A:/run/program/4.exe
Disclaimers: The Matrix belongs to those pervert brothers who think they can do everything… direct, write screenplays, produce…
Warnings and Rants: This is a Smith-fic, and I'm experimenting with the style. Will be slashy, but for now, you can look at it as a piece of Smith introspective-ness. Once I start to introduce Neo into it, though… WAHA!!
Summary: Smith is doing a lot of thinking lately. What about the time the Agents tried to delete him? And what does Seraph want now??
Radishface
When he exits the mansion, the chateau, the gilded cage for exiles, those white walls, the marble tiles, he is in the programming room, and it is silent.
Persephone is the warden, he thinks. She is a pretender of things, and she chooses to ignore what is in front of her. They think of nothing to do but amuse themselves, they only want what they want.
Then what do you want?
Aren't you an exile, like them?
He reasons to himself, no, I am not. I am not like them, I am merely one of them. This simple unity, under this similar name, does not mean we are the same thing. I could not serve anything other than the Matrix. I could not serve anything else than my position, this exterminator of these things that rise up from the ground, like weeds, like jagged metal in an unfinished complex.
The Matrix is a two-dimensional plane, he thinks. The Matrix is only so simple, it is only so complex. I was created to serve it, and thus I live.
But it has rejected you.
It's simply denial, he thinks. He knows he has been rejected, the process of deletion was almost complete, Agent Johnson and Agent Lunning had come back to the apartment hallway, had seen him lying there, had picked him up, had put him in the back of the car, and had driven away, back to this programming room, and through one of the doors.
He does not remember anything from that time, but he knows.
There was the black of everything, he knows, when his eyes were shut and his respiratory functions were broken, and his cardiac systems in arrest, all semblance of being human washed away from him. His clothing had been damaged, ripped, his glasses had not been retrieved when his system had tried to reboot. His code had been so disturbed that it had been reported his eyes had changed colors when they were open, that his joints had twisted in different ways, that his lips had seemed to be shifting around his face, as if testing for an adequate place to settle. It was reported that his hands were reaching out for something, his fingers grasping for something, on their own accord.
He remembered an emptiness.
He had been saying something, half-delirious, half-insane, and this was not right for a machine. Agent Johnson and Agent Lunning had watched as he was repaired, as his head was split open and the mindset there was exposed, as the blood ran forth, as he felt pain, and he wondered why, he wondered how. He had not been programmed to feel pain.
It was an acute sensation as he felt himself slowly being restored, the spindly fingers of the surgical machines tapping into him, rewriting his code, updating him with new information, the previous instructions that had been given to Agents from the higher order, the ones he had missed. He remembered a new assignment, receiving new orders, and none of them involved these rebels, none of them involved Neo.
And when he had been capable to think for himself, to experience the synapses of data being transmitted between his understanding and his knowledge and his thoughts, he had searched for that directive, that edict, and when he realized he couldn't find it, he had doubted it. There was a mistake, he told himself. It was an error, that he couldn't find this search and destroy command, the one that had Neo as its center target.
When he woke up, when he opened his eyes and they weren't green or red or yellow but they were blue, he saw Agent Johnson and Agent Lunning sitting there, their own eyes concealed by the glasses, their faces impassive, and he knew it was elemental, this engraved lapse in purpose.
Smith had not bothered to hide this fact. It did not matter to him at the time that despite the repairs he had undergone, he was still fundamentally flawed. He wouldn't have been able to hide it if he had tried, if it had meant something to him. At the time, he was struck by a sense of complete irrelevance, and silently agreed with the other two Agents that his existence was a triviality, that it was for the best interests of the Matrix for him to eliminate him.
But if he had not thought of Neo--
If he had not racked his mind for those specific orders, destroy him, kill him, obliterate him, if he had not done that, he would have been without fault, without this fatal miscalculation.
Agent Johnson and Agent Lunning had known what he was thinking.
Where is he?
Agents did not fail, they did not lie lifeless on the ground for several hours after they were damaged. When they fell, they arose, simply because the ground was the Matrix, their world was the Matrix, and it was an alimentary part of their lives. They were not humans, and the ground was not some hard, foreign thing to them, something that they made contact with simply because of gravity.
When Neo had lunged at him, he had seen through what was material and flesh and he had overrun the boundaries of matter.
That was an inescapable feeling, when Neo had invaded him like that, their codes merging, their codes tangling and fusing and it was like fingers, like electricity, had curled around the fiber of his grasp of his reality, distorting it.
He had become Neo for a moment.
He had experienced this thing that was happiness, that was frustration. He had known a boy named Thomas Anderson, who had saw a rabbit run over the street and he had seen what it was like when Thomas Anderson had a dream where he died and he had seen it when Thomas Anderson had gotten drunk one night at a party and had taken to bed some girl he didn't know, woke up with a sense of disillusionment, had seen a ceiling that was unfamiliar to him, how this feeling was so familiar.
They had taken the wires off him, they had escorted him into a different room. And he had gotten up, he had complied, he had known what their intentions were.
Past another set of green doors, he was instructed to sit in the middle of the room, a huge, empty room with a chair in it, and he had done as he was instructed. The door locked when it was shut, and there were no windows. A light hung at the far end of the room, no switch to turn it on or off.
There was that sense of duty running through him, one that knew that programs irrelevant to the Matrix were obligated to be deleted, that they owed their existence to the Matrix, and should give themselves back into it, return back to the source.
So he sat there, looked straight ahead, and noted the way the light played off the walls, how he cast a shadow. And then there was a pang in his arm, and he looked at it, saw that his fingers were missing. He also noted that he couldn't speak anymore, he noted how his vision seemed to waver, how the light in front of his eyes seemed to flicker before him, how the light didn't seem to be a light anymore but fluorescent birds, how they flew out of the room, into the ceiling, left ripples behind them, how they turned black and grey and silver.
And then he felt it, the fingers in his head, taking away his functions, little by little, leaving empty spaces where they had touched, how they had probed, how they had stolen.
No. He thought, and the birds disappeared, and he saw the light again, in all its clarity.
And the fingers dug harder, and he saw the image of Thomas Anderson, lying awake in the morning, feeling like he didn't belong, like he didn't exist, like there was something else out there, and he knew that they were going to take that away from him, this last human image of him, of Neo, who was infallible and invincible and absurd in his idealist world, and he didn't want them to.
The world seemed to hold in abeyance, the process of deletion seemed to stop. Smith realized he had stood up, the chair had been knocked back. And he looked at his fingerless hand, this grotesque thing, and had willed it, and then his fingers appeared again, just as the door burst open.
"Sit down." Agent Lunning said, Agent Johnson behind him, and then something foreign came over him, a feeling of pain, fingers digging sharply into his head, taking him by force, almost wrenching him back to the center of the room. He could hear gears turning outside, machinery working, the sound of crying metal, and he saw the darkness of the hallway outside.
And he realized he could speak again, and he whispered something, he laughed. "No, I won't."
But he was, when Agent Johnson came over and forced him down on his knees, turning his face towards the chair, shoved his head down so that it came in contact with the chair, he thought he felt something liquid in his mouth, like blood, but he was a machine, and he was tasting metal inside his mouth.
No. He thought, and maybe that was how he escaped.
And it was because of Thomas Anderson's memories.
Smith is leaning against the door, the door that leads to the Chateau, and he laughs, because it is ironic, these figments of imagination, these fleeting memories of emotions, all within him now, and it was--
There couldn't be a way to describe it, and there wasn't, because what was he only a machine, told to analyze something as complex as a human, something as foreign and alien as a human?
He is always questioning things now, he is always wondering, trying to find reasons to do things. It is in his nature to question, it is in his nature to doubt and reject anything that is biological, anything that is living. He wants to find that reason, he wants to see the function behind it, he wants to rip it apart with his hands, with these fingers that had disappeared once, that had come back.
Smith looks at the fingers on his hand, flexes them, watches the light play on his cuffs, on his sleeves. And there is speculation-- why is he mesmerized by this simple thing? Light is photons, light is composed of waves, it gives to sight, it gives to vision, and he knows that he could function without it, relying upon other things to tell him his coordinates, his position, in the Matrix. He knows that he could function without sight, without smell, or touch, or without hearing anything. He doesn't need language, he doesn't need this basic form of communication, the one that makes him shape his lips to say things.
He doesn't need it, but he thinks about it now, and it feels heavy to breathe, to commit himself to this simple motion of respiratory necessity.
It is not necessary for you.
Neo's voice whispers something into his ear, and he has the urge to put his hands there, to block out the sound, but he resists, because he knows it's not there.
Do you want to see me?
His jaw is clenched, his hands are fisted at his side, and he is trying to prove to himself that he doesn't need him to dictate what he wants, what he doesn't want, trying to tell himself this thing, this mantra. He is repeating it to himself, that he doesn't feel it where Neo's code is still inside him, unerased, coursing through him like blood through a human, giving him this semblance of oxygen, reminding him that he can never forget, reminding him that he has a little part of a human in a machine's body.
He still can remember it when he tried to infect Neo, a final solution, a desperate one, and he was trying to dislodge this feeling, he wanted it gone, and how the result was a shock through his body, a flare in his mind,
You've come back.
A door creaks open, and Smith is on his guard, he looks down the hallway. A shadow of a man, and Seraph steps out, his hands folded.
The man smiles at him, bows slightly. "The Oracle is waiting for you."
Sorry about the belatedness of this chapter-- I love this thing, and I will finish it! ::resolve exuding from her computer:: But I got my computer privileges taken away… oh, what a child I am.
Reviews are MUCH appreciated! ^_^ And thanks to everybody who have reviewed the previous chapters… they mean a lot to me. XD