Disclaimer: What can I say? Nothing, except that the Matrix isn't mine but Rain is!
Author's Note: Wow! So many people! Thanks a lot for reviewing and I'm sorry that this took so long-my beta reader was off on vacation and I had extra work. But please, review, because the next chapter is coming out tomorrow!
The Matrix: Revolution Rain
Chapter One
I would start off by telling you the year but hell I don't even know it. You find it strange to not know what year it is exactly? So do I, and though I have a feeling-an estimate-it's not accurate. It's like the flow of time has been adjusted while you were asleep and when you awake you find yourself in a whole other time zone. It's disorienting.
Then, learning not to reach for a clock or to check the date, to know that there is no real sense of time besides what you can count, that can be very unnerving. Is it the fifteenth or the twenty-sixth? Is it April or June? Is it three or four in the morning? Is it dawn or dusk?
So many questions and you're not really sure of the answer. You have to learn how to guess. Pretty soon everything comes down to a guess because in our world there is no definite answer. It's constantly changing because that's its job, programmed to change according to others.
Well, I can see that you're confused now. Let me revise what I have said. It's been so long since I've had to explain to anyone. Basically, we think the year is 2599. The keyword here is "think". We are not sure because the first of us just sort of woke up from a deep sleep and figured out the year by estimating and using logic.
We are humans and we live on Earth. Or what used to be Earth or what still is. You can take your pick of terms. Many people like to assume different things. It helps in the readjusting period. For now, we'll say we live on what used to be Earth.
In the beginning of the twentieth century we saw the rise of a new era-the dawn of a new beginning for the people on Earth. Our modern technology had grown and we had developed new technology that was sure to change the way we lived. Revolutionary technology was born and we were very proud of our selves. The technology did change the world for good… for a while.
Artificial Intelligence, or A.I. for short, was what we called it: a computer capable of learning from its surroundings just as we did; learning from what we taught it, told it, showed it and programmed it to learn. There was nothing else like it. It was extraordinary, a show of our intelligence and superiority and soon took over. They were in everyone's houses and intergraded themselves into part of our society. They were powered by solar energy so they never had to use up our precious fuels and energy reserves.
However, we were a little too zealous.
The A.I. learned and grew into something we could not manage. They decided that we were too weak to live, inferior to them, so they would stomp us out of existence. Or perhaps we were threatened by their, what we thought, sudden awareness to the world around them and the fact that for once there was something that we could not beat but could beat us.
In all, we don't know who started it; perhaps it was a growing discontentment from both sides, but someone started the makings of war. Strikes were made at the other side for years; each exchanging deadly or cunning attacks on the other. We built technology that could disassemble the A.I., disconnect their power source, we were even able to block out the sun thinking that without their main energy source the A.I. would not survive. How wrong we were.
The A.I. discovered that one human output more thermal energy then anything on Earth. They were smart and figured out that if they could harness it they would not need the sun. With enough humans they could sustain themselves forever. So they captured us, trapped us in a cocoon with wires connecting to our arteries and nerves, and melted a substance that would conserve our thermal heat long enough for the cocoon to harness the energy.
The machine that harvested our energy was like a long stem with hundreds and thousands of these cocoons attached to them. At first it was only one stem extending deep into the Earth's crust and as high as any skyscraper. However, the Earth began to cool without the sun and the machines had to move the upper parts deeper into the crust. Then they needed more heat for they created more machines so another stem was created. And then another and another until there were more then a hundred stems with more then ten thousand people in the cocoons. The people who died while connected to the machine were liquefied and used as the substance that would collect our heat.
At first people didn't go along with the plan. So the A.I. created a program in the form of a computer game in which a world that was exactly like the one we used to live in, one so real we couldn't tell it apart; a world that was a fantasy that our minds went along with, plugged into it like a remote control into a consol. The wires that connected us became neuron transmitters that gave our brain the necessary signals from the program that interacted with us. The plan was so perfect that we fell for it-for a while.
The first program was too perfect and people began to rebel. The A.I. learned that humans needed disaster and ill fate to live with in a world so they adjusted the program. They recreated the world that we lived in during 1999. It was perfect and soon they had enough energy to last for along time.
Yet people decayed in their cocoons, they died and were liquefied to create-what, more of the substance? Humans were beginning to die and there was more of the substance then there were people to use it. That was when the A.I. learned a valuable lesson. When humans are alone in their cocoon they cannot reproduce.
That was when the A.I. figured out they would birth their own humans to power them. We are still not sure how they did it but they did and soon they grew, like we grew plants, rows and rows of humans. There was no stopping them now.
We did not know anything. We were all continent in our own little reality. The program that enslaved us was called the Matrix but we didn't care. Hell we didn't even know it was a program. Yet someone did and they got out of the program, woke up in the real world.
What they saw horrified them. The Earth was destroyed-once great cities were now abandoned, the sun gone and dark clouds covering the once blue sky. There were no lakes or oceans, just a cold crust. The only free human civilization was underground, constantly moving until they finally settled near the core where it was still warm. Old cities that had been built underground during the first years were destroyed long ago by the A.I. and now were considered sewers.
However, this one person who had rebelled and fought the Matrix, and escaped its hold, this one man rose up and began to free people. I cannot explain the procedure because I never had to go through it and no one has yet to explain it to me in a way I can understand. I'll let someone else fill you in on that. This man awoke many into the real world, showed them the Matrix, and convinced them to help him.
The A.I. was watching however. They had expected something like this to happen so they had prepared. They could enter the Matrix and take over any human in it and become Agents-people who patrolled the streets to make sure everything was in order. It was like a security program to prevent an uprising.
Yet we thought we had an advantage. Since we knew that the Matrix was a computer program we learned that we could bend and break the laws of it. We were able to fly, to jump impossible lengths, and gravity was no longer trivial to us. The same applied for the Agents though. No matter how strong or fast we were they were always faster and stronger.
Born with sensory links, we soon were able to download information into our brains by the press of a button. We also were able to create a mini program like the Matrix only we could control it, called the Loading Program, later to be called the Construct. We used it as a battle simulator and we could create anything we wanted and transfer those things to the Matrix. All this helped in the fight against the Agents but it still wasn't enough. No matter what we knew the Agents always knew more. However, all hope was not lost.
There was a being called Oracle that was on our side. The rebels that knew the truth were taken to her for when the One had died, the man that had started to revolution; she had prophesized that he would return. All rebels were taken to her so she could identify them. The fight would continue until the One would return to them and bend the Matrix to his will. For that was his power.
Now that's the history. That's our past. There is one free colony on Earth and it's called Zion. That's where the party will be when we defeat the Agents and the A.I. At least, that's what I'm told.
But enough of this history and past revelations-I'm sure you're bored of that. You want to know what's happening now. What's going on in the Matrix and how do I know all this? Then listen. I'm one of the rebels who were awoken. I know the truth and I've seen and tasted it. I've lived in a different shadow then what my fellow fighters have chosen but I'm still fighting. My name is Rain Barton, my hacker name or alias is Shadow, and I'm the only one who knows the secret of killing Agents.
There was a beeping to her right as she turned in her small office chair to check a monitor. "Yeah, yeah, I know," she muttered to no one as she quickly tapped a flashing light on the monitor. The beeping stopped and she sighed.
Her desk was a mess of papers and sheets upon sheets of numerical data. It was like an ocean of data. If anyone was to see her desk they wound wonder how she was able to fit the two monitors in with the heap of junk. One monitor was her laptop and the other in which she used to track a certain amount of data that came in, colorful wires attached the large screen, which were plugged directly into the wall. She turned to her main monitor, her laptop, and finished typing her email.
Rain Barton was a twenty seven year old woman who knew something that someone else wanted very badly. She knew the secret of life. When she was young she had been liberated from her enslavement in the A.I. farm where they grew humans. Her family, or what she called them since they had raised her, a handful of individuals who fought against the machines, had taken her in and aboard their ship the Indigo, had taught her the truth of the world she was in. That it was nothing more then a computer program; something used by the A.I. to keep humans comfortable as they harvested their thermal energy.
Though they were only part of a handful of the dozen or so rebels that roamed the underground "sewers"-the destroyed cities of the humans-they possessed a few weapons against the A.I. that no one else had. The crew of the Indigo were among the first to perfect they systems that would revolutionize the fight against the machines; for they had been the ones who developed the E.M.P. (Electro-Magnetic Pulse) weapon that was now currently used against the A.I., they created the beginnings of a smaller Matrix program that could create anything and bring it into the Matrix, the Loading Program, and finally they were the only ones who knew how to kill the Agents.
Or, more appropriately, had known.
Rain closed her eyes and fought back the tears. She hated remembering. She hated seeing their faces as they forced her into the Matrix-all for her protection. She hated hearing their cries as she left the real world and entered the false reality of the Matrix.
"Don't beat yourself up," she whispered as she shook her head to rid her eyes of the coming tears, "remember what he said." She looked up at her monitor again and started typing. She had to keep going. There was no time for remorse or tears.
Rain didn't have a job or career because it was too dangerous for her. The Agents knew that she could kill them and they considered her a troublesome bug that must be squashed. They had hunted her all over the Matrix for years, trying to catch her unaware, but she was always watching. Whenever she was forced to run she always told herself that they would not be able to catch her, not now and not ever. Perhaps that was how she was able to elude them for so long.
Suddenly her second monitor began beeping again and Rain turned to it. She gazed at it as she read the new data that had just come in. A small smile lit up her thin face. They are here, she thought as she turned the power off of her second monitor and stood up. She closed her laptop, unplugged it, and put it inside a black bag that she threw over her shoulder. They're here, she thought as she left the small hotel room.
Out side it was dark and clammy-the regular New York night. People wandered the streets still wondering what their life held for them. Rain watched them sort of pitying the poor fools, and at the same time envying them. If only they knew half of what I did, she thought as she continued to walk. They would never believe it.
She had to get to downtown before they left. If they did she'd probably never get a chance like this again. I just hope they don't under estimate me, she said to herself.