Aeon Natum Engel

by EarthScorpion

That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die. Well, now it is the Strange Aeon, and the undying live again. The Evangelion Units may be able to face the Herald-entities, but what of the dangers within? Eva/Cthulhutech. Now complete; see Aeon Entelechy Evangelion for the rewrite.

12. Chapter 10: What Must be Done to Win?

Chapter 10

What Must be Done to Win?

~'/|\'~

Tokita, the disgraced Chief Engineer of the similarly disgraced Project Daeva sat slumped in his chair, fingers tapping against his front teeth.

Of course, this wasn't going to be his office for much longer. When the mighty fell, they fell hard. Project Daeva was being vivisected before his eyes. The Engel Project had already leapt for most of his best arcanotechnicians, and other groups were going for the rest. He had just had to fill in the transfer form for his best arcanobiologist to Project Amunet, that bunch of fucking necromancers who dressed their actions up as arcane applied physics, and he had had just about enough. They were going to be moving him out tomorrow, to "house custody", while the Registered Technology Enforcement division of the Federal Security Bureau asked him very pointed questions and tried to find out as much as they could about the Type-S

Yes, he hadn't registered with the FSB for the use of the extradimensional organism. That was sort of the point of a secret weapons project. He had received permission from his superiors from the Nay; permission which had vanished all too quickly after the Chicago-2 fiasco. So what? Project Evangelion hadn't registered whatever the hell those things were, and the Engel Project,he knew, normally only went after permission after the first field tests.

But they were Ashcroft groups.

The Ashcroft Foundation. That mass which switched between cancer and symbiote at its own will. It had the thrice-damned monopoly on the D-Engine and the A-Pod, which mean it controlled all modern power generation. The last nuclear fission plants had been shut down in between the First and Second Arcanotech Wars, hanging on slightly longer than the coal plants, which even now mouldered outside of the arcologies, often home to small communities of Rainers, those barely registered, barely supervised transients who dwelt outside of the safety of proper habitation. The Foundation had drained the countries in the New United Nations dry, the Nazzadi engineer had heard, and forced the issue of the Second Cold War by wrecking the economies of the gas-and-oil-dependent states with the D-Engine, then the old manufacturing economies of the East with the nanofactory. From what Tokita had learnt of pre-AW1 history, the recession which had resulted from the mass unemployment and government defaults had been localised to the countries who hadn't accepted in the Foundation, bartering their wealth for massive infrastructure projects and the insidious influence of the Ashcroft Advisers.

Because, after all, everyone knew that the best people to "advise" (and by advise, it was more like "issue ultimatums to") a government were the appointed, unelected representatives of a massive transnational corporation that didn't even issue shares and was the sixth largest economy in the world in 2050. Sure.

And so it came to the modern day, where the NEG Global Debt to the Ashcroft Foundation was greater than Global GDP. But they were kind creditors, weren't they. They didn't call in the debts, and they charged a negative rate of interest. All they asked for was near total autonomy from the practical rule of law, entire areas of major arcologies under their control where they enforced control, not the NEG (Tokita thought of the London-2 Geodome, of its near identical twin, the Tokyo-3 Geofront, and of the C2 Headquarters, which was practically an arcology in its own right), and nearly unlimited influence over government figures.

It was enough to make you vomit.

And so their Projects, with excellent salaries, the best medical care, both mental and physical, in the world, had come and poached almost all of the staff he had so carefully built up. Oddly enough, none of them had gone to Project Evangelion. No, those bastards had just swooped in and taken the plans for the mD/D Hybrid Engine from the Navy, in return for some unspecified aid in the future. The mD/D Hybrid Engine; superior even to the innovation of the Type-S. It improved on the standard D-Engine, still basically the same device which Czeny had designed using the theory calculated by Ashcroft and Yi, notably, allowing a distributed grid without the whole issue of space-time rips, which usually occurred when too many D-Rifts were bought into close proximity. And now it was going to vanish into Project Evangelion, into the Project which had destroyed the people who had actually invented it.

Oh yes.

Tokita was quite sure that everything that had happened was all the fault of Project Evangelion. It wasn't a coincidence, after all, that their Mass Production Evangelion, the only such model they had built in all the time that they'd had, was present for the unveiling of the Araska. It wasn't a coincidence that a Herald had attacked just in time for them to show off in front of all of the top brass that they were the superior model, in a way that left them almost completely undamaged while the C2 Fleet was wrecked.

And it certainly wasn't a coincidence that the Type-S went rampant exactly as the Evangelion approached it.

It was probably their Director of Research and Development, the disgraced engineer pondered. She had tried to sabotage them via the medium of opinion, in the demonstration where she kept on claiming, without proof, that the Araska was unsafe. And, surprise surprise, it went wrong just as she had predicted. Suspiciously like she had predicted. She had probably taken out the nanites infused into the flesh of the Type-S, the ones that kept the organism under control, probably by introducing a flaw into the computer code that managed the distributed network, given the way that the runaway growth had proceeded. The Evangelion Director of Operations probably wasn't involved, though, he thought; too stupid and rash for such subtlety. It was sensible to keep track of the staff of your rivals, and her records clearly showed why Evangelion wanted someone like her. She was practically made for the job.

Tokita suddenly knew that there was someone else in the room, from the way that the acoustics of his breathing shifted.

He looked up.

A women stared back at him, eyes boring deep into him. She tilted her head slightly, and spoke;

"I believe, Tokita, that you would like both a talk and a new job."

He stared at the woman blankly, hand groping under his desk for the panic button.

"Who are you? What are you doing here?"

The woman's expression did not change. "You are bitter about the loss of your Project, your humiliation by Project Evangelion and the shame of having released Shoggoths into the wild. Funding will be provided in return for your sole allegiance and your servitude to the maintenance of control."

He found the button and pressed it.

Nothing happened.

Red smiled broadly, and took a step towards the terrified engineer.

~'/|\'~

"You know, I would have said a while ago that you're going a bit far," said Toja, idly.

Ken shrugged. "What changed?"

"Now I know you are. Way too far."

"Why?"

Toja sighed. "Use your brain, Ken. I know you have one. She's an Evangelion pilot. You're taking pictures of her and selling them off. At some point, someone is going to catch you with your camera, and if you're very lucky, it will just be her. If you're not... well, do you want to have another chat with the Foundation, or worse with the FSB or OIS. Or Hikary, if she finds out about those pictures you got in the changing rooms."

"It's fine. I locked the files for no-sharing. They won't even be able to transfer them from their PCPUs without effort."

"Listen. You're being really stupid. Do you want to be expelled or something, or worse? Give it up."

"Oh, don't worry," said Ken, airily. "I'm not taking pictures any more. I'm just using stills from," he dropped his voice, "the security cameras around school. You know, the low sec ones that're really old; not the newer ones. They won't be able to trace me."

The Nazzadi's jaw dropped. "You're a moron. I want nothing more to do with this. I know nothing of this. Right, maybe before the punching incident I'd have helped you, but after the OIS thing... I never want to go near them again. I still have nightmares from being in the room, with them asking all those questions." His voice dropped. "Almost as bad as the red glow from that thing. No fucking way ever again."

Ken's eyes darted around. "Oh, shit. Damn, I didn't realise that. Yes, I'm stopping it right now." He paused. "Oh god."

There was a brief silence.

"Out of curiosity, how much have you made?" asked Toja, his voice purposefully innocent.

Ken pulled up a document on his wrist PCPU, datafiles streaming across his glasses as he scrolled down. "Almost one hundred T-notes. Yeah, it was good." There was a moment of breathless silence. "Toja."

"Yes?"

"The objection would surely only be to pictures of her, you know, like real pictures..."

The boy narrowed his red eyes. "Maybe. What are you getting at?"

"There wouldn't be any objections if we just used the pre-existing images, took some pictures around the school, and then edited in the shots of her, adjusting for lighting and stuff, would there?"

The silence extended.

"Yes." Toja rolled his eyes. "Yes, there would be. Just give it up."

Ken made a frustrated noise. "Fine."

~'/|\'~

Timana, the head engineer of the team assigned to Unit 01, looked up at the knock on his door.

"Come in," he called out, without looking up from the model of the Evangelion that floated before his eyes. He pulled his fingers apart, magnifying the join where the RA-09 plate meshed with RA-10, seeing if the issue with the carapace-dermal interface had been fixed.

There was a cough from in front of him. He looked up.

"Oh, it's you, Lieutenant Ibuki." He flapped a hand over the desk. "Please, have a seat. I'll just be a few minutes."

And... yes, it's bonded properly this time. The issue with the stresses from the missile packs shouldn't arise.

He shrunk the projection back down, down to a 28mm figurine on his desk, then took off the AR glasses, massaging the bridge of his nose.

"Sorry to leave you waiting," he told the young woman. "I was just checking that we'd resolved the problem with the new Type-C armour."

"And have you?" asked Maya.

The man nodded. "Yes. It wasn't vital, but if the problem hadn't been fixed, then there was an outside chance that firing those new missile packs that the Type-C added might cause slippage between the dermal layer of the ACXB organism and the the ceramic plates."

"Well, that is good news," she replied, then hesitated. "What do the engineering teams think of the Type-C?" Maya asked.

"In all honesty, it's a slight improvement for us. The Type-B is very close to the Type-C anyway; the Zero Zero team are much more thrilled with us, as they'd been operating with a hybrid Type-A/Type-B before this refit. Really the only changes are slightly better modularity, those M-Packs on the shoulders, and thicker chest armour."

She cocked her head. "Really? They didn't replace the integral weapons with those installed on the MP Eva?"

"No, Lieutenant." The man sighed. "Don't get me started on Unit 02. The Berlin-2 team have transferred over here fine, and they're... well sort of professionally annoyed at what happened. They've removed the Plasmathrower prototype completely and installed one of the Lightning Cannons that Unit 01 uses. It's malfunctioned twice in battlefield conditions, despite good performance in the lab. Miniaturisation issues, they say. They had to refit the entire arm, including reducing the local immunosuppressants to allow tissue regrowth, to repair the damage from the exploding prototype." The Nazzadi shuddered. "And they've had to replace several armour plates due to XB contamination. Is there something about the presence of the Third Child which gets the Units contaminated by extra-dimensional entities?" he asked, in an aggrieved tone.

Maya blushed slightly. "I don't think it's his fault," she protested. "It's just that the Heralds are biological nightmares." She shook her head. "How many spares do we have for each of the Units, anyway?"

Timana made a frustrated noise. "It's not as bad as it was just after Mot," he began, "but we only have one full set of spares for each Evangelion. Both Zero Zero and Zero One are right on the edge; we have the Type-C plus one full set, and that's all. The Type-B was pretty much too contaminated to use again, even though it's cross-compatible. Did I mention that one set of Zero One's armour was undergoing abiogenesis!" he added, in an exasperated tone.

"Yes, you did, Timana," Maya answered. "At the last meeting. But only one full set? That's not good."

"Quite. The Heralds are attacking faster than we can built fresh replacements. We're suffering from a lack of economies of scale, basically. We have to get them made in Navy Capital-Grade nanofactories, and we're only scheduled so much time. If we had our own plant, we could handle it, but there's no way," the man with a voice of authority, "that we could get a dedicated plant. They're needed for the Navy; they can lay a frigate backbone down in the time it takes for us to make a new breastplate." He shook his head. "From what I've heard, the Zero Two team are better off; they have at least three breastplate sections, which we could... that's Zero Zero and us 'we', by the way... can use, now that Zero Zero and Zero One have been upgraded to use the Type-C armour. But even they're suffering from a lack of left-arm sections, due to the fact that they've had to scrap the PP1-P, which had been integrated"

Maya nodded. "Thank you," she said. "I'll let you get back to what you were doing; I just was asked to get a personal evaluation of the states of the Units," she added, as she left.

The Evangelion Project had been chronically underfunded since before she had been transferred here by the Foundation, the young woman thought as she walked back through the hallways. A sudden new flood of funding had come after they had killed that first Herald, but money could not buy time. That was the problem they kept up running up against, and the young woman knew that Dr Akagi had been keeping back something about the armour since coming back from Chicago-2. The Director of Research and Development had been the one who had personally told her to get a first hand account from the Chief Engineer of the Zero One team, even when she had all his reports in front of her, accessible with the wave of a hand.

She shrugged, as she entered the changing room adjacent to the sterile area which the detailed Magi work was done. Oh, sure, the supercomputers could be operated from conventional AR panels and even antique keyboards, but that wasn't optimal for the really high-level analysis work.

She began to unfasten her uniform, the loose slacks the Magi technicians wore on days they knew they would have to do a dive.

The interface between the human brain and the horrifically complicated unison of the organic, the arcane and the machine that was the Magi could not be properly utilised if there was another barrier between them. Inside the Magi, the foibles of the human mind, its inability to comprehend higher dimensional objects, its tendency to get confused by a mere hypercube; all those were washed away by the Magi. The mind-machine interface which the Magi used was another spin-off from the Evangelion Project, a parallel evolution to the Engel Synthesis Interface implanted into the central nervous system of every single Engel pilot on the planet. With it, the brain was no longer restricted to its component neurons; tasks could be instead be performed by the Magi.

Maya removed the grafted synthflesh from her scalp, exposing the sub-dermal interface layer below. With great care, the synthflesh and the hair that grew from the engineered organism was placed in her storage facility. She winced slightly as she ran her hands over the ceramic composite that was bonded directly to her skull, warmed to body temperature yet so alien in feel to flesh. Underneath the hard outer layer, where the top of her skull should have been, lay layers of microelectronics, cortical jacks hanging down into her brain tissue like silver icicles.

In the initial trials, the brain had even delegated autonomous functions to the more efficient Magi. Dr Akagi's mother had almost died in the first trials; other technicians had. The Etemennigur defence system maintained a necessary level of separation between the technician and the Magi, but the alien view of reality (or, perhaps, the more accurate view) when connected to the supercomputer trio took its toll. Extracted its price. Claimed its victims.

Magi technicians burned out fast, at a rate comparable to that of front-line Engel pilots.

Maya winced as she stepped into the cleanser, grabbing the handles at the sides. She really hated this part, she really did. All her hair stood on end, as a static charge built. She kept her eyes closed, even though the permanent contacts protected them, and waited, as the machine stripped away her top layer of skin. The sudden blast of cold air on the newly revealed epidermis told her that it was complete, even as the faint scent of ozone filled her nostrils.

The woman groped in front of her for the immersion suit (really a glorified name for a short wetsuit), not opening her eyes until she had found it. The donning of this garment was nothing more than ritual by now. Without prompting, she went into the newly opened clean room, and lay down in the coffin-like vat of clear fluid, thick and viscous.

Oxygen mask... check. Test function... and there's the hiss, good.

"Breather is fine from this end," she announced into the mask.

"Oxygen supply reads green from this end," Makota announced from the monitoring facility, on the other side of the black glass which filled one side of the room, a discontinuity in this place of sterile whiteness. "Releasing the Demon."

The Demon was technically the DMIN, the Direct Magi Interface Node. But as Makota watched Maya fasten the helmet, the thick cable snaking out from the back; one end into the Magi, the other splitting into the tendrils which fed into her brain, he really felt that the nickname was more apt. The Nazzadi was not qualified to operate the Magi in this way, and he preferred to keep it like this. Part of it was that he would really rather not undergo surgery which removed notable amounts of the skull, leaving a hole in it like a newborn infant's, covering the hole with ceramics, and sticking two-way probes into his brain. But he also guessed that it was something cultural. Humans, homo sapiens sapiens would do things to themselves that people like him, homo sapiens nazzadi would not consider.

It probably came from not having been created as a weapon of war by alien fungoid insectoids to wipe out your base genetic material.

And so he watched the neural feed, looking for anything that would mean that he would have to pull the plug. Meanwhile, below, the woman's limbs twitched as Maya began swimming through the true virtual reality which the Magi generated, trying to fit together the data gathered on Yam into the models based on the observations of the previous Heralds.

Lal had told him something, he remembered, suddenly, with a pang of guilt. He hadn't thought of Lal in a while, ever since the man's nervous breakdown. Gurpreet had mentioned that he was out of the Clinic, now, away from the Magi. Now, what had he said?

Oh yes.

"I think," he had said, explaining what the Magi felt like, "and my thoughts cross the barrier into the synapses of the machine, just as the good doctor," and that had been said with heavy sarcasm and an ironic twist of the neck, Makota thought, "intended. But what I cannot shake, and what hints at things to come, is that thoughts cross back. In my dreams, the sensibility of the machine invades the periphery of my consciousness: dark, rigid, cold, alien. Evolution is at work here, but just what is evolving remains to be seen."

No, Makota did not trust the Magi at all. They were a tool, but a tool which was potentially dangerous to its users must be watched. But then again, so much of what the Evangelion Project did was like that. He hadn't expected to encounter this when he had accepted the promotion, recruited from among the arcanotechnicians of the New Earth Army to the Ashcroft Foundation. Something inside him screamed that some sacrifices were too great, that you shouldn't play around with peoples' brains, that it would be better to let the Migou win and wipe out the collective human subspecies than lose everything that made us different from them.

The Migou made their mecha from an unholy hybrid of machine and organism, transplanted brains from organism to organism, made decisions based purely upon their alien logic rather than based on any care for their men. They were alien monstrosities, utterly inhuman, but intelligent; more intelligent than mankind, in many ways. Cold, methodical and precise.

What became difficult at times was distinguishing any single thing that they did which the New Earth Government would not go.

Such thoughts Makota kept to himself. If he expressed them out loud, when employed by such a sensitive project, he'd probably be disappeared by the OIS or the Ashcroft Foundation. If anything reappeared; well, it certainly wouldn't be unmodified, possessing all the same memories and beliefs.

And the fact that he could think those thoughts was the only proof he had that something akin to that had not already happened him already. And technically all it meant that the hypothetical people building his memories were smart.

~'/|\'~

Second Lieutenant Asuka Langley Soryu, designated pilot of Evangelion Unit 02, Slayer of a Herald was being bored to the point of insanity by the inanity of the babble of teenagers.

Gods, they're just so stupid.

And, in a related and somewhat more direct fashion, she was also being annoyed to the point of violence by the gratuitous amount of junk letters and messages to her PCPU that they were sending her. Not only was she having to run a tight spam filter on the hand-held device, the idiots were resorting to meatspace spam, clogging up her assigned locker with paper jammed into every corner. An additional aggravation was that they weren't even bothering to hand-write the letters; they'd just chosen a personalised "Hand-Written" font and printed them out. There was such a thing as effort after all.

And, on top of all that, she was being forced to sit through basic ASCIET classes; not even undergraduate stuff. The stupidity of most of the human population amazed her, sometimes. Well, a lot of the time. Pretty much always, come to think about it.

Some people might call her intolerant of others, and perhaps suggest that she might consider lowering her standards. She would immediately dismiss them as willing to settle for less, and suspect that they had anti-intellectualist tendencies.

Of course, she was not about to let that show. If they were going to make sure that she sat her ASCIETs, even if she already had a better qualification, so that she would mingle with others and undergo the mandatory continually assessed socialisation testing, then she was going to do the best that she could.

Because if she didn't, they would probably be sarcastic at her and suggest that she failed at normal human interaction.

And she wouldn't have that. Couldn't have that.

She had been placed in the same class as the other two Children. The presence of the Third Child, Shinji, was annoying her, especially since she was forced to live under the same roof as him. She didn't particularly like him, and she was fairly sure that the feeling was mutual. Her queries to why she was staying with Misato and him had been brushed aside when they told her that any Children not resident in London-2 would be staying there, due to 'security reasons'. Nevertheless, at least he understood somewhat life as an Evangelion pilot was like, despite his inexperience, unlike the rest of the masses at the Academy.

Which bought her neatly onto the subject of the First Child, Rei Ayanami.

You can see just from looking at her that she is not a brand new pilot.

Of course, the fact that she's the First Child, while I'm only the Second, might also indicate that she has been doing it longer.

Asuka mentally rolled her eyes at that comment, and tuned back into the conversation.

"... and, yeah, it really stunk!" said a blond (rather plump, if the athletic Asuka would say so) girl, a thin pair of AR glasses perched on her nose.

"I know exactly what you mean!" replied another one, who would have been described as 'mousy' were it not for her coal black skin and red eyes.

"But you got the results, yes?"

"I'm sorry," interjected Asuka, politely despite the boredom she was suffering, "but do you know where the First Child... that is, Rei, is?"

She received shrugs all around.

"No-one really... knows what she does or where she is," the blond one said, picking her words carefully. "She's... odd."

"Even for a White. There's something about her that sets your teeth on edge," added another girl, with streaks of blue in her hair. "Like she's watching you. Really really watching you."

"There's this way that she can give you her full attention," muttered the Nazzadi.

Asuka frowned at that last comment.

"Normally, you see, when someone's talking to you, they're also thinking of what they're going to do next, whether there's any good food for lunch, whether they'll be able to get some games in this evening. You know, thinking stuff," the girl continued, softly. "She doesn't. She looks at you, and she's thinking of you. It's like..." she wrung her hands together, "help me out here."

"Like when your father caught you doing something where you were really small, and he would glare at you even before he'd entered the room where you'd broken something because he'd heard the smash, only you didn't know that because you were like five or something," the blue-haired girl whispered, body instinctively curling up in the memory.

"My dad never did that," said the plump blond one. "That was always my mum's role."

There was a subtle change in the air.

"... but the principle remains the same," she continued, hurriedly. "It's a feeling of shame and guilt, as if she disapproves of you interrupting her time and you should go and find something better to go do. It's the same sort of feeling that..."

"What are you lot talking about?" asked Hikary from over their shoulders, a subtle tone of menace in her voice.

"... uh, nothing, Hikary," she continued almost seamlessly, with only the implication that the individual who she had about to mention had somehow appeared (with near perfect comic timing) behind her. "Asuka here was just asking if we knew where Rei Ayanami was."

"And you were going to tell her, were you?" the amlati continued, in the same tone of voice.

"No, because we don't know where she is," answered the Nazzadi, muscled tensed. Asuka found this somewhat perplexing; the class representatives on TV seemed to be studious, slightly mocked teachers pets, not the figure of fear that the slight xenomix with her pigtails seemed to be.

"And you weren't 'spreading rumours about a fellow classmate', were you?" continued the grey-skinned girl.

"Of course not," the other girls chorused.

Hikary smiled wide. "Good. Just as well, really. Come on, Asuka. I'll show you where she is most lunchtimes."

As the German got up to leave, "Have fun with the Tyrant," was whispered by one of the other girls, in a tone so soft that Asuka couldn't recognise which one it was.

They walked down the corridors for a while, in silence.

"I have to say," Asuka said, a smile creeping up her face, "I was rather impressed by that."

"People just need to be reminded that there are certain standards to be followed," Hikary replied. She sighed. "Look, whatever they told you about Rei, it's not really true. She's just not a people person."

"You know her?" Asuka queried. If the amlati girl was friends with the sidoci, it would both be an easy pre-existing friends network, and useful.

"No. No-one really does, but you pick things up when you've been class representative for seven years."

"Seven years." Asuka was surprised by that. The other girls hadn't seemed to like Hikary, but she had to be popular to keep on being re-elected. "That's pretty impressive."

The other girl shrugged. "I get good grades and I can organise things, unlike most of the class." She smiled faintly. "And I'm the class champion of DoEA III, although that's not really the right criterion to be selecting people for a position of authority."

"DoEA III?" The red-haired girl frowned. "Oh yes, that PC game."

"The design team graduated from this Academy. They use us as beta testers and balance for patches, and they made it an interclass tournament. We've held the record ever since III came out, and we held it for II, as well." Hikary cocked her head. "You play?"

"Nah," she shrugged. "I'm a console gamer; Syzygy 2. Fighting games are just better."

"You're wrong, you know," the other girl responded, "but we'll just have to let it slip." She paused. "What were we talking about before?"

"You were telling me things about Rei Ayanami."

"Oh yes." The grey-skinned girl sighed. "Yes, it's not her fault. Some of us xenomixes are just born as sidoci; about 1%, as I recall. They're always a bit strange. Well, she's a bit stranger than most," she admitted. "She's been here all through, but we really don't know anything about her. The L2 Representative is the one who visits her guardian-teacher conferences, and we haven;t seen any other family," and then she gave a somewhat bitter laugh, rather unlike her normal demeanour, "although, since this is an Ashcroft Academy, it's not as if people who've lost parents are uncommon."

Asuka's eyes widened. Two questions were due to be asked, and she asked the one she thought was more important. "Wait? She's related to Shinji?"

Hikary frowned. "I've been trying to work that out myself. There's something about the jawline that's common to both of them, but if you look closely, past the fact that she's a sidoci, and you can see that she's doesn't have exclusively Asian features. There's something about the eyes. But, logically, if they're related, they'd have different mothers. A Nazzadi built from European genestock, probably, or maybe a second generation mix between European and Asian genestock."

The Migou had not build the Nazzadi fleet from scratch; the black-skinned, red-eyed constructs had been based on samples of human genetic material. What was fascinating for Nazzadi genealogists was the fact that the fungi from Yuggoth had even maintained a high degree of continuity between gene sources, to keep their mass produced army realistically diverse. There were genetic testing services which tracked the area where the sample biological material had come from. There had even been cases where the people taken had proven to be recent, and there were living homo sapiens sapiens relatives; where the truth of what had happened to Great Uncle Jim-Bob, who disappeared from his car late one night, finally came out. It was still infrequent enough that it made the local news, but it had a small-but-noticeable effect on human-Nazzadi relations, as a sharp reminder that the two branches of humanity were so very close.

"But I've seen pictures of the Representative," pointed out Asuka, "and he doesn't really look much like either of them."

"Shinji has his eyes," stated Hikary. "You see it sometimes, if he raises an eyebrow. It completely shifts his face."

That in turn caused one of Asuka's eyebrows to raise. "You've been "seeing" that idiot's eyes," she stated, somewhat in disdain of the other girl's bad taste.

Hikary shook her head. "No. He's nice enough, when he's not having time absent... I hope you don't intend to get beaten up in those things..."

"I'm better than he is," the red-haired girl stated.

"... but he's not that attractive. For one, he's built like a stick, no muscle anywhere. I bet he forgets to feed himself; he looks like the sort."

There was an odd look in Hikary's eyes as she said that.

"How far is this place anyway?" declared Asuka. "Does she really trek all the way over here in all her free time?"

"Just two more slights of stairs. She goes up to the roof and reads, as far as I can tell."

"Why did you find this out, actually," she asked curiously.

The other girl shrugged. "My father always says that knowledge is power, and that knowledge is useful. Mind you, he's the Ashcroft Representative on the AEB, so he says things like that a lot."

"AEB?"

"Arcology Education Board."

The eyebrow returned to its elevated position. "And you wonder why you keep on being made class representative," Asuka smirked.

"It's not like that at all," Hikary protested, as they emerged into the fake sunlight of the arcology dome, only about thirty metres above them at this point. The reinforced spires that supported the mass of buildings above them, strengthening the roof, could be seen to surround them. The Academy was in the middle of this level, at the centre of the dome.

Rei Ayanami sat in on one of the benches on this roof, beneath a fake sun, a fake wind blowing through her hair. It was scheduled that there would be a slight shower of water from the ceiling at precisely 13:45 today, lasting for 15 minutes, before stopping. She had noted this down, and was aware of the risk of getting wet should she prove to be outside at that point in time.

But for now, she was reading.

Sol shrugged in the darkness, the words on the page said. This was a real book, too, manufactured in a nanofactory, but the words printed rather than just displayed on a screen. 'I really know nothing about politics... or the Core's accuracy in predicting things. I'm a minor scholar from a small college on a backwater world. But I have a feeling that something terrible is in store for us... that some rough beast is slouching towards Bethlehem waiting to be born.'

Duré smiled. 'Yeats', he said. The smile faded. 'I suspect this place is going to be the new Bethlehem.' He looked down the valley, towards the glowing Tombs. 'I spent a lifetime teaching about St Teilhard's theories of evolution towards the Omega Point. Instead of that, we have this. Human folly in the skies, and a terrible Antichrist waiting to inherit the rest.'

A shadow fell over her book. She moved it away from the obstruction. The darkness returned.

"Hello," a voice declared in a tone that burned with arrogance to her ears. "You're Rei Ayanami, pilot of the prototype."

She lives in her name, Superbia, Rei thought, ignoring the annoyance.

"I'm Asuka. Second Lieutenant Asuka Langley Soryu, pilot of Evangelion Unit 02."

Rei closed her book, keeping a finger in between the pages to maintain her place, and gazed up at the other girl, pupils the only point of darkness on her face. Behind Asuka, Hikary flinched back slightly, then straightened up again, forcing herself to meet that gaze.

"Let's be friends!"

"Friends?" Rei echoed. She really wished the other girl would go away and leave her in peace. "For what reason?"

"Why? Because it's convenient."

Rei opened her book again. "Convenience is a sufficient reason. However, other directives stand before the preservation of the friendship which now exists between us," she replied, turning that terrible gaze from Asuka, who seemed entirely unaffected by it."

Asuka paused, stance deflating. "You... do understand what friendship is, right?"

"A mutual bond entailing benefits and obligations for both parties," Rei stated in her monotone, all attention seemingly on the book. "It is a legacy of the social pack-pursuit origins of humanity."

The German's face took on the appearance that most people's did, when they had an extended conversation with Rei. "You're strange."

"Asuka!" gasped Hikary, in the background. "That's not right."

"And you're charming," said Rei softly.

Asuka turned to leave, as this wasn't getting anywhere.

"Oh, hah hah," she added over her shoulder.

"Thank you," Rei replied, in the same monotone.

~'/|\'~

Shinji was slumped in front of the television, flicking through channels. He knew that he really should be doing his homework, as the combination of training and a PsychEval tomorrow would mean that he wouldn't have any time, but at the moment, he didn't really care. He just wanted to sit in a wonderful state of apathy.

Frowning, he picked up several beer cans left on the table, and transferred them to the recyclic. Honestly, there was no excuse not to just put the cans, made out of a hardened resin (which was much easier for a nanofactory to make from base materials, rather than tapping its metal reserves), in the recycler as soon as they were finished. He hoped that Asuka would be less avowedly indolent than Misato.

Not that that was difficult. There were pre-recylic landfill sites (now mostly salvaged and used as raw materials for the voracious nanofactories of the arcologies) with a better sense of cleanliness than Misato.

//Flick//

A studio audience was chanting a name.

"Sindry! Sindry! Sindry!"

Of course, they almost certainly weren't real. In this age of easy computer modelling, the production company had in all likelihood merely bought a standard "Low Brow" package, with each individual specimen given a randomised behaviour set to provide a suitably heterogeneous audience. All in all, though, they were probably less sophisticated than the AI opponents in a computer game.

A rather maternal looking Nazzadi, her black hair shot through with grey in a way that made her look almost grandmotherly, walked on stage, her clothes stylish while remaining understated, and smiled in the direction of the cameras, letting the applause from the audience wash over her.

She raised a hand. "Thank you, thank you," she said, in a voice that, despite her origins as a vat-born, showed no trace of the Nazzadi accent, instead elongating her sibilants in a way that had made her memorable among the perfect elocution that pervaded television . "Thank you. I'd like to say hello to all of you, and to all of the viewers watching from home. Welcome to the Sindry Show; I'm your host, Sindry." She cupped her hand, and turned to another camera. "That's me, in case you hadn't guessed," she said in a stage whisper, as an aside.

The audience laughed precisely on cue.

"Thank you, thank you," she said, blushing slightly. "And ladies and gentlemen, have we got a show for you."

"Have you?" called back the audience, all those who had an Enthusiasm quotient of over 0.43 joining in.

"Oh yes I have," she replied. "In the back room, we've got Bayl waiting with a girl born from an act of egocest."

There was a mixture of jeers, hisses and indrawn breath from the audience.

"Yes, I know," she replied. "Her mother, perfectly legally, went through the arcanotherapeutic sorcery which flips your gender, turning men into women and women into men. They call it 'Beckon the Unexpressed'," Sindry said, making the inverted commas with her fingers. "But what was not expected when it was developed by arcane researchers was that some people would use it to get themselves pregnant."

She turned to the other camera again. "You know, I don't think that those scientists and sorcerers were all that bright," she added, in another stage whisper. "I mean, haven't those eggheads ever been on the metanet? Once anything to do with human sexuality is invented, it's guaranteed that it will be used."

There was a mixture of boos and cheers from the audience.

"Before we can begin, we've got another one of Dr Eliphas' Explanations, for the weird and strange things that biology does. Over to you, Eliphas."

"Egocest can only be performed with the aid of the arcanotheraputic sorcery known variously as Beckon the Unexpressed, Aphrodite's Touch, or, more colloquially, Gender Bender," began a man's voice, speaking in refined, somewhat archaic Received Pronunciation over animated images. "After this rite is performed, over three days the subject's body painlessly shifts to what it would have been like had they been born as a member of the opposite sex. This is not a genetic shift; a man keeps his XY chromosomes when he becomes a woman, and a woman keeps her XX chromosomes when she becomes a man. However, apart from that fact in genetic testing, it is impossible to tell that it has occurred. This was originally developed as a method of gender reassignment far better than the crude surgeries of the twentieth century, allowing people to live out their lives happily as members of the gender they feel that they should have been born as. Of course, it did not take long before it saw wider use, by people who wanted to see how it was like for the other gender, and, inevitably once it had been found that it could make mixtures which did not occur in nature, in pornography.

The image focussed in on a strand of DNA, showing the classical double helix. "It was found that the individuals who underwent this process remained fully able to produce children if they had been fertile before hand. This immediately saw its uptake by same-sex couples who wished to conceive a child which was naturally theirs. This is where a few of the oddities with the procedure were found. You see, an individual born as a man has XY chromosomes, and these remain, even if their body becomes that of a woman. That means that one quarter of all pregnancies began by an individual born with male genetics miscarry immediately, as a foetus with the YY pairing of sex chromosomes cannot survive. Meanwhile, all babies conceived by individuals with a female genetic code are all female, as there is no genetic male to provide the Y chromosome. This has raised questions about whether men are now fully redundant," there was jeering from the male members of the audience, "as for the first time ever, an all female population could now perpetuate itself. However, such a unlikely prospect has been overshadowed by the tragic cases of egocestuous children which have emerged."

"Egocest can be performed by either gender, although it is easier for women, due to the issues of genetic men with their Y chromosomes bearing children. The individual obtains sperm while male, then switches, whether to or back to, female, and inseminates themselves. The infant conceived thus has their mother and father as the same individual."

The camera cut back to Sindry. "So, they're clones," she said. "Haven't scientists failed to make successfully cloned individuals, even before pressure from us made it illegal?" added the Nazzadi.

The camera cut back to Dr Eliphas. "No, they're not clones. That's what makes it so bad," he replied. "You see, normally, half your chromosomes come from one parent, and half from the other. That's 23 from each. But each egg, and each sperm doesn't carry the same 23; that's why brothers and sisters aren't identical. It's why there's even such a thing as brothers and sisters. And in the case of egocest, the children don't inherit the same mix as their parent had. Some genes which their parent had different copies of, so-called "heterogeneous" genes, they inherit two copies of the same one. And in many cases, that means that the child ends up with multiple recessive inherited diseases, even if their parent was only a carrier for them. The consequences for the children is the reason it is illegal, and classified as zeroth-degree incest."

"Thanks for explaining the facts, Dr Eliphas," replied Sindry, when the camera cut back to her. "He's such a bore, but we love him anyway," she added as an aside, to laughter from the audience. "Well, now that the good doctor has said his thing, let's bring out the guest!"

There were cheers from the audience which turned to gasps, as they saw that the somewhat brutish looking man, Bayl, was pushing a wheelchair. In it was a woman, looking to be in her early twenties, but from the way she shook, a constant tremor in her hands, and the slight twist in her facial features, it was clear that she was not well. The wheelchair was positioned opposite to Sindry, who sat down.

"And what's your name?" she asked.

"H-h-han-n-n-ah-h," the girl stuttered heavily, her voice thick as if she couldn't move her tongue properly. "I-i-i a-mm tw-tw-tw-e-n-n-n-ty w-w-on."

Shinji shuddered. These kinds of show were sick. They'd grab dysfunctional families and people from wherever they could find them, especially the poor from outside the arcologies; no, worse than that, because people actually volunteered to show this kind of thing on television. It was inevitable that they would bring out the egocestuous parent at some point too, subjecting that poor girl to even worse humiliation on television. Where they got those dysfunctional people, screwed up in all those novel and interesting ways, was a mystery to him. Was there some kind of agency that found them all and recruited them, for their own purposes?

Nah. No-one would employ anyone who was as dysfunctional as the people on these shows.

He actually thought less of either Misato or Asuka for watching that show, given that it had been left on that channel.

//Flick//

"Save Humanity! Join the New Earth Government Arm..."

//Flick//

"and after all, it's better!" stated out a rather enthusiastic female voiceover.

The screen was filled with a horde of butterflies, a multicoloured chaotic mess of brightly coloured insects, flapping in random patterns which coalesced into a drink can.

"Gulmoth! A better drink for a better person!"

The drink cans split into their component butterflies, one last time filling the screen before the advert faded to black.

Shinji shuddered. The targeted advertising had picked up Misato's taste in goods, and so the unskippable adverts had homed in on her demographic with unerring accuracy, showing her exactly what she wanted to buy. It would take the LAIs a while to overcome the inertia of choices, and realise that there were more people resident in the house.

A solemn violin replaced the previous pop track.

"In 1999, humanity stood alone, unaware of the greater cosmos," a deep voiced man stated, over the sad music. "Bush the Younger had inherited the throne of the United States from his father. The violence of the Cold War had died down with the conquest of the Middle East by the United Nations. But secessionists who deny their authority are everywhere, and in the background, religious cults lurk."

A silhouette of a man stands before an open doorway, clad in a long black trenchcoat.

"And one man knows all about them."

The man pulls two machine guns from his belt.

"Parapsychic."

Two swords are unsheathed from the scabbards on his back, levitating free in the air. Around him.

"Spy."

The man's sunglasses glint in the dark.

"Saviour."

The man speaks, in a deep, gravelly voice, with a notable Nazzadi accent under his obviously affected South African accent.

"Let's see how your cult does against my Colt."

A guitar chord strikes.

"Piyumana is," states the voiceover.

"SNAKE!

FIST!"

The theme music strikes up.

The boy sighed. The Snake Fist series. He'd forgotten that a new one was coming out. Critically panned; really, really commercially successful. People were idiots.

//Flick//

"But have you found the murderer yet?" asked a pale faced man, notable streaks of white in his hair, despite his youth, as the camera focussed on his face. "We are paying you a lot, detective."

The Nazzadi woman, hair dyed purple, and dressed in a suit just a little tighter than might be expected, smiled faintly. "I'm afraid I can't do that, David," she replied.

"And why not," the man demanded, angrily. "We heard you were the best, T."

"And I am," she answered calmly. "The Tangency Detective Agency is the best around; we can find information from anyone on almost any subject, no matter how obscure."

"Then why can't you find the person who killed my wife!" he shouted at her, moving towards the woman.

T was completely unruffled by that; despite the immanent threat of violence, she merely adjusted her hair, and wondered over to look at the plants on the desk. "Bodies... they're such a peculiar thing, you know, David. Flesh, blood, skin; they're just a machine. You can take a human apart piece by piece and replace every single bit. You can even systematically replace the entire brain, through vivisection and systematically applied arcanotherapy, although they will lose all the memories in those removed parts. Nevertheless, autonomous functions remain, and the new brain tissue has the learning ability of a newborn. There are even people who cut out and regrow their own language centres, so that they can learn new languages at the same rate as an infant."

"What are you getting at!" snapped David.

"And yet," she continued unabashed, "kill someone, and there's almost no way to bring them back. Oh, sure, there are myths and tales, but the only way really known is sorcerous, and doesn't bring them back as much as lock an extra-dimensional entity into the shell, which believes, at least for a short while, it is them. Even when we could replace all the broken parts, making them as good as new, something vital leaves the body around the point of death."

The man gave a cry of frustration, turning his eyes to the ceiling. "Just... leave! You aren't helping find her killer, and I'm paying by the hou..." He was silenced, as an arm wrapped around his neck from behind, and he felt the pressure of a gun barrel against his ear.

"That wasn't your wife's body," hissed T into the same ear, as she held a UT-9 needle pistol up against the skin. From the shock on the man's face, he had no idea how she had moved so fast. "The skin was too soft, too fresh. I considered briefly that she was a New Flesher, with an obsession with regular skin graphs to keep her seeming young, but the inside of her mouth was wrong, too. That was a vat grown replica, unliving but genetically her, so that someone could fake her death. And you are an illegal sorcerer."

"Oh, come on," began the man, before T tightened the arm around his neck.

"The plant on your desk is not Dactylorhiza sambucina, as you would have people believe, but instead is Dactylorhiza licinii, a close relative under strict control by the OIS due to its use in summoning rituals. Now," she said, sweetly, grinding the pistol against his ear, "why don't you tell me where exactly your wife is?"

The audience can see a flicker of panic in David's eyes. "They'll kill me!" he stuttered, eyes wide.

"The OIS won't kill you if they have proof that you're human," T replied.

"Not the OIS!" he shouted, eyes dilated wide. "Never the OIS! I won't be me that long! It's already started! Kill me now!" He swallowed, a trickle of blood running from his tear ducts. "Look for the goddamnned Soul and Seal!" His body wracked in agony. "Oh, gods! Kill me! God's in her heaven..." he screamed, his voice degenerating into babbling, as the blood flow increased.

T squeezed the trigger. The needler didn't make a noise, the thin shard of metal accelerated silently to subsonic velocities straight into David's brain.

He slumped to the ground.

T squeezed the trigger a few more times, standing impassively over the body, making sure to destroy the brain and heart. Seven shots, in total.

"The Soul and Seal?"

The screen faded to the credits, with an anachronistic Tudor piece of music playing in the background.

Shinji made a noise of annoyance. He'd forgotten that the new series of T for Tangency was on. He'd have to watch the episode properly some time later; he wasn't in the mood for kind of convoluted plotting in a T episode, not to mention the fact that Season 1 had shown how much they loved foreshadowing. This time he wasn't going to fall for it; he was going to keep a notebook and watch for any catchphrases or hints of theme arcs. Yes, T for Tangency, with its pronounced tendency to get diverted into things that the script writers felt were interesting at the time, was a hard show to watch when you didn't want to have to think. No one even knew what the entire running theme of cats was in the first series was about, although that wasn't to say that the metanet hadn't guessed. Some people had speculated on the connections to the old Bast myths of ancient Egypt, some that the fact that there had been cats at all of the important scenes of the Castellan arc meant that the cats were secretly controlling everything, and some just that the writers felt that cats (especially kittens) were cute, and liked putting them in surreal or humorous situations.

He checked the menu. The news on EBC wouldn't be on for a while.

I wonder if Unit 02 will be in any pictures?

//Flick//

"We hold life to be sacred, but we also know the foundation of life consists in a stream of codes not so different from the successive frames of a watchvid," said the Chinese man on the panel. "Why then cannot we cut one code short here, and start another there? Is life so fragile that it can withstand no tampering? Does the sacred brook no improvement?"

There was a round of polite applause from the audience; a real one, as these kind of topical debate programmes needed a sapient audience to pose their questions, even if anyone who wanted to attend had to be vetted.

The host inclined his head. "Well, I can see that Miriam is positively dying to respond to that answer. So, Miriam, what is your opinion on that question from the audience, about whether the genetics laws should be loosened to allow for prenatal repair of embryonic defects?"

The red-haired woman nodded her head vigorously. "Thank you, Pravin," she said, in an American accent. "I am fully opposed to such a violation of sacred human dignity, and I believe that all right-minded people would oppose such a potentially slippery slope. After all, if we begin to tamper with the human genetic code, where will we stop? The next generation may be similar, but the one after that? And after that? What monsters will be spawn from our genetic material; beasts akin to the horrific cannibals they call ghouls? Will we next create false gods to rule over us? How proud we have become, and how blind!"

"I object strongly to such a blatant slippery slope argument," interjected the Ashcroft scientist on the panel, as he adjusted his AR eyepiece. "Who really believes that just because we repair the faulty genes that would produce a congenital defect that would kill the child by the age of 30, that we would lose all sanity and become inhuman monsters. Rational discourse should be what decides these laws, not an appeal to the authority of a Bronze Age text written by people who would have been driven mad to see humanity in the Steel Age, let alone now. Man's unfailing capacity to believe what he prefers to be true rather than what the evidence shows to be likely and possible has always astounded me." The Russian sighed in a rather patronising way. "We long for a caring Universe which will save us from our childish mistakes, and in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary we will pin all our hopes on the slimmest of doubts. God has not been proven not to exist, therefore he must exist."

There was loud, but unevenly distributed clapping from the audience. Several of the faces that the camera panned over looked offended, as did the red-haired woman on the panel.

The host cocked his head slightly. "Although this is a provocative topic, I'm afraid I'm going to have to end it here, so that we can cover the other questions before the end of the show." He flicked down on the desk. "The next question is from Warata, from the Loughton District of L2."

The camera focussed on a middle aged Nazzadi who stood near the front of the audience, his hair dyed a dark brown.

"Does the panel feel that use of a Migou bioweapon against Chicago-2, which was successfully contained, was due to the recent string of triumphs across the North American front, where our forces rolled back the Bugs all across a wide front? And does that mean that the Migou are feeling under pressure, if they resorted to the use of such a weapon?"

The host nodded. "Yes, that has been one of the major news stories in the last few days. Sweeping triumphs all across the Canadian province, combined with the Migou use of a large extra-dimensional entity as an attempted decapitation blow against the New Earth Government capital. I'd like to reassure everyone that the entity was stopped, although Lake Michigan remains sealed due to biological contamination." He paused. "Over to you first, Colonel Santiago."

"Well, firstly I'd like to congratulate our forces for the wide-scale triumphs against the fungi from Yuggoth," she began, and paused while mass applause erupted from the audience.

"Okay, quieten down, so that she can continue," said Pravin, after about a quarter of a minute.

"Thank you. That we could push the forces back was a sign that the increase of funding in the last few budgets is paying off, as the Engels enter into full use. In fact, I think we can put a large amount of credit for these victories down to those high-tech additions to the NEA, which have allowed us to push the biomechanical creations of the Migou back through superior firepower and armour. And yes, I do have to say that the use of biological weapons in this way was very alarming, but we've known for a long time that..."

Shinji snorted. That would probably have had Dr Akagi ranting and raving over the credit that the Engels were getting. That certainly seemed to be the official story they were putting out; there was no official connection between any of the Heralds; that first one had been "an advanced Dagonite mecha", while Mot had been some kind of unidentified spacecraft.

He yawned and stretched out. The bickering on Query Hour was relaxing in its own way, and he really couldn't be bothered to move right now.

And then the doorbell rang.

He groaned when he realised that Misato wasn't home yet, and so he would have to do it. A somewhat unlikely saviour showed her face, though, as Asuka went to do it. Over by the door, there was an exclamation of "Finally".

And then the boxes started flowing in. Shinji could only watch in horror as crate after crate began flowing through the door, an endless succession of delivery men gushing forth and spreading out like a liquid, maintaining their volume but filling all available floorspace with the boxes.

He managed to hold his tongue, as Asuka directed the stream of crates to wherever she felt they were more convenient, until after the deliverers had left.

Shinji took a breath.

"What the hell are all these? What are you doing!" he said, in a somewhat panicked voice.

"That's not very nice," Asuka replied without looking at him, having already peeled open one of the boxes. "This is my stuff."

"All of this?"

"... yes."

"Allof this?"

"Uh... yes."

"This stuff... it is all yours?"

"Look, if you're going to stand there, slack jawed like some imbecile, then you can help me unpack."

Shinji waved his hands in front of himself, still not quite fully comprehending the situation. "You had all of this stuff shipped over from Germany, so that it could sit around and obstruct my bedroom door."

"Well, that wasn't the end goal," Asuka replied, as she sorted through clothes, "but the fact that you'll have to unpack that one..."

"Those ones," interjected Shinji, acidly. "Plural."

"Whatever. The fact that you'll have to help me unpack those ones to get into your room so you can lock yourself away is, from my point of view, a benefit, yes?"

"But... but... but," Shinji spread his hands wide, voice filled with confusion. "Why would you even have this lot shipped over? Why didn't you just recyclic them, then fab some new ones?"

"It's not the same!" exclaimed Asuka, a hand pressed against her temple.

"Why not? A standard licence lets you have one physical copy at any one time, and if you recycliced the old ones, you'd only be paying for the energy costs."

"Because the things wouldn't be the same, obviously," replied the girl, speaking slowly, as if explaining to a child. "They'd just be copies. A copy of a thing is not the same thing, even if it started off the same at the molecular level."

"Yes, it really is. They'd be identical to the ones you had before, and more importantly you wouldn't be cluttering up the entire house with boxes."

"No, they're not," she replied, voice slightly raised. "Just because they began with the same initial state doesn't mean that a newly fabbed copy is the same thing. Things change and grow."

Shinji raised an eyebrow. "Your clothes change and grow."

A frown was sent back in his direction. "Don't be an idiot. It was a metaphor; I'm sure that even your minuscule brain can understand such things. But, yes, actually, the clothes are a lot more comfortable when they've been worn a few times. And it means I have all my things accessible right away, instead of waiting for the fabber to make a new one."

Shinji threw up his hands in frustration, suppressing a nagging headache. "Whatever. I don't really care any more. Just get this stuff packed away somewhere. I'm not helping."

Asuka made an annoyed noise, turning away to unseal another package. "Just typical. You're not even needed here any more, you know," she added, after a slight pause. "You complain about practically being a conscript; well, now you can go. Back to wherever you came from."

"Toyko-3," muttered Shinji.

"Whatever. The point is, I'm a professional. I have to say that you've done a nice job filling in before I was moved here from the Eastern Front..."

"... just wait a moment," replied Shinji, jumping up, something inside snapping. "From what I saw of the reports Misato showed me, you've only actually been deployed twice in real life, and I was there for one of them. I actually have more physical experience than you.

"Irrelevant," she snapped back. "You have, what, less than six months training. I've been a candidate since I was four. Some natural talent at Evangelion synchronisation doesn't mean that you're suddenly actually able to fight. From what I've seen of your combat, you rely on either just pulling a button... oh yes, incidentally, anyone could have used that cut up ship to fire that laser; I don't see why they needed a giant robot to pull the trigger..."

"... there wasn't a physical trigger, like there aren't for any of the Eva-scale weapons," Shinji retorted. "Direct link to the main Eva control..."

"It doesn't matter! I know that! Stop interrupting! The point is, the Kathirat was the only kill which was really yours, so really, we're even. Look; it would be better that way. You can go back to before, as you obviously don't want to pilot an Eva, and I don't have to put up with your constant unhelpfulness and annoying comments."

"I don't see how you can call me annoying," Shinji muttered. "Given how you're always angry, all the time, I don't think you can really tell the difference."

"I'm always angry?" she shouted back. "I have to put up with your constant passive-aggressive attitude. No wonder I've got a headache."

Whatever Shinji said in response was drowned out by alarmed squawking coming from the kitchen. He took a sudden breath, and got up, heading towards the source of the noise.

"Oh, right. Pen-Pen. Yes."

Asuka frowned. "Pen... Pen? Some pet?" she asked, in a less confrontational voice.

"... sort of," was the response. Shinji manoeuvred his was around the boxes that filled the kitchen, finally finding the bird trapped in a jail cell of crates. "He's... well, he's a penguin."

"A penguin," Asuka said, flatly.

"Yes."

"A penguin."

"Yes."

"You have a penguin living in the house."

"In the fridge, actually," said Shinji, massaging the back of his neck. Come to think of it, it sounded a lot more ridiculous than it really was. "In a custom compartment." He stooped down, and begin shifting the boxes that trapped the bird inside.

"Wark! Wark-wark! Wark!"

The girl took a deep breath. "Okay. I can accept that." She watched, fascinated as the penguin waddled over to the other fridge, and pulled out a can of beer. "How long did it take to train him to do that... wait a moment. He's using his hands like wings! I mean, his wings like hands! Penguins don't do that," she said, lowering her voice as the tiny, beady eyes of the pale bird gazed towards her.

"Wark!" Pen-Pen said, in a tone of voice which was decidedly warning.

"... He. Has. Teeth," muttered Asuka to Shinji, the previous animosity gone. "Birds. Do. Not. Have. Teeth."

"This. One. Does," he whispered back.

"Why. Does. This. Bird. Have. Teeth?"

"... okay, we can stop doing that," said Shinji, as the penguin continued to gaze at the two of them. "He can hear us, after all. Misato said that he has very good hearing."

"But he's a bird," Asuka almost sobbed. "Why is there a bird... a penguin living with Misato? Why can he open things? Why does he have teeth? How can he understand English? He's a penguin! Penguins are not sapient!"

There was a hiss, as Pen-Pen opened the can; a surprisingly sinister noise. "Wark," he said, coldly.

"This whole thing makes no sense," added Asuka, switching to Japanese. "Have you even asked Misato what she's doing with that freak of nature!"

The tiny beady eyes of the penguin narrowed further. "Wark," it said again.

"Yeah, he understand that too," said Shinji, wincing. "And he can do the crossword."

Asuka threw up her hands. "That's it. I give up. I'm not going to question the sheer irrationality of having a sapient penguin living with us. I'm not going to question what produced him. I am going to accept it, as long as it keeps its hands... its wings... its whatever off my stuff."

~'/|\'~

Dr Ritsuko Akagi was running through the details of what little of the Fifth Herald's corpse that had not been consumed by the Shoggoth. Masses of data filled her vision, a matrix of possibilities in Augmented Reality. Possibilities were shaped, plotted on three dimension colour coded graphs, and then discarded. If people from an earlier age had seen what she was doing, they would have called it more akin to magic, as obscure symbols (the scientific discoveries from arcane theory had left the Greek alphabet suffering from massive degeneracy, and thus science had pillaged alphabets from all over the world to get symbols to represent concepts which were undreamed of before) were moved around, changing colours used to plot data just as classical Cartesian co-ordinates were.

And it still didn't make any sense. Silently, she cursed the new drugs that she was on, even as she understood their purpose. Every time they switched mental stabilisers, or added a new one to the cocktail, her performance at the cutting edge of arcane theory took a hit, taking several months to climb back up. She knew why they were needed; they kept her sane (by the rather lax standards of arcane scientists), but it was a balancing act. Too many of some metal stabilisers would effectively lobotomise her, and an overdose would actually do so, requiring extended arcanotherapy to remedy the neurological damage. Too few, and she would break, her mind shattering into a million shards; each one brilliant, astonishing, useful, but fundamentally dangerous and broken.

She took a sip of coffee, and grimaced as she realised that she'd let it go cold, before a man's arms encircled her from behind.

"You've lost weight," said Kaji softly into her ear.

"Oh, really?" she asked, a hint of sarcasm creeping into her voice.

"You're wasting away," he continued, hugging her closer, "doomed to eternal unhappiness."

"And why would that be?" Ritsuko replied, in an arch tone, amused by the sheer patheticness of the approach. Honestly, she had much better reasons to waste away than self-centred unhappiness.

"Because a woman who has a mole in the path of her..." Kaji paused, in the process of stroking her cheek. "You had it removed, didn't you?"

"Yes," she replied, pulling his hands away. "Quite a while ago, in a routine physical. There was no reason to keep it."

"But that was, well, at least ten percent of your charm," said Kaji, in a decidedly melancholy tone of voice. "Is it some man, responsible for such a change? Or some woman, come to take my fair princess away to another castle? Tell me where I may find them, so that I may slay them and thus take your hand in marriage."

Ritsuko sniffed. "Do you smell ham?" She shook her head, smiling gently. She sort of missed the casual flirting of university; in retrospect, she hadn't made enough of the opportunity. On the other hand, she had left with a first-class degree, which had proven essential for her career plans, while Misato had only obtained the bare minimum to be accepted for her officer training, which said something. "Never mind. But I do believe, Mr Kaji, that you are trying to seduce me."

"And what if I am?" he answered with a blatantly seductive grin.

"Then the green-eyed, very, very scary lady over there, the one carrying the Enforcer, will shoot you," continued Ritsuko in the same tone of voice, gazing at Misato, who was pressed up against the glass glaring at the two of them, flared nostrils leaving twin patches of fog on the transparent wall. "And blood will get everywhere, because a fifteen millimetre hole in your cranium is not a viable path for sustained survival. And even you would have problems dodging that, if you didn't know that she was there." She gave an exaggerated sigh of annoyance. "And then I'd have to fill in even more paperwork, and the blood would get into some of the sensitive electronic here, and even worse I'd get blood in my coffee."

Kaji let go. "You do know that the coffee is cold, yes?" he pointed out.

"I found out just before you arrived." She made a small, non-committal noise, as Misato pried her face from the window, and actually came into the room. "Long time, no see, Kaji."

The blue-shirted man sighed. "Well, it's been a long time. For all of us."

"You're not as discreet as you used to be, now that you're single again," Ritsuko said with a smile in her voice. "Although you still appear to be quite discrete."

Misato frowned, and Kaji stared blankly at that comment.

"Discreet? Discrete?" She waved a hand. "It would have looked better written down. What I said what that, although he remains slightly separated from other people, behind that attitude, he is less subtle." She paused for a moment. "Actually, it might work the other way, too. He might have become more sympathetic and thus better at subtlety through understanding of others."

"I'm perfectly sympathetic," protested Kaji, smiling.

"No," Ritsuko replied. "You've always been very empathetic. That isn't the same thing at all."

"He's an idiot, I know that," interjected Misato. "Always has been, always will be." She stopped by Ritsuko's desk, glaring at the man. "Now why don't you go back home and sit at your desk analysing intelligence, like you told me you do. I'm not sure how you'd recognise it, of course..."

Kaji clutched a hand to his heart. "You wound me," he said, in a light-hearted tone. "But I was just notified of my transfer to London-2 this morning..."

"Wait a moment," Misato exclaimed. "What are you even doing here in the first place? What are you doing in an Ashcroft facility? Last time I saw you, you were getting off the C2 Transit System. You don't have a valid reason to be here in L2."

The man just broadly smiled with his habitual grin and shrugged. "It'll be fun. We can hang about together, like we used to."

Misato whirled to face him, face contorted and hands twisted into claws. "You? You! Who in the hell would willingly spend time around..."

In what might be viewed as an act of cosmic censorship, before Misato's tirade against useless men who she would prefer to never see again, let alone spend time around, who spend all their time smirking and not enough time actually being useful, and n-plex other reasons, the sirens began to sound around the base, screaming out their warning with such frequency that those prone to infantile anthropomorphism would wonder why they were not losing their voices.

Glancing at the type code on the alarm displayed on the walls, Misato could only stare up at the ceiling and give an inarticulate yell of rage that ended in the words "Not again!".

~'/|\'~

"The defences around London-2 remain somewhat depleted from the casualties inflicted by the previous Heralds. The stationary defences were especially badly hit; we only have 26% functionality along the projected line of assault. Replacement parts for the Evangelions remain critically low. However, we now have all the Units available to us," stated the Major, a hint of triumph in her voice. "We will defeat the Herald before it comes into range of any high value targets, right as it emerges from the North Sea. Units 01 and 02 will engage the target simultaneously, while Unit 00 is positioned in reserve in case it pulls another surprise out from nowhere. This should be a close range battle; we've found that the easiest way to win is to neutralise the enemy's AT-Field as fast as possible. Moreover, this is the first proper night battle against the Heralds, as Mot was an ambush, so... be careful," Misato added.

Three titanic delta-shaped aeroplanes, super-heavy bombers who now carried a different (although some would say equally dangerous) cargo, cut their way through the dark sky, above the clouds, towards near where the ruins of NEG Norfolk, destroyed by Mot. The three Evangelions, dwarfed by these fliers, were slung underneath like toys.

Misato felt that they were actually looking like a proper military operation, as she gazed on the viewscreen back in London-2. For once, all the Evangelions were in the same colour scheme, the blueish grey-white of urban camouflage and were all using the Type-C armour. The only way to tell them apart was by their heads, where the legacy genetics of the underlying organism had produced a different number of eyes.

She hoped that this would go well.

"Are you sure that we should have deployed all three Units at once?" Ritsuko asked her, paralleling her own doubts. Yet, paradoxically, this had the net effect of calcifying her own certainty that this was the right thing to do.

"Yes," she nodded. " We have access to all three Evangelions; we should be trying to guarantee that the Herald is killed with the minimum risk to any of them individually." The Major paused. "And we're getting far less Army or Navy support for this mission," she added in a darker tone of voice. "The previous targets have been eliminated with considerably more support. Against a Herald, I'd prefer overkill than defeat."

Her friend nodded. "Good. You should be able to justify this to the Representative when he gets back." She paused. "Assuming things don't go really wrong, that is."

Misato shuddered. "Don't say things like that. You'll jinx the operation." She licked her lips nervously. "And I did get authorisation from Deputy Representative."

"Just so you remember," Ritsuko warned.

Meanwhile, back in the Evangelion entry plugs, Asuka was feeling a little bit annoyed.

"This is my combat début in L2," she complained, "and I'm not allowed to fight alone? This sucks," she added, in a sullen voice. "What possible reason could there be to bring those two along, in their obsolete Units?"

That comment was inevitably going to draw a response, and on cue a window appeared in the front of the entry plug.

Surprisingly enough, it was Rei. "Your statement is incorrect," she informed the other girl, her cold eyes, only a frosting of pale grey around the pupil serving as an iris, somehow gazing through the redhead. "After the recent refit, all three Units are using Type-C armour. The tactical difference between the Evangelions in a technical capacity is negligible."

"Did I ask your opinion?" snapped Asuka back.

"Your statement was factually incorrect. It needed to be remedied," was the response.

Shinji's head appeared on the wall too. He was actually rather surprised. That was the most words he had ever heard from Rei in one go, and more than he had heard from her on most days.

He vaguely wondered what kind of image adjustment they had to do to the picture to remove the LCL tint.

"Look, we're just going to follow the plan," he said, trying to defuse any tensions. And possible diffuse them, too. He wasn't quite sure what quite was the difference between the two words.

Stupid English and its homonyms... is that the right word? Stupid language and all the words that sound alike, he thought.

Shinji shook his head, bring his attention back to entry plug. It was funny how the mind wandered. He found Asuka staring at him, and realised she'd been talking while he was not paying attention.

"So you don't agree, Third Child?" she said, leaning forwards towards the camera, voice hostile.

"Shinji!" he corrected.

"Answer the question!"

"Ego is irrelevant," interjected Rei.

Asuka spluttered, an odd noise with the harmonics shifted by the LCL filling her lungs. "What? It is not ego! It's just that I should be the one to..."

"Ego is detrimental to the cause," the white girl replied in a tone which would have been described as icy had anyone but her used it. "The salvation of the world requires that the ego is subsumed to the greater good of humanity."

"What? What are you talking about?" Asuka was getting increasingly annoyed by the girl. The First Child always seemed to be like this; annoyingly cryptic, a discrete voice which spoke alone. She could see that Shinji was just as perplexed, although... was that a hint of fear in his eyes as he listened to her words. No, not quite fear, but something akin to it. Apprehension, perhaps.

She would have to find out more about those two.

"The Heralds are beings of pure ego. Their inability to co-operate is what has doomed them," the pale girl continued.

The command team was getting worried, too.

"How's the First Child's synchronisation ratio?" asked Ritsuko.

"Holding steady at sixty-one, plus-or-minus three percent," reported Maya calmly.

The blond woman started biting at a thumbnail, before realising that she was doing that, and tucking both hands into the pockets of her lab coat. She was the only one here who really knew the potential danger of the First Child, but she was so orthogonal to normal ways of thought (which would logically mean that she would actually be tangential, the scientist thought) that it was very hard to distinguish between her normal behaviour and possible mental contamination.

"Immediately force an ejection if we get a repeat of the Start-Up Incident," she ordered the technical staff, turning to the Director of Operations. "Misato, I recommend that we keep the First Child in reserve."

The black-haired woman turned her head and looked at Dr Akagi in a peculiar manner. "I'm already doing that," she said. "I do know her synchronisation ratio is notably worse than the other two's, and she has had the worst loss of control," a patronising hint leaking into her voice. "Now, if you'll excuse me, they should be deploying soon."

Ritsuko sighed inside. Thank goodness she thought I was merely worried about the low synchronisation ratio and the inferior control...

She made a note on her PCPU, though;

HERALDS: BEINGS OF PURE EGO? UNABLE TO CO-OPERATE?

~'/|\'~

Unit 00 was detached first, the blue-grey cyclops falling through the dark sky. Inside the fluid-filled entry plug, the First Child was calm. It was not as if this utter weightlessness, immersed in the almost-blood taste of the LCL, was an unfamiliar sensation to her.

She's been in there for ten years. Floating in darkness.

The A-Pod harness kicked in, reactionless thrusters producing an action which lacked an equal and opposite reaction, or so it was believed. That was not true. It was merely that, when the fabric of space-time was being used in such a manner, the opposing force could be spread out across the entire system.

She landed as gently as could be hoped by the standards of a forty metre biped, feet leaving massive dents in the hardened road as she sunk to one knee. There was a moment of stillness, as Rei held that position, motionless.

Then the single red eye of Unit 00 turned, its gaze scanning the landscape. In the darkness, it cast the land in a bloody red light. Once, the skies above them would have been polluted by light. Now, however, with the retreat of the populace into arcologies, the night was returned to a more primal state, stars fully visible through the holes in the cloud layer.

She found what she was looking for, the weapons drop, and loped over to it, leaving scars in the landscape where she stepped. Cradling the Charge Beam she had been assigned, she then returned to a waiting position, both body and Evangelion motionless, waiting for further orders.

The other two Children were dropped close to the coast, on the decaying ruins of what had once been a commuter village.

"Oh," Asuka said with a sudden glint of happiness in her eyes, as she examined the weapons crate marked "02".

"I thought you'd like the Deef Spear," commented Misato, a similar hint in her voice.

"I know I'd trained with them, but I thought they were stuck on the drawing board. Too many issues with the superconducting fibres and keeping the staff strong enough to be used by an Evangelion," the girl replied, as she reverently lifted the polearm, a good ten metres longer than the Unit was tall, from its case.

"There were," interjected Dr Akagi. "There were beyond modern materials technology, and required far too much fine control over the AT-Field to be truly useful in a combat situation."

Asuka paused as she swung the spear around, getting a grip on the balance. "What changed?"

Ritsuko grinned, a smile with a disproportionate amount of malice. "The Heralds changed."

Dimensionally Fielded weapons, she explained, were an innovation of the Evangelion Project. They were commonly in use; the integrated bladed weapons on the Units were all subject to a D-Field. The sorcerous ritual that produced the D-Field had been known about by occultists (and cultists) since before the discovery of Arcane Theory, but before had only been used as personal protection. The D-Field functioned as a catalyst, to promote the formation of an AT-Field around the weapon, and locally boost the strength, giving a concrete advantage against other AT-Fields. But there were problems with scaling; the two warped spaces were similar (but fortunately not the same, because if two D-Fields overlapped, anything in the intersection was torn apart at a sub-atomic level), and reacted in funny ways. Even the massive computing powers of full immersion Magi dives had not been able to find anything more than an empirical formula for how they interacted.

"And so we found that the remains of Mot, the fractal black crystalline structure, had an exceptionally high Arcane Field permissibility," explained Dr Akagi. "A solid core of that runs down the centre of the D-Field Spear, meaning that for the purposes of AT-Field generation, the spear is part of the Evangelion."

Most of the explanation had been meaningless to Shinji, as he hefted the weapon provided out of his own equipment crate. A small autonomous series of cables snaked out of his wrists as he (no, he reminded himself, as Unit 01) picked up the multi-barrelled contraption.

Ah, yes. The one that they insist that I not call the plasma minigun, but I can't remember the real name for.

As the targeting reticle appeared in screen, the name "Multi-Barrelled Automatic Magnetically Confined Ionised Gas Accelerator Prototype" appeared. It was another product of the fact that Evangelions stood at an uncomfortable level in the NEG armoury. They were three times the height of the next tallest bipeds, the Seraph and Chamshal Engels, but were too small for the naval-sized D-Engines which could enable them to chuck out capital grade firepower. The MBAMCIGAP was a workaround for that problem.

The design process had obviously passed through certain mental steps. It had started with complaints about not being able to use capital grade weapons, then moved onto asking for suggestions for how they might be able to compensate for that. The thought train got vaguer at that point, but at some point someone had obviously pointed out that often weight of fire could compensate. And then the phrase "What if we strapped eight plasma cannons, each with an independent smaller D-Engine, together, and made them spin to promote cooling?" had been uttered. Some back of the envelope calculations had been thrown together on someone's PCPU, and it had been found that, despite the blood alcohol level of the person who had come up with the idea, it actually had the potential to work.

Misato's face appeared before him. "Is everything operation, Shinji?"

"Yes, it looks fine from here."

The woman smiled. "I told them that the plasma minigun would be a good idea, but they didn't believe me until they actually did the calculations."

Ritsuko sighed. "One of your drunken ideas was good. The rest were bad. As I recall, you wanted to attach rocket boosters to the Deef Spear." There was chuckling from around the command room, releasing the tension.

"Shush," ordered the Major. "Pilots; contact with the Herald is ETA six minutes."

They sat in silence.

Far off, something broke the surface of the water. It would not have been visible in the darkness with the human eye (though it would with the Nazzadi eye), but the visual enhancements built into the Evangelions (as with all modern military gear) detected the water pouring off the titan that strode in from the sea, a figure of solidity in the protean waters.

"Right, this is it!" announced Asuka, with a predatory grin on her face. "I'll take it down, while you cover me."

"You could wait for me to weaken the AT-Fields first," countered Shinji. "At least wait to see if it can't shoot back before charging in!"

"Both of you, hold back," ordered the Major. "We've got an airstrike incoming."

Misato hated having to keep that from them, but orders from her superiors in the New Earth Government Army had necessitated it. After the attack on Chicago-2 just as Unit 02 was there, suspicion existed that it was the Evangelions which drew the Heralds. Certainly, the fact that so far the Heralds had conveniently only attacked places where there were Evangelions was screaming on the "Not-A-Coincidence" alarms of counter-intelligence units. Either the Evangelions attracted the Heralds, or there was someone who was arranging it so that the Units would be there. If so, that would be indicative of some greater conspiracy, that someone in the NEG had the ability to predict when the Heralds would attack. Such information would be very useful, as it would allow proper deployment of troops, rather than this slow seep of forces away from the front lines to protect the most important arcologies from such a potential threat.

And thus the higher-ups (the orders had come from the European Field Marshals themselves) had ordered her to see if the Evangelions could be used as bait, to place them slightly off the direct path of the Heralds, to see if the monster would adjust its course to make sure that it engaged them.

And it had. The behemoth now striding from the waters had notably turned, to engage the three Children in the three Evangelions.

That was not a good sign. Both in the short term, in that they were about to be attacked by a Herald, and in the long run this called the survival of the Evangelion Project into doubt.

It was then that the first wave of bombs hit, as the skies echoed to the crack of supersonic aircraft. Vast amounts of water were thrown up by the blasts, as well as the rippling explosions which broke against the coruscating mesh of the AT-Field. The behemoth did not fall, though, but instead broke into a run towards land, running through the fire and mist, AT-Field shaped like an arrow before it, parting the waters and running clear on the seabed.

A light on the display flipped. "You are cleared to engage," ordered the Major to the two pilots.

"Cover me!" called out Asuka, as she sprinted towards the fast-encroaching Herald, deef spear held in both hands as a lance.

"You're getting in my way!" shouted Shinji into the comms, as he was forced to cut off the plasma minigun, the stream of eight new suns no longer burning away the night and casting weird shadows on the ceiling above. Making a noise of frustration, he checked the lock of the MPACK 4s on his shoulders, one of the new things that the Type-C armour gave, then triggered with a thought a salvo of 8 rockets. The tiny computer brains within them recognised the presence of a friendly unit before them, and took evasive action, cutting upwards into the air before curving down onto the target, the explosions (which would have wrecked a Locust) doing nothing but producing more of a lightshow.

I hate AT-Fields! Shinji thought in a matter most intense.

The red-haired girl in the blue-grey Unit 02 saw the rippling explosions before her, as missiles cut over her head, and twisted her gait slightly, to allow her to mimic Shinji's actions, a second salvo of missiles flying flat and straight at the oncoming, round-shouldered target.

"Cover me!" she screamed over the comms.

"You're in my way!" Shinji shouted back, staring at the scene before him, as he triggered a second set of missiles.

Asuka lived for moments like this, she really did. Adrenaline flooded her system, overcoming the limiters in the LCL-f, designed to keep the fine muscle control and the clear head needed for optimal Evangelion operation. Each foot was placed perfectly, time slowing to a crawl to permit her to leap from area of solid ground to solid ground. She was the blademaster, and the Unit was her blade. A perfect harmony of war.

She reached the coast even as the Herald closed in closer, pushing hard against the ground and leaping up. Reaching out, she extended the cosmic, enveloping AT-Field out, down along this marvellous new spear and

Are you sure it will work, she had asked.

Oh, don't worry, the doctor had replied. By doing it this way, the usual risks are completely negated. As long as you are willing to put up with the ... wastage from the inferior specimens.

If I cared about inferior specimens, I wouldn't be here, she snapped back. Who do you think I am, some sort of superstitionist?

The doctor had smiled. Good to know that, he had said.

thrust it straight down, into the heart of the Herald, the blade going straight through the body. With a flourish, she pulled the weapon free, tearing upwards through the beasts flesh. With the AT-Field wrapped around and through it, the spear was more akin to a guardless long blade than a mere spear.

The round shouldered beast, covered in oddly compelling geometrical patterns that seemed to twist and turn from out of the corner of your eye, fell apart, split from mid-section to right shoulder.

Shinji gazed, eyes wide at the scene before him. That was shockingly fast and easy.

"... good job," he finally managed to stutter out.

Asuka cocked her head, eyes aflame and the demonic grin of a central nervous system flooded with adrenaline plastered across her face. "Now, how about that, Ikari," she declared proudly, voice filled with pride. "Battle should always be elegant and without waste. I just guess my design is better than yours, then."

Rei's head appeared. "The target has not been eliminated," she stated.

Asuka's eyes wided, and she blinked twice. "What?" she asked, screwing up her face.

"What?" queried Shinji, eyes widening ever further.

"What!" shouted Misato back in the control room.

The torn apart Herald, body oozing ichor into the water, began to twitch, the water around it sublimating straight from liquid to plasma as the coruscating AT-Field tore electrons from their orbits. In a beautiful mutilation of topography, the mass turned inside out into two duplicates of itself, the black and white patterns shifted into the red for one and the blue for others.

Twitching, these newborn (or were they really?) beings pulled themselves to their feet by flowing so that they were standing up.

Or at least tried to. The four eyes of Unit 02 burned white as Asuka whipped the spear around, shattering the hastily erected AT-Field and lopping the left arm off the red one. The spear continued through, before bouncing off a second AT-Field, the two areas of distorted spacetime irradiating the area as high energy protons and neutrons flew off in all directions, in a blast as the fundamental forces briefly, and just along the Planck length edge of the Evangelion's AT-Field, reunited into a GUT superforce.

As they collapsed back into the separate forces, the area of space where it had happened underwent rapid expansion, as in the first few moments of the universe. In the impossibly high energy densities, brief life evolved and died out as the universe suddenly became cold and dead to them, the magnetic monopoles and exotic particles that made up their body dissipating. They lived and died in subjective eternities, a brief blossoming of life unheard of since the early stages of the universe, and indeed never to be heard of by any of the unknowing gods, vast beings that survived in this cold dead cosmos where the least actions took untold aeons, and who never knew of the brief ecosystem that they had created.

No, more of a worry to the horrific beings which had birthed that stillborn cycle of life was the expansion of space-time they had unknowingly caused. Some of the participants, snug within their own realities which they called an AT-Field, could weather this sudden flux in universal constants, as reality tore itself apart, the distance between proton and neutron suddenly much greater than what the strong force could support.

A sphere of matter roughly one and a half kilometres in radius ceased to exist. Under most circumstances, this would have released vast amounts of energy, but the energy densities had crushed some matter to under its Schwartzchild radius. And a number of nascent, short-lived black holes were exactly what the abused fabric of spacetime did not need.

To explain what had just happened with the classic metaphor of heavy weights and a rubber sheet, the presence of the blackholes were akin to a heavy weight on the sheet, stretching it down and attracting things to them. Meanwhile, the spacetime expansion was the rubber sheet being stretched, each point getting further away from each other, while keeping the same amount of material between them.

To expand the metaphor, the AT-Fields had an effect on space and time roughly similar to taking a knife to the rubber sheet and slashing at it in a methodical pattern of cross hatching, leaving only enough material for it to just hold together, allowing it to be shaped to the will of the user. With all the opposing stresses, was it really a wonder that a rubber sheet, weakened by the knife, would fall apart?

Now, convert the rubber sheet into the five known dimensions and n higher dimensions, where n is not even necessarily a natural number, and the effects of what had just happened could be appreciated.

To cut things short, spacetime gave way under the strain.

And all these events had taken a period of time to which the firing of a single neuron would look like an aeon.

~'/|\'~

Misato stared up at the viewscreen, hoping for anything. Contact with all three of the Evangelions had been lost, along with a large number of NEG aircraft in the same airspace.

"Oh Gods, oh God, oh God," someone was muttering. Misato wanted to join in.

But I won't pray any more. Not after the Fall of New Kuala Lumpur. Not after the First Strike.

"Massive thermal bloom!" called out Liutenent Aoba. "The Reality Engines," he used, in the stress of the moment, the technicians term for the scanners which detected ripples in the fabric of reality, "they're screaming. Something happened there, and it's completely unheard of."

"Not again," said Ritsuko weakly, as she clutched at her forehead.

"No, no it's not!" yelled Aoba, as more data flowed in, breaking through his usually laconic outer shell. He swallowed hard, and licked his lips nervously. " We.... I found a... a match. It... it matches the Zone."

A silence fell over the room; a dreadful, terribly loud silence that drowned out the panic that hummed in the air. The noiselessness held; quiescent and horrible, for what had been said could not be unsaid.

The Zone had consumed the city of Las Vegas right at the start of the Second Arcanotech War, amid dark whisperings of illicit research into teleportation technology. A swirling void of darkness, reality given way to the random shifting of an infinite number of dimensions, one hundred and thirty kilometres in radius. Things came from the darkness, vile protean shapes which had to be contained, and slowly and surely the Zone was growing, consuming the lands of mankind. Even those who were not sucked into that Well of Oblivion were affected, because the Zone produced the rogue parapsychics known as Zoners, normal individuals driven mad by the powers which they had thrust upon themselves. Normal parapsychics were theorised to be a natural progression of humanity; they possessed innate powers which were determined by their genetics.

Zoners were not natural. They were insane by human standards, even the most stable of them, and many could crush an APC full of soldiers into a ball.

And they had quite possibly created a new one.

The Major was the first to break the silence.

"Shinji! Rei! Asuka! Report!"

The pale face of the First Child appeared on screen. She appeared completely unruffled by the hideous tear in reality, her face as emotionless and impassive as ever.

"I am alive," she informed the Major. "I was outside the rift."

"Any sign of Shinji or Asuka?" the woman asked, frantically.

"There is no sign of them as of yet," Rei replied, as if she was merely reporting that they were late for a meeting. "However, as long as they retain the ability to generate an AT-Field, they will survive. If they do not, they will be killed instantly. And painlessly," she added, a hint of unrecognisable emotion flashing across her face.

Misato turned to Ritsuko. "What do you know about that thing? How do we get them out of it?"

"... I really don't know," replied the blond woman, hands clutched at her temples. She groped around inside the pockets of her labcoat, pulling out a small cylinder, which was screwed into an injector. She relaxed as the device clicked, removing her other hand from her forehead. "Okay." She took a deep breath.

"Do not worry," Rei continued. "Aleph-one-dimensional local space is not stable in conjunction with forced 5-plus-n-dimensional space. Only three contingencies are stable."

"But... how do you know this?"

Rei managed to, while keeping her expression completely motionless, convey a similar feeling to what you get when you ask an adult why basic addition works like it does.

"And what can we do?" she continued, somewhat breathless at the ... well, the only really applicable term was alien intelligence before her.

"There is no need for concern, as nothing that can be done to change the inevitable results," the First Child replied, in a way that Misato guessed was meant to be reassuring.

"The Zone... it's shrinking," reported Makota.

"Five-plus-n-dimensional space is calcifying around the AT-Fields," clarified Rei.

"That doesn't clarify anything," blurted out Misato. "Ritsuko, what is she talking about?"

"Uh..." the blond woman paused, "Yes, that makes sense. I think. Basically, although we'd need to run it through the Magi, I think it's a distinct possibility that the stable AT-Fields are closing it. That is to say, what the First Child has said is one of the possibilities of an Arcane Field interacting with a shattered dimensional space. On the other hand, there are more than 9 times 10 to the power of 3 configurations predicted, and the theory hasn't been worked out properly yet. How she would know what would happen in such a complex A-Theory problem is... a puzzle."

Rei continued to stare from up on the screen, white hair floating around her in the LCL.

"Go do whatever you can to help," ordered the Major.

The girl nodded. "Understood." The window on the viewscreen blinked off.

A subtle tension left the control room, for everyone apart from Fuyutsuki.

She should not be able to do that yet.

~'/|\'~

The decay in the radius of this nascent Zone proved to be exponential, the perfect sphere of shredded space vanishing into nothingness as the mundane "reality" reasserted itself. As it shrunk, water flooded down into the crater, pooling under the new pit in the surface of the earth, the continental crust scarred by the new wound carved into it.

Unit 01 was the first to emerge back into the mundane, appearing at what had been the land level.

Shinji screamed, a noise more of surprise and shock than horror, as suddenly Unit 01 fell a hundred metres, landing heavily on one arm. There was a second scream, but that was from the sympathetic pain from the damage to the arm of the Evangelion. His eyes darted around the entry plug, trying to work out what had just happened.

The last thing... what the hell? Rei had just said that it wasn't dead... and then... something happened.

He looked around, pulling himself up with his (no, he reminded himself once again, the Evangelion's) good arm. He was at the edge of a vast, hemispherical crater, geometrically perfect. Gales were blowing into it, sucked towards the centre. But such an anomaly was nothing compared to the swirling blackness at the centre, opaque wisps of blackness (and colours within the blackness, colours only describable with phrases like "a sort of yellowish greenish purple").

He screamed and clapped his hands over his eyes. The Evangelion mimicked him, but it did no good, as the external cameras across the Unit still gave images to the interior of the plug walls, the blackness and the strange light shining through the hands before his eyes.

"Cut his viewscreens!" ordered the Deputy Representative, back in London-2. The order was rapidly implemented, and Shinji relaxed as the walls went back to their normal, solid appearance.

The proto-Zone continued to close, right to the epicentre, where it sealed itself with a rippling bulge that seemed to produce a shockwave in the universe itself. Two figures exploded away from one another, momentum conserved from the impact arcing down, to the waters now rushing into the bottom of the crater over a kilometre below. Asuka overcame her confusion to what had exactly happened, and tucked her AT-Field tight around herself, bringing her uncontrolled spin into a tight ball, spreading her limbs eagle wide.

And the Herald screamed, a cry of infinite agony and infinite loss.

It[--]gone
Half [--] soul [----] half [--] mind [--------] by [---] Daemon [------] himself [-] cannot [----] like [----] and [--] I [----] die [---] live [--] this [------] death [-] hate

It was half-dead already. The blow from that cursed weapon, hewn from the corpus of the Herald of Nyarlothtep, who had dedicated the totality of its existence to the promotion of entropy in emulation of that which it had worshipped, had torn apart reality, opening it up to the Ultimate Reality.

And half of it had not been warded by the Guard of Yog-Sothoth.

Now it was half-lobotomised, half its soul and half its flesh consumed by something far greater than itself. Life like this was impossible. Even before its ascension, it had always been twinned. And now it was alone, truly alone. It had always had another mind, to the extent that they had been two, and now it could do nothing but stare at the horrors of a cold cosmos where one was isolated, cut off from the minds of others.

I [--] not [----] if [-] die [-] am [-------] dead.
Kill [--]

It saw another loping figure approach the edge of the crater, now flooding with water. A single red eye stared at it, and it suddenly knew how it could make things right.

A half-life was no life at all. Cessation was better than this existence.

Kill [--] now!

[---] did [---] do [----] to [--] I [--------] your [----] call!

The Herald thrust its AT-Field down into the waters, sending it flying up into the air, towards the figure of Unit 00, which stood in the darkness, the clouds above the crater shredded by the release of the cosmic energies, letting the stars of the Strange Aeon shine in.

Rei aimed the charge beam she was carrying. The target was moving in a conventional parabolic trajectory, not even attempting to adjust its flight path.

She fired.

No AT-Field manifested to prevent the beam of relativistic particles punching through the centre of mass, tearing through the red, eye-like core.

Briefly, the landscape was lit up by another explosion, the waterfalls into the 1.5 kilometre crater cast in a harsh light.

"Target eliminated," reported Rei.

"Make a note," snapped the Major. "We are going to have to work on their training. We don't want to 'win' like this again."

And even as she sighed in relief, inside, Misato's mind was whirring.

If this incident involving two AT-Fields caused a Zone, what does that mean about what happened in Las Vegas?

~'/|\'~

Outside Space He waits. Outside Time He waits. He is neither Space nor Time, because an Other is those. No, He is the hanging frame upon which Space is suspended. He is the One who provides the Sands for the Hourglass of Time. The Flutes must play and the Bells must ring, and the Mysteries of the Earth must be Mapped out so that we may go where we wish, rather than descend into that Primal Chaos. All Things come from Him; all Things will return to Him. And if He wakes, that Day shall Come.

And Time and Space Shall be Warped, and all that is Felt shall be Looped. He will Play, when the Music stops and He wakes, and Mankind will not survive that. The Days of Sun shall end when the Gift of Yog-Sothoth, the Mantle of the Gate and the Key, does connect with Growth and matter and the rays of the Sun shall become One and the Same. That shall be a sign of the End Times.

I Feel for the Generation who sees the two Holes into the Body of the Daemon-Sultan. It shall be a Sign that They are all not Long to Live. Man Shall be wiped from the Earth, in a Wave of Darkness, and all the Constructs which We build for Ourselves shall prove to be no more permanent than a Hand of Sand in a wind.

The End is Nigh!

~ The Necronomicon, attributed to the infamous Arab author, Abdul Alhazred