(Humiliation)
From what I had heard, the Dummy System was very near to completion now, as in, the very first batch of actual Dummy Plugs was currently in production and may soon be on hands for actual use, at least theoretically.
As such, it wasn't a surprise that the work benches in Dr. Akagi's laboratory down in Terminal dogma had long since been cleared and wiped clean of what was once laid out on them.
Most of the biological material that she worked with in the design process had probably been thrown into an incinerator somewhere – only a few persistent stains of residue remain here and there on some of the surfaces, for not a lot of personnel was even cleared to go down here.
Though I expect that either the Doctor herself or Lt. Ibuki would scrub them when the time came for them to be used again.
It felt a little sad that they would be wiped away – the dark, scab-like crusts and sticky patches that were now all that remained of some of the clones in my batch.
I wondered if they were going to start producing more – both the development process and the fabrication of the finished Dummies must have eaten into the reserves.
Though I knew full well that the Commander would never allow for them to run out.
I wondered if I would see some of the new batch going through accelerated growth in the tank.
Maybe adjustments would be made to the recipe to make the next ones more robust than I had been – or perhaps that would not at all matter, if they were only made for use as Dummies.
Even so, though I contemplated this, I had made sure to sit down on one of the cleaner-looking benches, facing away from the ones with noticeable stains.
There was not a strong smell in the room, not really, but while I waited, there was little else to focus on but what subtle, yet pervasive odor that there was.
I'd already not had much of an appetite since the morning and the longer I had to remain here, the closer I was coming to getting outright nauseated.
When I was younger, I had sometimes been tempted to think that Dr. Akagi might have forgotten about me and the latest scheduled maintenance – but now I knew that this could not be.
She prided herself too much of her exacting work.
To carry it out as whatever pace she might please was her prerogative, her judgement as an expert and as the head of the department.
She did hold her position because she was wont to deliver results, and meant to continue doing so – So she did come, eventually, before it could have added up to any kind of significant delay.
It was no relief to see her shadowed silhouette in the door.
There was no real warmth in the polite, upbeat tone of her voice.
"I'm sorry, did you wait long?"
"No, not very."
I don't think that it would have made a difference if I had given any other answer.
The whole affair was very routine.
She marched right on in, as she usually did, and reached straight for the drawers where she kept the syringes and medication.
"Well, you know the drill. Hold out your arm."
"Yes, Ma'am."
She proceeded the way she always did, pulling a padded stand up to where I was sitting for me to put my arm on while she went to work preparing the injection site and loading the concoction into the syringe, then uncovering the long thin needle.
No doubt she would have had the skill to insert it in such a way that one would barely feel it.
She just didn't really care to, and as many times before, I endured it with barely a curling of my lip.
I do not think that it would have made a difference even if I had said something.
Best not to give her reason to stay longer than necessary… after all, half of the procedure was already over.
She was done tying a piece of gauze to my ellbow with medical tape, and now she was disposing of the needles and putting the flask of medication back into the fridge. Next, I knew from experience, she would be getting out a stetoscope for a routine examination, and after that, I could finally go.
I even hoped, for a moment, that this might come to pass wirthout any further talking or engagement on her part, that her attention would be elsewhere, rather than bothering with me.
But alas I was not so lucky.
Even as I was undoing the laces of my uniform shirt so that she might get at my chest and back, she began speaking, ostensibly to me, for there was no one else within that empty room.
"My, my you've really changed as of late…"
I didn't know what to make of that statement, nor of her tone of voice.
I couldn't really tell what she might be alluding to, or what she was expecting.
I had no choice left but to let her keep talking to discern her meaning. I don't think that she would have been willing to stop even if I had interjected anything.
She was going on and on even as she pressed the cold plates of the sthetoscope to my chest, as she usually did, building up some kind of momentum:
"...I never ever thought that the day would come when I'd see you talking back or questioning a direct order. Misato even told me that she had to break up a fight between you and Asuka last week – I wouldn't have believed her, but then the other day, I saw you walking with Shinji-kun… "
...was that when we went to the garden together? But when did she see? I cannot recall that we passed her anywhere on the way. The idea that any of that private moment may have been witnessed made me feel incredibly exposed – I should really have expected people to see, it wasn't a secret nor had there been any nominal reason to keep it as such, but in my mind, I'd always thought of these private moments that I'd spent with him as something separate from my duties here, so this abrupt collision punched right through the imaginary little membranes that I'd put between here and there.
"...is there a problem with that?"
I was careful not to betray any particular preference, not to give any kind of impression that she might respond to or have opinions about.
"No, no," she assured, her tone darkly amused but with a certain edge to it, in a way that did not put me at ease. "I'm just surprised is all. You're almost starting to look like a human…"
I wish she had not said 'almost'.
I wish she didn't talk of the very idea of that like it was a laughable proposition through and through.
"Just earlier, you even got Misato saying a ridiculous thing to me."
"Ridiculous how?"
I don't think I could wholly keep that from sounding at least a little bit sullen, but if she heard she didn't care to notice.
She just told me to take a large inhale while she listened to my lungs, so that I had to be still while she continued to relate her tale as if she were sharing with me the punchline to some great joke:
"Well, she wondered if it might be the power of ~love~ that is at work behind your recent changes. She's always been an idealist, that one."
Why is that so ridiculous?
I'm not saying it's true, but why would it be ridiculous?
I might not be human, but I'm a sentient being aren't I? In the same way as the angels, or the EVAs she would consider capable of ill-will.
Why would it not at least be theoretically worth considering, even if it wasn't possible?
Aren't I a thinking creature? She sees the psychographs in my synchronization data, does she not?
She must see that I, at very least, do think, if nothing else.
I'm thinking right now.
Why is the very possibility so ridiculous to her?
She really must believe it, if she was saying all this so casually to my face. Like she wasn't expecting me to have any sort of reaction to it.
"Still, I must confess I'm impressed! Both father and son, wrapped right around your little finger! And here I thought you only had eyes for Commander Ikari."
I noticed, as she spoke, how she was twisting the stethoscope cables in her hand, after being finished using it, bending it until the rubber formed a kink. Only then did I pick up what that undertone was that had been tainting her sugar-coated words from the start: Mockery revealed itself, and underneath, an abyss of long-repressed, simmering rage.
"There's really no hope left for us flesh and blood women if so many men are coming to prefer the convenience of mechanical toys…"
"I am not a toy."
I insisted – I remained quiet, but I was firm, too.
She did not like that at all – she whirled around in an instant, and at the first sight of her face, I knew I had made a mistake.
I only beheld for a moment the ugly contortions of anger that pulled apart the thick cake of makeup on her features.
Next thing I knew, I felt the lower cable of the stetoscope lashing against my face like a whip.
She flashed again in front of her rage-twisted face, and reached up to strike me again -
And then, presumably, her vaunted intellect caught up to the rest of her long enough for her to realize what she was doing.
A scrambling cascade of excuses tumbled out of her – with one hand, she half covered her face in some semblance of shame -
"I'm very sorry – It was just a prank – I've been very busy – I've been…"
Yet, hardened by dozens of life-and-death emergencies and a thousand black deeds, the steely Doctor very soon found her footing. Her panicked wide eyes hardened into something piercing.
"Better remember to watch your clever mouth, you little bitch. I'm the one who keeps that body of yours from falling apart, do you understand?!"
"Yes, Ma'am."
I understood.
I understood it very well.
There had been no need to remind me.
"Then hurry up and get out of here. Gendo has got to be waiting for you upstairs."
I was so stunned by what had just transpired, so eager to be gone, that I did not register the oddity of her referring to the Commander by his given name.
I don't think I even waited to close up my shirt again, I seem to recall buttoning it up in the elevator.
I still don't know exactly how the first 'Rei Ayanami' came to be destroyed, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was something very much like this.
It couldn't have been Dr. Akagi of course, she wasn't working her yet, but someone like her – many human beings could be wholly without mercy toward anyone they had branded an 'enemy' – disgustingly lesser, irritatingly higher, or just irrevocably other. It was an extremly banal kind of thing; Historical examples would attest that it does not take any special disturbance.
Insofar as I could discern, Dr. Akagi was perfectly ordinary or even wonderfully pleasant person when she was interacting with Major Katsuragi or Inspector Kaji.
She just didn't think anything of doing it to me, any more than one hesitates to shoot an enemy in a video game, or to kill of a character in a novel, or to have an abortion at an early stage where the brain has not developed yet.
No real person is involved, so no one hurts, or no one bleeds.
Or well, there might be blood, but only in the way that a cell culture stimulated to develop into cardiac cells will begin rythmically contracting on its own purely due to their electrochemical makeup. It doesn't mean there is a heartbeat.
I've heard of studies that showed some perfectly ordinary people having brain activity compared to that seen when looking at an object in response to looking at a homeless person. All the complicated algorithms and subroutines for social interaction or facial recognition just fail to trigger at all.
And all the while, a homeless man is still a person, with all the same complex insides of all the others, born once to a mother who may have loved him at the time.
That was far more than what could be said of me.
Doctor Akagi might not think more of it than she might of smashing an object in a rage.
It was embararssing for a grown adult to have such a lapse in self-control, but she does not expect the broken shards of the vase to shed any tears.
I had not shed tears either, to be perfectly fair.
Commander Ikari was indeed waiting at the top of the elevator.
He beckoned for me to follow him and asked me some perfectly meaningless things about school.
He made a few trivial, noncomittal questions, and I dutifully produced some trivial, noncomittal answers in return.
Stepping out of the elevator, I saw in the steel of the doors that I had some scrapes at the edge of my chin from where she had struck me.
'Please notice!' a part of me begged silent, the bits perhaps that were responsible for the uncomfortably noticeable hammering heartbeat that had not fully quieted yet. 'Please ask about it! Ask in such a way that I cannot help but reveal what happened without directly contradicting your order!'
It can't have been the part that kept walking, that was so very grateful that it was friday so that the mark might well have faded by the time I would return to school so that no one would ever ask about it while it lasted.
If the Commander noticed the little specks of red, he didn't say anything.
Perhaps he assumed that those must have been perfectly inevitable results of a legitimate and necessary experiment.
He must be very used to rationalizing a great many things for the supposed greater good; One would supposed that he had grown quite desensitized to sacrifices, that he no longer much resisted or wrested with himself.
For Dr. Akagi was very much of an expert in this, and she had learned she knew from him in that regard.
His only son had nearly died last week and he had yet to leak a single word about it.
One thing that all the dubs seem to get wrong: rendering 'I am not a doll' line as mildly surprised or neutral - Like she took it literally – 'I am not an anthropomorphic children's toy, why in the world would you say that?' If you actually pay attention to the original jp, she actually sounds distinctly hurt, like there is a subtle but marked shift in tone.
In general they tend to give her some sort of 'serious sci fi soldier voice', I remember being surprised when I first watched it subbed & found she had this high & feeble sort of voice in the OG.
