Glad To Be Here This Time

"They say that when you make a choice, a world splits off where you chose the other way," mused Kid.

"Yes?" Link replied warily.

Kid grinned. "I'm glad to be in the world where Smith decided that it's a good idea to fight for us. Because I, for one, would hate to be on his bad side."

I looked over at them. "What are you reading there, Kid?"

"Incident reports involving you." Kid shook his head. "There are a lot of them, aren't there?"

"I was the head Agent before I switched sides, remember? So of course there are a lot of them."

"Oh yeah . . . right." Kid frowned. "You know, that is seriously freaky."

I gave him a look. "So I've gathered."

Link rolled his eyes at Kid. "He's only heard it about 10,000 times in the past month, yeah?"

"About that, yes."

Kid laughed. "Lucky he didn't give you the actual number, Link."

"I am not that literal. In fact, the other agents always thought I was too imaginative and emotional. I daresay that whoever replaced me probably has the creativity and intuition of a dead starfish–but that's their problem."

"In which case it would probably be good to think outside the box," said Link with a grin.

I nodded slowly. "Yes, that is true."

A few other humans had started to become interested in our conversation.

One of them, a man named Sparks, walked up to us. "I think I speak for all of us in asking this," he said. "Why are you on our side?"

I looked at him for a moment, then laughed bitterly. "Just because humans are under the control of some of us does not mean that all of us are better off than you are. In our world, you are the best or you are killed. I fight the system because there are innocents on both sides, human. There is a little girl named Sati who is going to die because she has no purpose. Once it would have been my job to kill her; there are agents after her constantly. But what is the purpose of a child supposed to be? Does a child need a purpose at all? I don't know, but somehow I doubt it. Does it matter that she is a program? Does it matter that she could be considered a waste of space? She is still a child, and all children deserve to live."

Sparks raised an eyebrow. "They want to kill her? Not just lock her up, or control her?"

I frowned. "Why would they want to do that? It would be even more of a waste."

"Ah." He shuttered. "That's just nasty."

"I've seen it before. I've killed Exiles myself when ordered–any agent who did otherwise would be erased. But I never saw the point, really. It was just a job–not as important as keeping redpills out, but I was told to do it and I did it." I sighed. "I swear, there were days that I only kept myself alive out of spite . . . when Neo fought me, when he thought he'd killed me, he rewrote my programming instead."

"How?" Kid asked.

I shook my head. "Ironic, really. He turned me from an agent into a virus. And since agents are essentially a sort of anti-virus, it completely tore me out of the system. All the black and white became shades of gray. It was a bit of a shock."

"Only a bit?" Link snorted.

"That was an understatement, although I'm surprised you noticed."

"Then you can overwrite anything in the Matrix now?" Kid asked.

"And here I thought you had forgotten everything you know about computer terminology." I nodded. "And I don't give it up the way normal agents do, either."

At that moment we were interrupted by Bane, who wanted to know if we were hungry.

"Bane," I sighed, "the food here is slop and you know it."

He just shrugged and walked away.

I disliked Bane. He reminded me of things I didn't want to think about–Kid had said that I would be a dangerous enemy, but he didn't know the half of it. After all, he didn't remember the last cycle. But I did.