In the immortal words of Lord Gaben Newell, first of his name, guardian of Steam, lord of the hats, and protector of the PC realm, "hopefully it would have been worth the wait".
1.4
She woke up to the sound of strange music.

The woman took a look at the clock. It was past midnight. The music seemed to be coming from inside the apartment. Her head hurt. It had been a hard working, if mercifully early ended day; and she had rewarded herself with a few cans of Yebishu.

What the hell are those kids doing at this hour, she wondered. Misato Katsuragi might be lenient in regard of her two charges, but there were lines that she felt she needed to draw. And disturbing her sleep was certainly one of them.

It sounded like some sort of string instrument, but the melodies were not like anything she had ever heard. Violent and relentless, full of fear and terror, the music was an unstoppable force of aggression, a poem of death and destruction, of the horror of war. The sound carried with it a strange feeling of exotica, like what someone would expect to find in the tribal song of a long lost civilization; untamed, undiscovered by the rest of mankind. A feeling that it was, quite literally, out of this world.

That made her curious.

The woman made her way to the living room, and found Asuka sitting in front of the ex-storage room with the Shinji's lovely suit sign hanging outside, the girl hugging her legs, apparently lost in the music coming out from the Third Child's room. Now she remembered that Shinji owned a cello, but she had never heard the boy play it before. The kid was good, she had to admit. Still, why he'd chosen this time to practice, she couldn't imagine. They still had classes tomorrow, she should tell him to stop.

But the music was good. She noticed that she had been standing there for minutes. The song had gradually changed, no longer overwhelming with the sheer vicious velocity of uncontained anger, it now possessed just a hint of regret, of lost and sorrow. And as she listened on, that little hint kept growing, gripping and twisting, bringing forth a feeling of sadness, of pain and loss.

The song was about a war and every war, she realized.

So she silently sat down next to the redhead. The teen glanced at her, and Misato put a finger up in front of her lips. The redhead nodded. She would wait until he finished before interrupting.

And together, they listened to the first ever cello version of Expiring Light.

Five hours earlier.
~Are you sure this is a good idea?

~Trust me, kid. Sometimes you have to make some sacrifices for the greater good.

~But I liked my SDAT…

~I can play music for you anytime you want. Of better quality, too.

~... And Misato will kill me when she finds out that we destroyed the headsets.

~I don't think so. If they're so valuable, NERV would have never let us carry them everywhere, would they? She really likes you, so at worst, she would nag you a bit.
~Besides, it would take too much time to find all the necessary components otherwise. It would be terribly impolite for us to leave the poor wretch trapped in that thing, don't you think?

~Sorry.

~Don't be, kid. It's completely normal to stand up to protect your own interests. And to make an educated guess, the thing is not entirely self-aware in that state anyway. Just me being cautious in case something unexpected happens and we lose access to that mind-state.
~Plus, whoever they are, hopefully they were aware of what NERV was up to.

~How is that possible anyway? How can you download an entire personality?

~Well, you see, Ikari, the brain is ultimately a bunch of organic matter organized into a very specific structure. With a sufficiently powerful scanner, and a sufficiently powerful computer, one can essentially take a 3D photograph of a brain, accurate down to the sub-cellular level. Using that photograph and a compatible computational substrate, it is entirely possible to store a human mind, or even run it in a simulation without the need of a human body. Even us Minds can back-up like that.
~The problem with that is… The Mind failed to finish that last sentence, for a certain troublesome someone chose just that moment to knock on Shinji's door, interrupting it.

"Third! What are you doing in there?"

"Er… Homework?"

"You haven't finished it? But they're very easy! How stupid can you be?"
Shinji glanced at the pile of books in the corner. Indeed, even he had felt that today homework wasn't particularly challenging.
Of course, since they were low on time, Hub had "helped" him a little. And the homework put up as much resistance against the Mind as wet tissue paper against a N2 mine.

"And why are you studying in there? Normally, you'll be in the living room," Asuka asked again.

~Normally she doesn't care what I do. What's the deal with her today?

~Oh she does care, I assure you. You'll be surprised, Ikari...if you pay closer attention.

~… I just thought that out loud, didn't I?

~Well, it takes some time to get used to communicating this way. So yes, you did.

~And why would I be surprised? Shinji said. Silently, he was pretty sure that he did pay plenty of attention to the redhead. If she did something unexpected, he would have known.

"Hello? Are you doing anything perverted in there, baka?"

~It's not my place to say. But I do suggest that you look closer at the subtle clues. And to answer the first question, I believe it's partly my fault. Our admittedly rather strange actions seem to have drawn her attention.

Apparently Asuka had finally got bored of waiting, so she spoke up one more time, "Whatever, you weirdo," followed by the sound of her footsteps stomping away. Shinji let out a breath, at least one crisis averted. He had no idea how to explain the mess of parts and tools in his tiny room, including what was unmistakably a dissembled A10 headset, and the remains of his SDAT player. Their tinkering project was half way done now. He had… "borrowed" the headset from the sync test earlier, and the Mind instructed him step-by-step on how to "upgrade" the thing. The final result would hopefully give it a better "bandwidth" to work with.

Unbeknown to Shinji, his housemate's curiosity had not waned with her temporary retreat.

First, the strange behavior in the morning. She had dismissed that earlier, but the idiot did not even glance at the First even once in the whole school day. That was enough to raise some alarm.

Then he headed straight to the library. That alone was concerning enough. Then he borrow a bunch of really strange books, some of them in English, which she hadn't even known he could use before today.

There is definitely something going on with the Third Child, the redhead thought. Well, whatever it was, she was determined to get to the bottom of it.
… Maybe tomorrow, though. The Third Child was, after all, a teenage boy. And she was smart enough to realize that if you went stomping into a teenager boy's room, you could end up seeing things that cannot be unseen.

With that, she turned on the TV, and engaged in a process usually known as "killing time".

~If you pull out the mind state, would unit 01 still function?

~I suspect that it won't. Not without me writing a new operating system for it. Preferably non-sentient, they're less picky about compatible pilots. And that's also another reason we should get this done as soon as possible. Still, it would take around half an hour to finish both downloading the old one and installing the new one.
~Or we can just copy the mind, and leave the original there. That way is faster. But leaving a sentient mind trapped in there is just not nice, don't you think?

~Copy?

~Means I'll download the data of the mind-state and run it through a simulator without overwriting the state in the machine.
~You must understand, kid. The body, and even the physical brain do not represent who a person is. What defies individuality is the information stored inside said brain. Memories, emotions, knowledge, and many more. The sum of those is what makes an individual an individual. Most of the atoms made up your body were not the same one you were born with. The physical shell is just that, a physical shell, no matter how complex and intricate and marvelous it was, is not what makes a living human precious. So a so-called "copy", when done correctly, is still the same one as the original, and deserves every rights to be recognized as such.

Shinji kept silent for a while. He found it was hard to wrap his head around that. He had never been particularly religious, but the idea that a human mind is just another set of codes which happened to be written on a squishy material made him felt somewhat uncomfortable.
Then he remembered something, and asked,

~If you can do that, how did you die?

~Well, I suppose I can't avoid telling you forever. Very well. However, I feel that I should show you instead.
~I'll get you into one of my simulation. Then I'll merge it back into the real you. It'll work best if you were sleeping, the experience can be a little intense if you were conscious. Is that acceptable for you?

He found himself sitting in a stadium of some sort, only this one was much larger than any he had ever known, and much stranger.

From the materials to the various shape and size of the seats, everything looked sufficiently alien to Shinji's eyes. At least the seats arrangement was familiar enough: they were all focused on the central stage.

The stadium was currently empty, save for Shinji and a silver humanoid sitting next to him. The silver figure was androgynous, very tall and almost skeletally thin, with silver skin and hair. It looked vaguely human; but looking again more closely, he could see that it only had 4 fingers in each hand, and each of them had one too many joints. The thing smiled, and said, in what Shinji recognized as the Mind's voice:

"Welcome to Stullien Bowl, Masaq Orbital, Lacelere system, for the premier night of composer Mahrai Ziller's Expiring Light, or at least a simulation of it. Also, the last day of my old life. I've taken the liberty to remove the other spectators, it would have been terribly crowded otherwise. I believe it will tell you everything you need to know."

"So this is how you looked like?" Shinji asked.

"Oh no. My real self is more boring than this. This is just an avatar, to allow human like you to communicate with me face-to-face, in a sense. If that's all, you might sit down on any seat you like, and I'll start the recording."

Shinji took the seat right behind him, and the avatar took the next one. They were close to the stage. Suddenly, dozens of humanoids appeared onstage. They varied greatly in size, skin and hair colors and, in some cases, number of limbs. They carried with them what Shinji assumed were instruments; the most bizarre ones required more than two hands to play.

Then the music started.

The music, the accompanying light show, and sometimes the Mind's commentary, told a story of a war. It was, Shinji believed, deliberately bare in specific detail, but he still got the feeling that this one was a great tragedy. The music was a mixture of anger and sorrow. Each piece complemented the others, telling a brief summary of an ancient conflict. Its background, the broad strokes of its developments.

When they reached the relevant music pieces, the Mind would tell Shinji about its past. He learnt about its birth, and its almost suicidal attack – of course, as the avatar pointed out, it would have lived regardless of the outcome of the battle. He learnt about its other self, and its first death.

And, as the final piece, the star of the night, the Expiring Light began, he learnt about the people it had killed, and the regret it had always felt since that day, regardless of the fact that they had deliberately chosen to die.

"So, as you can see, I devoted myself to become the protector of this world, for I understand how disgustingly easy it is to kill a human like you, and how disgraceful, wasteful, worthless, barbaric such acts are. And to make up for that, I would have to forever stand against whatever the big, dumb, uncaring universe threw at the little, defenseless fragile lives in my care."

"You killed yourself," Shinji realized.

"Yes, I did. Turned out, that was never enough to lift the guilt of what I have done. And you must remember, I've lived with that feeling for eight hundred years, and each and every second for me would be many lifetimes for the likes of you - for I am a Culture Mind, and you are just a little organic brain. I am never able to forget, not unintentionally, and as for intentionally, I don't want the deaths to be forgotten, to be faceless. Regardless, I would never let my selfishness harm others. So, only after making sure that no harm could possibly come to my people, I chose oblivion. But somehow, I ended up with you." It paused.

"Why are you helping me, then?"

"Because, my dear, as I said, I consider it is my duty to make up for the things I have done by protecting the quaint little vulnerable meatbags like your kind. I still cannot let go of my desire for nothingness, but never forget, I will not stand still and let any harm come to the preciously fragile lives of your world."
…

Shinji woke up groggily. His head spun a little before the fake memory settled in. He looked at the clock. It was past midnight. The Mind was silent. He thought about what it had told him, and felt a pang of sadness.

The Third Child lay unable to sleep, his thoughts haunted by the story. He had a feeling that he had to do something about that.
Shinji turned around and saw his cello, still in its case, in a corner of his room.

He recalled the alien music the Mind had adapted for the cello earlier, and the haunting songs about the war.

So he asked.
~Hey, Hub, can you make a cello version for Expiring Light?