A Cartful of Junk (scene)

==Links==
* Afraid of the Dark
==Novelization==
Chapter 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.
Category:Newt
Category:Newt (scenes)
Category:Novelization excerpts
Category:Pages in need of tags