Chapter Text
Disclaimer: I do not own nor make any claim on Neon Genesis Evangelion. Even the 2nd Gen characters are not my creations.
Children of Evangelion
Nephilim - Chapter 5: Ex Machina
2035 - 20 Years After Third Impact
“This is awesome!”
The pilots ate lunch with Miya on the school roof. It had been several days since Uma’s first battle, and she finally confessed to them everything she had told Shinji. She didn't have to–Shinji had made that clear. But she had felt the pressure to tell someone building, maybe anyone, who wasn't an adult in her life, most of which happened to be her direct superiors.
“Miya!” Aki frowned at her. “I don’t see how this is a good thing.” She caught Uma flinching at that remark. “I mean… Not that… It’s not…”
“Smooth, Wondergirl,” Mai muttered to her cousin. “What she’s trying to say is that, while your visions, if they’re real, aren’t a problem, the knowledge that you’re destined to kill your father, our grandfather, is not necessarily a good thing.”
Miya asked, “Why?”
Uma was starting to realize that this was an argument Miya frequently had with her older sister. The youngest Ikari’s reasoning was laid out based on the facts. Gendo was a war criminal responsible for the genocide of eighteen percent of the planet at the time of Third Impact. He manipulated and tortured their parents, which included his own son, and mutilated the souls of their grandmothers and of God herself.
And while Mai argued that they had no moral or legal right to take his life, Miya pointed out that in the twenty years since Gendo’s most significant act was to help facilitate the creation of the Angel-Evangelion Hybrids, whose sole purpose was the destruction of themselves and everyone they loved. It wasn’t about morality. It was about survival.
“She wants to kill Gendo,” Miya continued, “and Gendo needs to die. I’m not seeing the downside here.”
“Yes, well…” Yosuke tried to steer the conversation away from their tired old argument before it began. “In a take from the not sociopathic members of the family, what makes you so sure that’s your destiny, Uma?”
“Because it’s not just some idle daydream,” she replied. “I know the difference between my visions and dreams. There’s a distinctness to my visions.”
He asked, “And they’re never wrong?”
She frowned back at him. “It literally saved your ass.”
Mai and Aki snickered at him.
“I’m just asking if…”
“I know what you’re asking,” she snapped. “And the answer is no.” She hesitated. “Though… I don’t know what exactly they mean. It’s only ever a glimpse. A snapshot. Sometimes the context is incomplete.”
“That’s all I meant,” he said. He could tell that she didn’t want him to press the issue anymore.
“Hey, it’s okay.” Aki placed her hand over Uma’s and smiled.
She smiled back at her. Mai nudged Yosuke.
Miya asked, “Can you, like, focus it? Pick what you want to see?”
Uma sighed. “It doesn’t work that way. I can’t even tell when it’s going to strike. Being in Psi… for the first time I could feel it. It was like a constant force all around me, a tide pulling me back and forth. But I felt… complete.”
That was something all three of the other pilots understood. Synching with their Evas felt like coming home, finding a piece of themselves that they didn’t know was missing. It’d been so very different for their parents.
“Forget Gendo,” Mai said. “Try to focus on your training. I don’t want you seeing next Tuesday when you’re supposed to be focusing on fighting a Hybrid.”
Uma nodded, accepting the senior pilot’s brusque command without question, but Yosuke subtly frowned. Mai hadn’t quite been the same since they’d come back from their little ‘Back to the Future’ style trip to the past. He suspected that he knew why but hadn’t bothered to push the issue. He knew how Mai would react.
“Since I’m a pilot now,” Uma said, “do I finally get to know how you met Gendo?”
While the other three exchanged wary glances, Miya shrugged.
“Sure, why not?”
Mai blanched. “It’s classified!”
“I’m not a pilot,” she said. “And I’m too young to be prosecuted.” She smiled sweetly at her older sister. No one bought it.
‘I’m going to wring her little neck,’ Mai thought over their SCC.
‘Easy, Sis,’ Yosuke thought back.
“Hey! Stop that!” Miya scowled. “I know you’re talking about me!”
The sisters were about to get into another argument when their wrist communicators flashed. Dr. Akagi’s face appeared, hovering over them.
“Good, you’re all together,” she said. “That’ll make this easier. I’d like all of you to report to HQ as soon as possible.”
Miya asked, “What’s up, Doc?” She smiled at Akagi’s annoyed expression.
But Uma knew that tone. Her mother was about to drop something on them.
“It’s time,” Akagi said. “We’re going to remove the Deus Ex Machina block.”
***
The WILLE command staff knew about the Deus Ex Machina device - Miya and Dr. Akagi built it together. It was supposed to be an option of last resort if Eva Team One was discovered when they traveled back to 2015. They blew their cover within a week.
The Deus Ex Machina emitted a neuroelectric pulse that shorted out the short-term memory and prevented its targets from accessing those parts of their long-term memory connected to the events. None of NERV could recall what had happened during that week. They would read the report on it years later, but it still seemed like something that happened to someone else, and there were many personal details left out.
The sole exception was Dr. Ritsuko Akagi, who built protections for herself into the device. She couldn’t be sure what she would change, or how much. She wasn’t even sure if this was the first time she’d done it, or creating a self-perpetuating loop. It wasn’t her field. But she did know that it had to be done. Someone had to keep things from going off the rails. That was how she justified it to herself and everyone else, anyway.
But things had changed now, and she needed everyone up to speed. She suspected that whatever Mari and Tabris were up to was going to result in an escalation of this war. And they’d sent those Hybrids after her daughter. She wasn’t going to forgive them for that.
“It’s an alternate timeline,” Asuka explained, because it was her field. “But you’re not responsible for any of this. The Third Impact is.”
The pilots, Miya and Shinji, and the rest of the command staff were gathered in a briefing room in WILLE HQ. Funny enough, it was the same one the pilots had been in just a few weeks ago, when they’d gone back in time and agreed to work with NERV.
Asuka explained the theory she had developed while working for Fuyutsuki, before coming to WILLE.
“The Third Impact was a singular quantum event that birthed thousands, maybe millions, maybe infinite potential realities. This is just one of them. It was the entire reason why Mari went back in time in the first place. She was trying to break the rules and create a timeline without us to stop her. That obviously failed.”
She looked at Shinji and smiled, “And any reality where I don’t have this isn’t one worth remembering.”
Misato asked, “So, what do we do? Is there a big machine we stick our heads in, or…?”
Miya and Ritsuko groaned in unison. It was the most surreal thing Uma had ever seen but elicited a giggle from her anyway. They turned their attention to the device that sat on the table at the front of the room, which until now they’d all assumed was just a black, featureless box.
“I can’t believe I agreed to this,” Asuka grumbled. “Rewriting our own memories.”
“It was necessary at the time, Captain,” Kotomi said. “Believe me. There are things about that trip I wish I could forget.”
“Well, let’s get it over with. Miya, do your thing.”
She nodded and typed on her holo terminal. “It’s just a simple recalibration. The device will emit another neural pulse that will unlock the memories.”
Toji asked, “There’s no risk of any permanent damage from this thing, is there?”
“Minimal,” Miya said. “Five percent. Fifteen, tops.”
“Wait, what?”
“Hold on!”
Miya entered the command code, and there was a flash of light from the box. The Second-Generation pilots felt… nothing. Their parents, on the other hand, swayed in their seats, and couldn’t move for several seconds as memories came flooding back to them.
“I think I just tasted purple,” Rei said.
Shinji pointed out to Toji that his nose was bleeding. Toji touched it and immediately panicked.
“You said it was safe! Rei, I need a CAT scan now!”
“Calm down, you stupid ape,” Asuka snapped. She rubbed her temples. “Ugh, I feel like I went on a three-day bender without any of the fun.”
“Tell me about it,” Misato said as she did the same. Then, her head snapped up, and she turned on Ryoji. “Oh, my god! You hit on our daughter!”
Royji winced. “Please, don’t bring that up. It’s not as if I knew.”
Kotomi tried to intervene before her parents had another fight.
Asuka’s head was swimming, but suddenly she looked up and narrowed her eyes on Miya. “You! You’re in big trouble, young lady!”
“Oh, shit,” Miya muttered. “Mai? Yosuke? Some help here, please?”
Her older siblings shook their heads in unison. She hated it when they did that.
“You made this mess, Little Sis,” Yosuke said. “Now you’ve gotta pay the price.”
Asuka stood, and Shinji was right behind her, equally furious but trying to keep his cool.
Asuka glowered at her youngest. “What the hell made you think that you could try to assassinate Mari and Tabris? Do you have any idea how foolish that was?” She cut off Miya when the girl tried to respond. “And you!” She whirled around and pointed at Ryoji Kaji. “You actually tried to help her!”
Uma leaned over to Aki, and whispered, “Should we do anything?”
“No,” Aki said. “Just enjoy the show.” Then, she thought, ‘And be glad it’s not us for once.’
“I…” Ryoji had a rare moment of stammering. “I was just making sure she didn’t make a big mistake.” Then, he turned to Misato. “How was I supposed to know it was Kotomi? I wasn’t serious, anyway. I was just doing it to annoy you.”
“Well, mission accomplished,” Misato growled. “Because I’m a hell of a lot more than annoyed!”
Ristuko pinched her fingers in her mouth and whistled loud and sharply. Everyone flinched and covered their ears. She glared at them.
“Are all of you done being idiots? Good, because this is serious. Now that you have all your memories back, we need to come up with a real plan to stop NERV.” They all waited to see if she would keep yelling. “Well? Dismissed!”
They all filed out, with Misato and Asuka vowing that this was not over for Ryoji and Miya.
Miya asked, “I’m grounded, aren’t I?”
“Oh, you better believe it,” Asuka said. “Until you’re thirty!” She then turned to Kotomi, and asked, “And you! How did she even get a gun?”
“She’s your daughter,” her lieutenant said matter-of-factly. “You literally trained all of us.”
“It’s not as if it was last week,” Miya tried to defend herself. “It was twenty years ago!”
Asuka whirled on her. “That’s not how causality works, and you know it, young lady!”
“I think you’re going to have to let this one go,” Shinji said to his youngest. He didn’t dare say it, but when it came to advanced physics, Asuka had her daughter beat.
Miya stalked away, grumbling, “Kausalität ist so ein Quatsch.”
“Language!”
The pilots watched the little melodrama play out, and then Yosuke asked, “So, what do we do now?”
“It’ll take a few hours for all of their memories to return,” Dr. Akagi said. She appeared behind them without anyone else noticing, but none of them flinched. They were used to her habit of sneaking up on others. “I suggest you use this time to rest. I have a feeling that you’re going to need it.”
She walked away, and all the pilots, even Uma, felt a chill pass through them. There was something deeply unsettling in the woman’s tone.
***
The Command staff gathered in Misato’s office a couple of hours later, after all of them had been given time to process their memories and read Royji and Akagi’s preliminary reports on the LCL theft.
“This is nuts,” Asuka said, summing up everyone else’s opinions on the report’s conclusions succinctly.
Kaji had managed to track down the LCL thieves in a matter of hours, and as he suspected they worked for NERV, a fact that they revealed after an exhaustive interrogation. But they were just mercenaries, go-betweens, and after they dropped off the shipment, they had no idea where it had gone or what happened to it other than it had been taken away by plane. The plane disappeared over the South China Sea, meaning they were no closer to finding where NERV was basing itself from than they had been five years ago.
Ritsuko, meanwhile, had taken careful measurements of the electromagnetic activity within the Sea of Gauf to make sure that it hadn’t dropped. She quickly realized that they hadn’t chosen the activation of Unit Psi as the time to enact their heist on accident. There was a surge in activity each time a Second Generation Evangelion was activated. The generation of a new soul, one specifically meant to be housed in an Eva, resulted in a temporary increase in the Sea’s mass, enough for the Eva, and some extra that typically waned after a brief window. Clearly, NERV knew about this and tried to use Unit Psi’s activation as cover for their LCL theft.
Shinji asked, “You really think they’re going to try this again? The clones? Instrumentality? A Fourth Impact?”
“I didn’t go that far in my conclusions,” Ritsuko said. “So please, do not assume anything that is not in the facts.”
“I still can’t believe Mari was a clone this whole time,” Toji said. “No offense, Rei.”
“None taken,” she said. She scowled at the report as though it had personally insulted her. It had in a way.
The real Mari - original, she thought. Not ‘real’. She hated that word. The original Mari had been a member of Gehirn, another one of Fuyutsuki’s students, and she pioneered the cloning process that had created the ‘Ayanami Series,’ using herself as a test sample. There had, apparently, been plans for a third series codenamed ‘Shikinami.’ They’d always been intended to be the pilots of the Evangelions, but those plans were changed when Gendo took over and restructured the organization into NERV.
And SEELE had raised Mari, just as they’d raised Kaworu and Gendo had raised Rei, to be their instrument. Was WILLE really any different?
“But” Misato said, “you do think they want to start up the cloning program again, don’t you?”
“That’s the most likely scenario,” Ritsuko admitted. “Though, to what end, I can’t say. There are just too many possibilities.”
“It explains why they wanted Gendo so badly,” Shinji said. He couldn’t hide the bitterness in his voice. All these years and the man still managed to get under his skin and find ways to upend his life. “No one knows more about it than he would.”
Ritsuko nodded. “The original Mari was killed by SEELE after she perfected the cloning process. He’s the only one who’s familiar enough with it to make it work again.”
“Well, him and you,” Kaji pointed out.
Ritsuko scowled at him. “I would never–!”
“Except you have,” Rei said. “With Uma.”
Ritsuko glared at her but said nothing.
“We’re not having this argument again, are we?” Misato asked, her tone indicating that she didn’t want to hear it. No one answered. “Good. The real question is what are we going to do about it?”
“Kick their asses is what we’re gonna do,” Asuka said.
“I appreciate the positivity,” Misato said, “but we need something a little more actionable.”
“For now,” Kaji said, “I think all we can do is wait.”
“Great,” Asuka growled. “Hurry up and wait, the Kaji Special.”
“He’s right, this time,” Rei said. “Until we have a way to track them, to find where NERV has been hiding all this time, all we can do is react. And Uma is our only chance of being ready for whatever they’re planning.”
***
The four pilots didn’t stick around for the meeting. They bolted from HQ as soon as they could and headed for the mall. They ran around from store to store, the food court to the arcade, the theater to the bookstore. Yosuke tried to talk up a pair of senior girls in line for the movie. He got one of their numbers. A line of boys from their class followed Mai around, just as Aki had predicted. She either ignored them or chased them off if they didn't get the message the first time.
Aki went stiff when she felt a hand on hers during the movie. She knew faster than she wanted to admit that it was Uma’s. Uma didn’t even realize how hard she was squeezing Aki’s hand until the girl said something. She blushed and ducked her head.
They went for ice cream after the movie and sat around outside the shop. Uma still hadn’t been able to meet Aki’s gaze. Yosuke nudged Mai, who frowned and nudged him back. They didn’t need their SCCs to know what the other was thinking.
“Deja vu,” Aki said.
Uma finally lifted her head. “What’s that?”
“A sense that you’ve experienced something happening before,” Yosuke said automatically.
Mai kicked his shin. “That’s not what she meant, and you know it!”
Aki ignored them. “I was doing this just a few weeks ago with the younger versions of Uncle Toji, Aunt Hikari, my mom, and…” Her face fell. “Uncle Kensuke.”
“He’s no one’s uncle,” Mai said. She stabbed her ice cream with her spoon. “He’s a traitor, and a skeez. I bet you his younger self tried to take pictures of us just like he did Mom.”
“Wait, I’m confused,” Uma said. “You mean Kensuke Aida?”
“It was the time travel thing,” Yosuke said. “The whole thing was confusing. Meeting fourteen-year-old versions of people you call Aunt and Uncle is just weird, to say nothing of our parents.”
‘That’s what I’m afraid of’, Aki thought, and glanced around.
The other three could feel the chill down Aki’s back.
‘Tabris stalked me when we were in the past,’ she explained to Uma. ‘He treated it like a game. He terrified my mom and Aunt Hikari for his amusement. He…’
Her fingers bent into a claw and trembled with anger.
“Aki…” Uma placed her hand over Aki’s. The gesture was gentle and calming. They looked up into each other’s eyes and were frozen there for a moment.
They realized something was off. They turned and saw the Ikari twins grinning at them with their chins resting on their hands.
Mai said, “Aren’t they just adorable?”
“Absolutely,” Yosuke said.
Aki jumped to her feet. “Will you two knock it off!” She and Uma were blushing brightly.
Mai threw her head back and laughed while Yosuke laughed so hard he clutched his sides.
“Come on, let’s get going.” Mai stood and threw her ice cream in the trash once they’d finished embarrassing their cousin. “I wanna be home in time to see how badly Mom is going to come down on Miya. It’s gonna be epic!”
Yosuke shook his head. “You are way too happy about this.”
Uma shuddered. She looked around - the sensation of her visions was there, but she didn’t see anything. There was just… the usual crowd of people passing by and going about their normal lives.
“Uma?” She turned around at the sound of Aki’s voice. “You coming?”
She nodded and followed. She didn’t see the man with silver hair watching them from inside the building across the street. He smiled.
“Found you.”
End Chapter 5