A:/run/program/1.exe

Disclaimers: The Matrix belongs to those pervert brothers. Has anybody else played Enter the Matrix from Niobe's POV and reached the Chateau level? I grumble deeply. Fanboys and their fan service. _

Warnings and Rants: This is a Smith-fic, and I'm experimenting with the style. Eventually will be slashy, but for now, it's all … general. You can look at it as a piece of Smith introspective-ness and then never come back to it once I start to introduce Neo into it. WAHA!

Summary: Smith finds a key after the Burly Brawl. Surprise, it unlocks to a room in the Chateau, and he sits down with Persephone and they talk.

Radishface



He is walking, in the act of walking, but really, he is following the scent of something. This trail that leads to the doors, the programming doors. And he is only one of himself right now, but he can quickly make it so that he is a hundred, perhaps even a thousand. He wishes he had a reason to do so. It makes him smile to see another one of him walking around, acting as nonchalantly as he does, yet on the scope for the exact same thing, to find him, and destroy him. And even as he is here, in this programming maintenance room, he knows that there might be another one of him, halfway across the Matrix, but he doesn't care about the others, what kind of trouble they are causing, no, from that point when he was killed and from that point he came back to life, the only thing he cared about was eliminating him.

And there is this key that he found. He didn't know how it got there, but he has his suspicions. It was after he was fighting, replicating, after that rebel flew off before he could attack again, that was when the rest of him dispersed and he was left standing there, thinking to himself, but we'll meet again, won't we, Mister Anderson. Then one of him turned around to face him and had asked him

why do you call him that?

He had frowned, he had remembered doing that, and then he had willed something to happen and then the man that was himself wasn't there anymore, and it was just a middle-aged woman, blinking furiously and rubbing at her face, taking one oblivious glance at him and wondering how in the world she had gotten where she was.

The bench that had been there when he had first approached him is in ruins up against the side of the wall, smashed and sabotaged, and he wonders that if something breaks in the Matrix, is it because it is meant to break, because everything is controlled and in a computer, or is it because these humans really have free will of their own to destroy what they want to?

And that was where he had found that key, lying inconspicuously among the wood and the metal and the stone. He had picked it up and had looked at it, at the little grooves along the side, and it was as if it had been untouched in the course of the fight.

The Oracle had been here, he knew that. She might have been the one who had sat on the bench, she might have left it here. But she couldn't have left it for him because if she had, then he would have put it away, would have swallowed it to ensure its security. So it wasn't meant for him.

Although he denied it, there was a part of him, more rational, more logical, that whispered to him, the Oracle doesn't make mistakes, she couldn't have left it there on accident, and even though the Oracle wasn't the Keymaker and didn't have the keys necessary it was all linked, wasn't it, it was all connected in the Matrix, and the two programs would have some way of communicating and they knew everything that was going to happen even if he didn't and that must mean that this key was meant for himself.

So here he is now, in this hallway of white and doors of green, and he pushes the key into the knob and he tells himself that whatever is on the other side of this door shouldn't be anything he can't handle, and that whomever he meets will either be expecting him or not, and he pushes the door open, assertively, like he always does.

"Hello."

"Hello."

The woman on the couch stretches slightly and she stands up, walks up to him, and he is alert now, because this can't be one of the programs. There's a noise buzzing in his head, and he realizes that this isn't in the Matrix at all. And he tells himself not to act without logic, without reason, because that's not what machines are meant to do. She stares at him, her hands placing themselves on her hips, her dress an off-white, a creamy, milky shade, and her hair is dark and is falling in cascades down her back so that her neck is exposed to him, the vein in her neck moves as she speaks to him.

"I was not expecting you." She says in a low, whispery voice, tainted, hued with an accent. "Not today."

She is not within the Matrix, and she knows she's not supposed to be, and she knows she doesn't want to be. "Then when were you expecting me?"

She smiles, and turns back around to sit down again, and he stands where he is. "I was expecting you to come when you realized why you had the key." She points to the object he holds in his hands, cold and biting, the teeth of the key sinking into his palm.

He doesn't say anything, just stands there, and realizes that he has to think, that it is programmed into him.

"Who are you?" He says, and she laughs.

"My name is Persephone." She replies easily. She does not ask for his name, because such trivialities are not necessary. When he realizes this, he thinks to himself, then why did I ask her name?

"I am the wife of the Merovingian." She continues. "And I know you know the name."

"Exiles." He murmurs under his breath, and his fingers itch to strike her, because that is the correct, automated response.

"Yes, we are exiles." She smiles again. "As are you."

He wills himself not to flinch at that response. It is true, of course it is, and that is logic in itself, and that is the cause of him coming here, the effect of his death at his hands. But he had been reborn, hadn't he? That means he is destined to come back, to serve the Matrix to some extent. But here he is, with an exile, and he is not killing her like he would have been programmed to do.

"Please." She waves her hand in a nonchalant gesture. "Sit down."

He finds himself sitting down, the arms of the leather chair cool under his fingertips, and he leans forward slightly, always apprehensive. He is relaxed, though, for some reason he can't quite determine. He is not trying to kill. Nobody is trying to kill him, and it is a new thing, for once. His hand twitches, the urge to strangle is undeniable, but he doesn't do anything. He sits there, and lets this contentment wash over him, this feeling of worthlessness.

He is an exile.

"You don't know why you are here." The woman continues. "And you don't wonder. Do you simply accept it, as many do?"

"That what?" He asks. He knows the answer.

"That we all live in the Matrix." She puts a finger to her lips, thoughtful. "That this is a nice place to live. It is capitalist, after all. You make the most of what you have and you let it go from there. And there are the law enforcers, like you once were." Her voice has become lilting, sardonic, and he leans into it with ease, letting the insinuations wash over him like equations being pounded into his mind. "Have you heard stories about the outside?"

He nods, carefully.

"It is a crude place." The upper part of her lip curls, and he realizes that she is just going through the motions of disgust, that she doesn't feel anything at all, that she, in a way, is more like an Agent than he once was, because of her detachment, and because of something else.

"You are so much more different, are you not?" She continues, without waiting for his answer. "Most Agents will not care whom they kill as long as they kill them. But you."

His breath seems to still, and his head is spinning. He is almost lost.

"But I think you are focused on something." She laughs. "Ah, don't make that face. It's true, I can feel it, all the way from where I'm sitting here. That energy is so high I can almost taste it, delicious." And yet such focus is unusual for a machine, yes? You have flaws."

He had convinced himself he was perfect, that he was a perfect Agent, that he was a machine as pure as they came, only obeying orders from above. And yet now he realizes that a real machine does not need to convince himself of anything, and he wonders when and why he changed.

It is then that she asks him an absurd question.

"Who is it that you are so focused on?" But he knows that she already has suspicions, and that she is already there at knowledge. But he denies it himself.

And when she takes his hand, her fingers lacing with his, he finds himself going cold, as if the life is being sucked out of him, and her eyes are closed and he wonders if she is always like this, this exile, if she has nothing else to do and so she lives other people's lives. And then she pulls away and she smiles very knowingly, and he finds his old instincts are rising again, that he wants to kill her.

But wouldn't you have something you'd rather do?

And suddenly he feels that he can't be bothered. She laughs.

"You love." She says, quite simply.

"I love to hate." He corrects, and leaves the way he came, suddenly wanting to see him, wanting to throw him into a wall and watch his head snap back against the bricks like they did before he found the key. He wants to see surprise, minute as it is, on that pale face, somehow rip those sunglasses off him so he can watch the emotion in his eyes, because he is not a machine, he is a human, and he can feel.

He pushes the key into the lock, and ignores her when she says you will come back.

And he walks outside, into the white corridor, and he meets a rebel, and his instincts are provoked, and he says but I didn't expect you before he can stop himself.

She is on her defense, this dark-skinned woman, and he knows she knows where Neo is.

If he can capture her, he thinks to himself, he can copy himself onto her, and stream into the world outside, and find Neo that way, and kill him, and watch the humanity of it, as the blood runs through his fingers and see the eyes behind the sunglasses clear and unfocused as he is dying, and then Smith will die with him, when he puts a knife in his throat, when he falls lifeless into those arms that want to crush his body and knock the life out of him. His last thoughts as he is dying will be that he has lived to kill Neo, and that it is the only time he has lived while being this machine, and this is the one thing that he will love to do.

He smiles to himself, and wishes for it to happen.