Well, here we have the very latest version of the second episode of EVA2055. And yay! I finally have a web version of the fic! This web-page is very much ahead of what I've posted on the list, going right up to Episode 4.0, with some nifty art too. Of course, all the Episodes are still in draft form, and so C&C is, as always, begged for.

The page is at:

http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Zone/1803/index2.htm

Anyway here's the fic:

Disclaimer: What I own, I own. What I don't own, I don't own, and am using without permission. 'Nuff said.

Spoilers: This fic contains spoilers throughout, and I'm not going to point out every last one. Suffice it to say, if you haven't seen the EVA movies and don't want anything spoiled, don't read this fic. Look, here are some lines:
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                                /*\

                              EVA2055
                     Episode 2.0, Exodus 0:2
               "Project the Past, onto the Future."

                                \*/


                                   "Could you wanna take my picture;
                                           'cause I won't remember."
                                                   -Take My Picture,
                                                              Filter

Walking through the streets of Tokyo-5, Aki felt at home. She had just left the university, on her way to the apartment she shared with her flatmate Saeko, a fellow medical student. Aki smiled at the black shapes of the buildings, the avoidance of a confrontation with Mrs. Honoda having put her in a good mood. Generally well-disposed towards the universe at large, she stepped softly down the lighted steps to the subway, catching the mag-lev train from Platform 3. Arriving at her station, the northern suburb of Ayada, she stepped out of the sub-surface platform and into the early dusk. As she walked, a beat came to her footsteps, matching the pounding techno currently playing on her imaginary mental jukebox.

Aki preferred the break-beat style of the 90s and early twenty-hundreds, rather than the harsher beats of the modern fashion. The piece she had at the moment was a semi-commercial track, by an artist of moderate renown. Rapid high-pitched whines, from a machine known simply as a '303', whirred through her head, laid over the deep thumping bass, which an amplifier would have made her feel reverberating in her bones, in a rhythm which was frequently punctuated by notes that were somewhere in the middle. Her amateur enthusiast's ears could detect the distinctive sound of an 808 or a 909 in there somewhere. It was club music, a solo artist's expression of themselves, specially crafted to get a crowd moving, to give the DJ that ultimate rush of 'owning' the audience. Music was the only thing Aki liked from the turn of the century. The buildings were ugly, the clothes unthinkable, but the music�.the music lasted. Lost as she was in this reverie, she didn't notice the figure ahead of her in the dimming light wearing a black plastic jacket, until the figure hustled her quickly into an alley.

"Fuck! Don't you ever do that again!" Aki stamped her booted feet in muted fury as she recovered from the unnecessary shock. The man she knew only as Ogami avoided her feet, but kept a hold of her upper arms.
"I'm lookin' for the boy." He said, face shrouded in the darkening street, eyes cold as glass just visible behind his hanging fringe.
"I don't know where he is. We broke up." She replied, annoyed. "Go find him yourself."
"Yeah. Whatever. He owes me money, see. Got 'im a little gear over his normal. Wants it fer a girl."
"Well don't ask me." Cold, fear barely showing. Good, Aki, good.
"If you know where he is, you better tell me."
Aki moved a little, but Ogami held her arms.
"Hey, don't you fight me." Ogami said, seeming irritated, but keeping his voice low as usual. "Had some pistoloco kid come try to roll me today, I knocked him on it and gave him back his piece. In pieces, right?" He spat the word 'pieces'.
Aki tried to ignore him. She maintained her cold stare. "I don't know where is, okay."
Ogami released her arms and stepped back. Aki turned away, and started walking back to the street.
"Hey." Ogami called after her. "How 'bout somethin' for you, a little bit to get you by?"
Aki did NOT turn around.

"Thank you." Said the machine. "You are Major Ruri Matsushira. Proceed."
Ruri pushed the door of the voice-print booth and stepped out. She strode down the corridor and into the main section of the UNAERG's Tokyo-5 building, a structure which seem to be trying to imitate a Gothic cathedral attempting to hatch from a circus tent. Reaching the drop-shaft entrance, she greeted the duty guard, Hayami. He looked worried.
" 'Morning ma'am." He said, snapping to attention as soon as he noticed her.
"What's the story this morning, Hayami?"
"You're not going to like it Ma'am. Commander Yokugawa's furious. He's called in the Security cell to audit everything."
"What! Let me get down there! Now!"
Hayami scrambled to open the door to the drop-shaft's delta-lifter, and Ruri stormed in, scowling at the door as it closed. The delta-lifter was a capsule suspended by three arms locked into spiralling grooves in the wall of the drop-shaft. The whole delta-lifter spun as it descended the ten kilometres to the bottom of the drop-shaft, but the passenger cabin was liquid-gyro stabilised, so Ruri didn't notice a thing. She had never understood exactly why the spiralling motion was necessary, and when she had asked the engineering cell responsible for its design, they had muttered something technical about air pressure. Privately, Ruri thought it might just be that way to look cool. All she really cared about was that it covered the ten-kilometre descent in the same time it took the elevator in her apartment block to carry her to the ground from the fifth floor.

As she exited the delta-lifter, she was met by Rumiko Hoshino. Dr. Hoshino had initially been in charge of the EVAs' interface with the pilots, but she had soon made herself the base's scientific jack-of-all-trades as well, and now had a finger in every technology-related pie going. Her major responsibility, apart from the EVAs and their pilots, was the mega-computer FAUST, upon which most of the base relied. Rumiko's Master Programming cell had quickly nicknamed the machine 'Omoikane' after she had taken charge of it, for reasons apparently related to the cell's mutual obsession with turn-of-the-century anime, a passion Rumiko did not share. Ruri had chuckled when Rumiko had confessed her annoyance at this, and had jokingly pointed out that one could hardly take people who kept plastic Gundams on their desks seriously. Ruri couldn't help liking her, despite the coldness others complained of. She was dependable beyond all else, a quality Ruri admired.

Rumiko greeted her, and immediately handed her a photograph.
"Seen anything like this yourself?" she asked.
The photo was of a blond, pale-skinned woman with a distinctive mole on her face. She wore a white jacket over a blue top, the jacket stained with blood around what was blatantly a gun-shot wound. The woman was obviously dead.
"Y-you got this?" stammered Ruri, half-stunned.
"We all did." Rumiko sounded unfazed by the photo, her usual 'scientific' detachment doing wonders for her confidence, but absolutely trashing any charisma. "Well, like it anyway. Yokugawa just about had a heart attack, and now he seems to be trying to give himself one." She took the photo back as they started to walk. "I think the children might have been a little disturbed, but they seem to be handling it better than some."
"So�so how did you get it?" asked Ruri.
"Me, I opened one of the children's synch test reports and there was a piece of paper with my name on it. Clipped to the back of it was the photo. Madoka from my Master Programming cell found a picture of Maya Ibuki taped to that picture of her and her fiance that she's got on her desk. Do you remember how Ibuki died?"
"Sure, we did that in High School Modern History, senior year. 'Automatic weapon shots, head and chest'" Ruri quoted automatically, then shuddered as realisation dawned. "Eww! Poor Madoka!"
"Uh-huh. Now you see why the Commander's pissed. Euthanasia's not always pretty."
Ruri began to see the pattern. "Gendo Ikari, right?"
"Yup."
There was a pause. They continued walking.
"Aika got one too. Kozue Fuyutski." Rumiko said.
"Fuyutski? Isn't he, I mean, he's still alive, isn't he?"
"Nope. Yokugawa had them call up the rest home in Hokkaido. Fuyutski died at 2am this morning."
"Shit. That's creepy."
Another silence. They were approaching the door to the control room.
Ruri broke it. "So when do I get one?"
"Who knows?"
A shorter pause.
This time Rumiko spoke. "You *do* know who you'll ge-"
"Shut up."
Rumiko did.

Hitomi grimaced as Commander Yokugawa yelled again at some nameless member of the Security cell. She and one of her fellow pilots, Hiroshi Samura, both tried to look inconspicuous in the second tier of the giant bowl that was the control room, as Yokugawa raged around like a bull, battering anyone in his way. The other pilot, Yuko Tagami, was yet to appear, but no-one seemed to be especially bothered, distracted as they were. Turning over her palm, she looked again at part of the cause of the furore. A photograph, of a girl, around Hitomi's own age, skin a pale white indistinguishable from a deathly pallor. Light blue hair, bare shoulders and red albino eyes. She knew the face from books, but she couldn't tell whether the girl was dead or not in the photo. She remembered that no-one had ever been able to find out what had happened to Ayanami.
"Some sick bastard's idea of a joke" she said to herself for the umpteenth time this morning. Turning to Hiroshi, she asked the question she had so far been avoiding. "So who did you get?"
Damn. She wished she hadn't sounded so flippant. The way that had come out, it had sounded like she wanted to compare collector cards or something.
Hiroshi was silent for a moment, as if he hadn't heard. Then slowly he faced her, and said, "I didn't get one."
Before Hitomi had time to properly digest this, a door in the side of the bowl opened nearby, disgorging Yuko Tagami at last. She stormed over and threw herself into the seat beside Hitomi, shoving a photograph into her face.
"What the fuck is this?!" she hissed.
Hitomi had a fair idea of what the photo's subject was, but looked anyway. A red-headed girl wearing a bright crimson NERV-era EVA plug-suit. Dead-looking eyes stared, one with a gash through it, and the girl's right arm was a mess from the shoulder down, bloodied and torn, reminding Hitomi of an old quote: 'A man may be naked but still in rags'. Bare bone poked through the skin of the suit. The background showed that the scene of the photo was the interior of an old EVA entry-plug.
"Asuka Langley Sohryu." Said Hitomi, returning the photo.
"I damn well know that! What the hell was it doing in my locker?!"
"We all got them." Hitomi replied, then added. "Except Samura." She passed Yuko her own photo.
Yuko grimaced at it, then handed it back, a little more subdued now that some form of partial explanation had been offered. The shallow ones were always easily distracted, Hitomi thought to herself.

As Hitomi glanced in his direction, she noticed that Hiroshi was silent, as usual, watching two of the Tactical cell whispering to each other on the opposite side of the bowl and a tier or two above them. Just a chance glimpse, Hitomi mused, as she slipped the photo into her pocket, but an information rich one, like eating a very heavy fruit cake. Samura seemed to observe people like birds, as if maybe he hoped to learn something from them. Some of the command staff said his watching made them feel nervous, but never in front of him. He was strange in other ways as well, never really spontaneous in any response, like he had to think deeply about it before he said anything. She wondered why Hiroshi hadn't received a photograph, like everyone else in the bowl seemed to have, and what he thought of it. Maybe he felt left out, excluded from something the others were going through together. Or maybe he didn't care, or preferred not to be included in this projection of some weirdo's view.

Once they had discovered that everyone else had got one, the command staff in the bowl had dredged up any and all information they could find on the subjects of their photos, comparing it to themselves to see how much they matched. Spookily enough, most of them found disturbing similarities in their NERV predecessors. Whoever's idea this was must have known a lot about both the NERV personnel and the present crew in the UNAERG headquarters. That was an unwelcome thought to some of the command staff.

Again, a new arrival interrupted her thoughts. At the top tier of the bowl, a little to Hitomi's right, a door opened, casting the unmistakable silhouette of Major Ruri into the room from the brighter corridor outside. Dr, Hoshino followed her in, descending the steps in the side of the bowl to join her Master Programming cell, while Ruri sought out Cmdr. Yokugawa, who was again busy bullying a hapless Security cell member. Hitomi watched as Ruri marched up to him, saluting tightly. Yokugawa spoke briefly to his current victim and pointed. The Security man fled in the direction indicated, and Yokugawa turned to Ruri. They talked, Yokugawa asking the questions, Ruri answering, accompanied by a few controlled gestures. After a short while, Ruri saluted again and stalked away, heading towards the pilots. Hitomi tapped her fellow pilots, grabbing their attention.
"Heads up." She muttered. "Incoming."

"Alright people, we're going." Ruri said as she approached, then scowled at Yuko's abortive salute. "Stop that! I've told you about that, don't do it. Your rank is honorary and pre-dominantly for ceremonial purposes. In practice, you're civilians, and therefore any salute can be interpreted as a sarcastic gesture of disrespect. Now follow me." Ruri led them to the door through which Yuko had entered.
"Bitch." Yuko muttered as she fell in behind Hitomi. Hitomi was sure that Ruri must have heard that, but she didn't bat an eye-lid. She never payed attention to Yuko's asides or snide remarks, but Yuko kept it up anyway. They walked out the door, into the labyrinth of corridors behind the bowl.
"Yokugawa wants you guys out of the way for now, so we're going down to one of the briefing rooms." Ruri said. She took them along a succession of half-familiar corridors, finally reaching a door labelled '7.32', and ushering them in. The room was fairly large, with rows of chairs and a screen and computer terminal at the front.
"You're welcome to use the equipment if you want, but FAUST is gonna be off-line intermittently while Security and Hoshino's Master Programming cell run some diagnostics."
Hiroshi was already halfway to the terminal.
"I'll come and get you when we can bring you back to the bowl, but for now, sit tight." Said Ruri. " Security won't let anyone leave the base until they're finished, and that could take a while."
"You are Lieutenant Hiroshi Samura." The terminal murmured quietly in the background, as Hiroshi logged on.

Ruri closed the door, and winced as she heard the bolt click, locking it. She knew Tagami would make some comment, as the children had to have heard the noise.
"Bitch doesn't trust us." She imagined Yuko saying, far as that might be from the truth. Ruri had to lock them in for Security purposes, and she was sure Samura and Miyamura would realise this. Nevertheless, it slightly annoyed her. Maybe she should stop ignoring Yuko's rudeness, and start reprimanding her for it. Hmm. The little voice at the back of Ruri's head chose this moment to make some comment along the lines of: 'Sounds like too much trouble to me.' Yeah. She decided she'd give Tagami a little more of the ignoring treatment. She didn't want a confrontation. After all, they were only kids. She made her way back to the bowl.

Again, Shinji made his way to Room 2.36, knocking and entering at Asuka's response. He greeted her and sat down in the chair opposite.
"What are you grinning at, Shinji?" she asked as he sat, her voice almost a high pitched whine.
Shinji kept smiling. "I was just thinking to myself as I knocked, I don't really know who you are. I mean, really."
Asuka seemed annoyed at this. "Of course you know who I am dumkopf!"
"Yes, but how are you who you are? We both know you should be dead."
"Does it matter? I told you yesterday!"
"Not really I suppose, but I like to know things. I mean, I know you're not the original Asuka, and I know they used the same principles as they used for Rei to make your body, but what about your mind? I don't know whether they took your original one and stuck it in that body, or did they just ghola the brain as well, or did they make a new one with an AI construct, or�" He paused at Asuka's looked of disgust. Then he studied her eyes. A smile crept over his face. "You don't know, do you. They never told you, did they." It was a pure statement of fact, without even a note of inquiry.

Asuka looked very annoyed, re-arranging herself to place her arms in front of her. No pretence of denial was necessary.
"Barrier" Shinji thought. "Classic gesture of insecurity."
"I don't even know what a ghola is!" She said, utterly peeved. "They didn't even tell me that much! Everything they told me, I told you yesterday!" She stopped, suddenly distracted. "What is a ghola anyway? They told me the word, but I don't know what it means."
Shinji adopted a critical thought pose, finger along side of face, hand cupping chin, but not supporting it. "The word ghola, at least as its used in this case, is from a series of stories from the last century, written by a man named Frank Herbert, I don't know if you've heard of him."
"I don't want a history lesson, Shinji! I've never heard of the guy!"
"Bear with me, okay. The word itself comes from the Arabic word 'ghul', meaning, of course, 'ghoul', and�" He paused. "Don't look at me like that! Its nowhere near as bad as it sounds. The process is basically creating a new person from the cells taken from a deceased person after their death, ie. you. The new-born grows up with the appearance of the dead person, and a traumatic event can trigger the memories of the deceased as well, if the brain is left intact. In the stories, the person got to keep the new body's memories as well, but in real life, the 'return', if you like, of the original persona shoves out the new, leaving them completely incapable of recalling anything between their death and the event which triggered their memory. Sometimes they can't even remember their death, or even a short period before that as well. From what I've been able to gather, that was the process used to create Rei as well, but she was a little different, and her original memories were never properly triggered."

Asuka looked at him strangely. "You know too much Shinji. You got old!"
Shinji shrugged.
"And so why do I still look like this?" She asked. "I thought you said I was a new-born?!"
" I don't know. Maybe they accelerated your growth somehow, or maybe they just kept you until you were this age before triggering your memories. They really didn't tell you any of this?"
"No! Everything they told me, I told you, yesterday!"
"So what *do* you remember?" Shinji asked. "When you arrived yesterday, all you told me was how you got here, that you escaped, found out who was still alive, then came here. And you told me what they'd told you, of course."
"The last thing I remember before yesterday was those big white EVAs coming down on me." A chill seemed to pass through her at the memory.
Shinji smiled, attempting to console her. "Don't worry, I beat them up for you."
"Its alright for you! That was forty years ago for you! For me it was the day before yesterday!"
"Believe me, I didn't forget it easily. The way your body looked when they brought it out�.." He seemed to suppress the memory, as if unable to reconcile it with the fact of the girl in front of him.
Asuka rallied, changing the subject. "I have to know more about this world, and *you* have to tell me! I wanna know everything! What happened about the Angels?"
"The UN and the Japanese Government tidied them up. Everyone these days assumes they were aliens."
Asuka snorted. "You stupid future people! They can't be aliens! You and I know that! YOU should have told them!"
Shinji smiled bitterly, spreading his arms to indicate the room around them. "I'm in a mental asylum! No-one would ever believe me."
Asuka seemed to be looking for a fight, though Shinji could hardly blame her, considering what she had gone through yesterday. She crossed her arms again. "Always dodging your responsibilities."
Sitting back in his chair, Shinji expressed his exasperation with a sigh. He was just about ready to let her win, out of sympathy if nothing else. But one more strike was necessary. "I never could fight you Asuka. But I've been in this world forty years longer than you. You basically woke up here yesterday. You might as well have been asleep."
"And you haven't changed much."
This stopped him dead. A slash of irrationality, parried with reasoning, but defeated by a hard thrust of uncommon clarity of perception. He officially gave up, and left the room.  Asuka gloated in her victory. He let her.

Hitomi removed the audio-beads from her ears and switched off her music as Ruri returned.
"We can go now. Commander Yokugawa's cancelled the briefing, so you're going straight over to see Dr. Hoshino for those synch tests. She wants you there in ten minutes, so you better get moving." Ruri opened the door wide, then left. Hitomi sighed. More tests. She stood, following Yuko out the door, Hiroshi close behind her, and they made their way to the test room. Dr. Hoshino greeted them as they arrived, then launched into a barrage of instructions. Hitomi obeyed with mechanical indifference. The test room was not the primitive intimidating environment that Hitomi remembered from pictures of the one at NERV. This room, like most of the base, was fashioned in a curving style, all the computer consoles a gleaming, almost liquid black, the rest of the room in similar materials, but lacking the yellow, orange and red glows of the console screens. The test chamber itself, beyond the ellipsoid observation window, was much the same, lit by a dull green glow that came from lights underneath the window, the spectral white of the test entry-plugs a harsh contrast to the darkness. One of Hoshino's assistants pressed something, and the plugs started to retract into the ceiling, to the room where the pilots would enter them. As they left their normal position, a plain white light replaced the green. By now, Dr. Hoshino's instructions had them in their plug-suits, lithe and graceful artifacts by comparison with those of the past, yet designed in such a way as to immediately suggest them at a glance. Now Hoshino shooed them up the black spiral stair in the corner, up to the place where the test plugs now gaped, ready to receive them. Hitomi climbed into hers, the couch and control apparatus moulding themselves to the curves of her back and legs. As had become her habit, she traced the words stencilled between the two hand-grips with her finger, spelling them out in her head as the plug peeled itself back into shape around her, like some bizarre backwards banana.
'E-V-A-1-4-U-N-A-E-R-G-2-0-5-5.'

As the test plug descended back into the chamber below, Hitomi closed her eyes and let the LCL fill the space around her, to her mind a ridiculous parody of the amniotic fluid of the womb. She remembered Hoshino's lecture on the EVA technology in general, how it was all old, essentially unchanged for forty years, despite what cosmetic changes modern industrial design might render. She pictured the blue-haired girl in the photo, forty years ago,  immersing herself in this stuff, as she was doing now, the same liquid, the same technology, the same interaction with the beast. She quashed that last thought quickly. That was *not* the sort of thing to think about just before meshing with the control interface, mechanical as they had been told the process was. Blanking her mind, she dived into the EVA's presence...

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