(Foreboding)
Not long ago, the Dummy Plug had been an entirely theoretical possibility of which it was not at all clear that it was ever going to manifest in reality.
At the time that Sachiel first invaded, no one had been taking its eventual completion for granted: That is precisely why further human pilot candidates had been gathered into the class of students that I was a part of.
For sure, the creation of artificial souls had been under discussion since the time of NERV's predecessor organizations, tracing its history to GEHIRN, and the Artificial Evolution Laboratory before that. The concept had been under discussion for as long as the EVAs themselves, but in the end both the animation of the EVAs and that of artificial pilots such as myself ended up being resolved by other means when the results did not pan out in time.
Some of the resulting research had contributed to designing the interface of the EVAs, but thus far, the only product that even came near to the scope of the researchers' initial ambitions was the Magi-Supercomputer, and even this was still miles away from a true artificial soul.
As far as I understand it, they simply ended up copying the personality of a senior researcher into the machines, rather than truly creating anything from scratch.
This achievement had still of course left the newly formed NERV with a powerful new tool which had since proven indispensable to all of its pursuits, as well as a proof of concept for what was now the state of the art method for feeding a pilot's thoughts into an EVA's neural circuits, but since then, the work on the real thing had stalled, ending up relegated to what was known in engineering circles as 'vaporware' or 'development hell'.
When I and the other clones inside the tank were first grown from samples taken from my original, it was considered that we might all be deployed at once as artificial soldiers, even manning the mass production EVAs if or when they were finished, but in the end, they had never succeeded to activating more than one at once, constrained by the workaround that was immediately decided on after the matter of man-made souls was put on ice.
If there had been no real progress made before the day of Third Impact, it would not have surprised anybody – but now, it would seem, the long fallow period had been interrupted by a recent series of breakthroughs.
At first, I had caught onto this between various snippets of discussion – passing remarks between Commander Ikari and either Dr. Akagi or Sub-Commander Fuyutsuki as they attended to such varied duties of theirs as I was sometimes an accessory to.
But eventually, it was perhaps unavoidable that I would lay eyes upon the results myself, as one of the very few people who were permitted comings and goings inside the halls of Terminal Dogma.
I was to see Dr. Akagi for my usual injection, and told to passing to find her in a different place than usual – not the little dressing cabin near the Dummy Plug Plant, nor the room I was created in, but something nearby, also part of the third annex, that had served one function or another long ago and since been left abandoned as it was, some of the surfaces still stained by whatever their last use had been.
When I was smaller, I think I'd wandered in there a couple of times, while I was waiting to be called to the next experiment.
Now, it seems the Doctor had set up shop there, to repurpose the facility for some deeds that could not be risked to leave the confines of Terminal Dogma.
I was probably told to come here out of convenience, so that she would not have to interrupt her work more than strictly necessary.
She was wearing soiled rubber gloved when she let me in, offhandedly gesturing for me to sit down on one of the work benches.
There was not much energy in the motion and her face, either, which suggested that she must have been at it for a considerable time.
Her tired eyes had drawn into a squint in the light from the hallway behind me.
The old lab itself was dimly illuminated, save for a few bright white lamps positioned right next to the work benches.
Some of them still held old dusty laboratory gear or various machines for analyzing samples.
I think I spotted a DNA sequencer and a chromatograph.
Both had probably gone unused for years.
The bench to which I was ushered, however, was empty, save for the little metal platter where Dr. Akagi had already laid out the syringes and the solutions that she was to squeeze into my body.
Perhaps she was going to use it for something else once I was done sitting on it – many of the other work tables were occupied, covered in intermediate products of her labors thus far – whatever stained her gloves.
She stripped them off and replaced them with a fresh set from a cardboard box, before coming to pick up the syringe once I was settled in place.
This one work table alone had its corresponding light switched on, but even in the dimness, one could make out something of the Doctor's previous handiwork.
Most of it was covered in tarp, some, given up for lost, zipped in body bags, but those projects that were still in progress or, simply had not been packed up yet, might be guessed at by their outlines.
Dr. Akagi must have carved them up right this morning, they could not have been here for long. For all that the room reeked of LCL, there was so smell of corpse.
In some cases, glimpses of pale hair or ashen flesh wee poking out beneath their hasty makeshift covers. In the twilight, I think I saw what might have been the outline of a severed thigh, with its bone protruding a bit from the soft flesh around it.
This was not in the least surprising.
It should not have been, it could not be:
I had known all along what creating the Dummy Plug would entail, since I was part of the process after all. I had known that Doctor Akagi would have been working on it in here.
I was also aware that, if, by random chance, any of the ones on these benches had been picked to be activated in my stead, it could be her sitting here in my place, enduring the needle's sting, while I could be there, opened on the bench, on still floating in the tank.
I did not know if I felt sorry for them, seeing them taken apart, or if maybe, I envied them – maybe they'd felt pain, or even a basic instinctual fear – they should, if their nervous systems were working.
But they had no understanding, no true concept of themselves.
They had never been made distinct from the un-living matter that we came from, so they had never truly suffered.
As I eyed them, trying not to look at the needle in my arm, I noticed, with the slightest start, that one of them wasn't even dead:
She was encased in a tank of LCL with a clear front, so that I could make out a shadow of her features. It was not a particularly large tank, though there were various tubes and cabled connected to it – The clone had been reduced down to a compact size, severed from shortly below the shoulders down, and I could see a multitude of cables wrapping around and joining with her spine. There were cabled protruding from the back of her skull, too, crudely jammed into her head without much concern for proper sutures – it was assumed that the LCL would preserve her.
You would think that no one could see their own spine while still living, yet I knew that, if I was to be cut open, my vertebrae would probably curve exactly like that.
Even so, I could mark the spasming of what must be her heart, a twitching first-sized mass – the size of my first, really quite frail and small.
Even still, it was beating.
She wasn't dead yet, that is, if she had ever been alive to begin with.
...poor thing.
Then, a more sensible thought:
I realized that I was looking at a proof of concept.
The most primitive form of what might be considered an elementary dummy plug.
Of course, this contruct would likely never see use in an actual EVA: It was a preliminary contraption which Dr. Akagi had probably assembled by triad and error from basic machine parts, maybe not even the final attempt based on which she would soon draft the schematics for mass production.
This clone would soon be destroyed, disposed of as organic waste – or released from whatever primitive level of suffering she was capable of: It all depends how you look at it.
I suppose we weren't too different from the clamps and machine parts, as far as Dr. Akagi was concerned, neither me nor the others.
But in seeing this I realized that, if the work had already progressed this far, we might actually see the completion of the Dummy System before the advent of the promised day.
This should have been a good thing; Once, I may have accounted it as such without further thinking. – the Commander had always pushed for this project to be pursued further.
He considered it the ultimate insurance, another means to cut out uncertainty to circumvent the fragility and lacking reliability of flesh and blood pilots. If it could be completed, that is.
There was no telling how soon that may be. At least, it might mean that Horaki-san and the others in our class would never have to be pilots.
Yet some strain of sourness remained as a bad taste in my mouth, an irksome astringency, neither clearly bad or good.
The day on which Commander Ikari would no longer need me might be coming closer.
I might be spared further pain. I might be as useless as any other obsolete technology.
In a way, if the creation and imbuing of an artificial souls were proven possible after all, that would imply that I had been given a soul in vain, that there had never been a reason for all of my present clashing components to be forced together though they were so unfit to exist in conjuction.
Up until now, it was not inconceivable that Ikari-kun and the Second could have defeated the angels on their own – it may have been somewhat harder, but not impossible.
Had I known suffering for no reason?
Was there never a reason for me to know pain, or exhaustion, or hopelessness, and now, even all this confusion and futility?
Perhaps not. It may be that the Commander may still have required this soul inside me to be housed in a vessel that would be amenable to human communication, if only for his subversion of SEELE's plans for third impact.
Whatever may be the truth of this, Dr. Akagi didn't see it fit to discuss it with me, or to even inform me about how the Dummy Plug project was progressing. She didn't seem to think that it might concern me. After all, I'd doubt she'd told the cut up clones what was about to become of them, or for what purpose it was that they were to be butchered. I suppose she expected me to just come whenever I would be called upon to be used. And I surely would.
She didn't think to say anything to me at all, she didn't say a word, until she finally pulled the needle from my arm and taped a piece of gauze to the resultant red dots:
"Rei. You may go now."
I think I was relieved, when I left the room.
Like I could finally let out a breath that I didn't remember holding.
I wondered if Dr. Akagi was just about to carve up another clone.
The possibility occurred to me, that she might idly find herself wishing to do the same to me, whenever my existence strained her patience.
That it might not look altogether that different, if she would end up doing my autopsy to find what exactly had killed me, if my paltry flesh were to give out on me before the promised day, if only to try and avoid similar issues with the next model.
I heard the sound of my steps hurrying up.
For some reason, I found I didn't want to stay down there no longer.
…
Though a considerable feat that no doubt represented the cumulation of a great many scientific advances, the prototype I had seen was only the bare skeleton of this undertaking, the absolute minimum requirement.
Through Dr. Akagi's work, we had in theory obtained the capability to link a Dummy Core with an EVA in terms of simple signal transduction, but this would avail little if the Dummy could not interpret the EVA's sensory input or convey any meaningful directions.
It would need to mimic the presence of a pilot well enough to fool the EVA into accepting it.
Perhaps, you might find it strange that the EVAs could be fooled, after all, I knew more than anyone that they were not simple machines, at least not any more so than other complex organisms. The EVAs, though the offspring of gods, were, in a manner of speaking, humans.
I had spoken to EVA 00, if not communicated in a deeper sense that did away with the imprecision of language.
But in truth, it's exactly because they are essentially human that they can be fooled.
Humans are fooled all the time, including their innermost circuitry for bonding and emotion – which was precisely what the EVAs run on.
See a plain paper printout of a picture depicting an attractive person, and a human will be aroused. Read an article or blog post about a person who is suffering, and your heart might be moved, even if you've never truly seen that person with your own eyes and could not, in fact, tell for certain that they were not completely fictional – your response, at last, would be very, very real.
Nowadays, humans were routinely fooled in such a manner by AI for the purposes of information warfare – perhaps, that might also be considered an indictment on the formulaic nature of political speech.
Of course, faking the presence of an entire soul was rather more challenging than constructing a simple chatbot that could carry on a convincing dialogue, but NERV's means were rather more advanced than the kind of simple neural net that any computer scientist could assemble on short notice nowadays.
In the end, a pilots' neural impulses were input as a series of signals, ones and zeros passing through computer parts, and highly regular patterns at that, complex as though they might be.
As long as it has some regularity there should at least exist the possibility to crudely model it with basic mathematics.
Knowing what I did about the usual pace of advancement at NERV and my own, if modest reading on the subject, I did not doubt that it could be done, at least for some crude enough workaround that would serve the Commander's purposes.
Still, I did not expect for the work on the Dummies to proceed to the next stage as quickly as it did.
On my last visit to NERV, I heard many of the workers discussing Commander Ikari's stringent demands – he wanted extensive data collection on the simulation bodies, as precise as possible, and he wanted the Magi thoroughly checked first to ensure that both the data collection and its subsequent analysis would be performed at peak efficiency.
Apparently, he'd just come in and declared this, confronting his underlings with a great deal of goals and demands that they now grumbled about – though it was a passive, resigned grumbling, reflecting what they had come to expect from their superior.
Most of the workers barely had the faintest idea of what the Dummy Plug really was – they would only have heard some nebulous talk about a hypothetical autopilot system.
Many of them might welcome it, finding it more humane than to use young pilots – to them it was, perhaps, something that promised to absolve them of their sins, so they did not question too much where it came from.
Of course, the results of the experiment would have other uses besides just serving as raw training data for the Dummy Plug – the more was understood about the process of interfacing and synchronization, the more the EVAs mechanical hardware and software could be optimized to support, but also control it.
Still I got the impression that these orders must have been given straight after Dr. Akagi had put some favorable result on top of Commander Ikari's Desk -
He seemed surprisingly fixated on the Dummy Plug, far more so than he had been on advances regarding artificial S²-Engines or replications of the holy spear, which he had thus far considered unimportant and tangential to what would truly decide the outcome.
I suppose he had created and worked on the EVAs because he desired their power. He was not a trusting man, and one who believed strongly in self-reliance – He would not rely on anyone, or leave anything up to chance, if he could also keep some leverage or assurance up his sleeve.
The Dummy Plug, then, was another means to control the EVA more directly, without need for pilots.
I suppose that was why I existed as well, an artificial tool rather than a human pilot – but I could only be in one place at once.
Well, at least for now…
After that, neither the other pilots nor myself were summoned for several days.
All of headquarters must have been abuzz with preparations, both for the system checks and the series of experiments that was to follow.
I was never explicitly told, but I could conclude from this that neither the Doctor nor the Commander had any more doubts that they could create the Dummies.
Their focus was now wholly on the question of how to program them.
But this would require large quantities of raw data – there were the records from my backup and calibration sessions, of course, but these were different from actual precision records of a pilot interacting with the EVAs in particular.
Eventually, the grand checkup on the Magi was concluded, and no sooner did the other pilots and I received a notification on our electronic devices:
The presence of all three pilots would be required for an extensive series of tests with the simulation bodies in the ultrapure cleanrooms of the Pribnow Box.
…
We had been summoned, and thus, we appeared, ostensibly for whatever reasons that had kept each of us from bowing out when given that choice in the preceding battle.
As far as I was concerned, that choice had never truly existed, though it was possible that the others saw it in much the same terms according to their personal understanding of reality.
We were still in our uniforms, having come here straight from school.
The Second, it seems, was displeased, as she often was.
She didn't appreciate having been summoned on such short notice – apparently, she had been meaning to go to town with some girls from our class, an appointment which she had now been forced to cancel.
Though she had already come, and nothing she might do now could possibly have changed he past that was already set in stone, she had no qualms in making her displeasure known.
I wondered what she expected to avoid with that, except perhaps to displace her frustration onto convenient targets – I believe she characterized myself and Ikari-kun as 'servile idiots' in the process just because we understood that it was senseless to protest.
It didn't seem to occur to her that we, too, might have preferred it another way.
It wouldn't surprise me if Ikari-kun had been forced to forsake some plans of his own – he too had friends, as well as solitary hobbies.
That said, if he did have something planned, I did not know.
If he did, he did not say so.
I obviously didn't have plans – not beyond doing some reading, which I could easily postpone and then continue at any given point if time.
I knew better than to make plans when tomorrow wasn't promised to anybody, us least of all.
No one is ever safe; We could all die at any time.
Once again, I wondered how the Second was even surprised – didn't she understand our situation at all? Or perhaps she did, and all this protesting was a means to act like she was in control.
From a certain point of view, this might seem adaptive. It wouldn't save her, but neither would knowing or accepting the truth. Experiments had shown that even mice bear hardship better when they have a sense of control over what is going on.
Even monkeys can relieve their stress and all its physiological costs by taking it out on another primate.
Seen from that view, her actions might be accounted quite logical. Displacing aggression is a very effective way to reduce physiologically disadvantageous excesses of stress hormones. How could one expect her to do anything else? She had been raised and trained to be a fighter, encouraged to compete and improve. She would never grow up and reach a future where she might benefit from constructive outlets or conflict resolution techniques.
NERV was going to work their tools until they break – I would know.
NERV had already worn through quite a lot of 'Rei Ayanami' objects at this point;
When the wear and tear would outpace Dr. Akagi's attempts to maintain me, I wouldn't even be the first.
"I'm not a child," bemoaned the Second after Major Katsuragi had beseeched her to 'be reasonable', "I understand that sometimes we have to sacrifice for the greater good!"
She clearly just threw this out as a phrase, mere lip-service, a rationalization, what she was supposed to say.
Though, as things were now, could I be any more sure than her of my sincerity when I said that my work was 'for the greater good?' That's what I'd always been told, so, it's what I told myself, but I could no longer truly say with conviction that I wasn't just looking for a reason to justify my suffering, to tell myself that it wasn't just completely senseless.
I was looking forward to release, not Utopia.
The Second continued ranting, oblivious to my silent, bleak thoughts, or whatever Ikari-kun might have been thinking:
"...but this is stupid! I mean, an autopilot for the EVAs? That's never going to work. As if some dumb robot could do our jobs! There's no way I'd lose to something man-made!"
I said nothing to this, because there would have been no point in saying anything.
"I dunno…" mused Ikari-kun, for his part, "The said the same thing about machine translations and AI art…"
Once, his relative reluctance and mildly pessimistic tone may have surprised me – one may have thought that he out of all of us might have been the most hopeful about a technology that might relieve him of the duties that had burdened him so.
But now, I knew better. Though everything in him may have been screaming for a chance to leave, something had kept him coming back. Something made him face Sahaquiel.
Perhaps he figured that he might not be seeing very much of his father once he was no longer needed as a pilot. I could not say that it seemed unlikely.
I too, I suppose, would no longer be needed by the Commander once my last order had been carried out.
Contemplating this, I couldn't help but find it a little surreal how Major Katsuragi attempted to keep up our morale:
"Come on kids, I know this is going to be a bit of a hassle, but that's all the more reason to just get it over with & be done with it. Once we're done here, I'm inviting you and your friends to some ice cream to make it up to you, alriiight?"
I wonder how much longer she would be able to say things like that.
Once the first of us died or became permanently handicapped from their injuries, she might find it harder to act as if our duties were like the normal chores, schoolwork or part time jobs that typical adolescents may need to be motivated into.
...
If the Second Child had been discontented to begin with, then her enthusiasm certainly did not increase once she learned more specifics about what this experiment was going to be requiring of us.
She shouted thoughtlessly, uncomfortably close to my ears inside the narrow chamber that held us at the time: "WHAAT? You want us to undress again?!"
Coming in from over the intercom, with a tinny quality overlaid by the imperfections of the machine, Dr. Akagi's voice was firm, but mostly sober, determined to press on no more perturbed or impressed by the Second's protestations than she might be by minor maintenance issues or faulty machine parts acting up:
"You'll be going into an ultra-cleanroom." she stated, emphasizing the word to underline that it wasn't negotiable: "A shower and a change of underwear won't cut it."
I think the Second understood this, though.
I had heard her complained a lot, and a few times, she had even refused to participate, but in the end, she had never truly done it.
The more time passed, the less her complaints seemed like petulance lacking in perspective, and more like an attempt at clinging to the cold comfort of having the last word:
"Why do we have to go through all of this just to test that silly autopilot system?!" she sulked, "It's probably never going to be used!"
Yet still we all knew that she was always going to proceed into the chamber in the end, and judging by the mild but unmistakable uptick of annoyance in her voice, so did Dr. Akagi, who proceeded to explain, failing to fully mask her exasperation at what she must have considered an obvious, useless waste of time.
Sometimes, I thought that I could feel sorry for the Second Child.
I wondered how much longer the heroic narrative in her mind would withstand contact with reality.
Especially since it was just as the Doctor kept saying:
"Time always marches on – to keep pace with the evolution of the angels, the EVA's technology must always keep improving. We're never not going to need new data to work off of."
...right. The evolution of the angels.
That too was something to consider.
They had seven more tries left to vanquish us, and the last one had already pushed us very near to the brink of our capabilities. But did the angels know that?
It was hard to estimate their perspective at all, seeing as their manner of thought was different from ours, but they might so.
In so far as they were concerned, it might look as if they had ever redoubled their efforts to no avail. The last attack represented an immense escalation in their combat and counterintelligence capabilities, but they might not understand how close they came to beating us.
If they knew, that would be bad, for if they understood that we might fold if just a little bit more pressure were applied to us, there was nothing stopping them from doing just that.
But the capacity for such observation-based analysis was precisely the part of the human mind which they were supposed to lack, though they had sharp intuitions, and reason to think they might have feelings every bit like us.
What they didn't have was thought, so it was possible that they had a limited ability to analyze just why they had failed. For all we know, they might think that they had kept escalating their tactics to no avail, and Sahaquiel's assault was nothing if not might pushed to the limit. There must be some limiting forces at play, or else, they would already have eliminated us.
For humans as creatures so used to relying on their intellect and seeing it as the crown jewel of god's creation, it was easy to picture beings that could not 'think' as mere automatons, bound to keep pushing in the same direction.
But in truth, even unicellular organisms such as stentor coeruleus had been proven to have the ability to respond to stressors and threats by varying alternating strategies.
It was very much possible that the angels might be right about to change course, vary their tactics… and if that were to happen, we would be in a precarious position indeed.
Not even the data sets we were set to gather nor new tools such as the Dummy Plug could guarantee that we would be prepared for whatever countermeasures those new approaches of theirs would require.
Yet be that as it may, there probably wasn't very much we could do about it as of now, other than to wait for the problem to present itself and do to us what it may.
Even the data collected from this experiment might in the end avail little; Yet, it had to be done.
So I ended this debate by stepping right into the decontamination cabin, quickly followed by the Second who swiftly darted after me, distracted from her earlier fuming by the notion that she must not be outdone and her dedication above suspicion.
Ikari-kun was visibly reluctant and uncomfortable, but yet, he forced himself to go.
All of us forced ourselves to go, in our own ways.
All of us having, from some angles, every choice, yet also none, since all options came with steep prices.
And thus we each marched on, like clockwork automata on the fixed trajectories of a mechanical, predetermined universe, trapped in the endless coiled embrace of Time and Necessity, the atoms that made up what we believed to be our minds compelled by the same forces that governed the celestial mechanics.
I could fathom that they must each have their reasons, perhaps as unspeakable to them as mine were for me, but as it was, we seemed doomed to remain opaque to each other, as the clockwork figures on an automaton clock, going through our fixed, repetitive motions without ever truly touching, the pale glimmer of our souls trapped as ghosts in a grand indifferent machine, as distant to each other as the stars, so that we may see each other burning off in the distance, but never truly touch – perhaps my role in the grand clockwork would be that of a figurine of death, the reaper to come, ever-present in the old central-european automaton clocks of medieval make, always included to remind the worshipers of their mortality and the coming end of days:
Work and pray, for no man knoweth the day nor the hour!
Except some of us knew, and yet our work and our prayers continued.
I stripped again without another word, in a routine, practiced motion, flinging the clothes off of me onto a heap on the floor.
To be honest, I did not understand the embarrassment or special significance that my co-pilots, classmates, and probably most humans, would have associated with their naked flesh.
Perhaps this was easy for me to say since I was already used to stripping for experiments all the time, but I did not view this as being made to reveal anything special, sacred or even particular about me, after all, it was just the outermost shell, unrelated to what was inside.
I did not choose my appearance, in fact, I had next to no control over it – it was coded in my genes, same as all the floating clones Dr. Akagi might be disassembling in the creation of the Dummies, same as the previous 'Ayanami Rei'.
Why be embarrassed of it? Why be proud of it? Why feel any particular connection or attachment to it at all?
The gene sequence that produced it was chiefly designed to give me piloting capabilities and carry out the Commander's plan, though I presume that not every feature was selected to that end.
I doubt that the particular shape of my nose or the texture of my hair mattered much to my piloting ability. I wondered sometimes how that was chosen. Probably with little care and thought.
As with the Magi's personality transplant OS, an existing template might have been copied just to make things easier, to save themselves the trouble of constructing a genome from scratch – the human parts weren't so important. Perhaps some of my face and body shape had come from one or multiple human donors.
I did not know, however, and I knew better than to think that it might matter more, or get some ideas into my head that this might mean I might have 'family' out there; For all intents and purposes, I never did, and that would not change.
Maybe I was constructed from scratch after all, and if I wasn't, it didn't matter much.
For all I knew they might have printed out some average human sequence from a data base to start with, or selected the most suitable sequence variants from many donors, to the extent that it was not really much different than from assembling it from scratch.
My human genes might have come from a cell culture line, taken many decades ago from a long dead cancer patient, or perhaps a swab donated by an insignificant lab technician who contributed only some routine laboratory work to my creation without even really knowing what it was for – that person might not even work at NERV anymore, or perhaps they were already dead.
At the very least, I knew that Commander Ikari cannot have used his own DNA, or Sub-Commander Fuyutsuki's;
I once secretly hoped he might have, if only just out of practicality, because his own spit, hair or blood was handy to come by. I had never dared to admit that hope, until after I saw it proven wrong, just around the time that I learned how sex chromosomes work.
Of course I was young then; Realistically I don't think it would have changed anything, even if it had been true. And in any case, my donor, if there ever was one, must have been a female, which means that it probably wasn't anybody I knew – So far as I knew, Dr. Akagi had not started working on Project E until after the first Ayanami Rei was assembled.
Female embryos survive mutations and malformations at a slightly higher rate, due to having extra copies of some genes, so perhaps a sample taken from a female was accounted more likely to yield success.
Or maybe there was no reason, no donor to begin with;
I knew better than to search the faces of the senior lab technicians for some likeness of my own. Even if this donor existed, the alterations needed to make me what I am would have rendered us so different that there was little I could have in common with her – grafted alien genomes, minute engineering, and last but not least the epigenetic switches thrown by my entirely different circumstances would render us not so much alike, myself a distorted, faded afterimage at best, my faulty shell shorter and thinner than hers would have been.
If I met her, I would probably fail to find much more of a resemblance than I might with any other human…
At last, my pondering was interrupted. The external world demanded my attention once again, the needs that still justified my existence for god knows how much longer.
The decontamination process was finished. Onwards to the next task. I exited the washing chamber, and though I could not care less that I was nude, that didn't mean that I didn't feel the cold, or the discomfort of having got cleaning solution halfway up my nose.
I felt faintly weary already.
Beside me, my co-pilots had finished as well: Though a set of translucent screens hid the middle portions of our bodies apart from perhaps a rough diffuse silhouette, Ikari-kun appeared rather preoccupied with covering his privates with his hands, emerging in a hunched, shameful posture.
The Second, however, strutted out with her arms on her hips, eminent in indignation.
With some dismay that I did not bother expressing, I noticed that she was just about to start yelling again:
"There! Here we are, just like you want us! Squeaky clean after 17 thorough scrubbings, and we're naked, too! Are you not entertained?!"
Dr. Akagi chose to side-step the theatrics by replying only to the contents: "Alright, now I need you to walk through this room just as you are now, and get to your plugs."
Again, the Second erupted straight away into a loud, immediate reaction – could she not voice her objections at a reasonable volume?
"Eeeeeh? You mean, naked?!"
Wasn't that much clear from context?
Nonetheless, the Doctor caught the gist of her complaints:
"Don't worry, the visual feed is going to be off; Your privacy will be respected."
Yet, the Second persisted in her protestations:
"That's not the point, and you know it!"
Huh?
"I'm seriously uncomfortable here!"
After so many years at NERV, did she think it was going to be comfortable?
"The aim of this test is to gauge how well the harmonics are picked up directly from your skin, without the aid of a plug suit."
Just in case the implications were not clear from Dr. Akagi's explications, Major Katsuragi saw the need to make them very clear:
"Asuka, this is an order."
"Ah, fine! But don't you dare peek!"
I highly doubt that any of them would be interested in that. As far as they were concerned, we probably registered as barely more than children, and even if we had been nubile adults, I would not think that there would be much titillation to be found in our awkward, uncomfortable selves undergoing a dreary, boring procedure in the name of scientific research.
If we were nude, we were nude in the manner of mere flesh, opened on an operating table, or excreting on a toilet bowl.
That was the only kind of nude I would ever get to be.
Even so, the Second Child suspiciously eyed the camera until she saw the little red light going on which confirmed that it had now been switched to infra red only and shouldn't be transmitting any more than the rough outline of our heat signatures.
I wondered why they had even bothered to put this in, to even include this feature – probably, including it to preempt complaints was the path of least resistance, all part of the charade, same as sending us to school.
Up here there were witnesses, liable to ask questions if some superficially appeased; No one had bothered with putting any such measures into the facilities in Terminal Dogma, having any frills installed would just unnecessarily bloat the number of people who might see enough of its components to guess at the whole that might be assembled from its pre-fabricated parts.
No one had thought of putting in any kind of privacy screen in the tube in the Dummy Plug plant, much less cover up the swimming clones – what for? Who was ever going to think of bothering with that?
Besides, nothing about my flesh would be news to the ones who tinkered with it for ages until they finally got it to work.
Though I suppose there wasn't any reason why the discomfort experienced by Ikari-kun and the Second shouldn't be lessened, if it was easily feasible to do so.
It was accounted worth doing for their sake, since, after all, they were human.
No one bothered to cover up the simulation bodies, swimming in the purified water of the Pribnow box; Their partially grown, headless torsos were not accounted much different from the cables that led into the next, or the mechanical grafts inserting the entry plugs into their bags.
Unlike the EVAs themselves, they weren't animated – as in, literally, imbued with a soul.
Butchered and cut up as wetware reagents, their fate was very much exactly that of the prototype Dummy Plug cores which I had seen in Dr. Akagi's lab, yet the latter were kept secret.
They were less likely to be accepted, as the Doctor thought, for their merely superficial greater resemblance to a human, though the DNA inside the simulation bodies and the structure of their limbs were not much more different from a human than me, the difference in size notwithstanding.
It's not that I didn't believe the Doctor's assessment about the likely reaction, but it made no logical sense to me. Biologically, myself and the parts of vat-grown flesh used as simulation bodies were about the same percentage human. The actual EVAs themselves might be more human, if you considered the origin of their soul, or the method used to obtain mine.
It was unclear if the simulation bodies suffered – once I connected with mine, I was met with raw sensory impressions, not a clear watchful alien presence like that of EVA 00.
Yet it could not be accounted the same as just a cell culture, a severed limb or a burned out beating-heart cadaver, if there was a core for the entry plug to be inserted into, the core that, for an angel for example, would be the full-fledged source of its life.
They had cores, just as the would be Dummy Plugs had functioning brains.
Perhaps this mindless existence could be accounted its own horror, but if it was, there was not much that could be done to stop it – what's one more inevitable loss, in a world about to be eradicated?
The steady sticking of the grand big cosmic automata clock took its course, the hourglass filling ever trickling down to the last of the words concerning us in the prophecies of the ancients.
Soon all the machines were brought online, the entry sequence was completed, the experiment started and Data Collection was begun.
It was set to take three hours and would likely keep us until Nightfall, at least if you counted the time we would need afterwards to get dressed.
I had expected that I would spend most that time trying my best to concentrate and keep my attention focused as well as I could, to ensure the quality of the data, futile though it may prove to keep perfect concentration throughout.
And maybe, when all of this was over, Major Katsuragi would remember her words about taking us out to ice cream, and maybe I would even agree, if I wasn't already to weary from a long day's labor – no, perhaps even then.
Maybe the ice cream shop would have interesting flavors, and perhaps, it was possible, that I should even find myself spoken to by Ikari-kun, invited to some simple, heartfelt exchange, a mere conversation, that might yet surprise me in ways I had not foreseen.
Or so I thought.
More than anyone here, I had known that the bell-tower of fate would soon sound its knell to mark our fates already sealed, yet somehow, even I had fallen to distraction just before the day, let myself be caught in the lull of these ephemeral peaceful days just before the finish line.
But of course, I didn't realize.
No one who falls to any folly ever realizes at first, it's right in the definition.
My thoughts were elsewhere then, trying, as I had said, to focus on my task, the chief part of which was now to begin in earnest.
Having gleaned all that she could from what her screens could tell her, Dr. Akagi saw it fit to ask us directly one more time, just to make sure one last time:
"So, Rei, how is it?"
Hm. How to describe it in words...
"It's different, somehow."
Ikari-kun appeared to share that impression.
"Yeah, it feels different than usual…"
Not content with simply repeating what was already stated, the Second attempted to provide additional detail:
"I sort of feel numb all over, except for my arm."
This, it seems, was not much of a divergence from what Dr. Akagi had been expecting to hear; In any case she judged then that she could proceed:
"Alright. Rei? Try moving your right arm."
I figured that slightly wiggling my, or rather, the simulation body's fingers would be enough.
It seems that it was.
Without further instructions, the experiment proceeded.
I expected that there would be nothing left to do but for us to stay put and concentrate.
At the edges of my consciousness, I took note of the technicians discussing the states of the various gauges or the first discernible properties of the data stream, and even some casual conversation between Major Katsuragi and Dr. Akagi.
There was much to notice, when you had nothing to do but wait, and few concerns of your own worth dwelling on.
Their presence kept tugging at my thoughts, not because I was especially interested in their particular affairs, but because there would be nothing else to listen for for hours and hours.
Notably, Major Katsuragi was impressed by the speed at which the data processing seemed to be proceeding:
"Whoha, look at it go! It's such a difference from those first tests that took a week to analyze! The Magi truly are amazing!"
I presume she was referring to the supercomputer's ability to learn and improve with each iteration. Dr. Akagi often discussed the details of it with her underlings while I waited for her to be finished and whisk me off for one procedure or another.
But her next comment went beyond anything I was familiar with:
"It really shows off the personality of the person who built them…"
Major Katsuragi, too, was surprised:
"What are you talking about? I thought you built them!"
"You don't know much about the Magi, do you?"
"That might have something to do with how you never talk about yourself!"
Was the Doctor contractually obliged to talk about herself somehow?
Despite Major Katsuragi's defensive huffing, Dr. Akagi conceded her point, and went on to explain:
"I suppose it might… I got the system up and running, but the one who built it and worked out the fundamental theories behind it was my mother."
Dr. Akagi's mother, huh? From the way she had phrased it, the elder Akagi must not be working here anymore.
For lack of anything else to do, I tried to recall if I could ever remember seeing her here – I was familiar enough with the rough time-frame to expect that the Magi would have been finished at about the same time as, well, myself.
Or was this before my time? Did she retire while I was still being tinkered with in the lab, or perhaps during the days of the very first 'Ayanami Rei' clone?
...the more I thought about it, the more I noticed a buzzing sense of unease welling up within my being, though I knew not why that should be, wha I would expect to know the answer, or why it mattered.
Several times I straightened my position, took a deep breath in, blinked my eyes as if to dispel some dream. I wondered if it was to do with the unfamiliar connection setup in the simulation. At last, I tried to put the thought out of my mind, lest it affect the quality of the data collected.
I just tried to focus on my breath, and leave everything else for later. When I caught onto some snippets of discussion concerning a corroded spot in one of the protein walls, I didn't think much of it at first.
Minor maintenance problems were not unusual, particularly in this branch of the complex that had to be finished after the angels first attacked.
I expected it to be a minor irritation at first, barely taking note of what was being discussed.
I dared not hope for an early release, especially since I knew well that this would only mean a repetition of the discomfort associated with the experiment at a later date.
Besides, Commander Ikari was unlikely to be pleased about any delays in the Dummy Plug's development.
It was known to me that human beings and, I presume, artificial homunculi whose brains replicate their make, perceived adverse events according to a so-called peak-end bias, where the quality of an experience depended largely on its most intense episode and the state near its end.
Duration was a negligible factor, much to the surprise of Doctor and Nurses who may have thought it a lesser evil to have patients undergoing short but intense procedures to 'get it over with'.
The dreary hours to come, I assume, would blend together in retrospect into perhaps a single image.
But then I picked up some phrase to do with 'spreading', and this then drew my attention – soon I'd heard enough to suspect that the issue might be more complicated after all.
Soon I found myself wondering if the experiment might indeed need to be postponed or even prematurely aborted, but in hindsight I must confess that I still failed to realize the gravity of the situation then: I still believed us to be dealing with a simple case of equipment failure.
Then, I felt the pain.
It came so sudden that I hardly had the chance to realize what was going on.
Before I knew it, I had cried out – I was screaming in pain before I had even parsed the spasm going through my arm, or rather, the simulation body's arm.
My own hand was tightly curled around the controls, my limbs pulled taut and stiff in a sympathetic reaction to what felt like a pinched-nerve malfunction in the foreign body I'd been attached to.
My senses were too flooded with pain and discomfort for me to realize that the simulation body's gigantesque arm was being twisted in a planful, deliberate motion – I would only put the sequence of events together in hindsight, once I'd been supplied with the information that I didn't have then, and the time to think it through without being doubled over in agony.
Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I think this is what happened:
The simulation body's arm started moving on its own.
Seen from the control room that the technicians were observing us from, it was described as bearing some of the same stains that had been sighted on the Pribnow box protein walls and thought to be simple corrosion or degradation, something which then resembled a bacterial mat or a slime mold, judging by the photographs I would later see.
The remarkable thing was that the muscles and nerves comprising it had been induced straight away to activate and contract in a coordinated manner, by means of whatever electrical or chemical signals had been fed into the artificial flesh by the parasitic organism.
And straight away, it targeted the control room, stretching out the hand that had been under my control mere instants before.
Soon the simulation body as a whole was straining against its bonds; The technicians responded quickly, detonating a charge implanted in the giant arm in the case that it should go out of control – a measure that may not have been implemented if this part of the complex and all the hardware and wetware inside had been finished as initially intended.
These extra failsafes had been a response to the incidents where the EVAs 00 and 01 had gone berserk.
The simulation body's arm-flesh was blown clean off its humerus, leaving the white trails of ripped sinews floating in the water – for me, this chiefly meant more pain, re-igniting one of the nerves that had seen so much stimulation in the last battle, sparking a resonant, sharp burning like a tuning fork that had been struck so that it may faithfully relay its own specific note.
But pain alone was all that it was, and moments later, it had ceased wholly and completely – and only then could I begin to piece together what had happened.
There were no physical injuries, my synchronization rate wasn't high enough for that at this point.
So the pain dissipated when the connection was cut.
The plug must have been ejected.
...
For a while, the entry plug continued on in the direction it had been propelled into, spurned forward by the force of the ejection mechanism and then, its own inertia.
At first, I, and, I presume, the other pilots, found ourselves suddenly and unexpectedly pressed into our seats, too overtaken by the sudden event to begin piecing together what might be happening.
Even from the limited fraction of the evidence that we got to see before being ejected, it would have been apparent that this was no mere equipment failure, but whatever it was, there was really no means for me to do anything about this – I had my suspicious, of course, but without any evidence by which to confirm or deny it, it seemed best to reserve judgment.
Closing my eyes, I tried my best to sense where the currents were taking me.
Once the kinetic energy of the initial push from the ejection would have been used up, it was to be expected that we would follow the flow of the Geofront's various water circulation systems for a while, floating idly like driftwood.
Then, at last, we would have reached some end to our journey, a distinct impulsion as the plug breached some manner of stagnant surface, left to exhaust all sense of direction but that of the small, local fluctuations conferred by small waves.
If the movement was strong, and required me to hold on to keep myself in place in my chair, I could feel the occasional small spine of pain traveling up or down my right arm, just a little bit of a sensory afterimage, clashing with the rational knowledge that my arm was quite intact – I tightened and un-clenched my fingers just a few times to confirm that it was moving alright, and for a moment, it even overrode the erroneous signal, but before long, it reasserted itself, refusing to be shaken off too quickly, uncomfortable in the manner of a limb that had fallen asleep and was now at last moved again for the first time in a while.
I really wish it had not been the arm again, though all in all it was probably the most expendable body part, all things considered.
Either way, this wasn't good: It would take a while to retrieve us, if the EVAs were to be mobilized, and unlike last time this happened during the blackout, our hands were tied with regards of transporting ourselves.
But there was one thing in our favor at last: Though we had no access to such communication devices as would be part of the core units of either the EVAs or the simulation bodies, the entry plugs came equipped with their own, more primitive communication devices.
Ikari-kun and the Second had just recently used it to bicker in the aftermath of defeating the angel Israfael.
The sound quality was poorer, and the range not remotely comparable, but if the others had been ejected at about the same time as I, they should still be in rage.
"Ikari-kun. Second Child. Sound off if you are able to hear me."
Fortunately, my estimation was soon proven correct:
"Shut up, First! How many times do I have to tell you that you don't get tell me what to do!"
Soon we heared from Ikari-kun too: "Ayanami! Asuka! I'm so glad you're ok!"
He seemed rather relieved to hear from us. Perhaps he'd panicked and, in that state, forgotten all about the secondary intercom. But once that immediate worry was resolved, it did not take him long to come up with another:
"I wonder what's happening, though… did the simulation body go berserk or something?"
"No. That's not possible; Unlike the EVAs, it would not meet the requirements. There must have been external forces at work."
I had not meant to imply anything beyond that while I couldn't be sure yet, but it seem that Ikari-kun still picked up what I had been thinking – not that there really were many other options:
"You mean… there was an angel? Here, right at headquarters? Where would it even be hiding… are you saying that weird stain was the angel?"
"There is no way for us to know under the current circumstances. Though it is possible."
"Who cares where it's hiding!" griped the Second, "They better come pick us up ASAP so we can beat the crap out of it!"
"I'm not certain that they will. If they were going to, they could have been waiting to fish out our plugs the moment we breached the surface. Though I suppose they could have been delayed for some reason beyond our knowledge."
"Dammit! I can't get out of here while I'm naked! Won't someone bring me a bathrobe already?!"
That probably would not have helped. My study of NERV headquarter's layout included that of the water pumps. If I was correct, we must have come to a stop roughly in the central portion of the artificial lake in the geofront.
Our distance to the shore might well be too far to safely attempt swimming, clothed or otherwise; Besides, Ikari-kun could not swim, so this course of action would have entailed the Second and I setting off on our own.
It was best to avoid splitting up now; so long as we all remained in the same location, right where they would expect us, it would be possible to retrieve us all at the same time – though, with any moment that passed without any technicians knocking on the entry hatch of our plugs, I became less and less certain about what might or might not have happened, or why.
All we could really do at this point was wait, and in the end, we were left to do so for much, much longer than any of us had anticipate.
….
We did not get any ice cream.
By the time we were indeed fished out of the lake and recovered from our plugs, that idea must have taken on the quality of something long since forgotten that had maybe once been mentioned a long, long time ago – for as long as these past hours had been to us, we would soon be given reason to suspect that they had been immeasurably longer in the subjective experience of the NERV staff.
Besides, I would assume that Major Katsuragi, the technicians, and especially Dr. Akagi would be quite busy with the aftermath of the incident; Even rescheduling or repeating the interrupted experiment may have been among the furthest thing from their minds, the reason for this being what was told to us as soon as we were released from our plugs, having been handing NERV-issue uniform towels that may have come from the staff's communal baths:
Apparently, it was much as I had surmised.
The bacterial-looking stains we had seen in the Pribnow Box were the marks of a microbe-like Angel.
Busy though she must have been in the cleanup of the aftermath, Major Katsuragi arranged to be on board of the boat that picked us up:
"You won't believe who beat it -" she claimed, turning the telling of the tale into some drawn-out, sensational tale while we were on our way back to the lake shore.
"Ritsuko did! Looks like Asuka is going to have to add a new name to her scoreboard!"
...Dr. Akagi did? But how exactly?
In theory, it was supposed to have been impossible to withstand the angels by means of conventional technology.
Work on the Dummy Plug may have progressed rapidly, but I did not think that any products of the program had been anywhere near ready enough to be hooked up to an EVA.
Since we were evidently not dead and all three of us had been evidently stuck floating across the lake, it was clear that it had been possible to destroy this new angel without the direct involvement of us pilots, so there would have been no point in surprise or disbelief, since evidently whatever had occurred must be something that is compatible with our continued existence right now.
I accepted the reality that presented itself plainly before my eyes.
Yet, the missing pieces in the sequence remained a discrepancy in my mind so long as I could not reconstruct them, a black spot on the map that called to be filled by such fragments as I could pick up from around me with my eyes and ears.
Perhaps Ikari-kun and the Second Child had received a more detailed account once the Major made it home.
To me, nothing was told.
Nobody considered that perhaps I should be told, or that perhaps being told might be useful or relevant to me.
Such was their discretion.
Still I wondered, silently, as I was sent home.
I supposed that I would be able to piece it together soon enough; I usually could, when it came to such things. I'd had much practice.
So, I simply went home, looking forward to sinking into my bed.
I really hadn't done anything but just sit there in the entry plug chair, yet I was relieved to be let go.
...
As I had expected, the picture clarified itself over the next couple of days.
Many discussions were had, between Doctor Akagi, Vice-Commander Fuyutsuki, and the Commander.
It was fascinating, really.
For once, one of the angels had appeared not as an animal-like creature, but as something rather more like bacterial or even a slime mold – of course, that should not been surprising.
Ireul and xier brethren were equally distant in relation to all Lillithian life – yet in other ways, our kinship had been clearer, since xir had manifested as a dispersed multitude, and not, like the others, as one grand monolithing entity towerung above us.
As I took note of the NERV staff's exchanges, I wondered how many more combinations might have been possible.
Conversations started long before I came along, which did not wait for me to start, but did not stop with my arrival, either.
In this fashion, I had been privy to at least as many secrets as the floors and the machines.
The naked body, wedged into it in between the plugs and tubes and cables, merely continuing or completing this unintentional imitation of a Giger-esque machine-scape, only that it was much smoother, more polished or improvised, never intended to convey any message or impression at all. They were only parts serving a purpose, and, I suppose, so was I.
The apparatus I was strapped into was not overly uncomfortable; It made no sense to design it that way.
But neither was much effort expended to make lying in it a pleasant experience.
It was just something that somehow needed to be done, a means to take a measurement.
Any experiment or procedure that needed to be carried out down here on the lower levels was likely to be both so classified and so crucial to the proceeding of the entire plan that Dr. Akagi could no leave it to any lower-ranked technician, at least for the moment.
Thus, since she was likely to be occupied for longer blocks of time, it seemed quite logical for the Commander and even the Sub-Commander as well to use these moments as opportunities to discuss things with the Doctor while she was left monitoring the slow progression of the results – each of their skills were invaluable to the many moving pieces of their project, so there were great incentives to utilize all of their time as much as possible – why schedule a meeting at a separate point in time, when matters could be discussed while Dr. Akagi was standing by here, not exactly needing the fulness of her brain power and attention at any given moment?
Especially when there was much to discuss, such as the repairs and the coverup schemes necessitated by the attack of the being was was now being classified as 'Ireul'.
As I had said, I had heard many things this way, focussed on the discussion rather then where I was or what was happening to me, for the most part speaking only when Doctor Akagi prompted me to answer something related to the experiment.
I knew better than to voice any complaints or requests.
The very notion would have been absurd: This was what I existed for, was it not?
To be used in this way.
If the people gathered here had ever done anything to protect me or maintain me, it was so they could continue to use me thus; It would be to nonsensical to consider that they might stop, or even compromise.
Does the owner of a factory farm care whether or not the livestock cares to be slaughter?
Were it not for the profit he stands to gain from butchering them, he would not have fed or sheltered them, nor even had them bred to begin with.
The whole strain of man-made creature would not exist, bred for ages to maximize yield to the point that they would now greatly struggle to compete in the wild.
That is part of why I could not bring myself to eat them, besides a desire to minimize my impact on this world and a repulsion towards all things flesh and blood:
So completely interchangeable, they were created only to be consumed.
They were just like me; Merely thinking of it was just too sad.
Though one may wonder if we were not all merely sown to be reaped, thrust into existence by the careless decisions of those who came before us, perhaps leading in an unbroken line back to the First Ancestral Race.
Though, while it may ultimately be the truth that we were all just driftwood in the torrents of destiny, right now it was only me who was strapped onto a table, plugged into machines and left exposed to the cool temperature in the subterranean hall.
Underneath Dr. Akagi's jacket and Commander Ikari's jacket, they should not be feeling the cold very much.
Though I was faintly grateful that he was here. The conversation left me something to focus on, as I had said, and besides, I would rather prefer not to be left alone with Dr. Akagi more often than what was strictly necessary.
She was less likely to do or say anything unecessary while someone else was here.
While there were people watching, she was apt to remain locked within the mask of a consummate professional, her usual dispassionate self -
Simply delineating. Explicating.
The Commander appeared especially insistent upon the answer to one possible question: "How was the angel allowed to infiltrate NERV HQ?"
Dr. Akagi was used to being able to answer the questions, or to being the one asking them – even so, the hint of pertubartion only flickered on her face for a mere moment before she continued to explain, composedly enough, but ever so subtly besmirched in the pride she took in her otherwise impeccable work:
"I realize that this is not an excuse, but chances are that it didn't – It probably 'hitched a ride' on some of the newly installed components in the B Wing, in the form of a cocoon – just like the Ninth Angel did, when we found it in that volcano. Since the angel's individual instance bodies were microscopic in size, its crysalis could have been smaller than a grain of sand – that's more than enough for it to have slipped into a plate of concrete somewhere, or maybe it was introduced with the rice straw that we use for cultivatium medium."
"Seems like an incredible coincidence…" remarked Sub-Commander Fuyutsuki from somewhere further back in the room. From the echo of his voice, his face must have been turned away towards the wall.
Perhaps he did not wish to behold the sight of me.
The Commander, I knew, was sitting close, though a pipe not far from my face kept me from seeing more than the bottom seams of his jacket and some specks of white that may have been his gloved hands hanging in his lap.
While the others spoke, he seemed to have been thinking in silence, but when his rouh, deep voice sounded, its presence seemed to fill the room:
"Was there no screening process in place for the components? At least for quality control."
Dr. Akagi's face only allowed her irritation to slip for a moment, but this, I could see, as she was standing right by the controls of the machinery I was strapped into.
Perhaps some part of her took it as an affront to her professional pride, the same one that now forced her into straightening her features:
"I assure you that I've had every possible measure taken insofar as it was possible under the circumstances-"
The Commander bluntly cut her off:
"That's not what I mean."
Dr. Akagi was irrirated at first, but Fuyutsuki, who had known him for a longer time, caught his drift more quickly:
"You mean this was SEELE's doing, somehow?!"
"They've had us sabotaged before, right on time for the tenth angel's coming. And they were not too interested in capturing the Ninth Angel, weren't they? Despite all the opportunities that a living sample could have presented. Of course, it could simply be that they did not want us to possess such a thing as much as they wanted it for themselves, or that they would hold it to be sacrilige according to the prophecy of the scrolls, but you and I know them better than that.
It would not be like them to forgo that power – that's what I was banking on when I made the request.
But of course, that was based on the assumption that they don't already have a sample."
The subcommander's voice sounded distinctly alarmed, though he professed not to be convinced:
"- and they would use something like that to send it here? For what? To warn us? To test us?"
"Maybe it's not their only one."
"Now, that's just speculation." interjected the Doctor.
But Fuyutsuki wasn't put as ease:
"They're yanking our chain. What more, they're practically daring us to ignore this provocation."
"That's because posturing is all they can do. They know we hold the trumps."
Commander Ikari's voice sounded entirely unperturbed.
He had been getting bolder, ever since obtaining both Adam and the Holy Lance.
Trying to hide the angel's very intrusion from SEELE was the clearest sign yet.
His underlings had probably believed that this concealment was simply a matter of not wanting it known to the Commitee that he had allowed an angel to intrude this far down, breaching for the first time the confines of NERV headquarters itself.
His actions were not questioned too much; Corruption or self-interest would not surprise anyone.
Instead, what he meant to do was probably to test the Commitee's reaction.
But even among all this, there was a question that hadn't clarified itself, an answer that thus far, showed little signs of crystalizing before me.
It did not occur to me immediately that I had a voice that I could use.
That they could hear me, since I was present in the same room, for all that it hardly felt this way sometimes. There was an effort required, like there would have been in getting dressed and crossing the street.
"Excuse me, Dr. Akagi-"
I froze in place when I saw her eyes darting to my face, betraying herself only for a moment.
In her mind, this body strapped here into these contraptions probably wasn't supposed to speak, not any more than the machines, not any more than the other bodies of the same likeness that she had been taking apart
To be fair to her, I had hardly ever done so before.
"Excuse me," I repeated in apology, "-but there is something I don't understand."
"What is it then that you don't understand, Rei?" she asked, the very picture of reasonable self-control, showing the same politeness she may have shown Ikari-kun and the others in the presence of Major Katsuragi.
Whatever she may have thought underneath was kept indiscernible, at least for now.
Truth be told I didn't have even the faintest idea what she may have been thinking, nor was it probably possible for me to guess.
I simply posed my inquiry, not even really asking in the sense of expecting any particular clarification from her, but simply doing what I needed to do to cause more information to appear in the field of my consciousness, so that I might confirm or deny my own ideas:
"How was it that you were able to defeat the angel without use of the Evangelions? As I understand, it should have been impossible to defeat an angel by means of conventional weaponry."
"Well, once we shot you three out of the Pribnow box-"
"I already know. The angel formed a kind of computing circuit and infiltrated the MAGI, is that correct? But how did you destroy it?"
She must have been quite irritated at me, for her to show it so visibly. I wondered if she even really deemed me capable of realizing out things she had not directly told me word for word.
"Well- You might find out if you actually listened to me!"
I was listening. I thought letting her know what I was already aware of would have quickened things, and irritated her less then. I think I may have broken yet another of those unwritten rules…
"Akagi-kun." a heavy voice admonished.
"Sorry, Rei. I didn't meant to yell. I've just been tired lately. Maybe I should listen to Misato and Ryo-chan and take a break."
So, under the Commander's watchful eye, Dr. Akagi chose to conceal her irritation for the moment, concealing herself within the part of a superficially friendly explainer:
"So, about the angel – the thing is, I may have used the Magi to do it, but in the end, the way I destroyed the angel was by using something that was already part of its makeup.
A program left behind by the First Ancestral race – you might call it a self-destruct switch.
Just like us, the angels cannot continue in their evolution past a certain point. They are near the end, unable to contiue unless they are able to obtain the entelechy entailed by Third Impact.
And since this particular Angel had abilities reliant on rapid adaptation, all I had to do was to artificially advance its growth until it reached the self-destruction point – without having made contact with Adam, of course.
So it simply vanished as if it had never been, just in the nick of time.
In a sense, it was actually defeated by itself. By the code lodged in its DNA."
Poor Ireul. I wonder what xir felt, what xir experienced, in those last few moments of accelerated unfoldment, racing towards the attainment of xier full potential, only to dissapear at a dead end, like a cherryblossom scattering as soon as it has bloomed.
And now xir was gone, but we were here.
Yet the fact that we were here was grounded in the certainty that we would soon be gone.
In the proof, that the prophecies had spoken true, that the future was unavaidably locked in, inexorably coming nearer, ourselves becoming more and more entangled, more unable to derail it, the more that we grounded our present actions on the certainty of that future.
For the same deadly mechanism, that same kill switch that had been inside Ireul was also left inside ourselves, the handwriting of those same creators who had never meant for our two branches of life to cross paths.
If we were still here now, then it was proof: Proof that we too were damned to suffer Ireul's fate, unless we slay xier brethren and claimed the divine light for ourselves.
Proof that there was no other way to live, as the Commander had often said.
I'd know this all along, and expected it, but I suppose seeing such a salient portend with my own eyes made it sink in more.
Or maybe it was other things that made it different, things that hasn't been a issue before these last few weeks.
Then, another thought struck me, right where I was, laying nude on cold steel:
"The angel invaded the data banks of the Magi, right? And after that, directed actions were take, such as to trigger the self-destruct mechanism, is that correct?"
"Yes. We think that the nanoparticles that made up its body formed a kind of Computer."
I think I had already pointed out that I was aware of that.
But by now even I had understood that I would probably be made to regret it if I brought that up, and it really did not matter anyway, compared with getting to the point:
"...is it possible then, that the angel could have… learned about us, from reading this data? Realized that we are sentient, that we have planned?"
It was hard to guess what the two older men were thinking, but if only for a moment, Dr. Akagi appeared taken aback – it seems that she had not considered this possibility.
She is normally sharper than this. I suppose she really was as worn out from work as she claimed to be.
Her answer came with some delay, as if she were running through possibilities in her mind, considering her words especially since both of her superiors had said nothing, as if they had great interest to hear her answer as well:
"It's hard to infer anything about its information processing capacity. In terms of taking over the MAGI systems, it was quicker than any human, but it's still an angel, lackin in the fruit of knowledge. It might not have the capacity to actually understand what's in the files – it's actions might be something closer to the scenario described in the Chinese Language Problem, in that it may have made use of the data by markers other than it's meaning – much like a simple Deep Learning AI."
"But the angels have souls, much like our souls. And the MAGI system is not just any computer – its circuits were modeled on an actual person, right? In an attempt to copy her soul – much like what you are attempting with the Dummy System right now.
How much like an actual soul was that copy? Could it be similar enough that the angel recognized it? That it could have been used as a means to get a better sense of our capabilities?"
Not a word was said.
Nothing was heard but the noises of the machinery.
The room stood dumbstruck with the characteristic silence that descends upon adults when a little child asks a seemingly simple question for which there isn't a real answer.
"It's worrysome that it took over the Simulation Body." conceded Fuyutsuki, perhaps bringing up a gripe that had been irking him for quite a while now. "If it had gotten to the EVAs, they could have been infected."
"It's a completely different strategy, different from the previous angels.", concluded the Commander: "So far they have been out to merely destroy us. To flat out reject our entire existence in its entirety. This one was different. A kind of corrosive type: Rather than attack us directly, it used the products of our very own technology against us."
Dr. Akagi understood then, and spoke now with appropriate sobriety: "Almost as if it were trying to take the products of our fruit of knowledge for itself, just as we ourselves have stretched out our hands towards the angels' share of our inheritance in creating the EVAs."
The subcommander was alarmed: "Do you think there could be more like this? Or completely different strategies? It's one thing to contend with the angels' autonomous evolution, but it would be a whole other if they somehow knew we were doing it….
Don't you think you have been getting a little too bold as of little, Ikari? SEELE's responses, the evolution of the angels… there are too many unknowns."
"None of it matters." spoke the Commander, his voice as unwavering and certain as if it were the inescapable voice of the Metratron, the certain voice of truth:
"There is nothing we can do. These are all just small details that may be abstracted away from. It's true that we cannot predict the exact place and velocity of every single particle inside a pot of water. The uncertainty relation will not permit us. And yet, if you turn on the heat, the pot is most certainly going to boil. The chaos of the individual atoms do not matter, so long as the emergent patterns they are part of remain known.
We do not need to know the specifics, or the little random fluctuations – it is no different from how, once you know what plumbing is and what a sewage system is, you are going to be able to predict that every house inside a city will have a faucet and a sink, even if you know nothing else of the house.
You cannot predict what each individual molecule of water is doing, but you know which way the river flows.
The signs and wonders that were promised are coming true one after another."
I suppose he was right.
No matter what happens – no matter what destructive, insidious forms the angels take, no matter how many of us they may reduce to ashes in their sad, futile strife for survival, in the end nothing would change.
Ayanami Rei would be there to greet the morning of the promised day – whether or not that final 'Ayanami Rei' was me, or long since another.
…
It struck me suddenly then, the next day at recess during school.
A thought spurned outby the events of the last days, long in secret motion, waiting for an idle moment in which to come floating to the top.
Leaning against the glass pane, idly feeling the echoes of a sunbeam on my skin once it had been blocked out by a passing cloud, my gaze had happened to graze the turned back and heads of some uniformed students that were lingering out there, and with but the most minute of delays, recognition set in: Over there in the corner were the class representative and the second, unmistakable by their distinctive hairstyles.
I, of course, had opted to remain inside, to forgo the effort of desceding the stairs and the noise of the other students.
But through the thick cold glass, I could still see them:
Down there in the corner, nearly obscured by the roof, Ikari-kun, Aida and Suzuhara could be glipmsed sitting on the little raised concrete cube surrounding a tree.
And seeing them there, through the windowpane, as if a metaphorical standin or reminder for any other kind of separation, keeping in my mind the ever-clearer omens of days to come, the thought was of all sudden crystal clear in my mind:
We were all dead. Dead people walking.
Long since vanished and gone by from the perspective of a hypothetic future.
Often had I read passages in many books, of the figures within him, and by implications, perhaps the authors that wrote the, wondering how they might be remembered in a distant times, as only some footnote here and there amid the records, a few survived anecdotes chosen at random to passed down a few generations. They often envisioned some future seeker encountering the trace of them specifically between the pages of a book, as if to retrace some londged imprint of their long-faded individual soul – but in the world to come, there would be no books, no individuals, no one to keep the many libraries of the world from falling into rot and disrepair.
They would not be needed anymore, as the Commander might say.
At most, there might be floating memories spreading through the whole of an unified consciousness like streaks of paint dissolving in water.
And in that future, if there was anything left of Ikari-kun, if only crystallized memories that had since become part of a larger whole, what would he remember?
How would he look back at the instants caught frozen in the mental likenesses of this classromm, before it would stand broken down and abandoned, weathering away at the shores of a red ocean?
I had known this before, of course.
I had known it all along, but somehow it was sinking in on a different level now, watching them all sitting out there.
Somehow it was… penetrating, bleeding through, in a way that it did not before.
I don't think it was because the signs were getting clearer, for lesser as well as greater signs had preceded them.
Many times before had I seen Horaki-san walking across the schoolyard, but she had not stood out to me as much. I might have barely recalled Aida's and Suzuhara's names, before it became a regular occurrence for Ikari-kun to tell me of their exploits together.
And him, I had not known at all, though he surely must have existed all along, all the time that I'd been here.
Their presence had been something in background, paper dolls glued to the back screen of a diorama – in a sense, they had no really been alive to me to begin with, their death, too, had been insubstantial to me.
And I, held a world apart from the realms of the living, could not have been considered too alive as well.
But now I knew that they lived, really knew it felt in taste, smell and touch, and I knew also that they were marked for death, and when I thought that, something constricted itself in the chest of this body, somewhere held apart but within my sights, and at least my thin reflection superimposed on the pane seemed to fill with a sharp, final urgency, an unbidden spike of sudden, paralyzing panic that gripped me like a wise and yet held be frozen in place.
They were down there, and soon, they would be no more.
They were laughing, talking with each other.
I was reminded of those few, scattered times we had dined together. The Ramen stand. The excursion to the wildlife preservation facility.
And the thought came into my mind that I could go down there, that I could go join them on their fleeting island of bliss, illusory as though it was.
But as it turned out, I didn't move.
I just watched me, watching myself as I was apparently going to keep sitting there.
Watching the entity known as Ayanami Rei.
Time is running out.
Time has always been running out and by the time I started figuring out what that meant, much of it was already over.
Even if the Commander had never been so right as it he thought and this course of actions not wholly inevitably, it was firmly locked in by now, if not by our creators or by fate, then by human hands.
Time was surely, indubitably, running out.
Instant by instant, moment by moment.
I've already wasted so much of it. I keep wasting it every day.
I think logically, knowing that it's so scarce should make me more motivated. It should have thrust me straight into motion, to rush down the stairs, skipping and jumping, hasting ahead trying to get to them before they were finished eating, or at least, before the bell had rang.
They would probably even let me join in.
Knowing how fleeting these days were should have spurned me on to grasp what's left of them as much as I still could, to let them passing me by, to act right now -
but it didn't.
Instead, the certainly lay upon me like a heavy, crushing blanket of bleakness of futility, like a black embrace lulling me into the deeps of futility, despite the desperate awareness that kept pounding in my chest, and my intimate knowledge might be cut shut at any moment.
Why try? Why bother?
We are already dead.
All I could do now would be a clumsy and rushed inferior version of what I perhaps may have done if I had sought them out from the beginning, a shot in the dark.
I didn't even bring a lunch, or money to buy one, it was my wont to just wait till I got home, so I had nothig to join them with, no real excuse to make.
I could picture myself standing at the edge of their little gathering, standing there in some threshold like a deer in the headlights, unable to speak up and yet unable to pull back, if my path would not end blindly in the stairs of the building, biding my time walking in idle circles, realizing it was too late to get to them, realizing it was too late to even bother standing up.
It was as if they were already all gone and all the crumbling walls around me already stained with the crimson remains of a bygone humanity – even as I still saw them there in the sunlight, talking, laughing, taking in their meal, they might as well have been on the other end of an insurmountable precipice, behind the cold hard glass.
