Geofront, AEL Headquarters
November 23, 2041
1637 hours
"Hold on, just for a minute." – Asuka spoke up, pinching her nose to make it stop itching. Sneezing into what she's breathing might not be a good idea, she figured. – "Are you telling me this thing is running off an illegal power source?"
"Correct."
"Did fusion not work or something?"
"Not enough power output from any reactor core still small enough to be portable." – Yui replied. – "Believe me, we ran the simulations. The only way fusion could work would be physically tethering the Evangelion to it with an umbilical cable and I'm sure you can see the issue with that."
"Shoot the cable. That's kinda obvious."
"Exactly."
"But the Evangelion is a living creature, right? You told me the armor is not mechanically-assisted, it only has electric reactive plating and that doesn't need a constant current. What's the big energy hog here?"
"Square-cube law."
A few seconds went by before Asuka tilted her head to the side. – "...what?"
"Linearly increasing length increases surface area quadratically and volume cubically." – Yui explained. – "As you may be aware, muscle fibers like those of humans and Evangelions utilize metabolic reactions to convert chemical energy stored in nutrients into kinetic energy via muscle contraction. That is a gross oversimplification of the biological mechanisms involved, but it will do. In the case of Evangelions, however, the square-cube law causes the Evangelion's body to be far too heavy to be moved by its own muscles with chemical energy alone. The muscles are capable of exerting the physical force to move the body, they just don't have the fuel for it, so to speak. Are you following so far?"
Asuka nodded. – "Yes."
"Good. When the project was still in the simulation stage for lack of working prototypes, we accounted for this problem and initially planned to implant the musculature with conductive micro-fibers to deliver the needed energy in the form of electricity, which would have increased production costs and repair process complexity tremendously. However, we ended up setting for a much more elegant solution."
"Which is?"
"The Evangelion has a vestigial secondary nervous system that runs across the entire body parallel to the primary one, but is not physically connected to any nerve clusters. This secondary nervous system includes traces of a molecular structure we haven't managed to fully replicate in laboratory conditions yet, but it is the closest thing we have ever seen to a biological superconductor. The end result is that the secondary nervous system has an amazingly low electrical resistance; even channeling the reactor's maximum designed power output through it only raises the Evangelion's body temperature by about 5 °C, which is completely removed from the body through the armor anchoring implants and dissipated into the surrounding air without requiring a dedicated cooling system."
"That air-cooling won't work in vacuum." – Asuka pointed out.
"As I have explained to the colonel before, the Evangelion is a ground-based weapon platform. It is not and never was intended for zero-gravity usage."
"But what if the military might want to deploy it on, say, the Moon? Or Mars? The thinner the air, the worse air-cooling's going to be."
The pause was enough for Asuka to realize the woman didn't consider that at all. – "What do you suggest, then?"
Asuka sighed and rested the back of her head against the entry plug seat. – "Durandals have a liquid droplet heatsink just for that scenario, but scaling it up as-is would add on another hundred tons of weight, maybe more, plus the armor to cover the tanks with because I'm not sure Evangelions have the room to spare under their skin. The navy's ships use their armor plating as heatsinks too, I think, so you may be on the right track... hmm..." – She paused for a few seconds, cupping her chin with her hand in thought before tapping on her chin with her finger thrice. – "How problematic is it to swap out the armor anchoring implants?"
"Quite."
"And the anchors? Can you pull them out without surgery?"
"That is possible, yes."
"How about hollowing out the anchor and installing a pipe system into it? You fill the pipe with coolant and circulate it to dump the heat out into the armor faster than a solid anchor would."
"That would increase costs and mechanical complexity, not to mention decrease the anchor's structural load-bearing capacity."
"If a place has no atmosphere, chances are it's because it doesn't have enough gravity to hold one." – Asuka pointed out. – "Lower gravity equals higher structural load-bearing capacity, so the plates' interlocks should hold everything together. Problem solved."
"...I see your point. I'll forward your suggestion to the designers. It would seem I made an excellent choice employing you. No offense to the others."
"None taken." – Kaworu's voice chimed in.
Asuka scowled towards the general direction his voice was coming from, even though his image wasn't being displayed anywhere. – "Didn't your parents ever tell you it's not nice to listen in to other people's conversations?"
"For one, I never met them, so no, they didn't." – came the casual reply. Asuka decided to file that away for later rather than commenting. – "For another, the colonel told me to listen because I might hear something useful. Besides, I've got nothing better to do."
"What are you doing, anyway?"
A sigh came over. – "Sync test. Every couple of days, they tell me to sit in Unit-01 for an hour or two while they're calibrating the interface or something like that."
"The interface is calibrated by the onboard AI, mister Nagisa." – Yui clarified. – "The technical crew is present merely to supervise and intervene if necessary. Since that part of the system is in direct contact with the pilot's brain, it and every process pertaining to it needs to be as thoroughly debugged as possible before it enters active service in order to maximize operator safety."
"Meaning we're guinea pigs."
"Of course not. If the interface is operated as intended, you are in no more danger from it than I am from suddenly being electrocuted by one of the terminals in the room I am standing in right now."
"Is that what I'm doing right now too? The sync test?" – Asuka asked.
"No. Sekhmet is currently scanning your cerebral activity to establish a synchro-profile and fine-tune the interface specifically for you. Once that is done, you could theoretically sit into mister Nagisa's Evangelion and it would work for you with the same profile."
"Though if she's smart, she'll stay away from that retard." – Sekhmet grumbled.
"Sekhmet." – Lilith spoke up with all the warmth of liquid nitrogen. – "If you have a problem with the way your brother speaks, help him instead of insulting him about it."
"I'm not a logopedist, do it yourself!"
"Ahem..." – Yui interjected. – "Ladies, please..."
"Pah."
Asuka reached up and rapped her knuckles on the entry plug's roof. – "She meant you too! So behave."
"Don't you talk down to me like tha-!"
Without missing a beat, Asuka tapped her finger on the mute button. Nor was she going to be talked down to by a machine, oh no. – "When can I expect to be able to take her out for a walk?"
"As soon as we are certain everything is working properly. Are you anxious to begin?" – Yui asked.
"No." – Which was a lie. – "I want to test the balance to see if the reactor doesn't make things top-heavy." – Which was true.
"We already have live data in that regard, thanks to Rei and mister Nagisa. Rei in particular has proven that the design is capable of movement up to and including high-speed sprinting without falling over."
"I'm not sure something this heavy should be running in a city; I'm no architect, but I don't think the buildings would like the shaking, much less the roads the weight. Even the news said so. The schematics you showed me included storm rollers. Aren't you using those?"
"Only in B-type and F-type equipment. A-type equipment has an alternative, D-type equipment is incompatible and the rest don't expressly require it."
Asuka nodded. – "Ah, I see. What about weapon loadouts?"
"As you can probably expect, Evangelions have extremely limited internal space for armaments. The armor can house some internal weaponry; in particular, Unit-00 and Unit-01 are both armed with a pair of 20mm forward-fixed autocannons located in the upper chest armor. Unit-02 has a pair of identical autocannons in the helmet; we were initially reluctant to move the weapons there for fear of the muzzle flash obstructing peripheral vision, but judged it an acceptable tradeoff for increasing the firing arc by allowing it to be aimed via head movement. We also deliberated over removing the chest autocannons from this model due to the head-mounted ones outperforming them in every way, but decided to leave them in for now and have the military make the final decision when full production begins. After all, it is a simple matter to swap out the chest plate containing the weapons."
"So the others are hand-carried or externally-mounted?"
"Indeed. We had the opportunity to test some of them, but not all."
Asuka had a hunch that 'test' was probably the recent battle, but kept that hunch to herself. For now, anyway; she had no illusions that sooner or later, it will come out. – "How close are you to entering production?"
"As a matter of fact, Unit-02 can be considered to be the very first production model to... roll off the assembly line, so to speak. If the design is sound, it will enter production as-is. As I may have mentioned, we intend to unveil it at the military expo next year – and while the military run trials to test its effectiveness, this company will spend that time rolling out and testing some concept models."
"And if they decide they don't want it?"
"Then the AEL will go bankrupt and hundreds of employees will be laid off. This is an all-or-nothing endeavor, miss Shephard, and I intend to succeed. Therefore I expect you to perform to the best of your abilities."
"No pressure, then." – Asuka snarked.
"Fighting for your life isn't enough?" – Kaworu asked.
The girl perked up at that. – "Yeah, about that... what was that in the contract about hazard pay for combat duty?"
"I'll let the colonel brief you on that." – came Yui's voice before Asuka recognized the distinctive sigh of her father.
"Alright, kid... listen up, 'cause this is for real. We're under attack. Don't know what they are or where they're coming from, but there's been three attacks in the past two months. Those two evacuation alarms since we came here? That was them. The lost carrier group? That was them too. The doc's girl fought off the first attack, which is when I got assigned here by the brass to find out what's going on."
Asuka's mind immediately clicked with the memory of the giant blue octahedron hovering above the city in the night. 'Sooner it is.'
"No two of 'em were alike, but they're all Evangelion-sized or larger. Current operational codename for them is Angel."
"Angel?" – Asuka couldn't decide whether to sound incredulous, amused, or otherwise. As such, the end result was somewhere along the lines of as if she had just said 'what' in a completely flat tone.
"Nagisa's idea, not mine. Anyway, we know that they're definitely not of terrestrial origin and can show up without warning at any time, though thankfully none of them dropped in right on top of us yet. Once they show up, we can track their gravimetric signature."
"How? I thought gravimetrics don't work in big gravity wells."
"Apparently, their signature is so huge that we can pick them up even if they stand on the ground. The last two also had some kind of energy shield that shrugged off anything we threw at it. And here's the kicker: based on how the previous ones behaved, the doc and I think these things might actually be intelligent."
That did not sound very reassuring. – "How intelligent?"
"Cover, suppression fire, asset denial, multitasking. Luckily, they don't seem to be omniscient because we managed to surprise them a few times, but nobody knows how long that'll work. Doc's trying to arrange for better hardware right now because we've been cutting it too close for comfort for the last two."
Asuka went deep into thought.
As parents can attest, children left unsupervised tend to occupy themselves in undesired ways, entertaining themselves with things and reading books they shouldn't. While her mother's old things weren't exactly off-limits to her and old textbooks weren't exactly harmful – or comprehensive, for that matter – for young children, Asuka was the same in this regard. Thus it was that shortly after she learned to read, she randomly picked out a book that ended up introducing herself to the classical psychology concepts of the id, the ego and the superego.
And one mustn't forget another habit children tend to do: talking to themselves and to imaginary friends.
Thus it was that a young Asuka decided to amuse herself by parallelizing her decision-making and general thought process along those three lines, examining dilemmas from multiple directions in order to reach "consensus" with herself. Except by force of habit, she found herself doing it even as she got older.
Even now.
The rational part of her mind was of the opinion to stay back and observe, postponing action until she has had more information to work with.
The survival instinct part of her mind was of the opinion that she was in over her head and therefore should back off while she still could. After all, she was yet to even turn 14 and, despite all the training she went through, was still technically a civilian. But again, the very fact that she was here in the first place was evident enough as to how little she listened to that part of her these days.
The part of her mind that was undeniably her, though... it was positively itching to be able to show her stuff. After all, there's asskicking to be had and competition to overtake. And who knows, maybe saving the world will get her what she wanted.
Something even her rational side had to agree with.
"...alright. I'm in."
"You sure?"
"Yeah."
"Absolutely sure?"
Asuka rolled her eyes. – "Yes." – As much as she appreciated her father caring, it sometimes became mildly annoying. – "But I want footage of everything up to now."
"You will have it." – Yui cut in. – "I also must stress that the non-disclosure agreement you signed as part of your employment contract applies to this as well."
"And not just that." – Shephard continued. – "We've got the president's personal backing on this one, so no screwups allowed. Understood?"
"Language, colonel."
"Understood."
"So... welcome to the team, I guess." – Kaworu offered.
"We'll discuss this later. Blueberry, are you listening?"
"I am." – came Rei's voice.
"You're coming too. Tac briefing, all three of us."
"In a secure location, I presume." – Yui added with the tone of an unspoken question.
Asuka rolled her eyes again. Seriously, the paranoia of some adults... – "Well, I wasn't exactly planning on inviting my friends." – Under her breath, she added – "Knowing them, Hikari would freak out and beg me to stay away from this job while Mari would ask me to let her try on my plugsuit."
"I do not believe Makinami's measurements would be compatible with your plugsuit."
"Well, duh." – Truth be told, Asuka was on the verge of demanding in a rather heated tone whether Rei was implying something about her chest size, but restrained herself. Open radio channel, after all.
Unfortunately for her, there was someone who did not need radio.
"Insecure about your breast size? Really?" – came Sekhmet's mocking voice, Asuka realizing too late that maybe she shouldn't have unmuted the AI once the display indicated no incoming audio.
"I'm not!"
"Then why did your heart rate spike when she brought the topic up? Is skill at lying correlative with chest size?"
Naturally, Asuka was most displeased by that assertion and did not restrain herself from expressing her displeasure.
"FUCK YOU!"
"Language, miss Shephard!"
Chapter completed on 16/09/22. I'm actually a bit unhappy with this chapter; too much of what TVTropes calls Featureless Plane of Disembodied Dialogue. But I'm publishing it anyway so that I can get going.
The concept of the human mind being a combination of id-ego-superego originates from Sigmund Freud, whose ideas tend to be ridiculed and looked down upon by modern psychology due to his perceived excessive focus on sexuality and the idea that repressing it is the cause of all mental disorders and antisocial behavior.
In his classification, the id represents the animalistic, instinctive part of the human mind unrestricted by reason or morality (which is why it will sound familiar to those who played Xenosaga), the ego represents the rational part that operates on logic of the cause-and-effect, I-want-this-and-that-will-get-it-for-me kind, while the superego represents the part that carries out the application of further behavioral modifiers in order to fit into society. It is worth nothing, however, that these aren't the actual words Freud used: he used 'es', 'ich' and 'über-ich' in his native German, but the English translator found that the literal translations ('it', 'I' and 'over-I') didn't carry enough weight, so he used the Latin equivalents instead.
