(Boredom)

There were no experiments scheduled for today.

I knew, for I had checked it in my notebook yesterday before going to bed.

NERV would not be requiring me today.

The preparations for the activation experiment were afoot, so Dr. Akagi and her team wished to thoroughly work out the quirks in the machinery before introducing a pilot.

Hence, I was not needed.

My only mission for today was to stay put and keep my physiological parts in tolerable repair, to stay where I was expected to be, in case I needed to be called, like a tool in its alotted box.

I was simply to move through time, until I would arrive at the point where I would be needed.

I awoke at the same time I always had, uninterrupted, every single day since I was moved to my quarters last year.

I took in the gloaming outside.

The cloying heat of the eternal summer that had been the state of affairs for my entire existence.

The staleness of the air, and the sweat clinging to the crevices of my limbs.

The heat was especially oppressive today.

I think I felt more tired than usual.

Still I didn't delay much in getting myself into the shower, which offered a slight relief at least.

I never quite closed the drawer containing my underclothes, since I would have to open it again in the end. Most of the pieces I owed were devoid of bright, exciting colors, which was how I preferred it.

After that, I reached for the uniform I had left on my lone chair yesterday, since it should still be good to be worn one more day.

Then, as every morning, I took my prescription with a glass of water.

It was unpleasant to swallow, but Dr. Akagi had insisted that they were absolutely indispensable for my continued functioning. Her instructions left very little wriggle room, and since it was an order, I followed it.

The Doctor had also made it very clear that taking them with water was absolutely required, after an instance where I neglected this resulting in an irritation of the esophagus.

It was her orders that I best take them with utmost regularity – much of her delicate handiwork had gone into maintaining my vessel, but there was a limit to what was physically possible.

I was to be careful not to strain it and to ensure that I kept up with its maintenance.

Existing was so troublesome.

Exhausting.

Unpleasant.

Every part of it is tiring.

I must wash this shell, feed it.

Ensure that it is considered properly covered by labyrinthine rules I don't fully understand.

No one explained to me, I just got scolded when Dr. Akagi thought I ought to have known to put on my garnments.

Dr. Akagi has many complaints of me.

Yet I must report to her if anything isn't functioning as it should.

I must endure being prodded and poked.

I must endure the stench of the LCL, the questions of the experimenters, the cold of NERV's spacious halls.

All of this, just to keep existing. Just to be available if they need me.

It is easier to bear when there is at least something meaningful to do.

That's when it's the easiest to hold on to the Commander's words about how we are helping to bring about some distant, glittering future, at least for others, if not by myself.

All the personel and every bit of machinery at NERV forms part of a purposeful, interlocking whole.

And though I am not certain if I should be considered machinery or personel, I am without doubt needed. I am useful. I am doing something which, as of right now, only 'Ayanami Rei' can do.

Playing a part – this is the closest that I come to being connected to anyone, to having a place, though I am an artificial creature that does not belong in this world.

But today, it is only for waiting.

I am only barely needed, yet I'm still aware.

I still have to be conscious for this day, to bear the influx of stimulation crashing against me through my senses...

Compared to the animated, energetic motions of the many humans around me, it seems like they barely gave me enough of a consciousness.

Compared to what is needed for my duties, I think they gave me too much.

I'm not certain that it was necessary for me to be aware of all that is happening, to feel it.

It was probably an undesired side product, an unavoidable consequence of giving me a nervous system that would be compatible with that of the EVAs.

The EVAs are modeled after humans, after all.

They may well be more akin to humans than I am.

I suppose it can't be helped. I was the first one created, though I am technically the second of the Ayanami series. The first, I'm told, perished a long time ago.

Something was transferred over from her, I've been told, to make me.

They salvaged her soul, or at least, they attempted it.

If she and I are both to be considered 'Ayanami Rei', then it would be correct to say that 'Ayanami Rei' has been dead for a long, long time now.

In books, creatures that are forcibly raised from the grave by unnatural means often long to return there.

I am aware that these are tales of fiction, of course, but I do believe that the authors' intuitions might have captured something truthful.

Still I wonder to which extent she is even me, if I can't recall the slightest thing about who she was, what she was like, or what she experienced. She seems as distant from my consciousness as any other stranger, though we must have had the same face.

The next time, I've been told, there will not be such a blank – all my experiences, my memories, chiefly my knowledge experience and my training for battle, is being stored now in every calibration session, and being impressed upon the remaining clones.

The chief aim of this is to one day use them as a part of an evangelion autopilot system, but if my current vessel is destroyed, one of them could be activated at any time to take my place, and she would get all my memories, even those of reading fiction books about the living dead.

I wonder if she would even notice that the replacement has happened.

I wonder if anyone would ever mark the difference between us enough to notice that I am gone.

It seems unlikely.

My classmates and the people at NERV and even the Commander – they all would speak to her exactly as if she were me.

Still, given the choice, I think I would prefer not to inflict all of this on the next 'Rei Ayanami'.

Better that she should never have being, never know suffering.

Sometimes, when it grows hard to endure what has to be done, I keep the thought in my mind that I am doing it for her sake. That I am sparing her.

If I make it all the way to the end, I think, just a few more months, then there will never have to be another.

I am not too hopeful about this prospect, however.

I am quite likely to get damaged a lot more often once the combat missions begin.

I'm only peripherally aware of what my classmates tend to discuss with each other.

If I pick up some of it by happenstance, it seems to me largely like meaningless drivel.

And yet they get so excited about it – animated, worked up, all kinds of activated.

I wonder if would even be capable of it, if I somehow figured out how to join in correctly.

There wouldn't be a point of course.

There's no reason for me to do it.

It is not part of my purpose.

And even if I did join in, I doubt that I could cherish it as they do.

I fail to understand why it even gives them pleasure.

I assume that this is proof that I am not like them.

Not meant to be here.

So I do not participate.

I watch, sometimes.
Most of the time, I tune them out.

They're loud.

So many, everyewhere.

So many noises bombarding my consciousness.

My limited capacity.

Most of the time, I do my best to ignore them.

I am not here to heed them.

I am here to sit and listen as the teacher talks, to perform the tasks assigned.

I have things to do.

And even those tasks are very low-priority, unimportant things.

I am here only for appearance.

I do what is asked to the bare minimum extent, because it was my order to participate, but I do not give it much weight.

My grades do not really matter if I will never live long enough to learn a profession.

If the established systems of jobs and economies will be rendered obsolete by instrumentality.

Much of the time, I am observing the sun falling through the trees outside, or the prattling of the rains.

Eternal, timeless things that have endured since long before schools, long before human beings even.

Yet even trees and rain are coming to an end with the advent of Third Impact.

Sometimes, though, I can't help but notice the others just by coincidence.

They gather in groups.

As they speak to each other, their faces change, and their voices waver.

As if each little set of them was enclosed in their own bubble, colored by their presence, a shared little world, a sphere of connection -

And I alone was left out of them all, not knowing how to enter.

Stark white, not knowing how to take on their colors.

Perhaps I am the only one seeing the world as it really is, undimmed by color.

Most likely, I am never going to see the same world as them.

Loose and unmoored and unconnected to anything.

They all have friends, families, pets, places to belong to.

They are all related to other humans.

I was born in a machine, unrelated to anyone.

The one singular dot that remains completely unconnected to the greater tree of life.

My classmates have more in common with animals, plants or even bacteria than they do with me.

Unliving as I am, lingering between life and death, I might as best have kinship with the cold viruses that sometimes float through this air.

Could I even get a cold?

The creatures might find no sustenance in my alien cells.

Which is probably for the best, as I'm not sure that my weakened shell could fight off an infection.

Sometimes I wonder if the Commander could be considered the closest I have to a family, since he is my creator. He does speak to me, most out of anyone.

It's a nice thought.

But I know better than to indulge it too far.

I know he speaks to me because I am important to the aims of NERV, for the EVAs, for the instrumentality project.

I would not make such a careless mistake as to try calling him 'father'.

I know he wouldn't welcome it; I do not need to see it confirmed.

But I prefer him. At least he speaks to me. At least he gave me a name.

It would not occur to me to call Dr. Akagi or Vice-Commander Fuyutsuki anything other than their ranks.

I did not understand at first, but I do now.

I read about it in books.

Humans have a natural repulsion towards things that resemble their shape, yet still remain different. It is an ancient instinct passed down from the days before the fruit of knowledge had fully ripened on its branch of the tree of life, when small monkeys fell prey to rabies.

Dr. Akagi is disgusted by me. She has more affection for her computer, which far better apes the speech of a person.

Maybe she thinks she could have built me better, if she had been involved in my creation from the beginning.

Programmers, I have read, are often frustrated when they have to maintain legacy code.

As for the vice commander, I think, is saddened.

I suppose it could be considered sad, something that resembled a person that could never be one.

That is treated as what it actually is.

I am not sure. I have little experience.

All I know about such sentiments, I know secondhand from books.

I understand it well in theory, but I cannot say that I know to apply it in practice, and in the end, it is not relevant to my work.

Is it sad that I am not a person? I can't say.

But if I had to guess I would say that it is not.

I can't say why being a person would be better.

A person would probably suffer more, have more needs that could get in the way of piloting.

So it is probably just right that I am not a person.

They created me, after all, because a person could not pilot EVA – or at least, that is what was thought. The science advanced, and now it is believed that perhaps my classmates could be pilots.

But I think it is better if they don't.

After all, that's what I am for.

Technology is meant to ease the lives of people.

To do difficult labor so that people do not have to.

I would not want my classmates to bear the brunt of piloting while also being people.

Even if they are repulsed by me.

Yet somehow, the Commander is not.

I still do not understand why that is.

Though they can be repulsed, people also have the opposite tendency, to see things that resemble them as more like them than they are. To speak to pets and machines as of they were people.

But I do not think this is the case with the Commander.

Among the NERV staff he is considered a pragmatic, determined person with a strong stomach, not someone who is sentimental.

So it might rather be that he prefers the company of machines to people.

That he endures my presence better than others precisely because he is not given to sentiment.

In any case,

I have no family.

I am as alien to my classmates as the creatures I was made to fight off.

Yet I am not completely irrelevant to them because of EVA.

Through piloting, and in carrying out the project, I might in fact have a larger impact on the course of their lives than any other person, though they may not know it.

When the battles begin, they will not know that it is me fighting.

Yet through EVA, we are connected.

Since we have nothing in common, it is only natural that we do not speak much.

They know nothing of NERV;

I know nothing of such things as they spend their time with.

Most of the time, I do not adress my classmates, and they do not adress me, which is precisely what suits me, all things considered.

The one exception might be Horaki-san, the class representative – naturally, as it is her duty to inform all the students of important going-ons at the school, to hand out forms and keep track of classroom duties.

"Ah, Ayanami-san! Just a second. Last Friday when you were absent, they gave us back our math tests – don't worry, yours was a B+ - so, congratulations~ Just get your guardian to sign it, ok?"

She handed me the sheet.

I folded it up and placed it into my bag.

Since this concluded the apparent business, I expected her to leave and move on, but for some reason, she lingered, as if she were were still waiting for something.

"Excuse me, do you need something?"

Those were the only audible works I would speak that entire day.

The class representative appeared a little confused, insofar as I could tell.

"Eh- no no, it's fine. Sorry to bother you."

And with that, she left.

I don't understand why she apologized.

I was left wondering if I did anything wrong.

If I did, it was not my intention – in truth, I appreciate Horaki-san. She attents to her duties without fail and makes an effort to treat me no different than she would the other students.

Of course, that is because she doesn't know what I am, and because she is following social convention, but like the others, she must sense how inept I am at resembling one of their number – yet it seems that because of her sense of duty, she is trying not to let it show.

When I first joined this class, she made it a point to try speaking to me and invite me to join in the activities of herself and her friends.

I declined, of course, as it had nothing to do with my duties.

I doubt that I would be more than a bother and besides, it wouldn't bring me the satisfaction that it does to them.

But when I kept declining, she one day asked me if I didn't like her or if she was getting on my nerves, even though I had never said anything to that effect.

I couldn't even say what I might have done to lead her to think that.

Since it wasn't true, I denied it of course, but after that, she didn't try inviting me anymore.

It's not that I want her to invite me, but I wonder if I had left her with the wrong impression.

It was one of the experiences through which I learned that my ability to express myself in such a way that others understand is very limited.

The truth is that, though my opinion on the matter is not too strong one way or another, my thoughts about Hokari-san are closer to appreciation than irritation.

Though I had never thought to inform her of this in all the time that I shared a classroom with her.

I didn't see why it would matter, why she might want to hear that, or indeed why there would be a point in a tool such as myself having an opinion at all, if it would not influence anything that happens.

Opinions are needed by those who might have to make choices, and I had none.

I sometimes think that, if I was a human, I might have liked to go to town with Horaki-san and her friends, but I can only speculate. It is rather hard to imagine something that you have never experienced.

...

In the end, I always come back to my lodgings.

Back to quiet, back to peace, or as close to that as I can get while my blood carries on its feeble pumping.

I can hear it in my ears sometimes, or feel it, depending on how I lay down.

If I exert myself in training, I can feel it pounding in my chest.

It is most uncomfortable, but it can be tolerated, for now, for a while.

I have been offered the use of an old sofa that Dr. Akagi's grandmother no longer needed, but I declined it.

My bed alone serves both functions just fine.

I lie there and watch the ceiling.

The lamp I scarcely use – most of the time, I keep the curtains drawn to escape the daytime brightness.

I rest my face on my hands.

I try to experience as little as possible, to shut out the world as best as I can.

When I become sore of lying on my front, I turn around and read a book.

When I can no longer ignore the sensations of hunger and thirst enough to concentrate, I have some food pills and one of those canned protein shakes.

I use one with as little strong flavors as possible.

The soap I use to wash myself, too, has as little strong scents as I can contrive.

I throw the can onto the floor, to bother with some other time.

It is not hard for it to pass out of my attention.

On days when I am less tired maybe I stuff it back into the plastic shopping bag I bought it with.

When I am done, I go back to my book.

When it has gone dark, I turn on my reading lamp.

When I am done reading, I change into my evening clothes, and lay down without delay.

I do not reflect or linger in thought.

There is nothing to reflect about.

When the clock ticks down to midnight, I will be one day closer to the time when it will all be over.

To the day when I will leave these lodgings for the very last time.

...

There should have been very little about that day that would have been worth recording in one's memory.

I did remember it, however, because it was the day before everything changed.