The Marquis and its entire crew is made up by me, as well as certain other characters. The rest of it is the property of their respective owners. So here it is.
MATRIX
ACE
CHAPTER 3
THE DESERT
Ace's entire body ached. He also felt a tingling sensation in most of his skin. He opened his eyes, and then wished he hadn't. He groaned. "Where ... am I?"
"You're in the real world." That was Tenshi's voice.
Ace mumbled, "What's real? It's all ... confused by senses ..." In his incoherence, he didn't even hear the other voices.
"Did I look like that?"
"No, you were more hot."
"Sh!"
"Your muscles were atrophied by disuse," said Tenshi. "We've had to rebuild them, and the process is still not complete ..."
"Captain?" This was a gruff voice. "I think we'd better let 'im rest some more."
"Of course," said Tenshi.
To Ace's mild annoyance, he felt the world spin around him, and everything faded.
Ace found himself lying on a bed in a claustrophobically small metal room. It resembled crew's quarters in a submarine. He was wearing an odd red uniform. His left sleeve was rolled up, and there was an IV tube in his arm ...
... in a small, black, plastic thing, grafted to his arm ...
There were two more, spaced along his arm. He rolled up his other sleeve, and found a matching set. He shivered, and it wasn't from the breeze on his head that he now noticed he was feeling. He put a hand on his head; there was only a faint trace of hair. What the hell?
His hand moved down his neck ... and a chill went up his spine as he found a circle of metal at the base of his neck.
The door opened, and a raven-haired man in a similar uniform walked in. "Oh, you're awake," he said. It was the gruff-voiced man. "I know you're Ace ... and I'm the chief medical officer here. My name's Coffin."
Ace felt more coherent than he had before. "How appropriate," he said dubiously.
Coffin rolled his eyes. "Here, lemme help you with that IV tube." In one swift motion, he pulled it out of Ace's arm.
"Ow!"
"Eh, better quick than prolonged," said Coffin. "Anyway, I'm here to figure out if you're mentally competent enough to find out the answer to the big, almighty question of 'What Is The Matrix', but if you're ironic as soon as I introduce myself, you're good enough as far as I'm concerned."
Ace was impressed. Not only could this man pronounce capital letters, he could do so sarcastically. "Where are we, anyway?"
Coffin considered this. "We're ... let's see ... about three kilometers below where Sri Lanka used to be."
"'Used to be'?" said Ace cautiously.
"Well, it's a little later than you think it is," said Coffin. "You think it's 2004, but it's actually, oh I don't know, around 2754. None of us has any clue, actually, and the only ones who really know are pretty tight-lipped about it." He shook his head. "Anyway, the Captain wants to see you as soon as you're ready."
Ace decided that if someone like this could be convinced that they were 750 years in the future, then it must be a pretty compelling argument. "The Captain?" he asked.
"Tenshi," said Coffin. "C'mon, let's go."
They left the room, and almost immediately found Tenshi there. "Ah, Ace, Coffin thought you might be ready now," he said. "There's no point in trying to tell you anything when I can just show you, so let's go to the main deck."
"This is my hovercraft ship, the Marquis," said Tenshi as they arrived in a much larger room. "Small, cold, and cramped, but it's home."
Ace looked around. It seemed to consist entirely of machinery, with a few people in the red uniforms puttering over it, though one of them, who sat at a large computer console, wore a blue one. They all turned as the trio arrived.
"You've already met Styx, Fate, and Jaxter," continued Tenshi, indicating them. They nodded in greeting. Apart from anything else, Ace noticed that they had worse hair. "The man in blue is Pylon, and those two are Red, Napalm, Zephyr -- who got out just a week ago -- and first officer Norton."
"Hello, Ace," said Norton, a heavyset man with blonde hair. "I would've been there, but I was stuck in sickbay."
"And this whole room," said Tenshi, "is the Core, from which we broadcast our pirate signal and hack into the Matrix."
Ace noticed ten exoskeleton chairs, with strange plugs in the back. He wondered what, exactly, they were for. "So when do I get the answer?" he asked.
Tenshi grinned. "Right now," he said. "Just sit in this chair. Help him, Norton."
Ace sat in one of the chairs, while around him they started bustling around, in preparation for something. "This," said Norton, as they plugged something into the chair behind him, "is going to feel pretty weird."
He felt something plugged into the back of his neck --
-- and then everything went white.
He looked around, but didn't see anything. A glance down revealed that he was standing on emptiness --
-- and that he was back in his black shirt and blue jeans from when he took the pill. What the hell ...?
"This is the Construct," said Tenshi, behind him. Ace turned; he was wearing his outfit from before ... "From here, we can load whatever we need, from weapons, to clothes ... the sky's practically the limit."
"So we're in a computer simulation?" said Ace.
"Precisely," said Tenshi. As Ace watched, a television set and three padded chairs appeared in a burst of green light.
"I'm not gonna bother asking if this is real," said Ace. "We already covered that."
"Is it so hard to imagine?" said Tenshi. "Look at your clothes. Your hair's back, and you don't have any of the plugs from the Real. This is what we call 'residual self-image.'"
"This is amazing," said Ace.
"You don't know the half of it," said Tenshi. "Come, sit down. This is going to be hard for you."
As Ace sat, Tenshi produced a remote control and pushed a button. A city skyline appeared on the screen. "This is the world as you know it -- as it existed in the year 2004. It now exists only as part of a neuro-interactive simulation called ... the Matrix. This is the world as it exists now." He pushed another button ... and the whiteness around them was replaced.
"Welcome," he said, "to the desert of the Real."
Ace stared at the scorched, grey, deserted landscape around them. The sky was covered by immense black clouds.
"Around 700 years ago," said Tenshi, "humanity was congratulating themselves on their latest achievement: the birth of AI - artificial intelligence. It wasn't long before the Machines began lobbying for equal rights, but when that turned sour ..." He smiled bitterly. "The Machines relied on solar power for their energy, so we thought it only logical to completely block out the sun as a prelude to defeating them. But then they discovered a new source of power: bioelectricity."
"Bioelectricity?" said Ace. "You mean ... from life forms?"
"Precisely," said Tenshi. "And what was a more readily available source than human beings, whose bodies generate more power than a 50-watt bulb? All they needed then was something to occupy our minds, and so the Matrix was created to give us the illusion that we were free."
The image on the TV screen changed. "And now, humans are not born. They are grown. I could hardly believe it myself until I saw the fields where fetuses are grown until the point of birth, and then placed in the main power plant, where their minds are given the illusion of a free life." Ace noticed that the bleak landscape had been replaced by the whiteness of the Construct again. "What is the Matrix?" said Tenshi finally. "It is control for our minds. It is that which affects our brain, preventing us from seeing reality."
Ace sat in the chair, his mouth hanging open. Okay, philosophy was all well and good -- but he had no idea it meant this.