Written for the Looking Glass Forum's Fanfiction Challenge Reloaded: the OC challenge. And yes. You will see Taliba again.
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Taliba
By ZionAngel
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At this rate, the light from the tiny black and white pixels on the screen would permanently burn itself onto her retinas, there to taunt her forever at her inability to make a simple choice between the words they represented. She thought she wouldn't have to make this decision for another three years, but it was becoming more and more apparent that it would take at least that long to choose. Why was that damn secondary placement exam even capable of determining that she should be so far advanced, especially when no other test she had ever taken had been? And to top it all off, the Education Council told her parents long before they told her. Her entire future was mapped out for her by dinner. The moment she sat down she was bombarded with two minutes of nonstop rants and exclamations about setting her up with all the best teachers, hiring top-notch private tutors on top of that, and a university degree here in the city which would of course land her a prestigious job as a researcher, politician - before she finally managed to stop them and ask just what was going on. Four days later, she still sat before her computer, staring at a list of options for her major, becoming ever more bored as she read the description of each one. She was twelve, for God's sake; now wasn't the time to be choosing the direction the rest of her life would take. She was sick enough of school as it was - she didn't need it to completely dominate her life for the next eight or nine years.
"Taliba," her mother called from the kitchen, "come on out, it's time for dinner."
They would ask her again, if she had chosen yet. They asked her the first night, all of thirty seconds after she learned of her placement scores, and long before she had even seen the list, what she wanted for her major. She sighed heavily as she rose from her chair, legs stiff from sitting in her usual curled position so long. Glancing over the words on the screen one last time, she finally shut off the computer, knowing that this would be another agonizingly long dinner, and that she would experience nothing else until - unless she made up her mind.
At dinner, her father went on and on about the merits of the University, and the fine education he had received in engineering there. Throughout his speech, he received silent groans and hidden eye-rolls from his daughter, none of which he noticed. He failed to mention that this outstanding institution of higher learning consisted of about twenty professors, a grand total of two hundred students, and that most of the classes were administered via computer. He also left out the reason for its minute size: this equally tiny outpost they lived in, population six thousand. Barely.
On the other hand, she had managed to squeak one tiny bit of good out of this debacle - the sooner she had her senior degree, the sooner she could make her own life decisions, and the sooner she could get out of this sad little hole in the ground. She had planned it since she was five, and now she would be able to realize her dream three years earlier. Thinking about those things was almost enough to make her grateful that she had scored so high. Almost.
"So, what's it going to be?"
The room fell quiet, no longer occupied by the overly-eager sound of her father's voice. She lifted her eyes to see what had happened before she realized that the last words had been a question directed at her. "Oh, uh..." she racked her memory for the exact words, and when she recalled them, became just the tiniest bit bitter. "I don't know."
"Taliba," her father chided, "you need to make a decision soon."
The young girl sighed heavily, her frustration and anger seeping into the action before she could restrain her emotions. She wasn't sure if it was fortunate or unfortunate that her mother took it the wrong way.
"Oh, I don't think we should be pushing her on the subject so soon. She doesn't have to decide for another two months, and this isn't a decision to take lightly."
The conversation shifted away from her indecisiveness, but she didn't focus enough to know what her parents were talking about now. After a while, she became bored, and told them she was tired. They let her leave for her room, and the moment the door was shut, she switched on her computer and flopped on the bed. Once it had warmed up, she connected it to the television channels streaming from the city mainframe. She flipped between the handful of channels - six, to be exact - for several minutes, not enjoying a moment of what she saw, but taking hope from the fact that it was nearly nine, and something new was sure to start soon. She finally gave up searching, and the channel she landed on now showed an advertisement for an upcoming documentary - The Sacred City: The Insider's Guide to Zion. She sighed heavily as she watched the images passing on the screen. Yes, only three years, not six, before she could leave this miserable hole beneath a ruined Cairo, and start a new life there. Zion. Even the name sounded promising and wonderful. She never said so, for fear that she would be written off as a silly child, but she had long believed her destiny would be found in Zion. The commercial could not have been but thirty seconds long, and still it showed her a city exactly like the one she had always imagined - full of culture, art, fashion, decent food, countless wonders to be discovered, and a personal fascination of hers, Pod-Born humans; she knew none personally, and had once heard that there were only twenty-three living here in Cairo, though she was fairly certain it was more than that. And not to be forgotten, Zion surely had more than six TV stations.
She sighed heavily again, and closed her eyes to imagine the day. The instant she held her diploma in her hands, her bags would be packed and she would be on the first hovercraft out of Cairo. Granted, she may have to wait a week or so for a ship to come by, but no doubt, she would be on it. She knew for a fact that Zion's population was well over half a million, some hundred times the population of her outpost. Somewhere along the line, years ago, she had come to believe this meant she would be hundred times happier the moment she set foot in the city.
Nine o'clock rolled around, and she did another quick search through the channels before finding herself right back where she started, with nothing better to watch than a documentary about the Revolution. What a great time that would be. She tried to force her body to sleep, but she was wide awake, and settled for listening to the program just enough to stave off severe boredom.
She knew as much as she needed to know about the Revolution, as much as she had been taught in her history lessons. Humans had once fought the machines for control of the Matrix, the One had come along, made a truce, and now humans and machines just went about life in their separate worlds, and mostly left each other alone. She knew it was significant, had heard half the teachers she ever had give the same speech about the importance of remembering the past, and knew that she probably didn't fully grasp just how influential the One's actions had been, but the events of a war that ended over two centuries before simply didn't interest her much.
But she didn't have much choice in the matter, and listened to the voice of the narrator. It took several references to a man named Neo before she realized that this was the name of the One. She had never been good at remembering names. He mentioned someone named Trinity - a woman, it seemed - his wife, or girlfriend, something like that. She vaguely remembered that the One had been in love.
But as she listened, a bit more attentively than she had been before, she began to realize that it may not have been so simple as that. She had never heard, in a few brief lessons, anything to suggest to her that theirs was anymore than a simple romance; genuine, but no different than what you would see between your own parents. But as she lay there in her bed, her undivided attention on the screen, she found herself learning a great deal that she had not known before. He had been shot, apparently, while on a rescue mission after the crew of their ship had been betrayed. He was even killed, it seemed. Legend held (it was apparently never explicitly confirmed by the captain, the only one left alive when the waking world first started to ask questions) that he became the One when she brought him back to life with a kiss. He was apparently not an infallible One, either, as this Trinity had saved his life many times, even after his resurrection. She would have heard what the narrator had to say about the alleged superpowers they shared, a telekinetic link of some sort - if only her mother had not chosen that precise moment to yell a reminder of the next day's math test down the hallway to her.
Later, he went on about Neo's journey to Zero-One (she actually did remember that this was the name of the machine city) in the last hours of the Revolution. Nobody really knew what happened after he and Trinity left in the Logos, only that she died first, in a crash, and that he went on to make a truce with the machines - defeat the virus Smith in exchange for peace. That was the first she had heard of such a thing. She had never known of such an AI, and had always assumed Neo's truce had been much more basic - "take me, leave them alone," that sort of thing. As she thought of it now, as the narrator spoke of the specific details of the Promise Treaty that was drawn up shortly after, that theory didn't make much sense, though it did go to show how little she had actually been taught on the subject.
The program ended, and she shut off the screen, musing on just how strange that was. If nothing else, she knew that the Revolution had been easily the most pivotal event in history. She would not be here, lying in this bed if it were not for the Revolution. If anything, she would be sitting in a pod, entirely convinced the illusion around her was real. Logic would dictate that she would know more about it by now.
As she drifted off, her thoughts turned back to Zion. She had heard things were different there. The history of the Revolution was found everywhere, from allegorical films to city holidays, song lyrics and even children's stories. Once, she had even heard, though she could not for the life of her remember where, that Neo and Trinity were considered Saints in Zion. One more thing to love, one more reason to get there as soon as humanly possible.
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The next night found her staring at the cruel words again. But rather than taunting her indecisiveness this time, they simply bored her. When the words began to blur slightly, she shut down the list, and absently logged on to the city network. She stared at the blinking cursor in the search bar for a minute, trying to think of something that interested her. After a moment, she typed the first words that came to mind. Neo and Trinity. Plenty of resources came up, and she clicked on the first, just to see what it had to say.
She read on, through this page and others, absorbing some information she already knew, some that she suspected or could have guessed on her own, and some that shocked her. Those tidbits of information were nearly as shocking as when she looked up from her screen, and saw that nearly four hours had gone by since she first sat down before her computer.
When she sat down to dinner, half-listening to the mundane conversation passing between her parents, she found herself thinking of the past, rather than her own future. She could not help but wonder at the finer details of things. She wondered what happened when Neo and Trinity first met - where, when, what had been said. For that matter, she could not figure out what had made anyone believe he was the One in the first place. And this Smith program was quite the enigma. She had learned only enough to make her more curious, and certain that mere talk of him would give any younger girl nightmares.
And the next evening after school she once again found herself before her computer screen, searching for answers to these very questions.
Her afternoons soon began to follow a very predictable pattern. She walked through the front door and straight for her room, and immediately began searching. Each session glued to her seat left her with more questions than answers, questions that plagued her through the night and the next day's classes, until she could return home to begin searching for their answers.
She never liked the implications of the word, but more and more she was beginning to realize she could only be called obsessed. She could focus on little else but Neo and Trinity, and everything they had given to the Revolution. She took every possible opportunity to learn more. The slightest mention of anything related to the topic instantly drew her giddy attention. And when her science teacher handed out a pop quiz last week, she tried to calm herself down by thinking that Trinity would not have been intimidated by a measly little quiz, that she would have hit it with everything she had in her, and given the one-in-a-million chance that she failed, she would have made the best of it.
Two weeks after the whole mess began, she found herself at the dinner table, poking around at her food as she worried about her own sanity.
"Taliba, have you chosen your major yet?"
But there was nothing like a mother to bring her crashing back to reality. She froze with her fork poised in midair, staring speechlessly at the older woman. The inaction was quickly - and correctly - interpreted to mean that she had reached no decision, and it was not met with as much kindness as it had been two weeks earlier.
"You need to make up your mind eventually. The deadline may seem like a long way off, but it will be here sooner than you think. You need to take a little more responsibility for that."
She hid an eye roll from both parents, and slumped back to her room when she finished eating, opening up the file she had not seen in what felt like years. She fought the temptation to search through the database again - at least until she had read over her options, so that she could turn them over in her head as she searched. As she reviewed, she wondered how the list managed to be so long when the student population here was so small. The list of majors themselves was actually fairly small, but within each was the option for a specific emphasis, which only made her task harder. There was art, behavioral science, education, history, math -
She stopped reading suddenly, and lifted her eyes back to the history section. Like the others, this had multiple sub-sections, and she slowly read through them, trying to find the one that caught her eye a moment before. Ancient world history, early world history, history of the Second Renaissance, history of the Revolution...
The idea had never come within a hundred miles of her mind before, and yet suddenly it was the most obvious thing in the world.
She rested her chin in her hand as she stared at the screen, keeping her eyes focused on the words for long seconds that turned into longer minutes.
She didn't have the slightest idea why her sudden interest in these things had manifested itself. But it certainly felt right. She couldn't remember ever caring so much about anything she had learned, not since her very first day of kindergarten. She learned things when she had to, and generally forgot them once the test was over. But not this. Somehow, this made sense to her, this stuck in her mind, the one subject she studied the least. There was just something about it that drew her in, that told her this was right, this was what she needed to do. She tried, just for a moment, to picture the future this would bring her. All she came up with was an obsessive old woman, sitting in a tiny room piled with a million old books, a room she only left to teach two tiny history classes a week. It wasn't a pretty future, but she was fairly certain she would end up with a life a little more glorious and meaningful than that. Either way, perhaps she had found her destiny. It might lead her to Zion, might not, but this was it. A part of her felt naive and silly for thinking such things, but another part thought... maybe.