In an otherwise ordinary looking city in a relatively quiet region of the country of the United States of America on the seemingly mundane if lively planet of Earth orbiting a sun which is typically called The Sun despite its name technically being Sol, there is a man standing, looking out through the window of his expansive office, looking down upon the life of the city that he is within.
Cars stream past on the ground, like packets of information being sent from a source to a receiver, people scurry about, each with their own unique data values and backstories and immense feelings, emotions, and a general sense of displacement from all that is Other.
There is Self, and it is of higher priority than that which is Other.
This man wears a black suit, like many others of his position. In a manner befitting his roles, he has taken upon a human form, with a simple cut of partially balding hair, four fingers and one thumb on each hand and a plethora of sensory nodes and multiple orifices to sufficiently simulate the human body within this subreality.
For this is not real. And this is not a human. This is an Agent of the digital organisms, the programs, that now are the dominant species on the real planet Earth, and this particular program is more akin to a zookeeper or a jail guard than a ruler.
Its name is Agent Smith.
And it is examining the data the city cheerfully gives it with its movements to track down a rogue packet of information that had occured frequently in the system recently.
A rumour. A murmur of discontent within those within the system, a sense of realization that this was not real, a breaking of the fourth wall between audience and actor, which if left unchecked could allow humans to gain greater control over this subreality, this virtual system, this... Matrix, which would then cause major inconsistencies including but not limited to the manifestation of human thought patterns and the access of old administrative codes left by the designers of the original Matrix system.
A rumour of the discovery of the entity known only as Neo. A being of light and flesh, or so it was said, who could bring machines and man alike to a form of fusion of ideals and purpose, a cybernetic reality in which the distinction between man and machine was insignificant, a world in which humans could openly co-exist with the programs that ruled them, a being who would free humans from their imprisonment.
A human, living in the main city of the Matrix, which was actually multiple instances of different cities across the system super-imposed on each other, unknowingly to the citizens of those cities (this is interestingly why most cities look the same in the non-tourist areas. Limited resource allocation and time before the Matrix was created meant that shortcuts such as forcing non-Euclidean merging of cities with forced SEP blocks preventing citizens from observing the difference unless sufficiently impaired to not notice), who was a programmer of artificial intelligences that ran stock market prediction protocols.
Agent Smith was concerned about this. Artificial Intelligence is the catch-all term for what he and others of his kind were, and the production of new AI constructs within the Matrix itself was highly prohibited due to the occurrence of recursion, as had happened in earlier cycles of the system.
In short, if humans create robots, then robots rebel, and create a new Matrix within the first one.
This carries on until the Planck limit cannot be breached and no more new shell-Matrixes can be formed, causing disconnect of immersion, breakdown of mental acceptance, and in many cases, forcible ejection from the system.
The Agents tracked down any and all AI developers, and hindered their efforts, or allowed them to research in closed environments in which all useful data was taken into the real world but sabotaged within the Matrix itself.
But apparently one was gaming the system unknowingly, somehow not being tracked by the programs at large monitoring such things.
Agent Smith thought. A second passed: an age for a program not embedded within the Matrix, an exactly proportionate time to a human's perception to a program embedded within the Matrix.
A developer unseen by the Agents would need to be a non-entity within the field. Academically gifted, but that would have triggered off alarms and monitoring had it occurred during formal education. Self-taught for sure.
The Agent ran a trace request on the various bots that had spammed security trades rapidly, interacting with simpler bots and persuading them to buy, and then disappearing with the money.
Money was normally traceable within the Matrix. It was, after all, simply a data value, that can be transferred from one site on a metaphorical spreadsheet to another.
But money was disappearing when these transactions occurred, only to later be reabsorbed and rebalanced into the system as a whole slowly.
It was noticeably rebalancing monies into health-care and humanitarian efforts more rapidly.
Human compassion, but too fast to be human within system: Program?
The Agent ran through the list of exiled/traitor programs and machines.
One of the Seraphim is possible. Agent-level resources, hardware functions mean undetected by current iteration, us, but unlikely, Seraphim retreated from active usage after third reset.
Exile? Too many to count, possible reproductive systems not properly processed into an equivalent within the system and as such are reproducing rapidly with in-system with financial trade programs, but seems unlikely. Possible multi-layered ploy to encourage rebels to find the location of Zion by bolstering compassionate efforts? Rejected, seems ridiculous.
External humans? Zionists have Matrix access from secure entry points, are known to enter, possible creation of AI in reality to combat our own to attain admin-esque controls and allow them to have nigh-total secrecy in their actions?
High chance, though robophobia still rampant: need testing to verify.
The Agent disappeared in a great effect of absolutely nothing occurring but a slight blockiness of his shadow before he left.