LNCrawler

Chapter 45: Asuka and the Ark

Neon Genesis Evangelion ANIMA — LNCrawler · All chapters

Chapter 45:
Asuka and the Ark
A SUKA’S EVA-02 ALLEGORICA ran across the craggy lunar surface toward the blue glass-like structure and the force that repelled her approach.
The localized geomagnetic field selectively filtered out the bombardment of cosmic rays and created a gray-and-black-striped abstract pattern in the regolith. Here and there, amid the patches that hadn’t been baked by the radiation, the soil showed curious patterns of stripes and swirls. After the Second Impact, as Earth entered the twenty-first century, all public lunar exploration had ceased, and planetary scientists knew little of the large magnetic anomaly on the far side of the moon. Asuka was the first to confirm its existence.
But something was strange. If the magnetic field had been the result of an asteroid impact, then it should have formed in swirls, but here they radiated outward from a central point—toward which Eva-02 Allegorica bounded.
Is this the remnant of a magnetic shield?
Doesn’t matter, Asuka told herself. I saw Angel larvae being born! I saw Angel Carriers summoned and bestowed with that larvae! That’s what matters right now.
It was all the reason she needed to destroy the structure.
The only local force her Eva’s external sensors registered was gravity, but the resistance Asuka felt was nothing like that. It was like being buffeted by a powerful wind, even though there was no wind on the surface of the moon. The force had likely turned the soldiers in that armored car to pillars of salt before they could even asphyxiate.
The unnatural force was like a gale driving into Asuka’s face; it was so blinding, so real, that she couldn’t keep her eyes open.
But I have to keep going, no matter what. If I’ve found the source of the cataclysm, I could put a stop to everything!
“Do you think you have the power,” Asuka said, breathing heavily, “to stop me?!”
Eva-02 Allegorica’s four legs pounded fiercely against the moon’s surface. In the low gravity, the Eva’s gallop was more like a series of slow-motion jumps. Each time Eva-02 landed, a small, inverted cone-like cloud blossomed from the regolith. This was no longer the moon with only one-sixth the Earth’s gravity—the moon was swelling, ugly and bulging—but it still had a lower gravity than Earth.
So why does each step feel so heavy?
Asuka put away the Eva’s Powered 8 and replaced the railgun with the Magorox sword. She was surprised when she noticed Eva-02’s hand shaking through the feedback signal. But she pressed on.
“Hyah!” she shouted as she drew the sword. She was almost upon the structure, her Eva reflected large in the crystalline surface. The two winged centaurs faced each other, paint scratched and armor battle-worn.
And then their images overlapped.
Suddenly, all was still. The repelling force was gone, and Asuka felt weightless.
The structure had appeared blue from the outside, but the inside was complete darkness. She felt the lunar soil beneath her feet; it continued freely through the structure’s outer walls. She brought Eva-02 sliding to a stop. So far, nothing unexpected had happened on a physical level. With her sword held at the ready, Eva-02 Allegorica had passed inside the glass structure, just as the rounds of her Powered 8 had done.
This was going exactly as she’d predicted.
I’ve been saving one last N 2 bomb in case I have to fight Armaros, Asuka thought, but what if I plant it in the middle of this place instead? Even if all my attacks pass through, this structure is linked to the moon’s surface. What if I wipe out the ground it stands upon? Or—
Suddenly, Eva-02 Allegorica whirled around.
After everything she’d been through on this journey, Asuka had become fully comfortable moving on four legs. She nimbly shifted her weight to the hind legs, and her front half lifted off the ground, the armor creaking. The Magorox flashed through the space that had just been directly behind her—and passed through emptiness.
“Who’s there?” Asuka demanded of the darkness.
There was someone there. Or some ones .
The sound of a crowd.
Something—or things —surrounded Eva-02. Standing quietly in place. Inhaling. Exhaling. Their breath spreading through a space larger than the structure had been on the outside. Countless presences extending unbroken to the far horizon.
Asuka could feel them all watching her.
“What are you?!”
She directed the thrusters in one Allegorica wing forward and the other backward, and quickly spun the Eva around as she swung the long sword again. There was nothing there, but she could still feel all those eyes upon her.
“Take this! And this!”
The sword’s tip slashed useless arcs in the air. Out of fear and frustration, she wildly swung the weapon again and again and—
WHAM!
The loud sound shook her body, and an alert window popped open. The Magorox’s handguard had struck the right Allegorica wing. The N 2 reactor on that side went into emergency shutdown, and the other systems in the wing began to self-repair. The arrival of a stack of red and yellow subwindows brought Asuka back to her senses.
Rattled, she told herself, “Wait. Focus. You need to destroy this place, remember?”
With a start, she looked over her shoulder, all around the plug.
Those invisible things were inside the plug with her! Someone or something was filling the space everywhere.
“N-no!” Asuka screamed.
The countless, quiet things reacted to her scream in unison, beginning to move, swirling together, making a lot of noise.
The noise. Are those…voices?
The sounds came from everywhere and blended into an unintelligible mass, like a great army of bees swarming around their hive. Every now and then, the sounds seemed to align, creating a sporadic, wave-like effect.
“These are people’s voices. These are people!”
It was the sound of billions, maybe even tens of billions of people.
When Asuka came to that understanding, she realized her body was no longer within her entry plug.
My body is gone.
She looked down at her empty seat from above. She couldn’t see her hands, or her legs, or her any part of her. All that remained was her vision. No, she realized, I can hear, too, although she didn’t know if she was perceiving actual light and sound.
Oh, I understand.
She was becoming like the people around her. When she touched one, she knew immediately who they were. Their individual lives flashed before her, from their births to their deaths. She knew their names, the era they’d been born in, their successes and failures, their meetings and partings. She saw everything that made them who they were in a fleeting flash of light.
People as data.
Witnessing entire lives in moments, Asuka’s mind was overwhelmed, almost to the point of shutting down. But still she realized, I’m becoming data, too.
The interior of the entry plug—the seat and everything else—was beginning to lose its form.
Is the Eva going to become data as well?
Her lack of panic was all she needed to conclude that she was in an abnormal state.
I can feel light from the distance.
Beyond the horizon of human data came an even louder billowing, like tsunami waves crashing. As soon as she noticed it, she was there, swept up by the current.
She found herself within a turbulent flow made up of pairs from every species of animal ever to undergo the cycle of life and death on Earth. Soon found her way to the sea creatures and swam among them. There were aquatic dinosaurs and huge whales.
“Incredible!”
“If he saw this…I think he’d be thrilled.”
Who would be?
A pair of dolphins swam tightly together as they passed by Asuka.
Dolphins… The blue sea…
As soon as she thought of the book, it appeared before her, its pages turning in the flow of the LCL, reconnecting her memories.
She’d been given the book as a gift before she left the Earth.
The person who gave this to me was…
“Shinji!” Asuka shouted, as if waking from a dream. Then she asked no one, “What is this?!”
The data responded, and Asuka received the answer in words she could immediately understand.
Our purpose is to set the stage for the test. Ordinarily, the Instrumentality Project would require hundreds of thousands of years from start to finish, but this planetary mechanism reduces the time to reset the test to 4,400 years.
This mechanism contains the records of every living creature and human being that walked the previous Earth up until 2,400 B.C.
When this structure is opened in a new world purified by the Great Flood, the preparations for the Instrumentality Project will begin anew.
“You’ve got to be kidding me! What do you think this is, some role-playing game? You can’t keep repeating from the same save file!”
This Ark administers all that data.
“Ark?” Asuka said. “Like from the Bible? That’s what this is?”
The torrent of life glimmered as it rushed past her.
The swirl of creatures rose around her, sweeping her up in the current. Her mind began to disassociate again; she lost perception of the boundary between herself and the outside.
“That’s what you say, but how can I know if it’s really true?”
What is the Ark doing lying in the moon dust? Asuka asked herself.
As her consciousness was swallowed up by the current, in those final moments before she disappeared completely, Asuka lashed out scornfully.
Besides, the data here is missing something.
Birds. There aren’t any birds.
But a genuine answer came.
Birds can transcend time and space. They’ll cross the vast distance to the newly constructed world.
“A new world?”
The Earth and the moon are two as one, breathing in and out in turn. This moon was the previous Earth, and your Earth was its moon. Now they will trade roles again, and your Earth will give itself over to the moon.
A powerful force suddenly yanked Asuka out from the eddy.
Eva-02 had been melding with the data stream as well and was losing its form, but now an even larger figure seized the Eva roughly and dragged it out.
There was clearly no care or caution in Armaros’ movements. The black giant reached into the Ark’s stream and forcefully tore Asuka and her Eva from it.
Asuka’s vision spun. Just before she was pulled out of the glass structure, the Allegorica unit’s rear legs were ripped off at the hip, accompanied by the earsplitting shriek of rupturing metal. Several animals were dragged out along with them. Data, forcibly given form, spilled out onto the uninhabitable environment of the moon’s surface.
Very soon all the animals had gone still.
On Earth, Seele, in the Kaji-vessel, said that the Ark rejected sentient beings.
Though railgun shells and moon dust could enter and leave freely, humans—as beings with a consciousness—turned to pillars of salt before they could even get near.
Any approach was rejected. But in another sense, the rejection was a commandment: Sentient beings shall not touch the Ark . By approaching with her Eva, Asuka had managed to overcome the Ark’s attempts to turn her away. She’d stepped inside and caused turmoil within the data of all creation.
That seemed to have been where she’d gotten herself into trouble. Armaros, the central figure visiting calamities upon the Earth—the giant who’d announced humanity’s exit and confined the Earth within the Longinus Curtain—had come to personally rid the Ark of Asuka’s infestation.
Armaros hurled Eva-02 into the sky. As the Eva sailed in a parabolic curve, groups of animals emerged from its arm, taking form before disappearing again. The tail fin of a whale emerged from the Eva’s back and then circled around to the giant’s chest before sinking back under again.
The data from various species had jumbled together inside Unit Two, and the Eva’s physical shape was beginning to radically change. Soon, it no longer looked like itself at all.
Just as this misshapen clay doll of an Evangelion was about to crash back down onto the moon’s surface, the giant changed form into a four-legged animal with an arched back and skillfully arrested its low-gravity landing. The Eva howled. Its body had synthesized many different animals, but it mostly resembled a monkey.
“Nein!”
Asuka’s voice rang across the gray surface, much like when Armaros had sounded the moon with the end of its spear. But what was her cry rejecting? Was she refusing to meld with the sea of data? Was she repudiating whoever had been tinkering with human history? Whatever it meant, it was the last word she said before she lost herself. And by the time she shouted it, she only faintly understood the significance of the word.
But as she saw the Earth beginning to climb the horizon, a feeling swelled within her, and she couldn’t keep from howling.
“Nein!”
Armaros had stolen enough of the Earth’s crust to expand the moon to nearly twice its size.
Like a poorly balanced top, the moon’s rotation had become increasingly erratic, and its orbit had slid closer to Earth. Now, behind Asuka, the blue sphere climbed a new horizon on what had once been the far side of the moon.
The Earth seemed a little darker through the isolating Longinus Curtain. On the other side, the curtain created a false image, and the moon appeared as the same beautiful goddess it always had. Aside from Asuka, no one was aware of the moon’s changes. Maybe one day, the people would realize they were being shown an illusion.
Meanwhile, Asuka watched the Earth from the moon. The planet was dark because it was a reflection of her own consciousness.
But now, that false Earth began to brighten, its blues becoming bluer.
Animals from the Earth teemed on the outer surface of what had once been a Type-2 Eva, and in its womb, and the Earth brightened from a number of distinct existences.
With the Earth to its back, and its body churning, the Eva rose to its feet…and sprang from the ground.
The force of the jump scattered the regolith like a blossoming flower, and with inhuman movements, the Eva leaped toward Armaros, who stood twice its size. When Asuka had previously sighted the giant, she’d run away because she’d been thinking logically.
But now, she attacked the enemy with no hesitation, acting in pure rage against the inhuman.
“Nein!”