Geofront, AEL Headquarters
January 27, 2042
082
1 hours

"Are you sure you don't need anything for that?"

Even with it being left unsaid, Yui was very much aware Sanada was referring to the purple bruise around her throat, clearly visible even in the semi-gloom of the observation room the sync test was being overseen from by the technical crew. She's been openly walking around with it for two days now, after all, and knew everyone she came across in the corridors of the facility during that time noticed it too. One good thing about being their boss, however, was that it spared her from having to bother telling them it wasn't their business. Second Impact or not, most of them were still Japanese.

"I'll be fine."

She made no attempt to cover it up or even put a salve on it. Uncomfortable or not, it was a reminder she needed and no amount of staring and whispering behind her back by her subordinates would dissuade her from that.

"Based on how I haven't heard of any arrests by security, I presume you had a disagreement with Rei."

She sighed. – "You know me too well."

It was impossible not to. They've been working together for the better part of twenty years now. A bit of an exaggeration to say that the two of them plus her ex-husband were inseparable back in the day, but they were still in the thick of it and he was still her oldest friend, even if he was closer to Gendo in terms of age than her. And just about the only friend she had left of her younger days as well; Yui didn't quite have the time to pursue personal relationships anymore.

"She's a teenager." – Sanada noted the obvious, as if it was supposed to make her feel better. – "Circumstances or not, she has volatile emotions at this age. Add in someone who usually bottles them in and I'm not surprised she cracked eventually."

"She knows about Nagisa."

"Ah."

Nothing more needed to be said. He knew enough to fully understand her meaning.

Silence dragged on between the two as the sync test continued. But while the rest of the technical crew were silently performing their respective duties, Yui's eyes were fixed firmly on the monitor showing the pilots – or to be more specific, on Rei, who was sitting cross-legged in Unit-00's entry plug, eyes closed in meditative calm to music only she heard (and which would be muted by Lilith the instant someone tried to contact Rei). Neither her expression nor her vitals showed the slightest sign of the 'volatility' from two days ago.

It was all too easy by those who didn't know the girl to assume she had no emotions, but that was nowhere close to the truth. Rei Ikari's emotions were like the proverbial iceberg: cool and lurking beneath a seemingly calm surface until someone believing themselves invincible attempted to challenge it and found that ice more unyielding than themselves.

"What did she want?" – Sanada asked eventually.

"I don't know. I think even she doesn't know."

She still remembered the little girl whose first reaction every single time someone she didn't know entered her line of sight was to hide behind the legs of the nearest adult. Never speaking unless spoken to and even then preferring wordless gestures and nods over making her voice heard. In fact, Yui wasn't entirely sure Rei wasn't autistic until years later when it became clear she just plain didn't want to socially engage with strangers and her habitual use of language and phrasing far too polite for a teenager, even a Japanese one, was done not out of any actual desire to appear polite whenever she wasn't absolutely required to, but to keep everyone at arm's length.

Which Yui indulged her in. After everything that happened, she felt giving the girl some room instead of micromanaging her life was the least she could do.

At least, that's what she told herself at the beginning.

She couldn't not see Rei huddled up in the corner hugging her knees close time and time again, all the toys in the room no longer showing any signs of being touched. How she became even quieter and stopped hiding behind the adults, instead preferring to just keep her distance from them altogether. How the answer to every question about how she felt had to be practically pried out of her as Rei refused to volunteer said answers herself.

And despite seeing all that, Yui did nothing. Said nothing.

As soon as Rei realized she actually had a say in her own wardrobe, the sundresses all vanished in favor of sweaters, hoodies and jackets, seemingly as if in refusal to be seen as a little girl by anyone. Nor did she ever say anything about school or friends. Finally Yui asked the teachers and whatever hopes she still had of Rei integrating into society as just another person were thrown back in her face by reality: Rei did not interact with her schoolmates whatsoever, neither in school, nor out of it. After the first few months, the other children were so unnerved by her that they gave her a wide berth. She had a brilliant mind but showed no interest whatsoever in actually putting it to use beyond achieving full grades; in fact, the school administration were more concerned with the other children's reactions to her to such an extent that even though the girl did absolutely nothing against the rules and in fact was the top-scoring student in the entire city, they still carefully and politely suggested Yui to take Rei and change schools entirely - with the unspoken implication that they had neither the time, nor the patience, nor the desire to deal with children of special needs ('special' by the standards of the Confederate education system, that is; the immediate post-Occupation generation would've been universally special by pre-Impact standards, Earth and humanity being in the shape they were in the immediate aftermath).

Equally as politely, Yui pretended she didn't notice and Rei stayed until graduation.

And then one day, Yui looked up from her tablet to see a black specter stalk the corridors in a leather trenchcoat that visibly unnerved fellow employees old enough to remember the winter wardrobe of Civil Protection officers, even without the jackboots, flak vest and gas mask. And beneath that armor a young woman whose response to loss was locking herself behind a wall of cold indifference at the world.

The worst part of which was how much it reminded Yui of herself. Of how she threw herself into her own work after she shattered her own youthful enthusiasm and ambition by leading fellow visionaries into trespassing somewhere no human should've ventured, only to get to see the consequences of her actions firsthand. Others saw her meteoric rise from mere project lead to chairwoman of the company and thought it ambition – when in truth, she cared nothing about all that, she just wanted to do something, anything, that distracted her from what all of it had cost her.

Yet she was like the Roman generals of old who, during their triumphs, had someone stand behind them to remind them of their own mortality and fallibility. For Yui Ikari, Rei's very presence in her life was the memento mori no distraction could ever hide.

And now Kaworu Nagisa was added to that category as an even more painful reminder of her fallibility, as Rei aptly demonstrated. Frankly, Yui expected her adopted daughter's reaction to his sudden reappearance to be worse. Scientist or not, Yui still grew up under the Combine's rule and very much recognized the faint smell of gun oil from the locked crate under Rei's bed.

As such, Yui had no illusions about the reality of the situation. The fact that said crate's contents hadn't been turned against her the instant Rei figured out who the boy was was a testament to Rei's sheer self-control... and the fact that Nagisa still didn't seem to be aware of anything was a testament that Rei's anger didn't blind her to the big picture, which was all too well.

She did not need Rei's demonstration to know what those two were capable of.

Yui was so deep in her thoughts that she didn't even notice when Sanada left and nearly missed the end of the sync test as well. The results were nothing surprising: Rei's years of experience easily maintained a rock-solid sync ratio almost effortlessly. The Shephard girl's own score, on the other hand, was steadily rising and was now only a hair's breadth away from catching up with Nagisa despite a whole three months' worth of head start on the latter's part. Acquiring her was an unexpected but very welcome boon that, for once, came with almost no strings attached.

Of course, Yui was still half-expecting the other shoe to drop: the girl's performance and motivation was nothing short of exemplary and while she had the ego to match, she was staying surprisingly level-headed aside from the verbal abuse Yui heard she apparently subjected Nagisa to on a regular basis. Yet Nagisa hadn't complained to anyone except back at the girl; in fact, he had never talked to Yui at all. He just came, did his work as instructed, then left.

Did he remember after all?

She simultaneously hoped for yes and no. Yes because that'd spare her from having to tell him eventually – and no because it'd be better if he never found out.


Two hours later

"Do you have the report on Unit-00's repair status?"

"Yes, ma'am." – Maya handed over the tablet in her hands to Yui as the latter sat in her office. – "Nerve reconnection is complete. Blood circulation is stable, no further necrosis can be detected. Structural reconstruction of the neck vertebrae can begin within the week, although initial estimates about the quantity of salvaged bone tissue seem to have been correct."

...as inappropriate as it was, Yui still spared herself a morbid thought of "Whose neck are we talking about?" despite knowing the answer. Not that many of her subordinates knew she still, in fact, possessed a sense of humor. Granted, it was only second to Rei; even Yui found herself baffled at her daughter's choice of name for her cat until she found out it only flew over her head was because she was a biologist, not a physicist.

Of course, she wouldn't have the luxury of getting her head reattached if Rei had decided to squeeze even more. Not that she would ever dare ask the girl to be a guinea pig for testing what she was truly capable of, but she did have access to anatomical simulations and extrapolations that did not paint a pretty picture of what Rei was theoretically capable of in hand-to-hand combat if she was well and truly aiming to kill.

"Not enough for a full reconstruction?" – Yui noted upon perusing the tablet's contents.

"Not without structurally compromising the neck. It will still work, just with a smaller range of twist the panoramic display makes irrelevant anyway."

Which was why Yui had the Evangelions use their entire field of vision supplemented by panoramic cameras to feed visual data to the entry plug in the first place. Attempting to implement an eye tracking system that synced Rei's eye movements to Unit-00's eye by way of a prototype helmet frame with brow-mounted off-the-shelf eye tracking sensors borrowed from an early holographic GUI the AEL did not actually have the license to disassemble and reverse-engineer were... less than successful. The sheer complexity of the programming to translate between two different frames of reference involving different counts of eyeballs at both ends was one thing, but even at maximum sampling speed the entire system couldn't keep up with the speed of human microsaccades in real time, making the image so shaky and blurry that Rei was visibly sick from disorientation after only a few minutes.

It took the girl actually throwing up into the LCL and Yui seeing her looking out the car's side window at the Geofront's landscape on the way home to realize she was being an idiot by overcomplicating things. If the pilot can move their field of vision independently of the Evangelion's, there's no need for the Evangelion's eyes to move in the first place and no need for expensive and complex eye tracking tech either. Not that someone else on the development team hadn't already suggested that idea right from the beginning, Occam's Razor being what it is, Yui was just obstinate about being able to one-up that suggestion until reality proved her wrong. In the end, they settled on the best of both worlds: switching to a panoramic display and integrating the eye-tracking system into the entry plug seat for GUI use only.

"Indeed. How goes the unthawing of #0023?"

"Vital signs and biochemical readings are good. We should be able to perform the... operation soon."

After a few seconds of silence, Yui looked up to see her subordinate looking pensive. - "Something wrong?"

"Nothing, ma'am." – Maya replied with a shake of her head. – "It's just... is Lilith really okay with this? I know #0023 hasn't undergone Quickening, but it's still an Evangelion. I know I wouldn't be if this would've been done to a human, especially for this reason."

"She knows the necessity, as do Adam. This is the fastest option we have available to bring them both back to full operational capacity."

"I don't mean to second-guess you, ma'am, but this by itself won't be enough for Adam." – Maya pointed out. – "We're fortunate as it is that at least Unit-00 and Unit-01 lost opposite arms, so we won't need more than one transplant donor. But if we go ahead with the legs as well, it'll undo the very joint abrasion issue we fixed with his model."

"I know, but I had the MAGI rerun the simulations." – Yui replied. – "Evangelions are too heavy for a robotic prosthetic without a level of structural reinforcement that negatively affects mobility. not to mention how difficult it would be for mister Nagisa to learn how to walk without any tactile feedback from the feet. Proceed as planned for now."

"Yes, ma'am."

If Yui would've had any say in who was going to be her successor once she retired, Maya would've been at the top of her list. The girl might've been only slightly more than half of Yui's own age, but she was very bright and had a good sense of when to exercise initiative beyond what she was explicitly told and when to let things go and focus on more immediately pressing matters. Frankly, having her pull double-duty as an equipment technician as well was a waste of her abilities; she would've been better off getting experience as a research assistant and eventually project lead, the same way Yui did in her own career.

...or maybe it was the fact that Maya had a much stronger moral compass than Yui herself did and wouldn't go anywhere near to making the same mistakes.

Of course, that was all contingent on the company's executive board also seeing things Yui's way and so far Maya was a textbook case of flying under the radar. A pity, but at least she was still young and wasn't forced to learn molecular biology autodidactically from dust-eaten textbooks stolen from the abandoned campus of Tokyo University during the Occupation.

"I'd prefer if we could get started this week, but I likely won't be able to oversee it." – Yui continued, handling back the tablet. – "The Gehirn representative we're expecting is arriving tomorrow. I expect all sensitive data has been secured for now?"

Maya nodded. – "Yes, ma'am."

"I'm told he was involved in the development process of the Evangelions' armor and equipment, but until we find out the exact degree of said involvement, assume he's not authorized to know anything and direct all his requests to me, just to be safe."

Cooperation or not, Gehirn was still lead by her ex-husband and Yui knew full well what the man was truly capable of.

It was why she divorced him, after all.


Chapter completed on 22/05/23.

Original concept art for Civil Protection included one design with an ankle-length trenchcoat which didn't make it into the retail release, probably due to how difficult it would've been to convincingly animate and ragdoll such a model without excessive physics calculations that would've clogged down an average 2004-era PC. Hence my guess that they probably only wore those during winter.

Occam's Razor is a problem-solving principle that basically states "sometimes the simple solution is the better solution". The name originates from a medieval English philosopher who likened the idea to "shaving off" unnecessary assumptions (and thus complexity) from a dilemma on the way to finding the answer, but he wasn't the first one to come up with it; even ancient Greek and Roman philosophers predating the man by over a millennia mentioned the concept in their writings, so it's likely as old as philosophy itself. A related concept in modern engineering parlance is the KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Saccades are split-second movements the eye makes when refocusing from one point in one's field of vision to another. They are some of the fastest movements the eye is physically capable of (as in, in the vicinity of the entire eyeball turning a full 360 in about half a second) but the finer microsaccades are mostly subconscious and operate entirely on instinct; in fact, the brain doesn't even process visual input during a saccade, it just skips from before to after because the input in-between would be too blurry to be useful. I would imagine visual input lagging behind just enough to throw off the timing of this skipping and blur vision anyway would be something of a WTF moment for the brain that's simultaneously trying to process both lagging and non-lagging input on different areas of its field of vision, akin to motion sickness.