Lisa

May there be mercy on man and machine for their sins. – The Animatrix

She sat there, in the stuffy old classroom, looking at her black, chewed up fingernails. Her teacher, some old fat guy with a bad tie, was trying to teach his class the basics of human biology. If someone was listening to him, they did their best not to let it show. Not in that classroom, not in that school, not with those people.

Those people...

Lisa Heweitt (that was her name, by the way) hated each and every one of them. She wanted to see them die, because they were mean to her, because they were idiots of the worst kind and she hated them because they'd stolen her Pokémon cards in grade three, her friends in grade four, her happiness in grade five, and her confidence by grade seven.

Her teacher started barking at them for attention: at least, that's what it sounded like. He had a scratchy voice, and whenever he raised his voice to yell at them, it sounded like he'd just run a five-mile marathon.

One of the pretty girls snorted behind her. "What a loser." she whispered, to the general consent of most around her.

Lisa clenched her fist inside her pockets. The black, over-sized hoodie she wore completely concealed her face, and her green eyes...

"Lisa, take off that hood! You know you can't cover your head in class!" her teacher wheezed. Lisa looked up. I do?

"Off!" he choked out again, and Lisa flinched-almost.

The hood came off slowly, tentatively. She hadn't washed her hair in days...maybe even weeks. She wasn't that sure how much it showed...and she had a horrible feeling that miss snotty pants behind her was going to make a huge deal out of it.

"Ewwwww." came the predictable lament, but it was enough to snap others to attention. Soon, everyone in the class was staring at her tangled blonde hair.

Well, at least that's what it felt like...Lisa felt the tears coming, and wondered why it still bothered her...after so many years...

She swallowed. Her teacher turned around and faced the board, and Lisa looked down, blinking rapidly. She hated this place and its stuffy, saturated air...

Putting her hood back on and slipping her cold feat into a pair of tattered purple sneakers under her desk, she got up and slowly left the room, the teacher paying no mind to her.

Before the classroom door closed, she could hear echoes of the word "freak" and "loser" ring out into the hallway.

Lisa hated them.

She was maybe seven, maybe nine. Maybe she was younger. Or older.

Did it matter? In any case, she was short, blonde and still had green eyes. She was her own, herself-the age didn't matter.

The air was black, not translucent yet not opaque. It was dark, but not in the absent of light.

Snowflakes, right? She could see them around her.

It's winter, remember?

No, you don't. I forgot.

Sorry.

This place, this moment… It's all there, somewhere in the nerves, between the signals...in the signals... Hahaha. You laughed and twirled around, you loved the feeling of fresh snow, falling from the sky. Had you been more naive, maybe you would have thought these snowdrops were fairies.

You looked around, to see him. He had been following you, right?

He was my dad.

Wait, what?

The scream was enough to wake the house. Her older brother, in the room next to hers came in running.

She was on the floor, in nothing but a bra and jeans. She had no pajamas, or maybe she did or she'd lost them. Her room was a mess like none you could ever imagine

"Liz, shut the fuck up." her brother snapped, rubbing his eyes. "You're like a fucking banshee."

He walked back out, slamming the door behind him. Lisa looked at the door, her dark green eyes wide open and her mouth dangling, taking in as much air as she could. She had streaks of green all over her face from her makeup...

She hiccupped, lacking air. "I can't breathe." She whispered, rolling over to her side, her fingers trying to clench around something. She wanted to scream. "Mike..." but she couldn't scream. Her lungs were collapsing. She started reaching out around her, tried to feel the cold, tried to see in the dark...see the outline of her door...

She blacked out.

"Liz?"

Her brother was the only one who called her like that...Liz.

"Huh?"

"Thank you universe." her brother said, pulling her from the ground. "You gave me the willies, Liz."

She coughed. "The...willies?"

"Oh, you know." he rolled his eyes tiredly, "Come on. How're you feeling?"

"Uhh..." Lisa couldn't talk, her throat was too dry.

"Let's get you something to drink then. Put a shirt on."

She looked down at her naked stomach. She was only wearing a bra. "I...I...I'll have a shower."

She was about to walk passed him when he grabbed her arm. "Are you alright? You're not going to faint on me again, are you?"

"What happened?" Lisa asked, ignoring the question.

"Oh, last night, you were shaking and screaming. I came in...wait, you don't remember this?" her brother's tone went from worry to...relief in a millisecond.

Lisa looked away. "I'm going to take a shower."

"Okay...but if you feel dizzy or something, call for me, 'kay?" He let go of her arm, and she walked away from him, "I'll make waffles, okay?"

She didn't answer, already uninterested in what he had to say. She left the room without a word.

The bathroom was small, a grey-tiled room with only a toilet, a sink, and an old shower. The floor was little more that smoothed-out cement and the ceiling had old neon lighting. The problem with living with her pompous brother: he refused to invest in decoration. Not like Lisa was any better at it than he was. Despite her most sincere wishes, she was his sister and somehow this lack of taste and cleanliness is a quality they shared as siblings. She tiredly undid the button of her hand-me-down jeans and took them off.

She turned on the lukewarm water and stepped in, not bothering to take off her underwear or her bra. She hadn't showered in a while. She hated the feeling of the water beating down on her skin. It felt so odd...she couldn't explain it, not even to herself.

She wasn't particularly skilled with words, or with poetry. Her worst subject was English, her second worst was Art: she hated both classes almost as much as she hated the girls and boys that went to her school.

She grabbed some of her brother's "manly" shampoo (manly: not flower-scented) and sloppily put it in her hair, on her shoulders...the blue, thick liquid slowly dripped down her back, over the strap of her bra...

Lisa impatiently rinsed it all off.

As quickly as humanly possible, she was out of the shower and her brother's old baggy jeans were back up around her waist. She went to her room and put a shirt on. The shirt was white, but had a red and black symbol on the front with some Chinese symbols on them...again, an old piece that had once belonged to her brother.

"Liz?" a voice called from outside her room. "I have to go out, okay? There's waffles on the counter. Be right back."

As if it were years away, she heard the door to the apartment shut, and Lisa sighed. "I hate waffles."

Leaving her room, she wandered the apartment, touching things and seeing things and trying to remember something at least slightly coherent from the night before...She opened the fridge door as she went through the small kitchen, and saw nothing but an old can of ginger ale and a few tomatoes left rotting in a corner. She grabbed the can and drank a little.

She couldn't help but feel a little nauseous as she tried to keep the fizzy liquid down. Head buzzing slightly, she walked back down the hall towards the rooms, and decided to go into her brother's. Somewhat surprisingly, the air in there was cleaner than the air in her own room. On his bed was a stash of floppy disks and a few printed sheets full of code...He had a small room, but it only looked small because of all the clutter that decorated it. He had a desk with two monitors, a bunch of keyboards and quite a few mice...And if she looked under, she could see the hard drives, all interconnected by colored cords and circuits. A real jungle: Lisa herself had no idea how to turn on a computer, and soon lost interest in the piece of machinery.

She slumped on the ground near his bed and looked under the frame, curious. She found a few shoe boxes filled with wires and more floppy disks...she went through all his things, her purple-shaded eyebrows (she liked dying her eyebrows different colors) knitted closely together as she went through pictures, documents, scraps of paper...

She didn't know what she was looking for, so she shoved everything back under the bed, and left her brother's room abruptly, slamming the door behind her.

Her purple sneakers carried her as she was walking towards China Town. She was in the mood for the spicy, asian food that was so easy to find and cheap there. It was only about four blocks away, and if she didn't stop walking, she'd be there in a matter of minutes.

She'd pulled the hood over her wet hair, and her eyes were once again hidden from the world. She was hungry, and decided to skip the light and walk straight across, ignoring cars and honking horns.

The faster she walked, the more she felt purposeful, like she was going somewhere and it had meaning...

And that meaning was her quest for food. Lisa smiled her little smile. It was one rarely seen, and it made her face look rather strange.

Suddenly, as she was crossing a street on a red light, she saw something flicker in the corner of her eyes.

She turned around, and faced the stopped cars...except all she saw was a darkness, the outlines and shapes covered by glowing green symbols of some sort...Lisa turned around, facing the intersection, to see the same thing. Everything was black and green and Lisa stepped back, suddenly realizing her own hand that she had placed in front of her was covered in shimmering green numbers...and some other code Lisa couldn't identify. She wanted to scream: everything around her was green, even the people, even the sky, she looked to her arm and panic settled in when her fingers disappeared in a mass of moving green lines.

"Lady...uhhh...girl... you okay?"

When Lisa opened her eyes to the blinding sunlight, she found herself lying on the sidewalk, and the everything was back to normal, and everything was all right again. An older man with a black goatee was talking to her, an odd look in his eye.

"Huh? What happened?" Lisa murmured, her heart beating a mile a minute.

The man looked uncomfortable, backing up slightly. "You...uhh...crossed the street and started panicking...When you fell I thought you had a seizure or somethin'..." Lisa gave him an incredulous look.

"What..." she said, her voice weak. The man shrugged, starting to become disinterested. He held out a hand and helped her off the ground.

"Anyways, you seem okay enough. Bye then."

He walked away from her, but Lisa was already focusing on something else.

What's happening to me???

"What?..Why doesn't..."

She noticed a flicker of glowing green again in the corner of her eye, and she wondered if she was losing her mind. It might be possible. Weird, geeky, smelly, greasy...insane...why not fill in the stereotype completely? Her head started pounding, and the choking feeling returned...It was what happened last night...

This has happened before!!!

She heard a strange high-pitched noise, and her vision blurred. She could faintly see the outline of people surrounding her, and she started panicking. Yet when she tried to call out and her voice wasn't working. And she could see a faint outline: black and white covered in green spots...

"Miss Elizabeth Alice Heweitt."

"It took us a while to find the source of the distortion."

"But we finally have her."

"We take her in?"

"Now."

Lisa eyes fluttered close: and she saw no more.

When her eyes opened, she lifted her head with a groan. Her neck hurt like hell as she rolled her head forward, trying to get over the heaviness that had completely overcome her limbs. Her eyes were hurting from the intense fluorescent lighting. She had a horrible headache too.

Her vision finally focused on the light on the ceiling, and when she brought her sight lower she could see a desk, and a man on the other side.

"What is this?" she called out, her voice sounding weird to her ears. "Who are you?"

The man in front of her placed his elbows on the table, hands clasped together. Finally, after a small moment he opened a small folder in front of him, and pulled out a few papers. "You are Elizabeth Alice Heweitt, is this information correct?"

"Who the fuck are you?"

"You are 14 years and 9 months of age. You are 5"6 and you are in grade 9."

"Are you from the FBI? The government? Ghostbusters?"

The man took off his sunglasses and sighed, his face extremely serious.

"I have some questions for you, Miss Heweitt."

"I don't care." the fourteen year old muttered.

"Well, no matter. You will answer us."

"No." LIsa felt a strange sensation around her, in her skin. Something was wrong, something was going wrong again. A strange noise reached her ears, before she realized she couldn't hear anything at all...a faint sound, like the sound of a child drowning in thick, dark water...

The men in black suits gave each other looks as her eyes rolled and her head tilted back.

"What do we know?"

"She is on the edge of her own sub-consciousness..."

"A strange specimen."

"What was on the file? Risk of self substantiation?"

"Suspected, but the file has been updated. It's not possible, given that the pathways have been secured and she is not stable enough. Call Mr. Heweitt. It is his job to keep an eye on this one until we determine her a threat."

"Hey, Liz. Welcome to the dark side." He chuckled as she came about.

She turned her head to face her older brother, but her eyes stayed closed. "Mike…" she whispered. Lisa found that her head was throbbing, as if all the blood was pounding against her skull, trying to break it. It hurt to move her neck. "What's wrong with me?"

"Nothing, you've been overdoing it lately. You've always been a little sickly." Her brother said softly. She heard him rise.

"Anyways, I had to go find you at the police station. They brought you there and found your wallet and called me."

She didn't answer him, but she heard him. Lisa was just trying to figure out what was going on.

"Well, you better go back to sleep and just rest through this bug you have…Call me if you need anything. I'll be in the next room."

"Okay…" she lay back down on her pillow, reluctant to open her eyes. What if the green is back?

Irrational fear as it could have been to any other sane teenager, she was terrified. Mostly because every time she saw it, something weird happened to her.

Like the men in black suits…

She snapped her eyes open and sat up. Events and voices rushed back into her mind, and soon everything was being pulled back together. She felt her fingers close on…nothing…

Instead of a thin bed sheet, her fingers closed on nothing but green code feeding signals into her brain.

I was supposed to forget this…forget why I saw the world in green and forget why it feels like I'm choking…

The walls around immaterialized before and Lisa took it all in. The pain, the headaches, the trauma and the sicknesses could no longer bring her down, because now she knew that none of this really affected her.

She remembered something, something from long ago that had been locked away into the code and she difficultly summoned the memory back to her, closing her eyes to concentrate but unable to close out the green. Memories of how, when she was little she would cower in fear because she couldn't see or hear anything. Memories of the code drifting over the objects and the plants and people, consuming them and disappearing and reappearing. Once again, Lisa felt slightly nauseous.

She tried to say something, vaguely remembering what it looked like in all this green. "I'm crazy…" she whispered, and in the back of her mind she could almost feel the wind leave her throat…but instead of sound, she only saw green letters appear before her and travel forward and bounce of the other code before disappearing with the other green symbols…

"I'm crazy." She muttered again, more to herself, as she moved her hand forward. She remembered something from long ago, back when she had to learn how to read the code like everybody else. She tried not to laugh, but found she couldn't help it. As a little girl, her mother had often told her to stop trying so hard not to understand anything…but frankly, she wasn't trying hard to do anything…

Other than understanding this mess of code.

"I hate it. It's so ugly." Lisa said loudly this time. She didn't care how loud she was, because she knew that she couldn't actually hear it. Only the green symbols seemed disturbed by it.

She tried to touch her skin on her cheek, and found that all that happened was the code being disturbed. She willed all the disturbances to stop.

Suddenly, in her little square room, everything stopped. The code stopped and stagnated, and Lisa felt her body stop moving. She wasn't breathing anymore. Yet she was still thinking properly. Lisa laughed.

"I'm dead aren't I?" with those words the whole motion was reset, and she felt the conditions around her return to as close to normal as possible.

"Hahaha I'm thinking." She yelled out. She couldn't see her thoughts in the code…she wondered if it was possible.

"Liz?" he opened her door.

She turned her head to look at the code that made her brother up, but to her horror saw only one thing: a man who looked identical to those that had detained her earlier…the men from ghostbusters…or was it the CIA? She couldn't remember, but they were agents for something, she was sure of that at least. That and they must have something to do with the green code.

Why is everything so difficult?

"Liz!" her brother calls out again, but she doesn't hear him, only sees code leaving his mouth. She wonders if she is even reading what he's actually saying. She wonders…

"Who are you?" she screams out, and somehow the room feels shaky.

"Liz?" her brother calls out again, "What's wrong? You're all pale!" he walks towards her and she feels something push her back down on the bed.

"You should rest. Calm down."

She felt two hands push her back down on the bed, and she started laughing. I'm perfectly calm. She didn't know if she was talking or simply thinking.

I'm just not real.

"This can't be real, this just can't be real…"

She felt something strange at the base of her neck, and something pulling at the back of her mind.

"You don't exist nothing exists…"

There was a strange zapping noise, like something cracking. She couldn't feel Mike's hands or the bed she was supposed to be lying on and she couldn't see the light or the dark because everything was covered in green lettering.

"Michael…" she whispered.

Her ears filled with water and her nose and mouth were suddenly blocked and all of a sudden a brilliant yellow and orange glare reached her eyes and she screamed, trying desperately not to throw up because something was irritating the back of her throat.

I've been resting long enough!!!

Seized by her fear of water, she started trashing, feeling metal cords in her and out of her and she was screaming and trying so hard to get free of the cage she was in. She couldn't talk or breathe properly and here, wherever she was, she realized she needed to breathe. Not like before, in the green world, where she could completely stop and still live.

Her eyes opened to see lightning and darkness and an orange aura surrounding her and she finally clued in that the orange was in fact some sort of fluid.

Finally everything seemed to come undone and she felt as if she was being ripped apart and finally was able to throw up a long black metal contraption that had been stuck down her throat and she took in her very first breath, trying to get out of the water and into the air.

And as she exhaled, she screamed.

Kode

You couldn't play with human emotion like that. You couldn't erase their memories like they were some computer files you could obliterate with a tap of the mouse. You can't mess around with our minds. At some point, the human mind is going to bite back. The human mind was going to get angry.

They took him in, he was a real mind they used to observe, he was nearly free of their touch but in the most deep parts of his minds, and there they could control him. He wasn't really one of them, but he was not to be trusted. She observed him calmly, night after night when the rest of the crew was asleep. She would just stare at the code, effortlessly reading it. She knew it by heart and could read better than some of the operators that had been on the ship for nearly ten years. It gained her the nickname "Kode".

Michael Alexander Heweitt was the one she watched. His mother had always loved the name Alexander. It said so in his memory files she had hacked into one night. She wasn't supposed to go there, those were highly secure files, and if she was caught, the signal could be traced back. She was messing around with the core of the Matrix, the past.

Kode smiled, and the smile looked strange on her face, her lips twisting in a way that her face crooked. She wasn't pretty at all, even she knew this. But it didn't matter. No one on board really cared. And her friend Onyx didn't care, so she supposed it didn't matter. Looks don't matter, it's what was underneath that did.

She touched her forehead, feeling sleepy yet she knew she wasn't going to sleep that night. She needed to make sure her Michael Alexander Heweitt went to bed first. Her hand trailed down the side of her face and she was pretty sure she could still feel the machines inside her, controlling her mind, so that she could feel when the code told her to, so that she could see when the code told her too.

Angrily, she grabbed the screen and wrenched it from it's post, and the circuits went flying and the screen shattered on the floor, the glass broken.

"That's seven years of bad luck, Kode."

The voice was dark with irony. Kode turned to see the silhouette of a tall woman against the doorway of the command center, and Kode sighed.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean it." She was looking at the screen, the broken one where she had been monitoring Mr. Heweitt. "I want the green…the screen…it's broken…"

She stopped talking, knowing full well she wasn't going to be able to say what she really wanted to say.

"Come on, Kode. You haven't slept in days, you should really rest…" she came towards her, standing next to the chair Kode was sitting on.

"Onyx, if I sleep the green numbers will come back."

Onyx sighed. "You're free."

Kode clutched her pale blonde hair and resisted tears. Those cruel pearls of water…Kode flinched at the thought of water. "Not here." She said, her voice cracking. "Not right here."

Onyx sighed. She almost hated to admit it, but she could understand the younger and newer crewmember better than the others did. Onyx remembered the nightmares. She remembered the feeling that she believed her nightmares were the good dreams, or that the good dreams were really the nightmares. "Com'on Kode."

"Leave me alone." The girl said bitterly, getting over herself and fully pushing back the tears.

"Kode."

Kode stood up and faced her very suddenly, nearly knocking the other woman back a foot.

"Onyx, leave me alone. I've slept enough."

Onyx turned and left, eyes downcast, trying not to let the young girl's words hurt her. Kode watched her leave almost pathetically. When she was out of sight, Kode looked at the broken control screen scattered across the metal floor.

The human mind bites back, and doesn't like the metal bars around it. The mind is meant to be free in its dream, and the Matrix enslaved that dream. Kode hates her English class, and her Art class, and she hates her classmates and her brother and the ghostbusters and she hates them all. She hates the water in her brother's old shower and she hates the water in the cocoon she lived in for fourteen years. She hates her name. She hates her nickname. She hates Onyx and the real world and she hates her dreams and she hates, she loathes, the color green.

Kode slid down to the floor, and picked up the pieces of the broken screen, one by one.