Chapter 1: The Value of Humankind

Chapter 1:
The Value of Humankind: Alpha

 

THE EARTH SHUDDERED and—at least for the moment—went still again. Within the armored personnel carrier acting as Nerv Japan’s mobile command center, a cheerful tone chimed, and an artificial voice announced, <<The preceding interplate earthquake was centered twenty-five kilometers east of this location. The earthquake forecast has been updated. As of 1100 local time, the probability of another interplate earthquake within the next twenty-four hours has risen to forty percent.>>

At the comms station, Commander Katsuragi Misato was holding on to a metal rack to steady her balance when she heard a man’s voice—familiar but unexpected—over her headset.

<<Commander Katsuragi.>>

“Deputy Commander Fuyutsuki?” He no longer held that rank—or any rank, for that matter—but old habits die hard. “Why are you in the command center?”

<<I’m here because you aren’t.>>

Misato didn’t know what had happened in Hakone after her sudden departure. She had a pretty good idea, however, of what was about to happen—a scolding.

 

In a valley within the Moroccan Atlas Mountains, crowded with bizarre and grotesque rock formations, Katsuragi Misato had met up with Nerv Japan’s search and recovery team, which had come from Hakone under the leadership of Acting Deputy Commander Suzuhara Toji.

Misato handed over the broken rebel, Ayanami Rei Quatre—who offered no meaningful resistance—to the security intelligence team to keep her safe…and secret. Then, at the comms station, she reconnected with Hakone and Tokyo-3, half a world away, via the network of stratospheric airplanes that had replaced the satellites cast adrift by the Earth’s shrinking.

She hoped to speak with Ibuki Maya, who was chief of both the science and engineering divisions, but instead, the person she reached was her former superior, an exacting officer who was not about to pass up the opportunity to put her through the wringer.

Rei Quatre had orchestrated Misato’s disappearance. But Misato couldn’t deny being at least partially at fault; when Chairman Kiel’s booby-trapped visor overwrote Kaji Ryoji’s mind in a hidden facility on the island of Cyprus, she’d gone into a state of shock and abandoned her duties. Now she felt like a truant student being scolded by her teacher.

Oh, come on, Misato silently griped. She attempted to run a hand through her hair, which she’d parted when she put on the headset, but the strands were too tangled by sand and dust for her fingers to pass through smoothly. Quatre had abducted her with the mutant Eva-0.0 and taken her on a strange trip, transporting her nearly instantaneously, like flipping channels on a TV, from Japan, to the eastern Mediterranean, and finally to North Africa. Each locale presented her with scenes that defied explanation. Only now was she able to focus on her own physical state.

Because Misato’s disappearance had been kept under wraps, when the retrieval crew happened across the commander in far-off Morocco, they assumed that she was either here to perform an unannounced inspection or to embed herself within the European troops under a false identity, for anti-terror operations. But beneath her European army uniform—“procured” on-site—she still wore the same off-duty clothing she’d had on at the time of her abduction from Nerv HQ several days before. Her tight skirt and unkempt hair clearly marked her as out of place among the professionals bustling about in workwear and armored vests.

I don’t even want to know what my face must look like right now.

Toji patted the top of her head and pointed to a door with a sign that read SHOWER ROOM. He placed a heavy-duty work uniform and an armored vest on the central table, where an analog map had been spread out. Without interrupting her call, he mouthed the words, Wear these. She waved him a thank you.

He could have at least warned me that Deputy Commander Fuyutsuki was back.

As if reading her mind, Toji stopped on his way out of the room and stuck his tongue out at her.

Over the connection to Tokyo-3, Maya asked, <<Is that thing really Asuka and Unit Two?>>

“To be honest, I don’t know. But that’s what the kids are saying.”

 

The red giant looked like an Evangelion, with feminine features breaking through the surface here and there like a colossal idol to a goddess. The resemblance to Soryu Asuka wasn’t immediately apparent to Misato, but once it had been pointed out to her, she saw the similarities. Still, she’d need more proof before she accepted, as Ikari Shinji and Horaki Hikari claimed, that this creature was a fusion of Eva-02 and Asuka.

The other Nerv Japan agents on the scene seemed to be taking the same stance as Misato. Among them, only Toji thought that the red giant was Asuka.

“I guess it’s something only kids understand,” Misato remarked.

<<They’re seventeen years old,>> Maya reminded her. <<If you keep treating them like children, you’ll only make them angry.>>

Misato scratched at her stiff, dirt-caked hair. “Well, how else am I supposed to treat them? They make decisions based on intuition and take absolutely no responsibility for their actions.”

<<I suppose that’s the mark of an adult—requiring proof so that we can obtain a shared understanding with others.>>

“I don’t think those kids are looking for proof.”

Fuyutsuki cut in. <<Commander Katsuragi, I’m going to be blunt. It doesn’t matter whether that red machine is Unit Two or Asuka or both—their combat capabilities are lost. But now we face a new problem…the loss of our greatest weapon, Super Eva.>>