Terminate and Stay Resident
By Moonraker One
Author Note: This story was deleted due to lack of reviews. This is a re-post. If I don't get more than one review, it'll be deleted forever.
Chapter one – Upload
He would probably never return from this, but this was his mission. Preparations for this mission required at least a month's time, and heavy coding on his part. What he was planning to do was something he could not tell any other member of the resistance, not even Morpheus. A grin made it onto his face as he pushed the thrusters as fast as he could, speeding down secret tunnels that were heavily guarded and evading sentinels like it was going out of style. Being caught by a sentinel meant death. Also, he figured, returning to Zion after stealing a ship would mean court-martial, and, death. His name was John, a.k.a. Cody; it was a nickname he got because he was the one who constantly did the hand coding for Morpheus's training simulations. The program he had on a disc at his side, however, was far more important than any training simulation.
Looking up, he saw that the force field around the main data area of the mainframe had gone down; this was crucial that he made it inside the field before it came up again, or he'd be destroyed instantly. He gritted his teeth and punched the already-taxed thrusters, making a sonic boom as his ship lurched forward at a high rate of velocity. Closing his eyes and preparing for the worst, he felt the ship rock a bit. Then he opened his eyes and smiled, for he had made it inside. Now came the suicidal part: the data upload. Every twelve and a half months the machines do a massive overhaul of their entire mainframe computer, which forces them to leave at least one data broadcast frequency open so the system can remain online. In that period of time, which would last about twelve seconds, he had to upload his entire program, which almost completely filled the disc. Hearing the telltale whirring of the massive hard drive upgrade, he shoved in the disc and punched away at the keyboard as hard as he could.
[WARNING!] boomed a sentinel. [ILLEGAL DATA UPLOAD DETECTED!]
John cursed silently, but knew that there was hope; because their system had not finished the overhaul yet, they could not terminate or interrupt the transmission. Even as he saw sentinels approaching his ship, he was keeping an eye on his computer. The progress bar for the upload hadn't even hit half yet, and the enemy was already approaching. Perhaps he would not be returning from this mission after all. At least he would help his fellow man gain an advantage over these machines.
[HUMAN PRESENCE DETECTED!] one sentinel beckoned to another. [MUST DESTROY IMMEDIATELY!]
John knew that the worst thing for the machines to do would be to get a hold of his data and program a counter-program, so he reached under the steering panel of the ship and opened the secret compartment; he pulled out a cord with an attached remote labeled "self-destruct mechanism." Suddenly startled by a strange beeping, he looked down at the control panel and smiled widely: the progress bar had reached a hundred percent. As the sentinels burst through the glass dome at the front of his stolen ship, John had a Clint Eastwood squint in his eyes.
"Smile, you bastards," he cried out into the darkness of the tunnels. Then a terrible explosion atomized everything for a hundred yards in every direction.
The night was a terrible one for the city police force; they were tired from ten bank robberies, and now this. Some hacker named Trinity was attempting to hack into FBI criminal records. If there was one thing the police hated, was dealing with federal agents. And speak of the devil, here they were.
"Where is the hacker?" inquired a calm and collected agent. "She is a threat of the utmost danger. We are here to bring her in."
The highest-ranking police officer scoffed. "We've got ten men on her," he reassured the agent, "so I think we can take her in. Who are you, anyway?"
"Your men are already dead," was the agent's response. "Oh, and my name is Agent Smith."
"Damn," Trinity said into her phone. "Our position has been compromised."
"Get out of there now!" ordered Morpheus. As directed, Trinity took off like a bat out of hell. Dodging the city's police officers—who were idiots anyway—she knew better than to be lulled into a false sense of believing that she was out of harm's way, for years of running away from the enemy taught her that agents were relentless. Even as the hallway faded into the distance and the roof of the building began to approach her, she could hear the close footsteps of Smith and his followers. The cold outside air provided a sense of urgency as Trinity tore through the air like a bullet on a speed high, and the edge of the building came and went rapidly. Years of training to bend the rules of the artificial world of the Matrix enabled her to run at least ten times faster than any person, but even still, she could feel the never-tiring agents closing in slowly but surely. With her faith stalling, she pushed her fears away; if she had any doubt over her escaping, she'd fail. Ducking through a hole in the ceiling of an abandoned building, she passed by a homeless man lying on a pile of mildew-eaten coats on her bat-out-of-hell run. A few seconds after the dark-haired Trinity faded from his view, a force seemed to overtake his body all at once. He could feel his bones twisting and his flesh being altered as well as his mind physically restructuring. He didn't know it, nor could he ever understand it.
Smith, with two of his servant agents behind him, ducked through the hole to find standing immediately in front of him a blonde-haired woman garbed in a suit that matched his (except it was a skirt suit instead of a pants suit), and the typical agent sunglasses. He knew instantly that she was an agent because she had the earpiece. "Who are you, fellow agent?" inquired a slightly uneasy Smith. The system did not have female agents; what was this new program? She gave him a slight grin.
"Agent Smith? Nice to meet you; I'm Agent O'Toole," she introduced. "You just lost the one called Trinity. But that's not the least of your problems now; another 'savior' of the humans will arise shortly." Smith's ears perked up at the sound of that; another "one" was about to exit the Matrix? He had to mobilize him and his fellow agents to destroy this threat before it became a bigger one.
"Thank you for the knowledge, Agent O'Toole," Smith agreed. "We will find and destroy him." She and the other agents nodded. With no time wasted, O'Toole thrust her hand through Agent Johnson's chest. The startled agent collapsed to the floor with a burst of green code erupting from the newly formed chest cavity; not an instant later, he was deleted. Smith looked at O'Toole in shock. "What the hell have you done? You've deleted a fellow agent!" shouted the angry Smith.
"There's a secret I'd like to share with you," she said, smiling at him. With not a moment wasted, she landed a straight punch on his upper chest, sending him sailing halfway down the hallway. The remaining agent, Banks, reached for his gun only to have his 'head' twisted around and his 'body' blasted through a wall; again, deletion was the fate decided. "I'm an agent, all right. I'm an agent created by a Human, for the purpose of aiding the Humans." Smith pulled off his sunglasses and crushed them in his hand.
"How...how was such a thing allowed by the system!?" shrieked the now-nervous Smith. Once he knew she was not going to be stupid and tell him, he threw himself at her with blistering speed. There was no way she was going to be able to defend against his attack, so during mid-flight when he clamped his hands tightly around her neck, she forced herself out of the homeless man's body. Unable to stop himself, Smith and the homeless man whose neck was in a vice grip slammed through the left wall, killing the man but leaving Smith unharmed. Freeing himself from the rubble, he stood up and examined his surroundings; two of his best fellow agents were deleted, and an agent programmed by a Human was somehow uploaded into the machine mainframe. To make matters worse, she had the ability to bend the rules of the Matrix, making her stronger than any agent. To steal a phrase from the Humans, he needed a vacation.
"Mister Tamberson," Agent Franklin said to his prisoner, chained to a steel chair. "I know you have access codes to the Zion mainframe. Tell me them or die." This was not good, for if the agents took his code, all of Zion would die. He spat in his captor's face.
"My name is Cracker," said Michael Tamberson, captain of the Zorflet.
His captor slapped him across the face with such force he knocked out a tooth. "I don't give a shit," replied Agent Franklin. He was doing such a good job interrogating the prisoner until Cracker began to quiver. Cracker's entire frame was quaking and convulsing until his flesh and bones began to morph. In a few seconds, sitting there strapped to the chair was a blonde-haired woman dressed exactly like an agent. Franklin had no clue as to what was happening when the woman ripped off her restraints and stood in front of him nonchalantly. Even if she was an agent, he didn't understand how she could insert herself into a body that had previously been jacked out of the Matrix. "Are...are you an Agent, madam?"
"Name's O'Toole," she responded. Before he had time to call for help, she began slamming his gut with punches so fast her arms left shadow trails as she repeatedly crashed fists into his abdomen. Still reeling even as she stopped punching him, he only had time to look up at her before she connected a standing side kick with his chest. The force of the kick, which forcefully pulled him off the ground and hurled him into the concrete wall of the interrogation room, caused him to leave a man-sized impression in the wall. He fell flat on his belly. Standing over him, she raised her right leg and crushed his head beneath her foot. Green code spurted out like blood from his neck as she wiped her shoe off on the carpet. She leaped out of the room, breaking through four layers of ceiling in order to get to the roof. There was a phone on the roof, and from the thoughts of the body she was in, this was the exit. Approaching the phone, she looked around for agents and ejected herself from the body. Startled, Cracker lifted the phone and left the Matrix.
"God, I can't believe that asshole," yelled Morpheus. "Died stealing a ship to go on a suicide mission."
"Who're you talking about?" inquired Trinity, who genuinely didn't know. Morpheus, who was seated at the main deck of his ship, lifted a picture of Cody, which Trinity hadn't seen in quite a while. She remembered the little man who would always sit at the computer and hand code the simulations for the crew. It came back to her slowly and angrily as she remembered the piece of trash that would always hit on her whenever he saw fit. Morpheus, who saw in the corner of his vision a small envelope attached inconspicuously to the wall, took the taped section of paper with attached disc and had Tank put it in the computer. A few beeps and Cody's ignorant face was back on the screen.
"If you're seeing this recorded message," he explained, "no doubt I'm already dead. I'm gonna tell you the details of what I died for. You know how every twelve months the machines do a full overhaul on all their hard drives? Well, I prepared for a month or so in advance, and uploaded a program directly onto their secure hard drive while it was vulnerable. That program was an Agent Program. Her name is Melissa O'Toole, my late girlfriend digitized and working for us. Her data program is encrypted so well that the machines won't be able to hack it without deleting the file and re-programming it from scratch."
Dozer shook his head. "Crazy son of a bitch was always a genius," he rused.
"Here's the best part," continued the recording. "I made the program a Terminate-And-Stay-Resident type. In idiot's English, it means that short of shutting down the entire machine system and permanently destroying EVERY machine connected to the Matrix program on the main hard drive, they'll never hack, edit, or delete her. Oh, and you know how the Agents' powers are based on the rules of the Matrix? Not Melissa. Her powers are based on the knowledge that the Matrix can be altered." His face disappeared and instantly was replaced by lines of O'Toole's source code.
Trinity shook her head; even she had to be amazed at the level of detail as a visual picture of the coding was shown to the group. "I can't believe THAT was the secret project he'd been working on."
"Before I go, one last thing. She not only can enter into anyone still in the Matrix back at the 'power plant,' she can also enter into anyone that is a resistance member hacked into the Matrix. See ya in the next life, my friends!" With that, the message was terminated.
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I'm sorry this chapter is this short. Normally my chapters end at close to ten or eleven pages long, and this'n is only three and a half. I swear the next chapter will be longer.