this chapter was brought to you by PubMed articles about periorbital necrotizing fasciitis, which probably constitutes a content warning in and of itself. I don't think the chapter is overly graphic, though, as the POV character is not a medical professional and so has limited exposure to the disease progression and its treatments. there is also some brief discussion about end-of-life medical decisions, including discussion of the possibility of euthanasia, although that course of action is decided against.
. . .
The day after the ceremony, Trap sends a messenger to collect Morpheus from the council meeting he's in.
"We have a problem," the kid says once the room has gone silent at her entrance, holding up the token that identifies her as one of Trap's and catching Morpheus' gaze. No one argues as Morpheus pushes back his chair and rises without question to follow her, and even Lock simply looks away after glancing over at him, apparently untempted by the opportunity to make a snide remark about prophecies and their expiration dates. Neo's not doing well, and few, if any, expect him to last long.
Now, it seems, he's doing even worse.
The messenger, Yànzì – Yen for short, or so she tells him – leads him back to the ship at a neat clip. She's free born, maybe twelve or thirteen years old, and has all the jittery energy characteristic of that age. If he'd slept more than seven hours combined in the last two days, he might be feeling some of it himself. As it is, he mostly feels dread. "Did Trap tell you anything else?" he asks as they leave the council hall, but she shakes her head without looking back.
"Naw, just said to tell you there's a problem. She's not letting anyone but doctors in the room, so I couldn't even see."
That can't be good.
"Sorry," she says, after his silence has spoken for him. "I know you're his friend."
She really does sound sorry, but there's nothing to say to that, either.
They reach a lift and stand in slightly awkward silence as it descends through the levels, Yen perhaps still regretting her unintentional callousness and Morpheus long past the point of wanting to make conversation. The lift clunks to a halt at base level and they step out into the maze of grounded ships and tents that make up the field hospital. Yen stays in front, guiding him unerringly through and under and around until they come to the Holocene. Yen hops up the boarding stairs – eager to return her token and get on to her next assignment, or possibly sign off for the day – but Morpheus lingers a moment to collect himself.
Whatever he sees in there isn't going to be good, and he'd better start bracing for it now. He takes a breath, lets it out, and makes his way onto the ship.
Trap intercepts him outside the closed door of the Neo's bunk room, looking tense and holding out a surgical mask to match the one she's already wearing.
"What's happened?" Morpheus asks.
"Put this on and I'll show you."
He ties on the mask to cover his nose and mouth with hands less steady than he'd like, then nods to Trap once he's ready. She opens the door and gestures him in. He goes, and she follows, closing the door again behind her.
He doesn't want to look. To a shameful extent, he wants to keep his eyes averted so as not to see whatever it is that's been hidden away like a dreadful secret. But Neo's his friend, and Trap had sent for him. Him, and no one else.
So he looks. Looks, and just as shamefully wishes he hadn't.
The burns on and around Neo's eyes had started out red and darkened as they crusted and scabbed, the skin stretching and growing shiny as the tissue underneath swelled with fluid and inflammation. Now, however, the color has taken on a purplish cast, and his eyelids are dotted with flat grey lesions. The rest of his face is flushed and sweaty, and his hair is damp, but still he lies unmoving against the pillow keeping him elevated.
"Necrotizing fasciitis," Trap says grimly, standing at his shoulder. "Flesh eating bacteria."
For the first time Morpheus can easily recall, he swears, softly but viciously. Reaches out a hand, stops himself. Pulls it back. Wants to hit something, splinter it, shout his helpless rage until he's empty of this impotent uselessness. Stops himself. Takes a breath. Lets it out. Takes another. Does the same. "What can be done," he says at last. Not even a question, because there may not be an answer.
"Not much," she says. "Antibiotics won't work once the blood supply's been compromised, and that—" she leans over, gestures a circle around the lesions with an elegantly swept back finger, underside flashing pink against ebony "—is textbook vascular compromise. The antibiotic ointment I've been using is apparently useless, so I'm guessing it's either a resistant strain or there's a biofilm protecting the infection site. We can try going antimicrobial rather than antibiotic – a mild acid like vinegar might help slow it down some, and I've already got some of the lab people working on synthesizing it – but what I really need to do is debride it. Remove the dead tissue and anything else that's already infected before it gets out of control."
"And it's just...the skin?" Morpheus asks. He looks at her, thinking it will be easier, but her arms are crossed tightly in front of her and her shoulders are hunched in an utterly uncharacteristic posture.
"If he'd been healthy to start off with, probably. The eyes are fairly well protected. But the burns go all the way through, to the corneas, and the damage to all the surrounding tissue is pretty extensive. It's not in the actual eyeballs yet, from what I can tell, but it's just a matter of time." Her tone is flat and steely, leaving no doubt as to her meaning, but above the mask her expression is pained.
Morpheus swallows, throat dry despite the sudden rush of saliva in his mouth. "And if it spreads?"
"Straight shot along the optic nerves to the brain. You need to sit down?"
"Maybe," he admits. His heart is pounding and his vision has started to go gray and grainy. He's never fainted before in his life and he doesn't intend to do so now, but there's no reason to tempt fate. Not any more than they've already gotten away with, anyway. Or not gotten away with, as the case may turn out to be.
"Chair's a few steps to your left," Trap tells him, and takes him by the shoulders to steer him. "There you go, head down." She pushes him down so he's bent over his knees and leaves a hand on the back of his head, just above the cranial jack. "Yeah, this shit's rough. Even if you've seen bodies and violence, there's usually some adrenaline pumping to keep you on your feet. This, though? Until you've seen it a few hundred times it'll mess you up. And sometimes even after that."
He still feels too warm, but after a few measured breaths his vision has started returning to normal and his hands and feet aren't tingling so much. He decides to give it a few more moments before trying to sit up, just to be safe. "Sorry," he mutters. "I never— I didn't expect it to hit me like this."
"Don't be. Like I said, it's rough. Especially when it's someone you care about." She moves her hand to his shoulder and squeezes.
"Is there any hope?"
"There's always hope, Morpheus. Thought you of all people would understand that. Might not be a lot of it, but until what's done is done there's always a chance it could go differently."
"How much of a chance? I don't need exact numbers, just— Be honest. What do you truly believe?"
She sighs. "I believe," she says, slowly, "that there are things that we can do to improve the odds, but nothing guaranteed. Mostly, I just want him out of this damn...whatever it is he's been in, because it's not a normal coma, and if his mind's somewhere else again then surgery is an even bigger risk than usual. And Morpheus, this would be a risky surgery under the best of circumstances. He's already blind, and his eyes could be a direct path to his brain for a serious infection. You understand what I'm saying?"
"Yes." Unfortunately. "But I don't understand why you're telling me." He looks up at her, still leaned over his lap with his elbows on his knees.
"I know nothing about any of this; I have nothing to offer, no opinion that could possibly matter. I trust you to do what you think is best."
"This is what I think is best. Normally I'd be having this talk with the patient, but Neo can't speak for himself right now, and you're the closest thing to family he has left."
"And?"
"And trying to treat this might not be worth it," she answers heavily. "Even if he pulls through, he'll be blind, possibly brain-damaged, probably disfigured, and in a lot of pain for a long time. We have the resources to support him, and if you want to try then I'll do my best, you know I will, but sometimes life isn't the more merciful option."
That's a fact, and one he's far too intimately familiar with. How many silent misgivings he'd had over the years, how many private moments of doubt. How easy it was, in an instant of weakness – after the death of a friend, the loss of an ally, the failure of a plan, the destruction of a hope – to wish that he'd chosen differently. That he'd never learned the truth of the world, never seen enough to make him question his reality in the first place. Ignorance is bliss, and bliss is a powerful currency. They'd lost Cipher to its call, along with those he'd taken down on his path to its promised reward, and he was hardly the only one who'd been willing to defect throughout the years. The horrid cruelty of the Matrix was that it worked, that it created an alternative that was preferable to resistance on nearly every level.
Nearly every level.
Hope. Commitment. Determination. A concern for the future, for all those freed and unfreed, all who lived and who had not yet begun to live.
That was where the Matrix had failed and failed again, because for all that the machines had learned of it, they lacked the understanding to every fully correct it. They could not understand, could not calculate, the extent to which human minds must create. They could not account for that compulsion in their models, despite observing it time and time again, and could never fully grasp the extent of its influence on all other cognition.
Neither can humans, and perhaps that has been their saving grace all along. The machines could not extract from their minds that which they did not fully understand themselves – could not extract it, and could not use it against them. And so it remained a loophole, a linchpin, a fulcrum. A cause that many had lived and died for.
Perhaps Neo had meant to be one of them. Perhaps he had never meant his story to continue beyond the saving or destroying of Zion. Perhaps he too had been tired of this life, of the role that it had chosen for him.
He had never wanted to be the One. He'd accepted the role and the responsibility that came with it because it meant so much to others, because of the hope it brought to so many, but it had never brought him any happiness or comfort. All he had ever wanted was the freedom they all wanted – the freedom to live his own life and determine his path by his own choices. It was that desire which brought him to the edges of the Matrix and then spurred him to break free from it, and it was that desire which had characterized everything he had done since. But those choices had always been constrained by context, and in many ways his context in the waking world had been more limiting than the Matrix ever had been. He chose, yes, but from among options borne of obligation. Borne of weight. Borne of expectation. Choices nonetheless, but not free. Not even. Not fair.
He could have chosen to let the hope of hundreds crumble to dust. Could have deemed the despair of others an acceptable balance to his own wish for an inconsequential life. Could have looked at his abilities and declared the cost of using them too high. He could have, of course, but at the same time, how?
He chose to leave the Matrix because he wanted to know the truth. He chose to be the One because he felt that to choose otherwise would cause immeasurable harm. Those choices may have been equal in weight, but never in circumstance. They cannot be compared.
And in that sense, Neo had not yet been able to claim the freedom he sought.
"Neo only ever wanted to be free to make his own choices," Morpheus says at last. "He didn't want for his life to be some grand adventure that would shape the fate of the world. He didn't want to be the hero. He just wanted to be in control of his own destiny, as much as any of us can be. If he decides that his role in this is over, that there is no place left for him in this world, I won't begrudge him that choice, but that must be his decision. His, and no one else's. Perhaps he never meant to survive his journey to the Machine City; perhaps that was to be his final choice, his final desperate act of free will. But he did survive it, and while he lives I will not curtail his freedoms. If he is alive to choose, he will be the one to choose."
"Okay, then," Trap says. "Let's do this."
The Holocene's Operator deck still has two functional set-ups, chairs and scanners and monitors still connected and ready for use, and so they make the most of it. In one of the chairs is Neo, and set up around it is an extemporized operating theater. They've pulled in carts and tables, loaded them with packets of sterile tools and dressings and staged them within reach; hung extra lights from the metal girders of the low ceiling overhead, as well as sheets and curtains along lines of the grid to divide the space into different zones of sterility. Life support machinery, scavenged and adapted from the pods, stands powered up and waiting, and dozens of port lines are prepared on gravity feed stands to deliver anything that might be necessary intravenously.
Neo has been on continuous monitor for the past twenty hours, head shaved and electrodes taped against his scalp, laid out limply in the chair as Trap and two other doctors work to contain the infection while Morpheus and Link watch the scanner feeds and prepare for the jump. Trap had estimated that she could keep surgical intervention to a minimum for a while longer, removing the most superficial of the dead tissue and relying on IV fluids, antibiotics, and a weak acid solution to stay ahead of the septic shock she deemed the immediate threat, but he knows that she's feeling the time pressure.
They all are. Morpheus is staying carefully outside of the screens, but it's a small space, and while it's easy to keep his eyes away from what he knows will be an unpleasant tableau it's much harder to avoid overhearing the occasional exchange between the doctors. It creates an odd sort of disconnect: he knows that Neo's temperature is rising and his blood pressure is falling, that his eyes are starting to show signs of the infection entering from the skin and that he may need skin grafts to replace his eyelids by the time this is done, but through it all Neo's neural activity remains completely unresponsive, completely disconnected from the realities of his body.
It's fascinating, in a way, to see how fully the mind can detach from the inputs of the physical self, yet at the same time deeply concerning. Neo has already shown that the death of a mental projection in the Matrix does not necessarily have to cause death of the body in the material world, but it is worrying to think that the reverse might somehow be true, as well. What would that mean for their understanding of reality? What possibilities might it imply for those who make a habit of moving between worlds? What could it say about the retentive power of the Matrix and other such simulations, that they could preserve consciousness in some pure state, divorced from the life systems of the body? In the words of a long-dead comrade, it's almost not worth thinking about.
Not that Neo appears to be in the Matrix at the moment. He is still somewhere unknown, walking between the neural profile of a comatose brain and the profile of one responding to complex simulated stimuli.
Tracings from minds in the Matrix look largely like tracings from minds that are conscious – because in the Matrix, they are. The main difference is the absence of observable movements in the body to correspond to activity detected by the scanner. The dreamer's eyes do not move, do not blink, and the body rarely moves except to breathe and to react to intense pain, yet in the readout it would seem that they do, that they must. Were it not for their stillness and unresponsiveness, it would seem from the activity in their brain that someone in the Matrix is fully awake; were it not for their shallow breathing, it would appear from the activity in their body that someone in the Matrix is fully dead.
It is an interesting effect, and one that they have not yet entirely managed to explain and recreate without machine technology. To induce such atonia, the brain stem must somehow be involved – but complete dysfunction would stop the person from breathing, and from what they can tell, the intubation of unawakened humans in the pods has more to do with the agar medium surrounding them than it has to do with their inability to breathe. Yet for higher cognitive functions to be so active and complex without the more basal systems activating in the physical body at all goes against all that humanity has learned about neuroscience both in and out of the Matrix. Even a sleeping, dreaming body is still a body that may move, twitch, gasp, wake up. A body whose mind is in the Matrix has no such abilities, yet once the mind is extracted the body immediately regains all physical instincts.
Wherever Neo's mind is, however, it is nowhere as rich and immersive as the Matrix. There are no ghost artifacts, no signs of subconscious movement, and his posterior dominant rhythm is much slower, albeit interspersed with spindles and slowing and discharges that look like seizures. This looks more like sleep or coma, but is still visibly distinct. If he's dreaming, it isn't quite like REM sleep. If he's in a simulated environment, he has no sense of body or physical form. If he's in a coma, it's the most bizarrely organized coma anyone's ever seen, because the anterior-posterior grade is in flux.
Electrical activity tends to occur at higher frequencies in the frontal regions of the brain and at lower frequencies further back. Absence or reversal of this grade can indicate different conditions, but never has anyone heard of this. It's like a tide, like the moon pulling water towards it, but instead of water it's high-frequency cerebral activity and instead of the moon it's...something unknown, going back and forth, provoking these wave-like changes.
If he didn't know better, Morpheus would say that there must be some sort of external current affecting him. He does know better, however; there is nothing in or on Neo's body that could be producing or conducting such charges, and the EKG they have doesn't show any unusual electrical activity in his heart. It truly seems as though his consciousness itself is experiencing contact with an electric charge, however impossible it sounds.
Hence the equal parts fascination and concern that persist in uneasy balance until something happens to disrupt it.
"Morpheus!" Link calls from his station on the deck, and Morpheus bolts up from the bunk in the recently vacated room he'd taken over to try to get a few hours of rest. "I've got something!"
It's a good thing he hadn't committed to trying to sleep, as he likely wouldn't have had the patience to put his boots back before dashing back out to the deck.
"What is it?" he demands, already looking over Link's shoulder, scouring the readouts on the screen.
"It might be nothing, but the APG just snapped back to normal." He scrolls back a handful of seconds in the recording and there: a clear line creating a mirrored image of the gradient tendencies.
"Has it ever changed that suddenly?" Morpheus demands. He's familiar with the principles, but as an Operator Link's expertise in this is far superior to his own.
"No, it's always gone through a neutral period first. And this was the whole brain, all at once, like a switch being flipped." Link traces the line down the screen with his finger, showing the same change reflected in each four-line group of paired electrodes. "It could still switch back, but I've been keeping track of the reversal frequency and it's been six-second intervals like clockwork. Let's go back to the readout and see..." He scrolls forward to display the active tracing. "No, it's still normal. Anterior-posterior, I mean, instead of posterior-anterior."
"What does it mean?"
"I don't know," Link admits. "Like I said, it might be nothing. But something definitely happened. And I don't think it originated endogenously, so something happened to his brain."
"His brain is in this room," Morpheus points out, frustrated. If only he knew what was going on.
"Brain, consciousness, who the hell knows which is which anymore." Link raises his voice. "Trap, did you poke him super hard or something?"
"I'd be thrilled if he started reacting to external stimuli," Trap calls back, only slightly muffled by her mask and the layers of hanging cloth separating them, "but no, we weren't even touching him, and he sure as hell wasn't moving."
Link sighs and turns back to the monitor. "I'm gonna have so many questions for this kid once he gets back," he mutters. "Sorry I woke you up for this, Morpheus. I thought it might end up being something bigger."
"No, I'm glad you did. You're right – it must be significant, even if we don't understand why. And I wasn't really sleeping, anyway."
"Yeah, I think that's its own problem."
"Solve one problem, get another ten thrown at you. That's life."
"Sad but true." Link sighs again, then slumps over the control board before leaning back and stretching. "Man, I'm wiped. Somehow sitting around waiting hasn't gotten any less tiring."
"You need a break?"
"Nah, just stating the obvious. I'd rather be here than getting shot at again, you know?"
"But you'd rather be at home with Zee than here."
"In a perfect world, sure. Let me know when it shows up and I'll take you up on that offer of a break. Until then I may gripe a little, but trust me, I know what I've got to be grateful for."
Morpheus drops a heavy hand on Link's shoulder, and Link lifts his own hand to cover Morpheus' and squeeze. It's not a gesture common between the two of them, but it's familiar nonetheless. His other hand finds Trinity's amulet just below his collarbone, and he imagines taking her hand and completing the loop. She'd call him a sap for it, but it'd be with a smile. God, he'd give almost anything to be able to see her smile again.
Still in here, Trinity's voice reminds him, amused. You forgetting my face already?
"You okay?" Link's looking at him oddly, and Morpheus abruptly realizes how close he is to tears.
"Yeah," he says quickly, and lets go. Both hands. "I just. Trinity." He reaches back up to the amulet, but only touches it lightly, this time, rather than clutching it.
"I know," Link says quietly. "She left a hole. I keep expecting to turn a corner and see her. It's rough. And listen, Morpheus, I know we were never all that close, but if you ever want to talk to someone, you know I'm here for you, right?"
Morpheus shakes his head, though not in denial. "You're family, Link. If we weren't close before, it was only because we hadn't had time to be. What you did...what you've done... I also know what I have to be grateful for," he finishes pointedly. "I couldn't be doing this without you."
He knows he hasn't answered the question directly, but Link nods all the same. Sometimes an indirect answer is answer enough. "All right. You want to try actually getting some sleep, or would you rather sit here and stare at spikey lines with me for another four hours?"
"Four hours? That's nothing. This is the first major change we've seen in the last twenty. I'll stay."
"Suit yourself. No falling asleep out here, though, or I'll poke you with something sharp."
"No bleeding in my operating room," Trap says loudly, making Link twitch in surprise. "You wanna draw blood, do it outside."
"How did she even hear that?" Link mouths, barely making a sound, and in spite of everything Morpheus feels himself smiling. In spite of everything that has happened, there is still friendship and camaraderie and reason to laugh.
Now you're starting to get it, Trinity tells him.
Shh, he says back. Let me work.
Sure thing, boss.
Morpheus pulls out the other chair at the control board and sits next to Link. It's the work of a few seconds to get his monitor up and displaying the tracing feed, and then he settles in to watch and wait.
. . .
over the past week I have given myself crash courses in periorbital necrotizing fasciitis and EEG interpretation, among other topics that are not yet relevant, but I am still a dumbass who doesn't actually know things.
thank you for reading! as always, please feel free to leave any feedback you'd like to!