Part 2: Nativity

Chapter 7:
Extinction Protocol

 

AFTER SHOOTING SHINJI, Ayanami Rei Quatre vanished into the haze, leaving no emissions trail, no footprints, no trace at all.

Through mental mirroring, the clone was supposed to have been under the control of Rei Trois—the primary Rei, the one with the soul.

Trois was immediately suspected of having instigated Quatre’s rebellion, whether intentionally or through negligence, and she was now undergoing intense questioning by the intelligence division.

But her interrogators’ voices sounded distant and hollow, as if a wall separated them from her. And Cinq and Six’s voices had gone silent as well.

The feeling was less like losing her sisters and more like losing a part of her body. She shut herself away inside.

 

Asuka was the first to visit Rei during her captivity, opening the door with a barrage of furious shouting and plowing through the interrogators’ attempts to block her entry. Once inside, she spat a single, anguished question.

“Why?”

In that moment, Rei Trois realized that the interrogators had been telling the truth; Rei Quatre, her other self, had shot and killed Shinji.

Even now, Ayanami’s face remained as inscrutable as it had been three years ago, but Asuka saw that Trois hadn’t purposefully made Quatre go berserk. Still, knowing Rei’s intentions, or lack thereof, didn’t change what had happened.

Asuka grabbed Ayanami by the collar of her school uniform and pulled her to her feet.

“Don’t give up so easily,” Asuka said. “Shinji can’t die when I still owe him for saving me three years ago.”

 

Asuka had dragged Eva-01 back to Nerv HQ, where the fallen giant was placed not into the primary hangar, Cage One, but Cage Two, which had long been sealed off. The cage had been kept as a backup and was located in what was now the oldest section of the complex, just beyond the northern outskirts of the Geofront. Its roof had collapsed in the Battle at Nerv HQ, and the hangar remained open to the air. It was also where the mass-production Evas had been disassembled.

 

Scans of Eva-01’s internals perplexed both the engineering and science teams. They’d hoped to determine whether Shinji was dead or alive but instead saw something entirely beyond their understanding.

Not only was there no sign of Shinji or the entry plug, but the physical boundaries between the internal components of the giant’s body—its skeletal structure, organs, muscles—had blurred, and the components now appeared to be mixing together. Not believing their eyes, the engineers in the old control booth brushed the dust off their display screens, but what they saw grew no clearer.

The gamma-ray laser had melted through Eva-01’s restraint armor. At the beam’s entry and exit points, the metal plating rippled out like the surface of a lake after a large rock has been hurled into it. The insides were a mess, burned all through. Some parts had instantly evaporated or exploded. But the damage explained only some of what the engineers found in the scans. The boundaries between all of the Eva’s internals—even its skeleton—were becoming indistinct. The work crew had had to scramble to fill the long-neglected cage with LCL before the 3,600-ton Eva collapsed under its own weight.

The giant humanoid housed inside the Type-F restraint armor appeared to be turning into a soup, a blank slate with no connection to what it had once been…with one exception. While the body died away, one component continued to produce dangerous levels of energy.

The S² Engine.

This power plant was a combination of the Eva’s own core and an engine that had once belonged to the Angel Zeruel, whose body the Eva had consumed in a berserk state. It freed Eva-01 from its reliance on the power cables, but it was more than just an engine; it was the beating heart that allowed for the Eva’s continued existence.

And now the engine was highly unstable, putting out berserk-level power in irregular bursts before dropping back to normal levels. The giant rumbled like a distant earthquake.

Whether Shinji was alive or dead—if he even existed anymore—any attempts to recover him had to be set aside. The top priority was stopping the volatile S² Engine. If left unchecked, its sudden release of energy could trigger a cataclysmic Third Impact.

The S² Engine was a cauldron ready to boil over, and the engineers and scientists needed to find some way to gain control over it, release its energy safely—but not too fast—and deliver Eva-01 to a gentle death.

The team had just resigned themselves to this bitter mission when the situation grew worse.

With dread, Maya said, “The S² Engine’s radius is shrinking… It’s falling into the other side.”

 

Late that night, the decision was made to evacuate all civilians from the Hakone caldera, beginning shortly after sunrise when the temperature had risen.

The UN offered their transports to take Eva-01 to a less-populated area, but Nerv Japan turned them down since there was no telling when the Eva might suddenly go berserk and explode. Launching it into space wasn’t an option, either. The HQ facility didn’t have a propulsion unit like the one used to launch the Series-0.0 Evas. Even if they did, without a way to manifest the Eva’s A.T. Field, a launch wouldn’t be possible. They had no means to dump Eva-01 in a remote location.

One way or another, the crisis would end in Hakone.

 

A torrent of evacuees clogged every road. The residents of Tokyo-3 had been told this was a temporary exodus in order to facilitate critical repairs to the city’s substructure.

Such repairs had indeed been underway, but those efforts were abandoned. Once the last of the civilians had been evacuated, all work crews and Nerv personnel were ordered to flee the caldera.

The Japanese government stationed SSDF units along every highway and rail line that led from the UN-leased territory to the Japanese territory outside it. Under the guise of offering security for the evacuees, they tasked a large detachment with running inspections of the Tokyo-3 citizens at each checkpoint before transporting them away.

 

Aoba Shigeru had hidden himself among a line of civilians waiting for an evacuation bus. He’d concealed his identity with artificial skin and fake contact lenses, and he was armed with the best ID the intelligence division could forge. If anything could cast suspicion upon him, it was his fashion, which dated back to the previous century. The soldier at the checkpoint gave him a funny look, but the light over the gate turned green all the same, and he was waved through. Policy was policy.

The computer technician was leaving to seek assistance from a former professor, with nothing but his guitar case on his back. Traveling by UN helicopter would have been far less hassle, but the Japanese government was vigilant against leaking valuable knowledge or personnel—especially when Nerv was the recipient. Better to travel under an identity that wouldn’t draw unwanted attention.

We’ve always taken what we want, Aoba thought, so, on a personal level, I sympathize with them.

But he had no intention of returning empty-handed.

 

Though the S² Engine’s functionality remained shrouded in mystery, there had been a time when scientists thought they could replicate one using human technology, with materials—like Fullerne-C60—capable of withstanding local tidal forces. A human-made S² Engine would have revolutionized energy.

But their understanding of the engines soon changed.

What existed of the S² Engines in the observable universe was only half of their whole.

This theory was first proposed by a theoretical physicist. At first, the rest of her team was unconvinced—it sounded more like science fiction than science fact—but once the data began pointing to the existence of “the other side,” they realized her theory explained the engines’ behavior.

Still, what exactly did that mean?

Scans of the S² Engine revealed two helixes entwined into a nearly perfect spherical mass. In three-dimensional space, this structure looked messy and inelegant, but when represented mathematically in two-dimensional space modeled on brane cosmology, the shape looked like a wadded-up cloth opening out, with eight antenna-like structures radiating into the braneworld.

Brane cosmology could be illustrated like this: Suppose the universe existed only in two dimensions, but gravity was not constrained by those dimensions and could instead move into a third. In other words, gravity could escape the universe. If gravitational energy could travel in any direction, then the vast majority of it would not remain on the two-dimensional plane. It would leak out of the universe.

The S² Engines captured that escaped energy and harnessed it.

In those higher dimensions—colloquially referred to as “the other side”—the eight antennae were theorized to extend far beyond the engine itself, with an expansive, octagonal membrane stretched across them, not unlike a parasol.

Now, the S² Engine was losing mass and slipping into the other side.

 

“This has never happened before.” This was not the kind of thing Maya liked to say when her lab was a run-down Evangelion cage.

As the S² Engine sank deeper into the other side, the mechanism could begin retrieving energy on a colossal scale.

But now we need to put that fire out.

According to her calculations, the S² Engine’s position in three-dimensional space would become more and more unstable. Even as she was contemplating this, the bottled-up energy began to waver.

Maya sighed. “Why does the math only work out when you don’t want it to?”

One of the other scientists laughed bitterly.

It was time to make a decision. Should they escape with their lives? Or should they sacrifice themselves—not so much to duty as to the desire to see dimensions beyond their own, if only for a fleeting moment?

Both choices were hard to reject.

 

Maya brought the scientists back to reality.

“We’re going to switch out Unit One’s restraint armor. I’ll get the authorization straight away, but don’t wait. Start dismantling it.”

Eva-01’s heat had begun warming the LCL. Steam rose where the liquid met the cold outside air. Condensation formed falling droplets on the surfaces of the old cage. Eva-01 had been waiting for this moment.

 

Asuka had been ordered to assist with the larger-scale cleanup efforts, such as collapsed buildings and bridges. Day in and day out, as she operated Eva-02 in the urban district, Asuka let her brain subconsciously choose which of the jumbled wireless communications to decode just to distract herself. She filled her senses with as much information as she could to keep unwanted thoughts at bay.

As her giant surveyed the area around her, her eyes landed on a single point.

She noticed something no one else had, and Eva-02 automatically changed direction, stepping over the yellow tape that marked the boundary of the active work area.

 

When the bowl of ice had shattered, massive blocks of it had scattered all across the headquarters. One such block had struck and overturned a section of the ground armor plating, which now threatened to crush Kaji’s—or rather, Shinji’s—watermelon patch.

 

“He kept the world from ending. He relocated the garden. And in three years it’s still over? That’s it?”

Asuka’s pent-up emotions transmitted to Eva-02, which flipped over the armor plating and—

—revealed sparse patches of green.

“Oh…”

It made for an odd sight: the red giant kneeling and scrutinizing the ground.

 

This small slice of the world, which Shinji had allowed to survive, was still alive.

Sediment had smothered the watermelon patch, but it had also insulated the vegetation from the arctic temperatures. Eva-02 held out its hand to the patch as if trying to feel its warmth.

Ding!

The chime from Asuka’s work schedule brought her back to reality.

Shinji will come back, she told herself. His world isn’t destroyed. Maybe I can look after it until he returns.

She prayed that this was only temporary and told herself it wouldn’t be like this forever.

 

Several days had passed since Ayanami Quatre’s rebellion and escape, and the mass-production Eva’s raid.

Nearly all the snow in the city had melted, but a tremendous amount of ice remained in the lake, from which the cold air continued to seep into the city.

Asuka used her Eva’s hands to gather bits of debris into a makeshift windbreak.

“I’ll be back soon,” Asuka said to the watermelon patch.

Eva-02 stood, dirt falling from the giant’s knee shields. Asuka turned and began walking back to the city, where her work awaited.