Chapter Five: Shadows of the Past
The fog starts to clear on the way back to headquarters. It is turning into quite a lovely day. Humans are out all around us, going about their lives. I probably should have been overwhelmed with the new knowledge and feelings of being an agent, but just somehow wasn't. Something in my programming, probably. I didn't need to be overwhelmed, and so I wasn't. I could use some time to think, though.
Harris parks the car and I get out. The three of us take the elevator to the sixth floor. Harris and I go to our offices, while Williams leaves to confer with the other two team leaders about our encounter with the exile.
Office 608 is identical to the room I was left in back in Phoenix, a day and a lifetime ago. The only exception is that there is a window in the first room as well as the second. The front office with its desk and laptop, which I now know is connected to the agent core network, as well as the human internet. I know how to use and program basically anything on both networks that I need to. And I know a lot, since I have been made into an agent of the more technical type, I realize for the first time with a bit of a surprise. Still assimilating information, I guess.
The windows in the first and second room look out towards the Golden Gate Bridge. It is visible only part of the time, through the fog and clouds that sweep over the headlands of San Francisco. I had come here once as a human. The summer before last, to look at colleges. I had loved it here, but gone instead to the university back in Tucson, close to my family.
It is something of an effort to recall these things. I know I do not need to think about my old life to perform my function as an agent, but standing here and looking out on a scene I first saw with my human mother I feel slightly wistful. Another unneeded memory and related emotion. What is wrong with me? I turn away from the window and survey my office.
I know much more about it, now. The flat-screened television picks up surveillance cameras as well as cable, the fridge is there because we do get hungry and thirsty if we stay too long in one body without transferring to reset our physical condition codes. I send in a request for the fridge to be stocked with suitable foods.
The bookcase is empty, aside from a few philosophy and evolution books. I notice a leather-bound copy of Simulacra & Simulation and smile. I cannot think of anything extra that I would need in either room. The old me had been a book nut and a bit of a packrat, but now things are different. There is nothing else I need but to fulfill my purpose. To be an agent.
I step back into the first room, my working office, sit down in my black leather chair, and turn on the computer. It boots very quickly and prompts me for a password. I enter my password without pause, even though a second ago I hadn't realized I had one.
I find without surprise that the computer is running a version of Windows. Bill Gates is a program working with the mainframe, after all. Though the buggy Windows software made and used by the humans is quite different from what we are supplied with. Our lower-level non-sentient computer systems have the advantage of nearly a thousand years of upgrading and refinement from the ones used at the peak of human civilization, though here in the matrix they must look identical to the ones sold in human stores.
I open a browser window and access the agentnet system. It is primarily a much more extensive and constantly updated version of the knowledge files downloaded into me by the Compiler. My files were primarily just for the Northern California Sector, and these are for the entire matrix.
Remembering the movies, on a whim I request files on the Merovingian. I am mildly surprised when they actually come up. He doesn't look exactly like the guy in the movie, though I can recognize some similarities. Mostly in looking French and completely full of himself. Has estates all over the matrix, with current headquarter location given as a restaurant in Toronto. No need to worry about him too much, then. There are standing orders attached to the file to detain him for questioning if possible. Hmm.
I remember something from before having to do with the movie and the other side of the bay. The freeway chase sequence for Reloaded was shot in Alameda. I check the agency records and find that my agency had someone on hand at the filming, ostensibly as a representative of some government group. Ha. I think momentarily that it would have been fun to be there for the filming, and then realize how silly this is. I am an agent, and not in the movie.
These flashes of my previous life's desires are getting disturbing.
I mentally shrug and pull up a browser connected to the human internet. It is one of my jobs to regularly patrol internet messageboards, communities, and chat rooms for potential rebels, generally by scanning existing messages. I also post inflammatory messages and mark whoever responds in certain ways for surveillance. This actually works, believe it or not.
It is strange. Some of these boards I frequented before, and had even posted to one or two. It was different to read the theories and ideas and speculation now, knowing what was true and what wasn't, and purposefully clouding what was.
When finished with that task for the moment, I review briefly the history of the matrix, or at least as much as I can recall. There is one curiously inaccessible spot in my files. I suppose it has to do with the events leading to the end of Revolutions.
Before that point the history follows very closely the timeline and history shown in the movies and anime. The files on the second renaissance are even grislier and more violent in real life. Then that ends, and the cycles of the matrix begin. One or two failed test runs, and then six versions beginning and ending with the emergence of the anomalies. The Ones.
Then ...something happens. An uneasy coexistence after the seventh reload. Exiled programs were allowed to try and find their own purpose, or else live as normal humans within the matrix. And only terminated if they interfered with the overall running of the matrix. This references the Truce I heard Williams talking about. And the rebels were not totally and utterly obliterated, but instead left to rebuild. And certain humans were released, the ones that chose consciously to reject the matrix. They were shipped to Zion and not allowed back in. The humans there are working with the machines to clear the skies, though as of now there has been little progress. When humans mess something up, they do it good.
And another project was started around this time, to further examine choice and coexistence. A list of names of participants with Lee, Agent at the bottom.
The peace did not last. Zion underwent a schism. Many were happy to just finally be free and at peace. But a contingent of rebels within the rebels, extending up to the highest authorities of Zion, insisted the war could not be over until the matrix and all AI was destroyed. One night they ran for it, taking enough ships and equipment to build a new city, somewhere else. They even stole the prophecy and made it their own.
It is these rebels agents primarily deal with. They jack in and try to free minds that want out before they are released to Zion by the system. The cycle of growth and destruction continues, though at a less escalated level. Though a new integral anomaly has not yet appeared since the balance of peace was disrupted, so perhaps something really has changed.