Newt has a plan (scene)

Newt wants to Drift with a Kaiju brain.
==A cartful of junk==
(Ch 9)
ROCK STAR, THOUGHT NEWT GEISZLER. ONCE he’d wanted to be one for real. Now he would settle for the figurative sense... at least until they won the Kaiju War and he could get back to the business of putting a band together. He hadn’t been onstage since the Gymnasium back in Berlin, where he and the Black Velvet Rabbits had bent the heads of geeks at every all-ages club he could haul his gear to.
Now he was thousands of miles from Berlin, fighting for humanity’s survival by scavenging bits of junk equipment from storage rooms behind the Jaeger repair bays. He’d found a processor that should function, left over from when the Hong Kong Shatterdome had its own strike team. It looked like it might have been original to Shaolin Rogue, but Newt didn’t know for sure. He had enough fiber-optic and fluid-core cabling to get the bandwidth he needed. He had leads and copper contact pins. He had a spare monitor and a solid-state recording drive back in the lab.
He piled all the stuff on a cart and looked it over one more time, speccing out the project in his head. It wasn’t that hard to build a Pons now that the tech was established and had found its way into so many other applications. Yep, Newt thought. He had what he needed.
Now it was time to tinker, like he was building instruments for Black Velvet Rabbit. Newt loved tinkering. He loved to give his highly creative, instinctive, yet profoundly analytical, brain free rein, shutting down his perceived reality and seeing where his ratiocinative mind would take him. Whenever he got to construct something, he had that crackle in his head... especially when he was about to do something as balls-out crazy as Drift with a sample of a dead kaiju. Swap neurotrasmissions with a silicate cerebellum. Open himself up to the alien alpha waves of a nonhuman sentience.
Hermann wouldn’t have done it even if he had conclusive mathematical proof that it would save the universe. It just wasn’t something a guy like Hermann could conceive of. But it was exactly the kind of thing that was constantly running through Newt’s mind, which (and Newt would never have admitted this out loud, but he knew it was true) was why he and Hermann worked so well together. They struck sparks.
Newt and his Uncle Gunter had struck the same sparks when Newt was a kid, tinkering in the basement of Gunter’s studio, where fringey techno musicians stood around making sounds and waiting for Gunter to come up with the next innovation that they would turn into the club tracks that pounded out of speakers all over Europe. Gunter had pioneered many of the sounds that were probably coming out of the Kaidanovskys’ speakers right now. All that Ukrainian stuff was derived from the Berlin scene anyway.
Music, the universal language, right? The same kind of cognitive link you got from Drifting, at least that was Newt’s theory. He’d never had the time to do a proper evaluation and now it didn’t matter.
He wheeled the cart out of the storage locker and across the repair bay, back to the door he had cut his way through with wire cutters. All this stuff was kept locked up, and Newt could never figure out why. Who would have wanted it? Were random thieves from Kowloon sneaking in and making off with eight-foot liquid-synapse segment? Security puzzled him sometimes.
But whatever. Newt eased the repair-bay door back into place. It was chain-link in a chain-link wall. Nobody would notice the cut until morning, and by then Newt would be all done. He’d take the heat for cutting into the door if he had to, but if he was right nobody would care about that little transgression. Still, he looked up and down the halls warily in case he saw someone and had to make excuses.
A couple of Jaeger techs passed, arguing about something with a pair of Jumphawk pilots. They glanced over at Newt but didn’t see anything remarkable about him rolling a cartful of junk down the hall in the middle of the night. It wasn’t remarkable, really. Inspiration struck when inspiration struck, and sometimes it required you to get a load of junk and see what you could build.
***
Back in the lab, he shoved a bunch of stuff out of the way, stacking reports against a model of Trespasser’s skeleton and shoving his specimen jars over toward the Line of Demarcation so he had some floor space on which to work.
The basics of the Pons were simple. You needed an interface on each end, so neuro signals from the two brains could reach the central bridge. You needed a processor capable of organizing and merging the two sets of signals. You needed an output so the data generated by the Drift could be recorded, monitored, and analyzed. That was it.
Newt soldered together a series of leads using the copper contact pins and short fluid-core cables. He had a webbed skullcap lying around somewhere, similar to what the Jaeger pilots called a thinking cap. Newt preferred the term “squid cap,” because the one he had wasn’t sealed into a full polypropylene head covering. It was a naked web of receptors and feed amplifiers. If you mashed it out flat it looked like a spiderweb with big red plastic nodules at the end of the radiating strands. If you dangled it over your head, it looked like a squid with several extra tentacles... and big red plastic nodules at the end of each one. Therefore, squid cap. It would be the interface with his brain.
It was connected through a silver half-torus that looked like a travel pillow but was in fact a four-dimensional quantum recorder that would provide a full record of the Drift. At least it worked that way when two humans did it.
For the kaiju brain, he put all of the fluid-core cables together into a single array, uniting them to a heavier cable that linked to the Pons processor. For that he was using the processing router from Shaolin Rogue. Suddenly he liked that. He wasn’t just a rock star, as awesome as that would be. Newt Geiszler was a Shaolin Rogue! Pentecost said he couldn’t do this. Hermann scoffed at the possibility. Herc Hansen, Captain Unflappable, didn’t give it a second thought.
All the more reason to do it, thought Newt. He loved proving people wrong even more than he loved being right.
And he knew he was right.
He attached the squid-cap leads to another array with fluid-core cables, until he ran out. Then he rummaged around on Hermann’s side of the lab until he found some more. It appeared that Hermann was using them to accelerate some kind of complex math simulation. Newt looked at the code, decided that Hermann’s experiment wasn’t mission-critical, and yanked cables until he had enough for his squid cap.
That was the two ends sorted. Now he needed to put the middle together and make sure it could hear... and, more importantly, that whatever it heard would be recorded so Newt could look at it later.
Or, if humanity’s first kaiju Drift killed him, so Hermann could look at it and figure out what went wrong.
Not that Newt was too worried about that. His brain was tough. Also, he was working with a miniscule sample of kaiju brain. For all he knew, it was only the part governing limbic processes or the kaiju’s sense of smell or something minor. He had no idea.
That was one more reason to find out.
Newt set aside the squid cap and got down to the business of retrofitting the Shaolin Rogue processor so it was up to the task he had set for it. He performed some quick recoding, and swapped out two of its chipsets for newer versions he plucked from the back of one of his workstations. Then he wired it into a holographic projector. He got out the soldering iron again and put together two interfaces so the squid cap and the liquid-core trunk line to the kaiju brain had their own dedicated plugs that would handle the torrent of information.
He looked at his watch. The sun would be up pretty soon. Not too long after that, Hermann would show up. Newt wanted to be done before Hermann got to the lab. Otherwise he’d have to explain himself, and Newt wasn’t always very good at that. He tended to assume either that everyone was as smart as he was—which was never true— or that everyone listening to him was an idiot who needed elementary explanations. Which also was never true, at least not around here, but Newt wasn’t too sensitive to social cues. He knew this. He didn’t care.
Anyway, he didn’t want to explain himself so the only thing to do was to get the whole thing over with before Hermann showed up.
Therefore, it was go time.
Newt ran a check on the squid cap to make sure it was transmitting at the specified levels: It was. Then he went to the specimen jar containing the partial kaiju brain. He wished he knew which kaiju it had come from, but the kind of people who bought and sold kaiju parts were also the kind of people who didn’t keep very good records. Maybe the kaiju’s identity would become clear when Newt Drifted with it. Maybe not.
He unsealed the jar, and pushed the copper pins into the brain one by one, trying to keep an even spacing between each pin, to increase the probability that he would get input from every possible portion of the brain that might be dedicated to different processes. If the kaiju brain was organized along principles analogous to human gray matter, it would be compartmentalized, with specialized neurons adapted to different functions. Newt’s analysis of the specimen indicated this was the case, but you never knew what was really in a brain until you Drifted with it. When he had the pins all in place, he connected the trunk cable to the processor and turned on the holoprojector.
An image appeared. It didn’t look at all like the image of a human brain, but Newt would have figured he’d done something wrong if it had. Kaiju brains tended to be pyramidal in shape, and this one generated a hologram that indeed appeared to be part of a pyramid. So maybe he’d gotten the pins in the right places.
He quickly ran a series of connectivity tests to see if the brain was still transmitting information: It was. The bath of silicate transmission medium still carried neuronic signals inside the brain, just like lipid plasmas did in human neurons.
After that, the only thing left to do was Drift.
But first Newt thought he would grab a quick bite to eat. He knew this would be a huge strain on his mind, and he wasn’t dumb enough to ignore the effects of fatigue on the human body. At least not all the time.
He went to the fridge and dug around in it until he had half a salami and cheese sandwich, some German potato salad, and a bag of baby carrots that belonged to Hermann.
Newt sat down back by his cobbled-together Pons. He was proud of himself. Not too many people could have done what he’d just done.
And once he finished breakfast, he was going to be the first human being in history to Drift with an alien brain.
==Unnamed==
(Ch 12)
NEWT FINISHED HIS BREAKFAST AND SHOVED THE sandwich wrapper and potato salad cup out of the way. He set up the recording software and took a deep breath. Go time. Newt Geiszler was about to reach for immortality.
He hoped that when his biographers took up the task of memorializing this moment, they would make sure to point out that Newt had spent all night cobbling together a Pons setup from bits of junk-room scrap and various components littering his side of the lab. He was a tinkerer in a lineage of tinkerers that led back through Edison and Tesla to da Vinci, all the way to whichever caveman had first decided that if he put a rock in a piece of hide, he could throw it farther.
As of this moment, he was ninety-five percent sure it would work.
Those were good enough odds for him. Hell, he’d done riskier things with the stats against him... well, no. He hadn’t. But what the hell.
Newt started a portable recorder.
“Oh eight hundred hours,” he said. “Kaiju/Human Drift Experiment. Take one.”
Newt picked up the squid cap from the tabletop. He worked it down over his head and checked the fit of the liquid-core trunk cable that led to the processor. It was solid.
Next to the chair he’d selected to be his Drift pilot’s seat was the makeshift Pons, an aggregation of cables and switches that he hoped would approximate the more polished setups in each Jaeger’s Conn-Pod. The jar of kaiju brain put him in mind of an old movie with Erich von Stroheim. He couldn’t remember the title, which irritated him momentarily until he reminded himself that he had more important things to do. He picked up the recorder again.
“Brain segment. Frontal lobe. Chances are the sample is far too damaged to Drift with. However, neural activity is still detectable.”
This was the conservative assessment. Newt’s intuition was, in fact, quite a bit more radical. He didn’t believe the brain was dead at all. It was dormant, maybe, but Newt was certain that if you stuck that brain back into a kaiju, the kaiju would get up and walk around and level Honolulu or Melbourne.
He just needed this experiment to prove his theory.
He rested his finger on the switch that would activate the neural handshake between the brain of Newt Geiszler and the kaiju brain formerly belonging to the exo-being known as... well, he didn’t know. In fact he didn’t know if the kaiju had names, or considered themselves individuals. Maybe he was about to find out.
“Unscientific aside,” he said. “Hermann, if you’re listening to this, I’m either alive and proving what I’ve just done, in which case ha! I won!”
Ungrammatical, yes. Satisfying, also yes.
“Or I’m dead,” Newt went on, “and you need to know that it’s you who drove me to this, and it’s all your fault. In which case... ha! I won. Kind of.”
He kept the recorder on and rested finger and thumb against the activation switch.
“I’m going in... five, four, three, two... One!”
Click.
***
Newt had never Drifted, so at first he didn’t know he was Drifting. He thought he was dreaming, even though in the midst of the dream his conscious mind observed— until it was blown away by the welter of sensations at the beginning of the Drift.
He was a boy. It was summer. He and his parents were on holiday, at one of the lower-Alpine resorts that aspired to be Lake Como. His mother had a concert that night. Newt felt wet sand between his toes. He swam, closed his eyes, envisioned the water around him as a matrix of flow equations. He wondered if there were fish looking at him, and what they thought.
Oh right I’m Drifting.
His uncle’s study, where Newt had learned both music and tinkering. Gunter, we dig this, can we take it? We’ll pay you when we’re back from tour.
Gunter’s laugh, from his belly, roughened along the way by cigarettes. Uncle Gunter who gave people things before they could steal from him. The gear in his studio. A new sound, one that nobody had ever made before. Lines on a monitor danced out the data, expressing it. Ecstasy of sound and idea, endlessly dividing inside Newt’s mind.
The lake in the summer, the skies growing dark and the water surging, getting heavier and thicker
Oh no, Newt thought, like a dreamer knowing his dream is about to become nightmare. He wasn’t looking at the lake of his childhood anymore. The scene in his mind, no human had ever seen it before. Sky turning red and the lake was a heaving sea of bio-slurry stirred and channeled into great sacs inside the sacs things moved and grew
This satisfied him and it satisfied the Precursors
The word speared its way into Newt’s consciousness and he could not fight it off. Precursors that is not who is who is where did I get that word oh god the kaiju it’s talking to me
Looking down with mind cold and empty save for hunger to conquer, Precursors
Around them a city made of bone and flesh, bred and grown not built now dying as the world around them was dying he was one of them he was not one of them they realized they were being watched
From a sac surged a monster, slick with fluid it shambled forward the Precursor saw it and beckoned
Behind it the factory
Factory
Spread under a dying sky sacs and watchers and the churning pools from which they sprang
Like Mutavore but larger, it spread wings deformity thought the precursor dying the kaiju fell back into the bio-slurry and was absorbed another sac split and another kaiju rose from within like Mutavore but larger, it spread wings
Mother never left the lake she fell in love there and
And died
Realization shattered the intensity of the Drift and for a moment Newt had clarity. Oh God, I understand
The kaiju died the first time around
The Precursor looked at him it looked at him and knew him they were ready this new world was ready for them they had waited a time for the world to prepare itself and now it had
They were coming now they were certain and they were coming
Pay you when we get back from tour
Another and another another another
Laughter of the Precursor from its bone belly roughened by brutal exhilaration of conquest the sound was bits and waves and
Newt
He was coming back. Was he coming back? Slowly.
was a brain Drifting in Lake Como below him fish burst from their sacs and
Newt
All those fish were probably dead from pollution acidification runoff pesticides estrogen mimics the world was dying Earth was dying, yes. But that other place, too... Their world was dying
Was that a voice calling him? Newt!
***
“Newt!”
The world was shaking around him. No, he was shaking.
No, someone was shaking him.
Hermann. Shaking him. Also he was shaking, spasming, making sounds.
“Newt!” Hermann shouted again. He tore the squid cap off Newt’s head and slapped him hard.
Newt froze. The world fell into place around him again. He had two thoughts at once.
The first was that he had no idea how the Rangers could do this more than once. As for the second... he looked up at Hermann and said, “I was right.”
Then he slumped into unconsciousness.
Category:Newt has a plan (scene)
Category:Novelization excerpts