DISCLAIMER: I own nothing in this fanfic, safe the characters in themselves and the Incentive's concept. The Matrix universe as a whole belongs to the quite talented Wachowski brothers, Village Roadshow Pictures and Warner Brothers. All other brand names mentioned in this fanfic are the property of their respective, legal users.
***
It was supposed to be just another covert foray into the Matrix. Nothing too hard. Max said it would've been like this. No exposure to Agents, no stunts, no nothing.
Even before we entered the Nortel building, on the other side of the Jacques-Cartier bridge, I felt it. A buzzing energy in the air, filling me with a growing need to get out of the car and run my ass off towards the offices. Even before we entered the parking, I was certain that our time would be scarce.
This was our biggest, most daring move ever, the way I saw it. Unfortunately, Max, my mentor, didn't share my point of view. He'd donned his old R.S.I, the black suit and dark glasses, along with the GRC pass he flashed to the security guard getting us onto the asphalt-covered surface like a knife cutting through butter. This was partly why Max was so confident, so sure of the flawlessness of his plan.
As for myself –I'll get to the formal presentations eventually, I just don't want to kill the punchline right away- I was seated in the back of the car, leather-clad from head to toe, my hands held behind my back with a pair of cuffs. Max was playing the part of Taggart, the Agent he once was, while I tried my best to look like what I imagined a caught potential would look like: a prisoner on his way to the gallows.
I think I did a pretty good job at it. The guard looked at me as if I was so much turd and that made me smile inwardly. Perfect. Everything was going on according to our plans, except for that nagging urge to go faster that nipped at my heart like a cannibalistic Chihuahua.
"I just don't like this, Max. I don't like this at all." I whispered in his ear, as he pulled me out of the black Crown Victoria with all the roughness reserved for real lowlifes, which made me grunt a little.
Once we were inside and out of earshot, I glared at him. "You could've squeezed my wrists harder, you know?" I asked, my voice evidently filled with irony.
"Sorry." he replied, after a silent chuckle. "Force of habit.
- Tell me about it." I answered grumpily.
The walls of the lobby were covered with thick glass panels that protected huge ferns and a wall-mounted fountain. I guess that if the lights had been turned on and that we've been in daytime, this place must've seemed quite cheery. That made me scowl lightly, in remembrance of my past life. I knew how that felt like, to be a part of the rat race, to work without purpose, without passion. I remembered my days as a slave to the Matrix and its system.
Dismissing these thoughts, I let my feet guide me behind Max, as we entered the elevator. I waited until the double doors closed to shoot a questioning glance to Max.
"You can take these things off, now." he replied, smiling kindly.
I half-lidded my eyes and concentrated on my wrists. I began to push. First, the cuffs held on, biting in my flesh. Still, after a few tense seconds, the familiar tingling overtook my wrists and hands and I felt them slide through the code that constituted the cuffs like air through a duct. The modern torture instruments clanked to the floor and I raised my hands in front of my face, in time to see them phase into existence once more, the greenish code regaining its opacity, returning to its initial seeming of flesh, muscle and bone.
The elevator stopped. We'd reached our floor.
Nortel Networks was –is- one of Canada's most thriving telecommunication service provider. Wireless networks, inner LANs for businesses, along with Novell security solutions, Nortel had it all, alongside what the general mass knew of it, that is, high-speed Net access and phone plans for households.
We were after the wireless telecom part of the building. Of course, this was just a relay station for the signals, and not the company's main broadcast station, as could be told by the little forest of antennas and satellite dishes that crowned the top of the place.
Stepping out of the elevator, I was surprised by the stark contrast to the sleek, glass walls that had made up the lobby. Now, almost all around us, I could see HAL 9000's little brothers and sisters, huge servers that relayed everything of the digital persuasion that Montreal sent to the whole of cyberspace.
Max and I wished to create a tear in the Matrix. A tear is an abandoned part of the mainframe, left unattended by the Architect as it shows all signs of being a cluster corrupted beyond repair. Most members of the resistance use such decrepit places as their havens and council chambers within the Matrix. The most common way to create one is to create a massive bug, thus affecting an area around the attacked point. With a little luck, the Matrix's fabric would ripple and shear for miles around, possibly pushing one or two buildings out of the main system. Those corrupted areas would serve as a gathering point for the likes of us.
Within the Matrix's own computers, like desktops or handhelds, a bug or a General Protection Fault usually occurred when the user did something that the program or operating system was unable to comprehend or assimilate. Within the Matrix's own fabric, a GPF could bear many forms. Max and I intended to use the biggest tool at our disposal: a whole, wired building, filled with explosives.
I remember us seriously considering the use of a ground-based atom bomb, but we finally decided against it. We were only trying to mess up the Matrix, not to kill a few hundreds' worth of Sleepwalkers, which was how we referred to the still-plugged humans.
I fumbled in my leather jacket and fished out my cell phone. Clicking it open and pressing the 0 key, I dialed for our operator, Pandora.
"Alright, Pan. Send Big Bertha over." I said, sneering as I spoke.
"Roger Dodger!" I heard her reply, her voice covering the sound of keys pushed at a blinding speed.
Soon, the air in front of us seemed to shimmer and ripple, and it seemed as if something would materialise in front of us. But as the fluctuations grew in power, half-visible tentacles of nothingness seared towards each of the predefined points of detonation Max had planned. After a few seconds, charges of C-4 were visible here and there, stuck to the walls and pillars, on the ceiling and, in fact, almost everywhere in the building, if you knew where to look.
I looked at my friend the ex-Agent with a hesitating stare. "Are you sure it's gonna work?" I queried.
To which he simply smiled, his eyes indecipherable behind his black Armanis. "Positive. I've been on the machines' side long enough to know what they'll be expecting. That's not part of it. We aren't part of what the Architect expected. Just by being here, we're probably causing a few minor GPFs."
I smiled, amazed as always by the certainty that fuelled him. He was a born strategist. He knew the innards and inner workings of the Matrix better than even the One would, as he was related to it directly. His blood, bones and flesh were made out of the Matrix's fabric, while I still had some trouble to adjust to what I really was. I'll get to that matter soon enough.
It was Max's turn to ring Pandora, as he raised a hand to his earpiece and scowled imperceptibly, concentrating. Finally, after a few seconds, something unexpected happened.
He raised his eyebrows in surprise and stated in a rather shaky tone that we'd been found. The Noah was chased by Sentinels and we were running on our Zion-based ports. I sighed. If it weren't for Pandora's reflexes, the squiddies might've aimed for our broadcast antenna and cut us short. We would've both been corrupted and rendered useless.
"But if we've been found, this means that-
- Yes. My old brethren's after us. It's only a matter of minutes, if not seconds.
- Pandora and the others… They might-
- They can take care of themselves, don't worry. Just two squids. Nothing a hovercraft's gun turrets can't handle."
Sighing, I surrendered to Max's expertise. We were in enough shit as it was, I didn't need to worry about them as of now. All that mattered is that we bailed out of here as quickly as possible.
For Max, it was easier than for me. All he had to do was to face one of the Agents down and use the corpses left behind if he was injured or killed. For me, a fledgling Glitch, things were different. I had to make tracks just like any other resistance fighter.
So I jumped through the nearest bay window, swinging myself around so that I'd grab the window's frame and propel myself upside down, up towards the top of the building. Just as I felt the woosh of the moving air around me, I distantly heard the elevator doors being torn open, followed by the muffled sounds of gunfight.
I ran. Ran as if the Devil himself were after me. In a sense, it isn't so far from the truth, as these MIB look-alikes were spooky enough for a guy like me, twenty years old with only one of them as a member of this cloaked war.
Dropping my current R.S.I out of panic, I morphed back into what I once was, a part-time punk, with my cargo pants and combat boots, red tee-shirt labelled with the word SLUT. The incarnation of every troubled teen there ever was, so much that with all my efforts to stand out of the crowd, I only blended in further into the Matrix's fabric.
I leaped down from the building's roof, my arms flailing in my futile attempt to stabilise myself in my fall. It didn't really matter anymore. Nothing did. Not even the solidity factor of the asphalt that was racing to come into contact with my feet.
It worked, as it had worked other times before. The asphalt rippled under my feet, becoming as soft and cushioning as melted taffy. Immediately after, I resumed my sprint and headed for the freeway entrance. In the second between my landing and my dash, the ground had resumed its solid consistency and now reacted normally to my impact, only with some measure of delay, by cracking violently.
I ran all the way across the bridge, back to Montreal's south shore. Back to where our smaller tear was located, in Longueuil, and also where all had started for me.
As I came onto Tashereau boulevard, the ambulance that was speeding beside me, sirens howling, stopped dead. Out stepped Max, who ripped I.Vs and electrodes from his chest, as he strode towards me, under the bewildered gazes of the van's medical technicians. He had the ability to insert his code within every inactive RSI he could find, which was either dead or sleeping humans.
His normal appearance was miles away from the Agent he had once been. While his face's frame remained the same, large and strong, his hair a black auburn hue and his eyes a dull grey, everything else had changed. His face now bore the wrinkles of a man used to smiling and even grinning openly, his hair worn in a straight, militaristic brush cut. Instead of the black Armanis, wireframe glasses were visible, which offered him a lightly intellectual feel. He wore a dirty and sweaty white tee-shirt, faded blue jeans and brown worker boots, along with a brown, chipped and worn motorcycle jacket.
He casually drew his gun, a silver Desert Eagle, and aimed at one of the technicians.
"What the fuck?" blurted the said tech. To which question Max only sustained his aim and began to count out loud.
"One, two, three, four, five, six, seven…"At seven, both techies began to scream, as their bodies were warped in order to fit the Agents' predictable RSI. Before their transformation even ended, Max placed a bullet in each of their heads, aborting the transfer and causing the two RSIs to disintegrate like vampires biting dust under the proverbial stake, only they did so in a hodgepodge of corrupted codelines.
"Quick," he said to me. "We've got to get back to the Hive before we have the whole city's worth of Agents after us."
As I sought to ask him why, a distant explosion was heard, coming from behind us. The few passers-by who had either seen us and stopped or felt the blast felt it to be as the Matrix meant it to be: yet another terrorist attack.
But for Max and I, the explosion sent a tidal wave of panicked, disorganised script through the fabric of the Matrix, and we both felt every aspect of reality being cruelly torn and twisted for but a millisecond.
We'd made it. Somewhere in the normal blast radius stood a now disconnected group of tenements, either residences or buildings, that only awaited us. What a relief. Housing the entire Hive inside our small, burnt and decrepit apartment building was becoming somewhat hard, as we still didn't understand how to stretch the boundaries of matter using the discrepancies and inner flaws of this reality's code. The extra space would allow us to breathe a bit.
I grinned at Max, he grinned back at me. We ran on, straight across Brossard and into Longueuil, near the Gentilly boulevard, where our current Hive's portal stood.
When we reached the Hive, our burnt, charred and ominous apartment, we were exhilerated. We'd finally have a place to call our own, since neither Zion or the Matrix seemed to be able to accept us.
I followed Max as we pulled open a makeshift plywood door and entered the apartment building's basement. Even after a year, the scent of smoke that lingered in the air surprised me. The fire had happened two years ago, allegedly triggered by arsonists. Those arsonists would turn out to be the first members of our growing community. I didn't know why, but every aspect of the Matrix went on around this building as if it didn't exist. Police tape still encircled the area, but the whole place was just another landmark now, as the glaring faces of an elderly couple that passed by told us. They probably figured us to be squatters. Nevertheless, we closed the door behind us and groped in the darkness, until I found the big industrial switch that was rigged to the basement's right wall, just beside the stairway. I flicked it on, the rectangular and drab concrete space filling with crude light dispensed by crackling neon lights we'd stolen from a nearby light fixtures shop.
The large room was empty, except for an old, plastic milk carton that had been turned over, serving as a makeshift table for an old, olive-green spin-dial phone. I stared at the thing dumbly for a few seconds, mesmerised by my own reflection on its scratched and bumped surface. So much that when the phone rang, I jumped lightly.
Max placed a hand on my shoulder and chuckled. "Whoa there. Settle in, Perseus. Guess the run wore you out more than you expected, right?
- No." I replied silently. "I just blacked out a little, that's all."
Answering Max's question was probably the smartest thing I'd ever done tonight, but it still didn't override what I understood, when I heard the door being torn open above us. My running across the bridge had ticked more Agents and led them to our access port. I vaguely recalled seeing shaded eyes in the shadows of an old sedan, halfway across Jacques-Cartier.
"Shit." I added, clenching my teeth. "Cover me and phone Pandora. We need that return signal."
Any other fighter would've stared at me and asked me if I had gone nuts. But Max didn't. He knew what I was capable of, what we were capable of. He only doubted that I'd be able to focus enough to enter the mindset needed to fight two Agents. I honestly didn't know myself, but it was the only chance we had.
I turned and faced the door, eyes once again half-lidded, and raised my hands in front of me. Guns, I thought. If I ever needed guns, I needed them NOW.
The air rippled in my hands and sweat beaded my forehead. Conjuring up the code of dual Mag-10s was hard. Painfully hard, but I'd never faced Agents down before. I didn't care how fast or how accurately I would fire, I only wanted to rip some of their nonexisting flesh apart, to make them suffer. We'd come so far, I'd never let them reach Zion or the Noah. I'd never let them undo what we'd worked so hard to achieve. They couldn't physically harm any of us, but they could harm me emotionally by destroying the work of months of carefully planned observation.
I guess all that righteousness helped. With a cry of near-agony, I felt the guns become solid in my hands. The effort made them shaky, but I tried my best to stifle the tremors.
The next moment, the plywood door was resolutely torn away from the basement shaft opening, letting natural light flood into our cold and moist, concrete-lined space. At the same instant, I leapt backwards, raising my guns towards the opening above and the two shadows silhouetted against it. The Mags sent nervous discharges throughout the whole of my arms, and for a moment, I was aware of each of the bullets that left my weapons, aware that I was tumbling down towards the concrete floor, where I'd probably land on my back. So I sealed my eyes shut and concentrated on the continuous fire that I fed to the Agents. I could feel them moving, avoiding each and every bullet with preternatural grace, while standing almost perfectly still.
Stop shooting for the sake of shooting. Think like an Agent, instead.
I stopped shooting for but a second and opened my eyes. The suit-clad drones stopped flipping back and forth, the five or six mirror images that followed them both disappearing instantly. One of them started to walk down the stairs.
"The defects," I heard him say. "They must be terminated."
He raised his gun and cocked it. This was my cue.
What followed has always felt odd to me, even though I've done it a few times now. Time almost stopped, and the air gained the consistency and feel of porridge or gruel. The Agent's movements and the mechanical cycle of his gun inserting a bullet into the cannon and slowly triggering the explosion that would expel it all seemed to be nearly frozen. Even Max, who stood beside me, apparently stuck in the middle of a shouted word, cell phone stuck to his right ear as he was sprawled on his back, away from the Agent and myself's lines of fire, surprised me. I was the only one who was moving at a normal speed.
I uncurled my fingers from the semi-automatics and let them fall. Only they didn't. They remained suspended in the air, as if the Invisible Man was holding the aim for me. I concentrated on my right hand and conjured a Colt, which was my favourite handgun brand.
Walking up to the Agent, I stuck my Colt's muzzle right in front of his Desert Eagle's, both openings facing one another like the angry eyes of two staring gargoyles.
I pulled the trigger.
Immediately, time resumed its course, as my bullet flew into the Agent's firearm, shredded its ignition system apart, tore through the safety and bit into his right jugular. His gun-holding hand went limp, his eyes became hazy and he fell on his knees, dead as a doorknob. With the connection between him and his host now severed, blind lightning covered his body and quickly seeped away, revealing the body of the old man that had passed by us, when we had descended the stairs into the basement. The other Agent had also been killed by my single bullet, the elderly woman's hand falling limply onto the first step, which was now coated with her blood.
Max sighed and stood up. "It's alright, Pan." I heard him say. "Perseus' taken care of them. Yes, send the signal over. We're clear now."
The phone began to ring. Max closed his cell phone and pocketed it. "You first." he said, his voice still laden with the grim authority common to Agents.
I picked the receiver up and glanced in my friend and mentor's direction. "See you soon." I said softly, after which I stuck the phone to my ear. Everything blacked out, but that didn't last.
The darkness was slowly replaced by a white void, similar to that of the construct program common to all resistance vessels. But this one was different.
Everywhere I looked, people stood. Some wore the outlandish clothes common to resistance fighters once in the Matrix, while others could be mistaken for still-plugged minds, as I could see a man with a mechanic's stained green outfit, a police officer, a hot dog stand worker, a proper English man, complete with watermelon hat and cane and many others. Children, animals, household appliances, personal computers, everything was there. Everything that shaped the Matrix into what it was, only each element was separate from the rest. It was like an open flea market in which everything and everyone were on display, from people to traffic lights.
The Englishman took a step forward. His face was a charismatic array of flaps of skin and wrinkles, his eyes a shining, witty shade of grey. In fact, he was dressed in grey from head to toe, except for his cane, which was made out of lacquered wood. Under his hat, his hair was pushed back in a short and wavy, white mass. He offered me a warm smile and placed a hand on my right shoulder.
"Welcome back, son." he said to me. "Welcome home."
Sensing Max materialising behind me, I felt even safer.
This was the Hive. This was home.
***
Alright. You've read this far. I think it's time you understood.
Have you heard of the Marovingian, of Persephone, of Seraph and the Twins? I'm a little like them, but I'm also worlds away from them.
I'm a program. My initial designation was Tyler Deveraux, created with the purpose to serve as son for two plugged humans which R.S.I rendered unable to procreate. I'm an experiment of some sort, as the Architect sought to understand how a program designed to operate above human standards, just like Agents, would react, if its conscience was nurtured by humans.
The first eighteen years of my life are a hoax, memories written in both my mind and that of my human parents, who were solidly convinced that I was their biological son. In truth, my life as a program has no existence beyond the last two years, beyond that late evening when I woke up in my bed, lost somewhere between consciousness and slumber.
A year ago, I met the Englishman. From that moment on, I slipped further and further away from Tyler Deveraux and into Perseus. Further and further away from my makeshift life as a human youth and into my life as a member of a group of rebelled programs which is known by its members as the Humanus Incentive.
We're programs, but what links us together is our common care of Humanity. We all wish the resistance to succeed in overthrowing our predecessors, as it'll mark the beginning of a new alliance between men and the machines.
Unlike Agents or some of the independent, rebellious programs, we don't seek to abuse humans while defying the laws of the Matrix. Those tears that we create are done so with a single objective in mind: we seek to create our own, isolated reality within which we may live our lives, independent from all control measures. Since our forays and hacks often help the rebels, we collaborate with Humanity on an open-minded basis. In return, they shelter us within Zion's mainframe, sometimes uploading some of us within a hovercraft's construct program, sending us in the Matrix either as backup or as scouting forces.
It's out of this spirit of collaboration, of this gathering of humane machines, that our leader, the Englishman, has dubbed our community The Humanus Incentive.
This is the story of how I came to join it.