+J.M.J.+
Under the Gun
by "Matrix Refugee"
Author's Note:
I honestly hope that "The Animatrix" is a sign of things to come: that the Wachowski Brothers will continue to develop the "Matrix" universe beyond the live-action trilogy. My personal favorite of the animated shorts is "Detective Story". So I thought I'd take an alternate look and see what would happen if Mr. Ash managed to step through the Looking Glass....
Disclaimer:
I do not own "The Matrix" series, its characters, concepts, imagery and/or other indicia, which are the legal property of the W Brothers (Warner and Wachowski), Red Pill Productions, Village Roadshow, et al. (If I owned it, this would be part of "The Animatrix: Detective Story" instead of on ff.n!)
* * * * * * * * * *
Chapter One
A case to end all cases....
And so, after my most recent adventure, I go from being a private investigator to being arguably a fugitive from what is usually called justice. But as I've found out, *that* is really just a front for a faceless entity...
* * * * *
It started out when this guy who wouldn't give me his name called me, offered me a job tracking down a notorious cybercriminal known only as "Trinity". I was in dire need of the cash the guy dumped right into my bank account, so I took the offer. $800,000 is nothing to sniff at when your rent is due and the fridge is empty.
I didn't know what I was putting my foot into, and when I found out I was anything but the first detective on the case, I knew I was getting in over head and ears. But hey, someone's gotta take on those kinda cases. Builds up the noteriety.
I poked around online, looking for this Trinity. Hacker bulletin boards, anonymous mailboxes, encrypted chatrooms. It was on one of those that I got a lead from a user who called himself Red Queen. I arranged to meet up with him after "the first of six brooks". Following the "Alice in Wonderland: Through the Looking Glass" MO, I realized I was supposed to meet this cat on a train.
I barely managed to scrabble aboard the 20.00 train. But I managed to get on and entered one of the rear compartments in the passenger car, hoping to find the guy there.
I came eye to gun muzzle with a weapon leveled by a tall, lean dame in black leather that made her look like a walking panther dipped in oil. If she'd wanted to kill me, she could have easily blown my brains out. I thought I'd fallen into a trap, but she assured me it was "only" a test.
The gun turned out to be something less deadly but more unsettling: she aimed it over my left eye and threw a switch on it. I thought the suction would yank the eye from the socket, but instead it sucked out a thing like a cross between a worm and a wiretapping device.
Suddenly shots and screams rang out in the corridor. We managed to get out, heading forward. I looked back to see three guys in dark suits and sunglasses (Yeah, even on a dark winter night like that), like some kind of Feds behind us, leveling their handguns at us.
They opened fire. We dodged them. I couldn't let them catch her. Yeah, like in the film noirs where the tough guy detective helps the femme fatale brunette in black escape from the cops.
I couldn't let them get me either. Something inthem seemed to be calling to something in me, telling me not to follow her. It was like something was trying to wake up inside me, but I fought it down.
We managed to get into a forward car and slammed the door shut, putting it between them and us while I reloaded. I'd emptied all the chambers on my revolver at those guys, but it hadn't had much effect, and I'm a crack shot.
"What *are* those guys?" I said, loading bullets into the chambers.
"I can't explain here," Trinity said. "There isn't time."
With that, she shot out the nearest window, then stuck the gun into the belt slung around her wide but shapely hips. She grabbed me by the collar and the seat of the pants. Before I could object, she'd shoved me out the window, headfirst.
I expected to hit the snow with a bone-crunching thud, or worse. But somehow I . . . hovered down.
She landed on top of me. She'd been holding onto me the whole time. The train roared past us, the backwash of wind it kicked up fell over us like a cloud of knife blades.
She got up and nudged me in the ribs with the toe of her boot. "Get up, we haven't got much time."
I pulled myself onto my knees. I had a funny feeling I was about to discover just why one of those other detectives had disappeared, but there wasn't time to dwell on that. She was already hustling me up the railroad bed and into an industrial area.
"Where are you taking me?" I asked.
"I'm taking you to someone who can answer your questions," she said.
We fled along a web of alleyways between warehouses and factories. At length we came to a fleabag hotel that rented rooms by the hour, the Lafayette. I'd been here a lot in the past: tracing someone's spouse to an illicit rendezvous in one of those rooms by the hour. She led me in by a back door and up the stairs to a suite marked 201.
She pushed me inside and followed me in. The room looked like it had once been quite a showcase but careless management or plain old neglect had let it go to seed very badly. The flock wallpaper had faded and peeled and lay on the floor in strips and the scant furniture was scuffed.
Something moved in the enclosure of one of the French windows. My hand reached for my gun, but Trinity put her hand on my arm, restraining me.
"It's all right, he's with me," she said.
A tall dark man with a shaven head stepped out of the shadow cast by the drapes. The floorlength leather topcoat he wore looked like something the grand high master of some mumbo-jumbo mystery cult might wear. He turned toward me a calm, quietly solemn face, his eyes hidden behind rimless sunglasses.
"You found him, Trinity," the stranger said. "The man who'd started to ask questions."
I shrugged, trying to be nonchalant, which ain't easy when you're face to face with an odd-looking guy in black. "Questions are kinda my line of business," I said.
"Ah. And what is your business?" the stranger asked.
"I'm a reporter." Not a lie: I'd been one for the high school newspaper.
"I was under the impression you were a detective of some sort, Mr. Harlen Ash," the stranger said.
It dawned on me that this guy might know more about me than I knew about him. They must have been watching me for some time now. Whoever *they* were.
"Well, you figured that out," I said. "But you got me at a disadvantage: you know my name, but I don't know yours."
"You would know my name if you have heard of a man called Morpheus," he replied.
I'd heard a lot of talk about a hacker-terrorist who went by that handle, who'd been responsible for some explosions and other delights as he tried to free members of his organization detained by the authorities. They claimed to be alerting the public to something they called "the Matrix", some kind of government conspiracy or something like that. I'd always treated it as a lot of conspiracy theories and alarmist nonsense. But right now it was a little hard to tell what was nonsense and theories and what was the truth.
"Yeah.... Yeah, I've heard of you," I said. "You're the guy who's warning people about this thing you call the Matrix."
"You don't believe that it could exist?" Morpheus asked, utterly without rebuke.
"I'm not sure of anything right now," I admitted, hoping I'd said the right thing.
"I imagine you feel much the way Alice felt when she stepped through the looking glass. Only, in your case, you're on the verge of stepping through it into the real world."
I eyed the wierd suction gun hanging from Trinity's belt. "That wouldn't happen to have something to do with that bug she took off me?" I asked.
"Yes, it would," he said. "The ones who created the Matrix will do anything to penetrate you and try to keep you from learning the truth, or try to make you forget what you have learned. They would try to consume you and make you one of them. But if you are one of them, you won't be free to find the answer to your questions."
"How can I get free?" I asked. I'm not saying I believed he might be right. I'm just naturally nosy and I had to find out.
"I can give you the means to step through the looking glass, but you have to decide which side you will dwell on," he said.
He reached into the breast pocket of his topcoat and took out a metal pillbox which he opened and took something out. "Hold out your hands, palm up," he said.
I obliged him. Morpheus held his lightly closed hands out over mine and put something in each palm.
When he drew his hands away, I looked down at two pills, a red one in my right and a blue one in my left.
"You take the blue pill and you stay here in the looking glass world and see only the dim shadows of things and your questions go unanswered," he said, almost like he was reciting a spell or something. "You take the red pill and you step through the looking glass. And I will help you find the answers."
My better judgement kicked in. What was this? I should just drop the pills and get out of there. Trouble was, if I did, there was a dame at my elbow who could put daylight in me before I could even draw my gun. I had the feeling that, as calm as this Morpheus might be, he could take me apart in no time. He stood a little taller than me and he was wider through the shoulders and chest.
Trinity stood at my elbow, holding a glass of water in her hands. As I reached for it, the blue pill dropped from my hand, but for some reason, that didn't faze me. I took the glass of water, put the red pill on the back of my tongue and washed it down with a good swig from the glass.
The sensible part of me kicked again. What was this stuff I'd just knocked back? They could be trying to poison me. Remember that other detective, the one who'd killed himself.... Maybe there was more to it.
Too late now. I could feel the pill sliding down my gullet and dropping into my empty stomach. Trinity gave me a slight reassuring smile as she and Morpheus led me into the next room.
On several tables stood a Rube Golsberg snarl of computer equipment: CPUs, war dialers, modems, relays, TV tubes, keyboards. Made my own kluged together computer look streamlined by comparison. Trinity helped me to sit down on a chair at one end of the table, then taped two electrodes to the sides of my neck, another to my forehead.
A stocky dark girl was typing something on one of the keyboards, while a short, rat-faced guy with tousled dark hair and olive skin got one of the war dialers going.
"What's all this for?" I asked.
"The pill you took contains a tracer to help us locate you in the system and a carrier to disrupt your input-output signal," Morpheus said.
That didn't mean a thing to me, but the questions were piling up in my head it was starting to feel like an overflowing ash tray.
I turned away from the technological snarl and spotted a large free-standing mirror to my left. I saw my reflection there, a skinny guy in his late-twenties, trying to look like a tough guy, but not able to shake off the slight baby-faced quality to my mug. Tousled hair under a battered grey fedora with a rumpled grey three-piece suit on under a spattered tan trenchcoat. The knot of my tie had gone slack and there was a cut on my cheek I didn't remember getting. The sight of it made it start to smart, but that suddenly stopped.
My image blurred. I blinked my eyes and rubbed them, but there was nothing wrong with them.
"Oh my god," the rat-faced guy groaned.
"Jack, what's wrong?" Morpheus asked. I could hear modems connecting.
"His code's all screwed up," Jack said.
"It's more than screwed up: we'll have to abort transmission," the girl said.
"We can't turn back now," Morpheus said. "Find him, Zara."
I turned back to the mirror. What I saw made me rear back in my chair.
A shadow had started to appear on the mirror, in the exact place where I sat. It looked like one of the wierd Feds with the cheaters, but it was hard to make out. I looked down at myself. Nothing had changed.
"Got his signal, but they've got a tap on it. They're trying to disrupt it," Zara said.
"We'll have to hazard it," Morpheus ordered. "Lock on him!"
I looked back at the mirror. I nearly jolted out of my chair.
The Fed or whatever he was had stood up and was approaching the mirror. He started to reach through with one hand, the surface of the mirror going taut over his hand like a skin or something. I could hear it creaking as he pushed relentlessly through. He had one foot on the floor already. Was I the only one who could see this?
I screamed. The sound turned itself inside out. Everything went reddish black before my eyes. I knew I'd fainted.
* * * * * * * * * *
To be continued...
Under the Gun
by "Matrix Refugee"
Author's Note:
I honestly hope that "The Animatrix" is a sign of things to come: that the Wachowski Brothers will continue to develop the "Matrix" universe beyond the live-action trilogy. My personal favorite of the animated shorts is "Detective Story". So I thought I'd take an alternate look and see what would happen if Mr. Ash managed to step through the Looking Glass....
Disclaimer:
I do not own "The Matrix" series, its characters, concepts, imagery and/or other indicia, which are the legal property of the W Brothers (Warner and Wachowski), Red Pill Productions, Village Roadshow, et al. (If I owned it, this would be part of "The Animatrix: Detective Story" instead of on ff.n!)
* * * * * * * * * *
Chapter One
A case to end all cases....
And so, after my most recent adventure, I go from being a private investigator to being arguably a fugitive from what is usually called justice. But as I've found out, *that* is really just a front for a faceless entity...
* * * * *
It started out when this guy who wouldn't give me his name called me, offered me a job tracking down a notorious cybercriminal known only as "Trinity". I was in dire need of the cash the guy dumped right into my bank account, so I took the offer. $800,000 is nothing to sniff at when your rent is due and the fridge is empty.
I didn't know what I was putting my foot into, and when I found out I was anything but the first detective on the case, I knew I was getting in over head and ears. But hey, someone's gotta take on those kinda cases. Builds up the noteriety.
I poked around online, looking for this Trinity. Hacker bulletin boards, anonymous mailboxes, encrypted chatrooms. It was on one of those that I got a lead from a user who called himself Red Queen. I arranged to meet up with him after "the first of six brooks". Following the "Alice in Wonderland: Through the Looking Glass" MO, I realized I was supposed to meet this cat on a train.
I barely managed to scrabble aboard the 20.00 train. But I managed to get on and entered one of the rear compartments in the passenger car, hoping to find the guy there.
I came eye to gun muzzle with a weapon leveled by a tall, lean dame in black leather that made her look like a walking panther dipped in oil. If she'd wanted to kill me, she could have easily blown my brains out. I thought I'd fallen into a trap, but she assured me it was "only" a test.
The gun turned out to be something less deadly but more unsettling: she aimed it over my left eye and threw a switch on it. I thought the suction would yank the eye from the socket, but instead it sucked out a thing like a cross between a worm and a wiretapping device.
Suddenly shots and screams rang out in the corridor. We managed to get out, heading forward. I looked back to see three guys in dark suits and sunglasses (Yeah, even on a dark winter night like that), like some kind of Feds behind us, leveling their handguns at us.
They opened fire. We dodged them. I couldn't let them catch her. Yeah, like in the film noirs where the tough guy detective helps the femme fatale brunette in black escape from the cops.
I couldn't let them get me either. Something inthem seemed to be calling to something in me, telling me not to follow her. It was like something was trying to wake up inside me, but I fought it down.
We managed to get into a forward car and slammed the door shut, putting it between them and us while I reloaded. I'd emptied all the chambers on my revolver at those guys, but it hadn't had much effect, and I'm a crack shot.
"What *are* those guys?" I said, loading bullets into the chambers.
"I can't explain here," Trinity said. "There isn't time."
With that, she shot out the nearest window, then stuck the gun into the belt slung around her wide but shapely hips. She grabbed me by the collar and the seat of the pants. Before I could object, she'd shoved me out the window, headfirst.
I expected to hit the snow with a bone-crunching thud, or worse. But somehow I . . . hovered down.
She landed on top of me. She'd been holding onto me the whole time. The train roared past us, the backwash of wind it kicked up fell over us like a cloud of knife blades.
She got up and nudged me in the ribs with the toe of her boot. "Get up, we haven't got much time."
I pulled myself onto my knees. I had a funny feeling I was about to discover just why one of those other detectives had disappeared, but there wasn't time to dwell on that. She was already hustling me up the railroad bed and into an industrial area.
"Where are you taking me?" I asked.
"I'm taking you to someone who can answer your questions," she said.
We fled along a web of alleyways between warehouses and factories. At length we came to a fleabag hotel that rented rooms by the hour, the Lafayette. I'd been here a lot in the past: tracing someone's spouse to an illicit rendezvous in one of those rooms by the hour. She led me in by a back door and up the stairs to a suite marked 201.
She pushed me inside and followed me in. The room looked like it had once been quite a showcase but careless management or plain old neglect had let it go to seed very badly. The flock wallpaper had faded and peeled and lay on the floor in strips and the scant furniture was scuffed.
Something moved in the enclosure of one of the French windows. My hand reached for my gun, but Trinity put her hand on my arm, restraining me.
"It's all right, he's with me," she said.
A tall dark man with a shaven head stepped out of the shadow cast by the drapes. The floorlength leather topcoat he wore looked like something the grand high master of some mumbo-jumbo mystery cult might wear. He turned toward me a calm, quietly solemn face, his eyes hidden behind rimless sunglasses.
"You found him, Trinity," the stranger said. "The man who'd started to ask questions."
I shrugged, trying to be nonchalant, which ain't easy when you're face to face with an odd-looking guy in black. "Questions are kinda my line of business," I said.
"Ah. And what is your business?" the stranger asked.
"I'm a reporter." Not a lie: I'd been one for the high school newspaper.
"I was under the impression you were a detective of some sort, Mr. Harlen Ash," the stranger said.
It dawned on me that this guy might know more about me than I knew about him. They must have been watching me for some time now. Whoever *they* were.
"Well, you figured that out," I said. "But you got me at a disadvantage: you know my name, but I don't know yours."
"You would know my name if you have heard of a man called Morpheus," he replied.
I'd heard a lot of talk about a hacker-terrorist who went by that handle, who'd been responsible for some explosions and other delights as he tried to free members of his organization detained by the authorities. They claimed to be alerting the public to something they called "the Matrix", some kind of government conspiracy or something like that. I'd always treated it as a lot of conspiracy theories and alarmist nonsense. But right now it was a little hard to tell what was nonsense and theories and what was the truth.
"Yeah.... Yeah, I've heard of you," I said. "You're the guy who's warning people about this thing you call the Matrix."
"You don't believe that it could exist?" Morpheus asked, utterly without rebuke.
"I'm not sure of anything right now," I admitted, hoping I'd said the right thing.
"I imagine you feel much the way Alice felt when she stepped through the looking glass. Only, in your case, you're on the verge of stepping through it into the real world."
I eyed the wierd suction gun hanging from Trinity's belt. "That wouldn't happen to have something to do with that bug she took off me?" I asked.
"Yes, it would," he said. "The ones who created the Matrix will do anything to penetrate you and try to keep you from learning the truth, or try to make you forget what you have learned. They would try to consume you and make you one of them. But if you are one of them, you won't be free to find the answer to your questions."
"How can I get free?" I asked. I'm not saying I believed he might be right. I'm just naturally nosy and I had to find out.
"I can give you the means to step through the looking glass, but you have to decide which side you will dwell on," he said.
He reached into the breast pocket of his topcoat and took out a metal pillbox which he opened and took something out. "Hold out your hands, palm up," he said.
I obliged him. Morpheus held his lightly closed hands out over mine and put something in each palm.
When he drew his hands away, I looked down at two pills, a red one in my right and a blue one in my left.
"You take the blue pill and you stay here in the looking glass world and see only the dim shadows of things and your questions go unanswered," he said, almost like he was reciting a spell or something. "You take the red pill and you step through the looking glass. And I will help you find the answers."
My better judgement kicked in. What was this? I should just drop the pills and get out of there. Trouble was, if I did, there was a dame at my elbow who could put daylight in me before I could even draw my gun. I had the feeling that, as calm as this Morpheus might be, he could take me apart in no time. He stood a little taller than me and he was wider through the shoulders and chest.
Trinity stood at my elbow, holding a glass of water in her hands. As I reached for it, the blue pill dropped from my hand, but for some reason, that didn't faze me. I took the glass of water, put the red pill on the back of my tongue and washed it down with a good swig from the glass.
The sensible part of me kicked again. What was this stuff I'd just knocked back? They could be trying to poison me. Remember that other detective, the one who'd killed himself.... Maybe there was more to it.
Too late now. I could feel the pill sliding down my gullet and dropping into my empty stomach. Trinity gave me a slight reassuring smile as she and Morpheus led me into the next room.
On several tables stood a Rube Golsberg snarl of computer equipment: CPUs, war dialers, modems, relays, TV tubes, keyboards. Made my own kluged together computer look streamlined by comparison. Trinity helped me to sit down on a chair at one end of the table, then taped two electrodes to the sides of my neck, another to my forehead.
A stocky dark girl was typing something on one of the keyboards, while a short, rat-faced guy with tousled dark hair and olive skin got one of the war dialers going.
"What's all this for?" I asked.
"The pill you took contains a tracer to help us locate you in the system and a carrier to disrupt your input-output signal," Morpheus said.
That didn't mean a thing to me, but the questions were piling up in my head it was starting to feel like an overflowing ash tray.
I turned away from the technological snarl and spotted a large free-standing mirror to my left. I saw my reflection there, a skinny guy in his late-twenties, trying to look like a tough guy, but not able to shake off the slight baby-faced quality to my mug. Tousled hair under a battered grey fedora with a rumpled grey three-piece suit on under a spattered tan trenchcoat. The knot of my tie had gone slack and there was a cut on my cheek I didn't remember getting. The sight of it made it start to smart, but that suddenly stopped.
My image blurred. I blinked my eyes and rubbed them, but there was nothing wrong with them.
"Oh my god," the rat-faced guy groaned.
"Jack, what's wrong?" Morpheus asked. I could hear modems connecting.
"His code's all screwed up," Jack said.
"It's more than screwed up: we'll have to abort transmission," the girl said.
"We can't turn back now," Morpheus said. "Find him, Zara."
I turned back to the mirror. What I saw made me rear back in my chair.
A shadow had started to appear on the mirror, in the exact place where I sat. It looked like one of the wierd Feds with the cheaters, but it was hard to make out. I looked down at myself. Nothing had changed.
"Got his signal, but they've got a tap on it. They're trying to disrupt it," Zara said.
"We'll have to hazard it," Morpheus ordered. "Lock on him!"
I looked back at the mirror. I nearly jolted out of my chair.
The Fed or whatever he was had stood up and was approaching the mirror. He started to reach through with one hand, the surface of the mirror going taut over his hand like a skin or something. I could hear it creaking as he pushed relentlessly through. He had one foot on the floor already. Was I the only one who could see this?
I screamed. The sound turned itself inside out. Everything went reddish black before my eyes. I knew I'd fainted.
* * * * * * * * * *
To be continued...
