Free Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization by Alex Irvine Page A

he could no longer contain himself.
    “It’s not enough to know when or for how long the portal will be open,” he said, waving at the holo like it was a third-grade science project. “Anyone can chop the numbers and figure that out. I mean, Hermann’s math is good. It always is. But math isn’t going to win this fight. Understanding the nature of the kaiju will. And on that front, I have a theory.”
    Gottlieb, primly offended, sniffed.
    “Please. Don’t embarrass yourself.”
    To Gottlieb’s visible irritation, Pentecost indicated that Newt should continue.
    “Why do we judge kaiju on a category system?” Newt said, adopting the lecturer’s tone. “Because each of them is different from the next. It’s almost as if each of them is an entirely new species. There don’t appear to be any family relationships among individuals that would give us a classification system, so we do it by size and mass instead.”
    “Get to your point,” Pentecost said.
    Newt stomped through the flotsam on his side of the lab and held up a piece of a dissected kaiju gland —The one, Herc thought, he’d been hacking at when we came in.
    “Despite the highly individuated appearance of each kaiju, there are some fundamental structures and systems they all seem to have in common. I’ve noticed the repetition of patterns in certain organs. See? This is a piece I collected from the glands harvested in Sydney.”
    Everyone looked. It was a gland, sliced across its crosssection, with a clear pattern to the striations of tissue and patterns of... whatever those dark lines were. Veins? Nerves? Herc wasn’t an anatomist.
    Newt placed the gland next to another sample on a tray and shoved tabletop debris away from the tray.
    “This was harvested in Manila, six years ago.”
    I killed the kaiju that gland came from, Herc thought. He stepped closer, crossing from Gottlieb’s Prussian fantasy of scientific order to Newt’s intuitive maelstrom. He looked closer at the two glands.
    They were identical.
    Herc looked at Pentecost, who was looking at Newt with absolute concentration. In the background, Gottlieb was making a great show of ignoring Newt.
    “Same exact DNA,” Newt said. “Two different specimens, two exact organ clones.”
    “Same DNA,” Pentecost echoed.
    “Identical,” Newt said. “Like spare parts in an assembly line. The entire organisms are obviously not the same, but different parts of them are absolutely taken from identical cloned snippets of DNA. This is a manufactured organ. It did not evolve this way. There is something more at play here than just monsters wandering through an interdimensional hole, and we need to know what.”
    “And now he gets crazy,” Gottlieb said, like he’d heard the whole schtick before.
    “The DNA structures replicated in each of these organs serve two functions,” Newt said. “One is of course to create this specific kind of tissue. Even in this silicate form instead of the carbon-based human DNA, the basic task of DNA is to encode the physical form of the being. But with the kaiju, it does something else, too. It encodes memories. I’ve identified structures within the silicate nucleotides that appear to exist purely for information storage. They don’t program tissue formation or function. They’re memory banks.”
    Herc wasn’t sure what a silicate nucleotide would be, but memory banks? In each kaiju? He thought he could see where Newt was going, and a moment later Newt confirmed it for him.
    “Cellular memory,” Newt said, continuing before Gottlieb could take the group’s attention away from him. He hurried to a large tank holding part of a kaiju brain. “This specimen’s damaged, weak... but still alive. If we can tap into it using the same tech that allows two Jaeger pilots to share a neural bridge, then we could, theoretically, learn where they come from... see inside the Breach and experience exactly how to get through ourselves.”
    Pentecost glanced over at