Disclaimer: I don't own Neon Genesis: Evangelion, A Love Supreme by John Coltrane, the rights to the name Genesis or Peter Gabriel or Phil Collins or Duke (and I don't want those, either), Coca Cola, Diet Coke, The Second Annual Report by Throbbing Gristle, the Beatles, any and all characters/objects/general associations associated with any and all of the recognizable products/companies/real figures mentioned.
Author's Note: I'd just like to thank William S. Burroughs for being the genius that he was, and Bob Dylan for "Desolation Row".
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Negated Cross-Sectional Fortitude
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"A Love Supreme changed history, man! You can't deny the facts!" Shigeru was bent over the cafeteria table, hands splayed out against the cool surface. His hair got in front of his eyes and that bothered him a little bit, but it mostly served as an eerie effect to keep his coworker, desk mate, and overall world defender comrade on edge—intimidation techniques work best when the intimidated can't see the intimidator's eyes—said so in a book he read.
"I'm not trying to suggest otherwise," Makoto put his hands up, shrugging, holding his turkey sandwich with one of them. A pickle fell out. "I'm just trying to say that maybe it wasn't as great as you're trying to make it out to be—"
"Oh, what, John Coltrane not good enough for you? Is that it?" Shigeru sat down, took a long drink from the Coke he had on the table. Twenty ounce bottle, purchased from the vending machine down the hall, some yen equivalent to $1.00—would say more, but I don't know how the economy will be doing in the years between then and now. "John Coltrane was a genius—more genius then you'll ever be! You know how he made it all so great? Superimposed harmonics, man! Superimposed harmonics." He sipped some more Coke.
Makoto shook his head. "Shig, I don't even know what that means."
"And you call yourself a music buff—"
"A pop music buff, sure—quiz me on Genesis—"
"Genesis sold out after Gabriel left—"
"You take that back!"
Lieutenant Ibuki ate her ham sandwich, the newest edition of Extreme Metal Blood Death Journal! Monthly open next to the metal tray that was provided by the lunch room staff. Pictures of forty-year-olds in face paint breathing fire donned the front cover, the articles inside ranging from "How To Build Your Own Shrine To The Underworld In Two Hours" to "Extreme Walls of Sound: A Metalhead's Guide To Shrieking Distortion That Makes Your Head IMPLODE!!!"
The conversation continued in the background: "Look, if you want me to spell it out for you, it's easy—Genesis sold out. Done. All you have to understand is that Phil Collins is a moron and it'll all be okay—"
"Hey, he is not a moron! You ever listened to Duke?"
"Oh please—"
"No seriously—you hear what he does with Duke? The multilayering of the uh, harmonic um, you know what I'm trying to say." Makoto took a bite of his sandwich. "The oh, ah, um, chord progressions and stuff."
"Yeah right, like it can compare to A Love Supreme." Shigeru rolled his eyes and continued his relentless assault. "A Love Supreme demonstrated a keen understanding of multilayered quasisymphonic resonation! His uncanny use of superimposed harmonics just further emphasized his modal tonalities that ranged all over the scale—and that's not even going into the differential counterpoints in the harmonic lines and the semi-variable chord progressions that kept the melodic undertones from sinking into the background."
Maya, who wasn't really paying attention anyhow, could only blink, take another bite of ham sandwich with dill, and go back to her magazine.
"Now you're just pulling stuff out of your ass!" Makoto threw his hands up. "I may not know a lot about music, I admit—but what in the hell is 'quasisymphonic resonation'?!"
Shigeru stuttered. "Ah—it's—what do you mean you don't know what that is?" He let the statement hang, silence punctuating his uncertainty.
Kaji sat down and quickly noticed the tension at the table, but he was hungry and didn't feel like moving. Instead, he took a bite out of his roast beef sandwich, and looked over at Maya. "How's it going?"
She stared at him, and then shrugged. "Not bad, I guess." She took a swig of Diet Coke, made a face, spoke again. "Do you know what quasisymphonic resonation is?"
Kaji blinked. "Well, if you know what resonation is, I suppose the answer could be pretty intuitive…" he trailed off, a thoughtful look on his features. "Hey, why don't we get together sometime later and discuss this in a more private environment. When's your shift end?"
After she felt the blush come over her, she frowned, and decided to ignore him. The title of the article she was reading was "Make That Annoying Noise Go Away: How To Keep Your Humbuckers Of Death From Humming Your Amp To Hell!!!" There was a picture of a man with a giant grimace on his face, superimposed upon a background of flames and demons. He had a guitar that was making his ears bleed. Maya felt his pain.
---
Shinji Ikari sat in the empty men's locker room, staring in a mirror, questioning the meaning of his existence.
"Why am I here?" He trailed a finger down the side of the mirror, the trail of oils smearing the polished glass. "All I ever do is cause others pain, and if they hurt because of me, then I guess it means that I'm nothing but a giant walking… hurt ball." He watched the face of himself in the mirror scrunch into a frown. "And hurt balls aren't wanted anywhere," he whispered, "because they cause nothing but pain. And I don't want to cause anyone pain. I don't like hurting people. But that is my nature, a hurt ball. And a hurt ball's nature is to cause pain. And that's what I do." The plug suit on the bench caught his eye; all twisted and wrinkled and dejected, it laid there on the bench like some object used and then thrown away. "Eva! The object that grants me pain and suffering, and yet, grants me peace as well…" he turned away from the mirror, his bare feet slapping the tile floor with sickening reality. He bent over, retrieved the plug suit, and breathed in deeply to absorb the scent of blood. "Mother…"
---
Rei never dreamed. This is why, when she found herself staring out across an enormous red ocean, she pondered the reason for her existence in this particular plane of reality. Though she could not see them, all the souls of everyone in the world gazed back at her from the pool of LCL, the primordial soup. From her vantage point on the shore, she stared back.
When she opened her eyes, she found that her cheek was all wet, as was the desk. And the Third Child was staring at her, touching her shoulder, sort of nudging her in an annoying manner that he was apt to do. The classroom was empty, but there he was, that pitiful look on his face, his uncertain nudges with the palm of his hand against her shoulder.
"Ayanami," he started to say, but then stopped, and she regarded him without curiosity.
Keeping eye contact, she used her sleeve to wipe away the saliva that had drooled out of her mouth. He looked away, full of shame.
"So that's how it is, is it?" He asked. The sun was suddenly setting, and his face was masked in shadow. "I should have known."
"Yes," a quiet voice, so full of mystery. "You should have." It echoed back at him after the door closed, and he was where?—stuck in an empty classroom. The door was locked for some unspecified reason.
---
All of a sudden, the theme music played, and a naked figure resembling Rei revolved around in circles for no specific reason, suspended over a lake, the moon silhouetting her figure, and after all that happened Misato's voice came from out of nowhere and told everyone what was going to happen next.
And, not knowing how to take this sudden lapse of logic, Shinji found himself back in his apartment when he swore that he was just standing in a classroom.
---
A few episodes passed uneventfully, but then for no reason at all they went backwards for awhile, and all the characters remembered what lay ahead even while they were trapped in the past.
---
A boy hummed a tune nearby. Shinji Ikari thought he vaguely recognized it, but he couldn't be sure. Minutes prior, he wasn't aware of the boy's presence. Blood lingered in his nostrils, and he didn't understand why.
"I think this is the pinnacle of lilim culture," the boy whose feet dangled sexually off of the statue gave him a sexual look that could have been interpreted as a sexual come on. "Don't you think so, Shinji Ikari?" He added the statement as sexually as possible. This beautiful silver-haired boy smelled like sex, looked like sex, sounded like sex, and radiated the lusts of the physical body out of every possible orifice.
Shinji was too straight to notice. "I'm sorry?"
"It is my own personal belief that suggests mammals are inherently drawn toward the sexual nature of senseless violence and needless suffering, and that, by developing the unconscious need for sex, the lilim have created a paradox of survival; to push the ones they most desire to have sex with away, they create a barrier of sexlessness and self loathing, and since all lilim want to have sex with all other lilim, the barrier of sexlessness is vast indeed, and thus all lilim are fundamentally alone."
"I-I don't understand." Shinji gave the boy an uncertain look, admiring his flawless physique that was so perfectly outlined by the needlessly setting sun.
"Sex, in all its grand enigmatic pleasures, is only a byproduct of the negative fear that is associated with all lilim interactions. The lilim seek to have sex because the lilim are afraid not to have sex, the consequences of such actions being too great to fully comprehend, relative to the overall aspect of lilim's divine sense of localized sexual divinity. God can only be found inside the aspect ratio of your unfathomable virginity, Shinji Ikari."
"But I don't—what are you trying to tell me?"
"However, even the intense pleasures of a sexual encounter cannot ward off the inherent nature of the solitary soul, so even should you experience a mind shattering orgasm unlike other you have ever experienced before, there will always be the fear of the other person's absence—and your sexual desire for that person stems only from your desire to have sex with him or her again, not from an actual spiritual need for that person's emotions or personality, but for a selfish physical need of that person's genitalia."
"…This isn't making any sense."
"My dear Shinji, this is because you are stupid and clueless." The boy smiled a dangerous sexual smile.
---
"Good afternoon, Fuyutsuki." The Commander walked into his chamber, the Sub Commander positioned near one of the windows. The man stood like a silhouetted statue, absorbing the view of the geofront.
At the sound of approaching footsteps and salutations, the man turned. "Ah, Ikari." The shorter man joined him at the window. "And what did the old men want?"
Gendo shoved his hands into his pockets. "The usual," he said.
"How did you handle the Second Annual Report that was to be turned into Kiel today?" Fuyutsuki scratched his cheek silently.
"I gave it to them."
The Sub Commander frowned. "Did you get one of the secretaries to make it up?"
"No," the Commander said.
"The Major?"
"Not the Major."
"You didn't do it."
"I did not."
"Neither did I."
"Neither did you."
Fuyutsuki remained puzzled. "I am puzzled, Ikari. How'd you pull this one off?"
The bearded man smirked. "I gave them a copy of The Second Annual Report."
"Throbbing Gristle." He didn't consciously do it, but his hand rubbed his temples and he let out a sigh. "You're a sick man."
Gendo nodded, the reflection of his smirk staring back at them both through the window. "That should throw them off for awhile."
---
Meanwhile, SEELE discussed plans to build a secret moon base to replace NERV, but relented after a tiresome several-hour long meeting came to the conclusion that it would be pointless trying to defend the Earth from Angels if the command center was on the Moon. And the morning commute would just be hell.
---
And it was decided, after much deliberation, that SEELE 12 would be the one to organize the catering at the next luncheon. It did not occur to them that, as all of their meetings took place as holographic teleconferences, luncheons were redundant, and they could all just tell their secretaries of wherever they actually were in real life to order Chinese and leave off the MSG sauce. But nobody thought about that.
---
"I am incredibly naïve!" Kensuke's enthusiasm was wasted in the empty shell of the school. His words echoed off the inside of the acoustically degenerative classroom. "I cannot express how naïve I am! I want to pilot giant weaponry capable of killing every single living being on the planet!" He pretends to shoot down Representative Horaki with his Mega-Uber-Detail Scale-Model-O-Figure VTOL manufactured by RenT-O-utSource Limited (Headquarters located in Warsaw, Poland—for free advertising, dial this number!). Instead of descending to the floor in plumes of smoke, Horaki snatched his camcorder and held it hostage for questionable items that shall not be divulged.
"Man, this sucks." Toji, who had hitherto gone unnoticed, relaxed with his feet on the desk. His tracksuit represented his unquestionable manliness.
Shinji said nothing, because he couldn't think of anything to say. Ironically, this same hindrance happened to be what kept his cohorts' mouths running nonstop—a paradox inverted simply by the unfathomable nature of the screwed up characters' psyches. In Shinji's case, he was too busy pondering the meaning of his existence to notice. "Why am I here?" he asked nobody in particular. He wasn't even listening to himself.
Kensuke beseeched the Class Representative. "I am a plot device!" he exclaimed in pathetic tones. "I am a two-dimensional plot device! I have no development! They just wrote me in here as an appliance to develop Shinji Ikari!" He might have been crying, but that's only if he actually had tear ducts like the rest of them. The animators might have forgotten to draw them in, since, I mean, come on—he's a plot device. Either way, his anguish was apparent—even in the English dub.
Suddenly, the door flew open and the teacher strode in, but forgot that he wasn't supposed to be written into the plot quite yet, as it was only 7:14AM and he wasn't supposed to appear for another six minutes. He disappeared in a puff of character inconsistencies.
The thought bubble that was Asuka strode into the classroom instead, though I had thought her presence had already been established earlier, but maybe I'm just—
---
This is a scene change to prevent further discombobulation, which it won't.
---
"…and the fifth time…" Rei dabbled her hand through the waters of the garden, mute appreciation playing across her face.
Shinji stared vacantly at her supple form.
"I want to hold your hand," she said.
He was stunned. "Rei…" he trailed off as he gazed into her red irises. "I had no idea you listened to the Beatles."
As she grasped his cold, clammy hand, shivers of excitement flooded her spine.
"I don't," she said.
---
An Angel came and blew up a few buildings, made some people mad. But then Unit-01 came blew its ass to hell. Or Unit-02. Or Unit-00. It doesn't matter. Anyway, Misato was left with tons of paperwork and the coffee maker in the lounge stopped working and Ritsuko bailed on their bar hopping night and Kaji was off in Kyoto and the Ibuki girl was busy spacing out at her post but it wasn't so bad since there was nothing to do anyhow and all the paperwork she had to do could always be put off since it didn't take a genius to figure out that the world was going to end real soon as the episodes were getting darker and darker with each number closer to 25 they got, but she was thankful that at least she still had a beer but was still kind of grumpy at it all and in the end everybody just had a headache. So she went home, fantasized for awhile, took a shower, and drank. This was how problems are solved in 2015.
---
The ceiling of Rei Ayanami's apartment was the most beautiful sight to behold only if you were blind, which Rei was not. She was, however, prone to think too deeply about the meaning of her existence and on life in general, which led to her comparison of the ceiling of her apartment to reality. She came up with an analogy:
"Dirt is to my ceiling as reality is to puppies."
Actually, she did not come up with that analogy at all. Part of it was already written on the walls of the stairwell when she moved in. This was the part that was already written:
"Arsenic is to puppies as graffiti is to the vandals of this construction site who keep putting snakes in our goddamn equipment come sundown. We're just doing our jobs, here, but NO! You kids have to come over and fuck up our lives for no damn reason at all!"
It said other things, but she could not remember the exact wording they used. She suspected it to be a warning, but when she retired to her bed after long hours of insomnia, she found her thoughts wandering back to the prophetic text written in bold red paint that trailed the ascending stairwell.
There was a deeper meaning there.
---
At ten pm, Misato Katsuragi was well on her way to getting stone drunk at the kitchen table of her apartment.
---
His S-DAT player died. The high-tech digital display kept blinking the same thing over and over: the little 'NO BAT' symbol, with the empty rectangle and the line that goes straight through it. Kept blinking that, over and over. Shinji didn't know what to do.
"Misato!" He tumbled into the kitchen, finding only empty beer cans and a phone that never rang. The television played the same commercial over and over, the faucet dripped, the icemaker in the refrigerator never worked. Strange men in suits lurked just beyond the reach of the shadows. It dawned on him—the NO BAT symbol, the empty apartment, the things going on as typical routine—it was a fabricated reality! It had to be!
"No!" he screamed, suddenly having the urge to bolt from the apartment. He left his shoes back in the foyer, knowing that if this was a fabricated reality, shoes would be pointless. "No, get away!" he screamed at the shadows. Nobody heard him. They must have been too fabricated to pay attention to him, he thought.
He didn't realize he was practically flying (another side effect of reality fabrication; relative physics and variable gravity) until he almost ran smack dab into his guardian, whose purple hair stunned him so dramatically that he realized naturally purple hair was so absurd there was no possible way it could be fabricated.
"Oh Shinji, hi!" she said, precariously holding three brown paper bags. "I went to the supermarket. Care to be a gentleman?" She handed him the one slipping off of her shoulder.
"…Did you get batteries?" His uncertain question lingered in the air, dramatically.
Finally, after an eternity: "Yes, they're in the bottom of this one here."
Setting the bags down on the kitchen table, he pulled out a pack of coppertops. "Thanks," he said, and the statement chilled nobody to the bone.
---
—remembered that time inside the cockpit where there were suddenly two of her and the one was like "Oh yeah I'm the me that exists inside you when you think you aren't looking" and the other was like "Oh right uh huh like you're me of course even though I'm me and nobody else is or can ever be me" but then the other one said "I am you" but then the second one above the water all clean and not submerged was all like "You are the angel" but she the other one replied with "this is loneliness" cockamamie thing to say sure but that's what she said and then the first or second or whoever one of them can't really keep 'em straight but who cares anyhow it's all a huge identity crisis and it isn't like any of these things are sane to begin with but then there was the whole infection thing and before anybody knew what was happening the whole damn cradle went up in flames KABOOM and they had to redraw the map again (which Fuyutsuki was sick and tired of doing).
---
Woke up from a reverie that came from out of nowhere. The blue sky was beyond the window, a teacher droning on in the background, hadn't even realized she spaced out.
Ikari was watching her. She could feel his eyes as they wandered up and down her innocent form, visually molesting her where the pale skin broke through the clothing, going through his own visions of what she would look like if he—
For some reason, she saw her blush in the double-reflection of the double-paned glass window. The teacher droned on.
---
"Pattern blue! It's an Angel!" Maya shouted over the unsettling silence that had permeated Central Dogma since lunch. Nobody argued with her. In fact, nobody did anything different than they did usually.
"Alright," Shigeru said, relaxing in his chair. He sighed, picked up his mug of coffee, gulped some down, scratched his scalp. A nameless tech on one of the lower levels, who will undoubtedly die when the JSSDF launches its awesome shoot-out in the Movie, coughed politely.
"Shouldn't we, uh, call somebody?" Makoto cracked his neck. "I mean, this seems like it could be pretty important." The other two bridge techs gave him weird looks, and he sank down in his chair. "But what do I know?"
But just then, the alarm sounded and gave everybody headaches.
---
The clouds looked vague, like ambiguous blorbs of water vapor suspended in the atmosphere by air currents and temperature, because that's what they were. Shinji was lying with his back on the roof of the school building, dramatic music pouring out of the loudspeaker nearby. In the back of his mind, he wondered why the dramatic music was playing, since that sort of thing only happened when there was an Angel battle taking place—the rest of the time it was boring ambient music or an obscure techno song. Mostly, though, his mind was preoccupied with coming up with more interesting analogies between his emotional and psychological state and the physical aspect of water vapor—
---
The guitars wailed as Asuka donned her plug suit and griped about having to don her plug suit. The First Child was on the other side of the locker bank, blushing over a pair of uninteresting cracked eye glasses that barely resembled the ones the Commander wore on duty. She found them on the sidewalk while aimlessly sleepwalking through the streets the previous night.
The drum set bashed incessantly with emotive blast beats as Asuka did a flying triple Lutz into the entry plug, giving several maintenance men heart attacks as she flew past them with millimeters to spare. Even with this distance, strands of her hair brushed across a man's face, slicing open his cheek, and he had to be sent to the infirmary immediately.
The bass guitarist's polyphonic solo went into extreme overdrive as the enormous Unit-02 blasted off towards the surface, striking a really dramatic kick-ass pose before whipping out its prog knife and striking an even more dramatic kick-ass pose.
The double bassist went crazy with a slide countermelody as everyone realized that it was a false alarm.
---
But it wasn't a false alarm, and Shinji Ikari realized that the clouds he was staring at were actually Angels themselves, in disguise, and it made him really depressed to know that the things that he had looked at all his life were, in actuality, enemies of mankind.
"Enemy!" he screamed, and catapulted himself down the stairwell as he made his way toward NERV—they had to be informed! Multiple synthesizers made somber organ dirges as he energetically raced toward headquarters.
---
"I will pilot it!" Shinji Ikari screamed at the techs in Central Dogma. Misato was absent, but nobody noticed. "I will pilot Eva!"
"Okay! Fine!" Shigeru threw his hands up, gesticulating wildly in dismissive motions. "Go, I don't care! Nobody's telling you not to!"
"Correct." The Commander stared down at Shinji from his balcony on high. Minutes later, Shinji was doing a back flip into the entry plug while the clarinetist dueled with the trumpeter for dominance over the high notes. The Eva rocketed toward the surface.
Shinji screamed when he discovered what he saw.
"AH!" Except it was more drawn out and dramatic than the single syllable I just wrote down.
Unit-02 was covered in water vapor, motionless, its eyes gazing blankly up at the yellow sun. The clouds seemed to be attacking her. An ominous choir sang a remixed version of the Hallelujah Chorus.
"Asuka!" He shouted. "Asuka, no!"
But alas, the effort was in vain—the clouds descended upon him, too, and the sky swallowed their existence with a solitary bite of reality distortion. There was a giant sound akin to a baseball bat smashing a man into a harpsichord, and suddenly everything was silent. Even the soundtrack stopped.
Fuyutsuki observed from Central Dogma. "This does not abide with the scenario."
Gendo agreed. "The old men must not know of this."
Meanwhile, meters below them, the techs were in an uproar, shouting things that didn't make any logical sense.
"Sir, the entry crust thermological expansion zone has been reduced by a factor of eight!" Makoto slammed his hand against his keyboard. "Randomization of frequently utilized phonetics is having no affect!"
"How is this possible?!" Shigeru yelled. "Exterior harmonics resonation is being generated by the sky's AT field!"
"It's an Angel!" Ritsuko, who I just realized was standing behind the three of them, stared at the overhead holographic projection of the sky in shock and awe.
"The sky is an Angel?!" Someone asked redundantly.
"All of that blue…" Makoto's heart fell through the floor and he suddenly felt woozy.
"This can't be right!" Maya screamed. "All readings indicate a super intelligence perpetuation machine reacting with the hypersensitive auxiliary control apparatus!"
Ritsuko glared at her. "Don't tell me—"
"Yes!" Shigeru confirmed. "Ideological forces are interacting with hypothetical realities! Soon, the borders separating the sequential order of events will break down and coherent speech will disintegrate!"
The guitars wailed with crescendo.
"Unbelievable—" Makoto hit the desk in frustration. "AT resonance is matching Unit-00!"
Misato appeared from out of nowhere. "But Unit-00 hasn't been launched yet! It's still in the docking bay!"
Fuyutsuki remained stoic. "Is this Instrumentality?"
Gendo kept his hands bridged. "It appears that the very thing we have feared is coming to pass." His enigmatic statement did nothing to move the plot along.
Shigeru continued the dramatics down below. "If AT field resonation breaches four-hundred percent, the placement of matter will become arbitrary and singular consciousnesses will begin to act independent of the timeline!" He slammed his fists into the computer screen, the breaking glass slicing open his hands. He cursed, blood flowing freely down his arms, and stared up at the holographic projections. "Incredible! The quasisymphonic resonation is reaching the terminal frequencies!"
Makoto gawked at the Commodore-64 monitor he had been working on for the entirety of the series. "No—impossible! It's happening!" He yelled in flabbergasted sputters. "Singular entities are starting to bridge the gap of linear consciousness and physical form—apparent dreams and thought patterns are taking shape—matter is no longer conservative!"
Maya screamed. "Time is ceasing its linear flow! Recognizable events no longer follow coherent order! Reality itself is unable to be defined!—"
---
Down a street—walking—one morning—a Sunday afternoon—middle of nowhere—no roads—the cicadas chirping—incessant noise—this was how it always was—had always been—will be—all along—nobody noticed—can't notice—can't see—won't see—it's all variable—reached the end—all of it—stand back from the yellow line—train's arrivin'—departin'—flat monotone—————Thank You For Riding The Tokyo-Three Loop Line; Have A Nice Day.