Chapter One: The Irony of Fate
Trinity liked to watch him. It wasn't just because he was cute, either. Morpheus was convinced that he was The One. That is, he was the prophesied savior of mankind, whose coming would herald the destruction of the virtual reality cyber-prison called The Matrix. Right now, though, he didn't look like anything but a regular guy with a bad case of insomnia. She wished she could be there to calm his fears—to lay his anxiety to rest. She would tell him that he was The One, and that he shouldn't be afraid…
"All right," she thought to herself, albeit reluctantly, "he's very cute."
She sat back in the operator's chair of the Nebuchadnezzar, her ship, and let out a sigh.
"You like to watch him, don't you?" asked a man's voice behind her.
Startled, she whirled around to see a bald man with a goatee standing there, grinning like an idiot at having caught her in what had otherwise been a private moment—like catching a mischievous young girl with her proverbial "hand in the cookie jar."
"Cypher? What the hell are you doing here?"
He folded his arms across his chest and took a seat next to her.
"I could ask you the same thing. You weren't supposed to relieve me, you know."
Trinity shrugged. "I felt like taking a shift."
Cypher glanced at the screen, which to the casual observer would appear to be nothing more than dancing lines of computer code scrolling endlessly across the screen.
"You really believe all that stuff Morpheus says about this guy?"
Trinity stared at him angrily, her brow furrowed. She was still more than a little annoyed that Cypher had all but barged in on her, and now he was attacking Morpheus, the man who had done them all a favor and set them all free.
"I'd like to believe it's true."
She narrowed her eyes. "Why, don't you?"
It was Cypher's turn to shrug. "I'll believe it when I see it. I mean, come on. Remember those other guys?"
"Everyone makes mistakes, Cypher."
He rolled his eyes.
"Yeah, but five in a row? Come on, Trin. Ol' Morph's credibility is seriously waning."
She turned away from him, focusing her attention once more on the screen in front of her.
"Believe what you want, but it's going to be different this time. You can bet on it."
Cypher sighed, got up out of his chair and turned to walk away when Trinity's screen changed from the dull green and black of the Matrix Computer Code to the stark red and white letters of the ship's warning system.
INCOMING MESSAGE, the "Neb's" computer told her, followed almost immediately by a crackle of static and a garbled radio transmission.
"Any ship…is Capt…nnor of…liath. We are un…ack. Need ass...nce."
A second dialog on the screen followed the broken voice of the man sending the distress call: PROXMITY WARNING.
"Shit!" Trinity swore, knowing at once what that meant before the Neb's radar screen brought up the source of the warning: another hovercraft, followed by a quintet of the squid-like patrol machines known as Sentinels.
"Goddamnit. We've got Squiddies!"
As soon as the alarm had stopped, Cypher had frozen in his tracks. Now he turned to face her, his former grin melted away into a severe frown.
"How many?"
Trinity shared his dismay, and her face showed it. "Five. Headed this way awfully fast. Get the others."
He turned to do so, but they had already come running: the muscular Apoc, the white-haired Switch, the gangly Mouse, Tank (Operator of the Neb), and her Captain, the smooth-talking, seemingly-always-calm Morpheus.
It was Morpheus who spoke first.
"What is going on?"
Cypher pointed at the screen. "Squiddies…five of them, headed this way."
"There," Morpheus said, indicating the larger form of the other hovercraft. "What ship is that?"
"I think it's the Goliath," Trinity said, making a quick check of her instruments.
Morpheus made a mental note. "Captain Connor's ship…"
"Connor?" Tank said. "What's he doing way out here? I thought he was back in Zion."
The Neb's Captain glanced at Trinity's instruments.
"We all have our reasons and our purposes, Tank, although I would guess they sent him for reconnaissance. It is his specialty, after all."
"Well, whatever he's doing here, he's not going to be doing it very long," Cypher said. "If these readings are right, they've taken quite a beating."
"Yeah," Mouse said, speaking from in between Switch and Apoc. "And so will we if we don't do something."
Morpheus nodded, still calm despite all the pressure. Though no one could fathom just how he could remain so focused, they all guessed it was what made him a good for the role of Captain.
"Trinity, take us down. We're going to let Connor pass over us. We'll only have a few seconds before the Sentinels get here, which means we've only got one shot at taking them out without taking out the Goliath, too."
Trinity nodded, and flipped open the plastic cover on a large red switch marked "Electromagnetic Pulse."
"Once we're in position, power down and prepare to fire the EMP."
Morpheus left Trinity's side and sat in his command chair at the center of what served as the Neb's "bridge."
Everyone held on as Trinity took the hovercraft into a steep dive, and then expertly leveled it out just before it hit the bottom of the decaying sewer duct in which they had been traveling.
Lights throughout the ship winked out one-by-one as it prepared for extremely silent running. It was the only way any of them would escape the wrath of the machines that would, without remorse, tear them all into tiny pieces.
In a few minutes, they heard the humming of the Goliath's engines as it passed over them, overlapped with the insect-like buzzing and whining of the machines internal servos as they swam like predators through the murky waters of the ancient sewers.
Hunting the human vermin that still seemed to infest the planet was not only their job, it was their reason for being—it was their life itself.
Unfortunately for them, however, their life would be cut short as Trinity let loose a barrage of deadly EM energy that shorted out the usually tough machinery that kept the ruthless killers alive. They dropped like dead weight as the pulse struck them, and their lifeless hulks crashed harmlessly into the duct walls with the crunching and twisting of malformed metal.
Everyone on the bridge of the Neb let out a collective sigh of relief. It seemed they had lived to die another day…
The beeping of an incoming transmission on the communication system snapped them out of their all-too-brief revelry.
"Goliath to Nebuchadnezzar," a man's voice, the same as the previous transmission and so obviously Captain Connor's, said. This time, however, he sounded relieved. "Is that you, Morpheus?"
"Indeed it is, Captain Connor," Morpheus replied.
"Goddamn, I'm sure glad you're here. We would have been food for machine thought if you hadn't showed up. But, damn, you came out of nowhere."
"I could say the same about you, Captain. What brings you to our 'neck of the woods'?"
Connor chuckled. "I know it isn't my usual stomping ground, Morpheus, but Deadbolt had us out scouting. We were trying to see if there was any machinery up top we could use, anything left over from before the War."
Morpheus arched an eyebrow, his interest piqued.
"And did you find anything?" he asked, a part of him hoping against hope that Connor had, among all the rubble, found something useful.
There was a brief pause, and then Connor answered, a tinge of hope in his otherwise battle-weary tone.
"As a matter of fact, I did. Let's find a place to rest and stretch our legs, and I'll tell you all about it."
Morpheus glanced at his crew, who, like Connor, were all exhausted from all the fighting they were constantly forced to do for nothing more than their own very survival.
"Agreed."
An hour later, Morpheus, Trinity, and Cypher were walking through the corridors on the Goliath, flanked on one side by the forty-something Captain John Connor, a tall man of medium build and deep, intense blue eyes, but whose most distinguishing feature was a long scar that ran down most of the length of the left side of his face.
On their other side was Connor's aide-de-camp, Sergeant Kyle Reese, a man who bore a subtle resemblance to Connor, and, due to his age (he was twenty years Connor's junior), might be mistaken for the elder man's son.
Both were leading the Neb's crew through the maze of wires, catwalk and piping that led to the hovercraft's medical bay.
When they arrived, they saw nothing of interest in the facility save for what appeared to be a human form with a simple white sheet draped over it. Reese and Connor stood on opposite sides of the examination table, while Morpheus, Trinity and Cypher settled in beside them. All of them stared at the covered form, the Neb's crew especially anxious to find out what new tool Connor had discovered to help them turn the tide of the war.
Morpheus knew in his heart that it could not compare to what he had found, but he was curious nonetheless.
"Gentlemen," Connor said, adding "and lady" almost as an afterthought as he remembered Trinity, "meet the newest addition to our arsenal."
Reese pulled back the sheet to reveal what appeared to be a man in his late-thirties with close-cropped brown hair, icy gray eyes and an impressively sculpted physique. The only trouble was, the "man" wasn't moving.
"A dead guy?" Cypher scoffed. "You mean to tell me that a corpse is going to help us take out the machines?"
Reese shook his head, not so much to say "no" as to balk at Cypher's obvious ignorance.
"It's not a man. It's a machine…"
"A machine?" Cypher said, baffled by Reese's claim. "That doesn't look like any one of them I've ever seen."
"It's a cyborg," Reese explained. "Living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. Not your run-of-the mill squiddie."
"The most interesting part is that from what we've seen, it predates even the first AI," Connor said, interrupting his subordinate.
Morpheus arched his eyebrow in surprise. "You mean the singular consciousness that gave birth to the race of machines we all know and loathe?"
Connor nodded. "The very same."
"Where did you find it?" Trinity asked, her interest sparked as well with these new developments.
Captain Connor stepped over to a computer console next to the med-table on which the inert cyborg lay and punched a keystroke sequence into the machine. A two-dimensional map of the earth's surface appeared, with one dot on the North American continent blinking red.
"As I said we were on a scouting mission, spying on the machines and sifting through the wreckage for anything useful. It was here, in the Rocky Mountains, that we discovered a faint energy signature."
The view on the screen magnified to show a series of mountain peaks, and one mountain peak that appeared to have the remnants of some sort of facility built into the face.
"What we discovered was an abandoned, but still functional, military base. Back when such things mattered, it was American. Not without much difficulty, we forced our way inside, tracking the power signature we had detected."
Connor pressed a few more buttons and a 3-D skeletal layout of the facility—a schematic obviously lifted directly from the facility's computers—filled the screen.
"Apparently, the United States government had been doing some research with AI even before the 'Second Renaissance.' They were in the process of developing a sentient computer network to run their defense systems."
He pointed once more to the motionless form of the cyborg on the med-table.
"These machines were just part of the program. The information we've gathered says they're infiltrators, designed to work their way inside enemy settlements undetected and destroy them from the inside."
"So what stopped them from going ahead with the program?" Cypher asked, now showing at least a little interest in what Reese and Connor were telling them.
"Apparently the civilian corporation that held the design contract on the AI was bought out by another, larger company. The government lost further access to the technology, but retained these facilities and kept working on the designs independently."
Morpheus nodded, absorbing all he was being told, and beginning to understand.
"Yet, these designs were not employed during the first war against the machines. Do you have any idea why?" he asked.
Connor shook his head. "We're not sure. We do know they were locked in cold-storage, but we're not sure why or for how long. The facility itself was in an advanced state of disrepair. This unit is the only one that was still viable."
"You didn't get anything else from this place, then?" Cypher asked.
"The squiddies were on to us not long after we got in," Reese chimed in. "We had to scramble to get out of there alive."
"And now you are here," Morpheus said. "Interesting."
Connor nodded his agreement. "Yeah, of all the ships I could run into, I meet the Nebuchadnezzar."
Cypher looked confused. "What's that supposed to mean?" He gestured toward the cyborg. "And how is that thing going to help us against the machines. There's like a million of them and only one of it."
Reese stepped close to Cypher to address him directly. "Are you always this cynical?"
Cypher narrowed his eyes, shocked that the much younger Reese would ask him such a question. "I've been fighting this war for nine years, since before you even reached puberty, and we haven't made one substantial gain against the machines. So, you can imagine I'm a little skeptical, especially when there's more squiddies out there than any of us can count."
Now it was Reese's turn to be defensive. "Look, I may be young, but I hate the machines as much as any of us. They've still got my family hooked up to that fucking dream prison. Besides, I didn't say we were going to fight the machines in the real world…"
"You mean, you're going to hook it up to the Matrix?" Trinity asked, astonished at the idea.
Reese's face suddenly lit up with a smile. "I'm glad somebody understands. Yes, that's exactly what we intend to do! We're just not sure how to do it."
Connor smiled, too, gesturing at the Neb crewmembers. "And that's why it's so strange that we ran into you all, out of all the ships in the fleet. After all, you are the best hackers in the business. If anyone could connect our 'friend' to the Matrix VR, it's you."
Trinity glanced at Morpheus. "What do you think?"
Her captain seemed lost in thought, but wasted no time in answering.
"I think it is a most intriguing idea. To have a machine mind hooked up to the Matrix…"
"That's what I was thinking," Trinity said. "Its level of comprehension would be far above that of a normal human being. It might even be a match for the Agents."
Morpheus grinned at that thought. The gatekeepers of the Matrix had troubled his cause for years. Now, to finally have some measure of advantage against them when they were nearing the end of their journey to find The One…
"Captain Connor," he said, "we will gladly find a way to connect our cybernetic friend to the Matrix. In return, we ask that we be able to recruit him in our quest to find 'The One.'"
Reese looked from Morpheus to Connor.
"Cap, you think that's a good idea? I mean, we found it, so we should be the ones to have it on our side."
"First of all, Sergeant," Connor said sternly, "if it weren't for Morpheus, we wouldn't be alive right now to have even showed them the cyborg. And second of all, they're the ones who'll be reprogramming it, so what's the problem?"
Reese nodded, turning away from his commander. "No problem, sir," he acquiesced.
"Morpheus," Connor said, "we'll help you get this big lug back to your ship so you can start work on it. In the meantime, I just wanted to say thank you."
He extended his hand, and Morpheus shook it.
"Thanks aren't necessary, Captain. I see it simply as a matter of Fate."
Connor shrugged. "My mother used to tell me that there's no fate but what we make for ourselves."
"True," Morpheus replied, smiling his enigmatic smile, "but such a statement contradicts itself. Fate implies circumstances that are out of one's control."
"But, if we don't take control, then we'll be controlled," Connor said, more than a little bitterly. "You know that as well as I do."
"Indeed. That is why we must find 'The One.' I believe he holds the key to taking back control from the machines."
"Then let that machine," he nodded in the direction of the cyborg, which Reese, Cypher and Trinity were prepping for transport, "be the key to finding The One."
Connor chuckled. "How about that? Your only hope in the war against the machines is a machine."
Morpheus grinned. "Fate is not without a sense of irony, you know."
"Back to Fate again, are we?" Connor mused. "It's like one big circle…"
End Chapter One