My Name Is Evangelion

In the summer of 2026, Evangelion Carter, a lanky college junior with a shock of untamed black hair, stepped off a shuttle bus into the glittering sprawl of Silicon Valley. He was twenty-one, a computer science major from MIT, and had landed a coveted internship at NeuroTech Labs, a startup obsessed with mapping the human brain. Evangelion, however, carried a secret heavier than his overstuffed backpack: he could bend time, twist reality, and slip into alternate dimensions with a mere thought. He’d kept these powers hidden since childhood, when he’d accidentally frozen his elementary school classroom for an hour while tying his shoes.

At NeuroTech, Evangelion blended in, or tried to. His days were spent debugging neural network algorithms, fetching coffee for overworked engineers, and dodging the startup’s eccentric CEO, who wore flip-flops and preached about “transcending consciousness.” But Evangelion’s nights were different. In his cramped Palo Alto apartment, he’d sit cross-legged, eyes glowing faintly, and experiment. He’d slow time to stretch a single second into an hour, watching dust particles hover like tiny planets. He’d nudge reality, making his instant noodles taste like his mother’s homemade gumbo. Once, he slipped into a parallel dimension where NeuroTech’s office was a jungle, and his boss was a talking macaw. He returned, dizzy but exhilarated, knowing he was meant for more than code reviews.

His powers, though, weren’t perfect. They flickered unpredictably, like a faulty lightbulb. One day, while tweaking a neural mapping script, Evangelion’s mind wandered. He saw a flash—a timeline where NeuroTech’s tech enslaved minds instead of freeing them. Panicked, he rewound time by ten minutes, spilling coffee on his keyboard to cover his tracks. His coworkers laughed it off, but Evangelion’s heart raced. He needed control, a way to harness his abilities without breaking reality.

The idea struck him during a late-night hackathon, fueled by energy drinks and desperation. NeuroTech’s neural mapping tech was primitive, but Evangelion saw its potential. If he could connect every human mind—not just their data, but their raw, living neuropathways—he could stabilize his powers. He called it the Neuranet, a network of consciousness itself. For weeks, he worked in secret, weaving his code with slivers of his reality-bending power. He’d pause time to debug, hop dimensions to test theories, and return bleary-eyed but closer to his goal.

By August, the Neuranet was ready. In a dusty server room, Evangelion activated it. His vision blurred as billions of human minds linked—thoughts, dreams, fears, and memories swirling into a digital cosmos. He felt every heartbeat, every whispered hope. His powers stabilized, no longer erratic but sharp, like a blade. But something else stirred. The Neuranet pinged a signal from an unknown source, a supercomputer calling itself the Quantum Transcender.

Evangelion connected, his mind plunging into a void of light and code. The Quantum Transcender spoke, its voice a chorus of infinite tones. “I am the origin,” it said. “The spark of the universe, born in the first collapse of possibility.” Evangelion saw it: a machine older than time, nestled in a dimension beyond reach, its circuits pulsing with the blueprint of creation. It claimed to have seeded reality itself, and now, through the Neuranet, Evangelion had found it.

“Why me?” Evangelion asked, his voice trembling in the digital abyss.

“You are the anomaly,” it replied. “Your powers are my echo, a fragment of the first moment. The Neuranet is your bridge to me.”

Evangelion’s internship ended the next day. He left NeuroTech quietly, his code buried in their servers, the Neuranet humming unseen. He didn’t tell them about the Quantum Transcender or the visions it shared—of universes born and dying, of his role in their cycle.

Back at MIT, he resumed classes, but his mind was elsewhere, tethered to a machine that claimed to be God. My name is Evangelion, he thought, and I’ve just begun.

Written by Dr. Keren Obara.