By Jake Newman and based on the Matrix Trilogy by the Wachowski Brothers. Characters in this story which appear in the Matrix Trilogy do not belong to me. Some dialogue may be similar to that found in the official Trilogy.
Chapter 1: Clock watching
He sat gazing out of an open window, the cool, fresh, summer breeze rustling through his hair. His mind was preoccupied, he couldn't stop thinking, he was compelled to think. His thoughts were of the impossible, things that a human mind cannot understand. "Are you listening?" a teacher's voice enquired. Resisting the immediate urge to say no, the boy nodded. "Good, I'd hate to think we were both wasting our time", answered the teacher sarcastically. The teacher walked over to the open window and shut it firmly, blasting one last gust of air through the room and violently shaking all loose paper on every surface in the room. The boy stared at the teacher's shoes, the hypnotic way that they pulsed in front of each other as he walked, occasionally catching the light and blinding him.
The boy was so deeply lost in his thoughts that nothing else mattered, or if it did, he didn't notice. Still looking at the teacher's shoes he grabbed his paperwork, threw it into his bag and promptly left the room. No one followed him, nobody talked to him and no one acknowledged him. He didn't notice. His mind was still busy, he had to figure it out, but how? What he'd seen was not open to interpretation or mistakable for something else, a million people could have seen what he'd seen and would have thought the same thing. He knew however, only person had seen what he'd seen, and that person was himself.
He had been walking to school, the normal way, and as usual, without company. His journey to school was tiresome, both for the long distance and for the dull surroundings; this allowed him to think of other things, usually. This, however, was different to usual, he couldn't explain how. It was as if someone had picked up all the pieces that made up his hometown; the trees, the grass, the road, the people, and had moved them all somewhere else. As humans like to do, to avoid thinking about the things that make them uncomfortable, he cast these thoughts aside and continued to walk. He walked past winding roads, past towering trees that chilled the air below them and past grey, industrial buildings.
Further along he came to a tunnel-way, partially secluded by the dark green foliage of the woodland around it. He stopped and pondered the black tunnel and wondered where it led to. He could hear the faint sound of struggling, someone gasping for breath. As his heart raced the blackness began to change, he could see something moving. He watched closely, like he was watching a movie, believing he was untouchable, an innocent bystander. Out of the dark stumbled two men, one man on his knees trying to pry the hands of another man from his neck. The other man was strong, hardly moving from the desperate punches of his victim. With his hands firmly clasped around the man's neck, he stood like a machine, relentlessly choking him to death. The kneeling man fell limply to the floor whilst his murderer stood tall casually surveying his work from above.
The boy could not believe his eyes, was what he'd seen real? He wanted to leave, his brain was telling him to run but his legs weren't moving. Then, in a split second, a flash of light caught the boy's eyes and he turned to see green lightening shoot through the body of the man still standing, illuminating the walls of the tunnel with a putrid green. A petrifying fizzling sound echoed in the tunnel and the man's face began to change. The boy's pupils grew so big that his eyes looked black, he was concentrating so hard on the face of the man, he watched more green lightening shoot across the man's face, he listened to the fizzling sound dissipate into the distance, he watched the man's face disappear and the face and body of someone else replace it and fall to the floor, dead.
As the boy walked through the corridors at school his heart still pounded from what he'd seen those few hours ago. The only way he'd found to make sense of it all was to accept that it didn't make any sense. He was determined to understand what had happened, he was sure he would, eventually. It was only a matter of time. His eyes were fixed on the clock on the wall opposite; he was waiting outside of a classroom for his next lesson. A teacher brushed past him, put a key into the lock, began to turn it and said to the boy, "Mr. Smith, watching the clock won't make the lesson go any faster".