The Ghost of Evangelion – Layer 04
A Ghost in the Shell/Neon Genesis Evangelion crossover
ESAGILA ACADEMY FOR YOUNG STUDENTS, July 31st, 2030
"Wait, Ayanami is still here?" someone said, with non-sarcastic astonishment. A quiet (this was the Literary Club, after all) whisper ran through the assembly of bibliophiles, occasionally breaking into actual speech. To them, this was a totally unexpected situation; Rei Ayanami had not attended a single club meeting, save the two first, since the beginning of the academic year, three-and-a-half months ago except possibly a few minutes each week to pick out a new book. This was, of course, discounting the interterm school break, a week-long token holdover from when the mid-July-to-late-August period of the year had been the warmest time of year, too warm to spend time inside a badly ventilated school building. In present day, that period of the year was much cooler, some would say uncomfortably so, and the Teachers Union had successfully pushed to shift the school year around in accordance with the new tides and times.
In fact, even though her name was on their official list of members (despite their best efforts), she had not been considered a member for the last three months.
"So, you've decided to finally attend, for once?" the Club President, one Upperclassman Jijuu Kishi, asked rhetorically, though Rei had no intention to let it stay rhetorical.
"By necessity," she answered flatly "I have to leave earlier than usual today." she continued cryptically; today was a special day, Commander Ikari had told her, and she would have to be at the ECCO GeoFront before the after-school clubs ended. Therefore, she would not have time to take the train back home and instead stayed at school until the Commander could pick her up. I should perhaps explain that part, Rei though to herself.
"Well then, Ayanami, why don't you tell us about the central themes in the books you've been reading lately? We haven't heard much from you," asked Nene Hosokawa, the head librarian, voice dripping with sarcasm.
Rei looked up from her book and considered the question.
"I am not certain I understand the exact symbolic nature of the, quote: 'Nipponese-eating lizards,' unquote, in this book." she said without a hint of interest, then flipped the page and returned to her reading.
As time passed, the sun hung lower and lower in the school-ground-facing classroom, and for each new page Rei read, the light from the window she sat next to crept further and further out towards the edges of the leaves. As she finished the last page (of the actual content; the advertisements went on for a few more pages) she spotted, from the corner of her eye, a jet-black German-produced car pull up to the gate of the Academy. Dutifully, she stood up and reached up for a new book, before approaching Hosokawa.
"Two books Ayanami?" Hosokawa asked as her eyes mechanically darted over the barcodes. "Oh, you're returning this one," she corrected herself as she took it from Rei's outstretched hand. She mumbled something about it being shockingly underdue, then reflexively looked upwards as she opened the browser that connected her to the Lit-Club's library database. "Well, in that case, only one book, Ayanami?" Hosokawa corrected herself, quizzically raising an eyebrow and smiling a little at the unexpected modesty as she handed the volume over.
This attitude was entirely typical in Rei's experience. There seemed to be something about librarians which made them plumb the depths of vitriol towards those people who removed books from the shelves and read them. No Ayanami, I can't let you borrow more than three books at once; other people might want to read a few of them, she had said on a previous occasion, the blue-haired girl recalled.
"Thank you," she said quietly, as she leapt towards the window and waved at the Commander. The genres and styles of these exact books… she had answered in return,…are inconsistent with the likes and enjoyed genres of all other Literary Club members, Miss Hosokawa.
Rei slipped the book down into her laptop bag and walked hurriedly out of the designated Lit-Club classroom and towards the stairs.'It's a matter of principle, Ayanami.' She was not alone in the corridor; her classmate, Temarei, was walking in the opposite direction, most likely with a Student Council errand.
'…it is a principle that I, exclusively, am not allowed to borrow more than three books?' she might have responded, in the would-have-beens of a long-past conversation. But she had not, and so would not ever. The time had passed.
"Oh, Ayanami!" Temarei said as they passed each other "I was meaning to ask you; will you join Hikari and me after school today?" Temarei lifted the blue hair-bangs from her own eyes, and smiled. Soon an imperfect measure of time, as the weather got colder, and the winter-uniforms' long sleeves would cover the seams in her arms leaving her hair as the only (ambiguous) indication of her partial cyberization.
"I cannot," Rei responded, and subtly tried to indicate that someone was waiting for her.
"Oh, don't be like that Ayanami!" Temarei said "I bet there's a really fun girl wrapped up in that shell of yours, just dying to get out!"
"…" was Rei's only response. (Or rather, a lack thereof, as silence is not audible.)
Commander Gendo Ikari stood, in his tailor-fit black suit, in the middle of the Esagilia Academy's schoolgrounds. South-west of him rested the large block-like building, a hollowed square brick with a smaller amputated, equally hollow wing stretching on southwards. He was flanked on one side by a large but narrow swimming hall, the track field and the sports fields, and on his other side by the Botany Club's enormous garden; a spectrum of natural (and occasionally unnatural, whenever the biology-inclined students got to buy seeds) colours imported from all over the world. If Yui Ikari had seen the garden, she would have found to be like out of her daydreams, designed and built according to her fragmented specifications. After all, it was. Gendo Ikari owned the school.
Once Rei had hurriedly reached the Commander, they walked over to his private car. Rei's eyes widened when the driver rolled down the reflective windows, revealing herself.
"Why is Captain Katsuragi driving?" she asked. It was a reasonable question.
"Well Rei, today is a big day," the Captain explained, as she electronically popped the rear doors "Everyone in Scientific and Tactical are positively excited about this!" she continued as she pulled the car onto the main road "Even Ritsuko…" she continued "Well, Rits… Rits gives me chances of success with too many zeroes, but I've known her for such a long time I can tell that she's excited too, even if she hides it behind pessimism." Understandably. "…besides, the Commander has an awesome car!" Misato continued, letting the engine roar as she waited at an intersection.
"But there are an infinite number of zeroes in any given number," said Rei. "How can there be too many?"
The Captain paused. "Too many zeroes after the decimal point, I mean," she corrected herself, recalling why she tried not to get into conversations with Rei.
"That is an interesting point. As the chance of success is a real number, the probability is incalculably large that it, too, contains aleph-zero zeroes after the..."
"Rei, it's a very small chance."
"Oh."
Rei was not relieved.
The Evangelion Unit-00 Prototype Unit, a genetically engineered nano-cyber-pharmaceutically augmented bioroid, to use the technical term, had been lowered into a vertical shaft of water. The white, rust-proof-painted shoulders and the white, wedge-like head, with its two giant lenses; a red frontal one and a green on the top, was above the water. It was surrounded by a floating walkway bolted to its shoulders. The head had been peeled open, like a skull split by a giant axe while redundant armour-plates slid away to give access to the artificial cerebellum. A cluster of cables coiled up from the brainstem and reached towards the giant cyberbrain-like titanium shell that contained an artificial neural network, suspended from the ceiling by a crane.
Rei watched as the ECCO technicians lowered the neurocomputer into Unit-00's shell. There was a loud hiss when pneumatic locks secured it to the vertebra and neck structure, almost deafening out Dr Akagi's bemoans for careful handling. One by one, the unfolded internal carbon-fiber armour-plates folding back in like a blossoming flower in reverse. Lastly, the face tilted back, lifting its gaze, though it has no such thing, Rei thought, upwards, until it stared right at her, uncannily.
Rei looked at her own reflection, a dark shade of her own paleness against the iris of the red eye, surrounded by the inscription of the optician who had made the prosthetic eye. Her proportions and angles were warped by the slight curvature, stretched over the darkness that allowed the reflection in the first place. What would she look like from the other end of that mirror, seen through a lens darkly?
She did not know.
Rei made her way to the white-on-white Entry Plug, which protruded from the neck of Unit-00. In its weird symbiosis with the Eva, it was just as likely that it also intruded, to complicate the terms. Rei climbed into the cylinder, a dark pool of clear LCL lit only by bluish LEDs. Without offering it a synapse of thought, she let the cold fluid seep into her lungs while she interfaced herself with the Prototype Unit.
Her thoughts turned inwards.
"…connecting the Outer Receptors" Dr Akagi said somewhere distant in the centre of Rei's mind, ending the introspection. She let go of her thoughts, and felt the sensory input flow into her, crossing the barriers between the two minds, where there should only have been one.
Rei remembered, she was walking towards her school. The tall buildings around her towered against the bright-white sky. All the colours were pale, washed out in the dull light. She reached an intersection and waited at the red light in a crowd. She wasn't the only student from her school there; the plain school uniform could be seen interspersed in the crowd, greyscale spots in a patternless background of colours. Wouldn't the fucking light change soon?
"Initiating Second Layer" 2nd Lt. Ibuki said.
The interactions of two cyberbrains are perhaps best represented a pair of fractal fields representing abstract mathematical calculations and transformations, each fractal layer revealing new complexities. It became almost pointless to imagine their interactions in only three dimensions, once the neural networks of pair of minds shot cubic packets of information back and forth between the sleep/wake centres of the brain and the ventral tegmental system. The visual space exploded hyperdimensionally between the two self-propagating electric fields, shaped to fit the neural networks they inhabited. Even when the functions of the human brain could be augmented with comprehensible mathematics and programming, and something as elusive as memories be converted to a standardized file, (ignoring the fact that there were at least two functionally indistinguishable but incompatible file systems) the brain as a whole remained as incomprehensible as it was when Egyptian priests dissolved it in wine and threw it away to preserve the shell of dead Egyptian kings.
Finally, the lights changed and she could cross. On each side of the intersection two crowds merged, joined, and almost seamlessly split as if they had never met or even interacted. A random stranger, though little is random, handed her a facial tissue wrapped in plastic, for no reason. Odd.
"Hey," a younger kid about Rei's age called "Mind if I hit on you?"
"Prepare for the Third Layer" Dr Akagi ordered. The flow of data between the two abstractions had increased in magnitude, and the effective distance between Rei's ghost and the other cyberbrain was shortening as predicted as the half-dive continued.
"Counting down to Absolute Borderline," Maya reported from her dive station, "Zero-point-nine, zero-point-eight, zer-"
She ignored the brat and shoved him out of the way. Sweet droplets scattered over her face and her sleeve felt moist. The little shit has spilled his soft-drink on her! She reached for the paper handkerchief events come into existence because they are prophesised and ripped the plastic. She was about to unfold it and clean her school uniform, but stopped. The facial tissue was covered in red paint or ink. The other side is overcrowded. The dead will have nowhere to go.
That's when everything went wrong.
"The dataflow is recursing!" Maya yelled.
While an accurate description of the events, Ritsuko realized that it was not an apt description; Zero-Zero was trashing spasmodically and pullet at its restraints. Heavy, slow movements in the water, but filled with momentum and force. The shoulder-bridge was crumpled like a thin sheet of aluminium foil. Underwater microphones screamed for a second, like a submarine being crushed by water pressure, until they were cut off by a technician.
The restraints held.
The armature they'd been welded to did not.
Unit-00's white arm tore hundreds of ceramic plates from the wall as it reached towards the observation module mounted to the wall. The black steel, bent out of shape by the force of the Eva, trailed behind like the strings of a puppet. Concrete dust fell by the kilos into the blue water, colouring it a dull grey.
It was just a bad joke, I must have been. In traditional Japanese fashion, she discarded the (untraditionally unused) facial tissue onto the street. She really had to get to school now. She was about to begin walking, but stopped. She could see herself standing in the middle of the road-crossing perpendicular to the one she had just crossed. Rei was crossing, or rather, not-crossing, on a red light. Cars ran past her, neither party acknowledging the other. What was she doing here? Rei spoke to nobody in particular, staring down at her feet, reciting without pause.
Weird.
"We can't abort the half-dive?" Ritsuko asked Aoba, herself digging through the explosion of data that emanated from the MAGI, concerning Unit-01.
"The Synchronization Control Software has locked up!" he responded, trying to manually force a shutdown.
A task made a lot more ardours by the process manager locking up the moment he selected any of the processes tied to Unit-00. His screen exploded with error messages, as did every other screen. The local MAGI terminal's memory stacks overflowed with recursive functions trying to model the complex (in both the common and mathematical meanings of the word) interactions of two noetic fields in the 3+ dimensions of our universe, currently limited to a simplified model of Euclidian-derived Minkowski space, trapped in a self-augmenting feedback loop.
It would be really bad for pretty much everyone if negative numbers were fed into the Feynman diagrams.
Or, more correctly and even more terrifying, derived from the rational solutions.
Unit-00 punched the giant, meter-thick armoured glass of the command module. Giant cracks manifested all over the many glass plates, saved from shattering inwards only by the outer (that is to say, inner room-wise, but on either side of the glass, so outer) layer of flexible, transparent plastic. The giant hybot's arms had not been designed to punch with, and only been fitted with thin armour plates that would soon break; the stress from the gigantic punches the Eva delivered too much. Unfortunately, the plastic would break first, being a lot weaker than steel.
Dr Akagi shattered a safety-glass case surrounding a large red button. It was big and it was obvious. It was the sort of button that begged through its very existence to be pushed hard without concern for what it really did. It was lined with a yellow-and-black diagonal pattern that screamed out to every enemy agent, bumbling fool and curious child that it should be pushed for no other reason that that it merely was there.
That was the point, after all. An ECCO technician missing half his brain and most of his limbs should still be able to push the button that cut power from the Eva. Preferably, even while blinded and on drugs. It was better to be safe than to never have the chance to be sorry.
Ritsuko pushed the button, as it begged her to, though she had never listened, and there was a quiet roar; four explosive lock bolts had detonated underwater, to push the Umbilical Cord away from the otherwise powerless Evangelion.
"Why hasn't it shut down?" Gendo Ikari demanded to know, when the Eva failed to power down. Even with the actual supply of power physically cut, the charge that remained in the Umbilical cord could keep Unit-00 powered for minutes.
Several minutes more than the armoured window and Ayanami's brain could hold; the few seconds of the Eva's internal capacitors were much gentler on both pilot and staff.
Rei, for once, screamed. She flailed and spasmed in her seat, bouncing off and drifting slowly until the nearly random direction of gravity within an equally spastic giant mecha pulled her back against the walls of the Entry Plug. She felt as if her head was about to rupture out from behind her right eyeball, bringing with it tortured grey matter. Her vision was clouded in red and black and she swallowed further screams when her left eyeball saw the explosion of blood from the right one.
On order from the Commander, who was already running down the stairs at a rate usually reserved for hyperactive children, the second set of explosive lock-bolts were detonated, and the Entry Plug ejected with solid-state rockets to force a shutdown. Rei felt the cyberlink-cables tear at her neural interface as she was thrown against the rapidly approaching Entry Plug wall, by her own inertia. There was a cracking sound.
It was followed by several more.
Gendo Ikari, meanwhile, was uncharacteristically pulling the 'open' switch of the door to the SynchTest chamber frantically while the light was still red. He would fire the idiot who hadn't made the drainage valves bigger, he would personally kick them out of whatever subsidiary they belong to, he would... No. He was angry, and afraid. He was overreacting. He was, however, going to dock their pay; they were emergency drainage valves, after all.
Finally the door swung open after one-too-many annoying beeps. He ran across the still-wet floor, not really caring whether he would slip or not. His walking became heavier as he approached the plug, and ejected LCL mixed with the water. The Entry Plug had been sucked away by the draining vortex, held against the grid that served as a filter, on the far end of the room. There were reddish clouds in the water, clearly blood pouring out. Lots of it. Please, Rei, no...
He burned his hands on the Entry Plug door's opening levers. Reflexively, he withdrew his hands only to try again, ignoring the burning feeling, sound and smell. As he recoiled his glasses fell from his face. Dr Akagi could go fuck herself for placing the solid-state rockets pointing towards the door. He did not have the patience or mood to care for her ego today.
At last, the Entry Plug hatch swung open, revealing Rei cradled face-down in a reddish-pink pool of LCL and blood.
"Rei!" Gendo yelled as he moved over to pull her head out "Rei!"
ESAGILA ACADEMY FOR YOUNG STUDENTS - Wednesday August 28th, 2030
It was oddly relieving to be back in school, Shinji Ikari thought. After 'Operation Tsubasa,' (a name that was mentally less evocative of the actual events than 'the second time this month I almost got killed by rampaging alien invaders') he had been subjected to a battery of cognitive tests, involving everything from his hand-eye coordination, pupil dilation, speech, skill in mathematics (there had been some worry until they checked his report-card and found that, yes, he was just poor at math) facial recognition, whatever they did through his neural interface and probably a lot of other tests he couldn't even remember. If he was pulled out of his comfortable bed, in the early hours of morning, even again, to answer grade-school questions concerning saccharine-cute anthropomorphized animals, he would end his life right there and then with the pen they'd given him, to escape the torturous pain and embarrassment. In the end, he'd practically begged Misato to put him back into school. It was that, or the nearest tall window.
Hah! I'm being rather suicidal today. Maybe they should have checked for depression, rather than 'psychic backlash,' and PTSD while they were at it… he thought sarcastically.
There were also the nightmares he'd had the first few days while still in pain, but he'd rather not think about them. According to the medical staff, stuff like that was pretty normal, and nothing to worry about.
But he was back in school, surprisingly undisturbed by his classmates. Rather than trying to crush him to death by grinding their bodies against him, or annoyingly ask him "Are you OK?" ad nauseam they had simply left him in peace to drown out the world around him with the music of relatively obscure composers and artist who'd had their fifteen minutes of fame (or were still bitterly awaiting it) in the shallow waters of the 'net. That is, he was, until Horaki and Temarei walked over to his desk; he had earlier tried to ignore the Class Rep once, much to the displeasure of his ears when she had yanked the earplugs out. In all fairness, he had deliberately ignored her, but she could at least have gotten his full attention less painfully.
"On behalf of the class," Horaki started "I'd like to thank you for saving us from the alien,"
"And on behalf of the rest of the school, I'd like to thank you too," Temarei continued.
That's not right… "Uh, if I hadn't almost landed on you," Shinji said "…I wouldn't have almost gotten you killed twice in the first place, so I really don't…"
"Hey, New Guy!" a loud voice interrupted him, or perhaps, interrupted Horaki's interruption. At least, she shot the interrupting party; Suzahara with Aide in tow, an indignant stare.
"I'm sorry," Shinji said back, not drawing quite as much ire from Horaki, despite the continued cycle of interruption "I'm really sorry! I didn't mean to get any of you caught up in the battle, I just…"
"Hey, don't apologize!" Toji interrupted once more (would it ever end?) "I'm the one who should apologize, for punching you – " Shinji didn't quite hear the next part, which was drowned out by Horaki's "You did what!?" but nonetheless " – uo for saving me and Kensuke!"
"Yeah, the JSDA held this mandatory seminar a few days ago that explained everything…" Kensuke began, stopping Shinji from making any further apologies "…well, everything they're willing to tell us civilians anyway, about your special situation,"
"You idiot!" Toji groaned to Kensuke "Now he's going to think I'm only apologizing because of that stupid seminar!"
"As opposed to; because your sister, a second-grader, verbally harassed you?" Kensuke retorted. Toji angrily groaned once more and then walked over to his desk as the teacher walked in. Immediately the lights were subdued and the whiteboard lit up, painted with the login screen of the school's network, courtesy of an overhead projector linked by WLAN to their teacher's cyberbrain. "Man, that one woman holding the seminar was hot!" Kensuke mumbled as he opened the lid of his laptop.
"Rise, bow!"
Some people might think that with the advent of cyberization and the consequential radical changes to all forms of body image, that society had changed; with a perfectly sculpted physique free of the genetically predispositioned failings of the biological bodies, bereft of the quirks of evolutionary biology (or if one were so inclined, the divine quirks of one's deity of choice) and the very real prospect of having a body designed to fit one's own self-image, that people in general and teenagers in particular, cared less for the exact development and contours of their (or perhaps, others') teenage bodies.
Those people were wrong. Evolutionary biology still cared. Its voice could not be silenced.
It could be told to look the other way though, such as by splitting the genders whenever any one of them would be wearing tight clothing that left a lot of skin exposed. Especially when that skin would also be wet, and glistening in the sun.
Or perhaps that was a Sisyphus-task, as evident by the all male students currently having a break from the basketball game staring in at the girls in swimming hall; placing the sports-fields next to the swimming hall, and then designing the latter out of large, clear panes of glass was somewhat counterproductive. The boys didn't particularly mind though. In fact, they quite enjoyed the opportunity.
"Man, all the girls have such great breasts," Toji noted in an exposed-skin-induced daze, heightened by the soft blue fabric that faintly accentuated the developing breasts. Shinji's gaze was somewhat less general.
Ayanami climbed out of the pool and into view. She loosened a white-and-blue floatation device from her right arm, a buoyant sleeve to compensate for the increase in weight from prosthetics. She looked so sad, where she stood alone, with nobody cheering at her when she swam, or any friends to talk to; all she did was to sit down alone on a bench with a towel.
"Hey, Shinji!" Toji yelled, having caught his indecent staring, through really there was nothing indecent about it since it was out of concern rather than lecherous lusts, Shinji told himself. Despite the fact that she was very pretty. "What are you staring so intently at?"
"No-no-nothing!" he objected.
"He's staring at Ayanami!" Kensuke joined in, "...and her silky thighs,"
"...or maybe Nakashima's giant tits, or Temarei's creamy legs?" Toji continued, the pair of minds as one. Shinji took advantage of the slip-up:
"What? Temarei's over there, playing baseball in the field. I can't have stared at her!" he said and pointed at the medium-to-heavily cyberized girls in their class, who, because they sank, did not participate in the swimming. They could perhaps have used larger versions of the floatation devices girls like Ayanami used, but that was seen as degrading and embarrassing. "...you're the one who has been looking in that direction, not me," he continued, motioning towards Kensuke.
"Oh," Toji began with a mischievous smile "...it's not the Student Council Rep he's been ogling..." to which Kensuke responded by turning a very deep shade of pink. "See that girl with the reddish-brown hair next in line to bat?" Toji said to Shinji and pointed at a girl standing in the batter's box. "Kensuke has a crush on her –" Kensuke protested "–just because she's named after an aircraft carrier,"
"Kongo-class battlecruiser," the boy with glasses corrected while pushing them back onto his nose "...and lots of girls in the school have the names of warships, not just Mana,"
"On a first-name basis already?" Shinji offered as his entry into the "make fun of Kensuke" communal activity "...you seem to know her really well," he said with a smirk. Kensuke just folded his arms and lifted his nose in the air with self-righteous indignation and a 'hmpf!'
Then everything was forgotten and forgiven as a girl with a full-conversion shell and a lack of full control batted a foul ball hard into Toji's chest. The baseball then bounced off the muscular boy and into Shinji's face, much to Kensuke's amusement. They all laughed.
Well, they all laughed once Toji was able to breathe again, and Shinji's world had stopped spinning.
A suspicious food-like odour hit Shinji with force as he opened the door to Misato's (and mine, he reminded himself) apartment. It was not particularly atrocious, (yet Shinji thought) although Misato had used too much onion again. Shinji merely opened the door to the balcony, letting the hot air rush out. It actually smelled good, in its own way. That won't last though… Shinji thought as he caught a small pile of brown packets of cyborg food-supplements in the corner of his eye.
"What's the occasion?" he asked; he was supposed to cook today, this was better food than Misato usually bought, and there was too much of it, even for two humans and an uplifted penguin. …is that more beer? The fridge is still half-full from her latest alcohol-raid!
"I've invited Ritsuko and Major Kusanagi over so we can get to know each other better, so I'm making something special," Misato explained. Special? It's unique! Your food's sheer lack of quality is unparalleled! It is also instant! "Besides, you cook all the time Shinji; I feel like a poor housemate, so I decided to make up for it."
I cook all the time on purpose. Making you feel bad enough about it to you do the laundry was just an added bene… I shouldn't think like that.
"Thank you," Shinji eventually said.
Much to his displeasure, Misato dropped the cyborg food packets right into the curry. A sickeningly sweet smell diffused throughout the room, a harbinger of unspeakable, incomprehensible tastes to come. He should probably do his homework on the balcony, even if it was rather cold outside. Penpen would undoubtedly join him, although being an uplifted penguin, he'd probably handle the cold better than Shinji.
[Shinji has mail]
READ
from: ..de
to: ..jp
subject: I'm Impressed!
Hello again, Third Child
I'm almost annoyed with you now. Both of the stupid Rakbu have attacked the facilities in Japan, with not a single one attacking Germany. That's not fair! Can't they understand that Germany is an important target too, since we developed the latest Evangelion unit? Maybe I should ask to be transferred to Japan.
Best regards,
Asuka Langley Soryu, Second Child and Pilot of Unit-02
Well, it certainly wouldn't bother Shinji to have someone a little more enthusiastic fight the Rakbu rather than him. Perhaps he should also reply to this one, rather than promising himself that he would some eventual tomorrow...
Shinji poured the thick sludge from its pot, onto Dr Akagi's plate of rice. Curry should probably not be that thick. In fact, until he had met Misato, Shinji did not think it possible tomake curry that thick, but now he had evidence to the contrary, which he hoped he could just forget about, gastronomic-scientific integrity be damned.
"Is this instant?" Dr Akagi asked. Ms Akagi, Shinji recalled that she insisted, since she wasn't working. Imagining that Dr/Ms Akagi had a life outside that of being a doctor of metacryptology, and that she could actually not wear a labcoat was something Shinji still had problems comprehending. "You still eat this junk? You have a salary now, you know!" the off-hours doctor complained.
"Hey, you're the guest; you have no right to complain!" Misato retorted equally impolite.
Ritsuko formed a ball of rice with her spoon and lifted it up through the curry, soaking it in the sauce, though, as Shinji, Ritsuko and Maj. Kusanagi noted, it was less soaking and more like lifting tasty lard that itself tried to eat and dissolve the rice.
'Tasty lard' was a presumptuous claim, to say the least.
"Misato cooked, didn't she? I can tell by the fact that we appear to have found a cheaper way to mass-produce combat-suitable non-Newtonian fluids," Ritsuko stated. Her spoon suddenly lay neatly on her plate, as if denying that she had eaten could somehow wash away the saccharine, oil-like taste. "…hasn't she heard about emulsifiers?" she mumbled under her breath.
"You can tell?" Misato asked while gobbling down her curry-beer-noodles. Has she not realized that the beer is the only reason she herself can eat that stuff? thought Shinji. "Well, dig in guys!" Misato said.
Yes, we should dig it down in the back yard… was the instant mental retort of three of the four people at the table.
"Ms Akagi, Maj. Kusanagi" Shinji leant over and whispered "Find some excuse to meet me in the kitchen; I have some day-old yakitori and frozen ostrich-gyudon that might interest you"
"I really can't taste what so bad about this," Maj. Kusanagi said as she shovelled rice and curry down with her chopsticks. She, like Misato and Ms Akagi, wore non-work clothes; a light blue loose-fitting t-shirt and dark blue baggy pants. Shinji supposed he shouldn't be surprised to see her like that, since he'd seen the same shell in anything from parkas to almost nothing, but all full-conversion cyborgs, even those with mass-production faces, always ended up with a sort of inseparable individuality tied to their ghost and shell. It was only natural to find it odd to not see her in the olive-green JSDA uniform.
All illusions of normality were interrupted by the horrified wail of a man-penguin decrying Misato's cooking. Sorry, Penpen. Misato insisted. I'll sneak you some tempura later…
"You know Shinji, you really ought to consider moving out," Ms Akagi broke the silence "You shouldn't let one bad roommate ruin your entire life."
Shinji looked away from the foaming aquatic avian: "It doesn't matter; I've grown used to it," Granted, 'used to it' in this case meant having his head filled with comments that measured red on the universal indicator, and a constant desire for Misato to grow up! but it was becoming second nature to him.
"He's right Ritsuko," the now-drunken Misato joined in "Never underestimate the natural ability of the human animal to adapt to its environment,"
"Humans have a greater tendency to alter their environments to suit themselves" Maj. Kusanagi noted with crossed arms, uncrossing them to take the occasional sip of canned beer "…and in the last forty years, themselves on a radical level"
"That's not an attribute exclusive to humans," Ms Akagi said while eating a ball of rice that hadn't been touched by the curry "many animals, best exemplified by the dam-building beaver, instinctively alter their environment to suit themselves"
"I remember reading an article about bobaddah bobaddah, yadga blah yadda yadda Dr Norden fuzjaimy boppobop fzink oh yeah ," Ms Akagi and Maj. Kusanagi said, or words to that effect, only to be broken off by Misato:
"…well, if Shinji tried to move, or build a beaver-dam in downtown Yugawara, for that matter –" Misato shook her beer can and disappointingly found it empty "Shinji, can I please have another one? Thank you!" she continued: "–he'd have to go through a mountain of red tape and angry desk-jockeys; he only just got his permanent security card, you know."
"Oh!" Dr Akagi exclaimed "I almost forgot again," she dug through her purse and withdrew a small plastic card "Shinji, I need a favour,"
"What is it?" he asked.
"This is Rei's new security card. I keep forgetting to give it to her, and her old one will be locked out tomorrow. Could you give it to her after school tomorrow?" Dr Akagi explained and passed him the card without waiting for a reply. Shinji was about to object, but then again he didn't really have anything against having an excuse to talk to her, did he? Shinji looked at the picture of Ayanami; there was no doubt it could only be her; she looked so sad, or rather, she looked so indifferent and in lack of happiness in a way that was saddening. She didn't really have any friends either, despite being quite pretty and smart, going by how accurately she answered questions their teachers posed, when and only when prompted.
Very pretty, in fact.
"What's the matter?" Misato said with a tone of voice that divided double-entendres by two and a look that turned suggestive comments into proclamations. Ritsuko looked at Shinji with a slightly raised eyebrow and a corner of her mouth raised in an amused smile. Maj. Kusanagi, well... She was a lot like Rei and if she had even stared at him, it had been momentary so that she could get back to drinking and eating. "You're staring at Rei's picture aren't you?" Misato continued.
"Wha-" Shinji exclaimed "I'm not!"
"Oh yes, you were, Shinji!" she teased.
"Was not," he objected, although the luminescent blush of his cheeks helped little. At least Ritsuko had derived all fun from the joke and returned to salvaging scraps of food from the assimilating curry, and Maj. Kusanagi was looking at Misato, not him, with an eyebrow raised as if asking 'are you for real?'
Misato laughed. "I think I embarrassed him," She laughed more behind her hand, the other occupied by her umpteenth can of beer that evening. I'm right here, damn it! Shinji thought It's not an witty aside when I can hear it! Also, it's not witty!
"Well, now you've got an excuse to go over to Rei's place," the teasing slob said with a smile "...don't you?" Why me? he asked himself. I already get this kind of crap from Toji and Kensuke concerning you daily. Next thing I know Ayanami will ask very overtly whether I have a crush on the Student Council Rep! he said, picking someone at random. That bore reiteration; random. Honestly.
Shinji resolutely sat down and whined angrily "Stop teasing me!" he said and glared at her. Misato just laughed.
"But I love teasing you," she said with a grin and the smell of alcohol on her breath, not that she didn't tease Shinji while sober. "...you go so ballistic!"
"...you certainly are a tease, aren't you?" Maj. Kusanagi offered, her tone as flat as a plane.
Now there were two blushing individuals in the room; luckily alcohol mends many faults.
"Apparently Misato isn't the only one to go ballistic..." Ms Akagi commented, to level the amount of embarrassment between her old room-mate and the Third Child, which until that point had been unfairly biased towards the younger of the two. That neither she herself, nor by consequence of being present, Maj. Kusanagi, had been embarrassed at allduring the evening, was irrelevant.
Maj. Kusanagi stared out through the window of Rei Ayanami's apartment. Beyond the windowsill, there were dozens of apartment buildings just like the one the blue-haired girl lived in, each an anonymous grey monolith of prosaic proportions, with a uniform pattern of dull windows in a gird strew across the façades. Smog from nearby industry and the thick lines of jammed cars along the high-way bridges drifted in through the narrow streets, like a poisonous flood. The purple-haired woman could hardly believe they let one of their pilots live in a dump like this.
That wasn't the real problem though. The real problem was that there were unhealthily many ways to kill Unit-00's only pilot while she was at home. Unhealthy for the pilot, that is; the only window to her tiny apartment opened directly into the main room and corridor, leaving a line-of-fire to the door and only escape route. The windowless bathroom could only be accessed by running through the aforementioned corridor. Which idiot thought this was a safe place? It didn't even have guards before the JSDA arrived. Anyone could have walked up and just shot her, because her door is broken!
With her nose almost against the glass of the window, Maj. Kusanagi could hear the reverberant hum of the Tachikoma on the other side, hanging from the smoggy grey façade and using its thorax and pod as an inhuman Tachikomatic, perhaps... shield against sniper fire and/or grenades. The optical cloak was active, re-rendering the depressing picture of undying grey buildings on a convex, radar-stealthed canvas with a brain of its own.
"You really live here?" she asked the teenage girl rhetorically.
"It is adequate," the girl answered and looked away from her screen.
"Then you won't mind that the JSDA are arranging for your transfer to somewhere more secure," she said to the indifferent girl.
"I don't mind," was the response, her red eyes reflecting the luminescent glow of the laptop screen. Her fingers moved awkwardly across the keyboard, unsynchronized with one hand rapid and inhumanly precise and the other jaggedly mechanical. Maj. Kusanagi leant in to look at Ayanami's work. The girl ceased typing and stared at her with open eyes. It was almost unnerving.
Maj. Kusanagi turned to leave. There were no hidden microphone or explosives, no breaches of security, and the target was not engaged in suicidally stupid activities like downloading uncensored infowarfare files.
"Miss Ayanami," she said as she reached for the door-handle "use static_castdouble(n) rather than (double) n. 'double' in parenthesis is just a holdover to ensure backwards compatibility. You shouldn't use it."
There were sounds of a chair being shuffled.
"..."
"Thank you,"
Shinji looked at Ayanami's security card as he let his PDA guide him to her apartment. It had taken some time to find out where she lived—her address had been impossible to get off the 'net. He'd found references to one 'Ayanami Rei' on the first search, but since she lived eight hours by shinkasen express train away in Kyosho, it couldn't be the 'First Child' as Dr Akagi occasionally called her. First, Second, Third... Is there a fourth? I'll ask Misato, he thought. There had been several more failed attempts at finding 'Ayanami Rei, Ashigarashimo' in public registers. He'd found nothing more than verification of her existence proving that she was not merely an elaborate joke set up by his father to torment him with a hunt for the metaphorical left-handed catcher's mitt I'm hanging out way to much with Kensuke...
Eventually he'd given up and asked the Class Rep, who thankfully didn't give him a hard time about why he wanted to know where she lived. The other half of the undividable pair, the Student Council Rep had been downright encouraging, smiling at him and telling him that Ayanami needed more friends.
Did she really live here?
His line of thought was broken when he passed Maj. Kusanagi at the entrance to Ayanami's apartment complex. ...couldn't she have delivered it? Then again, he now had an excuse to visit the apartment of a cute girl and even talk to her ...so never look a gift horse in the mouth, but beware of Greeks bearing gifts, yet if you do not enter the tigers cave, you will not catch its cub... argh! Proverbs are no help!
Apartment 402. The alarm bell didn't work. He tried it twice to verify. To his surprise, the door was not locked. As he swung the door open, a thick wad of dead-tree letters joined a heap of mail on the floor, falling from the mail slot. He called her name. No answer. He called again, slightly louder.
"I'm sorry to disturb. It's Shinji Ikari. I'm here to deliver your new security card. I'm coming in, OK?"
Still no response; she was probably not home. Then why is the door open? Odd He slipped out of his shoes and entered the corridor. He stared into the main living room. He'd never seen anything that lifeless—it was so empty even the cramped Japanese living standard seemed enormous; the walls were bare and grey, almost the same colour as the whitish floor. There was a letterbox window, halfway hidden behind blue curtains, letting light seep through to bleach the already colourless room.
If he had been presented with the room with no foreknowledge, he'd almost have guessed it was abandoned; it was almost devoid of personal belongings; no posters of famous idol singers, boybands or celebrities; there was a bookshelf though, filled with thick books that bore dry titles—none he recognized, at least, except for the schoolbooks. Her desk only held school stationary and an active laptop.
The room was as empty as Ayanami's circle of friends, to make a comparison, and about as telling as Ayanami herself. Well, she likes reading, he thought and looked at the piles of books scattered around, with small paper slips stuck between pages ...but I knew that already, as he'd occasionally seen her sitting on a bench during lunch breaks enveloped in a book.
So she's a girl, she doesn't talk much, and she likes books. I really don't know much about her, do I? What did I expect to find in her apartment? Proof to the contrary? Stupid.
Where should I leave this card so she can find it? Shinji asked himself. There was a change of clothes, Ayanami's school uniform, laid out neatly on her bed, next to the blood-soaked pillow. Ugh... There was an entire cardboard box of blood-soaked bandages, and the top of her refrigerator was littered with medication of some sort, including a popular brand of painkiller. He felt a tinge of guilt.
But what are the glasses doing here? Ayanami doesn't wear glasses, does she? He looked at them; large, almost rectangular halfrims, not quite browlines, but that was the limit of his glasses-vocabulary. He placed them in from of his eyes and looked through the cracked lenses; myopic. He tried to imagine her wearing them. He didn't know... 'cute' perhaps? Her eyes hidden behind the lenses—she'd look even colder...
Then he heard the sound of a door being closed. He smiled; if she had returned he could just hand the card to her and...
She was stark naked.
He was standing in Rei Ayanami's apartment, and she was naked.
He was also wearing her glasses, but that was a lesser worry.
"Ayanami, I..." he stammered "I...
She walked resolutely towards him and stretched out an arm—he anticipated a sharp pain in his face.
"I didn't mean..." he tried to apologize.
With one arm, she grabbed his shoulder hard. With the other, she took the glasses. Oh, so it's just the glass-
Then he slipped in something that made a cracking sound, like stepping on eggshells. They fell, awkwardly. His school bag snagged something, and he was thrown further off balance. There was a sharp pain to his face when his head struck her bare, wet skin on the way down. He wasn't really sure what was going on. Then they both hit the ground and lay slumped there. He looked right into her face.
She was beautiful.
Her red eyes were stunning, looking right back into his.
She cleared her throat.
"Are you going to mo-"
Then, the situation exploded. The sound of crashing glass filled his ear, and he could hear the thousand shards scatter down on Ayanami's desk.
"Stop right there, evil pervert!" a child's voice shouted. Shinji rolled off Ayanami Oh, god. I was holding her breast, wasn't I he was sure was going to be his last conscious thought. He stared right down the barrel of an urban-grey spider tank. It stood halfway through the broken window and fixed two of its three eyeballs on him. No, please... this was just embarrassing. "Don't move. I've got you right where I want you!" it continued.
Rei Ayanami got onto her feet and stared at the grey, cybernetic arachnid. Her eyebrows were lowered, a little. Still naked and wet, she walked over to her desk and lifted the dark blue curtains. With a decisive movement, she drew the curtains over the spider-tank, covering it. Then, and he could not believe this, she pushed at it, and it withdrew.
Its silhouette was still visible against the curtains. Shinji was fairly certain it still aimed at his head.
"What?" Ayanami asked him, breaking the new, painful silence.
"I... uh..." he stuttered, trying not to look as she got dressed. "I was asked to... Card. You card. I..."
Tried not to look. She was tying up a single bundle of long hair with a black hair band now. He looked away again, as she pulled the skirt of her school uniform on.
"...Dr Akagi asked me to, uh... I didn't mean to..."
The door slammed. She'd left.
Shinji Ikari walked at a steady pace a fixed distance from Rei Ayanami. He really didn't know how to apologize to her. 'I'm sorry I walked into your house, caught you naked, fell on you and then groped you. It wasn't my fault!' doesn't sound sincere enough. 'I'm really sorry. At least I didn't break your window.' beat *laugh* wouldn't even work on otherpeople! What to say, what to say?
And then there was the Tachikoma, protector of Miss Ayanami's dignity!, the giant urban-camouflaged spider-tank that followed him uncomfortably close. It scowled at him. It had no eyebrows, yet it scowled at him. It rolled on its tiny wheels, furtively sliding back and forth around him, as if he would suddenly veer off if it didn't keep both sides well guarded. He sighed.
Only five minutes to the metro. It'll only follow me for another five minutes. It can't fit through the train doors.
...though I know it will try.
He let out another sigh.
There was a regular staccato beat as the metro train-wagon's wheels hit the junctures between two rails at regular intervals. It was accompanied by the electric humming of the electric cables that ran alongside the railway in a chaotic and unpredictable pattern, yet at the same time constant and harmonic, like ambience. Rei flipped a page in her bookmore correctly, belonging to the School Library and borrowed, and let her eyes pan over the katanka.
But the Wizard was undoubtedly a machine. She had not yet had the opportunity to study it in detail, but after her experiences in all of King Coyote's other castles, she suspected that it, too, was just another Turing machine. Her study of the Cipherers' Market, and particularly of the rulebooks used by the cipherers to respond to messages, had taught her that for all its complexity, it too was nothing more than another Turing machine.
This was very interesting. She could, if she wanted, talk about this to the Literary Club, the next time there was a meeting; she could compare and contrast the author's views on the same subject matter over a three-year time period in two different works of literature. It is too dry and technical, she thought but that is not the object of the exercise. She would need to think about this.
She tried to read on, but the electric humming was becoming annoying. It was like small voices, constantly filling her head; broken fragments of conversation that was not being spoken Rei felt sweat form under her hair—she tried to concentrate on her book.
"Very funny," he said. "You snuck a zero divide past all of my defences."
The noise grew louder, like the rasping of silk paper. Electrified voices that reminded her of the noise in the Entry Plug.
She wished it would be quiet.
Rei swiped her security card through the card-reader at the entrance to the ECCO GeoFront. There was a buzz, a red light, and the door did not open. She swiped the card again, making sure that the magnetic line was on the right side against the card-reader. The door did still not open. She tried again. Dust on the reader? She swiped again. It still did not work. Puzzling.
"Here, try this," she heard the voice of Shinji Ikari say. He held out a security card bearing her name and image. She snatched it from his hand and swiped it. It worked.
She headed towards the long escalators that would bring her down to the Evangelion pens in Central Dogma. She could hear footsteps following her, probably belonging to Shinji Ikari, who would have passed the Security checkpoint moments after her. The footsteps ceased as he boarded the escalator she'd picked.
The escalator was long. She wished she hadn't deposited her book topside. Next time she would bring it; she'd seen the inside of the GeoFront more time than she could count, though she had a fairly good estimate of how many times it must have been, since she was 16 years old and couldn't remember it not being present as a daily occurrence. Of course, memory is imperfect.
"I'm sorry," she heard Shinji Ikari's voice say. What is he sorry about? Wearing the glasses? Unlikely.
"About what?" she asked flatly.
"I... uh..." he began. "...aren't you going to have a re-activation test today?" he finally asked. Why is he sorr—he changed subject, she realized.
"Yes," she answered.
"Aren't you scared, Ayanami?" he asked "Aren't you afraid of piloting Unit-Zero?"
"Why?" she asked. She could think of no reason she should be scared.
"Well, Misato told me you were hurt in an earlier test, so..." he said.
"Aren't you Commander Ikari's son?" she asked. Dr Akagi implies it, but the Commander has never referred to him as such, she remembered. Strange.
"Uh-huh," he replied
"Don't you trust your father's work?" she asked, keeping her tone quiet and neutral.
"No!" he shouted at her "Of course not! How can I ever trust him again?"
She turned around and faced him, entirely possible on an escalator. How can he not trust in his father? The Commander does many great things, she thought. It was an annoyingly selfish way of thinking, she realized, to judge people by single incidents in the past. It was...
Agitating.
She struck him across the face with her hand, with an audible 'slap'. Artificial pain ran up her arm as the fiber-optic skin was pressed against his face. She turned around and formed her hand to a fist around the pain. That was wrong, she thought. I overreacted. I will not let it happen again.
And my judgement may be clouded too, she said and clutched the broken glasses in the pocket of her school uniform.
Shinji sat in Unit-01, at a perpendicular angle to Unit-00, and half-slept through a battery of neural- and synchronization- tests. On order from Misato, he was trying to familiarize himself with the cluttered user-interface he was supposed to use, distributed between a tactile one and the one stuck inside his head. He still awoke in the middle of night scratching it to rash, trying to regain the sense of touch, or even pain in his neck.
Did you know, he said to an imaginary persona ...that the Eva has a sonar that activates when the head is submerged in water? That was a feature, according to Dr Akagi. Withoutpilot input? I've been killed twice in VR simulations because it gives my location away. Dr Akagi promises she's been working on a not!bug-fix, but honestly I think she'd been putting it off.
He keyed a radial menu that was faintly superimposed over his left field of view. Points of blue and red light danced around in his head as he rotated between the different options. Some of them made little sense. '[WEAPONS CONTROL]' doesn't make any sense, because Unit-01 doesn't have any weapons It could carry and use a giant rifle and a knife, but they were covered in another menu under '[MODULAR WEAPONS SYSTEM]' and '[EMERGENCY KNIFE] respectively, so why is there another menu for weapons the does nothing?
And what does '[GRUND-RAUM WAFFENSTEURSYSTEME]' mean? That's not Japanese. It's not even English!
'[ZOOM]' was rather easy to figure out though. He played around with the digital zoom, enlarging different parts of his view while he waited for Dr Akagi and Lt. Ibuki to finish toying around inside his head.
He could, for example, get a close-up of his father talking to Rei Ayanami, if he wanted. ...is Ayanami smiling? She was smiling with her entire face, eyebrows lifted high, and talking entire sentences, and his father was smiling back, and talking to her. ...can I get sound on this thing to? I think I saw an option for—what am I thinking? I'm not that desperate! Besides, it would be impolite to eavesdrop. That's an as good reason as any. Right.
Rei climbed into the Entry Plug of Unit-00 and connected the cyberlinks to her own neck. As she swallowed the LCL and let it pour into her lungs, he heard Dr Akagi order to connection of the Outer Receptors of the KIDs system. She felt a small tinge in her neck as her senses spread out like a vapour and inhabited the Evangelion.
She was sitting in the middle of a busy city intersection. She stared wide-eyed at the red 'Don't Walk' lights as cars passed her. She could feel her own heartbeat in her throat. She had nowhere to go in the thick stream of cars—none of them acknowledged her, almost hitting her as they passed. Nobody acknowledged her sitting there in her old school uniform. People, waiting for the green lights. So many people. Their colours washed out and they blended into each other, to faceless, anonymous shapes clad in—no ...made form black and smokey grey. She felt afraid, gasping at the total wrongness. She looked skywards and found herself trapped in the shadow of something terrible.
"Initiating Second Layer" 2nd Lt. Ibuki said.
She sat in a coffee shop and stared down at her shivering hand for ten minutes. Rei couldn't remember how she'd gotten out of the street, between the non-sentient automated cars. She tried to swallow, but her throat was too upset to let her. Her eyes widened and pupils dilated. She turned her head—nothing.
"Thank you!," someone said. She turned her head to the noise; school girls still in Lower Secondary school discussing boys—"Hey, don't you think he's pretty cute?" She turned her head and looked at the other patrons; people, just normal people, Rei thought. "How did it go with him?" their conversation continued. "Come on, you can tell us!"
Rei's thoughts returned to the coffee she'd bought I do not usually drink coffee. Then again this is not usual she reached her shaking hands towards the lid and tried to struggle it off; they always made the damn plastic—the lip popped off and the cup fell, spilling coffee over her table. She licked her finger to at least get one drop. I should clean this up, She tried to gather her thoughts before the coffee poured onto the floor. It was already dripping away, the holes forming shapes and—these shapes are unnatural Rei thought. They looked like... words: Fulfill the prophecy!
"W-What prophecy?" she yelled. The coffee-shop was empty. It was not empty the moment before. What was wrong with her?
"Counting down to Absolute Borderline," Maya reported from her dive station, "Zero-point-nine, zero-point-eight, zero-point-seven..."
Rei remembered, she was hyperventilating over a sink. She felt like she could throw up. "zero-point-six" she looked at... herself? in the mirror, her pupils like small pinheads and her hair frazzled. "What's going on?" she said to herself."Zero-point-five" "I usually have dinner with mom and dad—"wait, that thought is wrong? "...about now," the lights cut out, and Rei saw her pupils dilate to fill almost the entire iris "Wha—" "Zero point four" Her eyebrows were quivering in the mirror. She just wanted to go home. She just wanted to go home. "What's happening?"
A door squeaked behind her. She swallowed. "I—is there someone there?" she asked with an uneasy voice "Come on, I know you're there!" She walked towards the toilet stall."Zero-point-three" She was hyperventilating. She reached out an arm and fumbled towards the toilet stall door in the dark. She couldn't control her breathing anymore. She pushed the door open--
and there was no one there. Empty. "Zero-point-two..." The lights returned. Rei relaxed, and she let out a heavy breath. The door to the toilet stall closed and covered her in dark shadows. She jumped, span around, and could feel her heart jump again. Fulfil the prophecy! Fulfil the prophecy! Fulfil the prophecy! Fulfil the prophecy! Fulfil the prophecy! Fulfil the prophecy! Fulfil the prophecy! Fulfil the prophecy! Fulfil the prophecy! Fulfil the prophecy! Fulfil the prophecy! written in red paint all over the toilet stalls door. She screamed,yet did not. Rei stared into the blue dataspace of the Entry Plug, a snowcrashed fractal pattern of a sea of information. She looked down at the broken pair of glasses. Why did I bring those? she asked herself. They serve no purpose in the Entry Plug.
"Zero-point one and rising," she heard Maya Ibuki report "Borderline passed; Unit-Zero has been activated!"
"OK, everyone," Dr Ritsuko Akagi said over the intercom "Let's get the rest of this batch of tests done, and we might go home early tonight,"
Five hundred years ago, a man carried pen to paper and claimed that life was short, brutal and nasty.
To be specific, he claimed that the life of man was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short which is no less depressing. It might be a slight relief to know that Thomas Hobbes has specifically referred to the 'time of warre' and life without any security, and that 'short, brutal and nasty' was not a cynical commentary on the nature of human life itself, but rather a blanket statement about living in fear being much like being trapped in a war.
There are many words that could be used to describe the life of an ancient god that had spent the last 3 million years of eternity in a sentient embryonic state in an underground sea of information with no tangible or perceptible form.
Short is not one of them.
Nor, parenthetically, is human.
The Lyndon B. Johnson, a George Dewey-class aircraft carrier was en route from Pyongyang, Korea, where it had previously acted as 200,000 tons of deterrence against Chinese communist aggression, together with its sister ship, the George W. Bush. In true military style, American Empire Navy High Command had decided that the only suitable response to the failing of one George Dewey-class aircraft carrier against the first Rakbu was the deployment of twice as much firepower.
Since the George Dewey-class was the epitome of imperialistic gunboat diplomacy; a massive warship whose very continental presence could force smaller nations into surrender, already famous for having shot the second Rakbu out off the air, there might have been something to that strategy.
Sailing without sails after a brief stop in Wakanai, Hokkaido, the Lyndon B. Johnson maintained an airborne wing of helicopters and other recon aircraft. Unlike the other aircraft onboard the warship, these neither bore the insignia of the American Empire Navy, nor the American Empire Marine Corps, but instead of a special organization subordinate to the General of the Air Force only. The Captain of the Lyndon B. Johnson, Read Admiral Ornellas, wondered what blind idiot had picked the initialism of the organization, Defence:Extraterrestrial and Alien Threats, when it so easily turned into an unfortunate abbreviation. Why couldn't they have picked "FORCE: Extraterrestrial and Alien Threats" for a more positive impression, was what she wanted to ask.
Then again, if D.E.A.T. officer Captain Williams was anything to go by, they probably revelled in the raised eyebrows and slight drop of temperature that occurred whenever they presented their top secret, top priority orders with that foreboding header. The slight smirk he had whenever he gave orders, or rather, "advice" as to how to fight the alien invaders, and the way his government prescription shades not quite concealed his military-grade, inhuman optics were the telltale signs of an organization that enjoyed its power a little bit too much. What is he so smug about? The Anunnaki was defeated by the American Navy, not some Air Force subcommittee. Stuck-up landlubber flyboys with their heads in the air, thinking they're the alpha and omega of modern warfare.
And yes, he was insufferably smug when the 'Pattern BLUE'-classed report of alien activity within the Lyndon B. Johnson's operational range arrived.
Post-WWIII Imperial American doctrine and strategy was one of totally overwhelming firepower in the face of the enemy; why risk the lives of good American boys and girls fighting a 'Gentleman's war' on enemy terms, when you had one of the World's largest militaries and could just waltz right in, bomb your enemy back to the stone age are reduce their fighting power to nothing without breaking sweat?
Because of UN regulations, Japanese demands for caution, limited deployment pacts with China and the Russo-American Union, and all those other civilian pacifist regulations that proved Clemenceau wrong, that's why.
The grin on Rear Admiral Ornellas face was therefore wide when Cpt. Williams reported that the Third Rakbu had been detected in International Waters, where most of these regulations did not apply.
The total armament of the Lyndon B. Johnson and the Zumwalt-class destroyers that escorted it numbered over one hundred carrier-specialized fighters and bombers, and several dozen other aircraft for refuelling, anti-submarine warfare, recognisance or anti-satellite warfare. In addition to their Close-In-Weapons System, the not-so-innovatively-namedPhalanx II, the George Dewey-class carried enough anti-aircraft missiles, depth charges, cruise missiles, and tactical nuclear weapons alone to make landings under fire in Russian-held 'Vichy' Germany, should the need ever arise again.
On orders from the very sensible, in her opinion, Naval High Command, Rear Admiral Ornellas had deployed two-thirds of her entire air wing against the reflective octahedron. On 'advice' from Cpt. Williams, they were armed with armour-piercing missiles, rather than shrapnel, flechette and napalm, as previously 'suggested'
She'd thrown in a few cruise missiles with tactical nuclear warheads, as a personal gift.
They were opened first.
Cpt. Williams stood in the bridge and watched the first explosion turn the red evening sky turn white. A mushroom-shaped plume smoke and water rose up in an instant. Moments later, it was dispersed and recreated by a second bright flash.
Then there was a third flash.
The retaliatory shot cut the Lyndon B. Johnson in two.
The remaining halves collided as the propellers pushed the stern half against the aft. Steel crumpled under the pressure, bending like modelling clay. Nuclear waste and reactor-grade plutonium leaked out into the sea, boiling the water to steam. Oil leaked out and caught on fire. The aft half capsized, throwing the sailors on deck and some unscrambled A/F51s into the water. There was screaming for help among the men and women. Tiny, compared to the sinking capital ship, they swam frantically towards life-boats deployed by the Zumwalt-class destroyers. In their red, blue, yellow, purple, white and brown uniforms, the deck-crew held onto bleeding, howling and/or unconscious brothers-and-sisters-in-arms, kicking hard with their legs to keep their heads out of the water. Cpt. Williams tried to hold onto Ornellas, who had fallen through a window and landed next to him in the water. Her face was lined with cuts from the glass window and she was bleeding from her neural interface. From the way she'd landed it was probable she'd broken her neck. She'd live; she might never walk again. He wasn't a doctor, and passing that judgement now was the least of his priorities.
And in the distance, he could see the white glow of the Rakbu vaporizing the carrier air wing. Long beams of light reached out and vaporized pilots and their aircraft around them.
Their lives were short, brutal and nasty.
We truly are at war with the Rakbu, Cpt. Williams reflected.
"OK Shinji," Misato called over the cyberlink in Unit-01 "The target is a giant-" the signal cut off for a moment "'octahedron', eh... Do you know what an octahedron looks like?" Shinji nodded. Either because she had a visual feed Shinji didn't know about, or because she didn't particularly care, Misato continued "that's passing over Odawara right now. It'll be in Manazuru in a few moments, and it's headed straight at the GeoFront, so we've deployed you right into the middle of it,"
Shinji felt his stomach turn a little at the reminder of the railgun lift.
"We've got a report via the American Empire embassy that the Rakbu has previously engaged an AE carrier group, so we're co-operating with DEAT to clear out the details on its know capabilities. All we have now is that uses a long-ranged version of the beam the first Rakbu used, so make good use of the cover the fortified buildings provide you with," she continued.
Shinji looked at the projected viewscreen feed of the Entry Plug. He was holding the Eva-rifle to his shoulder and leant a giant white elbow on the roof a 10 storey building, while a taller building hid the rest of the Eva from view; Misato had taught him quite strictly that leaning out from cover was always better than peaking over the top. Had to do with his silhouette, or something.
A UAV-feed followed the sky-blue, almost shining giant Octahedron fly, or perhaps 'drift' or 'hover' were better words, over the cityscape, letting Shinji see the crystalline surface of the Rakbu. Compared to the hideous visage of the first Rakbu, or the disgusting, vermin-like appearance of the second, with its glowing tentacles, it looked almost harmless.
That's a bad attitude, and you know it, Shinji, he said to himself.
"Target should enter visual and firing-range in T minus 20 seconds," an ECCO Operator informed him in its mass-produced voice.
"T minus 15 seco—target has stopped moving," it reported both to the pilot of Unit-01, and to the GeoFront CIC, where its shell was housed. Reflexively, Cpt. Katsuragi turned her head towards it. "Stopped?"
"Correct, Captain Katsuragi. The target has stopped moving," it restated mindlessly.
"...wait," 2nd Lt. Aoba mumbled as he watched the thermal display projected onto his eyes. "There's a massive heat build-up in the target core!" he said as each of the Rakbu's eight triangular planes got a red-orange spot in the centre, where the distance to the core was shortest.
"What!?" Cpt. Katsuragi yelled. "What does that mean?"
Above ground, the Rakbu fired a white beam that ionized a tunnel of air. The beam struck a tall skyscraper in Manazuru. Then the same beam struck the building behind the skyscraper, then the building behind that one again. And a fourth building.
Then it left Manazuru and continued across Yugawara harbour into island above the GeoFront, where it hit another three buildings, leaving gaping holes with slagged edges and seeping liquid metal dripping down to the streets.
Then it left a gaping hole in Unit-01's ventral armour.
Shinji met insurmountable pain and predictably lost. As the LCL around him boiled, he recoiled in pain, reflexively kicking backwards in an unbalanced jump. The 40 metre giant fell backwards through an apartment complex. The 500 tons of Eva crashed into it, crumbling it like a sandcastle. Concrete and armoured steel fell to pieces like a ruptured bag building material. Dust and shrapnel scattered all over the streets.
Unit-01 continued falling backwards, stumbling on Shinji's reflexes and trying to regain its balance. Human balance, unfortunately, is not built to handle weight/height ratios that are off by a factor of 8000. Shinji felt himself roll backwards and land head-first against the bridge that connected the GeoFront island to Yugawara. Then everything went black.
[EMERGENCY LIFE SUPPORT ACTIVATED]