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The words spilled out uncontrollably. "I'm telling you, man, they have DNA okay, like the four bases are the same and the pattern is the same-- Hermann, we share almost the same percentage of our DNA with kaiju that we do with most reptiles! It's MINDBLOWING, okay, and this changes literally everything, and now it's all falling into place, and I'm pretty sure the neurotoxin in kaiju blue is like a single mutation away from tetrodotoxin, and it all makes SENSE! A parallel Earth-- it's sci-fi shit but so are the kaiju to begin with! The Breach was dimensional, right, so they don't have to be coming from just somewhere else in space? Herm, am I making sense right now? I need you to be listening to this for-fucking-once because this is important!"
"I am listening, Dr. Geiszler, and you are completely insane and as hopelessly illogical as ever." Dr. Gottlieb didn't bother to turn around, continuing to scrawl on his chalkboard at a steady rate.
"WHAT?" Dr. Geiszler's voice shot up an octave, high and frantic and furious. "Okay, Mr. Spock, fuck you, then. It CAN'T be coincidental, man, it CAN'T! They're too similar!"
His colleague sighed and set down his chalk, dusting off his hands and turning to face him at last. "I could not possibly care less about your crackpot theories or your fast-approaching academic humiliation, but if we are considering the INFINITE possibilities of parallel worlds, you should consider that there would be, by necessity, a world in which EVERY EVENTUALITY exists. Even within the reaches of our own universe, there are INFINITE other planets-- does that mean anything to your addled brain? In the case of infinite options, it is a statistical certainty that every combination of traits exists! It is an ontological FACT that these creatures could come from another world as easily as they could come from a parallel of our own. And what significance does that cliché even HOLD in the face of such VAGARIES? The moon is just a PARALLEL EARTH that experienced a different condition during the coalescence of its elements into a solid body. I am just a parallel YOU who is not an IDIOT."
"SHUT UP! I am so fucking sick of your stupid numbers! You couldn't come up with this kind of holistic theory on your own-- not with your precious equations and rationality," he sneered. "You're too linear to get to the big picture, so you just shoot down everything I say! Anything is possible, man, ANYTHING, at any goddamn time! You can't use that as an excuse! Have you ever SEEN the real world?"
"Nonetheless, DOCTOR Geiszler, out of that anything, certain things are less likely than others. The probability of flying monkeys, for instance, or of the Breach staying closed, or of YOU spontaneously solving the kaiju with a wild theory." Dr. Gottlieb's lip curled.
"That's a stupid example when you're talking to the world's foremost bioengineer, HERMANN. You want flying monkeys? I'll make you some. You can send them after people who have the gall to actually theorize."
"You are an arrogant idiot."
"Yeah? That's pretty harsh, coming from you. If you don't think my wild theories are going to help, then why are you still here? Wild theories are all we've fucking got."
"Shockingly, I am also capable of theorizing. It only seems alien to you because I theorize based on facts, not abject speculation and poorly-made films."
"This is based on facts!"Dr. Geiszler was almost screaming now, and had long-since crossed the divisive tape in the middle of the room. Dr. Gottlieb had met him toe to toe in the center of his half, and was giving no ground. "I TOLD you the facts! Did you even listen?!"
"Unfortunately, Dr. Geiszler, your evidence is SEVERELY lacking! The probability of your theory being correct is infinitesimal! That is not my fault!"
Dr. Geiszler snarled inarticulately and turned on his heel, slamming his messenger bag onto the laboratory table hard enough to make his specimens rattle. He shoved his laptop and a folder of notes furiously inside, bending a corner of the latter but unwilling to pause to resettle it, and stormed out without another word.
Four hours later, Dr. Gottlieb was beginning to consider leaving his remaining work for the morning. His leg was stiff and sore from repeatedly ascending and descending the ladder by his blackboard, and he had begun to make mistakes-- born from exhaustion and mental oversaturation, rather than a lack of understanding.
It was nearly three in the morning.
Dr. Geiszler made his reentry in a dramatic flurry of dropped pens and spilled coffee, shrieking "HERMANN! HERMANN!" in such a piercing tone that it startled his coworker promptly back to wakefulness and nearly off his ladder.
"What in God's name is the matter?" Dr. Gottlieb hissed back, clinging to the top step and the shreds of his dignity.
Dr. Geiszler beamed at him, bouncing on his toes like a child. "I FIGURED IT OUT. I've got it-- a cohesive, unified theory about the origins of the kaiju! I KNEW I was missing something but I gave up for the night and I may have been watching Evangelion and then it just-- it just CLICKED, dude, all of a sudden, and I've GOT IT!"
"Well?" Dr. Gottlieb asked, sounding faintly eager around his scowl. "I'm waiting to be impressed."
"When you were ventilating my theory, you said that I was too vague, and illogical, and that parallel worlds meant nothing without some kind of context—so here’s the context! The kaiju have dimensional travel, right? Like, beyond wormhole shit. Spacetime is fucking Google Maps. We have the same DNA, the same external features, the same basic biology—except what? Except instead of jaegers, they have kaiju drones, and instead of humans, they have Precursors. But what do all the kaiju have in common? Kaiju blue, which is like—like superengineered hemocyanic blood with evolved tetrodotoxin and amoebocytes intact, even though they have a lymph system, right? Now what the hell Earth animal has copper-blue blood and amoebocytes and can support symbiosis with Pseudoalteromonas tetraodonis?” Dr. Geiszler threw his notes onto the table and gesticulated wildly, fingers spreading and contracting spasmodically. “HORSESHOE CRABS. Limulidae! What are the basic features of the Limulidae family? THREE main sets of eyes, insectoid legs, arthropod shell, and—what else? They survived the extinction of the dinosaurs, all the way up to the modern day, without even EVOLVING. Right? Right? Are you listening?”
Dr. Gottlieb descended his ladder carefully and turned to face him. “Yes, Newton, I am, as usual, listening.”
“Okay, okay, now you remember what I said after the first drift? The kaiju have been here BEFORE, Hermann, they interacted with the DINOSAURS, okay? And at first I thought, woah, maybe that explains the kaiju thing, right? Maybe the Precursors took samples to make the kaiju! But dude, they don’t care about US, they don’t care about anything on our planet, even now that it’s habitable for them, so why the hell would they have cared about the dinosaurs when they couldn’t even survive here! They’re just interested in extinction! And then I realized—mass extinction. The dinosaurs. Climatic shifts. What if the Precursors wiped out the dinosaurs? And then—shit, I should have said this before, only—whatever, let me just—Limulidae, like horseshoe crabs, right? All those traits I described PLUS like a basic form of kaiju blue. What do the Precursors look like? Well according to Raleigh Becket, they have three main pairs of eyes, insectoid legs, and a bony head ridge, like maybe a vestigial piece of a shell from pre-cephalization! And the kaiju all have this blue shit, and they’re all bioengineered by the Precursors but like they’re part of the hive, so they can’t be totally separate from them, right?”
“Newton, I am becoming hopelessly lost. I would hesitate to confess that to anyone else, but I am reasonably certain that it has nothing to do with my comprehension or intellect and everything to do with your inability to think in a linear progression.”
“Fuck. Fuck, just—just stay with me here I—I’m gonna lose my train of thought, Herm, I have to finish this. It’ll all make sense in a sec, okay, I swear.”
“I suppose I have no choice but to—“
Dr. Geiszler plowed over him helplessly. “Another thirty seconds, okay, PLEASE. So these Precursors, they’re like horseshoe crabs, right? Did you—“
“Yes.”
“Okay. So I’m thinking that it’s too close to Earth life, that it has to be connected somehow, but you were so right, so right about parallel worlds because they need context, right? But what if—this is gonna sound crazy—“
“You clearly cannot hear yourself.”
“Shut UP, let me finish! What if the kaiju are being sent into the past? They saw the dinosaurs, like, they can clearly move through time like changing fucking lanes. What if the Precursors are—Jesus Christ—what if the Precursors and the kaiju—or kaiju raw material, you know—evolved from the fucking dinosaurs? What if Limulidae would have become the dominant species, and mammals would never have gotten a chance over reptiles, and reptiles would have competed and gotten even bigger if the extinction event hadn’t happened? What if they would have spread and developed and cephalized and then suddenly they were inventing weapons that they joined together to control with their minds, that they built on the basic model of their bodies, but altered, engineered to fight—what are the kaiju but Precursor jaegers, dude? They build with FLESH! And then at some point they conquer dimensional travel, and they’re overpopulated and they’re overdeveloped and they’re polluted—not so alien, right?—and then where do they go to colonize? Do they pick some random planet, do they terraform or adapt? Why would they? Dimensional travel, Herm, they can go BACK IN TIME. They can use the exact same planet that they live on, but over again! Because when you go to the past—you’re a physicist, what would happen?”
Dr. Gottlieb was eyeing him with a strange mix of clinical concern and genuine astonishment. “A parallel world,” he suggested, slow and thoughtful. “Its future would no longer be your own present, by virtue of your presence. It is the only way to avoid a paradox.”
“Yes. YES! And these shits, they came back too far, and they’d changed too much, and the atmosphere wasn’t right and it was too hot or too cold or whatever. So they fucked with it. Some kind of weapon, kind of weird fucking interference to make it change faster, and they fucking—they fucking wiped out their own ancestors, dude, they killed off the dinosaurs! Only nature always finds a way, right, and when they came to… t-to our time…!” The biologist tugged on his own hair, taking gasping breaths to keep up with his racing speech. “Well, shit, man, there were MAMMALS! There were humans! Killing off their ancestors didn’t kill the planet, it just gave us the opportunity!” His mouth continued to work for a few moments after he finished speaking, as though he couldn’t quite comprehend the success of his communication. “W-well? What do you think?” he managed at length.
Dr. Gottlieb was silent for a moment. “I think… I think that you should wait at least until morning before you attempt to write a thesis.”
His laboratory partner stared at him blankly, silent now.
“And perhaps not drink any more coffee?”
Dr. Geiszler stared at him for a moment more, and then began to laugh. It was helpless, wild, infectious laughter, and Dr. Gottlieb let out a few reluctant chuckles, himself. “Okay,” the biologist gasped, regaining control of himself. “Okay. No, that’s—I can do that.”
The mathematician smiled fondly and shook his head. “Out of the mouths of babes and idiots,” he sighed.
“Hey! But really. That… It made sense?”
“I cannot wait to see you attempt to prove it, but… It certainly isn’t impossible.”
Dr. Geiszler copied his coworker in the email when he sent his draft to MIT a few minutes before dawn. Dr. Gottlieb’s name was the only acknowledgement.