Chapter 2 - The Everything-You-Knew-Was-Wrong Affair, Part 1

A pregnant pause hung in the air after Kodama had 'welcomed' Shinji, and hung there for a few minutes until Shinji finally got his inquisitive gears turning.

"...CONTROL?" he asked. "W-what's CONTROL? And what's the name stand for?" He then looked our way for the briefest of moments and asked an additional question all of us have been asking since Evangelion first premiered back in 1995: "Come to think of it, what does NERV stand for?"

"On that front, I'm afraid I can't answer you there," Kodama replied to that query aimed our way.

"As for CONTROL..." Max began to say, before a hint of embarrassment graced his features, "...well, sorry to say, that one's a bit of a mystery-has been since the founding of the agency. According to a memo from that time, it was decided that all CONTROL employees and operatives from the top down, in the interests of security, could never know the full meaning of the agency's acronym. The folks back then even went to the trouble of destroying every record pertaining to the unabbreviated name."

Kodama appeared to grow baffled by that admission. "Wait, really? Talk about commitment to the bit..."

"What CONTROL is, as an agency, is another story altogether," Barbara Ann said as she pressed a button on the desk that lowered a projection screen as she and Max then moved to the side of Shinji and Kodama. "99, if you could hit the lights, please?" Kodama then pressed the bottom of the light switch just as a projector poked out of a small potted plant on a nearby shelf and turned on, its beam aimed at the screen. Max held up a popcorn bowl between himself and Shinji and offered the boy some, which Shinji, out of habit, took as he tossed a few pieces into his mouth. Barbara Ann then started up the slideshow using the small remote now in her hand. "CONTROL was originally founded in the early years of the Cold War, based primarily out of Washington D.C. though with branches in other parts of the country (and some in a few of the NATO-aligned nations)," she recounted in-between slides. "Its purpose: defending the world against threats to free will everywhere, especially those coming from the international organization of evil known as KAOS."

"If you're wondering what KAOS stands for, that's also one mystery that's remained unsolved to this day," Max chimed in.

"As you've no doubt learned in one history class or another," Barbara Ann continued as she shifted to a slide of an iconic shot of the fall of the Berlin Wall, "the Cold War eventually came to an end, symbolically first with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then with the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991."

"Partially thanks to, among other things, the old 'outspend the enemy on defense' trick," Max added. "Around the time of the collapse of the Soviets, we at CONTROL managed to take down the last remaining vestiges of KAOS, once and for all."

"But just because one great threat to global freedom was down, didn't mean we couldn't sit idle," Barbara Ann stated. "As the old saying goes, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance."

"So, with KAOS gone, who'd you wind up spying on then?" Shinji asked as he took another palm-ful of popcorn. "The Guatemalans?"

"Mostly various global crime syndicates," Max answered. "For one brief period in 1995, there was an attempt to revive KAOS which, thanks to our timely intervention, we made sure was extremely short-lived."

"How short?" Shinji asked.

"According to our archives," Kodama replied amusedly, "just a single week."

"Other than that, there was the big comeback of the notorious Dr. Evil in '97," Barbara Ann supplied, "which, thankfully, our colleagues 'across the pond' managed to get a handle on."

"With all our work putting out various fires around the world," Max sadly began as he made a gesture of a small space between his thumb and forefinger, "there was just one instance where we really missed it by that much."

"What was it?" Shinji asked, Max's tone making him a bit uneasy.

Barbara Ann switched to the next slide, which depicted a great explosion that was very familiar were one to read a textbook covering recent world history. The photo's date? September 13, 2000. "Second Impact," Barbara Ann grimly answered. It was then that Shinji lost his appetite for further helpings of popcorn, just when he was reaching for another few pieces.

"Of all those who were really unprepared for something of this magnitude, the intelligence community was caught with its pants down the most," Max said. "In the days that followed, most of our time was spent making sure all those fighting in the Impact Wars didn't go any further in their use of weapons of mass destruction, though few did slip through our fingers. (Sorry about the original Tokyo, on that note.)"

"Um, no problem," Shinji said. "Then again, I wasn't, you know, born before then."

"And as you no doubt already know," Barbara Ann continued, "the fighting ceased following the signing of the Valentine Treaty in 2001, which among other things increased the powers of the United Nations to a greater level of effectiveness not seen in the history of the organization before or since. But for a lot of us in the spy business, the timing, the circumstances-it didn't entirely add up."

"We, and others in our profession, felt there was more to all this than anybody realized," Max elaborated. "Before I go any further, answer me this, Shinji-what do you know as the cause of Second Impact?"

Shinji, a bit startled by the sudden question, rubbed the back of his head absentmindedly as he replied. "It-it was caused by a meteorite striking Antarctica-it's what we're all taught in school."

Max, Barbara Ann, and Kodama looked to one another briefly before returning their focus to Shinji. "Sorry to say, Shinji, but I'm afraid that the 'official' explanation isn't the case," Kodama stated.

Shinji's eyes widened on hearing her. "W-What?!"

"Think about it, if you will," Max began to say, "would you believe that a small meteorite, at four inches wide, impacted any part of the planet while traveling at 95% of the speed of light, enough to melt the whole of the Antarctic ice, and as a result cause enormous tsunamis that raised sea levels enough to wipe out a great number of coastal cities and islands? Would you believe that Ceimoa Nan, an astronomer whose credentials are highly dubious at best and practically nonexistent at worst, who was later found to be able to barely tell a planetoid from a pomegranate, just happened to detect it fifteen minutes before impact?"

Shinji, before he could offer a response, took a moment to recall some of the mutterings he overheard from his more nerdy classmates at his old school, mostly debates over the validity of the scientific facts offered by the 'meteorite explanation'. "Well, when you put it that way, it seems like it doesn't make that much sense."

"That's because it doesn't," Barbara Ann said. "We had our own scientific division secretly verify the findings offered by the U.N. investigative committee, and the results all pointed to the same conclusion."

"The whole thing absolutely reeked of a cover-up," Max stated. "A prime example of the old 'acts of God excuse' trick famously used by most major insurance companies if I ever did see it. Perhaps the greatest government cover-up since the true contents of Al Capone's vault-which, if you must know, had actually contained incriminating photos of several high-profile members of a number of Republican administrations up to Hoover. (The Reagan administration had them secretly moved before Geraldo Rivera opened the vault, but I digress...)"

"There were a number of questions we found ourselves asking once we started realizing it was a cover-up," Barbara Ann said. "Chiefly, who, how, and why? We started looking into the matter almost immediately, in conjunction with a number of colleagues and allied agencies. And if it was a cover-up, we took all necessary precautions to ensure we didn't have any moles within our respective agencies that might prevent us from exposing it."

"Eventually," Max began as Barbara Ann handed him the remote, "we found our biggest lead after getting our hands on this-" a press of the button changed the slide to a photo of the Smarts, dressed casually in a crowd of fans somewhere in the Nevada deserts. The sight of the Smarts painted up amid the revelers made Shinji and Kodama cringe slightly. "Whoops, pardon me-that was us at Burning Man in 2005, it was on our bucket list for a good while. (No idea how that photo got in here...)" He then clicked the button again, and this time got the image he wanted, which was of an old binder filled to the brim with notes, documents, and photographs. "The Tallman Dossier, put together by a retired CIA agent over the course of February to September 2000, in the name of finishing what a Japanese colleague of his by the name of Takahiro Kaji had started well before him. But this wasn't the only lead we had-a short while later, we came into possession of the findings put to paper by another who was highly suspicious of the cover-up, and had done his own investigations into it. That person being-" When Max clicked the remote, again the 'audience' was treated to another photo that clearly didn't belong in the set, if the facial reactions on Barbara Ann's, Kodama's, and Shinji's faces were any indicator. "Ah, sorry about this, that's from the New Year's bash of '99, after we'd managed to successfully destroy the Y2K Bug. (Who knew HYMIE could get that much of a buzz from a single beer...?)" Max clicked the remote again, and this time got the photo he wanted; who exactly was in that photo got a very surprised reaction from Shinji.

"Th-that's Sub-Commander Fuyutsuki!" he pointed out.

"Indeed," Barbara Ann affirmed.

"Well before he held that rank and position," Kodama elaborated as Max handed her the remote, "Kozo Fuyutsuki was a well-regarded university professor specializing in the, at the time, newly-emerged field of metaphysical biology. In his teaching days, there were two standout students in his class-" She clicked the remote, switching to a photo of two people who Shinji knew very well, based on the further surprise that grew on his face. "Yui Ikari and Gendo Rokubungi-your parents, Shinji."

Shinji's jaw went slack for a brief moment, before a bit of confusion came upon him. "Rokubungi? I thought-"

"Rokubungi is your father's family name," Kodama clarified. "When he married your mother, bucking a long-held marriage tradition, he took her name instead of the other way around." She then continued the flow of the explanation. "Once we managed to get through both Fuyutsuki's findings in conjunction with the Tallman Dossier, we were able to put a name and a 'face' to the ones behind the true cause of Second Impact." With a click of the remote, the quartet soon found themselves facing the image of a strange, seven-eyed mask, the sight of which unnerved Shinji.

"Who-?" Shinji started to ask.

"They call themselves 'SEELE', from the German word for soul," Kodama answered. "They're a secret cabal with a global reach so extensive and influential, they make the Illuminati look like a simple book club meeting. From what we've been able to gather, this group has been around for decades, as far as the early 20th century, though they themselves have spread rumors that they're supposedly some millennia-old secret society; our guess is in order to keep would-be conspiracy theorists and investigators constantly grasping at straws. Our intel's managed to get us a few key details about the group-among other things, they're led by a 12-man council, with five out of the dozen acting as their public face, the so-called "U.N. Human Instrumentality Committee". Their leader is this man-" She clicked the remote, shifting to the next image, which depicted an elderly man in a high-tech wheelchair and sporting an even more hi-tech visor over his eyes. "-Lorenz Kihl, German business magnate with his fingers in a lot of pies worldwide. He's the one who, from the shadows, spearheaded the efforts that led up to the current world order."

To be continued...

**Author's Note(s)**

The first half of where I basically assume the role of Basil Exposition, chiefly to catch folks up on what Get Smart's CONTROL is all about and expose Shinji to some of the intricacies of the world of EVA he knows (or supposedly does).

In the entirety of the Get Smart mythos, there's never been any elaboration on what the acronyms of CONTROL and KAOS stand for.

Shinji's comment about 'spying on the Guatemalans' is a takeoff on a line of Dana Carvey's from a 1992 "Wayne's World" sketch from the 17th season of Saturday Night Live. In the sketch, Wayne and Garth count down the top ten reasons why they're sort of bummed that communism fell in the Soviet Union. Reason #4? Wayne: "Spy junk, in the future, is gonna suck!" Garth: "Y-yeah! Who's gonna-who's James Bond gonna spy on, the Guatemalans? (Wayne: "Shyeah!") As if!"

The 'brief KAOS revival' is an in-joke about the short-lived Get Smart revival on FOX in 1995, which lasted a mere 7 episodes from January 8th through February 19th of that year.

Three guesses as to which cult classic film I'm hinting at with the mention of the comeback of one Dr. Evil.

Max, in his elaboration on the other government cover-up mentioned, refers to the 1986 Geraldo Rivera-hosted TV special The Mystery of Al Capone's Vaults, watched by over 30 million viewers in its original airing. Rivera's special built up an enormous amount of hype over what would be uncovered once said vaults (found underneath the Lexington Hotel in Chicago), only for everyone, including Rivera himself, to be disappointed upon seeing that the only things found within were dirt and several empty bottles. (The cover-up was my own invention.)

The "Tallman Dossier" is my nod to ArujeiGo's Evangelion fanfic prequel "On the Threshold We All Stood", in which retired CIA agent Charles Tallman tries to uncover the SEELE conspiracy in the months leading up to Second Impact.