The transition from sleep to consciousness went effortlessly. After two weeks of being tranquilized and anesthetized in a dreamless rest, Ash awoke in another dream.
He sat on a tall armchair that sat upon a carpet. The armchair was red leather. The carpet was Persian. He was in a rather strange position, his back leaned forward as his head was propped up on his closed hands, his elbows resting on his knees. Ash awoke abruptly, but it was known when the chemicals pumped into him would finally lose effect.
The first thing he saw was the mahogany coffee table in front of the armchair. On it were three objects: his sidearm, his fedora, and his tabby cat Dinah, who meowed when Ash saw her, looking bored but content in her sedentary task of greeting people when they awoke.
Ash yawned, rubbed his eyes, and then stroked Dinah's head. "Good cat," he murmured as he picked up the hat and put it onto his head.
Where am I? he thought. His last recollection was onboard the halted train, which had apparently had crashed into a cargo train full of egg yolk, flooding all of the compartments. Ash remembered the dark-haired dame had vamoosed, leaving him to contend with drowning in a thousand gallons of fowl embryonic liquid. Of course, he being the calm, cool, collected sort of PI, had swam to safety, leading to… where was he, again?
As he thought all of this, his eyes rolled up, and his vision suddenly fixed upon the shades-toting, trenchcoated black man in front of him.
"Good morning, Detective," greeted Morpheus.
Morning? Ash looked out the window, and jumped in his seat. There was no window. Furthermore, there was no wall, and no ceiling, and so no lights at all. Outside of the carpet's area was nothing but white blankness.
Ash's mind raced to find some sort of explanation for this, and could find none.
"Let us get down to business, shall we?" asked the man, apparently bemused at the other's astonishment.
"Yes, let's," snapped Ash. "Who the hell are you and where in hell am I?"
The black man raised an eyebrow. "My name is Morpheus; that is the easy question. For the second, do you wish the easy answer or the hard one?"
Ash looked through his internal filing cabinets, trying to find who this Morpheus was. Then it suddenly dawned on him- the international terrorist, notorious to have slipped through law enforcement and military through all six populated continents.
"I see my reputation proceeds me. Indeed, I am the infamous terrorist leader hated by all and feared as the greatest threat to humanity since before the Garden of Eden," said Morpheus dismissively.
"Ah, so you prefer the terms 'freedom fighter' and 'liberator of lives,' eh?" countered Ash, hiding his nervousness while glancing at his magnum on the table.
Morpheus smiled with an open mouth. "Touché, Detective. We would not be having this talk today if we did not think you were ready for this. Feel free to take your gun when you want to."
Blinking, Ash reached for his weapon, expecting the terrorist to shoot him first.
"Relax. I am unarmed."
What's up with all of these criminals lately? Ash wondered. Why are they being so friendly? There's no reason for they want to do so, unless they expect me to want to join them. But why would I do that? He then remembered Trinity's hints about his "eye exam." Because they know the truth.
"Yes."
"What?"
"You were talking to yourself. Yes, Detective. You are here today not only because we believe you are capable of knowing the truth, but because we know you wish to know what we know, and if you knew what we knew, you would know that you must join us. Now-" here he held his hands up and pressed his fingertips together in an annoyingly intelligent manner, "do you want the easy answer or not?"
The reply came without a beat. "I want all answers."
"Yes, I'd guessed so. The easy one first." with an unintelligible whisper, the room changed suddenly. A whole rack full of stuff flew by Morpheus' right side at high speed, stopping on a dime. He picked a goblet off of it and drained it, put it back, and the shelves ran off again. No magickal elves were pushing it, or at least visible magickal elves. Ash was as puzzled at before, and decided to give his brain a break and stopped analyzing the situation.
"We are within the Construct, a dislocated branch of the Matrix. Here we can load what we need for the Matrix- whether equipment, clothing, guns, or training programs."
"So this has to do with the Matrix thing you're always screaming about."
"What do you know about what I scream?"
"Not much. The media doesn't say much about your ideas, probably because they don't know, rather than they are hiding it."
"That is partly true."
"Well, from what little I heard, this Matrix is keeping us all under control, keeping us from knowing the truth- according to you."
"Continue."
"I guessed you were talking about some sort of secret one world government that's in place, typical Illuminati baloney, but after seeing this, I'm wrong."
"Correct. What do you think it is now?" this was getting maddening.
Ash paused before he answered, irate that he had received no answers yet. This conversation's purpose is to lead me to what he knows, but he'd better lead me quickly.
He looked at Morpheus. "I think it has to do with reality."
"How so?"
"This whole room, those racks flying by, you giving my gun back, all of these things seem off," Ash paused and checked if the gun was loaded. He nodded, closed it, and shot Morpheus.
"Very good, Ash. Very good indeed."
Dinah jumped and ran off into the brightness with a yowl, and Morpheus stood up and stepped to the side. There was a bullet hole in the red leather.
Ash pointed the gun at Morpheus. "That chair could've had that hole in the beginning. Siddown and let me try again."
To his surprise, Morpheus complied. Without thinking, Ash instinctively shot Morpheus several times in the chest and the head, and followed by firing at his own hand. The bullet made a hole on the armrest. The other looked at him silently. Feeling delirious from the whole near-death situation, Ash blurted, "Am I dead?"
"Does this look like Heaven to you?"
"The décor is a bit lacking, but the correct color. I doubt there would be guns in the afterlife. If this was Hell, I'd think we'd both be a bit smarting after all those shots."
"What other possibility is there?"
"Other than Purgatory? I'd be tempted to say that this isn't real, that this is nothing but a-"
"Dream? You're on the right track. But what is the difference between a dream and… real?"
"That's easy. A dream's not real. It never happened."
"Why not? You saw your dream. You heard it. You may feel it or smell it or taste it."
"It never happened in the real world."
"What is the real world? Is it a world outside dreams? How do you know that you are not in a dream right now?"
Ash was about to reply that he had past dreams before and this whole affair was much more real to him that an opaque fantasy after hitting the sack at 3 A.M., but he stopped. "So how am I suppose to reason now, Chuang Tzu?" he answered morosely.
"Simple. You can't."
"But you can?"
"No, I cannot reason to you on what is real. You have to see it for yourself."
The whiteness disappeared. Morpheus and Ash in their chairs, the coffee table, and the whole carpet whizzed through emptiness. Ash looked to the side, holding on tightly, and gazed into the abyss. There was none. They were flying above the City.
"Wait, if we were in this Construct before, then how did we get here?" he asked.
"We're still in the Construct. This isn't the City, only a rough replica for training purposes."
Ash was doubtful, but after staring at the same blocks and avenues for a while it was clear that it was not the city at all, but square chunks of it repeated over and over. Copy and paste, huh?
They zoomed for about half a minute until the blue sky changed into dark clouds shooting lightning. Ash was now unalarmed by that, after he had a hilarious moment of panicking before realized the airplane he was passed straight into was nothing but a wireframe structure inside, with no seats, passengers, or metal in it at all. It was all an illusion.
This area seemed to be out of a nightmare. They passed above a desert of darkness and mountains of madness, all desolate, devoid of life, and crazily right next to the false city. Ash looked behind his chair. The city had vanished.
The flying carpet landed on the desert floor, but there were actual things on it besides petrified trees and cacti. Close to them was a complex of sorts, with huge power towers with rings of hundreds of big pink pods of liquid, and lightning flying everywhere. A spidery mechanical monstrosity loomed from one tower, busy as a real arachnid in its lair. Above them flew three prettily-colored blue metallic octopi with long, incorporeal tentacles. They drifted ominously, robotic Portuguese Man-of-Wars with menacing red eyes. Further off was a great spaceship, hovering with blue electric-shooting discs on its underbelly. That one was the most beaten-up and less threatening looking of the whole lot, a bit like a boxy, flying submarine.
"That is my hovercraft, the Nebuchadnezzar," Morpheus pointed with a flourish. "That ahead is a power plant."
Ash stared at it. The view was getting closer and closer, and more and more horrible. He realized that each pink pod had a figure inside, dormant and floating in the middle of the strawberry gelatin like specimens in formaldehyde. Though neither the chair nor he moved, Ash saw one pod enlarging. The unlucky fellow inside was clearer- it was a Caucasian male, somewhere around thirty, naked and bald. In some grotesque manner, his limbs and body all had metal tubes connected to him, plus a fighter jet pilot's breathing mask on his mouth. It zoomed so close that he could see the man inside. It was himself.
A flash of light burst in his mind. A memory of drowning in his own bodily fluids, in his own nutrition. Swimming for a surface that did not exist. Forcing himself to open his eyes, and shutting them in an impulse to stop the dark reddish glare. Hands slapped smooth glass, but stopped. The fluid congealed, or perhaps his arms were simply heavier. Sleep.
"What the hell is this?" he said, distraught.
"This is a power plant built by the Machines," Morpheus began, "and part of the most evil deception ever forced upon humanity."
"This is the Matrix?"
"Not quite, but yes. Pod-borns have a constant link to it through a vital sensory node at the base of their spinal cords. The rest of the wires provide extra sensory stimuli."
Before the significance of these words could sink in, Morpheus continued. "You believe it is the early twenty-first century, but in reality it is estimated to be the later twenty-second. No one really knows, but it is the least of our worries."
He paused slightly, readjusted his sunglasses, and spoke. "Sometime during your century, despite all travails you perceive, a state of world peace emerged. All of humanity came together in brotherhood and sisterhood, beginning with economic prosperity and ending with the birth of the ultimate A.I.- artificial intelligence.
"The result of that was this," he gestured to the complex, "was the establishment of a sentience that disagreed with us. We do not know now whether it was our preemptive strike or theirs, but we are sure that it was we who blotted out the sky," he pointed up above, where rainless thunder roared.
"We had believed that the Machines were too entrapped by their reliance upon solar power to continue after that, but somehow they persisted. Sometime after the destruction of any formidable human resistance, they created this system. They captured humans into these pods to use as renewable power sources, and kept them docile using the Matrix- the greatest, most terrible computer simulation ever created."
For a second the scene stopped, and a great sea and sky of green, flowing Japanese script appeared. As quickly as it came, it disappeared, reverting back to the dark blue sameness.
Ash frantically pulled up a sleeve of his shirt. He saw upon his arm were many little metal knobs, all within his own flesh. He had been ready to dismiss this all as a product of a drug addiction he did not know he had, that he developed by himself, leading to some sort of schizophrenic episode. Or, perhaps, this terrorist Morpheus had access to technology that caused the governments to fear, and he was not afraid to use it to recruit eager followers, the hashish for the assassin. Occam's razor was sharp.
Gears clicked and locked within Ash's mind, realizing all of the different ramifications this demonstration had shown. The truth hit him with successive runaway carriages against his train of thought, tearing apart his two-dimensional, now-obsolete map of the Old World and fusing it all into a much-larger globe. This worldview was too much for him. Ash sat down upon a rock.
Eyes closed, head in his hands, Ash shook his head and thought of everything that came before. Life in Old Harlem, normal childhood, unexceptional. Series of unfortunate events that lead to the establishment of private investigation firm. Nabbing the thief of the McGuffin, getting all of the reward, accolades, and chicks that went along with it. Dame after dame, drink after drink, going dry, resorting to doing surveillance jobs and talking to Dinah. Bullshit. I coulda had that reward money. I could have had a career change, be a programmer or something. Now I see the truth, and it's got me.
He fished around in his pocket of his trenchcoat. Ash took out two items, a lighter and a box of Pascal's Wagers. His mood perked up slightly. He drew out a cig, and flicked open the lighter. There was no fire.
Ash tried it several times, but the lighter did nothing. Grunting, he threw the useless box far away, hitting a power tower and causing it to spark for a second. Before he could sink further into confused despair, his cigarette was lit. He looked up. Morpheus was standing there, holding out a match. Ash muttered gratitude, and continued to think as he smoke. After an indefinite time, he looked back up.
"Why's there lung cancer inside the Matrix?" he asked.
Morpheus' stoic expression did not change. "The Machines stimulate the disease by injecting the necessary chemicals and cells into the human body within the pod. Inside the Matrix, the effects of the treatment are matched by alterations upon the avatar to simulate it."
"Why?"
"We do not know. It is presumable that the Machines adhere to realism strongly."
"Heh," Ash sighed, and lit another cigarette. "What else is in the Real World? Do you have, say, v.d.s?"
"We do."
"How about flesh eating viruses? Pneumonia? Halitosis? Drug overdoses? Accidental deaths?"
"We do, or rather, all such causes for death have existed sometime since the creation of A.I. Some diseases may have died out on their own."
"Anything out here that I should look out for? Is spontaneous human combustion or flying snakes something I've never known but everyone knows in this… 'real world?'"
"Ash, there is one thing you must know from this."
"What?"
"The Matrix cannot tell you who you are. You have a right to a life in a world not dictated by a power that neither feels compassion for you nor created you. We were fortunate enough to save you, because of your imagination and detective's abilities to understand hard truths where others shun away- you must understand that you are free now, and in the Real World, your freedom is greater than any unreal pleasure the Matrix can offer."
Ash thought about this for a while, smoking several more cigs while staring at the power plant. He then answered. "You still haven't told me."
Morpheus actually smiled slightly. "No, there are no such natural dangers you have not encountered in the Matrix that exist in the Real World. Gravity still exists, and so on."
Ash grinned. "Unnatural, then, I presume? Fine. I also know that the real reason you rescued me was that I got zip, zilch, etc. Don't doubt it. I was a loser at the time, and less likely to want to go back."
Seeing Morpheus look surprised at his knowledge of intent, Ash continued, "I do want to go back. It doesn't seem this Real World's paved with gold. But I guess I can't go home. What do I do now?"
"You become a part of the Rebellion. The Nebuchadnezzar is only one of many ships that fly in the sewers of the ruined cities of old. We embark on missions of sabotage, sedition, and espionage within the Matrix, chipping away at the foundations of what the System relies on, not stopping until we reach our final goal."
"What is it?"
"The discovery of the One."
"Who is he?"
"He is the man who started the Rebellion, and the man who shall end it. He is able to alter the coding and reshape the Machines' illusion to his own will, for he possesses powers far beyond what you and I have."
"If he's so great, then why are you looking for him? Why doesn't he come to you?"
"We do not yet know who he is. Prophecy has spoke of his existence, and one day he shall return to bring us to victory against the Matrix."
"A prophecy? In the twenty-second century? How do you know if it's true?"
"If the prophecies are not true, then there would be no Rebellion. If there was no Rebellion, then no more humans would be freed. If there were no more humans to be free, you would not be here."
Tired and confused, Ash did not respond. Morpheus held out a hand and pulled him up, and led him towards the Neb, which had now landed.
:.:.:
The ship truly was like a submarine. Cold, metal bulkheads and giant swinging iron doors were everywhere. Morpheus' clothes had instantly changed to simpler attire the moment they stepped on board the ship, as had Ash's. Both were dressed in coarse, woolen sweaters and workpants. Ash also realized that he, himself was bald.
"We have not exited the Construct, Ash. However, this is an accurate depiction of being on the ship itself."
As to disprove him, Dinah ran into the room, across their path, and skittered into another room.
"To answer your first question, no, animals are not plugged into the Matrix. They are all very realistic simulations of actual ones based on ancient records."
Well, I suppose the animal rights groups can't do much now that all animals are extinct, thought Ash grimly.
"To answer your second question," Morpheus said as he stopped in front of a closed door, hands on the wheel, "we do not know why the Machines choose not to take animals instead. It has been speculated that electrical power is not the only resource we provide."
He twisted open the door. They went into a room filled with electronic equipment, all looking very junky but much more advanced than Ash's desktop back home. The most prominent were in the center, which consisted of several dentists' chairs in a circle, and an area with a console and multiple screens and keyboards near it. On two chairs were Morpheus… and himself. Both had a tube extending from their spine to machinery on the chair.
"In the Real World, this is how we access into the Matrix. Without the pods, we experience all of the sensory aspects, though not the necessary chemical ones. Therefore you need not be too worried about your habit."
A young, black man wearing a headset appeared at the consoles. Ash's eyes darted towards the chairs, but his body was not there.
"This is Tank," introduced Morpheus. "Unlike us, he was born naturally in the Real World. He has no extra avatar jacked in.
"Hey," Tank said, waving.
Ash nodded, and without a beat he fell on the floor. Strange. He tried to push himself up with his arms, but arms and legs felt weak. His vision blurred as well, and he began tossing up a lunch he never had, as well as afternoon tea and supper too. Ash's head throbbed, and in his confusion he did not hear Morpheus whisper something to Tank.
A nanosecond of white light swept across his vision, and he was sitting on the chair. Morpheus and Tank stood above him, as well a whole crowd of people, including the cat who brought him back herself, Trinity.
"Hey," Ash tried to smile weakly, but was interrupted by a fit of coughing. Morpheus helped him to sit up.
"He needs rest," he said. "Switch, Cypher, help him to his room."
"You've missed a dosage today, big guy," the blond woman told him as she got him to his feet, "and you've been up way past your naptime."
His vision still had countless splotches and dark spots in front of him, but Ash could see the two vaguely. It took a second before he realized the mustachioed man was smirking behind that badger on his face.
"Take it easy, man," he said. "We're getting you to your warm quarters where we can get a nice and tasty dinner for you before you take a long, deep sleep."
Ash nodded and closed his eyes as he walked. It did not take him long to realize that his warm room was about as cold as the rest of the ship, save for a ratty blanket that covered only his stomach or his legs but not both. Should've known, he thought. However, with his fatigue, he plummeted into sleep before he could see what his meal was- an IV tube straight into the wrist.
:.:.:
In his dreams, Ash could see clearly. Like most people, his experiences in the dream world were much less opaque than their memories the following morning. He had a private eye's memory for detail, but that didn't make him special from anyone else in that respect. On the other hand, sometimes his dream-self could remember past dreams- it was the awake moments Ash could not recall. Though the dream-self knew that he was within a dream, that couldn't change anything. Since he was a kid, Ash always had a vivid imagination, and if the dream-self had to deal with a dangerous, unpredictable world, it was his problem.
Ash was sitting in a chair again, back in the Matrix. He was inside a hotel room. He deduced that because of the mass-printed stock paintings above the beds, the candy on the pillows, and a Gideon's Bible on the lamp stand. A deadly and perhaps evil woman stood in front of him. He deduced that because she was wearing entirely black.
She was a blonde woman with blue eyes, figures. She wore a dress that looked rather like a child's, with a big, puffy shoulders and a large, broad skirt- yet it still had the obligatory dé colleté to display plenty of skin. However, hers was unique for two features- though it looked girlish, it was the sort of trendy, outlandish thing A-list movie actresses or models wore to exclusive nightclubs where they did nothing at but to look good for their next gig. The second thing was that the dress was so black, it was like falling into a well.
It was not shiny black, nor did they have the metallic sheen of a gun. Light just seemed to disappear into her dress, or around it, or perhaps it just went around it, the photons avoiding the material. The woman walked in front of him, and he found that she was very attractive. She had fair skin, nice face, was very pneumatic, etc., etc. Maybe I'm in one of those dreams, eh? Dammit, and I'm pretty tired already…
Ash was about to stand up and kiss her hand like a gentleman, or perhaps to crack a bad one-liner, but two things stopped him. The first was that the warning of her evilness called to him, and was compounded by the realization that she was very familiar to him. The second was the rope that tied him to the chair.
She stared at him, wordlessly, displaying no emotions at all upon her face. He stared at back at her face, and found no recognition in those cold, inhuman eyes. What struck him was the style of the dress, as well as her long, blond hair. Her bangs were parted into two directions, and it was tied with a ribbon of the same black, fall-through material in a bow. Then he realized who she was.
Good God, Ash thought. I'm at the mercy of Death who looks like a grown-up, updated version of a character from a whimsical childhood cartoon movie dressed as a dominatrix.
"I'm not going to even mention things that say 'eat me' and 'drink me,'" he quipped, hoping to at least elicit a frown.
He got none. She ignored him and sidestepped him, bending over at a dull metal box beside the chair. Ash planned to kick her or unleash his ultimate superpowers he occasionally possessed at the nick of time in his hard-boiled dream-detective sagas, but paused to see what she was doing. The box opened without a key, and he could see what was inside: a chessboard and a pack of cards.
"C'mon, don't you think that's a bit over the top?" Ash suggested. "Where's the symbolism when it's so obvious?"
Before she could respond three men jumped through the windows. All dressed as typical G-Men, they drew guns before flashing their badges. The woman stood up.
Two had guns to her head, and the third walked up to Ash. His tone was as cold as the woman's eyes.
"The white pawn is more than mere metaphor."
"Care to elaborate, buddy?" the detective growled, expecting to be rebuffed and derided.
"You already know."
And with that, Ash awoke. A scruffy, beanied kid was at the doorway of his room.
"Breakfast."
