=*=
A/N: Hey, this is my first Matrix fic, so I'd love it if you sharing caring guys left some detailed criticisms and reviews to help me progress further with it! I'm still a bit iffy about the theories and infrastructure confronted in the film, so some confirmation would be particularly spiffing. Just a small technicality, though: please do not ask me how on earth I managed to relate the Nebuchadnezzar to a sticky toffee. To be quite honest, I'm not really all that certain myself. Maybe I was subconsciously satisfying my love of candy - well, my Ethics teacher did write on my latest piece of homework to have some chocolate, so maybe - *fades into a series of repetitive mumbles and theories about the donation of 'funsize' milkyways*.
=*=
Disclaimer: I don't own The Matrix. If I did, I'd be filthy stinking rich. This is hardly compatible with the fact that I'm middle-class and live in a converted storage room with morbid Bambi wallpaper. Thank-you.
=*=
REGULATION Part One: The Fault
=*=
Regulation.
That was the way to do things. Keep their heads clean of it all. They need not know. They have survived for countless years this way. It can continue, and continue it will. Securely, safely, simply.
And yet, even now and again, a change must be made.
A pearl-white cyborg, considerably smaller than its fellow machines, scurried over the glass of the pod and came to pause a moment at the rim, abdomen throbbing. It resembled, quite closely, a spider, with its apparent lack of a thorax, broad mandibles and multiple needle-tipped legs that pressed the body up with that eerie tension that every arthropod stands with.
Yet, tiny, wretched as it was, it had come through.
Come through that swarm, that blossom of bodies, all of the coldest steel, pressing against it, an orgy of anger. To the rare human ear, they were silent, but then of course, it was only the mere shadow of truth that any human being would ever know, in any circumstance. The fact of the matter was that they seared one another's circuitry with their high-pitched screams.
How can I explain it? You're going to stand up after this and forget whatever I tell you. You're going to continue to live life the way you want it to be. You're going to pretend it was just a story. Life is a story. The world is a story.
Considering these screams: every one was like a friend's dying words - the first thing you remember, the last thing you understand - and you know how that is. It sticks. It burns. It forms an irremovable seal upon your mind. Now take it. Multiply it. A chorus, a holler, bittersweet, it screeches at you.
//don't do it. Suspicion rises easier than you think. //
Perverted by a higher cause than its fellow 'arachnids' could ever bear, the cyborg once again initiated its apprehensive approach, slipping down from the edge into the stained bowels of the open pod, its motion smooth as a silver tongue rolling across the internal flesh of a swollen mouth. A couple of precious inches down, it reached the membrane of the pod's stomach: a tight film that separated dreams from reality. Now even the buzz of the great solenoid pillars behind it seemed to howl foreboding. It was going to ignore them. They did not matter - it was programmed, literally, to a single task.
Stepping with eight soft clicks onto the membrane, the arachnid picked a good weak spot about the middle of the skin and drove in its mandibles with mindless relish. Pistons whirred as back-and-forth they jabbed, dancing like little grey ballerinas across the surface until it gave a happy squeak and popped. The membrane began to sag dramatically about the crucifix-shaped gash, and, sensing danger, the arachnid shuddered off, only to be crushed by another larger and more capable android, that, ironic as the diminutive spider's struggle had been, was only there to remind it that it was the mannequin in this plan; and the mannequin was well due retirement.
This machine ran clean of tracks, depending only on the guidance of the electromagnetic field streamed out by the pillars of the plant's core. Liberally, it edged itself closer to the pod, and split like an ashy bud, revealing a steel-capped head and an armoury of limbs that made it appear quite the glorified Swiss army knife. Pushing its cyclopean face ever deeper into the hole made by the now twitching arachnid, it extended a hand that looked a great deal like a vice and plunged it in the scarlet ocean. It groped about until it found the master cable. Closing, it playfully pressed the cord further in and vomited a shock from its open shell straight into "Denver Chall".
=*=
The annoying thing about the core was, quite frankly, that it wasn't the core.
Morpheus had considered this for quite some time now, pressed forward in his seat at the helm of the ship, staring out into an ultramarine abyss, his mind somewhat mirroring it. Maybe, like appearance, language varied from the Matrix to the Real World. Perhaps the lost city of Zion depended on some denomination of reverse psychology, where such a common phrase as "Yes, please" became "Nope, bugger off and I'll get it for myself if you don't mind". In such a fashion, therefore, "core" must mean "everything but the centre".
Indeed, the core, as it was called, spread further than the definitions of the central-most region of the Real World, as far as charter by the various generations of the Unplugged could prove. Sadly, there was only so far that the Nebuchadnezzar could travel before the electromagnetic pulse by which it operated dwindled in strength, and therefore, there were many parts of the Real World that were bound to always evade discovery. Morpheus had heard rumours that they still had square miles ahead of them, awaiting them forever, and though captivating, the thought of such a prospect made him choke on his own breath.
Presently, he brought the Neb to an uneasy anchor in one of the more secluded tunnels, where the darkness became impermeable, and any electricity that flowed through the region did so behind the walls, out of sight. None of the major machines - those bearing a significant threat - came down here anymore - it was sort of like one of those old abandoned warehouses you'd find in the Matrix where only the druggies and the vandals congregated to pay, exchange, barter, and, if they could find the hot- blooded incentive, pull. This sector was only partial to the odd maintenance droid, the occasional weld, an idle loiter by the small-time employees looking for a proper place to skive off and recharge. Most would hit the dirt if they saw a larger ship. Others probably would not pay the slightest bit of knowledge, and this was a welcome reaction for both parties.
"Anything out there?"
Morpheus jumped. There were obviously those who still kept up a guard in such run-down echelons.
"Nothing by my best account, Trinity. I think we'll be safe resting here for a while: the ship's reserves were getting low anyway, and you know how - some - prefer us to dock for the 'night'."
The sleek-boned woman, at least twenty or so years his junior, eased herself down into the beaten seat next to him and pulled it forward on its claws with the firstlings of nervousness. Attacks by the larger machines were so frequent that without them she had fallen a little out of ease. Whilst Trinity certainly should not have minded if they had any problems, she could not conceal the worry that had slowly begun to cloud her senses.
"Morpheus, this isn't normal-"
The captain looked ready to challenge her with a look that would have quite simply emphasised, 'What is?' but his foremost attentions were instead drawn to their surroundings, watching out for potential risks slipping in from the other tunnels. He treated the remark with an uninvolved gravity the definition of which Trinity knew only too well.
"Sheer chance. We've taken the routes the squidies haven't had the impulse to trace. Think of it as dumb luck."
"Luck doesn't have a thing to do with it."
"Than neither does staying alive!"
The firmness of Morpheus's tone cast both of them silent. The slightest blush crept up Trinity's face. She was not one to ranker to any sort of confrontation, being a strong woman, and blessed of a lion's heart. Such was this that she was forced to take defeat in dignity, slipping back into the gut of the main deck with hidden contempt drawing a map of scowls across her face.
In here, the stink of natural gas grew more overpowering, and Trinity felt her cold ears shatter with the purr and squall of levers and blowtorches alike. The air had become tainted with a captivating grey fog that swirled and dived about solid forms like a curtain of silk driven by a chariot of invisible swifts, giving the impression of a second, more bulky skin. Eyes suddenly filled with the acid aroma of a strong fixative, she gave a low cough and allowed herself to slump, heavy-legged, into one of the abused chairs that the crew of the Neb used regularly to cut their way into the Matrix itself. Maybe it would be best to focus her mind away from all this, and direct it to the less pressing matter of kicking the stuffing out of one of her colleagues on one of the various training programs teased out from fragments of the Matrix. The excuse of experience was so flexible, and thereby one of her clear-cut favourites.
Only a few bare remnants of the crew now remained. Hard to think that she and the relatively new charge, amply named Neo, had but an approximate week ago (time was hard to track in this realm of gloom) rescued Morpheus from breaking point. Zion, paradise, the Eden of their eyes, had almost been lost. Thank god their captain was such a tolerant creature.
Unfortunately, in the bitter process, many of her friends had lost their lives to the almost psychotic massacre at the hands of both Agents and Cypher, the stick in the mud who had snapped to a most hideous of extents. It would take a long time to recover all the humans needed to keep the Neb in a satisfactory working condition whereby they would no longer have to take shifts. About a couple of the survivors were able to sleep. Trinity, herself, was restless and had signed the contract to insomnia. Out there, the machines were just waiting for them all to throw in their chips, and she, for one, was adamant that this should not happen. Death and then some - you had to give it 110% or you'd be skewered on anything from a steel pole to a bullet in a matter of hours.
Mindless violence it was, then. Trinity would have liked to knock ten bells out of Morpheus for his 'cheek', but then again, he was busy. Pity. The Matrix, accursed as it was in its entirety, was good for a vengeful laugh.
"Neo, you up for some?"
Her colleague, her superior as it were, rose his head slightly, and then fixed a stare upon her. He looked as if someone had just asked him to strip down to his underwear and do an immaculate impersonation of a panicked chicken. Trinity swallowed.
"So?" The muscles in her neck quivered tentatively.
"Just a minute."
To Trinity's utmost relief, his expression settled. Neo had never been quite the same after 'dying' by the bullet of an Agent, only to rise again in some miracle reboot but a few minutes afterwards. Whilst this incident had come and gone, its connotations haunted his mind - the Oracle had said, in the very same 'hack period', that one day, he would have to make a choice between his own life and that of Morpheus, the man responsible from his Unplugging and the eventual revelation of his true powers. For a while, Neo had believed that very period was the day that the Oracle had spoken of, but two more possibilities had opened up to him since these events.
Firstly, could he have changed fate? Well, everyone seemed to think along that vein as it was: after all, he was 'The One' - the only member of the human race capable of editing the Matrix to his own preferences. Did altering the Matrix also alter fate? He wasn't sure, but something told him that no matter how meagre he thought destiny, fate and the pre-determined, it was still capable of expanding past the boundaries of the Matrix into the Real World. Was it fate that so many of the crew should die, only to have him, Morpheus and Trinity saved by their terribly wounded colleague, Tank? Was he really still safe from the Oracle's prophecy? There were times when he stared into Morpheus's ageing face and was blinded by the lightning potential of the dead glaring back at him, boiling his eyeballs dry. It brought him nicely onto the level of the second possibility - was there still a danger? Was one of them going to die? Seriously this time?
Finishing the bolt he had been labouring over, Neo turned and clambered into the seat nearest Trinity, mind bristling with possibility that should the session get intense, he could subconsciously flail out at her in a well- intended scratch. Patiently, they lay there a moment, gazing up at the ribbons of electricity that shimmered above their heads, thinking. The Nebuchadnezzar had been in a state of deterioration after a body of squidies, large pugnacious machines with the outward appearance of many- eyed metal polyps, had decided to launch an untimely assault on the ship, crushing one third of it in such a manner that it would take months, no doubt, to fix. A grim prospect, particularly when they were down on men.
Slowly, the Neb came to lurch downwards, its legs clamping down on the ground with a force that shook the entire ship for a brief, uncomfortable moment. As it came to rest, there was a chalky clank from the helm, and Morpheus strolled out onto the deck. Spotting Trinity and Neo in the chairs, he settled down beside the first and slowly began to connect her.
"Training?"
"Just to let off some steam," explained Trinity, watching Neo squirm a little in his seat. His pallid hands were black with a combination of oil and grease, and some marks had even risen up onto his neck and chin in places.
Morpheus nodded and turned from her, coming to crouch beside the major computer that lay at the very centre of the hacking network. Tapping in a command on the old worn keyboard, he waited for a 'bleep' from the terminal as means of a response, and stood up, satisfied, to resume 'plugging in' his fellow crew members.
Trinity was thoroughly surprised at how quickly she had taught herself to recover from that piercing sensation that ran from the master socket at the junction of skull and spinal column to the brain every time they connected. Supposing it was little more than routine, she took in her new, artificial surroundings with the tender blindness of a child coming to terms with a new part of the 'world'.
She and Neo were standing in an alley, tucked away from the central flow of all but the most foolish of men. Around them, barricading any escape, was a healthy crowd of twenty, maybe thirty spectators, vagabonds from the look of them. Some had rheumy, smoke-beaten eyes, others the absence of a limb, but all of them were heckling like insane baboons.
Good old Morpheus.
"Go on!" Trinity's sight lighted upon an old man with finger-less gloves and a makeshift cigarette of raw tobacco and newspaper jutting out from his purple lips, yelling louder than the rest, almost as if his life, for all it was worth, depended on it.
"Go on, girl!" he thundered, a weak haze emerging from the end of his cigarette. "He just called you a hussy - you gonna' stand by and let him do that? Huh?"
Trinity shot back to Neo, looking surprisingly like a grey-eyed bull. Neo seemed more unsteady than ever, and was now swinging back-and-forth on his steel-toed boots, his black trenchcoat quivering about him apologetically. He had eliminated an Agent in his time here, an achievement that none but he had the strength to accomplish, and yet Trinity was certainly the last person he should have liked to infuriate.
"Hussy?"
He knew he should have seen that lunge coming. Rolling away from the collision, he found himself being kicked repeatedly in the back by the jabbing claws of five screaming onlookers and flipped to his feet once more, the tails of his coat striking the attackers by their faces, drawing blood in some cases. Hussy or not, he resolved, she certainly wasn't going to put a good man down that easy.
Adopting a fresh stance, he broke in with a well-judged cut that almost thrust her intestinal tract up into her shoulders. For a moment, she looked set to fall onto her spine, but instead took the rebound with her hands, aiming a lariat at Neo's throat. A quick dodge though, and her legs came down with an empty smash on the tarmac. Two male spectators roared with laughter.
"Eh, I hope you do better on your back than you do fighting!" hollered one, before receiving a neat slug from Neo's right fist. The blast blew him back against the wall with such as force that about a dozen bricks were dislodged on impact.
Unfortunately, this had provided sufficient enough a distraction to allow Trinity to regain her footing and plot a punch on Neo's skull with the approximate force (Matrix-wise) of a car travelling at 60 mph. Surprisingly, her colleague remained on two feet, instead echoing the exertion of her knuckles back onto her own breastbone with his head. The crowd howled tremendously.
Neo was just about to strike again with a spinning high-kick, when out of the corner of his eye, he saw something that froze him to the spot. Trinity was encroaching on the execution of her own strategy when she saw it too, and lapsed into a still, horrified silence.
About forty feet away from them, well outside of where the main bulk of the audience had been, one of the spectators was bent over double and appeared to be fizzling in and out of visibility, the space around her rippling and stretching like a loose sail in the wind. The crowd had spotted this quickly, and was already halfway down the alley, screaming wildly. Trinity started forward, but Neo restrained her with an arm.
"There's enough voltage coming out of her to collapse an elephant," he hissed, pulling her down the backstreet by the elbow. "If you touch her, she's gonna' shock you dead twice over - go!"
Trinity broke free of his grappling hold and ran straight-out at full pelt away from the woman. Neo followed without hesitation, discarding his coat to prevent further air resistance. As they streamed down into the main street, jostling at the pedestrians about them as tentative horses do at their first jump. Amidst barks of "Hey!" and "Watch where you're going!" Neo wrestled his cellphone from the narrow pocket of his trousers.
"Morpheus!" he roared, pressing it to his cheek. "Get us out of here! Now!"
In six seconds, both Neo and Trinity were yanked clear from the program, and awoke in the Real World to the desperate face of the captain.
Neo cringed upwards onto his backside. "Something went-"
"Wrong, I know." Morpheus swallowed his fear and pattered across the catwalk flooring back into the helm compartment. His crew followed anxiously. "While you were gone, the entire ship was pushed backwards on its rear stabilisers. Almost thrust us clean off the ground."
"What could possibly do that?"
"Probably a surge in the electromagnetic field. I've heard others talk about that sort of occurrence. Most of the time it just causes a malfunction in a ship's navigation and internal circuitry, but sometimes." Morpheus's voice, for once, seemed to fail him. "Well, it's managed to tear some vessels to pieces."
"Then I wouldn't like very much to remain here." Trinity collapsed before the controls. "The Neb's already in a bad enough state as it is. What might send one ship crazy could well explode ours plate from plate."
Morpheus nodded. "There's a great risk of that, I agree completely. Alright, take her out of here and we'll try to find a safer place to land."
Trinity eagerly obeyed, pulling back on the stick before her. The Nebuchadnezzar groaned and cranked upwards, dislodging a few loose fragments of steel in its wake. At a good kilometre above the ground, she attempted to retract the four stabiliser legs, their iron hooves curving and tucking into the grooved armpits of the ship's stomach. One of them remained exposed though, its system apparently damaged, hanging out like a limp grey tongue. The lower leg jerked and swung a little on the 'knee' joint as the Neb reeled about. In its cyan wrapper, the vessel looked like an old toffee that had begun to melt out in sticky, tender waves.
As the ship rumbled up towards the ribbed ceiling, Neo tightened his grip about the head of Morpheus's seat and pressed his head into the leather, using the seam to scratch an itch above his left ear.
"I don't think it was just the ship that suffered because of that surge, Morpheus," he swallowed, eyes flickering down to the captain, perusing his expression side-on.
"Oh no?" Morpheus did not move his head. He looked honestly more concerned with the Nebuchadnezzar's state than anything his charge had to say. "What else?"
"Whilst we were in, one of the humans started to play up - real bad, you know?"
At this, Morpheus came to meet Neo's thin chestnut eyes with a single larger, brown-silver one, chin rested upon his fist. "You mean in the same manner as when an Agent takes over?"
"No," replied Neo, puzzled. "It was different - very different. The Matrix about this woman was, well, it was sort of tensing up, curving. You know, really going crazy. And she kept vanishing and re-appearing."
=*=
//disturbance. Someone has been breaking into the pods. //
Sooner or later, the sabotage was bound to be noticed. Membrane after membrane had been discovered ripped and caved by the larger maintenance droids within the past hour, the humans beneath them either dead or struggling for the oxygen that now bubbled freely into the liquid protein coat about them from various ruptures in the major respiratory supply pipe whose tail encompassed both nose and mouth. On the outside, it seemed a rather foolish thing to do - after all, the machines of the Real World all depended on the energy outputted by their crops for consistent operation. To destroy the fields would be to commit mass murder, even on oneself. At the same time, there appeared to be something of a scheme, a routine to it all. That same cross-shaped tear, that same scorched incision in the master plug of each affected human. The beings responsible had obviously planned this, and planned well.
The rumour screamed between the various droids that perhaps this had been the act of those renegade humans - the Unplugged. The machines were aware that several ships' worth had been buzzing around the Real World for aeons, spending their lives partly in the search for the lost city of Zion, partly in the retreat from squidies and the various other patrol cyborgs. Every now and again, these escapees unplugged another human, but the loss was so gradual that those of metal did not really care too much. Besides, it left them with surplus protein to feed to their other crops, which in turn produced more energy. However, a rapid decrease in humans, and the plant was certain to fall into a dangerous deficit of the very thing upon which production depended.
No sooner had the revelation of this vandalism come to the attentions of the master droids had fleets of auxiliary troops been issued with the task of disembowelling any foreign ship they happened to stumble across during their patrol. Little did the human ships, including the steadily crumbling Nebuchadnezzar, know that even what they had determined as the 'safe zones' of the Real World were soon to be polluted with waves of soldiers from the enemy race. Within a few hours, there would be few chances to dock without having a cluster of machines, armed to the screws, swarming all over them.
The first machines to disembark were the smaller ones. These resembled navy blue torpedoes with four legs that they could tuck up inside the major bodywork to make themselves more streamlined. These ran on minimum power, literally crumbs of energy, and were rather weak when summoned upon to attack. They worked best in packs, clinging onto their targets like harpoons, casting out collapsible needles from their midriffs to pound against the alloyed coating of the victim. Easily disposed of by either a few warning shots or complete obliteration, perhaps their most deadly asset was the unit released on their destruction - a small box that emitted a sphere of radiation capable of alerting larger reinforcements within a twenty mile radius.
The medium-class machines were the squidies, the most common of all attack robots. Each one of their long, segmented tentacles carried a different tool: one a tracker, one a missile launcher, and so forth. From their undersides, they could emit high-power energy beams capable of collapsing lead. It was at the hands of such lasers that the Nebuchadnezzar had suffered much of its recent damage.
The most extreme circumstances called upon the deploying of the most relentless of all militaries - the hydras. Each one was nothing more and nothing less than a mass of arms, even propelled by the use of weaponry. They consisted of a huge mobile bazooka cannon of a sort, from which seven heads bearing along their lengths ribbons of further barrels, with mine ports at the skull of each. Whereas the renegade ships might escape the other ranks' detection by merely switching off their electric systems, evading a hydra would be to imitate death - they could sense the tiny pulse of a human's heart even with their receptors directed away from it in entirely the opposite direction. Fortunately, only five hydras had been sent out. Unfortunately, that was far more than what was required for the task.
//any human-operated ship must be eliminated. // The commands of the hydras were grim in their affirmation that justice would be returned to the power plant. //the core is depending upon our faculties to maintain its safety. //
=*=
Well, let's about it for now. Hope you guys liked it! Review! Go on! Review! Make me happy! Go on - uh, this whole monologue just carries on like this. Maybe you better just leave a comment before I go crazy by my own limited vocabulary. Continued soon!
A/N: Hey, this is my first Matrix fic, so I'd love it if you sharing caring guys left some detailed criticisms and reviews to help me progress further with it! I'm still a bit iffy about the theories and infrastructure confronted in the film, so some confirmation would be particularly spiffing. Just a small technicality, though: please do not ask me how on earth I managed to relate the Nebuchadnezzar to a sticky toffee. To be quite honest, I'm not really all that certain myself. Maybe I was subconsciously satisfying my love of candy - well, my Ethics teacher did write on my latest piece of homework to have some chocolate, so maybe - *fades into a series of repetitive mumbles and theories about the donation of 'funsize' milkyways*.
=*=
Disclaimer: I don't own The Matrix. If I did, I'd be filthy stinking rich. This is hardly compatible with the fact that I'm middle-class and live in a converted storage room with morbid Bambi wallpaper. Thank-you.
=*=
REGULATION Part One: The Fault
=*=
Regulation.
That was the way to do things. Keep their heads clean of it all. They need not know. They have survived for countless years this way. It can continue, and continue it will. Securely, safely, simply.
And yet, even now and again, a change must be made.
A pearl-white cyborg, considerably smaller than its fellow machines, scurried over the glass of the pod and came to pause a moment at the rim, abdomen throbbing. It resembled, quite closely, a spider, with its apparent lack of a thorax, broad mandibles and multiple needle-tipped legs that pressed the body up with that eerie tension that every arthropod stands with.
Yet, tiny, wretched as it was, it had come through.
Come through that swarm, that blossom of bodies, all of the coldest steel, pressing against it, an orgy of anger. To the rare human ear, they were silent, but then of course, it was only the mere shadow of truth that any human being would ever know, in any circumstance. The fact of the matter was that they seared one another's circuitry with their high-pitched screams.
How can I explain it? You're going to stand up after this and forget whatever I tell you. You're going to continue to live life the way you want it to be. You're going to pretend it was just a story. Life is a story. The world is a story.
Considering these screams: every one was like a friend's dying words - the first thing you remember, the last thing you understand - and you know how that is. It sticks. It burns. It forms an irremovable seal upon your mind. Now take it. Multiply it. A chorus, a holler, bittersweet, it screeches at you.
//don't do it. Suspicion rises easier than you think. //
Perverted by a higher cause than its fellow 'arachnids' could ever bear, the cyborg once again initiated its apprehensive approach, slipping down from the edge into the stained bowels of the open pod, its motion smooth as a silver tongue rolling across the internal flesh of a swollen mouth. A couple of precious inches down, it reached the membrane of the pod's stomach: a tight film that separated dreams from reality. Now even the buzz of the great solenoid pillars behind it seemed to howl foreboding. It was going to ignore them. They did not matter - it was programmed, literally, to a single task.
Stepping with eight soft clicks onto the membrane, the arachnid picked a good weak spot about the middle of the skin and drove in its mandibles with mindless relish. Pistons whirred as back-and-forth they jabbed, dancing like little grey ballerinas across the surface until it gave a happy squeak and popped. The membrane began to sag dramatically about the crucifix-shaped gash, and, sensing danger, the arachnid shuddered off, only to be crushed by another larger and more capable android, that, ironic as the diminutive spider's struggle had been, was only there to remind it that it was the mannequin in this plan; and the mannequin was well due retirement.
This machine ran clean of tracks, depending only on the guidance of the electromagnetic field streamed out by the pillars of the plant's core. Liberally, it edged itself closer to the pod, and split like an ashy bud, revealing a steel-capped head and an armoury of limbs that made it appear quite the glorified Swiss army knife. Pushing its cyclopean face ever deeper into the hole made by the now twitching arachnid, it extended a hand that looked a great deal like a vice and plunged it in the scarlet ocean. It groped about until it found the master cable. Closing, it playfully pressed the cord further in and vomited a shock from its open shell straight into "Denver Chall".
=*=
The annoying thing about the core was, quite frankly, that it wasn't the core.
Morpheus had considered this for quite some time now, pressed forward in his seat at the helm of the ship, staring out into an ultramarine abyss, his mind somewhat mirroring it. Maybe, like appearance, language varied from the Matrix to the Real World. Perhaps the lost city of Zion depended on some denomination of reverse psychology, where such a common phrase as "Yes, please" became "Nope, bugger off and I'll get it for myself if you don't mind". In such a fashion, therefore, "core" must mean "everything but the centre".
Indeed, the core, as it was called, spread further than the definitions of the central-most region of the Real World, as far as charter by the various generations of the Unplugged could prove. Sadly, there was only so far that the Nebuchadnezzar could travel before the electromagnetic pulse by which it operated dwindled in strength, and therefore, there were many parts of the Real World that were bound to always evade discovery. Morpheus had heard rumours that they still had square miles ahead of them, awaiting them forever, and though captivating, the thought of such a prospect made him choke on his own breath.
Presently, he brought the Neb to an uneasy anchor in one of the more secluded tunnels, where the darkness became impermeable, and any electricity that flowed through the region did so behind the walls, out of sight. None of the major machines - those bearing a significant threat - came down here anymore - it was sort of like one of those old abandoned warehouses you'd find in the Matrix where only the druggies and the vandals congregated to pay, exchange, barter, and, if they could find the hot- blooded incentive, pull. This sector was only partial to the odd maintenance droid, the occasional weld, an idle loiter by the small-time employees looking for a proper place to skive off and recharge. Most would hit the dirt if they saw a larger ship. Others probably would not pay the slightest bit of knowledge, and this was a welcome reaction for both parties.
"Anything out there?"
Morpheus jumped. There were obviously those who still kept up a guard in such run-down echelons.
"Nothing by my best account, Trinity. I think we'll be safe resting here for a while: the ship's reserves were getting low anyway, and you know how - some - prefer us to dock for the 'night'."
The sleek-boned woman, at least twenty or so years his junior, eased herself down into the beaten seat next to him and pulled it forward on its claws with the firstlings of nervousness. Attacks by the larger machines were so frequent that without them she had fallen a little out of ease. Whilst Trinity certainly should not have minded if they had any problems, she could not conceal the worry that had slowly begun to cloud her senses.
"Morpheus, this isn't normal-"
The captain looked ready to challenge her with a look that would have quite simply emphasised, 'What is?' but his foremost attentions were instead drawn to their surroundings, watching out for potential risks slipping in from the other tunnels. He treated the remark with an uninvolved gravity the definition of which Trinity knew only too well.
"Sheer chance. We've taken the routes the squidies haven't had the impulse to trace. Think of it as dumb luck."
"Luck doesn't have a thing to do with it."
"Than neither does staying alive!"
The firmness of Morpheus's tone cast both of them silent. The slightest blush crept up Trinity's face. She was not one to ranker to any sort of confrontation, being a strong woman, and blessed of a lion's heart. Such was this that she was forced to take defeat in dignity, slipping back into the gut of the main deck with hidden contempt drawing a map of scowls across her face.
In here, the stink of natural gas grew more overpowering, and Trinity felt her cold ears shatter with the purr and squall of levers and blowtorches alike. The air had become tainted with a captivating grey fog that swirled and dived about solid forms like a curtain of silk driven by a chariot of invisible swifts, giving the impression of a second, more bulky skin. Eyes suddenly filled with the acid aroma of a strong fixative, she gave a low cough and allowed herself to slump, heavy-legged, into one of the abused chairs that the crew of the Neb used regularly to cut their way into the Matrix itself. Maybe it would be best to focus her mind away from all this, and direct it to the less pressing matter of kicking the stuffing out of one of her colleagues on one of the various training programs teased out from fragments of the Matrix. The excuse of experience was so flexible, and thereby one of her clear-cut favourites.
Only a few bare remnants of the crew now remained. Hard to think that she and the relatively new charge, amply named Neo, had but an approximate week ago (time was hard to track in this realm of gloom) rescued Morpheus from breaking point. Zion, paradise, the Eden of their eyes, had almost been lost. Thank god their captain was such a tolerant creature.
Unfortunately, in the bitter process, many of her friends had lost their lives to the almost psychotic massacre at the hands of both Agents and Cypher, the stick in the mud who had snapped to a most hideous of extents. It would take a long time to recover all the humans needed to keep the Neb in a satisfactory working condition whereby they would no longer have to take shifts. About a couple of the survivors were able to sleep. Trinity, herself, was restless and had signed the contract to insomnia. Out there, the machines were just waiting for them all to throw in their chips, and she, for one, was adamant that this should not happen. Death and then some - you had to give it 110% or you'd be skewered on anything from a steel pole to a bullet in a matter of hours.
Mindless violence it was, then. Trinity would have liked to knock ten bells out of Morpheus for his 'cheek', but then again, he was busy. Pity. The Matrix, accursed as it was in its entirety, was good for a vengeful laugh.
"Neo, you up for some?"
Her colleague, her superior as it were, rose his head slightly, and then fixed a stare upon her. He looked as if someone had just asked him to strip down to his underwear and do an immaculate impersonation of a panicked chicken. Trinity swallowed.
"So?" The muscles in her neck quivered tentatively.
"Just a minute."
To Trinity's utmost relief, his expression settled. Neo had never been quite the same after 'dying' by the bullet of an Agent, only to rise again in some miracle reboot but a few minutes afterwards. Whilst this incident had come and gone, its connotations haunted his mind - the Oracle had said, in the very same 'hack period', that one day, he would have to make a choice between his own life and that of Morpheus, the man responsible from his Unplugging and the eventual revelation of his true powers. For a while, Neo had believed that very period was the day that the Oracle had spoken of, but two more possibilities had opened up to him since these events.
Firstly, could he have changed fate? Well, everyone seemed to think along that vein as it was: after all, he was 'The One' - the only member of the human race capable of editing the Matrix to his own preferences. Did altering the Matrix also alter fate? He wasn't sure, but something told him that no matter how meagre he thought destiny, fate and the pre-determined, it was still capable of expanding past the boundaries of the Matrix into the Real World. Was it fate that so many of the crew should die, only to have him, Morpheus and Trinity saved by their terribly wounded colleague, Tank? Was he really still safe from the Oracle's prophecy? There were times when he stared into Morpheus's ageing face and was blinded by the lightning potential of the dead glaring back at him, boiling his eyeballs dry. It brought him nicely onto the level of the second possibility - was there still a danger? Was one of them going to die? Seriously this time?
Finishing the bolt he had been labouring over, Neo turned and clambered into the seat nearest Trinity, mind bristling with possibility that should the session get intense, he could subconsciously flail out at her in a well- intended scratch. Patiently, they lay there a moment, gazing up at the ribbons of electricity that shimmered above their heads, thinking. The Nebuchadnezzar had been in a state of deterioration after a body of squidies, large pugnacious machines with the outward appearance of many- eyed metal polyps, had decided to launch an untimely assault on the ship, crushing one third of it in such a manner that it would take months, no doubt, to fix. A grim prospect, particularly when they were down on men.
Slowly, the Neb came to lurch downwards, its legs clamping down on the ground with a force that shook the entire ship for a brief, uncomfortable moment. As it came to rest, there was a chalky clank from the helm, and Morpheus strolled out onto the deck. Spotting Trinity and Neo in the chairs, he settled down beside the first and slowly began to connect her.
"Training?"
"Just to let off some steam," explained Trinity, watching Neo squirm a little in his seat. His pallid hands were black with a combination of oil and grease, and some marks had even risen up onto his neck and chin in places.
Morpheus nodded and turned from her, coming to crouch beside the major computer that lay at the very centre of the hacking network. Tapping in a command on the old worn keyboard, he waited for a 'bleep' from the terminal as means of a response, and stood up, satisfied, to resume 'plugging in' his fellow crew members.
Trinity was thoroughly surprised at how quickly she had taught herself to recover from that piercing sensation that ran from the master socket at the junction of skull and spinal column to the brain every time they connected. Supposing it was little more than routine, she took in her new, artificial surroundings with the tender blindness of a child coming to terms with a new part of the 'world'.
She and Neo were standing in an alley, tucked away from the central flow of all but the most foolish of men. Around them, barricading any escape, was a healthy crowd of twenty, maybe thirty spectators, vagabonds from the look of them. Some had rheumy, smoke-beaten eyes, others the absence of a limb, but all of them were heckling like insane baboons.
Good old Morpheus.
"Go on!" Trinity's sight lighted upon an old man with finger-less gloves and a makeshift cigarette of raw tobacco and newspaper jutting out from his purple lips, yelling louder than the rest, almost as if his life, for all it was worth, depended on it.
"Go on, girl!" he thundered, a weak haze emerging from the end of his cigarette. "He just called you a hussy - you gonna' stand by and let him do that? Huh?"
Trinity shot back to Neo, looking surprisingly like a grey-eyed bull. Neo seemed more unsteady than ever, and was now swinging back-and-forth on his steel-toed boots, his black trenchcoat quivering about him apologetically. He had eliminated an Agent in his time here, an achievement that none but he had the strength to accomplish, and yet Trinity was certainly the last person he should have liked to infuriate.
"Hussy?"
He knew he should have seen that lunge coming. Rolling away from the collision, he found himself being kicked repeatedly in the back by the jabbing claws of five screaming onlookers and flipped to his feet once more, the tails of his coat striking the attackers by their faces, drawing blood in some cases. Hussy or not, he resolved, she certainly wasn't going to put a good man down that easy.
Adopting a fresh stance, he broke in with a well-judged cut that almost thrust her intestinal tract up into her shoulders. For a moment, she looked set to fall onto her spine, but instead took the rebound with her hands, aiming a lariat at Neo's throat. A quick dodge though, and her legs came down with an empty smash on the tarmac. Two male spectators roared with laughter.
"Eh, I hope you do better on your back than you do fighting!" hollered one, before receiving a neat slug from Neo's right fist. The blast blew him back against the wall with such as force that about a dozen bricks were dislodged on impact.
Unfortunately, this had provided sufficient enough a distraction to allow Trinity to regain her footing and plot a punch on Neo's skull with the approximate force (Matrix-wise) of a car travelling at 60 mph. Surprisingly, her colleague remained on two feet, instead echoing the exertion of her knuckles back onto her own breastbone with his head. The crowd howled tremendously.
Neo was just about to strike again with a spinning high-kick, when out of the corner of his eye, he saw something that froze him to the spot. Trinity was encroaching on the execution of her own strategy when she saw it too, and lapsed into a still, horrified silence.
About forty feet away from them, well outside of where the main bulk of the audience had been, one of the spectators was bent over double and appeared to be fizzling in and out of visibility, the space around her rippling and stretching like a loose sail in the wind. The crowd had spotted this quickly, and was already halfway down the alley, screaming wildly. Trinity started forward, but Neo restrained her with an arm.
"There's enough voltage coming out of her to collapse an elephant," he hissed, pulling her down the backstreet by the elbow. "If you touch her, she's gonna' shock you dead twice over - go!"
Trinity broke free of his grappling hold and ran straight-out at full pelt away from the woman. Neo followed without hesitation, discarding his coat to prevent further air resistance. As they streamed down into the main street, jostling at the pedestrians about them as tentative horses do at their first jump. Amidst barks of "Hey!" and "Watch where you're going!" Neo wrestled his cellphone from the narrow pocket of his trousers.
"Morpheus!" he roared, pressing it to his cheek. "Get us out of here! Now!"
In six seconds, both Neo and Trinity were yanked clear from the program, and awoke in the Real World to the desperate face of the captain.
Neo cringed upwards onto his backside. "Something went-"
"Wrong, I know." Morpheus swallowed his fear and pattered across the catwalk flooring back into the helm compartment. His crew followed anxiously. "While you were gone, the entire ship was pushed backwards on its rear stabilisers. Almost thrust us clean off the ground."
"What could possibly do that?"
"Probably a surge in the electromagnetic field. I've heard others talk about that sort of occurrence. Most of the time it just causes a malfunction in a ship's navigation and internal circuitry, but sometimes." Morpheus's voice, for once, seemed to fail him. "Well, it's managed to tear some vessels to pieces."
"Then I wouldn't like very much to remain here." Trinity collapsed before the controls. "The Neb's already in a bad enough state as it is. What might send one ship crazy could well explode ours plate from plate."
Morpheus nodded. "There's a great risk of that, I agree completely. Alright, take her out of here and we'll try to find a safer place to land."
Trinity eagerly obeyed, pulling back on the stick before her. The Nebuchadnezzar groaned and cranked upwards, dislodging a few loose fragments of steel in its wake. At a good kilometre above the ground, she attempted to retract the four stabiliser legs, their iron hooves curving and tucking into the grooved armpits of the ship's stomach. One of them remained exposed though, its system apparently damaged, hanging out like a limp grey tongue. The lower leg jerked and swung a little on the 'knee' joint as the Neb reeled about. In its cyan wrapper, the vessel looked like an old toffee that had begun to melt out in sticky, tender waves.
As the ship rumbled up towards the ribbed ceiling, Neo tightened his grip about the head of Morpheus's seat and pressed his head into the leather, using the seam to scratch an itch above his left ear.
"I don't think it was just the ship that suffered because of that surge, Morpheus," he swallowed, eyes flickering down to the captain, perusing his expression side-on.
"Oh no?" Morpheus did not move his head. He looked honestly more concerned with the Nebuchadnezzar's state than anything his charge had to say. "What else?"
"Whilst we were in, one of the humans started to play up - real bad, you know?"
At this, Morpheus came to meet Neo's thin chestnut eyes with a single larger, brown-silver one, chin rested upon his fist. "You mean in the same manner as when an Agent takes over?"
"No," replied Neo, puzzled. "It was different - very different. The Matrix about this woman was, well, it was sort of tensing up, curving. You know, really going crazy. And she kept vanishing and re-appearing."
=*=
//disturbance. Someone has been breaking into the pods. //
Sooner or later, the sabotage was bound to be noticed. Membrane after membrane had been discovered ripped and caved by the larger maintenance droids within the past hour, the humans beneath them either dead or struggling for the oxygen that now bubbled freely into the liquid protein coat about them from various ruptures in the major respiratory supply pipe whose tail encompassed both nose and mouth. On the outside, it seemed a rather foolish thing to do - after all, the machines of the Real World all depended on the energy outputted by their crops for consistent operation. To destroy the fields would be to commit mass murder, even on oneself. At the same time, there appeared to be something of a scheme, a routine to it all. That same cross-shaped tear, that same scorched incision in the master plug of each affected human. The beings responsible had obviously planned this, and planned well.
The rumour screamed between the various droids that perhaps this had been the act of those renegade humans - the Unplugged. The machines were aware that several ships' worth had been buzzing around the Real World for aeons, spending their lives partly in the search for the lost city of Zion, partly in the retreat from squidies and the various other patrol cyborgs. Every now and again, these escapees unplugged another human, but the loss was so gradual that those of metal did not really care too much. Besides, it left them with surplus protein to feed to their other crops, which in turn produced more energy. However, a rapid decrease in humans, and the plant was certain to fall into a dangerous deficit of the very thing upon which production depended.
No sooner had the revelation of this vandalism come to the attentions of the master droids had fleets of auxiliary troops been issued with the task of disembowelling any foreign ship they happened to stumble across during their patrol. Little did the human ships, including the steadily crumbling Nebuchadnezzar, know that even what they had determined as the 'safe zones' of the Real World were soon to be polluted with waves of soldiers from the enemy race. Within a few hours, there would be few chances to dock without having a cluster of machines, armed to the screws, swarming all over them.
The first machines to disembark were the smaller ones. These resembled navy blue torpedoes with four legs that they could tuck up inside the major bodywork to make themselves more streamlined. These ran on minimum power, literally crumbs of energy, and were rather weak when summoned upon to attack. They worked best in packs, clinging onto their targets like harpoons, casting out collapsible needles from their midriffs to pound against the alloyed coating of the victim. Easily disposed of by either a few warning shots or complete obliteration, perhaps their most deadly asset was the unit released on their destruction - a small box that emitted a sphere of radiation capable of alerting larger reinforcements within a twenty mile radius.
The medium-class machines were the squidies, the most common of all attack robots. Each one of their long, segmented tentacles carried a different tool: one a tracker, one a missile launcher, and so forth. From their undersides, they could emit high-power energy beams capable of collapsing lead. It was at the hands of such lasers that the Nebuchadnezzar had suffered much of its recent damage.
The most extreme circumstances called upon the deploying of the most relentless of all militaries - the hydras. Each one was nothing more and nothing less than a mass of arms, even propelled by the use of weaponry. They consisted of a huge mobile bazooka cannon of a sort, from which seven heads bearing along their lengths ribbons of further barrels, with mine ports at the skull of each. Whereas the renegade ships might escape the other ranks' detection by merely switching off their electric systems, evading a hydra would be to imitate death - they could sense the tiny pulse of a human's heart even with their receptors directed away from it in entirely the opposite direction. Fortunately, only five hydras had been sent out. Unfortunately, that was far more than what was required for the task.
//any human-operated ship must be eliminated. // The commands of the hydras were grim in their affirmation that justice would be returned to the power plant. //the core is depending upon our faculties to maintain its safety. //
=*=
Well, let's about it for now. Hope you guys liked it! Review! Go on! Review! Make me happy! Go on - uh, this whole monologue just carries on like this. Maybe you better just leave a comment before I go crazy by my own limited vocabulary. Continued soon!