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Hermann is a very quiet little boy. He lives in his own head, his mother says, looking at him with an emotion that she will always deny is sadness.
He doesn’t play with stuffed animals like his siblings, or action figures, or really any toys other than a few robot figures and some toy planes.
He loves toy planes.
He says he’s going to be a pilot someday, but he never really believes it, not as his hip starts bothering him more and more over the years and his eyes start to grow dull.
Mostly he doesn’t play with toys, though. Mostly he writes in little notebooks and on papers he carefully pastes on the walls.
He writes numbers. He starts that when he’s a very young child, about three, when he watches his father writing his own numbers on a whiteboard.
He studies those numbers, and they’re too advanced for him to understand, true, but he finds them fascinating, just the shape of them, and he steals Karla’s first grade math book and makes his own makeshift whiteboard and carefully reads the instructions in the book and then equally carefully writes numbers all over the pieces of paper.
That’s the day he learns how to add.
That’s also the day that Karla walks into his room and stops and stares at his work and then calls out, “Mama!”
That’s the day they realize that Hermann is different.
He skips many grades at school because his parents don’t believe in him wasting his intellect on things that he can already do and try their best to ignore what the teachers warn about “stunted development of social skills”.
Sometimes Hermann wonders if he would be better with people had he spent more time with people his age growing up like Karla always said, and most of the time he doesn’t care.
He doesn’t care about people because people start hurting him very early on—the children at school laugh at him and they beat him up and when he starts using a cane they call him a cripple and his mother promises that they’ll go out together soon but they never do and his father says he doesn’t have time for him right now but he will soon and he’s lying—and Hermann decides that numbers are his friends.
Then he decides that he doesn’t need any other friends. Numbers do not lie to him and he appreciates that.
Hermann finally leaves the hell that is secondary school when he’s fourteen to study at TU Berlin.
He buries himself even deeper in his studies because he still doesn’t know how to interact with other people, especially not these adults that look at him warily, who don’t know what to do with him.
But Hermann is happy enough, wrapped in his numbers like they’re armor.
When Hermann is twenty-six, his carefully constructed world falls apart as he watches utter confusion unfold before him on television.
Six months later, the next Kaiju makes landfall, and that is when Hermann is certain this is going to continue until somebody can stop it, and that is also when Hermann is certain that he is going to be one of those people, no matter what.
He starts to apply his numbers to the Kaiju.
The third makes landfall.
He begins to see a pattern.
Then, he’s predicting when the next Kaiju will land. He writes papers on it, posts his findings on the internet, informs his father—anything for people to at least have this knowledge in a world full of bizarre happenings.
The fourth Kaiju lands a day after he predicts it will, and then he’s making another prediction, and another, and he’s trying to figure out where the Kaiju are coming from. Other scientists have already figured out that they’re coming from an entirely different direction, and that’s when Hermann starts to study exactly where they could be coming from, where the breach was formed.
Because after they find that out, they can start figuring out what exactly is inside the breach. What this other dimension consists of, if there’s any kind of…passage that the Kaiju are taking.
Hermann is working on refining his predictive model when there’s a knock at the door of his office.
He doesn’t notice, too wrapped up in his equations, his chalk tapping against one of his blackboards.
The door opens, and that he does notice, huffing angrily and looking over at the stranger who has had the nerve to barge into his office.
He raises an eyebrow when he notices who it is: a tall man with a formidable military stature and a uniform.
Hermann knows where this is going, and he listens quietly as Marshall Pentecost recruits him to the PPDC.
Hermann nods when it’s over. “It’s about time.”
+
When he’s a child, Newt’s thoughts go so fast it’s hard for even him to catch up to them sometimes, but he does his best.
He scrawls his theories, his views, his diagrams, anything he deems important enough to keep into notebooks, and when he runs out of paper he writes on any other available surface—the walls of his room, his desk, his skin.
He draws on his skin a lot, monsters from movies and from his own mind.
(His mind is full of monsters. They rampage through his dreams, but he sleeps fine, when he sleeps.)
He talks too fast and the other kids call him a freak and Newt laughs at them and skips another grade because he’s bored.
That’s the problem, he’s always bored because the world is boring, and by the time Newt is thirteen years old he wants to crawl out of his skin and do something that is beyond just exist, and he picks fights even though he’s a tiny kid and revels in the pain of getting beaten up because that’s a good way to feel something.
He moves a million miles a minute and sometimes he ends up stagnating, holing himself in his room for days poring over his work and not even making as many corrections as he wants because who has the energy, and sometimes he goes so fast that it scares him, that his body feels like it’s completely charged with electricity and he’s pretty sure it’s going to electrocute him.
He watches monster movies and marvels in the scale of it all, wonders what it would be like if there were real monsters.
Newt gets accepted into MIT and immediately jumps in and starts working.
He’s got six doctorates and is teaching by the time he’s twenty-five, and when his parents ask him why Newt laughs and says, “You know I get bored easily.”
Twenty-five is also the year that the first Kaiju makes land in San Francisco, and Newt watches in horror along with a huge, jostling crowd of students and professors, but the thing is—he doesn’t just watch in horror, because that monster—it’s awesome.
Sure, maybe it’s awesome in the original sense of the word, but it’s amazing and he wants to study it immediately, because this is what he’s been dreaming of for years.
Monsters, and it’s sad that people are dying, it’s fucking tragic, but this is a huge breakthrough, because what can this be other than an alien?
Kaiju, his mind supplies.
The news anchor calls the monster Trespasser, and a few months after San Francisco gets cleaned up—Newt sees the numbers, the death toll, watches the news, watches people grieving and he vomits violently just from the guilt, because he thought and he still thinks that the monster that destroyed so many people’s lives was awesome and for the millionth time he wonders if he’s a monster too—Newt goes to see Trespasser’s skull, and he looks at it and takes like a million pictures and it’s seriously amazing because he’s already started to study Trespasser.
He wonders, loudly and to anyone who will listen, which is almost nobody, if Trespasser is really the last of these creatures.
He doesn’t think so.
It’s just too huge, too bizarre to happen just once. Where did it come from? If they can’t figure out where it came from, then they can’t say that it isn’t coming back, Newt argues.
He’s right, too, and there’s part of him that says, ha, told you, when the next Kaiju makes landfall in Manila, and there’s another part of him that says, shit.
That’s when he really starts studying the Kaiju, because Newt, over everything, is a biologist, it’s what’s always really fascinated him, and now he can do what he always wanted to do—he can be a xenobiologist.
His entire life starts to revolve around the Kaiju, and every time one of them makes landfall he catalogues what exactly they do, how they look, and he forms theories and he writes them down, he fills notebooks, he’s started writing on his walls again.
He publishes papers on the Kaiju, and that’s when he starts to get noticed. Mostly by people who call him crazy, a freak for caring so much about the monsters and less about defending the world against them, but there are other people who are interested in the Kaiju and Newt has things to say, and he knows that he can figure out how to beat them with the proper equipment.
Newt’s twenty-six years old when he’s hanging out in his office—which is really messy, full of post-it notes telling him to remember things he’s going to forget anyway and diagrams of Kaiju and blurry photographs of them and notebooks full of notes and diatribes and essays on anything and everything that he thinks might help his research—spinning around in his office chair, legs tucked under him, when the door opens.
He doesn’t really care, and just keeps spinning, until a hand comes down on the back of the chair, bringing it to a halt.
Frowning, Newt adjusts his glasses and looks up and finds himself staring into the stern face of…some military guy.
“Dr. Newton Geiszler, my name is Marshall Stacker Pentescost,” the guy says.
Newt nods, because he has a pretty good idea where this is going.
“The Pan-Pacific Defense Corps is interested in your work, Dr. Geiszler. I’m here to request that you join the Pan-Pacific Defense Corps in K-Science.”
Newt grins. “It’s about time.”
+
Newton Geiszler and Hermann Gottlieb are dangerous.
They are weapons.
People forget this. They forget it because it’s not as obvious in a Shatterdome full of soldiers, men and women with extensive physical training.
They’re the last men standing in K-Science, and there’s a reason for that.
They’re brilliant, so brilliant that they’re indispensable, and Stacker Pentecost thanks goodness every day that Hermann and Newt never even considered leaving the K-Science program, even when their funding was cut for the tenth time.
They’re too busy studying the monsters to care, too busy with their dissections and their numbers, too busy with each other.
They’re going to help save the world, because they don’t need a Jaeger to fight monsters. They just need their minds.