"Originally, there were two camps. Two dominant perspectives in the nascent field of metaphysical biology. The Katsuragi Camp and the Fuyutsuki Camp. Katsuragi was a brilliant scientist, and he inspired an entire generation of academics beneath him. He was always concerned with the physicality of the field—the energy potential, in particular, which was embodied in his S2 theory. He was practical, and sought practical questions to answer.
On the other hand, I was not very practical. My ideas were all theoretical. All academic. How could they be anything else? I had nothing to study! No hard evidence, nothing to test but numbers in a computer. So I tested and tested, simulated and simulated, and the simulations grew abstract and bizarre. How was I to know that reality was far stranger?
Neither of us was right, you understand. He was too practical, too concrete, to see that what he was tampering with was beyond him. I was too theoretical, too idealistic, to recognize the horrors my work could unleash. In the end, we both paid the price.
Yet even with his death, nothing changed. Our students took up the fight in our absence. For all the years of Gehirn's existence, and even into the early years of Nerv, the schism persisted. Katsuragi's devotees versus mine. The Berlin genius versus the Hakone wunderkind. Star pupil against star pupil. Practicality versus ideology. Soryu versus Ikari.
Two teams with all the funding in the world, each led by a brilliant woman in the prime of her life, trying to crack the ultimate code—to create divinity from cold flesh and steel. Arguments, eye-gouging. Laughter and late night phone calls. Failure after failure after failure, until, finally, they each earned the success that killed them.
I never asked Yui what she thought of the rivalry. In the end, I'm still not sure who won."
From the unpublished journals of Kozo Fuyutsuki. 2015.
Last Days of Wonder
By Toasterman
The hardwood is cold in the early morning. It chills her bare feet, but she moves slowly enough to stay quiet. She enters the kitchen in a bathrobe, her hair wrapped in a towel. She brews coffee and boots the PC in the living room. The trackball mouse clicks in the empty house. The hard drive clack-clacks like muffled pistons, connecting to the distant Gehirn server, rendering the results of the overnight simulation, keyed into the Hakone supercomputer network before end of day. She sips her coffee and fixes her bathrobe and waits.
Her keys and badge hang on the wall peg by the front door. The name on her badge says Soryu, K., though that isn't her full name. On her birth certificate, her name is hyphenated, like her mother's. Zeppelin-Soryu. It's that way on all her official documents—like her paycheck, her doctorate, and the deed to the family manse in Württemberg—but on anything else, especially things like her badge, she always drops the Zeppelin.
She's never liked it. Never liked the doors it opens, either. If she makes something, gets something, earns something, she wants it to be on her merits, her ability, not on some name given to her by a father she barely remembers.
She watches the progress bar inch its way across the screen. If Hakone screwed this up again, she'll go right over that doctor whatshername's head and complain to the international communications office. It's bad enough they have to put up with using the Japan branch's prototype supercomputers for every simulation. She doesn't have to stand for delayed responses. A complaint will improve things, though she's sure the whole Japanese team will hate her for it.
That's nothing new. People have always hated her. It earned her another name, one that she rarely hears firsthand, though she knows of its existence.
Wunderkind. Wonder kid, in English, though it's only ever used pejoratively. Too smart, too young, too good. That wunderkind gets everything she wants. That wunderkind gets to call all the shots. Who does that wunderkind think she is?
Not so much a kid anymore, though. Thirty-one this past May, married six years, and with a five-year-old daughter in tow. Thirty-one years is a long time to get used to the spite, the bitterness. The jealousy.
It doesn't bother her, though. She understands it as the natural consequence of always being the smartest woman in the room. It's followed her from childhood, up through her entire education—undergrad, grad, and doctoral studies. Now, even at the forefront of science in a career all her own, people still hate her. But no, it doesn't bother her at all.
What bothers her is knowing that she wasn't always the smartest.
"Mom?" She turns at the tiny voice. Her daughter is at the top of the stairs, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. "Why are you up?"
"No reason, darling."
"Are you working?"
"Yes, I'm working. You can go back to bed."
"Can I see?"
"Only if you want to."
Her daughter doesn't go back to bed. Instead, she walks down the stairs in that careful two-feet-on-one-step way that they've tried to break her of. She's six, after all—time to start taking the stairs like a big girl. But it's too early for that battle.
When she was pregnant, she read all the parenting books she could get her hands on. Well, not all of them. That would have been a waste of time. First, she conducted a qualitative assessment of the top parenting books, reading abstracts and reviews to determine validity. That narrowed the list from "all" down to the top twenty, so she read those twenty. Then she read ten more, selected at random from the cut-list to account for selection process flaws in her original assessment.
So while the rest of the world was recovering after Second Impact, putting out the fires of the panic wars and consolidating itself under the rule of the new United Nations, she was busily being pregnant and becoming an expert mother.
Richard likes to tease her about it. "My wife is trying to win at motherhood," he sometimes says to the rest of the staff. It gets a laugh—he somehow always does, despite his chronically American sense of humor—but behind closed doors, he is very serious.
"You don't have to work this hard at it," he told her, once, sitting on the sofa after bedtime.
"Who is working hard?" she said, noting in the margins of Siegel's Brain-based Learning for Early Adolescents.
"I'm only saying that most parents aren't experts," he said. "Yours weren't. Mine definitely weren't. It's okay if we make mistakes. We're going to make mistakes."
She didn't look up. "You might," she said.
Now, she sits down at the computer desk and lets her daughter climb onto her lap. "Did you sleep well?" she asks, in Japanese.
"Hai," her daughter says, following her language shift. She knows the expectation. Speak English to dad, and speak German or Japanese to mom, whichever mom wants. "What are you looking at?"
"A simulation." The bar is full. She sets her coffee down and clicks 'open'. The data appears. She skims over it. Destrudo pattern, psychography, bioelectrics, blah blah blah. Success rate: 100%.
"Who is taking me to school today?"
"Daddy is taking you," she says, scrolling through it again, slower. There are several unknowns in the data that the supercomputer ignored. She expected as much. The Ikari data helps, but modeling a successful activation is difficult, like mapping a continent no one has been to, or describing a color no one has ever seen. From one perspective, they're as prepared as they can possibly be. From another, they're groping blind.
"One hundred seems good," says the voice from her lap.
"It is good," she tells the little girl, "but it can always be better."
On the wall in the kitchen, the calendar reads Thursday, December 14, 2006. Friday the 15th is circled in red. 'V-Day,' it reads. Outside, the world is the gray of pre-dawn, ready to burst at any moment.
((()))
The first time they met was in March of '99, at a grad seminar in Tokyo. Dr. Katsuragi's artificial evolution laboratory, the forefront of science itself, opening its doors to tomorrow's best and brightest. At the time, Kyoko was the adjunct team lead, making her Dr. Katsuragi's right-hand. When he was absent, team members went to her. And when he didn't want to walk grad students around the laboratory on some trumped-up field trip, she had the honor of taking his place.
It happened between the keynote address and the theory workshop, when the tour was on the testing floor. Kyoko stood in front of the prototype of the embodiment engine, the original testbed for the S2 object. This was before the Antarctic discovery that changed everything, back when the good doctor thought he could synthesize the organ, breed and grow it in this house-sized sphere—a scientific womb covered in thick cables and surmounted by a dense thicket of scaffolding.
She stood there in her lab coat and explained the embodiment principle, the math behind it and the finer expense points—the fact they had to fabricate the connectors in Switzerland, and how expensive each part of it was. These were all the fun parts, the easy facts that made visitors ooh and aah.
She had seen Katsuragi do it a number of times to the investors, to the press, to all the people he needed to impress. Standing there, barely older than some of the students she was lecturing, it felt good to try and work the same magic as her mentor. Tell the same jokes, get the same laughs. It gave her a sense of separation from them—a confirmation that, yes, she was on another level, thank you very much.
Then one of the students raised a hand. Kyoko stopped halfway through a sentence, something about the main coolant line. "Yes?"
The hand went down and a voice spoke up. "How does the organ maintain homeostasis?"
"We maintain it," Kyoko said, correcting the mistake. "The organ does nothing for itself. It isn't a truly genetically encoded lifeform."
"How do you do that?"
The voice belonged to a woman in her early twenties. Yellow blouse, brown hair, soft eyes. Easy smile.
Kyoko nodded, entertaining the question. "A computer on-site maintains all the heating and cooling of the growing tissue. Its biological systems are shifted very precisely. For instance, we measure growth, and at certain instars—when the overall bulk and tissue complexity reaches certain predetermined exponential sizes—we release hormones. Even the flow of synthetic blood is calculated down to the microsecond, far more regularly than any true biological system."
She prepared to move on.
"How many attempted growth cycles have you undergone?" asked Yellow Blouse.
Kyoko turned back to her. "Eleven," she said.
"Why do they keep failing?"
"There are various theories," Kyoko said.
"Perhaps it's the very regularity of your growth system that's causing the failures."
Kyoko put her hands in her pockets. "How's that?"
"There's a lot of unpredictability in organic systems. Real growth patterns aren't perfect, they're flawed. A certain degree of predictable unpredictability that leads to life reactions. Perhaps the failures are due to just that—the perfection preventing the sustained reaction you're searching for."
Kyoko approached her. Several of the grad students between them backed up, clearing the way. She peered at the woman's visitor badge. Last name, first initial, and a space for her sponsoring institution, be it academy or company.
"Ikari, Y. Kyoto University," she read aloud. "Are you one of Fuyutsuki's, then?"
"Does it show?" said Ikari.
"Maybe." Kyoko looked at her. "Was there a point to your comment?"
"I was just wondering if you'd thought of it." Her smile returned, and Kyoko realized that what she had at first assumed was a kind smile was, in fact, tinged with a streak of arrogance.
Kyoko returned the smile, as snidely as she could. "Let's hold the questions until the workshop, Ms. Ikari."
"Certainly, Ms. Soryu," said Yui Ikari. "Thank you."
"Dr. Soryu. And don't mention it."
The tour moved on. Kyoko finished the explanation of the embodiment engine, the computer system, then let Dr. Chandana take the group into the conference room for the theory workshop.
Richard joined her. "Who was that?" he said.
"One of Fuyutsuki's," she said.
"Huh." He watched the group go, eyes lingering. "Nice top," he said, as an afterthought.
"Richard."
"What? There's no harm in looking."
"You're lucky I said yes to marrying you."
Richard agreed, and she decided to skip the workshop and let him take her to lunch instead. She had better things to do than watch the best and brightest trample the lab with baby steps. By the end of the day, she was back to work, and had almost forgotten Ikari, Y. from Kyoto University.
((()))
Richard takes the car. She rides with a coworker. His name is Dr. Strauss. She's worked with him for four years and considers him a friend, despite usually forgetting his first name. Strauss drives a green pre-Impact sedan, the Gehirn logo stenciled on both doors. She rides to work, listens to Strauss discuss the successful simulation, and thinks of when last she was in Hakone. The company car that picked her up from the airport was new. When it drove her to the geo-front, the construction lights of the soon-to-be 'city of the future' played across its sleek, black hood. Just one of a thousand little acts of budgetary nepotism.
No, her branch doesn't get new cars. It doesn't get new computers, new air conditioning, and it certainly doesn't get a pre-human space cavern. No. This morning, like every morning for the past five years, the security guard scans her badge and beeps them through a main gate labeled 'Gehirn Berlin'. Beyond the gate, a desolate airfield, broken only by the weeds which grow in spurts through the busted tarmac and the tombstone plinths of the hangars and control tower.
At the back of the property lies a cluster of prefab structures, a village of mobile buildings, excavation equipment, and locomotive-sized capacitors all huddling around the steel bulge of a decommissioned missile silo. This is the real Second Branch.
In time, it will grow. She knows this. After tomorrow, there will be no choice but to invest in her team. Money and prestige will flow into this airfield, and the Second Branch will eclipse its forebear. No more hand-me-downs. No more scraping by.
So long as she can pull it off, that is.
Strauss parks and Kyoko gets out. The day is young, but there is no cloud cover, and the midday heat threatens to move in early. She adjusts her sunglasses and realizes that she and Strauss aren't alone. "Who is that?" she says, pointing.
Strauss tracks her finger to the government cars by the capacitors, and the woman at their heart. "Energy commissioner," he says.
Kyoko frowns, trying to remember her name. Strauss notices.
"Victoria Stradland," he says.
"Danke." She closes her door and heads toward the commissioner. "Come with me."
"What for?" Strauss says, falling in beside her.
"Because I'm not dressed for this," she says, stepping over power cables and around electric golf carts. "I don't think sneakers and a tank top are appropriate attire for a political meeting."
"It's fair. You didn't know she was coming."
"Well, last time we talked didn't go well," she says.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. Insults were thrown. She called me an uppity egghead, and I think I called her an overpaid bureaucrat."
"Oh." Strauss smiles. "Then in that case, good news: nothing you wear is going to help."
"Thanks, Dr. Strauss."
"You're welcome, Dr. Soryu."
Stradland sees her over the rims of her thin glasses and approaches, tottering over an old parking berm in her black heels. "Soryu!" she says, leaving off the title entirely. "What do you think you're doing?"
"Dr. Soryu," she says. "And you'll have to be more specific."
"Your power draw is exceeding what was approved!" Stradland snaps her fingers rapidly. Eventually, one of the lesser bureaucrats in her wake steps up with a sheaf of paperwork. She then holds it out, bent where her thumb is pressing it into her palm. "We have a maximum budgeted energy allotment for your little science camp here. The federal power commission does not need to reallocate electricity away from vital reconstruction efforts for the sake of a project that does not aid reconstruction."
A project that does not aid reconstruction. The irony is too thick to be funny. Kyoko doesn't smile. "This isn't a federal concern. The United Nations chartered this installation, and gave clear instructions that we were to be provided all the power necessary."
"There are those of us who do not recognize the United Nations' newfound supreme authority. We Germans retain our sovereignty. You would do well to remember that, or have you completely lost all sense of national community just because someone else signs your checks?"
"You know I'm not on the UN payroll," Kyoko says, quickly. It's clumsy–a not-so-veiled reference to her real employer. The organization which no one names aloud, least so government employees like Stradland. Never seen, never mentioned. Always feared.
Stradland's lips form a thin, disgusted line. "I will shut this place down right here, right now," she says. "I'm not scared of you."
Perhaps you should be, Kyoko is about to say.
"Guten Morgen!" says Richard, from across the parking lot, as he steps out of the family car. He draws Stradland's attention, even from a distance. He approaches casually, but Kyoko can see that he's picking up pace as he realizes the situation at hand. "Energy Commissioner Stradland," he says, with a big, easy grin that offsets his stilted German. "It is so good to see you today. How have you been?"
"I'm well, Dr. Langley," she says, smiling.
"I have not seen you since that conference in Frankfurt. What was it, 'The Application of Civic Engineering in a Post-Impact Economy'?" He glances at Kyoko quickly, so much to say 'Is this going bad?'
She cocks her head and glares at him, as much to say 'What the hell do you think?'
"Very good memory," Stradland says. "I'm sure it was boring."
Richard shakes his head. "Not at all. Your presentation was the best one I saw that whole week."
"You flatter me," she says.
"It's not flattery if it's true." He gestures at the men behind her and the papers in her hand. "I can tell this is not just a social call, though. Is there something we can do for you?"
"Well, unfortunately, I'm here to shut down your access to the city grid."
Kyoko speaks up. "We're apparently non-essential to the efforts of reconstruction," she says.
Richard incorporates that quickly. "Oh, but we are. We are."
"Not in the eyes of the federal government," Stradland says.
"And are those eyes your eyes, Commissioner?" Richard says.
"They happen to be," Stradland says.
"And what lovely eyes they are," Richard says. Stradland smiles, caught off guard. Kyoko rolls her eyes. "Allow me to show you around the facility. I will explain exactly what we are doing with all that electricity. Full transparency."
Kyoko raises an eyebrow. "We can't really afford to–"
"Dr. Soryu cannot spare the time, but I'm happy to take you on a tour," Richard says.
Stradland doesn't seem to mind. "I'd be happy to, Richard," she says.
In a moment they're off, Richard trotting them across the compound. Kyoko watches them. Strauss is at her shoulder.
"Think he can get her off our backs?" he says.
"Absolutely," Kyoko says.
"How can you be sure?" Strauss says. In the rapidly-increasing distance, the energy commissioner laughs at one of Richard's jokes.
"I'm sure," she says.
((()))
The silo was originally constructed to house a ninety-meter tall intercontinental ballistic missile. Its payload was a MIRV warhead, a city-killer bundle of cluster munitions. Now the missile was gone, broken down and sold for scrap alongside the gantries, cabling, computers, and service equipment that helped maintain it. Today, the silo conceals a new weapon, far stranger and far, far more dangerous than any Cold War nuke.
The silo is surrounded by service rooms, access corridors, and a control chamber. The first thing that their team did upon taking the facility was to reconfigure these rooms for their own purpose. She follows the corridors out of long-ingrained habit and scans herself into the control room. Two guards stand sentry at the threshold. They log her entry and crank open the old Soviet door for her.
The control room is the former mission control center for the entire missile base, now gutted and filled with Gehirn's computers. Her desk is at the center of it. She drops her purse on the desktop. "Startup physical cycling," she says, throwing her jacket over the back of her seat. "Run pulses through every synapse. Test motor functions and reaction times in the body. I want her warmed up."
"Copy," says someone, Kyoko doesn't catch who. There are over twenty full-time analysts and testers on the team. She supervised the hiring of each of them, but she doesn't know them well, not by voice or name. If the security team wasn't so strict about everyone wearing their ID badge, it's likely she would never remember their names.
Keyboards clack. Kyoko watches the synaptic returns on her console, a 3D model of the unit's brain lighting up and going dark in sequence. Next to Kyoko's desk is a window into the silo. They had to reinforce the glass upon arrival, knowing that the original windows weren't specced to withstand the pressure of the biochemical oil they would need to fill it with. Now when she looks through it, she peers into a swirling, pinkish gloom, lit by the running lights of the silo itself.
In that gloom, a figure. Massive yet lithe, it is wrapped in black polymer strips, as though mummified. Monitoring cables emerge from bundles across its head, torso, arms and legs, all running into the walls, feeding constant data to the banks of computers around her. Thick cords of power cables snake from its back and up, up, disappearing out the top of the silo. Its head is the only fully-armored section of its body, and even that is provisional. A prototype helmet painted in bands of yellow and black hazard stripes, all turned the same shade of violet in the oil. On the helmet, stenciled identification. Evangelion Unit 02. Production Model.
She watches the Evangelion as it reacts to the pulses. Little twitches in its musculature tell her that it is functioning properly. A finger curl here, a jerk of the knee there.
"Muscle control is nominal," she says, to the team. "Let's move on. Feed dummy signals from the socket. Use the same startup cycle from last night's sim. Cycle the cortex. Light her up."
"Copy, Dr. Soryu. Startup cycle booting."
They left one relic from the silo's past: a gridded pane of glass with a permanent map of the planet printed on its surface, sitting at the center of the control room. Its original purpose was the tracking of outbound missiles to their target sites—a live-updating cartography of the apocalypse. In some ways, it came to pass; now the map is as outdated as the notion of the war it was meant to plot, with the coastlines of every continent in their pre-Impact configuration.
It's covered in handwritten calculations. Equations link the eastern seaboard of the USA to the old USSR. Proofs sprinkle the Pacific. A quick note, in English, covers the outline of Old Japan: 'Mylar sheathing: yay or nay?'. A spray bottle and wet erase markers sit on the easel tray nearby.
Her 3D model jags, showing errant signals splintering between the temporal and parietal lobes of the unit's brain. She calls them out. "I'm seeing sickle patterns again. Someone mark that."
Someone does, getting up from their desk and doodling the note on the to-do section of the big board. The to-do list scrawls across most of Africa. This one blots out Cape Town.
Kyoko keys up CCTV feeds on her computer. Security feeds from across the facility, all throughout the silo and its support tunnels. She finds maintenance teams milling, checking power feeds. She spots two team members—Dr. Runnels and Dr. Hargett, she thinks—in the service chamber, calibrating the cockpit cylinder, the item that the Ikari paperwork calls the 'entry plug'. She finds Richard guiding Stradland and her goons through the power junctions, stopping to show them specifics. There is no audio on the security feed, only images. Stradland laughing at his jokes, smiling at him. Her hand touches his arm. He doesn't pull away.
She minimizes the feed.
The term 'production model' itself is fundamentally inaccurate. For one thing, there was never a successful prototype or test type. Both such creations exist, yes, but neither have ever worked. There is no such thing as a functioning template for a production model Evangelion to be based on. The prototype was never meant to activate, just to prove that the biological systems work properly. And the test type…
Well, that experiment failed.
For another thing, the unit wasn't even originally grown for her team. Instead, it is a castoff body from the Hakone team—one of their late-stage failures. It has similar physical traits to its sister-spawn, the prototype. This can be seen clearly in its optical implants, which are of the conical lens pattern, not the humanoid slits of the test type. And because of all this, the unit is flush with experimental systems and slapdash engineering solutions—duct tape fixes for a thousand little problems.
Yet still, the old blast door has a sign that says "Project E: Production Model Test Facility." She has to call it that on all the official forms, all the proposal documents and equipment transfer request forms, all the budgetary slips and ticky-tacky do-whats that Gehirn runs on. She understands that. The project is inordinately expensive. The bottom line is that no one in the German branch wants to finance an Evangelion.
When she is in front of money people, she calls it 'the production model'. In front of her team, she calls it 'Test 02'. When it's just her and Richard, she calls it 'Shit Stack'.
The blast door grinds open again. Richard is back. She hears him bid good morning to each of the team members in turn, sharing little in-jokes and pleasantries. Eventually, he gets to his desk. It's next to hers. They share an edge.
He plops down in his chair. "She just left," he says, in English. "She says we aren't getting throttled tomorrow, so we should have full power for the test."
She charts another gray matter spasm—another of those damn sickle-signals—and makes a note on her clipboard. "Good," she says.
"What?" he says. She shrugs. He stares at her. "She was going to shut us down. I stopped it."
"I know," she says. "I'm sure she had a great time."
"What does that mean?" he says.
She raises an eyebrow at him, then lowers her voice. "'I'd be happy to, Richard. I wore my shortest dress, Richard. So glad to see you, Richard.'"
"Oh, come on."
"'I haven't seen you since the How to Be a Government Whore conference.'"
"I can't believe you're actually mad right now."
"I'm not mad." Kyoko clicks and drags, rotating the cerebral model to focus on the liaison point between the cybernetic vertebrae and the actual wetware.
"I solved the problem," Richard says. "What was your solution? Quote Seele regulation line and verse? She'd have shut us down. Sometimes you've got to schmooze a bit to get what you want."
"Your way is much better," she says, evenly. The model spasms again, at the connection point. She thinks she's found the problem.
"Christ, Kay, it's not like I fucked the woman."
She stands up. "Strauss," she says, raising her voice, "I think I've got an error. I'm going to make a dive. Keep the cycle ongoing."
"Copy that."
Richard throws his hands up and turns away in his chair, fed up with her ignoring him. She resists the urge to tell him to go to hell, and leaves the control room.
((()))
She was officially brought into the fold in '02. An invitation sent her across the planet again, back to Japan. Air travel was still rare in those days. With the planet still under reconstruction, it took special dispensation and an earmarked UN passport to approve any international flight. Thankfully, all the red tape magically disappeared after she got her paperwork.
Richard was accommodating. "I'll hold down the fort," he said. Just another one of his silly American phrases. "We'll be okay here. Go get 'em."
So she went. A ramjet from Stuttgart to Tokyo-II, then a train down to some place called Hakone. A clean, black car picked her up, then drove her to a complex of nondescript white buildings. A visitor's badge was provided for her, one that she pinned to her lapel. 'Soryu, K.' The university/corporation line was left blank. On the badge, a red and white motif. Beside it, a word. Gehirn.
She sat in a waiting room, across from a potted plant and a clock. The clock ticked away thirty minutes. Her watch ticked off the same. The potted plant did nothing.
A door opened, and Kyoko stood up. What she saw was unexpected.
"It's been some time," said Yui Ikari, bowing.
"It has," she said, reciprocating. She hoped it didn't look too stiff. The custom never set well with her.
"I'm very glad you made the trip," she said. "I'm sorry about the wait."
"Not a problem. Thank you for having me."
"Please," Ikari said, gesturing to the open door.
The tour was extensive. She gave an overview of the facility, which she referred to as Gehirn, First Branch. What she showed wasn't much, really nothing more than what Katsuragi's team had assembled years back in Tokyo. Certainly not cutting edge.
"Can I ask you a question?" Ikari said, when the tour had seemingly come to a close. They stood next to an elevator bank, prepared to head back down to the lobby.
"I believe that is a question," Kyoko said.
"Why do you think Katsuragi failed?" Ikari said.
His name hit like lightning. So long it had been gone from her life, from her lips, that the sound of it shocked her. "I can only speculate," she said.
"Please do, if you don't mind," Ikari said.
"It could have been a number of things," she said. "The leading reason, I would hazard, would be a rapid auto-reclamation of the target body upon the removal of Object Beta."
It felt almost sacrilegious to poke holes in her mentor's work. She had done so privately for two years, ever since the accident, turning the process around in her mind's eye, trying to theorize her way out of a practical mistake that had come and gone. Trying to unwrite an apocalypse through sheer tyranny of thought. But those thoughts had been just that–thoughts. She had never spoken her doubts aloud, even to Richard. Doing so now felt uncouth. Blasphemous.
The elevator arrived and both women boarded. Ikari hit the button for the lobby. The doors closed.
Kyoko looked at Ikari's face, trying to see if she knew more, but her expression was bemused. Inscrutable. Kyoko pressed on.
"If that happened, and the target body began to function autonomously, then it might have manifested a non-zero Absolute Terror quotient. Returning it to non-functionality would have required the re-insertion of Object Beta, which might have inverted the AT quotient. Which caused the explosion." She paused. "How am I doing so far?"
"What if I said you're right?"
"Then I'd ask what you're wasting all this time for," Kyoko said.
"What do you mean?"
"Nothing you've shown me is new. It's like you're working on tech—on theories—five years out of date. Like the discovery of Object Alpha never happened." Kyoko looked at her. "So why don't you show me what you're really doing."
Ikari hit another button. The ticker on the door did not stop at the lobby, but continued down, into numbers unmarked. The lights in the elevator dimmed, and then suddenly they were somewhere different, somewhere vast and cool and underground. Kyoko looked over the railing and down, down, down, into wherever, or whatever, this was.
"Welcome to Gehirn One," Ikari said. "For real, this time."
The real tour took three hours, and what she saw then was beyond anything they'd had back in Tokyo—beyond anything anyone had before. It was as though the full resources of the post-Impact economy were being funneled down into this cavern, so while the world above felt like a cemetery, this place felt like a cradle—a womb for a new future.
Every department she visited, she saw something wonderful taking shape. She saw supercomputers under construction and she saw plans for the super-city they would control. She saw massive weapons systems and power plants, colossal pedways and kilometer after kilometer of living facilities, fabrication plants, science testbeds and laboratories, hangars and launch bays for things which didn't even exist yet.
But Ikari saved the best for last. Kyoko was shown the prototype, hanging on its gimbal in the simulation bay, draped like an unfinished doll. It was just the two of them, herself and Ikari, standing beneath the drooping cranium. It was there in the half-dark that Kyoko first heard the word that would come to dominate the rest of her life.
"We call it Evangelion."
"Evangelion," Kyoko said.
"You like the name?"
Absolutely not. "Yes. Very interesting."
Ikari took off her lamplight helmet and set it on a work table. She ran a hand through her hair. "I'm sure by now it's clear what we're doing here."
"A clone of Object Alpha," Kyoko said.
"Adam," Ikari said, "is what we've come to call it. The first Angel."
"A clone of Adam, then," Kyoko said. She walked up to the prototype and laid a hand on one of its vertebrae. The rigid casing was covered in scribblings, all notes on its construction, stenciled on during fabrication. 'This end up,' etc. "Why are you showing me all this?"
"Part of the project, eventually, will be the growth and integration of an organ capable of sustaining an S2 reaction. We know Adam had it. Logically, so can its offspring."
"And with Katsuragi dead, I'm the foremost expert on that topic," Kyoko said. "Who asked for me?"
"Our benefactors thought we should meet," Ikari said.
"So not you, then."
"In a few days time, they are going to give you an offer. A choice," she said. "Gehirn 02 will be constructed and opened in Berlin, not too many months from now. Temporary for now, but it will grow. In time, I'm sure there will be Gehirn branches in all of the United Nations. However, primary fabrication, construction, and testing for Project E will remain here in Japan. The Berlin branch will mostly handle outsourced simulations and theorizing. That kind of thing."
"So what's the choice?" Kyoko said.
"Run the Berlin branch, or come here and work on Project E directly."
"Under you," Kyoko said.
For the second time in her life, she saw Yui Ikari smile. It looked much the same as it had the first time. Kindness concealing something deeper. A woman inordinately satisfied with herself. "Under me," she said, simply.
Kyoko did not give an answer. The tour concluded, and the two women rode back to the surface. Ikari bid her farewell at the nondescript door of the nondescript building, and then Kyoko took a ride in a nondescript sedan to the airport.
Two days later, she got a phone call, and made the choice she suspected Yui Ikari had wanted her to make all along: captain of the B-team.
((()))
Kyoko cinches the scuba mask to her face and slides down off the lip of the silo and into the oil. The midday squawk of insects disappears immediately, replaced by the hiss-woosh of her respiration. She sinks, letting her body weight carry her down into the magenta-tinged world of the Production Model's womb.
The oil isn't really oil, of course. It's a biosynthetic hydrostatic fluid, but since biosynthetic hydrostatic fluid is a nightmare jargon-jumble, oil it is. It keeps the biological and chemical components of the unit in a state of stasis. She drifts down to the Evangelion's neck. The creature's head is positioned forward, allowing the plug socket aperture to protrude from between the C2 and C3 vertebrae. Each of these vertebrae are synthetic replacements, meant to short-circuit the neural pulses between the unit's brain and the rest of its body. They were implanted in the body as it grew, replaced over time as it got larger and larger.
It is a key component of the unit's lobotomization, and the lynchpin structure that will allow its reactivation as a weapon of man.
The truth is that, like any massive project, the Evangelion is undergoing fixes and changes right up until the deadline. Science rarely runs on optimum timetables. Great works are due not when they should be, but when they are needed by their financiers. Unit 01 may have had a seemingly infinite budget, but even its creation was beholden to someone else's schedule.
Kyoko hovers by the topmost vertebrae and sinks her diagnostic cables into its input ports. Her datapad activates in its waterproof sheath. She troubleshoots the connection and tells herself that Richard is an asshole. She thinks about it a lot while she types. He just can't help himself. Some bitch shows up with a paper excuse for being there and he's all over her, talking about her beautiful eyes like some insufferable gigolo.
She charts the synaptic misfire. With a direct connection, she sees the problem clearly. She clicks the 'talk' button on the side of her respirator. "Control, you read me?"
"Copy, Dr. Soryu." The voice is Richard's. He's keeping it professional.
"I've pinned down the twitch. Adjust buffers to 0.05," she says, then adds, "please."
"Will do. Standby."
Time passes in the gloom. She breathes. Bubbles drift upwards through the oil.
"You should go with him," Katsuragi told her, on that last night in the Antarctic. They were sitting in the primary atrium, in the southern habitat. A radical botanist by the name of Gauthier had sublet the chamber to test artificially engineered plantlife, gene-crafted to withstand the extreme cold. Katsuragi often went there to think, bundled in his thermo-regulated coat amid the technicolor fronds.
"I'll miss the activation," she said.
"It's your honeymoon, Dr. Soryu."
She couldn't hide her shock. "The most important moment in history and I'll be in Hawaii."
"The most important moment in history," he repeated. "Are you history, then?"
"I've put years of my life into this project. I want to see it done."
"You want your name in the books, then. Einstein. Oppenheimer. Soryu. If that's the case, then you needn't worry. Your name is already everywhere. It's on all the papers, all the equipment, right next to mine."
"Right under it, you mean."
"Even more reason to take the time off. They'll give me all the credit anyway. It's the Katusragi Theory, not the Soryu Theory."
"I never meant to imply it shouldn't be," she said.
"I know," he said. "My point is that it will all come in due time. So go get married. Go with Richard to Hawaii. Sit on the beach and watch the sunset. You needn't be here for the throwing of a switch."
"You're telling me to give up on this," she said.
"Not at all. I'm just telling you that you aren't history. This isn't the most important thing to you. Your wedding, your marriage, those things are more important than work. Or they should be, anyway."
He gave her one of his smiles then, the kind he gave her when she should feel preposterous. It worked.
She took the last jet north the next day, just herself and a man named Rokubungi seated between stacks of equipment, all marked unusable and shipped back to Japan.
Dr. Katsuragi never came back from Antarctica. Neither did his team—a little over one hundred structural engineers, communications specialists, computational theorists, and academics in their postgraduate studies. Each one a genius in their own right, hitching their wagon to the Katsuragi comet. All gone. Snuffed out like nothing.
A meteor, they said, and brushed the whole thing under the rug. Katsuragi's name disappeared from everything. The project had been very hush-hush to begin with, but now it was entirely blackballed. No printed word of it. Her phone calls were recorded, and any mention of him resulted in a dead line. No one used his name anymore. Before long, she stopped trying.
The honeymoon never happened. Hard to sit on a beach when all the beaches were underwater.
Now, in the gloom, she watches the bubbles drift upward and realizes how much of a bitch she's been. Richard is right. Rank wasn't going to get them out of it, and neither was regulation. Cited evidence held no weight in this situation. They needed to be diplomatic. They needed to be personable.
Richard did the right thing, which also pisses her off. She finds that his diplomatic personability often pisses her off. That isn't his fault, either. She just doesn't have that gear in her mind, that ability to care as much as he does, and it bothers her, makes her jealous. It's a fault in her makeup, a weak point in her armor she hasn't had time to repair. She's told him as much, and she's tried to process it. She doesn't have time to make friends, to learn everyone's name and background, to create inside jokes and make everyone laugh. Too much to think about, too much to do.
"Buffer adjusted," Richard says. "Any change?"
She watches her datapad. The skipping signal stabilizes. "Affirmative," she says. "We've got it. Heading up."
She detaches her cables, seals the ports, and kicks her way back topside.
((()))
The grave was on a hill, barren, with a low, slow slope to it. When she looked at the grave marker, she saw it in duplicate, triplicate, and on and on, indistinguishable from the marker behind it and behind that and back and back and back, across the other hills, each as barren and low as the next. Cloned graves on cloned hills, stretching into the distance. Somewhere nearby, at the edge of her hearing, she knew there was a sea, but she couldn't see it from here.
The ceremony was short and uncomfortable, or at least it must have seemed so on her face, since Richard spoke up before it was even over. "You okay?" he said.
"Yes," she said, sharper than she intended.
"You don't look okay," he said, but he left it at that and she didn't give him anything else. She watched the meager crowd around them. The professor was there. So was Akagi, or at least the younger one. A few other colleagues and people she didn't recognize. One of them, she deduced, was the deceased's brother. Or maybe that was a brother-in-law. The wind stole specifics from the overheard conversations, rendering them snippets.
She felt out of place. So many years abroad had left her uncomfortable in a crowd of people speaking one of her two native languages. Where once she relished returning to Japanese, she now felt cold and alien. She regretted coming. Should have just let Richard talk her out of it, but no. Had to be here. Had to see it for herself. Why, exactly, she was not certain.
The ceremony ended quickly. Richard went down the hill ahead of her, mumbling an excuse about getting the car. She lingered at the grave as others filed out. Eventually, it was down to her and the professor.
"It's good you came," he said, stepping up next to her.
"What happened?" she said.
"I believe you have the debrief."
"I do. The parts of it that aren't blacked out, anyway." She shoved her hands in the pockets of her jacket. "I was hoping I could get more from you."
She watched him. His suit was clean-pressed and black, but it couldn't hide the lines around his eyes. His age was showing more than she remembered. Or maybe not. Maybe this was something else. Stress? Despair?
"You came just for that?" he said, and then she knew. The look on his face was disappointment.
"No," she said.
"Then why did you come here?"
She looked back at the little grave. The marker read Ikari, Yui. 1977 to 2004. Nothing else. No epitaph. No 'devoted wife and mother' or 'mother of the future' or 'greatest mind of a generation'. Nothing to remember her, nothing to cement her legacy. No monument at all to wither with time, no mention at all of her mighty works, unfinished or otherwise. Just her birth year, her death year, and another name to be slowly obliterated, until saying it aloud became a memory.
"She deserves better than this," she said, surprising even herself. "Tossed in here with all the others. She wasn't an Impact casualty."
"Wasn't she?" he said. She decided to ignore that.
"Her husband," she said. "He didn't want to come?"
"He's grieving in his own way. Privately, as I understand it." The old man's eyes did not leave her. "That doesn't answer my question. Why are you here?"
She let out a slow breath. "There had to be at least one person at her funeral smart enough to know what they had lost; someone with the vision to know what to do next. Someone to take up the baton and run with it."
"And that someone is you?" he said.
"Do you have a better option?" she said.
When she went back down the hill, Richard was waiting for her. The driver already had the car started. "Everything good?" he said.
She felt the data packet in her pocket; her ticket out of the cage. A way forward. The way to get her name on something. She cinched her jacket tight. The wind was getting intolerable.
"Yeah," she said. "Let's go home."
((()))
There are steps to putting a child to sleep. The first is establishing a bedtime routine. Children require structure. The stricter the routine, the more concrete the world they are provided with, the better they will behave, and the better they will accommodate change.
Her daughter is very set in her routine. She goes to bed at 8:00 on the dot, except for Fridays and Saturdays, when she knows she gets to stay up till 9:00. There's no TV allowed past 7:00, so usually she reads during that last hour. Sometimes she reads in her own room. Other times, she reads next to her mom or dad, sitting on the sofa in the living room.
Originally, when she was learning to read, the books were all fantasy stories—dragons, princesses, faraway lands—but she very quickly grew bored of them. Now she almost exclusively reads from a series of hardbacks called "Nature Kids". Each one is double-sided, and each side teaches her about a different animal: their habitats and behaviors, complete with charts and graphs explaining their size, territory, etc.
At 7:45, they get ready for bed. Her daughter stands on the stool in the bathroom so she can see the mirror. She brushes her own hair most nights, though Kyoko stays in the room in case she needs help. It's during this time that she recaps what she read, practicing her diction, and asking questions. Tonight, the topic is bonobos.
"Bonobos live in the Congo," she says, in German, while brushing her hair. "They use sticks to get termites out of their mounds and eat them. They're kinda like chimpanzees."
"Is that so?" Kyoko says, in Japanese, sitting on the edge of the tub.
"Hai," her daughter says. "They also have families. Big families, like fifteen or twenty bonobos. They travel around together to find food and… what's the Japanese word for shelter?"
"What do you think it is?" Kyoko says.
Her daughter thinks. "Sherutā?" she says.
"Hai." Kyoko smiles. "What else did you learn?"
"Their families are led by a female. The main mom is called a 'matriarch.'" Asuka puts her hairbrush down and grabs for the toothpaste. She can't reach it. "She decides everything, like where they go and who does what and who mates with who."
Kyoko passes the toothpaste to her, then returns to her seat. "Do you know any other animals that do that?" she says.
"Hai," Asuka says, around her toothbrush. "You do."
Kyoko snorts.
Eventually, they get from teeth-brushing to pajamas and from pajamas to bed. The bedside alarm clock reads 7:57. Kyoko tucks her in and sits on the edge of the bed. Illumination comes solely from the hallway light. "I wonder if the Congo is okay," Asuka says. Her books are out of date, and she knows it; most of the habitats she reads about are damaged or destroyed. The topic is always concerning to her.
"I don't know. It probably isn't," Kyoko says, swapping back to German.
"That's sad." Asuka's hands crinkle the edge of her red-striped comforter. "Tell me a quick story."
"Nope."
"Come on."
"You're stalling."
"Am not."
"Are too." Kyoko pats her daughter's chest and kisses her forehead. "Go to sleep. School tomorrow."
"Fine."
"I love you."
"Love you, too."
Kyoko closes the door behind her, leaving a hand's width crevice for the hall light to still reach in—they're also in the middle of a 'scared of the dark' phase. The light catches on the polished skin of a week-old birthday balloon, sagging on its string, hanging from the bedpost.
Down in the living room, Richard has the TV on. The volume is muted. He's watching basketball. "No story time?" he says, handing her a glass of wine without looking.
She takes it and sits next to him. "Not tonight. She keeps trying to get them out of me."
"Just stalling," he says.
"I did learn that I'm a matriarch, though."
"A matriarch," he says. "I know you're full of yourself, but matriarch?"
She laughs and he moves aside on the sofa, making room for her. She sits down.
"I'm sorry about that thing with Stradland today," he says. He is ready to continue, but she stops him with a raised hand.
"No, it's my mistake. You did the right thing." She drinks but stays perched forward, not relaxing. "We needed her off our backs and you did that. You used what she wanted against her."
"What she wanted," he repeats.
"You saw her dress," she says. "You don't show that much leg unless you want the famous Dick Langley charm."
Richard laughs. "Does that actually work?"
She shrugs. "It did on me."
He leans forward to kiss her cheek, but she's already up, already at the computer. Already logging onto the server, already queuing another simulation. He sighs, and she pretends she can't hear it.
"The mylar sheathing on the neurons," she says. "That'll hold, right?"
"It held in the test type activation," he says. "Not sure why it wouldn't hold here."
"I just don't want electrical bleed, especially not when we're crossing the threshold."
"There won't be, Kay."
"Okay," she says. "Good."
She keeps working. Eventually, the basketball game ends and Richard goes to bed. He squeezes her hand on the way out. She squeezes back. It's enough for now. There will be time for a proper apology tomorrow.
Alone in the living room, she procs another simulation and watches the startup procedure click its way through all two hundred steps. She sips her wine and realizes that she's going to be fine. The mylar sheathes will stand up to the pressure. The Destrudo barriers will de-buff properly. The test will be a success. She will get it activated, get it delivered, get it done. Then there will be time for everything else—time to apologize to Richard, time to raise Asuka. Time to learn names and make friends, to laugh at jokes and even make some herself. Time enough for everything.
Yes, Ikari got the math wrong, but she won't. She has it right because she always has it right, because she's the smartest woman in the room. The wunderkind.
The timer in its window spins minutes into seconds, counting down, down.
Always down.
About the author: Toasterman has been writing Evangelion fanfiction since 2007, which is way too long. His story, A Glass of Wine Rebuilt, is one of the fanfics that exists.