Chapter Two
How do you measure time when nothing changes?
That was my problem as I lived in a sightless, soundless void. No way to smell, no way to see, no way to smell, no way to hear, no way to touch. Whether it was hours or days or weeks, eventually I became thankful for the pain, terrified that in one moment it would stop and then I would be nothing but a tiny point trying to decide if I had imagined myself or not.
What is pain?
When pain is as constant as the air on your skin or the weight of your bones, is it pain anymore? Or is it just being? As I drifted in the dark I made friends with my pain, conversed with it. I learned to feel where it was, to build an image of my body, the agony of the armored restraints giving shape to my being the way ink gives shape to the white space on a page.
Most of the sensation was concentrated in my back, shoulders, and neck. The longer I had to sit and think the more I was able to draw myself together and work on the problem. Based on what I saw before I became paralyzed, I could draw no other conclusion. Somehow, instead of drawing a spirit or elemental force out of the idea of Eva and bringing it to physical manifestation through evocation, I'd created a door that opened the other way.
I was in Unit Zero. The restraint system was locked into my torso. I could feel struts attached to my spine and ribcage, and wires grafted into my muscles, linking machine and monster. No, machine and human. The Evas were really just big humans. I knew this from reading websites and studying the series.
I no longer felt human. After a long, long time, the panic at being unable to breathe faded. Whether it was some innate quality of my body or part of the machines that encased and entombed me, my cells were oxygenated on their own. I still felt like I had to breathe. Sometimes I would drift into an almost-sleep, and snap back to awareness of my frozen lungs crying for breath, and when that happened I would have wept if I were not frozen.
Besides the entry plug in my neck and the restraints in my chest I could feel heavy bolts connected directly to my bones in my arms and legs. They weren't simply rammed through my flesh but parted it, but my muscles seemed to grow around them on their own, the pressure increasing incrementally, or maybe that was my imagination and nothing changed at all.
Sometimes, I'd forget where I came from entirely, how I got there, what any of it meant. Then I would remember. The absurdity of it made me want to scream, made me feel the wires in my jaw. I would wonder if my life before this was all a fever dream, some kind of strange fancy. Last night I dreamed I was an Evangelion, or am I an Evangelion, who dreamed that I was a man?
I replayed things in my head. What I experienced was revealed in the show as flashback, and happened not long before Shinji arrived in Tokyo-3. A strange thought crossed my mind. I remembered all of the arguments about who was in Unit Zero, why it went berserk.
What if it was always me? What if that door was always waiting, ready to send me back?
It made no sense. The show was just a show, flat, two dimensional, unreal. When I opened that door I'd be interacting with something in my own mind, or maybe a real spirit that took the shape of a fictional character. It wasn't supposed to be real. Not real like this. How could I be here? Was I in some new place that collapsed into being when I first saw it?
Had I simply died, and this was all a final dream before I faded into nothing?
Hours, days, weeks. How long it was, I don't know, but I heard a voice and saw lights.
It began with the burning sensation in my back, spreading into my muscles. Think. It had to be electricity- the umbilical cable. As it flooded through me I first heard the rush of machinery, then began to feel my own weight as I lay awkwardly on my side. I could feel the pressure of something frozen around me, ice cold and heavy and solid. That would be the bakelite.
They let me see.
I couldn't move my head. That I had the energy in my muscles didn't seem to matter. I sent the signals, but they went nowhere. I don't think it would have mattered. Even unable to move, I could feel the mass of the bakelite, the weird red polymer they used to imprison me. Real bakelite, in the real world, didn't act like that at all, but I was in wonderland and the rules didn't matter.
The energy in my body made the pain more intense, more focused. Most of all I had to stare at the floor. If I had an eyelid I couldn't blink it, and my one eye was locked open, flattening the world and twisting everything, fisheye. I had a sense of something on the top of my head. It was almost like the feeling of a feather passing over my skin without touching it, that way that static electricity can tell you something is near without actually feeling it.
People were milling about on the stone floor of the testing chamber. It must not have been long after I first woke up. The laboratory was a mess, the wall still caved in where I'd pounded the glass with my fist. Horror twisted in my gut. I could have killed everyone inside and not even realized it. My jaw ached, all my teeth throbbing at once.
Something caught my eye. I saw a bright flash on the floor. From so high up I could only make her out from the other insects by the bright white of her coat and the straw yellow of her hair.
I would have jumped in surprise if I could move. My vision had changed, pulling everything down there closer. If I could move, my jaw would have dropped. Ritsuko was talking to someone, going over something on a clipboard. It must have been Maya. I went totally still, watching them. They were real. They were down there, in three dimensions. I could see the top of Ritsuko's head, and pick out little flecks of silver- her roots were starting to turn, and she hadn't done her hair in a while. I could see the curve of her jaw, the mole on her cheek. Her teeth were a little yellow, stained by coffee and cigarettes, and there was a speck of food, bleached into white mush, stuck between her lower teeth.
The more I looked at her the more amazed I was. She was so real. I wasn't looking at a drawing, this was a person, but different somehow. She walked along conversing with various people, all in the mouse brown Nerv uniforms. I could read their nametags -how, since they would be in Japanese, I had no idea- and stopped beside each one, speaking softly to them. Or perhaps she was shouting, and I simply couldn't hear.
Something happened. A circle appeared around Ritsuko's head, and next to it a block of text and a picture- the one on her identification badge, I would imagine. Even the picture was shockingly real, from her bored expression and bed hair to the tiny reflections of the camera flash in her eyes.
Someone looked up. A man standing next to her looked up. I saw his lips clearly, silently mouthing the words,
"The eye is moving."
Ritsuko looked up. She looked me in the eye. Her face grew closer, bigger, until it filled my entire vision. There was panic in her wide eyes and I could see her throat pulsing, her jaw working on the edge of speech as the wheels turned in her head. There were bags under her eyes and she looked plainer than I would have thought. The lipstick on the right side of her mouth was a little smeared and a little thinner than the rest, from a cigarette perhaps.
Her head snapped to her left and I saw her lips moving.
"Shut it down! Shut it down!"
Ice spread through me and choked out the heat. As before, my senses were stolen one by one, until a black ring closed around the world and left me in the pain.
It took so long it may as well have been a few minutes. I woke up and this time, this time, the strange flashes in my vision appeared sooner, and I was dragged to awareness much faster. I was still frozen in place, dully aware of my limbs but unable to move them no matter how I tried, but I was sure I'd been moved.
I was cold. Cold. I was freezing up to my chest. I could feel fluid moving over my skin- it must flowed under my armor. That would be the LCL bath. Maddeningly, I tried to turn my head as my vision irised into being, the black receding in a circle to the edges of my vision. After a moment, I realized I could turn my gaze even if my head was locked in place. That I could look around confused me even more. Was it that I couldn't move, or that I wasn't being allowed?
Then, I saw it.
Unit One was at an angle to me. I had a sudden flash of the episode where Shinji gropes Rei and Unit Zero is tested again. Was it that late already? The other Eva stood immobile in its own cage, up to the chest in LCL, like me. Looking down, I could see my own reflection.
I could also see Ritsuko, staring at me. At Unit Zero, at any rate. She was standing next to Maya, who looked even shorter and slighter in person, mousier somehow. She looked like a drowned rat, her and Ritsuko both. It was as if seeing them as I had before smoothed away all their features, made them too perfect. I realized I was staring again, but what else was I supposed to do? Ritsuko was skinnier than I'd imagined, and smaller, the way people always seem to be when you meet someone you've only ever seen on television.
They were talking. I couldn't hear them but I knew what they were saying anyway.
"Why is it doing that?" said Maya.
Ritsuko shook her head. "We have the tactical systems fully functional. I'm assuming it's a reflex action. The eye is drawn to movement."
She waved her hand, apparently waiting for me to follow it, but I looked at her.
A thought came, and it chilled me, soaking through my body and into the painful joints of my armor and back again. What if they realized what had happened? Would they pull me out, somehow, materialize me? Or destroy the Eva, get rid of me and build another one?
Ritsuko's arm fell to her side. "Huh," she mouthed to Maya. "It didn't do it. We'll get it ironed out. Shut it down for now. The Marduk Institute has identified the Third Child, and…"
When I went back to sleep, it was equally fast. The world irised closed, the sound died, and I retreated back into the pain, my mind hanging off it, clinging to it, or else I'd slip into the void. This time, though, it was not so near.
I had to think. Focusing on anything was difficult. Some painful memory would draw me in for a thousand years, and a vital thought would flicker for a bare second and drift off, forgotten forever.
Meditate. Yes, I had to meditate. If I could focus, draw myself together, I could make sense of what was going on.
The problem came back to time. Before, I would meditate through breath control. At first I counted one-two-three, then as I became more advanced I'd count up to twenty and return. By the time I began studying the occult and ritual work I would lie down, count to ninety-nine, and visualize traveling down the steps to the gate of Deeper Slumber.
Here, I had no breath. Everything was total static, totally locked. Nothing changed, so nothing could be measured. I almost left myself drift out of the idea before I focused.
I couldn't close my eyes, so I imagined closing them anyway, and imagined that with my eyes closed I was visualizing the first of the steps. The image flickered in my mind- a staircase as wide as an interstate, flanked on either side by total darkness, descending towards a distant gate wrought in gold and silver, the door to the Dreamlands. The image flickered and burst, like a bubble too long in the sun.
Frustrated, I felt a shock, as if I'd managed somehow to grind my teeth. Instead of the steps I visualized the number one, just a red slash, then added another to it to make two, then a third. Then, I blanked them away, and started again. I did it over and over, not counting, just slashing those three marks in my mind again again, every time pushing the rest away a little more, the pain and the void and the frozen burn in my lungs, all of it.
Once I caught myself adding a fourth slash, so I went on. I counted up to twenty, stopped, started again. Again, again, again. I opened my minds eye and there they were- seven hundred in all, though there were as few or as many as I needed. I could feel shoes on my feet and the belt around my waist and the jacket on my shoulders. When I walked down the steps to enter a trance I always dressed my dream-self as Lovecraft would have dressed Carter, his dreamer.
Counting the steps, one by one, I walked down. I had been exploring dream work for years. If I could do that in the real world, I could-
Reality came crashing through my vision like a blade as my eye irised open. Again, I had no idea how long I'd been in darkness, only that something had jolted me awake. The umbilical cable, it had to be. They'd give me power. Without thinking I scanned the room, moving my eye until I saw them.
Three figures stood in front of Unit One, two adults flanking a child. God, he was a child in truth. If I knew him in the real world I'd have made a joke about putting him in my pocket. He was shaking with fear, staring up at the tiny column of light where his father stood, judging him. I could make out the man's words but my attention was elsewhere.
Misato. I was seeing her, the real her, in person. I caught only a glimpse of her profile as she turned. Her face was harsher than I would have imagined, more angular, her eyes colder. She was beautiful but in a strange, distant way, all the drunken jocularity that I associated with her in my mind shed like a dirty skin. He was afraid of her.
Ritsuko was watching them, dispassionately. She was still in her bathing suit, the one from her very first appearance from the show. She wasn't the bombshell I remembered. Her eyes were tired and she had red marks on her face from where the scuba mask and goggles had dug into her skin and her hair was plaited thickly to her head.
She wasn't wearing makeup at all. Her skin was pale, almost pallid, and she had a thin scar on her right thigh I didn't know was supposed to be there. Her breasts sagged a little and if she didn't suck in her breath she'd have just a hint of a paunch. Her eyes were tired and there was something else in them as she looked at the boy and Misato and I didn't know what it was.
Someone must have realized their mistake. They turned me off.
When I woke up again, it couldn't have been too long. The lights over my head were swaying back and forth. Unit One was gone from the cage, a terrible void in its place. There was a rippling boom and the urge to duck made all my muscles grind and strain, and the pain became so intense that it flashed white in my sight. I heard screaming, high, girlish, and distant.
They were fighting.
I could feel him. It, over my head, as surely as I could feel myself. Drawing me, answering me, calling out to me in a hidden language. It was like wandering in a crowd and hearing my name spoken, only to be lost again in the murmurs when I turned to find its source. I could feel the Angel.
I felt it dying. My eye closed.
I began to count. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three…
I was beginning to count in twenties again when my eye spread open.
Ritsuko was standing under me, staring at me, arms folded. Her shoulders were a little hunched, her eyes were bloodshot, and her hair was a ruddy, ropey tangle, still stuck to her head, as if she'd let the LCL dry in it, maybe.
She'd changed into a t-shirt and sweat pants under her lab coat. The little details washed over me, the reality of her as she stood in front of me. She wasn't wearing the same clothes all the time, like a cartoon character.
Looking me in the eye, which in the end meant very little, she walked down the bridge that crossed before my chin and stopped. I tracked her, and the information feed popped up next to her head as my vision drew nearer to her. She stopped, a curious look on her face, then began walking the opposite way. I tracked her, not thinking.
She froze in front of me. Her hands trembled. More information appeared on my sight, projected somewhere in the aether in front of me. Something was reading the heat bloom on her skin and reporting it to me. I could feel her, too, the sensation from the top of my head stronger now. A sensor package? Did I have radar?
I'd almost forgotten. She was speaking, and this time I could hear her her. Her voice was thick and throaty, the kind of voice that oozed sex whenever its wielder wanted- but she didn't want to now. She sounded tired and raspy from too little sleep and too little to drink and too many cigarettes and she was scared.
"Why are you doing that?"
I tried to answer, I did.
I had to speak, but I had no mouth.
Someone shut me off.
One, two, three. One, two...