As always if anyone wants to help out by beta reading it'd be [s]welcome[/s] awesome.
Chapter One SPOILER: Show
Buzzards flew on the horizon; a superstition of red Earth. While she watched, they swooped and harried at the ground, attacking a moribund and unknown prey. Life had begun to flourish out in the red wilderness, against all odds, but like life, death had returned to the lifeless desert, a place having long forgotten the warmth and chill of either. It was a struggle as inevitable and consuming as the Sun’s fire, yet even after extinction the Sun would blaze over the world and the moon would cool its heat with the coming of each night; the rain would fall, and the setting stars would counsel sleep after a restless night of watching and waiting for death to rear its whitened head.
Days and days had passed like this, a tedium without end and without purpose or meaning and so many people had already died that it felt unnatural to save any more. But it was why she continued on and why she did what she did, her people had been placed in the way of death to stop its conquest, and they had risked their lives so that it could not conquer more, yet her own had suffered the least out of all. She found herself questioning whether it was her skill or her cowardice that had let it be so. A rare cigarette was pulled from her jacket and lit on an exhaust pipe. Smoking was a disgusting habit that she outwardly abhorred, it was wasteful and unhealthy and in such an unforgiving environment it felt obvious that it should be so hated.
And here she was, letting nicotine fill her senses and musing on her decision to lift the prohibition of alcohol.
At this rate it’ll only be a matter of time before we’re all alcoholics and addicts.
Anything to stave off the fear, she supposed, anything’s good.
As she watched embers drift to the ground distant thoughts of her ship, her prize, going up in flames and releasing her of her responsibilities came to her. She shook them free, but a small part of her was allowed to linger on them; after all her role was set, no matter what she thought, or what she thought she thought, or what that meant for her, she would just go along with what she had decided. This confidence in her decision was what kept her moving, it absolved her of her guilt and she dreaded the day that bull-head would droop and her resolution would wane.
Still, she appealed, in six months nothing will have changed. They’ll still be missing and we’ll still be fearing their absence. A white puff left her lips, mingling around raven hair until it was whipped away by the swift breezes. If she did nothing the status quo would remain, that alone gave her comfort, absens ne absentes morentur timet.
In the distance the buzzards dropped a final time.
~*~
Chapter One
~*~
‘What is he?’
The tired Doctor Fannon gave a sigh. It was a simple question to begin with, however he knew in his bones that today was set to be a rather more complex day. It had happened suddenly the previous night; two signatures had shown up on radar emitting energy equivalent to a two kiloton nuclear bomb each. Teams were immediately dispatched, coming across a crater filled with rubble and bodies that had appeared from nowhere. The bodies were all frozen stiff, long dead, some had even shattered on the way down to Earth after surviving by some miracle the explosion that caused their ingress, and unceremoniously strewn among the rubble that was just that; rubble. However, among this “just rubble” several structures had piqued the interest of the research team; a curious set of two large domes in the epicentre were mostly intact, the only sign of damage a set of web-like cracks running down the outside to the base, where a metal and concrete platform lay undisturbed in an eerily perfect circle around them. The circle in question seemed to encompass all that remained unbroken, and what was outside was simply destroyed; what appeared to be a mobile research facility, still filled with the shattered fragments of whatever team had staffed it, ran perfectly in one piece to the circumference of the circle where it had crumbled in ruin.
‘He’s human, that much we know.’
DNA tests were always conducted on the “finds”; the paranoia of possible infiltrators had never been higher, and it oppressed any goodwill in the ship. It was often a topic of thought for Fannon, brown haired, green eyed, and bearded, how long until the DNA tests would become mandatory for staff, and what, if anything, could follow that line’s crossing. Sleep had been snatched unceremoniously from the doctor, barely 26 and already balding, now with the scrap grounds the cafeteria called coffee highly ineffective, he felt sleep snatching the lost time back from him and his new patient.
Death had given him such a high profile; after the recent attacks on the ship where he lived and worked, a smaller vessel in the AAA Wunder fleet called Die Hoffnung (a name he personally detested), there were simply no other medical staff left onboard who could be trusted (Fannon had been on the toilet during the attacks, an ordeal resulting from his persistent abuse of his colon with quantities of coffee unheard of to the normal man), in fact, it could be said that no medical staff could be trusted.
‘Brilliant.’
Fannon rubbed his eyes; his “junior”, a man in fact 12 years his senior, never ceased these “harmless” digs, had never ceased in the past, and didn’t appear he would ever cease. Even now as the bedraggled and dreadlocked Grenadan coughed tar from blackened lungs, he kept a tormenting gaze upon Fannon. It was unclear whether the man, whose name was Izaiah, liked him, or would ever like him; something belied the insults that threw the doctor’s mind into a frenzy.
‘Yup.’
‘You don’t seem awake.’
‘I’m not.’
They stood in a small whitewashed room, on one side was a one way mirror; on the other side of that was a boy who sat in a wheel chair and stared out at them with green and unblinking eyes. He was the only human found alive in the ingression zone, alive like Fannon by virtue of timing.
‘Who is he?’
The frustrated Samuel Fannon rubbed his eyes at the questions, feeling a yawn rise in his throat. The yawn strangled his words and he shrugged until it passed. ‘There’s no way to be sure, but given that he was found inside the artifact, it’s easiest to assume that he’s the pilot.’ Another product of paranoia; there were no Units or Evangelions left over from the pre third impact days, instead there were the enemy and the Artifacts; Units controlled and maintained by NERV, and those that had survived and were controlled by no one. ‘But of course we don’t know, all data on him was lost and sync tests were ruled out. He’s an unknown.’ The teenager in the next room twitched slightly, he was gaunt and skinny, his shoulders thin and hunched, his nose hooked. ‘For all we know it could be another saboteur and this could all be just some ruse.’
The two men looked over at the boy, a stream of dribble ran down his chin.
Izaiah grimaced and turned away. A soft breeze rocked the ship and the room.
‘Somehow I doubt it.’
‘Yup.’
A quiet moment passed; such moments were rare and they willed this one to leave until for their prayers a bird cawed from outside and their stomachs grumbled. A mix up in the newly instituted rationing had left them at least two days without food, and drinks were only handed out every 24 hours at 7 AM on the dot, leaving both men somewhat starved and thirsting. Nobody wanted to say anything but the situation had the ability to become dire quickly; the fleet had always supplied itself by auxiliary means, and now that the supply choppers which carried food and water to the ships had seemingly dropped out of existence, an inkling of fear was beginning to nibble at the corners of many of the crew’s hearts. Many of them hadn’t seen the devastation after the second impact, most of them had only learned of it from textbooks and some had never gotten far enough in their schooling to have read about it, but starvation was always a fear lurking just around the corner; even after the exclusion zone had been established and the containment field erected, food had been an issue for the new world. As it had happened hot and regular sustenance had been one of the selling points behind Wille recruitment, enticing the hungry and destitute into voluntarily entering a sterile red desert with an upstart task force to try and quash a rogue UN initiative.
The hungry Doctor Fannon felt a familiar sickness grip in his mind and took his leave of the room.
‘Going to the bathroom?’
The door slammed behind him. The outside was better, it was too cramped in the warm, damp cube that stank of sterility and disinfectant, out here the wind could whip at his face and he could pretend that it drowned out his thoughts. Psychiatrists were in heavy demand after the many apocalypses that had almost come to pass; two hundred had been hired onto staff in the last six months alone, draining the budget. Die Hoffnung had three of them onboard, but he had refused sessions.
Just don’t think about it, you aren’t like that.
He closed his eyes and sucked in a breath, urging involuntary thoughts to fade away.
Please don’t do this to yourself.
He pulled a picture of his child from his pocket and stared intently at the image.
See? It’s not so bad.
~*~
Lunch was served in the mess at long last. Despite the events of the past the room nonetheless buzzed with happy activity as the hungry fed. Izaiah had cut in line after seeing it extend pass the mess room doors, to the dismay of those behind him, though none attempted to confront him, weary of both his size and his age. On board Die Hoffnung he was the oldest serving member of staff, a testament both to his perseverance and the frailty of life that the red wilderness offered. It was spoken in hushed whispers that he’d made a deal with the devil to live as long as he had.
He was 38.
The food plopped onto his plate resembled more than anything a sour mixture of minced rat and banana, albeit rinsed in tepid water, pureed, and fed to the masses. The fact that it was simply a protein synthesis mattered not, the thought of eating rats still provoked a light sweat on his forehead and a gag in his throat. Rats inspired an uneasiness in him beyond his own belief, having spent the majority of his teenage years hunting and eating them beneath the piles of detritus that used to be his home in St. George’s town. This scavenging among the mire and slum of former buildings was hardly sustainable; most of his friends had starved and those that hadn’t fell under a spell of unending insomnia that ended their life within a year, haunting them with hallucinations and dumbness until, one by one, they dropped slowly for the buzzards to eat. It had turned out later that the rats had been eating people almost as vivaciously as the slum dwellers had been eating them; a cycle of proxy cannibalism resulting in sickness and suffering for all.
Except Izaiah, who, after years of living in the nooks and crannies of the concrete undergrowth, had survived from a quirk of genetics, had hitched a ride on a UN convoy, sleeping and hiding underneath a pile of coats until they were unloaded onto a ship, and like that he had sailed away from the Grenadan Islands.
Mad world.
The table’s bench sagged under his weight, meanwhile the slosh on the plastic tray began to disappear into his stomach. He reflected that right now they’d be hooking an IV drip into the Artifact, filled with the same protein synthesis. It felt odd that they were spending any resources at all to keep him there and alive, being such an unknown. Although rumour had it that the order to extend his life had come from the top even before pattern analysis had confirmed his humanity, and rumours in such close quarters had the tendency to become truth in their own way.
If only the third child had been a vegetable. Could’ve saved us a lot of time.
A dried clump of protein slid between his teeth. He gagged and pulled it out. And people.
The buzz of people rang in his ears. He’d never thought of himself as sentimental; survival had forced a hand of cold pragmatism over idealism since the start of the century, now a third of the way into it, this way of living seemed inescapable. A businessman’s mind, his father had put it, a day being blown away in the aftermath of the second impact. A thought crossed into his mind of the world when all this drama had been wrapped up, and whether or not he could use that business mind to find himself a living in it. Easily, he concluded, everything would be easy once the whole NERV affair had been dealt with. At least he hoped.
He glanced to the right side of the mess hall, people were saying their various graces and the low hum of clashing prayers pulsed easily under the erratic clatter of voices that filled the space.
Quaint.
~*~
His eyes were locked on the lights above him, entranced by the flicker and the hum of their incessance, and, although faint, he could hear his heart beating at the back of his skull. How long had he sat like this? Hypnotized by the failing fluorescents, with muscles set into idleness? He was sure it had been at least an hour, maybe more, although who could tell; there was no natural light in the cell, no passing of the sun to signify the time.
Why aren’t you moving?
A splash of drool landed on his bib, showing at least some cruel mercy. As far as he could tell the argon tubes were the only sign of familiarity inside his humid room, in reality a harshly lit cube no more than four metres each side, everything else was horribly alien. Red inscribed pumps ran from floor to ceiling along the side of the room he was angled towards, hissing and spitting; unfamiliar machinery hooked into his arm, pumping unknown fluids into it.
He’ll be back any minute.
The thoughts barely came to him anymore; a boy trapped inside his own skin, looked out of eyes that were barely his into a mirror that shone with desperate glare. He willed himself to move but his limbs didn’t respond; he tried to talk himself into speaking but no words would come. It’d been like this for as long as he could remember, which fortunately wasn’t terribly far into the past.
At first it had started with confusion, a bewilderment as to why he was so cold, which soon sunk into a stupor as fluid was flushed from his lungs onto a cold medical table, and back into panic as he wondered why nobody would talk to him, and for what reason he had been contained in a small room with only a sweaty and greasy one way mirror to break up the pangs of the fluorescent lights.
They would come to kill him next, he could tell, the first time both the balding man and his assistant had entered his cell they’d taken blood from him, the second they’d stripped some skin, and the third they’d forced needles into his back and drained his spinal fluid. The pain had always been incredible for nerves still groggy after a long hiatus, yet a curse of silence had stifled cries and the urge to lash out at his aggressors.
They’d spoken in front of him, about him, unaware that he could hear, about their days, about current affairs, about his chances of recovery, his life, and about the possibility of having to end it. The staff were desperate, their twisted versions of news ranged from apocalypses to starvation to illness and death, no talk of anything his bones said was normal; no weather, no children, just decay. Cold fear gnawed at his stomach, pushing sweat from his pores as he saw shadows flit past the one slit in the only door the room had. Gradually it creeped open until in stepped the shaggy and immemorable doctor, clad in a faded lab-coat and holding a notepad of disintegrating cork.
‘All right, this’ll be quick.’
The pilot tensed his phantom muscles. Fannon knelt down to him and wiped the drool away with his sleeve, sighing as he did so. He turned to clean the mirror a little bit. ‘You aren’t really alive, are you?’ Could he have started, he would’ve. ‘How can someone live like this?’ The paralysed limbs relaxed in his mind, Fannon wasn’t talking to him, just to himself. The doctor paused, and pulled up a chair. Time for the daily exercises.
The chair the pilot was sitting in slid back with the pull of a lever, creaking as the ancient steel worked against itself. Everyday at 12 noon the doctor would come in and massage the muscles in his back and legs, as well as turning him over to relieve his bed sores. It was painful; the routine was deep and hard, meant to disturb the tissue so it would regenerate.
This was the sixth massage, so it had been six days since he’d been dredged up from inside a cold entry plug. There was nothing much to think, aside from relief that the black man that followed the doctor around hadn’t come to take more samples, the thought cringed inside him, ebbing against his moralities. So far he’d tried his hardest to understand and bear the treatment until they could fix him, but from what he’d heard it could take months for motor control to return, until then he was simply stuck inside a body that wouldn’t respond.
~*~
Then he was back in his entry plug, itching against the rubber they’d clad him in. He could never get used to the material, it rashed his skin and rubbed against his crotch; it felt so typical of the First Branch to get the second rate models, the tube he was in was scrapped together from spare parts.
Although he supposed he shouldn’t be complaining, it bet homework and school. So far he’d been at the clandestine base for three weeks, doing tests, practicing, learning about the enemy, the history of his company, what it stood for, and he had yet to miss the endless grind of waking at five in a cold and cramped house to catch a three hour bus to make it to the run-down twelve-student school that attempted to educate him. Yes, he decided that the glamour his being chosen afforded him and the comparative crispness of his new home was preferable in more than one way to the mildew lined carpet, the leak stained classroom, and the offbrand teacher. Here he knew he could flourish.
He wiped his brow of LCL, an act made futile by his immersion. He never felt quite comfortable in the pilot seat, but they told him it was normal, that nobody ever felt quite right until they’d done it for a few years, and that at his pace of learning, he would easily become the best pilot NERV had ever seen.
‘Deep sync test complete, Anthony.’
The monitor to Anthony’s left switched off, away went the face of his overall; the cool, fair haired lady who looked after his progress with Eva. Around him the plug began to shudder, bubbles freed themselves from the improperly plated interior and floated to the surface.
Outside the plug things were always buzzing; constant reports came in, blared over loudspeakers to maintain attention, engineers were always working, doing apparently meaningless tasks over and over again for unknown reasons, the crew inside the test control room was chattering to each other, satisfied with another success. When Anthony entered, after sputtering LCL from his lungs for the last half hour, he was greeted with cheers and smiles, and he would’ve been forgiven for thinking that he’d just killed an Angel and saved the planet. Instead he’d saved everybody’s jobs, a smaller but nonetheless appreciated task.
The US program was constantly on the verge of collapse; their proximity to blasphemy in the eyes of the public had always ended with them having their funds siphoned away in one way or another by lobbyists and interest groups, and they’d begged for years and years to acquire the rights that they had, the rights to build two Production Type Evangelions, Units 03, and 04. Even then it’d been rocky, unsteady footing for the fledgling branch; deadlines set were rarely met, quotas unfilled.
As a result the highest order of the UN security council had given them three months to find success, any success that would justify their continued support, since then it had been ninety days. It was not a short ninety days, The first 60 or so had indeed been spent at a leisurely pace, going by a sound strategy that was working until their original pilot had disappeared. They’d scrambled to find another, and fortunately they had.
‘Test scores are good.’ The fair headed lady said from behind her cup of water, ‘they’ve been sent to the UN as proof of our competence.’ She spat the last words, mingling them with contempt.
Anthony stepped up to her and beamed, relishing the attention. ‘Am I the best yet?’
‘Sure,’ the doctor began typing indecipherable strings of jargon into a message and sent it away with a swipe of her finger. The green light of the screen caught in Anthony’s eyes briefly, making him flinch. She looked back at him after she’d sent a few more messages, ‘It’s after your bed time, Anthony, you should get some sleep.’ She walked him over to the exit, leading him into the whitewashed hallway outside.
Anthony, the twelve year old, smiled and went to his bedroom across the corridor. The door closed behind him with a swish, filling the room with darkness.
~*~
Anthony came back to reality staring at his dark hair, his dark skin, and wondering at his green eyes past the doctor who’d so graciously pointed his head towards the mirror. They seemed out of place on him, dark as he was, to be so bright and piercing. He chalked it up to insecurity once more as time continued to pass him by.
He stared at himself for a while longer before he began to question his eyes again. They were too bright for him, too alive for a boy who was dead on the outside.
Anthony choked on his thoughts, although it’d been pushed to the back of his mind it always sat at the front, reflected in the mirror of his thoughts, with a mocking grin in his mind’s eye.
His body was shrivelled, his shoulders hunched, skin pulled tight against bone. He was a breathing corpse, he felt sure nobody could think of him as anything else, and that nobody would until he would walk and talk and eat again. So, he resigned, I better learn to walk quickly.
The encouragement lifted his spirits a bit.
‘Is that better?’
Sam, as he’d heard the other doctor call him, had finished, and began to turn Anthony back over. Anthony half expected a slap, he never knew what to expect from the man who could hurt and take biopsies of him but still make him as comfortable as he possibly could, but needless to say none came, instead as the doctor leaned over to pull the chair back up the two pairs of green eyes locked onto each other.
‘Sometimes I wonder if you’re awake in there.’
The lever was released, the chair shot back up, and Anthony was jarred back into sitting and staring at himself in the now clean mirror.
‘If you are, I’m sorry we couldn’t get you a room with a view. I’ll try harder in the future.’ The doctor lay a blanket over his patient's legs, before leaving the room.
A view of what? Anthony mused, staring long and hard at his blanket, the place his eyes had landed.
It dawned on him that he’d forgotten the concept of an outside world, disregarded nature and wildlife. He wondered what it would be like outside wherever they were. He assumed it must have changed since the incident that had resulted in his situation. Upon further rumination it dawned on him that he couldn’t remember the incident or accident or whatever had resulted in his paralysis, and he questioned whether any such thing had ever happened, or if he was just a clone making up stories in his own mind about his history and purpose.
The train of thought was interrupted when he caught sight of a bag hanging from his wheelchair. It was empty, yet no one had come in to replace it since his arrival.
Just another thing I guess.
He resigned his eyes to sleep, forcing them closed with what mental strength he could muster, before slowly ebbing into an inky black.
He wondered if they’d make him a pilot.
~*~
Days and days had passed like this, a tedium without end and without purpose or meaning and so many people had already died that it felt unnatural to save any more. But it was why she continued on and why she did what she did, her people had been placed in the way of death to stop its conquest, and they had risked their lives so that it could not conquer more, yet her own had suffered the least out of all. She found herself questioning whether it was her skill or her cowardice that had let it be so. A rare cigarette was pulled from her jacket and lit on an exhaust pipe. Smoking was a disgusting habit that she outwardly abhorred, it was wasteful and unhealthy and in such an unforgiving environment it felt obvious that it should be so hated.
And here she was, letting nicotine fill her senses and musing on her decision to lift the prohibition of alcohol.
At this rate it’ll only be a matter of time before we’re all alcoholics and addicts.
Anything to stave off the fear, she supposed, anything’s good.
As she watched embers drift to the ground distant thoughts of her ship, her prize, going up in flames and releasing her of her responsibilities came to her. She shook them free, but a small part of her was allowed to linger on them; after all her role was set, no matter what she thought, or what she thought she thought, or what that meant for her, she would just go along with what she had decided. This confidence in her decision was what kept her moving, it absolved her of her guilt and she dreaded the day that bull-head would droop and her resolution would wane.
Still, she appealed, in six months nothing will have changed. They’ll still be missing and we’ll still be fearing their absence. A white puff left her lips, mingling around raven hair until it was whipped away by the swift breezes. If she did nothing the status quo would remain, that alone gave her comfort, absens ne absentes morentur timet.
In the distance the buzzards dropped a final time.
~*~
Chapter One
~*~
‘What is he?’
The tired Doctor Fannon gave a sigh. It was a simple question to begin with, however he knew in his bones that today was set to be a rather more complex day. It had happened suddenly the previous night; two signatures had shown up on radar emitting energy equivalent to a two kiloton nuclear bomb each. Teams were immediately dispatched, coming across a crater filled with rubble and bodies that had appeared from nowhere. The bodies were all frozen stiff, long dead, some had even shattered on the way down to Earth after surviving by some miracle the explosion that caused their ingress, and unceremoniously strewn among the rubble that was just that; rubble. However, among this “just rubble” several structures had piqued the interest of the research team; a curious set of two large domes in the epicentre were mostly intact, the only sign of damage a set of web-like cracks running down the outside to the base, where a metal and concrete platform lay undisturbed in an eerily perfect circle around them. The circle in question seemed to encompass all that remained unbroken, and what was outside was simply destroyed; what appeared to be a mobile research facility, still filled with the shattered fragments of whatever team had staffed it, ran perfectly in one piece to the circumference of the circle where it had crumbled in ruin.
‘He’s human, that much we know.’
DNA tests were always conducted on the “finds”; the paranoia of possible infiltrators had never been higher, and it oppressed any goodwill in the ship. It was often a topic of thought for Fannon, brown haired, green eyed, and bearded, how long until the DNA tests would become mandatory for staff, and what, if anything, could follow that line’s crossing. Sleep had been snatched unceremoniously from the doctor, barely 26 and already balding, now with the scrap grounds the cafeteria called coffee highly ineffective, he felt sleep snatching the lost time back from him and his new patient.
Death had given him such a high profile; after the recent attacks on the ship where he lived and worked, a smaller vessel in the AAA Wunder fleet called Die Hoffnung (a name he personally detested), there were simply no other medical staff left onboard who could be trusted (Fannon had been on the toilet during the attacks, an ordeal resulting from his persistent abuse of his colon with quantities of coffee unheard of to the normal man), in fact, it could be said that no medical staff could be trusted.
‘Brilliant.’
Fannon rubbed his eyes; his “junior”, a man in fact 12 years his senior, never ceased these “harmless” digs, had never ceased in the past, and didn’t appear he would ever cease. Even now as the bedraggled and dreadlocked Grenadan coughed tar from blackened lungs, he kept a tormenting gaze upon Fannon. It was unclear whether the man, whose name was Izaiah, liked him, or would ever like him; something belied the insults that threw the doctor’s mind into a frenzy.
‘Yup.’
‘You don’t seem awake.’
‘I’m not.’
They stood in a small whitewashed room, on one side was a one way mirror; on the other side of that was a boy who sat in a wheel chair and stared out at them with green and unblinking eyes. He was the only human found alive in the ingression zone, alive like Fannon by virtue of timing.
‘Who is he?’
The frustrated Samuel Fannon rubbed his eyes at the questions, feeling a yawn rise in his throat. The yawn strangled his words and he shrugged until it passed. ‘There’s no way to be sure, but given that he was found inside the artifact, it’s easiest to assume that he’s the pilot.’ Another product of paranoia; there were no Units or Evangelions left over from the pre third impact days, instead there were the enemy and the Artifacts; Units controlled and maintained by NERV, and those that had survived and were controlled by no one. ‘But of course we don’t know, all data on him was lost and sync tests were ruled out. He’s an unknown.’ The teenager in the next room twitched slightly, he was gaunt and skinny, his shoulders thin and hunched, his nose hooked. ‘For all we know it could be another saboteur and this could all be just some ruse.’
The two men looked over at the boy, a stream of dribble ran down his chin.
Izaiah grimaced and turned away. A soft breeze rocked the ship and the room.
‘Somehow I doubt it.’
‘Yup.’
A quiet moment passed; such moments were rare and they willed this one to leave until for their prayers a bird cawed from outside and their stomachs grumbled. A mix up in the newly instituted rationing had left them at least two days without food, and drinks were only handed out every 24 hours at 7 AM on the dot, leaving both men somewhat starved and thirsting. Nobody wanted to say anything but the situation had the ability to become dire quickly; the fleet had always supplied itself by auxiliary means, and now that the supply choppers which carried food and water to the ships had seemingly dropped out of existence, an inkling of fear was beginning to nibble at the corners of many of the crew’s hearts. Many of them hadn’t seen the devastation after the second impact, most of them had only learned of it from textbooks and some had never gotten far enough in their schooling to have read about it, but starvation was always a fear lurking just around the corner; even after the exclusion zone had been established and the containment field erected, food had been an issue for the new world. As it had happened hot and regular sustenance had been one of the selling points behind Wille recruitment, enticing the hungry and destitute into voluntarily entering a sterile red desert with an upstart task force to try and quash a rogue UN initiative.
The hungry Doctor Fannon felt a familiar sickness grip in his mind and took his leave of the room.
‘Going to the bathroom?’
The door slammed behind him. The outside was better, it was too cramped in the warm, damp cube that stank of sterility and disinfectant, out here the wind could whip at his face and he could pretend that it drowned out his thoughts. Psychiatrists were in heavy demand after the many apocalypses that had almost come to pass; two hundred had been hired onto staff in the last six months alone, draining the budget. Die Hoffnung had three of them onboard, but he had refused sessions.
Just don’t think about it, you aren’t like that.
He closed his eyes and sucked in a breath, urging involuntary thoughts to fade away.
Please don’t do this to yourself.
He pulled a picture of his child from his pocket and stared intently at the image.
See? It’s not so bad.
~*~
Lunch was served in the mess at long last. Despite the events of the past the room nonetheless buzzed with happy activity as the hungry fed. Izaiah had cut in line after seeing it extend pass the mess room doors, to the dismay of those behind him, though none attempted to confront him, weary of both his size and his age. On board Die Hoffnung he was the oldest serving member of staff, a testament both to his perseverance and the frailty of life that the red wilderness offered. It was spoken in hushed whispers that he’d made a deal with the devil to live as long as he had.
He was 38.
The food plopped onto his plate resembled more than anything a sour mixture of minced rat and banana, albeit rinsed in tepid water, pureed, and fed to the masses. The fact that it was simply a protein synthesis mattered not, the thought of eating rats still provoked a light sweat on his forehead and a gag in his throat. Rats inspired an uneasiness in him beyond his own belief, having spent the majority of his teenage years hunting and eating them beneath the piles of detritus that used to be his home in St. George’s town. This scavenging among the mire and slum of former buildings was hardly sustainable; most of his friends had starved and those that hadn’t fell under a spell of unending insomnia that ended their life within a year, haunting them with hallucinations and dumbness until, one by one, they dropped slowly for the buzzards to eat. It had turned out later that the rats had been eating people almost as vivaciously as the slum dwellers had been eating them; a cycle of proxy cannibalism resulting in sickness and suffering for all.
Except Izaiah, who, after years of living in the nooks and crannies of the concrete undergrowth, had survived from a quirk of genetics, had hitched a ride on a UN convoy, sleeping and hiding underneath a pile of coats until they were unloaded onto a ship, and like that he had sailed away from the Grenadan Islands.
Mad world.
The table’s bench sagged under his weight, meanwhile the slosh on the plastic tray began to disappear into his stomach. He reflected that right now they’d be hooking an IV drip into the Artifact, filled with the same protein synthesis. It felt odd that they were spending any resources at all to keep him there and alive, being such an unknown. Although rumour had it that the order to extend his life had come from the top even before pattern analysis had confirmed his humanity, and rumours in such close quarters had the tendency to become truth in their own way.
If only the third child had been a vegetable. Could’ve saved us a lot of time.
A dried clump of protein slid between his teeth. He gagged and pulled it out. And people.
The buzz of people rang in his ears. He’d never thought of himself as sentimental; survival had forced a hand of cold pragmatism over idealism since the start of the century, now a third of the way into it, this way of living seemed inescapable. A businessman’s mind, his father had put it, a day being blown away in the aftermath of the second impact. A thought crossed into his mind of the world when all this drama had been wrapped up, and whether or not he could use that business mind to find himself a living in it. Easily, he concluded, everything would be easy once the whole NERV affair had been dealt with. At least he hoped.
He glanced to the right side of the mess hall, people were saying their various graces and the low hum of clashing prayers pulsed easily under the erratic clatter of voices that filled the space.
Quaint.
~*~
His eyes were locked on the lights above him, entranced by the flicker and the hum of their incessance, and, although faint, he could hear his heart beating at the back of his skull. How long had he sat like this? Hypnotized by the failing fluorescents, with muscles set into idleness? He was sure it had been at least an hour, maybe more, although who could tell; there was no natural light in the cell, no passing of the sun to signify the time.
Why aren’t you moving?
A splash of drool landed on his bib, showing at least some cruel mercy. As far as he could tell the argon tubes were the only sign of familiarity inside his humid room, in reality a harshly lit cube no more than four metres each side, everything else was horribly alien. Red inscribed pumps ran from floor to ceiling along the side of the room he was angled towards, hissing and spitting; unfamiliar machinery hooked into his arm, pumping unknown fluids into it.
He’ll be back any minute.
The thoughts barely came to him anymore; a boy trapped inside his own skin, looked out of eyes that were barely his into a mirror that shone with desperate glare. He willed himself to move but his limbs didn’t respond; he tried to talk himself into speaking but no words would come. It’d been like this for as long as he could remember, which fortunately wasn’t terribly far into the past.
At first it had started with confusion, a bewilderment as to why he was so cold, which soon sunk into a stupor as fluid was flushed from his lungs onto a cold medical table, and back into panic as he wondered why nobody would talk to him, and for what reason he had been contained in a small room with only a sweaty and greasy one way mirror to break up the pangs of the fluorescent lights.
They would come to kill him next, he could tell, the first time both the balding man and his assistant had entered his cell they’d taken blood from him, the second they’d stripped some skin, and the third they’d forced needles into his back and drained his spinal fluid. The pain had always been incredible for nerves still groggy after a long hiatus, yet a curse of silence had stifled cries and the urge to lash out at his aggressors.
They’d spoken in front of him, about him, unaware that he could hear, about their days, about current affairs, about his chances of recovery, his life, and about the possibility of having to end it. The staff were desperate, their twisted versions of news ranged from apocalypses to starvation to illness and death, no talk of anything his bones said was normal; no weather, no children, just decay. Cold fear gnawed at his stomach, pushing sweat from his pores as he saw shadows flit past the one slit in the only door the room had. Gradually it creeped open until in stepped the shaggy and immemorable doctor, clad in a faded lab-coat and holding a notepad of disintegrating cork.
‘All right, this’ll be quick.’
The pilot tensed his phantom muscles. Fannon knelt down to him and wiped the drool away with his sleeve, sighing as he did so. He turned to clean the mirror a little bit. ‘You aren’t really alive, are you?’ Could he have started, he would’ve. ‘How can someone live like this?’ The paralysed limbs relaxed in his mind, Fannon wasn’t talking to him, just to himself. The doctor paused, and pulled up a chair. Time for the daily exercises.
The chair the pilot was sitting in slid back with the pull of a lever, creaking as the ancient steel worked against itself. Everyday at 12 noon the doctor would come in and massage the muscles in his back and legs, as well as turning him over to relieve his bed sores. It was painful; the routine was deep and hard, meant to disturb the tissue so it would regenerate.
This was the sixth massage, so it had been six days since he’d been dredged up from inside a cold entry plug. There was nothing much to think, aside from relief that the black man that followed the doctor around hadn’t come to take more samples, the thought cringed inside him, ebbing against his moralities. So far he’d tried his hardest to understand and bear the treatment until they could fix him, but from what he’d heard it could take months for motor control to return, until then he was simply stuck inside a body that wouldn’t respond.
~*~
Then he was back in his entry plug, itching against the rubber they’d clad him in. He could never get used to the material, it rashed his skin and rubbed against his crotch; it felt so typical of the First Branch to get the second rate models, the tube he was in was scrapped together from spare parts.
Although he supposed he shouldn’t be complaining, it bet homework and school. So far he’d been at the clandestine base for three weeks, doing tests, practicing, learning about the enemy, the history of his company, what it stood for, and he had yet to miss the endless grind of waking at five in a cold and cramped house to catch a three hour bus to make it to the run-down twelve-student school that attempted to educate him. Yes, he decided that the glamour his being chosen afforded him and the comparative crispness of his new home was preferable in more than one way to the mildew lined carpet, the leak stained classroom, and the offbrand teacher. Here he knew he could flourish.
He wiped his brow of LCL, an act made futile by his immersion. He never felt quite comfortable in the pilot seat, but they told him it was normal, that nobody ever felt quite right until they’d done it for a few years, and that at his pace of learning, he would easily become the best pilot NERV had ever seen.
‘Deep sync test complete, Anthony.’
The monitor to Anthony’s left switched off, away went the face of his overall; the cool, fair haired lady who looked after his progress with Eva. Around him the plug began to shudder, bubbles freed themselves from the improperly plated interior and floated to the surface.
Outside the plug things were always buzzing; constant reports came in, blared over loudspeakers to maintain attention, engineers were always working, doing apparently meaningless tasks over and over again for unknown reasons, the crew inside the test control room was chattering to each other, satisfied with another success. When Anthony entered, after sputtering LCL from his lungs for the last half hour, he was greeted with cheers and smiles, and he would’ve been forgiven for thinking that he’d just killed an Angel and saved the planet. Instead he’d saved everybody’s jobs, a smaller but nonetheless appreciated task.
The US program was constantly on the verge of collapse; their proximity to blasphemy in the eyes of the public had always ended with them having their funds siphoned away in one way or another by lobbyists and interest groups, and they’d begged for years and years to acquire the rights that they had, the rights to build two Production Type Evangelions, Units 03, and 04. Even then it’d been rocky, unsteady footing for the fledgling branch; deadlines set were rarely met, quotas unfilled.
As a result the highest order of the UN security council had given them three months to find success, any success that would justify their continued support, since then it had been ninety days. It was not a short ninety days, The first 60 or so had indeed been spent at a leisurely pace, going by a sound strategy that was working until their original pilot had disappeared. They’d scrambled to find another, and fortunately they had.
‘Test scores are good.’ The fair headed lady said from behind her cup of water, ‘they’ve been sent to the UN as proof of our competence.’ She spat the last words, mingling them with contempt.
Anthony stepped up to her and beamed, relishing the attention. ‘Am I the best yet?’
‘Sure,’ the doctor began typing indecipherable strings of jargon into a message and sent it away with a swipe of her finger. The green light of the screen caught in Anthony’s eyes briefly, making him flinch. She looked back at him after she’d sent a few more messages, ‘It’s after your bed time, Anthony, you should get some sleep.’ She walked him over to the exit, leading him into the whitewashed hallway outside.
Anthony, the twelve year old, smiled and went to his bedroom across the corridor. The door closed behind him with a swish, filling the room with darkness.
~*~
Anthony came back to reality staring at his dark hair, his dark skin, and wondering at his green eyes past the doctor who’d so graciously pointed his head towards the mirror. They seemed out of place on him, dark as he was, to be so bright and piercing. He chalked it up to insecurity once more as time continued to pass him by.
He stared at himself for a while longer before he began to question his eyes again. They were too bright for him, too alive for a boy who was dead on the outside.
Anthony choked on his thoughts, although it’d been pushed to the back of his mind it always sat at the front, reflected in the mirror of his thoughts, with a mocking grin in his mind’s eye.
His body was shrivelled, his shoulders hunched, skin pulled tight against bone. He was a breathing corpse, he felt sure nobody could think of him as anything else, and that nobody would until he would walk and talk and eat again. So, he resigned, I better learn to walk quickly.
The encouragement lifted his spirits a bit.
‘Is that better?’
Sam, as he’d heard the other doctor call him, had finished, and began to turn Anthony back over. Anthony half expected a slap, he never knew what to expect from the man who could hurt and take biopsies of him but still make him as comfortable as he possibly could, but needless to say none came, instead as the doctor leaned over to pull the chair back up the two pairs of green eyes locked onto each other.
‘Sometimes I wonder if you’re awake in there.’
The lever was released, the chair shot back up, and Anthony was jarred back into sitting and staring at himself in the now clean mirror.
‘If you are, I’m sorry we couldn’t get you a room with a view. I’ll try harder in the future.’ The doctor lay a blanket over his patient's legs, before leaving the room.
A view of what? Anthony mused, staring long and hard at his blanket, the place his eyes had landed.
It dawned on him that he’d forgotten the concept of an outside world, disregarded nature and wildlife. He wondered what it would be like outside wherever they were. He assumed it must have changed since the incident that had resulted in his situation. Upon further rumination it dawned on him that he couldn’t remember the incident or accident or whatever had resulted in his paralysis, and he questioned whether any such thing had ever happened, or if he was just a clone making up stories in his own mind about his history and purpose.
The train of thought was interrupted when he caught sight of a bag hanging from his wheelchair. It was empty, yet no one had come in to replace it since his arrival.
Just another thing I guess.
He resigned his eyes to sleep, forcing them closed with what mental strength he could muster, before slowly ebbing into an inky black.
He wondered if they’d make him a pilot.
~*~
Chapter Two