The monitor clicked off and the room went silent. The colonel opened a desk drawer and pulled out a battered pack of cigarettes. He took one out, put it to his lips, and lit it.
"If Eleanor knew I was doing this she'd kill me."
Colonel William Fletcher was a stout, balding man who had nearly forty-two years of service in the United States Army. He had been drafted to go to Vietnam when he was 18 and he never bothered to get out. He had spent half of his career eligible to retire but he could never get himself to throw in the towel. The army was all he knew. This stint in Boston was supposed to be his last post. He didn't want to be a general and the Army didn't know what to do with a colonel who was on his way out, so they stuck him at MIT, babysitting eggheads who were working on some big defense project.
The work wasn't bad, but recent funding cuts had been giving him headaches.
"Damn Democrats. That's all they know how to do: Siphon money from the defense budget and give it to teenage girls that can't keep their legs closed."
Everything had been going smoothly until their sister facility in Nevada was vaporized a few months ago. Twelve thousand people: Gone. The entire facility was converted to dust. The higher ups said it was a failed experiment. Fletcher had believed them. He had no reason not to.
One day, a little more than three weeks ago, Fletcher walked into his office after lunch. A man was sitting in his chair. He had a pony tail and he was unshaven. He looked like one of those Japanese playboys that were in fashion these days. He said his name was Kaji. Fletch never could tell whether it was his last name or his first. Those Japanese had funny ideas about name order. The man said very little but he left a data disk. He told Fletcher that all of their lives depended on him reading and understanding the material on that disk. Kaji sauntered out of the office like it was his own. Fletch still had no idea how he got past security.
The information on the disk was mind blowing. Since taking over command of NERV-01, Fletcher had though it was odd that his chain of command had directed him to take orders from a group called SEELE. To his knowledge they were just another UN committee. According to the information Kaji had given him, SEELE was the real puppet master behind the United Nations. They had initiated the EVA program in hopes of forging all of mankind into one being. SEELE planned to use the EVAs to create God. It was crazy. It turns out that the Nevada facility had become aware of the true nature of the Human Instrumentality Project and SEELE had it destroyed. There was no 'failed experiment.' The commander of the Japanese branch of NERV had been a part of it all from the beginning and now he was trying to make himself into a God in spite of SEELE's plans. Fletcher put his face in his hands.
"My God Bill, how did it all come to this?"
It had taken a few days for the information to sink in. Fletcher finally shared the disk with the only man he could really trust, Dr. Henry Kilgrund. Hank knew as much about the EVA program as did its creators. He had trained with a Dr. Naoko Akagi in Japan and he had set up the MAGI system in the U.S. Between the two of them, they devised a plan. All of the Mass Production Evangelion units housed in the U.S. were piloted by dummy plugs. They had no actual pilot, just a pre-programmed core. They had received the cores from the Japanese. Fletcher was sure the dummy plugs had been programmed for Instrumentality. If they could replace one of the dummies with an actual pilot, then maybe they could cause enough interference and prevent either the Japanese or SEELE from turning the entire human race into soup.
Fletcher had to be careful. He didn't want to suffer the same fate as those in Nevada. They had only planned on one pilot, but for some reason they now had two.
"Hank, what are you up to?"
The intercom buzzed and a dead pan female voice came through the speaker, "Colonel Fletcher, Doctor Kilgrund is here to see you."
"Send him in."
"I liked Rachel better before they cloned her and started using her for everything."
The doctor entered the room. He was remarkably calm given the circumstances. Colonel Fletcher snubbed out his cigarette and addressed his colleague,
"Hank, what's going on? I thought we planned on one pilot? What are you doing with that civilian?"
The doctor sat down in front of the colonel's desk. His metallic voice rang through the smallish room,
"To be honest, I don't know what she's doing here. When we were transferring [Winborn] out of the buffer we discovered there were two consciousnesses. I was going to dump the pattern but then I noticed their synchronization rates were nearly identical. She's a perfect fit as a pilot, even if she has no experience."
The doctor continued, "While animating the new APCU it became apparent the two candidates already had a psychic bond of some sort. We can use that to our advantage. We don't have to risk scrambling our experienced pilot's brain in order to get him to synch with an EVA that was never meant to bond with an actual human. We can now use the two pilots as psychic insulators for one another. The synch rates will be higher and because we don't have to physically alter the EVAs there is less risk of detection."
The colonel lit another cigarette, "What kind of dumb luck is that? We go to harvest the consciousness of our pilot and the perfect match comes along. . . It doesn't make sense."
The doctor looked thoughtful for a moment, "She must have died at the same instant he did and somehow her psyche became attached to his. Those sorts of bonds do transcend both time and space."
"That all sounds dandy, but will it work?" Fletcher asked his comrade.
The doctor replied, "Well Bill, I guess we'll know soon. I was coming to tell you that the EVAs had launched."