"Who would have thought? It figures!"
Another day done; another rebellion put down.
He sighed as he looked in the mirror, taking his glasses off. Were programs supposed to get wrinkles? Because he could swear that he saw some lines forming around the corners of his eyes.
He wearily studied his reflection in the mirror that he knew didn't exist. He had been in this job far too long – the wear was definitely starting to show. He had been fighting the Resistance for as long as he could remember, which was a very long time.
In the beginning, he had relished hunting down every insolent fool who thought that he could take down a machine; he enjoyed watching the faces of the men and women that he destroyed as he destroyed them. He did not question his own fascination with human pain because he knew that it was part of his program. But after killing enough humans to repopulate all of the East Coast, he began to find the job monotonous.
That was when he began to notice the appearance of wrinkles around his eyes and lips. He would have written it off to his imagination, save for he didn't have one.
He lay down in his recharging bed, enclosed within its comforting womb. He felt himself sinking into oblivion and willed it to never end.
But end it did, entirely too soon, and he still hadn't shaken the persistent feeling of weariness. He got up, looking around for his sunglasses. This was going to be a long, long day.
He met up with Jones and Rood at the warehouse; Brown was in the shop for a tune-up. They continued on to squelch an uprising here and destroy a glitch there, over and over again. It was not hard, their work, actually quite similar to flipping burgers. This was especially true if the victim was white, for they had a programmed trait of superiority and believed themselves immortal more so than any other demographic group. It was like fur trapping at a zoo.
Sometimes he wondered why he did this, what the point was, since anyone could be destroyed through unplugging them through hardware. Whenever he caught himself thinking this, he restarted his program. Sometimes he even went in for a tune-up. But that wouldn't work this time. He knew that his current fatigue could not be corrected through a tune-up. It was more deep-seated than that.
Something would have to be done.
He tried exploring the Mother Board, downloading any information that seemed remotely interesting. When that flopped, he tried updating all of the equipment that his team used, designing new programs and twisting new chairs and desks out of the fabric of the Matrix. He tried visiting a brothel. He tried eating chocolate. But it was all to no avail, because he still had persistent boredom and fatigue. And it wasn't jetlag.
Then, on the second Tuesday four hundred thousand months since his initiation, the idea came to him. This creation, for creation it was, would provide years of entertainment.
It came to him while he was considering those that he destroyed, and thinking about how depressingly easy it was to destroy them. Most of the Resistants were misguided, untrained, or just plain stupid, and they offered no challenge, no game.
Smith could create a challenge for himself, though – he could write a program, a sentient program that could make its own choices, a complex creation that would actually be a worthy adversary. A puzzle worth solving and destroying.
An AI creating an AI that would fight for the downfall of the AIs. The irony made him smirk.
He got authorization for this venture from Mother Board by telling her that it was for training purposes, to increase the efficiency of the team.
He insisted on implementing the only training program the agents ever had directly into the Matrix, for they could always delete it if there happened to be a glitch. He was confident and sure of himself while communicating with Mother Board, and for the first time in a long time he was actually looking forward to something. His weariness had passed.
The first run of the program went much better than expected, and he could feel Mother Board's confidence in him, and it felt good. More versions were written and tested, until his program was ready to be initiated.
On that day, Agent Smith would have been quivering with anticipation had he been human. As it were, the only sign of excitement was a slight increase in respiration. He remained stoic and graceful.
It smoothly integrated itself into the Matrix, as a hybrid program-human. Smith chose to implement the program into a real coppertop in the Matrix, to more precisely mimic the Resistants. The dual personalities gave it the flavor of an intelligent being looking down at a fly, stupid even compared to its own race. Mother Board named it Anderson.
Agent Smith's program waited for it to evolve; waited for its chance to take over its mind. This Anderson would receive a phone call at work, which was the transmitting device for the program. He would then be switched over, out of the Matrix 6.0 program and into the training program, without knowing anything was happening. The program would mimic the process of freeing his mind, complete with shiny goop, red goop, and muscle goop. Smith didn't know if this was the way that things happened, and didn't care. Anderson would never know the difference. It would be his reality.
It went well. The cross-over was complete.
Let the games begin.
He never figured out why his program decided to add the article "the" to his name, for he was born as just "One."