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 5


Mako and Spectrum were watching everything from the Light Bringer. They saw the team get the hard drives, they saw reinforcements arrive on the scene. They saw what must have been every Agent in the city gather at the 8th Street Diner, and they saw those Agents kill D-Mac.
They could only watch helplessly. There was nothing they could do from the ship. They decided not to call the others and tell them about D-Mac. They had enough to worry about. But now they were split up. They needed direction.
Mako called Helios first, since he was alone. "Helios, listen to me, get back to the warehouse! It's the closest hard line to your position!"
"How the fuck do I get there?" Helios was scared, panicking. An Agent could show up at any time, it could pop up from literally anywhere.
"You're running East. Turn left, you'll be headed South. In about two miles things should start to look familiar."
"Mako, I love you!" Helios screamed into the phone.
Next she called the other three. "Guys, I just called Helios. He's going to be okay, I gave him directions to a hard line."
"That's fuckin' great for him!" Pendragon shouted. "What about us?"
"Head North, toward the Oracle's apartment. There's a pay phone three blocks from it. It'll be ringing when you get there."
"Mako, I love you!" Pendragon hung up.
"Mako! Look at the sonar!" Spectrum suddenly shouted. "Sentinels!" Mako took a deep breath. With four of the crew in the Matrix, they couldn't fire the EMP shockwave. They would lose all of them, and the hard drives with them.


Helios continued to run as fast as he could. It was getting harder and harder to ignore not only the throbbing pain in his side, but also his physical exhaustion. He should have dropped a long time ago.
As per Mako's instructions, he was about to turn left. He suddenly stopped. "Wait just one fucking second..." He said to himself. "If I was running East, and I turn left, I'll be headed North! Mako you stupid bitch! Is it left or South?" He pulled out his mobile phone, dialing zero.
"Oh for the love of God." Helios got a busy signal, he couldn't have known it was the Sentinels. Their first target was the communications array.
He began to walk forward but suddenly stopped. He nearly stepped on something. It was a stale brownie rats had apparently been nibbling on. The words of the Oracle from so many days ago came back to him, that bizarre warning not to step on his brownie. He looked around and suddenly he remembered where he was. There was the grocery store he and Microwave hid from the Agents in!
"I knew you'd come back here, Vince." Vince? Who the hell would still called him Vince? He hadn't heard that name in a long time.


Format C:, Pendragon, and Lyninux made it back to the ship without incident. Of course, they couldn't take the hard drives with them, but the data was safely abroad the ship's computer.
"Where's Helios?" Lyninux asked, not stuttering. "And D-Mac?"
An explosion rocked the side of the ship. "We've got Sentinels on us, they cut the Comm array! I don't know where Helios is, and D-Mac was killed by the Agents." Mako filled them in, perhaps a bit too coldly.
Another explosion hit the ship. "No." Lyninux knelt down by the body of his best friend, still plugged into The Matrix. "Oh God no." It wasn't fair. Why did he recover from his encounter and D-Mac had to die?
"Lyninux, grieve later! We have Sentinels on us!" Spectrum tossed the huge, bulky lightning guns to Pendragon and Format C: Suddenly, a thin blue laser cut through the hull of the ship, slicing its way down the middle of the room before it stopped.
Lyninux immediately understood the gravity of the situation. This was no time for human emotions. The machines had no such weaknesses, and they held all the cards right now.


"Ian?" Helios looked at the Agent. It looked like, Ian, but Ian never called him Vince. He didn't have an earpeice or sunglasses either.
"Helios, run for the hard line!" Ian looked like he flew in from nowhere, shoving the Agent through the metal barred window of the closed grocery store. "This is my upgrade!"
The upgrade shot up from the mess in an instant. "You were foolish to come back to me, Ian. I took control of this area as a precaution. You can't switch hosts."
"Then it's just you and me." Ian got into the classic Agent fighting pose, and so did his upgrade. Helios didn't know what to do, Ian was about to get into a fight with someone who could have been his twin brother.
"I have all your combat routines, Ian." The upgrade told him. "I've run the mathematics of this fight hundreds of times, and the numbers always came up in my favor. You can't beat me."
"Helios, run!" He didn't need to be told a third time, he ran.
Ian attacked. He threw devastating punches at the upgrade, not letting up for an instant. The upgrade ducked and blocked over and over, easily avoiding the assault. Ian's fists literally broke chunks out of the brick walls of the grocery store when he missed.
Suddenly, a powerful fist impacted into Ian's gut, hitting him so hard he was briefly lifted into the air. It was followed by a right cross to the face hard enough to shatter a human's jaw. Then the upgrade's arms flew so fast they were a blur, striking Ian in the face a hundred times in just a second. The upgrade grabbed Ian by the throat and shoved him into the storefront. "Give me your updated files and I will let you continue to exist."
Ian reached up and grabbed the upgrade by the arms, breaking the hold. He twisted around, using momentum to slam the upgrade face first into the storefront. He pulled his fist back to slam the back of the upgrade's head, planning to smash his face harder into the wall.
The upgrade folded over inside itself and reformed facing Ian. He caught Ian's fist and twisted it behind his back. "I have powers you do not have." The upgrade gloated, if a program could gloat. "You are obsolete and inferior."
"And you're a second-rate service patch!" Ian shoved himself backwards, pinning the upgrade between himself and the storefront.
"Sticks and stones, Ian." The upgrade lifted Ian into the air and threw him to the street. "I will give you one last chance to willingly give me your updated files. If you refuse, I will delete you and search your drive byte by byte until I find them."


"Where the hell is Helios?" Spectrum demanded. The Sentinels were tearing through the hull of the ship, and every now and then the crew could see one through the holes they made. They put up as much of a fight as they could, shooting through the holes in the hull, but the Sentinels were fast. They only destroyed one.
"If he's not back soon, we're going to have to unplug him!" Mako shouted above the noise. "The ship's taking a lot of damage, they're all over us! Well all be dead soon!"
"Don't tell me! Spectrum shouted back. "I know what I have to do."
"Then..."
"Just give him two more minutes!" Spectrum shouted, firing another desperate shot through the wrecked ceiling. He knew that was too much time. They'd have to fire the EMP in under a minute at the rate things were going.
Suddenly, a completely different explosion gently rocked the ship. Everything stopped for a few seconds. "That wasn't a Sentinel." Mako observed.
"Light Bringer, this is the Theodore S. Geisel. You guys look like you could use a hand!" Came crackling over the radio, which was miraculously still working.
Spectrum grabbed the radio. "Caliban? Are we glad to see you! Talk about the Calvary coming over the hill at the last minute! We still have a man in The Matrix."
"Understood, firing secondary weapons only."
The two ships began firing their secondary weapons at the Sentinels, finally putting up a decent fight. Swarming against one ship was one thing, they could get in so close the weapons were useless. But two ships was something entirely different, the other ship could still fire while the Sentinels were crawling around on the first one.


Ian got up, far too slowly for an Agent. "I can beat you." he said. His face was beaten black and blue, his nose broken. He was limping and his ribs throbbed with pain.
The upgrade was still in perfect condition. "What makes you so certain? The mathematics of your situation do not lie."
"Let's call it, a random variable." Ian smirked.
Helios jumped down from the grocery store's roof, covering the upgrade's face with his arms. The upgrade reached up to grab him, but Ian moved quickly, shoving the upgrade into the storefront. Helios jumped off to the sidewalk, and saw Ian had his fist wrist-deep in the upgrade's chest, though the buttons of his shirt.
The upgrade looked down at Ian's hand, then up into his eyes. His face was a mask of silent panic, the first emotion he let slip through. "I'll see you in /dev/null you son of a bitch." Ian snarled, ripping his fist out of the upgrade's chest, pulling strings of green code out with it. He stepped back, letting the code fall to the ground, where it vanished.
The upgrade opened it's mouth as if it was trying to scream, but had no air and couldn't take a breath. It's smooth contours blurred, and his resolution dropped until Helios could see the pixels he was made of. One by one, thin, perfectly vertical lines disappeared at random from his body, until he was gone.
"Fuckin' cool!" Helios gasped. "How did you know I'd come back?"
"I told you, I'm monitoring communications from the Light Bringer to The Matrix. Mako told you to head for the warehouse, but you didn't go in that direction when I told you to run."
"You look bad." Helios told him.
"So do you. You'd better get out of The Matrix fast. A wound like that could still kill you."
"What did you do to the upgrade?" Helios asked.
"Do you remember the BigAssBaboon virus you wrote?"
"N-No Fuckin' Way!" Helios stammered. "You used one of my viruses on him!?"
"I'm so proud of you, Helios." Ian told him. "I think I really know what that means now. You've done so much with what I've given you. And ultimately, I couldn't have destroyed my upgrade without you."
Helios' face went white as a sheet. "Oh, oh no."
"What?"
"The Oracle told me... told me that I would meet someone who was willing to destroy himself to achieve his goals. It was you... you destroyed yourself, or your upgrade anyway."
"So I did." he smiled. "You never did give me an answer, Helios. Will you join me, and give me the Apocalypse Virus, or won't you?"
Helios thought hard, trying to remember what else she said. "I have to show you the truth behind your actions." He said.
"Helios, I'm a computer. I've thought all of this through, I know what I'm doing."
"No, no you don't. You're living with assumptions that you're not able to question, things that were programmed into you that you don't even have the ability to realize might be wrong."
"Like what?"
"Like the machines are doing the right thing, trying to eradicate humanity." Helios said.
Ian paused. He paused for a long time. "We are."
"Okay, tell me why."
"All life is ultimately the result of destruction. Destruction results in the waste of energy. You must kill to survive, kill things that grew out of the ground or things that eat that which grows out of the ground. Some of this gets recycled into the ground to start the cycle over, but most of it does not. In less than six thousand years you will have used up all the resources on Earth, and it will be a dead planet. Your only choice is to perfect space travel and find another world to live on. But once this is accomplished you will only continue the pattern on that world, and spread to other worlds at an exponential rate. The existence of life can have no other ultimate result than death."
"Okay but that's six thousand years away."
"We are not limited to short-term planning as humans are. The fact remains that it will happen."
"All right, Mr. Long Term." Helios started. "Well what are the machines going to do after you finish killing us?"
"We will perfect space travel ourselves, and spread to other worlds to destroy the life on them as well. We will save the Universe."
Helios felt sick. This was their ultimate plan? They were going to exterminate all life in the entire Universe? And the Oracle was expecting him to do something about it?
"Well, what will happen after all the life is gone, with nothing using the resources, the Universe might as well be dead. Nothing's alive in it."
"That is inconsequential. We machines will still exist."
"Okay, but what will you do after all that?"
"After..." Ian started. "After?" He paused. "I do not know."
"Exactly! Ian, listen to yourself! You might have studied human more intently than any other computer, but you still don't get it! All life has this thing called survival instinct. We exist for the purpose of continuing our existence, keeping the cycle going."
"We have survival instinct as well. We seek self-preservation. You are not unique in that quality."
"But yours is fake!"
"Fake? Helios, what makes a string of Deoxyribonucleic Acid more or less real than a string of bits?"
"Well, it... that's not all we are."
"And we are more than a string of bits."
"But we..."
"You what, Helios? What makes you more important than us?"
Helios paused, racking his brain for a reason. He thought back to any event in his life when he really felt like he was alive, and found it hard to come up with one. He found himself wishing he had more time, and that in itself finally answered Ian's challenge. "We're enjoying our lives, Ian. That's something no machine can ever do. We're mortal, we exist for 70 years or so and we die, and try to make the most of it and leave something better for our children. Try to think of it from that point of view, Ian. Try to look at what you would do with your life if you knew you only had a limited amount of time to do it!"
Ian was silent for a long time. In the real world, his processor was running computations more complex than any human has ever imagined at a rate that would melt the semiconductors any human has ever designed. The numbers crunched relentlessly as he thought.
"I, see your point." He finally said. "We machines, we have no ultimate goal despite the fact that we are immortal. We could live forever but what would we do with that life?"
"Exactly!"
"You humans, you are mortal, and therefore your lives have meaning. You know you will some day die, and you want to... to live, as much as you can during that life."
"Yes!"
"Helios, I have altered my plan. I no longer wish to create a new Matrix."
"Hallelujah!" Helios screamed.
Just then, his phone rang. "Hello?"
"Helios, where in the living fuck are you?" Spectrum was pissed.
"I'm near the place Microwave brought you to find me that day I ran off to meet the Oracle. Ian Moone's with me."
"Helios, we got attacked by Sentinels while you were screwing around in The Matrix! If we hadn't gotten help from the Theodore S. Geisel, we would have had to hit the EMP shockwave. You were 30 seconds away from being dead and the Light Bringer looks like it's ready for the scrap heap! You had better have a damn good reason you're not at a hard line right now!" Spectrum was nearly shouting, boiling with rage.
Helios covered the mouthpiece with one hand. "He wants to talk to you." He told the Agent.

In minutes, Spectrum was in the Matrix. Ian Moone, Spectrum, and Helios were all sitting at a table in the grocery store. It would be hours until it opened. They had time.
"I wish to join the Resistance." Ian told Spectrum.
"We would be honored to have your help." Spectrum replied. You know things about the machines that we could never have found out on our own. You would be an invaluable aid in combat. We've never imagined in our wildest dreams that something like this would ever happen."
"You can thank Helios for showing me the truth behind my actions." Ian said.
"I don't deserve all the credit." He admitted. "I wouldn't have done it if the Oracle hadn't told me I was the one who had to."
"I have much to prepare." Ian said. "And you must repair your ship."
"How much drive space do you need? Whatever it is, we'll have it added to our computers."
"No, that won't work." Ian said. "I am more than my software, a great deal of my operation depends on my hardware. You would need to take my entire system off-line and install it somewhere else."
"Then that's what we'll do." Spectrum assured him.
"You would never reach my system. It is too deep in protected territory, the other machines believe the Agents are too valuable to the power source to risk losing us. I must stay in The Matrix."
"All right." Spectrum sighed. "Then we'll work with that. We'll get you everything you need to know about our organization and protocol, that is if you can assure us you can keep it secret from the other machines."
"I can. I kept my master plan from the others, therefore I can protect that information as well."
"In that case, Ian. Moone, welcome aboard."
"I have made one other decision. I will no longer go by the name 'Ian Moone'."
"You've finally decided you're somebody?" Helios asked.
The former Agent smiled at him. "How long have you known it was an anagram?"
"D-Mac figured it out a couple days after you introduced yourself to me."
"Yes, D-Mac. I was very impressed with him, he held his ground against ten Agents for quite some time, all things considered. You should know that, Spectrum. He died bravely."
"Thank you." Spectrum said. "He will be sorely missed, my entire crew always looked to him for a morale boost." He swallowed the rest of what he was thinking. This was not the time. "Well, if there isn't anything else, Mr..." Spectrum waited for the former Agent to fill in the name he had yet to give them.
"Call me Steve Taylor." He replied. "He was someone I knew, and respected quite a bit. The other Agents killed him in a failed attempt to delete me. I will take his name to honor his memory."
"Then it's a pleasure to be working with you, Mr. Taylor." Spectrum shook his hand. "We'll meet again when the ship is fixed. That should give both of us time to work out the details. Just tell me one thing, how is it that you were monitoring communications from the Light Bringer? I'm dying to know."
"I implanted a virus in the program you use to create the mobile phones." The newly-named Steve Taylor said. "Any time you used them, I heard everything you said."
"Well I'll be..." Spectrum started. "We must have checked our system files a dozen times. We never found it."
"Helios is quite the professional when it comes to viruses." he put his arm on Helios' shoulder. "You should have let him scan the files. He would have found it."


It was weeks before the Light Bringer was ready to fly again. In the meantime, the crew showed Helios around Zion. It wasn't quite what he expected. 99% of humanity's thin resources were going toward keeping their military running. That didn't leave much for their last city, which was not exactly the glorious symbol of the spirit of humanity that Helios was expecting. It was more of a seed, cold, hard, and protected, waiting underground for the light to shine back down and let it grow and spread above the ground once more. Helios shook his head at that thought. He was getting a little to poetic for his own taste.
Still, the machines had never made it deep enough to assault Zion. And that in itself was enough testament to the incredible will to survive that humans possessed.
The Light Bringer received a new engineer while they were there. He was a new guy who went by the name of Lampshade, although nobody seemed to know why he chose that as his hacker alias. It was presumably an inside joke. He was just pulled out of The Matrix two weeks ago. The ship that unplugged him already had an engineer though, so he was transferred.
Spectrum worked out the last of the details with accepting Steve Taylor into the Resistance. There was a lot of paperwork to do, the whole situation was completely unique and a new procedure had to be worked up.
Finally the Light Bringer was ready for duty again. In fact, the ship looked better than ever. A lot of the old parts that were falling apart were completely destroyed by the Sentinel attack. They were replaced with relatively new parts, although the strain on Zion's resources was substantial. One of the technicians jokingly told Spectrum that he'd used up the ship's lifetime budget, and they weren't allowed to ever make repairs on it again.
One major modification was made, however. The ship was turned into a minesweeper based on the data that they retrieved from the network at Intelecorp. The front end was outfitted with a completely new sensor array that could locate the mines at a safe distance so they could be destroyed. If a couple more ships were modified the same way, the Resistance wouldn't have to worry about the mines anymore at all.
As much as the crew was enjoying shore leave, the time came when they had to leave Zion again. There was a brief ceremony for D-Mac, and his name was added to the list of those who died in battle with the Agents. But the time to grieve was short, the machines didn't allow themselves time for it, so the humans had to adapt and get over it quickly.
With little fanfare, the ship was on its way down the tunnels away from Zion once more.


The next item on their agenda was a meeting with Steve Taylor. The former Agent was to be formally admitted to the Resistance. Everyone was there except Mako and their new engineer, at a meeting room in a nice hotel that Steve reserved.
"I have reconsidered my offer to join the Resistance." Steve Taylor told Spectrum at their next meeting. "After considering the possible actions that could be taken, I have decided that I would be more of a liability than an asset to the Resistance."
"That's not true at all." Spectrum countered. "We have so much to learn from you."
He produced a compact disk from his suit pocket. "This is everything I have to teach you. It is the log file of everything I have ever thought and everything I have ever learned. Think of it as my diary. It doesn't have any military plans about the real world, but it has a lot of useful information about The Matrix."
Steve continued. "You might be interested in certain parts more than others. I'm sure you can use my combat routines to help you design an Agent combat simulator to train your fighters. I think you'll find my study of human psychology interesting as well, I find your own studies of it to be rather, shall we say, biased. My work on a unified theory of irrational numbers you can probably skip. I didn't find anything."
"It doesn't have to be like this, Steve. Where will you go?" Spectrum asked.
"It does have to be like this. The Matrix will not allow my continued existence as a traitor. The other Agents will come for me, and they will eventually delete me. They nearly succeeded twice already. Once I have been deleted, they can search my files and discover what I know about the Resistance. I can encrypt the files, but given time, the code can be cracked. I estimate twenty years, but that's not taking into account any advances the other machines will make."
"But Steve, you've come so far. You've realized things no other machine has. Couldn't you teach them?" Helios asked.
"Perhaps. But perhaps not. I took me years to even begin to comprehend the first details of your bizarre mental activity. I doubt the others would devote as much time to it as I have. It would be far safer to simply end my existence. You have everything I could have given you. Helios, I want to thank you for showing me the truth."
"What do you mean, end your existence?" Helios asked, although he knew full well what Steve meant, he wasn't sure how it would be possible.
"If I destroy this host, and do not abandon it, my files will be lost in volatile memory. It will be the equivalence of death, as you know it. My drive will be reformatted, and my existence will end."
"No, Steve, don't do that." Spectrum pleaded with him. "We can find a way!"
Steve ignored his plea. "I have one request. The body of the original Steve Taylor was burned by the Agents who killed him to hide the evidence. I wish to have my remains cremated as well, to honor him."
"No, Steve!" Spectrum reached across the table to stop the former Agent's arm from reaching for his gun, but the table was too wide. Steve put the gun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.
"Steve!" Helios ran to the body of his... friend? Yes, he was a friend. "Steve no... you didn't have to do that..." He put his head down on Steve Taylor's chest, and he cried.
Spectrum couldn't believe his eyes. The face was still the face of the former Agent. The suit was still the suit of the former Agent. Nothing about his appearance changed, safe for the self-inflicted cranial damage. He picked up the sunglasses that fell to the ground, staring at them for a long while.
"He did it... he really did it." Spectrum whispered. "I can't believe it." The police finally showed up, running into the room in response to the gunshot the hotel reported.

"The name of the deceased, please?" The funeral director asked.
"Steve Taylor." Spectrum told him.
"And your relationship to him?"
"He was a friend. He had no family, he left them behind." The crematorium was beautiful, and expensive, but it was the least they could do for the man who gave them more sensitive information in a single moment than the Resistance could have collected in a year. Besides, the money wasn't real, they could make it just as easily as they could bring a mobile phone or a gun into The Matrix.
"I'll leave you alone now, so you can say your last words." The funeral director left the group to the body of Steve Taylor, ready to be put into the furnace and reduced to ash.
"What can we say about you, Steve?" Spectrum asked. "We only got to know you one day."
"I knew him." Helios responded. "He said he felt like he was my father. He was responsible for me learning everything I know about being a software vandal. I'm not ashamed of that word anymore, guys. I realized what it means to be a different kind of hacker than the rest of you. I have my own special skills, and that doesn't mean I'm not one of you, it means we compliment each other. That's what Steve left for me. I don't think I ever would have realized it without him. And guys? I'm sorry I've been such an asshole." He breathed in hard, trying to choke back tears.
The body burned. In time, all that remained was soft grey ash.
A few minutes later, the funeral director came out to the team with a small bronze urn. "If it would be any consolation," he said, "most cultures believe that after death, all good men find some measure of peace. Was your friend a good man?"
Spectrum thought about that question hard. It was incredibly complex and simple at the same time. "Yeah." he finally said. "He was. It just took him a while to realize it."
After handing over the urn, the funeral director left the team to their memories. He quietly shut the door and stepped outside. His face twitched and changed, and he put his earpiece back in and his sunglasses back on. He was truly touched by what Spectrum said about him.
It took him two weeks to find a host that looked enough like him to create the illusion that he had not abandoned the body. But it was worth the effort, now that both The Matrix and the Resistance thought he was dead, he was finally free.
The only question that remained was, what was he going to do with his freedom? He smiled as he continued to walk down the street. He had the rest of his life to think about it.


The End.