This is the real. She kept telling herself that. It had seemed like the idea should stick: the smell of engine grease. Crawling under tangled nests of cables. Trying (and failing) to get the grip strength needed to tighten down an assembly. But in the back of her mind, part of Winter felt like she was still dreaming bluepill dreams.
The job—and many others she had to do—were designed for a man. Someone stronger than she was should be doing this: biceps rippling down an arm, torquing bolts into place with this large-handled wrench. Maybe he'd sweat a little. Wipe a brow with the back of one hand. Men did that. They certainly did not feel like a small child, dangling at one end of a steel handle trying to force home a stubborn bolt.
She bore down: teeth clenched, trying not to hiss out her breath with the effort. Lean into it, let her body weight do the work. It moved—a bit. Maybe that was a quarter-turn, but at least it was something. A few more like that and it would be…well, good enough. They had far too much to do to be able to do it all perfectly.
When she had signed on for her captaincy, Winter knew that it would be hard. She'd expected to rise to the challenge, and for that first month she had even done well. But now it was starting to wear on her. The ship was small, but still—she had inherited a 5-man craft and only had a two-man crew. Again, that lurch in her stomach: that weird disconnected feeling that made her feel sick. Whenever she thought of "the ship" or "her crew" it always seemed to buckle reality around the edges. Something just didn't feel right. Hydracus, she thought. His name is Hydracus. How could she not handle that? Simple, that voice told her. You're going insane. The inner voice had developed a rather nasty chuckle.
They'd been on the same ship together, but they'd been on it too long. Over a month away, and both of them having to work double shifts. If you could even call them that: more like double-plus. All she knew was that, if Hovercrafts really broke this often, it was a wonder any of them ever finished a single journey out. What must it have been like before the truce? When they'd had to outrun the Machines, hide in dead tunnels, rest shaky hands on EMP kill-switches? "It's okay," Hydracus had explained to her. "When they get this old—and battered—this much maintenance is just the nature of the beast." And he'd flashed that grin of his. The grin that made her want to slap him, hard, across the face.
Irrational anger: there we go Winter, a sure sign that you've been out here too long. Other things tended to fire up her temper, but her irritation usually came and went. And in the matrix, it was all smiles and sweetness. Where else could she fly? A stubborn bolt would be a matter of Focus, a twist of reality, and flexing muscles that didn't exist. She wouldn't even need to feel that liquid swish in her brain that came with a new program loaded into her buffer.
Sometimes her RSI felt like an extension of herself, but most of the time it was like a superhero costume. Once, when she was a child, her mother had shown her a cartoon. It was a grainy feed, dumped from endless iterations of bootleg videotape: warbled sound, Gaussian bend to vivid colors. The voices seemed to only carry two extremes: hyperactive shrill squeaks, and hyperactive deep thundering in clipped tones, none of it in a language she'd ever heard. She loved to read, but still had to squint—blurry subtitles rippled by, and she caught few words with each pass.
The people in the cartoon all lived normal lives—until the sirens went off. Next thing you know, there was running down hallways, shouting, chaos…and they climbed into these giant robots. It was like they had a giant second body: mechanical, superior, slave to their every wish.
That was what the matrix felt like to her most of the time. Giant robo-suit, tiny girl inside. Exhilirating, tinged with vertigo, and all of it unreal. It was all she'd ever known, but now it was alien every time she went back. Seeing familiar places was like coming home had been, her first summer after a full year away at college: nothing had changed except her—and that had changed everything. She'd started a new life, now, and the things she saw were best left behind. Even her mother seemed older, and less close to her. It hadn't hurt at the time, but now the pangs kicked in when she thought of it.
Back to work. Sorry, nasty voice: no time for you now. Too much to do. Hydracus had left her a list when she'd awakened. She thought she heard his exhausted snores even through the steel door that sealed him into his quarters. Looking over it, she'd shaken her head: these things now seemed all too familiar. And repetitive. And grueling, at times, like the cable retainer that had come loose for what seemed like the tenth time that week. Can't have cables strung out all over the floor: seems unnecessary now, but that's because nobody's sprinting down the narrow corridor with sparks flying while the floor pitches crazily under you.
She'd like to think they'd never have a crash…or return to the days when everything out there could kill you…but that kind of thinking would get you caught out and killed quick. She'd heard that in the bad old days, Operatives might get confused in a fight-or-flight situation: trying to Hyper-Jump across a broken walkway, or fight one of the Medusas one-on-one using their Kung-Fu.
That's what was wired into their combat response, locked away in their brain and only lacking the right interface. Winter could easily see herself trying to feel that slushing sensation of Hyper-Speed dumping into her cortex, and instead getting tangled, falling face-first to the floor in a mess of unsecured cabling. So back to work they went, fixing shorts, chasing vermin (of all things) away from gnawing on the cables, and patching everything that malfunctioned, shorted out, or rotted from all the damp that hung in the air.
She didn't like to think of the matrix: not in the sense of the real. The idea that everyone she'd ever known and loved as a bluepill were really slabs of dreaming meat, lying dormant in who knew where, could unhinge your sanity if you thought too long about it. Was her mother really her biological mother? She probably wasn't.
Stop thinking about that, the voice told her. It wouldn't do much good to have Hydracus find her crying in a tunnel. Part of her wanted that: the animal part of her mind craved comfort, the presence of another living being. Lucky him, he was it. But that was what bothered her about the feeling: it wasn't valid. Wasn't the way she'd be if she were around other people. Cabin fever aside, she didn't dislike Hydracus; she was just not normally this "clingy". Or clingy at all, really.
Everyone on a crew had their own ways of dealing with being shut up in a ship for weeks on end. Hers was to try to socialize, during downtime: it had been so easy with Eddie's charisma: he'd chat with you any time. But Hydracus…for some reason, Hydracus dealt with isolation by avoiding her. Winter supposed that he exiled himself to keep from having to deal with the frustration: loneliness seemed to grant him some form of tranquility. He'd proven it by not even being there when Eddie left the ship.
They were both still in mourning over the loss of Eddie. He'd gotten out of control, his behavior erratic. And then, one day, he left. "I've found a new home," he beamed. He'd been frustrated with their companions in the Machine faction, and it seemed that he'd made a few friends in Zion along the way. Winter had smiled warmly: "Of course I support you." And, with sadness: "I just can't come with you." She'd put on a brave face, but after the hovercraft's door had closed shut with a very final clang, she'd been glad Hydracus had decided to hole up somewhere, because then the tears had flowed. Eddie had always been someone who lived life with the pedal to the floor and the throttle full open: Winter could never be that.
Control yourself, girl. Always control: keep things bottled up. She'd thrown herself into her work, spent weeks staying on top of the crew shortfall. And the whole time, Hydracus had been a voice over the comm, or a list left on the counter. She was a bit worried about his isolation: she'd learned how to read server logs, picked up the skill of packet-sniffing, traffic monitoring—the whole nine yards. And nothing she saw indicated that he had ever logged into the matrix. Not once. Not once since Eddie had left. Winter wasn't sure if that was good for him: they all needed escape from this…ugly gray reality of steel and wire, and worrying smells that came and went whenever the equipment heated up. You didn't just need to be a strong mechanic to do this, she realized: you needed to be a trained psychologist. Was it a good thing that she'd never seen him on? Or seen him, ever? That voice prodded her. The nausea tried to slide up her throat again: she didn't like running down that train of thought.
There was a secret she'd kept: the Machines had asked her to. They didn't often give reasons, but she was sure there was a purpose to their enforced discretion. Just the same, the holding back was enough to make her feel different from everybody else. They'd talk and she'd have to smile, nod, and act like she knew what they were talking about.
When they talked about their Operator, for example: because Winter didn't have one. Hadn't had one. Being on a small ship had made her resourceful. Learning how to re-wire one of the jacks was a fairly simple affair: she had tapped off the brain-jack, spliced the wires into an array of electrodes, and modified the field of dispersal to directly hit the frontal lobe. Old tech—the way Real people used to jack in, to whatever they'd had before the Matrix—and the only time she'd broken a sweat was when she tested the manual kill-switch. Neural current tests had all cleared out in sim, of course: no way was she going to fry her brain because the Machines couldn't seem to spare another crew member. But it worked. It got her in, and out
Maybe that was why Hydracus had stayed away; but then, he could always just ask her to Operate for him. Her gut clenched, and she stayed away from the idea. There was just something wrong about the fact that all she could seem to remember seeing of him was a face on a screen.
A face on a screen, a list on the table. She looked down at the agenda, scratched off another thing to do: re-attach assembly, port-aft-lower hull, generator feeds. Done, Hydracus. She'd seldom had to repair the exact same thing, but at the same time it seemed like she'd rebuilt the whole ship from stem to stern. And she knew Hydracus wasn't taking it easy: she could tell when he'd patched something. If ever a Captain could claim to know every last inch of their ship, it was her. She'd see a cable slightly out of plumb and know it had been set with a new bracket. Or there'd be welds where she'd been afraid to step the week before. He had been here, alright.
The nausea suddenly hit her, and she reeled over to one wall. My god, she thought. What is the matter with me? Stood up too fast—that's all. Just can't go doing that after exerting yourself on your knees, or bent down behind a piece of floor paneling. It had nothing to do with
Hydracus.
Dropping to her knees now, deep breaths. Slow and steady. Her vision dimmed at the edges, and suddenly it didn't matter because she was seeing something from the inside. Her eyes were on disconnect while her brain played back the picture-show, The Great Hydracus Story, Starring Hydracus.
When had she last seen him?
Really seen him?
Think, girl!
Heard him snore. Sometimes she woke up thinking she heard the CLANG! of the door to his cabin. Face on a screen. A face on a screen. Flat, two-dimensional. Talking to her on the comm from the other side of the ship. Her mind started to race: images whipped past, and she began to grow frantic: face on a screen, noise in the halls. Piece of paper on the table…every event of the past few weeks was wrong. That's what had been bothering her, and now the nausea bent her double, already on her knees: the emotional punch of realizing what her own mind had been concealing from her, knowing the awful truth would unhinge Winter and send her screaming into insanity. Floodgates opened, and the hell of knowledge yawned and spoke:
She had not seen him. Not once. His bluepill name was…it was…she couldn't remember. Agent Gray. The only other "person" she'd seen. Something there—an odd, half-remembered dream of lying down. Her eyes came open, he was looking down at her. "It's destabilizing," he'd said. She couldn't see who he was talking to, but that cold inhuman demeanor remained unmoved. "In sector" White noise then. His lips moved, but it was like he was speaking in code. She could understand that concept, even if her ears couldn't parse any data from the patterened buzz and hiss that seemed to rattle its way down to her. Down, down…and once more she was asleep.
He couldn't be there: couldn't be. Gray is an AI. He doesn't have a body!
Forehead inches from the floor, teeth gritted and eyes now shut tight, WinterMute rocked forward and fell. Head thumped gently against the hard steel floor grate, and she tumbled to one side. Curled up in a ball, she was dimly aware that she was gasping. And making an odd series of barks with each breath. Her vocal cords felt strained, and she couldn't tell if it was laughter or great choking sobs.
She was alone. She was, and had been, really and truly alone. The bluepill lie of the Matrix opened up on a redpill lie of a life. There was no Hydracus, she was sure of it. He and Agent Gray—and the ship—had all been another program that loaded when the Matrix disconnected her. That's why the secrecy. That's why no Operator.
The clamp holding her mind shut had come loose, and all those little oddities and stray thoughts suddenly leapt up and seized her. She lay in the grip of a logic stream that forced its way through the right brain and into the left. It had the sure focus of a sequence of theoretical numbers: back in class, making all the pieces fit into place on the blackboard, now dropping all the other pieces that represented her grip on the world.
Static hiss. Snow of another kind: the memory of trailing videotape. Mama, was the cartoon over again? Did I fall asleep? Yes, honey. She'd remembered, in a very vague way, all those times as a little girl that she'd fallen asleep and awakened the next morning, safe in her own bed, somehow dressed in clean PJs. It was a comforting feeling: her mother always there, keeping her safe.
The sound of Agent Gray's voice shattered it all into a million pieces. "Ms. Meyers," he breathed, and her eyes slid open. Bright white overhead lights, made worse with the contrast of dull gray walls. "Congratulations, Ms. Meyers: your time with us has already proven quite…" That eerie neck-twist they did, like clockwork. It was like the programmer for the Agents only knew one way to write "dramatic pause" into their subroutines. "…useful," he finished.
She sat up. Her mouth was dry, as if filled with paste. "Guh," was all she managed, before he put up a hand. Finger to the side of his lips, he awkwardly shushed her. "Shh…it is no use trying to talk yet, Ms. Meyers. You have been…speechless…for…rather longer than you think." She hated the way they drew out their sentences: as if they had all the time in the world. Which, she supposed, they did.
Smug bastards. Winter had certainly had her fill of Zion when she'd become willing to cast her lot with these inhumans. At one time, they would shoot her on sight, ripping up her RSI and casting her into that non-death time and again.
He handed her a glass of water. No—that wasn't right. He wasn't really there. He'd "left it" on the table. Best not to try to figure that one out: too unimportant, too many other things it would knock loose from the tower of alphabet blocks she was trying to re-arrange into her sanity. She picked up the glass, held it in front of her to eclipse his face on the screen. Clear, heavy, the water looked like mercury, tasted like being reborn. Awake. Her brain un-fuzzed and she realized that for quite a while the sensation of waking up hadn't at all been this tangible. Her brain felt like it had weight and mass for the first time. That odd sensation was very clear to her deepest animal instincts: she'd just had one long waking dream. Like those nights as a bluepill when she'd dream she'd awaken, realize it was a dream…and do it again. Repeating the cycle until the real one told her that this was wakefulness.
Gray was speaking again, that dreadful monotone. Something about psychological batteries, combat stress…preparedness? What was he talking about?
"And that is why you've made a useful subject to us. With your…insight…we feel we have a very close understanding of what it will take to make Zion fall."
Oh, god. A guinea pig: they'd just turned her against her own people, used her to undo humanity. Whatever knowledge they'd gained by toying with her mind, she hoped they had no goddamn clue what to do with it. Agents like Gray were a hairsbreadth away from destabilizing and going renegade, like Smith had. Just as Zion seemed to cling too hard to the idea of freeing everyone right now!, so too did the Machines sometimes swing to the other extreme: kill the humans, lobotomize what's left, make blind idiot-batteries and save everyone the trouble. As if this world weren't nightmare enough, Gray served as a reminder that it could get a hell of a lot worse. She gritted her teeth, hoped they weren't still monitoring her vitals.
"You seem…disappointed."
Bastards. They were still reading her. And to them, anger, horror, fear and determination—all those complex emotions that humans balanced so well—translated to "disappointment." As if humanity were a spilled cup of coffee, and her without a mop.
Winter was completely disoriented. The stark, overlit room gave no clue as to what she should do next. Return to the ship? Was there a ship? Did she have a room at the Machine "city", or was that all imaginary too? She was sure Agent Gray would open his mouth any moment now, resume that drawn-out business monotone, and give her instructions as to what to do next. A stray thought that ran through her mind:
This is the real.