It was 1996, and John Gideon-Sloan, alias Emmanuel, led on his bed, staring at the ceiling.

The room, part of an eighteenth-century manor house in Lancashire, England, called Pendle House, was decorated typically of the rest of the residence. Dark wooden panelling made up the walls of the room, while a thick, royal blue carpet covered the floor. Several paintings hung on the wall: the Gideon and Sloan family crests, the crest of the de Montfort line, from which the Gideon family came, and several impressionist pieces, there at the seventeen-year-olds insistence. A solid, substantial mahogany desk rested in one corner of the room, while in the other an array of expensive computer and entertainment equipment flashed mutely. The bed on which John lay was a four-post, curtained affair, with ornate carvings above his head. Any walls that were spare were covered in bookshelves containing leather-bound tomes.

The estate took up twenty-four acres in green rolling hills of the Ribble Valley, the heart of the Kingdom, and one of the wealthiest pockets in the otherwise industrial East Lancashire. It was also both the pride and hatred of John Gideon-Sloan. Pride, because as a teenager living in such a magnificent house, and attending the top private school Charterhouse, he knew he was privileged beyond 99% of his peers. Hatred, because this house was the symbol of all that constrained him: the public image of his family, the strict, cold and detached authoritarianism of his widower father, and his lack of friends besides the silver spoon Tarquin's, Crispin's and Quentin's of Charterhouse.

John had planned to do this for most of the day. Look at the ceiling, and consider. Consider the puzzle, which had been presented to him by the flashing computer equipment in one corner of the opulent room. John, whose degree of computer literacy had seemingly come to him with no effort whatsoever, had hit a brick wall in his forays into computer security. Though not particularly familiar with the rag-tag scene of computer geeks, criminals and middle-aged officer workers that made up the internet underworld, even he had heard of the infamous hacker, Morpheus.

 So what a surprise it had been when that very same man had found the number of his cell phone and told him to stop immediately his probing of a small Internet service provider based in Guyana. John had only taken interest in the ISP because someone using a connection from there had breached his firewall and looked at, though not altered, his data. Which in itself was a feat – John took a certain pride in the security of his network. So John had probed it – up until last week anyway, when the man claiming to be Morpheus had warned him off it.

John's musings were brought to an end by the shrill ring of his cell phone. Taking a deep breath, he allowed life to return to his body, and swung himself out of his bed. At full height, he stood at around six-feet; he had a medium, muscular build, and dark brown hair with blue eyes. Dressed in faded blue jeans and a white undershirt, he moved over to his desk and picked up the phone.

"Hello?" John asked, in his perfect R.P. accent.

"Giddy?" An excited voice asked down the line.

"Chase. How are you?"

Chase Morrison, handle Castor, was an American friend, who had often collaborated with John online. The two had never met, but had spoken on the phone, and John liked it better that way: Chase's American sense of fairness and justice would undoubtedly be set off-kilter by John's aristocracy.

"Uhm, fine. Look, you know that Guyanian ISP?"

"Guyanan, but yes, go ahead."

"Well, you know how that dude, Morpheus, told you to stay away from it?" Chase questioned, his excitement reaching a crescendo.

"I recall."

"Well, I took the liberty of… uhm… inspecting British Telecom's phone records, and it turns out that that phone call wasn't made from or through any known terrestrial network."

"Which means?" John asked as he rested on the edge of his desk.

"Which means that… well, we were right. The Internet isn't all there is out there. There must be something else outside of it. Much bigger."

"The Matrix?"

"Shh. Shhh. Shit John, I thought we agreed not to use that word. You don't know who's listening."

"You watch far too much television, my American friend. But you're right. This is big. I'm going to book you a flight to London Heathrow. I'll be there to pick you up, and I'll bring you back here."

"But what about M.I.T? My interview is the day after tomorrow."

"You'll be back by then, don't worry," John. He paused, then added, "Don't tell anyone where you're going. I'll arrange for a car to pick you up in an hour or so. Pack sensibly."

Four hours later, John slid the key into the ignition of his brand-new silver BMW Z3, and backed down the hundred-metre gravel driveway that lead up to his house. Spinning the car roughly around at the end of drive, he slid it into second gear and sped out of the gate, which closed automatically behind him. Two minutes later, he was in fifth and speeding down the M6.

With a screech, the Z3 slid into a space outside of terminal four at Heathrow. Locking the car behind him, the seventeen-year-old slid his jacket in and ran into the terminal, just in time to see the doors open for passengers alighting from the BA2562 flight from JFK. Chase was one of the first out. A little shorter than John, he was sandy-haired and very thin. He carried with him six or seven black suitcases on a trolley, most of which looked to John to be computer equipment. "Pack sensibly," he muttered to himself then hurried over to help his friend out.

On the motorway, Chase was still oohing and aahing over the car, quite shocked that John could afford the insurance on the vehicle, let alone the vehicle itself.

"You said you went to a private school and your dad was a big-shot stockbroker, but you never mentioned you had THIS."

"Well, I only passed my test last winter, and I got it this spring. Besides, my father bought it so I could travel to Charterhouse and back by myself," John replied as he eyed the rear-view mirror, and screamed past a Fiat Punto at ninety. "Anyway, what are we going to do about this business with the Guyanan ISP, and Morpheus, and the Matrix? He sounded rather threatening on the telephone, and I'd sooner not upset him."

"Oh, he's probably just a geek like us," Chase soothed. John gave him a sideways, indignant glance, but nodded mutely. "We'll break it again when we back to your place, see if we can find anything that leads to him. Or to the Matrix."

"Morpheus' connection to the Matrix is not the question."

"Then what is?"

"What is the Matrix?"

After Chase had recovered from the shock at seeing his friend's house, the pair retired to John's room, and set about their work. The network before them was comprised of two windows machines, a Linux box and a Mac. They worked simultaneously, beside each other, as they breached the Guyanan ISP through a backdoor Chase had left behind, and searched through its database for any link to Morpheus or the Matrix.

At last, John hit his hand to the desk. "I've found something."

Chase swivelled immediately on his chair and studied the screen of the Linux box. "What?"

"What in the Lord's name is that?" John said, pointing at the lines of green characters streaming down his screen."

Chase studied it. "It looks Chinese to me. Or Japanese. Maybe it's Navajo. God knows."

"No, I know Japanese, and it isn't that. And Chinese isn't that dissimilar. I thought Navajo had different symbols to these. Besides, it doesn't even make sense. It's just random."

"No, it isn't. Look." Chase's finger moved down the screen, at data that seemed to be moving in groups of three, side by side. "Look at that. What does that look like to you?"

"It looks like groups of three moving up and down. Like two people running past each other in the street or something."

"No, look closer. It's moving too fast. That symbol over there by itself looks like people, but these look like cars."

John glanced at Chase. "I think it's probably a government file. Maybe they keep real-time reports on traffic movements, or something. Or perhaps it's a record. Can we alter it?"

Chase turned to his keyboard, and quickly transferred the symbols to his screen, then to all four. His fingers clicked rapidly at the keyboard. After a few moments, the data seemed to shrink a bit.

"Now, look at that. That looks like a highway or something, with hills about it."

"If I didn't know better, I'd say that was Pendle hill there, Whalley village over there… and that traffic is the M6. Can you find out, and how come the data we randomly pulled is focusing on the Ribble Valley, of all places?"

"Perhaps it's engineered to bring up data which is relevant to the point where it is requested. I dunno."

John slumped back in his chair, and stroked his chin. After a moment, he sat up, and clicked on his keyboard. The symbols changed again, and seemed to centre on a few stationary markings east to the M6.

"That's us. That's my house," John said firmly.

Chase looked sceptical. "What's that?" he asked, pointing at a very small symbol resting at the side of a larger one.

"That must be the Z3. Jesus, how up to date is this? That's exactly where the Z3 is. Do you think it's a spy satellite or something? But this is impossible. There is nothing that advanced out there, is there?"

Chase swallowed hard. "John… try this." He clicked a few times on the keyboard, and with a whoosh, the entire screen zoomed out and revealed trillions upon trillions of microscopic symbols moving against each other. "That must be… that must be England. No, even bigger… Europe. Perhaps the Northern Hemisphere. It's so incredibly complex. This is just impossible. This is…"

John felt bumps raise on his skin, and his hair stand on end, "A perfect schematic for the entire world?"

As if those words themselves were a trigger, all four screens simultaneously flashed, and turned to black. After a few moments, a single word appeared on the screen.

Ø Enough.

John and Chase looked at each other. Then John tapped at the keyboard.

Ø I am Emmanuel, and my friend is Castor. Who are you?

Ø A friend.

Chase made a derisive noise, and turned to his own keyboard.

Ø What is it we just saw?

Ø I think you know.

John paused, then glanced at his friend. He reached slowly for the keyboard.

Ø The Matrix?

To be continued.