Chapter Text
The SI Generation was undoubtedly talented…though they weren't good at living long. EVA technology would be centuries away, or simply impossible, without their intelligence and their brutal lack of ethics. They scientifically verified and controlled what philosophers call the soul. 'Metaphysical Biology' is science's finest and final jab at the old ivory tower.
Yet because of SEELE's cultishness and its overbearing scrutiny, and perhaps because of a sort of intellectual fetish of their own, these scientists dressed their discoveries in Gnosticism and kabbalah. These protected the staggering power of their advances from the uninitiate, and also provided a kind of smokescreen from their less-technical overlords; but in the end, they also hid the fullest extent of their insights even from themselves.
I have no such impediments or predilections. I have quantified the 'soul.' Plato is dead, Aristotle is disgraced. Long live Democritus, hail to Lucretius.
Act One, Scene One
Blinding fluorescent lights. Overpowering smell of disinfectant and…copper? Tumbling down a flight of metal stairs. She didn't feel the falls per se, but the spinning. Bump bump bump bump. Stop. Well, she probably stopped, but her vague vision still reeled. Where was up? Disembodied voices, rapid and excited speech and yells of indeterminate language and meaning, assaulted her from all sides.
Like many people going into or coming awake from an induced sleep or coma, her sole act of will was to attempt to be as rational and attentive as possible, to process this utter flood of stimuli quickly and efficiently, to come. awake. She scrabbled at the sights and sounds, trying to put them in order. Naturally, she mostly failed. Her skull felt hollow and her temples were pounding.
"Wh…" she began. Her parched throat closed up and the world around her flickered. The migraine (which she now distinctly identified) reached a fever pitch. She closed her eyes and focused on drawing breath. A prick on her upper arm; a hypodermic needle, she idly realized. A deliciously cold feeling spread up the vein. When the feeling reached her head, she immediately began feeling clearer. Gradually, the babble of voices resolved into intelligible language.
"Dr. Soryu! Dr. Soryu! Can you understand me?" someone earnestly asked about two inches, or maybe two miles, too close to her face.
"Ugh…" Her brain still ached and pulsed. She drew away from the stimuli and simply counted the throbs of pain crashing in time with her heartbeat. One, two…thirteen, fourteen…twenty-two, twenty-three…
"Let me administer another shot of noradrenaline!" someone exclaimed. No, no, no, the fool, just wait...
"Lay off! The first has barely had any time to take effect!" an authoritative voice screeched back like nails on a chalkboard.
She began attending to her surroundings again. Absolutely overwhelming white light began resolving itself into more comprehensible colors. Her spatial horizon steadily expanded. Cavernous spaces yawned around her, but there still seemed to be a ceiling of some kind far above. As her somatosensory systems woke up, she perceived a chilling, metallic cold underneath her. Draped over her body was something warm and linen…a towel, perhaps? All over her body was a horrid, tacky wetness.
Blurry, towering shapes became human figures in her eyes. The whiteness of their clothing confused her perception until she anchored her focus on crease-lines and pockets, and determined that these were lab coats. Further away, there were clusters of figures in red-tan uniforms or dark fatigues. To her left, where no echo returned from the clamor, something utterly enormous cast a shadow over her. Dark lines and cables radiated from it. Faces, however, were still a little ways off from her grasp.
Okay…But maybe now she could talk.
"Where…" she heroically managed.
"She's coming around! Kestrel, please put the needle away now!" the first voice called.
She could perceive where that particular voice was coming from and locked her still-focusing eyes onto its source. Brown, dark brown, short…Feminine frame of face, but sharp. The eyes, brown too.
"Dr. Soryu!...Hold on, this'll get too confusing…er…Frau Doktor! Can you understand me?"
"Mmnn…Who?..."
"Ah! I'm Captain Ib–" the face-voice-thing began before it vanished from the known world.
"Move, techie! You'd confound a fully conscious person, much less a waking comatose!" the authoritative voice growled as it moved nearer to her field of view. That one was that one, and this one was…this one. Individual, novel. "Hey, hey, look here!"
Oh. Rusty red. That seemed familiar. She had a past now, she recalled dimly, and in that past she took great pride in the rarity of such red after the Second Impact devastated many of the lands where it abounded and yet it ran so strong in her family although one must acknowledge that it attracted undue attention where she usually wanted to be left to her work but even so even as she reached the pinnacle of her career she still took just as much pride and joy in seeing that color in…
"Asuk…a?"
"We've got her back! Mama!" Yes, there were those crystal blue eyes she had gazed at for four golden years.
But in those days, they were limpid. They retained their beauty, but shadows backed and lined them. That light now filtered through breaks in ominous thunderheads rather than clear noon air. They looked older. How long had she been asleep? This line of thought was cut short by her head coming more vertical suddenly, upending the world as she knew it. Her neck limply pitched forward before she could catch herself.
"Dr. Soryu, please don't move her too much! She's still coming around!" someone called out nervously.
"Back off, Kestrel! This is the pinnacle of my career!" Asuka, yes her daughter indeed, exuberantly replied above her ear. She could feel her daughter's arms trembling. "You morons have dragged me down for years! And now you have the nerve to slow me down? Know your place!"
"Ah, Asuka…" she rasped. Four syllables, not bad. She craned her neck painfully to recenter and refocus on that beacon of her memory and life.
Mid-transit on this excruciating little journey, one detail of the cavernous room flashed through her mind. She was laying on some sort of wide catwalk or gantry, she recognized from years of working on just such a one. Distantly, at the far end of the walkway, a towering figure was the sole one not regarding her. Rather, it was walking away, hands in pockets. Why did it catch her eye? Was it the height? The gait, just a little heavy on one leg, perhaps? She couldn't fathom it. After a split second of this distraction, she completed the passage to her daughter and locked back onto those eyes.
"Okay, mother…can you tell me your name? Do you know where you are? Where you've been?" Asuka rattled off.
"I am…Kyoko, Zeppelin Soryu…" she began, staring back, but finding herself needing to squint now.
"Yes, yes! Keep going…" her daughter pressed.
"I…I don't know where I am. Did the…ah…contact experiment fail?...Where?..." Her mind raced to fill in the missing details, but the shot they gave her was wearing off rapidly. The edges of her vision were receding back to gray and black. The smell of copper was bordering on the sickening, and even as she slipped away she was getting closer and closer to placing its origin. Was that what had made her think of her greatest experiment just now? Ah, but that…
"No, come on, stay with me! Stay with me!" Too late, she was slipping away.
Strangely enough, Kyoko's last waking thought was not of her daughter, who might as well be a stranger or acquaintance for all she had aged. Her mind instead lingered on that receding figure as though drawn by gravity, or by some intuition that it possessed enormous importance.
Who was that?
End Act One, Scene One.