+J.M.J.+
There is NO Pizza!
By "Matrix Refugee"
Author's Note:
WARNING: This is a rather wryly humorous fic, so beware! I based this on something that actually happened to my family and me. We had a phone number once that had the same digits as that of a local pizza place in almost the same order, so people dialing the pizza place's number too fast would sometimes miss and dial ours by mistake, which led to some crazy incidents (some of the calls are actual calls we got!). So I got to wondering...what would happen to the Matrix rebels if they had a cellphone with a phone number similar to that of a pizza joint? Some Alternate Universe stuff: Mouse is still alive (I'm mad at the Wachowskis for letting him get killed off).
Disclaimer:
I do not own The Matrix, its characters, concepts, and ideas which are the property of the Brothers W (Warner and Wachowski), Joel Silver Pictures, RedPill Productions, et al.
*******************************************************************
A tall, dark-haired, lean young man sat alone in a dingy hotel room, leaning over a laptop on a folding table, typing. His almond-shaped dark eyes scanned the columns of code, looking for an indicator.
The cellphone lying next to the laptop rang. He picked it up.
"Hello?"
From the other end of the line came an unfamiliar mousy woman's voice. "Hi, could I order a small cheese pizza and a one-liter Sprite?"
"Uh, I'm afraid you've reached the wrong number."
"I have a coupon, too. Can I use that for a delivery?"
"Ma'am, this is a wrong number. You haven't reached a pizza place."
"Can you deliver it in half an hour? I'm at..."
"Ma'am, this isn't a pizza place."
"Then who is this?"
"A wrong number."
Neo hung up the cellphone and turned back to the screen. He cursed under his breath. He'd missed his cue in the cod. He'd have to resend his commands...
He retyped them, his fingers flying. The loop in the code returned. He had to nail this, alerting his first potential: his old college friend Doug, who'd been a hacker but had gone white hat and who'd be of some use to the resistence.
An old friend in the old life that wasn't a life.
Neo had only been unplugged a year, but he'd trained enough to trace and attract potentials. The Zion elders all but worshipped him as a new god, his progress and abilities astonished them so thoroughly...
Beeeeeeeepp!
BEEEEEEEEEPPP!
The cellphone rang again. He picked it up.
"Hello?"
"Uh, is this...is this Mama Mia's?"
"No, you've reached a wrong number."
"Oh, sorry." The line cut out. He hung up and set the phone back on the table. The cue in the code had passed again. He swore, more acridly and retyped the commands.
The cue looped again and he had started uploading the first part of the message to the potential's computer.
Beeeeeeeepp!
BEEEEEEEEEPPP!
He reached for the cellphone and answered. Offline he heard a lot of jabbering and yelling over what sounded like the combined forces of a surround sound TV and a surround soung stereo system.
"Jimmy! Jimmy, tell 'em to shut up! I can't hear the pizza guy!" somebody hollered.
The NON-pizza guy hung up the cellphone and nearly threw it into the far corner of the room. He looked at the screen and sighed. He'd gotten a toehold in the potential's awareness, but it might not be enough to spark a search for the meaning. 'Probably think there's something wrong with his computer,' he thought.
He reached for the cellphone and dialled a certain number. The line whirred and picked up.
"Hullo, Ellio's Pizza." At least that was Tank's voice at the other end of the line.
"Tank, I'm coming out. Something wierd's going on."
"Okay, Neo. Save the story for the other side."
The line cut out. Neo hung up the cellphone. The rotary phone on the table rang. He reached for it and picked it up...
********************************************************************
Trinity removed the cable from the jack in the back of his head. "You okay?" she asked. "You look a little upset," she asked as she unstrapped him. He breathed a sigh of relief, glad to be back on the Neb.
"My cellphone started acting up," he said, sitting up and lowering his feet to the floor.
"What flavor of wierd?" Tank asked, looking up from the his console. "Static? Popping sounds?"
"Shoulda got one of those Sprint PCS phones," twitted Ref, one of the newer crew members.
"Yeah, but the Agents love to tap those and they taunt us with that coppertop in the black trench coat in the commercials!" Mouse added, duck-taping some wires to the wall.
"Let Neo finish," Trinity said.
"I kept getting calls for a pizza place," Neo continued. "Almost cost me the potential I was tracking."
"Pizza place?" Tank asked. "Oops, sorry. Guess I hit too close to home back there."
Neo shrugged and put a hand on Tank's arm. "No problem: you couldn't have known."
He went to the head to find some pain pills for the residual ache in his chest. His wounds had healed over, but the pain never really went away.
He found the jar in the medicine locker and popped a couple tablets into his mouth when he heard laughter echoing from the main deck. Ref and Mouse getting silly again. He gulped the pills fast to keep from choking on them. Pizza calls...
He went to his cabin to rest. Jacking in always tired him a little. He reached for the e-book reader on the shelf above his bunk and loaded his copy of "The Book of Zion" into it.
Someone knocked on his door. "Come in?" he called.
The door opened and Ref stuck her head in, trying to keep a straight face. "Evening mess is in five minutes," she said. "I better warn you: you ain't heard the end of the pizza."
"Thanks for the heads up," he said, trying to keep a straight face. She went away.
Ref looked like she could be Trinity's younger, scrawnier sister except her hair was longer to cover up her badly fitted head jack.
Five minutes later, he got up and went to the mess deck. The fun had started already: he could hear Jack, Trinity's "uncle" (or at least he had been prior to unplugging) singing:
"When the moon hits yer eye like a big-a pizza pie,
That's amore!
When you walk down the street with a cloud at you feet,
That's amore!"
"Okay, Dean Martin," Ref snarled, clearly trying not to laugh.
Neo stepped into the mess hall and took his seat at the table. Sand, Jack's wife and their new medic put a tin plate of single-cell in front of him.
"Did you want pepperoni on that?" Mouse asked with a straight but smiling face.
Ref and Trinity both started laughing so hard they almost choked. Sand reached over to Ref and thumped her on the back.
"I'd be scared s--- if I ever got a call like that," Zara, their new encrypter, groused.
"Yeah, but look at it this way," Mouse said. "Y' can reeeaaallly screw with the coppertops' heads. Next time y' get one of them calls, Neo, say something like...'Sure, a large pepperoni with mushrooms. Yeah you can use the coupon for delivery. Just give me your address and it'll be over there in thirty minutes, or it's free'!"
"Yeah, and give that pizza place an incentive to change their number after the four hundreth irate customer calls to complain about a missing order," Jack, their Matrix-side bodyguard said, his thin lips curled back in a wacky grin. In a redneck voice that hardly matched his scrawny build, he added, "Hey, ah ordered three deep dish pizzas wiff th' works. Where they get to?"
Everyone burst out laughing, except Zara who only sniffed and turned up her nose.
"Yah gotta laugh or you'd go nuts," Mouse said, with an ingratiating shurg.
"The only way I can eat this glop is if I think about pizza," Zara said.
"Come to think of it, you never really ate pizza," Neo said.
"Yeah, makes you feel sorry for the people in the pods," Ref said.
"Right now some people think they're sinking their teeth into a nice thick slice of deep dish smothered in mozzerella," Trinity said.
"Oh, shut up! You're only making my mouth water and there's nothing to put into it," Zara groused.
"Sure there is," Jack said, holding a spoonful of single cell delicately before his mouth. "Nice, delicious single cell protein." He closed his lips on it with delicate relish.
"And in relaity, all they're getting is a lot of stimulus to the tastebuds and nostrils," Ref observed.
"Sensory porno," Trinity said.
"You bet," Jack added.
Neo shivered, thinking of the grim reality. That could still be him. Or worse still, he could have been sucked under during his unplugging, dragged down to his death and thence to an obscene recycling plant beneath the power plants.
Trinity put a hand on his shoulder. "You all right?" she asked.
"Yeah," he said. "Just had a long day."
*****************************************************************
Ref brought a tray up to the main deack where Morpheus had taken the night shift.
"I heard laughter on the mess deck," he said. "What's the joke?"
"You haven't heard? Neo kept getting wierd calls on his cellphone while he was in earlier. People kept calling, looking for a pizza joint."
Morpheus laughed out loud and shook his head. His laugh came so infrequently, Ref had to laugh with him.
He resumed his usual calm solemnity. "That could turn problematic. I'll have to look into it."
"Yeah, it wouldn't be healthy for the One to be getting chased by you-know-whats and suddenly his cellphone rings and its a pizza call." She laughed again a little nervously as she set the tray on the floor.
"It wouldn't be healthy for you if you were with him," Morpheus observed.
"My worst failing: I feel too much and think too little," she said, sobered.
"You do all right," he said.
********************************************************************
Squiddies came within detection range in the night, but it passed otherwise uneventfully. Morpheus wouldn't hazard sending Neo in without Jack to keep an eye and ear open for any trouble.
"I hate it when he makes me do this," Jack muttered as Sand strapped him into one of the chairs on the main deck.
"Liar," she twitted, thrusting the cable into his head jack.
"See you later, on this side," Trinity said, kissing Neo just before she inserted his arm jacks.
"Don't forget: I love you," he replied.
*********************************************************************
A rotary phone rang in a dingy hotel room.
Neo picked it up. "Okay, Tank, we're in."
Ref rummaged in a locked box bolted to the floor behind the drapes of one window well. She stood up and strapped a holster to her thigh before slotting a handgun into it.
"Hey, check the clip, girl," Jack said, opening another locked box in the corner, closer to the door.
Ref obliged him. "It's loaded."
"Take along two extra clips, I don't want you getting caught without 'em," Jack warned as he rummaged about. "Is your cellphone charged?"
"Check." She eyed the cellphone Neo took from his trenchcoat pocket and set on the table before he sat down to work. "You rather trade?"
"I wouldn't want to put you at risk."
She smiled at him, something she rarely did Matrix-side, but which she did often, real-world side. She straightened the skirts of her coat over her weapon and went out.
Jack took a carton of cigarettes from the box, took out a fresh pack, and opened it while Neo got the computer out of hibernation. He watched the older man rummage in the box, take out an antique butane lighter and light up a cigarette as he took up his position by the door.
"Is that why you agree to jakcing in with me?" Neo asked.
"If the Fifth Amendment was still in effect, I'd be pleading it," Jack replied, blowing a smoke ring in Neo's direction.
"Be serious, Jack."
"If I had my druthers, I'd be back in Zion with a good meal inside me and the bedcovers over my head. When you get to be as old as I am, you learn to take your pleasures while you can."
"How old are you anyway?"
"Matrix years: wrong side of forty. Real world: closer to twelve years."
"I'd go easy on the Matrix-side pleasures: Morpheus thinks that's how Cypher got corrupted."
"Probably so. But I keep myself binary: If I'm in the real-reality, I'd rather be in Zion. Here. I'd rather make the code serve ME on MY terms for a change. I'm as crazy as I'm crusty, and I think that's the only reason why Morpheus lets me hang around."
Jack pretended he hadn't completely overcome the Matrix, but Neo knew otherwise. A half houir had passed: he glanced up from the computer and noticed Jack had only smoked half of that first cigarette.
Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeepp!!
BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEPP!!!!
Neo started to reach for the phone, but Jack grabbed it and answered it.
"Hullo? Jack's Pizza, whaddya want?...Yep, yep, yep..." He pretended to write something in the air. "Sure, we'll have that deep dish to you in thirty minutes. Thanks for ordering." He hung up.
"You and Mouse shouldn't be on the same ship," Neo said, darting a glare at Jack.
"Good thing Ref ain't here or she'd be cracking up and rendered non-functioning." Jack eyed the rotary phone. "I got an idea."
"What?"
Jack lifted the receiver of the rotary phone and dialled a number. "Hey, Tank, gotta minute? Could you run a number comparison on One-Boy's cellphone number? Thanks."
A few minutes later, the fax machine chirruped and scrolled out a sheet of paper. Jack reached for it, studied it with a straight face and handed it to Neo, who read it with one eye, while he finished typing the message.
767-933-1212--cellphone activated, 4-21-2000 Thomas A. Anderson.
767-933-1221--Andrea's Pizzeria
"I was afraid of that," Neo groaned, turning back to his work.
"It's so bad its funny!" Jack said, grinning.
Ref came back at that moment. "All quiet on the western front," she said.
"You get that Ovid for me like I asked you?" Jack asked.
"It'll be yours in ten minutes," she said.
Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeepp!!
BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEPPP!!
Neo reached for the cellphone without looking away from the screen, but Ref was a hair quicker and answered it.
After a moment, she said, "There is no pizza." She hung up the cellphone.
"Now there's a way to blow them off," Neo said.
"And give them something to think about," Ref replied, reaching for the rotary and dialling.
A pause. "Yeah, I'm the one that ordered the double cheese," she said.
Her form shivered and vanished in a swirl of code.
"Dratted thing is causing a crime wave," Jack muttered.
"Well, if anyone is listening who shouldn't, it'll throw them off the scent," Neo said.
"Before we find out the hard way who's listening, are you finished?"
"Almost."
A few minutes later, they jacked out.
********************************************************************
After evening mess, Neo sat cuddling with Trinity on the coach in the crew lounge.
"There is no pizza," she repeated, laughing.
"Ref handled it a lot better than I could," he confessed. "Sometimes I think she does better than I do, even if she has those melt-downs."
"You have more riding on you."
"Yeah, all Ref has to do is collect art and music and books for the library," he said, referring to an on-going project in Zion, trying to retrieve the last replicas of the classics of human art.
"Well, if I hear she's tried to do anything more for you than give you a few pointers, I'll scratch her face," she said, pretending to claw the air with one hand.
"Glad to hear you're still jealous."
"Aw, she's all right, she's just a kid," Trinity said, nestling into his shoulder.
*******************************************************************
Next day, Neo was tempted to leave the cellphone turned off when he jacked in to upload one last teaser to Doug, but he couldn't do that: he had to go into Agent territory with Jack and Ref while she collected some packages in the Post Office box she held for this purpose.
"That kid is the biggest asset toward keeping us human," Jack said, as they waited outside.
"She's got a better spirit than she thinks she has," Neo said. "Must come from reading all those texts."
"You have a point there. Oughta read some myself."
Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeppp!!
BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEPPP!!!
They looked at each other. Neo reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the cellphone.
"Hello?"
"Where's my order?! You said that pizza would be here in thirty minutes, and it's been thirty-five minutes!" a woman yattered at him.
"There is NO pizza," Neo informed her and hung up.
The door opened and Ref emerged with a satchel of packages under her arm. "Well, is the unhappy battery getting her late pizza?" she asked.
"No," Neo said. "How'd you know?"
"The lady behind the stamp counter was yelling into the phone about a missing pizza, so I wondered if you'd got the call and given her the hint: 'cause her face went as white as an Agent's shirt."
Jack looked over her shoulder. "Ref, don't turn around." He grabbed her and Neo both byu the arm and half dragged them down the sidewalk, heading for an alleyway between the Post Office and a storefront church.
They fled along a maze of alleyways until they came out on a sidestreet. They ran to a subway entrance at the street corner and clattered down the steps. Shots broke out over their heads as they plunged underground.
Jack lunged for a pay phone and dialled. He shoved the receiver at Ref, who pushed it at Neo. He took it.
The wierd prickling of jacking out passed over him...
********************************************************************
Trinity unlocked the cable from the back of his head. He sat up. Ref lay serene as Tank switched her over to the Construct to unpack and upload her finds. Jack, in the chair next to his lay quiet, but his left arm twitched. His heart monitor was going ballistic. Tank scurried to unlock him.
Jack's eyes flipped open, wild and a little glazed. "Ouch! Dammit!" he cried, gripping his left forearm.
"What happened?" Neo asked.
"Just a bruise. They winged me," Jack said. "I'll live."
"Pizza calls are turning dangerous to your health," Trinity said.
********************************************************************
"It's Anderson's cellphone, I tell yah," the scavenger said. "If he's getting crank calls on it, that's the way to get 'um."
Agent Smith gave the scavenger a razor-thin smile. "You forget, Mr. Regan, you are in training. Your task is to supply the information, not to suggest how we are to act on it."
Agent Green, standing behind Regan's chair put a hand on the back of the trainee's neck. "You'll get your chance soon enough," he said. His fingers twitched ever so slightly and tightened. Regan yelped with pain.
Agent Smith leaned back in his chair. "IF you survive the training."
*********************************************************************
Neo was resting in his cabin when he heard it: a loud, piercing shriek. He tensed, thinking it was a warning siren, and waited for the lights to go out. Then he realized the sound came from Ref, at the start of another meltdown. He got up and stuck his head out into the corridor to see if he could help.
Ref was leaning her face against the wall, Trinity and Sand standing close to her, trying to comfort her. At that moment, Zara and Jack came along. Zara glared at Ref.
"They never should have unplugged her," she said.
"Shut up, Zara: she's useful. And she meltsdown only on this side," Jack retorted. To Ref he added, "Hey, you ever get the missing pieces of the busted statues you got a while back? Future generations are gonna think, 'What were our ancestors thinking when they made these wierd statues with no arms?'"
Ref managed to look over her shoulder and laugh at Jack's remark. Neo caught himself breathing a sigh of relief. Ref would be all right.
*******************************************************************
After another training session with the new inductee, Agent Smith's pager went off. Code 13 blinked on the display. The chief wanted him to report to the central office.
He entered the chief's dimly lit office.
"Carton Smith?" asked a feminine voice from the well of the shaded windows.
"I am here."
"You have served well since your recovery, training our new defenders. But now it is time you mobilized one of your more important proteges."
"What do you mean? Regan barely passed his first trial."
"I did not mean Regan, I meant the female juvenile."
He tried not to grit his teeth. The gestures these human personas made! "As you wish."
********************************************************************
"Did you ever help unplug anyone, Ref?" Neo asked, later that evening, when he, Ref and Jack had gone in to contact Doug, prepartory to unplugging him.
"When I was on the 'Gilgamesh', the commander used to have me jack in for long periods of time. I'd actually pose as an employee in different companies, use that as leverage to free up whole blocks of peopel. If the boss got wise, the commander had me drop a red pill in the guy's coffee."
"Until she tried that on her ex-boss from her pre-unplugging," Jack said.
"What happened then?" Neo asked.
Ref shivered. "It proved something I'd wondered about before I did it."
"Proved what?"
Ref looked away, out the grimy window. "I'd rather not say."
Jack looked up from cleaning his gun. "Her ex-boss was an Agent in disguise. She told me she knew all along the guy wasn't ordinary. She knew... that's why THEY went after her and that's why we freed her."
"Let's not keep this fella waiting," Neo said. "Ref, you okay?"
"Yeah, got my grip back."
They went out into the hallway and down to the loading dock, where the car was parked, covered with a tarp, which Jack hauled off before he climbed into the driver's seat. Neo got in next to him, while Ref got into the back.
"So where is this place?"
"Lou's Laundromat, over on Fletcher Street," Neo said. "Doug does his laundry there."
BEEEEEEEPP!!
BEEEEEEEPP!!
Neo looked at Jack, who glanced at the cellphone and turned back to the light traffic about them. Neo took out the phone.
"Hello?"
"Hello?" a little girl's voice. "Who's this?"
"Who's this?" he asked. He wanted to bite his tongue on these words, but they slipped out.
"Kristin. Is this the store? The pizza store?"
"Uh, no, I'm sorry." He caught himself feeling a little sorry for her.
"Daddy! It's not the pizza store." Something else rustled on the other end of the line.
Ref lunged over the back of the seat, snatched the phone from Neo's hand and threw it out the open window so hard it shattered on the pavement ahead of them. The phone crunched as the wheels passed over it.
"Ref, what the hell you do that for?"
"I heard the kid's voice. I know her: she's bad news," she said. "Jack, find us an exit!"
"Yes, ma'am!" Jack said, flooring the gas and steering through the traffic. The car bounced off a Lexus and a Probe before Jack turned and charged down an alleyway. Garbage cans clattered, bowled over in the onslaught.
"How did you know the kid was trouble?" Neo asked.
"I babysat her before I was unplugged," Ref said.
"Good God!" Jack muttered, glanicng into the rearview mirror.
"What?" Ref asked.
"Don't look back," Jack ordered.
"Why?" Ref asked with an innocent, mock child-like lilt.
"Because I said so!" Jack snapped, eyes locked on the end of the alleyway.
Neo peered over his shoulder out the back window at a...
Pizza delivery truck.
"Uh oh," he said.
"What?" Ref asked. "What is it?"
"It's a pizza delivery truck."
"It's probably chock-full of Agents in disguise," Jack said. He spoke too late.
Ref peered out the back window. "Oh no!!" she said, and burst out laughing so hard she fell over in the back seat.
"Let the squiddie out of the bag, didn't you?" Jack snarled, turning onto a side street and whipping down another alleyway. "If you weren't the One, and I weren't a cross-wearer, I'd THROW you to them God-damned Agents! Find some way to shut her up."
"I can think of only one way," Neo said. He reached back and slugged Ref under the jaw. She sighed and slumped on the seat. "Didn't want to do that, but I had no choice."
"Well, it worked, didn't it?" Jack said, pulling up near a hardware store.
They threw open the doors. Jack grabbed Ref and hauled her over his shoulder as they ran for a phonebooth on the street corner.
Neo dialed the number and shoved the phone to Jack as it picked up. Jack leaned into the receiver as his and Ref's forms shivered into bits of code falling into the receiver.
Tires squealed behind him as he caught the receiver. He glanced back to see the pizza truck turn in the alleyway and charge full tilt at the phone booth. The skin-prickle of jacking out passed over him.
As his awareness retreated through a bolthole of code, Neo dimly heard the crash.
*******************************************************************
"What the h--- happened?" Morpheus asked.
"We got chased by a pizza truck," Jack said as Sand unstrapped an unconscious Ref. "Ref had another meltdown."
"You got chased by a _what_?" Morpheus asked.
"A pizza truck," Neo said.
"Does this have anything to do with the pizza calls?" Trinity asked, trying not to laugh as she unstrapped him.
"I'm afraid it did," Neo said.
*********************************************************************
Agent Green kicked the wreckage of the phone booth. "They got away again."
"I can see that," Agent Smith snarled, trying to scrape some cooling mozzarella off his pant leg.
They walked to the back of the now banged-up pizza truck. Regan sat on the back bumper surreptitiously munching on a slice of deep dish.
"Put that down," Agent Smith ordered.
"Shame to let it go to waste," Regan said. "Want some?"
"You know we don't eat," Smith said. "One more infraction, Regan, and we'll have to flush you."
"Next time, maybe we shouldn't use a pizza truck," Regan suggested. Then he nervously dropped the slice as his two supervisors moved in.
********************************************************************
"Tank, when you get Neo a new cellphone, make sure the number isn't similar to anything else," Morpheus warned over evening mess.
"What's next, a dry cleaner's?" Sand asked.
"No, a lingerie shop, that's funnier," Mouse said, grinning. Trinity stifled a laugh in her hand. Ref, holding an ice pack to her jaw with her free hand, kicked Mouse under the table. Neo focused his attention on his single-cell protein in an effort to keep from laughing his head off.
The End
There is NO Pizza!
By "Matrix Refugee"
Author's Note:
WARNING: This is a rather wryly humorous fic, so beware! I based this on something that actually happened to my family and me. We had a phone number once that had the same digits as that of a local pizza place in almost the same order, so people dialing the pizza place's number too fast would sometimes miss and dial ours by mistake, which led to some crazy incidents (some of the calls are actual calls we got!). So I got to wondering...what would happen to the Matrix rebels if they had a cellphone with a phone number similar to that of a pizza joint? Some Alternate Universe stuff: Mouse is still alive (I'm mad at the Wachowskis for letting him get killed off).
Disclaimer:
I do not own The Matrix, its characters, concepts, and ideas which are the property of the Brothers W (Warner and Wachowski), Joel Silver Pictures, RedPill Productions, et al.
*******************************************************************
A tall, dark-haired, lean young man sat alone in a dingy hotel room, leaning over a laptop on a folding table, typing. His almond-shaped dark eyes scanned the columns of code, looking for an indicator.
The cellphone lying next to the laptop rang. He picked it up.
"Hello?"
From the other end of the line came an unfamiliar mousy woman's voice. "Hi, could I order a small cheese pizza and a one-liter Sprite?"
"Uh, I'm afraid you've reached the wrong number."
"I have a coupon, too. Can I use that for a delivery?"
"Ma'am, this is a wrong number. You haven't reached a pizza place."
"Can you deliver it in half an hour? I'm at..."
"Ma'am, this isn't a pizza place."
"Then who is this?"
"A wrong number."
Neo hung up the cellphone and turned back to the screen. He cursed under his breath. He'd missed his cue in the cod. He'd have to resend his commands...
He retyped them, his fingers flying. The loop in the code returned. He had to nail this, alerting his first potential: his old college friend Doug, who'd been a hacker but had gone white hat and who'd be of some use to the resistence.
An old friend in the old life that wasn't a life.
Neo had only been unplugged a year, but he'd trained enough to trace and attract potentials. The Zion elders all but worshipped him as a new god, his progress and abilities astonished them so thoroughly...
Beeeeeeeepp!
BEEEEEEEEEPPP!
The cellphone rang again. He picked it up.
"Hello?"
"Uh, is this...is this Mama Mia's?"
"No, you've reached a wrong number."
"Oh, sorry." The line cut out. He hung up and set the phone back on the table. The cue in the code had passed again. He swore, more acridly and retyped the commands.
The cue looped again and he had started uploading the first part of the message to the potential's computer.
Beeeeeeeepp!
BEEEEEEEEEPPP!
He reached for the cellphone and answered. Offline he heard a lot of jabbering and yelling over what sounded like the combined forces of a surround sound TV and a surround soung stereo system.
"Jimmy! Jimmy, tell 'em to shut up! I can't hear the pizza guy!" somebody hollered.
The NON-pizza guy hung up the cellphone and nearly threw it into the far corner of the room. He looked at the screen and sighed. He'd gotten a toehold in the potential's awareness, but it might not be enough to spark a search for the meaning. 'Probably think there's something wrong with his computer,' he thought.
He reached for the cellphone and dialled a certain number. The line whirred and picked up.
"Hullo, Ellio's Pizza." At least that was Tank's voice at the other end of the line.
"Tank, I'm coming out. Something wierd's going on."
"Okay, Neo. Save the story for the other side."
The line cut out. Neo hung up the cellphone. The rotary phone on the table rang. He reached for it and picked it up...
********************************************************************
Trinity removed the cable from the jack in the back of his head. "You okay?" she asked. "You look a little upset," she asked as she unstrapped him. He breathed a sigh of relief, glad to be back on the Neb.
"My cellphone started acting up," he said, sitting up and lowering his feet to the floor.
"What flavor of wierd?" Tank asked, looking up from the his console. "Static? Popping sounds?"
"Shoulda got one of those Sprint PCS phones," twitted Ref, one of the newer crew members.
"Yeah, but the Agents love to tap those and they taunt us with that coppertop in the black trench coat in the commercials!" Mouse added, duck-taping some wires to the wall.
"Let Neo finish," Trinity said.
"I kept getting calls for a pizza place," Neo continued. "Almost cost me the potential I was tracking."
"Pizza place?" Tank asked. "Oops, sorry. Guess I hit too close to home back there."
Neo shrugged and put a hand on Tank's arm. "No problem: you couldn't have known."
He went to the head to find some pain pills for the residual ache in his chest. His wounds had healed over, but the pain never really went away.
He found the jar in the medicine locker and popped a couple tablets into his mouth when he heard laughter echoing from the main deck. Ref and Mouse getting silly again. He gulped the pills fast to keep from choking on them. Pizza calls...
He went to his cabin to rest. Jacking in always tired him a little. He reached for the e-book reader on the shelf above his bunk and loaded his copy of "The Book of Zion" into it.
Someone knocked on his door. "Come in?" he called.
The door opened and Ref stuck her head in, trying to keep a straight face. "Evening mess is in five minutes," she said. "I better warn you: you ain't heard the end of the pizza."
"Thanks for the heads up," he said, trying to keep a straight face. She went away.
Ref looked like she could be Trinity's younger, scrawnier sister except her hair was longer to cover up her badly fitted head jack.
Five minutes later, he got up and went to the mess deck. The fun had started already: he could hear Jack, Trinity's "uncle" (or at least he had been prior to unplugging) singing:
"When the moon hits yer eye like a big-a pizza pie,
That's amore!
When you walk down the street with a cloud at you feet,
That's amore!"
"Okay, Dean Martin," Ref snarled, clearly trying not to laugh.
Neo stepped into the mess hall and took his seat at the table. Sand, Jack's wife and their new medic put a tin plate of single-cell in front of him.
"Did you want pepperoni on that?" Mouse asked with a straight but smiling face.
Ref and Trinity both started laughing so hard they almost choked. Sand reached over to Ref and thumped her on the back.
"I'd be scared s--- if I ever got a call like that," Zara, their new encrypter, groused.
"Yeah, but look at it this way," Mouse said. "Y' can reeeaaallly screw with the coppertops' heads. Next time y' get one of them calls, Neo, say something like...'Sure, a large pepperoni with mushrooms. Yeah you can use the coupon for delivery. Just give me your address and it'll be over there in thirty minutes, or it's free'!"
"Yeah, and give that pizza place an incentive to change their number after the four hundreth irate customer calls to complain about a missing order," Jack, their Matrix-side bodyguard said, his thin lips curled back in a wacky grin. In a redneck voice that hardly matched his scrawny build, he added, "Hey, ah ordered three deep dish pizzas wiff th' works. Where they get to?"
Everyone burst out laughing, except Zara who only sniffed and turned up her nose.
"Yah gotta laugh or you'd go nuts," Mouse said, with an ingratiating shurg.
"The only way I can eat this glop is if I think about pizza," Zara said.
"Come to think of it, you never really ate pizza," Neo said.
"Yeah, makes you feel sorry for the people in the pods," Ref said.
"Right now some people think they're sinking their teeth into a nice thick slice of deep dish smothered in mozzerella," Trinity said.
"Oh, shut up! You're only making my mouth water and there's nothing to put into it," Zara groused.
"Sure there is," Jack said, holding a spoonful of single cell delicately before his mouth. "Nice, delicious single cell protein." He closed his lips on it with delicate relish.
"And in relaity, all they're getting is a lot of stimulus to the tastebuds and nostrils," Ref observed.
"Sensory porno," Trinity said.
"You bet," Jack added.
Neo shivered, thinking of the grim reality. That could still be him. Or worse still, he could have been sucked under during his unplugging, dragged down to his death and thence to an obscene recycling plant beneath the power plants.
Trinity put a hand on his shoulder. "You all right?" she asked.
"Yeah," he said. "Just had a long day."
*****************************************************************
Ref brought a tray up to the main deack where Morpheus had taken the night shift.
"I heard laughter on the mess deck," he said. "What's the joke?"
"You haven't heard? Neo kept getting wierd calls on his cellphone while he was in earlier. People kept calling, looking for a pizza joint."
Morpheus laughed out loud and shook his head. His laugh came so infrequently, Ref had to laugh with him.
He resumed his usual calm solemnity. "That could turn problematic. I'll have to look into it."
"Yeah, it wouldn't be healthy for the One to be getting chased by you-know-whats and suddenly his cellphone rings and its a pizza call." She laughed again a little nervously as she set the tray on the floor.
"It wouldn't be healthy for you if you were with him," Morpheus observed.
"My worst failing: I feel too much and think too little," she said, sobered.
"You do all right," he said.
********************************************************************
Squiddies came within detection range in the night, but it passed otherwise uneventfully. Morpheus wouldn't hazard sending Neo in without Jack to keep an eye and ear open for any trouble.
"I hate it when he makes me do this," Jack muttered as Sand strapped him into one of the chairs on the main deck.
"Liar," she twitted, thrusting the cable into his head jack.
"See you later, on this side," Trinity said, kissing Neo just before she inserted his arm jacks.
"Don't forget: I love you," he replied.
*********************************************************************
A rotary phone rang in a dingy hotel room.
Neo picked it up. "Okay, Tank, we're in."
Ref rummaged in a locked box bolted to the floor behind the drapes of one window well. She stood up and strapped a holster to her thigh before slotting a handgun into it.
"Hey, check the clip, girl," Jack said, opening another locked box in the corner, closer to the door.
Ref obliged him. "It's loaded."
"Take along two extra clips, I don't want you getting caught without 'em," Jack warned as he rummaged about. "Is your cellphone charged?"
"Check." She eyed the cellphone Neo took from his trenchcoat pocket and set on the table before he sat down to work. "You rather trade?"
"I wouldn't want to put you at risk."
She smiled at him, something she rarely did Matrix-side, but which she did often, real-world side. She straightened the skirts of her coat over her weapon and went out.
Jack took a carton of cigarettes from the box, took out a fresh pack, and opened it while Neo got the computer out of hibernation. He watched the older man rummage in the box, take out an antique butane lighter and light up a cigarette as he took up his position by the door.
"Is that why you agree to jakcing in with me?" Neo asked.
"If the Fifth Amendment was still in effect, I'd be pleading it," Jack replied, blowing a smoke ring in Neo's direction.
"Be serious, Jack."
"If I had my druthers, I'd be back in Zion with a good meal inside me and the bedcovers over my head. When you get to be as old as I am, you learn to take your pleasures while you can."
"How old are you anyway?"
"Matrix years: wrong side of forty. Real world: closer to twelve years."
"I'd go easy on the Matrix-side pleasures: Morpheus thinks that's how Cypher got corrupted."
"Probably so. But I keep myself binary: If I'm in the real-reality, I'd rather be in Zion. Here. I'd rather make the code serve ME on MY terms for a change. I'm as crazy as I'm crusty, and I think that's the only reason why Morpheus lets me hang around."
Jack pretended he hadn't completely overcome the Matrix, but Neo knew otherwise. A half houir had passed: he glanced up from the computer and noticed Jack had only smoked half of that first cigarette.
Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeepp!!
BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEPP!!!!
Neo started to reach for the phone, but Jack grabbed it and answered it.
"Hullo? Jack's Pizza, whaddya want?...Yep, yep, yep..." He pretended to write something in the air. "Sure, we'll have that deep dish to you in thirty minutes. Thanks for ordering." He hung up.
"You and Mouse shouldn't be on the same ship," Neo said, darting a glare at Jack.
"Good thing Ref ain't here or she'd be cracking up and rendered non-functioning." Jack eyed the rotary phone. "I got an idea."
"What?"
Jack lifted the receiver of the rotary phone and dialled a number. "Hey, Tank, gotta minute? Could you run a number comparison on One-Boy's cellphone number? Thanks."
A few minutes later, the fax machine chirruped and scrolled out a sheet of paper. Jack reached for it, studied it with a straight face and handed it to Neo, who read it with one eye, while he finished typing the message.
767-933-1212--cellphone activated, 4-21-2000 Thomas A. Anderson.
767-933-1221--Andrea's Pizzeria
"I was afraid of that," Neo groaned, turning back to his work.
"It's so bad its funny!" Jack said, grinning.
Ref came back at that moment. "All quiet on the western front," she said.
"You get that Ovid for me like I asked you?" Jack asked.
"It'll be yours in ten minutes," she said.
Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeepp!!
BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEPPP!!
Neo reached for the cellphone without looking away from the screen, but Ref was a hair quicker and answered it.
After a moment, she said, "There is no pizza." She hung up the cellphone.
"Now there's a way to blow them off," Neo said.
"And give them something to think about," Ref replied, reaching for the rotary and dialling.
A pause. "Yeah, I'm the one that ordered the double cheese," she said.
Her form shivered and vanished in a swirl of code.
"Dratted thing is causing a crime wave," Jack muttered.
"Well, if anyone is listening who shouldn't, it'll throw them off the scent," Neo said.
"Before we find out the hard way who's listening, are you finished?"
"Almost."
A few minutes later, they jacked out.
********************************************************************
After evening mess, Neo sat cuddling with Trinity on the coach in the crew lounge.
"There is no pizza," she repeated, laughing.
"Ref handled it a lot better than I could," he confessed. "Sometimes I think she does better than I do, even if she has those melt-downs."
"You have more riding on you."
"Yeah, all Ref has to do is collect art and music and books for the library," he said, referring to an on-going project in Zion, trying to retrieve the last replicas of the classics of human art.
"Well, if I hear she's tried to do anything more for you than give you a few pointers, I'll scratch her face," she said, pretending to claw the air with one hand.
"Glad to hear you're still jealous."
"Aw, she's all right, she's just a kid," Trinity said, nestling into his shoulder.
*******************************************************************
Next day, Neo was tempted to leave the cellphone turned off when he jacked in to upload one last teaser to Doug, but he couldn't do that: he had to go into Agent territory with Jack and Ref while she collected some packages in the Post Office box she held for this purpose.
"That kid is the biggest asset toward keeping us human," Jack said, as they waited outside.
"She's got a better spirit than she thinks she has," Neo said. "Must come from reading all those texts."
"You have a point there. Oughta read some myself."
Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeppp!!
BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEPPP!!!
They looked at each other. Neo reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the cellphone.
"Hello?"
"Where's my order?! You said that pizza would be here in thirty minutes, and it's been thirty-five minutes!" a woman yattered at him.
"There is NO pizza," Neo informed her and hung up.
The door opened and Ref emerged with a satchel of packages under her arm. "Well, is the unhappy battery getting her late pizza?" she asked.
"No," Neo said. "How'd you know?"
"The lady behind the stamp counter was yelling into the phone about a missing pizza, so I wondered if you'd got the call and given her the hint: 'cause her face went as white as an Agent's shirt."
Jack looked over her shoulder. "Ref, don't turn around." He grabbed her and Neo both byu the arm and half dragged them down the sidewalk, heading for an alleyway between the Post Office and a storefront church.
They fled along a maze of alleyways until they came out on a sidestreet. They ran to a subway entrance at the street corner and clattered down the steps. Shots broke out over their heads as they plunged underground.
Jack lunged for a pay phone and dialled. He shoved the receiver at Ref, who pushed it at Neo. He took it.
The wierd prickling of jacking out passed over him...
********************************************************************
Trinity unlocked the cable from the back of his head. He sat up. Ref lay serene as Tank switched her over to the Construct to unpack and upload her finds. Jack, in the chair next to his lay quiet, but his left arm twitched. His heart monitor was going ballistic. Tank scurried to unlock him.
Jack's eyes flipped open, wild and a little glazed. "Ouch! Dammit!" he cried, gripping his left forearm.
"What happened?" Neo asked.
"Just a bruise. They winged me," Jack said. "I'll live."
"Pizza calls are turning dangerous to your health," Trinity said.
********************************************************************
"It's Anderson's cellphone, I tell yah," the scavenger said. "If he's getting crank calls on it, that's the way to get 'um."
Agent Smith gave the scavenger a razor-thin smile. "You forget, Mr. Regan, you are in training. Your task is to supply the information, not to suggest how we are to act on it."
Agent Green, standing behind Regan's chair put a hand on the back of the trainee's neck. "You'll get your chance soon enough," he said. His fingers twitched ever so slightly and tightened. Regan yelped with pain.
Agent Smith leaned back in his chair. "IF you survive the training."
*********************************************************************
Neo was resting in his cabin when he heard it: a loud, piercing shriek. He tensed, thinking it was a warning siren, and waited for the lights to go out. Then he realized the sound came from Ref, at the start of another meltdown. He got up and stuck his head out into the corridor to see if he could help.
Ref was leaning her face against the wall, Trinity and Sand standing close to her, trying to comfort her. At that moment, Zara and Jack came along. Zara glared at Ref.
"They never should have unplugged her," she said.
"Shut up, Zara: she's useful. And she meltsdown only on this side," Jack retorted. To Ref he added, "Hey, you ever get the missing pieces of the busted statues you got a while back? Future generations are gonna think, 'What were our ancestors thinking when they made these wierd statues with no arms?'"
Ref managed to look over her shoulder and laugh at Jack's remark. Neo caught himself breathing a sigh of relief. Ref would be all right.
*******************************************************************
After another training session with the new inductee, Agent Smith's pager went off. Code 13 blinked on the display. The chief wanted him to report to the central office.
He entered the chief's dimly lit office.
"Carton Smith?" asked a feminine voice from the well of the shaded windows.
"I am here."
"You have served well since your recovery, training our new defenders. But now it is time you mobilized one of your more important proteges."
"What do you mean? Regan barely passed his first trial."
"I did not mean Regan, I meant the female juvenile."
He tried not to grit his teeth. The gestures these human personas made! "As you wish."
********************************************************************
"Did you ever help unplug anyone, Ref?" Neo asked, later that evening, when he, Ref and Jack had gone in to contact Doug, prepartory to unplugging him.
"When I was on the 'Gilgamesh', the commander used to have me jack in for long periods of time. I'd actually pose as an employee in different companies, use that as leverage to free up whole blocks of peopel. If the boss got wise, the commander had me drop a red pill in the guy's coffee."
"Until she tried that on her ex-boss from her pre-unplugging," Jack said.
"What happened then?" Neo asked.
Ref shivered. "It proved something I'd wondered about before I did it."
"Proved what?"
Ref looked away, out the grimy window. "I'd rather not say."
Jack looked up from cleaning his gun. "Her ex-boss was an Agent in disguise. She told me she knew all along the guy wasn't ordinary. She knew... that's why THEY went after her and that's why we freed her."
"Let's not keep this fella waiting," Neo said. "Ref, you okay?"
"Yeah, got my grip back."
They went out into the hallway and down to the loading dock, where the car was parked, covered with a tarp, which Jack hauled off before he climbed into the driver's seat. Neo got in next to him, while Ref got into the back.
"So where is this place?"
"Lou's Laundromat, over on Fletcher Street," Neo said. "Doug does his laundry there."
BEEEEEEEPP!!
BEEEEEEEPP!!
Neo looked at Jack, who glanced at the cellphone and turned back to the light traffic about them. Neo took out the phone.
"Hello?"
"Hello?" a little girl's voice. "Who's this?"
"Who's this?" he asked. He wanted to bite his tongue on these words, but they slipped out.
"Kristin. Is this the store? The pizza store?"
"Uh, no, I'm sorry." He caught himself feeling a little sorry for her.
"Daddy! It's not the pizza store." Something else rustled on the other end of the line.
Ref lunged over the back of the seat, snatched the phone from Neo's hand and threw it out the open window so hard it shattered on the pavement ahead of them. The phone crunched as the wheels passed over it.
"Ref, what the hell you do that for?"
"I heard the kid's voice. I know her: she's bad news," she said. "Jack, find us an exit!"
"Yes, ma'am!" Jack said, flooring the gas and steering through the traffic. The car bounced off a Lexus and a Probe before Jack turned and charged down an alleyway. Garbage cans clattered, bowled over in the onslaught.
"How did you know the kid was trouble?" Neo asked.
"I babysat her before I was unplugged," Ref said.
"Good God!" Jack muttered, glanicng into the rearview mirror.
"What?" Ref asked.
"Don't look back," Jack ordered.
"Why?" Ref asked with an innocent, mock child-like lilt.
"Because I said so!" Jack snapped, eyes locked on the end of the alleyway.
Neo peered over his shoulder out the back window at a...
Pizza delivery truck.
"Uh oh," he said.
"What?" Ref asked. "What is it?"
"It's a pizza delivery truck."
"It's probably chock-full of Agents in disguise," Jack said. He spoke too late.
Ref peered out the back window. "Oh no!!" she said, and burst out laughing so hard she fell over in the back seat.
"Let the squiddie out of the bag, didn't you?" Jack snarled, turning onto a side street and whipping down another alleyway. "If you weren't the One, and I weren't a cross-wearer, I'd THROW you to them God-damned Agents! Find some way to shut her up."
"I can think of only one way," Neo said. He reached back and slugged Ref under the jaw. She sighed and slumped on the seat. "Didn't want to do that, but I had no choice."
"Well, it worked, didn't it?" Jack said, pulling up near a hardware store.
They threw open the doors. Jack grabbed Ref and hauled her over his shoulder as they ran for a phonebooth on the street corner.
Neo dialed the number and shoved the phone to Jack as it picked up. Jack leaned into the receiver as his and Ref's forms shivered into bits of code falling into the receiver.
Tires squealed behind him as he caught the receiver. He glanced back to see the pizza truck turn in the alleyway and charge full tilt at the phone booth. The skin-prickle of jacking out passed over him.
As his awareness retreated through a bolthole of code, Neo dimly heard the crash.
*******************************************************************
"What the h--- happened?" Morpheus asked.
"We got chased by a pizza truck," Jack said as Sand unstrapped an unconscious Ref. "Ref had another meltdown."
"You got chased by a _what_?" Morpheus asked.
"A pizza truck," Neo said.
"Does this have anything to do with the pizza calls?" Trinity asked, trying not to laugh as she unstrapped him.
"I'm afraid it did," Neo said.
*********************************************************************
Agent Green kicked the wreckage of the phone booth. "They got away again."
"I can see that," Agent Smith snarled, trying to scrape some cooling mozzarella off his pant leg.
They walked to the back of the now banged-up pizza truck. Regan sat on the back bumper surreptitiously munching on a slice of deep dish.
"Put that down," Agent Smith ordered.
"Shame to let it go to waste," Regan said. "Want some?"
"You know we don't eat," Smith said. "One more infraction, Regan, and we'll have to flush you."
"Next time, maybe we shouldn't use a pizza truck," Regan suggested. Then he nervously dropped the slice as his two supervisors moved in.
********************************************************************
"Tank, when you get Neo a new cellphone, make sure the number isn't similar to anything else," Morpheus warned over evening mess.
"What's next, a dry cleaner's?" Sand asked.
"No, a lingerie shop, that's funnier," Mouse said, grinning. Trinity stifled a laugh in her hand. Ref, holding an ice pack to her jaw with her free hand, kicked Mouse under the table. Neo focused his attention on his single-cell protein in an effort to keep from laughing his head off.
The End