He was little more than a kid, the way he rocked back and forth reminding her of a child moaning about a scraped knee, not unlike one of the many she had cared for in a previous life that did not matter anymore.
But the cause of Kotaro Ikawa's ills was nothing quite so innocent. In fact, and despite the poor illumination in the room, she could still see the swollen red spot where the now discarded syringe had pierced through the man's skin, a little below his right ear.
The result of her own actions.
Unlike many of the others she had been instructed to dispatch, Kotaro Ikawa didn't have a direct connection to SEELE. He was the lowliest link in his chain of information, a nobody that had no way of knowing how the information he was selling, e-mail addresses of a sizable part of the NERV employee base, as well as the means to access them, were being used. He likely believed that he was just allowing for spam-mail and other online scams to annoy his co-workers, something that a young man of his talents probably found very shameful within the privacy of his own room. Unfortunately, property mortgages didn't discriminate based on university degrees, and the ones he had to pay were on the expensive side of the spectrum.
Not that his debts would be a cause of worry for Kotaro Ikawa anymore.
The rocking young man let out a pained whine, and just as his hands came up to weakly scratch at his scalp, the computer in the room let out a short, affirmative beep: the signal to let her know that the dissemination process had finished. With a sigh, the woman propped herself from the wall she had been resting against and walked closer to Kotaro.
"La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo," she spoke once she was standing on front of him, the man's lightless eyes turning to look at her, but at the same time look far beyond her.
"La…" he repeated in strangled gasps. "…Li-Lu… Le-Lo."
He had been a shy one, she remembered, the way that those same eyes had been so surprised at her flirty remarks during the end of their night shift telling her that he was very unused to women making passes at him. That and an unexpected caress had been all that she had needed to make him believe that he was going to get lucky that night; another clear indication that Kotaro Ikawa was much too young to be getting involved in the sort of mess he was.
But orders were orders, and no exceptions were to be made in subverting SEELE's information network. She knew that much.
"…Laputan Machine." The woman finally spoke, her words echoing inside the room like a death sentence.
In response, Kotaro Ikawa straightened in his seat, hands moving to cradle his head as his pupils expanded and dilated almost uncontrollably. He moaned and gurgled, teeth gnashing against one another and nostrils flaring as he appeared to struggle for breath…
…and then, in a moment, his entire body suddenly relaxed like a puppet that had had its strings cut.
"Good work, Agent. All readings are nominal," a familiar voice congratulated her. "Assuming direct control."
As soon as the words reached her ears, the female agent saw Kotaro's head snap to attention. She watched as the young man raised his right arm in the air and then rotated his hand so that it was facing backwards, before doing the same thing with the left. A few more similar movement exercises followed and then he began to speak, revealing all sorts of personal information first, prior to maintaining a conversation with himself and telling a bad joke to top it all off.
None of that was out of the young man's own volition, of course. She could see within the last glimmer of awareness in Kotaro's eyes a man despairing at what was happening to him. Soon, he would be unable to do even that whenever the nano-machines activated, and remember nothing at all outside of perfectly curated memories at the times where they were dormant. He would feel no need to do anything outside of the most base of routines, either, for ease of control and lessened risk of contamination.
Kotaro Ikawa was about to become a prisoner inside of his own body until the day when he was no longer necessary and discarded as such. The same horrifying fate that awaited every single one of SEELE's informants.
And she still couldn't stop thinking that he was little more than a kid.
"…I'm going out for a smoke, Arthur," the female agent turned towards the door, not wanting to watch the gruesome spectacle anymore. "Let me know when you're done so I can clean up."
"Of course, Agent," the monotone voice responded. "But before you leave, the latest regulations under article twenty-seven, paragraph eight, require me to ask whether you would prefer to have your likeness purged from the fabricated memories that we are to embed into the subject."
"New regulations?" the woman paused as told, turning back towards the room with an inquisitive look. "What's all that about?
"Indeed. A small faction of operatives have proclaimed their dissatisfaction with the measures sometimes required to lure their targets, and expressed their wish to ease their own minds by ensuring that the subjects remember nothing of their interactions together," Arthur detachedly explained. "The nature of this dilemma being something that we can easily alter with the means currently at our disposal, we have deemed their request acceptable. That being so, we ask you to please..."
'…Unbelievable,' the agent seethed to herself as Arthur droned on in the background, giving one last look at the shell of a man in the room. 'We are doing this… stuff, and whether the damn zombies remember bedding them is what they have an issue with?'
"It's fine, I don't care," she interrupted with an angry shake of her head, hurrying towards the exit. "At least let him have one last, nice, dream."
The veteran agent barely registered Arthur's clinical 'Acknowledged' as she cut ties with the room with more force than absolutely necessary. She quickly pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter and put one between her lips with a practised motion.
Within fifteen minutes, she had gone through three of the small stress-relievers. But much to her displeasure, the thin door proved unable to completely muffle the moans of the latest inmate inside.