2.31: [Instruments of Fate and Destiny]

In your creation heaven did decree

That in your arms sweet death should dwell

Deep silent complete, black velvet sea

The sirens are calling for me

Save my soul thinking: This song's a lie

The sand on the shore is so dry

Deep silent complete, black velvet sea

Brave day sinking in endless night

-Nightwish, ‚Deep Silent Complete'

The other side is overcrowded.

Those who leave this world will soon have nowhere to go.

...

The great project was a long-term undertaking, if there ever was one - Since the time of ancient civilizations, its representatives have been working in the shadows, pulling the strings in the background, arranging the emergence of the civilization in which they would be able to assume their current status of power, driving developments in technology they thought they would need in the distant future, fomenting wars, manipulating success and humiliation in the scientific community, pushing their fingers deeper between the strata of society with every social upheaval - and they had done so all across the world, even if they originally came from the Mediterranean, the middle east and later Europe, at least until the 19th century. And 20th century. When NERV was formally set up as a semi-public organization, the necessary personnel and infrastructure had been secretly in place for a long time, and not only at the headquarters in Tokyo-3 and its enclave in Matsushiro - Those who had the knowledge of the legacy of their creators were very miserly in their distribution of it – So that someone who worked at only one of the many bases in only one particular function would be practically incapable of putting the whole picture together in any form - The battle against the angels, which mainly took place at headquarters, was perhaps the most coherently comprehensible, even if it was by and large a rather peripheral corner of a plan, which made a fundamental change in human existence look like an old kaijuu movie.

There was Headquarters, or "Outpost" 0, if you will, with the EVAs 01 and 00 built and stationed there, as well as the facilities and equipment for the core parts of the instrumentality project, Outpost 1 in Massachusetts, where they worked on EVA 03, the next production model, Outpost 2 in Nevada, where research on Unit 04 and alternative energy sources was currently being prioritized, implying the replication of the fruit of life that would be needed in the construction of future units. Branch 3 in Hamburg with its enclave in Berlin, also relevant as the production site of EVA 02 and the training site of the Second Child, was mainly oriented towards theoretical research, branch 4, also known as the Golghata base directly on the "original" Dead Sea, was concerned with somewhat... shadier technologies, where a word that circulated in the circles of the initiated was often "dummyplug" - supposedly a by-product of the creation of the Evangelionss and the associated attempts to transfer and artificially replicate souls which had repurposed technology used in the creation of the magi, even if that was by no means all... Field office 05 in Beijing served less pompous-sounding purposes, the fast and cheap production of Evangelion and suitable weapons for the purpose of mass production, even if the word "lance copy" was also being floated now and then, usually which much less explanation. A similar dearth of explanations surrounded the since destroyed sixth base in the Arctic, seat of the Marduk Project - it was only said that research was being done at Bethany Base on a captured angel whose cocoon had once been found in the ice - and about the "secret excavation base" on the moon, outpost 07, which kept a low profile.

But at least it was widely known that this base existed - shooting rockets to the moon on a regular basis could not be hidden anyway, so it had to be admitted to. Outpost 8 in France was the opposite: It was located in plain sight, open enough, with its duty clearly circumscribed as „archeology". Pretty self-explanatory, though some who had never heard of the scrolls before might wonder how exactly that topic might pertain to the Project. („Witchcraft!" some of the personel would at times joke. „Honest to god, Turn-you-into-a-frog Witchcraft.". At least, there were products delivered both to headquarters and to Bethany Base.)

But there was also a ninth facility on the cliffs of Scandinavia, (not counting headquarters), whose existence and exact location were never disclosed - For cover-up purposes or personnel transfer, this place was occasionally treated as the NERV branch with the imaginary number, i, the Eden base that no one knew anything about, that no one had ever been to, and that no one had to ask about - But that was a pure farce, for all the initiated, this place, which was known to be not under NERV's control but that of GEIST, and referred to as simply Complex Five.

This should not suggest that there were still complexes one to four somewhere, the name came from the old days, when the project was still run under the banner of the "Institute of Artificial Evolution" - just as the first actual scientific work on the project had taken place at the University of Kyoto, this institution belonged to the time when a building permit had to be obtained for it, And the designation "Complex Five" was simply a convenient way of mentioning the space to colleagues without having to go into detail about what was actually going on there and was only intended for a very limited circle of ears, and the designation had remained in use ever since.

Over time, the resulting organization GEIST was entrusted with just about everything that SEELE wanted to keep as far away as possible from Ikari's nose - the SCHUTZENGEL project, for example, until certain parts, at least as far as their very existence was concerned, could no longer be kept secret for reasons of logistics and space (and were moved to Bethany Base), but the main task of Complex Five, which the people working there never lost sight of, has always been fundamental research, especially in the areas of souls and AT fields, and the pride of the complex has always been the DARWIN garden, the heart of Project Master -

Just as Terminal Dogma at the headquarters was a rather surreal sight, so was the Central Chamber of the DARWIN Garden, even if it seemed much more modest in direct comparison, because it was entirely the creation of human builders who had only carefully imitated the works of their distant creators here.

Thus, even though the chamber was an impossible, unique sight for an ordinary person, it did not live up to its importance - Miyazawa, as so often in an ordinary working day, entered as one of the highest-ranking employees of Complex Five through a thick, double-wing door that automatically closed behind her, and then there she was.

The room, as it would have appeared at the beginning of 2015, was a large, dome-shaped structure the size of a large gymnasium, in which the dominant color was white, white and shiny, white plastic - From the main entrance a path marked only by two notches in the floor led to the center of the room, where another such notch separated a circular area in which a further, diamond-shaped area was embedded, where the white ground was replaced by earth and grass - the whole depression was about so large that the projecting crown of the chestnut tree, which was located in the middle of the small green area, completely covered the rhombus. From this central circle, in addition to the path leading to the main entrance, there were other paths leading straight to the edge of the room, such as the spokes of a wheel or the rays of the sun, all marked only by two notches in the floor, about a hand's breadth apart, to the gates covered by arches that lined up against the walls of the hall, they reminded us of the arches that one would find in a Romanesque church, no higher than an average room, under each arch a door, and behind it, rooms that branched off from this one like petals, behind which lay a whole variety of things, to which this part of the complex owed its entire significance - Some of the doors and rooms had changed their function with time, as some undertakings had finished and others had started anew - The oldest markings on the doors were probably the large black lacquered numbers, such as "29" or "23", even though the latter number might not have been the best example, because the room currently labeled "23" originally had a different label, and the room that used to carry the 23, the number now has the same label as many other rooms that were labeled with something other than a number a grey overpainted square, and again over it the new label:

KEEP OUT

EVA 08 CONSTRUCTION SITE

NO UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY ALLOWED

- The gigantic tank, from which the 23rd subject had been able to flee for ages anyway, had in the meantime been reassigned to another purpose, and Subject had been given another quarter, whose previous purpose had become superfluous.

Perhaps also conspicuous was the door directly opposite the entrance - the painted surface in its center also had the shape of a square, without, unlike the gray squares, there being any indication that there had ever been anything else there that had been painted over.

The cryptic label of the door actually consisted of only one square of light blue color, and from this was derived the similarly opaque designation that the scientists working here had for this place: The "blue room."

But if one were to look only at the numbers originally left behind, they would still not be in the right order, so long between room 29 and the corresponding room that once carried the 23, not exactly five more doors, but two - And the room stopped making sense long before anyone could have noticed this detail: They stayed away from the paths, but above the pizza-like areas in between, seemingly unprovoked and randomly arranged blocks hovered, also covered in white plastic like everything else, in simple, geometric shapes like those you would find in tetris blocks, none of them close to the ground, but none of them higher than an ordinary cupboard.

The roof of the dome was also mainly white, but printed with black lines whose shapes lay between bar code and integrated circuits, but at the top of the dome formed a bird shape similar to the Nazca lines.

The absolute icing on the cake, which finally made the room seem like something out of a confused fantasia, was the grand piano, which stood directly in the shadow of the previously mentioned chestnut tree in the room, including a stool belonging to it - this was usually also the place where one could meet the "inhabitant" of this facility, who himself seemed hardly less unreal, than the halls that surrounded him - and he was there, even if he was not doing his usual business - instead he had turned his back on the keys of the piano and held a stack of paper in his hands, even though he had draped another stack of paper, which he had apparently already been through, on the lid of the piano - A quick glance at the stacks deposited there told Miyazawa what was going on

"Ah, are you looking at the profiles of the other pilots?"

He looked up at her with a smile and nodded, even though he didn't really need this confirmation. Miyazawa already knew these documents, and was likewise familiar with the faces on them, though only in a distant way, she had seen them at most once or twice in person, but she knew the photographs - top left, the most promising candidate at the moment, classified as a Second Child, Shikinami Asuka Langley, a still very childlike-looking girl with long, red hair at the time when the picture in this file was last updated, who was depicted in this picture in her plugsuit, with her arms crossed and a smile seemingly bursting with self-confidence, and a little further to the right, the file of the American candidate, Maria Vincennes, also very much convinced of herself, with long blonde hair, large, chunky sunglasses, and conspicuous, crescent-shaped earrings, skillfully taking possession of the small rectangle of paper, under it, a fairly recent addition to these files, at the time this picture was taken, still without her later infamous bust size, with bright red plastic glasses, a blue headband, two long braids that underlined the ‚Pipi longstocking' aesthetic she had going, and the idiosyncratic combination of a green plugsuit and a parasol, a surprising newcomer: Makinami Mari Illustrious, and then there wasthe file which gave the impression that the boy had leafed through it most urgently until now, the big question mark from headquarters, Commander Ikari's little mystery, about which even they had very limited information here at GEIST - Ayanami Rei, to be seen on her file, The way she stared severely into the camera in a simple school uniform, with her pale skin, her red eyes and her strangely colored, short hair, showed a not insignificant resemblance to Tabris himself, no doubt the reason why he was so taken with the sparse, heavily redacted information that was available.

So what was it that the superhuman boy was concerning himself with right now?

Miyazawa tried to peer over his shoulder inconspicuously, failing at least at the "inconspicuous" part because Tabris felt the need to make a statement before she could even get a good look at the papers in his hands: "This is your compilation of possible further candidates, especially for the still unclaimed position of the third chosen one... remember Haruhi?"

"Indeed." The scientist confirmed. "It is already a small embarrassment - everything is already arranged, we built up the stage, called the audience here, invited the other actors, and drilled their lines into them, but when it comes to the main actor for the starring role, we haven't found him yet!" She shook her head, sighing.

"The worst thing would be if he had already been found and someone else had arranged it right under our noses, without us having any influence on it... Director Kuze and I hoped that the committee had simply not told us this, but if even you flip through these old lists, there really must still be a black spot on the map..."

Miyazawa glanced at the page of the dossier Tabris had just opened with the intention of making a few comments, if necessary, on the candidate being discussed:

"...But this one is rather unlikely for this role. Commander Ikari's own son... the comitee wouldn't put up with such insolence, at least not without a good reason... But on the other hand, this Ikari is said to be very cunning. At least that's what the director thought, and she knew him personally..." she brooded, scratching her chin absently. "Still... Of course I was only shown so much, but I've already seen enough of the passages from the scrolls that talk about this Third Child..."

Miyazawa threw another glance at the picture on the page the silver-haired teenager was currently looking through, not quite knowing what to make of it.

"It seems to me somehow hard to believe that one of these children is supposed to blow the final trumpet with his own hand..."

"What else can the son of the devil become but the Antichrist? It was all set in stone a long, long time ago..."

"Then you think it will be him?" Miyazawa asked, surprised, somewhat incredulous, but also able to admit her error and curious about the reasons for it - assuming that this boy's insinuations and premonitions were true and treating them like facts had proven to be a very effective strategy so far to push the plans further, it had gotten to the point that even Kuze had started to accept it with a roll of his eyes.

Tabris, on the other hand, smiled at her in response to her request and put the papers away, so that he could devote himself entirely to the conversation with her.

"There are factors that make me think so, yes, but that's not the only reason why I'm concerned about this possibility... If he were the third child here, it would mean that we would most likely meet... And also, if these candidates are all very interesting here, I think, of all the people here, I would like to meet him the most... If I remember correctly, I even saw him at the first screening of candidates... I remember that he seemed a little inconsolable, as if he needed someone to comfort him...".

"Then you hope it's him?"

"Not at all." The angel shook his head. "The destiny of the Chosen One is barren and empty. I would not wish this on anyone, and certainly not on someone who does not have the strength to withstand it..." he said, his words colored with melancholy.

"You're a nice guy, Tabris. Many people would be a little more attentive to their own interests if they were you..." She sighed: "It is even less to be believable that you could mean the end of this world..."

"That's what I've been trying to tell you, Haruhi... about myself, and also about this boy here, with us, the problem is that our paths have been predetermined for a long, long time, perhaps billions of years ago, when the phenomenon called life first entered this world, but certainly since the committee has been working on the great work. In the great clockwork of things, we are therefore nothing but parts, not any small inconspicuous cogwheels, even the pendulum and the hands, but ultimately only components, and we are expected to be like a well-tuned instrument and to keep still so that fate and providence can play their melody on us...

But at the same time... we are beings who have a soul, and we cannot help but form our own image of this world as we move forward, and feel something as we walk our paths... and that is what he is... what I am, what we all are, whose paths have been predetermined... That is our tragedy."

"A shared suffering then?"

"Why not, Haruhi? Is it not common among your kind to be attracted to those with whom you have something in common?"

Yes... but he actually did not belong to them.

But was it really so astonishing that he resembled them? Despite their different forms, these beings they called the enemies had never been quite so different, and even if they were not, had he not been created by man, at least in some sense? When the result of a contact experiment using human DNA, it wouldn't be too far-fetched to consider him partially human, and even if he wasn't, he had spent most of his life among humans - She didn't want to say "raised by humans," because that would have implied that he needed to be raised and cared for, like a human child did, that even if he was perfectly healthy, he just couldn't develop without the presence of other people, and besides, it would have been an overestimation of their own achievements, what they, the former director and the current director Kuze had done with him was not childrearing - The discrepancy was so great that it was not the person or the older sister in Miyazawa who protested, but the scientist who simply could not let inaccurate, false facts stand, and certainly not in relation to this unique "sample.".

But even if all this were otherwise, there was still the stupid, stuck, irrational matter of Miyazawa's feelings, the "recognition software" in her skull and the strange way it had classified that boy there.

In moments like these, when he said these kinds of things, never openly sad, but with a melancholy twist in a smile that he kept up because he thought of her first, before anything else, when it was her he was talking to, she began to wonder if he was capable of feeling something like loneliness after all - Sure, it would not be an primal, instinctive urge for him, nothing he needed, like people need water and oxygen, if he had things he needed in this way at all, he certainly would not go crazy if he was left alone too long, that was proven after all these years, but maybe it was something high and abstract for him, like when people longed for those things that went beyond their programming, like charity and transcendence, maybe he could hunger for companionship like a human being hungers for beauty and art and meaningful occupation - one could not die of lacking all these things, but as a rule one was happier when one had them, and Miyazawa thought he could now see that he preferred to have someone with whom he could spend his time. And all that other abstract nonsense, charity, art, beauty, blah, blah, he had it all, and how! In that respect, they were alike.

Perhaps the differences in their form, limitations and the like stopped playing a role above a certain level.

"What you mean is that a person for whom a certain role is intended can still be a person? Any kind of person?"

If that was roughly what he meant, Miyazawa began to understand what he was getting at, but yes, that still didn't make it fair.

Why did he have to be this kind of person? It would all be much easier if he was an unpleasant, inappropriate fellow who hated them right back and behaved like an enemy... Even if Miyazawa found herself preferring a situation where they had a chance, and considering all the power this boy had, that was the present one, cold as it sounded.

Tabris' answer to her question was once again just a smile with which he held her off while he prepared his answer, eloquent as ever, so radiant that it hurt.

"Even if he is sitting at several of the most important pivots, it would be like a mirror image in a pond trying to pluck the moon out of the sky... but still he cannot be a simple chess piece - because he is so much less than that, not a... knight, bishop, rook or soldier, and because he is so much more than that, wishes and feelings and unpredictability in three dimensions, and a light that can touch others..."

"Are you saying that we have forgotten that the linchpin of our plans are still human children? Or do you think that a world which won't even let a simple child have his place may not deserve to exist?"

She scratched her chin, thoughtfully, perhaps with a touch of melancholy, but without anger or judgment. "Our Chosen One would certainly not be the only child in this world whose destiny, as you say, is barren and empty... Then our attempts to steer events in a certain direction might in reality disrupt a process that was intended to correct a mistake in this world..."

"That's one way of looking at it, but I hope that this case won't happen... the Haruhi, you know, I actually like this world... If for some reason I don't get to fulfill my destiny, I'd like it to continue..."

"So you're the only one who is allowed to plunge us into ruin," commented the scientist, slightly rebuking but smiling. "At least one thing is the way I see it... Don't get me wrong, if I had the choice, I would of course prefer to live, but I wouldn't blame you if you destroyed us after all we have done to you..." Miyazawa couldn't help but stifle this embarrassed, suddenly bursting smile when she suddenly realized how morbid it sounded. "I wouldn't be happy about it, of course, but... I wouldn't hate you or anything."

"Me neither, Haruhi. And I don't hold any grudge against you because of the things that happened in this institution - It is only natural that you wanted to learn about our kind, it is more in your nature than in ours, and I have always enjoyed learning more about you... And I can imagine that some of my siblings will be interested in finding out about you too..."

"Some of them?"

"Probably, no, surely it will probably be the same with them as with you, that there will be those who hate you, those who simply want to go on living and therefore strive for your destruction, those who want to make your power their own as you have ours, and those who are interested in you... But they lack the fruit of knowledge, so it will be of little help to them to observe you, and they won't have the... privileged position that has allowed me to get to know you better - Most likely they will try to connect directly with one of you... But there are some things I know about you after all these years that my siblings might not immediately understand... I just hope that...".

"That they won't break anything in their attempts to ‚find out'?"

"I know how this sounds now, but unfortunately you are so much, much more fragile than we are, from a certain limited point of view..."

Miyazawa could not say that he was wrong...

"Have you made these, uh, speculations know to the committee as well?"

"If I hadn't, you would have notified them right away, wouldn't you?" He sounded not in the slightest accusatory, no deviation from his usual relaxed smile.

Now she was actually feeling guilty.

To think that guilt would be what she would feel about the opportunity to volunteer information that might contribute to the survival of all life on this planet!

That boy... It just wasn't fair, just pretty much everything about him.

"Tabbie-chan..."

"It's all right. After all, I am something created by you Lillim, you who fear me... Even you, Haruhi..."

At this point she was honestly a little shocked.

"...so I have no choice but to make the best of it - in my position, I am free to do what I like to do to a certain degree... If the position of our "chosen one" is comparable to a reflection in a pond, then with my knowledge and my position I am already something like a fish in the pond... I will see what I can do..."

Miyazawa would like to know for what purpose - Even she sometimes wasn't really clear about what purpose he was talking about, sometimes he mentioned things that should have opposite effects... "Do that...".

"But Haruhi... you didn't come here to talk to me, did you?"

"Not really." What I wanted to tell you is that your transport to Tabgha base is organized, but will probably be delayed - the chairman apparently wants to discuss some confidential matters with you, and you will be transported from there.

"So this is goodbye?"

"Looks like it... The chairman is sending one of his private jets to fetch you, and it should be there in about three hours... So we still have a little while, and I'm actually done with the rest of my work for today, so..."

"It would be nice if Director Kuze would join us..."

"He already went home for today... And I'm afraid that he wouldn't get excited about this either... I'm afraid that we could never quite enthuse him about you..."

"That's too bad... I always appreciated him."

THE SAME ROOM -

TEN YEARS BEFORE

Only a few months after Ikari Yui had disappeared from this world, the prediction she had made months before came true with alarming accuracy, and the two men who had been her right and left hand during her lifetime became her right hand after having tried so long without success to infiltrate this facility with one of their agents, were summoned to Complex Five in person - Of course, the people in charge there had cleaned up everything, and of course none of the others here were allowed to move around here without an escort, even though they were not even the most closely watched guests, because some of the people who had been brought here for this event had not even been initiated into the very basics of the project - with the explanation that most of them had been brought here for their own sake - Ikari had an inexplicable, little blue-haired girl in a rich red dress with him, and he had wanted to present her here from the beginning, or perhaps it would be more correct to say that he wanted to present something here, and that the girl existed for this purpose.

Bringing her here was really just a formality, nothing more than an administrative procedure to get an already decided matter signed off - He knew that she would be found compatible and approved as a pilot, which meant for him that he would have to keep a little less secrecy about the preparations he had already made in this direction - He had checked the readings that would be taken here today only yesterday and knew that the old men would be unable to ignore them.

He could imagine that they were all frantically trying to uncover the girl's past at this moment, but they could search as much as they pleased - there was no past for them to find.

This was the first time she had left the walls of her familiar laboratory, and it had taken both him and Fuyutsuki quite some effort to make sure that she wouldn't fall apart in front of an audience, but she was sufficiently "programmed", and Ikari believed that her duties had been sufficiently drilled into her.

Fuyutsuki hadn't liked the whole thing at all, but he would have had to lie to say that he hadn't been involved in her creation - Ayanami Rei, ironically named after the former director of the complex, the product of his despair, and yet the object of Ikari's twisted hope...

But he had known about her long enough to show open shock - What he hadn't expected was the second, apparently somewhat older child at Ikari's side, a quiet little boy who bore a not inconsiderable resemblance to Ikari...

"Didn't you want to avoid involving him at all costs?"

"The situation has changed."

And Fuyutsuki felt horrible hunch lighting up in his mind, a conclusion that seemed to be inevitable, an idea that didn't seem to match with how he liked to remember the boy's mother, but fit in very well with the sides of her he'd always tried not to think about.

The thought that she had wanted to bring about this ...necessity, that she had already planned it when she signed up for this experiment and took this child with her... And yet the old professor couldn't bring himself to speak - taking away Ikari's illusions might have been the right thing to do, might have been the sensible thing to do, might have made him overcome his delusions, might have finally driven him far enough into madness to take his ability to function with it, and there was a good chance that the world as a whole would come off much better, but it wasn't very high on his list of priorities - he rationalized this in telling himself that Ikari would probably refuse to believe it anyways, but he ignored the fact that the probability would decrease with every day he kept silent, and he couldn't bring himself to care about this child in particular, or couldn't ignore the fact that this boy didn't seem to have spoken or smiled much since his mother's death, maybe not at all.

Even a deaf-mute blind man with cane could have easily noticed that the present leader of GEHIRN was completely overwhelmed with his new duties as a single father.

However, the old professor could only be blamed for this to a limited extent, for he too was beside himself with grief ever since the center of all their undertakings had disappeared from their midst, though his feelings about it took the form of a quiet frustration, at least partially pressed into shape by his mind, which as such could only manifest itself through such small omissions - later he was to repent of each of them individually, thus also partially motivating his half-hearted attempts to persuade Ikari to do so to turn to this child again after he had finally gotten rid of him, telling himself that Yui had probably wanted it that way… but blame was honestly speaking the stronger of the two motivations, he was not a gorilla, he still had enough common sense (and sometimes Fuyutsuki had the feeling that he was the only one far and wide in this organization) and could see that it was a three-year-old child whom he resented for his very existence -

Fuyutsuki, of course, recognized the boy from the day of the activation experiment, there was no detail of this tragedy that he could ever forget, and even if Yui had rarely talked about anything but her beloved offspring - he knew remotely that it wasn't her intention to rub his defeat into his face.

But in one way or another, this toddler had already accumulated a lot of resentment and bad will on his person for a child that was only just house-trained, even if he was only loathed by extension - it was the connection of his parents which had been inconvenient for a great many people, either because they were personally after one half of the couple (Akagi Naoko for example - how her own daughter had survived her would be an eternal mystery to the rest of the universe), or because they didn't think he was suitable for Yui and had suspected him of shady motives from the beginning - For the operators of SEELE, the man had been an unpredictable source of trouble from the very beginning, which suddenly got stuck at the seat of power and refused to be rubbed out like a perfect stain. Yui's elitist family would probably have made life difficult for any son-in-law, but of course, to put it simply, a shady rascal in shabby clothes was the least likely to get a warm welcome. And the most irrefutable, most obvious proof of the "unholy bond" between the Ikaris was this brat, of whom no one really knew what to do with him after his mother's death, least of all his father - Yui had friends and relatives who still had a room or two free in their houses, yes, of course, but most of them were of the opinion that this child should never have existed to begin with, and were heartily indifferent to his further fate.

Until now, however, Little Shinji had been much too young to notice any of this, and so the first three years of his life had actually been completely unobtrusive and undramatic.

He had learned to sit, crawl and walk more or less on time, and even if he took his sweet time to begin actively speaking, his mother was steadfast in her claim that her son understood everything she said, and she confidently bragged that little one had started to say "please" and "thank you" at a very early age, only by imitation, while other small children often had to be badgered into doing so. When he was about one-and-a-half years old, Dr. Ikari had started to regularly leave the boy in a daycare center when she was busy in the laboratory and could not be arranged to drag her little sunshine to work, and the kindergarten teachers rarely had anything to complain about. He still had his problems with numbers over five, but at least according to his parents, he made up for it by being remarcably musical, having great success with all of the various noise-making implements that were commonly presented to small toddlers. His parents claimed that he could sucessfully reproduce a few basic children's songs such as "All my little ducklings" or "A little man standing in the woods," (although you never really know whether his father actually agreed, because he generally never contradicted his wife - in fact, there were only exactly four things on which they had ever disagreed, although it was perhaps remarkable that they had all had to do with their son.) At least, he was not the noisy, hyperactive variety of toddler who had to be kept busy all the time; One could confidently plopp him down in a corner of the room with a few wooden toys without taking too great a risk of him trying to escape – the occasional trantrums were usually quite a challenge, but they were mercifully rare. So all in all he had been a pretty sucessful toddler.

Surely, perhaps Makinami's little daughter could have been considered a bit more likeable, with her way of introducing herself to strangers, mostly all kinds of colleagues of her parent, directly with her full name and delightful kooky toddler logic, and then there was also Dr. Shikinami-Zeppelin, who didn't miss the opportunity to shift her rather one-sided rivalry with Dr. Ikari into the nursery - whatever Dr. Ikari's little brat had managed, Shikinami's little daughter was reportedly doing twice as well, and although it was just as likely that she simply resented her colleague for kissing her husband in her presence and raving about her happy family while she herself had only recently caught her own husband in flagrante delicto with another woman and consistently expelled him from the house, it could just as well have been that there was something to the claims, especially since little Asuka later turned out to be something of a prodigy.

But even though there was nothing much extraordinary about him, Ikari Shinji was a model toddler, at least until he was three years old, one could have confidently assumed would one day become a balanced, happy, productive member of society - that is, until the day of the activation experiment.

Had the circumstances been different, there would certainly have been someone who would have spoken to the boy's father about his situation, or at least been outraged when he finally ended up giving his own child away, but the sad truth was that most people who knew of his existence were only too happy that his old man finally threw in the towel and made the boy disappear from their sights forever.

Before the Second Impact, there might have been a chance that at least one or two distant relatives would have shown mercy and either taken the child in or directed its father to a support group or a social worker before the need arose, but after a catastrophe that claimed half of all people as victims, there were quite a few children in this world who missed their parents and no one who had the time to pick them all up. In this world, the trauma of a near-apocalypse was part of the "basic equipment", at least for all but the very youngest, so that the survivors could not afford to be choosy in this respect either - Insanity was tolerated as long as it only remained in its place in the shadows - That something like the whole conspiracy and the child soldiers that were inevitably demanded by it were possible at all, yes, was tacitly accepted by so many people was probably owed to this new status quo. The disappearance of the seasons was probably the most obvious and disturbing sign that the world Fuyutsuki once knew was a thing of the past, but it was these subtler shifts in society that really made him doubt what would become of this world - Years ago it would have been the stuff of bad pulp fiction and B movies, today it was reality: A decade before Tabris' parting with Miyazawa, this hall presented itself with the same notches in the floor marking the paths and the same patterns on the wall, but even if relevant things were already going on behind them, the doors still lacked the inscriptions, not even numbers were to be seen on them at that time - The diamond-shaped recess in the middle of the room already existed, but instead of containing a tree and some grass, it looked more like a big sandbox, and the furnishings of this hall looked quite different in other respects as well: Perhaps these white, unexplainably floating things had not been created until much later, perhaps they already existed, and they had only been put away because there were some in the assembly of those invited here for today for whom this appearance would not be an unexplainable phenomenon, but something with whose mechanics they were familiar, so that the mere sight of the phenomenon would have told them everything about what was actually going on here - there were many such not quite unexplainable things in the depths of this and similar facilities.

Instead, the room was filled with truckloads of colorful means of occupying the real reason for the gathering here: The several dozen children that had been shortlisted for the program.

It is quite possible that this had been planned from the beginning in such a way that SEELE knew in advance what it would lead to and had only "allowed" them to find out the same thing little by little, including the sacrifices that would be required for it - Yui seemed to have guessed a lot, had insiinuated some things to her associates, probably had had completely different plans, but as far as SEELE wanted the scientists of GEHIRN to know, the whole process had gone like this:

At first, it would not have occurred to anyone to let anything other than a trained adult into these godlike fighting machines, yes, one did not even want to risk innocent lives not involved in the program - As far as the development of the test model had progressed so far that one could make a first attempt at activation, the creator of the humanoid monstrosity volunteered herself as a test sunject, so that if something went wrong, she would be the only victim of her ambitions - but she became only the first.

And what a nasty, brutal death it became, right before the eyes of her little son.

The less words were said about the day of the activation experiment, the better.

The images still weighed heavily on Fuyutsuki's grey head.

Anyway, the conclusion that was drawn from this tragedy was that the Doctor's wife did not fulfill the right conditions to connect with her construct - All attempts to recover her failed, even if they were not entirely fruitless - They obtained a lot of useful data and some very, very interesting research material from which later on the solution of the same problem that caused its existence in the first place should arise, but that did not mean much: All that could be salvaged were a few unrecognizable, deformed shreds of flesh that did not even have the shape of a human body. Yes, on closer inspection, the cells contained Dr. Ikari's DNA, but the attempt to rip them out of EVA 01 had been so incomplete that the shreds were mixed in different parts with genetic material from the Evangelion itself, that is, with the genes of Lillith - In his desperation, wishing to rescue his disciple whom he had secretly admired for so long, Fuyutsuki had pushed aside Dr. Akagi, who had been leading the recovery attempt until then, and pressed a few keys herself, and let the extraction algorithm run, although Akagi had not entirely suceeded in grasping the ego boundary of her colleague as the signal was about to fade away, and this was the result, the product of his desperation: Uncertain about how to proceed, the shreds of contaminated meat had been packed into a glass tank not unlike a coffin, helplessly covered with a few adhesive strips with various symbols and descriptions for "biohazard", and then placed in the darkness of a storehouse to catch dust, together with the LCL which partly came from the Evangelion's core, and partly from what used to be Dr. Ikari's body - After it had poured over the floor of the laboratory, it was not possible to really tell the difference, it is quite possible that a few molecules that once belonged to the brilliant scientist could have been mopped up and poured down a drain.

It should have been clear what to do with these remains - they should have been cremated and packed in an urn, that would have to be what all human decency would suggest - But no, not so, they were much too precious as a research sample!

When the ancestor of the angels exploded in Antarctica, he must have taken the better half of humanity with him - in the horribly cold world left behind by the Second Impact, one could not help but desecrate a corpse!

One might think that a world that could continue to exist only at such a price perhaps deserved to perish, but the number of people who would give up just for the sake of propriety was pretty much close to zero. But truly, a world that continued to revolve around such an atrocity would be cursed until its destruction, and the same applied to this institution and especially to this Evangelion and all who would come in contact with it -

Dr. Ikari had been the leader of the team, her husband had disappeared without a trace for the first week after the incident - In the lab it was almost universally assumed that he must have committed a foolish act and very probably was no longer alive, but a week later he returned, with deep, black rings around his eyes, filled with a cold restlessness, and with his deep, authoritative voice ended the haphazard chaos that had reigned since the incident in the halls of GEHIRN and dominated the atmosphere during the failed rescue attempt.

Dr. Ikari's widower returned in deep black, giving hard, clear orders, still carrying the rubber suit that had become his wife's execution robe, with all that stinky, dried LCL on it, the material full of hand prints and wrinkles, too crumpled to hide the fact that he had been clinging to it almost continuously for the past week. Somewhere in his cold body a heart was still beating, but you would have had to get a stethoscope and spend a while looking for it, and only if you knew roughly where to look - he seemed to be his own ghost, a dried, washed out afterimage of a better day...

Contrary to expectations, he willingly parted with the sticky divesuit, almost casually threw it into a garbage chute as he made his way to the laboratory, even though the stench of LCL did not completely dissipate from him - astonishingly calm, he immediately demanded the tank with the remains of his wife, broke its seal single-mindedly and then barricaded himself in the third annex of the Laboratory for Artificial Evolution, far down in the bowels of Terminal Dogma, and refused to come out of it for anything beyond the most urgent maintenance of his body, noting that he classified eating and sleeping as "unimportant", and met his need for fluid from the laboratory taps at irregular intervals.

To his superiors he presented new, more precise drafts of the plan, to his subordinates he gave the clear orders they had been lacking since the death of their scientific director. Dr. Akagi perforce became her sucessor.

The plan described by the new documents was similar to the one previously discussed with Dr. Ikari, except for what Fuyutsuki called significant deviations, and Ikari called it clarifications and revisions though he sold it to SEELE as a new, more effective way to achieve their goal, but Makinami knew far too much to not see through this, and Akagi, ignorant and simple-minded as she was, was easier to control - that's why she got the post and not Makinami who, in her eternal unpredictability, only smiled quietly but made it clear to Fuyutsuki that she would personally stick to the old plan.

But even though he managed to get NERV's operations, which had been slackened in his absence, up and running again, the head of GEHIRN spent all the time he didn't need for anything else in that laboratory and refused to be disturbed there – at the very most he tolerated Fuyutsuki and Makinami, when she opened the door for herself, but none of them could really dissuade him from his goings-on, driven like one of those bewitched brooms from the fable of the magician's apprentice - Akagi was not invited, no thanks.

"Earth to Gendo-kun. Makinami here. Anybody home?"

The bespectacled woman finally shook her head and left the room. When Akagi asked her where Ikari was, she replied that he was likely wherever his wife had gone.

- but it wasn't wild zeal that had taken possession of him, but rather cold, planned calculation, had he been unable to run his organization, both his well-meaning colleagues and his opponents would have had the perfect excuse to remove him - no, instead it appeared that he had lost nothing of his bold efficiency in the week that he had been gone from the face of the earth – quite possible that his mind had even been sharpened (by adequate motivation). He had a logical explanation ready for all that he did - he was analyzing the leftovers, he had a solution for the pilot problem in mind. If he was mad, then there was certainly a method to his madness.

Fuyutsuki still had his doubts, but when he came to take on the unpleasant duty of making Ikari understand that his efforts were futile and the really ought to let her go and bury her instead of continuing to tinker with her corpse, in part to confront how his inability to accept this same loss what had caused these twisted pieces of flesh to be extracted from the Evangelion at all, he realized that he had significantly underestimated the man whom Yui had chosen over him.

He had routed hoses and cables into the bassin; his fingers flew over the keyboards and the LCL started moving in ripples.

Before his eyes the strips of flesh joined together, took shape and form, and with it order and structure; Unformed shreds formed hands and feet, arms and legs... but before either of the two men was able to take a closer look at it, the construct seemed to explode from the inside out, simply losing all coherence. The unnatural combination of its components could simply not hold together any longer and sprayed the glass walls of the tank with blood and ribbons of half-formed organs, intestines, brain pulp, half-melted pieces of bone, partly splashed out of the coffin-like basson and stained Ikari's form, new stains that joined the old ones that had long since turned brown.

But Ikari was confident: "Fuyutsuki! Good that you are here. Help me stabilize this. I'm getting close now..."

Fuyutsuki swallowed hard - and raced straight to the next console. He had no right to shake his head at Ikari - his longing, too, was much stronger than his common sense had ever been. He found these dealings ugly and tasteless, yes, but ultimately, the difference between himself and Ikari was that Ikari called things what they were, while he himself was guilty of hypocrisy.

What did Yui find in this lying reptile? Well, maybe it had always been his blatant, cheeky honesty, paradoxical as it sounded... An endless paradox, this Doctor Ikari.

But Fuyutsuki knew that she never did anything without a reason... he just hoped that she had known what she was doing when she stepped into that Evangelion.

A few days later, the two men succeeded in kneading the contaminated residue in that tank into a human shape - the material had not even enough volume to form an adult woman - what presented itself to the two men in the tank had the shape of a completely naked little girl who, from the outside, could only be of preschool age.

Fuyutsuki recoiled, much distraught. It was clear that they had failed.

But Ikari immediately rushed to the pool and lowered his arm inside, soaking the sleeves of his sweater and white coat with LCL and the rest of the human slime to lift the unnaturally pale, immature little body out of its birthplace - when he grabbed the shoulder, the tiny pale hand in large, calloused one, as he tried to lift the tiny result of his work out of the liquid in which it was floating, her head would hang down without showing any sign that this small white form was much more alive than the remains from which it was made.

Ikari also put the other arm into the tank to hold her as well as possible, so that she didn't lie in any uncomfortable position, carefully lifted her out, held her close to his chest, no matter how much the liquid she was soaked in stained his clothes, no matter how quickly it spread on his once white coat, and so he lingered, watching every detail of his construct vividly, finally awaiting the moment of truth after days of consuming work.

Then - indeed! A movement, a stirring, weak, irregular, but present, a jerky lifting and lowering of the chest, like a stuttering motor, noises, a cough reflex, the LCL being spit out like an infant born through a caesarean section child would first have to get rid of the amniotic fluid because the narrowness of the birth canal had not pressed it out of its lungs, and there were noises!

That voice!

That any of them should ever be so lucky as to be able to hear this voice again, even if it was only an instinctive sound that accompanied the cough, the gagging of the liquid, with only a hint of familiarity to it.

"...Yui?" Ikari asked cautiously, his voice trembling and moved, although Fuyutsuki was still in the room... But he had already guessed at this point that something was very, very wrong - It wasn't just the childlike shape of what they had put together - The face was too symmetrical, like a face drawn from memory, whether or not the human brain was programmed to find symmetry beautiful, and even if Yui used to have a very fair skin, this unnatural pallor went far beyond that - but probably the most obvious sign was the mop of blue hair that flowed down Ikari's arm.

For a moment he was inclined to believe it, when, as a reaction to the voice of the director of GEHIRN, an impulse went through the small, but so, so familiar little face, and the eyes opened a crack... Behind the eyelids lay an unobjectionable iris with a pupil, all flawless, but if the eyes were to be the windows to the soul, then beyond these eyes one would have seen only a large "for rent" sign - sure, there were instinctive reactions, perhaps a rudimentary intelligence that could react to stimuli, but there was no recognition, no comprehension, no quietly whispered "...Gendo?", no reaction, not even when he shook the small, pale body slightly, his creature kept staring at him, not answering, the only thing he managed to do with his waking attempts was to reveal the imperfection of his construct even further, while Fuyutsuki had long since painfully averted his gaze, a small arm, a bag of flesh that slipped cleanly from the humerus and splashed into the LCL, the tendons hanging down like long strips of chewing gum, other pieces crumbling down like dried sand or bread crumbs, where Ikari had grasped the shoulder firmly, the skin began to warp and tear like paper, the neck, the chest, all of them slipped from their mold like plastic that slowly began to melt,and more pieces plummeted back into the tank, no matter how much Ikari tried to compensate for the gravity and the decay with his arms - for the second time, she escaped him, and how! Barely a full minute after this imperfect imitation was removed from the tank it was created in and exposed to the outside air, it finally dissolved into foam like Andersen's little mermaid - it was probably only because Ikari instinctively let go of the disintegrating creature at this point, as its decomposing structure hissed towards him like the contents of a kicked coke bottle, that there was anything left at all to stare at the two desperate men with its empty eyes, after it had sunk back into the LCL and was further preserved by it, from a half-molten face with muscles, bones and part of the eyeball exposed on the right half. The force of the short fall and landing in the LCL tank had been enough to detach the upper half of that empty, human-shaped meat puppet from the lower one, connected only by the cleanly detached spine and a spiral of intestines.

It almost had a poetic quality - like Wagner's little homunculus from "Faust", this artificial construct, this corked-up attempt to create an artificial human being could only exist in the flask in which it was created.

Fuyutsuki saw only one possible description for the outcome of this venture:

"We have failed..."

He stepped away from his console because he saw no reason to be there anymore, hit by a resignation that had actually been present, albeit less obviously, when he entered the room – At last, it was all over, except for the mourning and the dubious pleasure of disabusing his colleague of any ideas to the contrary.

Ikari himself knelt there for a moment, his face lowered, the expression on it unrecognizable in the gloom, looking down at his now empty, stained arms.

But then he set himself back into motion, not violently, but slowly, gradually and in itself undramatic, and he went back to his console and pressed buttons as if nothing else was happening.

He was a hideous sight, stinking of blood from head to toe, stained from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head, and ages seemed to have passed since he had last shaved, and Fuyutsuki could not explain how he could see anything through those glasses; at the very least he could have wiped them off under a faucet. It was as if he had bathed in a butcher's shop - This whole room and everything it represented slowly began to weigh heavily on Fuyutsuki's stomach as he contemplated what a terrible, unnatural undertaking he had gotten himself into.

He had guessed from the beginning that it would be an ugly affair to get Ikari out of this room and allowed himself a last, resigned sigh before he tried once more to talk to the younger man, knowing that it would be in vain. "Leave it, Ikari. It is useless. Just look at it. What we extracted was contaminated with foreign genetic material to begin with... it wasn't Yui-kun... Her soul was never actually in here... There's really no reason to keep poking around in her remains... Who do take yourself for, Ikari? A necromancer from the tales of old? Let it go, and go home. Take a shower and shave... Who's been taking care of your son the whole time you were locked up in here? The poor child has already lost his mother... I think that's enough. There is no reason for him to lose his father, too."

"...The matter with Shinji is… taken care of." Ikari retorted, apparently unwilling to talk about it any further. His fingers continued to fly over the keys unhindered.

Fuyutsuki had expected that he would now vehemently deny the situation and perhaps have a kind of breakdown, in the worst case a total refusal to understand what had just happened, to the extent that he would continue to speak unhindered to the disintegrating, soulless doll he had made there as if it were his wife - But none of that happened, after the initial moment of consternation Ikari seemed completely calm, analytical even, the things that came out of his mouth made sense, and it was frightening just how much sense they made: "If she wasn't here from the beginning, then it's as I suspected. Her soul must still be in the Evangelions... And that means that the plan is feasible...".

"The Plan-?! I don't know that anything like that was ever a part of it!"

"Obviously, a few corrections were necessary due to the incident."

"Corrections? Are you sure that you haven't lost sight of what our goal actually was...?"!

"To ovewrite SEELE's scenario, just as you, me, Yui and Makinami swore to do two years ago. This has not changed... Of course it would be good if I could discuss the change with her, but unfortunately... this is no longer possible. It will take quite a while until we see her again..."

"See her?! Ikari, what the-"

"That's what you want as well, isn't it, Professor?"

Fuyutsuki couldn't deny that, but-

"If that is so, what are you still stirring in that broth? If you wanted to make sure that Yui-kun was still-"

"You said it yourself, Fuyutsuki. These samples are interspersed with the DNA of Lillith ... The combination of man and angel, the forbidden fusion... That opens up a whole range of possibilities... It is still too unstable to withstand contact with the outside air, but it should be possible to fix that... I told you what I am working on down here: a way to find compatible pilots for the Evangelions... or rather to create them ourselves. What could be better suited to successfully pilot Unit One than something that comes from the same source?"

"Do you know what you're saying?!"

Fuyutsuki did not wait for an answer. Ethics had never particularly irked Ikari from the beginning. "Suppose you get your little... Frankenstein there stabilized, then what? How is a soulless doll supposed to control an Evangelion?"

"The development in the field of artificial souls is still very rudimentary, but I am sure that the colleagues from the Golghata base will be able to make use of the finished results... But apart from that, we have a soul at our disposal that could be extremely useful in this context..."

"You don't mean..."

"As I said before, what could fit better than something from the same source?"

"Ikari, this is madness. You are messing with things that are far beyond your control... You want to make a godlike being into your personal remote control? Not just as a pilot, but as a medium? What if you fail to control your creature?! It will destroy you..."

But Ikari hadn't thought of that from the beginning. The idea that moved him to do this had been different from the beginning - if this creature was created from Yui's DNA, and he was the one who had done its creation, if it was going to be in some way a product of both of them... then what did that make it?

"The old men will never tolerate this!"

"The old men depend on pilots as much as we do... Do you remember this passage from the scrolls? The one that never made sense? The woman who takes the robe of the goddess, and the goddess who takes the robe of the woman? I think I know what it means now."

(In the ancient tales, it was said that the Chamber of Guf is the place where the souls that the Creators provided are eternally waiting for the time to come to earth and fulfill their destiny - but their number, it was said, is limited, and will one day come to an end. And when the first soulless child is born, well, that is when the end times have begun and the apocalypse is imminent...

Whatever the exact relationship between the legend and the real situation, it was and remained a sad fact that the birth rate continued to fall year after year after the Second Impact, and that a soulles child had been born down in Terminal Dogma among the complexes of GEHIRN. A little girl whose only purpose in life was to herald the end of the world, and she too was doomed from the beginning of her existence to become an instrument of fate and destiny...)

From that point on, Fuyutsuki could no longer claim that he was simply associating with a few shady characters in order to save the world - no, the sad reality was that saving the world was probably no longer on the menu. What could he do on his own?

All he had left was to promote the lesser of two evils and hope that his favorite student could do a little more than he could from where she was now.

To what extent did she know what was going on in the outside world? To what extent had she guessed, to what extent had she accepted it?

Oh, if only she could have seen this, this mess would have broken her heart!

Ikari took several samples from his half-decayed construct, labeled it '00' and put it in storage for posterity - but from the cells he took, not all of which contained the same combination of angel and human, he bred more creatures. The DNA of his wife became the basic material, simply because the original sample had resulted from her activation experiment.

Out of 1004 emrbyons cloned from as many different cells of the construct, only 4 developed human faces - In the others, the number of eyes had been as much a game of dice as in the Evangelions, probably because of the similar source, and the rate of stunted or terribly misshapen failures was even greater - The vast majority died of their own accord, but even if they not, that didn't always mean much - Something with fifteen arms no longer deserved to be called human.

But the internal homogeneity of the clones produced in this way helped, so that at least these four halfway acceptable specimens were produced. The best sequences from each of these four were then combined to form an ideal genome, 44% of which later received targeted biotechnological modifications of varying scope before the next attempt was made to assemble a reasonably viable organism - human technology was limited after all, and man and angel seemed doomed to destroy each other even on a molecular biological level, so that the being that Ikari finally assembled in this laboratory would still decompose by itself unless numerous measures were taken to maintain its unnatural existence - but these were within the realm of possibility.

Despite all the setbacks, Ikari had already finished and prepared the final version of his Impact Trigger when he committee proposed the use of recombinant organisms as pilots to the committee a few months after the experiment, and thus they had no choice but to agree.

Soon, the first completed homunculus was ready, and went into mass production shortly thereafter - they kept a few dozen back at heartquarters, on the one hand as spare parts for what was soon classified as the"First Child". Years later, when her existence could no longer be kept secret because of her pilot training, she would be introduced to the rest of GEHIRN as the child of some acquaintance, Golgotha base, however, practically produced them on assembly lines, where the facilities looked like a cross between an industrial butcher's shop and a sex doll factory, and made one realize anew how uncanny the human form could be when it appeared in the wrong "context", and how little different from base animals in the layout of fat bone and sinew.

The official name for Ikari's practical invention was "Ayanami-Type Artificial Humanoid Evangelion Multi-Purpose Control Interface Instance Body", or, supposedly in honor of the late Director of Complex Five (whose last publication was actually something like a Y.U.I.-effect, and really squeezed the words to come up with that acronym, but had also publicated some papers that played a part on giving Ikari his idea, not that he knew what else that research of hers had been used for), simply abbreviated as the "Ayanami Series," which told you about that just as little as a euphemism like "collateral damage" could prepare you to see your home being set ablaze by war. Words like "artificial" and "humanoid" were used in many things Evangelion-related, no one who had read any reports or papers on the subject but hadn't been privy to the sight of them would think of an "Ayanami type" as something resembling a little girl, and not something more like a giant robot-like, like some kind of war machine - but wasn't it always actually the people who fired the war machines and those who commanded them who actually fought the wars?

In this respect, these mass-produced androids represented an archetypal figure in the literature of horror, and at the same time the ideal of a perfect war machine: A super-soldier, a construct enhanced with mystical or scientific in its fighting potential, deprived of its humanity, insensitive, absolutely obedient, and completely interchangeable, with an almost endless stock of spare parts, spare bodies, a repugnant crime against nature that did not even have a will to live, completely empty except for a distant spark of something that had never belonged in a human form to begin with, all rolled into a single nightmare that should never have existed.

One might think so.

When the finished result lay on this piece furniture, which could have been called a "bed" or a "workbench" according to one's taste, lost under a weave of cables that covered her hitherto naked, pale little body, she looked more pathetic than nightmarish, not much different from a normal little girl who might as well just be taking a nap.

Since she was the first specimen, her creation had been continuous, something had been added to her body as well as to her mental routines little by little, and so there was probably no definite moment or day of "birth", at some point ghosts of consciousness appeared, memory, bizarrely, somewhat before that, a kind of self-image or concept of her own existence or identity only much, much later, and somewhere in between all that Ikari fed the soul into the mix, once it was apparent that the vessel produced sufficient brainwaves, which could be analyzed, monitored and interpreted - after he had started with nothing more than a head and a spine, the least flawed of the many he he had grown, and now he could finally call his construct complete, and, as mentioned before, had clones made of it in heaps, after this being under the many cables opened its eyes and seemed to actually look at Ikari, thus proving that these vessels were indeed compatible with the inserted soul.

"Now we just have to program her," Ikari said to Fuyutsuki, who had also been there for the big day on which the great work was completed.

But while the latter kept his distance, Ikari himself leaned forward to take a closer look at his creation - Yes, he, the creator of this dubious creature, saw the whole thing a little bit differently than one might have thought - This little red dress, which he had bought a little hastily years ago for a completely different child, would probably see some use after all.

He leaned forward and carefully lifted the now finished homunculus out of the network of cables to which the girl, still a tabula rasa, did not really react.

‚Programming' he said... Fuyutsuki didn't even bother to shudder anymore.

Ghastly as it sounded, it was a necessity - They didn't really have the time to teach her to speak, walk, and the like at normal speed in the old-fashioned way, and ultimately, a baby or toddler with a projectable AT-Field would simply not be practicable – Not when your typical two-year-old temper tantrum might result in an unscheduled Third Impact; And how would you get a baby to swallow the necessary medications and supplements in a reliable fashion? And if you were left with a baby everytime the physical components would need replacing, her 'replacement' would be much too time-consuming, and she would simply be unsuitable as a weapon.

"We'll need a name in order to comission the Marduk Designation... Are you thinking of "Kagura," after Ayanami-kun, or do you want to name her after Yui-kun?"

Ikari shook his head without really turning to Fuyutsuki. "No, none of that."

He had now disconnected his creature from all the cables, probably to carry her to where this 'programming' was to take place.

"Rei." Proclaimed Ikari, firm in his resolve. "Her name is Ayanami Rei."

Fuyutsuki did not like the thin smile that stuck to his lips for a short moment afterwards. It was perhaps the first time since the day of the tragedy that the eternal gloom in his gaze broke, and most of it was probably anticipation and triumph, the certainty that the realization of his daring plan had just gotten a good deal closer, but there was also a glimmer of something else...

(Had he smiled like this when his own son was born?

No, he had not.

It was not, as one might have thought at first, because he was simply not moved or interested in it, but rather because he was too busy at that moment to feel a whole whirlpool of other things, which would have hopelessly drowned out the joy, even if it had been there – For Ikari Gendo, June 6, 2001 had been a day of which he was quite glad to know it was finally over.

It was a beautiful irony: A couple who were involved in bringing about Second Impact more than anyone else almost became one of its victims - Knowing that it was imminent, they and the others had made their preparations and rich as they were, few of the conspirators had to do without any comforts - Most of them were already sitting waiting in some of the most luxurious underground bunkers in world history, while the ordinary people on the street were deprived of everything - conquest, war, famine, and at last, death and the plague - all riders of the Apocalypse raged out there to their hearts desire and trampled everything under the hooves of their hellish steeds, everything which humans had built up in over 10000 years civilization, despoiled in less than nine months time.

When this child was conceived, ten years after the end of the cold war, humanity was in the midst of its most brilliant bloom, and when this child finally saw the light of the world, not much of it was left. Had he entered this world exactly one year earlier, he would have been a summer child, always wanted and eagerly awaited, and, according to various local superstitions, predestined for a happy life, but the 21st century would hardly have been a time time to be happy. And that whole thing about summer children was hopeless nonsense anyeways, this beginning existence was already hopelessly botched when his parents were still feeling orgasm – their two names alone would have made it impossible from the beginning that this child would have a normal, happy life.

No matter how tangled his paths might have been, sooner or later all would have led into the hollowed body cavities of EVA 01, no matter how bright the sun shone on the day of his birth.

The sun's rays were the closest thing to an obstacle for the Ikaris, because they had their first and only son on June 6, 2001, exactly 16 minutes past 6 in the morning under a bloody sunrise - and thus just under one and a half weeks before their expected due date. They were on their way home, and had no intention of leaving their domicile and thus the proximity of quickly available medical care until the child was born. On June 6th they were supposed to have arrived there already, but one day before they would have reached this safe haven, they were stopped - they had dawdled around, had stayed in the mountains, and the cliffs and valleys had irritated Yui's romantic vein in passing, and her husband could not refuse her even the smallest wish - months after the catastrophe, the green had begun to spring up again, The reconstruction would have to destroy these secret little gardens before it could create something new - So you both belonged to the tiny circle of people who would see and remember this sight.

They both found something paradisiacal in this sight, albeit in very different ways - the scientist appreciated the bursting forth of new life, her husband the return of part of the world to a kind of primordial state, but they agreed to disagree, and instead wondered what their son would think of it if they were to tell him about it one day - not that it ever came to that.

They left the overgrown ruins still in the mist of the morning, but then they stopped, hurried around without seeing any reason to return quickly to their vehicle, but strolled through the landscape in meanders, as was customary for lovers in the sun - in the end they were surprised by the contractions in the midday sun, at the edge of an overgrown sunflower field, where some of the plants had been waiting long after their creators had left them, now that winter no longer imposed any restrictions on how long they were free to sprout - the whole thing had an almost poetic quality, the sunflowers, the small traces of various wild plants around the one field and beyond it, poppies, cornflowers, buttercups and dandelions, and the small, not even exactly delimited, cobblestone path, next to which a few wild apple trees provided shade, and the rays of the merciless sun, which made all the colors seem almost unreal in intensity - This whole day presented itself in an aura of vivid madness, the air full of sweetness and depressed by dizzying heat, what one could have thought to be an idyllic scene, is transformed into something out of a particularly artistic, but no less tragic-ironic story with just one sentence: "Gendo, I think the baby is coming..." . It could have come from a work by Max Frisch, perhaps Goethe or Fontane, a beauty whose deeper purpose was to expose a defect or a limitation of human nature - Truly, it could hardly have been another day.

Ikari still remembered exactly how his wife had looked that day, her hair much longer than when she had met him or at her supposed death, in waves down to her shoulders, and she wore a wide spaghetti strap dress in the color of wisteria, similar to lavender, but distinctly different, as if a layer of dust had been wiped off of it.

In between the contractions she had tried again and again to assure him that it would be all right, that having children was not a disease after all – after all, humanity had somehow sucessfully reproduced itself to this day. But that she had to interrupt her explanation from time to time for a chilling cry of pain, during which she had no choice but to hold on to her husband, who of course did his best to support her; At least in his ears, she didn't sound very convincing - To mention that they were barely making headway a waste of a sentence, the oxygen could have been used better, or at least it didn't happen fast enough for Ikari - The expectant father didn't stand the spectacle very long, and quickly decided to carry his wife, big belly and all, and even if the difference in physique helped, carrying an adult woman over long distances turned out to be a difficult matter after all, and his muscles and bones probably only took part in it relatively unprotestingly because he was in such an extremely exceptional situation, or at least in a situation that he himself perceived as such, and he was forced to hold her in both arms because he could hardly throw her over his shoulder in her present gravid state - Yui was still protesting at first, insisting that she could certainly walk, and that he would only end up giving himself a hernia, but he wouldn't listen, and she finally let him do it, she knew him well enough to realize that despite the controlled, determined appearance he presented to her, he must have been absolutely panicked inside - he had his sensitivities, this man, however much the bitter experiences of his past had forced him to harden and become blunted in the end. It would not be wrong to say that he appeared so hard and corrupt precisely because the softer layers of himself simply could not withstand the rigors of human existence, withered and etched away like dead flesh over bones, but she alone knew this other side of him, she alone took it upon herself to give him the things that had been missing for so long, to take care of parts of him that he had long forgotten were even there.

This did not mean that she ever suceeded in infecting him with any of her optimism - he remained an incorrigible pessimist, and that was reflected also in the first thoughts with which he reacted to Yuis announcement of the approaching birth: Which was the realization that she might not survive it out here in the wilderness. One saw it often enough in bad movies or old tales from history, during which women died in childbirth, sometimes along with the child. Although this was largely a thing of the past thanks to modern technology, modern technology was not available here, not in any of the four cardinal directions; they were practically out in the open. Of course, they had both read sufficient related literature to prepare themselves, her in relaxed, joyful anticipation, himself in a cool, planned zeal, which grew largely from fears about his own inadequacy, with a pen in his hand and a pile of paper next to it, on which he delusionally recorded all possible and impossible preparations, all factors to be planned for and to be considered, as if he were a comic book villain who wanted to take over the world domination by a complicated three-phase plan - He had clung in his cluelessness to the strategies that he knew - This universe was random in its nature from its physical quantum foundations up, but if one prepared for all possible end results, one did not have stand helpless, helpless without knowing what to do - This is how he had survived the world until now, and this is how he would continue to survive it - The wheels of his mind began to tick: He knew where they had left their car, and he could remember that not too long before they had gotten off for their little detour, they had passed a village that was still half in ruins, but nonetheless inhabited, where the rubble had been swept aside at least as far as it was feasible.

If he could get Yui there, if he could only make it to this settlement, they had a chance - There had to be a doctor there for sure, with some luck even medical equipment, without luck at least one old woman who had some rough idea about childbirth.

So he hurried through the landscape with his wife in his arms, sweating beneath the central star that glimmered down on them from its zenith, a single point of hurried movement in the midst of the golden day, and the plants that were slowly and pleasurably swaying in the wind, a shadow that fell out of the rhythm of the surroundings, bursting with exertion, but pushing himself forward, just slowly enough to keep the risk of losing his balance along with his wife and child negligible - If this were a movie, there would have been a scene change by now at the latest, but Ikari was forced to live through every minute of this spectacle, every single one that might cost his wife dearly, without their car and the unkempt run-down country road where they had parked it finally coming into view, not the black sedan which the director of GEHIRN only acquired during his time as a widower, but something much more suitable for the terrain that they had acquired in preparation for the Second Impact, in lilac, mainly because this was one of Yui's favorite colors.

When he finally put his wife on the back seat (They had bought a child seat a long time ago, but they didn't take it with them - great! That would make the further transport of his wife and child yet more difficult), he first had to sit down, yes, he almost collapsed on the spot and had to pause to catch his breath as much as he tried to force himself to get up again immediately.

Although his wife assured him that only very few babies were born a mere three-quarters of an hour after the onset of the first contractions, and certainly not during a first-time birth, he swung himself in the driver's seat, after he had strapped at least one safety belt over them as fast as the limitations of his human body allowed it, and drove off, not as one might have thought, at top speed, but rather cautiously, following the traffic rules, mastering speed output and safety mathematically balanced against each other - essentially it was a multidimensional extreme value problem, maximizing both as far as possible. It was two o'clock when they reached the settlement, which was a bit further away than Ikari had remembered, and even though Yui had only let herself be carried out of consideration for her husband's nerves, she was in dire need of it by the time he carried her out of the car, especially since the contractions had become much more regular... But here the full extent of the irony was revealed to them: This small town had never had a hospital, but there had been a doctor's office - But the building had collapsed on the day of the Second Impact and buried the family doctor with all the nurses, his unfortunate secretary and a dozen or so waiting patients; The best Ikari could find in this unfortunate hamlet was a woman who had already had five children of her own and a pimply teenager who had done community service in a doctor's office.

No sterile instruments, no devices to monitor fetal heart sounds, no painkillers, not even hot water or delivery forceps!

What a nightmare!

As he did not trust any of the half-timbered buildings in the center of the demolished village, nor any of the worn, strange-smelling blankets that the people of this hamlet had to offer, he would have to make do with the back seat of their car and the silver insulation blanket from the small, dusty first-aid box, and whatever was in it.

But because both the space in the back of their car and the things that he could have helped both improvised obstetricians with were quite limited - the boy turned out to be surprisingly useless, but the experienced housewife all the more practical, so that she took over command and simply sent the young man to get lost after she had him fetch this and that, especially since he found the whole affair disgusting enough anyway - the father-to-be would have liked to follow him, at the latest when the sticky amniotic fluid poured over the seat and its sweetish odor began to flow in the car.

But he had long ago offered Yui to stay with her during the birth if she wanted him to, simply because it was something that was expected from devoted husbands, but what he had not known what he was getting into - he held her hand and she said that was enough for her, but he felt like he was just decoration here, he was squeezed in between the front seat and his wife, and did his best to concentrate on the top half of her, and not to take notice of all these strange biological processes that were going on further back - As the contractions gave her a few minutes of break between them at the beginning, Yui started a conversation with the other woman, who started to talk about her own children - Apparently the lady herself had once had a child in three-quarters of an hour, the fourth - But now the youngest of her children was already four and was currently being cared for by the older siblings.

The father of the pack hadn't survived Second Impact, the oldest brother had taken over the role of the man of the house, and Yui couldn't get enough of all the children's stories, couldn't wait to finally get to her own baby stories to tell, but then the waves came more regularly, and took away the air she needed to talk.

It was a long, painful birth, which dragged on like cheese - Would they have done a cesarian if a doctor had been there? Even the woman from the village could not say, it had never taken so long with her.

The golden noon melted into red evening, the embers of the evening went out into night, and the night went on endlessly, screams under the starry sky -

"And push!"

"AHHH!"

Even though the lady from the village went at it only according to her intuition, without any real technical aids from which she could have read the ideal times for breathing and pressing - Ikari had clung to his wife's hand just about the same as she had clung to his - Occasionally he changed his position slightly, because he couldn't feel his feet, but it didn't occur to him to leave her side.

Until now, it would have been his worst nightmare to get into a situation where some nurse would ask him which of the two to save, the woman or the child - but if there were to be any complication, she would probably die, it would have been a nice irony, a beautiful reckoning for all the bad karma and all the men who lost their wives and children in Second Impact, but karma would have to wait its turn here, because fate had other plans for both wife and child, even if these were not to be understood as mercy.

The first sounds of the new citizen of the earth finally came, just in time to greet the dawn, as mentioned shortly after six o'clock in the morning - at least they had a watch.

In the end it had been long, but not really dramatic, not really complicated, more his own fears than anything else, it was true what she had said, having children wasn't a disease, and until now people had also reproduced somehow, but for him it was definitely a traumatic memory, screams in the night, blood and amniotic fluid, slimy and biological things, his inability to do anything, and the knowledge that it was somehow him who had put her in that situation in the first place, and whatever the sun had been doing in the respective moments seared into his memory - And then, of course, came the big, much-praised moment when the lady from the village planted the child in his arms for the first time, just as tired as they both were, and despite all her helpfulness, was finally glad that all this would soon be over, muttering something about afterbirth, which was probably more addressed to Yui than to him, who cares that he was still standing here, he had been only decoration from the beginning, and he heard his wife speak, exhausted but beyond all measure blissfully happy: "Look, Gendo... It was a boy, just like I always said.", and then he held the bundle in his arms, the rest of the umbilical cord tied off with a clothespin, still full of blood and grease, shriveled, the small skull, which hardly had the dimensions of a grapefruit, still somewhat deformed, as it sometimes happened with newborns, perhaps remotely resembling the shape of the inner walls of the birth canal, who knows, in any case it was indeed a boy - the Ikaris never learned how their little son would have scored on one of those typical ten-point tests for newborns, in any case the child was ridiculously tiny, thrifty, but not stingly furbished with baby fat. Instead of announcing his arrival with a loud roar, he only gave a slight mewl, and if one would have wanted to estimate whether everything was being properly supplied with blood, he would have had to be washed thoroughly first, but essentially everything seemed to be fine; The pediatrician to whom they finally presented the child after they had returned home found nothing to complain about.

Ikari had feared until the very end that the brat would end up bearing a striking resemblance to Fuyutsuki, but no, this was clearly his, the resemblance was so obvious that you could see it even after the boy had just come out of his mother... but his reaction to that was not joy, but detached dismay - He had hoped from the innermost depths of himself that this child would not look like him, hence his insistence on a girl, if it were a girl, any similarities would be easier to overlook - The last thing he wanted was this child, Yui's child that she had wanted so much (and he saw it from the beginning as something he would just give her, something she wanted, for which he had just allowed her to use parts of himself that she didn't have, because he put everything of himself at her disposal, just out of principle - and not as something that really concerned himself, in which he himself was involved) would be stained by his corruption, would have his faults, his imperfections and inadequacies, and would have to go through the same suffering - There was almost a wave of absurd anger, like the one that sometimes came over you when you were overcome with feelings, 'Why couldn't you be different? Why did you have to be like me?' and somewhere the cold, unfeeling consideration, the "operating mode" that saw this as an experiment or a shady operation, was it worth it? Was this little pile of biology, which did not look like much, worth the pain that his wife had just gone through because of him? Her life had probably never even come close to being in danger, but in his personal perception, the reality of running with her in his arms down that dirt road, and kneeling practically uselessly squashed in the corner of that SUV, it felt like she almost died for it, and he knew, of course, that it was irrational, and tried to banish the laboratory and the ways of thinking that belong to it from here like all the other things that had no place here, but then he would have had to see everything that was here, the present, and he would have had to shake himself from this place, the smells in the air and what had happened here, and he could not afford it, to move even a millimeter, so he stayed still and held his arms as they had been when the woman put the child in there, because he knew that this had to be a correct position, this was a correct way to hold the child, and if he had left this exact position, he would not have known what to look for, whether he was holding the child properly or not, it looked so tiny and fragile, as if the slightest wrong move would mean that all this torturous journey had been for naught, and he just didn't know what to do, waiting in silence that someone would take pity on him and take the child away from there, and at the same time he was ashamed.

What was actually going on? At that time he had already killed people and challenged gods, disgust and ugliness had been his daily bread longer than he knew his wife, so why was an ordinary, biological process now suddenly enough to make all the blood disappear from his face? Maybe it was just confusing to see a woman he desired in the role of a mother, or that he still hadn't quite realized where his role should be in all this circus here.

"Um... Hello, Shinji," he said to the baby, feeling that he should probably say something, but not quite knowing what.

"I, um, I'm your father. Perhaps you recognize my voice."

He looked down on this dynamic pile of existence, which he had not yet fully registered as human, and his eyes asked, 'What am I to think of you? What am I to do with you?' and as it happens, there was this one truth about human children that had been revealed to humans only relatively recently: Once it was thought that a newborn had not much more inner life than a cabbage and would only acquire this life in the course of education, but today it was known that such a human was in fact born with a lot of inbuilt "software", the vast majority of which was designed to form a bond, and a "cute" consequence of this was that you could make a baby of any age cry just by looking at him icily for a while and not reacting to him sufficiently - A "feat" that Ikari accomplished before his child had reached the age of five minutes - No, at least in this respect there was nothing to worry about, this baby could definitely cry. And how! Such was the sound of healthy lungs.

Ikari attempted a hesitant "Don't... don't cry, Shinji..." but maybe the baby would have understood what his father meant if he'd underlined his words with some kind of gesture, maybe cradled the baby closer to himself or rocked him slightly, but he did not dare to make the slightest movement, continued to kneel there as if frozen, helplessly watching the screaming, until Yui, probably relieved of the afterbirth by now, spoke to him and instructed her to place the baby on her stomach so that she could look at him more closely and, above all, breastfeed it.

He didn't even realize that he had been the first of the two of them to come to hold the baby - Yui had quickly calmed her little son down again, her husband's only contribution was to help her get rid of her dress, which had been rolled up for hours, and also to get rid of her bra, and she lay there in her most original form, in the most original occupation of all life, and most of the beauty, the more the excitement faded away, the more clearly he felt the overwhelming tiredness as the result of staying up the entire night. But he had never once smiled at any time, and to rejoice in any form after the strains of the last hours, after he had seen what his beloved wife had had to go through would have been the last thing that could possibly have occurred to him. )

….

(1) "It lives! It LIIIIVES!" Fuyutsuki referred to Rei as "the product of his despair" in 23'. It's fun to speculate about why that is.

(2) Where there are two sixes, it's hard to resist the temptation to insert a third.

(3) tbc in 2.32: [The Maw of Saturn]. Which is of course famous for devouring his sons.