"Beware, beware, his flashing eyes, his floating hair! Draw a circle round him thrice and look on him in dread, for he on honey-dew hath fed and drunk the milk of paradise"
- Samuel Coleridge, Kubalah Khan
THE GREAT BEAST
CHAPTER 07: HEARTS OF BLACK SCIENCE (Unraveling a story 0.1)
This was the major drawback of the Evangelion system, Ritsuko thought. In harnessing powers beyond their understanding, man had gambled with his own destiny. It was in this slow, plodding, meticulous way that apocalypses are constructed.
Shinji had been dissolved into the plug for a week now. She could discern no reason why. His sync ratio typically fluctuated in battle, and this battle was certainly not unlike any of the others. The angel didn't seem significantly more difficult, and didn't seem to have any special abilities outside of the AT field. It was difficult to determine whether there were psychological factors at play, of course, since Shinji seemed to go entirely catatonic within the plug upon sync, and had no memories of the battles upon desyncronizing. She should have investigated that factor immediately upon hearing about it, but they were short on both time and funding, the Organization not being too keen on questioning the methods and abilities of the Children (though ever so insistent upon questioning every single decision made by the mere humans running the show, pfft), and she was forced instead to simply hope for the best.
This is what hope causes. Demiurge soup.
This had happened once before, in the early tests with Shinji's mother. The attempts at rescuing her failed, but her mind was so gone by that point in the prototyping that it was no major loss. One of the greatest scientists of the age... It was such a shame. So many of them were seduced by the freedom of it. Mixing the right and left-hand paths is dangerous, yes. It gets results. That is the biggest danger of man: the will without the knowlege of the whole.
That was why the gears of second impact were set a-spinning, even as early as the nineteen thirties.
She turned back to her terminal, working out some equations. "Glory to Nuit and to Hadit, and to Him that hath given us the Symbol," she muttered to herself.
--
Rei lay on her bed, in a waking dream. The everpresent construction outside was a good enough approximation for white noise, and with a towel draped over her face and the shades open, she was able to generate hallucinations via the ganzfield effect. She was entirely aware, intellectually, of the nature of these. She held no contempt for science -- in fact, she kept all her hallucinations logged daily in a diary, and correlated syncronities with her waking life diary once a month, determining the subliminal cues that caused the precognition.
But for now, she was no scientist. She was Delphi, breathing the heady vapours of her unconscious. Her dream-form rose and separated from her still-sensing body. It walked across the room, silver hands grasping an invisible sphere. It turned, showing the sphere as containing a blue eye inside a golden triangle, inverted with the triangle pointing down. It began to burn, hot as the sun. She smelled honey and mint. She sat up with a start. She had a sense of knowing, quite purely, what was going on and why. 'Is this what they call Gnosis?'
She took out her cell phone and made a call. "Doctor Akagi? Yes. No. The way to save Pilot Ikari is Will. Goodbye."
--
"Will?" Misato was barely concious enough to rummage for the telephone amongst the junk around her futon. "I don't understand."
"He knows where he is, on some level. On another level, he wants to get out. But he has to Want to get out on the same level that he Knows where he is. It's easier to understand than explain."
"Oh, that's actually pretty simple. Isn't that what all those giant mecha shows were on about when we were kids? 'Believe in yourself, and pierce the heavens with your drill of destiny' and all that."
Ritsuko sighed over the phone. "Remind me never to explain transactional psychology to you. You're likely to bring up Kare Kano."
"Stroke me or I'll buy box cutters?" She threw a coat on over her night clothes and grabbed her keys.
Ritsuko surpressed a chuckle. "Something like that."
"I'll be right over. You just need to tell me what to do."
--
Rei lay on her bed again, nude in the morning sun. She removed the towel from her face, and fingered the silver pendant around her neck. "It's nearly time, isn't it?"
Her doppelganger, on the other side of the room, merely smiled.
Soft as distant bells, Rei began to sing. "And you know that her tears were taken and cooked up for the queen, but you will never find her now she's gone and her trail is far too clean..."
