This was hell.
How had it come to this, anyway? How had she gone from her happy, eccentric little life, one of motorcycles and academics, of Ned's banter and her own limitless curiosity, to..... this?
Hell. She was in hell.
This pathetic excuse for food, like boiled spooge, the constant subliminal hum of the Ma'ats engines, the walls....
God. The walls. They were lovely enough, but to live in them... The slightly curving surfaces had been welcoming at first, like the embrace of the womb, but after a while, the golden metallic glow had become... Entrapping? Clinging, maybe that was the right word. They didn't quite seem solid, with no hard straight lines to distinguish one object from another. She wanted to break out. It seemed like she had reverted, devolved, instead of being 'reborn.'
And the silence.
Her mind was so quiet now. Deathly quiet. Nothing seemed to move in there, except her own bewildered, half-formed thoughts. Without Ned, there was nothing. Without Lawrence sharing space in her mind, how could she be Eyes-of-Lawrence?
She sighed, flopping back on her dusty cot. The bunker would have been a cell, if it weren't for the wall etchings. In the Noveau-Egyptian movement that the Ma'at had been created in, she thanked whatever God there was that they had included this. It was upraised lines, like some streamlined Braille, of a winged Isis protecting Osiris. Beautiful, really, infused with some sweet forgotten promise that called in the murky depths of her subconscious.
Long, delicate fingers laced behind her head, the stubble having gone from prickly to fuzzy. It was still odd, and more painful than she would have thought, not to have her long hair anymore. Still, this was at least manageable, and it was alright, really. The odd sort of peach-fuzz covering had seemed... sleek, somehow. It was little matter, though, in the whole scheme of things.
God. The world. The whole goddamned world. Like that. Civilization, wiped out. And reduced to this. To snotlike food and cramped ships. To desperate fighting, single-minded survival, with no range, no vision, no hope... She shuddered. Maybe it was better than enslavement. She didn't know... But those lines of green code shone in her dreams, straight and hard and tangible, so unlike these soft walls...
Time seemed to hang like Jell-O here, some parts solid and real, mandarin oranges and peeled grapes suspended in the ephemeral, measureless slog. She couldn't tell how long she'd been here. True, the crew was nice enough, Typhus wily and wise, Thread just wily, and Caliban and Ariel... She smiled. Those two were as different as day and night, Caliban with his booming bass voice and bear-like good humor, everyone's big brother, and Ariel, knife-slim, graceful as death, all smirk and wit. And sometimes, late at night, when they played for the rest of the crew in the tiny mess chamber (for it could not truly be called a hall,) Marie remembered why humanity was worth fighting for, with their sweet earthy music washing away the stiff hum and seductive lines of the ship. The rhythm seemed to suggest that the world was worth fighting for, yes, but it was also fine, as fine as silk and wine and the smoke-and-sweat-stained tribal dances of long, long ago. That was the kind of magic Caliban and Ariel wove. The passion for life, and the soft-spoken determination to save it, at all costs...
And Shakespeare. Shakespeare, too tall and rail-thin, like a praying mantis in a blown-glass cage. The man was eternally silent, hair hanging like chunks of chestnut silk in hazel-green eyes deep like the night sky was deep, deep like the code that haunted her dreams, the ones where she could hear Ned's voice echoing back, warped by the digital translation.... Shakespeare had been the one to comfort her, to calm her madness after she had been rebuilt, and woke to find Ned gone. It was Shakespeare that had remembered the stories, the plays, the sonnets, the poems, that she had made half a living strapping down and picking apart, Shakespeare that had shown her their spirit and made it tremble in her hands like a newborn chick. He had brought her to his bunker, once, to show her the sketches that had lined the walls, sketches of a weary woman on a park bench in the Matrix smiling at her child chasing pigeons, sketches of the cold, elegant structure of the buildings, broken by one small, defiant balloon floating up through the air, sketches of the crew, the angle of someone's jaw as they smiled, head tilted downward... Shakespeare could still find the beauty in this place, could recognize the cold beauty in the Matrix, just as she could. But, as he had written on a battered legal pad, in his fine copperplate, this was home now. This was where they belonged. It was all here, and it could be built back up again...
It gave Marie something to think about, but somehow, it seemed... False. Marie. She had to remember, she was Aether now. She'd explained to Typhus about that, and she'd agreed that it was probably better that way. Shakespeare thought that it was a good name, something about air and heaven and poets and the upper reaches... Almost too trippy for Mar- Aether.
And, after the first few weeks, which were still hazy in her mind, clouded from the delirium she'd undergone at being ripped from Lawrence's presence, Morpheus and his crew had come around less and less. They kept close, yes, and in contact, but she could have used seeing some different faces. Maybe Neo could explain to her what this crap about being a Catalyst was, seeing as how he was the One or whatever... Typhus had been unusually cryptic on the subject.
She popped her back, squirming a bit on the cot to do so. Her eyes focused absently on the Egyptian motif, brow furrowed. It wasn't making any sense, this Catalyst bit. She was pathetic in the Construct, and training programs they tried to load failed more often than not. It seemed like her brain just wasn't wired correctly for it. Still, enough had took for her to do a combat sim or two with some of the other crew members. Not that it was always a success... Weird coincidences always seemed to trip her opponents up, like the mat slipping upward and catching a foot, or a bit of ill-placed moisture, or a sudden cramp. Always something. It got to the point that no one really wanted to fight her, and she was vaguely worried that she wouldn't get the proper training.
But only vaguely. None of this seemed real, somehow. She was halfway expecting to wake up and find it was some crack-induced dream, that some sick joker had put drugs in her drink. She'd wake up on her couch, panting, with the Indian blanket draped over her, sweat-soaked, and laugh at her own stupidity, relieved...
It never happened.
She was still stuck in this hellish place, the curved walls, the slop, the hum... And there was no way out. She shut her eyes tightly, blowing out a sigh. Maybe she'd actually try to sleep tonight...
Thread pounded on the hatch with a noise like cymbals in the still semi-dark. "Wakey, wakey! Rise an' shine, Aether!"
Marie- no, Aether. Aether, now. Groaned, heaving herself forward. Just another day in paradise...