Better Than Life
Chapter Three: Without Action
By: Cornel Kennedy

This is not an action to wake. For something to be deemed an action, the person acting must have knowledge and desire. I had not known that I was asleep so that I could awake; this comes after when I take in my surroundings. As for the desire to wake up, it was a natural respondence for my body to wake when it has gone to sleep. This is harmony. This is a slight hang over also.

I had a dreamt while I had slept. Sometimes I find that I have never stopped dreaming. My mind picks out situations that I could be in and acts them out to some conclusion. I never stop these daydreams and can almost imagine while in their duration, that they are as real as the world in which I work and pay taxes.

"You're awake," a light browned skin man says sitting across of me in a dusty maroon leather chair with a high back. "My name is Morpheus."

He is one of the three that were on the bus when it had crashed. The other two lean against the ratty wall. I look to my other side and see my reflection in the mirror. There is a crude couple of skitches in my lip and some slight swelling. My head is neatly combed and parted to the left.

"Could you ever know how many times you have been here?" He asks me.

"Fifty times?" I guess. "I really don't have a great memory."

"Fifty times a year since you were 13." He corrects me.

"13?" I say. "That's when I was labelled with paranoid personality disorder. Or was it schizotypal personality disorder?"

"I know from speaking to you over the years, that you don't trust that there are such things as mental illnesses." Morpheus states. "They are no more than a way to control people from seeking the truth."

"I am a cave, a mere shadow of my self, relating to other projections and echoes." I say.

"Precisely. This is Plato's cave. A prison constructed to bond humanity to keep their eyes on the path they have set for us. Some of us have been able to expell from this cave and help others who are close to finding this disturbing truth. Slaves, we are to the machines and seek the truth they provide; but wireless we may be left to believe, yet everything had its bondages." Morpheus says.

His speech pattern is grand and even has hints of pretentiousness, but it is human and perfect in that it is flawed. It would need some translation and I am sure to interpret his words in my own context that he did not intend. However, this is how I understand him. The progress of communication has developed to a trend of freedom in mobility. The trend has ended up causing less freedom than what was expected. At one time, phone cords were so short and the network so limited that no one on either end could strangle themselves with the cord or be sad with whom they have connected. This has caused the greatest conversations as connecting with another user would be lucky, so out of the ordinary. The person on the other end would have to make an effort to be received the incoming tranmission and would not be trapped after the conversation finished. In the advancement of technology, there is no cord and there are no limits. People are walking around with a noose of the network and cannot escape from it. If one cannot escape from something, then they cannot be free.

Imagine a network were one does not only connect to this network but has the network connect to her. What would this network say to her? Generally, it is not difficult to emulate the conversation carried on a limitless network with no cords. There is nothing special about the advance communication network and no effort needed to connect to it. There is no excitement to receiving, so the quality of what is given would not exert the network. A machine would have to record information about the weather, daily sport teams, and celebrity break up which is already carried on the network. If the machines are left to control the network, then they control the information. Since a conversation is the tranfering of information, the machine supporting the network has already recorded what users want to hear. The machine would meet its own expectation of what it controls to be the user's expectation. Everyone is connected. Lain had told me this.

Fingers snap at me. "Hey, you were trapped in a loop."

"Huh?" I return in a daze. "What do you mean by loop?"

"Every single object in your environment is a program. When you smell a rose, it can make you access your memory bank to when you remembered the smell of roses. Maybe it would make you recall a date with a special lady you have not thought about in years. The reason you have been here many times is because objects around you have made you run a program to direct you to making statements and conclusions that everything around you is an illusion of the machines. Keywords, events, and triggers set your mind on these loops. In this world, your mind is described to be paranoid, but it is so effective that all most everything will set you off on these loops." Morpheus says. Yeah, loops. I'll jump through loops for you. What I want is out of the illusion of samsara and... I shake my head. "There you go off again in your program that has sent you here. This is not an exceptable program to the machines. They are programmed to ensure that you accept the information picked up by your senses. This is why they make you think that you're confused about reality and mentally ill. And this is why we come to you with a way out of your loop. In one of my hands, there is a blue pill. A red pill is in my other. Choose the one in my right hand, and you can continue your loop. Choose the one in my left hand, and you are free from this prison."

I start to move my hand to his right hand and he closes his fists. "Consider this. Let's have fate decide where you go." He puts his hands behind his back and sits at the edge of his seat. "Pick a hand."

"Morpheus!" A man shouts. Morpheus raises a finger to the man who had raisen his voice. "I don't think this is the correct way to convert him."

"I understand your objection, Neo." He says. Yeah, Neo, I have used his programs before but they were circulating old dated ones at the club. "My friend doesn't like the idea of destiny, but reality is not something that can be fully liked. Who you give your destiny to fate?"

"No." I say. "Fate implies that I would not know the outcome."

"And you don't like that?" Morpheus asks. "Not having control."

"Fate implies that I would not know the answer." I say. "But the answer is in your hands."

"That is true. If you say, the hand that I have the pill to sent you free, then I will keep it that way. And if you say otherwise, I can switch. But the difference is that you wouldn't know if it was fate or my hands." He states.

"Your left," I say. He gives me his fist, and I take the pill without look at it. "I will swallow the one in your right."

"Very well." And he hands me the other pill that I dare not see the colour. I swallow it. "To what fate may hold."

Sleep hits me. I wonder if I have ever been awake for more than four hours.

When awaking, it is strange that unknown environments cause people to quicken their pace of awareness. This panic would not be a suitable reaction to a new place and should have been erased by natural selection. I do not know where I am, even after I have awaken. I am resting on a thin hard bunk in a room of dirty used metal. Above me is a vent with waving ribbons tied to the bars. My clothes are different but just as messy, with weak cuffs. "Fate."