Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization Read online

  Raleigh didn’t consider himself an especially sharp judge of women, but he could practically smell the ozone in the air between him and Mako. Tension, attraction, rivalry, suspicion—all at once. It was good. Invigorating. He shut the door and thought to himself that he was exactly where he belonged.

  Tomorrow, as Tendo Choi had said, would be a big day. The first of many

  * * *

  PAN-PACIFIC DEFENSE CORPS

  PERSONNEL DOSSIER

  NAME

  Newton Geiszler, PhD

  ASSIGNED TEAM

  Kaiju Science,

  ID S-NGEI_100.11-Y

  DATE OF ACTIVE SERVICE

  August 7, 2016

  CURRENT SERVICE STATUS

  ACTIVE; BASED HONG KONG

  SHATTERDOME

  BIOGRAPHY

  Born Berlin January 19, 1990. Only child. Parents musicians. Strongly influenced by uncle, musical engineer, who taught Geiszler the basics of electronics; also avid consumer of manga and monster movies. Combination of these influences and genius-level intellect led Geiszler to voracious interest in all sciences. Second youngest student admitted to Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Received six doctorates by 2015, taught MIT 2010-2016, pioneered research in artificial tissue replication. Joined PPDC 2016. Psychological profile indicates profound ambivalence toward kaiju resulting from conflict between childhood adoration of monsters and contemporary observation of kaiju attacks. Borderline manic personality, poor social skills. Has performed critical research leading to upgraded Jaeger armaments.

  NOTES

  Born Berlin January 19,Unorthodox approach causes chain-of-command issues; these are to be handled lightly due to Geiszler's outstanding record of research and reverse engineering Anteverse biotechnologies. Service file contains written complaints from Kaiju Science colleague Dr. Hermann Gottlieb regarding Geiszler's laboratory procedures, personal demeanor, taste in music, and other minor issues. Complaints deemed nonessential. No action is to be taken.

  * * *

  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.

  * * *

  PAN PACIFIC DEFENSE CORPS

  J-TECH PROJECT UPDATE

  GIPSY DANGER UPGRADE PROGRESS

  JANUARY 2, 2025

  The project of restoring and upgrading Gipsy Danger is complete. An updated list of improvements follows.

  UPGRADED REACTOR SHIELDING

  Restored plasma reservoirs for both cannons

  Overhauled initiation protocols for plasma cannons, reducing warmup delays by 15%

  Integrated post-Mark III advances in Conn-Pod interface technology

  Restored and updated hydraulics and neuromuscular assemblies, resulting in faster reaction times and increased endurance

  Restored painted insignia

  Chain Sword installed and fully integrated into neurocommand systems

  Other minor improvements in aesthetics and functionality

  Reactor fuel rods replenished and coolant circulation system rebuilt

  New venting system installed for improved reactor efficiency and venting of waste heat

  Escape mechanisms tested and components updated per most recent PPDC specifications

  Thorough vetting of upgrades demonstrates complete integration into existing circuitry undamaged during Gipsy Danger's last combat deployment. Tendo Choi has observed vetting and simulations, and is in agreement with this assessment.

  Screening of potential Drift partners for Raleigh Becket is complete. Five candidate finalists have been briefed and are prepared for physical trials in the Kwoon as soon as Becket is cleared to meet them.

  PERSONAL ASIDE

  This candidate strenuously objects to being removed from the list of finalists.

  Submitted by Mako Mori on behalf of the Gipsy Danger Upgrade Team

  * * *

  10

  RALEIGH HIT THE MESS HALL AT FIVE-THIRTY sharp, figuring on a quick bite that would leave him time to warm up before the trials. He wasn’t a big breakfast eater as a rule, but this morning he was starved. He was going to have to be careful not to stuff himself and then be groggy when it was time to fight.

  The mess hall was the product of the same mold as the mess halls in every other military and pseudo-military facility all over the world. Serving area along one wall with trash cans and a counter at the far end. Through an open window Raleigh could see the kitchen crew energetically washing dishes. The main floor area was taken up with long tables set parallel to each other.

  Even this early in the morning, most of the tables were occupied. Each Jaeger crew appeared to have a designated spot. The Wei triplets were accompanied by the syncopated thump of their ever-present basketball as they carried trays with one hand and dribbled between the three of them with the other. The Russians, a few tables over, had brought along their soundtrack. Ukrainian hard house rumbled and boomed from a portable speaker set in the middle of their table. Raleigh didn’t see Mako, and he hadn’t yet met any of Gipsy Danger’s crew, so he wasn’t sure where to sit.

  He’d just decided to find a spot at an empty table when he heard Herc call out to him.

  “Raleigh! Come with us. Plenty of food on our table.”

  Herc was coming from the serving area, and Raleigh fell into step with him. He couldn’t believe the bounty on Herc’s tray, it was a feast compared to what he’d been used to over the last five years of ration cards in Alaska.

  “Haven’t seen bread in ages,” he said, picking up a piece from Herc’s tray. It was still warm. The smell made his mouth water.

  “Hong Kong,” Herc said. “That’s the beauty of an open port. No rationing. We have potatoes, peas, sweet beans, some decent meatloaf...”

  They got to the table and Herc waved at the crew
to scoot down and make space for Raleigh.

  “Sit down,” he said. “This is my son, Chuck. He’s my co-pilot now.”

  Raleigh nodded. He remembered Chuck from the night before and he figured that Herc was making the reintroduction as much for Chuck as for Raleigh. He was making a point: he’s one of us. Max the dog was under the table patrolling for scraps. A good guy, Herc. Raleigh remembered thinking that five years ago, and he appreciated the gesture now. Five years ago, Chuck was still in high school, or whatever Australians called it. Now he was looking at Raleigh like... well, like Raleigh had looked at Tommy back on the Wall.

  “He’s my co-pilot,” Chuck said. Then, as Raleigh sat down, he started talking to his father as if Raleigh wasn’t there. “This is the guy that’s supposed to run defense for me? In the steam engine? Is Pentecost actually working for the kaiju now?”

  Raleigh turned. He was having a bit of deja vu, like the scene in the Alaskan commissary was about to repeat itself.

  “When was the last time you jockeyed, Ray?” Chuck asked.

  Ray.

  “Five years,” Raleigh said.

  “And what did you do those five years?” Chuck pressed. “Something pretty important, I reckon.”

  “I was in construction,” Raleigh said. Here we go, he thought. In Alaska I took all kinds of shit because I used to pilot Jaegers and nobody believed in Jaegers. Now I’m going to take more shit because the cocky son with a chip on his shoulder doesn’t think I’ve got what it takes anymore. No matter where I go, I hear it from someone.

  It was enough to make a guy want to kill some kaiju.