(Part III of "The Evangelion Matrix"! And there was great rejoicing...sorry about the delay. Had an attack of Real Life, which sucks. No, not the comic; that's pretty kewl. Anyway, here you go...also a quick nod of thanks this time to Slayerwolf and his "NERV Recruit" AMV.)

(* Footnote: What's an Eva story without a toothpick joke?)


Gendo strode into an antechamber, Shinji in his wake. Shinji paused for a moment on the threshhold. The antechamber's dilapidated furniture had been shoved to one side and piled in a corner, with the exception of a high-backed, Victorian chair and a shattered mirror. In the center of the room was a huge bank of computers, monitors, and a periscope like device. He recognized Toji, Rei, and Asuka, but at the periscope was a man about Shinji's height, with skin and hair so pale that looked albino.

"Toji, are we online?" Gendo asked.

"Almost," Toji replied, his fingers flying across the keyboard.

"Time is always against us. Always has been." He sighed, then smiled slightly at Shinji. "Please, take a seat there." Rei took Shinji's jacket, her face unreadable.

Shinji was still mystified by the computers. They were like nothing he had ever seen, even at Nergal. "You did all this?" he asked Asuka as he took the high-backed chair.

"Ja." She stuck medical sensors on his shoulders and neck.

"The pocky stick you ate is part of a trace program," Gendo explained. "It's designed to disrupt your input/output carrier signals so we can pinpoint your location."

"What does that mean?" Shinji asked Toji.

"How should I know? I just press the shiny buttons."

The albino rolled his eyes and looked away from the periscope. "It means buckle your seat belt, Miyuki-chan, because you're going to Wonderland."

"Swell," Shinji sighed. He leaned back and tried to relax. I must be crazy, he thought. I'm trusting a hypersensitive German, a fugitive from a punk rock band with an attitude, a dumb-looking jock, and an albino. And my father. There was more than a trace program inside that pocky stick. He looked over at a cracked mirror, at his own reflection. Maybe I should grow a beard like Dad's, though...I'd look tougher...

Suddenly the mirror wavered and shifted. Shinji blinked. When his eyes opened, there were no cracks; it was a solid piece. Shinji reached out and touched it in curiousity. To his surprise, it shimmered and he felt his fingers go into the mirror, as if it was water. Ripples spread out from his fingers, and when he drew them back, the tips of them were covered in liquid silver. He looked over at his father. "Did you–"

"Have you ever had a dream, Shinji, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream?" Gendo asked.

Sure, Shinji almost answered, I could have sworn I was making it with Tenchi's girlfriend Ryoko once. His response died on his lips, however, because the silver was moving down his fingers.

"How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?" Gendo was continuing.

Shinji ignored him. Now the silver was traveling down his arm. "This...can't be..."

"Be what?" Gendo raised an eyebrow. "Be real?"

"I was going to say normal..." Shinji recoiled from the stuff. It felt like his arm was freezing solid beneath the silver, and it was spreading towards his shoulder and chest.

"It's going into replication," Asuka said from her station. "Kinda kewl, actually."

"Toji?" Gendo looked over his shoulder.

"Still nothing," Toji sighed. He was scanning sites as quickly as he could.

"Eeaagh!" Shinji yelled, as the silver began to crawl up his neck. "It's cold! It's cold!" He looked at his father. "Father, why?"

Now it was Gendo's turn to ignore him. He was dialing a cell phone. "Maya, we'll need a signal soon."

As it spread across his chest, Shinji found he could not get his breath. That seemed a lower priority, however, as the silver was spreading across his chin and face. Shinji looked at his father, but typically Gendo's back was to him as he looked over Toji's shoulder.

"He's going into arrest," Asuka warned, picking up the tire iron.

I'm dying, Shinji thought in panic. He could barely move, but he managed to raise his left arm to face his father. In a last act of defiance, Shinji gave him the finger.

"Lock, I got him!" Toji yelled. "Woot!"

"Now, Maya!" Gendo shouted into the cellphone.

Shinji felt the silver pour into his throat and screamed, choking. Then everything went black.

* * *


Everything was orange. Shinji blinked, but the orange was still there. He could barely see through it, and what he could see puzzled him. He was naked, except where various hoses and wires were attached to him–three to his shoulders and two to his sides was as far as he could tell. He could move his arms and legs, though it felt like he was immersed in syrup. He reached up and met resistance; there was some sort of membrane over...whatever he was encased in. To his surprise, the effort of trying to break through exhausted him.

Shinji rested a moment and tried again. This time, he pulled it apart and sliding, managed to sit up. A cold breeze washed over him and he shivered, and the air tasted acidic. It was dark, but not so that he couldn't see; it was lit as if by a television set in a darkened room.

"Gah!" Shinji exclaimed. "I'm covered in snot! Gross!" He tried to wipe it off, but that seemed to only make things worse. Where am I...

He looked around. As far as he could see, there were people encased in mostly opaque cylinders, extending out from a single core like spokes on a wheel. The cylinders were above him, underneath him, across a chasm from him–everywhere. And each one was filled with a barely visible, but nonetheless real, person. People just like him.

Abruptly Shinji realized that his mouth tasted like blood. But there was no blood there, only more of the slimy, sticky fluid that he was still immersed in from the waist down.

Shinji heard something on the wind, a sound that grew louder. He shakily stood up, trying to find out where the sound was coming from, when suddenly the source was right before him. He stumbled backwards and fell back into the muck-filled cylinder that had been his home.

To Shinji's surprise, the source of the noise was actually kind of cute. It was feminine looking, a little shorter than him, with hair so red and so spiky it had to be artificial. An attached winged jetpack kept her aloft, and Shinji could make out the letters NK-1124 stenciled on the wings. Incongrouously, the figure was dressed in a sailor suit, a fuku. That told Shinji that he might be in trouble.

The female leaned towards him, small metal ears extending from the side of her head as she looked him up and down. Shinji got to his feet again, wanting to communicate with whatever she was. Is this what Father wanted–

His thoughts were cut off as the girl's eyes widened to the size of platters. "EEEEK!" she screamed, pointing at Shinji. "ECCHI!"

"What?!" Shinji abruptly tried to cover himself. "Wait–you don't–"

The girl continued to scream and call him a pervert, shutting her eyes. Before he could stop her, she reached out and pulled a lever that was clearly marked PULL TO FLUSH.

That can't be good! was all that Shinji had time to think. The hoses and wires attached to him exploded from his body with hisses of released air, sending the hoses skittering. Shinji screamed with the pain. The girl reached out, called him a pervert one last time, and shoved him back into the goo. Before Shinji could get to his feet again, he was being sucked down, down, down...

Shinji was falling. (As if that wasn't obvious.) He went down some sort of shaft, scarred and mossy with age. It was actually kind of fun, or would have had Shinji known what awaited him at the bottom. But instead of a nice splashdown in a heated pool, Shinji was ejected into open space.

"Ooooohhhhhhh shiiiiiiiii—" He hit scummy water with a tremendous splash. Using arms and legs that suddenly seemed reluctant to work, Shinji managed to get back to the surface, but didn't stay there long. Abruptly, Shinji realized that one thing he had been meaning to do was to learn how to swim.

Thanks a lot, Dad, Shinji thought grimly as he went under for the third time. Fill me up with LSD or PCP or something, so I can drown! Geez, I can think...of other ways...to commit...suicide...

For the second time in what seemed to him ten minutes, Shinji knew that he was going to die. Water closed over his head and he sank into the dark, dank water.

Dimly, he heard something splash into the water next to him, then he felt metal fingers closing around him. He fought against them, but what little strength he had was long gone. Then he realized he was being drawn up, out of the water, towards a bright light. Well, that's it, Shinji feebly decided. I'm dead. Hmm. This appears to be heaven or something, which is good...maybe there really is 72 virgins waiting for me...

Helping hands waited for him at the top, and as the metal fingers were pried away, he was laid on a cold floor of some kind by hands that were undeniably female. He still could not see very well. The goo was wiped off of him and he was wrapped in a warm blanket. Hazily, he could make out two women very close to him.

"Where am I?" Shinji asked sleepily.

A face swam into focus. "Welcome...to the real world." It was his father, Gendo Ikari.

Damn. I was hoping for the virgins, Shinji thought, and then everything went black again.


"We've done it, Asuka. We've found him."

Shinji slowly opened his eyes. He was in some sort of bed, another cylinder, but this time he was not immersed in anything that tasted like blood. He recognized his father's voice, and sure enough, Gendo was staring down at him. Shinji could tell that he wore some sort of jumpsuit, not at all how Shinji remembered him ever dressing.

A loud pop from his left made him look in that direction. Asuka Langely Soryu's face came into view, wearing some sort of threadbare-looking shirt. She was chewing gum, which she popped again loudly. "Yeah, yeah. I hope you're right, considering all the trouble we went through."

"I don't have to hope," Gendo said softly. "I know."

"Am I dead?" Shinji groaned.

"Far from it," Gendo smiled.

Dammit, where's my virgins?! Shinji nearly yelled, but luckily he passed out again.


"He still needs a lot of work. I'm not sure the Porcupine Dilemma will work."

Another female voice, one Shinji didn't recognize. He opened his eyes, and this time looked into the face of an attractive, older woman with blond hair. She wore the same sort of Salvation Army-reject clothing that everyone else had, but thrown over that was a white lab coat. She looked at him through tinted glasses, similar but larger than his father's.

"We have the technology. We can rebuild him." Gendo came into Shinji's view again.

Shinji managed to muster the strength to look down at himself. He was still naked, though covered loosely by a cloth, but instead of a few hoses and wires, he had what looked to be hundreds of needles, or toothpicks*, stuck in him. "AAA!" he screamed. "What are you doing to me now?!"

"Your muscles have atrophied. We're rebuilding them," Gendo explained.

"Why do my eyes hurt?!" Shinji demanded loudly.

"You've never used them before," Gendo said. He rubbed Shinji's hair, which was slowly growing back. "Rest, Shinji. The answers are coming."

"I've been made to eat laced pocky and then you poured liquid mercury down my throat and then I woke up in a bowl of warm snot and got flushed by some chick in a sailor suit and fell into a canyon and nearly drowned and thought I was dead and there isn't any damn virgins anywhere and–"

"Bomb him, Ritsuko," Gendo said, overriding Shinji's tirade. The blond woman pulled a lever and everything went dark yet once more.


Shinji slowly woke up, but this time the room was silent. He was also no longer in any cylinder of any kind, but a real bed. Nor was he naked, but dressed, though the loose clothing was hardly stylish. Luckily, style was not something Shinji was ever concerned with. For a moment, Shinji wondered if it had all been a bad dream, if he was back in his tiny apartment.

Then he looked up and sighed. "Unfamiliar ceiling," he said aloud.

He slowly rose from the bed, and found that everything worked the way it was supposed to. He still felt weak, but not nearly as weak as before. Guess they must have rebuilt my muscles or whatever. Wonder if I can leap tall buildings with a single bound now? Shinji noticed, as he rolled down his sleeves, that the attachment ports for the hoses were still in his shoulders, and he could feel them in his sides. He could feel something else, cold and metal, at the base of his skull. The way my week's been going, it's probably a cortex bomb.

The door squeaked open. Shinji looked over as his father walked through the steel doorway. "Shinji," he said by way of greeting.

"Dad...what's happened to me? What is this place?"

"More important than 'what,' Shinji, is 'when.'"

"Not more mind games..."

"No, no, school's out." Gendo leaned against the bulkhead. "You believe it's the year 2015, when in fact it's closer to 2215. I can't tell you exactly what year it is, because we honestly don't know." Gendo sighed. "There's nothing I can say that will explain it for you, Shinji. Come with me; you can see for yourself." He motioned towards the door. Shinji, after a moment of hesitation, did as he was told.

Gendo led his son down a long corridor which felt as if it was moving. Shinji realized it was an optical illusion; it was the walls that were moving, rotating slowly around an unseen axis. They came out of the corridor to a set of steps, into a large chamber.

"This is my ship," Gendo explained, though Shinji had already figured out they were not on terra firma, "the Bebop. It's an old converted fishing vessel. This is the main deck, where we broadcast our pirate signal and hack into the Eva Matrix." Gendo walked down the stairs towards a bank of computers, surrounded by a semicircle of ratty-looking barber chairs. Hooked up to each chair was something that looked as if it came from the Marquis de Sade's nightmares, with a liberal dose of H.R. Giger thrown in.

"Most of my crew you already know," Gendo continued. A female stood up and pulled back a welding mask, revealing the face of Asuka Soryu. They locked eyes for a moment until Shinji looked away. Gendo was introducing the other members of the Bebop's crew, but Shinji knew he would not have been able to keep eye contact with the fiery Asuka in any case. "This is Toji, Rei, and Kaworu."

Toji grinned at Shinji and shook his hand. Rei gave him the barest of nods, her face unreadable, while Kaworu smiled. "Hello."

Gendo motioned at two other females. "The ones you don't know are Ritsuko Akagi–" Shinji recognized the blonde with the lab coat from earlier– "and her student, Maya Ibuki." Ritsuko nodded affably, while Maya's grin threatened to split her face. "Oh, and the one behind you, that's Ed."

Shinji whirled to find himself looking at a pair of dirty feet. He looked down into the face of a girl perhaps ten or eleven, her short red hair brushing the deck between the hands she was walking on. With lightning speed, she was back on her feet and looking at Shinji. Her expression serious, she slowly reached out towards Shinji's face and touched his nose. "Beep," she said with all the gravity of a science professor, then giggled and ran away, arms outstretched like wings and making annoyingly loud buzzing noises.

"Ed?" Shinji asked.

"Ed," Gendo sighed, which was becoming a habit. "She came with the ship..." He waved that away. "You wanted to know what the Eva Matrix is, Shinji?" He motioned to one of the barber chair-torture devices. "Have a seat."