A/N: I integrated a small scene from Reloaded in here, so you could get a good bearing on the time period. Don't get offended, I wasn't plagiarizing. The scene, of course, belongs to the Wachowski Brothers.
Chapter 8: Discovery
It was about 0300 and Link was still analyzing Smith's program. He was in the process of evaluating the memory files. After hours and hours of staring at code functions, he was exhausted. He was slowly nodding off, trying to fight it somewhat unsuccessfully. His eyelids had dropped and opened again, and that was when he noticed something scrolling down his screen that made him sit straight up in his chair.
He gaped in horror for a few moments, then blurted out a string of obscenities, obviously not interested in falling asleep anymore.
"Shit. Shit! Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit…"
Twenty minutes later, the entire crew of both the Hammer and the Nebuchadnezzar were gathered in the infirmary beside Neo's bed. He was still in a deep coma. Beside him, Bane, the only survivor of the five-ship massacre, lay unconscious as well.
Captain Roland came stalking into the room and jabbed a finger at Bane.
"Inject him with a sedative immediately," he ordered. The orderly, Maggie, complied.
"What seems to be the problem, Captain?" Morpheus asked calmly. Trinity stood beside him in quiet concern.
Link came rushing in directly behind Roland.
"There's a huge problem, sir," he said to Morpheus, almost stumbling over his words. Both crews looked at him in interest.
"Here, let me just show you…" he inserted a disk into the nearest monitor. "I was studying Smith's functional, aptitude, and memory files to find out if there was some way that we could re-program him. Unfortunately, they're all read-only files. The encryptions to alter him are like a steel vault with a gadjillion locks on it. I doubt we'd be able to get through them. However, I found this in his memory files. I converted it to video format for easier storage." He tapped a button on the display, and everyone gathered around closer to watch.
It was like looking through Smith's eyes. He was standing atop an abandoned building, evidently in pursuit of someone. There were two of them; they had jumped down through a glass skylight into a room that contained their escape. By the time Smith caught up, one of them had already picked up the phone and gone, but the other was still there. It was Bane. Smith jumped down to join him. Bane whirled around, yanking out his pistol, but Smith caught him by the wrist and jabbed his hand into the unfortunate man's chest. A black substance began flowing outward from his fingers.
"Oh, God," Bane whispered in horror, right before the inky tendrils consumed his face.
"Smith will suffice," came a rather sardonic reply. In a matter of seconds, Bane had been transformed into another copy of Smith. The original stepped forward to adjust the other's tie.
"Thank you," the copy said gratefully.
"My pleasure."
The phone rang again. The two looked down at it, then at each other. A harkened grin crossed the copy's face.
The two crews stood and watched in horror as the copy reached for the ringing phone meant for Bane, removed it from the cradle, and placed it to his ear. He vanished in a flurry of fragmented code.
Slowly they all turned to gape at the unconscious Bane. No one said a word, but a resounding "Holy shit" was going through everyone's mind.
Trinity spoke up first. Her voice was steel-hard angry. "Smith…is in Bane?"
"Yes," Link said quietly. He looked down at the floor.
Roland ordered his crew back to their stations.
Morpheus was astounded. "I think we all owe Link our gratitude. We might have all been dead by now if it wasn't for him."
"I was just doing what I was told, sir."
Trinity glared at Bane. Or rather, Smith. Bane Smith. Whoever he was. Had he really been unconscious this whole time, or had it been a hoax? It didn't matter now. He had been sedated.
"We should move him to the brig," she said quietly. It seemed that she should have been acting more volatile in this situation, but shock had taken over her brain. Smith was no more than two feet away from Neo, and no one had known that it was he. Neo was lying there wholly vulnerable and unprotected, save for frequent condition checks from Maggie. They were lucky. They were damned lucky.
"What are we going to do?" Trinity asked Morpheus.
"We are going to plug him into the blank construct with the original Smith, that is what we are going to. We are going to remove him from that body and give Bane a proper burial."