Chapter Fourteen: The Amazing Moving Picture Show
Time passed. The worldwide opening for Revolutions finally came. Harris and I went to an early morning show, though not the crack of dawn zero-hour release. Williams decided to not come, as he was busy with the Southern California agents helping coordinate an attack on the Merovingian.
There was a group of people waiting in line dressed up as rebels. Mostly just by wearing shades and trenchcoats or black PVC like Trinity. Though there was some guy dressed up as Neo with an outfit he obviously spent some time on, and didn't just pick up from the mall. Along with him was a Morpheus wanna-be in a jacket that did look like he got it from the mall. They were all just fans, and not real rebels. I noted one of them had monitoring tags on them, as a potential rebel recruit or release.
This group also had one guy in a black suit and sunglasses and an earpiece made of an old telephone cord and a single earplug, dressed up as an agent. When he saw Harris and me walk up and join the line, wearing our normal outfits, he got a really big grin on his face and came over to say hi.
How should we play this, Lee? You have more experience dealing with humans than I do. Harris asked me as the costumed agent walked towards us real agents.
Act friendly, as one fan of the movies to another, I say, He'll probably write off anything strange as us being in character.
"Hiya," the agent costumed person says as he nears us. "Those are some seriously sweet costumes. Real accurate."
"Thanks," I say. "Nice to see someone else in a suit."
"It seems like there are many rebels around," Harris continues.
"Yeah," the guy says. "I tried to get two of them—," he points a thumb back over his shoulder towards the main costumed party, "—to dress up as agents so there'd be three of us in suits, but they all wanted to be rebels." He pauses for a moment. "Hey, after the movie we're all going to go to this skate park real close and take some pictures in costume. It would be cool if you two came along, y'know, so there'd be three agents. More impressive, like."
Harris and I swivel our heads in unison to look each other in the eye, quickly weighing the pros and cons of going with them. Pro, it would be fun. Con, we didn't have a car to follow them to the park in as we had transferred directly to the theater. Pro, we could do some covert observation on the one in their group marked as a possible release target.
"Sure," says Harris, still looking at me, "We'll come along."
"It sounds fun," I say, and turn back to the human. "Your name is...?" I already know his name, having done a quick search the moment he started talking to us, but letting him know we knew would not be a good thing for keeping him a happily plugged in little human.
"Oh yeah," he says. "I'm John." His last name is Brown, which I find slightly amusing.
"I'm Lee," I say, and shake his hand.
"Harris," my partner says, and after a slight hesitation also shakes John's hand.
The line starts to move, and someone from the costumed group whistles and waves at John. He looks over his shoulder.
"Oh," he says, "Time to go. You guys want me to save you two some seats down in front?"
"Sure," I say, "That would be great."
John nods, and runs off to join his group as the line moves forward. I see him telling some about us, pointing back at us, and then they are through the door.
We get through a little bit after and move confidently through the dark theater wearing our sunglasses. We find John easily and sit down by him. He, along with the rest of the costumed group, has taken his sunglasses off. He notices we have ours on still.
"Hey, aren't you gonna take those off?" he says.
"No," Harris says.
Harris, that would be a bit of a giveaway, I say hurriedly over our link. "Oh yeah," I say out loud, carefully reaching up and removing my sunglasses. I feel partially naked without them, but leaving them on would attract more attention than I want. Take them off, Harris. "It is kind of dark in here."
Harris takes his own sunglasses off, though a little grumpily as he doesn't quite understand why I am so insistent about this. He does it though, bowing to my greater expertise dealing with humans.
John involuntarily pulls back a little when he sees my eyes. There's just something about an agent's eyes that freaks out humans. Maybe it's the look of knowing too much, maybe they sense that we have killed far too many of their kind.
"Uh, yeah," says John uneasily, "It is." He is thankfully distracted by the lights dimming even further, and the first of the previews coming on. There is scattered applause and hooting in the theater. There is even more applause as the Warner Brothers logo comes up and turns green. Harris and I stay still.
I sit enthralled as the movie plays, though making sure to react properly in the appropriate spots. During the big fight in Zion, Harris sneakily puts his sunglasses back on. I follow his lead. It's really just more comfortable to have them on. Everyone else is too glued to the screen to notice the two agents down in the front section. Even John, sitting next to us.
All too soon the end credits roll, and I sit there, trying to absorb everything I saw, and reconciling it with everything I know. I can now access everything in my history files without trouble, I realize. Everything is tying itself together and falling into place. The movies truly are a history of the matrix, with only a few slight changes for style and understandability. Because of that, I'm betting it will infuriate quite a few people.
John slumps back in his seat. "Holy craaap," he says. "That was... something."
"Did you like it?" I ask.
"I— I don't know yet," he says. "Is it really over? Did you see that sunrise? It was all colors and there wasn't really any green and the sky was blue—" He stops babbling and shakes his head to clear it as the credits end and house lights come up.
The rest of the costumed group gets up, talking loudly among themselves about the movie. It ended up that about a quarter liked it and about two thirds loathed it, with a few, like John, needing to think about it some more.
Harris and I follow John following the group out of the theater.
"We're all meeting up at the park a few blocks north of here," says John once we come out of the theater and stand on the sidewalk in front of it. Almost everyone has their sunglasses back on, and they all are still arguing about whether the movie rocked or sucked. There are strong feelings on both sides.
"All right," I say.
"We will meet you there," says Harris. We turn and walk away, around the corner of the building towards the parking lot and ostensibly towards our car. But once we are out of sight of the humans, Harris and I transfer away to hosts near to the park.
We wait there for some time. Eventually the costumed group shows up, caravanning in a few cars. They have lost a few of their group, mostly the people who were vehemently expressing their hatred of the final movie. They have also picked up a guy in street clothes carrying a fancy digital camera.
John gets out of one of the cars and waves to us. Harris and I walk over to him.
"Hey Lee, Harris. You guys got any prop guns on you? 'Cause I have this replica one I got off of ebay and we could do some pics like from the first movie if you guys have some."
Harris and I confer quickly about pros and cons again, and then in unison we reach into our jackets and draw our guns. John's eyes widen as he sees them.
"Jeez. You guys really went all out with those costumes. Those things look really real. Where'd you get them? Can I see one?"
"No," Harris says quickly.
Harris, I say to him privately, Let me answer the questions, OK?
That human is not touching my gun, says Harris. And I am designed to interact with law enforcement and government humans, remember?
Yes, I say, Sorry. But this human is just a civilian. They don't work like government types do. And I remember quite a bit about interacting with civilian humans from when I was one for twenty years.
All right, says Harris. You can answer the stupid questions.
This conversation is conducted fast enough that John only waits through a very slight pause before I say, "They look real because they are." I smile, but not with my eyes, though that's okay because I have my sunglasses on. "I have an uncle who runs a gun shop. These are loaners."
"Huh. That's pretty cool. Isn't that illegal or something, though?" John has a slightly puzzled look on his face through this, but it clears up pretty quick. Mostly because an agent's speech has special code tags connected to them that make plugged-in humans accept what we say with very little questioning. Though it works better on those used to obeying commands, such as the humans Harris usually works with. Which in turn is why he is having a bit of a problem conversing with John.
I smile for real. "Not for us." The comply and conform command kick in and the last of John's doubts evaporate. This happens mostly because John is a happy little plugged in battery. If I had been talking to the one in this group marked for observation (he was still in the group, and was complaining about parts of the movie like the lack of ending, which upgraded his watch status with us) I probably would have faced more questioning and resistance.
John blinks, our coded command having interrupted his train of thought.
"Oh," he says, and shakes his head. Conversations with an agent can be confusing. "I think they're ready to take some pictures, now."
They are. John takes us over and introduces us to the group and we go around saying our names and shaking hands of all the humans dressed as rebels. The one on watch as potential rebel or release seems a little jumpy around us, which is understandable, really. He sees us a bit more for what we really are, at some level, and it freaks him out.
The photographer guy takes over. This is mainly a shoot to just have fun with the costumes, but not totally. One of the dressed up rebel types writes fanfiction, and got the idea to illustrate some of his works with photographs. This was mainly why John had pulled us out of the crowd to come help out, as there were three agents in the stories but they only had one willing to dress up in a suit and be the bad guy.
The fanfiction we were going to help illustrate was of the basic battery is freed, joins a ship, has interesting adventures fighting against the agents variety. The only real twist is that in the last of the series, his rebel captain girlfriend is captured by agents and he tries to save her and fails. She dies, he tries to fight the agents and dies, and everyone dies. Realistic, at least.
The photographer starts off with some group and individual shots, just taking pictures. Then we start in on the fanfic illustration photos. The guy who wrote the story tells us what to do like a director, having us get into specific fighting positions against someone dressed up as the main character and his girlfriend.
He also experiments with taking a dodging bullets shot, by taking the same shot over with me and the non-agent John in different positions, intending to mess around with the various photos in Photoshop to make them one. If I still had the drives my previous self did, I would have had to fight myself to resist moving at bullet dodging speed here, to freak them all out. But I'm a good, well behaved agent and so I don't.
This goes on for some time, Harris and John and me posing for the pictures with the costumed rebels. And then Harris and I pick up a disturbance. Our hands go to our earpieces and we twist around to look north. A group of rebels is trying to blow up a theater that's doing a special triple showing of the original Matrix movie, Reloaded, and Revolutions. We have no idea why the rebels are doing this, whether they are trying to suppress the movies or promote them. And frankly it doesn't matter. This event will be suppressed, no matter what happens. The general public will be oblivious to it, as they are to almost all interactions between the rebels and the agents. The call goes out for all local agents to respond immediately.
Harris and I transfer out of the park and straight to the theater, in such a hurry that we don't bother to even get out of view of the humans before transferring hosts. It is more important that we get to the agency right this instant, even with the at-risk for release or recruitment person standing right next to us.
"Uh, guys?" says John, staring at the two confused looking people that appeared where Lee and Harris had been standing, and who were currently trying to figure out just how they got there with no memory of how they ended up standing by a group of people wearing way too much leather. "Did you see that?"
"See what?" says Mike, the guy costumed as Neo, as he stares right along with John at the two people who had appeared when the two agents disappeared.
"Uh, yeah, okay," says John, "Nothing." Did that really happen? John thinks to himself. He had thought their costumes were just a little too good, their actions and speech a little too in character. And they did the morphing thing. Like real agents in the movies.
These thoughts make large enough ripples that a subprogram running in the sector kicks in, and blanks out the last few moments of the wondering people's thoughts, substituting something harmless. John and his group go silent for a moment as their thoughts are altered, and then shake their heads and snap back into it.
"Right," says John, "I think I got distracted or something. Where were we?"
They go back to shooting pictures, and don't think any more of the strangeness until later, when the photographer goes through and edits the files on his computer and finds pictures of more agents than just his friend John. He mentally shrugs, and assumes he just missed meeting them and forgot all about them.
The incident at the theater is cleared up pretty quickly, and with minimal civilian damages. Some theater workers and attendees remember being evacuated because a fire alarm went off, but it was just a false alarm and everything was taken care of by the friendly government officials, though why government officials responded to a false fire alarm gave a few people momentary pause, until they suddenly remembered they had something important that needed doing, if they could just remember what that was.
The effects of the bomb were removed with a quick edit to the matrix. The bodies of the rebels that didn't run fast enough were removed as well, though they were taken off and put into graves that had been occupied by shills for as long as each rebel had been a rebel.
Williams had met us to chase down the rebels at the theater, and I focused on containing and eliminating the bomb and its results. Harris did final cleanup of the memories of the firemen that had been called out, and we transferred back to the agency, to wait for whatever needed our attention next.
There was always something to do, I had found in the first week or so of being an agent. I never go tired of any part of it, though, and also didn't get tired in the usual human sense of the word either. The limits of exhaustion were set so low in an agent's program that they might as well be nonexistent.
So I sat in my office, working on the net, or I patrolled through the streets with Williams and Harris, searching for and fixing glitches, checking up on registered and permitted exiles, watching for unregistered exiles, and just generally being an agent. I hardly ever thought about my old life now. I even thought of Miss Sato as just another rebel in need of termination.
I was happy; doing what I was supposed to do, fulfilling my purpose. I felt as if I could go on like this for ever. And I could, through reload after reload, through the turning of the cycle. As long as I was needed, I would exist and do what I was meant to do.
I did my job, my life, and time passed. The days turned into weeks. I noted with surprise the coming of November thirtieth, a day which had my old self not been killed with my transformation into an agent would have been one of frantic writing, working hard to reach my final word count for the novel I had planned to write for the strange event called NaNoWriMo.
I allowed myself a brief moment to smile mentally at that thought. The novel I would have written would have been a big Matrix fanfiction about agents. I might even have done a big stupid self insertion fic, if my life hadn't turned into one of its own accord a few days before the event. It doesn't matter, though. All of that is gone, now, and only the agent remains.
As it was, the day is significant because on November thirtieth rebels attacked the agency.