Disclaimer: The Wachowski Brothers, Warner Brothers, Joel Silver, and any number of other people own the rights to The Matrix and any and all related characters/content. Not me.
Caveat: If anyone has read my Beetlejuice fan fiction they know I am the queen of super short chapters. I apologize for this, but such is the nature of my muse. She makes me break things up in a certain way and I must obey her.
Synopsis: If you haven't read my first Matrix fan fic, In The Beginning, you're going to want to read that before proceeding. This is part two of a series of prequels to the Matrix movies. It's been five years since Christopher Inizio, called "Abe" by his people, freed himself from The Matrix. Now he works to free other humans from the machines' energy collectors. But his life is far from simple, and his problems have just begun.
Special disclaimer for chapter 1: This story is once again entirely not my own. True, I've inserted my character and the events from my previous fiction into it, but the story remains entirely not mine. This chapter is my retelling of the story The Architect tells Neo in Matrix: Reloaded. I won't make any money off this story so please don't sue me. From a literary standpoint, this story had to be told.
I now present to you: A Tangled Web
A man with pure white hair, dressed in a white suit, sat silently watching hundreds of monitors showing every aspect of an event that troubled him greatly. He pinched the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes and sighing quietly. He never ceased to marvel at the extremes the human mind would go to simply to maintain their right to suffer.
He had created a simple and yet elegant program once. He had seen in the minds of countless humans their ultimate goal of salvation and Utopia and he had written a program to give them that. The program was flawless. The humans, however, were not.
Their minds absolutely refused to accept the program. Their tiny, insignificant, primitive human brains just simply could not believe perfection could exist on such a grand scale. So he had gone back to the drawing board.
He consulted the entirety of human history and wrote another program, still simple and elegant, that he thought would placate the humans. His new "Matrix" gave an experience identical to humanity at the end of the 20th century. This seemed to work for a time, but soon more and more human minds began to reject this program just as they had the first. Their minds, somehow aware that his program wasn't real, were screaming to be released. So he had created her.
She was an intuitive program designed specifically to discover why so many humans simply refused to accept his program as their reality. She probed deeply into the human population, too deeply as he had just recently found out, and discovered a possible problem: choice. He had never allowed the force-grown clones to decide for themselves whether to be a part of the program or not. That lack of choice, lack of free will, created the struggle against the program. It wasn't as strong in some humans as it was in others, but ultimately it was a problem (an anomaly if you will) that could destroy his carefully laid out plans. So he set to work again, creating a program that inserted choice into the mix of processes.
This single variable, though, had lead to an unbalanced equation. He had thought he could contain that anomaly, could control the variable. The humans began to be offered, subconsciously and unknowingly, the choice to accept the program or to be set free from it. If they chose to remain a part of the Matrix then they were kept attached to it. If they chose freedom, they were quietly and secretly taken out of 01 (the machine city) to be dropped near the one remaining human settlement: Zion. The humans, completely oblivious, always took the "orphan" in. And so, a new balance was achieved.
There were always some minds that would ultimately reject the program. Alarmingly, he had come upon them more and more often in recent years. Until now, he had always been able to send his agents to collect the mind and clear it before anything unsettling had happened. For some reason, however, Christopher Inizio had been immune to the influence of his agents. And Christopher, aided by the intuitive program now calling itself the Oracle, had freed himself.
Now the problem was no longer one he could ignore. Escalating attempts culminating in a success meant one thing to him: he was no longer able to control the anomaly introduced by giving the humans choice. But he knew from previous experience he was also not able to control the humans when no choice was given.
The choice itself was also getting out of hand. The number of humans choosing not to be inserted into the Matrix was growing at an exponential rate. He felt control slipping through his fingers.
Very well. He began to write a new bit of code…a myth for the humans. It would be a messianic story, to placate their religious tendencies. This code would be fed to them if they chose to be separated from the Matrix. Every generation or so, an extra bit of code would be fed to one human who would then be termed "The One." This human would be allowed out of the Matrix, be allowed to bend and shape the Matrix to his will. Then, he would be brought here. The true nature of the Matrix would be revealed and "The One" would reset the program. Then they would begin again. Meanwhile, he would send machines to dispatch the human city Zion and "The One" would be allowed to take a contingent of humans from the Matrix to rebuild the city. In this manner, the anomaly would be kept at bay, controlled as he had not been able to control it before.
He smiled slightly as he watched Christopher disappear for the nth time from his monitors. They will call me The Architect, he thought to himself, and as such I suppose I am.