CROSSING THE LINE
* This is a continuation of the previous story, 'The Chess Game'. It is a good idea to read that first if you want the fullest background, however, it is not totally necessary. Each installment is an individual exploration of an element of the Matrix… so the only real prerequisite is to see the movie.( And of course, you've done that!)
The sound of stiff material being rearranged was a frighteningly loud noise in a city of shadows.
Brisingamen, the White Rabbit…the One. Her mission was to protect the man whose identity would merge with hers. She felt like a fraud most of the time. But here, now, she was doing her job; keeping Neo alive was paramount to the cause.
Mankind was relying on her, as it would him. What a classic statement! The Agents came too soon, old digital demons back to reminisce in person. Yet something had happened to her as she was reinserted back from an unwanted wake-up call. Residual self image, they termed it… they, the free minds.
This all flashed through Brisingamen's thoughts within the few sparse moments of anticipation. Something new had been unwittingly created, and this intriguing concept was right in front of her, practically begging to be challenged. Never before had a simple glitch escalated into an artwork. And as she bent the System to her whim, creating force and energy that would simply not exist in the real world, the White Rabbit found she no longer was afraid.
Jones. If anything had come before his name, it was gone now. Taken away like the super-ability he once commanded. Perhaps he couldn't move quite so fast, turning the air into a blurry mess… or punch through a solid brick-and-mortar wall. He felt— fulfilled. Like this state was what he'd always needed to be real.
A few slender fingers came up and delicately plucked the silent I.N.C out of an ear that belonged to the same being that owned the fingers. A wealth of choices opened up before him; he could do so many things if he wanted to! To roam alone in this creation he had taken for granted as a mere job. Marvel at it, revel in it-
- but this woman, standing ever so proudly, a striking figure against a tedious urban backdrop, held him in his place. Brisingamen's long hair swept back over her shoulders as Jones watched her. She shifted, and something in her quiet, aggressive stance sparked a reaction in the small part of Jones that had disappeared for a moment.
Agents are not the most highly skilled killers for nothing, and standing there, watching the One's wordless taunt, brought the Agent in Jones back from not-so-distant memory.
He wanted to feel the crack of bone on bone, to inflict and receive as one of them; the other side of the line.
Lift-off; Brisingamen bounced on the gel air like a trampoline, speed and velocity gathering force as she launched herself across the pavement. Free of the constant whine of I.N.C cycles, Jones moved like fluid, liquid mercury; every sound, every breath a gift and fuel. His hands fell away from the buttons of the black suit jacket and exhilaration seized mind and muscle.
A spectacular manipulation of the code enabled the White Rabbit to obliterate the distance between her and her opponent in a mere few moments; Brisingamen drove all her resentment, all her frustration, into the magnified forward motion of a single fist.
Jones felt his vision condense to a tunnel that only contained Brisingamen until the incredible agony of knuckles-on-nose seared straight across his face like fire.
Back on the tightrope of real and illusion, the One wrought impossible actions on the simulated world around her. Jones lunged for her and missed as she hung almost totally suspended above his head.
"I am impressed," remarked the former Agent calmly as she pounded back onto the ground. Brisingamen gasped for breath, clutching her stomach. She stared at him ludicrously; he merely gazed back as if following some unknown code of chivalry that stated, "Thou shalt not smite thine enemy if they be depraved of oxygen".
"HAIIII!!!" (Brisingamen must have read the 'New, Strike-from-behind Edition').
A knife was closing in on Jones' chest, and although he lacked the mixed blessing of Agent ability… he was still fast. Brain-meltingly fast.
Retaliating like a ferret on Transdrenaline, his polished black heels crushing gravel-
-Brisingamen turned, hair flicking like a dark banner as his crushing strength closed around her wrist even as she kicked out savagely.
Jones pivoted with the calculated grace of his former companions; Brisingamen yelped as her arm muscles were twisted… the air was a rage of red and black… impaled on pain and horror at his ability, she struggled to move. The blade clattered to the bitumen, useless.
Jones struck her in a quick sequence. It was brutally effective: Brisingamen felt as if her spine had been suddenly extracted. The pain was indescribable… what kind of demon thought of this? The ground beckoned, passing in and out of focus as she folded over.
There would be no heroic miracles to save Brisingamen. She slumped, paralyzed muscles responding as a puppet with its strings cut off would. Fate was not on her side, nor good, nor evil. Fate was not something to be packaged and imagined with sides. She prepared to accept what had shadowed her for the majority of her life.
But fate did not step in here. Jones didn't either; he merely stood stationary. As every inaction is still an action, something in the man who was once Agent decided, quite ordinarily, to wait. As tiny seconds passed with no death-blow, Brisingamen realized something. She said it out loud without really knowing why, her paralysis waning.
"There is no fate. Only choices that ripple out to cause some unknown effect in the world."
Jones listened. A world of chaos appeared in his mind, crowded with accidents and joy and surprise and death. Trillions of ripples, traveling over millennia to brush against one another to what cataclysmic end… he didn't know.
" I have made a ripple, then."
"What?"
"I am intrigued by the possibilities of being human. What will happen if I do not terminate you? You seem real."
The White Rabbit stood slowly, brushing dirt granules off her clothing. Real? She opened her mouth, ready with some sort of reply- but alarm bells clanged in her head without warning. The other Agents!
Brisingamen swallowed her shock and gave Jones a long look that seemed to last forever, her muscles poised for flight. If you're not one of them…
" We should go," he said, and Brisingamen realized she'd made a new friend.