Chapter Seven: A Switch of POV (finally!)
In his room in San Jose, Sean jerks awake with mouth wide open. He sits up in bed, gasping, and runs a hand over his face. Oh man, was that a weird dream. No more reading Matrix fanfic before bed. And it's only—he looks at the clock—nine thirty? And he's fully clothed. Strange. The last thing he really remembers is his computer going funny... Sean looks over at the monitor, but it is black and silent.
"Chill out. It was just a dream. Just a dream," he mumbles to himself, rubbing the bridge of his nose and staring at the computer on its desk across from his bed.
And then a line of green text appears on the screen.
Sean holds his breath and blinks. It does not go away. He reads it slowly, holding each word in his mind.
We found you, they found you. As soon as he is done reading it, another line appears, and then another.
RUN outside now.
They won't find us.
Sean reflexively turns to look out the window. A black car has pulled up to the curb outside his house. He looks back at the computer screen it is blank. For a long moment he hesitates, touching his mouth with his fingertips, and then he grabs his coat.
That's it, I say, back at the agency, They've made contact.
The captain will not be in the vehicle doing the pickup, says Williams, Track our tracer.
Harris nods, and shifts his focus into tracing the passage of the rebel's car through the matrix.
Sean runs down the stairs in three big steps and is out the front door before his father can even sit up in front of the television. He struggles into his coat as he crosses the small lawn, heading towards the big black car. The back door closest to him opens as he runs, and he jumps in, trying not to think too hard about what he is doing.
The car pulls away from the curb even before he shuts the door. Sean gets it shut, and turns around to find a gun pointed right at his face. Sean found that the end of the barrel focused his attention very sharply, but only on the gun, so that he had difficulties listening to the guy who held it when he spoke to Sean. He did notice the guy is wearing quite a lot of leather.
"Okay, kid. You know what this is all about and why I got a gun to ya, so don't go on acting all stupid-like."
"A... are you Ajax?" Sean asks after a moment of trying to find where his voice went off to.
"Naw. I'm Chowder. Captain Ajax is who we're going to see. So why don't you just sit tight, uh, how d'you pronounce your handle?"
"Er. Just call me Sean," said Sean.
Chowder chuckled. "Fine, then, Sean. He gestures with his gun. "Why don't you lie back so Kami there can give you a looking over for bugs. 'Cause we know you got one."
Sean looks to the seat next to him. There is a dark haired girl kneeling on the seat there who looks just a bit older than himself. She is also dressed in leather, but it is much tighter, especially around the... Sean gulps ...chest area, and edged in dark purple marabou feathers. She is also wearing too much sparkly purple eye shadow and dark purple lipstick. And she is holding a scary looking and angular scanning machine.
Kami arches an eyebrow at Sean, who lies back against the seat. She moves the scanning device over him. It beeps when over his nose.
"Damn," she says in response. "One of the new kind."
"Just get it out of him," says the guy who is driving, who isn't wearing too much leather, incidentally.
Kami drops the scanner and rummages around on the floor of the car, picking up something Sean is afraid he recognizes. A... bug extractor, but smaller and more compact than the one used in the movie. And shaped specially to fit over the nose.
Kami hand the cord of the extractor to the driver, who plugs it into the cigarette lighter. She pushes a button and it starts to make a very high-pitched whirring sound. Sean flinches as she brings the machine near his face, and then sticks it right over his nose. Something very complicated happens.
"Augh!" the extraction device is pulled away and Sean is left with blood welling up out of his left nostril and dripping down his shirt. He is too preoccupied with this, with realizing that it's all real, to notice Kami fiddling with the extractor and dumping the bug out of the car.
"They removed it," I say out loud, back at the agency.
"No matter," says Williams.
"There seems to be some trouble with the trace program," says Harris, "The signal of the car is breaking up. Possibly-"
"They have a new scrambling program," I say.
"We will transfer to their last known location and track them on foot," says Williams. A car would draw too much attention.
I get the location from Harris and the three of us transfer in, as close as possible. I end up taking over a street person sleeping in a park half a block away and a few streets back from the car. Williams and Harris take over the two night guards at a nearby warehouse, an equal distance in the opposite direction of our target. We don't attempt to take over Mr. Levan, as the rebels are holding a gun to his head and any blurring of one of us morphing in to him would result in a dead human and no chance of capturing the rebel captain.
After getting rid of the bug, the car guns it and travels south, staying on surface streets. Soon they reach the outskirts of town, in an industrial area. Very few people are around, this time of night. Even so, Kami keeps her semiautomatic gun out and ready while she scans the roads and building around them for any sign of agents.
Agents. Kami shivers. She had been free of the matrix for almost three years, and working on a ship for half that time, and had shot at them and run from them and got away countless times, and still they terrified her. They were all just so identical and emotionless. Even the female agents, which she saw now and again. That had been a surprise, when she was first freed. She had been a fan of the movie, of course, and there certainly weren't any female agents in the movie.
The agent training program for her ship had been bad enough, but finally getting back into the matrix and having them chase her with utter dispassion was almost too much. The first time she encountered them, she remembers, she was only able to get away due to a lucky hiding spot.
But they hadn't caught her yet. She glanced over at Sean (mentally noting to find him a good handle). He had been grabbed by agents earlier tonight, had been in close quarters with them and been bugged by them. It was a sign of his adaptability (or of shock) that he was able to just sit there and dab at his bleeding nose with a tissue, after all that had happened to him tonight.
The car pulled into an alley next to an old abandoned building. They had arrived.
I watch from the roof of a building across the street as the three rebels and Mr. Levan climb out of their car and head through a large gap in a chain link fence and into the building that was their destination.
Williams, Harris, and I had shadowed the car as it traveled south, pacing them, jumping from rooftop to rooftop as we ran at full speed. We stayed just far enough away to avoid being picked up on any but the most obsessive operator's screens. It had been near fifteen minutes that we ran, and I wasn't even breathing hard.
The group of rebels disappears around the side of the building. Harris, cut the hardline. Lee, come with me, says Williams from his perch on a nearby roof. He does not call for backup from the police, because by the time they got here in adequate force, this should be decided or the fight will have moved somewhere else.
I send an acknowledgement over our link and jump from the rooftop across the street, landing just in front of the building entrance. Jumping like this is just as easy for me as it is for any agent, naturally. Williams jumps down to join me and we both draw our guns.
There are nine bullets in each of our guns. That is more than fit into a normal Desert Eagle .50, but through some special programming they fit in ours. It has been found that by the time an agent shoots all their bullets in chasing a rebel, they have either transferred hosts and end up with a full clip again, or have cornered the rebel to dispatch with hand to hand combat. So we don't carry extra clips or guns.
I know from my link to my partners and my instructions from the agency that we will attempt to terminate every rebel except for the captain, Mr. Gonzalez, who we will attempt to capture. I know from the agency files that Mr. Gonzalez is called Ajax and sometimes Telemonian by the rebels, and from the appended pictures that he is a very tall Hispanic man, and tends to wear a charcoal gray double breasted suit and matching fedora with a fancy dark overcoat rather than the usual rebel gear of black leather. The rest of the rebels are inconsequential.
Williams and I enter the building, and then split up to cover all six floors, after checking a floorplan. After cutting the hardline, Harris will remain outside to cover the exits if the rebels are alerted to our presence and try to escape.
The hardline has been disabled, Harris sends to us. They now have no way out.
I walk carefully through the building, an old factory and warehouse converted to smaller offices, with my gun out and ready. There is no sign of rebels. Harris and Williams don't spot anything, either. Williams and I meet at the top floor of the offices. Neither of us has seen so much as a scrap of rebel equipment. Or giant holes in the walls, wet or otherwise.
"Where are they?" I say, annoyed at the parallels of these words and this situation to the movie.
There has been no sign of the rebels exiting the building, Harris says from his position outside.
"We must have missed something," says Williams. We walk quickly and directly back to the entrance of the building and cross the fenced off area to where the rebels entered.
I turn around and scan the building. We came in just there, and the rebels... went off that way. I put my gun back in its holster, for the moment.
Go check it out, says Williams, as he ducks through the fence to disable the rebels car by the simple method of letting the air out of the tires. If they are hiding somewhere nearby, they'd have to escape on foot.
I walk along the perimeter of the building, tracking the path of the rebels and Mr. Levan across a small paved parking lot that edged the building. Nothing.
I turn the corner. The back of the building faces a small side street, and the backs of other buildings, which have many door and windows. They could have gone into any of them. Just great.
Williams and Harris come up behind me. I suddenly notice disturbance signals coming from an upper floor of a building to the right. Mr. Levan's carrier signals are being disrupted. He took the red pill, and is in the process of being unplugged. The disturbance signals disappear abruptly. He is out.
The others aren't yet.
Harris, override the telephone system priority one and kill service to the blocks around this location NOW, Williams sends as he and I run towards the rebel's location.
Harris puts a hand to his earpiece and closes his eyes. This is much more difficult and takes longer than simply cutting service to one building. The world flickers as Williams and I reach the door and bust through it, and the phones go down. There is no time to do a more complex alteration of the matrix; we will have to settle for running the rebels down.
We got an exact location of the rebels when they red-pilled Mr. Levan. Even if we didn't, we would still be able to find them since as soon as the hardline went down the rebel's cellphones went on. And we can trace that signal, if we can isolate it from the normal cellphone traffic of the city. Easy, at this hour. I listen in as we reach the right floor, still at a run.
Operator.
Line's down, Zip, what's up? Did Ajax get through in time? It is a female voice. That suggests Miss Earheart, also known as Abdiel, the second in command.
Yeah, he's fine, and—shit, you guys gotta get out of there RIGHT NOW, there's two-no, three—agents incoming. They're on your floor. Then the phone clicks off.
"We got company! MOVE, OUT THE WINDOW, NOW!" I hear a shout from down the hall, followed by glass shattering. I draw my gun.
Kami's heart starts hammering. It had been going fine, they got the kid unhooked, and Ajax, Chowder, and Theta out through the hardline. Just her and Abdiel left in the matrix. And agents right down the hall.
Abdiel smashes the glass out of the window with a kick. "Go, Kami," she says, grabbing up her gun.
Kami bolts for the window and throws herself out, curling into a ball around her semiautomatic. She makes the landing and takes off running back towards the car. She hears Abdiel land behind her, and then gunshots, but she doesn't turn to see who was shooting at whom. One of the key principles of escaping from agents is to not look behind you. It never helps.
At lest Theta is out of it, she thinks. Though she bets right now he's standing at the main screens on the ship and fuming that it's not him in there and her out. It's rather sweet how protective he is, even though she can fight at least as well as him. Some of their better evenings involve beating up on each other in a construct program. And then other things.
Kami accelerates as she turns into the alley. The car's tires are flat. Shit, she thinks, and runs on past the now useless car. Kami pulls out her cellphone as she runs and dials up Zip, their operator.
"Operator."
"It's Kami. I need an exit, and the car's busted. Is Abdiel alright?"
"Abbie's running. Heading towards a payphone outside a closed convenience store. Five blocks away in the opposite direction of where you're heading. I got a phone for you six blocks due west. Second floor of the office building on the northeast corner, room 212. Think you can get there?"
"You bet." She changes directions towards the phone. "Find the new guy yet?"
"He got dumped out nearly on top of the Argos. Sleeping in their sickbay right now."
"Good," says Kami, beginning to pant from the run. "See ya on the other side."
"I'll be ready."
Kami hangs up the phone and clips it onto her belt. She runs, not looking behind her, not focusing on anything but her destination and the gun in her hand.
The two rebels have already leapt from the fourth-story window by the time we bust through the door. Williams is in front, and crosses the floor in a flash, aims down at the fleeing rebels, and shoots three times. Nothing hits.
I follow him jumping out the window and Harris follows me. Williams runs off straight down the street after the taller, older rebel.
You two get the other one. She is heading towards their car, says Williams.
Harris and I run back up the side alley and out into the other street. The rebel is about a hundred and fifty yards away.
We run after her tirelessly. Harris transmits a plan to me, and I agree. He jumps up on to the roofs and will attempt to get ahead of the target, while I try to herd her into his path. There are no other humans around to transfer into that would get me ahead and closer to her. I take aim, and fire just to the left of her. I get enough of a look at her to pull up her file from the agency. It is a certain Miss Sato, who goes by Kami. Hmm.
She reflexively dodges to the right and starts to weave back and forth as she runs; in an attempt to throw off my aim should I try to shoot her again.
Then Miss Sato turns right down a small side alley. On the rooftops, Harris leaps down in front of her in the alley and I come in from behind, blocking her off. Harris takes aim with his gun, and shoots. She twists around, Harris' shot missing her, and I dodge Harris' bullet easily as it crawls through the air. Bullet time, yeah. I take aim at the rebel. I get a good look at her face as she frantically brings her gun to bear and blasts away at us, while trying to find a way out of the trap. The world goes in slow motion as I dodge the bullets, and then they are past and it still feels like time is crawling past. I recognize the rebel, and not from agency files. It's Beth.
Shoot, Lee, Harris prompts me. My programming kicks in and I pull the trigger, but am much too distracted by seeing Beth here to properly aim. And then she finds a door to the right, breaks it down and runs through.
I automatically go after her and keep shooting, but my concentration is gone. I hear a phone ringing in the building, but by the time Harris and I catch up to her, she is out. I stare at the phone she escaped down, hand clenched on my gun.
What was that, Lee? says Harris.
I... used to know her. In my previous life. To greatly understate it. Beth was my best friend from third grade through our sophomore year of high school, when her family abruptly left town. I never found out where they went.
She is a rebel, now. It is Williams, who also did not quite catch his target, and is still blocks away from us. And you are an agent. That's how it is. Did she recognize you?
I do not think so, I say. She saw only my suit and gun.
That's something, at least, says Harris. Miss Sato's termination priority will have to be upgraded to a higher level. The agents have worked hard to keep their recruitment of humans secret, in order to show a front of complete programmed non-humanness to the rebels. Mainly it worked because there had been so few humans turned agents.
We are done here, says Williams. Return to the agency.
I put a hand to my earpiece and transfer back. Williams and Harris do so as well. We all congregate again in the third floor meeting room. The day isn't over yet.
Kami opens her eyes as the needle is pulled out of her head socket. She sits up in what she likes to think of as the evil dentist chair. Theta is standing next to her.
"That was a good run," he says.
"Thanks," says Kami, as she tugs at the scratchy, dirty, too big sweater she wears in the real world. One thing the matrix has going for it, she reflects, is fashion sense. "We on the way to rendezvous with the—what ship was it that picked the new guy up?"
"The Argos. We're just about to get underway. You were the last one out." Theta smiles, but can't hide the concern on his face.
"Oh yeah. Zip told me, but I was a bit distracted." Kami remembers the agents and shivers. That had been her closest call yet. She climbs out of the chair and gives Theta a brief hug. "Come on, let's get to the cockpit. I wanna see this."
The hovercraft Namtar is driven quickly and quietly by its captain, Telemonian Ajax, to the rendezvous point. Sean, their newest recruit, is handed over. The Namtar was unable to do the pickup from the power plant, as they couldn't be in the area and broadcasting into the matrix at the same time. Much too likely that the machines would pick up their signal. Also, the power plant was spread over a large enough area that even if they were able to broadcast safely from right below it, odds were low that they would be near the correct drain or able to get there before the new recruit drowned. So three additional ships came to aid in the pickup.
Sean was unconscious, of course. After shifting him into the Namtar's sickbay, Abdiel and Zip set him up with the muscle rehabilitation routine and started working on him. He slept through it all.
I was unaware you knew any human that had joined the rebels, says Harris, once we all reach the meeting room.
So was I, I say. And I still shot at her, remember? Poor Beth. I knew if I saw her again, I would have to shoot, and shoot to kill. There was no other choice. With that shot, programmed or not, I had demonstrated to myself once and for all which side I was on. No going back.
"Miss Sato and the rest of her crew have been given a higher priority assignment for termination. Additionally-" says Harris.
"The sentinels have been alerted to the change," I say. One of my jobs is to coordinate our fight against the rebels with the sentinels, the outside world counterpart of agents.
"It is unlikely that there will be further rebel activity in this sector tonight," says William.
We are on standby the rest of the night, says Williams over the earpiece network. You're on your own unless called, Williams says, specifically to me. This still is my first day, after all.
Harris and I acknowledge, and then we all head off to our offices.
I do a little more work at one of my secondary tasks looking for true rebels on the internet. Nothing too important is turned up. On a whim, I call up the website for the one of the local news stations back in Tucson. There is a brief article concerning a homicide a block north of the university campus. Female college student shot in the chest while biking home Wednesday night, name withheld. Miller probably arranged it special. I close the browser window, wondering briefly what would happen if I turned up for my own funeral, and discovered I didn't want to find out. I was beginning to find out that the cleaner the break with my previous life, the better.
I turn in my chair and look out at the night through my sunglasses. Do agents sleep? I wonder, and check my files. Nope. Not like humans, at least. Though a few hours of downtime every week or so is required, for unconscious processes to scan and fix our systems as needed. And I'm not due for downtime for another... 187.42 hours.
I ping Williams.
Yes? he says.
I'm going for a walk, I say. To get better acquainted with the sector.
That's fine, he says, Keep an eye out for glitches.
Will do, I say. I put a hand to my earpiece and transfer to a host near the beach out to the west of Golden Gate Park.
The moon is about halfway between new and full, but I see just as well as I do in full daylight, even with my sunglasses on. The sea is inky black in front of me, waves only breaking right at the beach. Even with my enhanced vision I can't see many stars. The lights of the city drown them out.
I walk along the beach a short ways, near the surf where the sand is damp. Walking down there, less sand gets into my shoes, which only have a pointier toe and a bit more heel to differentiate them from the shoes my partners Harris and Williams wear.
Looking similar has its advantages. The rebels can't tell us apart very well, at least in the matrix where they can't see our code, and thus when more than one of us is chasing a rebel it seems as if we are in multiple places at once. Very confusing.
Though with careful observation you can tell agents apart. At least I was able to, in the movie. At least, in the first one.
I look out at the ocean once more. When I came to San Francisco as a human I had come down to the beach and had stood somewhere quite near here, also looking out at the ocean. But things had changed since then. The part of me that had been fascinated with the ocean was gone, excised from my primary files and locked away with the other files that I didn't need in order to perform my function but still made up some vital part of my history and thus my consciousness.
The old me, unsure and longing for something to bloody well happen was gone, used as the foundation for Agent Lee. Foundations are hidden, when the building is done, and so was Renee. The ocean was still large and wet and out there, but it had somehow diminished. I tilt my head back and listen to the waves, and then transfer away.
Alameda. I take over the body of a handy night guard and walk onto the freeway chase set. It is larger than you would think, in person. My favorite part of that movie. I get up on the truncated overpass and walk out to the middle. The San Francisco skyline glitters on the horizon, hovering over darkness out on the other side of the bay, with the bridges ribbons of lights linking this side of the bay to the other.
The set is quiet now, and has been for some months. I suppose it will be used in other movies now, though I doubt in anything I would find quite as exciting as the sequence in Reloaded. In fact, it was a given now that that would be true. Knowing you are a program in a giant simulation has that effect.
I hear footsteps behind me. It is another agent, one I haven't—no, wait, I have met him. Just not today. It is Miller.
"Hello, agent," he says, "How was your first day?"
I consider my responses, noting he speaks much more familiarly out loud than anyone at my agency. "It was interesting."
"Is that all?" He's probably here to evaluate me or something. I guess I'll comply with his familiarity and answer honestly.
"It felt like it lasted a week," I say. "So much is new to me, and yet I know it all. I have learned and changed so much."
"And how do you feel, about it all?" A tricky question.
"I feel that I have preformed my functions adequately." I can feel him raising an eyebrow at me, though I still stare across the bay at the floating city. Darn, he won't let me get away with just that.
"I feel... content," I say, feeling almost as if I am in a trance. "Even though I held down a terrified boy in a scene straight out of the film. Even though I have met and shot at someone who used to be Renee's best friend."
"You speak of who you were in third person?" I wonder briefly where the term 'third degree' came from. I am not curious to access my link to the agency and find out.
"Yes. I am Agent Lee. It is my name, and my function, my purpose. That is who I am. Renee is gone. Dead." I cock my head to the side slightly, emphasizing my earpiece. "Shot down in a drive-by while biking home. A tragedy for her family, no doubt. But of no concern to me."
Agent Miller smiles, an agent's ghost of a smile. "Is that truly so?"
"Yes." And it is. I know to the very last symbol in my code that it is.
"I see." He nods, and then speaks to me for the first time through the earpiece connection. My tie to him is much less... intimate than my link to Harris and Williams, and even to the other two agent groups in this sector. I think he's on a different server or something.
Very good, Agent. You pass, he says. I can tell he is happy with this.
And what if I had failed? I thought it was a test.
If you had failed, it would have meant the transfer had failed in some way and that you were flawed. The system has no use for flawed agents. Had you failed, you would have been deleted. But do not worry. You passed, and with flying colors, as they say. He smiled, very broadly for an agent. A human would have just barely noticed.
I though you said there was little risk of failure, I say, unsettled, remembering our conversation in Phoenix.
Little risk of failure of the actual transfer, yes. Failure in the process of programming and adaptation is much higher. We are unsure why. Some suppose there is an aspect of the human psyche that has to let itself be subsumed for the transition to take place. He pauses for a moment, to prepare his words or to let all that sink in. It is ultimately you who choose whether or not to accept the reprogramming of your self.
I still stand quiet and at peace, looking out towards the city. "It's always choice, isn't it."
"You got it." He turns and walks away, off to return to his permanent assignment in the Arizona sector. We don't need to go through human rituals of saying goodbye. Not sure of how to think of these revelations, I close my eyes and transfer back to the agency.