"So Lieutenant, given that I woke up this morning in my own bed with my cat biting my nose, I'm assuming I wasn't hallucinating you ordering me to go home and sleep. Thus I also wasn't imagining you saying you'd found something interesting."
Ibuki nods enthusiastically, "Yes Sempai! I have pictures!"
Akagi raises an eyebrow.
"Data Visualisations. Of what I found. I think it even passes the Katsuragi test."
"The Katsuragi test?"
Maya nods, "If you can put together a presentation that you can show the Major without her eyes glazing over, it's sufficiently clear. If she's nodding through it, you've lost her. If she claims to understand at the end, it's either a disastrously stupid idea or she'll use it to defeat the next Angel."
"Or both", mutters Ristuko under her breath.
Maya brings up her first image on the display.
"This is the pilots' synchronisation rates over time. As you can see there's no clear patterns."
"This is the rates of Asuka and Shinji during their second battle with Israfel. Very noisy as you can see. However, if you overlay them and adjust for Asuka's higher sync rate," Maya taps her pad and the images overlap, "You can see they look similar. If you plot the delta between them, you get this:"
The image changes to one that appears to be random peaks and valleys on either side, with a much smoother, though far from flat, section in the middle.
"That middle part is the sixty seconds of combat where they were moving together."
"Where are you going with this, Lieutenant?"
Maya brings up the next set of images.
"I assume that's not just something my cat threw up."
Maya blushes, "No, Sempai. That's multiple data points we have that go into each pilot's synchronisation rate plotted over time, for all the time slices we have - training and combat, not just their peak scores which is what we usually focus on. It's actually eight dimensional data but I simplified it for the visualisation. However if you take away the time vectors, you get this."
"That just looks like noise."
"It does until you combine all three pilots' data together."
"Alright, I can make out some possible patterns if I squint. I assume you have more than this and aren't wasting my time."
Maya triggers the next visualisation and suddenly the faint patterns are clear arcs and swirls that form a distinct shape.
"What the hell is that?"
.
"Ghosts", grins Maya.
Akagi glares at her.
"Once I thought that I saw a pattern in the combined data, I went back to the test with all the ghosting. It looks like it's just full of noise when you look at the data from each Eva. The same when we filtered out the 'ghosts' as if they were the pilots they were reading as.
"However if you strip out the source from the data, all that extra noise fits.
Maya pulls up one last image.
"Here's the line I showed you last night, Sempai. This is a topological description of the shape of the attractor over time. I had the Magi pull the data from what Nerv Germany sent us when Asuka came over, so it goes back nearly ten years, though it's obviously less precise until our records start. It's very stable up until the last few weeks, then it starts changing. Not only is the attractor's shape changing, but the pilots' data points are closer to it."
"I can see the data and the patterns, but what does this mean Sempai?"
"Other than that you have a PhD as soon as you write this up Captain, I have no damn clue."
Notes: The attractor visualization is the Poisson Saturne attractor from the Wikipedia Attractor page. But FFN eats the links so if you want to see it either view this on ao3 or go to the Wikipedia page.