Blocks

Newt yawns, nods off, and jerks awake.
“Morning, Doctor Geiszler,” greets Tang Min.
“Morning,” he yawns. “Wait. What are you doing in New Zealand?”
“This is a dream.”
“Why’m I dreaming about you?”
Her eyes grow bloodshot and eyelids raw and scaly. The bruised crescent on her cheek darkens into a full ring, violet spiderwebbing along her jaw and crawling to her forehead. “Because there’s no else.”
Max barks.
Hercules Hansen crosses his arms. “The point, mate, is for you to see, not to scare you.”
Mako-chan cradles her shoe. “I’m only a child; you would worry for me and miss the point.”
Raleigh smiles sadly. “That teachable moment went right over your head. Was Drifting worth it?”
“Hell yea, dude! I saved the world! I,” Newt leans forward, “am a rockstar.”
Tang Min wrinkles her nose. “At the cost of ending five others.” She frowns. “One could argue at the cost of ending seven worlds.”
“Ended seven… what are you talking about?”
“The Jaegers.”
“How? I was… I would never sabotage a Jaeger.”
Tang Min stands.  “C'mon.”
“Where are we going?”
A memory from the Anteverse.
“No one can know for sure, however,” Tang Min shines a laser pointer at a still-in-its-pod Kaiju, throwing a spray of stars across its arms, “Otachi’s wings. See them?”
“But that’s not Otachi.”
“Nah, just another hound. Maybe an Exterminator.”
She and Newt tilt their heads and study it.
Tang Min shrugs. "Hard to tell from this angle." She points to another Kaiju’s tail. “Otachi’s tail.” A third Kaiju. “Leatherback’s EMP.” A fourth. “Otachi’s acid.”
“I already know all this,” scoffs Newt. “In fact, I discovered it. The Kaiju were assembled, so what?”
“Dude, preaching to the choir. This is the subconscious speaking, hello, how are you?” Tang Min clicks off the pointer. “Fact: They already had the pieces. Another fact: they hadn’t the ‘ideal’ combination. Question: How long would it take them before they figured it out?”
“Figured out what?”
Tang Min heads off between the pods. “Qualifying the statement would be great,” she calls, “but that’s impossible.” She stops and twists back. “What’s the hold up? Don't fall behind.”
Newt hurries after her.
“‘There’s a chance’,” she continues, “well no, that implies a certain,” she makes air quotes, “‘negligible’ element, which again, is qualifying. Assumptions cannot be made because there is no answer, no way to test whatever theory or hypothesis drawn; a conclusion cannot be attained because data can never be collected and because these two criteria are impossible to meet the ‘what if’ will drive even the healthiest mind insane.”
“Okay, fine,” snaps Newt, “lots of words. Words words words! Whoop-de-doo! Statistical probabilities, yay, technobabble, whoohoo. What’s next, ‘reversing the polarity of the neutron flow’? I get it.”
Tang Min stops dead and gives him a look bordering on disgust. “No, you don’t.” She climbs into the Breach. “It’s easy to see the situation as black or white, ‘it either happened this way or it didn’t’.”
Damn, it's weird walking up a vertical wall.
“But it’s actually in colour and while it’s impossible to determine the colour, it is there. Basically,” she looks over her shoulder and finds him, “The odds can never be determined but there are odds.”
They step from the Breach into a brilliant white light with two silhouettes.
“Stacker Pentecost and Chuck Hansen,” states Tang Min, illuminating each. “Vaporized.”
“Why are you doing this?” demands Newt.
“Why are you doing this?” shoots Tang Min. She slips around Chuck and the Kaidanovskys lie between them; Lady Kaidanovsky screaming in rage and fighting to get free; Taller Kaidanovsky helmetless and...
“Alexandra Kaidanovskaya,” says Tang Min, shining stars on the woman’s helmet, “inhaled enough water to drown but was vaporized before she suffocated. Aleksis Kaidanvosky. That final impact from Leatherback severed his brain stem. Died instantly.” Tang Min drums her fingers on the twisted mess of struts.
Newt ducks to avoid the crumpled metal that he keeps passing through anyway.  
“Tang Jin Wei. Impact trauma liquefied his insides; blacked out and died within minutes. Tang Cheung Wei, crushed, died within minutes. Tang Hu Wei, would have bled out had his brothers not fried his brain.”
“Ha! I’ve got you!” says Newt. “You can’t possibly be my subconscious because I couldn’t possibly know any of this!”
“Oh, knowledge has nothing on imagination,” replies Tang Min. “This is all up here,” she taps her head and they were back in the lab. “This is what you dread. It’s going to come crawling and oozing out of the dark, primal depths some rainy night after hours of tossing and turning and from the ashes will rise panic and madness.”
Newt takes a step back.
“There’s a possibility so horrifying, so terrifying that it required a trip to the morgue to see. How long, do you think, would it take the Precursors to figure out which bits and pieces were best to take out the final Jaegers? There were thousands of blocks from which to choose, some humans didn’t even have words for so, do tell, how could humans possibly defend against them? What’s next is to wake up and scream, and how, exactly could a tiny human possibly destroy not one, not two, but four giant machines?”
Tang Min doesn't have to look up at him. When did she get so tall?
“The same way that tiny human destroyed a universe, by plucking secrets out of a brain.”
“But if I didn’t Drift with it, I wouldn’t have saved the world.”
Tang Min throws up her hands. “Me me me me! Is that all there is to it? ‘My name’, ‘my legacy’, ‘my ego’? There are 60 custodians, 50 kitchen employees, and a full complement of medical professionals, but you couldn’t ask any one of them. It had to be you. Congratulations, look at what you've done. How much did the Kaiju learn about Jaegers from the brain of Doctor Geiszler?”
He wakes with a gasp.
The door opens
“Newton, what's wrong?”
“Hermann, I think I killed them."
“Who?”
"That's not right..."
"Newton."
"Risk, reward, reversing the polarity-,"
"Newton."
"Chances! Oh god, Hermann, the chances."
"Newt!"
"The chances I’m responsible for killing them. What are they?”
Hermann stays silent.
“The Rangers- the Kaidanovksys and the Weis and Chuck – he was just a kid – and Marshal Pentecost?”
“I… What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know.”
Category:Ficlet
Category:Tang Min
Category:Tang Min (ficlet)
Category:Hermann
Category:Hermann (ficlet)
Category:Newt
Category:Newt (ficlet)
Category:Pacific Rim (2013)
Category:Kaiju
Category:Cherno Alpha
Category:Leatherback
Category:Anteverse
Category:Operation Pitfall
Category:The Drift
Category:Battle of Hong Kong
Category:Crimson Typhoon
Category:Blocked