Agent Smith rebooted.
He sat in an alley somewhere. His suit was perfect, his hair was perfect. Everything was normal except that he hadn't formed inside one of the human shell programs, like he was supposed to. And his earphone was dead.
Smith tried harder to listen. A human trait, that, one he'd started to learn. Something worked or it didn't. You heard something or you didn't. The problem was that he didn't want to accept what he heard. He heard nothing. That meant he wasn't connected to the Matrix anymore. He wasn't receiving signals from the God Machine.
He remembered having his code blown apart by Anderson. The world had blown apart from the inside. Then it felt like he could hear everything, everywhere. Now he was in an alley. Alone.
Smith stood up. Everything felt different. Agents' suits didn't get dirty. His was covered in muck from where he'd been sitting. Agents didn't feel cold. They didn't notice the wet. Now he felt both.
"Everything that I hate about this place… I feel more of it. Anderson infected me," Smith said quietly. He felt cold all over his body. Anderson rubbed his arms. He felt like snakes crawled under his skin. He couldn't feel anything there.
He looked behind him. An empty, smelly alley, filled with grit and garbage. He looked in front of him. The street. A bum. Pigeons. His physical senses were distracting him. Every time the air shifted he thought someone was walking behind him.
Smith grit his teeth. He shifted his awareness to the Code world. His perception flickered. Instead of his physical sensations, he saw green data streams everywhere. He concentrated. There were no threats nearby. No Zion hackers. No agents. No one was aware of his presence.
Smith let go. He gasped for breath. He used to sense the Matrix like that constantly. Now he couldn't hold it.
"What's happened to me?" he growled. His hands clenched in rock-solid, stone-balled fists. He hadn't even known he'd made them.
Smith punched the nearest wall. His relentless fist caved in the brick like punching a bag of potato chips. It gave Smith pleasure to destroy something for no reason. He laughed at the simile that his human code generated. This might not be so bad, at least until the Machine removed his anomalous programming.
When he drew his hand back, he saw blood.
Smith screamed.