Part Two
"What did you do, Ryuko?!"
"Me?! I didn't touch anything! It all just started goin' crazy by itself!"
All the machines in the Matrix of Time chamber beeped around a spooked Ryuko and Senketsu. Gen remained sitting in the chair at the center of the area, wearing a unique crown on her head that granted instant access into the Matrix.
"If I were to guess," Senketsu said. "These machines must keep status of her bio readings."
"Like a heart rate monitor?" Ryuko interpreted, realizing how on point Senketsu's deduction was when she glanced over to Gen, whose body convulsed with blood seeping out the corner of her mouth. "What's happenin' to her in there?"
Gen had gotten to know more about the Matrix than she bargained for, particularly the sum of how realistic the simulated reality was. Her face was in excruciating agony from the bruises she sustained at the hands of the agent that attacked her for reasons unknown.
She tried fighting back, using every form of martial arts she learned in the Mortal Kombat tournament back in a previous regeneration, but not a single blow landed on the quick-moving agent.
Barely able to stand, she managed to ask him, "Who are you?"
His answer: "The last remaining hope this world has left."
Cryptic as it was, she didn't have a moment to figure what it meant.
The agent raised his fist high, intending to land the final killing blow.
"SMITH!"
He stopped once he heard a burly voice aggressively cry out his name.
With one unbruised eye, Gen looked to see two sharply-dressed men – one African American, the other Asian – running down the alley, aiming their firearms towards the agent known as "Smith." Bullets were fired, yet the agent somehow dodged every single one, maneuvering his body in ways that were uncanny to the human physique.
Then again, this was no mere human.
That much was clear when he unexpectedly leapt high into the air, flying across the skies, much to the astonishment of Gen.
"Ma'am, are you alright?"
Her two rescuers came to her aid, helping her to stand.
"Yeah, I'm fine," she acknowledged.
"You're lucky not to have been assimilated by Smith," the Asian man told her.
"Assimilated?" Gen reacted to the term. "You mean like a Cyberman?"
He grimaced. "Cyber-what?!" Moving past the topic, he focused on his African American companion and asked, "Morpheus, could that really have been Smith? How can he still exist in the Matrix? Neo erased him."
"The Oracle mentioned a dark presence she felt growing," Morpheus said. "Smith's reemergence could have been what made her uneasy."
Becoming more and more curious by their exchange, Gen interrogated them, "I'm sorry, but how do you two know you're in the Matrix? You can't be both Time Lords…can you?"
"Time Lords?" The Asian man uttered, again baffled by the strange diction.
"How do you know you're in the Matrix?" Morpheus deflected to Gen. "Are you one of the liberated?"
Now it was Gen's turn to be confused.
"Liberated?" She questionably repeated. "From what?"
Misperception echoed among them, until Gen ultimately figured out where these two men were actually from.
"You're alive!" Ryuko joyously exclaimed right at the second she saw Gen's eyes open. The machines within the chamber ceased in their inconsistent beeps, signifying some stability in Gen's bio signature. "Are you okay? What happened to you in there?"
Gen wiped away the blood at the corner of her mouth. "I'm fine. Just got my butt handed to me by a deadly program, that's all." Without missing a beat, she got up from the chair, removed the crown off her head, and rushed out of the chamber.
Ryuko followed her while wondering how she recovered so quickly from whatever it was that happened to her in the simulation. "Maybe you oughta slow down," she suggested to the Time Lady.
"Can't," Gen refused. "Made some new friends in there that we've got to meet face-to-face."
Once they arrived in the console room, Gen brought the T.A.R.D.I.S. out of the dimensional corridor. It rematerialized on board the hovercraft that she learned about from Morpheus and Ghost. As it turned out, the two men were in fact residents of a dimension with Matrix technology similar in nature to that on her Gallifreyan ship.
It was still a mystery as to how their Matrixes intertwined.
Stepping out of the T.A.R.D.I.S. and into the dank atmosphere of the Nebuchadnezzar II, they were welcomed by Morpheus, Ghost, and their crew in the "real world." Both crews got to know one another and their fascinating stories; of course, nothing of the Nebuchadnezzar II crew could top being interdimensional travelers like Gen and Ryuko.
"Morpheus," Link summoned from the operator console he and Sparks shared. "We got something."
"What is it?" Morpheus queried.
"Well, during that encounter you guys had with what appeared to be Smith, we noticed that his code signature also appeared very familiar," Link stated.
Ghost scoffed. "Yeah, tell us something we don't already know."
"As you wish," Sparks jested. "The signature isn't familiar in the sense that it belonged to Smith…but in the sense that it belonged to Neo."
"As if they've been fused together," Gen concluded with mounting interest.
"What're you tech geeks talkin' about?!" An impatient Ryuko griped. "What does any of this mean?!"
Morpheus's countenance hardened. "It means that the Smith we encountered earlier was Neo."