(Apathy)

All of what I just described took place a long, long time ago.

When I first came into the world, it seemed to me a strange and terrible place, but now that I have understood how it works, it is relatively simple.

I have received instructions.

I read about it in books.

It was back when I still resided in the now abandoned laboratory in Terminal Dogma.

When Commander Ikari took me to the Dummy Plug Plant for one of the usual backup sessions, I saw that he was reading a book. I inquired about what it was, and its purpose, and he gladly explained to me about how these are containers of knowledge from which one might obtain any possible kind of information.

"What is knowledge?"

"Knowledge is the power of man." said the Commander, "the means by which even a wretched ape such as Man might master his own destiny through the perception of cause and effect, as well as the reasons and interconnections of all things."

Dr. Akagi did not think that he would have in his quarters any books that would be suitable for me, since they were largely all about subject matters to do with the technology employed by NERV, but I still asked to have them. I realize that the ins and outs of metaphysical biology were not what my classmates would have been reading, but they are not pilots. My purpose was to carry out the human instrumentality project, so it seemed right to me that I should know more about the subject matters related to it, of all that might well help me carry out my role.

I began with some of the contents of the Commander's personal library, but since then, I have come to find many other places where one might obtain books, so that I need not trouble the commander himself about such non-essential matters. NERV headquarters has a dedicated library for the staff, as does the city above ground, and even the school.

There are many books there. Scientific Books. Experience reports. Fiction stories.

It occurs to me that what is held in those pages is the most that I will ever see of the world, of all its breadth and depht of interconnections, its long histories.

A history that is nearly over.

The Commander says it will be a little less than a year now.

My time in it has been short, and even that is mostly over.

Most people do not know this.

The workers at NERV do not know it.

The youths at my school do not know it.

They go on planning and preparing for a future that will never come.

The whole point of school is in that planning and preparing.

The whole point of school is pointless.

Watching the others, all the many swarming people who have nothing to do with me,

I sometimes feel sorry since they do not know.

I told the commander once, and he told me that there was no reason.

If they knew about instrumentality, he says, they might be dismayed, but if they truly understood it, they would rejoice.

Instrumentality will be good for them, he says.

I am doing them a favor.

I most important sacrifice for humanity, he says.

He says many things.

He talked at length, with many words.

Words that seem to be just words rather than things or places.

He says that we will be there in paradise, him and me, but I'm not sure that I will be there, that what's going to make it there is going to be me.

It doesn't really matter, of course, since my very purpose is to make this happen and that without it, I would never have existed in the first place – sometimes I wonder if that wouldn't have been better.

At least, when the promised day comes, I will no longer have to suffer.

My being at NERV is a farce.

There was never any doubt that we would defeat the angels.

The commander has explained to me about the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The angels, without a doubt, will be defeated.

The Third Impact, without a doubt, will come to pass regardless.

It was impossible to prevent for the first.

The staff at NERV talks at length of preventing it, all around me in the periphery, as they carry out routine maintenance experiments.

When they converse, I say nothing.

Nothing but what I am asked to answer, nothing but what is required.

I have nothing to add to their vain hopes.

No means to answer truthfully.

They wouldn't understand.

Nobody does.

There is nobody who would.

Even the commander wouldn't – not about the parts of me that have no purpose.

Superflous thoughts that he did not ask for nor call into being.

My being at school then, is also a farce.

The students here know nothing about NERV.

They know nothing about what I do, nothing about what is coming.

Even if I told them, they wouldn't understand.

And I cannot tell them.

I wouldn't know how.

They prepare for a future that is never coming, an adulthood that is never coming.

All the various parts of schooling, all their various purposes, are all rendered purposeless.

What is the point in studying, practicing socializing?

I am well aware of the benefits it is supposed to have, I read about it in books.

It's just that it will not matter, and nobody knows it.

They will never reach adulthood.

I would not even reach adulthood if the Third Impact were not coming.

I am as a cut flower made to wilt -

I was not designed to last past the time – I understand it was hard work for the Commander, the Vice-commander and Dr. Akagi to design me so that I would last as long as I had.

Most of my alloted span was already over.

I wondered, sometimes, I was already seeing the signs.

My shell of flesh had never functione all that well to begin with.

No part of me functions all that well.

My being here might be a farce, but it was required, for reasons of public relations, so I had the time to observe authentic humans of the age that my shell is supposed to approximate, though there are none at NERV.

My creation was difficult and had to accommodate many different needs related to the many different subsets of project E, so it is no surprising that I am not very well made.

I am discolored, first of all.

Thin, slight – every couple of months, Dr. Akagi needs to correct something.

But it is not only my flesh that is a vat-grown fake.

My mind and soul, too, were created.

Dr. Akagi, I am told, had a large role in programming me.

After the first clone was destroyed, there was not enough time left to rear me to maturity, so they had to accelerate maturity, to implant knowledge and procedures, what a human my apparent age would know.

The same technology was used as in the growing of the EVAs and the programming of the Magi.

Once that technology advances, they are hoping to animate more vessels.

For now, they are backing up my memories during my callibration sessions.

My training involves learning the skills necessary for my duties.

It is those that are being backed up, more so than me.

But I was the first attempt.

The second one that was developed in Europe ended up yielding much higher synchronization values than myself.

Their ability to make me ape a person was also limited.

When I came to the school last year, I was surprised to learn that the students had been assembled from many different parts of the country such that they might be pilot candidates.

I had assumed that they must already have known each other.

They had seemed privy to many unspoken rules that I alone was somehow not privy to.

They handed out instructions for the correct behavior in the school – not to run in the hallways, for example.

There were pamhlets for how to conduct emergency drills.

There was the procedural manual at NERV.

But I never received instructions for how to correctly conduct conversations with my classmates.

I asked for them once.

It left me with the impression that the others did not require them.

They already knew somehow. They seemed to possess a sense that I was missing.

When I spoke, my replies often gave them pause, though it was them who had asked me.

Even not speaking did sometimes appear to be incorrect.

It is as if they were always expecting something more, something different, that I had no idea how to provide.

After far too long time, it occurred to me what it was when I oerheard two employees conversing at NERV.

They said I was unsettling.

That I seemed to be lacking a heart.

Some of the people at school spoke of me as hiding my heart instead, or my true thoughts.

But I wasn't hiding anything.

I wasn't holding anything back.

Should there be something, that to be absent would need to be hidden?

Something whose genuine absence they could not conceive of?

And emptiness of something that a genuine human should have contained?

It should not be surprising, for after all, I was a pale imitation.

Or perhaps it was not even that I was fake, but simply that I was me.

I was made for a different purpose.

If that ellusive something were truly something that I needed to have, then I can't imagine that Commander Ikari wouldn't have given it to me.

Perhaps I was not required to have a heart.

Perhaps a heart was not needed to pilot EVA or bring about Third Impact – it may even have been a burden, or at the very least a superfluous expense.

I was never supposed to be like them, simply different.

Perhaps anything to do with a heart was simply not relevant to me.

Perhaps most things weren't.

The great wide world. The bonds and concerns of the NERV employees and schoolchildren.

None of that pertained to me.

None of that had any use for piloting or the instrumentality project.

None of it had a purpose.

I wondered if I was missing out, by not having a heart.

Or perhaps it was lucky.

If I truly didn't have one, how could I ever know for sure?

...

My quarters lay at the outskirts of the town, among rows of cheap conrete building that had been errected quickly back when the fortress city was still under construction.

Now that the city was finished and with it many more lavish accomodations, this neighborhood was barely occupied.

There was talk of tearing it down now – at the northermost corer, the demolition had already begun. The sounds came closer and closer each day, but there was no reason for concern – the building that I occupied was not scheduled to come down until the week after the Third Impact would have come to pass.

Just a few more months now, until the promised day would come.

Until I could fulfill my duty.

Until my sufferings were over.

Until the sole man who ever stopped to talk to me would no longer have need of me.

He had asked me if I too wanted novel accomodations.

He asked this even though there was no real reason.

I turned him down of course.

My quarters are sufficient.

They are peaceful.

They remind me of my room in the laboratory, and the people in the books do say that there is something special about the place of one's origins.

Besides, there was nothing asked of me here.

No duties.

No expectations.

No experiments.

No pain.

No incomprehensible people who know not what avaits them, no remainder of the coming time.

There is nothing that I need to do here.

I can just be, think, ponder.

Sometimes I read, though I do know why.

It is not always relevant to my duties.

Maybe I do it because it is the closest that I get to know what it's like to be alive, like the others are.

Maybe I do it because it is the only proof that I exist, I, as a thinking being, not a piece of biological technology that is owned by NERV; Not the vessel of the commander's plan, not behavior following pre-programmed subroutines.

By the motion of curiosity, my spirit was proven to be present.

Even if there was little other proof of it, little else that it could possibly affect.

...

I receive orders, and I carry them out.

Day after day after day.