To The Nth Degree

by Trent Roman

The Resistance has been losing fighters in transit between the Matrix and the real world, and Morpheus, Trinity and Cypher might be the next victims! Now, to free them from a hostile world, the crew of the Neb must make a risky venture to the surface...

To The Nth Degree Trent Roman

    Seraphim shifted impatiently from foot to foot, being sure to keep one hand on the butt of the DD44 Dostovei clipped to her belt. She stood in front of a window, watching from above as people drove down the street or walked on the sidewalks, going to work, meeting for lunch, or just chatting with friends. All perfectly normal things to do. Everyday kind of things. It made her stomach coil in on itself.

    Normalcy. Even before she was pulled out, it made her sick. Seeing these people live their pointless little lives, going to school day after day, replacing school with work, breeding some kids, then dying old and senile in a nursing home somewhere. Before, she had thought this was the height of mental impotency. That these people submitted to this kind of life of long labours and brief joys because they couldn't envision anything else. Not necessarily something better – she didn't pretend to hold all the answers – but at least something different.

    Now that she had been out of the Matrix for several years, her contempt for the "normal people" had only increased. They were blind fools. They lived their lives in slavery, and moved through life in a dream-like state. The fight against the machines was just so phenomenally important that they should be able to pierce through the illusion of the Matrix. Just by being alive, the ant-sized humans below contributed to the Machines' cause.

    Seraphim moved away from the window, anxious to get the job finished so she could leave this façade of reality, and get back to the real world. It may not be as pretty, but at least it had substance, importance. It wasn't all mists and shadows, like this place.

    "Come on, Byl! How much longer is this going to take?" she asked.

    "Just a few more minutes," the man at the computer terminal, Chernobyl 55, answered. "I'm almost there. They put up a lot of deflecting programming and dead ends, but I think I'm on the right track. I should be able to crack this baby open any minute now."

    "Hurry it up. You know this place gives me the creeps."

    "You poor thing," Chernobyl 55 replied, not taking his eyes off the computer monitor. On it scrolled a series of transmission signals, indicating the various non-physical means of communications and relay throughout this sector of the Matrix.

    There had been an odd surge detected by the Gilgamesh when they had first entered the Matrix with the intent of doing a follow-up on a series of potential candidates for liberation. After assuring themselves that there were no Agents in the vicinity, it was decided that the original mission was to be scraped, and that Seraphim and Chernobyl 55 would investigate the surge instead.

    Chernobyl 55 finished inputting the last few strings of commands and hit the return key. On the screen the various curves started winking out, leaving only a few select lines against the amplitude graph in the background.

    "There we go. I've gotten rid of all the frequencies that are exclusively in the Matrix in order to isolate communication lines between the Matrix and the outside world. I'm sure it's one of these that sent the burst when we got here."

    "I don't need a narrative. You can impress me with your skills later, just figure out what is was so we can get out."

    Chernobyl 55 scowled as he turned back to the screen. His genius was just so under-appreciated sometimes.

* * *

    "Are they in there?" one bland faced man asked another outside the door.

    "Yes."

    "Is the new programming in place?"

    "It is."

    "Good. They are trapped."

* * *

    "I've found it!" Chernobyl 55 reported.

    "Finally!" Seraphim flipped out her cell phone. She punched in a set of number rapidly, and then waited for the call to be complete.

    "Operator."

    "Copter, we're almost done here. Get us a line out."

    "Right." There was a brief silence on the other side of the line, then Copter came back: "The phone on the desk of a hotel lobby, a few buildings to your right."

    "Kind of public, no?"

    "You want something farther?"

    "No, it'll do." Seraphim closed the phone, then walked over to Chernobyl 55 and peered at the screen over his shoulder. "Well? What was it?"

    "Apparently, there was a surge at exactly the same moment we entered the Matrix along this frequency, here," Chernobyl 55 pointed. "That surge caused it to intersect on another frequency. Actually… that sort of looks like a series of coordinates."

    Chernobyl 55 brought up a second window of the screen and accessed the schematics for the Matrix. Trying to gain access to this kind of information whilst in the Matrix itself was sometimes risky, but Chernobyl 55 had already installed firewalls in order to mask his other activities. He cross-referenced the frequencies he had obtained with the blueprints of the Matrix.

    The schematics on the screen zoomed in through masses of tangled green lines representing the various buildings of the city. Finally, it slowed and froze on a single room. The display slowly began to rotate, situating the room within the schematics.

    "It's our entry point," Chernobyl 55 whispered.

    "What? Are you telling me that a communications burst giving our coordinates went off on Matrix frequencies when we came in?"

    "Yeah…" Chernobyl 55 replied, sounding a little distracted.

    "We've got to get out of here," Seraphim said, drawing her Dostovei and moving over to the window. All the tiny people below, just a few minutes ago the objects of her contempt, now represented hundreds of possible avenues for attack.

    "Wait… there's something else here," Chernobyl 55 muttered, still seated in front of the computer. "I'm not quite sure what…"

    "Forget it! We've got to go now!"

    As if on cue, the wooden door to the room splintered open and two cookie-cutter Agents came through the frame. Chernobyl 55 yanked himself away from the computer, but the Agents' arms moved in a blur and brought two sleek guns to bear on Chernobyl 55. The young man took several bullets in the chest and fell back into his chair, twitching spasmodically.

    Seraphim, realizing that Chernobyl 55 was lost, threw herself backwards, bringing her pistol to bear and firing off a few shots as cover. She crashed backwards through the window, glass breaking around her and nipping at her skin. As she fell from a three-story height, she spun in mid-air so that she landed by bracing herself with one knee and one hand, keeping her Dostovei firmly in her grip.

    The people in the streets around her pulled back and let out yells of astonishment as Seraphim landed on the asphalt, surrounded by a shower of broken glass. Paying no heed to the gaping fools, Seraphim got to her feet and sprinted down the street, leaping over incoming traffic. A hotel a few buildings to your right… Seraphim fired a few shots backwards, not bothering to look where she was shooting, while she reached into her jacket with her other hand and brought of her phone. She hit redial, bounced off the top of a car and over a semi-trailer, and brought the phone to her ear. Before she even heard Copter answer on the other side, she screamed:

    "Agents! Ring it!"

    As she did this, she looked back and saw that the agents were closing in on her. Any closer and they would be able to stop long enough to get a clear shot. Seraphim spotted the hotel off to the side, and pulled an almost ninety degree turn through the traffic, letting the phone drop. The Agents behind her ran over it, breaking the casing and crushing the electronics inside.

    Seraphim raced for the classy looking front entrance to the hotel, shoved a pair of little old ladies out of the way and nearly broke down the double doors when she burst through them. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the soft lighting of the lobby, but she picked up the sound of the ringing phone right away.

    "Don't answer that!" she screamed at a uniformed man standing behind the lobby desk. He drew back from the phone, startled, and Seraphim seized hold of the receiver.

    As she put it against her head, she spotted the pair of Agents coming through the enlarged doorway. As they caught sight of her, she smiled and a made a small waving gesture with her free hand. Then she was gone.

* * *

    Seraphim blinked rapidly as she awoke in her chair on the Gilgamesh. She took a second to reorient herself with the dark, flat grays on the ship's ceiling, patched over recently after a Sentinel had managed to get into the Core just before being driven off. She swung out of the chair to face Copter.

    "Damn it! We lost Byl! They knew where we had come in, and… uh, Copter?"

    The man had not so much as blinked since she'd begun looking at him. Seraphim frowned. Something was wrong, she could feel it.

    Suddenly, Copter's face seemed to melt away, and reformed into one that had been drilled into her memory by fear. That's impossible! she thought, a moment before the bullet entered her brain.

* * *

TWO DAYS LATER...

    Morpheus scanned the latest information package that Zion had sent up. Though his face remained impassive, Trinity had been with him long enough to know that something in there had displeased him.

    "What's wrong, Morpheus? It's bad news, isn't it?"

    Trinity heard a snort to her right.

    "Of course it's bad news," Cypher said slowly, sitting in his chair, using an uplink to watch the Matrix code screen from the cockpit. "It's always bad news. Nothing ever seems to go right for us. It's like a universal constant."

    Trinity didn't afford him a glance. Nobody had been getting much rest lately, not with the rather odd way the Sentinels were behaving. Cypher, never one of the more cheerful members of the Nebuchadnezzar, had been even more irascible lately, snapping at everybody for the slightest provocation. Trinity had decided that she would ignore him. It was either that, or bodily harm.

    "What does it say?"

    "Casualty list. The Gilgamesh lost two of their crew."

    "So?" Trinity asked. It was not that she was insensitive to the loss. Every liberated human that died took with them not only a fellow fighter against the Machines, but the hours of effort that had been put into freeing that person and training them. Only usually these kind of reports where not distributed to ship captains, because of the cell fashion that the resistance operated. If captured, a person could not reveal what they did not know.

    "One of them died in transit somehow. Between the Matrix and the real world."

    "Overload?" Trinity asked. Some of the older model ships had defects in their wiring that caused occasional overloads, which had rather unfortunate and often fatal results for whomever was using the chair. That kind of malfunction hadn't happen in years, however. The last one was well before she had been pulled out.

    "Nothing quite so obvious," Morpheus replied. "Her mind never seemed to return after she was pulled out, then she went into shock and flat lined." Morpheus pushed a few buttons on the keyboard. "The same thing happened to one of the members of the Hammurabi."

    An uneasy silence fell between them. It could be just coincidence, but…

    "Anyway," Morpheus pursued, "We've been asked to take over the Gilgamesh's assignment. They detected an abnormal energy spike when their team went in. The team was supposed to investigate, and were almost finished when they got caught by Agents. For that reason, it was decided that a larger number of people would be required for this mission; only because of their losses the crew of the Gilgamesh can no longer complete the assignment. We'll all be going in when the next shift comes on."

    "Hey!" Dozer called out from the front of the cockpit. "It's doing it again."

    Morpheus, Trinity and Cypher joined Dozer at the large, sloping window at the front of the ship. Outside, hovering in the huge corridors between the Machines' immense constructs, was the metallic cephalopod-like form of a Sentinel. It's feelers hung limply behind it, contracted as if it was traveling, despite it being immobile. The red lights circumnavigating its "head" – for lack of a better term – were flashing intermittently, and the smaller, pincher-like appendages appeared at rest.

    Prowling the metallic corridors of the meta-urban landscape left by two centuries of mass construction and warfare, the Sentinels were a constant danger to liberated ships, especially since their only weapon against it, the Electro-Magnetic Pulse, can't be used if members of the crew are inside the Matrix. Well, it could be used, but the resulting pulse would turn off all electronics on the ship as well as the Sentinel – which would mean death for anyone still hooked up.

    But this Sentinel wasn't acting in any overtly hostile way. In fact, if it weren't for the red lights blinking on and off once in a while, one would think that it was deactivated. It just hovered in space, a good distance away from the ship, looking but doing nothing else.

    It wasn't the first time the crew of the Neb had observed this kind of bizarre behaviour in the Sentinels either. They had been playing this game of possum for nearly a week now. It made Morpheus very uncomfortable, though he didn't show it. Aggression was clear, without hidden intent. This new behaviour was… disturbing. Obviously there was something going on, and since he didn't know what that was, he had to assume it was a threat to his crew.

    "Should I shock it?" Dozer asked, his hand moving towards the button for the EMP.

    "No," Morpheus answered. "As long as it doesn't attack us, we leave it alone. It might have companions waiting just outside the sphere of our pulse. We take it down, but while we're rebooting systems its friends come in after us from a blind spot. It's too risky."

    "That thing is really freaking me out, though," Cypher said edgily. "What the hell is it doing out there? Taking a nap?"

    Morpheus chose not to respond. It was bad form for the captain of a vessel to reveal that he didn't know what was going on. Instead, he slid back from the window.

    "Keep an eye on it, Dozer," he said. "If it makes any hostile moves, fry it."

    "Will do."

* * *

    Morpheus had planned to relax a bit before he had to go into the Matrix. To that purpose, he had made his way to the galley and gotten himself some food. And yet he had barely managed to sit there for a minute, chewing dejectedly, before he found himself rising from the table and walking back towards the cockpit. He stood there, leaning against one of the chairs, holding in one hand the bowl with the lumpy off-white single-cell protein substance that Mouse persisted in calling Tasty Wheat.

    His eyes rested fixedly on the immobile form of the sentinel outside. Cypher, studying the stream of Matrix code, was also uncomfortable. It wasn't as much because of the Sentinel (though that was certainly bothersome), but rather the sheer intensity of Morpheus' gaze. It's like he's holding a staring contest with a hunk of metal. Cypher chuckled at his own joke.

    "Care to share?" Trinity asked.

    "It's nothing."

    "Oh, come on, Cypher. A little humour would be a welcome thing right about now," Dozer put in.

    "It's nothing, really," Cypher replied, beginning to feel irritated. It's bad enough that I'm stuck on this ratty little ship; do I really have to repeat myself on top of that?

    "It's moving," Morpheus said, halting any further conversation.

    The four humans in the cockpit looked out and watched as the Sentinel folded its feelers in on itself. Some hidden engine activated and soon the Sentinel had disappeared into one of the innumerable side corridors.

    "Easy come, easy go," Dozer stated.

    "I don't like this," Cypher said.

    "It's time for the second shift, anyway," Trinity observed.

    As if on cue, Switch walked into the cockpit a little groggily, running her hand through her close-cropped bleached hair. She sat on the side of a chair, and then nodded towards the group assembled at the front of the cockpit.

    "Sight seeing?"

    "Sentinels behaving weird again," Dozer elucidated for her.

    "Oh." Switch frowned. "Why do they keep doing that?"

    "That's not for us to find out – yet," Morpheus said. "For now, we've got another mission."

    "Oh yeah?" Mouse asked, walking in behind Tank and Apoc. "What?"

    "Okay, here's the deal, people. We're all going in, but mostly for protection. Our mission is to access communications logs between the Matrix and the outside world, and look for any strange occurrences. The Gilgamesh detected a surge when their people went in, and that has the Leadership in Zion concerned. We'll be going in to figure out exactly what that surge was. This is going to be risky, so Tank: I want you to find us a room with both a hard line and a computer with a modem. I don't want to do any unnecessary traveling in the Matrix."

    "I'm on it," Tank replied. He moved just off to the side, tapping a few keys on the keyboard of a computer without sitting down, perusing the Matrix for such a locale.

    "Cypher and Mouse, you'll be our hackers for the day," Morpheus continued. "The rest of us will be on guard duty. The Gilgamesh lost people who were ambushed on this assignment, so we pull out at the slightest sign of trouble. Understood?"

    There was a chorus of acknowledgements around the cockpit.

    "Good. Tank?"

    "Yep. I've got a likely site here. Third story of an old apartment building that was evacuated and condemned for violating construction regulations. Someone left their computer in there, and the phone lines haven't been de-activated yet."

    "Excellent," Morpheus said, heading for the Core. "Plug us in."

* * *

    Looking around, it came to no surprise to anyone that this building had been condemned. The apartment had almost no furniture in it save a foldaway-bed/couch, a chair and the desk with the computer. The paint on the walls had long since peeled away, and the paneling had fallen away in places, revealing insulation that looked suspiciously like asbestos.

    Switch looked around quickly as she arrived in the room, immediately locating possible avenues of exit. There were two: a cracked window in the north wall, and a mouldy-looking door in the opposite wall. As she was the closest to the door, she began moving towards it, Apoc trailing her. The door opened surprisingly easily for something so old. It opened onto a corridor as decrepit as the room they were just in. This apartment was the last one before the staircase, an old wooden model in a spiral style. The corridor was deserted, and illuminated by a single window set at the far end.

    Switch turned back towards their room, where Cypher had taken the chair and had begun typing away at the console. Mouse was leaning over his shoulder, and occasionally pointed to something on screen. Morpheus had taken up position next to the window with Trinity.

    Morpheus was looking out the window at the skyline of the city. It was a beautiful day, with a deep blue sky and few clouds. The radiant sun shone down into the street below, cloaking the litter-filled sidewalks in shadows. The street itself was largely empty at this hour. A brown-beige sedan cruised down the road, going a little over the speed limit, no doubt someone taking an early lunch.

    Suddenly, the car lurched, then came to a screeching stop, leaving black tire marks against the pavement. One of the rear side doors opened and a balding man in a blue business suit stumbled out. He looked frightened out of his wits as he ran away from the car. I don't like the looks of this; Morpheus though as he reached into a pocket and thumbed his cell phone.

    The other three doors opened, and three similar men stepped out. They all had close cropped hair, non-descript faces, sunglasses and black suits.

    "Agents!" Morpheus called out. "Evac, now!" As Cypher jumped to his feet behind him, Morpheus called up Tank on the cell phone.

    "Operator."

    "Tank, ring us out of here," Morpheus said, looking back out the window. The three agents strode determinedly towards to building they were in. They didn't seem to be in any hurry.

    Morpheus closed his cell phone as soon as Tank acknowledged, and the phone in the room began ringing shortly after. Mouse grabbed the receiver, and disappeared in a burst of digital static. Morpheus looked out the window, and saw the Agents walk into the building.

* * *

"They have begun to leave," one said, putting a hand to his ear.

"Already? We must have been spotted. Activate the program."

* * *

    As Cypher waited to be pulled out next, Switch moved back towards the door of the apartment. She looked anxiously at the rickety old staircase, knowing that soon the distinct face of an Agent would crest the stairs, heading straight for them. There had to be a way to delay them long enough for everybody to get out.

    "Apoc," Switch called out, "Grenade!"

    Apoc fumbled for a second inside his overcoat and unclipped a grenade from his belt. He threw it to Switch who caught it and brought it up to her mouth. She clamped her teeth down on the pin, yanking it out of the green sphere. Spitting the pin to the floor, she jumped out of the doorway and onto the wall just before the beginning of the staircase. She could hear the echoes of footsteps.

    Switch bobbed her head into the opening once to assure herself that the coast was clear, then threw the grenade down. She gestured to Apoc to take cover, and he slipped back into the apartment, his back against the wall. Switch herself moved down the corridor until she was at a safe distance from the stairwell. Crouching in a doorway, she could hear the grenade make a couple more bounces down the spiral staircase before it detonated.

    The levels separating the impact point and the third floor did nothing to muffle the sounds of the explosion. Switch actually felt the floor rock ever so slightly. When the building seemed to have regained its integrity, she raced over to the stairway's entrance. As she had hoped, the grenade had caught the Agents by surprise, judging by the three bodies of businessmen lying beneath rubble. The explosion, in a testament to the building's poor construction, had brought down the entire staircase.

    Switch smiled as she walked back into the apartment. Cypher and Trinity had already left.

    "That should slow them down," she announced. "They'll have to find some new bodies, and the missing staircase should delay them a bit."

    "Quick thinking, Switch," Morpheus said approvingly. Then the phone next to him began to ring. He picked it off the cradle and was pulled out of the Matrix.

    Just as Apoc replaced the phone on it's cradle, his cell phone went off. He looked up at Switch in puzzlement, then reached inside his overcoat and pulled the small black case out.

    "Hello?"

    It was Tank.

    "Are you guys coming or not?"

* * *

    Mouse shook his head briskly as he opened his eyes to the ceiling of the Nebuchadnezzar. He swung himself over the side of his chair, picking up his cap and placing in on his head.

    "That was a short trip. What happened?" Dozer asked him from the Sentinel station.

    "Morpheus spotted some Agents," Mouse answered. He stretched and brushed off his vest. As he did so, he noticed that the sleeves of his shirt were getting a little short. The advantage of the clothes provided by their residual self-image when in the Matrix was that they fit perfectly. Not to mention that they weren't as ratty.

    Mouse walked over to Tank's chair, who was pressing a hand against his ear in order to hear the signals from his receiver better.

    "Come on, come on, pick up," he muttered.

    "What's wrong?" Mouse asked.

    "They should have picked up by now. How close were those Agents?"

    "Three stories down, I think. Morpheus spotted them out the window."

    Tank stayed silent for a few seconds, listening to his earpiece, then swore.

    "That's it, I'm calling."

    Tank punched in the numbers for Apoc's cell phone. It rang once, and then Apoc picked it up:

    "Hello?"

    "Are you guys coming or not?" Tank asked in irritation.

    "What? What are you talking about?"

    "You called me to say you wanted out of the Matrix, but only Mouse had come back. So are the rest of you coming out, or should I abort the call?"

    There was a long silence on Apoc's end.

    "Cypher, Trinity and Morpheus have already left," he finally said. "They picked up the phone and got pulled out of the Matrix."

    Tank looked over to where Morpheus and the others were lying in the chairs. They were all still plugged in and unconscious.

    "Well they haven't woken up here!"

    "So where are they?"

    "I have no idea," Tank admitted.

* * *

    Cypher opened his eyes, blinking away the illusion. That was pointless he thought sourly. One quick trip into the Matrix, just to tease him with the brief impression of normalcy, no doubt, and then back to the grit and grime of the real world.

    He rose from the chair, and was surprised to see that the rest of the Core was deserted. Tank, at least, should be in the operator's chair, but he was not.

    There was a slight hissing noise, and Trinity sat up in the chair next to him. She looked around, and then glanced at him in obvious confusion.

    "Where is everyone?"

    Another hiss, and Morpheus was out. Cypher had the queer impression that Morpheus had not been in that chair a few seconds ago, and maybe Trinity too, though he couldn't be sure of that because he had just been pulled out at the time.

    Morpheus took a look around, and asked the same question Trinity had. When it was clear that none of them knew why the ship seemed so empty, they stood up from the chairs and began calling the names of their fellow crewmembers. When there were no replies, Morpheus instructed them:

    "Spread out and look around, people. I want to find our friends, or lacking that, any clues as to their disappearance. Trinity, you check out the cockpit. Cypher, the mess and bunks. I'll check the engines."

    They split three ways, each heading for their respective destinations. Trinity grabbed hold of the cold metal ladder that led up from the Core to the cockpit, and climbed the rungs two at a time. At the top, she hoisted herself onto the railing, walked down to the cockpit and turned to find herself staring right into her own face.

    Trinity jerked back, startled. She looked again, tried blinking, but she was still standing there, in front of herself. For a moment she thought it might have been an oddly placed mirror. But she quickly disproved this because her effigy was frozen in place, unmoving, not responding to any of Trinity's – the real Trinity – motions.

    She detached her gaze from the doppelganger with effort, and scanned the rest of the cockpit. Dozer was there, standing near the cockpit window, similarly looking like a three-dimensional still-shot from a camera. So were Morpheus and Cypher, despite the fact that she knew they were below decks.

    Trinity turned back towards the statue of herself, stared at her – it – some more, then called out:

    "Morpheus? I think there's something up here you should see!"

    It took Morpheus a few seconds to get to the cockpit himself, during with Trinity continued to glare at her twin as if expecting it to make some hostile gesture at any moment.

    When Morpheus did arrive, he remained typically silent while regarding the odd tableau in the cockpit. Trinity detached her gaze from the double of herself, choosing to fix on Morpheus instead, searching for a stable anchor in this confusing situation.

    Morpheus glanced back towards her, as if seeking an explanation, but Trinity simply shrugged back. Morpheus stared at his replica, his stoic, almost aloof expression betraying none of the confusion he was no doubt feeling.

    The other Morpheus was staring out of the cockpit, the face frozen emotionlessly but the eyes seeming to scowl at something outside the ship. In one hand was a bowl of the single-cell protein that passed as food on the Neb. In the other hand, a spoonful of the off-white substance hovered in mid-air, unmoving. Morpheus, the real one, suddenly got a disquieting sense of déjà-vu, one that he knew couldn't be attributable to any glitch in the Matrix. He had seen – or rather been – in that position before, just a short while ago.

    Morpheus followed the doppelganger's gaze to the empty air outside the ship. If this really was a moment before they had entered the Matrix, there should have been a Sentinel hovering some distance away. Instead, there was only the indiscriminate tunnel system that the Neb navigated just under surface level. So that ruled out time travel, even if such a thing were possible.

    "What the…?"

    Morpheus turned to see Cypher sticking his head out from the access port. Having searched the mess and crew quarters with no success, he had decided to see for himself what exactly Trinity had found in the cockpit. Now, he decided that he regretted that decision. More weirdness, as if his life wasn't bizarre enough already.

    Cypher glanced at his crewmates, hoping that they would be able to shed some light on the four statues in the cockpit. But Trinity stayed in the back of the cockpit, looking ill at ease, and Morpheus was inscrutable as ever. Haltingly, Cypher slowly walked up to his freeze-frame twin. He stared into his own face, goatee to goatee.

    "Wow," he said softly. "What a mind job."

    He craned his head towards Morpheus.

    "Hey, what do you think–"

    "Cypher, look out!"

    Cypher snapped his head back towards his mirror image just in time to see that the "mirror" had become fluid and distorted. In it's stead appeared the square, clean-shaven face of an Agent.

    Cypher's mouth fell open, too stunned by the impossibility of what had just happened and too scared by the presence of his worst nightmare a mere ten centimetres from his face to react in any other manner. The Agent's hand reached up and grabbed the wide-eyed man by the throat, lifting him off his feet.

    Morpheus rushed towards his endangered comrade, acting out of instinct rather than thought because his mind was still reeling from the Agent's sudden appearance. Morpheus swung at the nondescript face of their long-time nemesis, but before the fist could connect the Agent's free arm scythed upwards with blinding speed, closing around Morpheus' neck. As the rebel leader brought his hands back to his throat in a vain attempt to release the Agent's vice-like grip, he was lifted from the deck of the Neb alongside Cypher.

    Trinity, who had cried out the warning, saw these events take place within the space of a few seconds. Cypher and Morpheus choked and gagged in the Agent's grip, and Trinity knew that it would be a simple matter for the Agent to simply tighten his grip and both their windpipes would be crushed.

    But in those same moments, Trinity came to realize something else: they were still in. She didn't know how or why, but the Truth was standing right in front of her, undeniable. Somehow, they were still in the Matrix.

    And that meant that she some resources to draw on, even if they paled in comparison with what an Agent could bring to bear. Trinity ran towards the Agent, covering the short distance between the two of them in a second. The Agent turned its head towards her, but both his hands were otherwise occupied with the struggling humans.

    Trinity leaped into the air, coming in sideways and over the Agent. Around her, time seemed to slow as she folded her legs into herself, keeping her arms out for balance. When she was directly over the Agent's arms, she lashed out with both legs, her feet striking the Agent's forearms with such speed and force that they snapped the bones in half.

    Despite being artificial intelligences capable of bending the rules of the Matrix, the Agents were nevertheless patterned after biological beings. Which meant that they could be bruised, made to bleed, their hair dishevelled and their bones broken. And like a biological being, Agents received "pain" impulses to indicate where their chosen body had been damaged.

    So when Trinity shattered the Agent's forearms, he gasped out in pain and stumbled backwards, his arms drooping downwards since they were no longer linked to the rest of the body by a skeletal structure. Cypher and Morpheus dropped to the deck, still trying to pry the Agent's unyielding fingers from their throats.

    Trinity landed behind her crewmates, but quickly turned around and delivered a spinning jump kick to the head of the Agent. The force of the blow sent the unprepared Agent flying again, only this time he was weighed down by two adult males with no way of lifting or exerting any kind of direct force on them. His skin, muscles and other soft tissue came apart from the pressure applied in differing directions with a sickeningly wet ripping sound. The Agent stumbled backwards, leaving bloody stumps of arms still clutching at Cypher and Morpheus' throats.

    Deciding that an armless body was of no use to him, the Agent exited his current housing, leaving behind him an extremly battered version of Cypher that fell amputated and immobile to the deck of the Neb's cockpit. At the same time, the false Morpheus' figure began to twitch, the spoon and plate in his hands dropping as the Agent took over the replica's body.

    The newly revitalized Agent strode towards Trinity, not even glancing down at the kneeling, choking humans as he passed by them. Trinity knew that no one could win a fight with an Agent; they were much too powerful. Without the element of surprise, she hadn't a chance.

    Trinity turned and ran towards the ladder that led to the Core. She didn't bother to use the rungs, she just leap off the railing and landed on the metal deck below, using her Matrix abilities to soften the landing. Knowing that the Agent would be right behind her, Trinity began to look for anything that might serve to deter her pursuer. Her gaze fell on the plasma rifle holstered against a pylon.

    She made a grab for it, yanking it out of the holster just as the Agent landed heavily onto the Core level behind her. She flipped the switch to activate it, and the edge began to crackle with electricity. Trinity fired the weapon, the stream of charged plasma lancing out towards the Agent. Nimble as ever, the Agent stepped to the side and then began running around the Core as Trinity tried to sweep the beam onto him. Although the Agent couldn't dodge something as thick as the plasma charge like he would a bullet, he nevertheless managed to elude Trinity. The crackling weapon left a trail of dark black scoring across the wall of the Neb's Core.

    Trinity stepped backwards so that her back was against the wall. In doing so, she had managed to corner the Agent in a part of the Core, trapped between a wall and the sweeping blast from the plasma rifle. The Agent lunged onto a wall and pushed off, trying to flip himself over the oncoming discharge. Trinity jerked her weapon upwards as soon as she saw this, and managed to catch the Agent's feet in the plasma beam. Energy crackled along his body and the Agent fell to the floor. He began getting up almost as soon as he landed, but Trinity ran over to him, plasma rifle braced against her hip, and fired at point-blank. She didn't stop until the Agent's body was fried to a crisp.

    She breathed a sigh of relief as she switched off the plasma rifle. The stink of ozone permeated the air, and Trinity could feel her hair standing on end from all the electricity that had been discharged within the Core. As she stared at the Agent's body, she saw it begin to lose resolution. At once she knew that the Agent was abandoning this body, and moving to another. And there was only one place on this false ship that Trinity knew had fresh bodies for taking over.

    She jumped onto the ladder, somehow managing to climb up to the cockpit with one hand and holding onto the heavy plasma rifle with the other. When she got there, she saw that Cypher and Morpheus were still struggling with the dead hands around their throats, breathing in deep but short gasps, the only kind that the grimy hands would allow them. Trinity's eyes flew quickly over her comrades to the replica of Dozer standing by the cockpit window. Just as his image began to twitch, Trinity fired the plasma rifle. Still loading into his new body, the Agent was unable to move in any way and caught the blast full in the chest. Trinity kept firing until she was sure that Dozer's body was dead.

    Then she turned sideways to face her own doppelganger. She hesitated for a second, looking into her own eyes, then set her jaw and fired. The electricity danced over her twin's body, searing flesh and burning hair. Trinity stopped when her statuesque other was reduced to a blackened form. It had felt extremely bizarre and unnerving to fire on herself, but Trinity dismissed the feelings. She could reflect on this incident later; right now she had to help her friends.

    She walked over to Morpheus and tugged at the sectioned hand attached to his throat. One finger at a time, she helped him pry it off of him. Morpheus breathed in his first unobstructed breath, relishing the feeling of the air against the back of his throat, even if it was computer-simulated and tasted like burnt chicken. Then the both of them walked over to Cypher and freed him. When Cypher had recovered a few seconds later, he looked at his fellow shipmates with an almost accusing glare.

    "Can someone please tell me," he asked haltingly, "what the fuck just happened?"

* * *

    "I'm not sure what happened," Tank said on the other end of the line. "If they picked up the phone, they should be here."

    "They picked up the phone, and they left," Apoc repeated.

    "Well, they have to be somewhere." A pause. "Look, I'll try running a diagnosis over on this end. It might not be safe for you guys to be pulled out right about now. As soon as the diagnosis is done, I'll call you guys and tell you what's up. It might take a while, though. So I suggest that you two find a place to lay low and out of the Agents' way in the meantime."

    "We will," Apoc assured him. They exchanged partings, and Apoc closed the cell phone. Switch looked at him with an enquiring raised eyebrow.

    "Morpheus, Trinity and Cypher didn't wake up on the outside. Tank has to run a diagnosis before he pulls us out, so that means we go into hiding for now."

    "Underground?" Switch asked, referring not to the sewer system but to the layer of society that tended to operate below the scopes of law enforcement agencies.

    "Seems like the best place," Apoc answered.

    "I know a place not too far from here," Switch said. "A neo-punk club."

    "Lead on."

    Moving quickly before the Agents they had fought off hand a chance to regroup and attack again, Switch and Apoc left the crumbling building. Switch began to lead him through a system of alleys, heading for the underground.

* * *

    "We're still in the Matrix," Trinity said.

    "You know, that part I had kind of guessed already," Cypher stated. "I mean why are we still in, and why does it look like the real world?"

    "Now we know why the Sentinels were acting the way they did," Morpheus stated.

    "What do you mean?"

    "We thought that they were just hovering outside of the ship, doing nothing. They weren't doing nothing; they were taking pictures, or filming. They were taking in all the details of this ship and others in order to help the Machines create this place." Morpheus lifted his arms, turning slightly to indicate not only the ship, but also the tunnels outside. "Another false world, but one that actually looks like the real world this time."

    "So none of this is real," Cypher said, staring at the familiar cockpit. "Man, this is like being pulled out all over again."

    "The Machines are insidious," Morpheus said. "Just like they pull the wool over the eyes of humanity by presenting them an illusion of a false world, they tried to pull the wool over our eyes by presenting us with an illusion of our real world."

    "But how did it happen?" Trinity asked. "How did we come to be here?"

    Morpheus shook his head, unable to answer. Cypher grunted, as if to say that it figured, and dropped down into one of the cockpit chairs.

    "If we don't know how we got here, then how are we going to get out?" he asked, leaning back into the chair.

    "I don't know that either… yet," Morpheus answered. "This world is like another version of the Matrix. We have to treat it as such."

    "If this really was the Matrix," Trinity put in, "Then we'd be able to at least contact the outside world with our cells." She patted her pants absently. "Why are we dressed this way? I mean, in our real world clothes? Isn't our residual self-image supposed to dictate the way we look inside the simulation?"

    Morpheus looked pensive. "Perhaps this world is a place completely detached from the Matrix. An independent virtual reality. And if so, then it wouldn't have our residual self-images from the Matrix already cached. It would need new input to form our appearance. And since we all expected to awake in the real world, in these bodies and clothes, it took those self-images to build our appearance. So we're really our perception of what we think we look like in the real world."

    "Huh, that explains it," Cypher commented. "I thought Trinity looked a little taller."

    Trinity didn't bother to answer. Instead, she walked up to a bulkhead and punched it. Her fist left a sizeable dent in the metal.

    "Looks like it operates like the Matrix," she pointed out.

    "They must have used the base programming from the Matrix to build this world. So it will have all the basic interaction software as well as rules and limits."

    "But the core programming has been expanded upon significantly," Cypher said, leaning forwards. "Otherwise, Xena Warrior Princess here wouldn't have been able to fry those Agents with the plasma rifle. They've at least included instructions for the use of the beds, the engines and the rifle. Which doesn't really make much sense to me."

    "Why bother with those kinds of details if all you're building is a trap?" Morpheus stated, completing Cypher's thought.

    "Exactly. This place was a mousetrap, right? While we stumble around trying to figure out what the hell's going on, the Agents take over some bodies they've conveniently placed in the ship for that purpose."

    "Using the pictures taken by the Sentinels to create replicas of the crew and thus confuse us even more," Trinity finished.

    There was a prolonged silence as the trio tried to think of something to get them out of their situation. Finally, Trinity snapped her fingers and said:

    "Wait a minute… if the plasma rifle and the engines are working, then maybe the Core is working too!"

    "So?" Cypher asked. "We want to get back to the real world, not go back into the Matrix."

    "But if the Core really is a working copy of the one onboard resistance ships, we should be able to broadcast outwards from it and into the real world," Morpheus reasoned.

    With a possible solution at hand, the three liberated humans quickly made their way from the cockpit to the Core. Cypher slipped into the Operator's chair and put on the headset. He flipped the power button, and breathed a sigh of relief when the screens fixed onto the Core flickered to life. He quickly dialled in the number for the Neb's own operating unit.

    "I'm not finished with the diagnosis yet," an irate voice sounded through the headset.

    "Diagnosis? Tank, it's Cypher."

    "Cypher! Where the hell are you guys? Apoc said he saw you leave, but you're still plugged in over here."

    "We're in another simulation. Not the Matrix, something else. It's really freaky, but I'd much rather tell you about it over dinner, if that's possible."

    "Hang on, I'm going to try and trace your signal." While Tank worked on the other end of the phone line, Cypher turned towards Morpheus.

    "He's trying to trace our signal."

    Morpheus nodded.

    "Cypher? Okay, I've got you guys tracked down. It looks like you're in one of the mainframes used as repositories for the Matrix program, but in a different database. I'm getting some weird readings on this thing, but I think I can pull you out from this end. It looks like you did get pulled out of the Matrix when you picked up the phone; only your consciousness was redirected to this other program instead of ending up here on the Neb. So since you guys are sort of 'afloat' in the mainframe, I should be able to yank you out of that program without a hard line. Just say the word."

    "Tank says he thinks he can pull us out of this place right now," Cypher said to Morpheus.

    "Do it."

* * *

    Tank's fingers flew over the keyboard as he locked onto the patterns of Morpheus, Trinity and Cypher thanks to his trace program. He then sent a retrieval command into the mainframe and watched as their codes blinked out of whatever pocket reality they had been trapped in and out through the layers of programming in the mainframe.

    Unexpectedly, a firewall activated within the confines of the mainframe, challenging the departing command strings. Tank reached for the keyboard to attempt to crack whatever criteria the firewall had just challenged his friends' programs with, but whatever the recognition factor or password was, it must have had an extremely short time limit on delivery because Tank watched helpless as Morpheus and the rest were denied exit. Their programs sped off back into the mainframe.

    "They're being redirected again!"

* * *

    The three of them woke up simultaneously this time. Removing the plugs from the sockets in the back of their necks, they sat up in the chairs. As one, they glanced over to the Operator's seat.

    It was empty.

    Trinity exchanged worried glances with her shipmates, and then leapt off of her seat. She rolled herself into a tight ball and rolled over on her axis several times in mid-air before landing effortlessly in a perfect finishing stance on the deck.

    None of them needed to be told the significance of that action. There was no way a normal human being could have performed such an acrobatic feat in the real world without extensive training. They were still inside the mainframe.

    And if this false Neb was anything like the previous one, they weren't alone.

    "Trinity, rifle," Morpheus said, heading straight towards the ladder that would give them access to the cockpit. He climbed it and emerged in the arrowhead-like space, where the four eerie reproductions of the Neb crew stood in immobile silence. Cypher came up behind him, helping Trinity with the rifle.

    As Trinity climbed the last rung, Morpheus noticed the telltale distortion that marked the arrival of an Agent into another's body. Only this time, there wasn't just one Agent – all four frozen figures were morphing into Agents.

    Trinity saw this and hefted her weapon, but Morpheus knew that by the time she had finished off one of them, the other three would have had more than enough opportunity to strike back at the Neb's crew. Morpheus brought his hand down in a chopping gesture onto the tip of the plasma rifle a split second before she fired, breaking off a piece of equipment on the edge.

    The rifle fired super-heated plasma that instantly fried the circuits of anything it came into contact with. It was designed as a last resort in dealing with invading Sentinels and other machines, but on biological beings it acted like a lightning bolt. So while not necessarily lethal, any prolonged exposure to a plasma blast was deadly, and even a brief blast could be fatal.

    To act as a successful weapon, the plasma rifle was equipped with a conical nozzle that helped focus the superheated plasma into a single stream. When Morpheus struck the weapon, that nozzle was broken off and so the weapon spewed plasma in whatever direction it left the chamber of the weapon where it was generated and heated instead of emerging in a concentrated beam.

    As a result, the energy that spewed forth from the rifle look more like a lightning storm than a weapon discharge. Strands of plasma jutted forth, sweeping along the front of the cockpit, crackling through the air for a second or two before dissipating and being replaced by another strand. Sparks flew as circuits all over the cockpit blew out. The four Agents were caught in the centre of this storm, trying to move forwards or at least out of the way, but every time they tried they would get caught by one of the sweeping bolts of plasma and knocked backwards. Eventually their normally pale flesh began to sear and burn, some parts of their hair and clothes catching fire. This went on for quite some time, the Agents twitching like puppets whose strings were being jerked by cruel children in the embrace of the plasma.

    Because the light produced such spread out energy made it blinding to look at the front of the cockpit, Trinity didn't stop firing the weapon until its trembling became so violent that she thought she might very well lose her grip on it, and there was no telling what kind of damage an uncontrolled, unfocused plasma rifle could do to her shipmates.

    She let go of the trigger and the weapon shut down, thought not without a few more tendrils of plasma snaking from the segmented muzzle. As soon as she ceased firing, something inside the rifle began emitting a high-pitched whine. She let the weapon drop of the deck, then covered her eyes as circuits inside the rifle overloaded, causing a shower of blazing sparks to leap from the broken rifle. With a final tremor, the plasma rifle came to a rest on the cold metal floor, burnt out from the inside.

    The humans glanced at the four charred bodies that used to bear their faces lying against the floor, walls and consoles of the Neb's cockpit. Once again, they had been lucky enough to have arrived before the Agents got a chance to fully load into their new bodies. The damage dealt to their host bodies had been too extensive to continue operating, and the Agents had once again been chased out of this particular reality. Despite the extenuating circumstances, not many crews would be able to boast that they had driven off four Agents.

    "Damn thing must have overloaded from the strain of continuous use," Cypher commented, kicking the smouldering husk of the plasma rifle.

    "Get down to the Core and call Tank," Morpheus instructed. "I want to know what happened to us."

    "Sure. This place stinks, anyway."

    Morpheus sniffed the air. Indeed, the plasma rifle's discharge and the smoking, burnt out circuitry gave the cockpit a less than pleasing aroma. Morpheus decided he would relocate himself to the Core as well.

* * *

    "Well, I've been studying what happened when I tried to pull you out the first time," Tank said towards the microphone. To facilitate finding a solution to this problem, he had put the other line on speakerphone, and he assumed Cypher had done the same on his version of the Nebuchadnezzar.

    "And?" Morpheus' voice came in clear.

    "Well, when I initially pulled you guys out, some sort of firewall-like program went up around the mainframe. Not just the database you were in, but around the entire Matrix. It issued some sort of challenge to your own codices as you tried to leave, and it didn't get the appropriate response it needed so it redirected you to this other Neb."

    "A cage. A place for Agents to slaughter resistance fighters," Morpheus said coldly.

    "Uh-huh. Well, that must be why anything that tries to leave the Matrix gets queried by this thing."

    "So how do we provide the correct response?"

    "I don't know yet. I don't think it's a password. Even at the speed computers operate, the whole process went way to fast for that kind of communication to take place. It has to be something else."

    "That's not the only mystery we have on our hands," Morpheus claimed. "First, there's the question of how the Agents knew where we were inside the Matrix barely after we had arrived. And why did Mouse manage to get through this blockade?"

    "In Mouse's case, it could simply be that the query program wasn't running yet. Maybe something that controls the exit of anything in the Matrix takes up a lot of power or space, and they only activate it when they have need of it."

    "But how would they know that there are free humans in the Matrix in order to activate this program in the first place?"

    "That brings us back to the question of how they knew you had gotten into the Matrix, and where. And I don't know the answer to that."

    "Wait a minute," Mouse piped up to the left of the Operator's chair. "Cypher, do you remember what was on the computer screen before we were forced to leave by the Agents?"

    "Sure. It showed a surge. A communications surge."

    "Yeah, but a comm. surge that cut across several Matrix frequencies…"

    "And it occurred around the time that we entered the Matrix," Cypher finished, catching on. "So they know to activate their trap programming because they get a warning every time somebody enters the Matrix."

    "Not only that, but there's probably coordinates along with the communications burst. So they know where to find us."

    On the other end of the speakerphone, Morpheus sounded as if he was frowning. "But statistics garnered by observation probes sent by Zion have shown that thousands of new human embryos are plucked from the fields and plugged into the Matrix every day. That would have the Agents running around on a continuous basis, checking out every new person that comes into the Matrix to see if it's a resistance fighter or just a normal captive. It doesn't sound like something the Machines would do; it's too inefficient."

    "Isn't there a way for the Machines to tell a signal coming from one of the pods the coppertops are stored in from one we broadcast?" Dozer asked from over by the radar station where he was looking out for Sentinels.

    "No," Morpheus answered. "One of the first things the resistance did when they took the fighting to inside the Matrix itself was assure themselves that the signals broadcast by a ship's Core was indistinguishable from the ones emitted by the pods. That way, the Machines couldn't simply scan the Matrix for anomalous signals to find our fighters."

    "Maybe the nature of the signals themselves are the same," Tank said excitedly, "but what about the frequencies they're being broadcast on?"

    "What do you mean?"

    "Remember about a month ago when we discovered that the Machines had set things up so that only a specific frequency was allowed to pull things out of the Matrix, and anything that didn't comply would get fried by an electrical backlash?"

    "I do." The crew of the Neb had intercepted the transmission warning Agents inside the Matrix of the new measures. A young man had died helping the crew get their hands on the only safe frequency to use. He hadn't been a liberated human, but he would have made a valuable asset to the resistance nevertheless.

    "Well, once we got the safe frequency we switched our Core broadcast to that frequency and told Zion to relay the message to all other resistance ships. Eventually, the Machines must have realised that their plan hadn't worked, and from there it wasn't too hard to deduce we had their 'safe' frequency. But because all resistance ships were now operating with that frequency…"

    "We basically gave the Machines a way to detect liberated humans entering the Matrix," Morpheus completed glumly. "That's why we've been losing people recently. Not only did the Agents have a heads-up when hunting us inside the Matrix, they also had a fail-safe in case we got away from them."

    "So how do we get around this query program thing and back into the real world?" Cypher asked.

    "Well, they've got to have a frequency that's clean. That must be what the firewall queries for. It would certainly explain the speed of the interaction: it doesn't take much time to detect an outgoing frequency and decide it doesn't match up with assigned parameters. If we can find the good frequency, we'll be able to pull the three of you and Switch and Apoc out without any further false realities."

    "How do we find the frequency?" Trinity asked. "I don't suppose we'd be lucky enough to intercept a transmission this time around."

    "No, I doubt it," Tank mulled. "The only way we can get the frequency the Machines are using is by taking a reading directly from one of the pods themselves. And that means going up to the surface."

    "Under no condition," Morpheus said. "It's much too dangerous. This crew is an exemplary one, but we can all be replaced. Hoverships, on the other hand, are much too valuable to risk. Zion needs every ship it has. The resistance can't afford to lose one, no matter who ends up stranded in the Matrix."

    "Sir, with all due respect, if we don't find a way to get around this query program nobody is going to be able to go in and out of the Matrix at will anymore. With no fighters inside the Matrix, the Machines might as well have won the war."

    Morpheus was silent on the other end for a long time. Finally, he said: "Fine, do it. But be careful."

    "We will," Tank assured him, moving to cut off the communication.

    "Wait," Trinity put in. "What if the frequency that the pods use to get in is different from the frequency we'd have to use to get out?"

    "I certainly hope that's not the case," Tank answered. "Because otherwise, we're screwed."

* * *

    Apoc closed the cell phone and walked over to Switch, his face grim.

    "That was Tank. He had bad news. There's some kind of program blocking our exit from the Matrix. If we try to leave, we'll just end up in another computer simulation with a bunch of Agents. They're working on a solution now, but it's risky and it's going to take some time."

    "So in the meantime, we're stranded here, right?"

    Apoc nodded. Switch sighed heavily.

    "Well, at least we've reached our destination," she said without enthusiasm. "Behold, the glory that is the Dreamland club. Home of the lost and premium source for Mescaline and eXtasy for several blocks."

    It didn't look like much on the outside. The sign that announced Dreamland was a green neon that managed to look faded despite its cold glow. A concrete corridor dipped under the first floor of the building, going in several meters into the structure before one reached the doors into the club. A very tall and large man with a shaved head and a single golden earring guarded the door. He looked like he'd just as soon rip off a few limbs then let someone get by him.

    "Names?" he asked in a deep voice.

    "I'm Switch, this is Apoc."

    The man's eyebrows went up, and he looked vaguely amused. "I don't suppose you're on the list."

    "List? Since when do we have to be on a list to get into the Dreamland?"

    "Mr. Gibbons runs a very exclusive club. We wouldn't let the wrong kind of people get in."

    "Oh, please. The wrong kind of people are Dreamland's sole clientele."

    The bouncer actually cracked a smile, but it made him look even more like a predator.

    "We have something to offer your employer," Switch said.

    "Mr. Gibbons doesn't need anything from the likes of you."

    "I'm sure he'd be very interested in our proposal."

    "Well then, that's too bad, because you're not getting in. Now leave." To accentuate his point, the bouncer moved closer to Switch and Apoc, using his height to tower over them. With speed that would shock any normal human, Switch's hand lanced out and grabbed the bouncer by his crotch, using her Matrix-enhanced abilities to apply just the right amount of pressure.

    "You go in there and tell your Mr. Gibbons that we want to meet with him, or I'll turn you into a eunuch," Switch said sweetly. "Got that?"

    The bouncer, bent over and mouth hanging open, nodded solemnly. Switch released him, and he stumbled away through the tinted doors of the Dreamland club. Switch turned to Apoc, who looked vaguely uncomfortable.

    "Men," she snorted. "Just squeeze a little and they crack."

    Apoc didn't reply. Shortly after the bouncer went in, another man came out to great them. His dress was vastly different from the formal attire of the bouncer, which had probably been just for show anyway. Their new contact seemed to favour dark colours and leather, and his hair and goatee were coloured in red-orange.

    "What do you want?" The man's tone was soft, though Switch suspected in was attributable more to narcotics than a gentle demeanour.

    "Are you Mr. Gibbons?"

    "I'm his assistant."

    "We want to talk to Gibbons."

    "You'll talk to me. Now what do you want?"

    "We want into Dreamland. We can pay for our entry in services."

    "Such as?"

    "Hacking."

    "We already have a hacker." He turned to leave.

    "Wait. Whoever it is, he can't possibly be as good as we are."

    "I don't know... he's pretty good."

    "Trust me, we're the best there is."

    "If you're so certain, you wouldn't object to a little test."

    "Bring it on."

    "This way," the man said, leading them inside of Dreamland.

    The club, despite whatever window dressing this Gibbons guy had tried to put up, was still the same rather seedy spot that Switch remembered. The lighting was poor, provided by a few overhead lights here and there that hadn't burnt out in combination with bright green strobe lights. A few couches and chairs were set along side the walls, many of which had been "decorated" with metallic grillage. All of the clients of Dreamland that they passed were dressed in clothes that were dark and leathery. Many of them had changed their hair colour and style to something out of sync with mainstream society.

    There was a dance floor a few steps lower than the rest of the main room, where the techno-punks danced jarringly to a hoarse-voiced singer straining to be heard over the heavy metal music. This was the darkest area of the club, the green strobe above flashing on and off at regular intervals. So strong was the contrast between the dance floor when illuminated and not that looking at it was like looking at a series of still-frame photographs, with the dancers changing position with every picture.

    Their soft-spoken escort led them to a side room were they could at least talk without having to shout over the music. Amongst other detritus in the room was a single computer, screen glowing dully. Switch glanced at their host, and then sat down into the chair. Apoc hovered to the side, keeping his hand where he could reach for his weapon should things get ugly.

    "Mr. Gibbons engages in, shall we say, certain import businesses with certain Columbian gentlemen. Recently, we've become concerned that Big Brother might be sticking its nose where it doesn't belong. So we'd like you to check what the government has on Mr. Gibbons' accounts."

    "You want us to hack into the IRS?" Switch asked, not without surprise. This was still considered to be quite a feat in hacker circles. Switch hadn't been able to do it before she had been unplugged, but Trinity had, and the other woman had given Switch a few pointers since.

    "You said you were the best," the false redhead said neutrally.

    Switch scowled, mostly for show, and then went to work.

* * *

    "We're going to have to be extremely careful," Dozer said. "With Morpheus and the others still plugged in, we can't use the electromagnetic pulse if we run into any Sentinels, or any of the other creepy crawlies up on the surface."

    "And we can't very well switch over to stealth running if we're using both the chairs and the hovership's engines to keep us above surface," added Tank. "If we do get spotted, we're going to have to try to run away and evade the Sentinels."

    "Right," Mouse said sourly. "With me being dragged along in the back." Mouse tightened the metal belt around his waist. "I still don't like this."

    "We don't have a choice, Mouse. I need to keep an eye out on our crewmates, and Dozer is better qualified to fly the ship than you are. Which leaves you." Mouse's uncharacteristically long face told Tank that the programmer still wasn't overly fond of his assignment. "Come on, Mouse. You're still young and nimble, and we all known how much you love getting your hands on a new piece of tech. This shouldn't be a problem for you."

    Mouse straightened, his pride touched. "Of course it won't be a problem. After all, you are talking to the master. I just, well, I don't like it, that's all."

    Tank chuckled. "Too bad. Dozer? We're all ready down here!"

    "Gotcha!" his brother called back from the cockpit. "Radar is clean, I'm starting the engines."

    Tank felt the vibrations of the engines humming to life through the deck plates. He gave one last supportive clap on the shoulder to Mouse, and then went back into his Operator's chair.

    Up in the cockpit, Dozer flew the Nebuchadnezzar as fast as he dared through the subterranean tunnels under the planet's surface. On the one hand he wanted to push the engines to the maximum because every second that they took getting the proper frequency was one more second his friends were trapped in a hostile world. But he also needed to go slow in case there were any Sentinels patrolling up ahead. He had to give himself a window of time to react to a Sentinel's presence and either go the other way or hide the ship, otherwise none of them would make it out of this alive.

   Because of this feeling of urgency, the trip to the surface of the planet seemed to take much longer than it actually did. He used mainly vertical shafts, making the Neb drift upwards through the dark tunnels as if on some unseen bed. Twice, Dozer had to stop because of Sentinels. They snaked through the tunnels like squids in water as they went about their patrol routes, looking for ships to crack open. Dozer would place the Nebuchadnezzar into a small vent at these times, unable to shut down the ship but hoping to hell that the Sentinels would not notice it's energy signature. As he watched the last of a trio move out of his field of vision, he made a mental note to recommend that Zion try to acquire a Sentinel to study in order to determine just what their limitations were. An ambushing hovership, another one serving as decoy and a salvage vessel should do the trick.

    Contrary to his expectations, there actually seemed to be less Sentinels the closer he got to the surface. He supposed the Machines knew that Zion was deep underground, and that the Sentinels patrolled the lower tunnels for Zion ship rather than the higher ones closer to the Machine-controlled surface. Whatever the reason, it made navigation easier.

    Dozer finally reached the level that his instruments indicated was surface, though he didn't notice any difference in his surroundings at first. It would seem like this intricate system of tunnels, or at least this portion of it, actually extended above ground.

    Dozer was two hundred and fifty meters up when he saw the oddly lit side tunnel. At this point, he had begun to doubt either the accuracy of his instruments or the resistance's knowledge of surface conditions. Could it be that the Machines had transformed the entire planet into one big metal block, leaving only room for the human fields?

    The tunnel in question branched off from the main conduit that the Nebuchadnezzar had been rising through for the last ten minutes. Dozer could see it's lighting flicker continuously, never shutting off entirely but never becoming as bright as the fluorescents or incandescents in these tunnels should be. Dozer eased the ship into the tunnel, and was able to see that it ended a short distance away. Beyond it was a wall some distance away, and that wall bore rows of pinkish cocoons.

    Dozer brought the ship to a halt, finally realizing that they had reached the surface, and then some. Slowly, he inched the ship out of the tunnel. The wall in front of him was actually a tower that stretched so far down that it became lost in mists, and it reached up towards the wounded sky in the other direction. Dozer stared at the sky for several seconds. He had seen pictures of what is was supposed to be like, and Morpheus and the others that had seen it in the Construct had described it to him, but to see it in person was quite different. Clouds of various degrees of darkness rolled continuously across the sky, forming and dissipating within seconds. They covered the heavens as far as his eye could see, not letting a single ray of sun past the atmosphere. Lightning flashed between the layers, which must have been the odd lighting he had seen on the tunnel walls.

    Dozer glanced out the side of the cockpit window, and saw that the structure in which the side tunnel was inlaid was another such tower, bristling with pods for the unaware coppertops. Dozer didn't understand what the purpose of having the tunnel here in the middle of the tower was – possibly for moving in and out of the tunnel systems – but he didn't concern himself with it much. All that mattered was that they could now have access to the information they needed to save their friends.

    Dozer pushed the Neb out of the tunnel enough so that the midsection hovered above the emptiness below. "We're above the pods!" he called out.

    "Okay, we're lowering the crane!" Tank shouted back. He turned towards Mouse. "Are you ready?"

    Mouse gave one last yank on the cord attached to his belt, making sure it was firmly tied around one of the crane's grasping arms.

    "As ready as I'll ever be, I guess," Mouse answered.

    "Great. Hang on tight."

    Mouse grasped the crane's cable, using it to hoist himself up so he could stand on the crane's grasping arms. Tank pulled down a lever, and the floor beneath Mouse parted as the sass opened up. Below, Mouse could see the first row of pods a few meters away, and beyond them the rows stretched out into a seemingly bottom void. Mouse gave a startled gasp as Tank activated the crane, and the device jerked once before beginning its descent.

    Once Mouse and the crane he was standing on were outside of the Neb's belly, their mass was caught by a wind that swept through the metallic towers, whispering in a forlorn, mourning tone in Mouse's ears. The base of the crane began rocking, and he along with it. It reminded him of a time, before he'd been pulled out, when he'd gone skiing, and the chair lift had gotten caught in a powerful gust of wind, rocking back and forth over the mountain below. Mouse tightened his hold on the cable until his knuckles had gone white.

    Rationally, he knew that the cable and crane were attached to the ship, and he to the crane, so there was no chance of anybody falling into the dark depths below, but it's hard to override the sense of fear that comes from being on a shifty, open platform two hundred and fifty meters above the unforgiving surface. Mouse stared upwards, into the belly of the ship that had become his home, in order to give himself courage – and somewhere else to look but down.

    After what seemed like a ridiculous amount of time, the crane had reached the level of the closest pod. Mouse waited until the wind died down so that the crane and pod were perfectly aligned, then called out: "Okay, now!"

    At his command, Tank activated the crane's claws, and it clamped onto the pod. Gingerly, Mouse stepped off of the crane and onto the pod's railing. He put his other foot down, and nearly lost his balance when it went straight through the translucent covering. He made pinwheel with his arms briefly, and breathed a sigh of relief when he stabilized himself. He then made a sick face as he realized that he was standing in something warm and liquid.

    Putting both feet into the pod, Mouse proceeded to strip off the rest of the covering so he could gain access to the systems inside. There was someone inside, of course – a female, maybe in her twenties judging from the development of her naked body floating in the pinkish ooze that was at that moment seeping into Mouse's shoes. Seeing her like this, eyes closed and plugged into the system, sent a chill down Mouse's spine. He couldn't help thinking about when he had been in a similar situation, and the bewilderment that had follow his unplugging.

    He pushed her body aside, feeling a momentary pang of guilt for having violated the pod. He wasn't certain what happened to people still plugged in who had defective pods. Maybe the Machines fixed the pods, or maybe their occupants were just flushed down into the sewers. Mouse shook these thoughts from his head, and began working on the series of cables and wiring inside of the pod. He didn't have the luxury to worry about the fate of a single coppertop. His captain – his friends – were in danger.

* * *

    Trinity could be patient when she needed to. When you fought against enemies that could do almost anything better than you could, it was wise to learn a little bit of restraint. Nevertheless, she was a woman of action. And trapped here, in a computer reproduction of her ship, with nothing to do but wait and no way to help, was begging to get on her nerves.

    And she wasn't the only one. Cypher was pacing restlessly the length of the Core, managing to rack up a significant amount of mileage in such a cramped environment. Only Morpheus seemed to be unperturbed by their situation, resting with his eyes closed against the wall. Drumming her fingers against the bulkhead, Trinity envied his apparent calm.

    "What the hell is taking them so long?" Cypher asked irritably, pausing in his pacing.

    "They're going up to the surface, Cypher," Trinity pointed out. "That's not like popping in at the closest McDonald's for a bite to eat."

    "I'd kill for a Big Mac right about now," Cypher muttered.

    "They have to watch out for Sentinels," Trinity continued, ignoring the comment. "I bet that isn't exactly relaxing either."

    "Yeah? We'll at least they're in the real ship. Not this… this… thing. This sucks! What if the Sentinels do catch them, huh? What then? We'll be stuck here forever, that's what. Trapped here! Another goddamn computer simulation, only one that looks just like the shitty real world. At least the Matrix had restaurants, and bed with mattresses, and internal heating! This is the worst of both worlds."

    "Look on the bright side, Cypher," Trinity said with smirk. "We won't be here forever. If the Sentinels do catch the Neb, it's only a matter of time before they rip our bodies to shreds in the real world."

    "You're really not helping here!" Cypher screamed, pointing an accusing finger at Trinity.

    "Enough! The both of you!" Morpheus had opened his eyes and glared at them. Trinity expected him to make some sort of speech along the lines of 'we all have to work together', but Morpheus just leaned his head back against the bulkhead, saying nothing. Maybe, Trinity thought, under the cool composure of command, their situation was starting to get to him as much as it did to Cypher and her.

    An uncomfortable silence descended in the wake of Morpheus' order. Cypher had began pacing again, and Trinity tracked his progress to and fro in the Core, really wishing that he would stop because all his restless movement was making her even more edgy.

    She was seriously considering saying something to that effect despite Morpheus' admonition when a series of alarm bells began ringing through the Core. The trio, being very tense, jumped when the strident noise sounded. They all looked at each other in puzzlement for a second, then Morpheus said:

    "Sentinel alarm."

    "Sentinels?" Cypher repeated. "In here? This place just gets better and better."

    Out of conditioned response, they headed towards the cockpit. As they came up the ladder, the stench of ozone was their first reminder that this was no ordinary Sentinel alarm. Stepping over the charred bodies of their replicas and the burnt husk of the plasma rifle, they threw themselves into the cockpit's chairs. Only as they were about to plot an escape course did they realize that all the controls in the cockpit were dead. The plasma rifle had done an efficient job in short-circuiting everything they would have normally used to control the ship.

    "Cypher, get the E.M.P. No time for a shut-down." Morpheus called out. Without scanners, they had no way of knowing just how close the Sentinels were. They'd just have to hope that the squids were within the blast radius. Not to mention that the E.M.P. would take care of wrecking every electrical system onboard still active – including the Core. Which meant that they were going to be cut off from Tank and the rest. Again, there was nothing more to do but hope that their crewmates could come through for them.

    Cypher flipped open the transparent plastic casing that protected the E.M.P. from casual activation. His hand hovered over the red button for a second. Cypher licked his lips and brought his palm down.

    Nothing happened.

    Cypher tried pressing down again. When there was still no response, he began repeatedly jabbing at the button with his finger.

    "Come on, come on! Great, this had to be the only goddamn thing in this replica that doesn't fucking work!"

    "Now what do we do?" Trinity asked in a low, urgent tone.

    Just at that moment, a massive hunk of metal seemed to rear itself up at them. A Sentinel spread it's tentacle-like appendages over the cockpit, piercing the bulkheads as it grabbed onto the Nebuchadnezzar. The trio could see its scanner eyes sweeping across the glass and its serrated claws spinning just outside the cockpit window.

    "Go! Back, now!" Morpheus called out, jumping out of his seat and heading towards the Core. Trinity and Cypher were right behind him as a scarlet beam lanced out from the Sentinel and began burning it's way through the glass, searing the already blackened floor.

    They jumped to the floor of the Core, feeling the entire ship shudder as it was manhandled by the Sentinel… or Sentinels. As if confirming this suspicion, a new laser pierced through the roof of the Core.

    Cypher lost his footing, stumbling to the floor as a tremor shook the ship. Morpheus turned around to help him up, and the two men started back towards Trinity when a second laser shot into the Core, raising a puff of smoke where it vaporized metal plating. Some kind of metallic feeler came through the newly made hole in the ceiling, the tubular appendage ending in a wicked set of spinning blades. The tentacle dangled from the roof like a cut electrical wire, the lethal end sweeping from side to side with no clear destination as it blindly searched for prey.

    Trinity saw that the feeler had cut her off from her crewmates, and furthermore that it wasn't going to be long now before the Sentinel would be able to pierce completely through. Even now, Morpheus and Cypher were pressed against the bulkhead, trying to hold off the inevitable as the Sentinel burrowed deeper into the heart of the Neb. Trinity spotted the Operator's chair on her side of the of Sentinel's arm and rushed over to it.

    She flipped up the casing of the E.M.P., hoping that this one would work, that the cockpit button had malfunctioned because of a transmission error and not because the E.M.P. itself was broken or absent, but it was in vain. So that was it. They couldn't escape the Sentinels now: the cockpit controls were fried, the plasma rifle was a piece of junk on the floor, and the E.M.P. didn't work. She slumped against the Operator's chair amidst the cacophony of the Sentinel coming through the ceiling to put an end to all their existences.

    Suddenly, feeling the Operator's chair pressing against her, Trinity realized that she had fallen into the trap of thinking that this was the real world. This was just a computer simulation, like any other. And although she didn't think she could wrestle a Sentinel even with her Matrix-enhanced abilities, she did have another option open to her.

    Trinity grabbed the headset and hit the recall button. As soon as she heard the first ring interrupted by a voice on the other end, she said:

    "Tank, get us out of here, now!"

    "But Mouse is still–"

    "Pull us out!" she screamed into the headset.

    "Okay, sure," Tank said quickly.

    The other end of the line went silent as Tank activated the retrieval program he'd previously designed.

    "Come on, Tank! Hurry up!"

    Trinity stared powerless as the front of the Sentinel finally pierced through the ceiling. It's eyes locked onto to Morpheus and Cypher, and the claw-topped tentacles shot off from its metallic body towards the two men…

    …and suddenly Trinity was staring at the Neb's dour but nevertheless intact ceiling. She sat up in the chair, glancing over at the Operator's chair in the hope that somehow they had left the computer world and Tank would be sitting there, ready to welcome them home. He wasn't, of course, and Trinity knew exactly what she had to do now.

    She leapt from the bed as Cypher and Morpheus sat up, surprised to still be alive. Trinity grabbed the new version of the plasma rifle from its holster on the wall, heading straight for the ladder. She bounded down the walkway and through the sass leading into the cockpit, the weapon in her hands becoming warm as it charged.

    The foursome of false humans was in their now-familiar places in the cockpit, unmoving. Without hesitating a second, Trinity bracketed the first of the statue-like figures and fired a sizzling hot stream of plasma at it. She let it fire for two seconds, and then stopped the rifle as she switched over to her next target. She repeated the same procedure for the others. Just as she was about to pump some more juice into her first target, the smoking bodies sprawled in the cockpit twitched and reformed. Although they bore no exterior sign of the punishment their hosts had just taken, Trinity saw that they seemed to be lurching to their feet rather than gracefully springing upwards.

    Trinity fired the plasma rifle again and again in short bursts. The Agents' guns became fused and unusable with the first hit or two from the superheated plasma jet. Nevertheless, they persisted in trying to get close enough to Trinity to do some damage. Trinity would fire the rifle and hit the Agent in the chest or head, and it would bounce backwards, sprawling to the floor, only to rise and begin shambling towards her again. Firing at whichever Agent was closest, Trinity absurdly felt as if she was stuck in some kind of bad horror B movie, where the zombies or whatnot just kept on coming no matter how many times they were shot.

    Finally however, the Agents' bodies began to get too damaged to function properly. The first one left his host leaving a charred, motionless body behind, creating a gap in the Agents' attack that allowed Trinity to spend more time shooting the others. One by one the three remaining Agents escaped from the false Nebuchadnezzar and back to wherever Agents went.

    "Good job."

    Trinity jumped. She hadn't realized that at some point during the shooting Morpheus and Cypher had come up behind her. Of course, blocking the doorway as she was, there hadn't been any way for them to help out.

    "Thanks," she told Morpheus. She unslung the rifle and plopped down into one of the cockpit chairs. "This is beginning to get routine," she said, cracking a faint smile.

    "I promise to have you out of here before you can get too bored," Morpheus played along.

    Cypher didn't seem very amused. "I'm glad the two of you are enjoying yourselves. I guess there must be something wrong with me if I fail to see the humour in this situation." He sat in a chair and began to brood. "Of all the places to get stuck in, we had to get stuck in the place we spend too much time already. And while we're stuck here, Switch and Apoc get to play around in the Matrix. I bet they're having fun," Cypher said pettishly.

* * *

    Switch had to admit it: she was having fun. Somewhere in between the dreary drudgery of life onboard the Nebuchadnezzar and playing hide and seek with Agents while in the Matrix, she hadn't had much time to practice her hacking skills, the very skills that had gotten herself noticed by the resistance in the first place. Typing away at the keyboard like her fingers were pistons, Switch felt good to be doing something she actually enjoyed for once. Seeing the IRS security crumble before her attacks, Switch recalled the dewy days of youth, before Morpheus and the rest, when her sole concern was with breaking every computer related law she could think of.

    "Here you go," Switch finally said, popping a diskette out of the console and handing it to their 'friend', a little disappointed to have the game end so soon. "The IRS is completely clueless to your boss's activities."

    The redhead nodded solemnly, but somehow the gesture seemed almost comical when he did it. "Thanks. You are good. Come on, I'll introduce you to Mister Gibbons."

    As it turned out, Gibbons' office was right next door to the room with the computer. The office had a desk, chair, cabinet and wastebasket, and the man sitting behind it was balding and wearing a two-piece business suit. But like all the other attempts to lend credibility to Dreamland, Switch and Apoc could see right through it. A scum-hole with delusions of grandeur. It was almost laughable.

    "What's this?" Gibbons asked.

    "Hackers," their guide said.

    "Didn't we already have a hacker?"

    "These are better. They got into the IRS accounts. We're clean," he said, handing his boss the diskette.

    Gibbons split into a large, feral grin. "Excellent." He pocketed the diskette, then turned back towards Switch and Apoc and extended a hand. "I'm Gibbons," he said, rather unnecessarily. "You've already met Choi," Gibbons nodded towards the redhead, "and these are my friends Pete and DuJour."

    Sensing a presence behind her, Switch turned to see the bouncer leering down at her from the doorway. A shorter woman who wore elaborate make-up, plenty of black leather and metallic rings around her neck, flanked him. The woman pushed past the liberated humans, smiling at Apoc suggestively. As she moved by, Switch noticed a white rabbit tattoo on her left shoulder. It reminded her of Morpheus and his constant Alice in Wonderland references.

    DuJour slinked over to Gibbons' desk and rubbed up against him, practically sitting in the man's lap. She grinned again at the guests, as if daring them to do something about it.

    Gibbons raised an eyebrow at Switch and Apoc. "It will be a pleasure working with you in the future. Thank you," he said dismissively.

    "Hang on," Apoc said. "There's still the matter of payment for that disk."

    "I assumed that it was a token of good will," Gibbons said silkily. When neither of them answered, the smile dropped from his face. "Why should I pay for a product I've already obtained?"

    "Good business aside, I doubt you'd want to have us as enemies."

    "Is that so?"

    Behind and to the left, Switch saw Choi shift his posture towards them, and felt Pete the Bouncer doing the same. DuJour reached for something under the desk. Switch got the distinct impression that there were several weapons pointed at them.

    "You'll forgive me if I'm not very frightened at this moment," Gibbons said haughtily.

    "Our friends know we're here," Switch said. She felt Apoc tensing up next to her, ready to spring if things got ugly – well, uglier. "If something happens to us, you can be sure that they'll come after you. And they're even better hackers than we are. So unless you want to find yourself facing a full board of inquiry about your import business, I think you'd be better off if we talked about this. I assure you, our prices our reasonable."

    "How much?"

    "For this first one, nothing more than admission to Dreamland for us and some friends. Consider it a token of good will, if you wish. For any other jobs, the standard fee."

    "Sounds good to me," Choi piped up. "Better to have them with us than against us."

    Gibbons mulled over it a bit, then agreed with a nod of his head. Switch noted with relief that the bouncer and the others relaxed. There wouldn't be any shooting in this office today.

    "Pete, take down the names," Gibbons instructed. "Choi, show 'em around. And meanwhile, I have some paperwork to take care of. If you'll excuse me, my dear…"

    DuJour rose, and followed Choi, Pete the Bouncer, Switch and Apoc out of the office.

* * *

    Mouse licked his lips as he placed the tracker onto one of the cables leading out of the tangled mass of wires at the base of the pod, just behind the woman's head. The tiny screen flickered as it tried to establish communication with the information being processed through the cable. As he waited to see if the tracker would catch, Mouse gently lowered the woman's head back into the ooze, being careful not to snag any of the wires that assured feeding. Her head was bald, of course, since the pink stuff acted as a natural inhibitor for hair growth, but Mouse liked to think that she was probably a blonde, for no other reason that her body looked like the one associated with the blonde bimbo types. Yeah, blonde, maybe shoulder length and styled, with a flowing red dress–

    A shrill beeping took him away from his reverie. The small indicator screen on the tracker indicated that it had managed to intercept the data flow through the cable. The tracker would take that data, transmit a copy for the Neb or any other ship to intercept, and send it along its merry way back into the cable within milliseconds. This woman might have experienced a brief time loss when it was activated, but now there would be no other effects because the tracker's activity was continuous.

    Mouse noted the number currently displayed on the small screen, memorizing the carrier wave for the frequency used by this pod to communicate to and from this woman's brain and the Matrix.

    He stood and was about to call up for Tank to crank the cable and hook back up again when a flurry of movement below him caught his attention. He peered down over the edge of the pod a saw some kind of machine that looked like a cross between and spider and a mantis come floating upwards. It rose up in front of Mouse with such speed that the shock of its arrival caused him to lose balance, falling on his back into the pink fluid.

    The machine hovered above the pod, a plethora of eyes under a shell-like metal casing moving from side to side. One of the eyes finally focused on Mouse, and the rest followed its lead, swivelling to look at him in eerie unison.

    "Uh, Tank? Now would be a good time for you to pull me up!"

    Tank, still seated in the operator's chair, was about to flip the switch to retract the crane when he heard Dozer call out from the cockpit:

    "Tank! We've got company! Sentinels, heading straight for us. Pull in Mouse now because we've got to leave!"

    Tank activated the crane retraction system just as he felt the Neb's engines begin to make that little whine they emitted whenever the ship was travelling. He ran over to the sass to help Mouse up, and then saw with surprise that Mouse wasn't on the crane.

    Mouse was, in fact, staring at the insect-like machine in front of him, having gotten to his knees in the pinkish ooze. Somehow, he thought he saw in its eyes that it had reached a decision as to what it should do with the pesky human, and Mouse doubted he was going to enjoy what came next.

    Suddenly, the combined action of the ship lifting and the crane retracting jerked the rope around his waist. Mouse felt himself going sprawling on all fours again as he was pulled down, just in time to avoid some kind of pincer like appendage that had just sprouted from the machine from latching onto his head or neck. Another tug, and Mouse felt himself sliding through the ooze for a brief second, going under the cumbersome yet speedy metal body of the machine, and emerging from the pink liquid into the open air.

    Mouse's elation at having avoided capture lasted just long enough for him to remember just what the phrase "open air" entailed when one was two hundred and fifty meters above ground. He opened his eyes (which had been clenched shut in anticipation of the machine's strike) and saw that he was dangling above the rows of pods, the spectacle below a bottomless pit, an inscrutable void.

    Mouse let out a squeal that would have done his namesake proud and grabbed onto the cord with both hands. Looking up, he could see that the rope around his waist had held tight around one of the crane's claws, which itself was being pulled up into the belly of the Nebuchadnezzar at a painfully slow pace for someone in his rather precarious position.

    To make matters worse, that chasm wind had blown up again, and Mouse was now rocking wildly without anything relatively stable to hang onto. Even the Neb itself couldn't provide a stable object to look at since it was making a U-turn to get back into the side tunnel from which they had emerged, a manoeuvre that wasn't helping Mouse's stomach in the least.

    Finally properly aligned, the Neb leapt forwards, the engines lighting up as the hoverpads kicked into action. Mouse felt the boost in sped several milliseconds after it actually happened, causing him to be yanked harder than ever at the end of his rope. Still, the rope held and Mouse felt as if he had suddenly become a living projectile as he speeded towards the tunnel, attached by the now-rigid cord. Within a second the intermittent lighting of the surface world was replaced with the penumbra of the tunnel systems that the freedom fighters called home.

    It took a second or two for his eyes to adjust, but he wished they hadn't. The decaying walls flashed under him as the Neb sped to escape a trio of Sentinels that had engaged themselves in the tunnels after them. Mouse's eyes went wide as he saw they were approaching a narrow passage, and Mouse had a brief but vivid mental picture of himself splattered against the featureless grey walls.

    Just as he was certain that he was about to become a big red blotch, he felt a pair of arms grab onto his clothes and lift him up through the sass and into the Neb. It was Tank: during the ordeal he hadn't noticed that the crane retraction mechanism had brought him closer to the ship, until finally Tank had been able to seize him. Tank dropped Mouse onto the deck, and the young man promised himself never to take stable deck plating for granted again, even if it was cold and uncomfortable.

    "Are you okay, Mouse?"

    Mouse considered several bitter responses to such a stupid question, but decided that he was too tired to argue about anything.

    "I'll be alright."

    "Did you get it?"

    "Huh?"

    "The frequency. To get Morpheus and the others out. Did you get it?"

    "Oh, yeah. Come, I'll show you."

* * *

    It stank of burned flesh and electrical discharge in the cockpit, but the trapped trio had stayed there anyway. It wasn't as if they had anywhere else to go. It would be foolish to try to get some food or even sleep in this environment. They had patched any Core communications through the cockpit so that they would hear if Tank called, but they did not call him. Morpheus was sure that his crew was much to occupied to be bothered by him checking up on things. Still, the waiting was difficult.

    Cypher was standing next to the E.M.P. (not that it worked), staring out the cockpit window. He couldn't exactly place their location, but then after all this time 'liberated' from the Matrix, one underground tunnel pretty much looked like any other. Drab and decaying. Just now, a piece of piping detached itself from the main conduit and fell to the floor of the tunnel.

    Everything was falling into ruins. These tunnels were just another symptom. The entire species might as well be extinct. Cypher watched with a scowl as a piece of piping broke off from the main conduit and fell to the floor of the tunnel…

    "Hang on a second."

    "What?" Trinity asked.

    "That piece of pipe. I just saw it fall twice."

    "Are you sure it's the same piece?" Morpheus enquired.

    "Positive. There aren't any other pieces on the floor."

    "Glitch," Morpheus said, making it sound like a swear.

    "What did they change?" Trinity wondered, looking around herself.

    Before any of them had a chance to conduct a more extensive search, a strident alarm sounded in the cockpit.

    "Sentinels."

    "That's what they changed?"

    "I guess so. The Sentinels mustn't be a part of this program and have to be loaded in from the outside."

    "Then why didn't we catch a glitch when they attacked before?"

    "We must have missed it, I suppose."

    Morpheus keyed in a few sequences into the cockpit and was rewarded by the sound of the engines starting their high-pitched whine. He briefly wondered why this replica should be working at all, but pushed away the thought. He had more important things to worry about now. Without the E.M.P., their only chance of escaping the Sentinels was to try and out-run them. Morpheus kicked the engines into gear and the Nebuchadnezzar began moving down the tunnels.

    Trinity moved over to the radar screen, where a trio of squid-like Sentinels was moving towards the central blip representing the Neb.

    "We've got three coming in at nine o'clock," she said.

    Morpheus accelerated and the Neb began speeding away from their hunters. Cypher hovered over Trinity as she called out the Sentinel's positions.

    "Why don't we just call Tank and tell him to get us out?"

    "Do you want to go up against those four Agents again? Eventually, our luck is going to run out."

    "Trinity is right, Cypher. We can't keep jumping from one false world to another. It's just a matter of time before this mouse trap snaps down on us for good."

    "Well, maybe so, but have you ever thought of just how much tunnel there is in this place? Frankly, I'm surprised that they've reproduced this much just for a trap, and I'd sure as hell be willing to wager that they didn't reproduce the whole tunnel system."

    "Nothing we can do about that now," Morpheus said, making a steep turn to the right. On the console next to him, a small button lit up orange. "Cypher, take that call."

    Cypher walked over to the console and pressed the button.

    "Hello?"

    "Cypher, it's Tank. We've got the right frequency to pull you guys out."

    "That's great! Get us out of here!"

    "Yep, just hang on a few seconds. The frequencies are too far apart for me to switch from one to the other, so I'm going to rotate your signals over to the right one with the retrieval program active. It might be a little uncomfortable."

    "Just do it," Morpheus instructed.

    "Right. Activating the program."

    Morpheus stared ahead the tunnel system flying by the cockpit, waiting for a sign of Tank's retrieval program kicking in. He took a turn into a side tunnel since the one they were currently engaged in ended some distance away, then saw with shock that this side tunnel had not been completely loaded. Dead ahead was a blank, featureless wall, like the floor of the Construct, where this computer simulation of the tunnel systems ended. Morpheus slammed on the brakes, but the Neb was going much to fast and was about to careen right into the boundary–

    –and suddenly he wasn't looking at a blank wall anymore no it was the ceiling of the Neb all grey and blank and featureless and then he was also looking at the ceiling of the Neb only now he wasn't looking at one ceiling but two he was looking at two at the same time and one ceiling wasn't beside the other they were both there both on top of each other both superimposing two in one like layers of solid reality and it's impossible because how can one see two ceilings take up the same space of one but it has to be possible because here now is a third ceiling and a  fourth and a fifth and a tenth and a twentieth and a fiftieth and a hundredth and a thousandth–

    –and some part of his mind insisted on saying that it was just the frequencies as they shifted and rotated to get out but that part was quickly drowned out and made silent by the pain because it hurt the mind it hurt so much it hurt like a real bitch to look at thousands of ceilings all in the same place and every sense screamed that he couldn't be seeing this but he did see it and that it couldn't be possible but there it was damn it–

    –and Morpheus tried to look away from the ceilings he looked over to one side and at another side and all the sides at once he was looking everywhere at the same time which wasn't really possible but at this point who gave a flying fuck about reality and realities and all the realities just piling up on top of each other and he could see the chairs and the floor and his crewmates and everything else being stretched out reflected in hundreds of mirrors over and over and over again–

    –and Morpheus held up his hand in front of his face and that too was stretched out and reflected and duplicated and doubled and tripled a thousand times over and Morpheus could see now that there were millions of Morpheus hands and billions of Cyphers and trillions of Trinities and even if Morpheus could see everywhere he couldn't see everything it was impossible to see everything because it just went on and on forever and ever to infinity to eternity to the nth degree–

    –and it was all over almost as soon at it had begun. Morpheus gasped for air, his hands scrambling to the back of his neck to undo the plug. Someone got there before he did, and Morpheus used his new freedom to slide off the chair and collapse to the floor. He began taking it long breaths of air through his nose, trying to slow himself down. Next to him, Trinity was doing and same, and beyond her Cypher was heaving against the floor, thankful that he hadn't had the opportunity to eat that Big Mac after all.

    Morpheus saw a hand in front of his face and grasped it. As Tank helped him to his feet, the operator asked:

    "Are you okay? On my screen it looked like you went through a retrieval and reroute each time the frequency changed – which was a lot, considering that we were cycling through all the frequencies until we reached our target."

    Morpheus shook his head, unsure of how to describe what he had just experienced.

    "It was like standing between two mirrors," he finally said, "and seeing your reflection reflected as far as the eye can see. Only it was all around you. It was the whole reality." Morpheus shrugged, feeling impotent to properly describe how it had felt. "How's the rest of the crew?"

    "Well, we're being chased by Sentinels and we can't use the E.M.P. because Apoc and Switch are still under."

    "What? Haven't you called them yet?"

    "I've been trying," Tank said. "They're not answering."

* * *

    The grand tour of Dreamland wasn't much of a tour, and by no means grand. Choi had shown them every dank and dirty corner of the drug club, with DuJour tagging along behind them and making eyes at Apoc. The bouncer, one Pete, had taken their names and that of their friends (Pete had raised an eyebrow at the rather odd list of names, but said nothing) and left to return to his post, keeping drifters and other undesirables (like police officers) out of Dreamland.

    The tour began and ended in Dreamland's main room and dance floor. Heavy metal music blared from the speakers in the ceiling as the strobe lights flashed on and off. Switch was starting to get a headache.

    "And that's Dreamland. Quite a place, huh?"

    "It's certainly something," Switch said neutrally.

    "You know, our merchandise is the best you'll find anywhere, if you ever want to sample it. Personally, I recommend the Mescaline. It's premium."

    "I'll pass, thanks." Switch considered seeking altered realities in a reality that was already altered to be the height of pointlessness.

    A small trilling rang out in proximity. Everybody within a five-meter radius reached inside pockets and jackets and took out their cell phones. They put them back when the call appeared to be for the white-haired woman. Switch was about to answer the summons when she heard a ruckus coming from the front of the club.

    She looked over the heads of the mulling crowd of dancer and spotted the distinct shape of Pete the Bouncer at the entrance, stalking angrily towards some unseen goal. Switch heard him say something to the effect of "You can't come in here" before Pete was suddenly airborne and heading in the opposite direction. The bouncer hit a nearby wall upside down from the force of the throw. There was an unpleasant snapping sound that could be heard all the way over on the other side of Dreamland, and Pete slid to the floor lifelessly.

    At this point the ruckus became and all-out riot. People were chanting angrily or screaming in fear, some of them converging onto the spot from whence Pete was thrown and others (the majority, Switch noticed) fleeing. The two-way traffic made the dancers a confused mass.

    Gibbons came out of his office, a gun in hand. He fired several times into the air. After an initial set of screams, the milling tenants of Dreamland seemed to quiet down and freeze in place. Gibbons glanced over at the body of his bouncer, and levelled his gun into the crowd. As the occupants of the club moved out of the line of fire of the angered owner, Switch caught her first real glance at the source of all this brouhaha. Three men, standing with their backs perfectly squared off, wearing black suits with a white shirt and black ties. On their strikingly similar faces rested a pair of sunglasses, and a wire ran from inside their lapel to their ear.

    Switch cursed under her breath and glanced over at Apoc. He nodded solemnly, and the two began inching their way further back into the club. Choi and DuJour seemed to have approached the crowd to get a better look.

    Gibbons fired three times. The Agents in Dreamland's entrance blurred for a second, looking as if they were in two places at the same time like the blades in an electric fan. Then they were perfectly still again. There was no sign that they had been shot at save for a trio of bullet holes behind them.

    Gibbons lowered his gun, a confused look on his face. The lead Agent raised his own weapon and fired twice, each slug taking Gibbons in the chest. He jerked when they hit, then toppled backwards.

    The crowd in Dreamland turned into a stampede as people began rushing to and fro, not sure where they were going but certain in the knowledge that they had to vacate the premises. Switch and Apoc tried to mingle in with the rest, hoping that they would be able to exit Dreamland hidden in the waves of patrons heading for the front door despite the Agents' presence. Suddenly, Choi was at their side, DuJour hanging off his side.

    "Come on, there's a back exit," he said.

    Switch and Apoc followed the pair as he led them through a poorly lit section at the back of the club. There was a knob inlaid amongst the metal netting that decorated the back wall of Dreamland. Choi opened the hidden door and they walked into a rather drab room whose most prominent features were a single large table and an adjustable overhead light.

    "This is where we process our merchandise," Choi said in passing, as if still conducting a tour. They crossed the room and opened another door, closing it behind them as they had the first. The foursome now stood in an alley behind the club, a set of garbage cans off to the side. Twilight had come and gone whilst they were inside Dreamland, and the alley was plunged into shadows. Switch looked around, none too sure of what direction to go in.

    "Go that way and take a left," Choi pointed out. "You'll come out on the street, but on the other side of the building block with the entrance."

    "Thanks," Switch said. She and Apoc started jogging off, when they noticed that Choi and DuJour weren't following. "Aren't you coming?" she asked suspiciously.

    "No. I'm just going to wait out the raid back here. With Gibbons gone, I want to be in a prime position to take over the club once the feds leave."

    Switch shrugged, then turned around and ran back down the alleyway. They took the turn, and eventually emerged from the shadows into a street lit by a few malfunctioning lamps. Still, even a cursory glance showed that they were alone on the street. She could hear sirens a short distance away, and could even see red and blue flashed from squad cars on the walls of the taller buildings of the block they'd just left.

    The ringing of the phone startled them both. In all the excitement, they had never had the chance to answer the previous call.

    "Hello?"

    "Finally! What took you so long?"

    "We got… distracted."

    "Well, we've got the right frequency to pull you out, so head towards an exit. The nearest one is an apartment building on the other side of a viaduct. Sixth floor, around the back. You see it?"

    "I got it. See you soon."

    Switch pointed out their destination to Apoc. Jogging through the night air, Switch suddenly wished that her outfit was a little less visible against the shadows. As if the thought had jinxed them, the night air was shattered by the sounds of gunfire in their direction. Switch glanced over her shoulder even as she broke into a full-fledge marathon towards the apartment building. There was a single shadowy figure coming towards them from several buildings down, firing as he ran.

    "Agent," Switch cursed.

    "Only one," Apoc pointed out as they neared the apartment building.

    "Lucky us," Switch answered with little breath and even less enthusiasm.

    "Not the door," Apoc said, grabbing Switch and keeping up the pace as they passed the glass panes of the building's reception area. "Too many people in there to take over. We'll go around back."

    Switch acknowledged, following Apoc as they spun around the brick corner of the apartment building. A chip of brick and mortar flew across her face as the Agent kept up the barrage. Come morning, the residents of this street would wake up to find several bullet holes dotting their buildings. As to whether they would care, considering how close this neighbourhood was too a seedy joint like Dreamland, was another question altogether.

    Switch and Apoc quickly rounded the building and reached the back of the edifice. There was barely two meters of space between the apartment building and it's rear neighbour, just enough space for a rickety fire escape that snaked it's way up the brick wall, embracing windows at every floor.

    Not wasting any time examining their claustrophobic surroundings, Switch and Apoc began climbing up the staircase. They'd barely taken a few steps on the aging metal that it began rattling wildly, shifting from side to side as their feet clambered up the porous stairs. Obviously the fire escape had been in sore need off repair for quite some time now, and the way it shook made Switch think that it was ready to break off from under them, but they needed to get up to the sixth floor and didn't exactly have much choice in the matter.

    By the time they were halfway up they began feeling another force bearing down on the fire escaping, this one going up much faster and with greater force judging by the frequency and intensity. The stairway jangled even more as they went further up and Switch began to wonder whether the fire escape was even attached to the building or just sort of leaning against it.

    When they finally reached the sixth floor, Apoc made short work of the window leading into the apartment. At the same time, Switch heard the sound of gunfire and saw the bright yellow flash of bullets deflecting off the metal staircase. The Agent was shooting at them but couldn't get a clear line of sight thanks to the fire escape's railing.

    As Apoc swung into the window, Switch gave a Matrix-enhanced kick at the first few stairs leading up to the seventh floor, punching through the corroded metal easily and sending that piece of the fire swinging into the open as it became disconnected from the rest of the structure. She then grabbed the railing where it connected with the wall of the apartment building on both sides of the window and pushed off of them without releasing her grip, throwing herself into the window and ripping out the fire escape's support in the same gesture. Severed from both the structure above and its supporting rails, the portion of the fire escape where they'd just been standing collapsed downwards, dragging the rest of the structure below it down with it.

    Switch smiled, looking down from the window, but the smile quickly vanished as she saw a figure leap from the falling structure and onto – or rather into – the opposite wall. The Agent drove his hands and feet into the brick, securing himself against the wall, then looked back at Switch. Less than a second later the Agent pushed himself off of the wall, flipped a hundred and eighty degrees in mid-air in the two meters separating the two apartment buildings, and lodged himself firmly into the wall. He looked up again, and then began climbing the wall towards Switch, punching holes in the brick with his hands and feet.

    Switch was momentarily stunned by this display of acrobatics, but had enough presence of mind to bring her gun to bear on her climbing opponent. Lodged in the wall as he was, there was no way for him to dodge. Switch was rewarded with an annoyed twitch of realization on the Agent's face a minute before she put a bullet into his forehead. If still alive, the Agent nonetheless lost his grip and fell down into the metallic mass of the fallen fire escape.

    In the meantime, Apoc had taken care of the apartment's inhabitant and found their exit. The phone was already ringing. Apoc picked it up, and disappeared in a burst of static. Switch waited nervously for it to begin ringing again, gun in hand. Finally, it trilled at her, and she picked up the handset.

    The world fuzzed and fizzled, zooming in towards her until she could see the pieces of code that made up the Matrix. She went beyond the glowing green symbols, into a total blackness. This situation was quickly remedied by opening her eyes to the grey but familiar sight of the Neb's Core. Next to her, Tank was helping Apoc up.

    "Morpheus got out alright?" she asked as Tank undid the plug.

    "He did. And now that you're out, will be able to get rid of these Sentinels that have been hounding us. Dozer!" he called up. "They're out!"

    Up in the cockpit, Dozer was much to tense to breathe any sight of relief, but Cypher, sitting next to him, did. For the past few minutes since they'd left the false world, the Nebuchadnezzar had been pursued by a threesome of angry looking Sentinels. Dozer had once again had to evade the Sentinels as they flew through the tunnels, but the machines were relentless, always driving them forwards.

    "It's about time," Cypher said. He pointed to the rapidly changing tunnel system outside. "All this weaving and dodging was beginning to give me a really creepy feeling of déjà–"

    "Please, don't say it," Trinity implored.

    "We've had enough of that for one day," Morpheus concurred. "Cypher, go back and help Tank with the shut-down. We're going to have to time this perfectly. Dozer, think you can find us somewhere to set down?"

    "I can try."

    It was another few seconds of racing through the underground tunnels before Dozer finally spotted a likely side tunnel at the end of a concrete cupola. As he slowed into the side tunnel, the Sentinels began catching up with the Neb fast.

    "Get ready back there," Morpheus called.

    He flipped open the glass casing of the E.M.P. Dozer pulled the hovership into the side tunnel and cut the engines.

    "Now, Tank!"

    In the Core, Tank had already turned off all of the ship's systems. With that call he flipped the final switch, the one that controlled the Neb's hover systems. When Morpheus felt the Neb rock as it hit the ground, he pressed down on the E.M.P. Instantly the air seemed to become liquid as the pulse rippled outwards of the Core. It swept past the darkened ship and slammed into the onrushing Sentinels. Two of them dropped dead as soon as the wave hit them, but the lead one kept on going thanks to its momentum. It smashed into the wall next to the side tunnel, crunching its metallic body like the metaphorical fly in the windshield. Something inside ignited and the crushed Sentinel went up in a ball of fire, briefly lighting up the otherwise dark cockpit.

    This time everybody breathed a sigh of relief. Feeling very tired all of a sudden, the three people in the cockpit made their way back to the Core, sliding down the ladder to join up with the rest of the Neb crew.

    "I think I might have been able to secure a safe-house for us in the Matrix," Switch said. "I'd have to check up on it, but if all goes well we'll be able to use it as a contact point."

    Morpheus nodded. "We'll look into it at a later time. For now, it's great to all be back together again."

    "Yeah. We almost thought we'd lost you guys for a while there," Tank said.

    "As soon as we get the systems back on line, we'll have to get down to broadcasting depth and tell Zion about this new trap. Send them the right frequency. But it's only going to be a matter of time before the Machines figure out that we've gotten around their trap and switch again. I'm not sure what Zion will do then."

    "They won't have to do anything," Mouse piped up. "While in was in that pod, I set up a tracker bug on one of the cables they use to communicate. It's monitoring the frequency that the pods are using, and if the carrier waves get changed then it will send out a transmission to the nearest resistance ship advising them of the change. So the Machines won't be able to pull another one of these select frequency stunts on us again."

    "What if the Machines ever get the idea to use a different frequency for pods going in than for anything going out?" Trinity asked.

    Mouse shrugged.

    "We'll just have to hope it never occurs to them that we're monitoring pod frequencies," Morpheus said. "Or maybe they'll just give up on the whole idea considering that we've beaten both of their previous attempts."

    "Something still bothers me, though," Trinity said. "The place where we were, the false-Neb, almost everything worked like it did in the real version except for the E.M.P. Why would they build a trap for us but then go on to include all those functions?"

    "I'm not sure," Morpheus said. "Maybe it had another purpose that we weren't aware of."

    "Oh, who cares?" Cypher whined. "Can't we deal with that later? Because right now, all I want to do is get some sleep."

    "After the day we've had, I think we can all do with some sleep," Morpheus agreed. "But we still need a few people to get down to broadcast depth and monitor for Sentinels. Volunteers?"

    Apoc and Tank raised their hands.

    "Good. You know what to do. Wake us up at the beginning of the next shift."

    As the two remaining volunteers moved to take their station, the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar walked off towards their bunks to get some well-deserved rest.