Green Code by BadAss 9
The rain beat heavily on the agent's shoulders as he crossed the road. He was soaked from head to toe, with rain pouring down his face and drenching his suit. His shoes sloshed through the puddles as he walked.
The rain was synthetic, as was everything else in this world, merely snippets of computer programming dressed up to look like raindrops. The street he walked on was a sea of blinking green symbols, electronically adjusted to give the impression of a tarmac pavement. The overcast sky above was little more than a vast, undulating cloud of the glowing Matrix code. The agent, himself a sentient computer program, was similarly a construct of the Matrix. Green code bleeped and pulsed in his artificial body, like green blood in a mechanical vein.
The few umbrella-wielding commuters who were walking the sodden streets with him were unaware of this. Like everyone else in the Matrix, they believed this prison of electricity was their home, a familiar world of certainty and no surprises. The agent smiled at the thought. Walking batteries, that's what they were. Living power sources trapped in their own little computerised heaven.
He crossed over to a traffic island, watching as the rain-soaked cars whooshed past. He needn't have waited for the traffic light – by manipulating the code structure of the Matrix, he could simply leap over the honking traffic. But he liked to keep a low profile. It was a bad idea for an agent like him to display his inhuman abilities in public, lest the human sheep around him see a glimpse of what their world truly was.
Walking across the road and into a side street, he detected the pulse of a disturbance in the flow of the Matrix. His computerized senses told him that this was what he was here for.
The Zionist hideout.
As an agent of the Matrix, he was required by the ruling mainframe of the Machine Nation to root out and crush those elements of humanity who had escaped the Matrix's electronic grip. These Zionists – named for their fortified underground city – were a direct threat to the Matrix and its machine overlords, and had to be dealt with sternly. Despite the seriousness of his task, the agent liked to think of himself as a policeman, disciplining his unruly charges.
This particular hideout had been ID'd by a sniper program a few days before, and the agent had been dispatched immediately after. He had his orders, and would follow them with his customary mechanical efficiency.
He rounded a corner and glanced at the source of the disturbance. A small steel door, set into the wall of a grimy alleyway. Two brown-jacketed rogues stood watch outside it. Zionists. Armed, no doubt, but the agent had nothing to fear from bullets.
He strode confidently up to the door, drawing his pistol. The large black handgun weighed heavily in his hand, and he smiled, as though he were holding a familiar childhood toy.
The first of the Zionist guards took a moment to realise what the tall, suited stranger was, and by then it was too late. The agent shot him in the stomach, and he went down, cursing his life away, to lie twitching in the gutter.
His companion was faster, and was able to loose a few shots in the agent's direction. Ducking smoothly under the bullets, the agent punched him in the face. The man's head came clean off in an explosion of blood, and the agent kicked his spurting corpse into the empty street.
Muffled shouts and thuds from behind the steel door indicated that the Zionists inside had been alerted by the gunfire, and were endeavouring to escape. But the front door was the only way out, and there was no way any of the humans inside would be able to get past the agent.
Converting himself to pure Matrix code, the agent flowed through the coding of the door and reformed neatly on the other side, gun raised, in a low-ceilinged room with a few meagre furnishings and a flickering lightbulb. Two surprised humans stood facing him, submachine-guns in their hands.
Easily dodging the wave of bullets from the human guards, the agent loosed two supremely accurate shots of his own. The two Zionists dropped, blood pouring from identical crater-like wounds in their foreheads. Another man jumped through a door on the agent's left, pumping the slide of a shotgun.
The spray of buckshot exploded into the agent's body, killing him instantly. Or so it would seem. As his body vanished in a spray of blood, he simply warped his Matrix code into the computer signature of the shotgunner's body. The man's face flickered and blurred, and was quickly replaced by the eternally calm visage of the agent, complete with suit, shoes and handgun. The body that lay bleeding on the floor was that of an unfortunate cab driver, whom the agent had possessed earlier.
Holstering his gun, the agent picked up the abandoned shotgun and spun round to look into the room the shotgunner had come out of. It was empty, except for a rickety table and an old-style candlestick telephone. Oh, and the fading bluish signature of a recently warped-out Zionist.
Grinning, the agent converted himself to Matrix code and hurtled down the phone line. This was going to be fun…
