A:/run/program/2.exe
Disclaimers: The Matrix belongs to those fan boy brothers. They make Niobe and Persephone make out. How fan-boyish can you get? You should have more maturity if you're a movie producer!
Warnings and Rants: This is a Smith-fic, and I'm experimenting with the style. Eventually there will be more slashiness. Oh yeah… in here be spoilers for The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, and Enter the Matrix.
Summary: Smith realizes he's an exile, unbound to the Matrix anymore. And then... when is he going to understand this other thing?
Status: 2/?
Radishface
She had fought well, he thought. Or rather, she had run very quickly. She had disappeared into one of the doors, randomly, had let him chase her through an half-constructed skyscraper. And then she had been stuck in a room, her human emotions of frustration and desperation had been apparent and he had laughed to himself, and blown a hole in the wall, started to shoot at her. However, she had escaped him, and then flew down the stairs, ran out the back door. She had interrupted a woman in her work and had turned the sewing tables over as she struggled to hinder his path, but he had run after her as if there had been nothing there. And then they were in Chinatown, the confusing mazes of streets smelling like the butcher shop, the blood dripping from the animals. Humans, he had thought, humans, and rebels, and their endless filth.
She has escaped him, though. She has made it to the hardline in the cathedral, and he wondered why he didn't just trace the hardline and order more of himself there, to destroy it. He could have killed her if she hadn't a way to escape, and humans had their limitations, they could not run forever, even if they could see that the Matrix was only a computer program and they could twist it sometimes.
But if he kills her, he can't interrogate her. And a part of him tells him that there isn't any need to interrogate her because she may not speak, anyway. This one, this woman, is related to Morpheus in some way and possesses his unending stubbornness, his dogmatic structure, his eternally stoic expression, although she carries it with less conviction.
She does not know him, completely, though. She does not know Neo, where Neo is and what is going on aboard that rebel ship, she is with a battalion of her own, fighting her own personal battles in this epic struggle.
So it is pointless to run after her. It is pointless to exert his energy in such a way when he can be doing other things.
Ah, but that is it. Since he is an exile now, as the Merovingian's wife has so delicately put it, he has no more assignments from the top, no more missions to complete, no more need to endanger himself, to risk another deletion, or another attempt at it.
But look, his mind tells him, you have nothing else to do. You serve no more purpose in the Matrix. They have tried to delete you, and you have escaped it because you didn't wish it to be. And chasing this human provides you with something to do.
And then, Do I feel boredom, then? Do I feel incomplete without something to do? Do I feel bereft of an activity, do I feel as if my hands and my legs and my mind needs to be constantly working and moving? This doesn't supposed to happen. You have no orders.
I have no orders. He had thought, and had infused conviction into his steps, had chased her as ifhe had been meant to do this, made that way. Because if he catches her, he can take her somewhere, and find out where he is, and then he can access the Sentinel database and order them to destroy their ship, and kill him, and that would be the end of it, and the Matrix will be preserved.
He doesn't say it can be saved. It is not a thing that is to be saved, because it is not precious.
"And where would you be, if it were destroyed?"
He turns his head around and is met with a copy of himself, perhaps one he had created earlier that day.
He doesn't answer, and merely looks straight ahead, and chooses not to see a blue sky and the green grass of the park he is walking past, chooses not to see the trees, the benches, the children playing on the swings, the mothers watching nearby. And the moment he thinks that, he is seeing an endless black space, green and white numbers and symbols floating like they are randomly arranged on this black canvas, individual specks of humanity, of nature, and it is supposed to resemble it. And he sees that the air is filled with it too, the oxygen, the krypton, the nitrogen, these elements, weightless and heavy, all the same, scattered like these people are scattered, like he is scattered-- across this place with no definition. He turns to the copy of himself and sees the same thing, the black infinity of emptiness where it is designated, the fluid code that is spawning from the region where the head is, covering the body like water surrounding a swimmer. When he looks deeper, he sees the vestiges of the man he had possessed that day, the man's own code floating about in its container, unaware of what is happening.
I don't know. He thinks, and the other him does not smile. They are both thinking the same things, and it is visible between them that this is the first time he has thought this thing, this uncertainty, this I don't know. Of course he knows what will happen. He knows that if the Matrix were destroyed, he will be eliminated, and the beauty of these greens and whites painted on this black will disappear, and he will only be left with the vacuum, this darkness, and he will share the same fate as well. He wants to take off his sunglasses, because they are superfluous there, they do not serve any purpose to help him see, to help him realize what he does not process, and they only conserve his anonymity, his state of nonentity.
"So you are fighting," the other him says, "because you wish to maintain yourself."
"No," he says, and then tells himself to disappear, to free this cocoon of the human from within himself, to return to being himself, his true self.
The man opposite him begins to melt away, and seems to invert upon himself, and then another face springs out of the thawing skin, and blue eyes stare into his, and lips form words, and he barely registers them.
"How'd I get here?" The man is blinking, his dirty blonde hair glinting in the sun, and he is healthy, breathing, and there is life and blood and air flowing in him in this world, and in the other, he is still there in that cocoon, huddled within himself, unaware of what is happening around him.
Smith cocks his head to one side and assumes the confidence, the authority, the meaning he once held, and thinks, there is no driving force, as the Merovingian's wife says. I am merely doing what I am programmed to do.
And the man is still looking at him and looking around him and Smith says, "I don't know."
He quickly realizes that this key that was left to him is universal. It takes him time to find a door in which a key will fit, because this world is automated, and this world has sliding doors of glass and plastic. A door, he thinks, is only hiding something on both sides.
He pushes that part to the back of his head, the one that says in his own voice that he doesn't know, that he is losing something, this conviction, this certainty, and that in that, he is losing a part of himself, and may as well be deleted, for what is an Agent, no matter if he is an exile, if he is something else?
The room he is in is the same room he was in last time, but with the absence of the Merovingian's wife. The couch that she had been sitting on is located in the enter of the room, directly facing the door. It makes him think that perhaps the furniture in this place is all arranged so they resemble their owners, so that each of them is prepared to face the other side of that door, the unknowns that will either be unlocked or remain as they are. But the Merovingian's wife is not here, is not going to confront him, and he finds himself striding over to the couch, and sitting down on it, in the middle of this empty room, waiting for something.
And maybe he is waiting for a stray thought to enter his head. And there it is, irrational and ludicrous. What do the rebels see the Matrix as?
Is is a question that can be phrased in many ways. He knows the rebels see the Matrix as a gilded cage, as an ugly glass object that changes faces to those who view it, something that is imprisoning their human kind, something that needs to be destroyed for a greater cause, for this freedom, this concept of freedom that is elusive to him.
And then it is a question that can be answered literally. The rebels all have some ability, he thinks, to see the Matrix for what it really is, and that is why they can bend the rules, if only temporarily. It is only Neo that can completely see it for what it is, without the assistance of a computer screen, without anything acting as a translator so he can interpret it.
The man can see everything, just as Smith can, in this unprotected, naked fashion, this code that changes constantly, this world structured from illusions crafted from electric fields, and that is what makes him dangerous, this is what makes him so different. He is the one, his mind whispers through his ear, of course he could,and Smith wants to speculate whether Neo sees everything around him as black emptiness and sparkling green that resembles water. He wants to consider that when they are fighting, Neo sees him as the person that is fabricated to resemble a human, and not the impersonal vacancy that everything is created from.
The room is cold, he realizes, the marble on the floor is chilling, the air around him is crumbling in icicles, and then the Merovingian's wife walks in through the set of doors in front of him, and this time, it is him who is sitting there to receive her, and not the other way around.
"Hello." She says, pausing slightly in the doorway, and then turning around so she can close the doors.
He does not greet her in return. It is unnecessary, and it is so very like the Merovingian exile to indulge in his excesses, from greetings to this place, this frivolity.
"And what," the Merovingian's wife smiles, and walks to him, "have I done, to deserve such company today?"
"Nothing." He says.
"You are not a good liar, you realize?" She takes a seat next to him. "You must know that."
Liar.
"Would you like something to drink, perhaps?" She turns to him, and puts a hand very close to his own. They do not touch, but he can feel the coldness emanating off of her, seeking the warmth of his body, but there isn't any.
"No." He says.
"And you are quite impolite." She murmurs, laughing slightly, sitting back up, reclining so that her back rests against the couch. "Won't you remove your glasses in a lady's presence?"
He can't, he thinks. He won't.
"If you won't, then." She says, and puts her hand on his knee, and he wills himself not to flinch as something seems to be flowing out of him, and into her, and then it disappates into the air, a memory of what was there.
"Have you been thinking?" She leans back, and smiles, and there is lust there for more of this, more of this touching, and absorbing, and analyzing, but she restrains herself.
"I have been." He says, steels his voice to sound without emotion, without feeling, without I feel this and I want that, except there is nothing that he feels, nothing that he wants, he is a machine, repeat, repeat, repeat.
"Did you know," she begins, and he knows that she wants him to listen, and that he won't be able to help it, because other than that, there is silence in this room, and it is getting dim outside, and he can barely make out her features. "Did you know that I kissed him?"
His vision suddenly changes from seeing things the way they are meant to be seen to the way he had seen earlier before, the black, the green rain from the sky, the Merovingian's wife's pale face and dark hair changes to something else entirely, with bare outlines and fluid code and running text that is her skin, her blood, and then it reverts back, and he is breathing faster. He tells himself it is this inconsistency, this sudden fluctuation in his programming.
"Of course he was reluctant," she continues conversationally. "And that girl was standing there, and she hated me, but I don't see why she would, because I was not taking anything from her besides one kiss." She laughs, and Smith is brought back to reality, with her, in this room, and he looks at her. "And what is a kiss that means everything, and means nothing at the same time? It is an... amusement."
"So it was." He says, after a pause, and he can feel her eyes on him, scrutinizing. He doesn't know what there is to analyze. There isn's anything there. Just. Just--
"I am bored to death here." She starts again. "There is nothing better to do. They have a mission, and if I am obliterated, so be it. Maybe I will feel afraid, in those last moments."
He stands up, before the temptation of curiosity can overtake him, and begins to walk to the door, his key in hand, and he will throw it away, he will melt it so that it doesn't resemble anything after he is done. He does not want to know, he has no desire to for knowledge. He is an Agent, he was an Agent.
"Do you still wish to kill him?" She calls out after him, not moving from her seat on the couch, and he stops walking for a minute, if only to answer her.
"Yes." He says.
"For what?" She is laughing again. "For the Matrix? So they will accept you again, so you can redeem yourself?"
No.
She looks inquiringly at him. "For your pride, because he killed you once before?"
He doesn't say anything.
"Pourquoi?" She asks again. "Pourquoi? Est-ce que c'est parce que tu veux qu'il te remarque? Pourtant il pense déjà à toi tout le temps."
"
"No." He says, and he has found his ease again, the way the words can slip off his tongue, the way they flow together. Something is repairing itself inside of him, mending the hole that was there, and the doubt in the back of his mind is being pushed to the front, only to be hacked at, mutilated, until it is an indistinguishable wreck. Thinking about killing Neo, seeing, hearing that spine break under his hands, to feel that neck pulsing their beat in his fingers, it seems to steady him, seems to give him a sense of resolution, a reason to exist, and that one thing is just to kill him.
It is absurdly simple, and he exits.
Excuse my French if it's not… correct… I don't quite have complete mastery over it yet. _ Um… what it says is something along the lines of, "Why? Is it because you want him to notice you? But he already thinks of you all the time."
C&C is much appreciated! ^_^