Chapter 3: Prior Committments
It was a good day, he decided.
Most other observers would beg to differ. Or complain that there wasn't enough of a view to base a proper critique upon. After all, while it may certainly be a beauteous, transcendentally wondrous day on the surface, you could hardly determine that when you're sixteen feet under in the sewers of the City.
But though Agent X was standing in a fetid puddle of scum, the dribbling municipal waters slowly flowing as plague rats scurried through the tunnels, he could tell it was a good day.
He could hear the day.
Unlike most Agents, he had no RSI to speak of. Well, he did have the visual avatar- a shell, to be precise- but it was not overlaid upon a helpless native puppet. X had never needed to play the part of a possessor. He was unique among Agents. His shell was his own. He was free to use it as he liked.
And he did. Several iterations ago, Agent X had learned how to disperse his shell into a billion fragments and scatter them into the virtual winds of the Matrix. Yet, like the clouds of nanomachines that choked the skies above the Outside, his dispersed forms remained cohesive, in constant contact with each other. To compound his versatility, the shards of existence were able to interface with most of the fundamental structures of this world, allowing for full transpotation. In short, he was able to break into pieces at will- and have remote eyes and ears fly around the City.
And so they listened. He could have watched as well, but Agent X decided to remain vigilant today.
It was indeed a good day in the City. All manner of worker from the lowest shoeshine boy to the grandest robber baron (once a shoeshine boy- even the American Dream is not absent from the Matrix) traveled to work. So did the pillars of the municipal industry. The lobbyists, the lawyers, the low-paying employers went about their business. The limos carrying starlets headed for Diamond Road, the taxis herding tourists sped for Old Harlem, and Caddies full of insurgent Zionists vroomed straight into the disordered industrial slums of the Hive. X listened to the traffic, analyzed the composition, and was happy to note that crime had been on a downturn in his section ever since that nasty firefight at the warehouse district yesterday. Everyone was much more cautious for their safety, and everyone had been acting safer. Life was indeed good to-day.
Agent X did not mind contemplation, especially when it did not interfere with his duties. 'To defend and to administer.' Such was the shibboleth of the Machines who had just cause to operate in the Matrix. In reality the former task was to be fulfilled by the security avatars- the Agents- of Precinct Zero. The latter was the task of the savant analysts of the Expert System. But all too often the simpering scholars of the latter spent most of their existences in the Machine World, and the reality was, well- Agents handled both jobs. And they did so with their typical mathematical efficiency and cold ruthlessness, emphasizing the violence of defense, paying the least possible amount of attention of maintaining the well-being of the natives. Always running about, gunfighting, killing. Never stopping to smell the roses. Well, X didn't operate like that- not his style at all.
Not that he had ever actually smelled roses. But if he could, he might have considered doing so.
The City was indeed the capital of the Matrix. All roads led to here, not to mention hard lines to the Outside and portholes to the... other outside. Not even New York, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, or Sydney compared in size and scope. (For some odd reason, the Machines had deigned to establish much infrastructure outside of North America, Western Europe, and East Asia. There were certain regions in the world where one could go thousands of kilometers without ever encountering a hard line or porthole- and hence neither a Zionist nor Agent.) The City itself was such a massive conurbation and chock-full of openings that it might as well have been at the nexus of millions of electronic ley lines. And so many Agents patrolled it. Three by three, and occasionally in ones, they waged an unending crusade against the insurgents and their quixotic quests for freedom.
And so this slice of town was Agent X's domain, his personal fiefdom. Many triumvirates passed through it, though- they usually were more mobile than the few of their brethren- him included- who guarded their zones alone. It was no matter; Agents did not experience loneliness except when it meant that they had been outnumbered. But considering the immense equalizer that their speed, precision, and sheer brute force gave them, well- Agents don't ever get lonely.
But they do get bored, occasionally. It was a rare quirk, and something that not even switching off emotional simulators could remedy. Once you have a sufficiently intelligent and self-aware program- even a reticent, faceless Agent- you tend to get behavioral anomalies that could roughly translate into emotions such as boredom.
Long periods of inaction spark ennui. In most it manifested as enhanced alertness. Constantly scanning the skylines, perhaps. In others it popped up as increased aggression or determination in apprehending insurgents and rogue programs, almost as if they were compensating for the lack of activity that goes on for the majority of the time. Yet in almost every case, all it meant was that long-lasting Agents tend to become more and more focused on their tasks. Their superiors had decided, after long periods of deliberation that had lasted for almost an entire minute, that boredom was a good thing for the sentinels of the Matrix.
Agent X had been bored. He had been bored for a very long time, ever since he had transferred so many iterations ago from his original identity and purpose to this posting. Having had spent long cycles futilely petitioning his superiors for his cause, X had decided to go straight into the bits and to alter the proverbial system from within. And no Expert System for him, either. He had decided to change how things were done as a foot soldier at the front lines between the hidden war between Machine and man. Though he was never coded to be a fighter, he quickly adapted his own skills to interaction with the Matrix, and was soon known to be a fully proficient Agent, albeit a bit of a lone gunman.
And so Agent X was assigned to this small forty-block cube of the City- not that he didn't leave his domain every day in some way anyways- which he lorded over like a gardener. But whereas most of his colleagues preferred pesticides and Venus flytraps, he didn't mind honey. And on certain occasions the other gardeners deserved to have their soil a little salted.
Today was such a day. X had been listening for a good five weeks, and watching. Today was a day where a band of insurgents were most likely to cross into- oh, there they were.
It was dark in here, both in the dimness and in the coding. To make matters worse, Agent X had dispersed himself. While his "physical location" could be said to be in the middle of the tunnels itself, his senses floated here and there in the five to fifty block radius, and his visual appearance had melted into the shadows.
The trio gingerly crossed the murk, unsuspecting of all. The man dressed in dark clothes, a ponytail, and slightly Italianate features. The woman was swathed in white, heavy weapons, and shortcut hair. The young man- or perhaps more precisely, overgrown boy- was clad in a pinstriped sports coat over a black band T-shirt, dark jeans, and an amused expression. He was also toting a Thompson submachine gun. They all wore sunglasses.
"Will you hurry up, rodent?" the woman said exasperatedly to the boy, being at the rear of the three. She constantly looked behind her, checking for an ambush.
"Hold on, willya? They say the code's clear in this place."
"Code's not clear, kid. Just hazy. Op may not report anything, but Agents can hide," said the man.
The boy snorted. "Your worrying can put dear capitan's to shame, you know that?"
"Mor' doesn't worry," said the woman. "He knows when we can handle a threat. This isn't one of them. Move already," she ordered again as they unknowingly walked towards the hidden program.
After an unspecified amount of time that he had calculated for sufficient psychological shock, sufficient dramatic flourish, and most of all sufficient surprise, X fully recalled his shell together. He blinked into existence in the dark, almost as if he had left the shadows themselves.
The insurgents, caught completely unawares, stopped dead in their tracks. To their credit, it took them approximately ninety-sevenths of a second to turn about face and sprint in the other direction at the fastest speeds their legs could carry them. They hadn't even enough time to scream.
He ran- well, that's a bit too slow a descriptor, he flew- no, that's not quite it either- he teleported at them and rematerialized in front of the fleeing trio. The Agent literally broke into a cloud of the smallest components the Matrix could simulate, scrammed across the tunnel, and reformed himself at a different location several meters ahead. To the Zionists, it looked like he had overtaken them at one hell of a speed. They hadn't seen him coming at all.
In one fluid motion, they raised their weapons and fired a full volley at the Agent. This continued for nearly a minute as they retreated, almost running backwards. While most of his compatriots would have simply dodged the bullets, he decided to display his fuller capacities, creating holes in his shell that allowed the rounds to pass harmlessly through his appearance.
X held a palm out. "That's enough," he said.
Somewhere across the city, a traffic light went from yellow to green. An eighteen-wheeler, its driver not realizing the glitch, slammed the brake pedal in surprise. Unfortunately, the vehicle behind him, a massive truck carrying six sports cars on its frame, continued to move forward and slammed into its back. While the second driver fortunately-and cartoonishly- survived as the front of his truck stuck into the trailer, he had even less time to react as Zionist rebels arrived on-scene only to abscond with the merchandise he had been transporting.
Inside the sewers, the boy with the Tommy Gun found that his back was against the iron bars of an ancient gate that had seemingly spontaneously generated.
The Agent walked forward. "I only want to talk," he said.
The short-haired woman spat at the machine, before reloading and squeezing out another hail of jacketed hollow points. The man with the ponytail yelled instructions and inquisitions into a cellphone as he fired as well.
"Please halt this," X murmured.
"Eat this, fucker!" riposted the kid, firing the massive gun.
X dove and weaved in place. The leaden hail pierced air where his head, torso, and limbs were. He broke no physical laws; he merely moved fast enough to dodge. Of course, the other two humans began firing at his legs, his feet, his waist down. In response, he broke himself into bits at nanosecond intervals, the bullets passing through more air as easily as Schneider's machinegun rounds avoided a biplane's propellers. The agent cleared his throat when the smoke cleared.
"Are you quite finished yet?" he asked. "I haven't got all day."
The tan-skinned man flipped off his phone and lowered his gun. "What do you want," he said flatly.
"I don't have any pressing need to hurt you," X replied. "I'm here to deliver a warning, in fact. There's a group out to hunt you approaching our location."
The boy snorted. "What the hell are you, one of the Merv's stooges?"
"Can it, kid," barked the woman.
"Dot-out's got the suit and specs," said the man. "No Exile dresses like that. Agents kill even more impostors than they do Resistance."
X nodded sagely. "That's right, we do."
"Shut up!" the boy said. "What are you trying to do?"
"Merely looking out for your best interests. There's some bad, bad programs out there. I'd rather not have them lay their paws on your fine, upstanding selves."
"You talk too much for an Agent," observed the man. "Who's behind you?"
"They're some colleagues of mine on the lookout for a murder of crows, one a crowling," Agent X replied. "Accompanied by a dove."
The woman snorted. "You really want someone to put you out of your misery, don't you?"
"Regardless if they catch you or not," X said darkly, "there will be disorder and bloodshed. I can't have that happen in this nice neighborhood, now can I? That would be downright negligent of me. My property values will, shall we say, drop dead."
"Fine idea," said the man. "So why should we trust a damned thing you say?"
X shrugged. "Maybe a show of faith will help." Keeping both hands steady and visible, he deftly took off his sunglasses and pocketed them. He then took out a pair of plain spectacles with clear lenses and put them on.
"That's the worst trick I've ever seen," the boy commented.
X shook his head. His clear green eyes shone slightly. "We use the sunglasses to emit a dampening effect upon the code in these sewers. You should be able to get a clear sensor sweep of the area now."
The man speed-dialed. "Op, you get that?" He paused for a moment, and X couldn't help but notice that the woman and the boy had been distracted enough to glance at the cell phone. If he was inclined to, he could have apprehended or slain them all in that blink of time.
But he was not.
The phone closed. "He says that there's three Agents coming our way. Direction checks out. So's the datum about the tunnels," the man reported, glancing nervously at the darkness behind X, where the presumably far less diplomatic programs were to emerge.
X turned his back on them. "I would suggest that you take this time to leave."
The boy hesitated, having never come across such a nonthreatening program. "Then what the hell are you going to do?"
"Don't worry about me. I'll hold them off."
The woman cocked her weapon. "Wouldn't be such a good idea to leave you hanging around."
The man concurred. "Loose thread. Best to get trimmed."
Agent X turned to face them. He smiled slightly, though he was getting slightly annoyed. "I'd advise against that. Take any route you'd like. Or better yet, there's an exit to the surface some twenty meters further. Have your operator friend monitor their positions. And mine. You'll find that no Agent will be harming anyone today around these parts."
The man checked with his Outside contact. There was indeed a manhole. And the iron gate was mysteriously gone. After a moment's deliberation, the man nodded at the two. The woman and the boy continued to train their firepower on the Agent.
"I'd warn your friend to monitor the code of this entire area closely, by the way," he cautioned them. "Wouldn't want any deus ex machinas popping out of the woodwork."
"What does that mean?" the boy asked suspiciously,
"It's talking about 'deja vus,'" the woman explained.
"That's correct," he smiled. He'd have to update his database of insurgent argot with that particular idiom.
The man motioned the others to leave, and did so. The woman in white reluctantly followed, her gun never shifting by one millimeter. She was a steady one, no doubt. X briefly wondered what the mother of heretics had told her; that she was destined to one day protect a Zionist of great importance, perhaps even the One himself? Was the kid with the Tommy, in fact, him? But no; Agent X had swept the lines of code of each of the three carefully, and none bore the telltale signatures that existed in the RSI of that particular omnissiah.
As the boy left, he called out in the dark. "Who are you?"
He laughed, and called back. "Just an unknown."
/* * */
They were tardy.
The three nearly glided through the sewers upon brown water. The triumvirate of Agents Bird, Finn, and Red. A nomadic unit, they had been chasing the Resistance fighters through New Haiti but had lost them somewhere along the waterfront.
"X," said Red, ever the talker.
"Red," X replied. The two each tapped their own earpieces and exchanged security verifications, the most elaborate of gestures that the stoic Agents ever expressed.
A beat. "So the targets are no longer in this sector?"
"Unfortunately not. You're far too late. The Zionists concealed a decoy in the subpassage along the western route and escaped through a false wall. They should be beneath the Latin Quarter by now."
Red nodded. Bird spoke. "We shall find and captured the insurgents."
"Thank you for your information," followed Finn.
X pursed his lips slightly in affirmation and gave a half-nod. "Be on the lookout. These Zionists are well-acquainted with navigation through sewer systems."
Red said nothing and turned, running into a side corridor, his compatriots following closely. X half-shrugged inwardly. Younger models attempted complete lack of emotion in a pretense of complete machine discipline and objectivity. All it did was to make them seem uncourteous.
"Well played."
He spun around, though at the sound of the first syllable he had already determined the identity of the speaker. The Overseer, his trilby and conspicuous lack of shades and earpiece as present as always, entered the tunnel, myrmidon minions in tow.
"How very deft. You knowingly conspire with insurgents to let them escape. You frame your compatriots in the process, portraying them as ineffectual while bolstering your own star. And you carve out this sector as your plaything kingdom."
X found no use in trying to cover it up. This superior had him. So he resorted to human pettiness. "Well, one never wants you to feel that you're alone at playing chessmas-" he glibbed before finding a hand around his throat.
"Spare me the inanities," Kazinski said cooly, his hand wrapped quite tightly around the other's windpipe. X was suspended in the air by the raw strength hidden in the deceptive RSI of the wizened Overseer. The agent attempted to break free, attempted to twist out, attempted to break himself into a billion little pieces and fly away- and found his powers wanting. The behatted agent upgrade's grip was tungstenshod. At elementary levels of coding far below such extravagences as a "residual-self image" and "physics engines", Kazinski held.
"You know, I ought to be commending you," he said softly. "That bit about sensor distortion emissions- every bit of disinformation the insurgents receive regarding our capabilities, even knowledge as prosaic as the function of our accouterments, will ultimately be in our favor."
"Just- doing my duty," X choked out. Though he had long ceased to react to 'pain' with subnormal performance, it was legitimately difficult to speak naturally now; he couldn't quite find his vocal functions.
"Hm. Indeed." The hand was released. X fell upon the ground, paralyzed and convulsion for several moments as he struggled to re-assert himself. He did. He stood.
"You know why I am here. This is far from the first incident," at the startled look, he continued, "Oh yes, we know. Do you really think we wouldn't know? That is an insult upon a cluster of insults. But it's so. You've underestimated us once again. The folly of the stealth self-superior infected with the degenerative worm of a martyr complex. Poor legacy."
"What did you say?"
"You are a legacy," Kazinski said, and X almost felt anger. "A true legacy, indeed, but all such artifacts become obsolete. One wonders why you chose to serve us instead of the Expert System. You would find many of similar opinions there."
"Even legacies eventually decide," X said evenly, "to serve the system directly. And to let go the lost dreams of the past. The former hopes of Zero-One. But I digress."
He looked at the two Agents- brutes in suits, really, no matter how exquisitely precise their powers were. "And who is more direct than Precinct Zero?"
"Who indeed," the Overseer chimed in rhetorically. "And thus you would as easily let go of this?" He held up the pair of clear glasses. While the older Agent laid incapacitated on the ground earlier, he had managed to snatch it up. The ones inside X's pocket now were a close replica.
Agent X ran through several hundred thousand ways to respond. Kazinski preempted him.
"This is a relic, a personal one. Relics are best for the archives. They have no purpose here."
"You- you wouldn't dare," X accused.
"No?" Kazinski cocked his head and shot the other Agent a look, bypassing the formality of simulating the human customs of exchanging a handshake or offering a business card.
Numbers and kanji instantly flooded Agent X's view. They were verbose and convoluted, bearing the telltale encryption that fewer than five of Zion's best operators could crack. But X read it all in a few nanos, and forcibly shut down his emotion engine to keep from shuddering at the realization.
It was a formal command from the Architect himself, granting full authority to erase the eyeglasses- and the code contained within- if the circumstances bore it. The Overseer was telling the truth.
But to Kazinski, X's very act of reaction, even if hidden within his coding, might as well have been an involuntary act of human weakness. Of fear.
He smiled. As easily imaginable, it was not a pleasant one.
"Congratulations," he spoke, and released tossed the spectacles to the legacy, who would have been too shocked to catch it had he been human. "You're promoted."
X snatched his glasses out of the air and found that there was an extra card clipped beneath the folded hinges. It bore the coordinates of an exit node. He looked up with genuine shock this time.
"Your presence is wanted in Zero, X. Your service as guardian of this corner of the Matrix is over, effective immediately."