2.30 [Heir to the White Moon II: Gates of Eden]
Nun kommt uns seht uns einmal an
Wir sind gefanden in uns selbst
Und laufen nur im Kreis, doch es könnte anders sein
Wir fordern endlich unseren Preis
Und wollen nicht mehr sterblich sein
Für diese Welt zu schwach, so erschaffen wir uns neu
Wir werden noch viel stärker sein
Und sehen auch viel besser aus,
Komm lass uns anders sein, nur ein Schritt, dann sind wir frei.
Wenn wir hoch zum Himmel sehn
Können wir uns nicht verstehen
Denn unsere Hirne sind zu klein
Wir wollen keine Menschen sein
Jetzt sind wir keine Menschen mehr
Wir werden leben für die Ewigkeit
Und ich glaube, ich glaube wir können fliegen!
Jetzt wissen wir alles, haben die Macht
Wir können fliegen um die Welt
Jetzt sind wir Gott sehr nah und stehn fast über ihm
Wenn wir hoch zum Himmel sehn
Können wir uns nicht verstehn
Denn unsere Hirne sind zu klein
Wir wollen keine Menschen sein.
–Welle:Erdball, ‚Wir wollen keine Menschen sein'
[:]
Come and take a look at us
We are lost within in ourselves
And only run in circles, but it could be different
We finally demand our price
And no longer want to be mortal
Too weak for this world, so we create ourselves anew
We will be even stronger
And they look much better too,
Come let us be different, just one step, then we are free.
When we look up to the sky
we cannot understand ourselves
Because our brains are too small
We do not want to be humans
Now we are no longer human
We will live for eternity
And I think, I think we can fly!
Now we know everything, have the power
We can fly around the world
Now we are very close to God and almost above him
When we look up to the sky
we cannot understand ourselves
Because our brains are too small
We do not want to be humans
…
GEIST laboratory complex number five, lowest F-Level, primary test chamber - 44th AT-field quantification experiment and 81st field strength measurement
Subject: number 23, code name "Tabris"
Experimenters: Deputy Director, Kuze Tetsuo, Executive Director: Ayanami Kagura, and her assistant: Miyazawa Haruhi
The small, pale hand was flanked by thick schackles, the once godlike creature was put in chains, little fingers struggled to form a feeble first in ancipation of what was to come.
There was a kind of mechanical noise.
"18,000 megawatts" Miyazawa's voice announced from the control room across the hall, and thus as far away from the subject as possible. She stood by a slider that could be moved up to ninety degrees, and which is attached to the left and right to a "holding piston" on the corresponding fittings, pushing it slightly higher. "And fire!"
And the projectile raced off, already much too fast to be seen by human eyes, surrounded by blue sparks whose light traced its path like a comet's trail, and just a moment after the young scientist had announced the shot, you could already see it: Through the whole, huge, sterile white-tiled hall, as wide as a bus, and at least as high, the characteristic octagonal pattern appeared - and the projectile bounced off!
What finally came to a halt in the opposite, left-hand corner of the room was just a simple metal spere the size of a tennis ball, but you shouldn't be deceived by that: This was the lowest floor of Complex Five, and this test hall took up everything on that floor, not primarily because of the dimensions of the hall itself, no, it was the whole technical trappings that allowed this metal sphere to be equipped with extremely high kinetic energies, and the means to preventing it from shooting holes in the walls and heating the rest of the complex into oblivion every time they were fired; The necessary machines took up the whole floor for themselves, partly because of the strong electromagnets that were supposed to slow down the bullet once it bounced off the walls and could cause significantly more damage than a few broken tiles... Which also guaranteed that the experimenters would be safe behind their thick glass pane.
The entire experimental setup was in many aspects comparable to a particle accelerator.
Moments after the projectile was fired, the numerous monitors in front of the three scientists filled with life - one showed seemingly randomly arranged colored spots like those seen in all those light tricks with cellopham, another something like a rainbow-colored phase pattern, and others showed heaps of numbers.
"Receiving data." Confirmed Kuze, pressing a few buttons on his own console. "Continue."
Miyazawa moved the slider up a little further. "19,000 megawatts!"
She made some minor adjustments on the keyboard based on the data from the last attempt. "And fire!"
This time, the projectile did not make it quite so easy for the test subject - the ball did not bounce off immediately, but at first seemed to be more "stuck" in the field as if it had a membrane-like quality that was not sufficient at that moment to stop the rotation of the ball - it continued to rotate, continued to spray blue sparks, pushed itself further into the flickering field... and was finally slowed down by it, and then finally stopped, falling to the ground much like a stone, not even leaving a depression.
Between relief and exhaustion the guinea pig loosened his small fists.
(Ayanami, who was just monitoring the whole experiment, standing a noticeable distance behind Kuze and Miyazawa, had apparently averted her gaze just before this happened, as if as a precaution, as if she didn't want to see what would have happened if the field had not held the sphere. )
Soon afterwards, the detectors delivered another load of test results to the screens of the command center. Kuze took a quick look at them, then leaned forward in front of a screen with a pattern of colored areas and pressed a few buttons to zoom in more closely on a particularly blue-heavy area.
"The data looks very good. Going ahead with 20,000."
"Okay." Confirmed Miyazawa, now bring the slider completely into the vertical position. "20,000 megawatts. We are now at full power output."
The whirring of the machines, now running at their absolute limit, became clearly audible and dominated the room more than the previous background noise. Miyazawa knew to speak noticeably louder to be still well audible: "And shot!"
This time there were broken tiles.
And blood.
"So twenty thousand is the limit?" Kuze asked dryly into the room, scratching his chin thoughtfully.
Kuze interrupted his conclusions when an unknown sound claimed his attention.
Immediately, a cool breeze of air spread through the control room - the cold came from the gap in the door that provided direct access to the actual test chamber, and the noise had been the opening mechanism, the clicking of several bolts and serrations installed between the door and the wall - the door itself could only be opened mechanically, it was much too thick for human muscle power to open it, and for good reason -
Likewise, it needed a special security key to open this gate at all.
A key that only Ayanami had.
In the meantime, the measurement data had arrived - even if it had finally been penetrated, it was not as if this AT field had broken immediately - there had been more of a membrane-like deformation, which must have slowed down the projectile significantly before the magnets, which could have offered only limited deceleration at full power anyway, had had a chance to do so.
The geometry involved looked really interesting and probably warranted more detailed investigations, and certainly at least the attempt of a mathematical modeling, and a comparison with the mathematical models of AT fields known so far. This dynamic could be of utmost importance in the actual battle against the angels, but also in the resonance that would be needed to bring about the final tragedy...
Even if it was ultimately hit, the subject was very well able to effectively counteract and significantly mitigate the "attack".
And 20,000 was the highest output possible with the technology in this facility. Very soon the subject would be able to handle that too, and judging by this rate of growth, by next month at the latest, it would be able to withstand just about any man-made technology... and the gentlemen on the committee didn't seem to have a problem with that.
Kuze didn't like all this at all, but it wasn't his job to ask questions.
The door closed again.
This time it was Miyazawa who turned the security key for it and immediately handed it over to its owner - Dr. Ayanami couldn't do it herself because her hands were full.
She had still been wearing her labcoat when she had just walked through the door - now that she was back, it was gone, wrapped around the test subject, which she had been carrying with her, and already stained through with his blood - It was red, just like theirs, but Kuze didn't let that lead him astray.
As much as it resembled a human child, its true nature finally shone through, in those inhuman eyes, in that colorlessness of the hair and skin.
And above all...
It was not only that a human child would have died in this experimental chamber with absolute certainty.
No, that was the least of it - if it were a human child, an imperfect individual, no matter how powerful, under these circumstances at least his mind would have collapsed long ago.
A human in this situation, especially a human with such power, would inevitably hate them abysmally. No, it was even quite possible that this creature did hate them; every moment they were poking around in its body, the time of prophecy was approaching faster and faster,, and subject 23 had never made a secret of the fact that it would then most likely make an attempt to completely eradicate the entire biosphere of this earth.
He even said that this was his destiny.
But a person could never put his hatred on the back burner like that and project this illusion of kindness without letting the slightest gram of hostility shine through. A human being would blow a gasket before long; a human being would have a limit as to what he can bear and what he is willing to give.
Impossible that Kuze would ever have mistaken this... this thing for a human being; He was the enemy of humanity, and all other life on this planet.
One could not do this work without being reminded every second that this thing was not human.
Thus, Kuze wanted to believe the spectacle before his eyes all the less.
What was probably more eerie than the mere existence of this inhuman child was having to observe when others seemed to fail to recognize its fundamental wrongness.
He couldn't help but think that it had to be a deliberate strategy by this thing to lead them all to their doom.
He could still understand Miyazawa, she was a naive child, but Ayanami?
She hadn't said anything particularly frightening, but the way she held this so-called child, so tightly that its blood pressed down on her dress, her face pale with shock despite the completely restrained expression, made it hard to believe - even with the subject himself it didn't go unnoticed.
He had his unnatural white hand full of deep red, and held it out to the director to illustrate what he meant by his next words:
"Are you surprised, Kagura-san?"
Kagura-san? Even after all this time Kuze would never believe it.
"...are you surprised that my shape is a little more similar to yours than you thought?"
She did not even deny it.
"Do not worry, Kagura-san. There may be similarities, my body is not like the one you have..."
Miyazawa seemed to feel obliged to act, however, and grabbed a box that she had left on the edge of her console - it was a packet of the dessert commonly known as dark chocolate pocky. It was Miyazawa's favorite food, so she often carried a little of it around with her, but the two sticks she now pulled out of it were not for her own consumption - she also held them out to the test subject, still in the arms of her chairperson, while she stroked his silver hair with her other hand.
"Nice work, Tabbie-chan. Thanks again for being so brave in this... Here you go."
Tabbie-chan. It wasn't the first time Kuze heard that, but he still couldn't believe his ears. "Cut it out, Miyazawa." He rebuked Dr. Ayanami's young assistant. "The subject possesses the fruit of life. It is not as if it has any use for metabolic building blocks..."
But before Kuze was done talking, the superhuman child had already wiped his hands on Dr. Ayanami's already filthy gown and taken possession of the candy, innocently looking up at the deputy director while he crunched on it despite his words, almost like an ordinary five-year-old child who hadn't just fended off projectiles hurtling towards him at energies equivalent to the power grids of entire countries.
"That may be so, Mr. Deputy Director..." Miyazawa defended her "protégé" "...but that doesn't mean that he can't enjoy it anyway, does it? And he deserved it," she announced, continuing to caress the man-made monster eagerly.
"Thanks again for your cooperation, yeah? Thanks to you we could learn a lot about AT-Fields, which will be very useful for our defense and survival..." But Miyazawa's exuberant enthusiasm faded in the middle of the movement.
"Even though you... probably don't really want us to defeat your brothers and sisters with our Evangelions... I'm sorry, Tabbie-chan, please don't feel guilty!"
Although the first drops of blood had wandered along the fabric of the gown against gravity and dripped onto the white, tiled floor of the control room, the boy smiled with a deep wisdom, seemingly inappropriate for such a small child, but one that had been heard of even in real children, often with the same simple nature as his next statement: "But how could I possibly blame you?"
Kuze felt the cold running over his over the back. The two were practically eating out of this thing's hand, and the little bald man was looking for explanations. It must have been because Ayanami had carried this thing to term. She had been quite pragmatic about this... measure in the beginning, but it was not impossible that the hormones had affected her more than she suspected.
"You do nothing but try to maintain your existence, don't you? This is one of the most natural instincts that all life forms have... And I see that you enjoy your existence. I have no right to reproach you... because if I become the one who manages to escape the time of destruction, you will probably disappear... Or is your enjoyment of your existence in some form less real, somehow less valuable than my enjoyment of it? Our desires are not really contradictory, they are similar. This is really the sad thing that we are doomed to fight, even though we are so much alike..."
Well, or not like a little kid.
It was these words that made Ayanami noticeably thoughtful as she wiped a few strands of hair from the child's face as she looked inside, into the big, bright red eyes.
Was it truly impossible to coexist?
(It didn't have much to do with a "family", not really - At the end of the day, these people all went home and led their own private lives, with none of their test subjects occupying a particularly relevant place in them. Had one of them been transferred to another post, this would probably have ended all interactions between them. And it hardly bears mentioning that real friends and family members did not shoot metal projectiles at each other :-)
(But there it was, a construct, not the kind of big emotions that made you do stupid things, but a friendly interaction that was not fake in any way, an honestly shared smile)
He didn't seem to hate them, despite everything.
(Was the reason that he did not hate them precisely because he was not human, or...)
(Because he knew nothing else? They had not told him that normal family members did not shoot metal projectiles at each other. Nor did they usually plan to destroy each other when the appointed time came).
(Was he just a better person than they were?)
(Did they hate him?)
(Kuze feared him. But hate...? You don't resent the storm on the horizon, you just avoid it. The subject was a force of nature, not a willfully malicious perpetrator; he did not hate him any more than he hated wolves or crocodiles, or anything that was just capable of killing and eating a human being in order to prolong its own existence).
(Whenever Miyazawa was with him, she was having a good time. Sometimes she woke up in the morning looking forward to seeing him :-)
(Ayanami... Ayanami was well aware that it was not her place to doubt the scenario).
They didn't have to stay down there in that small control room to evaluate the results - Ayanami and Kuze moved to a room with lighting that was a bit more similar to daylight and a large monitor table for them to sit around and view the results.
Miyazawa had been sent to go wash the subject and she thought he deserved a nice, warm bath. It was quite possible that his regenative capacity had already caused every trace of the wound to fade by the time he left the tub.
Dressed in a simple white medical gown, Miyazawa had then taken him to his usual piano lesson, or at least that was what they had announced. During these sessions, he liked to ask her attentively how he was doing, how her life was going, and this often branched off to a deep conversation about the human condition, and the young scientist, who did not have it in her to think how "practical" it would be to tell him certain things, always answered his questions in good cheer.
Anyway, she was busy, and was not really needed for the evaluation of these results.
...
Excerpt from the results report of the 44th AT field quantification experiment in Laboratory Complex Five, written by Director Ayanami Kagura.
The current theories of the origin of life have long discarded the notion that the first component that was created was something relatively complicated, like self-replicating molecules.
It is rather assumed that it was the metabolism that preceded everything.
Many different experiments have been carried out to recreate the mixture that existed in the oceans billions of years ago, and many of them brought to light a significant proportion of the most common molecules found in organic matter today, including vesicles made up of a bilayer of lipid molecules that were essentially the basic structure of a cell membrane, and a tendency of the other biomolecules to accumulate in these vesicles was observed - Without giving specific examples, the new model assumed that there was a reaction in several steps, all of which were coupled together, so that the second product could not immediately disintegrate into its starting materials again without further consequences.
Depending on the environment in which classical life is assumed to develop, various known reaction cascades could take over this role, and simulations showed how a kind of proto-cell could eventually develop from this via various scenarios.
An indispensable factor in any such theory, however, was some kind of spatial separation: be it by small bubbles in the rock or the lipid bilayers mentioned earlier, without anything to create a degree of separation between the nascent organism and its environment, the potential metabolites would simply dissociate awaye after the first step, instead of meeting often enough to carry out multiple, nested reactions.
Without separation, such a living being could not be distinguished from the primordial soup from which it had emerged.
Now, these precursors of cells have evolved endlessly, forming compounds, opening up new habitats, taking with them analogues of this original liquid medium in which they once learned to exist,in the form of blood, lymph, intracellular fluid or cerebrospinal fluid.
The generation of today's researchers is privileged in the sense that we now know the exact composition of the original medium - we learned it after the recovery of the second angel, its original source, which has never run dry until today.
And we now also know that this separation is an important factor even when there is no real metabolism at all, as with this other branch of life whose only proof of existence was buried for so long in the Antarctic.
Today we have examined all this in more detail, and can look at this elementary idea of "separation" in more concrete terms: The AT-Field.
In a life form in its final form, such as us, where after the long sprouting and growing of the tree of life's ancestry, the fruit of knowledge finally came to light, it essentially means the sphere of influence of a soul, for us typically the limits of our own body, the area that we can influence just by exerting our will, such as our arms and hands.
Despite its fundamental importance for our existence, our AT fields are a fine, barely noticeable part of our daily life, precisely because they are limited to keeping our form in place.
But the danger that makes us fear the approaching threat from the Angels is the ability they share with all that is divine - the ability to project their AT-Field, the sphere of influence of their will, beyond the body that holds it together.
We already have words for the ability to subject things outside one's own body to one's will, but most of them sound rather unscientific, like ‚magic' or ‚ESP'.
Nevertheless, as I will explain in the following report, we are now able for the first time to describe the mechanics and dynamics of such phenomena in detail...
"This is a brilliant essay, as usual, Madam Director..." Miyazawa commented, holding with one hand the dark stick of pocky she was nibbling on, while in the other hand she held a printout of Ayanami's work, her eyes shining with admiration.
„Do you really think."
Kuzes reaction was different:
"The power of the fruit of life... is truly something to fear..."
"Are you still concerned about the subject...?"
"You have seen its power. Do you dare to say that we could still control this thing if we needed to?"
Ayanami just kept this unwavering smile and made a remark colored by the amusement over some irony:
"...This morning Miyazawa asked me if we will all have such power one day. And wether we might be able to control it..."
"Adam's power?"
"But the fusion is prohibited," commented the director amusedly.
"But Miyazawa is a smart girl. And I was forced to tell her about the projects at headquarters..."
"What Ikari is currently working on? The Evangelion Test Type?"
Ayanami nodded. "EVA Unit 01. It will probably take at least another six months before it is even ready to be tested. I assume you are familiar with the... particularities of the test type?"
"You told Miyazawa about that?"
"Of course. She is my assistant. It is her job to support me in all my projects, and for this it is necessary that she knows about them. Unlike all the other models in progress or planned for the future, EVA 01 is not copied from Adam, but a full-fledged descendant of Lillith, our own origin. Born, not copied, of one being with the original. And yet Yui-chan is quite sure that she can create a projectable AT-field with it -
With an artificially elevated being from our own evolutionary line...
And Miyazawa speculated that some of the experiments we prepared here in the DARWIN garden would go in that direction as well... and that we already have the first specimen here in Subject 23, a being in our form, with these powers, created by us..."
"Isn't it presumptuous to say that subject 23 is our work?"
"If it weren't for us, would he be here?"
"If you want to put it that way, it's a debate on semantics..."
"In any case, Miyazawa also studied Murasaki-chan's works in this direction, and therefore asked me this question."
"And what did you say?"
"That this facility and the DARWIN Garden exist to explore the limits of these possibilities. But as far as the realization of these possibilities is concerned, we do not need to look for the answers - the scenario is clearly expressed there: With humanity, the dead point has been reached, and whatever potential intermediate stages exist cannot be reached from where we currently stand. The grand plan does not foresee any further use for our AT fields.
And who am I to doubt the scenario?"
(By the way, these were also the last words the Ikari couple heard from her lips. "Who am I to doubt the scenario?")
(Much later, at a convention of scientists from the project, Miyazawa came to ask a similar question to leading scientists from GEHIRN. She did not get to ask the answer from Ikari Yui herself, with the almost absolute authority that came with it in her field - she had long since vanished from this world by that time).
(But she was lucky to be at the last convention attended by Makinami Murasaki. She had her little daughter of five years with her, a quite... peculiar little girl.
"Yes, that's one possible answer." She said so when Miyazawa told her about Ayanami's opinion, with a smile full of mystery.
„But the final result is for our grandchildren to see."
(grandchildren? That was something Miyazawa had not yet thought of. Not only because she was still relatively young. She was working on a small part of the Human Instrumentality Project.
What was worth having children now, so shortly before the day of prophecy?
They would hardly be in elementary school by the time that the horsemen of the apocalypse were sheduled to begin their ride around the world.
And grandchildren? There would be no time for that.)
(As some might imagine, Dr. Ikari's answer would have been a lot like Makinami's)
"...But...", and so Dr. Ayanami had continued her conversation with her deputy : "What Miyazawa is saying is by no means without meaning. The study of human AT fields is one of the main focuses of our institution, and one that could very, very soon become very relevant... That is what the DARWIN Garden was created for."
"You're not talking about the chosen children, are you?"
„ "What I'm talking about is that I advised Miyazawa to specialize in the field if it appeals to her so much."
(When Dr. Ayanami took Miyazawa Haruhi under her wing, she did so because the student had reminded her of her former self.
And perhaps also due to a spontaneous bout of maternal instinct )
...
Excerpt from an addendum to the dossier of test results requested by the committee outside the normal reporting intervals. From the final report, written as requested by the commissioning party by Director Ayanami Kagura personally.
During the next AT field quantification test, the subject was also able to easily fend off the full power output of 20000 megawatts. The limit of the equipment in complex five was reached...
A few months later, we had a high-performance particle accelerator sealed off for further experiments with the subject, for which I would like to thank the gentlemen from the committee once again, but in the months between this experiment and the last one, the subject's AT field had surpassed even the most extreme possibilities of human technology - breaking through an AT field with brute force is theoretically possible, but in the particular case of Subject Code Tabris, it is unlikely that such amounts of energy have come together at all since the early days of our universe - if this AT-Field can exist, it is not unlikely that such power was available to our creators, but here we can only speculate - we ourselves, and their other creations are ultimately the only real evidence of their existence. In any case, we do not have it.
"So in other words, it's impossible to penetrate?" Kuze asked, leafing through the paper.
Ayanami leaned back in her chair with a thin smile. "This is what the gentlemen from the committee wanted confirmed."
"I suppose they were pleased with the answer?"
"Not really, no."
"But... You said yourself that the AT-Field is impossible to penetrate..."
"Impossible to break through, yes, but to neutralize it is another matter. It would simply require an AT-Field of equal strenght."
"An equal field? An Evangelion?"
"Oh, the Evangelions are only bad copies, and even so, limited human souls will be in them... But there is exactly one entity here on this planet that could project an equivalent field - in fact, our world is relatively unique in this respect... The other seed of life, Kuze. Our own source, Lillith... currently located in the complexes under the NERV headquarters in the black moon, also due to the construction of EVA 01...".
"The construction of EVA 01? Is that what's worrying the gentlemen upstairs?"
"The whole thing is a... rather chaotic nexus in which many important components are close together, even components we don't know are important yet... If they are completed on schedule, the activation experiment is scheduled in eight months. When that time comes... anything could happen. Something very relevant will probably happen. Good old Yui-chan is planning something, and I think the gentlemen from the committee suspect the result... - I guess they know what's going to happen, but not how exactly, or something like that. "
"And do you suspect?" Kuze himself began to find this result all the more worrying the longer Ayanami smiled thinly to herself - experience alone had taught him that.
"But... it is not for me to question the scenario. But probably... we are dealing with this one passage from the scrolls that has consistently refused to make sense - The Woman Taking the Goddess' Robe, and the Goddess Taking the Woman's Robe... Ikari Gendo, Fuyutsuki Kozo, Makinami Murasaki, and most of all, Ikari Yui. Who knows what these people are thinking? No one knows what these four are really up to... and I know them all well enough to say with certainty that none of the other three have any idea what Yui-chan is up to..."
"Not even her husband?"
„ Him least of all. Does that surprise you? I'm an old sandbox friend of hers, and I know no more than you do. But there could be factors that even she cannot foresee... She has an excellent brain, our Yui-chan. So does her better half. They both have a very, very good understanding of the big picture, of long-term processes... of predicting the future, in short. But their logic stops where the other comes in..."
...
Ayanami did not think that this thing would change her, but it did.
Admittedly, it was less some kind of immediate "rearrangement" by the environment, but rather something non-material such as a memory that she was allowed to keep for herself forever.
She felt clearer in her decisions, sharper in her determination, and things that she had previously worried about had now long been left behind.
Henceforth, the worries of the one friend in the bunch who never had anything interesting to tell, were replaced by this quiet, knowing smile.
The dreams must have been a kind of compensation to show her what she would never see, and even if that particular corner of her brain where those thoughts and memories were stored never made sense to her waking mind again, after the dynamic, living piece of eternity had left her body, she had been aware of it in the dreams themselves, in a kind of bitter hunch.
And these "premonitions" were always filled with music and joy and glory, with a melody that spoke like poems, and blades of grass and heather that parted in the wind to reveal the view of a young man of about fifteen years of age, who turned and smiled, playful wind in his silver hair, the seashore behind him, the setting evening in the background.
Sometimes she can read the word from his lips ("thank you"), but she does not know what the thanks are for. Sometimes she does not understand this one word, but everything before that, and she is seriously thinking about ending it all, so that this tender, whiny boy with the impossible blue eyes would not have to stain his hands with blood, and he would not present this world in his desperation as an offering to the flames, but when she saw the warmth that the two exchanged with each other, she could never bring herself to be fully convinced, and when she got up the next morning, she would know nothing more except that there was a good reason for that thin smile on her mouth.
The states she experienced were incredible, and she knew it couldn't just be the hormones.
Hormones were not enough to make an adult woman lean against a wall or the back of a chair while sitting and then stay like that for hours, simply because for some reason she had felt such deep joy that she could not think of anything to correct her present condition, of if, instead of experiencing strange cravings and mood swings, the person suddenly started humming songs she had never heard before.
Ayanami was a scientist through and through, writing several papers on the subject, some of which were hard analyses and others more read like diary entries, always anxious to preserve her unique eyewitness account for posterity.
Even though she had already calculated that it would not even take the nine months usual in humans, complications were expected, humans and angels, it was written since eternal times, could not coexist after all, not even on the molecular biological level.
But they did not come.
Ayanami had clearly stated to her staff that in the case of an emergency, priority should be given to preserving the subject, since they had only one of these, but that her work could continue with the data she had left behind, but her fears were completely unfounded.
Instead of being miserably tied to her bed, the scientist felt better than ever before and ever after, and so it happened that after months of observation, despite her... condition, she was let go to visit her old friend.
Yet she had little real memory of the last weeks of her pregnancy, so deeply had she sunk into this dreamland of lights and melodies, more and more often, and more and more, completely enraptured by what the fruit showed her, by the golden glow that led her to the gates of the Elysium and allowed her to take a brief glimpse into the glorious future whose foundations had just been laid.
"Now the moment is approaching when our paths must part..." her timeless, silver-haired ferryman told her. "But Kagura-san, don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened..."
Smile because it has happened.
This time he led her into the garden beyond those golden gates, that was his gift to her, of whom he knew that she sought knowledge above all else, and showed her the children of the future, showed her how Moses had been shown the promised land, although he was never allowed to enter it himself, showed her the children of today with their own children by their side, ready to spread out into the world they had inherited:
Be fruitful and multiply!
There was a little redheaded girl with a single braid, looking around with big eyes; Her clothes hung in rags, but her feet were up to her ankles in clear, finally blue water, and the sea breeze played with the scraps of cloth, and behind her was a teenager with deep tanned skin, dark hair, and earthy brown eyes, the fire of a long glowing rage finally extinguished, right of it, a couple with a newborn, a little bit aside, a stupidly smiling young man with a bird's nest of confused black hair, on the left, a young woman with a waterfall of dark brown hair and a slightly younger, more delicate girl, whose crested hairstyle showed a somewhat strange color...
And the youngest child, apart from the infant, the little girl with the red hair, this germinating sprout of grass in a supposed desert, knelt overjoyed on the beach and began to splash about happily in the water, washing the dirt of the past from her young life, and to spread the scent of the seashore everywhere, which had actually disappeared from this world forever with the Second Impact, that catastrophe which had completely killed even the original home of life, the ocean, giving the impression that the forge of life would never ignite again.
The scent of the sea coast (Nagisa Kaworu) - A wordless promise of one thing above all: "salvation".
"("The result... is for your grandchildren to see. )
"No, it is I who must thank you." She finally answered him when he led her out of that golden garden for the last time.
"But let me ask you one more question, Tabris... no, Kaworu... did you find love in the end?"
"Everyone finds love in the end."
"Yeah, but did you find it?"
"So strong that it is worth the death."
"And what is he like, he whom your soul loves?"
"So very, very... human."
And Ayanami smiled her thin, knowing smile. "That's just like you."
This must have happened in the last few hours.
This child may not have gotten into her body in the classical way, but it got out the old-fashioned way. Ayanami Kagura was probably the first woman in the history of mankind whose hymen was torn from the inside when her birth canal stretched open to let this boy pass through.
And even there, Ayanami had not quite understood what was happening to her physical presence in the present, in her memory there were only a few snapshots of half the crew of Complex Five, including, of course, the medical staff, and how they all fussed over her.
The many tones, songs and melodies confused her considerably - a birth should cause pain, not... joy.
She had to think of this little redheaded girl, this impossible avatar of a bright future, with her shining stars.
I wonder who she had been?
She was probably never meant to find out more.
That was probably all that could be revealed to her without the wrong word in the wrong place triggering some fatal spiral.
She had no good reason to complain, not after she had already received so much grace.
Do not cry because it is over, smile because it happened
Then it was done. Over. Gone.
It was only natural.
From the beginning, they were only everhis melodies, his light and his glory.
She had only borrowed them from him.
She let herself sink exhaustedly into the pale gray light of reality, and almost stretched out her arms, expecting to be able to hold him, but someone - Kuze? - had already taken the child with them, for first examinations and further safekeeping, while she too was rolled away from here, presumably to a place where she would be afforded more privacy.
The child had been borrowed as well.
What was bizarre was that she missed his gentle movements inside her, this... spark more than the glow and the light and the heavenly fanfares.
Yui had been right, she had underestimated this, and sinking into this feeling of abrupt disenchantment, Dr. Ayanami could suddenly understand the abstruse actions that women who had lost their children might be capable of.
Once you felt this, you couldn't go back to the state in which you started the journey.
She could not go back to having never carried life.
A last voice in the back chambers of her skull estimated that it was actually good that she had not seen the boy in this probably quite... hormonal state. She knew how bonds work, basic brain chemistry was a must in her area of expertise. She knew the phenomena, she refused to call it a feeling, it was a matter of pride to explain it down to the molecular level, and she could imagine that once this biochemical fog was cleared, she would see clearly again, and then, once she had rested sufficiently, she would probably set out to see the her new test subject.
Or perhaps she would take him in her arms, speak to him and sing songs to him.
Or both.
Before she went to sleep, she asked herself once more who this little redheaded girl had been.
(Shortly before Ikari Yui followed her husband and mentor, leaving the scene of the crime, she paused for a moment, still outside the doorway, almost in awe. This last, thin smile, with which her friend's face had frozen forever, was one of those things that even she could not explain).
...
When we learned of Dr. Ayanami's death, we were all shocked.
The sudden, unexpected way in which it had happened, the brutality of the act itself, and the grueling fact that all the evidence indicated that she had known her killer and let herself into the room she had not left alive.
Everyone here in Complex Five was affected - because even though we all worked underground for a long time, even though we knew the end was near, it was not as if we had nothing left of our humanity. That would not be the kind of organization that Dr. Ayanami had led.
But now it was time to continue her work, and soon, because with the completion of the first Evangelions, or at least their control systems, the time was approaching when Project Master would be expected to deliver the results for which it had been started.
Although Deputy Director Kuze was the next best qualified person available to take over Dr. Ayanami's position as Director of GEIST, he remained loyal to his old research areas and responsibilities - none of them were unimportant and insignificant, and Deputy Director... no, Director Kuze was entrusted with them because he was the best in his field.
And the one who knew most about Dr. Ayanami's research was the person who had been with her every day for almost a year anyway - me.
I have to admit that I was seriously beginning to wonder if Dr. Ayanami hadn't somehow ...guessed this might happen when she told me a while ago about some ... crunchier details of the project.
It rarely gave him lucky coincidences in our business.
Despite my attempts to fill the gap left by our director, it took several years to become the new vice director and almost ten years to get my own doctorate, but still, as sick as it sounds, I have to admit that it was probably Dr. Ayanami's death was the one event that gave me a chance to shine as a scientist and show off my skills, because based on Dr. Ayanami's preliminary work, Director Kuze and I were actually able to complete the project as planned, and I can say that I have come much closer to my goal of becoming like her...
I think by now she probably wanted me to continue her work sooner or later, and I consider it an honor but...
I would have liked it to be later rather than sooner.
Tabbie-chan... I mean, Code "Tabris" kept his smile up, probably for the rest of us, but it took on a noticeably melancholic touch for a good while.
So it wasn't as if it didn't affect him - and yet in the end it was him who comforted me, regardless of whether my plans initially looked the other way around.
"Don't cry because it's over, smile because you met Kagura-san in the first place, because she was here at all."
At that moment, I didn't really care how far his ability to see it this way was related to how much he did or didn't resemble a human.
Didn't it also happen occasionally that ordinary children that they said something unusually profound?
It didn't really matter to me at that moment, wether Tabris was angel or no angel, just ...Tabris, and as such someone who could be... really inspiring.
Yes, inspiring was the word, in the same context in which it was used, when we heard in news or documentary programs about children who had suffered some bad fate, cancer or a disability or whatever, but who could still look into the future with hope and radiance, precisely because their situation had taught them the value of things...
The fact that it was me who had "administered" the boy until then was probably one of the factors that benefited my advancement
As for the boy himself, it never really occurred to me that he really was, as Director Kuze always likes to remind me, a monster whose raison d'être is to destroy humanity - he didn't deny it, but the whole thing sounded rather abstract and distant, and if you looked at it that way, so, distant, abstract and incapable of pulling together big, accusatory chunks of emotion, you couldn't help but notice that the grand project does indeed foresee the destruction of all Adam-based life.
His destruction.
One could of course say that we are many and he is only one, and that our interests should therefore outweigh the others, but it was also true that technically speaking he formed a "self-contained unit" just like all of us together.
These were by no means doubts about our right to fight for our survival, or even doubts about the great project, no, absolutely not, we agree on this: complete destruction by the angels is not good!
I'm more talking about how this affects the way I see him - Sometimes I look at him and there's nothing but the friendliest, most well-behaved, most attentive boy you can imagine - But if I said I see him as such, I'd probably be guilty of hypocrisy - if I saw a normal kid living in these circumstances, my first thought would be that I'd have to get them out of here somehow, right?
But such feelings and thoughts did not actually come, even though I was inclined to bring him souvenirs from the outside world whenever he asked for them, and tried to find excuses to go outside with him.
But I guess that I probably still didn't perceive him as a human child, just as something that my brain processed as sweet or lovable because it resembled human children.
Of course, I will always be able to say that the circumstances left us no choice and that I knew what he was.
And the boy himself?
The years passed and he grew up, in what one might call a very ironic way - over the years this first wise little boy became a young man whose charm one could practically not escape. It should have been our hated enemy, Adam's offshoot, but when you were in a room with him, it seemed almost impossible not to like him.
Polite, kind, helpful, open to new things, grateful and cultured, a person of great words who could make just about anything he said sound like a deep philosophical wisdom, a profound person, a man of the abstract who craved beauty like men crave air and water, the sort who would die for an ideal, who would gratefully take a philosophical or moral victory to an actual one. Able to see beauty in the darkest places and circumstances, and able to read in people like a book, virtuous if ever there was one, almost the transfigured ideal of a young man, the mind of a scholar, the soul of a martyr, the essence of a perfect friend, or, from my point of view, an ideal little brother, I guess, truly an angel, but of the kind known from ancient legends.
It seems wrong that this is the shape of our enemy, the face of our adversary - The enemy should be unruly and nasty, and repulsive, just like something that does not fit with the logos of our world and can only exist in a fundamentally different world where there will be no place for us, and if this is the truth, I begin to wonder: If this is the enemy with whom we cannot coexist, what are we? What does that say about us? What does that make us?
To a certain extent, it is probably pointless to ask this question. I know first of all that I don't want to die, and even if I felt like it, there are still all the others. Possibilities in which we die are therefore out of the question from the start.
- Dr. Miyazawa Haruhi, written in early 2015.
...
(1) Its happening! Its happening! We have a release date for the 4th rebuild AAAA im just getting ready to be emotionally eviscerated over here
(2) tbc in 2.31: [Instruments of Fate and Destiny]. I'm not sure if this chapter & the previous have stood the test of time, but I'm still somewhat proud of the next two.
