2.33: [Heir to the White Moon III: Rooster's feather]
Ich sprech zu dir
Und bitte dich
Ich hoffe doch, du erhörst mich
Denn der Mensch, den du erschufst
Kann eigentlich nur ein Fehler sein
Ich schau sie an
Sie machen nichts,
Fressen, saufen, stören mich,
Und denken noch dabei
Die Krone der Schöpfung zu sein
Lieber Gott,
Schmeiß doch Gehirn
Denn wir könn's gebrauchen hier
Und prügel es hinein
Benutze mich dafür
Ich hör ihnen zu
Nur Macht und Geld
Ich hoff doch bald die Schnauze hält
Jetzt töten sie sich selbst
Raketen fliegen über mir
Lieber Gott,
Ich fleh dich an
Dein neuer Sohn kommt irgendwann
Der uns zum Lichte führt
Benutze mich dafür
Lieber Gott,
Ich frage mich,
Der Mensch scheint mir so lächerlich
Und sie, sie denken nur,
Was geht das uns überhaupt an?
Lieber Gott,
Schmeiß doch Gehirn
Denn wir könn's gut brauchen hier
Und prügel es ihnen rein
Benutze mich!
Lieber Gott,
Ich fleh dich an
Dein neuer Sohn muss wieder rann,
Der uns zum Lichte führt
Benutze mich!
Lieber Gott,
Komm nun zu mir
Die neue Welt erschaffen wir
Den neuen Mensch dazu
Benutze mich dafür
-Welle:Erdball, ‚Lieber Gott'
[:]
I speak to you
And beg of you
I hope you will hear me
For the man you created
Can only be a mistake
I look at them
They do nothing,
Eat, drink, disturb me,
And still think
themselves to be the crown of creation
Dear God,
Throw down some brains
Because we could use it here
And beat it in
Use me for this
I listen to them
Only power and money
I hope they shut up soon
Now they kill themselves
Rockets flying above me
Dear God,
I beg you
Your new son will come one day
Who leads us to the light
Use me for this
Dear God,
I wonder,
Man seems so ridiculous to me
And they, they just think,
What does this concern us anyway?
Dear God,
Throw down some brains
Because we could use it well here
And beat it into them
Use me!
Dear God,
I beg you
Your new son must take care of this again
Who leads us to the light
Use me!
Dear God,
Come to me now
We create the new world
and a new humanity to go with it
Use me for this
…
"You can't be serious, Yui-chan!"
An enthusiastically thrown, emptied boba tea cup with a straw still in it hit the faceplate of EVA 01, bounced off it unimpressed and plunged into the coolant with a clearly audible 'splash!', where it probably sailed to the bottom of the cage, and sweeten up the day of the maintenance worker, who would have the dubious luck to stumble upon it with an unexpected surprise.
2005
NERV Headquarters
Cage of EVA 01, shortly after its preliminary completion
The originator of the loud words, and thus also of the improperly disposed-of drink cup, was currently standing on the catwalk over the Umbilical Bridge, right in front of the face of the humanoid fighting machine - After the activation experiment and the soon following end of all salvage attempts, the construction of the monstrous creation had nevertheless continued quite soon, no matter whether it had eaten its creator with skin and hair - There had not even been a discussion, so small was the role played by ethics in this institution. Whatever might have happened here last year, it was clear from the start that sooner or later this ominous god-machine would be used again - to abandon it because of some kind of security concerns was unthinkable; too much had been invested in it, especially in this test model, which was more than just a simple copy - Regardless of the fact that the activation experiment had claimed a human life, the construction on the gigantic meat colossus continued without further ado, steel pipes were driven into the meat and these armour plates were attached to it - "And look at that! Gendo-kun even had them painted in your favorite color, beautiful purple, just as you've loved it ever since preschool! I hope you are satisfied!"
This drastic expression of opinion, like the previously released projectile, came from a single, tall woman, and as one might have guessed, she did not seem pleased at all - her long brown hair fell heavily over her back tamed only by a single, clunky red barette, the shapes of her body could be guessed by a yellow-pink checkered dress held together by buttons at the front, over which an additional white labcoat hung down at the sides, and on her nose sat a pair of glasses with a red, minimalist frame that restricted the lenses only from above.
The resemblance to her daughter was probably obvious to those who knew her, the biggest difference being in the eye color and the noticeably more pronounced jaw of the mother: Dr. Makinami Murasaki.
Her daughter would have been similarly uninhibited in her opinions, but probably more relaxed - there were very few things in this world that would ever really surprise Makinami Mari Illustrious.
But even Dr. Makinami didn't take her anger quite so seriously, and would gladly interrupt her complaints for a deep sigh.
"'Sorry, Yui-chan, I didn't mean it that way. Anger is a natural stage of grief, and I do miss you, honestly, even if it doesn't always look that way..." Nevertheless, the scientist had quickly found her fire again: "...still, I would very much like to know what you were smoking when you came up with this plan! Because I would like to have some of that stuff, too!"
As expected, no answer came from the purple Evangelion.
But Dr. Makinami was not deterred by this and continued to say, "Honestly, Yui-chan. And you were always the sensible one of the two of us - even if I'm beginning to think that you were just better at looking sensible..."
And for the third time, Dr. Makinami sighed into the large, empty hall that formed the cage.
"...in any case, I am here because I wanted to pay you another visit before my own experiment. Judging by the results so far, my chances are not very good..." she admitted, smiling embarrassedly and scratching the back of her head, apparently having never considered it necessary to give up youthful madness by the age of 25.
"...that's why I I've been wondering, about you and how the world looks like for you now. You are in the body of a living god, so to speak, it's quite possible that you don't have the nerve for the business of us crawling mortals anymore... but you better be listening to me! You ought to have more than enough time for that these days... Seriously, isn't it boring to stand around in this cage day in and day out? I'll never stand it if my stupid experiment goes wrong... Though "going wrong" would imply that the desired result was not achieved. And you got yours, didn't you...? They said you were talking about some ‚bright future' to the last… This isn't funny, you know?
Yui, Yui, Yui, you two are lousy parents!
Lousy, lousy, lousy parents!
Look, I don't mean to interfere with your family life.
Just for your information: Your "passing away" seems to have inspired your dear husband for to go for the "Final Solution" after all, if you understand what I mean. No, no, he didn't join forces with the old men, don't worry! Whatever he is up to, it looks significantly different. But either way it bears only a theoretical resemblance to our original plan, as soon as I can estimate that. He doesn't want to carry it through to the end, so to speak... Oh, and old Akagi has a really disgusting grin on her face lately. Maybe you should think about filing for divorce - if Gendo-kun doesn't file it first.
You were really nasty to that poor devil, you know that?
Leaving him alone with a little kid like that...
What you have done is one thing, but that you haven't told him a word..."
Dr. Makinami shook his head. "I can very well imagine how he was racking his brains over his desk about what you might want from him and what you would do under the circumstances, but if you don't leave him any instructions, you shouldn't be surprised if he starts up something stupid. And if you thought that he would let Fuyutsuki-sensei bring him to his senses, you should have been blinder than you already were!
But no, you thought that he would be inspired by your heroic sacrifice and continue your project with fiery zeal, didn't you?
One can't blame you for having the infamous rose-colored glasses on your nose when it comes to your own husband, even you may not be completely immune to the power of love, but what you overestimated here is your own influence, Yui-chan.
You thought that you had shown him the way, no, you were certain that he would be okay on his own by now, that you had patched up his little heart completely...
Cute, Yui, really cute, but it wasn't like that... Didn't you learn anything from the story with Kagura-chan?"
If that dressdown had shown any results so far, they couldn't be seen through the Evangelion's facial armor - Dr. Makinami hoped that there was a sufficient blush of shame beneath the metal plates, even though she suspected that she probably hoped in vain.
She did not care.
"You were always the one who has mastered the "magic", the "voodoo" you conjured up all by yourself, and now he thinks he could only have it with you, whatever you showed him, and certainly not without you...
Remember how Kagura-chan used to say that you shouldn't have procreated? She rather imagined that your blissful creatures would surpass you in terms of super brainpower and ambition and would have seized world domination before they were out of diapers...
Well, I'm more worried about what a combination of your stubbornness and Gendo-kun's complexes might do, especially with this thing!"
Makinami made a sweeping gesture toward the Evangelion.
"Bright future,my butt... you think this job will be a privilege? It'll be a war, Yui. Wars are not glorious, take a look at recent history - The last few times we confused wars with glory, we burned up many of the already scarce resources after Second Impact, and the time before last, it ended with a few atomic bombs in our neighborhood... Yui, Yui, Yui... Of course, of course, you didn't see it that way, you probably thought you'd rather give up your own child than take someone else's child to prove responsibility for the thing you built. You wanted to take this 'heavy burden' upon yourself, even if you have to part from your beloved family, and you think that you are much more useful to your sweet baby in there, where you can protect him from the big, bad angels and so on and so on, et cetera, et cetera, all very noble...
Only that you missed something very important!
You know what? I really don't want to interfere in your child rearing, but you and Gendo-kun really need to talk."
She pointed her index finger unabashedly at the purple Evangelion.
"Seems as if he wants to decide and thread everything himself, and leave your junior completely in the dark. If I were a mean person, you could even call it manipulation...
But there are some things you as parents should decide for yourself. And don't act so clueless!"
Dr. Makinami was probably the only one who knew what exactly constituted a ‚clueless act' for EVA 01.
"Really, Yui. ‚Do you want to turn the population of the planet into orange juice' is not something you should be asking your Junior before he's old enough to vote or get a credit card. Yes, of course, you hope that he will agree with you on everything, and want the same thing as you do, after all he is your son... Except, Yui, do the math! The boy will be in the middle of puberty when the day of prophecy comes... What child at that age really emulates his parents?
You probably haven't seen any teenagers since your sister turned twenty! Of course, the kid will have a totally life-affirming attitude, sure, I mean, as far as he knows, his mother is dead and his old man is a hopeless workaholic... You've arranged everything, sure, everything should be perfect - I get it, you've made arrangements, so you think that everything will be okay, and that you can make this "noble sacrifice" confidently, so that everything will be okay... but it won't, because you won't be there, got it? There's only so much you can control from in there.
Don't you always say that the role of a wife and mother is always underestimated in its importance?
And anyway! Yui, Yui, how is your junior supposed to make a mature, informed decision when none of you jerks think it's necessary to tell him anything!"
Dr. Makinami took off her glasses so that she could do a proper facepalm.
"But, what the heck, that's, as I said, a matter between you and Gendo-kun... I probably shouldn't open my mouth so wide, considering that my own experiment is scheduled for the day after tomorrow... It's not as if there are guidebooks for it, "conspiracies and raising children" or, "Five Important Tips for Conspiratorial Parents" ...the thought of Clark alone with Mari makes my skin crawl, but at least I had the time to make preparations... which you would have had as well, I would like to point out. But what choice do I have? This stone has long been set in moion, and if I quit now, I'll probably just get shot for knowing to much – Gendo-kun might even do it himself, since I'm a friend of the family..."
She sighed. "...I guess I'm more useful to all factions in a metal thing like this... If I'm honest, I'm even a little bit curious about it... Nevertheless. This is the plan that you forged and initiated without asking us. Not me, not Fuyutsuki-sensei, not Genko-kun, and certainly not poor Kyoko-san. But if Í learned anything from watching that debacle, it would be that the absorption would be more pleasant for all concerned if I let go voluntarily... Kind of morbid when you think about it... I would have liked to make this decision myself."
The purple Evangelion didn't look very penitent - slowly even Makinami couldn't escape the feeling that she might as well talk to herself.
She stopped gesturing and put her hands in the pockets of her white coat.
"...Anyway... you will have a lot of time to think now, from today until the big day, so I wanted to tell you something, just so you can plan for it. I'm pursuing a different kind of "conspirator parenting"... uh, parenting approach than you..."
Dr. Makinami took a deep breath - if her friend were still standing in front of her in her original shell, she would instinctively prepare herself for a thunderstorm.
"Mari-chan knows everything."
She could have sworn that the biomechanical fighting machine was staring at her. Or at least she hoped so. If Yui wouldn't lower herself to that (which was understandable, I admit - after all, the slightest unplanned movement of the gigantic cyborg would set off all the alarm bells. ), Makinami had to contribute the reactions herself. She knew her old friend well enough to be able to estimate how she would have reacted and then, to her own amusement, hope the opposite would happen.
"That is, she will know everything. I have left her notes and my will says she should get them when she is about old enough to understand them - or at least around the time she would probably be recruited, if I judge all this correctly. I will leave her everything I have, everything I know that could be useful to her. What she will do with it, I can't tell you either - I'll leave that to Mari, without interfering with her life any further..."
On her lips there was a smile that was slightly challenging around the corners of her mouth, but also had a certain natural, yet profound wisdom, not unlike her daughter's.
"If I've put a damper on your plans with this, I'm sorry, but what can I say... You raise your son as you see fit, and I'll do the same for my young lady... I want her to know. Because he who knows nothing can understand nothing.
Well, Yui-chan... I'll see you on the day of the prophecy... Take care. And good luck with the childrearing; I'm afraid you'll need it."
A final thin smile was exchanged, then Makinami turned on her heel and set off without further ado to leave this place for the last time, leaving the purple Evangelion in darkness for a long, long time, along with the soul that resided within.
…
A south wall, a large window with many, white frames, rectangular, above it arched with spoke-like frames, from the ceiling to the floor - long, white curtains, and behind them, endless, wide heath landscape under the sun, silvery pale green marbled with extensive patches of violet, almost unreal and psychedelic-looking, if one concentrated on the whole and the colors, and not on the individual plants and their complex little flowers - The country was flat, and the view was therefore wide, as far as the horizon, a somewhat picturesque image, garnished here and there with pines or junipers, whose needles fitted well into the silvery pale green of the general color palette.
And in front of the window, on heavy, dark wooden planks, two gray heads that could hardly have belonged to more different men.
Spring 2014
Germany, Schleswig-Holstein, near the Baltic Sea coast
2. private residence of the Chairman of the
Human Instrumentality Project
One of them, the owner of this dwelling, was incredibly old, and had probably already spent more time in this world than he had been granted by the clockwork of fate - the lines of time cut deeply and clearly into his face, more clearly still, where flesh met metal and plastic - his companion, on the other hand, was just about to reach his prime, and only recently had he been mature enough to be dignified with the words "young man", fresh and new as the morning, and he would probably always remain so.
But if the old man had been asked which of the two of them had spent the longer time in this world, he would refer to the silver child, behind whose paper-thin marble skin the soul of a living god shone, and his light shone out through the cracks and edges of this imperfect figure, marking him as something else, as the cock's feather on his hat marked the transformed devil, no matter in what form he might hatch, which in any case was only a temporary makeshift, no different from the aids with which the chairman preserved his own flesh, long after he had renounced all flesh - that was the reason why so many undertakings of mankind had failed, the spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak and possessed by primeval greed.
But enough of that; "No more!"The gods had proclaimed, and Lorenz was here to carry out their will, as their representative – It was for this purpose that he had brought forth that creature, which at present stayed at his side and supported its bright fingers on the windowsill - He saw primarily the being, the alien, and felt himself exalted above those whose recognition stopped at the youthful cover of his nature, but in retrospect one could doubt this conviction - If Lorenz had ever been able to realize this for himself, he would not follow this organization and these ideologies, but the drawers of later conclusions would imply in the coming times that the moment he simply dismissed the boy, he overlooked something very important which might well thwart his calculations, and, if Fortune was inclined, would do so.
But that was in the future, when out of its paths trees of meaning had grown and all its branches and twigs blossomed, every flower a life, a destiny that had been influenced by its deeds and decisions, every fruit a lasting consequence that would outlive the flower from which it had sprung, and bending the branches of the tree with its weight, magnificently presented for the inhabitants of the future to harvest.
Now there was only the entirely green, sour present without flower or fruit, nothing more than an ancient man and an adolescent boy, no older than the newborn millennium, standing in front of a large panoramic window, and as different as their earthly figures were, so too was what they saw beyond this pane of glass and its reflection on their features - serious austerity in one corner of the ring, a relaxed, open smile in the other.
If one of them had asked "What do you see?" a long conversation, marked by contrasting poles, could have taken place, in which no tree would not have been lit from both sides and no shade of color would have been named with the same word, and because the chairman, however much he tried to stand up for humility and letting go of the self, had a weakness for the sound of his own voice that should not be underestimated, thoroughly denied, not freed from hypocrisy, he nevertheless did just that.
Tabris, who had become quite familiar with this landscape over the years, perhaps more so than with any other, if you don't count the inside of Complex Five, didn't think at all that Lorenz could mean the landscape itself in its physical simplicity - all sorts of exchanges that they could have had about it had taken place in the past, and he was able to show respect and care in perception, understanding and communication despite all his efforts, could not recall any pretext that could justify a renewed discussion of this topic - Nor would it ever occur to Keel Lorenz, who knew Tabris, to suspect anything beyond this pane of glass that would have been worth his time - he stood here only because he saw the child, who despite the difference in her apparent age was described more appropriately as his potential accomplice than by the word "protégé", which would not even be appropriate here in an ironically perverted understanding.
The partially metaphorical nature of the question was thus recognized without delay-even if their philosophies said very different things, they spoke purely in terms of expression on the same wavelength, simply because the old man and his ilk were one of the sources, along with the scientists, from which he took his words before grouping them according to his own will, and the truth was that the words of the conspirators, regardless of what they said with them, had more to say to his personal nature than those of the scientists - He was not a conspirator or a cultist, but in his heart the silver boy was more a philosopher than he was a scientist, even if he was well aware of the overlaps and did not have the arrogance, to misjudge them - As an ideal science, mathematics, for example, as unintuitive as it might seem to a layman, was the closest relative of philosophy - Certainly, when he thought of these connections, he thought of Miyazawa, but in the end, despite his deliberate, conscious, chosen participation in his surroundings, he resembled the wise men from the East in certain respects, on which everything rolled off like raindrops on lotus leaves, and she, with everything for which she stood, was one of those drops which he only did not leave behind him unchanged, as it had would correspond to his nature, because he wanted it so, chose it so, and could choose differently at any time, if he wished it differently, freely according to his discretion.
By nature, as an angel of free will, he was first and foremost free and open; this first, short word did not quite do justice to the evergreen freshness of the implications.
The angels had never left their Garden of Eden, which meant that on the one hand they were still rigidly subject to the will of the Creators, but also that the fruit of life offered them remedies for many of life's fragilities and shortcomings. But he alone was not even bound by this, he alone could decide whether he should follow the call of his nature or not, it was up to him alone to decide, so to speak, whether the existence of the angels was right or not - in this respect he was to the angels what the Chosen One would be to men if none of them succeeded first in seizing the crown of creation, another fiber in the red thread that inevitably bound their paths together.
The one who would drag him down into the realms of human vulnerability, dismay and mortality had yet to come -
(Long after your death I still felt your thoughts being washed into mine; long before we met, we had the same dreams).
Until then, however, he was essentially free to do what he liked-he could have walked out of SEELE's facilities at any time and need not have paid them any more attention than he felt like granting them. Until then, he remained, as the philosopher Epicurus had imagined the gods (for at the present state of science it was thought thatonly his students who renounced them completely, and wrote the famous quotation), untouched and joyful, considering mortals at most for personal amusement, but only very limited interested in their pleas and sufferings - That, at least, was the idea Keel Lorenz had of him when he heard the bright, light sound of his answer, which for him could only be equated with naivety: "...The world."
Tabris had considered it for quite a while, but it still seemed infinitely simple to Lorenz - But he had already become accustomed to this facet of the angelic child far enough to understand it to a certain extent as having been fathomed, understood and afoundation of his superiority, so that his following words, a hollow repetition, did not hide the fact that he felt he knew better here, without having had enough passion to express this fact in particular: "The world then?
He was sure of his own cause. "To call it simply "world" shows the lack of a better word - If we were to mean the universe, or the galaxy, or another world, Mars or Venus, our words would be more precise, but it is our own existence that makes our words stumble...".
"What would you suggest we call it, Mr. Chairman," the boy asked, bright and clear, as if he couldn't think of the answer, or at least its approximate direction. Lorenz was sure he could, and this knowledge, gave his semblance o naively spoken words an almost sparkling provocative aftertaste to any complex little part of a wine bouquet, or a flavored ingredient in a cocktail.
"A hive." replied the chairman, deliberately shutting down the variety of meaning and interpretation in the boy's radiant voice. The unspoken implication, but all the more emphasized by the necessity of adding it on one's own, was of course the prefix "wretched" to "hive", even if, at least in Lorenz' opinion, there was hardly any need to say this separately before Tabris - who, after all, had to know this better than any other entity.
But regardless of what he should or should not know, he asked, light-heartedly, as if walking on trampolines: "...Don't you like the other Lillim?
A question that the silver youth repeated from time to time.
SEELE 01 would have found this almost amusing, if amusement had been present in the catalog of his reactions.
"Have you ever really looked at them, Tabris?"
If laughter were not something that the old leader of SEELE did not do on principle, the irony of what this young silver-haired god had just said would have been enough to make him do it.
"I never tire of looking at them, Mr. Chairman."
"That is because you know nothing about them, Tabris, because they are as foreign to you as temptation is to the Savior... It is understandable that you find it fascinating, like a writer thinks of murder, but it does not take long for a human being who is a human being to see people, to expose them as destructive, absurd creatures...
That we humans can recognize ourselves in the mirror as the monsters that we are, is perhaps our greatest curse..."
"But if it were not for this curse..." the angel formed his bold, ponderously challenging verbal enigma "...could you then devise a plan, a project to escape your limitations?
The brat was good, the brat was really good.
If he were really the son of Man whose appearance he badly imitated, Lorenz would remark that hell had undoubtedly been created for those who asked such questions, but since he was well aware of what he was talking to, he lacked the authority to do so.
Nevertheless, he did not see in this a counter-proof to his theses, but rather a test.
"Tabris, Tabris... To return to your question, and to the one you asked when you first arrived here... You asked me why this residence is on the outside, and not in the hollow hives where other people gather... The truth is that I am tired of seeing their ways... and why shouldn't I be?
Greed dominates them, and selfishness, the only content of their existence is to eat, drink, and mate, consciously ignoring everything else or just declaring themselves extensions of their ego. The ego, the individual and the fixation with it, are after all the true origin of all vices, of all sin, and of all greed, this sick infatuation with something as transitory, as unsteady as the self, is after all the true cause of all injustice, pride the scaffold of all civilizations! If we are proud, if we are interested in weaving our own taste into the melodies, then fate cannot weave and play upon and play as it does upon good instruments, and thus we disturb the the higher, the transcendent, the part of the melody that sounds the same on organ, piano and violin, and would be indistinguishable even on the instruments of past and future, because our self-infatuation with our own sound, our unwillingness to let the story we want to tell stand on its own, nips it in the bud - A song with a name in it can only be sung by one person and cannot persist beyond that person, and what cannot persist has had no meaning from the beginning...
The future, then, the only hope for humanity can only consist in the merciless eradication of this "self", the grinding up of all pride, that gift of Lucifer, in which man becomes aware of his wretchedness, repents, and renounces all his own desires and longings, so that he can receive the divine will and become a part of the greater whole, after he has recognized all 108 temptations that keep him away from Nirvana, and realizes that life is suffering, and suffering can only be found in the end of life - there is truly little more wretched than human life...
Even the primitive beings are preferable, the ones those stubborn fools dismiss as animals and plants... as limited as their existences must be - and even that certainly much less than most of these simpletons want to admit - at least they still exist as they should exist, as it is in their nature to exist, exactly as the creators have determined for them, all equal, all following the same instincts, all joining the same round dance of evolution...
People are different. People are in love with their own pride; hypnotized, they pick the flowers at the precipice, and then wonder why they tumble down the slope like lemmings!
They are impudent and without humility, and Ikari Gendo, that is the worst of all, the boldest and most careless! The flower at the precipice!"
Tabris had the good breeding to let the bitter old man speak, in part because the name of this one man had been mentioned, who to a certain extent was his very own, dark counterpart - Being able to restrain his burning interest did not mean that he did not gratefully absorb every drop of information - The Flower on the precipice?
He would have to work out what he thought of that after careful consideration, and perhaps one day he would recite it to Lorenz, Miyazawa, or some other soul inclined to listen, perhaps the one he had been looking for for so long, but for the moment he had another, no less apt answer ready to try out.
"Have you never even tried?"
"What do you mean, Tabris?"
"This life, I mean. The life of Lillim, the life in this world... You must have been born into this conspiracy, right? How else could they have risen to the presidency of these rigidity-addicted circles? Have you never even given this world a chance...?"
The difference between Ikari and Lorenz, at least one of the differences, was that the former would smile the thinnest of smiles and the latter would not. He remained thoroughly strict as he gave his answer.
"It is true that I was born into these circles... but in my youth I admittedly thought little of them..."
"The fact that you are able to recognize the mistakes of your youth only means that you have recognized yourself since then and yet have developed from there..."
Lorenz could only deny this to an extent, so he continued right there: "I have been living for a long, long time now, and have seen a lot during this time, Tabris... Enough to recognize the senselessness of this existence... As I said, it is true that I was born into this world, but at first I could find very little to do with it – my young mind deemed the great work too vague and too abstract, and so I decided in my youthful folly to examine the world as it was, and to ignore the warnings of the scrolls... I roamed about for quite some time, eating, sleeping and mating - A considerable part of my wealth, as meaningless as the use of this word must seem to you in this respect, I inherited, and a large part of it I invested in this so-called "life"; but not for a moment could I deny that between harlots and speculative trade I was missing something... The truth, the one truth behind all truth. And, as I was instructed to do by wiser, older souls, I finally returned to the root of my origin and submitted myself to the old prophecies, just as if there had never been any other way. A short wandering off the path made me realize that they were right.
Were you of all people subject to the deception that I didn't know what I was talking about? Oh no, I have seen this world, right down to the lowest cracks of those wretched hives which they call their cities, and I have grown tired of seeing it - hope that you do not have to spend long enough in this pigsty to tire of this sight."
Tiredness was beneath him, the suggestion of the possibility a challenge in pedantic wrapping, his response to it, a crack of a grin, behind which the white of his teeth peeped through like the silver of moonlight between the old boards of a wooden hut in the field.
"With every folly that we think to be new knowledge, we remove ourselves further from the primordial state of our nature, clinging to the very fragile knowledge for which we were expelled from paradise, and remove ourselves further and further from it, believing in foolish arrogance that we can replace the favor of the Creators themselves, when we are still the same monkeys that run around in eternal circles without learning the slightest thing... Yes, often they still graze upon the same old illusions after they become aware of their insanity, and continue to make the knowledge that we have foolishly plucked from the tree more of a curse than a gift...
Sodom and Ghomorrah!
Death is a gift they do not deserve!"
Running in circles - Tabris understood what he meant; He'd learned at least that much about humans so far.
His eyes narrowed slightly, and as he chewed on this thought, his bright smile gave way to an expression with a more thoughtful, melancholic note, but in a distant way, as someone who pondered sad music or unhappy events in the gray past without being affected, not weighed down by personal pai in his eternal lightness.
He was fully aware that people had their contradictions and absurdities - for him it was part of the price, so to speak, something he could abstract, the difference between a play that made him feel negative things like frustration or sadness and one that was simply bad, for many good plays were tragedies;
People lived it. He didn't feel it, but he had understanding for it, and for someone who valued insight, understanding and comprehension so highly in the philosophical sense, acutely felt it was nothing that would cloud his view, he understood the shortcomings and had compassion - but whether people were really incapable of advancing was something that he wanted to confirm with his own eyes first.
Perhaps this was also one of the reasons why he would ultimately be drawn to an especially absurd, desperate, lonely person, to someone whose repeating circles were painfully obvious - If he were to judge that even he was blessed with life rather than cursed, and deprived of the future rather than spared of it, if Tabris' answer to the final question that they would all ultimately have to ask themselves, all of them fighting for the crown of this planet, would be "yes" and not "no", then he could assume that the same could be said for the vast majority of its current inhabitants -
But what he would or should do, if he were to reach this conclusion could not have occurred to him at that time – those were experimental, distant thoughts, theoretical extrapolation, such as one could have had only in the, albeit anticipatory, contemplation of something one had not yet experienced oneself, much more flowery and complicated than it was, and yet only a dull, self-indulgent imitation of a much more fundamental, real thing - the kind of expression and idea he would have used before he had actually encountered the later object of his fascination face to face.
(With a little experience, you could learn to tell from artwork whether it came from someone who had really loved, how to tell someone who had really become a mother (Before, descriptions of motherhood were rather general and archetypal; after that, words had a warmth, gentleness, and an undertone that could be clearly recognized in all the tongues of the world), or someone who had really been on the verge of suicide (those who had never sunk so deep into the swamp of despair, imagined the farewell letters full of hollow, sweeping platitudes about existence, and hatred of the world, in fact the truly unfortunate were more likely to experience a simplification of their world view, concentration on small things because they could no longer bear the big ones, things like, "Darling don't forget to feed the dog" and also a perception of themselves as separate from the world, as foreign bodies, who didn't add anything - Few people thought they were too good for this world, rather the opposite) and with love it was the same – the devil's advocate might accuse those who didn't knew love of likening it to beauty while those who had lived it would liken it to uglyness, but one could, poetically, tell the subtle difference between the common, candy-sweet strawberry aroma and the more specific, distinctive smell of real strawberries, between candy pink and poppy-red, or more soberly, note that the works of singles tended to have the protagonist between stuck between many ladies, while the author imagined the many possibilities with each potential target, or enumerated the general side of the desired sex, while someone who already had a partner tended to have the protagonist focused on one person and focus on the gradual deepening of trust rather than on the discovery of the new and hidden.
In this example it was something similar...
Tabris, the angel of free will - But also the angel of betrayal...)
…
SAME YEAR
COAST OF THE DEAD SEA
NERV BRANCH 04 - GOLGHATA BASE
CRYPT OF THE OLD BUILDING
Perhaps the most characteristic thing about this place was the constant sound of dripping in the background, plop, plop, drip, drip, drip, too slow and leisurely to have anything in common with a drizzle, more akin to a leaking faucet, or rather like a whole forest of them, sometimes several at once, from time to time, now and then...
Perhaps the forest was one of the most aptly possible analogies to be found, a forest, but a forest after a storm, which kept the raindrops that it had kept from those that might have walked under the canopy of leaves away during the storm itself and now slowly released, leaf by leaf, drop by drop, down from the refreshed green, still holding all the substance in this ecosystem; Only that the plants in this dripping forest never seemed to dry out completely... or, without carrying the metaphor too far, it was enough to say that the frequency and quantity of those dripping sounds never really seemed to change. Only a few of the not very numerous employees of this highly mechanized base were allowed to penetrate deep enough into the bowels of this base, which was built into a deep ravine or rather against the opposite walls of the ravine, to occasionally witness this phenomenon and whisper about its origin, but here, close to the bottom of the deep, but relatively narrow - That is to say, Even though the dimensions of several factory halls are surpassed by the fissure of the earth, from the upper end of which no ray of light, however tiny, would have penetrated down to here, even without all the buildings down here, the popping sounds of liquid drops became a constant, unnerving companion that constantly gnawed at concentration and comfort enough to startle many a visitor when it suddenly occured amid the surrounding silence.
It was grueling work, but the only scientist who was down here at the moment was much more comfortable with the discomfort than the implications of ever getting used to this place - It did not really fall within the prerogative of humans, down here there was constant work, but most of it was done by robots, which were also maintained by robots - If a scientist got lost down here, he either had to put on a jacket and gloves or switch on the environmental controls in advance, leaving them on by default had proven inefficient - anyway, only the very, very few who were authorized to know its ultimate secrets and wanted to control or switch on something here entered this place. The facilities down here all had their purpose, most of them highly significant, but they were not always in operation - The facility the lone scientist had just entered, for example, had been lying still for quite some time and had only recently been illuminated for the first time in years, now not by explicitly pressing a light switch, but by an automatic sensor which caused the activation of dim, red, indirect lights as soon as the elderly scientist and hisconspicuous combover had taken the first steps into the room.
This facility was a copy of a similar experimental setup currently located at headquarters in Terminal Dogma - larger, more modern, on a much larger scale, but decommissioned for years, while the analogous setup was still in regular use at headquarters - This one had served its original purpose years ago, and now it was set to serve a very different purpose that the one it was first created for.
Instead of a complicated pattern, the floor of this cylindrical room showed denser, illuminated concentric circles that became more dense towards the center, and the cables that extended from the top of the transparent tube that made up the center of the room branched out upwards to form an unmanageable nest of struts, Cables and tubes, whose way led further up, bringing down things that were needed down here and bringing up things that had been made here, mainly the data the scientist had inspected at on a portable device on his way down here.
As one could see from this, the recording of these data and with that the experiment that had taken place here had long since ended, and the presence of the scientist explained itself in the fact that he was here to fetch that which had been the subject of the experiments - nevertheless, he had not come here in expectation of its end, but had only shown up when one of those practical beepers signaled that the data was "in the box", meaning that a good quarter of an hour might have passed between the end of the experiment and his arrival here - it was a long, long elevator ride down here, and the result was hard to miss: The tube had already been partially raised, the LCL was streaming across the floor, a neatly discarded pile of clothes had apparently been taken away without a trace, with the exception of a pair of shoes and the socks still hanging out of them.
12th data collection session for project-master, enterprise X4-0204, later reclassified as experimental precursor of the 2nd generation dummy plug system.
Subject: Code "Tabris"
Experimenter: Kuze Testsuo
Time: 0:16 hours after end of data recording
Yeah. It was not without reason that a person later known as Asahina, (but at that time still called Ueda) sometimes accused Kuze of negligence - the really "beautiful" thing about this matter was that Kuze himself always called for caution with this creature, which he usually did maintain – yet today, the sobering truth revealed itself directly as a first or second reaction when he found the apparatus abandones.
He didn't waste much time with reactions of shock or the like, though there was most likely still something like a sigh about a well-known, familiar source of frustration, though sharply different from it in certain tonal details, but for the untrained observer unfamiliar with the bald scientist, his response might not have sounded much different from the kind of sigh that might follow anger about his wife or some prank by his children, on a purely acoustic level - whether he liked it or not, he had already become too accustomed to „surviving" things like Miyazawa and Subject 23 to be much more frustrated.
That he himself had completely missed any reason to hurry to get here... sauntering wasn't the right word, because Kuze generally didn't saunter or dawdle, but the possibility that the subject could flee and kill them all was simply not present in his mind - not that he would now really believe that the being called Tabris could have escaped in any form (He had a healthy instinct for self-preservation, not paranoia) - In his experience, this rascal would almost certainly be somewhere very close by, and would have left for no other purpose than to satiate his personal curiosity, to stretch his legs a bit to fight his boredom, and to mock them all with their inability to stop him - Kuze could already picture the far too angelic look of innocence on the face of that brat.
Not that Kuze had stopped for even a moment to see the fact that he had actually expected to meet him here as a dangerous sign that this creature had begun to lull even him into a false sense of security, just as the time of extinction was approaching; But the "threat" (-for the poor remnants of dignity, from which he had long ago taken his leave-) that would see him carrying around the angel-child's shoes to that he might give them to him was of a quite different nature.
But it wasn't sa personal matter - unlike Miyazawa, who saw no reason to draw a line, and the former director, who couldn't completely avoid being influenced privately by parts of her work, Kuze was the kind of person who kept his private life separate and left his work behind on his desk, finding no contradiction between human experimenter and family man, just as some people didn't find any significant conflict between religion and making significant achievements in physics.
The room in which the tube stood was largely enclosed with solid walls and more, but there was one of the dark corridors that, beyond thick walls, simply led into the gorge that had been converted into the lowest levels of these installations, continued by a simple footbridge, admittedly with the width of a generous sidewalk including a bicycle path, and divided into three parts by two notched lines -
It was a smooth, slightly shiny surface with a marbled pattern of green and violet with traces of grey in between, like a polished alexandrite in the play of different lights, which produced a glow that Kuze could not clearly attribute to a source and stretched out into the darkness of the gorge - the ground could not be much further, as this here was the deepest level, but it was safe to assume that it went down far enough to the stony ground for a man to fall to his death.
Here the dripping sound was not even shielded by the walls of the distant bulbous or rather physalis-shaped ramparts of the previous test chamber, whose dark shape, rooted like a budding mushroom on a tree trunk on the rock face, he had just left behind - From the "top", cables grew out like shoots from a flower bulb in spring, high up, as if they wanted to grow into the light.
All the more clearly one could hear every distinct drop, and some might succumb to the illusion that the sounds followed one's own breaths or heartbeats in some bizarre way.
Walking along this walkway, one could make out smaller, glowing sources of light that lit up their surroundings only enough to produce an ambiance of shadowy gloom, but Kuze did not care as long as the lighting was sufficient for him to make out where he was stepping - he knew better than many others what was here, and he preferred to see only its shadows as he walked past it.
"Packed" into columnar vessels or, hanging down from assembly line like structures naked as they were, partly in the process of being "converted" into dummy plug prototypes, naked young flesh was found here as factory goods, the human form in its most basic appearance, mostly female the further down one went, occasionally male, nothing but spare parts and building materials, some of which were garnished with mechanical parts so that they might perform all manner of useful tasks.
Those alone would have been a scandal, but they were not even the main attraction down here:
In between, sometimes passing quite close to Kuzes catwalk, were a multitude of cables and hoses, not all of which seemed to go to any complexes or installations, many of them, dark and some of them marked with labels that, although not readable in this lighting situation, could have been made to tell you everything they had to tell you with the beam of a single flashlight.
In the darkness it was only possible to make out where the tubes led to, although these targets were not so far away from the footbridge - from Kuzes point of view they could only be seen as shadows of huge shoulders, to which could have belonged whole bodies, right, a greenish grayish-brown with an inscribed letter alpha, left, lying a bit further ahead, medium green with a beta, both built in secret by SEELE, for special purposes they preferred to keep to themselves, and designed for use with the other important technologies they were working on advancing here, but essentially not really special or much different from the common production models like EVA 02, except maybe in a few relevant to their alotted tasks - But there was a third bunch of cables that branched off from the figure to which they belonged like the spines of a hedgehog, cables and tubes whose destination was finally too far from the footbridge to be recognizable without switching on any further light, but the so-called cables and tubes spoke for themselves, in the way they, like the silver boy, made their difference from that, what they pretended to be made painfully obvious at second glance, sending chills down the spine of any human being who would try to understand them as something familiar - in fact, the currently still very unfinished something growing deep in the heart of darkness could, with some justification, be considered something like the radiant boy's dark twin, chiefly due to its similar source.
Especially in comparison to the cables and tubes that led to the other two man-made colossuses, these false struts revealed all too easily that they were just something that pretended to be cables and tubes, and allowed similar things to be deduced about that to which they were connected - theirs was such a deep coal-black that even the darkness at the bottom of this crevice appeared comparatively light, and their contours showed up only as shadows, albeit sharply defined, looking like the shadows ordinary tubes and cables.
But here and there their true nature was revealed: They resembled the shape of a cable or hose in the end only in how far a rubber doll could resemble a human being, in form and appearance, but not in substance, and drops of the infernal material began to form in some places, to form in all silence, where men could, more badly than rightly, impose form on what they had grasped in their presumptuousness - it seemed as if the cables were bleeding, or at least this mediocre, obsidian-colored imitation of them; red, inconspicuous droplets appeared where the substance still failed to hold its shape to an acceptable degree, subtle but still noticeable, and its point of assembly was not dictated by gravity, but by the very own, lovecraftian characteristics of its original substance, and accompanied by these quiet, inoxerable "plop" noises, thus bidding farewell not downwards but upwards, probably the most unnatural of all phenomena that could be observed at this place: Those paradoxical drops, like a rivulet of blood falling in reverse, which occasionally ran up the gorge, and were mostly harmlessly stopped by all sorts of installations and equipment that stood in their way, so that, as far as one followed the fissure of the earth containing the Golghata base upwards, they were heard less and less often.
This far down, so close to the source, you could even smell the smell sticking in the air, somewhere between blood, carcass and vomit, if you just stood still, took your time and sucked in a cramped nosefull of air - the bald scientist had learned long ago not to do it.
Of course, he himself knew only too well where these tubes led to, whether the darkness wanted to reveal it to him or not, even though he thought about it even less than he did about the clones - Evangelion Mark Nine.
Instead of only creating humans who had the abilities of monsters, they now dared to create monsters in human form...
Kuze's destination, on the other hand, was probably relatively harmless by comparision, even though his way there almost led him to the other end of the gorge, where another complex was embedded in the rock face, one of many, a slit, a key card, a door, and the aging man had already found what he had lost, sitting at the edge of a large, ring-shaped swimming pool-like basin, turning towards him with a smile as if he had seen the man's arrival straight through the wall.
This room was basically a slightly different dimensioned version of the last one, only that Kuze and his creation were now one floor higher, so to speak, and the whole thing was therefore from a slightly different perspective - Below this level, at the same level as the bottom of the pool, there was a room almost identical to the one they had just come from - Only the "filling" was different - this boy had not needed light, but the elderly scientist preferred to switch it on, even if he was not spared the sight of the immature female bodies sloshing about in the orange-red liquid in front of them, corresponding to about thirteen-year-old children, with blue hair and empty eyes which opened in a primitive reaction to the light, without any particular recognition or even the slightest spark of intelligence seeming to lie in them, naked, inanimate, mass-produced, nothing more than usable biomass that had never been anywhere else, or would be anywhere else but in this hole here - An outsider might have been bothered by the naked flesh, but Kuze worked with it long enough to see it simply as the shape these components had - that too was simply a matter of appearance, as he already knew it from the silver-haired boy who had apparently patiently awaited him here, a picture of innocence, seemingly casually leaning back and leaning on his arms, almost a bit playful in the way he had rolled up his pants, and now apparently splashing around with his bare feet in the LCL without a care in the world, remembering with relish the existence of all the little joints and tendons in his feet.
In the function planned for him, he had recently been given something like a uniform, black, similar in appearance to those worn by the higher ups, although one wondered why, often he didn't wear it - but today Kuze had decided for himself what to throw at the supposed boy, to make him appear presentable to the outside world, and unlike Miyazawa, for example, he didn't find pleasure in dressing the creature up like a well-behaved shop window dummy - Kuze knew what it was and thought that this ought to be enough to spoil the game.
The dark fabric only emphasized the unnatural appearance of the superhuman child, made the white of its skin seem even whiter and the red of its eyes even redder; In this gloom, he was unmistakably demonic in appearance.
Kuze didn't even bother to rebuke this thing or tell him where the problem was - the boy would know exactly what he meant from the start anyway, would care little about it (or would have consciously chosen to incurr his anger, from which he had nothing to fear anyway) and still apologize with an angelic expression, looking much more repentant than a real teenager would ever be.
So he limited himself to throwing its shoes at that entity, not without frustration.
"We're leaving." He remarked, not consciously blaming, but also not bothering to hide his opinion of it.
In the meantime, he had developed quite a good feeling for the places to which the angel would sometimes spontaneously be drawn...
The latter willingly accepted the shoes, and immediately began to put them on, without that damned upbeat smile fading from his lips for even a moment.
"Thank you, Mr. Director." He noted, while he was still working on his shoelaces, practically the picture of cheerfulness itself!
However, this was by no means because he was simply unaware of the older man's irritability, which the scientist himself would have found much more reassuring.
Oh no, the inhuman child knew only too well how to interpret the gestures, facial expressions and tone of his reluctant watchdog.
"...did it inconvenience you to find me not in the chamber...?"
He was finished with his shoes and stood up to turn his full attention to the elderly scientist. Unlike most other brats, the subject could not be accused of not paying attention to the adults around him.
But somehow Kuze wished he could accuse him of something solid, something other than airy, vaguely outlined feelings of "eeriness".
But even if so, what was he supposed to do? Cut the subject's pocket money? Tell him to stand in a corner? A living god?
No, actually, they were lucky that for the moment it corresponded to the whims of this thing to be cooperative, but that was far too vague and diffuse for them to be betting their lives on it.
Kuze had to admit that one of the reasons for his frustration was probably the fact that he had to face this unimaginable danger from a creature scarce taller than his youngest son.
"I beg your pardon, Mr. Director..." the supposed teenager said in all sincerity. Kuze could imagine that he would sneak out again without batting an eyelash, and the next sentence only confirmed this impression further.
"...But I couldn't resist... I really wanted to take a look at her..."
"Her?"
Tabris made a sweeping gesture across the basin with the clones.
"Her. The First Child. Ayanami Rei. Even if these vessels here are only a tiny little part of her... I will probably not come much closer to her before the time of prophecy..."
Kuze didn't even want to know what he meant by half of these things, had spent his time trying to fathom them as long as they were not specifically related to his task... He firmly believed that there were some truths in this universe that the human mind was never meant to grasp, and Kuze left it up to other, cooler spirits to expose themselves to them.
He didn't even ask any further questions, refrained from taking a closer look at the clones sloshing around in the LCL or consider the point of view that they might be parts of some diffuse whole, but turned to leave with a harsh "Come!" that he didn't really polish, but didn't bother to make sound emphatically brusque, and the boy just smiled quietly after him and followed.
…
(1) This set of flashbacks shall conclude in 2.34: [Heir to White Moon IV: Nidhöggr]. When the leaves of the world tree start falling, the apocalypse cannot be far...
