Everything in life was an illusion. If Brisingamen had to write a quote on her tombstone, that'd be it.
The deceptive calm of the throng around her was a dangerous mirage. Aware of this, the One kept her subconscious on edge whilst she thought somewhat wistfully of Neo.
Watching from a distance as he passed through the transparent sliding doors, she noted the dogged stride, roughly gelled hair and a briefcase that was forever banging against his legs.
She wanted to call out the name that so many people depended on, the name of the person who would do what she must never. Neo!
He walked by, oblivious, and the White Rabbit's thoughts remained her own as he was swallowed up by the commuters, beyond the reach of her voice.
The cogs of Brisingamen's plan were slowly creaking to life… now she'd have a bit of a wait until the staggers found her planted info and came after her. The whole premise was totally insane. No person with intentions of self-preservation would actually invite Agent attentions. She may as well wear a small neon sign which read 'I've been unplugged'.
The young woman stood fairly tall amongst the crowd, wearing the same kimono top as she was during her last Agent encounter. This time, a pair of cargo pants and hiking boots, but that hardly dulled her conspicuous appearance.
At the end of the street loomed quite suddenly the NYCorp hi-rise. Brisingamen's breezy meander faltered. She wondered if the tiny tendril of alarm coiling around her heart was simply an artifact from when she'd dived out of one of the building's windows.
The harrowing ache grew, dragging itself from the back of Brisingamen's mind. It slithered through the burble of nervous analysis, and when its host saw the distorted minature of a city street reflected in opaque black sunglasses, it became a bloated spectre of warning, hammering on the insides of the skull in which it was contained.
"Oh holy #@&*!!!!" was all that Brisingamen could manage, and the plan went to hell, dissolved to ashes. She felt her pulse triple, her mind going into overload… the world sharpened into painful focus, sunlight carving patterns into a black suit jacket as it stepped forward. Arm raising.
Stay, fight, die.
Run, escape, live.
Maybe.
The White Rabbit gathered all her gibbering thoughts inside, the System running alongside her, brushing and bounding with rules and limits. Maybe she was pivoting faster than she'd ever done before. Maybe Agent Jones was somehow contemplating a cat-and-mouse game before he pulled the trigger. That was the wonderful thing about the Matrix: it was all about the maybe.
Agent Jones was in a machine's state of ecstasy. Here was the very same human who had caused him humiliation in the past. He tasted the bittersweet tang of revenge and wanted more.
Moving out of perfect synchrony with his colleagues, gun clenched tightly in hand, Jones launched himself after his prey, the air resistance ruffling his hair as he accelerated.
Brisingamen had noted in a sliver of a second who he was, how much he wanted to kill her and the pain that would occur if she ran into the lamppost directly in front of her!
Dodging it with eye-watering agility, the One barely spared her fond memories another thought… feet pounding into the pavement, people staring dumbstruck, the omnipresent pace of him behind her; Agent Jones was branding new memories with every breath she drew.
It was like running through the fabric of darkness, where nothing seems real to the senses, every movement a mockery of the truth, each small breath a sickeningly crafted lie.
The illusion was stretched thin, the veil beginning to lift from Brisingamen's mind as she ducked, weaved and generally avoided the death hiss of bullets and her fellow digital projections. She was faltering, stumbling into a narrow path behind one of the shopping malls, and the world threatened to crumble away.
Cornered! A whole list of profanity welled up to the surface of the White Rabbit's shifting thoughts, the measured footfalls of a singular Agent hammering fear and adrenaline into her psyche.
"Not now, not now, not…" Eyes closed, tears streaming with the One's mantra of denial. She could almost break through. Her starved lungs sucked in nothing, the sudden end to the alley blurring into flashbacks and then-
Then, the Construct shattered, spliced in two.
A secluded room, hidden by service pipes and life-support equipment. Zion's population never questioned what lay beyond the heavy, vacuum- sealed synthsteel door.
Inside, an artificially regulated atmosphere houses a system modeled on the very thing that the city was built to escape.
Tangled wires and an intravenous input monitor, blinking on and off in the clinical blue light. A UV generator reveals the purpose for such an insidious mockery of the machine's enslavement pods…
The Matrix is not built to function under these conditions. It clings, still coursing into her mind like a trickle of water. She opens her eyes into fluid, harsh blue light glaring into eyes that haven't been used for a long time, the frosted interior of the cyrogenic cradle tight around her form.
Dujour never wanted to wake from the dream world, never wanted to cease being Brisingamen. But she hadn't conceived that she could push the boundaries this far, a monstrous union of man and machine. Both worlds her own, fluttering in and out of the System and reality, two parallel perceptions. A kind of wretched limbo. Dujour/Brisingamen felt her insides shudder in both planes, her vision a corrupted union of the Matrix feed and her true eyes.
She would have to make a choice.
Agent Jones halted perfectly. No skid or unnecessary friction arose from his shiny shoed feet, and his arithlogic unit system launched smoothly.
Fuzzy logic was the apex of Agent refinement. The ability to reason like a human being was the most powerful tool a machine could ever obtain. Unfortunately, refinement is never absolute.
-overflow error, unknown malfunction has occurred. Pending * * * * *
The air was tortured, and the figure of his target was flickering in sections, the code slightly slow to knit up the unraveling threads of mirage. Jones vacillated, gun clutched waveringly in his hand. His rational analysis was completely unhelpful, and the Agent stepped slowly closer, making the final move that would ultimately bring him too far into her world, beyond the deception that his kind had wrought upon humanity.
He saw the brick wall next to him introvert into a rippling whorl, and he saw it as a super-being, an enhanced Agent, for what could have been the last time.
Dujour centered her will, desperation and disbelief and turned back. Her eyelids snapped shut again, the blue fuzz gone. The Matrix took her, enveloping her in a violent rush of readjustment and reconfiguration.
Brisingamen forced herself into the System with such strength that a freak of encoding came to pass, one that was never written to occur or exist. The Matrix repackaged the White Rabbit, collating digital attributes and applying them as per usual… but her original orientation was precisely were Jones was standing.
Unable to assimilate why two entities would be sharing a singular bounding, the code processed them as one, distributing the physical and kinetic limitation of a 'normal' human onto both. Generic details like blood and brains were filled in, the regular procedure for digital projections. Of course, memory and personality was preserved, which is why free minds could come and go as they pleased.
The phrase 'there's a glitch in the Matrix' was a serious, serious understatement.
Brisingamen, upon finding herself deposited neatly a hair's breadth from a hated stagger, saw it as quite acceptable to ram her fist into his face.
She'd seen it all… or so she'd thought. Entire bodies simply shifting, breakneck reflexes, uncanny tracking ability. Enviable talent, in other words. The One was a little blasé with the whole 'if you see an Agent, run like hell, or, if you'd prefer, be smeared all over the sidewalk' theory. Agents were just glorified clumps of symbols with a pretty CG sheen and a penchant for power dressing.
This was the way Brisingamen lived. This was her code of conduct.
Right until the point that Agent Jones- emphasis, Agent Jones- was hit in the delicately structured nose and felt complete, indescribable pain… and a tiny trickle of crimson blood, escaping his brand new veins, trembled timorously on a patch of previously spotless skin.
Brisingamen's hand, bearing a lethal switchblade, ground to a split-second halt in thin air.
"What," she said in slow, uncomprehending tones, "in the name of all things still sane, are you?"
Agent Jones, stifled by the sensory assault of thick emotions and sudden awareness of a pulse – not the half-baked, clinical endowment of an Agent program, but the full human package- dragged his sunglasses off his face and licked his lips. He relished the feeling of saliva on facial tissue, and thought to himself.
" That's an engaging question, human female," Jones managed, the bite of her knuckles not quite forgotten. "But I have always been as you are."
Brisingamen couldn't believe this conversation, wouldn't accept it, just stepped back desperately and croaked, "And what is that, stagger?"
The Agent clutched his nose against the agony and blinked savagely. It took a few moments but eventually it came. He regarded her coolly.
"We are our own downfall, our own mistake… we are reflections of humanity."
The story begins where the line between man and machine ends. When Brisingamen's mind was, for a brief moment, fooled by his expression and the fall of his eyelids, the line was crossed. And the story begins.
** If you like the sound of this story, have a look at the next story in what is becoming suspiciously like a series—'Crossing the Line' will either be up soon or is up already.
-DH