New Century 2318 [NGE]

[Pineapple]

Chapter 19:
Till death do us part​

If I was going to cry myself to death, a martian brig was as fine a place as any. Failure, abandonment, invalidation. I could pick from a list of reasons to bawl, so why not cry about everything? It wasn't like I had much else to do between the bi-hourly ass beatings and quarter hourly interrogations.

Martian weaponry wiped my home off the globe, somehow that justified beating my ass over it. I guess that's just how military dickheads operate. I would know, my father was one, or close enough to count.

Hard men making hard decisions. Gotta keep up appearances.

I didn't tell them a damn thing. I didn't tell them how to use Eva, didn't tell them how to pull the data, didn't tell them how to start it. Didn't tell them shit about my neural link. Especially not the fact that everything out of my left eye had been in grayscale this entire time, showing me information I shouldn't know.

The link felt active, but distant. Eva was nearby, I only needed to get to her. Not that they'd ever give me a chance. I'd made it back to space but into yet another cage. I'd slain gods but I could do nothing without a machine to do it with.

I was nothing to them, or I shouldn't have been. Actually, I should have torn the ship in half instead of agreeing to dock with it. But that was before the intimate medical examinations and even more intimate interrogations.

If one more Mars Fleet dickhead uttered the name 'Shinji Ikari' in my earshot, I was going to do everything in my power to snap his fucking neck.

I crossed my legs and sat in the corner of my cell, index and middle finger pressed against the middle of my forehead, thumb just under my lip. I found this helped me focus on the implant. It was in my brain, it interacted with my brain. If that was the case, my brain should be able to learn to interact with the implant.

It was there, in my brain, I could feel it's location, I could feel the way the information crossed over the boundary. It was all programatic data; I wanted to ask it a question. It wasn't the first time my brain had to re-learn its nerve connections. I'd had plenty of re-learning to do after I'd killed Gendo's son, after all.

I could perceive a not-quite-static that my brain translated as best as it could into white noise. Actually, no, something else. A carrier wave, that's what a carrier wave sounded like. My link to Unit One wasn't based on that kind of technology, so what the fu--

My eyes snapped open and my brain felt like it had been bitch-slapped from the inside. I felt my eyes tearing up as I fell back against the wall. I could feel the blood running down my nose. No, that wasn't supposed to happen at all.

Yet at the same time, I was left with a gut feeling that somehow, someone was coming for me.

There was something else too, not that carrier wave. This came in unbidden, almost like I was about to cross the activation threshold--

***​

"Fuck!" I screamed at the top of my lungs as I sat upright on an exam table. The black and white effect had disappeared from the vision in my eye and instead I was seeing things in a whole new light. Everything was in it's standard vivid visible spectrum but then of course ultraviolet and infrared had also decided to join the party.

My brain didn't like this. It didn't have a way of assigning perceptible values to those ranges and yet it was being forced to and it hurt like a son of a bitch. I could feel the interface with the implant had expanded, I could feel it hooked into my senses, accelerating and caching impulses, but why?

Sorry about that. There wasn't a way to initiate a bidirectional link so I pushed myself over as an AI construct.

I took a break from holding my head in agony to instead stare at the floor in terror. That voice in my head was not mine. It was not mine at all and it was a voice that I hadn't heard since I was four years old, one I'd never expected to hear again.

Mom?

Sort of. I am Yui Ikari's memories grafted onto the artificial soul construct that was originally intended to inhabit Evangelion Unit One. So I'm not exactly your mother, but every time you come into range with Unit One our mutual memories synchronize so--

So it's close enough I thought back to the voice in my head that was certainly not a symptom of implant psychosis. So, if it wasn't psychosis, why was she even here.

Evangelion cannot get to you right now. Even if it could, it would be of no help. The three of us formed consensus that you shouldn't be left without aid at a time like this.

Three of you?

Yui Ikari, Myself, and the fragment of Lilith that comprise Unit One. The triad of our wills forms the control interface that allows you to become one with the beast. This copy of myself residing within you doesn't compromise this fact.

Okay, that doesn't make sense but if you're a copy my mother and… and for some reason I believe you. Why go through this?

Natsu, even if I'm not really your mother, I'm still your mother. Deep down, I think you've always felt that, ever since the first time you sat in the chair.

Not that I don't appreciate a voice in my head offering help, how exactly are you going to help me out of this mess?

Oh Natsu, didn't your father tell you I was a doctor?

I don't like where this is going.

Then keep your eyes closed.

***​

I hadn't been able to, despite her warning. I'd seen much, much worse, but I'd seen it from within Evangelion. It was a little different when the blood stained my own skin. Whatever had happened while I was 'out' had been violent, it had been efficient, and it had been… wet.

When I was me again, my left hand was broken and my right hand had a gun in it. The door to my cell was sealed behind me and I had the very strong compulsion not to look inside. Whatever 'Yui' had done, she was silent in my head now.

So maybe I was just insane.

I tried to press-check the pistol but my left hand turned out to be very broken, not just a little bit broken. Failing that, I bit down on the rear sight and pushed the grip forward to pull the slide back just a bit, just enough to catch a glance inside the chamber with my peripheral vision.

Round in the pipe. Thank you, Yui.

It was funny how a battery of waterboarding, interrogation, and deliberate deadnaming could change a girl's outlook on interpersonal violence. Or maybe that was just the time I'd spent riding that beast of destruction.

That my mother resided inside should have been a revelation, but if she could work me like a marionette she could just as easily keep me calm, right? With that implant rammed into my brain I had to wonder how much came back in when I synchronized with Eva.

This Yui-AI said she was running on my implant hardware but it still made me wonder what was sitting in my wetware.

I shook that thought out of my head. That carrier wave was still tickling at the edge of aformentioned implant. It wasn't Eva, wasn't mother's AI. It was local to the ship but it was carrying more bandwidth than even the synchronization with Eva.

Now how in the hell did I know that?

The sound of rushing boots echoed around the corner of the hallway that seemed to run around the outside of the ship. I couldn't tell how many, but I hadn't survived a space station decompression, eldritch abominations, and my father just to die now.

Maybe it was something that the construct living in my implant had done to me, maybe it had been the torturous invalidation and hostile medical exams at the hands of my captors, but in either case…

It was time to free the beast.

I might have been next to helpless on Earth without my mobility frame but in microgravity I was at home. I shoved my broken left hand through the hand hold on a crew transit track and punched it to maximum speed.

Oh adrenalin how I've missed you. Somehow I didn't feel like Natsu Ikari, I felt like I had all the power of my Eva behind me at the same time. This felt like being back in the entry plug. It felt like being...home.

Gunfire shook me out of my thoughts and I pulled my hand out of the conveyor grip. I'd picked up enough speed already. I raised my pistol as I kicked off the wall to round the corner—to realize that none of that fire was meant for me.

In the middle of a pile of bodies in various states of distress, stood an augment, and a very heavily augmented one at that. Steam vented from crescent shaped slits alongside where his ribs should have been. Then he turned to face me and I saw a face I honestly hadn't expected to see again. One I wasn't even sure I wanted to see again.

"Natsu?!" He said with shock that quickly melted into determination. "I'm here to rescue you!"

I almost dropped the gun in shock. After his reaction I would have thought… "Touji? Why? How?"

He pulled me into an embrace before I could react and his lips pressed firmly to mine. "Because I love you. Now let's get the fuck out of here."

 

[Pineapple]

Chapter 20:
Over The Top​

It felt like a punch to the spine; he hadn't given me any warning of what was to come. Something latched in just like the mobility frame but then quickly became something else entirely: The initial frame quickly spider-webbed across my entire body before rapidly filling in with material, and a familiar one at that.

As the material I now recognized to be plugsuit—or at least plugsuit adjacent—spread across my limbs just behind the frame sections I took a look down to my broken hand and barely had time to react before the 'deployment' sequence of the unit Touji had stuck to me finished on that hand and forcibly re-set all of the broken finger bones into their proper locations.

"Fuck!" I screamed at the top of my lungs as I doubled over from the sudden and intense shock of having my entire broken hand twisted around all at once. For the best, probably, but clearly there wasn't going to be any pain killer.

I didn't throw up but I chalked that up to having an empty stomach more than anything else. At some point in my agony I dropped the gun I'd been holding and I became aware that I was moving, but I was way too focused on the radiating pain that I could only clench my jaw against.

Touji was carrying me, for however much of Touji was actually left under all that augmentation. That he was alive at all I supposed could be considered a miracle, considering how things had been when I'd left Earth.

A helmet deployed around my head and a moment later a HUD superimposed itself on the polycarbonate face plate. My pain started to fade as whatever operating system had finished booting and finally administered medical care; just like a regular plugsuit.

Except this one seemed to be for hard vacuum, not the entry plug.

"Good, you're ready." Touji said as my head started to clear. We were in what appeared to be an external corridor, pressure glass on my right showed the moon; we were still in Earth orbit?

He did not give me a chance to ask for what he thought I was ready for, but when he pulled a hand grenade off his leg and threw it to the far end of the corridor I had a pretty good idea what he had planned and I grabbed onto him tight.

I saw the flash of the detonation, but heard nothing as the atmosphere rushing out through the rupture in the hull stole the sound away into the black of space. The acceleration was not unlike the last time I was blown out into space and the fact that it had happened to me twice wasn't lost on me.

As we continued to accelerate away from the ship—no doubt due to some augment of Touji's—I got a good look at the battleship as it's main engine lit up in retrograde. "Touji, why are they scuttling their ship?"

"They're not the ones doing it. Mari told me to tell you hi from her." Touji answered back through my helmet speaker.

"Admiral of the Fleet Mari?" I asked incredulously.

"I guess she hasn't told you yet. But sure yeah, that Mari." Touji answered back.

There was a twitch in the back of my head and suddenly there was a window on my HUD labeled 'sound only' from which came the voice in my head. "MARI is still online?"

"Natsu who is inside your helmet with you?" Touji asked me as he continued to accelerate us on a trajectory into a higher orbital track.

Before I had a chance to speak, 'the voice' responded for me, "Hi, it's a long story and we're short on time. You can call me 'Ichi' and I live in Natsu's implant."

On the HUD I could see an inbound track with a blue IFF tag, it looked like our orbits were going to intersect. "So what do you mean by 'still online'?" I asked.

"She's a system wide distributed AI system written almost two decades ago by Yui Ikari." 'Ichi' answered me.

"Pretty sure she's a person, I've touched her." I countered with some measure of mounting confusion.

"I've met about sixteen of her. She's definitely an AI" Touji said in agreement with Ichi.

"She's manifested physical nodes? How exciting!" Ichi yelled into my helmet.

"Yeah she's a bucket of fun. Can we get back on mission? Our rides are here." Touji cut in before Ichi could get worked up even further. How that was possible for some kind of middleware running on my implant, I didn't know—

I felt the proximity in my implant and I was certain 'Ichi' knew it too. Touji didn't need to tell me what he meant. Our orbital track and that blue IFF signal were intersecting and as the transponder code finally came through I knew exactly who we were about to meet.
I'd seen that transponder code from my entry plug.

"Tengu this is Suzuhara, I have Natsu, did you get the package?" Touji asked as the gunship suddenly filled my view, burning retrograde to match orbits with us.

"Of course, I'm a professional. Akagi is ready to disengage when you are." Aoba's voice came back through the shared communication channel.

"I'm ready," I answered, feeling that I knew exactly what package they were talking about implant feedback, subtle but--

"Copy that Natsu, payload released, we're going to burn zenith for a few seconds to open up a gap."

Touji released me from his grip and turned to face me, touched our helmets together, "This is my stop, but don't worry, I'll see you soon."

Before I could ask what that meant he was jerked away from me by his own grapple that he'd fired at the Tengu while I was distracted.

I could forgive that though, as Unit One rose into view, entry plug open and inviting.

***​

"Okay 'Ichi' let's speed this up as best we can, alright? We're cold starting without support from headquarters." I said into the dark and empty entry plug after I'd pulled the hatch closed from the inside. The seat felt as I remembered it. Everything did.

I wrapped my hands around the controls to initiate the startup sequence and the next moment the screens were lit up and I felt myself pulled deep into the sync.

They were ready for our arrival. Is this fast enough for you?

Yes.

I checked the throttle and found it to be a lot more responsive than the ground type equipment. I hadn't had much experience in the S-type before I got knocked out and woke up in a brig

"Got any guns for me" I asked as I opened a vid-link with the Tengu. Misato's face was a welcome one, and in the background I could see Touji and Akagi discussing something with someone who looked like Mari, except dressed like she was an astronaut. Like, old school.

"Unfortunately not until we link up with the Schiaparelli in a few hours."

I nodded along with her as I rolled my throttle up and rotated around Z a full one eighty back towards the still de-orbiting Herschel, and the multitude of Tengu-sized ships leaving its docking bays to evacuate the crew.

I clicked the left trigger and opened up the shoulder pylons and pulled my knives. "That's fine, I can do this by hand."

Without waiting for reply I slammed the throttle to the stop and opened open kilometers with the Tengu in seconds; back down the gravity well that those martian gunships were trying to escape from.

I reached the lead ship in a blink and sliced through the mid-deck with my knife and then kicked the still firing drive section on a wild dive back down the pipe of ships trying to follow up after it; and on the followthrough I back-heel-kicked the forward half of the ship back down towards the planet below.

A flick of the right wrist sent my right blade like a throwing knife straight through the next ship and I dragged my left blade in a reverse grip through the hull of the ship adjacent to the one that had taken the first knife, until that blade snapped against the reactor casing.

Large caliber point defense ammo started to pepper my armor plating, followed by a few anti-ship torpedos that were easy enough to dodge, and even easier to catch. I flipped two of the torpedos back around and sent them back home, where their friends were.

The resulting explosion took out everything that was left, according to my sensors anyway. At least one of those torpedos had been nuclear. So much for that treaty.

I sat in the seat panting for a few minutes as I started ascending back up to my previous orbital plane; alongside Tengu. It wasn't long before the ship to Eva link was back up and Misato looked… worn out. "If I had known you were going to just tear them apart anyway we wouldn't have gone through the trouble of getting them to evacuate the ship so that we could steal Eva back."

"I wish I knew the plan so I could have saved you the trouble." I answered back with a grimace, "They did things, Misato. They crossed lines you just don't cross, and now they know what happens if they try it again."

Feel better after that rampage?

No, no I did not.

 

[Pineapple]

Chapter 21:
I Wanna Breathe Again​

It was psychological whiplash to find myself in his arms again. It had been... weeks? Maybe a month?, since we'd found ourselves on opposite sides of my outing as a trans-woman. Since I'd been inundated with that god damned name.

I still loved him, not that I had any idea why, but I suppose the sting wouldn't have lasted so long if I hadn't. Maybe he could relate more to me, now that he'd had a transition of a sorts of his own. That was always the problem with being in a relationship, at least for me. It either gets weird or it gets over or suddenly another girl is more attrac—

"Natsu?" his voice pushed through my negative thoughts. I didn't need to make excuses, he was remorseful, he apologized, right?

I pressed myself further into his embrace and shook my head a little. "It's nothing, just thinking about… well, everything. This isn't really the trajectory I saw us taking."

His body tensed, but his arm held tighter. He wanted me close but he was afraid of what I might say next. Of course, every time I felt his grip tighten I felt even safer, more at home in his warm embrace. He was where I'd found solace, who else if not…

"Whenever we get back to Earth, if we ever do get back to Earth, I was thinkin' that maybe the two of us, that is, if I can find a place…" he said, his voice starting to trail off into inaudibility as he aborted his mission.

I felt the heat rising on my cheeks and pressed myself against his chest to hide the blush before he had a chance to see it, not that doing so didn't give off the same idea. He was too uncomfortable, it was his own fault but… but…

"I wanna take you on a nice date, just like that first night. Just like that first d-dance," he finally said, his voice hitching at the end. I could feel his heart beating like a drum, my own wasn't too far behind.

Don't be a fucking coward, Natsu.

I lifted my head and climbed just far enough to press my lips to his. "I wish you'd asked me sooner."

His arms slipped around me and he pulled me back into the kiss. "I won't wait so long next time."


***

Too much concern is put into healthy coping methods, at least that's my opinion. If I want to forget all sins and dive into a few hours of hedonistic excess with the man that I for some silly-ass reason still love, then who is to stop me? Certainly not me.

No, things weren't perfect, they weren't even back to normal, but it was a start.

An inversion, almost, of what we'd had before. I'd been the space girl on Earth for the first time, he was now an Earth boy out in space for the first time, right?

The cargo ship was about as boring as the one I'd ridden in on my trip inward through the system, even if it was a super-heavy dry bulk about fifty times the size. Perfect for the transport of dozens prefabricated colony modules.

Or an Evangelion.

You seem distracted.

If Ichi had any particular gifts, one was her gift for understatement. Of course I was distracted; there was a lot on my mind, not the least of of which was… whatever the hell Touji and I had done to each other in that bunk room.

I had not just the A.I. in my head, but apparently Mari was also an A.I., and my boyfriend was half robot. For the first time in my life I was the normal one and that thought alone was enough to give me the piss shivers.

Though not quite as strong as feeling of ice cold emptiness in the pit of my stomach when I had the realization that a computer facsimile of my mother was riding shotgun in my brain while I was having sex.

I wasn't watching.

"Well if that isn't just the least you could do!" I yelled, in the manner of a lunatic, into the void.

Stress? No I wasn't under any of that. Did somebody say I was? They were a liar.

I shook my head and kicked the floor of the vast cargo bay, even with Unit One sitting dead center the container was far from full and the ship carried two, and I had to cross both of them. Lengthwise. At least most of it was coasting through the air.

News articles scrolled across the data-pad in my hands while the floor passed by underneath. A Martian billionaire made a record breaking dive on Europa, Tokyo-3 filled in with water, Mars Fleet sent a fleet to blockade Ganymede.

Hold up.

I rolled back to the article about Ganymede and opened it up with a tap. A video was attached of… well, of what I'd done to the Herschel escape ships. It wasn't bad work but it did leave something of a sour taste in my mouth.

"Fugitive pilot, citizen of Ganymede, Shinji Ikari." The news ranged from the concerning to the enraging, but they did have my number; Ganymede was our destination. It might have been a backwater but I would have the home field advantage.

And being higher up the solar gravity well wasn't exactly a minor advantage either.

Catching myself at the far end of the bay with only one hand was a bit more of an adventure than it normally would have been, but I'd spent most of my life in micro-gravity and this was old hat. A clumsy but effective snag of the grab bar and I managed to swing myself shoe-first into the floor.

Click, and she's stuck the landing. Woo!

I slapped my hand on the door catch for the flight deck and flinched when the hatch slid into the wall with a metallic swish. Inside, as more or less expected, Misato was scowling into a coffee cup while Aoba gave her a good three meters of personal space in which to do so. No tension there, none at all.

I offered a silent wave and an uncomfortable smile, eager to avoid any confrontations on my journey through the compartment and into the forward hold, where we'd stashed Tengu. It was an unfortunate fact of life that her drive signature had become a little famous and not in the good way.

Natsu, that carrier signal—

A sound like a balloon being pinched while the air is let out pierced through whatever it was that Ichi had been trying to say, and a pink missile the size of a person, the source of the wailing noise, rather ceremoniously collided with me, and then we both collided with Aoba, and finally, the wall.

Poor Shigeru pinged off the wall like a human bowling pin, inexorably towards Misato, something that was equal parts likely to get him laid or drop kicked. Depending on how exactly Misa-chan happened to be feeling in the moment.

"Mari?" I finally asked the mop of hair attached to the pink hard-suit floating in my lap.

"Yes," the voice under the hair answered in a tone best described as 'gremlin adjacent', "it is Mari!"

Her head pitched up and her wide, excited eyes met my even wider, terrified eyes. The grin that contorted the corners of her mouth felt...

Cannibalistic? Ichi offered, unhelpfully.

I hadn't been thinking that, but then variety was the spice of fear or something, right? One hand on either of her shoulders, I pushed the much smaller and far less dignified version of Admiral Makinami to what could only generously be called a safe distance.

"Sure, why not," I muttered out of the corner of my mouth. Ichi felt satisfied with that, and I opted not to think too hard about why I knew how she felt.

Or to think too hard about the fact that she felt.

"You're alright! I knew that you were, of course, but then there's seeing it with your own two eyes, so to speak," the little pink admiral-shaped imp rattled on in a high energy squeal not online her earlier balloon-toned exclamation.

"I'm feeling pretty far from alright, it's that my measuring stick for trauma is shaped a little funny," I answered back with a little more bitchiness than I'd intended.

"Yes, I suppose that is true," She conceded. "But even so I am glad to see you safe, if not sound," she finished in a tone much closer to that of the mature-adult version of her I'd met on earth.

I raised my eyebrow at that, "Are you? Can you feel, the way I do?" I found myself asking, rudely. The nagging in the back of my head about Ichi decided not to be silent any longer, it seemed.

"I can," she confirmed with a smile, "While it was not one of the first lessons we learned, it has been among the most rewarding traits we've assimilated."

I decided that I would skip over the word 'assimilated' and cut to the more immediately concerning word she'd used. "Who is 'we'?" I asked, looking out of the corner of my eye to see if Misato seemed concerned, though whatever she was thinking, I couldn't discern from the inscrutable expression on her face.

"That's explanation would be a little too high level without a background in neuroscience and AI development. Let's just say, I am both one and many." She explained in a tone that bordered on… anxious?

What!? That's not how she was written! Ichi's voice blasted into my brain. Software can't do that!

It did seem, however, that she did work that way, or she was lying.

Something changed on Mari's face, her eyes narrowed and seemed to be focusing on a point inside my head, from which a warm sensation started to spread, my vision swapped into grayscale—oh, shit.

"Who's in there with you?"