Two Years Later
Chapter One

People ask me, sometimes, if there's anything I regret about my life. I try not to have regrets—or if I do, I try to learn from them, to learn how not to make the same mistakes. "But is there anything you would change?" they say. "Is there anything you wish were different?"

There was one thing, actually. I used to wish I could pass people on the street without being noticed. I used to wish I could make eye contact with a stranger and just walk on by. I used to wish I could meet someone for the first time without them saying,

"You're that boy…."

That boy. They might not have known my name, but they knew my face. They knew what I looked like and how I carried myself, and the glint of recognition in their eyes—it was unmistakable.

Like me, I guess.

But you see, some things can't be put behind you just because you'd rather forget. I learned that well one day.

I was working in a soup kitchen at the time. We were chronically short-staffed, with people coming and going on a daily basis. We had people burn themselves on the pot handles or pour out too much stock for a given meal. That was the way things were. We had people come in with the qualifications to be literary critics or materials scientists. That didn't help them learn how to bring broth to a simmer.

The newest recruit was a middle-aged man named Taniguchi. I met him on an afternoon shift at the kitchen, and his eyes lit up.

"You're that boy, aren't you? You are!"

I sighed, shook my head, and said, "My name's Nakai. Nice to meet you. Do you understand?"

He nodded eagerly, beaming. It was like how, if you told a friend in school that you were interested in a classmate—that you liked her—and asked them not to say anything, they'd smile and nod and grin at you knowingly. Taniguchi's smile was like that.

"So, what do I need to do, uh, Nakai?"

He learned fast, too—not just what to say, but how to cook. He may have been unkempt—with a scraggly beard and disheveled hair—but Taniguchi cared for the soup gently, moving the ladle with deliberate caresses as he stirred.

"It's not bad, you know?" he said, once I showed him the ropes. "It's nice to make something other people will appreciate."

I laughed to myself at that. "You haven't seen the ingredients."

"Huh? What do you mean?"

I tore open a gray paper packet and dumped the contents into the broth. Dried seaweed floated in a clump on top of the broth, and a few cubes of tofu followed.

"You're kidding," he said, scoffing.

I opened a cupboard, showing him dozens of those gray paper packets.

"Take five more of these per pot. That's the standard batch."

He shook the packet with two fingers. "How many people is this pot supposed to serve?"

"Thirty, if you can stretch it that far."

Shaking his head, Taniguchi tore open another packet and stirred the seaweed and tofu into the pale yellow broth.

"Didn't used to be this way…," he muttered.

He was right about that. It didn't used to be that we had to stretch out instant soup packets to feed the hungry. It didn't used to be that a boy not even out of high school and a salaryman would cook up soup for people in a school kitchen, but that was reality. We were two men in a spacious, shiny middle-school kitchen, surrounded by polished steel stoves and ovens. The white fluorescent lights cast a glare from those surfaces, as though the past itself were looking back at us with an unwavering gaze. If you looked hard enough, you might see the distant memories of children stopping by to pick up lunches and chat with their classmates. They would've eaten just through the double doors to the cafeteria, day in and day out, never paying any mind to the food service workers in the kitchen.

As Taniguchi tended to the soup, I peered through a tiny, circular window in the double doors. There were few children in the cafeteria that day. There were mostly adults in rags or tattered clothes. Open sores and boils festered on their skin. A stereo in the corner played a tape of '70s pop music. A couple people rocked to it, but mostly, the patrons stared at the cafeteria walls, thinking nothing and feeling nothing.

"Ah, Nakai? I think the soup is ready? What do we do now?"

Taniguchi leaned over the steaming broth and turned his head sideways, watching bubbles form on the surface.

"It is ready, right?" he said.

I looked over the edge of the pot and nodded. "You can take it outside. Bowls should be under the table."

"You're not coming with me?"

"Someone has to clean the kitchen," I said with a shrug.

He frowned, but I offered him a pair of mitts to hold to carry the pot with, and he went on his way. The patrons would form a line in front of the soup pot, never sniffing with joy the food before them, never smiling as they filled their bellies.

For all their infected sores and brittle bones, they were alive, right? And I—I did my part to provide for them, unseen and unknown. I stayed behind in the kitchen, and to the beat of a distant, archaic eight-track, I straightened up the boxes of seaweed and tofu packets. I ran water—spurting, irregular water—to clean bowls from the morning meal. And if the kitchen looked clean, that was only to the untrained eye. Tiny yellow spots dotted the area around the sink and even past that. I found a few stains on the center island, too, and I kneeled down to wipe them away.

That's why, when the double door opened, I didn't see who came in. I just said, "If you need more bowls, I'll be through with them in a minute."

"Sorry, I'm not hungry."

I shot up. It was a man—a stranger in a dirty green jacket two sizes too small. Despite his haggard appearance, the man's gaze was steady and even.

As steady as the revolver at his side.

"I see," I said. "What do you want? We don't have a lot of money."

The man huffed, shaking his head. "This isn't about money."

"What then?"

At that, the man made no reply, at least not at first. Instead, he wandered the kitchen for a bit. He ran a finger over the countertop, picking up loose droplets of soup. He admired his own reflection in the dangling pots and pans.

"Why here?" he asked at last. "What are you doing here?"

"It, uh…" I backed away from him. He circled the kitchen island, following me, and I backpedaled to match his strides. "It helps people," I said.

"Does it?"

I reached for the edge of the island behind me. "I like to think so."

"It doesn't help me," he said, keeping up with me with long steps.

"It could." I gestured to the doors leading into the cafeteria. "Are you hungry?"

He shook his head. "I don't need help. If you want to help someone, help my wife."

I frowned. I opened my mouth to reply, but before I could speak, the doors to the cafeteria opened. Taniguchi came in with an empty pot.

"I can't believe we got that much out of that one packet," he muttered. "All right, so, I think we might need another—oh."

The stranger hid his hands behind his back, nodding in apology. "Sorry, I was just talking with my friend here," the stranger explained. "We go way back."

Taniguchi frowned. "Is that true?" he asked me.

My eyes flickered to the revolver behind the stranger's back. There were less than two meters between Taniguchi and the stranger—a short enough distance for one man to tackle another in a couple steps, and short enough that a shot from that range would be fatal.

"It is. It's, uh, been a long time, so we're just trying to catch up."

"All right. I'll leave you two alone, okay?"

I nodded. "Great!"

Taniguchi left us, though not without one last look at the stranger. When the door shut, the stranger put the revolver at his side again. He stared at the door with narrowed eyes.

And while he was doing that, I slipped a pot from the rack above me and hid it behind my back.

"Your wife, was it?" I said, breaking the silence.

The stranger's eyes snapped back to me. "Yes," he said. "She's had a hard time finding a job. We both have."

I nodded. "I could help you with that. We know some people, recruiters—"

"No, no." The man shook his head and looked aside. "She's gone now."

"Oh, I'm sorry."

"She walked into the ocean and didn't come back."

The stranger pressed the gun to the side of his head.

"And you were right here," he said. "You weren't there for her."

I put out a hand, trying to calm him down. "Hey, wait a minute. I've been trying to help; I—"

"Help? Like this?" He tapped a couple pots with the grip of his revolver and scoffed. "Does this look like helping to you? Look at all this. Look at this mess! We needed you, and you hide here. You don't even show your face! You're not helping anyone!"

"I am!" I said, stomping my foot on the floor.

"You're not." The man put the gun back to his temple. "And you can't help someone like me."

"No, that's not—" I shuddered. "That isn't—that's not fair!"

"Not fair?" The man laughed. "Does something about this seem like it should be fair to you?"

I shuddered again. I ran my fingers through my hair. "You come in here—you tell me I'm not helping people—and you don't give me a chance to make it right?"

The man tilted his head slightly, and the barrel of the gun moved a few millimeters from his skin. "What can you do?" he asked.

I circled back toward the man, approaching him between the island and the oven rack. "I don't know what exactly," I admitted, "but I can try. I can try to find a way to make things better."

"You promise that?" he asked. "You promise to try, no matter how hard it gets?"

"I do, absolutely." I nodded twice, keeping my eyes steady on him.

The man shook his head, breaking into a coy grin. "No, don't mess with me, kid. You're just saying that. You gave up on us a long time ago."

I winced. "That's not it! Honest! I did what I could when there was an opportunity. I haven't been able to do that in a while, but maybe. I didn't want to lead everyone back out here to something hopeless. I didn't want…" I gestured to the cafeteria outside. "I didn't want to lead people to just this. It needs to change; I know that. We need to make things better. I don't know how, but it has to happen."

"Better how?" he yelled.

"I don't know how, but it needs to be good enough that…" I looked aside, fumbling for words. "That people feel they can stay in this world!"

The man raised an eyebrow. "I see. So that's what you think, huh?" He laughed, taking his eyes off me. "I thought so. All you needed was a little push, and you'd show what still mattered to you. Good. I'm glad for that."

"I'm glad too," I said, daring to smile. "So—"

The man raised the gun.

He raised the gun and pointed it at me.

He lined up his eye to the barrel, and he put his finger on the trigger.

I shrank down; I threw the pot from behind my back and crouched!

BA-CLANG!

Metal ripped at my shoulder; I fell back into the row of cabinets behind me. The pot fluttered across the room and clattered on the tile. My arm burned like a lava flow.

"I'm so glad," the man said. "That makes this easier."

"Wha—why?" I cried. "I told you exactly what you wanted to hear!"

But the man was implacable. With narrow, focused eyes, he offered neither answers nor mercy. He towered over me by the kitchen island, and he leveled the revolver on me again. My eyes crossed to see the tip of the barrel, and all else about the scene—the splatter of blood on those stainless cabinets; the gunman's steady, emotionless face—faded from view. There was just the tip of the barrel left in my sight.

And a glow—the glow of a girl who shouldn't be. From the far corner of the kitchen, she watched us, a silent observer of history.

Rei Ayanami watched us—the girl who never should've been, in the green-and-white uniform of a school that no longer existed.

How fitting it was, that the girl who had lived and died for us would reappear as a phantom, a mirage of my pain and suffering, just as I was about to die, too.

And like a good assassin, the gunman didn't make me beg for my life. He aimed for my forehead, and—

BANG!

I shut my eyes, then I thought I shouldn't have time to think about shutting my eyes.

Then I thought I shouldn't have time to think about not having time to think about shutting my eyes, definitely.

So why was I still alive?

The gunman seemed as perplexed as I was. He turned the revolver aside, opened the chamber, and spun it. He snarled, gritting his teeth, and he shot again:

BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG!

Four ear-splitting shots—they swamped my hearing with a high-pitched hiss. I was half-deafened, but I was still alive.

The gunman snarled. He turned the gun over, holding it by the barrel. He raised the gun overhead and turned grip down to club me into submission.

Thud! There was a thud, but I couldn't find it with the noise in my ears. My eyes darted about the room, and then, I saw it: the double doors to the cafeteria had slammed on their hinges. Taniguchi barged in. He swung the soup pot like a meteor hammer!

The pot struck the gunman's head and rattled in Taniguchi's hand.

"It's all right; we got him! We got him, Ikari!"

My body slid down along the back cabinets. Somewhere, Taniguchi was yelling for police and paramedics. The shooter lay on his side and clutched his head woozily.

Rei Ayanami? No one saw anyone like her.

As for me, I lay there, among the cold metal cabinets and utensils, as my blood seeped away. I'd given my body for the world before. What was a little blood?

Unfortunately, the paramedics arrived shortly and thought I didn't need to give any more. They stuck me with needles to take care of the pain, and they wheeled me past the shooter to an ambulance, but I tugged on one of the medic's sleeves as we went by.

"Sir?" said the medic.

"I'd like to speak to someone," I said.

The police had taken the shooter to the main cafeteria. With a dark blue bruise on his forehead, he sat with his head hanging low and his hands cuffed behind his back.

My throat was dry, but I cleared it and said, "Why did you do this?"

The shooter looked up, through the strands of hair that had fallen around his face, and he spat on the floor.

But in doing so, he exposed some black ink on the side of his neck.

One of the officers pulled down the man's jacket collar, showing the tattoo for all to see: a triangle, upside down, with two sets of eyes in columns running through it—two on the left and three on the right.

The mark of Instrumentality's architects, of Seele.

"Take care, Ikari," he said, grinning. "Our eyes are watching you."

Some things can't be put behind you because you'd rather forget them, you see. You can run away from them and put those memories in the past, but if you're not careful, those things you flee from will grow and grow in the dark, into a cancer that reaches out from where you cannot see.

#

It amazes me still—how quickly most people put themselves back together, how quickly they got back to their lives.

After all, how many people did it take to crew an ambulance? To drive it? To maintain it when it leaked oil or needed new tires? To tell the driver where to go? To give it a place to stay when it wasn't needed?

That's a lot of people, and they all came out to see me. The doctors bowed before me, promising a full recovery within a week—not a difficult promise, considering I'd only been grazed. The nurses asked if I had any special requests for food or entertainment. Even the cleaning staff took care to wipe down my suite's washroom by hand. They all asked questions when they thought there was a free minute: "What have you been doing since we got back? I never see you on the news." "Did you get together with the redhead?" Stuff like that.

I thought they were just paying me too much attention, but it was more than that. When I took a look around the hospital, just to stretch my legs, I passed rows of empty beds and vacant suites. On my floor, the only other soul was a young girl with a broken leg.

The hospital had been built for a different time. Like I said, it amazes me how many people put themselves back together and got back to their lives, for I know how many people didn't come back, and it would've been far easier for most of us to have stayed behind.

After that walk, I made it known I'd be checking out as soon as I was healthy enough to do so.

"But Ikari," said the doctor, "someone just tried to kill you. Don't you think it'd be wise to wait a while? Or to ask for some protection?"

"I'm a private citizen. I work for no one, and the police have better things to do."

The doctor gawked at me, but he wrote down some notes on his pad, shook his head, and went on his way. And for a while, I was naive enough to think it was that easy.

By early evening, I walked out of the hospital with a sling around my arm. I shaded my eyes from the sun and crossed a large parking lot—one large enough for a hundred cars, yet there were less than twenty taking up space there.

And as I came upon the sidewalk and the nearest street, a white car rolled up. The window started to roll down. There was a glint of light, a reflection from inside.

My heart turned cold. I raised my good arm over my face—like that would stop a bullet!—and the driver of the car said,

"What the hell? I actually went to the trouble to look pretty for you today."

Misato Katsuragi peered over her sunglasses at me, and she leaned across the width of the car to open the passenger-side door, grinning like an imp.

"Or did you think I was here to kill you?"

I shrugged. "It wouldn't be the first time in the last day or two." I glanced back at the brown hospital building. "Did my doctor call you?"

"Yeah, you know, I should be irritated about that. I was told working at this level would keep random people from calling me up at any time of the day or night. I think someone overstated the benefits of this job."

I laughed a bit and climbed inside. Misato pointed out the seat belt—which she was definitely not wearing, but she drummed her fingers on the gear shifter until I was buckled in—and she said,

"Sorry I'm late."

"Late? I wasn't waiting."

"I know." She smiled to herself. "Just seems appropriate, somehow."

That was the nice thing about Misato: some people didn't come back from the sea quite the same, but Misato hadn't changed. Her idea of "looking pretty" was a tiny touch of lipstick and tangled hair; she drove faster than was sane.

And, of course, she would drive an old friend of hers home from the hospital to protect him from an assassin. These were all aspects of her personality, none of them any more (or any less) real than the others. They were all parts of her.

And I was glad that something somewhere saw fit to bring her back from the dead for us.

"I didn't die!" she said once. "I was just momentarily less than alive!"

That was her usual protest if the topic came up, anyway, and looking at her then, you'd have never known she'd died in the first place. Despite her knotted hair, she looked quite at home in her uniform—the green officer's dress of the Ground Self-Defense Force, even if she wasn't entirely happy with her job.

"It's a little dull," she bemoaned, and she took her displeasure out on a traffic cone, squibbing it behind us. "Believe me, the PM isn't interested in hearing advice from an upstart like me. He'd make me General of the Arctic if it would put me in charge of absolutely nothing."

"You like to stay busy."

"Damn right I do. Work hard, sleep hard, drink hard, bang hard. You've got to go at life full-tilt, or life will tilt you instead."

I made a face. "Is that so?"

She shrugged, but she did let off the gas a little. "Okay, maybe there's room for a little moderation now and then. I came back with a new liver; I'm trying to live with it for at least the next ten years. That's a goal, right?"

"You need to take care of yourself, Misato."

"Same for you, I should think." She slammed on the brakes at a stoplight, and when I was done getting the seatbelt out of my chest, Misato said, "So, what happened?"

I turned aside, facing the window. "You already know, don't you?"

"I know what I've read and what I've heard. I'm asking you."

"The man had a Seele tattoo."

She nodded. "Yeah, I know." She took out her frustrations on the accelerator. "I wasn't looking forward to hearing from those guys again, but it was just a matter of time!" She turned a curve at 1.5g just for the hell of it. Thank goodness my left arm still worked, or I would've been pinned against the window. "Men like them prey on the downtrodden and hopeless. That's why we have to fight them by rebuilding this world, one day at a time."

We hit straight, level road, and I relaxed.

That word Misato used—rebuilding—I'm not sure it was the right one. We came back to the real world with the world already built up. Beyond the Crater, most cities were still standing. Nature had hardly encroached upon them, despite the time that had passed while we dreamed. Truly, there wasn't much we needed to build. How could there be? Just on that drive, Misato and I passed a boarded-up grocery store, with broken windows and graffiti sprayed over the walls. Nature and time hadn't caused that damage. That was humanity.

"So, we'll put something together to go punch those guys in the face. They're the last thing we need to deal with now."

"Is that really SDF's job?"

"I mean the government. I'm part of the government now—as useless as my so-called job might be."

"You might need to find another job, if you're so bored right now."

Misato smiled, and she shifted into a higher gear. The car accelerated, and I sank a little deeper into my seat.

"You might say I have some prospects," she said.

"That's good."

"It is. And what about you?"

"Me?"

"Are you intent on working in soup kitchens and charity shops for the rest of your life?"

I drummed my fingers on the armrest, looking away. "Until I can go around without being recognized anymore."

"That right? Well, maybe that's for the best. You've done more than anyone could've expected of you. It's not unreasonable to rest on your laurels. It's our turn now."

Misato's grip on the steering wheel was firm and steady, and she navigated the next curve gently. She turned just enough to guide us through the ninety-degree bend, and she let the wheel slip through her fingers until it was straight and level again. All throughout, her expression was focused and serious. She watched the road with unwavering eyes. She never even glanced at me.

"Right?" she said.

"Mm," was all I could say.

Misato dropped me off at my building in the New City. I invited her over for dinner, but she wouldn't stay. Always some other meaningless task for the PM—that's what she said. As much as she complained, Misato zipped off in that horrifically expensive sportscar. Or at least, it would've been expensive before. Maybe, after Third Impact, it didn't have an owner anymore.

#

Apartments in the New City were mostly high rise buildings. They stuck out on the Tokyo-2 skyline like needles from a pin cushion. Old Matsumoto had been a rather small city (or perhaps, a large town), with few buildings tall enough to block a view of the mountains in the distance. But from the top of my building, you could be forgiven for thinking you were taller than the mountains. My penthouse there was my perch, my eye on the world beneath me. The world below was a jungle, and I was a monkey clinging to the highest branch I could.

In front of my door was a red sack of mail. The sack was property of Japan Post, and we had to leave it out each morning for the mailman to pick up. Our mail demanded thorough and intense screening for hazardous substances. Anthrax, ricin—you name it, they scanned for it, or purged it with radiation, or something. I never really knew the details there. The government said the mail was safe, and we hand-picked the postman who would deliver the mail for us each day. That way, we could tell ourselves it was all safe.

I still wonder, though: how fortunate were we, that someone came back from the LCL sea and wanted to be a mailman? Or he felt willing enough to do it? Willing to deliver threats like they were nothing? Dangerous packages and contaminated letters like they were no big deal?

People should be more appreciative of their mailmen, I think. There are so many tough, unglamorous jobs like that, jobs that simply need to be done. The world wouldn't go forward without people to deliver mail and packages. It wouldn't go forward without someone like me to cook food now and again, as I did that evening, despite the sling on my arm. It's a challenge to get water boiling, to boil noodles, or to cut mushrooms with just one good hand, but I did what I could. Because people carry mail or cook food for others, it frees everyone else to fight wars, make art and music, or do science.

Asuka was a great example of that.

She came home around eight that night. She kicked off her shoes and thrust her hands into the pockets of her labcoat. She took one look at me, and she said,

"What the hell? That's just a graze?"

I pulled on my sling. "It's basically a graze, yeah."

"Says you! Get away from that counter. I'm taking care of this."

"So, you want to take care of me? Or do you want to enjoy your dinner?"

She folded her arms and glared, but she relented. "Fine. But if there's anything that takes two hands, I'm helping."

With Asuka's help carrying the soup pot and chopping mushrooms, making dinner went a lot faster, and once Asuka was over the shock of my injury, she settled down enough to tell me about her day.

"Oh, it was awful. Damn undergrad contaminated a trial, so we had to do everything over. I would've been home an hour ago if not for that. Guy's gotta get his head on straight. His own dad died from heart failure; you'd think that'd give a guy motivation!"

At that time, Asuka worked on growing synthetic organs and limbs from an LCL base. As the stuff of primordial life itself, the LCL in the ocean could be harvested and "coerced" into shapes and forms people needed. Apparently this coercion took some combination of electric shocks and threaded scaffolds to make the organs take shape, or something. I was never real clear on the details, but it was impressive work—work people needed to see done.

"Don't be too hard on him," I told her. "People make mistakes sometimes."

Asuka put her soup spoon down and dabbed at her lip. "Mistakes are costly. Some people go off by themselves all alone, even when they get a kilo of hate mail every day. That could've been a very costly mistake." Her eyes snapped up to mine, and she said, "You need to get some protection. Or stay home."

"Protection would draw attention. And I won't stay home and do nothing."

"You don't get to have it both ways. If you do something that matters, people are going to notice you."

"Not if they don't know I'm there."

Asuka made a face at that, like I'd just started speaking Arabic, but her cell phone rang, interrupting us. She grumbled to herself in German and answered.

"Yeah? What? No, we tried the concentration at 0.35 for this batch. What? Okay, let me look."

Phone pressed between her shoulder and ear, Asuka climbed up from the dinner table and trotted into the bedroom. She came back with a laptop under her arm and set it up on a spare cushion.

"Hm, we could increase the thread density and worry about how to remove them later? No, let me pull those up. That was maybe three months ago? I don't remember what we saw then, but I should have it written down here somewhere…."

That conversation went on for over half an hour. Asuka worked on her soup now and then, but she she still had about a third of her bowl left when I washed my bowl out. I left her at the dinner table as she chatted with her colleague over charts and graphs. The work of advancing science doesn't rest when you get home to eat, you see.

Like Asuka, I tried to stay busy, too. I retired to the study and opened the red sack of mail. I had a special set of stationery for responding to these letters, though it wasn't very fancy: just my name in the letterhead, really. The first few letters weren't anything unusual: "My husband had been depressed lately. Do you think Lilith has forsaken us? Why does she let us endure all this suffering, after she promised us salvation here?" Stuff like that.

I'd never been a student of religious theory, and I didn't remember Ayanami promising us anything like salvation in this world, but letters like that weren't so bad. I could say, "We only thought it would be better in this world, to talk to people and meet them, even if they might hurt us, too." That any of us came back at all—that was a decision made by people, and people can be wrong, after all. That doesn't mean the decision was made in bad faith.

That was one of the easier ones. Letters like, "You were wrong, Ikari! You were naive and ignorant! Why would you lead people back into a world of starvation, disease, and death? A world where people can't even find relief on a beach without smelling of blood? What were you thinking?"

I put that letter aside, on a stack of a dozen others, and went on as best I could. Yes, it's hard to deal with letters like that, but at least they're individual people giving their honest thoughts. I couldn't say that about a lot of other people: the vultures who constantly rang our phone off the hook, for instance.

That's not to say the calls didn't bother Asuka and me; we'd put in a switch to disable the ringer if we needed to, and we had a caller ID system installed, too. Right then, all incoming calls to the apartment just lit up a red light on the phone base, and the incoming call number showed in black against a lit background.

And when one of those numbers called, I let the red light blink away until it fizzled out. What happened to us wasn't any of their business. No, what happened to me wasn't any of their business. Asuka was a scientist. She worked for the greater good of humanity. Me? I was a private citizen, nothing more. Unless one of them wanted to talk to me about security near soup kitchens, what happened to me shouldn't have mattered to anyone.

I went back to my letters:

"Ikari, you may not remember, but this isn't the first time I've written to you. I enjoyed your letter from before, but it amazes me that I heard from you at all. What's happened to you? What have you been doing? Everyone says you're a shut-in now, and I don't understand why you'd do that. You helped show everyone we'd lose something if we stayed in the sea. Aren't you losing something by staying isolated in that tower of yours?"

I mean, on the face of it, it wasn't true. I still saw people from time to time. I saw Asuka almost every day. I worked in the soup kitchen and had good relations with the other staff there. I knew over a dozen of the kitchen's patrons by sight. I'd heard about where they lived, their past histories, and their future dreams. I met people. I was meeting people. And I had never objected to meeting people—not most people, anyway.

It was the people who'd call my home phone at all hours of the day or night, who'd flash the red light there even when it was dark—all because we couldn't stand to leave the ringer on and hear them wailing at us—those were the people I'd shut out of my life, and there were a lot of them.

But when I put that letter aside, I put my pen down and slid my stationery away, too. The red light on the phone base blinked incessantly, and I snatched up the handset to snuff it out.

"Yes, who is it?" I snapped.

"Hm?" said the man on the other end. "Oh, wow, uh, good evening. Is this Ikari?"

"Speaking."

"Ah, yes, this is Itsuki Miyamoto from—"

I glanced at the number on the caller ID. "From Yomiuri News."

"Yes, yes. I, uh, I wasn't expecting to reach you…."

"What do you want?"

"Well, as you can imagine, there's wild speculation and rumor surrounding the attempt on your life."

"And?"

"…ah, well, I would go over the details of the attack with you? The police report is rather sparse."

"A man entered the kitchen with a revolver. He tried to shoot me, but he only shot once before the gun misfired. That's all."

"That's all? Really? What about the lack of bullets? What about the five-eyed tattoo on the man's neck?"

A chill ran down my spine, and I brought the handset closer to my mouth.

"What do you know about that?" I said.

"It's from the new Seele, Ikari. Haven't you heard what they're up to?"

I balled my hand into a fist. "What those people choose to do with their lives is no concern of mine."

"Until they shoot at you. That makes them a threat, doesn't it?"

I drummed my fingers on the handset. "I don't have anything else to say. Leave us alone. Goodbye."

"Wait, WAIT! Just one more thing, and that's all. Please understand; my boss would have my ass if I didn't get at least one more thing out of you. One question, and that's it. I promise."

I straightened out the last letter on my desk. "One question."

"You've got dozens of people—not just in my paper but in every newspaper in the country—hanging on your every word. You could use that to speak out against militaristic buildup, or to push for better social services for the poor and hungry. You could condemn Seele publicly, but you do nothing. So, I must ask you: why do you stay silent?"

I hissed, forcing air through my clenched teeth. "I never asked anyone to follow me," I said curtly. "I made a decision for myself. Don't look to me for answers; I don't have any, so just leave me alone, all right?"

"Maybe you're right about that, but right or wrong, Ikari, people aren't going to leave you alone just because you ask them nicely."

No, people were too stubborn, too insistent for that. And for that matter, they wouldn't refrain from shooting you just because you told them what you thought they wanted to hear.

"Hello?" said the reporter. "Are you still there?"

I jerked in my seat. "Um, yes, I'm still here."

"Okay. Well, thank you for your time."

"No, wait."

"What?" A pause. "What is it?"

"I might have more to say to you," I said, glancing at the unlit red light on the phone base, "if you can give me some information in return."

"I'm listening."

"What do you know about Seele these days?"

"That depends, Ikari. Are you telling me it was a tattoo of a triangle and eyes on the shooter's neck?"

I smiled to myself, and for the first time that whole conversation, I sat back in my chair.

#

You see, people did more than just get back to their lives after Instrumentality. They moved forward. They dedicated themselves to building the future they wanted to see, however beautiful or horrific it was.

Seele was like that. For the next week or so, I let the hate mail pile up on my desk as I looked into Seele. They were organized, I found, and very good at propaganda. They had their own website dedicated to putting out their twisted views. "Mankind will destroy itself without Instrumentality!" That's what they said, in blinking red text that scrolled across the page. As secretive as they were, I guess they didn't believe in subtlety.

They wanted to get their message across to the world, too. They recorded a broadcast each week to their followers, in English, German, Japanese, and French. "Fear not, brothers and sisters, for though Adam and Lilith have failed us, there is still salvation to be found, and it is coming—soon."

The promise of that "salvation" inspired Seele to go to war—and they interpreted the actions of legitimate governments as preparations for that coming battle, too. Now, you should be skeptical of evidence that comes from terrorists. Photos of armies on exercises, or warplanes being built, don't really tell you anything. Countries do that all the time anyway, and they would do it just to protect themselves from each other than to defend against some Fourth Impact Revolution.

Still, I asked some people I knew to check the evidence and look on their own for information, which turned up a few leads. For instance, the Defense Agency had requested significant sums of money for various projects—mostly in the name of "emergency preparedness." I thought that was vague enough to investigate, though I hadn't thought much would come of it.

Until I got a phone call from an old friend.

"Hey, Shinji, did you ask Kensuke to do some snoopin' about some SDF money?"

Toji Suzuhara, an old friend and fellow Eva pilot, called me up on a sleepy Sunday afternoon, as I'd been listening to another Seele broadcast. I put my headphones aside and pressed the phone handset closer to my ear. I lowered my voice and said, "Yes, why?"

"I just got a call from his dad a little while ago; PSB just barged in and snatched him up! With no warning! What the hell did you get him involved in?"

That's what I wanted to know!

I made a few calls and found out that my friend and contact—Kensuke Aida—had been taken to Metro Police headquarters in National Square for questioning. I showed up there and spoke with some of the officers in charge, trying to get Kensuke off the hook, but the officer in charge was adamant:

"Look, Ikari, you really shouldn't say anything more to me," said the inspector. "Your friend is in possession of classified material. The PSB's duty to investigate this is paramount. I'm sorry. There's nothing we can do here."

"Not even for me?"

In came Misato, who gave the inspector a polite bow while I stared dumbstruck.

"I'm sorry, General," said the inspector, "but if you think SDF can intrude on a police matter, you're quite mistaken."

"Haven't you heard?" said Misato, showing him an award-winning smile. "SDF is an extension of the police. You and I are the same."

The inspector chuckled politely. "I doubt that."

"Oh? Well, maybe this will change your mind." Misato handed over an envelope. The inspector furrowed his brow as he pored over each line in the memo.

"You can't be serious!" he said. "You can't do this!"

"I think you'll find that letter has the PM's signature on it, yes? That means I can do anything. If it said I could put you and your officers on vacation, I could do it. If it said I could turn the fountain outside into a swimming pool, I could do it. If it said I could requisition some pizza and beer for staff productivity, I could damn well do it." Misato snapped her fingers and frowned. "Damn. Why didn't I ask him for that?"

The inspector balled up the letter and hurled it into a trashcan, shaking his head. He conferred with one of his officers, and Kensuke was shown the way out from an interrogation room.

"Hey! About time you showed up! I thought they were gonna waterboard me!"

He pulled on his collar, adjusting his plaid red tie. One of the officers handed Kensuke's black blazer back to him, and Kensuke carried it over his shoulder as he wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead.

"Don't be silly," said Misato. "We have much more effective methods than that."

Kensuke paled, laughing stiffly. "Uh…huh?"

"Don't do it again, and don't look into these matters any further, Aida." Misato winked. "That's an order, okay?"

Kensuke stiffened, standing straight and tall. "Yes, ma'am!"

"Good! Now, do you need a ride home?"

"Ah, no, I'll catch the train. It's not a big deal." Kensuke turned to me. "Shinji—first time I've seen you in months, and you get me involved in some military conspiracy! What gives?"

I bowed in apology. "Sorry. I shouldn't have gotten you wrapped up in this."

"You kidding? Military Club's gonna go wild over this!"

Misato cleared her throat and raised both eyebrows.

"Or they would go wild over this," said Kensuke, slapping his forehead with a sigh. "Ah well. Thanks for calling in the cavalry to spring me."

I glanced at Misato, and she put on the smile of an innocent schoolgirl. Kensuke didn't notice, continuing on:

"Stay in touch a little more, okay? Toji and I are doing a weekly tournament at the arcade. You should drop by."

"I'll try to pop in," I said.

"Don't just promise; be there, yeah?"

Misato cleared her throat again. "Aida, maybe you want to get home before you worry your father?"

"Ah!" Kensuke checked his watch. "You're right. Thanks again!"

With that, he ran off, leaving Misato and me alone. We followed Kensuke outside, into the open air. It was only as we cleared the lobby doors and entered the sunlight that I spoke to Misato.

"How did you know?"

"I'm nothing if not well-connected. Working for the PM does that, after all."

"I'd understand that if you pulled it off after the fact, but I hadn't told anyone Kensuke was arrested. How did you find out so fast?"

"Why is it you're looking into SDF troop movements and Seele activities?"

I looked out, over the square in front of us. It was a large greenspace with criss-crossing sidewalks and a central fountain. The surrounding buildings had all the features of regal governance: metal domes, classical pillars, tall and narrow windows, and the like. This was National Square, the heart of the Japanese government. SDF officers milled about in uniform. Lawyers and politicians crossed the grounds in their suits, all working toward the efficient operation of the country.

It's easy to be cynical about politicians and the like, but I'd learned over the previous two years that most politicians believe in what they're doing. They have conviction that they need to win and gain power to steer the nation toward safety and prosperity. People like them don't like to sit idly by.

And neither did Misato.

"You don't just work for the PM, do you?" I asked.

Misato shook her head.

"Are we safe?" I went on. "Are we safe from them?"

"I'm working to make us all safe."

I stepped in front of her, trying to catch her eye. "What can you do? If an assassin corners you in a kitchen, what can you do? If a suicide bomber takes out a ship, what can you do?"

Misato folded her arms. "Seele's just a group of people. I'm not worried about what people do. We can handle them."

"So there's nothing to worry about? No cause for concern?"

"I didn't exactly say that." She smiled bitterly, and she touched my shoulder—the shoulder of mine that supported my sling. "Sorry. That's all I can tell you, right now."

" 'Sorry'?" I jolted away from her. I pulled on the strap of the sling and let go. It snapped back against my body. "Look at this: this is what they did to me, and all you can say is sorry? Come on. Tell me: why are they making a move now?"

"Why do you ask?"

I shuddered, gawking at her. Misato's stare pierced me like a blast of x-rays.

"Do I need to say it again?" she said. "Why do you want to know?"

"Be—because I deserve to know!" I sputtered.

"And if you'd regret finding out? What then?"

"I should be the one to decide that."

We stared at each other for a time, and Misato was first to break: she sighed, shaking her head, and headed down the steps into the square.

"Come on, then," she said.

Misato led me across the square, into a building I wasn't familiar with. SDF guards manned the lobby, but Misato flashed them an ID card and nodded at me, and the guards stood down. One of them even said,

"Nice to see you here, sir."

I gave a polite smile in return, and that was all.

We took an elevator down several floors to an underground train station. I call it a station, but it was much smaller than any public train or subway station, with only a handful of guards on duty and no passengers in sight. The traincar itself was a curved, glossy white vehicle, like something out of the future—too pristine and neat to be part of the real world.

"Are you coming?" Misato stood between the sliding doors, holding them open.

My mouth hung open. I glanced down both ends of the tunnel, but the lights beyond were dim and unhelpful.

I tugged at the sling on my shoulder. I swallowed, and I said,

"Yeah."

Misato stood aside and waved me inside, and I sat down with her. The train doors closed, and we sped down a tunnel of gray rock and fluorescent lights to parts unknown.

#

The train arrived at another platform, identical to the first. The guards saluted when Misato walked out, and their eyes followed me as we entered the rest of the facility. Misato explained it used to be a bunker for the government. "Politicians spare no expense to make sure they'll survive," she quipped. But since learning of Seele's "salvation," SDF had converted the bunker into a base of operations.

We headed down a rocky tunnel, which let to buildings, of all things. They sat on springs, but they were buildings nonetheless: underground buildings, complete with fluorescent lighting, speckled ceiling tiles, and fake wood trim. If not for the occasional window that showed the rock tunnel, we could've been above ground for all I'd have known.

Misato led me to one of those false mahogany doors in particular. She took her ID in hand, but her hand hovered over the card reader.

"You know," she said, not facing me, "you can go back at any time."

"I know," I said.

Misato nodded, and she swiped her card in the reader. The lock clicked open, and Misato pushed the door inward, revealing…

An array of cubicles?

Misato went inside, and I scampered in as the door closed automatically behind me. I stared, open-mouthed, as I took in the sight around me: SDF officers manned the workstations, looking entirely too mundane as they chatted on headsets and moved windows around on their dual-monitor setups.

More exotic were the three large screens at the front of the room. They were lit by projectors in the back. The left screen had a map of the world with three stars on it: one in Germany, one in America, and one in Japan. The middle screen had some image I couldn't quite make out—a round object with a series of rings around it. The edges were irregular and pixellated, however.

Finally, the rightmost screen showed a graph of some kind: distance to earth in light-minutes versus time. The distance of what wasn't made clear.

"Well, it's about time!"

I jerked in surprise. A man in thick, black-rimmed glasses approached us with a clipboard—he was the former Lieutenant Hyuga with Nerv, and since then, it seemed he'd switched to GSDF, too.

"Nice to see you again, Shinji," he said, offering a hand. "We'll be glad to have any help you can give us."

I shook his hand weakly, laughing to myself. Misato caught Hyuga's gaze and shook her head.

"Sorry, I guess I misunderstood," said Hyuga, wincing. "General—should I give you these some other time?"

"No, that's all right. I'd like to review everything as soon as I'm done giving the grand tour. Anything I should know about in particular?"

The two of them went over some information I didn't completely understand—at least, not at the time. There were new measurements from the National Observatory that Hyuga wanted to go over. Some object they'd been monitoring was only two hundred light-minutes away. Misato and Hyuga discussed the issue while studying a graph on one of the projector screens. The curve on that graph had been steeper at one point. It was leveling off, but it still made an inexorable mark toward zero.

While they were talking, I looked more closely over the room. There was something primitive and minimalistic about it The sloped ceiling gave it a claustrophobic feel, and the grid of cubicles—each with a nameplate reading Telemetry or Liaison—seemed remarkably low-tech compared to what I was used to.

Misato must've caught me looking around, for she leaned over my shoulder, saying, "Not really that much to see, is there? Well, let's get to something exciting, hm?" She nodded to Hyuga. "We're going downstairs."

Misato led me from the control room out another door. We went down a few hallways to an open elevator—one with an empty, honeycomb wire lattice for walls. Beyond those walls lay a large chamber. An unusual warmth and humidity emanated from that chamber. It felt like standing a few meters from an open sauna door, or from a hot spring. That heat and humidity pushed against me like a surging tide—a tide with the smell of iron.

"What is it? Don't you want to see?" Misato flipped a switch on the elevator, holding the doors open.

"No, I—I don't need to see that."

"No? All right. Is there anything else you want to see, then?"

I shook my head.

"So, what do you plan to do now?" Misato folded her arms, and she leaned back against the metal railing that reinforced the elevator. "Do you regret knowing what you know now?"

I stared at the floor. "So what if I do? There's nothing I can do about it."

"That's not true. You could work here."

My head snapped up, and my hand clenched into a fist. "No! I won't! Not again!"

"That's fine. We don't need you to do that."

A small sound came out of my mouth, but it was nothing sensible. I stared at her, at a loss.

"We have candidates already," she explained. "They would benefit from your experience, your wisdom, your strength—if you're willing to offer it. You don't need to do anything now. You just need to show them who you are—or who you were."

"And who is that?"

"A hero, right?"

I shook my head. "That would be a lie. I'm not that. I was never that."

Misato raised an eyebrow at me, but she said nothing. She pushed off the railing of the elevator, flipped the switch on the controls, and stepped out, letting the elevator doors close. She took a heavy breath, watching me with steady eyes, and said,

"If you say so."

And with that, the tour was over. Misato took me back to the train, and we parted ways on the other side, back in town. Though I set foot on the platform, she stayed aboard the train, leaving me with these words:

"Seele's wrong about a lot of things. They're wrong about the way the world should be, or what humanity should do from here on. But they're not wrong about one thing."

"What's that?" I asked her.

"Something is coming. It's out there, and it's not going to turn around and go back the way it came. You can either do something about that or do your best to stay out of the way."

And with that, she left me. Misato had to make the future she wanted to see become reality, and if she didn't work for it, that reality would crumble around us soon.

Misato and Seele both set goals for themselves—goals meant to change the world.

And I?

The best goal I had was to get dinner started before Asuka came home.

#

I'm not sure if there's a place in the world for people like me—or like how I was, at that time. Either you help turn the present into the future, or you get left behind as you try to take refuge in the past. Looking at it that way, I guess there's always a place for people in some world—just not the world of what's yet to come.

Asuka wasn't like that. As soon as I told her what Misato was doing, she got on the phone with the general, looking for a job. "I have experience with this, Misato! Not just experience, but the technical expertise to be useful. Now, tell me: how did you guys manage to build another one, let alone three?"

Misato was vague on details—especially over the phone—but she invited Asuka for a meeting, and things moved along there quite quickly. I didn't pay attention to the exact details there. They'd get it all figured out on their own, and I had letters to respond to.

It turned out I had more time to respond to letters than I'd realized, too. A couple days later, I went back to the soup kitchen—the abandoned school—to work my usual shifts again. I went to change my shoes at the shoe lockers, but I found a note in mine:

Ikari, we've always valued your contribution to our cause here, but the staff are concerned that your presence constitutes a safety risk that we—

I balled up the note and chucked it aside. Sighing, I leaned back against the lockers, closed my eyes, and shut it all away.

I wandered the area around the school for a time. It was a hot and uncomfortable walk, as I wore a green, hooded sweatshirt to help hide my face. Sunglasses protected my eyes, and they gave the world around me an unrealistically vibrant hue. I hate that about sunglasses. Everything looks more real, more full of life, through those lenses. And then you take them off, and the real world is pale and withering in the sun. Grass that looked a healthy green is actually dying and losing color. Stuff like that. Sunglasses make the world look better than it really is.

I ripped those sunglasses off my face and forced that withered world into my eyes. I stomped my foot on the sidewalk, and it cracked just a little. The world was broken. Its people were broken. Their lives and their homes were full of ghosts.

And one of those ghosts—one of those faults or defects—stared back at me.

It took the form of a person. It stood at the end of the middle school access road, and it watched me. It dressed in all white; its robes shined with the gloss of satin. The thing stared at me without eyes, for its hood covered its face—all the way to its nose.

I did a double-take when I ran into that thing. I glanced back down the other end of the road, but no one else was around.

And when I looked back at it, the hooded stranger was gone.

#

I stayed home for the rest of the week. I still had a backlog of letters to respond to, and it was a rule of mine that no letter should take more than a week to deal with—either to respond to, or to put aside.

Aren't you losing something by staying isolated in that tower of yours?

I twirled a pen in my hand as I stared over that letter, but after a few minutes to think on it, I stood at my desk, twisted a bit funny to line up my sling over the paper, and wrote,

"No, I like being up here. I like seeing all the lights in the city as they come on at night. I like knowing that people are recovering, a little bit at a time. People are doing just fine now, but don't worry. If the time comes that I need to be there, that I need to say something, I'll be there. That's a promise."

I stared at that for a moment before crumpling up the stationery and pulling out a new sheet.

But just as I put pen to paper, a voice called to me from the main room.

"Hey! Do you see what's going on outside?"

I trotted from the bedroom to meet Asuka. She stood at the sliding glass door that opened to our balcony. It was nighttime, and there was a steady, rhythmic clatter on the balcony.

"It's raining," I said.

"Is it?"

I stepped out on the balcony. It was raining. There was no question of that.

It was raining red splotches of viscous goo.

#

You know, I lied before when I said there's not much I regret. I regret a lot.

I regret being the boy who drifted aimlessly for two years.

I regret stuffing myself in that penthouse to look down on the world, as though I weren't a part of it. There's no place in the world for people who act like that yet expect the world to not pass them by. Those who try to make their own futures won't always succeed, but they have more control than someone like me, than anyone like who I was at that time.

I won't say I was ready to start swimming against that inexorable current of the future others make.

But, as the bloody rain came down on Tokyo-2, I put on my green hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses. I packed a backpack with crackers and bottles of water.

And I took with me a sheathed kitchen knife, to help steer the current in my favor.