E V A N G E L I O N

L A S T D A Y S

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A R M A G E D D O N

B y G r e g o r y M i l n e

It began like any other day. People leading their busy lives, running to jobs, school, stores. Nothing seemed special or out-of-place for anybody. But on October 1, the year 2001, the world as you know it ended. And like so many have said before, it was our own fault.

It is now 2018, September 28th to be exact, almost seventeen years to the day. I can't tell you exactly what happened, because I wasn't born until four days later. There isn't much in the way of recorded history of the end, because nearly everyone who was there died that day. But the Voice was heard, no matter where on the planet you were.

I'll tell you what I can.

The center of it all was New York City. If you hear the old folks talk about it, they'll tell you it was either ironic, or well deserved. Rush hour traffic was at an all-time high. It was just grid-locked. The streets were crammed with pedestrians (in fact, according to the last satellite broadcast to come out of New York, several drivers had exited their cars and joined the walking ranks). Like I said before: busy people, busy lives, same old, same old.

Now at roughly 6:35, give or take a few, communications to the city ceased. Most people assume now that the power went out. Over the course of the next twenty-odd minutes, nobody knew what was happening in the city limits. What people did know, and we're talking people as far as South America, a blinding light begins to build in the skies over New York. It would have lit up the whole hemisphere, I'm sure.

As the clock neared seven, The Voice came. It has been described by the survivors as telepathic. Everyone on Earth heard it from the inside. It was deep and monotone, that much everyone agrees on. Gerald Pauls (he's a friend of mine who was living in Nevada at the time. He would have been a little younger than I am now.) tells me that you could almost hear pain in The Voice, like sadness or regret. Knowing what I know now, I'd believe it.

"The eyes of the heavens watch and know. This warning is yours. So can salvation be. We shall return."

And with that, the entire Atlantic coastline erupted into a blaze that rose miles in air. It stopped a little more than halfway across the continent. Everything was ash. No remains, no form. Just a flat plain of ashes. And North America wasn't alone. Asia had a similar episode. Most of China is gone. It sad to think of the thousands upon thousands of years of history and culture that died there. Most of the Slavic countries, Northern Europe, all of it is just beaches of ash. South Africa, same scenerio.

It took all of twenty minutes to reduce all of that into nothing but ash and memories in history books.

What came after? Many would have expected chaos and anarchy. But this shook people up beyond that. The Voice resonated deep inside everybody's soul. In fact, for what was probably the first time in our history, the world's population joined together with a common goal. They joined together against a common fear. People didn't know what hit them, and they reacted like any group that was threatened by something they didn't understand. They wanted to defend themselves. They wanted to destroy the threat.

The Voice, whatever it had been, had promised its return.

Mankind put aside its bickering, its quest for power, and pooled together it's resources to create weapons that could be used to stop whatever it was that had come from the skies to try and exterminate us.

A massive military base was erected on the border between Washington and Oregon called DBAY (it was short for defensive-something, but that name lasted about a month and a half). The world's scientists all came together a DBAY and began designing several prototypes. Most were airship designs, some were tank-like. Some designs were simply swiveled cannons. The design that was most accepted by the scientific collective were tall humanoid machines called EVAs. The scientists had developed a system to link the mind of a pilot directly into the artificial nerve centers of the EVAs, thus giving them stronger reflexes, more room for variation in there battle strategies, and in some way, a soul.

To date they have built five of these machines, but have only selected three pilots. This is due mostly to the fragility of the syncronization procedure. Eight test pilots were put into comas or other such-like vegetative states due to the overwhelming input/output going through their heads. Of course the history books won't tell you that. The screening process was extensive. The scientists spent a year or more finding single pilots, just to make sure that the sync would be nearly flawless, and the pilot would be strong enough to handle the mental demands.

The first of the pilots was me.

So now everything is ready, and mankind lies in wait for the return of whatever it was that had arrived from the skies seventeen years ago. Whatever had tried to exterminate us. We wait so that when the time comes, we can defend ourselves.

- Shawn

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Gregory Milne: blues@mortimer.com

NOTES: I wrote this prologue in the first

-person. The rest of the series will be

in the third-person. The prologue just

seemed to work better this way.

As you can tell if you've read this all

the way through, I'm not sticking close

to the source material at all. I've

decided to do a bit a re-do, and a bit of

an Americanization (ironic, since I'm

from Canada). I apologize to any purists,

but I know that couldn't do the original

characters justice, and I figure I'd get

blasted worse for that.

So I hope you all enjoy this semi-new

story, and I hope you'll take the time to

e-mail me with your thoughts.

Thanks, Greg.