Disclaimer: The Matrix is not mine. It belongs to the Wachowski Brothers, who are much cleverer than I.
Author's Note: This started as a reflection of my own summer boredom at 1:00 a.m. one night, and somehow turned into this.
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Day in, day out. Everything was the same. Always the same. Days bled into weeks, which blurred into months, then years. The passage of time was irrelevant. The only thing that mattered was the answer to the question, the hacker's question. It was as if the meaning of his entire life hinged upon that answer he so desperately sought, exhibiting a steadfast devotion to a quest that constantly threatened to overtake him completely.
He could not tell you exactly when he disappeared from human existence, or when his feverish searches for any and all information on the Matrix began to consume what was left of his life. It was not a great loss, at any rate, for Thomas Anderson had always been disconnected from life and those around him on some level. The world bothered him, confused him. Something was wrong, something he couldn't quite put his finger on, but it was there, always there. And being out in the world just made it worse, that feeling always present in the back of his mind that he could do nothing about. His computer was his refuge. The online world made infinitely more sense than the real one. It was controllable with the right skills, and it felt more "real" to him than supposed reality ever had. The "real world"? What a joke.
Time was a societal construct that held no meaning for him. It did not progress logically as it should have; rather, it was fluid, aimlessly meandering from one weird event to the next with no rhyme or reason. He couldn't even discern what was happening in real time from what occurred in his dreams. The lines of reality blurred, mocking him mercilessly. This couldn't be normal. He must have been insane, he'd think to himself as he would once again wake up in a cold sweat, not knowing where he was or whether the events that he had just witnessed in his mind were real. It happened more often than not, perhaps a side effect of all the time he spent thinking about things that the average person wouldn't dare touch. His life was endlessly dominated by questions with no answer. Questions that could not be answered. Questions that only turned up more questions. It was a maddening and vicious cycle of reality and non-reality that promised no end in sight.
But the search was everything. It was the only thing that kept him going in this pathetic excuse of a life. It gave him purpose. Direction. Focus. Made him feel as if he were rising above the system. Yes. It was strength in a mundane world that sought so desperately to dumb him down, numb his mind. It was power, a sense of control over his own life, and he liked that. Control was everything. The thought that he might not be in control over his own life haunted him, a constant specter that hovered over his consciousness. He did his best to exterminate the ghost, to give himself a peace of mind, and thus he became an almost full-time hacker. The search for answers to the hacker's question was the only thing that could bring him comfort and reassurance that his life might not be so terrifyingly empty after all.
Searches. Command prompts. Coding. Matrix. Morpheus. Those things filled his life with a constant rhythm. Day in, day out. His heartbeat. The breath that kept him alive.