THE MATRIX: RECONSTRUCTED
Caveat lector.
This is not my universe, however, I have come here to play.
1.
Ab initio mundi.
The wreckage lay in heaping mounds as far as the eye could see. Sputtering flames and the moans of the crippled and dying still flickered all around them. Peace had been won but at such a great price. APUs torn from the dock walkways and smashed onto the floor with their operators still inside, curled tight, as though their exoskeleton might save them in even death. Survivors picked through the destruction looked for familiar faces and all too often, found them.
Two giant holes punctured the dome roof above them, their edges scarred with machine gun fire and the claw-marks of Sentinels that had poured through. The concrete and stone were weakened despite the fact that they held. A collapse would herald the end of Zion despite what Neo had accomplished. A collapse would mean the end of free humanity and they had come too far for that.
Commander Jason Lock stood at the edge of it all and tasted the bitter acid on his tongue that didn't come from his defeat at the hands of the machines. It came from the fact that Morpheus had been right. Neo had been the key to winning the final stanza of the war and he knew for certain that they would all forget that his defense had kept them alive until that point. It is not the general who holds the charge and keeps the enemy at bay who becomes a hero. The hero is the one who leads the final sally forth and turns the tide. Neo would never have been a hero if Zion had fallen in the hours before he made it to the Machine City. Locke knew that and felt it roll through his mouth with bitterness and pain. He'd given so very much to keep them all safe.
"Sir?" Lt. Rand stood just behind him, not close enough to touch, but still waiting for his commander's instructions.
It took Lock a moment to clear his head. He was a battle commander but maybe this too could be a battle. The dock needed to be up and operational as swiftly as possible. Neo's truce might have stopped the Sentinel incursion, but there was no guarantee of how long it would last. When it failed and the machines attacked again, they would need the dock to be at full strength. They would need him.
"Assign the infantry to removing the ammo from the docks first. Send in civilians behind them to retrieve the bodies and when that's done we'll start to work on the rest." He paused for a moment. "And find me a working radio. I want to know how many ships we have left out there."
His eyes caught on the wrecked hulk of the Hammer. "We're going to have to send someone into the Matrix to find out what really happened."
"Sir." The Lt.'s attention wandered briefly as a voice came through the short wave radio attached to his ear. "The Council has requested a meeting."
"Tell them I don't have time." Lock brushed the Lt. out of his way. "I have a job to do."
"Three captains," she started, "but not Morpheus. Such is the price of being right. You lose some of the freedom that once defined you."
Niobe looked tired bereft of her sunglasses. All three of them did. "He has been called to duty on the council."
"Ah," the Oracle nodded as though she had expected the answer.
But the man still standing looked impatient. Roland had been one of the three called, for reasons he did not understand, and things that he did not understand made him uncomfortable. His voice, when he spoke, was gruff. "Why have you called us here?"
"Always so direct and to the point, Roland. You've changed too since the last time I saw you. And I don't just mean the grey hairs." The cigarette was stubbed out with a brief twisting motion and she let her gaze travel around to room to each one of the three.
Niobe in her traditional maroon suit of stamped leather, her hair knotted into intricate whorls that would take hours in the real world, but in the Matrix could be replicated with a thought. There was no humor in her face only an intense wariness that bespoke of her concern. The machine war was finished. There should be no reason that the Oracle needed to contact them. But her certainty was not complete and the Oracle could see that. Niobe had never wanted to believe in the prophecy, and had, only when Neo made her see. She was skeptical but would be the easiest of the three to make believe.
The other two would be the difficult ones.
Roland had shifted uncomfortably when she called attention to his age. The threat of mortality hadn't caught up to him until he saw the wreck that had been his life and his home. She knew that the Hammer lay destroyed inside of the dock and what it had cost him to turn the ship over to Niobe. There hadn't been any other choice that he could have taken, they all ended with the death of his ship, but she knew that part of Roland had died with his ship. Just like part of the man had died fifteen years earlier when the Oracle had found herself outmaneuvered. One of the few times it happened, but Roland still carried the scars of her being wrong, and he was not about to forgive her for that error.
"Are we here to chat or to find out about Neo?" The voice was ascerbic and almost hateful. The Oracle didn't like the narrow lipped Captain of the Defiant. Sacẻ had survived the battle with the machines by hunkering down and avoiding any real confrontation. Everything about the woman, from her dark and uncomforting eyes, to the way she had only reluctantly passed on the Oracle's message boded ill for Zion. And yet, they would not be here without this woman, and they all knew it.
The Oracle started to reach for her cigarette and then remembered that she'd put it out. "Who said anything about Neo?"
"Seraph said…" Niobe's words faded. "We just assumed."
"That's the funny thing about assumptions, they're so often wrong." Another cigarette found its way into her hand and she lit it with a comforting sigh. So few comforts were left to her these days, especially now that she felt the edges fraying. "No, I can't tell you what happened to Neo one way or another."
"Do you know?"
"That's not for me to say, Roland. What I've brought you here to discuss is what the truce entails. The Architect has allowed that the minds who wish to free themselves from the Matrix may do so without retribution. That has already begun to some extent. But as you know, you cannot trust him. He may not be human with human lies and frailities, but his program has spent many years feeling the bitter sting of imperfection and he knows how to exploit that flaw now." She inhaled deeply, smoke filling all of the faded edges. "The Kid was the first to self-substantiate, but he will not be the last. While the Architect has made it easier for their minds to leave the Matrix - without anyone to catch them - they will fall." Her eyes close slowly. "And their light goes out. Just. like. that."
Sacẻ snorted. "You're trying to save lives? You're a machine."
"I'm a program." The Oracle snapped back, her patience suddenly worn thin. With great effort she calmed herself and managed to make herself level once again. "There's a difference. You always have a choice of whether or not to believe me. But don't waste my time by coming here with your mind closed. Without her you will be lucky to save one out of ten. I'm offering you a chance. A choice."
Niobe stared intently at her. "Is she like Neo?"
"No, my dear. She is nothing like Neo. He was one of a kind. Really special."
"Then how will she help us?"
The Oracle smiled. "Always pragmatic, Roland. But what you really want to know, is how will she help you? She cannot rebuild the Hammer. She cannot bring the Logos back from the Machine City but she can do something much more important."
"What?" He demanded. "What can she do?"
"She can find those that are falling."
"Bullshit." The words leapt out.
"I made a mistake, with you, once. And you've never forgiven me for it."
The conversation had become more personal and both Niobe and Sacẻ were at a loss as to what to think. Roland had been noticeably absent from most of their dealings in the Matrix. He went because that was what he'd been ordered to do, but his ship had never made very many extractions. The Hammer had been a defensive ship for fighting Sentinels as long as anyone could remember. That he'd once known the Oracle was a revelation.
"You're the Oracle. You're supposed to know these things."
The cigarette sat forgotten once again. "I'm a program." She said softly. "I use personality, probability and casuality to map out future possibilities. What you wanted from me was to profess infallibility. No, after everything that has happened, after six attempts to gain what we have here today, I am all too aware that I am not omnipotent. And neither is that old man on the hill for all that he'd have you believe. If I told you that you had that chance again, would you believe me?"
His answer was flat. "No."
"But then," it came with a slight smile. "I already knew that."
"Who is this person we're supposed to find?" Niobe interrupted the moment. "What exactly can she do?"
"Many things." The Oracle told her and again felt the sense of disquiet that frightened her much more than Smith ever had. "But the most important is that she can find the fallen."
Jessica Swanson had had enough. Everyday full of more bullshit and crap than the last. She looked down at the doctor's letter in her hand and wished that the self-righteous bastard had to undergo half of the chemo she'd been through. Four kinds of cancer were ripping through her body and he looked at each additional version as a new exploratory piece in the journal article that he was writing. She didn't want to be the highlight of his career, she wanted to live.
"God owes me a refund." She said outloud and felt the carcinogens burn into her veins yet again. The hospital smothered her with its chemical smell and the death that it dealt out in the name of life. She hated it. Hated the lies that the nurses told her when they said everything was going to be fine. Hated that they said that were saving her when they took thousands of dollars and gave nothing but pain and nausea and a vicious sense that it was all futile. Even now, alone in the cancer room, she wanted to be rid of it all.
"I don't belong here."
The world twisted suddenly and wrenched out of alignment. It wasn't like anything she'd ever felt before. A sense of falling.
Bright lights and the feel of liquid on her skin. She vomited convulsively, from the chemo and the sense of dislocation as an alien set of cords bound themselves around her skin more thoroughly than any iv line. She tried to scream and thrash but pincers caught her throat tightly and yanked something out of her head. It was obscene.
She'd been weak for months, but now her body had no strength at all. The hospital was gone and she didn't know what was going on. Her body fell into some sort of pool and she choked on water that tasted rancid. Her arms and legs flailed to get purchase, but there was no force in the movements. More and more water filled her mouth as her body sank despite the thrashing.
In the very last moments of her life, she opened her eyes onto a water-logged vision of the real world, and drowned.
Latin translation: From the beginning