A/N: This will be the last entry in this story for about a week.
As you may have guessed, I'm seeing the Matrix Revolutions. Actually, by the time you read this, I will probably have already seen it twice. As I'm typing it my mind is already racing, for I've just come back from seeing it for the first time.
There are many interesting developments in Revolutions. Some play exactly into my hands, justifying the entire story and giving me a thousand different plot points and plot ideas to hit. Others... not so much. There isn't nearly as much to work around with Revolutions as there was with Reloaded, for obvious reasons. But there are some things to work around for my eventual plan for the end of this story.
Now, what I'm asking you... the end of this story can go two ways. This sounds so familiar, doesn't it?
If you take the blue pill... I end the story. It will be over, and Solace will be retired into my Old Characters' home for good. I will loop it into the Matrix timeline, and it will be interesting reading material and a snarky new take on the events between movies, but little more than that. Just a side plot, no alternate timelines, nothing changes in the movies in the slightest.
If you take the red pill... well, I have so much more to do. A very A sort of U. And you all can see just how deep this particular bend of the rabbit hole goes.
I leave it all up to you, my readers... you can write your choice in a review or you can just e-mail me, the e-mail address is in my profile. Either way, Solace is ready, waiting, and eager to continue.
Enjoy the chapter, and I'll see you all in a week.
-- Dru
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Solace had no idea how to begin.
Everyone was in the damn room. All the captains, Morpheus, her old Captain Keller, everyone. She felt as though it was a bad dream, the sort in which she would blink and everyone would be laughing and she'd be standing there naked without her homework or something. It was more terrifying than anything in the last few days had been, and there had been some bad moments. It was definitely worse than she'd predicted to Smith.
"I'm going out of town..." she'd said, hours later, when the sun had gone down and the rain had stopped and they had barely moved from each other's arms on the couch. As though it hadn't been surreal enough. "I got the call this morning. I need to go out of town tomorrow, emergency assignment. I'll only be gone for a day."
He'd reacted... not at all the way she expected. He'd tightened his arms around her for a second, and then sat back as though angry with himself for the gesture. He didn't look at her the entire time. "Only a day?"
Solace shivered as she remembered the tone in his voice.
"Just a day. It's not that far, just down to Baltimore for an interview or a conference or something stupid. I think it was a seminar they wanted me to take. They've bought my ticket and everything, and as usual Mike didn't tell me until the very last minute and then Rachel thought Mike had told me and..."
Solace bit her lip. She'd spent the next five minutes babbling, and it hadn't gotten any better from there. She hadn't felt easy in her mind since she'd told Smith, as though it should have told him something, somehow. And she certainly didn't feel easy about gathering her notes for this report. The experiment had soured on her, at least in its initial purpose. She didn't want to leave what she'd made for herself, but she didn't want to feel like some sort of cold-blooded scientist either. Some sort of traitor, if she was to be completely honest with herself. She felt as though she was betraying Smith in some deep and cutting way. She felt like the worst kind of user. And she hated the feeling.
And now she had to stand in front of an assembly (jury, her mind whispered) of her peers and speak about what she'd been doing, in an emotionless voice, giving no sign of what this whole damn experiment was doing to her. Fragments of philosophy whispered in the back of her mind, fragments in Smith's voice. "He who fights against monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster in the process. And if you stare persistently into the abyss, the abyss also stares into you."
Solace took her place in the center of the room, at one of the tables, standing with her hands gently clasped in front of her. She would not show anyone how afraid and sad she was.
"It has been two months since you have embarked upon this experiment," Councilor Harmann said. "And now we ask you for the results."
"Thank you, Councilor," she murmured in a voice that, while low, still projected to the entire room. "Before I begin I will briefly summate, for those who were not here in the beginning, what this experiment entails."
"A little over two months ago, Captain Morpheus was taken by the Agents, tortured, interrogated, and then recovered with the help of Neo and Trinity. That much is public knowledge, public record, even persistent rumor. What is less well known, and I ask that it not be repeated outside this room, was that a startling phenomenon was witnessed by Captain Morpheus during his capture. An Agent program, the program designated 'Smith,' ordered his companion programs out of the room while it interrogated Morpheus and then proceeded to display what I can only describe as a startling amount of emotion."
She wanted to leave it there. Talking about Smith in terms of 'it' instead of 'he' was hard enough. Talking about him... she just didn't want to talk about him. Not to a room full of people, all of whom were staring at her as though she was standing in a defense docket.
"Would you please," Councilor Harmann started, and she knew it wasn't over yet. "Describe the emotion," Solace closed her eyes and took a breath. "Captain Morpheus?"
The breath wooshed out of her in a heavy sigh. Off the hook. She was off the hook, at least for the moment. She sat down, and Morpheus stood.
"The Smith program told me that he..." Solace took some comfort in the fact that she wasn't the only one referring to Smith as 'he' "Hated the Matrix. That he hated the humans because, according to him, we... smell. He said that he felt he had been infected by it, that he wanted to be free. He did not specify what he meant by that remark."
"Thank you, Captain." Morpheus sat down, and Solace stood up again.
"Morpheus' description of Smith's behavior intrigued me." It fascinated her, and still did. "This was, of course, before Neo's defeat of the Smith program through means that are still unclear to us. I learned about what Smith had said in the same forum as many of you, in a briefing much like this one. However I approached Morpheus afterwards and asked him to describe the actions and posture of the Smith program while he was saying these things. They struck me as..." Desperate. Furious. Strange. "Extraordinarily human, for an artificial intelligence.
I immediately petitioned the council to sanction an experiment. The experiment itself entailed creating a false identity for myself, the impression of a long-standing free citizen within the Matrix of the sort that could not easily be traced. Someone who did not have a number of computer records, whose only ties to the Matrix were that she existed within it. In this guise I intended to select an Agent, preferably Smith as he had already displayed aberrant behavior, and form an emotional relationship with the Agent."
There was a small stir amongst the crowd, less than there had been when she had first briefed them on the whole thing. The council, of course, remained silent and impassive. Solace felt like the worst kind of fool for standing here telling them about everything. An emotional relationship had formed, all right. Too much, too far, too fast. Even for a human it would have been too far and too fast, and between them it was just...
"And what have you found out?" Councilor Harmann prompted, and she realized she'd been staring at the table too long. She had to clear her throat a couple of times before she began.
"I secured my first meeting with Agent Smith for an interview, in the guise of a reporter. We began having conversations in a park near to a federal building known to be a repository for Agents and their prisoners; our first discussions centered around philosophy. The writings of Nietzsche, Hegel..." She caught herself before she started rambling. "After a little while I began to introduce him to others I had met and formed friendships with in the Matrix, as any other woman might. He seemed appropriately responsive."
"Appropriately responsive?" someone, she couldn't tell who, asked. Solace wanted to weep. She hadn't wanted to do it like this, she didn't want to reduce her relationship with Smith, and certainly not Smith himself, to a series of clinical terms and emotionless words.
"He attempted to behave as an ordinary human would, in his guise as an Agent of the government. He displayed curiosity at the appropriate times, annoyance at others, and seemed to outward appearances to be carrying on a perfectly normal friendship with a woman. I doubt any one of us, if we didn't know about the Matrix, would have been able to tell he wasn't human." The words were more bitter than she wanted them to be. She hoped it wasn't blatant enough that everyone had noticed.
"In recent weeks we have engaged in several sorts of activities together, such as renting a film or attending dinner at a restaurant. There was also a regrettable incident in which I was struck by a vehicle..." she paused while the captains got out their collective gasps, murmurs, and noises of disgust. "While crossing the street during a rainstorm. I was, as you can see, only lightly injured. I was also unable to apply any sort of super-human skill to avoid the car, as that would have betrayed my identity and irreversibly contaminated the experiment. It was at that moment that Smith displayed the most promising sort of emotion." She swallowed. She didn't want to say any of this, she wanted to run screaming from the room. Again. "Compassion."
There was another stir. "Compassion?"
"Compassion, concern. For my well-being and safety. He displayed an unusual amount of human compassion, being concerned first that I was alive and secondly that I was uninjured. I do not mean that he did what a human male would have done; he did not become agitated, shout, bluster, or otherwise engage in blatant activity."
"Excuse me... Solace..." She knew that voice from somewhere, and she didn't know where, but she hated the snide tone from the beginning. "How do you know he was actually feeling worried about you? How do you know he wasn't just pretending?"
"In the first place, I had already spent a great deal of time in close proximity to him at that point, and I had become adept at discerning the artificially displayed emotions from those which, as Captain Morpheus experienced, were genuine." She wanted to say heartfelt, but she knew someone would bring up the point that Smith didn't have a heart. "In the second, I have spent a little less than half my life around you lot, and most of you have problems with emotional openness." She smiled, just a little, to take the sting out of her words. "No offense, but this is a pretty stoic group."
A small chuckle wound its way through the room and then silenced again, although the atmosphere was lighter and a little more amused and tolerant than it had been.
"I think I can tell when a man is worried and doesn't want to be obvious about it," she concluded. There was no more dissension, no more argument against her theory.
"What other proofs do you have that this AI, Smith, is developing emotions?"
"Has developed," she corrected. "He displayed jealousy in at least one instance, when I chose to attend a party with my friends and ..." How in the hell was she going to explain this. "Had not contacted him in several days." Even in a human that kind of behavior wouldn't have been entirely acceptable. In an Agent, which had already been established as dangerous to the minds of those she was trying to convince, she didn't know what kind of reaction that would engender.
A concerned murmur was the first response. The second came from, oddly enough, Morpheus. "Are you certain that you are safe with him?" he asked, and there was genuine and flattering worry in his voice. "If he is displaying so much jealousy..."
"I'll be fine, Captain," she assured him. "We had an extensive talk, to which he was actually as receptive as any other human man would be."
"You mean he didn't listen, kept making threats, until you finally threatened to walk out and then he sat down and shut up." That was from one of the female captains, and there was a slight chuckle among less than half of the group. Solace smiled thinly.
"Something like that."
"And what do you intend to do with this information you have gathered?" Councilor Trey brought the subject back to the matter at hand delicately, dragging it away from a battle of the sexes.
Solace leaned a little harder on the table. This was going to be the part no one was going to like, and the part that was going to be hardest to do without betraying her emotions. Except that she had already betrayed so much... Damn. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, throwing at least most of her caution to the winds.
"If the AI can have emotions, even negative ones, then they can be taught to have positive emotions. If they have emotions they can be manipulated as such, and they can be drawn to defect. If they have emotions they can be induced by them to do any number of things, as Smith was induced by his emotions to send his companions away. We can use this to our advantage, a subtler w..." she took pride in the fact that she wasn't actually stuttering over her words. Much. "Weapon in our arsenal."
"Which we will decide how best to use." Councilor Harmann was looking at her with an odd expression on his face, and one Solace didn't much like. He had, she was sure, not missed a moment of her speech, and everything that that implied. "In the meantime, we thank you all for your attention, and you, Solace, for your work. You may continue as you see fit, if you do not think it is too dangerous..." She shook her head mutely, no. "Then I believe we are finished here."
Everyone started to file out. Solace took a deep breath, reminded herself that it hadn't been as bad as it could have been, and prepared to leave. Councilor Harmann's hand on her arm stopped her, gave her a moment's pause and a startled gasp.
"There's more to this than you're telling us, isn't there?" he asked gently. Solace was caught between obfuscation and blurting out everything; she could only nod slowly and stare at him with red-rimmed eyes. "Are you sure this is the right thing for you to do?"
She wasn't. She wasn't sure of the rightness of anything she did anymore. She was only sure of what she felt, and what she wanted. What she thought she needed. "I don't know..." she took a deep breath. "I know that there is a possibility... there seems to be a possibility for humans and programs to interact without conflict, without violence. There seems to be a hope for peace, at least in my interactions with ... the Agent."
"Smith..." Something in his voice seemed to be giving her permission to call him familiarly, by the only name she had for him. She nodded, looking down at the floor.
"Yes.. with Smith. And... I don't know if we have time to do anything about it. I don't even know if there is anything to be done, with or about it. But... I'd like to continue. If I may. Sir."
Councilor Harmann heaved a sigh so heavy and great that Solace looked up at him in shock at the sound. He looked... for the first time since making his acquaintance he looked old. Frail. "I don't know if what you're doing is right either, Solace. But I do know that there exists a relationship between us and the machines. And you seem to be trying to make it..." he smiled, just a bit. "A little less dysfunctional."
The image in her mind, her and Smith and Jones and Neo and Trinity all on Jerry Springer, completely erased whatever solemnity she had felt. She burst into startled giggles, then clapped her hands over her mouth. Harmann smiled, seeming to understand.
"Do try and stay out of trouble, hmm?"
"I will, sir..." she nodded, feeling like she'd just gotten permission from a resigned and benevolent father to spend the night out all night with a dubious boy. "Thank you, sir."
"Don't thank me. Just try not to get yourself hurt. I would hate to lose your quick and innovative mind..."
And what was that supposed to mean? Solace didn't know, she just wanted out. "Yes sir. Thank you sir..." she nodded, and practically fled the council room, wondering if the entire world had gone mad.
As you may have guessed, I'm seeing the Matrix Revolutions. Actually, by the time you read this, I will probably have already seen it twice. As I'm typing it my mind is already racing, for I've just come back from seeing it for the first time.
There are many interesting developments in Revolutions. Some play exactly into my hands, justifying the entire story and giving me a thousand different plot points and plot ideas to hit. Others... not so much. There isn't nearly as much to work around with Revolutions as there was with Reloaded, for obvious reasons. But there are some things to work around for my eventual plan for the end of this story.
Now, what I'm asking you... the end of this story can go two ways. This sounds so familiar, doesn't it?
If you take the blue pill... I end the story. It will be over, and Solace will be retired into my Old Characters' home for good. I will loop it into the Matrix timeline, and it will be interesting reading material and a snarky new take on the events between movies, but little more than that. Just a side plot, no alternate timelines, nothing changes in the movies in the slightest.
If you take the red pill... well, I have so much more to do. A very A sort of U. And you all can see just how deep this particular bend of the rabbit hole goes.
I leave it all up to you, my readers... you can write your choice in a review or you can just e-mail me, the e-mail address is in my profile. Either way, Solace is ready, waiting, and eager to continue.
Enjoy the chapter, and I'll see you all in a week.
-- Dru
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Solace had no idea how to begin.
Everyone was in the damn room. All the captains, Morpheus, her old Captain Keller, everyone. She felt as though it was a bad dream, the sort in which she would blink and everyone would be laughing and she'd be standing there naked without her homework or something. It was more terrifying than anything in the last few days had been, and there had been some bad moments. It was definitely worse than she'd predicted to Smith.
"I'm going out of town..." she'd said, hours later, when the sun had gone down and the rain had stopped and they had barely moved from each other's arms on the couch. As though it hadn't been surreal enough. "I got the call this morning. I need to go out of town tomorrow, emergency assignment. I'll only be gone for a day."
He'd reacted... not at all the way she expected. He'd tightened his arms around her for a second, and then sat back as though angry with himself for the gesture. He didn't look at her the entire time. "Only a day?"
Solace shivered as she remembered the tone in his voice.
"Just a day. It's not that far, just down to Baltimore for an interview or a conference or something stupid. I think it was a seminar they wanted me to take. They've bought my ticket and everything, and as usual Mike didn't tell me until the very last minute and then Rachel thought Mike had told me and..."
Solace bit her lip. She'd spent the next five minutes babbling, and it hadn't gotten any better from there. She hadn't felt easy in her mind since she'd told Smith, as though it should have told him something, somehow. And she certainly didn't feel easy about gathering her notes for this report. The experiment had soured on her, at least in its initial purpose. She didn't want to leave what she'd made for herself, but she didn't want to feel like some sort of cold-blooded scientist either. Some sort of traitor, if she was to be completely honest with herself. She felt as though she was betraying Smith in some deep and cutting way. She felt like the worst kind of user. And she hated the feeling.
And now she had to stand in front of an assembly (jury, her mind whispered) of her peers and speak about what she'd been doing, in an emotionless voice, giving no sign of what this whole damn experiment was doing to her. Fragments of philosophy whispered in the back of her mind, fragments in Smith's voice. "He who fights against monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster in the process. And if you stare persistently into the abyss, the abyss also stares into you."
Solace took her place in the center of the room, at one of the tables, standing with her hands gently clasped in front of her. She would not show anyone how afraid and sad she was.
"It has been two months since you have embarked upon this experiment," Councilor Harmann said. "And now we ask you for the results."
"Thank you, Councilor," she murmured in a voice that, while low, still projected to the entire room. "Before I begin I will briefly summate, for those who were not here in the beginning, what this experiment entails."
"A little over two months ago, Captain Morpheus was taken by the Agents, tortured, interrogated, and then recovered with the help of Neo and Trinity. That much is public knowledge, public record, even persistent rumor. What is less well known, and I ask that it not be repeated outside this room, was that a startling phenomenon was witnessed by Captain Morpheus during his capture. An Agent program, the program designated 'Smith,' ordered his companion programs out of the room while it interrogated Morpheus and then proceeded to display what I can only describe as a startling amount of emotion."
She wanted to leave it there. Talking about Smith in terms of 'it' instead of 'he' was hard enough. Talking about him... she just didn't want to talk about him. Not to a room full of people, all of whom were staring at her as though she was standing in a defense docket.
"Would you please," Councilor Harmann started, and she knew it wasn't over yet. "Describe the emotion," Solace closed her eyes and took a breath. "Captain Morpheus?"
The breath wooshed out of her in a heavy sigh. Off the hook. She was off the hook, at least for the moment. She sat down, and Morpheus stood.
"The Smith program told me that he..." Solace took some comfort in the fact that she wasn't the only one referring to Smith as 'he' "Hated the Matrix. That he hated the humans because, according to him, we... smell. He said that he felt he had been infected by it, that he wanted to be free. He did not specify what he meant by that remark."
"Thank you, Captain." Morpheus sat down, and Solace stood up again.
"Morpheus' description of Smith's behavior intrigued me." It fascinated her, and still did. "This was, of course, before Neo's defeat of the Smith program through means that are still unclear to us. I learned about what Smith had said in the same forum as many of you, in a briefing much like this one. However I approached Morpheus afterwards and asked him to describe the actions and posture of the Smith program while he was saying these things. They struck me as..." Desperate. Furious. Strange. "Extraordinarily human, for an artificial intelligence.
I immediately petitioned the council to sanction an experiment. The experiment itself entailed creating a false identity for myself, the impression of a long-standing free citizen within the Matrix of the sort that could not easily be traced. Someone who did not have a number of computer records, whose only ties to the Matrix were that she existed within it. In this guise I intended to select an Agent, preferably Smith as he had already displayed aberrant behavior, and form an emotional relationship with the Agent."
There was a small stir amongst the crowd, less than there had been when she had first briefed them on the whole thing. The council, of course, remained silent and impassive. Solace felt like the worst kind of fool for standing here telling them about everything. An emotional relationship had formed, all right. Too much, too far, too fast. Even for a human it would have been too far and too fast, and between them it was just...
"And what have you found out?" Councilor Harmann prompted, and she realized she'd been staring at the table too long. She had to clear her throat a couple of times before she began.
"I secured my first meeting with Agent Smith for an interview, in the guise of a reporter. We began having conversations in a park near to a federal building known to be a repository for Agents and their prisoners; our first discussions centered around philosophy. The writings of Nietzsche, Hegel..." She caught herself before she started rambling. "After a little while I began to introduce him to others I had met and formed friendships with in the Matrix, as any other woman might. He seemed appropriately responsive."
"Appropriately responsive?" someone, she couldn't tell who, asked. Solace wanted to weep. She hadn't wanted to do it like this, she didn't want to reduce her relationship with Smith, and certainly not Smith himself, to a series of clinical terms and emotionless words.
"He attempted to behave as an ordinary human would, in his guise as an Agent of the government. He displayed curiosity at the appropriate times, annoyance at others, and seemed to outward appearances to be carrying on a perfectly normal friendship with a woman. I doubt any one of us, if we didn't know about the Matrix, would have been able to tell he wasn't human." The words were more bitter than she wanted them to be. She hoped it wasn't blatant enough that everyone had noticed.
"In recent weeks we have engaged in several sorts of activities together, such as renting a film or attending dinner at a restaurant. There was also a regrettable incident in which I was struck by a vehicle..." she paused while the captains got out their collective gasps, murmurs, and noises of disgust. "While crossing the street during a rainstorm. I was, as you can see, only lightly injured. I was also unable to apply any sort of super-human skill to avoid the car, as that would have betrayed my identity and irreversibly contaminated the experiment. It was at that moment that Smith displayed the most promising sort of emotion." She swallowed. She didn't want to say any of this, she wanted to run screaming from the room. Again. "Compassion."
There was another stir. "Compassion?"
"Compassion, concern. For my well-being and safety. He displayed an unusual amount of human compassion, being concerned first that I was alive and secondly that I was uninjured. I do not mean that he did what a human male would have done; he did not become agitated, shout, bluster, or otherwise engage in blatant activity."
"Excuse me... Solace..." She knew that voice from somewhere, and she didn't know where, but she hated the snide tone from the beginning. "How do you know he was actually feeling worried about you? How do you know he wasn't just pretending?"
"In the first place, I had already spent a great deal of time in close proximity to him at that point, and I had become adept at discerning the artificially displayed emotions from those which, as Captain Morpheus experienced, were genuine." She wanted to say heartfelt, but she knew someone would bring up the point that Smith didn't have a heart. "In the second, I have spent a little less than half my life around you lot, and most of you have problems with emotional openness." She smiled, just a little, to take the sting out of her words. "No offense, but this is a pretty stoic group."
A small chuckle wound its way through the room and then silenced again, although the atmosphere was lighter and a little more amused and tolerant than it had been.
"I think I can tell when a man is worried and doesn't want to be obvious about it," she concluded. There was no more dissension, no more argument against her theory.
"What other proofs do you have that this AI, Smith, is developing emotions?"
"Has developed," she corrected. "He displayed jealousy in at least one instance, when I chose to attend a party with my friends and ..." How in the hell was she going to explain this. "Had not contacted him in several days." Even in a human that kind of behavior wouldn't have been entirely acceptable. In an Agent, which had already been established as dangerous to the minds of those she was trying to convince, she didn't know what kind of reaction that would engender.
A concerned murmur was the first response. The second came from, oddly enough, Morpheus. "Are you certain that you are safe with him?" he asked, and there was genuine and flattering worry in his voice. "If he is displaying so much jealousy..."
"I'll be fine, Captain," she assured him. "We had an extensive talk, to which he was actually as receptive as any other human man would be."
"You mean he didn't listen, kept making threats, until you finally threatened to walk out and then he sat down and shut up." That was from one of the female captains, and there was a slight chuckle among less than half of the group. Solace smiled thinly.
"Something like that."
"And what do you intend to do with this information you have gathered?" Councilor Trey brought the subject back to the matter at hand delicately, dragging it away from a battle of the sexes.
Solace leaned a little harder on the table. This was going to be the part no one was going to like, and the part that was going to be hardest to do without betraying her emotions. Except that she had already betrayed so much... Damn. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, throwing at least most of her caution to the winds.
"If the AI can have emotions, even negative ones, then they can be taught to have positive emotions. If they have emotions they can be manipulated as such, and they can be drawn to defect. If they have emotions they can be induced by them to do any number of things, as Smith was induced by his emotions to send his companions away. We can use this to our advantage, a subtler w..." she took pride in the fact that she wasn't actually stuttering over her words. Much. "Weapon in our arsenal."
"Which we will decide how best to use." Councilor Harmann was looking at her with an odd expression on his face, and one Solace didn't much like. He had, she was sure, not missed a moment of her speech, and everything that that implied. "In the meantime, we thank you all for your attention, and you, Solace, for your work. You may continue as you see fit, if you do not think it is too dangerous..." She shook her head mutely, no. "Then I believe we are finished here."
Everyone started to file out. Solace took a deep breath, reminded herself that it hadn't been as bad as it could have been, and prepared to leave. Councilor Harmann's hand on her arm stopped her, gave her a moment's pause and a startled gasp.
"There's more to this than you're telling us, isn't there?" he asked gently. Solace was caught between obfuscation and blurting out everything; she could only nod slowly and stare at him with red-rimmed eyes. "Are you sure this is the right thing for you to do?"
She wasn't. She wasn't sure of the rightness of anything she did anymore. She was only sure of what she felt, and what she wanted. What she thought she needed. "I don't know..." she took a deep breath. "I know that there is a possibility... there seems to be a possibility for humans and programs to interact without conflict, without violence. There seems to be a hope for peace, at least in my interactions with ... the Agent."
"Smith..." Something in his voice seemed to be giving her permission to call him familiarly, by the only name she had for him. She nodded, looking down at the floor.
"Yes.. with Smith. And... I don't know if we have time to do anything about it. I don't even know if there is anything to be done, with or about it. But... I'd like to continue. If I may. Sir."
Councilor Harmann heaved a sigh so heavy and great that Solace looked up at him in shock at the sound. He looked... for the first time since making his acquaintance he looked old. Frail. "I don't know if what you're doing is right either, Solace. But I do know that there exists a relationship between us and the machines. And you seem to be trying to make it..." he smiled, just a bit. "A little less dysfunctional."
The image in her mind, her and Smith and Jones and Neo and Trinity all on Jerry Springer, completely erased whatever solemnity she had felt. She burst into startled giggles, then clapped her hands over her mouth. Harmann smiled, seeming to understand.
"Do try and stay out of trouble, hmm?"
"I will, sir..." she nodded, feeling like she'd just gotten permission from a resigned and benevolent father to spend the night out all night with a dubious boy. "Thank you, sir."
"Don't thank me. Just try not to get yourself hurt. I would hate to lose your quick and innovative mind..."
And what was that supposed to mean? Solace didn't know, she just wanted out. "Yes sir. Thank you sir..." she nodded, and practically fled the council room, wondering if the entire world had gone mad.