The next days, or weeks (I can't really tell) pass in a haze. Stirring out of dreamless sleep on a hard steel table.  Cold.  Pain.  Morpheus and Trinity above me.  Bright white lights.

I wake up on a steel cot with a mattress upon it.  A blanket has been pulled up around my neck.  I'm dressed in a black wool shirt, slightly wear-worn, and some dull gray pants, secured with buttons at the top. On my feet there's pair of black strapped boots.  My arms still feel slightly weak, as do my legs, but I manage to sit up in bed, and then swing my legs off the side of it.  I realize, with a jolt, that there's an IV in my arm.  I lift up my sleeve and gasp.  It's somehow stuck in a plug in my arm.  Suddenly I have a flash of memory.  Red. Red liquid.  A tank.  Plugs. Metal. Cold.

 I grab the tube in my arm and pull the IV out.  The ugly black plug remains imbedded in my skin.  I run my fingers over it.  I move my hands to my head and I pull the knit cap off and notice it's bare of its usual mop of brown hair.  Instead, there's a fine peach fuzz growing there, like my head was shaved.  I look around.  It seems like I'm in some kind of cell. I slowly pull myself to me feet. 

"Hello?" I say, surprised to hear my own voice so loud and clear.

"Hello?" I say again, louder.

With a clanking sound the door of my room opens and Trinity walks in.  "Em. You're awake." She says, her voice sounding happier than I've ever heard it.

"How long have I been asleep?" I say, my mind racing with questions.

"Almost three weeks." She says.  "You woke up from time to time, as I'm sure you know, but this is the first time you've been fully conscious. You know, up and about."

"What's happened to me?" I say, feeling my hair again. Suddenly, with a jolt, I realize on the back of my head, near the end of my hairline there's cold metal imbedded in my skin.  My hand pulls away as soon as I touch it, but reluctantly I draw my fingers back over it and shudder at the touch of a round steel plug.

"Please, save your questions for Morpheus.  All your answers will be given to you."

Trinity turns her back to me and walks from the room.  I follow her, rubbing my hands over my arms in the cold.  Morpheus meets me halfway down a steel corridor. 

"Em." He says, smiling.  He's dressed in a tattered red sweater and the same grayish pants as me.  He has a thick leather cord with a pendant on the end around his neck.  "How are you feeling?"

"Cold." I say, automatically.

He smiles quickly, and puts a hand on my shoulder.  "What are you thinking?"

And suddenly it seems like the dam that stemmed the flow from between my brain and my mouth burst, and all the questions I had in my head babbled out my mouth.

Morpheus seemed a little taken aback, but not unkindly.  He watched me and listened to my stream of queries. 

"As to your most basic questions—where you are—first I should tell you when you are."  I notice as he says this that Trinity slips away to leave us alone. Morpheus and I sit down on benches that are in the corridor. 

"When I am?" I say, puzzled.

"The year is somewhere around 2200, about two hundred years later than you believe it to be. We're really not sure, because most written histories have long since the time you've been living in been destroyed."

"What happened to me? How did I get here? Or…to now?"

"You were always existing in this time.  Your body did anyway, but your mind was plugged into a different time and place.  Do you remember waking up?"

I have another flash of memory.  A red film sticking to my face, and blurred sights around me.  Bodies. Red liquid. Cold. 

"Kinda." I reply, trying to hold on to these bits and pieces in my mind. "Where was that place?"

"It is where your body was living, while your mind existed somewhere else.  In Boston, in an October 200 years ago." 

I swallow hard, "And…And the plugs?"

"They kept your body alive and believing in its mental state.  When your mind told you that you were eating, your body was given nourishment.  When your mind told you that you were experiencing happiness, electrical signals sent through that plug in the back of your head told your brain's pleasure center something that wasn't physically true."

"So. The world I lived in.  It wasn't real.  It was all a big lie? Is that what Trinity meant?"

"Yes.  We call it The Matrix.  The world that they used as distraction…A preoccupation. While they could do their work."

"Who's they?"

"The machines." Morpheus says calmly. "From what we've learned over the years, apparently as technology advanced around the time you've been living in, people created a beautiful new form of technology known as AI."

"Artificial Intelligence." I say, already knowing some about it.

"Soon machines were programmed to do the menial tasks that people didn't want to bother with. They were given work in mines, factories, restaurants.  But their minds were programmed too well, and advancements continued to come about.  They began to learn of their own will.  To understand.  To feel.  And their feeling was not one of gratitude.  There was a war, and in the process the world was badly damaged.  We'd developed the technology for all machines to run off solar energy, so as a last resort, we decided to scorch the sky with toxins that would hang there in the atmosphere and block out the sun's rays.  It was a desperate move, but humans felt sure of victory after this plan…This was not so.  The machines were quick to act with their source of energy gone…. And they found their salvation in their greatest enemies."

"Humans." I murmur, feeling the plug in my arm.

"Precisely."  Morpheus says.  "The machines knew all about the human anatomy.  And they knew that humans, with their warm blood, produced an abundance of heat.  Heat, that when harnessed correctly would make energy."

"Why go to so much trouble to survive when the earth was utterly destroyed though? What did they have to gain?" I say, drinking in all of this information with a sickly feeling of wonder and amazement.

"For the same reason that humans went to all the trouble to destroy the greatest source of life in the solar system.  Dominance.  An age old theme.  When it comes down to it, it's what all wars are about.  Not over land, or beliefs, but about what that land or belief must grant you.  Dominance. Power. Superiority.  The machines, after enslaving the human race, had a ruling hand over the entire world.  And they created a program known as the matrix, to keep humans confined in their own little worlds, and to produce all the heat that kept them alive, and in power." 

There's a pause.  I feel numb.  It all fits together.  It all makes sense.  I feel sick that I devoted so much of my life to computers, only to find that one day my trusty monitor and CPU would sprout legs and turn on me.  Then I realize, this is probably the same way that Trinity, or Morpheus felt.  Suddenly, another thought strikes me.

"Well, then how are we here? Me and you and Trinity?"

"Ah.  That is a story I was hoping you'd ask me." Morpheus smiles. 

"Years ago, when the matrix was a very new program, a man was born inside, just like you or me, but as he grew up in the matrix, he found that he could control things.  Change things.  He soon discovered the truth and freed himself.  Then he devoted the rest of his days to freeing other minds.  He began a city known as Zion, that is located deep beneath the earth's mantle, near its core, where there is still some heat left.  When he died, the oracle, a seer, prophesized his return, and that when he did return, the matrix would be torn away, and humans would triumph at last.   Well, with his beginnings Zion grew and grew.  Ships were built, much like the Nebudchanezzar, the one you're on now, and minds were freed.  Now we await the coming of The One, and the freedom of all people."

I sigh with the end of the story.  It was so much information to take in.  "So," I say after a pause.  "How do you get into the matrix if you've been unplugged?"

Morpheus smiles. "The matrix, Em, is just like any other computer program or website. It can be hacked into. Around the places we fly in our ship, we find areas where we can broadcast a pirated matrix signal, and hack our way into the matrix.  Your body stays on the ship, and your mind goes into the matrix." 

I nod, not fully understanding yet, but getting the gist of things.

"Well, where are we now? I mean, I know we're on a ship. But where in the world? Are we underground?"

"Yes.  We generally stay below ground.  It's too dangerous above.  The cities that had been built before the war were enormous metropolises.  When the cities were leveled the huge sewers that snaked underground remained.  That's where we are now."

I nod again, my brain processing everything very quickly.

"Why is it dangerous above ground?"

Morpheus smiles again, seemingly bemused with all of my questions, but he is quite ready to answer.

"The machines.  Of course they know about us by now, and are constantly tracking us.  We're generally good at evading them, but it's always a problem when we're broadcasting.  When you're inside the matrix, your mind is in the matrix.  If the signal connecting your brain with your body was suddenly torn away, you would die.  So, if the machine's sentinel robots, or squiddies find us while we have people in matrix, it's a problem."

"Why's that?" I say. "Can't you just shoot them?"

"Well, some ships are equipped with guns, but our one weapon is an EMP, or electromagnetic pulse."

I nod. 

"It shorts out all electricity in a large radius around the ship, so if we're ever threatened by sentinels, it will protect us." He continues. "But, it will also short out a pirate connection with the matrix, which would kill anyone inside.  That's the reason we brought you and not Sherin."

"There were sentinels after you?" I gasp.

"Yes.  We only had time to pick up one of you from the drop point where you were discarded after you were unplugged, before we could flee to a haven.  Since then we haven't been able to find a safe point to land and broadcast."

I sigh and lean back on the wall, resting the back of my head against the cool steel.  "Wow." I say, my eyes closed, but my mind full of images.

"It is quite incredible." Morpheus says.  I hear him stand and I open my eyes and sit up.  "Come with me.  I want you to meet the rest of the crew."