So, I was thinking about this image here:

https://wiki.evageeks.org/File:Tank_ima ... unshin.jpg

And it got my brain bubbling with a crazy thought...

Going off the order of events. We know that Gehrin somehow managed to secure Lilith. And we know that Unit 01 more or less bred from Lilith's flesh and born through her. Then, the contact experiment happens and Unit 01, which now has a core at this point, sucks Yui's entire soul into it. At some other point a salvage operation ensues to recreate Yuis body and reinsert her soul back into it...To which this is a complete failure. We know that Rei is create sometime after this event...

So, what if just as Eva 01 was create day doubling Lilith up on itself, Rei was created doing the same thing to Eva 01 at a later point?

Further, is it possible that this is how the other Evas were created from Adam using the same method? Maybe even why the Adam fetus is coded "Sample 1?" Perhaps Adam was copied and then these new body were made form the flesh... OR simple grown and cut from that first body whereupon Adam was reduced to that fetus..

In this line of thinking, I'm taking into account how things like god, angels, etc. are code for other concepts...Could it be then that the word "clone" is just a place holder for entirely different terminology, in this case "grown from?"

I might just be having a brain fart lol But, I needed to get it out before I forgot. Plus, it's been a while since I watched the show proper, so I'm a tad rusty on certain conceptualizations within the series.

Actually, what apparently happened is that Rei was created during the salvage operation, not sometime afterward. Thus the operation wasn't a total failure. They salvaged Yui's body, albeit in child form, but they somehow got Lilith's soul instead of Yui's. For this to happen, Unit-01 must have still been attached to Lilith during the salvage operation.

Adam was blown to bits during Second Impact, so the Evas couldn't have been grown the exact same way, but they were no doubt grown from samples like the one that appears in the show as Sample-01.

"Grown from" isn't entirely different terminology from clone; that's what clone means. The word goes back millennia before the days of Science Fiction. If you break a branch off of a plant and root it, the resulting plant is a genetically identical clone of the original plant.

thewayneiac wrote:Actually, what apparently happened is that Rei was created during the salvage operation, not sometime afterward. Thus the operation wasn't a total failure. They salvaged Yui's body, albeit in child form, but they somehow got Lilith's soul instead of Yui's. For this to happen, Unit-01 must have still been attached to Lilith during the salvage operation.

Wow, I really like this idea. Is there consensus about it? Was this originally proposed by MDWings?
I never thought the creation of Rei could have been a mistake, but surely it sounds right. A failure for Gendo, but a thought-through play for Yui, who didn't want to come back. Moreover: what if the "mistake" was cooengineered by Fuyutsuki? He agreed with Yui's plan without Gendo's knowledge, and he refers to Rei as the "fruit of his desperation" (like he felt guilty for something he had to do and that brought about Rei as we know her). Moreover, Rei is necessary to Yui's strategy during Instrumentality (she must choose Shinji over Gendo), so we can't rule out the possibility that the incident during the rescue mission too (not only the first one, when she got absorbed) had been arranged with her former prof when she was alive. Am I going too far?

That Rei was created from the results of the salvage operation is pretty much canon, it might've been in the CI or some other official released material and the manga also heavily implies it.


I don't think that Rei was the direct result though, in that she popped out fully formed with Lillith's soul already in place, because Naoko was present for the salvage operation but didn't know about Rei until she showed up a few years later also Rei herself says in ep 25 that she was created by Gendo (though she could of course be misinformed there)

The exact phrasing I think was that Rei was created from "Yui's salvaged remains", which could've been as little as a few scraps of meat contaminated with Lillith DNA, and then Gendo used that as base material to make Rei.

Fuyutsuki might've pushed Naoko aside, once the operation started going south, pressed a few buttons, and reacted in dismay when he saw the results; Or he simply helped Gendo with making Rei.

Thanks for the clarification. How do you know for sure that Naoko was present during the salvaging experiment? Because of the plans Ritsuko is referring to in Ep 20?

^Yes. She was apparently in charge of the operation.

Ritsuko doesn't say "in charge of", she just says "It seems my mom was here [i.e., able to witness the incident]". 「母さんは立ち会ったらいいけど」

There are appealing features in the conceit of Rei resulting from the salvage experiment directly: the union of Yui's body and Lilith's soul a) would be a single event, not an intricate process including recreating Yui's body, collecting Lilith's soul and using the latter to keep together the first; b) could be reasonably induced by Yui and/or Lilith from inside the Eva 01-Lilith parthenogenetic combo, bypassing Gendo's will and diverting from his specifical goal.
BUT, you're right, Naoko is a problem. Her surprise in meeting Rei indicates she had no idea of her existence; still, her quick realization ("she resembles Yui, thus she is Yui") seems to point to the fact that the possibility that the salvage experiment did have success, differently from her previous knowledge, looked pretty realistic to her. Maybe because she was present but couldn't check the results first-hand?
If one chews over it, it is very unlikely that Gendo left control of the operation to Naoko, who had no interest in seeing Yui's comeback. He would have used her theory and maybe asked her in to support the workings with the Magi system, but it had to be him himself or Fuyutsuki to have the finger on the trigger. "Fear is a man's best friend" could have been something said by Gendo.
BUT, one thing is assuming Gendo wanting to preserve first-hand control over the operation, another is taking for granted that he deemed success or even partial success had to be kept hidden from Naoko and even the Magi. If such efforts seemed necessary to him at the time, why then introducing Rei to Naoko so naively later on?
Let's go back to Ritsuko's laconic account: when Maya asks her what happened when the rescue procedure was tried, she replies "A failure, apparently" (I don't know Japanese so I'm relying on a sub here). She is clearly keeping much for herself, and the last sentence is pronounced with a very marked bitter feeling, almost sarcastic, which is not easily explainable. Why would she be so resentful about the fact that the salvage experiment was a failure? More importantly: why would she be following the same technique if she really thought that it didn't work?
In the same episode she tells us that all she knows is what is reported on the files. Her mother's files. And here I see a light. There's only one thing Ritsuko could be so embittered about: the files saying that the experiment was a failure, while the evidence of Rei's existence proving the contrary (so much so she follows the rescue plan knowing it can work perfectly well), pointed her to the fact that her mother was deceived by Gendo, regarding, guess who, that little being called Rei... such a tangential element in her suicide!
So, if Ritsuko really is enraged for what the incompleteness of her mother's report implies, the apparent inconsistency with Naoko's lack of knowledge of Rei's existence results dismantled within the same dialogues that seemed to raise it in the first place.
How could Gendo and Fuyutsuki deceive Naoko if the experiment was performed via the Magi system? I can only think of one word, and with that I close because this got way longer than I intended. And the word of course is Caspar.

The timeline is fuzzy there though -

ie, we don't know if Gendo was even there for the salvage operation. He went MIA for a week right after she dissapeared so it could well have happened in his absence, leaving Fuyutsuki in charge. Perhaps he made the decision to attempt it.

In Shinji's case it took a month until they attempted it, but that time they had seen something like this before.

Also regardless of Naoko's trustworthyness or lack thereof, was there anyone else with the necessary skills? I mean later on Gendo basically lets her fuck him because he needed to ensure her loyalty.

As for Ritsuko's tone of voice there I'd connect it more to the present situation and how the odds of getting Shinji out of there are supposedly low. Misato is like "It's your mechanical abomination, you fix this" - "He's soup, ma'am, they have never desouped a person before"

Kendrix wrote:

As for Ritsuko's tone of voice there I'd connect it more to the present situation and how the odds of getting Shinji out of there are supposedly low. Misato is like "It's your mechanical abomination, you fix this" - "He's soup, ma'am, they have never desouped a person before"

I respect your opinion, which comes more naturally and was also my first impression watching the show; still, IMO after what we get to know Ritsuko was hiding (I mean, from the second watch on), her voice and expression there are clearly allusive, too allusive to be referring to the low odds of success of the situation in front of them. By the way: she's not justifying herself with Misato there, she's answering Maya's usual intelligent questions with her usual half-truths. What are everybody's thoughts on this?

Talking about half truths, this thread https://forum.evageeks.org/thread/19727/Lilith-and-Yuis-Contact-Experiment-and-Related-Subjects/ is strongly connected to the one we're writing in. I will quote and address some lines from there, waiting to know if the moderators prefer to differently organize the conversation.

Reichu wrote:

Nerv's personnel (in NGE) were mislead into thinking that the Evas use digitized personalities as pilot interfaces. This explains why people like Misato and Maya accept so many strange things (like berserk episodes) despite not knowing what's actually going on -- they think it's just renegade AI.

What do organic supercomputers implanted with someone's personality have to do with Eva piloting, aside from the remote assist provided by the MAGI? Nothing, as far as I can tell. Which means this is probably referring to a cover story about the Evas.

Interesting idea, I'd like to elaborate a little on that. I think that Evas running on MAGI-based technology (Personality OS) is not exactly a mislead, just a half truth. The two souls in a working Eva (let's leave the Dummies aside for a moment) are connected through technological implants, which operate on a cybernetic level. A software works directly on that hardware, so, somewhere between a soul and the other, everything must be reduced to discrete signals. I'm not saying that the connection between core and pilot only works through the software (which I understand being a sort of external management): it's most probably a direct electrical biocircuit but, somewhere along its path, there must be converters. If you are able to design and build such a circuit, then you must also have worked out a formalization of souls and personalities. Naoko with the OS demonstrated that personalities are wholly formal: they can be treated as information.
This I think is the right place for another quote from that thread

ACGT-Samael wrote:

My comment was more about the great disparity between research to artificially create the soul for the Eva body and an AI designed to substitute for the pilot, which would seem to be very different from each other. I'm more wondering how a ultimately led to b.

That's the idea itself of the Evas, of them being maneuverable. Gehirn doesn't just want to artificially create souls or personalities, wants to pilot a God, and to do so they first need to know how any personality pilots any soul. If you turn the question around and pragmatically contemplate it from the point of view of what is needed to reach a determinate end, you'll see that the link between personality (characterized by verbal consciousness) and "soul" (in the series kind of arbitrarily intended to specifically mean "individual unity", AT Field) is the steering wheel itself. Will.

Reichu wrote:

Now, think about the salvage operation that Gehirn carried out. We know the one in episode 20 was heavily based upon the original, and the process is described as "reconstructing [the] body and anchoring [the] psyche within it". The "real" reason this process failed is because Yui didn't want to leave the core, and a soul's will to return is critical. This meant that Gehirn were actively creating demand for a soul, via the attempted replacement Yui-body, that was not being satisfied. What if this "vacuum" stimulated Lilith's Chamber of Guf into wanting to satisfy the demand? Only, her Guf is empty, so there's nothing to be done. However, from a certain point of view, there IS still one soul left: Lilith's own. And so that's the soul that answers the call, resulting in Rei.
[I'm not 100% satisfied with this. On the one hand, that whole "Chamber of Guf" mention really bothers me and I want to address it one way or another. On the other, it opens up countless doors of inquiry regarding exactly how soul acquisition is supposed to work in the variety of humans from NGE. Why would the mere act of creating a Lilin generate a spiritual vacuum powerful enough to affect a god, whereas creating the body of a god does nothing? I have some ideas about this, but they probably don't belong here.]

Bringing it all back home (I mean, this is why I thought what I wrote above was not OT): first, I'd like to point out that that sentence is told by Maya to Misato, and your idea that they were completely in the dark about souls (at least, enough so that they thought they were connecting a real personality, the pilot, to a fake personality, the AI inside the Eva) is sharply contrasting with your consideration of Maya's words here. But the idea that "reconstructing [the] body and anchoring [the] psyche within it" is to be taken into account as an actual technical description of the operation is not far-fetched; even if those could be intended merely as wished results, we know that in Evangelion souls are exactly what keeps organic bodies together, so an artificially-kept-together body used as soul-trap makes perfect sense.
So I think that it is the salvage experiments that are telling us that synthesizing personalities with supercomputers is a necessary step for piloting an Eva, and that this is the same topic as the creation of Rei, of Kaworu, of the Dummy System and the explanation of how the MP Eva series are supposed to work. Nerv cannot use the Magi to maneuvre Evas because each Eva's soul only responds to her son's personality. That's the difference between Magi and Dummy: the specific personality. Of the soul of the pilot, only its projection through personality is really needed. That's all an Eva's soul can get of the pilot's: its personality. This is how an Eva works, like a man: with one soul and one personality. Unlike men, but like mother-child symbioses, the personality and the soul are not from the same individual. But, unlike mother-child symbioses, in Evas the child's personality is fully formed. The second soul, the child's, is accessory.