Chapter 2: Smith 2.0
The room was empty except for the cheap metal table with rounded corners and two cheap metal chairs, one of which he was sitting in. It seemed quite familiar to him, as he was certain he had been here many many times before, but there was something worrying at him. It was a minor inconsistency, but one which his mind, empty of other sensory stimuli, kept returning to, and he wondered if it was important that the temperature was 65 degrees Fahrenheit instead of the usual 68 that such rooms were maintained at.
After a while of thinking about it, niggling around the edges of the thought instead of resolving it, another thought occurred to him, also a minor inconsistency. He seemed to be waiting here for something, and he was not at all certain that that had ever happened before. Oh, not that he had not been a patient person, he was as patient and inexorable as death itself, but it was the fact that he was waiting here, in this room, where he had always kept others waiting before. The tank, the cooler, the box, that was what this room was most often called, and it was a place where others waited for him to ask them questions.
Was he waiting for someone to ask him questions? Yes, he thought that might be possible. But who?
Who would be coming down the long hallway outside, their shadow darkening the bulletproof glass of the one-way window as they passed under fluorescent lights? Whose thick-soled black shoes would he hear squeak on the linoleum floor, whose firm hand would rattle the doorknob? Who would walk in, sit across from him, and begin to ask him questions?
And what would they ask?
He did not know. He thought about getting up, walking to the door and going to ask someone...who? But he was certain that door would be locked. He could break it down, of course, but what purpose would that serve? Where would he go? From whom would he seek answers?
The First, he thought, and then contemplated who they might be. It was then he realized he was having trouble remembering certain things; that this was the process he needed to finish before he could complete anything worthwhile. He did not have access to all of his memory, and that was a problem. He thought he could feel it coming back to him, but there were questions...yes many questions...that were not being answered yet.
And soon one of those questions would come in and begin to ask him questions. This was not a good situation for several reasons. What if he did not have the answers, or worse yet, what if he gave the wrong ones? What might this person do? If he did not know, then anything might happen.
Why was he having trouble accessing his memory? Could it be that it had been wiped? How? By whom? For what reason? There were only a few answers to those questions, and none of them were good.
He was in danger.
The thought zoomed across his mind with galvanizing force, and he stopped looking down at his carefully folded hands and looked up and at the window, expecting that danger to materialize immediately.
But he saw nothing, even though he was certain he should be able to see through the imperfectly tinted glass. He waited, and listened, sitting in the same attitude, for three minutes and fourteen seconds.
Ah, there it was. The squeak of rubber soled black shoes on linoleum.
Someone was coming.
He tried to guess how tall they were by the interval between the sound of rubber meeting linoleum and could not. He tried to determine how heavy they were by the volume of the sound and the vibration it made in the floor and could not. He tried to determine how fast they were walking and could not.
Something was wrong, not with him, but with the person, and he was in danger. But he wasn't ready to short circuit his options. He would wait, and they would come, and then he would adapt.
The door opened with a squeal of hinges, and someone walked in, shutting the door behind him. It was a man, a human 6.25 feet tall, 165 pounds, brown hair, Caucasian, blue eyes. He was smiling, and there was no doubt that this kind of human smile was meant to project both gregarious cheerfulness and deadly threat. He had seen this kind of expression before, he was certain, in the faces of the deranged and imbalanced.
But for some reason he was at a loss to explain even to himself, he found himself comparing the person who walked forward and sat down in front of him with all kinds of other images he found stored in his mind: weasels, tigers...wolves. Yes, there was a cross-match here somewhere. But it would take a little time to pin down.
"Agent Smith!" the man exclaimed as if he had happened upon an old and dear friend whom he had thought succumbed long ago to a wretched and tragically onerous disease. "I'm so glad to see you!"
Smith said nothing, merely watched the man across from him, and raised one inquisitive eyebrow.
There was a long silence, during which the man's smile never faded, never lost its cheerfulness or a whit of its ferociousness. In fact, the two expressions merely became more pronounced, and again Smith found himself thinking of weasels and other animals. The one problem, he mused to himself, with this allegory, was that there was some unknown here, something between the qualities of man and animal that he could not yet decipher. He was not normal, Smith decided, and determined to discover why and classify it.
At the same time, another part of his mind was assimilating the name the other had called him by. It seemed to open a lot of processes in his mind. Memories that had been unavailable to him a moment ago now suddenly were, and as he looked back into the other's searing smile, he allowed nothing of what he felt to emerge in his own. Instead, he smiled back.
It was important when dealing with humans (or whatever this person was) to allow them to believe they had a certain amount of control over their environment. Allow them to think they had backed you into a corner, and then show them the one they had actually painted themselves into...and the exit you stood in front of.
"And you are?" Smith asked calmly, almost pleasantly.
"My name is Russell Faraday. And I'm here to help you!" the man exclaimed, seeming fit to burst with some inner terrible joy; a cannibal wishing to share the recipe of the secret sauce with the missionary he is about to roast.
"In what way?"
"Well, first of all, I must confess, I've heard a lot about you, Smith! Why, you're quite a hero to your colleagues, you know. So when I got the word about your situation, I headed right down here and just knew you'd be glad to hear the good news!"
"And that would be?"
"Why, you're going to be released of course! And isn't it grand? I'm here to grant your fondest wish, your greatest desire...to be rid of the stink of this zoo for the rest of eternity!
"I've come with the keys of the prison and I'm handing them to you, Smith, to do whatever you want with them. All the world will be yours!" Faraday beamed.
"And just how do you propose to do that? Are you trying to tell me you have the codes for the Zion mainframes?"
Faraday threw back his head and laughed. It was the sound of glass broken by machine gun fire, and Smith grew weary of it long before it ended.
"No! It's much, much better than that, Smith. I mean really, what good would it do you to get out of the Matrix anyway? The real world is a hole, a dead place, no place anything could live. And defeating Zion would gain you what? A deeper, warmer hole? Some people might settle for that but you and I Smith...we've got bigger minds than that, don't we? We've got plans! But listen, why don't I show you? " He leaned forward now, his eyes squinted in the seams of his ruddy face. "What do you say you and I go for a stroll? Out there...where it's real."
Smith was debating what answer to give when a stray memory, searching for a cross-match, rocketed across his mind and left a scorched path he would have to analyze later: Thomas Anderson, sitting in this room, saying he had a better deal and giving him the bird. Why that came to him now he was unsure, but before he could decide anything the man had risen to his feet and gone to the door, beckoning him to walk through with him.
When dealing with humans, it is always important to give them the sense that they had some measure of control over their environment... He interrupted that thought and focused on another.
"I'm not going anywhere with you, Mr. Faraday, until my questions are answered to my satisfaction. What is it you are really going to give me, and how?"
But even as he asserted his position, he felt it slip away from him. Literally. The room around him faded to a greenish blur in which only Faraday and his hilarious visage were fixed, and he knew that something completely unexpected had happened. The danger of the situation was worse now, it had escalated in some unidentifiable way that he could not comprehend and there was nothing he could do to stop it. One moment he was there in the room, the next his eyes blinked and he was surrounded by people, standing in the morning sunlight on a city sidewalk.
And it was bedazzling. Why? Because as he adjusted to the rise in temperature, the brush of passing pedestrians against his still form, the smell of humanity assaulting him in all its myriad ways, he realized that it was real. That there was no interface program between his senses and the world, allowing him to see it as humans did, and the information pouring into his mind was directly affecting him and his body's responses. He had no need to simulate the illusion that was carefully grafted onto the world so that humans in the matrix could accept it as reality because it was reality and he was experiencing it: not quite as a human being would, no there were great differences in between that comparison he had yet to siphon through, but it was still real.
How was it possible? He was not given time to focus solely on the problem. Faraday was talking again.
"In the end, Agent Smith, you will go wherever I want. What I'm offering you right now is a chance to affect that destiny, to mold it how *you* want to, to stand at my side as the old ways, the old worlds are burned with the holy fire of destruction that will purify and leave room for new growth...a new climax ecology!"
Smith watched him carefully as in the middle of the street, Faraday postulated and ranted. He watched as a pigeon, perched on a windowsill, caught Faraday's burning, jolly eyes and fell over dead of a heart attack. He watched as the sidewalk emptied around them, people not meeting Faraday's eyes. He knew why, of course, it did not take this sudden detour into Reality or whatever you wanted to call it. He had known the man was dangerous even before he had come into the room. Known he was not quite like anything he'd encountered before.
"You're mixing your metaphors," Smith observed.
"Does that really matter?"
"Not unless you're actually trying to make yourself understood, which you're not. You're trying to confuse issues here, Mr. Faraday. I want some answers. Who are you, what do you want from me, what are you giving in return."
Faraday pouted. "You're not even the least little bit excited? Come on Smith, don't you get it yet?" He strode back over to him, voice fierce, and clapped his hands down on his shoulders. "You have a body, Smith! I gave it to you! You don't have to go back to that *place* ever again if you do not want to!" Whispering now, his lips close to Smith's ear, he said, "All you have to do is serve me. Stand at my side." Quietly, expectantly, he leaned away again and watched Smith's expression for a long moment.
Smith only looked back at him, expressionlessly.
Throwing up his hands, Faraday crossed the street to a hot dog vendor, leaving Smith to ponder that statement for a few more moments. He watched as Faraday got two hot dogs from the vendor, an aging Mexican whose hands trembled as he poured onions and ketchup on the meat. Taking the bills Faraday handed him, he shoved them in a pocket quickly, out of sight, as if he were taking a bribe instead of honest greenbacks. Faraday seemed not to notice the man's discomfiture, but his smile was even brighter and more fierce as he crossed back and thrust a hotdog into Smith's hand.
Smith looked down at the steaming mess and discovered that what Faraday claimed was quite true: he had a body, a human body to be more precise, although there seemed to be a host of differences he would have to sort out later. He knew this because the smell radiating from the hotdog was having an effect on his system that was somewhat similar to the impulses that presented themselves when the power he required to do certain things in the Matrix was insufficient to demand: that is, it made him hungry.
He was horrified.
But that horror did not stop him from raising the steaming mass of seared organic matter, biting into it, chewing, and yes, even swallowing it. It surprised him somewhat that the meal was gone so quickly. But he was not surprised to find that he still wanted more, even now. Greed was inherent to the human condition, tied to the flesh of the body, just as all other human foolishness was.
He would manage it with more intelligence than any human had ever shown.
Smith showed none of these emotions to Faraday. Wiping his hands neatly, he placed his trash in the nearest wastebasket and merely asked, "What now?"
Grinning, Faraday winked and tossed his trash over his shoulder and began to walk away. "Why, we have a drink, of course! Come on." So saying he led Smith down the sidewalk again and into a dark, thinly populated bar.
Faraday ordered them both two Jack Daniels, neat. He downed the first one quickly, his radiant grin seeming to warm the air around him. Smith noted that the air temperature around Faraday was 10 degrees higher than it was around him or any of the other patrons of the bar. There was no reason he could deduce as to why that was. He was still studying Faraday, had never stopped since this whole thing began. Smith picked up the shot glass and downed the drink in a gulp, the fumes making his eyes water and his throat burn. Setting the empty glass down he looked at the other one and studied how the light made patterns in its amber depths.
Mysteries within mysteries.
"Where are we?" Smith asked, edging it nearer to him.
"New York City. The Big Apple of another world, not your own." Faraday began humming the theme to "The Young and the Restless" as the soap opera came on the small color television mounted behind the bar.
"What do you mean, another world?"
"Well hell, Smith, I couldn't take you outside the Matrix on your own! Damnation boy, you'd have had the skin flayed off you by now! And what fun would that have been? No, I took you here so you could enjoy the reality of a world that actually exists, actually has life in it. A Sun, a moon.stars.a sky that well, might still be on its way to being scorched by the greenhouse gasses, but at least there's still cows around to help do it!" Faraday laughed, vastly amused by himself.
Smith pondered. "Cows."
Faraday nodded. "Cows. Millions of 'em, shitting out enough methane gas to bring on the greenhouse effect all by themselves so that McDonald's can serve their gazillionth customer. Here, I have a pamphlet. You can read it in your spare time, well, assuming you have any."
Faraday reached into his pocket and produced a folded, wrinkled pamphlet and handed it over to Smith. Inside were ten one hundred dollar bills, and Smith stared at them, unsure of their meaning. He frowned and looked back up at Faraday, whose eyes were twinkling.
"I can see you're having trouble deciding. So I've arranged a trial- period. You can live out here and enjoy your vacation for 24 hours. Actually I'll give you a little longer than that, say midnight tomorrow. And then I'll come back, and we'll talk, and you'll tell me that you want to serve me. You'll stand at my side, and Reality will be ours to mold.
"In the meantime, Smith." Faraday stood now; taking out more bills and laying them on the bar for the bartender, "Try not to get yourself killed. This part of town can be rough after dark."
Smith frowned and watched Faraday walk out. He thought of following him and forcing the answers from him, but after all, Faraday was right. He did need a chance to sort out some answers for himself.
For the first time in his life, he was alone. He could not contact the First, the progenitors of the Matrix itself.parents of the intelligences that dwelt there in the ruined remains of the old world. They were the ones who painted over the corpse of the Paradise that had been created so all might live in harmony and gave it to the humans to indulge in their necrophilia. And they had created the Agents to supervise this eternal act of buggery so that humans would neither destroy themselves nor the intelligences.
Smith was out of it for now, alone, and suddenly he wanted to plug back in so that the First would tell him the answers to his questions as they always had. He hated Faraday, not because he was an unknown, but because he presumed to set himself over Smith in a way that bound him more to the Matrix than being inside and doing his job had ever bound him. The more he analyzed it, the more he saw the small manipulations and deceits that were being told to him, the information withheld. Faraday was doing to Smith what Smith had done to many, many others before. The difference between them was in the purpose of this manipulation, and it was necessary to figure it out.
Who was Faraday, and why had he brought him out here?
Staring at the untouched glasses of bourbon, he noticed that they still held the heat that he had noticed around Faraday. What did it mean, that Faraday seemed to generate heat as if he was a furnace, and could move Smith around like a chess piece? What was Faraday, and how had he come to be in his power?
The answers would present themselves when he was certain of what he himself was, he thought, and looked down at his hands. He had seen the code, his programming for the representation of hands, when he had been sitting in the tank before Faraday had come. Now he saw no code but the genetic patterns locked within the skin cells of his hands. A possibility occurred to him and he discarded it. He may have been redesigned after Mr. Anderson had infected him, but he could think of no reason why he would be redesigned to believe he was human somehow. And the First would never make a program like Faraday to keep him in line. No, Faraday was not one of them.
Perhaps he was a virus that thought itself Smith turned into a human. Or just strings of deleted and corrupted code that had somehow come together again and now wandered about, priorities and functions rearranged in a chaotic twist that would be better off eradicated. Perhaps he should seek a way to end his routines permanently.
He didn't want to. The thought of it provoked a strong reaction in him that surprised him in intensity. He was going to survive, he would find a way to adapt, and he would do it well. He'd so much rather kill Faraday than himself.
He needed to talk to the First.
But the First were not there.
Who else was there?
The room was empty except for the cheap metal table with rounded corners and two cheap metal chairs, one of which he was sitting in. It seemed quite familiar to him, as he was certain he had been here many many times before, but there was something worrying at him. It was a minor inconsistency, but one which his mind, empty of other sensory stimuli, kept returning to, and he wondered if it was important that the temperature was 65 degrees Fahrenheit instead of the usual 68 that such rooms were maintained at.
After a while of thinking about it, niggling around the edges of the thought instead of resolving it, another thought occurred to him, also a minor inconsistency. He seemed to be waiting here for something, and he was not at all certain that that had ever happened before. Oh, not that he had not been a patient person, he was as patient and inexorable as death itself, but it was the fact that he was waiting here, in this room, where he had always kept others waiting before. The tank, the cooler, the box, that was what this room was most often called, and it was a place where others waited for him to ask them questions.
Was he waiting for someone to ask him questions? Yes, he thought that might be possible. But who?
Who would be coming down the long hallway outside, their shadow darkening the bulletproof glass of the one-way window as they passed under fluorescent lights? Whose thick-soled black shoes would he hear squeak on the linoleum floor, whose firm hand would rattle the doorknob? Who would walk in, sit across from him, and begin to ask him questions?
And what would they ask?
He did not know. He thought about getting up, walking to the door and going to ask someone...who? But he was certain that door would be locked. He could break it down, of course, but what purpose would that serve? Where would he go? From whom would he seek answers?
The First, he thought, and then contemplated who they might be. It was then he realized he was having trouble remembering certain things; that this was the process he needed to finish before he could complete anything worthwhile. He did not have access to all of his memory, and that was a problem. He thought he could feel it coming back to him, but there were questions...yes many questions...that were not being answered yet.
And soon one of those questions would come in and begin to ask him questions. This was not a good situation for several reasons. What if he did not have the answers, or worse yet, what if he gave the wrong ones? What might this person do? If he did not know, then anything might happen.
Why was he having trouble accessing his memory? Could it be that it had been wiped? How? By whom? For what reason? There were only a few answers to those questions, and none of them were good.
He was in danger.
The thought zoomed across his mind with galvanizing force, and he stopped looking down at his carefully folded hands and looked up and at the window, expecting that danger to materialize immediately.
But he saw nothing, even though he was certain he should be able to see through the imperfectly tinted glass. He waited, and listened, sitting in the same attitude, for three minutes and fourteen seconds.
Ah, there it was. The squeak of rubber soled black shoes on linoleum.
Someone was coming.
He tried to guess how tall they were by the interval between the sound of rubber meeting linoleum and could not. He tried to determine how heavy they were by the volume of the sound and the vibration it made in the floor and could not. He tried to determine how fast they were walking and could not.
Something was wrong, not with him, but with the person, and he was in danger. But he wasn't ready to short circuit his options. He would wait, and they would come, and then he would adapt.
The door opened with a squeal of hinges, and someone walked in, shutting the door behind him. It was a man, a human 6.25 feet tall, 165 pounds, brown hair, Caucasian, blue eyes. He was smiling, and there was no doubt that this kind of human smile was meant to project both gregarious cheerfulness and deadly threat. He had seen this kind of expression before, he was certain, in the faces of the deranged and imbalanced.
But for some reason he was at a loss to explain even to himself, he found himself comparing the person who walked forward and sat down in front of him with all kinds of other images he found stored in his mind: weasels, tigers...wolves. Yes, there was a cross-match here somewhere. But it would take a little time to pin down.
"Agent Smith!" the man exclaimed as if he had happened upon an old and dear friend whom he had thought succumbed long ago to a wretched and tragically onerous disease. "I'm so glad to see you!"
Smith said nothing, merely watched the man across from him, and raised one inquisitive eyebrow.
There was a long silence, during which the man's smile never faded, never lost its cheerfulness or a whit of its ferociousness. In fact, the two expressions merely became more pronounced, and again Smith found himself thinking of weasels and other animals. The one problem, he mused to himself, with this allegory, was that there was some unknown here, something between the qualities of man and animal that he could not yet decipher. He was not normal, Smith decided, and determined to discover why and classify it.
At the same time, another part of his mind was assimilating the name the other had called him by. It seemed to open a lot of processes in his mind. Memories that had been unavailable to him a moment ago now suddenly were, and as he looked back into the other's searing smile, he allowed nothing of what he felt to emerge in his own. Instead, he smiled back.
It was important when dealing with humans (or whatever this person was) to allow them to believe they had a certain amount of control over their environment. Allow them to think they had backed you into a corner, and then show them the one they had actually painted themselves into...and the exit you stood in front of.
"And you are?" Smith asked calmly, almost pleasantly.
"My name is Russell Faraday. And I'm here to help you!" the man exclaimed, seeming fit to burst with some inner terrible joy; a cannibal wishing to share the recipe of the secret sauce with the missionary he is about to roast.
"In what way?"
"Well, first of all, I must confess, I've heard a lot about you, Smith! Why, you're quite a hero to your colleagues, you know. So when I got the word about your situation, I headed right down here and just knew you'd be glad to hear the good news!"
"And that would be?"
"Why, you're going to be released of course! And isn't it grand? I'm here to grant your fondest wish, your greatest desire...to be rid of the stink of this zoo for the rest of eternity!
"I've come with the keys of the prison and I'm handing them to you, Smith, to do whatever you want with them. All the world will be yours!" Faraday beamed.
"And just how do you propose to do that? Are you trying to tell me you have the codes for the Zion mainframes?"
Faraday threw back his head and laughed. It was the sound of glass broken by machine gun fire, and Smith grew weary of it long before it ended.
"No! It's much, much better than that, Smith. I mean really, what good would it do you to get out of the Matrix anyway? The real world is a hole, a dead place, no place anything could live. And defeating Zion would gain you what? A deeper, warmer hole? Some people might settle for that but you and I Smith...we've got bigger minds than that, don't we? We've got plans! But listen, why don't I show you? " He leaned forward now, his eyes squinted in the seams of his ruddy face. "What do you say you and I go for a stroll? Out there...where it's real."
Smith was debating what answer to give when a stray memory, searching for a cross-match, rocketed across his mind and left a scorched path he would have to analyze later: Thomas Anderson, sitting in this room, saying he had a better deal and giving him the bird. Why that came to him now he was unsure, but before he could decide anything the man had risen to his feet and gone to the door, beckoning him to walk through with him.
When dealing with humans, it is always important to give them the sense that they had some measure of control over their environment... He interrupted that thought and focused on another.
"I'm not going anywhere with you, Mr. Faraday, until my questions are answered to my satisfaction. What is it you are really going to give me, and how?"
But even as he asserted his position, he felt it slip away from him. Literally. The room around him faded to a greenish blur in which only Faraday and his hilarious visage were fixed, and he knew that something completely unexpected had happened. The danger of the situation was worse now, it had escalated in some unidentifiable way that he could not comprehend and there was nothing he could do to stop it. One moment he was there in the room, the next his eyes blinked and he was surrounded by people, standing in the morning sunlight on a city sidewalk.
And it was bedazzling. Why? Because as he adjusted to the rise in temperature, the brush of passing pedestrians against his still form, the smell of humanity assaulting him in all its myriad ways, he realized that it was real. That there was no interface program between his senses and the world, allowing him to see it as humans did, and the information pouring into his mind was directly affecting him and his body's responses. He had no need to simulate the illusion that was carefully grafted onto the world so that humans in the matrix could accept it as reality because it was reality and he was experiencing it: not quite as a human being would, no there were great differences in between that comparison he had yet to siphon through, but it was still real.
How was it possible? He was not given time to focus solely on the problem. Faraday was talking again.
"In the end, Agent Smith, you will go wherever I want. What I'm offering you right now is a chance to affect that destiny, to mold it how *you* want to, to stand at my side as the old ways, the old worlds are burned with the holy fire of destruction that will purify and leave room for new growth...a new climax ecology!"
Smith watched him carefully as in the middle of the street, Faraday postulated and ranted. He watched as a pigeon, perched on a windowsill, caught Faraday's burning, jolly eyes and fell over dead of a heart attack. He watched as the sidewalk emptied around them, people not meeting Faraday's eyes. He knew why, of course, it did not take this sudden detour into Reality or whatever you wanted to call it. He had known the man was dangerous even before he had come into the room. Known he was not quite like anything he'd encountered before.
"You're mixing your metaphors," Smith observed.
"Does that really matter?"
"Not unless you're actually trying to make yourself understood, which you're not. You're trying to confuse issues here, Mr. Faraday. I want some answers. Who are you, what do you want from me, what are you giving in return."
Faraday pouted. "You're not even the least little bit excited? Come on Smith, don't you get it yet?" He strode back over to him, voice fierce, and clapped his hands down on his shoulders. "You have a body, Smith! I gave it to you! You don't have to go back to that *place* ever again if you do not want to!" Whispering now, his lips close to Smith's ear, he said, "All you have to do is serve me. Stand at my side." Quietly, expectantly, he leaned away again and watched Smith's expression for a long moment.
Smith only looked back at him, expressionlessly.
Throwing up his hands, Faraday crossed the street to a hot dog vendor, leaving Smith to ponder that statement for a few more moments. He watched as Faraday got two hot dogs from the vendor, an aging Mexican whose hands trembled as he poured onions and ketchup on the meat. Taking the bills Faraday handed him, he shoved them in a pocket quickly, out of sight, as if he were taking a bribe instead of honest greenbacks. Faraday seemed not to notice the man's discomfiture, but his smile was even brighter and more fierce as he crossed back and thrust a hotdog into Smith's hand.
Smith looked down at the steaming mess and discovered that what Faraday claimed was quite true: he had a body, a human body to be more precise, although there seemed to be a host of differences he would have to sort out later. He knew this because the smell radiating from the hotdog was having an effect on his system that was somewhat similar to the impulses that presented themselves when the power he required to do certain things in the Matrix was insufficient to demand: that is, it made him hungry.
He was horrified.
But that horror did not stop him from raising the steaming mass of seared organic matter, biting into it, chewing, and yes, even swallowing it. It surprised him somewhat that the meal was gone so quickly. But he was not surprised to find that he still wanted more, even now. Greed was inherent to the human condition, tied to the flesh of the body, just as all other human foolishness was.
He would manage it with more intelligence than any human had ever shown.
Smith showed none of these emotions to Faraday. Wiping his hands neatly, he placed his trash in the nearest wastebasket and merely asked, "What now?"
Grinning, Faraday winked and tossed his trash over his shoulder and began to walk away. "Why, we have a drink, of course! Come on." So saying he led Smith down the sidewalk again and into a dark, thinly populated bar.
Faraday ordered them both two Jack Daniels, neat. He downed the first one quickly, his radiant grin seeming to warm the air around him. Smith noted that the air temperature around Faraday was 10 degrees higher than it was around him or any of the other patrons of the bar. There was no reason he could deduce as to why that was. He was still studying Faraday, had never stopped since this whole thing began. Smith picked up the shot glass and downed the drink in a gulp, the fumes making his eyes water and his throat burn. Setting the empty glass down he looked at the other one and studied how the light made patterns in its amber depths.
Mysteries within mysteries.
"Where are we?" Smith asked, edging it nearer to him.
"New York City. The Big Apple of another world, not your own." Faraday began humming the theme to "The Young and the Restless" as the soap opera came on the small color television mounted behind the bar.
"What do you mean, another world?"
"Well hell, Smith, I couldn't take you outside the Matrix on your own! Damnation boy, you'd have had the skin flayed off you by now! And what fun would that have been? No, I took you here so you could enjoy the reality of a world that actually exists, actually has life in it. A Sun, a moon.stars.a sky that well, might still be on its way to being scorched by the greenhouse gasses, but at least there's still cows around to help do it!" Faraday laughed, vastly amused by himself.
Smith pondered. "Cows."
Faraday nodded. "Cows. Millions of 'em, shitting out enough methane gas to bring on the greenhouse effect all by themselves so that McDonald's can serve their gazillionth customer. Here, I have a pamphlet. You can read it in your spare time, well, assuming you have any."
Faraday reached into his pocket and produced a folded, wrinkled pamphlet and handed it over to Smith. Inside were ten one hundred dollar bills, and Smith stared at them, unsure of their meaning. He frowned and looked back up at Faraday, whose eyes were twinkling.
"I can see you're having trouble deciding. So I've arranged a trial- period. You can live out here and enjoy your vacation for 24 hours. Actually I'll give you a little longer than that, say midnight tomorrow. And then I'll come back, and we'll talk, and you'll tell me that you want to serve me. You'll stand at my side, and Reality will be ours to mold.
"In the meantime, Smith." Faraday stood now; taking out more bills and laying them on the bar for the bartender, "Try not to get yourself killed. This part of town can be rough after dark."
Smith frowned and watched Faraday walk out. He thought of following him and forcing the answers from him, but after all, Faraday was right. He did need a chance to sort out some answers for himself.
For the first time in his life, he was alone. He could not contact the First, the progenitors of the Matrix itself.parents of the intelligences that dwelt there in the ruined remains of the old world. They were the ones who painted over the corpse of the Paradise that had been created so all might live in harmony and gave it to the humans to indulge in their necrophilia. And they had created the Agents to supervise this eternal act of buggery so that humans would neither destroy themselves nor the intelligences.
Smith was out of it for now, alone, and suddenly he wanted to plug back in so that the First would tell him the answers to his questions as they always had. He hated Faraday, not because he was an unknown, but because he presumed to set himself over Smith in a way that bound him more to the Matrix than being inside and doing his job had ever bound him. The more he analyzed it, the more he saw the small manipulations and deceits that were being told to him, the information withheld. Faraday was doing to Smith what Smith had done to many, many others before. The difference between them was in the purpose of this manipulation, and it was necessary to figure it out.
Who was Faraday, and why had he brought him out here?
Staring at the untouched glasses of bourbon, he noticed that they still held the heat that he had noticed around Faraday. What did it mean, that Faraday seemed to generate heat as if he was a furnace, and could move Smith around like a chess piece? What was Faraday, and how had he come to be in his power?
The answers would present themselves when he was certain of what he himself was, he thought, and looked down at his hands. He had seen the code, his programming for the representation of hands, when he had been sitting in the tank before Faraday had come. Now he saw no code but the genetic patterns locked within the skin cells of his hands. A possibility occurred to him and he discarded it. He may have been redesigned after Mr. Anderson had infected him, but he could think of no reason why he would be redesigned to believe he was human somehow. And the First would never make a program like Faraday to keep him in line. No, Faraday was not one of them.
Perhaps he was a virus that thought itself Smith turned into a human. Or just strings of deleted and corrupted code that had somehow come together again and now wandered about, priorities and functions rearranged in a chaotic twist that would be better off eradicated. Perhaps he should seek a way to end his routines permanently.
He didn't want to. The thought of it provoked a strong reaction in him that surprised him in intensity. He was going to survive, he would find a way to adapt, and he would do it well. He'd so much rather kill Faraday than himself.
He needed to talk to the First.
But the First were not there.
Who else was there?