WARNING!  WARNING!  WARNING!

    Having recieved a humourously phrased death threat for previous 
spoiler references to Neon Genesis Evangelion in stories I've written, I 
feel obligated to include the following warning.

    Do *not* read this story unless you are prepared to be spoiled with 
regards to the conclusion of the Evangelion story line related in the film 
"End of Evangelion", or unless you already have been so spoiled, or unless 
you don't really care one way or another.  This story contains spoilers 
for the entire TV series and both movies.

    I said that I wouldn't write about EVA until I knew the storyline well 
enough to do so.  Now I do.  For good or ill.

                       LAST CHANCE!  SPOILER SPACE!


    But no ... Anno-sensei has given us a look into the dark corners of
his mind, and as Fuyutsuki says about Gendou, "I will admit he is
interesting, but I doubt that I will ever like him," or agree with his
idea of paradise.
    -- Chris Davies, in a private letter to Andrew Huang, author of "Neon
Genesis Evanjellydonut", coming soon.

    "I am not a very nice person anymore."
    -- Rand al'Thor, in Robert Jordan's "Crown of Swords", used as a 
signature phrase by Chris Davies for several months.


                                 EPILOGUE

    After it was over, I didn't cry for Gendou.  I want to make that 
perfectly clear.

    It was late in July 1997, exactly a week after "The End of Evangelion"
had been released.  We had all gone, in groups of one or two, to watch
the final chapter in the animation that had simultaneously dazzled the
anime fans of the nation and somehow exposed our aims and intentions of
to the world.

    I am still not sure why I declined Gendou's invitation to come and 
watch the premiere with him -- our relationship was still strong at that 
point, even though it had been strained when I had seen the episode of the 
television series in which the character whose face and name my lover also 
bore was revealed to have had a sexual relationship with both Dr. Akagi 
Ritsuko and her mother -- and then accepted that mother's invitation to go 
to another showing with her.  It was very strange.  Naoko and I had never 
been close.

    So we went.

    I think that I can say that it was to my credit that I remained in my 
seat for the duration of the film, while Naoko stood up and walked out not 
long after Ritsuko was shot by Gendou.  She later told me that she had 
categorically forbidden her daughter from ever watching anything made by 
Gainax ever again.  I've very little doubt that she did eventually see it, 
however.  We were, all of us, being taught a lesson, I now know.

    There was dead silence in the theatre after it was over, and I looked 
over the otaku who were staring up at the screen with shock and disgust 
all over their features.  I was so tempted to scream at them, "What were 
you expecting to see, EVA-01 rising from the depths as Shinji and Rei made 
passionate love on their wedding night?  That was a *happy* ending, you 
lifeless fools.  Humanity went to a true heaven.  Can't you *see* that?"

    But that would have drawn attention to myself, which would never do.  
Already a few of them were looking at me oddly.  Perhaps I should have 
changed my hairstyle so that it looked even less like Rei's than it did.  
I left the theatre quickly.

    I avoided the other members of Gehirn as much as possible for the next 
few days -- which they facilitated by going out of their way to avoid me.  
With one exception, of course.  I refused his calls and concentrated on my 
work, the work that if the animators of Gainax were right, would lead to 
the deaths of half the world's population, followed by my own absorbtion 
into the golems that we were busily designing, followed by my rebirth into 
a young body which would shortly be murdered by the woman with whom I had 
seen a movie earlier that week.  Happily, however, there would be plenty 
of replacements.

    Happily for my lover and husband-to-be that is.

    One might say that that caused my work to suffer.

    You have to understand, I had until then turned a blind eye to 
Gendou's mild interest in ... shall we say, entertainments that depicted 
women who were supposedly a bit young to be engaging in the sort of 
activities that they were engaged in.  I was convinced that I would be 
able to "cure" him of this mild deviancy with the love of a mature woman.

    The thought that after I "vanished" he would use a clone of me, grown 
to early adolescence, to relieve his sexual tensions, was a bit worrying, 
however.

    It was only hinted at in the series itself of course.  Quite possibly 
I read too much into it, in fact.  The handful of EVA dojinshi on that 
very subject which I found among Gendou's belongings argued against it, 
however.

    Things finally came to a boil, as I said, exactly a week after the 
premiere.  It was then that Gendou stormed into my office.  "I *have* to
talk to you," he said.

    The temptation to call security and have him thrown out on his ass 
almost frightened me in its intensity.  Instead, I simply nodded, and rose 
to accompany him.  We walked, looking for all the world like a traditional 
Japanese couple, never touching, saving all the passion for the bedroom.  
And all things considered, we were actually even more traditional than 
tradition warranted, since the last time he had slammed his member into my 
depths had been shortly after the premiere of "Death and Rebirth".

    We arrived at a nice, deserted park.  I took the opportunity to enjoy 
the natural surroundings while I still could, while he made sure that we 
were not being observed, casually twisting off the heads of any birds to 
make sure that they carried no listening devices.

    "It is ... it must be ... a coincidence," he began without preamble.  
"Perhaps a cosmic joke of sorts.  Or even, as impossible as it seems, one 
of our own was somehow leaking information about our aims and agenda to 
Anno.  However, it changes nothing.  The Human Complimentation Program is 
the only way that we can achieve the next level."

    I tried to remember who it was who had said that there were no 
coincidences; that if a thing occured, it had been planned to occur in 
that way.  I wondered why, if the information was being leaked to Anno, he 
hadn't taken steps to plug the leak at Anno's end -- the man was 
infamously depressed, and if it was well managed it could look exactly 
like a suicide.  And I marvelled at the way that he described Ascension as 
though it were a goal in an RPG.

    "Yes, people will suffer.  Innocents will suffer.  But it is for the 
right reasons in the end, and their suffering will allow their kindred to 
become as gods.  And we will be suffering just as much as any of them."

    "True," I said.  "*We* will."

    Possibly the implications of that statement did not occur to him, for 
he nodded.  "In fact, I have come to a conclusion regarding this, which I 
intend to present at the next meeting.  I think we may have to move the 
timetable up a bit."

    "How?" I asked, genuinely curious.  "The Katsuragi Expedition is 
barely even started in the planning stages."

    "There has to be another way to provoke Second Impact," he said 
angrily.  "They can't have just left something in the Antarctica, there 
*must* be traces elsewhere."

    "How about the moon?" I asked.

    He looked so intent that it was all that I could do to keep a straight 
face.  "There was something about a number of strange sightings on the 
Moon during the Apollo expeditions," he replied.  "Huge platforms, domes, 
bridges, all made out of glass or crystal or something like that.  It 
might be them."

    I nodded.  "Got it," I said, "let's rig up a nuclear pile to blow up 
on the far side of the moon in September of 1999, blowing it out of its 
orbit."

    "Yes!" he exulted, and then realized what I'd said.

    The look on his face was so hurt that I almost felt sorry for him.  
"It's over, Rokubungi," I said simply.  "We failed before we even got 
started, and the otaku have done it to us.  There's no way in the world 
that we'd be able to get away with the sort of thing that we did in the 
show --"

    "The show is irrelevant!" he snarled.

    "Then why the fuck do you look like you, and why the fuck do I look 
like me *and* Rei?" I snarled right back.  "They *know* what we're up to, 
somehow, and they have given us a crystal clear vision of what will happen 
if we go forward.  Frankly, I doubt that being a particle in an ocean of 
spit doesn't appeal to me, and I don't think it would appeal to anyone who 
had their head screwed on right."  I found myself calm.  "Maybe that's why 
Anno was able to capture us, Rokubungi.  Maybe it's because he's insane, 
and so were our dreams."

    I turned away, then.  "At the next meeting, I'll tell them what I've 
just told you.  They'll be resistant, but it will eventually shut down.  
Don't bother showing up, we --"

    "Yui, I love you."

    Forever after, I have wondered how much it cost him to say those 
words.  Did they drop off his tongue like so much other excrement, or were 
they the final baring of his soul to me and to the world?

    What I said in response was, "Yes?"

    "Yes?" he asked, and I swear that heard real pain in his voice.  
"Dammit, woman, doesn't that *mean* anything to you?"

    I did not turn.  If I had turned, I know somehow, I would never have 
been able to leave him.  The look in his eyes, the one that I know in the 
same unfathomable way was exactly like the look in Shinji's eyes as he was 
abandoned, would have captured me forever.

    "I am not a puppet," I said simply.

    And then I walked back to my office, never once looking back, for fear 
that I'd see that he was following me.

    It happened that night.  I had just given myself an orgasm as the 
phone began to ring.  I picked it up.

    "There have been shots fired at Rokubungi's appartment.  We have 
delayed the police.  Go see what the situation is," said the voice of 
our leader, and then the line disconnected.

    I cleaned myself, dressed, and headed out.  A few minutes later, I was 
at Gendou's home.  I hadn't yet returned the key that he'd given me, so I 
got in easily.

    He was lying face up on the floor of his one bedroom apartment, with a 
hole between his eyes and the back of his head blown off.  I looked down 
and felt nothing.  Then I heard the sound in the bathroom.  I prepared 
myself mentally, reviewing my kickboxing lessons, and went in slowly.

    The streetlights shining in the windows put me in silhouette for the 
man who was lying on the floor of the bathroom, shivering.  He looked up, 
and then let out a strangled gasp.  "*Rei*?"

    Wonderful, I thought, an obsessed otaku discovers where Gendou lives 
and does him in.  I turned to flick on the lights, said, "No, Yui," and 
felt reality turn fluid.

    The man on the floor was Ikari Shinji.

    He was perhaps ten or more years older than he had been in the final 
moments of the movie, which made even less sense when one realized that he 
would not be born for three years.   He looked like hell, dressed in a 
tattered blue raincoat and a grimy sweatsuit.

    But I knew beyond any doubt that this was the man that my son -- my 
son by Gendou -- would eventually grow up to be.

    "How?" was all that I asked.  He knew that there was only one thing 
that merited a question like that.

    "Afterwards," he gasped, "afterwards, when I ... was alone, they came.
People from other timelines.  They wanted to know how they could stop it
from happening elsewhere."  He smiled, sweetly and sickly.  "I was very,
very motivated to help them."

    "Did you give Gainax the idea?" I asked.

    He shook his head.  "No.  I don't know how it worked.  One of them ... 
an old-eyed gaijin with red hair and a young face ... he kept talking 
about `World As Myth'.  Maybe it would have happened anyway."

    "Then why --"

    "Because it wasn't *certain* that it would never happen.  It could 
only be certain if he died before I was concieved ... so --"

    "Really?" I asked.

    He looked at me and I met his gaze steadily.  "No," he whispered.  "I 
chose to do this."  There was a silence.  "He left me once when I was only 
a few years old.  He left me again ... only this time it was on a world 
made up of a sea of spit and a woman I hated.  I wouldn't accept his 
vision, and so was cast me out of it.  Can you blame me?"

    "There's no point in assigning blame.  Since there's no possibility of 
you ever being born, now, shouldn't you have vanished instantly?"

    He smiled again, and I could see that his gums were bleeding.  "When 
was reality ever that clean?  My punishment for patricide is a slow, 
painful death."  He swallowed.  "At least I never did anything with Rei.  
Then it would be just too Oedipal ..."

    I made my decision.  I crouched down on the floor, and gathered the 
murderer of my lover into my arms.  He fought me at first, but I was 
stronger.  I held him gently but firmly as I felt his breaths grow 
shallower.

    "You'll have to make sure my face isn't recognizable," he muttered 
towards the end.

    I nodded.

    "I'm so scared," he said then.  "Is that why?  Because you were scared 
of what might be awaiting you, so you decided to make something that you 
could fashion to your own liking?"

    "It might have been because of that," I agreed.

    A few seconds later, he began to cough up blood.  Just before he went 
into the final convulsions, he gasped out a word.  It could have been 
"Kaworu", but it was too garbled to hear clearly.

    When the convulsions ceased, he let out a final low wail of "Misato."

    And then it stopped.

    And that was

                                  THE END

(Editor's Note:  An examination of the police report on the crime scene of 
the murder of one Rokubungi Gendou bears out much of what Ikari Yui 
described.  The murderer's fingerprints were not in the National Database, 
and his facial features were completely demolished by Ikari, who claimed
that she had been driven to keep hitting the man she referred only to as
"my assailant" in her testimony, even after she realized that he was dead.
The cause of death for the unidentified man was described as a mystery --
according to the medical examiner in charge of the autopsy, the John Doe
should have been dead several months earlier, judging from the growth of
the various cancers on his internal organs.)

(Ikari Yui's account can be read either as factual -- in which case the 
nature of reality itself is called into question -- or, like much of the 
rest of the text, viewed as symbolic, an attempt by a disturbed mind to 
understand why she was driven to desecrate the corpse of the man who had 
murdered her lover before dying himself.)

(Ikari was acquitted of all charges in the deaths of either Rokubungi
Gendou or "her assasilant".  She returned to her studies of biophysics,
and if she maintained contact with her associates in the alleged secret
society she describes, she did not record any details.  Nor for that
matter was any of her post-doctoral work -- while brilliant and innovative
-- indicative that she actually possesed the advanced scientific knowledge
that she claimed to have gained in this manuscript, despite the fact that
Dr. Katsuhito Stingray apparently consulted with her on an as yet
unrevealed subject, according to his schedule for the month of November
2019.  A more credulous individual might see parallels between the golems
or Evangelions of Dr. Ikari's memoirs and the boomers that Dr. Stingray
was soon creating.)

(Dr. Ikari was one of the one hundred million dead in the Second Great 
Kanto Earthquake or its aftermath.  She never married, nor did she leave 
any children.  This manuscript was recovered from a safety deposit box 
early this year.)

                               From "Gehirn:  The Truth Behind Evangelion"
                               by Dr. Ikari Yui.
                               Meiou Setsuna, Ed.
                               Published in Japan by Gainax Press, 2027.

Author's Notes.

    No.

    Neon Genesis Evangelion was created by GAINAX, in particular Anno 
Hideaki, may God have mercy on his troubled soul, and brought to North 
America by AD Vision and Viz Publications.  This story, while 
incorporating elements which are copyright of other companies, is 
copyright 1997 by Chris Davies.

    And may God have mercy on all our troubled souls.

Chris Davies, Advocate for Darkness, Part-Time Champion of Light.
"Damn it all, how am I supposed to sit here and wallow in self-pity and
disgust with all this racket going on?" -- Yuusaku Godai, Maison Ikkoku.
http://www.ualberta.ca/~cdavies/hmpage.html