--
The school being closed meant for extra hours testing. Technical division filled every spare hour they could. On some level, I remembered having an idea that being the Pilot of some kind of giant robot at the apex of a pan global United Nations effort to save the world from annihilation would be a fun thing.
Mostly, it was as utterly boring as any other job you could do on a Tuesday morning when you knew the sun was shining outside.
Real robots demanded testing, maintenance, more testing and hours sitting in a cockpit with a procedure specification on my knee that ran through at least four hundred meticulously choreographed steps.
With nothing more interesting to focus on, my thoughts turned to Shinji
Trying the heart of a teenage girl on for size brought a smile to my face and a soft sense of warmth to my chest, like wrapping myself in his arms. My mouth watered at the idea of another kiss, my heart stumbling at the possibility of going further.
Tingles and thrills ran through my body, begging for something more than a warm pillow. My mind drifted its way through the fantasy, embracing his firm body once more, extending a few moments of a kiss into a long night.
My thoughts dithered on the idea, poking at it like a fresh scab. The only thing that might’ve felt better than a few private teenage fantasies would’ve been the real thing.
Lensed through an adult's experience, I could see the storm coming, even as I reminded myself that adult relationships tended to come with a lot more strings attached. They came with lifelong consequences.
Things had been so much simpler when I'd been fourteen for the first time and didn't know better.
Maybe it is cowardice. Either from being burned too much as an adult, or being afraid to take that final step– like your average teenager. Part of me smiled, remembering this had once been a nightmare. Part of me wondered what I'd been so scared about.
Part of me recoiled in horror at becoming everything I feared.
A breath quelled the welling tears.
My revenge will be my happiness.
My mind called up the first time I'd ever had a girlfriend – fumbling, grabbing, trying to figure out what to do with a real person, compared to the printed thing in a magazine. Mt body slipped into her skin, cringing at clumsy fingers
My mind called up that moment with Shinji
Where my hand had gone and what my fingers felt. My body thrilled at the memory, begging me to carry it to the next level.
I pulled back
I’d take the pain.
So it goes.
I did the right thing.
This is my choice.
And that makes it valid.
One some level, out of the remnants of two personalities, something had been built that had a fighting chance of doing all the normal things it should be doing.
From Control: “Noriko, are you concentrating in there?”
Ritsuko’s voice filled the plug. He face filled a window, staring at me.
From Control: “You missed program 16-38…”
Asuka’s voice cut in, her face appearing on another screen hovering beside my shoulder.
From Unit 02: “She’s thinking about Shinji,”
“…I am not.” I lied. The projection beside my shoulder smirked.
From Unit 02: “His soft lips. His firm chest, His hard….” She continued, heating up the blush on my face.
From Control: “Can we please be serious? This is a critical test.”
I ignored her, staring back at Sorhyu. “Sounds like you’re the one with Third Child fantasies”
From Unit 02: “Which one of us was hugging a pillow sprayed with his deodorant?”
My mouth activated before my mind did. “Which one of us slept with him?”
The shriek in my ear told me I’d scored a hit.
From Unit 02: “What? He told you about that? You traitor Shinji you know that was an accident!”
Shinji’s face appeared. Somebody else groaned with frustration.
From Unit 01: “I didn’t tell!”
Asuka’s face turned in her window to wherever Shinji had appeared on her cockpit
From Unit 02: “Then how did she find out?”
I watched the animé.
From Unit 01: “….I….”
Shinji’s mouth locked open. His face glanced around for an answer. He looked to me, wondering. He looked offscreen.
Misato’s voice added to the confusion, from somewhere behind Ritsuko on the screen “Let them be children Ritsuko.”
The Doctor turned from her monitor.
From Control: “They don’t have time to be Children. If we don’t finish this test the updates to the radar rangefinding system will be delayed.”
Shinji continued in a panic. I felt myself start to laugh inside my throat.
From Unit 01: “Asuka I didn’t tell her I don’t know how she found out….”
Kawaoru’s face appeared with an electronic chirp
From Unit 04: “You kissed him, if I recall,”
From Unit 02: “He told you too,”
She glanced from screen to screen, half in a panic, corned by the revelation. I almost felt guilty.
From Unit 04: “The conversation is in the operational logs for the seventh angel mission. I read them all before arriving.”
From Control: “They are part of the official record, yes.” Her image on screen massaged her temples with her hands. He face had begun to redden. ”As is every word spoken during this test.”
From Unit 02: “No. That’s not right. I don’t even like him and….”
She looked for support, gaze snapping from screen to screen
From Unit 02: “Well if you don’t want your sex life to be part of public record then I suggest you stop talking about it on official comm.”
From Unit 02: “No…”
He voice trailed to a whine.
From Control: “Now can we please resume the test. Step 108.”
My life is a giant robot harem anime. And I amn’t the protagonist.
I comforted myself with the knowledge that it could be worse. It could be one of those shows where everybody dies at the end and I’m the cast member who exists solely to kiss once, then die screaming and finally push the protagonist over the edge of despair.
Somehow, that didn’t comfort me much, if at all.
The End loomed.
I focused on the test instead, setting a few cockpit switches before marking them as complete on my kneeboard with a pressure-pen.
The End didn’t matter if we didn’t live that long.
Shinji’s named flashed across the comm, attached to another
The thought occurred to me that Shinji would, of course, be happier if he had a stable relationship. I’d get to come home to hot meals and a cleaned house every day, followed by a warm embrace in strong arms.
Ritsuko’s voice cut in.
From Control: “Noriko. Please concentrate.”
The control room could read my vitals - my heartrate, my breathing, my blood-pressures and sugars. They could read my mind, tracing nerve impulses as they sparked in the depths of the lizard brain and raced through my body and out to the machine beyond. They could datalog my very soul, my moods, my feelings, right down to my subconscious.
The scream of an alarm sent a punch of adrenaline straight through my chest - even if it’d been expected. My eyes bounced from monitor to monitor, scanning for information. My fingers worked at the switches on both throttles, reframing the information
I beat the operators up in the booth to the cause.
“Master Alarm. Code 12-02 at 16-68.”
Kawaoru followed a heartbeat later.
From Unit 04: “Same. 12-02 alarm at verb 16 and noun 68”
Shinji waited a moment.
From Unit 01 “I’m still online.”
From Unit 02 “Unit 02 is not affected.”
Asuka gloated, her face looming beside me.
Maya’s voice offered a deeper explanation
From Control: “No valid sectors in vector accumulator.”
Ritsuko gave us her favourite catchphrase.
From Control:“What, that’s Impossible?”
Misato giggled in the background.
From Control: “You always say that Ritsuko, but Operations still finds a way.”
In my mind’s eye I could see Misato kneeling on an office chair, spinning herself around in boredom.
From Control: “Unit 03 and 04. CDU is still engaged. Confirm step 77 completion”
Obviously, we had to be the ones to make the mistake - Technical division were perfect, after all.
“Step 77. Switch radar to slew mode. Confirmed”
I’d marked it in grease pencil on the checklist.
From Control: “Retry,”
I could almost hear the steam whistling from Ritsuko’s ears. My fingers reset the switches, cycling through the test schedule, before reaching the exact same end point. Screens filled an angry red, with alarms screaming from speakers embedded in the chair.
“ Yeah. Confirmed. Same alarm,”
Maya dutifully gave the reason why.
From Control: “The CDU’s sending empty frames and overloading the buffer. It’s causing a memory leak,”
I knew what those words meant. Another me might’ve found them interesting. I couldn’t bring myself to care anymore. Just another glitch. One of dozens that fell off the bleeding edge of science fact.
Being an Evangelion Pilot sounded cool until I had to be an Evangelion Pilot. Then it became a job like any other. My body followed instructions on autopilot while my mind chewed on that idea.
The infinite capacity of the human mind to accept the insane as normal. To live two lives at once, while also being a third completely different from either. To be the man and the girl, the engineer and the athlete, to watch the show and to live in it at the same time.
This is just who I am now.
I think I would’ve preferred to be Magical Girl.
---
The school being closed meant for extra hours testing. Technical division filled every spare hour they could. On some level, I remembered having an idea that being the Pilot of some kind of giant robot at the apex of a pan global United Nations effort to save the world from annihilation would be a fun thing.
Mostly, it was as utterly boring as any other job you could do on a Tuesday morning when you knew the sun was shining outside.
Real robots demanded testing, maintenance, more testing and hours sitting in a cockpit with a procedure specification on my knee that ran through at least four hundred meticulously choreographed steps.
With nothing more interesting to focus on, my thoughts turned to Shinji
Trying the heart of a teenage girl on for size brought a smile to my face and a soft sense of warmth to my chest, like wrapping myself in his arms. My mouth watered at the idea of another kiss, my heart stumbling at the possibility of going further.
Tingles and thrills ran through my body, begging for something more than a warm pillow. My mind drifted its way through the fantasy, embracing his firm body once more, extending a few moments of a kiss into a long night.
My thoughts dithered on the idea, poking at it like a fresh scab. The only thing that might’ve felt better than a few private teenage fantasies would’ve been the real thing.
Lensed through an adult's experience, I could see the storm coming, even as I reminded myself that adult relationships tended to come with a lot more strings attached. They came with lifelong consequences.
Things had been so much simpler when I'd been fourteen for the first time and didn't know better.
Maybe it is cowardice. Either from being burned too much as an adult, or being afraid to take that final step– like your average teenager. Part of me smiled, remembering this had once been a nightmare. Part of me wondered what I'd been so scared about.
Part of me recoiled in horror at becoming everything I feared.
A breath quelled the welling tears.
My revenge will be my happiness.
My mind called up the first time I'd ever had a girlfriend – fumbling, grabbing, trying to figure out what to do with a real person, compared to the printed thing in a magazine. Mt body slipped into her skin, cringing at clumsy fingers
My mind called up that moment with Shinji
Where my hand had gone and what my fingers felt. My body thrilled at the memory, begging me to carry it to the next level.
I pulled back
I’d take the pain.
So it goes.
I did the right thing.
This is my choice.
And that makes it valid.
One some level, out of the remnants of two personalities, something had been built that had a fighting chance of doing all the normal things it should be doing.
From Control: “Noriko, are you concentrating in there?”
Ritsuko’s voice filled the plug. He face filled a window, staring at me.
From Control: “You missed program 16-38…”
Asuka’s voice cut in, her face appearing on another screen hovering beside my shoulder.
From Unit 02: “She’s thinking about Shinji,”
“…I am not.” I lied. The projection beside my shoulder smirked.
From Unit 02: “His soft lips. His firm chest, His hard….” She continued, heating up the blush on my face.
From Control: “Can we please be serious? This is a critical test.”
I ignored her, staring back at Sorhyu. “Sounds like you’re the one with Third Child fantasies”
From Unit 02: “Which one of us was hugging a pillow sprayed with his deodorant?”
My mouth activated before my mind did. “Which one of us slept with him?”
The shriek in my ear told me I’d scored a hit.
From Unit 02: “What? He told you about that? You traitor Shinji you know that was an accident!”
Shinji’s face appeared. Somebody else groaned with frustration.
From Unit 01: “I didn’t tell!”
Asuka’s face turned in her window to wherever Shinji had appeared on her cockpit
From Unit 02: “Then how did she find out?”
I watched the animé.
From Unit 01: “….I….”
Shinji’s mouth locked open. His face glanced around for an answer. He looked to me, wondering. He looked offscreen.
Misato’s voice added to the confusion, from somewhere behind Ritsuko on the screen “Let them be children Ritsuko.”
The Doctor turned from her monitor.
From Control: “They don’t have time to be Children. If we don’t finish this test the updates to the radar rangefinding system will be delayed.”
Shinji continued in a panic. I felt myself start to laugh inside my throat.
From Unit 01: “Asuka I didn’t tell her I don’t know how she found out….”
Kawaoru’s face appeared with an electronic chirp
From Unit 04: “You kissed him, if I recall,”
From Unit 02: “He told you too,”
She glanced from screen to screen, half in a panic, corned by the revelation. I almost felt guilty.
From Unit 04: “The conversation is in the operational logs for the seventh angel mission. I read them all before arriving.”
From Control: “They are part of the official record, yes.” Her image on screen massaged her temples with her hands. He face had begun to redden. ”As is every word spoken during this test.”
From Unit 02: “No. That’s not right. I don’t even like him and….”
She looked for support, gaze snapping from screen to screen
From Unit 02: “Well if you don’t want your sex life to be part of public record then I suggest you stop talking about it on official comm.”
From Unit 02: “No…”
He voice trailed to a whine.
From Control: “Now can we please resume the test. Step 108.”
My life is a giant robot harem anime. And I amn’t the protagonist.
I comforted myself with the knowledge that it could be worse. It could be one of those shows where everybody dies at the end and I’m the cast member who exists solely to kiss once, then die screaming and finally push the protagonist over the edge of despair.
Somehow, that didn’t comfort me much, if at all.
The End loomed.
I focused on the test instead, setting a few cockpit switches before marking them as complete on my kneeboard with a pressure-pen.
The End didn’t matter if we didn’t live that long.
Shinji’s named flashed across the comm, attached to another
The thought occurred to me that Shinji would, of course, be happier if he had a stable relationship. I’d get to come home to hot meals and a cleaned house every day, followed by a warm embrace in strong arms.
Ritsuko’s voice cut in.
From Control: “Noriko. Please concentrate.”
The control room could read my vitals - my heartrate, my breathing, my blood-pressures and sugars. They could read my mind, tracing nerve impulses as they sparked in the depths of the lizard brain and raced through my body and out to the machine beyond. They could datalog my very soul, my moods, my feelings, right down to my subconscious.
The scream of an alarm sent a punch of adrenaline straight through my chest - even if it’d been expected. My eyes bounced from monitor to monitor, scanning for information. My fingers worked at the switches on both throttles, reframing the information
I beat the operators up in the booth to the cause.
“Master Alarm. Code 12-02 at 16-68.”
Kawaoru followed a heartbeat later.
From Unit 04: “Same. 12-02 alarm at verb 16 and noun 68”
Shinji waited a moment.
From Unit 01 “I’m still online.”
From Unit 02 “Unit 02 is not affected.”
Asuka gloated, her face looming beside me.
Maya’s voice offered a deeper explanation
From Control: “No valid sectors in vector accumulator.”
Ritsuko gave us her favourite catchphrase.
From Control:“What, that’s Impossible?”
Misato giggled in the background.
From Control: “You always say that Ritsuko, but Operations still finds a way.”
In my mind’s eye I could see Misato kneeling on an office chair, spinning herself around in boredom.
From Control: “Unit 03 and 04. CDU is still engaged. Confirm step 77 completion”
Obviously, we had to be the ones to make the mistake - Technical division were perfect, after all.
“Step 77. Switch radar to slew mode. Confirmed”
I’d marked it in grease pencil on the checklist.
From Control: “Retry,”
I could almost hear the steam whistling from Ritsuko’s ears. My fingers reset the switches, cycling through the test schedule, before reaching the exact same end point. Screens filled an angry red, with alarms screaming from speakers embedded in the chair.
“ Yeah. Confirmed. Same alarm,”
Maya dutifully gave the reason why.
From Control: “The CDU’s sending empty frames and overloading the buffer. It’s causing a memory leak,”
I knew what those words meant. Another me might’ve found them interesting. I couldn’t bring myself to care anymore. Just another glitch. One of dozens that fell off the bleeding edge of science fact.
Being an Evangelion Pilot sounded cool until I had to be an Evangelion Pilot. Then it became a job like any other. My body followed instructions on autopilot while my mind chewed on that idea.
The infinite capacity of the human mind to accept the insane as normal. To live two lives at once, while also being a third completely different from either. To be the man and the girl, the engineer and the athlete, to watch the show and to live in it at the same time.
This is just who I am now.
I think I would’ve preferred to be Magical Girl.
---
Oh sweet meteor of death
Fall upon us.
Deliver us in fire
To Peace everlasting.
Fall upon us.
Deliver us in fire
To Peace everlasting.