Shinji Ikari Goes to New York
Chapter Three - Cenotaph
At the appointed time, Shinji shouldered the travel pack and crossed the street. Twenty dollars got him through the caged turnstile, and then he was walking down a narrow flight of stairs, walled in metal grating. He took each step deliberately, trying to keep things even and normal. After 202 steps (he counted), the corridor opened into a courtyard, already lit harshly with halogens despite the lingering sunset.
The place felt empty. Not only of people, for it surely was empty of that, but of everything else too. There was no art to the place. No expression. Just a series of shapes stamped into place with a few spare lines of dark blue tile as a decorative flourish. The metal grating walls, which shielded Central Park proper from sight, were the sole evidence of thoughtful design. It felt like a bath house locker room. After Yggdrasil, bland and simple space was something of a relief to Shinji Ikari.
He crossed the courtyard and entered one of several doors marked "Visitor Center".
The chamber lights snapped on when he entered, along with a dozen huge screens scattered on the walls. A sundries machine in one corner rattled to life, then began to fill the room with the harsh whine of a failing compressor.
He breathed in, and was back on Akari time. This place couldn't have endured, it must have been reclaimed, at least the technology would have been salvaged and replaced, but it had also not been looked after.
He walked to a screen, letting his feet drag through the leaf mulch that had accumulated on the ground. Four inches of mulch, two inches of dirt under that, so it had probably been… three years. He had been having that impossible discussion with Misato the same time someone had been cleaning this place for the last time.
He tapped the name he had been given into a screen, and while he waited for a response, tried to read some of the exhibits. Because what would be plastered on the walls of a visitor center except for information about the location being visited?
Legal threats, as it turned out. English and icons threatening harsh penalties for littering, vandalism, and defecation outside designated areas.
The lack of personality to this place was impressive.
The screen chimed, and reported that A. Buckman-5 was in Block 51d. Shinji took a moment to duck out and use the unisex bathroom in the courtyard, then went back into the Center and pushed through yet another turnstile, and out into the main event.
And for a moment, Shinji was overwhelmed. Too many individual shapes all at once. Too many lines. He had to generalize them into a single, collective mass.
Japan had gone about transforming a large amount of its territory into graveyards following Second Impact. Some blend of ancestor worship and trauma response had produced long stretching fields of printed black stone. Everyone that died in Second Impact got a marker and six meters of space from any other marker. Those that had lived through Second Impact were given a marker when they died as well, since surviving something like that was it's own sort of victimhood.
It was clear that New York had tried to do something similar, but without the self-destructive spark that had caused Japan to convert large swathes of easily accessible, arable land into graveyards.
No, New York had set aside a section of land, maybe a kilometer squared, and then proceeded to cram every single marker into that space.
He couldn't approximate at this scale, from this perspective, but there had to be more than a million markers, easy.
Trees spotted the landscape, likely unintentional additions that had sprouted in the interval following Third Impact, as where they grew the earth bulged, causing the markers planted there to project at angles like a fan of silica along the rim of an impact crater.
Over the trees and some distance away hung an arc of gleaming molten light, barely visible with the sunset beyond it. The ruin of stretched and twisted copper they called The Lady.
Shinji gave himself a good solid minute for this all to sink in and even out. Then he went looking for Block 51d.
There were a series of narrow paths set with gray cement flagstones, and every ten meters or so one of these was etched with coordinates. Shinji followed these, heading north at the first turn. The Park was near empty. He spotted a solitary figure a ways off, toward the shore, moving at an oblique away from him. Perhaps the rangers and crazy people were just a rumor.
He had not properly visited a memorial site since Akari time, when he'd hiked nearly 200 miles along the coast and used a sledgehammer scrounged from a nearby municipal fire department to bring down the marker with IKARI YUI printed on it. It had been an attempt at symbolic correction, something that would fix everything, since for Mother, there would always never be death.
And it had been such a hard thing to do. Nearly impossible. All those cenotaphs looming out of the early-morning Shizuoka fog, each a wedge of anti-life beyond the threshold of which all the ghosts of a killed planet reached and screamed for him. Begging for an end. For extinction.
It had taken him hours to dismantle the marker properly, and months to convince himself that it hadn't worked. That it had not triggered some great, if gradual, return. No, there had just been him, only him. Forever.
But now he was off Akari time, and Second Impact memorial sites like this were simply a summation of all the harm he hadn't done. Everything out in the world now had been disrupted by him, but the people these markers represented had all been dead before he had been born.
Especially here, within one of the so-called 'black zones', where nothing had survived.
And now here he was, walking easy and normal along a flagstone path that roiled, turned, split apart for short distances and then threaded back together. The block numbers went up the further north he went, and the block letters incremented up the closer he got to the shore. A simple system, if the path itself had been on a grid.
Block 51d was up on a knob of hill, at the end of a narrow capillary path as wide as the spacing for two markers. The flagstones were stacked into stairs here, firmly planted but short and numerous. By the time he crested the hill Shinji was breathing hard. He had been sedentary on Yggdrasil, and the Vietnamese electronics in his pack, along with his clothes and personal kit, had to be about 80 kilos.
He let the pack off, took a moment to catch his breath, then started searching. It quickly became clear that A. Buckman-5 wasn't one of the markers that lined the path. So he slipped off the travel pack and pushed into the dense grove of stones.
It was nearly ten minutes of searching before he found any Buckmans at all. They were clustered away from the path, on a precarious decline near the edge of the bulging lip of the hill. A. Buckman-5 was at the most extreme point of this, requiring Shinji to brace against other markers to keep from sliding down to it, past it, and over the drop.
After noting the position of the marker, he crawled back up to the hilltop and waited for a time, watching the sky. The letter had been specific, but the sky remained orange and red. If Manhattan hadn't been crowding out the eastern horizon, he probably could have seen the first stars coming out in that direction. Instead, he had to wait, and wait.
A faint, staticky voice called out, and for a moment he thought that this was contact, that Asuka was reaching out, and he looked around with a fluttery, nervous energy he hadn't expected but which was there all the same.
It had been nearly five years, after all. You could only move on so much.
But then the voice separated, imperfectly overlapping as it hit from different directions, and he realized it was coming from a general address system distributed throughout the site, apparently poorly maintained. He concentrated, filtering out meaning from noise.
Dusk. Something at dusk. Collapse. Close.
The park closed at dusk.
His anxiety and paranoia had been ebbing since he had entered the Park. Well, probably since it became clear that Daniels had just been happy to see him. He was here to deliver the pack and see Asuka again, and those were the only things that mattered. That this would require him to stay in the park past closing troubled the socially-conscious part of him that, somehow, existed in his mind at a level greater than zero.
But it was a small feeling, briefly acknowledged.
And so Shinji hunkered down among the markers, onto a carpet of shredded rubber, and waited for the stars to come out.