Keel Lorenz

Age and augmentation have both reshaped Keel. Sometime between Second Impact and 2015, nearly everything beneath his neck gave way to cybernetic replacements, and a visor sits over eyes that production drawings confirm still function. A photograph from the Second Impact cover-up shows a man who looks no older than his seventies, and he has aged visibly across the fifteen years since, though how much the implants slowed that decline is unknowable. When Instrumentality reduces his organic tissue to LCL, the hardware stays behind, including what appears to be most of an artificial spine.

Keel operates as a believer as much as a schemer. Convinced that Instrumentality means salvation, he treats deception, assassination, and mass slaughter as acceptable overhead, lying to Kaworu about SEELE's loyalties and condemning NERV's entire staff to extermination without hesitation. He prefers intermediaries to direct action, steering the UN and, through it, the governments of the world from concealment. His last words, spoken as his body liquefies, frame the erasure of individual humanity as the world's rescue.

Keel's involvement with SEELE predates Second Impact, and he works alongside Gendo Ikari on the UN cover-up burying the truth about Adam and the Katsuragi Expedition. Through SEELE he quietly bankrolls Gehirn and its successor NERV as the Evangelion project takes shape, and Fuyutsuki recalls that a man carrying the name Keel Lorenz crossed paths with Gendo repeatedly in those years.

Across the series he monitors NERV's victories over the Angels with only measured approval. He orders Ryoji Kaji to abduct Fuyutsuki, a job Kaji reverses by returning the professor to NERV, earning an assassin's bullet from SEELE. Once the Spear of Longinus has been thrown away against Arael, Keel dispatches Kaworu Nagisa to trigger Third Impact on SEELE's terms; the scheme collapses when Kaworu finds Lilith in Terminal Dogma and chooses death at Shinji's hands, after which Gendo pushes ahead with his own version of the project.

In The End of Evangelion, Keel demands Unit-01 to complete Instrumentality. Gendo flatly refuses, insisting the result would be death without peace, so SEELE strips NERV of its legal standing, paints it to the UN as a rogue agency, and sends the JSSDF to kill everyone inside, following up with the Mass Production Evangelions that overwhelm Asuka's Unit-02. As Third Impact unfolds, Keel pronounces the world saved and dissolves into LCL, leaving only his implants. Sadamoto's manga stretches SEELE's existence back centuries. His name splices the nautical keel with the biologist Konrad Lorenz, and early planning documents named him Konrad outright.