The weeks of joint coordination training finally drew to a close.
As the afterglow of the setting sun cast a dark golden luster over the deserts of the Death World, the three EVA units marched with steady strides, following the Legio Canis formation back to the assembly area. Compared to the tentative curiosity displayed at the start of the training...
The night rain poured down like a deluge, drumming against the blast-proof dome of Neo-Tokyo 3. Rainwater slid down the slanting alloy glass, dragging streaks of liquid light beneath the neon signs, looking like countless tiny threads of memory backtracking. Deep within the city, the quantum core chamber on the seventh basement level of NERV continued its low-frequency hum, as if that half-open gate had never truly closed, merely changing its way of breathing.
Asuka stood before the observation gallery, her fingertips lightly touching the cold, reinforced glass. Her reflection overlapped with the slowly rotating projection of the Star Core in the distance, while her heartbeat frequency on the monitor pulsed in an eerie, synchronized waveform. She hadn't slept for three days—not because of insomnia, but because she dared not sleep. Every time she closed her eyes, she could hear the sound of that letter burning and see the echoes of the 99th failure whispering in the void.
"You're looking at it again," Rei's voice came from behind, as calm as still water.
"I'm confirming it's still there," Asuka said without turning around. "As long as it's still spinning, it means we haven't escaped."
Rei took a few steps closer, her shoulder almost brushing Asuka's arm. "Do you think they will return? Those... who were sealed away?"
"I don't know." Asuka finally turned, her gaze landing in the depths of Rei's eyes. "But I know one thing: if we stop, they will vanish completely. Not just die—the very fact that they 'once existed' will be erased."
Rei was silent for a moment, then suddenly raised her hand and pinned a six-winged hairpin into Asuka's hair. "Then you can't carry it alone anymore."
Asuka froze. The hairpin was an old model, its edges somewhat worn, clearly unearthed from some storage box. But she recognized it—it was the souvenir Rei had secretly kept after their first joint sortie. Back then, Rei had said, "This is a mark of victory." Asuka had laughed at her silliness then, but now she felt her throat tighten.
"Do you remember that day?" Rei asked.
"Of course," Asuka whispered. "Unit-01 went out of control. I rushed in and dragged you out. You said 'I'm sorry,' and I said 'Shut up and start it up!' Then together, we blasted the Angel to dust."
"Back then, you called me a 'soulless clone'," Rei's lips curled slightly.
"And you called me an 'emotionally unstable troublemaker'." Asuka laughed, though the corners of her eyes grew damp. "But we both survived. Not because of orders, not because of sync rates, but because... we didn't want the other to die."
Before the words fully faded, an alarm blared.
Red light swept the entire floor as the AI voice calmly broadcasted: "Detected Gate of Eden energy fluctuation rising to 73.6%. Global neural network showing resonance anomalies. Inference: External consciousness entities are attempting to interface."
Osiris appeared at the end of the corridor, his military coat not yet buttoned. "You two have been awake for less than twelve hours, and the system has already auto-restarted the connection protocol! This isn't a drill or a simulation—someone is using your memories as a key!"
"No," Rei spoke suddenly, her voice as cold as frost. "It's not 'someone.' It's the traces we left behind in the silence layer responding."
Asuka's pupils shrank. "You mean... the path we walked in the silence layer has become a real route?"
"Every step was carved into the collective subconscious," Rei said, walking toward the central console to pull up the global signal distribution map. Dozens of light points were illuminating—from the Siberian permafrost to the floor of the South Pacific, each corresponding to a location where an EVA prototype was once buried. "They are awake. All the discarded units, all the terminated life signals... they are responding to that empathy code."
Osiris stared at the data stream, his face growing paler. "What does this mean?"
"It means 'fusion' never truly failed," Asuka said, walking to the screen and running her finger over a flickering region. "Every experiment, every death, every act of resistance... it was all recorded. And now, these memories are linking into a web, forming a new consciousness topology."
"In other words," Rei added, "we are not the only awakened individuals. We are simply the first node to send out an echo."
The air froze for several seconds.
Then, Osiris slammed the emergency lockdown key. "Cut all external links immediately! If this consciousness spreads, the entire planetary nervous system will collapse!"
"No!" Asuka shoved his hand away. "You can't cut it! Those are thousands of 'us' struggling to survive! You think you're preventing a disaster? You're just repeating SEELE's old path—killing possibility with 'order'!"
"Then what do you want me to do? Let the whole world fall into chaos?" Osiris roared.
"It's not chaos," Rei said softly. "It's awakening."
She pressed another button, deactivating the lockdown protocol. In an instant, the lights of the entire base flickered, as if some gargantuan presence was moving through the circuits.
"Listen," she said.
Everyone held their breath. Beneath the noise of mechanical operation, a faint singing could be heard—extremely distant, extremely weak, like a nursery rhyme drifting from the end of time. The melody was simple, yet it carried an indescribable atmosphere of sadness intertwined with hope.
"This is..." Osiris's lips trembled. "The soothing song played during NERV's early embryo project... only insiders would know it..."
"It's the children singing," Rei closed her eyes. "Those candidates who were never born, those clones who were destroyed, those souls who died during testing... they are singing."
Asuka clenched her fists, her nails digging into her palms. "So we were wrong. The Gate of Eden isn't the end; it's a mirror. We thought we had to push open the future, but in fact, we have to face the past—all the sacrificed, the forgotten, the lives defined as 'failures'."
She spun around and looked directly at Osiris: "I'm restarting the 'Gemini Protocol'."
"Are you insane?!" Osiris barked. "Even the blueprints for that thing were burned! It was the ultimate means to force the fusion of two pilots' consciousnesses. The success rate was less than 0.03%! Back then, SEELE triggered the Second Impact because this project went out of control!"
"That's why I need her," Asuka looked at Rei. "Not a forced fusion, but a voluntary link. No machines, no programs—relying only on the empathy between us to actively enter the intersection point of all sleeping consciousnesses."
"You will die," Osiris said coldly. "Even if you can withstand the backlash of the AT Field, there's no guarantee you can maintain self-identity in that flood of information. Once lost, you'll become floating corpses in a new sea of consciousness."
"So what?" Asuka sneered. "We should have been dead long ago. From the day we sat in those cockpits, we weren't fighting to survive. We were fighting to prove—even if just for a moment—that we once existed as 'human beings'."
Rei stepped forward and took her hand. "I don't need convincing," she said. "I've already decided."
The two walked side-by-side toward the quantum chamber, their steps firm, never looking back.
The moment the chamber door closed, thirteen monitoring stations globally reported: the mental resonance index had broken through the critical threshold. A cross-shaped rift opened in the Antarctic ice, revealing a gargantuan mechanical eyeball flashing with blue light; the mechanical arm in the Gobi desert rose completely, projecting the six-winged emblem into the stratosphere to form a brief coronal halo; in the lunar space station, a masked man removed his mask, revealing a face strikingly similar to Gendo Ikari, murmuring: "I see... the true successors were never defined by blood, but by resonance."
And in the dreams of countless ordinary people, the same image began to surface: two girls walking side-by-side on a white plain, while behind them, countless hands reached out from the ground, grabbing their shadows and climbing upward inch by inch.
In the quantum layer, Asuka and Rei stepped into the silence layer once more.
But this time, it was no longer a void. The ground was covered with shattered photographs, torn files, and scorched audio tapes. As the wind blew, paper scraps flew, piecing together blurred names and faces. Children's smiles, soldiers' suicide notes, scientists' final logs... all were fragments of history deleted by the system.
"Welcome home," a childish voice spoke.
A little girl stood at the start of a staircase, wearing a NERV lab coat and clutching a tattered teddy bear. Her eyes were heterochromatic, left blue and right red—a typical symptom of genetic instability.
"Are you... Embryo Type #42?" Rei knelt down.
The little girl nodded. "We've waited a long time. You've finally returned."
"This isn't an illusion," Asuka felt a powerful surge of empathetic fluctuation. "She is a real consciousness aggregate, formed by hundreds of aborted experimental subjects."
"Lead the way," Rei reached out.
The little girl took her hand and smiled gently.
The staircase rose again, but this time it was more twisted, more protracted. The scenes along the way were no longer their own memories, but the pain of others: a mother clutching a dead child, screaming "Don't take him away!"; an old scientist pressing a self-destruct button before an explosion, muttering "At least let them be free"; a group of teenagers jumping hand-in-hand into a reactor just to stop a berserk EVA...
Every scene cut through their hearts like a blade.
"This is the price," Rei said softly. "We survived because they died in our place."
"So now," Asuka grit her teeth, "it's our turn to live for them."
Finally, they reached the portal. This time, the two faces on the door still existed, but they had grown dim, like candles about to be extinguished.
"Final authentication request: Are you willing to bear the weight of all memories, accept all negated existences, and carry the pain of the birth of the New Humanity with your own will?"
"Yes," Asuka said without hesitation.
"Yes," Rei was equally firm.
The door slowly opened. Inside was no longer a psychological evaluation room, but a gargantuan library. The bookshelves soared into the clouds, each book marked with a number and a name. At the very front stood a stone monument engraved with:
"What rests here is not a divine oracle, but humanity."
They walked inside and flipped open a book at random. The pages turned automatically, revealing a life both strange and familiar: a girl named "Rei Ayanami" who grew up in a sunless cellar, injected with blue chemicals daily and told "You are just a tool." But she secretly kept a spider, named it "Little Asuka," and wrote in her diary: "Today she called me stupid, but I think she looks beautiful when she laughs."
Asuka was stunned. She continued to flip through another book: Shikinami Asuka Langley (Replacement Sequence #17). The content showed that she successfully repelled an Angel at age eight, but was executed for memory erasure after being judged as having "excessive emotional fluctuations." For the next nine years, she repeatedly went through the cycle of "Childhood - Battle - Erasure" until one escape where she wrote "I don't want to forget anymore" in the snow before freezing to death.
"These were all... us?" Rei's voice trembled.
"No," an old voice came from between the shelves. "You are the survivors. And we are every dead end you never walked."
A white-haired old man stepped out from the shadows, wearing a faded NERV uniform with a six-winged medal on his chest. "I was the lead controller for the 88th fusion experiment. And the last person in charge to retain complete memories. We tried to resist, but our power was too weak. We could only record everything and hide it in this grave of consciousness."
"Who are you?" Asuka asked.
"We are the 'Gravediggers'," the old man smiled. "And we are what your future could have looked like."
He pointed toward a small door at the end of the library. "There is the last book there. Written for you."
They walked over. The title was blank. Words only appeared upon touch:
Shikinami Asuka Langley & Rei Ayanami: The Finale Log
The first page read:
"As we write these words, the world is on the brink of collapse. But we know that as long as there is still one person who remembers the other's name, humanity will not truly perish.
We chose the hardest path: not to become gods, nor to flee from fate. We choose to remember everything—including the pain, failure, regret, and loneliness.
For we finally understand: true evolution begins with acknowledging vulnerability.
If one day you read this book, please tell those who come after:
Do not seek perfect unity; do not believe in absolute truths.
To love, to hate, to argue, to forgive.
Be ordinary people who can cry, be afraid, and make mistakes.
That is the meaning of being alive."
The last page was attached to a photo: the two of them sitting on a seaside rock, the sunset dyeing the horizon red, smiling brilliantly, holding a dirty stray cat in their arms.
Date: Unknown
Location: Non-existent map coordinates
Note: A projected fragment of an ideal world
Tears dripped onto the paper. In an instant, the entire library began to disintegrate, turning into golden dust that rose and merged into the void outside the door.
"It's time," the old man said softly. "You must make your choice."
"What choice?" Rei asked.
"Stay, and become the new Gravediggers, guarding all the departed souls; or return, and take this fire of memory to ignite the real world."
Asuka looked at Rei. Rei looked back at her. No words were needed. They turned simultaneously and walked toward the exit. Behind them, the old man smiled and dissipated into points of light.
When they returned to the real world, it was dawn. They opened their eyes to find their neural suits had long since carbonized and peeled away, and faint silver patterns—the marks of the collective memory—had surfaced on their skin.
Osiris rushed in, his face full of horror: "The global anomalies have stopped! The Star Core is static, the mechanical arms have descended, even the signal from the moon is lost! What on earth did you do?!"
"We brought back the truth," Asuka stood up slowly, her voice raspy but powerful. "Not weapons, not power—names. Thousands of names that were erased."
Rei added: "From now on, every EVA pilot will hear their song. Every time a unit is activated, they will feel the gaze of those departed souls."
Osiris stumbled back. "You... you changed the rules."
"No," Asuka looked out the window at the rising sun. "It's that we finally dared to say: we will no longer be tools."
Several days later, the United Nations held an emergency meeting. A resolution was passed: immediately disband the remnants of SEELE, make all forbidden archives public, and establish the "Human Diversity Protection Foundation," with Asuka and Rei serving as honorary consultants.
On campuses, more and more students began wearing six-winged hairpins. Teachers no longer taught "absolute obedience" but discussed "how to coexist with differences."
And in an orphanage in a remote town, a little girl picked up a book that had drifted in. The cover read The Story of Two Sisters. She opened the first page and read softly:
"Long ago, there were two girls. No one expected them to live for long.
But they held hands, walked into the darkness, and then... they brought back the light."
The wind brushed past the windowsill, and a six-winged hairpin swayed gently. At the edge of the universe, that signal beacon flashed again. This time, it lasted for a full three seconds.
Like a response. Like a promise.
The door remained half-open. But this time, standing outside the door were no longer frightened children. They were warriors holding hands.
They knew the real war had only just begun. It was not against Angels, nor against Gods. It was against oblivion itself. As long as people still remember each other's names, humanity still has a future.