+J.M.J.+
"Sounds of Silence"
By "Matrix Refugee"
Author's note:
I always used to get an eerie, otherworldly, ontologically questioning feeling (i.e. "What is real?") whenever I heard Simon and Garfunkel's classic song "Sounds of Silence". Yet, since I "became" the Matrix Refugee, the song took on a whole other meaning for me. Rated PG for adult themes and general eeriness. This, like the song, is a very rhapsodic and lyrical piece, and it tends to be introverted (Neo's POV) so bear with it.
Disclaimer:
I do not "own" The Matrix, its characters, concepts, imagery or other indicia, which are the legal property of the Brothers W (Warner and Wachowski), Village Roadshow, Joel Silver Pictures, Redpill Productions, et al; the only characters that are mine are Jack, Ref, and Zara. Nor do I own the song "Sounds of Silence", which belongs to Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel.
Dedicated to my mother, who introduced me to this song, and who knows how deafening the sounds of silence can be…
"Hello, darkness, my old friend,
I've come to talk with you again…"
Most times, Neo jacked in only for a mission. Too many risks lay in wait. But once in a while, when Morpheus was off shift taking a few moments of rest, Neo went in alone, just to walk the streets he once knew. This put him at risk of reattaching to the false world once again, but his superior knowledge helped him ward off the worst longings that attacked.
But at times he needed to go in and stare this virtual beast in the face, to stare into this virtual abyss until it stared back, yielding up its secrets. Even a novice could know these barely deserved the label "secrets", but it took an adept to see the Matrix as it was. The lies unmasked themselves. The signals broke down into vibrating bits of code, green phosphors reflecting off the backs of his retinas.
"Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping…"
Nostalgia drew him in, but once he got in, the reminiscence vanished, confronted by the harsh truth. What mesmerized his memory repulsed his intellect. Despite the gnosis granted him after his brush with death, he remained human, a mere man. For that matter, he had only started to live as a man. And, despite the weaknesses that lingered in his nature, the gnosis let him see things as they really were, only so many binary 1s and 0s and code flowing through the circuits of this obscene structure of lies. Sometimes, real world side, he caught himself bracing his perception for the moment when things shivered and dissolved into that cascading code. This quirk of his unsettled people in Zion who didn't know him well, those who knew him only as "the One". But those who knew him well—Morpheus, Tank, and especially Trinity—understood why this happened and took no notice. They knew what he'd gone through.
"And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains, within the sounds of silence."
He couldn't pride himself for the gnosis. The Oracle had given him some of the answers even as she screwed up his head. So had Saki, the kid with the spoons who he'd met in her apartment. And, at his lowest moment, when the Matrix almost consumed him, Trinity had given him the impetus to fight it and get back on his feet.
But despite all the gifts, the talents, the gnosis, he remained an ordinary man. The more he changed, the more he remained the same. The only real difference between Thomas A. Anderson, the coppertop and Neo, "the One" was this knowledge, this grasp of the truth, the freedom that his knowledge brought. Social gatherings in Zion left him as fumbling and awkward as he had been in his old life. The Zion Council and the trainers at the Academy found him at once an object of awe and a paradox. Despite his new abilities, he maintained as low a profile as he had in his old life…if you could call it a life. Sometimes he felt more comfortable fighting the Matrix than working in Zion, just as he had been more adept with computers than with small talk.
"In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone…"But he refocused on the present. One thing he had learned about the Matrix: you had to keep your focus all the times when you jacked in. If you lost focus for too long, you rendered yourself a sitting duck for any predators that might manifest. Since his enlightening, he'd developed a knack for spotting Agents disguised as ordinary coppertops. They'd started doing that a lot lately.
He walked along a side street through his old neighborhood—if you could call it that. Windows glowed in the apartment buildings around him. Shadows moved against lowered shades. Here and there, a computer screen showed in an unshaded window. Light from television screens flickered in some windows. His awareness translated these into dense batches of code. Of course. The code always thickened around anything intended to subdue the coppertops. The only thing with denser code than a television was an Agent.
"Beneath the halo of the E Street lampI turned my collar to the cold and damp…"
He stopped on the street corner, under the streetlight. Some Rebels in training tended to make the mistake of sticking to the shadows, but the enemy expected this kind of behavior. He'd discovered that the best way to throw off an Agent was to do something they didn't expect.
A thin drizzle had started to fall. Its chill worked its way into his awareness. He turned the collar of his black trench coat up to keep the worst off his neck. If doing something unexpected baffled an Agent, doing something ordinary was the best way to keep the coppertops form getting too suspicious. He'd heard of Rebels who had given themselves away by doing something odd at the wrong time. One of the new crewmembers aboard the Neb, Zara, their tech, had an unfortunate tendency toward "showing off" whenever she jacked in—things like wearing a halter top and short-short shorts in the dead of winter—which had cost them some trouble more than once.
But to show that justice still existed, they had another crewmember, Ref, who at first glance seemed so awkward that she seemed out of place in the real world and in the Matrix. Zara despised her, but Neo quietly respected Ref: he understood her predicament. He'd bungled just as badly as she had. Ref's worst blunders limited themselves to reality-side meltdowns after especially rough missions, but at lest she was adept enough to keep her emotions in check until she jacked out.
"When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night and touched the sound of silence."
Something caught his awareness. He gazed around him. The scene dissolved into the code. He spotted a density of code approaching him. Three densities.
They always came in threes.
He stepped into the shadows of an alleyway and ran up a wall to the roof of the nearest building, out of their way. It bought him some time, if nothing else. The world congealed around him for a moment.
The heavy brightness in the code passed by his locus like a squiddie passing by a hiding ship. For the moment, they had missed him, some thing They did not normally do. Somehow They probably could not do this, knowing how code-hose-code the Matrix was.
"And in the naked light I saw
10,000 people, maybe more…"
He gazed out over the city from his vantage point. The city lights gave way to the light of the code. He watched the pale knots of light that formed the external appearance of the human dweller behind that locus: people walking the streets, people at work even at that late hour, people in restaurants and theatres and bars, people driving, people at home watching TV or surfing the 'Net—that mini-Matrix within the Matrix…Hundreds of people, thousands of people, even millions of people rose to his awareness, as if for a moment the Higher Power had given him some omniscience so he could see all people everywhere in the world.
"People talking without speaking,
People hearing without listening…"
He watched them going about their movements, barely focusing on what they were doing, barely aware of the person or persons next to them, working without counting the time until fatigue and stress overcame them, eating without noticing what they ate or how much they had consumed; people entertaining themselves though their spirits had grown too jaded to let them really enjoy it; people embracing each other though they barely knew or cared much for the person they embraced; people dancing though their hearts and their limbs barely responded to the rhythms of the music; people laughing though they had little reason to laugh or to cry.
"People writing songs that voices never shared.
No one dared disturb the sound of silence."
He knew why. To his eyes, to his awareness, and through the gnosis granted to it, the veil of code between him and reality all but tore back, exposing the real reality lurking behind it. The tall buildings around him seemed to expand and heave up toward a boiling, blackened sky. The frantic humans froze into place and shriveled with passivity.
The world buckled and it seemed he stood for an instant in the midst of a forest of power plants, gazing at humanity frozen into brain dead submissiveness, each human lying in narcosis, each in their separate isolation pod, eyes seeing the dazzling virtual reality of the code, yet blind to the darkness outside; ears listening to the sounds fed to them by the artificial intelligence in control, but stoppered with cables; mouth chattering away, yet plugged with a muzzle of electrodes and tubes; brain numbed into believing it thought and created, yet dumbly mouthing the information fed through the coaxial cable plugged into the base of the passive battery's skull.
He tried not to dwell too long on this vision, letting it fade. Thinking too much about the grim reality was just as bad as not believing it at all. The latter produced apathy and lassitude, the machine's greatest ally, yet the former led to fear and terror which clouded the awareness and jammed the flow of judgment, rendering the hapless unable to react.
"Fools, said I, you do not know
Silence like a cancered rose…"
He couldn't mock at them or sneer at them the way Zara did. You might as well fault a second grader for not knowing integral calculus. But he pitied them: too many of them would never see "the darkness that is light, the pain that is delight," as Ref called the real world. And he too had been just as blind as they. He had been one of them; he still bore the marks. He still had the metal jacks in his arms and the back of his head, which he would carry till this war ended; a line of scars ran down his back where Morpheus and Dozer had removed the spine jacks, scars he would carry to his resting place. These people could know what he knew, could receive some of the gnosis granted to him, if they chose to seek out the means of escaping and open their minds to the truth, as frightful as it was.
But he realized, with a sigh, that many of these people would prefer the sham comfort of the Matrix over the harsh realm of the real world. Hothouse flowers cannot transplant to a frosty slope facing the north wind. Even if they had the truth proffered to them, would these people take it?
He pitied their ignorance, their riotous delight in an empty shell of lies. Rather than take the more nourishing—if less appetizing—food of the truth, they unwittingly chose to glut themselves on the empty calories of the illusion.
And the AIs that masterminded these lies played on this like a synthesizer. They prepared the system that bound the humans. They powered the machines that kept the humans enslaved; they devised the fusion that utilized the energy produced by a living human body. They designed and ordered the construction of the power plants. They planted the biomechanoid stalks on which they farmed the next crop of human batteries. They controlled the machines that tended the fetuses, giving these underlings an inbuilt prejudice toward the stronger, "more human" fetuses that could produce more energy for a longer time.
Much as Neo hated the AIs, he pitied them too, locked into a mutual parasite state with their enslaved power sources, the descendants of the people who had discovered machine intelligence in the first place.
"Hear my words that I might teach you,
Take my arms that I might reach you…"
He spread out his arms, wishing he might somehow spare every man, woman, and child enshadowed and give them the truth. Many commanders on other ships showed less scruples in releasing the Matrix-bound than Morpheus had. Some resorted to virtual kidnapping, dropping the red pill into an unsuspecting coppertop's coffee or what not. Ref had done this kind of work, and it bugged her that she had: most of the people unplugged this way had suffered horribly in the real world. A few had gone mad; several had suicided because they could no longer handle the discomfort of reality. Cypher had been one of these and he had betrayed them in order to get back inside the Matrix. Morpheus had drawn some criticism from these other commanders for his methods, but the Zion council had adopted them. At least it gave you a chance to brace yourself for the shocks to come, not that anything Matrix-side could prepare you for what lay beyond in the real world.
"But my words like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence."
But he knew, even if he could tell the whole world the truth, not everyone would listen or believe it. Even if he could bypass the watchdogs inside the Matrix, the gatekeepers, the Agents, not every man woman and child would accept the truth, most would shake their heads in disbelief and turn away to go on dreaming. When the rebels won this war, when they hosed the AIs controlling the bulk of humanity and they tore down the power plants and cleansed the sky, most of humanity would go down with its masters. The Oracle had sadly told this to Morpheus and a few other commanders; Ref, who had some of the Oracle's gift of foresight, had had dreams in which she saw two thirds of the human race wiped out because they would not listen.
Neo realized that the damp on his face didn't come merely from the rain. He shook his head to clear it and refocus.
"And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made…"
He descended into the midst of the unsuspecting, down to the pavement, down to their level, the skirts of his coat spread like wings as he dropped into the alleyway. He righted himself and strode out of shadows into the half-light, mingling with the crowds that thronged the pulsing streets. Car radios thudded, music blared from the open doors of dance clubs. He walked the streets not hearing these sounds, hearing only the speckling sounds of the code, the constant metallic hum of the circuits, the deep-pitched roar that had washed through his ears that first day, that first moment the had awakened and broken free…
He walked among them, not seeking to be noticed, though few took note of him, or if they did, they made no sign. Nor did he seek to stand out. THEY would sense something if he did. They would anyway. If he registered in the awareness of any coppertops, they would only see a tall, dark, good-looking young man dressed entirely in black, his pale face anonymous behind his sunglasses. They couldn't see the angry tears he hid behind the dark lenses.
He hated the Matrix. He hated mankind's folly that had led it to become enslaved by its very creation, the Frankenstein monster written large, consuming its creator without destroying it. he hated his own foolishness, be he thanked God or Whatever lay beyond the even horizon that had mercifully kept the universe functioning, yet in a mysterious providence let man make his own mistakes even when these mistakes led man as far away from its own humanity as a man can get.
He hoped, somehow, these people could find and embrace the truth before the last hour. He hoped that somehow their souls could escape the service of the silicon demons, the virtual Moloch that demanded his daily sacrifice of their energy and their dignity.
Was the Matrix Moloch or was it some other god just as hideous? Ref and Trinity, who both had some understanding of mythology, once discussed the nature of the beast that was their quarry and their hunter while they were in the galley washing dishes.
"You have to remember the word matrix is feminine," Ref said.
"In what language…Latin?" Trinity asked.
"Yeah, it originally meant 'womb', or, 'an animal kept for breeding'."
"That makes sense if you think about it: those pods look an awful lot like uteruses, and the machines are breeding humans for fuel."
At that point, Trinity's "uncle" Jack—at least he had been her uncle before they both had been unplugged—stuck his too-thin face, darker than usual from the grease that spattered it, around the galley door, where he had been listening.
"So if that's the case, then the Matrix is some kind of cybernetic bitch run amok," Jack said.
Ref rolled her eyes and turned back to washing the dishes; Trinity hid a smile behind her hand. Regaining her composure, she added, "That leads to another question: do the AIs have any gender?"
"Probably not," Ref said. "THEY are pure intellect, so THEY have no flesh and blood bodies, and therefore no gender."
"Okay," Trinity said, starting a counterstroke. If THEY have no gender, who do all the Agents look like guys?"
"Probably because guys are more authoritarian than most women," Ref said.
"Oh, there's female Agents, too," Jack threw in, wary-eyed. "I spotted one on the peripheral last time I jacked in. Y' better warn Neo about 'em, Trin, in case one tries to jump him and run circles around him with a hootchie-cootchie dance. I'd rather deal with the standard issue guys in FBI rig any day."
"Thanks for the heads up," Neo had cut in, coming out from his hiding place. Jack glared up at him cross-eyed, but he smiled. Despite his small stature and less than imposing persona, Jack doubled as their Matrix-side bodyguard and driver; he always pretended to disapprove of Neo's stature in the resistance, but Neo knew the older man looked up to him—in more than just one way.
But his mind digressed. If the Matrix was a goddess, it wouldn't be a pleasant one, probably the Hindu Kali or Lilith of the Jewish legends, out to destroy mankind, the voluptuous goddess who seduced you only to suck the life from you.
"And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming…"
He scanned the crowd as he headed for an exit. Rebels on other ships had reported heightened numbers of Agents jumping them at the last minute near an exit; he wasn't taking any chances. The neon lights on the buildings flashed off dozens of faces rushing past him. He watched for any incongruities.
He spotted something.
A busty blonde in a tight red dress, oddly resembling the woman in red in the Agent training program he'd undergone in his early days. She walked past him, pretending not to notice him. But as she passed out of his sight range, her big brown eyes swerved in his direction.
His awareness kicked into high gear. He scanned the code, watching for the inevitable trio of clusters.
They came toward him from a side street. He quickened his pace without running. He wound his awareness around space, pulling himself closer to the exit as he got closer to it. This would cause a weird fold in space which others outside him could see, but he knew some of the crowd was too drunk or high to notice, and the sober ones were too preoccupied.
He hotfooted to the exit, a payphone behind an Asian convenience store, and ducked into it. He dialed the number and waited.
It picked up. "Welcome to Movie-Phone," Jack boomed.
The skin-prickle of jacking out passed over his body. At the same moment, he heard a shot from somewhere nearby. A bullet plocked into the fiberglass window beside him…
"And the sign said the words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls and tenement halls
And whispered in the sounds of silence."
"Got you out in time," he heard Jack saying as the older man removed the cable from the back of his head. Neo sat up and let Jack help him to stand.
"Yeah, they were right on my heels," Neo said.
"Not just that: the boss was about to come on shift," Jack said walking him down the corridor to the crew quarters. "You got an early shift yourself, so you go get some shut-eye and, eh, anything else." Jack winked at him with a lusty grin.
At the door to the cabin Neo shared with his life partner, Jack called out, "Hey, Mrs. Anderson, yer wayward spouse is back from flirting with the other woman!" Before Neo could reach back to bop Jack on the arm, the smaller guy had scampered away, cackling mischievously.
"You went in alone again," Trinity said, a concerned edge to her tone, as she led him inside their cabin. "You know the risks."
"I know them, I just had to do some thinking, alone."
"Just don't go in there without me, next time. I want to go with you if anything happens."
"Might not be a bad idea, you can help me chase off all the beautiful women the Agents have been throwing at my head."
"What beautiful women?" she asked.
"Remember Jack talking about the female Agent he spotted? I saw her myself."
"Uh oh! I don't like the sound of that."
"I didn't like seeing her. She had company."
"I'll bet she did."
He slid his arms around her, reassuring himself she was real and letting her know she was the only woman in his life.