Disclaimer: The Wachowski Brothers, Warner Brothers, Joel Silver, and any number of other people own the rights to The Matrix and any and all related characters/content. Not me.
Caveat: If anyone has read my Beetlejuice fan fiction they know I am the queen of super short chapters. I apologize for this, but such is the nature of my muse. She makes me break things up in a certain way and I must obey her.
Synopsis: In the first Matrix movie, Morpheus speaks of one who was able to bend and shape the Matrix to his will and who began to free the first humans from their machine-imposed fantasy. That person sticks in my mind. Knowing the nature of myths and legends I don't think he was really able to affect the Matrix like that. I think he was just a clever hacker kid who had the skills to get himself to wake up from the goo pod. But how did he do it? Who helped him along the way? Where did the myth come from? These are questions I hope to answer. This began as one story, but as it unfolded I began to see that this just might end up being a trilogy. I'm kind of hoping not, because I just don't have the patience for three stories around one plotline lol, but it is at least going to be two stories. What you are reading is the first. I hope you enjoy it.
I now present to you: In The Beginning...
Imagine, if you will, a city. A city not unlike our own. Tall buildings in the downtown area, farmlands on the outskirts. It could be Tokyo. It could be Chicago. It could be London. It could even be Cincinnati.
Imagine within this city are millions of people, going about their lives, oblivious to much of the world around them. They get up in the morning, go to work, eat lunch, come home, watch television, spend time with their children and their spouses, and go to bed each night convinced that they know their place in the world. This is the world we know. This is the world as it is today.
Now, imagine a man. Imagine his name is Christopher. Christopher, unlike every other human being in our city, is not sure of his place in it at all. His dreams are troubled and make him question reality. It is of Christopher that we will now speak.
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Christopher worked in the IT department at a Credit Union. He kept the software running, provided upgrades to the Credit Union PCs, wrote firewall software to prevent hackers from stealing the millions of dollars the Credit Union had as assets, and hated his job. True, he could come in and leave when he wished and still "earn" a full forty hours of pay. True, as long as he did his job the Credit Union looked the other way when he brought his own projects to work with him. However, after one takes the three hundredth call asking why the email isn't working one can imagine becoming somewhat disillusioned with the job. Regardless of pay and flexibility, IT and tech support isn't exactly the most rewarding of jobs to have.
In his younger days Christopher had served as a quasi black marketeer. After the movie Hackers had come out and his friends had begun trying to become the next Zero Cool or Acid Burn, Christopher had begun writing bits of software (that could never be traced to him) to give his friends the illusion of "Hollywood Hacking." He himself, meanwhile, laughed up his sleeve at his gullible friends as he built a large arsenal of computer skills that would be sure to land him a lucrative career in the future.
Now though, after obtaining a degree in computer programming and software creation and pursuing the career he had dreamed about as a young hacker kid, he was troubled. Things in Christopher's life had become somewhat routine. He had fallen back into some of his old hacker circles and was astonished by the number of his friends who had been imprisoned for identity theft or other cyber crimes. Apparently, while Christopher had been frittering his life away at the Credit Union hacking had become the pursuit of thieves and scoundrels instead of petty troublemakers.
More than that, though…Christopher found that some of his old friends and acquaintances had simply disappeared. Here one day and gone the next. It troubled him. Living in the twenty-first century had given him a healthy dose of paranoia, comparable to the next human, but for people to simply disappear? It was positively unsettling.
Which brings us to the present moment, and brings us to Christopher's apartment late one Sunday night. This is where I leave you, gentle reader, and the tale begins of its own accord.
