(Disquiet)

After the visit, I had meant to go back home and spend the rest of the day reading.

I still had the day off, and so far as I'd been told, there was nothing else scheduled for the day.

After what had previously occurred, the prospect of being alone with the pages and the faint ambient noises of my room seemed very much as relief, insofar as anything like that can be said to exist in this world –

Books certainly do not judge you.

They do not demand anything of you, especially not that you explain yourself.

The black letters on white paper were perfectly comprehensible; the meaning would be absorbed and incorporated into my mind without much room for misunderstanding, and even if I failed to recognize a word or a phrase, I could simply get out my phone and type it into a search engine, without any chance of awkward glances.

On many occasions, I had indulged the idle, futile daydream of wishing I could just sink into the realm of facts and stories, and forget about me here, that there was a vessel that was mine, a surface layer to all towers of abstraction that was the one undeniable reality where time kept ticking by -

I didn't even make it past the lobby of the medical wing until a characteristic beeping in the pockets of my uniform dress put a very abrupt end to this idea.

I got out my phone immediately, and as soon as I saw the number, I had already understood what to expect. The one-line contents of the text message confirmed more or less what I had suspected.

It was Commander Ikari, using a secret number he maintained for discrete communications only.

The message consisted just of a plain, straightforward instruction of where to go.

Everything else was implied.

It would appear that he once again had need of me.

Perhaps he had already been considering this when he approved Major Katsuragi's suggestion to give me the day off.

One again, just one single path was laid out before me, just a further elucidation of the path I had always been on, the path I was always going to take.

Right then, I knew exactly how the next moments were going to go.

No choice, little probability of any derailment.

As expected, I watched myself making a different turn than I had thought to make on my way home, taking the shortest path from here to the location I was sent to.

I had a last few minutes to myself, for drifting, contemplation, while the elevators and escalators propelled me to my destination. A product of inevitable inefficiency.

Had there been a faster way to get to where I needed to be, I would have taken it without a second thought.

I would have missed the minutes of silence though they did not really make a difference, nor amount to much space to be filled.

Before I knew it, I had arrived.

Being lost in thought only made the time go faster.

Just as I expeced, Commander Ikari was already waiting for me, standing in the twillight of the corridor.

He was a man who valued efficiency, rarely one to waste time.

"This will be off the record.

Go to Cage Nine. There you will find Unit Zero prepared for you, as well as an object wrapped in a tarpaulin.

Take the object, and proceed to the main shaft.

The means for you to descend it has been prepared.

Follow it all the way down to the main LCL plant.

Do not unwrap the object until you have reached Terminal Dogma.

Then, you will take the object, pass heaven's door, and use it on the torso the creature that is contained below.

That is all.

You will leave the object in its place and return to the cage."

That is all he told me.

No why. Not what for.

Why would he even tell me?

I was simply the instrument, my role like that of a conduit in a machine.

He would already have thought about what I needed to know.

Once, this would have made perfect sense.

I would simply have taken this as the way of the world, as it always had been.

Nothing had changed, really, except for that thin strain of weary bitterness that had crept in where the doubt had made room for it.

Or maybe not even that.

Perhaps it had always been there, and I was only now growing aware of it, like the aquifers running in the ground under my feet.

Regardless of all that, those same feet set themselves in motion, going where they were bid.

It was never explicitly told to me, of course, but I knew more than just that, whether the various participants in my creation were aware of this or not.

I would be very much surprised if the artifact in the wrappings turned out to be anything other than the Lance of Longinus.

One foot in front of the other.

I trudged along the only path laid out to me.

Soon, my slight steps were replaced by the thundering footfalls of EVA Unit 00.

If the two of us did not think, or feel pain, we might have been indistinguishable from the machinery that moved the lifeless gates of Heaven's Door.

Our thoughts did not amount for anything.

The contents of our hearts would vanish unheard.

They were not really anything great – there was naught to feel but pain. There was naught to see but the leaden weight of inevitability settling upon us all.

But for now, they were proof of our existence.

Fleeting proof, but woven into the universe's chain of causality.

Subtly impacting our surroundings like the wings of a buttlerfly.

Its effect would probably collapse into the foam of random variations.

A few more steps, and we were there.

The thing that was nailed to the cross here was not terrible because it was alien.

It was presumably, less alien to me than anyone else.

If I were to indulge my private fantasy of Commander Ikari as my father, this being was perhaps the closest to what might be considered my mother.

I am derived from it, in various manners.

Its horror is that of a flesh without a mind, meat without soul, emptied of personhood.

The equivalent of a cricked whose brain was eaten by cordyceps or snuffed out by a parasitic wasp.

It was still alive, despite the nails in its palms, despite the many tubes that had been grafted into its back, despite the mask forced on its countenance for the convenience of mankind, taken into possession through the brand of their symbol, and how it cut into the folds of its white crumbled flesh, drawing rivers of blood.

And there were deeper scars still, one mark across its chest, and another, where its marred torso ceased.

If I understand it correctly, these were the result of the creation of Unit One.

This flesh was, of course, immortal, as a cell of cancer lines in a laboratory was immortal, alive as contracting cardiac muscle cells in a petri dish were alive.

Even thus violated, the life that it once was could not taste the dignity of release, a beating-heart-cadaver for which there was no life support to disconnect.

The wound on the chest had even knit back together into a scar, its torn abdomen even continued its attempt at growing legs, like experimental flies with bits of hox genes placed on the wrong body parts, a portuguese manowar's worth of independent cells that had ceased to be an emergent structure.

It lacked an impression of its own image, a sense of itself, or herself maybe, or themself.

It lacked all that would have made it a 'she' or a 'they' or a 'xir'.

It was an abomination against any sense of order that might ever have existed in this word.

The meat, was, of course, immortal.

Dead meat twitching.

But there was no will to guide it, no blueprint to tell it what to regrow.

Where she had been lopped off at the waist – for there was still a her, back then – the flesh hung off in knotted growths.

There was a semblance of legs, covering it like a hairy white mold.

Legs twitching.

Legs sticking out of odd places.

Legs growing out of each other.

Legs running red with LCL dripping down from their midts, pooling down below the twitching semblance of feet.

Why is my heart faltering?

All I have to do is to drive in this spear.