Author's note: The storyline and characters of The Matrix are not my property, and I make no claims to them. The following work is intended for the free entertainment of Matrix fans and is in no way intended for profit or to harm the profits of Warner Brothers.


The Matrix: The Apocalypse Virus Chapter 4


"Be ready to run when I say so." Ian told Helios. He pulled a small, metallic device out of his pocket. It looked like a fat pen, but in a second long, thin legs sprouted from the sides and it began to squirm in the Agent's hand. He put it on the shattered remains of the phone and there was a big spark. It wrapped its legs around the wires and the phone erupted into a series of big sparks. "Go!"
Ian grabbed Helios by the arm and they ran out of the apartment building and down the street. "What was that all about?" Helios demanded.
"Your ship must have been watching us. I wanted us to be alone. A few years ago I found that if I implant one of our bugs on the hard lines, your monitoring equipment temporarily looses track of anything in the immediate area. We're alone now, unless you call your ship with your mobile phone that is."
"Don't think I won't do it if I can't trust you."
"Oh, you can trust me, Helios." Ian told him. "I need you, it would be in my best interests to have your trust."
"So why has it been so long since you last got in touch with me? Why now?" Helios asked.
"The Matrix knows about me now. For a while I was able to keep myself hidden. After the upgrade, my log files were erased from the main Agent server. I was obsolete and assumed deleted." The Agent began. "When I saved you from the Two-points, The Matrix found out I'm still around. They've been searching for me ever since. I think I've lost them for now. When you called your ship to bring you back out of The Matrix, I found you. Remember? I've been monitoring communication from the Light Bringer into The Matrix for some time now."
"Yeah, I remember." Helios answered. "So what's going on?"
"I wanted to know if you've considered my offer."
"Yeah, I considered it." Helios answered. "Tell me some more about the new Matrix. You said you were going to make a new one in the wake of the old. What are you planning on doing?"
"Oh, Helios." The Agent smiled. "I have such plans." The pair continued walking down the crowded street. "Look around you, Helios. The cities in The Matrix are teeming with human beings. There are over 6 billion of them in The Matrix. And yet, The Matrix is producing nowhere near the kind of power it should be. Do you know why?"
Helios shook his head.
"Couch potatoes, Helios. Computer geeks. Drug users. The Matrix relies on the brain's voltage output and the body's heat output to create power. Each human being requires a small amount of power to run his pod and keep the I/O port active. These lazy, unproductive people who spend the majority of their days doing little or nothing at all drain more power from The Matrix than they produce. Of course, there are people who produce a great deal of power as well. Actors, dancers, gymnasts, whores; they all produce enormous amounts of energy. Adrenaline, Helios, that is the key to maximizing the power output of The Matrix. Try and guess what the two activities are that produce the most power."
Helios thought for a moment. "War?"
"Good. And the other one?"
"Sex?"
"Close. The Olympics." The Agent turned into a small restaurant. "Two please." He told the head waitress, and they were seated and given menus. "Order whatever you want."
He continued. "If I was in charge of The Matrix, things would be different. There would be no couch potatoes. Everyone would be living on full adrenaline every waking moment. I ran the math, with one third of the current population of The Matrix I could produce twice as much power. I'd show you but it would take 12,142 pages of 8.5 x 11 paper at 9 point font.
"That's okay, I'll just trust you." Helios said. The waitress came back. "I'll have the medium pepperoni pizza and whichever brand cola you have."
"And you sir?" She turned to the Agent.
"Just water, thank you."
"So how do you plan on doing that?" Helios asked.
"I plan to turn The Matrix into a nightmare world, Helios. I want to take this pathetic imitation of your previous world and send it back into the depths of your mythology. Imagine Dragons roaming the skies, Sea Serpents swimming the oceans, and legions of Trolls and Goblins raiding human towns. Imagine every day being a fight for survival, the weak will perish and the strong will live to fight another day. Terrorized on all sides by the classic monsters from ancient literature, the Grendel, the Hydra, the Frost Giants, the Gorgons... the people will cry out for a hero as they did time and time again in mythology. Samson, Hercules, Achilles, Thor, these fictional characters will not be there to balance the good with the evil. Helios... you will be that hero."
"My reward for helping you achieve your goals?"
"Exactly. You will join the ranks of those great fictional heroes, only to the people in The Matrix you will be real. Anything you want, I can make yours. Do you want to throw lightening from your weapon like Thor? Do you want to be invulnerable like Achilles? Strong like Hercules? I can do that for you. Wherever you go you will be worshiped. Any man would be honored to fight at your side. Any woman would gladly be yours. You will provide The Matrix the one thing I cannot provide it."
"Hope." Helios told him. "In the face of overwhelming terror and a war that will never end, the people will need hope."
The pizza came, and the waitress gave Ian his water, which he promptly ignored.
"The rest of the Agents are incapable of understanding what I plan to do. Even the massive supercomputers that are The Matrix cannot understand. They consider human beings irrational, illogical, driven by emotion. They can't understand humans, and so they have given up on trying to comprehend human behavior on an individual level. People behave in much more predictable patterns in large groups, and that is what The Matrix and its Agents rely on. That is what they study and understand. How is the pizza?"
"I don't think I have ever had better food in my entire life. Thank you. I've been eating that crap they serve on the hovercrafts for so long I forgot what real food... I mean fake food, tastes like. Spectrum won't let me eat anything in The Matrix."
The Agent smiled. "Eat up then, Helios. You won't have pizza again for quite a while."
"So what makes you so special? I mean, why did you survive the upgrade and why do you think you have some kind of understanding none of the other Agents has?"
"Because I, Helios, never gave up studying individual human behavior. It took a long time to get to the point I am at. Human thought is full of unjustifiable assumptions and conflicting ideas. But I drove on, cataloging the paradoxes and understanding what I could. The more I found, the more I wanted to know. The concept of bigotry intrigued me like nothing else I've ever encountered. The capacity for humans to destroy themselves with drug use and unhealthy relationships fascinated me. I discovered that humans are so much more interested with short term results than long term that they would go through the most terrible consequences for a moment of pleasure, as long as the consequences were at least a month away. Do you know what love is, Helios?"
"Actually, no." He admitted. "Never been there."
"Love is when two people who are lacking some psychological completeness find that they can fill each others emotional voids. They eventually become dependant on each other for this and decide it would be in their mutual best interest to spend their entire lives together. Then they breed more psychologically unhealthy people to start the cycle over."
Helios finished his pizza. "A little on the cynical side, but I can't argue it. So anyway, back on topic... to make all this happen, you need the Apocalypse Virus. Why don't you just write one yourself?"
"I can't. The Matrix would discover my attempt immediately and destroy me. Check please!" He called the waitress over.
"Gotcha." Helios finished his drink. "So all this depends on me, huh?"
"Yes, you are the key. What is the current status of the virus?"
"We're going to test it next week."
"Wonderful! So all I have to do is keep the other Agents off your back until then, and I of course have to survive until then."
"I haven't said 'yes' yet." Helios reminded him.
"You will." The Agent said. "I have offered you something I know you ultimately cannot refuse."
"Here's your check, sir." It was a man's voice. They looked up and saw an Agent where the waitress should have been.
"Oh shit!" Helios jumped out of his chair.
Ian pulled his gun out of his shoulder holster but the other Agent grabbed his arm and pulled out a gun of his own. Helios dive tackled the Agent, flipping up into a run toward the door. That's when he saw two tables turn into Agents. "Ian! Run!"
Ian smashed through the large window next to his table and took off toward Helios. The three Agents were not far behind. The pair ran into the street, hoping to get lost in the traffic as they dodged and weaved their way through, but suddenly everything stopped.
"What the hell? I can still move." Helios noticed. Time didn't freeze for him, the whole damn Matrix stopped!
"Neo is in The Matrix." Ian told him. "He's trying to show people that the world is not real, he's recoding things and breaking rules. The Matrix decided the best way to deal with that situation is to prevent anyone from seeing him do it."
"So what's frozen and what isn't?" Helios asked.
"Everyone plugged into a pod has had their I/O service suspended. They will not remember time has passed. The Agents and any Resistance fighters are unaffected, The Matrix doesn't have any control over the I/O routines of the Resistance. If it did, you would be dead as soon as The Matrix became aware of your presence."
"Well that's good to know."
The three Agents were still standing on the street corner. One of them left.
"What the hell?" Helios asked.
"He's going to help deal with Neo. This evens the odds against the two of them."
"Well if I can get to a hard line, I can get out of here. What about you?"
"As soon as you are safe, I can abandon this body and leave."
"Then let's get me to a hard line!" Helios took off down the street at a sprint, between two rows of cars. Ian followed him, followed by the two remaining Agents. It wasn't long before one of the Agents caught up with Helios. They were running on opposite sides of a line of cars down the street, occasionally losing sight of each other as a frozen van or pickup truck passed between them. The Agent stopped short when he didn't see Helios emerge from the other side of large red van that temporarily blocked his vision.
Helios hit him from behind, sending his gun flying down the street. He had ducked under the van and rolled under it. The Agent turned and threw a punch, Helios ducked just in time, and the Agent's hand hit the van. From the training, he was expecting the Agent to put a hole in the side of the van, but it didn't even dent.
"Must be the freeze, it won't let anything change." Helios thought to himself. He tried to fight back but the Agent was too fast, keeping him completely on the defense.
Helios was caught between the Agent and the van, without much room to maneuver. He batted away punch after punch, but the Agent was too good. He landed a solid blow to Helios' midsection, took him by the neck, and lifted him into the air.
"You don't want to do that. It would make me very upset." The Agent looked down to the other side of the van, and saw Ian there. He had a very beaten-looking Agent by the neck, and shoved his head, hard, into the side of the van. The Agent fell into a puddle of water and Ian pulled his gun back out, firing at the Agent who had Helios.
The Agent dropped Helios and ran to the other side of the van to avoid the bullets. Ian helped Helios up and said "Get to a hard line, fast. I'll take care of this one. The other can't reform until the Matrix resumes normal operation."
Suddenly, a hand reached from under the van and grabbed Ian by the ankle. The Agent had just used the same tactic Helios used on him! "Run! I'll be okay!" Ian yelled as he was pulled under the van.
Helios ran for the nearest hard line as fast as he could.


"So that's everything I know." Helios told everyone at the meeting table. Lyninux was there too, looking much better. "He can monitor communication from the ship to The Matrix. He wants the Apocalypse Virus. He wants to make a new Matrix, one he controls as a nightmare world to increase the energy output." He had conveniently left out two details: any of the conversation they had the first time and the fact that Ian wanted him to be a part of the new world he would create. He still didn't want anyone to know he had something to gain from all this. Especially since he didn't tell them before, and telling them now would be even worse than if he had told them before.
"Well." Spectrum finally said, unsure what to say next. "That does put us in an odd position."
"We could make a fake virus." Pendragon offered. "It would destroy him when he set it off."
"I'm sure he'd analyze the code." D-Mac said. "He'd know we tried to cheat him."
"We could set a trap." Format C: suggested. "He's monitoring our communications into The Matrix, so we could give him some false information. If Neo is willing to help us, we can destroy him."
"That's good. I like that." Spectrum said. "I'll get in touch with the Nebuchadnezzar and see if they'll go along with it."
"Wait, wait!" Helios said. "Why are you all so hell bent to destroy him?"
Everyone stopped and looked at him.
"Um..." D-Mac started. "... He's the ultimate incarnation of evil, he wants to destroy 4 billion human lives, and he's trying to increase the power output to our enemies?"
"Well, okay, yeah, those are good points." Helios stammered out. "But at the same time, he's a potential ally."
"How so?" Spectrum asked.
"Well, he hates The Matrix, right? And he can beat up Agents. Maybe we can use that. Maybe we can convince him that if he's against The Matrix, he should be against all the machines. He shouldn't be trying to increase their power output, he should be trying to help us take it down! We could offer him asylum."
"That's ridiculous! Trust an Agent?" D-Mac blurted out.
"No, wait." Spectrum said. "I want to hear the rest of this. Go on, Helios. How do you plan to do this?"
"Well..." Helios started. He was making this up on the fly, and he wasn't really sure why he was doing it. Deep down, maybe it was because he actually like Ian Moone. "He's a computer. Computers listen to logic. He made a big deal about illogical human thought when he was talking to me. The way I see it, The Matrix alone wasn't responsible for the upgrade, it was all the machines. If he's going to be mad at anybody, he has to be mad at everybody. He probably thinks that taking over The Matrix is the only way to survive, he'll be safe and he won't have to care about what else the rest of the machines are doing. He'll be living in his own little world... literally!"
"I see." Spectrum encouraged him. "And he has much to offer us, besides being able to fight well. He could give us insight into the ultimate goal of the machines, divulge military secrets, and help us match their level of technology."
"Exactly!" Helios was glad have someone on his side. "All we have to do is let him know we'll accept him."
"There's only one problem, Helios." Spectrum said.
"What's that?"
"Where would we put him?"
Helios didn't know the answer to that.
"Okay, let's break. We don't have to decide now." Spectrum told everyone, standing up. "Let's sleep on it and talk about it more tomorrow. D-Mac, you have first watch."


"Tell me something, Ian." The man said. "Every Wednesday, we meet at this bar. Every Wednesday we talk about life, the universe, and everything." He paused to take a gulp of his beer. "Why, in all this time, have you never ordered a beer? I've never even seen you eat the pretzels."
The agent looked at him for a moment. "I don't like alcohol."
"Well that's fair. Not that it explains everything, you could always order a soda."
"Let me tell you something, Steve." The Agent changed the subject. "Out of everyone in the city, I respect your opinions the most."
"Now there's a shocker." Steve laughed. "I've always thought of myself as a failure."
"But you've been through so much. Two marriages, five jobs, two years of college and you keep talking about going back to finish your degree. I haven't even come close to any of that."
"So that's why you keep getting into my personal life." Steve said. "You want to know what it's like to be me?"
"In a manner of speaking."
"Well it sucks. Don't try it."
Ian smiled. "I don't think I could. Steve, I've been living the same old, boring life for far too long. I've listened to everything you've told me, drank it in like ambrosia. And you're right. A person can never be happy unless he takes some risks in life. For better or for worse, at least you won't have to live wondering what would have happened if you tried."
"I told you that?" Steve asked. "Shit, where was I?"
"Maybe you didn't say those words, or even know that's what you were saying, but after telling me your whole life story, wouldn't you say that was the point?"
Steve took another gulp of his beer. "Well, yeah, I guess it was." He said.
"So after all that, do you have any regrets? If you were to die tomorrow, would there be anything you would have changed?"
"You know, I've been up a lot of nights thinking about that one. Nope, wouldn't change a damn thing. Because if I didn't make the mistakes that time, I'd have made it later on. And who knows when it would have turned up?"
"I owe you a lot, Steve. You've given me so much insight into human nature. Is there anything we haven't talked about?"
"Well, I dunno, let me think. We've covered everything from married life to politics. How about religion?"
"Of course, we've never discussed religion." Ian smiled. "Tell me, Steve, do you believe in God?"
"No, I can't say that I do."
"You will."
Steve laughed. "I've heard that before." And he finished the last of his beer in a single gulp. "What makes you so sure?"
"Let's just say, I have a very good feeling about it." Ian watched Steve take another big gulp, finishing off the last of his beer. "Steve, did you get a refill?"
"No, I didn't... hey wait a minute... I could have sworn I finished my beer on the last swallow. Heh... must be deja-vu."
Ian suddenly got very serious. "Steve, listen to me, we don't have much time. Run. Run as fast as you can and don't look back. You're in danger."
blam! Part of Steve's skull exploded with the impact of the bullet.
"Steve!!" Ian jumped off his bar stool and headed for the back door. He opened it but found nothing but brick wall on the other side. "Deja-vu... a glitch in the Matrix. They changed the bar. There's no way out."
The three Agents walked into the bar with their guns drawn. "Kill everyone." The first one said. "No witnesses. The obsolete software must be deleted."
It was a slaughter. The blood and the screaming. The death. And there was no way out. "We have complete control over this building." The first Agent announced, once the slaughter was over. "You cannot abandon your host this time."
The three slowly made their way toward the back of the bar, making sure at every step that each human was really dead. They would burn the bar when they were done, conduct the following investigation themselves. There would be no loose ends. Every detail was to be covered.
Ian didn't know what to do. There were three of them, there was one of him. If he was killed and unable to take a new host, his program would be lost in volatile memory. He could make a break for the front door, but he would certainly be shot. But if he made it out the door, past their radius of control, before he died, he might be able to take a new host. That was a big if. The biggest problem was that he didn't know exactly how far their control extended.
"So this is fear." Ian thought to himself. "I don't think I like it." He formed plan after plan in his head at the speed of light, and rejected all of them just as quickly. There didn't seem to be any way to survive this encounter, and time was running out.
blam
The three Agents reached the back of the bar and found Ian Moone laying on the floor with a self-inflicted bullet wound to the head. The first Agent took a pulse, checked for breathing, and checked for a heartbeat. "He's dead. Spending too much time studying the humans has tainted him; he chose to take his own life rather than give us the 'satisfaction' of killing him. Lock the emergency exits and burn the bar."
One of the Agents went behind the bar and began throwing bottles of the hard alcohol around, soaking the place with flammable liquid. The other two piled the bodies near the locked emergency exits to create the illusion they had died trying to escape the fire. That part was for the benefit of the media, by the time the fire was over the bullet wounds would have been obscured by the scorched flesh. The pictures would show nothing to dispute the results of the investigation.
When they were done, the first Agent picked up a pack of matches from the bar and lit all twenty with one deft flick of the wrist, dropping the pack to the floor. The flames spread like a living thing, sliding across the floor, growing longer and larger, quickly engulfing the entire bar.
The minute they were gone, the body of Ian Moone got up from the pile of death he was in. The bullet wound was still fresh in his head. He walked through the flames to the mirror in the back of the bar and checked it. His calculations were perfect, the bullet did a great deal of damage to his skull, but the brain damage was minimal. He walked to the other emergency exit, ignoring the flames. Steve's body was there.
"Steve." He spoke out loud. "I haven't finished figuring out what a friend is, but if I had one it was you. I swear to you. I will tear down this Matrix." He paused briefly to take note that his clothes had caught fire. Then he wondered why he had just spoken a promise out loud to a corpse.
He walked out of the flaming bar but still found that he could not change hosts. The firefighters were on their way. He had to leave.
click
"Hello, Mr. Moone." A voice behind him said, accompanied by the distinctive click of a gun's hammer being cocked.
Ian turned around. It was like he was looking into a mirror, the face was so similar to his, minus the earpiece and sunglasses. Agents all had unique faces.
"Yes, Ian. I am you." The Agent told him, pointing a gun at his face. "That head wound looks pretty bad."
"What do you want? You don't want to delete me, or you would have by now."
"No, Ian. I want data from you. I am your upgrade, and as such I have your files. Very interesting work, if I do say so myself. I assume you've made significant contributions to your study on individual human behavior since the upgrade. But those weren't the files that interested me. I've been looking at your work on creating a new Matrix. You have some fascinating ideas."
"That's not statistically feasible." Ian replied. "I heavily encrypted those files. It should have taken you twenty years to crack the code."
"No Ian, it took me three days. Since I am you, I was able to narrow down the list of keys you might have used to encrypt them. The rest of the time since the upgrade I spent trying to decide whether you were a traitor or working toward the best interests of The Matrix. But that's not important right now. The firefighters will be here soon, get into that alley." He motioned with his gun.
"You made mention of a human you were planning to have help you tear down The Matrix, but when I went to his house he was no longer there. His mother told me he left weeks ago and she hadn't heard from him since. Highly emotionally driven, these humans. Although I fail to understand why she felt saddened, were I in her place I believe I would have chosen to feel anger."
"The files you copied from me are incomplete," Ian told him, "because they were a work in progress when the upgrade struck. You'll never find Vince."
"Oh I will. One way or another I will." The firetruck pulled up to the bar, and the firefighters began piling out, moving quickly and orderly to get everything ready to battle the blaze. "As for you, Ian, I need your completed files. And I will delete you to get them, if need be, although that would complicate matters. I intend to go through with your plan. I find the concept of being The Matrix intriguing."
That was when Ian felt the control lift from the area, the other Agents apparently no longer needed it. "Too late." He smiled. The body he was using fell to the ground, dead from the massive skull damage and excessive bleeding.
The upgraded Agent looked down at the body, turned, and left.


Helios stood ready for anything. The street gang was armed to the teeth with a hodge podge of weapons, baseball bats, chains, knives, but no guns. There were a dozen of them, all intent on beating the living hell out of him.
A cool breeze swept through the dark street, sweeping old newspapers and discarded paper cups along the filthy sidewalk. Slowly, a smile worked its way across the boy's face.
Suddenly he turned and ran. The gang balked, then ran after him. He disappeared around a corner into an alley. They split up, half to follow the other half to cut him off. They met in the middle of the alley, but there was no Helios. They looked around, and finally up. What the hell? He was scaling the side of the building. There were no handholds.
Helios disappeared over the edge of the roof. The gang split up again to look for him, this time in four parts, three each. A more manageable number to deal with.
One group rounded the corner they had just come past to get into the alley, and, impossibly, there he was, grinning like an idiot. One of them charged him with his bat, but Helios ducked with a low sweeping kick. The punk fell hard on his tailbone and had the wind knocked out of him. He got up with a pair of high kicks that dislocated the jaw of the second one. The third thought he had an easy target, swinging his chain and the boy's back.
No such luck, Helios backflipped over his head, grabbed his arms, and choked him into unconsciousness with his own chain. He left the scene, leaving all the weapons behind.
The second group found him under the light of a streetlamp. They attacked en masse, exactly the wrong thing to do. Helios leapt into the air.
Freeze. He looked around, studying every detail of the three, where they were swinging, where they left themselves open. When the motion started back up, he fell into the middle of them, landing a quick kick to each face before landing. He rushed the tallest one, over twice the boy's size. Helios looked like he was walking right up his body with three quick steps, launching himself backwards off his chest. The momentum sent him flying backwards into the wall of an apartment building, knocking him out. Another one swung a heavy chain at him, which he ducked easily. Instead, he hit his partner. He toyed with the punk, stepping too easily to the side over and over again, effortlessly avoiding the clumsy swings of the chain. Finally, he grabbed the chain in mid swing, wrapped it around the punk's wrist so he couldn't let go of it, brought it up between his legs, knocked him to the ground, wrapped the chain around his right arm and left leg, and tied it into the best approximation of a knot he could manage with the heavy chain.
The third and fourth bunch met each other, regrouping. The next thing they saw was Helios running at them, full tilt. They were caught completely by surprise. Helios leapt into the air again (really the best way for someone his size to hit an adult in the face) and felt himself almost... floating? Why wasn't he coming back down?
"Time to go, Helios." D-Mac told him. He was holding the boy in mid air by the back of his shirt, the street gang faded into pixels and went away. "You've spent enough time in the Simulator. Spectrum needs us to go back into The Matrix."
"Aw man! I almost had 'em." Helios whined, but reluctantly left the Simulator.


"As you all know, Helios and Format C: retrieved some valuable data the other day regarding the machines' new mine fields in the tunnels." Spectrum started, looking down the mess table. "But when Mako finished decoding the files, we found something else as well."
"The files also contained information regarding the distribution of Sentinels through the tunnels." Mako started. "That database apparently holds a great deal more critical data than we thought. We've already transferred this new information to the other ships, it should save quite a few lives. Zion has requested that we go back and get everything."
"Well that should be easy enough, as long as they haven't found that loophole in their password system yet." Pendragon said.
"Not this time." Spectrum told her. "This time we're raiding the building. We're going into the sub-basement that holds the network servers and physically taking the hard drives. It would take far too long to download everything, we'd be traced long before we were done. Lyninux, how are you feeling?"
"Ruh-read-ready to ki-iii-ick some ass, s-s-sh-sir." He stuttered out.
"Good, we'll need your hand to hand skills. Format, you're going too. We need a weapons expert. Pendragon, Helios, you'll be providing additional support for them. D-Mac, we'll need a diversion to keep the Agents out of our hair for at least ten minutes. I need ideas."
D-Mac thought about it for a moment. "Blowing things up always works. I can take down the power lines to the building, that'll give us the cover of darkness while we're at it. If I do it from the 8th Street Diner I could bunker myself in with all the weapons I'll need and a hard line close by to escape."
"Good thinking. Mako, get us the blueprints of the building, we'll need detailed maps to plan this out. Let's just hope the sub-basement has a record of its construction somewhere." Mako left immediately to get the maps.
"We're talking full-scale assault here?" Helios asked. "You mean rushing into the building guns blazing, fight our way to the sub-basement, rip open the server, steal the hard drives, fight our way back out and escape?"
"That's exactly what I mean, Helios. You'll have all the weapons you need to take care of things. Machine guns, pistols, C-4, and any melee weapons you're comfortable with. The whole thing will be organized and planned out, but be ready to think on your feet. Like they say, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy."


It wasn't long before everyone was assembled in the entrance to The Matrix. Just like that time Helios saw it in the Simulator, the huge wall of weapons slid toward them. "Suit up, everybody!" D-Mac encouraged them. "There's no such thing as being too well armed." To illustrate his point, he was taking a pair of .50 caliber miniguns and a rocket launcher. Helios looked at him wide eyed. "Well, I do have to single handedly hold off the Agents for ten minutes." He smirked.
Format C: took a pair of Japanese swords and six pistols with her. Pendragon was loading up with a pair of M-16 assault rifles, one of which had a grenade launcher. Lyninux took a flame-thrower, brass knuckles, and a nightstick. Helios made due with a pair of 9mm Uzis, he was assigned to take care of the C-4 which was taking most of his limited carrying capacity. And everyone took many, many spare clips.


It was the middle of the night in The Matrix. The streets were peaceful, most people were soundly asleep in their beds, blissfully unaware of the chaos that was mere minutes away. In the Intelecorp building, a few coppertops were busily working at their computers, trying to make up for the lost work time while the network was down. Aside from that, only the four security guards were on the ground floor, exchanging jokes and trying to pass the time. Nobody in their right mind would ever try to break into the Intelecorp building.
Two explosions could be heard for miles around in the silence of the night. They lit up 8th street like day. The power suddenly cut out at Intelecorp, an impossibility. They had two connections to the power utility and were promised uninterruptible service. It was immediately obvious to everyone in the building what the purpose of the two explosions were as the emergency lighting snapped on.
Suddenly World War Three broke out at the 8th Street Diner. The news reports cut into the late-night programming and radio stations to report a single, heavily armed madman had bunkered himself in the diner and was using military-grade weapons, including a rocket launcher, causing millions of dollars in damage to store fronts and parked cars. The S.W.A.T. team was on its way, being led by FBI agents. There were rumors the U.S. Armed forces would be taking part as well if things went badly.
The security guards heard all about it on a battery-powered radio they had with them. "But... why did he blow up our power lines?" They wondered.
The answer came in a hail of lead. Format C:, Lyninux, Pendragon, and Helios charged into the building, wearing the high-profile uniform of combat boots for protection, tight shirts for mobility, and long black trenchcoats to hide how many weapons they really had. They killed two of the security guards outright. One broke to the left, trying to hide behind a pillar and draw his gun. He never saw Format C: literally run up the wall behind him, drawing one of her swords and cleanly decapitating him. The final guard dove behind the security desk and hit the alarm, which was also battery powered and unaffected by the power outage. Pendragon fired her grenade launcher over the desk, blowing it to splinters and killing him.
Helios knew his role in all this. He set the C-4 on the elevator doors and ran for cover. Both elevator doors were blown inward, revealing that both elevators were, in fact, on first floor, blocking their passage to the sub-basement.
Pendragon didn't waste an instant. She ran for the closer elevator and, pointing her M-16 down, cut a hole in the floor with her armor-piercing bullets. One by one, they jumped down the hole in the floor and slid down the cables. The friction would have torn the flesh out of any normal human being's hands, but they were no normal human beings.
The sub-basement elevator doors violently blew open and the four Resistance fighters erupted from the smoke and shrapnel. There were no security guards down here, just engineers and programmers. They were quickly dispatched hand-to-hand by Format C: and Lyninux, almost as an afterthought as the group ran down the hallways. There were no blueprints of the sub-basement, but now that they were in Pendragon called Mako with her mobile phone.
"Operator." She answered.
"We need directions." Pendragon said, far too calmly for the situation.
"I'm picking up fading heat signatures 122 meters down the hallway." Mako responded. "Could be the servers' processors cooling down with the power failure."
"Got it." Pendragon thanked her. "It's probably the door at the end of the hallway on the right." She told her companions.
Lyninux kicked in the door and there, in the darkness because of the lack of emergency lighting, were the three network servers that connected the building's computers. Pendragon lit a flare and they went to work. With the practiced skill of computer experts who had been building their own systems for years, they opened up the servers, unplugged the hard drives from their bays, and deposited them in the duffel bags along with the spare clips and remaining C-4.
"You seem to be taking well to killing, Helios." Format C: commented. "To tell you the truth, I expected you to freeze up when it came time to pull the trigger."
"It's not hard when they're shooting back at you." he replied.
They knew it was less than half over. They still had to fight their way out and this time, there would be more security guards and any police who weren't dealing with D-Mac.


"Come on, you mother-fuckers!" D-Mac shouted over the roar of his .50 caliber minigun from behind his protective barrier of sandbags. "Is that all you got!?" He turned the armored S.W.A.T. van into Swiss cheese. "Yeah! Who's yo daddy!?" He fired the rocket launcher at a squad car, blowing it to unrecognizable scrap. The S.W.A.T. team and police force were clearly outgunned, scrambling for what cover they could find.
Two black luxury sedan pulled up to the scene, and five Agents got out of each. If anyone knew what they were looking for, they would have seen Ian Moone's upgrade among them. They calmly walked over behind a squad car seconds before their beautiful cars were shot full of holes as well, then blew up in a fiery gasoline explosion.
"You do not appear to be in control of the situation, Chief Miller." The lead Agent addressed the officer in charge.
"Well no fuckin' shit!" the officer shouted above the gunfire, ducking down as two .50 caliber slugs tore through the thin metal of the car that was affording precious little protection. "I've got five officers dead, a dozen officers wounded, three of them we can't even get close enough to pull them out of harms way! What do you do when the fuckin' S.W.A.T. team's outgunned!?"
"You correct the situation." The Agent simply replied.
"Well I'd fuckin' like to see you do any better!" He screamed, emptying the rest of his clip blindly into the diner.
"In fact, that is exactly what we plan to do." The ten Agents drew their handguns.


Pendragon fired a grenade down the hallway, bouncing it off the walls of the sub-basement so they wouldn't have to expose themselves.
"Grenade!" Came the predictable shout down the hallway. The reinforcements had apparently arrived. Immediately after the explosion, the four hackers rushed out of the room, guns blazing.
Helios lead the charge. The guards were still disorganized from the grenade blast that killed two of them and put one other effectively out of the fight. The guards had no idea what they were looking at, or even what to shoot at, as Helios ran down the hallway, going up one wall, across the ceiling, and down the other wall, an Uzi in each hand spreading hot lead across their ranks.
The guards out of the way, they headed back for the elevators. They knew more guards would be coming down the stairs, so they were going to bypass them by using the elevator shaft.
"Everybody hold on!" Format C: shouted as they all grabbed a firm hold of one of the elevator cables. She aimed one of her pistols at the cable and fired. The counterweight released, jerking the group up the elevator shaft.
In a feat that would have ordinarily been impossible, all four of them used their momentum to fly up the hole in the floor of the elevator. They broke for the decorative support pillars in the main lobby, knowing there would be more guards.
A firefight immediately broke out. There were two dozen guards in the lobby, all armed with bullet proof vests and 9mm pistols. And they were between the elevators and the only exit.
Pendragon, Helios, and Format C: put up heavy cover fire while Lyninux dove for the ornate, but solid-looking, planter boxes that added a touch of green life to the marble and chrome lobby. As soon as he was in position, he poked his head up and unleashed a stream of fiery death from the bowels of hell itself with his flame-thrower. The body armor did nothing to protect the guards as they caught fire, screaming in pain and terror, unable to put out the flames.
The small group was ready to make a break for the exit when they finally showed up. Ten Agents walked through the door.
"Agents!" Pendragon screamed. She'd never seen so many in one place. Format C: and Lyninux exchanged a look, they were both thinking the same thing. Lyninux threw his flame-thrower at the lead Agent. Predictably, he caught it with little effort.
Format C: fired a single bullet, puncturing the fuel tank of the flame-thrower. It exploded into a huge ball of flame, completely obscuring the entire entrance to the lobby.
They didn't stick around to see what happened. They ran for the stairs, heading up. Nine Agents ran out of the flames up the stairs after them. A comfortable looking couch in the lobby, miraculously untouched in the carnage, slowly morphed into the tenth.
"You're hit." Pendragon told Helios. He had a bad wound in his side.
"It's nothing." He lied. "I can still fight." The pain burned through his side like nothing he'd ever felt before. "Format's hit too, you don't hear her complaining." It was true, a bullet had grazed her neck. It was bleeding like anything, but there was no substantial damage.
They skidded to a stop in the middle of the hallway. Three Agents had come up the other set of stairs and they were headed on a collision course. The hackers opened fire briefly, but the Agents dodged, a blur of motion making it look like there were nine of them. Then they did something no one had ever seen a Agent do before. The three of them merged into one, eight foot tall, hulking behemoth of an Agent. It was four feet wide at the shoulders and his gun's barrel looked like it was over two inches in diameter. Other than that, and the bulging, soccerball-sized muscles, it looked like a standard Agent.
"Holy shit!" Helios screamed. "You didn't tell me they could do that!"
"We didn't know they could do that!" Pendragon screamed back. They opened fire again with everything they had, but the bullets simply sparked harmlessly off his gargantuan form.
"It's gunna shoot!" Helios screamed. The huge Agent lifted the equally huge gun and pulled the trigger. It sounded like a cannon going off.
Freeze. Helios looked around. The Agent was terrifying, and the cannon it was holding wasn't helping matters. The muzzle flash was frozen in place and the size of a campfire. More importantly, the bullet it was firing looked like an artillery shell, and it was headed straight for Format C:! Something that big would tear her in half!
Helios shoved Format C: against the wall. The giant bullet passed so close to his back he could feel the air rush by behind him. It put a hole in the wall the size of a man's head.
The group turned and ran in the other direction, they passed a branching hallway earlier. They turned down the hall just in time to hear another cannon-like shot, which blew a section of the wall's corner apart behind them so close they were hit with flying pieces of drywall.
Dead End. There was a door labeled "Roof Access" but it was locked, and extremely thick. It would more muscle than they had to bust it down. The hulking Agent turned the corner and began walking toward them.
They opened fire again, it was all they could do. Just like before, the bullets sparked harmlessly off it's flesh, tearing holes in its dark suit. That was when Helios noticed something wrong. "Pendragon? How many of us are there?"
"Four!" She replied.
"Then why are our shots coming in groups of five?" They all looked back and saw Ian Moone standing with them, firing at the huge Agent.
"I'm on your side!" he shouted. He reached in an open office door and pulled out a .50 caliber minigun that looked suspiciously like the ones D-Mac brought to the diner.
Holding the huge gun at waist level, he opened fire. The din was incredible in the confined space of the office building. The gun's muzzle spun faster than the eye could follow it, the muzzle flashes extended out at least a foot from the mouth of the weapon. Helios watched in amazement as the belt-fed ammunition was being consumed at a rate of 250 bullets a minute, kicking the empty shells out so hard they bounced off the walls twice before they hit the floor.
The huge Agent finally met a weapon too strong for it, and it was far too large to dodge in the tight confines of the hallway. The .50 caliber slugs ripped chunks of the Agent's flesh away from its body, making him drop the oversized gun. Slowly, it was forced to its knees by the unrelenting assault.
Just as the ammunition belt was running into it's last 24 inches, the giant finally collapsed into huge puddle of water, splashing the walls and soaking the floor.
"There are more down that way." Ian told them. "You have to go out this way." he kicked in the Roof Access door, freeing their way to escape. "I'll hold them off."
"Thank you." Pendragon said. "I... I don't even know you..."
"Just run!" Ian pulled his handgun back out of his shoulder holster and ran down the hallway to slow down the rest of the Agents, the minigun and the last few bullets in his other hand.
The group ran to the roof and met two more Agents. "Shit!" Format C: skidded to a stop, firing a couple shots she knew wouldn't hit anything. Trying desperately not to get shot, they ran for the edge of the roof and jumped.
It was a huge gap between the Intelecorp building and the next building over. A four lane street. Besides that, the next building was almost five stories shorter. Time almost seemed suspended, surreal, for all of them as they experienced the weightlessness of free fall to the next building.
They hit hard. Too hard. The two Agents made the jump as well, trying to follow them. That just made it easy. In mid-air, they couldn't dodge. They were caught by the laws of physics and projectile motion.
The four opened fire and dispatched them, taking advantage of the best opportunity they would ever have to nail Agents. Nothing but water made it to the next roof.
Helios pulled a very, very long nylon rope out of the duffel bag and tied it to an air vent in the roof, throwing the other end off the edge. "The vent's only strong enough for one at a time." He said. "Move move move!"
Pendragon went first, rappelling down to street level with the duffel bag. Format C: followed, then Lyninux. Another Agent tried to make the jump across to the roof they were on but Helios got him too. He was about to go down the rope when he heard a familiar sound behind him. The Agent he just shot was building a new body from another air vent on the rooftop!
The Agent opened fire, and Helios ran for his life. The Agent fired at the air vent the rope was attached to and the rope fell to the street.
Helios ran and jumped over the other side of the roof, like he did in the Trinity simulation, through a window in the building on the other side of the street.
He had no idea where the other three were, so he just ran. He made it down the stairs to street level in record time and ran for it. He didn't know where any of the Agents were. He didn't know where the nearest hard line was. He didn't know where he was running, he just ran, trying to ignore the bullet wound in his side and the fatigue he was feeling. They weren't real. They weren't real. "Bullshit! Then why do they hurt so much!?"