[X] Follow them in secret.
The path is very familiar.
You follow at a distance. You're wearing a dark shirt, and you use that to your advantage to hide in the shadows of the poorly lit corridors. You go down, down, down into the bowels of NERV. You pass the same strange, unknown facilities as you did before. A faint groaning sound echoes throughout the lower levels, the wind rushing upwards through the main shaft of Central Dogma. The light gets dimmer and greener as you descend. Apart from the wind and the occasional humming of an unknown machine running in the chambers you pass, the only sounds are Ritsuko's footsteps and a barely audible squeaking from the wheels of Rei's chair. Neither of them speak to each other.
Ritsuko turns down an unfamiliar corridor where a gigantic door reading TERMINAL DOGMA ROUTE 3 awaits. Ritsuko presses a few buttons, and the giant door makes a loud clunk before slowly opening. You wait for them to step inside and dart in after them while Ritsuko has her attention occupied with the only thing in the room: an elevator set into the far wall. You reach for your holster.
There's no gun in it.
Your breath hitches. You carefully check your pockets, but your trusty firearm is missing. You're sure you had it when you returned to NERV. You didn't lose it in the battle with the Angel. You think about where it could possibly have gone. Your eyes fall on the back of Rei's head. Panic spreads from your guts into your extremities, viscous and heavy. The hug. She must have taken it then. Hid it in the jacket you gave her. Rei is armed and in an isolated location with a person she declared her intent to harm earlier today. The elevator door thuds open. Before you can consider your next move, Ritsuko and Rei get into the elevator, which slams shut with a dull clang that echoes in the dark room.
You need to do something. The situation is extremely dire. You know that Rei isn't going to fumble with the weapon, either. She's clearly been trained how to use a handgun. You know that Ritsuko also has a service weapon of her own. This situation, if you do not intervene, will end in violence.
You approach the elevator and fix your gaze on the counter placed above it. You can barely make out the numbers as they rapidly tick upwards until they hit Sublevel 144. You force yourself to wait another thirty seconds, muttering the numbers under your breath, before you hit the call button. Every additional second it takes feels like an eternity. Finally, the elevator opens for you. It's empty.
You slam the button for B-144 – ARTIFICIAL EVOLUTION LABORATORY. You do not know what kind of place that could be, or why Ritsuko would be taking Rei there. You have never heard of it. You notice that some of the floor names have tape over them. You idly pick at one of them with your nails. The word GEHIRN has been taped over. You narrow your eyes and finger your empty holster, squinting beyond the chain-link door into the darkness of the elevator shaft. In the distant darkness you can make out hexagonal, honeycomb-like cavities hewn into black stone. It doesn't look natural, but it doesn't look entirely artificial, either. It certainly wasn't recently carved here. What is this place…?
The elevator halts. A metal wall in front of you reflects the dull green fluorescent light in this place. ARTIFICIAL EVOLUTION LABORATORY – ANNEX NO. 3 is written in black in Japanese and English. Below is a strange logo of an inverted triangle bisected by a vertical line. Along the edges of the triangle are seven rectangular shapes that might represent genes. The logo looks familiar, but you're unable to place it. You need to hurry. No time to sightsee.
You head down the corridor where a light has been left on. You find a large concrete room filled with long-disused computers and medical monitors, yellowed and coated in dust. A bare hospital bed and dusty white privacy curtain stand in one corner. The floor, walls and even the ceiling have numbers and strange equations written on them. Near the bed is a familiar sight. An empty beaker and blister packs of pills. It reminds you unpleasantly of Rei's apartment. You have a horrible suspicion that Rei may have lived down in this bleak room sometime before you met her.
You continue, a sense of dread weighing down your body. The next room is cavernous and dark. You emerge onto a catwalk overlooking a series of perfectly circular pits in a vast concrete plain. The pits glow faintly with a hellish red light. Inside the pits are the rusted and half-rotten remains of what look like copies of the head, ribcage, and spinal cord of Unit-00. Between the pits is a long, cross-shaped trench, filled with even more discarded Evangelion remains. It reeks of copper and decay. You ignore the darkness pressing on you from all sides and move on. You think you can hear the shuffling footsteps of Ritsuko.
The last corridor is completely unlit. On the far end, you see the silhouettes of Ritsuko and Rei against a dim green light. You quicken your pace, not caring whether you're noticed anymore. Whatever is going to happen, you need to put a stop to it. As you approach, the contents of the room come more into focus. In the center of the room is a glass tube filled with LCL. The rest of the room is mostly dark, save for a pattern of green lights that spells out a long base-pair sequence. The floor glows a dull orange, and a strange magic circle seems to have been inscribed into it.
You step into the room and behold what the LCL tube is attached to. From the top of the tube, a bundle of spindly wires reminiscent of a human spine attaches to a massive cluster of steel tubes and cables in a grotesque mechanical imitation of a gigantic brain. Further cables haphazardly connect the mysterious device to ports in the dark walls. It looms malevolently over the three of you.
Hello, Major. This is a restricted area, Rei says calmly without turning to look at you. She somehow knew you were there. It creeps you out. Ritsuko, fiddling with her PDA, whirls around, nearly dropping the device in her hand.
What the hell are you doing here? Ritsuko demands. She looks furious. You're not supposed to be down here, and you're not supposed to see this.
You coolly ask Ritsuko the same thing. What exactly does she think she's doing with one of your pilots in a place like this? Ritsuko says it's none of your concern. You say you think it's very much your concern. Rei should be in the medical ward under guard. She's your asset, and you have a responsibility to make sure she's being taken care of.
Ritsuko says this is where Rei needs to undergo treatment, and gestures to the gigantic machine in the middle of the room. Please leave, Misato. She's telling you that you do not need to know what's happening here. It's for your own good. Trust her on this. Both you and Rei are better off if you let her do her job in peace.
You snort. Ritsuko asking you to trust her is awfully rich, considering she's made it abundantly clear she has no trust in you. You say you're not moving. You want some answers, and whatever Ritsuko is up to down here is extremely suspicious. Ritsuko again asks you to leave. It's seriously for your own good. You do not want to know what's happening. She gives you a look of genuine concern. It's for Rei's own good too.
You ask how.
Ritsuko's eye twitches, her concern morphing into annoyance. It just is. Stop overcomplicating this. She's going to treat Rei and return her to her room upstairs once the treatment is complete. There is nothing here you should think about.
Bad answer. You take a few steps towards Ritsuko. Ritsuko holds up the PDA as if it's somehow going to stop you. It…isn't, right? Ritsuko tells you not to take another step. Rei also tells you not to approach closer. Her voice falters. You refuse to leave the room until someone explains what the hell is going on. You're not leaving Ritsuko and Rei alone, certainly not with whatever the hell this machine is. You take a step forward. Ritsuko gives you a look of deep contempt. Fine, you asked for it.
Rei tries to grab Ritsuko's arm, but Ritsuko sidesteps her and tips over Rei's wheelchair, causing the poor girl to spill onto the floor in a heap with a whimper. You yell Ritsuko's name and begin closing the distance between the two of you. Just as you come face-to-face with her, the corners of her mouth tilt upwards and she pushes a button on the PDA.
The room floods with harsh orange light. The sudden brightness feels like knives are being driven into your optic nerves. Your concussed brain explodes with fresh waves of pain. Your vision blurs. You take a few steps backwards and furiously rub your eyes, trying to assess what you see.
The dark walls of the room have become transparent, revealing a long tank of LCL that wraps around the room. But the tank is not empty. You're not sure what you're looking at, at first. Your vision doubles and blurs and refuses to stay focused. Slender pale shapes are floating in the LCL. You squint at them, your heart pounding against your ribcage. What the hell are those? They look like human corpses…
What…
All of the shapes move in unison. Their heads turn and fix their gaze on the prone form of Rei, struggling to pull herself off the floor. Your throat closes up as you realize all the things in that tank are the naked form of Rei Ayanami. Once again, in unison, their faces all twist into maniacal grins. You've never seen that face on Rei before. That's not how Rei should look, that's not…
Your legs threaten to buckle out from under you as you stare out into the abyss of LCL. Dozens of copies of Rei Ayanami, all smiling vacantly at you. Some of their expressions are ecstatic, others excited, still others have a hint of cruelty in their expressions. You hear a faint sound from behind the glass you cannot recognize right away. It's laughter. A chorus of it.
You've never heard Rei laugh before.
It's high and barking, lilting down and then up again in pitch, and then back down, a polyphony of madness. You feel sick.
Ritsuko says she warned you.
You struggle to collect your thoughts, managing a demand for an explanation. Ritsuko says with disturbing matter-of-factness that this is the Dummy Plug Manufacturing facility. The crucial component of the Dummy Plug is created here. Namely, those. She points at the tank full of Rei. Rei's personality data is written onto one of those things. Then it's prepared and placed into a Dummy Plug. The Evangelion detects that it's Rei piloting and switches to the commands given by the Dummy. After use, the Dummy is disposed of. Or in the case of a physical override, the Dummy can be destroyed.
What does she mean…destroyed…? What happens to them…?
Ritsuko pauses for a moment before informing you that they are dissolved in acid, destroying the component. You stare at her in disbelief. Ritsuko rolls her eyes at you. They're just Dummies. They're not people. They're things in the shape of a person. They have no souls. They're lower than bacteria. They're spare parts for that thing on the floor. Ritsuko points at Rei. Your Rei, specifically.
You move to help her back into the wheelchair. Rei recoils and withdraws from your touch, curling into a fetal position and refusing to move.
When…when was this done? Why didn't Ritsuko tell you she was making clones of Rei? Ritsuko says Rei's been here since before she started working here. She's always been here. So have these, though some of them Ritsuko helped grow herself. Like this one. Ritsuko points to one with a ravenous expression on her face. Ritsuko's been forced to take care of it since she displayed an aptitude for this sort of thing. Looks like Fuyutsuki's grooming Asuka to do the same thing one day, should the need arise. Ritsuko feels sorry for her.
You remember the documents Kaji showed you. It falls into place. Rei isn't an imposter. She's a clone. You blurt out the phrase "Rei II". Ritsuko gives you a look of confusion. You point at Rei on the floor. She's Rei II, you say. Ritsuko says that Kaji must be leaking you some bad information. And yes, she knows about his snooping, too. She should've known he'd try to drag you into this. She specifically warned him not to. She specifically told him he's playing with fire. And no, she's not going to report him. A friend is a friend, after all.
This isn't Rei Two. This is Rei Eleven.
What?
It occurs to you that you only saw the bottom part of the words "Rei II". It wasn't "Rei II" that was sloppily redacted. It was "Rei 11". You feel numb. How many times has Rei "died"? Has it really been ten?
Ritsuko sees the question on your lips and answers for you. Rei has never been good at living. Only existing. It's like she told you. Rei can't handle changes to its environment. So it always self-destructs in the end. That's why NERV keeps backups. And Ritsuko gets to spend hours of her evenings down here, with them. You spend your Wednesday nights staring at this and see how you feel about Rei Ayanami. Why get attached to something that just dies over and over and over and over again? Ritsuko's voice cracks. That's why she didn't want you to see this.
She regains her composure and says she has orders to retire the eleventh vessel and transfer Rei to the twelfth. Something is defective with this one, obviously. Rei's memory gets backed up regularly, so Ritsuko will dump a backup from the past onto her. It's like a system restore point. You know computers, right, Misato? She explains this calmly as if giving a lecture rather than casually talking about murdering one of your pilots.
The shock begins to give way to anger. How many times has Ritsuko done this? You ask her. How many times has she killed Rei?
Ritsuko says those are two different questions, but she's handled nine transfers to a new host. The previous host was dead in all cases except one. Ritsuko's expression darkens. She had to humanely euthanize that one. But regardless, Rei was not "killed" by her. Rei's still here, isn't it? They're just bodies for it. The soul remains intact. Largely. The soul had to be salvaged, you see.
You ask what the hell that means. Are the clones even still the same person when they die?
Ritsuko says "mostly", an answer you decide you really don't like. Ritsuko explains that fifteen years ago, at the South Pole, man found God, and in his joy, tried to possess Him. That is why there was divine punishment. You were there, you should know. God was lost to him. So, man tried to resurrect Him. Adam. And like God, they tried to make people from His body. Eva. Eva are people, with souls. But the souls all had to be salvaged from somewhere else. The Chamber of Guf was empty, you see. Inside each Eva is a human soul. The pilots need something to connect to.
Unit-00's soul is Rei Ayanami. The first vessel, anyway. Part of its soul was put into Unit-00 for its successors' benefit. It draws the other vessels' souls to it. Rei's soul needs to be salvaged every time it's moved to a new body. But the process isn't perfect. The lure is too strong. So a small part of it is lost to Unit-00 every time. Still, the one on the floor contains the vast majority of it. How many parts of it need to be removed before it stops being Rei Ayanami? Ritsuko doesn't really care about those kinds of questions. They're for the philosophers.
You stare at her in disbelief.
Ritsuko needs you to let her do her job and restabilize Rei Ayanami. If she lets this one continue after whatever the hell happened back there, it will kill someone and probably itself. She is trying to help you here. She understands you're attached to Rei. It will still be Rei after the transfer. And Rei will be safer, healthier and happier once she does this. Which is what you want, isn't it, Misato? Use your head and do the right thing. What does she need to say to you to make you see sense here?
What do you need to say to Ritsuko to convince her that everything she told you is completely psychotic?
Rei rises to her feet and stumbles backwards. Ritsuko looks at her warily before turning her attention back to you. A mistake. Rei reaches into your jacket and draws out your service weapon, pointing it at Ritsuko. Ritsuko stiffens, the color draining from her face. Rei says there is no need for words. Her voice is colder than it's ever been. She does not intend to comply, Ritsuko Akagi. She turns the safety off. She seems to be mentally preparing herself to shoot, her finger still outside the trigger guard.
[ ] Try to convince Rei to lower the weapon (write-in).
[ ] Physically interpose yourself between Ritsuko and Rei.
[ ] Try to restrain Rei.
[ ] Do nothing.
