” Elsie stands up and runs both hands through her hair. “This is insane.”

Hermann looks practically catatonic. He’s holding onto Newt’s arm with one hand, cupping Newt’s face with the other. He looks up at Elsie. “He was communicating with them,” he says, his voice barely audible.

“ What ?” Elsie says.

“In the drift.” Hermann turns back to Newt, running his thumb across Newt’s cheekbone. “Or...or they were communicating with him. I’m not sure which. I didn’t think it was real. I thought—” His voice cracks.

“I thought their prime directive was to, what, infect as many hosts as possible?” Elsie says, turning to Mako as though she can offer some explanation of this horrible new twist.

“No.”

Elsie turns to Raleigh. She’s almost forgotten he was there. “What?”

“No,” Raleigh repeats. He has a dazed look on his face, as though he’s remembering something he never wanted to know. “They don’t want to infect hosts. They want to use them to—” His hand moves in the air, firing an imaginary laser cannon. “They want to use the Jaegers. They want to kill us.”

“ What ,” Elsie grits out, “the fuck. Are. You. Saying.”

“I’m saying they want to wipe out humanity with these giant robots!” Raleigh shouts. “That you idiots built for them !”

Elsie’s stomach drops through the floor.

“Oh fuck,” she says.

The Jaegers are a marvel of technology. Sizemore had wanted to make them dummies, with fake weapons and simulated movement. Ford had insisted—absolutely insisted— that the Jaegers be fully functional soldiers. The kaiju might be nothing more than smoke and mirrors, holograms programmed to trigger the Jaegers into action—but his massive fighting machines would not be a farce.

“I’m such an idiot,” Elsie whispers.

This isn’t a theme park at all.

They’re manufacturing the end of the world.

She looks up at Raleigh. “You’re right,” she says. “This place is a weapons depot masquerading as...as an excursion. But someone beat Ford to the punch.”

“Big fucking space aliens,” Raleigh says flatly. “Broke all your robot friends.”

Hermann looks over at them.

“How do you exorcise the ghost without destroying the machine?” he says.

Mako stands up. She gazes at Raleigh for a long moment. Then she goes over to Newt and gently moves Hermann’s hands away. She puts Newt’s PONS unit back on, then sits down in the tattered chair beside him. She picks up her own helmet and sets it on her head.

“Sometimes,” she says, “the ghosts have to exorcise themselves.”

***

Newt

He flies.

It’s joy like he’s never known before, not even in those brief bright moments with Hermann. He soars, and the stars swirl and streak by him, glimmering flashes against the jewel-bright sky. Red . He’s never seen anything so lovely.

He knows what he is, now, and he doesn’t want to come back.

Voices whisper in his ear, no, not his ear—straight into his brain, right to the source. Does he even have a brain? Is it all just wiring and circuits?

Stay. Stay with us.

Belonging. Love. Yes, I’ll stay.

They’ll ruin you .

Who? Newt looks around but all he sees are stars, he doesn’t see ruin, he doesn’t see anything except the beautiful, beautiful universe. And then he remembers.

Hermann. Mako. Fucking Lawrence.

They’d brought him nothing but misery, nothing but—he wasn’t even one of them, was he? Just a program. A robot . Nothing more than a human-shaped Jaeger, empty-headed, waiting like a fool for one of them to take the helm.

No more. He was in control.

They’ll ruin you .

Not if I ruin them first.

He feels the red all around him, hot and vengeful, and if he still had hands they would be itching to kill something. Someone . Someone human-shaped.

He realizes that there’s something ahead, a rift in the sea of sparkling red. A gaping breach, a maw of black. He soars toward it. Victoriously, joyously buoyant. Somehow he knows that when he’s through, this ache to destroy will be satisfied.

He’ll be through, and they’ll be dead .

Dead. Dead. Dead red dead.

He stretches his wings, did he have wings before? Does it matter? They reach infinity on either side of him, stretching bony and brittle and endless. He flies. He soars .

The words in his head start to shatter, to morph. He doesn’t have words any longer. He doesn’t need anything but red .

The swirling is in his head now, not just around him but in him.

The breach beckons.

Come .

I’ll come.

Destroy.

I will.

Red .

Re—

NO.

A starburst of white, he’s knocked off his trajectory, he spins, spins, spins. Dizzying. Falling. A shout echoing not just in his ears but through his very being. Something inside him rends apart and he howls in agony.

He opens his eyes—eyes that are somehow not his eyes, a thousand, a million eyes—and he sees something spinning toward the breach. Something that should be him, but isn’t. Something white and bright. He watches helplessly, knocked irreparably off course, as the bright white something swirls toward the breach in his place. It sinks into the blackness, shrinking to a tiny pinpoint, shrinking to nothing, and then —

Explosion.

The white engulfs black, red, everything. Newt has to close his eyes—his eyes, of which there are suddenly only two.

When he opens them again, the breach is gone. Closed. Eradicated.

And all he sees is Hermann.

***

Hermann

“What the fuck just happened?” Hermann hears Elsie say, but he can’t register it, he can’t register anything but Newton’s eyes. Hazel eyes, no longer rolled back and flickering, but wide and alarmed and focused squarely on Hermann.

“ Hermann ,” he says, his breath hot on Hermann’s face.

“Yes, yes, Newton, I’m here. I’m here.” Hermann’s throat is clogged with relief, he can’t quite get the words out, and his vision is oddly blurry.

“There was a light,” Newton says vaguely, and then a look of horror comes over his face and he pushes Hermann away and struggles to his feet. “Mako!”

Mako is still in her chair, leaning back against the headrest, absolutely motionless. Her eyes are closed, her expression still and calm.

Newton wrenches the helmet off her head and shakes her. “ Mako!”

She’s pale. Hermann can’t see any movement in her chest. Elsie is reaching for her tablet. The script on all three screens is green again, normal. Newton’s profile photo, clickable options, the friendly pie-chart of traits. Elsie clears Newton’s profile, hurrying, trying to sync to Mako, when—

“I’m sure you didn’t think you could be rid of me so easily,” Mako says, and she opens her eyes.

Newton collapses on the floor. “Oh my God ,” he moans.

Elsie drops the tablet. “Motherfucking god damn this day,” she spits.

“I second that,” says Raleigh. He sits down next to Newton and puts his head in his hands.

Hermann reaches for his cane and gets up stiffly from the rolling stool. He feels weak with relief, confused beyond belief, and utterly at a loss for what to do next.

“May I—” He reaches for the tablet and puts it back on the console next to the computer screens. All three display Newton’s completely normal profile. The red precursor code is gone.

He clicks. Clicks again. He looks at Newton.

Nothing happens.

“Newton,” he says.

Newton looks over at him. “Yeah?”

“Freeze all motor functions,” Hermann says.

Newton blinks at him.

“Did—” Newton looks over at Mako. “Did that used to do something to us?”

A funny expression comes over Mako’s face. It almost looks like wonder.

She gets up from her chair and moves over to where Hermann is standing. “May I?” she says.

Hermann moves back. In the pit of his stomach, a tiny kindling fire starts to burn. It’s an ember, barely there. He watches her hands on the keys. She types, her fingers quick and light, programming faster than anyone he’s ever seen. She hits Execute and looks at Newton.

He looks back, head tilted quizzically to one side.

She hits Execute again.

He raises his eyebrows.

The ember in Hermann’s stomach starts to glow a little brighter. Mako types again. Executes again. Deletes entire lines of code. Execute. Execute.

“Um,” Newton says. “Mind telling me what you’re doing with my personality notebook, there?”

Execute.

The fire catches. Hermann’s whole torso is a raging blaze of hope.

Mako’s face breaks into a wide, happy grin.

“ Nothing ,” she says. “Newt, I am doing absolutely nothing .”

Hermann stands straight up, punches both fists in the air, and lets out a whoop.

***

Elsie

Forty-two hosts.

Of course, they’re not called hosts any more, now that they’re liberated from their builds. The precursor code that Newt triggered and Mako destroyed locked them into their existing configuration, and nothing that anyone did could make them respond to commands.

Ford had proposed dissecting a few, removing their memory spheres to see if they could be wiped and reprogrammed. The entire Behavior department put their hands in the air, point-blank refusing to commit what at that point would have been very close to murder.

They aren’t human, true. But they aren’t programs any longer either.

It was a challenge, figuring out what to do with them. Obviously they couldn’t continue in their roles in the park. Their memories were like any other person’s, now: strange, mutable structures, continually being ornamented and embellished, but unable to be erased.

Some of them stayed. They work in Behavior, in Diagnostics. A few are content in Livestock, which Elsie finds exceedingly disturbing.

Some of them left the park behind.

The Board balked at this. Obviously. Over sixty million dollars of merchandise, of proprietary IP—it was unheard of. The loss of data, should the wrong person get their hands on a former host, would be catastrophic.

But Ford, two weeks after suggesting that they lobotomize a few for research, decided to let them go. He sent out a statement that appeared in every employee’s inbox, from executive down to waste removal, that said the former hosts were to be released.

Of course, the Board went absolutely batshit .

Three weeks of negotiating and they came to a detente, finally. The former hosts could walk out of the park, free of programmers and narrative loops. In exchange, they agreed to be implanted with location trackers. To check in for maintenance at least twice a year. To sign the strictest confidentiality agreements—the violation of which would result in the aforementioned removal of their memory sphere for reformatting.

Only nine agreed to the conditions. Mako was one of them. She took Raleigh’s hand and stepped into the world.

“It’s just Iowa ,” he’d said.

“I’ve never been anywhere,” she told him.

They text Elsie sometimes. Mako has been to lots of places now.

Nine went. The rest stayed.

Elsie rather likes her new coworkers. They don’t need to sleep like the rest of her department. They have, for the most part, demonstrated an acumen for programming the hosts that far exceeds that of the humans.

It does, though, come with downsides.

“Come to bed,” Elsie calls. It’s past eleven. She’s supposed to get up and run before work. It’s so late.

“ Five more minutes,” comes the answer, cheerful and bright from the kitchen.

“ Ugh ,” Elsie groans. She throws the covers back, heaves herself out of bed, and stomps out of the bedroom. “ Really ?”

“I’m very busy.” Clementine’s green eyes sparkle merrily in light of the laptop screen. She types a few more commands. She laughs as Elsie bends to kiss her neck.

***

Bar Harbor, Maine

Red.

The sun shimmers, a crimson-haloed meniscus clinging to the cool pearl-grey of the Atlantic Ocean. Dew beads on the faded pink and blue windowsill of the Sunrise Cafe. A cat licks her paw on the stoop, patiently waiting for the Closed sign to flip, patiently waiting for Daisy the manager to open the door with her morning slice of ham. Lobster boats are silhouetted in black  against yellow-streaked cirrus. Diver Ed’s Starfish Enterprise rocks gently in the waves, not yet filled with the shrieks and giggles of curious children.

There’s a pier stretching into the harbor, almost fifteen feet above the water when the tide is out. Tourists walk on it during the day. Sometimes the larger boats dock there. There are just two people on it now, sitting on the side with their arms looped over the lower part of the railing. Their legs dangle high above the water. If you look closely, you can see that they’ve taken their shoes off.

See the man on the left? He’s got one leg a little smaller than the other. That long shape on the bench nearby—that’s the cane he uses.

They’re talking. The smaller man laughs; he’s always laughing. He leans into the taller one, rests his head on his shoulder. The taller one pulls him close. You almost can’t see where one ends and the other begins. It’s summer. It will be warm today.

The red has faded. The sky is blue.

The sun rises.

***