4002004
The Witch was just sitting on her volcano, minding her own business.
Not that she could have occupied herself with anybody else's business, being in the middle of nowhere as she was. Indeed, with nothing but blustering white below her, and nothing but howling black above, she was nearly dead of boredom and cold.
She occupied herself by plucking fleas off her wings feeding them to her spiders. The spells required that she keep the disgusting, eight-legged things alive, which was no easy feat. Fortunately they liked fleas, so every time The Witch felt a bite, she clawed and pinched madly until she found something to throw into the glass mayonnaise jar. Usually, she ended up plucking out more of her own feathers than anything else, and her pained curses could be heard echoing off the ice for miles.
With a growl of discomfort she snatched up the visitor's guide which Brown had fetched for her from the Höfn Tourism Bureau.
(In exchange for letting him live, she'd told the agent to get her some new clothing and Big Mac with no pickles. When the idiot had returned with a hideous green snowsuit and a McChicken, the only thing that had saved his life was the glossy vacation package tucked into his breast pocket. "I have found what you're looking for," he'd announced, picking pieces of lettuce and shreds of lime polyester from his jacket. "You're welcome and you will be receiving my dry-cleaning bill.")
His infuriating smugness aside, The Witch had only barely kept herself form hugging him. Aurora over Iceland, the cover of the pamphlet read, displaying aquatic lights across a night sky. See the brilliant show from the apex of the Vatnajokull glacier – guided expeditions available upon request.
"Aurora," she whispered to herself, closing her eyes as if in prayer. Then she looked up to the sky, which was stubbornly silent as if to mock her. You're alone, the heavens seemed to say. Where will you go now that you've failed yet again?
But the heavens were mistaken; she was not alone. The Witch felt it before she saw it, coming from the east, like a magnet pulling at the opposite pole in her mind. Black on black, she could only see the undulations of code sparkling like a comet in the night.
She stood, her posture taking on the defensive stance of a cat sensing an oncoming storm. As the object drew nearer, she could make out two forms – flying programs. Her spiders grew excited. What new plague was this? What fresh torment descended from on high to drive her closer to suicide?
It was her parents.
"No," she breathed. The bastard had learned to fly. "What must I do to kill them!" she exclaimed, screaming at the bugs. She shook the jar in anger. "Why must everything in my life be so difficult?"
In a swift, vengeful motion, The Witch hurled the jar onto the ice at her feet, where it shattered and spilled its spiders into the snow. They scurried about as she pinched a few out of the cold, squeezing them into a pulp between her fingers. From the torn folds of her lime green snowsuit The Witch pulled long vines of fish code, shark code and blood, weaving the ingredients together between her fingertips, incorporating the appropriate threads of spider juice where she deemed it necessary.
The earth shook as her enemies made their landing. The Witch could see them clearly for only an instant. Her mother had guns and a truly hideous haircut. Her father was no more than fifty feet away. "We need to talk," he shouted over the growing winds. She grinned in response. Snow blew up and around, blurring their lines of vision. He yelled and yelled, but she heard nothing more. Her spell was almost cast.
Pillars of code shattered like giant icicles, the very fabric of the matrix collapsing around her. Bit by bit, a shell of anticode was taking shape, cocooning her body in a hemisphere of nothingness. Light was the first to go, then sound, then air, then gravity, and finally Time. The Void was true oblivion. All symbols and meaning fell away.
The Witch slowly released her breath to the vacuum and opened her fist. In the perfect darkness, her spell twinkled like a star, floating above her palm. It turned from blue to purple to white, eventually burning so brightly she had to shield her eyes. The heat of it scorched her skin, prompting her to try to produce a scream from her bursting lungs. Already, The Witch was aware that her own code was dissolving. The pain of it was almost more than she could endure.
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"Where did she go?" Trinity asked, lowering her gun and staring at the empty crater from which the strange woman had just vanished. "What happened to…" she trailed off as she turned to see Neo's face. In the Merovingian's eyes she could read her husband's expression perfectly. Without question or hesitation, she turned to run.
From the perspective of Neo and The Witch, their encounter played out in slow-motion. He couldn't see her, but he knew she was there, and he knew exactly what she was doing. She was hidden inside the spatial distortion – a dome of anticode made visible only by the cascades of code that fell from the sky, crashing onto the surface and rolling off the sides like rainfall.
Neo shifted his posture to stand directly between Trinity and the anomaly. He dug his boots into the ice and prepared himself.
Faster than he could have imagined, the bubble shattered and exploded into an incredible shockwave of anticode. The One held up his hands to stop its progression, though he could only barely wrap his mind around it. The toxic mass of white scorched the skin of his palms and ate away at the edges of his clothing.
The stalemate that followed could have lasted an instant or an hour (as at the interface even Time melted away). Although neither Neo nor The Witch could see each other, they could feel the force of the other's mind, pushing on the wall until it stood squarely between them.
Neo hadn't encountered such an adversary since Smith. It was the same futility, the same hopeless feeling of hitting his head against a brick wall, of trying to fight a battle with a ghost in the mirror. She was his equal, or perhaps even greater than that, for she was young and full of some kind of conviction – though he couldn't guess at the roots of such adamant passion. It was not as pure as love or hate, but something conflicted and confused that lay in-between.
Pixel by pixel he was losing his ground, the space around him liquefying until he could no longer tell where he was. Sounds and voices came from places that were not of this world, and when he dared to look into the white, ghastly images of the Real flashed before his eyes. The Machine City. The sewers. The surface, barren and littered with frozen bodies. He saw the past and he saw the future. The sensation of unraveling, more physical than mental, was like death from the extremities inward.
Neo tried to cut through it all. He had a notion of reaching over to the other side to see The Witch. He wanted to see her face and read her code. Could he transpose himself simply by thinking it? This was his mission. But when Neo opened his eyes anew with this destination in mind, the face he saw was not one of a witch.
This was the face of his daughter.
Rorie's young features were twisted into the kind of fright that shook Neo to the core. She was cowering in a dark corner, looking out at something he couldn't fathom. "Knight… they're alive," she said. Neo saw a swarm of black creatures crawling over her dainty, ivory hands. "Knight…"
It was so real, Neo felt he could reach out and touch her, protect her. But every time he tried, he was just out of reach. Paradoxically, the harder he pushed, the farther away he drifted until finally, Neo was back in the Digital with the entire mass of oblivion at his fingertips.
As Trinity would recount the story later, Neo marched forward with the invisible weapon in his hands, as if in a trance. The Witch – visible now only as a blur through the distortions - was backing away at an equal pace.
Suddenly, the scene took on an eerie blue glow as the sky came alive with a vivid presentation of the Northern Lights. At this The Witch seemed to take notice, faltering for only a second – and a second was all Neo needed. As the anticode washed over her, a scream echoed over the raging din.
Still disoriented, Neo couldn't tell whether it was The Witch or Rorie who was shrieking.