Gospel 1:13

Ritsuko's hands flit across the console while her eyes moved between the three screens positioned in front of her. The left-most screen held Maya's latest report on the neural transfer system. Although they'd managed to correct all of the problems so far, too many more kept appearing during the test runs for them to attempt a complete transfer between Rei and the cores.

She added her own comments to the report, along with a set of suggested alterations for the system's operating parameters. She felt a grim sense of amusement as she sent the report back to Maya. Although paperwork passed between them at least a dozen times a day, it had been more than a week since she'd last spoken with the other woman, and more than two weeks since she'd last actually seen her. Of course, part of the reason for that was her fault. She was practically living out of the third cage, and had turned the balcony into an impromptu office so that even when she wasn't working directly with Eve, she could remain close to the girl/Eva.

The screen in front of her held a magnetic resonance scan of Eve. Although it'd been extraordinarily difficult to smuggle the MRI equipment into the cage, the results were well worth it. For the first time she could beneath the Unit-04's armor and see the amalgamation between the Eva and the dummy plug.

Most of the mechanical systems were gone, absorbed and overgrown by organic replacements. Metaphorically, the plug could be accurately described as the Eva's brain, but in Eve's case, it was the literal truth. Eve hadn't exaggerated when she said that ejecting the plug would kill her. She could no more survive removal of the plug than an ordinary person could survive having their brain pulled out.

The Eva’s computer systems had been completely superceded by organic components and while it wasn't as efficient as a silicon chip, Ritsuko had to concede that it was almost as effective.

The right-most third screen displayed a breakdown of the data that Eve was currently 'reading' from the discs that Ritsuko had provided her. Eve was uploading more than a megabyte a second of data from her current disk, and had already finished two others. Her current areas of interest were metaphysics and quantum mechanics and the disc she was reading contained texts that pressed the boundaries of Ritsuko's own understanding of the subjects. Eve seemed to retain everything that she uploaded but Ritsuko wasn't sure of just how much that information she really learned, and how much was just stored.

Ritsuko had tried to teach Eve two languages besides the Japanese that she spoke naturally so uncannily but when she'd tried to repeat what she'd learned, she'd ended up sounding like she was speaking straight from a dictionary. Her sentence structure had sounded almost completely random, reminding Ritsuko of a translation done without regard for either context or situation. It'd been a frustrating experience for them both, and Ritsuko had gladly ended the experiment. Not precisely because she was afraid of Eve growing frustrated to the point of lashing out. She showed remarkable self-restraint even under the most trying of conditions, but… Ritsuko shivered slightly as her thoughts returned to the N² mines buried beneath the walls.

A small video window unobtrusively occupied a corner in the third. Although she could never provide herself with an adequate explanation, she never felt comfortable when the video window was off. It showed her the view from the only operating camera left in the dummy plug, showing what remained of the inside of the entry plug and the pale, naked upper body of a girl who could've been Rei but so obviously wasn't. Eve's hair had grown out and it floated in a shoulder length tangle around her head. Ritsuko realized that hers had grown as well: she hadn't re-dyed it since her imprisonment and nearly a centimeter of brown showed at the roots.

Ritsuko's eyes were drawn up to the middle monitor as the data-flow dropped sharply, despite the fact that Eve was still in the middle of the file. The organic computer that had grown in Unit-04 was an extension of her own brain, and so that by focusing her mind, she could augment its performance, such as data acquisition. When the data-flow dropped like that, it meant she was focusing her attention somewhere else. Eve had tried to explain how it worked, but Ritsuko didn't know enough about how everything tied together understand. Another reason to be glad for the MRI scans.

Ritsuko turned her thoughts back to the left-most screen as it painted out the girl/Eva in a multitude of hues. As Eve explained it, she possessed two bodies of consciousness. One was the 'greater body,' the Evangelion, and it was through her greater body that she could see, hear, touch. Her other consciousness, what she called her 'inner body,' was the dummy core. Ritsuko had termed the two as 'body and mind,' but Eve had disagreed with that description. It was not two parts of a whole, but two separate awarenesses joined as one. She had two bodies, with a separate awareness for each, but while her greater body provided her with her senses, on its own it was no more than an inert lump of flesh. It was her inner body, deaf, mute, and immobile that was the throne of her soul.

Eve's voice issued softly from the speaker on the console. "Mother?"

The title immersed Ritsuko in a bittersweet mix of emotions. After the defeat of the eleventh Angel, she'd told Misato that she didn't want, and doubted that she'd ever have children and would never be able to understand motherhood. However, whenever Eve called her 'mother' she felt a certain awe and wonder at the title wondered if this was how her mother, all mothers, felt when in the presence of their children.

"Mother?" Eve asked again.

"I'm sorry, Eve," Ritsuko apologized. "My mind was wandering. What do you need?"

Eve's reply was hesitant. "Whenever you question me, there are things that you try to find the answers for, even though I have made it clear that I do not wish to provide them. Yet you ask me anyway."

"There are some answers that we must have," Ritsuko said carefully, "because the questions that they answer are so crucial to what we're doing."

"Many of them concern my creation, how I came into being. Those are both painful memories, and personal ones. If I asked you to tell me of your own creation, of what is was like to float in your mother's womb, to drowse while listening to the beat of her heart, would you not be reluctant to share that with someone else?"

"Well, I am your mother after all," Ritsuko said, forcing a smile.

Eve's laugh was sharp, short, and made Ritsuko's scalp prickle. "Our relationship is somewhat different than others."

"Adoptions can lead to strange pairings."

"I doubt even the strangest pairing involved an abomination like myself."

"I never called you an abomination," Ritsuko said quickly.

"No, but you might have thought it, and even if you didn't then almost certainly someone else has; the Commander maybe, or the technicians trapped in this cage with me. They do not know why they cannot leave this cage, nor why the pilot of Unit-04 cannot leave her Eva, but they know that something is terribly wrong and it frightens them."

Ritsuko started to reply, but Eve cut her off. "When the 12^th Angel trapped the 3^rd Child within a Sea of Dirac, was any data recovered?"

Ritsuko shook her head. "No. The 3^rd Child has no memory of what occurred during the incident, and after Unit 01's internal batteries failed the electrical systems were scrambled, rendering the sensor logs useless."

"Even if the sensors had functioned properly, the information that they recorded would've been incomprehensible. Your definition of a Sea of Dirac, according to the data you've given me, is in error."

"Planning on revolutionizing the theoretical sciences?" Ritsuko asked wryly.

"A Sea of Dirac," Eve ignored Ritsuko's comment and went on, "is not an entire universe, nor even the beginning of a universe."

"Then what is it?"

"Why I refused to answer your questions before, besides the nature of the subjects they touched, was because I lacked the knowledge to fully answer them. Are you familiar with the terms 10^-43 seconds and 10^-35 meters?"

Ritsuko nodded. "Of course. Planck's Length and Planck's Time. The shortest length of time and distance possible."

"Within a Sea of Dirac time passes more quickly and distances are shorter."

"That's impossible. The physical universe ceases to exist if you go below those thresholds, breaking down into quantum foam and coinciding probability waves."

"That is what it is like inside a Sea of Dirac; a formless mass of quantum foam and probability, approaching, but never reaching Planck's Length and Time. It is the possibility of a universe waiting to be born, and into that possibility was thrust a being that lacked both life and consciousness. When it ended as inexplicably as it began, I was what emerged."

"The sea collapsed because Unit-04's S² organ was depleted and could no longer maintain it."

"If every star in the galaxy were to supernova simultaneously and every erg of the resulting energy harnessed, it would not be enough to create a Sea of Dirac, much less destroy it. There was a flaw in Unit-04's S² engine that upon activation, caused it's A.T. Field to fold and invert, temporarily forcing a Sea of Dirac into existence. Once the Sea absorbed the Evangelion and all that its altered A.T. Field encompassed it could maintain itself, sealing away whatever it had swallowed. Its borders were a series of quantum variations that touch on all universes at once and anything that tried to enter them was torn into an infinite number of pieces scattered across an infinite number of universes."

"If that's true, then how did you escape? How was Shinji able to get out?"

"The interior of a Sea of Dirac is the physical manifestation of probability. It is tangible chance. In such a universe there is no greater power than that of conscious will. When Unit-04 entered the Sea of Dirac, it was of two parts. My greater body held the fruit of life; my inner body possessed the seed of knowledge. The two combined within the Sea, growing and maturing until the two were no longer two, but me. What had been inanimate, senseless flesh transformed into a living consciousness. Because I wished to escape the Sea, I did."

Ritsuko did not speak for several minutes, trying to make sense of what Eve was saying. "So you collapsed the Sea…just by willing it?"

The pause before Eve replied was her equivalent of a frown. "That is an incredible oversimplification, but not entirely wrong. A conscious will can shape the interior of the sea, building vistas, worlds, heavens, hells, whatever the will so desires. My will was to leave and so I forced the phase variations of the border into the same sequence as every atom of my bodies, so that I would be expelled into the universe of my origin. I formed order out of chaos, forced an answer where there could only be questions. I made the Sea what it couldn't be, and it forced me out even as it tore itself apart.

"For the first time in my existence, the world was what I saw. It did not vanish when I turned my attention elsewhere, did not change to the force of my thoughts. I was enthralled by the world I was in, but terrified that I no longer was in control."

"That's why did you initially hide yourself from the Americans?"

"You have to understand the change I underwent. Quantum foam is the stuff of creation. With it you can make something as delicate as the rhizomes of a cell or as immense as an entire universe."

"Why would you want to leave then? Why turn down the power of creation?"

"Because you can only create what you know. All that I knew was what was held within the Evangelion's computers, within its cells… and what was left to me by my mother. I could feel her touch upon my mind, my body, but I could not find her, know her. That is what drove me from the sea. I sought my progenitor."

"Why?"

Eve's voice took on an ironic tone. "Isn't that the eternal question? Why am I here, what is my purpose? I want the answers that everyone else seeks."

Ritsuko's hands trembled slightly. "Y-you think that your mother can tell you the answer?"

"No, but to whom else am I to look?" her voice began to quiver as if she was on the verge of tears. "I was not. Then I was. What is there to keep me from becoming not again? In this world I have no power, no control. I know that almost nothing on this world can harm my greater body, but when the Americans held me, when that man Taylor looked at me, I was afraid. Afraid of a man who would never know what it was like to hold the stuff of creation in the palm of his hand, but with a single look made me feel as if the protection of my greater body was nothing at all!"

"It's all right Eve," Ritsuko said soothingly. "You don't have to worry. I will keep you safe." The words felt awkward in Ritsuko's mouth, but as she said them she felt a sense of exultation, that, as if by saying them, reality would alter so that they would be the truth. "I'll keep you safe."

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It was dark; her head hurt; and the shrill ringing of an alarm clock didn’t help either condition in the least. Misato cracked her eyes. That got rid of the dark, but the addition of light made her head hurt even more. She clenched her eyes shut. Dark hurt less.

With a practiced motion she reached out to slap the snooze button on the alarm clock as she twisted her ankle to snag the hem of her pajama bottoms and kick them off, part of a ritual that she’d preformed almost every morning for more than five years. Only this time there was a problem. The alarm clock wasn’t there; neither were her pajama bottoms.

Her eyes popped open and the room snapped into focus before her. Her pajamas weren't there because she wasn't wearing them, or anything else. The alarm clock wasn’t in its accustomed place because this wasn’t her room. Her stomach curled into a hard ball. She’d made sure that the world had gotten very fuzzy very fast last night, and the last memories she had were of an ill defined form taking the seat next to her, and saying something that she’d been too drunk to understand. It seemed that in the interim, she'd managed to do something incredibly stupid.

Her anxiety eased somewhat when she saw her clothes lying on the floor next to her bed, still sealed in the cleaning bag. She doubted that a random stranger would've had the consideration to clean her clothes for her. Which meant she'd gone home with a non-random stranger, but she still didn't know who. That was only a slight improvement

She stumbled over to the dresser and silenced the incessant alarm, noticing a picture that had been respectfully turned down. She flipped it over, noting that it held an older couple that she didn’t recognize and a younger man that she did: Makoto.

She began to swear at herself as she realized that she was no longer covered in bakelite. So he had cleaned her clothes and her body as well. What else might he have done while she lay in a drunken stupor? She wanted to kick herself for getting herself into a situation like this in the first place.

The snooze alarm went off and Misato winced as she slapped it off. Makoto was apparently an early riser. Even through the haze of her hangover she could tell that the light coming through the window had the overly bright look of early morning and the clock read 6:38. She dressed hurriedly, but pressed her ear to the door before she ventured out of the room. She could hear someone moving around the apartment, but not what he was doing.

Hesitantly, she opened the door and stepped out into the hall. Makoto was apparently making breakfast, because the smell of cooking hit her nose as soon as she left his bedroom, sending her stomach for a slow loop. She crept down the hall like a thief. If this had been her apartment, all that she had to do was stay close to the wall of the living room and she could reach the front door without passing into view of anyone in the kitchen. She hoped that she could get out without his noticing. This would be awkward enough without confronting him with accusations still fresh in her mind.

"Major?"

Misato froze in mid-step and turned, forcibly reminded that this wasn’t her apartment. The kitchen opened directly into the living room and she wondered how long he’d been watching her sneak along before getting her attention. He held a pan in one hand and was wearing a short cooking apron. His clothes were rumpled, as if he’d slept in them.

"Makoto, good morning," she said cautiously, backing towards the door. "Thank you for taking me in last night, but I need to get back to the geofront."

"The next train going that way doesn’t arrive until 7:15," he said with frosty neutrality, "so you might as well stay for breakfast." Misato winced as he set the pan down on a counter with a loud clatter.

"I really don’t want to impose," Misato said apologetically, shooting a quick glance over her shoulder at the door.

"It isn’t that much more of an imposition," Makoto said curtly, his tone slipping just enough to betray hints of consternation and frustration. He turned his back to her, returning to whatever it was he had on the stove.

Misato’s eyes traveled around the apartment, and she noticed a rumpled blanket that had been roughly kicked under the coffee table, and the couch cushions still held the imprint of a restless body. "I would like a cup of coffee, if you have any." She finally began to relax. His body language, the way he was speaking—he was acting like a man who had been offered his greatest temptation but had turned it down.

"I thought that you would," Makoto said, getting a mug from the kitchen as Misato seated herself. "Do you have any cream or sugar?" she asked.

"I don’t think you’ll want it," he replied as he filled her cup.

The coffee wasn’t particularly hot and Misato raised the cup to her lips and drank deeply. She barely had time to swallow before she erupted into a fit of coughing. "What kind of coffee is this? It almost took the roof of my mouth off."

"Something I learned in college to treat hangovers," Makoto explained, flipping two pancakes out of the pan. He spread a thin layer of sweet bean paste on them then sandwiched them together, adding them to a small stack on the counter. "Would you like any?" he asked, offering her the plate.

The caffeine hit Misato's system like a brick and she could feel the headache beginning to recede, but the odor of food turned her stomach. "I’ll pass, although I don’t suppose I could have a glass of water. I’m a little thirsty."

"I can imagine," Makoto said as he filled a glass, "considering how much booze you must have poured into your system last night."

"I-," Misato looked away. "I’m sorry, I must’ve been a terrible burden. It’s just that-."

All the neutrality dropped from Makoto’s voice. "It’s all right, you don’t have to explain."

The world started to get wavy as tears began to fill Misato’s eyes. To hide them, she downed the rest of the coffee in a single gulp. "Thank you," she gasped as the coffee tried to peel the lining from her throat, "for not leaving me alone. I’m not sure I could’ve taken being on my own last night."

At her words his face again froze into neutrality. "It was the least I could do." He abruptly stood and began clearing the table. "We should get going if we want to reach the station in time to catch our train."

Misato stared after him as he retreated into the kitchen, wondering how that one sentence had offended him so much.

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Terry stretched his legs, and stared resentfully at the two Section Two agents standing guard in the hall outside. Not that they were guarding him from anything. Following the fight with Asuka they’d dumped him in an old meeting room, judging by the worn folding table and battered collapsible chairs that it held.

There was no clock in the room and he’d lost his watch at some point in the previous day’s chaos. He’d dozed intermittently through the night, throwing his time sense off completely, so he could only guess at the time, figuring for some point in the early morning.

He pulled the table over to the wall, propping one of the legs with his foot to keep it from collapsing, and set up his laptop. The first thing that he’d done after they’d thrown him in here was sulk. Asuka had started the fight, so why was he being punished too?

The second thing he did was get indignant. That hadn't gotten him too far. He'd tried to walk out but the Agents had physically restrained him, pushing him back into the room. They’d lost patience when he’d started demanding that they could not treat like this, and that they’d better let him out right now. "Just shut up and sit down," one of them had snapped.

The glare that they'd given him was forceful enough that he sat without further protest. Someone must've returned to the school to get his things, because once he sat, one of the agents left, and returned a few minutes later with his laptop and several textbooks. "You’re staying here until Major Katsuragi comes for you," he’d told Terry as he handed him the computer. "Use this to keep yourself busy, and quiet until then."

He dropped his math text onto the table with a loud thump, then bent over to plug in the computer. He pulled up a chair and slouched over the keyboard, leaving the textbook conspicuously open beside him, but he wasn’t doing math. He’d seen a network socket in the wall next to power outlet and when he plugged the computer in, he also hooked it into the network, giving him access to the geofront’s intranet. The position that he'd moved the table to hid both the cable and the socket from the view of the Section Two agents.

He’d already disabled the computer’s identity protocols and he configured its network protocols so that the system remained passive, making it impossible for anyone to detect the connection unless he was actively using the network. He glanced at the agents as his fingers typed slowly over random keys and he reached out turned a page in his textbook.

By disabling the protocols he could piggyback onto other datastreams, allowing him entry to the same files that they were accessing. He gave an exaggerated sigh and tapped a few keys as if he’d just finished a particularly tedious problem. What he’d actually done was execute a sifting program. There were millions of datastreams in transit at any given second, accessing everything from the rotation of that day’s lunch shuffle to NERV’s highest level secrets. The sifting program dipped unobtrusively into the passing datastreams, identifying their contents and destination. Although it could only analyze the barest fraction of datastreams as they flashed by, the sheer number insured that he would find one he could use sooner or later.

He cast a covert glance at the two agents standing outside the door, seemingly oblivious to what he was really doing. If he’d been caught breaking into the database to find Rei’s address, that would’ve been bad. If they caught him doing this… As he waited for the sifter program to produce results he wondered if Japanese legal system endorsed capital punishment.

He swallowed nervously. The risks were incredible but there was something going on, something that few people seemed to know about, and he wanted to know what it was. He knew that the attack had not been undertaken by terrorists, as the official press report had stated. Section Two took its role very seriously. The only way he could imagine someone so getting by Section Two was if they had a full military force with full military support.

That brought up the question of just who would want the Children dead? The only reason that he could think of was that there was something about him, the Children, that scared someone. There was something about the Children that someone was willing to murder them for, something that he would never learn unless he looked on his own.

The sifter found a datastream that he could use and with a single keystroke Terry dove into it. He tried to keep the expression on his face studiously bored as he waited to see if his intrusion had been noticed. He wasn’t, and the screen began to fill with data. He was in.

He drummed his fingers nervously against the table as he waited for the data to finish loading. He had a data spike ready to execute if someone found him but he was hesitant to use it. Even though he tried to do his best coding with it, it was still jury-rigged and even if it worked, it might not be fast enough to prevent his connection from being traced before he could disconnect.

The datastream carried him to what appeared to be the pilots' records. The first column on the screen read ‘Pilot Candidates.’ It was hard to keep a look of surprise off of his face when he recognized many of the names under it. They belonged to members of his class, several bearing a red tag that read DECEASED, along with the previous day’s date.

Terry swallowed nervously. His pilot status gave him a clearance of only Sigma Seta, which was about mid-range, but Omega Lambda was the highest security clearance he knew of. If he left the sifter running for a year he doubted that he'd have the luck to find a data stream that would give him that kind of clearance.

Rei Ayanami: 1^st Child

-but next to her name was the tag: Third Children, which was highlighted to indicate that it led to a another directory. None of the other names bore a similar tag, but as he moved down the list his eyes were drawn to another red DECEASED tag.

Kaworu Nagisa: 5^th Child / 17^th Angel.

Full report available.

Terry attempted to open the report, but the message window reappeared.

Terry felt a cold sweat break out on his forehead. Security clearances just didn't go that high. With exaggerated care he deselected the file, breathing a sigh of relief when the window vanished. The breath froze in his throat as a tiny indicator in the corner of his screen began to flash madly: someone had found him. His fingers shook so hard that it took him three tries to activate the data spike. He prayed that he hadn’t been too slow.

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Misato shut her eyes against the too bright morning sun that streamed through the windows of the train car. However, the caffeine roaring through her veins prevented her keeping them shut for long and the rattle of the train car beat mercilessly against her eardrums. Before they'd left his apartment, Makoto had given her a couple of painkillers and right now Misato wished that she’d taken the entire bottle, then chased it with a case of Boa.

Makoto stood several feet away, so carefully not looking at her that the only way he could watch her more blatantly would be if he stared outright. He’d kept a careful distance between the two of them ever since breakfast, when she’d thanked him for not leaving her alone. The throbbing in her temples made it difficult to think. What had she said to him last night that made those words hurt?

When they reached the geofront, Makoto stopped then turned. "Have a good day Major Katsuragi," he said stiffly, bowing slightly.

As Misato watched his rapidly retreating back, an air of despondency overtook her. He was leaving her alone too, just like they always did. Her father, Kaji, and… Makoto? The sheer absurdity of the thought restored her mood, and Misato laughed lightly, if rather nervously, and headed for her office.

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The doorknob rattled as someone tried to open the door and when it failed to turn they knocked loudly. Misato had locked the door after reaching her office; she hadn’t felt like dealing with anyone that morning, but more importantly, she didn’t want to be disturbed. Heaps of security manuals were scattered across her desk, and folders filled with regulations were piled haphazardly on the floor.

After the attack on the Commander she’d decided to review and reorganize the geofront’s security regulations, but had let the project drop after seeing the measures that Section Two had instigated in response. The attack on the Children had proven that even those weren't enough and she’d be damned if she would let anyone have another chance.

Her spirits sank as she opened the door and saw the blue suit standing on the other side. Section Two never sent people to her directly unless there was trouble. "What is it?"

"There was an incident last night," the agent said, but didn’t go on, as if waiting to see her reaction.

"What kind of incident?" Misato asked, careful to keep her voice level. She already would have been informed if the matter had been important, but that didn’t mean he had to be such a self-important jackass.

"There was an altercation between pilots Soryu and St. John." He stopped again.

Misato decided that it would be in bad form to kick him in the shins. "Were either of them hurt?"

"Both pilots received minor injuries, although nothing serious enough to require a doctor." He only paused for a second, as if he’d caught wind of her rising ire and realized that pushing her was rapidly becoming unhealthy. "We stuck them in a couple of unused offices to cool their heels until you could be notified."

"Very well," Misato said, shooting a glance back at her desk. "Leave them where they are for now. I’ll deal with them after I meet with the Commander."

The Agent nodded then left, walking a bit more hurriedly than might have been necessary.

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The Commander’s expression was inscrutable as Misato finished going over her outline, making her wonder if she would’ve been better off talking to the wall.

"You believe that these increased measures are necessary?"

"Yes sir. I think it is by luck alone that the pilots escaped without serious injury. As I stated previously, I feel we should assign at least one plainclothes and two uniformed security officers to the Children's immediate vicinity at all times and-."

"Very well, Major. Present a formal proposal to the security heads. You are dismissed."

"But sir, I feel that these should be implemented immediately. Whoever planned the last attack could still be out there-."

"That will be all, Major."

"But Commander-!"

Gendo’s voice took on a harsh note. "That will be all."

"Yes sir."

Misato kept her temper under control until she was out of the Commander’s office, but as soon as she was away she turned and kicked the wall, swearing violently as pain shot up her foot. She hobbled back to her office, hoping that she hadn’t broken her toe.

She slammed her office door and hurled her proposal onto her desk. He'd completely brushed her off. Whoever had engineered the attack might still be out there, but the Commander had acted like that didn't matter to him in the least, as if he didn’t think that the threat of another attack had any significance… as if he knew for a fact that there wouldn’t be one. He knew something. She didn't know what game the Commander thought he was playing, but somehow he'd managed to neutralize his opponent.

She yanked out one of her desk's drawers, revealing a plastic bag taped to its back, a small, nondescript capsule wrapped inside. She might not be able to make herself a player in whatever game the Commander was playing, but she would make herself a factor. She was suddenly aware of the holster pressing against her side. Especially if anyone tries to hurt my children again.

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Misato pulled her jacket closer around her as her breath curled visibly around her head. Heat sinks and cooling towers worked relentlessly within the guts of the MAGI, ensuring that the supercomputers didn’t cook themselves with their own exertions.

Her foot struck a conduit, causing it to rattle loudly, and she glanced up, as if someone might have heard her. Twenty meters of steel, concrete, and conduit separated her from the secondary command center, but she had to fight down the feeling that all someone had to do was lift the right floor plate and she’d be caught.

With one last glance upward she hooked the modified command board into the MAGI, using, for the first time, the computer chip that had been Kaji’s final gift.

His voice sounded so real that Misato almost looked over her shoulder to see if he was standing behind her. She bit her lip to the point of pain. Kaji was dead and nothing she could do would change that and if she didn’t keep her mind on the task at hand she might be joining him.

She focused her attention on the control board in front of her. The attackers must’ve had a contact within NERV otherwise they never would've been able to get past Section Two so easily. They must have something behind, something that gave away how it had been done, and it was with that thought in mind that she began digging through the MAGI.

She would've missed it if she hadn’t had the sheer luck to be looking in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. It was a transfer notice, denoting the rotation of twenty Americans into the UN force stationed within Tokyo-3. Misato called up their service files and one of the photographs leapt out at her immediately. She had seen him before, lying unconscious in the parking lot of the First Tokyo-3 Junior High School.

She dug back into his record, but it crumpled almost instantly beneath her scrutiny, along with the records of eleven other of the other transferred men. Although she could tell that their records were obvious fakes, they would have passed inspection without question for the low security, non-critical post that they’d been assigned to, especially since the UN frequently rotated troops in and out of the city.

Misato scrutinized their command reports but didn't find anything to indicate that the twelve men were planning to attack a junior high school. Once again it was the intervention of luck that kept her from missing a memo that had been buried within a series of supply reports. It was addressed to the man who had led the attack, although she couldn’t figure out the name of the sender until she remembered that it was the English word for the number twelve.

Misato couldn’t believe what she was reading. Whoever or whatever ‘Twelve" was, he’d just told a dozen soldiers that not only were they to open fire on a room full of children, but that they wouldn't be held responsible for anyone else they killed. Had they somehow learned about the 11^th or the 17^th Angels? Did they know enough about the last Angel to fear that the other Children might suddenly turn on them?

Misato carefully crept through the Magi’s systems, peeling away layer after layer of data until she reached the pilot’s records. Her eyes fell on the DECEASED tag next to the name of Kaworu Nagisa. Did "Twelve" think that the other Children posed the same risk?

Before she could go any further an indicator began to flash madly in the corner of the board’s screen and Misato’s gut clenched in fear. Someone else was accessing the same directory as she was. It couldn’t be a coincidence; someone had detected her intrusion and was trying to track her down.

Along with the algorithms and programs encoded on the chip that supposedly allowed her slip through the MAGIs’ systems undetected, there was one program that was to be used only in the direst emergency. Misato activated the data spike then yanked the cable out of the control board, stashing it under a conduit and fleeing from the MAGIs’ innards.

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After a data spike is uploaded into a target system it begins tripping security protocols. The system's reaction would then be to try to isolate the intruder within the system and lock it down. The data spike could then operate in one of two ways. It could jam access paths open, activating even more security measures, forcing the system to use more and more of its resources as it tried to force the paths shut. Alternately the spike could attempt to slip through the closing data paths, forcing the computer to tie up its own resources as it chased the spike, trying to close it off. Either way the targeted system was forced to tie up more and more of its resources to bear, until it collapsed under its own weight.

Two data spikes streaked through the electron pathways within the MAGI. One was a huge mass of code that relied on brute force to keep data paths open. The other was small and lithe, written to sneak through the tiniest holes in a code and force a system to tie itself into a knot as it tried to pursue. In the formless digital universe within the MAGI supercomputers, the two data spikes collided head on.

And went to war.

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It took several seconds for Shigeru to assess the situation as klaxons began to scream. "Two intruders detected within the MAGI! Primary security measures ineffective!" His fingers began to fly over his console. "Initiating secondary-! What the hell?" The screen in front of him froze and disintegrated into rainbow static.

"It's a processor cascade! The MAGI are crashing!" Suiko shouted as red blocks began spreading like measles across the screen that displaying the supercomputers’ status, as processor blocks went offline.

"Shut down the I/O system," Gendo ordered.

Shigeru yanked open a drawer and pulled out his I/O key and then glanced over at Makoto’s chair. Which was empty.

"He’s still on break!" Suiko shouted. "Where’s his key?"

"Second drawer on the left!" Shigeru shouted back.

Suiko yanked the drawer open, grabbing papers and throwing them over her shoulder. "Where?"

"There!" Shigeru pointed. Suiko grabbed the key but it slipped from her fingers and went skittering across the floor.

"Hurry!" Shigeru shouted as Suiko scrambled after the key. The Magi’s status screen was a rapidly solidifying mass of red. Suiko managed to grab the key and jammed it into the I/O slot. "Three!" Shigeru called out. "Two-One-Now!"

Simultaneously they turned their keys, the command center plunging into darkness. Minutes ticked by in panicked silence before the back up generators kicked in and the secondary lighting came on..

"Status?" Gendo demanded.

Most of the screens on Shigeru’s console were blank. "The MAGI and all primary systems are offline. Secondary computer and power systems are online."

Suiko tapped a few keys, and several of her monitors reluctantly returned to life. "Environmental controls are still functioning." She shot a glance at Shigeru. "I guess that means that we’re not going to cook, this time."

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Terry began to relax. The data spike seemed to have done its job. He'd gotten out of the datastream without whoever had been after him getting a fix on his system.

He jumped a foot into the air as alarms began to scream. Then the lights went out.

"Oh shit," he said.