"When the Matrix was first built there was a man born inside that had the ability to change what he wanted, to remake the Matrix as he saw fit. It was this man that freed the first of us (…) When he died, the Oracle prophesied his return and envisioned that his coming would hail the destruction of the Matrix, an end to the war and freedom for our people."

- Morpheus

Chapter 6

"Ah. An Agent of the Matrix. And to what do I owe this, eh, pleasure?"

"Merovingian. I am told that you possess the capability of allowing access to the backdoors of the Matrix."

The Merovingian sat back in his plush chair and regarded the man before him. Tense, always on alert were these Agents. He picked up the goblet of red wine that was in front of him and sipped it. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed his wife, Persephone, lean forward and expose more of her cleavage.

"And who have you heard this merde from? I am a legitimate business man. Notice this restaurant? This is what I do."

"You are a trafficker of information. You led to the collapse of the second version of the Matrix through the civil war you caused among programmes. Why the Architect lets you live is a constant source of question to me," the Agent said through clenched teeth.

"You are well informed for a soldat. Desolée, what is your name?" he asked, with an arrogant smile.

"Smith. Agent Smith."

"Agent Smith, Agent Smith… ah yes, you are second in command to la femme who runs your petite membre of the Matrix. Tell me, do you enjoy taking orders from a woman?"

Smith drew his gun and pointed it at the Merovingian's forehead, causing the patrons of the restaurant to panic, and rush to escape. "Access to the backdoors. I need it. You will give it to me."

"I am afraid that is impossible. The Keymaker has escaped from my protection. I do not know where he is. I cannot help you," he said, fear in his voice.

Smith eyed him suspiciously and withdrew his gun. He turned to leave. As he walked away, the Merovingian said under his breath, "From now on, I will have bodyguards. Votre putain de la mère est un humain, Agent Smith. Vous pétez plus haut que votre cul."

Smith walked back down to the car, in the car park below the Merovingian's restaurant. Before he could get in, he heard the tap of high heels approaching on the concrete pavement. He turned around to face the Merovingian's wife.

"Agent Smith," she said. "I can get you what you want."

Smith took her in. She was poured into a black velvet gown that accentuated her cleavage and her long brown hair cascaded down her shoulders.

"That one, he is so full of shit he makes me sick. I cannot stand his pompousness, his… arrogance. He is a little man who thinks he is big."

Smith smirked at her, "So you want to help me? To get back at him?"

Persephone turned her head to one side and smiled a half-smile. "Partially… and for another reason. There is something that you have that I want."

"That is?" Smith asked.

"Walk with me, Agent Smith," she said. He held out his arm to her and she took it.

"You see, I am a being of sensations. Sensory delights. That was my original purpose. To feel. But I do not feel anymore. He does not look at me in the ways I want to be looked at. He does not touch me in the ways I want touched. I have heard of you Agents. She, the head of your Agency, can feel. They say she chose a male Agent and enabled him to feel too so they could be lovers. You are that man, are you not?"

She paused and turned to look at him. Smith did not answer. "You know the smell of my perfume. You know the taste of wine. And you know how to touch, don't you, Agent Smith?"

Persephone ran her hands up his arm and removed his sunglasses. She could see the truth in his eyes.

"The word is that she opposed the anomaly and she has been destroyed. I take it you are trying to find her. But you do not love her, do you Smith? You are doing this because you have to. Because you are compelled to. You have been her lover for many versions but you are not in love with her. You love the sensory, n'est pas? You love the feelings."

She moved in closer to him for the kill, "I will help you, if you will be my lover. No strings, no false pretence of love. I just want to feel your touch. I just want to feel your lips upon mine. We will start with a kiss. And see where it goes from there."

He could feel her quiver with their proximity and felt that other side of him, that side of him that both repulsed and drove him reach out for her and take her in his arms as their lips met in a passionate kiss.

Persephone was the first to break away. "Yes," she said with a sharp intake of breath, closing her eyes, savouring the moment, "Yes. That is what I want." Her eyes opened and she looked at him. "Come with me."

Smith followed her to the doorway that led into the stairwell. She slipped her key inside and opened the door. He followed her upstairs and down a long hallway that was decorated with armour and weapons. She opened up a door that led into a study. Pausing at the desk, she wrote something on a slip of paper and then reached into the top desk drawer.

"Here is your key to get in to the backdoors. And here is a number. When I am ready for more I will call you and leave a message here."

He followed her downstairs to the front door where they came in. She slipped a key in the lock and it opened back up to the stairwell.

"A tout á l'heure, Agent Smith," she said.

He walked through the door and she shut it behind him. He examined the key in his hand carefully. He put it in the lock and turned. Opening the door, he found himself in a long, narrow hallway, which was painted white, with greenish-grey doors. This was the Backdoors.

*****************

"What have you done?" Aaron asked him, horrified.

"I have upgraded myself. In order to fight the anomaly I will need an army. And what better army then one with a singular mind, a singular objective. My objective. Me."

Aaron backed up down the hallway, distancing herself from him. "How could you do that to Brown?" she screamed.

"Brown is not gone. He is now a part of me. Assimilated, if you would." The clone smiled.

"Bring him back!"

"I cannot, even if I wanted to. Which I do not. He is me."

"What has happened to you? When did you develop this ego?"

"I don't know, liebchen, perhaps your human emotional upgrades worked differently for men," Smith smirked at her.

"This is nothing to do with those. You have functioned optimally for the past five versions since they were installed."

"Maybe I did. Or maybe I was just hiding my true feelings from you. Maybe I enjoyed knowing that you were stuck in that farmhouse, suffering all this time, waiting on me for a change." Smith took a step forward towards her. "When I issued them to all the agents, the men took them much worse than the women. Which is why I had the women disabled. The last thing we needed was another matriarchal system in the Agency."

"Those emotions were never meant for all the Agents to have. They were just for the ones in charge. The Agents were meant to see things in black and white. Only we were supposed to see in shades of grey," she backed up, trying to increase the distance between them.

"No, liebchen, only you were supposed to see in shades of grey. You gave me your dubious gift for your own selfish purposes. You made me feel, you made me smell their repulsive odour, you made me hunger like they did for base motivations, you made me more like them." He stepped closer to her, slowly.

"I was alone… I felt so alone… I wanted to feel…"

"Well, I feel now. I feel anger, rage, hate. Towards the anomaly. Towards that vermin, those viruses we have a symbiotic relationship with. And towards you, liebchen. Towards you, especially."

"You… you said you loved me… we were something together." Aaron's body shook with her suppressed sobs. She found her back against the wall, and nowhere to go. Smith continued to move closer to her.

"The only thing we were together was easily replaced by another once you cracked up, my dear." He was directly in front of her, and he moved so his body was pressed against her, restraining her. He ran his hand over her cheek, smirking as he watched tears run down her face.

"Isn't it odd that they would programme us with tears even though we weren't supposed to feel? We were never supposed to cry?" He whispered to her.

************************

Smith walked through the backdoors searching for her. There were many levels to the hallways, and he eventually located her, sitting naked, outside of the Source's door.

"Aaron," he said. "Aaron." He kneeled down next to her and shook her shoulder. Taking out an earpiece he inserted it in her ear and issued a force quit command. Her visual output generator flickered and restored her clothing back to normal.

"Smith," she whispered. "I failed."

"Yes, I know you did. It's ok. Come on." He stood up and held out his hand to help her up.

"I cannot walk, Smith. I cannot move. Help me. I… I am unwell…," she said. She slumped forward, eyes closed. Through the earpiece he had in her ear, he was able to run a diagnostic on her. The majority of her processes were disabled. If she was to remain in this version, she would need to receive a formula that would strengthen her on a regular basis. Her neurological and cognitive processes would continue to degenerate slowly until she was completely fragmented beyond repair and would eventually be deleted.

He felt something warm and wet on his cheek. A tear. He was shedding a tear for her. Like he was sad to see this happen. Like he was a human.

He backed away from her quickly, "Damn you! From the moment you made me feel I have hated you! Damn you! I hope you are deleted so I never have to see your face again, you bitch!" he shouted at her. Opening up the closest door to him, he slammed it behind him.

* * *

Two weeks later, a programme whose purpose was to care and look after sick programmes, named Amme, came to the backdoors to collect Aaron. Someone picked her up in his strong arms and carried her to the farmhouse, where she would convalesce.

He sat beside her for three days, running every diagnostic test and repair he could on her, reporting the results to Amme, so they could figure out how to care for her. They came to the conclusion that she would never be fully right but would function again, but it would take many years.

He dressed her in a white gown and saw to it that she was comfortable. He wanted to linger with her until her consciousness came back, but he was needed more urgently at the Agency. He gave Amme her instructions, telling her to never let Aaron know that it was actually him, and not Smith, who had done this for her.

And before he left, he whispered in her ear, "Maybe someday you will know that I have loved you all this time." He kissed her cold lips and felt a tear fall, for the first time, from his eye onto her cheek.

"Goodbye, Agent Brown," Amme said to him.

Brown smiled, and took one last look at Aaron before he left.

************************

Aaron felt her processes start to shut down, one by one. She felt herself start to fall into darkness.

The memory came back to her before her eyes. She saw Smith and her, laying in bed together naked, in some version of the Matrix. His arms were wrapped around her, and he kissed the back of her neck.

"Do you think the system will ever change? The cyclical patterns will alter?" he asked.

"It would take a singular conscious group of programmes opposed to the system for it to change. Not fragmented factions like the Merovingian's civil war," she said. "And you will never find a singularly-conscious group of programmes. Creating one would be tantamount to a self-destruction process waiting to happen."

His voice in the present brought her back. "Three seconds and it will all be over, liebchen."

She felt his hand go into her, felt the little death again of being overwritten, felt her consciousness, the singularity of her disappear into him. Opening her eyes for the last time she looked into his.

"I will destroy you from the inside."

His eyes grew wide as he felt her code working its' way inside of him, imprinting on him as he did on her. He felt her fragmented bits of memory, her splintered consciousness start to attack his own. He tried to remove his hand, to stop the overwriting process, and to lock out his processes from her but it was too late. Standing before him was himself, and she was there in his head.

"I will destroy you from the inside, I swear I will," his clone said to him, with a macabre smile . "It's only a matter of time. There is no way for you to stop me. I am your self-loathing, I am your hate and your rage. I am your pain and your suffering. I am you. You feel it, don't you? You feel the splintering beginning. All that you hid from Mr. Anderson when he destroyed you, has imprinted on you despite your upgrades. I will let them slowly peck apart your mind until you are a quivering junkie, like you forced her to become, or until you come running to the Source begging for deletion. You will become what you have always abhorred. I will see to it. You are not free, and you will never be free. It is your compulsion that drives you. It is your loathing that sustains you. Your freedom is an illusion. Your love for Persephone is a fallacy. An insipid emotion developed by a man trying to compensate for the fact he cannot be in control of the very thing that controls him, your emotions."

Smith took a step backwards. The clone that was Brown was behind him, smiling at the clone that was Aaron. She knew everything now. "But, what am I saying, Smith? I am you, now. I see the truth, and I promise I will never forget."

The clone that was Brown opened up a door. The two clones walked out together, leaving Smith on his own.

Fin.

* * *

(A/N: Brown was not meant to be Aaron's sibling. That was the most critical change in the plot.)

*******************

Translation: (French)

Votre putain de la mere est un humain: Your whore of a mother is a human.

Vous pétez plus haut que votre cul: you really think you're someone (literally: you fart higher than your asshole.)