- Urban Legends -

Summary: Within the Matrix, two young sleepers are dreaming of an awakening. They do not fully understand the nature of what they seek, but the urban legends of their online world – snatched whispers of saviours holding answers - beckon them forward and alight their minds with questions. [A One Shot Story / Set Between The Matrix and Reloaded]

Acknowledgements: A bit of a rambler, this one, but something close to me. It's a dip back into something that truly struck me about the first Matrix, before the epic storyline and fascinating themes really took to the spotlight. That adolescent pain of not belonging, of not understanding the world, and thinking you're the only one who feels that way.

In The Animatrix and The Matrix Comics, we got a closer look at coppertop life. The Kid that worships Neo, the hacker who took the blue pill, strange and unexplainable happenings, the hushed whispers about things the men in suits don't want you to hear. This is a tribute to the sleepers who dreamt of answers.

Quiet. Dark. Warm. A gentle whir, a cool pale light, all generated by my machine. It's like floating in subspace. Pure ambience. The chat client's cheery notification jingle pierces my ears.

Crasher: r u still awake

I lift my head up slowly and glance at the clock in the corner of the screen. It's two in the morning. Damn, I need to stop doing this to myself. Across the room, my bed lies in disarray; it's an unwelcoming maw of tangled pyjamas and old blankets, the teddy bear-patterned remnants of my childhood. Why is it that this hunk of plastic and wires feel so much more familiar than those sheets?

Crasher: u need to see this

I shove a few strands of hair back under my headphone band to keep them off my face. Twisting the locks between my fingers, I grimace. Greasy as hell. One of the many joys of being a teenager. Great, now I'll have to get up early and wash it, on top of sleep deprivation.

I grab lazily for the mouse as Crasher continues to spam me. My brain is only just getting into gear, and as always, I feel displaced. It's hard to put it into words. The sense of floating doesn't stop, it just travels up to my head and stays there. Almost like I'm hovering, just above my body. Like my mind isn't in my skull, but somewhere else, somewhere outside, looking in.

Does everyone get this sensation when they're sleepy? Surely they do, it must be normal. But is it really natural, just because everyone feels it? That doesn't mean it belongs. I should ask Crasher, he thinks like I do. That's why we're friends. Well, that, and the fact that we're both pretty desperate for company.

Ping. A link comes through. Finally, my eyes start to focus. The beady eyeholes on Crasher's avatar stare out at me, silently. In pixels, his masked face looks pretty intimidating. If you happen to find a tattooed skull threatening, that is. It loses some of its potency when you've seen the article in real life and realise it's just a kid's paper mask with some permanent marker scrawls on it. Still, a little Photoshop goes a long way.

Crasher: take a look man it's CRAZY

Alice: Got it off the forum?

Crasher: yea it's legit, it's from gigamight, says he got it off the cop's comps

I take a look. The picture takes a while to load, slow-mo avalanching onto the screen chunk by chunk. The resulting image is brutally visceral, but also brutally anticlimactic; the wreckage of Glenn's Garage, an old car repair shop perched on the outskirts of the city. They say it was a bomb, planted after some terrorists stormed the place and tore through the surrounding public like tissue paper. The story's been on the news all week, rammed again and again into our faces as if we'd forget unless they reminded us.

Crasher's picture is taken from an angle different to that the news programmes and papers show. No police tape yet, no chalk outlines. This is the real thing, with real bodies. Maybe it sounds heartless, but there's little shock value now. You get your hands on your first computer, fuel the machine with morbid curiosity, and soon enough it's hard to stay disturbed by anything you see. Eventually you twig that as bad as something is, it's just a matter of time before the media uproots it and replants the soil with even worse content.

Alice: Yeah Crash, I know. What about it?

Crasher: check out the right side, man, go close

I rub my eyes to try and shake off the last vestiges of sleep before peering into the photo. The rubble of the garage takes up the centre of the image, breaking up the horizon. Grey, fuzzy ghosts of buildings arc out like wings, bearing down over the strewn corpses.

It's hard to notice it, if you don't have someone to point it out to you. You're so distracted by the carnage that it almost doesn't register. Two figures, black impressions of humans, like an artist's quick preliminary sketch to capture the motion of his subjects. They're running, I think, past the scene that engulfs ninety percent of the shot.

A suit, a coat.

Alice: The suit guys again? You know it makes sense for there to be G-men at a crime scene, right

My hands are slow to type the words. I always do this, playing the devil's advocate to Crasher's schoolboy hype. Maybe I get some kind of kick from it, a sense that I can finally be the mature one. Sometimes, I wish I didn't have to be that way. Like now.

He's right, after all. It seems like every serious crime these past two months has been punctuated by photos of the men in black suits - photos that are always sealed behind a damn strong firewall. The men in the suits rarely appear in the public news footage. Well, of course, there are plenty of guys in suits, but… There's something creepy about these people. The cut and colour of their clothes are identical; it's a strict uniform. They wear shades that hold nothing but blank expressions beneath. It doesn't matter how awful the accompanying scenery is – blood, bones, all manner of destruction – none of them seem to be having the slightest emotional response to their environment. At least the suits on the news frown, or cry, or hang their heads in pain.

Crasher: ok ok but u see the one in that cape thing?

Alice: Yeah?

Crasher: he's been showing up lots lately too - you know, with the suit guys. this isn't the only pic

A pause.

Crasher: they're saying it's Neo

I get chills along my arms. Trinity. Morpheus. The new cyber-cowboy, the one called Neo. The stalkers of the deep, mentioned only in passing, pursued by the brave and the stupid. Months might go by with no sign of their presence, and people start whispering that they were captured, or killed, or simply finished. But then they'd snap out from the darkness, and once they made contact with you, you'd probably never be heard from again. And if we did hear from you, you wouldn't be the same anymore.

Before long, you'd go of your own accord.

Alice: This again? I don't buy it.

Crasher: u can't say it's not him

Alice: All these guys saying Neo's some kind of crazy kung-fu priest, it's not right.

Crasher: wat do u mean?

Alice: That's not what we're about. Neo's one of us, like Trinity and Morpheus, they wouldn't be doing stuff out in the open.

I met Crasher during my second week of college. Secondary school had been a quiet time. We had a field back then, and flowers too. You don't have to be lonely when you have plants. All you have to do is focus hard enough, and you start to see the patterns and numbers that form them.

College had no plants. College had concrete.

Crasher found me at the cafeteria, jotting down notes. I was trying to think of ways to remake AntiCMOS. After sneaking past and looking over my shoulder a few times, he finally decided it was worth making contact with me. Had a couple of ideas in him, too.

We don't talk much at college. A quick meet-up sometimes, relaying any important news and exchanging hardware we've been messing with in our free time. There's no need to spend ages socialising. We see each other every night online. You don't ever need to meet your friends in real life, it only makes it harder to say what you really mean.

Crasher: I kno wat u mean but u can't just fight the system with hacking u need to get out there

Alice: You really think the world is run by guys in suits?

Crasher: well if not who runs it

Alice: An old man with a white beard.

Crasher: lol u mean god? :P didn't take u for a religious nut

Alice: You're the one who thinks there's a computer hacker flying around and blowing stuff up.

Crasher: well I kno 1 thing for real, Neo isn't just some urban legend, he's getting things done

Alice: If it is Neo, why do so many civilians get killed?

Crasher: it's not him killing them it's the suits, it's what I keep tellin guys

Crasher: no one gets it! he stops them from doing anything worse I bet

No one knows exactly what they want from us. Nobody comes back to tell us what happened. The enigma is what drives us to find them, the desire to find answers to a question we barely understand ourselves. But is this really what it's all about? Fights in the run-down parts of the city, government men, civilian bodies decorating the rubble?

Crasher: this is our time. they're active, we gotta move. u thought bout buying a dog yet?

Along with his anonymous avatar, Crasher likes to flaunt his cyber-criminal paranoia by employing his own set of code words and phrases. I'm sure he must have a comprehensive dictionary stashed in a false-bottom draw somewhere, elegantly defeating the purpose of using a code in the first place. 'Buying the dog', believe it or not, is one of his better allegories. After all, this is the kid that truly thinks 'chatting with the masons' is a sufficient espionage term for researching firewalls.

Alice: Not yet. I just can't pick the right dog.

Crasher will attack anyone, especially when he knows he might not get away with it. His preferred odds are usually 80/20 in his favour, because although victories keep his reputation afloat, the allure of arrest and media attention is strong. I guess it makes him feel like a proper cyber-cowboy when he knows he could become a martyr at the hands of the white-collar powers that be.

It's not that I'm doubtful of my skills, nor that I'm worried about the consequences. I just want my first real attack to be special. The legends are remembered for their motives. They don't go after any old business, they find something reprehensible to punish, or warn the foolhardy ones that refuse to protect their customers properly.

Alice: I'll find a puppy soon. I want to pick one that they would like, too.

Crasher: you won't meet Neo with that 'tude, step it up

I want to meet Morpheus, though. Neo might appeal to someone as energetic as Crasher with all his flashy rumours, bursting into the photographs of nearly every recent shoot-out. But Morpheus is quiet and patient. Neo hasn't stopped since he first showed up, but it's taken years for Morpheus to slowly grow his web presence.

Crasher's real name is Theodore Bradley, Teddy to his enemies. He chose the username because it sounds cool, or so he insists. You know, like a computer crash, or someone crashing a party. It's multi-layered. The guys on the forum seem to like it, which is all that really matters.

I had a show-off persona too, once, but I changed it. It didn't take long to think of my new name. Alice…

It was the first time I'd ever seen evidence of Morpheus' activity, as opposed to simple reports. Crasher met me by the park and grabbed my arm, bubbling with excitement about something he just had to show me. We ended up at his house, my arm sore from his tugging. He booted up his computer and shoved me down on the seat in front of it.

"It's a screenshot," he said, "a real screenshot, dude! Look, it's Morpheus, he got into hyperion86's computer, look!"

And so I looked. The image was low res, but clear enough. I could still read the words, the ghosts of neon green that shone out against the darkness.

"Follow the white rabbit."

Something clicked. I know, I know, that sounds cliché as all hell, but I don't know how else to put it. It was like I suddenly realised that the solution to all my problems, all my questions, all my fears… was just there. Somewhere, with Morpheus. Maybe I couldn't find them myself, maybe they were hidden, but he could guide me to them.

Morpheus, just waiting to explain everything to me – even things I hadn't thought of, questions I hadn't asked. Why does my body feel so alien? Why are computers and numbers my only comfort? Why is it that Crasher, loud, dumb, fun Crasher, can talk more sense than my tutors?

I want to be Alice, able to just slip away into the undergrowth and chase after my white rabbit. No domineering sister, rigid in her thinking, holding me back and giving me the same tired answers that I just know can't be right. No, no, a wonderland instead, where things sound wrong yet hold more truth in them than all the facts in the textbooks.

No one ever gets my username. Most think it's my real name, and tell me I need to change it if I want to stay anonymous. I don't care, though. I believe that Morpheus will understand me, if he ever finds me.

Morpheus, I believe, I really do.

Alice: You're right.

Crasher: always am! ;)

Alice: I'm being serious Crash! We need to do this.

Crasher: get a dog?

Alice: Stop with the code words, no one is monitoring you!

Crasher: aw :(

Alice: We're going to do this properly. Combine our forces, do something BIG.

Crasher: serious dude? this is the best! u got ur fire back!

Alice: Yeah, why not – we need to have each other's backs on this though, okay? We're gonna pick a target that needs shaking up, it's what they'd want. Either we get away with it and Morpheus comes to find us, or we fail and ruin our lives forever.

Crasher: YEAH MAN SOUNDS RAD! :D don't forget neo too ~

I can't help but smile. Yes, this is officially the stupidest thing I've ever considered. I can end it now, tell him I'm joking. But I don't want to hide anymore. I've been the devil's advocate too long, playing with machines and chiding Crasher while he gets his name out there. It's time I joined him. If I really want answers as much as I say I do, then it's time to stop making daisy chains.

Time to follow my little white rabbit.

Alice: Stay behind after college, we can talk targets. We need to act quickly, but if we're reckless they won't want to find us. It needs to be perfect. Perfect goal, execution, escape. Coordination is going to be key.

Crasher: u think we gonna run in to the suits?

Alice: Government people aren't allowed to hurt you without reason, you watch too many action films. Don't be a baby.

Crasher: hey im not scared just worried bout u

Alice: Sure, whatever.

Crasher: ur really serious bout dis?

Alice: You need to take it seriously too Crash!

Crasher: no no no I am! just surprised man, im so happy, wanted to do dis with u for so long :) im gonna make u proud boss lady

It's late now. School tomorrow, time to turn off the computer, my sweet lifeline. My mind is buzzing with ideas, plans, fears, thrumming away incessantly like a high-power machine. I don't want to wait a second longer, but we can't do anything else until we've met up and discussed it in detail. Patience, right? I just need to tell myself to be patient, like Morpheus. Okay, settle down. The ball is rolling, and the hard part is out of the way. One last goodbye to Crasher.

Crasher: k dude, sweet dreams

No more dreams, Crash, no more urban legends, no more conspiracy. From now on, it's going to be about reality. I crawl into bed and pull the covers over my head. Block out this world, this cage that feels so wrong. Come and free me, please. Morpheus, Trinity, Neo, anyone.

Free my mind.