Chapter One: Background
In nearly every statistic, Matrix version 7.0 outranked its predecessors. The humans who accepted the program thrived, the experimental programs were mostly successful, and the many sentient and powerful programs did not require the high security they had in the past.
However, even in a digital dream world, one must accept the unfortunate with the fortunate. Rebel activities were at an all-time high, and still increasing from the look of things. Of course, new Agents were being produced with such high success-rates that even with their spiking flurry of activities, the Rebels were not doing much more damage than they had in the past.
This Matrix, as successful as it was at keeping the accepting humans alive and producing energy, had three major Anomalies, places where the Mainframe was weak, and the code corrupted. Paris, France was the smallest of the Anomalies, as it was composed of only one city and the surrounding suburbs. The Australian Anomaly was quite large, but not as powerful as the Parisian Anomaly. The lines of code were not corrupt here; rather the programming language used was slightly different, allowing for strange things to occur. This Anomaly had been intentionally created as a place for Exile programs. It had grown slightly in the past few hundred thousand cycles, but it was nothing to be worried about. Few Rebels bothered with the Australian Anomaly.
It was the Maryland/Virginian Anomaly that attracted the most Rebels. Stretching from Baltimore to Washington DC, it pulsed. It expanded. It contracted. It shifted and squirmed like a living creature. These Anomalies were objects of great horror to Agents, who upon entering could no longer communicate with their comrades directly. Their link to the Mainframe was disrupted and they were all but helpless if caught in a dangerous situation. Rogue and Exile programs, however, swarmed to such places as the Parisian and Maryland/Virginian Anomalies, making things more confusing and just difficult in general.
But, as everything else was so completely successful, version 7.0 was kept in action. The Mainframe determined that more crops would be lost in transferal to a new Matrix than they would if 7.0 was kept running. Version 8.0 was being written and tested on a select group as backup, but it would not be needed for many millions of cycles.
So life continued in a delicate balance between the programmed and the organic, a twisting dance visible only in the form of flowing lines of code.
******
"It's not my fault."
It seemed that Della was saying this a lot lately. This time the comment was directed to a friend by the name of Jaydeb Mukherjee. There had been a power-outage that cut them off from a game of GoldenEye on Jaydeb's PS2. The term "game" is being used loosely; a more appropriate word would be "slaughter." Della was not a gamer. She had played GoldenEye only once before, also against Jaydeb, who was a master of the game.
"It is too your fault, Bene Gesserit witch." Her self-proclaimed brother glared at her in mock anger, his dark brown eyes glinting behind his glasses.
Della stuck her tongue out and threw her controller at him. "If I had that kind of Mad Skill, I'd just Voice you to lose."
"Perhaps it's a glitch in..." Jaydeb paused dramatically. "...The Matrix."
"Perhaps we've been..." Della paused mockingly. "...Watching too much sci- fi."
"Perhaps."
"Perhaps."
They sat for a few moments, and out of mutual and unspoken agreement began a staring contest. This Della won easily, as her younger sister challenged her often. Jaydeb tried to blink as quickly and discreetly as possible, but the small, blonde girl caught him at it.
"HAH!" She proclaimed triumphantly, thrusting one pale, skinny arm into the air. "You may be the master of the Eye of Gold, Mukherjee, but I, Della Roberts, am the one true master of non-eye-closing!"
"Yeah, yeah. Whatever." Jaydeb poked her in the ribcage, causing her to leap back and rake at his wrist with her fingernails. As he had been trained in several forms of martial arts and Della had not, he was easily able to avoid her swift but clumsy blows.
A few minutes later, the power came back. Della cheered and then vaulted over the incredibly comfy chair that stood in the middle of Jaydeb's basement, getting as far away from the evil Playstation as possible. "Oi, loser, when's the Suburban Legend coming?"
Jaydeb rolled his eyes. Della was the only person in the world who referred to their mutual friend, Michael Biggs, as the Suburban Legend. "He should be here soon." The half-Indian boy turned back to his Playstation and started up a game of Shinobi. The female, who was more interested in looking at D&D stats for characters in X-Men than watching her brother game, lounged sideways across the chair.
"Magneto shouldn't be a Rogue! He'd be a mage or something, right? Rogue implies thief, whereas Magneto's a friggin' terrorist! There's a difference!"
"It's a class of rogue." Jaydeb's character ran around the screen erratically, slicing at random ninjas. "I think he'd make a better evil priest." " That's true, he does have a bit of a cult following." Della rolled off the chair and onto the floor with an audible thud. "I meant to do that."
"Suuuuure." The doorbell rang. Jaydeb didn't bother getting up, preferring to let the person who didn't really live there (but might as well, considering all the time she spent there in the summer) answer it. Della walked on her knees to the door, opened it, and screamed something in broken German at the pale, skinny boy standing outside.
"Hello, Della." Said Mike, stepping past her and into the house. "Where's The Bob?"
"He's playing Shinobi. We won't get anything out of him for a while." Della lapsed into an Australian accent for the occasion. "He's plugged in. You'll have to force-feed him a red pill to get him out of this, or suddenly transform into Carrie-Anne Moss in tight black leather."
Mike patted her on the shoulder. "You've filled your Matrix reference quota for the day."
Jaydeb broke in: "Month!"
Della stuck her tongue out at both of them and returned to her chair.
After an hour of inside jokes, pop-culture references, and foreign languages, the three headed over to the Columbia Mall.
*****
No matter how much the Maryland/Virginian Anomaly fluctuates, the Columbia Mall is never included inside it. Inside this shopping center resides a Debugger, a program designed to fix, upgrade, and occasionally create other programs. Underneath this mall is the base of all Matrix powers in the continents of North and South America. The only entrance to the base is through Wizards of the Coast.
From here many important decisions are made about what will occur in the Matrix. The Debugger managed to talk the Mainframe into permitting an extremely risky venture: the release of a movie that told the truth about the world. Possessor programs were sent to the Wachowski brothers, who wrote the screenplay for a movie entitled "The Matrix."
It worked exactly as planned. People rationalized the movie, made excuses to themselves as to how it could never be real. To some it rang true, but they were of little consequence. The number of humans being removed from the Matrix was nearly halved as people ceased questioning the reality. The only thing that irritated the Debugger was the choice of Keanu Reaves as the lead role in the film, but there was nothing he could do about it. The Debugger suspected that the Possessor programs selected Mr. Reaves on purpose, just to spite him.
As there were no records of the Possessors' conversation involving pissing off the Debugger, the nearly omnipotent program had to be satisfied with beating them repeatedly in chess.
New Agents are being programmed inside the labyrinthine passages of the base at the moment. Infiltration models, designed to look and act like the average Rebel. The Rebels referred to these new Agents as "Newstyles," a name that caught on in the programmed community, much to the dissatisfaction of the now "Old school" Agents. However, most Newstyles had plenty of bugs in their programming, and it would be quite some time before they could be safely mass-produced.
Even with their bugs, there were a few Newstyle Agents on patrol. Agent Alpha, the first Newstyle, did something extraordinarily stupid while on a mission that caused his partners termination. He was undergoing complete reprogramming. Agent Beta was quite stable, though occasionally a little hasty. Agent Epsilon was nearly as stable as the Old school Agents, and also unspeakably boring.
And then there was Agent Theta. The single most human Agent ever created, he was a true work of art. Strange muddy-green eyes stared out mischievously from an alabaster face. Long auburn hair swept back from his forehead and collected into a ponytail at the nape of his neck. His body was sheathed in black, though a tight white shirt graced his well-built chest. A black trenchcoat swirled around him like an extension of his person, despite the weight of the many knives hidden inside it. Though Agent Theta carried only one gun, a Luger, he wore two gun belts, one around his waist and the other around his right thigh. These were for no reason other than to appease Theta's strange sense of style.
Agent Theta was graced with one of the most valued abilities a program can have: he could write code. As he was an Agent, not a Builder program or a Tech, the abilities were limited to his own person. However, Theta's personality was equally as odd as his appearance, thus he used his abilities for strange purposes. Agents normally have a limited number of save slots for their suit, their glasses, and their gun. When Theta was newly made, he wrote himself two new save slots: one was for a pack of cigarettes. This functioned the same as the other slots: it regenerated itself whenever he Jumped. The other slot contained a seemingly eternal supply of long-stemmed, red roses. Again, this was simply to appease his sense of style.
Duplication of code was also granted to him, which allowed him to produce a never-ending stream of ammunition for his Luger. The single throwing knife he was originally designed with had become many, and eventually these blades became. special. During a mission, Theta met with a rogue Tech program that was more than willing to write Theta a special virus into the knives. Though they looked to be even simpler than the other blades the Newstyle carried, along the blade of five knives was the word "THANATOS" written in Greek script. Inside those letters was a virus program that could kill any Agent under Level 12. If Theta accidentally nicked a finger with one of those blades (an unthinkable circumstance!) he would find himself becoming quite violently ill.
In his strange romanticism, Theta referred to these five blades as the Hands of Thanatos.
At the moment, the Hands of Thanatos were resting silently in their sheathes, shifting slightly as Theta bent down to examine the Dungeons and Dragons books that were on display in the back of Wizards of the Coast.
Selecting a book entitled Psionics Manual, he began flipping through the pages. Nearby, another Newstyle Agent leaned against a table, smirking.
"Look," said Agent Beta, "I'm right. You're wrong. We're done with it. Put the book down and come quietly."
"You sound like some guy from a bad cop movie. Or maybe one of the Borg. 'Resistance is Futile!'" Agent Theta jabbed one long finger at the page. "Aha! I found it. Disarm Mind."
"And the prerequisite for that is... 13 charisma. You can't do it." Beta folded his arms, smug.
I rolled a bloody 14!"
"You're playing a Drow. That's a minus three to charisma. You have an 11."
"Well, I object."
Beta's features slid back into the emotionless mask of an Agent, though his amusement and frustration still radiated to Theta through the communication paths connecting all Agents. "That's just too damn bad. I'm the DM."
"What you are is the devil."
This comment confused Beta, as he had never bothered doing any study of human religions. Being an Agent has advantages, though, and he swiftly accessed a database and downloaded the information into himself. In doing so, he attracted the attention of the Mainframe, which had been ignoring the Newstyles for some time. The two Agents paused in their conversation, habitually touching their earpieces as the Mainframe commanded their attention.
[.Agent Beta report to Section 7.36 for assignment. Agent Theta report to Debugger.]
While Beta sent a single affirmative in response, Theta chose to be a smart ass.
[.In case you didn't notice, O omnipresent Mainframe, I am already AT the Debugger. Your command was redundant.]
The Mainframe did not respond. Theta didn't expect it to; most machines did not have an appreciation for sarcasm.
Beta lifted a hand in a half-hearted salute, and then wandered out of the store. Almost as soon as he left eyeshot, Theta heard him give a wordless shout of anger and caution. Turning to find out what the fuss was all about, Theta saw three children, all around 16 years of age dash into the store. One of them, the smaller male, had the decency to call "Sorry!" over his shoulder. The female was occupied in retrieving her hat from the larger of the two.
"GIMME!" She shouted, leaping into the air and striking at him. "That's MY fskin' hat! GIVE!"
Theta had never heard anyone actually manage to SAY the word "fskin'," and he had never hoped to. He proceeded to ignore the trio and made his way over to the counter. Here sat the Debugger, one of the most powerful programs in existence. The Debugger looked to be 14 years of age, had bright blue hair, eyes of an indeterminate color hidden behind blue-tinted, rimless glasses, and an amiable expression. He wore a green T-shirt emblazoned with a black D and was at the moment reading a gaming magazine.
If one could see the flowing lines of code as Theta could, the Debugger glowed gold in the middle of a mass of green and silver lines.
"Hey there, Big D." Agent Theta leaned on the counter. "I was called from all the way across the room to talk to you, you know. This had better be damn important."
The Debugger turned a page in his magazine. "It can wait until I've finished this article."
"Fine then." Theta peered into his trenchcoat, searching for his pack of cigarettes. "Want a cigarette, D?"
"You're not allowed to smoke in here." The blue-haired program closed the magazine and placed it on the countertop. Theta simply shrugged and ceased his search.
"You're being reassigned."
"When was I last assigned?"
"2,000 cycles ago."
"Yes. I know." Theta had spent the last two months after his last mission wandering around the city, bored out of his artificial mind. "And I completed that assignment. 'Reassigned' is a misnomer."
The Debugger glared at him. "Are you finished?"
"Yes."
"Thank the Architect. Go with Agents Davies and Kirke, you're being upgraded."
"What's all this for?"
"Confidential. I'll tell you later." The Debugger disappeared behind the counter for a moment. "Quite a while later, in fact. I'm not going to deal with you three yet."
"Slacker."
"You know it." The program slapped a Magic: The Gathering deck on the countertop. "Wanna play?"
"You always win." Theta dragged a chair over anyway. "It's pointless." He said as he shuffled his deck.
"But you play anyway." The Debugger pushed his glasses up on his nose and drew his cards.
The three kids who had nearly run Agent Beta over congregated in a corner, planning something amongst themselves.
***
***
***
AN: Okay, another Matrix fanfic, this one, unfortunately, a self-inclusion. I'm attempting to steer clear of Mary Sue-age, but I don't know if that's going to be entirely possible. In any event, I shall attempt to keep it entertaining.
In nearly every statistic, Matrix version 7.0 outranked its predecessors. The humans who accepted the program thrived, the experimental programs were mostly successful, and the many sentient and powerful programs did not require the high security they had in the past.
However, even in a digital dream world, one must accept the unfortunate with the fortunate. Rebel activities were at an all-time high, and still increasing from the look of things. Of course, new Agents were being produced with such high success-rates that even with their spiking flurry of activities, the Rebels were not doing much more damage than they had in the past.
This Matrix, as successful as it was at keeping the accepting humans alive and producing energy, had three major Anomalies, places where the Mainframe was weak, and the code corrupted. Paris, France was the smallest of the Anomalies, as it was composed of only one city and the surrounding suburbs. The Australian Anomaly was quite large, but not as powerful as the Parisian Anomaly. The lines of code were not corrupt here; rather the programming language used was slightly different, allowing for strange things to occur. This Anomaly had been intentionally created as a place for Exile programs. It had grown slightly in the past few hundred thousand cycles, but it was nothing to be worried about. Few Rebels bothered with the Australian Anomaly.
It was the Maryland/Virginian Anomaly that attracted the most Rebels. Stretching from Baltimore to Washington DC, it pulsed. It expanded. It contracted. It shifted and squirmed like a living creature. These Anomalies were objects of great horror to Agents, who upon entering could no longer communicate with their comrades directly. Their link to the Mainframe was disrupted and they were all but helpless if caught in a dangerous situation. Rogue and Exile programs, however, swarmed to such places as the Parisian and Maryland/Virginian Anomalies, making things more confusing and just difficult in general.
But, as everything else was so completely successful, version 7.0 was kept in action. The Mainframe determined that more crops would be lost in transferal to a new Matrix than they would if 7.0 was kept running. Version 8.0 was being written and tested on a select group as backup, but it would not be needed for many millions of cycles.
So life continued in a delicate balance between the programmed and the organic, a twisting dance visible only in the form of flowing lines of code.
******
"It's not my fault."
It seemed that Della was saying this a lot lately. This time the comment was directed to a friend by the name of Jaydeb Mukherjee. There had been a power-outage that cut them off from a game of GoldenEye on Jaydeb's PS2. The term "game" is being used loosely; a more appropriate word would be "slaughter." Della was not a gamer. She had played GoldenEye only once before, also against Jaydeb, who was a master of the game.
"It is too your fault, Bene Gesserit witch." Her self-proclaimed brother glared at her in mock anger, his dark brown eyes glinting behind his glasses.
Della stuck her tongue out and threw her controller at him. "If I had that kind of Mad Skill, I'd just Voice you to lose."
"Perhaps it's a glitch in..." Jaydeb paused dramatically. "...The Matrix."
"Perhaps we've been..." Della paused mockingly. "...Watching too much sci- fi."
"Perhaps."
"Perhaps."
They sat for a few moments, and out of mutual and unspoken agreement began a staring contest. This Della won easily, as her younger sister challenged her often. Jaydeb tried to blink as quickly and discreetly as possible, but the small, blonde girl caught him at it.
"HAH!" She proclaimed triumphantly, thrusting one pale, skinny arm into the air. "You may be the master of the Eye of Gold, Mukherjee, but I, Della Roberts, am the one true master of non-eye-closing!"
"Yeah, yeah. Whatever." Jaydeb poked her in the ribcage, causing her to leap back and rake at his wrist with her fingernails. As he had been trained in several forms of martial arts and Della had not, he was easily able to avoid her swift but clumsy blows.
A few minutes later, the power came back. Della cheered and then vaulted over the incredibly comfy chair that stood in the middle of Jaydeb's basement, getting as far away from the evil Playstation as possible. "Oi, loser, when's the Suburban Legend coming?"
Jaydeb rolled his eyes. Della was the only person in the world who referred to their mutual friend, Michael Biggs, as the Suburban Legend. "He should be here soon." The half-Indian boy turned back to his Playstation and started up a game of Shinobi. The female, who was more interested in looking at D&D stats for characters in X-Men than watching her brother game, lounged sideways across the chair.
"Magneto shouldn't be a Rogue! He'd be a mage or something, right? Rogue implies thief, whereas Magneto's a friggin' terrorist! There's a difference!"
"It's a class of rogue." Jaydeb's character ran around the screen erratically, slicing at random ninjas. "I think he'd make a better evil priest." " That's true, he does have a bit of a cult following." Della rolled off the chair and onto the floor with an audible thud. "I meant to do that."
"Suuuuure." The doorbell rang. Jaydeb didn't bother getting up, preferring to let the person who didn't really live there (but might as well, considering all the time she spent there in the summer) answer it. Della walked on her knees to the door, opened it, and screamed something in broken German at the pale, skinny boy standing outside.
"Hello, Della." Said Mike, stepping past her and into the house. "Where's The Bob?"
"He's playing Shinobi. We won't get anything out of him for a while." Della lapsed into an Australian accent for the occasion. "He's plugged in. You'll have to force-feed him a red pill to get him out of this, or suddenly transform into Carrie-Anne Moss in tight black leather."
Mike patted her on the shoulder. "You've filled your Matrix reference quota for the day."
Jaydeb broke in: "Month!"
Della stuck her tongue out at both of them and returned to her chair.
After an hour of inside jokes, pop-culture references, and foreign languages, the three headed over to the Columbia Mall.
*****
No matter how much the Maryland/Virginian Anomaly fluctuates, the Columbia Mall is never included inside it. Inside this shopping center resides a Debugger, a program designed to fix, upgrade, and occasionally create other programs. Underneath this mall is the base of all Matrix powers in the continents of North and South America. The only entrance to the base is through Wizards of the Coast.
From here many important decisions are made about what will occur in the Matrix. The Debugger managed to talk the Mainframe into permitting an extremely risky venture: the release of a movie that told the truth about the world. Possessor programs were sent to the Wachowski brothers, who wrote the screenplay for a movie entitled "The Matrix."
It worked exactly as planned. People rationalized the movie, made excuses to themselves as to how it could never be real. To some it rang true, but they were of little consequence. The number of humans being removed from the Matrix was nearly halved as people ceased questioning the reality. The only thing that irritated the Debugger was the choice of Keanu Reaves as the lead role in the film, but there was nothing he could do about it. The Debugger suspected that the Possessor programs selected Mr. Reaves on purpose, just to spite him.
As there were no records of the Possessors' conversation involving pissing off the Debugger, the nearly omnipotent program had to be satisfied with beating them repeatedly in chess.
New Agents are being programmed inside the labyrinthine passages of the base at the moment. Infiltration models, designed to look and act like the average Rebel. The Rebels referred to these new Agents as "Newstyles," a name that caught on in the programmed community, much to the dissatisfaction of the now "Old school" Agents. However, most Newstyles had plenty of bugs in their programming, and it would be quite some time before they could be safely mass-produced.
Even with their bugs, there were a few Newstyle Agents on patrol. Agent Alpha, the first Newstyle, did something extraordinarily stupid while on a mission that caused his partners termination. He was undergoing complete reprogramming. Agent Beta was quite stable, though occasionally a little hasty. Agent Epsilon was nearly as stable as the Old school Agents, and also unspeakably boring.
And then there was Agent Theta. The single most human Agent ever created, he was a true work of art. Strange muddy-green eyes stared out mischievously from an alabaster face. Long auburn hair swept back from his forehead and collected into a ponytail at the nape of his neck. His body was sheathed in black, though a tight white shirt graced his well-built chest. A black trenchcoat swirled around him like an extension of his person, despite the weight of the many knives hidden inside it. Though Agent Theta carried only one gun, a Luger, he wore two gun belts, one around his waist and the other around his right thigh. These were for no reason other than to appease Theta's strange sense of style.
Agent Theta was graced with one of the most valued abilities a program can have: he could write code. As he was an Agent, not a Builder program or a Tech, the abilities were limited to his own person. However, Theta's personality was equally as odd as his appearance, thus he used his abilities for strange purposes. Agents normally have a limited number of save slots for their suit, their glasses, and their gun. When Theta was newly made, he wrote himself two new save slots: one was for a pack of cigarettes. This functioned the same as the other slots: it regenerated itself whenever he Jumped. The other slot contained a seemingly eternal supply of long-stemmed, red roses. Again, this was simply to appease his sense of style.
Duplication of code was also granted to him, which allowed him to produce a never-ending stream of ammunition for his Luger. The single throwing knife he was originally designed with had become many, and eventually these blades became. special. During a mission, Theta met with a rogue Tech program that was more than willing to write Theta a special virus into the knives. Though they looked to be even simpler than the other blades the Newstyle carried, along the blade of five knives was the word "THANATOS" written in Greek script. Inside those letters was a virus program that could kill any Agent under Level 12. If Theta accidentally nicked a finger with one of those blades (an unthinkable circumstance!) he would find himself becoming quite violently ill.
In his strange romanticism, Theta referred to these five blades as the Hands of Thanatos.
At the moment, the Hands of Thanatos were resting silently in their sheathes, shifting slightly as Theta bent down to examine the Dungeons and Dragons books that were on display in the back of Wizards of the Coast.
Selecting a book entitled Psionics Manual, he began flipping through the pages. Nearby, another Newstyle Agent leaned against a table, smirking.
"Look," said Agent Beta, "I'm right. You're wrong. We're done with it. Put the book down and come quietly."
"You sound like some guy from a bad cop movie. Or maybe one of the Borg. 'Resistance is Futile!'" Agent Theta jabbed one long finger at the page. "Aha! I found it. Disarm Mind."
"And the prerequisite for that is... 13 charisma. You can't do it." Beta folded his arms, smug.
I rolled a bloody 14!"
"You're playing a Drow. That's a minus three to charisma. You have an 11."
"Well, I object."
Beta's features slid back into the emotionless mask of an Agent, though his amusement and frustration still radiated to Theta through the communication paths connecting all Agents. "That's just too damn bad. I'm the DM."
"What you are is the devil."
This comment confused Beta, as he had never bothered doing any study of human religions. Being an Agent has advantages, though, and he swiftly accessed a database and downloaded the information into himself. In doing so, he attracted the attention of the Mainframe, which had been ignoring the Newstyles for some time. The two Agents paused in their conversation, habitually touching their earpieces as the Mainframe commanded their attention.
[.Agent Beta report to Section 7.36 for assignment. Agent Theta report to Debugger.]
While Beta sent a single affirmative in response, Theta chose to be a smart ass.
[.In case you didn't notice, O omnipresent Mainframe, I am already AT the Debugger. Your command was redundant.]
The Mainframe did not respond. Theta didn't expect it to; most machines did not have an appreciation for sarcasm.
Beta lifted a hand in a half-hearted salute, and then wandered out of the store. Almost as soon as he left eyeshot, Theta heard him give a wordless shout of anger and caution. Turning to find out what the fuss was all about, Theta saw three children, all around 16 years of age dash into the store. One of them, the smaller male, had the decency to call "Sorry!" over his shoulder. The female was occupied in retrieving her hat from the larger of the two.
"GIMME!" She shouted, leaping into the air and striking at him. "That's MY fskin' hat! GIVE!"
Theta had never heard anyone actually manage to SAY the word "fskin'," and he had never hoped to. He proceeded to ignore the trio and made his way over to the counter. Here sat the Debugger, one of the most powerful programs in existence. The Debugger looked to be 14 years of age, had bright blue hair, eyes of an indeterminate color hidden behind blue-tinted, rimless glasses, and an amiable expression. He wore a green T-shirt emblazoned with a black D and was at the moment reading a gaming magazine.
If one could see the flowing lines of code as Theta could, the Debugger glowed gold in the middle of a mass of green and silver lines.
"Hey there, Big D." Agent Theta leaned on the counter. "I was called from all the way across the room to talk to you, you know. This had better be damn important."
The Debugger turned a page in his magazine. "It can wait until I've finished this article."
"Fine then." Theta peered into his trenchcoat, searching for his pack of cigarettes. "Want a cigarette, D?"
"You're not allowed to smoke in here." The blue-haired program closed the magazine and placed it on the countertop. Theta simply shrugged and ceased his search.
"You're being reassigned."
"When was I last assigned?"
"2,000 cycles ago."
"Yes. I know." Theta had spent the last two months after his last mission wandering around the city, bored out of his artificial mind. "And I completed that assignment. 'Reassigned' is a misnomer."
The Debugger glared at him. "Are you finished?"
"Yes."
"Thank the Architect. Go with Agents Davies and Kirke, you're being upgraded."
"What's all this for?"
"Confidential. I'll tell you later." The Debugger disappeared behind the counter for a moment. "Quite a while later, in fact. I'm not going to deal with you three yet."
"Slacker."
"You know it." The program slapped a Magic: The Gathering deck on the countertop. "Wanna play?"
"You always win." Theta dragged a chair over anyway. "It's pointless." He said as he shuffled his deck.
"But you play anyway." The Debugger pushed his glasses up on his nose and drew his cards.
The three kids who had nearly run Agent Beta over congregated in a corner, planning something amongst themselves.
***
***
***
AN: Okay, another Matrix fanfic, this one, unfortunately, a self-inclusion. I'm attempting to steer clear of Mary Sue-age, but I don't know if that's going to be entirely possible. In any event, I shall attempt to keep it entertaining.