A/N: I'm really sorry that I haven't updated in forever. I've had this
chapter done for weeks. I'm a horrible person. But I did get a 4.0 this
semester, so, you know, studying good. But anyway, I have reservations
about these two chapters. They don't flow too well for me. I know what
I'm trying to say, but I don't want to just say it. So let me know what
you think. I have two hella long chapters for you. It's my apology for
the long wait.
Xixie
In which I lose the thread of the story . . . I think.
Pusher awoke the morning after his trip into the Matrix early. Assuming that no one would be awake, he padded into the mess hall for breakfast. Surprised to find Trinity already awake and eating, he nodded before sitting across from her.
"Morning, Trin."
"Morning. You know I really hate it when people call me that."
"I know."
Trinity smiled, but raised an eyebrow.
He looked at her for a moment, then nodded. "Okay. Trinity."
"You and I are going to work in the Construct today. Hopefully we can recreate the code that you hacked yesterday. If we can recreate a segment of the new agent's programming, maybe Neo can figure out how to dismantle it."
Pusher nodded. He could recreate the code; it'd probably take hours upon hours, but he could do it. It was, however, some of the most amazingly complex stuff he'd ever seen. Just how Neo managed to dismantle Agent Smith still confused Pusher, but he figured that even the One would have problems with this new thing.
The generators kicked in at that moment, signaling the beginning of "morning." Pusher figured the rest of the crew would be rising any time now.
He was not mistaken. Only five minutes later, Neo entered the mess looking sleepy.
Although he found Neo's half-awake mumbling annoying, he watched as Trinity followed his every move with her eyes, smiling when he bumped into the edge of the bench before plopping down beside his lover.
Staring bleakly at the back wall before turning to his right, Neo yawned before saying, "Why'd you get up so early, Trin? I'd have gotten up to, if you'd wanted."
"Yeah. You look so ready to be awake."
Pusher got up from the table, moving away to wash his bowl. "I'll be on the bridge when your ready to go in, Trin- ity."
Trinity, who was talking to Neo in a low voice, turned slightly. "I'll be up when we're finished with breakfast."
Neo looked up. "Going in where?"
"Just to the Construct. We're going to work on the code he found yesterday. Give you a visual aid."
"I could have just looked at it myself, you know."
Trinity thought about throwing out a remark about his safety and needing to be careful, but thought better. "I know. But this way, since I get to work with him on this, you not only get to wash my dishes, you also get to revamp the repulsor arrays." She referred to the very messy job of cleaning out and recalibrating a series of engine nodes.
"Well," Neo returned dryly. "As long as there's an upside."
Anyone who knew the Trinity of a year ago would have been shocked at the genuine smile that she gave him, and probably disconcerted with the way she crinkled her nose before leaning forward to kiss him. "Off to work."
Morpheus and Tank moved out of the doorway so that Trinity could get past.
Neo stood, taking his and Trinity's dishes over to the sink. "I get stuck doing this a lot, don't I?"
Morpheus and Tank thought for a second, before replying in unison. "Yeah."
*****
Trinity and Pusher entered the Construct under the supervision of Tank. Immediately, Trinity had him pull up the program he had been compiling on the computer. The three-dimensional nature of the code made if far easier at this point to manipulate the strings of symbols in cyberspace. And Trinity, would had pretty much hovered over Pusher while he worked on the code, was familiar enough to help him.
As soon as they started, Pusher began the questioning he had been waiting for. "So. Trinity. What's up with you and Savior-boy?"
Trinity looked at him with an unreadable expression. "You've been here for a week. You managed to hold off questions for a lot longer than I expected." She supposed she owed him some answers.
"Not really. It's just very difficult to find a time when the two of you aren't attached at the hip."
"I don't know what you mean."
Trinity moved a strand of code, which caused a cascade effect. The entire shape of the coding changed. Pusher moved to examine the programming from a new angle.
"For a person who used to swear that the beds were too small for one person, let alone two, you seem to have found a way to work around it."
"All it takes is a desire to work around it. Then the problem disappears."
"Six months ago, when we met up at the Tashi incident, you said you didn't want to sleep with me. You said that physical attachments were irrelevant. That we should focus specifically on the Rebellion. And you changed your mind two months after that?"
Trinity countered another cascade caused by Pusher. "We're not in a relationship, Pusher. Technically, we were never in a relationship. This is none of your business."
"Trin. It's not as if I want you back or anything. I'm just worried that you've changed yourself too much for this guy. You don't have to love him just because he's the One."
"You never had me to get back. And I won't say I haven't been changed by Neo, but I will say that I'm happier now than before."
Trinity paused to look Pusher in the eye. "And I don't love him because he's the One. He's the One because I love him."
She paused. "Just so you know, the only reason I said that six months ago was because we had already started monitoring Neo. I couldn't bring myself to fuck you and then go watch him sleep. I would have felt dirty."
Just because she owed him answers didn't mean she had to be nice during questioning.
Pusher managed to keep the look of pain off his face. "Don't get nasty or anything."
Calmly, Trinity surveyed the coding. "You're the one who just insinuated that I'm only with Neo because of his position as the One. What would that make me? A groupie?"
"You've been unplugged for two decades, Trinity. In that time, you've been in, what, two relationships? Fucked four or so guys?"
"Don't forget Juria. That's one girl." Pusher snorted. "Men have been falling in and out of love with you, more of them in than out, for years. I just don't see anything so damned wonderful about Neo. Other than the fact that he's the One. Why'd you pick him?"
"I didn't choose him. He just happened. I'm just lucky he choose me back."
Trinity could see that Pusher still had feelings for her. Not as strong as they used to be, but still there nonetheless. He exuded an almost palpable sense of distaste whenever she and Neo interacted. Neo, being Neo, hadn't particularly noticed how his actions irked Pusher. Trinity was tired of seeing Pusher twinge any time she leaned near her lover. He needed get over this fast. Before she had to hurt him.
"Look Pusher. I'm going to tell you this because I think you deserve to know it. We are actually friends, no matter how adolescent you've been behaving about Neo. Yeah, I can tell. In my entire life I've never been in love. Never. Not with you or anyone else. Until Neo. So just let it alone. If Morpheus can put up with it, then you can certainly deal with it long enough to help us with this problem and return to your ship."
Pusher's eyes darkened. "Of course, Trinity." He stressed her full name. "I was just worried about you."
The two continued working in silence.
After seven straight hours of working, Morpheus insisted that they take a break. Trinity was single-mindedly focused on the problem at hand, but didn't put up much of a fight. The project was becoming redundant. They'd fix one thing, then another would fall through. Fixing that would cause the original problem to return. Figuring a lunch break was better than a mental breakdown, they were pulled out.
Pusher rose from the chair after the jack was removed. "You want to go grab something to eat, Trinity?"
He looked over at the chair beside him. Apparently, Neo had been hovering around waiting for her to get out. He had just unplugged her, and now they were moving towards the ladder. Trinity had apparently not heard him.
Jesus. They were stuck on a small ship in the middle of a desolate landscape of abandoned sewer systems. Didn't they ever just get tired of each other? Even when he and Trinity had been sleeping together, she insisted that he keep some distance. She hadn't liked being crowded. Hell, even when they were on separate ships and were only together for short periods of time, sporadically, she still hadn't wanted him to stand around all the time.
When Pusher made his way back to the chairs, he saw both Trinity and Neo ready to go.
Seeing his questioning gaze Trinity said, "I think we've recreated a big enough chunk to give Neo some idea. He'll be able to extrapolate from you've already found, probably."
Pusher wasn't a fan of others putting their hands in his work before he was ready, but couldn't really say no. Besides, even if the guy could get some sort of idea, he and Trinity had been having problems working out a specific problem with the program. It had to be something he had mis- remembered, or just plain forgot, but this was really advanced code. No one had seen anything like this before, it was going to be slow going.
***** When the three materialized in the Construct, Pusher took a moment to study Neo's RSI. You could tell a lot about a person from the mental presentation they had of themselves. Pusher, himself, was wearing PVC pants and a black shirt with red flecks when he turned. His hair, brown, was short, the way he kept it in the Real World.
Neo was wearing a black outfit, the whole thing looked like it was made of wool, for some reason. Pusher had never seen someone project their image in wool. The thing had a long coat and was buttoned up to his throat. When Neo turned, the coat moved behind him, almost slowly rippling.
Trinity was showing him the code that they had come up with so far. Pusher figured he would go and try to explain what exactly he had seen and what they were going for.
"The problem is that the code had a new symbol in it. And, since it was 3D, I only saw part of it. I'm sure that's the key."
Neo didn't acknowledge his words. He stared at the code like he was the only person in the room. When he looked up from the code, finally, "Yeah. Looks like."
Reaching into the middle of the code mass, Neo pulled out a representation of the unfinished hieroglyph. Pusher looked on in alarm, "No. Don't do that."
That one piece of code was the keystone of the entire structure. Rage rose up in Pusher, now the seven hour code construction he and Trinity had worked on would fall. Neo could have easily asked for Pusher to bring up another representation.
Looking over to watch his work fall, Pusher was shocked to see it as stable as ever, even with the missing link.
"How's that possible?"
Neo was staring at the rune, hanging in the air between him and Trinity. "I'm keeping it up. Don't worry."
Pusher couldn't bring himself to say anything.
After what seemed like forever, maybe a minute and a half, Neo nodded to himself. Pusher was annoyed to see that Trinity, who had been amusing herself with moving the remaining glyphs to see how they would fit without the cascade effect and was seemingly oblivious to the surrounding world, was so attuned to Neo that she immediately moved to his side, leaving the code construction mangled and ill-fitting.
"What?" Pusher asked.
"I got it."
Pusher took a breath. "You got it? What, an overview? Why have we just been standing around watching you stare?"
Neo looked to the side of the glyph at thin air. A small green spark appeared, growing and forming another three-dimensional glyph. Neo pushed these two together; they merged to form a new whole. Pusher's glyph changed to a nearly unrecognizable fifth of the formation.
Neo moved over to the frozen code mass. Looking at Trinity's "improvements," Neo turned to her and smiled, eyebrows raised. Trinity looked innocent and shrugged, a small smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.
Sticking his hand into the middle of the form, Neo made all the glyphs move back to their original positions. Then he looked into it for a moment, finally reaching in and pulling out handfuls of code at a speed nearly impossible to follow. When he had finished gutting Pusher's work, Neo stepped back and released his hold on the structure. Pusher gaped as the entire thing collapsed in on itself and reconstituted in a more streamlined form.
Neo then turned to his new glyph. The rune duplicated itself three times, and Neo pushed the four symbols into seemingly random positions in the whole. Pulling a phone from his pocket, "Tank, make the Construct read and run this, freeze it once she's been formed."
The green form disappeared, leaving a tall, pale, dark-haired woman in its place. She wore a clinging white dress and looked almost angelic.
Pusher marveled at the sight. "That's not what I saw. I only pulled a small string of information out. That's far too complex to be extrapolated."
Neo moved to Trinity's side. "Not really."
"It only took you five minutes to do all that."
"Yes."
"Why did we spend all fucking morning in here then? If you could just do that at any second?"
Neo turned his head slowly to look at Pusher. No emotion showed on his face, and Pusher marveled at the differences between Matrix Neo and Real World Neo. "Call Tank. Tell him to get us out."
Even though it was said quietly, it was an order. Pusher narrowed his eyes. But then he realized, even though he was looking at him, Neo was speaking to Trinity. Trinity, who immediately pulled out her Nokia and hit send. "Get us out."
Pusher was glad as he felt the familiar pull in the back of his mind. Had he been in the Construct one second longer, he would have hit Neo. That one order to Trinity was galling enough. The fact that she unquestioningly obeyed nearly choked her ex-lover.
A/N: Bear with me here people. I'm not a sexist bastard. I'm a politically active lesbian feminist of the British Marxist variety. So, don't hate me until you at least read the next chapter.
Xixie
Xixie
In which I lose the thread of the story . . . I think.
Pusher awoke the morning after his trip into the Matrix early. Assuming that no one would be awake, he padded into the mess hall for breakfast. Surprised to find Trinity already awake and eating, he nodded before sitting across from her.
"Morning, Trin."
"Morning. You know I really hate it when people call me that."
"I know."
Trinity smiled, but raised an eyebrow.
He looked at her for a moment, then nodded. "Okay. Trinity."
"You and I are going to work in the Construct today. Hopefully we can recreate the code that you hacked yesterday. If we can recreate a segment of the new agent's programming, maybe Neo can figure out how to dismantle it."
Pusher nodded. He could recreate the code; it'd probably take hours upon hours, but he could do it. It was, however, some of the most amazingly complex stuff he'd ever seen. Just how Neo managed to dismantle Agent Smith still confused Pusher, but he figured that even the One would have problems with this new thing.
The generators kicked in at that moment, signaling the beginning of "morning." Pusher figured the rest of the crew would be rising any time now.
He was not mistaken. Only five minutes later, Neo entered the mess looking sleepy.
Although he found Neo's half-awake mumbling annoying, he watched as Trinity followed his every move with her eyes, smiling when he bumped into the edge of the bench before plopping down beside his lover.
Staring bleakly at the back wall before turning to his right, Neo yawned before saying, "Why'd you get up so early, Trin? I'd have gotten up to, if you'd wanted."
"Yeah. You look so ready to be awake."
Pusher got up from the table, moving away to wash his bowl. "I'll be on the bridge when your ready to go in, Trin- ity."
Trinity, who was talking to Neo in a low voice, turned slightly. "I'll be up when we're finished with breakfast."
Neo looked up. "Going in where?"
"Just to the Construct. We're going to work on the code he found yesterday. Give you a visual aid."
"I could have just looked at it myself, you know."
Trinity thought about throwing out a remark about his safety and needing to be careful, but thought better. "I know. But this way, since I get to work with him on this, you not only get to wash my dishes, you also get to revamp the repulsor arrays." She referred to the very messy job of cleaning out and recalibrating a series of engine nodes.
"Well," Neo returned dryly. "As long as there's an upside."
Anyone who knew the Trinity of a year ago would have been shocked at the genuine smile that she gave him, and probably disconcerted with the way she crinkled her nose before leaning forward to kiss him. "Off to work."
Morpheus and Tank moved out of the doorway so that Trinity could get past.
Neo stood, taking his and Trinity's dishes over to the sink. "I get stuck doing this a lot, don't I?"
Morpheus and Tank thought for a second, before replying in unison. "Yeah."
*****
Trinity and Pusher entered the Construct under the supervision of Tank. Immediately, Trinity had him pull up the program he had been compiling on the computer. The three-dimensional nature of the code made if far easier at this point to manipulate the strings of symbols in cyberspace. And Trinity, would had pretty much hovered over Pusher while he worked on the code, was familiar enough to help him.
As soon as they started, Pusher began the questioning he had been waiting for. "So. Trinity. What's up with you and Savior-boy?"
Trinity looked at him with an unreadable expression. "You've been here for a week. You managed to hold off questions for a lot longer than I expected." She supposed she owed him some answers.
"Not really. It's just very difficult to find a time when the two of you aren't attached at the hip."
"I don't know what you mean."
Trinity moved a strand of code, which caused a cascade effect. The entire shape of the coding changed. Pusher moved to examine the programming from a new angle.
"For a person who used to swear that the beds were too small for one person, let alone two, you seem to have found a way to work around it."
"All it takes is a desire to work around it. Then the problem disappears."
"Six months ago, when we met up at the Tashi incident, you said you didn't want to sleep with me. You said that physical attachments were irrelevant. That we should focus specifically on the Rebellion. And you changed your mind two months after that?"
Trinity countered another cascade caused by Pusher. "We're not in a relationship, Pusher. Technically, we were never in a relationship. This is none of your business."
"Trin. It's not as if I want you back or anything. I'm just worried that you've changed yourself too much for this guy. You don't have to love him just because he's the One."
"You never had me to get back. And I won't say I haven't been changed by Neo, but I will say that I'm happier now than before."
Trinity paused to look Pusher in the eye. "And I don't love him because he's the One. He's the One because I love him."
She paused. "Just so you know, the only reason I said that six months ago was because we had already started monitoring Neo. I couldn't bring myself to fuck you and then go watch him sleep. I would have felt dirty."
Just because she owed him answers didn't mean she had to be nice during questioning.
Pusher managed to keep the look of pain off his face. "Don't get nasty or anything."
Calmly, Trinity surveyed the coding. "You're the one who just insinuated that I'm only with Neo because of his position as the One. What would that make me? A groupie?"
"You've been unplugged for two decades, Trinity. In that time, you've been in, what, two relationships? Fucked four or so guys?"
"Don't forget Juria. That's one girl." Pusher snorted. "Men have been falling in and out of love with you, more of them in than out, for years. I just don't see anything so damned wonderful about Neo. Other than the fact that he's the One. Why'd you pick him?"
"I didn't choose him. He just happened. I'm just lucky he choose me back."
Trinity could see that Pusher still had feelings for her. Not as strong as they used to be, but still there nonetheless. He exuded an almost palpable sense of distaste whenever she and Neo interacted. Neo, being Neo, hadn't particularly noticed how his actions irked Pusher. Trinity was tired of seeing Pusher twinge any time she leaned near her lover. He needed get over this fast. Before she had to hurt him.
"Look Pusher. I'm going to tell you this because I think you deserve to know it. We are actually friends, no matter how adolescent you've been behaving about Neo. Yeah, I can tell. In my entire life I've never been in love. Never. Not with you or anyone else. Until Neo. So just let it alone. If Morpheus can put up with it, then you can certainly deal with it long enough to help us with this problem and return to your ship."
Pusher's eyes darkened. "Of course, Trinity." He stressed her full name. "I was just worried about you."
The two continued working in silence.
After seven straight hours of working, Morpheus insisted that they take a break. Trinity was single-mindedly focused on the problem at hand, but didn't put up much of a fight. The project was becoming redundant. They'd fix one thing, then another would fall through. Fixing that would cause the original problem to return. Figuring a lunch break was better than a mental breakdown, they were pulled out.
Pusher rose from the chair after the jack was removed. "You want to go grab something to eat, Trinity?"
He looked over at the chair beside him. Apparently, Neo had been hovering around waiting for her to get out. He had just unplugged her, and now they were moving towards the ladder. Trinity had apparently not heard him.
Jesus. They were stuck on a small ship in the middle of a desolate landscape of abandoned sewer systems. Didn't they ever just get tired of each other? Even when he and Trinity had been sleeping together, she insisted that he keep some distance. She hadn't liked being crowded. Hell, even when they were on separate ships and were only together for short periods of time, sporadically, she still hadn't wanted him to stand around all the time.
When Pusher made his way back to the chairs, he saw both Trinity and Neo ready to go.
Seeing his questioning gaze Trinity said, "I think we've recreated a big enough chunk to give Neo some idea. He'll be able to extrapolate from you've already found, probably."
Pusher wasn't a fan of others putting their hands in his work before he was ready, but couldn't really say no. Besides, even if the guy could get some sort of idea, he and Trinity had been having problems working out a specific problem with the program. It had to be something he had mis- remembered, or just plain forgot, but this was really advanced code. No one had seen anything like this before, it was going to be slow going.
***** When the three materialized in the Construct, Pusher took a moment to study Neo's RSI. You could tell a lot about a person from the mental presentation they had of themselves. Pusher, himself, was wearing PVC pants and a black shirt with red flecks when he turned. His hair, brown, was short, the way he kept it in the Real World.
Neo was wearing a black outfit, the whole thing looked like it was made of wool, for some reason. Pusher had never seen someone project their image in wool. The thing had a long coat and was buttoned up to his throat. When Neo turned, the coat moved behind him, almost slowly rippling.
Trinity was showing him the code that they had come up with so far. Pusher figured he would go and try to explain what exactly he had seen and what they were going for.
"The problem is that the code had a new symbol in it. And, since it was 3D, I only saw part of it. I'm sure that's the key."
Neo didn't acknowledge his words. He stared at the code like he was the only person in the room. When he looked up from the code, finally, "Yeah. Looks like."
Reaching into the middle of the code mass, Neo pulled out a representation of the unfinished hieroglyph. Pusher looked on in alarm, "No. Don't do that."
That one piece of code was the keystone of the entire structure. Rage rose up in Pusher, now the seven hour code construction he and Trinity had worked on would fall. Neo could have easily asked for Pusher to bring up another representation.
Looking over to watch his work fall, Pusher was shocked to see it as stable as ever, even with the missing link.
"How's that possible?"
Neo was staring at the rune, hanging in the air between him and Trinity. "I'm keeping it up. Don't worry."
Pusher couldn't bring himself to say anything.
After what seemed like forever, maybe a minute and a half, Neo nodded to himself. Pusher was annoyed to see that Trinity, who had been amusing herself with moving the remaining glyphs to see how they would fit without the cascade effect and was seemingly oblivious to the surrounding world, was so attuned to Neo that she immediately moved to his side, leaving the code construction mangled and ill-fitting.
"What?" Pusher asked.
"I got it."
Pusher took a breath. "You got it? What, an overview? Why have we just been standing around watching you stare?"
Neo looked to the side of the glyph at thin air. A small green spark appeared, growing and forming another three-dimensional glyph. Neo pushed these two together; they merged to form a new whole. Pusher's glyph changed to a nearly unrecognizable fifth of the formation.
Neo moved over to the frozen code mass. Looking at Trinity's "improvements," Neo turned to her and smiled, eyebrows raised. Trinity looked innocent and shrugged, a small smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.
Sticking his hand into the middle of the form, Neo made all the glyphs move back to their original positions. Then he looked into it for a moment, finally reaching in and pulling out handfuls of code at a speed nearly impossible to follow. When he had finished gutting Pusher's work, Neo stepped back and released his hold on the structure. Pusher gaped as the entire thing collapsed in on itself and reconstituted in a more streamlined form.
Neo then turned to his new glyph. The rune duplicated itself three times, and Neo pushed the four symbols into seemingly random positions in the whole. Pulling a phone from his pocket, "Tank, make the Construct read and run this, freeze it once she's been formed."
The green form disappeared, leaving a tall, pale, dark-haired woman in its place. She wore a clinging white dress and looked almost angelic.
Pusher marveled at the sight. "That's not what I saw. I only pulled a small string of information out. That's far too complex to be extrapolated."
Neo moved to Trinity's side. "Not really."
"It only took you five minutes to do all that."
"Yes."
"Why did we spend all fucking morning in here then? If you could just do that at any second?"
Neo turned his head slowly to look at Pusher. No emotion showed on his face, and Pusher marveled at the differences between Matrix Neo and Real World Neo. "Call Tank. Tell him to get us out."
Even though it was said quietly, it was an order. Pusher narrowed his eyes. But then he realized, even though he was looking at him, Neo was speaking to Trinity. Trinity, who immediately pulled out her Nokia and hit send. "Get us out."
Pusher was glad as he felt the familiar pull in the back of his mind. Had he been in the Construct one second longer, he would have hit Neo. That one order to Trinity was galling enough. The fact that she unquestioningly obeyed nearly choked her ex-lover.
A/N: Bear with me here people. I'm not a sexist bastard. I'm a politically active lesbian feminist of the British Marxist variety. So, don't hate me until you at least read the next chapter.
Xixie
