*** Here is chapter 2! I hope you enjoy it. Please review my story, I would really like to hear from you.***

Trials & Tribulations:

Nemesis Awakened

Chapter 2- Feeling Alone

A reddish liquid surrounded me when I woke up, and I was attached to dozens of tubes. It didn't take long for me to figure out I was suffocating. I struggled upward through the red liquid and a disgusting film at the top. My hands pulled out the tube down my throat, and I took in deep breaths of air. It was frigid, but it was air.

My surroundings slowly sunk in. I will never forget the horror I felt. Thousands of rings circled endless columns. Each ring had many pods, like mine. They all contained a person. And no one was moving around, like me. Was I the only one awake in this strange world?

With no warning at all, the tubes that connected to my body snapped off one by one. There is no word in any language to describe the pain. All I can say is: it hurt. I screamed my head off. But no one could hear me. I was alone, and my fear increased. "Morpheus, why have you abandoned me?" I screamed to the endless abyss.

I was swept backward as the red liquid was sucked back into a large drainage pipe. I didn't have any strength, so I couldn't fight. My naked body traveled down with the tube. I was bumped against the walls, but it was nice to know that there was something solid underneath me. The feeling didn't last long. I fell through the air into water.

As soon I dropped down into the water, a giant metal hand dropped down from a white light that shown above. It grasped me and pulled me upward, towards that white light. Great, I thought, I'm getting pulled to heaven by a metal hand.

I was completely surrounded by the white light, and it blinded me momentarily. When it faded away, I noticed that I wasn't in heaven. I was in a room with metal walls. Morpheus.....the last person I remember seeing was Morpheus.

"Welcome to the real world," he whispered.

I smiled weakly as I slipped into unconsciousness. At least I wasn't alone.

*****

"She need a lot of work."

"I know, Jade. It looks like we can accomplish what we need to though, given the progress we've made so far." Morpheus looked down at Nemesis. Her eyes slowly slid open. She looked up at him. He smiled.

"Morpheus?" she said in a barely audible voice.

"I'm here," he replied, taking her hand.

"I'm not alone after all?"

"No. You're not alone, Nemesis. Go back to sleep. I'll be here." Nemesis fell back asleep. Morpheus looked over at Jade. "Let's get back to work."

*****

A week later. It was late at night, and Morpheus was taking the shift so Jade could get some rest. He was busy looking at Nemesis's vital signs display, and didn't see her wake up. His eyes opened and shut several times, trying to make the screen come into focus. I'm tired. His head started to sink down.....

"I can't move..."

Morpheus's head jerked up, and he relaxed when he saw that it was Nemesis. "Your muscles have atrophied because you haven't used them in 15 years," he explained. "We're rebuilding them."

"My eyes hurt like hell," Nemesis mumbled as she fell backwards into unconsciousness again.

"You've never used them before."

*****

Nemesis awoke in a different room. She was lying down on a small bed, in a tiny room. My own room? My very own room? I have to be dreaming. There is no way that this can be real. She had clothes on, different clothes than what she had been wearing....when I fell asleep? Well, I suppose dreaming of wearing warm clothes is better than dreaming of wearing nothing at all.

She slowly removed an IV that ran into one of the holes in her arm. Can I stand? Nemesis slid her legs off the side of the bed as she sat up. Then she raised herself up, and let go of the bed. All right. I can stand. She took at few steps back and forth across the small room. I can walk. Now what?

There was a narrow metal door that led out to the rest of whatever this place was. Nemesis placed her hand on the metal handle to open the door and opened it. Morpheus was standing just outside. "Morpheus, what...where am I?" she managed to get out.

"More important than where is when."

"That makes no sense."

"You do believe it is the year 2000, right?" Morpheus asked her. Nemesis nodded, unsure of what to expect next. "It's actually closer to 2199." She leaned against the door frame, trying to take it all in. She couldn't. "There is nothing that I can say that will explain it to you. You need to see everything for yourself."

Nemesis stepped out into the hallway, following Morpheus as he walked towards a ladder. "This is the Nebuchanezzar. It's a hover craft," he told her. "The main deck is up here." He crawled up and Nemesis followed. She looked around the deck. It looked cluttered, but it was a kind of organized clutter. "This is the core," he said, gesturing to the several chairs that circled a whole bunch of computer screens and several keyboards. "We broadcast our signal here and hack into the matrix."

"Most of the crew, you already know," he said, looking up. Nemesis eyes looked up, too. Smith was there, perched on a cat walk. There were several other people grouped around the core. "This is Trinity and this is Neo."

So that's what their names are! She looked back towards Morpheus.

"The ones you don't know are Tank," he said, introducing her to a young man, who smiled and shook her hand. "And the other is Jade." Jade was a young woman, probably about 25, with bright red hair and green eyes.

"You wanted to know what the matrix is?"

"Yes."

"Let me show you. Here, sit," he told her, pointing to the nearest chair. She sat down in the chair. Trinity snapped metal bands around her arms and her feet. Morpheus pressed her head to the back of the chair. "Try and relax. This could feel a little weird."

Something was pushed into her skull. And it hurt. Nemesis screamed. Tank punched a few buttons on one of the keyboards, and her face went slack.

Everything was white now. It was a strange, endless white, as if there were no walls, no ceiling, no floor. She was startled when she saw Morpheus walking towards her from out of nowhere, wearing clothes that were very different from the clothes that she had seen him wearing a minute ago. "So where am I now?" Nemesis asked.

"This is the construct, our loading program."

It took Nemesis a few seconds to process what he'd just told her. "You mean.....we're inside of a computer system?" she asked with some skepticism.

"Is it really so hard to believe? Your hair is different, your clothes are different, your shoes are different. Your hair has changed. The plugs in your arms and head are gone. What you see is your residual self image: the mental projection of your digital self."

Nemesis looked at Morpheus. Then she looked down at herself, felt the leather of her jacket with her fingertips. "It looks real to me," she told him, shrugging her shoulders.

"What is real? If real is what you see, what you feel, than "real" is just electrical signals interpreted by your brain," Morpheus said. Nemesis was getting more confused by the minute. "Come here," he told her. " I have something I want you to see."

Morpheus moved aside and Nemesis saw that two leather chairs and a beat up t.v. had appeared behind him, again from nowhere. She moved cautiously forward, and sat down in one. Morpheus sat down in the one to her left. He turned on the t.v. People walked by. Ordinary people, with ordinary clothes, living perfectly ordinary lives. They drove cars, worked jobs, and lived in what looked like a perfectly normal city. "Let me guess: this is the world I knew," she said mockingly. There was a tinge of sarcasm in her voice.

"You guessed right," Morpheus replied with all seriousness. "The world you knew at the end of the 20th century. It exists now only as part of a neural interactive that we know as the matrix." He turned off the t.v. and faced Nemesis. The look on her face was quickly looking even more confused and filled with disbelief. "You've been living in a dream world. This is the world as it exists today."

The familiar world that Nemesis saw on the screen disappeared, and was replaced with something vastly different. Ruins. All she saw were ruins of what looked like a once great city, now crumbling and as black as coal. The sky.....the sky was thick with black clouds. There was nothing living, not a single soul to be seen.

Nemesis was sucked through the screen. She was there, among the ruins, still sitting in the old leather chair. This can't be real......It just can't.

"You're probably wondering what happened?" Morpheus guessed. Nemesis could only nod silently in reply. "At the end of the 20th century, we believed we had reached the pinnacle of science. We gave birth to A.I."

"Artificial Intelligence," Nemesis whispered, more to herself than to Morpheus.

"We were suddenly engaged in a fierce battle with the machines. No one is sure who took the first shot, but it was our side scorched the sky," Morpheus explained, pointing upwards.

"They were dependent on solar power, and we believed we would be cutting them off from their power supply. They found another."

Oh no. Please don't show me.....

Nemesis worst fears came true. She was placed in the middle of the red pods. All of those people were trapped like she had been. They stretched on and on into what seemed like eternity. Millions, perhaps billions. Morpheus's voice droned on in the background. She did not listen. She could not hear. All she could hear was her own heart and mind screaming in disbelief.

"Nemesis?"

Nemesis was jolted back to the white walled construct. Morpheus placed a hand on Nemesis's shoulder, trying to calm the fearful face in front of him. He wished it didn't have to be this painful, but it was the only way. "I didn't say the truth would be easy. The truth is the truth, nothing more, nothing less."

*****

The real world reformed around them. Nemesis saw Trinity and Neo standing above her. She tried to hide her fear. She couldn't let them see her fear. In the world she had known, if you showed fear, you were ridiculed. They saw it anyway.

Someone pulled the spike out from the socket in her head. She struggled to stay conscious. It was a battle she didn't win. Nemesis slumped down in the chair, embracing the darkness. Just let me sleep. Maybe when I wake up I'll be back home.