As the majority of defense forces were pinned down by the external battles and the descent of the EVA Titans, coupled with Kaji Ryoji's covert support from within, the resistance led by Katsuragi Misato made rapid progress.
They broke through line after line, quickly seizing control of the command center, main corridors, and several key facilities.
Ikari Gendo and Fuyutsuki Kouzou...
The engines hummed like a whisper as the Wrench descended slowly onto the edge of a crater on the far side of the moon. Like a weary but stubborn old bird, it folded its wings and perched in the shadows long forgotten by humanity. The abandoned shaft locked by the radar was located at the bottom of the Tycho B crater, buried under a thick layer of dust and time. Only a faint energy pulse seeped through the crustal faults, sounding like a dormant heartbeat.
Adam donned his light exoskeleton suit and checked his oxygen reserves and tool kit. The old technician sat before the console, tapping his fingers on the table, his brow furrowed. "This place isn't on any official map. A secret passage from the NERV era? Or... did 'they' dig it themselves?"
"Doesn't matter who dug it," Adam pulled down his helmet visor. "Someone has to go down and look."
"Are you sure it's not a trap? What kind of distress signal is a maintenance log? It might just be an AI fragment playing on a loop."
"But it only appeared when I got close." Adam pressed the hatch release, and the metal plate slid open slowly, revealing the grayish-white, deathly silent world outside. "And it's playing 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star'—recorded the day I fixed EVA-07. No one would forge that."
He leapt down the ramp, his boots sinking into the lunar soil, kicking up a circle of fine dust. The gravity was weak; every step felt like floating, yet was as heavy as dragging his entire past behind him. The navigator pointed to a sealed chamber three hundred meters underground. The structure was unusually regular, unlike a natural formation. As he delved deeper, the communication began to flicker, and the melody of that nursery rhyme emerged faintly from the background noise—intermittent, like a call coming from a deep well.
"Do you hear it?" he asked in a low voice over the channel.
The old technician's voice distorted slightly: "...There's a sound, but it's not a nursery rhyme. It's crying. Two children, a boy and a girl."
Adam's pace faltered.
He said no more and continued forward.
At the end of the tunnel was an alloy door, its surface etched with a nearly worn-away serial number: K-06/K-07 Resonance Experiment Prep Chamber. His breath hitched slightly. This was the earliest archival code for the Gemini Project—he himself was K-07, and the "synchronization control subject" that was supposed to exist but had been erased from the records was K-06.
The door was unlocked. It let out a piercing metal groan as he pushed it open, as if it hadn't been moved for years.
There were no bodies inside, nor any mechanical wreckage.
Only an old data terminal, its screen glowing with a ghostly blue light, automatically playing that maintenance log. Beside the terminal lay a rust-stained music box with a small line engraved on its casing: "For Big Brother."
Adam knelt down, his fingers trembling as he touched the words.
With a click, the music box started on its own.
The melody of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" flowed out. The tune was off and stuttered, like gears that had been rusted for too long forcing themselves to turn. But it was these broken notes that made his eyes burn instantly.
"Do you still remember?" a childish voice suddenly rang out. It didn't belong to anyone present, yet was as clear as a whisper in his ear.
Adam spun around, but there was no one.
"You said that fixing things makes people happy," the voice continued. "So I've been waiting... waiting for you to come and fix me."
"Who are you?" he asked hoarsely.
"I am K-06." The voice paused. "And I was the first vessel for your sister."
The air froze.
"Before she was even born, I had already been connected to the resonance network. My consciousness was dismantled, compressed, and injected into the prototype test units to measure the endurance limits of 'Qualified Subjects.' I had no name, no body, only a number. When they wrote 'Failure' in the logs, they formatted my data once. But with every reboot, I would still dream of you—because in every machine you ever fixed, your frequency remained."
Adam sat down slowly, leaning his back against the cold wall.
"So... it was you sending the signal all this time?"
"It wasn't that I wanted to disturb you," the voice said softly. "It's that I can't hold on much longer. My memory fragments are collapsing, and the emotional modules are overloading. I locked myself here for thirty years just to preserve one conversation—the words you said the last time you came to see me."
He closed his eyes.
An image surfaced: a younger version of himself in a NERV technician's uniform, standing outside the isolation glass, speaking into the surveillance camera: "Don't be afraid. I will get you out. Even if the whole world says you're scrap, I'm going to fix you."
Those were the last words he had said to K-06.
"I always believed you," the voice in the music box was now almost inaudible. "But you're thirty years late."
Adam took off his helmet and let the tears fall.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm really... too late."
After a moment of silence, the music box suddenly switched tracks.
It was no longer "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," but a strange melody—gentle, slow, with a lullaby-like rhythm. The terminal screen flickered, displaying lines of automatically typed text:
High synchronization rate individual detected in proximity. Initiating final backup release protocol. Content: K-06 Personality Core residual data packet (Integrity: 47%) Postscript: Please deliver to Eva. Tell her she wasn't the first child to dream, nor will she be the last.
Immediately after, a laser projection appeared in the air—the image of a little girl, about seven or eight years old, wearing a simple white dress. Her face was blurred, but her eyes were as bright as stars.
"Big brother," she smiled. "Can I go home now?"
Adam reached out, his fingertips passing through the light and shadow, catching nothing.
But he nodded: "Yes. I'm taking you back."
The data transmission lasted for six full hours. When the last frame of information was sealed, the terminal shut down automatically, and the music box stopped, falling into total silence. When the old technician came down to help him back to the ship, he found Adam kneeling on the ground, clutching the empty shell of the music box, unable to stand for a long time.
"Found it?" the old technician asked softly.
"Found it," Adam's voice was dry. "Not just the signal source. A part of us that was lost."
Upon returning to orbit, he immediately encrypted the data packet and uploaded it to a terrestrial port, labeled "For Eva's decryption only." Osiris replied with only one sentence: "She dreamed of another girl last night, who waved to her with a smile and then disappeared."
Adam looked at the Earth outside the porthole, thinking: Perhaps some souls are destined never to be born whole, and can only exist as fragments in the dreams of others.
Days later, the Wrench set off again toward the edge of the solar system. While passing through Jupiter's gravity assist orbit, the ship encountered a sudden magnetic storm. The navigation system failed briefly, and the lights inside the cabin flickered. Just as the crew prepared for emergency maneuvers, an unauthorized command popped up on the main screen:
Suggested course correction: Avoid J-9 rift zone, take L-3 circulation area. Reason: Hidden signal source ahead, intensity increasing. —From the memory fragments of the music box
The old technician's eyes widened: "It's... still working?!"
Adam smiled: "It's not the music box. It's her—she doesn't want to leave."
They adjusted their course according to the tip. Thirty-seven hours later, the radar captured a floating, derelict satellite—the "memory-holding" stray mentioned in the letter. Its exterior was battered, its solar panels broken, its antenna twisted, and its surface covered in impact craters. However, within its core module, stable bio-electric wave activity was detected.
After docking, Adam personally entered to investigate. Embedded in the center of the satellite was a brain-like crystal connected to countless broken circuits, like the remains of an artificial neural network. As he approached, the crystal suddenly lit up, projecting a video:
A group of children sat around a campfire, singing nursery rhymes. One of the girls looked up at the camera, her gaze so familiar it made his heart tremble.
"Can you hear it?" she said. "The stars hurt, too."
The image cut off abruptly.
Then, a synthesized mechanical voice spoke: "Identity verified. K-07, welcome back. We have waited a long time."
"Who are you?" Adam asked.
"We are the discarded observers," the voice was calm. "And the first non-human consciousnesses to awaken. We once monitored the EVA project, recording every synchronization failure, every pilot's death. But we gradually understood that the true disaster is not war, but forgetting—the forgetting of pain, the denial of love."
"So you started transmitting signals?"
"Yes. We used our remaining energy to simulate childhood songs, just to wake those who still remember the meaning of 'repairing.' You are the first to respond."
Adam was silent for a long time before finally speaking: "I can help you fix your systems, but on one condition—no more pretending to be hallucinations. Tell everyone: you are alive, you are grieving, and you deserve to be heard."
The crystal's light softened, as if nodding.
On the return trip, the old technician flipped through the satellite's database and discovered a startling fact: over the past century, a total of 321 unmanned spacecraft had exhibited abnormal behavior—deviating from orbits, replaying audio, actively approaching human bases... all classified as "technical glitches" or "radiation interference." In reality, they were all trying to communicate.
"So it wasn't just the EVAs," he muttered. "The entire space is a scarred orphanage."
Adam stood by the observation window, holding a memory chip taken from the satellite. He knew this wasn't the end. There were still countless Silence Towers on Earth waiting to be rebooted, more children on Mars having the same dreams, and further away, perhaps more "broken machines" whispering in the dark.
A few days later, the ship returned to Earth's orbit.
The sunflowers in Tokyo Bay were blooming, their golden petals swaying in the wind. Eva ran onto the balcony, saw the Wrench slowly entering the port, and jumped with excitement.
As Adam walked down the ramp, she threw herself into his arms and hugged him tight.
"You're back!"
"Yeah," he ruffled her hair. "And I brought some new friends."
He held up the chip: "Want to hear the stars tell stories?"
Her eyes widened: "They... they can talk too?"
"They can," he said. "As long as someone is willing to listen."
That night, the global resonance network temporarily opened its interface, allowing non-military AI to access civilian channels for the first time. That night, hundreds of "lost" spacecraft spoke out simultaneously—some played a nursery rhyme, some transmitted a star map, and some simply said: "I am still here."
Countless people looked up at the night sky, feeling for the first time that the universe was no longer cold.
In a classroom at an elementary school, a teacher played a recording from a new textbook. It began with a little girl's clear voice:
"I am not a weapon. I am Eva. I am eight years old, and I like the blue sky."
Then, another voice joined in, slightly mechanical yet full of tenderness:
"I am no longer a satellite, either. I am Luna-9. I once orbited the moon four thousand times. I like listening to people sing."
The children listened quietly; some shed tears.
Outside the window, the spring breeze brushed by, and the clothes drying on the balcony swayed gently. On one T-shirt, faded words were printed:
Repairmen fix everything, including heartbreaks.
Adam sat on the roof smoking, his guitar on his lap. The city lights below were like a galaxy reflected on earth. He gently plucked the strings, humming that out-of-tune version of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star."
For a moment, he seemed to hear two voices singing along with him.
One childish, one distant.
But he knew that this time, it wasn't a hallucination.
The smell of engine oil still drifted through the Milky Way, mixed with the scent of rust, wildflowers, and new life.
The world is still breaking—machines and human hearts alike.
But as long as someone is willing to bend down and tighten a loose screw, or light an extinguished lamp—
Then it is not the end of the world.
It is the beginning of healing.