Chapter 8: Echoes

Chapter 8:
Echoes

 

IN HIS OFFICE on the university campus, an associate professor in his late fifties called out to the young man he’d caught typing at his computer.

“You there! Just what do you think you’re—”

“Mizusato-sensei. It’s been a while,” Aoba said, scratching his jaw, which still tingled from removing the artificial skin.

Mizusato grunted in annoyed surprise. “Aoba. What brings you—hey! Get your hands off of my keyboard.”

“That’s some welcome for a former student who’s come to visit you after four years. Then again, I’m not exactly thrilled to be here myself.” Aoba continued typing as he looked over his shoulder. “If you’d kept your old password, I might not have had to make the trek.”

Aoba’s chair creaked as he swiveled to face the older man. “So then, down to business. Where are the copies you took of the quantum wave mirror blueprints and test data?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Dr. Akagi Ritsuko asked your opinion on quantum wave collapses. At the time, I’d just started at Nerv. I only found out later.”

Mizusato was silent.

“If she asked for your opinion, that means she showed you the data.”

More silence.

“I wonder why she asked someone outside the organization for help. You might not realize this, but our intelligence division is quite terrifying.”

Mizusato remained still for moment. Then he opened the door of a small, humming refrigerator, retrieved a can of beer from its hiding place behind a bottle of mineral water, cracked open the tab, and drank it all at once.

He slammed the empty can onto his desk. “It’s because the mirror can destroy Evas.”

“Oh?” That was quite the statement.

“Don’t get me wrong. The mirror can’t produce energy on the same scale as an S² Engine. But an Eva’s core has minute contact with other dimensions. The mirror reflects those extradimensional quantum waves and keeps them from crossing into our own dimension.”

“In other words, it suffocates their cores.”

The professor nodded.

“Okay,” Aoba said, “but even if the calculations checked out, you’d never have had the means to construct the thing. It’s not just shelved, it’s—”

“With some minor adjustments, a mirror could boost the core instead. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Well, I’ve already done the calculations.”

“What?” Another surprise.

“When Dr. Akagi saw the design, she told me it was her mother’s data. That woman is scary, Aoba.”

Mizusato opened the drawer of his steel desk and reached inside. He produced an envelope containing documents and an old storage device, and tossed them to Aoba.

The younger man rose. “Thanks, Sensei. Everything is still in the old Geofront, covered in dust, but we lost all our data three years ago. I’m in a hurry, and I’ve got to run. See you later.”

“Not if I can help it!”

 

Where am I

A sunlit porch

It’s fall.

I’ve never seen fall

Warm colors fill my sight

A feeling of nostalgia

Whose memory is this?

There’s so much light

I can’t see clearly around me

But it doesn’t feel too bright

This world is like a dream and

Lend me a hand.

Mother

I’m not surprised

This feels natural

 

I thought of something interesting.

She says we might be able to do it if we work together

Like folding a very large bedsheet

I’m still not sure what’s going on

I don’t quite follow what she means

Come.

I stand

We step down into the garden

Here, I’ll hold this end.

She spreads it open

Or at least that’s the mental image I try to form

 

Following her motions, I pinch with my fingers and spread my arms wide.

 

A tremendous roar, like an ocean wave crashing onto the rocks, thundered through Cage Two. Its vibrations were so strong that they could rattle bone.

The technicians cried out in surprise.

The tremor kept on coming, as if a massive waterfall had appeared right beside them.

Maya dashed up to the control booth, feeling as though the air were compressing her entire body.

“What’s happening?” she demanded.

The scientist watching the scanner had turned pale, and her shouted replies disappeared into the noise.

“I can’t hear you!”

As a general rule, Maya stayed at least two paces away from other people, but this was an emergency. She leaned in and asked again.

“The S² Engine has vanished!” the scientist replied. “Could it have gone to the other side?”

“What?! If that were true, then all of the energy would also be going to the other side, and we wouldn’t be able to detect it. Let me see.”

Maya peered at the display, and her expression changed.

Where the S² Engine had been was an unmeasurable field—just a black space on the screen.

 

The personnel in Cage Two were all shouting at each other, trying to understand the situation.

The cage was filled with noise—not just sound, but noise of every kind—gravitational, magnetic, and radioactive.

The noise so overwhelmed the three-dimensional scanner that the system was on the brink of crashing altogether, but that wasn’t what surprised Maya the most—nor was the black, unmeasurable space. What surprised her was the soup around it. The Eva’s organs had begun reasserting their boundaries with terrific speed.

Except…

“This is different from before. Unit One is developing into something new.”

The giant’s internal structure sprang into existence with explosive force.

Where it hadn’t been removed, the Type-F restraint armor was being pushed past its limits. A section of plating flew off the Eva’s arm, which was now visibly larger. The remaining armor followed suit.

 

The technical officer shouted. “Don’t stand in front of its chest!”

“Why not?” yelled an engineer.

“Because of that!”

The technical officer pointed at the cage wall facing the Eva, where a wide patch of its surface had changed color. Smoke drifted off of it, as if Eva-01 was emitting something.

“Turn off lights four, five, eight, and nine!” The technical officer ordered.

The lights in front of the Eva went dark, and a soft, pink glow remained. The effect was more pronounced in the LCL, where splintered light radiated out from Eva-01’s chest.

“All personnel, put on your protective suits!” Maya shouted.

The light now seemed to be coming not from the Eva itself but from a point in space in front of its chest, as if an invisible lens floated there, pouring out a torrent of energy.

“That’s proton decay,” gasped a scientist in the control booth before bursting into laughter. “Ha! A never-before-seen particle, and I get to observe a dozen of them up close. Incredible!”

“Put on your protective suit,” another scolded. “Those particles are flying in from extradimensional space!”

As the crew shouted back and forth, excitement and emotions running high, the service bay door slid open. They turned in unison. A crane arm entered the cage on an overhead rail. Ten wires hung from the crane, holding an armored chest piece reworked from an abandoned design—the magic mirror that could kill an Eva.

The crane brought the mirror to a stop near Eva-01, which was still shedding its own armor.

Maya shouted as loudly as she could to be heard over the waterfall roar, waving her arms broadly within her protective suit.

“Everyone, to me!”

The scientists tapped each other on the shoulder to pass the word along, while the engineers, more used to working in noisy environments, used hand signals. They gathered in front of Maya, a sea of orange protective suits.

“Is everyone all right?” Maya asked, thinking, When did I start worrying about others?

Her crew’s eyes were wide with fear and excitement.

I bet I have the same look on my face, too.

Everyone knew that they were present for something extraordinary.

Like everyone standing before her, Maya had been thoroughly soaked by the condensation. She wiped the droplets from her glasses and dried her forehead with a sleeve. Anyone who hadn’t joined this team until after the Battle at Nerv HQ was seeing her smile for the first time.

“The situation has changed, so I’ll give a brief rundown. If anyone has doubts, please share your opinion, because we’re about to install the mirror.”

 

The chest armor had a more complex shape than the standard Eva design. It was the very antithesis of grace and elegance. There was a certain artistry inherent in mechanical design, but this armor came across as the product of a designer who’d thrown everything at the wall to see what stuck.

This Eva-killer is a lot heavier than it looks.

 

“Until now,” Maya explained, “Unit One has operated by recovering energy escaping our observable universe into the higher dimensions.”

“Like recycling,” offered the technical officer, a tall woman who’d placed herself at Maya’s side.

“But now that extradimensional energy is cascading over to our side completely unchecked.”

“Too much of a good thing!” said the technical officer.

“Right now, Unit One’s body is transforming at an incredible pace. But this is not some kind of self-destruct sequence. The Eva is not trying to discard its body, nor is it going to release all that energy.”

The crew erupted, but Maya brought them to order.

“However, the estimated volume of this energy is increasing proportionally with the speed of Unit One’s growth.” Maya pointed to a chart indicating the predicted levels. “At this mark here, the reconstruction of its body should be complete. But look how the energy keeps rising after.”

The line remained nearly straight all the way off the chart.

“If we can’t get the energy under control,” Maya continued, “the reconstruction process will run haywire until it finally breaks down. The end result will be self-destruction, and we have no way of knowing how much damage it will cause.”

Maya looked at the faces of her crew. She had their complete attention.

“Start attaching the prototype restraint armor!” Maya shouted. Her throat was getting scratchy; she wasn’t used to speaking so loudly. “The mirror will keep reflecting the energy back on itself until it returns to the other side—hopefully before our universe is torn apart through the extradimensional window.”

 

For the second time in several days, an attack alarm added itself to the noise of the cage.

But the technical officer ordered the crew to keep working. “Equipment and transport teams, come with me to Cage One. Everyone else, follow Chief Ibuki’s commands and start installing that armor!”

The cluster of orange bodies hustled off in two directions.

Toji appeared at the entrance to the cage. “Heya! I heard you needed as many people as you could get, so I came to help with the physical stuff!”

Maya pressed a damp protective suit into his hands and barked, “Wear this!” Then, with some surprise, she added, “Why didn’t you evacuate? You have family, don’t you—a sister?”

“Yeah, I was leaving ’cause of that, but before we got out of the caldera, I decided to check in on Shinji, and then—” Toji unfolded the soggy suit with a look of disgust but put it on anyway. “Well, the alarm went off. Sis is in the lobby watching our bags. Anyway, what’s all this noise?”

Maya pointed at the LCL. Steam rose from its surface.

“Look, no coffin makes that much of a racket. Maya-san, Shinji’s—”

“He’s still melted inside there.”