Doctor Who: The Evangelion Error (Book One)

E6 Part 2: has he lost his mind?

NERV Headquarters - Conference Room Broca.
T-26 Hours, 35 Minutes

"Our preliminary data indicates that it's from the future."

There was a moment of silence as everyone in the room digested Maya's words. She looked down at her papers, her cheeks slightly red, and coughed.

Shinji glanced around the room. Asuka sat a few seats away from him, her arms crossed, her mouth compressed into a thin, angry line. He could see Rei down in the front row, behind a sea of uniformed officers. In the back of the room, Ryoji Kaji -- the thin, lanky man appointed as Asuka's official caretaker -- waved at him cheerfully.

"It being...?" Misato finally asked.

"The second Unit One." Maya waved her hand over the conference room's holoscreen. An image of the Evangelion came up. "We've been calling it Unit 1B for the sake of convenience. It appears to be our Unit One from approximately 32 hours into the future."

"You mean tomorrow night," Misato said.

"Yes, ma'am. Or at least that seems to be the case."

"And we know that because...?"

"Because of the data we've recovered from its internal systems." Maya gestured. A list of files floated up to her hand. "What information we have is fragmentary. Most of 1B's recorders seem to have been damaged in a manner consistent with large-scale electromagnetic interference, to the point that the majority of the data has been lost. We've nonetheless established certain facts."

"Such as?" Misato rubbed her temples.

"At 1228 hours tomorrow, the unit's sensors registered -- err, will register -- a massive shock, equivalent to over six hundred megatons of TNT." Maya pressed her thumb against one of the files. "At 1441, this video is recorded by the Eva's cameras."

A video clip appeared and expanded to the size of a movie screen. At first, Shinji thought he was looking at some kind of desert. Then he noticed that he could see the outline of Mt. Fuji in the distance, as if from the shore of Lake Ashi. There didn't seem to be any water, though. The landscape in front of him was little more than a flat plain of dust and boiling mud. A heavy curtain of ash and steam hung in the air.

The video abruptly cut to another shot. The Evangelion was on the move through the wasteland, the camera jolting with its every step. Another cut. The Eva bent down and pulled something out of the mud. It held up in one hand Unit Two's head. Shinji glanced towards Asuka. She saw him and snorted derisively, shaking her head.

When Shinji looked back at the screen, he found himself looking down into a deep pit. The Evangelion stood at the edge of a vast crater, kilometers wide. With a jolt, he realized that he was looking at the city -- or, at least, where it had been. Fragments of familiar buildings littered the landscape. At the bottom of the crater, what little was left of the Geofront had caved in, exposed to the sky, but filled to the brim with dirt and rubble.

The view shifted as the Evangelion knelt down. It placed Unit Two's head down carefully at the crater's edge. Then everything dissolved into static.

"That's it." Maya closed the video. "At 1742 hours, the unit recorded that the entry plug ejected. That's the last piece of data we've been able to extract."

The room fell silent. After a moment, Lieutenant Hyuga cleared his throat. "Excuse me. So if Unit One -- sorry, I mean, 1B -- is really from tomorrow, what's it doing here?"

"We have no idea." Maya spread her hands. "This situation is completely unprecedented in the history of science. People have talked about time travel in theory before, but no one has ever seen anything like this."