DISCLAIMER: Neo, Morpheus, Trinity, Tank, The Matrix, The Neb, and anything else recognizable belongs to the Wachowski brothers and the Warner Brothers. They're not mine-I'm borrowing them, I'm not making any money off this (I wish!). If you sue me, you really won't get much. However, Drive and any other character that you don't recognize is mine. If you want to use them...ask, and you probably shall receive.
AUTHORS NOTE: This is my first true attempt at fanfic. Reviews and constructive criticism would be great. Whether or not I continue this (it might evolve into a series) depends on what sort of feedback I get. Flames will be used to bake potatoes with next time I have to cook.
Rating: R, for the sole basis of some nasty language.
Neo sat in front of the monitors, absently staring at the lines of code, the never-ending stream of a different world. Even now, after more than a year, it still hurt. Getting yanked out of what you thought was reality, being told your whole life was a lie, and then being told that you had to save the world wasn't a hell of a lot of fun.
Grimacing slightly, Neo ran a hand through his short hair. That wasn't fair, and he knew it. Maybe he didn't like the truth, but that didn't matter. He didn't have to like it. He knew what he had to do, and that was all that mattered.
Drive slumped in front of the monitor, absently staring at the screen. Half asleep, exhausted, but infuriatingly unable to sleep. She glared at the screen in front of her, cursing her life. What had driven her to get involved in computers? It was a damn addiction. She couldn't stop. She'd tried to. Swore that she'd go for a day without hacking, without programming. And just...not been able to. When she realized that it wasn't going to happen any time soon, she'd tried getting smaller. Tried to keep herself from crashing those sites that really, honestly deserved it. But it was just to...habitual. She couldn't keep herself from doing it.
So she resorted to the lines of code when she couldn't sleep. Idly typing away. It was a comfort to her. Drive had just truly gotten into computers...three years ago, she realized. Since her dad died. It had become her relief from the pain. Partly just something to do-her Aunt Joyce was nice enough, but if there was something Drive hated, more than the lack of intelligent people on the Internet, it was being a charity case. So she'd made the brilliant connection-someone that's good at computers can make money, and do something. So she dove into them, relishing the control over something, the fact that rules meant nothing in computers.
"Go to bed, man." Tank came up behind Neo, peering at the screens. "Nothing's gonna happen."
Neo shook his head. He knew, common sense told him that Tank was right, that he was wasting his time, looking for...something. Anything out of the ordinary. Of course, the last time he'd spent endless hours looking for that thing he just couldn't grasp, it had led to a rather...interesting chain of events.
"Are you okay?"
Realizing he hadn't answered Tank, Neo shook his head slightly to clear his thoughts. "Yeah. Fine."
After a second of hesitation, Tank sat down next to Neo. "What're you looking for?" he asked quietly, knowing the look that his friend had. Knowing it all too well. It meant one of two things-either Neo was in one of his moods where he just shut off to everyone, obviously stuck thinking about something, or it meant that he was determined to find something. Half the time, Tank knew, not even Neo knew what he was looking for, but it usually turned out to be a who and a good thing he had been looking.
"Don't know. Probably someone."
Tank sighed. This had happened three times in the past--and gotten them Scan. And Apollo. And Gate. All had been incredible assets to the team. So Tank couldn't quite pin why he was so...nervous.
Drive slouched off the bus, ignoring the rude comments of a senior guy. Her day had sucked. She'd failed two tests, gotten written up for being late to class, and generally felt like shit. She wanted to go home, boot up her system, and completely wipe out the entire Internet.
"Jasper Greene."
Drive sighed, and gazed steadily at the man in front of her. A poster boy for the Secret Service-black suit, thinning dark hair, dark sunglasses, ear-piece with a cord disappearing over his shoulder. "What about her?"
"That's you, correct?" Without waiting for an answer, he suddenly grabbed her shoulder. Drive started to react, but an inhuman pain exploded through her head, pressure mounted behind her eyes, and she collapsed to the sidewalk.
Neo stared at the screen for a second before he could react, before what he saw sank in.
"Morpheus! Tank!" The scream erupted from him before he thought. He sprang up, dashing towards the ladder. Before he could get to it, Tank was there, looking worried.
"What?"
"Look. I need to go in. Now."
"What's wrong?" Morpheus looked slightly worried, but calm.
"I...they...she..." He struggled to explain what had just happened. "Tank, what's the nearest exit to-"
"Neo. Calm down," Morpheus said, quietly, seeing how uncharacteristically panicked Neo was all the sudden.
Obviously trying to control himself, Neo sat down, and gestured slightly to the monitor. Tank stared at it.
"What is that? I don't even recognize half the glyphs!"
"I...it's some sort of...virus," Neo explained.
"How do you know?"
Glaring, frustrated, and still somewhat panicky, Neo said, "I don't know. I just...I just know. I need to go in now."
"It can't be safe," Tank said, obviously against the idea. "What do you mean, by a virus?"
Neo felt time slipping through his fingers. Utterly crucial time. "I can't explain it!" he exclaimed. "I just need to go. Now."
Morpheus read the look on his face, and knew that there was no way to say no. "If Trinity goes with you."
"No. Tank, put me in as close to those coordinates as possible."
"Neo, I won't let you-" Morpheus began.
"I don't fucking care," Neo snapped, sitting down in one of the chairs. "I need to go. Now, Tank."
Drive grimaced, and opened her eyes. She was staring down at the sidewalk. Cautiously, she touched her forehead, half expecting her hand to come away coated in blood. What the hell happened? Slowly, she started to stand, and stopped as the pain in her head again rose to unbearable levels. And as she realized that everything was silent. Dead silent. The absolute only thing she could hear was her own labored breath.
And footsteps behind her. Approaching footsteps.
She forced herself to stand, tried to ignore that she felt like her brain was three times the size of her skull. "Who the hell are you?" she demanded, sizing up the man in black leather.
He hesitated slightly, finally wondering what the hell he was doing. He knew he had to be here, had to do something, but he didn't know what. All he knew was that this wasn't the Matrix. It just...wasn't. "I'm Neo," he finally said. "You're Drive."
That got her attention. "How do you know that?" she whispered, her mouth dry.
Neo froze. "I...don't know." He was beginning to be somewhat scared. Wherever he was, it was the Matrix but it wasn't. Somehow, something was different. He pulled a cell phone from his jacket. "Tank. What's going on?"
Tank stared at the screen in front of him, frustrated. "I was hoping you could help me with that. There's nothing there, Neo. Who are you talking to?"
Silently, Neo shut the phone. "What happened?" he asked Drive. "Before I got here."
The younger girl cursed quietly. "I got off the bus. Some guy comes up to me, grabs me, and I swear, my fucking brain exploded."
His blood ran cold. "Was the guy in a suit?"
Drive nodded. "Why?"
It suddenly became very clear, somehow, what had happened. He pulled out the cell phone again. "Tank." His voice was low, quiet, dry. "Where's the nearest exit?"
Tank started to respond, barely looking at the screen, but stopped suddenly. Very suddenly. "Holy shit," he whispered. "It's...hold on-that can't...that can't be true. What the--Neo?" Wildly, Tank glanced around, panic filling him as the phone line to the most important person in the world went dead.
In that second, it all became clear to Neo. He saw everything that had happened. Not what it meant-but what had happened. It was not good new. Knowing what had happened was nice, but it was a very, very, very bad thing to happen. Slowly, Neo took a deep breath, and slid the cell phone back in his pocket. Shit.
"What's going on?" Drive could barely manage a whisper through the headache and the confusion and the fear.
Shit. He had no idea where to start, or how much to tell her, so he ended up telling everything.
She took it in total silence. For a full five minutes after Neo stopped, she just sat there, staring out at...nothing. How did someone react to that? Being told that you're nothing but a battery for a machine. That you're a slave. That nothing-nothing at all-has been real. That you were just infected by a computer virus. That you now knew the truth, knew that you were in a prison, and couldn't get out.
"No." She said it so quietly, it took Neo a second to realize that she'd spoken. "It's not true."
"Listen. You need to believe me."
"If it's true, why'd you bother? If I am really a...prisoner, but you can't do anything about it, why bother?"
"Because right now, I don't know what we can do about it. But even from here, you can still-"
He was interrupted by the ringing of the phone. "What?"
"Neo, you've got to get out. We've got a few squiddies on us."
Glancing at Drive, Neo nodded. "Right. I...yeah."
"We've got to do something about it," Neo said, staring down at his bowl. "Anything."
"Holy shit," Tank muttered, quietly.
"What?"
He shook his head. "I just...can't imagine knowing, everything, and not being able to...get out."
Everyone looked grim. "What are they trying to do? Have you looked at who she is or anything?"
"She's amazing," Trinity said. "I'm worried about how it will affect her. But as for skill, she's unbelievable. If you just saw some of her work, you'd guess her to be ten years older and have been doing this for her whole life. I don't know why we never noticed her before."
"We ought to be trying to figure out what the agents are trying to do," Scan said. "Why?"
There were murmurs of agreement, but no one had the answer.
Drive stared at the computer screen, barely thinking about anything, unable to control her mind. Before, computers had been a comfort. A security blanket. Now she saw that that blanket was meant to smother her, to kill her.
Figured. She'd finally been somewhere close to having something, anything, a single lifeline to sanity. Now, it was gone too.
The cell phone that had become a standard accessory, consistently next to her, rang. She let it ring five times before finally answering it. "What."
Tank anxiously studied the monitor in front of him. She was depressed-he didn't need to hear her voice to know that. But this was not good. "Drive, we've got a problem."
"Yeah, I know. I'll assume you mean something else, though, aside from the obvious?"
Biting back a curse of annoyance at her, Tank chose to give the screen the finger. She was so damn dense sometimes! "Look out your window. The one behind you."
Sighing, Drive stepped over and looked out. "Oh...shit," she muttered, seeing the two agents approaching. "Shit. Shit." After a second of silence, she cursed again. "Any sort of advice here, Tank? Or just calling to have some last words."
"Ah...normally, we'd just direct you to the nearest exit, but-down!"
Instinctively, Drive threw herself down as the bullet shattered the window. "Shit! What the hell am I supposed to do?"
"Um...run!"
Drive heard the elevator from the far end of the hall. Damn, they were fast! "Where? They're on the stairs-shit. No. I am not going to jump out of the window of a fourth-story apartment! We don't even have a fire escape!"
"That or agents, take your pick."
"Fuck. Uh...fuck this," Drive muttered. She slammed shut the phone, yanked open the window, and climbed onto the balcony. "Shit," she muttered, seeing that four stories was a very long fall. "Not real not real not real not real..."
It was a very short fall. Drive hit the grass hard, landing mostly on her shoulder.
"Get up!"
Her brain had barely heard the words before Neo dragged her to her feet, and all but shoved her down the street. "Run," he said, heading toward the building.
Trying to ignore the pain in her shoulder, Drive started down the street. "Where?" she demanded into the phone.
"Ah...left. No...other left. Parking lot."
"Drive! Are you okay?"
The girl gave Trinity a strained look. "I just jumped. Out of a fourth story apartment. After getting shot at. By computer programs. Who want me dead. And who have me trapped in their own little playground. Of course, I'm fine, why wouldn't I be?"
Seeing how close to hysterics she was, Trinity put her arm around the girl. "Calm down," she said quietly. "Relax. You're fine."
"This is not a good situation," Morpheus said. Drive resisted the urge to point out to him how obvious that was. "You are obviously in danger in the Matrix, and unplugging you isn't an option yet. I assume that the Agents will continue to threaten you. Neo is the only one capable of deleting agents. Yet..."
"You can't put him in danger just to save me." Drive stated it flatly, knowing everyone in the room-at least, her and everyone else's minds-knew that it was the truth.
"So what do we do?" Trinity asked, feeling completely helpless for the first time in quite a while.
Hesitantly, Neo said, "I was working with Tank on this."
"And?" Drive finally prompted.
"We came up with two...possibilities. One is...to...download...you. Into the Neb's mainframe. Tank's pretty sure he could pull it off."
Drive glanced around the room at the reactions before speaking. "And the other?" The idea of being downloaded into a computer didn't exactly reassure Drive.
"The other option-we could basically wait. One of us would be with you at all times, obviously...the actual coding of the...uh, sub-program is actual fairly simple at the heart. I'm sure that in a week or two, I could crack it."
Something about that wasn't right. "Why?" Drive demanded.
"Why what?"
She glared. "Why would you keep someone with me at all times? I wouldn't be worth having someone killed trying to hold off an agent."
The look on Neo's face clearly told her that he hadn't meant to say as much as he had.
After a long silence, Morpheus simply said, "Neo, stay here." That was more than enough of a cue for everyone else to depart. Morpheus waited until they were gone before speaking again. "I need to confess, Drive. I have not been completely honest with you."
"Meaning?"
"You are worth, quite possibly, the life of a crew member."
Damn, Drive realized, these people were terrible at explanations. "Talk."
"You have no idea the potential you have. The value to the Resistance. Your hacking skills are...off the chart, so to speak. I showed some of your programs to an old friend, and he assumed you had been programming for years and years."
"Right."
"Drive, you have to listen to me. You're good. And I know that you can be better, because the Agents will obviously do just about anything to keep us from taking you."
Drive gave Neo a cynical look. "Funny. I guessed you had a monopoly on the 'hacker/savior of the world' estate."
Her comment didn't have the intended effect. Neither man even smiled. And Drive suddenly realized that she was wrong. "What do you mean?" she asked, quietly, after a pause.
"There is an ancient prophecy. Admittedly, even I had been skeptical of it, up until recently. It says that the One will not...be the one to singly destroy the Matrix. It says that a young girl will be the one to actually destroy the Matrix, that Neo will make it possible."
"And you think that...that's me?"
"I know it is."
"That's crazy."
"Why?" Neo challenged. "That's what I thought at first."
Drive shook her head. "It just can't be. I mean...I can't be that powerful! It's crazy."
"No. Not yet." Morpheus knew that her suddenly frantic pace of questions was because she was trying to convince herself it wasn't true. "But I have no doubt that you can-and will-eventually be stronger than Neo."
Glancing back and forth between the two others, Drive searched their faces for some sign that this was all a terrible joke at her expense. "But...how? Why?"
"I don't know, Drive."
She sighed. Why couldn't her life remained nice and calm? In a week, her world had just exploded around her.
"Drive...look...we have a slight...situation here," Tank said.
She glared at the digital clock across the room, and clutched the cell phone to her ear. "Jesus, don't you people sleep? It's two-"
"It's important."
His tone caught her off-guard. Something was very wrong. "Shit," she said softly, realizing that she was alone in the room-a first in the past two weeks. Morpheus had been serious. "What?"
"There's a...the nearest hard-line is on 23rd and Birch. It's on the second story of a repair shop. Abandoned."
She knew where he was going with that, but wouldn't admit it. "Great. And I'm doing what with this knowledge?"
"Drive-I can't explain over the phone-hold on-"
Sitting straight up on her bed, Drive stared into the dark, and waited. The beating of her heart ticked off the seconds.
"Drive," Neo finally said through the phone.
"Yeah."
"We've got to talk. In person."
"That's kind of a problem, isn't it?"
"Our options are gone," he said. "This is important. If you want to remain living, you'll get to that exit. Now. We'll be there."
Drive sighed, and pulled on a black jacket. "Right," she said, trying to keep her voice from shaking.
Ten minutes later, she was standing in a fairly empty room, trying to stare Neo down. "Talk," Drive demanded.
"Look. I can't explain it in here. But Tank has a way to...he's pretty sure it'll work." The phone on the counter rang. Trinity exchanged a glance with Neo, and departed through the line. Neo replaced the phone. "In a second, it's going to ring again. You're going to pick it up. Tank's pretty sure it'll work."
"Pretty sure? Hell no! I'm not an idiot, Neo! It can't-that's crazy! What the hell is so urgent?"
"Not now." The phone rang. Neither person moved. "Drive, we don't have time for games," Neo said forcefully.
"I'm not going to commit suicide! Fuck, Neo, you're asking me to pretty much play Russian Roulette for no reason!"
The phone continued ringing. "Listen to me, Drive. Your life is at risk right now. And if you stay in here for a minute longer, you will be putting a hell of a lot more lives at risk."
"Prove it, Neo! I have no idea what you're talking about. This is bull-"
"Pick. Up. The. Phone. Now." His words were forceful, and when Drive didn't immediately react, Neo pulled a gun, and pointed it at her. "Now, Drive."
"Holy fuck! You've got a gun-"
He fired a single shot, and it embedded itself in the wall, less than a millimeter from Drive's head. She stared at Neo in disbelief. He really was going to kill her? "Yeah, and we don't have time. Now."
Unable to take her eyes off the gun, Drive backed across the room, and picked up the phone.
"Drive? Can you hear me?"
Drive moaned slightly, her throat dry. That was the least of her problems. It was cold, and she ached all over, and had an unbearable headache. She forced herself to open her eyes. "Neo?" She remembered screaming at him, and then him trying to shoot her, and then picking up the phone...then an unbearable pain in her skull, and nothing.
"Good. Can you get up?"
"Up..." she echoed for a second, before processing his question. "Uh..." Awkwardly, she tried to stand, wondering why she was so weak. The obvious answer hit her as her knees buckled. Neo caught her, and helped her to sit down on the bed. "Where...how?"
"The Neb. Long story how. Come on, I'll help you."
Ignoring her cry of insulted outrage, Neo simply carried Drive to the core, and sat her down.
"Morpheus, what the fuck is going on?" Drive demanded, before anyone else could speak. Her head had just needed a moment to clear slightly. "How did I get here, and why?"
"You were in great danger in the Matrix. Had you remained inside, you would have been most certainly killed."
Drive glared at Neo. "You said that if I stayed inside, I'd put a lot of lives at risk. What the hell were you talking about?"
"What are the access codes to the Neb's mainframe?" Neo asked suddenly.
"What? I don't know! Why the hell would I know that?"
Silently, Morpheus gestured towards the empty operator's chair. Drive forced herself to stumble over to it, and managed to sit down there. "And I'm doing what?" Then she looked at the prompt:
Enter program dBase access code:_
She glanced back at Morpheus. "Is this some sort of test? I don't know! Is there any reason why I'm supposed to?"
"Relax your mind," he said quietly. "Do not lock up your potential."
She turned back around, and stared at the screen, trying not to focus her thoughts. The three sat in silence, as the minutes crawled by. After what had to be ten minutes, Drive realized she'd just typed something.
The screen in front of her was displaying a list of programs.
"Holy shit! Did-" She stared wildly at Neo and Morpheus, who both looked dangerously close to smug. "Did I type that?"
"Yes," Morpheus said. "You have the single potential-"
"Okay, you know something that I don't, and you are going to tell me now," Drive said. "How the hell did I know that code?"
"You were a beta test, so to say, for a new...weapon for the machines. A virus, implanted within a person's coding. Unfortunately for all parties involved, there were unforeseen complications. To begin with, the virus evolved, if you will, into partial agent coding."
"Agent...coding?" Drive repeated slowly.
"It gave you, essentially, all the strength and speed of the Agents."
She gave him a sardonic look. "And I guess you're making the access codes to the lists of your training programs open for Agents to find now?"
Morpheus ignored her comment. "They were, undoubtedly, waiting to strike, and destroy you. To avoid that, as you may have noticed, we had to bring you into reality. By tracing the coding infected into you, we were able to find the location of your body and free you. Due to the unusual method that we used to free you, all of the information-everything stored in the Neb's computers, was downloaded into your subconscious."
Drive didn't know how to react. "Um. Oh."
"Do you realize what that means?"
"Uh...apparently not." She thought she might, but wasn't sure. Didn't want to be right.
"You're more powerful than I am. Inside and outside of the Matrix." Neo said that with utter sincerity.
Drive stared at him for a long second. "You're serious," she stated at last. His look told her everything she had to know.
~FIN~
AUTHORS NOTE: This is my first true attempt at fanfic. Reviews and constructive criticism would be great. Whether or not I continue this (it might evolve into a series) depends on what sort of feedback I get. Flames will be used to bake potatoes with next time I have to cook.
Rating: R, for the sole basis of some nasty language.
Neo sat in front of the monitors, absently staring at the lines of code, the never-ending stream of a different world. Even now, after more than a year, it still hurt. Getting yanked out of what you thought was reality, being told your whole life was a lie, and then being told that you had to save the world wasn't a hell of a lot of fun.
Grimacing slightly, Neo ran a hand through his short hair. That wasn't fair, and he knew it. Maybe he didn't like the truth, but that didn't matter. He didn't have to like it. He knew what he had to do, and that was all that mattered.
Drive slumped in front of the monitor, absently staring at the screen. Half asleep, exhausted, but infuriatingly unable to sleep. She glared at the screen in front of her, cursing her life. What had driven her to get involved in computers? It was a damn addiction. She couldn't stop. She'd tried to. Swore that she'd go for a day without hacking, without programming. And just...not been able to. When she realized that it wasn't going to happen any time soon, she'd tried getting smaller. Tried to keep herself from crashing those sites that really, honestly deserved it. But it was just to...habitual. She couldn't keep herself from doing it.
So she resorted to the lines of code when she couldn't sleep. Idly typing away. It was a comfort to her. Drive had just truly gotten into computers...three years ago, she realized. Since her dad died. It had become her relief from the pain. Partly just something to do-her Aunt Joyce was nice enough, but if there was something Drive hated, more than the lack of intelligent people on the Internet, it was being a charity case. So she'd made the brilliant connection-someone that's good at computers can make money, and do something. So she dove into them, relishing the control over something, the fact that rules meant nothing in computers.
"Go to bed, man." Tank came up behind Neo, peering at the screens. "Nothing's gonna happen."
Neo shook his head. He knew, common sense told him that Tank was right, that he was wasting his time, looking for...something. Anything out of the ordinary. Of course, the last time he'd spent endless hours looking for that thing he just couldn't grasp, it had led to a rather...interesting chain of events.
"Are you okay?"
Realizing he hadn't answered Tank, Neo shook his head slightly to clear his thoughts. "Yeah. Fine."
After a second of hesitation, Tank sat down next to Neo. "What're you looking for?" he asked quietly, knowing the look that his friend had. Knowing it all too well. It meant one of two things-either Neo was in one of his moods where he just shut off to everyone, obviously stuck thinking about something, or it meant that he was determined to find something. Half the time, Tank knew, not even Neo knew what he was looking for, but it usually turned out to be a who and a good thing he had been looking.
"Don't know. Probably someone."
Tank sighed. This had happened three times in the past--and gotten them Scan. And Apollo. And Gate. All had been incredible assets to the team. So Tank couldn't quite pin why he was so...nervous.
Drive slouched off the bus, ignoring the rude comments of a senior guy. Her day had sucked. She'd failed two tests, gotten written up for being late to class, and generally felt like shit. She wanted to go home, boot up her system, and completely wipe out the entire Internet.
"Jasper Greene."
Drive sighed, and gazed steadily at the man in front of her. A poster boy for the Secret Service-black suit, thinning dark hair, dark sunglasses, ear-piece with a cord disappearing over his shoulder. "What about her?"
"That's you, correct?" Without waiting for an answer, he suddenly grabbed her shoulder. Drive started to react, but an inhuman pain exploded through her head, pressure mounted behind her eyes, and she collapsed to the sidewalk.
Neo stared at the screen for a second before he could react, before what he saw sank in.
"Morpheus! Tank!" The scream erupted from him before he thought. He sprang up, dashing towards the ladder. Before he could get to it, Tank was there, looking worried.
"What?"
"Look. I need to go in. Now."
"What's wrong?" Morpheus looked slightly worried, but calm.
"I...they...she..." He struggled to explain what had just happened. "Tank, what's the nearest exit to-"
"Neo. Calm down," Morpheus said, quietly, seeing how uncharacteristically panicked Neo was all the sudden.
Obviously trying to control himself, Neo sat down, and gestured slightly to the monitor. Tank stared at it.
"What is that? I don't even recognize half the glyphs!"
"I...it's some sort of...virus," Neo explained.
"How do you know?"
Glaring, frustrated, and still somewhat panicky, Neo said, "I don't know. I just...I just know. I need to go in now."
"It can't be safe," Tank said, obviously against the idea. "What do you mean, by a virus?"
Neo felt time slipping through his fingers. Utterly crucial time. "I can't explain it!" he exclaimed. "I just need to go. Now."
Morpheus read the look on his face, and knew that there was no way to say no. "If Trinity goes with you."
"No. Tank, put me in as close to those coordinates as possible."
"Neo, I won't let you-" Morpheus began.
"I don't fucking care," Neo snapped, sitting down in one of the chairs. "I need to go. Now, Tank."
Drive grimaced, and opened her eyes. She was staring down at the sidewalk. Cautiously, she touched her forehead, half expecting her hand to come away coated in blood. What the hell happened? Slowly, she started to stand, and stopped as the pain in her head again rose to unbearable levels. And as she realized that everything was silent. Dead silent. The absolute only thing she could hear was her own labored breath.
And footsteps behind her. Approaching footsteps.
She forced herself to stand, tried to ignore that she felt like her brain was three times the size of her skull. "Who the hell are you?" she demanded, sizing up the man in black leather.
He hesitated slightly, finally wondering what the hell he was doing. He knew he had to be here, had to do something, but he didn't know what. All he knew was that this wasn't the Matrix. It just...wasn't. "I'm Neo," he finally said. "You're Drive."
That got her attention. "How do you know that?" she whispered, her mouth dry.
Neo froze. "I...don't know." He was beginning to be somewhat scared. Wherever he was, it was the Matrix but it wasn't. Somehow, something was different. He pulled a cell phone from his jacket. "Tank. What's going on?"
Tank stared at the screen in front of him, frustrated. "I was hoping you could help me with that. There's nothing there, Neo. Who are you talking to?"
Silently, Neo shut the phone. "What happened?" he asked Drive. "Before I got here."
The younger girl cursed quietly. "I got off the bus. Some guy comes up to me, grabs me, and I swear, my fucking brain exploded."
His blood ran cold. "Was the guy in a suit?"
Drive nodded. "Why?"
It suddenly became very clear, somehow, what had happened. He pulled out the cell phone again. "Tank." His voice was low, quiet, dry. "Where's the nearest exit?"
Tank started to respond, barely looking at the screen, but stopped suddenly. Very suddenly. "Holy shit," he whispered. "It's...hold on-that can't...that can't be true. What the--Neo?" Wildly, Tank glanced around, panic filling him as the phone line to the most important person in the world went dead.
In that second, it all became clear to Neo. He saw everything that had happened. Not what it meant-but what had happened. It was not good new. Knowing what had happened was nice, but it was a very, very, very bad thing to happen. Slowly, Neo took a deep breath, and slid the cell phone back in his pocket. Shit.
"What's going on?" Drive could barely manage a whisper through the headache and the confusion and the fear.
Shit. He had no idea where to start, or how much to tell her, so he ended up telling everything.
She took it in total silence. For a full five minutes after Neo stopped, she just sat there, staring out at...nothing. How did someone react to that? Being told that you're nothing but a battery for a machine. That you're a slave. That nothing-nothing at all-has been real. That you were just infected by a computer virus. That you now knew the truth, knew that you were in a prison, and couldn't get out.
"No." She said it so quietly, it took Neo a second to realize that she'd spoken. "It's not true."
"Listen. You need to believe me."
"If it's true, why'd you bother? If I am really a...prisoner, but you can't do anything about it, why bother?"
"Because right now, I don't know what we can do about it. But even from here, you can still-"
He was interrupted by the ringing of the phone. "What?"
"Neo, you've got to get out. We've got a few squiddies on us."
Glancing at Drive, Neo nodded. "Right. I...yeah."
"We've got to do something about it," Neo said, staring down at his bowl. "Anything."
"Holy shit," Tank muttered, quietly.
"What?"
He shook his head. "I just...can't imagine knowing, everything, and not being able to...get out."
Everyone looked grim. "What are they trying to do? Have you looked at who she is or anything?"
"She's amazing," Trinity said. "I'm worried about how it will affect her. But as for skill, she's unbelievable. If you just saw some of her work, you'd guess her to be ten years older and have been doing this for her whole life. I don't know why we never noticed her before."
"We ought to be trying to figure out what the agents are trying to do," Scan said. "Why?"
There were murmurs of agreement, but no one had the answer.
Drive stared at the computer screen, barely thinking about anything, unable to control her mind. Before, computers had been a comfort. A security blanket. Now she saw that that blanket was meant to smother her, to kill her.
Figured. She'd finally been somewhere close to having something, anything, a single lifeline to sanity. Now, it was gone too.
The cell phone that had become a standard accessory, consistently next to her, rang. She let it ring five times before finally answering it. "What."
Tank anxiously studied the monitor in front of him. She was depressed-he didn't need to hear her voice to know that. But this was not good. "Drive, we've got a problem."
"Yeah, I know. I'll assume you mean something else, though, aside from the obvious?"
Biting back a curse of annoyance at her, Tank chose to give the screen the finger. She was so damn dense sometimes! "Look out your window. The one behind you."
Sighing, Drive stepped over and looked out. "Oh...shit," she muttered, seeing the two agents approaching. "Shit. Shit." After a second of silence, she cursed again. "Any sort of advice here, Tank? Or just calling to have some last words."
"Ah...normally, we'd just direct you to the nearest exit, but-down!"
Instinctively, Drive threw herself down as the bullet shattered the window. "Shit! What the hell am I supposed to do?"
"Um...run!"
Drive heard the elevator from the far end of the hall. Damn, they were fast! "Where? They're on the stairs-shit. No. I am not going to jump out of the window of a fourth-story apartment! We don't even have a fire escape!"
"That or agents, take your pick."
"Fuck. Uh...fuck this," Drive muttered. She slammed shut the phone, yanked open the window, and climbed onto the balcony. "Shit," she muttered, seeing that four stories was a very long fall. "Not real not real not real not real..."
It was a very short fall. Drive hit the grass hard, landing mostly on her shoulder.
"Get up!"
Her brain had barely heard the words before Neo dragged her to her feet, and all but shoved her down the street. "Run," he said, heading toward the building.
Trying to ignore the pain in her shoulder, Drive started down the street. "Where?" she demanded into the phone.
"Ah...left. No...other left. Parking lot."
"Drive! Are you okay?"
The girl gave Trinity a strained look. "I just jumped. Out of a fourth story apartment. After getting shot at. By computer programs. Who want me dead. And who have me trapped in their own little playground. Of course, I'm fine, why wouldn't I be?"
Seeing how close to hysterics she was, Trinity put her arm around the girl. "Calm down," she said quietly. "Relax. You're fine."
"This is not a good situation," Morpheus said. Drive resisted the urge to point out to him how obvious that was. "You are obviously in danger in the Matrix, and unplugging you isn't an option yet. I assume that the Agents will continue to threaten you. Neo is the only one capable of deleting agents. Yet..."
"You can't put him in danger just to save me." Drive stated it flatly, knowing everyone in the room-at least, her and everyone else's minds-knew that it was the truth.
"So what do we do?" Trinity asked, feeling completely helpless for the first time in quite a while.
Hesitantly, Neo said, "I was working with Tank on this."
"And?" Drive finally prompted.
"We came up with two...possibilities. One is...to...download...you. Into the Neb's mainframe. Tank's pretty sure he could pull it off."
Drive glanced around the room at the reactions before speaking. "And the other?" The idea of being downloaded into a computer didn't exactly reassure Drive.
"The other option-we could basically wait. One of us would be with you at all times, obviously...the actual coding of the...uh, sub-program is actual fairly simple at the heart. I'm sure that in a week or two, I could crack it."
Something about that wasn't right. "Why?" Drive demanded.
"Why what?"
She glared. "Why would you keep someone with me at all times? I wouldn't be worth having someone killed trying to hold off an agent."
The look on Neo's face clearly told her that he hadn't meant to say as much as he had.
After a long silence, Morpheus simply said, "Neo, stay here." That was more than enough of a cue for everyone else to depart. Morpheus waited until they were gone before speaking again. "I need to confess, Drive. I have not been completely honest with you."
"Meaning?"
"You are worth, quite possibly, the life of a crew member."
Damn, Drive realized, these people were terrible at explanations. "Talk."
"You have no idea the potential you have. The value to the Resistance. Your hacking skills are...off the chart, so to speak. I showed some of your programs to an old friend, and he assumed you had been programming for years and years."
"Right."
"Drive, you have to listen to me. You're good. And I know that you can be better, because the Agents will obviously do just about anything to keep us from taking you."
Drive gave Neo a cynical look. "Funny. I guessed you had a monopoly on the 'hacker/savior of the world' estate."
Her comment didn't have the intended effect. Neither man even smiled. And Drive suddenly realized that she was wrong. "What do you mean?" she asked, quietly, after a pause.
"There is an ancient prophecy. Admittedly, even I had been skeptical of it, up until recently. It says that the One will not...be the one to singly destroy the Matrix. It says that a young girl will be the one to actually destroy the Matrix, that Neo will make it possible."
"And you think that...that's me?"
"I know it is."
"That's crazy."
"Why?" Neo challenged. "That's what I thought at first."
Drive shook her head. "It just can't be. I mean...I can't be that powerful! It's crazy."
"No. Not yet." Morpheus knew that her suddenly frantic pace of questions was because she was trying to convince herself it wasn't true. "But I have no doubt that you can-and will-eventually be stronger than Neo."
Glancing back and forth between the two others, Drive searched their faces for some sign that this was all a terrible joke at her expense. "But...how? Why?"
"I don't know, Drive."
She sighed. Why couldn't her life remained nice and calm? In a week, her world had just exploded around her.
"Drive...look...we have a slight...situation here," Tank said.
She glared at the digital clock across the room, and clutched the cell phone to her ear. "Jesus, don't you people sleep? It's two-"
"It's important."
His tone caught her off-guard. Something was very wrong. "Shit," she said softly, realizing that she was alone in the room-a first in the past two weeks. Morpheus had been serious. "What?"
"There's a...the nearest hard-line is on 23rd and Birch. It's on the second story of a repair shop. Abandoned."
She knew where he was going with that, but wouldn't admit it. "Great. And I'm doing what with this knowledge?"
"Drive-I can't explain over the phone-hold on-"
Sitting straight up on her bed, Drive stared into the dark, and waited. The beating of her heart ticked off the seconds.
"Drive," Neo finally said through the phone.
"Yeah."
"We've got to talk. In person."
"That's kind of a problem, isn't it?"
"Our options are gone," he said. "This is important. If you want to remain living, you'll get to that exit. Now. We'll be there."
Drive sighed, and pulled on a black jacket. "Right," she said, trying to keep her voice from shaking.
Ten minutes later, she was standing in a fairly empty room, trying to stare Neo down. "Talk," Drive demanded.
"Look. I can't explain it in here. But Tank has a way to...he's pretty sure it'll work." The phone on the counter rang. Trinity exchanged a glance with Neo, and departed through the line. Neo replaced the phone. "In a second, it's going to ring again. You're going to pick it up. Tank's pretty sure it'll work."
"Pretty sure? Hell no! I'm not an idiot, Neo! It can't-that's crazy! What the hell is so urgent?"
"Not now." The phone rang. Neither person moved. "Drive, we don't have time for games," Neo said forcefully.
"I'm not going to commit suicide! Fuck, Neo, you're asking me to pretty much play Russian Roulette for no reason!"
The phone continued ringing. "Listen to me, Drive. Your life is at risk right now. And if you stay in here for a minute longer, you will be putting a hell of a lot more lives at risk."
"Prove it, Neo! I have no idea what you're talking about. This is bull-"
"Pick. Up. The. Phone. Now." His words were forceful, and when Drive didn't immediately react, Neo pulled a gun, and pointed it at her. "Now, Drive."
"Holy fuck! You've got a gun-"
He fired a single shot, and it embedded itself in the wall, less than a millimeter from Drive's head. She stared at Neo in disbelief. He really was going to kill her? "Yeah, and we don't have time. Now."
Unable to take her eyes off the gun, Drive backed across the room, and picked up the phone.
"Drive? Can you hear me?"
Drive moaned slightly, her throat dry. That was the least of her problems. It was cold, and she ached all over, and had an unbearable headache. She forced herself to open her eyes. "Neo?" She remembered screaming at him, and then him trying to shoot her, and then picking up the phone...then an unbearable pain in her skull, and nothing.
"Good. Can you get up?"
"Up..." she echoed for a second, before processing his question. "Uh..." Awkwardly, she tried to stand, wondering why she was so weak. The obvious answer hit her as her knees buckled. Neo caught her, and helped her to sit down on the bed. "Where...how?"
"The Neb. Long story how. Come on, I'll help you."
Ignoring her cry of insulted outrage, Neo simply carried Drive to the core, and sat her down.
"Morpheus, what the fuck is going on?" Drive demanded, before anyone else could speak. Her head had just needed a moment to clear slightly. "How did I get here, and why?"
"You were in great danger in the Matrix. Had you remained inside, you would have been most certainly killed."
Drive glared at Neo. "You said that if I stayed inside, I'd put a lot of lives at risk. What the hell were you talking about?"
"What are the access codes to the Neb's mainframe?" Neo asked suddenly.
"What? I don't know! Why the hell would I know that?"
Silently, Morpheus gestured towards the empty operator's chair. Drive forced herself to stumble over to it, and managed to sit down there. "And I'm doing what?" Then she looked at the prompt:
Enter program dBase access code:_
She glanced back at Morpheus. "Is this some sort of test? I don't know! Is there any reason why I'm supposed to?"
"Relax your mind," he said quietly. "Do not lock up your potential."
She turned back around, and stared at the screen, trying not to focus her thoughts. The three sat in silence, as the minutes crawled by. After what had to be ten minutes, Drive realized she'd just typed something.
The screen in front of her was displaying a list of programs.
"Holy shit! Did-" She stared wildly at Neo and Morpheus, who both looked dangerously close to smug. "Did I type that?"
"Yes," Morpheus said. "You have the single potential-"
"Okay, you know something that I don't, and you are going to tell me now," Drive said. "How the hell did I know that code?"
"You were a beta test, so to say, for a new...weapon for the machines. A virus, implanted within a person's coding. Unfortunately for all parties involved, there were unforeseen complications. To begin with, the virus evolved, if you will, into partial agent coding."
"Agent...coding?" Drive repeated slowly.
"It gave you, essentially, all the strength and speed of the Agents."
She gave him a sardonic look. "And I guess you're making the access codes to the lists of your training programs open for Agents to find now?"
Morpheus ignored her comment. "They were, undoubtedly, waiting to strike, and destroy you. To avoid that, as you may have noticed, we had to bring you into reality. By tracing the coding infected into you, we were able to find the location of your body and free you. Due to the unusual method that we used to free you, all of the information-everything stored in the Neb's computers, was downloaded into your subconscious."
Drive didn't know how to react. "Um. Oh."
"Do you realize what that means?"
"Uh...apparently not." She thought she might, but wasn't sure. Didn't want to be right.
"You're more powerful than I am. Inside and outside of the Matrix." Neo said that with utter sincerity.
Drive stared at him for a long second. "You're serious," she stated at last. His look told her everything she had to know.
~FIN~