Chapter Eight: The Glitch.
The false sun rises above the digital horizon to find me at my computer, idly running searches through the internet and the matrix, looking for potential rebel targets for release. I don't worry about the other kind of release, others handle those.
I look up as the door to my office opens. It is Harris.
"Yes?" I say.
"Orders from the mainframe have arrived. We are to terminate the exile that was warned yesterday."
I close my laptop and stand up. He has failed to stop manipulating the matrix solely for his own benefit?
Yes. And more than that. We have discovered that emissaries from the Merovingian, with standing orders for their own termination, will be coming up from Los Angeles to recruit him.
Do we attempt the termination now?
No. The exile has gone into hiding, and the emissaries from the Merovingian will not get her until this afternoon. The Merovingian no longer had access to the sector-crossing backdoors; the system had been upgraded in the last reload with additional safeguards. As a result, when any of his people had to leave the Southern California sector they were forced to travel by normal human routes.
Williams contacts us then, sending coordinates along with his message. A small glitch has appeared overnight in Stanford. We must take care of it. The coordinates are off in the natural reserve area, where no one lives and hardly anyone goes, but it has to be fixed all the same.
Harris and I acknowledge, and all three of us transfer to as close to the coordinates as we can get. In this case, it is three people working at the Stanford linear accelerator. The three of us walk out of the building, attracting no notice, and commandeer an SUV from the parking lot. Harris has a key that unlocks and starts it. This key will start basically any motor vehicle, a handy thing when having to drive to glitches off in the middle of nowhere. We take our usual seats in the car.
The glitch is approximately a kilometer from any kind of road or trail, but across basically even ground. This is probably the first time this SUV has been off a road of any kind, and isn't taking it too well. No matter. Before too long Harris is pulling up to a boulder to park, and I see a true glitch in the matrix for the first time.
It is centered in a small pine tree. As I watch, the tree flickers on and off. When it is off, there is a sort of white-noise buzzing and where the tree is supposed to be is a sort of a gap, edged in crackling green code. I suppose if I was human it would make my eyes water, out of the pure wrongness if nothing else.
I keep my gaze steady on the glitch, analyzing it, trying to see what went wrong so we can fix it. I identify the main possible causes, scrolling through a checklist in my files.
Glitch type IIA, subsection gamma, I say. What that basically means is that something went wrong with the code that made the tree grow, freezing it in time while in the rest of the matrix around it time went on as usual. And the glitch could spread to any program that touched it. Small frozen insects and a bird or two littered the ground at the base of the tree. Standard practice in dealing with this kind of glitch was to contain it and delete the entire patch of code, replacing it with something else.
Harris requests the materials needed to contain the glitch from the agency, and a minute later the specialized containment team arrives and sets up.
At the go-ahead signal from Harris, Williams gives the command to delete the broken code. A moment of slight déjà vu and it is done. I have a code for a small rocky outcropping all set to be inserted into the gap left by the tree, and Williams handles the changeover.
The containment team packs up and disappears, going back on standby. The code is all fixed, and so the three of us get back into the SUV and Harris drives us back to where we transferred in and took the vehicle. Once there, we transfer back to the agency. No need to cause the human hosts we took undue confusion.
Back at the agency, I access all the files I can, looking for information related to the Merovingian, his henchmen, and the exile target for deletion by us and for recruitment by the Merovingian. This takes some time, as there are extensive files on the Merovingian dating back to when he was first created, in the very first version of the matrix.
I find to some amusement that the quote from the movie, that Merv is "a trafficker in information" is exactly correct. The Merovingian started out his existence as nothing other than a search engine. Google's great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandson gone bad. As for Persephone, she started out as a program designed to observe and relate to the phenomena of human emotion.
They got together, and then went rogue just as the first matrix began to fail. During the upgrade and reload they were able to hide and protect themselves, along with a few other exiled programs loyal to them, and began their rise in power. The Merovingian was very powerful even before he became an exile, and afterward his power grew even more.
The agents of that time tried to stop him, of course. They were unsuccessful. He was just too well protected. Any attempt against him wound up costing too much in terms of bodies. Especially once the exiled twins joined him. The advantages of switching host bodies and dodging bullets in a fight go way down against an opponent who doesn't need to.
Eventually the Merovingian and his associates were allowed to continue by being all but impossible to kill. Monitoring of their activities and attempts at containment has been the modus operandi with that group of exiles for many, many years. At times, like now, the Merovingian tries to expand his group and gain more power, and as ever we will be there to stop him.
The exile was marked for deletion the moment the system realized he was a target of the Merovingian. The Truce does not extend to dangerous programs, of which Merv and his group certainly are.
I pause a moment in my search. The Truce. I am not totally sure of how it works, as it most definitely has something crucial to do with the third movie. I guess I'll find out what in a few days. Right now I need to focus on the job at hand.