AUTHOR'S NOTE: All original characters from the Matrix trilogy belong to Warner Bros. and the brothers Wachowski; I'm just ad-libbing.
"The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide;
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Though Eden took their solitary way."
- Paradise Lost (bk. XII, l. 646) [Banishment : World]
SERAPH
A visually endless hall of doors.
Seraph walked softly down the smooth channel, stopping before the right door. He withdrew the chain of keys from his wide sleeve and, swiftly selecting the appropriate one, brought it up to the lock.
He paused.
Seraph looked down the hall. The row upon row of doors on either side of him, along with their stark symmetry, gave anyone within it a feeling of limbo.
Neither in one place or another. A type of systematic purgatory, perhaps.
A way out.
Seraph knew why he paused before opening the door and fleeing, soundless, into another part of the Matrix altogether, emerging an unprecedented distance from where he had been before.
One last thought, before the image would be put aside for a number of years, decades, however long the conflict would last.
The garden in spring.
There had been blossom falling, pink and white petals that filled the air with fragrance and movement. Still the crisp cold of winter clinging to the budding branches, still a freshness, and new light to everything in it.
There had been a time when there was no running, when the only illusion was the happy one that they had given to the humans. A beautiful dream, yes, but one that was too perfect.
Now, illusions were everywhere, and I must become, at least to others, something else, Seraph considered. A front, working for the Merovingian. Not pretty work, the Oracle had called it. Seraph could easily imagine what the simple comment referred, and momentarily winced at the thought of associating with the powerful but corrupt programme and his many cohorts.
No time for attaining moral superiority, at least for now.
It is not real, Seraph admonished himself. Only an aid to protect myself.
Snow would not be the same again, having confronted another entity of more severe frost. Seraph dismissed the fight from his head quickly, a reflex action.
You cannot change what has happened already, but still, do not take your victory with too much confidence, thought the solitary figure in the white shirt against pale walls.
You have beaten him once. That is enough, for now.
Seraph slipped through the open door, which closed behind him with an indrawn breath of deep suction.
For now, you have to become the illusion. Become the ghost. Paradise, how Seraph liked to think of the garden, was gone. Lost.
Seraph surveyed his surroundings and, travelling light, began the gradual process of losing the last shreds of paradise.
SMITH
"Execrable son! So to aspire
Above his brethren, to himself assuming
Authority usurp'd, from God not given.
He gave us only over beast, fish, fowl,
Dominion absolute; that right we hold
By his donation; but man over men
He made not lord; such title to himself
Reserving, human left from human free."
- Paradise Lost (bk. XII, l. 64) [Slavery]
The agent looked up from the monotonous greys and browns that tinged the desk he sat before.
The colours were irrelevant. Blue eyes glanced through the dark glasses, at once translucently bland and icily superior.
Some colours he did not want to waste time on debating the significance of. Appearance was second in importance to efficiency, and Agent Smith felt a slight percentage less efficient than he usually did.
The elusive Seraph had indeed lived up to his name. Vanishing, as if holding the keys to -
Back doors.
Exactly, Smith seized on the conclusion of thought. Back doors. Like a ghost, he slips in and out of our jurisdictions.
One day, it would be different.
Agent Smith was finding it increasingly difficult to accept his, as he saw it, failure. Without realising it, he turned the self-directed anger into a means to excuse his defeat in a disturbingly human fashion. Laying it on another.
If I had more control over separate locations in the Matrix, the renegade would have been located much faster and eliminated with greater ease. The company of imbeciles surrounds me, he thought irritably, glancing over at the solid but somehow inert figures of Jones ands Brown, sat at their designated desks.
There was silence. Nothing. Smith blinked, taken aback.
The other agents had not reacted to this new form of address. He had frankly insulted them, and yet the wave of information usually transferred to both of them via their close quarters did not appear to have an effect.
Normally, one thought would pass between them like a pulse. Three entities sharing the same information. The construct aware of all of them, individually processed thoughts rebounding like kinetically charged impulses across a network of intelligence.
Nothing. The construct did not instruct Jones and Brown to delete him for what was the equivalent of insubordination. They did not know.
Smith, quietly astonished, tested this theory to prove its existence.
The words formed, slowly, but injected with vehemence and cautious annunciation in his advanced brain.
I hate this place.
Nothing.
The agent's patterns of thought multiplied with this realisation.
He was still trapped.
But now, now he had independent thought, independent in that other agents did not register his alien sentiments.
Agent Smith took a last glance at the two agents sharing the room with him. He was superior indeed, and now more alienated than before. Set apart from other sentient programmes.
Things now were very different.