Work Text:
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March 2025
Eventually the pair come to yet again another heated argument, this time in a dingy, humming elevator.
"But they're the future, Hermann!"
"I will not waste my time giving a lecture that will just fly over their little brains like the sea breeze," snarls Dr. Hermann Gottlieb, mouth set in a firm line as he leans heavily on to his cane. He fixes his gaze firmly on the numbers, counting up: 4, 5, 6. They comfort him. "Our time is precious. You understand, more than anyone, that though the Breach has been closed, the danger still looms, and that my predictive formula is the only reliable-"
"You said so yourself that another instance within the next few months is improbable, and- hey- wait, that's not even the point!" Dr. Newton Geiszler, running his hands through his already-mussed hair, makes a strangled noise in the back of his throat. "Stop changing the subject, asshole. Admit it. You just don't like kids."
"Whether or not I enjoy them is irrelevant. They wouldn't appreciate the enormity of what we do."
"But it's in Seoul! Remember Atticon? These kids will understand. They've been through an attack. They'll get it."
"Newton-"
"I would have understood. Well, because I was already at MIT then. You would have. Because you're a nerd. And you're not the world's only nerd, Hermann."
It's a low, juvenile blow, and Hermann rolls his eyes heavenward, tapping his cane impatiently. The elevator slows to a stop at the ninth floor and the doors slowly slide back with a low, mechanical hum that tastes of electricity and old metal, and Hermann Gottlieb tries to make a getaway. He's swiftly cut off by a thick, tattooed arm that swings up to block his path, and when Hermann meets Newton's eyes, he knows that the arm will not budge.
If Newton had just extended his arm half a foot further down, the move would have had the potential to be a lower blow than the quip about his childhood. Hermann would not be able to stoop to walk below the arm like an impromptu game of hatred-limbo, but Newton has deliberately made a perfectly passable barrier of himself, and they both know it.
Newton Geiszler, as childish and insensitive as he can be, doesn't ever take advantage of Hermann's disability, and this is what makes Hermann actually stop to stare back at the eyes that glare at him, a full two inches below his own. They would be four, but for the life of him, Hermann can never stand perfectly straight.
The look is the look of a scientist, and it dissects Hermann's blustering like a spleen. Something in the look makes Hermann carefully consider his options, and then pick the convenient one- to tell the truth.
"You can do the demonstration yourself if you wish," Herman says stiffly. "I doubt they'd care. In fact, I'd be doing them a favor in their eyes, I'm sure. Even to a room full of young 'nerds', I won't be subject to being ogled at by- by-"
"Oh. Is that what this is about?" Instantly, Newton's arm falls from where it was grasping at the wall of the elevator.
The two of them understand each other. A decade and a drift has inevitably led to their lives, and minds, running in tandem- not quite synonymous or antonymous, but analogous.
Hermann's eyes swing down to the floor, and he wills himself not to grit his teeth. It's highly embarrassing, but he knows that there isn't a point in hiding anything from his companion, and he'd rather the debate be over. "It isn't a matter of my own pride. It's a matter of how the numbers will look to them. Whereas I can trust that our… usual routine… will be met with understanding and at least a modicum of comprehension, my experience with schoolchildren is composed of admittedly less professional courtesy than horrid ignorance."
("-and cruelty," is the unspoken, yet understood true ending to the sentence.)
The two men stand less than a foot apart from each other, at an impasse, until the elevator doors automatically shut behind Newton's back, shocking them both out of their staring contest.
Newton interrupts Hermann's grumbled complaint with a quick-fire, "Can you just- just- trust me, this once?"
"I trust you with forgetting to retrieve the mail when I ask you to, and with constantly losing your phone charger, and very little else," Hermann replies dryly. When Newton fails to reply for his nearly-comical outrage, something deep and knotted and ugly inside of Herman begins to calm down, and he sighs, "I trust you, quite obviously. As much as I hate to rehash old, tired phrases, however, it isn't you. It's me."
"Very funny, Herm."
"I don't know what possessed me to agree to the touring lectures in the first place, but it certainly wasn't to hold the thing I care about most- the work of a decade, the beauty I find in a wall of dry numbers- to the scrutiny of children."
And when Hermann reaches out to press the door button, Newton does that thing that he does to make Hermann completely lose his temper, to respect him all over again, to hate him all the more, to want to lean on him. He does that thing that changes Hermann's mind.
"I'm writing the textbook, okay?"
Hermann stops, his hand brushing the button, and he says, embarrassingly stupidly, "What?"
"I said, I'm writing the fucking textbook. Geez," says Newton Geiszler, running his hand across his neck (now adorned with the final piece in his mosaic of flesh and color) and screwing up his eyes. "You were right. I'm gonna fucking write it. And it doesn't matter that it's boring, or that I don't particularly wanna distill a decade's worth of notes into a little book for academia's praise, or that arguing with a publisher isn't a cool thing to do or whatever. You're right, and I was wrong. I'm in the middle of organizing the papers and I'll get started within the month, all right?"
The knot inside Hermann relaxes, the twists and tangles slowly losing their firm grip to his insides. What might have been the urge to gloat five years ago is now a thin, warm thankfulness at the back of his tongue.
It isn't every day that Newton vocally agrees to Hermann's boring ideas.
It's almost never that he organizes, and it's beautif-
"We'll rework the usual spiel or whatever," says Newton in a bright voice that masks a wheedling beg, "and you know the kids would LOVE the Chalkboard Trick. We'll even get Mako and Becket to do a Drift demo and it'll be so fucking cool and c'mon, you stiff old bag, could you please do this? For- you know, the kids?"
("-and me?")
-
November 2019
In the dim, echoing hallways of the Sydney Shatterdome, at four in the morning, Dr. Hermann Gottlieb hobbles towards his lab to try and pace away the anxiety of the night. He finds Dr. Newton Geiszler babbling away to himself, and for the first time, it worries him to the core.
Dr. Geiszler is a shivering, sweating, weeping mess under Gottlieb's worktable, and though he should find the river of mucus running under the man's nose revolting, Hermann immediately swats his sticky hand away from where it is worrying at his collar and demands, without preamble or pretense of ignorance, "Where is your medication?"
The answer comes wet, bubbly and stuttered, "右側の引き出しの中に-"
As fast as he can, Hermann forces himself across the cramped room (shared by five researchers in the day, and only himself and Dr. Geiszler at night) to wrench open the tiny, plastic drawers on the right of the sink, and closes his bony fist around a little bottle of pills. He locates a small stack of red plastic cups further in, reminding himself to make a snide remark about them later as a show of sympathy, and runs the tap.
Before he can hobble back, balancing the cup and the bottle in the hand without the cane, he hears the soft, shallow "I will nicht," from under his own desk.
"Dr. Geiszler-"
"Ich mag nicht, wie ich mich fühle, wenn ich meine Medikamente nehme."
"Sprich nicht Deutsch", Hermann spits almost viscously, before correcting himself . "You mustn't forget yourself so deeply that you lose your English, too." When he reaches his desk once more he sets the medication down before he eases himself, slowly, to the ground. The former MIT professor, only a year younger than he but as insufferable as a young child, doesn't shrink back, but leans lightly on a crate, eyes far away, face wet and splotchy. Hermann has no doubt that he has already forgotten the last thing he has spoken. He presses the cup and pills to Dr. Geiszler's jittery hands, and when he only stares at them, Hermann is forced to count two pills, press them gently but firmly into Geiszler's mouth, and slowly feed him the water by hand.
Geiszler swallows, and begins to recite, and Hermann wonders how long he's been like this, shredded down to his core, without anyone to hold him back up again. He suspects it's been the entirety of the six hours since he's left the lab, and he wonders, vaguely, if he's to blame for not noticing Dr. Geiszler's panic earlier in the day.
Because Dr. Geiszler is infuriatingly chipper about nearly every development, be they failures or successes, but Hermann knows that he is not a solid structure, and sometimes, the framework crumbles, and his mind turns on him.
Hermann is unsure of how to proceed from where he finds himself, sitting stiffly beside a neatly categorized stack of hard drives while his co-worker slowly buzzes beside him, mumbling (correct) hypotheses about silicone, but he knows that he cannot leave, if only because he is dimly frightened of arriving back in the morning to run final calculations, only to find Dr. Newton Geiszler dead beneath his very own table.
Hermann knows next to nothing about comforting someone, but certain that he has to initiate a conversation to bring his colleague back to himself again, he searches within himself for whatever he finds calming, and thinks only of numbers.
"Tomorrow, we launch Striker Eureka," he says, awkwardly, almost to thin air. The muttering beside him stutters to a halt with a wet plop. "I assure you, Doctor, my diagnostics of the T-16 wings ran as clear as day last night. That means aerodynamic stability in conjunction with the burst combat strategy, which means a faster kill, which means a fresher specimen for you to slap around. Before the end of the year, if I'm right, and I am."
"But the 4.211 Knuckles will only promote stronger internal hemorrhaging, damaging the surface interstitial tissues before oxygenation ruins them further. Any contusion has been proven to exponentially increase the rate of decomposition in a dead Kaiju," murmurs Geiszler, who draws his shaking hand up to feel around his face. His fingers nudge at the wetness beneath his nose, serving only to spread the mess a little bit, but he quickly finds purchase. The snot comes off, slowly but thankfully surely, and Geiszler begins to breathe with deeper, cigarette-hoarse gasps. "Not to mention Striker's six-barreled WMB2x90 missile chest. Eighteen K-Stunner warheads, developed specifically for ripping Kaiju tissue apart. This might be the end of intact epidermal swatches."
"But the thermal carbon nanotubes within the retractable Assault Mount 3.25 Blades?" asks Hermann, feeling a bit like a schoolteacher.
"They cauterize the wound, effectively preventing exsanguination," replies Geiszler softly. "Which means I might get an intact limb cross-section, maybe. So, uh, yay."
"I'm not implying that I programmed the initial simulation to include such a variable for your express pleasure, Dr. Geiszler," Hermann drawls dryly, clasping his hands over his bad leg and staring off into the quiet emptiness of the lab, "but believe me, I know the value of your work, though at times I feel your methods may be absolut schrecklich."
"...It's Newt, goddamnit," mumbles the man underneath his desk, and Hermann knows that the worst has passed.
"Save German for the day, Doctor. It's already an unwieldy language. It doesn't need to be used for anything other than conversing with our parents, or when hurling vicious insults."
A few dry laugh-sobs later, Dr. Geiszler's voice clears up, and he actively scrubs at the sticky wetness on his face. "Why're you even here, Hermann?"
"It's Dr. Gottlieb," corrects Hermann almost immediately, but gentler than he might at noon, in front of the other researchers. "And I couldn't sleep. I meant to pace awhile, here where I wouldn't wake the entire floor with my cane."
"Do people complain? No one should complain," says Dr. Geiszler, a touch of his childish petulance returning to his voice once more.
"… Thank you," sighs Hermann, reaching for his cane. He tries to lever himself up, but he finds himself a permanent fixture to the cold metal floor in no time, and he begins to grit his teeth, irritated. The intense panic upon his entry into the lab has ebbed, leaving only fatigue where his restlessness once lay in the pit of his stomach.
He wants to blame Dr. Geiszler, as he has always done since their first meeting, but he knows that this time cannot be one of those cases.
As Hermann struggles, Dr. Geiszler crawls out of his little cave beneath Hermann's desk, takes a deep breath, and rolls his shoulders with a sigh. When Hermann looks up again, Dr. Geiszler rubs a hand briskly across the thigh of his pinstripe trousers before offering it, blank-faced, towards him.
The hand is absolutely still covered in traces of nasal mucus, sweat, and whatever tears Dr. Geiszler has undoubtedly shed while in the throes of his manic, neuroatypical episode, but Hermann takes it anyway, feeling himself lifted up in the (somehow still trustworthy) grip of his colleague, and washes his hand in the privacy of his own bathroom sink when the two of them part ways in the dim, humming corridor.
In December, when Gipsy Danger lands the Category IV in Manila but Striker Eureka's blades earn Dr. Geiszler a small but completely intact cross section of tail, his first ever complete limb portion, the entire science division holds a small (and totally inappropriate) party. Hermann is roped into attending, and he expresses his immense displeasure by sneering at Dr. Geiszler's juvenile red plastic cups. He is given a rude gesture and a hearty laugh, and then Dr. Geiszler hands him a beer and swings his arm around his neck, and Hermann smiles into his cup.
-
March 2025
Seoul welcomes Drs. Gottlieb and Geiszler at the airport with a little line of fans and a smaller panel of critics. Newton signs a few autographs and poses for a couple of photographs, while Hermann takes some comfort in shooting everyone in sight his very best stink-eye. The pair of them have been under intense public scrutiny since the day the clock was stopped, and Hermann is determined to have their audience know which is the Rock Star and which is just the rock.
Newton's first reaction to Seoul is to immediately ask about the night market that has sprung up in the ruins of Atticon's brutal assault five years earlier, which infuriates Hermann to the core. He shuts himself in their hotel quarters and busies himself with arranging, re-arranging and re-re-arranging his notes, ignoring Newton's jabs, and sighs to himself when the walking tattoo exhibit shrugs on his leather jacket and shuts the door behind him.
It's approximately an hour past midnight when Newton comes back, hauling in two plastic take-out bags with him, and Hermann hides his face behind his hand.
"Seriously, Herm? You already know the routine. You don't need to study this shit like you're headed to your final exams, dude."
"Better to review and catch a mistake now than to waste our time on sightseeing, don't you agree, Newton?"
Newton rolls his eyes at him and lowers the bags on to their shared couch. "I got us blood sausage and dumplings and barbecue and radish and this really cool spicy stuff made out of everything. And some rice booze. And tangerine juice. And popsicles that look kind of like duck penises."
"I'm not touching the- why on Earth would you even-"
"Whatever, man. It's strawberry-and-apple flavored."
("It was colorful and weird and I just wanted to try it once.")
The two of them shuffle into their comfortable late-night meal routine, dividing up Newton's spoils and wordlessly passing each other the utensils (chopsticks for Geiszler, a plastic fork for Gottlieb) over the makgeolli. The night is filled with the distant sounds of cars and the closer sounds of two men bickering over comfort food. Hermann ends up requisitioning most of the blood sausage and radish, while Newton steals the majority of the barbecue and dumplings, and in no time the two of them clear the entirety of the takeout.
By three AM, Newton has his feet propped up over the side of the couch with a Korean comic book in one hand, duck phallus popsicle in the other, and Hermann has nearly finished his fourth re-organization of the demonstration material when Newton's phone rings with a cheerful buzz, ruining their companionable silence and entire evening.
"Heya, Mako. What's-"
Hermann doesn't ever listen in on Newton's private conversations, but something in the way the cigarette-ash voice stutters, "Oh- oh. Um. No, I get it," turns his head.
The call extends a few minutes further, punctuated with Newton's sincere well-wishes, a few off-color jokes and a message to the Becket boy for drinks in the future, and when it ends Hermann demands, "What is it?"
Newton shrugs, bites the rest of the duck-cicle off the stick, and throws it at the nearest trash bin. It misses, bouncing off the edge, and Newton grumbles before picking himself up to throw it away properly (knowing Hermann will complain).
"Nothing. The kids are gonna be really disappointed on Saturday is all."
"… Oh no."
"Yeah," says Newton. "The Gipsy-D team can't make it."
Hermann looks at his carefully timed demonstration plan, spread all over the table and his own lap, and suppresses a shriek.
-
August 2020
It takes Geiszler a stupidly long amount of time to realize that the Dr. Lars Gottlieb heading the construction of the 'Wall of Life' is his very own Dr. Hermann Gottlieb's father.
Geiszler shakes the crumpled-up article in his hands, reading bits and pieces out loud in a half-strangled rage, and when he runs out of sappy, propaganda-filled lines to chew apart, he begins to insult every name he comes across, focusing on the stern-faced, gray-haired 'floppy-dicked old fucker' featured in the foldout. Eventually he stumbles over the same name enough times for it to register in his fury-addled consciousness. When he finally puts two and two together, he clasps his hands over his mouth, thankfully free of blue-stained gloves, and Hermann grumbles privately that at least his colleague has the decency to look mortified.
"Oh my shit. I've been cussing out your dad the whole fucking time?"
Hermann turns back to the computer screen hooked up to a taped-together diagnostic machine and barely suppresses a snide grin. "It should no longer surprise me that your insistence on removing yourself from the larger scope of reality extends to the politics that hold jurisdiction over your entire career, yet here we are." He rests his jaw on a bony fist and wallows in his newfound smugness, even swinging a foot forward to nudge at where his cane rests on the haphazardly constructed imaging device.
"Hey, I've literally been busy rewriting every fact we know about stable biology here," Geiszler's shoulders bunch up, defensive and petulant. "I'm an important guy. I got things to do and Kaijus to study. I don't have to know the name of the guy ruining our lives as we speak. And I- oh my god, that dickhead really is your dad?"
Hermann nods, not bothering to swing back around in his chair to review the feed. He knows the numbers. He trusts them. This is where he feels the most comfortable, with a string of beautiful, perfect numbers humming softly around him, his leg a blessedly low ghost of pain. With a deep, relaxed sigh, Hermann brings a finger up to tap at his cheekbone. "It pains me to verify that he is, indeed, my father."
"Shit. I'm sorry, dude." Geiszler crumples into a chair on the opposite side of the line in the middle of their lab, eyebrows furrowing at the article in his hands.
Hermann knows why. Geiszler, for all of his hastily put-together image and bluster, was raised with great love and care by the world's least talented musicians but most warm parents, as revealed one quiet and drunken night after the first ever budget cut. He is uncomfortable in his comfortable background and self-perceived place of unwanted judgement, and he treads on the subject of parental experiences with a shocking amount of care. It's hopelessly sentimental and completely out of touch with Hermann's entire mental image of Dr. Newton Geiszler, and Hermann immediately feels the need to cut the undoubtedly growing unease in the bud.
"Apologies aren't necessary. He's a bloody prat and a stubborn old fool."
Newton begins to laugh but forces himself to wrench his jaw closed. "Wow. I mean, wow, Hermann. I can't believe it. It's like you two are on opposite sides of a war here. Are you two close- well, obviously you're not close-close, but- I mean- he knows his plan is gonna get us all killed, probably, right?"
"We haven't had a civil chat in years, if that's what you're asking. He… He is an unpleasant man, but more than that, he has little hope. He doesn't see the hope in numbers, and thus I have lost all expectation in him. It's futile to explain to him that he is entirely wrong, and though he is the source of most of our misery in the present, I'm still looking forward to laughing at his expression when a Kaiju inevitably breaks through his shoddy excuse for a wall."
Newton cracks a grin at him, warm and obviously satiated in the knowledge that Hermann won't take offense at his earlier tirade. He leans his forearms on his knees. "You don't laugh at anything."
Hermann answers with a wry grin that feels unfamiliar on his face, and in the back of his mind, he hopes that it doesn't seem faked. He is unused to smiling at people. "I laugh when the PPDC will surely answer for the horrendous way they trivialize our division."
"You'll laugh when our funding runs to zero and we're out of a job and the world is taken over by Kaiju," Newton chuckles in his cigarette-ash throat, and then rubs at his dark circles with one thick hand, edged with ink. "Oh fuck," he laughs, sounding despaired and hysterical and completely jaded. "Oh, holy hell. How are we going to get by on so little? How do I even afford any specimens now? How will you buy your stupid chalk?"
Hermann rolls his eyes, though the smile somehow stays on his face. "Cut funding isn't the end of the world. The Marshall is a reasonable man, and the United Nations respects him nearly as much as we do. He, of all people, understands our importance to the Program. He'll see us through."
"Since when did you start believing in people like that?" asks Newton, looking at Hermann from between the cage of his fingers, stained light blue beneath his fingernails.
"Since people started living up to my expectations," replies Hermann softly, without meaning to. After a moment's silence, he realizes what he has just admitted to and clears his throat, averting his eyes from Newton's slowly widening grin. Loudly, he snorts, "And in any case, we'll be seeing good results with this new sequencing rig, am I correct? It isn't every day that humanity successfully sequences a silicone-based life form's DNA."
"A day for history," Newton agrees, stretching back to slouch into his swivel chair. "We should write a textbook."
"I've already written textbooks, Newton," Hermann shoots back. "You should compile your notes when you have the time. You hold six PHDs, for heaven's sake."
"But I don't want tooooo-"
Newton's childish whine is interrupted by a small chirrup from the hardware behind Hermann's head. The two scientists both frown simultaneously.
"Uh, Herm? Is that supposed to do that?"
"I- I- oh, dear."
In a flash, Newton is at his side, and Hermann pushes his spectacles over his nose to scan over the rapidly scrolling wall of shifting numbers. In seconds, the pounding in his chest gives way to a breathtaking, elated euphoria. It all becomes clear, and it is beautiful.
Newton grabs at Hermann's shoulder and half-screams, "What? What is it? What?"
"The microarray- it's… Newton, the biochip is stable. The expression levels are reading in their entirety, and you will have your protein isolation within the day."
"Oh my god. Oh my god-" Newton scrubs his hands over his infuriating hair, wild-eyed and glowing. "Oh my god. We're- we- oh my god, we really sequenced it!"
The laugh that barks out of Hermann of it's own accord should surprise him, but the surprise is drowned in his heady joy. "By jove, we have."
"What was the beep?"
Hermann feels light on his feet as he slowly levers himself off of his chair. "Oh, just a string processing algorithm my new program has detected from your biochip. It'll only revolutionize the data mining theories of our current scope of statistical pattern understanding, building what is only the world's first completely unique itemset database via biological value delivery, and changing our methods of association rule learning for an eternity."
"What the hell kinda language is that? I'm too wound up for this, Herm. Sprich Homo Sapiens."
"Newton, you'll find that 'Sprich Kaiju' is rather more appropriate now," says Hermann with a laugh, clasping Newton's shoulder to prevent himself from keeling over, face screwing up with new hope. "We are so much closer to understanding them than ever before. Years of revolutionary research lies ahead. We've done it."
And suddenly Hermann finds himself encased in a burning-hot, solid embrace, held up in Newton's thick arms and half-buried in a suffocating cage of tattoos, crinkled shirt, and mussed-up hair. The air is pushed from his ribcage and the man holding him up whoops and hollers into the vast emptiness of their shared lab, "You stupid, dusty old bastard, you're a fucking genius. You hear that, Herm's old man? That's a big 'FUCK YOU' to your crazy ass!"
The adrenaline rush removes all thoughts of grasping for his cane, or even jerking away, and Hermann only hangs on limply, cackling, "We'll do it without the others. They were fools. The future is all but waiting for us."
"My flesh and your numbers, man," says Newton, who pulls away to hold Hermann at arm's length, gripping into his arms, and never letting him fall. His face is a pink-flushed and giddy mess, glasses askew, and he grins brighter than day, "Let's do this."
"To the flesh," grins Hermann, grabbing Newton's forearm and shoulder and holding on for dear life.
"To the numbers."
"To my father."
"To the Wall."
"To the Kaiju."
"To the Jaegers."
"To the last two members of the K-Science Division."
"To humanity."
("To us.")
When the pair come down from their mutual high, they find themselves still locked in their impromptu embrace, shaking and glowing and reveling in their small success, in their tiny metal lab that stinks of sulfur and ammonia. Held up by leaning into each other, they slowly pry themselves apart, Hermann catching his breath while swatting his hand to grab at his cane and Newton leaning into the machine.
The silence that follows is still warm.
Eventually, however, Newton drives Hermann away again, grumbling to himself and flushing at the back of his neck, burying himself into his over-large coat and stalking away, by asking, "Wait. Since when do you call me Newton?"
-
March 2025
The audience files in as soon as the doors open, shuffled feet on worn carpet, murmurs and nudges and whispers behind small hands. To Hermann's immediate pacification, none of the heads present look young enough to throw a tantrum. The youngest present might be eleven- the oldest large group is composed of what look to be high school seniors in crisply ironed uniforms, perfectly pleated skirts and lapels with little Jaeger pins. Amidst a sea of dark hair, he spots patches of darker skin and lighter hair, a testament to Gottlieb and Geiszler's star power and the growing diversity that the allied Universities of the Pacific have thankfully chosen to nurture. The audience is made up of top students from around the globe, and he has been assured that each one is indeed intelligent enough to understand the breadth of their privilege in attendance.
One by one, the students take their seats, grouping together into classes or friend clans, staring at the beautiful array in the front of the auditorium and the three men half-hidden behind a chalkboard at the front. The dim light of the auditorium catches on many countless pairs of spectacles perched on small noses, and Hermann notices, lip curling with impatience and a tiny, hidden drop of anxiety, that many of the children who file in are wide-eyed, frightened, and knock-kneed.
The knock-kneed youth do not whisper excitedly to their friends, or flip through their pamphlets, but stare intensely at the curtain behind the chalkboards, and Hermann is certain that they have guessed what lies behind it.
They remind him of himself, and of the young Newton he saw within the Drift with the Kaiju in January, and nothing like the brainless playground groupies he had been imagining. Perhaps they might understand after all.
"We begin in five," says Tendo Choi, checking his watch. His rosary clacks against the clasp at his wrist and Hermann wonders, briefly, if Choi has healed. The sealing of the Breach has done wonders for the families and loved ones of the lost, but for many, Hermann knows, the loss will never fade. He has only spoken with Hercules Hansen face-to-face twice since the final battle, but he knows that the Marshall is permanently damaged. He and Ms. Mori have become the beacon of stalwart strength in loss. They cannot afford to grieve openly.
It isn't so with Choi, who has had the brilliance (of the sort that Hermann respects quite highly) to stay out of the international spotlight. Though every Jaeger pilot has earned their own cover of TIME Magazine, and sound clips from Marshals Pentecost and Hansen have played over newscasts for years, the average civilian has no clue what actually goes on in LOCCENT. A few interviews here and there aside, the world at large just assumes that Tendo Choi doesn't exist.
Hermann clears his throat. "Mr. Choi, in my haste to reorganize our plans for the lecture and demonstration, I seem to have forgotten to thank you for coming all this way."
Choi fixes him with an easy grin. "Tendo, please. After all this time, really? And hey, it's nothing. Besides, Allison said that if I didn't help, I'd be a terrible example. If Bruce were as old as these kids, I'd want him to be able to learn from the big dogs themselves, you know?"
Oh. The wife and young son. "A year old now, I should think?"
"Yeah. And I'm in for a whole lot more than just diapers. I'm just realizing now that I can't imagine Bruce as a teenager." Choi gives a chuckle. "Christ. He'll be asking about Jaegers and Kaiju and China and Peru and- gosh. He'll ask about Korea, too."
Newton chimes in from his hiding place behind a chalkboard, haphazardly wiping sweet red bean and confectioner's sugar from his chin, "And what'll you tell him?"
Choi shrugs. "That the Jaegers and the Kaijus were big and now they're gone, and that China and Peru and Korea used to be bigger, but they're still here, I guess. At least," he says, rolling his shoulders and smiling in his faint, odd way, "that's in the best-case scenario, right, Doctors?"
Newton swallows the last of the sweets and stage-whispers, "That's classified."
The pair share a somewhat morbid chuckle, but Hermann stands rooted to his place, gripping his cane tight. After another glance at his watch, Tendo pats the scientists on the shoulders before ducking around the chalkboard array to take slip behind the curtain. Newton hands Hermann a fresh box of chalk, and Herman rolls his eyes before violently wiping away the last of the sugar from the corner of Newt's mouth with his sleeve.
After batting him off, Newton cracks his knuckles and flashes his teeth at Hermann. "And here we go. Are you ready?"
("Are you okay?")
"Just get started, Newton," replies Hermann, mouth set.
("I'm fine. I feel a lot better than I did before I actually saw the crowd.")
A grin, and a little knock on his chest with a few knuckles.
("Good.")
Newton patters up to the front of the setup, pointing a remote from his pocket in the general direction of the sensor in the ceiling. Slowly the lights grow dimmer and dimmer before there is only a single floodlight shining directly at the display at the front of the auditorium- a high-powered foldout holographic projector hooked up to a K-Science Division hard drive, Hermann's slapdash diagnostic imager from five years prior, a tank with Newton's last intact slice of spleen floating majestically within, and the sad, tangled remains of Newton's haphazardly engineered Pons, all sitting directly in front of an impressive display of completely blank chalkboards. With another press of the remote, a short, sharp whine emits from the speakers situated around the auditorium, and the scientists' collar-mounted microphones come to life.
The whispers immediately cease.
Hermann swallows, wills himself not to lose grasp of his cane, and steps out with Newton into the floodlight.
"Uh, hey. Welcome to the Seoul K-Science Lecture, everyone. I'm Dr. Newton Geiszler, as many of you are already aware, and this is my partner Dr. Hermann Gottlieb. Today, we'll be showing you some of the coolest things we've done in our nine years together in the Jaeger Program." says Newton, showing his teeth. "나는 한국말을 조금 할수있지만, 아무래도 영어가 편하니까 영어로 발표 하는것을 이해하기 바랍니다."
That earns him some appreciative noises from the crowd. Hermann glances to his right, giving his best dry look, and Newton raises his eyebrows with the worst shit-eating grin Hermann has ever seen. He suppresses a snort. English, German, Japanese, Portuguese, a smattering of Cantonese and now Korean, too?
("You are a show-off and a braggart.")
("Just admit that I'm awesome. Are we okay with the Chalkboard Trick?")
("… Yes.")
"Now, before we begin, can we have a volunteer from the audience?"
A few hands shoot up immediately, mostly from the very young or the high school teenagers, but Hermann spies a few trembling, hesitant hands that rise up in smatters, and he squints a bit in the glare of the spotlight, trying to make out some faces. Suddenly, despite himself, he breathes in with a quiet sigh when one thin, clenched fist, belonging to a painfully bony, spectacled child of perhaps twelve, eventually joins the throng. Newton nudges his side, and he coughs and points at the last volunteer.
"You there. Would you please come up to the front?"
The row parts to make way for the boy, who nearly trips on his own feet, and when he approaches the scientists, Hermann sees an unfortunate bowl cut, a smattering of small, angry red acne scars on sharp cheekbones, and dark eyes that simply cannot make eye contact with him. Hermann is immediately sure that the child regrets raising his hand, but presses on anyway, willing his horribly encroaching empathy to cease existing.
"Your name?"
"Uh… Jung Dae-Jun."
"Could you step onto the scale for me, Mr. Jung? Shoes off, please."
With a thoroughly confused and half-terrified expression, the boy removes his shoes and lets Hermann take his height and weight, and nearly forgets to put his trainers back on after he completes his simple strength test. He scampers deep into the audience, head bowed and face scorching heat, to a small wave of tittering from his classmates. Hermann commits the numbers to memory, adjusts his own spectacles over his nose, turns his back to the audience, and immediately retreats to the back of the setup.
Without hesitation, he retrieves a fresh stick of chalk from his pocket and, starting from the lower right-hand corner of the right-most chalkboard, begins to scribble.
Newton's spiel begins immediately, masking any sounds of confusion from the audience as Hermann continues to slowly make his way across the board. It's a condensed and somewhat over-simplified version of their normal Gottlieb and Geiszler lecture, substituting catch-all words (and, in Hermann's opinion, rather grandiose and theatrical phrases) for the more scholarly terms, and it doesn't surprise him at all when Newton actually melts into his newfound role.
He is, predictably, great with children.
"So when I first entered the Jaeger Program, I was twenty-six years old, and I started off in a lab of seventeen scientists that eventually got cut down to two. In our nine-year run, Dr. Gottlieb coded the very first Mark I Jaeger himself, calculated the unknowable inner workings of the Breach from numbers alone, and figured out the only accurate way to predict a Kaiju event. I mapped the complete autonomic nervous system of a Kaiju within the first four years, sequenced their completely unique silicone-based DNA, and initiated the first Kaiju-human Drift in history. Eventually, our shared intelligence helped the now infamous Final Rangers close the Breach for good two months ago."
Hermann doesn't even need to turn around to know that Newton is working the crowd. He is wowing them. He is good at this. Hermann smiles.
"So how did we do it, and what did we learn? Well, I'll start off by telling you guys the absolute truth- I'm a nerd. People are under the assumption that nerds and geeks and obsessive fanboys like us are… cold, and crazy, and all sorts of rude things. Maybe it's because we are excited about the unknown, and the unknown scares people. I'll direct your attention to this 3D projector here- this is a scale model of Tresspasser, the very first Kaiju. You'll notice that it's incomplete…"
Eventually Newton's voice becomes somewhat calming background noise. After being subject to horrible heavy metal, the disgusting squelching of Kaiju innards popping out of place, and Newton's near-constant babble, Hermann has learned to deal with the noise by imaging Newton's head on a pike, but nine years has made it a constant in his life, and Hermann suspects that he has developed some horrifying form of Stockholm Syndrome. As the cigarette-ash voice reverberates around the room, Hermann's hand doesn't waver- instead, he lets the ups and downs of Newton's excitable chatter flow freely through the back of his mind, clearer than day, making him work harder, like a Pavlovian response honed over the course of a decade. When his first stick runs down to just a tiny nub, Hermann replaces it with a fresh piece and continues to scribble, allowing the voice to carry him.
"- and the interesting thing is, though we initially didn't possess the proper tech to test my hypothesis, I eventually figured out that Kaiju exhibit five different synapses between neurons. This led way to our deeper understanding of their disintegration patterns and behavioral impulses-"
The tension in the room is palpable. They're hanging on to every word out of Newton's mouth.
("They love me, Herms. I'm a goddamn rock star.")
Hermann nearly cracks his chalk in half. ("You're good with them because you're a child yourself.")
"-Crimson Typhoon's new data proved crucial in obtaining the final piece of the puzzle. I spent a long time running these tests, but they proved it without a doubt. They were… clones!"
A gasp from the audience, completely sucked into the story. Hermann moves on to the next chalkboard.
"These neurotransmitters were entirely artificial- deliberate! Implanted in them! They weren't evolutionary at all! So of course I started to have a wild hunch- maybe… maybe there was a way to find out for sure. Yeah, some of you are ahead of me here- yup. It was the Drift. I know that you guys have watched all of the Rangers' interviews, so you know what a Pilot-to-Pilot Drift is supposed to be like, right? Well, a Drift with a Kaiju was completely unknown territory, something so… crazy awesome, that everyone thought it was stupid. The late Marshall Pentecost was a great guy, you know? Everyone was really scared of him, and he was famous for running the tightest ship in the world, so it isn't really his fault that he didn't believe me. It wasn't anybody's fault, because, yeah, I knew my idea was crazy, too. Nobody's fault except maybe my friend Dr. Gottlieb's."
Laughter.
"But I built the Pons anyway! Because… Because I had hope. Hope that it would work. Nine years of research, a Shatterdome full of people who thought I was crazy, and millennia of scientific data had nothing on this one truth- I believed in myself. Yes, I was scared. Very scared. So scared, in fact, that I dedicated my 'final' test log to Dr. Gottlieb!"
More laughter.
"And even though I was scared that I might die, I did it anyway. It was the only way to know for sure if my idea would work, and if it did work, it would mean that humanity might have a chance at winning. We would finally know what it is about the Kaiju that make them so scary, figure out the mystery of it all, and come up with the answer that would change history forever. Fortune favors the brave, you know? And I... wanted to be brave, just this once."
Hermann forms an upside-down 4 and breathes to himself, watching the floodlight illuminate a cloud of chalk dust floating by his sleeve.
Newton has never talked about his emotions directly before his first Drift. Hermann has seen it- felt it, deep in his core, within the Drift, but just like the Hansens' infamously silent relationship before the younger's untimely demise, they never speak of Newton's terror. It seems inappropriate, given the pain that so many of their colleagues have faced, and Newton isn't one for speaking of himself in emotional terms.
But here, in front of a crowd of children and teenagers, Newton had admitted, out loud, to something that he has never expressed before even in their moments alone, and the immensity of the trust that his friend has given him makes the knot inside his chest lose all tension, unraveling at the seams and melting into the pool of his stomach.
"So I Drifted, and the rest is history."
("Hey. You done?")
("Yes.")
("Showtime.")
"And y'know, I'm sure you're wondering what Dr. Gottlieb has been doing all this time."
Hermann almost freezes in his place, but the last line is nearly finished, and he grips the stub of chalk, grits his teeth, and doesn't stop writing.
"It's something we came up with, to prove something to you- that there is a point to all of this work, and that there is a way to end the craziness that comes with the unexpected and dangerous. Wonder, and hope, and beauty, and love. We call it the Chalkboard Trick. I've been distracting you the whole time."
The floodlight directly over his head turns on, just as the pair planned, and Hermann blinks, though his eyes are mostly shielded from the glare. The stark white numbers on the chalkboard glow, a wall of undeniable truth and immense beauty, and Hermann finishes off the very last number before setting the stub (now the size of the tip of his index finger) down and taking a half-step back.
"While I was wowing you with monsters and graphics and my super awesome science, Dr. Hermann Gottlieb was running a completely new calculation for an algorithm, based on the diagnostic of Mr. Jung Dae-Jun's height, weight and strength, to calibrate the Conn-Pod of a Mark V Jaeger to accommodate our volunteer as a temporary pilot. And he did it all in his head, upside-down, and back-to-front."
The audience explodes in a wave of shocked hisses, incredulous laughter, and gasps, and as Hermann starts to rotate the chalkboards on their hidden hinges, a low shriek of recognition flows through the lecture hall, bouncing off the walls and growing into a buzzing hum of wonder.
Hermann doesn't turn around. He stares up at his numbers, painstakingly arranged and glowing bright under the lights.
From behind him, Newton Geiszler breathes into his mic, cigarette-ash and pure joy, "Without seeing the true beauty of the world around you, without curiosity and hope and the determination to discover and study and change and fight against everything and win, you can't dedicate yourself wholeheartedly to something that initially seems dull, or cold, or hopeless. This is why I have Kaiju tattoos on me- even Atticon, the Kaiju that destroyed Seoul five years ago, still a painful memory for you guys. Because numbers, Kaiju, art, love, it's all the same- an unknown for us to attempt to understand. By understanding, you start to see the truth- and the closer we are to the truth, the more hope Dr. Gottlieb and I have for the future. This, my friends, is what a nerd can do. Isn't it beautiful?"
The buzz slowly undulates, spreading, growing, pressurized and electric and expanding and exploding into a cheer- Hermann turns around, brushing the chalk dust from his hands and sleeves, to a standing ovation.
The crowd is awestruck at the wall of dusty, boring numbers on the chalkboards, and they understand. Hermann searches the room, looking for a single, specific child, and eventually finds the raw and wet face of one young Jung Dae-Jun. He is staring at the numbers, eyes gradually glowing brighter and brighter and brighter.
Hermann emerges from behind the 3D projector and stands, as casually as he can manage, at his friend's side. He feels, rather than sees, Newton's hand grasp his, to lift up into the air like a conqueror, and Herman closes his eyes and allows himself to revel in the only time he has ever felt like a rock star in his entire life.
-
June 2016
"I gotcha," Dr. Geiszler murmurs, slowly lowering Hermann to the ground, and Hermann heats up in humiliation and indignant fury. Falling to the floor like a sickly young waif might be embarrassing in its own right, but to be saved from a potentially harmful fall by the world's most irritating co-worker, and by being slammed into the wall, no less, is worse than death.
Trapped in the arms of the bane of his existence, one infuriating Dr. Newton Geiszler, and crushed bodily into the side of their shared lab, Hermann is certain that he will die of an aneurysm within the week, and for that he is wryly grateful.
In a moment Dr. Geiszler safely delivers Hermann to the floor with his leg stretched out, and when Geiszler falls back on to his rump and exaggerated wipes his brow, he leans his back against the wall, partly to be as far away from the filthy Geiszler as physically possible, and partly because the shock of the fall and subsequent rescue has knocked the breath out of him.
He can't look his rescuer in the eyes, and Geiszler laughs, scratchy and loud and genuine.
"I have you figured out, man."
"… Excuse me?"
"You heard me. The clothes. The chalk. The accent. I swear, you're the best fucking- you're like a painting."
It has barely been two months since Hermann has been forced to share a lab space with four other researchers, and two months feels rather like an inappropriately short time before Hermann files a complaint to the Marshall, but it might be necessary for his sanity. Hermann grits his teeth and mutters into the wall, still shaking from the shock of the fall and breathing hard, "What in the world is the matter with you, Geiszler?"
"Dude. It's okay. I'm not making fun of you."
Indignantly, Hermann locks eyes with Geiszler and suppresses a revolted shudder at the stringy, obviously disinfected but still horribly disgusting strand of Kaiju mucus stuck in his hair. The man might be calmer than Hermann has ever seen him before, but that doesn't excuse the Kaiju-stained shirt and would't-melt-butter smile.
"You're dressing to look older."
"… I'm sorry?"
Hermann is taken aback.
"I do the same thing," Geiszler laughs, leaning back on his arms, stained blue and dusted with hair, pale skin giving way to a few mysterious tattoos that peek from under his rolled-up sleeves. "Only I dress to look younger. In the end, though, you're less than a year older than me, man, and in the end I think I hate you and want to be your friend at the same time. Because we're all losers here, in K-Science, and we're all sorta really fucked up. But we're losers that are gonna stick together. You don't have to put up a front like you're detached from everything, man. Don't be so scared of everything that you end up trusting numbers more than living things."
Hermann is so shocked and angry that his answer comes as calm as day, "Numbers cannot disappoint, Doctor. They do not operate on expectations and emotion. They can only tell the truth."
Dr. Geiszler only looks at him with an expression that makes Hermann want to tear his face off- a wide, genuine smile laced with sadness, pity and a twinge of exasperation. "Fine. Be Old Professor if you want. But you're wrong, and there is beauty in expectation, even if you're let down later."
"And I suppose that the Kaiju won't let you down?" hisses Hermann, trying valiantly to scramble to his feet, wishing for all the world that his cane hadn't skittered so far away from him. "When my numbers are the only thing in this facility that are in any way useful in our endeavor to survive against the beasts at our door, and you waste your time fetishizing the very thing that threatens to destroy us, because of some juvenile expectation that they are the answer to your childhood dreams? You're a maniac and a sad excuse for a scientist and an insufferable fanboy, and the fact that you even have the gall to assume that you understand me is revolting."
Geiszler snorts at him. Bodily lifting himself off the ground with a little 'oof' (for the soft padding of fat around his hips, no doubt left over from doughnuts in college), he ignores Hermann's slap to the chest and lifts him by the shoulders, leaning him into the wall, and fetching him the cane from where it has rolled half-under Geiszler's desk.
"You know what? You're a miserable, cold, dickbaggy and stuck-up husk of a human being, too afraid of being hurt that you fail to see that we're supposed to love beauty, not hide behind it like a shield. It makes you jaded and stuck in your own mind and therefore completely useless as a researcher in a facility that is meant to study the unknown for the sake of our futures, and your complete lack of trust in our human emotions makes you closer to a machine than a man."
With that, Geiszler offers Hermann the cane, and when it's ripped from his hands his entire face screws up in a tangled mess of burning disbelief and- and- something else.
"If I am a machine, Dr. Geiszler, then you are a Kaiju," Hermann snarls between his teeth, and shoves his co-worker aside to limp towards the door. "Tomorrow, with the permission of the others, I am dividing this lab with a line and you are never to cross it- never to touch me again."
"You're an asshole," yells Geiszler, hoarse from a long night of cigarettes and Kaiju fumes, and with his hands in tight, shaking fists, he marches across the room. For half of a moment, Hermann, still in the throes of his barely-suppressed rage and wild burst of hatred-fueled adrenaline, is certain that Geiszler will punch him, and flinches before he can contain himself.
Geiszler strides right past him with solid, pounding steps that reverberate through the metal walls of the Shatterdome, seizes a section of oozing Kaiju intestine from a large, open tray on his side of the room, and throws it, as hard as he can, directly into the middle of one of Hermann's chalkboards. It lands with a squelch, sticks for a moment, and then slowly travels down the board, leaving a slime trail that elegantly erases a thick and incredibly important path through the scribbles of chalk.
-
March 2025
After Hermann's part of the lecture, a short spiel on the practical application of statistical data association in a war zone and his thought process during the calculation of the mechanics of the Portal, the two scientists signal to Tendo Choi, and take the stage together for their grand finale.
Newton takes the remote control out of his pocket and aims it at the ceiling above their heads. The curtain behind the backdrop of chalkboards pulls back with a low, electric hum, and the audience gives a simultaneous shriek of delight at what lies behind it.
The custom Pons.
"I'm sure that most, if not all of you were disappointed that Rangers Becket and Mori couldn't make it out here this evening," says Newton, holding out his hand to help Hermann up the stairs at the side of the stage. "You all probably wanted autographs and pictures and all the rest of that stuff. Hey, I understand. But I'm not gonna apologize 'cause you got us instead. Tendolicious, my man, we clear?"
"All clear. Pack yourselves in." Choi rolls their last surprise, an extra-large 3D projector, to the middle of the stage, and hooks it up to the Pons unit himself.
Newton's hand doesn't leave his arm until Hermann carefully seats himself on the makeshift harness built into the portable Pons unit, and then he situates himself to Herman's left side, facing the audience of eager eyes. Built to recreate the same type of Neural Handshake inside an actual Conn-Pod, without the actual hardware protecting the pilots and moving the Jaeger's limbs, only a small portion of Mark V AI runs through the Pons, carefully extracted and packed into a hard drive the size of a mattress by Hermann himself earlier in the week. The scientists lower the headgear down, situate themselves firmly, and strap in.
Choi adjusts his bow tie, turns on his own mic, and addresses the audience. "What you're about to see is a fully realized Neural Handshake, with each and every calculation that we see in the actual Local Command Center, or LOCCENT, graphed right in front of you. This is the same task that I performed for years in the PPDC Shatterdomes, only without the added chore of having to compensate for data from an enormous robot on top of that. Now, I already have the data from Becket and Mori because they've already properly Drifted in a Jaeger, so I know for sure what the readouts will be like. But Drs. Gottlieb and Geiszler have only drifted once before, without an advanced AI scanning their functions for safety, and with a Kaiju brain, as well. I don't have any guarantee that what we see will be anything like a typical Drift. But we're doing it anyway!"
"Fortune favors the brave, dude!" Newton yells from his place in the left-side Pons.
Choi laughs. Hand over the console, he begins the neural scan. The 3D projector comes to life, whirring a complex array of displays into the space between the scientists. "Pilot to Pilot protocol, engaged. AI ready and aligned. Everything looks peachy, folks. Ready?"
"Setting neural for beta mode. Ready."
"Beta mode. Ready."
With a nod, Choi presses the button. "Initiating Neural Handshake."
The AI hums, 'Neural interface Drift… initiating.'
And then the world is-
Newton, twenty, drunk out of his wits and singing to himself on a dingy sidewalk. Newton, thirty-one, speaking with his mother over the phone. Newton, four, pudgy and pink-cheeked, digging a trench in a sandbox with a plastic trowel and filling it with enough water to drown his plastic velociraptor. Newton, just before the start of their lecture, wondering if Bruce Choi was named after Bruce Lee or Bruce Wayne, and deciding on both. Newton, twenty-six, staring at the back of Hermann's head-
And then blissful, blissful silence.
Choi's voice brings Hermann back into the light. "Neural Handshake strong… and holding. Right hemisphere calibrating, left calibrating. Doctors, you'd better see this."
Hermann opens his eyes, unaware that he had closed them in the first place, and sees the readout before him. Backwards, and scrolling even faster than he can make out, the AI is working overtime, creating a completely new item set for unknown variable data- the Kaiju- and furiously reworking its own programming. A new graph blinks from the corner of the display- red and blue, crisp and clear and perfect and beautiful, a graphical representation of his odd connection with the man at his side.
"Wow. Cool," says Newt simply.
"It's more than 'cool', you insufferable child. It's the start of a new era."
("You're thinking of the data, right? About the possibility that-")
("In the event that the Breach is opened once more and the world is again at the mercy of one Newton Geiszler, I weep for humanity.")
Hermann looks at the audience, wide-eyed, spotty youths hanging on the edge of their seats, and wonders to himself if he has been teaching any future co-workers unknowingly. His eyes land on the bright and glowing face of one Jung Dae-Jun, still reeling from awe. He sees his partner, and he sees himself.
As the knot in his chest finally falls apart, Hermann privately thinks to himself that in the event that the war is not over, and the youth that understand what it means to truly believe in the extraordinary grow up to join the ranks of the people who will change the course of history, the world has more hope than he could ever have imagined possible.
("Aw. That's so sweet, Herm. I'll throw up a rainbow.")
("Shut up, you moronic, doe-eyed sack of Kaiju offal.")
-