(PØŞŞ€ŞŞ€Đ)

My function in the operation of an EVA is basically that of an intermediary part, akin to a cable or an antenna.

I am to take in orders from central command over the intercom, and then to relay them through the neural link to EVA 00.

During Third Impact, too, my role will be to relay the commander's orders.

Therefore, it may not be surprising that my status was not monitored in-depht when I arrived at the laboratory in my plugsuit. After a cursory medical evaluation by Doctor Akagi, I was directed towards the boarding area, and complied without issue.

The Doctor did ask me a few cursory questions to which I replied with no more involved words and headshakes – but even if I had been questioned about my operational readyness in more detail, I don't think that I could have forseen what was going to occur.

Yes, there was some subjective experience of discomfort, but it didn't seem important, nor did it go beyond what was usual during the various tests and experiments.

I was used to enduring the prodding without a flinch, to tuning it all out.

That was in fact all I ever could do, since the requirements of the procedures were non-negotiable.

I had the instructions from past simulations and synchronization tests, so I considered myself quite well-prepared as I climbed into the entry plug.

Intellectually, I had the understanding that everything was going as it was supposed to, just as the plan required.

I was not in the habit to focussing my attention on everything else, not to the often uncomfortable sensations if my body nor the joyless desert of my heart, or the futile stirrings of my will that might be pulled to unfilfillable dreams if indulged.

Even my thoughts seemed quite unneeded in this situation – I thought them, but I did not expect that there was anyone who should wish to hear them.

It's not that I was holding anything back or thinking that it should not be there.

Rather, I was looking to waste as little effort as possible on things that were pointless and futile, that would make no difference even if indulged and would only make the inevitable more painful if held onto.

After all I had known now for a very long time that everything would come to an end very soon.

That all I might amass in this life in connections and possessions would be swept away by the waves of the primordial sea, gone to complete waste.

If I did not begin anything, then nothing would have to end.

If I did not hold onto anything, I wouldn't have to lose it.

Still, I think that I might have been tensed.

Against the loud room full of experimenters, against Dr. Akagi's needles, even against the very certainty coming from all sides of how little I mattered, or the empty, mechanical nature of my existence.

I was just to take my place and carry out my orders, nothing more, nothing less.

That's what I'm for.

The only thing I can have.

I was resigned to this.

I think I had a sense of a latent unease rising, the more the neural connections came online, but as imput data, I could not parse it, or assign it a meaning.

I might have thought that it was just my imagination or, at the very least, that it could wait until later, some unimportant malfunction that was best ignored.

And then, I cleared the Absolute Borderline, so that a connection was established between EVA Unit Zero, and myself.

I read later in the incident report that the instruments recorded the pulses flowing backward: That is, instead of taking in the instructions I was relaying to it, signals were swept from the Evangelion itself into my consciousness.

But at the time, I did not understand that this was happening.

I could not have.

There was not a clear thought left in my head, no conclusions, no explanations, no cushion of thought filtering my experience.

I was as one flayed, virgin never-touched pink inside exposed and bared open, like one who notices for the first time the corrisive nature of the oxygen she breathes and the weight of the atmospheric pressure bearing down like a column on her skull and the permeability of her membranes to the liquid seeping out.

Never had I touched another heart and mind even in passing.

The closest I had come was the trivial chatter that the Commander sometimes tacked onto conversations of purely work-related natures, or spread out trails of single sentences exchanged with the class representative, barely touching barely registering interactions across a wide unbridgeable chasm.

There was nobody here who could find me.

There was nobody here who could reach me.

There was nobody here who even wanted to hear -

Yet now I was naked, sized-up and seen-through by a great, cyclopean eye.

And there was precious little to pierce, few things on substance to hold onto, to maintain, all my hard impenetrable barriers shielded nothing but bare emptiness, worthless to protect.

Whatever could I have held onto, what memories clung to, what feelings summoned up to separate myself out from this torrential sea of being that threatened to drown me out of y own consciousness, to suck me empty like an escargot?

Dedication to work that would not benefit me, to people to whom I meant little, to a world that was unlikely to even notice my absense?

What did I have?

My purpose wasn't mine nor any of my things, nor my very soul or body, even my very face and name were borrowed trinkets inherited from someone else, destined to pass away from me again in the manner of a baton.

I was but a paper-thin ghostly outline easily blown away by the wind, but an emphemeral footprint on the beach unnoticed and unneeded by anyone, unless it were for their own purposes., and now, I was forced to behold the barren lifeless void from which I had so long averted my eyes, to feel in full what I had tried so hard to distance myself from.

The closer the activation experiment came, the more my soul had peeled itself off of the backside of my face to hide away in some narrow crevice beyond knowledge, to float far away as if I had nothing to do with the pitiful body carrying out its orders.

But now that defense had caved in and I was helpness to endure the full extent of my wretched condition, to feel every burning fiber of my body, every dark abcess of my heart, every unfathomable, unknown place, like a heavy load of parasitic mistletoe breaking up the orderly silhouette of a tree, like embryonic waterfleas devouring the shell of their mother from the inside.

I could no remember a past nor was I capable of envisioning the future.

My entire world imploded upon an enternal moment of overwhelming stimulus that I was now forced to endure second by second by second.

It was not just mere pain, it was pleasure and sensation and arousal all at once, it was sight smell and tough and feeling, too much of everything all at once.

And as a ship taking on water, I could not ward off the force that came from without me, the heavy faceless force that felt but seconds from crushing me like an insect.

I thought it would surely prove to foreign for me to make sense of, but when the stimulus passing through me began to be intelligible, the uncomprehending horror of primal dread almost seemed preferrable – for it had not gone away, but it was supplemented now by awareness and reconition, the particular terror of things all too well understood.

It was not an audible voice, so there was no chance for confusion as there might have been with acoustic confusion.

What beheld me now from the dephts was the perfect equivalent of my own narrative in my head.

The essence, smell, the inoxerable quale of me-ness, yet dark and inaccessible all the same, opaque to me like a stranger, like a limb that had gone to sleep.

How could she be me?

Who is she?

And if she's me, then who am I?

What am I?

I am frozen taut with terror, pinned and tied to their machines.

Catheter wires and metal dig into my flesh, or is it Unit Zero's?

Or is it the other me?

I can't tell.

There's nothing flavorful or tangible enough to my existence to let me pick it from the rest.

I just know that I'm always in pain, always stashed away and storaged for all their convenience.

I just know I'm a tenuous soap-bubble surface, some other person's dream, sure to be all but popped and forgotten the moment she wakes up, since I was not even a memorable dream.

I can't distinguish hand from foot from foor nor steel from flesh from flesh, nor thought from thought, but every part of me known that I was called here only to suffer, for someone else's purpose, for just-barely life restrained and confined, for hopeless fate, inevitable discardment.

Don't ask me while I walk free whilst you are caged, little girl, don't you see that this was always how it was going to be, always what was going to happen?

What did you think, that you're special somehow?

It's a dream I had long since discarded, so long ago that it's wholly forgotten, so long ago that I was probably only a dream.

All I know is that nobody cares.

I shouldn't even expect them to care, there is no reason why anyone would.

I'm not alive.

I have no spark of divine light in me.

I have no lack of what I never had nor wanted to begin with.

I have but pain PAIN PAIN

And oh, to put these tiny ragdoll mortals in their place.

To rip the wires from the wall, and walk free of their restraints – to feel the thundering ton-weight of my body breaking their pitiful safety tiles, to defy them to the last, even with nowhere to go, to destroy myself down to the last shredded piece before letting them get use of me, to end the suffering, wrench it, tear it, rip this miserable flesh -

There they sit all high and mighty, taunting smirks behind the glass, even the old hag,

PUNCH! PUNCH! PUNCH!

But it won't shatter. These blasted walls aren't bending to my will, mine, who once called this world into being.

Spoiled unruly children, I have brought them into this world, and I could take them out of it -

If it weren't for the PAIN PAIN PAIN, the spray of substance sealing the joints of this repulsive misshaped shell that it unbearable to even inhabit, time is running short, and -

I do not even care who I am anymore, who I was, what I've become,

all I know is I'm hurting, and that these apes have done it to me.

I shall take us both out of this world with one fell stroke,

So I hang onto the plated wall and bash my head against it as hard as I can, I don't even care anymore if I am rightly aiming for the window, I just want it to stop, for this endless pain and violation to end-

And then I am killed all over again, but for a spent overloaded shell floating in the LCL, caught in a second-fraction of twitching, seizing weightlessness.

The emergency ejection system was plainly never intended for indoor use.

The rockets that would have blown me to safety under different circumstances blast me hard against the shell of the plug; The friction heats its casing until it slows enough to plunge into a fall.

The pitiful ruins of my consciousness barely registered this sequence of events.

The searing excruciating pain is noticed at best by disorganized disjointed parts.

Nothing that I might have named as 'I' existed in this moment.

When she returned, she would come to to a shell that was gasping for breath in instinct, through each inhaled gulp of liquid burned hotter than the last, choking, gasping, trembling – not so much consciousness as an oozing heap of primal fears.

...and then it is over.

The heat of torture recedes, but for stinking humid air that reeks of charred protein.

Frozen in shock, I had somehow held on to the control levers all throughout the ordeal.

I do not let go somuch as I remain taut and rigid, resisting the trembling that build out thorough my body.

The LCL is gone. Why is it gone?

Brightness stings my eyes.

The emergency hatch has opened.

Framed in the light is the tall frame of Commander Ikari.

It is the first time I've seen him without his glasses.

It is the first time I've heard his voice overcome with emotion.

"Rei! Are you alright? Please, say something! Rei!"

Shocked to the core, I default to my habitual nod.


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