8. Blue

.

At times, the voices retreated a short ways, and his mind would grow clearer, and he would look out from the ruins, and see the bones scattered across the plain, and the lightning tearing apart the heavens. The noise of thunder was a dry hacking cough, the relentless agony of emphysema, tuberculosis, lung cancer. He did not know why it was like this, that a world made of code had to replicate the frailty of flesh and blood.

"I need to get out of here. I have to get out of here." That was him. Not her, not any of the others, the myriad others. "I need to find the door..."

At times, they would rush at him all together, their numbers increasing to more than mere numbers. They shouted in fear, fear before a dark-suited, dark-shaded figure or many such figures, stretching across the earth like a phalanx of black wings. But he knew they were not afraid of him, not anymore.

"Look up. Look up to the clouds." That was not him, nor any of the multitude from the storm. It was familiar, and surprisingly gentle. "Look at the ground, all those broken shards. You see, once, the first time I was here, I glimpsed a fallen star, or maybe it was a reflection of the blue sky..."

When the crowds came, and kept coming, she would talk to him about inconsequential things, human things. Sometimes she talked about the times when they had walked about hidden parts of the city, the two of them, volleying their pointless little games of espionage back and forth. Sometimes she talked about the trees, the streets, the oblivious passers-by, trivial details she had observed during their meetings. Sometimes she repeated things he had once said to her. She was the only thing that was not him, yet he could not remember her.

"It lay at my feet amid the dust, and it stood out like a flame in the shadows, bright as midday sunlight. Do you remember where we used to meet? The fountain was empty at first, but when spring came the waters leapt up and caught the sun..."

Sometimes, she gave him trite little tales of her childhood and her sister. He would understand the sentences, at least one at a time, and they would weave and shimmer, growing stronger inside his ears, and the others grew weaker. And afterwards he would search for his contempt and his disgust. It galled him to think of it, this small power she had somehow gained over them. They were supposed to be part and parcel of him now.

But he still could not remember her.

He remembered everything else. He remembered how angry he had been at first, when she'd insisted on staring at him, her face so irritatingly and inexplicably well-known. He remembered the dim yellowish light in an underground garage, where he stood facing Brown and Jones, and how watchful she had been then, caught in the center of the triangle. He remembered driving out into the night, no longer bothering to keep watch on her, and the freeway that turned into a country road, then an unpaved track. He remembered the spidery television tower like a needle above the metropolis. But there was still exactly one tenth of a second that he could not remember.

"A key. A keyhole on a door." Was she still there next to him? "A reflection, luminous and blue like it used to be, before the clouds, before everything. All I could do was follow..."

He remembered an arc of electric code in the air around them, as she leaned forward and her lips touched his. Something missing inside of him. He remembered the glittering hatred in her eyes as she put her hands against shoulders, and pushed. He remembered Thomas Anderson, a superior smile quirking his face, the One, the Chosen, and he himself nothing more than an agent. He remembered saying to the Oracle, Mom. He remembered the swift wind, and an entire world trembling beneath the thunder.

Ex-agent Smith opened his eyes. He saw Aleph still there, standing next to him. She did not back away.

"Why did you come to me?" he asked.

"Because of this." She raised a hand to gesture around them, once, then let it drop. "Well, not this, precisely. Something about Zion was...not as I imagined."

"What did you see?"

"I saw you," she replied softly.

That wasn't right. That couldn't have been right. But he could do nothing except wait.

"And I saw something else. I keep on thinking about it, keep on seeing it even now." A new trace of urgency was entering her voice. Or maybe he'd simply never noticed it until now. "Another point of light, upon the horizon across the bridge. Another city in the night, but its glow was not that of flames..."

"I was trying to get across, to that other city," said Smith. Then, after a moment that startled even himself, he added, "Though it was forbidden to me."

Her eyes widened.

"You remember it now?"

"No." The faintest smirk twitched the corner of his lips, though he did not know it himself. "But it was the only possible reason."

Aleph stare at him for a while, and finally let out a low chuckle. The two of them stood gazing out wordlessly at the dead land. In the distance, a jagged blade stabbed at the sky, twisted metal skeleton sticking out in every direction. It had once been the proudest skyscraper in the city. A charred scent hung in the air, a sign of what must have been a tremendous conflagration, ages past. Funny, he'd always thought the world ended in icy rain instead.

"Look at this place, Smith," she murmured, half to him, half to herself. "The way to enter here was through the Zion archives—that was what he told me, the Merovingian. But this, this is not human. It cannot be. Someone in Zion must have known about it..."

"Obviously, Miss Greene." A touch of the old superciliousness returned to his tone, though his heart was not in it. Nothing was obvious, not anymore. "That was the reason they never meant you to return. And the reason they allowed you to come to me in the first place."

"He must have been sure that you would kill me." She did not specify what she meant by 'he', but he understood. "But you didn't."

"They knew." He did not spell out what 'they' meant, either, but she, too, understood, he could tell. "They knew from the start you were not a simple informant, yet they ordered me to keep playing the game because there was something else about you. They must have suspected it had to do with me, or it would never have lasted so long—"

"You told me there was an directive that I was not to be harmed." Aleph glanced up at him sharply, sudden realizing dawning in her face. "But Smith, listen, they did try to kill me. The Hyperion was attacked by sentinels, several times. We kept wondering why our silence and evasive patterns no longer worked, but in truth—"

"They were merely searching that much harder." Coming another stride forward, he loomed over her just as if they were in an interrogation room, somewhere back in the Matrix. Of course. He had been utterly blind all along.

"And they were searching for me."

"Why?"

"I don't know."

"When was this?"

"Afterwards. After the television tower. Before our last meeting." She bit her lips. "At the cafe. I didn't see you for three weeks. I thought you were..."

Her voice trailed off. The wind screamed up in the clouds, and whipped her hair into a black comet about her face. There were no answers in her eyes. None that would be acceptable, in any case.

"It's all happening exactly as before," he said.

"What?"

Another bolt of lightning exploded overhead, brilliantly illuminating all the windows of the graveyard city, and for a fraction of a second he glimpsed the electricity crackling the air, and the coded walls of the prison fluttered like a tattered curtain, revealing a throng of impossible shadows that danced just behind. Then the thunder came, and the brief dawn returned to perpetual midnight.

"I spoke these words," he said. Noticing how near each other they stood, he took a step backward. A curious emptiness was beginning to wash over him, like the dark afterimage following the blast of light. For the first time, he was torn adrift, without the anchor of rage to hold him to the ground. "But they were not my own. They must have come to me when..." Another pause. When what? When everything had been his? When there had been nothing to stop him, nothing to lose?

"When my code and that of the One were mingled," he went on. "At that instant, I saw beyond what my programming or my purpose allowed, beyond what they allowed. Yet I never understood what I saw."

Aleph's brows furrowed. He could see her hesitating to speak.

"You mean...Neo?"

"No." His reply was calmer than he had expected. "The One."

"But I thought—" She ground to a halt in mid-sentence. "I see. Neo—he—it was not human after all, was it?"

"The code was carried in a human," he began, slowly at first. "But the One itself was not so, and had never been so. It was born of the Source, of us, though for what purpose, I cannot yet fathom."

"And you knew this because you had his code. Its code," Aleph corrected herself, the reflected glow of the burning clouds bright in her eyes. "It all came out in that one moment."

"I know now. Not then. I did not know there were more pasts to the Matrix than eyes could see or code could record. I did not know how inescapable their power had been, beyond programming, beyond wars and beginnings and ends. I did not know why I had to get there, the city of men, their reality, though its imperative was in every line of my code, pushing me forward. I did not know..."

Again, a pause. All he had known at the time was the cold fire of power like a knife in his body, and the echo of a wild laughter ringing in his ears. But right now, in the present, there was merely Aleph standing before him, frowning a little in concentration, expectant.

"I did not know they were hiding the truth from me," he finished. It was more difficult than he had imagined.

"Smith," began Aleph.

"From us."

Her breath caught in her throat.

"You saw into them," she murmured. "But they must have seen into you, too. Because that was when the attacks on the Hyperion began, right after you and Neo..."

Smith braced himself against the next question. Mercifully, she stopped right there. There was no more need to continue, not really.

"The Merovingian must have seen something," said Aleph after a silence, perhaps only to change the subject. "That was why he took such an interest in me, and why he did not kill me after I changed his key and kept him out of this place. He told me a human hand was needed to open the door. Any human hand? I'm no longer so certain."

"He did not make the lock, did he?"

"It was never a lock, only a weakness in the walls. They barely figured out how to exploit it."

"But he gave you the key."

"Well, a key is nothing more than code searching for its rightful owner." The corner of her lips twitched. She seemed to be reciting the line from memory. "The Keymaker told me that," she added, not quite meeting his eyes. But then, before he could find an answer, she shook her head firmly, and looked up again at his face.

"I must have been going crazy, you know." There was almost the glimmer of a smile in her eyes. "Voices kept whispering and promising inside my head..."

"And what did they say, Miss Greene?"

"Hope."

"How damned human of you."

Aleph let out a short snort of laughter.

"It was about you." She sounded for all the world like she was stating the simplest fact. "I saw you. I saw the battle, the fires that lit up the bridge. I saw you fall. I saw the blood on your face, and your eyes. Not just an image, not just a record, but you. And you saw me, too."

He was supposed to know all this, yet he had nothing to say in reply. The wind had abated, and everything went silent, within, without. They had taken away so much from him.

"I do not remember you," he said after an eternity. His voice was unrecognizable even to himself.

"Smith," whispered Aleph. She leaned forward as if to reach to him, then caught herself midway. "Smith," she repeated. "I will prove it to you."

He forced himself to face her one more time, and saw her raising a hand up to her own chest, until the tips of her fingers were pressed against the spot where her heart would have been, had she still been one of them. Without lowering her gaze or turning away for an instant, she began to unbutton her shirt.

"Look at me, Smith." The words, though barely audible, were a command. "Look right here. It happened."

Her skin was pale, the only pale spot in the eternal darkness, and in the middle of her chest, between her breasts, there was a scar. The wound appeared as if it had been made and healed years ago, yet the livid mark remained, slanting against the smoothness of her flesh. It was angry and ugly, and undeniable.

"It happened," said Aleph quietly. "Here." Slipping the shirt off her shoulders, she turned around, revealing another scar on her back, halfway between the shoulder blades. It matched the other nearly perfectly.

"This is where the sword went in, and it came out the front." Her tone was even, almost clinical. "It went through me on its way to you."

Carefully, Smith held out one hand, then stopped within a few inches of her body, holding it suspended in the air. Aleph remained motionless, her back to him, though surely she sensed his proximity behind her. After a second or two, he shifted his hand forward a little more, and another tiny arc of electrical code snapped from his fingertips to her skin. Aleph's shoulders stiffened almost imperceptibly as contact was made. The raised ridge of the scar was hard and cold. It felt as if it did not belong there against the warmth of her skin and the surprising strength of her pulse, against what was really her.

Swiftly he caught her by the arm and turned her around. Aleph's gaze searched his face, but he had trouble meeting it, so he lowered his eyes. Taking hold of her shirt, he pulled it back over her shoulders, and began to refasten the first button, taking slow care with each small movement of the fingers. He kept his sight fixed resolutely upon his hands, and after it was done, he moved on to the next button, then the next. Neither said a word until he had finished.

"I believe you," he muttered.

Aleph drew in a quick breath, and opened her mouth to speak, but whatever reply she was about to make never came out. Her eyes widened abruptly, but she was no longer watching him.

"There," she breathed. "There. Behind you."

Smith spun around. Lightning flared again overhead, throwing the slag-heaps piled high to every direction into sharp relief. He glimpsed the ground at their feet, paved with shards of metal and glass for as far as eyes could see. The innumerable windows of the city, once like gold in the sunlight, now only reflected smoldering flames. Sun, moon, stars: all had died ages in the past, and would never live again.

"There," Aleph's voice quickened with wonder. "That piece of glass. Do you see it? Right there. It's blue, bright blue—"